ONE evening, Afzal Lala and I went to the airport, for the heck of it. I liked to be among people and there was a special excitement about an airport, aeroplanes arriving and departing. The terminal building consisted of a rotunda with a restaurant called Skyroom and there was a post-office, a shop that sold curios, and most unlikely of all, a book-shop. That particular evening, a largish crowd was being assembled by the equivalent of a master of ceremonies or a drill-sergeant and he was going about his business like a goatherd. There were rows of trucks lined up which had brought these people to the airport. Obviously, some dignitary was expected. It could not have been a foreign dignitary, otherwise there would have been national flags strung up on the lamp-posts, like laundry hung up to dry. The crowd itself looked disinterested and bored. We had no idea who was expected and decided to ask the master of ceremonies who was strutting about like a rooster. “Who’s coming?” we inquired. “Liaqat Ali” he said. We told him that that was impossible since Liaquat was dead. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that Qasoo Seth has sent us. “We had no idea who Qasoo Seth was but clearly he seemed to be in the business of renting a crowd. I cannot remember who the dignitary was, it might have been Iskandar Mirza arriving from Dhaka. I wrote a column about this, pointing out that this was a good example of self-help. Since politicians were unable to draw crowds on their own, they rented them. The facade that they were popular leaders had to be maintained. I pointed out too that this was the extent of the participation of the people in the politics of the country.
Yet, there was this anomoly. Politics seemed to be the main activity. That’s the impression one would have got from reading the newspapers. Politicians seemed happy enough to be manipulated by a bureaucracy who were by now entrenched beyond undoing and were the real masters of the country. Good, bad or indifferent, the bureaucracy was the power-centre and there was no such thing as public opinion. When a government was changed, which meant primarily the prime minister, there was kind of re-shuffle, like a decks of cards being re-shuffled. Ordinarily, the whole edifice should have come tumbling down but there were neither institutions nor traditions but the bureaucracy ensured that there would be continuity and there would not be any tampering with the status quo. So, only faces changed, not policies.
AS a working journalist, one was a witness to this charade from close quarters. Often one felt, as one got sucked in because of the editorial policy of our newspapers, which was like the reed and bent with the breeze, disconcertingly close. One would have liked to have been a spectator who sees more of the game but we functioned like ball-boys, had a certain nuisance value. Our editors imagined themselves to be king-makers and became close confidants of a prime minister or someone aspiring to be one. The course of the ship was accordingly altered. The readers did not seem to mind or notice that the newspaper had taken an editorial somersault nor did it seem to weigh too heavily on our conscience. But this is because, we did not attach too much importance to politics.
BUT there were other subjects that we could write about and I was writing a daily column for the Times of Karachi. There was room enough to write reasonably freely. Not necessarily that we could issue a call for the storming of the Bastille. There was always Col. Majid Malik who was the Principal Information Officer and one would get a telephone call from him and he would gently suggest a cooling off. He was a kind, soft-spoken man and in some oblique way, my mother claimed to be related to him, the Kashmiri connection. One of our sub-editors was Shaukat Siddiqui, he would go on to become a distinguished playwright. On one occasion, he had got two stories horribly jumbled up and we had Nehru denouncing separate electorates in Pakistan. I was all set to write a thunderous editorial denouncing him for interfering in Pakistan’s domestic policies. I got a telephone call from Col Majid Malik asking me where we had got the story. “What are you making Nehru say?” he asked, the sarcasm was in the politeness. I told him, that it was an agency story and he said I should re-check it. I checked and found the mistake and issued our regrets the following day. I confronted Shaukat and he said that it was an oversight and I respected and liked him too much and there the matter rested. I think, deep down in our hearts, we knew that what we were writing was an exercise in futility but working for a newspaper was something special.
Every day was a new day. What we had done yesterday stood cancelled. The office of The Times of Karachi was off Burns Road and as best as I could remember it had only one toilet and that was attached to the editor’s room. A strong gust of wind would have brought the building down. But I loved that office, I loved the sound of the teleprinter and the clatter of the typewriters as reporters worked on their stories and the buzz of sub-editors studiously going through the copy and their occasional sneering comments on what they thought of them. It was an uplifting place of work even though the tables wobbled. It was too in the very heart of Karachi and not one that the newspapers would call a posh area as PECHS was being called, the then high-rent district. Clifton was where people went to catch a sight of the sea and the braver and more foolish to wade in the water. The elite of the city, how the elite liked to be called elite, went to Hawkes Bay where many of them had huts.
Choudary Muhammad Ali’s government seemed to be tottering. The cancellation of his visit to China had shown that he was on a turning wicket with vultures gathering like close-in fielders. His days were numbered and whether the Embassay located at Kandawalla Building had anything to do with it, he was shown the door or as P.G. Woodhouse would have put it, “given his bowler hat.” Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy became prime minister. My brothers Nasir and Sattoo had known him in Calcutta and he was a regular at our Friday nights.
He was a modern man, a man of great personal charm and there was something of a seignior about him which could easily have been mistaken for arrogance. He was anything but that. He had been a controversial politician in pre-partition India. It was his misfortune that he had been Chief Minister of Bengal during the great Calcutta killings and Stanley Wolpert is his book Gandhi’s Passion writes that the man who was most widely blamed for the mass murder of Hindus had been Suhrawardy. Wolpert, in the same breath, as it were, says that Gandhi had long known and liked Suhrawardy and so when Muslim friends had pressed Gandhi to stay on in Calcutta, to put out the fires, Gandhi had made one condition — that Suhrawardy share the same roof with him so they could appeal to Muslims and Hindus alike to live in peace. Suhrawardy agreed and they both moved into the Hydari House. He had also championed the cause of an United Bengal and though at first, Mr Jinnah had rejected it, as events began to unfold, Mr Jinnah was not unsympathetic to it. His Awami League had scored a stunning victory in the elections in East Pakistan. He was a professional politician which neither Mohammad Ali Bogra nor Choudary Mohammad had been. He was the one politician who was accepted in both East and West Pakistan, a national leader.
I got on very well with him even though the Times of Karachi was less than friendly to him. He followed cricket and would tell me that he listened to the cricket commentary. He had once berated one of his opponents and called him a “trouble shooter.” In my column, I pointed out that a trouble shooter was someone who solved problems and what he meant to say was that his opponent was a trouble-maker. When I next met him, he told me that he would listen to my commentary avidly “and God help you if make a mistake,” he said, and he had smiled, as if to suggest, no hard feelings. And there weren’t any. Somehow we knew, he would not last long in his job. He was his own ma and this was anathema to the king-makers. For the time being, however, he was prime minister and a bridge between the two wings of the country.
ONE evening, Afzal Lala and I went to the airport, for the heck of it. I liked to be among people and there was a special excitement about an airport, aeroplanes arriving and departing. The terminal building consisted of a rotunda with a restaurant called Skyroom and there was a post-office, a shop that sold curios, and most unlikely of all, a book-shop. That particular evening, a largish crowd was being assembled by the equivalent of a master of ceremonies or a drill-sergeant and he was going about his business like a goatherd. There were rows of trucks lined up which had brought these people to the airport. Obviously, some dignitary was expected. It could not have been a foreign dignitary, otherwise there would have been national flags strung up on the lamp-posts, like laundry hung up to dry. The crowd itself looked disinterested and bored. We had no idea who was expected and decided to ask the master of ceremonies who was strutting about like a rooster. “Who’s coming?” we inquired. “Liaqat Ali” he said. We told him that that was impossible since Liaquat was dead. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that Qasoo Seth has sent us. “We had no idea who Qasoo Seth was but clearly he seemed to be in the business of renting a crowd. I cannot remember who the dignitary was, it might have been Iskandar Mirza arriving from Dhaka. I wrote a column about this, pointing out that this was a good example of self-help. Since politicians were unable to draw crowds on their own, they rented them. The facade that they were popular leaders had to be maintained. I pointed out too that this was the extent of the participation of the people in the politics of the country.
