Srinagar: One early morning earlier this month, Muneeb ul Islam, a young photojournalist based in South Kashmir who works for a few local dailies, left his home as usual to cover protests in Simthan, Bijbehara, in the Anantnag district. When he reached closer to the street where people were protesting, he was confronted by angry CRPF troops who stopped him from taking pictures of the protest.

“The claim that photojournalists provoke protesters to pelt stones and shout slogans is simply baseless.”

“They also slapped me and beat me up,” says Islam, “and then they used me as a shield against stone pelting protestors.” Some of the protestors, however, recognised him in time and didn’t pelt stones in his direction. He was finally let off by the troops.

“Both sides suspect us,” Islam says about the difficulties of covering the latest protests that erupted after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8. “The forces accuse us of instigating protestors, while the protestors suspect us of being government agents,” he says, adding that it gets difficult to work in this hostile environment.

Taking note of the above incident – and a few other incidents involving violence inflicted on journalists covering the recent protests in Kashmir – Benjamin Ismaïl, the head of Asia desk at Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF or Reporters Without Borders) called for “investigations to identify members of the security forces responsible for abuses against journalists and all other violations of freedom of information.”

“We have seen many reports, often accompanied by photos, offering a shocking insight into the aggressive actions and behaviour of the security forces towards the general public and journalists in particular, who are regarded as undesired witnesses,” Ismail said in an official RSF statement released on August 11. “We call on the authorities to carry out investigations to identify those responsible for targeted violence against journalists who risk their lives to inform their fellow citizens.”

In the latest incident, on Tuesday Greater Kashmir reported that the residence of senior photojournalist Danish Ismail was damaged by government forces in Srinagar, which triggered panic among those at his house. “I wasn’t home, when forces attacked my house in Batamaloo area. Locals told me that they threw stones at my house. It was a joint team of police and paramilitary CRPF,” Ismail told Greater Kashmir. “My wife, who isn’t keeping well, fainted.”

“The forces accuse us of instigating protestors, while the protestors suspect us of being government agents.”

In another incident on August 29, photojournalists had gone to cover protests in the Batamaloo area of Srinagar when they were stopped from taking pictures by the policemen stationed in the area. “SHO of the Batamaloo police station stopped us from performing our professional duties,” said Mubashir Khan, staff photographer of Greater Kashmir. “He abused media persons present there and forced photojournalists to go back without taking pictures.”

The following day, policemen at Batamaloo reportedly pelted a stone at photojournalists who were trying to cover the protests in the area. “The policemen there threatened us with dire consequences if we covered the ongoing protests in the area,” said Aman Farooq, a Srinagar based photojournalist who had gone to cover the protests along with his colleagues.

Difficult work

“Whenever there is a volatile situation, people run away from it, but it is the photojournalists who run towards it to cover it for the world,” says Javed Dar, an award-winning photojournalist who has extensively covered the conflict in Kashmir for more than a decade. “Photojournalists working here are always at risk of being hit by bullets or teargas shells because they have to enter the heart of clashes between protestors and the forces to get a better angle for taking pictures.”

Dar has been taking pictures of Kashmir for the Chinese new agency Xinhua for the past ten years. He says he can’t stop himself from covering the recent protests and the blinding of youth and children by pellets, even when he’s not supposed to cover all the events for the agency. “But it’s more of a responsibility since we bring out pictures which can’t lie,” he says. “No one can manipulate a photograph and be biased, and you can’t accuse us of lying as a photographer,” he adds. “Our photos speak for themselves, they clearly tell who is suffering and who is responsible for that suffering.”

Dar says there have been many instances in the last month when photojournalists in Kashmir were stopped from covering the protests. They were also often unable to reach their offices in time to file the day’s photos since their curfew passes were rejected several times by the police and CRPF troops manning the streets. “We also have to take risks of going past barricades put up by the troops and protestors from where other people would normally come back,” says Dar, adding that what happens there depends on the mood of troops and police near the barricades. “Many times we are not allowed to go past the road barricades and have to turn back disappointed, without getting the pictures from the spot.”

The recent ban on internet and mobile network has also affected the work of photojournalists in Kashmir. “Sometimes we came back with pictures after a lot of struggle and risks, but couldn’t access internet and send the photos outside due to the ban,” says Dar. “That is very disappointing.”

Photojournalists have also been at the receiving end of public anger in Kashmir since last month. “Since we are first to reach the spot when someone is killed, people are naturally angry at that time and they think of us as some government agency photographers,” he says. “Till they calm down, we are at risk and sometimes the first victims of public anger.”

Last month, while people were bringing out the dead body of a boy killed in Bijbehara from SMHS hospital in Srinagar, AP photojournalist Dar Yasin rushed to the hospital where he was beaten up along with another colleague by the angry people who had assembled outside the hospital. “By the time he was rescued from the crowd and people came to know that he was a photojournalist, his camera was broken in the scuffle,” says Dar, adding that the camera and lens damaged was worth Rs 3 lakh. “In these times, when there is a shutdown and curfew, we can’t get these costly equipments and thus we have to be very careful of our cameras and lenses while covering the protests.”

In that brief period, before the protestors understand their work, Dar says the photojournalists with their costly cameras and equipments are at risk. “There have been instances when photojournalists have been beaten by people and by the time people know what we are doing, our cameras and other equipment worth lakhs are sometimes damaged,” he says, adding that people also understand and cooperate when they understand their work.

"Our photos speak for themselves, they clearly tell who is suffering and who is responsible for that suffering."

These days, Dar says, they are careful of being seen with their cameras in front of angry people and attendants of those injured who are brought to the hospitals. “Whenever we go to the hospital to take pictures of the injured youth, we take our cameras in our bag and talk to the people there first, check their mood and make them understand that we are here to do our job before we take out our cameras to click photos of the injured,” he says. “That way we gain their trust first. We have to tread carefully in these circumstances.”

Since last month, the frequent mobile ban also made it difficult for Dar to reach out to his family in South Kashmir for several days. “I am always worried about my family and my son back home as my village is the epicentre of protests in the south,” he says, adding that there were days when he was unable to get in touch with his family due to the mobile network ban. On some days, he was able to talk to his family through a friend who had walked to his home with his phone that was somehow working. “It was disturbing and difficult to focus on work in Srinagar while being unaware of the welfare of my family back home.”

“We only show what we click without manipulating the pictures,” says Faisal Khan, a young photojournalist who works for Turkish Anadolu Agency and also for a local Srinagar daily. “The claim that photojournalists provoke protesters to pelt stones and shout slogans is simply baseless,” he says.

Faisal says the “biased reporting” of a section New Delhi-based news channels on the recent protests has made the job of photojournalists working in Kashmir more difficult. “There is public anger against the biased reporting of some Delhi-based news channels, including some Hindi news channels, which has made it difficult for us to work properly as people on the ground don’t differentiate between journalists and can’t tell who works for whom,” he says. “Till these channels keep reporting on Kashmir in a manner which doesn’t reflect the ground realities, we will keep facing the public anger.”

This article was originally published in The Wire, India

Majid Maqbool is a journalist and writes for The Wire, India.

For at least two years now, we have seen a simmering conflict between the Sindh government and the Sindh Rangers about the legal extent of the latter’s powers and authority. Despite much debate and discussion on the subject, some very basic questions remain unanswered.

Can the rangers operate in Karachi without the provincial government’s sanction? What about the other areas of Sindh? Who exercises legal control over them? Is it the army, the federal government or the provincial government? What kind of law enforcement functions can they perform?

Our Constitution defines two separate types of armed forces: the regular armed forces (the army, the navy and the air force) and what are known as the ‘civil armed forces’. The rangers are an example of the latter. They do not fall within the line of command of the regular armed forces.

Also read: Operation overkill — How not to improve law and order in Karachi

The rangers were initially constituted through a West Pakistan Ordinance in 1959 as a force to patrol the Sindh and Punjab borders with India and prevent the smuggling of people and goods across the border. While operational control over the rangers was originally vested in the provincial governments, eventually – through an amendment initiated by Bhutto in 1972 – operational control was transferred to the federal government. Rangers’ officers and men may be directly recruited or taken on deputation from the regular armed forces or any other government department. Technically, therefore, the Pakistan Rangers are a federal agency no different from other federal agencies such as the Federal Investigation Agency or the National Accountability Bureau. Practically, however, since the top command of the rangers usually comprises regular army officers on deputation, they are more inclined to take their orders from the army chief rather than directly from the federal government.

Their current presence in Karachi, however, is pursuant to section four of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), 1997. This allows the federal government to order the presence of civil armed forces in any area for the prevention and punishment of terrorist acts and scheduled offences under the ATA. The federal government can make this order on its own accord or on the request of a provincial government.

The present attitude of the rangers and the federal government seems to be that they do not need the Sindh government and can carry on operations without the latter’s consent. That perception is incorrect.

So far, the rangers’ presence in Karachi has been secured by the Sindh government making periodic requests to the federal government, which have been duly granted by the latter. According to the Sindh government, however, since they have only requested for such presence in Karachi, the rangers cannot operate beyond the port city. This assertion appears to be correct. It would, nevertheless, be open for the federal government to directly order the rangers to operate in Karachi (or indeed in any other part of Sindh).

However, if the federal government exercises the direct option under section four of the ATA, it will run into another obstacle. Under the act, the rangers are authorised to use force to prevent terrorist acts, make arrests and exercise search and seizure powers. However, the investigation of cases and submission of challan to the anti-terrorism court is to be led by the police. Without this, the rangers would eventually have to release all the persons it arrested. Needless to say, the police force falls within the control of the Sindh government. As such, it is not possible to enforce the ATA without the consent of the Sindh government.

Also read: Lyari live — Macabre sights and sounds of a benighted neighbourhood

Unfortunately, the present attitude of the rangers and the federal government seems to be that they do not need the Sindh government and can carry on operations without the latter’s consent. That perception is incorrect. There is an urgent need for the rangers to be more respectful of the legal regime under which it operates and resist the tendency to carry out operations patently beyond its legal mandate. At the same time, the Sindh government needs to be more responsible about the continuing need for the rangers to back up its law enforcement functions – especially in Karachi – and not use the extension of the rangers’ mandate as a bargaining tool. The people of Sindh have a right to demand better sense and coordination from all of them.

This was originally published in the Herald's August 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a lawyer based in Karachi.

I was in Kabul when the tanks first rolled out on its rutted streets, a dead body in their path marking the demise of a fragile state. I was in Jamrud when they first came, carrying their wealth in woven woolen khurjeen balanced across pack animals, babies straddled across donkeys, women veiled, children bedraggled and barefoot. We – the citizens of a state which collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to destroy their country – enjoyed the ethnic jewelry and antique fabrics which were sold across the country in expensive boutiques — the last bits of an old life sold off to finance another life in the misery of refugee camps huddled amidst dust and despair.

Also read: Closing the gates of Lahore — Pakhtuns and Afghans allege discrimination as the government cracks down on terrorism

Today, I am in Lahore as I hear news of the modus operandi of a state which no longer has use for three million Afghans, most of whom had no choice when their homes were bombed by foreign forces in wars that were not of their own making. I hear about the coercion being exercised by officials tasked with the largely forcible repatriation of these men, women and children — the majority of whom have been born here over the past almost four decades. I learn of the detention of the elders of families; I hear the trucks pulling up outside their homes built in shanty towns from the savings of years of labour; I see the trucks being loaded up and then driven to where the elder has been detained. Once the detainee has been released and seated amongst the family and their meager belongings, the truck is instructed to drive them to the border, a border created by another foreign force which divided then ruled, and continues to do so with its insidious agendas being unfolded in Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

Also read: Who feels safe in Pakistan? By Zarrar Khuhro

Why do I care about this midnight movement of people I may have never met, never chanced to know? Why is it important that the political, humanitarian, and legal aspects of this new executive order be deconstructed? Because the involvement of Pakistan’s agencies in the 10-year war to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan cannot be denied. Because the aggrandisement of Pakistan’s generals through the sharing of billions of US dollars cannot be denied. Because of the movement of thousands of tons of armaments through the National Logistics Cell cannot be denied. Because the victims of the blast that destroyed evidence of the sale of missiles from Ojhri Camp cannot be denied. Because the human tragedy of those who own little and are forced to give up their homes, their fields, their livestock because of global agendas, cannot be denied. Because the loss of dignity when forced to live in a refugee camp, living on handouts cannot be denied. Because the sheer strength of will it takes to rebuild lives in a strange land cannot be denied. Because once the state grants citizenship to those born here – a birthright enshrined in the Naturalization Act of 1926 – that citizenship cannot be denied.

Why don’t you care?

The writer is a human rights activist and former United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Population Fund.

Since independence, Pakistan has been an externally dependent economy, polity and security entity. It has sought “external equalisers” vis-à-vis its much larger and unfriendly neighbour: India. These have ranged from military alliances with the United States and special relations with China to Salafi Islamisation à la Saudi Arabia and “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. Even our nuclear deterrent has had its external dimension since Pakistan does not have an indigenous and diversified enough manufacturing base to develop a sustainable full-cycle capability. The Abdul Qadeer Khan saga testifies to this. Accordingly, external policy has weighed large in the national policy framework.

Among the prime ministers of Pakistan, the only true “foreign policy prime minister” has been Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The only other candidate was Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy. Amongst the military dictators, only Ayub Khan (for a while) achieved a certain external stature largely because he gave considerable policy space to his senior bureaucrats, including diplomats. The other military rulers privileged fellow generals as their closest foreign policy advisers, simplified the complexities of foreign policy challenges to the point of absurdity, and followed institutional agendas that inflicted untold losses upon the country. These include a lasting imbalance in civil-military relations which guarantees short-sighted and unsuccessful external policies to this day.

Also read: Fighting the Taliban: The US and Pakistan's failed strategies

As a result, Pakistan remains a deeply challenged state. It has unsatisfactory relations with three of its four immediate neighbours. It has a strategically loser relationship with the US. It is in danger of becoming a strategic burden for China. It is under international pressure on a range of issues including its India and Afghanistan policies, its policies with regard to terrorism and extremism, nuclear and human rights issues. Its internal governance and degree of corruption in its leadership are seen as criminally irresponsible by both external observers and the people of Pakistan. In these circumstances, the absence of a full-time political heavy weight as a foreign minister may be regarded as the least of the challenges facing Pakistan today. Nevertheless, it involves a gratuitous cost.

Our current foreign policy adviser, Sartaj Aziz, is said to be a “de facto” foreign minister. But without the automatic protocol attached to a foreign minister, his status and reception abroad have to be negotiated. Moreover, neither he nor the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Tariq Fatemi are members of parliament which takes away from their political weight at home. The prime minister – who is absolutely no “foreign policy” prime minister – holds the portfolio. No credible explanation is offered. It is merely reported that he “is in no mood” to make anyone a full time foreign minister!

Incidentally, Aziz was twice promised the presidency and twice let down. He has been divested of his responsibilities for even the external aspects of national security which has further undermined his authority and effectiveness. That he is an internationally respected eminence seems to have counted against him. His predicament is just one reflection of our general state of affairs.

Also read: Offshore accounts aren't as bad as we think

The above indicates a general lack of purpose among the political leadership which has willingly or reluctantly handed over substantive direction of foreign policy to the military and intelligence establishments. Their performance is a matter of historical record and can today be gauged by the national and international media headlines every day. They are simply not designed and therefore not qualified for the job. India-centricism has become a substitute for the arduous and complex job of formulating and implementing a foreign policy appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century - in which the price of failure can be existential. The Chinese are expected to bail us out forever even though as an emerging global power it has its own global interests and priorities that will not always comport with the institutional priorities of the security establishment of Pakistan. A day could arrive when China may not feel compelled to keep India out of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group or even a reformed United Nations Security Council. Do we have any effective policy planning to deal with or avert the costs of such a scenario? Can the China Pakistan Economic Corridor be a magic wand for us? Can a soft state ever develop soft power? To all three questions the answer is a flat “no!”

This was originally published in the Herald's July 2016 issue under the headline "It's foreign to us". To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.

Why would any of the few hundred rich Pakistanis named in the list of the so-called Panama Papers need to hide their honest and legitimately earned income and wealth in a tax-free, offshore haven, when they could just as easily have kept their money at home? The only explanation to this quandary must be that all those Pakistanis named and as yet to be named in the Panama Papers are actually all well meaning, honest citizens who have made the most of a legal tax loophole to set up offshore companies. Since it is not illegal to do so, they may not have broken the law.

All accusations of them being “corrupt” are just that — mere accusations, with as yet no proof. In fact, had they kept all their hard-earned and legitimate income and wealth in Pakistan, they may have ended up in the long list of the millions of Pakistanis – rich and not so rich – who end up avoiding paying any taxes, hurting their conscience and, perhaps, also being accused of being corrupt.

Few Pakistanis pay any income tax voluntarily. At best, the state uses its authority and means to withhold presumptive income taxes on items which they consume, and which individuals are supposed to adjust and claim, when (and if) they file their income tax returns. Pakistan is a better tax haven than most countries, with less than one per cent of the population filing their income tax returns. Estimates suggest that only 20 per cent of Pakistan’s taxable income is actually collected by the government, implying that four times as much is evaded.

Also read: Satire: Diary of Hussain Nawaz

According to various calculations, around six million to eight million Pakistanis earn income which ought to be taxed, but only a million actually filed their returns. As an example, data shows that there are 650,000 doctors in Pakistan and 450,000 lawyers. Yet, only 14,721 doctors (just two per cent) and 5,761 lawyers (a mere one per cent) filed their income tax returns in 2015-2016. It is not just such essential professional services which manage to avoid paying taxes, but out of the 65,000 companies registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, less than 40 per cent filed a tax return. And not all of them ended up paying taxes, since many did not even declare a profit.

Only 14,721 doctors (just two per cent) and 5,761 lawyers (a mere one per cent) filed their income tax returns in 2015-2016

But that is not it. Tax avoidance is clearly illegal, is a crime, and comes under the broad rubric of corruption. However, the government has many legal and legitimate means to favour individuals and special interest groups without ever being accused of corruption, through numerous concessions and exemptions granted under different discretionary statutory rules and orders.

Just a single example will explain the importance of tax exemptions. During 2008-2012, exemptions worth 650 billion rupees were granted to various individuals, sectors and interests. In the same period, the government borrowed around 500 billion rupees from the International Monetary Fund, because it had a revenue shortfall. Moreover, from 2003 till 2007, the Pervez Musharraf–Shaukat Aziz government granted exemption to capital gains from shares traded in the stock market, when the Karachi Stock Exchange Index was booming, causing a loss of an estimated one trillion rupees! Mind you, these legal exemptions do not constitute any definition of ‘corruption’.

These numbers are just a miniscule indication of the extent of tax avoidance in Pakistan. Almost all Pakistanis end up paying some taxes whenever they send an SMS or make a phone call or use electricity (if it is available), but these forms of extraction by the state agencies are forced, not voluntarily delivered, by law-abiding citizens. These taxes are regressive, discriminatory and work against the interests and the income-earning abilities of the poor.

The Panama Papers’ squabble has impaired and postponed the need to have a proper debate about taxation within Pakistan, by focusing on the use of legitimate offshore accounts and companies, instead. By politicising issues of alleged corruption around the few hundred named in the Panama Papers, all those who have promoted public debate about an utterly irrelevant issue, have successfully shifted the discourse about substantive issues, in which tax evasion and corruption are of central importance.

This was originally published in the Herald's June 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a political economist, and teaches at Columbia University in New York.

On May 23, 2016, President Barack Obama announced that the head of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Mansour, it is believed, resisted negotiations with the Afghan government and its allies. The strike was notable for several reasons. First, the United States military executed it and not the CIA. Second, it was the first drone strike outside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and their peripheries in Pakistan. Third, it likely did not involve coordination with the ISI or the Pakistan Army. The move signaled ever-growing American frustration with Pakistan’s tactics of extracting rents from Washington while proving itself unable or unwilling to bring the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table.

From the perspectives of the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, there is no incentive to do so for several reasons. First, why negotiate when the Taliban are winning with Pakistan’s generous and unstinting support? Second, the international community will eventually leave Afghanistan and the Taliban can once again ensconce themselves to ostensibly do Pakistan’s bidding. Third, even if the Taliban cannot regain their past glory, they and their allies, such as the Haqqani network, will at least keep the Indians at bay.

Both Pakistan and the United States employ failed strategies. For the American part, it launched a war it could never win because it was dependent upon the one country that opposed its key interests — Pakistan. The United States continues fighting the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan, when its key vulnerabilities are in Pakistan. At the same time, it built an unwieldy and unsustainable state in Afghanistan whose leadership continued to be corrupt and unresponsive to Afghan needs. Worse, it incentivised Pakistan to continue aiding and abetting America’s enemies through the Coalition Support Funds. If Pakistan had actually delivered, the cash flows would stop.

Also read: Pakistan, Afghanistan and India's triangle of terrorism

In the absence of a strategy, the United States opts to take out the Taliban leadership in hopes of bringing the rest of them to the table. Yet there is no evidence that such leadership decapitation degrades the organisation or makes it more amenable to negotiation. In fact, it likely encourages greater infighting and defections to the Islamic State. As with previous drone strikes, the ISI will coordinate the ensuing leadership selection process and little else will change for the positive.

Pakistan’s men in uniform may believe they have won. However, Pakistan stands to lose more than it gains for several reasons. During their heyday, the Taliban never delivered a resolution on the Durand Line, encouraged Pakhtun nationalism, harboured Pakistani criminals, and brought additional international opprobrium to Pakistan for its support of Islamist militias in Afghanistan and India. There would be no Pakistani Taliban had Pakistan not nurtured the Afghan Taliban and the numerous other Deobandi militant groups that comprise the backbone of the Pakistani Taliban.

The Afghans, too, have come to loathe Pakistan for its incessant interference that dates back to the earliest years of the Pakistani state. Pakistan’s stale and murderous policies have delivered even Ashraf Ghani, who extended an olive branch to Rawalpindi, over to the Indians.

The Americans will leave Afghanistan. More Afghans will die. But over the long term, Pakistanis will continue paying the price for the follies of their men in uniform who think strategic depth in Afghanistan is more important than security at home.

This was originally published in Herald's June 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is an associate professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program

Start-ups are ventures with unconventional business models, often characterised by their ability to grow faster than bacteria. Like Patari, they start small and dream big, with a workforce not bigger than 12 people and often relying on social media and the internet as marketing tools. Whether they make it big in the long run is a question worth pondering over. As far as Patari is concerned, it seems to have successfully established its presence; within just five days after its beta launch, it had already processed 600 requests for membership with thousands of applicants in queue.

But Patari’s journey has not been entirely smooth. Soon after its launch, EMI Pakistan, a music recording and distribution company, accused Patari of breaching copyright by uploading EMI-recorded songs without permission. If the two sides do not reach an agreement over the accusations, Patari will not be able to feature almost 70 per cent of Pakistan’s total music repertoire which EMI owns under contracts with hundreds of Pakistani artists, including legends such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Noor Jehan, Mehdi Hassan, Farida Khanum and Alamgir.

Tech start-ups elsewhere too have faced similar problems. In the first half of 2015, an American music streaming service, Grooveshark, was forced to shut down. A tech start-up created by three undergraduate students at the University of Florida in 2006, Grooveshark lost a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by major recording companies and could not recover from the financial shock. Khalid Bajwa, chief executive officer of Patari, says facing the copyright infringement accusations has been a good learning experience for his start-up due to what he describes as a “grind… one that took a lot of time and persuasion” to resolve the problem with EMI. Patari, according to him, has since made significant progress in ensuring that it does not attract similar accusations in the future.

Other start-ups making waves in Pakistan are delivery services, Delivery ChaCha perhaps being the most visible among them. It promises to “deliver anything”— from groceries to movie tickets and from meals and birthday cakes to pets. To get an idea of what bumps Delivery ChaCha has faced in a market flooded with delivery boys and riders, the Herald spoke to its chief executive officer Nashit Iqbal.

According to Iqbal, the recruitment of riders was the first and one of the most significant challenges. “The riders are required to be completely reliable, honest and especially polite with customers.” This, of course, is understandable. Karachi, where Delivery ChaCha operates, is riddled with crime. A business venture aiming at delivering goods at the doorsteps of its customers will only risk losing business and credibility if its staff are found to be involved in criminal activities. Iqbal is also keen on reducing the time between the placing of an order and the delivery which means that his employees need to be efficient in navigating the city, its badly laid out streets and its chaotic traffic.

Support for businesses such as Patari and Delivery ChaCha exists in the form of incubators — the first pit stop in the life cycle of a start-up. Incubators provide start-ups with an environment that helps them during their nascence. Ahmed Khan, entrepreneur-in-residence at The Foundation, an incubator run by the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, explains that incubators provide training to those looking to initiate start-ups in order to equip them with the basics: knowledge about administration, team management, finances and marketing. “They are provided an office space which encourages interaction and innovation. They are provided access to mentors in specific domains as well as in general business disciplines,” he explains. The incubators, he adds, also help start-ups find potential investors.

The Foundation is not the only start-up incubator in Pakistan. Patari, for instance, was incubated at Plan 9, which is run by the Punjab government in Lahore. Patari’s Bajwa describes Plan 9 as a cradle. “In addition to providing a monthly stipend and offering an awesome workplace, the incubator assisted us tremendously in sorting out operational and legal issues besides providing us a network of support,” he says.

Start-ups, however, generally do not get a warm response from local investors. “Local investors are very traditional and are wary of technology,” says Khan of The Foundation. The start-ups also operate – or rather, attempt to operate – within Pakistan’s volatile business landscape. “They are small and can pivot easily if the wind changes,” says Khan.

Because of their vulnerability to the ups and downs in the market, start-ups receive minimal support from investors abroad. Khan cites the lack of support from foreign investors as a major obstacle in the growth of Pakistani start-ups.

But being small can work to their advantage as well: they can be responsive to market and consumer feedback more quickly and more efficiently than difficult-to-change bigger companies.

Start-ups also do not start making profits quickly. How, then, can they inspire confidence among investors? There is no single answer to the question. Different start-ups have tried different approaches to address it. Patari, for instance, intends to attract money through audio advertisements which it will play between tracks. It will also start premium subscriptions, offering its customers the ability – by paying a monthly fee – to save songs offline and/or listen to them without advertisements. Khan believes the start-ups need to focus on achieving scale (a point where costs decrease and production increases) before thinking of making profit. “Once they have achieved scale, they can worry about profitability.” Pandora, a music streaming service based in the United States, was launched in 2000, but it started making profit only in 2011, after it had reached out to millions of registered users who now number more than 250 million.

Can nascent Pakistani start-ups dream of entering the global market? Considering that they are a new trend in Pakistan, it is rather early for them to be able to compete with start-ups based elsewhere. But Khan is of the opinion that the start-up success rate in Pakistan is higher – despite a seemingly unfavourable business environment and lack of investors – than the international rate, which hovers around 30 per cent. That may be a sign that they can survive international competition at a similarly stronger rate.

However, before being able to cash in on this strength, Pakistani start-ups need to learn skills for addressing their teething problems efficiently and effectively. If they fail to do so, these problems run the risk of becoming too monstrous to take on. That will only spell doom for the start-ups.

“We will never allow the government to have a divorce clause in the Hindu Marriage Act. We have no concept of divorce in our religion,” said Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani in 2011. He is the patron of the Pakistan Hindu Council and a member of the National Assembly. It is in the context of this statement that the recently introduced laws on Hindu marriages must be seen.

The enactment of a law on Hindu marriages has been a thorny issue for a long time, particularly because of a clause which provides grounds for divorce. As expected, this provision in the bill titled Hindu Marriage Act 2016 – recently approved by the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice – has led to controversy. Many upper-caste Hindus do not want the option for divorce to be part of the bill because, as they say, there is no concept of divorce among Hindus.

And yet everyone in the Hindu community agrees, especially women and lower-caste marginalised groups, that the absence of a law for registration and other aspects of marriage (including divorce) has been creating a lot of problems in property transfer and in the procuring of travel and identity documents. It has become increasingly important in a globalised world where financial freedom and mobility are linked to such documents.

Sindh took the lead by passing a law on registration of Hindu marriages on February 15, 2016. The Sindh Assembly conveniently left the provision of divorce out of consideration, apparently due to pressure from or fear of the upper-caste Hindus, who control minority politics in the province.

The complete absence of women’s voices from the discourse in the media, local or national, is noticeable.

A provision allowing for divorce means one can get out of an unwanted relationship and be free to enter another with the state facilitating the process. It is this aspect which the patriarchs of Hindu community seem to dislike: they fear losing control over the minds and bodies of their women — the complete absence of women’s voices from the discourse in the media, local or national, is noticeable.

Apart from the upper-caste Hindus, there are others who do not like this clause, which makes conversion a possible ground for either of the two partners to approach the court in order to opt out of an unwanted relationship. Their fear is that Hindu women are likely to be taken away from their communities by Muslim men, who (by virtue of their higher social and economic status) are likely to influence, convert and marry them. Under Islamic law, Muslim men can marry Christian women who are ahl-e-kitab (‘people of the book’), for instance, but cannot marry Hindu women. For that to happen, they must convert the women. In a society where one religious group dominates in numerical terms and is often oppressive, with the state’s active help, conversion sometimes also offers an opportunity of upward mobility for Hindu women. The incentive to opt out of Hinduism, as well as a Hindu marriage, and enter the fold of Islam is strong. It is this social and cultural context that explains why such conversions are referred to as “forced conversions.”

Leap of faith

Not surprisingly, some Muslim members of parliament as well as some state institutions such as the Council of Islamic Ideology have been quite enthusiastic in their support for the inclusion of a clause on divorce, particularly on grounds of conversion. They see the growth of Islam in such laws.

Dr Vankwani has recently vowed to keep raising his voice in parliament and at all other forums to ensure the protection of the rights of all Hindus. Ironically, he, too, suggested an option for marriage termination “in the present context.” He states: “After a separation of two years, the marriage can be terminated and each individual can independently make decisions, including conversion.”

This was originally published in the Herald's March 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

It was sometime in 1996 that I was assigned to cover a Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) rally in Rawalpindi where the famous tribesman Mast Gul was to speak. The stage was set in front of the outer gate of Liaquat Bagh, close to Gordon College, and there were around 4,000 to 5,000 people - mostly JI activists - in attendance.

The atmosphere was charged as the enthusiastic JI activists appeared anxious to listen to the guerrilla leader's speech. He was being portrayed as a war hero by the local media and right-wing public intellectuals. In a standoff that lasted two months in 1995, Mast Gul kept the Indian army at bay at the Sufi Shrine of Chrar-e-Sharief in Kashmir, in the vicinity of Srinagar. Later he escaped from the scene to reach Pakistan, hoodwinking the Indian army.

He now stood in front of the crowd, inviting the people of Rawalpindi to join the armed freedom struggle in Indian held Kashmir. Mast Gul was clamouring for blood. “I want 5,000 martyrs from the city of Rawalpindi…in fact every city of Pakistan should contribute martyrs for the Kashmir cause,” I recall him saying in broken Urdu, thick with a Pashtun accent.

Also read: The most potent existential threats to Pakistan

To hear these words was shocking to say the least. “5,000 martyrs from Pindi would mean 5,000 affected families,” one of the journalists there whispered in my ear. Rawalpindi used to be a small city in those days, and hypothetically speaking, such a large number of deaths would have shaken the city’s population psychologically. But Mast Gul continued his histrionic speech, telling his audience that they were living in desperate times which necessitated desperate measures. After listening to him, an ideologically motivated Islamist would be convinced that death is more important than a psychologically stable life in a stable social and political environment, “I need 5,000 martyrs from Rawalpindi…give me 5,000 martyrs…Kashmir needs you…” His words echoing over an emotionally charged crowd left a lasting imprint on my memory.

Since then, I have attempted many times to answer the disturbing question: What would have happened if Mast Gul’s wish had come true, how would the death of 5,000 young people impact the psychological and social makeup of my city?

Mast Gul vanished into thin air, as far as public life in our society is concerned. But his desperate call to die for a political cause or ideology has endured in our society. In the last 20 years, I have come across many instances of people – and high-profile people at that – preaching the same desperation to die for a political cause.

Occasionally, we see high-profile people who themselves lead very cozy lives, putting on the same act as Mast Gul; the idea of death with the same level of desperation is inbuilt into their public assertions. Dr A Q Khan, for instance used to say – whenever there arose military tensions with India – that Pakistan has the capacity to destroy seven Indian cities in the wink of an eye. I consider such statements in line with the Mast Gul’s clarion call. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that Indians are equally capable of destroying an even larger number of Pakistani cities.

Such desperate statements are justified strategically. They say India has a far superior conventional military capability and the gap is ever widening. To keep India’s aggressive military designs in check, Pakistan has to appear desperate, almost primed to use its nuclear capability against any advance of the Indian army. This image of desperation is the crux of Pakistan’s nuclear strategy if the past public assertions of Dr A Q Khan and many others like him are anything to go by. In other words, it would seem that Pakistan constantly needs a Mast Gul to keep selling it as a country desperate enough to react instantly in the face of threat.

Pakistan officials seldom discuss their nuclear doctrine in public. On the basis of some western writings it becomes clear that the official nuclear doctrine – as far as it is revealed to these western experts – is not as desperate as the Mast Guls of our society would have us believe. But there has never been a time in our public life after we became a declared nuclear state when we were without a public figure that followed Mast Gul’s show in Rawalpindi that day. And all this makes official strategy suspect.

Who is currently putting on the Mast Gul act in Pakistani society? Former military ruler Pervez Musharraf in his jingoistic interviews – given from the cosy drawing room of his house in Karachi – with Indian news channels, regularly talks about war with India. “We are not wearing bangles,” he says. “…If they cast a dirty eye on Pakistan, we will scorch their very eyes ... our capability to destroy is real and we mean business”.

How important social and psychological stability is for a stable society goes without saying. We need psychologically stable human beings, who are more interested in life than death, to take our society towards a bright economic future. Unstable humans ever immersed in the ideas of death, who are continuously hammered with the ideas to be desperate about death, will hardly prove to be stock for an economically growing society. Who knows how much these clamours for death and blood have contributed in the emergence of an ideology which produces suicide bombers — a dreadful phenomenon that is playing havoc with the stability of our society.

After the December 2014 Army Public School (APS) massacre in Peshawar, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif promised there would be “no differentiation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban”. In February 2015, Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif announced in Kabul that “the enemies of Afghanistan are the enemies of Pakistan”. Sartaj Aziz, advisor to the prime minister on national security, repeated the same sentiment in May that year. He was trying to overcome the damage he had done in November 2014, when he told BBC Urdu that the enemies of Afghanistan and the United States were not necessarily threats to Pakistan. But it looks like the Sartaj Aziz-Big Bill Broonzy counterterrorism policy is still in effect.

Born in Arkansas, grown to fame in Chicago, bluesman Broonzy summarised the American racial order of the time in a song:

They says if you was white, should be all right

If you was brown, stick around

But as you’s black, m-mm brother, git back git back git back

The Pakistani terrorist groups that target India are all right. The supposedly banned Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) is alleged to have attacked the Indian airbase in Pathankot on January 2, 2016. Its leader, Masood Azhar, has been taken into “protective custody,” but the organisation’s headquarters in Bahawalpur functions as always. So does Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT), under the name Jamaatud Dawa (JuD), and its leader – Hafiz Saeed – is treated as a respected leader in the media, even though the United Nations Security Council (including Pakistan’s all-weather friend, China) has designated him a terrorist.

Also read: The crackdown on Hizbut Tehrir intensifies

For now, at least, the Afghan Taliban can stick around. The official spokesman of the so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), whose Twitter account places him in “Sindh, Pakistan” (Karachi, presumably) proudly claimed responsibility for the murder of seven young journalists of Afghanistan’s Tolo TV in Kabul on January 21. By far the most important Taliban group, the IEA operates more or less openly out of Quetta and Karachi. Pakistan’s policy is to persuade it to join in on the talks with the Afghan government, but it refuses to enforce it’s own laws (to say nothing of the National Action Plan against terrorism) against the Afghan Taliban’s military and terrorist infrastructure on Pakistan’s territory. The United States bears responsibility for undermining former Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s early efforts to bring the Taliban out from the cold and hold negotiations with them, leaving them no choice but Guantanamo or hide in Pakistan. A political settlement might offer them a better choice, but only if Pakistan stops enabling their violence.

The army launched operation Zarb-e-Azb to force the various fragments of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to git back — and so they did; they have gone to parts of Afghanistan under the secure control of the Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban, whom Pakistan refuses to target. That is why the accusations from Pakistan’s General Headquarters that the commander of the attack on Bacha Khan University in Charsadda came from Afghanistan rings hollow. Efforts to stamp out the one group of terrorists that the Pakistan military really treats as enemies will leave Pakistan undefended, as long as the TTP can seek refuge with other terrorist groups that Pakistan still seeks to use for political ends.

All terrorism is abhorrent and illegal under international and Pakistani national law. It is inevitable that the Pakistani state will crumble when its own security forces refuse to enforce the law unless foreign governments meet Pakistan’s demands — a classic case of threatening to shoot oneself if demands are not met.

But not all groups that use terrorism for political ends are the same. The undifferentiated use of so-called “counterterrorism” tactics (military operations and drone strikes) against them has proved a failure. Countering terrorism requires a political strategy.

Indian airmen in Pathankot were collateral damage in an attack aimed ultimately at Nawaz Sharif and his efforts to lessen tensions with India. The government of Pakistan has to remove terrorism from the India-Pakistan relationship, and India’s restraint is helping it. But that restraint can continue only as long as Pakistan takes firm measures against those guilty of anti-Indian terrorism.

This originally appeared in the Herald's February 2016 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

This story has been co-published by The Wire, India.

Sabeen Mahmud’s murder, the first event, had nothing to do with Balochistan. Yet, it had everything to do with it. She was not a freedom fighter for Baloch rights or for the Baloch people, and not as politically active or astute as many of those who mourn her make us believe. One is not even sure if she ever visited Balochistan but she was killed following an event held at her T2F in Karachi about the voices of the disappeared Baloch. Whoever her killers may have been and whichever agency or organisation was responsible for her murder, hers was yet another Baloch death. Balochistan has buried many dead over the last few years, and here was yet another along with the many Hazaras killed indiscriminately. Numerous others – poets, writers, activists – have disappeared. The outgoing year, too, was one for the disappeared Baloch.

Also read: Republic of fear

The second event took place, perhaps in Islamabad, or probably close to or in the corridors of the Great Hall of the People, or in the President of China’s office in Beijing. It was what the government in Pakistan, and many others who subscribe to an unknown vision, are calling a ‘game changer’ for the whole of Pakistan — more specifically for Balochistan: a highway, with supporting infrastructure, passing through the desolate and insurgent-ridden parts of Balochistan, ending up at yet another game changer, the Gwadar Port. It is called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and is supposed to bring untold prosperity to Pakistan’s poorest districts. Of all the districts in Pakistan, all but one of the poorest and least developed quarter lie in Balochistan. There is no end to the wishful statements and analyses of the untold riches that await the people of Balochistan when, if ever, the CPEC starts operation.

Yet another Balochistan-related development, with longer-term consequences for the province, took place in Europe where the supposedly dissident Baloch groups were said to be thinking about ending their insurgency and coming back to join some stream of Balochistan’s politics. Just like the CPEC, one does not really know what is going to happen with this development, either.

Insurgency, meanwhile, has continued unabated, although there was far less media coverage of it in 2015 than there was in 2014 or 2013, when attempts to actually identify and quantify the disappeared were undertaken. Mahmud’s murder was an effective silencing call, like Hamid Mir’s attempted assassination in 2014 had been. Since we do not hear about the insurgency, we tend to believe that it is over and settled, and reconciliation and the CPEC are paving the way for Balochistan’s radiant future. What the media, instead, reported in 2015 was that many Baloch freedom fighters had laid down their arms and had given up their struggle for independence. Peace and prosperity are just around the corner, we were told.

And for those who are interested in that other Balochistan, the Pakhtun-dominated part of the province, there was always Jami’s film Moor.

Photo: Security officials at a bomb blast site in Quetta city | B Khan, White Star

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

Yet another year of floods. Floods that have now become routine. So routine, that the havoc they wreak doesn’t even make news.

A heatwave that should not have, but did, take us by surprise; that took more lives, in Karachi in particular, than it ever should have. Tragically. Needlessly.

Earthquakes that pock the calendar. Each taking a toll — a toll that keeps adding up.

Yes. 2015 was a year of disasters. It was not the first. It will not be the last.

Of course, it was also another year of resilience. What else could it have been?

Once all the death and destruction has been counted, all the tears accounted for; once the moment of disaster has passed, aid workers have departed, television cameras switched off, attention diverted; all that is left, then, is resilience.

This is a picture of resilience.

Resilience is that technical-sounding poetic term that we seek solace in. It is the resolve to bounce back, the will to try to put things together again, the determination to mend what is broken, the insistence to move on with life.

We talk about resilience with great and justified pride. The dignity with which the poor in Pakistan have coped with one disaster after another is remarkable.

But there is also a hollowness in how we – the chattering classes – talk about resilience. As if it is something unique to Pakistan and Pakistanis. As if we have it in greater abundance than others. As if having it makes up for everything else. As if it is infinite, unending, self-replenishing. The thing to know about resilience is that it should not be tested too often. It does erode. Something is bound to give. Something breaks. Usually, resilience itself.

Also read: A disaster foretold

But what else can the poor, the marginalised, the vulnerable, do? Except to be resilient. Yet resilience cannot be the coping strategy of a nation. In Pakistan, that is exactly what it has become. We resign to disasters because (a) they are inevitable, and (b) we are resilient. Newsflash, 2015: Wrong on both counts!

In the age of climate change, disasters will become more frequent, not less. But it is not climate change that kills people, makes them homeless, steals their livelihoods. It is not earthquakes. It is not heatwaves. It is certainly not ‘nature’s will’. Nor can it be the ‘will’ of a benevolent and merciful God. It is, instead, man’s neglect.

True. Nature’s wrath cannot always be predicted, but it can be anticipated; and it can be prepared for. There is no excuse for Pakistan – being what it is, and being where it is – not being prepared for floods. For earthquakes. For heatwaves. The surprise is that they keep catching us by surprise. Our surprise is borne out of our neglect.

That the poor suffer more in disasters cannot be because God loves them less. Nor because they are more sinful. It is because they live under roofs more shabby, on grounds more fragile, on streets less covered and in rooms more suffocating.

That they demonstrate resilience in the face of all this is not just a testimony to their fortitude. It is also a reflection of our neglect.

Nowhere is this neglect more apparent than in our attitude towards disaster management. Disaster management cannot just be preparedness to respond to disasters. It has to be as much about avoiding disasters; about minimising damage.

It cannot simply be to provide food and shelter to the displaced, cash to the heirs of the dead and photo ops to politicians. It must also be to invest in the living conditions of the poor so that their reservoirs of resilience are not tested so brutally, so often.

Ultimately, development is the only feasible strategy for disaster management. Pride must not come only from how we ‘show’ resilience in the face of disaster, but from how much we invest in ‘building’ resilience so that we do not have to show it as much when disaster strikes.

In the race between climate change and the resilience of our poor that now seems inevitable, development is our best, maybe our only, bet. To not invest in development will be to erode our resilience. To invest in it is to conserve resilience for the moment when it will truly be needed.

May 2016 not test our resilience as 2015 did.

Photo: Relief goods being brought to the flood affected village of Kas Koroona in the outskirts of Peshawar|Abdul Majeed Goraya, White Star

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

 “When I was researching for my college thesis it was heartbreaking to discover how little was out there on Pakistani music or musicians,” Noorani said, when asked why she wanted to hold the festival in the first place. “And there was no space for discourse on the subject either.”

She wanted to explore Pakistani music without help from corporate sponsors and aspired to promote a variety of music styles and musicians, who had little chance of making it to commercial platforms such as Coke Studio. She and her co-organisers invited as many musicians – including young and upcoming bands, soloists, instrumentalists – as they could, convincing them to share their music and experiences at the festival. 

Multiple interactive talks by various music-related personalities were held inside the Alhamra halls on The Mall and, sunset onwards, live performances were held in the lawns outside. Noorani admitted there were thinner audiences at the talks.

Inviting instrument makers to display and sell their instruments was another very good initiative. Many people showed keen interest in their stalls. 

For the organisers of I Am Karachi Music Festival, money was not much of an issue; they had a host of sponsors enabling them to advertise heavily and hire people to help as well. All good, except the format: the festival had a number of musicians talk about their work but not perform much. When you think of a music festival, you think of stage, musicians and singers; but that only happened on the last two nights. The attendance at the talks was unsurprisingly low.  

Such talk sessions may be a bit premature for our audiences. People, at large, are not likely to be interested in a topic like ‘How to make music into a full-blown business’. These issues must be discussed, but with an initiated audience.

The festival did culminate in a grand music gala at Port Grand and, as expected, it was hugely attended. There were multiple performances happening simultaneously on different stages around the venue. Many in the audience were left wishing they could attend them all.

A better way could have been to offer all performances from a single stage. Coming from a single-television channel generation, I believe it is not such a bad idea to expose the audiences to a bit of everything. Pakistan Television is the reason why my generation grew up not only knowing pop but a bit of folk, qawwali, classical and ghazal as well.

Islamabad’s Music Mela was the brainchild of musician Arieb Azhar. Supported by a number of sponsors including the American Embassy, it was held at the Lok Virsa grounds. 

Azhar was happy to see large crowds who had come to attend the festival, not only from Islamabad but from neighbouring Rawalpindi as well. He, however, wished the event attracted people from different sectors of society, including the kind of people who go to, say, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s urs or Mela Chiraghan in Lahore. In short, he wanted the festival to have the old-world mela look. His wish can come true if next time he can involve more folk musicians. 

We saw this happen when the Faiz Aman Mela started in Lahore, around 1984. Every year, it would have two venues — an enclosed one at Alhamra, where singers like Iqbal Bano sang, and a public one at some open-air venue, where performers like Tufail Niazi, Abida Parveen Arif Lohar, Shaukat Ali, Tahira Syed and Humera Channa sang to the delight of thousands of people. The audience – a heady mix from all walks of life – would momentarily forget all class barriers and sway seamlessly together with the music. 

Photo: Pappu Sain performs at Islamabad’s Music Mela, April 2015 | Tanveer Shahzad, White Star

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

Cumulative losses of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), which is 87 per cent government-owned, were 76 billion rupees in 2013-2014 and were expected to continue into 2015, despite a sharp fall in the price of oil. The airline is rated poorly (never mind its glorious past) on customer care, in-flight service and timeliness. Given the open skies policy, international travellers using Pakistani destinations have a choice of Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, Turkish Airlines, Emirates and Thai Airways. They notice the difference in service quality and have since deserted PIA.

Is privatisation the solution to PIA’s ills? Let’s look at the competition: Qatar, Etihad and Emirates are among the world’s top 10 airlines according to consumer satisfaction surveys and are all government-owned. Thai Airways (ranked 19 in the world) is also majority-owned by the government.

Turkish Airlines, on the other hand, was 87 per cent government-owned in the mid-2000s and was in the doldrums. The government reduced its share to 49 per cent, brought in professional management and saw a huge growth in operations. From 2004 till 2014, aircrafts increased from 73 to 261, destinations from 102 to 264, passengers from 12 million to 55 million, net profit quadrupled and, most importantly, technical staff increased by 2,000. (Take note, PIA labour unions.)

The common factor among all these well-run airlines is a professional management targeting the global tourism and business markets. The resource-rich, labour-scarce owners of Qatar, Etihad and Emirates have mastered the art of hiring professional management to produce goods and services that meet world standards, be they hotels, ports, shopping malls or airlines. Thailand sees Thai Airways as a vital input into its unmatched global tourism industry. The turnaround of Turkish Airlines was the result of the decision to integrate Turkey into the world economy via trade, investment and tourism. Privatising PIA will certainly help stem the rot because of greater transparency and more accountable management that our government owned companies find a challenge to institute. Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) and the telecommunications sector are good examples of progress after privatisation. But if we truly want PIA to be a flagship carrier we are proud of, we have to make Pakistan a hub of global economy and not a playground of protected local monopolies, free-riding officials and jet-setting jihadists.

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

Hussain is seen as a man, not a sex object. Even if found guilty, he is believed to deserve the respect due to any citizen, especially because he is a doctor and has held high positions the in government. It is deemed inappropriate to make fun of him, comment on his looks and dress or humiliate his person.

Compare this with the treatment meted out to Ayyan Ali, the model frequently taken from prison to court hearings and back during the latter half of the outgoing year. Almost any channel one tuned into showed the same fare during the coverage of her case — some silly, raucous, loud movie song would play in the background as though this were some entertainment show. Some mindless newsreader sporting a taunting smile would read the news, focussing entirely on her dress, make-up, handbags, shoes, hairstyles, walk and sunglasses. So much so, that one often forgot what the actual issue was, as the newscasters and reporters seemed obsessed only with her body.

Ali is a woman and, therefore, automatically portrayed as a sex object. Being a model makes her doubly vulnerable to the vulgar gaze and bawdy humour. It is all right to make fun of her, to deny her the dignity and respect due to a citizen. It does not matter if she should also be presumed innocent until proved guilty. Even if she were to be found guilty, for television channels it will be not her deed that is to be condemned but her womanhood that is to be scorned and violated. She is already guilty by virtue of being a woman and a model, and liable to the punishment of being ridiculed. Her actual guilt may never be established but she is already condemned merely on the basis of her gender and profession. Never mind that she is a working woman making a living through legal means — as legal as the ones employed by the doctor mentioned earlier.

The race for ratings has made the media channels sink to such depths that they will not desist from using a woman’s body to attract the audiences even if that means demeaning women at large. Men may commit crimes far worse than money laundering but they are entitled to male dignity and cannot be made the butt of cheap jokes. Women have to be depicted in demeaning and humiliating ways to make the channels commercially successful, to win the competition with other channels engaged in equally despicable portrayals.

The objectification of women’s bodies has long been an issue, especially in the advertising industry, where they are used to sell anything from cigarettes to cars and motorbikes. Women working in advertising may have joined the profession by choice or they may have been forced by their financial circumstances to do so. Either way, their choices are fraught with danger as they are then immediately conceived as immoral or lacking in virtue. The industry that uses their bodies in a specific way is never characterised as immoral — only the woman model, basically a worker, receives such labels.

It is not only in advertising and modelling that one discerns these attitudes. They are also abundantly evident in television dramas and shows. Women are portrayed in the duality of Eve and Mary. Either a woman is a temptress, responsible for all the wrongs of men around her, or she is the epitome of virtue and a reincarnation of the archetypal mother figure. Women can be anything but human. They must fit into a false and imagined binary which robs them of the opportunity to choose to be anyone they desire. Will the media free itself from its straitjacket of greed and stupidity to let women live as human beings — just human beings, neither goddesses nor whores?

Photo: Model Ayyan Ali arrives at court in Rawalpindi on November 19, 2015|Tanveer Shahzad, White Star

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

Bigotry has always flourished in South Asia. It has worsened whenever state actions have supported it overtly or covertly. In India, the states that enacted anti-conversion laws have witnessed more communal violence than those where local legislatures refused to interfere in religious matters. Sri Lanka experienced religion-based violence when its anti-conversion laws were being debated in its parliament in recent years. Once the draft law was dropped, communal violence disappeared.

The state has not only the obligation to stay neutral in matters of religion, but also to ensure that freedom of thought and conscience of all individuals is protected. Pakistan’s laws and the behaviour of those in authority, on the other hand, are oppressive for non-religious citizens, dangerous for the country’s religious minorities and cruel to its populace at large.

Almost everyone agrees that the laws protecting religious sensitivities are frequently misused, yet the right-wing mullah spits fire at any suggestion of punishing those responsible for filing false charges of blasphemy. If all laws are misused, then why single out offences against religion, they argue. That may be the case but it is also true that the laws on blasphemy have a far greater potential of being exploited and deployed as a lethal tool to terrorise the public than anything else on the statute books.

The users of this law have not even spared mentally challenged individuals. Four mentally challenged women accused of desecrating the holy Quran are still languishing in Central Jail, Lahore. Many others were only able to secure bail from the Supreme Court after years of incarceration.

Religiosity is suffocating in Pakistan. It invariably stokes the fire in driving society to religious extremism. Respect for every faith is desirable, but it loses its value if it is aimed at playing to the gallery. Why must every official duty, function or utterance begin with a religious ritual? Surely, the Almighty cannot be impressed with our public display of faith in Him.

Duplicity in matters of religion is not confined to Pakistan, but it hurts the most in societies where debate on religion is asphyxiated and preachers of hate have become keepers of faith. This is precisely what the laws on blasphemy have achieved.

Also read: The most controversial rulings by the superior judiciary

It is well documented that a vast number of complaints about blasphemy only surfaced after the laws on it prescribed harsh punishment for certain forms of blasphemy. The law offers a bandwagon for faith-based zealots to ride and bond together in seeking revenge as well as publicity.

Thus far, successive parliaments have made no changes in the blasphemy law that imposes mandatory death penalty even when the alleged blasphemers may have committed the crime unwittingly and/or unintentionally. The executive and the legislature have placed the entire burden on the courts to administer justice in blasphemy cases where the law is very obviously flawed, but overturning accusations under it is risky.

In the past, a high court judge was killed for acquitting a 16-year-old Christian boy and his co-accused in a blasphemy case, notwithstanding the fact that a number of leading criminal lawyers had pleaded for acquittal while assisting the court. Recently, radical religious groups have reprimanded the Supreme Court for upholding the punishment for Mumtaz Qadri, the murderer of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. No action has been taken against them for their public censure of the highest court in the country.

We must acknowledge that the judgements that have acquitted an obviously innocent person falsely accused of blasphemy have been few and far in between. The low level of religious tolerance present in Pakistan’s judiciary can easily be measured by the fact that Qadri was defended by a former chief justice of the largest high court of the country – the Lahore High Court – and a retired judge of the same court. While scores of lawyers volunteered to defend Qadri, only a couple agreed to take up the prosecution brief against Taseer’s assassin.

We may fight terrorism through brute force, but the terror that is unleashed in the name of religion can only be challenged through moral courage. Every fair-minded person holding a position of authority must support the few who have stood up against the injustice being perpetrated in the name of blasphemy.

Photo: Protesters at a seminary in Karachi raise slogans in favour of blasphemy laws

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

The others have also owned me, abused me. Perhaps they were like me once, unsuspecting, caught in a web of intricate design, suffering silently, for the ‘honour’ of our families was at stake. Strange, this notion of honour — to remain silent when atrocities against our bodies are committed, allowing the crime to be accepted as a given reality. I had grown up believing that honour was vested in the bodies of girls and women, that only when they were violated, or had chosen to make a decision about their own lives, that the ‘honour’ of the family would be besmirched. I had not known then that when my body was used, abused and then discarded, I, too, would be responsible for the shaming of the family.

They say now that there were not many of us who suffered like this and that the media exaggerated the numbers. I say to myself that it does not matter how many were abused. What matters is that this happened and that it shall continue to happen as long as there is silence around crimes involving our bodies. Strange how each one of us is in possession of a body, but that no one among us is willing to show the scars where we have been tortured, over and over again — the act giving pleasure to some and only pain to others.

Also read: Republic of fear

Sometimes, I ask myself if there can be any pleasure in giving another person pain. Then I remember there are many ways in which that happens, everyday, all around us. It happens in my home, when my father hits my mother, or my brother hits my sister, reaffirming his power over her, reaffirming that he is a man, and she merely a powerless female. But how did I become a victim? I, too, am a man, a young man. How did I find myself at the centre of this dirty game where silence was bought, where my body and soul were sold? Who shall answer this question? How many have the courage to tell the truth about what happened, and what continues to happen? We have convinced ourselves that we are a pious society, that our religion has taught us moral values. What, then, led to the telling of lies and the spinning of a web which caught so many of us in its gossamer weave?

They say that such things happen everywhere; that no one speaks of them. I know I am not safe anywhere. I know the nightmare shall continue, inside my head, etched deep inside my eyelids.

In August 2015, the media was rife with revelations that a gang filmed some 270 children being sexually abused as part of a blackmailing ring that operated for years in the rural town of Hussain Khan Wala near Kasur, Punjab. Residents say the gang forced children at gunpoint to be abused or drugged them into submission. Members of the gang later blackmailed the families of the victims, threatening to release videos of the abuse on the Internet. It was only after one family spoke up that others rose against the alleged perpetrators, with police later arresting 11 suspects, all of whom maintained that they were innocent and that they were being framed by rival power groups.

Zia Ahmed Awan, founder of the Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid, and Madadgar, says 767 children were raped and murdered across Pakistan in 2014. These are the cases that are reported. The fact that abuse takes place with impunity points to not just serious issues of governance but also to the social attitudes which permit and, in some cases, encourage the violation of the bodies and minds of those who are powerless. Abuse becomes pervasive when the victim becomes the perpetrator, moving up in the power dynamic, ‘righting’ the wrong done to them.

Photo: Victims sit with their backs turned towards the camera as a relative sits in the foreground | M Arif, White Star

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

Yet, moving into 2016, while many questions and doubts remain, these are now more concerned with “how” rather than “if” the CPEC will happen. What are the debt implications for the Pakistani economy? Will Punjab be the disproportionate beneficiary? What will be the local impact of the projects? Which route will be completed first? Does the government have the capacity to build a set of projects on as grand a scale as the CPEC includes?

Even when there are no ready answers to these questions, the very fact that these are being asked reflects a genuine step forward. The political battles around the CPEC are an indication of the fact that there is actually something to fight over. These are far preferable problems to wrestle with than the persistently weak levels of Chinese investment in the past. There is a tangible push to get the first round of projects completed in the next two years – roads, power plants, port development and special economic zones – to demonstrate meaningful progress by the time the next Pakistani elections become due in 2018.

But the challenges that these plans face are formidable, and hang over not just the CPEC, but the entire ‘One Belt, One Road’ Silk Road initiative of which the corridor forms a part. If China simply attempts to externalise the development model that it has pursued domestically, it may leave some valuable infrastructure behind but it will also create a set of political pressures that risk undermining much of the purpose of the venture.

The first issue is transparency. The opaque fashion in which many of the projects are being pursued may be viable for a few billion dollars worth of investment but it is not tenable on the huge scale envisaged by the CPEC. When Pakistan’s central bank governor publicly states that he does not understand the composition of financing for the projects, we have a real problem. Routine accusations that one route or another for the corridor is being favoured are easy to make when it is so difficult to figure out what is really going on. While no one expects the details of every deal to be made public, greater clarity on routes, timetables and figures would do much to allay these concerns.

The second issue is social impact. China hopes that all these new investments will have a politically stabilising effect in its western neighbourhood. But without serious efforts to ensure demonstrable local benefits, the danger is that the influx of investment will exacerbate existing political and social grievances and divisions rather than reducing them. For the CPEC, this risk is perhaps most obvious in Balochistan, though the planning for the scheme as a whole has not given sufficiently prominent attention to issues ranging from job creation to education and training. Even if a national-level political consensus has been built behind the CPEC, community buy-in and sustained support at the grass-roots level will be equally important. Again, this is hardly an insoluble problem. Diverting even a small fraction of the CPEC financing towards local schools and hospitals, and coming up with projected employment figures that are as striking as the overall investment numbers, will go a long way in addressing this.

Yet, Chinese officials still lack the instinct to take measures of this sort. Transparency and social impact have not tended to rank high on the list of priorities in China. At present, Beijing is trying to do a lot, very quickly. While there is good reason for Islamabad to prioritise speedy project delivery, ensuring that Beijing gets the underlying politics of the economic corridor right too will save Pakistan, China and many other countries along the putative Silk Road from a lot of future headaches.

Photo: Commuters pass through a newly-built tunnel in Gojal Valley. The tunnel is part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor | AFP

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

Located at the intersection of Lahore’s walled city and its relatively newer colonial parts, the installation – with its plethora of birdhouses – resembles a contemporary vision of the vertical dwellings that crowd Old Lahore itself. The same kind of dense dwellings exist in the medieval parts of Venice, Marrakech and, for that matter, Istanbul; that the installation establishes a visual link with other historic cities where contemporary art is a huge part of visual culture is both clever and timely. Pleasingly, it will also house actual birds right in the middle of a crowded, noisy city roundabout. That it can create a link to other also cities located on the cross-currents of centuries is one of the many strengths of this piece of art. The other is, quite simply, that it exists.

Public art is not something that Lahore – or Pakistan generally – invests much real estate in. The government usually shuns art projects, and most of our roundabouts and traffic lights sport sad reliefs of national leaders, amorphous religious calligraphy or anatomically ambiguous horses; a trend as disappointing as it is bewildering. It is disappointing because Lahore’s aesthetic sense is then left to only its architectural landmarks and buildings that serve as the closest thing to public art that we have, and that have existed since before Pakistan did. It is bewildering because of the sheer number of internationally renowned artists we have produced who would only be too happy to create public art pieces.

Contemporary art is sometimes viewed as totally separate from what the public can access; accused of being elitist by nature, and reserved for drawing rooms and galleries. That is not true — or at least it need not be true. Large, public projects like the one at Istanbul Chowk need institutional support from donors, city managers and government offices. We have no large museums with endowment funds that can do such projects (the Lahore Museum, for all of its treasures, seems completely oblivious to being current in any way), and our governments are more concerned with other things. Whether this is by design or circumstance is irrelevant. The result is that our cities are bereft of the wonderful things that happen when beautiful, thoughtful art pieces are put in large public spaces.

The LBF’s efforts, then, are seminal and remarkable, for they intend to turn the city into not just a catalogue of things past but also want Lahore to represent the ideas that are burgeoning now. In facilitating Khan in his creation of the installation, we are essentially reclaiming a public space that has been left lost for decades (unless you count monuments to warfare). Its loss was insidious and veiled, and often so slow that we did not even notice. We take it for granted now that public spaces are only high-threat locations, crammed with armed guards, checkpoints and barbed wire. We take it for granted that we should feel unsafe in public areas and that they are to be crossed quickly, quietly and without attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Small interventions, like the one at Istanbul Chowk, remind us that not only is it our right to have something thoughtful and beautiful to look at, but that it is also our duty. So why give money to public art when we can fund education or water purification? It’s not an either/or. Art does not stop wars, or replace guns or get people jobs. Art does not change events, because that was never its purpose. What it does do, every day, is affect people. Art-enriched societies, where beauty and thought and perspectives are celebrated publicly and without clause, change the way people think, and act, and vote. Art may not change the world, but it does change people.

Photo: Artist Atif Khan’s installation, City within a City, at Lahore’s Istanbul Chowk | M Arif, White Star

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

When Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif cast his ballot on October 31, 2015, in his home constituency in Lahore, he could rightly claim to have secured a big first for his government. These were the first-ever local government elections in Pakistan’s history held under local government laws passed by elected legislatures. But, ironically, despite all their historic significance, they offered little to rejoice and celebrate in terms of devolution of power.

So this is not a ‘first’. Almost all elected federal and provincial governments have been wary of local governments. They have never seen local governments as their grassroots extensions and instead have identified them as competitors, even rivals, for political clout. There is history behind this: three out of four military dictators in the country – Ayub Khan, Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf – designed and instituted local government systems to not only centralise power in their own hands but also to use these as nurseries for developing politicians who would eventually challenge the established political stalwarts.

In doing so, the generals were following in the footsteps of our colonial masters who had used local government to counter the nationalist independence movements. The colonial model ensured that legislative bodies of any sort were stuffed with more nominated members than elected ones and that these legislative bodies remained subservient to the bureaucracy loyal to the colonial administration.

The recent local government elections were held under five different laws enacted by the four provincial assemblies and the federal government (the last one being applicable only for Islamabad). These laws differed on minor details, but they were the same concerning major issues. Each ensured a large number of reserved seats — another name for nominations since indirect elections to these seats manifest the choice of the few rather than the will of the many. Each law gives the local governments very little power. Even the powers given to them by one hand have been taken away by the other. And the powers that are taken away have been given to the bureaucracy working under the tight control of the provincial governments.

The ruling parties in the provinces have, thus, managed to defeat the very idea of devolution as well as their political rivals. The election results have perpetuated party status quos in both Punjab and Sindh. Even in Karachi, which has undergone a number of politically ‘destabilising’ actions by law enforcement agencies since 2013, elections for the local government could not undo, or even alter, the city’s political landscape.

But it will be a folly to see this status quo as everlasting. The local government elections did expose a gaping hole in our politics — the absence of a viable opposition party. Independents have come out as runners-up everywhere. In some districts, they have actually managed to win as many seats as the provincial ruling parties.

This new (first-ever) trend signifies two important things. One, it demonstrates the marked incapacity of political parties to accommodate new political leaders emerging at the local level. Their refusal to use these elections to set up and strengthen their grassroots structure has boomeranged on them in the shape of victories by the independents. Two, the massive horde of independent winners will constantly loom large on our political horizon. Can they be tamed by the ruling parties or will their collective aspirations take the shape of a new king’s party?

Their existence is sign enough that the formation of a political party capable of opposing the ruling ones may just be one announcement away. The independents obviously are not committed to any organisation. This makes them political raw material, one that the generals have always loved to mould into parties they could install as their own.

The ruling parties in the provinces, therefore, may have won the local government elections but they have not entirely defeated the opponents who have become rather elusive to beat. Similarly, the ruling parties may have thwarted a genuine devolution of power but the power politics ushered by the local governments has produced legitimate claimants to power in every village and every neighbourhood.

Sharif’s motorcade has quite literally reached the narrow alley of local government. He will now have to negotiate the difficult political twists and turns in each village and neighbourhood. And he must bear in mind that there is no signal-free corridor, overhead bridge or underpass available that can land his party directly to a victory in the 2018 general election.

This article was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015. To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

Geeta had flown from Pakistan to India after 13 years to be reunited with her family. No one knows who her parents are, and while the search continues for them, she is staying at the Indore Deaf Bilingual Academy.

In a photograph taken on her journey out of Pakistan, there is a purple shopping bag from the Pakistani fashion brand Khaadi next to her. Geeta sits with her palms touching, with a smile on her face, as she is escorted in a van to the airport in Karachi.

This summer’s Bollywood megahit Bajrangi Bhaijaan tells almost the same story — of a deaf child who is lost across the border and is heroically returned to her homeland by the hero, played by Salman Khan. The movie makes many arguments for a homogenous humanity across borders – sincerity, love, friendship – while foregrounding differences that could be understood and accepted: the Muslim love for eating meat or Bajrangi’s love for Hanuman or the inhumanity of the police. It was only after that movie that journalists began to tweet out the story of Geeta, this “real-life Munni”.

A couple of months after Geeta’s departure, I am watching – via Twitter and online video streaming – Modi’s (surprise) visit to Lahore to wish Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif a happy birthday and attend Sharif’s granddaughter’s wedding. Journalists and commentators on Twitter are divided on the possible factors behind the visit. One vocal group notes the involvement of Sajjan Jindal, the Indian businessman with major stakes in a mining consortium which has purchased rights to extracting iron ore from Afghanistan to turn it into steel. Jindal was in Lahore the same day, after all. “In Lahore to greet PM Navaz Sharif [sic] on his birthday,” reads a tweet by the steel tycoon on December 25, 2015.

Khaadi. Salman Khan. Steel.

What unites these strands is the South Asian consumer: the one in Lahore and Delhi who buys designer clothes, watches Bollywood movies and wants easy regional commerce in minerals, metals and all sorts of consumer goods. Modi and Sharif, both proud of their pro-business credentials, no doubt wish to accelerate such commerce and the consumption that it fuels and is fuelled by. While India and Pakistan have long insisted on defining themselves through their borders, capital has no love lost for any boundaries or restrictions. Capital sees a young Pakistani labour market and a vast Indian market requiring iron and gas from Afghanistan and Balochistan in order for the regional and global economies to keep moving at their current pace, if not better.

The jingoists and the xenophobes on both sides of the India-Pakistan border have plenty of ammunition – cultural and theological – to scream against normalcy between the two countries. There is also scant evidence that the dominant paradigms governing their bilateral relations have shifted much. Surely, one can point to a story like that of Geeta’s to demonstrate that the two nuclear-armed neighbours are making some progress towards normalising their relations, but it is remarkable precisely because of its singularity.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Indian and Pakistani fishermen caught in the open sea continue to languish in prisons on the wrong side of the border. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of families divided by the Pakistan-India border constantly ache to reunite. Their hope lies not in the real-world heroism of Abdul Sattar Edhi or the fictional one of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, but in the calculus of capital which seeks to unite us all as consumers.

Photo: Geeta leaves for the airport from the Edhi Foundation in Karachi | White Star

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. Through a selection of photographs, the Herald took a look at some of the events and developments that were extremely significant in 2015.To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

It had its sceptics. It was fighting the odds. There was hardly a free window in the international cricket calendar. Unable to host matches at home, Pakistan cricket was coloured in a narrative of isolation and marginalisation. Organisation and entrepreneurship had never been the Pakistan Cricket Board’s (PCB) strong suit. And as a country, Pakistan didn’t appear to have the economic might to generate millions of dollars for a sports extravaganza.

And yet, here it is: the Pakistan Super League (PSL). Breathing and blossoming. To be sure, the tournament hasn’t seen a ball bowled, and there are still many a step between the cup and the lip. But the PSL’s fate and fortune are aligning up rapidly.

After some haggling and hand-wringing, an opening in the calendar was finally secured and two venues in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Sharjah) were earmarked. The five team franchises – Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Islamabad and Quetta – each attracted sizeable bids from both national and international business houses. For example Karachi, which drew the highest price, was sold for 26 million dollars. The team-backed offices got organised quickly and announced the names of coaches and support staff, including luminaries such as Dean Jones, Andy Flower, Mickey Arthur, and Moin Khan. PSL picked two brilliant brand ambassadors, namely Wasim Akram and Ramiz Raja. Ten Sports bought the television rights, and fans began to take notice.

Within a short time, world-class players started showing interest and made themselves available for the selection pool, which eventually expanded to 310 names, including 138 from Pakistan. Crowd-pullers such as Chris Gayle, Kumar Sangakkara, Shahid Afridi, Kevin Pietersen and Shane Watson imparted lustre and momentum to the PSL. In a stroke of genius, the PCB opted for a player draft instead of auction, in order to avoid expensive bidding wars and ensure a level field for all franchises.

All signs now point to the PSL becoming a smashing and roaring success. Beyond that, there is also the larger question of what the rise of club-based leagues means for the structure of cricket as an international sport. Will these T20 tremors soon evolve into an earthquake that transforms cricket’s existing international order? Well, the genie is out of the bottle and it’s certainly not going back in.

This was originally published in Herald's Annual 2016 issue. To read more, subscribe to Herald in print.

This image of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s arrival at a polling station to cast his vote was flashed by all TV channels and the print media. What message does it send to the people?

To find an answer let us see what happens in similar situations in other democracies (since we are talking of polling and casting of votes, let us include Pakistan in the list of formal democracies).

In the advanced democracies too the incumbent prime minister’s arrival at a polling station to cast her/his vote receives special treatment from the media. There the message is clear: the prime minister comes to affirm the principle that she/he is ultimately answerable to the electorate. She/he has presented her/his government’s performance before the people and they will decide whether a change of government is called for. In a way, the prime minister’s appearance at the polling station is symbolic of her/his faith in democracy and affirmation of the people’s sovereignty.

In Pakistan, the situation is somewhat different. To begin with, Pakistan’s prime ministers rarely appear in person to acknowledge the decisive role of the ballot box. And as regards sovereignty of the people, the less said about it the better.

Pakistan’s first seven prime ministers – Liaquat Ali Khan, Sir Khwaja Nazimuddin, Mohammad Ali Bogra, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, H S Suhrawardy, I I Chundrigar and Feroz Khan Noon could not cast their votes because no general election was held during their tenure. President Ayub Khan held two elections (1960 and 1965) but he had merged the office of the head of government with that of the head of state. His appearance at the polling station could hardly be taken as affirmation of faith in democracy because he had declared democracy incompatible with the genius of the Pakistani people.

Likewise, the 1970 election was ordered by General Yahya Khan who did not have a prime minister; he only greeted Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the future prime minister and made sure that he did not have to keep his word. I doubt if he had time to go to a polling station.

After Noon’s deposition in 1958, Pakistan had no prime minister until Zulfikar Ali Bhutto stepped down from the position of president in 1973. He had a chance to go to the polling station in 1977 but he decided to get elected unopposed and missed this great opportunity.

Then came Ziaul Haq and he followed in the footsteps of Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan. He organised a referendum and did not consider it necessary to cast his vote as he was the sole beneficiary of the manoeuvre.

He also held a general election in 1985, sort of, as contrary to the democratic principle all candidates had to swear freedom from any political affiliation. He named Mohammad Khan Junejo as prime minister but saved him from going to a polling station as a supplicant by sacking him before his time was up.

The 1988 general election was organised by Ghulam Ishaq Khan who also chose to rule without a prime minister and, thus, there was no possibility of a prime minister’s appearance at a polling station.

Then Pakistan entered the phase of elections under caretaker prime ministers – Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi in 1990, Moeen Qureshi in 1993, and Meraj Khalid in 1996. They were not expected to send any message about the future of democracy in Pakistan as each of them had taken over after strangulation of the National Assembly.

The elections of 2002 and 2008 were called by President Pervez Musharraf. Zafarullah Jamali and Muhammad Mian Soomro were there as prime ministers, but nobody was in a mood to receive messages from anyone other than the real boss.

The 2013 election was again held under a caretaker prime minister, Hazar Khan Khoso, but his anxieties about ensuring fair polls left him with little time to talk of democracy and its future. The main problem with prime ministers in Pakistan has been that they have held office during the pleasure of the head of the state or the COAS or the judiciary and not during the pleasure of the parliament, and their position is as little understood in the country as the system of parliamentary democracy itself.

Further, this country is concerned less with the system of elections than with the system of rigging them. Thus, the public response to the appearance of the prime minister at a polling station comes firstly in the form of annoyance at the disruption of the polling caused by his security brigade and, secondly, in the form of a question: “How much of a fair election can you afford?”.

The picture before me must have been taken when Sharif came to cast his vote in a local body election. He had no fear of accountability that he should have at the time of general election – but then he will be shielded by a caretaker prime minister. During the local body election he had no worries as the Punjab Government had in its infinite wisdom taken out all the teeth the local government institutions had.

What a pity the people of Pakistan cannot see their prime minister bowing before their will, not even ceremoniously.

The appointment of Lieutenant General (retd) Nasir Janjua as National Security Adviser evoked a response from across the political spectrum that has almost become cliched by now — that the military has come to dominate foreign policy and internal security processes completely. It is quite common to hear that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has completely abdicated his position as the chief executive of the state, and by constitutional privileges, the one who is in charge of internal and external security matters.

The gradual retreat of Nawaz Sharif's government from policymaking has been visible from the start of his third tenure. The man – who in his last days as leader of the opposition against the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government, and in the early days of his current tenure as prime minister – was quite vocal in his desire to normalise relations with India, now shows no signs that he understands the implications of genuine rapprochement with India. Although some of his party members do understand that headway made on the path of normalisation would immensely increase the space for civilian leadership to restructure the political arrangements within the country and eclipse the military’s overly dominant role in public policymaking.

There is every reason to believe that army’s leadership, too, clearly understands its decreasing weight in the domestic political arrangements whenever genuine signs of rapprochement appear on the horizon. It is not at all a surprise that during the last 10 years the army has repeatedly shot down the proposal to increase trade and commercial relations with India – the only proposals which could have led to normalised relations.

In the words of several retired diplomats who I interviewed recently, the army, in its post-Pervez Musharraf return-to-civilian-governance era, has wanted to use the dialogue process with India – which continued somewhat intermittently during the PPP government – as a tool for conflict avoidance only. It wants to obstruct the civilian leadership from going beyond this limited objective. So the PPP government during its five-year tenure had to walk a diplomatic tight rope.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, however, found an easy way out of the complexities of these power politics. He completely withdrew from his position towards India after coming under pressure from a crisis that threatened the stability of his government, and which was generally believed to be masterminded by the army's intelligence agencies. Hard-hitting speeches and statements against India, marking incidents of exchange of fire on the international boundary, have increasingly brought him back into the kind of nationalistic fold the security establishment is comfortable with. Going to multilateral forums to complain against India has also become a defining position of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government towards India.

Army Chief General Raheel Sharif’s statement on September 6, 2015, is described by most military experts as clearly positing deterrence measures in the face of India’s recent aggressiveness, “If the enemy ever resorts to any misadventure, regardless of its size and scale – short or long – it will have to pay an unbearable cost,” he said in his address at a special event organised by the army at the GHQ. No matter how much nationalistic egos such statements may satisfy, such statements will always reduce the space of civilian government to pursue a normalisation process with India and, as a corollary, to pursue a restructuring of political arrangements within the country.

Looking at the official profile of Junjua, it is fairly obvious that he has no experience of dealing with political complexities. He is purely a military man and has served only in the military before this appointment. While he can militarily brief the prime minister about the exchange of fire on the Line of Control, or counter-insurgency operations in this or that part of the country, he can't proffer any policymaking advice that would take into account political ramifications, and the insecurity and instability caused by ferocious comments about war, in a charged nuclear environment, with the world's eyes as ever on Pakistan's ability to maintain internal and external peace.

Janjua won't have a nuanced understanding of Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi’s problematic treatment of the Muslim community of India, making an argument that not to deal with Modi on inter-state relations will serve no foreign policy or security interests. On the contrary, it will prove counter-productive to the stated aims of de-radicalizing Pakistani society. True, having a retired military man by his side (who will be having daily conversations with generals in GHQ), will make the prime minister politically more secure. However, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has to realize that national security is a totally different ballgame.

National security is a much wider problem than managing border skirmishes. Every time the anti-India flames are fanned, we also incur internal security costs in the form of right-wing militancy, we incur regional security costs as places like Afghanistan become ideological battlegrounds and Kashmir becomes a killing field. The internal stability of Pakistan right now very much depends on prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's ability to learn from the past, and make sure that civilian interests come first in policymaking, over martial interests — even if it weakens his own political position.

“What is the city but the people?” asks the opening sentence of the Capital Development Authority’s (CDA) website. The sentence – originally from Shakespeare's play Coriolanus – expresses a sentiment appropriate for this government-owned public benefit corporation, tasked with running and maintaining the master plan of the capital city of Pakistan. Upon researching the CDA’s establishment, I discovered a lineage of military leadership starting with General Ayub Khan and the organisation’s first chairman, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, who defined the charter of this organisation and its role in building Islamabad. This essay provides a preface to a longer discussion about public space in Pakistan by analysing perceptions of the ideal city, in popular and official discourse.

On a sweltering July day in Islamabad this year, images of bulldozers, riot gear, and protesting men, women and children dragged from their homes in a katchi abadi, poured into news circuits and social media. The CDA announced a successful removal of all illegal occupants from sector I-11, who posed (among other things) security threats and sanitation risks to the city. It is almost tragic that a government institution tasked with representing the ‘people’ of a city, could be responsible for the eviction of thousands of them from their homes, with no alternatives for resettlement.

This katchi abadi settlement was established in the 1980s, initially housing Afghan refugees and later expanded to include various demographics, including Pakistanis displaced from the country’s north-western peripheries by the War on Terror. According to official and civilian reports, between 5,000 to 20,000 residents of this abadi were subject to eviction. The ground for eviction was the illegal occupation of private property. While this was absolutely true, I could not help but notice the ubiquity of katchi abadis all across Pakistan’s cities and realised that there was more to these eviction narratives than ‘fixing’ violations of the law.

The rabid construction of high-rises by influential developers, who can somehow bypass environmental, legal and zoning concerns of our cities, makes the issue of upholding the law a moot point. In fact, the sheer impunity with which some things are built and others destroyed, begs us to evaluate what kind of places we imagine our cities to be, as well as what we want our cities to become. What does our ideal city look like? Who is this city for? And who are ‘the people’ that government organisations like the CDA seem to represent?

The image you see at the head of this essay is one such imagination of an ideal city drawn in 15th century Italy, projecting some of the formative ideas of the European Enlightenment. I found this image compelling as an artist and former student of architecture because of its striking representation of public space; its symmetry, rationality, precision, measurable distance, order and the central presence of a beautifully crafted, clean public square. There is only one thing missing — ‘the people’.

This picture of the ideal city is haunting as a paradox of achievement; architecture and the urban plan are privileged here to the extent that living beings capable of bringing disorder into it are simply imagined out. While the image of an ideal city from the 15th century might seem temporally and geographically remote to our contemporary surroundings, I observed the similarities of world view in our landscape that idealise enlightenment positivisms to this day.

A look at the master plan of Baghdad by Constantinos Doxiadis, who was incidentally also the chief architect and planner for the city of Islamabad, induces a sense of dread at the assembly line distribution of buildings. Extreme order stands out in the image. This desire for order in various developing cities of the global south – particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, shortly after independence from colonial rule – reveals modernist imaginaries of control, that pay homage to various visualities in the Italian ‘ideal city’ painting.

While these plans are careful not to spell out the removal of the poor outright, it is hard to believe that cities with such large populations of urban poor could be rebranded otherwise.

One of the ideals that stands out as common in the master plans from the 1950s onwards across South Asia, is the desire to remove the urban poor as an eyesore on public space. While these plans are careful not to spell out the removal of the poor outright, it is hard to believe that cities with such large populations of urban poor could be rebranded otherwise. The CDA’s aggressive removal of the katchi abadi in Islamabad signals expanding urban development, aspiring to align itself with the global rhetoric of world cities. The anonymity of the urban slum, teeming with unregistered residents is presented as the undesirable and irrational – sometimes religious, at other times terrorist – ‘unknown’. This dark unknown poses a threat to the desirable order of the bright ideal city; an ideal city sold and consumed as an imaginary of progress by government agencies, aspiring political leaders, the wealthy, and often also the poor, residents of urban Pakistan. But stepping back a bit, the purpose of this essay is not to point out the callous displacement of the poor but rather the world view that denigrates spaces which are “unplanned” (or not centrally controlled), “chaotic” (or self ordered), “donkey track” (or non-linear) — spaces typically occupied by the urban poor.

The colonisation of South Asia altered our world view and understanding of space. Today, this transformed world view can be mined by reading our cities like palimpsests, defining the way we think about ideal ‘public space’. It can be suggested, that the foundations of our contemporary world view were laid during the Great Enlightenment of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries (though peaking during this time, the roots of the Enlightenment go back to the Renaissance in Europe) and brought to our collective imaginations via British colonial rule. Reason, individualism and scientific objectivity defined the new ground upon which thinkers, cultural producers and governments stood; an age of ‘light’ as opposed to the ‘darkness’ of the Middle Ages.

The Plague which devastated Europe in a fragment of the 14th century, contributed heavily to this sweeping essentialism that made the Middle Ages synonymous with darkness — a judgment that simplistically summarised a thousand-year-long period of history. It can be argued that the European Enlightenment gained popular support by playing up its opposition to the ‘dark’ Middle Ages (a stance of order against disorder, rationality against the irrational, control against chaos) and ultimately influenced many future movements, including Liberal Modernism in the newly independent states of South Asia.

Rewind a little less to a post-independence landscape where echoes of the urban renewal movements from America, (laden with enlightenment values) were palpable in the plans for new South Asian cities. American experts were contracted by the young southern States to draw master plans to differentiate these rising cities from their colonial pasts (in India this would include a separation from the architectures of Mughal cities). It is ironic that a celebration of independence from colonial rule did not include independence from a foreign value system.

The ‘Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020’ made by the City Government during mayor Mustafa Kamal’s tenure (2007), also shared a vision of “transforming Karachi into a world city." While many of the goals in this plan are good directions to move towards, the desire to brand oneself like a world city comes with the pitfalls of superficial reforms that privilege specific publics.

Ravi Sundaram in his book, Pirate Modernity, talks about the traces of the Enlightenment bias found in these urban master planning projects. Le Corbusier (the French-Swiss architect who designed Chandigarh), for example, is noted to dislike the “non-rational rhythm of the old city which he contemptuously calls the ‘donkey track’ view of urban life”. Further in the text, Sundaram shares historian and critic, Anthony Vidler’s, argument that “modern urbanism has always been haunted by Enlightenment fears of “dark space,” which is seen as a repository of superstition, non-reason and the breakdown of civility.”

Sundaram shares a fascinating excerpt about Jawaharlal Nehru’s invitation to the Ford Foundation and Albert Mayer to design the 1962 master plan for Delhi. At an architecture seminar in Delhi at the National Academy of Art, he voices a personal dislike for traditional Hindu temples saying:

"I just can’t stand them. Why? I do not know I cannot explain that, but they are oppressive, they suppress my spirit. They do not allow me to rise, they keep me down. The dark corridors — I like the sun and air and not dark corridors."

It was no surprise that Delhi’s master plan, which echoed regionalist American ‘model cities’, tried to order the chaotic urban landscape with infrastructure; controlling the flows of people along technocratic hierarchies. That Enlightenment ideals have endured all across South Asia even after the end of colonisation, and that master planning exercises for various cities in Pakistan have shared similar aspirations, demands scrutiny.

In the 21st century, enlightenment ideals of light, rationality and order are folded into the global branding of the (successful) metropolis as a ‘world city’. The urban landscapes of Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai establish a benchmark for these cities. These cities are not only prosperous — they look a certain way, that defines them as successful in the world. They have specific surfaces and materiality, designated public spaces and office parks, high security, and international starchitects vying to design landmark buildings for a globally branded skyline. Most significantly, these cities are planned and controlled.

The ‘Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020’ made by the City Government during mayor Mustafa Kamal’s tenure (2007), also shared a vision of “transforming Karachi into a world city.” While many of the goals in this plan are good directions to move towards, the desire to brand oneself like a world city comes with the pitfalls of superficial reforms that privilege specific publics. Take flyovers in Karachi for example; while they make commutes from Karachi’s rich suburbs to areas of work across the city much faster, they enable ‘flying’ over large swathes of marginalised neighbourhoods without the uncomfortable interface with the poor. The poor seldom benefit from such organising infrastructure projects, their neighbourhoods literally bypassed often to create smooth traffic for others.

Laurent Gayer talks about this in his recent book Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, pointing to the flyovers and underpasses initiated by the city government as a kind of dream of modernity for a select population:

"Besides reinforcing feelings of alienation among the residents of what increasingly resemble neighbourhoods of exile, these megaprojects involve the demolition of lower-income housing and the displacement of already disenfranchised populations on a massive scale (the construction of the Lyari Expressway thus required the displacement of 24,000 families)."

Not dissimilar to Nehru’s desire for light, these dreams of modernity – of desiring the ideal world city – point to a city ideal only for select publics. The urban poor who rely upon informal infrastructures for housing and livelihood often benefit the least from grand master plans. Karachi’s Strategic Development Plan 2020 points out that world cities are, “well governed, managed, and planned” and “characterised by minimal poverty and slums.” Similar sentiments in Islamabad resulted in the conviction that removing the I-11 slum was the right thing to do for the city.

Everyday structures in public space – the suburban park, the gated mall, the sterilised roundabout, the securitised university – form part of the landscape of control. No example is insignificant because it reveals the logic of its use and the mindset of its publics. I observe that the degree of control in public space is proportional to the amount of privilege in the given area of the city. The rapidly expanding real estate developments of the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) in Karachi (also run by military personnel), reveal anxieties of control in public space in almost every structure in their elite suburbs. A popular public park in the DHA displays a huge sign with so many orders of conduct it’s almost comic:

• Political and religious conversations and gatherings are prohibited inside the park

• Visitors are requested to wear appropriate dress inside the park

• Park does not allow weapons, private security guards, pets, children cycling

• Trash must be discarded in provided bins

• You are not allowed to pick flowers in the park

• You are not allowed to play cricket in the park

• Playing is not allowed in the park

• Smoking is not allowed in the park

• Dogs are not allowed in the park

• We would like your cooperation to maintain the beauty of the park

As if signage were not enough, the DHA also boasts a surveillance mechanism to provide security and protection from – what is described in the DHA newsletter as – “unforeseen situations” for its most fragile, valued publics. Security as an infrastructural tool for controlling the chaotic city is something I’ll go into further detail in another essay but for now, take a look at the image from one of the DHA’s newsletters to its residents.

The desire for order in the ideal city, or the threat of disorder, is often managed by securitising and sanitising the ‘public’ sphere; policing in the process all kinds of informal activities and unruly publics, and dividing the urban into quantifiable categories. One can project that this anxiety about public space is a psychological fallout from the Enlightenment, seeded in South Asia by the British, and nurtured by the desires of fragile nations for technocratic policies of control. Removing certain publics (slums) in Islamabad is one overt manifestation of the state’s impulse to manage public space; but each of us is complicit in maintaining this world view in countless other ways we barely notice.

The question is not, ‘what is the city but the people’, but whether ‘the people’ can even imagine a different kind of city.

An ignorant military dictator and his equally misguided ministers first forced the Forest Department to increase forest cover in the advent of the 1960s. Since the survival rates of local saplings were as low as 15 per cent, the eucalyptus – imported from Australia and not fed upon by any subcontinental animal – was favoured; thus starting the practice of destroying forest cover with wholesale plantations of water-guzzling eucalyptuses.

Towns expanded, chewing up what was once forest and farmland. Large tracts of well-forested land were cleared of trees hundreds of years old, and were replaced by new roads and newly laid out parks. Hills that were once clad with pine trees, but had since been denuded due to erosion control post-Partition, were generously carpeted with eucalyptuses. When the old intercity road, once passing under tunnels of acacia, neem, pipal and shisham, was widened, the old trees were cut and replaced with eucalyptus trees. By the late 1970s, eucalyptus was seen from Sost, on the Chinese border, to Jiwani on the Balochistan seaboard, and from Nagarparkar in Sindh to the hills of Bajaur and Swat. Yet, no one connected the drying up of springs to the introduction of the ever-thirsty tree.

Research in the 1990s by the Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology, Faisalabad, laid bare the hydrologic properties of the eucalyptus. We are now aware of how it siphons water from our dwindling aquifer, yet nothing has changed for the forest departments: they continue to promote this invidious species. To top it all off, unsurprisingly, every new canal dug in Pakistan is faithfully lined with eucalyptus.

Photo by Salman Rashid

We were still raucously singing the eucalyptus for its hardiness and fast growth when the next poison was imposed upon us in Islamabad. The paper mulberry, imported from China, was planted in mass, and has blighted the capital with its notorious high yield of allergens —asthma aggravation and hay fever run rampant today.

In the early 1990s, a general duty bureaucrat masquerading as a horticulturist induced the Plague of the Palm Tree to Lahore. Though indigenous to the land, it was an ill-advised plantation, which began on Main Boulevard, Gulberg, where spreading mango trees were chopped down and replaced with date palms.

Thereafter, there was no looking back. Palm trees of every description have since replaced ancient trees. Along brand new roadways and highways, we see newly planted palms: dwarfed, middling and large. Roads in upcoming housing communities are lined with palm trees, and their parks filled either with palms or imported shrubbery. This has occurred not just in cities under the control of an absent-minded bureaucracy, but across the country where ordinary people believe the government can do no wrong.

As we cut down more of our native trees, our bird-life suffers. Lahore was home to 170 different species of birds in 1970. Today only 60 remain.

But, our administrators were not done yet. Conocarpus was discovered, a species of mangrove imported from Central and South America. This new magic tree virtually grows by the metre every day, and is company for the palm. Conocarpus, having existed in Pakistan for less than 10 years, is known to be a major producer of allergens; it will not be long before a nationwide attack of allergies and asthma makes itself known.

Trees are carbon sinks; the more biomass they have, the greater the amount of carbon they sequester. The more carbon sequestered, the less of it remains in the atmosphere to contribute to warming. What we are doing in Pakistan is destroying our indigenous trees of huge biomass, and replacing them with aesthetically pleasing but, ultimately, useless palm trees and shrubs — our carbon emissions roam freely in the atmosphere.

As we cut down more native trees, our birdlife suffers. Lahore was home to a 170 different species of birds in 1970. Today only 60 remain. The foolish obsession of our masters with imported species of trees and shrubbery is making a green desert of the country.

Perhaps no other nation suffers from the same lack of hindsight as Pakistanis do, for even when we have learned the perils of imported trees, we remain negligent of ecology | File Photo

Moreover, Pakistan is a country of eight months of searing sunshine. We need shade, and we should not have anyone else tell us that. Yet we are replacing all our indigenous trees, which provide shade, with shade-less imported palms and shrubs.

The bane of the issue is the general duty ignorant bureaucrat masquerading as a horticulturist, whilst having no understanding of the word 'ecology', and considering it beneath him to be advised by experts. The babu panders to an equally foolish political master. Unwilling to learn, this unholy cabal is destroying the future of Pakistan.

Perhaps no other nation suffers from the same lack of hindsight as Pakistanis do, for even when we have learned the perils of imported trees, we remain negligent of ecology. In another few years, shade will no longer exist to shelter us from the growing heat. Our souls will wither away from the absence of birdsong; we will live in hell.

The tall eucalyptus, swaying in the breeze delighted the ignorant powerful. They knew only of trees; they had no understanding of the ecology.

It’s been almost seven years since the Mumbai attacks — seven years without improved relations between Pakistan and India, and no end in sight. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has at least publicly announced a visit to Pakistan, though, something his predecessor never managed to do. Repairing ties with Pakistan has not been a high priority for Modi, who reaches out to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif when regional leaders gather. To remain aloof during these events would frost relations more than Modi would like, and New Delhi gets annoyed when outsiders – especially Washington – worry that ties between India and Pakistan may be spiralling downward. So there are photo opportunities and telephone calls, carefully choreographed so as not to seem too bilateral, after which not much happens, except firing across the Kashmir divide.

The ceasefire across the Line of Control, arranged a year after the Twin Peaks crisis sparked by the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, is long gone. Whatever was left of the ceasefire eroded badly in late 2012. Modi and other senior Indian officials have warned that firing on Indian soldiers and civilians would be returned many times over. This deterrent message hasn’t stopped the firing, which now approximates pre-Twin Peaks levels.

Pakistan doesn’t like to be ignored by India, but stratagems employed to increase its leverage have backfired badly

After the Indian Parliament attack and subsequent war scare, bilateral relations stabilised with the ceasefire and a few confidence-building and nuclear-risk reduction measures. In contrast, after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, India-Pakistan relations have flatlined. Even before Modi’s arrival, sentiment in New Delhi congealed that improved relations with Pakistan was a pipe dream as long as army headquarters in Rawalpindi remained unwilling. And if Rawalpindi wasn’t on board, it made no sense to undertake diplomatic exertions with Islamabad. New Delhi has since gone about its business without much regard for Pakistan. And business has been good.

Pakistani strategists have long held that New Delhi needs to engage its nuclear-armed neighbour; New Delhi is demonstrating otherwise. Serious diplomatic re-engagement is not beyond reach, but Pakistan’s means of suasion have diminished, along with its domestic health. India doesn’t need Pakistan’s market, and it intends to reach the markets of Central Asia though Iran. Pakistan’s economy, on the other hand, needs the Indian market.

Pakistan doesn’t like to be ignored by India, but stratagems employed to increase its leverage have backfired badly. Before barriers were constructed along the Kashmir divide, it was easy to get India’s attention (and everyone else’s) by stoking insurgency in the valley. These tactics have hurt Pakistan more than India. The nuclear competition also draws attention, but too much attention to Pakistan’s build-up is unwanted. And besides, weapons that are not usable do not provide leverage. Attacks on iconic Indian targets by violent extremist groups also draw attention, but not the kind that helps Pakistan. Ineffectual judicial proceedings against Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi are an enduring embarrassment. He has become the symbol of Rawalpindi’s past misdeeds and the most ostensible reason for New Delhi’s current disinterest.

The meeting between Sharif and Modi at Ufa provided an opening for sustained high-level dialogue. But meetings can be postponed when they are deemed ill-timed. The most obvious place to start improving bilateral relations and to keep high-level meetings on track is to reinstitute the ceasefire along the Kashmir divide. The 2003 ceasefire was initiated by General Pervez Musharraf. The initiative this time must come from Modi. Stopping this fire would be a boon to non-combatants and would clarify that Rawalpindi and Islamabad are on the same page — at least on this matter. Only then might more pages be turned.

This was originally published in Herald's August 2015 issue. To read more, subscribe to Herald's print edition.

A political set-up devoid of legitimacy invites military coups. In a politically unstable country like Pakistan, when the government’s legitimacy is lost or challenged, a military coup becomes a real possibility — this is clearly exemplified by the two previous military coups. General Ziaul Haq staged the 1977 coup when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government was facing a challenge to its legitimacy, from a coalition of groups belonging to the religious right alleging rigging in the general elections. General (retd) Pervez Musharraf and his generals staged their coup when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was facing allegations of rigging in parliamentary elections. In a subsequent case of intervention by the army, Musharraf was removed from power by his subordinate generals when the street protests spearheaded by the lawyers’ community brought into focus the question of Musharraf’s legitimacy — a question as old as the regime itself.

Every regime in the post-Musharraf period has faced a challenge to its legitimacy. This includes the administration headed by Musharraf himself. On the onset, he hardly faced political resistance of any significance to his rule; nevertheless, the legal and constitutional legitimacy of his rule were seriously questioned from the very start. The Lawyers’ Movement, starting in 2007, only brought this issue of legal and constitutional legitimacy to the forefront.

Legitimacy can be defined as a public perception that a ruler or a government has the right and authority to govern the country — politically, legally and morally. Losing legitimacy means a situation where the government or the ruler becomes devoid, in public perception, of the right to rule the country on account of any illegality or corruption.

The Asif Ali Zardari-led Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government was elected through a democratic electoral process which was legally, politically and morally legitimate. Nevertheless, a situation was created where the PPP was forced, through a campaign of media trials and succession of court judgments, to face allegations of financial corruption of its leaders and the situation escalated to created a sense of mistrust in the government.

The Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PMLN) government came into power in 2013 in an atmosphere where allegations of corruption were a constant. Something new and more powerful was required, and came when the leading opposition party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), pushed for rolling back the whole political system on the basis of alleged rigging in the 2013 election. The protests that brought these allegations into the limelight came and went away, with the Sharif government surviving the onslaught. However, the protests left lingering doubts in the public imagination about the credibility of parliamentary elections. These doubts could be left to hibernate, while the power struggle continued in the corridors of power in Islamabad, and revived at an appropriate time to act as the Sword of Damocles over the political system.

The Pakistani people have passively witnessed similar developments unfold so often in the past that they can make educated guesses regarding what the next act will entail, and who the main actors will be. The actors are constant: political parties of the religious right spearheading campaigns to raise the legitimacy question, the recently mobilised retired generals and ex-servicemen similarly advancing this campaign, and the media acting as another proxy in this game played out by not-so-hidden hands.

A regime change is not the only objective pursued; sometimes forcing the incumbent government to change the unpalatable policy becomes the intended objective. Prime Minister Sharif, for example, came into power promising to normalise relations with India. Immediately before coming into power he appeared so soft on India that he even suggested close cultural affinity between the two neighbouring countries become the basis of a close friendship. In the first year of his rule, he remained determined to pursue his policy of friendly relations with India. But all this changed as the government seemed to reel under the pressure of PTI's dharna. As tension in Islamabad peaked in the first week of September 2014, Sharif went to the United Nations General Assembly in New York and delivered a hard-hitting speech against India, mentioning the word Kashmir more often than he mentioned the word Pakistan.

Zardari was even more vulnerable: after his alleged corruption scandals became the source of trouble for his government, he was forced to completely abdicate his control over the foreign policy-making process. Military governments are not completely immune to this treacherous environment in Islamabad either. After Musharraf’s legitimacy came into question in the wake of the Lawyers’ Movement, he was completely cut off from his military commanders and increasingly became dependent on Pakistani intelligence services.

The reason why Pakistani rulers’ legitimacy is brought into question so easily is that none of the governments in the country—with the exception of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government—have been broad-based. They start with a narrow base, leaving the field open for people for whom treachery is a job requirement, to woo the alienated section of society, and turn them against the government.

If the legitimacy of governments can be brought into question so easily, then why has there been no coup since October 1999, even though two civilian governments — under Zardari and Sharif — since then have faced serious challenges? The answer has to do with the privileged position that the army enjoys in this political set-up, which came into being as a result of the parliamentary elections in 2008. This political system has acted as a shock absorber for the army against the shocks coming from outside and within the country.

After eight suicide attacks against military installations in Rawalpindi, in the wake of the July 2007 Lal Masjid operation and after an avalanche of criticisms coming from the West, accusing the army and its intelligence agencies of playing a double game in dealing with militant groups and the Taliban, the army generals seemed to have realised that democracy is best suited to meet their requirements. I had the privilege of meeting one of these gentlemen in Rawalpindi in those days, and I vividly recall one of his quotes on the situation: “Democracy has become a security imperative”. I believe democracy is still a security imperative, but apparently they see no harm in manipulating this same democracy to serve their own interests.

Disturbingly, a parallel process of challenging the legitimacy of the state is underway in Pakistan. While this process may be as old as the state itself, this time the legitimacy of the state has been brought into question by forces which are armed to the teeth. It is not the strength of the political system that is keeping away the manipulative army generals from staging a coup again, it is the fact that the army generals don’t see the iron hand of the state machinery as sufficient to keep the state intact. They need democracy as a safety valve and additional glue to keep the state together. However, whether democracy will continue to remain a security imperative is difficult to predict.

Every year, I go trekking and camping in the Northern Areas of Pakistan with a group of a few hundred college kids. After roughing it for a week and a bottom-destroying 30-hour bus ride back, we always stop at a fast-food joint in Islamabad for a meal. Naturally, after a week outdoors – and that bus ride – the young folks are not looking their best. A bunch of raccoons stuffed into a sack of dirt and given a good shake would be the closest description of the group, looks-wise. And yet, every year without fail, the sight of these bedraggled creatures (its quite difficult to tell the men and women apart after a bus ride on the Karakoram Highway) out in the open, attracts dozens of local young men, who pile into their cars, pump up the music and cruise around the parking lot for hours until our group finally departs. As a student of human behavior, I have always found this alpha male display curious and fascinating.

There are the usual sociocultural explanations: Islamabad, it has been suggested, is only marginally more amusing than being in ones grave. Islamabad residents jump to defend their city and suggest that the culprits are 'the Pindi boyz'. The blame game then shifts to politicians, the army and often to the doctrine of strategic depth. The usual theory about a repressed, religious society and hidden currents of sexual frustration also get taken out for a walk. All these are only partial explanations at best. Having watched the boyz and their stunt driving displays over the years, I have noted that while it may start off as a display of low-IQ manliness (is there another kind?), the reason it goes on for hours is that the boyz are clearly having a lot of FUN. Not sexual frustration, just rip-roaring, laughing hysterically and thumping each other on the head FUN. And that leads me to another line of thought.

You see there are various kinds of and ways of having fun. The younger generation in the middle class is particularly addicted to acquisitive fun, sometimes sternly called consumerism, where you buy something and have fun with it. Video game platforms, smartphones, TV, clothes all fall in this category and there is no doubt that these are all a lot of fun. But, of course, the fun fades away (usually quite rapidly) and then you have to buy the next fun thing and keep China busy.

The younger generation in the middle class is particularly addicted to acquisitive fun, sometimes sternly called consumerism, where you buy something and have fun with it.

There is another class of fun which takes place in, and requires, public spaces. The street where you play cricket under street lights, your favorite walk through a bazaar (or these days, a mall), your school or college campus, the beach, a trek through the mountains are all examples of this. The odd thing about this sort of fun is that it seems to have a much longer half-life — it doesn’t fade as rapidly with use. Mall rats are not always avid shoppers, they just hang out enjoy it there. I have been going to the same park for ages and I still enjoy it; every time I see the neighborhood kids having their all-night, iftar-to-sehri, tape-ball cricket match, I am always tempted. At my university, I regularly see alumni wandering in with no purpose other than to nostalgically enjoy a public space with which they were familiar. There is a generation of Indians and Pakistani (increasingly elderly but still with us) who really long for a walkabout in Anarkali Bazaar or some mohallas in Delhi and pretend they want to visit relatives and friends. They really just want to hang out in a space which they enjoyed and had fun in.

Nor is this primarily a nostalgic exercise for those with extremities dangling in graves. There is the famous question-and-answer sequence that defines teenage life: Q. Where did you go? A. Out. Q. What did you do? Ans. Ummm... Nothing. The life (and pain) of any local market is the groups of young people (primarily men) who stand around doing nothing and having fun. In Lahore, over late-night weekends, the major roads are death traps because the motorcycle wheelie boys are doing their thing (PTI is making major inroads into this constituency, I notice). My annoyance at this freelance stunt riding is tempered by the fact that I used to do the same thing with my group of friends. We used bicycles and stuck to our neighborhood but the aimless fun of wandering the streets is an undeniable similarity. The particular activity (wheelies, cricket, shopping, etc) is changeable and (it seems to me) dispensable. What is fun is just hanging out in public. It is the public space that forms the undertone of the memory. It seems, therefore, that worthwhile investment for local governments – fun-wise – would be to have more hangout spaces and to encourage and enable more people, particularly women and the elderly, to enjoy them. Basically just go out, hang out and if necessary, do nothing.

In the spring of 1997, I was doing a fellowship on Pak-India conflict resolution with a Washington DC-based think tank. As a fellow, I was paired with an Indian intellectual from the world of academia who now teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. In those days, Washington DC was abuzz with theories and policy recommendations on how to reduce Pak-India tensions. Everybody was an expert on South Asia and everybody who mattered had something to say on the issue.

Every day, the management of the think tank used to arrange meetings for us with the officials at the US State Department, Pentagon and American experts on South Asia. One morning, when we reached the office, we were informed that we had a meeting with a senior US diplomat, Robert Oakley (the famous US Ambassador renowned in Pakistan as the American Viceroy), who was then serving in senior capacity at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University of the US Army.

During a two-hour long session, Oakley told us that the security establishment in Washington (including himself) has been urging the Pakistani ruling elite (including politicians, army generals and part of the civil service) to put the face of their country on their western border. “We have been telling them that the situation on Pakistan’s eastern border is constant; both threats and opportunities are constant, but the situation on the country’s western border is evolving and new threats and opportunities are arising with each passing day,” he told us. Remember that the post-911 forced U-turn or re-orientation of the Pakistani state was still four years away. And, in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, everybody thought that the core issue facing the nation was nothing else than how to counter the Indian threat. Nuclear jingoism was the norm.

During the conversation, both my Indian colleague and I suggested that this shift could lead to a deep ideological conflict in Pakistani society. Anti-India feelings are deeply entrenched in the country’s society and state structures are dominated by those who espouse these feelings.

As acrimonious ideological debate came to dominate the security debate increasingly over the years, we seem to have completely ignored the economic opportunities emerging in our neighbouring country

Oakley was speaking in the context of economic opportunities opening up after the energy-rich Central Asian states achieved their independence from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Stabilisation of Afghanistan was not seen as an unrealistic objective as it seems now. So, Oakley told us that both threats and opportunities on Pakistan’s western borders were immense, whereas the situation on Pakistan’s eastern border would remain “constant for the foreseeable future”. However, in those days, he was not the only one in Washington who wanted Pakistan to devote its military resources as its contribution to bring stability to part of south-west and central Asia and refrain from wasting these resources on tensions with India. Nonetheless, I found Oakley to be the most articulate proponent of this idea. “Putting your face on the western border” meant that Pakistan would act as a stabilising force in south-west and Central Asia, militarily, and would benefit from the economic bonanza that a newly independent Central Asian republic would seem to generate.

The idea made perfect sense: Pakistan could provide military stability to Central Asia, where the newly independent republics not only lacked the military resources but were facing internal security threat from the resurgence of Islamic extremists/militant groups. In return, these republics could meet the energy requirements of Pakistan’s industrial expansion and could serve as a market for its products.

Events in the next 10 years took place at a pace much faster than expected. Oakley’s words proved to be partially correct. New opportunities and threats continued to arise on the western border. But the situation on the eastern border hardly remained constant. While the post-911 US invasion of Afghanistan put Pakistan under continuous pressure to reorient its military priorities towards a more active role in south-west Asia, military tensions with India in post-911 period were putting equal pressure on Pakistani military strategists to keep their plans oriented towards the eastern border.

In the last 10 to 15 years, besides two large-scale military mobilisations, Pakistan and India have remained engaged in dangerous military brinkmanship without proper attention being paid to these developments at the public level in either country. The period starting with the year 2011 was especially dangerous as the militaries in both countries started exchanging dangerous signals. This year, Indian armed forces conducted two military exercises close to the Pakistan border, with the aim of reducing time of mobilising Indian strike forces from three weeks to 48 hours, “in order to punish Pakistan after mass casualty attack on an Indian city or strategic installation by Pakistan-based militant groups”. Two years later, Pakistan integrated its tactical nukes into its war plans and repeatedly flight-tested its delivery system.

We, as a nation, are far from clear as to what our prime security interests are. In Pakistan, ideological confusion always reflects in debates on security matters

The two military mobilisations by India (in 2002 and 2008), following terrorist attacks on its mainland, brought lessons for the military planners of the two countries. For India, it was clear that before the sluggish Indian army could mobilise for operation, Pakistan could always mobilise the international public opinion in its favour to deter India from undertaking any adventure. So the only option left for the frustrated Indian military planner was to reduce the mobilisation time of their strike crops. On the other hand, two counter mobilisations proved financially costly for Pakistan and that forced Pakistan to integrate nukes into its war plans.

However, there is one part of Oakley’s statement that did prove correct. The events did force Pakistan to change its focus towards its western border. But this was not done as neatly as Oakley predicted or proposed. This was done at a considerable cost to the social and political stability of Pakistani society. Pakistan Armed Forces' activities on the western border, in the post-911 period - no matter how essential they were at the strategic level - were seen by a segment of society to be carried out at the behest of western powers and, therefore, suspect. In fact, during this period, even the Pakistani army’s activities to counter the India threat came under suspicion - at least among the intelligentsia - despite the fact that this part of our security policy was based on broad support in the pre-911 society.

Not surprisingly, this period saw an emergence of deep ideological conflicts reflecting on the question of whether we should focus on our western or eastern border. In the event, the conflicting ideological camps kept on issuing divergent mandates to the army. While the religious right wanted the armed forces to remain oriented towards its anti-India mission, the liberal left wanted the army to focus on the threat on our western border.

Since 1998, there are clear signs of the security establishment pushing for this kind of reorientation as General Jehangir Karamat was the first army chief who openly advocated that the country’s prime security threat emanates from its internal situation that has linkages across its western borders. The events in the following years also pushed us in this direction. But the conflict is far from resolved. We, as a nation, are far from clear as to what our prime security interests are. In Pakistan, ideological confusion always reflects on the debate on security matters.

Besides, as acrimonious ideological debate came to dominate the security debate increasingly over the years, we seem to have completely ignored the economic opportunities emerging in our neighbouring country. Proving Oakley completely wrong is the economic miracle India produced in its society since the 1990s, which, undoubtedly, is a major development on Pakistan’s eastern border, carrying with it immense opportunities. We seem to be completely missing this opportunity on account of our purely militaristic perspective of our security problems. To avail this opportunity, we don’t have to change the location of face of our country. We only have to soften our face.