Sunday, September 30, 2007

Pakistan: 60 Years of "Independence"

Thursday, Aug. 02, 2007 Time
Pakistan: Divided by Faith
By Aryn Baker

A few weeks before Abdul Rashid Ghazi died in a shootout with Pakistani special forces, he told me about a young woman who had asked him to make her a suicide bomber. I was drinking tea with Ghazi, the deputy leader of Islamabad's radical Red Mosque, in his small office just off the mosque's main entrance. Outside, a man — a boy really, with barely a beard — paced nervously, an AK-47 gripped tightly in his hands. Inside, one of Ghazi's assistants updated the mosque's website, which promoted his campaign to spread Shari'a, or Islamic law, throughout the land. Another assistant was affixing labels to a stack of newly burned DVDs portraying American "aggression" in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was these heinous acts, said Ghazi, that inspired his young female acolyte to seek martyrdom. "Had I wanted to use her, I could have, because she was completely ready. But I sent her back, saying we don't need her, inshallah [God willing]."

On July 3, Pakistani forces laid siege to the mosque complex, which had housed some 5,000 students, teachers and clerics — plus a host of heavily armed militants. On the eighth day, after many had fled or surrendered, the soldiers raided the compound. Ghazi was killed, along with 11 soldiers, some 80 militants and a dozen women and children who may have been used as human shields. (The Red Mosque remains a magnet for violence: last Friday, a suicide bombing at a restaurant behind the mosque killed at least 13.) After the July 11 assault, the President, General Pervez Musharraf, addressed the nation. This was not a day of celebration, he said: "We have been up against our own people ... They strayed from the right path and became susceptible to terrorism." Then Musharraf posed wider questions meant for Pakistan but relevant, too, to the rest of South Asia: "What kind of Islam do these people represent? What do we want as a nation?" Today, 60 years after partition created Pakistan and India, Islam on the subcontinent is in the grip of a crisis whose central dilemma is the religion's place and role in modern society. It is a crisis 150 years in the making.

On the afternoon of March 29, 1857, Mangal Pandey, a handsome, mustachioed soldier in the East India Company's native regiment in Barrackpore, near Kolkata, attacked his British lieutenant with a musket, then a sword. At his trial Pandey swore that he acted alone, but his hanging a week later sparked a subcontinental revolt known to Indians as the first war of independence and to the British as the Sepoy Mutiny. Retribution was swift, and though Pandey was a Hindu, it was the subcontinent's Muslims, whose Mughal King nominally held power in Delhi, who bore the brunt of British rage. The remnants of the Mughal Empire were dismantled, and Bahadur Shah, the last Indian Emperor, was exiled to Burma. Five hundred years of Muslim supremacy on the subcontinent was brought to a halt.

Following the 1857 war, Muslim society in India collapsed. The British imposed English as the official language for both education and communication. The impact was cataclysmic. Muslims went from near 100% literacy in Urdu to 20% within a half-century. The country's educated Muslim élite was effectively blocked from administrative jobs in the government. Between 1858 and 1878, only 57 out of 3,100 graduates of Calcutta University — then the center of South Asian education — were Muslim. In the 1880s, only one Muslim was enrolled for every 25 students at the British-run colleges. While discrimination by both Hindus and the British played a role, it was as if the whole of Muslim society had retreated to lick its collective wounds.

From this period of introspection two rival movements emerged to foster an Islamic ascendancy. Revivalist groups blamed the collapse of their empire on a society that had strayed too far from the teachings of the Koran. They promoted a return to a more pure form of Islam, modeled on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Others embraced the modern ways of their new rulers, seeking Muslim advancement through the pursuit of Western sciences, culture and law. From these movements two great Islamic institutions were born: Darul Uloom Deoband in northern India, rivaled only by al-Azhar University in Cairo for its teaching of Islam, and Aligarh Muslim University, not far from New Delhi, a secular institution that promoted Muslim culture, philosophy and languages, but left religion to the mosque. These two schools embody the fundamental split that continues to divide Islam in the subcontinent today. "You could say that Deoband and Aligarh are husband and wife, born from the same historical events," says Adil Siddiqui, information coordinator for Deoband. "But they live at daggers drawn."

The campus at Deoband is only a three-hour drive from New Delhi through the modern megasuburb of Noida. Strip malls and monster shopping complexes have consumed many of the mango groves that once framed the road to Deoband, but the contemporary world stops at the gate. Lost, my translator and I wander the campus in search of the guesthouse that Siddiqui indicated would be our meeting point. The courtyards are packed with bearded young men wearing long, collared shirts and white caps. The air thrums with the voices of hundreds of students reciting the Koran from open-door classrooms. My translator's requests for directions are met with averted eyes, vague gestures and mumbled responses. Finally we get an answer, but as we turn a corner, a voice calls out, "You are not supposed to be here; women are not allowed." That's not entirely true — later that day Siddiqui takes me on a tour through the same courtyard — but Deoband practices strict segregation between the sexes, and does not offer education to women. "They have their own institutions," says Siddiqui, waving vaguely in the direction of the gate.

Founded in 1866, the Deoband school quickly set itself apart from other traditional madrasahs, which were usually based in the home of the village mosque's prayer leader. Deoband's founders, a group of Muslim scholars from New Delhi, instituted a regimented system of classrooms, coursework, texts and exams. Instruction is in Urdu, Persian and Arabic, and the curriculum closely follows the teachings of the 18th century Indian Islamic scholar Mullah Nizamuddin Sehalvi. Graduates go on to study at Cairo's al-Azhar and Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, or found their own Deobandi institutions. Today, more than 9,000 are scattered throughout India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, most infamously the Dara-ul-Uloom Haqaniya Akora Khattak, near Peshawar, where Mullah Mohammed Omar, and several other leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban first tasted a life lived in accordance with Shari'a. Islamabad's Red Mosque follows the same school. Siddiqui visibly stiffens when those names are brought up. They have become synonymous with Islamic radicalism, and Siddiqui is careful to disassociate his institution from those that carry on its traditions, without actually condemning their actions. "Our books are being taught there," he says. "They have the same system and rules. But if someone is following the path of terrorism, it is because of local compulsions and local politics."

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College at Aligarh in 1877, studied under the same teachers as the founders of Deoband. But he believed that the downfall of India's Muslims was due to their unwillingness to embrace modern ways. He decoupled religion from education, and in his school sought to emulate the culture and training of India's new colonial masters. Islamic culture was part of the curriculum, but so were the latest advances in sciences, medicine and Western philosophy. The medium was English, the better to prepare students for civil-service jobs. He called his school the Oxford of the East. In architecture alone, the campus lives up to that name. A euphoric blend of clock towers, crenellated battlements, Mughal arches, domes and the staid red brick of Victorian institutions that only India's enthusiastic embrace of all things European could produce, the central campus of Aligarh today is haven to a diverse crowd of male, female, Hindu and Muslim students. Its law and medicine schools are among the top-ranked in India, but so are its arts faculty and Quranic Studies Centre. "With all this diversity, language, culture, secularism was the only way to go forward as a nation," says Aligarh's vice-chancellor, P.K. Abdul Azis. "It was the new religion."

This fracture in religious doctrine — whether Islam should embrace the modern or revert to its fundamental origins — between two schools less than a day's donkey ride apart when they were founded, was barely remarked upon at the time. But over the course of the next 100 years, that tiny crack would split Islam into two warring ideologies with repercussions that reverberate around the world to this day. Before the split manifested into crisis, however, the founders of both the Deoband and Aligarh universities shared the common goal of an independent India. Pedagogical leanings were overlooked as students and staff of both institutions joined with Hindus across the subcontinent to remove the yoke of colonial rule in the early decades of the 20th century. But nationalistic trends were pulling at the fragile alliance, and India, an unruly collection of rival states coerced into unity under Mughal rule, then again under the British, began to splinter along ethnic and religious lines. Following World War I, a populist Muslim poet-philosopher by the name of Muhammad Iqbal began to frame the Islamic zeitgeist when he questioned the position of minority Muslims in a future, independent India.

Once called the prophet of Hindu and Muslim unity for poems espousing intercommunal unity, Iqbal became increasingly concerned with the fate of the Jewish diaspora in Europe. "Iqbal saw the solidarity of Jews crumble under the cultural majority of Christian Europe," says Fateh Mohammad Malik, chairman of Pakistan's National Language Authority and editor of a book on Iqbal's political thought. "He was worried that the same fate would befall the Muslims. He thought that if they sacrificed their culture at the altar of Indian nationhood, slowly they would be absorbed and made extinct."

The solution, Iqbal proposed to a stunned congregation of the All India Muslim League on Dec. 29, 1930, was an independent state for Muslim-majority provinces in northwestern India, a separate country where Muslims would rule themselves. The response was explosive. The then British Prime Minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, declared that "the poet Iqbal has spoiled all our efforts," to keep a united India. The next day, an editorial in the Times of London trumpeted a pan-Islamic plot to create a contiguous Muslim empire spanning the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and now the sensitive regions bordering the Russian empire.

When asked by a Muslim student group the name for this new nation, Iqbal was at a loss, according to Malik. As an afterthought he suggested taking letters from the names of the provinces: Punjab, Afganiyat or the North-West Frontier, Kashmir and Sindh, ending with Baluchistan. The Hindu newspapers derided the composite name, mocking both Iqbal and the idea of a separate Muslim state. But the name stuck, and the idea of Pakistan was born.

The embryonic nation might have been given a name, but its identity was still uncertain 17 years later when the idea became reality. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Savile Row-suited lawyer who midwifed Pakistan into existence on Aug. 14, 1947, as leader of the Muslim League, was notoriously ambiguous about how he envisioned the country once it became an independent state. Both he and Iqbal, who were friends until the poet's death in 1938, had repeatedly stated their dream for a "modern, moderate and very enlightened Pakistan," says Sharifuddin Pirzada, Jinnah's personal secretary from 1941 to 1944. But mindful of the fragile and fractious consortium of supporters for the new nation, whose plans for independence from both India and Britain were only finalized on July 18, 1947, Jinnah rarely elaborated on his religious views. "He was a very liberal-minded Muslim," says Pirzada. "He rejected the idea that Pakistan would be ruled according to the righteous caliphs of Islam; he did not want a theocracy. At the same time he was very careful not to make a commitment one way or the other so that Muslims would not be alienated."

Both religious conservatives and secular liberals have appropriated Jinnah's words, actions and manners to prove their claims on Pakistan's identity. Clerics that once dismissed him as an infidel for his secular leanings before partition now embrace him for his borrowings from the Koran in his talks. Liberal newspaper editorials quote fragmented speeches to bolster claims that he was an avowed secularist. Jinnah's own wish was that the Pakistani people, as members of a new, modern and democratic nation, would decide the country's direction. "There is no contradiction," says Pirzada, who has watched the debate rage for 60 years. "An Islamic state can be a fully modern state, unless you say it should be ruled by a theocracy. Jinnah was against theocracy. That is what matters."

But rarely in Pakistan's history have its people lived Jinnah's vision. The nation was barely a decade old when President Iskander Ali Mirza declared martial law in an attempt to save his presidency from growing unpopularity. "That was the blackest day in our history," says Senator Khurshid Ahmad, the deputy chief of Pakistan's largest Islamist party. "Even our elected rulers became despots." Pakistan has been cursed ever since. Only twice in its 60-year history has Pakistan seen a peaceful, democratic transition of power. Pakistan considers itself a democracy, but its governments have rarely had a mandate from the people. With four disparate provinces, over a dozen languages and dialects, and powerful neighbors, leaders — be they Presidents, Prime Ministers or army chiefs — have been forced to knit the nation together with the only thing Pakistanis have in common: religion.

Following the 1971 civil war, when East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, broke away, the populist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto embarked on a Muslim identity program to prevent the country from fracturing further. General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq continued the Islamization campaign when he overthrew Bhutto in 1977, hoping to garner favor with the religious parties, the only constituency available to a military dictator. He instituted Shari'a courts, made blasphemy illegal, and established laws that punished fornicators with lashes and held that rape victims could be convicted of adultery. When the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan was already poised for its own Islamic revolution.

Almost overnight, thousands of refugees poured over the border into Pakistan. Camps mushroomed, and so did madrasahs. Ostensibly created to educate the refugees, they provided the ideal recruiting ground for a new breed of soldier: mujahedin, or holy warriors, trained to vanquish the infidel invaders in America's proxy war with the Soviet Union. Thousands of Pakistanis joined fellow Muslims from across the world to fight the Soviets. As far away as Karachi, high-school kids started wearing "jihadi jackets," the pocketed vests popular with the mujahedin. Says Hamid Gul, then head of the Pakistan intelligence agency charged with arming and training the mujahedin: "In the 1980s, the world watched the people of Afghanistan stand up to tyranny, oppression and slavery. The spirit of jihad was rekindled, and it gave a new vision to the youth of Pakistan."

But jihad, as it is described in the Koran, does not end merely with political gain. It ends in a perfect Islamic state. The West's, and Pakistan's, cynical resurrection of something so profoundly powerful and complex unleashed a force whose roots can be found in al-Qaeda's rage, the Taliban's dream of an Islamic utopia in Afghanistan, and in the dozens of radical Islamic groups rapidly replicating themselves around the world today. "The promise of jihad was never fulfilled," says Gul. "Is it any wonder the fighting continues to this day?" Religion may have been used to unite Pakistan, but it is also tearing it apart.

In India, Islam is, in contrast, the other — purged by the British, denigrated by the Hindu right, mistrusted by the majority, marginalized by society. India has nearly as many Muslims as all of Pakistan, but in a nation of more than a billion, they are still a minority, with all the burdens that minorities anywhere carry. Government surveys show that Muslims live shorter, poorer and unhealthier lives than Hindus and are often excluded from the better jobs. To be sure, there are Muslim success stories in the booming economy. Azim Premji, the founder of the outsourcing giant Wipro, is one of the richest individuals in India. But, for many Muslims, the inequality of the boom has reinforced their exclusion.

Kashmir, a Muslim-dominated princely state whose fate had been left undecided in the chaos that led up to partition, remains a suppurating wound in India's Muslim psyche. As the cause of three wars between India and Pakistan — one of which nearly went nuclear in 1999 — Kashmir has become a symbol of profound injustice to Indian Muslims who believe that their government cares little for Kashmir's claim of independence, which is based upon a 1948 U.N. resolution promising a plebiscite to determine the Kashmiri people's future. That frustration has spilled into the rest of India in the form of several devastating terrorist attacks that have made Indian Muslims both perpetrators and victims.

A mounting sense of persecution, fueled by the government's seeming reluctance to address the brutal anti-Muslim riots that killed more than 2,000 in the state of Gujarat in 2002, has aided the cause of homegrown militant groups. They include the banned Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which was accused of detonating nine bombs in Bombay during the course of 2003, killing close to 80. The 2006 terrorist attacks on the Bombay commuter rail system that killed 183 people were also blamed on SIMI, as well as the pro-Kashmir Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). Those incidents exposed the all-too-common Hindu belief that Muslims aren't really Indian. "LeT, SIMI, it doesn't matter who was behind these attacks. They are all children of Musharraf," sneers Manish Shah, a Mumbai resident who lost his best friend in the explosions. In India, unlike most of the time in Pakistan, Islam does not unify, but only divide.

Islam has also proved divisive in Bangladesh, even though the country is overwhelmingly Muslim. There, over the past few years, a similar fight for the soul of the country has taken place, between the secular vision of Bangladesh's nationalist founders, who led the 1971 war of secession from West Pakistan, and a more fundamentalist vision that embraces political Islam. After the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the more Islamic of the two main parties, came to power in 2001 with the support of small fundamentalist Islamic political parties, Western diplomats and intelligence agencies feared that the pro-Islamic grouping was turning a blind eye as Bangladesh became a base for jihadi groups. A series of bombings around the country, including 500 near-simultaneous explosions in August 2005, finally forced the government to round up extremist leaders and jail them. Since then, according to opinion polls, support for fundamentalism, always small, has declined, and the country's problems have centered on its massive corruption and political violence, which led to a de facto military coup in January. Religious tensions, says Najma Begum, professor and chairwoman of the Department of Islamic History and Culture at the University of Dhaka, have been manipulated by mainstream politicians not because they genuinely believe in fundamentalist Islam but for political gain. "They exploit the support of lesser-privileged people so they can get into power and make money," says Najma. "We are not fundamentalist in Bangladesh; we are moderate."

Still, many South Asian Muslims insist Islam is the one and only force that can bring the subcontinent together and return it to preeminence as a single whole. "We [Muslims] were the legal rulers of India, and in 1857 the British took that away from us," says Tarik Jan, a gentle-mannered scholar at Islamabad's Institute of Policy Studies. "In 1947 they should have given that back to the Muslims." Jan is no militant, but he pines for the golden era of the Mughal period in the 1700s, and has a fervent desire to see India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reunited under Islamic rule.

That sense of injustice is at the root of Muslim identity today. It has permeated every aspect of society, and forms the basis of rising Islamic radicalism on the subcontinent. "People are hungry for justice," says Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani journalist and author of the seminal book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. "It is perceived to be the fundamental promise of the Koran." These twin phenomena — the longing many Muslims have to see their religion restored as the subcontinent's core, and the marks of both piety and extremism Islam bears — reflect the lack of strong political and civic institutions in the region for people to have faith in. Pervez Musharraf asks Pakistanis what they want. But the real question is what they, as well as Indians and Bangladeshis, Muslims and non-Muslims, believe.

A Page From History


Monday, Apr. 22, 1946 Time

Long Shadow


India's festering sun beat down impartially on New and Old Delhi—on the precisely geometric, grandly drab preserves of the British Raj, on the noisy, squalid, sprawling native town. A sweat-soaked British wallah might change his shirt four times before settling down to an evening burra peg of bad Australian whiskey in the garden of the Cecil Hotel. Even the calloused, naked feet of shirtless Indians burned as they padded along the teeming Chandni Chauk. In the brassy glare, the flowering trees near the Viceroy's residence seemed to bear sparks rather than blossoms. The rind of an orange would shrivel the moment it was peeled from its fruit. Here & there an exhausted cow rested, sacred and undisturbed, in the traffic lanes of the boulevards.

Delhi in the spring heat of 1946 was not relaxed; it was taut with waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two Socialist lawyers and a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat for 25 days in the southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the richest portion of empire that history had ever seen—to end the British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny merchant Lord Inchcape, and by the great Viceroys, austere Curzon and gentle Halifax. The Raj was finished: scarcely a voice in Britain spoke against independence; scarcely an Indian wanted the British to stay; scarcely a leader in India questioned the sincerity of Britain's intention to get out. The only questions were "when?" and "how?"

Last week the three members of the British Cabinet Mission strove to force Indians to take the ultimate step—agreement on the constitution of an independent state. Much like a judge locking a hung jury in an uncomfortable room, Ministers Lord Pethick-Lawrence, A. V. Alexander and Sir Stafford Cripps prepared for a long Easter weekend in Kashmir's cool mountains with a message that when they returned "they hoped to find sufficient elements of agreement on which a settlement will be based."

Inside the cream stucco Imperial Hotel, beneath the propeller-blade fans, zealots and schemers argued, intrigued and speculated in more tongues than the Ganges has mouths. When they repeated to each other (as they often did) that now at last Britain's colonial policy had lumbered to the point where Whitehall really wanted to free India, hope revived. When they reflected (as they often did) that civil war had never been closer, despair reached .its depth. The issue seemed to turn on one man—Mohamed Ali Jinnah. Last week all India watched Jinnah's words and actions.

Man with an Angora Cap. While the Cabinet Mission still talked with India's leaders, a meeting was held in the courtyard of Anglo-Arabic College across Delhi from the Viceroy's palace. Green and white banners flaunted unacademic slogans: "Pakistan or die," "We are determined to fight." The speeches were equally inflammatory. Said Abdul Qaiyum Khan from the North-West Frontier Province: "I hope the Moslem nation will strike swiftly before [a Hindu] government can be set up in this country. . . . The Moslems will have no alternative but to take out their swords." Said Sirdar Shaukat Hyat Khan of the Punjab (which furnishes more than half the troops of the Indian regular army): "The Punjabi Moslems . . . will fight for you unto the death."

One of the wealthiest of Moslem leaders, Sir Firozkhan Noon, a Punjab landowner, did not hesitate to wave the Red flag; "If neither [the Hindus nor the British] give [Pakistan] to us . . . if our own course is to fight, and if in that fight we go down, the only course for Moslems is to look to Russia. ... I will be the first to lose every rupee I have in order that we may be free in this country." Five thousand Moslems cheered. Even the women in the purdah enclosure to the left of the platform could be heard-applauding behind their screen.

The presiding officer was neither shocked nor carried away by the incendiary speeches. Mohamed Ali Jinnah, clad in black angora cap, a long black sherwani (tunic), and tight-fitting black churidar on his wire-thin legs, smiled his ice-cold smile. He was at the peak of his power. He was the man who might say whether one-fifth of the world's people would be free. His 5 ft. 11 in. and 119 Ibs. stood between India and independence.

Man with a Monocle. After the meeting, Jinnah got out of his political costume as soon as possible, relaxed in his comfortable New Delhi home (he has a more palatial one on Bombay's Malabar Hill). He changed quickly to a tropical grey suit, blue & black striped tie, black & white sport shoes. Later, as he read to a reporter passages from one of his past speeches, Jinnah screwed a monocle into his right eye. He wears Moslem dress only because his enemies sneer that Jinnah, head of India's Moslem League, is lax in his religious observances. ("Jinnah does not have a beard; Jinnah does not go to the Mosque; Jinnah drinks whiskey!") With his perfect English, which he speaks better than his native Gujerati, his slick grey hair and graceful, precise gestures, he might be a European diplomat of the old school. How such a man at a fateful moment in history came to be the spokesman for millions of Moslem peasants, small shopkeepers and soldiers, is a story of love of country and lust for power, a story that twists and turns like a bullock track in the hills.

Jinnah was born on Christmas Day, 1876, the eldest son of Jinnah Poonja, a wealthy Karachi dealer in gum arabic and hides. The boy grew up in an atmosphere of wealth among a doting family. After going to school in Bombay and Karachi, young Jinnah, "a tall thin boy in a funny long yellow coat," as Poetess Sarojini Naidu described him, went to England. At the age of 16 he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn to read law. Soon after Jinnah returned to India, his father lost his money. Three hard, jobless years followed, until briefs and money started coming in.

Man of Unity. In 1940 Bombay Moslems elected him to the Supreme Legislative Council. Jinnah rose steadily in the councils of the nationalists and in the courtrooms of India. He revisited England and there, in 1913, enrolled in the Moslem League. "Typical of his sense of honor," wrote his rhapsodic biographer Naidu,* "he partook of it something like a sacrament . . . made his two sponsors take a solemn preliminary covenant that loyalty to the Moslem League . . . would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause to which his life was dedicated."

During World War I Jinnah was a conspicuous worker for Moslem-Hindu unity, persuaded the Congress Party and Moslem League to hold joint sessions, used as his slogan "a free and federated India." In 1917 he could still attack the idea which later became his obsession. "This [fear of Hindu domination] is a bogey," he told League members, ". . . to scare you away from the cooperation with the Hindus which is essential for the establishment of self-government."

Man of Discord. The solemn dedication to the "larger national cause" began to waver after the war. The shrewd, suave Moslem saw a shrewd, complexly simple Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, step into the leadership of the nationalist Congress

Party. When Gandhi began to turn the party, once the sounding board for polite talk about independence among a few cautious Indian leaders, into a powerful mass movement, Jinnah drifted out of the fold. Some Hindus think he lost his nationalist ardor when he lost his beautiful Parsi wife (he was 42, she 18, when they were married) after their only child, a daughter, was born. His wife had been a zealous worker for independence.

Since then he has shared his Malabar Hill and New Delhi homes with his sister, Fatima. He lives austerely, has no close friends. He disowned his daughter for marrying a rich Christian.

Even Poetess Naidu found little warmth in Jinnah: "Somewhat formal and fastidious and a little aloof and imperious of manner. . . . Tall and stately, but thin to the point of emaciation, languid and luxurious of habit, Jinnah's attenuated form is the deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance."

Man of Threats. That vitality and cold intelligence were turned more & more to the Moslem cause during the late '30s. After the sweeping Congress Party victories in the 1936-37 provincial elections, Moslems charged that Hindus were trying to monopolize the government.

At a crucial meeting in March 1940 Jinnah first publicly plumped for Pakistan.* A hundred thousand followers thronged into the shade of a huge pandal (big tent) in Lahore, where the League was meeting, overflowed into the scorching heat outside, heard Jinnah proclaim over the loudspeaker: ". . . The only course open to us all is to allow the major nations [of India] to separate to their homelands." He warned that any democratic government in a unified India which gave Moslems a permanent minority "must lead to civil war and the raising of private armies." An enthusiastic woman follower tore off her veil, came from behind the purdah screen, mounted the speakers' platform. But Moslem revolutionary ardor was not ready to break with tradition; she was quietly escorted back to purdah by a uniformed guard.

When Gandhi led Congress into civil disobedience after the failure of the Cripps mission in 1942, Jinnah ordered his Moslems to take no part, promised a "state of benevolent neutrality" that would not hamper the British in fighting the Japanese. He boasted that if his followers joined Gandhi's pacifist program, the British would have 500 times more trouble "because we have 500 times more guts than the Hindus." He recalled past glories of the Mogul Emperor Baber ("The Tiger") and other Moslem warriors: "The Moslems have been slaves for only 200 years but the Hindus have been slaves for a thousand."

A historic meeting with Gandhi on Malabar Hill in 1944 ended in an impasse. Even Gandhi's healer, Dinshaw Mehta, who massaged Jinnah for two hours daily during the meetings, could not rub out the wrinkles of obstinacy that made the skinny Moslem uncompromisingly demand Pakistan, made the skinny Hindu as uncompromisingly demand a unified India, with the Pakistan issue postponed until after independence.

Man of Pomp. Today Jinnah revels in his one-man show. Nobody in all his Moslem League can be called a No. 2 man, or even No. 8. He delights in the princely processions staged by his followers when he tours the Moslem cities of northern India. His buglers herald his arrival at railway stations. Bands play God Save the King because "that's the only tune they know." Victory arches go up, rose petals flutter down from the rooftops, richly bedizened elephants, camels, mounted guards of honor accompany the Hollywood float in which Jinnah rides. Today Jinnah, and not the hated Hindu Gandhi, is prima donna on India's stage.

The gulf between Moslem and Hindu had always been real, but Jinnah dug it deeper. Last Christmas Day, Jinnah's 69th birthday, he summed up his demand for two nations. "I want to eat the cow the Hindu worships. . . . The Moslem has nothing in common with the Hindu except his slavery to the British."

Economic differences aggravate the irritation. Enterprising Hindus and Parsis almost monopolize banking, insurance, big business. Moslems, slower to welcome Western education, complain bitterly that Hindu factory owners rarely employ a Moslem clerk or foreman even when most workmen are Moslem. Moslems have a real fear that, in a unified India, Hindus would freeze them out of important posts in government and industry.

The British, in the years when they still hoped to hold India, gave the religious difference official standing by decreeing, in 1909, that Hindus and Moslems should vote separately. H. N. Brailsford, a sympathetic British student of India, has said: "We labeled them Hindus and Moslems till they forgot they were men." The British policy of "divide and rule" has been turned by Jinnah to the Pakistan demand "divide and quit."

The Poorest State. The British Raj had given India a unified defense and a unified region of internal free trade. Jinnah would destroy both. His Pakistan, in northwest and northeast India, would be an agricultural state, poor in resources and industry, unless, improbably, the Hindus agreed to turn Hindu Calcutta over to Pakistan. Between mighty Russia to the north and the main body of India to the south, Pakistan would dangle like two withered arms. Only half the population of the area claimed for Pakistan is Moslem. None could claim that to split India in twain would solve the minority problem—in Hindustan there would still be islands of Moslems, in Pakistan large Hindu minorities. Jinnah has not concealed that behind Pakistan lies the ancient Asiatic practice of taking hostages; a Hindu minority in Pakistan could, "by reprisals, be made to answer Tor persecution of Moslems in Hindu India.

To warnings that a separate Pakistan would be poor and backward, Jinnah answers: "Why are the Hindus worrying so much about us? Let us stew in our own juice if we are willing. . . . [The Hindus] would be getting rid of the poorest parts of India, so they ought to be glad. The economy would take care of itself in time."

The Plainest Answer. The Congress Party's position on Pakistan was just as firm as Jinnah's. The party's official head, goateed Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a Moslem who looks like a caricature of a Kentucky colonel, paced up & down in his Delhi quarters last week, smoking a big cigar. "Eighty percent of the Indian people live in villages where Hindus and Moslems get along well together—the only trouble is among the twenty percent living in the cities. This is basically an economic conflict, not religious." Jawaharlal Nehru made the plainest answer: "Nothing on earth, including the United Nations, is going to bring about the Pakistan of Jinnah's conception." The Congress Party might compromise on some plan for a limited Pakistan within a federated India. Jinnah might change his mind—as he has so often before. But if neither gave way, the British Cabinet Mission would probably impose a constitution on India despite the threats of civil war. When a British official in Delhi last week said, "This is the most important British diplomatic effort of the century," he had in mind the danger that a failure to settle the Indian problem would keep the whole East in turmoil and disturb international relations throughout the world by presenting Rus sia with an opportunity to increase her influence among Asia's people.

Even if settlement of the constitutional issue resulted in an independent, unified India, the future was none too bright.

Famine was tightening its grip on the subcontinent. Sir A. Ramaswami Mudaliar warned of "ten million dead on the streets of India" unless he could buy four million tons of grain this year in the U.S.* Independence alone would not answer the food problem, which would recur until India had more irrigation, more fertilizer, better agricultural methods and more industry. Many Indian leaders looked to the U.S. for machinery and technical advice. The most practical immediate step would be a U.S. loan to Britain, which would permit London to pay off much of its wartime debt to India and to give India the dollars she needs for imports from the U.S.

Where Akbar Failed. If India, with its diverse tongues, its anachronistic princes and princelings, its millennium of dependence on the rule of outsiders, could become a nation in the Western sense, the achievement would be one of the greatest triumphs of history. In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, a Moslem character, Dr. Aziz, recalled that the great Mogul Emperor Akbar had worked with tolerance and wisdom to unite India, had even attempted to devise a new unifying faith. But, says Dr. Aziz: "Nothing embraces the whole of India—nothing, nothing, and that was Akbar's mistake."

This people without a common denominator are at the same time the most bound and the most free in the world. They are bound by poverty, by caste, by religious practices that often descend to the crassest animism, by political ignorance and by disease. Yet they have been free enough to produce great contemporary leaders and thinkers. Nobody, not even the British Raj in the days of its strength, has regimented the Indians, who wear a thousand local costumes, speak 225 languages, and follow highly individual patterns of behavior. An Indian is free to sleep on the sidewalks of Madras when he feels tired, or to declare himself a saint and sit waiting for disciples by the burning ghats of Benares; or to send out a seven-year-old child with a dead baby dangling from its hand to beg in Calcutta's Howrah railroad station.

No one who looked at India's anarchic scene last week could believe that Jinnah had created all the obstacles to India's freedom, but in the present crisis he had come to symbolize them. The Indian sun cast Jinnah's long thin shadow not only across the negotiations in Delhi but over India's future.

* At 67 plump Madame Naidu is still a member of the Congress Party's Working Committee, is considered India's topmost orator. She paints her toenails bright red.

* Pakistan, a dream of Moslem students before it became a political issue, was originally concocted from P for Punjab, A for the Afghans of the North-West Frontier, K for Kashmir, S for Sind, "pure" in Tan from Urdu, with "stan" Baluchistan. means "Pak" also "Land of the means Pure." Last week the League convention defined it to embrace Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, North-West Frontier Province (all in northwestern In dia), Assam and most of Bengal (in the north east). Jinnah has even advocated a thousand-mile corridor across Hindustan to connect the two parts.

* In 1943's Bengal famine 1.5 million starved.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Reelection by Fiat

Washington Post Editorial Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf tries to dictate the terms for keeping a presidential office most Pakistanis want him out of.

LAST MONTH Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf seemed ready to rescue himself from a mounting political crisis by striking a deal with his country's secular political parties -- a step he should have taken long ago. Now, after unsuccessful negotiations with former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, he has returned to the practice of political fiat that has served his country so poorly over the past eight years. Last week Mr. Musharraf refused to allow another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to return to the country from exile, in direct violation of a ruling by Pakistan's Supreme Court. On Monday, the electoral commission his government controls issued a legally questionable ruling that would allow Mr. Musharraf to orchestrate his reelection as president in the next few weeks without giving up his position as army chief of staff.

Yesterday, Mr. Musharraf's lawyer told the Supreme Court, which is considering half a dozen legal challenges to the election scheme, that the president would retire from the army, but only after his reelection. That was less a concession than a threat to both Pakistan's centrist political parties and the court. Mr. Musharraf is in effect insisting that he be given another five-year mandate on his own terms, even though a large majority of Pakistanis want to see him step down and even though his election process violates the constitution on multiple grounds. If he does not get his way, Mr. Musharraf's allies are hinting that he will declare a state of emergency and dictate to the parties and the court.

The likely result of the general's actions is that, instead of uniting against the growing threat from Islamic extremist groups, Pakistan's secular institutions will continue to wage a destructive political war against each other. Their past records contain numerous blots, but the political parties of Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif, like the Supreme Court, are pressing Mr. Musharraf and the army to respect the country's constitution and allow free parliamentary elections. The result could be a centrist government better able to confront al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other extremist movements. If he succeeds in imposing his own solution, Mr. Musharraf will deal a severe blow to the rule of law and further isolate and weaken himself.

It's doubtful that the general would pursue this course if not for the tolerance and support he enjoys from the Bush administration, which has repeatedly signaled that it prefers the short-term benefits of alliance with an autocratic general to the uncertainties and messiness of a return to democracy. The administration conspicuously did not criticize the deportation of Mr. Sharif last week and persistently describes Mr. Musharraf's anti-democratic moves as "an internal matter." The risks and dangers for the United States in Pakistan are unquestionably great. By failing to insist that Mr. Musharraf come to terms with the country's moderate and secular center, the Bush administration is making a bad problem worse.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Nawaz Sharif, Bnazir Bhutto: Two Faces of Pakistan

Hindustan Times - Karan Thapar September 15, 2007

If I ever needed proof that luck was essential for a television interviewer this week, I got it in abundance. Two interviewees I have pursued with diligence, but not much success, accepted and granted interviews within 3 days of each other. It turned out to be the right time to talk to both.

The first thing that struck me about Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif is how different they are. On screen he comes across as genial, even friendly; she seems stern, often forbidding. At times he fumbles, his arguments meander and you feel he’s crafting his answers as he replies. She’s always assured, her flow unstoppable, her answers planned and when she does expand it’s to stop you interrupting.

Nawaz kept a large Pakistani flag by his side, Benazir a small photograph of her late father. His advisors and senior officials crammed into the room to witness the recording. She was on her own and when our cameraman told her staff they were in danger of creeping into the frame she asked them to leave.

Benazir is tough and cold. Sharif is soft and waffly. Both referred to Musharraf as a dictator but thereafter the divergence was vast.

She kept her head covered though her dupatta kept slipping off. In his case I felt he wanted to show off the new head of hair he’s acquired. Every now and then he would lovingly pat it, no doubt to reassure himself it was still there.

A stark difference was their attitude to Musharraf. Both referred to him as a dictator but thereafter the divergence was vast. Nawaz Sharif refused to accept anything Musharraf has done, including progress on the Kashmir front. Benazir made a point of saying she would not reverse good work even if done by a dictator. Nawaz said he would set up a Kargil Commission and it would be free to question, even try, Musharraf. “No one is above the law”, he added. Benazir, on the other hand, whilst accepting the need for such a commission forcefully added that it would not be “designed for revenge”.

More significant were the differences in their attitude to Kashmir. Both saw it as the core issue — but whilst Nawaz seemed to stick to the UN resolutions as the basis for a solution, Benazir insisted that a solution of the Kashmir issue should not hold up progress in other areas. More importantly, Benazir agrees with the way India and Pakistan are inching towards joint consultative mechanisms. Nawaz, I suspect, either hasn’t made up his mind or doesn’t like the idea because it’s identified with Musharraf.

On militant training camps, access to Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed and Masood Azhar and the extradition of Dawood Ibrahim I felt they answered with different audiences in mind. Nawaz, no doubt, condemned terrorism but saw it as “tit for tat”. Both sides need to stop it, he said. He insisted he wouldn’t comment on Sayeed or Azhar till he’s seen the facts and evaded the Dawood question on the grounds that he ought not to discuss specifics. The audience he was addressing seemed to be in Lahore.

Benazir had no hesitation being forthright. Training camps, if they exist, will be closed down; India’s case for access to Sayeed and Azhar would be sympathetically examined; and Dawood could be extradited. I can’t say there weren’t qualifying clauses in her answers but they were not the bits you remembered. Her message was clear. And it was a message for Delhi.

There was, of course, one area of similarity — they dislike each other with a passion that is uncannily the same. If Nawaz feels let down by Benazir, “dismayed and disappointed” as he put it, chiding her for cutting a deal with a dictator, she’s contemptuous of him. “I’m more popular,” she interrupted when asked if Nawaz had stolen a march. Nawaz, she insisted, had lived in luxury after accepting exile whilst her husband, Asif, had spent 8 years in jail refusing similar leniency.

So what do I make of them? She’s tough and cold. He’s soft and waffly. If as a viewer you warm to him, equally, you will respect Benazir. It all depends on what you’re looking for — likeability or strength.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Karan Thapar: Interview with Benazir Bhutto

CNN-IBN Published on September 12, 2007

'The poor and shirtless of Pak are my strength'

Is former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto making a mistake talking to President Musharraf? It was one of issues raised in a special interview on Devil’s Advocate with Benazir Bhutto.

Karan Thapar: You have been talking to General Musharraf for a year, for the last six months there has been speculation that a deal is in the offing, yet it has not materialised. Will it or won’t it materialise?

Benazir Bhutto: The Pakistan People’s Party and I have been in a struggle for the democratic rights of the people and we have been exploring whether a transition to democracy can be made through the holding of free and fair elections open to all political parties and political leaders. We haven’t still come to a point where an agreement can be reached. Many people in his party are against the democratization of Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: Are you hopeful that there will be an agreement or are you beginning to feel that there won’t be one?

Benazir Bhutto: We are running out of time as elections are coming up but the window is not completely shut.

Karan Thapar: So the window is still open?

Benazir Bhutto: Yes.

Karan Thapar: In the belief that the window is still open, for four decades the Bhuttos have been identified with democracy and being opposed to military rule. You have been to jail in that course and your late father paid with his life. Why, today, are you negotiating with an army dictator?

Benazir Bhutto: That is a good question because people should realise that we have used every platform for our people and their democratic rights: whether it is the platform of the streets, Parliament or dialogue. I want to remind you that General Zia-ul-Haq went and visited my father in 1977 to seek political settlement. My father met him but did not agree to the dictatorship. I haven’t agreed to the dictatorship either. My husband spent eight years in prison. I, too, could given foreign guarantees and had charges against me dropped and lived in comfort. I chose to face the consequences of opposing a military dictatorship. Let’s make this clear: it’s all for democracy and people’s rights.

Karan Thapar: Your critics in Pakistan turn around and say, 'This is just for herself'. They say you are just courting General Musharraf because you are desperate to get the corruption charges against you dropped.

Benazir Bhutto: : Well, that's wrong, because if I just wanted the corruption charges dropped, there would be no problem, would there? They would be only too happy to do it, just like they dropped the corruption charges against Nawaz Sharif and limited his sentence. If it was an issue of just charges, they would have been dropped and my husband and I would have led a smooth life with our three children. But we didn’t, we were buffeted by storms because we stayed true to the people of Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: But what about the second criticism made that you are extending a lifeline to a sinking dictator. Arguably, Musharraf would not be able to retain his presidency without your party and your support. So at this moment, when he is anyway on the run and falling, why are you supporting him?

Benazir Bhutto: I think the question needs to be reframed because we are not supporting him. We are supporting a transition to democracy and the holding of fair elections and electing a viable Parliament.

Karan Thapar: Can I quote to you what you said to the Sunday Times in Britain just six weeks ago on July 22? You said, ‘Musharraf has lost his moral authority. His popularity ratings are down and it would be very unpopular if we saved him and would lose votes if we are associated with him.’ But that is exactly what you are doing. You have reversed your view. Why?

Benazir Bhutto: I don’t reverse my views, Mr Thapar. I have a very clear mission of where my party and my country should go. I don’t support uniformed presidency. When I was asked a question related to uniformed presidency, is said it was not possible for us. He is very unpopular and that is what the International Republican Institute polls also show. Pakistan is an important country. It is facing a threat from within and it is very important for us to move in a manner that can get the country elections. This dialogue of ours on democracy has precluded at certain critical moments so far the imposition of emergency in country.

Karan Thapar: You are suggesting that the deal that’s in the offing is in the interest of Pakistan but your own party workers, when they found out that you were talking to Musharraf were perplexed and disheartened. Even newspapers like The Daily Times, owned my members, supporters and former MPs of your party say you have gone soft and have compromised.

Benazir Bhutto: People are entitled to their opinion and at the end of the day you have to be judged by your people and the forces of history. The people of Pakistan support me. The people in my party believe in my leadership and if any of them were disgruntled they would not be applying to me to give them tickets in the forthcoming the general elections. The very fact that there are so many people interested in obtaining the tickets from the PPP shows that the PPP’s struggle for democracy is understood by the people of Pakistan. The PPP’s mission to eliminate poverty and unemployment and control inflation is understood by them.

Karan Thapar: Those are of course noble sentiments and any politician would express them.

Benazir Bhutto: I don’t think all politicians express that.

Karan Thapar: Most of them do.

Benazir Bhutto: I don’t see that. Most of them talk about a power struggle and lifelines to dictators. People don’t really talk about suffering.

Karan Thapar: People say Benazir Bhutto is doing this under American pressure. She is obliged by the George Bush administration to extend a helping hand and therefore she has come under American pressure.

Benazir Bhutto: I am not under American pressure. I am under the pressure of the people of Pakistan who want their social, economic and democratic. Certainly, General Musharraf is a key ally to the US in the war against terrorism. The US has interest in the stability and welfare of Pakistan. But I am a Pakistani leader and I have been lobbying very hard for Washington to review its policies and support the democratic process in Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: You say you are a Pakistani leader and you are. Yet, Richard Boucher was in Islamabad over the weekend, John Negroponte will be there on Wednesday, they are all lobbying for this deal. To Pakistanis, it suddenly looks as if you are an American ally. Aren't you endangering your independence and credibility by this close association and this impression that you are under American pressure?

Benazir Bhutto: I know that some people are trying to create this impression, but it's wrong. The Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mr John Negroponte and Ambassador Boucher have visited Pakistan many times because Pakistan is a key ally in the war against terror.

Karan Thapar: Now they are lobbying for you?

Benazir Bhutto: That's what you are saying. I haven't heard from them.

Karan Thapar: That's what the papers are saying.

Benazir Bhutto: I think that is wrong. It's a smear campaign that is being carried on by fearful political leaders. I want you to wait till you get the fact which is that Pakistan has a situation the tribal areas. NATO troupes in Afghanistan are being persistently attacked by pro-Taliban forces who run across the border into our area. America has threatened to take uni-lateral action. There are very many issues.

Karan Thapar: So this allegation embarrasses you?

Benazir Bhutto: It does not embarrass me but I think what you are trying to do is to cover up the fact that there is a war going on and you don’t want me to talk about that. Whenever Mr Boucher has been to Pakistan he has met with Maulana Fazul Rahman and leaders of the MMA. They have gone to Washington. Washington is the world’s only superpower. It is giving Pakistan $10 billion in aid and I am not at all embarrassed about the fact that I am a Pakistani leader who can speak up in the US about the need for democracy in my country and I have been doing that. But the reason people speak to me is because I am the majority leader of the people of Pakistan. The poor and shirtless people of Pakistan who many would like to ignore support me and they are my strength.

Karan Thapar: The worst outcome of the talks that you are having with General Musharraf regardless of whether it would lead to deal or not…..

Benazir Bhutto: Don’t use the word 'deal' because a deal means two parties or two people coming together under hand. People ask why didn’t I make a deal. They ask why didn’t I make a deal when my husband was in prison facing the hangman’s noose.

Karan Thapar: The worst outcome of this association whether there is conclusion or not, is that in contrast and comparison to your great rival, Nawaz Sharif, who today looks like a champion of democracy. He has gone back to Pakistan and faced up to arrest. The Pakistani polls today are suggesting that he is the most popular leader in the country. Aren’t you losing out in comparison to him by trying to find a sideways entry back home?

Benazir Bhutto: The answers must be longer than the questions so you will indulge me as I answer you. Mr Nawaz Sharif has compromised his position by involving Saudi and Lebanese leaders to get out of prison. People contrast that with the heroism shown by my husband and my family in resisting the temptation to run and have charges against us dropped. We have stood up for the people of Pakistan and the political system. Polls show that the Pakistan People's Party and I are most popular leaders in the country. Yes, more popular than even Mr Nawaz Sharif

Karan Thapar: Are you more popular than Nawaz Sharif even after his return and arrest?

Benazir Bhutto: Of course, that is what the polls show Mr Nawaz Sharif compromised his political position and now after I announce that I would be going back between September and December and after of the struggle of the lawyer showed that the chief justice of Pakistan is independent. Mr Nawaz Sharif chose to go back but when the judiciary was under pressure, when there was no hope of getting any relief from them and the days were dark and dismal. Those were the days when PPP workers and other democratic forces stood the ground and kept the torch of democracy alive.

Karan Thapar: You have frequently suggested that the understanding that you are about to reach with General Musharraf is in the best interest of Pakistan. Why is it in the best interest of Pakistan that General Musharraf should continue as President for another five years?

Benazir Bhutto: I think that it is in the best interest of Pakistan that the people of Pakistan should elect their leaders, that there should be a civilian President who does not wear a uniform and that there be credible elections in which the people get to elect a representative government to deal with their problems.

Karan Thapar: If all of that may happen without your being involved, how does your involvement make this more likely?

Benazir Bhutto: That is not true. That is absolutely not true. It think that it was the involvement of the Pakistan People’s Party through dialogue and street pressure which has lead to a particular situation Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: Do you mean with that pressure General Musharraf would still be retaining his uniform not even talking of shedding?

Benazir Bhutto: Yes, I think that if the pressure of the Pakistan People’s Party as well as of the other democratic forces would not be there then the Chief Justice would not have been reinstated. That was a very critical point on our country’s history.

Karan Thapar: Did you play a role in the reinstatement of the Chief Justice?

Benazir Bhutto:My party was very critical.

Karan Thapar: What about the fact that people say that Benazir Bhutto is the one person who ensures that Musharraf gets five years as President? Without her support and without the understanding it is the end of Musharraf, but she ensuring that he survives?

Benazir Bhutto: I don’t agree with that assessment. I think General Musharraf could be replaced by another General. I don’t believe that the jehadi forces are in the restoration of democracy. The jehadi force that the destabilised the PPP government in 1996 made sure that when Mr Nawaz Sharif was removed there was martial law so PPP would not go down.

In Pakistan it is a battle between dictatorship and democracy but it also battle between moderation and extremism.

Karan Thapar: Which is the more important one?

Benazir Bhutto: They are both important.

Karan Thapar: At the moment you seem to be supporting the survival of a dictator in the belief that he is liberal like you.

Benazir Bhutto: I don’t believe in the survival of dictatorship. I believe in democracy. There have been contacts in 1999 that have not led to an agreement. Mr Nawaz Sharif did sign an agreement with Saudi and Lebanese guarantees and he left. If I had done the same democracy would have died in Pakistan and we would be in a situation like Husni Mubarrak.

Karan Thapar: So in other words, by accepting exile and not doing a deal, you have kept the flame of democracy alive.

Benazir Bhutto: My husband was in prison so I didn’t accept the exile. I went into exile myself and it was not a comfortable exile. There was once a time when I was dragged from one courtroom to another, I had litigation, I was slandered in the press, I had Interpol notices and I could hardly go from airport to airport without knowing that I would be arrested. If I too had said why should I be troubled and thought of my self then there would have been no democracy today in Pakistan. I have fought for the democratic rights of my people and I am grateful to the people of Pakistan who support me despite the propaganda of my opponents.

Karan Thapar: The challenge that now lies ahead of you is this- without an understanding will you return? You will be arrested like Nawaz Sharif, you could face trial or you could end up in jail. Will you return of you don’t have an understanding?

Benazir Bhutto: Yes. I will return. I announced on January 5 of this year that I would be returning to Pakistan and whether there is an understanding or not. The reason there has been no understanding to date is because I have refused to accept anything for myself. I have been fighting to get something for the people of Pakistan. Through this process of dialogue, I have insured that the elections that were promised in Pakistan not be derailed. There could have been an emergency and there could have been an imposition of martial law, but during these critical months from January to September, we have averted such a disaster and we have done so because we always kept the doors of dialogue open for a peaceful political transition towards democracy in our country.

Karan Thapar: My last question is that is there an outer date by when you will be back on Pakistan soil?

Benazir Bhutto: My party intends to announce the date of my return on September 14. We want to announce it from the soil of Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: And what ever that date is, you will abide by it, you won’t change it.

Benazir Bhutto: I don’t change dates. There has been no dates announced so far because when a date is announced, the date is implemented.

Karan Thapar: Thank you for talking to us.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Karan Thapar: Interview with Nawaz Sharif

CNN-IBN Published on Sunday , September 09, 2007

'Politically, Musharraf is breathing his last'

Will Nawaz Sharif return to Pakistan on Monday and if he does what sort of future does he face? These are the two issues Karan Thapar explores in a two-part interview on Devil’s Advocate with the former Pakistani prime minister.

Karan Thapar: Mr Sharif, on Sunday evening will you be on a plane going back to Pakistan or will you at the last moment duck the challenge?

Nawaz Sharif: (laughs) Well, we have booked the flight on September 10 and we have every intention now to go to Pakistan especially after the Supreme Court judgment. We want to go back as early as possible.

Karan Thapar: So, on the 10th morning, which is Monday, Nawaz Sharif will be standing on Pakistani soil.

Nawaz Sharif: Hopefully.

Karan Thapar: When you say hopefully does that mean…

Nawaz Sharif: Hopefully means Inshallah.

Karan Thapar: Is it in God’s hands or yours?

Nawaz Sharif: First God and then of course in our hands.

Karan Thapar: Am I detecting any doubt or are you sure in your mind that you are going?

Nawaz Sharif: (laughs) Do you have doubts? What makes you believe that?

Karan Thapar: I’ll tell why I say that. General Pervez Musharraf has sent emissaries to King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia to ask him to persuade you not to go back. Are you under pressure from the Saudis to reconsider?

Nawaz Sharif: I think Musharraf is running here and there trying to pressurise anybody that he can. The Saudis are talking to me. I am grateful to the Saudis for thinking of me in difficult times. I have told them what is happening in Pakistan and what Musharraf is up to and how he is destroying institutions one by one. I also told them how he dealt with the Chief Justice, which is one of the major institutions of Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: Quite right, but what did the Saudis say when you told them this?

Nawaz Sharif: I have told them and also explained this. I am in regular contact with them. Looking at the situation in Pakistan I also have to think about my country. Pakistan needs me today.

Karan Thapar: So, the Saudis are happy if you go back?

Nawaz Sharif: Well, I don’t see any problem.

Karan Thapar: No problem. It’s said in Pakistan that if you arrive you could be put on the first plane and deported to Saudi Arabia. And a Saudi spokesman has said that were you to arrive in Saudi Arabia in those circumstances you would find it’s a very different country and your welcome would be different. Does that worry you?

Nawaz Sharif: I don’t know what is the source of this news. I haven’t read that.

Karan Thapar: SPA news agency came out with this a few days ago.

Nawaz Sharif: It is without any source.

Karan Thapar: So, you are not deterred, worried or concerned?

Nawaz Sharif: Musharraf is threatening me with dire consequences. Sometimes he says that he will take me to jail from Islamabad Airport. Then sometimes the news comes that a cell in the Attock Fort is being prepared for me. So, all these stories are coming out in the press. I watch them on television but I am not deterred.

Karan Thapar: So, what you are saying to me is that even at the risk of being deported to Saudi Arabia on arrival in Islamabad and even at the risk of being sent to jail you are going back and you will be in Pakistan on Monday morning?

Nawaz Sharif: Yes, yes. My flight is booked which takes off on September 9.

Karan Thapar: Let me put it like this - you may go to jail, you may get deported but if you don’t, how confident are you that you will be permitted to contest elections? This is because the Pakistan Attorney General has gone on record to say that as a consequence of your conviction, in what’s called, the plane-hijack case you have been disqualified under Article 62. Does that worry you? You may be able to go back but still not function as a politician.

Nawaz Sharif: The Attorney General is in the habit of saying all sorts of contradictory things. So, I have no faith in his statements or any government spokesman. They are all the time saying the same things again and again. So, I am going there to restore democracy in Pakistan. Dictatorship has inflicted so much damage to the country that it’s beyond any imagination. I would say that my primary task is to restore the law of the land.

Karan Thapar: I want to talk about the sort of Pakistan that you want to create but one last question before I switch to all of that. I hear in you determination, I see in you firm resolve but you still have 48 hours between now and Sunday. In those 48 hours the pressure on you to change your mind, whether it’s from the Saudis or your family because you may end up going to jail, will grow. Will Nawaz Sharif under pressure change his mind?

Nawaz Sharif: The family is highly supportive of my decision. My friends and my party, the All Parties Democratic Movement is supportive of my decisions and they all support that I come there on the 10th.

Karan Thapar: If today, tomorrow or day after, perhaps even as latest as Sunday morning King Abdullah rings you personally and says Mr Sharif don’t do it. Will you say to him ‘your majesty this is something I have to do, I am going back’ or will you say to him ‘alright, as a favour I agree.’ Which will you say?

Nawaz Sharif: (smiles) You are asking very strange questions. Well, I have told you, I have explained it to everybody and my Saudi hosts. And I will explain it to him also if it comes to a telephone call.

Karan Thapar: So, Monday morning you will be in Pakistan.

Nawaz Sharif: Inshallah.

Karan Thapar: In that case, let me put it like this - you are going back to Pakistan after almost seven years. Your party has split in your absence, if elections were to be held within weeks how confident are you that you can actually win those elections?

Nawaz Sharif: The party is not divided, it is intact.

Karan Thapar: A large section moved across to the PML-Q and are now with General Musharraf.

Nawaz Sharif: There are a few individuals but not the party. The rank and file of the party is intact and so is the vote bank. The support of the party in the masses is also intact by the grace of God. So, therefore it is a very vibrant party. According to the three latest polls conducted by national and international agencies our party is at the top and the second party is far below as compared to our party. The track record of our party is that we have won three consecutive elections in the country.

Karan Thapar: But can you win the one that lies ahead. Seven years you have been out of the country and some of your top leaders have switched to Musharraf’s side. The government itself will be working against you. Can you in those circumstances…

Nawaz Sharif: Many of them who have switched over to Musharraf’s side are keen to come back to our party.

Karan Thapar: They have been in touch with you?

Nawaz Sharif: They have not directly been in touch with me but with my responsible people. We don’t want them back. They are more liabilities than an asset to our party. We do not want them at any cost. Yes, we might accept some of them back who are willing to stay away from the election of the President, who are not willing to vote for him in case he seeks an election in the current Assembly. So, we might consider them.

Karan Thapar: In the elections that happen you are confident that your party will be united and it can win, but you have a big opponent in former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The two of you represent civilian democracy in Pakistan. Will you unite to fight together to defeat dictatorship or will the Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League fight each other and split the opposition?

Nawaz Sharif: It’s a very good question and I would have really welcomed that. We buried our past and made a new beginning. I and Benazir Bhutto sat down and signed a charter of democracy, which very clearly says that there can be no parlance, no negotiation or deals with dictator. We have got to struggle for undiluted democracy in Pakistan. We will struggle for the restoration of the 1973 constitution.

Karan Thapar: Are you saying that she let you down? She backed out and betrayed the charter of democracy?

Nawaz Sharif: Yes, she took the other course. She joined hands with Musharraf. They have agreed on a deal and this document (charter of democracy) very clearly says that there can be no give and take with dictators. So, it’s very unfortunate that the give and take is taking place.

Karan Thapar: So, there is no question of an alliance between your party and Benazir because she is the one who has broken the relationship.

Nawaz Sharif: Not at this stage. We both put our signatures in this document and I couldn’t have imagined a violation of the document. I stand by the document even today. But she chose to go the other way.

Karan Thapar: Can I ask you something? Do you feel let down?

Nawaz Sharif: Well, in a way yes.

Karan Thapar: Do you feel betrayed?

Nawaz Sharif: No, I don’t feel betrayed. I am dismayed and disappointed. And I think any democratic party that believes in democracy must never think of going with a dictator or strengthen his hands because at this time when the dictator is on his way out, let me say that Musharraf’s government is a sinking ship today, so it amounts to lending a hand of support to a sinking ship.

Karan Thapar: You are fighting the dictator while she is supporting the dictator.

Nawaz Sharif: Politically speaking, he is now breathing his last. And at this juncture if anyone of us tries to support Musharraf then I think it will be very wrong on our part.

Karan Thapar: So, therefore what you are saying for the foreseeable elections which are coming that there is no question of any alliance with Benazir. She has gone her way and you are going yours.

Nawaz Sharif: Let us see what happens in the future. Let us first send the dictator home. First we need to bring democracy back to Pakistan and then there are many other things we can jointly do in Pakistan. That’s for the future, not for now.

Karan Thapar: Now let’s talk about the sort of democracy you want to restore in Pakistan. In the political set up as you envisaged is there room for General Musharraf if he takes off his uniform as president?

Nawaz Sharif: We don’t accept him, neither in uniform nor otherwise. He is not acceptable. I think the civil society, political forces and lawyers community have demonstrated that.

Karan Thapar: The American government believes that Musharraf is critical to the war on terror and many Western governments share that viewpoint. How would you handle the enormous pressure from the West to find a role for Musharraf?

Nawaz Sharif: I think Pakistan has to make its own decisions independently without any foreign pressure. This is what I believe in. Musharraf needs the threat of terror for his own survival. And I think it’s about time for the foreign forces also to review their policy to support Musharraf. They cannot equate Pakistan with Musharraf. Pakistan is Pakistan and Musharraf is Musharraf. They have to be clear about the fact whether they want to support democracy or dictatorship. There can’t be a patchwork of democracy and dictatorship.

Karan Thapar: You are sending a message to US President George Bush as well. You are saying to him ‘you mustn’t support Musharraf at the cost of good relations with Pakistan and its democracy.’

Nawaz Sharif: It is aerating the 160 million people of Pakistan the present Bush policy. And Pakistanis feel dismayed and disappointed on the policies being pursued by Mr Bush to support one man against the wishes of the 160 million people. Unfortunately this is giving rise to an anti-American feeling in Pakistan, which is not good for the relations of the two countries.

Karan Thapar: And if push comes to shove, you will explain it in this way to George Bush?

Nawaz Sharif: Why not?

Karan Thapar: Even if there is no room in the set up that you envisaged for Musharraf do you think you need to find an institutional role for the Pakistan Army. A role perhaps in the National Security Council?

Nawaz Sharif: To answer your earlier question when former US president Bill Clinton came to Pakistan on a state visit, and by then Musharraf had staged a coup against my government, he publically refused to be photographed shaking hands with Musharraf. That is the message he gave to the world.

Karan Thapar: And that’s what you are going to say to George Bush. Clinton’s way of treating Musharraf is the way George Bush should adopt.

Nawaz Sharif: Exactly.

Karan Thapar: Even if there is no room for Musharraf in your system, what about room for the wider Pakistan Army? Do you think there is a need with experience in mind to institutionalise its role perhaps in the National Security Council?

Nawaz Sharif: No, Army has no role in politics. According to our constitution they have their own role and that is their domain. They must not step out of their domain and meddle with politics. At the time of taking a commission in the Army every officer has to take an oath that they will not indulge and involve in politics and will abide by and uphold the constitution of Pakistan. Also obey the government’s orders, which has been defied by Musharraf.

Karan Thapar: You will enforce this if you become prime minister?

Nawaz Sharif: Yes.

Karan Thapar: You will enforce total civilian control over the Army?

Nawaz Sharif: Absolutely and that is how the country can survive.

Karan Thapar: Including the Army budget?

Nawaz Sharif: The budget will then be taken out of Parliament, debated, discussed and then approved.

Karan Thapar: Many Army generals may not like that.

Nawaz Sharif: Doesn’t matter. What happens in India? I think Parliament decides and approves the budget of the Army, not the Army itself.

Karan Thapar: What about the Fauji Foundation? What about all the business activities, direct or indirect, that the Pakistan Army is involved in? Ayesha Siddiqui has written at great length about the separate structure of the economy run by the Army.

Nawaz Sharif: All these things will need to be looked into. And then the decision will be made after consulting Parliament and political parties of the country because if we are to eliminate the menace of military dictatorship for all times to come in Pakistan then we will have to take some major decisions.

Karan Thapar: But in this major decision you could be taking on the Army. Do you think you are stepping one step too far. You are threatening the very generals whose support and loyalty you need.

Nawaz Sharif: No, I think it’s going according to the law and constitution of the country. I am not doing anything, which other democratic countries have not done.

Karan Thapar: And you think it will work in Pakistan? You don’t think you will invite a backlash?

Nawaz Sharif: It should work if we are to have a long-lasting democratic system in Pakistan. We need to follow the example of other democratic countries and our Army or politics is no exception.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

British Gas Chambers in Pakistan

The British Empire had the power of life and death over Pakistanis then. Its military scientists wanted to do experiments on humans. They wanted to send them into gas chambers and expose them to poisonous mustard gas - that can cause cancer and other fatal diseases. They had soldiers of Pakistani and Indian descent stationed right here, at Rawalpindi. The troops were serving under the command of the British military.

Hundreds of these soldiers were sent to the gas chambers. Many suffered severe burns on their skin, including their genitals, leaving them in pain for days and even weeks. Some had to be treated in hospital. Other soldiers were hospitalised for a week after they were sent into a gas chamber wearing "drill shorts and open-necked, khaki, cotton shirts" to gauge the effect of mustard gas on their eyes.

In some cases soldiers were exposed to mustard gas protected only by a respirator. On one occasion the gas mask of a sepoy (a private) slipped, leaving him with severe burns on his eyes and face.

The experiments took place over more than 10 years before and during World War Two. They were conducted by scientists from the Porton Down chemical warfare establishment in Wiltshire who had been posted to the sub-continent to develop poison gases to use against the Japanese. The tests were used to determine how much gas was needed to kill a person on the battlefield. The scientists also wanted to find out if mustard gas inflicted greater damage on Indian skin compared with British skin.

In 1942 the scientists reported that "Severely burned patients are often very miserable and depressed and in considerable discomfort, which must be experienced to be properly realised".

Porton Down was founded in 1916, and is the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world. Until the 1950s Porton developed chemical weapons such as mustard gas and nerve gas. In the 1940s and 1950s Porton also devised biological weapons, chiefly anthrax bombs.

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Cutting Pakistani People Out Of the Deal

The Guardian of London writes in its editorial on August 30, 2007, "Pakistan's fundamental problem is that it is dominated by a military establishment" that has "a vice-like hold on the extensive privileges it has built". It toggles in and out of direct power when it needs to. It has strong bonds with corrupt politicians, drawn from the landlord class or from religious circles, who allow an easy manipulation, when they are taking their turns in office or in opposition. Behind toggling "lies a surprising continuity of interests". The industrial, military, landowning, and bureaucratic elites are all interrelated and look after one another and share power with little reference to the electorate.

Now once estranged bed fellows, a general and a polititian, are being cheered on to negotiate a deal so that the west could have at least another five years of free hand in its war of terror. None of them are concerned that a slew of constitutional hurdles stand in the path to such a deal.

He cannot be a candidate because he is on payroll as an on duty military general. He has to wait two years before he can run. He cannot have oath of the president for the third time that he has already done. He has presided over growing human rights violations and abductions by state intelligence agencies - an estimated 600 activists have "disappeared" since 2002. A bloody shooting spree by his supporters in Karachi left scores of people dead.

No doubt the constitutional changes Musharaff and Benazir require for the deal to go through will end up before a revitalized supreme court which is showing amazing sensitivity to popular feeling. This "mood of popular empowerment" will determine the fate of this or any other future deal. Pakistan has been ruled by an elite for too long now. Benazir Bhutto's return would only perpetuate the old order.

Benazir Bhutto is asking a blanket pardon of the crimes she, her husband, and her and Musharraf cronies have committed since 1988. In 1994 with her support the police shot and killed three of the retainers of Bhutto family when Begum Bhutto with a convoy wanted to visit Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's grave. Soon afterwards, her brother Murtaza Bhutto, who had just returned to Pakistan to try to oust his sister from control of the Pakistan Peoples Party, was killed along with six of his supporters, by police bullets, yards from his front door. Many, including Murtaza's family pointed the finger of suspicion at Benazir who was prime minister then. Her husband, Asif Zardari was later charged with complicity in the murder.

Suddenly, taking a cue from their governments, the western media have suddenly made her the face liberal democracy in Pakistan. She got her chance at the helm, twice.
During her first 20-month long premiership she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Her reign was marked by massive human rights abuse: Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Her second term in power was only distinguished by epic levels of corruption. In 1995, Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari - widely known as "Mr 10%" - faced allegations of plundering the country. Musharraf spent millions of dollars to investigate those cases.

The Americans like her because she speaks against Taliban (even though she was the one who raised them as a political force), against madrassas, against bearded mullas, she "stayed" her followers away from mass rallies, she stoppped them from chanting anti-American slognas. They don't care if she speaks Urdu with a strange accent and grammer, and speaks no Sindhi at all.

All they want to do by cobbling this deal together is taking Pakistan to what the Guardian calls a "strange variety of democracy - really a form of elective feudalism". Real democracy has never been allowed to thrive. Unlike India where the educated middle class gained control in 1947, in Pakistan middle class leadership from non-feudal backgrounds who represent the grassroots is still largely excluded from the political process. It is this as much as anything else that has fuelled the growth of the Islamists. For the great majority of poorer Pakistanis life remains intolerably hard and access to justice or education is a distant hope. Healthcare and other social services, even necessities such as clean water and electricity for the poor have been neglected. Money is spent only on the public services that benefit the wealthy.

But what is in this deal or system for the Pakistani people? Nothing, as long as they stay on the side lines. But if they decide to get involved and get fucused as they did six months ago after Musharraf sacked the Chief Justice they can deliver a potentially fatal blow to this system once and for all. They have to show once again that they will not tolerate how their country is run. They have to say a collective "NO" as Justice Chaudhry did on March 9.