SUHRAWARDY was replaced by I.I. Chundrigar not through elections or a great upheaval, but through the painless process of a ‘palace’ coup. There was nor rhyme nor reason to the political process. Pakistan had six prime ministers and the country was not even ten years old and there hadn’t been a general election. The political wheel revolved steadily, suggesting movement, but it was the movement of a tread-wheel. We were still at the place from where we had started.
A new country would suggest vigour, momentum, intellectual audacity and courage, innovation, a boldness of colours. We should have set our sights on climbing every mountain and our newness called for unorthodoxy, even for honest error. Instead, we appeared to have got bogged down. We were learning to walk by standing still. Our personal lives may not have been dull, mine was certainly not, but we were becoming an old country without ever being young.
Because there was no momentum of our own, our affairs started to slip out of our own hands and though we were Pakistanis to the core, it didn’t seem to rankle that we were not masters of our own fate. Nothing had better illustrated this than the position that we had taken during the Suez Crisis.
Among the people, there had been a feeling of outrage, and processions had been taken out and there had been demonstrations. In fact, my newspaper was in the forefront in denouncing the ‘imperialists’, and standing behind Nasser. So much so that the Egyptian Ambassador telephoned me to thank me for the articles I had written. But the Pakistan government preferred to waffle, and there was not even a token condemnation. I don’t think the Egyptians ever forgot this. We had betrayed the worst kind of toadyism.
The engine that drove our foreign policy was that Pakistan felt insecure because of the continuing hostility of India which had not reconciled to the partition of India. Nehru had said that it (Pakistan) would “evaporate at the first touch of reality”. It hadn’t, and we were right to consider India as an ‘enemy’. Thus, the security of Pakistan was a matter of such urgency that it took precedence over everything else.
IN theory, Pakistan was right in entering into alliances, which, if nothing else, should have acted as a deterrent against any adventure that a predatory neighbour may undertake. But we should have ensured that we and our allies were on the same wavelength.
There was one set of reasons for our joining military pacts. Another and a totally different set of reasons motivated our allies, mainly the United States. Was there any commonality? We were committed to defending Pakistan against India. Our Allies were committed to fighting communism. Ideally, we should have sat across a table with our friends, and said: “Let’s define terms.” We should have said: “This is what we mean by aggression, now tell us what do you mean by it.”
Obviously, international relations are far more sophisticated than this, and this kind of approach would have been crude and rough and far too honest. There has to be a lot of waffling and flannel and circumlocution. And convention and protocol are all about good manners. But this was what we should have sorted out. It would have saved us from grief. There would have been little or no misunderstanding and no cause for periodic moods of disenchantment. There was, as far as we could tell, no danger that communism was any kind of threat to Pakistan, ideological or military.
There may have been other advantages to our membership in military pacts, but they should have been weighed against the obvious political disadvantages. It was to be expected or should have been expected that in a bi-polar world whose orientation was either-or, these entanglements would have alienated the other Superpower. Indeed, as early as 1952, the Soviet Union had served notice of its ‘non-neutral’ stance on Kashmir.
Jacob Malik had indicated this to the General Assembly of the United Nations meeting at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. Bulganin and Khrushchev had been even more explicit, if not blunt. If the solution of the Kashmir dispute, in accordance with the United Nations resolutions was a primary objective of our foreign policy, this wholehearted commitment to the West did not seem the most expedient way of going about it. The veto of the Soviet Union was hovering around like a dark cloud.
BUT the American diplomats and those attached to various aid missions were reasonably outgoing, giving the impression that they would rather be friends than masters though a few of them could be arrogant and intimidating, but certainly those who came to the Friday Nights at Air Cottage or were regulars at the coffee-house had no airs about them.
Having been educated at the University of Southern California, I had no difficulty in connecting with them and some of them became my close friends. We did not always agree, but that did not affect our friendship. One day, I received an invitation to lunch. It was from a senior US diplomat, someone I did not know well, but had heard of him as being one of the big wheels in the Embassy. Unfortunately, I cannot remember his name and the invitation was a formal one for it came via a printed card with an RSVP.
THE lunch was at his residence which was behind Frere Hall. I had a rough idea of where it was, but one used to be guided by the presence of cars outside the residence. I passed his residence a couple of times, there were not cars and I stopped and asked a surly chowkidar who told me that was the house. Perhaps, I had got the date wrong. But I went in all the same and was met by my host.
I noticed a small table for two had been laid out. I asked my host if I was the only guest, and he said that he wanted to get to know me better. I was a little put off that I was being ‘checked’ out. We talked in general terms, but the discussion was getting personal. Did I intend to stay in the profession of journalism? And finally, he asked me whether I had any political ambitions? He said that with my educational background, politics needed young men like me. I told him that I had no political ambitions. “Besides, politics is a costly profession,” I told him. “Disregard the costs, are you interested in politics as a career?” he asked me. I told him that I was flattered by his interest in me, but I saw no future for me in politics, indeed saw no future for politics in this country. I was puzzled by this lunch invitation.
Far away from all this, and of another dimension, was the eye-camp in Shikarpur in rural Sindh. The camp was not in the town itself, but on its outskirts, on the fringes of the desert. There, Ronnie Holland held camp every winter. He was assisted by his wife, a polio-victim who was on a wheelchair and was her husband’s anaesthetist.
I had met Ronnie Holland and his wife at Jamsheed Marker’s house and he had told me about his eve-camp and he invited me to visit it. I told Tony Masacarenhas about it and he said he would accompany me and bring a photographer with him. He thought that Time magazine whose stringer he was, might be interested in a story about the eye-camp. When Taj Hidayatullah, a close family friend heard I was going to Shikarpur, he told me to look up a friend of his and he would be happy to put me up. Thus, I would become friend of Aftab Shahban Mirani, a very good friend.
WHAT a fabulous sight the eye-camp was! Hundreds of people came from all parts of the country and from Iran and Afghanistan. Unable to pronounce Ronnie, the word would go around: “Rana Sahib is back.” And the near-blind would start their trek to Ronnie Holland’s camp, by train, by trucks, carts, camels and some by foot. Some of the world’s best eye-surgeons would come, to assist and to learn.
Ronnie Holland was the son of the distinguished Sir Henry Holland, who had founded the camp. Sir Henry, a man of endless energy and sharp humour, had retired and handed over this genuine labour of love to his son. Ronnie performed hundreds of cataract operations in the duration of the camp of a few weeks. We lived in tents though I later moved to Aftab Shahban Mirani’s house.
It was one of my richest experience. The camp had the look of a mela. Whole families had moved in with what seemed like their entire belongings, and had brought their powindah dogs who looked ferocious. I wrote of Ronnie Holland: “Every winter, a light shines in the desert. It comes from a surgeon’s knife as the sun’s rays catch it and make it glisten.”
Tony was not so lucky with Time magazine, but felt he had not wasted his time. It had been my first visit to the interior of Sindh. How different it seemed from Karachi. The people were poor, but rich in their heritage and traditions, in their folkways. Simple people living simple lives with simple problems, to feed themselves and their families, to clothe them and provide shelter, the sons and daughters of the soil which they tilled in the burning sun and huddled together in front of fires in the cold of desert nights.
SUHRAWARDY was replaced by I.I. Chundrigar not through elections or a great upheaval, but through the painless process of a ‘palace’ coup. There was nor rhyme nor reason to the political process. Pakistan had six prime ministers and the country was not even ten years old and there hadn’t been a general election. The political wheel revolved steadily, suggesting movement, but it was the movement of a tread-wheel. We were still at the place from where we had started.
