Palestine after Powell

The announcement on Monday that US Secretary of State Colin Powell had resigned came as no surprise. It had been expected that in his second term President George W. Bush would want a principal foreign policy adviser more in tune with his own ideological leanings. It is no secret that Bush's inner circle resented the popularity and credibility that Powell enjoyed not only internationally but also inside America.

Despite the care Powell took to affirm his loyalty to Bush and his policies formulated by the conservatives, he not only questioned these but, through carefully arranged leaks, let his doubts and misgivings be known to the world. The most publicized of these doubts were perhaps those expressed in the Powell Doctrine and the Pottery Barn rule with regard to Iraq.

According to the Powell Doctrine, when military force is employed it must be done with a clear objective in mind. The amount of force must be such as to crush the enemy and achieve the objective. First enunciated in the Desert War of 1991, when Powell was the chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, the doctrine was recalled after it became clear that Iraq's descent into chaos, after the defeat of Saddam's forces, had been occasioned by a paucity of manpower and lack of planning for the post-Saddam era.

The Pottery Barn, a chain of crockery stores apparently, had a rule for its customers "if you break it you own it". Powell or his supporters let it be known that he had repeatedly warned Bush that in Iraq once Saddam had been overthrown the US president would "own" 25 million Iraqis and would be responsible for their well -being, a task for which he believed the United States was ill-prepared.

The fact that events proved Powell right on both counts hardly endeared him to the coterie of Bush advisers who had advocated the war on Iraq. These advisers may have been subjected to relentless criticism by the "liberal press" but in the end they played what seemed to be a crucial role in galvanizing the support of the religious right for Bush's reelection.

Whether the religious right voted for Bush because of his Iraq policy is debatable. Many believe that these voters were probably opposed to the policy but this weighed less heavily with them than the fact that by their reckoning the Democrats, and particularly Senator John Kerry, would allow a further deterioration in moral values including the legalization of single sex marriage.

Bush, however, has chosen to see his victory, and particularly the 3.5 million, lead in the popular vote as a validation of all his policies, and by extension that of the neo conservatives. Under these circumstances, it was apparent that Powell's continuing as secretary of state would not be countenanced no matter what credibility he enjoyed internationally or domestically.

What comes next? Washington is apparently abuzz with the news - attributed to senior US officials - that Bush will nominate his National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as his new secretary of state. It has been known for some time that Ms Rice had been angling for a cabinet post but her preference was said to have been the defence department. If she is now being considered for secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld would stay on as defence secretary.

America's military professionals believe that the present mess in Iraq has been caused largely by Rumsfeld's refusal to heed their advice on required troop levels and preparations for governing a post-Saddam Iraq. It was Rumsfeld whose department, in the face of opposition from the CIA and the state department, tried to foist the now discredited Ahmad Chalabi on the Iraqis as the leader of the interim government; it was Rumsfeld who signed off on the egregiously mistaken decision made by his appointee Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army; it was Rumsfeld who rejected Paul Bremer's own requests for additional troops in Iraq; and it was again Rumsfeld who endorsed the decision to reject the UN proposal for an Iraqi interim government of technocrats, opting instead for a government comprising largely Iraqi exiles with CIA ties.

It may be that Rumsfeld is being retained because Bush shares his vision of trimming the American armed forces but ensuring that they are better equipped to handle the type of wars that America expects to fight in the future. More likely, however, Bush may keep him on because to do so otherwise would be to acknowledge implicitly that the policy in Iraq was wrong and that its implementation was clumsy and counter-productive.

Condoleezza Rice is known to be a close confidante of the Bush family and to enjoy the president's confidence to a much higher degree than Powell. The leaders that she would have to deal with as secretary of state - most of whom she has met already in her capacity of national security adviser - will know that what she says would mirror President Bush's views. She is an acknowledged expert on Soviet affairs and on present day Russia.

The question is whether she has the intellectual depth and the expertise to be able to assess the situation in other parts of the world. More importantly, the question will be whether she can influence the president's thinking and give him a perspective on the international scene that is different from that pressed upon him by Vice-President Dick Cheney and other neo-conservatives.

This is going to be of particular importance with regard to the Palestine question. There has been much talk of the fact that Arafat's demise has provided a new window of opportunity on the settlement of this question. Prime Minister Tony Blair, before his recent visit to Washington, had opined that the settlement of the Palestine issue was a critical part of the battle against terrorism. He was advocating the appointment of an American special envoy and the holding of an international summit meeting to resurrect and implement the roadmap. He got very little from his American friend.

Bush did not talk of appointing a special envoy nor did he unequivocally endorse the call for an international summit. Even his much-publicized statement that he hoped to see an independent Palestinian state before the end of his second term was wrung from him by reporters at the joint press conference he and Blair held after their talks.

The emphasis appeared to be on the fact that the Palestinian elections must go forward and that Israel should help to make this possible. "I believe," Bush said, "that the responsibility for peace is going to rest with the Palestinian people's desire to build a democracy and Israel's willingness to help them build a democracy." He went on to add that the Americans would "hold their (Palestinians') feet to the fire to make sure democracy prevails, that there are free elections."

There are reports that suggest the Americans are bringing pressure to bear on Israel to create conditions in which the elections can be held and are preparing to offer financial and technical support to the Palestinian authorities to facilitate the elections. At the same time, it is clear that the Americans expect the Palestinians to elect "moderate" leaders and that if this does not happen the Americans will walk away from the process, leaving the Palestinians to fend for themselves against an increasingly intransigent Ariel Sharon.

Sharon's own game plan is also clear. He has been the advocate of fence-building and of restricting the movement of Palestinians. His idea of a Palestinian state is essentially one of creating non-contiguous Palestinian enclaves encompassing about 42 per cent of the area of the West Bank while leaving security and the rest of the West Bank territory in Israeli hands. Independent observers have noted that, in violation of agreements, Sharon has not frozen settlement activity. Apart from negotiating with the Americans on how much "natural expansion" should be permitted in existing settlements he is also funding the creation of new settlements.

He has announced a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for an American endorsement of his maintenance of settlements on the West Bank. His close adviser has offered the view that Sharon by offering to withdraw from Gaza, which has 37 per cent of the Palestinian population but about one per cent of the territory of the West Bank Sharon has effectively put into cold storage the idea of creating an independent Palestinian state.

Clinton said, perhaps rightly, though Arab sources dispute this, that Arafat missed a golden opportunity to create a Palestinian state when he refused to sign off on the proposals that emerged from the Camp David summit organized in July 2000. According to some reports, these proposals would have meant the vacation of 95 per cent of the West Bank by Israel but would have also required the Palestinians to give up the claim that the displaced be allowed to return to their homes in what was now the state of Israel.

Arab observers claim that this proposal was never formally tabled and even its full parameters were not made available until December 2000. Other observers point out that the deal was being made by an Israeli prime minister in deep political trouble at home who could never have delivered on the deal.

The Palestinians have demonstrated remarkable maturity in the days following Arafat's death. There has been no internal bickering at least in public. The rule of law is being strictly adhered to in determining the succession and in the scheduling of elections. Appeals have been made for international support for the elections and for pressure on Israel to withdraw troops so that elections could be held peacefully.

Optimistic Palestinians believe that the electorate would back the moderates and reject the extremists of Hamas and similar organizations. Alternatively, they hope that Hamas will itself help bring this about. The fact is, however, that whatever the deal offered then was far better than anything that that the Palestinians can hope to get while Sharon is prime minister and while Bush remains heavily influenced by his neo conservative aides.

It is in this context that Ms Rice will have a crucial role to play. She has to be able to persuade Bush that peace, and as a corollary the reduction and eventual elimination of the attraction militant organizations hold for disaffected youth in the region, will come not through military action in Iraq but through patient work as an "honest broker" to help the Palestinians arrive at a just settlement with Israel.

This would require much greater pressure on Israel than has been applied but this a second term president can afford to do, particularly if he can argue that a just settlement, more than military strength or even American assistance, offers the best chance of guaranteeing Israel secure borders.

In the absence of such a settlement, European nations would find themselves having to cope with the sort of anti-Islamic sentiment ignited in the Netherlands by the assassination of the film director Theo Van Gogh. Intolerance, already at a high level, would scale new heights, and provide fresh impetus to militant organizations, which would like nothing better than to see the so-called clash of civilizations become a reality. It is a formidable task for whoever Bush nominates as his secretary of state.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Growing ties with Russia

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once wrote that nothing is permanent and that everything is in flux. This is certainly true of relationships between nations where former enemies have become friends and coalition partners, and former allies have become bitter rivals and at times enemies. This observation certainly applies to the new current political alliances that appear to be forming.

Early in February 2003 President Musharraf, after receiving an invitation from Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, ended the 30-year diplomatic estrangement that existed between Pakistan and Russia, that colossal monolith that stretches across 11 time zones. Ever since the three-day visit, analysts have been anxiously watching developments for signs of shifting strategic partnerships for the two south Asian rivals.

For this initiative, President Musharraf must be given full credit, for he displayed considerable alertness and sagacity in trying to stabilize his country's future, commercially and militarily. The meeting was a successful one, conducted in a spirit of bonhomie, even though it was tempered somewhat by the Kremlin's announcement that Putin had telephoned the prime minister of India that the meeting with their arch rivals would not affect the cordial relations the Russians enjoyed with the Indians.

In fact, after the historic session ran well past its scheduled end, the Russian leader quipped that he was not at all surprised. The last visit by a Pakistani head of state to his country took place 33 years ago. They obviously had a vast agenda to cover and discuss.

A basket of diplomatic and cultural accords was signed during the two-hour session, and both leaders appeared pleased by the outcome. A year later in February, the Pakistan foreign secretary, Riaz Khokar, addressing a visiting Russian delegation to Pakistan, led by Russian deputy foreign minister, Anatoly Safanov, reiterated the commitment of the government of Pakistan to reinvigorate its relations with Russia and expand bilateral relations in all fields, particularly defence and communications.

To remove existing impediments to the development of cooperation between Pakistani and Russian organizations, it was agreed to work towards the prompt settlement of issues like Pakistani debt restructuring, financial obligations, the promotion of inter-bank relations and the establishment of most-favoured-nation status in trade and investment.

What has caused this sudden about-turn in relations between the two countries, after decades of alliances with each other's enemies? The superficial answer is that both presidents were exploring new diplomatic horizons and channels so that they could widen the spectrum of trade.

The more plausible answer, however, is that there have been increasing signs of tension in Islamabad's relations with Washington, especially after the religious parties, who have an abiding grip on the popular imagination, took over the government of the NWFP, and after Washington's attempts to improve strategic and diplomatic ties with New Delhi. Israel's agreement to supply the Arrow air defence missile system to India, which has been seen as part of the same strategy, has been particularly irksome to Islamabad.

Conversely, Moscow hasn't taken too kindly to the way India has recently developed strategic and in-depth relationships with the United States. President Putin possibly saw Musharraf's visit in terms of a Kremlin bid to enhance Russia's role in South Asia, at a time when other strategic partnerships are shifting. It is a replay of the old nineteenth century balance of power game, where weaker nations ganged up against the stronger one.

However, attempts to overhaul memories of a bitter past, when Pakistan became a staging area for US-backed Afghan Mujahideen fighters who took on the invading power, will take a very long time. What is interesting is that the Mujahideen, who were reactionary and retrogressive in outlook, and who also had the support of the Pakistan army intelligence network, was attacking a people that had built roads, hospitals and schools and provided education to Afghan women and girls. This last named positive gesture of the Soviets was quickly extinguished by the Taliban when they came to power on the lame excuse that they didn't have the resources to provide education to women..

It will take a huge effort and a long time to change attitudes towards Russia. There are still analysts in this country who haven't altered their perceptions of the Great Bear and harbour strong views on Russian nationalism, which they see as a malevolent force and follow a tradition of belief in an unchanging national culture which has persisted from the days of Tsarism to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Put another way, "communism was little more than the new face of eternal Russia."

These analysts see Russian culture as unchanging, a culture which has bred an ethnic, collectivist and authoritarian nationalism that is infused with anti-western sentiments, exaggerated claims of uniqueness and an apocalyptic sense of mission.

In spite of occasional snubs and rebukes, no Pakistani government has ever been willing to cut the umbilical cord with the United States. As long as one can remember, the Soviets have always been regarded as the bad guys in this neck of the woods.

Ever since Liaquat Ali Khan decided to fly west instead of north, the Pakistani public was fed on a diet of intense anti-socialism, funnelled through newspapers and magazines, motion pictures and television, which depicted Russia and its satellites as a society of extreme repression where the people lived in constant fear of purges and the midnight knock on the door. To this was added the belief that the Soviets were atheists and the United States the only really open society in the world.

One of the great disadvantages from which the Russians suffer, is that outside the ambit of the former Soviet Union, not too many people speak Russian, and so anything that appears on the western news channels is swallowed by the English speaking world hook, line and sinker. A case in point is the truly shocking recent Beslan carnage.

The western television networks had been at it for three days. The scenes, fierce and clumsy, weren't choreographed in the sweeping Hollywood style that casts terrorist attackers in the safe past tense. The siege demonstrated a rare visceral power and had a freshly minted terror. Even the attractive female Asian announcer on the BBC, who has never been seen to display any emotion stronger than ladylike distress over a broken tea-cup, was visibly moved.

The world was told that the terrorists were Chechens who were trying to settle old scores with the Russians. But, were they all Chechens? Aslanbek Aslakhanov, President Putin's adviser for north Caucasian affairs, didn't think so. In fact, he said that when he spoke to them in the Chechen language they couldn't understand a word of what he was saying.

The destruction of the Soviet Union 13 years ago, was the greatest disaster that befell the people of the Third World. Not only did it rob the nations of Asia, Africa and South America of the opportunity of playing off one superpower against the other, it triggered a chain reaction which resulted in, among other things, the disintegration of the former state of Yugoslavia.

In 1991 the 74-year old USSR, once described by Winston Churchill as ...a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma...disbanded and 15 former Soviet republics spun off on independent trajectories.The communist parties in Italy, France and India still look back nostalgically to the days when the hammer and sickle fluttered loftily in the wind.

President Putin is aware that such sentiments are still being expressed in present day Russia, where people long for the simple securities and certainties of the Soviet period when nobody went hungry, when everybody had enough clothes to wear, where one could see the Bolshoi ballet or hear a Brahms symphony for the equivalent of a dollar, and living conditions for the majority of the people were about the same.

President Musharraf certainly did his homework before he stepped into the plane for that historic meeting with Putin. Russia may no longer be a military giant, but it is still an industrial colossus. It nurtures an economy which for all its clumsiness still produces sophisticated weapons, and twice as much oil, steel, cement, aluminium and rubber than the United States.

The Russians are still better educated and more cultured than most people in the world. Moscow University has always been on a par with the Sorbonne and Cambridge. In fact, a former commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Navy, a highly cultured and urbane individual, chose Moscow, rather than a university in the United States, Germany or Britain as the place of study for his two sons. He certainly knew something that the majority of parents who rush blindly to the West didn't. Russia is the country of the future.

Love of English

In the years following partition, there was a war of words in East Punjab whether Hindi should be the language of that province or Punjabi written in the Gurmukhi script. Tempers ran high on both sides.

Pandit Nehru made an amusing comment on this linguistic quarrel. He said, "Funnily enough, the battle between Hindi and Punjabi is being fought in Urdu." At that time, all but a few daily newspapers in Indian Punjab were still being published in Urdu.

Something of the same kind is constantly going on in our midst too. The respective merits of Urdu and English as medium of instruction and as official language are being hotly disputed all over the country. But the most passionate votaries of Urdu choose to express their preference for that language in the English dailies, as can often been seen in letters to the Editor in Dawn. I wonder if they are able to write equally well in Urdu also.

Since I too am writing on this sensitive subject in an English newspaper, you won't find me committing myself to any side, for or against. I'm too clever for that. But write on the subject I must, otherwise I shall be the only semi-educated person in Pakistan who has not expressed his views on the language issue. The immediate provocation is the remark of a friend asking way General Pervez Musharraf, belonging to an Urdu- speaking family, always speaks in English.

Actually we are going through a national trauma in thus regard. And if trauma can be measured in time, it started in August 1947 and is still going on. This realization, that one's own language should be the national language, is very much there. But the habit of English is too old and too deep to be shed without a fight.

There is also the complex that Urdu stands for a desi and a somewhat backward culture, while English denotes modernity and enlightenment and higher education. The intelligentsia and the elite take pride in reading, writing and speaking English. Even the uneducated, and in fact the illiterate too, like to be seen using common English words as a matter of prestige.

The desire to show off in English when no English is there is a very old phenomenon. When I was studying in Aligarh in the forties, I was sent to a hakim for a persistent ailment. I still remember his name, Hakim Abdul Latif. Completely devoid of English himself he made it a point to use English words with his unlettered patients.

In my presence, extolling the qualities of barley water and deploring his patients' ignorance he said to two of them, "Barley water pia karo. Kya samjhe? Barley water nahin jaante? Arre bhai, jau ka paani. Yaar, bilkul hi jaahil ho!" I do not recall now if the patients were impressed or not.

And then there was the West Pakistan minister in the days of One Unit, who, as Lahoris are fond of saying, was quite 'pedestrian' in English and educated "up to Shahdara only." But he would spout English expressions in profusion. For instance, when asked what his department was doing about a certain new project, he would reply there was no hurry. "Graduately karenge," were his words.

I saw him dictating a D.O. letter to a cabinet colleague. He called his PA and started speaking. The letter opened with the English words "My dear Malik Sahib" and then he dictated the entire letter in Punjabi, concluding again in English with "Yours sincerely. And hurry up." The direction to hurry up was meant for the PA who was required to come back at once with a correct fair draft in English for the minister to sign.

It never occurred to old Chaudhry Sahib that there was no harm if he didn't know English as long as he had been elected by the people to represent them and as long as he was a fairly good minister, which he was. It is a different matter that later he was proceeded against for misusing his ministerial position, as was his wife who was a senior officer in education.

No senior government officer worth his salt would like to be found deficient in qualities that go to make the conventional officer. One of these is the quality to give dictation to the PA in clear, fluent and correct English. An old PCS hand managed to become Home Secretary of West Pakistan just before retirement. Rather than fumble for words, he would write out the letter on a piece of paper, and then, holding the paper under the office desk, read out its contents slowly to the PA as if he was dictating it from memory.

It so happened that he got a new PA who was rather cheeky and most officers didn't want him on their staff. This PA got to the secretary's stratagem. He bore with him for a week or so, but then he could no longer resist the temptation to show off his cleverness. One day he calmly asked the boss to hand over the paper to him so that he could copy the text on the typewriter. "It will be easier this way, sir," he added, tongue in cheek. Imagine the poor home secretary's discomfiture.

Talking of PAs, there is a characteristic common to all of them. I they are in doubt about an English word which they have taken down in shorthand, they will never go back to the boss and ask him about it. That would be infra dig. They will try their hardest to decipher it or ask another PA and even rummage through the dictionary.

A typical story that I often narrate in this connection is about my own man in the last days of my service. I had ended a rather personal letter with the words "Good luck to you." He took an unusually long time over typing it out, and I found later that he had been consulting both his colleagues and the dictionary. Eventually when he came to me with the fair draft, the words typed out by him were "Good lunch to you!"

In the situation we have in Pakistan today, Urdu is certainly suffering from disuse, while poor English, much maligned in the debate about the national and official languages, is the victim of great misuse. I suppose it will go on like this till we have evolved an English of our own and have to have an SPCE - Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to English - if, by that time, somebody knows the spelling of these words.

The potency of poetry

"Most people ignore most poetry," the English poet Adrian Mitchell once aptly pointed out, "because most poetry ignores most people." As he would no doubt happily concede, there are some extremely honourable exceptions. And in the subcontinental context, arguably the leading contender for pre-eminence in this respect was Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who died 20 years ago this week.

Faiz wasn't a people's poet in the commonly understood sense of the term. Such an achievement would, perhaps, have required a considerably loftier level of literacy in his homeland. And it certainly didn't help that for much of his lifetime, Faiz's verses - even those that seemed politically innocuous - were effectively banned on PTV and Radio Pakistan, which monopolized the airwaves in those days.

Among those who enjoyed access to his poetry - the intelligentsia, students, political activists, even bureaucrats - Faiz was widely appreciated even by those who were wary of his ideological inclinations. And a measure of the adulation he enjoyed across the border can be gained from the late Dr Eqbal Ahmed's recollection that when the poet visited the capital of West Bengal in September 1977, half a million Kolkattans thronged to catch a glimpse of him.

However, it's not the accolades he received from various parts of the world that make Faiz a people's poet. What qualified him for that status was the fact that the people - humanity collectively, and the oppressed in particular - were ever-present in his poetry. More often than not, his imagination was fired and his eloquence unlocked by the plight of the dispossessed.

And, speaking of the dispossessed, in the light of recent events it seems particularly appropriate to recall that Faiz's final volume of verse (barring his collected poems), Meray Dil Meray Musafir, was dedicated to Yasser Arafat. It was published in 1981, while Faiz was based in Beirut as editor of the Afro-Asian Writers Association journal Lotus. The following year, Arafat is said to have personally persuaded Faiz and his wife, Alys, to leave Lebanon's war-torn capital ahead of the Israeli invasion.

Not surprisingly, one of the main themes of Meray Dil Meray Musafir is the loneliness of exile. Edward Said encountered Faiz in Beirut and found him subdued, if not disconsolate - but recalled that he perked up considerably upon unexpectedly encountering a fellow Pakistani exile, Eqbal Ahmed, who happened to be on a lecture tour. When the three of them went out for a meal, Faiz, usually polite to a fault, apparently had no qualms about leaving Said to his own devices while he conversed with Eqbal in Urdu.

Faiz's frame of mind in those years must have helped him empathize with the Palestinians he encountered - by force of circumstance, the likes of Mahmoud Darwish excelled in the poetry of exile. Meray Dil Meray Musafir contained a number of poems informed by the poet's direct encounter with PLO stalwarts, including one commemorating Palestinians martyred in their quest for a homeland, which begins: "Main jahan par bhi gaya arz-e-watan/ Teri tazleel ke daghon ki jalan dil mein liye/ Teri hurmat ke chiraghon ki lagan dil mein liye/ Teri ulfat, teri yaadon ki kask saath gayee/ Teray naranj shagufon ki mehk saath gayee..."

But there were other sorrows, too, that weighed on his mind. Pakistan was once again under the jackboot; it's first popularly elected prime minister had recently been executed. Hence the poet's pen yielded verses such as: "Phool murjha gaye hain saray/Thamte nahin hain aasmaan ke aansoo" and "Lao to qatal-name mera, main bhi dekh loon/ Kis kis ki muhr hai sar-e-mehzar lagi hui". Somewhat uncharacteristically, there are even hints of denial and despair: "Jo tum kehte ho sab kuchch ho chuka, aise nahein hota", and "Yeh Jama-e roz-o-shab gazeedo/ Mujhe yeh pairahan-e dareeda/ Azeez bhi, napasand bhi hai/ Kabhi yeh farman-e josh-e wehshat/ Keh noch kar iss ko phaink dalo/ Kabhi yeh israr-e harf-e ulfat/ Keh choom kar phir gallay lagalo".

This conundrum wasn't Faiz's alone, of course - although it may have felt that way in faraway Beirut. Many thinking Pakistanis wrestled with similar notions as they contemplated the jackboot above them and the growing obscurantism all around. The oppressiveness of the times was exemplified by the execution of the country's first popularly elected prime minister - a leader who, for all his flaws, seemed to appreciate more than his predecessors the cultural wealth represented by Faiz and others of his ilk.

Few silver linings pierced the gloom. But Faiz, a seasoned purveyor of hope in times of darkness, wasn't about to let go. His faith in the future, the leitmotif of his poetry, which had sustained him through numerous previous phases of darkness, may have been severely tested and perhaps even diminished, but it didn't die out. "Jaza saza sab yahein pe ho gi," he vowed, "Yahein azaab-o-sawaab hoga/ Yahein se utthay ga shor-e mehshar/ Yahein pe roz-e hisaab ho ga."

And that wasn't all. Perhaps his best-known nazm from that era is the one now known almost exclusive by its first line, Hum Dekhain Ge". Lines such as "Sab taj uchchalle jaayen ge/ sab takht giraye jaayen ge" probably helped to ensure that when the first popular edition of Faiz's collected verse, Nuskha Haaye Wafa, appeared two years after Meray Dil Meray Musafir, this poem was nowhere to be found in its pages. What had happened in the interim was that its potency as a protest had been enhanced manifold by Iqbal Bano's spirited rendition.

It was an unusual choice of poem for a semi-classical singer - but then, some years earlier Iqbal Bano had also worked wonders with another ostensibly hard-to-sing set of verses, Dasht-e-Tanhai. There may well be a fascinating tale behind how the singer and the song made each other's acquaintance, but what there can be little doubt that Iqbal Bano poured her heart into Hum Dekhain Ge, and it is thanks to her that the soft-spoken poet's cry of defiance remains indelibly associated in many a mind with the Zia years.

Broadly speaking, however, there's an element of timelessness even in Faiz's most topical lines. To an extent, that may have more to do with the nature of the nation than with the nature of the poetry. One can hardly blame Faiz for the fact that August 1947 - from the bleak imagery of its opening line, "Yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab gazeeda sehr", to its concluding counsel, "Chale chalo keh woh manzil abhi nahein aayee" - has retained so much of its validity over the decades. Perhaps every false dawn in Pakistan's history can retrospectively be explained with "Hum saada hi aise thay ki yunhi pazeerayee/ Jis baar khizan aayee samjhe keh bahaar aayee", but the question that inevitably arises is: why has Pakistan been cursed with far more than what could be construed as its fair share of false dawns?

The last verse above dates back to 1971, the year when Pakistan was bloodily being torn apart. At the time, Faiz was intimidated by the ideology-wallahsand what were then known as Islam-pasands - whose collective patriotism, misguided as it was, would barely have added up to a fraction of the love for his country that Faiz's poetry is steeped in - into condemning India and the Soviet Union for conspiring to dismember Pakistan.

Faiz knew only too well who the real conspirators were, and he more than made up for his moment of weakness with a poem whose blood-soaked imagery has few parallels. "Teh-ba-teh dil ki kadoorat," it begins, "Meri aankhon mein umand aayee to kuchch chara na tha/ Charagar ki maan li/ Aur main ne gard alood aankhon lahu se dho liya." Beyond that, there is a sea of red - "Subhon ka hansna bhi lahu/ Raaton kar rona bhi lahu/ Har shajr minar-e-khoon, har phool khooneen deeda hai" - until the final invocation: "Charagar aisa na honay de/ Kahein se la koee sailaab-e ashk/ Aab-e wazu/ jis mein dhul jaaye to shayed dhul sakay/ Meri aankhon, meri gard alood aankhon ka lahu."

There are innumerable aspects of Faiz and his poetry - his evolutionary and revolutionary aspects, the marriage of tradition and modernity in his verse, the romantic/political duality, his ideological inclinations, his journalism and trade-unionism and various other struggles - that must inevitably go unmentioned in a brief appreciation such as this. But the very contemplation of his trajectory in life and literature underlines the need for a comprehensive biography. There is none that I know of, at least not in English - a shortcoming that one hopes will be rectified before his birth centenary is celebrated in 2011.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of translators, who range from Indian and Scottish professors to a leading Pakistani economist. Some efforts, naturally, are worthier than others - from Victor Kiernan's pioneering endeavour to selections by Agha Shahid Ali and Naomi Lazard - and one can hardly fault them for failing, in most cases, to capture the cadences of the Urdu originals or to adequately convey the images that Faiz excelled at conjuring up. Because that may be a near-impossible task.

It is unfortunate, meanwhile, that the many superb recordings of renditions by performers ranging from Mehdi Hasan, Begum Akhtar and Noor Jehan to Tina Sani, Talat Mahmood and Madhurani are relatively hard to come by. EMI's two volumes of In Memoriam appear to be out of print, and even Nayyara Noor's exquisite album is available only in pirated versions. And whatever became, incidentally, of the long rumoured second volume of Nayyara Sings Faiz? Luckily, Zia Mohyeddin's Faiz Sahab Ki Mohabbat Mein remains in print, as does Aaj Ke Naam, the superb CD-ROM produced a few years ago by Technopak Media Creations. Overall, however, greater attention to this aspect of his legacy would not go amiss.

Happily, the written word is readily available, and in conclusion one could do worse than cite this potent mixture of hope and defiance from a prison poem included in what is arguably Faiz's strongest collection of verse, 1952's Daste-e Saba: "Dil se peham khayal kehta hai/ Itni shereen hai zindagi iss pal/ Zulm ka zehr gholne waale/ Kamran ho sakein ge aaj na kal/ Jalwagah-e wisaal ke shamein/ Wo bhujha bhi chukay aggar to kya/ Chand ko gul karein to hum janein."

Email: mahirali2@netscape.net