Monster

He wants us to understand that he loves her.

The context of his actions make no sense in English, this language of wide open spaces, predictable grammar and punctuation, but in his scribe’s suffocating paragraphs of endless, clear Urdu prose the act takes on entirely different dimensions, love is not “love” but “mauhabbat,” a deeper, aortal lub-dub that exits not from our tongues but our solar plexus, where we also locate the sickness with which it fills us, this act of mauhabbat.

He wants us to understand the balance in their life that was upended by his nephew, the intruder. The details appeal to our sense of familiarity – love forbidden by families, surmounting hardship, defeating obstacles. He draws us into his security, love-as-happiness and fulfillment. What could be better for two people than complete contentment in each other (he asks), man and woman, the harmony of their lives is transcendent, uncomplicated because he loved her, he was a good husband and he wants us to know this. He wants us to know that the usurper, a man more privileged than he, the outsider, had no business taking advantage of his and his wife’s mehmaan-nawazi – crucially, because like marital love, a man’s obligations to his family and neighbors is also holy. He speaks to us intimately of his wife’s flirtation with his nephew. The long walks, the long drives, the movies together, the acts of – let’s face it, infidelity – that led him to banish the young man from his house, he says all of this to us, as a friend, what would you do, you know? You tell me, as a man in my position, you try to be reasonable, you appeal to your love for her, her hospitality, and you find yourself a guest in your own house, I thought once I threw him out that things would go back to normal, but it wasn’t so, she just got worse, I mean, Christ, what would you do?

(Fact: marital disputes, rejection of romantic advances and of marriage/love/sex proposals are amongst the most common reasons given by men for carrying out acid attacks. The literature falls just short on establishing a correlation between love and violence, yet tells us that perpetrators are frequently “lovers” or “suitors.” This is unremarkable in itself until we unpack the identity of “love” which is almost stubbornly and uncompromisingly male. Following a pattern of sexual politics so typical[1] that it’s almost depressing, our friend constructs his “Self” as transcending the body in acts of love, tolerance and neighborliness while his partner is limited to her body, she is an object of love, an object to love, an object that, by diverting from the path he chose for her, worries and upsets him.)

What would you do if she threw you out of the house? With creeping horror our friend faces the reality of his powerlessness. The house in her name, the business she jointly owns, the annulment she will seek and the nephew she will marry – all this, virtually overnight, in spite of his best efforts to forgive her. In Bangladesh, the increasing participation of women in the labor force was accompanied by increasing instances of violence against women; many acid attacks, for example, took place on the way to or from work[2]. Working women upset many orders, the primary one being of their own objectification. Women who seek love, sex and income have no place in mauhabbat.

But fuck this. Forget this endless processing of what he means, let’s listen to what the man says. Let’s hold our love-sickness in for a while longer: he wants us to know that he suffered, an inner imbalance that “burnt” like the tehzaab he had thrown on her face. The coup de grace is the appeal itself – “woman, don’t make a monster out of me so that I have to make a monster out of you.” The cadence between “qatil” and “maqtool,” where one kills and the other is killed, is lost entirely in translation, he wants us to know, this poet, that the two are entwined, by etymology, in death – dono maarey jaatey hain – and if the maqtool were to stand before you with her bosom bared,  beating on her heart and screaming shoot me, shoot me and if you had a loaded rifle and were beside yourself, beyond your Self, bey-qaaboo, and if you were your father’s son would you not pull the trigger, take the first flight out of the country and get someone to throw acid on her face?

(Aside: In “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” David Foster Wallace reproduced, verbatim, conversations overheard and interviews conducted with rapists, molesters, with men who slept with women because they were vulnerable, who beat them because they could. Very little context is given, and almost no explanation is given for what the act of monstrosity actually was – the man is a monster, clearly, but what about his friend, the rapporteur? What about Wallace, the conduit and what about us, in our uncomfortable ability to relate to, sympathize with and finally recoil from in horror?)

The richness of JC’s language, his meticulous loyalty – “neutrality” – to his subject is precisely what horrifies us. The reproduction of male love and male hurt and male anxiety will not be satisfied in death and will not be silenced by law. It will not settle for anything less than complete disfigurement of women who love and earn and fuck. JC’s op-ed leaves us cold because just for once, we’d like someone to reproduce voices of women before they become acid victims, right when they’re deciding to leave their husbands for the men they’ve fallen in love with. Long interviews with wives who screwed their husbands out of alimony, with those petty, selfish women who leave their families, who fornicate without consent, who stay late at work and neglect to put tarka on the daal. Monstrous women who ruin marriages, cause “misunderstandings,” lie, cheat and steal but at the very least have the option, as men do, of carrying their hideousness on the inside.

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[1] Rehman, Mofizur (2010), “Body of the other: constructing gender identity in anti-acid violence campaign materials in Bangladesh,” Post 1(1), pp. 31-60

[2] Chowdhury, Elora Halim (2005) “Feminist Negotiations: Contesting Narratives of Campaign against Acid Violence in Bangladesh,” Meridians, 6(1), pp. 163-192

Read Javed Chaudhry’s op-ed in Urdu here: http://www.javed-chaudhry.com/chala-goli-javed-chaudhry/

For context, you might like to read this piece by Abira Ashfaq and this great summary of the events and issues by Ahsan Butt

Weekends home

Karachiites often, and often without irony, agonize about armpit hair in warzone-like situations.

It feels good to be home, and I’ll say it to anyone who’ll listen. This large sprawl of a metropolis where I grew up comforts me with its rotting industrial sea smell, its vaguely algae-scented evening breezes and layers of salty scum on your skin. It calms me with its tea-stalls and dossa vending carts, its staggering concrete tower blocks and tireless tread of human activity. Even the hijra who sits outside the shaadi lawn next to my apartment building makes me feel blubbery and nostalgic.

(The hijra has been a steady feature on our block since my family moved here four years ago. S/he is about six feet tall, broad shouldered and thin-lipped, her lean and somewhat muscular calves offset by the stretch at her belly. Her preferred evening wear consists of a kurta and capri pants, both black with spangly silver trimming, both just slightly short for her. Often my car’s headlights pick out the bling on her pants before anything else, and sometimes I see her slowly make her way back down main Bilawal Chowk road, swinging a jeweled party purse back and forth sullenly. I think her specialty – if you can call it that – is that she worked through strikes. However, [and I've noticed this with what I am embarrassed to admit is my only source of pity for her], her legs are often visibly unshaved, in a resigned and unhappy contrast to her flashy party suit.)

I wonder if anyone else in the world is as comfortable with the idea of commercial shut-down as a Karachiwala. If they are, they should speak up. They should let us know if the same nonchalant sense of unextraordinary rests on their shoulders like dandruff, if they face the fact of shuttered gas stations, line upon line, with a yawn and a fleeting wonder if HBO is showing that Jason Statham movie again. If they engage in “sleeping” not like something one does between the hours of roughly 1 and 9 am, but as if it were an endurance sport to get them through shutter-down days. If they seek relief in a tank of gas just full enough to get them to work and back, or a ricksha-walla desperate enough to take them for under a 150 rupees for a ten-minute ride.

I wonder if, like us, they barely follow the news, but know exactly whose guys rode through the neighborhood on a motorbike at eight am this morning, forcing everyone from the man who sells paratha and chai to the 24-hour pharmacy to shut down.

“They were MQM guys,” my maasi tells me conspiratorially.

“They tells these guys they’re going to shoot them or beat them up if they don’t keep it closed today.”

I grunted and took the tea from her, and thumbed my book of essays by David Foster Wallace. Meh, strike, yawn, I wonder if that Jason Statham movie will be on HBO today etc. Maybe I’ll go for a swim to Gymkhana.

(It is important to mention here that I am in Karachi because for the last three weeks I have been suffering from what can only be summed up as mild depression. I am in the process of getting rejecting from every PhD program I applied to this year and my normally engaged and politically conscious but still altogether callously upper-class soul has been ripped out of my chest, shredded and then stuck back in there as a warning to future hopes and dreams. I exaggerate only slightly. DFW keeps me sane and I clutch to it like a newborn puppy to its mother’s tit.)

The trouble, I think, is that even in a total shut-down, walled-up, we’re-not-fucking-around MQM strike, the parts of the city that will not ensure people on the street will get shot continue to function with a grimness that borders on the psychotic. People who have been threatened with being strangled by their own innards if they sell vegetables will quietly watch the road for a couple of hours, and then slowly, insidiously, start putting cabbages back on the cart, one by one. A van laden with Chinese-made bathroom exhaust fans will attempt to trundle through a stoplight the minute the traffic cop’s back is turned, cutting off a motorbike stacked like a game of tetris with two men and a dozen empty PC cases. In the ensuing commotion the light will turn green and three rows of cars will begin to bleat with soothing belligerence.

Fuck, I realize. I haven’t shaved my armpits.

It is pertinent here to mention that MQM has called a strike because they are fed-up with extortion and felt that “criminal activity” was getting out of hand; in their enthusiasm to do what social scientists call signalling power to the government and opposition they pursued this objective in the usual way i.e. by deploying neighborhood gangs (read: young men on bikes) and as with all outsourced activities faced the embarrassing problem of a few particularly overzealous freelancers torching buses in order to ensure their local-level power is reinforced and/or all of MQM’s future “make sure those bastards keep their shops closed” TORs come to them first. You can read about it, as I did a minute ago, on Express Tribune, if you like scanty information and poor editing, here.

Unshaved armpits are bad. I gave up de-hairing my arms a while back because a) it’s time-consuming, b) I’m lazy and c) white chicks don’t bother so why should I. Underarm hair is a different ballgame, especially when one wears sleeveless clothes frequently (as I do) and has alarmingly fecund follicles (as I have). Lately I’d been staring at my arsenal of sleek pink imported razors listlessly every time I took a shower, giving into the age-old trope of “letting yourself go” in a state of deep unhappiness. But maybe I was unhappy because I let myself go. Maybe if I shaved my underarms and worked out and got a flat stomach and listened to more Ella I’d feel like myself again.

“I need to go to a general store,” I tell the driver at the exact same moment he says “we have no fuel.”

And then I noticed that every single one of the twenty gas stations we visit are closed, like a scene from a World War II movie. Every shop, every khokha and theila, even paan shops and men with baskets of fruit were nowhere to be seen. Even the beggars, it seems, have been refused the justice of selling whatever brand of emotional blackmail they sell at traffic intersections. Why did no one tell me, I wonder. Why aren’t my friends and I sitting around a TV with appropriately concerned and drawn faces? Why aren’t frantic phone calls being made to loved ones, why aren’t there long lines outside… outside… anything! I don’t know! Make a line, people, bring your babies and jerrycans!

There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. So I went for a swim, hairy arms and all. I will tolerate my agonies and anxieties with stoic grimness, like a Karachiite. I will suffer the casual indifference of my family and the marathon somnolence of my peers with passive-aggressive silence. I will ignore the tittering of sleek teenage swimmers with summer gala builds in the shower room as they catch a sight of my furry pits. You snooty upper-class bitches, I think gleefully. I bet you don’t even know there’s a strike.

Know your election fraud

February 13th, …

February 13^th, 2012. Islamabad. For those of us still following the game of thrones taking place at the center, it appears that Prime Minister Gilani is running out of road. He’s taking a long walk off a short pier. Insert your own cliché here. The debate has overtaken the Prime Minister, the discussion is now focused on what Pakistan must do, post-Gilani. To write the letter or not? Will Senate elections go ahead or not? Will the PPP spin this ungraceful end to a five year term as a victory, will Gilani go back to Multan a living shaheed? Pity the constituency whose only claim to a fruitful five year term is a representative with a knack for getting stabbed in the stomach and making it look like he meant to fall on his sword. Gilani will end up being a sacrifice for an utterly worthless cause – twenty-eight million US dollars that will never be returned to the people of Pakistan. Ever.

The statute of limitations on the Swiss cases are rumored to be anywhere between April and August 2012. The time for reopening old cases is diminishing fast. Yet we insist that the court charade of the last few months was necessary – it’s not about the money, it’s about setting an institutional precedent.

It has been nearly two decades since our President and his late wife stole a mind-bubbling sum of money and squirreled it away into Swiss banks, mansions in Surrey, bank accounts in Dubai and trendy flats in London. Reading the famous 1998 New York Times article reinforces the idea that when politicians from very poor countries amass vast amounts of wealth, they are not likely to let go of it that easily. So forget fantasies of liquidating the Bhutto assets and paying off Pakistan’s international loans. The Pakistani Supreme Court can humiliate the Prime Minister, but it can’t overturn decades of sophisticated white collar crime, much of which takes place outside its judicial territory.

And surely impotence of this intensity is severely humiliating for Chief Justice Chaudhry himself. Having become the defacto arbitrator of every aggrieved party in Pakistan, he suddenly finds himself without any implementation power whatsoever. He is the supreme commander of a court system that is rotten at the foundation, fighting the country’s largest and most public corruption scandal while his own lower court clerks accept petty bribes to tie up litigation for years. His own middle-class biases against the landed elite of the PPP notwithstanding, Chaudhary now faces the task of living up to the dubious honor of being the sole institution in this country deemed impartial and uncorrupt. Which means that if he isn’t seen going after egregious acts of corruption, he will be immediately deemed implicit.

In the face of such impotence, charging and convicting a seated Prime Minister of contempt is a sufficiently bold task to secure Chaudhary’s tripod of potency: judicial independence, of having real power (as opposed to simply striking down the NRO and not being able to do a damn thing to implement it for a full two years), and of being a guardian of the people. Gilani’s removal, whenever it happens, will be sufficiently large to distract from the fact that the PM never stole the twenty-eight million. He never decided to write the letter, or not to write it, for that matter – any more than he decided to become Prime Minister. It will serve to silence those who suggest that post-reinstatement, the CJ has been “bought out” by the PPP, to outcry those who notice that investigations into sugar cartels, NILC, Hajj, Abbotabad,  and Karachi came to naught. It is eye candy for the myopic, a desperate sideshow to distract from a flaming circus of budget malfunctions, energy scams and policy fubars.

But lets not beat ourselves up too much. John Burns pointed out in 1998 that multilateral organizations such as the World Bank regularly support teetering Third World economies “bled dry” by corruption in exchange for weak promises of institutional reform. The last five years have been immensely lucrative for friends of the regime, for those individuals and institutions capable of buying out or bullying Mr. Hundered Percent. At last count, this included everyone from ARY Gold to the Pakistan Army, from AKD to NLC to the men who bring you fantastically overpriced imported cars at huge markups. Zardari did not invent corruption, but he’s a fine example (an institutional precedent, as it were) of just how successful some men and women become in countries with broken democratic systems. Where the Army can quietly wring the neck of anyone attempting to infringe on its economic and political territory. Where an entire Parliament – incumbent, opposition and all – routes all decision-making through the Supreme Court. Where a judge is deeply contemptuous of men who take advantage of their office for personal aggrandizement – and then goes and does exactly the same.

	The Friday Times, 72 FCC Gulberg 4, Lahore, Pakistan Ph: 92-42-5763510, Fax: 92-42-5751025, e-Mail: tft@lhr.comsats.net.pk
Everybody loves Raymond?
Erum Haider The Davis case casts a long shadow over issues of foreign policy and security
It seems that Imran Khan has gotten his wish. A suitably ambiguous yet highly contentious issue? Check. A slow and blundering civilian government? Check. A no-objection certificate from rival party the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and finally, a tacitly acquiescent Army? Check. Raymond Davis is a godsend amongst a baffling barrage of events that threaten to render even mainstream parties redundant in their helplessness: blasphemy and minority rights abuses, rising inflation, and political instability. Issues such as unemployment and inflation are notoriously difficult to build consensus around. On the other hand, even the most hardened rationalists have trouble arguing that the core of the Davis issue was not inherently unjust. The Davis case casts a long shadow over issues of foreign policy and security, on which many good articles have been written already. It has exposed fissures in the US-Pakistan relationship, something which observers have been pointing out from the very beginning. And it is one of those rare cases where the entire parcel of the incumbent government is so thoroughly complicit in the crimes it allows on its territory that only those parties which have nothing to lose and no alternatives to put into practice can afford to take a stand. Enter Imran Khan. Skillfully lumping together the army, the central government and sitting political parties, Khan reserved the worst of his vitriol for his rivals in Punjab, the Sharifs. The “rich factory-builders” who promised to try Davis in court were in all likelihood aware of the American’s eventual release. There was also almost certainly an expectation that religious parties will make a cause célèbre out of such issues. What few people in Pakistan were expecting is that PTI would be leading the charge. Amidst the contempt heaped on Imran Khan for colluding with Syed Munawarul Hasan of JI (although this isn’t the first time such an alliance has been made), and the outright ridicule of Khan’s young, urban (read: “burger”) supporters; is a deep, underlying insecurity. Has the Khan, with his Oxford roots and ostensible “enlightened moderate” leanings, finally “gone fundo”? The hundreds of people who showed up on Friday in various parts of the country were not the tens of thousands who came out on the 9th of January in support of the blasphemy laws, although many of them may support a more conservative view on the issue of blasphemy. From blogs and various forums it appears that PTI’s nationalistic rhetoric which is big on ideals and shy on particulars is especially appealing to young people and those in the upper-middle class who are deeply distrustful of mainstream politics. As one supporter in Karachi noted, the entire draw of Khan’s party is that it is different from the horse-trading that takes place in Islamabad: “we need to show that we haven’t been bought out, like the other parties.” And yet, as Khan reaches out to religious parties and “opens dialogue” with mainstream parties, as his party members like to put it, PTI finds itself struggling to remain the only “clean and non-corrupt” party in town. Perhaps his followers, contemptuous as they are of dirty politics, will abandon Khan as his party begins the messy business of electoral campaigning and bargaining in 2013. However, some supporters have already begun to reconcile themselves with the idea of going mainstream. The strike call on Friday last week was one such example. According to the PTI, it was a necessary show of strength for all the threats made during the Davis trial. For parties outside the fold during a period of civilian rule, such protests are the bread and butter of their work. The Jamat e Islami echoes this view: “we took a principled stand during the trial,” says JI Secretary of Information, Sarfaraz Ahmed. “We can’t face our constituents if we do not follow up on these threats, no one will take us seriously.” Such is the lot of minority parties during civilian rule. In the absence of seats in government, whether incumbent or in opposition, they are constantly on the verge of total anonymity. During times of prosperity they may support mainstream parties, adding to numbers on the street during rallies. During times of distress they distance themselves, calling for radical change. So far, such calls for change by the PTI and the JI have been ridiculed by mainstream parties and the press. However, the anger that these parties opportunistically exploit, and thereby amplify, is not completely insignificant. Davis’ case falls into a lowest-common-denominator agenda between parties on the left and right, conservative and liberal: national sovereignty. The JI calls it “anti-Americanism” and adds it to the general idea that American “involvement” is the root cause of problems facing Pakistanis today; PTI stands for respect for human rights and autonomy writ large. Such opportunities for agreement and street mobilization are few and far between. The argument is not, therefore, whether this tiny victory will matter, if at all, to the PTI’s miniscule voter base in 2013. However, it is almost certain that the chairman of the party was left with little choice but to take this opportunity in order to be in the running for the polls. His supporters, similarly, have little choice but to ignore their own logical inconsistencies – benefiting from the gains of globalised Pakistan while wanting to distance themselves from a superpower, despising political parties but struggling to be taken seriously at the same forum. Such is the nature of politics everywhere, and they will be no worse off for attempting to learn the rules of the game. As always, the clear winner in this round (besides, I suppose, Raymond Davis himself) is the Pakistani intelligence. Artfully playing the same game they’ve perfected over the last three decades, they reiterate private assurances of support for the war on terror as their anthem of “national sovereignty” is chanted over by the media and “popular movements.” Digging deeper trenches of mistrust between the people of the two countries, they’ve convinced both that they are the last bastion of freedom against the animals on the other side. The writer is a research analyst based in Karachi

	The Friday Times, 72 FCC Gulberg 4, Lahore, Pakistan Ph: 92-42-5763510, Fax: 92-42-5751025, e-Mail: tft@lhr.comsats.net.pk
Writing aloud (but to the same audience)
Erum Haider is stimulated and exasperated by the Karachi Literature Festival
By Monday morning, the Karachi Literature Festival has been hailed, celebrated, and slammed in dozens of columns, blogs and newspaper articles. The program itself reads like a heady freshman-level course catalogue at the most fabulous college in the world, the only problem being that the bright-eyed visitor with a keen interest in, say, national security and Urdu poetry would end up inevitably disappointed for having to choose one over the other. On the other hand, this enormously successful event left people quite spoiled for choice and left each session abuzz with unanswered questions. The KLF, for all its merits, seemed somewhat overrun with anxious hand-wringing over the crisis that Pakistan is currently facing, with perhaps less attention paid to the quality of writers that have emerged from the country in the last couple of years. The fact that Pakistan is in dire economic straits is a concern for everyone, but the fact that few world-class fiction books have been published since Daniyal Mueenuddin’s ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’ is a far more troubling fact for the ardent reader of Pakistani prose. It seemed at times that the reality of elitism and extremism, terrorism and terrified-ism had taken over a festival devoted ostensibly to the much more bookish and impracticable craft of reading and writing. “Look, the point is, there are bombs going off all around us. But if somewhere a boy happens to fall in love with a girl we can’t tell the poet not to write about it,” said acclaimed Urdu writer Fahmida Riaz in the session titled “Literature in the Age of Extremism.” It is impossible to divide the two worlds, as this session suggested. Writers, poets and authors of all hues agreed that in reflecting life around them, the inevitable bomb, or reference to terrorism, was bound to creep in. Such is the reality of living in Pakistan. Even beauty and art can only tolerate so much, however, when the tranquility of poetry seminars is interrupted by the rattle and hum of earnest civil society members crowding the hallways to listen to Ahmed Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Maleeha Lodhi and other politics-parsing pundits. Intellects such as theirs will never be unwelcome anywhere; however, as the conference hall shrank under the weight of hundreds of attendees, it became abundantly clear that this was the same well-tuned choir they’ve always addressed. Dr. Hoodbhoy recalled growing up in Karachi when it had a population of one million – “as many of my friends in the audience will remember.” The fact is, this city today is a world away from the Karachi they remember. And that’s because it’s teeming with young people: children of the Class of ‘71, children of migrants, children of families across Pakistan; a staggering youth bulge of some 7 million Karachiites under the age of 25 who were sorely under-represented at sessions such as “Where are we today?” and “Re-imagining Pakistan.” The “youth” in Pakistan are a constant source of stress for Pakistani civil society and their Western friends, yet there seem to be few good ideas on how to involve them in events such as these. The spatial divide is just one symptom of this condition, says Hoodbhoy: “Outside the high walls of DHA we encounter a majority that is united against people like you and me, who will then fight amongst themselves.” The threat of extremism inevitably spills over into an unhappy realization that the polarization of “liberals” and “extremists” runs perplexingly close to the divide between the Cambridge O-level crowd and the Intermediate crowd, the increasingly rich and the exceedingly poor, the English-speaking and the vernacular, those who managed to make it all the way out to Carlton Hotel (situated at the very end of the Manhattan-like peninsula that makes up the DHA and Clifton areas of Karachi) and those for whom the trip was too far. Zahid Hussain, author of ‘The Scorpion’s Tail’, takes a relatively optimistic view, while acknowledging that terrorists operate within a climate of fear that engulfs both liberals and moderates. While there is vocal support for the murderer of Salmaan Taseer, for example, we cannot assume that the majority of people subscribe to this view. “We cannot afford to become diffident,” said Hussain to murmurs of agreement from the front rows, adding that a society of intolerance is not our fate. But evidence to the contrary is ubiquitous. Nasim Zehra’s address from the podium was the stuff of “awareness campaigns.” An attempt by Senator Nilofer Bakhtiar to recite the fateha for Taseer has been rejected, Zehra tells us. A senior politician asks for a text message to be declared blasphemous for calling the late Governor “Shaheed.” The prosecutor for the trial of the assassinated political leader fails to show up in court. Each one of these blows is suffered with sighs of appreciative horror from the audience. Appeals from the panel were made to the army, to civil society to reimagine itself, to break away from the past: “Pakistan cannot continue to see itself as an alter-ego to India,” said Zehra. The existential threat must be taken seriously by the Pakistan army, said Hoodbhoy. “We’ve got to look after ourselves,” he asserted, before we pledge support for other countries. In doing so, however, it certainly helps to be cognizant of the world around us. According to Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan “missed” two important moments in history to change the tide of its national security narrative. To have scaled back dependency after the fall of the Soviet Union and invested instead in regional alliances would have been enormously beneficial. Similarly, taking the attack on the World Trade Center as a sign that Pakistan can no longer use non-state actors would have led down a very different road. Civil society needs to push for change, according to the panelists, and find alternatives to the religious-nationalist narrative. Those desperate for some literary element in this discussion may want to take note of the irony of a secular, economically-elite class that is historically disinclined to popular shows of strength wanting to take on a populist, street-savvy force. “It takes extreme passions to bring people out on the street,” noted leading columnist Khalid Ahmed, articulating a need for liberals to do what they do best – talk, and use channels of influence. The fact is that the liberals of Pakistan remain confined to echo chambers filled with like-minded people, unable to reach out to conservative groups, moderate forces, political actors, or even a younger generation. By accident or by design, none of the panelists felt it necessary to situate politicians in either the history or the future of the country. Poverty and inequality, being the forte of politicians, also evaded analysis. Religion and faith, being the specialization of extremists, also failed to make an appearance. Particularly in the light of the haunting assassination of January 4th, desperation has replaced curiosity and indignation has replaced humility. We’re no longer looking to read, but to write and assert. And even our fiction writers, instead of living with and mirroring the fear and hopelessness of war, poverty and the rising tide of intolerance – as their peers in India, Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere have – have resorted to using their pulpit to analyze and explain the world they live in. This being a literature festival, it was still possible to seek reprieve from the charged atmosphere of political discussions, and slip into a session on translation, or emerging writing in Pakistan, or a recitation of Punjabi poetry. Between the calls of appreciation heaped on Mudassir Aziz and Ali Akbar Natiq, and the roars of laughter elicited by Mohommad Hanif, it is comforting to think that there are writers who can make us laugh and cry – at ourselves, and our vanity, in these difficult times. The writer is a Research Analyst based in Karachi

	The Friday Times, 72 FCC Gulberg 4, Lahore, Pakistan Ph: 92-42-5763510, Fax: 92-42-5751025, e-Mail: tft@lhr.comsats.net.pk
Writing aloud (but to the same audience)
Erum Haider is stimulated and exasperated by the Karachi Literature Festival
By Monday morning, the Karachi Literature Festival has been hailed, celebrated, and slammed in dozens of columns, blogs and newspaper articles. The program itself reads like a heady freshman-level course catalogue at the most fabulous college in the world, the only problem being that the bright-eyed visitor with a keen interest in, say, national security and Urdu poetry would end up inevitably disappointed for having to choose one over the other. On the other hand, this enormously successful event left people quite spoiled for choice and left each session abuzz with unanswered questions. The KLF, for all its merits, seemed somewhat overrun with anxious hand-wringing over the crisis that Pakistan is currently facing, with perhaps less attention paid to the quality of writers that have emerged from the country in the last couple of years. The fact that Pakistan is in dire economic straits is a concern for everyone, but the fact that few world-class fiction books have been published since Daniyal Mueenuddin’s ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’ is a far more troubling fact for the ardent reader of Pakistani prose. It seemed at times that the reality of elitism and extremism, terrorism and terrified-ism had taken over a festival devoted ostensibly to the much more bookish and impracticable craft of reading and writing. “Look, the point is, there are bombs going off all around us. But if somewhere a boy happens to fall in love with a girl we can’t tell the poet not to write about it,” said acclaimed Urdu writer Fahmida Riaz in the session titled “Literature in the Age of Extremism.” It is impossible to divide the two worlds, as this session suggested. Writers, poets and authors of all hues agreed that in reflecting life around them, the inevitable bomb, or reference to terrorism, was bound to creep in. Such is the reality of living in Pakistan. Even beauty and art can only tolerate so much, however, when the tranquility of poetry seminars is interrupted by the rattle and hum of earnest civil society members crowding the hallways to listen to Ahmed Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Maleeha Lodhi and other politics-parsing pundits. Intellects such as theirs will never be unwelcome anywhere; however, as the conference hall shrank under the weight of hundreds of attendees, it became abundantly clear that this was the same well-tuned choir they’ve always addressed. Dr. Hoodbhoy recalled growing up in Karachi when it had a population of one million – “as many of my friends in the audience will remember.” The fact is, this city today is a world away from the Karachi they remember. And that’s because it’s teeming with young people: children of the Class of ‘71, children of migrants, children of families across Pakistan; a staggering youth bulge of some 7 million Karachiites under the age of 25 who were sorely under-represented at sessions such as “Where are we today?” and “Re-imagining Pakistan.” The “youth” in Pakistan are a constant source of stress for Pakistani civil society and their Western friends, yet there seem to be few good ideas on how to involve them in events such as these. The spatial divide is just one symptom of this condition, says Hoodbhoy: “Outside the high walls of DHA we encounter a majority that is united against people like you and me, who will then fight amongst themselves.” The threat of extremism inevitably spills over into an unhappy realization that the polarization of “liberals” and “extremists” runs perplexingly close to the divide between the Cambridge O-level crowd and the Intermediate crowd, the increasingly rich and the exceedingly poor, the English-speaking and the vernacular, those who managed to make it all the way out to Carlton Hotel (situated at the very end of the Manhattan-like peninsula that makes up the DHA and Clifton areas of Karachi) and those for whom the trip was too far. Zahid Hussain, author of ‘The Scorpion’s Tail’, takes a relatively optimistic view, while acknowledging that terrorists operate within a climate of fear that engulfs both liberals and moderates. While there is vocal support for the murderer of Salmaan Taseer, for example, we cannot assume that the majority of people subscribe to this view. “We cannot afford to become diffident,” said Hussain to murmurs of agreement from the front rows, adding that a society of intolerance is not our fate. But evidence to the contrary is ubiquitous. Nasim Zehra’s address from the podium was the stuff of “awareness campaigns.” An attempt by Senator Nilofer Bakhtiar to recite the fateha for Taseer has been rejected, Zehra tells us. A senior politician asks for a text message to be declared blasphemous for calling the late Governor “Shaheed.” The prosecutor for the trial of the assassinated political leader fails to show up in court. Each one of these blows is suffered with sighs of appreciative horror from the audience. Appeals from the panel were made to the army, to civil society to reimagine itself, to break away from the past: “Pakistan cannot continue to see itself as an alter-ego to India,” said Zehra. The existential threat must be taken seriously by the Pakistan army, said Hoodbhoy. “We’ve got to look after ourselves,” he asserted, before we pledge support for other countries. In doing so, however, it certainly helps to be cognizant of the world around us. According to Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan “missed” two important moments in history to change the tide of its national security narrative. To have scaled back dependency after the fall of the Soviet Union and invested instead in regional alliances would have been enormously beneficial. Similarly, taking the attack on the World Trade Center as a sign that Pakistan can no longer use non-state actors would have led down a very different road. Civil society needs to push for change, according to the panelists, and find alternatives to the religious-nationalist narrative. Those desperate for some literary element in this discussion may want to take note of the irony of a secular, economically-elite class that is historically disinclined to popular shows of strength wanting to take on a populist, street-savvy force. “It takes extreme passions to bring people out on the street,” noted leading columnist Khalid Ahmed, articulating a need for liberals to do what they do best – talk, and use channels of influence. The fact is that the liberals of Pakistan remain confined to echo chambers filled with like-minded people, unable to reach out to conservative groups, moderate forces, political actors, or even a younger generation. By accident or by design, none of the panelists felt it necessary to situate politicians in either the history or the future of the country. Poverty and inequality, being the forte of politicians, also evaded analysis. Religion and faith, being the specialization of extremists, also failed to make an appearance. Particularly in the light of the haunting assassination of January 4th, desperation has replaced curiosity and indignation has replaced humility. We’re no longer looking to read, but to write and assert. And even our fiction writers, instead of living with and mirroring the fear and hopelessness of war, poverty and the rising tide of intolerance – as their peers in India, Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere have – have resorted to using their pulpit to analyze and explain the world they live in. This being a literature festival, it was still possible to seek reprieve from the charged atmosphere of political discussions, and slip into a session on translation, or emerging writing in Pakistan, or a recitation of Punjabi poetry. Between the calls of appreciation heaped on Mudassir Aziz and Ali Akbar Natiq, and the roars of laughter elicited by Mohommad Hanif, it is comforting to think that there are writers who can make us laugh and cry – at ourselves, and our vanity, in these difficult times. The writer is a Research Analyst based in Karachi

I don’t like being called irrelvant.

Originally published on Express Tribune.

If you haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker, on how Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are “lazy activism,” then you’re missing out on the biggest existential crisis of the Internet in, like, forever.

Gladwell’s concluding statement is as follows:

(Social networking is) a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Google News informs me that the article received over 100 related blogposts, articles and follow-ups. The vast majority – the main-page blog, the article that gets into the Guardian – think he’s “wrong”.

Leo Mirani of the Guardian points out that Twitter, for the first time, made middle-class Indians “interested” in the Kashmir protests. “Gladwell ignores the true significance of social media, which lies in their ability to rapidly spread information about alternative points of view that might otherwise never reach a large audience.”

It’s true, Gladwell didn’t talk about Kashmir – a deliberate omission, say many detractors. Nor did he mention the Obama campaign, says HuffPo writer Sam Graham-Felsen, author of “What Gladwell got wrong: beyond ‘Like Button’ activism.” The internet was a powerful tool in organizing the Obama campaign, says Graham-Felsen: “while Obama’s supporters can’t be compared to the Greensboro lunch counter protesters, their engagement was far from trivial.”

Their contribution wasn’t trivial, he says, because they donated huge sums to the election campaign during an economic downturn.

The posts follow a similar in format. Malcolm “Got it Wrong” captions one post. Gladwell’s “Twitter-Hating article.” Malcolm “Misses the Mark.” They then present half a dozen counter-examples, all of which have nothing in common except a vast Twitter and Facebook presence. What about Haiti? asked one. What about Iran, said another. What about Greenpeace, the elections, and incidences of a journalist getting beaten up or a health care facility brought to justice for malpractice. As Pakistanis, we can join the chorus. What about the Sialkot lynching? We would’ve never known, had it not been for Twitter and Youtube.

Most articles also concede that Gladwell makes the distinction between boots-on-the-ground activism and the cloud of silent supporters hovering around them. Which is not incorrect, they say, but he underestimates how important knowing and letting someone else know about an election, election fraud, or protest is.

We mean to say, he trivializes how important our job is. And we don’t like it.

The mantra of “social networking” is “Spreading Awareness.” Twitter users let the world know that Iran was protesting, it let people know of an earthquake in Haiti and riots in Kashmir.

Here’s how the fairytale goes: you’re a middle-class Indian or Pakistani, and you learn by tweet that the people whom your governments screwed over for sixty-three years are in fact, still bleeding and dying. You sit up and take notice. You’ll re-tweet it, blog about it. The major news network you watch will realize that you and your coterie of valued customers ‘likes’ Kashmir protest, and will send a reporter up to Srinagar. Images will flood the screen, politicians will sweat, speeches will be made, more blogs, tweets and re-retweets. Some scrap of paper may be signed, money might be raised, petitions written. But way before that, a mighty chorus will have struck up – all hail social media, look at how much awareness was raised!

Why all the fuss? Is Kashmir an independent country? Have protesters stopped being killed? Has Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech and has the Civil Rights Act been signed? Are there more boots in the ground, and are they going to stay there?

No, God no. We’re just celebrating the fact that we know. The fundamental problem – of the breakdown of political institutions for activism, of weakened student unions and community organizations – has not changed.

Celebrating social networking’s role in aiding activism is like celebrating the car that drove you to the protest. It’s like holding an award ceremony for the kid who passes out pamphlets on the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. It’s like celebrating yourself, really, for your enlightenment from a sheltered middle-class university grad to a revolutionary, trailblazing Twitterati getting a million hits and a million likes. It’s great that everyone can be an activist without having to skip classes to join a rally, having to spend hours in the heat getting tear-gassed by the police or having to take orders from a hierarchical organization.

One commenter on the “Gladwell gets it wrong – again” post writes:

Many advocates of social media seem to imply that the various activist movements of recent years would not have developed in the way they did or, worst, would not have happened at all if it wasn’t for Twitter. Which is patently absurd. Perhaps social media facilitated or modestly accelerated the spreading of the message, but it was by no means responsible for it.

Another blog, another comment:

I have to disagree that a $5 donation on Facebook is equivalent to a direct action or an activist with real skin in the game, willing to show up in a community, have challenging conversations with decision makers, develop solutions with stakeholders and the like.

The commentators have it right. Just because we want to feel good about “knowing” and “blogging” doesn’t mean we get to glorify the Internet or, in the instance of one post, redefine activism to fit our “digital world” better. Calling ours a digital “world” is astonishing hubris: anyone who thinks the Twitter – or even the Internet – is “revolutionary” because it reaches every corner of the globe is in desperate need of some perspective.

Gladwell got it right, for correctly using a phrase that’s become rapidly misused and totally unstylish – ‘status quo.’ The status quo does not mind being blogged or re-tweeted, it does not mind a million hits against it on Facebook. I’m no activist, but I have a feeling that if I’m ever truly brave enough to fly in the face of the status quo, like those black kids who sat down at a white lunch counter in 1960, or the hundreds of Kashmiri protesters facing down barrels of guns, I probably will have bigger things on my mind than how many ‘likes’ I have on my Facebook wall.

Guess this Story!

Goof morning, Has-Press Tribune! Oh, you make my day. I like to play a little game called “Guess this story.” Basically, you take the top headlines and guess what the story will be. Let’s start with Has-Press Tribunes “Most Popular.”  Guessing the author correctly gets you 2 points. Each correct “topic” gets you one point. If you manage to quote a phrase VERBATIM (remember, this is without even looking at the story!) you get 5 points. And finally, if you manage to guess correctly even ONE of the Comments on it you get a whopping 10-point touchdown. Go!

1. The Aafia mafia
Oooh, this one has the most hits. Imma say it’s been written by… George Fulton. It’s about how the Aafia issue has been politicized by the MQM, the JI, everyone. “Look at the other side of the issue.” Comment:
Zahid: there is no proof of her actions…. if US is convicting her then why is it so afraid of prooff…. dont u think???

2. For Musharraf’s Facebook fans
Ok, I know this was written by Ayesha Siddiqa but I originally guessed NadyaV. Close enough!
It’s about how Musharraf ruined institutions, put corrupt people in power, expanded the army, blocked the media, etc etc (again this is unfair b/c, shit, what else would AS say?)
Comment:
Erum: Ayesha thank you for such a clear and articulate piece of writing. We unfortunately have very short term memories when it comes to dictators. If only everyone had the kind of patience and tolerance for democracy that I do. Then again, not everyone is a UofC grad either. Pity.

3. ‘Nation will forgive Zardari if he returns its money’
Statement made by someone in opposition? First guess N/Shabby Sharif. Next guess Maulana Deisel. Third guess some PML-Q goon.
“We do not want to destabilize democracy, but Zardari is bringing name of Pakistan down, he has lost confidence of the people. He must return the money and we will be confident again. Failing that, we should burn Islamabad down.”
Comment: what about your own money mr politician please return it.. only army is not corrupt…

Correct answers:
1. Fasi Zaka (argh, so close!! Come on, he’s like a desi George Fulton, isn’t he?)
About – Giving Aafia a fair trial. (Completely off. doof )
Comment: pro americans would agree with the writer but none of them has come out with aquestion how she was sold. the culprits that is the sellers should be brought to the book and given exaplery punishnent. (ka-ching! 10 pts. This part is so easy. And so rewarding.)

2. AS
About – “After all, these ‘bad’ politicians are the only ones who are ever held accountable.” (1 point!)
Comment: Brilliantly Analyzed Report You Revealed Madm, I Agree To Your Concerns & Facts That You’ve Shown To Us. Thank You…!!! (yay, 10pts!)

3. Nawaz Sharif!! (Oh man, I am so good at this. 2 points!)
About – “He said the army should not be involved if the government does not implement the Supreme Court verdicts as there were other means of their implementation” (2 pts)
Comment: “Parvez musharraf waapas aao!
Mulk ko choaron se chhutwaao!” (10pts )

So much fun.

The best revenge

I just returned from watching “Bhutto” at the National Geographic in Washington DC. It takes me back to that moment, when I was getting my hair blow dried in the TV studios on my way to my friend’s wedding on December 27th, 2007. One eye in the mirror watching my 23 year old self get done up, another on the plasma screen above the make-up room lights. Rushing out as Geo TV ran the ticker that she had been injured.
And then staring in shock, when they said she was dead.
Benazir never joined the lawyer’s movement. She was more concerned with reconciliation with Musharraf, more concerned with selling herself, and selling Pakistan to the United States. It was something of a fashion then, to be critical of politicians. And while no one knew what crimes she was guilty of I guess just being powerful and determined was criminal enough.
And so for the life of me I couldn’t understand why I was weeping.
It’s a sad, sad story. When the camera swings behind her and pans over hundreds of thousands of people waving back at her, it’s a sad story. How quickly all her loving friends in the West forgot that Ms. Bhutto – charming, ruthless, liberal Ms. Bhutto – was a product of “the most dangerous place on earth.” Before they write us off, I wish they’d loop back that clip of the endless sea of people three times the size of anything that came out to Grant Park two years ago – screaming and cheering and waving at a woman. Not a bearded Talib, or a military dictator, or an Oxford intellectual, but a woman. The people, the people, the people. “When I look at the people, I am at peace…” Unfortunately the movie isn’t about the people, except tangentially. In which regard I’d like to thank Mark Siegel for making the point that “Pakistanis are like people anywhere in the world, and want the same things as any of us: jobs, education, a future.”
So why then be so insecure about the people, Bhuttos? Why not sell yourself to the middle class? Why spend less time with intellectuals from Pakistan and more with journalists and writers in the West? Why not create a cadre of technocrats who are assured of positions in your government, as senior economists and advisers and experts?
And why, for us intellectuals, why did we never learn from the mistakes of our leaders in the Muslim League and join the political parties in full force? Why must we be so goddamn intellectual all the time? We’ll give everyone a chance – the military, the Islamist parties, shit, even the Taliban themselves. But never the mainstream, secular, messy PPP. Not because Bhutto’s a charming politician: even if she was, she’s dead.
Moeed Yusuf says that we’ve become an increasingly polarized society. I agree. I think the hardest pill to swallow is that we’ve all got to live with each other. The shitty politicians (yes, if Nawaz wins the next elections I am obliged to honor the vote), the “uneducated” jiyalas, the conceited elite, the religious middle class. Nothing will change unless we have a personal stake in the democratic process. I’m not even part of a political party – how can I say with a straight face that I’m interested in the persistence of democracy in Pakistan? If we have no personal stake in this, nothing will change.

Two sides of the same FOIN

Pakistan has an India problem.

Never mind the thousands of civilians dead, displaced, and dispossessed by militancy and its backlash. Never mind that a politician who was set to capture a significant percentage of votes was assassinated by a terrorist organisation based not in India, but on Pakistan’s own territory. Never mind that hundreds of armed soldiers and security guards have been kidnapped, beheaded, and blown up by groups claiming a hard-line Islamic ideology.

The idea of a “pro-Pakistan,” Taliban regime in Afghanistan makes us grin. A pro-India regime in Afghanistan makes us queasy. Sixty years on, Pakistan (still) has an India problem.

In Washington DC, an understanding of Pakistan’s regional strategy in Afghanistan is defined by what they call the country’s ‘national security calculus’ – in other words, ‘Pakistan’s India problem.’ The story goes as follows: the Pakistan Army fomented insurgency in the 1980s with the help of the CIA, mostly because it wanted to hedge its bets against a hostile India by having a favourable regime in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, it continued its campaign of using militants in Kashmir as low-level irritants against the Indian Army.

In recent years, intelligence agencies have found their network amongst militants to be disassembling. Meanwhile, army officials have been targeted by the same militants they once cultivated, and the Frontier Corps have faced high casualties. As a result, the strategy has “switched” from one of FOIN (fomenting insurgency) to one of all-out COIN (counter insurgency).

The Pakistan Army now realises that the Pakistani Taliban are part of the national security threat, which is why there has been a “paradigm shift,” in the words of strategic analyst Haider Mullick of the Joint Special Operations University in Florida. Mullick’s new book, Pakistan’s Security Paradox, provides insights into what has been the cornerstone of the Pakistan Army’s strategic outlook for the last 30 years.

The powers that be remain reluctant about owning up to the Pakistan Army’s dealings with militant groups. But assuming a FOIN strategy exists, what would it look like? Mullick describes FOIN in great detail: for the numerically weaker Pakistan Army, “friendly” militants in Kashmir provided “plausible deniability.” That is, they did not operate on domestic soil and therefore posed no immediate threat to the country. They were a cheap tool against the Indian forces in Kashmir and acted as a force multiplier. After all, says Mullick, the Indian Army had more guns pointed at militants than it did at the Pakistani force in Kashmir.

Of course, even while fostering militancy, the Pakistan Army simultaneously conducted its own brand of counter-insurgency. Secessionist movements from Bangladesh to Baluchistan have faced the full force of the army. The picture is complicated when, between 2002 and 2008, the army seemingly increased domestic COIN tactics even while refusing to go after those groups it had carefully cultivated over the years. It is only in recent weeks, with the capture and killing of several high-level militant figures, that the army has shown that it can have its cake and eat it too.

The question persists, though: why does the Pakistan Army single-handedly continue to define national security, despite the installation of a democratically elected government at the centre? If analysts such as Mullick are correct, then the army has outwitted fate – by creating a problem and then solving it. Secondly, such an argument claims that it is perfectly reasonable to expect Pakistan to have national security concerns against India and deal with them in any way it sees appropriate, while simultaneously fighting terrorists that have killed thousands of Pakistani civilians.

It doesn’t take a military strategist to understand that what has happened in the Pakistan Army’s calculus is not a “paradigm shift,” but a “selective readjustment.” India is still the number one enemy, and militants are still the best resource for the Pakistan Army to maintain its influence in the region.

Although Pakistanis do not like the US government telling us our army harbours militants, we are not ready to admit that, at some level, our national security concerns are driven entirely by the “Indian threat.” Some seek solace in the fantasy that perhaps India is behind the terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil. Many among the public are willing to believe that Islamic hard-liners in Waziristan and Punjab take orders from Hindu agents, rather than admit the obvious.

In any other country in the world, it makes perfect sense to deal strategically with an army, and diplomatically with a civilian government. The underlying assumption is that the civilian government defines a country’s overarching goals while the army deploys the best possible strategy to fulfil those goals. In Pakistan, the army has had the privilege of being able to define national security goals and see them to their end. The civilian government, meanwhile, particularly in recent decades, has taken cues from the army and not the other way around.

Today, Washington puzzles over why the Pakistan Army is successfully “clearing” swathes of militant territory, but has not been able to “hold” it. The answer, any analyst will tell you, is that there is a complete lack of engagement of political parties when it comes to military strategy: they don’t understand it and are therefore justifiably left out of decision-making processes on the issue.

America would do well to realise that a long-term settlement of the tribal regions must involve political parties such as the Awami National Party and other vote-seeking, representative groups. Far more crucially, this is an excellent time for us to realise that there is something inherently dangerous and self-destructive about leaving the process of defining a nation’s goal to its brute force.

We in Pakistan like to think that as long as our army is strong, no external force can touch us. This is absurd logic for people whose house is on fire. Part of the army’s strength as the country’s “most efficient and stable institution” derives from our blinkered faith in, and support for, its policies, regardless of how disastrous they are for the country in the long run. Consequently, neither the Pakistan Army, nor the decision makers in Washington want to seriously engage with politicians.

Allowing the army to make decisions on our behalf is a comfortable way out of having to make hard decisions about the country’s ideology and national security. For instance, it is time we asked why India continues to be our biggest national security threat?

The fact is, engagement with politicians is the only long-term solution to Pakistan’s security problems. Political parties need to be given the encouragement and support they need to define national security goals. And they certainly need to be at the dead centre of any solution in the tribal areas. Anything else is a stop-gap measure.