“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe.
“Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer.
"My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
The Theory of “Penti Pentures” (35 punctures) was supposed to explode with a bang. Instead it has evaporated into thin air without a whimper.
There was no secret tape recording of mine informing Nawaz Sharif that I, as caretaker CM Punjab, had applied “Penti Pentures” (ie rigged 35 seats) to the elections in 2013. Indeed, not one word of “Penti Pentures” was even whispered by the great Hafeez Pirzada (with Imran Khan breathing down his neck) when I was cross-examined before the Judicial Commission last week. What was produced was a clip from my TV show of 7th July 2013 in which I had said that about fifteen days before the end of my tenure as caretaker chief minister Punjab on June 6th 2013, (ie, ten days after the election results were announced on May 11) I had become powerless and the Punjab bureaucracy was already looking to the designated new chief minister. So what was so strange about that, the CJP seemed to imply, when he asked Mr Pirzada to move on. ----Also watch
------ Imran Khan’s unending harangue about Nawaz Sharif “rewarding” me for applying “penti pentures” by appointing me chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board also fell flat. Indeed, it never went to the point of explicating the substance of the so-called “reward”. How could it? I have not drawn a penny in salary for two years. I have not even taken a luxury vehicle for my personal use. In fact, I have abolished all undue “perks and privileges” that previous chairmen enjoyed, like free First Class International Travel with spouse, a posse of hangers-on, a fleet of expensive rented cars, millions of rupees of free tickets for family, friends and cronies during international cricket events abroad, unlimited entertainment allowances, BoG meetings in holiday resorts, and a score-full of jobs in PCB for sifarishis and family.
The “Penti Penture Theory” was based on idle talk cunningly fabricated by a maverick named Ejaz Hussain who was desperate to worm his way into the top echelons of Khan’s party. A gullible Imran bought into it readily because it suited his political ploy. How could he manufacture a conspiracy theory of Nawaz Sharif stealing the election without challenging the results of the elections in the Punjab that contributed to Mr Sharif”s thumping victory? Hence it was critical to damn my administration. Fourteen months ago, I sued him in court to prove his allegations or pay damages for defaming me. He hasn’t appeared in court once, nor filed a word in response to my complaint. Much the same may be said of his lackeys like Naeem ul Haque and Shirin Mazari who have parroted the same lie ad nauseum, and “journalists” like Dr Shahid Masood who are constantly creeping out of the woodwork. The amusing fact is that only days after the fiasco in the Supreme Court, Naeem blatantly named the source of the “penti penture” story as Agha Murtaza Poya, the veteran politician and ex-owner of The Muslim newspaper, only to be rebuffed by a stout public denial by Mr Poya hours later.
The fact is that I was the caretaker CM nominee of the PPP and its allies. The fact is that the PMLN had fielded two candidates of its own but only acceded in my favour half an hour before the three-day deadline because it realized its nominees would most certainly be adjudged unsuitable by the ECP. The fact is that Imran Khan publicly welcomed my nomination as a consensus caretaker CM in March. The fact is that I refused to accept the nominee of the ECP, Qamaruzaman Chaudhry, as my Chief Secretary because Imran Khan publicly asked me not to appoint him. The fact is that I shunted 15 senior bureaucrats from the Punjab to Islamabad because they were allegedly close to the Sharifs. The fact is that I shuffled the bureaucracy from Patwari to Chief Secretary and SHO to IGP so that none could complain I was biased. The fact is that I retained two senior secretaries whose close relatives were contesting on PTI tickets. The fact is that my Home Minister was on the PTI’s Task Force on Terrorism. The fact is that I even leaned on the Advocate General appointed by Shahbaz Sharif to resign his constitutional position in order to be neutral. The fact is that the only favour I ever did anyone was to Imran Khan when I allowed him to hold rallies in the centre of the small towns on his campaign trail in Southern Punjab, which was contrary to the SOPs of the elections. The PTI accepted the results as free and fair, a fact corroborated by FAFEN and over 100 international observers.
Imran Khan didn’t have the courage to accuse ex-CJP Iftikhar Chaudhy, ex-Justice Khalil Ramday, and GEO/Jang Group in the JC, all co-accused with me in public. Now that his short-cut-to-power bid has failed and been exposed, he should have the courage to apologise to me and stop tarnishing my reputation.
Tarek Fatah chats about his four-months visit to Hindustan - Bilatakalluf with Tahir Gora Ep10
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
The PTI Election Tribunal (ET) headed by Justice (r) Wajihuddin Ahmed has reported that the PTI intra-party elections held in 2013 were “fraudulent”.
The 60-page report points out core problems in the whole exercise. Tickets were badly distributed to poor candidates because of corrupt practices by central party leaders; millions of voters registered through the given phone numbers were not included in voter lists because of incompetence and inefficiency in the PTI’s Central Office; the central command of the party did not obey the guidelines for regional, provincial and central parliamentary boards to be set up to process and decide the names of party’s nominees for tickets for the general elections, preferring instead to direct party ticket aspirants to file their nominations with the Central Office directly; the UC-level election was manipulated by aspirants of district and provincial posts, assisted by aspirants of party tickets for general elections; the process of candidates’ assessment and allocation of tickets was carried out by a couple of groups in a ‘hush hush’ manner; people who became party members through telephone help lines were disenfranchised during intra-party polls; the top posts of the party in the provinces and center are all nominated; that Jehangir Tareen’s role was highly objectionable; and so on. The ET has ordered Imran Khan to dissolve all posts and hold new elections.
This is in sharp contrast to Mr Khan’s earlier claim that these party elections were “unprecedented and historical”. He is furious that the Report was leaked and shows the squabbling party leadership in bad light. He has reacted by replacing Justice ® Wajihudidn’s tribunal with a new one led by Tasneem Noorani.
The error of his self-righteous ways is dawning on Mr Khan. After the failure of the longest “dharna” in history last year to try and dislodge the government, with a wink and nod from sections of the military establishment, Imran Khan has finally agreed to an unprecedented compromise with the PMLN on the matter of the judicial commission to determine the fairness of the last general elections. He has desperately backpedalled from his position that the elections were deliberately and premeditatedly stolen from the PTI by a gang of powerful conspirators. That has prompted the PMLN to put a clause into the TORs to exactly that effect: if this specially “designed and systematic” conspiracy is not proved, then, despite any irregularities, the election wasn’t stolen, and there is no compulsion to dissolve the assemblies and hold mid-term polls.
Imran’s about-turns are getting to be predictable. Earlier, he insisted that the Pakistani Taliban were simply “misguided Muslims” provoked by US drones who should be talked to; now he admits they are brutal terrorists who should be stamped out militarily. Before long the PTI will doubtless take back its resignations and return to the National Assembly.
But this is not necessarily a sign of weakness or opportunism. Recognition of ground realities and necessary adjustment can also be a sign of political maturity. Consider.
Indeed, Imran’s attempt to focus on the elections in AJK, provincial local bodies and the developing political vacuum in Karachi instead of trying to compel regime change are steps in the right direction. Hopefully, he will also acknowledge the harm done to his party by “lotas” and “electables” and oversee a new and transparent intra-party election that brings genuinely new and untainted PTI supporters from grass roots to positions of responsibility so that they can help the party positively impact the next general elections in 2018. He also needs to get cracking in running a good government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa so that he has an enviable track record to flaunt before cynical voters.
Imran Khan is not the only one having second thoughts. Nawaz Sharif is also working hand in hand on core national security issues with the very military establishment with whom he has expressed bitter grievances in the past. His obsession with the trial of General Pervez Musharraf has also ended. All this augurs well for the stability of the country.
The most important development, however, is a radical change in the strategic perspective of the military establishment regarding both internal and external affairs. This is entirely due to the new army chief Gen Raheel Sharif and a crop of new corps commanders who are in the process of re-evaluating security doctrines and responding to new realities.
The MQM is the only political player that is still resisting the broad based transitions in the country. It is crying foul against the clean-up operation in Karachi when this military-led operation has the support of all of Pakistan much like that against the Taliban. The sooner the MQM comes to accept the fact that its fearful blackmailing hegemony in Karachi is untenable from a national security viewpoint and won’t be tolerated, the better.
These multi-faceted military and political transitions in Pakistan are most welcome and should be supported. We need to put our house in order rather than constantly blaming others for our woes.
My foreign trip has been ruined by happenings back home. Imran’s party wallah has gone to court to say agents of gormint are harassing him. “Haw?” judge is asking. “Every time I pick up my landline phone to dial out, a voice says: ‘your phone has been cut off due to non-payment of bill’”, he replied. Did I tell them to do civil disobedience and not pay bills of utilities, hain ji? Naw they are threatening massive dharna on November 30 to paralyze gormint.
I told Shbaz Saab worry not, if we are dethroned, we will set up new business. “Which one?” Shbaz Saab asked. “We’ll make windows, like Bill Gates. Look how much money he’s made. Only puzzle is that his name is Gates but he makes windows, hain ji?” But other people are worst off. I was in German recently. One unfartunate man, hailing from Lahore, was sattled in Frankfurt. His wife was nag and abusive. When his daughter applied for college, she brought farms to Abu to fill out. In section of Mother Tongue, Unfartunate advised his daughter, “Likh puttar, write my child ‘very long, black and be lagaam meaning out of control’”. Haw sad.
Unfartunate prevailed upon me to counsel his wife. When I met her I said, “Bhabi, why you are so mean to your husband?” She told me heart-wrenching story. “Mian Saab, he is so unromantic. Last week he went on trip. I was missing him so sent him a message: ‘If you are sleeping, send me your dreams. If you are laughing, send me your smile. If you are eating, send me a bite. If you are drinking, send me a sip. If you are crying, send me your tears’. Horrible man replied, ‘I am sitting on commode. Now tell?’” Then she bust into tears.
Needlass to say, I was leaving German with heavy heart so Her Majesty Angela Merkel asked me, “Prime Minister, what is the problem?” I sighed, “Your Highness, will I live to see democrat generals and a reasonable Imran Khan?” She replied, “just as I will not live to see unicorns, you will not live to see democratic generals and a reasonable Imran Khan. These are all fictional characters.”
The “conspiracy” to get rid of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been exposed. Although the circumstantial evidence was compelling, no one, not even the government and parliament, had hard-core facts to prove who was doing what and why. That’s why the government’s political and administrative response to the unfolding crisis was confused, weak and vacillating. Then the Heavens parted and Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf President Javed Hashmi descended like an angel to “save” the government by making a clean breast of things. The story can now be stitched up safely.
The old guard in the military left behind by General Ashfaq Kayani – a master spy who occupied both high offices in ISI and GHQ by turns and fashioned the military’s strategic policies for over a decade – was unhappy with the proposed foreign policy initiatives of Nawaz Sharif towards India, Afghanistan, USA, and his stance on non-state actor “assets” and the war against the Pakistani Taliban. Mr Sharif’s choice of General Raheel Sharif as COAS, number three in the lineup and totally apolitical to boot, also queried their pitch. The dye was cast when Mr Sharif hauled up ex-army chief General Pervez Musharraf for treason because this move threatened to drag in General Kayani and many other senior military officers who had backed the coup maker. It was also feared that, come October 2014, when several key generals from the “Kayani guard” would face retirement, Mr Sharif would appoint another relatively apolitical general to the powerful DG-ISI post, thereby seizing the “national security” initiative from the military. It may be recalled that the fear was not unjustified: on two previous occasions as prime minister, Mr Sharif had taken exactly such steps when he sacked Lt Gen Asad Durrani in 1991 and appointed Lt Gen Javed Nasir as DG-ISI and when he appointed Lt Gen Ziauddin Butt as DG-ISI in his second stint as prime minister and later tried to make him COAS and triggered a coup by General Musharraf.
According to the Kayani doctrine,a serious “threat” of a coup is a better instrument of military policy than a coup itself because coups can be messy business in this day and age with a weak economy, an independent judiciary, ubiquitous media, obstreperous civil society institutions and bullying international state and non-state actors. Far better, they say, to pull strings via the military’s intelligence agencies from behind the political scenes and achieve the required objectives by pitting one actor against another and bringing things to such a pass that a coup seems like a real possibility. This is exactly how Gen Kayani brought the Zardari regime to heel on foreign policy and the war against terrorism on matters such as relations with India, USA and Afghanistan, Kerry-Lugar Bill, Memogate, etc. And this is exactly how his remnants wanted to deal with Nawaz Sharif when he threatened to disrupt or disown their doctrines.
Accordingly, a plan was hatched to oust Nawaz Sharif, with the threat of a coup, and before October when some of the key conspirators were due to retire. On the one hand, Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri, two desperadoes dying to become prime minister by hook or by crook, were roped in with the assistance of evergreen military “assets” like Sheikh Rashid, the Chaudhries of Gujrat and notorious elements in the media. On the other hand, potential oppositionists in the media like the Geo-Jang group were attacked and put down, while Supreme Court judges were scared off from interventionism by an attack from Imran Khan on ex-CJPs Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and Tassaduq Hussain Jilani and ex-CEC Fakhruddin G Ibrahim. The pretext of a “rigged and polluted” election was perfect because in one fell swoop all potential oppositionists were routed at the hands of the country’s leading “populist” forces in the shape of Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri. Unfortunately, both Geo and PMLN played into the hands of the conspirators by outraging the nation, the first by directly targeting the DG of an “esteemed national security institution” like the ISI and the second by precipitating a bloody crisis in Model Town, Lahore.
Fortunately, three things went wrong for the conspirators. First, the million-strong crowds didn’t materialize. Second, the scared government didn’t resort to further violent measures to stop the marchers, thereby denying a pretext for Mr Sharif’s head as in the case of Shahbaz Sharif. Third, just when things seemed to be slipping out of the government’s hand, Javed Hashmi came along to spill the beans, expose the mala fides of the conspirators and galvanise parliament and civil society to unite behind the prime minister.
Mr Sharif has made errors of judgment and policy that have weakened him considerably. Imran Khan has been exposed as a “match-fixer”. The conspiratorial rogues have been identified. Only General Raheel Sharif has come out looking reasonably good. Along with PM Sharif, he needs to help restore Geo and the credibility of all those unfairly targeted by the conspirators and build a trust-worthy civil-military relationship.
Once General Pervez Musharraf was Imran Khan’s great hero because he expected to get the top berth from the general. But when Musharraf chose Zafarullah Jamali and then Shaukat Aziz as prime minister, Imran Khan changed Musharraf’s status to a big zero.
Once the Geo/Jang Group was Imran’s great hero because it was supporting him to the hilt before the elections. But after the elections, when Geo became critical of Imran’s policies and positions, it was reduced to a big bloated zero.
Once the former Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was Imran’s great hero for constantly knocking down the PPP. But after Chaudhry didn’t buy into Imran’s election petitions, he was blasted as a big treacherous zero.
Once Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G Ibrahim was Imran’s great hero. But when Ibrahim couldn’t deliver on Imran’s great expectations, he was charged with being a big incompetent zero.
Imran Khan’s blossoming political alliances are also noteworthy. The MQM was once his pet-hate, now his stunning silence is a prelude to a budding alliance for mid-term elections. Much the same sort of bonhomie is beginning to tell between Imran and the Chaudhrys of Gujrat. Once they were allegedly Musharraf’s partners in crime because they refused to give him any electoral leverage in Punjab during the 2002 elections. Now they are comrades-in-arms in the joint struggle to destabilize, weaken and eventually get rid of Nawaz Sharif.
Imran’s relationship with the “Angels” (Pakistan Army and ISI) is another fascinating subject for research. He has unfailingly whipped up public sentiment in their favour whenever they have been cross with elected civilian governments: on Rehman Malik’s attempt to bring the political wing of the ISI under his boot; on the “objectionable” clauses in the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid to Pakistan bill; on the May 2nd Osama bin Laden debacle; on Memogate; on the “state within the state” accusation by the then prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani; on the blockage of NATO supplies following Salala; and now most vociferously on the Geo/Jang/ISI confrontation (he is silent on the Musharraf case which is a very big concession to them). An Ex-DGISI’s attempt to pressurise assorted politicians to join the PTI in 2012 is well known.
Indeed, it is this dubious relationship that helps to explain the induction of several key politicians into Imran Khan’s fold despite the lofty “lota” credentials of some of them. Sheikh Rashid, who has a ringside seat in the inner circle of IK advisors, is a self-claimed GHQ man who was once Nawaz Sharif’s and then Musharraf’s federal minister. Asad Omar is the son of an army general and hails from an “army family”; Shah Mahmood Qureshi jumped the PPP ship when nudged by the Angels on the Raymond Davis affair; Jehangir Tareen was Musharraf’s blue-eyed boy; Shafqat Mahmood served in Musharraf’s Punjab cabinet in 2000; Khurshid Kasuri was Musharraf’s Foreign Minister; and so on.
More significantly, Imran’s decision to launch a “movement” on May 11 is clearly aimed at destablising the Sharif regime. It has been followed up by a vicious attack on the Geo/Jang Group and a stinging denunciation of the ex-CJP and judiciary. This betrays the perennial objective of the Angels to keep every civilian government in a hunkered down defensive posture vis a vis the military establishment. In 1998 Benazir Bhutto was lumped with President Ishaq Khan and Foreign Minister Sahibzada Yaqub Khan while Aitzaz Ahsan was swiftly cut down to size for being soft on India, later she was sacked. In 1990, Nawaz Sharif was lumped with President Ishaq and Gen Waheed Kakar and shown the door in 1993. In 1997, when Nawaz Sharif got too big for his boots after easing out both President Farooq Leghari and COAS Gen Jehangir Karamat, he was ousted by a military coup. President Asif Zardari was hounded on one pretext or the other by the Angels from 2008-13, in alliance with the media and judiciary. Now Nawaz Sharif is in trouble over his attempt to try Musharraf for treason and to seize control of national security and foreign policy.
Some people say the Angels are planning another Islami Jamhoori Ittehad a la the late 1980s with Imran Khan as their opening batsman like they did with Nawaz Sharif earlier. The problem with this theory is that the Angels had to contend with only one popular force in 1988. Now there will be two, PPP and PMNL, covering both Sindh and Punjab, which will make it very difficult to play such a game. More likely, the Angels are only seeking to rap Nawaz Sharif on the knuckles and teach him to stay in his place on key issues like national security, foreign policy and the “sacred cow” status of the military rather than putting their faith in Imran Khan to lead Pakistan next. In order words, they are “using” Imran Khan for their own political goals just as they have used other politicians in the past. Therefore who will be hero and who will be zero remains to be seen.
In Pakistan, the Taliban is negotiating in bad faith. Its choice of interlocutors for talks and list of demands confirm this.
The peace pipe Pakistan wished to smoke with the Taliban was turned into a pipe dream after the banned organisation issued, on February 9, the following “to do” list for Islamabad before it could think of a ceasefire: one, stop drone attacks; two, introduce sharia law in courts; three, introduce Islamic system of education in public and private institutions; four, release Pakistani and foreign Taliban prisoners; five, restore property damaged by drone attacks and pay compensation; six, hand over control of tribal areas to local forces; seven, withdraw the army from tribal areas and close down checkposts; eight, drop all criminal charges against the Taliban; nine, release prisoners from both sides; ten, grant equal rights for all, poor and rich; eleven, offer jobs to the families of drone-attack victims; twelve, end interest-based system; thirteen, end support for the US’s “war on terror”; fourteen, replace democratic system of governance with Islamic system; and fifteen, end all relations with the US.
After deciding to talk peace with the Taliban, Pakistan had nominated a four-member “pro-Taliban” negotiating team. The Taliban responded by naming a five-member, equally “pro-Taliban” team, without consultation with them: Maulana Samiul Haq of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Samiul Haq (JUI-S), Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Kifaetullah of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), Maulana Abdul Aziz of the Red Mosque of Islamabad and Mohammad Ibrahim of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). None of them is a member of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is a banned organisation. The new Taliban leader, a wanted criminal named Mullah Fazlullah, seemed to thumb his nose at the state of Pakistan by choosing his team from the politico-religious mainstream.
The five members represent a Talibanised section of the country, boasting old connections with the Afghan Taliban and the TTP. The irony was crushing — Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s own team contained people with pro-Taliban and anti-American leanings. The idea was to win the confidence of the Taliban, but Mullah Fazlullah didn’t bite. The talks wouldn’t commit the TTP to anything.
Another irony was that Fazlullah named Imran Khan on his panel, thus creating a situation where the PTI would be talking to itself while pretending to talk to the TTP. Mercifully, Khan begged off from this absurd scenario. After that, Kifaetullah of the JUI-F too bowed out. The JUI-F is more vulnerable to the Taliban because of its location close to North Waziristan than Samiul Haq, whose seminary is close to Peshawar. Fazlur Rehman has escaped attacks from the terrorists, which means North Waziristan thinks him soft on the state of Pakistan.
Maulana Abdul Aziz, frontman of al-Qaeda’s policy of Islamic vigilantism in Islamabad, whom the judiciary is perhaps too scared to convict in scores of cases of terrorism, held a separate press conference in the capital with scary-looking armed guards to say that “nothing short of [the] removal of democracy and [the] constitution itself would be acceptable as a condition for peace.”
His Red Mosque was attacked by commando troops in 2007, after he staged a number of vigilante incidents to force Islamabad to become an Islamic city the way the TTP thinks it should be. He symbolises Pakistan’s trajectory of Islamisation since 1947 and causes the Pakistani mind to split over what should be the next phase of state identity. By voting rightwing in 2013 against the ever-dwindling liberal elements, the people of Pakistan have joined the issue on the side of the Taliban. Intimidation plays the part of a persuader more than is often realised.
After Imran Khan and the JUI-F opted out, Fazlullah reiterated his disdain towards Islamabad by proposing two replacements: the chief reporter of a leading English-language newspaper, Ansar Abbasi, whose reports read like sermonising opinion pieces; and a serving senior bureaucrat, Oria Maqbul Jan, whose crazy advocacy of the Taliban has upset all kinds of Pakistanis. Both begged off, although their worldview on TV talk shows has presaged the next mutation of the Islamic state.
A debate is raging on TV about sharia. Almost all religious organisations — most of them with street muscle and some clearly aligned with the TTP — are convinced that sharia is not in force, and therefore the Taliban demand for dismantling the modern state is justified. An important presence on the negotiating panel appointed by the Taliban, the Jamaat-e-Islami, has however decided not to support the Taliban’s rejection of the current constitution.
The Jamaat clerics, however, insist that Pakistan’s Islamic constitution is not acted upon. They have in the past rejected the modern state’s punishment of “bad” conduct (munkirat) under a penal code and neglect of “good” conduct (marufat) as pieties enforceable through punitive legislation. Starting in the post-medieval period in Europe, the modern state stopped punishing the lack of piety and concentrated only on punishing crime. The Muslims of the world, free to choose as in Egypt, want it back. Already, Pakistan is fast losing the distinction between sin and crime.
The drive to get the arrested Taliban out of state custody remains on top of the Taliban agenda. So far, they have broken two big jails under the administered jurisdiction of the state and got their killers out — most of them returning piously to their job of killing innocent people. The Shia remain in their crosshairs and don’t mind lying when it suits them to keep the common Pakistani deluded into thinking that the Shia are, in fact, being killed by America and India. They have denied the killing of Shias in a Peshawar restaurant earlier in February.
One reason the TTP has more credibility than the state is the former’s intimidatory hold over the media. Most opinion-makers in Urdu are already on their side because of Urdu’s more unbuttoned ideological message against the modern state. But the English-language newspapers are actually threatened into censoring themselves by removing the more convincing liberal-secular voices from their opinion pages.
The “popular consensus” is thus against the state and in favour of the terrorists. Of course, peace has to prevail, but will the state accept its death that easily? Sharif will have to intervene and say enough is enough at some stage of this unfolding farce.
In the first week of February, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar had to go to Dubai to meet the IMF team because the multilateral financial institution is unwilling to come to Islamabad after being painted by the media as an enemy of Islam and as an instrument of America’s diabolical plots against Pakistan. Dar was asking the IMF for another loan of a half a billion dollars while the Taliban had made a billion dollars in 2013 from Karachi alone .
One reason the Taliban can’t think of peace is the money it is making in Pakistan with almost zero loss of manpower, setting itself apart from the terror franchises in Yemen, Somalia and Mali — dying states that don’t have the financial lucre to attract terrorists. Pakistanis wonder who is financing the Taliban, often blaming Saudi Arabia, America and India.
The fact is that the Taliban is in the process of emptying Karachi of its cash after leaching the city of Peshawar dry. Out of the four billion dollars the Afghan Taliban makes from heroin, at least one billion falls to the TTP’s share as the “southern funnel”. Moreover, news of shakedowns from Islamabad and Lahore is being suppressed because the well-heeled victims want to keep it hush-hush.
Only the other day at the Bedford cricket festival, Om, our
fifteen year old cricket playing son, asked me for advice on what he should do
if he nicked the ball and the umpire failed to detect it. Apparently, another
player whose father had told him to walk had failed to do so and was afraid of
the consequences if his father became aware of this code violation. At the time
I told Om that it was his decision and I did
not have any clear position in this matter. Hence this piece aims to provide Om with the various nuances involved in this matter. Unfortunately
it may not act as a commandment, 'Thou shall always walk', but it may enable
him to appreciate the diverse viewpoints on this matter.
In some quarters, particularly English, the act of playing
cricket, like doing ethical business, has connotations with a moral code of
behaviour. Every time a batsman, the most recent being Broad, fails to walk the
moralists create a crescendo of condemnation and ridicule. In my opinion this
morality is as fake as Niall Ferguson's claims on 'benevolent and enlightened
imperialism'. Historically, the game of cricket has been played by scoundrels
and saints alike and cheating at cricket has been rife since the time of the
first batting superstar W G Grace.
Another theory suggests that the moral code for cricket was
invented after World War II by English amateurs to differentiate them from the
professionals who played the game for a living. This period also featured different
dressing rooms for amateurs and professionals, there may also have been a third
dressing room for coloured players. One could therefore surmise that 'walking'
was a code of behaviour for white upper class amateurs who played the game for
pleasure and did not have to bother about their livelihood.
This then raises the question should a professional
cricketer walk?
Honore de Balzac once wrote, 'Behind every great fortune
there is a crime'. Though I am not familiar of the context in which Balzac
penned these words, I assume that he may have referred to the great wealth
accumulated by the businessmen of his times. As a student and a teacher of
economics I am of the conviction that at some stage in their evolution even the
most ethical of businesses and governments may have done things that was not
considered 'cricket'. The British during the empire building period was not
ethical nor have been the Ambanis or Richard Branson.
So if I am the professional batsman, with no other tradable
skill in a market economy with no welfare protection, travelling in a last
chance saloon provided by a whimsical selection committee what would I do? I
would definitely not walk, I'd think it was a divine intervention and try to
play a career saving knock.
As you will see I am a sceptic whenever any government or
business claims that it is always ethical just as much as the claims of walking
by a Gilchrist or a Cowdrey.
I am more sympathetic to the Australian position that it is
the umpire's job to decide if a batsman is out. Since dissent against umpiring
decisions is not tolerated and there is no DRS at the lower echelons of cricket
it does not make sense to walk at all. As for the old chestnut, 'It evens out
in the end', trotted out by wizened
greats of the game I'd like to counter with an ancient Roman story about
drowned worshippers narrated by NN Taleb in his book The Black Swan.
One Diagoras, a non
believer in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some
worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent ship wreck. The implication
was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, 'Where were the
pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?"
In a similar vein I wish to ask, 'Where are the batters who
walked and found themselves out of the team?' The problem with the quote, 'It
evens out in the end' is that it is used only by batters who survived. The
views of those batters with good skills but who were not blessed with good
fortune is ignored by this 'half-truth'.
So, Om, to help you make up
your mind I think Kipling's IF says it best:
If you can trust
yourself when all men doubt you
If you can meet with
Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two
impostors just the same
If you can make one
heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one
turn of pitch and toss
And lose, and start
again at your beginnings
Then, you may WALK, my
son! WALK!
There is another advantage, if you can create in the public
eye an 'image' of an honest and upright cricketer. Unlike ordinary mortals, you will find it
easier, in your post cricket life, to garner support as a politician or as an entrepreneur. The gullible public, who make decisions based on media created images, will cling to your past image as an honest cricketer and will back
you with their votes and money. Then what you do with it is really up to you. Just
watch Imran Khan and his crusade for religion and morality!
The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs league.
The results of the Pakistan elections are in – but how did a former exile win the vote? By promising airports to people who can't afford bicycles, says novelist Mohammed Hanif
Here's a little fairytale from Pakistan. Fourteen years ago a wise man ruled the country. He enjoyed the support of his people. But some of his treacherous generals thought he wasn't that smart. One night he was held at gunpoint, handcuffed, put in a dark dungeon, sentenced to life imprisonment. But then a little miracle happened; he, along with his family and servants, was put on a royal plane and exiled to Saudi Arabia, that fancy retirement home for the world's unwanted Muslim leaders.
Imran Khan in hospital after a fall at a campaign rally. Photograph: HO/AFP
Well he has, sort of. But not in the way he would have liked. Visiting foreign journalists have profiled Imran Khan more than they have profiled any living thing in this part of the world. If all the world's magazine editors were allowed to vote for Imran Khan he would be the prime minister of half the English-speaking world. If Imran Khan had contested in west London he would have won hands-down. But since this is Pakistan, he has won in Peshawar and two other cities. His party is set to form a government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, that north-western frontier province of Pakistan which Khan's profile writers never fail to remind us is the province that borders Afghanistan and the tribal areas that the world is so scared of. Or as some others never fail to remind the world: the land of the fierce pathans.
It's true that Khan ran a fierce, bloody-minded campaign, drawing huge crowds. When his campaign culminated in a televised tumble from a stage, during a public rally, the whole nation held its breath. Khan galvanised not only Pakistan's parasitical upper classes but also found support among the country's young men and women of all ages; basically the kind of people who use the words politics and politician as common insults. He inspired drawing-room revolutionaries to go out and stand in the blistering heat for hours on end to vote for him. For a few months he made politics hip in Pakistan. Partly, he was relying on votes from Pakistan's posh locales. He probably forgot that there was a slight problem there: not enough posh locales in Pakistan. There were kids who flew in from Chicago, from Birmingham to vote for him. Again, there are not enough Pakistani kids living and studying in Chicago and Birmingham. He appealed to the educated middle classes but Pakistan's main problem is that there aren't enough educated urban middle-class citizens in the country.
And the masses, it appears, were not really clamouring for a revolution but for electricity.
From the gossip columns of British tabloids to massive political rallies across Pakistan, Khan has been on a meaningful journey. In his campaign speeches, his blatantly Blairite message of New Pakistan did appeal to people but he really tested his supporters' attention span when he started to lecture them about how the Scandinavian welfare state model is borrowed from the early days of the Islamic empire in Arabia. Amateur historians have never fared well in Pakistani politics. Or anywhere else. Khan promised to turn Pakistan into Sweden, Norway or any one of those countries where everyone is blond and pays tax. His opponents promised Dubai – where everyone is either a bonded labourer or a property speculator and no one pays taxes – and won.
It's a bit of a fairytale that Khan, whose message was directed at educated urban voters, has found supporters in the north-western frontier province that profile writers must remind us is largely tribal and the front line of the world's war on terror. Khan has led a popular campaign against drone attacks. He has promised that he will shoot down drones, look Americans in the eye, sit down with the Taliban over a cup of qahwa and sort this mess out.
So we finally have someone who feels at home in Mayfair as well as Peshawar. He finally has the chance to rule Peshawar. Slight problem: as he speaks no Pashto, the language of the Pathans. But his first fight will be against American drones hovering in the sky. And drones speak no Pashto either. If Khan can win this match, he can challenge Nawaz Sharif in the next elections.
Is this Nawaz Sharif man for real?
Nawaz Sharif at a campaign rally in Liaquat Bagh, Pakistan. Photograph: T. MUGHAL/EPA
Hasn't he been tried before? Twice? It seems voters in the largest province of Pakistani Punjab just can't have enough of this guy. At every campaign stop, Sharif reminded his supporters of two of his biggest achievements: I built the motorway, I built the bomb. He did build Pakistan's first motorway. And despite several phone calls from the then American president Bill Clinton and other world leaders and offers of million of dollars in aid, Sharif did go ahead and order six nuclear explosions in response to India's five. And then he thought that now that both countries have the bomb he could go ahead and be friends with India. While he was making history hosting the Indian prime minister in the historic city of Lahore, his generals were busy elsewhere repeating history on the mountains of Kargil. In a misadventure typical of Pakistani generals, they occupied the abandoned posts and then pretended that these were mujahideen fighting India and not regular Pakistan army soldiers.
When India reacted with overwhelming force and a diplomatic offensive, Sharif pleaded ignorance and rushed off to Washington to bail out the army and his own government. President Clinton praised his diplomatic skills and the crisis was resolved briefly. When, months later he tried to fire his handpicked army chief General Pervez Musharraf, the architect of the Kargil fiasco, a bunch of army officers put their guns to Sharif's head. Handcuffed, jailed, sentenced to life imprisonment, in the end Sharif was saved by his powerful friends in Saudi Arabia. A royal jet flew him, his family and his servants to a palace in Saudi Arabia. An exile in Saudi Arabia for Muslim rulers is generally considered a permanent retirement home where you get closer to Allah and atone for past sins. Sharif must be the only politician in exile in Saudi Arabia who not only managed to survive this holy exile but in the process got a hair transplant and managed to hold on to his political base in Pakistan.
Many of his political opponents say that if Sharif wasn't from the dominant province Punjab, where most of the army elite comes from, if he didn't represent the trading and business classes of Punjab, he would still be begging forgiveness for his sins in Saudi. But he returned just before the last elections and has been behaving like a statesman. A very rich statesman.
It has yet to be proven whether eight years of exile in Saudi Arabia can make anyone wiser but it has never made anybody poorer. Sharif was rich before he got into politics, then he became fabulously rich. Even in exile the Saudis gave him a palace and, on his return, a fleet of bulletproof limousines. His campaign proved that poor people don't really vote for somebody who understands poverty, or wants to do anything about it. People have voted him in because he talks money, talks about spending money, talks about opening a bank on every village street and who doesn't like that? He has promised motorway connections and airports to towns so small that they still don't have a proper bus station. Poor people, who couldn't afford a bicycle at the time of the elections, like to be promised an airport. You never know when you might need it.
In his five years' rule in Punjab, Sharif's party has had one policy about the Pakistani Taliban who have been wreaking havoc in parts of Pakistan: please go and do your business elsewhere. And they have generally obliged. But now that he is set to rule all of Pakistan, what's he going to tell them?
Have we defeated the Taliban or sent them a friend request?
A voter displays her inked thumb after marking her ballot paper at a polling station in Karachi. Photograph: Athar Hussain/REUTERS
When Pakistan decided to throw itself an election party, the first ones to arrive were the Taliban. They weren't really interested in the party because they keep reminding us that elections are un-Islamic and a major sin on a par with educating girls. But they were interested in watching what party games were played and who got to play them. They decided that the three political parties that had ruled Pakistan for the past five years and taken a clear stand against the Taliban would be targeted. And the Taliban started their own campaign, targeting candidates and their supporters with bomb attacks and drive-by shootings. In one case, a candidate in Karachi was shot as he came out of a mosque. Along with his six-year-old son. The election campaign across Pakistan looked like this: some parties held huge rallies, in a carnival-type atmosphere with live tigers and massive music systems. Other candidates sneaked from one little corner meeting to another trying to remind people of their heroic stand against the Taliban. Many of the candidates were never seen in public. Many journalists refused to visit them because they were sitting targets. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the public face of the ruling People's party, could only deliver a couple of video messages from Dubai.
The other parties, the ones who were allowed to campaign freely, were grateful in their silence. When we look at the election results we must not forget that while the Pakistani Taliban didn't contest the elections as a political party, they did see themselves as kingmakers. In Pakistan's liberal media the Taliban are often described as brutes with an endless bloodlust. But by making allies and choosing partners they have demonstrated that they are at least as canny as the average campaigning politician.
But in the end the Taliban failed to deliver the kind of devastation they had promised. They managed to kill about 130 people in eight weeks. In the past they have achieved that kind of number in a single day. Also, 60% of Pakistanis who came out to vote seem to be politely disagreeing with the Taliban by saying that there is nothing un-Islamic about standing in a queue and stamping a ballot paper.
The Taliban's real success is that they bet on the winners. They promised not to attack Khan and Sharif's parties. And these parties will be in power. But the Taliban have never contested an election before. And they are soon to find out that politicians never keep the promises they make during the heat of the campaign.
Why does this election mean nothing for Farzana Majeed?
Pakistani voters line up at a polling station in Karachi. Photograph: Athar Hussain/Reuters
Three weeks before the elections, a 27-year-old biochemistry graduate stood outside Karachi Press club. Farzana Majeed and a couple of dozen young people carried pictures of Zakir Majeed, a literature student who was abducted by Pakistan's military intelligence four years ago and since then has become one of the hundreds of missing Baloch people, mostly young, political activists. Their mutilated, tortured bodies turn up on the roadsidewith sickening regularity. The Pakistani media, otherwise quite noisy about every subject under the sun, stay quiet. None of the political parties campaigning in recent elections uttered a word about Zakir Majeed or hundreds of other people languishing in military-run dungeons. Why? Because it's a security issue. A militant separatist movement in parts of Balochistan means that the rest of Pakistan sees it as an enemy. The protesters distributed pamphlets encouraging the fellow Balochs not to participate in the elections. The voter turn out in Baloch areas in Balochistan has been less than 10%. No political party in the country had the heart to go and ask Farzana Majeed or thousands of other families to vote. Farzana is a polite, articulate person but mention the word elections and she is likely to wave her missing brother's picture in front of you. And just like Pakistan's last political government, the new one also doesn't want to see this picture.
So what happens to the federation?
Watching the election results come in, in a teashop in Lahore. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/REUTERS
Who needs a federation when you can have so much more fun doing things your own way. So in the post-election Pakistan, Khan will rule the north and shoot down American drones while discussing Scandinavian social welfare models with the Taliban. Sharif will rule in Punjab and the centre, try to do business with India and build more motorways all the while looking over his shoulder for generals looking at him. In the south, Bhutto's decimated People's party will keep ruling and keep saying that folks up north are stealing its water, destroying its social welfare programmes and secular legacy. And, in Balochistan, Farzana Majeed will keep waving her missing brother's picture.
Do these bits add up to a country? They do, if you are sitting in Islamabad and showing off your nuclear weapons to the world or planning a motorway to central Asia. But if you are an old woman waiting for her 2,000-rupee welfare cheque or a student activist in a military dungeon waiting for your next interrogation session, you are not likely to dream of motorways and new airports.
Pakistan as a federation has gone through its first rite of passage: handover of power from one elected civilian setup to another. It took Pakistan 67 years to get here. Let us not forget that the reasons that caused this delay haven't disappeared.
Mohammed Hanif is BBC Urdu's special correspondent based in Karachi. He is the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
The Islamic and irrationally anti-Indian elements in the self-image of the Pakistani state have led it down a self-destructive path.
Salman Rushdie famously said that Pakistan was “insufficiently imagined”. To say that a state is insufficiently imagined is to run into thorny questions regarding the appropriate quantum of imagination needed by any state; there is no single answer and at their edges (internal or external), all states and all imaginings are contested. But while the mythology used to justify any state is elastic and details vary in every case, it is not infinitely elastic and all options are not equally workable. I will argue that Pakistan in particular was insufficiently imagined prior to birth; that once it came into being, the mythology favoured by its establishment proved to be self-destructive; and that it must be corrected (surreptitiously if need be, openly if possible) in order to permit the emergence of workable solutions to myriad common post-colonial problems.
In state sponsored textbooks it is claimed that Pakistan was established because two separate nations lived in India — one of the Muslims and the other of the Hindus (or Muslims and non-Muslims, to be more accurate) and the Muslims needed a separate state to develop individually and collectively. That the two “nations” lived mixed up with each other in a vast subcontinent and were highly heterogeneous were considered minor details. What was important was the fact that the Muslim elite of North India (primarily Turk and Afghan in origin) entered India as conquerors from ‘Islamic’ lands. And even though they then settled in India and intermarried with locals and evolved a new Indo-Muslim identity, they remained a separate nation from the locals. More surprisingly, those locals who converted to the faith of the conquerors also became a separate nation, even as they continued to live in their ancestral lands alongside their unconverted neighbours. Accompanying this was the belief that the last millennium of Indian history was a period of Muslim rule followed by a period of British rule. Little mention was made of the fact that the relatively unified rule of the Delhi Sultanate and the Moghul empire (both of which can be fairly characterised as “Muslim rule”, Hindu generals, satraps and ministers notwithstanding) collapsed in the 18th century to be replaced in large sections of India by the Maratha empire, and then by the Sikh Kingdom of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
During British rule the cultural goods of the North Indian Muslim elite (Urdu language, literate “high church” Islam, Islamicate social customs, a sense of separateness and a sense of superiority to the ‘natives’) became more of a model for the emerging Muslim middle class. But even as many leading lights of the North Indian Muslim community fought hard to promote what they saw as “Muslim interests”, they were also attracted by the emerging notion of a modern and democratic Indian whole. Some of these leaders (including Jinnah) simultaneously espoused elements of Muslim nationalism and secularised Indian nationalism and sometimes went back and forth between these ideals or tried to aim for a synthesis. Some of this multi-tasking was undoubtedly the result of sophisticated political calculation by very smart people, but it must not be forgotten that a lot of it was also a reflection of the half-formed and still evolving nature of these categories.
In this confused and somewhat chaotic setting it is hard to argue that any particular outcome was inevitable or pre-ordained. But the tension between the Muslim elite’s sense of Muslim distinctiveness (a sense cultivated by the British rulers for their own purposes at every step) on the one hand and emerging Indian nationalism dominated by Hindus on the other, led some Muslims to think about various schemes of separation. Allama Iqbal, for example, imagined a separate Muslim country in the Northwest that would serve as India’s martial bulwark against central Asian marauders, while also acting as a laboratory for the development of an as yet uncreated Islamicate culture of his dreams. In this dream, Islam is not a static revealed truth; it is an evolving idea, a fire in the minds of men that drives them to endlessly create something new and heroic, yet rooted and eternal. The audience for this romantic but sophisticated fantasy was necessarily small, but less sophisticated versions of this vision played a role in exciting the minds of many young and newly-educated men during the movement for Pakistan.
Other visions of Pakistan were cruder and more literal minded and imagined a state where perfect Islamic law (already revealed and written in books, waiting to be applied as it had once been applied in the golden ages past) replaced “failed heathen systems”. Since no orthodox school of Sunni Islamic law had actually evolved beyond medieval models there was no way those blueprints could create a working modern state. But these mythical visions had played a prominent role in the propaganda of the Muslim league and they prepared the ground in which crude Salafist fantasies would find traction in the years to come.
The historian Ayesha Jalal has convincingly argued that Mr. Jinnah in fact wanted to use the threat of partition as a bargaining ploy to secure more rights for the Muslim political elite within united India. In this view, Mr. Jinnah and his lieutenants had never fully answered the many objections that were raised against the partition scheme because they never really expected the scheme to be carried out, but via a complicated series of mistakes and miscalculations on all sides, partition ended up becoming a reality.
Pakistan as it was created did not really overlap the domain of the North Indian Muslim elite who had been the main drivers of this demand. One way to solve this problem was to imagine the actually existing Pakistan as a transitional phase between British India and the re-establishment of some future Delhi sultanate (this crackpot scheme being the official ideology of the Zaid Hamid faction of Paknationalism). The other was to imagine that the cultural heritage of the Delhi Sultanate has now been transferred in toto to Pakistan by the North Indian Muslim elite and would grow and prosper here as the unifying culture of Pakistan. This package frequently included conscious or unconscious disdain for the existing cultures of Bengal, Punjab, Sindh, Pakhtoonkhwa and Baluchistan, and an irrational determination to expiate any sign of ‘Indian-ness’ in the greater cause of Urdu-speaking North Indian Muslim high culture.
The Bengalis found this so hard to swallow that they opted out of the experiment altogether. And in spite of the creation of a pan-Pakistan middle class that has been acculturated into a (necessarily shallow) version of North Indian Urdu culture, these contradictions remain potent in the West as well. Separatist movements are one consequence of this attempt to impose a shallow and partly imaginary Pakistani nationalism on existing cultures; a more insidious consequence is the accelerated decay of deeply rooted cultural frameworks and the growth of shallow Saudi or Western (or mixed-up) cultural tendencies in the resulting vacuum.
Other contradictions at the heart of the “two-nation theory” proved equally deadly in the long run. Pakistan had been created utilising the language of Muslim separatism and the millenarian excitement generated by the promise of a “Muslim state”. And even at the outset, these ideas were not just convenient tools for the elite to achieve economic objectives (a view common among leftists). The elite itself was Muslim. To varying extents, its members shared the myths of past greatness and future Islamic revival that they had just used to obtain a state for themselves. In a world where modern European institutions and ideas were taken for granted even by relatively orthodox upper class Muslims, the disruptive political possibilities hidden in orthodox Islamism were not easily appreciated and dreams of Islamic revival could take on almost any form.
Most hardcore Islamists had not supported the Pakistan movement precisely because they regarded the Muslim League leadership as Westernised modernists ignorant of orthodox Islamic thought. But they were quick to realise that Pakistan was a natural laboratory for their Islamic experiments. The fact that fantasies of Islamic rule had been projected as models for the state made it very difficult to argue against those who claimed to speak in the name of pure Islam. Besides, orthodox Islamists possessed the twin notions of apostasy and blasphemy that are extremely potent tools to suppress any challenge to Islamic orthodoxy. These tools create problems in all modern Muslim states, but they are especially hard to resist in a state supposedly created so that Islamic ideals could “order the collective life of Muslims in the light of the Quran and Sunnah” (to quote the Objectives Resolution). Consequently the modern Pakistani state has slowly but steadily ceded ideological ground to Islamists who can legitimately claim to be closer to the Islam described in orthodox books and taught in orthodox schools.
This rise of Islamic politics was not an overnight process. In fact Left wing slogans had far more appeal in the first 30 years of Pakistan than any Islamic slogan. But the Islamists proved far-sighted and persistent and used a succession of wedge issues to insert their agenda into national politics. From the anti-Ahmedi agitation of 1953 to the successful effort to declare them non-Muslim in 1974; and from the free-lance enforcement of blasphemy laws in British times (albeit one that prominent Muslim leaders including Allama Iqbal supported in the Ilm Deen case in the 1920s) to the powerful instrument of legal intimidation, bullying and state-sponsored murder created by General Zia in the 1980s, the Islamists have steadily tightened their grip. Having adopted Islam and irrational denial of our own Indian-ness as core elements of the state, the ‘modern’ factions of the establishment lack the vocabulary to answer the fanatics. This has allowed a relatively small number of Islamist officers to promote wildly dangerous policies (like training half a million armed Islamic fanatics in the 1990s) without saner elements being able to stop them. This unique “own-goal”, unprecedented in the history of modern states, is impossible to understand without reference to the Islamic and irrationally anti-Indian element in the self-image of the Pakistani state.
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Pakistan and its Stories
I recently wrote a piece titled “Pakistan, myths and consequences”, in which I argued that Pakistan’s founding myths (whether present at birth or fashioned retroactively) make it unusually difficult to resist those who want to impose various dangerous ideas upon the state in the name of Islam. The argument was not that Pakistan exists in some parallel dimension where economic and political factors that operate in the rest of the world play no role. But rather that the usual problems of twenty-first century post-colonial countries (problems that may prove overwhelming even where Islamism plays no role) are made significantly worse by the imposition upon them of a flawed and dangerous “Paknationalist-Islamic” framework. Without that framework Pakistan would still be a third world country facing immense challenges. But with this framework we are committed to an ideological cul-de-sac that devalues existing cultural strengths and sharpens existing religious problems (including the Shia-Sunni divide and the use of blasphemy laws to persecute minorities). Not only do these creation myths have negative consequences (as partly enumerated in the above-linked article) but they also have very little positive content. There is really no such thing as a specifically Islamic or “Pakistani” blueprint for running a modern state. None. Nada. Nothing. There is no there there. Yet school textbooks, official propaganda and everyday political speech in Pakistan endlessly refer to some imaginary “Islamic model” of administration and statecraft. Since no such model exists, we are condemned to hypocritically mouthing meaningless and destructive Paknationalist and Islamist slogans while simultaneously (and almost surreptitiously) trying to operate modern Western constitutional, legal and economic models.
This argument is anathema to Pakistani nationalists, Islamists and neo-Islamists (e.g. Imran Khan, who believes a truly Islamic state would look something like Sweden without the half-naked women) but it is also uncomfortable for upper class Leftists educated in Western universities. Their objections matter to me because they are my friends and family, so I will try to answer some of them here. These friends have pointed out to me that:
India is not much better.
The US systematically supported Islamists in Pakistan and pushed for the suppression of leftist and progressive intellectuals for decades.
Colonialism.
About the India objection, I believe that objection misses the point. The Indian subcontinent is all a work in progress. Every nation has miles to go. We are by far the largest repository of REALLY poor people on planet earth. Indians (defined as anyone belonging to the wider Indian genetic and civilisational cluster, hence including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan) are the most numerous population group on earth (outnumbering the Chinese by hundreds of millions) and living standards in greater India are barely ahead of “sub-Saharan Africa” (which admittedly includes South Africa, so the category is rather heterogeneous and misleading) and social and economic problems are correspondingly huge.
Culturally too, it is a remarkably heterogeneous and variegated civilization (though still recognizably “Indian”) and the modern Indian state is very far from being a model for anyone. While its founding myth and ideal are positive ideals (multicultural, secular, democratic India) its actual practice is frequently very far from those ideals. But if and when India approaches its ideal, it will have improved. And its ideal draws upon the same vast storehouse of experimentation and theorization to which every other modern country and culture contributes and from which they all draw their lessons. That India is not much better is expected. But it is swimming the same river as everyone else and with time, may swim better. It may even contribute some original ideas of its own to the great (and frequently bloody and unjust) ongoing project of human social organization in the 21st century CE. But what is (ostensibly) being attempted in Pakistan is something different. IF the “ideology of Pakistan” propaganda is taken remotely seriously then something not yet in existence elsewhere is to be created in Pakistan. This will be something religious, Islamic, republican, democratic, socialist, capitalist and fair (all elements may not apply). In principle one must concede the possibility that Pakistan and its leading intellectuals will craft something new, different and better than anything that exists elsewhere in Europe or Asia today. In practice one can take one look at said intellectuals and, well, enough said.
The US has indeed played a large (and usually negative) role in Pakistani politics (and continues to play a large role). But while US imperial intervention is a fact of life, it is not (and has never been) omnipotent or omniscient. Many countries have maneuvered from a position of dependency to one of near-independence. Pakistani nationalism and its supposedly Islamic ideal are neither a necessary result of US intervention, nor its best antithesis. The Pakistani bourgeoisie can and should dump both and still figure out how to manage US intervention.
Colonialism I will leave to the post-colonialists.
There are limits to what can be discussed on a highly educated liberal blog without getting lost in translation.
Finally, a recent concrete illustration of how the founding myths work to alter the direction of events in Pakistan.
A couple of days ago, prominent journalist (and Islamist Paknationalist) Ansar Abbasi wrote a front page “expose” in the daily The News, owned and operated by the supposedly modern and forward looking “Jang Group” (the largest media group in Pakistan). In this article, he announced that the Punjab government (led by the right-of-center Pakistan Muslim League-N; a party that is no stranger to using Islamist and Paknationalist propaganda) had deleted some “Islamic” chapters from the 10th grade Urdu language textbook for 2013. His litany of complaints included the following:
The second chapter in the old edition was on ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ written by Dr Ghulam Mustafa Khan. This important chapter highlighted the basis for the creation of Pakistan and endorsed that the country was created in the name of Islam, to make it an Islamic state, has been replaced by a new chapter on ‘Princess of Paristan’ (Paristan ki shahzadi) written by Ashraf Saboohi.
…Poetry of a Indian poet Firaq Gorakhpuri has been included in the text book and the poet is presented as a hero awarded by the Indian and Russian governments.
While the title page of the book contains the picture of Allama Iqbal, it does not contain any poem of the great poet of Islam and Pakistan. Excluding extremely impressive Islamic poetry, the new text book, however starts with a Hamd (praise of Almighty Allah) and Naat (praise of Hazrat Muhammad — PBUH).
Keep in mind that this is a textbook meant for the Urdu language class, not the Islamic studies or Pakistan studies class. One day after the publication of this attack (and its amplification on social media, especially by supporters of Imran Khan) chief minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered the “Islamic chapters” reinstated. It took less than 24 hours for matters to be corrected.
Cricketer and philanthropist Imran Khan has recently become very popular among young people educated through these textbooks. His current policy is to be all things to all people and his manifesto is progressive and liberal and completely skips the topic of Islam and the so-called ideology of Pakistan. While it is unlikely that he will overcome various hurdles and become the leading party in the coming elections, even if his party were to somehow sweep into power it will never be able to resist demands couched in the idiom of Islam and Pakistan. This is because neither he nor his fans have any vocabulary with which they can counter arguments that are obviously in line with orthodox Islam and behind which looms the specter of blasphemy and apostasy. Within their circles, some of these people can and do have conversations about modern Islam and the need to counter “extremism”, but when someone like Ansar Abbasi becomes aggressive, they will have to back down.In fact, their fate is likely to be worse than Shahbaz Sharif's because they want to achieve their modern Scandinavian Islamic state without resort to “dirty politics” or hypocrisy. It is very hard to square that circlewith resort to dirty politics and hypocrisy…without them, it is likely to be impossible.
(Listen from the 1:20 mark onwards)
Finally, it is not my claim that there is something essentially barbaric about “Islam” which makes an “Islamic” solution impossible. Islam is what Muslims make of it. It has been made many things in the past and will be made into many things in the future. But intellectual development in orthodox mainstream Sunni Islam has been moribund for centuries. This is partly due to the unusual success of blasphemy and apostasy memes that were meant to protect orthodoxy from criticism but have also made it sterile. I do not think that this is a permanent state of affairs. There are already glimmers of change. Much more will happen as orthodox controls loosen. But the time frame of that renaissance and the immediate needs of the Pakistani state do not coincide. For now, we have to stay away from Islamism or we are going to end up with Munawwar Hassan’sIslam. That’s just how things happen to be at this point in history.
History was old and rusted, it was a machine nobody had plugged in for thousands of years, and here all of a sudden it was being asked for maximum output. Nobody was surprised that there were accidents…
—Salman Rushdie, Shame
Omar Ali is a Pakistani-American physician who also moderates the “Asiapeace” discussion group on the internet. This article first appeared on 3Quarksdaily. The paintings are by Punjabi artist Shahid Mirza
TFT Issue: 05 Sep 2014
The US has indeed played a large (and usually negative) role in Pakistani politics (and continues to play a large role). But while US imperial intervention is a fact of life, it is not (and has never been) omnipotent or omniscient. Many countries have maneuvered from a position of dependency to one of near-independence. Pakistani nationalism and its supposedly Islamic ideal are neither a necessary result of US intervention, nor its best antithesis. The Pakistani bourgeoisie 