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Interstate conflict: India-Pakistan syndrome!: COMMENT
KATHMANDU: The expression ‘Free media’ used in the acronym SAFMA (South Asian Free Media Association) sounded quite a bit ironical in Kathmandu, venue of SAFMA-II, and the capital city of a country under a state of emergency ever since the last year’s wholesale grisly massacre of the royal family. And yet the bona fides of the underlying urge and thrust towards a free press could be hardly questioned.
SAFMA provided the largest single forum for a selected group of media men from Saarc countries to mix and interact freely in a club-like atmosphere of relative bonhomie and comradeship despite the unrelieved baggage of inter-state disharmony and conflict of the past and the present.
While Bhutan and the Maldives stay happily outside the conflictual mainstream, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka each have had a bone to pick with India. Pakistan finds itself caught in a state of perpetual crises ranging from tense stand-offs to war-like manoeuvres and actual wars. Who is more to blame for the endless wrangling and confrontation? In all honesty, both. Perhaps India more than Pakistan for failing to live up to its status as the largest in the menage and the large-heartedness commensurate with its size.
What goes without saying is that together the two have held the peace and progress of the whole subcontinent hostage to their unremitting in-feuding. That was, more or less, the consensus emerging from the animated discussion among the participants of the working group on Inter-state conflict as a part of the SAFMA seminar. Regardless of the one being more at fault than the other, in provoking and perpetuating tensions and conflicts, neither was behaving exactly as a responsible state and a constitutionally established entity whose existential reality was beyond question.
In spite of over half a century of existence as two independent states no matter how troubled (and ruptured in case of Pakistan) neither had, as yet, managed to break out of its pre-partition communal mindset. In other words, each tended to behave much in the same manner and spirit as the inexorably in- feuding Hindu-Muslim communities through the closing episode of the freedom-struggle.
Neither would seem to have attained, as yet, the status of full statehood, as India and Pakistan, untainted by the communal animus and fears underlying the demand for partition and its ultimate materialization in the emergence of two independent states. To carry the argument to its logical conclusion, it could be said that while the reality of partition remains absolute, the acceptance of its end-result in the political re-definition and physical reconfiguration of the subcontinent could still be debated. Or else why the mantra of Akhund Bharat be still chanted. And not just by a few fundamentalist madcaps on one side of the divide, but by people in positions of responsibility. No names.
Not until India and Pakistan break themselves out of their pre-partition mindset, therefore, would they start conducting themselves as two sovereign nation-states rather than as two communally-driven communities. My Indian friends would react aggressively to my formulation, questioning the attainment of the status of full statehood by the two neighbours in terms of the pre-partition — Hindu-pani, Muslim-pani syndrome. The ‘two-nation’ theory, they would go on to contend, was ‘dead’ once and for all. I wish it were alive rather than dead to make the two people and their respective governments and states behave as constituents of two nation-states in the fullest sense of the term. Alive, in the post-partition context, the two-nation theory might well have served as ballast to the consolidation of India and Pakistan as two responsible nation-states — each with its own store to mind.
A closer look at the India-Pakistan wars should suffice to underscore the point that these had been little more than communal in-feuding, at their worst, with armour, artillery and air force. Except for the 1971 war, India diabolically planned and waged to tear Pakistan’s right shoulder apart from its main body politic, none had a defined political objective. The Kashmir war of 1947-1948 might have been an escalation of the communal frenzy and carnage accompanying the partition. India and Pakistan both had been itching to prove their superior military prowess against the other.
That was besides the rationale of the princely state integrating with Pakistan on the same grounds of geographical contiguity and religious majorities forming the basis of partition itself.
The 1965 war might have been a continuation of communal politics by other means. The way it originated in the mudflats of the Rann of Kutch and allowed to escalate to the level of a general war made no military sense. It had been real chaos of half-baked strategies and sporadic, stray actions divided between ceasefire and truce in the Rann under British pressure. Almost simultaneously with the Kutch truce, general mobilization and massing of troops was ordered all along the western border, and demobilization and return of troops to their normal, peace-time locations soon afterwards. That was in July. Hardly a month later, the ceasefire line (CFL, now LoC) was activated and followed by the Indian invasion of Pakistan on Sept 6.
The six-year gap between the 1965 and the 1971 wars had been a period of intensive preparation on both sides for the decisive final round. However, much of the military focus in Pakistan shifted from the external Indian threat to internal political strife, leading to the imposition of martial law in March 1969, all the way to the post-1970 election crises; military crackdown and bitter civil war in East Pakistan; war with India and the fall of Dhaka. Indira Gandhi pronounced proudly the death of the two-nation theory once and for all. Death of the two- nation theory or the return of the communal virus with a vengeance? The question keeps staring us.
The quarter century between the Simla Agreement (1972) and 1998 found the two countries engaged feverishly in weaponizing their nuclear programmes and achieving the desired end with the successful detonations of their devices in May 1998. The big bangs came at the height of the armed freedom struggle in Kashmir dating back to 1989. India labelled the freedom fight as terrorism and blamed Pakistan for its cross-border’ forays in support of the terrorists.
In 1999, the two countries found themselves on the verge of war in the wake of the Kargil episode. Although war was averted, the threat of war continued to stare both in the face. India enlarged Pakistan’s ‘cross border’ intervention in Kashmir to integrate it with the US war on international terrorism in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks in New York and Washington (DC).
India’s had been a clever manoeuvre to help it rub shoulders with America in a campaign based on a seemingly shared objective. What remains to be seen is that who stands more to gain from the shared campaign in the end. Indian leadership, civil and military, must decide for themselves, whether their present stand on international terrorism is more out of their unqualified support for America or out of spite for Pakistan. America used Afghanistan to terminate the Taliban regime and terror there and then to establish a firm foothold in India and Pakistan.
Almost everyone in the group on inter-state conflict agreed that America was there to stay ‘for keeps’. And that too not only out of its own volition but virtually at the invitation both of India and Pakistan. A return to the halcyon days of colonialism. Isn’t that?
The virtue of self-respect: FRIDAY FEATURE
SELF-respect has been defined by philosophers as conducting oneself in a dignified manner that asserts a claim to deference. In Islam, it is considered an ethical virtue of a very high order. Devoid of it, an individual, or an entire nation is likely to be treated lightly and of little consequence.
It was this strong notion of self-respect that had prompted Hazrat Umar to pick up courage and voice his objection to the terms of the Treaty of Hudaibya. As recorded by Imam Bokhari, Hazrat Umar addressed the holy Prophet (peace be upon him) inquiringly: “O, Messenger of Allah! are we not on the right path and the heathens in the wrong?” The reply came: “Of course, this is the position.” Hazrat Umar’s further query was: “Then why should we suffer religious ignominy?” The final reply that closed all controversy was: “I am a Prophet of God and cannot act even slightly against His command.”
The point sought to be driven home is that, ordinarily in circumstances other than Divine or religious edict, self-respect should not be compromised. Now that there is no possibility of any one being in direct communion with the Creator, the only course open to us, individually and collectively, is to follow what the Quran prescribes and what the Prophet’s opinions and practices suggest.
Let us turn to the Quran first. The occasion of the revelation being quoted below was that the defection of the Hypocrites, who were purely time-serving adherents of Islam, was the real cause of the reverse suffered by the Muslims in the battle of Uhad in the third year of the Prophet’s migration to Madinah; and that, after the reverse, some of the Jewish tribes, with whom there was a treaty of mutual help, started supporting the idolators of Makkah by furnishing the information and ‘intelligence.’
Allah made this observation: “Those who choose disbelievers for their friends instead of believers, look for respectability and power (‘Izzat’) at their hands although respectability and power pertain to Allah” (3:139).
The notion of self-respect should not be confused with pride and arrogance. In fact, the Quran is highly critical of haughtiness and vanity. It advises the Muslims not to take much notice of vainglorious, self-complacent and conceited persons, as “it is better to pass by with dignity, ignoring the display of vanity and senseless play and ostentation” (25:72).
What a splendid tradition of uncompromising self-respect as individuals and also as community has been left for us by the Prophet and his close companions can be gleaned from various events recorded meticulously by the Prophet’s biographers and historians. One of these, reported by Ibne Hisham, relates to the ‘battle of the ditch (Khandaq), during a defensive war fought by the Madinite Muslims under the Prophet’s personal guidance, against the alliance of heathen tribes, aided by the Jews, who had besieged Madinah shortly after the reverses suffered by the Muslims at Uhud.
Negotiations with the various tribes were underway to dissuade some of them from ganging up against the Muslims and one powerful tribe, that of Ghaffan, was inclined to withdraw from the combined opposition if the Madinites agreed to part with a third of the total annual produce of dates cultivated on a commercial scale in the orchards of that city. This was taken as an affront by the newly converted Madinites, as it amounted to paying tribute to the superior enemy and accepting their own inferior position. The offer was disdainfully spurned, even though its acceptance would have been dictated by expediency and national interest.
What is worth noting is not so much the turning down of this offer but the spirit of self-respect as a people who, in the words of the Quran, were “raised as the best nation for mankind’ (3:110). The exact words spoken by them were: “O, Messenger of God! while we worshipped idols and were ignorant of God, they did not dare make such a demand from us, and now that God has made us respectable by turning us into Muslims, we swear that we shall never agree to giving them our goods — nor concede such terms of an agreement with them.” They being in the right, God showed them the way. The strategy of digging ditches to obstruct the enemy’s approach dawned on them.
Even after the Prophet was no more among them, his companions during the rule of the ‘pious Caliphs’, showed exemplary courage of conviction and held their heads high, aware of the indelible mark of respectability that God had stamped upon them. They never hesitated from speaking fearlessly and on equal terms with the bejewelled and bedecked holders of high offices in the Byzantine and Sassanid imperial courts of their times whenever they had to meet them as emissaries of nascent Islam. History is replete with such instances.
According to various observations attributed to the Prophet in respect of vindicating one’s self-respect and self-esteem, the highest place goes to the person who does not turn his back to his adversary on the battlefield while fighting for a sacred cause. In fact, the Quran prohibits “turning one’s back in a battle with disbelievers unless manoeuvring for the fight or for joining a company.” The Quran warns the person who fails to so defend his honour on the battlefield with the punishment of “habitation in hell — a hapless journey’s end” (8.15-16).
Away from the battle front, the holy Prophet is reported to have accorded the highest place to the person who fears none but God while adopting an honourable and respectable stance in front of a ruthless ruler when the latter does, or commands to do, something patently unfair and unjust. (Ibne Maaja).
According to an authentic saying of the Prophet, if one is conscious of the ethical value of self-respect and wants to maintain one’s dignified mien, he should not run helter-skelter to the mosque for joining the congregational prayer. This shows how self-respect was considered extremely important by the Prophet, even in such cases as going in a hurry for the prayer. (recorded by Bukhari in the chapter on Salat).
Beggary has been condemned by the Quran and also by the prophet as this is the basest and the most degrading case of human indignity and disrespect. While the Quran vilifies “those who beg from men with importunity, clasping and grasping them” (2:273), the Prophet is reported (by Abu Daud in connection with Zakat) to have said that “one who keeps on begging and begging will arise on the Day of Judgment with a face bereft of even a single patch of flesh.”
The holy Prophet used to impress upon his companions that “the person who asks God for self-respect, God grants him this virtue and one who prays for freedom from want, his prayer too is answered by God.”
Let us learn from the past: CITYSCAPES
THE English engineer who in 1915 built Bunder Road — later renamed M.A. Jinnah Road — was charged with being “frivolous and spendthrift” as he constructed too wide a road. The engineer insisted that a wide road led to an important port of the subcontinent. He, however, lost his job.
At the time of the partition of the subcontinent, a large number of Muslims migrating from India came and settled in this city. Naturally enough, massive refugee population gave birth to a great many problems which became even more acute because the resources were scant. Mai Kolachi’s fishing village is now a metropolis of more than 12 million residents, bulging at the seams.
Since 1947, many political leaders and civil and military bureaucrats have tried to resolve the ever-growing problems of the city and its residents. While most heartfelt efforts bore fruit, they were, sadly, belated. The official residence of the first elected mayor of Karachi, Jamshed Nasarwanji, has formally been converted into the officers’ mess of a law- enforcement agency. One hopes that such a total disregard for the architectural heritage of the city stems from ignorance on the part of the authorities and not contempt for Karachi.
In the early 1960s, the then administrator of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation allowed construction of some four hundred ground plus one shops around the 10-acre city zoo. Even the 36-inch water main passing nearby was also encroached upon. The zoo subsequently became the centre of commercial activity, housing one of the busiest auto repair markets as well as several other businesses. The poor owners of shops and offices sold these properties for millions of rupees yet paid rentals of less than few hundred a month to the city. The area residents and the animals at the zoo suffer equally from noise and pollution.
Originally a fisherman’s village, Karachi has historically been dependent on natural and drilled wells to meet its water requirements. It was in 1916 that the first water supply conduit was built from Dummlottee wells. In the early 1960s, the chairman of the Karachi Development Authority, Naseeruddin Humayoun, was chargesheeted by the then governor of West Pakistan, Nawab of Kalabagh, for having developed a 240mgd water supply scheme for Karachi.
During 1997-98 a number of houses were allowed to be built over the Dumlottee conduit passing through Gulshan-i-Iqbal.
During the same period more than 600 shops were also constructed over a storm water drain in North Karachi. The construction of the Wonder Builders’ Commercial plaza, over Sui gas reservation on Rashid Minhas Road near the NIPA roundabout, is another example of callousness on the part of the KDA and the building control authority.
For the past 40-odd years, Karachi has largely been an orphaned city, mostly governed by those who have little love for or stake in the city. Hardly any son or daughter of this city has shown an inclination to pass an opportunity of making a quick buck even if that meant causing great harm to Karachi.
A former commissioner of Karachi stated in Dec 1999 that the administration would not allow unchecked putting up of hoardings in the city after June 2000. The city’s top bureaucrat may not have realized at that time the quantum of money involved in the scam of acquiring permission and subleasing a hoarding on the city’s main roads or intersections.
That sum, depending upon the location, may range from the official annual payment of a couple of thousand rupees to more than a million from the ultimate client renting the billboard.
The commissioner also put a ban on the production of black plastic bags blamed for causing cancer. The production of black plastic bags, however, continues unmitigated.
The construction of highrise buildings may have stopped in other areas but their construction continues unabated in civic areas under cantonment boards. A cantonment executive officer of Malir was famous for his method for approval of building plans. People claim that he used to measure the size of plans by running the palm of his hand over the building plans to work out price.
While the so-called city elite is in two minds about condemning or condoning the Sindh Building Control Ordinance (Amendment) 2001, regularizing the so-called 268 illegal buildings in the city, Platinum Shopping Centre near the drive-in cinema on Rashid Minhas Road and many other high-rise buildings allowed in the city by the Cantonment executive officers are being constructed at this very moment.
Even the builders say that the most unfortunate thing about cantonment boards is that they do not even have the basic technical capacity to vet the plans submitted by the builders.
Speaking of the so-called elite and concerned citizens, the credit for commercialization and subsequent construction of an American fast-food restaurant over a residential plot at the corner of Tariq Road goes to the spouse of the lady who heads the NGO struggling to keep Karachi’s environment kosher! Even the service road has been closed to facilitate the parking of the restaurant.
Criminals put to sword, crime still at large: DATELINE MULTAN
THE Punjab Governor, Lt-Gen Khalid Maqbool (retired), chose to pay surprise raids to various government departments without pause from the day he assumed office. Several departments, including district and tehsil revenue offices, figured high on his register. However, the only victims, suspended on public complaints, were low-ranked officials.
The current project which Mr Maqbool is up to is stepping up the rate of wholesale killing in the name of ‘encounters’. Reports have been pouring in from various parts of the province on display of shooting. Of late, Multan was leading with the highest number of such incidents. As many as six alleged dacoits fell prey to four shootouts with police in five days. In all the encounters, the news about the killed alleged dacoits had published in local dailies a day or two before the ‘encounter’. For instance, Zubair alias Dr Asim was arrested along with two accomplices a night before his ‘elimination’ from a public call office in the Nawan Shehar area.
News of the arrest of Awais from Kabirwala had appeared in an Urdu daily two days before his death in a police ‘encounter’. In Ameerabad, police shot dead the younger brother of the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan district president and his companions. Reports about raids on Multan SSP President Mirza Luqman’s residence also appeared in the local press few days before his brother fell prey to a shootout.
If one recalls, staged police ‘encounters’ are not a new phenomena, especially in the Punjab, as Mian Shahbaz Sharif let loose the police to wipe out criminals through assuming the role of both judge and jury.
‘Criminals’ were put to sword but not the crime. What emanated from the action were the faces of corrupt police officials like Abid boxer in the provincial capital and a bunch of LMGs (lootmar groups) in Multan for conducting staged police encounters.
Unfortunately, the groups, being the blue-eyed of the higher-ups, enjoyed the support by getting lucrative postings. Pocketing their purses beyond capacity, most of the officials left the services while the remaining joined the race of encounters.
Investigations and general reputation of the shootout-lovers suggest the officials sometimes patronize the criminals since they know each and every thing about them.
The Bahauddin Zakariya University (BZU) has recently started a three-year BSc honours programme.
Hundreds of students rushed to ensure their places in the session only to meet rumours that the university would award them the degree of two-year BSc course.
The students started meetings and chalked out a protest plan. The other day they were gathered when the vice-chancellor, Prof Dr Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry, arrived there and assured them that no such proposal was under consideration.
He told them that the university management was planning to set up a separate computer centre for the under graduate students.
The district revenue officer, in a meeting the other day, expressed concerns over the alarming downfall in revenues of the district and directed the officials of the department to nab ‘big’ defaulters instead of targeting only the small farmers.
He also learnt the officials of irrigation department charge water rate (abiana) heavily from small growers and at less ratio from the big farmers.
The matter was brought into his notice by a revenue officer who said the irrigation department patwaris had imposed Rs2,500 to a grower while Rs250 to another for same area and cultivation.
As many as seven people live, on an average, in single-room houses in Multan which constitute 40 per cent of its inhabitants.
This was disclosed in a seminar by a local population welfare officer.
He told the audience that total area of Multan district was 3,720 square kilometres and some 837 people live in a square kilometre. Multan ranked 17th in literacy rate and 20th in population among the 34 districts of the Punjab, he concluded.
From England with dreams: LITERARY ROUND-UP
THE TWAIN probably won’t ever meet. This world may become the global village the West wants it to become, national economies may be taken over by multinational corporations, and all of us from one end of the North to the nether tip of the South and across may start dressing and eating alike in the sweep of what Najiba Arif called the ‘disposable culture’, it is reassuring the frail ghost of the East will continue to haunt the clay houses and dark streets of our heart. The spirit of the Orient refuses to submit. Like Albert Camus’ rebel we discover new reasons to say No. Beaten flat we remain undefeated.
Love, the source of all existence and beauty and joy, and the deepest of human sorrows, had its birth on this side of the Suez. And it is we who freed it from its biological moorings raising it to the sublime level of devotion and worship. This was Prof Ehsan Akbar’s claim. He was discussing Arshad Latif’s first collection of verse, Chashma-i-Khwab Se, the poet had brought from England where he is permanently settled.
The function was arranged by Ghazanfar Hashmi at the Pakistan Academy of Letters on Wednesday evening. The West, he said, dealt with the functional and purposive aspect of love, its biology so to say. Iftikhar Arif, who would pick no quarrel for nothing, begged to disagree. Love, he thought, was not the East’s exclusive domain. It was a basic human trait that was universal. That was wholly true but the professor should have been shown the havoc done to our national demography by the fertile property of our sublime ethereal love. We have nearly quadrupled since our emergence; lusty, carnal, libidinous West has been issue-less like abstinent monks. Somebody has to look into this mystery. In a similar vein, as if the influence of the West were some kind of a lethal poison, Aisha Masood praised Arshad Latif for retaining his Eastern purity.
Anjum Khaleeq, who lamented the low priority Urdu had in the educational system and how students and teachers alike lacked the keenness to acquire a taste for its beautiful poetry, few among whom could recite a verse in the manner poetical lines are pronounced, was happy to note Urdu had found other climes to flourish. He praised Arshad’s verse for its simple diction that made little recourse to heavy Persian and Arabic expressions, yet even his prose poems had a lyrical beauty.
Hameed Shahid pointed to the serious thought content of the collection and Arshad’s easy rapport with the ghazal temper. But it was Najiba Arif who stole the show with her very thoughtful appreciation of the poet’s first presentation. She surveyed the present trends and attitudes that were manifesting in the cultural facets of life, as seen in the growing stress on the transient. This was breaking up the intimacy of relationships and deepening the mist of alienation. In the realm of poetry form more than content was in vogue and poetry had descended to the level of verbal jugglery. Not Arshad Latif’s as it is a vehicle of his thought. He can discard embellishments because he has things to say that he says with lyrical ease. Not that he has new themes to introduce but that the familiar is subjected to a different sensibility that is quite his own.
Iftikhar Arif agreed with Najiba’s emphasis on content, which no form could do without. Both thought and emotion mattered in verse. But as to influences he disagreed with an earlier speaker who thought one could remain aloof to what was happening around. He cited the example of Akhter Ahsen, poet, psychiatrist and philosopher, who is settled in America for the last thirty years or more and whose English poetry — Manhunt in the Desert and the latest Ganesh, the Broken and Misshapen — has aroused much interest in Europe and North America, as examples of a happy confluence of the two sensibilities that are thought to be incompatible. Very few people now remember Akhter Ahsen now but he was a great, I would say, diabolical influence on the literary scene of Rawalpindi in the 50s when we were all very poor and very happy as Hemingway said of his days in the Forties. As for the denunciation of some aspects of Western culture Iftikhar Arif said one found its most convincing critics among its own intellectuals.
Zia Jallandhri summing up the review of Arshad Latif’s work pointed to its apolitical nature as it held no brief for any manifesto or programme of social reform. Its frame did not recognize a good verse. Good poetry was the result of deep thought and hard labour, the veteran poet said.
IMKAAN, a literary organization of Rawalpindi organized a reference in memory of Parveen Shakir who died in a road accident in December 1994. That year she was the third among the bold and the beautiful who made our life the poorer with their loss.
Dr Afzal Iqbal and Ahmad Daud were the other two, lost in the fog of those cold mornings of Islamabad. Parveen Shakir being a woman and an attractive person with the halo of romance that goes with good looks, had an opportune share of the limelight that in the early Seventies TV was giving to emerging talents. The literary community too was just then opening up after the suffocative ‘development decade’, and Perveen Shakir, as perhaps the first whiff of fresh air was eagerly lifted as a symbol of the hopes and yearnings which that eventful period had aroused. This response was not a wit less deserved. Though youthful and romantic in essence, her verse had the artistic restraint and elegance of a cultured mind. She wasn’t youth babbling forth sentimental froth. Her lavish sensuousness had dignity and a delicacy that one can hone only with a tranquil mind. It blended the traditional and the new on a mild fire. For the young poets she became the role model and for the old a worthy protege to look forward to. For one so fascinated by words Perveen Shakir’s was a silent soliloquy, her last respect to the “sanctity of words”.
