A wintery morning. A small, all but abandoned, railway station. A few scrawny plants growing between its building and a double rail track glued on a cheerless slope with sombre, brooding hills closing in from all sides as if to prevent the station from escaping. That was Hirok station in the heart of Balochistan’s Bolan Pass — or at least that is my most abiding memory of it.

On a bench in front of the building lay what looked like a body shrouded in a grey shawl. To the grinding sound of our trolley’s brakes, it raised a bit of the shawl from its head to cast a bleary eye in our direction. Recognising the trolley men, it waved a languid hand and went back under the shawl. We passed on down the slope, once again gathering speed.

It was March 1995 and friends in the railway had arranged for me to be taken down the Bolan Pass by trolley. From Kolpur station at the western head of the pass to the coal town of Machh, around 25 kilometres in the south-east, it is all the way down. After the initial push, the trolley goes screaming down the sharp gradient powered only by gravity. This slope had once seemed impossible for broad gauge steam engines to negotiate.

It was, indeed, for the sharp gradients of the Bolan Pass that railway engineers took the line north from Sibi through the Nari Gorge and across the dramatic Chappar Rift in order to connect Quetta with the rest of British India. But the unstable geology and the continual mud and rock slides in the rift told Raj railway engineers that another line was needed if they had to get to Kandahar in a hurry. And the hurry was imperative.

Having resoundingly lost the First Afghan War (1839-42), the army of the East India Company was paranoid with fear of Russia marching into Afghanistan. The situation only worsened in the latter half of the 19th century as tensions between Czarist Russia and Victorian Britain rose to a fever pitch, both vying for imperial superiority in Central Asia. Since railway was the fastest way to transport troops, Russia was swiftly embroidering Asian deserts with steel threads east of the Don River even as British engineers hastened to match stitch for stitch through the Subcontinent and across the shale and limestone barriers of the Suleman Mountains and the Bolan Pass.

It was not until seven years after the end of the second Afghan War (1878-80) that the first line through Chappar Rift reached Quetta. But landslides and floods plagued the route even when it was being built, necessitating an alternate line. This seemed feasible only through the more stable geology of the Bolan Pass

Originally, the line from Sibi was to swing due west to reach the village of Rind Ali (Rindli on British maps of that era). Here it would veer north-west for Hirok through the Kundlani Gorge.

As the summer began in 1885, the line started to inch forward. Through furnace blasts of searing wind, labourers and engineers toiled to put a broad gauge (five feet and six inches wide) line. To add to the discomfort of the heat, cholera broke out in construction camps, resulting in the deaths of several hundred workers. Still, with remarkable doggedness, the builders kept at it, perhaps driven by the desire to reach the cooler heights as quickly as possible.

By mid-November that year, when the heat had already let off, the line reached Hirok (where the body under the shawl had waved to me) at 1,400 metres above the sea. Now came the hard part. The height rose dramatically to 1,790 metres within the 12 kilometres distance between Hirok and Kolpur through the Dozan Gorge. This rise of 390 metres in such a short distance was so sheer that not even the most powerful locomotive of the time could haul a train up it.

The railwaymen’s answer was to put in a smaller metre gauge (three feet and three inches wide) line between Hirok and Kolpur. The line to Quetta from Kolpur was again to be broad gauge, passing across what is known as Dasht-e-Bedaulat (the Wretched Plain) — nothing grew here except a few grasses and, if winter rain and snow were abundant, some flowers. (In the early 1990s, I saw the first of several tube wells sprouting on the plain. Within years, it stood transformed with seasonal wheat and orchards.)

The change in gauge meant that freight and passengers would be transhipped from broad gauge carriages to the smaller ones at Hirok. After being hauled up to the cool heights of Kolpur, they would be shipped again to the larger vehicles. If that was not trouble enough for sahibs and memsahibs, another problem was that the line, sitting on the stony bed of the Bolan River as it passed through the tortuous Dozan Gorge, suffered periodic damage when rain sent down a flood in the otherwise dry stream. Once again, it was realised that this too was not the answer and plans were put in place to lay a ‘high level’ broad gauge line from Sibi to Dozan.

In 1888, work began on new bridges and tunnels. Two years later, as if to prove the old adage about the best laid plans of mice and men, nature brought down a huge flood through the gorge, washing away the bridges, girders and all. The Kundlani Gorge route just turned out to be another replay of the maddening Chappar Rift route.

So, yet another alternative was needed. The line was now to be built through somewhat higher Mushkaf Valley that sits between Sibi and Hirok. With a shallower gradient difference, the line was forced all the way up to Hirok through places with names as mysterious as Aab-e-Gum (Lost Water, where the Bolan River disappears underground) and as evocative as Machh (Date Palm).

Hirok onward, some magnificent bridges and a number of tunnels took the line to the top of the pass at Kolpur. Even now, trains had to be hauled up from Machh to Kolpur with what in railway parlance is called a banking engine, that is, an extra engine at the back of the train to give it additional upward push.

The tunnels here have interesting names: there is Windy Corner and then there are Mary Jane, Cascade and Summit. The second one is named after the wife of F L O’Callaghan, the pioneer of this line, and the last one is an obvious reference to the top of the Bolan Pass. Below Cascade, right next to Elgin Bridge, there is a bit of another mystery: a smaller tunnel. This is the old metre gauge tunnel abandoned after the broad gauge line became operational.

It was in 1894 when the first ‘through’ train from down country rolled into Quetta by the Mushkaf-Bolan route. By and by, this became a daily service even while the once a week up and down service through the Chappar Rift also continued. Then, in July 1942, came the flood in the rift to wash out that line. If Raj engineers had little interest to re-establish it, it was only because the Bolan Pass line was running trouble-free.

Climb to a vantage point high above the valley floor in Dozan Gorge and watch the diesel engines hauling green and cream coaches along the brown contours of the landscape into Cascade Tunnel. As the clatter and growl of the engine turns into a boom and, later, as the noise reverberates solidly off the rocky bed of the dry stream when the lines travels over the magnificent Elgin Bridge, the flesh crawls and the eye mists. It is like being in a high adventure movie. And as you contemplate the scene below, of a sudden you are hit with one realisation: had periodic disasters not devilled the Chappar Rift, the Bolan Pass line would never have been laid.

At Quetta, the line spreads out in three prongs: one going south-west to the Iranian frontier; the other going west across the Khwaja Amran Mountains to Chaman; and the third going north-east to Zhob. Each of these lines has a story of its own to tell.

This article was published in the Herald's June 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

New York: It's a frigid morning on the urbane East Side and the hulky American-made Chevrolet Caprice Classic is guzzling its way past Central Park and its standard smattering of joggers and roller-bladers covered with lycra and spandex. Now and then the cab makes a loud clunkety sound, let off from somewhere within its mammoth eight-cylinder engine, and the Haitian born driver makes token protests in response, mostly in monosyllables.

“This car’s a piece of you know what man,” says Michael the cabbie. “But when we get there you say when to stop man and I make this thing stop as good as I can.” This is the last thing he says as we hurtle down a maze of city streets until we finally reach the Morningside Heights neighborhood, a sort of American equivalent of Kharadar gone help where Columbia University is located. "What you wanna do here man?" he says now, putting on a large pair of Rayban Wayfarer sunglasses and pointing to my Dictaphone. “You wanna interview somebody or what?" In truth, of course, it's more than the mini tape recorder that's giving away his passenger as a foreign journalist. Michael picked up his fare at the Overseas Press Club and he is probing to see if he has I a vulnerable newcomer on his hands.

The Fourth Estate is a worldwide victim of shark cab-drivers and New York is no different. To make matters worse, I am carrying a copy of The Jerusalem Post overseas edition in my hands, a sure sign for any driver that his passenger deserves no more than the full treatment. I peer at the meter, answer yes to his question, and hand him the exact fare. It's a coup; he is shocked and dismayed. But he insists that he is genuinely interested and wants to know the subject of the interview. So, I say “Edward Said” and explain who Said is, unprepared for his response.

“Goddamned Arabs” he exults, guffawing, obviously unaware of the racist charge of his outburst. “You go put those Jews in their place brother,” he screams, loud enough for a group at a nearby bus stop to hear. “Show them man”, his voice booms as the cab clunkety-clunks once and disappears, leaving just his unreconstructed racism and a bad taste in the mouth. It will stay with me for the course of the day.

In a way, of course, it is relevant. Arab and Jew, Muslim and Palestinian. Wog and hymie. One only needs to visit New York, not to mention the Middle East, to realise that these distinctions, real and imaginary, convenient and hustling, continue to inform social and political discourse. “Compared to us”, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once told the Palestinians, “you are like grasshopper.” And in America’s great universities and across Washington D.C, at well- funded think-tanks, it is still not passe to talk about ‘Arab attitudes’ and the ‘Muslim mind’. To regard peoples who are different from oneself and may have different beliefs or espouse a separate set of ideals as somehow less legitimate or inferior.

Edward W. Said, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia, friend and advisor of the Palestine National Council, writer, historian and critic, has been explicating these ugly truths for well over twenty years. A prolific producer of books and a relentless destroyer of wordprocessor keyboards, Said is seen by many as having singlehandedly wrought a sea change in the way the western mind perceives its oriental opposite, a process whose implications of knowledge and power he explained in his landmark 1978 work Orientalism.

His other works include Covering Islam, which documented in painstaking detail the hypocracies of mainstream US news coverage, and his three books dealing with the issue closest to his heart, Palestine: The Question of Palestine, Blaming the Victims, and After the Last Sky. The last book takes its title from a poem by Mahmoud Darvish, the national poet of the Palestinians, and was produced in collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr.

Taken as a body of work, these individual books have put into sharp perspective the narrow, often ethnocentric path which western literary and political treatments of the east have more often than not taken. At the sync time, they have also made Said a hero and a cult figure, opening up vast areas of debate and making his name synonymous with innovation and change in both thought and action. His opinions and comments have been sought by major news organizations all over the United States. He has appeared regularly on national television. In many ways he is regarded as Palestine's Ambassador At Large.

But if Said’s work on Palestine has brought him international recognition, it has also exposed him to unfair, sometimes racist, attacks from both extremist Jewish groups and, on a more serious note, the mainstream of American intelligentsia which once dominated the issues which Said has made rapidly his own: Palestine, the Middle East, Europe and the West’s distorted perceptions of the so-called ‘other,’ the Orient, the horrendous implications of Zionism for the Palestinians.

For instance, Said routinely receives death threats. His home telephone number is kept unpublished for fear of racist phone calls. And all callers at his office are thoroughly screened by his staff before he meets them. His experience with the US media has also been coloured by the unpleasant feeling that he has come to be regarded by American intelligentsia as “some sort of diplomat for terrorism”, a stereotypical characterization that he finds unfair. And yet, whatever the cost, nobody doubts that Said has made his mark, not only as the historiographer/iconoclast of orientalism, which to many in the third world will remain his most memorable moment, but also in the more rarefied field of bare bones literary criticism.

In the heart of American literary academe, Said is now known as a disciple and heir of sorts to the French philosopher and litterateur, Michel Foucault, mainly due to his approaches to post-structuralist theory. His early works, Joseph Conrad and The Fiction of Autobiography, and Beginnings: Intention and Method have been standard university texts for many years. And his 1983 collection of essays, The World, The Text, And The Critic is a virtual must on any serious bookshelf.

Last, but not the least, especially to Pakistanis and Indians, he is known for his abiding interest in the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Holding him to be a great example of the post-colonialist intellectual at work, Said often mentions Faiz’s name along with that of the great Kenyan writer and intellectual, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, to illustrate for the uninitiated the nature of the third world literary and political landscape. In fact, in Said’s hands, Faiz almost became an epigram, a fact evident in the oft-quoted article which the Palestinian writer contributed to the New York based Harper’s magazine in 1984.

“To see a poet in exile-as opposed to reading the poetry of exile-is to see exile’s antimonies embodied and endured. Several years ago, I spent some time with Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the greatest of the contemporary Urdu poets. He had been exiled from his native Pakistan by Ziaul Haq’s military regime and had found a welcome of sort in the ruins of Beirut. His closest friends were Palestinian, but I found that although there was an affinity between them, nothing quite matched- language, poetic convention, life history. Only once, when Eqbal Ahmed, a Pakistani and fellow exile, came to Beirut, did Faiz seem to overcome the estrangement written all over his face. The three of us sat in a dingy restaurant one night and Faiz recited poems to us. After a while, he and Eqbal stopped translating his verses for my benefit, but it did not matter. For what I watched required no translation, no enactment of homecoming steeped in defiance and loss, as if to say exultantly to Zia: ‘We are Here’. Of course, Zia was the one who was at home.”

The Herald thought it would be proper to begin the interview with some more thoughts on the significance of Faiz before asking Professor Said about the importance of being Edward.

Herald. You say, 'Of course Zia was the one who was at home'. But if he was, and indeed we know he was, what was in it for Faiz? And if in countries like Pakistan, we are to espouse this Faizian model of the postcolonial intellectual, what in the end is gained and lost? Tell us why the world maybe needs another Faiz. Why we must continue to turn to the Zias of the world and continue the chant, ‘We are here'.

Edward Said. First, a couple of things. The article came out in 1984 but my meeting with Faiz was in '79 or '80. Also, even though I had no way of knowing this at the time, I understand Faiz went back to Pakistan. In fact, he died in Pakistan.

Now, I don't know the precise reasons because of which he left Pakistan in 1979 (or thereabouts), but I assume it was because his freedom was threatened. He may have been put in jail, or silenced in other ways. As I remember it, he was the editor of Lotus, which was an Afro-Asian writers' magazine and, to the test of my knowledge, he was the responsibility of the Palestinians. There was a man there by the name of Mu'in Besseisso, a Palestinian poet who has since died also, who worked at the magazine and understood Faiz's satire, and so on. Since this was a particularly lawless period in Beirut's history, I think he (Besseisso) secured the protection of the Palestinians so that Faiz's safety and comfort were assured.

What I say in that article, and the point I am leading up to here is that in spite of all this, exile is not such a bad thing. I think that in order to continue working, in the case of a writer or an intellectual! (like Faiz) it might be necessary sometimes to leave and to find another place to continue. At the time of the meeting, I didn't know Faiz would return, and what I was doing was contrasting his condition with my own. I left Palestine in 1947 and never went back to the part of Palestine I am from, which later became Israel. I was on the West Bank in 1966, one year before the Israeli invasion, but I haven't been back there either.

Herald. And what about this exultant and defiant retort to Zia, ‘We Are Here’, as a larger sort of condition, as opposed to whatever it may be construed as meaning in a narrower Pakistani sense. As a general condition, what does that statement say?

Said. Look, as a general condition, India and Pakistan on the one hand, and the Arabs on the other, share a common background of colonial tribulation followed by independence and sovereignty. And at least in our case, speaking of the Arabs, what has happened is that although there are now twenty plus independent Arab states, the Arab world itself, with its rules and regimes and kings and presidents, is a catastrophe.

You have regimes, all of whom, with the exception of a few, are deeply unpopular. You have the resurgence of Muslim religious political feeling. You have a significant brain-drain; a lot of people are leaving. And above all, from my point of view, you have a cultural class, let’s say, who are either silent or hiding or abroad.

So, very frequently in a situation like this – when the situation is hopeless – it is important to turn to a symbolic figure, like a poet or a writer or an intellectual, to a Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who is not co-opted, who is not corrupted, who is not silenced, and to say what he or she is doing is enough for us. Of course, in reality it’s not enough. What we are talking about are situations where political change has often been set back. There has been no political change.

Herald. You are also a writer exiled from his country. Tell us, is your situation essentially different from Faiz or, say, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, the Kenyan, who you also sometimes mention? Does being in America make the situation distinctly different? And I ask you this because in one of the essays in The World, The Text, And The Critic you talk about Eric Auerbach, the Jewish, western trained and educated intellectual who wrote Mimesis.

You note that he was exiled by the Nazis and wrote the book in Istanbul, an odd place for such an important western work to be written in, since that city at the time still represented what Europe regarded as the Ottoman menace. Then you go on to discuss Auerbach’s condition in more detail. But it sounds almost as if you are talking about yourself. After all, you are also in the belly of the beast, a Palestinian at work in the United States. Is that so?

Said. Well, obviously there are many parallels, but I wouldn’t want to suggest that my life is a very difficult one. Due to a series of fortunate circumstances, I am in a field which allows me to teach literature and to maintain a position as a professor, with great luxury and ease. I mean, it’s a wonderful job. It’s the best job in the world. So in that sense, I can’t really complain. But I must say that there is no question that I live in an alien environment. And all said and done, it is very difficult because my relationship with the culture and the surroundings is adversarial. People are always waiting for me to say something in order for them to utter rebuttal.

Nothing I say is easily accepted, it must be fought over. Not to mention the fact that I come from a part of the world that most people here are completely ignorant of: the Arab world, the Islamic world. Nothing is known about it at all. What is known, as I tried to show in Orientalism, is extremely attenuated and a series of stupid clichés: violent this, despotic that. And then, if you say, well can you name a writer, an Arabic writer, these people come up with no names. There is nothing. They draw a blank. So, it’s a tough situation.

Herald. You described an occasion once, before Naguib Mahfooz won the Nobel Prize, when an American publisher called you and asked for a list of writers. Could you tell that story for the benefit of our readers?

Said. I will tell you exactly. The publisher called me sometime in 1980 or ’81 and asked for a list of third world writers, because he wanted to start a series, and I put Mahfooz at the top of the list. A few months later, I saw this publisher and I said well, what have you picked? So he told me that Mahfooz was not one of the writers that he had chosen. I asked him why. After all, Mahfooz was the greatest Arabic writer, and a world figure. Why would he drop him? He said: “Well, you see, Arabic is a controversial language.” The language is controversial! I mean, what are we talking about here?

I’ll give you another example. There is a great deal done in American universities, in their literature departments, with medieval studies: medieval English, medieval French, and so on. And the phrase medieval is understood to cover the entire middle ages.

Yet, not a single instance can I think of in which medieval courses and programmes ever include Andalusian, Muslim civilisation, which was exactly contemporary with that of say Dante, Chaucer, Aquinas etcetra, etcetra. And on a much higher level, whether it be science or literature or theology or medicine, it’s just left out! So, if you live in this culture and you come from the part of the world (the Arab and Islamic world), you have to pay the price of this, lapse, let’s call it.

Herald. Now, on the other hand, your own works are very widely distributed in the West and equally sought after in the third world. With Orientalism, you had a profound galvanizing influence on an entire generation. It has been translated into seventeen or eighteen languages, and to many among us, it represents a manifesto, so to speak, a state of mind. Tell us, have you had the time, so many years since 1978 when that book came out, to sit down and scrutinize the changes in perception it has brought about?

Said. Well, yes, I think it has changed perceptions. In the west, for instance, in certain fields, such as anthropology, history, cultural studies, feminist studies, it has influenced people to think about problems of power relationships between cultures and peoples, where dominance includes the power to represent and create, to control and to manipulate. In other words, it makes the argument for the connection between the production of knowledge and power. And specifically, because it was a historical work, it really looks at all of this in the age of empire.

Now, one of the things I was slightly disturbed by, in terms of the book’s influence in the Muslim world, was that it was considered by some to be a book in defense of Islam, which it was not at all. I have nothing to say about Islam; what I talk about are representations of Islam, rather than Islam itself. I suppose somebody could write a book about portrayals of the West in the Islamic world, and come up with roughly the same distortions. But what I am really interested in, to make my point, is not just distortion, because distortion always occurs, but rather in trying to facilitate an understanding of how it occurs, and what might be done to ameliorate it. So, that is one point.

Another reflection is that since Orientalism came out in 1978, I have myself started thinking of the problem of orientalism in a wider context. Beginning in 1984-85, I started working on a book, nearly finished now and scheduled to come out later this year, which is a kind of sequel to Orientalism, but looks at the problem in a global context.

In other words, I try to look at Africa, I look at the Middle East, I look at India and Pakistan and I try to discover what the role of culture was in forming imperialism in the West. In the middle of the book, I look at the role of culture in the process of decolonisation and resistance to imperialism – in other words, what role culture played in resisting empire in places like India and what is now Pakistan, in Africa, the Caribbean and so on.

And then, in the last chapter, I look at the role of the United States after classical empires were dismantled in World War II, to see, since the extraordinary role that the United States played as the last remaining imperial power, and the influence of that role upon knowledge and the production of knowledge. And all of this really comes out of my work on orientalism. I have tried to extend it and take it further, looking not only at the aggressive aspects of empire but also at the resistances to empire that people like you and I were able to mount. After all, empires didn’t last. India gained its independence in 1947. So, something happened, and that is what I look at in this book.

Herald. Getting back to Orientalism itself. Tell us, was there a sequence of events in your life which led to the writing of Orientalism?

Said. Well, there are several germs. One of the things was when I was growing up after we left Palestine and were in Egypt. Although my family was well off and I went to colonial schools in Palestine and Egypt, I realised that no matter what I was by virtue of family or education or language, to a ruling Englishman – and this is colonial Egypt in 1948-49 – I would always remain a wog. It was brought home to me in an episode I will never forget.

I was walking home across the fields of the Gazira Sporting Club in Cairo, a great colonial sporting club of which my family was a member. It was a club really for the English but they admitted a few locals. So, I was walking home (we lived near the club) and the man whom I saw coming towards me on a bicycle was the secretary of the club, an Englishman named Mr. Pilly. He stopped me and said: “Boy, what are you doing here” and I replied, “I’m walking home.” And he said: “Don’t you know you’re not allowed to be here” and I said “Yes, I am allowed to be here. Because my family is a member.” And he said “Boy, you are not allowed here. You are an Arab boy. Get out.” Now the irony of this is) and by the way, I did get out: I was scared) that Mr Philly’s son was a classmate of mine at school. Now these are the sort of formative experiences where you come to understand that race, in the colonial context-no matter what else goes on – is determining. So that’s one of the germs to it.

Another germ was 1967, when I was here already. I was a professor at Columbia. I was not at all involved in politics. I was a student of European literature and a professor of it. But then the war broke out and I realised the enormous cultural hatred and bias towards Arabs and the Arab world, and that politicised me. That is to say, being an Arab, I identified with the Arab losses and realised how much of the loss was due to the fact that we were considered to be an inferior people. I began to try to understand where that image they had of us came from.

The last point that I want to make about Orientalism, which is also very important, is that I don’t think I would have written that book had I not been politically associated with a struggle. The struggle of Arab and Palestinian nationalism is very important to that book. Orientalism is not meant to be an abstract account of some historical formation but rather a part of the liberation from such stereotypes and such domination of my own people, whether they are Arabs, or Muslims or Palestinians.

Herald. It’s good you brought it up, Professor Said, since we were about to turn to Palestine any way. You concluded The Question of Palestine by saying that by saying: “We must not forget that Palestine is saturated with blood and violence, and we must look forward realistically to much turbulence, much ugly human waste, in the short term.

Unhappily, the question of Palestine with renew itself in all too well-known forms. But so too will the people of Palestine-Arabs and Jews-whose past and future binds them inexorably together. Their encounter has yet to occur on any important scale. But it will occur, I know, and it will be to their mutual benefit.” Now with the advent of direct negotiations (and the third round of negotiations in Washington will already have taken place by the time this is printed) do you think that the encounter, so to speak, has occurred?

Said. Yes I think it really began to occur during the Intifada, with the beginning of the Intifada in December of 1987, and it has continued to occur. The Israelis have had to confront the reality of the Palestinian nation. I am not talking about rioting individuals or of throwing stones. I am talking about a nation. For the first time in their history, Israelis are dealing with an entire population which constitutes a nation because.

Of course, that entire population in the Occupied Territories is tied with people like myself, who live in exile. More than half of the Palestinian population lives outside Palestine. Forty-five percent live on this land of historical Palestine, that is to say the Occupied Territories and present day Israel, and fifty-dive percent live abroad, like myself and my entire family, who were made refugees in 1948.

This has made Israel confront, first through the Intifada and then through the declaration of Palestinian statehood in Algiers in 1988, then the recognition of Israel by the Palestinians, and now through these talks, the reality of the Palestinian nation. It is coming. It is very, very slow. But I have no doubt that at the end of the process there will be an independent Palestinian state.

I also have no doubt, however, that Israel as a nation- and I’m not talking about individuals but rather an establishment –had made very little progress towards us and towards what we have done as people. They still will not recognize the PLO. They still will not recognize Palestinian nationalism.

I don’t know if you notice this, and most people in the West are not aware of this, but when Shamir and Netanyahu (Israel’s deputy foreign minister) speak they never speak about the Palestinians, they always call them “the Palestinian Arabs.” That’s still a part of their political make-up; that we (the Palestinians) are not a people.

Herald. So you don’t exist?

Said. Well, we do exist, but they refer to us as “aliens” who lie on the land of Eretz Israel. The more honest Likud settler in Israel refers to the Palestinians on the West bank and Gaza as “aliens” on the land of Israel. So, they have made no progress yet in coming to terms with our reality as a nation. The same is true of the most American Jews.

I can’t speak of Jews in the West, but American Jews, with a few exceptions, still cannot reconcile themselves to the existence of our nationhood. And one of the reasons is that the whole enterprise that brought Israel into being was premised upon our non-existence. Now, suddenly, forty-five years later, they discover that not only are we here now, but that we have been here all along, and it’s something that’s just very difficult for them to accept.

Herald. Do you think that an encounter on a major scale, at this point in time (and we are talking about, say, the next two years), is at all possible without the PLO and Yasser Arafat coming overtly into the picture?

Said. No it’s not. And, in fact, it is taking place with the PLO. In other words, there is this tremendous illusion, mainly because of this ludicrous puerile attitude of the Americans and the Israeli’s, that if you exclude the physical presence of the PLO, the PLO will go away. The delegation sent to Madrid and to Washington was chosen by the PLO. Everything they say or do is referred to and approved by the PLO. The delegates receive directives from the PLO.

Many of them are supporters of parties within the PLO. And all of them recognize the supreme authority of the PLO as the national organisation representing Palestinian identity as a nation. So, I think this ‘we are not talking with the PLO’ business is a reflection on the juvenile qualities of the Americans and the Israelis. They say, “Well, you know, we are not dealing with them.”

But on the other hand, they are dealing with them in this roundabout way. They are prisoners of their own silly ideology that the PLO is nothing but a terrorist organisation. If you believe that kind of lie then you can’t really deal with reality. That’s why I am really proud of the fact that the Palestinians are mature and are able to deal with the Israelis as they are.

We don’t need ideological fiction. We can say: “We are dealing with Israel” We are not dealing with “the Zionist entity.” And it’s true, we are the ones who want to deal with the Israeli government; they are the ones who have difficulty sitting with us. In the last round of talks in Washington, they refused to sit in the same room with the Palestinians. They said we don’t recognise you. We must sit only with the Jordanians. And that is what they are stalling. But I think in their hearts they know that the inevitable is upon them. They are going to have to deal with us. The real question now, of course, is how much and how long America is going to indulge them in this fantasy of not dealing with us.

Herald. There has been some criticism of this specific administration, the Bush administration, over its decision to join this month’s United Nations resolution condemning Israel for its latest deportations of Palestinians. How do you feel about that?

Said. I don’t take very seriously the changes that have occurred in the policies of this country under the Bush-Baker administration. I think it is very important to remember that this is the first American administration to attempt and partially succeed in destroying a major Arab country.

This is an administration that uses the United Nations to continue to violate the sovereignty of Iraq, which is one of the two major Arab countries. It is an administration that has granted nothing to Palestinian nationalism at all except cosmetic improvement in its image after the end of the Gulf war.

It needs a ‘Peace Victory’ to make up for what it was not able to do in Iraq to bring down the regime of Saddam. He is a tyrant, I will say it, and what he did in Kuwait was absolutely wrong, but the Americans have not solved the problems of the region. They have caused rifts between Arab states. They have caused a huge amount of human suffering and waste and violence. What they are doing now with this so called peace process is, I will repeat, a cosmetic attempt to restore the lustre of George Bush’s image as a peacemaker and, at the same time, to express a sort of petulance at Israel’s behavior.

But petulance is not enough. Israel continues to settle and appropriate the land. Israel continues to deport. Israel continues to kill. Israel continues to imprison. Israel continues to clamp down the curfews, twenty-four hours a day. And the United Nations has not withheld one cent of the five billion dollars annually sent to Israel in US aid. That is against the law of this country. The law says that gross violations of human rights have to result in curtailment of US aid to the recipient country. That has never happened.

So, I am not one of those people who think this is a historical breakthrough that United States has changed its policy. They are still exacting from the Palestinians concessions they are too scared to ask from the Israelis. I will give you a simple example. The two Palestinians who negotiated with Baker for six months, from March until the beginning of August, were Hanan Ashrawi and Faisal Hussaini, and Baker praised them publicly in Madrid for their negotiations.

Neither one of them was allowed to come to the Peace Palace in Madrid because Israel said we cannot have these people since they are affiliated with the PLO and they are real leaders. The official reason they gave was that they were from East Jerusalem. And America accepted these conditions, so what are we talking about? We are talking about an administration that is too afraid, too tied to the past, to subservient to whether its Saudi Arabia on the one hand or the Israeli lobby on the other, to make any courageous advancements in the progress towards peace.

Herald. Is it true that Shamir had once objected to George Shultz meeting you?

Said. Not only that, he wouldn’t allow me into the country. In the spring of 1988, I wanted to go with my family and he wouldn’t allow it. I am an American citizen but he expressly forbade me from entering the country. We are dealing with a really lousy situation here. And, to get back to the point, I don’t see a vote in the United Nations where the United States condemns a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention is all that significant.

First of all, who is going to enforce the resolution? What astonishes me is the Arabs accepting that as a reason for coming back to the talks. We got nothing from it. Just a condemnation. So what. There are already sixty-four UN Security council resolutions condemning Israel for one or other abuse of Palestinian rights. Not one of them has been implemented, and the reason they haven’t been implemented in the United States.

Herald. Talking of resolutions, you gave an interview once to Salman Rushdie in which you described Zionism as the touchstone of contemporary political judgement in America. You said a lot of people who are happy to attack apartheid or to talk about US intervention in Central America are not prepared to "talk about Zionism and what it has done to Palestinians."

You said that here in the United States, if you say anything about Zionism you are seen as "joining classical European or western anti-Semitism. Therefore, you said, it has become "absolutely necessary to concentrate on the particular history and context of Zionism in discussing what it represents for the Palestinian."

Said. The important part of that phrase is "for the Palestinian." Zionism for the Jew was a wonderful thing. They say it was their liberation movement. They say it was that which gave them sovereignty. They established institutions which they never had before, etcetra etcetra. The list is very long. So, I am not talking about that. That's good. It's fine. But so far as the Palestinians are concerned, we re the victims of Zionism.

Herald. But this undertaking itself, of making this position known, how will it be affected by the reversal of the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism?

Said. Well, look, I was never happy with the resolution. To say that Zionism is a form of racism is to be sufficiently clear about, and insufficiently sensitive to, what Zionism did for the Jews; for the Jews on the one hand and to the Palestinians on the other. In the Question of Palestine, I talk about it. To me, Zionism is Zionism. I don’t have to equate it with anything else.

But for the Palestinians today, Zionism means: number one, the shattering of their society; number two, the dispossession of their population; number three, and most importantly, the continuing oppression of the Palestinians as a people. To give you an example, Israel is the only state in the world which is not a state of its own citizens, it is a state of the Jewish people, if you happen to be a non-Jew in that Jewish state (and there are some 800,00 Palestinians who are Israeli citizens) and you are referred to as a non-Jew and you are discriminated against simply because you are not Jewish.

Jews are allowed to return to Israel by the law of return. I was born there but I can’t. Jews can buy and lease and rent land in Israel. Palestinians cannot. And on the West Bank and Gaza, in the Occupied Territories, Palestinians are discriminated against in ways Jews are not discriminated against. Settlers on the West Bank and Gaza can take away land from Palestinians and just live on it.

However, in spite of all these things, I must say that the resolution on Zionism and racism was a tremendously unfortunate episode. It was partly the euphoria of the early seventies, with the Afro-Asian movement in full bloom, and the Soviet Union still a player, and the Islamic movement heating up, which caused it to come about. It was badly thought through, insufficiently sensitive as I said, and as a result of it we, the Palestinians, have paid a very high political price. It became a stumbling block. But that is in the past now.

Herald. You were just saying that you are not allowed to buy land. One of the most important piece of land at issue, of course, is Jerusalem itself. The peace process which has just been started is torturously slow. Do you believe, by the time this process comes to fruition, there will be any chance left at all for non-Jews to lay claim on Jerusalem.

Said. I don’t see any a way of resolving the problem if Israel continues to hold on to the whole of Jerusalem. I am not saying that I am repartitioning of Jerusalem, I am not. I think it should remain a united city. But there should be an imaginative way for Palestinians to see in Jerusalem, of at least Arab or East Jerusalem, their capital. It has to be.

It means a lot to Palestinians. And, of course, it also means a tremendous amount to the Islamic world. Jerusalem is not just a Palestinian city. It is also a city with great significance for a billion Muslims. So, some arrangement has to be made whereby Israel cannot go on dispossessing Palestinians within Jerusalem. But I must repeat I am not for the repartitioning of the city.

I think something should be done in an imaginative way so the city, which is a universal city, can express the hopes and traditions of the three faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Herald. Something on the lines of the Vatican, would you say?

Said. Something like that, without necessarily internationalizing it. But something of that sort, rather than cutting it up again or keeping it unified under Israeli control.

Herald. Now let’s talk about intimidation. And we know it’s a sensitive issue. As a highly visible spokesperson for the Palestinian cause, you have been targeted by the various groups who turn out and protest when you deliver papers, who attack you in print, hand out leaflets quoting you out of context and so on. They call you an Ambassador of Terrorism. All these unpleasant incidents have taken place.

Said. Well, there have even been death threats. What can you do?

Herald. Tell us what bothers you the most about all this.

Said. Well, what bothers me most, I think, is the lying and the injustice that’s involved, because by any standard whatsoever, I am a victim. I was chased out of the house. I lost my homeland. And my people have continued to be killed and be mistreated, in the hundreds of thousands. And yet these people are mounting the viscous campaign not only to continue to hurt me and my people in these concrete ways but also to heap all kinds of lies and opprobrium upon me and to call me a terrorist and what not. That’s number one.

Number two, in America, I have no real way of responding. That bothers me a lot. Many of the people who have attacked me and written about me in slanderous and libelous ways have entire magazines at their disposal. Commentary, for instance, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee, which is one of them, gives them space to write whatever they want. I, on the other hand, don’t have a magazine to write in. So, it’s very hard, if you know what I am trying to say. In other words, there is no organized equivalent to the platform that the enemies of the Palestinians have in this country.

The third, most galling thing of all, is that the Arabs and the Muslims, in this country and elsewhere have never organised themselves together and tried to put forward a credible, alternative view to that put forward about us-not about me necessarily but about us-the Zionist lobby in this country. It’s a crime. We are the inheritors of a great tradition and a great civilisation. We have many talented people and yet we cannot, just cannot, work together.

The Palestinians work not only in five different directions but frequently in opposing ones. The Syrians work by themselves. There is no attempt to take ourselves seriously as members of a nation. And it really goes back about what I said earlier about the condition of the Arab world: It’s a sink. It’s a sink of corruption and mediocrity and the most appalling and murderous tyrannies. There are no democratic freedoms. It’s just a dreadful place.

And yet, it is a place to which I feel attached; it’s where I am from, and my family is from. I mean, I am not about to give up. And I won’t do what the Samir El Khalils and the Fouad Ajamis of the world want to do, which is to set up in this country, the United States, and to become apologists for the enemies of the Arabs. I won’t play that game.

Herald. You once described Fauad Ajamis (the Middle East expert of The New Republic, a Washington based anti-Palestinian magazine) as The New Republic’s resident anti-Arab Arab.”

Said. That’s right. He’s a disgrace. Not just because of his viciousness and his hatred of his own people but because what he says is so trivial and so ignorant. He, much more than me, is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies. That’s what he does for a living.

Yet, he doesn’t know anything about the Arab World. He doesn’t read about it. He doesn’t care about it. He is an ignorant man who writes negligible stuff that is simply used by the Zionist lobby and the establishment in this country against the Arabs. It is a very despicable kind of work he does, and doesn’t contribute to knowledge so far as I am concerned.

Herald. Samir El Khalil is the author of the book entitled State of Fear, which is about Iraq and gained wide currency during and after the Gulf war. Would you put him in the same category?

Said. Roughly. He perhaps doesn’t have the venom. He hasn’t been at it long enough. In some ways, he is a much more confused man. Ajami, at least, has the virtue of clear-sightedness. He knows what he wants. He wants to attack the Arabs. This man, I don’t know what he wants. He is a confused, emotionally distraught figure who had leapt to a kind of sudden prominence on the basis of this basically negligible book. So, it attacks Saddam-fine. But it’s not a historical contribution, it’s not a scholarly contribution to understanding Iraq and it was useful as part of the mobilisation of this country against Saddam Hussain. Khalil has played that role and he has played it well and I really don’t see him doing anything else. When his post-war euphoria in this country is over, he will pass from the scene.

Herald. So you think he will indeed disappear?

Said. I think so, yes. He hasn’t really written anything of the lasting consequence, in my opinion. He is not a scholar.

Herald. There is some talk of a new Palestinian leadership, and many Americans mention Hanan Ashrawi, for instance, as a new kind of leader. Give us your thoughts on that.

Said. Well, you know she was a student of mine. She was at the University of Virginia, not here at Columbia, but they asked me if I would like to supervise the writing of her dissertation and it interested me, so I said yes. After that, for about two or three years, she would send me chapters of it and so on. She is a very intelligent and interesting woman. Lately, she has received a lot of attention too.

In my point of view, it is unfortunate that this has been used invidiously against Arafat, I am referring to the speculation and the attention that you asked about. In a certain sense, if you look at it honestly, she is unthinkable without Arafat, if you see what I mean. But it’s all a part of the racism of the West. They think they like her because she speaks English well, the same reason they used to like me, because I spoke English well. As if that’s it, if you don’t speak English well, you’re really not in the same world with their exalted highnesses.

Herald. Which brings us to a final question, one I know you are keen to address, about yet another person who speaks English well: Salman Rushdie. If you could just outline for us your position on Salman Rushdie. And we ask this because there are a lot of people who would be very interested to know precisely what Edward Said thinks about the whole Rushdie affair.

Said. Well, my feeling is the following. And there are two or three points to be made. Number one, I am an absolute believer in absolute freedom of expression. As a Palestinian, I have fought Israeli attempts to censor my people in what they can write or read. A lot of our battle of liberation has to do with freedom of though and opinion and expression. I firmly believe in them. So, let me say, regardless of the reason, I believe there should be no censorship after all. That’s number one.

Number two, Salman Rushdie is an old friend of mine whom I am known for about ten years. I first met him in 1980-81 in London. I’m a great admirer of his writing, especially Midnight’s Children, which I think is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. I also liked very much the book of short stories he wrote for his son, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I reviewed here in the United States. Shame I like less than Midnight’s Children. I read it only once, and maybe if I read it again I will be able to get more into it.

The Satanic Verses, I think, is an interesting novel. It’s a large, confused, in many ways brilliant book designed to be provocative. I mean, I am not going to sit here this evening and give you my precise liter critical analysis of his work, but he is a very gifted and extraordinary man and I deeply regret all the things that have happened to him. I also urge you to not censor what I am saying and to print it as I say it, knowing that you will be under pressure to decide how much you want to print about him.

So, as a I was saying, I really regret that reactions to him have been as violent as they have been. Personally, I don’t myself believe that is in the nature of Islam or a part of the best traditions of Islamic civilisation to suppress the writings of an offending dissenter, let us say.

So, the hullabaloo about him has been deeply regrettable and, in many ways, unacceptable to me. Now, I understand that a lot of Muslims are offended by Satanic Verses, even though, I must say, I’m not sure if very many of them have even read the book. That’s one of the great comic events of all time. All these people screaming about this book being an offense to Islam when most of them, at least in the Arab world, can’t read the English language. After all, it is in English. But they just take the world of some ulema who claims this or that is what he says. That’s garbage. It’s terrible.

So, I am very disturbed about the whole thing and I just wish that Salman Rushdie could lead a normal life. I have seen him since he went underground and the toll this has taken on him has been terrible. It’s a huge price to pay for an individual. He has lost the ability to be free. He can’t move around as he wishes. He can’t see his son. His second marriage failed while he was in hiding. And the sense of persecution and insecurity is tremendous. I feel it shouldn’t happen to anyone. Our world is big enough to have people like Salman Rushdie writing as they do and to debate what they say. But to condemn him to death and to burn his book and ban it - those are horrible, horrible things.

This coming Sunday, by the way, in The New York Times, they asked a number of people, including me to give their opinions about whether Wagner should be played in Israel or not. What I have done is written a few paragraphs comparing the attitudes to Israeli’s to Wagner with that of the Muslims in the case of Salman Rushdie. And I oppose both views, Art and ideas one doesn’t like have to be discussed, they can’t just be thrown out of the window the way it was done during the inquisition. It’s a great crime and I think it would do our world a great disservice if we let that view prevail.

This article was published in the Herald's February 1992 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

This is the first article in a two-part series on Manto’s writing on Jallianwala Bagh.

‘I am the trader of sighs To versify blood is my mission Remaining winds of the garden! Gather your refuges…for My fiery songs Are about to cause an upheaval within depressed bosoms.’

Amritsar was a city of worshippers of freedom. A 100 years ago this month, the city witnessed the bloody tragedy of Jallianwala Bagh.

When this violence occurred in 1919, Saadat Hasan Manto was nine years old. The hero of Jallianwala, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, was a close relative of Manto’s and because of him, the Manto family also had to face misfortunes. Due to this, the calamity was preserved in Manto’s memory. He has written a few short stories on what happened: Tamasha, 1919 ki Aik Baat, Divaana Shayir, Swaraj ke Liye, etc.

Manto’s ancestral homes were in Kucha Vakilan (Chowk Fareed), Amritsar. Since a majority of his family members were linked to the legal profession, and almost all the houses in this quarter belonged to the Manto family, it had become famous as the ‘Lawyers Quarter’. Several powerful Muslim families lived here, and prominent Muslim leaders too were born there.

In addition to Kitchlew, Attaullah Bukhari, Qazi Fazlullah and others were also important political leaders. Several others were eminent lawyers and barristers. Manto’s eldest uncle, Asadullah Manto, and Manto’s two elder brothers, Khwaja Muhammad Hasan Manto and Khwaja Saeed Hasan Manto, were also barristers. Their higher education degrees were from the UK.

Manto’s own initial education was at home. When he was a child of 8-9 years, he was admitted to Class 4 of the Muslim School. The primary section of the school was located near Chowk Fareed, which was only minutes away from their home. After passing Class 4, he was admitted to Class 5 at the Government High School Amritsar, near the statue of Queen Victoria. While he was here, an incident occurred which is worth noting, as it shaped the writer in Manto and was a precursor to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

In 1919, the whole of Punjab was agitating against the British government’s Rowlatt Act. Indian members of the Legislative Council had strongly opposed the Act; Muhammad Ali Jinnah had resigned from the Council in protest. The newspapers also strongly opposed it, but contrary to all popular feelings, this law took the shape of an Act by being passed on March 21, 1919.

This was deemed humiliating and oppressive. As per the Act, no recourse to appeal, dalil (evidence) or vakil (lawyer) could be had. In that period, Kitchlew and Maulana Ali Azhar, contemporaries of Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, were also excellent speakers. The Muslims of India were already at the forefront of the movement for the restoration of the Caliphate in Turkey under the leadership of the Ali brothers – Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar and Maulana Shaukat Ali. Mahatma Gandhi too had given the call for a country-wide satyagraha on February 25, 1919.

The leaders of the Punjab branch of the Indian National Congress were Kitchlew. On March 30, a meeting organised by the two was attended by about 30,000 people. This popular wave worried the then-provincial government. Deputy commissioner of Amritsar Irving warned Kitchlew not to participate in the movement, but the leaders did not heed this at all. Many strikes occurred across the province; now the Act had created an explosive atmosphere.

In these circumstances, governor of Punjab Michael O’Dwyer deemed gatherings and strikes to be a conspiracy against the British government and a declaration of war against the British crown. When Gandhi arrived in Delhi from Bombay on April 8 to review the effects of the movement, he received an official order under which he was barred from entering Punjab; but he proceeded towards Amritsar. He was arrested on the way near Palwal and sent back to Bombay.

The government supplied cantonments in Punjab with further military reinforcements and decided to remove Kitchlew and Satyapal from Amritsar on April 9. Coincidentally on that day, Hindus had taken out a procession on the occasion of Ram Navami, and Muslims too were participating in large numbers. The deputy commissioner of Delhi was of the opinion that the coming together of Muslims and Hindus in this manner has assumed a new political importance.

The rulers were definitely nervous. Irving had received orders for the expulsion of Kitchlew and Satyapal, but he was not ready to follow them since he thought that there was no danger at that moment. People organised peacefully and there was no question of violence, but the very name Governor O’Dwyer stood for blind power. He rejected the deputy commissioner’s report. So Irving had to take measures which he thought would mitigate the trouble.

On April 10 at 10 am, Irving called Kitchlew and Satyapal to his bungalow and read out the order of district expulsion to them. He had the two leaders escorted out of the back door and put in a car, and took them to an unknown location. The English officers thought that the situation would improve after their removal. But when Congress members who had come along with their leaders to the deputy commissioner’s bungalow protested, they were arrested. The news spread like wildfire. Bazaars and businesses closed down. People began to congregate in droves near the Hall Gate.

All kinds of people were there that day, and among them was school student Manto. Though he was young, he wanted to find out what had happened and why there was a sense of chaos. When people collected near the Gate, a slogan could be heard: “Everyone should go together to the deputy commissioner bahadur and request for the cancellation of the expulsion orders of our beloved leaders.” But the moment to make that request never came. The rulers deemed this congregation of the people illegal.

This happened on April 9, and when people began to march from Hall Gate, Manto was with them too. These were unarmed and peaceful people. The procession was stopped near the gate. When they tried to proceed further, the goras opened fire on the other side. Some were injured by bullets and many were injured in the resultant stampede. There was a drain on the right side and some fell into it, including young Manto. The drain was not deep; he remained hidden there until the bullets stopped.

He then returned near the Hall Gate, crossing the drain from the other side passing through the takia of Zahira Pir. Here, a gang of 30-40 youth was hurling stones in anger at the clock of the Hall Gate. Its glass broke and fell on the road. A young man cried, “Chalo…now let’s break the statue of the Queen.” His friend said, “No yaar..let’s burn the magistrate’s office.” Another interrupted, “And all the banks too…” An agitated young man, stopping them, said, “Wait…what use is this? Chalo let’s kill the armed ones on the bridge.”

Despite being at a distance, Manto recognised him. He was Thaila Kanjar….his name was Tufail but was famous as Thaila Kanjar. He was the son of a prostitute, and famous as a drunkard and gambler. That was all young Manto knew about him. Thaila’s sisters, Shamshad and Almas, were the most beautiful courtesans of their time. The richest people would attend their mujra. Both sisters were always complaining about their brother’s tricks.

Manto could see that he was passionate. A mini-party of boys had accompanied him. Some hotheads advanced towards the statue of the Queen. Thaila screamed forcefully, “I said do not waste your passion there, come here with me…chalo let’s kill them who have taken the life of our innocent men and injured them. By God, if we come together, we can wring their necks…aao chalo!”

Some stopped, the rest went. “Thaila just wants to tell them that he is not the one to be afraid of bullets,” he addressed his fellows. “Those who are afraid can return.” Thaila quickened his steps, the others also did the same.

Manto was watching, hidden near the fountain. The bridge was 60-70 yards from Hall Gate. When Thaila got close to the British soldiers on horses, a bullet was heard. Everybody ran, but Thaila kept going forward. He looked back and yelled, “Don’t run away…advance forward!” Another shot was fired occurred. Manto saw reddish spots on Thaila’s white shirt, but he did not fall and kept moving forward. Another shot. He stumbled, but with one or two strong steps he jumped at the soldier nearest him and the soldier fell. Thaila was on top of him, his hands around the soldier’s neck. The other soldiers rained bullets on Thaile. Manto could take no more; he fainted near the fountain.

When he regained consciousness, he was home. People had recognised him and taken him back.

Manto turned his eyewitness account into a story, centred around Shamshad and Almas, and the bravery and patriotism with which they responded to their brother’s killing.

After the violence against a peaceful group, the mood in the city changed that day. The rest of the day was marred by violence. Now the crowd was no longer peaceful. It set fire to official buildings, banks, the Town Hall, the central post office, the Mission Hall and the Bhagtanwala Railway Station. The godowns of the National Bank were burnt. Looting intensified in the shops and bazaars.

Wire and telephone systems were also disconnected and European families were forced to take refuge in the fort and other safe places. This fire spread to the villages of Amritsar too. Twenty Indians were killed in these incidents and countless were injured. People were often shot from the back as they tried to flee.

Six Britishers were also killed in this carnage. Two of them were photographing the great door of Darbar Sahib when two people attacked them with swords. Both died as soon as they fell.

In Sharifpura Chowk, an Englishman had a knife pierced right through his neck. He cried silently, waiting for death; eventually he died.

A British woman was running in terror through the lane linking Hall Bazaar and Sabzi Mandi; a mob was in pursuit after her. They came upon the woman in the middle of the lane and were staring at her. She kept revolving on her heels in fear. She let out screams, the party fell upon her. She disappeared below the men. She managed to jump up and run; she was semi-naked. The mob followed, eventually came upon her and then killed her. This was a woman of a missionary school teacher named Miss Sherwood.

Governor O’Dwyer had received telephone calls in Lahore on the situation of the city. Irving had given the city to the charge of the army. The governor had also immediately sent the deputy commissioner of Lahore, A.J.W. Kitchin, to Amritsar. General Dyer was commanding the army. The machinery of the government was in motion.

The inhabitants of the city were now gathering together. One crowd tried to enter Hall Bazaar from the street. There, a lot of armed soldiers were standing. The crowd stopped, afraid. Meanwhile, suddenly a division of Indian club-wielding police appeared in the bazaar from the opposite direction which started clubbing the crowd; some were hit and others were not. In the same manner, people were stopped by bullets and bayonets at other places too. Kitchin presented a full report of control to Governor O’Dwyer.

Kitchlew and Satyapal had been charged in a conspiracy case. Since Kitchlew was a close relative of the Mantos, Saadat’s two lawyer older brothers went to Lahore from Amritsar to fight ths case.

On April 10, Amritsar was quiet. The authorities too allowed people to bury or burn their dead, but with the instruction that they should return home by 2 pm after completing their last rites. The supply of electricity and water was withheld as punishment.

When Thaila’s body was brought home for burial, it was riddled with bullets. He was not popular in his community, but everyone began to scream and cry upon seeing his corpse. His sisters were in a stupor. Thaila was buried hastily, amid a state of panic. The same situation was seen across houses, as if mourning the dead was some serious crime committed by their relatives. General Dyer marched with the soldiers in the city.

Manto was sitting near his father in the the courtyard of his home. “Abba jan, why don’t you let me go to school?” he asked

His father said to him, “Beta schools are off.”

Manto said, “Master sahib didn’t inform us. He said that whichever boy will not show his copy after completing schoolwork will be severely punished…you didn’t even let me go yesterday.”

“School is off. So is our office,” his father reasoned with him.

“Okay then that’s fine. Chalo, I’ll hear a very nice story from you today.”

“No bhai, not today.”

“You don’t even let me go out, if I remain at home, I’ll listen to a story from you.”

Manto was adamant. In the meanwhile, suddenly three airplanes passed overhead. Both looked up, terrified. Manto thought that yesterday too planes had been circling the whole day in the sunlight. He could not reach a conclusion, so he said to his father, “Abba jan, I get really scared by the noise from these planes. Whatever they scream, ask them not to pass over our house.”

“You’re mad indeed.”

“Abba, these planes are so terrible, yesterday Ammi jan was saying that these plane people also have lots of cannons…what if some day they throw a cannon on our homes.”

Manto’s father Ghulam Hasan cracked up at his son’s talk. “Your mother is mad indeed. I will inquire from her why she talks like that at home…don’t worry, there is absolutely nothing of the sort.”

“If the planes do any kind of such mischief, remember I too have a gun, the same one which you had bought me last Eid.” Manto went into his room, practicing marking a target for his air-gun with his finger. He sat at the window of the room which opened towards the bazaar, where everything was quiet. He understood why the bazaars were closed the day of the violence, but why were they closed yesterday and today still? There was no violence outside.

How could young Manto know that all of Punjab was crying silently, beneath the oppression of the British? Arrests were hastily brought into effect in the city. People were publicly flogged. To humiliate citizens, an order was issued for them to salute any Englishman by bowing; the slender lane in which Miss Sherwood was murdered was utilised exclusively for flogging people. Every Indian passing there had to cross the lane by crawling along his or her stomach.

On both sides of this “crawling” lane were two-storey houses. The lane was extremely narrow, dirty and densely-populated. The rule became a source of humiliation and misery for the residents there. They could not bring provisions and basic items from the bazaar and also could not arrange to clean their homes. People of all ages had to suffer. These punishments became infamous across the world – so much so that even Governor O’Dwyer had to contravene General Dyer, because the British government was becoming too notorious.

The article was originally published in The Wire.

Benazir Bhutto, 32, the acting chairperson of the Pakistan People's Party and the daughter of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is today undoubtedly the most formidable political figure in the country. Compelled by circumstances, Benazir Bhutto entered the political arena in 1977 after her father's arrest. Fresh from Harvard and Oxford, she had no prior experience in the complexities of politics. All her political training came from practical struggle. Her nine-year political career has been a period of hardship and sufferings.

lt has been a long personal ordeal - more than five years in prison and house arrest in Pakistan and two years of exile in London. She started her political career as the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but now shows signs of becoming a leader in her own right. The long period of confinement and hardship seem to have steeled her and strengthened her resolution, giving her a certain degree of maturity and political acumen, which are clearly manifested in her speeches and statements. Although she derives her political inspiration from her late father's political beliefs, she is more pragmatic than him in her approach. Her recent political stance clearly indicates that achieving an end is for her more important then rigidly sticking to principles.

Although she has emerged as an astute leader and tough organiser, her real test will come in the next few months when she will have to deal not only with the new and more complex political situation but also with challenges from rebels within her party. In this interview Benazir Bhutto talks about her party's policies, its past and future, the political situation in the country and her political strategy ...

Herald. Did you expect the kind of welcome you received on your return?

Benazir Bhutto. Well, I have full faith in the people, and in their judgement. I knew that they were aware of the role of the party and its leaders, but what I saw was completely overwhelming and it was such a triumph for the people. It was a warm crowd, an affectionate crowd. It was a crowd of expectations and hopes. I look to the day when we can fulfill these expectations.

Herald. To what do you attribute the response that you got?

Benazir. I think the people know that our party is committed to the underprivileged, the oppressed, the discriminated. They know that we stand for fair wage for labour. They know that we stand for land for tenants, for employment for rural and urban sectors. They know that we stand for an independent foreign policy and for non-alignment. Because of our struggle for principles, they know that we cannot betray them. We are prepared to give our lives; the people will stay with us.

Herald. But some people feel that it is emotional rather than political support?

Benazir. I used to be told this, but I have never ever believed in emotional support. You cannot sustain emotional support. Emotional support is something which evaporates within a week. If it can sustain itself for even ten days, it is a big thing. Our support has been there for nine years. lt is there because of the policies of Mr. Bhutto, who sacrificed for the country, who served the people. He served every part of the country. And also because people, when they saw our pain, felt it mirrored their own pain. In a way it was baptised in something beyond just text· book politics, or programmes. The cause was there. The message was there. The symbolism was there. But it was baptised in the valley of pain blood and sacrifice.

Herald. Can this mass support be turned into a political movement?

Benazir. You are right, there is a difference. People have always been with the Pakistan People's Party. It is not the policy of the administration to deprive the PPP, but to deprive the masses by depriving the PPP. But we believe that the masses will get their rights, and the People's Party will play a political party's role, showing the way for the restoration of democracy. We have had different strategies during the last few years, but now I am more hopeful than ever because I believe substantive changes have taken place. Social forces have been released, and there is an opportunity to be taken forward. The mass support cannot be ignored. The impact, the responsiveness of the crowd and the intensity of the crowd's feelings cannot be ignored. I hope that our party organisers will be able to tap the reservoir of popular support.

Herald. Do you think people will come out on the streets if the government arrests you?

Benazir. Yes, the party will play its role. If they arrest me, the party is not going to sit back and watch. The day they arrest me, the onus will be on them, because we have been very peaceful. All our meetings have been very peaceful. I am the leader of the largest political party and no one should make the mistake of thinking that they can arrest me and nothing will happen. Of course, we will remain peaceful, but the parry will naturally come out on the streets if they arrest me.

Even if they arrest the provincial cadre, the party will still come out. The party has prepared for this eventuality. They all knew that when I came back, he would want to arrest me. One of the reasons he didn't arrest me was because he knew that the situation had been prepared. He thought it best to let us run out of steam. But we are not running out of steam. We are gaining momentum with greater mobilisation. And they are just sitting there thinking that we'll wear out. But people won't wear out. If nine years of lashes and hangings could not wear out the people of our country, it's not going to wear them out now

Herald. For a political movement you need a strong organisation at the grassroots level. Does your party, at present, have the organisational capability to mobilise the masses for a political movement?

Benazir. We have grassroots organisation. But the party was driven by factionalism. Because of this factional factor, the grassroots organisation was never given a clear lead and always remained in confusion. We are trying to reduce factionalism and we have come some way.

Herald. Why do you say that the People's Party organisation at present is better than ever before?

Benazir. Well, in terms of what we have learnt through the last eight or nine years, yes, we are. Our student wings are doing very well. Our youth wings have come of age. Our women's wing is quite committed, it has been to Shahi Qila, Baldia Town and so on. In addition to that, we have a young president in the Punjab and we have other young people in the leadership who have never been ministers. You have got to be tough, you have got to be strong to go out and carry along the rest of the people.

Herald. Is it your policy to bring forward new people in the leadership of the party?

Benazir. Oh no. It is my policy to see that the party remains revitalised. They are not new people, they are our own people. It is not my policy to drive anyone out of the party. The workers of the party wanted action against certain individuals way back, but it has never been my policy nor the policy of Begum Sahiba to take this action, because we believe that in politics there is a natural process: those who are with you stay with you and those who are not, let the parting come. But I do believe that it is important for us to understand the mistakes of the past.

Mistakes of the past do not lie with Mr Bhutto. He founded the party and as soon as he came into power, people who had come to power on his back suddenly began regarding themselves as his equal and started thinking they could succeed Mr Bhutto and so they started intriguing. I know one chief minister told my father, 'You have done more for me than my own father, I could not dream of becoming chief minister.' Another chief minister said, 'You have even taught me how to eat and dress.' But soon they started thinking that it was all very easy. Mr Bhutto had twenty years of hard work before he became prime minister. So it was not easy. And this factionalism weakened us. Whether it was from the left or whether it was from the right, everything was done in the name of ideology. But there was very little ideology and more personal thought in it.

One needs a team. I cannot stay in politics without a team. I can't succeed without a team. What I have tried to do is develop the concept of teamwork. I have always consulted people. And I used to consult to such an extent when factionalism and polarisation were rampant in the party, that all my time was taken up in trying to balance everybody together. And in a way, we were paralysed. We could not move because we were balancing. We thought that if we took one step we would fall out of balance. Ultimately, with the shahadat of Shahnawaz I realised that if I was to continue I had to take decisions if I believed they were right. I could no longer allow myself to be paralysed.

I started taking decisions for the betterment of my country even before his shahadat. I think the turning point was the shahadat of Nasir Baloch. We met on March 5 in London and I was very upset. He had been like a brother to me, he had written letters to me. I was shattered by his death. I was feeling very bad, and I thought; which way is the party going? I started thinking from that time.

After Shahnawaz's death the process was accelerated. I decided that I had to take decisions. I started taking decisions and I required discipline, loyalty and team spirit from everyone. I faced many conspiracies and only my party workers saved me. At every stage and at every step I went through hell, not only from outside, because you can put up with what is from outside, but also from within.

I know how I suffered. I know how people treated me. It was quite agonising and demoralising. But I got strength from the people at Shahnawaz's funeral. When they came out I could see the hope in their eyes. I could see how poor they were. I realised l owed it to them to pull myself together. I went back to France in those days because the manner of the conspiracy against Shahnawaz had left me very confused. I was feeling a bit pulled down. When the Begum Sahiba and I were together, she said, "Look, we have come this far, we can't let this tragedy overwhelm us; we must overwhelm the tragedy," That's when I made the decision that whether the case was over or not, I would go back and face the consequences.

Herald. You have asked for a peaceful transfer of power and you have demanded that the assembly hold elections. Do you see any likelihood of this happening?

Benazir. What options do they have? If they order my arrest, and there is popular discontent, they would resort to repression and repression can lead the way to martial law. In that case where would that leave the assembly? There will be no assembly. But if they hold elections, they will be rising to their historic duty. We're not trying to cut everybody out.

Herald. Does this not amount to a de facto recognition of the assembly you have rejected?

Benazir. We've given them a role that we see for them. We've said that the role they can play is the role of transition, of a stepping stone. We do not want to go into the question of whether we recognise them or not. Why go into areas of disagreement? We should concentrate on the areas of agreement. But I will also say, and I've said this before, that Nawabzada, Malik Qasim and other members of the MRD went calling on assembly members; I have not done that. In fact, many have wished to see me. And I'm not saying whether we recognise them or not. But we do recognise that they have a certain role to play and that is the transfer of democracy.

Herald. Suppose they do not agree to fulfil their 'historic' role, what then?

Benazir. They can either arrest me or stop the party at some stage.

Herald. Your party will then enter its second stage?

Benazir. They will force it to. The ball is in their court.

Herald. What will be your tactics in the second stage?

Benazir. Let's say we want peaceful change. And I'm sure peaceful change will come.

Herald: You have been talking very little about economic issues?

Benazir. I'd say I've have been talking a lot. Far more than anyone else. I have been hearing all the other speakers. There is no economic content.

Herald. Will you pursue the same economic policies as the PPP did between 1972-1978. Or will you reassess those policies in the light of past experiences?

Benazir. Well, I think Mr. Bhutto always believed in reassessing. We don't do things for the sake of doing it, out of stubbornness. We do it for the purpose of achieving certain social and economic objectives. We will keep the major sectors of the economy nationalised because we believe it should be in the service of the people. We don't think that rice husking and ginning should be nationalised because this scares the middle class and we created the middle class. By giving passports to immigrant labour, we created the middle class; by increasing the salary of the white-collar class, we created the lower middle class. We don't want to turn the very class we created against us. We want to be identified with the peasants, the labourers, the lower middle class and the middle class. We want private enterprise to play its role but at the same time we believe that the state must also have its public sector. Providing employment is very important.·

Herald. You do not advocate imposing a ceiling on land?

Benazir. Land is a very important question. We had the '77 land reforms which were never implemented properly. We'd like to see those implemented properly at the first and initial stage. But also, we'd like to see the social objective of reforms. Some people talk of land reforms because it is a catchy slogan. They think by talking about them, they can fool everybody into giving them their votes. People can't be fooled. I'd Iike to see peasants get land, and the infrastructural to maintain that Iand. And I'd Iike a study to be done on the land reforms of '72 and '77 to see how much land is still with the peasants and how much is not, and what were the reasons for that and what can be done next to ensure that the land is with them.

Herald. What is your position on the MRD? Are you opposed to an electoral alliance?

Benazir. I am not opposed to the MRD. I feel very uncomfortable being leader of the PPP because I consider myself more Mr. Bhutto's political worker. I am proud of my Prime Minister; I am proud of his heroic struggle. I am proud of the party's flag, proud of the sacrifices offered by my party workers. The others aren't. They don't have any respect for our Prime Minister or our flag.

They said many mean things about us. They accused us of rigging the elections. We never rigged any elections. We have our identity, we want to maintain that identity. We are also a national party. Parties that aren't national in character want to have alliances to show that they can form a government. We don't have those compulsions; we have different compulsions. I would, however, like to see the MRD parties come along. But you know when you have so much support in the country you also have the responsibility to deliver the goods. Leadership is not easy; it carries with it a tremendous sense of responsibility.

I feel that as leader of the PPP I have a certain flexibility and maneuverability which I would not have if it was an alliance. For instance, when we were abroad, they gave statements that Begum Sahiba should come back to Pakistan. Really, how can they judge? We are the people who have defended democracy. What we were doing was in the interest of our struggle. We could not surrender our autonomy of decision-making to others because people had entrusted us with the leadership to guide them. Then when I came back and I said we will not do anything till December 31, they said, 'Who is she to say nothing till December 31; the MRD has not passed the decision.' Then when I went to America, they said, 'Who is she to go to America? She's tarnished the MRD image.'

How can I tarnish their image when I talk of human rights, when I talk of democracy? The people of Pakistan know that I can't. These sort of attacks are unfair and also, when they come from your own alliance then people think, 'Wait a minute, what is happening.' But if you don't have an alliance, you say, 'Okay, that is your view, our view is separate.'

Asghar Khan registered his party. I got a call that the MRD was breaking up because of Asghar Khan. I said, 'Okay, let him register. Save your tears, we have our views too. We're together for elections, aren't we?'

Then they said that Wali Khan has said that he does not accept the '73 constitution. I said, 'Let him not. He's got his party, we've got our party. Others have got their parties. Why do you want to split?' I think it's important for political parties to have flexibility, to have maneuverability because that makes a more sound basis for cooperation.

Herald. Would you consider an electoral alliance with some parties?

Benazir. Not electoral alliance but we can discuss the question of elections with parties at an appropriate time. I've never ruled that out. But I have ruled out losing initiative and not having flexibility and maneuverability. It is important to have cohesiveness, which you cannot have if there are so many divergent views.

Herald. How do you feel being the leader of the largest political party in the country?

Benazir. Well, it's a tremendous honour and a tremendous responsibility.

Herald. What were the reasons for the collapse of the PPP organisation in 1977?

Benazir. Factionalism.

Herald. Don't you think the party leadership too was responsible to a certain extent? A lot of people who lost in the '70 elections were given party tickets in '77.

Benazir. Oh, now you will say that we are talking of giving party tickets to those who appeared on Zulm ki Dastan and said that Mr. Bhutto should be assassinated, right? Because that's what we are being asked to do. It's not that. Parties have to broaden their base.

What occurred when the party was three years old? Many people came in but we did not have support. A party has got to have two things: it's got to have credibility and a programme. It's got to have a programme and a personality. You can have a thousand programmes but if you do not have a personality, it does not mean anything.

Mr. Bhutto's personality had the credibility factor that he would do things. His own long struggle gave that credibility factor. But many people thought no. And as soon as he came in, Khurshid Hasan Meer. Hanif Ramay, Mairaj Mohammad Khan, Khar and J A Rahim - they all created problems. Nobody worked as a team. At the Hala conference they even said, 'Well, now we are fighting the elections and we'll see who is going to lose.' Such things are on public record! That gave birth to factionalism. Even lately, people were saying, 'Benazir is both an asset and a liability. She's an asset - we need her for the votes - but she's a liability - what will we do with her afterwards.'

The fact of the matter is that my father couldn't be manipulated. I can't be manipulated because l am there for principles. And if I do something people look towards me. And I can't become a little rubber stamp or a pawn in the hands of manipulating forces. I am prepared to take risks and I am prepared to take their consequences. But I take calculated risks. I don't just take risks in a vacuum and I also believe in doing my homework.

So getting back to the point, our party was driven by factionalism to such an extent that if Mr. Bhutto gave somebody a task to do, the task would not be done. Even books that we printed to be distributed to party workers were never distributed. And in the end, he had to ask the bureaucrats to get the job done; he was compelled. He never depended on the bureaucrats, he always tried to depend on the ministers (for support) but unfortunately that was not there; it was the first glow of power.

I remember I was travelling in a taxi once. The taxi driver didn't know who I was. My father was always well-known, so I have always been in the public limelight and I've always liked my privacy too. So if somebody doesn't know who I am, I never tell them who I am. I pretend I'm somebody else. I asked him what he thought of Bhutto Sahib. And he said, 'Ayub's sons were responsible for his downfall and Bhutto's ministers are going to bring him down.

Recently someone said something about Ayub's sons, Bhutto's ministers and Benazir's uncles ... I don't know whether I should be saying this. I hope it's not going to happen.

Herald. Do you think Mr. Bhutto's life might have been saved if the People's Party leadership had mobilised the masses?

Benazir. I certainly think a call should have been given when I sent a message from Sihala. But that call was not given. I sent a message that they were calling us for the last meeting with my father and that something should be done. In fact BBC said, 'Benazir has panicked.'

Herald. But one PPP leader said that Mr. Bhutto had forbidden them to take out processions?

Benazir. That is not true at all. Many wrong things have been said. In fact it hurts me greatly to see people who owe everything in their political life to Mr Bhutto, now saying things which are not true at all.

I heard one leader say, 'Mr. Bhutto told me not to give a call.' Can you imagine? Firstly, he told Mr. Bhutto, 'I don't think people will come out. But if you insist I'll give a call. Do you think I should?' Mr. Bhutto shrugged his shoulders and told me, 'Can you imagine? Here I am sitting in a death cell with the gallows around my neck and he's telling me people are not coming out. '

Another man had said, 'Mr. Bhutto wanted to put martial law and I said don't put martial law.' Well, he rang up on election day and said, 'Please declare martial law,' and Mr. Bhutto said, ''Let's lose all the seats, but I don't want to declare martial law.'

It's very unfair. People just come out and say whatever. And I guess that's why the people of the country turned to me. They knew that at least what I said would be true and I would not go against my own people.

So much has been said about me which is unfair. I don't respond. Attempts have been made to provoke me into responding, but I don't respond. Be cause I think it's much better to do what one thinks is right than to get into tu tu main main. I hate this negativism. I hope I am a positive person. I've always been optimistic: that I could get things going.

Herald. So you are optimistic that elections will be held this year?

Benazir. I am optimistic only because of the confidence of the people. I am confident; I feel the time has come. I feel that internationally and internally somehow certain social and political forces have been let loose which if channelised properly can certainly lead to elections. There were certain subjective and objective factors which had nothing to do with us but one needed that perception to see them, including the withdrawal of the military courts, including the assembly, including his not making a new chief of army staff.

These were very important indicators. And it was important to try and channelise them. And yes, l feel confident, not for my sake but for the sake of Pakistan and its people.

Herald. The army has always played a crucial role in any political change in the country. Do you see the danger of another martial law?

Benazir. Let's hope we can avoid it. That's why we are staying peaceful; that's why we want to involve this assembly about which we too have certain reservations. If we just go in for a movement it may or may not be a step towards full democracy. We would prefer to have full democracy. As far as Zia is concerned, his time is finished. He has to decide which way he wants to go. His time is over.

Herald. On the Afghan issue, most MRD parties are for direct talks with the Karmal regime. You seem to have taken a different stance?

Benazir. I haven't. I have said that we must attain our objective. Direct, indirect is not so important. We should not lose sight of our main objective.

It's not my concern, the internal problems of other countries. My concern is my own country and the consequences for it. And for that I do think it is important that the Soviet troops withdraw and that conditions are created for the refugees to go back because tensions are resulting from this problem. I would like to see it resolved as soon as possible. But I can't just say something which is in the American camp or which is in the Soviet camp. I always try to keep in mind the people of Pakistan.

When I went to America, I was asked, 'Can we stop aid for nuclear issues?' I said, 'No,' even though the nuclear issue is something which causes a lot of misunderstading. So I can never be a party to something which harms my own country's interest. I can never be so selfish.

Herald. Some people say that you are a pragmatist while your father was an idealist. Do you agree?

Benazir. Well I think both of us are realists. I learnt my politics beside him. Whatever I know, I know from him - everything. He trained me, he taught me, he showed me. All my life, I grew up in a political atmosphere. I know there were people who, because I am young, because I am a girl and maybe because they've seen me speaking politely to people - you know how we have takalluf and riwayat and I'm very polite but being polite does not mean I'm weak - thought they could pressurise me or manipulate me, but they should have known that I'm Mr. Bhutto's daughter. It just can't happen. And Inshallah because of the prayers and the support of the workers, it won't happen.

Now too, I welcome everybody in the party but I do say, 'Work with discipline, and a sense of unity and dedication. Don't work for personal belief.' I can be given recommendations but I have the right to ask others for their views too. And I must take a decision on merit because in the end I am answerable, nobody else. l can't say so and so told me to do it. Even my disagreements with other people were not on policy: they came up on a personal basis. It was difficult for certain people. And well, I think a time will come when one can speak at greater length.

But it's been a long haul. It hasn't been easy. It's been difficult. And whatever courage I have, and if I am staying on in the field, it's because I have had the greatest support from the party workers.

They're like my shield. Whenever they see an attack on me or a conspiracy against me, they come forward - and that's how I like it to be. Like they think in the old chauvinistic way: she's a woman, she's an orphan, she doesn't have any brothers, she doesn't have any uncles. Who'll support her? Well, my party workers are looking after me.

The article was published in the Herald's May 1986 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Yesterday night, I received a call from my sister. In a rushed voice, she said, “My eight-year-old son is being pestered by his friend at school who keeps asking him if he believes in his god.”

Born to a Christian father and Hindu mother, he refused to engage questions about whether he believes in someone else’s God. However, the episode later took a violent turn when his lunch box was thrashed around by his friend and he was ridiculed for belonging to a certain faith.

“You must go to the school tomorrow and report this to the principal,” I told my sister with a sense of helplessness and rage, all at once. For a moment I wanted to disbelieve the fact that it was possible for one to possess such an acute and stark sense of identity at such young age

The very next moment, I turned to my friend and enquired as to whether he ever faced such a situation. He replied saying it was worse if not as bad.

My friend, who is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at IIT Delhi, recalled an incident when, in response to a complaint against a young Muslim boy, his teacher publicly humiliated him and said, “Boys like you later become terrorists.”

The boy was later made to leave the school by his parents.

He also recollected how during his childhood, he would be seen as an object of both curiosity and disgust. His friends would often ask him about circumcision rituals, if he ate beef and whether he supported Pakistan.

“Of course, all this happened in a mood of banter, but it sticks with you!” he said.

In 2002, the ripples from the Gujarat violence reached Patna. The very same friends now exchanged playful remarks about how they would target each other in a riot.

“Nothing happened! But it sticks around!” he repeated.

Escalation of communal rhetoric

A few days back, Shaukat Ali, an elderly man was thrashed and heckled by a vigilante mob in Assam. He was attacked not for being poor, or for doing something wrong, but because of his identity as a Muslim. Communal attacks in contemporary India are part of a new discourse where attacks are seen by everyone on their screens. Attacks take place at an intimate level where one is very efficiently conveyed the risk that their identity carries.

It is not simply a process through which Amit Shah, the president of the BJP, declares the official disenfranchisement of Bangladeshi Muslim migrants; it is also a process through which the Hindu majoritarian state produces and encourages anxiety and hostility towards the Muslims of the country.

The anxiety is not necessarily over the question of class, or a case of discrimination; more than that it renders a certain community as the ‘other’. This otherisation is a dehumanising process. It is a process through which self imagines the other as weak and powerless.

Recently, during the launch of Congress manifesto Rahul Gandhi exclaimed that “all were Hindu.” Instead of asserting and accepting differences, he purported to claim that the Hindu identity was national and universal. While his politics may claim to be different from that of Hindu majoritarian values, this time, strangely, the presence of other communities escaped his imagination.

This absence can also be gleaned from the fact that Ghulam Nabi Azad, an experienced Muslim leader from Congress, in an address to the alumni of Aligarh Muslim University rued the fact that Muslim figures have no visible presence in Congress’s campaign. He suggested that his own party leaders have stopped calling him for campaigns because they fear its impact on voters.

Intellectuals like Meghnad Desai and Kancha Ilaiah in their columns have also alluded to a certain tilt within the Congress towards proving its Hindu credentials (a brilliant example is Shashi Tharoor’s book Why I am a Hindu).

Desai even goes further and questions Congress’s use of acronyms such as NYAY – a scheme which promises to give Rs. 72000 yearly to every poor in the country. With its Sanskritised Hindi name that can capture people’s attention, to Desai, this appears less to be a counter and more an imitation of Modi’s style of politics.

The difference between BJP’s Hindutva and Congress’s Hinduism seems to be losing its ground. While the BJP, in order to assert the idea of a strong Hindu rashtra, represents the Muslim as a vulnerable figure like Shaukat Ali who can be excluded, humiliated and violated in broad daylight, Congress decides to altogether invisibilise them to present a truer Hindu self.

Invisibilisation of minorities

The invisibilisation of the community goes hand in hand with a call for the liberal idea of fraternity. This idea of fraternity, on the other hand, takes a more pronounced form in BJP which attempts to create a sense of superiority among Hindus (including working class and different caste groups) through a shared feeling of communalism against the Muslim other.

Like two bulls locked in each other’s horn, the worldview of BJP and Congress remains confined to a majority-minority relationship. The minority in the scheme of their dominant ideology is always the Muslim community in the country. The multiplicity of differences over region, language, caste and gender do not find any significant place in their idea of the national whole.

Had it mattered, the Hindu Brahmins with 5% of the total population would have ranked first in the minority list. Since this is not the case – as it would lay bare how power works in India – a fixed gaze at the Muslim ‘other’ and use of Muslims as a monolithic category helps both the BJP and the Congress keep their politics running without end.

Can we then think of going beyond the strategy of mere survival as a nation? Can we imagine a politics, an alternative politics, which recognises difference as a precondition for ‘national unity’? A politics based on the idea of recognition and representation?

In the existing political climate and the logic in which these two major national parties and their ideologies seem to be working, these questions remain far-fetched and very distant as of now.

The writer is a research assistant in the visual studies department at School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

The article was originally published in The Wire.

When Imran Khan first announced his cabinet after assuming power, some people were surprised by the fact that the overwhelming majority of its members were relics from past regimes. With some notable exceptions, such as Asad Umar, most of his ministers and advisers had either served under Pervez Musharraf or the governments that succeeded him. Their inclusion in the highest echelons of the government seemed incongruous given the stated commitment of his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), to usher in a new kind of politics.

But the reality was that the party had abandoned its more radical pretensions long ago. It had given in to the politics of expediency by welcoming the so-called ‘electables’ into its fold in order to have a better chance of winning the general elections of 2018. These traditional, elite politicians – products of a status quo defined by nepotism, rent-seeking and patronage-based politics – were hardly ever going to be the champions of change. More importantly, they were always going to extract their pound of flesh in return for their electoral invincibility. No wonder, a number of such electables found themselves rewarded with positions in the PTI government’s ever-increasing cabinet.

Their influx into the party not just diluted its message of change, its ranks and files also became polarised. One of the more enduring effects of the PTI’s decision to engage in politics as usual, therefore, has been the emergence of deeper schisms within its leaders and members than those that existed already.

Numerous accounts have emerged that suggest that there have always been multiple power centres within the party, each of which attempted to assert its power and influence vis-à-vis its rivals. In the years following the PTI’s underwhelming electoral performance in 2013, these divisions assumed a new character. They, indeed, took the form of a battle between the so-called ‘ideological’ wing, comprised of old party hands and workers, and newly-inducted electables whose economic, social and political resources would become increasingly indispensible for the party’s electoral fortunes.

Having seized control of the party and its agenda from their ‘ideological’ colleagues, the electables reportedly turned their guns on each other, vying for influence. They all ultimately have been positioning themselves for the greatest prizes of all — the premiership of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab, and, one day, the country itself. This is precisely the reason why rumours have persistently circulated about rifts within the party in Punjab where multiple factions have coalesced around different, powerful individuals who continue to take advantage of the presence of a weak chief minister.

Any attempt to make sense of Imran Khan’s recent decision to reshuffle his cabinet should be aware of this context.

The most high profile casualty of his decision to reshape his team is, of course, Umar who, for years, has been trumpeted by PTI and its supporters as someone capable of curing all of Pakistan’s economic ills. Much has been written and said about the reasons for his departure from the cabinet. The sum of it all is that he was unable to steer the economy out of a crisis that had begun to unfold on his watch, thereby leading to panic and confusion; he also failed to present a consistent strategy when negotiating with the International Monetary Fund.

All of this seems to be true but the nature of Umar’s departure – he was all by himself in his last press conference and then Imran Khan followed it up with a statement decrying dead wood in his cabinet – indicates the presence of more than a little internal frustration about and opposition to the former finance minister. As has been reported in daily Dawn, Umar’s departure was possibly the culmination of a months-long campaign to have him removed. This campaign was reportedly spearheaded by his political rivals within the party as well as special interests opposed to his economic policies.

If Umar was the casualty of a turf war within PTI, what can be said of the equally unceremonious demotions of Chaudhry Fawad Hussain and Shehryar Afridi whose portfolios have been awarded to Firdous Ashiq Awan and Ijaz Ahmad Shah respectively? Here, the reasoning seems less rooted in internal politics (although there have been plenty of whispers about differences between Hussain and others within the party) and more connected to the increasing widespread belief that at least some of the political shots are being called by the military establishment. Handing over the interior ministry to a man who was part of the Musharraf regime and is known for his links to the military indicated a desire to bring about greater alignment between the civilian government and the establishment. The appointment of an information minister with a history of shifting loyalties and a demonstrated willingness to toe the military’s line has the same effect. The circle is squared with the decision to make Abdul Hafeez Shaikh the new finance minister. While he does possess the credentials to occupy the position he has been given, it is perhaps not coincidental that he, too, has served under a variety of different political masters - including a stint as a provincial minister during the Musharraf years.

Will these changes help PTI address the growing perception that it is failing to deliver ‘good’ governance? The jury is out.

Even in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, oft-touted as a shining example of the party’s ability to run effective administration, it is becoming glaringly obvious that is not as it seems. The much-publicised problems with the Peshawar Bus Rapid Transit system, characterised by chronic delays and cost overruns, have been accompanied by tales of corruption and misuse of power by the province’s top leaders and politicians.

While PTI makes much of the reforms it has bright about in the province’s police, healthcare and education systems, the facts on the ground suggest that the impact of these measures has been limited. It is difficult to find evidence to support the lofty claims the government has been making. Announcing policies such as a health insurance scheme is certainly not the same as properly implementing them. PTI, this, appears to be floundering even in a context like Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which is relatively free from competing centres of power or intra-party machinations.

The blame for all of this failure must ultimately lie with Imran Khan. In addition to his inability to address schisms and factionalism within his own party, he has also shown a tendency to centralise the decision-making process in his own hands. The appointment of relatively weak and unknown chief ministers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab has been interpreted by many as an attempt by him to ensure that he himself remains the real person in charge to the two provinces.

Indeed, it is routine to find him preceding over meetings of the Punjab cabinet, seemingly managing the affairs of the province that, both in theory and practice, are the exclusive domain of the provincial Chris executive, Chief Minister Usman Buzdar. The problem with this centralisation, of course, is that the more Imran Khan does it, the more it seems he is out of his depth. He is taking arbitrary decisions and making superficial announcements just as his party and government succumb to unrelenting infighting. More importantly, his approach is preventing the few genuinely talented individuals within his party from rising to the top and working with the autonomy required to come up with creative solutions to the country’s problems.

In a nutshell, therefore, the latest cabinet reshuffle is arguably the outcome of three distinct tendencies: factional warfare within the party; the increasing influence being wielded by the military establishment; and an idiosyncratic management style that has prevented Prime Minister Imran Khan from delegating authority to the right people.

While Imran Khan has tried to couch changes to the cabinet in terms of performance and delivery, the reality is that these amount to little more than shifting the deck’s chairs on the Titanic. In as much as the government’s visible policy paralysis stems from his party’s continuing inability to define what it wishes to do due to its ongoing internal conflicts, the situation is unlikely to change any time soon. Similarly, the appointment of ministers known for their loyalty and closeness to the powers that be simply indicates where the source of the future policy directives lies.

The writer is an assistant professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences.

This article was originally published in the Herald's May 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Part One

Blue blobs are floating above dark pink water in a drain in an industrial area of Karachi; teal green bubbles are circling wildly over a slow-moving liquid surface at a factory nearby; a river in the same area is dotted with what looks like snow-white candyfloss foam and a neighbouring creek has the sheen of a mirror placed in the sun.

This patchwork of colours and forms, though attractive to look at, not just smells foul but is also poisonous. A kilometre away from the rainbow, the water’s surface looks deathly still. It has all turned into blue splotches.

The locale of this spectacle is Karachi’s Korangi Industrial Area and its parts are formed by various types of untreated industrial waste. The single largest carrier of these noxious effluents here is a drain that carries them into the Malir river which, in turn, flows into the Arabian Sea. Dark pink, almost maroon, water rushes through the drain, looking menacingly polluted.

The uneven banks of the drain are peppered with mounds of dirty earth, topped by even bigger mounds of trash — mainly plastics. The possibility that this garbage may slip into the sludge flowing below looks very real. A number of young rag pickers are busy sifting through the piles of earth and waste, and filling their sacks with whatever reusable stuff they can find.

“Cleaning the drain is a responsibility of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB),” points out Dr Ashiq Ali Langah, the director for initial environmental assessment (IEE) at the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa). He has seen deterioration in not just the drain’s level of cleanliness but also in Korangi’s overall physical environment since Sepa’s headquarters shifted here from Clifton 12 years ago. “[Everything] has changed for the worse,” he says.

This is despite the fact that Karachi’s lone combined effluent treatment plant has been housed in Korangi, not quite far from the drain, since 2007. It was set up by the Pakistan Tanners Association, in collaboration with the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan, the federal government, the government of Netherlands, provincial government of Sindh and the City District Government Karachi, at a total cost of 492 million rupees. (Its sponsors and operators have plans to upgrade it by 2020 at an estimated cost of 530 million rupees.)

Located near a place called Chamra Chowrangi, named so because of a number of chamra – leather – tanning factories around it, the plant was put in place because of pressure from foreign buyers, says Mohammad Sultan who works as its manager administration. The buyers forced local leather manufacturers to make their production processes compliant with international environmental standards, he says.

The plant is spread over 15 acres of land. It consists of several round and rectangular receptacles, a network of pipes, some tanks and a sludge drying area. Dark brown water in one of its huge surface tanks looks almost still from the rooftop of its administration block — until one looks closely to find it churning, slowly but constantly.

The plant is clearly not enough. Korangi Industrial Area has 673 big, small and medium industries, according to Sepa’s website, but the plant treats waste water of only about 400 factories — 120 of them being tanneries. Out of the rest, only 24 industrial units have their own waste water treatment plants. About 80 other tanneries and more than a hundred other industrial units release their untreated liquid waste directly into the drain.

Capacity is not the only problem at the plant.

Designed for treating effluents from tanneries, it also receives toxic waste from 280 or so other factories — including the manufacturers of soaps, detergents, garments, lubricants and textiles. They are sending their waste to the plant without paying for its treatment. “We are unable to stop the effluent of [these] factories being discharged into our reservoirs,” says Mohammad Ali, an engineer working at the plant.

The plant also does not run at its full capacity. It treats more than 20,000 cubic metres of waste water each day although it can treat more than double that amount. Its treated water is supposed to flow into the drain through a pipe which looks suspiciously dry and decrepit.

All these flaws leave a question mark on the efficacy of the plant. Dr Ghulam Murtaza, a researcher at the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources, questions the very amount of effluents being treated here. “If a huge amount of waste is being treated then how come the treated effluents are not being discharged into the drain?” he asks. When he raised this point during a recent visit to the plant, its engineer remained silent.

Murtaza says he was also horrified to know from the engineer that the solid waste – turned into a cake form – is put outside the plant from where it is lifted by waste disposal companies. This could be a dangerous practice, he says. “The waste still has chromium, lead and mercury in it [which make it] extremely harmful for human health even in solid form. It needs to be handled with extreme care,” he says. “What if it gets mixed with groundwater or surface water?”

Murtaza is not impressed by the plant’s laboratory either. “This laboratory should be well-equipped and be manned by qualified people to ensure credible measurements of waste water,” he says. The analysis of water coming into the plant and that getting out should also be carried out by independent agencies periodically, he adds, in order to ascertain if the plant is treating the waste effectively.

The plant’s safety record, too, is not entirely unblemished. Four of its workers, according to daily Dawn, lost their lives “after inhaling poisonous gas leaked” from one of its valve chambers back in 2009.

Fixing these problems does not seem to be on the cards though. Indeed, even to keep the plant running is increasingly becoming a problem as the number of factories willing to pay for its operations is declining. A recovery officer at the plant says he visits a dozen or so tanneries every day to recover overdue costs but finds it increasingly difficult to make the industrialists clear their accounts. “Nobody wants to pay.”

There are over 10,000 big and small industries in Karachi but only 4,500 of them are registered with the provincial environment authorities, according to a Sepa survey. Most of them are located in seven industrial zones in different parts of Karachi such the Sindh Industrial Trading Estate, Landhi, Korangi, Malir, Federal B Area, North Karachi, Super Highway and Port Qasim.

There are more than 65 different types of industries in the city — including tanneries, foundries, metal processors, manufacturers of plastic, rubber, glass, ceramics, tiles, cement, textiles, pharmaceuticals, soaps and detergents, fish processing units, producers of fertilizers, pesticides, chemicals, and the makers of edible oils and cars.

“The biggest hurdle in enforcing [environmental] laws is the absence of zoning,” says Sepa’s Langah. There could be a tannery next to a pharmaceutical industry or a textile factory next to a steel mill or a cooking oil processor next to a car-maker. “There is just no planning,” he says.

If he were empowered to bring some order in the industry sector, he says, he would immediately “cluster” factories together based on what they produce. This, according to him, will help government agencies handle different types of solid waste in accordance with different requirements for its disposal. It will also be useful in deciding which industrial area needs what kind of an effluent treatment plant, he says.

Individual factories cleaning up their act as much as they can on their own is another factor that can contribute enormously to a proper industrial waste disposal. Langah says this is exactly what the Sindh Environmental Proctection Act, 2014 requires. It makes it mandatory for each factory to set up a primary effluent treatment plant on its premises, he says. “Factories need to carry out the first round of cleaning on their own premises before letting out their waste. If they do not do so, there is always the danger of a [combined effluent treatment plant] getting choked.”

There are factories in Karachi that have in-house effluent treatment plants. A manufacturer of denim cloth, for instance, has set up treatment plants at all its four factories in Korangi Industrial Area since 2004. Its factories in Landhi and Nooriabad also have similar plants.

“It all boils down to economics,” says its general manager. “If we do not comply [with global environmental standards], we do not get buyers. Without buyers, we are out of business,” he says.

This company’s treatment plants run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They keep running even during holidays. Each plant has a standby power generator to provide a backup in case electricity fails. Each of them also has spare parts and mechanics at hand to fix technical problems as soon as they arise. The plants are monitored by a company in Germany to ensure these treat the effluent to the desired levels.

A confectionery producer also has its own treatment plant. Set up in 2017, the plant has a capacity to treat 600 cubic metres of waste water each day. “We are treating 300 cubic metres of waste water every day as of now but we will be running the plant to its full capacity after an expected expansion in our business in the future,” says a company official who oversees its health, safety and environment wing.

Other industrialists whose factories do not have internal arrangements for waste disposal like to point out that setting up treatment plants at each industrial unit is not financially feasible. Individual factory owners either do not have money or they lack enough space to set up an in-house plant, says Saleem-uz-Zaman who heads an environment committee at the Korangi Association of Trade and Industry. “A treatment plant can cost anywhere between 30 million and 40 million rupees” he says, and will require a large piece of land too.

To overcome these obstacles, the provincial government has recently asked KWSB to set up combined treatment plants in five of the seven industrial estates in Karachi. “We are all so relieved,” says Zaman. The factory owners, according to him, are willing to pool money to bear the operational cost of these plants.

At the same time, however, he does not exhibit much confidence in KWSB’s ability to build and run these proposed plants in an efficient manner. It “cannot even carry out” its core functions of providing water and drainage to the city, he says, “what to talk of adding more” to its duties.

Only a few industries ensure that the solid residues of their production processes are dried, pressed into cakes and then burned to ashes in incinerators. Others do not know where their solid waste ends up. “Earlier we would put our residues outside our factory wherefrom it would be picked up by waste disposal companies but Sepa officials have become very strict,” says a manager at a tannery in Korangi. Now the waste is kept inside factories until it is lifted by a disposal company which often does not treat it the way it should be treated.

In theory, it must end up at incinerators. Karachi has two of them — one each in Korangi and Port Qasim. They are meant for burning down waste from pharmaceuticals, chemical industries and food manufacturers. Some industrial waste is also incinerated at two other facilities – originally set up for burning hospital waste – that are run by the city government.

A number of Sepa-certified private companies also offer solid waste disposal services to industries. This, though, is set to change with the implementation of a recently approved law, Sindh Solid Waste Management Board Act, 2014, which makes these companies ineligible to do what they are doing now. The act does not absolve individual industries and industry associations of the primary responsibility to manage and remove their industrial waste, but it bars them from engaging private companies for the purpose. All waste disposal services, under the law, will be provided only by a single government entity, Sindh Solid Waste Management Board.

“We are working on a feasibility study for a scientific treatment of industrial waste,” says Almas Saleem, a deputy director at the board. “Once that study concludes, we may start disposing of industrial waste after signing service agreements with concerned industry organisations,” he says.

Sceptics remain wary. Before preparing a feasibility study, they say, authentic and verifiable data should have been collected on how much industrial waste is actually generated in Karachi, how many dumpers and staff will be needed for its disposal, and how hazardous and non-hazardous waste will be separated. Similarly, they say, there should be a proper assessment of how many incinerators the city requires to dispose of hazardous industrial waste and how the recycling industry and scavengers can be involved to retrieve reusable materials.

Others doubt if the SSWMB can handle the city’s industrial waste at all. As Langah asks: when, five years after its formation, it is still struggling to collect and dispose of non-industrial urban waste, how can it be trusted to take care of more complex types of trash such as the residues of industrial production?

In the absence of a unified citywide mechanism for the removal of industrial waste, what Karachi has is a mishmash. Hundreds of thousands of rag pickers, usually boys in their early teens, unregistered contractors and small companies rummage through the trash to find anything reusable and saleable — all these together, by default, constitute the city’s industrial waste disposal mechanism. A lot of trash that factories either do not care about or have little means to tackle still gets handled because ‘one man’s waste is another man’s treasure’.

The problem with this informal arrangement is that waste collectors are often unaware of the hazards they might be exposed to. They are also only concerned about what can be reused and sold. The rest is often thrown at open garbage dumps along roads.

Shehri, or Citizens for a Better Environment, was formed in 1988 as a non-profit organisation. Among its founding members were Qazi Faez Isa, who is now a judge at the Supreme Court, and Dr Kaiser Bengali, an economist who has advised both the government and international donors on social development issues.

A 2015 study by Shehri, Karachi’s Industrial Estates, revealed that the liquid, solid and gaseous emissions of the city’s industrial sector were poorly monitored and regulated. The problem, according to the authors of the study, stemmed from the fact that government officials were unable to enforce laws. They were equally unsuccessful in convincing industrialists that it made good economic sense for them to make environment-friendly changes in their production processes.

Sepa, the main government entity responsible for enforcing environmental rules and regulations, does not inspire much confidence in its capability. If the environs of its own headquarters – strewn with all kinds of trash – are anything to go by, it does not seem well suited for the task assigned to it.

Naeem Mughal, Sepa’s director general, shifts uncomfortably in his seat as he talks about his organisation’s problems. “We have our share of challenges, the biggest being capacity — both financial and human,” he says.

Another senior official, Langah, argues it is next to impossible for Sepa to monitor over 10,000 factories spread all over Karachi “with just under two dozen inspectors”. Even these inspectors do not have access to enough motorcycles and they do not get sufficient fuel allowance to move around the city, he says.

Sepa also does not have the expertise to conduct high quality tests required for monitoring air and water pollution. Shahab Usto, a Karachi-based lawyer and an environmental activist, recalls how, during a recent visit to the Sepa head office, he found expensive laboratory equipment and state-of-the-art air monitoring system lying unused.

Others say Sepa is so corrupt that it will fail to protect the city’s environment even if it has all the financial and human resources it is asking for. They allege that it either colludes with violators of environmental laws or looks the other way when they indulge in violations.

Many of those doing regular business with Sepa say – off the record, of course – that there is a nexus between Sepa, the laboratories that conduct environmental tests and a handful of firms that provide consultancies to businesses on environmental problems. This is a “highly organised racket” with no one willing to talk about it, says one of these insiders. “A person wanting to set up an industry has to get a no-objection certificate from Sepa which asks that person to get the initial environmental examination and the environmental impact assessment of his project done from Sepa’s ‘favourite’ consulting firms,” he claims. “If you do not get the assessments done by those firms, you will struggle to obtain clearance and risk delays in your project,” he alleges.

Another insider says Sepa helps polluting industries avoid penalties. If and when an industrial unit runs the risk of losing its permission to operate for violating environmental laws, it goes to a lab that works in collusion with Sepa and gets its emission data fudged, he claims. This way it continues to operate, spewing pollutants into the environment, he says.

Even when industrialists are not in cahoots with Sepa, they are generally wary of any government interference in their businesses. “When a government official pays us a visit, the first thought that comes to our minds is that he will needlessly find some fault in the way we work,” says the security chief at a denim manufacturer. “This fault then gets rectified only by greasing that official’s palm,” he says.

Langah retorts that “bribery is never one-sided”. Industrialists who violate laws “try underhand means” to make us “look the other way”.

He says, on paper, Sepa has sweeping powers to inspect factories as and when it likes but, in reality, those powers are never exercised. “It is within our mandate to pay them surprise visits ... but we dare not,” he says. “We have to cajole them and take their permission.”

If and when Sepa takes industrialists to task, Langah says, “they accuse us of either harassment or bribery”. As he puts it: “There is no way to win from powerful and influential industrialists.”

Waqar Phulpoto, an additional director at Sepa, argues the real reason for his organisation’s failure to implement environmental laws is that it is a “toothless” entity. It does not have its own enforcement wing, he says. This wing, according to him, should have the same job description and powers as the enforcement wings of other civic bodies such as the Sindh Building Control Authority and the excise, taxation, and narcotics control department. It should have powers to raid factories, register cases and arrest polluters, he says. “We need it for an effective implementation of environmental laws.”

His organisation has had a glimpse of such power after a high-powered water commission, set up by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2016 on a petition filed by lawyer Usto, put its entire judicial weight behind Sepa. Working under a recently retired Supreme Court judge, Amir Hani Muslim, the commission conducted regular hearings and made frequent raids at sites alleged to be hindering or harming water supplies to Karachi in particular and Sindh in general. It also helped Sepa when in 2018 it wanted to carry out a survey of factories in Site. “Where we met with resistance, the [apex] court would appoint magistrates and depute police to help us get into the factories,” Phulpoto says.

Even then 77 factories did not allow Sepa teams to enter their premises, he says. This made the Supreme Court order the owners of those factories to appear before it and tender a written apology. “Still 15 or so of them refused to appear.” So, says Phulpoto, cases were lodged against them.

The lesson that Sepa has learnt from this exercise is that courts are the best place to make the breakers of law pay — especially when some judges themselves are proactively working to protect the environment. The only problem with such judicial initiatives is that they always have an expiry date. As soon as an environmentally aware judge leaves the court, the steps taken by him also come to an end. The water commission, for instance, did not get an extension after its original tenure expired in January this year. This was mainly because Justice Saqib Nisar, who had set it up, retired as Chief Justice of Pakistan in the same month.

Predictably, Usto is now worried about the future of the commission’s accomplishments. He says the “huge amount of work” initiated by the commission will now come to naught. “Many industries may have already returned to their old ways.”

He is particularly concerned over the reinstatement of Sepa’s director general Naeem Mughal who was earlier removed by the Supreme Court. Usto plans to challenge his reinstatement if corruption and inefficiency continue to mar Sepa’s working under Mughal.

The other major problem with taking the courtroom route is that it stretches Sepa’s already meagre human resources even thinner. The organisation’s senior officials find themselves occupied more with court appearances than with monitoring and checking pollution on the ground.

Also, since Sepa does not have a dedicated legal cell and does not have money to hire lawyers from outside, it seldom succeeds in winning a court battle. As Phulpoto puts it: “We often get stumped by the top-notch lawyers hired by big industrialists.”

Part Two

Since smog became its own season during the dry rain-starved winter months in Punjab, the provincial government has introduced an anti-smog policy. Approved in October 2017, it states: “A wide range of small to medium-scale industries, including brick kilns and steel re-rolling mills make a much larger contribution [to smog] as compared to the size of their economic activity due to the use of “waste” fuels such as old tires, paper, wood, and textile waste.”

The environmental impact of these industries is visible even to the naked eye in Punjab’s two largest metropolises — Lahore and Faisalabad. The two cities house the highest number of factories after Karachi and are, unsurprisingly, counted among 10 places in the world with worst air quality.

Brick kilns seem like an obvious culprit for this state of affairs. They are everywhere on Lahore’s outskirts — even in areas that once used to be outside the city but are now parts of its bustling residential neighbourhoods. The black dense smoke that emits from their chimneys is a familiar sight in this part of the country.

Last winter, the Punjab government placed brick kilns at the top of the polluters against whom it decided to take action. It divided the province into three zones – green, yellow and red – depending on their air quality and, for two months, starting from November 3, ordered the closure of all brick kilns in the red zone that includes Lahore and has the worst air quality. (Kiln owners moved the Lahore High Court against the closure and had it restricted to less than a month.)

Some of them, though, used the closure as an opportunity to improve their production processes. A kiln near Thokar Niaz Baig, a village on the southern edge of Lahore, shows how this has been done.

Located off a busy road that leads to Lahore-Islamabad motorway, the kiln is surrounded by localities that house educational institutions, markets and a few thousand residences. Its untreated smoke can potentially threaten many lives.

On a recent spring afternoon, its owner Muhammad Islam is wearing a dark blue shalwar kameez with a matching waistcoat and a pair of sturdy black shoes which have a thick rubber sole — fit for a walk on a smouldering surface. As he moves around above the kiln’s furnace, heat seems to emanate from underneath his feet, travelling imperceptibly but quickly upwards.

A greyish smoke is coming out of the bluish chimney jutting straight out into the sky from the furnace. The smoke looks almost like dark grey clouds. Another kiln right next to it, also owned by Islam, has a blackened chimney that is releasing thick black smoke.

“I was the first one to use a new technique for baking bricks in Pakistan,” he says, all smiles, as he stretches his arm towards unbaked bricks laid out in front of him.

Here is how the new technique differs from the old one: at an ordinary kiln, unbaked bricks are lined in neat rows in the furnace; hot air that passes through them leaves the furnace unhindered to escape through the chimney. The environment-friendly technique requires bricks to be lined in a way that they create obstacles in the way of hot air, trapping most pollutants inside the furnace rather than allowing them to escape into the atmosphere. Coal inserted into the furnace is also crushed to a powdered form so that its carbon content burns down to the maximum. The most important constituent of the new technique is a blower that makes hot air rotate through the furnace.

Kiln owners are required to use the new technique by a new Punjab government policy formulated as per the recommendations of a commission set up on December 19, 2017, by the Lahore High Court. The commission’s mandate was “to formulate a smog policy for Punjab [in order] to protect and safeguard the life and health of the people of [the province]”. It later identified many contributors to smog, chief among them being brick kilns, various industries, emissions from motor vehicles and the burning of urban and agricultural waste.

One of the commission’s main recommendations wanted the provincial government to ensure that 200 kilns “be upgraded to [a] more efficient” technique.

Though the commission also suggested the provincial government provide credit facility to kiln owners, build their capacity and transfer technology to them, most of the upgrading has happened without provincial administration’s involvement. The absence of official support is a major reason why the scale of change in brick kilns remains small so far. Without government money coming to their aid, most kiln owners find the costs of the new technique to be prohibitive.

A kiln equipped with the new technique costs 3.3-3.5 million rupees in total. The blower alone costs around 600,000 rupees. The technology required for putting together the blower, according to Islam, does not exist in Pakistan. Kiln owners, therefore, are experimenting with different shapes and structures to see which one works the best and lasts the longest. More often than not, their experiments also fail.

While capital costs of building kilns with the new technique are high, these kilns need much less money for their running costs than that required by traditional kilns, says Islam. The new technique is fuel efficient because it helps coal burn longer and keeps almost all the hot air within the furnace. It, thus, saves a lot of money to be spend on coal.

Naveed Saqib, who runs a company that provides environmental solutions to various industries, has been in the business for the past 19 years. It is only now that local businessmen are approaching him to engage his services, he says. Earlier, according to him, all his customers were multinational companies.

One of the biggest challenges he faces is making industrialists see value in pollution prevention. If this does not make economic sense to them, they will never invest in costly mechanisms to reduce toxic industrial emissions. “The strongest resistance comes from Lahore,” says Saqib who is a resident of Faisalabad but has customers throughout the country.

Industrials in Lahore seem to believe the government will soon back off from its current focus on the implementation of environmental rules and regulations, he says. So, they do not take the problem seriously.

Their views may change if superior courts maintain their policy of treating environmental problems as urgently as they have been doing in recent past.

One of the most important judicial initiative in this regard was a suo moto notice taken in early 2018 by the Supreme Court over persistent smog in and around Lahore. Some months later, the apex court forced the provincial government to take urgent and strong action against those sectors of the economy whose emissions, according to the findings of Punjab’s own smog commission, are contributing the most to smog.

The resultant action convinced the owners of many steel smelters in Lahore that they can no longer shun the responsibility for their highly-polluting production processes. They now appear willing to change their dirty old ways, says Saqib.

The main pollutant in steel production is not unburnt carbon – as is the case with traditional brick kilns – but other particulate matter. The smoke that comes out from a steel furnace burning at 1,700 degrees centigrade is actually dust of various oxides – such as nickel – that may cause chronic bronchitis, sinus blockade, breathing difficulties and even lung cancer.

The mechanism to capture these oxides before they get dispersed in the atmosphere is more complex than the one used in environment-friendly brick kilns. It is also way more costly. Only large steel factories have the money to put it in place. The smaller ones cannot afford it.

Saqib has set up one such mechanism at a Faisalabad-based steel mill. He has built a roofless room right on top of the mill’s furnace. A blower fixed in the centre of this room sucks in all the smoke from the furnace, making it rise up in an S-shaped pattern and sending it to another machine where pollutants are captured and turned into very fine ash.

This ash is not entirely useless. It can be exported to China for 60-70 rupees per kilogramme. This opportunity, Saqib says, could become an incentive for steel factories to add smoke filtration plants to their furnaces.

Many large factories in industrial estates of Lahore and Faisalabad have found a cheap but extremely dirty alternative to costly and often unreliable electricity supply. After the sunset, they light up their boilers by burning old rubber tyres, among other things. Clouds of black smoke rising from steel furnaces that use tyres as fuel can be seen all along the newly constructed Ring Road in Lahore every night.

In Faisalabad’s industrial areas such pollution is even more obvious. A neighbourhood called Ghulam Muhammadabad houses thousands of small weaving and knitting looms, and is probably one of the most unkempt parts of the city. Piles of biomass can be seen lying outside what look like industrial units.

Streets in Ghulam Muhammadabad look almost empty during the day. As night falls, thousands of small industrial units start running, often using old cloth rags mixed with wood to fire up their machinery. They purchase the rags from the importers of used western clothes for as low as seven rupees per kilogramme. Together, these units send thick plumes of poisonous smoke into the atmosphere.

The fear of raids by environment protection agencies has restricted the use of rags only to night-time. “Ever since the government has become strict, the factories do not really buy much cloth from us anymore,” says a local vendor of used garments who operates from a small shop right next to a big textile mill.

Liquid industrial waste is an equally major problem in Faisalabad.

A large number of textile factories are littered along an open sewage drain passing through the heart of the city. For years, these have been releasing their effluents into the local sewerage system thus poisoning groundwater. “Sulphates and nitrates discharged by textile mills [into underground water] are extremely harmful for human health,” says Ali Hasnain Sayed, an engineer and development practitioner based in Faisalabad.

According to him, only those factories in Faisalabad are treating their liquid waste that are linked to international trade. The rest, especially small factories, see no economic benefit in setting up waste treatment plants. They think of these plants only in terms of additional costs to be incurred, Sayed says.

He was also a part of a team which conducted a situation analysis of water supply in Lahore in 2014. The report that resulted from that analysis found higher than internationally permissible levels of arsenic in Lahore’s groundwater. The analysts found out that “high-polluting” industries contributing to the arsenic poisoning of groundwater included textile processing units, carpet weaving factories, tanneries, food processing units and makers of dairy products.

Their report also noted that around 100 industrial units in Lahore were discharging their untreated effluents directly into Hadiara drain, a rainwater channel that flows from India into Pakistan and ends up in the Ravi river after travelling along the southern edge of the city. The drain irrigates a large number of plant nurseries and vegetable farms whose products then land at Lahore’s major wholesale and retail markets.

Part three

Malik Amin Aslam has served a four-year term – starting from 2012 – as a vice-president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and has also worked as a junior minister for environment in 2004-2007 during the government of former president General (retd) Pervez Musharraf. He is now working as an advisor to Prime Minister Imran Khan on climate change.

Aslam endorses the argument that air pollution has “a direct nexus” with climate change. Citing a source apportionment study done for Lahore by the commission on smog, he points out that vehicular emissions followed by exhausts from steel mills are the two largest sources of air pollution in the city.

The climatic effects of this pollution, Aslam says, “are augmented by the fast vanishing green cover” in Lahore which, according to him, has lost 70 per cent of its tree cover in the last decade. “Our recent love affair with coal” is equally to be blamed, according to him. He calls a coal-fired power plant in Sahiwal, set up by the previous government, “a double disaster which not only spews carbon emissions but also does so… in our country’s prime agricultural heartland”. That is why, he says, the government has halted the construction of further coal-fired power plants.

Aslam also says the government is devising “a climate mitigation plan based on regulating and controlling [polluting] emissions”. This plan, he says, will ensure “compliance” with the National Environmental Quality Standards for Ambient Air — or air quality for starters. Measures such as the introduction of more fuel-efficient car engines and increase in the contribution of renewable sources of power to the national energy mix are also being planned and implemented, he says.

Another important government move is a “greening initiative” that aims at planting 10 billion trees across Pakistan over the next five years. This will help us in “sequestering emissions” that are polluting our environment and thus contributing to climate change.

Additional reporting by Mehmal Sarfraz

This article was published in the Herald's April 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Laila Rahman has studied at prestigious art institutions such as Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London, the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and the National College of Arts, Lahore, where she now teaches at the Department of Fine Arts. In 2010, she won a Fulbright Award which took her for a year to the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, United States. Her stint there ended with a solo exhibition.

Rahman’s large body of work incorporates and combines her skills both as a painter and a printmaker. In her prints, paintings and mixed media works, she uses imagery that is rich, personal and, at once, intimate and cosmological. Her art addresses issues concerning the human condition, the female form, mythology and religion and their intersection.

Marked by a strong draughtsmanship and a keen understanding of design, her artworks also have an enduring engagement with symbols and texts. In her latest works, exhibited at Koel Gallery, Karachi, in December 2018, Rahman tackled her old concerns, themes and techniques through new questions, motifs and materials.

Below are excerpts of a recent conversation with her:

Dua Abbas Rizvi. Your recent solo exhibition in Karachi, titled Meem Mashriq, Meem Maghrib, consisted of mixed media paintings and prints. Could you tell us a little about these works and what you set out to explore through them?

Laila Rahman. These works centre on the state of humankind which has been engrossing me for quite a while. The [Urdu] letter meem (ã), which I am fascinated by because of its myriad representations in calligraphy, also became central to these works. The changing and ductile form of meem fascinates me.

Meem, rendered calligraphically, can be very flowery, very decorative. In some cases, it simply becomes an arabesque and, therefore, difficult to spot. And it is, of course, a very heavy letter. In Urdu, meem is the first letter in words such as mashriq (east) and maghrib (west). Meem is also the first letter in mein (I), in Muhammad and also in majma and majlis (both meaning congregation). These are the kinds of associations I was thinking of [while creating these works]. But the constant face-off between the East and the West is really where I began these works.

Dua. The letter meem, in many ways, becomes a point of convergence for different motifs that run through this particular body of work. Because, in addition to encapsulating the eponymous mashriq and maghrib dichotomy, meem also signals the word mahtaab (the moon) which, too, is central to these works. In fact, one of your large drawings from the show is titled Mahtaab se mulaqaatain (Meetings with the moon).

Laila . Yes, as you have observed, the moon is something that has intrigued me and has become, eventually, the shape that the surfaces have taken [in my work] this time around. For me, the moon is entirely feminine while square shapes are more masculine than feminine.

In earlier works, I was fascinated by the square [but] the square always had a circle in it, referring to the moon. Everything that I have showed this time round is a circle. In many of the compositions, there are circles within circles [and this] really has to do with another thing that I have explored in my work — the form of a pomegranate.

Dua. What does a pomegranate symbolise for you?

Laila. The pomegranate, for me, has become really important to paint, draw and think about because I feel that it is nuanced and layered and complex in its formation. For me, it is also the fruit of the original sin. I really wanted to dissect it and see it almost like a diagram. So the surfaces in these works have become almost like a diagram, a map. A pomegranate is also, I think, redolent of the East, of mashriq. It appears in Persian and Mughal paintings. Tuzk-e-Babri [memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babar] onwards, one sees pomegranate trees and the pomegranate fruit represented very beautifully in our arts.

I also associate the pomegranate’s colour – like many people do – with blood. Even the seeds inside it are like beads of blood and the white skin that separates these beads is like a membrane. So, it made me think of the human body. And, from there, it really began to represent the fractured state of the East. So, in the painting titled Meem Mashriq, Meem Maghrib, the East is represented by this once beautiful pomegranate depicted at the moment of its decay. My objective in making it in this state was to ask: where do we stand today as a people? Are we our own worst enemy? [Historically], it is a difficult moment to be in. I think Islam is inevitably going to come into this conversation.

Dua. I did want to bring up religion and religious iconography with regards to your work. Something that you mentioned recently to another viewer at your open studio event has stayed with me. You mentioned how, while working on Majma I and Majma II, two of the works in this latest show, you had in mind the ornate faces of Muslim preachers that now grace the backs of many rickshaws in Pakistan. Could you talk a little about that visual connection?

Laila. I think that came about because of the endless delays [while moving through] traffic in Lahore. I began to amuse myself by noting how many rickshaws have the faces of these religious leaders repeated in absolutely symmetrical patterns. You will have the main person, or two main people, in the largest circle(s), then the lesser ranked beings in smaller circles below them, and then even lesser ranked clerics arrayed like a string of pearls at the bottom. What struck me was that they were always symmetrical. What is happening on the left [of the poster] is happening on the right too.

Dua. I cannot help but be reminded of medieval Christian compositional schemes of angels and saints when I see these posters.

Laila. Absolutely, the halos become these circles today — the halos behind those angels of Giotto, for instance…

So, Majma I and Majma II were my nod towards these visual congregations that we are constantly being bombarded with — attend this, and hear that, and remember these words of wisdom, and so on. It is a visual overload.

But the fact is that symmetry and pattern underlie absolutely everything in the East — whether it is a mosaic floor, tile-work on the walls or frescos right up to the ceiling. Even the ceiling is [sometimes] honeycombed with beautiful shapes. In some cases, there is a body of water, like the pool at the Alhambra [palace in Granada], that reflects and multiplies all that complexity.

I have also been observing our fruit and vegetable vendors. They arrange their products, daily, in this gentle sweep upwards — with vegetables on one side and fruits on the other. Green and purple vegetables are punctuated by little bunches of red radishes which look like full stops [in a text or a composition]. Your average vegetable vendor knows intuitively [how important] the full stop, or nukta, is. He knows colour relationships intuitively and he knows exactly where to stretch for whichever product you have asked for; they are never in a jumble; here, too, there is always a symmetry.

Dua. It is all a system. There is a method to it…

Laila. Absolutely.

Dua. Growing up, you spent time in different regions of Pakistan and studied and lived for some years in England after your graduation from Lahore. How much has travel informed your work? Would you say that having to travel so much was an advantage? Or was it a disadvantage?

Laila. Well, my father was from [Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province] – from Mardan – and my mother is from Lahore. My sisters and I went to school in Lahore so it made sense for my parents to have some kind of a base here. The way our family worked was that all holidays were spent in Mardan. So my childhood was set in a pattern — schooling here, vacationing there.

But, being half-Pakhtun and half-Punjabi, I have always felt that I have to defend Punjab in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Punjab. My painting Ze/Mein really shows the two halves of me. Half of the text [in it] is in Pashto and half in Urdu. [The former represents my] Pukhtun half [through writings about] places that I have known all my life and have associations with. [The latter represents my] Lahori half. I felt that I really needed to put this down somewhere as a kind of marker for myself.

Dua. This also comes across in other works such as Do raastay, aik dil… (that translates as ‘two paths, one heart’)…

Laila. Yes, Do raastay, aik dil shows Pashto and Urdu alphabets superimposed on each other as a photo-etching. The placement of some of the letters is meant to almost fool the viewer into thinking, ‘Oh, is this a word I am reading?’ Of course, it is not a word. It is just two different letters from two different alphabets sitting on top of each other, creating an unfamiliar shape.

Dua. Works like Ze/Mein also feature a kind of vortex — formed first by metal spikes protruding from the surface and then by paint and graphite expanding that circular movement outwards. It brings to mind The Second Coming, [a poem by W B] Yeats. Looking at this work, and several others from your latest show, it really does feel as if, to quote Yeats, “the centre cannot hold”. There is a thread of apocalyptic imagery going through these works…

Laila. Your use of the word ‘apocalyptic’ is quite apposite because one of my earlier solos, at Chawkandi Art Gallery in Karachi, was titled Apocalypse. It dealt with religion, magic and superstition. [It also dealt with] how we observe certain rituals and how they become central to our identification with a certain part of the world.

The black rectangles in this latest body of work are really a reference to the Kaaba. I almost titled [the painting as] Meem Mashriq, Meem Maghrib, Praying West, with all its connotations and with the pun intended. We want to be like the West – just now we are speaking in a language of the West – and, geographically, we pray facing the Kaaba [which is also to the west from us]. Whether it is Lahore or Mardan or Karachi, we are physically, actually, praying while facing the West.

But in the paintings Ze/Mein and Meem Mashriq, Meem Maghrib, the medium took over. Once I had made the black rectangles, the spikes jutting from them became people, standing in rows for prayer, for worship. They also took on another aspect – of something that is cold, hard, menacing and industrial, something that has to do with being emotionless – whereas, even in its putrefied state, the pomegranate, representing the East, remains beautiful and emotive. The crux of the matter is that I will still opt for the East. This is home.

Dua. You mentioned, in an earlier conversation we had, that while you worked on some of the paintings and drawings in your last series, your mother sat in your studio and read to you from a book. This struck me as a very interesting, soothing and deeply symbolic ritual. How much of art-making is ritualistic to you? What are some of the rituals that you, as an artist, perform while working or while preparing yourself to work?

Laila. I perform the ritual of cleaning my studio, top to bottom, and organising it so that I know exactly where every last pencil or stump of graphite is. While I am physically getting the space organised, I am doing the same brain-wise: I am clearing a mental space in which I can sit and think. That really is a necessary ritual. It is a cleansing, a purification, a getting-ready.

There are days when I do not go into the studio but I know it is waiting there for me and that is a huge comfort. Just like my mother reading to me was a huge comfort because it was a kind of soothing background sound. She was reading from The Moon: Myth and Image by Jules Cashford, a book that my sister gave to me.

As I worked on this latest series, my mother read to me about various myths from across the world and how they are all impacted by the moon. The images that have spun out of just this one orb are tremendous.

Dua. And your mother reading it becomes doubly meaningful because the moon evokes maternity and femininity so to have your mother’s voice…

Laila. Yes, I think that really was important because I needed that closeness.

Dua. It just struck me as very beautiful because a lot of art-making now is propelled by such an ugly sense of competition that we, as artists, do not make time for these little moments that should be bringing us closer to our thoughts, to others and to the universe. I remember reading, in a book by Janet Kaplan, that Spanish painter Remedios Varo once bought a strange-looking plant which was said to produce egg-shaped fruit. She placed it on her terrace in the moonlight. Then she arranged her paint tubes around the plant, believing that the combination of plant energy, moonlight and paint would be propitious for her work in the studio the following day.

Laila. There is a scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s film Romeo and Juliet which shows a friar collecting herbs by the light of the full moon. They could only be picked or harvested at that point in the lunar cycle.

The cycle of the moon, the cycle of women’s bodies and the cyclical nature of things — leading into a spiral: these are all connected for me. As a woman, I find it important to see things grow. I do some form of gardening every now and then and it brings me great peace and joy. Or I occasionally cook, or put things right, or think of ways leftover food or cloth or even a piece of wood can be reused. I hate waste of any kind. I think these are all ways in which we fulfil something within ourselves.

The fate of women is that we have to juggle [many things] but I think that makes us stronger and wiser and, therefore, we are complex and nuanced — like a pomegranate and unlike the masculine apple.

Dua. Constantly making and revising inventories, lists…

Laila. Absolutely. List-making is secondary nature [to me]. It is instinctive. I have a pencil and paper always at hand for the myriad things that need to be done. To make a home is something that I enjoy doing. It gives me a lot of satisfaction and pleasure to do this. It is an ongoing commitment — to the people whom you live with and whom you love and to whom you are committed and, therefore, you are looking after them.

This looking-after has got that same spiral, cyclical quality. I am reminded of grandmothers who were in our homes when we were children and how, when we would gather there for holidays, meals and rooms would be ready. It did not happen by magic. It happened because those women exerted themselves to make sure that everything was in place. That is a legacy that I am now beginning to understand and treasure.

The author is a visual artist and writer based in Lahore.

This article was published in the Herald's April 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Radicalisation, alienation and belongingness – these are the main themes of Fatima Bhutto’s new novel, The Runaways. The novel traces the lives of three young people – Anita, Monty and Sunny – who escape their lives in Pakistan and run away to Iraq during the ascent of the Islamic State.

Fatima Bhutto is the author of a book on poetry, two works of non-fiction, including her memoir Songs of Blood and Sword, and now, two works of fiction. In an interview with The Wire, she talks about why she was drawn towards the lives of radicalised young people, and why she believes they “need to be treated with compassion before they make these terrible mistakes.”

The main theme of your book is radicalisation. Was it the sudden rise of ISIS that drew you to the subject – or was it developments closer to home, in Pakistan, because of which so many Pakistanis have suffered?

Fatima Bhutto: I write because I am disturbed by something enough that it doesn’t let go of me. I am 36 years old, so I remember a time before the ‘war on terror’ had subsumed everything – when the colour of my passport or my religion wasn’t a ticking threat to most people. But a generation of young people have come of age under this oppressive shadow.

Pakistanis have certainly suffered. What can you say to the fathers and mothers of those boys whose blood covers this country? What can you say to Aitzaz Hasan’s family? He was killed protecting 2,000 fellow students from a suicide bomber, using his body as a shield. I am heartbroken that such a sacrifice is paid by the young and the innocent over and over again.

The West doesn’t understand the pain of the non-western world. They have constructed a completely false narrative about radicalism, which conveniently excuses their wars, their occupations, from any role in its creation. You write a novel for many reasons, these are just a few of the things that were on my mind when I sat down to start.

The three protagonists come from different economic and religious backgrounds. Do you believe that a rich Muslim teen today is just as prone to Islamic radicalisation as a poor Christian girl like Anita?

Fatima Bhutto: I wouldn’t call it ‘Islamic’ radicalism at all. Look at the world today – radicalism isn’t the exclusive property of one people or one religion. Young people are vulnerable to anger and violence all over the world.

Radicalism is a reaction spurred by nationalism more than any religious belief – studies have shown this to us again and again. A University of Chicago professor studied every case of suicide terrorism in the early 2000s and found that they were motivated by political beliefs, not religious ones. Look at the 28-year-old terrorist who killed fifty people in New Zealand – it was politics and his hateful interpretation of nationalism that motivated his violent actions.

The stories of your three main characters are very similar to that of Shamima Begum, the British teenager who chose to join the Islamic State. Many in the UK opposed her right to return, saying she didn’t deserve any form of amnesty. In the ‘Runaways’, Sunny is aware of the extreme nature of his decisions, but voluntarily chooses the same path that Shamima did. What do you think is the right way to deal with these young people?

Fatima Bhutto: Look, Shahmima Begum was born in Britain, raised in Britain, educated in Britain and radicalised in Britain. Britain is a part of her journey towards the catastrophic decision she made to run away.

How can it wipe its hands off her? She is a citizen and she has rights. They have a responsibility to try her if she has committed a crime and to rehabilitate her and understand why this happened in the first place.

How is a 15-year-old allowed to board an international flight without a passport? Where were the adults, the authorities to ask, ‘Where are you going?’. I understand she has expressed regret, and she has lost three children before they could walk and talk – I think she has suffered the incredible error of her choices.

These young people, lonely and angry enough to turn against the world, need to be treated with compassion before they make these terrible mistakes. In Sunny’s case in ‘The Runaways’, it’s not the first choice he makes. He tries to find a place, a community that will absorb and understand him but he doesn’t find it. That’s partly why he makes his terrible choice.

Sunny’s incapable local Imam, who fails to see the signs, Anita’s poverty due to the structure of capitalism, and the West’s ‘war on terror’ (described through one character’s arguments)— are these the main reasons that radicalise young people today?

Fatima Bhutto: I think they are a huge part of why young people are so vulnerable today. It’s not religion. That’s what the talking heads in the West keep telling us but they have no experience of what it means to be a Muslim, let alone any actual understanding of Islam.

The West’s war on terror has been hypocritical and it’s been phenomenally bloody. Look at any Western country today – what are they talking about? Migration. They’re terrified of outsiders, but why? These are countries that colonised the world for hundreds of years – hundreds – and now they are completely destabilised by some of those people coming to their shores to live and work?

Look at the rising intolerance all over the world: the racism, the exclusion and ugliness in the rhetoric of world leaders. This is alienating, but it’s also humiliating, it’s wounding. Again look at the New Zealand shooter – he is a completely radicalised man. He’s not a Muslim. He’s a fundamentalist and a terrorist who took life into his hands in a brutal way. Why do we only talk about radicalism as though it’s the property of one people?

Why did you choose to select the jihad-camp setting, all the way in Iraq? Why not closer to home? Are you deliberately looking the other way, denying the presence of terror camps in Pakistan?

Fatima Bhutto: The story I’m telling in ‘The Runaways’ is about a particular moment in radicalism that pronounced itself as very young, very modern, and very global. My novel is about Daesh and the casualties of this transnational blaze of radicalism, not about Pakistan.

Secondly, a novel is a work of imagination – it’s not a non-fiction history or investigation that is obliged to do anything, so your question is perhaps better directed to a non-fictional work.

What do you think is the role of Prime Ministers like Narendra Modi and Imran Khan to address this kind of radicalisation and alienation?

Fatima Bhutto: The job of any leader is to provide a vision for the youth of his country and to make sure that they are included in the construction of that vision. When people have dignified work, a home, a feeling – that of security that comes from knowing they are a vital part of the fabric of their country and community – they don’t run away to die. They don’t pick up arms if they are assured an honourable life in their home countries.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Delhi. She tweets @IntifadaBasheer.

The article was originally published in The Wire

Muhammad Ishaq Bhatti owns 32 acres of farmland. In most parts of Pakistan, this landholding would be sufficient to afford its owner a decent lifestyle. But not in the water-starved Badin district where he lives with his family in poverty.

The reason for his plight is that canals in his area have no water to allow any cultivation. “Water courses in my village have dried up,” says 68-year-old Bhatti. He has not cultivated even a single acre of his land for the last two years. Earlier, when he could still sow some crops, his yield would be so low that his input costs always exceeded his earnings. He now makes ends meet by working as a daily wage manual labourer.

Farmers and landowners in four out of five talukas – or tehsils – of Badin district have the same complaint. These talukas receive river water for irrigation via two canals — Akram Canal, which flows throughout the year, and Phuleli Canal, that flows only during the sowing seasons for main cash crops such as sugarcane and wheat. The water from these canals now fails to reach vast tracts of farmland in Badin, Tando Bago, Golarchi and Talhar talukas.

Settlers from other provinces who own farmland in these talukas also have not escaped the effects of water shortage. Muhammad Ilyas Ghumman, a settler who owns 160 acres of land and heads an organisation of local farmers, says he has received no yield from his fields in the 2018-19 crop cycle. His produce was only 10 per cent of the normal in 2017-18 and was only a little higher – at 40 per cent of the normal – in 2016-17.

Ghumman alleges water supply has been dwindling since 2008 mainly because landowners upstream steal water from the canals, leaving little of it to flow below Badin’s Matli taluka. Even below Matli, he claims, some water is still being stolen. Those involved in this stealing, according to him, are politically influential people belonging to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) that rules Sindh province. “This is why the irrigation department fails to take action against them,” he says. Another settler, Abu Rasheed, who is a retired army brigadier and owns 113 acres of land, also cries foul. “My entire land is lying barren since 2018 because canal water is being stolen before it reaches where my farm is,” he says.

The district administration acknowledges that water theft is a big issue. Badin’s deputy commissioner Hafeez Ahmed Siyal says that he is aware of the problem and that the local officials of the irrigation department have been doing what they could to put an end to it. “They have removed more than 200 illegal pipes recently,” he says.

Phuleli Canal and Akram Canal emanate from Kotri Barrage on the Indus river and are, respectively, supposed to irrigate one million acres and 0.5 million acres of land throughout Badin district. “In the 2018-19 crop season, cultivation could be done on just 10 per cent of this land,” claims Mir Noor.

Ahmed Talpur, a PPP member of the district council. The land cultivated during crop cycles in the last couple of years was also only 25 per cent of the total, he says.

Water shortage is so severe in hundreds of villages along the tail ends of the two canals that it has left their residents with no opportunities to earn a livelihood within their own settlements. Their animals, too, are falling sick and dying due to the absence of water and fodder.

Water is also not available for human consumption. Local groundwater is unfit for drinking due to its high mineral content and canal water, which the villagers would use for all their domestic and irrigation needs, is no longer flowing in irrigation channels close to them. Those who have motorcycles travel for many kilometres until they find water and fill it in jerry cans to take back home.

This situation has forced a large, though unspecified, number of villagers to migrate to other parts of the province. Several villages in three coastal union councils of Badin taluka – which lie at the end of the canal system – have emptied out. In many other villages in the same area, only a few residents have been left behind. According to Riaz Buhar, a district council member associated with PPP, 25 to 30 per cent population of the three union councils has already migrated.

Khuda Bakhsh Mandhro, a 75-year-old landowner, is among those who are still staying put. He has not been able to cultivate his 300 acres of land for 14 months but he does not intend to leave his village. “I own some big and small animals and I am able to bear my expenses by selling them,” he says.

The price he is getting for his animals, though, is half as much as he would get in normal circumstances and his lone source of income is also threatened due to the unavailability of water. Over the last year or so, three of his cows and 12 of his goats have died.

If some local landowners and political activists are to be believed, Badin has been losing its share of canal water for quite some time. The canals flowing into the district first experienced a reduced water supply in the 1970s when some of their water was diverted to irrigate regions north of Badin (which generally receive canal water from Sukkur Barrage that is upstream from Kotri Barrage), they say.

“In 1977 and even afterwards, landowners from the areas irrigated by canals originating from Sukkur Barrage connived with the irrigation department and had channels excavated to divert water from Phuleli Canal,” says district council member Talpur. The areas that benefited from this diversion include Badin’s Matli taluka and its neighbouring district of Tando Muhammad Khan, he claims.

Syed Zafar Ali Shah, a local landowner who is also a retired employee of the irrigation department, makes a similar claim. The whole of Matli taluka, according to him, used to receive irrigation water from the canals that started from Sukkur Barrage but now 175,000 acres of the taluka’s farmland is getting water from Akram Canal, he says.

These assertions find little echo in Karachi, the provincial headquarters.

Idris Rajput, a renowned irrigation expert and a former secretary of Sindh’s irrigation department who lives in the city, does not find them convincing. According to him, no legal or constitutional provisions stop the irrigation department from directing or redirecting canal water as, when and where it wants. Water shortage, he says, is being caused by some other factor.

For many in Badin, that factor could be the government’s failure to stop landowners in upstream regions from stealing canal water — a problem that is as old as the canal system in the district. Echoing the settlers quoted earlier, many local landowners complain how illegally installed water suction pumps and pipelines in upstream disctricts have been used for withdrawing water from both Akram and Phuleli canals for decades — putting the four talukas downstream from Matli at a serious disadvantage.

Another factor frequently cited by Badin’s residents as a reason for the shortage of water is the irrigation department’s alleged failure to remove silt from irrigation channels. The silt, they say, has reduced the capacity of the canals to carry water to farmland. Phuleli Canal, according to a local journalist, Haroon Gopang, was 200 feet wide when it was constructed in 1955. Now, he says, its width has decreased to 130-150 feet due to silting as well as encroachment of its banks by growers.

All these factors, whether considered separately or together, are responsible only for a partial decrease in the canal water flow. They still do not explain how and why, over the last couple of years, irrigation channels in the four talukas have all but dried up.

Residents of the district, including many PPP associates, landowners, growers, traders, social workers, writers, poets and artists — all have started a series of protests since February 2019 against the shortage of canal water. Some former staff members of Sindh’s irrigation department, including some engineers, have joined the protesters too.

Local residents have formed a number of organisations – such as the Save Badin Action Committee – to organise protests and thereby press the provincial and the federal governments to ensure that they get their share of water. Businesses have been kept closed and marches have been carried out from one taluka to another. A protest gathering was also organised in Islamabad.

Unlike many others in the district, these protesters point out that the single most important factor behind the scarcity of water is the construction of three new water regulators on both Akram and Phuleli canals. These regulators, they complain, include crests – or raised stoppers – which have reduced the supply of water from the canals into irrigation channels that lead to farmlands.

The regulators have been built as part of a project funded by the World Bank and overseen by the Sindh Irrigation and Drainage Authority. Their construction started in 2016 but only one of them has become functional since then. The remaining two will start functioning later this year. The crests of all three, though, are already firmly in place. Various theories circulate in Badin about why the regulators and their crests have been built.

Local residents allege these have been built to benefit landowners in Matli taluka and Tando Muhammad Khan. This has been done, they allege, because a majority of the landowners in these two regions are well connected politically — with PPP as well as with some other political parties.

Local landowner Shah endorses these claims by saying that the crests have been built in such a way that they allow a high flow of water till Matli but leave little water in the canal system downstream from there. This, he says, is due to the fact that the crests are unusually high — the highest of them being as tall as two feet and 10 inches. Others are only a little lower; one of them is 1.75 feet high and two others are as high as 1.5 feet.

The protesters have been successful to the extent that the news media has given them extensive – though, according to them, belated – coverage and the provincial authorities have also agreed to hear them out. The government of Sindh, consequently, has formed a committee, headed by Rajput, to assess the impact of the regulators on the flow of canal water.

The committee has not started its work but Rajput says there has been no change for the worse in recent years as far as the discharge of water from Kotri Barrage into Akram and Phuleli canals is concerned. If anything, the discharge is “higher than the allocated quota of the two canals”.

He seems to agree with the residents of Badin when he says the crests could be the reason for a reduction in the flow of water to certain areas in the district. But he is cautious in making a final judgment call. “The exact situation will become clear after the committee inspects the regulators.”

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This article was published in the Herald's April 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Sarmad Sehbai is an enigma. He always provokes extreme reactions: you either hate him or adore him. Indifference towards his work is almost impossible. Unfortunately, Sarmad's name has recently found its way into many a scandal sheet. He is constantly disparaged for being a hedonist, a libertine.

Sarmad Sehbai, however, cannot be dismissed so easily. It is time the enfant terrible of our literary scene was isolated from his caricature. It is time the curtain went up allowing the audience to gauge a potential that has remained heresy. A dimension that has been studiously obscured by an insecure literary elite, must emerge from the shadows, away form the lonely flicker of the traditional shama and into the glare of footlights.

Sarmat Sehbai cannot be permitted his silence. It may be interpreted as complicity and cowardice.

Ali Khan. In the early 70's you made a thrilling debut with your avant garde theatre and a new idiom in poetry. How come you left the scene after generating such a mood?

Sarmad Sehbai. I was probably too green at that time and maybe I'm ''wised up" now. In fact, I didn't leave the scene; the scene left me for a while. You talk ab­out a certain kind of 'mood' and moods are not created in isolation. It was sometime in the late sixties that the children of Independence started having their teething pains.

Born out of the lap of world wars and the awakening of the Asian and African countries, they shared both the optimism of a newly liberated world and the nihilism of war. This led to a violent outburst —­ a kind of poetic delirium. Something had gone wrong with their pre-natal existence.

With their early stub of raw poems they experienced wet dreams of a new world. It was the poetic anarchy of a disinherited youth, termed as ''modernism". The urge for change, however, was threateningly obvious. I only shared this "mad mood" of the sixties and perhaps gave it a ''method."

Khan. But this mood did not carry on. Perhaps it did not have its roots here?

Sehbai. Yes, that's partly true. The difference came when some of us looked towards post World War Europe to seek our 'dadaistik' roots without realising the latent energy of indigenous cultures, and without sharing our predicament with the Afro-Asian world.

Most of the poets who emerged with the modernist movement like a hurricane, have been swept away with time. They've either given up writing or have changed their stance. But this movement was not all that insignificant and can not be easily ignored. On the surface it was a war of polemic but underneath there was a strong urge to find one's self.

The subjective essence of this movement was quite different from its objective manifestation. The anti-establishment impulse had created the anti novel, the anti form or the anti hero. It's a much later realisation that the alienation of this generation was confused with the alienation of the individual in the West.

Terribly Eliotized and crucially Pounded, they could not understand the nature of their alienation. If absurdity was born in the West out of affluence, in Asia it rose out of scarcity. Here, it is the alienation of man from his heritage and productivity.

But even with their infantile Dadaism, this generation did challenge the basis of the existing values and visualised a fresh world view which soon lapsed into oblivion by an overemphasis on obscurantism.

Khan. Why do you think this happened?

Sehbai. In the recent past, we have experienced a staggering phase of regression.­ The process which started with the social realism of Manto and other progressives, released our Literature from the medievalism of dastan and ghazal. Both these forms are back in vogue thanks to the enthusiasm with which our so-called literary masters have embraced them.

Our whole culture reeks of sickening nostalgia. Nostalgia is merely a human recurrence but if not placed in relation to the immediate present it degenerates into a narcissistic jaundice. With this background, the scene is suddenly usurped by megalomania and exhibitionism. Foppery is confused with art, sermonization with literature and glamour with recognition. One would rather flirt with this "broad" than be seduced by it.

Khan. You were known to be an in­novator and a modernist poet but recently you've started writing kafis. Why did you chose kafi as a form of expression?

Sehbai. Kafi or Wai has been the most powerful form in Sindh and Punjab and contains the landscape of these regions and the profile of a culture being rooted in this land. Apart from kafi, I have also adopted forms of bait doha and kissa which are equally suited to modern verse.

Kafi and modernism are not in conflict with each other. It's the way you handle a form. Any form no matter how ancient it is, starts throb­bing with the touch of a poet. It is misleading to think that 'modernisatoin' implies 'westernisation' or 'indutrialization' of literary diction. There can be no modernism without an awareness of your past and living tradition. It will just be like driving without a back mirror, which could be suicidal.

Khan. What about the ghazal?

Sehbai. Ghazal because of its very medium and tradition demands a clas­sical discipline and one has to work with the given metaphors which have their origin in the Persian courts. It is also easily accessible. Younger poets try to break from the court mannerisms extant, and some of them did succeed in bringing out a freshness in this form.

I am not against the ghazal, or for that matter, any form. But it still does not appeal to me. With the kafi, I feel at home.

Khan. But your kafis are written in a language which might not be acceptable as Urdu?

Sehbai. That is precisely my contention. The language I use is certainly not the so-called literary court Urdu. It is a natural outcome of an evolutionary process which existed and flourished all along outside the court. Some critics argue that there is no such tradition and only that language which had the patronage of the court would be chaste enough to be adopted for literary purposes.

They seem to ignore the great masters such as Amir Khusro, Mira Bai and Bhagat Kabir who made intimate use of the language.

By employing the same linguistic devices, I draw my inspiration from the contemporary and classical sources of regional cultures. You will seldom come across our own landscape in our Urdu poetry. If it is a river it has to be Dadgla or Phurat. If it is a bird, it has to be a nightingale.

The woman who emerges from this poetry is not the dark, dusky Dravidian goddess but an abstract Persian miniature. The other great influence comes from the West, which gave to some poets, the feeling of being international. This myopic view alienated them from their own roots. I think it is time the prodigal son came home.

Khan. Your early poems speak of a dif­ferent technique and a different diction specially your long poem "Teesray Pehr kee Dastak."

Sehbai. I used the film technique and broke away from the narrative style of the nazm using flashbacks and sudden switch overs from the realistic to the surreal, like you cut in a film. I also used the recurrent linguistic pattern evolved in the cities. I did not use the traditional connotations of words but by turning a phrase or an image from the present or future, attempted to destroy the traditional meaning. It's a kind of de-sublimation.

Khan. You mentioned 'a new genesis for our culture'. What do you mean by it?

Sehbai. We did begin to feel its pulse sometime in the early 70's and it still throbs under the city's macadam. By the new genesis of culture I mean a new Adam and Eve who break through the gilt frame of a court-oriented garden of dead metaphors.

In other words, to discover the new social man on earth rather than on metaphysical planes. Our literature has been dominated by an extra-territorial mythos which has been fondly cuddled by the court, although the courts do not exist any more. Yet we are caught up in this tradition and our literature has remained academic, elegantly false, at home with a fictitious reality.

The culture of the people was banished and exiled. The other tradition is of anti­-court poets who embraced this exiled world of God's plenty. In fact, this tradition is the jugular vein of this culture.

Khan. Are you referring to the Sufi tradition of the subcontinent?

Sehbai. If you wish to term it that way, yes. But the word 'Sufi' has been misinterpreted and at times, deliberately — which is being unjust to poets such as Waris Shah, Shah Hussain, Shah Latif and Khwaja Fareed who were not just mystical bards but the very sources of our consciousness of which we have been deprived due to our literary criteria and the educational system we have.

Khan. When did you start writing plays?

Sehbai. I just bumped into this form. I had never considered drama as some­thing worth trying but I was looking for a job in 1968 and I got one with PTV as scripts producer. In this job I had to know about drama, so I read a lot of stuff and wrote one.

Khan. 'Lamp post'?

Sehbai. Yes, and with this play the trouble started. Both myself and the producer were under fire for producing such a play. But by this time I had discovered the inherent power of this form and wrote another one. Not for TV this time. I looked around for a stage but found it impossible to produce the play as the Arts Council, La­hore was busy producing pale copies of drawing room comedies such as Khalid ki Khala and Aap kee Tareef.

Two well­ known dramatic forums of Government College and Kinnaird College, Lahore were monopolised by an Anglo American crowd who would prefer a Moliere or a Shaw to an original play. In fact K.C and G.C.D.C had never pro­duced an original play by any local writer up to that time. The play I had written was about young people of the urban middle class.

It was a kind of rehearsal play where we did away with props and decor and the whole action was to be mimed. It worked very well. Later, the same play was produced in almost the same form at the Kinnaird College Drama Festival where it won the best play award. It was called 'Dark Room'. Meantime, Dr Ajmal, then principal of Government College had asked me to give him a play for the Government College dramatic club.

I gave him a Punjabi play, Toan Koan, which he was very keen to stage. But there was strong opposition from the monopoly group of G.C.D.C. In spite of all this, Dr Sahib succeeded in getting it through and the play was produced. It got a tremendous response.

Khan. What was the reason for the suc­cess of these plays?

Sehbai. I believe it was their realism. Realism in the sense that these plays didn't take you to a pseudo world of mistaken identies but faithfully pre­sented actual social conflicts. Brecht says, "The audience is not sitting only in the theatre but also in the world". When you isolate theatre from the rest of the situation it only serves as a cathartic dose.

Khan. Why didn't you continue writing plays?

Sehbai. I did write a couple of plays which were staged by Government College, Kinnaird College, National Councils of the Arts and Lahore College by amateur actors but in 1975 I worked with professional actors and produced a play called Hash at the Art Council which was about drug addic­tion among the young people of Pakistan.

Talat Hussain and Tahira Naqvi did the leading roles while Farooq Zamir directed the play. In 1976, another tragic farce entitled Ashraf-ul-Makhluqat was put on stage at the Arts Council but was taken off within the first week.

Khan. Why?

Sehbai. The governing body of the Arts Council gave a very plausible reason — that due to the rains the roof of the auditorium could fall any minute. It is interesting that the roof did not fall until it was demolished after more than five years and the dance classes continued on the roof of the same auditorium without any danger.

Khan. Did you write any more plays?

Sehbai. Yes. I had written a full-length musical comedy called Suno Gup Shup in 1971 which Mr Shoaib Hashmi was producing. Rehearsals were under way and some of the songs were also composed but then Mr Hashmi got a contract with PTV and the play could not be staged.

Khan. Did you have anything to do with the PTV programme Such Gup?

Sehbai. As much as the name suggests­ — that is, to the extent of some such and some gup. Mr Hashmi and myself had worked together on the production of Dark Room and had exchanged views on theatre in Pakistan. Mr Hashmi was enthusiastic about theatre bur then he chose the easy way out. Since he had worked on my script for Suno Gup Shup, some of the songs and motif from Suno Gup Shup were used in these programmes with more or less the same dramatic technique .

Khan. What do you think of our stage plays?

Sehbai. There has been a recent uproar about the theatre boom in the country. The boom has been attributed to the lack of entertainment and the failure of our film industry. But at the same time it reminds us of the once great theatre boom in the late nineteenth century when more than thirty Parsi theatrical companies were competing with each other with their munshis and mujras, completely devoid of any reference to the freedom movement of the people of the subcontinent against British colonialism.

On the contrary, it was feeding the massive theatre crowd with meaningless fantasies about Shehzada Gulfam and Sabz Pari. What was mistaken as a theatre boom was, in fact, an opportunistic and conscious collaboration of the British masters, Hindu lalas and rich Parsi seths.

Unfortunately, it still remains the same old degraded art form in the hands of profiteering hacks. This powerful medium of social change could never become a part of our historical process. It could never present the actual conflicts and the live issues of our society. Holding up the 'mirror to reality' was far off; it could never even mirror reality.

Khan. What is the responsibility of a writer towards society?

Sehbai. Don't you think it's equally important to know the responsibility of society towards the writers? I will probably not dwell on the painful sub­ject of whether you can live off your writings or not. A great writer like Manto got 25 rupees for a masterpiece he wrote for a magazine.

Conditions are not so pleasant for a writer in Pakistan. He has to think of ways and means to survive. As such, I am not very fond of assigning a role to the writer. He only renders unto God what is God's.

Khan. Did you have the Sufi tradition in mind when you wrote your Punjabi play Panjwan Chiragh?

Sehbai. Yes, in fact it serves as back ground for the central theme, which is the mystical dance called dhamal. It is an attempt to reinterpret the legend of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the great sufi of Sindh, in purely contemporary terms. Qalandar is the one who breaks all inhibitions to chant the truth.

Legend has it that once the great Qalandar was captured by the king and put into chains. One night he started dancing in ecstasy and as he danced the chains melted and he was free. I have jux­taposed the two images of the ecstatic dancers and the paralysed grave worshippers. The conflict is heigh­tened by this tension between movement and fixity; between dance and paralysis.

There is this grotesque spectacle depicting the historical role of the sufis and the degeneration of this order into mujawari. They have lost the will to dance and to dance is to be free.

Khan. What now — complicitous silence or more theatre?

Sehbai. I hope to produce Suno Gup Shap in Karachi. The play if properly handled, can be a milestone. We intend to dress it up into a musical extravaganza. Tell me after you have seen it, if I have succeeded in implementing some of the high ideals I have set myself.

This was originally published in the Herald's October 1984 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

A veteran of the entertainment business, Shoaib Mansoor has enthralled audiences in this country with unforgettable productions that have become landmarks in Pakistan Television history.

The trend-setting serialised drama Ankahi, the outrageously funny Fifty- Fifty and the music nostalgia buff’s dream, Silver Jubilee, all possessed a freshness and vitality of the kind that rarely makes it to the mini-screen in this country. With these and many other memo-rable television programmes to his credit, Shoaib Mansoor has proved time and again that he is a breed apart.

More recently, Mansoor has ventured into relatively uncharted terrain, directing two drama series based on life in the Pakistan Army. The first, Sunehrey Din, aired in 1990, was notable for its slick editing and glossy production values — qualities that are sadly lacking in standard PTV fare. For his most recent venture, Alpha Bravo Charlie, a sequel of sorts to the 1990 series, Mansoor is not only in the director’s seat, but has written the script and handled most of the camera work as well.

What sets him apart from other directors or producers? How does he keep the creative spirit alive, when others at PTV seem stuck in a rut? In this tete-a-tete with the Herald, Mansoor talks about the making of Alpha Bravo Charlie, his unique style of working and the difficulties of getting army jawans to deliver their lines without staring straight into the camera.

Navaid Rashid. You have done two serialised dramas about life in the armed forces. Is there a special reason for your fascination with this theme?

Shoaib Mansoor. It is just coincidence. When Sunehrey Din was aired in 1990, the response from viewers was tremendous. As a result, the people at the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) asked me to do another serial about the army.

Rashid. How did you come up with the idea of Alpha Bravo Charlie?

Mansoor. It is actually a sequel to Sunehrey Din. The Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) cadets who featured in the 1990 drama are now lieutenants and captains. They have completed their training and are commissioned by the Pakistan Army.

I initially based the new serial on the life of officers in a single unit but when I started writing, I felt the play would be more interesting if it was not limited to a particular unit. And since Pakistani troops are frequently sent overseas, I decided to place some characters in a foreign setting. So, one of the captains in Alpha Bravo Charlie is sent to Bosnia.

Initially, we had decided to shoot in Somalia but Pakistani troops had already returned from that country, so Bosnia became the only option. The earlier part of the serial was actually filmed in Bosnia. I had not even completed the script at the time, all I had was the portion based in Bosnia.

I wrote the rest of the script on our return to Pakistan and then shot the remainder of the play. Many facts about the Bosnian war, which very few people are aware of, have been portrayed in this serial. The real reason behind the war is also discussed, but all this information is knitted into the plot.

Rashid. Writing and producing a play on the army is a sensitive task. How did you go about your work?

Mansoor. I started work on the serial in 1995 and completed it in 1997, spending the first eight or nine months doing research. I lived in army units for several weeks and spent a lot of time with officers and jawans in Lahore and other cities to see how they live and what they do.

I wanted to add a touch of reality to the serial. When you watch it, you can’t tell that a civilian has written the script. I have captured the language, the lifestyle and the various situations that arise in real army life.

Rashid. Like Sunehrey Din, Alpha Bravo Charlie is also sponsored by the ISPR. Was their involvement a problem for you?

Mansoor. I have enjoyed a good rapport with the ISPR ever since we did Sunehrey Din together. I feel army men are comparatively better people to work with as they are more disciplined. Perhaps if someone new was doing this serial, he would have encountered a few problems. But since I had worked with the ISPR before, I did not face any difficulties. I am satisfied with my work.

Rashid. As far as the officers in the drama are concerned, you used the entire cast of Sunehrey Din with the exception of Saleem Sheikh. Why was he not chosen?

Mansoor. I like to work with fresh talent. Saleem was a newcomer in Sunehrey Din, but over the years he has evolved into a popular film and TV star. So I decided not to cast him in Alpha Bravo Charlie. There is no other reason why he was not selected. In fact, I am on very good terms with him.

Rashid. The three main characters of Alpha Bravo Charlie are not professional actors, or even civilians for that matter. Why is that?

Mansoor.Actually, one of the three boys playing the lead roles is not an army officer. The reason that I used these young men is that, as I mentioned earlier, Alpha Bravo Charlie is a sequel to Sunehrey Din so I felt I had to use the same actors. At the same time, I had worked with them before and knew that they had the potential to carry a serial.

Meanwhile, if I had chosen a professional actor he would have had to be thoroughly coached first. I felt that army officers would play the roles more authentically. As far as the supporting cast is concerned, when I am choosing newcomers for the lead roles, it simply does not make sense to make the play seem stale by adding a known face.

And in any case, I don’t like to hire stars for my serials — I make stars. I am not being conceited, it is just what I prefer. As long as I work, I will always work with newcomers. Stars don’t excite me. They never have.

Rashid. But wasn’t it difficult to get army personnel to act?

Mansoor. It was both easy and difficult. Easy because the officers were not really acting, but merely doing what they do in their professional lives. What one needs in this kind of work is self-confidence, and that is a quality army officers possess in abundance. They faced the camera confidently, which is a great help, so it was easy to work with them.

There were some problems, though, with the jawans because many of them had never seen a camera before. The first few days of shooting were wasted because the jawans would look straight into the camera while saying their lines. They did not understand that an actor must not look into the camera. I had to re-shoot a number of scenes, especially the ones in Siachen, because of this problem.

Moreover, since the jawans are not educated they could not read the script. So I had to make them memorise the lines by reading them out. At times, when a jawan had to speak more than one sentence, I had to shoot each sentence separately, and that too after several retakes. You might not have noticed this while watching the serial because of the editing. But when I am working with newcomers, I am prepared to face these kinds of problems.

Rashid. What was the most trying aspect of the project?

Mansoor. People might think that it must have been difficult to shoot in Bosnia, with a war going on, or in Siachen, where the weather is unforgiving. But I was at ease in both these locations because when I work, the problems that crop up don’t bother me. The only problem that I had was with the jawans, as I mentioned earlier.

I also had to keep my recording unit small, so I handled the camera myself, besides writing the script and directing. At times, there was just one man accompanying me who carried the equipment. Part of the camera work was done by someone else, but I had already shot most of the difficult scenes in Bosnia and Siachen myself, and the results were equally good. And since I was more confident when I was operating the camera myself, I thought I’d handle it on my own.

Rashid. What feedback have you received about Alpha Bravo Charlie?

Mansoor. I get my feedback through the print media because I lead a secluded life. In fact, I stay at home most of the time and my social life is practically nonexistent. Sometimes, I spend weeks at a time in the house without going out. So I did not get a direct public response, just what I heard from the press shows I attended for the serial.

Before it was aired on PTV, though, the serial was viewed by a committee comprising generals – somewhat like a censor board – who approved it and then the chief of army staff watched it and he too approved of the programme. Their reaction was very positive.

Do not mistake this for arrogance but, frankly, I do not wait for any sort of reaction to my plays. The director should have a basic sense of what he is doing, which audience he is targeting, what appeal it has for them and how to handle the theme. I knew the audience for whom I made this serial.

Alpha Bravo Charlie is not for the uneducated classes. In fact, they might not even be able to understand a major portion of the play, the scenes shot in Bosnia, since it is in English. But I could hardly force the Bosnians to speak Urdu, and dubbing their voices would have spoiled the entire effect. This section has Urdu subtitles, but to read them you have to be educated as well.

Although it is important to produce something that has mass appeal, at times one must do something for a certain class alone. I made this serial from that point of view.

This was originally published in the Herald's July 1998 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Fatemeh Aman was a little girl living in Iran in the 1970s. Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was ruling her home country and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was Pakistan’s prime minister at the time. The two states – as well as their rulers – were very close to each other. Her own family, too, partook in the bonhomie. Her parents were friends with a Pakistani couple who worked in Iran as doctors. “They worked very hard and were nice people,” she says of them in Karachi where she came last month to attend the Adab Festival, the latest addition to Pakistan’s annual literary gatherings. “My love for South Asia started with my interaction with that Pakistani couple.”

Fatemeh is a non-resident senior fellow at the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council, an American think tank focused on the study of international relations. She has written extensively on Iran, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries for more than 17 years. Her first job, however, was as a science correspondent for Radio Free Europe. “I did that for many years and then I just started covering South Asia,” she says. “That was my dream — travelling through this region, discovering everyday life here and knowing its politics.”

Following are excerpts of an interview with her.

Huma Baqai. After so many years of using force as the only option to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the United States seems to have taken a 180-degree turn by talking to them. The international community is now promising them an [official] status in a future political setup in Afghanistan. Are these developments legitimising the Afghan Taliban?

Fatemeh Aman. Yes, they are. The issue is that there is literally no other option. Every other option has been exhausted. The Taliban got together with the Afghan government several times in the past in the Persian Gulf and Arab states but those negotiations never came to anything. Whenever there was some hope of reaching a settlement, the Taliban would increase their violent actions inside Afghanistan and the Afghan government, under emotional and psychological pressure from the population, would pull back from negotiations.

The Taliban have been also insisting for years that they would only talk with the United States. They have been demanding that they would negotiate with the United States directly, without any mediation and any involvement of the Afghan government.

Huma. Has the West in general and the United States in particular reached a situation where they have to abide by all the terms and conditions being set by the Taliban — be it a stake in a future government in Afghanistan or their demand to talk to the United States directly?

Fatemeh. The Taliban are not in a position to dictate but the Afghan government is weaker than ever before [and] circumstances in the United States are completely unique considering [President Donald] Trump’s campaign promises to pull back [American forces] from Afghanistan and Iraq. And then the new Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has been released from a Pakistani prison last October even though we do not know what kind of weight he has within the Taliban. Still, I do not read all these developments as the Taliban dictating the process though I read these as their strengths.

Huma. So, they are negotiating from a position of power?

Fatemeh. Yes. Taliban are in a strengthened position. I [still] found it extremely disappointing that a deputy of Abdullah Abdullah [who is the chief executive of the Afghan government] was in Moscow taking part in [intra-Afghan negotiations] with the Taliban. When the deputy of the second most important person in the government is participating in negotiations that the government has rejected, it shows that there is chaos within the Afghan government. This is kind of scary.

I also do not know how successful and legitimate negotiations can be without an active participation of the Afghan government. There is no disputing the fact that the government is weak but it still represents the Afghan people who voted for it. They did not vote for the Taliban. So, just ignoring the government and bringing [people like former Afghan president Hamid] Karzai and whoever has been in opposition to negotiate with the Taliban is going to be very complicated. Firstly, it is taking the legitimacy away from the Afghan government. Secondly, it is going to be harder to sell [the outcome of the dialogue] to the population [without the government’s involvement].

Huma. How do you see China’s role in the peace process? Has China compelled the United States to negotiate with the Taliban?

Fatemeh. China is a contributing factor because it obviously has investment in both Afghanistan and in the rest of the region but I do not see it as the lone actor. It also supported and encouraged earlier negotiations – whether those were in Qatar or in Dubai – but those negotiations still failed. Where the current negotiations differ from previous negotiations is that all the regional players somehow are participating in these now. Iran is [doing] direct negotiations with the Taliban. Pakistan is obviously [in contact with the Taliban]. Prime Minister Imran Khan is promoting negotiations and has been very helpful [in making them possible]. This has been a good public relations move for Pakistan in the western world. Russia is also participating in the peace process while China has always been very active in it and has never broken its connection with the Taliban.

Huma. When you say everybody has a stake, there is a soft power thrust by the Indians also. Do you see the Indians getting subtracted or marginalised in this new initiative for peace in Afghanistan?

Fatemeh. India is very much involved in major projects in Afghanistan and is viewed very positively by the Afghan people. That is why it stayed away from any type of engagement with the Taliban. This is now turning out to be a mistake, I believe. India missed an opportunity by insisting from the beginning that the Taliban were puppets out to disrupt normal life in Afghanistan. I, however, will not be surprised if India is invited to negotiations or if it reaches out to the Taliban.

Huma. Do you see the conflict between India and Pakistan being a spoiler for peace in Afghanistan? Do you think China can convince Pakistan to let India be a part of the peace process?

Fatemeh. If there is any justification for Iran, Pakistan and China to be part of negotiations because of their investments in Afghanistan, it does make sense that India, too, should join the process. Either India will completely ignore its investment in Afghanistan and go away or it will want to be a part of negotiations. Any agreement will be securer if more players are involved in it.

And it is not up to China to decide who should be a part of the peace process and who should not. At this point, no neighbour of Afghanistan is incharge of the peace process. There was a time when everybody thought the Taliban were a puppet of Pakistan. Not anymore. First of all, the Taliban are divided into different factions. We do not know which part [of them] is listening to Pakistan and which part is listening to some other country. The Taliban have also repeatedly said they would have friendly relations with all neighbours, including India.

Huma. How do you see Iran’s role in the peace process?

Fatemeh. There are two major concerns for Iran. One is the Islamic State, or Daesh or ISIS [which has presence in Afghanistan]. This is extraordinarily important for Iran and it is not going to ignore this factor. The other major issue which is of the same level of importance to Iran is border management. Iran has a long-running boundary conflict with Afghanistan.

The relationship between Iran and the Taliban has been very contentious. In 1998, the Taliban killed 11 Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e-Sharif. They also often block the Afghan border with Iran.

Another major issue for Iran is drug trafficking. Drugs have a major contribution [in fueling violence in Afghanistan]. Poppy crop and opium which are produced in Afghanistan pass through Iran before these go to Europe and from there to other parts of the world.

Iran cannot just leave these concerns to the Afghan government to address. It also cannot leave these to fate. It has to be in contact with the Taliban to have these concerns addressed. It has to know what is going on inside Afghanistan.

Huma. There is a general perception that the United States in particular and the western community in general are quite comfortable with agreeing to everything that the Taliban ask for provided they make two commitments: one, they do not allow the revival of al Qaeda and, two, they fight against IS that is now reported to be based in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Fatemeh. First of all, the Taliban have denied the existence of IS for a long time. They said that no Afghan was supporting the IS ideology and that the western countries were exaggerating about the IS [presence in Afghanistan] just to stay longer in the country.

But, yes, the United States and the West are seeking that guarantee though they also know that the Taliban cannot give any guarantee to anyone that they can prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for either IS or al Qaeda. They are not really in a position to offer such a guarantee.

Huma. So, if something is built on a false premise, how far can it go?

Fatemeh. The western countries only want to assure their own population that all their concerns are being addressed. They only want to calm people down back home.

Huma. Do you actually see the negotiations resulting in a breakthrough? Where do you see the peace process on a scale of 1-10?

Fatemeh. As long as the Afghan government is not a part of the negotiations, I will not describe myself as terribly optimistic but the Americans are in a rush to leave Afghanistan. They are in a rush to leave all those places where American troops are fighting.

On the other hand, there are people in the United States administration and in the United States military who think the timing and the manner [of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan] are not right. So, given the unpredictability of Mr Trump, I will not be surprised if a military commander convinces him to postpone the pullout of troops from Afghanistan.

Huma. Anyway, the number of American troops in Afghanistan is so small that they can hardly do anything? If they had done something, security on the ground could have been much better.

Fatemeh. They are not involved in active combat. They are mostly training the Afghan security forces in maintaining security.

Huma. One of the concerns being identified by women in Afghanistan is that negotiations with the Taliban will bargain away their rights. The freedoms they enjoy now – including employment facilities and the freedom of movement – will be taken away from them. Do you think the Taliban will show some flexibility?

Fatemeh. With all the shortcomings of the Afghan government that we all know about and all the corruption going on in Afghanistan, that country has made some major achievements during the last 17 years. One of these achievements is protection and promotion of women’s rights. Women can own businesses. They can get higher education and no one can prevent them from going to school. The Afghan constitution also guarantees some rights for minorities.

What worries me is what Mullah Baradar said: “We are going to get rid of the constitution of Afghanistan because it is a copy of western constitutions. We are going to follow a Quranic constitution.” He did say that women can have education as long as the Quran permits it but my concern is that the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam can be very [rigid].

Huma. Is the United States ready to bargain away those rights?

Fatemeh. The United States is rushing to get out of Afghanistan but it can do no harm to the rights of women and minorities in Afghanistan if it can ensure that these two groups are part of the peace process. There should be active participation of women in the peace process. Let them join the process and defend themselves.

Huma. Will there be protests if women’s rights get curtailed?

Fatemeh. I do not see that unfortunately. Women [in Afghanistan] have experienced a lot of violence. Even those in positions of power have not been free from violence [but] I do not see any organised women’s movement in Afghanistan which can call women on to the streets and help them defend their rights. That is why it is important that all those who were a part of putting the Afghan constitution together, including women and minorities, also become a part of the ongoing negotiation process.

Huma. But you just said the Taliban are not ready to honour the constitution...

Fatemeh. What I meant is that those who previously worked on the constitution should still be a part of whatever arrangement is being negotiated for the future. They should not just leave it at the Taliban’s mercy to decide what women deserve and what they do not. Not just those who are involved in negotiations but the whole international community and women everywhere have a very big responsibility to not leave Afghan women alone.

Huma. Are you frustrated by the fact that policymaking sometimes has a complete disconnect with ground realities?

Fatemeh. What bothers me is that the majority of policymakers are men. This is true not just for South Asia but for the whole world. This is true even in the United States. Women should be a part of peace processes everywhere. A peace which involves more women will be a lasting one.

The writer is an associate dean at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi.

This was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Zay Khalilzad, special representative of the United States for Afghanistan reconciliation, must have been highly satisfied with the outcome of his latest round of negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. As the talks concluded, he immediately took to Twitter, elated.

“Emerging from three solid days of talks with the Taliban in Doha. Meetings were productive. We continue to take slow, steady steps toward understanding and eventually peace,” he tweeted on February 28. “There is also progress on forming a national team [of non-Taliban delegates] in Kabul ready to engage in intra-Afghan Before “moving on to talks”, Khalilzad met with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the second-in-command of the elusive Taliban chief Maulvi Haibatullah Akhundzada. “Just finished a working lunch with Mullah Baradar and his team. First time we’ve met,” he tweeted.

In earlier tweets, Khalilzad said his January talks with the Taliban, also in Doha, were “more productive than they have been in the past”. Those negotiations went on for six days — longer than their original schedule. The two sides, according to him, agreed to a “draft framework” for a peace agreement. Under this framework, the Americans will commit themselves to withdrawing their forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban will guarantee that terrorist groups do not have bases and operations in the areas under their control.

If this account is to be believed, nothing is standing in the way of peace in Afghanistan. Everyone who matters – starting with the Afghan government, that welcomed Mullah Baradar’s participation in the talks, down to the governments in Pakistan and Iran – seems to be on board, finally, for a negotiated resolution of the four-decades-long strife in the country.

“This is good news for the peace process,” Mohammed Umer Daudzai, Afghan president’s special envoy on peace, told an American newspaper. “If [Mullah Baradar] is leading the negotiations, he can make decisions more quickly.”

Khalilzad, on his part, thanked Pakistan for helping Mullah Baradar travel to Qatar (helping him bypass travel restrictions placed on the Taliban leaders by the United Nations Security Council). “[I] appreciate … Pakistan in facilitating [his] travel,” said Khalilzad in a tweet on February 25.

The Taliban, too, sounded extremely optimistic. “Yes, there is a possibility we will reach some results,” their spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid told the Associated Press news agency ahead of the most recent parleys. Only weeks earlier, the situation did not appear as hopeful. The Taliban had announced that Mullah Baradar himself would not take part in the negotiations. Afghanistan’s cultural attaché in Washington DC, Majeed Qarar, went so far as to allege – without any proof – that this was because Pakistan had detained Mullah Baradar again (after having released him in October 2018).

As his presence in Doha later confirmed, he was not being kept in custody but Pakistan did use a combination of diplomacy and arm-twisting to make the Taliban join the negotiations. “A Taliban-era minister, Hafez Mohibullah, was arrested from Peshawar in January 2019. Movement of the Taliban’s family members in Pakistan was curtailed and their offices were closed down,” says Juma Khan Sufi, a Peshawar-based political activist and analyst. “These were unrecognised offices,” he says. “Neither Pakistan nor the Taliban ever officially admitted to their presence.”

Reuters news agency quoted a senior Taliban source from Peshawar as saying that, after Mohibullah’s arrest, “Pakistani authorities started raids on many other houses of the Taliban movement, their friends and commanders in different places in Pakistan.”

The Afghan government, too, was protesting angrily that any negotiations without its involvement were not going to work. “What are they agreeing to, with whom? Where is their implementing power?” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani asked in a television interview after an intra-Afghan conference took place in Moscow early last month to discuss a future political and constitutional system for Afghanistan. “They could hold a hundred such meetings, but until the Afghan government, the Afghan Parliament, the legal institutions of Afghanistan approve it, it is just agreements on paper,” he said.

His government also launched a diplomatic effort to scupper talks between the Taliban and Khalizad, scheduled to be held in the middle of last month in Islamabad. It successfully invoked the United Nations ban to stop the Taliban delegates from travelling for the meeting.

In a similar move, the Afghan government did not allow Anas Haqqani, a part of the Taliban’s 14-member delegation, to travel to Doha. He is a son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the Haqqani Network, a feared militant group affiliated with the Taliban. Though he is in jail in Kabul, the Taliban made him a delegate hoping that he will be released. Kabul did not budge.

There seemed to have been considerable confusion, if not outright disagreement, within the Taliban too. Their lack of clarity was on public display when they could not decide on whether or not to meet Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan while being in Islamabad for talks with Khalilzad. An article published in Foreign Policy magazine claimed there were differences among them on who should have been a part of the delegation that would meet Imran Khan.

They also did not have a consensus on what would be the official agenda of their meeting with Imran Khan because they wanted to avoid the impression that they are following Islamabad’s dictation. A senior journalist based in Islamabad, who has been covering Afghanistan for many years, claims the Taliban members on the ground were opposed to the meeting because they saw no rationale for it. Some of their leaders suggested that they could discuss with Imran Khan the situation of Afghan refugees living in Pakistan but others objected, says the journalist. “How could you put this on the agenda when you do not enjoy an official status?” is what they asked.

Some reports suggested they were split on whether it was appropriate for them to visit Islamabad at a time when Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman was also in the city on a high profile official visit. The reason for their reluctance, as stated by Rahimullah Yousafzai, a Peshawar-based journalist with vast experience of covering the Taliban, was that the “Taliban are not on good terms with Saudi Arabia”.

Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, rejected reports about these differences and said these were the creations of certain news outlets which, according to him, had started a propaganda campaign against the Taliban’s participation in negotiations. He cited the case of a western news agency that, he alleged, published a whole list of reasons why Mullah Baradar would not take part in the Qatar talks.

His clarification, no matter how critical of the media coverage, did not stop speculations over the itinerary of the Taliban’s visit to Islamabad as well as about the people they were supposed to meet — including Muhammad bin Salman.

Until, of course, he announced that the visit had been called off due to the travel ban.

Sher Muhammad Abbas Stanekzai is the visible face of the Taliban in talks with the United States, as well as with other Afghans. Born in 1963 in Baraki Barak district of Afghanistan’s Logar province and educated and trained in a military college in India, according to a The New York Times report, he is a fluent speaker of English. After his return to Afghanistan from India, he joined a religious resistance force fighting against the Soviet troops that had entered Afghanistan in 1979.

His military training came in handy for him in guerrilla activities and his language skills made him an important interlocutor for Pakistanis, Saudis and Americans, all supporting the resistance against the Soviets. These qualities helped him become a top aide to Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, one of the main guerrilla commanders.

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, Stanekzai initially worked as a deputy minister of foreign affairs. Later, he became a deputy minister of health. He arrived in Doha in January 2012 when the Taliban were allowed to open a political office there. In August 2015, he became the head of that office. He recently led the Taliban delegation that took part in the Moscow conference. The organisers of the event, according to The New York Times, were ostensibly Afghan expatriates living in Russia but it had the backing of the Russian authorities as well. The hotel where it took place is owned by Kremlin, the headquarters of the government in Moscow.

The delegates of the conference, apart from the Taliban, included former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, former provincial governor Atta Muhammad Noor, a prominent member of the Afghan parliament Muhammad Mohaqiq, and former Afghan interior minister Hanif Atmer. “It is too early to decide if [conferences like this] would lead to peace in Afghanistan,” says Pakistan’s former national security adviser Sartaj Aziz, “but the Moscow meeting was remarkable for its composition because it had all the stakeholders except the Afghan government.”

Some of the non-Taliban delegates at the conference argued that they represented the Afghans better than the government in Kabul did. “We have been fighting for 40 years, and we are the people with influence, not Ghani,” The New York Times quoted Noor as saying. In December 2017, he was sacked by Ghani from his long-held post as governor of the north-western Balkh province.

The Afghan politicians also emphasised in Moscow that any future setup in Afghanistan must include all positive social and political developments made over the last two decades, particularly those concerning the role of women in the state and society. The Taliban representatives, to the surprise of the other side, responded positively.

Stanekzai, according to The New York Times, said the Taliban were “committed to all rights given to women by Islam … such as trade, ownership, inheritance, education, work and the choice of partner, security and education, and a good life.” Though he did not recognise Afghanistan’s current constitution, calling it a copy of western constitutions, he assured other delegates that the Taliban “did not seek to monopolize power inside Afghanistan”.

Back in Afghanistan, Afghan women parliamentarians and civil rights organisations remain sceptical. To ensure that the Taliban do not change their stance, they demand, women should get representation in the High Peace Council, the highest official body to carry out negotiations with the Taliban and other militant groups. They also insist that no agreement at any level will be acceptable to them unless Afghan women are made a part of all negotiations. “I do not want such a peace which brings stability but puts me in chains,” an Afghan female journalist, Najwa Aleemi, told news media in Kabul recently.

The Taliban seem to have made some important gains after the initiation of the peace talks — the most important being the recognition of their central position in the peace process. The fact that they have finally forced the Americans to have direct negotiations with them is seen by them as an acceptance of their geostrategic advantage within Afghanistan. The writ of the central government in Kabul is strongly contested in many areas; in many other areas, it does not even have a nominal presence. The Taliban, on the other hand, have presence in 70 per cent of the country without any major internal challenge.

This, in some cases, has led them to prefer bravado over discretion. To cite just one example: soon after they concluded the talks in Qatar with Khalilzad in January, they claimed the Americans had agreed to withdraw all their forces from Afghanistan.

Khalilzad took little time to deny this. “Our shared purpose is to reach a peace agreement (not withdrawal agreement) that is worthy of the sacrifices made over decades of war,” he said in a tweet after briefing senior European Union officials and representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) about the peace process last month.

In a video statement after the same talks, the Taliban’s chief negotiator, Stanekzai, claimed the Afghan army would be dissolved as soon as there was a peace agreement. The Afghan government immediately protested, prompting Stanekzai to clarify that what he, in fact, meant was that certain reforms would be brought in all the state institutions, including the army.

This tiff was nothing if not symptomatic of a bigger trust deficit between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Each of them has blamed the other in the past for hurting the peace process at various occasions. The Taliban accuse the Afghan government of leaking the news of their founding leader Mullah Muhammad Omar’s death in July 2015, only a few days after some helpful progress had been made in talks in Murree. The death, which actually happened in 2013, was kept secret by the Taliban but its disclosure diverted their attention from talks to choosing a new leader and keeping their organisational unity intact. The government in Kabul says that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s arrest in Pakistan in 2010 was a similar move.

This tiff was nothing if not symptomatic of a bigger trust deficit between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Each of them has blamed the other in the past for hurting the peace process at various occasions. The Taliban accuse the Afghan government of leaking the news of their founding leader Mullah Muhammad Omar’s death in July 2015, only a few days after some helpful progress had been made in talks in Murree. The death, which actually happened in 2013, was kept secret by the Taliban but its disclosure diverted their attention from talks to choosing a new leader and keeping their organisational unity intact. The government in Kabul says that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s arrest in Pakistan in 2010 was a similar move.

It took place in the wake of his contacts with the then Afghan president Karzai (possibly without the knowledge of his superiors and colleagues within the Taliban).

Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa met a group of senior journalists a few weeks ago. He told them that Pakistan had suffered a lot as a result of the conflict in Afghanistan and, therefore, was determined to see the Afghan peace talks succeed. “Without talking to [the Taliban], we are creating an environment that encourages talks,” he is quoted by a participant of the meeting to have said.

Bajwa told the journalists that Pakistan had made it clear to the Taliban that they had only one choice: talks. Pakistan will have nothing to do with them if they do not agree to talk, he is reported to have said. These warnings seem to have worked. This, according to Lieutenant General (retired) Talat Masood, an Islamabad-based security analyst, means that Pakistan still has a lot of leverage with the Taliban.

Not everyone among the Taliban is happy with Pakistan though. One of their senior officials in Peshawar was reported by Reuters news agency as saying that “Pakistan is saying what the Afghan government and the [United States] wanted”. This allegation, too, is an acknowledgement, even though a backhanded one, of Pakistan’s importance to the Afghan peace process.

Besides Pakistan, Washington remains one of the most important pieces in the Afghan jigsaw puzzle. And since the coming into power of Donald Trump in the United States, this piece seems to be willing to withdraw from the centre stage. Imtiaz Gul, a defence analyst based in Islamabad, sees this as something that may guarantee the success of the peace process. Trump is the basic difference between the current round of peace talks and the flopped previous ones, he says.

Gul says Trump wants to leave Afghanistan before the primary season starts for the next American election later this year. “He just wants to convey to the people that he has pulled out of Afghanistan as he promised.” But, as almost everyone agrees, Trump is highly unpredictable. He, in fact, takes pride in being so. How will his unpredictability influence the Afghan peace process is an important question.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that he has always championed the idea of keeping America’s military interventions abroad to the minimum. “This is a president who has never been comfortable [with] staying in Afghanistan and is likely to be thinking about the political environment at home,” says Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program and a senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. “His core base doesn’t support extended overseas military presences.”

Yet Kugelman believes that American troops are not going to leave Afghanistan anytime soon. “While Trump is itching to head for the exits, his advisers have made it clear to him that a sudden and total withdrawal – particularly in the absence of a deal with the Taliban – will be dangerous,” he says. “We can expect him to wait it out and see if his negotiators can get a deal with the Taliban before the Afghan election this summer.” Trump, he says, is likely to come back to the idea of a full withdrawal only if there is no deal by summer.

While Pakistanis remain firmly behind the peace process and Trump is also likely to give the peace process a chance, where does this leave the rest of the actors involved? Can the Afghan government keep itself in power if the Americans decide to leave? Are the Taliban as united, motivated and militarily nimble as they were when they took over power in Kabul in 1996 by subduing almost all their opponents?

There are fears that, without American support, the Afghan government will be as powerless as the government of Dr Najibullah – whom the Afghan mujahideen replaced in 1992 – was after the withdrawal of the Soviet forces in 1988. For a number of reasons, however, the situation this time round augurs better for the administration in Kabul.

Firstly, Afghanistan became nobody’s concern in the international community after the Soviet withdrawal. This time round, its location right next to rising superpower China, as well as its proximity to Pakistan, India and Iran, each of them vying aggressively for regional supremacy, may mean that outsiders continue to remain seriously interested in Afghanistan’s stability. This, at least partially, explains why the world has committed to give 15.2 billion US dollars to Afghanistan till 2020 in economic and financial support.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there is a very real threat of the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), or Daesh, in Afghanistan. If the organisation is able to take advantage of the security vacuum that an American withdrawal may create, it may gain strength quickly and bring its leadership and cadres from Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan. The world can ignore this threat only at its own peril — as was evident when the west, albeit involuntarily, allowed the ISIS to take root in Iraq and Syria and then, before long, it was carrying out acts of terrorism in the heart of Europe.

Equally significantly, the international community should be wary of the seemingly ceaseless cycle of violence in Afghanistan. If the recent history of that country is anything to go by, those living by the gun now are highly likely to continue living – and dying – by the gun in the foreseeable future.

“Thousands of young men – aged between 18 and 25 years – are fighting under various Taliban commanders. The fear is that they may opt for a better paymaster,” says Fakhar Kakakhel, a journalist based in Peshawar who has covered the Pak-Afghan border for many years. “The Taliban pay roughly 250-300 dollars to a fighter, he says. “Daesh can woo many of them since it has been paying roughly 700 dollars to even novices.”

All said, it is the Taliban who hold the key to peace in Afghanistan. Will they give up arms and, instead, allow the Afghan people to choose or reject them in an election?

Ayaz Wazir, a former Pakistani diplomat who has served in Afghanistan, believes people in Afghanistan will like to see the Taliban as one of the many political options to choose from, rather than being coerced into submission by them through the barrel of a gun. Given a multiplicity of choices, the Taliban may not find it easy to win all the hearts and minds they need to win to get back to ruling Afghanistan. “They are a fighting force which draws its strength from field commanders. They do not have strong support among people,” says Wazir.

The best option for the Taliban in particular and the Afghans in general, in his opinion, is to demand the formation of an interim government that has representation from every section of the Afghan society. This government should then convene a Loya Jirga, a grand (but unelected) assembly of tribal chiefs, political leaders, parliamentarians, religious and ethnic minorities, women, current and former warlords and local religious groups such as the Taliban.

“The Loya Jirga must have the authority to make a final call about a future political setup for Afghanistan, determining who gets what and in what manner,” Wazir suggests.

Afghanistan has seen interim governments and Loya Jirgas before — without any lasting impact on the ongoing conflict in the country. There are, of course, no easy pathways to peace - notwithstanding the optimism generated by the latest round of talks in Qatar.

Behroz Khan is a Washington-based senior journalist currently working with the Voice of America.

This was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Justice Qazi Faez Isa is an exception in many ways. He was inducted into the superior judiciary at a time when it was riding high on popular approval, yet he has been a stickler for reserve and restraint. He refrains from making headline-grabbing observations and his judgments read as if every word in them has been measured twice.

It was Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who recommended Justice Isa’s appointment – without any previous judicial experience – as the chief justice of the Balochistan High Court in 2009. The appointment was seen, and challenged, as a manifestation of the judicial overreach that has become synonymous with Justice Chaudhry. The Supreme Court later dismissed the challenge as frivolous.

That was not the only instance of Justice Isa being in the headlines.

He came down hard on news media when, as the high court chief justice, he banned journalists from covering proscribed organisations. He ruled they could be tried under anti-terrorism laws if they violated the ban. Since then, 11 journalists have been booked under these laws in Balochistan.

As a Supreme Court judge, Justice Isa conducted an inquiry into an August 2016 terrorist attack on lawyers in Quetta that had claimed more than 70 lives. The inquiry report was highly critical of the interior ministry and the paramilitary Frontier Corps. The then interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan called the report ‘one-sided’ and asked the Supreme Court to omit his name from it. The court did not agree.

More recently, Justice Isa made his dissent known after previous chief justice Mian Saqib Nisar controversially dissolved a Supreme Court bench last year. The bench included both of them. Justice Isa’s dissent was later endorsed by Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, the third judge in the same bench.

The case involving a violent sit-in by religious activists on a highway leading to Islamabad in November 2017 has been in the limelight similarly. The judgment in the case – written by Justice Isa along with his fellow judge, Justice Mushir Alam, and released on February 6, 2019 – shows the judges faithfully following the letter of the law in order to critique the way security and intelligence agencies had handled, or mishandled, the sit-in. They proved that the judiciary could criticise, even reprimand, other institutions of the state without having to stretch the laws beyond desirable limits — as some other judges have done in recent times.

Here is a catch though.

In the instances given above, Justice Isa’s rulings seem to have discounted some important objective conditions. Pre-empting a suicide bombing is recognised as one of the most difficult law and order tasks all over the world yet his report on the Quetta attack does not dwell much on this aspect. His restrictions on news coverage of banned organisations did not take into account protests by journalists who said they could follow his ruling only at the risk of losing their own lives. Similarly in the sit-in case, he seems to have declared almost all types of protests as illegal. “The right of assembly … cannot be used to overthrow a lawful government. Nor can the right of assembly be used to bring about a revolution or insurrection,” the judgment states.

These sentences prima facie suggest that any mass mobilisation to change the status quo is now illegal. At the very least, these seem to delegitimise any protests, either by opposition parties or by the public at large, that seek the removal of an unpopular government. How should people seek change, if not through a protest, after a democratic government has implemented undemocratic and anti-people policies? Will protesters demanding an early election be committing an illegal act?

Justice Isa has been a newspaper columnist too. Undoubtedly, he understands that keeping mitigating circumstances and other such caveats in mind is important to the working of both news media and the judiciary. His own upbringing at the politically active household of his father, Qazi Mohammad Isa – an eminent lawyer and a stalwart of the independence movement – must also have helped him realise that even the most textually perfect judicial verdicts sometimes ill-suit our highly imperfect state and society.

Implementing the letter of the law is one half of the judicial edifice; its second half consists of maintaining the spirit of the law. And that spirit, in any democratic state, cannot but be pro-people.

This article was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Siddharth Varadarajan: The past [few] weeks have been a tumultuous period for India-Pakistan relations, starting with the Pulwama attack on a CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force] convoy and then, of course, the Balakot airstrikes. We saw for the first time a military confrontation that involved the use of air power between India and Pakistan and it seemed, for at least a day or two, as if the two countries were set for a larger military confrontation. Fortunately, saner counsel seems to have prevailed, both in India and Pakistan. We know also that external powers have played a role. Joining me to discuss the events of the past [few] weeks, what happened and its consequences, is Shivshankar Menon, [India’s] former National Security Advisor and, of course, a former foreign secretary. Somebody who has watched not just India-Pakistan relations closely but has been a central figure in Indian foreign policy for the past decade and a half.

Mr Menon, let me start with Balakot itself, there has been a lively debate among politicians and among military analysts about what happened [and] the efficacy or the effectiveness of the airstrike that India conducted. Any use of military power involves risks and there is a payoff — in other words a cost benefit analysis is presumably made before a decision is taken. What to your mind were the benefits or payoff from the use of military power this time and the risks that are attendant on that?

Shivshankar Menon: Well, I think there were some clear benefits. One is that deterrence had clearly broken down. With Pulwama happening, ceasefire had broken down across the line [of control]; there was shelling; there [was] an escalation of violence generally. I think the strikes on Balakot at least forced recalculation on the Pakistani side of the costs and of what [India] would be ready to do to prevent it. That [India] is prepared to do an airstrike on Pakistani territory, against those who not only did but also profess to have hit [India] in Pulwama: Jaish actually claimed credit for this. So for me, therefore, [the strike] was necessary.

There is a clear military and even a political benefit in changing the calculus and trying to restore deterrence. I think the risk, of course, is that any use of military force invites counterforce one; [also], if you escalate the level of force either in terms of what you use [and] where you use it, you also invite escalation by the other side and we saw that Pakistan, the next day, did use air power to try and hit military targets in India. But I think the risk of escalation — is exaggerated somewhat. [This is because] these are rational people on both sides. It is not that the Pakistanis or we are suicidal. Nobody actually wants to raise it and there is no automatic doomsday machine which takes you up the so called escalation ladder.

At each stage there are decisions to be made on both sides and both sides made the right decisions and actually wound it down. That does not mean it is over. It’s not as though the problem [has been] solved. In fact the incentives [for another escalation] remain high and one reason for that is the political uses to which it has been put. The more you use it for political uses the more the other side then has an interest in also using [it for the] same reason. Thirdly, you need to remember that [the military instrument is] only one of your potential tools of statecraft. That you have a whole range of things that you can use and that you are most successful when you actually use all of them together in a strategic, coordinated fashion to achieve certain outcomes. But there again, not everything needs to be done publicly.

What has been missing though in the last three weeks is proper strategic communication with our own people. Everyday there’s a new story ascribed to sources. This kind of confusion is not a measure of success. After all you are trying to create an outcome so you measure [your success] against the outcomes you have set for yourself.

Varadarajan: I want to amplify one part of what you said on the risks side: the question of escalation. To my mind, it is as follows: the surgical strike India claimed to have made after a terrorist attack in Uri in 2015 did not stop what happened in Sunjuwan and it certainly did not stop what happened in Pulwama, hence you have escalated your response to an airstrike. If Pakistan-based groups were to stage spectacular attacks in the hope of drawing an even more robust Indian military response is that the kind of danger that you are hinting at?

Menon: That possibility is always there, but you have the choice whether to respond [or not].

Varadarajan: But politically you have talked yourself into an escalatory ladder in a way…

Menon: Not, not necessarily. I think you need to be clear in your own mind that you are not going to be sucked into playing their game. Pakistan always waves the nuclear card to internationalise this. They think they can internationalise it as a nuclear flashpoint, as a very dangerous situation [where] the world should get involved. Groups like Jaish and Lashkar do [whatever they do] within a certain envelope which is created for them by the [establishment]. There are certain things that they do and there are times when they have actually lowered the intensity of what they are doing when it suits the [Pakistani establishment]. So I don’t think we need to start looking for individual sort of actors in this. I think we know where it’s coming from, we know who enables it, supports it, and to a very large extent directs it.

Varadarajan: So the risk in terms of relying exclusively or primarily on military means rather than treating that as one of many options then lies in locking yourself into a situation where the other side is calling the shots.

Menon: Also where you become predictable, you lose the initiative. [The other side] can then make you do what it wants and I think that is something you need to be very conscious of. Your goal here is to create the outcomes that suit you, not the ones that [the other side] wants.

Varadarajan: You have written in your 2016 book that the Manmohan Singh government contemplated military action or retaliation of some kind or the other [after the Mumbai terrorist attack] but then decided against it. What were the factors that went into the calculus at that time?

Menon: Well, I think the calculus was what happens if we do use overt military means, and what happens if we don’t. It is not that by not [using military means] we achieved wonderful results but by not doing it we did allow other means to work. We did get our hands on all those who had either procured the equipment or organised the funding around the world; we got cooperation across the world. The moment we had done something overtly military, it would have become “oh there they go again”. It is like the way adults react to children fighting. Nobody asks who started this. You just say children stop it.

Varadarajan: Yet in 2009, without the use of military, or explicitly military sort of threats, you were able to get cooperation from other countries.

Menon: Well, we got counter-terrorism cooperation around the world. More than that, we also did manage to isolate Pakistan to a much greater extent than for instance today. [Pakistan’s] international situation is actually much better than it was in 2008. Most important of all, we did get several years where there was no incidents in India that could be traced directly back to Pakistan. And there was a diminution in terrorist violence for a few years. We stepped up our own efforts also. [It is] as important, to improve our own counter-terrorism capabilities as to be at peace with our own people whether it is in Jammu and Kashmir or elsewhere.

Varadarajan: Yet by the end of Manmohan Singh’s government, it seemed as if that playbook had run its course in terms of incremental gains.

Menon: As I said in Choices, in my book, if there were another incident it was very unlikely that the government of India could react the same way as it did to [Mumbai attacks] in 2008. And it was also clear to me that there was likely to be a military action.

I think the problem here is that you can count on the world to let you take care of your own security but I don’t think you can count on the world to take care of [your security] for you and that is something that you have to do yourself. Secondly, Pakistan’s position internationally [has improved]. The Americans are trying to withdraw out of Afghanistan. They feel they need Pakistani brokerage in the talks that they are having with the Taliban in order to enable of a face-saving exit. The Chinese commitment to Pakistan today is much more than it was in 2008 [due to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor] and because of the situation in Xinjiang. They therefore need the Pakistani cooperation. The Russians themselves have been selling weapons to Pakistan in the last year or so. The international context for Pakistan has actually eased in a sense. So I think there are limits to what you can expect from the rest of the world.

Varadarajan: Right, we know that the United States has played a role in the past in helping to ameliorate tension.

Menon: Every outside power will tell you that they carried messages and they helped to calm things down. Ultimately, it is Pakistan and India, these two states who take the decisions. We talk to everybody because we don’t want them hearing only one side of the story or making mistakes in what they choose to do. So we will all talk to everybody right through these processes but the decisions are for India to take, for Pakistan to take. So I think there’s a tendency to exaggerate the rule that other people play.

Varadarajan: But [Donald] Trump’s announcement out of Vietnam.

Menon: I’m sure he would love to take the credit. He might believe it as well that [the United States has] talked to both sides and both sides have said, yes, they are willing to do this. But I think ultimately we have to remember who takes the decision no matter how active the mediators. And frankly I’m not sure that this time you have seen the kind of active mediation you have seen in the past, [in] Tashkent [in 1965] for instance. I don’t think we are in that situation anymore.

Varadarajan: Turning now to where we go from here. We are in a situation where even minor incidents will generate headlines. How do you see things proceeding from here?

Menon: For me, what we need to do is increasing our options vis-a-vis Pakistan because I don’t think it is reasonable to say that I will not do anything, I will not talk, I will not allow trade, I will not allow travel, I will not allow anything unless they stop all terrorism because that is most unlikely to happen. You have then thrown away all your other instruments and means of pressure that you might have on different parts of Pakistan, on Pakistani civil society, on Pakistani business. So I think we need to actually reactivate the various instruments we have. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight terrorism. But these [steps and fighting against terrorism] are not mutually exclusive.

So you need to increase your options. The more you can do vis-à-vis Pakistan the better chance you have of creating a better outcome. But I am not saying you will have a solution. This is not an engineering problem. This is a political problem and a lot of it is structural to the nature of Pakistan itself which we are not today in a position to change. So I think we must expect some level of cross-border terrorism but we have to make it costly and then see where we can go from there. The Israelis have this very good phrase “mowing the grass”; that you have to keep going back in rather than getting stuck in it and I think that is something we have to do. We [also] have much more important things to do.

Even if you have settled everything there are better and bigger things that we as India should be doing.

Varadarajan: What are the key areas of focus that we have taken our eyes off?

Menon: If you look at the world economy, we really [see] three big changes; a rise of China, and a change therefore in China-US relations; a phase transformation in US policy; and a huge change in the world economy to a low growth trajectory where it is fragmenting. You need to devise new solutions; you need to adapt your foreign policies and security policies to all three of these things.

Varadarajan: And since we did begin with Pakistan, many people who watch Jammu and Kashmir closely are of the opinion that the domestic handling of the situation is something which has contributed an unstable element.

Menon: When Pakistan sees trouble in Jammu and Kashmir they are incentivised to try and contribute to the trouble of course but they have been proven [to be] mistaken every single time. It is more important that we handle Jammu and Kashmir properly and that we deal with our own people properly. I think it is more important for ourselves. Not so much because of what Pakistan may or may not do, or what it enables Pakistan to do but what kind of India do we want and what kind of India are we building.

Siddharth Varadarajan is the founding editor of The Wire, an independent news and views website based in Delhi, India

This is an abridged and excerpted version of the interview. A fuller version is being published by The Wire, India.

Twenty-six years ago, on March 25,1971, the army was sent in to put down a rebellion in what was then East Pakistan. The move proved a turning point in this country’s history. By the end of that year, the Pakistan that had come into being in 1947 was no more. In this golden jubilee year of Pakistan’s creation, the Herald examines the darkest chapter of our country’s history, focusing on the ten crucial days leading up to action taken by the army.

On March 25, 1971, General Yahya Khan launched Operation Searchlight, sending in troops to quell the rebellion in East Pakistan. That year, the idea of a united Pakistan finally faded into oblivion and, on December 16, 1971, a new state was carved out of the eastern wing of the country.

The drama unfolded in four stages. The December 1970 general elections saw the Awami League emerge with a massive victory. Tense political bargaining followed, involving Yahya Khan, Sheikh Mujib and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had received a thumping mandate from the country’s West wing. Meanwhile, Mujib ruled East Pakistan virtually independent from the centre. Finally, military action was launched against the rebel province, leading to the massacre of thousands of Bengalis and the eventual surrender of Pakistani forces to the Indian army.

The Herald travels back in time to re-examine history, tracing the dramatic events of 10 crucial days in March 1971 which led to the dismemberment of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh.

In December 1970, the first-ever free elections were held in Pakistan. The Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, swept the polls, winning 167 of the 169 seats allocated to East Pakistan in a combined house of 300. This massive victory gave the Bengali nationalists an absolute majority throughout the country and entitled them to form the central government. It also confirmed the worst fears of the establishment, which had for years maneuvered to deny the East Pakistani majority the right to power.

In the intervening period a tense drama unfolded. Mujb was virtually running the show in the East and public opinion in West Pakistan was whipped into a frenzy.

On March 2, 1971, the illusion of a united Pakistan was already beginning to fade. On March 6, Yahya Khan declared: Let me make it absolutely clear that no matter what happens, as long as I am in command of the Pakistan Armed Forces and head of state, I will ensure the complete and absolute integrity of Pakistan.

As expected, Mujib reacted with equal vehemence. On March 7, he demanded the immediate withdrawal of martial law and the transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people, threatening to boycott the National Assembly session. He also bitterly criticized Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for obstructing the transfer of power. For his part, Bhutto maintained that majority rule would only be possible if the Awami League agreed to drop its six-point programme, which demanded much greater autonomy for East Pakistan. Bhutto insisted that before a new constitution was framed, power should be transferred to the two majority parties of the country, his own Pakistan People’s Party in West Pakistan and the Awami League in East Pakistan.

Faced with the Awami League’s legislative strength and Mujib’s de facto assumption of power, Yahya Khan rushed to Dacca on March 15 to work out a political settlement. By March 20, the negotiating teams of the Awami League and Yahya Khan had agreed on a draft proclamation containing the outlines of an interim arrangement for the transfer of power. But this agreement was not acceptable to Bhutto, he suggested that either the National Assembly session should be called first, or he should be allowed more time to negotiate directly with Mujib.

On March 21, having received satisfactory clarifications, Bhutto joined the Dhaka negotiations. These proved to be inconclusive, and the National Assembly session scheduled for March 23 was postponed once again.

On March 21, a draft presidential proclamation prepared by Colonel Hassan, a member of the official negotiating team, was handed over to the Awami League. After examining this document on March 22, the Awami League team met Yahya’s team the following day. When they arrived, they were told that the Six Point Scheme could come into effect with some minor practical adaptations. At this stage, it was proposed that, in order to examine the implications of the financial and economic provisions of the proposal, M. M. Ahmed should sit separately with the Awami League team.

The Awami League team members initially refused to accept the proposal because they felt that Yahya’s advisers were trying to prolong discussions on each clause in order to buy time for the military crackdown. However, they finally agreed and March 23 was spent in discussions. By the next evening the Awami League had concluded discussions. However, a clause-by-clause reading of the entire draft proclamation remained to be finalised.

The Awami League proposed that Mujib’s close aide and respected lawyer, Dr. Kamal Hosain, and Justice Cornelius, the respected jurist, sit together through the night of March 24 and finalise a draft that could be put before Sheikh Mujib and Yahya the next day. It is on record that Justice Cornelius agreed but Yahya’s aide Lieutenant-General Peerzada held him back, saying, “No, we may discuss for a while, then we may meet tomorrow morning.” When the Bengali team suggested that a time be fixed for the following day, Peerzada again intervened to say that this could be arranged by contacting him on the telephone. The Awami League team waited all day for a call from the official team which never came.

With each passing day, the mood of confrontation intensified. The impasse was finally broken with the decision to employ a military solution to the crisis. Many believe the military option was part of a well-considered policy. At the time, the general opinion in West Pakistan was that army action had been a necessary preemptive strike to check the Awami League’s conspiracy to dismember the country.

However, world opinion widely maintained that Yahya deliberately dragged his feet on the talks with Mujib in order to prepare for a military operation. On March 24, leaders of the minority parties, as well as some members of the PPP left Dacca. However, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and a few other PPP leaders stayed behind. Bhutto was still in the city when the holocaust began. He recalled: At about 10.30 at night, after finishing our dinner, we went to our rooms. An hour later we were awakened by the noise of gunfire. A number of my friends came to my room and we saw the army in action. We witnessed the military operation from our hotel room, for about three hours.

A number of places were ablaze and we saw the demolition of the office of the newspaper, The People. This local English daily had indulged in crude and unrestrained provocation against the army and West Pakistan. With the horizon ablaze, my thoughts turned to the past and to the future. I wondered what was in store for us. Here in front of my eyes I saw the death and destruction of our own people. It was difficult to think straight. Many thoughts crossed my mind. Had we reached the point of no return or would time heal the wounds and open a new chapter in the history of Pakistan? How I wished I knew the answer.

Despite his philosophical concerns regarding the move, Bhutto maintained that military reprisal had been necessary: If the regime had not acted on the night of the 25th, on the following day the Awami League would have declared the independence of Bangladesh. Everything was made ready for it the state of their armed preparedness, the concentration of their forces and the barricades on the streets were visible proof of this. The general strike called for the 27th was obviously a blind to lead the regime astray. The intention was to proclaim the independence of Bangladesh on the 26th of March after Friday prayers.

On March 26, Yahya Khan proclaimed: I have ordered them [the armed forces] to do their duty and fully restore the authority of the government. Two years to the very day after proclaiming martial law and pledging, as he put it, to strive to restore democratic institutions in the country, General Yahya found it necessary to deploy the armed forces against the people of one province and to ban the political party which had secured an overall majority in the National Assembly.

It is said that while leaving for West Pakistan, Yahya Khan told General Tikka Khan at the Dhaka Airport on March 25: Sort them out! In the ensuing weeks this phrase was on the lips of many army officers.

“Why did you initiate the genocide in Dhaka?”, journalist asked Tikka Khan following the debacle. His reply was that there was no genocide. “Some terrorists were making preparations at the Jagannath Hall to attack the patrol force with firearms. After that, I sent some forces to Jagannath Hall. It is true that some Hindus died on the occasion. When two groups fight or are in a combat, it can’t be called genocide.”

This article was published in the Herald's April 1997 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Imagine a surprisingly youthful Queen Victoria fixing you with a regal stare while a headless male figure, presumably Prince Albert, stands by her side. Close at hand, the blindfolded figure of Justice seems somewhat disabled with the scales of her trade missing from her upheld hands. Shapely muses tilt rounded urns from which liquid gushes forth. Another gentleman strikes an imposing stance, the effect ruined somewhat by the fact that his head rolls near his feet on the ground below. And this motley assortment is assembled in the most unlikely of places, exposed to the elements in an open maidan of the KMC warehouse. Welcome to the dead statues society. Buried in the small by-lanes of the old quarters of Karachi, this magical assemblage is wasting away undiscovered.

Wrenched out from roundabouts, gardens and street corners, these relics of our colonial legacy have been doomed to oblivion by the local authorities. Even in a city as culturally starved as Karachi, where the statues would well represent a very real part of our history, the fear of being branded infidels has scared off successive administrations from restoring these discarded figures to their original sites or finding a new home for them.

Apparently, during Ayub Khan's regime, fundamentalist fervour had found a-ripe target in these statues which dotted various parts of the city. With a visit by Saudi Arabia 's King Faisal looming ahead and the mullahs screaming for the elimination of the ghair Isami statues, Ayub Khan issued an abrupt order for the removal of the offending objects. Subsequently, Queen Victoria and her ilk were haphazardly looted out from their resting places by the KMC. This hurried operation cost several statues an arm or a leg, some were split right through the torso and some even smashed to bits. These unfortunate figures were then stashed away in the KMC warehouse on Lawrence Road while some were dumped on the premises of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board building.

On my search for these forsaken statues, I was led into the quarters of the. sweepers working for the KWSB. As we guiltily knocked on the door of one of the homes, hesitant to disturb the residents in the middle of the afternoon, the door was opened by the man of the house who, for his part, was quite unperturbed by the intrusion. Apparently, he and his family are used to strangers traipsing through their homes for a glimpse of the missing statues.

But I became increasingly mystified as the man began calling for chairs and ladders even as I could see no trace of the promised figures. It finally dawned that the statues were literally walled into an enclosure which had no entrance. Hence, one had to climb up and peer down into the space housing the statues. Balanced precariously on top of a brick placed on a chair which stood on a table, I gazed down on the heads of a stately Roman warrior, an angel, an English sepoy and a kneeling boy.

"I have been living in these quarters for the last 15 years," the sweeper whose house it was informed us. "And these statues have been lying here ever since. But sometimes, at night, the children would stumble across the statues and get scared, so we had them walled in." And so, heathen soldiers, avenging angels and stiff upper lip type British sepoys have remained suffocatingly closeted in the sweeper's front courtyard to this day. "Many people come here and look at the statues, but they all go away and the figures stay here."

While the precise age of the statues is not known, with very little written material available on them, they are at least 80 to 90 years old. Some of them, such as the figure of Queen Victoria and the romantic young women, were removed from the gardens surrounding Frere Hall, which was built in the 1870s, and so the figures are presumably of the same age as well. Carved in bronze or marble, the statues were probably crafted by local Hindu craftsmen who were skilled at fashioning figures of their own deities. The towering, now headless, figure of Prince Albert was taken down from what was once the Victoria and Albert Natural History Museum and now houses the KWSB. Mahatama Gandhi, who once guarded the entrance to the Karachi High Court building, was rooted out of his place and has mysteriously disappeared. In a similar instance, a colossal black granite monument to Nelson, which dominated the Karachi Polo Ground, was defaced by filling in the engravings on the monument. During Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's rule, all the writing on the stone block was erased and the ground re-named Sherpao Park.

Saifar Rahman Grami, Director Social Welfare and Culture KMC, said that a proposal was floated by his department last year for the rehabilitation of these statues. According to this scheme, the statues were to be placed in an enclosure at the recently renovated Burns Hall Gardens. "And if some people felt that Islam would be endangered by these statues being put on public display then viewing could be kept limited. Perhaps some interested foreign visitors would make a bid for them and we could then dispose off these controversial statues while ensuring that they remained intact." But not surprisingly, like most other such schemes, the proposal was also shelved.

Later, the authorities were approached by the principal of a local art school requesting them to grant the institution custody of the statues for their premises, but once again the request was denied.

"When people think of the KMC, cleaning up generally springs to mind," says Grami sahib. "In actual fact, up to 70 per cent of the KMC's responsibility falls under the category of social welfare and service. But this is very low on the KMC's priority list as well. So it is extremely difficult to push such schemes through." And even when a proposal is considered and approved, rapid changes in the administration put paid to them, the new government shelving schemes which their predecessor's could claim credit for.

In this particular instance, the problem is compounded by the fact that the statues carry the added stigma of being associated with but parasti and being repugnant to the true spirit of Islam. Even the more liberal elements within successive administrations are reluctant to pursue the issue for fear of inciting a fundamentalist backlash. And so the irony is that while sculpture exhibitions are feted in certain circles, these majestic relics of our recent history are crumbling to bits.

But there is a distinct case of double standards involved in the local administration's strictures against setting up statues to mark or commemorate certain institutions. According to reports, the building housing the Sindh Rangers headquarters in Hyderabad is guarded by the towering statue of a gun toting sipahi, which has obviously received the sanction of the local authorities and defence officials.

Another problem with the uprooted statues is that they hail from an era which most would-be patriots prefer not to draw attention to. The figures are viewed by some as an unwelcome reminder of an age of enslavement they would prefer to gloss over. The issue of provoking religious or patriotic sentiments apart, the problem at hand is clearly a lack of will and interest in salvaging a tiny bit of our past. Simply no one at any influential level is interested in the relatively simple task of cleaning up and assembling the figures into some kind of collection.

According to earlier reports, a far greater number of figures jostled for space at the KMC warehouse. But even the most persistent investigations yielded about two dozen statues in all at both the KMC and KWSB sites. "Some figures, especially of soldiers, were carried away to Islamabad during the martial law years in the eighties," said an employee of the warehouse. But just who these people were or where the statues ultimately wound up remains a mystery. This seemed to confirm the suspicion that the best pieces have probably been spirited away to private collections.

Visitors can breeze in and out of the premises unchecked and it seems all too easy to smuggle off a piece or two.

Among the small collection which remains, a few fragmented body parts and the lower torso of a toga swathed cherub are tantalising clues of the missing pieces that were once included in this exotic company.

Meanwhile, the broad pedestal which once supported Queen Victoria's statuesque frame is today being used as a bench to squat on by the chowkidars at the warehouse. As the queen herself would have put it: "We are not amused."

This article was original published in the May 1994 issue of the Herald under the headline 'Remains of the day'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Did the Indian Air Force strike the various structures at the madrasa in Balakot with lethality sufficient to have caused “heavy casualties”, as foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale told reporters on February 26?

Sections of the Indian media and of course BJP politicians believe it did and have even put a figure on the number of dead terrorists that ranges from 250 to 400. Pakistan has denied any damage or casualties and said the Indian payload landed on a nearby forest. On their part, international analysts have raised doubts about the Indian version based on their reading of pre- and post-airstrike satellite imagery of the madrasa.

While the truth is known to both the Indian and Pakistani governments, neither side appears keen to allow independent verification of its claims. The Pakistani military has prevented reporters from visiting the madrasa while the Indian government has also been circumspect about sharing imagery of the sort the US, Israeli and western air forces routinely release into the public domain.

In this vacuum, different people are resorting to different ways to settle the matter for themselves – including chest-thumping. In this clamour, there is now a debate among ammunition and aviation experts, who are trying to piece together what they know about the bombs the IAF dropped to figure out what might have happened on the ground.

Since World War II, missiles and their warheads have been designed to do things other than just be dropped and blow up. In the Balakot case, virtually the entire Indian media has reported that the IAF dropped 2,000-pound (lb) bombs over the madrassa. This claim, which has never been properly sourced, seems extremely unlikely based on post-airstrike satellite imagery.

It also reinforces the need for authentic, verifiable information about what happened in Balakot. However, with the governments’ silence and campaigns for the national elections gaining momentum in India, it is important to understand what is possible and why, and to keep from getting carried away.

According to media reports, the bombs were delivered using a guidance kit called SPICE, which can convert unguided bombs into guided ones. It is manufactured by Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, an Israeli company, and is used by the Israeli and Indian air forces.

The SPICE 2000, which can carry 2,000 lbs of bombs, is one of India’s most powerful (non-nuclear) air-to-surface weapons, depending on its configuration. And thanks to its precision guidance and long range, such weapons are often used as ‘bunker busters’: devices that can penetrate heavily fortified structures to blow them up from the inside.

At the same time, a bomb weighing 2,000 lbs (907 kg) can effect different kinds of damage on the ground, depending on its own specifications as well as those of the targets.

This forms the crux of the current debate, which takes off from sections of the media sharing higher resolution satellite images than were previously available of the Balakot madrasa after the IAF strike. The images show a clump of small buildings surrounded by a forest. Small dark smudges are visible on the roof of the main structure.

The confusion and uncertainty assailing the wider debate are relevant here. An official Indian statement claimed – before the images were released – that these buildings were a Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) training camp. Journalists who spoke to people living nearby say it is a madrasa and a school linked to the Jaish. Al Jazeera reported that the madrasa was run by the JeM and, according to Reuters, a signboard attesting to this was subsequently removed.

Whatever the purpose of the structure, it looks like a regular brick-and-mortar building. And many have claimed that the dark smudges are evidence of a SPICE bomb (or perhaps four SPICE bombs, since there are four smudges or holes) penetrating the roof’s outer shell to burrow in and kill everyone inside using explosives.

In the face of initial satellite images showing limited damage to the buildings, senior government officials had told reporters that the Pakistani army had been able to go back and put the roofs back on in two days, thus fooling the world that India hit nothing. But with the latest satellite imagery with its smudges on the roof, the briefing given to defence reports has changed. Now, the claim is not that the roofs were replaced but that the smudges/holes still visible on it are actually evidence of India having successfully struck its target.

The latest account of Indian “sources”, however, has been challenged by Western analysts.

George William Herbert, an expert on missile systems, tweeted on March 6 that a 2,000-lb non-penetrator warhead comprises 945 lbs of explosive filling and 1,055 lbs of metal casing. Assuming the filling is made either of tritonal (TNT + aluminium powder) or Composition B (TNT + RDX), the Gurney equation for a cylindrical casing indicates the explosion will set the metal – assumed to weigh 478.5 kg – off at 1.83-2.13 km/s. So if it went off inside a madrasa, the shrapnel would have obliterated the building.

Herbert continued on Twitter, “The thousand pounds of explosive becomes hot gas at over a thousand degrees kelvin, and that’s about 1,000 cubic meters of air equivalent. [This] will approximately double the pressure inside a typical three-story building around 25 meters [wide]” – further contributing to explosive damage.

As a result, the most popular claims that the SPICE 2000 dealt damage on the inside but not on the outside don’t hold up. Forget about Pakistani forces replacing the roof in two days. If a SPICE 2000 with a 2,000-lb bomb had hit the madrasa, they would have had to refill the crater, re-lay the foundation and rebuild the whole structure in two days.

However, Herbert told The Wire he wanted to make it clear that he does not know what actually happened, that he wasn’t proposing any particular theory and was simply clarifying the technical aspects.

Now, this analysis did assume that the warhead on the SPICE 2000 was a non-penetrator Mk 84 (which uses tritonal, Composition H6 or minol for the explosive filling). If it had been a penetrative weapon, most of the weapon’s mass would’ve been contained in the casing so that the weapon can smash through a strong outer layer first.

For example, the BLU-109 is another 2,000-lb bomb that can be used with SPICE guidance kits. As a bunker buster, it can penetrate up to six feet of reinforced concrete with a casing that weighs 634 kg, to deliver a 240-kg payload of tritonal. A BLU-116 weighs the same 874 kg but carries only 109 kg of tritonal filling to be able to penetrate over 10 feet of reinforced concrete.

As Angad Singh, an aviations expert, commented on Twitter, “Depending on effects required at the target (for example, fragmentation) the explosive filling in the bomb could be even less. So there is no hard and fast rule that a 2000-lb class bomb will wipe out half a hillside.”

He also noted that if India’s defence procurement was anything to go by, the SPICE units were likelier to be all-up rounds, where the bomb is already configured and attached to the guidance kit at the time of purchase. However, he told The Wire, “We have no good information on the exact bomb mated to the Indian SPICE munitions,” although it was “not an Mk 84”.

As a result, he said on Twitter, India’s “Spice 2000 [could all be] earmarked for high-value targets” and “that all but guarantees they have low-mass warheads”.

On March 8, the Indian Express quoted an unnamed “top” military officer as saying, “Each warhead used by the IAF to target buildings on the campus of the JeM madrasa at Balakot … had a net explosive quantity (NEQ) of only 70-80 kg of TNT.” This is further indication that a low-mass warhead was used – and it also indicates the kind of warhead that might have been used.

This is because, if the filling was made of a high explosive like tritonal, the Gurney equation poses a problem. The shrapnel from a BLU-109 would still be released at 1.3 km/s and from a BLU-116 at 0.8 km/s. If, say, an NEQ of 80 kg of TNT was used in the BLU-116 configuration, it would still release shrapnel at nearly 1 km/s, and have a range of 14 metres. The madrasa is likely to have received significant damage any which way.

These numbers also hold for all conventional explosives of other kinds – not just bunker busters – as long as they use tritonal, which has a relatively lower Gurney constant of 2.3, similar to TNT, and which have a similar casing-to-filling mass ratio.

Second: considering neither the IAF nor the Government of India have released any official statements about which warhead was used, the radius of possibilities becomes longer.

A second military officer reportedly told the Indian Express:

It is a precision weapon meant to hit specific targets but without any collateral damage. … This time the target was Balakot. If the target was Muzaffarabad instead, which is heavily inhabited and where no collateral damage would be acceptable, we would need to take out the people staying in a particular room without causing any damage to the adjacent room. We have the capacity to do that with this weapon.

Why the IAF wanted to use expensive ordnance that minimised the damage to buildings that were located far away from any population is not clear.

That said, one option that fits the bill is a fuel-air explosive (FAE), which – according to the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) – is “highly effective against soft targets like light vehicles, drop tank, trenches, bunkers and antitank mines”. They use fuels to consume oxygen from the air and burn at over 1,500º C for a long time. They are effective against targets enclosed in inaccessible niches like caves and tunnels.

As a result, the dark smudges in the images could be burn marks from the use of an FAE flown with a SPICE 250 kit – which means the total weight of the weapon was only 113 kg (250 lbs). This mass is close to an FAE developed by the DRDO that can carry 38 kg of propylene oxide and deal damage in a circle of radius 8 metres. If an NEQ of 70 kg of TNT was used, then each FAE could have carried 18-19 kg of propylene oxide, adjusted for the amount of physical damage dealt at 7-9 metres.

This is sufficient to have killed people inside a madrasa-sized structure, and the multiple dark smudges on the roof of the main structure could simply be signs of fire damage. However, there is the overpressure to deal with.

Herbert explained to The Wire that FAEs have a reaction detonation pressure determined by the materials used and how they mix with the air. This is called the Chapman-Jouget detonation pressure (PCJ). And if the FAE is detonated inside a structure, the fuel “tends to fill” large parts of the structure and pressurise it from the inside.

For a typical FAE, the PCJ can be hundreds of pound-force per sq. inch (PSI). A hundred PSI is equal to 6.8-times the atmospheric pressure (atm). This kind of pressure, Herbert said, “tends to break every wall apart very effectively” but does not throw the walls “very hard or throw fragments very far.”

For its part, the DRDO has estimated that the blast pressure of a rocket-delivered FAE is 0.8 kg-force/cm2 at 16 metres. This is a little less than the atmospheric pressure that regular buildings can withstand. Extrapolating the findings of one DRDO study, 18.5 kg of propylene oxide has a blast peak overpressure of 2.1-3.4 atm at about 8 metres from the canister. Even if multiple units were not fired, structural damage seems likely.

The satellite images also show burn marks of varying sizes, as well as a few craters. Col. Vinayak Bhat (retd.) reasoned in The Print that the smaller burn marks, found on the landscape surrounding the building, could have been human-made whereas the larger ones could have been the result of FAEs. Assuming they are contemporary, this suggests FAEs with a larger impact range could also have been used.

One possible way out, as Col. Bhat suggested, is that there were two waves of IAF fighters. The first carried FAEs used on the madrasa and against fleeing people. Then, a second wave carried high-explosive weapons to bomb the surroundings.

But while this seems to be able to explain some of the features of the satellite images, the theory does not square with the detailed briefings that reputed defence reporters like Indian Express‘s Sushant Singh received from the government, which spoke of only one group of four Mirage-2000s firing their precision-guided munitions from the Indian side of the Line of Control.

Angad Singh also told The Wire that he does not think an FAE was used – “certainly not the DRDO one, which as far as I am aware, is not in wide service yet.” He added that “the attack direction and profile seems to suggest SPICE 2000, not 1000 or 250.”

An FAE mated to a SPICE 2000 seems excessive: while it could explain the burn marks on the ground, it doesn’t explain what appears to be an erect, intact structure. If the kit had been mated with a high-explosive, then the unnamed military officer’s comment implies that the casing on the weapon was really heavy.

This in turn could mean one of two things. First, that the madrasa had a roof full of holes/smudges to begin with, and that they are not signs of damage.

Second, the madrasa was – or presumed to be – very heavily fortified. If the madrasa wasn’t fortified, it wouldn’t be standing. But if it was, there is no way to confirm.

So there we have it: multiple intersecting theories, led by a SPICE kit and low-mass warheads that may or may not have been FAEs, Mk 84s or something else – something the Government of India is keeping mum about. At the centre of all this stands the Ship of Theseus: a madrasa that journalists are being kept away from, a building that may or may not be fortified, which even may or may not be the same building it was before.

The article was originally published in The Wire.

Spring comes in gradual stages in Karimabad: the pink and white blossoms appear first on the floor of the valley, while the apple and apricot trees are still bare on the higher slopes of the surrounding mountains. But as winter loosens its grip, the trees on the steep heights break into their spring colours of green, white and pink. Towering over this unfolding panorama are the eternally snowcapped peaks of Rakaposhi, Altur, the Lady's Finger and many other mountains which soar well over 20,000 feet.

Perched on a hill overlooking the valley and the ancient village is Baltit Fort. Legend has it that a bygone ruler of Hunza married a princess from Baltistan, and she brought some craftsmen as part of her trousseau to build this fort. However, it is almost certain that this story is apocryphal as recent research indicates that the fort came into being as a haphazard addition of rooms which connected two (or possibly three) watch-towers. Carbon dating of a piece of wood from the oldest part of the fort indicates that the original structure is at least seven hundred years old. For centuries, this was a stronghold from which raids were launched against caravans plying the Silk Route as well as against neighboring Nagar. Together with the nearby Altit Fort, Baltit constituted the seat of power of the Mirs, the rulers of Hunza who held absolute power over the valley until the reforms of 1974.

After the arrival of the British in the area a century ago, the fort lost its importance as a military base. Although the Mirs tried to make it more comfortable by gentrifying it, probably using craftsmen from the plains, they abandoned it in the 1930s, moving to a more modern palace on the lower slopes of the village which was renamed Karimabad in 1976 after the Aga Khan. Over the years, the neglected old fort fell into disrepair to the point that it was in danger of complete collapse. In 1979, the fort was visited independently by Richard Hughes, an engineer, and Didier Lefort, an architect, who both convinced the Aga Khan to save the fort.

The Mir, Ghazanfar Ali Khan, did his bit by transferring ownership of his traditional family seat to the newly created Baltit Heritage Trust, and soon thereafter, restoration work on the fort commenced. The first step was to thoroughly document the structure before arriving at a comprehensive conservation strategy based on structural and soil analyses. Today, the fort is shrouded in scaffolding as 80 workers and a team of architects and engineers toil to meet its target reopening date in 1996.

Conservation was the subject of a two-week workshop held in Karimabad recently which brought together 18 architects, engineers and archaeologists to discuss and learn new techniques in the field. Using a hands-on approach, the organisers had participants out in the village and the fort every day, learning documentation and local building techniques.

One of the principal concerns of the team at Bait it Fort is to try and maintain the historic flavour of the village. Indeed, the Karimabad Planning Support Service (KPSS) offers free designing services to villagers to encourage them to preserve their traditional way of life. But this may be a losing battle. As, tourism, education and the ubiquitous dish antenna bring the rest of the world closer to Hunza, it becomes more and more difficult to convince villagers that what was good enough for their forefathers should be good enough for them.

If the purists among the conservationists had their way, the locals would build on the same pattern, using the same materials as the old houses. In the traditional Hunza house, the whole family cooks, eats and sleeps in the same large room called aha. There is a central opening to let the smoke out and the light in, as there are no windows. Men, women and children relieve themselves outside. The only other room is a small enclosure for animals.

Understandably, young couples - especially those who have lived in cities - now demand greater privacy. As a result, a number of houses are now being built outside the old village, using bricks or concrete blocks, as opposed to the stone and wood used in the old houses. While most of the new homes incorporate the ha into their designs, they also boast windows and attached bathrooms.

The planners at KPSS are aware of the fact that unless they can provide modern conveniences like running water and sewerage to the inhabitants of Karimabad, they will be unable to convince them not to move down to the terraced fields. Such a movement would not only change the character of the community, but would also put pressure on the limited farmland. As it is, Karimabad is no longer self-sufficient in food, importing over 70 per cent of its requirements. The conservationists are not trying to preserve Karimabad in a kind of time warp simply because they harbour romantic notions of an idyllic past, but because they realise that if the character of the valley changes too drastically, the tourist trade- the mainstay of the local economy - will decline as well.

A major debate during the workshop centered around the degree to which modern influences could or should be resisted. A heated argument broke out when Richard Hughes informed participants that after the structural works were over, the fort would be painted white. Originally, all the structures in the area were a natural stone grey; Baltit Fort was painted white subsequently, probably in the late 19th century when it was being gentrified. Currently, despite the efforts of KPSS, a number of houses have been painted white as well as some more jarring colours.

Participants were concerned about the influence the fort will exert on the community when it is opened, and the KPSS team wanted to know how they were to convince villagers not to paint their houses when the dominant structure in the area was gleaming white. Richard Hughes defended the decision on the grounds that the fort was being restored to the point at which the earliest photographs of the structure existed, and these show it being whitewashed.

The argument is not as abstruse as it seems but goes to the heart of the whole philosophy of conservation. To what extent is intervention valid? Should conservators try to restore a structure to its (imagined) original shape, or make the degree of change apparent to the modern visitor? Added to these questions is the larger concern for the conservation of the area. In the case of Karimabad, the village is unique in its layout and traditional features, and should be preserved as a living community but not as a museum. These were some of the issues which were raised during the workshop but were not entirely resolved. However, the subject is constantly evolving, as is our understanding of it, and the workshop helped to give participants new perspectives and insights.

This article was original published in the June 1994 issue of the Herald under the headline 'Freezing time'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

It must have been nice to be Malik Riaz.

Until events finally overtook him in 2018, he had managed the impressive task of amassing a massive fortune while simultaneously brushing off every public accusations of underhanded, if not outright criminal, behaviour. After all, Riaz is the same man who was caught bribing and influencing talk-show hosts on television; who admitted in court to lavishly funding foreign trips of the son of a chief justice who was then adjudicating cases involving him; who accused serving and retired military personnel of trying to extort money from him; and who, on several occasions, openly declared that he had spent a fortune on ‘influencing’ bureaucrats, politicians and other state functionaries in his inexorable march towards becoming one of Pakistan’s richest men.

Riaz’s journey from a humble government contractor in the 1990s to a real estate tycoon in the early 2000s has often been characterised as a rags-to-riches story. The hagiographic accounts of his life that frequently appear in print emphasise his modest origins as well as his commitment to philanthropy and the welfare of the people of Pakistan. Bahria Town, Riaz’s flagship real estate venture in multiple cities, has been marketed from its very inception as the manifestation of one man’s desire to provide Pakistan’s middle class with a lifestyle equal to, if not better than, that enjoyed by their equivalents in the first world. It is not coincidental that his residential schemes come complete with replicas of famous monuments like the Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square and the Pyramids of Giza. Why leave Pakistan when everything that is apparently special about the rest of the world can be brought right to your doorstep?

Yet, behind the manicured lawns, glitzy malls, flashy cinemas and well-equipped hospitals, there has always been a whiff of duplicity. Riaz may have started with nothing but his rise to the top arguably had less to do with his zeal and vision and much more to do with his apparent talent for making friends in the right places.

Not everyone would, for example, be able to launch a joint venture with the Defence Housing Authority in 2008, creating the DHA Valley scheme in Islamabad (and allegedly embezzle 62 billion rupees from it). No average real estate developer would have a tax claim of 119 billion rupees withdrawn in 2013 as Riaz did when then president Asif Ali Zardari allegedly intervened on his behalf to get the Federal Board of Revenue to back off from pursuing the claim. No other builder would receive thousands of acres of state land to develop a new housing scheme in Karachi as he could when he started setting up Bahria Town in Karachi in 2015. From the media to the military and from the bureaucracy to the upper echelons of all the mainstream political parties, Riaz has always been only a phone call, gift or bribe away from seeking the favours he needed to pursue his business interests.

In a way, he embodies the nexus that arguably exists between the state institutions, political power, big business and criminality in Pakistan. It is abundantly clear that his alleged crimes and wrongdoings – from illegal encroachments on state land and land-grabbing often from unsuspecting farmers to tax evasion and money laundering – could only have been done with a deliberate silence, or even connivance, of the authorities.

As evidence of all this continues to pile up, what remains perhaps most surprising is Riaz’s seeming indifference to all forms of public criticism, corruption investigations and even law suits. Despite numerous allegations of forcible takeover of land from villagers for Bahria Town as well as scandals involving dubious and suspect land swaps with various government departments, he continues to build his empire, a living example of the idea that the law works very differently for the rich and the poor. Riaz demonstrates how right connections and the right amount of money to maintain them is all that is required to make it big and keep it that way in the Land of the Pure. Without ever contesting an election or holding a public office of any kind, he has cannily manipulated the levers of patronage in order to make himself one of the most powerful men in Pakistan.

This is precisely why Riaz’s legal troubles in 2018 are of such great significance. It is difficult to say why the last year might come to be remembered as the one that marked the beginning of his success story’s end. Perhaps an energised and activist Supreme Court is finally able to take the cases lodged against him seriously. Maybe it is the change in the political calculus brought about by the ascent to power by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf amid the disintegration of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and Pakistan Peoples Party. Or it could have even been nothing more than a falling out among friends at the highest levels of power and influence in Pakistan.

Whatever the reason, Riaz was never far from the news in 2018 as reports continued to emerge of the cracks appearing in the armour that had shielded him from too much scrutiny in years past. Since a Supreme Court judgment in May 2018 barred Bahria Town from selling any more land or apartments in Karachi following a ruling that its exchange of land with the Malir Development Authority was illegal, his misfortunes have multiplied.

Questions have been raised about his land acquisitions in Islamabad (where the authorities have told him to hand back 500 kanals of land), older allegations of money laundering and other financial misconduct have resurfaced and many of his associates have been hauled before courts or off to prison as investigations into Bahria Town’s business dealings expand. Riaz himself has been made to stand in the dock at the Supreme Court on several occasions and has also been placed on the exit control list.

If he is to be remembered as one of the key figures of 2018, it is not because of what he has done but what he has come to symbolise. As the most visible symbol of a corrupt system in which the powerful are able to do as they please, his gradual fall from grace in the last year potentially augurs a change in a direction that may eventually lead to accountability for all and equality before the law. Yet, such hopes may turn out to be premature, independent of the fact that accountability of this kind has yet to extend to Riaz’s co-conspirators in politics, bureaucracy and other state institutions.

Unlike Karachi’s Empress market, where relatively poor shopkeepers and stall owners saw their livelihoods being wiped out in an instant in the name of an anti-encroachment drive, his Bahria Towns have repeatedly been spared such a fate due to the timely interventions of high-ranking officials in spite of court orders to the contrary. In the media, reports and opinion pieces praising Riaz continue to appear and he himself has repeatedly highlighted his charity work as a reason to spare him, even going so far as to offer to contribute billions of rupees towards the construction of dams in Pakistan.

Riaz may be in trouble but it is clear that his influence in Pakistan persists and is likely to do so for some time to come.

The writer is an assistant professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

This article was originally published in the Herald's January 2019 issue under the headline. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

As the year 2018 drew to a close, Pakistan witnessed a strong pressure on the freedoms of association and expression, the federal character of the state as defined in the Constitution and the requisite transparency in political and strategic decision-making. There is a popular discourse that systematically tarnishes the democratic political process and promotes corporate administrative solutions for long-standing political problems that have origins in our history and geography. The proponents of this discourse - a large part of the affluent urban middle class - believe that such solutions are not only possible but also the only option available.

The structural manifestation of the ideas and interests of this class lie in the exposed and latent actions taken by the permanent institutions of the state which are run by those who belong to the same class. Consequently, the 2018 general elections saw an uneven playing field being created for all those mainstream political parties that represent multi-class interests. On the other hand, the party that essentially represents the mindset of the affluent urban middle class was brought to power with help from the institutions that this class dominates.

At a broader social and cultural level, the long-standing policies of the Pakistani state have had a cascading effect on how communities, families and individuals view and treat religion in their lives. There was a time when we lived more cohesively as a diverse nation. We were always a largely religious society but we were also accepting of people belonging to other faiths who lived among us. What we see now is obscurantism in behaviour and radicalisation in thinking being widely prevalent and deeply ingrained at the individual, communal and institutional levels. If we take a recent example and discuss the text of the much celebrated court verdict in favour of the blasphemy accused Aasia Bibi, we will find that the judges had to go an extra mile to establish their own love for the Prophet of Islam and their belief in the finality of his prophethood. They quoted heavily from assorted religious texts to decide a case essentially falling under common law. Fear rules the hearts and minds of practising Muslims, let alone religious minorities, when it comes to matters of faith.

There are still many people in Pakistan who have some sense of the inherent regional, ethnic, economic and religious tensions that have always played out in the country's chequered history. They also have a bit of understanding of how our economy and polity will take shape in the coming years given how the world around us is changing. These people realise fully that the only way to survive and prosper is to create a democratic order where individual and collective freedoms are respected, where there is a just and trust-based relationship among the constituent units of the federation and where equal opportunities exist for the growth and development for all - irrespective of faith, ethnicity and gender. They similarly see the need for social and cultural reform movements at the grass-roots level while at the same time acknowledging that major structural changes can only be brought about by political action.

In light of all these circumstances and factors, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari is the only head of a mainstream political party who represented, at least in theory, the ideas of democratic freedoms, federalism, equal citizenship and religious deradicalisation of the society in clear, consistent and coherent terms in 2018. He has taken the right positions at the right time, whenever the rights of individuals or groups were threatened, rights of minorities were not realised, women were suppressed, voices of dissent were muffled and civil rights activists were made to disappear. Currently, among the top leaders of all mainstream parties, he remains the most vocal advocate of the rights of women, minorities and working classes even though his detractors have never shied away from pointing to his own luxurious lifestyle, his huge assets both inside and outside Pakistan and his upper-class upbringing in a highly secluded and privileged environment.

He also showed how political conversations do not need to be indecent to be impactful. The campaign for the 2018 general elections saw disgraceful language being used for adversaries by political leaders, propagandists and spin doctors belonging to almost all the major parties - including, sometimes, by Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari's own Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). He himself, however, made a point to stay away from all that mud-slinging. While he criticised those he was fighting the election against, there was not even a modicum of offensiveness in his campaign speeches.

Later, after getting elected to the National Assembly - a direct descendant of PPP's founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto having entered that house of Parliament after two decades - his famous first speech in the opening session stole the thunder away from anyone and everyone speaking on the floor either from the treasury or the opposition benches. He made it clear that in the larger interest of the democratic order - so that there remains a continuity in the electoral system - he will accept the new government's right to rule, despite being convinced that the elections were engineered. He was the first to remind the new government led by Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) that its role has now changed and that it now needed to meet public expectations raised by its own rhetoric.

Since then, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has not only participated in parliamentary proceedings more than most other party leaders, all his speeches have also been focused on substantive issues and have been eloquently delivered. He attends the National Assembly sessions more regularly than many other senior political leaders, perhaps, in order to stress the pre-eminence of Parliament over other institutions. This is in sharp contrast to how Prime Minister Imran Khan has treated the legislature. He has seldom attended parliamentary proceedings - much the same way he did when he was in the opposition.

Critics, again, may highlight the numerous allegations of embezzlement of public funds and fraud that Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari's father, former president Asif Ali Zardari, has been facing for more than three decades (and now the son himself is also facing). They contend that all his parliamentary eloquence and his campaigning for the rights of the marginalised are meant to save himself and his father from accountability. Now that his own name has been placed on a no-fly list along with his father's (and those of many members of his party's government in Sindh), Bilawal Bhutto- Zardari's politics is increasingly seen by his opponents as a face-saving mechanism. They dub his belligerent speeches as aggressive posturing aimed at hoodwinking public opinion and presenting the ongoing process of accountability as a politically-motivated witch-hunt.

Yet, some of his actions suggest that he may be genuinely believing in at least some of what he says. For instance, in matters surrounding the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), which is seen negatively by parts of the establishment, and as well as the news media, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has shown more courage than the leadership of even Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party (ANP). While ANP has asked its senior leaders who supported PTM to resign, he is constantly asking the state and the government to listen to the movement's grievances and amicably address them rather than demonstrating high-handedness in dealing with them. Likewise, he raises the issue of enforced disappearances in Balochistan without mincing any words. Raising these sensitive issues will earn him few, if any, brownie points with voters anywhere in the political heartland of Sindh and Punjab.

Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has also taken a clear stance on religious extremism. He seems to understand that Pakistan can only be successfully run as a federation - one in which every group of people belonging to every province, region, political opinion and religion has a defined stake.

One can hope that he lives up to the growing expectations about him and sustains his slowly but surely increasing popularity. Given that he is the only leader of any major political party whose age cohort represents the majority of Pakistani population (unlike most other political leaders who are all in their sixties), one also hopes that he can attract the political attention of his own generation.

The stickiest point will be the manner in which he deals with allegations of corruption, as well as the many question marks over the performance of the Sindh government. If evidence emerges to back the charges of corruption, his politics will go down rather than going up. Especially considering that the news media mostly loves to hate the Bhuttos - and now also the Zardaris - it will be particularly difficult for someone who combines both these surnames to survive the onslaught of criticism if even a modicum of truth is found in the accusations against him. He also needs to substantially improve the delivery of public goods in Sindh to be able to counter questions often raised about the PPP's track record in governance.

At the same time, we also have to see whether he continues to stick to his professed social and democratic ideals, and is able to resuscitate his party across Pakistan by leading from the front. As far as 2018 is concerned, he has certainly emerged as a political leader to watch out for and listen to in the coming years.

The writer is a poet, essayist and columnist.

This article was originally published in the Herald's January 2019 issue under the headline. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

It is easy, in our country, to antagonise the patriarchy. Even without trying, most women manage it every day. But to do so consciously - knowing what backlash lies in store - takes a great deal of courage. In April last year, we watched in awe and alarm as singer and actor Meesha Shafi did exactly that, accusing another artiste, Ali Zafar, of sexual harassment. But we also rejoiced. It was a pivotal moment for all of us, for the conversation on abuse and accountability that the #MeToo movement had activated in our collective imaginations.

Our social media timelines were already flooding with stories. Closed Facebook groups were circulating lists of abusive men. One of them, Khalid Bajwa, had just been removed as the chief executive officer of the Pakistani music streaming app Patari. Right when #MeToo was gaining momentum, Meesha tipped it in the direction we had all been waiting for: she named a powerful public figure, becoming the first person - both in Pakistani and Indian showbiz industry - to call out a renowned celebrity. Now the force, we thought, could only gather strength. Like in the United States, where many women revealed their stories of sexual harassment at the hands of a powerful film producer, Harvey Weinstein, we expected scores of women to come out of the woods, naming all the Ali Zafars in our midst. We hoped the survivors of sexual assault would finally be heard and believed.

Not quite. The later months turned into a nightmare for Meesha and #MeToo. We watched in horror as she was slammed with a one-billion-rupee defamation suit, as she was bullied off social media, as the entire #MeToo movement became suspect. Women were reminded what we have always known: Pakistan is just not ready to deal with sexual violence.

Why is it that a movement, which is only getting louder in other countries even with all its messiness, has failed to take root in Pakistan? The answer is not difficult to find. In a society where women cannot openly talk about their bodies, how can we speak about the trauma our bodies carry? The only place where sex and violence coexist in our imaginations is porn and, of course, television dramas where any woman who survives rape automatically loses her honour. It is impossible for us to speak about sex or sexual violence outside of shame. We go around policing women's bodies in the fear that something might happen to them. But when something does happen, in fiction or in reality, our shame overpowers our support. We blame the woman who accuses - not just socially but also legally. Cue the draconian Section 18 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act. This criminal defamation clause dictates that harming another person's reputation or privacy can land you in jail or can attract exorbitant fines. No wonder #MeToo has been trammelled in Pakistan even before it took off.

But the movement's impact here must be measured differently. Even with Meesha losing legal ground and Ali Zafar's movie thriving at the box office, even with close to zero action being taken against the others who have been named and shamed - even with all this, #MeToo has not been in vain. We have to pay closer attention to what #MeToo's failure has brought to light. Painfully but vividly, it has made visible the workings of patriarchy as well as the forces that will undo it: silence and the labour of women.

In Meesha's case, and also in #MeToo's case, we can see how power works, how it silences. Meesha was subjected to personal hate and professional vitriol, effectively shut down and forced to retreat. Ali Zafar's defamation suit set a precedent so students and teenagers, who were taking to social media to name and shame, ended up deleting their testimonies for the fear of lawsuits. Out of the four popular men who have been named after Ali Zafar - Faisal Edhi, Taimur Rahman, Junaid Akram and Feica - only Feica's case has been followed up. But nothing has come of it, and, meanwhile, the rest move unhindered. The entire leftist brigade has descended in the defence of Faisal Edhi, Taimur Rahman has ignored the complaints and Junaid Akram has tweeted that he will take his accusers to court. The women who named these men are facing intense cyberbullying while the men are weaponising silence itself: to quote Ali Zafar, "Silence is not an option."

But, unlike Ali Zafar, those of us who have actually experienced silencing, know that it works like a pressure cooker - at some point it erupts. We only have to look around: #MeToo has made it impossible to sit in a gathering of women and not have the discussion veer towards sexual abuse; all our conversations are about the latest person named, wherever in the world, about our personal stories of survival, about how we feel, what we fear. We do not always agree about the politics of #MeToo and its strategies, but we are collectively labouring under its weight.

This labour takes many forms; there is the labour of women like Meesha who venture forth on behalf of everyone, who then have to contend with vicious negativity while keeping up appearances and handling lawsuits; there is the labour of women who surround the abusers, the wives and sisters and mothers, who pick up after the damage caused by the men in their lives, who have to reassure their fathers, husbands and brothers and stroke their egos even as they deal with the women these men have hurt; and there is the labour of women all around us whose trauma surfaces each time another woman names hers, whose everyday life is exploding with questions of consent, justice and assault.

We have always laboured, of course, but now this labour is turning into a combined force. The more the conversation on #MeToo is stifled publicly, the more it is spilling into our privately shared spaces. And it is in these spaces of labour that we witness the impact of #MeToo. Here, unfiltered and unchecked, women are having conversations that affirm each other while slowly pushing towards new possibilities. Our imaginations are shifting; we are agreeing and disagreeing, yes, but we are making room for a more nuanced discussion on abuse and consent: do they exist on a spectrum of severity and intensity or should all transgressions be considered equally vehement?

We are challenging old ideas of accountability, thinking about justice as more than a matter of public trial, as a matter of individual catharsis. Recognising that for some, the act of naming their hurt is enough, that everyone processes trauma differently. We are linking trauma to healing and asking: what does the survivor want? How have we failed her all these years? We are questioning our roles as bystanders, seeing ourselves as enablers whose neutrality can cause harm. We are coming to understand that justice and repair involves active processes like boycotting someone socially or publicly saying #BelieveHer or privately offering care. And when we speak of care, we are also talking about toxic masculinity and beginning to identify that abusive men are equally the victims of patriarchal structures.

Initiating and building these conversations has been difficult and their reach is admittedly confined to a certain highly educated segment of the society. These conversations, however, host the undercurrents of #MeToo and possess the power to undo norms. These are the spaces where women are gaining confidence and finding a common language, where we are learning to extend our humanity - to survivors and abusers alike. I think of the feminist writer Noor Zaheer who said at a talk in Karachi recently: for the next three years, just believe women. I think of the women who care for broken men. I think of so many conversations where we have asked: what would our world look like tomorrow if Ali Zafar or one of the accused stepped up and said, yes, I did this, I am sorry, I am ashamed, how can I do better? How would it restore agency to the survivors, how would it open up greater compassion for the abusers?

If we get there one day, it will have been through the collective labour of women who are knitting these spaces into existence with pain and solidarity. It will happen because we are choosing, with #MeToo, to transform our decades of silence into a different kind of labour: one where we comfort each other even as we describe and carry our own trauma. One that will slowly seep in and unmake the patriarchy. One that has been set into motion by others among us who are speaking up - women like Meesha whose conscience is no longer allowing them to keep silent.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Karachi with a degree in journalism from Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Who is Khadim Hussain Rizvi? How has he earned a place among the major makers and breakers of news in 2018?

A madrasa graduate hailing from Pindi Gheb area of Attock district, he has worked for long as a khateeb (sermoniser) at a mosque attached to a saint’s tomb near Data Darbar in Lahore. For more than two decades, his career remained rather unremarkable.

This changed in January 2011.

A few weeks earlier, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer had met Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman imprisoned on blasphemy charges, and sought a review of the blasphemy laws. His security guard, Mumtaz Qadri, later killed him in Islamabad for doing that. Rizvi was among many clerics who issued a fatwa, asking people not to take part in Taseer’s funeral prayer.

Soon, Rizvi helped launch Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah, an umbrella group consisting of many religious entities and leaders. It cut its political teeth by agitating against Qadri’s imprisonment and trial and later his death sentence. After he was executed in February 2016, the tehreek organised another series of protests including a violent one in the federal capital, Islamabad, right after his funeral prayer in the nearby city of Rawalpindi.

About a month prior to that, law enforcement agencies used force to disrupt a protest rally that Rizvi headed in Lahore. The extensive media coverage of the incident created a ripple, if not a wave, of sympathy for him and his tehreek in central parts of Punjab.

The grass-roots level mobilisation that he launched after Qadri’s execution helped him gather a few hundred highly charged protesters just outside Islamabad in November 2017 after the government made some changes in electoral nomination forms. He and his supporters saw those changes as an attempt to water down the importance of the finality of prophethood as a central tenet of Islam. The gathering, etched into public memory as the Faizabad dharna, or sit-in, was often violent, always cantankerous and never willing to cooperate with the authorities. After Rizvi gave a call for a country-wide traffic shut down in late November 2017, security and intelligence agencies got involved to put an end to the dharna through a negotiated settlement. Later, a senior official of a security agency distributed money among the dharna participants to facilitate their return home. Soon, they had another reward: federal law minister Zahid Hamid resigned in a major concession to their protest.

Only weeks before the dharna, Rizvi and his associates had their tehreek registered as a political party called Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan. Come elections in July 2018 and the party would field hundreds of candidates across Pakistan. In the event, it garnered more than two million votes, mostly from central Punjab and Karachi, though only two of its candidates, both for Sindh Assembly, could get elected. In many constituencies, they did contribute to the defeat of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) candidates.

Buoyed by the popularity he had gained after the Faizabad dharna and emboldened by his electoral performance, Rizvi upped the ante on his rhetoric by threatening to launch another country-wide agitation after Aasia Bibi was acquitted by the Supreme Court in October 2018. The government’s response oscillated between a half-hearted crackdown against his violent followers and outright appeasement. Soon, the authorities cut a deal to have the protest call withdrawn in return for disallowing Aasia Bibi from going abroad until a final appeal in her case is heard and decided.

Through all these developments, Rizvi - known as Baba Ji among his followers – has acquired all the features of a populist politician: a no-holds-barred inflammatory rhetoric, an open challenge to the ‘corrupt’ elites to mend their ways and an unabashed exploitation of highly touchy religious issues. He has spiked these ingredients with a self-belief that borders on arrogance, one that has been boosted enormously due to the state’s lackadaisical response to his disruptive politics.

Over the last three years, his religious populism has helped him wedge himself into Pakistan’s religious-political landscape mainly by exploiting the sense of neglect among Barelvis who always think that the state is sympathetic, even partial, to their rival Sunni group, Deobandis. The latter has acquired political eminence and amassed muscle power on the back of its participation in the state-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan since the 1980s.

To o qualify for his appointment as a khateeb at a mosque run by the Punjab government’s Auqaf Department, Rizvi needed to have a proven affiliation with the Barelvi-Sunni school of thought but no political association. Once he was hired as a provincial government employee, he was required to avoid hate speech against other religions and sects and was particularly not allowed to speak against the state. He was always careful in his sermons except that he was also known among his audiences as a vocal supporter of the blasphemy laws and the finality of prophethood.

These two elements, along with his love for Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi, the founder of Barelvi Islam, would become the pillars of his politics. Barelvi leaders and parties in the past have tried to base their politics on these three factors but only with marginal success. Most Barelvi voters often vote on the advice of the custodians of Sufi shrines – the pirs and shaikhs – they follow. Since almost all of the politically active pirs and shaikhs contest elections as candidates of mainstream non-sectarian political parties, strictly Barelvi parties have almost always fared poorly in previous elections.

Even otherwise, these parties did not have a mass base. When, for instance, the blasphemy laws became politically salient in the wake of Qadri’s hanging, traditional Barelvi parties, such as Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan and its various factions, neither had popular leaders nor organisational mechanisms on the ground to mobilise people.

Enter Rizvi.

He and his Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan not just wiped out the politics of older Barelvi parties, they also threatened the electoral power enjoyed by pirs and shaikhs. This may explain why, in January 2018, the custodian of one of the most revered Sunni Sufi shrines in Punjab, Sial Sharif in Sargodha district, announced a provincial lockdown of Punjab, demanding the enforcement of shariah as well as the resignation of the then provincial law minister Rana Sanaullah for allegedly having committed blasphemy. Many of the shrine’s politically eminent followers, including a scion of the custodian himself, also distanced themselves from the then ruling PMLN.

The pirs and shaikhs might have realised that they needed to match Rizvi’s aggressive Barelvi politics to remain electorally relevant. The fact that they then joined the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in droves might have strengthened an impression among Barelvi voters that the pirs and mashaikh are always interested only in ensuring their own political survival.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan is sometimes seen as nothing but a coming together of politically ambitious, but socially and economically weak, clerics in search of an electoral salience. That may or may not be the case but what is clear is that Rizvi and his associates have mobilised a huge number of Barelvis to the extent that they are not hesitant in taking to the streets and even using violence to make themselves heard.

Even though their agitation has subsided after Rizvi’s detention in November 2018 under terrorism and treason charges, their potential to create large-scale trouble remains intact and can resurface as and when there is any development on any blasphemy-related subject, including giving Aasia Bibi her freedom of movement. They also remain aggressively active in cyberspace where they openly call for violence against anyone who has said or written anything even remotely perceived as opposing the blasphemy laws or undermining the finality of prophethood.

This constant state of mobilisation stems from Rizvi’s ability to have married a religious narrative with the socio-economic miseries of a working class that finds little voice in the political arena and even less representation in the making of the state’s policies. He tells them their salvation does not rest in trying to improve their worldly lot but in attaining an other-worldly redemption by working continuously for the twin causes of the blasphemy laws and the finality of prophethood.

Like the unsophisticated and bloodthirsty Punjabi film hero Maula Jutt, his typical follower never balks at advocating violence against the rich and the powerful to have his grievances addressed. As a rebel with no plan, he threatens to rid the country of its existing West-inspired order – by bloody means if so required – but offers only vague religious rhetoric about what should replace it.

Rizvi can verily be credited with introducing this highly destabilising force into Pakistan’s already not-so-stable polity. He has certainly succeeded where many earlier Barelvi leaders failed.

The writer is the director of Pak Institute for Peace Studies.

This article was originally published in the Herald's January 2019 issue under the headline. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Who is this man of means who appears in a court almost every day to face charges of graft?

He is Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, the only Pakistani to be elected prime minister thrice and the chief minister of the largest province twice. He is also the only prime minister in Pakistan's history whose dismissal by the president in 1993 was set aside by the Supreme Court. No politician in the country has been more fortunate than him. And no Pakistani politician has been as unfortunate as him, for he was removed from the post of prime minister thrice, disqualified from holding public office twice, forced into exile for nearly a decade and sentenced to various lengths of imprisonment, including once for life.

Over the last 17 months or so alone, he has been declared ineligible to be a member of Parliament - and, thus, barred from being the prime minister - by the Supreme Court and awarded 10 years of rigorous imprisonment, alongside massive financial penalties, by an accountability court for owning expensive residential properties in London. In another case concerning a steel mill that his family set up in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s, he has been sentenced to seven years in jail and has been fined 25 million US dollars. While his daughter and son-in-law have also been convicted and sentenced along with him, his party has lost its grip over Punjab in the July 2018 elections after 10 years of continuous rule in the province. He still faces at least one more inquiry and may well be convicted and sentenced again. His brother and three-time chief minister of Punjab, Shehbaz Sharif, is also facing multiple charges of graft as are some other members of their immediate family and many of their loyalists.

How has he come to this pass?

It is a long story and there are extremely intriguing turns in Nawaz Sharif's career. We have to find out why he was abandoned by the forces that had patronised him for nearly two decades. And how did he move from the right side of the judiciary to its wrong one?

It seems three factors have played a decisive role in Nawaz Sharif's fall. First, his desire to be a real prime minister with full powers. Secondly, a streak of impetuosity in his character that impels him to take drastic actions without weighing the risks. And, thirdly, his inability to realise that nobody could be an elected keeper of the folks and a robber baron at the same time. There is also an ironical twist to his career: he soared high as an innocuous and innocent politician but was felled when he appeared to have become a political heavyweight to be reckoned with.

As a young man with plenty of money to spend without earning it, Nawaz Sharif started flirting with politics under air marshal (retired) Asghar Khan's party, Tehreek-e-Istiqlal. He was without recommendation except for the money his father is reported to have set apart for investment in his political career - and which was profitably spent. He owed his rise in politics to three army generals. General Ghulam Jilani, the Punjab governor and former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief, gave the break Nawaz Sharif needed by making him finance minister in the provincial government in 1981 and nominating him as Punjab's chief minister after the party-less election of 1985. General Ziaul Haq chose him to secure Punjab as the defender of their shared objective of Islamising the society by pumping enormous money into the province's economy. And General Hamid Gul who, as the ISI chief, helped Nawaz Sharif in 1988 by fostering the formation of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI), a coalition of mostly right-wing parties opposed to Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). When PPP still managed to win more National Assembly seats from Punjab than IJI did, Gul ensured that Nawaz Sharif retained his hold over Punjab as chief minister to help contain the government of Benazir Bhutto at the centre.

Nawaz Sharif remembered all this. When he became prime minister in 1990, he declared completion of Zia's mission as his goal. The then president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, had won his office in a bargain with Benazir but, as a warrior from the Zia camp, he had a soft corner for Nawaz Sharif. He, however, had inflated ambitions of his own. Nawaz Sharif did not like the president's habit of sitting on files. He also wanted a repeal of the constitution's Article 58-2 (b) which empowered the president to dissolve the National Assembly in his discretion - but the president would not hear this. The prime minister also wanted his say in the appointment of the chiefs of armed forces but the president surprised him by appointing General Abdul Waheed Kakar as the new chief of army staff (COAS). Nawaz Sharif allowed the streak of impetuosity to get the better of his judgment. In an address to the nation, he strongly denounced the president for conspiring against him. The very next day, the president sacked him by dissolving the National Assembly. The Supreme Court struck down the president's order, the first and so far the only instance of its kind. Nawaz Sharif was back in power but his failure to get rid of the Punjab chief minister, who had the president's backing, persuaded the army chief to give marching orders to the president and the prime minister both.

Nawaz Sharif did not give up the fight. When he returned to power with a huge majority in Parliament in 1997, the first thing he did was to get rid of Article 58-2 (b). He did not display the courtesy to inform president Farooq Leghari, a Benazir nominee-turned-nemesis. Next he managed to secure the Supreme Court chief justice's downfall and his party workers did not hesitate to storm the apex court. Then, president Leghari was forced to quit. In 1998, Nawaz Sharif appealed to the people's hearts by detonating more nuclear devices than India had done some days earlier.

Finally, in another fit of impetuosity, he overreacted to COAS General Jehangir Karamat's suggestion about the formation of a National Security Council, something that had repeatedly been advocated by his own mentor, Zia. He, thus, sowed the seed of his ouster on October 12, 1999 when he tried to repeat the drama by sacking General Pervez Musharraf. Nawaz Sharif not only lost his office but also earned life imprisonment for plane hijacking and was lucky to get a reprieve and become a guest of the Saudi king. The army did not mind his return in 2008 and in a way helped him by withdrawing its support from his party's breakaway faction. He was allowed to win the 2013 election but he was on a short leash. When he continued trying to be a real prime minister, he was abandoned by his long-time patrons.

In his early life, Nawaz Sharif only spent the money that was made by his father, one of his uncles and his younger brother. He saw no harm in making money after gaining power, as it was being amassed by fellow entrepreneurs and others including his patrons in the establishment. Making money appeared to be good regardless of means but he made two critical mistakes. First, he forgot that a politician has no private life and he cannot conceal anything from the public. Secondly, he engaged lawyers to pull him out of trouble and not to prevent him from getting into it.

Nawaz Sharif was surprised when the petition for his trial on the basis of the Panama Leaks was admitted by the Supreme Court. He was perhaps banking on his support of the lawyers' movement, his decision to quit the coalition with PPP on its reluctance to resolve the case of judges sidelined by Musharraf and the contribution his 2009 Long March had made to their restoration. Once the first step to try him had been taken, the writing on the wall became clear.

During Nawaz Sharif's early days in power, the intelligentsia relished joking about his memory or attention span being short. When he was in exile, many wondered whether he was learning any lessons. He was. The first indication of this came when he joined hands with Benazir to sign the Charter of Democracy, a document of great value for the protection and promotion of democracy in Pakistan. Then his party joined the effort to draft and pass the 18th Constitutional Amendment - mainly to devolve power to the provinces but also to rid the Constitution of many anomalies inserted in it by military regimes and quasi-democratic governments.

Yet, he also displayed some impetuous traits of his past. A few months after quitting the ruling coalition in 2008, he abandoned a core principle of the Charter of Democracy by destabilising an elected government through his long march for the restoration of judges. Later, he would also court both the judiciary and the judges to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the PPP's administration.

In his third term as prime minister, however, Nawaz Sharif demonstrated considerable political acumen by giving the National Party, a predominantly Baloch political party, its first chance to make a government in Balochistan and by declining to be a party to obstructing Pakistan Tehreek-e- Insaf's assumption of power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. But his lack of interest in organising his own party as well as his failure to strengthen Parliament made him vulnerable.

As his fall became imminent in the summer of 2017, his camp portrayed him as a victim of his desire to have peaceful neighbourly relations with India. If this story is true, one wonders how history will judge him.

The writer is a senior journalist, peace activist and human rights advocate.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

This article was published in the Herald's February 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The year ends; winter begins, shadows cast themselves early, birds stop singing as dusk falls around us, ushering in a long night of respite from all that one has strived for, failure ringing the promising rim of possibility. I stare into the pale light of a fading day, wondering if the fact of winter and its barren evenings has anything to do with the crimes that scar this land, the jagged blade of violence puncturing the thin veil of propriety that covers us, draping us in the subterfuge of silence.

So what are these voices that break through this empty space where light fades and corners merge with walls, ceiling descending to the floor, crushing all that breathes between the Earth and the sky? Why do I hear one particular voice, a young girl's voice, persistent, urgent, desperate to be heard? Why does my mind's eye keep going back to the lanes and alleyways of Kasur where this voice was last heard, perhaps gasping for breath as she, too, was crushed under the weight of the psychosis that possessed the young man who had abducted, assaulted and then murdered her.

Zainab Amin Ansari was not yet seven at the time she was taken away, raped, brutalised, then strangled to death, her lifeless body laid out in a garbage dump not more than 400 metres from her home. The frenzy over her disappearance whipped up by the media was matched by the fury of the people of her hometown who gathered in the hundreds and ransacked government installations, expressing their anger and venting their frustration. Zainab was the ninth girl to go missing in the space of two years, from within a two-and-a-half kilometre radius. Nothing seemed to have been done about the other missing girls, all of them except one found dead after having been raped and brutalised.

Then, suddenly, the volcano of resentment blew up and the people of Kasur made sure that the outrage in their hearts became known to their fellow citizens across the country. Posters of young Zainab, a beautiful little girl with limpid, grey eyes, were immediately printed and put up across the city walls. Two bloody hand prints, one on each side of Zainab's photograph, signified the terrible crime that had taken her away from those who loved her, knew her, watched her come and go, living the life of a six-year-old with her future stretching before her like a rice field, lush and bountiful.

It is almost a year since that fateful evening when Zainab disappeared. I have thought often of those cold, blustery evenings last January when I sat with her family or spent time with District Police Officer Zahid Nawaz Marwat and his staff, unravelling hundreds of hours of footage where Zainab could be seen traversing the narrow lanes of her hometown, never to return to her home except as a mutilated, desecrated, lifeless, limp corpse.

Through the piecing together of her story, through the diligent efforts made by her family and law enforcement agencies, as well as through the technical skills of the scientists at the Punjab Forensic Science Agency who studied the chilling evidence of sexual assault and murder provided by a young medical officer at Kasur's public sector hospital, Zainab's abductor and killer was identified and arrested within three weeks of her disappearance. He was convicted on four counts of assault and murder on February 12, 2018, and hanged to death eight months later, after the President of Pakistan rejected his clemency plea. Zainab's father, Amin Ansari, requested that the perpetrator be hanged publicly, citing Section 22 of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 which empowers the government to hang a convict in public. This request was turned down by the Lahore High Court.

Amin Ansari, arriving at Kot Lakhpat jail early on the morning of October 17 last year, watched the execution of his daughter's killer and reported that he was satisfied that justice had been done, that this execution will deter others from committing such crimes. That is what has always been underscored when capital punishment is meted out to convicted criminals: that the state's decision to execute convicts leads to deterrence and a reduction in crime.

Perhaps Amin Ansari, still grieving from his young daughter's brutal death, did not know that the incidence of such crimes had actually risen since that dark January evening when Zainab had gone missing. According to the statistics provided by Sahil, a non-governmental organisation, more than 2,322 cases of child sexual abuse have been reported in the first six months of 2018, indicating a 32 per cent increase compared to the data for the same period of time in 2017. These cases increased from nine per day in 2017 to 12 per day between the start of January and the end of June in 2018. The data shows that, out of the total reported cases, 1,298 (56 per cent) of the victims were girls and 1,024 (44 per cent) were boys. The data also reveals that children in the age brackets of 6-10 and 11-15 have been most vulnerable to abuse. Zainab was just six; she was amongst the most vulnerable of all children who are often abused by those familiar to them or their families.

What has her assault and death meant for children and their families throughout Pakistan, in fact throughout South Asia, where such crimes occur with regularity but are not spoken about openly? Is it possible that the rise in the incidence of such crimes actually reflects the fact that the families of missing and abused children are now reporting such crimes instead of fearing the shame associated with the stigma of rape and sexual assault? Or is it possible that criminals have become emboldened after the fact that those who assaulted and killed other children after Zainab were never arrested or convicted? That such crimes are not necessarily recorded or investigated? That the promises made to improve policing, to increase the training of law enforcement agencies, to provide mechanisms to address such crimes immediately without criminal lapses and neglect, and to secure a safe future for our children have just fallen by the wayside, much as the footprints of Zainab and her murderer faded from the dust of Kasur's desolate alleys and narrow lanes?

I shall never forget that moment at the beginning of last year when I sat across the room with Zainab's father and interpreted his responses for a Washington Post correspondent. She had asked Amin Ansari if he found it ironic that his daughter had been abducted and murdered while he was performing Umrah in Makkah. I faltered to find the words to express this, fearing that I was treading on sacrosanct ground, asking for too much, too soon. But the correspondent repeated the question and I translated for her, hoping against hope that I was not invading Amin Ansari's privacy more than we already had, that I was not brutally tearing away the skin which contained his suppurating grief.

To my great surprise, his answer was lucid and concise. He spoke softly, without any hesitation, his grey eyes calm and piercing at the same time. He said that Zainab died so that justice could be sought for the eight other girls who had been taken from their families. This was made possible because he and his wife were in the midst of performing a pilgrimage; it was ordained that this would be so, that their little daughter would be taken away so that justice would be meted out to the perpetrator of these crimes.

I remember my breath sticking in my throat as I listened to Amin Ansari's response, amazed at his clarity, the conviction of his faith. I dare not judge the validity of his words, for I have not suffered this terrible ordeal of losing a child in the brutal manner of Zainab's death. I cannot judge his words, nor his thoughts, for all I have been left with is the voice inside my head, urging me not to forget, not to let this happen to another child, not to let Zainab's death be in vain.

It is late now. Dusk has turned to nightfall. Outside, the fog begins to descend, a veil enveloping the many dreams little Zainab may have dreamt. It was up to us to ensure that her life and that of other young children did not turn into a nightmare. It is up to us now to ensure that in her death we will honour her life, snuffed out too soon, like the tiny flame of a candle on a cold, blustery, winter's night.

The author is a famed writer, actor, film-maker and human rights activist.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

In 1991, as the armed insurgency in Kashmir was just beginning to ignite, Meema Akhtar married a shy young man, Ali Mohammad Shergojri, who lived with his brother Anwar. They were happy, although a few years in, they were still struggling to conceive. They went to see a doctor and took some test, and learnt that they were infertile.

“It broke my heart,” says Meema. “We consulted scores of doctors. Spent lakhs of rupees on medications and tests, but nothing happened.”

The couple also visited nearly every shrine in Kashmir, holding onto a belief that it would grant their wish to have a child. Meema couldn’t count how many votive knots she had tied on the window grills, wooden railings and entrance gates of different shrines.

Above all, they put their hopes in the Khiram dargah – thought to hold a holy relic belonging to the Prophet – which was just down the road in their village, Khiram, in Anantnag district in south Kashmir.

“Every year thousands of childless couples like us visited Khiram dargah,” says Meema. “And we lived just a few meters away from it. You can imagine how many times I went there.”

One day, eight years into their marriage, Ali’s brother Anwar came home from work carrying a newborn baby boy. Everyone in the family was astonished. Anwar handed the child to Meema. “He told me that my prayers were rewarded finally,” Meema said.

Anwar, who at that time delivered milk door-to-door, often had to visit the maternity hospital located in Sherbagh to deliver milk. One day, he learned of a couple who had delivered a baby there and were ready to give him away. Anwar legally adopted the child for his brother.

“Before taking the baby,” Ali said, “Anwar made one condition – that they would not reveal their identity to the family. They agreed. Anwar didn’t want the parents to approach us one day with a demand to return their son. He did all that for me.”

"Our joy knew no bounds,” Meema recalled. They named the child Asif.

Nearly 20 years later, on January 5, 2018, Asif came home from the public park just before dusk. He was 19, and had just finished class 12 – a pious young man who supported the Jamaat-e-Islami, and eagerly participated in Islamic seminars. That evening, he drank his tea, made wudu (ablutions) and went to pray in the nearby mosque.

“He didn’t return,” says Meema. “I never saw him again. I don’t even have his picture. He was so simple and pious he never liked anyone taking his picture.”

Ten months later, on October 24, Asif was killed in an armed encounter in Nowgam, Srinagar, along with the scholar-turned-militant Sabzar Ahmad Sofi.

In his 19 years as Meema and Ali’s son, Asif never learned that he had been adopted. The couple doted on him. “Asif was my world,” Meema said. “We still don’t know Asif’s real parents. And he died without knowing his own real story.”

On the January evening when he failed to return from prayers, Meema called him repeatedly, but his phone was switched off. Ali, now aged 52, went to look for him at the mosque. Asif wasn’t there. Ali knocked on the door of every neighbour, but nobody had seen him.

“We searched for him everywhere,” Ali said. “We contacted friends, relatives and neighbours but didn’t find him.”

They continued their search until news arrived that jolted them and changed their lives forever. Asif’s picture brandishing an AK-47 rifle was making the rounds on social media. He had joined Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, where his code name was Khubaib.

“Like every Kashmiri youth, my son was pro-freedom,” Ali said. “But I never thought Asif could join the militancy himself.”

“Asif was a pampered child. Despite fighting poverty, Asif’s parents always fulfilled his every demand. They wanted to see him highly educated,” said Uzma Akhtar, Asif’s aunt. “But since 2016, when the situation turned worse in Kashmir, Asif’s mindset also changed. Every killing in Kashmir caused him great pain. He chose his path.”

The family says it was his own decision to join the militancy. “Asif’s decision to join militancy utterly appalled us,” said Ali, controlling his tears. “We tried everything to bring him back. He was our lone son and last hope.”

“He even didn’t come to meet me once,” said Meema. “He knew that he would not bear my emotion.”

Officials confirmed that Asif joined the militant ranks in January 2018. Police records say he was actively involved in attacks on security forces and civilians in the area. An FIR No. 15/2018 under section 451, 392, 506 RPC and 7/25 Arms Act was registered against him at P.S. Srigufwara in Anantnag.

And after 18 years, Ali and Meema became childless again.

The day after the encounter, Ali went to Srinagar to receive Asif’s body. Thousands of people from nearby villages took part in his funeral procession.

He is buried just outside their home. Ali and Meema, who used to regularly visit the Khiram dargah hoping for a child, now visit their son’s grave.

“How should I say what we did for Asif? How we cherished him?” Meema said. “Every night he wouldn’t sleep until he rested his head on his father’s arm and I ruffled his hair. Asif was everything for us.”

“It is my appeal to take some concrete steps to solve Kashmir issue,” said Ali. “Otherwise, this war will leave every parent childless.”

“I don’t care if this world is turned upside down,” said Meema. “My world is already destroyed.”

This article was originally published in The Wire.

The date eludes me even when the day haunts still. It was early 2014, perhaps January. A friend displaced from North Waziristan took me to the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar. There was a patient in the children's ward we had come to see - a boy no more than seven years old, injured in a bombing campaign in his village. Perhaps injured is not the right word. He was mutilated. The boy lay unconscious, his fair face pale under the fluorescent light. Wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, his body was a grotesque distortion of one. Cut up by shrapnel below the waist, he had no legs. Blood oozed from a cotton-plugged hole where his genitals should have been.

That child, collateral damage of war, died later that week. When a terrorist attack on the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar happened in December the same year, I kept thinking: a year that had started with the sight of a dying child ended with scores of dead children. A year bookended by blood - as innocent as that of children.

Every December since then, I drive through roads with posters of dead children mounted on electricity poles as part of the anniversary of what we have come to call the day of the martyrs, Youm-e-Shuhada. I recoil at the outrage that the children killed due to the policies of the state should now be its martyrs - the children the state failed to protect.

I look for the face of that child from North Waziristan. I understand he was not from APS, and did not die there. But I also understand that his birthplace in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), the militancy, and subsequent military operations there had something to do with the carnage at the APS.

The hapless parents of those killed at the school relive the agony of the attack every day as they commute roads flanked by the posters of their loved ones but, at least, they have the consolation that their children are martyrs. They are counted when it comes to sacrifices rendered in our ongoing war against terrorism. It does not matter if the sacrifice was forced on them.

Is the boy from North Waziristan counted? Are others counted who, like him in erstwhile Fata, died in their hundreds - including those associated with peace committees that took up arms against militants? We have a figure for the whole of Pakistan for deaths related to the war against terrorism. There is no separate figure for the borderlands where the war continues to play out, where death comes and goes at will and life has no value.

That boy from North Waziristan lived short and died brutally in the necro-space called the tribal areas. His sacrifice will not be remembered, not even acknowledged.

From here will rise 26-year-old Manzoor Pashteen, and not a moment too soon. His generation grew up in the midst of war; he has been a victim of it. His Mehsud tribe was the first in Fata to be uprooted from its home in South Waziristan as Pakistan started military operations in Taliban-infested regions along the border with Afghanistan in the mid-2000s. He would found the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) in early 2018 while leading a sit-in protest in Islamabad over the death of a Mehsud tribesman, Naqeebullah, in an allegedly fake encounter with the police in Karachi. Long before that, however, terrorised people from Swat, the seven agencies in Fata and elsewhere in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa whispered stories about the injudicious use of force post-September 11 in the name of security. There was no one to go to as media regurgitated one-sided, state-sponsored stories, putting the cries and anguish of people from the region on mute - as it does even now in the case of PTM.

The Pashtun leadership that spoke for people and peace - tribal chieftains or maliks, jirgas, nationalist politicians - were bombed and beheaded by the Taliban in the hundreds. Many others were silenced by mortal threats.

Then came 2014 and the military launched operation Zarb-e-Azb to weed out militancy from the tribal lands. This immediately resulted in endless queues of the broken and the displaced - a heart-rending sight mirroring the misery of Swat in 2009 - stretching all the way from Mir Ali in North Waziristan to the town of Bannu. In scorching heat, they would arrive at an under-construction refugee camp at Bakkakhel in the sun-baked, thirsty badlands of Frontier Region Bannu - their status exalted from Internally Displaced Persons to Temporarily Displaced Persons (TDPs).

When those displaced people stood in lines to receive handouts, the spine was ripped out of a tough and proud people. That started much earlier though - when Parachinar in Kurram agency was cut off for four years from the rest of the country without food and medicine; when inhabitants from Mohmand and Bajaur were displaced to Jalozai and Kacha Garhi neighbourhoods that served as a home to Afghan refugees before them. It was not the indignities that accompanied displacement that crushed the displaced. Nor the atrocities that the militants inflicted and the military operations compounded. It was a systematic economic strangulation of a people that really broke their back.

When they returned home, the TDPs found their markets, shops, farms, cattle and homes destroyed. The anger that they felt was sterile, but seething everywhere you looked.

Pashteen took that anger and turned it into a taunt. It is the worst thing you can do to someone in the honour-bound tribal milieu.

In his village Jhandola in South Waziristan, Abdullah Bhittani knew an old khasadar - a guard - from the tribal border force of Levies who was close to a local malik. The khasadar sang praises of the chieftain wherever he went. Bhittani was among the village children who teased him with the taunt "jhanjanay" - a cowbell. To the children, the khasadar was a bell around the malik's neck, tinkling with every move he made. "Jhanjanay, jhanjanay," went the kids, every time they saw the Levies man. It drove him mad. He waved his gun at them in anger. The children scurried to safety, only to come back again, jeering.

"[Our demands] are like that taunt," says Bhittani, who is also a member of PTM's core committee.

To quieten them down, many PTM activists have been jailed. Some others have been put on no-fly lists. Pashteen himself has been stopped from travelling to many parts of the country. This could be because the man and his followers raise the taunt in the tones of another movement that once symbolised Pashtun nationalism - Khudai Khidmatgars of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan who is known as Bacha Khan, due to the respect accorded to him, and as Frontier Gandhi for his non-violent activism.

Like Bacha Khan, Pashteen bears no guns but speaks his generation's mind matured in a violent place with no institutions. In him, an oppressed people have found a voice and a common rallying point. Most significantly, in him you see someone who has broken a silence imposed upon minds and imaginations of those who have suffered long and hard just because they have been caught in the middle of a war that was not theirs to start with.

All this with just a taunt. As Abdullah Bhittani likes to say: "With 3G, not G3" - referring to PTM's heavy reliance on the Internet and social media and its avoidance of guns and arms. Aren't its adherents the same passionate, hot-blooded tribal Pashtun youth who are known to be gun-happy? Much we knew about Fata - its stereotypical image as a land of perpetually querulous, even murderous, people - did not reflect in Pashteen and his PTM. These stereotypes would still result in displaced Pashtuns being turned away from cities in Sindh and Punjab by government orders like they were pariahs, to be kept at bay.

Pashteen still cannot freely travel across Pakistan precisely because his presence there would blow apart other myths that contribute to a benign, motherly image of the state she wants us citizens to embrace. He may ask: why is the mother quiet about her missing children?

Says Bhittani: "The state calls us agents of Afghanistan and India. People call us agents of the army. But we are agents of our community and we take pride in that. We don't dub the darkness light."

If Fata epitomises what is wrong with Pakistan, Pashteen personifies all that is broken about Fata. Militarism, radicalisation, militancy, oppression, lack of institutions. That he came out of the Pandora's Box of troubles in the region so fully formed is something of a miracle. And as he finds his place within the historical narrative of Khudai Khidmatgars, it is history - and the expectations it brings with it - that he will have to contend with before anyone decides if he is an agent or an angel.

When his movement graduated from the Mehsud Tahafuz Movement to the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, he grew bigger than a tribe to represent an entire ethnic community. One expects Fata's troubles - such as its merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the rehabilitation of people displaced from here, the restructuring and reconstruction of its towns and bazaars, the building of its political and administrative institutions - will take up Pashteen's attention in the short and medium term even though there is no PTM plan or manifesto on any of these subjects.

Yet, it is the bigger questions he would need to address. Given the regional dynamics and the uncertain times we live in, there can be no peace in Pakistan's border regions without a peaceful Afghanistan. Without turning a war economy into one based on human security, without replacing necropolitics propelled by security to deliberative democracy, can any protection be guaranteed to anyone in Pakistan, leave alone Pashtuns along the border regions. Seen within this context, does Pashteen stand for division or cohesion of the historical Pashtun nationalist narrative? And if he stands for a collective Pashtun identity, is he prepared to transcend tribal, regional and even national affiliations to present a united front?

A movement to end history is having a sway over the Pakistan of today. Ideologies are dying and ideologues are in disarray amidst a great wave of political engineering where democracy, as we know it, is being asphyxiated. Old orders built on historical struggles for rights and representation are being divided and undermined to create new historical entities where fresh faces without a sense of history can lip-synch to a new loud tone of jazba-junoon - that is, a surfeit of a passionate intensity that cohabits with naivety.

Within this tumult, which side does PTM stand? As a people's movement, it may not have political aspirations but its mission cannot be divested from politics. As the tribal districts emerge from decades of oppression made possible by the colonial-era rules for collective responsibilities and collective punishments, would PTM, with a large-scale following in Fata, present a united political vision for Pashtuns in Pakistan? Or would Pashteen further reinforce divisions within Pashtuns along the same old regional lines of Fata, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan? Divisions that have contributed to the present plight of Pashtuns to begin with and divisions that Pashteen decries and seeks to redress.

The APS children and the child who died in the Peshawar hospital were caught between warriors with a long history. First it was the Afghan mujahideen; later their offspring, the Taliban. All Pashtuns. The Taliban that emerged in Pakistan were Pashtuns. Those we brought and later bombed in tribal areas were Pashtuns. Those who kill and rob Pashtun children of a future are Pashtuns. Pashtuns in schools and colleges are threatened and slayed by Pashtuns who attack and burn schools. Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? At whose behest does the perpetrator take up arms against his own kind? How do we separate the two? How do we unite the two?

Unless it provides an answer that unites Pashtuns around a common understanding of this conundrum, PTM's slogan of Pashtun Tahafuz - or the defence of Pashtuns - will remain a tricky one: an isolationist ideal that is neither practicable nor desireable to achieve.

Whether Pashteen is an agent or an angel, the answer hinges on whether he unites or divides his own people. For what divides Pashtuns only strengthens their oppressors.

The writer is a Peshawar-based freelance writer.

This article was published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.