Love is the essence

OVERWHELMED by the hospitality showered on the Indian film delegation in Lahore and Karachi last week, director-producer Sanjay Khan said on Friday night that he wished this country could be rechristened as ‘Mohabatistan’, the country of love.

Sindh Chief Minister Dr Arbab Rahim said it was love between the peoples of the two countries that had compelled their respective governments to seek closer ties.

Dr Rahim and Sanjay Khan were speaking at a reception held in the honour of the delegation at the Baradari in Bagh-i-Jinnah, the delegation was part of the premiere of the Indian film Taj Mahal. It included Mahesh Bhatt, Feroze Khan, Kabir Bedi, Fardeen Khan, Manisha Koirala and, of course, the film’s team: hero Zulfikar Syed, heroine Sonia Jehan and director Akbar Khan.

Cultural Minister Qamar Mansur said Sindh was the land of sufi-saints, who preached love among people and communities.

Akbar Khan said the launch of the film here was a token of his love for the people of Pakistan. Part of the film’s earnings will be contributed to the earthquake survivors’ relief fund.

Our own Mustafa Qureshi said the 21st century’s demands of love were different from those of the 17th century as it required building shelters for the poor of the two nations and not Taj Mahals.

The film Taj Mahal also of course revolves round the love between Shahjahan and Mumtaz Mahal — so there was much love in the air in Karachi last week despite the quick disappearance of spring.

Although Manisha Koirala is already popular here, it was Sonia Jehan, the leading lady of Taj Mahal, who received the most attention. Granddaughter of the legendary Noor Jehan, Sonia was born in Pakistan, did her O’ Levels from Karachi, received her higher education from London, has the dual nationality of Britain and Pakistan and is now settled in India. Here in Karachi, she attended dance classes under the tutelage of Sheema Kirmani. Her French mother, divorced from the late Akbar Rizvi, the eldest son of Noor Jehan and Shaukat Rizvi, runs an elite restaurant in the city. Now Sonia, who fell in love with an Indian while studying abroad and married him, lives in Delhi. She is reportedly taking music classes as well as dance lessons. Critics have already likened her to Noor Jehan.

The permission by the government for the release of Taj Mahal and Mughal-i-Azam adds to the confidence building measures between India and Pakistan. Earlier, the revival of bus and train services was seen as a giant step towards promoting friendship between the two nations. But will there be a market for Pakistani films in India? Well, there doesn’t seem one for them even here.

Call of the wild

KARACHI has a sizable population of people of African origin. They are the descendants of those slaves who were brought from Oman to Makran in the past. Later, recurring famine brought them liberty, forcing their prince-turnedpauper owners to free them. Most of the freed persons then migrated to what is now Karachi.

Despite being assimilated in the Baloch community and living in the metropolis for almost a century now, they have succeeded in retaining parts of their cultural identity. These include a distinctively African dance called Leva, and every year on certain dates, the Sheedis, the local name for Afro-Pakistanis, gather in the dusty suburb of Manghopir, where they erect a temporary colony in the shadow of a shrine and live there for an entire week with their families and dance and sing.

Called Sheedi Jaat, the week-long festival is a curious combination of solemn spiritual rituals and cultural celebrations. These include collective sessions of meditation accompanied by sacred lyrics often rendered by an elderly woman or man in a soulful voice, followed by dhamal sessions.

There are songs in a bizarre blend of Balochi, Urdu and Gujrati, with a few Swahili words, celebrating blackhood. Most of the songs contain the refrain of Sheedi Basha (read Badshah) meaning the black king. And, of course, with the singing comes dancing in typical African rhythms.

The festival revolves around some sacred crocodiles at a pond at the shrine of Manghopir, confirming the participants’ African roots as crocodile worship was prevalent in the swamps and forests of Africa and still is among some tribes.

The festival ends in a ritual of feeding the crocodiles with meat and rubbing vermilion on the head of the revered ‘chief’ crocodile, called More Badshah.

The annual festival provides the sheedis with an opportunity to strengthen their community ties and reaffirm their roots, although many or them are unaware of their African heritage and some deny that their ancestors were slaves and instead insist that they are descendants of black soldiers in the army of Mohammad Bin Qasim.

Flowers on walls

Whether the city government’s efforts to make Karachi a city of flowers will bring results in the near future is not clear, but many people have made their houses flowery. A manifestation of this can be seen in the Defence Housing Authority, particularly along the Sunset Boulevard. Weary commuters travelling in crammed buses and minibuses let their glances linger on these colourful clusters as they pass along the road.

Bougainvillea creepers, called ‘Bhogan bail’, laden with white, pink and red flowers not only embellish the boundary walls and balconies, they also enchant the onlookers.

The city government and its predecessors have been trying to give a facelift to the city’s ecology. Every year flower exhibitions are held under the auspices of the city government and its towns. It has also tried to plant various flower varieties on the greenbelts and in parks. It also seems to be patronising private nurseries on roadsides. But a visible change is yet to be seen.

— Karachian

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com

Moving on the F-16 front — finally

ISLAMABAD and Washington have finally decided to proceed with the much-talked about sale of American F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. Over the years Pakistan-US dealings over the F-16 issue have come to symbolise the roller-coaster nature of relations between the two countries.

We started by ordering F-16s at the height of muted cooperation during the jihad over Afghanistan. We even paid out the money. The Soviets then departed. Non-proliferation sanctions were activated against Pakistan, the ally who had helped fight the last great war of the Cold War. Part of the ‘punishment’ for proliferation was non-delivery of the F-16s Islamabad had paid for. Washington had our money and our F-16s! Some in Pakistan called it ‘highway robbery’ by the superpower.

Now with a high in the bilateral relationship, Washington is willing to go ahead with the sale of the F-16s. This was confirmed by US Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns at a joint news briefing with Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan in Washington on Thursday after the first round of the strategic dialogue. While reiterating the US commitment to the sale of F-16s to Pakistan, Mr Burns announced that the Bush administration had moved a request for the planes in the US Congress which is required to clear the deal. The administration had given Pakistan the green light on the F-16s last year and the government had almost firmed up the deal with the American authorities. However, after the devastating earthquake last October, Pakistan decided to put the matter on hold.

The request now made is much scaled down from last year. Initially, the F-16 package comprised brand new aircraft but due to financial constraints as a consequence of the October earthquake, Pakistan has decided to go for a mix of new and used F-16s, according to our foreign secretary.

The thinking in the Pakistan Air Force is that its needs can be met through the purchase of two less costly Chinese fighter jets. The JF Thunder-17 aircraft, being jointly manufactured by Pakistan and China, figures prominently among the chosen substitutes. The other worthy substitute is J-10, the multi-role Chinese fighter aircraft dubbed as the F-10. The defence secretary for production has already indicated the government’s intention to buy this new generation Chinese fighter aircraft. The F-10 (export version of the J-10) has used the advanced technology that was employed in the mid-way abandoned Israeli Lavi fighter jet. The Lavi was to be modelled upon the US F-16 Fighting Falcon muti-role aircraft.

The JF-17 is supposed to be ready for induction into the PAF early next year. Defence policy experts believe that these would eventually form the backbone of Pakistan’s military air power.

While there is no official word on details of the revised F-16 package, it is learnt that the number of new planes has been reduced from the original 55 to 18. The order placed is for a total of 52 F-16s, 18 new and 34 used. The Pentagon was sent separate letters for three sets of F-16 related purchases. The first order is for 18 brand new fighter jets, the second for 34 used ones and the third for upgradation of the F-16s Pakistan already has.

The mode of supply and the pricing of the F-16s will be worked out through system both the countries have already in place and will also figure at the Pakistan-US Defence Consultative Group’s meeting in Washington this week.

Indications are that the Bush administration will put a bill seeking Congressional approval for the sale of F-16s perhaps at the same time as the bill on the controversial Indo-US civil nuclear deal will be voted upon. One view is that Washington believes that this may help to ease some criticism from Islamabad on the Indo-US deal. It remains unclear if this near simultaneous tabling of bills could translate in some linkage in the voting pattern on the passage of the nuclear deal and the F-16s.

Another explanation for the timing chosen to table the bill for the sale of the F-16s has reportedly to do with the production cycle. Apparently, placing the order at this juncture may mean that the F-16s will cost relatively less than if the orders are placed later. The fighter jets are currently on Lockheed Martin’s production line which according to US sources may mean saving some millions of dollars.

But the real reason for this simultaneous tabling is not entirely clear. However, the US move to lump the two may be an attempt to blunt domestic criticism on its controversial nuclear agreement with India. Also in the face of criticism in Washington over the rather rough deal being given to Washington’s ‘key ally’ on war on terrorism, this may be the administration’s unconvincing attempt to demonstrate Washington’s ‘fair-mindedness’.

Meanwhile, the US Administration cannot be comfortable with Islamabad’s reservations on the Indo-US deal. In fact there has been increasing criticism of the deal by senior Pakistani policy-makers. Censure from Islamabad runs no differently than criticism within the US. The Pakistan government has been sending warning signals that the deal could trigger a new nuclear arms race in the region and have serious implications for international non-proliferation efforts. Pakistan’s message to the US and other members of the international community is that it has its own security requirements and it will do whatever it takes to maintain its credible minimum deterrence.

Not a thinking animal

I read in this newspaper on Friday that the Model Town Society plans to acquire a thousand kanals of land near Kahna on Ferozepur Road to build a new housing district, to be called New Model Town. This newspaper quoted Col Tahir Kardar, the president of the MTS as having said so. A thousand kanals? Does the MTS plan to have five-marla houses in the new settlement? We will see when the new plan unfolds itself.

The main question to be asked here is: How many acres of arable land do we propose to put under ugly, congested and polluted housing schemes? Already, we must have lost millions of acres of invaluable farmland to ill-planned housing colonies across the country. If the present trend continues, the whole country will become a huge, unmanageable and ill provided for anthill in, say, the next fifty years. There will be little or no land left to grow food. No matter. We shall import all the things we need to eat and to waste. Why bother about family planning? Let us multiply and no holds barred and no questions asked. As Krishan Chander, the great story teller, wrote perhaps more than sixty years ago, when a child is born to a family, it is not adding to the burden on our limited resources. It is the first child in the world and the devil take our neighbours.

As for Col Kardar and the new Model Town scheme. I am reminded here of an old question which the poet had put to Col Kardar, Mian Aamer Mahmood and others like them:

Tu Kar-i-Zamin ra niko sakhti

Ke ba asmaan niz pardakhti?

(Have you done wonders with the affairs of Mother Earth that you now aspire to muck things up in the sky?)

Presidents will come and go but we shall continue to grow. Multiplication is the name of the game and each generation will play the same. That is how the song went and that is how it will go on till we have got only standing room left for each one of us in this blessed land of ours.

But it is not like this elsewhere in the world. In a report published by The Guardian on March 15, we are told that the number of children born in Germany last year was the lowest since the end of the Second World War (1939-45). According to provisional figures, 680,000 babies were born in 2005, down from 1.36 million in 1964. The report further said that Germany now had the lowest birth rate in Europe with 8.5 births per 1,000 inhabitants. Leading economists feel that unless the Germans start breading again, Europe’s biggest nation faces the prospect of reduced growth, economic decline and an elderly, shrinking population.

“We are reaching a critical point,” Michael Huther, the head of Cologne’s economics institute, told Die Welt newspaper. “The number of births now determines what happens in the next decade-and-a-half to two decades. You can’t revise it afterwards. The availability of human capital will get worse, and act as a brake on growth.”

He told the Guardian: “The tradition in the 1950s, 60s and even the 80s in Germany was that a mother was only a mother and looked after the children.”

Last year Germany’s family minister, Ursula Vonder Leyen, tabled proposals to encourage reluctant couples to have children. They included tax breaks of pound 3,000 a year for working couples, more nursery places, and a new state-funded welfare scheme that requires men to take two months off for families to get full funding. So far the changes appear to have had little impact and they have been criticised by some as a perk for the well-off.

Experts have pointed to many reasons why Germans are failing to reproduce a conservative family culture, women expected to stay at home, schools that finish at lunch time; and a tax system that discriminates against working women. “I’d like to have children. But to do so now would kill off my career.” Steffi Warnke, a 31-year-old PhD student at Berlin’s free university told the Guardian.

“The problem is we study in Germany for a long time. When you reach the stage you are applying for academic jobs you are 30-35. And if you do have kids you don’t get much support. Germany is becoming a society of pensioners. You only have to turn on the TV to see that all the programmes are for the over-50s.”

The latest federal figures show wide regional discrepancies. The highest birth rate is in former West Germany, with Wiesbaden (10.5), Frankfurt (10.2) and Bonn (10.1) topping the list. In former communist East Germany, by contrast, the birth rate is alarmingly low, with the city of Chemnitz (6.9) registering the lowest birth rate in the world. According to Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, by 2050 Europe’s population will have fallen by around 1.5%, or 7 million people.

Here ends the Gaurdian report. In Pakistan, it is all ulta pulta, all upside down. If by 2050 the European population falls by 1.7 million, how many millions will have been added in our country. Today, we are around 150 million. How many of us shall there be in 2050? Try and extrapolate. How many? Will 300 million be a fair guess? Or 350 million or 400 million? The very idea gives me sleepless nights. But what do I do as a concerned citizen? I watch television, I do not think because the Pakistani male is not a thinking animal.

LAST week, I had promised you more from Ravinder Kumar’s account of the Rowlatt Act agitation in Lahore in 1919. But I have run out of steam. So more of Ravinder Kumar next week. For today, I invite you to go attend some May Day function or the other.

South Asia’s right royal mess

IF INDIA got it wrong on Nepal, Pakistan wasn’t too far behind. First Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz during a visit to Kathmandu in November 2004 made avoidable military overtures to the government to contain the Maoists and then after the royal coup took place, Islamabad’s envoy followed suit to virtually assure the autocratic king how well he would be armed in Pakistan’s care. It’s time for everyone to feel small.

India of course has a habit of plunging headlong into these right royal blunders. Remember that Delhi ended up inviting the Shah of Iran on what was to be his last state visit anywhere, at a time when the writing on the wall was clear that that Aryameher’s days were numbered. In fact, beginning to be known as the autocratic quisling of the United States, the Shah was not welcome anywhere. So much so that President Carter, who tried hard to save him from imminent ruin, nudged Prime Minister Morarji Desai to bail him out with India’s symbolic show of support. The ploy worked but only briefly.

No one was inordinately surprised, barring perhaps then foreign minister Vajpayee, as Khomeini took power in Iran. India had to desperately find some way of saying sorry. In a hurried U-turn to make amends for the Shah’s ill-advised visit under his watch, the Vajpayee-led foreign ministry thought it useful to pick up a Shia maulvi from Lucknow who had been heard boasting of his proximity to Imam Khomeini. The damage control delegation, including the maulvi, was soon enough presented before the Ayatollah.

Eye-witnesses say Khomeini publicly berated and humiliated the maulvi in Farsi and used the services of an excellent interpreter to leave the Indian delegation in no doubt about the terse message. It turned out the cleric was someone the Ayatollah may have casually met in Paris but had never authorised to represent him in any capacity in India or elsewhere. The valiant Indian delegation had no choice but to turn tail. It took the fall of Morarji’s government for relations between Iran and India to begin to improve again.

In the brief vacuum that came between the Shah’s fall and the Khomeini consolidation, desperate attempts were made to instal a pro-West government headed by Shahpour Bakhtiar. His credentials included the fact that he had suffered at the hands of the Shah. In this way and more there is a similarity between the Girija Prasad Koirala experiment now under way in Nepal and the ill-fated Bakhtiar regime.

Both are or were the outcome of status quoist approaches, an attempt to deny the existence of popular upheaval at the base of the political change like the one we are witnessing in South Asia’s poorest country.

Newspapers and TV channels have described Gyanendra’s decision to revive the parliament a result of ‘weeks of popular protest’. The fact is that it has taken years of grassroots struggle, bordering on civil war for the turn of events to become so favourable earlier last month for democracy to get a chance in Nepal.

Of course the status quoists in the Indian foreign ministry would accept none of that. They picked two representatives, including one from the Indian opposition, to meet the king only too aware that both had reasons to prescribe remedies that would be far removed from the popular demand that the palace be made redundant in Nepal’s politics.

It was thus that New Delhi rushed to support the king’s offer of sharing some power with Nepal’s democratic parties. The offer was destined to be promptly rejected by everyone of any importance in Nepal today.

One of these critics was Kunwar Natwar Singh, India’s former foreign minister. He may be on the back foot of late because of allegations surrounding the Volker Committee’s claims of his culpability in the oil-for-food deal, but he has not allowed this to blur his views on India’s foreign policy.

In a terse response to his former colleagues’ rushed welcome to the king’s offer of sharing power in Nepal, Natwar Singh remarked: “We have let the people of Nepal down, lost the goodwill of the seven parties, earned the annoyance of the Maoists and received no kudos from King Gyanendra.”

Baburam Bhattarai is one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). He wrote a ‘letter to the editor’ to the Kantipur Newspaper on Tuesday, April 25, 2006. The Monthly Review published a translated version of the letter, which is available on website http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bhattarai260406.html

Since the supposedly mainstream media are unlikely to find it of any use, analysts who are interested in knowing what lies ahead in Nepal, and therefore in South Asia, might want to read it. It contains a critique of the media too.

“Letters to the editor seem more interesting, lively and factual than the editorials, articles, and news in established newspapers. Perhaps this is the sign of political consciousness among the masses rising higher than that of the established political leadership and intelligentsia...I too feel it is more appropriate for me to share my views as a letter to the editor than by articles or statements,” wrote Bahattrai.

He compared the popular protests still under way with a ‘historic revolutionary tsunami’.

“The scene of people gallantly resisting the Royal Armed Forces with whatever they could get their hands on has raised all Nepali heads high, and has established our reputation as freedom fighters rather than as mercenaries for foreign armies. Since the revolution is still going strong, what will be its climax has eluded and worried many people.”

Then comes the warning to Koirala, India, the world: “In the last leg of this revolution, the danger has increased of polarisation between, on the one hand, the international power centres, the palace and the leadership of the established parliamentary forces, and, on the other, the revolutionary masses of common people, civil society and other political forces, leading to factionalism in the revolution.

“Especially the current situation in which the conscious revolutionary forces demand a democratic republic, and the established political leadership is unable to rise above their demand for the reinstatement of the dissolved parliament, has posed an immediate danger of factionalism in revolution...

“When the whole of Nepal has approved chanting slogans to end the monarchy and to establish a republic, there is no reason why the political leadership has to hesitate to formally endorse and move forward with the republican slogan. Even the international power centres, which, until yesterday, were unaware of the Nepali people’s actual consciousness and power, shall eventually have to understand the ground realities of this revolution. In this context, the failure to move forward with the slogan that incorporates the people’s aspirations and the nation’s need in order to bow to international pressure will be a huge mistake and highly ironic...

“If even today the political leadership only considers the slogans for a democratic republic to be a Maoist slogan, then they would be seen by history to have made the millions of people and their own political activists chanting this slogan in the streets, ‘Maoists’. The CPN-Maoist is flexible and responsible and, keeping in mind the international situation, has been proposing the elections for a constituent assembly as a meeting point for all. The path for that, which will prove correct, scientific and permanent, is not the merciful reinstatement of parliament by the king, but the parallel government declared and established by the revolutionary forces. That is crystal clear.”

History moves in a tight spiral and doesn’t always repeat itself. Nepal may not be Iran, but there are shades of similarities in our approaches to both.

PAKISTAN’S deputy high commissioner Munawwar Saeed Bhatti will leave Delhi this week to take over as his country’s first high commissioner to New Zealand.

He says one of his first jobs will be to make friends in the Indian community in Wellington. That should be natural given the fact that he has always surrounded himself in Delhi with Indians.

His friends are whispering though that the first job will be to find out what happened with India’s high commissioner in Wellington recently that he had to be forcibly pulled out by Delhi. Mr Bhatti then proposes to share this knowledge with fellow diplomats, the theme being: how to take evasive action when headquarters bowls a bouncer.

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