| 22 November 2004 | Monday | 09 Shawwal 1425 |
Tearful interlude
For all practical purposes most of Jammu and Kashmir is part of India or, to be politically correct, it is a disputed part of India. As things stand little is likely to change on this front in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, India is keen to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, preferably with veto powers. In other words it wants to become a member of the body whose resolutions, such as the one on Kashmir, it considers effete and useless.
Moreover, its insistence on not signing the NPT will, if it is allowed into the apex club, make India the only nuclear power in that august body which hasn't accepted the nuclear doctrine of the Big Five.
While these are major issues to ponder, there are other bigger factors that have come into play that could determine the way ahead not just for India for the world community at large.
Suppose India is admitted as a permanent member in a recast Security Council, with or without veto powers. What would be its role in the new world architecture? According to Professor Perry Anderson, renowned British historian and Marxist scholar, who was in Delhi earlier this month, India would very likely do what the other countries that deal with the United States do: fall in line.
His reasoning: "India is engaged in military operations in Nepal as part of America's campaign to crush a Maoist rebellion against an unpopular monarch. This is not dissimilar to what the US did in Guatemala earlier."
To be sure, Prof. Anderson was not picking on India. In fact, he described the country as one of the two major Asian powers that had the potential to challenge American hegemony in the region, the other being China. However, given the exigencies of real politik, this was most unlikely to happen, according to the good professor.
"The fact is that the United Nations is united around the United States. Check it out for yourselves," he urged the audience at the packed convocation hall of Delhi University.
To help them understand what he was driving at, Prof. Anderson listed the 15 countries that were members of the Security Council when they endorsed Resolution 8117 on June 6, 2004, which legitimized the US-installed government of Iyad Allawi in Iraq.
The UK, France, Algeria, Pakistan, China, Germany, the Russian Federation, Chile, Spain, Brazil, Romania, Angola and Benin spoke in unison with the United States. The representative of the Philippines, council president for the month, spoke in his national capacity.
The list of the nations endorsing the US writ was a stark statement rooted in the simple fact of their complicity with the world's most powerful country. The anti-war movement of Europe thus melted away, so what if millions of people came out on the streets to oppose their governments' support for the US-led war.
They suddenly stood neutralized by the complicity in the resolution of Germany and France, who had once seemed to offer at least a notional resistance to the Anglo-Saxon way wardness in the Middle East.
Even Spain, which threw up a left-leaning liberal government in an election that surprised everyone, mainly because of its promise to oppose the occupation of Iraq, voted in unison with the rest.
Brazil and Chile that formed the backbone of a popular Latin American movement against American hegemony at home and abroad were silenced into submission. China, Russia and, of course, Pakistan, despite a raging anti-American sentiment across the country, were co-opted. So here is a scary picture of helplessness of the people and collusion of their governments with American wilfulness.
There were strong voices raised at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in January against the American war plans in Iraq. But WSF is scarcely equipped to carry the battle forward.
Ideologically, the WSF opposes the neo-liberal policies of the Bush administration and yet, somehow, it has failed to grasp the need for a campaign against neo-imperialism, says the Prof Anderson.
Indeed, on reflection it does look quite obvious that many of the WSF peace activists who had gathered in Mumbai were so riveted to their Iraq campaign that they seemed quite willing to overlook the excesses of the Clinton administration in Yugoslavia.
However, as Prof. Anderson argued, there was little to choose between collective bombing by Nato in Yugoslavia and a very nearly solo campaign of unacceptable destruction of a sovereign country like Iraq.
Another professorial insight concerned the issue of human rights as a malleable idea that usually serves the interest of the strong against the weak. For example, while most juridical systems acknowledge the right to inheritance as a fundamental right, the same is not true for the right to employment. He said that it was time now to replace the discourse of human rights with that of human needs.
According to Prof Anderson, it is this notion of human rights, which was used by the Nato war machinery to override national sovereignty in the Balkans, and by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, to perpetuate their socio-political and economic dominance.
This "military humanism", a phrase used previously by Professor Noam Chomsky to deride the Bush doctrine, signifies nothing but the quest for global hegemony. And yet the ideas were formulated during the tenure of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, and aggressively pursued by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and settled into a seemingly routine fact of politics during the Clinton years.
Now if this is the big picture, and American hegemony is indeed complete and solid over large areas of the globe, as Prof. Anderson indicates it does, then what are we discussing in and about Kashmir?
It was Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed who had concluded in his direct, abrasive way during his visit to New Delhi. "Now even you are a blue-eyed boy of the United States," he told the Indian interlocutors. "So why don't we become friends?" An answer to that question is overdue, but perhaps too embarrassing for anyone to attempt it honestly.
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Iftikhar Geelani's woes never seem to abate. The respected journalist, an expert on Kashmir and Pakistan affairs, was offloaded last week from a plane by Indian immigration officials when he was about to leave for Colombo. Geelani, who was incarcerated by the previous government for nine months on false charges of espionage, was told this time by officials of the supposedly new administration that he could not travel for the peace conference in Colombo because his passport was slightly damaged.
Just as he was beginning to believe the officials, a bigger surprise was coming. After the plane had left, he was told that he was offloaded because of a miscommunication, and that he was now free to travel - on the same supposedly damaged passport.
Tearful interlude
Following Eid prayers at a Clifton mosque, the imam raised his hands in "dua". The congregation followed. Halfway through, there was a pause and then over the loudspeaker came the sound of sobs and hiccups. The imam had obviously broken down. For the next five minutes as everyone kept their hands raised in "dua", there was only the crying of the imam to be heard.
Emotion has to be respected. But grief and penance are extremely personal matters and should not be turned into a public spectacle. Then, instead of understanding and sympathy, they stand in danger of drawing snide remarks. During the tearful interlude, one member of the congregation was heard saying: "The imam should either cry or end the dua so that we can disperse and greet one another."
Someone later said some other mosque imams had also taken to breaking down in the middle of supplication. There is a TV presenter too who in his religious programmes seeks to play with the emotions of the more gullible of his viewers. Is that a new twist to the growing religiosity that is replacing the spirit of our religion?
Art seminar
The Pakistani art market has never been livelier. Apart from discerning art lovers who have a good eye for paintings and sculptures, the nouve riche have also started to invest in art, with the result that works of art are becoming prohibitively expensive. The number of art galleries has also risen over the years. But what one still misses is a critical evaluation of artwork by scholars.
However, Karachians may no longer complain about the absence of an academic discourse on art in the city. The national section of the Paris-based International Art Critics Association is holding a two-day seminar which would, to quote the organizers, put "Pakistan on the map of art scholarship."
The seminar will be attended by speakers from Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, Italy, Canada and Pakistan. The AICA president, Henry Hughes, will also take part in the two-day seminar which will begin on Nov 25.
On the first day of the seminar the participants will discuss "Art criticism and nation", and "Strategies in art criticism". The second day will see speakers discuss "Urban energies" and "Globalization of art - inclusive or exclusive?"
Much in a name
Karachi has not one, not two but three colonies named after Delhi - the Delhi Mercantile Society, Dilli Saudagaran Society and Dehli Colony. There is Bombay Town in North Nazimabad, which has houses mainly occupied by people who migrated from the coastal areas near Mumbai, mainly those from Kokan.
But then there is also a Kokan Society, and not too far from there is C.P. Berar Society, but far away from both is Bihar Colony, which can be classified as a shanty town. There are entrepreneurs who have named their businesses after their home towns.
Pilibhit Oil Depot in Liaquatabad is a case in point. Ambala Sweet Meat Mart, on Burnes Road and in Saddar, was doing fairly well. The owners moved to London, where they have done very well. People who go from Ambala to the UK are surprised to learn that the business moved from their city to London via Karachi.
English Boot House and English Book House were owned by an Englishman during the Raj on what was until recently Elphinstone Street. When he couldn't resist the call of his motherland, he sold the two outlets to a Karachian, who in 1947 sold the outlets to two migrants from India. English Book House closed down, but English Boot House remains very much in business. And this trait of naming cities after the migrants' home towns in not limited to the subcontinent. There's St Petersburg in the US and London in Ontario, Canada.
Murder of a son
A former colleague reports how a bereaved father feels about the murder of his son: I have only met him a couple of times, but the one thing that strikes you about this activist is that he speaks his mind quite undeterred and candid words seem to never leave his side.
Today I called him up for a different reason. I called him to offer my condolences on the death of his young son, Faraz Ahmed, a 22-year-old university student whose badly tortured body was found on Nov 10 behind father Baseer Naveed's office.
"It was so badly mutilated I couldn't recognize my own son," Naveed says. He took his son's body to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre and "was there for three hours begging and pleading with the doctors to carry out a post-mortem, but they refused.
So I took him to Edhi for ghusl as the body was fast decomposing. Even there I asked the police to send a medico-legal officer to perform an autopsy but they did nothing. Finally we had his funeral prayers and buried him only to be told that the body will be exhumed and an autopsy performed. My family won't allow this."
In a voice sapped of all life and energy, this activist who wears quite a few hats - a journalist and controller at an FM radio - says: "What's the point of a post mortem in any case? We know who the murderers are and we know the motive."
Chop-chop
Foreign fast-food chains have been here now for nearly a decade. Every year, if not every month, new restaurants with fancy French, Italian and Mexican names crop up and find a clientele.
However, it is the chicken tikka and "khata khat" or "thaka thuk" eateries that have virtually taken over the city. People in once quiet residential localities now seem to have given up the battle to save their environs and got used to the things that go with it - the unending chop-chop sound well beyond midnight, the smoke that goes up and finds its way into apartments and homes, the ceaseless honking by customers, and of course the ubiquitous beggars, besides the traffic mess.
What is amazing is the rapidity with which a small eatery that begins in a small room with a few chairs turns into a full-fledged restaurant. It begins with a few chairs placed on the footpath. Then the stretch of the sidewalk occupied by the chairs increases. Soon they spill over to the road, and a full-fledged and busy restaurant comes into being.
In some cases, the management's employ uniformed security men with guns to ensure discipline, because these eateries are also patronized by the rougher lot who flare up at the slightest provocation.
All of these shops do not pay tax; some do, but cheat, because no cash memo is ever presented to the customer. So how much a barbecue shop earns is a matter of opinion, and the question is settled with the tax people on a mutually beneficial basis.
The city nazim should consider taxing such shops according to the number of chairs and tables placed on footpaths and roads. This would perhaps give the city administration some more money, though it would hardly serve to discourage encroachments - eating and serving being such a profitable hobby and business. Indeed, Karachi may soon earn the dubious distinction of being called a city of restaurants.
Daily trouble
A colleague reports that dropping her children to school on Sharae Faisal is a tough exercise that she has to go through every day. There is a cluster of schools in the area and traffic jams are a daily occurrence. Driving through the service lane is also difficult because a major chunk of the potholed road is occupied by cars parked on both sides.
According to her, bus drivers are least bothered about the safety of the children they bring to school, as they drop them on the main road and expect them to cross what is the one of the busiest arteries in the city. Getting late for work, parents don't venture into side lanes and, instead, park their cars on the main road, causing traffic coming from the airport to slow down.
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A flier came with the daily newspapers on one of the Eid holidays. It was from a catering service and advertised several "packages" or menus. The packages included "Seekh kabab (live)", "Kachori (live)" and "Chicken boti tikka (live)". Figure out the "live" bit yourself. It has the virtue at least of being graphic.
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