Gandhi’s image in Pakistan

SONIA Gandhi was in New York in October to take part in events organised to mark the International Day of Non-Violence.

It was in June 2007 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to observe Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence. Some Pakistanis didn’t like the idea and drew attention to the atrocities committed by the Indian state agencies in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Holding Gandhi responsible for actions of the Indian state shows how little such people know about Gandhi. For reasons having to do with the political history of the first half of the 20th century of the subcontinent, Gandhi is projected in our textbooks as a cunning bania who tried to prevent the creation of Pakistan only to go into oblivion thereafter. The popular perception of Gandhi in Pakistan is a mix of ignorance and negative stereotyping. In India, he is everywhere. Major thoroughfares bear his name and his image adorns Indian currency notes.

The popular rendition of Gandhi is stripped of all contradictions that constitute his person and legacy. That is true on both sides of the border especially when it comes to the cast of the lead characters of the Partition saga. Gandhi is the personification of good and Jinnah of evil in Indian nationalist historiography. In Pakistan, it is the other way around.

Tampering with official orthodoxies comes with political risks. Deviation from the nationalist script can cast its shadow on even a patently anti-Pakistan person like L.K. Advani when he dared to utter something positive about Jinnah during his visit to Karachi a few years ago.

Individuals like Gandhi are difficult to pigeon-hole. They defy easy categorisations. Someone who did not play the role of a responsible father towards his biological children as envisaged by tradition was considered as ‘Bapu’ by many of his compatriots, including Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister. Nehru in a tearful voice conveyed the news of Gandhi’s assassination to his countrymen by saying, “the light has gone out of our lives”. Let us look at some aspects of his complicated personality and politics that are not part of the image of Gandhi that we have in Pakistan.

Consider the logic of holding Gandhi responsible for the violence that is endorsed by the Indian state. The man who lived only for five months after India’s independence himself had a very troubled and complicated relationship with the new state. The icon of the Indian anti-colonial movement was not even in Delhi when the Indian tricolour replaced the Union Jack in August 1947. When Nehru’s India was having its ‘tryst with destiny’, Gandhi was in faraway Calcutta, now renamed Kolkata, trying to put out communal fires that had gripped Bengal’s capital. The person who is portrayed as the father of the Indian nation was in mourning at its birth.

His relationship with the party, the Indian National Congress, that had led India’s movement for independence and whose leader was in New York on October 2 as heir to Gandhi’s political lineage was not straightforward either. Once India gained independence, Mohandas proposed to disband the Congress party because, according to this political maverick, the organisation had served its purpose.

The cunning bania of Pakistani textbooks was killed by a Hindu zealot because in the latter’s estimation the man was too soft on Muslims. We are not told in Pakistan that one of the reasons behind Nathuram Godse’s, the man who pulled the trigger on Gandhi, and his associates’ anger was Gandhi’s insistence that Muslims shouldn’t be reduced to second class citizens in India and that the Indian government should be fair in dividing the assets of British India with Pakistan.

If the above examples tell us about Gandhi’s nuanced relationship with the central Indian state after independence and the party that ran it, the nature of his personal relationship with his contemporaries was not free of tensions either. Jinnah’s bumpy relationship with Gandhi is sufficiently chronicled in Pakistan. We tend to think that barring Jinnah and his All India Muslim League the rest of India dutifully followed whatever Gandhi said. The reality was far from it. I will offer glimpses of Gandhi’s ties with Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar to illustrate this point.Nehru comes across as a spiritual son of Gandhi. In the Pakistani version of history, Nehru was the Brahmanical stick that the lean, half-naked bania used to undermine the Pakistan movement. Non-violence was a creed for Gandhi, for Nehru it was more of a method. In January 1928, the differences between the two men reached the level where Gandhi in a letter to Nehru wrote, “the differences between you and me appear to me to be so vast and radical that there seems to be no meeting ground between us.”

Whereas the Nehru-Gandhi differences were conducted under the umbrella of the Congress, one of the major challenges to Gandhi’s claim as being the true representative of all Indians came from Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who came from the community of untouchables but managed to study at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

He challenged the Gandhian solution to the problem of untouchability and lobbied for separate electorates for them. When the British consented to Ambedkar’s demand in 1932, Gandhi went on a fast unto death. Ambedkar finally agreed to forego separate electorates in turn, saving Gandhi’s life. Thus, an untouchable saved Gandhi’s life while a born-again Hindu took it in 1948.

But what is it about Gandhi that a Bollywood motion picture, Lage Raho Munna Bhai, based on his methodology, can become a blockbuster in the 21st century?

Partly it was Gandhi’s subversion of rules of the charismatic leadership. Charismatic leaders are seen as a cut above ordinary people. The way they come across is as if common human traits don’t apply to them. Larger than life in public their personal persona is usually a well-kept secret.

Gandhi became all too ordinary to the chagrin of his foes and friends alike. He literally denuded himself for everyone to see how physically vulnerable he was. He turned that vulnerability into his strength. He had no compunction in cleaning the latrines at a Congress conference in solidarity with bhangis (waste removers).

In the age of sound-bytes where emphasis is more on packaging than the message, Gandhi serves wide-ranging purposes, from Apple computers using his image in its ‘Think Different’ campaign to Sanjay Dutt popularising Gandhigiri.

But Gandhi did not succeed in achieving his declared political and social objectives. The man who was equally at ease with Indian industrialists and untouchables couldn’t surmount the political fault-line of Muslim nationalism that stared in the face of pan-Indian nationalism. Maulana Azad’s recounting of two meetings with Gandhi in March-April 1947 best capture the mysteriously contradictory nature of the man. In the first he told Azad, “If the Congress wishes to accept Partition, it will be over my dead body.” Azad had the ‘greatest shock of (his) life’ when in the subsequent meeting Gandhi was no longer opposed to Partition.

Gandhi as we know in Pakistan is a caricature of his complex self, in pretty much the same way as Jinnah is in the Indian popular imagination.

The writer teaches at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

hnizamani@hotmail.com

Of art and globalised cities

AS contemporary art and life intersect to build a new people’s narrative, the city has become its primary focus. The impact of this collective habitat can be seen in the way contemporary art is being made, perceived and exhibited in the last two decades.

A small group of artists working closely with the anti-globalisation movement were the first to create this new space within art, which today has mainstreamed into an important discourse.

Two recent art biennales successfully integrated visual commentary on vital issues with communal space. This not only widened the audience base but reinforced art’s claim as an agency of change.

At the Singapore Biennale (2006) with its theme of the cultural and religious pluralism of the island, Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi created site specific works in a mosque. Other places of worship were also identified as art sites by the curators of this international exhibition.

The work of Imran Qureshi informed by the traditional skills of painting was an unconventional mural that depicted water streaming down the side of the wall along the mosque’s water pipes.

The gentle stream of translucent water was punctuated with rosettes of leaves, a motif borrowed from miniature painting, which over the years has become Imran’s signature. The deceptively decorative work makes a loaded reference to water as a medium of purification in prayer rituals within the mosque.

It could easily be pointing to a deeper cleansing offered by spirituality which can be lost by over-ritualised religious practice.

The universal message could extend to abuse through wastage of potable water resources as a fear of future droughts looms over the planet.

The same artist’s video installation that projects the moon’s reflection on the prayer courtyard alludes to the Muslim preoccupation with the lunar sighting to determine religious dates in the age of scientific and technological advancement. This paradoxical phenomenon accepted even by educated Muslims, reveals an unresolved divided self that is ruled simultaneously by rational thought and blind faith.

Taking the work of just one artist’s intervention in a public space shows how art can nudge audiences to question established norms as they open themselves to new interpretations in resonance with the 21st century.

In Istanbul this year, locations throughout the city host the Biennale. Inaugurated just a few weeks ago, its curator Hou Hanru has explored art as an enabling strategy with some success.

The six projects act both as a physical and intellectual network through which the marginalised and the privileged of Istanbul can come together to view art and perhaps understand their city better in the context of issues of globalisation.

At Istanbul two buildings in crisis are linked to community dialogue by artists from all over the world. The ‘Burn It or Not’ project is located on the three floors of the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM), a state monument of culture from the 1970s that houses several theatres for entertainment and ceremonies. Since both political and economic aspiration of the Turkish state seems to have changed since it was designed, there is a move to pull down the functional facility and replace AKM with a post-modern edifice to represent the neo-liberal agenda.

Not including the citizens in the debate on the erasure of their history has marginalised public opinion which the art on display within the building addresses.

Some artists focus on the history of the building and its iconic presence while others bring to the viewers, spaces and architecture from other locations that faced redundancy in a similar way.

The exhibition titled ‘World Factory’ located at the Istanbul Textile Traders Market threatened by land grabbers refers to the human crisis of economic, political and personal uncertainty brought about by free trade policies. The market built 40 years ago acts as a metaphor of forced transition.

As similar closure and profound change impacts lives of people from over the world, artists give them a face and bring their narratives to the foreground, through photographs, audio and video documentation.

The underbelly of the global powerhouse of manufacturing, China is examined closely to reveal the cannibalisation of villages into ‘Production Cities’ with criminal disregard to the historical core. Allowed to slip into decay it is inhabited by the poorest of workers that get trapped in conditions of de-humanising poverty.

This process is documented and presented in ‘Unknown Urbanity in China- Village within a City’, a collaborative work by Yushi Uehara and Berlage Institute.

Another piece of video art and photography traces the rapid transformation of Da Zha Lau, a slum outside Beijing that was once a handicraft centre which has undergone various stages of industrialisation. Here the workers are shown enjoying their consumer goods while they face cultural disintegration and displacement.

Across the world, artists, Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, ask women factory workers in Tijhana to document their stories.

This industrial zone located on the US and Mexican border once housed 900 assembly plants but prosperity proved impermanent as many factories were relocated to China to take advantage of cheap labour. In the work titled ‘Maquillapolis’, the women self record their interviews as they stand in their blue uniforms with the plants in the distant background.

In their hands they hold the components that each one assembles into television sets. Their stories are empty of dreams as the reality of this globalised city centres on toxins in the environment that makes the place increasingly inhospitable, not to mention its lack of labour laws and negligible women rights.

This art that unites globalised cities and its dwellers in duress, occupies an original and unique terrain that invites diverse, innovative and relevant experiments. This artistic action often embraces the tools of documentation and research to disseminate facts without fuss and continues to dissolve the boundaries between journalism, documentary making and art practice.

Often the engagement with social reality mirrors despondency and hardship. But it hopes that the provocative edge can prompt change through its process of informing the audience through visions of alternative strategies and making faceless statistics who are the champions of the globalised city more visible.

asnaclay06@yahoo.com

Of art and globalised cities

AS contemporary art and life intersect to build a new people’s narrative, the city has become its primary focus. The impact of this collective habitat can be seen in the way contemporary art is being made, perceived and exhibited in the last two decades.

A small group of artists working closely with the anti-globalisation movement were the first to create this new space within art, which today has mainstreamed into an important discourse.

Two recent art biennales successfully integrated visual commentary on vital issues with communal space. This not only widened the audience base but reinforced art’s claim as an agency of change.

At the Singapore Biennale (2006) with its theme of the cultural and religious pluralism of the island, Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi created site specific works in a mosque. Other places of worship were also identified as art sites by the curators of this international exhibition.

The work of Imran Qureshi informed by the traditional skills of painting was an unconventional mural that depicted water streaming down the side of the wall along the mosque’s water pipes.

The gentle stream of translucent water was punctuated with rosettes of leaves, a motif borrowed from miniature painting, which over the years has become Imran’s signature. The deceptively decorative work makes a loaded reference to water as a medium of purification in prayer rituals within the mosque.

It could easily be pointing to a deeper cleansing offered by spirituality which can be lost by over-ritualised religious practice.

The universal message could extend to abuse through wastage of potable water resources as a fear of future droughts looms over the planet.

The same artist’s video installation that projects the moon’s reflection on the prayer courtyard alludes to the Muslim preoccupation with the lunar sighting to determine religious dates in the age of scientific and technological advancement. This paradoxical phenomenon accepted even by educated Muslims, reveals an unresolved divided self that is ruled simultaneously by rational thought and blind faith.

Taking the work of just one artist’s intervention in a public space shows how art can nudge audiences to question established norms as they open themselves to new interpretations in resonance with the 21st century.

In Istanbul this year, locations throughout the city host the Biennale. Inaugurated just a few weeks ago, its curator Hou Hanru has explored art as an enabling strategy with some success.

The six projects act both as a physical and intellectual network through which the marginalised and the privileged of Istanbul can come together to view art and perhaps understand their city better in the context of issues of globalisation.

At Istanbul two buildings in crisis are linked to community dialogue by artists from all over the world. The ‘Burn It or Not’ project is located on the three floors of the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM), a state monument of culture from the 1970s that houses several theatres for entertainment and ceremonies. Since both political and economic aspiration of the Turkish state seems to have changed since it was designed, there is a move to pull down the functional facility and replace AKM with a post-modern edifice to represent the neo-liberal agenda.

Not including the citizens in the debate on the erasure of their history has marginalised public opinion which the art on display within the building addresses.

Some artists focus on the history of the building and its iconic presence while others bring to the viewers, spaces and architecture from other locations that faced redundancy in a similar way.

The exhibition titled ‘World Factory’ located at the Istanbul Textile Traders Market threatened by land grabbers refers to the human crisis of economic, political and personal uncertainty brought about by free trade policies. The market built 40 years ago acts as a metaphor of forced transition.

As similar closure and profound change impacts lives of people from over the world, artists give them a face and bring their narratives to the foreground, through photographs, audio and video documentation.

The underbelly of the global powerhouse of manufacturing, China is examined closely to reveal the cannibalisation of villages into ‘Production Cities’ with criminal disregard to the historical core. Allowed to slip into decay it is inhabited by the poorest of workers that get trapped in conditions of de-humanising poverty.

This process is documented and presented in ‘Unknown Urbanity in China- Village within a City’, a collaborative work by Yushi Uehara and Berlage Institute.

Another piece of video art and photography traces the rapid transformation of Da Zha Lau, a slum outside Beijing that was once a handicraft centre which has undergone various stages of industrialisation. Here the workers are shown enjoying their consumer goods while they face cultural disintegration and displacement.

Across the world, artists, Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, ask women factory workers in Tijhana to document their stories.

This industrial zone located on the US and Mexican border once housed 900 assembly plants but prosperity proved impermanent as many factories were relocated to China to take advantage of cheap labour. In the work titled ‘Maquillapolis’, the women self record their interviews as they stand in their blue uniforms with the plants in the distant background.

In their hands they hold the components that each one assembles into television sets. Their stories are empty of dreams as the reality of this globalised city centres on toxins in the environment that makes the place increasingly inhospitable, not to mention its lack of labour laws and negligible women rights.

This art that unites globalised cities and its dwellers in duress, occupies an original and unique terrain that invites diverse, innovative and relevant experiments. This artistic action often embraces the tools of documentation and research to disseminate facts without fuss and continues to dissolve the boundaries between journalism, documentary making and art practice.

Often the engagement with social reality mirrors despondency and hardship. But it hopes that the provocative edge can prompt change through its process of informing the audience through visions of alternative strategies and making faceless statistics who are the champions of the globalised city more visible.

asnaclay06@yahoo.com

What next after Swat?

AS the western capitals sheepishly wake up to the dynamics of the emergency the people of Swat — like their compatriots in Waziristan — have been subjected to the worst kind of state terror and brutalities of the (state-sponsored) Taliban who have now been ‘rewarded’ with a truce dictated by the militants and ‘approved’ by the caretaker NWFP government, headed by a former Wapda chairman, whose only distinction to win this position was to toe the federal government’s line on the Kalabagh dam.

While civil society members, the legal fraternity and legitimate political forces feel the ire of the state apparatus, the leaders of radical parties (foremost amongst them Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JUI) have been mandated to broker the dubious deal.

As the Musharraf regime clumsily grappled with the legal challenge to his presidential nomination, he trained his guns on the idyllic valley of Swat to justify his edict. By now the antics of Mullah Fazlullah have been well-documented like his predecessor’s — Mullah Sufi Mohammad. A creation of the state, from 1994 onwards he surfaced every summer at the height of the tourist season, with his ragtag army of militants to demand ‘nifaz-i-sharia’ in the Provincially Administered Tribal Areas (Pata).

The symbiotic relationship between the powerful timber mafia, the Taliban militants and some agencies involved in timber and narco-trafficking is an open secret. Tourism, the mainstay of the once lovely valley, poses a threat to the unfettered control of the virgin forests and mineral resources by this unholy nexus that has successfully served to undercut all conservation and development efforts of the neglected region for tourism as it checks their criminal supremacy.

It is ironical that like their predecessors in Afghanistan, the Taliban first destroyed vestiges of the rich cultural heritage of Gandhara and are now brazenly denuding the mostly protected forests of Matta, Malam Jabba, Nek Pekhel, Kabal and Marghazar in connivance with the powerful timber mafia and local officials. In the atmosphere of militancy, the forest departments have abandoned their duties, ceding to the ruthless militants and the timber mafia who carry on this nefarious duty unchecked.

As in the case of Waziristan, where the state had a free hand in creating unrest in the name of the Sharia, the same game was repeated in Swat. For months, a buildup of heavy and sophisticated ammunition for the state-sponsored insurgency in the area was witnessed. Reports of indiscriminate massacres started pouring in. Thousands of girls were taken out of school with Taliban-style threats being made against education in the entire district. Women’s mobility was restricted and men forced to grow beards. Barber shops, video and audio businesses were blown up to create unrest and fear.

With the increase in suicide attacks on security personnel and check posts, Maulana Fazlullah’s forces began taking control of several tehsils in the district so effortlessly that it was too good to be true for the militants. The total surrender of the security apparatus to this unruly mob appeared as being scripted to the minutest detail.

The grisly slaughter of the security personnel by the mercenaries, reportedly the Uzbeks and Tajiks, (allegedly transported for these missions) in both Waziristan and Swat needs to be investigated by international human rights organisations and experts. Atrocities on the country’s citizens were choreographed to attract international scorn for Pashtuns (Taliban) and their eventual massacre has become an intolerable practice that simply should not carry on.

The Pashtuns find themselves in a bind. It is being impressed upon western allies in this ‘war against terror’ that Pukhtunkhwa is a breeding ground for terrorists, the Pashtuns are all religious extremists and that the situation could be best handled by none other than the ‘indispensable ally’ Musharraf.

The Mullah-Military Alliance (MMA) has played a key role in furthering this agenda in the province. Access to these areas by the independent media was restricted by the state to prevent the truth from coming out. An uninterrupted supply of ammunition to these areas was ensured and the militants were trained to carry out operations accordingly — playing with the lives of scores of innocent people and risking the lives and credibility of the Pakistani security forces.

It is saddening that the ‘democratic West’ seems to have bought Pakistan’s military-led government’s excuse of fighting the ‘war against terror’. The ground reality is the opposite: the militants have been given a ‘free turf’ in the NWFP as they consolidate their hold. Also, despite all the security at its disposal, the government is abandoning one region after another.

It also raises questions regarding the whole exercise of ‘emergency’ as the axe has fallen on the most ‘liberal, secular, democratic and educated’ sections of Pakistan. On the western front the most ‘radical, violent, diabolical and sinister’ forces have been given a free hand to assemble and broker a so-called truce. The most shameful part of this is the release and rewarding of Maulana Sufi Mohammad by the provincial government. This man is responsible for transporting thousands of innocent Pashtuns across Afghanistan for jihad to their inevitable death — while he himself fled the war zone.

He needs to be tried as a war criminal and his gang of wicked Taliban radicals should be treated with a strong hand. The appeasement and reward of radical criminals reflects negatively on the so-called ‘enlightened moderation’ of the military junta and also its western sponsors. Both have lost the moral high ground, and all double speak about the ‘merits of emergency’ amounts to hoodwinking world public opinion. The end result of this mayhem would be the total, irreversible loss of a once idyllic state and it precious environment which will take ages to find its way out of the abyss that it has plunged into.

adilzareef@yahoo.com