Articles by Nadeem F. Paracha
 

[CENTER][B][SIZE="3"]Jinnah rebranded?[/SIZE][/B][/CENTER]


[SIZE="3"]A friend of mine, a Shia Muslim, often tells me an intriguing but a very telling little tale.

He is from Jhang in the Punjab province where he, as a school kid, was always a passionate participant of Shia processions.

During one Moharram day (in the late 1980s), a Shia procession he was a part of was attacked by a couple of armed young men belonging to a radical Sunni Muslim outfit.

Nothing surprising, especially in a Pakistan that began to take shape from the early 1980s onwards; and/or when the state under General Ziaul Haq actually encouraged the proliferation of violent Islamist and sectarian organisations as a way to bolster its efforts to whip up a jihadist frenzy against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.

But my friend and some of his contemporaries were left surprised by the attack. Not because it was carried out by a sectarian outfit but because of the fact that one of the attackers was a young teenaged lad who was actually a contemporary of my friend at school.

The teen was arrested and thrown in one of the city’s lock-ups. When my friend told an empathetic teacher at the school, the teacher too was shocked and decided to visit the young militant.

Reaching the police station the concerned teacher let lose a volley of questions at the boy (in Punjabi): ‘Sohail, what have you done? Why did you attack your friends?’

The young militant was unmoved: ‘What kind of question is that? We all know they (the Shias) are kafir (infidels)!’

Taken aback by the sudden transformation of the young boy, the teacher remarked that the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, too wasn’t a Sunni.

‘What are you saying, sir?’ The young boy shot back. ‘Jinnah wasn’t the founder of Pakistan. Quaid-e-Azam was. And Quaid-e-Azam was Sunni.’

This is a fascinating little tale that is otherwise big on explaining the social and political outcome of the Pakistani state’s long-winded project to construct and impose a rather xenophobic model of faith that could be moulded and easily used to legitimise the hegemony of the religious, political, economic and military elites that make-up the country’s figurative establishment.

The fact that the Pakistani state used Orwellian tactics to twist and turn historical facts to construct a mythical socio-political narrative is now in the open.

Using the media and school textbooks, the state went on a rampage, especially after the loss of the former East Pakistan in 1971. A highly suspicious, xenophobic and aggressive narrative about Pakistan’s ideology, history and society was streamlined that eventually mutated into a warped worldview now found across the society.

One can rightly blame men like Z. A. Bhutto and more specifically, General Zia, for such a state of affairs. But those who came before these two weren’t all that truthful either. This tradition’s earliest roots actually lie in one of the first insistences of Orwellian manipulation of faith and nationalism way back in 1948.

Soon after the creation of Pakistan, Jinnah gave his famous speech to the Constituent Assembly in which he insisted that in Pakistan minorities were free to follow their faiths and that the Pakistani state had nothing to do with religion.

This speech did not go down well with that section of the Muslim League elite that had tasted the power of using religion as a political tool during the Pakistan Movement.

Soon after Jinnah’s speech, an attempt was made by a number of Muslim League leaders to censor the draft of the speech that was to be published in the newspapers.

It was only when the then editor of Dawn, Altaf Hussain, threatened to take the issue directly to Jinnah that the League leaders relented.

No wonder then, soon after Jinnah’s death in 1948, the League’s top leadership at once departed from the secular contents of Jinnah’s speech and, in fact, flipped it on its head by drafting the 1949 Objectives Resolution that in the future became the basis of Bhutto’s populist Islamic experiments and Zia’s Machiavellian Islamist demagoguery.

Re-imagining Jinnah and propagating him as seen from the eyes of the above-mentioned religious and political elite has been a vital tool for the establishment.

Sometimes this dastardly project has been stretched to absurd lengths just so Jinnah’s credentials of being a secular Muslim nationalist can be undermined.

For example, in July 1977 when Zia toppled the Bhutto regime, he almost immediately got down to the business of radically transforming the ideological complexion of Pakistan, changing it from being a ‘democratic Muslim majority state’ into peddling it as a state that was supposedly conceived as a theocratic entity.

Zia and his ideological partners, mainly the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), hit a brick wall when they couldn’t endorse their revisionist narrative with any of the speeches of Jinnah.

They came up with nothing, until one fine day in early 1983 when after still failing to get a worthwhile endorsement from Jinnah for Zia’s ‘Islamic’ narrative, his Ministry of Information enthusiastically announced the sudden ‘discovery’ of Jinnah’s personal diary.

Excited, Zia held a press conference in which he claimed that in the newly discovered ‘personal diary of the founder’, Jinnah had spoken about having a ‘powerful Head of State (read: dictator),’ and ‘the dangers of parliamentary democracy.’ Then he conveniently concluding Jinnah’s views being very close to having an ‘Islamic system of government’.

The Urdu press gave lavish coverage to the event, as the state-owned PTV and Radio Pakistan broadcasted discussions with ‘scholars’ on this breathtaking discovery.

But, alas, the euphoria around this farce was thankfully short-lived. Two of Jinnah’s close associates, Mumtaz Daultana and K. H. Khurshid, rubbished Zia’s claims saying there was never such a diary.After this, a group of senior intellectuals from the Quaid-e-Azam Academy also denied that such a diary ever existed in the Academy’s archives (from where Zia had claimed the diary had emerged).

Strangely once his claims were trashed, not only did Zia never mention anything about the supposed diary ever again, a number of Urdu newspapers that had splashed the drastic discovery went completely quiet as well.

But for the future generations that have produced confused kids like Sohail, Zia’s claims became a documented utterance, whereas Daultana and Khurshid’s refutations slid down becoming nothing more than mere footnotes.

No wonder the young lad in Jhang thought Jinnah and Quaid-e-Azam were actually two separate men.[/SIZE]

[URL="http://dawn.com/2012/08/26/smokers-corner-jinnah-rebranded/"]http://dawn.com/2012/08/26/smokers-corner-jinnah-rebranded/[/URL]

[CENTER][B][SIZE="3"]The painfully entertaining[/SIZE][/B][/CENTER]


I’ve related the story before, but I find the need to relate it again. Especially after watching a ‘born-again Muslim’ actually denouncing (on local TV) a woman parliamentarian’s plea to pass more pro-women laws in the National Assembly and doing away with the controversial laws that were imposed by the Ziaul Haq regime : due to which thousands of mostly innocent women languished in jails for crimes that were actually committed by men!

This was back in 1995. A women’s organisation invited me to a seminar for a discussion dramatically titled “The Casualties of the Hudood Ordinance.”

Interestingly, also present there were a string of pop and television celebrities of the time.

All of them passionately decried the Ordinance (imposed by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship).

Since it was a strictly no-smoking hall, my habit kept me going in and out of the hall, so much that I completely missed my slot as a
speaker. No problem, because I am not much of a speaker and would rather keep quiet and listen.

However, I did manage to ask some of the celebrities present in the hall what they really thought about the Ordinance. All of them insisted they were against it. I asked if so, then how come none of them have ever used their art and talents to address this issue.

One of them who is still pretty popular, said, “It is not for us entertainers.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. “Then what are you doing here then?”

He said he was there as a common citizen and not as an entertainer. Ironically, he said this while signing autographs for his fans.

“I see,” said I, smiling. “But common citizens do not sign autographs, do they?”

He smiled back, shook his head and moved on.

My eyes then fell upon another famous pop star of the time who today functions as an evangelist of sorts.

Since on most occasions we had remained amiable acquaintances, we did end up talking in that hall.

“So Paracha sahib, Marx [I]kya kehta hai[/I]?” (What does Marx say?) He asked, sarcastically.

“[I]Marx koh choro[/I] (leave Marx),” I said, “[I]Tum kya kehtay ho[/I]?” (Forget Marx. What do you say?).

“Same,” he said confidently. “Same as everyone here. But we being Muslims should look for a middle-ground in this issue. After all, we can’t just repeal a law given to us by Allah!”

“Allah? Or Ziaul Haq?” I asked, still holding my smile.

I was expecting a cynical chuckle at best, but what I got was a tirade of references from various Islamic scriptures. You must remember this
guy was still a pop star and hadn’t turned to preaching.

“But all this is useless to a person like you,” he casually concluded, at the end of his passionate spiel.

“Hmmm … ” I nodded, still holding on to the smile, even though I was slightly ticked off. Then putting a hand on one of his shoulders, I continued: “Now I get it. If this is how our pop stars think, I am wasting my time asking them to use their art for social and political causes.
Of course, you will never use your star status to talk about the Hudood Ordinance, now would you?”

Lo & behold! He said exactly what his contemporary had earlier said. “We are entertainers, yaar, not politicians.”

Irritated, I decided to actually use a part of my unused speech on him. So this (in essence) is how it went…
“You know, Zia’s Ordinances would have been welcomed by Nazi Germany!” I unabashedly announced.

He was shocked: “What do you mean?”

“Well,” I continued, “Women in Nazi Germany were to have a very specific role. Hitler was very clear about this. This role was that they should be good mothers bringing up children at home while their husbands worked. Hitler saw no reason why a woman should work. From their earliest years, girls were taught in their schools that all good German women married a proper German at a young age and the wife’s task was to have children and keep a decent home for her working husband.”

He interrupted: “What has this got to do with the topic at hand?”

“A lot,” said I. “This is got to do with a law passed by a myopic regime in a society that is becoming more and more chauvinistic and intolerant. A society you entertainers, God bless you, are also a part of.”

He stared at me again. But decided to hear me out.

Mentally mapping words from my undelivered speech, I continued: “As housewives and mothers in Nazi Germany, their lives were controlled. Women were not expected to wear make-up or trousers. Only flat shoes were expected to be worn. Women were discouraged from slimming as this was considered bad for child birth. Women were also discouraged from smoking, not because it was linked to problems with pregnancies, but because it was considered non-German to do so. There used to be a song in Nazi Germany. And it went something like this:
‘Take hold of kettle, broom and pan, then you’ll surely get a man, shop and office leave alone, your true life work lies at home.’”

Finally, that cynical chuckle did arrive. But he went very serious when he asked: “So, are you suggesting that our laws are a product of fascists?”

“Yes I am,” said I. “Entertaining, no?”

He never talked to me after that. And/or vice versa.

[B]Source: [URL="http://dawn.com/2012/10/07/smokers-corner-the-painfully-entertaining/"]Painfully Entertaining[/URL][/B]

[B][SIZE="3"][CENTER]By the book[/CENTER][/SIZE][/B]

Pakistan is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Non-Muslims are an essential part of it. Many of them have contributed to the country’s well being in various fields.
However, according to renowned scholar and educationist, Professor A. H. Nayyar, the culture and the idioms of Muslim ‘majority-ism’ (after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle) started gaining more currency in the country’s politics and, in turn, also got reflected in the educational process.

Though agreeing with Nayyar, another well known academic, Dr Rubina Saigol, however, suggests that the attempt to mould the minds of the young through textbooks started in earnest in the early 1980s.

The syllabus was redesigned and textbooks were rewritten to create a monolithic image of Pakistan as a theocratic state and Pakistani citizens as Muslim only.

According to Saigol, this clearly tells young non-Muslim students that they are excluded from the national identity.

In an extensive study conducted by Nayyar and Dr Ahmad Salim (in 2002), the following four themes emerge most strongly in history textbooks in Pakistan:

That Pakistan is for Muslims alone; the ideology of Pakistan is deeply interlinked with faith and one should never trust Hindus and India. Students should take the path of jihad and martyrdom.

Scholars like Ayesha Jalal and Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy have argued that the term ‘ideology of Pakistan’ is an after-thought; it was absent at the time of the creation of Pakistan.

According to them Jinnah never used the term ‘ideology of Pakistan’ (especially with respect to Islam).

For 15 years after the establishment of Pakistan, the term was not known to anybody.

The phrase ‘ideology of Pakistan’ has no historical basis in the Pakistan movement. It was coined much later by those political forces that needed it to sanctify their particular brand of politics: especially those religious parties that had earlier been against the creation of Pakistan.

Even though in a 1954 report Justice Munir strongly noted that Jinnah never uttered the words ‘ideology of Pakistan,’ the curriculum documents (ever since the 1980s) insist that the students be taught that the ideology of Pakistan was pronounced by the Quaid.

No textbook has ever been able to cite a single reference to Jinnah using this term.

Jinnah’s speech to the Constituent Assembly on Sept 11, 1947 is completely contrary to the so-called ‘ideology of Pakistan’ as it is presented in school history books. Nayyar, Jalal, Hoodbhoy and Saigol suggest that associated with the ‘ideology of Pakistan’ is an essential component of hate against India and Hindus.

Some time after 1971, the subject of Indo-Pakistan history was replaced with ‘Pakistan Studies,’ whose sole purpose now was to define Pakistan as an Islamic state. The students were deprived of learning about pre-Islamic history of their region. Instead, history books now started with the Arab conquest of Sindh and swiftly jumped to the Muslim conquerors from Central Asia.

Nayyar and Salim have pointed out the following examples of expression of hate in post-1971 history text books:

Hindus have always been enemies of Islam; they worship idols in temples which are very narrow and dark places; they declared the Congress rule as Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims. The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation and Gandhi was as an extremist.

Though still not part of the mainstream text books, another ‘enemy’ has recently been added in the shape of the ‘modern American (read Christian) crusaders.’

What’s more all history in these books is along religious lines while social, historical, material and economic causes are missing. Pakistanis are not told that the rise of Western powers in the last 500 years was mainly due to the advances made in education, science and culture. This rise was not based on military might alone, and certainly not on any overwhelming religious doctrine.

After 1979, the themes of jihad and martyrdom in textbooks became strong. In this period, history and social studies books openly eulogise jihad and martyrdom.

According to Nayyar, in Pakistan the impression one gets from textbooks on the subjects of Pakistan Studies is that the students don’t learn history, but rather a carefully crafted collection of falsehoods.

For example, in these books, Muhammad bin Qasim is declared the first Pakistani citizen. The story of the Arabs’ arrival in Sindh is recounted as the first moment of Pakistan with the glorious ascendancy of Islam.

Also a widely taught history book insists that, “Although Pakistan was created in August 1947, the present-day Pakistan has existed, as a more or less single entity, for centuries.”

A history book published in 1992 has on its cover a Muslim warrior holding a sword and charging in on a horse; and a chapter called, ‘The Enemies of Islam.’ This chapter is broken into various sections that define these enemies as being Hindus, Christians, Jews and “secularists.”

In their study, both Nayyar and Salim conclude that one should not be surprised at the irrational hate and confusion among Pakistani children after what they learn at school: a state of mind that they can carry well into their adult life as well.

Source:[url]http://dawn.com/2012/10/14/smokers-corner-by-the-book/[/url]

[B][SIZE="3"][CENTER]From apology to perversity[/CENTER][/SIZE][/B]


It took them by surprise. Comfortable in the belief` that the nation has well and truly been converted to a narrative that explains the violence of` Islamic militants in Pakistan as an expression of defiance against everything from `US imperialism` to the `invasion of` Hindu and Western culture`. The advocates of this narrative were taken aback with the way the majority of` Pakistanis and the mainstream media responded to young Malala Yousuf`zai`s shooting by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

As the social media wing of` Imran Khan`s PTI went into overdrive on Twitter and Facebook in trying to explain their leader`s rather ambiguous stand on TTP, religious parties such as the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI), and the Difa-e-Pakistan Council, were caught stuttering in front of an aggressive media backlash. They were first shaken up and then exhibited anger at the way the media was puttingthem on the spot.

Amazingly, even though all these parties (including the once `new` PTI) have in them seasoned political players. Their response to the hostility that they faced from the media, and from their political opponents (for not taking a clear stand against the extremists), suggests that none of them had even conceived a scenario where the electronic media would begin to furiously shoot holes in the narrative that these parties bank on.

But a week later and by the time young Malala was being flown to a hospital in Birmingham, a rearguard response f`rom the so-called apologists coupled by a threat to the media by the TTP finally pulled back a bit the tide that was threatening to sweep away those being accused of` punctuating their condemnation of the shooting with a series of`buts and ifs.

A brief look at the way the events in this respect unf`olded can l`urther elaborate this: Malala is shot. TV channels and the websites of major Pakistani newspapers break the news. The news is at once shared across social media. Parties and personnel that are routinely denounced by right-wing outfits for `fighting America`s war`, condemn the shooting.

Soon, the TTP claim responsibility. Twoof the ruling parties, MQM and ANP, begin to condemn the shooters by name. PTI and religious parties also begin to issue condemnations, but without mentioning TTP.

As details of the shooting begin to flood in, the electronic media, as if overnight, turns the apologist narrative on its head.

This is a turning point. Or so it seems. As hours pass, the media refuses to give vent to the many dis-claimers that come with the condemnation statements of the PTI, JI and JUI. What`s more, a stern statement of the Chief of Army StalT, General Parvez Kiyani, appears, suggesting that the military will intensify its war against the Islamist militants.

What, the media begins to ask, did Malala have to do with US drone strikes? Those linking the brutal attack on her to the drones insist that the shooting was part of what the US is up to in the militant-infested areas of north-west Pakistan.The media is not having any of that. A new day begins. Malala continues to hold on to dear life.

Days go by, as perhaps for the first time in the last decade or so, the apologists are finding themselves drowned out by accusations of being cowards and for trying to dilute the issue with the usual rhetoric about `nefarious US designs` in the region.

The apologists call the shooters animals, barbarians,and what not, but refuse to take the name of those who proudly confessed to have sent the men to execute the school girl.

They are a reaction to US drone attacks, they keep saying. But what did Malala have to do with the drones? The media keeps asking.

On one channel, a woman JI member, pushed into a corner by a TV anchor who popularised the term `liberal fascist` two years ago, tries to squeeze her wayout by calling those accusing her party of cowardice, as liberal fascists. It`s a desperate act. She thinks this might soften the anchor`s stance. It doesn`t.

PTI, JI and JUI leaders and their supporters slightly change tact. Now they begin to ask, What about all the other Malalas killed in drone attacks? The `liberal fascists` snicker: This is strange, they say. When the same media was going about decrying the plight of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, none of them were concerned about so many other Aafias rotting in local jails (many of them without trial) and for crimes that were mostly committed by men.

They further enquire, How come when for weeks the media covered Dr. Aafia`s case, none of these parties accused it of exaggeration, or of overreacting like they are now? Still feeling cornered and sounding sheepish, some PTI and JI supporters in cyberspace flood Twitter and Facebook with a tragic photograph of a young girl supposedly injured in a drone attack. But within hours the picture is proven to be a shameless forgery.

But even this does not stop those hell-bent on stubbornly holding on to their delusions.

Pictures of Malala sitting with former US diplomat, late Richard Holbrooke, emerge.

Yes, being a Pashtun girl from Swat valley she should`ve been seen tending sheep instead.

Then a TV anchor suggests that the cyber diaries written by Malala for BBC were actually written by someone else. Malala is unconscious to answer him. But then maybe so is his conscience.

Days pass. In spite of a huge rally by the MQM, openly condemning the TTP, the apologists slip back on the mini-screen. An `investigative reporter`, who, during the Swat girl flogging episode, was explaining the act being according to Sharia, this is how he analysed the Malala episode: `Very sad, indeed. But all this is due to our slavery for the US.

His expert journalistic, geo-political analysis continued: `Our decision to joinAmerica`s war was against the dictates of Quran and Sunnah.` Seriously? The apologists may make a comeback, but their response to Malala`s shooting will not be recorded by history as a story of gallant, principled men.

It will record it as a story of those who lied, forged and carelessly quoted from holy scripture just to defend a questionable narrative inflated by nothing else but their misplaced egos.


[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=21_10_2012_424_002"]http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=21_10_2012_424_002[/URL]

Refiguring Jinnah
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"]Refiguring Jinnah[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]


Today many Pakistanis are aware of Jinnah’s August 11, 1947, speech in which he clearly explains Pakistan to be a democratic Muslim majority country where religion has nothing to do with the business of the state. Well-known historians have all maintained that to Jinnah the Muslims of undivided India were a separate cultural entity requiring their own homeland. Jinnah’s desire to see this through was born from his awkwardness with the idea of a post-colonial India subjugated by the ‘Hindu-dominated’ Indian National Congress: even though the Congress was almost entirely secular. However, there is absolutely no evidence that Jinnah’s push to carve out a separate Muslim country was made in order to construct an Islamic state. For years Pakistanis have debated about how Jinnah went about claiming Pakistan. Was he able to think it through, or did he fail to perceive the vulnerability of his claim? Many also believe that his claim in this respect was too open-ended. That’s why it was easily exploited by some who eventually turned it into a monolithic entity and a militaristic bastion of Islam.

It is ironic that the first Pakistani head of state to sincerely try to realise Jinnah’s concept of Pakistan was a military dictator. Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s regime (1959-69) still remains perhaps the most secular in the country’s history. Apart from, of course, sidelining the democratic aspects of Jinnah’s concept, Ayub otherwise went about defining (through legislation) his understanding of Jinnah’s Pakistan. To him it was about a secular Muslim majority state sustained by the genius of entrepreneurial action, a strong military, and the spirit of modernistic and progressive Islam of the likes of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Iqbal and Jinnah.

However, in a naturally pluralistic society like Pakistan with multiple ethnicities, religions and Islamic sects, if one takes out democracy from the above equation, one would get (as Ayub did) ethnic strife, religious reactionary-ism and class conflict. The class-based and multi-ethnic commotion in this respect opened windows of opportunity for well-organised leftist groups who were not only successful in forcing Ayub out (1969), but they also eschewed the religious opposition to the Field Marshal’s government. Left parties like the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), National Awami Party (NAP), and student groups like the National Students Federation (NSF), in the former West Pakistan, achieved this by attacking Ayub’s ‘pro-rich policies’ (state-facilitated capitalism), and, on the other hand, neutralised the Islamic fundamentalists by adding a new twist to Jinnah’s image. For example, the PPP advocated Jinnah to be a progressive democrat whose thinking was close to the ideas of ‘Islamic socialism’ first purported (in the region) by such leaders of the Pakistan Movement, as Chaudhry Rehmat Ali, and Iqbal.

After the breakaway of East Pakistan in 1971, and the coming to power of the PPP (led by Z A. Bhutto), the authoritarian centre-right secularism of the Ayub era (and concept of Jinnah), moved towards the populist left. But the Bhutto regime was highly mutable. Though it remained populist, it regularly shifted from left to right on an issue to issue basis.

A study of Jinnah’s quotes used on state-owned media of the period suggests a regime trying to push Jinnah as a democrat who was not secular in the western sense, but a progressive Muslim whose faith was pluralistic in essence and ‘awami’ (populist). Such quotes, that became a mainstay just before the main 9pm news bulletin on the state-owned PTV, suddenly changed track when Bhutto was toppled in a reactionary military coup by General Ziaul Haq (July 1977).
From 1977 onwards, no more was Jinnah being bounced between Ayubian secularists and Bhutto’s Islamic Socialists. He now became the property of the ‘Islam-pasand’ (pro-Islamic state) lot. PTV and Radio Pakistan were ordered to only use those quotes from Jinnah’s speeches that contained the word ‘Islam’.
A concentrated effort was made to remould him into a leader who conceived Pakistan as an Islamic state with a strong military.

In 1978, the order of Jinnah’s celebrated motto, ‘Unity, Faith, Discipline,’ was reshuffled to put the word ‘faith’ first instead of the middle. Then Zia’s information ministry suddenly unearthed a diary kept by Jinnah in which he had supposedly expressed his desire to see Pakistan as a country run on Islamic laws (instead of democracy), and emphasised the political and ideological role of the military. The diary turned out to be a desperate forgery. Also, Jinnah’s August 11 speech was expunged from the school textbooks, as if it never existed.

By the end of Zia’s dictatorship (1988), Jinnah had been turned into a pious, 20th century caliph of sorts who presided over the creation of a ‘citadel of Islam’.
However, a decade later during the self-contradictory military dictatorship of General Parvez Musharraf: who was advertising himself as an updated version of Ayub Khan: Jinnah was made to slightly shed the facial hair that Zia had hung on him. Jinnah now became an enlightened moderate.
But Jinnah’s emergence of (now) becoming a moderate Muslim, at once clashed with his more pious, quasi-Islamist image that was cultivated for more than a decade by the Zia regime. This reignited the debate about exactly who or what Jinnah really was.

Today, with Pakistan facing the deadly spectre of Islamist terrorism, growing societal conservatism, a free (and somewhat anarchic) media, an activistic judiciary and the steady resurgence of the secular Muslim intellectual: all trying to figure (or refigure) Jinnah, something unprecedented happened.
Not since the Ayub dictatorship and during the early years of Bhutto’s government has a mainstream political party openly described Jinnah as a progressive, secular Muslim. But recently the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) did just that. Well, this means at least in Karachi, the Jinnah who wanted a progressive, secular and democratic Muslim majority country is back. And this time he’s not confronting grumpy Islamic parties, but a monster that not only considers him a heretic, but a majority of Pakistani Muslims too.

[URL="http://dawn.com/2012/11/11/smokers-corner-refiguring-jinnah/"]http://dawn.com/2012/11/11/smokers-corner-refiguring-jinnah/[/URL]

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"]Will to veil[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]


Last Sunday I came across a most awkward sight. Just outside the big fast-food joint near Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport, I saw at least three separate middle-class families with daughters in hijabs wrapped around their little heads. The girls couldn’t have been more than four years old. Watching the young girls bop about in their hijabs (around their moms who were all in burqas), a question popped in my mind: What exactly were the parents thinking when they decided to wrap scarves around the heads of their little daughters?

Think about it: Did they believe that without their hijabs these little girls would attract immodest stares from men? This is a rather disturbing thought. But as much as I wanted to, of course, I just couldn’t walk up to the parents and ask them.

Nevertheless, I too belong to a large clan where most women adorn the burqa. So I’ve had ample opportunities to interact with both the hijab and burqa phenomenon up-close, enough to develop at least some understanding of it. Incidents of urban middle-class women opting for the hijab and/or the more cloaked burqa is nothing new in Pakistan. It’s been on the rise for the past twenty-five years or so.

Apart from the blanket fact that correctly describes this happening as a symptom of the growing social and religious conservatism among the lower-middle and middle-class urbanites, unfortunately not a lot else has been said or studied in this respect.

Whose decision it is that a woman should wear a hijab or a burqa?
To understand this I’ll bank on the findings of a rare study undertaken by Professor Sadaf Ahmad on the workings of the Islamic evangelist, Farhat Hashmi’s Al-Huda organisation; and on my own observations during the time period I was growing up with girl cousins most of whom opted for the burqa.

Women who take up the more conservative burqa usually do so because it is a tradition (as is the case in my extended family). However, though it is a tradition that is willingly followed by the women, its importance is largely emphasised by the male members of the family. On the other hand, the young middle-class women who have decided to adorn the hijab mostly seem to have done so of their own accord.

In fact there have been cases (and some are even related in Ahmed’s study and book), in which, certain young members of the Al-Huda and other Islamic outfits for women, had become so conservative in their habits and beliefs (again, of their own accord), that it actually became a problem of sorts for their parents. Mostly this is due to the fact that such young women are coming from families that did not have a tradition of women adorning the Islamic attire. For example, in her book, Ahmad is told by one young woman at Al-Huda that she was shocked to see how women of her mother’s generation dressed (in the 1970s).

A large number of both religious as well as secular scholars of Islam agree that Quranic verses on the matter of women’s dressing are open to a wide array of interpretations. Then there are also well-known Muslim intellectuals and authors such as Ziauddin Sardar, Irshad Manji, Muhammad Arkhun, Raza Aslan and even the more restrained Akber S. Ahmed who suggest that the observance of the modern hijab/burqa largely remains to be an extension of a tradition shaped by the dictates of men.

They say that the practice is an outcome of laws and social mores constructed and imposed over the last many centuries by judges, clerics, and lawmakers who were all men. But contemplating the theological part of the topic is not the purpose here.

Simply because I personally believe that the practice in this respect within the lower-middle and middle-class Pakistani women has major economic and non-religious reasons attached to it as well.

More than a religious practice, both the hijab and the burqa, is a social statement. And a defensive one, as opposed to being defiant.

This is especially so in societies (such as Pakistan) where faith has increasingly been advocated as a way to judge one’s character not through his or her actions in the modern context of nationhood, law and order; but on how frequently a person exercises religious rituals that now also include adorning correct Islamic attire.

So, for example, a hijab-clad woman may be interacting with a number of secular-materialistic situations, her hijab here becomes a statement suggesting that she has not lost her Islamic identity in the amoral commotion. She believes that her moral character will be judged more harshly (especially by men) if she did not adorn the hijab in non-religious surroundings. To me, this notion is what makes her act of wearing a hijab more defensive in orientation, in spite of the fact that she is likely to explain it as liberating and being faithful to holy scriptures.

There’s also an economic factor involved here. But this factor has more to do with women who prefer the burqa.

A majority of Pakistanis before the 1980s were associated with a more pluralistic and permissive strain of the faith directly linked to the region’s Sufi shrine culture. But that began to change when, from the late 1970s onwards, a number of Pakistanis started to travel to and work in oil-rich Arab countries.

Those returning to Pakistan or sending money back from these countries gave birth to Pakistan’s first major batch of the nouveau-riche. In the Arab countries not only did they make a lot of money, they also came into direct contact with denominations of the faith that looked suspiciously at their beliefs. Thus, many Pakistanis who returned richer from these countries almost at once began to peel off their old interpretations of the faith, replacing them with the more puritanical ones that they’d come into contact with in Arabia.

In fact, since the old strain of the faith that they were born into now reminded them of their less well-off past, the newly adopted denomination became a badge announcing their new-found economic prosperity and status.

The resurgence of the burqa (especially the kind worn in the oil-rich Arab world) among urban middle-class women in Pakistan whose husbands or brothers have done well in oil-rich Arab countries is at least one obvious sign flashed to exhibit one’s raised economic status.

Another reflection of this is the way the burqas have evolved, becoming more stylised with their own accessories, such as sack-like handbags that are usually shiny gold and silver in colour.

Indeed, a show of ‘modesty’ has never been so stylistic (or expensive). Or for that matter, imposed on very young girls who might already have begun to denounce Dora for running around with Diego without a head scarf!

Source - [URL="http://dawn.com/2012/11/18/smokers-corner-will-to-veil/"]http://dawn.com/2012/11/18/smokers-corner-will-to-veil/[/URL]

No country for old men
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"]No country for old men[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]

[SIZE="3"]By[/SIZE] [SIZE="3"]NFP[/SIZE]

I don't just read books. I devour them. One of my favorite things to do even while I`m travelling is to spend hours on end in book stores.

And yet, till only recently I had never visited the annual Karachi International Book Fair.

It`s an event that has been taking place for the past eight years and has grown in size and scope with each passing year. All leading publishing houses in the country along with those from India, Turkey, Iran and Bangladesh have continued to participate in the event.

But why did I continue to ignore it? I thought aboutthis a lot and the only convincing answer I kept coming up with, was that instinctively I knew there was nothing special about the fair and that I would be disappointed.

Now that`s a major concem for a person like me. I actually get depressed at book stores where inspite of spending hours browsing across section after section of books, I come out empty handed.

Well, despite my instinctive misgivings about an event that I had never been to, I decided to finally go. And, boy was I stunned! No, I wasn`t gleefully and cuphorically swept away by a tidal wave of books of all shapes and sizes.

Instead, my senses were bombarded by the kind of loud religiosity I had last encountered while doing a newspaper feature on the Tableeghi Jamaal in Raiwind back in the early 1990s.

As I entered one (of the three) main halls where the fair was being held, I was instantly swept in by a sea of`(urban middleclass) humanity, largely made up of women in jet black abayas, men with long, curly beards, and kids. Very noisy kids.

Sure, nothing wrong with that (as such). But as I tried to make my way through this very pious looking crowd, the deaf`ening PA system suddenly came alive with some guy shouting about how Pakistan was created in the name of`Islam and then went on to literally scream: `Pakistan ka matlab kya... ? (What is the meaning of`Pakistan?).

His rhetorical (and very loudly put) question was answered by what sounded like a bunch of kids about to storm an infidel`s castle: `Lailahaillalahl` Answered the kids.

This went on and on and on, until I decided to check out where the chanting was coming from.

It was emerging (like a hurricane of disembodied voices) from huge amplifiers set-up at a big `book stall` run by a religious publishing house.

There was this huge bearded man with a microphone addressing a group of cute little kids (with their abaya-clad moms).

He wasn`t just selling them books. He was selling theman ideology.

`Pakistan ka matlab kya ...?` He bellowed.

`Lal/lahaillalah!` Answered the kids in unison, but without ever letting go of` their lollipops, popcom and packs of fruit juice.

I looked around to see if anyone else was as Habbergasted by this as I was. I found none.

And how could I? I f`inally realised that more than 70 per cent of the book stalls in this large hall were owned and run by publishers that only of`f`ered religious literature.But wait a minute. It wasn`t as simple as that.

As I turned away shocked by looking at more than a dozen young kids mindlessly mouthing what some seriously warped elders of theirs had told them to, I came face-to-face with yet another bearded fellow who shoved two A-4 size glossy pamphlets in my face.

`Take!` He said. So I took. A casual, confused glance at the glossics told me they belonged to yet another religious publishing house. But that`s all I could understand because most of the pamphlets were in Arabic! So, without taking names here, I must tell that the guy shouting in the microphone was representing a `publishing house` associated with outfits advocating one particular sunni Muslim school of thought while the one who had handed me the pamphlets was representing another sunni sub-sect.

The Pandora`s box was now wide open. Stall upon stall that I passed had mountains of books, all on Islam, or rather, the Islam according to the stalls` particular sub-sect and denomination.

A friend cynically said about the event, `There were 72 sects there, all trying to convert Pakistani Muslims to their particular strain of Islam.

Bamed by what looked more like a recruiting ground for all kinds of Islamic evangelical outfits than a book fair, I frantically began to look for non-Pakistani stalls. And voila! I found one belonging to a Turkish publisher.

Ah, I thought. Good old secular Turkey. But, alas, it was Pakistan that the fair was being held in. But all that this particular stall carried was literature by Turkish Islamic author, Fetullah Gullen.

So amidst the loud chanting of aggressive sloganeering over the PA, abayas, beards and book after book after book claiming to contain the `true essence of Islam,` (for mama, papa, Bablu and Baby), I loped out to check the other two halls.

Though things were a bit quieter here, but here too, the majority of the stalls were piled up with books, DVDs and CDs aboutIslam for men, women, boys, girls, kids, old people, bankers, economists, wives, husbands and more wives. .

I finally came to three stalls that had nothing to do with faith.

Or rather they had more than just books about how to become a `true Muslim.

The tiniest of these was a stall selling books on MQM chief Altaf Hussain. I moved on because I had already read most of the stuff that they were selling.

Next was a stall run by a Sindhi publishing house. Impressive stuff on Sindhi culture, polities, art and the poetry of Shah Latif was on display. But unfortunately, most of it was in Sindhi.The third was an impressive stall run by ABC Publishers and Random House.

These guys too had a religious section (who wouldn't in Pakistan), finally, I could look at books on politics, music, philosophy and history as well.

Forget about secular space in Pakistan. It vanished a long time ago. This book fair proves that now even neutral space too is becoming a rarity.

Also, never underestimate the myth of subliminal messaging.

Guess which book I did end up buying at the fair: Islam in South-East Asia.

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=16_12_2012_424_003"]http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=16_12_2012_424_003[/URL]

The exposition
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="6"]The exposition[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]

Published - 12/23/2012

Almost two years ago Osama bin Laden was supposedly killed. Do the silly Americans think that we actually believe the lies they are spreading about his tragic murder and his demeaning burial at the sea?:huh We being true Muslims and card-carrying/bomb-making/McDonald`s-clomping leaders of the ummah can`t be fooled. There was no Osama in that compound in Abbottabad.:nono The Americans killed a look-alike of Osama. The real Osama died of gall-bladder failure in a bush in Sudan in 2002.:8: What`s more, his wives who were supposedly captured from the Abbottabad compound too were look-alikes, and so were his children. They were all look-alikes.

But it doesn`t stop here. Us Pakistanis know that the news about Osama`s death from gallbladder ailment in Sudan in 2002 is also suspect. That guy too was a look-alike. So, yes, it can safely be suggested that the guy they killed in Abbottabad in 2011 was actually a look-alike of a look-alike.:?

So when did Osama die if not in 2002 or 2011? According to a super famous journalist and TV anchor, Tipu Sultan, who interviewed Osama in an impoverished disco in Kandahar in 1998, Osama was actually dead at the time of the interview. He said that that the guy he talked to was actually a man called Al-Bakir Al-Shaikh Al Qaedawallah, an expert Elvis-turned-Osama-look-alike who told him (off the record) that Osama actually died in 1991 of malaria in the jungles of the Republic of Congo.

Nevertheless, there is every likelihood that the Congo guy was an Osama look-alike as well. So, in other words, the guy who the Americans claimed to have killed in Abbottabad was really a look-alike of a look-alike of a look-alike of a look-alike.:cow

Nevertheless the actual truth is that there was never an Osama. He was never born. It was all an American concoction. The character of Osama Bin Laden was first conceived by America`s 15th President James Buchannan in 1859 when along with the Queen of England he decided to begin a brand new crusade against the Muslims. According to well known Muslim historian and gymnast, Naseem Hijazi, the British monarchy had accused a man called Osama Bin Laden for financing and instigating the 1857 Indian Mutiny against the British imperialists.The Americans and the British then claimed to have suppressed the mutiny by killing Osama in a daring raid. He was claimed to have been hiding in the hookah cafe of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Zafar denied the accusations, saying that no such man was seen on his radar. The British exiled Zafar to Burma and destroyed the radar, saying there is no such thing as a radar.

By the way, the guy the British claimed was Zafar was not exiled to Burma. He was only a lookalike. The real Zafar died of dengue forever in Guatemala where he had gone to raise an army against the British and study plants. Famous thinker and horticulturalist, Noam Chomsky, confirmed this. This concocted episode was rightly expunged from the history books by Muslim historians, until America brought the invisible Osama character back to life in the 1990s. They had originally planed to use him as a bogey to invade Canada, but changed their plans and decided to invade Afghanistan after they got jealous of all the amazing and unprecedented economic, cultural and military progress taking place in Afghanistan (under the Taliban) and Pakistan (under handsome military men).

Thus, not surprisingly, the 9/11 episode happened. We all know who was responsible. Not a single Jew died in that attack. Neither did any Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, animists and pagans. The truth is, only Muslims died in that attack. The proof? Simple. Log on to YouTube and check out brilliant, award-winning documentaries, `Loose Nut` and `The Drivels.` Popcorn`s on the house. There was never any Osama Bin Laden. Just like there is no Mulla Omar, no Taliban, no Al-Qaeda.:dd

They`re all American concoctions. There`s only Coca-Cola the real thing.

Furthermore, America never won the war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union`s breakup too was a concoction. Soviet Union is still alive and thriving.

We don`t hear about it is because the Jewish controlled media has blocked all news about the Soviet Union. That is because the Afghan and Arab mujahideen that fought against it, liberated Afghanistan and conquered Soviet Union turning it into an Islamic caliphate. That`s why America`s next target will be Valdimir Putin (real name Abdul Something).:evil So if one day you hear that Americans have assassinated Putin, don`t believe it. The real Putin died of a kidney ailment in 1045 AD.

The Zardari government should`ve resigned for letting America make a fool of Pakistanis even though at the same time it be praised for saving our souls and faith by banning YouTube. The Army is not to be blamed. The radar that failed to pick up American helicopters on May 2 was not a radar. It was a look-alike of the real thing that the Americans didn`t give us. Only the mighty Hamid Gul hinted at this while picking his nose. It was a sign: `Dig deep, dear patriots. You have nothing to lose but your heads.

Well said, Gul (real name Genghis), because after all, who needs heads when knees can perform the same function.:thinking

The slippery constituency
 

[B][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][CENTER][SIZE="5"]The slippery constituency[/SIZE][/CENTER][/FONT][/B]

[I]Nadeem F Paracha[/I]

Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It was once called the `city of lights`, due to its bustling and lively night life driven by nightclubs, cinemas, bars, eating places and other recreational outlets until many of these were closed down in 1977.

Nevertheless, Karachi still remains to be a nocturnal abode. Many of its famous symbols of nightlife may have been forced to close down thirty years ago, the pleasures that they once offered are still very much available under-the-table and largely tolerated.

Karachi is also the most diverse city in the country. Its large population is dotted by a number of different ethnicities, religions, Muslim sects and sub-sects.

The largest ethnic group here is made up of Urdu-speakers (Mohajirs), who constitute about 43per cent of the city`s population. The mohajirs also include Gujrati-speakers (Memons).

The second largest ethnic group in Karachi ismade up of the Pashtuns (now 18 to 20per cent). The Punjabis and Siraiki speakers together constitute about 19 per cent of the city`s population, followed by the Baloch and Sindhis.

More than 90per cent of Karachiites are Muslim. Most of them belong to the Barelvi Sunni Muslim sub-sect but there is now also a significant number (especially among the Pashtun) who identify with the conservative Deobandi Sunni Muslim sub-sect.

Karachi also has a large Shia Muslim population. Then there is a concentration of both Catholic and Protestant Christians; Bohri and Agha Khani Muslim sects, some Hindus as well as an influential concentration of Zoroastrians.

Karachi also hosts the largest number of immigrant population in Pakistan. These include Bengalis, Burmese, Afghans and a sprinkling of Philippinos, Sri-Lankans and Iranians.

The electoral constituency which best reflects this stunning ethnic, Muslim and religious diversity in Karachi is NA-250. It is not only the largest in Karachi, but one of the largest in Sindh as well.

It is due to this reason that this constituency has been throwing up some of the most interesting results.

Of course, it was not always so massive, but the diverse make-up of its voting population has remained more or less the same.

NA-250 constitutes the city`s leading posh localities, as well as some thickly populated middle and working class areas.

All of these localities are dotted by hefty pockets of Mohajir, Pashtun, Baloch, Punjabi and Sindhi populations.

Ever since 1988, Karachi`s voters have overwhelmingly voted for `secular` parties, mainly the MQM, followed by the PPP and (after the 2008 election), the ANP.

NA-250 however, has remained to be the trickiest and most uncertain electoral battlegrounds for the competing parties.

During the 1970 election many of the areas that are now within NA-250 came under NW134 (Karachi VII).

As the majority of voters in the former West Pakistan voted for left-leaning parties such as the PPP and the National Awami Party, voters in the Karachi-7 constituency returned Shah Noorani, chief of the Barelvi Islamic party, the JUP to the National Assembly. Noorani garnered 28,304 votes followed by the PPP`s Noorul Arfin who bagged 22,609 votes.

In the 1977 election, the constituency was further expanded and became NA-191. It was won by Munawar Hassan of Jamat-i-Islami (JI) who got 73,997 votes beating the PPP`s Jamiluddin Aali who managed 33,086 votes.

Karachi`s demography and consequently its polities began to change rapidly during the Ziaul Haq dictatorship between 1977 and 1988.

With the arrival of a large number of Afghans from the war-torn Afghanistan the number of Pashtuns in Karachi grew. The rising population of the city triggered ethnic and sectarian tensions and this resulted in the rise of the mohajir-centric MQM as a powerful secular-ethnic political force.

In the 1988 election, NA-191 was won by MQM`s Tariq Mehmood who received 36,746 votes. He had to fight hard against Sarwar Malik who was representing the constituency`s Punjabi and Pashtun populations under the Punjabi Pashtun Ittihad (PPI) umbrella. He received 28,145 votes.

The NA clections in 1993 were boycotted by the MQM. In these elections, NA-191 went tothe non-religious conservative PML-N`s Abu Bakar who received 27,845 votes followed by the Islamic JI`s Munawar Hassan who could only garner 8,550 votes.

In the 1997 election, whereas most of the NA seats in Karachi were being won by the MQM, NA-191 however produced an upset win for PML-N`s Capt. Haleem who won the seat with 31,414 votes. His closest rival was MQM`s Abdul Jalil who received 25,008 votes.

During the 2002 election, with the increase in the number of seats in the National Assembly , NA-191 became NA-250. Once again this con-stituency voted against the tide by returning veteran JI member, Sattar Afghani, to the NA with 21,462 votes. His closest rival was MQM`s Nasreen Jalil who received 19,414 votes.

The constituency witnessed perhaps its toughest electoral battle during the 2008 election.MQM`s Khushbakht Shujaat deleated PPP`s Dr. Ikhtiar Baig in a close and tense fight. Shujaat received 52,045 votes and Baig stood second with 44,412 votes.

NA-250 remains to be a wide-open and uncertain constituency. Recently Karachi`s largest party the MQM has been canvassing aggressively here, setting up various campaigns and offices.

But this time its main battle here is not expected to come from a PPP candidate. Because theother party that is seen trying to make use of this constituency`s cecentric electoral nature is Imran Khan`s PTI. It understands that NA-250 is the only constituency in Karachi that can produce a winner not associated with either the MQM or the PPP.

There is every likelihood that the main contest in NA-250 in the 2013 election will between the MQM and PTI. But PML-N also has a vote bank here and might spoil PTI`s ambitions. My prediction is that MQM, with the help of votes from disillusioned PPP voters in the constituency`s well-to-do and middle-class areas is poised to retain this seat.

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=30_12_2012_424_002"]http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=30_12_2012_424_002[/URL]

With, within, without
 

[B][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"][CENTER][SIZE="5"]With, within, without[/SIZE][/CENTER][/SIZE][/FONT][/B]

By [I]Nadeem F Paracha[/I]

Over the decades, the 1956 science-fiction film, The Forbidden Planet,` has been elevated by film critics to be a vintage Hollywood sci-fi classic.

In the sci-fi genre it is sometimes placed right along side director Stanley Kubrick`s 1968 masterpiece, `2001: A Space Odyssey ` as being one of the most intellectually rich sci-fi movies of all time.

`Forbidden Planet takes place in the 23rd Century where a spaceship is sent from Earth to a planet that is 16 light years away to find out what happened to a space probe that was sent to the planet 20 years ago.

On reaching the planet, the captain and crew members of the spaceship find a scientist and his family who tell the investigation party that an unknown force had destroyed the probe and killed the inhabitants of the planet.After facing attacks from the same unknown force/entity that is largely invisible, the spaceship crew finally figures out that the force is actually the subconscious manifestation of the scientist himself, triggered by a machine invented by him.

The scientist continues to deny this until he is finally convinced that the shadowy entity that is going about slaughtering the planet`s inhabitants is indeed the expression of his own subconscious mind and/or the manifestation of what German psychologist, Freud, called `the id`.

The film`s plot has always fascinated me; especially when I have wondered whether the unprecedented spats of violence by religious extremists that have been haunting Pakistan for years now, may be physical manifestations of our own collective subconscious.

This might also explain the inexplicable state of denial or silence that we as a nation usually fall into every time some entity goes on a killing spree in the name of faith.

May be our Dr Jekyll is simply refusing to realise that the despicable, chaotic and evil Mr Hyde is actually an extension of our own being and not some alien force unleashed across our Land of the Pure.

It is as if the figurative demons of hatred repressed deep within our sub-consciousness have suddenly leaped out to become a horrifying, tangible reality.

Laying latent in us have been awkward fantasies about gallant military takeovers and bloody revolutions based on rotating myths of` bravado and a worldview that has no room for any grey areas.

Such a state of mind has given birth to a cringing mindset radiating a somewhat delusional sense of chauvinism, patriotism and ideological self-indulgence, but one that also comes attached with a persecution complex and an obsessive-compulsive need to deny and deflect one`s own failures.

Though most of us are only willing to exhibit our quivering religious/sectarian and `patriotic` biases in the shape of the usual knee-jerk rhetoric on the internet and the TV, it won`t be all that wrong to suggest that most of what is harmlessly spilled out as patriotic rants in cyber space or the media, has now found its physical expression.

These are the physical manifestations of the demons of hatred most of us have been nurturing in our minds; demons fed by decades of`education`, propaganda or mythical tall tales of bluster and glory that have only ended up conspiring to isolate the Pakistani nation from reality.

We have been carved out and crafted (by the state, the clergy, the media and the class room), as a people who are on a divine mission to safeguard faith from its many (largely imagined and demagogically concocted) `enemies` We think of ourselves as being the chosen people and (thus) are quick to deny and hide most of our own failings by claiming that, No! These failures do not stem from our bloated perceptions about ourselves.

Instead, to most of us these failings are due to any number of` diabolic forces named and numbered and then wrapped in the usual deflective cliches that are spontaneously spouted out by preachers, politicians and patriots out there: i.e. the lingering residue of `colonialism,` malicious designs of `anti-Islam/anti-Pakistan forces`, American tinkering and intervention and, of course, democracy, liberalism, secularism...The truth is, on most occasions than not, it has very much been us and us alone who have brought this country to its knees.

The inflexible, intolerant and gun-totting strain of the faith that was glorified from the 1980s onwards gradually began making a number of us believe that what we had (peacefully) been practicing as our religion before this was perhaps wrong.We beg n to doubt our faith the way it was. The crises turned itself` into a daunting dilemma of` identity. Subtlety in matters of faith went out the window. The new Pakistani society started to judge this subtlety as a sign of weak faith. Consequently everything according to us and our faith be-came loud and pertaining to sheer exhibitionism.

Our faith`s spiritual dimensions were clipped away and it was made to freeze and lose its evolutionary and progressive spirit. It then became just another political and social ideology. A lumbering dogma. Such a dogma means nothing spiritually to an individual.

But it does detach him from the progressive and evolutionary character and body of the faith. Add politics to this mixture and you have a disaster in the making.

The violence that this country faces today in the name of faith is not very different from the violence that our state, politicians, media, and text books have instilled in each one of us.

Indeed, when we sit quietly looking in horror at images on TV of the carnage caused by a suicide bomber on our soldiers, policemen, politicians and common civilians, isn`t this a deep, dark reflection of all that was instilled and nurtured in our own heads? That is, the idea of faith not as a spiritually, intellectually and morally enriching path, but as a demagogic, politicised weapon to retain social, political and economic power. The power to exploit.

The day we finally realise that God alone has the wisdom and right to determine and judge the level and status of`one`s faith is when we may finally reign in the monster that is largely a horrendous and unwitting manifestation of our own self-righteousness and religious biases.

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailNews.php?StoryText=06_01_2013_424_003"]http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailNews.php?StoryText=06_01_2013_424_003[/URL]

When in Canada ...
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="5"]When in Canada ...[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]


John J. Pinto, the Caucasian Canadian and Catholic scholar who for some reason became a citizen of Pakistan has reached the Canadian capital, Ottawa, with some 40 billion followers of his.

Speaking near the Canadian Parliament Hall, Pinto told the mega-ultra-epic-mammoth crowd that he had returned to Canada to get rid of its corrupt politicians, parties and political system and impose true democracy with the help of` the country`s armed forces, judiciary and ice hockey team.

`I won`t move l`rom here until I achieve my goal,` he promised. `I will turn Ottawa into Nazareth and send Creaser and his evil men home even if`they f`eed me to the lions! Most Canadian politicians in the government and opposition have been critical of Pinto. They have accused him of` staying in Pakistan as a Pakistani only to return to Canada on the instructions of those who want to derail Canada`s democracy, topple an elected parliament and replace it with a technocratic set-up backed by the military, judiciary and the country`s ice hockey squad.

`Pinto is a former failed politician and a spiritual fraud, a government spokesman claimed. `We know who he is working for, and believe me, it`s not John the Baptist.

Pinto refuted the claim: `I don`t want power,` he shouted from behind his bullet-proof, water-proof, soundproof, smoke-free, digital, 60-inch flat-screen altar. `I am ready to give my life for my country! This created some confusion as many were not quite sure whether he meant giving his life for Pakistan or Canada.

`For Canada!` He clarified.

`Does that mean you are ready to renounce your Pakistani citizenship?` A nosy journalist asked him.

`I`m a citizen of the world. Of Christendom. Of true democracy. What`s in a passport? Repent, fool!` Pinto replied.

As he was saying this, he began to weep: `I had a dream last night. It was a most glorious dream. I saw a light descending from the blue skies of Ottawa. The light hit the ground and on the ground emerged tanks and soldiers marching towards victory and then snow began to fall. I looked closely and realised the big snow flakes were actually white curly wigs the sort judges wear.

Hallelujah! `Hallelujah!` The crowd chanted back. `Change! Change! Change!` They began to shout, even though most of them were women who were basically demanding that they be allowed to change their babies` diapers in peace.

I`ve been here for hours,` one such woman who was with a shell-shocked baby told journalists. `The government is not allowing us to change our babies` diapers.

This is an outrage! We want change.

And then it happened. While Pinto was speaking, an aide of his whispered something into his ears. Pinto stop-ped for a while, threw up his arms and began to shout out loud: `Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice! The Supreme Court of Canada has just ordered the arrest of the Prime Minister! Rejoice! Throw your children in the air and then catch them after they perform two somersaults and you perform four cartwheels. I hear the tanks coming. I hear the judiciary puffing its chest. I see an elected government collapsing.

A glorious day for democracy!The Canadian media went into overdrive. Why did the SC decide to choose this very moment to deliver its verdict in an old case f`iled against the PM? Was it in on Pinto`s agenda and game`? Would the military or a technoeratic set-up f`ollow? A spokesperson of Canada`s Chief Justice (who also doubles as a TV anchor) denied the allegation: `The CJ doesn`t even know who Pinto is,` he said.

The Canadian Supreme Court is situated only a few kilometres away from where Pinto was holding his rally.

Oh, that,` the spokesperson replied. The CJ thought there was a huge baby diaper sale taking place there But as SC supporters continued to insist on the diaper sale theory, detractors warned that the SC`s decision was part of the Canadian establishment`s plan to derail democracy.

Canada`s leading political parties agreed, but were still cautious. However, everyone now looked towards what the party headed by the former captain of the Canadian ice hockey team, Jim Kant, would do.

Jim`s party has no representation in the parliament but does have street power.

During a press conference he put forward seven demands to the government: `We have taken a wait and see approach,` Jim told reporters. `But we are putting out a list of seven demands to the government. 1: Hold elections ASAP, that is As Soon As Possible and not America Speaks Armenian Punk, okay? 2: Change some fishy personnel in the Election Commission of Canada; 3: The President of the country should resign. Just f or the heck of it. 4: A truly neutral caretaker government should be formed, preferably in Zurich, Switzerland. 5: Five. 6: Seven. 7: One, Two, Three, Four and Five. Dig?

At the time this report was filed by this correspondent, Pinto was still holding fort and sharing his latest dreams that now included visions of fairies and angels descending from the skies and rewriting the Canadian Constitution according to the dictates of the Bible (King James edition); Jim`s musclemen were trying to convince him to let them storm the Bastille in Paris; the SC was running out of prime ministers to fire; and the media was loudly gazing at its navel and calling it `Breaking News!

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=20_01_2013_424_003"]http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=20_01_2013_424_003[/URL]

Scary votes
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="5"]Scary votes[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]


Much has been analysed about why the PPP-led coalition government, the opposition (both within and outside the Parliament), and the security agencies have all been so hapless in the face of the ever-growing menace of extremist violence in the country. The govemment has done well to set an exceptional precedent of surviving its full term as an elected entity (a rarity in Pakistan), but it was just that: Survival.

Beyond this it has looked shaky, indecisive and at times almost paralysed in addressing issues such as sectarian violence and extremist terror. On the other hand, the security agencies and the military-establishment have still to come to terms with political and ideological complexities arising from an awkward situation in which they find themselves face-to-face with brutal outfits, most of whom were once their strategic assets. But there is also another aspect and dimension to this that doesn't get the kind of attention that it deserves.

I am pointing towards the attitude of non-religious political parties that seem paralysed and awkwardly placed when it comes to addressing the issue of extremism. For example, we keep hearing why so and so political parties can't go all out in supporting bills, resolutions and policies against extremist outfits because they don't want to offend the sentiments of a particular section of their voters.

Though this is calmly related in an analysis, the fact that this may also suggest support among large sections of the population for the brutes is never touched upon. PML-N, though at this point in time the most vocal champion of democracy in Pakistan, has continued to remain ambiguous in its stance against extremist terrorism. It condemns it, but never does this party take the names of those responsible for slaughtering over 40,000 soldiers, cops, politicians and common civilians ever since 2004.

One of the reasons given (by analysts) is that (in the Punjab), a vital section of the party's vote-bank constitutes conservative right-wing petty-bourgeoisie and the trader classes.
So, is this to suggest that these classes (though not violent) actually have sympathies for sectarian and extremist organisations; and that they will refuse to vote for the PML-N if it supports any move against, say, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda or any of the many Sunni extremist organisations out there? If so then this is certainly a cause for concern.

It proves that violent anti-state outfits actually have support among certain sections of the population and that these sections are being patronised by democratic parties that should normally and inherently be anathematic to such a scenario. Thus it does make sense then when one sees some PML-N men holding hands with members of banned sectarian organisations so the party can count on the votes of certain pro-extremist sections of the population in urban and semi-urban Punjab. But PML-N is not the only non-religious party caught in the paradox of at least keeping one of its electoral branches rooted in the mentioned section of the population.
This is the same enigmatic section that Imran Khan's PTI is also counting on to give him a numerical edge over the PML-N in an election.

That's why, though recently Khan has decided to shed some of his ambiguity regarding his stance on Islamist and sectarian violence, till only early last year he was sending emissaries to rallies where some of the star speakers were sectarian bigots! Even the more secular outfits such as the PPP and the MQM have gone on to appease and bag extremists on the other end of the sectarian spectrum. For example, a few months back the PPP announced a possible electoral alliance with the Sunni Tehrik (ST).

ST is an organisation of Sunni Muslims from the Barelvi school that, though opposed to the extremist expressions of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam (such as the Taliban), has its own extremist tendencies. ST is often involved in organising anti-Taliban rallies, but this is the same outfit that considers those who kill supposed blasphemers as heroes. That's why the PPP's decision to cosy up with ST also has a stark irony attached to it.

In January 2010, the PPP's senior members and Govemor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by a man who accused him of committing blasphemy. The man, Mumtaz Qadri, was hailed as a hero and true soldier of Islam by the ST. So, by getting into an alliance with ST, is the PPP expecting to get some electoral push by that section of the population which considers extrajudicial killers and self-styled vanguards of faith as admirable heroes? The MQM's case in this respect is a bit more complicated. Compared to the PPP and maybe even the ANP, it has flexed itself to be perhaps the most overtly secular mainstream party in the country.

In fact, it has continued to be at odds (sometimes violently) with the fundamentalist Jamat-i-Islami (JI) and Deobandi extremists such as the Taliban and the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LeJ). Unlike the PPP, MQM has also been at odds with Barelvi parties such as the Jamiat Ulema Pakistan (JUP), and the ST. Though MQM's animosity against outfits such as ST, Taliban and LeJ have been largely ideological, its anti-ST stance has more to do with the fact that during the state's operation against the MQM in 1990s, the more religious cadres of the party shifted their loyalties to the ST.
Recently the MQM tried to regain this ground by supporting Dr. Tahirul Qadri's long march in Islamabad. Qadri, an Islamic scholar from the Barelvi denomination, and a politician, heads the Minhajul Quran (MuQ) organisation that has a large following among the petty bourgeoisie in the Punjab. It was obvious that Qadri had some backing of that segment of the establishment that is still trying to redefine and mould democracy, government, and the state of Pakistan in its own image.

But this article is not about that. Thus, even though it is true that the MQM has tried to remain close to the establishment ever since it rose from the ashes of the state's operation against it in the 1990s, there was certainly talk within the party of banking on Qadri to help the MQM bag the moderate religious Barelvi vote in Karachi and maybe even in the Punjab. MuQ is largely a Punjab-based organisation.

So, what does this prove? As we see the military establishment and even non-religious political parties trying to strike partnerships with organisations that express varied extremist tendencies, all this also lays bare the fact that within the non-violent (and voting) sections of Pakistan's population, are sections of 'normal' men and women who (with their vote) are willing to punish any party for actually taking a clear stand to counter extremism.

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Of shades and sprees
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="4"]Of shades and sprees[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]

The reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s was most triggerhappy when it came to banning stuff. Films, TV shows and books were regularly pulled out of circulation because they were considered to be contrary to the interests and ideology of Pakistan and Islam.

Of course, these interests and ideology being no more than diabolie convolutions constructed by a handful of military men and maulanas who still like to keep things like free speech and open debate at bay.

So maybe that's why all that was banned by these hammerheads almost always managed to sneak its way into the homes of a majority of Pakistanis.

But, alas, if one thought that things in this respect would have improved with the demise of Zia's long Islamist charade, they had another thing coming.

Twenty years after the dictator's death in August 1988, the left-leaning Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was elected by the people of Pakistan to form its fourth government after its radical inception in 1967.

Now here's the irony: This once socialist/secular party that eventually evolved into a populist social democratic entity, has, in its most recent term (2008-13), paralleled the banning spree of its former tormentor, Ziaul Haq.

It has banned films, TV shows and websites at the drop of a hat.

Pakistanis have always found ingenious and enterprising ways of getting the banned material into the comforts of their homes. Mainly because there is something not very right about parliamentarians, military hunks and animated preachers with questionable ethics, and closets packed with all kinds of skeletons, behaving as the moral compasses of the nation.

If one compares the banning spree (in this context) of the reactionary Zia dictatorship with that of the current 'liberal' PPP regime, one can safely conclude that the thinking of democratic governments in Pakistan is still held hostage by the rather paranoid and pseudo-moralistic mindset shaped during the Zia set-up.

When Zia toppled the first PPP regime in 1977, his Ministry of Information right away banned actors, writers, journalists and producers from the state-owned media outlets who were suspected of having sympathics with the fallen regime and/or were leftist.

Then the ministry drew up a list of TV plays and films that were not allowed a rerun on the mini-screen. This included the serial, [I]Khada Ki Basti[/I], a 1974 TV rendition of celebrated writer Shaukat Siddiqui's novel of the same name that explores incidents of exploitation (by the petty bourgeoisie) in congested shanty towns of Karachi.

Once the regime happily got rid of the country's big and small screens of Pakistan's `im-moral, unIslamic past,` it moved to rid them of material that could put wrong ideas in people's minds about Pakistan's glorious new path to Islamisation.

First to go was a TV serial written by Shoaib Hashmi called Baleela. A simple comedy about a slacker family that keeps selling parts of an old car of theirs (called Balecla) to make a living.

The series was abruptly taken off the air.

The censors claimed that Baleela the car was meant to be Pakistan and the family that sold it bit by bit symbolised military men and bureaucrats.Then in 1979, the dictatorship banned director Jamil Dehlvi's [I]Blood of Hussain[/I]. A modern-day version of the 7th century struggle between Imam Hussain and the Ummayad Caliph, Yazid, this rather sloppy piece of cinema gained a cult status when its release was banned and its director chased out of the country.

It was not that Dehlvi had meant Zia to be the modern Yazid; but it was a scene in the film in which a man is shown dressing his pet monkey in a general's uniform that ticked the censors off.

Blood of Hussain also became one of the first banned movies in the country that quietly appeared in the then booming VHS market and made a little fortune for video rental outlets that slipped it to their customers under the counter.

Next to go was Salman Peerzada's Mela a film based on the struggle of an angry young man who was moved by those Sufi saints who challenged the authorities to support the rights of the people. Peerzada too was bounded out of Pakistan.

Among the many books banned during this period was Stanley Wolpert's Jinnah (1984). A biography of Pakistan's founder, it radically contradicted the image of the kind of `Islamised` Jinnah that the regime was constructing. During the same time PTV was running BBC's famous comedy series, Yes Prime Minster. However, the show was taken off theair in 1985 when it was felt that the clumsy prime minister, his scheming bureaucrats and bumbling cabinet shown in the series seemed just like the farcical `democratic government` that Zia had constructed after the 1985 partyless election.

All this was going on in the name of protecting the innocent Pakistanis from deviant ideas.However, this also went on during a period when heroin, guns, militant Islamist and sectarian outfits and literature were actually being allowed to penetrate the soul of the same innocent society.

Let's now very briefly see how the current PPP government has fared in this respect.

In the name of protecting the sanctity of the faith, it has off and on banned social websites like Facebook and Twitter and recently blocked YouTube.

Though quick to ban social websites, this government has almost done nothing to check the continuous growth of sectarian hate literature or the kind of violent indoctrination still taking place in a number of Islamic seminaries.

This is a government claiming to be democratic and liberal but in reality, it has seemed to be nothing more than a blundering hoard, almost completely in-ept at addressing the many economic and social problems faced by the country and the ubiquitous spectre of terrorism.

Thus, it is rather hilarious when one sees the same regime periodically become the society's moral guide! Crackpots continue to come on TV and mouth off tirades smacking of sectarian and religious hatred and bigotry, and moulding the so-called `ideology of Pakistan` in their own mutant image; terrorists and criminals seem almost free to cause ultimate scenes of carnage and mayhem; state and government institutions are riddled with accusations of corruption. And yet films and TV shows are being banned for `giving Pakistan a bad name?` Zero Dark Thirty (film); Homeland (TV series); Call of Duty and Medal of Honour (video games); Facebook, Twitter, YouTube . .

A government and state that (quite literally) is struggling with putting lids over boiling manholes, are so quick to block sites, films and TV shows. Shades of Zia.

Let the people evolve, grow and be bold to debate everything out in the open.

In a democracy, it is the people who elect and reject and make their own choices and not self-appointed guardians of morality whose own characters are greatly suspect.

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The meaning of violence
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]The meaning of violence[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]


Propagating or eulogising terrorists or acts of terror as heroic is usually a product of populist apologists.

They then proceed to inflict more harm to society than the terrorists.

This kind of callousness is at least one of the reasons behind many an impressionable mind convincing itself to have found some sort of identity and meaning in life. Even if it is in the shape of a violent act passionately justified to be an episode of true faith.

Many of us have wondered what makes a perfectly normal looking person take a life (or lives) and sometimes his own. Secure in a rather convoluted and perverse knowledge that his act is sure to place him in the good books of the Almighty or find him pleasurably loitering in the gardens of paradisc.

Sociologists, psychologists and political scientists have often come up with various explanations. Some suggest that bad economics is to be blamed for some young people desperate enough to be exploited by the violent patrons of faith to go on a killing spree for money as well as God.

But then there are also those who remind us that if it was all about economics, how would one explain acts of faith-driven terror undertaken by young men and women from well-todo middle-class families? Faisal Shahzad, Omar Sheikh, the 7/7 bombers in the UK, all of these men came from educated, urban and middle-class Pakistani families. In such cases it is believed that the mad urge to kill in the name of faith transcends economics and becomes a blatant example of a time honoured theory.

This theory, found in various Marxist and left-liberal philosophics, suggests that throughout history religion has been the most easily exploited element for those desiring to gain political and social power, easy money and/or worse of all, unleash a spree of bloodletting on the bases of religious bigotry and fanaticism (for gains and aims that are largely cynical).

All these theories have merit. However, what gets missed in this context is the role played by those non-violent men and womenin politics, media and the academia who actually end up somewhat justifying (if not entirely applauding) certain violent acts of men they believe are a product of bad economics, injustice and some kind of a noble war.

Such people who can emerge from both the right as well as left sides of the conventional ideological divide are usually called apologists.

Of course, when one accuses them of this, many of them lash back with their own handy terms: Liberal fascist; anti-religion; et al.

Funny thing is that when pressed to describe a person who has no qualms about strapping a suicide belt around his waist and then blow himself up (in the name of God) in a crowded mosque, a Sufi shrine or a congested market buzzing with men, women and children, the apologists would strike a pose of the unbiased and objective thinker to suggest: You see, one man`s terrorist can be another man`s freedom fighter ` That`s why what needs to be looked at and studied is the impact apologists in politics, media and the academia are having on a society quivering under the weight of unabashed terrorism taking place in the name of God and sects.

Yes, bad economics and the vulnerability of religion to be exploited in the most violent manner is making many Pakistanis sully the idea of the Almighty by committing unabashed acts of terror in His name.

But maybe such misguided and deluded souls are also finding a justification of their madness from those who refuse to call them terrorists, or explain their mutant ideas of heroism, faith and glory as a reflection of some noble anti-imperialist and anti-establishmentarian cause.

Back in the late 1970s and just before a revolution toppled the all-powerful Shah of Iran, segments supporting Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, began finding the act of torching cinemas a rather satisfying and pleasing act.

Hundreds of cinemas were torched in Iran between 1978 and 1979, but only when there were no crowds inside the cinema halls.Iranian intellectuals and leaders who were supporting the anti-Shah clergy under Khomeini (who was in exile in Paris), instead of condemning the act of burning down public property, explained it as an attack on the symbols of the Shah`s regime.

Hosien Takbali, a young drug addict from the Iranian city of Abadan, was buying and selling drugs on the streets of his hometown when his family and friends intervened and convinced him to travel to Isfahan and get admitted to a drug detox centre there. He didjust that. The revolution against the Shah was intensifying when young Takbali was in recovery.

Since this was also a time in Iran when religious as well as leftist ideas were enthusiastically being absorbed by the country`s middle and lower middle classes, Takbali was encouraged by three other young men whom he had befriended in Isfahan, to supplement his recovery with the study of faith.

When Takbali returned to Abadan, he came back as a man who had kicked his addictionand had become pious.

Nevertheless, he retained his love of` movies, but unfortunately, these were days when cinemaswere going up in flames in Iran.

In August 1978, his three new f`riends visited him at his home. They came with an issue of a British newspaper in which a few members of the clergy were quoted as saying that cinemas were a way to distract Iranians and make them ignore their religious duties.

Takbali`s friends informed him that inspired by the way the clergy was explaining the torching of cinemas, they too have decided to set a cinema on fire.

`Everybody is burning down cinemas,` one of his friends said. `But we`ll do it in a way that will make us genuine revolutionary heroes.

This meant burning down a cinema while it was screening a film and was packed with people.

The young men all bought tickets to an Iranian film called The Deer, at one of Abadan`s oldest cinemas, Rex. The hall was packed with men, women and children when Takbali and friends poured kerosene oil inside the hall and set it on fire. Over 350 people died and were turned into ash. Only a few people survived, including Takbali.

The incident is still considered to be one the most horrific acts of violence and murder that took place during the turbulent years of the Iranian Revolution.

Of course, the apologists who were praising acts of burning down cinemas previosuly, now changed track. Fearing a backlash, they began accusing `agents of the Shah regime for torching Rex.

A year after the imposition of Iran`s postShah Islamic government, some Iranians demanded an inquiry into the Rex tragedy.

Takbali, who was expecting to be hailed as a hero of the Islamic Revolution was arrested and accused of being an agent of the old Shah regime. He was hanged.

The apologists hailed the hanging as a great act of Iran`s Islamic justice.

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10 Mar 2013
 

[B][U][CENTER][SIZE="4"]Shifting sands: Short history of elections in Pak's 4 major cities[/SIZE][/CENTER][/U][/B]

Ever since the 1980s, urbanisation in Pakistan has been galloping at a brisk pace. This has affected demographics and the political and economic cultures of almost all major urban centres of Pakistan.

One is likely to comprehend this by studying election results in the big cities during some of the most telling general elections in the country.

There have been nine direct general elections based on adult franchise in Pakistan.

At least three of these (1977, 1985 and 1990) have largely been discarded as being bogus, even though the rest (apart from the ones held in 1970), cannot be judged as being entirely fair either.

But the 1970, 1988, 1993, 1997, 2002 and 2008 elections certainly hold enough meat and credibility to deserve a study in the context of the shifting political, economic and social dynamics of big cities.

Such a study is also important because rapid urbanisation in Pakistan has affected the growing political ambitions of the country’s middle and lower-middle-classes, and the fact is that even though elections in Pakistan as a whole are still not being contested on issue-basis, these issues do come into play in big cities.

I have chosen four cities: Karachi (in Sindh); Lahore (Punjab); Peshawar (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Quetta (Balochistan).

In Karachi, elections were held on seven National Assembly (NA) seats in 1970. Two of these seats were won by the pro-Barelvi Islamic party — Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP) — two were won by the conservative Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), two by the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and one by an independent.

Karachi’s population in 1970 had an overwhelming Mohajir (Urdu-speaking) majority, most of which was politically aligned with JUP and JI.

Though socially liberal, the Mohajirs were politically conservative because being migrants from India, they were not considered to be ‘sons of the soil’ and the concept of ‘unity in faith (Islam)’ appealed to them because they had yet to declare themselves to be a separate ethnic entity like the Sindhi, Pashtun, Baloch and Punjabi.

The two seats that PPP won in Karachi were both in areas that had a majority of Baloch, Sindhi and Pashtun working-class populations where the party’s socialist manifesto attracted more support.

In Lahore, eight NA seats were up for grabs during the 1970 election. All eight were won by PPP.

PPP’s appeal in Lahore cut across classes and not only did the city respond well to the party’s socialist manifesto, but also to its animated anti-India posturing.

In Peshawar, NA election in 1970 was held on four seats. Two of these were won by the left-wing National Awami Party (NAP) — a party consisting of Baloch, Sindhi and Pashtun nationalists and progressive Mohajirs — and one seat each was won by the conservative Pakistan Muslim League-(Qayyum), and the Deobandi Islamic party, Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI).

The PPP failed to win even a single NA seat in Peshawar.

Since Pashtun nationalist sentiment was strong at the time, the city’s large Pashtun population voted for NAP, whereas some Pashtun and Hindko speakers of the city preferred PML-Q and JUI.

Quetta had just two NA seats in 1970. One each was won by NAP and JUI.

The next significant general election to take place was in 1988, after the 1977 election was declared null and void and then a military regime ruled the country from 1977 till 1988.

A non-party election was held by the dictatorship in 1985 that was boycotted by almost all major parties.

The number of NA seats in Karachi increased to 13 during the 1988 election. The city had witnessed a mixture of economic boom as well as ethnic and sectarian strife in the 1980s. Crime also increased two-fold.

The Mohajir population decreased from being over 60 per cent in 1970 to about 51 per cent in 1988 (1981 consensus). The Punjabi population of the city grew to about 15 per cent and so did the city’s Baloch, Pashtun and Sindhi segments.

The Mohajirs (including the Gujrati-speaking Memons), had organised themselves as a separate ethnic entity in 1984 under the radical and secular Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM).

This meant a huge reduction in the vote-bank of right-wing religious parties, JI and JUP in the city.

Eleven of 13 NA seats in Karachi were won by MQM. The remaining two were won by PPP — again, in areas largely populated by the Baloch, Sindhi, Punjabi and the Pashtun.

Lahore had nine NA seats in the 1988 election. The PPP had swept the city in 1970 but not this time.

A new middle and lower middle-class had begun to emerge in the city during the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship. These classes saw the nine-party alliance, the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (IJI), as being closer to their new-found ideological and economic interests.

The IJI was led by Pakistan Muslim League that had been given a reboot by the Zia regime in 1985. IJI also included right-wing Islamic parties.

PPP picked up six of the nine seats in Lahore in 1988. IJI won two seats and one was won by Pakistan Awami Ittihad (PAI).

The 1988 NA elections in Peshawar were held on four seats — all four won by PPP — a remarkable achievement considering the fact that the party had failed to win a single seat here in 1970.

Peshawar had become flushed with Afghan refugees and the destructive impact that Pakistan’s involvement in the US and Saudi backed ‘Afghan jihad’ against the Soviets in neighbouring Afghanistan directly impacted KP.

Also, Pashtun nationalism was in retreat, replaced by the Islamic radicalisation witnessed in Pashtun areas as a consequence of the so-called jihad.

The city reacted to this by overwhelmingly voting for the centre-left PPP.

Election in Quetta was held on only one seat in 1988. The seat was won by JUI.

Karachi went into the 1993 election with 13 NA seats. MQM boycotted the NA election due to a military operation against its cadres during the first Nawaz Sharif government (1990-93).

Six seats were won by Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) that had become a separate outfit after IJI collapsed; another six were won by the PPP and one was won by JI. The voter turnout, however, was extremely low due to MQM’s boycott.

The 1993 election in Lahore was held on nine seats. Eight of these went to PML-N and PPP managed to win just one.

The PPP’s electoral grip over the city had finally loosened as the growing sense of Punjabi ethnic sensibilities and the continuing expansion in the city’s middle and trader classes mostly benefitted the conservative PML-N.

The 1993 election in Peshawar was contested on three NA seats. Two were won by PPP and one by the Pashtun nationalist outfit, the Awami National Party (ANP).

Quetta again had just one NA seat. This was won by the Pashtun nationalist party, the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PKMAP).

During the 1997 election, MQM returned with a bang to win 10 of 13 NA seats contested in Karachi. Two were won by PML-N and just one by PPP.

In Lahore, eight of the nine seats were bagged by PML-N and one was won by an independent. PPP won none.

The PPP’s debacle was explained as a reaction to the alleged misrule and corruption of the second Benazir Bhutto regime (1993-96).

ANP wiped out PPP in Peshawar by wining all three NA seats, whereas in Quetta PML-N won the solitary NA seat.

During the 2002 election, held under the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, Karachi was allotted 20 NA seats.

Out of these, 13 were won by the MQM, five by the right-wing Islamic alliance, the Mutahidda Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), and two by PPP.

Lahore had 13 NA seats in 2002. Four were won by PML-N, three by MMA and PPP (that made a comeback of sorts here), two by PML-Q (a faction of PML formed by the Musharraf regime) and one by Tahirul Qadri’s moderate Barelvi party, the Pakistan Awami Ittihad.

All four NA seats in Peshawar were won by MMA, mainly due to a reaction against the Musharraf regime’s support for US military operation in Afghanistan.

The two NA seats in Quetta were also won by MMA.

By the 2008 election, all major cities of the country had been hit multiple times in terrorist attacks by extreme Islamist and sectarian outfits and were experiencing the economic fall-out of a collapsing dictatorship.

Even though the Mohajir population in Karachi had reduced to about 41 per cent, 17 of 20 NA seats in Karachi were won by MQM. Three were won by PPP.

PML-N reversed its weak performance in 2002 in Lahore by winning 10 of 13 Lahore NA seats, while the remaining three were won by PPP.

Reacting to the misrule of MMA’s provincial government in KP and rising cases of extremist violence in Peshawar, Peshawarites opted for PPP and ANP. Each won two seats out of four in Peshawar.

Both NA seats in Quetta were bagged by PPP

When Nawaz rocked the Casbah
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"][FONT="System"]When Nawaz rocked the Casbah[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]


A gradual but firm pressure is being asserted by the media and the civil society upon the state, the government and the civil-military intelligence agencies — to once and for all —mount a decisive operation against sectarian organisations, involved in a number of acts of terror and bloodletting in Pakistan.

It can be safely assumed that never before in Pakistan has the media and almost all sections of the society so categorically condemned the activities of extremist outfits and demanded an equally categorical action against them. Also interesting is the way those political parties that had largely remained ambiguous in their stance on sectarian and extremist organisations, are also coming under the weight of various quarters to clearify their respective positions in this context.

Such parties do not only include right-wing religious outfits such as the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) or the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI), but also parties such as the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) and the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N).

The starkest turnaround in this respect was witnessed in Imran Khan’s PTI. Until only a year and a half ago, PTI was sending ‘emissaries’ to rallies led by some of the most controversial sectarian and religious outfits and personalities in the Difa-i-Pakistan Council. And even though the PTI has stuck to its long-standing policy of holding a dialogue with extremist groups like the Taliban, recently it has come down hard on Sunni sectarian outfits, especially the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LeJ).

Soon after LeJ’s brutal attack on the Hazara Shia community in Quetta, PTI chairman, Imran Khan, castigated the LeJ by name. Till Khan’s vocal onslaught against the LeJ, only centre-left parties like the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Awami National Party (ANP), and the secular Mohajir-centric outfit, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), were the ones willing to play the naming game.

PTI, that is being predicted to become PML-N’s fiercest opponents in the coming general election (especially in the Punjab), also went on to lambast the PML-N for having links with sectarian outfits such as the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamat (ASWJ).

The PML-N dismissed PTI’s accusation, describing it as a ploy to dissuade the Shia as well as members of the Sunni Barelvi Muslim majority and ‘liberals’ from voting for the PML-N. But it became tougher for PML-N to respond to PTI’s severe allusions when the social media came alive with old photographs of PML-N luminary, Rana Sanaullah, attending and addressing a rally of the ASWJ.

The LeJ that has owned many of the most gruesome attacks on the men, women and even children belonging to the Shia community, is a breakaway group of the Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), which was formed in the Punjab in 1985 by some former members of the mainstream JUI.

After rejecting JUI’s electoral politics and the fact that the party had decided to side with secular parties against the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship, these members were also the product of the initial rise of sectarianism fanned by the Zia dictatorship and Pakistan’s involvement in the so-called anti-Soviet Afghan jihad.

SSP held strong anti-Shia views and was often involved in violent acts against the Shia community.

With the consequent formation of the militant Shia group, the Sipah-e-Muhammad (SeM), in the early 1990s, the SSP was hit back by counterattacks by the SeM until the SSP split, and a more militant group emerged, calling itself the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

Though SSP and LeJ would eventually be banned in the early 2000s by the Musharraf regime, both have survived through various ‘front organisations.’

SeM too was banned and seemed to have withered away, but some experts believe it might have been reactivated in Karachi due to LeJ’s relentless campaign of murder and mayhem against the Shia.

Though a growing number of media personnel and political leaders have begun to now openly talk about the connections LeJ might have had with members of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and with the puritanical oil-rich Arab monarchies, the ironic bit is that one of the first mainstream political parties to allude to this was actually the PML-N!

It is very likely that the current PML-N government in the Punjab might have decided to ignore the presence of sectarian outfits such as the SSP (now called the ASWJ) and LeJ as long as they continued to operate outside Punjab.

But it is also true that one of the first concentrated operations against the LeJ and SSP was initiated by the second PML-N government (1997-99).

Newspapers of the era, and perhaps two of the finest books written on the subject of extremist violence in Pakistan, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism (Hassan Abbas), and Talibanisation of Pakistan (Amir Mir), talk in length about the mentioned operation.

The LeJ was formed in 1996 as a splinter group of the SSP, and by the late 1990s, both the outfits were highly active in the Punjab. In 1998, the PML-N regime led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif unleashed a no-holds-barred police operation against both the organisations, killing at least 36 of the most militant cadres of SSP and LeJ within a matter of months. The operation dramatically decreased the number of episodes of sectarian violence in the Punjab.

SSP and LeJ had tried to topple Benazir Bhutto during her second term as prime minister (1993-96). But they were not expecting Nawaz Sharif (who till then had been known as the ‘establishment’s man’) to break away from the orbit and act against outfits whose seeds were sown by Sharif’s former mentor, Ziaul Haq.

Sharif did this by taking visible action against SSP and LeJ and then bypassing the military high command to peruse peace with India.

In 1999, Nawaz openly began to name the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (posted there in 1996 by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia), for funding and training the SSP and LeJ.
Even though Sharif and his brother Shahbaz (who was Chief Minister of Punjab) managed to put SSP and LeJ on the defensive, both the outfits redirected their anger towards the prime minister and his brother.

In January 1999, LeJ tried to assassinate Nawaz by bombing the Lahore-Raiwind Bridge over which the Prime Minster’s motorcade was to pass. The bridge was blown, but a few minutes too early. Nawaz escaped unhurt, even though one bystander was killed. LeJ then offered Rs135m to anyone who would kill Nawaz or Shahbaz.

Alas, the operation against SSP and LeJ came to a sudden halt when the Sharif regime was toppled in a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf in October 1999.

Clever nativity
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]Clever nativity[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]


One of the most common comments one still hears from the cricketers who played in Imran Khan`s captaincy during the 1992 cricket World Cup is that despite the fact that more than half way through the tournament, the Pakistan team looked beat and was on its way out of any practical contention, Khan insisted that they would win the cup.

In a stunning display of positive reversal, the team did rise from the bottom of the pile and go on to win the cup. Many attributed Khan`s optimism as a mixture of unwavering self-belief and a dose of naivety. Something he seems to have carried over into his political career as well.

But I believe the naivety aspect that many have pin-pointed in Khan`s thinking is largely self-imposed.

It seems, he does this to keep in check his cynical side because he thinks leaders who lead during desperate times cannot afford to pace their manoeuvres according to events that can make people find refuge in cynicism.

Where on-ground realities suggest that Khan is more likely to recommend something else, thus facing labels of being naive and out-of-it.

But is he really that naive? Well, apart from embracing nativity as a deterrent to cynicism, he would rather see this as a well thought-out tactic.

Let`s get back to cricket for an example. In 1982 when he replaced Javed Miandad as captain, he picked Abdul Qadir in the squad that was to travel to England for a Test series.Qadir, a leg-break bowler, had been discarded by the selectors alfter he lailed to impress in the Tests that he was played in between 1977 and 1980.

And also, by 1982 leg-break bowling was already on its way out in the international Test arena.

Khan bumped into Qadir at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore where the Pakistan team was practicing. Qadir was there on his own, bowling in a T-shirt and a shalwar! Khan made up his mind that the English batsmen who hadn't played quality leg-break bowling for years would struggle against Qadir.

The selectors thought Imran was being, yes,naive. They refused to pick Qadir. Khan insisted and finally managed to bring Qadir into the fold.

Khan`s `naivety` was vindicated when Qadir bamboozled the English batsmen.The point being that it wasn't naivety, as such, but a gut feeling turned into a theory (the English would struggle against leg-spin).

The naively bit was simply Khan`s way of banking on his gut and theory without letting cynical stats derail his belief.

Another reason to believe that it was largely Khan`s mind at work here was when he not only told the British press that Qadir was a `wizard with the ball`, but went on to ask Qadir to keep a striking goatee to look the part! So it was a gut feeling, turned into a theory and then implemented with a dose of mind play, fan-fare and posturing.

Khan had disarmed the opposition players with his self-imposed (and cleverly self-manipulated) naivety of inducting a discarded cricketer, leaving them unprepared for a jumpy, volatile leg-break bowler with a telling wizard`s goatee coming at them in ways that they (now believed) they were not used to tackling. They`d been successfully psyched.

Over and over again Khan, as captain, would use this combination of outrageous ploys.

In the late 1980s, during an ODI tournament in Australia, he made even his own teammates raise their eyebrows when he told the Australian press that the otherwise mediocre all-rounder, Mansoor Illahi `was the hardest hitting batsmen in the world` Of course, Khan knew he wasn`t. But the ploy worked when opposing teams went into a defensive mode every time Illahi came into bat, giving Pakistani batsmen enough space to gather runs in twos and singles.

The same year the Indian team and press thought Khan was being naive when during a toumament in Sharjah, he went on record suggesting that the Kashmir issue between Pakistan and India should be settled on the cricket pitch! Pakistan won that tournament.

It seems that apart from the fact that Khan has found a still largely enigmatic middle-ground between faith and fun, he has held on to his old cricketing combination of ploys even in polities.

Gut feeling turned into a theory, then kept away from the cynicism of cold facts and imposed with great f an fare and pomp to great effect.

After all, it was a Qadir that he pulled in Lahore two years ago and shook the PML-N out of its compliancy in the Punjab.

The Sharif brothers and their merry men laughed when Khan confidently announced that he was about to host the largest political rally ever in Lahore.

He actually did pull it off. Yes, there is little doubt that this was done with more than a little help from former ISI chief, Shuja Pasha, but between then and now, Khan seems to have broken away from the establishment`s orbit.

He wasn`t the first. Z.A. Bhutto was part of the Ayub Khan dictatorship when he pulled out to form his own party. Not only did he break away from the orbit, the orbit eventually sucked him back in the most unfortunate manner by killing him! PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif` was the establishment`s blue-eyed boy for over a decade before he too broke away and became his own man.

MQM was alleged to be a party formed on the behest of Ziaul Haq`s intelli-gence agencies, but by 1988 it had quickly spun away from the influence of its supposed moulders.

And here we are today, with a `naive` Imran Khan, now threatening to topple the apple cart mounted with all types of apples placed there by the country`s two largest parties, the PML-N and PPP.

Experts still suggest that Khan`s PTI would play the role of nothing more than a spoiler in the upcoming general election.

But once again Khan is banking on his beloved combination.

Recently after disarming his opponents with naive talk` about sweeping the election and doing away with economic issues and the law and order problem within 90, 120 or how many ridiculously few days, he stole the limelight by denouncing sectarian attacks by banned Sunni outfits and mob attacks on Christians in the Punjab.

The timing was perfect. Whereas the PPP-led coalition regime is being massacred for completely failing to address sectarianism and extremism in Pakistan, PML-N`s government in the Punjab has come into focus for cutting deals with banned extremist organisations.

Suddenly it is the naive `Mr. Taliban Khan` who has become the hope of not only a majority of young new voters-to-be, but perhaps also a large number of Shia Pakistanis and the Christian community in the Punjab.

Yes, `naivety` remains Khan`s cleverest ploy.

And what is now more disconcerting for his opponents is that this ploy actually works, and maybe it is them being naive about being so `realistic`?

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=17_03_2013_424_002"]http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=17_03_2013_424_002[/URL]

Lahore, Barcelona
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"]Lahore, Barcelona[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]


As a college student and a fancy `Marxist revolutionary`, back in the mid-1980s, one of the historical events that interested me the most was the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

When in 1930 a military dictatorship in Spain fell, a coalition of communists, socialists and anarchists (the Republicans) swept the country`s municipal elections, forcing the Spanish monarch to flee the country.

The Republicans took over the reigns of the new Spanish government and state and authored a constitution that was hostile towards the military, monarchy and the Catholic clergy.

The new government nationalised all public services and land, banks and the railways but these radical steps created tensions between the leftists (the Republicans) and the coalition of monarchist, Catholic priests and the landed elite (the Falange).

In July 1936, General Franco, on the behest of the Falange, attempted to launch a military coup against the Republican regime, but failed. The failure however, resulted in an all-out civil war between the Republicans and the military-backed Falange.

The first shots of the bloody war were fired in the Spanish city of Barcelona. Even though after four years, Franco's forces were finally able to defeat the Republicans, but what happened in Barcelona during this period is most interesting.

As the state and government crumbled during the civil war, Barcelona was almost entirely run by its residents supported by Republican forces.

Everything was nationalised and taken over by the people, including factories, buildings, transport and policing duties.

The event baffled a number of historians because what in theory sounded like an improbable and highly Utopian proposition i.e. common civilians running a whole city on their own without any state or conventional government in place actually transpired in Barcelona, and that too for a full four years.

This episode used to fascinate me to no end.

However, even more fascinating is a piece of local history that I only recently stumbled upon.

In his 2001 book, The Mirage of Power, former PPP ideologue and founder, Dr. Mubashir Hassan, writes in detail about an event that has been inexplicably ignored and forgotten about by most Pakistanis.

The event is about a Barcelona type situation in the Lahore of`1972.

The PPP had swept the 1970 election in Sindh and Punjab in the former West Pakistan on a radical socialist manifesto.

Though elections were held under a military dictator, the dictatorship was forced to relinquish its power after the Pakistan armed forces were defeated in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, and what was once East Pakistan separated, becoming the independent republic of Bangladesh.

The dictatorship`s fall paved the way for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto`s PPP to form the country`s first ever democratically elected regime. But almost immediately it began to face daunting economic problems, and hostility from the rightists and even from those forces that had passionately campaigned for the PPP during the 1970 election.

But since in the early days of its inception, the regime was genuinely popular among a large number of people residing in Punjab and Sindh, it found itself being actively supported by the masses in the face of various issues that had cropped up due to Pakistan`s military defeat and the consequential break-up of the country.

For example, when the regime failed to break a crippling police strike in Peshawar (in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), it asked the Army to intervene. But the Army refused and Bhutto`s ministers had to get into lengthy discussions and deliberations with the striking policemen to resolve the issue.

But just as the government was about to achieve a breakthrough in Peshawar, an even more crippling strike by the police broke out in Lahore.

Short on resources, time and men, the Bhutto regime struggled to juggle between handling strikes in Peshawar and Lahore. The military refused to intervene in Lahore, claiming that the city was in shambles after the 1971 war and thus, lacked the influence and resources to pacify the striking policemen.

Unable to get appropriate attention of the government, police officers and their subordinates (including those from traffic police), simply abandoned their posts and stations, and went home.

Bhutto and his governor in the Punjab, Mustafa Khar, panicked. Lahore was lingering without any police protection whatsoever and there was fear that if habitual criminals come loose, anarchy would engulf the city.

The fear was realistic. A major city was without any police presence; a city of a country that had lostits pride due to a humiliating defeat at the hands of a hated enemy and consequentially facing a daunting economic and political crises.

But instead of anarchy and free-for-all bloodletting, something entirely unexpected happened.

After finding absolutely no cops directing the traffic and the police stations totally empty, the people of Lahore decided to run the city themselves.

Almost everyone participated fruit and vegetable vendors to labour, college and university students to white-collar office workers.

College and high school students used abandoned stools and sheds to control tralTic. And what`s more, they were all obeyed by the car, taxi, rickshaw and bus drivers.

As the students ran the traffic, the labour and office workers moved in to take over police stations. As some police stations were not abandoned by the striking cops, they were asked to leave.

Those who refused to go were thrown out by large crowds.

In some areas these crowds chose common working class men as the station's new [I]thanedaars[/I] (SHO). Masons, carpenters, school teachers, and in one case, an unemployed old man were chosen to run police stations as [I]awami thanedaars[/I] (people`s officers).

The old man had initially refused the offer saying that since he couldn't even recover his lost goat, how could he ever catch any thieves? But the crowd around him persisted and the man relented when someone from the crowd appeared with three goats and handed them to him.

This continued for almost two days and Lahore newspapers reported that traffic violations and incidents of theft had dropped considerably during these eventful and unprecedented days.

Khar exploited the event brilliantly. After failing to get the cops to end their strike, he held a large rally in Lahore (televised by PTV).

In the rally he warned the policemen that if they did not return to their posts, they would be dismissed and common civilians would be given their posts and perks. The cops returned, almost immediately.

It is interesting to note that this was the same city that would eventually go up in flames due to the 1974 anti-Ahmadi riots, and these days is making a name for itself` for generating mobs of hatred who go about killing supposed `blasphemers` and burning down whole residential areas populated by Pakistani Christians.

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Smokers’ Corner: The Baloch electoral enigma
 

[U][B][CENTER][SIZE="4"]Smokers’ Corner: The Baloch electoral enigma[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B][/U]

[B][SIZE="3"]Nadeem F. Paracha
[/SIZE][/B]

One can be left rather perplexed trying to figure out the number of Baloch nationalist parties out there and their many factions and sub-factions. Even though one can say the same about Sindhi nationalist outfits as well, the difference is that unlike the Sindhi parties, the Baloch parties actually have it in them to win national and provincial elections.

The question is, if almost all Baloch parties and their factions have the capability as well as a history of winning NA and PA seats, and the fact that, more or less, they all stand for the same things, why don’t they simply merge into becoming a single and more effective electoral unit?

One reason is that in spite of the fact that all Baloch parties and factions have roots in left-wing politics, are staunchly secular, and analyse the economic and politics issues facing Balochistan with almost similar lenses, they are divided on the basis of class and in their solutions to tackling these issues.

For example, some Baloch parties claim to be made up of middle-class Baloch leadership and are likely to criticise another Baloch outfit of being under the influence of a Baloch sardar or tribal lord.

Secondly, some Baloch parties believe in solving the many problems that the Baloch nationalists have faced from the state of Pakistan through political and democratic means, whereas other Baloch groups support an armed insurgency as the solution.

At the moment there are about 10 Baloch political parties operating in the troubled province.

The leading parties in this respect are Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M), BNP-Awami, National Party (NP), Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP) and Baloch Republican Party (BPR).

Apart from these there are various factions of the Baloch Students Organisation (BSO) and insurgent groups such as Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF).

Out of these, the two BNP factions, NP, JWP and maybe BPR are expected to contest the May 11 general election.

The BNP factions emerged from the Balochistan National Party (BNP) formed in 1996. The BNP itself surfaced from Balochistan National Movement (BNM) that sprang from Balochistan National Alliance (BNA), a left-wing alliance of youth leaders belonging to BSO and radical Baloch politicians.

BNA was formed in 1987 and managed to win two NA seats from Balochistan in the 1988 elections. It evolved into becoming Balochistan National Movement that split into BNM-Mengal and BNM-Hayee. The Mengal faction then became Balochistan National Party (BNP) but that too split into BNP-M and BNP-A.

The National Party (NP) emerged in 2004 when the BNA-Hayee faction merged with the Pakistan National Democratic Party (PNDP which itself was an evolutionary offshoot of the Pakistan National Party (PNP), formed in the late 1980s as a centre-left Baloch party that shunned Baloch separatism.

The PNP failed to win any NA seat in the 1988 election. In 1990 it won one NA seat and none in 1993. In did not take part in the 1997 election and had become the Balochistan National Democratic Party (BNDP) for the 2002 elections but failed to win a seat. In the 2008 elections it merged with BNM-Hayee to become National Party but couldn’t win any NA seat.

Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP) was formed in 1989. It won two NA seats in 1990, 1993, 1997 and one in 2002 but boycotted the 2008 election.

Recently, a faction split from JWP and formed the Baloch Republican Party.

Before it split into three factions, the Balochistan National Party (BNP) won three NA seats in 1997 but failed to win any seat in 2002.

After the split, only the BNP-A faction contested the 2008 election, winning just one NA seat.

None of these parties seem inclined to launch a joint electoral venture for the forthcoming elections. Yet, interestingly, almost each and every party mentioned here has roots in a united political singularity called the National Awami Party (NAP).

Formed in 1957, NAP was an outfit made up of mainly Punjabi and Mohajir communists merged with leading Sindhi, Baloch, Pakhtun and Bengali nationalist groups.

Many believe that had the promised direct general elections been allowed to take place in 1958, NAP was in a position to win the largest number of seats in both the wings of the country (East and West).

NAP was banned in 1959 when Ayub Khan imposed martial law. It revived itself as the country’s largest left-wing party in 1962, broke into two factions at the onset of another leftist party, the PPP in 1967.

The pro-China faction of NAP became NAP-Bhashani and the pro-Soviet faction became NAP-Wali. The Wali faction (named after Pakhtun nationalist, Wali Khan) was the larger faction, having in its fold leading Pakhtun and Baloch nationalists and Marxist Mohajir and Punjabi members.

During the 1970 elections, NAP-Wali won the largest number of NA and PA seats in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan. It managed to form coalition governments in these two provinces whereas Sindh, Punjab and the Federal government went to Bhutto’s PPP.

In 1973, the Bhutto regime dismissed the NAP set-up in Balochistan (on charges of instigating a Baloch separatist movement). The KP government resigned in protest.

On the plea of the federal government, the Supreme Court banned NAP in 1975. With most of NAP’s leadership in jail, the remaining Baloch, Sindhi and Pakhtun members of NAP formed the National Democratic Party (NDP) and became part of the anti-PPP alliance, the PNA, for the 1977 elections.

However, after Ziaul Haq’s military coup (in July 1977), differences erupted in NDP and its Pashtun, Sindhi and Baloch leaders formed their own nationalist parties.

In 1986 these parties merged once again to form the Awami National Party (ANP). But by the time the 1988 elections were held, ANP had become a Pakhtun nationalist party when the party’s Baloch and Sindhi leadership broke away to again form their own localised outfits.

Out of these only some Baloch outfits (apart from the Pashtun version of ANP), has exhibited any ability to win seats during NA and PA elections.


[url]http://dawn.com/2013/04/07/smokers-corner-the-baloch-electoral-enigma/[/url]

[B][CENTER][SIZE="4"]Past tense[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]

Recently, a shocking display of self-righteous tactics employed by the Returning Officers (ROs) while whetting the moral standing of candidates for the May 11 election triggered a series of heated debates in the media.

The controversy revolved around Articles 62 and 63 in the Constitution which were introduced by a reactionary military dictator in the 1980s.

Yet, even after the demise of the dictator, about 15 years of civilian rule couldn’t put the controversial articles up for any worthwhile democratic scrutiny or debate.

The mentioned articles are based on almost entirely abstract allusions about Pakistan’s founding ideology. No matter how much the term Pakistan Ideology is mentioned in the country’s school textbooks and by the mainly right-wing intelligentsia, the truth is that the term has never been fully defined and/or agreed upon.

But it is also true that in spite of the fact that the so-called Pakistan Ideology (Nazariya-i-Pakistan) is at best a figment of lofty and illusionary thinking with very little connection to any substantial historical reality, it remains a widely used term among a majority of Pakistanis.

The main reason for this has been the kind of history almost each and every Pakistani has been taught at school and college ever since the mid-1970s. School and college students are actively discouraged from understanding history as a set of facts based on literary and archaeological evidence.

They are also asked to blindly consume history (especially that of Pakistan) even when facts in this context suggest that much of it was written to fulfil certain manipulative ideological ends and to popularise political and social episodes that have little or no link to any historical reality as such.

No matter how aversely some Nazariya-i-Pakistan enthusiasts in the media, the ‘establishment’ or the intelligentsia may react to the above-mentioned scenario, the truth remains that the whole Pakistan Ideology bit is a comparatively recent construct (if not an outright convolution).

Scholars like Ayesha Jalal, Rubina Saigol and A.H. Nayyar, historians K.K. Aziz and Dr Mubarak Ali, and authors like Hussain Haqqani, Ian Talbot and Stephen P. Cohen have all provided reliable evidence to substantiate that the term Pakistan Ideology was nowhere to be found in the speeches and documents related to the founders of the country.

The ‘Pakistan Movement’ was based on the ‘Two-Nation Theory’ which considered the Muslims of India a separate political and cultural entity from the region’s Hindu majority and was dynamic enough to deserve a separate Muslim homeland. Nevertheless, even after Pakistan was created in 1947, there were more Muslims in India than there were in Pakistan.

The founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was quick to realise this and according to two of his colleagues, Chaudhry Khaliq-uz Zaman and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, this is why in his first major speech to the Constituent Assembly (August 11, 1947), he emphasised Pakistan to be a Muslim nation-state that was broad-based in its make-up.

In his 1961 book, Pathway to Pakistan, Khaliq-uz Zaman suggests that the speech “effectively negated (and put to rest) the faith-based nationalism of the Pakistan Movement”.

So if Jinnah dropped the Islamic aspects of the movement, then what is the Pakistan Ideology?

Subscribers of this ideology explain it to be a belief in the ‘Two-Nation Theory’ and in the conviction that Pakistan came into being in the name of Islam and was destined to become an ‘Islamic state’.

Detractors, however, point to the fact that the Two-Nation Theory collapsed the moment the majority of Muslims stayed behind in India, making Jinnah affirm his idea of Pakistan as a Muslim-majority nation-state where the state will have nothing to do with religion.

Detractors also suggest that the Theory was contradicted once again in 1971, when Bengali Muslims in the former East Pakistan broke away to form a separate country on the basis of Bengali nationalism.

They further point out that had the founders conceived Pakistan as an Islamic state, they would not have been opposed by Islamic fundamentalists, many of whom were staunchly anti-Jinnah and thought the idea of Pakistan was an un-Islamic abomination.

Jinnah justified Pakistan as a Muslim majority state that would encapsulate the political, economic and cultural genius of the Muslims of South Asia without evoking the theological aspects of their faith.

He was also conscious of the history of polemical conflicts between the many Muslim sects and sub-sects Pakistan had inherited.

Unfortunately, his concerns and vision were rudely ignored after his death in 1948, and the ruling elite haphazardly began to give shape to a monolithic idea of Pakistan in which Islamic laws would be central (1949 Objectives Resolution).

The 1956 Constitution again spoke of an Islamic Republic, but the problem was, all this was being suggested without putting the plan up for any authentic democratic scrutiny or consensus in front of a multi-sectarian and multi-cultural polity.

Most nation states have a history of creating an idealised past to sustain their justification. It was during the secular military regime of Ayub Khan (1959-69) that the myths required to build a nationalist narrative began in earnest. He formed a Council of Islamic Ideology but populated it with liberal Islamic scholars.

The Council was more an exercise in painting Ayub’s polices as being close to Jinnah’s thinking, who, according to the Council, only believed in ‘controlled democracy’ and a centralised government. The Islamic aspect was given mere lip-service in the 1962 Constitution.

Ayub’s policies were opposed by the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) that, in 1962, for the first time used the term Nazariya-i-Pakistan.

Over the next few years, JI, without mentioning Jinnah, continued to call for the creation of an Islamic state by claiming that it was a natural outcome of Nazariya-i-Pakistan.

Leftist thought and groups ascending in the late 1960s trashed JI’s claims by countering that Pakistan was conceived as a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Muslim-majority country based on democracy and socialism.

Interestingly, it was during the populist and left-liberal government of ZA Bhutto (1972-77), that the term Nazariya-i-Pakistan first began to appear in textbooks and official lingo (especially after the passing of the 1973 Constitution).

The government rationalised the separation of East Pakistan as a natural occurrence because the real Pakistan was always West Pakistan or the region that ran along the mighty River Indus.

Though more friendly to the idea of the country being multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, the Bhutto regime explained that a largely homogenous understanding of Islam was the glue that kept all the ethnicities together (in the Indus region).

For this, the 1973 Constitution gave power to the state and government of Pakistan to define this so-called homogenous understanding of Islam.

In a land riddled with numerous sects, sub-sects and varied religious interpretations, the move was bound to alienate and even offend a number of Pakistanis who disagreed with the state’s version of Islam.

The Constitution actually took away the right of a Pakistani Muslim to interpret Islam for him or herself without state interference. But it was under General Zia, the man who toppled Bhutto in 1977— all that was first part of public debate (in the 1960s), and then a constitutional allusion in the 1970s became strict state policy — that Nazariya-i-Pakistan finally became an official creed.

Flushed with petro-dollars and an increasing confidence in his power, Zia unfolded a number of Islamic laws culled from interpretations of certain puritanical branches of Islamic thought and then (through textbooks, constitutional amendments and state media), weaved them to become the central planks of the Pakistan Ideology.

Ever since the 1980s, Nazariya-i-Pakistan has come down to mean the belief in the right of the Islamic state and Islamic constitution to not only define faith, but to also judge and measure the faith of the faithful as well as denounce and prosecute those deemed to be threats to the Pakistan Ideology.

All this has created sectarian and sub-sectarian divisions; justified state interference in matters of faith; and rationalised non-democratic intervention in the name of defending the ideology.

Consequently, the mindset has trickled down and armed people to openly manipulate faith as a means to meet self-righteous as well as cynical ends.

Lastly, the so-called called Pakistan Ideology has also left the youth of the country thoroughly confused about its identity in a rapidly changing and complex world.

For starters, instead of looking for their roots upon the ground that they stand on, many of them now look for these roots in the ways and trends of booming desert lands hundreds of miles away, as if Pakistan was conceived in Arabia.

[URL="http://dawn.com/2013/04/14/smokers-corner-past-tense/"]Dawn[/URL]

Smokers’ Corner: A Tuesday in hell
 

[B][U][CENTER][SIZE="5"]
Smokers’ Corner: A Tuesday in hell[/SIZE][/CENTER][/U][/B]

[B][SIZE="3"]
Nadeem F. Paracha [/SIZE][/B]


Tuesday, the 16th of April was an extraordinary day in Pakistan. The sun rose to bring into view a brutal attack on the convoy of PML-N leader, Sannullah Zehri in Khuzdar, Balochistan.

Though Zehri survived the assault, unfortunately three members of his family lost their lives.

Police pointed the finger at the Baloch insurgent group, the Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) that has already threatened to thwart the election in Balochistan.

But the tragic episode rudely brought home a stinging realisation to the PML-N: Keeping mum about armed militant threats may give it space to hold rallies and corner meetings in the Punjab, elsewhere it is as venerable to the psychotic rage of extremists as are secular parties like the ANP, MQM and the PPP.

The PML-N has to realise that by remaining awkwardly vague about its stand on the threat faced by secular parties from those who slaughter indiscriminately in the name God, it cannot remain unharmed in a country now overflowing with mad men of all shapes, sizes, hue and colour.

If those who mercilessly cut down Zehri’s family members belonged to an outfit that evokes hatred in the name of Baloch nationalism, the same Tuesday witnessed yet another bloody attack on the ANP by those who consider themselves to be the only true Muslims in this country.

Ever since the TTP threatened to attack leaders and rallies of the ANP, MQM and PPP, it has planted a bomb in front of almost every little step that the ANP has taken.

On that eventful, gory Tuesday, the extremists were at it again blowing up a small ANP rally in Peshawar that was also being attended by veteran ANP leader, Ghulam Ahmed Bilour. His younger brother, Bashir Bilour, had already been killed by the extremists.

Bilour only barely managed to escape the onslaught, but the attack put to death 17 people, including eight children.

It is perfectly reasonable to ask exactly how killing innocent men, women and children pleases the Almighty and benefit the faith that He bestowed upon us Muslims through his last Messenger?

Equally rational is to question the sanity of men who slaughter unarmed civilians in the most sneaky and cowardly manner and then claim that their faith and God ordains it?

But even more pressing should be the question seeking an enquiry into the state of mind of those who, despite the ever-increasing episode of mindless bloodshed that our TV screens are usually splattered with, still manage to actually end up blaming the victims.

And here I am not only talking about the confused urban middle-class kids who move to and fro from their Xbox consoles to their laptops, bashing out ill-informed and knee-jerk gibberish on Twitter and Facebook — reactionary nonsense that sounds as foul as their fast-food burps.

They are simply mimicking all those noble men and women who appear on TV with the sole aim to obfuscate the obvious truth about the sheer brutality of the madmen.

They do this with reactive rhetorical arguments studded with pointy terms like geo-political situation, Islamophobia, drone attacks and corruption, etc.

If they can’t get themselves to forgive the ‘last five years of record-breaking corruption,’ of ANP, MQM and PPP leaders who have so far been killed by the extremists; and, in a way, see the killings as God’s retribution against these awful, awful politicians, what about the men, women and children who had absolutely nothing to do with what the satanic politicians were up to?

How is the mass murders justified? In this case, of course, expect the drone argument to sprout like a wild flower, and angry laments about how we are fighting someone else’s war to kick in.

So about 49,000 Pakistani civilians, politicians, cops and soldiers have been massacred by those who kill indiscriminately just because drones chase them and we are fighting an alien war?

Ah, if it was all that simple. TV channels showed the heartbreaking scene of a nine-year-old child weeping and beating himself at the site where our anti-imperialist heroes tried to blow up an aged leader of the ANP.

No one knows if the kid was doing so because he had lost a relative or a friend in the attack, or was he in shock, but imagine a son, brother, nephew or close relative of yours as young as that unfortunate boy going through a similar episode.

The extremists are what they are and they take pride in their madness. That’s why to me more disturbing are apparently sane men and women who seem to muster their sadness, outrage and tears only if a tragedy comes with the words drone, America and Karachi gangs. As if all other acts of murder and violence are justified and not worth outraging about.

The lives of the loved ones of the 49,000 Pakistanis killed since 2002 have been shaken. On Tuesday, everyone else (especially in Karachi) was shaken by an earthquake (about 5.9 on the Richter Scale).

Amazing how well Karachi managed to survive the quake, with all those tall buildings and congested apartment blocks.

On the night of the earthquake, a famous TV anchor did us all a great favor by talking to a seismologist. But, alas, since for some strange reason any talk about science on local TV channels requires to be balanced out by the musings of a religionist, the anchor then promptly called in a cleric to give that inevitable religious twist to the topic.

His mighty insight: The Almighty creates earthquakes in societies that listen to music and have become obscene.

How conveniently we trivialise the glory of the Almighty and how quickly we reduce science to mean nothing but a heap of secular, Western nonsense.

So remember, the next time you switch on your Ipod, you might be inviting an earthquake. Meanwhile nothing of the sort happens when men slaughter women and children in the name of God.

Of course, nothing obscene about that, no?

[url]http://dawn.com/2013/04/21/smokers-corner-a-tuesday-in-hell/[/url]

Smokers’ Corner: Pulp fantasies
 

[B][CENTER][U][SIZE="4"]Smokers’ Corner: Pulp fantasies[/SIZE][/U][/CENTER][/B]

[B][SIZE="2"] Nadeem F. Paracha [/SIZE][/B]


A recent editorial in Dawn appropriately wondered about this year’s speech by COAS General Parvez Kayani at the annual passing out parade at the Pakistan Military Academy.

The moment contents of his speech became news, some conservative media personnel and columnists could be seen puffing their chests with happy hot air and excitedly wagging their fingers at their more liberal counterparts, reminding them how the COAS had gone on to declare that Pakistan was made in the name of Islam and that ‘no one can take Islam out of Pakistan’.

Much has been written and discussed about exactly what constitutes this ‘ideology’. Liberal scholars, intellectuals, historians and those on the left have for long argued that things like the ‘Pakistan Ideology’ are post-Jinnah concoctions molded by conservative historians, religious parties and the military-establishment to maintain and sustain their undemocratic influence over a diverse ethnic and sectarian polity.

Those on the right, of course, disagree. They continue to insist that Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, used the Pakistan Movement as a roadmap to a destination where Muslims of different languages, cultures and sectarian persuasions would gel together as a monolithic state and nation and be ruled by the dictates of the Quran and the Sunnah.

This has not happened. And it can’t. It’s a fairy tale scenario peddled as history and an ideology that in spite of creating fissure after fissure between sects, ethnicities and between the military-establishment and political parties, is still being unabashedly flaunted.

So much so, that the fissures that it has caused have now gradually created an extreme expression of madness that uses terror and bloodshed to enact a so-called Islamic State.

But more pressing should be the concern about the state of mind of the soldiers who are on the frontlines of a vicious battle against those expressing this extremism in the most brutal manner.

In his last year’s speech at the PMA, the COAS clearly emphasised that the existential threat to Pakistan was largely internal. This year, however, it became external again. Where do such sudden shifts leave the soldiers?

A friend of mine (a former journalist and now a filmmaker) once told me a revealing little tale. To film a documentary, he had travelled up north into a tense battle zone where the Pakistan Army was fighting a bloody war against the extremists. This was during the military operation in Swat in 2009.

There he met a soldier who startled him by saying: “Sir, since you seem to be an educated man and someone I can trust, let me tell you that all these men (extremists) are our own people”.

He then added: “We are told so many things about whom we are fighting. But we know who these people are. These are the people we have known for years, but now they have turned against us”.

The soldier was not saying anything new. Because barring the usual set of so-called patriots who are ever-willing to lie through their teeth just because they believe that certain fibs serve the country’s interests, by now most Pakistanis (at least outside the Punjab) know that the vicious enemy, the people of Pakistan and its army are up against are very much a product of our own naive follies and misplaced arrogance.

Nevertheless, when one hears this coming from a soldier on the frontlines, one is not sure how to react.

Whether one should rejoice or should we see this as a warning?

The debacles faced by the US army in Vietnam and by the Soviet forces in Afghanistan should be taken as examples to be learnt from.

It is easier to raise an army on certain myths about one’s foreign enemies and on an exaggerated sense of patriotism. But the post-World War II scenario in this regard is studded with examples in which, in a long drawn-out armed conflict, there does come a time when armies facing guerrilla warfare begin to lose touch with all the ideological hoopla that they were fed during training.

There are numerous accounts of how whole battalions of American marines and Soviet fighters ended up rebelling against their own superiors because after facing bloodshed and madness on the battlefield they completely lost contact with what they were told by their politicians and generals. All that indoctrination began to melt away and they found themselves awkwardly exposed to a set of truths that they were conditioned to actually repress.

These are the kind of truths that a soldier, especially if he is being readied to take on a ruthless bunch of insurgents, should be briefed about up front.

As one saw in Vietnam and Afghanistan, all that mythical talk about how the soldiers were fighting for a higher cause simply began to melt away and the soldiers were not only left stranded with a rude reality, but they had no clue how to address it. It is a bit unsettling to know that the Pakistan army is preparing its men for the conflict against armed extremists by using rhetoric it originally devised for a possible war against an external enemy.

But it is their own countrymen that the soldiers are facing on the battlefield and/or legions of fanatics who believe that they are the ones serving God, even if that means blowing up women and children.

The enemy in this context is not the saffron-clad battalions on mechanical elephants fitted with nuclear warheads. The enemy is very much from amongst us.

Telling the soldiers the whole truth is better. This should mean organising a re-orientation program with a view to ready them to fight an enemy that is not dropping from the sky or rolling in from across the border, but emerging from our very own mountains and cities. The threat remains very much internal, dear General.


[url]http://dawn.com/2013/04/28/smokers-corner-pulp-fantasies/[/url]

Pakistan: a very modern history
 

[CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][B][SIZE="4"]Pakistan: a very modern history[/SIZE][/B][/FONT][/CENTER]

Pakistan occupies an area which was home to some of the earliest Neanderthal settlements, some of whose decedents can still be found hiding in caves in the mountains of North West Pakistan.

The only difference is, in the Stone Ages, these Neanderthals were armed with clubs and stones, but today they are armed with guns and bombs.

Remarkably though, they remain as furry as they were millions of years ago.

The modern state of Pakistan was born out of the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 and has faced many regional confrontations, usually brought on by its continuing habit of poking its nose where it doesn't belong.

Created to meet the demands of Indian Muslims, Pakistan was originally in two parts: Part 1 was called [I]Maula jat[/I] and Part 2 was called [I]jat in Dhaka[/I].

The east wing present day Flooded Republic of Bangladesh is on the Bay of Bengal bordering the Bollywood Republic of India and the Miserable Republic of Burma.

The west wing present-day the Not-Quite-Arab Republic of Pakistan stretches from the Arabian Sea to the Himalayas and according to famous poet, philosopher, military strategist, historian and judo expert, Zidec Hamid, the country actually stretches all the way to New Delhi, Kabul, Tashkent and maybe even Beijing and many parts of Mars.

The break-up of the two wings came in 1971 when the fish-eating east-wing seceded after fighting an insurgency culled and planned from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and an early draft of the Di Vinci Code.

Civilian politics in Pakistan in the last few decades has been tarnished by corruption, inefficiency, confrontations and bad breath between various institutions and/or whatever institutions that are left in the country. Actually, the word political institution is an oxymoron when discussed in the context of Pakistani polities and the state.

Alternating periods of civilian and military rule have not helped to establish stability. In fact, instability is the only stable tradition in Pakistan; a tradition that is being passionately upheld by a series of TV talk shows because political stability would mean lack of viewership and advertising revenues for the channels and a drastic drop in popcorn sales that can spell disaster for the country`s economy.

Pakistan came under military rule once again in October 1999 after the ousting of a civilian government that had lost a great deal of support because the public lost its appetite for rich dishes such as nihari, paye, and biryani which Prime Minister Naraaz Sharif was a great fan of.

He has since become a vegetarian of sorts and is usually taunted as becoming a sissy by Brig (R) Cookie Monster Gul, the architect of the Afghan Jihad and the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

According to famous poet, philosopher, military strategist and lifestyle fascist, Maria Beep she also took part in the 1857 Mutiny as a gallant needle-worker.

Her gallantry was praised by the famous poet, philosopher, military strategist and flogging enthusiast, Sangsar Abbasi. Maria Beep still has her famous 1857 needles with which she now pokes voodoo dolls of her competitors in Pakistan`s cutthroat fashion industry.

Sanana & Safibarf are her two latest victims who launched a counterattack through their new summer collection that included Persian tea cosies worn as corporate aunty headgear.

After Pakistan`s last benevolent dictator, General Mush P. Bonaparte, eventually relinquished his uniform amidst tears in November 2007, in February 2008, his supporters were defeated in the election, also amidst tears.

The Pakistan Khapay Khapay Khapay Party formed a coalition government led by Asif Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Zardari Bhutto and an impeachment process was launched against Mush, who resigned (amidst more tears) in August 2008.

Pakistan`s place on the world stage shifted after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US. It dropped its support for the Neanderthal regime in Afghanistan and was propelled into the frontline inthe fight against terrorism, becoming a key ally of the Elders of Zion and assorted secret Freemason societics.

However, Pakistani forces have struggled to maintain control over the restive Neanderthal regions along the Afghan border, where Neanderthal militants are firmly entrenched with bombs strapped around their tummies which they claim is only a weight reducing exercise. Most Pakistanis entirely believe this to be true.

In the spring of 2009, the government attempted to reduce disaffection in the troubled north-western Swat district by agreeing to the imposition of the Whipping Women Law.

Far from improving security, this move allowed the Neanderthals to tighten their grip on the region, and the agreement broke down after only a few whips.

The government waged a military campaign to flush out the furry Neanderthals an act that many sensitive Pakistanis such as poet, philosopher, politician and balaybaaz, Lord Jibran Can`t, and Mian Naraz Sharif criticised. Mainly just for the heck of it.

Asif Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Zardari Bhutto won the presidential race of September 6, 2008, by a big majority. His election came after his predecessor General P. Mush Bonaparte resigned amidst tears under threat of impeachment.

General P. Mush Bonaparte`s rule had ushered in increased freedom for the print media and a liberalisation of broadcasting policies.

Television is the dominant medium, and there are around 50,000 private channels all babbling about the same things but each calling their individual babbling `exclusive.

More than 100 private FM radio stations have been licensed. Fake American accents and low IQ levels are firm prerequisites for success.

Scores of unlicensed FM stations are said to operate in the tribal areas. They are usually operated by Neanderthal RJs of which DJ Fazalullah In Da Caaaaave is the most popular.

There are around 20 million internet users in Pakistan. A growing number of young Pakistanis have engrossing and intelligent discussions on various internet sites. Here is one example:

Superbilla: What you think you think you are you kafir anti-Islam Pakistan Afghanistan Israeli Hindu dog!

Pakpunk: Oh, you shut up you terrorist what you think you are you and I am I am great Muslim and Pakistan jeeay jeeay yea!

Munchkins: Oh why you fight you both, we all Muslim ummah and Pakistani patriots so we should make unity and gather and explode atom bum on India!

Superbilla: Oh you shut up you hypocrite you not real Pakistani but Ahmadi nonsense, oh you bastaaaaaaaa! !

Munchkins: Shut up your face you infidel man you destroy unity of Muslim ummah you too bastaaaaaaaa! !

Moderator: Guys please refrain from using bad language. We're Muslims and this is a respectable forum.

Munchkins: Oh why you say this to me to me what about superbilla and pakpunk I am tolerant best Muslim in whole wide world like Pakistan best country in whole wide worldly universe.

Moderator: I said exhibit tolerance and respect, okay?

BobbyBunny: Thank you, sir, for the tolerant words. I am from the US and....

Moderator: What? US? Oh, you bastaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailNews.php?StoryText=05_05_2013_424_002"]Pakistan: a very modern history[/URL]

How green was my valley?
 

[B][SIZE="4"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][CENTER]How green was my valley?[/CENTER][/FONT][/SIZE][/B]


Many years ago, when Swat was still green and free from bushy warlords, I knew a middle aged man there who was also a tracking guide. His name was Atique Ali Khan and I remember every time I used to ask him about how his two children were doing at school, he was in the habit of constantly quoting a well-known hadith. `Allah be praised`, he used to say. `They are doing well at school. As the Prophet (PBUH) used to say, go as far as China f`or knowledge.

Well, I haven`t been to Swat in a long time and I have no idea what became of Atique. But thanks to the rude mushrooming of the rowdy keepers of faith in that part of` Pakistan some f`ive years ago, I`m sure his children weren`t even able to walk a kilometre for knowledge, let alone ever visiting China.

Though the 2009 military operation in that area largely cleared the place of the mad men, last year`s shooting of the 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai confirmed the apprehension that these men are still embedded in Swat among its otherwise peaceful populace.

These men were an angry lot.Once upon a time, it is said, they used to let off steam by chopping down trees. That was bad enough, but I guess ever since trees have become somewhat scarce in Swat, the level of their delusions about faith suddenly doubled, rather quadrupled.As a consequence, they began ranting incoherent loud nothings on clandestine FM radio stations about how extremely angry they were about all the obscenity and injustice in the world and about matters related to the education of little girls. Indeed, a grave danger to faith these young ones certainly are.

Well, the loud FM stations too didn`t seem to satisfy their monstrous appetites for divinely inspired action, so off they went blowing up CD shops and girls` schools.

Blow `em all, became their heartfelt mantra, as they became angrier, louder and, of course, a lot bushier.

Unfortunately, since supposedly their faith was a lot stronger than that of us `bad Muslims`, it required more from them. So these angry men started blowing themselves up! What`s more, for an impressive display and effect, they did this in public places. Off they went with a bang, taking along with them mutilated and severed bodies, dozens of men,women and children. And up they all went to paradise, or so they say, and so they believed.

But what about you and I, the bad Muslims? What do we have to say about the blowing up of girls` schools, CD and barber shops in our own backyard? Happenings that are still a reality in various towns, enclaves and cities of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, south Punjab and parts of Karachi? What do we have to say about men of faith in our very own country who actually believe that suicide and multiple murders in the name of God will land them a cosy little corner in paradise? The ideological and material clash of two extremes Bush`s clean-shaven neo-cons and the bushy Islamist terrorists have left most `moderate` Muslim populations in a scared and awkward state of myopia.

This disposition has helped serve the purpose of the Islamists.

Sadly, most `moderate Muslims` instead of forming a third opinion through some sort of a rational consensus, have decided to take sides between the two extremes.

For example, most Pakistanis naturally took an opposing view of Bush`s `war on terror`. Fair enough. But since much of this was done without a clear third view, commentaries and opinions against matters like drone attacks, suicide bombings and `war on terror` have regrettably sounded more and more like jerky jingoistic spiels.

Unfortunately, these excitable tirades helped fatten the delusional and self-righteous complexes of`the Islamists.

The third view that is directly linked to the democratic political parties and the self-interest of` the military, government and society of Pakistan was ultimately sacrificed at the altar of hyperbolic political cliches and rants, making the country continue suffering from a scenario in which we went on bad-mouthing one extreme (neocons) while uncannily allowing the other extreme to get fatter,bolder and wilder.

As for Atique Ali Khan, I wonder if he`s still alive, or for that matter, if his children are still alive. One thing`s for sure, though. They won`t have many schools left to go to. But what`s a school compared to a place in paradise, aye?

[URL="How green was my valley?"]How green was my valley?[/URL]

Lurching for meaning
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]Lurching for meaning[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]


I'm sure, by the time this column appears on these pages, a lot has already been said, written and investigated about the rather stunning results produced by the May 11 election.

It was interesting to note that, alas, though the electronic and social media is effective in generating hype and virtual commotions, they do not necessarily impact voting trends the way one was expecting them to.

If one believed in the sustained hype about PTI`s `tsunami` in the social media, he or she was understandably left mouthing incoherent and disoriented gibberish on Twitter and Facebook the moment it became clear that PMLN would bulldoze all opposition, especially in the Punjab.

Not only was PTI drubbed severely in the Punjab by PMLN, it could not even go past the number of seats won by the PPP a party that was pushed into the corner by threats and attacks by the TTP and came to the election as a highly unpopular outfit after spending five chaotic and mismanaged years as the outgoing ruling party.

In Sindh where, according to the electronic media, PMLF and the Sindhi nationalists were set to f`inally topple the PPP`s traditional supremacy, they simply failed to even slightly check the PPP`s sprint towards victory. The PPP cnded up winning a comfortable majority in both the national as well as provincial assembly elections in the region.

However, the electronic media was correct in predicting the success of the MQM, the major party of Sindh`s capital, Karachi. The party managed to retain its electoral hold in the city, even though PTl accused it of rigging the election.

The truth is, even if one takes back a chunk of` the votes that the MQM received, it will still manage to win in Karachi. Those residing outside Karachi, or for that matter, away from the more congested areas of the city, have yet to figure out the rather complex and paradoxical nature of the party`s electoral popularity among the Urdu-speaking majority in Karachi and in parts of Hyderabad.

MQM cannot be defeated in Karachi with lofty middle class idealism and moralism or with flag-waving patriotism. Not only are these perceived by MQM voters to be tools and excuses to undo the economic and political interests of the city`s Urdu-speakers, these also don`t unclog gutters, mend electricity wires, and guarantee regular water supply to areas far way from trendy boulevards and shopping malls of Clifton and Defense.

Apart from PMLN`s stunning show in the Punjab, the other most interesting bits about the election was the wayPTl managed to gather a semblance of respectability by winning big in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK).

Though the media did allude to PTI`s growing popularity in KP, how-ever, during the last few weeks of the election campaign, when the province`s outgoing ruling party, the ANP, was suffering a continuous series of brutal assaults by the extremists, TV channels began to float the idea that the ANP might benefit from a sympathy wave.

Nothing of the sort happened and the party was rudely wiped out by PTI that managed to win the largest number of seats in KP.

But perhaps the most noteworthy bit, at least to me, was to see how Peshawar in KP and Rawalpindi in the Punjab voted. Both these cities went to the PTI.

Rawalpindi was swept by the left-liberal PPP in the 1970 and 1977 election. It gave a split verdict between the PPP and the conservative PML (IJI), in the 1988 election, before falling completely in the lap of PMLN throughout the 1990s.

The PPP did manage to win a few seats here in the 2002 and 2008 election, but Rawalpindi remained to be a PMLN stronghold until this year`s election.

PTT dislodged PMLN`s supremely here on May 11, and ironically, it did so in an election in which the PMLN completely swept the rest of the Punjab! Peshawar where PTl enjoyed a clean sweep on May 11, has turned out to be an even more (if not the most) temperamental city when it comes to elections. Its seats were shared between the left-wing NAP and the right-wing JUT in 1970.

Then between 1988 and 1997, these seats altered between the PPP and the left-liberal ANP before going completely to the right-wing alliance of religious parties, the MMA in the 2002 election.

In 2008, Peshawar re-adjusted itself and once again voted for the secular ANP and the PPP, only to obliterate both these parties in 2013 and give the centre-right PTI all four of its seats.

Some observers believe that whereas voting in Rawalpindi still takes place on the basis of ideology reflecting Punjab`s shift from left to right ever since 1990 voting trends in Peshawar however, always exhibit the city`s pragmatic nature where its Pashtoon and Hindko voters are merciless in judging both left and right parties purely on the basis of performance.

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=19_05_2013_424_002"]Lurching for meaning[/URL]

[CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][B][SIZE="4"]Good luck, gentlemen[/SIZE][/B][/FONT][/CENTER]


In a recent speech, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Parvez Kayani praised the nation for rejecting the threats of the extremists by coming out and voting in the May 11 general elections.

Within a month the COAS has made two speeches in which he has come out clean in reiterating the military`s narrative and stance regarding the menace of extremist insurgency and violence in the country.

Never has a leading military man been so clear and categorical in owning the `war against terrorism` in Pakistan.

Not only did things in this respect remained vague, uncertain and muggy in the civilian political circles, the military too, whose men are on the front lines of this vicious war, remained somewhat hesitant in fully defining Pakistan`s role in the conflict.

In spite of the fact that ever since 2002, thousands of Pakistani civilians, soldiers, policemen and politicians have been killed by the extremists, Pakistan`s civilian and military circles remained largely uncommitted and fuzzy about the required narrative that was needed to inform the nation and consequently attract its support for the war.

In the absence of such a narrative, the task fell on the laps of the populist electronic media and certain political parties.

Playing to the confusion set off by the unabashed acts of terror by the extremists and almost perversely explaining the war as an extension of `American imperialism`, the media and some opposition parties created exactly the kind of uncertainty and doubt that the COAS tried to counter in his speeches.

Rightly and timely, the COAS was more concerned about how a narrative generated by the populist media and the opposition parties about the war was now affecting the soldiers fighting an enigmatic and almost ghost-like enemy that is not rolling in from across the Indian border nor parachuting from the skies. It is emerging from within our own cities, towns and mountains.

Nevertheless, his recent statement has come at yet another intriguing period in the country`s topsy-turvy history.

In a few days time, two centre-right parties, the PML-N and the PTI, will be forming governments in the centre, the Punjab and the KP.

The parties that were part of the last ruling coalition, the PPP and the MQM, and under whom the military carried out various operations against the extremists, have been relegated to Sindh. Another anti-extremist outfit, the ANP, that too was part of the former coalition, has been wiped out in the KP after the May 11 elections.

Both PML-N and PTl have been strong advocates of holding peace talks and dialogue with the extremists.

The two`s strong showing in the Punjab and the KP in the May 11 elections now gives them enough democratic credibility and right to put their dialogue theory into practice.

Of course, this will not be the first time that a civilian government would be entering into a major dialogue with the extremist outfits. The PPP-led coalition almost handed over Swat to them after one such dialogue and deal in 2009, until the deal was unabashedly broken by the extremists, and the military had to be sent in to wrest back the control of the area.

The extremists vented out their rage on the three main parties of the former ruling coalition by killing over a hundred of these parties` supporters and leaders just before the May 11 elections. Even more painful was the collateral damage that occurred during the terror campaign in (mainly) Karachi and the KP.

That said the PML-N and PTI now have the mandate in the Parliament and in the Punjab and KP Provincial Assemblies to correctly claim the right to put into action what they believe is a better idea to win peace for the Pakistanis.

Supposedly, the offer for a dialogue has come from the extremists, but only if parties such as the PML-N, PTI and JI are involved. Fair enough.

These parties should be given all the space and support that they require in this respect because they`ve earned it through the vote. But one will be watching with great interest how men like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan negotiate with a rigid group of men who not only reject the Constitution of the country and democracy, but also consider a majority of`Pakistanis to be false Muslims, if not outright heretics.

Eyes will be fixed more on Nawaz Sharif whose party, the PML-N, has the largest number of seats in the National and Punjab Assemblies.

Also, as a politician, he is far more seasoned, mature and perhaps more temperate, than the impulsive, inexperienced and somewhat brash, Khan.

If both these parties actually manage to make the extremists end their campaigns of terror, it will be nothing short of achieving a miracle.

But how much are they willing to compromise to achieve this? Will the extremists be asked to join the mainstream scheme of things? If so, then as what? They hate shrines, CD shops, cinemas, even paan shops (!) And what if the talks fail? Is there a Plan B? Let`s hope peace does come and the extremists finally realise that when over 60pc Pakistanis poured to vote, it was a sign that they may be suffering from war fatigue but their trust in democracy is robust, now more than ever.

Also, both Mian Sahib and Khan must bear in mind that peace is achieved with honour and not at the expense of sullying the memory of the 50,000 Pakistanis killed in this war.

It is the people who elected your parties for stability and good governance and this is more for Khan not because of your fancy theories and whims.

Good luck to you both. And may win peace either way.

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=26_05_2013_424_001"]Good luck, gentlemen[/URL]

True lies
 

[CENTER][B][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="5"]True lies[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]

A couple of questions, gentlemen: If US drone strikes in Pakistan`s tribal areas whip up an enraged sense of` revenge among the area`s Pashtun populace, what do terrorist attacks by the extremists create? On TV talk shows one of`ten hears anchors and politicians bemoaning how drone strikes that (along with the militants) also kill innocent people, are creating angry Pashtuns who then go on to become extremists because taking revenge is a cherished Pashtun custom.

But what about the hundreds of Pashtuns who have been slaughtered by the extremists in mosques, shrines, markets, political rallies and sometimes even outside their own homes? If collateral damage from a drone strike takes out the family of an honourable Pashtun in the tribal area and he then takes up arms, or decides to wrap his waist with a suicide vest, then what does that Pashtun who lost a loved one in a terrorist attack from an angry extremist do? Does he pick up a gun or wear a suicide belt as well to take revenge from those who killed his loved ones? Or are just those Pashtuns who have become terrorists (due to drone strikes) the only real Pashtuns who follow real Pashtun traditions, while those who died or lost friends and family members in extremist attacks, fake Pashtuns? So, once again, let me try to understand this. Pashtuns who lost loved ones in US drone strikes become extremists.

They then go on to kill those they blame of siding with the US because seeking revenge becomes their traditional and customary duty.

But if taking revenge is such a Pashtun tradition, who do those Pashtuns whose loved ones were blown up, shot or beheaded by the revenge-seeking extremists, take revenge from? Sorry for going round and round here, but think about it.

Aren`t we continuing to offer a rather simplistic explanation fattened with the over-exaggeration of certain Pashtun traditions and myths in trying to figure out what makes a Pashtun man kill in the name of revenge and religion? Drone, Pashtun tradition, revenge are words that are spouted out whenever our knees go on a collective jerking spree.So, extremists become extremists because of drone strikes. Their violence is their revenge against the state, government and the people of Pakistan who supposedly allow these strikes to take place.

But, it`s back to the same question: If US drone strikes create extremists, what do extremist strikes create? Also, if drone strikes are creating violent religious extremism, what are extremist attacks creating? Do extremist attacks create enraged atheists who move out to slaughter, torture or behead religious extremists? Do they create Muslims who toss away their faith and become peace-loving Buddhist monks? No. What both drone strikes as well as those by extremists are creating is an ever-expanding narrative that eschews complexities and embraces one-dimensional, black and white simplicities: Pashtuns are an honourable but vengeful race so extremist violence will vanish once the drone strikes end and the US pulls out of Afghanistan.

I sincerely hope so. But, of course, as the few realists left in this country in this context would tell you, the mentioned narrative is simplistic hogwash, if not entirely to do with apologists who still believe that extremist violence is some kind of an anti-US and `anti-imperialistic` statement.

Yes, negotiations can take place with angry men hurt by the slights of a superpower or the state. But can they take place against sheer criminality? The realists suggest that what may have begun as an angry ideological reaction to American military action in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, has mutated into becoming a thorny network of brutal criminality that, apart from the usual attacks on mosques, Sufi shrines, schools, political rallies and in markets, now also include kidnapping for ransom, extortion, smuggling, bank robberies, et at So, if` drone strikes turn peace loving men into violent extremists, do terror attacks by these extremists turn bad Pakistani Muslims into good ones? One has to be extremely cautious in taking a position on the drones` issue. For years now, all kinds of surveys and reports have been waved, pointed at and talked about.

Some reports talk of the widespread collateral damage that drone strikes generate, whereas there are some equally detailed reports claiming that the collateral damage is minimal and drones almost always hit their target, taking out dangerous militants hiding in places where the Pakistani authorities can not, or even fear to trade.

The truth however lies somewhere in the mid-die of` these two positions. It has to because not even the finest researchers and media personnel have ever been able to visit and closely analyse the on-ground situation in areas where drones hover over and then strike.

Blindly condoning drone strikes is as mindless an act as is the blind condemnation of these strikes.

The truth behind what really takes place due to the strikes is still very much with the Pakistani armed forces that are fighting a brutal war in Pakistan`s rugged tribal areas.

Because by the looks of it, I am quite convinced (and disturbingly so), that neither Pakistan`s news media nor even its top politicians really have a clue about this. They`re simply mouthing off a simplistic narrative.

Thus, it has now become imperative for the armed forces to truthfully brief the country`s civilian leadership on the issue.

It will then become equally binding on the civilian leadership to share with the Pakistani people the truth in this matter, instead of muddling it just because it might contradict the popular narrative that many politicians and media personnel have been advocating.

Yes, the truth hurts. But the damage caused by a lie has a deeper, more lasting impact.

[URL="http://epaper.dawn.com/~epaper/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=16_06_2013_424_002"]True lies[/URL]

Groovy patriots
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]Groovy patriots[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]

This just has to be the ‘preachiest’ generation of young Pakistanis ever. On TV, in social media and even in drawing rooms, young Pakistanis are proudly out in numbers advocating ‘positive thinking’ to the cynics, calmly ignoring the fact that a cynic may just be a sceptic (like most rational human beings).

But, you see, rationalism is bad because it may amount to one repressing his or her emotions.

A very unhealthy thing to do. It can turn a person, not only into a cynic, but, horror of horrors, unpatriotic, which, in Pakistan’s case, can then lead him to become an agnostic, or, God forbid, an atheist.

In which case positive thinking must dictate affirmative action: Kill the fools.

Of course, you must understand that this logic is usually and entirely based on assumptions.

Positive thinking demands it. After all, investigating the facts behind the assumptions can be a time-wasting exercise that makes Jack, Jimmy or Junaid a very dull, introverted boy on his way to becoming a cynic and (thus) a positive case for elimination.

The let’s-be-positive crowd is a weird lot. Not that I’m all that normal, but they’re weirder, even though they might not look it.

Brought up on those amazingly unhinged tales of sword and sorcery (‘Pakistan Studies’) at school, they then plunge into those ‘building self-esteem’/self-improvement' seminars and books that are basically the corporate yuppie strain of that New Age nonsense about personal aura, positive vibes, et al.

Nevertheless, the swords-sorcery-meets-let’s-be-positive-generation will shower you with great admiration if you unthinkingly and animatedly nod to whatever positivism is trending on Twitter or Facebook. No, you’re not a sheep but … okay, you are a sheep but, like, so what? Right? Right.

They will shower you with love if you agree with their positivism. Especially if the positivism is about being positive in one’s condemnation of what is not positive. Such as the oh-so-arrogant display of individualism.

Don’t you hate such so-called individualistic displays of negative thinking and arrogance? Always trying to look and sound different. Always trying to tell us that suicide bombers kill more people in Pakistan than drone attacks. And that accountability against corrupt people should not only include politicians, but military men and the judiciary too. And that Tariq Ali has started to sound like a man who got out of the jungle after decades thinking that the Vietnam War was still on. Or that the TTP were a 21st Century reincarnation of the Viet Cong.

One is ‘paid’ (by a ‘foreign hand’) if he disagrees with the positivists and patriotic if he agrees. This swords-and-sorcery-meets-let’s-be positive-generation leapfrog’s from Mohammad Bin Qasim to the ‘be positive’ corporate guru of the month in a matter of a single sentence.

Take for instance how many of them responded to the UK court’s verdict on the three Pakistani spot-fixing cricketers. In 2010 when the spot-fixing scandal broke, positive thinking dictated that the cricketers must be supported because both international and local (negative) forces were most probably behind this event as well.

And thanks to many of our positive media personnel it seemed that for a while, Salman Butt, Muhammad Amir and Muhammad Asif, were about to become the male equivalents of Aafia Siddiqui (remember her of the ‘I shot the sheriff’ fame?).

But, alas, a little more than a year later when the three were proven guilty in court and sent to prison, all hell broke lose.

No, there were no rallies against the ruling or condemnation of the verdict. Instead, people began burning the three cricketers’ effigies, cursing them for disgracing the country’s name.

So the negative old me decided to tweet a question: How come there are stones and curses for a spot-fixer but rallies and rose petals for certain pious killers? Remember Mumtaz Qadri?

As the positivists came rushing in (on Twitter) to condemn my negative question, I kept on wondering how come so many Pakistanis and the media are ready to pour out and passionately demand that certain corrupt cricketers or politicians be lynched, but then the same people shower praises on self-appointed defenders of the faith who commit murder? And how the positivists look the other way when some other self-appointees in this respect go about their business of blowing up mosques, shrines, schools and markets?

But, then, I understood. Why disturb one’s healthy positive aura and vibe with awkward questions. Why complicate things. I mean, all this might lead to negative thinking thus cynicism, thus unpatriotic thoughts and perhaps even atheism, no?

One should be positive. Especially about his country, its nuclear arsenal and especially the fact that we are ready to eat grass for our precious bomb. Or rather, the poor are ready to eat grass for it. An entirely positive thing to do.

So it is our duty to sympathise with the poor grass eaters and hang a few politicians, eliminate a few cricketers, censure a few journalists and make peace with extremists so as to at least keep the price of grass affordable for the masses who, inshaallah, will one day vote in hoards for a Mr Positive par excellence in the next election. It’s beside the point that positive thinking also dictates that democracy is a sham and only a modern-day caliphate is the answer to all our problems.

Ah, that felt good. Yea, man, check out my positive vibes. Like, groovy — in a Mohammad bin Qasim kind of a way, of course.

[URL="http://beta.dawn.com/news/1020147/smokers-corner-groovy-patriots/?commentPage=1&storyPage=2"]Groovy patriots[/URL]

The day the world changed (but we didn’t)
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="5"]The day the world changed (but we didn’t)[/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]

It was the Autumn of our disconnect. Meddle Earth — also called North America and/or Hollywood — was struck by a tragic catastrophe: Its leader, the very popular and articulate, George W.XYZ, lay in his TV lounge choking on a banana.

It was a gift given to him by the High Priestess of Kabala, Madonna, on her return from the dark heart of Africa where she had adopted 1,600 starving young Michael Jackson wannabes.

Seeing their master choke on the banana, George’s two dogs, Walt and Disney, ran for the phone. Walt picked up the receiver, while Disney dialed 911.

By now the banana had travelled past George’s Adam’s Apple, when George’s friend, Secretary of State, Dick Van Winkle — an apparently senile but wily ol’ sorcerer — entered the room.

“George,” he said. “Cough! Cough!” Coughed George. “George, we have been attacked!” Said Dick. “What?” Said George, and plump! Out came the banana. “Gee, George,” said Dick. “What in the good Lord’s name is that?” “Madonna… I mean, banana”! George replied. “You said we were attacked?” “Yes, George. Attacked!” “In Iraq!” “No, George, in New York.” “Really?” “Yes, George, really.” “No, I mean, you are serious, right?” “Yes, George, I am serious.” “Really?” “Yes, George, really.” “I see. So, what are you going to do about it?” “You’re the President, George.” “I am?” “Yes, George, you are.” “Really?” “Yes, George, really.”

FOXed News confirmed that the city of New York had been attacked. The highly objective and sober channel reported that the city’s two landmark buildings, called the Swindle Towers, had been attacked by a couple of flying camels.

The network’s correspondent who was at the disastrous scene of the dastardly attack said that two flying camels were seen in the sky just before the attack, and then suddenly both the camels rammed themselves into the two buildings.

As the TV channels showed the harrowing scenes of the buildings being razed and crashing to the ground, Al-Kabeera TV started running exclusive footage of famous Arab philanthropist, Osama Bin Ladee’da, discussing the fine points of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk in the singer’s 1983 video of Billie Jean.

In passing, Osama was also heard praising the camels for their heroic, paradise-bound deed in New York — a city where Osama once worked as an aspiring ballet dancer in the 1970s.

“Really?” said George. “Yes, George, really,” said Dick.

Only a few days after the dastardly, disastrous, devastating and depressing attack, America’s two leading intelligence agencies, CIA and FBI (or Dumb & Dumber), released information on the flying camels.

According to the agencies, a total number of four camels took part in the attack — the other two had flown to ram themselves in the Octagon Building in Pennsylvania and the White house in Washington DC.

All the camels, it was said, came from a sprawling camel farm in the peaceful and democratic Scandinavian country of Afghanistan.

The farm was said to be owned by Osama’s international charity organisation called Al-Fido — named after Osama’s beloved German Shepherd whom, nonetheless, he shot dead when he left ballet dancing and embraced armed philanthropy (bullet dancing), that forbids keeping dogs as pets. Instead, Osama had started raising camels, goats, llamas and wives, with the later being kept in the goats’ section.

The names of the camels who attacked the Swindle Towers were: Al-Alim Bin Qasim Al-Baruni and Al-Walim Bin Ghaznavi Al-Al. Both the camels belonged to the liberal country of Saudi Arabia and had arrived at Meddle Earth by Euro-Train which they had taken (at gunpoint) from a station in the cultural capital of Europe, Mogadishu.

The camels had then got wings fixed on the sides of their humps in Disneyland in Florida and were financially supported by Osama’s Al-Fido organisation throughout their groovy stay in the US of A where they also attended a couple of Britney Spears concerts and a few baseball games, all the while planning their attack on lollipops (at the concerts) and hotdogs (at the baseball games).

Concerned that the camels are being assimilated by the wicked ways and culture of Meddle Earth, Osama’s contact in Meddle Earth, country & Western singer Noam Chomsky, gave them a long lecture on linguistics which the camels found to be rather boring.

Anyway, the CIA and the FBI claimed that Osama’s camel farm in Afghanistan also had illegal naswar labs. Naswar is a very strong green colored snuff which is popular in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of the leading naswar brands in these countries is called The Taliban®.

Though banned all over the world, The Taliban® remains to be the largest selling naswar brand in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was only recently banned in Pakistan when it was said to have induced wild hallucinations in young users, making them see Musarat Shaheen floating in the sky. This somehow made (and still make) very enterprising young men chop heads and blow up mosques and schools.

This is exactly what the users of The Taliban naswar brand started to do, and all in the name of charity, philanthropy and meditation.

CIA and FBI explained that Osama had made huge investments in The Taliban® naswar brand, and that the CEO of The Taliban Naswar Corporation©, One Eyed Jack, had connections in certain Pakistani agencies, Heckle & Jeckle.

“Really?”Said George. “Yes, George, really,” said Dick.

Pakistan had been bombing itself to stone age for long, so George threatened its leader, General Musharraf Schwarzenegger — a carefree mountaineer famous for scaling the rocky hills of Kargil— that he will bomb Pakistan out of the stone age if he didn’t support Meddle Earth in its attack on Osama’s camel farms and the offices of The Taliban® snuff brand in Afghanistan.

Fearing that getting out of the stone age would deprive Pakistan of glorious military dictators (and TV talk shows), Musharraf agreed to support Meddle Earth’s operation in Afghanistan.

However, two of Pakistan’s biggest, most popular, largest and landslide-election-winning political parties such as Pakistan Thereek-i-Imran (PTI) and the Jamat-i-Zabaani (JZ), severely criticised Musharraf’s decision.

PML-S [Pakistan Muslim League-Saudi), a tiny party in the dusty Pakistani town of Jeddah in the improvished province of Punjab, too accused Musharraf of selling-out.

“Nothing and no-one can dare pull Pakistan out of the stone age!” said Jimran Khan in a press statement. They added that enjoying Taliban® snuff brand is the right of every Pakistani and that of their brothers (but not sisters) in Afghanistan.

Even though Meddle Earth let Pakistan retain its sacred stone age status, it attacked Afghanistan. But after realising that Afghanistan was merely a large, useless lump of rock, bombing it out of stone age won’t make an iota of difference.

In frustration, George ordered an attack on Iraq saying that Iraqi dictator, Aladdin, was funding renegade Red Indians who wanted to take back the American continent from the superior Caucasian invaders.

As can be seen in various Oscar-winning documentaries made on the subject, and groundbreaking research conducted by giant scholars and intellectuals like Prof. Zion Hamid, Dr Haroon Shahid Yahya Billa and trillions of their PhD followers on Facebook, we now know that the whole attack was a hoax; a conspiracy by the illuminati, the Third Generation of the Elders of Zion, Mr Spock and Dr Phil against Islam, Pakistan and the wonders of the stone age.

[URL="http://beta.dawn.com/news/1021696/smokers-corner-the-day-the-world-changed-but-we-didnt/?commentPage=1&storyPage=2"]The day the world changed (but we didn’t)[/URL]

The lost plot
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="5"]The lost plot[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]

Even 68 years after the Second World War folded with the terrible spectre of two mushroom clouds over Japan, a disturbing thought has continued to haunt the people of Germany, rest of Europe and the United States of America.

This thought, or more so guilt, has made the state, governments and the media in these countries adopt certain political and social narratives and stances that are commendable.

These have gone a long way to nourish the respective societies in these countries with a consciousness that is largely based on intellectual faculties such as rationalism and an emotional disposition that is readily empathetic towards victims of mass violence and immediately repulsed by those who inflict such acts of ferocity.

Nevertheless, the mentioned remorse-ridden thought has at times also seen some European nations and the US overcompensate in this respect.

But what is this thought? For the Germans it’s about how the bulk of its society remained soporifically quiet when Adolf Hitler’s Nazis were marching thousands of men, women and children of the country’s Jewish community, along with the gypsies, communists and the physically and mentally handicapped to the harrowing gas chambers and twisted torture cells set up by the Nazis to ‘cleanse the country from impure Germans’.

For the rest of Europe (especially the United Kingdom), and for the US, the disturbing thought is about how for quite some time their governments decided to simply ignore the rise of fascism in Europe and as a matter of fact, at one time, even submissively engage with fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, simply discounting the fact that these were violent, racist and aggressive regimes with some rather twisted ideas about racial purity, governance and dominance.

Indeed over the decades, these thoughts made many European countries and the United States instil anti-racist and anti-hate aspects into the mainstream narrative, that began to appear in these countries after the war. A narrative in which the ‘civilised man’ did not mean a Christian out to colonise barbarians and teach them the ways of the civilised Caucasian races.

A civilised man now meant a tolerant, democratic and progressive person who was empathetic towards the plight of those suffering from the effects of dictatorships, corruption, racism and bigotry.

But whereas this narrative did help many European governments to engineer genuinely progressive societies and strong, caring states, some myopia did set in to define the new civilised and empathetic man.

For example, driven by the guilt of the past, the US and Europe went all out to accommodate the Jews who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

But in case of the Jewish state of Israel, the US and Europe looked the other way when (this time) the previous victims of fascist savagery disturbingly began to adopt some questionable methods of their former tormenters in their tussle against the Arabs.

Things got a lot more ironic and complicated when, at the same time, the new, tolerant and democratic man was asked to denounce the violent totalitarianism of communism by embracing the Arabs and the pious, Godly Muslims against the ungodly communists — in spite of the fact that the pious ones clearly had bigoted, delusional ideas about the glory of their faith and most even thought that Hitler was a rather fine gentleman.

Today, such topsy-turvy and inherently contradictory dictates of post-war Western thought have suddenly converted the once pious allies into dangerous barbarians (‘Islamo-fascists’).

Western fascism erected by the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Spain’s Franco did not fragment into oblivion. It was displaced and became an organisational and operational inspiration for a number of mad men in Africa, Latin America and Asia/Middle-East, most of who were supported by the US and various European countries to keep the violent spectre of vicious, inhuman communism at bay.

The funny thing is, in the context of the Muslims, though they continue to be pushed aside and scorned at for being anti-Semitic, the West and the US still believe that their respective societies’ democratic and tolerant values will be successful in turning angry bigots into allies to oust anti-West/Israel regimes in the Middle East. The West’s on-going misadventure in Syria is a recent case in point.

On the other hand, it is perhaps the guilt of nurturing whole chunks of Muslim societies into becoming psychotic hoards of sectarian and religious bigotry and hatred during the fight against the evil communists that many Western countries today can be seen looking the other way when extremists wag their fingers at ‘Western debauchery’ in mosques within European capitals.

Ask any liberal Pakistani or Arab journalist or columnist and they are more than likely to tell you that most of the hate mail that they get comes from Pakistanis and Arabs living in the US, Canada and especially the UK.

Apologetic behaviour and narratives born from guilt, political cynicism or a distorted understanding of religious text, all contribute to the disquieting slumber, silence and confusion that follow a terrorist act.

It can be a military atrocity inflicted by the Israeli military against unarmed civilians in Gaza; a vicious, primeval blow against men, women and children by ‘Islamo-fascists;’ or mad men spewing utter hatred on TV, in a mosque or on the social media.

The West and the US must escape from the stranglehold of its guilt-ridden disposition because the key to solving such problems still lie with the developed countries, as the states in countries facing the major brunt of bigoted violence from Israel and religious extremists in Muslim countries are empty shells ruling over thoroughly (and dangerously) confused societies.

[URL="http://dawn.com/news/1023413/smokers-corner-the-lost-plot/?commentPage=1&storyPage=2"]The lost plot[/URL]

Not quite sane
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="5"]Not quite sane[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]

One of the most notorious and infamous criminals in recent US history is a man called Charles Manson. Manson was a failed musician who in the late 1960s somehow managed to form a small cult around him of confused young middle-class drifters (mostly women) in San Francisco.

Taking bits from the Bible and pseudo-religions like Scientology and inspiration from the rising socio-political tensions in the US at the time, Manson concocted a theory suggesting that the song, Helter Skelter, by the famous British pop/psychedelic band, the Beatles, predicted a coming racial war between the blacks and Caucasian Americans.

Manson’s ramblings in this respect were largely the result of the high dosages of the powerful hallucinogenic drug LSD, that his small group and he were constantly taking. He told his followers that they would have to ‘create Helter Skelter’ by committing murder and (thus) trigger the predicted racial war.

In August 1969 the cult went on a killing spree, stabbing and shooting to death nine people, including actress Sharon Tate who was pregnant at the time. She was stabbed 16 times.

The gruesome murders shocked the country. Manson and his circle of followers were finally apprehended by the police in December 1969. But what disturbed Middle America even more was the sight of some young men and women who turned up outside the court building where Manson’s trial was being held and began to demonstrate and demand his release.

In March 1971, the court handed Manson and three other members of the group death sentences for their direct involvement in the murders. In 1972 another member of the group was also given the death sentence. But the sentences were automatically reduced to life imprisonment when California abolished death penalty in the state.

Various noted American sociologists and psychologists have tried to investigate what made a group of young middle-class Americans follow Manson into slaughtering nine innocent people for the sake of an irrational and delusional cause.

More curious are certain studies probing the mindset of those men and women who actually exhibited sympathy and support for Manson and his group of killers — even after the gruesome and graphic details of the murders became common knowledge.

One popular theory emerging from these psychological probes suggests that most probably Manson fans and apologists saw the murders as reflections (and release) of their own repressed social and sexual frustrations and anger in the event of their inability to discharge these frustrations by committing murder and acts of violence themselves.

In other words, if the murderers were criminally insane, then those rationalising or glorifying their crime were not quite sane as well.

Thus, in Pakistan’s context, I wonder if the same can be said about those who were captured by TV cameras showering rose petals on Mumtaz Qadri — the man who gunned down former Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, because he thought Taseer had committed blasphemy.

And what about young, educated, middle-class men and women who went off the tangent abusing and battering (on social media) a young 16-year-old girl from Swat who last year was shot in the forehead by religious extremists?

Malala Yousufzai narrowly survived the attack and had to be treated by military doctors in Pakistan and surgeons in the UAE and the UK before recovering.

She then went on to deliver a remarkable speech at the UN, pleading universal peace and women’s education, sounding decades more mature, coherent and inspirational than her detractors.

On the evening of her speech, I undertook a quick study of Twitter and Facebook, chasing the profiles of that section of Pakistanis who erupted after Malala completed her address at the UN.

Though many Pakistanis exhibited profound praise and applause for the brave girl, I did come across numerous Tweets and Facebook ramblings of many perfectly ‘normal’ looking men and women who accused her of being a US/Western agent, a hoax, a fraud, etc.

The detractors all seemed to be educated young urbanites with an interest in pop music, Bollywood/Hollywood films and other fun stuff. At the same time, most of them seemed to also be Imran Khan fans.

A PTI Karachi member confessed to me that Khan, who had not Tweeted anything about the speech on the day that it took place, finally tweeted about it (in praise of Malala) after it became apparent that most of the people badmouthing Malala on Twitter and Facebook had Khan’s picture as their DP (display picture), or claimed to be from the ‘PTI family’.

Nevertheless, not all were PTI or Khan fans. I know some very decent, intelligent and empathetic ones as well. But the question remains: How can anyone with a young sister, daughter or even a fellow female classmate, ever get him or herself to abuse an innocent young teenaged schoolgirl who was shot by a man full of unadulterated hatered and who thought everyone but him was an infidel and worthy of death?

Going back to the theory that attempted to psycho-profile Manson’s fans, can it be said that if those in Pakistan who slaughter men, women and children in the name of faith are criminally insane, then are those who do not pull the trigger or explode themselves in a mosque, shrine or market, but are ever ready to defend, rationalise or even glorify acts of sheer brutality, are not quite sane either?

I’m not a psychologist, and maybe in anger I’d like to label them as being equally insane. But as a citizen of Pakistan, even in my most calm moments, I can’t help but to lament that if these people are not as insane, then mentally they are certainly not all there and can be in need of some urgent psychiatric help.

Heck, the way things are in this country,perhaps we all are.

[URL="http://dawn.com/news/1030811/smokers-corner-not-quite-sane"]Not quite sane[/URL]

My name is Pakistan and I’m not an Arab
 

[B][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][CENTER][SIZE="4"]My name is Pakistan and I’m not an Arab[/SIZE][/CENTER][/FONT][/B]

In 1973, my paternal grandparents visited Makkah to perform the first of their two Hajj pilgrimages.

With them were two of my grandmother’s sisters and their respective husbands.

Upon reaching Jeddah, they hailed a taxi from the airport and headed for their designated hotel.

The driver of the taxi was a Sudanese man. As my grandparents and one of my grandmother’s sisters settled themselves in the taxi, the driver leisurely began driving towards the hotel and on the way inserted a cassette of Arabic songs into the car’s Japanese cassette-player.

My grandfather who was seated in the front seat beside the driver noticed that the man kept glancing at the rear view mirror, and every time he did that, one of his eyebrows would rise.

Curious, my grandfather turned his head to see exactly what was it about the women seated in the back seat that the taxi driver found so amusing.

This was what he discovered: As my grandmother was trying to take a quick nap, her sister too had her eyes closed, but her head was gently swinging from left to right to the beat of the music and she kept whispering (as if in quiet spiritual ecstasy) the Arabic expression Subhanallah, subhanallah …’

My grandfather knew enough Arabic to realise that the song to which my grandmother’s sister was swinging and praising the Almighty for was about an (Egyptian) Romeo who was lamenting his past as a heart-breaking flirt.

After giving a sideways glance to the driver to make sure he didn’t understand Punjabi, my grandfather politely asked my grandmother’s sister: ‘I didn’t know you were so much into music.’

‘Allah be praised, brother,’ she replied. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

The chatter woke my grandmother up: ‘What is so wonderful?’ She asked. ‘This,’ said her sister, pointing at one of the stereo speakers behind her. ‘So peaceful and spiritual …’

My grandfather let off a sudden burst of an albeit shy and muffled laughter. ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘the singer is not singing holy verses. He is singing about his romantic past.’

My grandmother started to laugh as well. Her sister’s spiritual smile was at once replaced by an utterly confused look: ‘What …?’

‘Sister,’ my grandfather explained, ‘Arabs don’t go around chanting spiritual and holy verses. Do you think they quote a verse from the holy book when, for example, they go to a fruit shop to buy fruit or want toothpaste?’

I’m sure my grandmother’s sister got the point. Not everything Arabic is holy.

Even though I was only a small child then I clearly remember my grandfather relating the episode with great relish. Though he was an extremely conservative and religious man and twice performed the Hajj, he refused to sport a beard, and wasn’t much of a fan of the Arabs (especially the monarchical kind).

He was proud of the fact that he was born in a small town in north Punjab that before 1947 was part of India.

In the early 1980s when Saudi money and influence truly began to take hold on the culture and politics of Pakistan, there were many families (especially from the Punjab) that actually began to rewrite their histories.

For example, families and clans that had emerged from within the South Asian region began to claim that their ancestors actually came from Arabia.

Something like this happened within the Paracha clan as well. In 1982 a book (authored by one of my grandfather’s many cousins) claimed that the Paracha clan originally appeared in Yemen and was converted to Islam during the time of the Holy Prophet (Pbuh).

The truth, however, was that like a majority of Pakistanis, Parachas too were once either Hindus or Buddhists who were converted to Islam by Sufi saints between the 11th and 15th centuries.

When the cousin gifted his book to my grandfather, he rubbished the claim and told him that he might attract Saudi Riyals with the book but zero historical credibility.

But historical accuracy and credibility does not pan well in an insecure country like Pakistan whose state and people, even after six decades of existence, are yet to clearly define exactly what constitutes their nationalistic and cultural identity.

After the complete fall of the Mughal Empire in the 19th century till about the late 1960s, Pakistanis (post-1947), attempted to separate themselves from other religious communities of the region by identifying with those Persian cultural aspects that had reigned supreme in Muslim royal courts in India, especially during the Mughal era.

However, after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, the state with the help of conservative historians and ulema made a conscious effort to divorce Pakistan’s history from its Hindu and Persian past and enact a project to bond this history with a largely mythical and superficial link with Arabia.

The project began to evolve at a much more rapid pace from the 1980s onwards. The streaming in of the ‘Petro Dollars’ from oil-rich monarchies and the Pakistanis’ increasing interaction with their Arab employers in these countries, turned Pakistan’s historical identity on its head.

In other words, instead of investing intellectual resources to develop a nationalism that was grounded and rooted in the more historically accurate sociology and politics of the Muslims of the region, a reactive attempt was made to dislodge one form of ‘cultural imperialism’ and import by adopting another.

For example, attempts were made to dislodge ‘Hindu and Western cultural influences’ in the Pakistani society by adopting Arabic cultural hegemony that came as a pre-requisite and condition with the Arabian Petro Dollar.

The point is, instead of assimilating the finer points of the diverse religious and ethnic cultures that our history is made of and synthesise them to form a more convincing and grounded nationalism and cultural identity, we have decided to reject our diverse and pluralistic past and instead adopt cultural dimensions of a people who, ironically, still consider non-Arabs like Pakistanis as second-class Muslims.

[URL="http://dawn.com/news/1032519/my-name-is-pakistan-and-im-not-an-arab"]http://dawn.com/news/1032519/my-name-is-pakistan-and-im-not-an-arab[/URL]

A fine anomaly
 

[CENTER][B][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]A fine anomaly[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]


Recently the Bangladesh Supreme Court banned the right-wing Islamic party, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Apart from accusing it of being involved in the atrocities committed by the party members against Bengali nationalists in league with the former West Pakistan forces in 1971, the court also maintained that the party’s existence went against the constitution of Bangladesh.

Few remember that even before the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, a similar move was attempted in Pakistan in which the government contemplated banning religious parties because they ‘soiled the image of Islam by mixing it with amoral politics’.

It is also bemusing to note that in a country that has increasingly become obsessed with religion and the role it plays in its politics and society, very few remember one of the finest and most refined Islamic scholars produced by Pakistan. He was also the man directly associated with the attempt to dislodge religious parties from politics in Pakistan.

Maybe this is because for years the image of an Islamic scholar that has been peddled by the state and accepted by society in Pakistan is that of a man with a long beard, speaking Urdu in an Arabic accent (!), or a woman fully draped in a jet black burqa, mumbling moralistic little nothings on TV.

The man in question was Professor Fazalur Rehman Malik. Clean-shaven, well-spoken, always looking sharp in his suits and ties, and more importantly, extremely well-informed and well-versed in Islamic literature, philosophy and history, he was on the verge of almost completely undermining the role of religious parties in Pakistan when he was forced to flee the country.

After studying Arabic at the Punjab University in Lahore, Rehman went to Oxford in the UK for further studies.

He was teaching Islamic philosophy at McGill University in Canada when in 1961 he recieved an invitation from Pakistan’s head of state, Field Martial Ayub Khan, to come to Pakistan and help him set up the Central Institute of Islamic Research (CIIR).

Ayub had come to power on the back of a military coup in 1958. Though a practicing Muslim who seldom missed saying his daily prayers, he was not only allergic to civilian politicians (whom he described as being selfish and corrupt), but he also had a great disliking for religious parties and the clergy.

With the ambition to create a Pakistan driven by his ‘benevolent’ military dictatorship, and based on state-facilitated capitalism, and a constitution culled from what he described to be the ‘progressive and modernist Islam of Jinnah,’ Ayub wanted the CIIR to help him achieve this through legislation and necessary laws.

It was the CIIR under Professor Rehman who advised Ayub to constitutionally curb the religious parties and their interpretation of Islam.

Rehman then drew a social and political framework for making Pakistan a ‘progressive, modern Muslim majority state.’

Though Ayub did not act upon each and every aspect of Rehman’s framework, the workings of the CIIR certainly made the Ayub regime ban the Jamaat-i-Islami in 1964. The decision, however, was overturned by the Supreme Court.

But Rehman was not a secularist, as such. Instead he saw himself and his work to be a modern extension of the ‘Islamic rationalism’ of figures like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Syed Ameer Ali, Maulana Shibli Naumani, Niaz Fatehpuri and the 8th and 9th century Muslim rationalists, the Mu’tazilites.

Instead of attempting to become a militaristic bastion of international Islam, Rehman suggested that Pakistan take the lead in engineering an Islamic polity that through science and scholarship, could successfully compete with the economic and technological prowess of the two superpowers of the time, the United States and the communist Soviet Union.

The detailed research papers that the CIIR produced under his guidance emphasised the application of reason in the interpretation of the Qu’ran, and the absorption of western science, philosophy and economics to help Islam (in Pakistan) survive as a progressive and flexible religion with the ability to supplement economic, scientific and cultural progress instead of hindering or retarding it.

However, when in one such paper he suggested that laws and society in Pakistan should be based on a rationalist and modernist interpretation of the Qu’ran, and that the hadith (Islamic traditions based on hearsay), should only play a minimal role in this respect, he was vehemently challenged by his more conservative counterparts.

The counterparts were also well aware of his advice to Ayub to ban religious political parties.

Leading the attack on Rehman was the prolific Islamic scholar and founder of the Jamaat, Abul Ala Mauddudi, who demanded that Rehman be expelled from Pakistan. and from the fold of Islam.

Then, in 1967, during a lecture that he was delivering on Pakistan’s then nascent state-owned TV channel, PTV, Rehman suggested that drinking alcohol was not a major sin in Islam.

Even though alcohol was legal in Pakistan till 1977, the religious parties went berserk and held a number of rallies against Rehman.

Rehman, more or less, was basically repeating what early scholars of the Hanafi School of Islamic jurisprudence had already suggested.

And ironically, some 40 years after Rehman’s musings, and 30 years after the sale of alcohol (to Muslims) was banned in Pakistan, the highly conservative Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan finally decreed that consuming alcohol indeed was a minor sin.

On May 28, 2009, the Federal Shariat Court (FSC) declared whipping for the offence of drinking as un-Islamic and directed the government to amend the law to make the offence bailable — even though the last person to be whipped for consuming alcohol was in 1981.

In 1969 as Pakistan entered a turbulent period in which a far-reaching political movement led by leftist parties and student organisations forced Ayub to resign, Rehman continued being perused and harassed by the Islamic parties until he was left with no other choice but to leave the country.

He went to the US and distinguished himself as a highly regarded Professor of Islamic Thought and researcher at the University of Chicago.

The 1970s and 1980s were also his most prolific years as an author in which he wrote some of the most influential books on modern Islamic thought — especially Islam (1979) and Islam & Modernity (1982).

He never returned to Pakistan and died in Chicago in 1988.

[URL="http://dawn.com/news/1035129/a-fine-anomaly"]A fine anomaly[/URL]

The broken bow
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]The broken bow[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]

So often one hears a fellow Pakistani bemoaning how polarised a nation we are.

But sometimes I feel that what they mean by polarisation in this context is the presence of the rich ethnic, religious and sectarian diversity that this country is actually blessed with.

This diversity on most occasions has simply refused to come under the all-encompassing umbrella of ideological unity that the country’s establishment, its religious allies and the urban bourgeoisie have been shoving down our throats for the last six decades. They refuse to realise that organic diversity (and not synthetic homogeneity) is what drives democracy and best utilises the inherent economic, cultural and sporting genius of a nation.

But no doubt there is also polarisation of a more disturbing kind in the Pakistani society.

On occasions it’s been like a black comedy that can generate sheer bafflement.

Every Friday at my office during the second half of the morning session, I notice guys who regularly go for Friday prayers at the mosque break up into little groups. One day I decided to figure out why this happens or why they are all not going to the same mosque (or to the one nearest to the office).

It is easy to understand that the Shia among them would visit the Shia mosques.

But one Friday I was rather amused when I overheard a group of Sunni colleagues discussing why they would not go to a particular (Sunni) mosque because the mullah’s sermons there offended them.

It turned out that the lads were Deobandi Sunnis, who, due to lack of time, had had to visit a nearby mosque whose mullah belonged to another Sunni sub-sect, the Barelvi — which, nevertheless, is the majority Sunni sub-sect in Pakistan. So the discussion was to locate a Deobandi mosque nearest to the office.

A senior colleague, who’d seen me talking to these guys, approached me in the evening, smiling: “Did you see how they were whining?” I smiled back: “I’m not very good at understanding these things.”

He shook his head and then said something that took me by surprise. He said: “I was the one who introduced them to the mosque they are now whining about. I’m sure in their hearts they now believe I am a heretic.”

This colleague is a very religious man, with a beard and all, so his claim did baffle me but not for long.

I soon realised what he was suggesting. He belonged to the Barelvi sect. It was a strange experience because on various occasions I’ve seen him agreeing with his Deobandi counterparts on so many issues, especially on things like the blasphemy law, the need to enforce the Sharia, etc. But here they were all, refusing to go to each other’s preferred mosques.

This actually shouldn’t come as a surprise in a country where the state has for long been active in defining what or who a ‘Muslim’ is in a society brimming with various Islamic sects and sub-sects. This has left the sects judging one another, sometimes overtly and sometimes discreetly.

The state did not learn anything from the findings of the famous Justice Munir Report in which — after the 1953 anti-Ahmadi riots instigated by the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Majlis-i-Ahrar Party — Justice Munir noted that according to his interviews with a number of ulema on the matter, he found that no two ulema agreed on a uniformed definition of a good Muslim.

Later on history recorded another rather amusing episode. During the movement against the Z A. Bhutto government in 1977, led by an alliance of various anti-PPP parties (the PNA), the alliance leaders met at the Karachi Press Club to brief the press about their plan of action.

Demanding the imposition of Sharia laws and the ouster of the ‘secular- socialist’ Bhutto regime, the alliance’s top three parties were representing the country’s main Sunni sub-sects.

The Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) followed the Deobandi school while the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP) was Barelvi in orientation. PNA’s third main party, Jamaat-i-Islami, had a following among middle-class urban Sunni conservatives and pro-Saudi elements.

Newspapers reported that after outlining their plan of action and professing their unity of purpose (i.e. the downfall of Bhutto and the imposition of Sharia), the PNA leaders broke for the evening prayers.

In those days there were no prayer rooms or mosques at places of work, and certainly none at the Karachi Press Club (though there is one now).

So some journalists cleared a room for the PNA leaders to say their prayers in.

Urdu dailies, Imroze, Jang and Musawat, then went on to report how a commotion of sorts broke out amongst the PNA leaders when they couldn’t agree on who would lead the prayers as all three followed their own respective schools of Islam.

The issue was not political but sub-sectarian. Some newspapers reported that JUI’s Maulana Mufti Mehmood refused to offer prayers behind JUP’s Shah Ahmed Noorani (and vice versa).

Syed A. Peerzada in his book Politics of JUI quotes a JUI leader who alleged that the reporting of this discord was the doing of the PPP’s Kausar Niazi whose job it was to exploit the sectarian differences between the PNA’s religious parties.

This might be true, but then this was perhaps the easiest thing to do: i.e. to disturb the make-up of what Bhutto might have (correctly) thought was, at best, a cosmetic face of unity among the political-religious figures of Pakistan.

The fact still holds true, and like it or not, perhaps it always will.

[URL="http://dawn.com/news/1038271/the-broken-bow"]The broken bow[/URL]

Sudden awakenings
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]Sudden awakenings[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]


Imagine this: A country ravaged by religious extremism and violence. Its people elect a government that for five years (while in opposition) wagged its finger at the previous government for failing to curb and control this violence.

Then, after winning a handsome majority in the election, the new government’s prime minister appears on TV to deliver his first address to the nation.

This is what he says: ‘It is only now that we (the new government) realised how grave and complicated the situation (regarding terrorism) really is’.

You hear him say this and you wonder: What on earth were these guys wagging their fingers for? Were they not in the country for the past five years?

Quite the contrary. Not only were they running things in the Punjab Assembly, they had also faced a spate of extremist violence in the province that they had managed to win in the 2008 election.

That is, before the Punjab chief minister (who is once again the province’s CM), almost pleaded to the extremists to spare Punjab because ‘they (the Punjab government) believed in the same things as the extremists did.

This submissive plea did manage to make the extremists stop their attacks in the Punjab. However, elsewhere, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Sindh and Balochistan, the bloodshed and the madness unleashed by the supposedly banned extremist and sectarian outfits continued unabated.

Nevertheless, what was once just a provincial government in the Punjab has mostly become the new national government. The Punjab CM can continue to ward off extremist attacks by suggesting that his government stands for the same things as the faithful brutes do, but the rest of Pakistan is not willing to go down the same apologetic and submissive road.

The last government in Islamabad and its allies in the KP, Sindh and Balochistan had suffered an unprecedented volley of deaths and violence at the hands of the extremists.

And yet its (albeit chaotic) response to the violence was carelessly and cruelly criticised by opposition parties, especially the PML-N, the PTI and Jamaat-i-Islami.

The previous government’s chaotic conduct was milked to the hilt by the opposition and its overt sympathisers in the private electronic media, enough for the nation to vote for the PML-N (in the centre and Punjab) and PTI (in KP) in the May 11, 2013 election.

Both PML-N and PTI insisted that they had the right understanding and answers to all the ills being faced by Pakistan, especially regarding extremist violence, the energy crises and the struggling economy.

But as far as the overbearing spectre and experience of extremist and sectarian violence is concerned it now seems that both these parties were chasing illusions created by empty theories and concoctions built upon a stunningly half-baked and superficial understanding of the issue of religious extremism and terrorism in Pakistan.

A respected English weekly recently reported how PTI chief Imran Khan was perturbed when a string of officials in KP gave him a detailed presentation on the make-up of extremist organisations operating from the province.

He was told that there were more than 40 outfits that were functioning under the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) umbrella. This seemed to have surprised him.

But all that has been baffling men like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan recently in this regard was not only being reiterated by the previous government, but also by a string of well-grounded newspaper reporters, columnists and even some TV anchors for quite some time now.

Were the Sharifs and Khan reading Naseem Hijazi novels when they should have been taking notes from what a number of Pakistani as well as some foreign journalists had been informing the public regarding the make-up, agenda and operational modus operandi of the extremist and sectarian organisations in Pakistan?

In their ignorance, not only did PML-N and PTI lead the country astray and confused it on the issue of extremist violence, it now seems they ended up believing in their own delusions.

And today here we are, with new governments in Islamabad, Balochistan and the KP demonstrating a shocked and almost numb look after suffering over 50 terrorist attacks within a matter of two months.

This is cause for concern. We now have in power governments at the centre, Punjab and KP whose elaborate theories — about how things like drone attacks and military presence in Waziristan are the main cause for extremist violence — are being blowing to pieces and sounding more naïve than ever.

We are seeing men in top governmental positions wringing their hands after realising the true nature of what this country is really up against.

I am convinced that an experienced man like Nawaz Sharif is more than likely to finally come to terms with what he seems to have been suddenly made to realise.

His government should wipe away that dropped-jaw look, roll up its sleeves and get down to first fully understand the complexities of extremist violence in this country and then actually do something about it — instead of continuing to air the flowery baloney (both PML-N and PTI) have been feeding an unsuspecting but terror-struck populace.

And about time Khan too allows his ego to shift and make room for the kind of vital information that may actually humble his otherwise haughty demeanour. He is still an important player, considering that his party runs the government in war-torn KP.

If he refuses to accept the fact that his theories regarding extremist violence have now started to sound ill-informed and based on woolly assumptions, then he is bound to end up on the wrong side of history. Not a very glorious side to be on for a very glory-loving man.

[URL="http://www.dawn.com/news/1039825/sudden-awakenings"]http://www.dawn.com/news/1039825/sudden-awakenings[/URL]

Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]

Last Monday, the parents of university student Shahzeb Khan, whose death sparked an outrage against the abuse of power by the wealthy and the landed in Pakistan, decided to pardon the culprits responsible for the murder of their son.

The family filed an affidavit with the court several days ago pardoning the men accused of killing their only son.

But as the young (and now pardoned) culprits came out of the courtroom smiling triumphantly and waving victory signs as if they were some mutant versions of the great Nelson Mandela, local TV channels and social media sites erupted with outrage and condemnation.

This anger was entirely understandable because a concerted campaign against the alleged culprits had been passionately initiated in the electronic media and on social websites. So when the mother of the unfortunate young victim was reported to have pardoned the culprits, the news arrived as a rude shock to a lot of Pakistanis.

But it was equally disconcerting to witness the way the electronic media responded to the news.

Since myopia in most matters relating to ideology and morality remains the prevailing mindset among the now more-vocal-than-ever urban classes in this country, TV anchors and reporters came down hard on the victim’s mother.

But since she was not a CIA agent, ‘liberal fascist’, someone from a minority sect or religion, or any other such socio-political parasite, the outraged media began hammering her for being a ‘bad mother’, a ‘dishonest woman’, and an insult to motherhood.

So-called religious scholars and the ulema were invited by the TV channels to lash out at her, and legal experts gazed intensely into their navels while questioning the court’s role in accepting the pardon.

Alas, as one saw the mother being reduced to becoming a vicious, heartless vamp, one wondered. I mean, if she was (reportedly) forced by influential elements to pardon the killer of her own son and thus became a villain in the story, how is she any different from a mother (Aafia Siddiqui) who (reportedly) dumped her husband, abandoned her kids, escaped to fight a jihad in Afghanistan and ended up in an American jail?

Yet, to the media Shahzeb’s mother is a cold-blooded woman and another mother, Aafia Siddiqui, is a petite soul who became a victim of US imperialism, bigotry and conspiracy. How so?

On the day the heartless vamp pardoned her only son’s vicious killers, members of the armed forces, the government and the opposition parties were drafting a resolution that called for immediate ‘peace talks’ with armed extremist groups.

Now, God willing, this (albeit wishy-washy) idea of talks with rabid militants actually manages to bring peace, this would automatically mean that the state, government and people of Pakistan have decided to forgive the deaths of over 50,000 Pakistani civilians, politicians, soldiers and policemen slaughtered in the country’s war against armed extremists.

Well, as the experts and purveyors of peace talks in this context will tell you, the ceasefire and the forgiving bit will at least ensure that no more Pakistanis are killed in their mosques, shrines and markets by the overtly and trigger-happy faithful.

Let’s hope that’s exactly what the resolution achieves and that’s what the electronic media was applauding and euphorically hoping for. Fair enough.

But, then, if peace with the extremists would mean the collective forgiveness of the tens of thousands of parents who lost their loved ones at the hands of the extremists and of the hundreds killed (as collateral damage) in US drone attacks, how on earth is the act of forgiveness in this regard of one mother any worse?

Rest assured I too was deeply disappointed at the way the Shahzeb case finally panned out. But call it a weakness, I just cannot hail one act of forgetting and forgiving and denounce the other. I cannot call one mother a greedy, heartless vamp and the other ‘qaum ki beti’ (daughter of the nation).

Either we should be willing and honest enough to condemn acts of violence (and bad motherhood) and of forgiveness and compromise across the board or simply keep mum, unless we want to go on proving that not only are we entirely confused, but also as a nation and state we have actually turned moral hypocrisy into a glorified, knee-jerk art.

[URL="http://dawn.com/news/1043031/mother-do-you-think-theyll-drop-the-bomb"]Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?[/URL]

Candy floss and cyanide
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]Candy floss and cyanide[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]

Ever been approached by a member of the Tableeghi Jamat (TJ)? How soft-spoken and friendly they sound. So much so that even if you disagree with their overly ritualistic interpretation of the faith, you can’t help but listen to them before (politely) excusing yourself.

However, recently when a TV anchor did a show on the leader of this Islamic evangelical movement, Tariq Jamil, and criticised some of his ways, the anchor was bombarded with the kind of unhinged comments (on social media) that are usually associated with the notorious ‘PTI trolls’.

Crude, crass, abusive and entirely reactionary. One was surprised at how easily the veneer of gentility that usually defines the personalities of TJ members and of their supporters rubs off at the first sign of criticism.

The attacks on the (liberal) anchor were so rapid and abusive that it even made the anchor’s (more conservative) companion on the show Tweet that ‘Tariq Jamil is no prophet that he cannot be criticised’.

Late last year, the former Interior Minister Rehman Malik had also come down hard on the TJ, claiming that the evangelical movement had become a breeding ground for extremists. His statement understandably ruffled quite a few feathers, especially from within parties like the moderate-right PML-N and the Islamic JUI-F.

PML-N’s Sharif brothers have had close links with the TJ, and the JUI-F follows the Sunni Deobandi school of thought that the TJ too adheres to.

Also, quite a large number of TJ members are from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), the province from where the JUI-F draws the bulk of its electoral support.

For long the TJ has been viewed as a benign movement that distances itself from mainstream politics and militancy, focusing instead on propagating ‘correct’ Islamic rites and attire, and ritualistic paraphernalia in tune with the Deobandi line of thinking.

The TJ was formed in the late 1920s to supposedly ‘cleanse Islam from Hindu and Sikh influences’ in the subcontinent.

However, after Pakistan’s creation in 1947 the TJ was more successful in attracting positive attention from Pakistanis living abroad than from those living in the country.

Based in Raiwind in the Punjab, the TJ membership and appeal, however, got a two-fold boost after the arrival of the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship in 1977.

This was the time when Zia used a part of CIA and Arab funds (dished out for the anti-Soviet Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan) on constructing a number of indoctrination centres in the shape of seminaries. The rise in the TJ’s fortunes was thus a product of the proliferation of the more puritanical strands of Islam during the Zia regime.

By the late 1980s, the TJ became successful in also attracting membership from the country’s trader classes, especially in the Punjab and KP. In the 1990s it began attracting the interest of certain prominent sections of Pakistan’s affluent middle-classes, including certain pop musicians, TV actors and eventually cricketers.

Throughout the (Sunni-Shia) sectarian turmoil that the country faced in the 1980s and 1990s, the TJ however, remained free to preach and recruit. It was always believed to be a harmless movement that had no political, sectarian or militant motives.

However, since the country’s Sunni majority remains 'Barelvi', a parallel evangelical movement emerged in the 1980s. ‘Barelvi Islam’ emerged in the 19th century India as a Sunni Muslim infusion concocted from elements of Sufism and ‘folk-Islam’. It is opposed to the Deobandi branch of South Asian Islam and both the Sunni sub-sects have been embroiled in vicious polemical battles for over 150 years.

Called the Dawat-i-Islami, the new evangelical movement claims to represent the Barelvi majority’s spiritual interests. Also seen as non-political, the Dawat, however, has been accused of containing members that have graduated to becoming members of some Barelvi militant organisations.

The guard who shot dead Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer (for ‘blasphemy’) in 2011 was also a former member of the Dawat.

On the other end, when Rehman Malik spoke about the TJ it was the first time a member of a sitting government in Pakistan had accused the outfit of breeding possible recruits for various hard-core Islamist organisations.

Alarms in this respect were first raised by some western observers when in the mid and late 1990s, the former chief of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, Lt Gen Javed Nasir, became a staunch member of the TJ. This was also the time the TJ was making in-roads into the Pakistan army.

Though known for his staunch Islamist views, Lt Gen Nasir’s entry into TJ’s fold was seen as being only incidental and the TJ continued to recruit and preach freely.

But the accusations (though suppressed in Pakistan) kept coming. The TJ’s name came up in connection with terrorism plots, such as in October 2002 in the US (the Portland Seven case) and the September 2002 Lackawanna Six case (also in the US).The TJ was mentioned again in the August 2006 in a plot to bomb airliners en route from London to the United States, and in the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005.

However, TJ as an organisation was not directly accused in any of the cases because most of the accused men were said to be members of various violent Islamist organisations. TJ's name only came up when the accused were also said to have been a part of the TJ at some point before their final radicalisation and entry into more militant and radical outfits.

In 2008, the Spanish police arrested 14 Asian Muslims for allegedly planning to attack various places in Spain. Twelve were Pakistanis. A Spanish Muslim leader claimed that all of these men had once been members of the TJ. Though counter-terrorism experts have understandably focused their studies more on the militant groups, in the last five years or so, many of them have now begun to also study the dynamics of evangelical groups like the TJ.

They believe that in spite of the fact that TJ’s primary function remains to be non-political and almost entirely evangelical, its rather secretive organisational structure and the goodwill that it enjoys among most Pakistanis allows elements from extremist organisations to use TJ as a recruiting ground for more violent purposes. They say that most young men joining the TJ are more vulnerable to the Islamists’ propaganda due to the TJ’s conservative social orientation.

Rehman Malik was not shooting in the air. He was merely pointing out yet another area of concern in a country being torn apart by men committing violence in the name of faith. His statement only became controversial because very few Pakistanis are aware of the potential of the TJ unwittingly allowing the polluting of its pond with rotten fish.

[URL="http://www.dawn.com/news/1046248/candy-floss-and-cyanide"]Candy floss and cyanide[/URL]

The truth about drones
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]The truth about drones[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]


[I]Nadeem Paracha in his usual satirical style writes about the drones attacks and their apparent reaction in the form of suicide bombings. (A popular disposition of the Pakistani social/political classes).[/I]

Drones are unmanned aircrafts. They are called unmanned because they are actually manned by women. So one can say drones are women-manned aircrafts. This is done to insult the conservative sensibilities of our brothers in the tribal areas where, of course, there are no women.

The first drone attack to take place in Pakistan was actually in 1024AD. It was fired by a Rajput stooge of the Jews on the army of Mahmud Ghaznavi who was liberating the Somnath temple from idols. He took away some gold as well which he duly distributed among the poor in what today is Dubai.

The first Pakistani to be hit by a drone was actually an innocent camel in North Waziristan. This made him very angry and as a result, he began to behave like a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Drones were invented by the famous Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein when his equation, E=mc2, was successfully challenged and debunked by the famous Muslim physicist, Oreo Maqbool Biscuit in his equally famous book, ‘War and Peace’, co-written with nuclear scientist, alchemist and judo expert, Zaid Hamid in 1941.

When asked how a drone attack was possible in 1024AD, Oreo said it was a case of time travel. This, he said, was achieved when the reptilian Elders of Zion discovered a wormhole near Jerusalem that distorted the space-time continuum in the region and made the camels of that area very angry and militant. Thus, the invention of drones. He insists that he be given a Nobel Prize for this discovery.

Ever since 1024AD, drones have killed over three billion Pakistanis. It is strange how not a single non-Muslim Pakistani has ever been killed by a drone. So, to balance things out, the angry camels began to kill Christians. It was only fair.

Compared to the 3bn Pakistani Muslims killed by the drones, only 14 Pakistanis have been killed in suicide attacks by the angry camels. Such attacks are not at all common in Pakistan. In fact, the first ever suicide attack in the country took place only last Sunday and that too only because Pakistan is a country full of sinners and bad Muslims.

It is wrong to say that the Pakistan military is allowing the Americans to use drones in the country. The truth is that it is actually against the drones that the army is fighting and not against the so-called militants, who are simply innocent herdsmen. The truth is that it is the civilian government which is allowing the Americans to use drones — especially former President Zardari who is believed to own a number of drone factories in Switzerland.

On the other hand some liberal fascists are planning to set up drone factories on the moon on a large area that they illegally occupied by evicting poverty-stricken Uzbek and Chechen liberation fighters who wanted to liberate the moon from the tyranny of the descendants of Jewish astronaut, Neil Armstrong, who by the way, had converted to Islam.

But he turned out to be a bad Muslim, unlike Michael Jackson who turned out to be a good one, before he died in a drone attack. In Dubai.

The Government of Pakistan does not allow its greatest scientist — in fact, the world’s greatest scientist — Dr. A.Q. Skywalker, to develop the drone technology so Pakistan can make its own drones and kill innocent shepherds itself. In fact, the so-called militants are on record saying that they would rather be struck by a Pakistani drone than by an American one. Very patriotic people, they are.

The Pakistani drones will make sure that no innocent Pakistani (i.e. Muslim, of course) is killed. Only bad militants would be targeted which, till last count, were just two and they too were willing to repent after the inevitable success of the peace talks. Reports suggest that they had become bad militants because they’d been listening to John Lennon’s song, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ backwards.

If one listens to that song backwards one could clearly hear a cleverly masked message that says: ‘Garrble, garrble, woonok wonk bing donk.’ Very evil.

According to famous intellectual, revolutionary and very angry old man, Imran Khan, only one out of a million people living in Waziristan is a bad militant. That is a fact. And the blast that you just heard was actually caused by a gas cylinder explosion.

It is not true that Americans use drones to attack those militants that are out of our reach. This is an American lie. And that gas cylinder explosion you just heard is actually innocent civilians being struck by a drone missile.

It is a sad fact that some Pakistanis use more time protesting about trivial issues such as the misuse of the blasphemy law, rape cases and the 14 people who were killed in the only suicide attack that has ever taken place in this country, instead of protesting against the drones that have killed billions of Pakistanis.

But then, such misguided people are all alcoholics, drug addicts and believers of free sex, so one cannot expect them to speak out against the drones. They will all burn in hell.

The Americans are bribing the Chinese to make toy drones so they can be exported to Pakistan and given to Muslim children to play with. We should retaliate by asking the Chinese to make toy models of Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif that say ‘stop drones, stop drones, stop drones’ every time a gas cylinder explosion kill civilians and soldiers.

Orders should also be placed for the making of revolutionary looking dolls (male, of course) whose features are a cross between Che Guevara, OBL and Lady Gaga. Comrade Tariq Ali can be used to market these dolls.

But Pakistan should make manned drones i.e. un-womaned drones manned by hunks, called hunk-manned drones.

Trained pilots should not be necessary for such drones. One’s ghairat, patriotism and control over his daily flatulence cycle should be enough. We suggest handsome, ingenious and muscular hunks like Sangsar Abbasi to be given the honour of using these hunk-manned drones against the sissy women-manned American drones.

Last but not the least, the drones are also said to be the main cause of last year’s devastating floods in Pakistan and this year’s horrifying earthquake in Balochistan.

There is ample evidence to prove this. Some brilliant scholars at the Punjab University are close to proving the long-term effects of drone attacks. Apart from floods and earthquakes (in Muslim countries), the effects also include the spread of homosexuality, energy shortage, corruption, dengue fever, hair-loss and worst of all, Turkish soaps on local TV channels.

So beware, friends. It’s all ‘garrble, garrble, woonok wonk bing donk.’

[URL="http://www.dawn.com/news/1047773/smokers-corner-the-truth-about-drones"]The truth about drones[/URL]

The good, the bad, the deadly
 

[B][CENTER][SIZE="4"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]The good, the bad, the deadly[/FONT][/SIZE][/CENTER][/B]

It was called the ‘New Left’. Emerging in Britain in the 1950s, the New Left was the (old) left’s disparaging response to the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism mainly symbolised by so-called ‘Stalinism’. The New Left revisited Marxist doctrines and attempted to bring them more in line with concepts like liberal democracy.

The New Left criticised both Western capitalism and Soviet communism and attempted to put forward a more non-dogmatic and democracy-friendly version of Marxism. By the 1960s, it was ideologically informing the evolution of the various neo-Marxist movements that began taking shape around the world.

The New Left thinking also contributed to the various contemporary socialist experiments taking place in the Muslim world at the time, where certain leaders and political organs attempted to cut through Marxist dogma and capitalism by fusing nationalism and the more egalitarian notions of Islam with socialist economics. By the early 1970s, the New Left had begun to influence conventional social-democracy in Europe as well, where leftist parties emerged without any ideological strings attached to the Soviet Union.

However, the international oil crisis, brought on by Egypt and Syria’s war against Israel in 1973, triggered a serious economic downturn in the West. It also began generating a gradual reaction against the New Left politics and economics. Consequently a number of economists emerged who severely critiqued social-democracy, socialism and the concept of the welfare state.

By the early 1980s, this tendency was referred to as the ‘New Right’ and its early political and economic manifestations were defined by the Ronald Reagan presidency in the US and Margaret Thatcher’s rule in the UK. The New Right forwarded an aggressive mixing of free market economy, patriotism and a militarist foreign policy, a tendency which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, peaked in the shape of ‘neo-conservatism’ during George W. Bush’s administration (2001-2008).

In Pakistan, the New Left’s frontline expressions were the students’ movement against Ayub Khan in the 1960s, and the populist emergence of social-democratic parties such as the PPP. However, interestingly, just as the New Left was being wiped out in the West by the New Right in the 1980s, in Pakistan it was the old right (i.e. conventional religious parties in cahoots with a politicised military) that did the trick.

But, alas, the New Right in Pakistan seems to finally be coming of age. Because if the collapse of the country’s last military dictatorship and the constant drubbing the conventional religious parties have faced in various elections can be seen as the withering away of the old right in Pakistan, then the active emergence of a revamped PML-N supplemented by an alarmist new electronic media can be detected as a more vocal arrival of the New Right in Pakistan.

Couple these happenings with the ‘judicial activism’ exhibited by the current strand of top judges and lawyers, and the impulsive support it got from PML-N, the electronic media and right-wing parties like the Jamaat-i-Islami and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf, one can then suggest that a somewhat instinctive move is afoot to challenge the large remnants of both the old and new Left in Pakistan.

Boiling within the mix of the New Right politics and sociology in Pakistan are also characters operating as televangelists, ‘security analysts’ and TV journalists. In appearance and content they consciously avoid looking like the greying guard of the old right, and instead attempting to sound and look a lot more contemporary.

They have gone on to use an intriguing combination of the economic and aesthetic dynamics of consumerism, free-market enterprise and various forms of media to forward a fusion of social piety, political Islam, a plethora of conspiracy theories and demagogic (left-meets-right) oratory.

However, it is almost entirely ambiguous about its stand on matters such as terrorism and extremism. It claims to condemn it, but is more likely to put the blame on American foreign policy and then return to its ambiguous disposition when questioned about the long involvement of Pakistan’s own past policies in the matter.

Whereas the top tier of the Pakistani New Right (PML-N and certain senior TV anchors) are merging lofty political notions such as constitutionalism and accountability with ‘judicial activism,’ the second tier, mainly made up of political parties like the PTI, and a new breed of TV preachers and personalities, are (for want of a better word) glamourising certain updated notions of the ‘Islamic state’.

More dangerously though, undaunted by the obvious failure of political Islam in the Muslim world, the country’s New Right is trying to rekindle it and that too at a time when various Islamic reformist movements across most Muslim countries are consciously trying to detach Islam from the political moorings it was convolutedly given in the 20th century by men like Abul Ala Maududi and Syed Qutb. It is those very moorings that may have played a major role in plunging many Muslim countries in the state of cultural stagnation and political turmoil that they are in today.

[URL="http://www.dawn.com/news/1050501/the-good-the-bad-the-deadly"]The good, the bad, the deadly[/URL]

Red handed
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Palatino Linotype"][SIZE="4"]Red handed[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]

Conflicting views and feelings become the order of the day whenever former military dictator, Gen Musharraf is put in the dock for his regime’s action against militants holed up in Islamabad’s Lal Masjid (Red Mosque).

Though the action took place more than five years ago, it still creates (at least in the mainstream and social media) heated debates and extreme stances.

One Abdul Rashid Ghazi had become the centrepiece of the event; a radical cleric who was said to have been leading a group of armed militants from the mosque and its seminary.

Ghazi today is remembered as a militant who had asked his followers to burn down CD shops and kidnap ‘obscene women’ in Islamabad because he wanted to force the government to impose Sharia Law across Pakistan.

After refusing to give in to the orders of the government of Gen Musharraf, the mosque and its seminary were stormed by the army and Ghazi was shot dead.

If one monitors what has been said about Ghazi in the media, two distinct views come to the surface: The first one describes him as a terrorist who wanted to impose his version of the Sharia by force, while the other hails him as a ‘mujahid’’ who stood up to the might of an ‘infidel state.’

But often we picture our heroes and villains as caricatures drawn from conflicting perceptions that are wildly aired in the media. I’ve always wondered why isn’t there any serious attempt to study them as we would any of our immediate contemporaries.

Last year, while on a visit to Islamabad, a journalist colleague of mine introduced me to an old college friend of Abdul Rashid Ghazi. Without any hesitation I got down to probe him about the less talked about (or even unknown) aspects of Ghazi’s life.

Who was he and what made him so desperately angry? I’m sure he wasn’t born this way.

Ghazi’s friend told me that he (Ghazi) was a militant for a very brief period of his life. Otherwise he was an extremely bright man with normal career ambitions.

“He could have been a diplomat in the foreign office or an educationist,” his friend told me.

The friend added that Ghazi’s greatest ambition was to become a diplomat at the United Nations. This is what Ghazi was planning to become when he joined college in 1982.

Ghazi was born into in a religious family. His father was a cleric who had founded the Red Mosque in the late 1960s.

He enrolled his two sons into an Islamic seminary. But Ghazi rebelled and dropped out, demanding that he be put in a ‘normal school’. This was in 1976 when he was about to enter his teens.

His father reluctantly got him admitted into an all-boys school from where Ghazi did his matriculation in 1979.

Ghazi’s friend fondly remembers him as an enthusiastic fan of music, films and political history. Ghazi had already begun dreaming of becoming a diplomat.

Nevertheless, Ghazi once again got into an altercation with his father. According to his friend, his father wanted him to grow a beard and join the seminary that he was running.

Not only did Ghazi refuse to grow a beard and join his father’s seminary, he went on to join a co-ed college. Here he got involved with various student groups opposed to the reactionary dictatorship of Gen Zia.

All communication between his father and him had broken down. They were not on talking terms when in 1984 Ghazi joined the Quaid-i-Azam University that was then a hotbed of anti-Zia activities.

He enrolled as an MSc student of International Relations. His friends remember him to be a bright student and an active member of a progressive student organisation.

This created a problem for his father, who was being facilitated by the Zia dictatorship to help produce jihadis for the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency that Pakistan was backing.

“He hardly ever went to a mosque, let alone visited his father’s mosque,” his friend claimed. “He was reading writings by Marx, Max Weber and Henry Kissinger. He was a lively fellow but always focused on becoming an international figure in world diplomacy,” the friend added.

But Ghazi’s brother, who had followed his father into becoming a cleric, would never miss the opportunity to admonish Ghazi for going against family traditions and bringing a bad name to their father due to his ‘westernised’ ideas and lifestyle.

So what happened?

According to Ghazi’s friend, after getting his Master’s degree in International Relations, he ended up getting a job at the Ministry of Education.

The friend suggested that Ghazi was not happy with his job and was impatient to realise his dream of becoming a diplomat.

Estranged from his family and not achieving his goal quickly enough, Ghazi became agitated. Then in 1998 his father died. He was assassinated (allegedly) on the orders of an opposing militant outfit.

“All that guilt that had been instilled into him by his brother came to the forefront,” his friend explained. “His brother told him how he had hurt his father’s feelings …”

Ghazi went into depression and began attending the gatherings of a variety of Islamic evangelical groups.

Then, in 1999, he joined his brother at the Red Mosque where both became leaders.

After Pakistan entered the ‘War on Terror’ as a US ally, the brothers are said to have established links with militant Islamist organisations.

Ghazi was now a changed man. He’d grown a beard, renounced his ‘secular’ past and had become a vehement militant insisting that the state of Pakistan impose strict Sharia laws.

But, as his friend interestingly noted: “He wasn’t built to fight. He was too intelligent to become a jihadi. His philosophy might have become aggressive, but I don’t think he was willing to die for it.”

This statement makes sense. During the military operation against the Red Mosque militants, some TV channels began to report that Ghazi was willing to surrender, but was held hostage (through ‘emotional blackmail’) by some frontline militants in his entourage until the military finally barged in and shot dead each one of them.

Ironically, this man who had dreamt and studied to be an international diplomat died for an idea and cause he had actually rejected most of his life.

[URL="http://www.dawn.com/news/1053771/red-handed"]Red handed[/URL]