| January 12, 2002 | Saturday | Shawwal 27, 1422 |
Of Nawabs and Nightingales: LAHORE LITERARY SCENE
A touching farewell: DIPLOMATIC ENCLAVE
WITH no worthwhile literary function to attend in the city, I kept looking for reading material, evidently books, to keep myself busy during the week. In the process, I laid my hands on one published in India. It is written by Moosa Raza, a Muslim with a first class from the Madras University, who qualified in 1960 for the Indian Administrative Service, the successor of the Indian Civil Service in post-partition India.
NO it’s not Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, or Madonna or even Alicia Keys. Nor a prince or a princess and certainly not George W Bush. Going by the coverage in the American print and electronic media it’s no one other than Donald Rumsfled, the American defence secretary. The man who gives a daily briefing at the Pentagon, the man whose net worth, declared by himself prior to joining the Bush cabinet, is a cool $61 million. Like US Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condolezza Rice and Treasury secretary Paul O’ Neill, Mr Rumsfeld has long-standing connections with big business in the US, especially with the oil and gas industry. And it’s probably no coincidence that we are seeing such increased US involvement in Central Asia and Afghanistan, notwithstanding the aftermath of September 11. What is being implied here is that the US involvement is not going to die down once a stable Afghan government is in place and it’s here in this region for the long haul this time.
Well, back to Mr Rumsfeld. His press briefings can be seen live on any given day in Pakistan on CNN, BBC or Fox News. Yes, he does seem to have a sense of humour and seems to be in command — what else would you be if you were in charge of the world’s largest military machine — of what he’s talking about. However, how many of you who have seen these press briefings have ever seen or heard any of the journalists present asking him, or the military top brass who accompany him, tough questions? Some of the questions are so inane and innocent, and whatever the secretary or the generals/admirals tell the journalists is taken at such face value that you could be mistaken into thinking that a rehearsed show for kiddies is going on. It’s as if you can predict what the next question and the response will be if someone conscientious (not only morally but also professionally) happens to ask a question concerning civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Part of the reason why the American media — which as we all are now aware isn’t all that unbiased, objective or even compassionate — appreciates Mr Rumsfeld is his apparent frankness, he seems to tell it like it is, and because early on the campaign, in October last, he made it a point to say: “Let’s hear it for the essential daily briefing, however hollow and empty it might be. We’ll do it.” The shrewd politician that he is, he must have known that this would only stand to increase his and his government’s image in the eyes of the American public since the flow of information at such press conferences would always be tightly managed by the Pentagon.
Other than the daily briefings, Mr Rumsfeld has carried on with the propaganda by regularly giving live interviews or making impromptu remarks. Let’s now analyse how the US media has judged this man.
A news report by CNN called him “a virtual rock star.” A Wall Street Journal essay — by TV critic Claudia Rosett, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board — described Rumsfeld as “a gent who in our country’s hour of need had turned out to be one (of) the classiest acts on camera... The basic source of Mr Rumsfeld’s charm is that he talks straight. He doesn’t expend his energy on spin ...” In an earlier article, she had described the man as “[I]n print and on the air, we’ve been hearing about Don Rumsfeld, sex symbol, the new hunk of home-front airtime.”
Ms Rosett, like many in her profession, seems to have dispensed with her objectivity and sense of judgment. Speaking in a minimalist or blunt style might seem as if someone is talking straight but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this person isn’t trying to pass off a certain slanted view of things, which is precisely what propaganda is. One doesn’t have to look far in Pakistan for exactly this sort of style since our president, too, is much loved, quite ironically, by most liberals for his straight-talking attitude. However, that doesn’t mean that he isn’t putting a spin on what he’s saying, it’s just that some people are too enamoured of him, like Ms Rosett is of Mr Rumsfeld, that they can see only good.
The Wall Street Journal (a newspaper known for its political conservatism and right-wing leanings) piece then goes a bit overboard in saying that the briefings, beamed out live have become “the best news show on television.”
Several weeks ago, a University of New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, released a report calculating that 3,767 Afghan civilians had been killed by the bombing between Oct 7 and Dec 10. The report was ignored by major US media outlets. It was only in Britain, whose print media is less monolithic than America’s, that the report received slightly more attention with the Guardian, as one would expect, writing on it.
The comment by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on Mr Rumsfeld’s new found status as the TV matinee idol, also alluded to by George W Bush this week as he went to the Pentagon to sign a defence spending bill worth $318 billion, ends by saying: “As wars go, we are supposed to understand, this has been a noble one. Great men like Donald Rumsfeld have told us so. However, from a more informed and less credulous vantage point, buying such claims might seem absurd. But not funny like a Jerry Lewis movie.” — OMAR R QURAISHI
He served as collector and district magistrate in some districts of Gujarat and later rose to be a federal secretary. The book is a compendium of his memoirs and experiences during service. Titled, Of Nawabs And Nightingales, it is so absorbing that I went through its 200 pages in one sitting probably because I had never read better English by an Indian bureaucrat.
The author starts with his first posting in Surat in West India. See how he describes the place:
“It was a sleepy old town, not even struggling to come out of its colonial past. Visitors to the city were still shown the museum the Hope Bridge and the English factory as the most important tourist spots. The more inquisitive of them were taken to the English cemetery whose gravestones dating back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century stood as lonely monuments to the glory of the East India Company and the British Empire...”
Further on he writes: “One of these monuments of the British Empire that had survived the trauma of Independence was the Surat Gymkhana... It had a galvanized tin roof and a false ceiling made of teak. The card room was panelled at places, with cartoon prints from the Punch and The Tatler, on the walls... There must have been a bar but it had become a victim of the prohibition law. With the onset of twilight, the club’s gloomy interior was lit by low wattage bulbs hung by long wires from the high ceiling. The old pre-World War vintage fans moved with whines and groans, stirring the tepid air reluctantly. A few bridge and rummy tables with men assembled on the former and ladies at the latter... For a young civilian and a bachelor to boot, the Gymkhana was the only place to be in once the sun had set. Considering that the alternative was the museum or the cemetery, the Gymkhana had its compensations.”
The book is so interesting that I would like to quote passage after passage from it. However, I’ll just narrate an incident from the book to show the problems faced by a Muslim district officer serving in India.
In 1969, soon after the bloody communal riots in Ahmedabad, Moosa Raza was informed that tension between Hindus and Muslims was building up in a town in his jurisdiction as someone had broken the head of the Hanuman idol and thrown it on a nearby rubble heap. Naturally, the local Muslims were suspected. Although short of police force, he went to the town where mobs had collected with lighted torches to burn down houses belonging to the Muslims. He addressed them through a mike and promised that he would stay in the town till the person responsible for the dastardly act was caught and punished.
Initially, the mob raised slogans against him for being a Muslim but later accepted his appeal and dispersed. Soon more policemen arrived in the town and after inquiries it was found that the culprit was a young Hindu who had fallen in love with a high caste girl and sought the help of Hanumanji to secure her hand. He confessed that the idol had promised him in his dream that he would help him marry her. When the girl was married to someone else he felt that he had been fouled by Hanumanji. He, therefore, went to the temple when there was no one around and smashed the head of the idol.
MUSTANSAR Husain Tarar has written three excellent novels in Urdu, one even fetching him a lucrative award, besides several newspaper columns and a long play, but somehow he is dubbed a travelogue writer, though it is not the readers’ fault. After all, what can they do and think about him when he dishes out a travelogue every second day? I don’t think it was too long ago when he produced Nepal Nagri, followed by Shamshal Be-misal and has now come up with Chitral Dastaan. (There may have been another one in between which I missed). But permit me to say in loud and clear terms that Chitral Dastaan has disappointed me. I’ll tell you why.
My misfortune is that I have read most of Mustansar’s earlier travelogues. Now I can easily forget those about his wanderings in the west as he has been blamed for incorporating libidinous matter in them. Since far from any such diversions, I care little for what he wrote at the time. My appreciation of his writings has been confined to what he has written about his wanderings in the Northern Areas where he could only make love to glaciers and the like. There is a sting of adventure in those stories which is lacking in Chitral Dastaan.
I still appreciate the smooth flow in his narrative, the exquisite description of scenic beauty in an inimitable style but what I want to read about is his hanging by a rope bridge with a gushing river below rising to wet his jeans, his jumping over deep and wide crevices his honeymoon with the glaciers, and his search every morning for a ‘potty palace.’ Now if you find a commode at every resting place during your trip to Gilgit, Chitral and Kafiristan how is it different from a family picnic to Jallo Park or, a little further up, to Chhange Manga? Going during a military regime in the country to the Northern Areas as a guest of a top military officer amounts to making fun of all that Mustansar has indulged in earlier. He is basically a vagabond, as he has himself admitted more than once, and I want to remember him as one. I hate to see him as a caring husband and an over-concerned loving father as he appears in Chitral Dastaan. He is probably getting old.
I HAVE to make another clarification. Last week, while commenting on the contents of Payam Shahjahanpuri’s weekly Taqazay, I wrote that Azhar Javed was missing. The fact is that he was right there but I missed him because his writeup was not at its usual place. Since the editor considered his column to be of utmost importance as it pertained to the possibility of a war between India and Pakistan, he placed it under Aaina-i-Watan, a column he normally writes himself.
THE AMBASSADOR of Greece, Dimitri Loundras, is leaving Pakistan after a tenure of four-and-a-half years. He was to leave earlier but circumstances required the presence of a senior diplomat who knew the country and its officials well, so he stayed on. He has been dined out by most of his friends, both local and expatriate, each time receiving many compliments for his role in preserving and improving bilateral ties between the two countries. One of the nicer dinner parties, hosted in his honour, was the one by the ambassador of the Republic of Turkey and Mrs Ali Vural Oktem.
People in general often have the misconception that since Greece and Turkey have political differences, it must follow that the envoys of the two countries remain at loggerheads with one another. Not true. There may be exceptions to the rule, but as has been the case in Pakistan, the ambassadors usually remain on good terms and in a number of cases have been good friends.
This friendship was recognized by the host in his after-dinner speech in which he praised the Greek envoy for being a good diplomat, with an intriguing vision of future relations between Turkey and Greece. “I wish him and his wife, Christine who, unfortunately, is not with us tonight, a happy and prosperous life,” he said. He concluded with a touch of humour by asking his guests to raise their glasses in a toast. “Pakistan Zindabad”, “Turkey Zindabad” and when everyone said, “Greece Zindabad”, he said “No”. Then amid the silence that followed he added, “Greece Paindabad!”
The guest of honour thanked the ambassador and his wife for hosting a dinner in which many of his friends were present and said he not only valued their friendship, but also treasured the memories of his tenure in Pakistan, which had been a very fruitful and rewarding. “I am very happy that I have achieved what I had set out to do viz-a-viz bilateral relations”, he said, adding “it was aptly said that each of you leave something you love, you die a little”.
He concluded by saying that Pakistan was a beautiful country and had the potential of becoming a big tourist attraction and he hoped to be back someday for a visit.
Attending the dinner were envoys from other countries as well, including the European Union, a couple of Turkish nationals serving the UN in senior positions and politicians Salim Saifullah, Abida Hussain, Syed Fakhr Imam and Gohar Ayub. Representing the Foreign Office were senior diplomats Anisuddin Ahmed and Aziz Khan, who is at present the FO spokesman and gets to answer difficult questions while trying to keep his cool. The menu gave guests a chance to partake of Turkish specialties, a rare treat, as there is no Turkish restaurant in Islamabad. All in all, an evening that will surely be added to Dimitri Loundras’s list of good memories.—Diplomatic dispatcher