Why has always the Women’s Ministry played the role of a defendant?
IS she coming here or not? Read Dawn and you’ll be cheered at the Foreign Office spokesman’s techy testimony that none dare stop Mukhtaran from streaking across to America. Good, the matter is done with finally; we can now move on with our lives.
Darn, that’s not what The New York Times op-ed page reflects. Kristof, the angry columnist is still hammering away at Musharraf for barring her from addressing the noble doctors of Pakistani origin in North America (APPNA) at Texas next month.
And those purpose-driven ambitious women at ANAA (Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women) who invited Mukhtaran, know exactly when to strike, what the story line should read and how to sell it to the foreign media. (I remain in permanent awe of them). They are still shouting their young lungs out in front of our missions in New York and Washington DC. “We want Mukhtaran,” they continue to holler.
Why has no factotum told these young women to shut up and go home? Stop the racket. The game is over and Mukhtaran is no longer a live topic? Is it not Gen (retd) Jehangir Karamat’s army of no-do-gooders task to come out and tell the protesters the party is over?
Someone is double-dealing here. Liar, liar, your pants are on fire. Really? That’s wishful thinking on my part. Like Shazia, the doctor who got raped at Sui, the subterfuge (of whoever) is so sophisticated that it dies a natural death, taking the truth with it to the netherworld.
Like Shazia, Mukhtaran too is a hero today, gone tomorrow. The powers that be prefer it this way.
Will someone tell Madam Nilofur Bakhtiar to remove that fixed grin from her face? Mohammad Malik of PTV did a provocative number baiting the woman adviser who debated like a shrew with nothing muscular to add. The only vigorous activity she undertakes is as a goalkeeper defending the government, especially its ace player, the president.
Why has always the Women’s Ministry played the dubious role of a defendant? Since Benazir’s time, when she literally picked up a woman secretary from the street, this ministry apart from getting fancy names is a den of otiosed sycophants. Ms Bakhtiar, in the words of those who suffer her verbal diarrhoea vouch she only beats her own drum. Meanwhile, every concerned columnist has dutifully written the same story on Mukhtaran and the prize for each man’s enlightenment goes to this unbelievably media savvy group of four people calling themselves ANAA.
How did the story break?
ANAA takes responsibility for breaking into The New York Times Masonic op-ed pages with columnist Kristof as their carrier. Smart as a whip move, dare I say.
It hived a colony of waspish tales on all things poisonous in Pakistan. Kristof the yellow wasp (we call tumburhi in Punjabi) lay in wait to sting Musharraf where it hurts, because he got denied a visa to visit Pakistan.
Along came ANAA and spirited him to action with the latest on Musharraf’s ‘misdeeds’ on Mukhtaran’s maltreatment.
And if you are still wondering what’s the big deal in getting Kristof on their side, then you are missing the forest for the trees.
Recall the proverb: the power of the pen is mightier than the sword and you’ll know what my drift is. Here’s the chronology of events: Kristof writes a column, next day there’s an editorial in The New York Times, and the following day, Sherpao our guardian of the interior announces — hear ye, hear all — Mukhtaran is a free agent.
Truth or dare. Knock, knock, who is the liar?
The Times has a time-honoured habit of grooming people who outright rubbish Pakistan. Such pluralism on its pages is what makes this newspaper the greatest in the world. And those Pakistanis who present the ugly face of their government want truth to be told. They love Pakistan, they say. And there is absolutely no reason for me to parrot Nilofur Bakhtiar’s line that these individuals living in America are unpatriotic. Who made her the judge?
But in the same measure, how come the Times only nurtures the mavericks and the rebellious? Added to their list of favourites recently is ANAA. And I am delighted for them. They don’t need anyone else. The American media here is falling over each other to shake their hands.
Some years ago, I attended a New York Times event where I met Michael Oreskes, whose name I read daily in Times masthead on the editorial page — he is number four in their hallowed hierarchy.
Pitching for Sharmeen Obaid, he told me to interview her. Her documentary Re-inventing the Taliban was to be aired on The New York Times Discovery Channel.
Oreskes followed up with a call to me the next day giving the details of this young Pakistani student studying at Stanford who had earlier made Terror’s Children and seized the imagination of people like Oreskes at the Times. “You must give her publicity in the Pakistani papers,” nudged the great man, “she deserves it.”
Like ANAA women, Sharmeen needs no Pakistani hack to be her mouthpiece. Being “adopted” by the Times is enough. She later made Pakistan on a razor’s edge — a ghastly rehash of her interviews with the MMA fellows and Channel 13 aired it. Now, she’s bagged the 2004 Livingston Award, which “honours young journalists for outstanding reporting”. The $10,000 prize goes to journalists under the age of 35 and is the “largest all-media general-reporting award in the country.”
Pakistan through Ms Obaid’s lens is a scary place to visit, let alone invest. Any hopeful traveller or investor, watching the grisly drama of mediaeval justice as portrayed will run in the opposite direction. Who wants to go to a country crawling with crazy fundos?
Has Sharmeen then done her country justice by showing such a horrid side of the beards? You decide.
And for that matter whose side is Nuzhat Ahmed on? One of the brains behind ANAA. Earlier when she and her Mensa smart buddies launched a magazine called Chowrangi I contacted this intrepid professor of medicine at U-Penn, one of America’s top teaching hospitals.
“However much I may consider myself a citizen of the world, the fact is that I am always going to be asked where I am from. I have therefore dispensed with the multi-rooted pretence,” she told me then.
Does the doctor who studied at Dow Medical in Karachi and saw “bodies from the Bohri bazaar bomb blast, the Pan Am hijacking, rioting and tear gas in the 80s and 90s,” think that the future is graspable?
“Pakistan has a very real chance of success in the future and we twenty and thirty-somethings will have to play a vital part in that success.”
Translating their resolve into action, these “30-somethings” are now getting into their groove, via the foreign media muckraking Pakistani leaders.
What ANAA projects is 500 per cent fact.
But apart from fuelling Kristof’s hatred filled columns on Pakistan (his taps have fully opened up), we must wait and see how ANAA succeeds in achieving what it claims to achieve in the years to come. For the greater good of Pakistani women who have no voice roundly abused and raped back home, one hopes the group can do lasting good and not just have a knee-jerk reaction each time the government is mean hearted to a rape victim.
Why just Mukhtaran? Why not the other millions like her who never will get invited to talk to the noble Pakistani doctors in Houston? Why don’t they set up a permanent shelter for them in Pakistan and persuade Musharraf to give Kristof a visa to come visit and write. Will he and his paper, The New York Times then report the good news? You decide.
IS she coming here or not? Read Dawn and you’ll be cheered at the Foreign Office spokesman’s techy testimony that none dare stop Mukhtaran from streaking across to America. Good, the matter is done with finally; we can now move on with our lives.
ANAA takes responsibility for breaking into The New York Times Masonic op-ed pages with columnist Kristof as their carrier. Smart as a whip move, dare I say.
Pitching for Sharmeen Obaid, he told me to interview her. Her documentary Re-inventing the Taliban was to be aired on The New York Times Discovery Channel.
Does the doctor who studied at Dow Medical in Karachi and saw “bodies from the Bohri bazaar bomb blast, the Pan Am hijacking, rioting and tear gas in the 80s and 90s,” think that the future is graspable?
