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  #81  
Old Wednesday, July 22, 2015
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Default July 19, 2015

Figuring Putin in Bonn


During a recent trip across Scandinavia, I noticed many locals (especially in Copenhagen, Denmark), being extremely critical of the Russian President Vladimir Putin. My previous trips in these wonderful countries had not seen anything like this, so I was rather curious to know why Putin had become such a villain.

I had a feeling that this had something to do with the crisis in Ukraine. But the underlying hostility against Russia in these appropriately rational and stable European polities was intense enough for me to finally ask a bartender in Copenhagen what the fuss was all about.

He laughed and then produced the day’s paper from a nearby table. In the inner pages was a picture of American/Nato tanks rolling along somewhere in Denmark. He pointed at the photo and smilingly said, ‘We fear Russia again ...’

In his broken English, he managed to explain that the crises in Ukraine is creating ‘Cold War type of a situation in Europe’. To him the situation was mostly due to ‘Russian hostilities’ and that these had forced the Nato troops to return.

What exactly prompts Putin’s image as a villain for his own countrymen and not a hero?
My next stop was Bonn in Germany where I was invited to the annual Deutsche Welle (DW) World Media Forum. The Forum was being attended by journalists (both print and electronic) from dozens of countries.

The highlight of the conference was the launch of Deutsche Welle’s 24/7 English TV channel that will be competing with the likes of BBC and CNN, especially in Asia.

DW’s president explained that instead of coming down to the level of the sensationalist trends that have ravaged electronic journalism in the past many years, DW will aspire to pull up its audiences to a higher level. This philosophy, he explained, was behind the new channel’s rather telling short slogan: ‘Made for minds.’

The conference offered a number of sessions on media and how, it was being influenced by (and influencing) international politics. But being a South Asian, I was surprised that not much was said in this regard on certain recent unprecedented happenings in South Asia.

For example, though there was much talk about the civil war in Syria and the consequential emergence of groups like Daesh, there was nothing on the possible paradigm shift taking place in flash-points such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pakistan military’s all-out push against extremist groups is a first in this country that just might change (for the better) Pakistan’s traditionally cold ties with strife-torn Afghanistan.

There was also nothing said or discussed about how the election of a militaristic right-wing government in India is once again hotting up Indo-Pak relations.

Apart from Syria, the other consistent topic at the conference was, of course, Ukraine.

During one such session I began to make frantic notes on my notepad to build a question that I planned to ask a very articulate British journalist who was on the panel. He was explaining why Putin had become such a threat to both Russia as well as to the rest of Europe.

Unfortunately, by the time the Q&A session began, I had filled up four pages and was unable to convert these notes into a single, coherent question.

Nevertheless, I did finally organise these notes on my iPad in my hotel room and am publishing them here.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union (and Soviet Communism) in December 1991, Boris Yeltsin rose to become President. During his two regimes (1991-99), he presided over a radical change of system that was almost entirely driven by ‘crony capitalism’ that triggered maddening inflation and a dramatic rise in unemployment, poverty and crime. By the late 1990s, Russia had become one of the most corrupt countries in the world!

Yet, I hardly remember him receiving the kind of criticism (from Western media) that Putin is. Mind you, this is a question and not a statement.

Is a weak, corrupt and crumbling Russia a more acceptable and ‘safe’ Russia? Or, to put it more sardonically, is it then a more ‘democratic’ and likable Russia? Again, just a question.

Over the last decade I have met many Russian travellers in various countries of Europe, Asia and the Americas, and without fail, all of them seemed to adore Putin. How come?

When Putin replaced Yeltsin in 1999, Russian politics, society and economy had become hostage to overnight oligarchs, monopolists and various mafias who had all helped Yeltsin stay in power because he was good for them — especially his economic policies that had replaced an obsolete and worn-out ‘communist system’ with a rather anarchic model of capitalism akin to sheer thuggery!

After coming to power in 1999, Putin began to reign-in the all-powerful oligarchs and reintroduced the practice of nationalisation when he brought a number of major Russian industries under state control. Most of these had been privatised by Yeltsin at throwaway prices.

Indeed nationalisation to most seemed to be a relic of the past, but as one Russian journalist (in Singapore) explai ned, it was Putin’s re-nationalisation of Russia’s vast oil industry that helped the state to amicably utilise the rise in international oil prices in the early 2000s. ‘Otherwise, the new money would have been squandered by the oligarchs and we would have become like oil-rich but poverty-stricken Nigeria,’ he had told me.

It was this that helped Putin dramatically reduce Russia’s growing poverty rate and bring it down to just 13 per cent in 2011. This figure is taken from UK’s respectable monthly, The Economist, and not from any Russian publication.

Putin also used the profits from oil to increase payments of pensions by 60pc. He cracked down hard against corruption that was rampant and almost untouchable in the 1990s. His policies against terrorism too seemed more effective.

He did manipulate the country’s constitution to remain in power; bring the media under state control to avoid criticism; centralised authority, degraded certain democratic rights and his appeal to Russian nationalism has increasingly become militaristic. But the question is: With the fragmentary and implosive nature of Russian politics, economy and society in the 1990s, I wonder, would Putin have been able to rectify much of his country’s multiple problems as a more likable Yeltsin Mark: 2?

Again, this is a question and not a sweeping endorsement of Putin’s ways.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 19th, 2015

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Figuring Putin in Bonn
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  #82  
Old Monday, July 27, 2015
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Default July 26th, 2015

Looking for Jinnah’s Pakistan


All sorts of ironies are often pointed out about what happened to Pakistan after the early demise of its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Shamim Ahmed in his article, “A Leaf from Jinnah’s Life” (DAWN, 1948), described Jinnah to be a supremely confident man who, before leaving for England to study Law, told his first cousin Fatima Ganji Vaji, ‘I will return a great man …’

Though he had first arrived in England to study Business, he switched to Law, leaving his father fuming.

On his return to India in 1896, the then 20-year-old Jinnah started to practice Law in Bombay (present-day Mumbai). He consciously began to cultivate an image of being a highly rational man who valued veracity and integrity.

Shamim Ahmed wrote that these traits that Jinnah proudly exhibited were initially informed by his admiration for late 19th century British Liberalism that he encountered in England; but they not only remained being an important part of Jinnah’s make-up for the rest of his life, they actually became stronger with age.

Ahmed was not just blindly eulogising the founder of his country. The idea of a young Jinnah striving to nurture an upright image for himself is reflected in many of his utterings and manoeuvres (as a young lawyer) in the courts of Bombay.

Senior lawyer and author, Shariffuddin Pirzada, in his 1978 essay, “Some Aspects of Quaid-i-Azam’s Life”, narrates an incident in the court of Chief Justice Davis. Finding the courtroom packed to capacity, Justice Davis ordered that the doors of the room be closed.

Not agreeing with the order, Jinnah, the young lawyer, quickly retorted, ‘My Lord, the doors of justice should be kept open ..!’

S. Iqbal in an article on Jinnah (in the October 1952 edition of India’s Illustrated Weekly) mentions that Jinnah had a firm but steady style of arguing his cases in the court, with a touch of dry wit and theatre. Iqbal suggests that Jinnah’s style in this regard was rooted in a (still) little known fact that when he was a student in London, Jinnah loved sophisticated Shakespearean theatre — so much so that he almost joined a Shakespearean theatrical company (as a budding stage actor)!

In terms of how society and polity have been crafted in the country, today’s Pakistan mirrors all that Quaid-i-Azam abhorred
His dream to become an acclaimed stage actor was cut short when his father came to know about it. Jinnah was ordered to go back to studying Law. He grudgingly obliged because he had already annoyed his father when he switched to studying Law instead of Business.

The ironies of a post-Jinnah Pakistan have mostly to do with how the country that he founded eventually became almost exactly the opposite of what Jinnah as a person, lawyer and politician admired. The image of an honest and upright man steeped in the ways of modern law and constitutional manoeuvres that Jinnah enjoyed failed to rub off on the overall polity of Pakistan; and nor did his more cosmopolitan and rational understanding of his faith and creed.

One ruler after another that followed his demise (in 1948), disregarded constitutional processes and undermined the importance of having a strong and unbiased judiciary.

These, coupled with the demagogic ways faith was used to shape and reach purely cynical political positions, have moulded a society pierced with political and moral dichotomies and, at times, downright hypocrisy!

Most Indian historians believe that one should have expected this in a country whose demand emerged from a communal platform. But the truth is that the demand (for a separate Muslim-majority country in South Asia) was not quite communal as such because Jinnah and his party’s ideologues had treated ‘Muslimness’ not as a theocratic concept, but more as a separate cultural and even quasi-ethnic entity, demanding its own land and state.

This is all too apparent in Jinnah’s first address to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly on Aug 11, 1947. But he did not live long to shape the country the way he saw it. After him, it struggled to evolve into becoming a Muslim-majority state where modern concepts of progress and law would seamlessly merge with the egalitarian notions of Islam; a country driven by a system informed by constitutionalism, pluralism and a rational reading of the Muslim scriptures.

Instead, over the decades, it has become a bastion of political Machiavellian obesity and, as some would rightly lament, numerous forms of moral hypocrisy.

Therefore so little is mentioned about one of Jinnah’s pet dislikes in the terribly rhetorical school text books that overtly eulogise only those aspects of Jinnah’s personality that seem to suit the manipulative ways of men who have unabashedly used historical forgery and distortion of faith to meet cynical political and social aims.

Never have I read in such text books how much Jinnah hated moral hypocrisy. And yet, if one studies history a lot more honestly, he or she is bound to stumble upon some very telling incidents in this respect.

For example, Aziz Beg in his book Jinnah and his Times (1986) writes how when during the month of Ramazan, Jinnah strolled out of the Constituent Assembly with a cigar in his hand, he was asked by some of his colleagues to extinguish it, but he refused, saying ‘I am not a hypocrite!’

During the height of his party’s movement to win a separate Muslim homeland, the party (The All India Muslim League) was offered a large sum of money (as donation) by a rich Muslim businessman. When Jinnah came to know that the man was rumoured to be a smuggler, he flatly refused the donation, saying, “We do not want even an anna of his money. My party does not accept silver bullets …”

Aziz also relates how once when someone mentioned how urbane, modern and well-dressed Jinnah seemed compared to the modest looks and attire of Mahatma Gandhi, Jinnah retorted with his archetypical dry wit: “It is costing the nation to keep Gandhi in a state of poverty. He is fasting in a marble palace. It is like Jesus Christ going to crucifixion in a Rolls Royce.”

Despite his cosmopolitan outlook and aloof patrician demeanour, Jinnah’s sense of integrity, uprightness and honesty were admired even by his staunchest opponents.

For example, Indian historian, S.K. Datta (an opponent of Jinnah’s ‘Two Nation Theory’), has a separate sub-chapter in his 2002 book on Pakistan that just eulogises Jinnah’s disposition as a man of integrity and honesty.

Even when Jinnah became the all-powerful Governor General of Pakistan, he would make sure to ask his chauffer to stop the car at a red light every time his motorcade came across a traffic signal on the roads of Karachi.

I believe Jinnah’s Pakistan can be discovered in such small but telling incidents, rather than in the rhetorical flourishes that eulogise him not for what he really was, but how many would have liked him to be.

Source:Looking for Jinnah’s Pakistan
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine July 26th, 2015
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  #83  
Old Sunday, August 02, 2015
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Default August 2nd, 2015

The forgotten flippant

The mid and late 19th century was a highly charged period in India. The centuries-old Muslim Empire in the region had collapsed and the British were consolidating their colonial rule over a vast expanse teeming with millions of people belonging to a number of faiths.

Though powered by superior military might and the novel vintages of the ‘Industrial Age,’ the British colonialists somewhat struggled to determine the religious complexities found in the region — especially when a wave of reformist religious movements erupted in India just before and after the complete downfall of the Mughal Empire in 1857.

These movements emerged from within the Hindu majority as well as from among the significant Muslim and Sikh minorities of India. One of the triggers in this respect was the intensifying of Christian missionary activity that was indirectly encouraged by the British.

The reformist movements also tried to tackle ideas introduced by the British culled from the zeitgeists of the ‘Age of Reason’ and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ that appeared in the West (in the 17th and 18th centuries).

During these eras, social and political emphasis in the West had gradually shifted away from religious / clerical authority, feudalism and tradition to reason / rationalism, empiricism and science.

In 1875 the Hindu reformist movement, the Arya Samaj, emerged. It attempted to configure Hinduism as a unified and ‘enlightened’ faith. To counter Christian and rationalist criticism of it being outmoded and even exploitative, the Samaj introduced a Hinduism that was centred entirely on the Vedas and devoid of idol worship. It accepted women’s rights and the belief in a single supreme deity, the Om. It also claimed to be superior to Christianity and Islam.

On the other hand, four strands of reformers appeared from among the Sunni Muslims. The ‘Deobandis’ were a kind of reformed believers of Sufism who advocated a more scholastic understanding of Islam as a ‘pristine faith’ that should be liberated from ‘innovations’ popular in South Asian folk Islam. They also rejected the modernist interpretations of the faith’s scriptures.

The ‘Baralvies’, however, defended the rituals and beliefs associated with the region’s folk Islam that was a hybrid of Sufism and various local traditions associated with a majority of Muslims in India.

On the other end were the Ahl-i-Hadees who were directly inspired by the puritanical and stern doctrines of Saudi ‘Wahabism’. There also emerged prolific ‘modernists’ who advocated a more rational and ‘scientific’ understanding of Islamic texts.

As frantic polemical treatises and literature flew thick and fast between these four strands; and between the Hindus and Christians; and then between Hindus, Christians and Muslims, a battle of propaganda too erupted in which reformist religious groups proudly paraded the number of converts they had managed to bag.

The reformist movements also tried to tackle ideas introduced by the British culled from the zeitgeists of the ‘Age of Reason’ and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ that appeared in the West (in the 17th and 18th centuries).
One of the most intriguing cases in this context was of Ghazi Mehmood that became all the rage in the early 1900s but has faded away from history books.

In 2011 a Pakistani historian of repute and researcher, Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, brought it back to life in his brilliant study of the enigmatic ‘Ahl-i-Quran’ Movement in the Punjab (that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

Before Usman, Mohammad Ishaq Bhatti had penned a whole article (in Urdu) on the Ghazi Mehmood case in Al-Ai’tasam (in 2003).

Ghazi Mehmood was born into a middle-class Sunni Muslim family and exhibited a great interest in the study of Islam. As a teenager, however, he was put off by a sermon that he had heard in a mosque and increasingly became sceptical about his faith.

In 1899 he moved close to a small Hindu reformist outfit, the Dev Samaj. Though he did not convert to Hinduism, he did change his surname to Dharampal and became Ghazi Dharampal.

Unable to reconcile to some beliefs of the Dev Samaj, Ghazi broke away from the group. But soon he was successfully engaged by the Arya Samaj. In 1903, at the age of 21, he finally embraced Hinduism and began working for the Arya Samaj.

The Samaj aggressively publicised this conversion through pamphlets and Hindi newspapers and then financed Ghazi’s first book, Tark-i-Islam, in which he explained why he renounced his original faith.

He continued to publish treatises for the Samaj. He was challenged by counter-treatises that attempted to blunt his criticism. Most of these were authored by Sanaullah Amritsari, an aggressive Ahl-i-Hadees polemicist, and Hakim Nuruddin, a member of the Ahamadiyya community.

Ghazi also began publishing a Hindi monthly dedicated to promoting Arya Samaj beliefs. However, in 1913 he fell in love with a Brahmin widow and married her. This is when he had a falling out with the Samaj whose leadership did not approve of the marriage.

Distressed by the way his friends in the Samaj had responded to his marriage to a Brahmin widow, Ghazi authored an appeal to scholars of all faiths (in India) pleading which religion could guarantee the rights of his wife and children without discrimination.

He received dozens of responses. But it was the response from a judge and scholar from the Ahl-i-Hadees branch, Sulayman Mansurpuri, which appealed the most to Ghazi.

The judge wrote that he (Ghazi) was lawfully married and that his children had equal rights even if their mother chose to remain a Hindu.

This response saw Ghazi visit the judge and agree to re-enter the fold of Islam.

Ghazi now spent his scholastic energies in writing treatises against the Arya Samaj (denouncing their ‘hypocrisies’).

But he was soon at loggerheads with the Ahle-i-Hadees, founding their ideas to be too cumbersome and retrogressive. It was at this point that he was adopted by the so-called ‘Ahl-i-Quran’ Movement. The movement insisted that the Quran alone should be the focus of all law-making in Islam and rejected all other Muslim texts as being largely ‘man-made’.

So, from being a curious young Sunni Muslim, Ghazi became a poster-boy of Hindu reformists, to becoming a scholar of the Ahl-i-Hadees branch, to finally being adopted by the rationalist Ahl-i-Quran Movement.

His conversion to Hinduism and re-conversion to Islam were both highly publicised events. Interestingly, though the memory and mention of his case eventually faded away, historians who dragged it out again referred to him as Ghazi Mehmood Dharampal.

This is because though after his re-conversion to Islam he restored his Muslim surname, Mehmood, he did not discard the Hindu surname that he had adopted in 1899.

He died in 1960 at the age of 78 and was given a proper Muslim burial. Little is known what became of his beliefs after the withering away of the Ahl-i-Quran Movement in the early 1940s.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine August 2nd, 2015
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The forgotten flippant
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  #84  
Old Sunday, August 09, 2015
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Default August 9th, 2015

Smokers’ Corner: The fateful split
Source:

The recent killing of Malik Ishaq one of the most controversial figureheads of the banned sectarian militant outfit, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LeJ) saw a number of commentaries on the organisation appear in the electronic and print media.

Though most of these analyses correctly focused on the fact that the LeJ was an off-shoot of another sectarian group, the Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), many commentators failed to point out that the SSP too was an off-shoot.

Formed in 1985 (in Jhang, Punjab), the SSP emerged as a militant anti-Shia outfit that claimed to be working towards stemming the tide of ‘Shia influence’ in Pakistan especially after the formation of a revolutionary ‘Islamic regime’ in the Shia-majority country of Iran (in 1979).

Though it is correct to assume that the reactionary dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq somewhat facilitated the formation of the SSP, the organisation was not entirely the construct of the said regime.

There is substantial political history behind the mushrooming of militant sectarian outfits
In his book, The Militant, author M. Amir Rana traces the emergence of SSP as an outfit that was formed by a splinter group from the mainstream religious party, the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI).

The JUI was formed in the late 1940s by a group of Islamic scholars and clerics belonging to one of India’s main Deobandi Sunni Muslim parties, the Jamiat Ulema Hind (JUH).

The JUH, though a staunch religious outfit, had sided with the Indian Congress party that was opposing the All India Muslim League’s bid to create a separate Muslim homeland in the region.

After Jinnah’s Muslim League succeeded in creating the Muslim-majority country of Pakistan in 1947, these men completely split from JUH and formed the JUI that became one of the largest Deobandi religious parties in Pakistan.

In the late 1960s when leftist sentiments and parties were in the ascendency in Pakistan, JUI became the only right-wing religious party to overtly support the agendas of populist progressive outfits such as the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the National Awami Party (NAP).

JUI refused to support an attempt by other religious parties to denounce the socialist groups as being ‘un-Islamic’. What’s more, the party also launched an aggressive polemical onslaught against Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of the conservative Jamaat-i-Islami.

Professor Philip E. Jones in his detailed study of the historic 1970 election in Pakistan, mentions that at one point the JUI had even exhibited interest in contesting the said election as an ally of the then overtly socialist PPP.

Most religious and conservative parties were routed by the PPP and NAP (in the former West Pakistan) and by the Bengali nationalist party, the Awami League (in former East Pakistan) in the election.

The only religious party to do well in that election was the JUI that then went on to form a coalition government with the left-wing NAP in the NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). The JUI was being headed by Mufti Mehmood.

The JUI finally had a falling out with the PPP when the latter’s government in the centre dismissed the NAP regime in Balochistan and consequently the NAP-JUI coalition in NWFP resigned in protest.

In 1974 the student-wing of JUI took an active part in the JI-led agitation against the Ahmadiyya community, and in late 1976 the party became a senior partner in the large anti-PPP grouping, the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA).

JUI also directly participated in PNA’s 1977 movement against the PPP regime. The movement uncannily helped General Ziaul Haq to use the resultant turmoil as a pretext to launch a military coup.

Though JI and some Muslim League factions welcomed the coup, JUI immediately denounced it and (in 1981) joined the PPP-led anti-Zia alliance, the Movement For The Restoration of Democracy (MRD).

In an era when (with the logistical help of the Zia regime and US and Saudi funding), seminaries had rapidly begun to crop up (to indoctrinate fighters against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan), the JUI too was given a free hand to establish madressahs, especially in NWFP and Balochistan.

JUI happily took this opportunity to increase its network of seminaries, but at the same time it continued being an integral part of the anti-Zia MRD!

A senior leader of the party, Maulana Samiul Haq, who wanted the party to join the Zia regime, broke away from party leader, Maulana Fazalul Rehman, and formed his own (pro-Zia) faction of the JUI, the JUI-Sami.

Meanwhile, during the same period, some cadres who were part of JUI’s youth wing in the 1970s formed the SSP. One of them was Haq Nawaz Jhangvi who had been radicalised by 1974’s anti-Ahmadiyya movement and then graduated to become an important member of the JUI in the 1980s.

SSP soon became the most militant expression of anti-Shia politics in Pakistan. It was mainly backed and funded by the Sunni trader classes in the city of Jhang who saw the organisation as a radical anti-feudal outfit because most landowners in Jhang had belonged to the Shia sect.

But according to Amir Mir’s book, ‘From 9/11 to 26/11’, the pro-SSP trader classes were not entirely comfortable with its overtly militant ways. They wanted it to counter the so-called Shia political and economic influence (in Jhang) through the mosque and, more so, from the national and provincial assemblies.

From 1988 onwards, SSP men began to regularly contest polls from Jhang. In 1990, Jhangvi was assassinated (allegedly by Shia gunmen in retaliation for the killing of a prominent religious leader of a Shia group).

Thus began a vicious cycle of killings and retaliatory assassinations between Sunni and Shia militants. In 1996 a group walked out of the SSP and formed the LeJ, after accusing the SSP leadership of deviating from Jhangvi’s philosophy.

In 2002, both SSP and LeJ were banned by the Musharraf regime along with the main Shia sectarian organisation, the Tehreek-i-Jafiria.

SSP remoulded itself and returned as Millat-i-Islamia but was banned again. However it remerged, this time as Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamat (ASWJ), whereas LeJ went entirely rogue and has often been accused of undertaking numerous bombings and assassinations.

Though ASWJ has retained SSP’s firebrand sectarian character, however, it now claims that it pursues its goals through political and legal means.

Last week when Malik Ishaq was killed in a police encounter, with him also went two other top tier leaders of the LeJ. The fourth one is in jail.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 9th, 2015
Smokers’ Corner: The fateful split
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Old Wednesday, August 19, 2015
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Default August 16th, 2015

Smokers’ Corner: Left wing, right wing, broken wing


Most major operations of the Pakistan Military in the last decade or so have almost entirely concentrated on such groups stationed in the tribal areas near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and also in certain more well-settled parts of the region, such as Swat.

The immediate rationale behind the emergence of extremist groups in these areas has to do with the permissive policies of the Ziaul Haq dictatorship (1977-88) that allowed the proliferation of non-conventional religious groups across Pakistan during the war that erupted between Afghan insurgents and the Soviet-backed government in Kabul in the 1980s.

Pakistan played the role of a facilitator in the war, channelling the funds and arms received from the US and Saudi Arabia to various insurgent groups who increasingly saw their battle against the Kabul regime as a holy struggle.

Pakistan also provided indoctrination facilities to these groups. The indoctrination was largely undertaken by radical clerics who till the late 1970s had been on the fringes of society.

For decades various areas in North West Pakistan have gained infamy for being bastions of a number
of extreme right-wing militant outfits
It is correct to suggest that such manoeuvres by the state of Pakistan were instrumental in turning large swaths of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province into areas that became increasingly infested by a number of religious militant outfits (many of which eventually turned against the state of Pakistan).

But there are some political scientists who suggest that the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s was just one reason that triggered the appearance of religious militancy and insurgencies in KP.

They suggest that some of the earliest fighters (from Pakistan) who joined the Afghan insurrection at the start of the anti-Soviet insurgency in early 1980 were actually first radicalised by certain militant leftist groups that had been active in KP in the 1970s.

In Beyond Swat (edited by Magnus Marsden), anthropologist Charles Lindholm in his paper — based on his on-field study in Swat in the 1970s —suggests that young men in Swat coming from less well-to-do families were first radicalised by the socialist message of former prime minister and chairman of the PPP, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Lindholm informs that young Swatis voted in droves for the PPP in the 1977 election (that were declared void by the Zia dictatorship after that year’s military coup).

These young Bhutto enthusiasts worked actively against religious parties and non-religious conservative groups whom they accused of being in league with the landed elite of Swat.

Interestingly Lindholm then goes on to inform that in the 1980s, when politics based on religious populism began to peak and was welded with right-wing militant groups that had begun to crop up during the Zia regime, young men from Swat’s working and lower-middle-class backgrounds who had been radicalised by Bhutto’s populist and leftist rhetoric, started to colour their angry stances with an equally angry ‘Islamist’ point of view. Lindholm saw this trend unfold during his stay in Swat between 1977 and late 1980s.

There is weight in this observation. Because ever since the 1980s incidents have come to light in which some early recruits of religious militant outfits in Swat once had links with either politics of the radical left or with the equally radical Pakhtun nationalist tendencies.

One of the most prominent examples in this respect is of the renegade leader of perhaps the most belligerent factions of the Pakistani Taliban, Mullah Fazalullah.

As a teen in Swat in 1990, Fazalullah is reported to have been attached to the politics of the student-wing of the Pakhtun nationalist party, the Awami National Party (ANP), whereas other reports claim that he was associated with the youth wing of the PPP.

On the surface this may suggest an inherent extremist moving from one extreme to another.

But in his study, Lindholm treats the phenomenon (in Swat), as being about a generation that was made aware (by Bhutto) of certain overpowering economic and political discrepancies and it expressed its discontent through an idea that was at the time promising radical change (socialism). But sections of this generation then moved to another promising idea (militant faith) once the earlier idea withered away from popular imagination.

If so, then those discrepancies are still present. And recently with the kind of battering the second radical idea has suffered (after it turned against the state and eventually on itself with its anarchic violence), what shape has the shifting radical tendency that (according to Lindholm) has been present in Swat since the 1970s, taken now?

Something similar also happened elsewhere in KP. For example, most scholars on religious militancy in Pakistan points to the fact that one of the first Pakistani recruits to volunteer to take part in the Afghan conflict of the 1980s, were members of the student wing of the right-wing Jamaat-i-Islami (JI).

Indeed, but what gets missed in this regard is the fact that some of the very early recruits from Pakistan who joined the conflict were actually men who had first taken up arms against the government in the early 1970s.

Between 1969 and 1974 the hilly Hashtnagar area in KP was the scene of several peasant uprisings and insurgencies against landlords (Khans). The insurgency was initiated and led by the Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP).

The MKP was a far-left/Maoist outfit that had broken away from the mainstream left-wing party, the National Awami Party (NAP) in 1968.

MKP cadres travelled to Hashtnagar with Urdu and Pashto translations of radical Marxist and Maoist literature and then with light weapons. They began a programme of indoctrinating the poorest peasants of the area, and then trained them in guerrilla warfare.

A number of landlords were driven out and their lands occupied by MKP-led peasants. However, by 1974 the movement was crushed when it began to spill into villages of (South) Punjab.

Dozens of young peasants who had taken part in the fighting (under a red flag), then became some of the earliest Pakistanis to join the first Afghan Islamic insurgent groups who were allowed set up shop in KP soon after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet forces.

In 2002 when American planes began bombarding the Taliban-held Afghanistan, I happened to bump into one Ilyas in Islamabad. Ilyas, a Pakhtun living in Peshawar, was distributing posters of Osama Bin Laden (along with his cousin), and protesting against the US bombing. He was then in his early 40s and claimed to have fought for MKP in 1973 as a young man.

He told me that after the MKP movement collapsed, he was befriended by a group of young clerics (in 1980) who sent him to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. He returned in 1984 and vowed to fight for an ‘Islamic revolution’ in Pakistan.

In 2002 he told me he was again preparing to go to Afghanistan. In 2006, I managed to meet his cousin again who now claimed that Illyas did go to Afghanistan, but this time did not return.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Left wing, right wing, broken wing
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 16th, 2015
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Misbahul Haq: the war time captain


Recently a respected Bri*tish newspaper declared Pakistan’s Misbahul Haq as the best contemporary Test captain in the cricket-playing world.

As captain Misbah-ul-Haq has been unique. He might also be the modern-day game’s first ‘war-time captain’.

When he was recalled to the Pakistan side and handed over the captaincy in 2011, the country was in the midst of an existential crisis. Extremist terror outfits were bombing mosques, markets and shrines, unabashedly downing civilians, cops and soldiers.

Apart from good, consistent cricket, the skipper must have leadership skills found in a military general or in a political leader
The country stood on the brink of a war that today has come to pass; a war that is now actually promising a safer Pakistan.

But back in 2011, Pakistan was staring into the abyss. Its rulers, military and polity were unsure how to contain the rampaging monsters of militancy, extremism, corruption and crime. The country was also facing growing international isolation. For example, no Test side was willing to tour Pakistan after the Sri Lankan team was attacked in Lahore by militants in 2009.

Misbah has never led the Pakistan cricket team in Pakistan. He’s never had what in cricket is called ‘the home advantage’. Ever since 2009, most of Pakistan’s ‘home series’ have taken place in the UAE.

More than in any other sport, in cricket, teams have to do well on foreign tours and in front of foreign crowds, to fully prove their mantle. That’s what the Pakistan team has been doing ever since 2009 but especially after Misbah took up the captaincy in 2011.

All of Misbah’s games as captain have been played, won, lost and drawn on foreign soil.

The irony of it all is that Misbah, who today has risen to become Pakistan’s most successful Test captain, was not even in the team when he was hastily made captain!

When he was given the captaincy, he was making his third comeback to the side and that too at the ripe old age of 36 an age when most international cricketers either retire or start thinking about retirement.

He had made his debut for the national squad in 2001, but lost his place (due to loss of form) in 2002.

However, despite the fact that he continued to perform well in the domestic circuit, he could not break back into the side till years later when he was finally recalled in 2007.

He almost became a hero in his first comeback event, the T20 World Cup in South Africa. And what a comeback it was. Misbah’s batting helped Pakistan reach the finals.

He almost turned the final (against India) on its head. Pakistan’s batting collapsed while chasing the Indian score. But Misbah held his nerve and then began smashing the Indian bowling attack to all parts of the stadium, getting Pakistan ever so close to a stunning victory, but only to get out in the very last over.

Alas, in 2010 he lost form again, and also his place in the side.

Between the retirement of former Pakistan skipper, Inzamam (in 2007), and Misbah’s elevation to the post of captain in 2011, the team went through five captains!

The team could not play at home, because that home kept plunging into extremist violence and political turmoil. During this testing period, the squad was also being torn apart by continuous infighting, players’ rebellions and charges of spot-fixing.

What’s more, when a bewildered Pakistan cricket board decided to hand over the captaincy to Misbah, he was still struggling to gain the kind of form required to play international cricket.

It was a temporary arrangement. He was asked to be a caretaker of sorts till the board could come up with a more permanent candidate for the captaincy. But this is when Misbah began to play his best cricket.

After consolidating his place in the team again as a solid middle-order batsman, Misbah slowly began to peel off whatever that was left of the culture weaved by Inzamam’s four-year-captaincy stint (2003-2007).

Under Misbah cricket alone became the thing with which to measure a player’s worth. He also tried to subdue the team’s reputation of being frustratingly unpredictable and impulsive by encouraging a more watchful, planned and cautious approach towards the game.

He was fervently criticised for this by critics and fans alike. But quietly he managed to pull the team together and out of its existential doldrums and inspired its slow march upwards in world rankings.

But Misbah’s steady approach and tactics not only supported the curbing of flashy cricketing skills (because they smacked of recklessness), they consequentially made the role of spinners more prominent in the team than that of the quick bowlers.

This was a clear break from the past. The fast bowlers had been in the forefront of Pakistani attacks ever since the mid-1980s. Under Misbah, the spinners took precedence, and this precedence saw him introduce one of the finest and most innovative off-spinners in the game: Saeed Ajmal.

Under Misbah, Ajmal became the team’s main strike bowler. Batsmen exhibiting patience and good technique were preferred and encouraged (Asad Shafique, Azhar Ali), even though, the bulk of the batting load was largely shared between Misbah and the team’s other old warhorse, Younis Khan.

Ever so slowly but surely, Misbah’s tactics began to bear fruit. However, on the way, he also managed to gather some exceedingly vocal critics who seemed enormously disturbed by his curious, cautious attitude and the way he was dismantling the team culture designed by Inzamam and then by the short-term captains that had followed Inzamam in quick succession.

Teams under good and influential captains begin to reflect the personality of that person. Mushtaq Mohammad and Imran Khan’s teams reflected the flamboyant and intrepid ways of their captains, and same can be said about the team under Wasim Akram.

Like Inzamam’s personality, the team culture under him too had become reticent and contrary: socially introverted, but exhibitionistic in matters of the faith, even though as a batsman he was extremely flamboyant.

The team under Misbah evolved a more stoic and determined dimension. Like Misbah, the team did not wear its faith on its sleeves. Faith once again became a strictly private matter in Pakistan cricket.

Misbah’s team was neither as colourful as the teams under Mushtaq and Imran, nor anything like what it had become during Inzi’s captaincy.

By 2013, Misbah had plucked more Test and ODI victories than most Pakistani captains.

Two years later in 2015, he finally overtook the joint Test captaincy record of former greats, Imran Khan and Javed Miandad, to become the Pakistani Test captain with the most wins.

His batting average as a captain has remained to be over 50, and he has notched up more fifties and hundreds as a skipper than he was able to during any other stage in his career as a batsman.

It won’t be incorrect to suggest that with a stoic, quiet but stubborn determination, Misbah has admiringly faced a number of some unprecedented challenges.

The kind of circumstances he as a captain was faced with, such as cricketing controversies that he was never a part of, and the violence and turmoil in his country that threw Pakistan cricket into exile he had to beat much bigger odds to become a great captain compared to those faced by his contemporaries in the country’s elite group of captains.

Source:Misbahul Haq: the war time captain
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 23rd, 2015
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Pay up, Pakistanis: Tax-exempt patriotism won’t cut it anymore


Surveys show repeatedly that Pakistanis carry and exhibit high levels of patriotism. Yet, despite this, these citizens do not fulfill an important component of their social contract with the state that they eulogise or want to strengthen: paying taxes.

Very few Pakistanis are bothered to pay what is due from them, yet, they are always ready and willing to display their patriotism at the drop of a hat.

This is nationalism minus responsibility. In addition, not enough attention is being given to Pakistan's underlying fiscal fragility that has compounded itself over 30 years.

All the issues topical today, be it child protection, increased internal security and human development needs, all need to be financed. Fixing taxation is the only solution.

A series of three in-depth studies and reports by RAFTAAR (Research and Advocacy for the Advancement of Allied Reforms) on the issue of Tax in Pakistan have shown just how important it is for the state, government and polity of Pakistan to understand the significance of this issue in the context of Pakistan surviving as a truly sovereign nation.

Take a look: Taxation issues: Pakistan's Ignored Existential Crisis

The reports’ findings are rather startling. Only 0.3 per cent of the population of Pakistan files their income tax returns. India, on the other hand, which has a greater percentage of people in poverty, manages up to 3 per cent.

Since 2003, Pakistan’s revenue collection has remained flat. Expenditures by the state have continued to grow as newer challenges to the country emerge, such as natural disasters, annual flooding, internal security, etc. How is the state to meet these expenditures without receiving much assistance from its citizens?

Pakistan’s tax to GDP ratio is just 9.4 per cent, this is close to the bottom of countries worldwide in terms of revenue generation.

The country’s budgetary deficit is crawling with debt because we do not collect enough taxes. And it’s an expensive debt. One third of it is foreign, two thirds is raised through domestic sources. Foreign debt has an interest rate of 1.9 per cent. Domestic debt has an interest rate of 10.7 per cent. Foreign debt is cheaper, but access to it for Pakistan is harder. So the cost of interest on our debt is 1.3 trillion, of which 92 per cent goes to domestic creditors, and 8 per cent to international lenders.

The reports further inform that in 2008, Pakistan’s public debt was Rs 6.3 trillion. Today it’s 17 trillion! That is a three-fold increase. And it will continue to increase unless the state can increase revenue, because otherwise, it will continue to finance through debt.

This debt is eating up our current revenue.

This squeezes the state’s ability to invest in the people of Pakistan because as debt interests are paid, there is less left for development.

We just can’t continue to depend upon the international community. The reports declare that its role is overstated. Over the last eight years, foreign project assistance in the development budget has only been 15 per cent. Overall, net external assistance has only financed 4 per cent of the budget. Pakistan’s real source of budgetary gaps is deficit financing through loans.

Pakistan’s ability to endure through unexpected crises is also dependent upon improving taxation. Right now, 60 per cent of the federal budget is earmarked to interest payments, wages, pensions and defense. 12 per cent goes to subsidies and grants. Only 28 per cent is adjustable. Thus, any unforeseen event gives the country little fiscal room. We have a fiscally fragile economy.

Despite the fact that only 0.3 per cent Pakistani file income tax returns, the people largely feel they are being taxed a lot. This is relatively correct because the government has not been able to collect direct taxes. So in desperation, it resorts to indirect taxation.

68 per cent of tax revenue in Pakistan comes from indirect taxation. Pakistanis pay more for fuel and electricity than other regional countries because of the surcharges added.

But the problem with indirect taxation is that for some items it penalises the poorer more than those with higher incomes. As one of RAFTAAR’s reports explains, for example, tax on a loaf of bread will be the same for the rich and the poor. Without improvements in the direct taxation system and more compliance there will be continued pressure to levy indirect taxes on consumption.

Because of non-revenue sources of funds Pakistan has historically functioned on loans, and aid. Consequently, Pakistan has not been compelled to develop its tax system adequately. As a result, there is no tax-culture in Pakistan.

There are now a number of groups with political clout who oppose tax reform. But tax reform is a cross-party issue that will require all parties to come together in order to ensure progress, otherwise reform-losers will shift allegiances to those promising no change.

The reports suggest that Pakistan needs to embed taxation into its education system in order to create a next generation of compliant taxpayers. Students need to be taught why taxation is integral to the state and is one of the cornerstones of citizenship as is done in many countries around the world.

A tax-paying citizen is a truly patriotic citizen; we must ensure our future generations always remember that.
The state also needs to explain how it delivers services to the people, however imperfect. The existing quid-pro-quo between taxation and services needs to be emphasised in order for increased tax literacy and to address the information deficit in the people.

The system of the FBR also needs to be simplified so that more people are able to file returns without the help of specialists.

Better and improved tax collection will pay for itself. If Pakistan can raise its own revenues to improve the quality of its infrastructure, it could mean a growth of 3.7 per cent GDP per capita

Pakistan’s development expenditure has declined from 7 per cent to 2.5 per cent of the GDP. With increased tax revenues this trend can be reversed and Pakistan will be able to invest more in education, health and other human development initiatives.

Source: Pay up, Pakistanis: Tax-exempt patriotism won’t cut it anymore by Nadeem F. Paracha
Published in Dawn, August 27, 2015.
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Smokers’ Corner: Bhutto’s ideologue: friend, mentor, enemy


In 1966 when Z.A. Bhutto was pushed out from his post as Foreign Minister by the regime of Field Martial Ayub Khan, he found himself wandering aimlessly in the political wilderness. Historian Stanley Wolpert (in his book, Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan), and Philip E. Jones (in Pakistan People’s Party: Rise to Power), have covered in detail this period of Bhutto’s life, suggesting that he had even decided to quit politics and leave the country.

The feeling of estrangement in him was such that at one point he walked out of his house in Karachi’s Clifton area (70 Clifton), and strolled into the palatial Mohatta Palace that is about a 100 metres away from 70 Clifton. At the time the Mohatta was the residence of Fatimah Jinnah, the aging sister of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (d.1948).

Ms Jinnah had contested the 1965 presidential election against Ayub Khan. But she had retired into seclusion after she was narrowly defeated by the fetching Field Marshall. Bhutto was part of the Ayub government during the election and had enthusiastically helped him in his electoral campaign against Ms Jinnah. Nevertheless, when Bhutto arrived at her doorstep, broken and feeling abandoned, Ms Jinnah agreed to meet him and (according to Wolpert), her parting words to him were: ‘I told you never to trust Ayub …’

Bhutto had opposed Ayub’s ceasefire agreement with the Indian Prime Minster after the 1965 Pakistan-India war reached a stalemate. The war was largely initiated by Bhutto’s analysis that suggested that the ‘Indian military was vulnerable after it was defeated by the Chinese army in 1962.’

Surprisingly, not much has been written about the man who transformed Bhutto from being a lost politician into the force behind one of the largest political parties in Pakistan
Though the Pakistan military had made some impressive gains at the start of the 1965 war, both Pakistan and India soon began to run out of military and economic resources and settled for a ceasefire.

Ayub accused Bhutto of misleading him, and Bhutto came out to claim that ‘Ayub had lost the war on the negotiating table’. Bhutto enjoyed a sudden surge of popularity among students who were angry at the ceasefire agreement. But after his ouster from the Ayub regime, he was just a young former Foreign Minister who had gained the admiration of some sections of the youth. But this support was likely to wither away if not cultivated from an established political platform.

So Bhutto first tried to make his way into Council Muslim League, the Muslim League (ML) faction that was opposed to the faction being led by Ayub (the Convention Muslim League). But Bhutto’s meeting with the Council League leadership did not go anywhere, mainly because the party was being headed by old Muslim League warhorses.

Philip E. Jones informs that after recognising the era’s rise of leftist sentiments among the youth across the world, Bhutto sensed the same phenomenon unfolding in Pakistan as well. Encouraged by the support he had received from the student community after the 1965 war, Bhutto now began to contemplate joining the time’s largest left-wing party in Pakistan, the National Awami Party (NAP). But here too he failed to bag an important spot because NAP already had a number of established leaders in its fold.

The resultant despondency drove Bhutto to leave Pakistan for the UK. There he began receiving letters from J. A. Rahim. Rahim was a retired civil servant who had been a secret member of the clandestine Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). Rahim advised Bhutto to form his own party. Bhutto met Rahim and the latter convinced Bhutto by explaining him how Pakistan was ripe for the emergence of a populist progressive party.

Like Bhutto, Rahim too possessed a sharp intellect and was extremely well-read. But he was also a trained Marxist ideologue and theoretician. A Bengali, he had studied Philosophy and Political Science at university and then gone on to receive an additional degree in Law. As a university student, Rahim had taken part in the movement that gave birth to Pakistan in 1947. In Pakistan he joined the new country’s fledgling civil service. However, he also secretly became a member of the Communist Party of Pakistan. But he chose to be politically inactive, until he saw how Bhutto was hailed as a hero by the youth in 1965.

At the time Bhutto had a rather superficial knowledge of Marxism, but he was impressed by how Rahim had used Marxist analytical tools to justify the emergence of a populist socialist party in Pakistan. Consequently, in 1967 Rahim became one of the founding members of such a party: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Bhutto became the party’s chairman.

Rahim was also the main author of the party’s first manifesto. Other contributors included Dr Mubasher Hassan (socialist economist), Hanif Ramay (the intellectual who introduced Bhutto to the concept of ‘Islamic Socialism’) and Bhutto himself.

Rahim, Hassan and another socialist leader, S. Mohammad Rashid, were the main architects of organising the PPP across cities, towns and villages of (mainly) West Pakistan. They used various Maoist and Leninist organisational methods in this regard, setting up numerous party offices; forming youth, peasant and labour groups; and striking alliances with radical left-wing student and trade unions.

Rahim also authored much of the party literature that was translated into Urdu and regional languages and then distributed for indoctrination purposes and to counter the propaganda of right-wing parties that had begun to describe the PPP as an irreligious outfit.

The party swept the 1970 election in West Pakistan’s two largest provinces. It became the country’s new ruling party in December 1971 after East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh. Bhutto became President and then Prime Minister.

Rahim was made a federal minister. Along with other top PPP ideologues, he began the party’s project to turn Pakistan into a socialist economy and polity. However, by 1973 when a dramatic increase in oil prices by oil-rich Arab states triggered a global economic crisis, Bhutto began to drastically scale back his government’s socialist initiatives.

Bhutto was more a populist pragmatist than a socialist. From 1974 onwards, he moved slightly to the right and sidelined the party’s left ideologues. Some of them were even ousted. Rahim was asked to become Pakistan’s Ambassador to France.

But in 1975, Rahim was back and sitting in the drawing room of 70 Clifton with some other ministers. Bhutto often invited his ministers and party leaders for dinner but would not meet them till very late in the night.

Philip Jones explains how Rahim, now in his 70s, got agitated and complained, ‘I am not waiting for the Maharaja of Larkana anymore!’ He then stood up and left. The very next day an armed party of Bhutto’s special security force raided Rahim’s house, dragged him out, punched and kicked him, and then threw him in jail.

Bhutto accused Rahim of insulting his (Bhutto’s) ethnicity. However, Bhutto soon released him, apologised and asked him to return to France. Rahim passed away in 1977, the year Bhutto’s regime fell in a reactionary coup orchestrated by General Ziaul Haq. Rahim’s son welcomed the fall.

It is surprising that not much has been written about the man who transformed Bhutto from being a lost politician into becoming a powerful political force, and then helped him form one of the largest political parties in Pakistan. During his last days in Zia’s death cell (in 1979), one of the things Bhutto is said to have regretted most was his fall-out with his former mentor. But he was no more. And after April 4, 1979, neither was Bhutto.

Source: Smokers’ Corner: Bhutto’s ideologue: friend, mentor, enemy
Published in Dawn, Sunday, August 30, 2015
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The Lost Boys


Author, Raja Anwar, in his controversial book, The Terrorist Prince (1997), informs how dozens of young Pakistanis who ended up in exile in countries like Syria and Libya in the 1980s, simply vanished.

Anwar was a radical student activist in the 1960s who was made an advisor on youth affairs when the PPP came to power in December 1971.

After former Prime Minister and PPP Chairman, Z.A. Bhutto was hanged in 1979 by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship, Anwar escaped to Kabul that had a Soviet-backed government at the time. There he joined the urban guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfikar (AZO).

Hair-raising tales of illegal immigrants …
Raja’s book is mostly about his experiences as an AZO operative. But he also sprints through stories of young lower-middle and working class Pakistanis who, due to their admiration for Bhutto, had joined the AZO (in Kabul).

Many such young men were also rotting in Zia’s cramped jails when some 50 of them were flown into Syria in exchange for passengers of a PIA plane that was hijacked by AZO in 1981.

According to Anwar, many early AZO men died or were arrested when they returned to Pakistan to orchestrate attacks against the Zia regime, while others (including the men who were swapped for the passengers) settled across countries such as Syria and Libya. Some even made it to certain European countries as well.

However, only a handful of those who had gotten political asylum in Europe managed to survive, and some even returned to Pakistan. But most of those who, to escape the Zia regime, had entered ‘anti-Zia’ countries like Libya and Syria, were never seen again.

According to Anwar, many of them ended up in jails. This happened after their utility as militants exhausted itself in the eyes of the radical Libyan and Syrian regimes or they chose not to get involved. They never made it back to Pakistan.

At the end of the Cold War in 1990, another group of young Pakistanis almost faced a similar fate. But the difference was that unlike their compatriots discussed above, these young men were not political.

In 2008, I met a group of Pakistanis selling flowers in a congested market in Rome. One such man, Qadir, who was in his late 30s, related to me an extraordinary story.

He told me that most of his Pakistani contemporaries who were selling flowers in that area were illegal immigrants who had been in Europe ever since the early 1990s. He said that he had first landed in Europe in 1992.

He was part of a group of about a dozen young men (from various small towns in the Punjab), who were contacted by a clandestine ‘travel agent’ (situated in Lahore).

Qadir, at the time, was 22 and working with his father who owned a small plot of farm land, even though he had managed to get an intermediate degree from a local collage.

The travel agent told them that since the Soviet Union had broken up (in 1991), reaching Europe had become a lot easier. They were asked to dish out Rs100,000 each.

‘He told us that we could make double this amount within months once we got jobs in Europe,’ Qadir had added.

Qadir and eight other such young men persuaded their parents to procure loans and pay the agent. They then bid farewell to their families in March 1992 and headed (by bus) to Afghanistan. The agent got them into Afghanistan by bribing some Afghan custom officials.

‘The Afghan war was (briefly) over, the Soviet troops had left, and there were no Taliban there in those days,’ Qadir had told me.

From Afghanistan they entered Russia (by foot). Qadir said: ‘More bribes were paid, and by the time we reached the Russia-Ukraine border, most of us had no money left and had lost lots of weight … but there was no turning back.’

The group was suddenly abandoned by the agent on the border, but the men were able to enter Ukraine due to the chaos that accompanied that country’s sudden independence from the former Soviet Union.

They tried to get jobs in the Ukrainian capital, but apart from securing some menial work (as daily wage janitors), they struggled. They bumped into a Pakistani businessman who agreed to pay for their return to Pakistan. ‘… But he just handed us $50 and we never saw him again,’ Qadir remembered.

In October 1992 the group took a bus to a town near the Ukraine-Romania border. In 1989 a West-backed revolution had toppled Romania’s communist regime.

‘There was still lots of turmoil in Romania,’ Qadir explained. ‘Poverty and corruption was rampant and, believe it or not, each one of us paid $7 each to a Ukrainian man who then paid half of this money to three Romanian border guards, and we managed to cross into Romania!’

But they found that country too was in the throes of economic and political turmoil.

‘There was no work,’ Qadir lamented. ‘We cleaned the streets and bathrooms for little money and slept in crumbling buildings with roving gypsies. Some of us began to break down and cry a lot.’

After hearing their story, a Romanian shopkeeper told them that they should travel to Bosnia: ‘He said, you are Muslims. Go to Bosnia. There are many Muslims there,’ Qadir remembered.

Bosnia had emerged in March 1992 after Yugoslavia broke up.

So they travelled from Romania on the edges of the Romania-Hungary border by foot and sometimes on the backs of donkeys owned by gypsy tribes. They entered Bosnia in February 1993.

But what the shopkeeper didn’t tell them was that a vicious civil war had erupted between Bosnians, Croats and Serbs.

They reached a Muslim Bosnian village. They were fed by a family of farmers and given some work. ‘They (the Bosnians) are very different kind of Muslims,’ Qadir laughed. ‘Very different culture and rituals.’

But after about a month, a group of Bosnian men arrived and took most of the men from the village away, included them. They were immediately recruited to fight against the Serbs.

At this point of the story, Qadir became sad: ‘For next five years we bounced from one Bosnian group to another, fighting their war,’ he shook his head. ‘It was terrible. The Serbs were like monsters. Killing women and children, and then the Bosnians would retaliate. Our (Pakistani) group lost three men and one was taken away by the Serbs. Don’t know what happened to him. We tried to escape, but couldn’t. There was war everywhere. We had to keep fighting (for the Bosnian groups) …’

Just four of them remained when the war came to an end after American planes bombed Serbia in 1999. Two decided to return to Pakistan while Qadir and three others ended up in Rome, Italy.

‘It was only in 2005 that my family got to know about my fate (through a relative who tracked him down). I talked to them on the phone, and my mother burst out crying. She was sure I was dead.’

Qadir was hopeful that one day he would be able to get Italian citizenship. Sometimes he gets arrested, but said that the cops of the area knew what he had gone through, and so they usually let him go.

I asked Qadir why he didn’t go back to Pakistan. ‘I would have loved to,’ he told me. ‘But I kept hearing about the terrible things happening there, the violence and all. So I think, wouldn’t going back be like being in Bosnia again …?’

Before I could answer, he had spotted an approaching cop. He handed me a flower, then after saying, Rab Rakha (May God be with you), he quickly slid away.

Source: The Lost Boys
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 6th, 2015
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Default Sep 10, 2015

Making of the Sindhi identity: From Shah Latif to GM Syed to Bhutto


In a nutshell, between the 1930s and mid-2000s, the existential narrative that furnished the Sindhi identity in Pakistan was this: Sindhis were of a land and society that was largely shaped by the deeds of hundreds of Sufi saints (especially Shah Abdul Latif), who preached tolerance and co-existence, and were suspicious of those who were stripping Islam of its spiritual essence, while replacing it with a creed based on a rigid worldview and an obsession with rituals.

This narrative was essential for Sindhis because it helped them find an anchor for their ethnic identity and sense of history; especially in a country where (according to them) the state was attempting to bypass centuries-old identities based on ethnicity, on the back of a largely cosmetic ideology based on a myopic understanding of the ethnic, religious and sectarian complexities of Pakistan.

The 19th century British traveller, Richard Burton, in his prolific accounts of Sindh, described the province to be one of the calmest regions of British India, with its own unique blends of faith.

Writing in the mid-1800s, Burton described Sindh as a land dotted by numerous shrines of Sufi saints; frequented in large numbers, by both the Muslim, as well as the Hindu inhabitants of the region.

He described Sindhi Muslims to be somewhat different (in their beliefs and rituals) from the Muslims of the rest of India.

According to Burton, even the Hindus of Sindh were different because their Hinduism was more influenced by Buddhism.

Birth of the existential Sindhi identity
When Punjab was being ripped apart by violent and gruesome clashes between the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Sindh remained peaceful.

In Interpreting the Sindh World, Vazira Fazila writes that Sindh’s British Governor, Francis Mudie, reported that the Hindus of Sindh were likely to stay behind (in Pakistan) because there was no chance of communal violence in the province that had exhibited ‘great communal harmony’.

However, after some Hindu places of worship were attacked in Karachi in 1948, Hindu Sindhis began to leave in droves.

This is when Sindhi intellectuals and political thinkers such as Ibrahim Joyo and GM Syed began to shape a meta-narrative of Sindhi identity, because to them, the departing Hindus were first Sindhis, then Hindus; and their departure weakened Sindh’s demography and economy.

After the creation of Pakistan (and then the demise of its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah), the Pakistani state began in earnest its long-drawn project to cut through the country’s ethnic complexities by constructing and then imposing a monolithic narrative of Pakistani nationhood.

This attracted the scorn of the country’s various ethnicities, who dismissed and rejected the state’s idea of nationhood. They believed it contradicted the notions of nationhood and faith enshrined in the historical DNA of their respective ethnicities.

Between 1958 and the early 1970s, GM Syed immersed himself in the study of the religious, social and political histories of Sindh. In 1966, he created 'Bazm-e-Sufian-e-Sindh', an intellectual initiative that also included a number of other Sindhi scholars.

Syed and these scholars then went on to publish a number of important papers and books that helped form the doctrinal and ideological basis of modern Sindhi nationalism.

This nationalism explained the Sindhis to be descendants of the natives of the Indus Valley Civilisation, whose social, political and religious consciousness was influenced by various religions and cultures that had arrived and established themselves in the region in the last 5000 years.

It added that this aspect of Sindh’s history, along with the Muslim Sufi saints who began to arrive and settle in Sindh after the 8th Century CE, helped shape the Sindhi society in becoming inherently tolerant and pluralistic, and repulsed by those strands of the faith that eschewed tolerance.

Syed’s works gave Sindhi identity a historical and religious context that also helped shield the Sindhi society from being affected by the disastrous sectarian and extremist fall-outs of the various religious experiments conducted by the state and governments of Pakistan.

Bhutto steps in
Though Syed failed to transform his scholarly impact into political mileage (for himself), another Sindhi, ZA Bhutto, who was accused by Syed of being a stooge of the ‘establishment’, recognised the impact Syed had had on the Sindhi mindset.

In 1975, when his party, the left-liberal Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), was in power and he was ruling as the country’s first elected prime minister, Bhutto appropriated Syed’s narrative by organising a large government-backed conference on Sindh (in Karachi), in which Sindhi scholars were invited to officially adopt what Syed had already initiated.

In 1972, Syed’s Sindhi ethnic party, the Jeeay Sindh (JS), had demanded the separation of Sindh from Pakistan and Syed had been arrested. Bhutto wanted to neutralise separatist feelings in his home province by tying Syed’s enormous thesis and narrative of Sindh’s religious and cultural history to that of the Pakistani state’s.

It was during the 1975 conference that Syed’s idea of Sindh historically being ‘the land of the Sufis’ was first recognised and promoted by the state. It was then turned into an official narrative (through state-owned media), but only after stripping the Sindhi nationalist/separatist aspect that Syed had attached to this narrative.

Thus, it was after 1975 that the expression ‘Sindh is a land of Sufis’ was given official currency.

Dutch author and expert on Sindh, Oskar Verkaaik, suggests (in his 2010 paper The Sufi Saints of Sindhi Nationalism) that Bhutto, besides trying to neutralise Syed’s political impact in the province, used the conference to further beef up his (Bhutto’s) concept of the populist ‘Third World Socialism’ by combining it with Syed’s thesis on Sindhi Sufism.

Bhutto’s regime was toppled in a reactionary military coup by General Ziaul Haq (July 1977), and in 1979, he was executed through a sham trial.

On the day Bhutto was hanged, Syed commented that the ‘the (Punjabi-dominated) establishment doesn’t realise that today, it hanged its most loyal servant.’

Yet, most of the movements and protests against the Zia dictatorship took place in Sindh. And rather ironically, during perhaps the largest such movement (the 1983 MRD uprising in the interior of Sindh), Syed did not take any part.

When he was asked why his party had decided not to take part in a movement that was being brutally crushed by the ‘establishment’, Syed said: ‘Zia is making our job easier by leading the break-up of Pakistan.’

Dozens of Sindhis lost their lives in the 1983 movement against Zia.

The MRD (Movement for the Restoration of Democracy) was a PPP-led alliance that also included some small far-left parties and one religious party, the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI) that was the only mainstream religious outfit that was opposing Zia.

Much of the protesting and fighting was done by activists belonging to the PPP and its student-wing, the PSF, and by the members of the far-left Awami Tehreek – a Sindhi nationalist party that was not associated with GM Syed. A number of journalist unions and women’s organisations also took an active part.

When the violence increased and the number of civilian deaths rose, Syed’s Jeeay Sindh broke into two factions. One faction (the Jeeay Sindh Taraqi Pasand Party) decided to go against Syed’s decision to sit out the movement.

Zia was killed in August 1988 when (allegedly) a bomb went off on the C130 plane he was traveling on. The federalist PPP (now led by Bhutto’s young daughter, Benazir Bhutto) had managed to retain its influence and popularity in Sindh, whereas the Sindhi nationalists, by then, had become a fractured and fragmented lot.

Jeeay Sindh had broken into various factions and many Sindhi nationalists had also joined Murtaza Bhutto’s urban guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfikar (AZO).

The AZO was formed by Bhutto’s sons, Murtaza and Shahnawaz in 1979. It had been an ethnically diverse group, having in its ranks many young Punjabis, Mohajirs (Urdu-speakers), Pakhtuns and Sindhis. However, in 1985, it changed colour and largely became a militant Sindhi nationalist outfit before it was folded (in 1990) by Murtaza.

Despite the fact that the PPP had managed to dominate the political proceedings in Sindh, GM Syed continued to be revered as a sage by the Sindhis.

Dutch academic, Oskar Verkaaik, during his field study in Sindh in 1989-90, came across shops that had portraits of ZA Bhutto hanging on the walls right beside those of GM Syed.

Sindh’s existential disposition shaped by the likes of GM Syed and then pragmatically adopted and reengineered by Bhutto had survived Zia’s reactionary ideological onslaught.

A narrative in crisis
But if (thanks to the social and political outcome of Syed’s narrative) Sindh managed to withstand the many waves of religious extremism and radicalisation in the last three decades in Pakistan, why, all of a sudden, are we now witnessing episodes of religious bigotry and violence in the interior of the province?

In the last five years or so, attacks on Hindu places of worship and on men who had allegedly committed ‘heresy’, have been reported from the ‘land of the Sufis.’

Though the number of such incidents in Sindh is far lower still when compared to those taking place in, say, the Punjab and KP, the incidents seem to generate more debate because they took place in Sindh.


Though Sindh’s sprawling cosmopolitan capital, Karachi, is a staggering melting-pot of various ethnicities, religions, sects and sub-sects; and remains to hold its general pluralistic disposition, its darker sides, boiling with ethnic tensions, street crime, violent gangs and administrational chaos, continues to get darkened still.

What’s more, entering the chaos now are various groups of militant sectarian and extremist organisations that have taken over many congested swaths of the city.

But the rest of Sindh, till only a few years ago, was being explained as being perhaps, the country’s last major bastion of sectarian and religious harmony, still holding its reputation of being an epicentre of ‘indigenous Sufism-inspired tolerance.’

So what happened?

Three views have recently cropped up to explain the rising incidents of religious bigotry in Sindh.

1. Many Sindhi nationalists have accused the state of using extreme groups in Sindh to neutralise Sindhi nationalism.

2. The second view suggests that when Sindh suffered serious damage from the devastating 2011 floods in the province, some well-organised militant faith-based organisations set-up ‘relief camps’ in the flood-hit areas. But when the floods receded, these organisations stayed back and began to build madrassahs, from where, they are indoctrinating young Sindhis coming from poverty-stricken backgrounds.

3. The third view sees the PPP – the party that has been sweeping elections in Sindh for over 40 years now – of being unable to detect the intensity of the problem, and now suffering from extreme complacency. Those holding this view also blame the failed economic policies of the PPP governments here, which are making many poor young Sindhis fall into the trap laid down by extremist organisations.

However, there are also those who believe that bad economics is not the main issue (at least in this regard).

Just before the 2013 election, Faiz Qureshi, a retired Sindhi civil servant told a local news channel: ‘Sindhis are not fools to keep voting for the PPP in spite of that party leaving them hungry and desperate.’ He then added: ‘this (the gradual rise of religious discord) is a completely new phenomenon in Sindh. The PPP just doesn’t know how to tackle it.’

Syed’s retreat

Some economists have credited the many PPP governments in Sindh for helping shape the province’s growing middle-classes.

Political economist Asad Sayeed claims that to most Sindhis, the PPP remains to be the only party that helps them keep pace with the economics related to federal-level politics. He suggests, ‘the PPP remains to be their (the Sindhis') main link with Islamabad.’

Some three years ago, author and columnist, Ayesha Siddiqua, explained in an article how she had witnessed the emergence of madrassahs in upper Sindh.

To her, the sudden growth of madressas in the province is not a coincidence. She believes they are being set up for reasons that are far more ominous than just bad economics.

The interior of the Sindh province has had the fewest number of madrassahs, especially the kind that sprang up in Punjab and KP from the 1980s onwards and were used as indoctrination centres for young men willing to fight ‘infidels’ in Afghanistan.

Many have now also turned against their former mentors (in state institutions) who had molded them to do their bidding (and fighting) in Afghanistan.

But Sindhis were never part of any jihad (state-sponsored or otherwise). So, who is joining these seminaries?

A TV host at the Sindhi TV channel 'Awaaz' recently told me:

‘It’s confusing. Most Sindhis are still PPP voters and followers of Syed Sain (GM Syed). Most of them are still pluralistic and visit Sufi shrines like they always did. The problem is that the new generation of Sindhis have lost its bearings.’

When I asked him to elaborate, he added: ‘Till even a decade ago, most young Sindhis used to either join the student-wings of the PPP or that of a Sindhi nationalist party. But the generation today has become anarchist (sic). One really doesn’t know where they stand.’

He went on: ‘The PPP has grown lazy. It keeps its voters happy with certain economic schemes but fails to understand so many complexities that have cropped up in the Sindhi society. Many young Sindhis today are not being educated about their people’s history the way they used to. Look at the Sindhi nationalists. They’ve split into a thousand factions!’

I asked him whether the Sindh Festival (organised by the PPP-led Sindh government and organised by Benazir’s son, Bilawal Bhutto in 2014) was the PPP’s way of revitalising views about Sindh’s Sufi heritage among the new generation of young Sindhis.

‘As an idea, it made sense,’ he replied. ‘But it won’t do much. Because some Sindhis have learned from the rest of Pakistan that land and other petty disputes can now be solved by accusing ones opponent of sacrilege!’

The same year (2014), a Hindu place of worship was torched in Bhutto’s hometown of Larkana. The majority of Sindhis I managed to talk to after the Larkana incident exhibited a genuine concern. Most were of the view that something of the scale of Syed’s narrative would be required to once again shield Sindh from the scrooge of sectarianism and extremism that has ravaged Pakistani society and polity for decades now.

They believe Syed’s works should be popularised among the new generation of young Sindhis. But since the PPP is still the largest party in the province, they think that the PPP’s next foray should be an intellectual one. It should provide a platform that would work out a narrative based on the modern-day understanding of Sindh’s harmonious heritage and then circulated among the young people of Sindh (of all ethnicities and classes).

Meanwhile in Karachi …
Mohajirs (Urdu-speakers) constitute the second largest ethnic community in Sindh. They are sprinkled across the province, but are a majority in the province’s capital, Karachi (48 per cent according to the 1998 consensus); and a large Mohajir population can also be found in Sindh’s second largest city, Hyderabad. Unlike the country’s other ethnic groups, Mohajirs are not ‘people of the soil’ and/or they have roots in areas that are outside of what today is Pakistan.

A majority of them arrived from various Indian villages, towns and cities (especially from North India). 'Mohajir' in Urdu means 'refugee', and that’s what they were called when they migrated to Pakistan in 1947.

Most of them were Urdu-speakers, but also included Gujrati-speakers. A bulk of them settled in Karachi and by the early 1950s, they had become a vital part of the otherwise Punjabi-dominated ruling elite of Pakistan – mainly due to the high rate of education found in the Mohajir community, its urbane complexion, and the required expertise in running the new country’s nascent bureaucracy and (urban) economy.

Socially, the Mohajirs of Sindh were urbane, but politically they sided with the country’s two major religious parties, the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) and the Jamiat Ulema Pakistan (JUP).

The dichotomy between the Mohajirs’ social and political dispositions was a result of the community’s sense of insecurity that it felt in a country where the majority of its inhabitants were ‘sons of the soil.’ The Punjabis, Bengalis, Sindhis, Baloch and Pakhtuns already had dedicated constituencies in the new country based on their ethnic histories and languages.

The Mohajirs didn’t. They were refugees. So, out of this sense of anxiety, on the one hand, they excelled in the building and running of the nascent country’s state and government institutions (except the military that was dominated by the Punjabis); and on the other hand, they politically allied themselves with religious parties and the state of Pakistan that wanted to eschew and undermine the ethnic diversity of the country and mold a more monolithic concept of Pakistani nationhood.

This curtailed any chance of the Mohajirs to earnestly integrate and adopt the ways of the Sindhi-speaking majority of Sindh. Also, since the Mohajir community had risen to become part of the country’s early ruling elite, the Sindhis started to see the Mohajirs as cultural and political invaders who wanted to sideline the Sindhis in their own land.

But with the arrival of the country’s first military rule in 1958 (Field Martial Ayub Khan), the Mohajirs had already begun to lose their influence in the ruling elite.

With the Baloch, Bengali and Sindhi nationalists radically distancing themselves from the state’s narratives of nationhood (and remaining well outside of the ruling elite), Ayub (who hailed from Khyber Pakhtunkha), slowly began to pull in the Pakhtuns into the mainstream of Pakistani economy and politics.

Celebrated Marxist academic, Professor Jamal Naqvi, in his 2014 biography, Leaving the Left Behind, claims that Pakhtun nationalist leaders such as Wali Khan too decided to ‘bargain with the establishment after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle’ and this also facilitated the gradual entry of the Pakhtuns into the ruling and economic elite of the country.

Though by the late 1960s, the Mohajirs had decisively lost their place in the ruling elite, they were still an economic force (especially in urban Sindh).

When a Sindhi, ZA Bhutto, became the country’s prime minister in 1972, the Mohajirs feared that they would be further sidelined, this time by the economic and political resurgence of Sindhis under Bhutto. In response to this apprehension, the Mohajirs participated in droves against the Bhutto regime during the 1977 anti-Bhutto PNA movement.

PNA’s main driving force were the country’s three main religious parties: JI, JUP and Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI), though it also had in its fold Pir Pagara’s conservative Muslim League and Asghar Khan’s centrist Tehreek-e-Istaqlal.

PNA accused Bhutto of rigging the 1977 election and the violent movement that it initiated made way for the country’s third Martial Law (General Ziaul Haq).

But taking part in the PNA movement did not see the Mohajirs finding their way back into the fold of the ruling elite, even though the JI became an important player in Ziaul Haq’s first cabinet.

Disillusioned by the results of the movement, some Mohajir politicians came to the conclusion that the Mohajirs had been exploited by religious parties, and it was the shoulders of the Mohajirs that these parties had used to climb into the corridors of power.

It was this feeling that triggered the formation of the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation (in 1978) and then the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in 1984. Its founders, led by Altaf Hussain and Azim Ahmed Tariq, decided to organise the Mohajir community into a coherent ethnic whole.

For this, they felt the need to break away from the Mohajir community’s tradition of being politically allied to the religious parties, and politicise the Mohajirs’ more pluralistic social dynamics and disposition. The Mohajir dichotomy between social liberalism and political conservatism was dissolved and replaced with a new identity-narrative concentrating on the formation of Mohajir ethnic nationalism, pitched against the ‘Punjabi establishment’ as a whole and against the political muscle of the religious parties in urban Sindh.

The MQM eventually broke the electoral hold of the religious parties in Karachi and succeeded in organising and reinventing the Mohajirs of Sindh as a distinct ethnic group.

By 1992, the MQM had become Sindh’s second largest political party. Its rise created severe cleavages in Karachi’s traditional political landscape, that had been largely dominated by parties such as the PPP, the JI and JUP.

As Karachi’s economics and resources continued to come under stress due to the increasing migration to the city from within Sindh, KP and the Punjab, corruption in the police and other government institutions operating in Karachi grew two-fold.

The need to use muscle to tilt the political and economic aspects of the city towards a community’s interests became prominent.

Thus emerged the so-called militant wings in the city’s prominent political groups, whose members, even by the early 1990s, had begun to moonlight as fraudsters and violent criminals.

These cleavages saw the MQM ghettoising large swaths of the city’s Mohajirs in areas where it ruled supreme.

The results were disastrous. It replaced the pluralistic and enterprising disposition of the Mohajirs with a besieged mentality that expressed itself in an awkwardly violent manner attracting the concern and then the wrath of the state.

Between 1992 and 1999, the MQM faced three full-fledged operations from the military, police and para-military forces.

The operations and the violence did not fragment the party because the Mohajir nationalism that it had molded remained intact among the Mohajirs. But the experience did lead the MQM leadership to further elaborate and define the Mohajir nationalist narrative.

In 2002, MQM began to regenerate itself when it decided to end hostilities with the state by allying itself with the General Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008).

Musharraf had posed himself as a liberal, and it was during the time that the MQM operated as a partner of his regime that it began to expand the concept of Mohajir identity and nationalism.

The party had already weaned away the Mohajir community from the concept of Pakistani nationhood propagated by the religious parties. Now, it added two more dimensions to Mohajir nationalism that worked side-by-side.

It began to explain the Mohajirs as Urdu-speaking Sindhis who were connected to the Sindhi-speakers of the province in a spiritual bond emerging from the teachings of Sindh’s ‘patron saint’, Shah Abdul Latif.

This was MQM’s way of resolving the Mohajirs’ early failures to fully adopt Sindhi culture. Sindhi nationalists saw it as just another political move.

The other dimension that emerged during this period among the Mohajir community (through the MQM), was to address the disposition of Mohajir identity in the Mohajir-majority areas of Sindh.

This dimension saw MQM make Mohajir nationalism and identity (regarding Islam) to be understood as a modern reworking of the ‘modernist Islam’ of 19th century Muslim scholar, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, and his Aligarh School of Thought (that most urban middle-class Urdu-speaking Muslims of India had belonged to before partition).

So, whereas Sindhi nationalism had formulated a pluralism based on the teachings and histories of Sufi saints, Mohajir nationalism began to express its pluralism as a modern reworking of the ‘rational and scientific Islam ‘of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, which sees spiritual growth as a consequence of material progress (derived from modern economics, art and the de-politicisation of faith). However, it still didn’t dent the party’s tendency to use militant tactics when needed.

A new Sindh?
In 2014, PPP co-chairperson, Bilwal Bhutto, organised a Sindh Festival on the site of Sindh’s oldest known civilisation, the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Using the popular perception that Sindhi culture was historically pluralistic, tolerant and deeply rooted in the traditions of Sufism, Bilawal used this acuity and its many artistic, literary, and social expressions to explain what (he thought) could be used as a cultural model (across Pakistan) to overwhelm the extremist mindset that has been ravaging the country for so many years now.

But unlike famous Sindhi nationalist and scholar, GM Syed, Bilawal was not just talking about an inherent and ‘indigenous pluralism,’ that is part of the Sindhi culture.

Syed’s ‘indigenous pluralism’ had meant a society that was spiritually close to God but politically materialistic; and thus, whose economic, political and social interests were best served by keeping its religious beliefs within the confines of the mosque and/or the Sufi shrine.

He thought this was vital because religious orthodoxy when used as a political and social tool becomes a weapon in the hands of forces that try to seize and neutralise a pluralistic society (like Sindh) by imposing a cosmetic homogeneity through monolithic concepts of society, culture and faith.

For example, to Syed and his contemporaries in Sindh’s intellectual circles, the kind of faith that was being advocated in Pakistan was alien to the Islam that has been practiced by Sindhi Muslims of the region for over a thousand years.

Syed’s indigenous pluralism was also suspicious of Western capitalism, but not in an intransigent manner.

He suggested addressing the onslaught of ‘soulless modern materialism’ on a social level with the help of Sindh’s traditional disposition and its inherent pluralistic and esoteric psyche.

But today, Sindh is changing. The Sindhi-speaking middle-class has expanded in the last three decades. Syed is still revered in the province, but he is not as relevant as he was till about the early 1980s. But the PPP still is.

Apart from being popular among Sindhi peasants and working-classes, the PPP offers the emerging Sindhi-speaking middle and lower middle-classes opportunities to attempt fulfilling their upwardly mobile ambitions.

Sindhis still see the PPP as the only nationwide party that is not only close to their ethnic roots, but is their best mode to keep in touch with the economics, sociology and politics tied to federal-level politics. Thus, voting for the PPP (by the Sindhis) is now more of a pragmatic move than an ideological one.

But the emergence of a larger Sindhi-speaking middle-class has also triggered social strife in the province. The youth among this section of the Sindhi-speakers see the PPP as a dinosaur associated with the politics of their parents.

However, there is no effective alternative. The PPP has continued to neutralise the Sindhi nationalists who have little or nothing substantial to offer anymore to the new Sindhi-speaking youth in terms of this youth’s more universal ideas of upward mobility.

Other parties, such as the PML-N and the PTI are still largely seen in Sindh as squarely peddling the interests of non-Sindhi businessmen and bourgeoisie.

But even though religious parties have remained to be weak in the province, certain social and economic fissures being caused by the rapid emergence of Sindhi-speaking middle-classes has also witnessed a very non-Sindhi phenomenon of religious radicalisation creeping in.

This is still a new phenomenon among Sindhi speakers. But one can relate it to the way Punjab’s middle and trader classes became overtly conservative from the late 1970s onwards, due to their growing exposure and engagement with conservative oil-rich Arab societies in the Middle East, and due to the economic benefits that they enjoyed during General Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s.

Of course, the Sindhis (from any class) did not enjoy much economic benefits from Zia. But a series of PPP provincial regimes in Sindh ever since the 1970s have helped shape the Sindhi middle-classes, and make them become more influential in impacting the electoral and economic dynamics of Sindh.

Conscious of this, Bilawal’s Sindh Festival was planned as a two-pronged strategy: First, to furnish Bilawal’s idea of a ‘progressive Pakistan’, and second, to address the trend of urbanisation in Sindh from going the way urbanisation went in the Punjab.

The cultural activities that were on display during the Sindh Festival suggest an understanding (or need) on Bilawal’s part of an urbanisation trend that should produce a progressive workforce and an economic, political and religious culture based on a healthy respect for diversity; instead of a culture based on economics tied to the politics of faith and sects.

Of course, many aspects of Bilawal’s thinking have a lot to do with youthful optimism and (for want of a better word) well-intentioned social engineering.

But PPP’s rejuvenation can now only be convincingly cemented if the party’s next step is steeped in an ideology that, though futuristic, is still rooted in the party’s past of being a large, all-encompassing progressive entity; and not on the amoral Machiavellian machine that it has become.

Source: Making of the Sindhi identity: From Shah Latif to GM Syed to Bhutto by Nadeem F. Paracha
Published in Dawn, Sep 10, 2015.
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