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This was published in the Dhaka Daily 'New Age' late last year. I'm sharing the story here.
Miles apart, poles apart
Abu Jar M Akkas recounts a recent visit to Pakistan.
He is news editor at New Age. The story was published on
October 7, 2013.
MOMENTS before we landed at Jinnah International in Karachi, we had noticed almost an even development across the city, nothing like the patches here and there that we see when we fly over Dhaka. An old city like Karachi must have grown unplanned; but it seemed that at some point, someone dared to straighten things and could undo, to a large extent, what was not planned.
The Pakistan high commission in Dhaka wanted us — nine journalists, including one from a newspaper based in Khulna, and an assistant professor of international relations in the University of Dhaka — to see Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, speak to people and get to know the difference between what Pakistan is perceived as and what it really is all about so that our judgement in future could be informed.
We were a group of 10 — ‘do auratein and eight gents’ as our protocol officer from the Sindh press information told an immigration officer at Jinnah. The eldest of us was ABN Mobaidur Rahman of the Bangla daily Inquilab, imposing his decision on others at one moment and asking not to be forced to do anything even when all others want it the next.
After we had been named for the tour, by our offices or the high commission, we had a meeting with Ambreen Jan, Pakistan’s press counsellor in Dhaka. It was at the meeting that Ambreen Jan proposed that Mobaidur, for whom it would be the fifth visit to Pakistan, should lead the group because his hairs are grey enough to have been amenable to reasons. And he left his mark all the way we travelled. He had to be handled quite a few times and could be controlled on one or two occasions.
The day we landed in Karachi was Saturday (July 22, 2013) and a general strike was in force because gunmen had shot dead a Muttahida Qaumi Movement leader, Sajid Qureshi, a provincial lawmaker, his son and a pedestrian as they were leaving a mosque after Friday prayers. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is later reported to have claimed the responsibility for the attack in continuation of its earlier announcement of targeting the ‘secular’ MQM, Awami National Party and the Pakistan People’s Party.
When we reached the commercial district of Saddar Karachi for the board in the Hotel Al Harmain Tower, on Raja Ghazanfar Ali (Khan) Road (formerly Somerset Street) as a cement plaque in one corner in the crossing sported, the general strike was over. There were not many people on the road but when we were back on the road in a hired microbus headed for a mobile outlet in Clifton Block 9 to buy SIMs, the city started waking up to the daily business.
The mobile outlet was closed. But many shopping malls were open, or they had opened just after the strike hours. As we had nothing to do for the night but to dine, in or out, shopping frenzy began. Karachi, or Pakistan for that matter, began to appear different from what we had so far heard about. This is not a place where anyone walks about pulling out a gun although business establishments of note and many individuals have private security guards. But still anything can happen any moment anywhere despite not being in a war zone.
The MQM leader had been killed in Karachi the day before we reached there. Gunmen also killed 10 people, nine of whom were foreigners, in Gilgit-Baltistan the day after we had reached Karachi and the Pakistani Taliban bombed the convoy of Sindh High Court justice Babar Maqbool in Karachi, killing eight security men, on July 26 a day after we had reached Lahore. There are security threats but they all appear to have taken this for their way of life.
The Gilgit-Baltistan incident also prompted the Pakistan authorities, at the direction of the high commissioner in Dhaka, to deploy a security squad for us in Lahore and Islamabad.
The next morning on Sunday, the weekend, we began our schedule with a tour of Mazar-e-Quaid, the tomb of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan and Jinnah’s sister Fatima Jinnah are also buried besides graves of Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar and Nurul Amin.
The tomb’s custodian Ather Mir, a retired army officer much reverent to Jinnah, took us around the tomb, the premise and the museum. Other graves in the premises have names written in Urdu on one side and in Bangla on the other. Why are there Bangla on the graves when Jinnah in a public meeting at the Ramna Race Course in Dhaka on March 21, 1948, made it clear that ‘the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language.... Without one state language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function’?
Pakistan’s first constitution, laid out later in 1956, in Article 214 (1) says: ‘The State languages of Pakistan shall be Urdu and Bengali.’ The language movement of 1952 in the erstwhile East Pakistan that resulted from the 1948 incidents resulted in the independence of the land from the erstwhile West Pakistan in 1971. The bilingual policy of the government of the day, however, continued to be in the constitution of 1962 until the third constitution was framed in 1973.
Jinnah has remained the greatest leader of Pakistan, even with his secular slant that becomes evident from his efforts centring on the first national anthem, Aye sar zamin-e-pak (O, Land of the pure), which he asked ‘Urdu-knowing Hindu poet’ Jagannath Azad to write. The anthem had been in force for a year and a half before Pak sar zamin shad bad (Blessed be the sacred land), took over.
But no counter knowledge about Jinnah could develop, probably because he died shortly after the partition and the following rulers, who were not that much charismatic, tried to create a nationalism based on the tenet that Islam was the foundation of the state, set him aside ideologically and allowed no criticism of him or his work. There were even court cases and verdicts regarding the religious affiliation of Jinnah, who had a non-sectarian stance, after his death.
Some people resident in Karachi said that there were still many more people with a secular leaning but they were not willing to speak out in fear of being branded as leaning towards Hinduism, or even India. Islam is what the state was founded on and this has remained the best selling plank for all — but there are many who are opposed to, but do not oppose, the tenet, projected by the ruling class.
In place of women observing hijab, we rather found young girls, along with boys, in European dresses, some coming on the streets from shopping malls or cinemas, holding hands and walking into cars well after midnight without bothering about any social frowning. There were many girls who were not even wearing scarves. We saw only a few girls, understandably from the lower class, in niqab, with their elders, not even wearing scarves, behind them. In our hotel restaurant, which seemed to be a famous place for dining out, we saw a few women wearing burka. A female official in Islamabad later said that women and girls in Karachi were far more ‘advanced’ than they were in Lahore and Islamabad. She also asked us if there was any segregation between man and women in Bangladesh. We had, of course, been to only three cities and, that too, in a week.
A few of our fellows watched films in cinemas in the Atrium Mall, which was across the Inverarity Road by our hotel, on the first two nights. The mall has half a dozen cinemas where four of the screenings were English films and one Hindi — Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani; the other is an Urdu (Pakistani) film. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation had hit hard the Pakistan film industry, with restrictive provisions in registration laws beginning from 1979 to well into the mid-1990s. The film industry in Pakistan was still struggling to recover from the setback.
OUR next visit was to a charity called Alamgir Welfare Trust International, on Alamgir Road at Bahadurabad. The charity provides the poor with food, pays for the treatment of the poor in private hospitals, runs ambulance services, sells sacrificial animals, arranges for weddings of poor and orphan girls, and provides deserving students with course books and low-income households with month ration. But for what seemed to be a communication gap, we could not go around the building or talk with the staff.
We had two things to do for the day — going to Clifton Beach and attending a dinner at the Karachi Press Club. From the welfare trust, we went to Dolmen Mall on the Clifton Marine Drive — to change dollars and to see for ourselves the big mall which has two other branches in the city. Probably being in the cantonment area, the place had a high security. Even when I snapped a photograph inside the mall, a guard came running after saying, politely, Yahan tasveer khinchna mana hai (Taking photograph is now allowed here). As I offered to delete the snap, in Urdu markedly different from theirs and typical of outsiders, he smiled and let it go.
After all our fellows had apparently finished shopping for the day, we were left with not enough time before our visit to the press club for a walk down the beach. We headed back to the hotel and then out to the press club, on Sarwar Shaheed Road, known as Ingle Road much earlier, a few blocks from our hotel. It was a majestic Victorian-style building where the press club was set up in 1958. The ground floor houses the main hall for press conferences and other programmes and the upper floor houses a well-stocked library, with even a shelf full of books on Bangladesh, a committee room and a TV lounge.
After the routine introduction and speeches, we had a question-answer session which soon became affairs of several small groups as we advanced into the dinner. As soon as we finished, the secretary to the club committee, who had collected our visiting cards, started reading out the names one after another, along with one from the committee members, at intervals when they presented us with block-printed shawls known by the name of ajrak, a symbol of Sindh culture and traditions, in a mark of hospitality.
After we had finished doing what we had to in the room, we got down into the lawn for tea and photocalls in a manner known as ‘firing squad’ in news rooms. The landings of the stairs were decorated with huge paintings of noted journalists, poets and others.
After a short peep into the library and the computer room, as we were about to set foot on the staircase, with a big portrait of Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the landing, I recited: Hum ke thehre ajnabi itni madaraton ke bad (We who became strangers after so much of easy intimacy), the opening line from Faiz’s poem, Dhaka Se Wapsi Par (On Return from Dhaka), written in 1974, when was last the poet visited Dhaka, Naseer Ahmed, a senior subeditor of the Daily Jang, recited the next line: phir banenge ashna kitni mulakaton ke bad (After how many meetings shall be friends again).
He took me into the library to show me issues of Sindhi newspaper Kawish, which had more than 70 news reports on the front page, with one column headline of the text size set in white on black and a column line of news with a request for turning over the page, after I had told him that his newspaper, Roznamah Jang, looked a bit crammed with huge, decorative headlines and all single-column text layout.
We met a senior journalist, Farooq Moin, known as a man of rectitude in the circle, at the dinner where many journalists said that they had learnt the trade with him. Farooq Moin, who had worked with the Pakistan Press International news agency for more than four decades, was the wittiest of the people I have met in Pakistan.
After another round of shopping in malls and markets in the neighbourhood, it was time for retiring to bed. Monday began with a routine visit, along with a briefing, to the Sindh press information office, typical of a provincial government office. We were then headed for Wackenhut Pakistan Ltd, housed in Kawish Crown Plaza at Shahrah-e-Faisal, a security company owned by Ikram Sehgal, who wears ‘two hats’ — of a columnist and the head of the company, which earns Rs 3.2 billion a month.
Apart from having the idea of how big security business could be in a country where security is at risk, we also had a sumptuous lunch and a copy each of Sehgal’s Escape from Oblivion, which according to an Express Tribune review of 2012 is ‘a gripping narrative about his experiences during a time of great tribulation that followed the Pakistan Army’s crackdown on the rebellious elements in East Pakistan on March 25, 1971.... But... the narrative suffers from contradictions and an inadequate explanation of events, especially those that took place after his arrival in Dhaka from West Pakistan up until his imprisonment.’
On our way back to the Boat Basin in Clifton for a visit to the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, we passed by the University of Karachi, set up in 1953, thirty-two years after the University of Dhaka had been founded. In Karachi, they think highly of any Dhaka University alumni although Pakistanis who have been to and in Bangladesh think that the standards of education in Dhaka have fallen these days but not as low as they have in Karachi.
But we missed the PEMRA programme as our team leader, who somehow convinced the protocol officers accompanying us that he should meet an old friend of his he had not been in touch with for decades. We reached the house of his old-time friend, an engineer who owns a house and a flat in a posh area in Karachi and another house in Islamabad. We had to stay there for an hour. On our way back to the PEMRA office, passing through the town, we heard that the agency chairman had left his office for the day — good news for many of us as they could jump into shopping. We got back to hotel. After a couple of hours, as some of our fellows could not finish shopping on time, we headed for Clifton Beach. It was a long while past evening when we reached there. We walked down the wet sand, up to knee-high waves, and listened to and watched waves breaking down onto the shore.
Back to our hotel, five of us, after the dinner, started walking down the road looking for a roadside tea stall about midnight. A few blocks away, we found one, Quetta Dirar Hotel (as in Dhaka, the word hotel, in most cases, means a restaurant also in Karachi), owned by Haji Abdul Khaliq, with three people standing — two behind the counter making tea and one waiting on customers. It looked more like any Shab-e-Barat night in Old Town of Dhaka, with children exploding crackers and elders making preparations for prayers asking them not to. We ordered four cups of tea. When we asked about the price of a cup of tea. The youngest of the three, Nazir Ahmed from Quetta, to our surprise, said, ‘Teis rupaye.’
As we looked up, we noticed a rate list, mounted on the wall, saying that a cup of tea without milk costs Rs 17, a piece of paratha Rs 17, an egg omelette Rs 18 and a plate of milk skin (malai) Rs 40. Although the tea was good, the restaurant was not that big and clean and the prices were high by any standards if we think about such a restaurant in Dhaka. The notice also thanks customers for telling the counter people before having anything if they had notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500. The youngest of them said that they import tea; and milk is dear, at least in Karachi.
This boy has been living in Karachi for some days, working with the restaurant for Rs 7,000 a month, all of which he sends to his family — his parents, sisters and brothers — back in Quetta. He gets the bread, literally, from the restaurant and he stays with some people from his area in a room a few blocks away where 15 others like him for a monthly rent of Rs 5,000 share the space for sleep — seven who work at daytime sleep at night and others who work at night sleep during the day.
All these small-to-medium neighborhood restaurants give away meals, usually roti(bread) and dal mas (lentil curry), to the poor who start lining up a while before the meal time. They said that there were some restaurants where people pay for extra meals which are later given to the poor.
The next (Tuesday) morning, we flew to Lahore.
As we landed at Allama Iqbal International, we saw a reporter of a Lahore-based regional television channel, City42, waiting for our arrival. The cameraman who was standing with the reporter, Nabeel Malik, was holding a list of all our names. The chivalrous Mobaidur Rahman, as leader of the group, spoke about what he personally felt he should visit in Lahore. The next day when we were having our dinner in a restaurant called Tabak, we came to know about us being covered in a news bulletin. The waiter told us about that.
Lahore was hotter than Karachi. Coming out of the airport we got into a car headed for the Ambassador Hotel on Davis Road. We had a team of four policemen in a car going before ours. In the two days, they became friendly with us as we talked about their firearms, uniform, their station house, which was Wahdat Colony, and their career as policemen.
After check-in formalities, we hurried — because we needed to keep the schedule as we left Karachi more than an hour and a half late for a trouble at Lahore airport — for Badshahi Mosque, where about a hundred thousand people can say prayers at a time. Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir started building it in 1671 and the job was completed in 1673. The mosque has the trace of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity in the decoration of its main structure.
It was about 50 degrees Celsius and there were pairs of shoes, made of leather-cloth, for us at the gate because a walk barefooted from one to the other end through the yard would cause blisters. I heard that they charge ordinary visitors some money for the shoes. To a corner of the mosque structure, there stands a Sikh temple called Gurdwara Dera Sahib; the guide gave us an example of all religions coexisting and said that the Sikh ruler of Lahore Ranjit Singh had built the temple but did not give the reason that Ranjit Singh built the temple in honour of the fifth guru of Sikhism, Arjun Dev Ji, who was drowned in the River Ravi while fighting with Emperor Jahangir’s men. The mosque had been under Sikh occupation for about 50 years since 1799 and the yard was used as the stable of the Sikh ruler, who also fired shell into the sprawling Lahore Fort, or Shahi Qila, that stands opposite the mosque. British rulers later renovated the part of the fort that was damaged in the shelling.
It was in the Lahore Fort, with the Walled City to one side and Old City to the other, that I met the second most wittiest man, by far wide a margin, in the trip — the guide, who also teaches English in an institution, with a genuine interest in history and quite entertaining. It reminded me of the ready wit of Old Town of Dhaka. He walked us around from one to the other corner. Far from the fort to a side, there stands Minar-e-Pakistan, or the Tower of Pakistan, built in the 1960s in the place where on March 23, 1940 the Lahore Resolution was passed, setting out the partition of India that was effected in 1947.
As we were pressed for time, we hurried to the Lahore Museum, or Ajaib Ghar (wonder house) as they call it in Urdu, where Rudyard Kipling’s father John Lockwood Kipling was once a curator. The fabled gun Zamzamah, or Kim’s gun, which begins Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zamah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher...), is placed on a raised brick platform. The museum, now at Mall Road, was then located in the Tollinton Market, named after a government of Punjab officer. The most important things about the museum are its collection of relics of the Buddha, especially from the Gandhara period, and Mughal miniature portraits on ivory tusks.
It was soon lunch time and we headed for a restaurant in a big road crossing. In a short while, we would be driving up to the Wahga Border, where the Pakistan and the Indian flag are hoisted in the morning and lowered in the evening with a ceremonial salute between the Pakistan Rangers and the Border Security Force of India. But when we were about to finish our meal in the restaurant, our group leader resolved that he would not go to the border and would rather we so did. He was game for Shalamar Bagh, or garden, which we were not supposed to visit. He then again resolved that he would not keep with us and eat with us. He was packed back to the hotel in a car.
When we reached the border, the ceremony had already begun. But still the best thing the hosts did for us was to keep enough seats almost reserved for us in the front row of the VIP gallery. It was time for beating the retreat with high goose-stepping, amid aggressive postures and the shouting of Jiye jiye Pakistan one this side and Bharat mata ki jai on the Indian side. The whole episode was spectacular but appeared to be means for creating or invoking the sense of nationalism among the several thousand people attending on both sides of the border. Shortly before I thought this to be a futile exercise, suddenly I could feel the pangs of the partition, families being halved by the line drawn by Radcliffe.
Pakistani rulers try to instil a sense of opposition against India in ordinary people even after they were continuing with exchanges with India. Many of the government officials, like many ordinary people, also think that India was a superior military power which they cannot fight and need to sit across the table with India.
Back into the town, we went straight to the Food Street at Anarkali. After a round of tea, almost all jumped into shopping. We were so spent, especially after such a hectic day in the hot and humid weather, no one was willing to have a meal. We had fruit juice instead, fading into shopping again till midnight when we got back to the hotel for a sound sleep.
On Wednesday morning, we started for Lahore University of Management Sciences, an institution offering higher education of world standards, which even provides many poor students with full scholarship. We had a session with the vice-chancellor. It was a holiday and we could see a handful of students, girls in Western dresses, entering and going out of the rooms. But in all it seemed that it was a place for the elite and a place to breed elitism, which seemed to be a big problem with the functioning of the state.
The National College of Arts on Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam proved to be a big relief after this. Quite a spacious campus sparse with statues and fountains under the green of large trees, the college seemed to have been drawing us. Laila Rahman, who gave an introduction to the college with the screening of two short documentaries, said, with a smile apparently looking forward to an approval for a mischief, that she would like to think that Zainul Abedin was also their man. Zainul Abedin had an exhibition of his work in Lahore in 1953 that is believed to be starting point for a series of exhibitions aimed at promoting contemporary Pakistani art.
After a ziyafat, lunch, that the Lahore press information hosted at a Chinese restaurant, we were off to Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre. This could be an example of what a man like Imran Khan, with supports from others, can do. We walked around the whole of the hospital and headed back to the hotel. After a round of tea in the lounge, the protocol officer, Ehsan Ullah Shahzad, who had read all our curricula vitae meticulously before we reached here, said that his official engagement with us was over and it was ‘over to Islamabad’ the next morning.
We told him that some of us would like to visit book shops and he asked the policemen to accompany us to Readings, a big shop on main boulevard Gulberg. Getting down from the car, I told the security team chief: Ap yahan thahriye, main kitab kharid ke ata hun (You wait here till I get back with books). He said he would follow me. It was a large shop with books mostly on popular subjects. I chanced on the AP Stylebook and John T Platts’s grammar of Hindustani. As I inquired if an Urdu dictionary could be available, the man at the counter asked the policeman to take us to Variety Books in Liberty market area. It was a huge four-storey shop for books, CDs and such accessories. I could dig out a dictionary, Estelle Dryland’s Faiz Ahmed Faiz and a few other titles. Four of us who were there had by that time started to receive calls from our team members in the hotel that we should get back early as they would go shopping.
When we were on our way back to the hotel, the police squad withdrew as they had worked beyond their duty hours. The inspector, who got into our car, also got off near the hotel. But we needed to have our meals. We informed the protocol officer and he said that night time in Lahore was safe. We got into the car and asked the driver to get to the restaurant where we had our lunch the day before. Soon after we had reached the place, the police called our driver to get to know our location. Within minutes, the police squad reached the place and asked one of us to go out to meet them. We then started for Anarkali, yes, for shopping.
While we were in the restaurant, we needed to tell the restaurant people that we were a group of journalists from Bangladesh, the man waiting on our table instantly said that he had recognised us. Then he said that C42 TV channel had aired a bit in its news bulletin on us. Back home in Dhaka, I managed to dig out the clip of the bulletin from an online repository and found that the producer of the news item had thoughtfully done away with showing the interview with our group leader.
People of Lahore, considered the cultural capital of Pakistan, say that Lahore Lahore Aye (in Punjabi, Lahore is Lahore). Probably they are right even though it seemed that the whole city was trying to become modern, shaking off the old. In the two days, we could hardly feel the city as we visited a few places, within a small circle, and stayed in a corner off the city bustles, but we could see that it has everything that we could like about an old city.
It was all over with the Lahore protocol, with us waiting to be taken to a bus terminal at dawn on Thursday from where we will be travelling on a motorway called M2 to Islamabad. We later found out that the terminal on the other end was in effect in Rawalpindi.
A hotel bus took us to the M-2 motorway station. Shahzad the previous night had told us not to fall asleep after we would reach Bhera as the place along the rest of the road was scenic. The motorway spans 367km and offers a nice journey. We were going in a luxury bus of Daewoo Bus Company. After we had had started rolling on the road, a girl, working as the guide in the bus, offered us snacks and drinks. She was announcing the departures and arrivals, first in Urdu and then in English. But we could hardly make anything of what she was saying because of a drawling accent, strongly marked with mid, high and low tones, till then unknown to us. It seemed that she was speaking in a third language.
Later, when we were in Murree Tehsil, I heard a similar utterance, looked back and noticed a girl standing on a slope. I asked the protocol officer what was the language she was speaking in. He said that it was Pothohari, a dialect of Western Punjabi but the language she was speaking was a Murree dialect of the Pothohari, which is a group also known as Pahari-Potowari.
Getting down at the bus terminal in Rawalpindi, we found an EP wing protocol officer waiting for us with car and a security squad composed of four personnel of the Anti-Terrorism Squad. Soon we headed for the Islamabad Capital Territory, or Waqafi Darul Hukumat, established in 1960 on land from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Headed for the hotel, on AK Fazal-e-Haq Road (I heard people also calling it Sher-e-Bangal Road), with Jinnah Avenue passing by at a distance, we checked in an hour before midday. The city is quiet and traffic was thin. We hurried to the Foreign Office, had a briefing with the director general of the South Asia Division Riffat Masood.
After a short briefing and a question-answer session, we went to a place where our group leader by his refusal to ‘talk about local politics on foreign land’ shamed us all. We went to the Institute of Regional Studies on Kamal Ataturk Avenue, to trade questions and answers. This organisation, running on government fund, documents news on bilateral relations. It also has half a dozen folders on Pakistan’s relation with Bangladesh.
After all we asked and they answered, the director, a former army officer, said that they also had questions for us. As he asked a question about religion and secularism being used by political parties in Bangladesh, our group leader blurted out, to our dismay and awe, that as leader of the team he had decided not to talk about local politics, which we feared was out of his unwillingness to hear bad things about whatever political group he is ideologically inclined to. The director heaved a sigh and asked his people not to ask questions. Aside, later we handed them our visiting cards and requested them to ask questions on anything and we would be giving replies. No one has so far made any queries.
The next destination was the National Press Club, a relatively new structure with corrugated tin sheets on a sprawling space. At lunch, we met the cook, who is from Bangladesh but spoke Bengali with an accent. We could not meet more than two or three journalists as the Pakistan parliament was in session passing the national budget.
We were off to the information ministry in a while and had a briefing with the federal secretary to the ministry, Agha Nadeem. He said that they believed that partial freedom of the press was worse than having no freedom even if it were a bit too strong against the government. It seemed that he talked facts as from discussions with journalists, and even government officials, we came to know of the strong, vibrant press in Pakistan, especially in Karachi, which houses headquarters of all newspapers.
I have not seen any newspaper shops on the footpath or in road crossings that we see in almost every important crossing Dhaka. On our second day in Karachi, I saw an old man hawking around some newspapers through the bustling Bohri Bazaar where we were waiting on the road, I wished to buy some newspapers and as I got down, he walked so far away that I could not shout enough to draw his attention. I asked an officer if there are any footpath shops for newspapers. He said that they had them removed many years ago. They get newspapers delivered at home in the morning. He then said that there was the Empress Market (All we came across in Karachi pronounced it Impress) where we could buy newspapers.
In the afternoon, I saw an old man holding a bag of rolled newspapers coming out of the hotel. I called him aloud, but not loud enough and a security guard had to call him. I asked him if he had any Sindhi newspapers, he said that he had sold them out and could bring a few for me the next morning. I bought a Jang and an Express Tribune. He said that they had made up ‘Chabbis rupaye.’ As I was looking for small notes, he said, ‘Rehne dijie, nahin hai to. Akhir, ap hamare mehman hain.’ (Let it go, if you do not have changes. After all, you are our guests.) We did not meet the next morning. Either he came early or we left early.
I met the chief reporter of the Express Tribune at the provincial bureau of the newspaper. I had a gift a colleague of mine, who met him in China, had given to me for him. I called him the moment we reached Islamabad. He came over to the hotel, on that busy day, with another gift for my colleague in Dhaka. We talked various issues for a long while. Many of our groups, who went shopping and to see Faisal Mosque, got back two hours later when we had already been late for a dinner the EP wing was hosting to us at a restaurant called Des Pardes in Saidpur on the Margalla Hills.
We reached the place an hour late, with secretary waiting glum, not because we were late but because, I believe, he was made an officer on special duty, which we had seen in newspapers the next morning before we left for Murree. It was a lavish dinner but we were a bit tired because of the hectic schedule and the heat. This was a beautiful place, with steps carved on the hill slope, with musicians playing on traditional instruments, in light, bright in one place and mysteriously dark in the other.
We got back to the hotel, full, content and tired. The next (Friday) morning, we started for Murree about 9:00am. As soon as we reached Murree Tehsil on the Islamabad-Murree Highway, we saw our security squad with ATS people turning back towards Islamabad. But that was close to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir. Still we felt that the authorities had thought that we would no longer need security. After crossing about a kilometre or two, we saw a van, with a group of Kashmir police personnel, taking over.
Five of us bought ripe cherry and anjeer (figs), which I tasted for the first time, from a small boy hawking around with a bamboo container and fig leaves, which he was using to make cones to hold the fruit. Another shopping frenzy went on. As we wasted about an hour and a half, we decided not to get into chairlift and cable car to go as high as 9,000 feet from the ground. Later our protocol officer sought the help of the security people, who managed our way right then into the chairlift and then cable car and way back without any hassles.
The place above 9,000 feet looked pristine, with tall pine (chirr) trees. When we were taking lunch on the top of a hill, I asked the protocol officer, Yeh kaun sa perr hai (what are these trees called)? He looked a bit nonplussed. Another from the Pakistan government, Sadaf Zahra, said, Yeh sab darakht hain. I could say, but not bet, that perr is a Hindustani word and it might well fall into the ahl-e-zuban vocabulary; they came up with darakht. As luck would have it they did not come up with the word shajar. The word perr is there in Urdu dictionaries but later I read somewhere that in Karachi, the utterance of the word perr has a connotation of rusticity.
We had heard that it was a very pleasant weather on Murree hills but it was close to 40 degrees Celsius when we were there. And as we had no experience of climbing slopes, it soon sapped us of our energy. After all this, the view of Murree was exquisitely beautiful, with clouds shadowing a portion a moment and the sun lighting the place the next.
In Murree, which is a hill station founded by the British, there is a brewery, dating back from 1860, which trickles down to the local market of majority Muslims where only non-Muslims are allowed alcohol permits. The restrictions were imposed after free sales and consumption of liquor for three decades after the partition. The sales of liquor to Muslims, who account for about 97 per cent of the population, are prohibited but drinking, in private, is not. A local journalist offered me to walk around the clubs at night if I could be free. A hotel man also said that he could get us liquor but the drinking needed to be done in the room.
From Murree, we hurried to the hotel as we had been late adequately to miss the flight to Karachi for some of us, deeply engrossed in Murree’s scenic beauty especially on the Kashmir point, was waiting for any damsel to fall into distress. We checked out in about 10 minutes and darted out for the airport, in Rawalpindi, with the security car blaring siren all along and the ATS members making the way for us in every means they could employ. We heaved a sigh of relief but to the frowning of the airport officials. The cargo hold, we heard, had already been closed and all our bags travelled to Karachi sitting in the cabin separately.
We reached Jinnah International about 9:00pm. Sindh protocol officers waiting at the airport dashed us into PIA Hotel as we had a transit for more than six hours. The hotel was not very far from the airport. It was a nice sprawling building with lawns. We decided to chat in a room as we might not feel comfortable to wake up to start for the airport at 5:00am. As we had talked every night but for the first two nights in Karachi, the session of chat continued. Every night, at least four of us would discuss what we had seen and felt about Pakistan.
The language movement of 1952, in which political matters found an expression, held back our people, especially the young, from learning Urdu and getting to know what Pakistan thinks about the present-day erstwhile East Pakistan although there are many around, even the young, who take pride in being able to talk about, or recite, a few specimens of sher (poems). The subsequent culmination of the nationalistic movement into Bangladesh’s struggle for independence has made many of us hostile to anything related to Pakistan.
Although Pakistanis, especially the young, these days know almost nothing, or bother to know, about Bangladesh, many of their elders still think that Yahya Khan should have handed over power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who won the elections although it is still debatable whether things could have continued the way they were going if power had been handed over to Sheikh Mujib, who won no seats in the then West Pakistan and the Bengali-speaking people had issues with political supremacy and discrimination in addition to the right to language being denied in the erstwhile East Pakistan.
People in Pakistan said that they had removed everything regarding the then East Pakistan from their textbooks. Ordinary people in Pakistan only learn that they had a wing called East Pakistan separated by a patch of India; Sheikh Mujib won the elections; India had East Pakistan liberated into Bangladesh; and East Pakistan had jute and a paper mill in Khulna.
Many elders in Pakistan still consider Bangladeshis their bhais (brothers) although the elite might think of it in a different way. Many of the young, with many others still being left out, are interested to know about Bangladesh. Many of them individually apologise for what happened to Bangladeshis in 1971, beginning from 1947. While the young are eager to carry forward the relationship, the state, it seemed, will never officially apologise over the 1971 war.
New Age | The Outspoken Daily
Miles apart, poles apart
Abu Jar M Akkas recounts a recent visit to Pakistan.
He is news editor at New Age. The story was published on
October 7, 2013.
MOMENTS before we landed at Jinnah International in Karachi, we had noticed almost an even development across the city, nothing like the patches here and there that we see when we fly over Dhaka. An old city like Karachi must have grown unplanned; but it seemed that at some point, someone dared to straighten things and could undo, to a large extent, what was not planned.
The Pakistan high commission in Dhaka wanted us — nine journalists, including one from a newspaper based in Khulna, and an assistant professor of international relations in the University of Dhaka — to see Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, speak to people and get to know the difference between what Pakistan is perceived as and what it really is all about so that our judgement in future could be informed.
We were a group of 10 — ‘do auratein and eight gents’ as our protocol officer from the Sindh press information told an immigration officer at Jinnah. The eldest of us was ABN Mobaidur Rahman of the Bangla daily Inquilab, imposing his decision on others at one moment and asking not to be forced to do anything even when all others want it the next.
After we had been named for the tour, by our offices or the high commission, we had a meeting with Ambreen Jan, Pakistan’s press counsellor in Dhaka. It was at the meeting that Ambreen Jan proposed that Mobaidur, for whom it would be the fifth visit to Pakistan, should lead the group because his hairs are grey enough to have been amenable to reasons. And he left his mark all the way we travelled. He had to be handled quite a few times and could be controlled on one or two occasions.
The day we landed in Karachi was Saturday (July 22, 2013) and a general strike was in force because gunmen had shot dead a Muttahida Qaumi Movement leader, Sajid Qureshi, a provincial lawmaker, his son and a pedestrian as they were leaving a mosque after Friday prayers. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is later reported to have claimed the responsibility for the attack in continuation of its earlier announcement of targeting the ‘secular’ MQM, Awami National Party and the Pakistan People’s Party.
When we reached the commercial district of Saddar Karachi for the board in the Hotel Al Harmain Tower, on Raja Ghazanfar Ali (Khan) Road (formerly Somerset Street) as a cement plaque in one corner in the crossing sported, the general strike was over. There were not many people on the road but when we were back on the road in a hired microbus headed for a mobile outlet in Clifton Block 9 to buy SIMs, the city started waking up to the daily business.
The mobile outlet was closed. But many shopping malls were open, or they had opened just after the strike hours. As we had nothing to do for the night but to dine, in or out, shopping frenzy began. Karachi, or Pakistan for that matter, began to appear different from what we had so far heard about. This is not a place where anyone walks about pulling out a gun although business establishments of note and many individuals have private security guards. But still anything can happen any moment anywhere despite not being in a war zone.
The MQM leader had been killed in Karachi the day before we reached there. Gunmen also killed 10 people, nine of whom were foreigners, in Gilgit-Baltistan the day after we had reached Karachi and the Pakistani Taliban bombed the convoy of Sindh High Court justice Babar Maqbool in Karachi, killing eight security men, on July 26 a day after we had reached Lahore. There are security threats but they all appear to have taken this for their way of life.
The Gilgit-Baltistan incident also prompted the Pakistan authorities, at the direction of the high commissioner in Dhaka, to deploy a security squad for us in Lahore and Islamabad.
The next morning on Sunday, the weekend, we began our schedule with a tour of Mazar-e-Quaid, the tomb of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan and Jinnah’s sister Fatima Jinnah are also buried besides graves of Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar and Nurul Amin.
The tomb’s custodian Ather Mir, a retired army officer much reverent to Jinnah, took us around the tomb, the premise and the museum. Other graves in the premises have names written in Urdu on one side and in Bangla on the other. Why are there Bangla on the graves when Jinnah in a public meeting at the Ramna Race Course in Dhaka on March 21, 1948, made it clear that ‘the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language.... Without one state language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function’?
Pakistan’s first constitution, laid out later in 1956, in Article 214 (1) says: ‘The State languages of Pakistan shall be Urdu and Bengali.’ The language movement of 1952 in the erstwhile East Pakistan that resulted from the 1948 incidents resulted in the independence of the land from the erstwhile West Pakistan in 1971. The bilingual policy of the government of the day, however, continued to be in the constitution of 1962 until the third constitution was framed in 1973.
Jinnah has remained the greatest leader of Pakistan, even with his secular slant that becomes evident from his efforts centring on the first national anthem, Aye sar zamin-e-pak (O, Land of the pure), which he asked ‘Urdu-knowing Hindu poet’ Jagannath Azad to write. The anthem had been in force for a year and a half before Pak sar zamin shad bad (Blessed be the sacred land), took over.
But no counter knowledge about Jinnah could develop, probably because he died shortly after the partition and the following rulers, who were not that much charismatic, tried to create a nationalism based on the tenet that Islam was the foundation of the state, set him aside ideologically and allowed no criticism of him or his work. There were even court cases and verdicts regarding the religious affiliation of Jinnah, who had a non-sectarian stance, after his death.
Some people resident in Karachi said that there were still many more people with a secular leaning but they were not willing to speak out in fear of being branded as leaning towards Hinduism, or even India. Islam is what the state was founded on and this has remained the best selling plank for all — but there are many who are opposed to, but do not oppose, the tenet, projected by the ruling class.
In place of women observing hijab, we rather found young girls, along with boys, in European dresses, some coming on the streets from shopping malls or cinemas, holding hands and walking into cars well after midnight without bothering about any social frowning. There were many girls who were not even wearing scarves. We saw only a few girls, understandably from the lower class, in niqab, with their elders, not even wearing scarves, behind them. In our hotel restaurant, which seemed to be a famous place for dining out, we saw a few women wearing burka. A female official in Islamabad later said that women and girls in Karachi were far more ‘advanced’ than they were in Lahore and Islamabad. She also asked us if there was any segregation between man and women in Bangladesh. We had, of course, been to only three cities and, that too, in a week.
A few of our fellows watched films in cinemas in the Atrium Mall, which was across the Inverarity Road by our hotel, on the first two nights. The mall has half a dozen cinemas where four of the screenings were English films and one Hindi — Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani; the other is an Urdu (Pakistani) film. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation had hit hard the Pakistan film industry, with restrictive provisions in registration laws beginning from 1979 to well into the mid-1990s. The film industry in Pakistan was still struggling to recover from the setback.
OUR next visit was to a charity called Alamgir Welfare Trust International, on Alamgir Road at Bahadurabad. The charity provides the poor with food, pays for the treatment of the poor in private hospitals, runs ambulance services, sells sacrificial animals, arranges for weddings of poor and orphan girls, and provides deserving students with course books and low-income households with month ration. But for what seemed to be a communication gap, we could not go around the building or talk with the staff.
We had two things to do for the day — going to Clifton Beach and attending a dinner at the Karachi Press Club. From the welfare trust, we went to Dolmen Mall on the Clifton Marine Drive — to change dollars and to see for ourselves the big mall which has two other branches in the city. Probably being in the cantonment area, the place had a high security. Even when I snapped a photograph inside the mall, a guard came running after saying, politely, Yahan tasveer khinchna mana hai (Taking photograph is now allowed here). As I offered to delete the snap, in Urdu markedly different from theirs and typical of outsiders, he smiled and let it go.
After all our fellows had apparently finished shopping for the day, we were left with not enough time before our visit to the press club for a walk down the beach. We headed back to the hotel and then out to the press club, on Sarwar Shaheed Road, known as Ingle Road much earlier, a few blocks from our hotel. It was a majestic Victorian-style building where the press club was set up in 1958. The ground floor houses the main hall for press conferences and other programmes and the upper floor houses a well-stocked library, with even a shelf full of books on Bangladesh, a committee room and a TV lounge.
After the routine introduction and speeches, we had a question-answer session which soon became affairs of several small groups as we advanced into the dinner. As soon as we finished, the secretary to the club committee, who had collected our visiting cards, started reading out the names one after another, along with one from the committee members, at intervals when they presented us with block-printed shawls known by the name of ajrak, a symbol of Sindh culture and traditions, in a mark of hospitality.
After we had finished doing what we had to in the room, we got down into the lawn for tea and photocalls in a manner known as ‘firing squad’ in news rooms. The landings of the stairs were decorated with huge paintings of noted journalists, poets and others.
After a short peep into the library and the computer room, as we were about to set foot on the staircase, with a big portrait of Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the landing, I recited: Hum ke thehre ajnabi itni madaraton ke bad (We who became strangers after so much of easy intimacy), the opening line from Faiz’s poem, Dhaka Se Wapsi Par (On Return from Dhaka), written in 1974, when was last the poet visited Dhaka, Naseer Ahmed, a senior subeditor of the Daily Jang, recited the next line: phir banenge ashna kitni mulakaton ke bad (After how many meetings shall be friends again).
He took me into the library to show me issues of Sindhi newspaper Kawish, which had more than 70 news reports on the front page, with one column headline of the text size set in white on black and a column line of news with a request for turning over the page, after I had told him that his newspaper, Roznamah Jang, looked a bit crammed with huge, decorative headlines and all single-column text layout.
We met a senior journalist, Farooq Moin, known as a man of rectitude in the circle, at the dinner where many journalists said that they had learnt the trade with him. Farooq Moin, who had worked with the Pakistan Press International news agency for more than four decades, was the wittiest of the people I have met in Pakistan.
After another round of shopping in malls and markets in the neighbourhood, it was time for retiring to bed. Monday began with a routine visit, along with a briefing, to the Sindh press information office, typical of a provincial government office. We were then headed for Wackenhut Pakistan Ltd, housed in Kawish Crown Plaza at Shahrah-e-Faisal, a security company owned by Ikram Sehgal, who wears ‘two hats’ — of a columnist and the head of the company, which earns Rs 3.2 billion a month.
Apart from having the idea of how big security business could be in a country where security is at risk, we also had a sumptuous lunch and a copy each of Sehgal’s Escape from Oblivion, which according to an Express Tribune review of 2012 is ‘a gripping narrative about his experiences during a time of great tribulation that followed the Pakistan Army’s crackdown on the rebellious elements in East Pakistan on March 25, 1971.... But... the narrative suffers from contradictions and an inadequate explanation of events, especially those that took place after his arrival in Dhaka from West Pakistan up until his imprisonment.’
On our way back to the Boat Basin in Clifton for a visit to the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, we passed by the University of Karachi, set up in 1953, thirty-two years after the University of Dhaka had been founded. In Karachi, they think highly of any Dhaka University alumni although Pakistanis who have been to and in Bangladesh think that the standards of education in Dhaka have fallen these days but not as low as they have in Karachi.
But we missed the PEMRA programme as our team leader, who somehow convinced the protocol officers accompanying us that he should meet an old friend of his he had not been in touch with for decades. We reached the house of his old-time friend, an engineer who owns a house and a flat in a posh area in Karachi and another house in Islamabad. We had to stay there for an hour. On our way back to the PEMRA office, passing through the town, we heard that the agency chairman had left his office for the day — good news for many of us as they could jump into shopping. We got back to hotel. After a couple of hours, as some of our fellows could not finish shopping on time, we headed for Clifton Beach. It was a long while past evening when we reached there. We walked down the wet sand, up to knee-high waves, and listened to and watched waves breaking down onto the shore.
Back to our hotel, five of us, after the dinner, started walking down the road looking for a roadside tea stall about midnight. A few blocks away, we found one, Quetta Dirar Hotel (as in Dhaka, the word hotel, in most cases, means a restaurant also in Karachi), owned by Haji Abdul Khaliq, with three people standing — two behind the counter making tea and one waiting on customers. It looked more like any Shab-e-Barat night in Old Town of Dhaka, with children exploding crackers and elders making preparations for prayers asking them not to. We ordered four cups of tea. When we asked about the price of a cup of tea. The youngest of the three, Nazir Ahmed from Quetta, to our surprise, said, ‘Teis rupaye.’
As we looked up, we noticed a rate list, mounted on the wall, saying that a cup of tea without milk costs Rs 17, a piece of paratha Rs 17, an egg omelette Rs 18 and a plate of milk skin (malai) Rs 40. Although the tea was good, the restaurant was not that big and clean and the prices were high by any standards if we think about such a restaurant in Dhaka. The notice also thanks customers for telling the counter people before having anything if they had notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500. The youngest of them said that they import tea; and milk is dear, at least in Karachi.
This boy has been living in Karachi for some days, working with the restaurant for Rs 7,000 a month, all of which he sends to his family — his parents, sisters and brothers — back in Quetta. He gets the bread, literally, from the restaurant and he stays with some people from his area in a room a few blocks away where 15 others like him for a monthly rent of Rs 5,000 share the space for sleep — seven who work at daytime sleep at night and others who work at night sleep during the day.
All these small-to-medium neighborhood restaurants give away meals, usually roti(bread) and dal mas (lentil curry), to the poor who start lining up a while before the meal time. They said that there were some restaurants where people pay for extra meals which are later given to the poor.
The next (Tuesday) morning, we flew to Lahore.
As we landed at Allama Iqbal International, we saw a reporter of a Lahore-based regional television channel, City42, waiting for our arrival. The cameraman who was standing with the reporter, Nabeel Malik, was holding a list of all our names. The chivalrous Mobaidur Rahman, as leader of the group, spoke about what he personally felt he should visit in Lahore. The next day when we were having our dinner in a restaurant called Tabak, we came to know about us being covered in a news bulletin. The waiter told us about that.
Lahore was hotter than Karachi. Coming out of the airport we got into a car headed for the Ambassador Hotel on Davis Road. We had a team of four policemen in a car going before ours. In the two days, they became friendly with us as we talked about their firearms, uniform, their station house, which was Wahdat Colony, and their career as policemen.
After check-in formalities, we hurried — because we needed to keep the schedule as we left Karachi more than an hour and a half late for a trouble at Lahore airport — for Badshahi Mosque, where about a hundred thousand people can say prayers at a time. Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir started building it in 1671 and the job was completed in 1673. The mosque has the trace of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity in the decoration of its main structure.
It was about 50 degrees Celsius and there were pairs of shoes, made of leather-cloth, for us at the gate because a walk barefooted from one to the other end through the yard would cause blisters. I heard that they charge ordinary visitors some money for the shoes. To a corner of the mosque structure, there stands a Sikh temple called Gurdwara Dera Sahib; the guide gave us an example of all religions coexisting and said that the Sikh ruler of Lahore Ranjit Singh had built the temple but did not give the reason that Ranjit Singh built the temple in honour of the fifth guru of Sikhism, Arjun Dev Ji, who was drowned in the River Ravi while fighting with Emperor Jahangir’s men. The mosque had been under Sikh occupation for about 50 years since 1799 and the yard was used as the stable of the Sikh ruler, who also fired shell into the sprawling Lahore Fort, or Shahi Qila, that stands opposite the mosque. British rulers later renovated the part of the fort that was damaged in the shelling.
It was in the Lahore Fort, with the Walled City to one side and Old City to the other, that I met the second most wittiest man, by far wide a margin, in the trip — the guide, who also teaches English in an institution, with a genuine interest in history and quite entertaining. It reminded me of the ready wit of Old Town of Dhaka. He walked us around from one to the other corner. Far from the fort to a side, there stands Minar-e-Pakistan, or the Tower of Pakistan, built in the 1960s in the place where on March 23, 1940 the Lahore Resolution was passed, setting out the partition of India that was effected in 1947.
As we were pressed for time, we hurried to the Lahore Museum, or Ajaib Ghar (wonder house) as they call it in Urdu, where Rudyard Kipling’s father John Lockwood Kipling was once a curator. The fabled gun Zamzamah, or Kim’s gun, which begins Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zamah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher...), is placed on a raised brick platform. The museum, now at Mall Road, was then located in the Tollinton Market, named after a government of Punjab officer. The most important things about the museum are its collection of relics of the Buddha, especially from the Gandhara period, and Mughal miniature portraits on ivory tusks.
It was soon lunch time and we headed for a restaurant in a big road crossing. In a short while, we would be driving up to the Wahga Border, where the Pakistan and the Indian flag are hoisted in the morning and lowered in the evening with a ceremonial salute between the Pakistan Rangers and the Border Security Force of India. But when we were about to finish our meal in the restaurant, our group leader resolved that he would not go to the border and would rather we so did. He was game for Shalamar Bagh, or garden, which we were not supposed to visit. He then again resolved that he would not keep with us and eat with us. He was packed back to the hotel in a car.
When we reached the border, the ceremony had already begun. But still the best thing the hosts did for us was to keep enough seats almost reserved for us in the front row of the VIP gallery. It was time for beating the retreat with high goose-stepping, amid aggressive postures and the shouting of Jiye jiye Pakistan one this side and Bharat mata ki jai on the Indian side. The whole episode was spectacular but appeared to be means for creating or invoking the sense of nationalism among the several thousand people attending on both sides of the border. Shortly before I thought this to be a futile exercise, suddenly I could feel the pangs of the partition, families being halved by the line drawn by Radcliffe.
Pakistani rulers try to instil a sense of opposition against India in ordinary people even after they were continuing with exchanges with India. Many of the government officials, like many ordinary people, also think that India was a superior military power which they cannot fight and need to sit across the table with India.
Back into the town, we went straight to the Food Street at Anarkali. After a round of tea, almost all jumped into shopping. We were so spent, especially after such a hectic day in the hot and humid weather, no one was willing to have a meal. We had fruit juice instead, fading into shopping again till midnight when we got back to the hotel for a sound sleep.
On Wednesday morning, we started for Lahore University of Management Sciences, an institution offering higher education of world standards, which even provides many poor students with full scholarship. We had a session with the vice-chancellor. It was a holiday and we could see a handful of students, girls in Western dresses, entering and going out of the rooms. But in all it seemed that it was a place for the elite and a place to breed elitism, which seemed to be a big problem with the functioning of the state.
The National College of Arts on Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam proved to be a big relief after this. Quite a spacious campus sparse with statues and fountains under the green of large trees, the college seemed to have been drawing us. Laila Rahman, who gave an introduction to the college with the screening of two short documentaries, said, with a smile apparently looking forward to an approval for a mischief, that she would like to think that Zainul Abedin was also their man. Zainul Abedin had an exhibition of his work in Lahore in 1953 that is believed to be starting point for a series of exhibitions aimed at promoting contemporary Pakistani art.
After a ziyafat, lunch, that the Lahore press information hosted at a Chinese restaurant, we were off to Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre. This could be an example of what a man like Imran Khan, with supports from others, can do. We walked around the whole of the hospital and headed back to the hotel. After a round of tea in the lounge, the protocol officer, Ehsan Ullah Shahzad, who had read all our curricula vitae meticulously before we reached here, said that his official engagement with us was over and it was ‘over to Islamabad’ the next morning.
We told him that some of us would like to visit book shops and he asked the policemen to accompany us to Readings, a big shop on main boulevard Gulberg. Getting down from the car, I told the security team chief: Ap yahan thahriye, main kitab kharid ke ata hun (You wait here till I get back with books). He said he would follow me. It was a large shop with books mostly on popular subjects. I chanced on the AP Stylebook and John T Platts’s grammar of Hindustani. As I inquired if an Urdu dictionary could be available, the man at the counter asked the policeman to take us to Variety Books in Liberty market area. It was a huge four-storey shop for books, CDs and such accessories. I could dig out a dictionary, Estelle Dryland’s Faiz Ahmed Faiz and a few other titles. Four of us who were there had by that time started to receive calls from our team members in the hotel that we should get back early as they would go shopping.
When we were on our way back to the hotel, the police squad withdrew as they had worked beyond their duty hours. The inspector, who got into our car, also got off near the hotel. But we needed to have our meals. We informed the protocol officer and he said that night time in Lahore was safe. We got into the car and asked the driver to get to the restaurant where we had our lunch the day before. Soon after we had reached the place, the police called our driver to get to know our location. Within minutes, the police squad reached the place and asked one of us to go out to meet them. We then started for Anarkali, yes, for shopping.
While we were in the restaurant, we needed to tell the restaurant people that we were a group of journalists from Bangladesh, the man waiting on our table instantly said that he had recognised us. Then he said that C42 TV channel had aired a bit in its news bulletin on us. Back home in Dhaka, I managed to dig out the clip of the bulletin from an online repository and found that the producer of the news item had thoughtfully done away with showing the interview with our group leader.
People of Lahore, considered the cultural capital of Pakistan, say that Lahore Lahore Aye (in Punjabi, Lahore is Lahore). Probably they are right even though it seemed that the whole city was trying to become modern, shaking off the old. In the two days, we could hardly feel the city as we visited a few places, within a small circle, and stayed in a corner off the city bustles, but we could see that it has everything that we could like about an old city.
It was all over with the Lahore protocol, with us waiting to be taken to a bus terminal at dawn on Thursday from where we will be travelling on a motorway called M2 to Islamabad. We later found out that the terminal on the other end was in effect in Rawalpindi.
A hotel bus took us to the M-2 motorway station. Shahzad the previous night had told us not to fall asleep after we would reach Bhera as the place along the rest of the road was scenic. The motorway spans 367km and offers a nice journey. We were going in a luxury bus of Daewoo Bus Company. After we had had started rolling on the road, a girl, working as the guide in the bus, offered us snacks and drinks. She was announcing the departures and arrivals, first in Urdu and then in English. But we could hardly make anything of what she was saying because of a drawling accent, strongly marked with mid, high and low tones, till then unknown to us. It seemed that she was speaking in a third language.
Later, when we were in Murree Tehsil, I heard a similar utterance, looked back and noticed a girl standing on a slope. I asked the protocol officer what was the language she was speaking in. He said that it was Pothohari, a dialect of Western Punjabi but the language she was speaking was a Murree dialect of the Pothohari, which is a group also known as Pahari-Potowari.
Getting down at the bus terminal in Rawalpindi, we found an EP wing protocol officer waiting for us with car and a security squad composed of four personnel of the Anti-Terrorism Squad. Soon we headed for the Islamabad Capital Territory, or Waqafi Darul Hukumat, established in 1960 on land from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Headed for the hotel, on AK Fazal-e-Haq Road (I heard people also calling it Sher-e-Bangal Road), with Jinnah Avenue passing by at a distance, we checked in an hour before midday. The city is quiet and traffic was thin. We hurried to the Foreign Office, had a briefing with the director general of the South Asia Division Riffat Masood.
After a short briefing and a question-answer session, we went to a place where our group leader by his refusal to ‘talk about local politics on foreign land’ shamed us all. We went to the Institute of Regional Studies on Kamal Ataturk Avenue, to trade questions and answers. This organisation, running on government fund, documents news on bilateral relations. It also has half a dozen folders on Pakistan’s relation with Bangladesh.
After all we asked and they answered, the director, a former army officer, said that they also had questions for us. As he asked a question about religion and secularism being used by political parties in Bangladesh, our group leader blurted out, to our dismay and awe, that as leader of the team he had decided not to talk about local politics, which we feared was out of his unwillingness to hear bad things about whatever political group he is ideologically inclined to. The director heaved a sigh and asked his people not to ask questions. Aside, later we handed them our visiting cards and requested them to ask questions on anything and we would be giving replies. No one has so far made any queries.
The next destination was the National Press Club, a relatively new structure with corrugated tin sheets on a sprawling space. At lunch, we met the cook, who is from Bangladesh but spoke Bengali with an accent. We could not meet more than two or three journalists as the Pakistan parliament was in session passing the national budget.
We were off to the information ministry in a while and had a briefing with the federal secretary to the ministry, Agha Nadeem. He said that they believed that partial freedom of the press was worse than having no freedom even if it were a bit too strong against the government. It seemed that he talked facts as from discussions with journalists, and even government officials, we came to know of the strong, vibrant press in Pakistan, especially in Karachi, which houses headquarters of all newspapers.
I have not seen any newspaper shops on the footpath or in road crossings that we see in almost every important crossing Dhaka. On our second day in Karachi, I saw an old man hawking around some newspapers through the bustling Bohri Bazaar where we were waiting on the road, I wished to buy some newspapers and as I got down, he walked so far away that I could not shout enough to draw his attention. I asked an officer if there are any footpath shops for newspapers. He said that they had them removed many years ago. They get newspapers delivered at home in the morning. He then said that there was the Empress Market (All we came across in Karachi pronounced it Impress) where we could buy newspapers.
In the afternoon, I saw an old man holding a bag of rolled newspapers coming out of the hotel. I called him aloud, but not loud enough and a security guard had to call him. I asked him if he had any Sindhi newspapers, he said that he had sold them out and could bring a few for me the next morning. I bought a Jang and an Express Tribune. He said that they had made up ‘Chabbis rupaye.’ As I was looking for small notes, he said, ‘Rehne dijie, nahin hai to. Akhir, ap hamare mehman hain.’ (Let it go, if you do not have changes. After all, you are our guests.) We did not meet the next morning. Either he came early or we left early.
I met the chief reporter of the Express Tribune at the provincial bureau of the newspaper. I had a gift a colleague of mine, who met him in China, had given to me for him. I called him the moment we reached Islamabad. He came over to the hotel, on that busy day, with another gift for my colleague in Dhaka. We talked various issues for a long while. Many of our groups, who went shopping and to see Faisal Mosque, got back two hours later when we had already been late for a dinner the EP wing was hosting to us at a restaurant called Des Pardes in Saidpur on the Margalla Hills.
We reached the place an hour late, with secretary waiting glum, not because we were late but because, I believe, he was made an officer on special duty, which we had seen in newspapers the next morning before we left for Murree. It was a lavish dinner but we were a bit tired because of the hectic schedule and the heat. This was a beautiful place, with steps carved on the hill slope, with musicians playing on traditional instruments, in light, bright in one place and mysteriously dark in the other.
We got back to the hotel, full, content and tired. The next (Friday) morning, we started for Murree about 9:00am. As soon as we reached Murree Tehsil on the Islamabad-Murree Highway, we saw our security squad with ATS people turning back towards Islamabad. But that was close to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir. Still we felt that the authorities had thought that we would no longer need security. After crossing about a kilometre or two, we saw a van, with a group of Kashmir police personnel, taking over.
Five of us bought ripe cherry and anjeer (figs), which I tasted for the first time, from a small boy hawking around with a bamboo container and fig leaves, which he was using to make cones to hold the fruit. Another shopping frenzy went on. As we wasted about an hour and a half, we decided not to get into chairlift and cable car to go as high as 9,000 feet from the ground. Later our protocol officer sought the help of the security people, who managed our way right then into the chairlift and then cable car and way back without any hassles.
The place above 9,000 feet looked pristine, with tall pine (chirr) trees. When we were taking lunch on the top of a hill, I asked the protocol officer, Yeh kaun sa perr hai (what are these trees called)? He looked a bit nonplussed. Another from the Pakistan government, Sadaf Zahra, said, Yeh sab darakht hain. I could say, but not bet, that perr is a Hindustani word and it might well fall into the ahl-e-zuban vocabulary; they came up with darakht. As luck would have it they did not come up with the word shajar. The word perr is there in Urdu dictionaries but later I read somewhere that in Karachi, the utterance of the word perr has a connotation of rusticity.
We had heard that it was a very pleasant weather on Murree hills but it was close to 40 degrees Celsius when we were there. And as we had no experience of climbing slopes, it soon sapped us of our energy. After all this, the view of Murree was exquisitely beautiful, with clouds shadowing a portion a moment and the sun lighting the place the next.
In Murree, which is a hill station founded by the British, there is a brewery, dating back from 1860, which trickles down to the local market of majority Muslims where only non-Muslims are allowed alcohol permits. The restrictions were imposed after free sales and consumption of liquor for three decades after the partition. The sales of liquor to Muslims, who account for about 97 per cent of the population, are prohibited but drinking, in private, is not. A local journalist offered me to walk around the clubs at night if I could be free. A hotel man also said that he could get us liquor but the drinking needed to be done in the room.
From Murree, we hurried to the hotel as we had been late adequately to miss the flight to Karachi for some of us, deeply engrossed in Murree’s scenic beauty especially on the Kashmir point, was waiting for any damsel to fall into distress. We checked out in about 10 minutes and darted out for the airport, in Rawalpindi, with the security car blaring siren all along and the ATS members making the way for us in every means they could employ. We heaved a sigh of relief but to the frowning of the airport officials. The cargo hold, we heard, had already been closed and all our bags travelled to Karachi sitting in the cabin separately.
We reached Jinnah International about 9:00pm. Sindh protocol officers waiting at the airport dashed us into PIA Hotel as we had a transit for more than six hours. The hotel was not very far from the airport. It was a nice sprawling building with lawns. We decided to chat in a room as we might not feel comfortable to wake up to start for the airport at 5:00am. As we had talked every night but for the first two nights in Karachi, the session of chat continued. Every night, at least four of us would discuss what we had seen and felt about Pakistan.
The language movement of 1952, in which political matters found an expression, held back our people, especially the young, from learning Urdu and getting to know what Pakistan thinks about the present-day erstwhile East Pakistan although there are many around, even the young, who take pride in being able to talk about, or recite, a few specimens of sher (poems). The subsequent culmination of the nationalistic movement into Bangladesh’s struggle for independence has made many of us hostile to anything related to Pakistan.
Although Pakistanis, especially the young, these days know almost nothing, or bother to know, about Bangladesh, many of their elders still think that Yahya Khan should have handed over power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who won the elections although it is still debatable whether things could have continued the way they were going if power had been handed over to Sheikh Mujib, who won no seats in the then West Pakistan and the Bengali-speaking people had issues with political supremacy and discrimination in addition to the right to language being denied in the erstwhile East Pakistan.
People in Pakistan said that they had removed everything regarding the then East Pakistan from their textbooks. Ordinary people in Pakistan only learn that they had a wing called East Pakistan separated by a patch of India; Sheikh Mujib won the elections; India had East Pakistan liberated into Bangladesh; and East Pakistan had jute and a paper mill in Khulna.
Many elders in Pakistan still consider Bangladeshis their bhais (brothers) although the elite might think of it in a different way. Many of the young, with many others still being left out, are interested to know about Bangladesh. Many of them individually apologise for what happened to Bangladeshis in 1971, beginning from 1947. While the young are eager to carry forward the relationship, the state, it seemed, will never officially apologise over the 1971 war.
New Age | The Outspoken Daily
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but rest is worth a read.
I have to admit too - great summary. One thing that blew right over everyone's head however is that this guy tried to recite Shayari in Urdu for which you have to give him props (for keeping an open mind). Awami League-ers will not get anywhere near speaking Urdu - much less recite Shayari.
