Jahane Rumi In search of the unsearchable: O, my soul! where would you find your house?

27Feb/104

On Nietzsche

I am happy to publish this guest post sent from New Zealand.. (RR)

“Let us honour if we can, the vertical man,

Though we value none but the horizontal one.” – Auden

“Be sorry for the extraordinary man that he had to live in such miserable age that he had to exert himself polemically all the times.”- Goethe

Nietzsche went hopelessly insane at the age of forty five in January 1889 and died as such eleven years later on 25th August 1900 in Weimer. Ironically the king Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, on whose birthday Nietzsche was born and christened after him, became mad a few years later and so did Nietzsche’s father. Yet this man, Nietzsche, has inspired the greatest minds of twentieth century more than any other thinkers of recent times. Thomas Mann, Herman Hess, Rilke, Andre Gide, Sartre, Camus, G.B.Shaw,  W.B.Yeats,O’Neil, Martin Bubber and Freud have all acknowledged their debts to the inspirational vision of Nietzsche. In Mohammad Iqbal’s poetry one can clearly realize the strong influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy before Iqbal’s lapse into politico-religious whirlpool.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Rocker, in the Prussian province of Saxony, on 15th October,1844. His father Ludwig Nietzsche was a Lutheran minister.

25Feb/103

Pakistan: democratic governance is the only way forward

(Also published by The News) Given the average shelf life of any civilian government, it is almost miraculous that the incumbent government has survived and there are signs that its removal is not immediate. The longevity of civilian order has less to do with the inherent strengths of its style of governance or delivery of public goods that it had promised in its manifesto. The survival of this government is an outcome of the lack of options for the establishment as well as its international allies, notably the Western powers. Leaving the conspiracy theories and the excessive over-reliance of the analysts on the American factor, we can safely argue that the military establishment of Pakistan and its intelligence agencies has found themselves in a unique situation since the assumption of the presidency by Asif Ali Zardari.

The truth is that Pakistan People’s Party, an anathema to the civil-military bureaucracy, has assumed the most important and powerful offices that a civilian government can aspire for. Two years ago, when the Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was

9Feb/103

Muslimness – shifting boundaries

Muslimness is an elusive state of being. There are watertight strictures of the theological identity defined by men, interpreted as the Sharia, on the one hand; and the broad political and cultural sense of the self, on the other. Identity, in any case, is a messy affair: shifty, shifting and eventually, imagined. While 9/11 placed Muslims at the centre stage of global politics, the broth had already been simmering in the cauldrons of biased academe and pop reality mirrored through the blood-thirsty lens of corporate media.

So what is it to be a Muslim? An inflexible bag of rituals? Or a cultural sense of belonging or a deeper dogma ingrained in young minds? I have never considered myself anything but a believer, a ‘practicing Muslim’. This has never been at variance with my secular and inclusive pretensions, despite the fact that the clergy in my country considers secularism akin to atheism, a sort of mirror image of the Pakistani political foundation. The clerics translate secular as la-deen , at best irreligious, and at worst, godless.

Ironical that this business of religious identity is articulated in a land that was the crucible of the secular Indus Valley civilization, non-militant Buddhism and a peculiar version of South Asian Islam that spread via the Sufi khanqahs and was a sort of amalgam of the Central Asian with the ancient South Asian. Even more ironical is the reality, neglected and veiled, that lived Islam is located around dargahs , tribal codes and customs which are irreligious in their own way. But who cares? Referred to as the world’s most dangerous country, Pakistan, according to the pundits of global opinion, is a haven for Islamic terrorists. Collateral damage, therefore, is kosher and a necessity to undo the unstated part of the ‘axis of evil’.

Labels and more labels. On the global shelves such products sell well and work in favour of a war machine hungry for energy resources, territory and blood.

8Feb/104

How instability is garnered

My latest analysis published by The News

We continue to bemoan the failure of democratic norms to take root in our governance culture. True, that the repeated extra-constitutional interventions and direct or indirect military rule have rendered democratic governance as a distant and seemingly unattainable goal. In addition, the emergence of non-state actors, sometimes more powerful than the state itself has also led to formidable and multiple centres of power. In such a milieu, achieving the sustainability of democratic process is a Herculean task. Whilst the intentions of our unelected state institutions and their overt and covert non-state partners are clear, the behaviour of the political elites is confounding.

Not unlike the past, the divisiveness of Pakistan’s political elites has entered into a decisive phase. Fissures are apparent in the post-2008 political accord that led to the unanimous election of the Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani. The first cleavage, now a recurrent pattern, has emerged in Sindh where the coalition partners — the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) — are pitted against each other for political control of urban Sindh. The latest skirmish is rooted in the evolving arrangements for the local governments and who will end up controlling the third tier of government. However, there is an ethnic dimension to it as well. Karachi remains besieged by sectarian, provincial, and linguistic ghosts that apparently are alive and kicking.

The second disruption in the political compact that led to a transition towards representative rule is unfolding in the shape of a brewing discord between the ruling PPP and the opposition Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz). The PML-N rules the Punjab and thereby has a stake in the system and power matrix but it is also striving to maintain its ‘opposition’ status. This is why a dual strategy is evident where a few firebrand leaders of PML-N take a hard line against the federal government and the President Asif Ali Zardari. The party does not want to rock the system it says but also considers ‘options’ that lead to a mid-term election or even the premature exit of the President from the office in the wake of Supreme Court rulings on the National Reconciliation Ordinance.

25Jan/100

Should we bid farewell to democracy in Pakistan?

Published in The NEWS

It is still not too late that PML-N and PPP and the regional parties sit together and agree on the way forward says Raza Rumi

Many decades ago, our Governor General-President Iskander Mirza had rather contemptuously stated that democracy does not suit the genius of Pakistani people. Immediately after these words of wisdom were uttered, direct military rule not only exiled Mirza but also became a norm rather than aberration. For the last six decades or so we have not been able to overcome this political reality. The unelected institutions of the state are not willing to give up the power they inherited from the might of the colonial state. At best, they are willing to share power to a degree that they deem fit.

It is now clear that within a few months Pakistan is due for another political upheaval. Barely twoyears after an election took place, the political elites are back in business: bickering, wrangling and oblivious to their historical role in strengthening the fragile democratic process. The unelected institutions have traditionally been contemptuous of democracy and their conduct in the last two years has not been surprising. The losers at the hand of the military rule – the PML-N and the PPP ought to have learnt their lesson: no matter how adverse the political climate was, the political forces had to stay united for a common cause.

However, the brief interlude of political cooperation led to mistrust and misgivings among the political players. First the restoration of judges and a partisan interpretation to the issue of independence of the judiciary created a rift between the two parties. Second, the imposition of ill-advised Governor’s rule led to widening of the gulf. This was followed by the long march that led to the restoration of the deposed judges. In the process, the co-chairperson of the PPP was termed as a leader who did not keep his promises and time and again betrayed the trust of Mian Nawaz Sharif painted by a prejudiced media as an innocent victim.

4Jan/100

To undo the vicious past

It's about time a civilian Pakistan functions as a peaceful country with fair share of resources put into people's welfare by Raza Rumi (published in the News on Sunday)

That Pakistan's endemic political instability is a function of its inherent power imbalances is well known. The continued spells of authoritarian rule have also retarded the growth of political parties and other necessary institutions essential for democratic governance. We are a country trapped in our history, our self-fulfilling conspiracies and intrigues that are also rooted in the various phases of colonial era. Our geo-political situation, celebrated by a rentier state, has not helped us either. From the 1950s we have been in close partnership with global powers that are viewed as the ultimate saviours of a dysfunctional polity.

In 1971, we lost half the country. While the seeds of discord in East Pakistan had been laid by West Pakistan's ruling elites, our vengeful neighbour took full advantage and supported the Bangladeshi liberation movement. By all accounts, this was an avoidable tragedy had the national security-obsessed state dominated by West Pakistani vested interests could have seen the writing on the wall and fixed the issues of federalism that still haunt us.

11Nov/092

Anchorless rambling

We did it again. A hallmark of Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan was her meeting with the stars of the Pakistani media – the all-knowing anchors who have taken it upon themselves to be the “representatives” of Pakistan. Forget the President elected by all the legislatures, the Prime Minister who enjoys the confidence of the National Assembly, and even the Foreign Minister, who at the end of the day was elected from a constituency with a huge majority and nominated by the ruling party.

Such constitutional niceties are of little value. What we witnessed with a motley group of top anchors was a repeat of their daily performance on the idiot box, and the discourse with America’s second most powerful politician was familiar and disappointing. A senior journalist based in Lahore remarked that even the young students at the Government College University came up with better questions than the exchanges aired on television.

Who are we? Muslim, South Asian, Arab? No clear answer, because we are ten different things at the same time, and while the rest of the world is comfortable with multiple identities, Punjab’s urban middle classes crave a singular Islamic identity but want it with all the world’s frills. This is why we cheer the blowing up of the World Trade Centre and at the same want to live in New York. This is why the Islamo-fascist hate-America crowd is at ease with their progeny studying in the United States

26Oct/093

Media misogyny

My piece for The Friday Times

Pakistan’s electronic media is not accountable to anyone except to the barons and the market. And let us not forget that the barons, the mafia and the market are great bedfellows

Stereotype sells and its reinforcement is a popular cause. Perhaps this is why the electronic media has taken the inherent sexism of mainstream Urdu media to new heights. A new culture of real-time degradation of women is in vogue – all in the name of entertainment and the vague estimation of ratings that guarantee commercial earnings.

In the recent weeks, we were shamelessly entertained by a reality-TV-esque squabble between two parliamentarians who called each other names. Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan, a sitting federal minister of the ruling party, and Kashmala Tariq, a doyenne of the Musharraf regime entered into an argument over switching of political loyalties. Kashmala had a fair point: Dr Awan switched her party before the 2008 election and joined the PPP. Once confronted with this uncomfortable truth, she became abusive to the extent of questioning Kashamla’s ‘character’, a generally male-defined view of women’s sexuality in Pakistan.

28Aug/093

Faiz’s ‘Intesab’ – a lovely translation

A reader - Joe 31 - has rendered a great translation of Faiz's poem - "Intesab". I am posting it as a separate blog entry for all those who read and enjoy Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Pakistan's eminent poet. This poem appears as an introduction to one of his early collections of verse. This timeless poem is relevant even today as it celebrates the resilience and courage of Pakistani proletariat.

Dedicated to these times, and the sorrow of these times.
The pain of today, that is set against the plentiful garden of life.
The forest of dead leaves, that is my land.
The collection of pain that is my land.

Dedicated to the gloomy lives of clerks
Moth eaten hearts and words.
Dedicated to the postmen
Dedicated to the coachmen
Dedicated to the railway workers
Dedicated to the innocent beings in the factories.

13Aug/091

Land of My Dreams – of Mushirul Hasan’s woes

This is such a well written piece. I had read it a few months ago and now my friend ARK sent it via email. I am sharing it for the readers who may not have seen it. Reading Mushir ul Hasan and about him is always a pleasure. The comments on Boston Globe that published it are equally revealing as they reek of bigotry and fundamentalism that the writer is trying to depict in her piece. In a way, the non-resident-Indian (NRI) mindset is quite amusing as it shows that education and success and living in 'open' societies has little to do with socialised attitudes.

Land of My Dreams
Islamic liberalism under fire in India Martha C. Nussbaum
As it became clear that Pakistani Muslims perpetrated the horrendous terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November, many feared a wave of violence against India’s own Muslim community. The community, which represents 13.4 percent of Hindu-;majority India, suffers from poverty and systemic discrimination, as the government’s recent Sachar Commission report documents. It has also been targeted by the Hindu right, which, in 2002, murdered as many as 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, in the state of Gujarat.
That violence, like the violence of Hindu-;right mobs against Christians in the eastern state of Orissa in 2008, surely deserves the name of “terrorism.” Yet, in India as elsewhere, the word “terrorism” is now frequently confined to the actions of Muslims, and Muslims are suspects almost by virtue of their religion alone. There was reason, then, to fear that mobs would take the Mumbai blasts as the occasion for a renewed assault on an already beleaguered minority.
This assault did not materialize—largely because India’s Muslim community strongly condemned the terrorist acts and immediately took steps to demonstrate its loyalty to the nation. Muslim cemeteries refused burial to the perpetrators. Muslims wore black armbands on Eid, showing solidarity with mourners of all religions and nationalities. The world saw a deeply nationalist community, one loyal to the liberal values of a nation that has yet to treat it justly.
It was not the first time India’s Muslims have demonstrated a peaceful embrace of the country’s founding values. The personal experience of Mushirul Hasan exemplifies the same commitment. A leader of the community, Hasan has been at the center of controversy for his liberal, secular views and has weathered attempts to force him out of his job as Vice-;Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, a pluralistic university closely linked to Muslim contributions in India’s struggle for nationhood. His story illustrates three aspects of Indian and Muslim life that concerned Western observers regularly ignore.
First, the values we associate with classical liberalism—such as the defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and procedural due process—are not exclusively Western values. During the independence movement in India, they were reinvented by a colonized people who had seen just how little their Western masters honored such norms.
Second, these values are not tepid and centrist, as we sometimes hear, but rather, truly radical in a world of nations increasingly under pressure both from external violence and from internal quasi-;fascist forces.
And finally, Hasan’s story shows that there is a distinctive and genuinely Islamic form of liberalism, long-;lived and drawing inspiration from religious texts and their central concepts.
Hasan was born on August 15, 1949, exactly two years after the cohort of “midnight’s children” whose birth coincided with that of modern India on August 15, 1947. He spent his childhood in cosmopolitan Calcutta (now Kolkata), and later moved North with his family to the Aligarh Muslim University, where his father, a well-;known historian, had accepted a post. From early childhood, Hasan encountered the variety and plurality of Muslim life in India.
Then, as now, Muslims were respected as equal citizens by the nation’s laws and by some of its citizens, those who followed the lead of Gandhi and Nehru. But Muslims still encountered ubiquitous suspicion and discrimination, and, despite his middle-;class upbringing, Hasan was no exception. He once recalled to me how he and his brother were refused when they tried to rent a flat in South Delhi on the grounds that the smell of beef from Muslim kitchens would disgust the local (Hindu) inhabitants.
Hasan received a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University in 1977 and quickly became one of India’s most accomplished and respected historians of the nationalist movement and the modern nation. At the age of thirty-;one, he was the youngest historian ever named to a professorial chair in India. He took a teaching position at Jamia Millia Islamia and has published a dozen or so well-;regarded books on the nationalist struggle, the Nehru family, and the ideas of Gandhi, Nehru, and the liberal Muslims who joined with them.
Hasan addressed the student body, telling them that “the answer to this is to be more secular, to be more liberal in your outlook, to be more enlightened in your perspective.”
In spite of its name, Jamia has never been a Muslim university. Its location, in a predominantly Muslim residential area, and its historical association with secular liberal Muslims who took leading roles in the independence struggle have made it, over the years, an appealing place for Muslim students, but there has never been preferential admission for Muslims—the admissions form does not even ask the religion of the applicant—and the guiding values of the institution are firmly secular and pluralistic. Today about 60 percent of Jamia Millia Islamia’s students and 75 percent of its faculty are Muslim, but inclusiveness is the watchword (as it often is not in Hindu-;majority institutions, where both Muslim and lower-;caste students routinely suffer stigmatization and harassment).
Rumki Basu, a Hindu woman from West Bengal who currently chairs the university’s distinguished Political Science department, explained to me that she never encountered any discrimination or disparagement—even though, right after she got there, she proposed a radical revision of time-;honored syllabi, the sort of thing that usually drives at least some colleagues crazy. At Jamia, however, department discussions were always democratic, respectful, and cordial. (“No,” she says, “I am not making this up.”) “Jamia,” she concludes, “has busted a lot of unfair stereotypes and myths others hold about Muslims in modern India.” “Debate, dialogue, and discuss,” these are the principles that define Jamia—and that should be more common at other Indian universities.
In October 1988 Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was banned in India. Hasan spoke out publicly against the ban, defending the freedom of speech. A group of radical students in the university, attempting to stop him from teaching, assaulted him physically, inflicting minor injuries. While pressing criminal charges against his assailants, Hasan, who was then Pro-;Vice-;Chancellor of the University, was forced to work from home. He was unable to resume administrative and teaching duties for more than four years. During this time he wrote the excellent book Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims Since Independence.
Eventually he returned to the university, and the values for which he stood—always the institution’s dominant values—began to prevail even among its more radical students. Hasan dropped the criminal complaints against the ones who assaulted him (justice moves slowly in India, so by the time Hasan returned to Jamia, they were long since graduates with jobs and families to support), and his mercy made him a popular figure among students of all types. When the Congress Party took over in 2004, the President of the India, following the advice of a three-;member selection committee, asked him to become the Vice-;Chancellor of the university, equivalent to a U. S. university president.
In September 2008 police investigating a bomb blast in Delhi that had been tentatively linked to Islamic radicalism arrived at the off-;campus apartment of some Jamia students. In the ensuing violence, two suspects were killed, one a Jamia student; a police officer later died of his wounds. Two Jamia students were soon arrested on suspicion of aiding terrorism.The students were too poor to pay for competent legal counsel, and, while India’s constitution guarantees cost-;free legal assistance to “ensure that opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities,” public defenders are low-;grade, and many had recently received threats of violence should they take any case associated with alleged Islamic terrorism. With no hesitation, Hasan said that the university would pay for their legal counsel. The university had done this in other cases, just as it pays students’ medical fees. No one objected on those earlier occasions.
But the political charge in the air ensured that this time would be different. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Hindu right, decided to make an issue of the legal support. Accusing Hasan of misusing public money (Jamia, like all Central Universities in India, is government-;funded), they demanded his resignation. Education Minister Arjun Singh quickly came to Hasan’s defense, noting that the money he was using did not come from the government, but from student activity fees and private donations. Like Hasan, he pointed out that the accused are innocent until proven guilty and have a right to a fair trial.
“What do you want us to do?” Hasan asked, “Stand on a terrace and announce that we are liberal Muslims and that we want to proclaim our loyalty to the nation?”
Meanwhile, Hasan addressed the student body, telling them that “the answer to this is to be more secular, to be more liberal in your outlook, to be more enlightened in your perspective.” He then led a peace march on the campus, a march so silent, so nonviolent and orderly, that even the press could find no incident of bad behavior to sensationalize. The national media have been decidedly unenthusiastic about Hasan’s defense of procedural due process and constitutional norms; they suggest, repeatedly, that he is part of some sinister Muslim cabal. (An honorable exception is The Hindu, India’s best daily, which published an editorial putting the matter in a balanced perspective; the Indian Express and Kolkata’s Telegraph published valuable op-;eds.)
Hasan’s fight for basic principles has been won for now, but he still faces a fight in the court of public opinion for the reputation of his university and the honor of its students and teachers. Stereotypes of the violent Muslim are so prevalent in India—as elsewhere in the world—that it is virtually impossible for Muslim liberals to be taken at their word when they say that they believe in free speech, pluralism, nonviolent persuasion, the rule of law, and the right of each person to a fair trial. ’Oh yes, a screen for darker motives,’ is the typical response, pervasive on Hindu blogs and common even in the mainstream press. You say you are a liberal, and that proves you are a radical Islamist.
Meanwhile, hooligans of the Bajrang Dal, a youth movement associated with the Hindu right, have been on a rampage in Orissa, murdering Christians who refuse to reconvert to Hinduism, but the media never refer to this carnage as “terrorism.” Nor did they use the term “terrorism” for the Gujarat pogrom. For the media, as for so much of our world, “terrorism” just means Muslim terrorism. To a skeptical Hindu journalist who had asked him why Muslim intellectuals do not condemn terrorism, Hasan (who had just finished condemning all terrorism, Hindu and Muslim alike) replied:
You probably don’t hear those voices because you don’t want to hear those voices. The media doesn’t represent those voices because the media is only interested in strident voices. They are not interested in the sane, liberal, rational voices. . . . What do you want us to do? Stand on a terrace and announce that we are liberal Muslims and that we want to proclaim our loyalty to the nation?
Hasan is a remarkable person, but his convictions are hardly sui generis. They are deeply rooted in Jamia Millia Islamia’s history: a home-;grown, tolerant, liberal pluralism has defined the institution from its anti-;colonial inception.
The university was born in internal struggles at Aligarh Muslim University, then a conservative institution very much under British control. Many wanted this situation to continue, holding that the mission of Aligarh ought to be to make Indian Muslims “worthy and useful subjects of the British Crown.” A group of younger intellectuals, however, inspired by Gandhi’s ideas and increasingly involved in resistance against the Raj, sought change. Part of their zeal was for Islamic politics: they took a passionate interest in the Khilafat movement, which worked to protect the Ottoman caliphate and sacred Muslim sites from British hijacking. But the Khilafat movement was inherently a campaign against British imperialism, and before long the young radicals of Jamia joined their Turkish concerns to Gandhi’s non-;cooperation movement, becoming apostles of nonviolent resistance to the local British rulers.
The campus soon split into two camps. The old guard, backed by the British, drove out the young radicals in 1920. Sir George Campbell, the district magistrate, confronted Mohammed Ali, one of the radical leaders, saying, “You want to bring up these students as disobedient boys.” Ali responded by reciting a verse of the eighteenth-;century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir that neatly epitomized the behavior of the Raj at this period (though tactfully omitting its heinous acts of violence):
To taunt and sneer and wound and speak unkindly,
She has all these accomplishments, my friend;
Friendship and love and graciousness and kindness
Are things she could never comprehend.
Jamia Millia Islamia was opened the following year. After a short time in Aligarh, it moved to Delhi.
Jamia was born radical. Its curriculum emphasized the study of nationalism as well as the study of Islamic history and the Qu’ran; its admissions policy welcomed male and female, Hindu and Muslim; its pedagogy emphasized debate and contestation in the teaching of all subjects, including religion, denouncing the mere “passive awareness of dead facts.” The school had strong links with theorists of progressive education such as Bertrand Russell and Rabindranath Tagore and thus gave substantial weight to the arts and vocational education. This philosophy was applied early, since the university included a residential primary school, where “learning by doing” was the progressive norm. One founder summarized: “We believe that formal instruction should serve as a support for the exercise of initiative, that the child’s mind should be active and responsive, not passive, that the body should be made efficient along with the mind.”
Older students, meanwhile, learned that the national ideal of independence from colonial domination could also become a personal ideal, as Ali stressed:
Jamia’s objective is that Muslims should [not] follow blindly the previous ‘fixed’ path . . . the Jamia has instilled hatred in the heart of every student—be he a Muslim or a Hindu—against subjugation by foreign powers. It has kept its air free of transgression and prejudice. For these reasons, the Jamia is both Jamia Millia Islamia and a national university.
The Jamians insisted that identity politics, with its preference for insiders, was foreign to Islam’s ideal universal brotherhood.
Jamia was coeducational from the start, but initially the number of female students was small. By 1930, however, the arrival of distinguished female faculty prepared the way for full integration. A later Vice-;Chancellor wrote of the way in which the university has helped women “not only break into the spaces which are male preserves, but also . . . fight back against male tyranny and violence.” Today, women compose about 25 percent of undergraduates, but more than 50 percent of those at the master’s degree stage.
Meanwhile, the institution’s progressive educational vision led to a stream of visitors from abroad. A distinguished British observer spoke of Jamia as having “an international breadth of vision” that most Britain-;oriented Indian universities lacked. Jamia’s degrees were not recognized by the British, but they were recognized in Germany, France, and the United States.
Teachers at Jamia report a glut of detentions and arrests of students. Politicians, the media, and the police try to paint a picture of the university as a hotbed of terrorism.
Jamia’s early years were marked by recurrent financial crises. To keep the young institution afloat, a group of distinguished scholars pledged to serve Jamia for twenty years, taking only a token salary. Chief among them was Zakir Hussain, an economist trained in Germany who became Vice Chancellor in 1928, serving for twenty-;one years (and who much later served as the third President of India). A man of tireless energy, enthusiasm, and self-;sacrifice, Hussain furthered both the university’s educational vision and the nationalist ideal, and did so in close conversation with Gandhi, who viewed Jamia as an important part of a tolerant India. In one letter to the university in 1930, Gandhi wrote:
Islam enjoins upon us tolerance towards others’ religions. It doesn’t say that other religions are false. He alone who does good to others is a true man. This is the principle of the [Qu’ran] as also the teaching of other religions. The students of the Jamia, I hope, will spread the message of unity and freedom throughout the country.
The teachers and students of Jamia were passionate about these ideas, as Gandhi acknowledged, saying, “When I come to the Jamia, I feel I have come home.” Again and again, the faculty wrote about the sort of nationalism they intended to foster: not “the jingo nationalism of the German or Italian type,” but “nationalism as a step to internationalism,” “nationalism of a liberal type.”
After Independence Jamia remained a favorite of the national leadership, Nehru in particular. In a letter of 1952 to Zakir Hussain, Nehru characterized Jamia as a pet project of Gandhi’s that he was committed to nurturing. He added a gloomy coda:
Whatever I can do for Jamia, I shall endeavour to do. The world seems a very dark, dismal and dreary place, full of people with wrong urges or no urge at all, living their lives trivially and without any significance. All the more, therefore, we seek the few sanctuaries and causes and try to derive sustenance from them.
And yet Jamia’s financial woes continued. Although some of its degree programs were recognized in 1945, and it achieved nationally recognized university status in 1962, it was only in 1988 that the university was recognized as a Central University, giving it access to more government funds. Having begun as a group of rebels departing from a government-;controlled institution (Aligarh), Jamia had finally achieved full recognition by the government of the independent nation.
When Hasan arrived at Jamia, it had a glorious past, but faced many contemporary challenges. Even after it began to receive funds from the central government, it had a hard time becoming the sort of first-;rank, cutting-;edge university that could compete successfully for students and faculty against Delhi’s other prestigious Central Universities, Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
Apart from his massive fundraising efforts, for which he has a gift, Hasan has insistently emphasized the institution’s pluralistic, secular character, making it clear to faculty and students from all regions and religions that it can be a very good place to be. One of his successes has been to put Jamia on the map as a dream university for students from some of India’s poorest states and regions. Such students might lack the preparation required to get into JNU, but talent and ambition could get them a place in Jamia. Another way Hasan highlights pluralism is by naming buildings after individuals from other nations and religions—including the aforementioned Hindu politician Arjun Singh, who, as Education Minister, has strongly supported the growth of the institution. Meanwhile, empowering faculty such as Basu sends a signal of religious pluralism and sex equality that aids both student and faculty recruitment.
In regard to curriculum, Hasan has strengethened specific areas in which Jamia can compete with the best: thus, a renowned Academy for Third-;World Studies (founded in 1988, but bolstered under Hasan’s leadership); an unparalleled human rights program; and both core and optional courses in public administration, social work, education management, and journalism that are not available in any other university in Delhi. Finally, as Basu emphasizes, Hasan has pushed for an educational climate of tolerance, debate, and difference that few Indian universities, where students raised on rote learning all too often find more of the same, can match.
Hasan’s own scholarship has often focused on Jawaharlal Nehru and his accomplishments, so it is not surprising that he sought, for Jamia, the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, the first institution of its kind in the country. The Centre opened in October 2004 (shortly after the electoral defeat of the Hindu right and the victory of Congress), with Sonia Gandhi, Congress Party chair, in attendance. In his dedicatory speech, Hasan said that Nehru’s legacy is more important in India now than ever because Nehru “argued for the moral value and legitimacy of nationalism in a form compatible with liberal democratic principles and institutions.” Hasan said that he feels it particularly important to honor Nehru at Jamia, in order to break with the tendency to partition India’s heritage by “saying to each other, Azad is ‘yours,’ Nehru is ‘ours,’ Tagore is ‘ours’ because we are Bengalis,” etc. “This must stop . . . . We should teach Mir and Ghalib in Bengal, and Tagore and Nazrul Islam in north India.” The Nehru Centre should be a reminder of India’s identity as “tolerant and inclusive,” through its invitation to contemplate Nehru’s “own eclectic and broad-;minded outlook and the liberal and scientific temper he created in a society that had strong illiberal and authoritarian traits.”
But Hasan also understands, as did Gandhi, that liberal values and nonviolence need to be alluring, not just morally right. Unlike Gandhi, however, Hasan is thoroughly secular, a bon vivant who has a great interest in Urdu poetry and literature. The home he shares with his wife, Zoya, a leading political scientist at JNU and a member of the National Commission for Minorities, is full of beautiful art. And both, as hosts, exemplify Mir’s notion of “graciousness and kindness.” Closer, then, to his hero Nehru, who, despite the bleak tone of many of his letters, was famous for wit and zest at dinner parties.
Hasan, in short, exudes the kind of joyfulness and playfulness that make peple feel that moral principles are not only a duty, but a delight. That is a gift, unfortunately lacking in most of the giants of the Western Enlightenment, though Martin Luther King, Jr., surely had it. Liberal politics is based on respect for the person, but if it does not have something else as well, something more akin to love, it will not capture the hearts of people who long for meaning.
In May a national election may bring to power a coalition government in which the Hindu-;nationalist BJP will play a leading role. If that happens the BJP will no doubt continue their current agenda: attacking moderate Islam, trying to convert what exists at Jamia into the bogeyman of their rhetoric. Only determined public pressure can save the day, ensuring that someone who shares Hasan’s commitments, if not he himself (since his term ends this summer), is at the helm during a crucial period of growth and transition for the university.
The story of nonreligious terrorism (for example, the Tamil Tigers) is underreported, and Hindu terrorism against both Muslims and Christians has yet to appear on the American radar screen.
Other needs are even more pressing in the short term. The National Human Rights Commission has notified the Delhi police that it is investigating the bloody September 2008 incident and wants a complete report. The police write-;up is, indeed, full of inconsistencies and gaps. For example, the police arrived at the student dwelling without backup and without bulletproof vests, as if they were not preparing to encounter armed terrorists—yet, in retrospect, they say this is exactly what they were doing. The dwelling where the policeman was shot had only one entrance, yet we are supposed to believe that, with police lined up at the door, two students managed to escape unharmed. The students in the house had submitted the usual residential questionnaire with correct names, dates of birth, etc., all rather odd if their student identities were a ruse and they were really members of a widespread Muslim terrorist organization (the Indian Mujahideen), as is alleged. Finally, the two students whose legal fees Jamia is paying have a clean record, and all who know them describe them as peaceful, even dreamy and impractical. So we urgently need to know the quality of the evidence linking them to the case.
Meanwhile, teachers at Jamia report a glut of detentions and arrests of students. Politicians, the media, and the police try to paint a picture of the university as a hotbed of terrorism, and large numbers of students in off-;campus housing have been asked to vacate their flats by landlords who fear police reprisals. Police presence all around the campus is distressing, disrupting the climate of instruction. The unfairness of disturbing an entire university of 14,000 students over the alleged actions of two of its members is obvious, but hardly anyone is complaining about it, apart from the teachers and students themselves.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the Jamia case is the atmosphere surrounding those who provide legal counsel to people accused of terrorism. One after another, bar associations in different parts of the country are announcing boycotts of terror suspects. In Madhya Pradesh, two suspects were forced to hire counsel from a different state after all local lawyers refused them. A leading state BJP official supported the boycott, saying that “a distinction must be made between criminals and terrorists.” So much for the presumption of innocence. In Uttar Pradesh, lawyers have been faced with threats to their safety if they take on terror cases. Legal and social activists believe that the Hindu right has profoundly infiltrated the mechanisms of criminal justice making it very difficult for Muslims to get a fair trial. Often, moreover, Muslims remain in detention without trial for years. Muslims constitute 18 percent of convicts in Indian prisons, 21.8 percent of those whose cases are currently being tried, and 37.2 percent of those in detention awaiting either trial or specific charges.
When the legal system works this badly, essential constitutional rights become mere words on paper. Moreover, the rhetoric of the Hindu right, which constantly equates arrest with conviction, suggests at best a tenuous commitment to the rule of law. The contention that offering legal aid means being “soft on terrorism”—a ubiquitous charge against Hasan, despite his repeated condemnations of terrorism in any form—is a communitarian idea that betrays impatience with the very idea of due process. When lots of people in a democracy think this way, there is danger. In India its source has been the same for decades: a Hindu right that never accepted the liberal values of equal respect, due process, and religious non-;establishment.
Hasan’s ordeal leaves us with four conclusions.
First, we should mistrust stereotypes of the violent Muslim. Current preconceptions, combined with media sensationalism, lead to selective reporting (in India as elsewhere). Stories of Muslim liberals, provoke boredom or skepticism. But the failure to report only confirms the preconceptions. Meanwhile, the story of nonreligious terrorism (for example, the Tamil Tigers) is underreported, and Hindu terrorism against both Muslims and Christians has yet to appear on the American radar screen. As Hasan points out, we need more prominent stories of Muslim nonviolence:
A whole auditorium can be filled up with books on Islam and violence but what about Islam and nonviolence? What about Gaffar Khan [a Muslim associate of Gandhi’s, who developed a philosophy of nonviolence using Islamic sources]? Does he not exist or is he of no consequence because he does not fit the stereotype that some people wish to create and perpetuate about an entire community?
For this reason, one of Hasan’s current priorities is the creation on Jamia’s campus of a museum of the nationalist struggle, devoted to the history elided at other museums: the prominent role played by Muslims in the nationalist movement. While we wait for the museum to be built, the book Partners in Freedom, which Hasan co-;authored with Rakhshanda Jalil, tells the story in both text and photographs.
Second, the stereotyping of Muslims as violent, when combined with economic and political discrimination, engenders among Muslims a justified anger that can all too easily spill over into unjustified violence. Gandhi knew well that the rage of his followers against the British had legitimate roots, yet he was able to convince people that the best response to oppression was nonviolent protest.
Mushirul Hasan follows Gandhi’s program. In fact, I am tempted to say, somewhat hyperbolically, that virtually the only place in today’s India where Gandhi’s ideas are being duly honored is on the campus of Jamia. But Hasan knows, like Gandhi, and like Martin Luther King, Jr., that anger will not go away, will not cease to create the possibility of violence, unless the subordination that fuels it is brought to an end.
Therefore, while working to promote nonviolence, one must also work to eradicate political and economic conditions that nourish the desire for violence. Noting the economic discrimination suffered by India’s Muslims (the lack of basic social services, such as clean water, in the poor residential areas surrounding Jamia is one ugly example)—now compounded by widespread political discrimination in the form of round-;ups on suspicion of terrorism (India’s analogue to the odious American tradition of racial profiling) and, more worrying, threats against lawyers who defend people accused of terrorism—Hasan says to that same skeptical reporter: “The fact that they are still liberals in this sort of situation—caught between the devil and the deep sea—you should give them a Padma award.” (The Padma Shri award is given by the Indian government each year to people who have performed some meritorious service to the nation. Hasan was awarded the Padma Shri in 2007.)
The third conclusion to be drawn from these events is the Gandhian one: the importance of the nonviolent response. Speaking about Muslim communities more generally, Hasan insists that the solution to Muslims’ problems lies in nonviolence and a grass-;roots demand for democracy:
The stranglehold of the orthodoxy, especially in its political and religious form, has to be loosened and slackened. The answer lies in more and more Muslim communities moving towards democracy. There is no short cut to democracy. . . . There is no place for pharaohs in the modern world.
Hasan thus joins such anti-;theocratic Muslims as Akbar Ganji of Iran in calling for a restructuring of Islamic nations through a popular demand for democratic self-;government, prominently including a commitment to the equality and empowerment of women. And he immediately adds that the move to democracy has been very much impeded by attempts on the part of the United States to impose democracy by force.
The final, and perhaps most important, lesson is that, following Gandhi, we must all rethink our understandings of strength and weakness, courage and timidity. Real strength, in an individual, is not manifested by bashing people over the head. Who does that? Only someone who feels threatened and weak. Real strength is manifested by the ability to show respect to others, to treat them as equals, and not to try to impose one’s will by force. Real strength in a community or a nation, similarly, is manifested not by a willingness to dispose of liberal values whenever violence seems easier or more fun, but by a commitment to them that does not bend when the going gets tough. That is radical. And if being radical means going “to the root” of the matter, it is the liberal, who subdues the violence and greed of the self, who is the true radical, while left and right communitarians casually allow the banal and constant desire for domination to carry the day.
In a world where so many anthems call for blood and equate manliness with abuse, here is what Jamia’s founders wrote for its students to sing as the official anthem of the university:
Here conscience alone is the beacon, . . .
It’s the Mecca of many faiths,
Travelling is the credo here, pausing a sacrilege, . . .
Cleaving against currents is the creed here,
The pleasure of arrival lies in countering crosscurrents.
This is the home of my yearnings,
This is the land of my dreams.
A radical song indeed.

Islamic liberalism under fire in India Martha C. Nussbaum

As it became clear that Pakistani Muslims perpetrated the horrendous terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November, many feared a wave of violence against India’s own Muslim community. The community, which represents 13.4 percent of Hindu-;majority India, suffers from poverty and systemic discrimination, as the government’s recent Sachar Commission report documents. It has also been targeted by the Hindu right, which, in 2002, murdered as many as 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, in the state of Gujarat.

That violence, like the violence of Hindu-;right mobs against Christians in the eastern state of Orissa in 2008, surely deserves the name of “terrorism.” Yet, in India as elsewhere, the word “terrorism” is now frequently confined to the actions of Muslims, and Muslims are suspects almost by virtue of their religion alone. There was reason, then, to fear that mobs would take the Mumbai blasts as the occasion for a renewed assault on an already beleaguered minority.

3Aug/090

US assistance needs an alternative paradigm

An oped published by The NEWS

The gods are smiling at Pakistan's development industry once again. Such a moment was experienced almost a decade ago when Pakistan's strategic location made it into a hub of post-9/11 investments to secure the world peace. However, this time the United States of America has undertaken a historic step of aiding the civilian government and addressing the structural imbalances such as poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity that quite rightly fuel militancy and promote factories of suicide bombers. Some would think this is naive in view of the imperial occupation of Afghanistan and the rather schizophrenic and counterproductive policies of the US elsewhere in the Muslim world.

This is not an invalid position taken by the rejectionists of US assistance. But this is an equally naive postulate for it is far more important to invest in civilian governance than hi-tech arms and domestic war machine. Haven't we reaped the disastrous

23Jul/093

The devolution saga

My op-ed published in the NEWS yesterday

The debate on the scrapping of Musharraf’s devolution experiment cannot hide or ignore two key imperatives. First, that all military dictators have a penchant for local democracy at the expense of provincial autonomy and the country’s parliamentary structure. Second, never has Pakistan been so vulnerable to state’s fragmentation and erosion of trust in public institutions. This is why the elected government, with bipartisan consensus, has proceeded to restructure the 2002 Local Government Ordinances.

But, the debate remains obsessed with the district management group (DMG), a cadre that is a much weaker and tainted inheritor of administrative structures instituted by the Mughal and British empires. Therefore, the proposed restoration of executive magistracy has been termed yet another big conspiracy by the supposedly powerful DMG, which allegedly has influenced the political elites to revive the colonial institution of the district magistrate. The simple question is if the DMG were so powerful, it would have saved its field structure and magistracy nearly a decade ago.

5Jul/093

The question of Pakistan’s provincialism

My piece that appeared in the 'political economy' section of The NEWS on Sunday.

The elites drunk on the status quo have expressed two major reactions to the proposal of creating another province within the mighty Punjab. First that this is akin to opening a Pandora's box when we are at war against terrorism. Second, that this is a planted controversy whereby the ruling PPP wants to harm the house of Raiwind; or a conspiracy by those who want to destabilise Pakistan's political system.

Both these arguments are spurious for nothing is more important for Pakistan than to make the federation work. The argument that the British drawn provincial boundaries are sacrosanct is as nonsensical as the reality of the Durand Line or for that matter the line of control itself. If anything, South Asia has experienced territorial and demographic shifts through the centuries. When resisted, the sweep of history has blown away the resistant elements and when carefully manoeuvred such shifts have resulted in commonsensical political and administrative solutions.

28Jun/090

Pakistani state: reform or perish

My op-ed for The NEWS
Raza Rumi

On the face of it, the Pakistani state with the clear endorsement of political parties and the majority of its citizenry is fighting a battle against militant Islamism. However, it is not as simple a formulation as it appears to be. The state is also cracking under extreme pressure for having lost its capacities and effectiveness a long time ago. The central tenet of state policy and implementation is adhocism that keeps a mammoth, oversized, under-paid and snail-paced elephant going. With Mughal and pre-industrial social structures reflecting in a colonial organisation, the Pakistani state is an unattended patient lying on an Elliotesque table, waiting for a surgery.

The fact that ragtag groups have the audacity to challenge the state and its mighty armed forces speaks a lot for where we stand today. That a relatively small number of bandits can wreak havoc and make us look like pariah country with nervous neighbours is by itself a parable of our times. Add to this the dysfunctional police that simply cannot discharge their functions let alone tackle the suicide missions launched by jihad laboratories. Services – health, education, water and justice – are abysmally delivered to the lucky ones who have access to them. Otherwise, it is pretty much a jungle out there. In a context where insecurity and lack of faith in the state pervades the body politique, the current war can accentuate the pressures on the state, leading to a near-collapse situation: assuming, rather charitably, that it still functions as an arbiter between citizen interest and the legitimate use of violence.

22Jun/094

Pakistan’s martial state is a self-perpetuating reality

The Taliban phenomenon was erroneously, and rather dangerously, projected as a herald of a new dawn

The Pakistani state policy of nurturing jihad factories over the decades is staring back at its architects, supporters and sponsors. Zafar Hilaly, a close aide of the late Benazir Bhutto, recently divulged in his memoirs that BB had confessed how the support to the Taliban was perhaps her most regrettable mistake. She could recognise it was more of a function of being out of the power ambit for nearly a decade. The compulsions of exercising power and playing it by the rules set by the national security obsessed state are perhaps germane to Pakistan's creation as an insecure postcolonial state that was neither prepared not committed to reverse the colonial modes of governance.

19Jun/093

Literature in the time of terror

My piece that appeared in The Friday Times (May 29-4 June, 2009 issue). I have argued that the silence of Pakistani writers on terrorism and extremism is finally breaking  

 
 
 

‘Fallen Indus’, a painting by the author

 
 

‘Ignorance Is Bliss’, a miniature by Saira Wasim

 

Since the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and the global hysteria about 'terror' and 'terrorism', Pakistan has faced the greatest of existential challenges after its dismemberment in 1971. As a frontline ally of the US in the war on terror, Pakistani society and polity have been engulfed by growing militancy and acts of violence. Whilst there is no single definition of 'terrorism', the mainstream media and policymakers – in the service of imperial rhetoric aimed to justify and perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq – have established terrorism as the major threat to domestic and regional peace in South Asia. Acts of premeditated and organised violence in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have thus assumed a central place in discourse on regional cooperation or its converse: the rivalries between the constructed nation states and their irresponsible power-elites.

 In this milieu, South Asian citizens have been the victims of violence, uncertainty and acrimony that have only led to the exacerbation of poverty, inequality, ascendancy of militarism and the war-mantra. All of this is taking place when globalization is relentlessly seeping into domestic economies, cultures and social systems. Where does this leave the writers and poets of the

9May/091

The Battle over Hindu History

Author Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago’s Divinity School , writes on this blog about her new work. This new work further consolidates the view that much of the now politically packaged Hinduism was actually a product of colonial scholarship in the ninteenth centruy.

The Battle over Hindu History

For years, some Hindus have argued that the 16th century mosque called the Babri Masjid (after the Mughal emperor Babur) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) in Ayodhya (the city where, according to the ancient poem called the Ramayana, Rama was born), though there is no evidence whatsoever that there has been ever a temple on that spot or that Rama was born there.

22Mar/0913

Varun Gandhi is a scary bigot

A post at Pak Tea House and the sharp comments attracted some ire among the readers as to what was Varun Gandhi issue doing on a Pakistani blog-zine? Indeed, the question merits some deliberation. We in Pakistan are constantly being demonised by the Indian mainstream media as a ‘terrorist’ country and that we are a great threat to the ’secular’, shining India. Varun gandhi’s remarks as the saner elements of Indian media and commentators are saying only show that people have gotten away with such crap. The fissures in the secular Indian democracy get even more evident when such speeches are delivered.

Varun Gandhi’s remarks on Muslims, hate speech that goes beyond all measures of ‘hate speech’ concerns us as it only exposes us to brigades of hatred, communalism and violence across the border.

21Mar/092

Chronicles foretold

A piece that I wrote with Asad Sayeed for The Friday Times. This piece was written before the long March and the subsequent developments that include the restoration of deposed judges.

The two years old lawyers’ movement is now entering its decisive phase. It started in March 2007 as a spontaneous, vibrant expression of fatigue with a military dictator, after which the lawyers mobilised Pakistan’s inert middle classes and sections of civil society against the arbitrary ouster of the former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, and his subsequent maltreatment at the hands of the security agencies. Within weeks, the political parties jumped into the fray and mounted a formidable challenge to an otherwise seemingly well-entrenched military rule. This was a critical year when General Musharraf had assured both the world as well as the nation of a transition to democratic rule. However, Musharraf’s efforts to direct the transition in his favour were forcefully countered by the lawyers through a judicial and political struggle that continues to date.

5Mar/093

Suicide Democrats

Raza Rumi

I am appalled by the recent events that have yet again stirred instability and uncertainty into Pakistani politics. Those of us who voted in last year's elections expected that the political leaders and Pakistan's political elites would learn a lesson from our unfortunate history.

We also expected the lawyers' movement, headed by men of extraordinary calibre, to display sagacity and vision and contribute to the consolidation of a democratic culture. However, what we witnessed was a complete rejection of the Feb 18 polls by the leading lights of the movement, and a few other naïve political actors. When the electorate voted in large numbers and returned the two mainstream political parties to the parliament, the lawyers, instead of accepting that they were wrong to boycott elections, insisted on their narrow and bourgeois interpretation of the term "rule of law."

26Feb/092

Pakistan: turmoil,implosions and drama

Pakistan is once again in political turmoil. Two popular Punjabi leaders are disqualified by a court that has been maligned over the last few months. Governor's rule has been imposed in the larger province - epicentre of Pakistani power.

Overall these recent developments do not bode well for democratic development - after all it has only been a year but it seems that our political elites have learnt no lesson from history and even their personal tribulations. Both Zardari and Sharif have suffered over the last decade and their parties were in the wilderness. And, now they cannot resolve their differences. What a shame. It does not matter who is right or wrong - the country gave a split mandate last February and both parties had the obligation to cooperate and perform. It appears that our expectations from the elected leaders were way too many. They remain their old, bickeringselves.

At my other blog-zine Pak Tea House, I have posted a few interesting analyses. Do visit if you want to see how the debate is unfolding: the rationalist argument, the political insight and a 'scathing comment on the Sharifs of the situation.

30Dec/083

Dark forces still potent year after Bhutto’s slaying

I was quoted in this piece posted below

ISLAMABAD -- A year after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, Pakistan is still struggling to embed democracy and battle Islamic extremism, the causes for which she died.

The same dark forces that appear to have killed Ms. Bhutto on this day last year - Islamic extremist groups based in Pakistan - seem to be behind the carnage in Mumbai last month, an event that pushed Pakistan into an even deeper crisis.

27Dec/086

Remembering Benazir Bhutto

Raza Rumi retraces the bittersweet legacy of Benazir Bhutto (published in the Friday Times)

It was only yesterday that we were mourning for the loss of an icon of our times. The much loved, and passionately hated Benazir Bhutto whose tragic murder in broad daylight was the greatest metaphor of what Pakistan has turned into: a jungle of history, ethnicity and extremism. Little wonder that Bhutto’s worst enemies cried and lamented the loss of a federal politician whose life and times were as unique as her name. The populist slogan – charon soobon ki zanjeer (the chain of the four provinces, literally) could not have been truer than the most tested of axioms. As if her death were not enough, the state response was even more brutal. Why did she participate in public rallies? On that fateful day of December 27, 2007, why did she invite death by sticking her neck out – literally and metaphorically? This was tragedy compounded by invective and betrayal. After all, had she not received a tacit understanding from the then military President, General Pervez Musharraf?

The official machinery then went to work in a super-efficient frenzy. Within hours, the murder scene had been washed away, right opposite the Liaqat Bagh in Rawalpindi where Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was also shot dead. If anything history repeated itself with a bang – only to restate that Pakistani Prime Ministers are dispensable accessories of the power game. The misogynistic thirst for blood-letting once quenched, patriarchy dictated that the autopsy of a woman became an issue of honour, confusion and violation of the law. How telling, that the laws of the land remain subservient to the imperatives of culture and tradition.

Within a day, Pakistan shook and the world also felt the tremors from an already stinking cesspool of violence, terror and global mischief. Many Pakistanis think these labels are of imperialist manufacture, reeking of hogwash. But the case has been made: Pakistan is a rogue and failing state and no one is safe.

20Dec/085

1971: the forgotten silence

The NEWS: Friday, December 19, 2008

by Raza Rumi

This week marks the 37th anniversary of the tragic events of 1971 that led to the dismemberment of Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh. This time the sixteenth day of that deadly December invited little attention in the mainstream media as the new Pakistan struggles to manage the multiple crises of statehood, governance and cohesion.

Whether we like it or not, history and its bitter truths have to be confronted. When the united Punjab was being ruled by the Unionists and the Congress and the NWFP had a chief minister from the congress-Khudai Khidmatgar alliance, and almost all the custodians of South Asian puritanical Islam were opposed to Pakistan, the peasantry and the intelligentsia of East Bengal were spearheading a movement for Pakistan. There were indeed economic reasons, but there was an unchallengeable mass support for and belief in Pakistan. What happened after 1947 is well known; and within two decades or so, those who wanted Pakistan in the first place were subjected to state excesses and brutal treatment by the groups and elites that had actually little commitment to Pakistan or its idea. Nothing could be more ironical.

It is of little significance to remember the exact chronology of events or to indulge in a blame-game. The truth is that we as a state and society lost our majority province after pushing its people into a situation where independence through a War of Liberation was the only choice. India, of course, played a huge role in transacting this deal, but the West Pakistani elites had prepared the ground, sown the seeds of mistrust to a great degree. Thus the Pakistan created by its founding members was no more in 1971, further subdividing the Muslims of the subcontinent. A bitter lesson of history was in the making. If only, we were capable of paying heed to it.

6Dec/084

Who will win the game?

Saturday, December 06, 2008
Raza Rumi

I have been amazed at the reaction that my little piece, "Policy shifts not war" published on these pages on Dec 4 has generated especially from the other side of the border. My email inbox was inundated with a wide variety of views and comments, some of which were quite unsavoury and abusive. However, the silver lining is that there were many voices from the other side that called for regional cooperation and finding alternative solutions to mindless jingoism. Most Pakistanis, while disagreeing with my interpretation of partition, expressed their sadness at the Mumbai mayhem and reiterated that a war had to be avoided at all costs.

The media factor has been much analysed over the past few years. As a powerful player in the game, the role of Indian, and to a great extent, Pakistani media industries has been far from satisfactory. As another formal institution with charitable rhetoric, it is emerging as yet another tool for reinforcing conformity, boundaries and the famed refuge of the scoundrels.

Media polls with shady sample sizes are confirming that the 'public' in India wants revenge thus isolating the sensible Indian leadership that has tried to undo the legacy of the past. Similarly, the prediction of surgical strikes and eliminating the so-called hideouts for terrorists in Pakistan is a magic bullet that would create a terror-free region. Nothing could be farther from reality, if only the lessons from US misadventures, bloody at that, are kept in view. Aggression and violence breed further violence. The relative degree of failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are rude reminders of how the neo-con, or its ideologically equivalent Hindutva strategy, is bound to create more problems than solving anything.

7Nov/080

The words of others

Faiz Ahmed Faiz with friends: Faiz's poetry is now being used to advertise phones

Habib Jalib: anti-establishment

Opposition to the military regime was marked by a liberal ethos, a value-system that stressed constitutionalism, rule of law, and the independence of judiciary, rather than identifying with the politics of redistribution or attacking Pakistan's problem uno supremo: poverty

My piece published in the Friday Times last week

For decades, Pakistan's poets and writers have defied conventions and the almighty establishment. Rooted in the progressive writers' movement, the literature of resistance was a pro-people ideology that kept redistribution of power and resources at its core. The great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz was often jailed and kept on the margins of the literary and cultural establishment and castigated as a "foreign agent" and "anti-Pakistan." Scores of other writers had to suffer torture and silencing by the state when they challenged its arbitrariness. Habib Jalib faced similar treatment and died a poor man after decades of acting as the poetic conscience of a nation.

It was the lyrical, direct poetry of Habib Jalib that stirred the street for decades, echoing the vision of the world from below. Jalib's expression was popular and immediate, and could be related to easily by the average listener. During the rule of General Ayub Khan, from 1958 until 1969, Jalib particularly represented the public conscience when he chanted his poem Dastoor (Constitution), which was about Ayub Khan's tailor-made "constitution." Later, this work was utilised in support of Fatima Jinnah's (the Quaid-e-Azam's younger sister's) campaign against the general:

Aisay dastoor ko,

Subh-e-baynoor ko,

Mein naheen manta,

Mein naheen janta

(I do not accept/I do not recognise/A constitution that resembles/A morning with no light).

In 2008, we saw the Punjab Chief Minister chanting these lines. The poetry has come full circle. While the Chief Minister's

20Oct/081

Confronting militancy

The unedited version of my op-ed published in the NEWS today:

It is time that the vocabulary introduced by the global imperial projects is changed in Pakistan. The infamous and rotten coinage – war on terror – needs to be trashed. It was constructed by an imbecile global leader, whose vision defies basic standards of human intelligence. And, in our case the frontline-state status is a passé title as well. The war has now entered the Pakistani consciousness, has consumed thousands and continues to destabilize the country to a point where its citizenry is insecure and bereft of hope. We have to now protect Pakistanis and Pakistan first. All else is secondary.

The gravity of the situation is however not shared by many. The rugged militants are artfully backed by the ‘urban Taliban’, a term that has emanated from Sindhi intelligentsia. There are political parties and their leaders who downplay the threat to Pakistan, and few journalists and TV anchors brazenly eulogise the Taliban bravery and, believe it or not, ‘sound’ governance. Even some on the residual Left term this extremism as an anti-imperial struggle. We are being reminded that the destruction of private property and daylight murders of innocent civilians are nothing but a ‘reaction’ to our policies and Western diktat. Ironically, a key religious party now train-marching across the country on a was ruling two of the war zoned provinces for nothing less than five years tacitly supporting Army operations as well as legitimizing a military ruler through a constitutional amendment.

20Sep/0814

Islamabad is burning – down with terrorism

What jihad, what Islam and what kind of Muslims these butchers are - they kill innocent people, the underclass outside a posh hotel in Islamabad and think that they are serving some cause. And, this is the month of Ramzan when the Satan is apparently locked up....

The numbers of dead and injured are mounting - there is blood everywhere and a commentator has termed it Pakistan's 9/11.

About time Pakistani government weeds them out and saves us all from this menace.

Horrific. Barbarity at its worst.

www.chinaview.cn

ISLAMABAD, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A blast occurred outside Marriott hotel in the center of Pakistan's capital Islamabad on Saturday evening, leaving at least 30 dead and scores of people injured, said the Pakistani Adviser to Prime Minister on Interior Rehman Malik.

18Sep/087

Through a screen, darkly

My piece published in the Friday Times last week.

Pakistani cable operators, following the cyclical escalation of imagined hatreds, discontinued the transmission of Indian satellite channels in 2002. The absence of Indian TV soaps, fodder for an entertainment hungry populace, was widely mourned. Once, not long ago, the axiomatic edge of Pakistan’s TV serials was widely acknowledged both in Pakistan and in India. No longer. This is the age of the market, of selling dreams and drama, of converting the stereotype into a saleable commodity and citing it on the cultural stock exchange.

The popularity of Hindi language soaps is not limited to Pakistan. I have seen squatters in Dhaka’s decrepit Bihari camp, Bangladesh’s largest no man’s land, glued to their colour TV sets. Here, Biharis lack citizenship; they are technically Pakistani, having opted for the Land of the Pure at the cessation of Bangladesh in 1971. But Pakistan doesn’t want them and so they continue to live in limbo. Yet, Star Plus is still beamed 24/7 into their tiny, cramped, leaking shacks. Indian soaps have made inroads even into Afghanistan, that newly liberated project of global corporate interests. They were wildly popular until the Afghan government banned them as inimical to Afghani values.

The soaring audience of Star Plus and Zee TV serials, with their in-your-face parivar mantras, is known all too well. The hype is also a constructed story of success and market acquisition. On the face of it, the commodification of entertainment is a global phenomenon. So what’s the problem, one might ask, given that most of us post-colonial wannabes in South Asia want to integrate into the global economy and its uniform cultural variants? Junk food, designer brands, pop music and the corporate media ethos are all “signs of progress.”

6Sep/087

The Zardari conundrum

by Raza Rumi ( published in the NEWS)

By all statistical estimates and anecdotal evidence, Pakistan's middleclass has grown during the last decade. The visible manifestation of this historically significant trend was the spontaneous outrage at the dismissal of the chief justice in 2007 and the robust movement that followed. However, the other side of this sociological transformation has been the capture of the "opinion" in Pakistan by the overdriven urban middleclass segment now backed and voiced through a powerful and not always responsible electronic media.

Amid the torrential attacks and doomsday predictions on Asif Zardari's candidature for presidency, a few reasoned voices have attempted to remind the country that fortification of a fractured democratic process requires civilian ascendancy. No, say our wise ones. They are enraged at the corruption tales, and media and real trials. There is a deafening silence over the fact that without a single conviction an accused has spent 11-and-a-half years in jails and suffered solitary imprisonment, torture and pressure that could have easily broken a common back. Admittedly, our president-to-be is hardly an angel. But this is not about morality or middleclass affront or even a thousand stories of international media that have suddenly become so credible. Not long ago, the vanguard of middleclass morality were telling us how biased the international media is about Musharraf and how twisted its reporting was on the US-led war on terror. All of a sudden Zardari tales have become legit, true and worrying.