EARLY 2003 saw me researching the tangled networks of gender, class and religious interpretation between communities in Pakistan and members of the Pakistani diaspora, in particular those living in the cities of Australia. This was a time when the events of Sept 11, 2001 were still fresh in the minds of the Pakistani-Australian community I wanted to work with.

The political climate of the time brought out all the internal identity-related contradictions that characterise many Pakistanis or people of Pakistani descent. But I soon realised that the Pakistani communities in these cities had been influenced more by the emergence of a particular religious network for women (Al Huda), based in Pakistan with supporters in the Pakistani diasporic communities in North America, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. Despite the events of Sept 11, it was the growing popularity of this transnational religious network that was discussed in the cities.

Though the phenomenon of transnational religious networks has existed for some time in Muslim communities, what was unusual about the recent developments was that it was Pakistani women who were taking the lead in terms of organisation. Communities at home and in the Pakistani diaspora were witnessing the growth of an emergent group of religious interpreters that challenged existing hierarchies of gender, class and age.

Rather than the influence of Sept 11 in their lives, most interviewees would bring up Dr Farhat Hashmi, the founder of Al Huda, and whether or not they approved of her and her supporters’ activities.

The meteoric rise of Farhat Hashmi and Al Huda and the organisation’s project to build a base among professional, urban and upper-middle-class groups has confused the traditional as well as the modernist/secular groups in the Pakistani community.

As the experience of Islamists in Turkey shows, though these groups are in an oppositional political struggle with the modern secularists, they often mirror them and search for public representatives who speak foreign languages and belong to the professional and intellectual elite. This was reflected in Al Huda’s move to recruit students with such backgrounds.

The next feature that came up in the months that followed was the dars (Quranic) sessions and other societal gatherings organised along religious themes for and by Pakistani women.

At times I suspected that these women had read Rousseau’s debates on the inner relations between private and public virtue. Rousseau described the ‘cackle’ of women’s societies, noting that much of their conversation revolves round the behaviour of other women. He approved of this, arguing that gossip gives women a censoring role.

By assuring that a deviant will be talked about, sometimes mercilessly, or even ostracised, women can use their collective speech to prevent scandal and to promote virtue. Group pressure and the fear of ‘losing face’ because one is from the shurfa (genteel) convinces many a Pakistani woman to turn up at the monthly dars meeting rather than face censure by the organisers of the congregation.

One has to concentrate on the specificity of generational change and how that has influenced religious practices in the Pakistani community and amongst women in particular. There is a difference between the past and what young Pakistani Muslim women, like their sisters elsewhere in the Muslim world, are exploring today, and this has been progressively interspersed with their growing interest in religious studies.

This difference from the past is reflected in their enthusiasm for learning how to translate the Arabic of Quranic verses and for exploring alternative commentaries on religious texts. They have not been content with the traditional explanations of Quranic verses offered to them as their mothers’ generation was. I was fascinated by how the organisation could integrate a religious sanction into their transnational network by strategically using Quranic verses.

However, what is particular about Al Huda’s appeal to the Pakistani diaspora? This question was imperative as I unpacked the analytical moment of social geography and class for the Pakistani diasporic community.

Why was it that Al Huda appealed to particular ‘living rooms’ in Australia, Canada and Dubai in the Middle East but not in certain cities in Pakistan, the United States and the United Kingdom? Why was Al Huda overwhelming popular with the wives of high-ranking military officers in Islamabad and the residents of some suburbs of Canberra but not with other groups?

Issues of class, power and aspirations towards dominance of social networks is central to understanding the Al Huda phenomenon and what is particular about the Pakistani overseas communities. What Al Huda’s supporters have in common is their need for a support system and their exclusion from certain networks traditionally dominated by ‘old money’. Al Huda tacitly acknowledged this particular community’s ‘moment of arrival’.

Therefore the conversations in these living room seminaries revolve around being seen as doing well for themselves and of concerns they may want to sponsor. But any mention or analysis of Pakistan’s poverty or the structural disadvantages Pakistani women face is missing.

Al Huda is about how particular families in Pakistani communities can ‘network’. These families are, as I interpret, a bourgeois group doing the ‘right thing’ by being part of this particular organisation and attending the Al Huda lecture sessions, and thus achieving what they perceive as social status.

Even today I still remain uncertain about where to place Hashmi. Though I admired her for challenging the hierarchy that controlled religious spaces, in many ways she had stayed complacent over the gender-biased legislation prevalent in Pakistan and Muslim communities.

She explained everything that I found problematic as the “wisdom of a just God” and that it was only the “passion of one’s [mine and my colleagues’] misguided youth” that struggled against what God had ordained best for women.

Though I had personal objections to her advocacy of the “merits of compliance”, I could not deny her appeal to a growing group of Pakistani women who subscribed to her networks as an aid to overcoming the unequal ethnic and class distribution that they have inherited. Being involved in these networks could ease the pressures of living life in the diaspora, and assist Pakistani women in their quest to acquire the desired ‘stage/status’ where they can be recognised and gain distinction within the community.

Pakistani women living in the diaspora, Muslim and non-Muslim, are born into certain social structures, into families who have certain ‘being’ or ‘non-being’. With the pressures of leading their lives in the diaspora and the perceived quest to acquire the desired ‘stage/status’, the women negotiate with other entry points to the power circles. If the currency in Islamabad and their host cities is exhibiting a certain flavour of Islam, then that is what is pursued fervently.

With Hashmi you stop mourning the shrinking of possibilities, the un-realisation of self and are content with your lot. Any angst at the growing realisation of the inequality of distribution of resources in Pakistani society and the gendered reality of the community and family is suppressed by the inequality of desire for change among her readers.

AMAZING things have been happening with us. With our tradition of military dominance, praetorian culture and political bankruptcy, we have become a nation of double standards, double character, dual nationalities, dual loyalties and dual office-holders, losing touch with the very originality of our values and national character. There is certainly something fundamentally wrong with our patterns and standards of governance.

Our country is dismembered but we take no lessons. Our people remain disenfranchised and have no role in national decision-making. Our polity is in ruins. Our democratic ethos is comatose. Our Constitution is grossly subverted. Our judiciary is mousetrapped. Aversion to the rule of law is endemic. Crime and corruption are rampant. Our governance is abysmally poor. Terrorism is now our sole identity.

Our economy is in a shambles. With our continued domestic political instability and aggravating law and order situation, especially the precarious extremism-led violence, we remain unable to harness the unique asset of our geographical location for our economic growth.

Despite governmental claims, foreign capital is hesitant to come to Pakistan. There are no signs of our people benefiting in any measure from the dividends of the post-9/11 economic windfall.

The last eight years have been a painfully eventful period of our crisis-ridden history. We now figure prominently in the top global lists of most corrupt, most violent and most undemocratic countries. We have lost our sovereign independence and are waging a war against our own people. The Constitution and the law have become the property of one man who can do whatever he likes to do with them. He just needs a draftsman to mould the law as he pleases.

With an ingrained culture of political opportunism and ineptitude, our politicians have been losing out to dual-nationality technocrats of Pakistan origin who have, in recent decades, become a double-utility hit in our system.

Our ‘Double Shah’ culture is also gravitating overseas people of Pakistan origin with dual nationality as potential candidates for ‘double-purpose’ high-profile positions in Pakistan.

We borrowed a prime minister from the World Bank in the early ’90s and then another from Citibank, first as finance minister in the late ’90s and later upgraded to prime minister in 2004, both with known foreign allegiance and banking credentials. Both had no constituency of their own, yet political aridity at home produced no one to match their calibre and clairvoyance.

While the former was inducted only as a caretaker head of government, and had to do only with a borrowed Sherwani for the less than three months of his ‘caretaking’ stint, the latter has been more persistent in his adaptation to the local political culture. He is no more the prime minister but he has not taken off his Sherwani. He has had ‘good times’ here which he thinks will soon revisit him.

He came to Pakistan as finance minister in October 1999, and then never looked back. With an exemplary sense of involvement, he made himself the pivot of everything that went wrong in the country. This included the controversial privatisation process and the most ill-advised ‘presidential reference’ against the chief justice in March, sparking the worst-ever judicial crisis in our history that precipitated the beginning of Gen Musharraf’s irreversible political decline.

What now amazes the nation is that although he has been denied an election ticket by his own political outfit, he continues to use state-provided security and occupy two houses in the official ministerial enclave in Islamabad. This would be both unlawful and unethical in his adopted homeland where the Constitution and rule of law, unlike his native land, remain sacrosanct.

It now appears he has no intention of leaving our political scene and will remain a favourite ‘stalking horse’ in the current environment of uncertainty. Some people surmise that he might be keeping himself available, under orders from Washington, just in case the current crisis erupts into a serious political convulsion leading to the removal of its most favourite and trustworthy incumbent from the presidency.

In the absence of a consensus-wielding politician from amongst the country’s political parties, they might need him as the only consensus-provided successor to the office of the presidency of this benighted country.

No wonder President Gen (retd) Musharraf was reportedly piqued the other day when asked about the future of his former ‘technocrat’ prime minister. He replied smilingly that he was not running a career planning office.

Incidentally, we have no shortage of imported, smart technocrats avidly seeking to build careers in their country of origin to which they said goodbye long ago in search of far and fairy lands. Having spent their lifetime overseas making a few dimes and high-rise dens, they want to serve their native country where these rootless technocrats become the stalking horses of our system, easy to grasp, easy to install and always handy to control.

Another expatriate with identical banking antecedents and dual ambitions, having already served in high positions for five years and now presiding over a commission on our systemic reforms, is now hovering around the power pillars and presenting himself as another potential ‘compromise’ candidate for any job in the country.

The list of stalking horses with dual citizenship and imported credentials for top positions in the country also includes another American national, a doctor who already holds dual positions — head of the national commission for human development and overseer of the downswing in our cricketing fortunes.

Lately he has also been heading a mission to his homeland to do some image-building there but he and his two companions must have been shocked at the negative response they received wherever they tried to glorify the military regime and its extra-constitutional feats. But amazing things kept happening.

As a follow-up to their mission, most of our information and press officers based in major capitals of the world were recalled for not projecting the ‘true’ image of the country and its present regime.

What can the poor information and press officers project when there is no image or a face to be projected? Image is not something that you can show on videos. It is basically what you are and what the world thinks of you.

A country without a Constitution or rule of law and where there is no independent judiciary, no free media, and no fundamental freedoms and rights has no face to show the world. It has no place in the comity of civilised nations. We won’t have any image at home or outside unless we fix our fundamentals.

We must return to civilised democratic norms, rooted in the will of the people and based on constitutional supremacy, independence of the judiciary, rule of law and a civilianised body politic.

We must return to the pre-Nov 3 status quo ante by restoring the untempered Constitution, the illegally removed judges, media freedom and the constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights of the people.

No election will be free, fair and credible unless we have a truly neutral and independent national consensus government as well as a reconstituted and genuinely empowered Election Commission

IT is said that an educated person should never be dogmatic and should always be open to fresh ideas and ready to change his views, if commonsense so dictates. A wag insists that this dictum also covers politics and political views and even political loyalties.

Regarding our politicians, you can hardly accuse them of being dogmatic in the matter of party loyalty. Already there are reports that many members of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, having developed a feeling that there is not much air left in that windbag party, are getting ready to switch over to PML-N or the Pakistan People’s Party, and even the MMA or MQM. No, they are not opportunists, they are pragmatists and sensible enough to see which the wind is blowing as far as national politics is concerned. In a sense it is more like changing colours than changing loyalties.

According to a foreign newspaper, textile experts in Britain have developed a cloth which changes colour many times during the day “like a chameleon.” No name has yet been given to the new invention. I don’t think the designers will accept the suggestion of a wag that the cloth be christened “Pakistani Politician.” If they do agree to give it that unromantic name, do you think Pakistan’s politicians will protest?

Although they don’t have a union or a similar body, they can always manage to have a privilege motion in the National Assembly and the Senate. This might turn out to be the only motion on which all parties – even the independents – would be united, without a single member opposing or abstaining. The privilege motion would ask for lodging a protest with the British government, although that government could hardly imagine such interference in a private commercial matter of that country.

What the Pakistani politicians can protest against is the exaggeration implied in the name. Yes, they will say, ‘we politicians do change colours but never several times in one day. We have not yet come to that.’ Moving from one party to another is a sign of healthy intellectual consideration of verities and realities as they exist on the ground at a given moment. It only shows that one is not dogmatic and pig-headed. Ask anyone in the so-called principled democratic societies of the world what they think of a politician who is not open to conviction.

You must have heard of the old Punjabi zamindar (say Malik Sahib) who always managed to get elected from his home seat. Starting at a comparatively young age as a member of the Unionist Party in the days of the British, he swore allegiance to the Muslim League soon before Pakistan came into being.

A few years after independence Malik Sahib joined the newly-formed Republican Party and then deemed it in his voters’ interest to shift to the Council Muslim League. He also became an enthusiastic admirer of President Ayub’s Basic Democracies. When asked why he had changed loyalties so many times, his reply was, “I have never changed my loyalty which has always been to the government in power. It’s the government that keeps changing from party to party.”

That was not the end of Malik Sahib’s odyssey. With the advent of ZAB as the new shining star on the political horizon, he opted for the Pakistan People’s Party. Later, he was selected by General Ziaul Haq as a member of his Majlis-i-Shoora. Again, prompted by the good of his people, and racked by nostalgia of the awami feeling, he went back to the PPP, and finally, disappointed by that party’s failure to deliver (as he said) he resigned and then didn’t know what to do.

He was right. It was not he who was disloyal and unfaithful and changed his fealty with the passing times; it was the government which was fickle and inconsistent and changed its party every now and then.

You will say I am being flippant about a very grave matter, and that it’s easy to disparage the tendency to switch parties, when I should, in all honesty, be giving serious thought to the reasons that prompt politicians to act capriciously. You would be correct in one aspect of the matter at least. It is a sad fact of life with us even when we have a democratic regime in the country that the opposition member’s life is made pretty difficult.

For one, he can’t get his proposals for improving conditions in his constituency through. After all, as an MNA or MPA, he has to give explanation to his voters when he fails to persuade the ruling party to launch some welfare, uplift and improvement schemes in his area. Then, we are a society built on concepts of mutual aid (“You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”), recommendation of the undeserving (“If he was deserving I wouldn’t have to speak for him”), and backing for one’ near and dear ones (“Charity begins at home”), and it’s not that simple to observe the western principles of merit and integrity.

In fact it is almost impossible. So whenever the opposition legislator goes to a minister to get something done for his people, he is confronted with the query, “Why don’t you come over to us? You’ll get everything you want.” Can you really blame him for switching loyalties?

So let the British textile designers call the new cloth what they will – whether chameleon or Pakistani Politician. But let those who decry this attribute of changing colour come and practise politics in this country to know its heart-breaking realities.

THE rulers in Islamabad claim that no stone will be left unturned for holding free, fair and transparent elections. This is nothing new. Such claims have been made on the eve of every election since the eighties but the reality has been different.

Serious allegations of rigging have been levelled on the day of polling and charges of pre-election rigging have also been rife.

The local press in Balochistan is full of such allegations. It is said that those members of the Balochistan Assembly who voted for President Pervez Musharraf in the presidential election of Oct 6 have been offered huge sums for development activities. Former Governor of Balochistan Lt General (retd) Abdul Qadir Baloch disclosed at a seminar in Quetta that Rs70m have been placed at the disposal of each MPA from the ruling coalition from Balochistan for development activities in his constituency during election time.

According to another press report, former PPPP MPA Shafiq Ahmed had alleged that members of the treasury benches were given Rs1.6bn on the pretext of initiating development works to ensure their success in the next elections. These charges were not denied by the former chief minister and other ministers.Confirming this report, officials of the planning and development (P&D) department of Balochistan said that 33 MPAs received Rs50m each from the federal government. Those who had close links with the outgoing chief minister received Rs20m each from the provincial government.

The beneficiaries of the development package were 25 members of the PML-Q, three members of its allied Balochistan National Party (a pro-Musharraf group), four members of the JWP and two defectors from the MMA.

The support of four JWP members and two MMA defectors had saved the last assembly from collapse on the eve of the presidential elections and President Musharraf managed to win 33 votes from the 65-member house.

Independent observers in Balochistan are now raising questions about the impartiality of the caretaker set-up in Quetta which takes orders from the president. Many members of the caretaker cabinet belong to the PML-Q — some were even office-bearers of the party before they became ministers.

Measures that betray lack of integrity include the acceptance of nomination papers of those who are disqualified under the NAB ordinance. A special concession was also made for those candidates who held madressah certificates. The JUI-F particularly benefited from this concession.

It was widely believed in Balochistan’s political circles that this special consideration would be withdrawn following the Supreme Court’s decision on the eve of the local bodies’ elections rejecting the certificates of religious seminaries as equivalent to a bachelor’s degree without the candidate having passed exams in English, Urdu and Pakistan Studies.

But a large number of candidates have been allowed to contest elections on the basis of these certificates. Is this a goodwill gesture towards the JUI which has proved to be helpful to the Musharraf regime?

There are reports — the source being Hasil Khan Bizenjo, the central secretary general of the National Party — that all former members of the treasury benches belonging to the PML-Q and BNP-Awami were told that they should name their preferred returning officers for their respective constituencies a few months prior to the election process.

Sarfaraz Ahmed Bugti, a candidate for a National Assembly seat from NA-265 (Dera Bugti-Sibi and Kohlu) as well as a provincial seat (PB-24 Dera Bugti), was not allowed to file his nomination papers. An intelligence agency is reported to have brought in its favourite Tariq Masoori, a nominee of the PML-Q, in an attempt to have him elected unopposed to the provincial assembly seat.

In his constitutional petition in the Balochistan High Court, Sarfaraz Bugti submitted that he was detained by an officer of the agency who did not allow him to file his nomination papers. The court accepted his version and allowed him to file his papers for both seats as it was confirmed that he was detained under the MPO.

The Baloch nationalist parties are already under pressure for quitting parliamentary politics. The general opinion is that the elections are a futile exercise because they change nothing. If the coming elections become controversial, they will help convince the people that the ballot box is not the solution to their problems.