Age of Reason

GHALIB died somewhere in the middle of the 19th century. I do not remember the exact year but I am positive that it was on February 15 that he was recalled by his Maker. (Now February 15 happens to be a day of considerable importance for me personally). Over-zealous Pakistanis across the country saw to it that we forget all about Ghalib and his verse and his letters.

Denmark is a small country the size of your thumb-nail. Before a witless cartoonist caused all this Hangama with his silly-smart thing, Denmark was known in these parts only for its dairy products and the Danes were known to be nice, friendly people. Not any longer. Today, all inhabitants of that distant country are heretics fit only for being put to the sword. I read in the papers that Pakistan had recalled its ambassador from Copenhagen and that Denmark had closed down its embassy in Islamabad. I do not know where are we headed. Do you? I have read comments by various people cleverer than myself who have advanced various reasons for the nationwide upheaval. Some say the mobs took to the street because they were sick of the President and that the accursed Danish cartoon served only as a catalyst. Others say that the intelligence agencies themselves had engineered the 1947-like rioting. I do not remember much about 1947 but I remember 1977 like it was Yesterday. On April 9 that year, nine people were killed in police firing in a situation created by the Nizam-i-Mustafa zealots. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto lasted until July but I am positive in my mind that it was on April 9 that the army had decided to take over. I also remember that it was on that very day that my dear friend Chaudhary Aitzaz Ahsan decided to quit the Peoples Party in a fit of righteous but suicidal indignation. To return to events closer home, however. There was this young lad who had been among the rioters on February 14. I had seen him very clearly on television. The following day I asked him why had he taken the law into his own hand. You do not know what the kafirs have done? he asked. What had the kafir done?

They had published a blasphemous cartoon.

Where?

In Denmark, the boy replied.

Was the blasphemy committed by one Dane or by all of them?

I don’t know but by one Dane or by all of them, it is all the same. Where is Denmark? I asked him.

I don’t know and it does not matter where the hell is that country, said the boy.

Allright. Do you think we should recall all the Pakistanis living in that country?

I asked.

The boy scratched his head and then replied petulantly: Yes!

You think we should return all aid that the Danes had given us for the earth-quake victims? I persisted.

The boy was clearly stumped but was adamant: better to die than to accept help from the infidels.

Do you know that the cartoon has been reproduced in other countries of the European Union? Do you think we should sever relations will all of them?

By all means, said the boy.

Do you think Pakistan is an island unto itself?

It is not an island, we should turn it into one, spat the boy.

This is no argument, I said.

Matters of faith require no argument, no reason. And let me tell you one thing: I am not ashamed of what I did last Tuesday and should the need arise, I will do it yet again.

But the cars and the motorbikes and other property you destroyed belonged to Pakistani Muslims, I made one last attempt to bring the boy to reason.

Shutup, said the boy and left, brandishing a mean looking stick.

God have mercy on us all, I prayed, as I saw boy receding into the distance.

Do you remember Zaheer Abbas bowling in a World Cup match? Well, I recall one game of the 1983 Cup against England in Manchester. Pakistan lost by seven wickets. Batting first, the Pakistanis made 232 for eight wickets. In response, England hit 233 for seven. Zaheer Abbas bowled a neat little spell of seven overs in which he took one for 26. His victim was Chris Tavare whom he had caught by Waseem Raja for 58. Raja is now a TV commentator. He is very fond of saying, “Pakistan are 30 without a wicket.... India are 67 without a wicket....”

Now, “without a wicket” should mean that the batting side have no wickets left and that they are all out. Hitherto, other commentators have been saying that such and such team is 30, 60 or whatever without loss which means that the batting side have all their wickets intact. But without a wicket?

Celebrating Nero’s feast

P. SAINATH was speaking here last week on the escalating incidence of distress suicides among Indian farmers. Sainath, as you may know, is the author of the hugely popular acerbic and insightful book on the travails of rural India —Everybody Loves a Good Drought. He is these days rural affairs editor of The Hindu, which means he spends about 300 days in a year traversing through far-flung villages, a challenging feat for any caring journalist.

Former premier V. P. Singh, supposed to be clued in on rural issues, took copious notes and rebel writer Arundhati Roy sat riveted to each word of Sainath as he cited fresh data to assail the Indian state’s complicity in the unending tragedy. Thousands of fellow humans are dying, in pointless, avoidable deaths, he lamented.

In the course of his talk, Sainath mentioned Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal’s daughter’s wedding at the Versailles Palace. By an irony, former US president Clinton also arrived in India as Sainath spoke to attend another similarly opulent wedding, that of a relative of his Sikh hotelier friend from New York. Every Indian tycoon and his neighbour indulges these days in similarly sickening merriment as India’s economic reforms, euphemism for neo-liberal prescriptions, tighten their noose on the common man. The media plays up these celebrity pictures with obvious approval, finding plenty of otherwise rare space to give a glimpse of Page Three life to their readers.

Sainath compared these celebrations to a feast once thrown by Roman emperor Nero. Of course Nero did not set fire to Rome as is widely believed, but he picked up his famous (or notorious) fiddle to distract the people away from the raging inferno. It is another matter that in trying to cheer his audience of Roman senators and their hangers-on in the next few days, the wicked emperor used human bodies of slaves as torches to light up the evening sky.

To Sainath the depredations faced by thousands of dying farmers of India present a similar outrage — a relentlessly booming Sensex at the stock exchange and all enveloping misery in the villages. The unending tragedy has prompted an occasional investigation by the print media, but the widely watched electronic version has passed this one by, its attention span with serious issues being quite limited.

Giving one example of the Indian government’s neo-liberal economic thinking, Sainath compared the generous funds available for consumer goods for farmers to the trickier and more expensive offer of loans to the villagers to meet their farming needs.

One set of statistics was admittedly peripheral to the real source of rural trauma but presents a striking sketch of life evolving in India’s villages today. In the heartland of Maharashtra, where the maximum numbers of deaths have occurred among cotton farmers, branded motorcycles are on offer on loan at four per cent interest, without often any need for a down payment till the first instalment is due.

For farm loans, seeds and fertilizers etc. if seen in tandem with the nightmarish uncertainty of the markets for the produce, the rules of lending are far more painful, making the borrowers susceptible to loan sharks.

Typically in these situations where the youthful sons of already indebted farmers are being enticed to buy say motorcycles, where the first petrol station would be 60km away, the incidence of repossession of the vehicles by the lending banks is very high.

The lure of a seemingly free offer would entice any young man smitten by TV ads. The repossession usually ends with the farmer surrendering all or part of the collateral, which could be his wife’s jewellery or a part of his land. For core farm loans the picture is even grimmer.

“It’s a Marie Antoinette kind of economics that this government and the ones before have been pursuing,” Sainath said. “Does anybody remember that we had general elections in 2004 to oppose precisely these policies?”

In the meantime, the flip side of the picture has Lakshmi Mittal occupying centre-stage in most newspapers. Even President Chirac, coming here after eight years, is confronted first thing with a query as though on cue from the cheer leaders of ‘enlightened national interest’, the mantra that drives Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s policies: What is France doing to make it easy for Mr Mittal to become the owner of European steelmaker Arcelor, Chirac was asked.

The deal’s European detractors regard the 18.6 billion euro offer as a hostile takeover bid by the Indian billionaire. The Luxembourg government, the steelmaker’s largest shareholder with a 5.6 per cent stake, has rejected the bid. One of Arcelor’s antecedents was the state-owned French steelmaker Usinor. With 28,000 employees in the country, Arcelor is one of the largest employers in France.

President Chirac told India Today bluntly that “French authorities are concerned about the shareholders and the company...(and) there is room for debate on questions like differences in corporate cultures between Arcelor and Mittal, or the conditions of the bid”.

Yes, we can sniff a bit of racism in attempts to stall Mr Mittal’s plans. But why should anyone shed a tear for the Indian tycoon? Did he or his country sympathize with Kuwait when British premier Margaret Thatcher forced the sheikhdom to return the 21 per cent plus shares the Kuwaiti government had bought in British Petroleum in the mid-1980s?

Willy-nilly the Kuwaiti government was made to cough up the shares for purely non-economic reasons. That incident was not the end of story.

At a political level hostilities against Kuwait were fuelled by western manoeuvres and at one time it was difficult to tell whether Iraq or Saudi Arabia would be the first to invade the emirate. So the lesson for Mr Mittal is very simple. You don’t mess around with racist business cartels. They are too powerful and would show you your place eventually as they did with the powerful Kuwaiti government some years ago.

True Mr Mittal’s financial clout has got the so-called nationalist Indian media rooting for him against Europe’s purported racism. But that, as Sainath would say, pretty much ignores the depredations caused by Mittal’s clones at home.

Oil Minister Jadoon’s joint press conference with India’s Murli Deora was about to end when an Iranian journalist flung an unwieldy one to both. The burden of his question was that enough attention had perhaps not been given to the possibility that Iran might not be ready now to deal with India in the face of New Delhi’s alleged betrayal of Tehran at the IAEA vote. The ministers escaped answering the question partly because it was too long and so they tackled the more innocuous part. But IRNA journalists usually reflect their government’s thinking. And so it could be the case here too. We’ll find out next month.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com,

Karachi sets an example

TENS of thousands of people marched on M.A. Jinnah Road on Thursday in a demonstration organized to protest against the blasphemous cartoons published in some European newspapers.

Karachians deserve praise for the peaceful culmination of the march, particularly when similar demonstrations in Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar had gone berserk with the burning and destruction of public and private property. Several precious lives were also lost in those acts of mob frenzy.

The kind of rage felt among Muslims across the globe is a natural outcome of the highly provocative anti-Islam cartoons published initially by a Denmark newspaper. In Karachi, almost every organization — including the Christian clergy and community — condemned the sacrilege and took part in peaceful demonstrations. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, politicians, women, even stage artistes showed their anger over he publication of the blasphemous sketches. That they all did so peacefully should be appreciated.

Will not violent incidents elsewhere, coupled with the killing of Chinese engineers at Hub, affect the efforts being made by the government to lure in foreign investment? It was distressing to see that a particular telecom firm was targeted by the mobs. The firm in question belongs to a country whose prime minister has already apologized for the publication of blasphemous cartoons. Wasn’t this the aim of the protests: seek an apology and an assurance that such acts will not be repeated? The peaceful Karachi demonstration may have had a positive effect.

Meanwhile, individuals have also been airing their views on how to face the challenge thrown our way by some European newspapers. One message reads: “Plz check the bar code of any product before u buy. Check the first three digits from the left — 729 is Israel, 570-579 Denmark, 700-709 Norway. We should be positive and defend our Prophet (PBUH).” Another message says: “If Jews wish to destroy Muslims and Pakistan, it is quite easy for them. They just publish a few more cartoons and the Pakistanis will burn themselves & also burn everything else. Isn’t it?”

Peace was also preserved during the Muharram processions. Friday’s wheel-jam strike also remained largely peaceful, barring a few stone-pelting incidents. There are more anti-blasphemy protests slated for the coming days. If the protesters remain peaceful, the cause they are fighting for will be better served. The organizers and the administration have a joint responsibility to ensure that demonstrations remain orderly, and obviously political parties too have to ensure that this happens.

Balan on ‘blurred parameters’

KARACHI was recently host to Indian cinema’s debutante sensation, Vidya Balan.The Kerala actress is a graduate in sociology and was enrolled for a master’s degree at Mumbai University when she took on a role in her first film which was in Malayam. She made her debut as a Hindi film star in Parineeta, based on the novel written by the acclaimed Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhay. She is already being likened to the iconic Shabana Azmi by Bollywood buffs after just one film (opposite Saif Ali Khan).

Born on the January 1, her early brush with the camera was as a detergent advertisement model, and she claimed in a chat during her stay in Karachi for a book launch that she had been “fortunate to be at the right place at the right time and with the right people” when she was offered the role as the female lead in Parineeta.

The demure actress related that she had also worked in music videos and many commercials, saying, “It seems that I have done ad films for most of my life”, many of which were directed by Pradeep Sarkar. Having also acted in some TV projects and Bengali movies (winning the best actress award in Kolkata for her performance in a Bengali film), she feels the transition from small to big screen is not such a great change any more, saying, “the parameters are blurring today, from the small world of modelling to the wider world of the cinema.

Balan’s debut film has recently been chosen for the Berlin Film Festival. It has also featured along the best film titles for the year 2005 at various Indian and international film award ceremonies. “I am fortunate to have started with people like Vinod Chopra and Pradeep Sarkar who are sticklers for perfection and passionate about every shot that they take. I went through rigorous screen testing before I got the film and a lot of costume trials as I was being groomed to get into the role — not as Vidya but as a character (40 screen tests and 17 make-up shots to be precise!). Pradeep Sarkar used to have a storyboard detailing the entire film so you could go through it and see how he would be shooting it, which made it all easier. We also recorded the entire film on an audio board with all the sound effects etc. before actual shooting. That kind of preparation I think is very essential.”

The next films on Balan’s plate are quite different from the debut period film, though some have been thrown at the public without confirmation.

Vidya is happy to be part of the Indian cinema at this point in time as she feels that the trends of scripts and roles are changing gradually. “There are roles being written for women. There is a mushrooming of multiplexes (in India) today because you can afford to see not something star-studded but story driven and character oriented.” She denies being labelled as belonging to the Vidhu Vinod Chopra camp as she thinks it is too premature for her to think that way, but “having said that I also feel proud that it seems to be that way as his passion with cinema is so inspiring that it supersedes everything else. It was a dream come true to be working with him and directed by him.”

Though she has been asked by many how it felt to be in the shoes of Meena Kumari who acted in the original Parineeta, she has “fallen back on her instinct to play the role and tried not to copy”. Unlike many actors who enroll in acting schools, Vidya’s hands-on experience has been her training. Asked where she wouldn’t like to see herself, she answers: “If you take me out of the film and it can still go on, I would gladly want to step out of it. The length of the role really doesn’t matter, there has to be substance in it.”

And although the Tamil actress claimed to not have easy command over Urdu, her Urdu rendition of Mo’s Star, the book she helped launch in Karachi, was quite spellbinding, perhaps due to the myriad tones her voice ranges over.

Bees and buzz

BEES and beetles hum over patches of blossoms on roadsides, in parks or along the boundary walls of sprawling houses. This is just a faint reminder of the arrival of spring in this ‘season- free’ city. Elsewhere in the country, spring makes its presence felt quite vividly. Fruit trees overnight don their pink, yellowish and white flowery dresses. Birds chirp in delight.

Karachians cannot visualize the various strains of fragrance in the air at this time in Lahore or Islamabad.

But, then, compare the extreme weather conditions soon to engulf these cities with the relatively mild climate in Karachi and you will be content with fewer flowers and birdsong in Karachi.— Karachian

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com

Respect not hatred determines survival of societies

DEMONSTRATIONS against the infamous 12 Danish cartoons condemned as blasphemous by many Muslims around the world finally erupted in several major cities here last week — four and a half months after they were first published in Denmark’s largest far right newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, on 30 September 2005, and weeks after anti-cartoon protests had broken out in many other Muslim nations.

The needlessly violent nature of last week’s protests, which deteriorated into destructive non-target-specific rioting sprees, shows how domestic policies in a distant country can ultimately have politically destabilizing repercussions here in Pakistan.

Jyllands-Posten’s commissioning and publication of the 12 cartoons is reflective of an increasingly open racist attitude exhibited by the Danes towards their five per cent minority immigrant population, the majority of whom are Muslims from Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Bosnia, Pakistan, Somalia and Iran.

According to a 2004 European Network Against Racism (Enar) Shadow Report on Denmark, Danish politicians and the media are openly racist, particularly against the Muslim minority. Enar’s report is a compilation of information and data collected and provided by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with anti-racism, protection of human rights and provision of legal help and moral support to victims of discrimination, unequal treatment and marginalization in Denmark.

The following are excerpts from the report, which was funded in part by the European Commission.

“...Denmark is setting a very bad example to other EU countries when it comes to the legal protection of ethnic minorities and other victims of racism and discrimination...”

“...most politicians, media and the common man in the street, not only express their racist opinions openly, but at the same time believe that there is no racism in Denmark.”

“Many political parties have been openly hostile towards ethnic minorities. Danish People’s Party (an ultra far right, anti-immigrant ally of the current Danish government) Parliament members have often made racist and discriminating statements about immigrants, especially Muslims. The Supreme Court has even pronounced that the Danish People’s Party chairperson had racist tendencies.”

“...Danish People’s Party office holders are often reported to the police for racism...members of the Danish People’s Party and the ultra-right Progressive Party...had engaged in anti-Muslim or anti-Jewish rhetoric. It is unfortunate that public prosecutors often dismiss complaints of alleged hate speech filed against politicians with the explanation that it is especially important to protect the right to freedom of speech of politicians.”

According to the report, which is the third Enar Shadow Report on racism and discriminatory practices in Denmark, Muslim minorities there have not been allowed to build mosques nor to have separate cemeteries. They are also under threat from extreme racist groups and organizations operating and functioning in Denmark.

One such group is the Dansk Front, whose famous website has been used to send death threats to many well-known ethnic minority personalities, including members of parliament. Another is the DNSB, also called the Nazi Party, which has its own radio station, and has distributed tens of thousands of leaflets in Danish schools and institutions warning of the “dangers of Islam” and the “scourge of coloured people”.

What is particularly alarming is Enar’s analysis that the institutionalization of this kind of racism is not a phenomenon unique to Danish society. In fact, according to the Enar report, “similar trends are traceable in other European countries”.

Enar continues: “Populist political statements and distorted media coverage has not helped to better the situation. Politicians hide behind “freedom of speech” to get away with the most hateful propaganda against certain groups, while the media holds the microphone. Mainstream media not only indulge in the generalization of minorities but are also steadfast in denying any responsibility in creating an atmosphere in which racism thrives.”

The responsibility for fanning such hatred for Muslims and their religion in the western world must ultimately rest with the US, and also Britain to a large extent. The latter two governments’ foreign and military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and particularly their troops’ treatment of prisoners at the detention centre in Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad have only helped to encourage xenophobic ultra- rightism in western countries like Denmark, as well as to embolden publications like Jyllands-Posten to be gratuitously insulting to Muslims and their beliefs.

No doubt the mainstream media in both the US and the UK, despite defending freedom of speech, largely abstained from republishing the 12 cartoons, with various major newspapers citing the cartoons as “too offensive”, “deliberately insulting”, “insensitive”, “malicious”, “stupid”, and “plainly provocative”.

One well-known American newspaper, which did not publish the cartoons, even described them as “a cultural assault akin to staging a neo-Nazi rally in a Jewish neighbourhood”. A notable paper in the UK, which also abstained from taking the cartoons, said: “It will be senselessly provocative to reproduce a set of images, of no intrinsic value, which pander to the worst prejudices about Muslims. To directly associate the founder of one of the world’s three great monotheistic religions with terrorist violence — the unmistakable meaning of the most explicit of the cartoons — is wrong.”

Another major paper in the UK pragmatically opined: “...a multiracial society can only hope to survive where there is respect for beliefs which the majority do not adhere and where a decision to publish or not to publish offensive material has regard to the sensitivities of belief.”

But the recent emergence of a video recording of British soldiers beating Iraqis and soon after this, the re-surfacing of pictures of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, serve to remind Muslims all over the world that despite the responsibility apparently exhibited by the mainstream media at large in the US and the UK in not taking the cartoons, their governments and soldiers, and to a large extent their media as well, are responsible for a kind of anti-Muslim propaganda which is even more potent.

American military policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the continued hounding of countries like Iran and Syria by western governments, the much publicized degrading treatment of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, as well as the often humiliating treatment of Muslims in America and Britain in the name of security and anti-terrorism, all provoke anger in the Muslim world. But in the eyes of the western world such actions only serve to paint a very undesirable picture of Muslims.

This negative stereotyping of Muslims only helps to fuel the popularity of xenophobic anti-immigrant ultra-right parties and governments in the West, as well as increase the prejudiced and insulting representation of Muslims in mainstream channels of mass communications in western countries.

If, as one UK paper wrote, a multiracial society can only hope to survive where there is respect for beliefs which the majority do not adhere, then a multiracial globalized world can only hope to survive where there is respect not only for each other’s beliefs but also for each other’s territorial integrity, resource rights and human rights.