This story first appeared in Southasia Peace Action Network

This is the story of Ganpat Singh from Pakistan’s Sodha Rajput community of less than half a million. Like him, each member of this community has matrimonial linkages across the border in neighbouring Rajasthan, India. This is the only way they can keep their community alive, as they are barred from marrying within their own ‘gotra’. A special dispensation over a decade ago provided them relief with six-month visa extensions – but now those who apply for such extensions are being blacklisted, leading to painful and preventable human tragedies

Ganpat Singh Sodha couldn’t go to his mother as she lay dying of cancer at his brother’s house in Jodhpur, India, a little over 300 km from Umerkot, Pakistan, where he lives. Three of his children are in Jodhpur too. He has been apart from them for five years.

A former government schoolteacher of Sindhi in Umerkot — as the Hindu principality of Amarkot was renamed after Pakistan’s birth — Ganpat kept applying for a visa and desperately calling the Indian High Commission in Islamabad.

On 20 April 2021, he sent a voice message in Urdu/English: “This is Ganpat from Umerkot, Sindh. I applied for a visa last month also and it was not issued. Now my visa has been rejected again.”

He still has the recording, in which his voice audibly cracks as he pleads: “My mother is on her deathbed. Please issue the visa on humanitarian grounds.”

“We cannot issue the visa as we have not got the necessary clearances from India,” an official texted.

Ganpat found he was blacklisted for ‘overstaying’ his visa when he was last in India. While there, he had applied for a six-month visa extension, expecting it to be granted.

Ganpat belongs to the tiny Rajput Sodha clan, estimated at around 50,000, based in Pakistan. The Sodhas are a minority within the minority Hindu community, estimated to be around 8 million, the largest non-Muslim group in Pakistan’s 220 million Muslim-majority population.

His eldest brother Lal Singh lives in Jodhpur. Their mother Darya Kanwar went to India for an angioplasty in 2014 and stayed on. An older sister is married in the border town of Jaisalmir, India. The second brother Dalpat Singh was 34 when he died of a heart attack in Pakistan in 2004, leaving behind a wife and two minor daughters. Ganpat, 49, is the youngest.

The family in Jodhpur was planning the nuptials of Dulpat Singh’s daughters, Madan Kanwar and Chander Kanwar in December 2016 when Ganpat arrived on a 60-day visa. He applied to the local foreign resident registration office (FRRO) for a six-month extension to stay on for the weddings.

Visa extensions

For over a decade now, Pakistan’s Sodha Rajputs have been able to avail of such extensions for marriage-related visits granted by the local foreign resident registration offices in Rajasthan. They can also allow Sodhas visiting Jaipur or Jodhpur to visit cities in border districts like Bikaner, Jaisalmir, and Kuch.

These authorisations for Pakistani Sodhas emerged from the relationship between the Ranas of Umerkot and S. K. Singh, former spokesperson of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, and later India’s high commissioner to Pakistan 1985-1989.

Singh was close to Pakistani parliamentarian and 25th hereditary ruler of Umerkot, Rana Chandra Singh whose wife had had matrimonial linkages to Singh’s family.

The Sodha gotra or lineage is part of the larger Rajput community in SouthAsia. Rajputs marry within the community but intermarriage within a gotra is strictly prohibited. Since 1123 AD when the first Sodha ruler Rana Amar Singh settled in Tharparkar and founded Amarkot, his descendants have traditionally married into Rajput gotras in neighbouring Rajasthan state.

After Independence and Partition 1947, local deputy commissioners were authorised to issue permits for people to cross the border. There was a direct flight between Hyderabad, Sindh, and Jodhpur, Rajasthan, says the Rana Hamir Singh, the 26th Sodha rule of Umerkot.

Before Partition, his grandfather Arjun Singh went by train from Amarkot to Jodhphur. His father Chandra Singh’s barat flew from Hyderabad to Jaipur to bring back Rajmata Subhdra Kumari from Bikaner.

“When my mother missed her favourite food, katchoris and samosas, my father deputed a kamdar to go by train to Jodhpur and bring them to make her happy,” Hamir Singh chuckles at the memory.

Cross-border marriages not just of the royalty but of ordinary Sodhas continue despite increasing difficulties. Since the 1965 war, visa regimes have solidified and become more restrictive.

“Maybe we should start looking at Rajput families in Nepal,” quips Sarita Kumari, Hamir Singh’s cousin married in Jaipur.

The Hyderabad-Jaipur flight was suspended in 1965, never to be revived. The train service was cancelled. The Thar Express running between Karachi and Jodhpur was revived in 2006, then cancelled in 2019 after escalating tensions between India and Pakistan.

Since then, the only regular border opening between the two countries is at Wagah near Lahore, 1,200 km north of Umerkot. Special permission is required to cross at the Monabao border, barely 40 miles from Umerkot.

Ganpat’s second wife Dimple has retained her Indian nationality. Son Kuldeep, 7, and daughter Priya, 3, both born in Umerkot, are Indian nationals. The three were in India when the coronavirus pandemic began. They returned to Pakistan in March for some months, going back in November to renew the children’s Indian passports.

It is less than an hour’s drive from Umerkot to Monabao. But crossing at Monabao requires hard-to-obtain special permission from the security forces.

With the Monabao crossing closed, Ganpat went all the way to Wagah border – over 1000 km from Umerkot to Lahore, then Amritsar to Jodhpur — to see off his wife and  children, and later to receive them.

Indian national

In 2018, the FRRO set up online services to allow visitors to apply electronically for visa extensions. However, several Sodhas told reporter Shishir Arya that they only submit papers physically at the FRROs  (‘Blacklisted’ over visa issues, Pak Hindu Rajputs miss out on funerals, weddings, Times of India, 1 Dec. 2021)

The Sodhas say the 30 or 40-day city-specific visa India grants is inadequate for their needs. Arranging marriages takes time, involving multiple visits to the prospective bride or bridegroom’s families, followed by long drawn-out wedding ceremonies.

When S.K. Singh became Governor Rajasthan, Rana Hamir Singh approached him for help. “I told him we have this problem.”

Singh requested President Pratibha Patil to intervene. The Home Ministry subsequently issued a special notification to the FRROs. But over the past few years, Indian officials have been overriding the authorisation.

When Ganpat applied for a six-month extension visa extension, the FRRO sent it on to Delhi instead of processing the application locally.

Unaware that the extension wasn’t forthcoming, Ganpat returned to Pakistan in May 2017 after his nieces’ weddings, a little more than two months after his original visa expiry but earlier than the requested extension.

No one raised any objections about an “overstay”, he says. In fact, the FRRO duly cleared his return through a ‘departure letter’ that is retained by Indian border officials. Had there been an issue, he says it would have been pointed out when he returned to Pakistan.

Weddings, funerals

When Ganpat applied for an Indian visa again, he found himself blocked. He misses his children. Most tragically, he was unable to be with his mother in her last days. She died on 15 May 2021, less than three weeks after his plea to the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.

Ganpat married his first wife Magan in Jodhpur, 1996. The train was cancelled in those days so the barat flew from Karachi to Delhi. Magan came to Umerkot and obtained Pakistani citizenship.

Their three children, son Chander Veer Singh and daughters, Meena and Disha, now 21, 20, and 12 respectively, were little when Magan died of hepatitis in Karachi in 2012.

Two years later, Magan’s family in Jodhpur arranged Ganpat’s marriage to her cousin Dimple Kumari. The children have lived in Jodhpur since. They visited Umerkot once, a couple of years later and would like to go again, but their long-term visas or LTVs require a no-objection return to India (NORI) visa if they leave the country. And that is not so easy to obtain, they say.

Chandar Veer got engaged at the end of November. All the family was present except Ganpat. He participated in the ceremony via video call from Unerkot.

“We missed Papa,” Meena tells Sapan News.

Kept apart

There are many other such families being kept apart by the visa issue. Several Sodhas told Shishir Arya of TOI that they duly apply for and are granted visa extensions in India. But after they return to Pakistan, their visa applications get rejected.

Ganpat estimates that there are around 300 cases of ‘blacklisted’ Sodhas. He knows of dozens of such cases, like Shakti Singh, a physician the only brother of four sisters married in India. When he visited them in 2017, he got a visa extension through the local FRRO. He wants to go again to get married but is being refused a visa on grounds of ‘overstay’ last time.

Another case is that of Lohran, 75, widowed recently and alone in Khipro village. She and her husband were both ‘blacklisted’. Their children are in India.

Visa issues also keep brides and grooms apart. Three years ago, Rana Hamir Singh hosted three barats from Jaisalmir to Umerkot. When the brides’ Indian visas didn’t come through, he got visa extensions for the grooms.

“I told the Pakistan government, they are my guests, stuck in this situation.” The grooms eventually left. The visas came three years later. By then babies had been born. “Can you imagine?”

Recently however Ganpat Singh got some good news. Inquiries about his case led to the blockage being cleared, and he was told to re-apply for a visa. He couriered the application to the Indian High Commission in Islamabad on 27 November. The process normally takes 4-6 weeks.

He now awaits the visa that will reunite him with his family, sadly without his mother.

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This story first appeared in Open The Magazine

From the dark years of Zia in Pakistan to the hijab row in India

Women across South Asia and beyond have for centuries loosely covered their heads and bosoms, regardless of religion, shielding themselves from unrelated men as well as from the hot sun.

Women entering the workforce in urban areas have been quicker to shed traditional attire. Those who find these changes threatening sometimes find ways to keep women in their place. Religion offers a convenient pretext.

The more conservative Muslim women in South Asia also traditionally wore a burqa, more all-enveloping than a chaddar or dupatta. My grandmother in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, used to wear a brown burqa that she discarded eventually in Karachi.

Growing up in Pakistan under the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, 1978-88, women like me have firsthand experience of such tactics. We watch in horror as shadows of the Zia dark years seem to spread across the border into India.

“You have turned out to be just like us,” wrote the Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz, addressing Indians after the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. “Where were you hiding until now, brother?”

It was this tragic event initiated by the Hindu rightwing that contributed to the Indian Muslims’ growing sense of insecurity and allowed radical Muslims to gain ground, and gave rise to identity politics.

With her political acumen, Fahmida Riaz would have known, of course, that we have always been alike, the protestations of our rightwing constituencies notwithstanding. The killing fields of Punjab and Bengal in 1947 proved this. Mob violence and lynchings in the name of religion over the past years have provided further proof. So does how we treat our poor and vulnerable communities. Does the “hijab row” that started in Karnataka belong in this list? It’s a question worth considering.

Coming back to traditional standards of modesty for South Asian women, in cities, it has long been enough for women to wear a dupatta, the long, flimsy piece of cloth that traditionally covers the head and bosom. With modernisation/Westernisation, the dupatta increasingly became a token to complete an outfit, relegated to one shoulder, flung across the neck, or removed altogether.

As an intern at the daily The Star in Karachi, 1981-82, I’d go to work in a salwar kameez, often without a dupatta. Some of the other women journalists wore dupattas, some didn’t. The men we worked with, or encountered on our way to work, didn’t bother us. It was simply not an issue.

But General Zia’s military dictatorship made it into one. Trying to legitimise his rule on the pretext of religion—Pakistan wasn’t ‘Islamic’ enough—General Zia began to clamp down on women’s freedom.

The military regime’s obsession with overclad women extended to the sham parliament where the general would present women with chaddars—a heavier, larger version of the dupatta.

When women on television were directed to cover their heads, one newscaster resigned. Interestingly, across the border in India, we heard that women newscasters in Amritsar were also asked to cover their heads—it’s part of Punjabi culture, they said.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the rhetoric of ‘chaddar and char-dewari’ (purdah and the four walls of the home) began being touted as a prerequisite for women’s safety.

I hit back in the only way I knew. I typed out a satirical piece titled ‘A hundred and one uses of a chadar’, and illustrated it with single-column cartoons.

If you cursed yourself during a journey where you found yourself without napkins to wipe the kids’ hands, I wrote, “you are one of the so-called ‘liberated and modern’ women, uniniti­ated and chadar-less, who have not yet seen the light.” I listed various creative uses for the garment, including “pretend to be a laundry bag” to hide from unwelcome guests or “refuse to let a doctor near you on the grounds that you are too modest.”

“Yes indeed, a chadar is one of the most useful and absolutely essential items of a woman’s wardrobe. Without it you are nowhere. There are so many uses for it, once you’ve experienced its dependability and durability, you will never want to be without it.”

CAN’T SAY THE same for the “hijab”, a tight head covering that originated in the Middle East, and gradually made its way into South Asian culture in the 1980s. This coincided with the export of manpower and labour from the region to the Gulf states as well as the geopolitics in the neighbourhood.

America’s entry into Afghanistan via its proxy Pakistan transformed the Afghans’ national war of liberation against the Soviets into a ‘holy war’, a jihad backed by Saudi Arabia seeking to assert its brand of Wahhabi Islam against the Shia Islam making waves through the Iranian Revolution.

The hijab first became visible in south India with its strong connections to the Gulf states, much before it spread to the north. The phenomenon prompted a young journalist from Kerala in 2009 to pitch a piece on the rise of the hijab in her region to the online publication TwoCircles.net. The piece contains interviews of several women and concludes that while the hijab used to be viewed as a sign of oppression, that narrative “failed as more and more educated women are turning to the hijab.”

Opposition to the garment is based on fear, she commented. “A fear of what would happen if women get to know and practise Islam well. The fear that traditional leaders have of the loss of their authority. However, women who wear the hijab feel safe, secure and confident. And that helps them to succeed.” (‘Hijab in Kerala: The transformation from ignorance to knowledge’, Najiya O, TwoCircles.net, August 8, 2009.)

It’s not just a symbol of religious identity but “also a fashion statement and a way to connect to and be part of a global conver­sation,” comments Boston-based biotech professional Kashif-ul-Huda, Indian-origin founder and former editor of TwoCircles.net.

“It’s complicated”, as he says. Not all scholars agree that Muslim women must wear the hijab. Some uphold the view that the real purdah lies in the eyes.

In 1993, about 10 years after my little satire on the chaddar, as a features editor with The Frontier Post in Lahore, I commis­sioned a journalist in the industrial town of Faisalabad (former Lyallpur) to report on the education department’s directive to college principals telling female students to cover their heads to and from school. The ministry of religious affairs had jumped in, directing the principals to report back with their compliance.

I wanted to highlight the pressures on young women. If they want to cover their heads, they should be allowed to do so, I reasoned. They don’t need a directive from the men at educational or religious ministries telling them what to wear and how to wear it.

The onslaught has continued, with women’s clothes and bodies being increasingly politicised.

THE PUSHBACK FROM working women and activists has led to some gains. There are also setbacks. In general, women in Pakistan have increasingly been pushed into “cover­ing” at least in urban public spaces. For rural women, the question doesn’t generally arise.

In 2018, women’s groups initiated a celebration of women’s rights on International Women’s Day, March 8, called the “Aurat Azadi (women’s freedom) March”. Held in cities across the country, it has become an annual event, observed even in small towns and villages. The more popular it gets, the more threatened the orthodox elements of society feel.

In past years, some participants carried placards with slogans that irked those holding conservative, traditional views. These slogans have been used as a pretext to attack the entire event, and to ban it.

The ministry of religious affairs in Pakistan has now urged the government to declare March 8, International Women’s Day, as “Hijab Day” in Pakistan. Really?

There is already an annual World Hijab Day, started on the first day of February in 2013 by an American Muslim woman in New York. Which makes sense if you’re trying to assert your Muslim identity, particularly, as an immigrant.

Women in Muslim-majority Pakistan hardly need support and solidarity to assert their Muslim identities.

In neighbouring India, it is worth noting that despite the onslaught of Hindutva supremacy, Muslim women have been making strides. They hold top ranks in universities across the country. Besides education, they are steadily advancing on vari­ous fronts, including financially, politically and culturally.

Kashif-ul-Huda shares an anecdote from a few years ago, when he visited India and spoke to a largely Muslim college au­dience in Azamgarh, UP. Towards the end, he asked how many of the female students wanted to go abroad.

All hands went up. Why?

“Ambition. They are all very ambitious.”

And that is very threatening not just to the Muslim ortho­doxy, but also to the Hindutva lobby. You are just like us, after all, as Fahmida Riaz said. No surprise that vested interests are using the hijab row to advance their own agendas, with com­petitive communalism further hardening positions.

Many of the protests are clearly orchestrated, with righ­twing organisations handing out saffron scarves to students to stage protests, as investigative journalists have revealed. (‘ TNM Investigation: How Hindutva group mobilised saffron-clad stu­dents at Udupi college ’, February 9, 2022.)

This is politically convenient for the ruling party as the se­nior journalist Prem Shankar Jha has outlined in a recent piece: “Like the Pulwama suicide bombing in 2019, the hijab contro­versy has come as an unsolicited gift to a BJP government that has been on its back feet since its mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis last year. (‘Thanks to the Hijab Issue, India is Falling Once More into the Communal Trap’, The Wire, February 2022.)

In the end, the issue is not about uniforms and hijabs, but upholding power politics and keeping Muslim women down. Having seen the pattern in Pakistan, it’s sad to see it being replicated in India.

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This story first appeared in Journeys to democracy

Even while grieving the loss of her father to Covid-19 the previous day, journalist Barkha Dutt was able to put aside her own pain to send out a powerful message to the world: “Don’t treat this as our problem alone,” she said in an interview to ITV.

Her father was one of over 2,500 Indians who reportedly succumbed to the coronavirus on Tuesday – the real numbers are suspected to be far higher as many dying at home are not counted as Covid victims. If the Covid-19 crisis “erupts” in India, it will “hit the world.” Countries understandably want to shut borders as a “necessary” short term response and put their citizens first but “we live in a world where we cannot be separated indefinitely,” she added.

A number of us had made a similar plea underscoring the connected nature of today’s world and the regionalism of South Asia, at an online discussion originally aimed to focus on Khelne Do (play for peace) on Sunday under the series title – Imagine! Neighbours in Peace’. We changed the focus at the last minute to share grief and solidarity as the situation in India spiraled out of control.

See press release below.

‘Fighting Covid-19 requires empathy and cooperation’ –  South Asia Peace Action Network

Press release, April 26:

As dozens of South Asians came together for an online gathering Sunday to express grief and solidarity amidst the suffering inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, a poignant moment arrived when one of the participants – a long time human rights and peace activist in Karachi – revealed his personal pain.

Trade unionist Karamat Ali said his wife was visiting Delhi and was down with Covid-19 infection, but visa restrictions did not allow him to visit her.

“I want to go to the Wagah border and take a tank of oxygen to my wife, but I can’t,” said Ali, his voice choking. He said he wanted to also take a defibrillator and whatever medical supplies he could carry.

Karamat Ali’s story illustrates the anguish of divided families unable to help loved ones across the border. The frustration is compounded as citizens above the age of 65 are entitled to visa-on-arrival at the border, according to the 2012 agreement signed by India and Pakistan, ignored by both sides.

The online event was organized by the recently launched South Asia Peace Action Network (SAPAN), which seeks to complement other organisations working to bring peace in South Asia. The Network believes that a great volume of pain and suffering could be mitigated through greater socio-economic cooperation, resource-sharing, and a visa-free South Asia, a region with soft borders reflecting the shared history and inter-connected space.

On fighting the pandemic, the participants emphasised the need for cross-border empathy and cooperation.

The focus of the Sunday event, originally planned as a call to open sporting ties – #KhelneDo – and visas in the South Asia, #MilneDo, was changed at the last minute due to the dire situation on the ground in India where a mounting daily death toll and rising infection rates are stretching health facilities, crematoriums and burial grounds beyond capacity.

Other participants also shared their experience of personal loss over the past 24 hours. Prominent educationist Baela Jamil had to leave the programme as news came in about a cousin’s death in Lahore. Eminent sports journalist Sharda Ugra lost a friend in Mumbai that morning, prominent photojournalist Vivek Bendre. Two prominent peace activists also passed away that morning in India.

Pivoting from the original discussion titled ‘Khelne Do – Imagine! Neighbours in Peace’, top sports personalities, journalists and activists instead shared thoughts and experiences in a moving expression of regional solidarity even as the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic hit India grievously.

The T20 World Cup cricket, scheduled in India later this year had raised hopes that India would grant visas to Pakistani players, media and fans.

The event was the first of a series of monthly discussions being curated by a coalition of individuals and organisations joining hands to take forward the principles and ideals of peace, justice, democracy and human rights in South Asia as championed by the late I.A Rehman, Asma Jahangir, Dr Mubashir Hasan, Nikhil Chakravartty, Nirmala Deshpande, Kuldip Nayar, Rajni Kothari and others.

Other participants at the meeting included Kathmandu-based journalist Kanak Mani Dixit, environmental, peace and rights activist Lalita Ramdas and former Indian Navy chief R. Ramdas in Alibag village, south of Mumbai, former Planning Commission member Dr Syeda Hameed in Delhi, Lahore-based artists Salima Hashmi, Dhaka-based activists Nazneen Firdausi and Khushi Kabir, journalist Rajdeep Sardesai from Delhi, Boston-based journalist Beena Sarwar from Karachi, former Pakistani test cricketer Jalaluddin, international squash player Nooreena Shams and sports journalists Afia Salam in Karachi and Zainab Abbas in Lahore.

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This story first appeared in The Wire

That a poor man ends up spending years in jail due to bureaucratic delays points to a larger issue. But Ismail Sama’s repatriation also gives cause for some hope.

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This story first appeared in The Wire

According to the recent report of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the US government has traditionally promoted free press at home and around the globe. However, such a reputation was marred under Donald Trump’s presidency. 

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This story first appeared in beenasarwar.com

Journalist and SAWM member Beena Sarwar writes about Justice Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim whom the writer lovingly called Fakru Uncle. Not only an emotional tribute to  the man who wore many hats in his lifetime but an in-depth discussion on why he should be remembered for his political ideology – this one is a must read.

Justice Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim (12 February 1928-7 January 2020) gained respect early on in his career for refusing to take oath under the military dictatorship of Gen. Ziaul Haq. Through his life he wore many hats — founder member Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Pakistan Supreme Court judge, Governor Sindh, Chief Election Commissioner, to name some. But a little-known feather in his cap is his pro bono work for the imprisoned leftist and student activists of the 1950s, that he credited for his politicisation. Those, he would say, were “the best days” of his life. Here’s that story as I heard it from him and from my father Dr. M. Sarwar, published in The News on Sunday and The Wire a few days after Fakhru Uncle passed on.

As the debate on the much-delayed restoration of student unions in Pakistan gathers momentum, we celebrate and commemorate a beloved jurist who cut his teeth by taking on cases of detained student activists pro bono in the 1950s.

Justice (retd.) Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim passed away quietly at home on 7 January 2020, just weeks short of his 92^nd birthday, surrounded by family – wife, children and grandchildren.

Just days earlier, in a brief New Year message to his grandchildren, he had reminded them of the importance of planning together, walking together, eating together, and giving “everybody a chance” to improve their lot in life. A revolutionary, invigorating and inspiring message, particularly given how frail and unwell he was at the time, commented his granddaughter Kulsoom Ebrahim who recorded the video.

Fakhru Uncle, as I called him because of his relationship with my father Dr M. Sarwar, loved telling the story of how he had got into progressive politics.

It is a coincidence and an irony that Fakhru Uncle passed away on 7 January, the day observed in 1953 as Demands Day by the Democratic Students Federation, DSF, Pakistan’s first nation-wide student movement that my father led (1949-54).

In 1954 Sarwar, then a medical student, was in prison along with a host of other students and progressive activists. It was young Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim’s interaction with these student political prisoners that contributed to his politicisation after he moved to Karachi in 1950 from Bombay where he received his first law degree.

After obtaining his LLM from Sindh Muslim Law College, he set up practice “at a most convenient location”, as he told me, near Karachi Central Jail. One of his first clients was the prominent journalist Z.A. Suleri, incarcerated as an A Class prisoner.

While visiting Karachi Jail to meet with Suleri, Ebrahim heard about the students imprisoned there “just for their political convictions” as he remembered. As part of the largely apolitical, business-oriented Gujrati Bohri community, this world was new to him.

But something about the story of the students jailed just for their political beliefs struck a chord in him and fired his imagination. He met with my father and other students and took on their cases pro bono, including that of the legendary Communist Party of Pakistan leader Hasan Nasir.

Hasan Nasir and the students, said Fakhru Uncle, “weren’t paying me anything so I had nothing to lose. So I became very brave, very courageous, and I gained a ferocious reputation. That’s why I always say it was Hasan Nasir who made a lawyer out of me.”

Hasan Nasir remains an icon of resistance, disappeared in the prime of his youth after Pakistan’s first military coup imposed by Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1958.

For the student prisoners back in 1953, “it was because of Fakhru Bhai that our cases were heard, we were released, and we are here today,” says Iqbal Alavi, paying tribute to his old friend.

In 1954, Alavi was the last of the progressive activists to be arrested. Then a trade union leader with Orient Airways, PIA’s predecessor, he continues to organise for progressive politics through various fora in Karachi including Irtiqa Study Centre, the Hamza Alavi Foundation, and Society for Secular Pakistan, as well as his work with Rotary International.

Iqbal Alavi shared a special bond with Nasir as they both came from Hyderabad, Deccan. Nasir, the “eternal optimist” as his friends remember him, retained his high spirits in prison. When Alavi landed in prison, he found Nasir exulting at the election of D. N. Aidit as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), the largest in the world after the USSR and China.

“The leadership is going into the hands of the youth,” proclaimed Nasir, reading an old issue of Newsweek magazine that the imprisoned comrades would squabble over. This was long before the U.S.-backed Indonesian army overthrew Sukarno and massacred his left-wing supporters and other progressive activists in 1965, in what the CIA itself termed “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century” (Indonesia — The Coup that Backfired, 1968).

The students imprisoned in 1954 began to be released one by one after Ebrahim and other lawyers began filing habeas corpus petitions on their behalf and the Sindh High Court heard and decided their cases on individual bases. Some were in prison for months, some for a year or more like my father. Iqbal Alavi, the last to be arrested, was the last to be released.

Hasan Nasir was released under general amnesty along with the others a few months later and sent back to India along with the Communist Party leader Sajjad Zaheer. But Nasir sneaked back into Pakistan in 1955 and began operated underground. The military authorities picked him up again in 1958 after Ayub Khan imposed martial law.

The military authorities nabbed Hasan Nasir and carted him off to a dungeon in the infamous Lahore Fort. This was different than being held in a police lockup or prison cell. The Fort was “the seat of power of the dreaded CID and Intelligence Bureau of the time. Where Hasan Nasir could resist the demands of the jail authorities, in the Fort such demands could be taken as resistance that more torture could tame and discipline” as Kamran Asdar Ali notes (Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan, 1947-1972, OUP, 2015).

News about Hasan Nasir’s death surfaced in 1960 only during court hearings after Major Ishaq filed a habeas corpus petition seeking information about his whereabouts.

Ishaq, of course, was one of those imprisoned along with the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case 1951. They had been sentenced to long prison terms but released in 1957 after their defence lawyer Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the eminent Bengali politician, became Prime Minister in and obtained a reprieve for them.

As an ad hoc judge in 1981, Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim gained widespread respect for his principled stand in refusing to take oath under the provisional constitutional order imposed by Gen. Ziaul Haq’s military dictatorship. Other judges who took this stand were Chief Justice Sheikh Anwarul Haq and Justice Dorab Patel.

In 1987, the retired judges Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim and Dorab Patel were among the co-founders of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan launched by Asma Jahangir and friends. This remains the most credible institution and voice for the vulnerable in Pakistan.

The day after Fakhru Uncle passed away in Karachi, students in Karachi and Lahore gathered at the press clubs in their respective cities to express solidarity with fellow students in India who are under fire for standing up for their rights.

The demonstration in Karachi was followed by a discussion at the Press Club about the Sindh government’s approval of a draft law to restore student unions, banned in 1984 by the Ziaul Haq military regime. Their consultative meeting on 8 January, presided over by veteran lawyer Justice (retd) Rasheed A. Razvi, developed several recommendations that they will discuss further before presenting to the provincial assembly.

The day of their deliberations is relevant to the student unions debate for another reason. “Three days that shook the country” in 1953 were 7-10 January, as headlined in the Student Herald, edited by S.M. Naseem, DSF General Secretary at D.J. Science College.

January 2020 has a similar feel not only in Pakistan but also India.

Fakhru Uncle, rest in peace. You leave a fine legacy.

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The people of Kashmir are losing out on the human rights and political rights everyday as the Indian state is constantly trying to silence them. Local journalists are fighting tooth and nail to maintain the freedom of Media. Beena Sarwar listens to the unheard voices from Kashmir and writes this article. Beena is SAWM member and journalist.

The social media noise and majoritarian chest-thumping in India and Pakistan, about Kashmir, crowds out a critical factor in the equation — the Kashmiri people. It overshadows their trauma. And it obscures a larger context: the ongoing fight for democracy and human rights in India that is relevant elsewhere too.

Trauma. People rendered voiceless and invisible by curfew and communications shutdown. Families unable to connect with their loved ones, a black cloud of silence shrouding the area, preventing people from reaching loved ones in Kashmir and vice versa. Never before have even telephone landlines been cut off like this.

Journalist Ashwaq Masoodi, who landed in Boston for the Nieman Fellowship a few days ago, was unable to reach her parents in Kashmir for days after saying goodbye to them in Srinagar.

“It’s not that I spoke to them every day when I was working in Delhi,” she said when we met. “Just the feeling that I can’t talk to them…” Her voice trailed off, eyes bright with unshed tears.

Censorship

Trauma. Media blackout. Journalists smuggling copy out on pen drives. Two weeks after the clampdown, even where the internet has started working, it is slow and patchy. “Although there is no direct press censorship today in Kashmir, blocking all means of communication is, in fact, a form of censorship. It has prevented any information about what Kashmiris feel about these developments and what is happening there from reaching the rest of the country,” writes Mumbai-based Indian journalist Kalpana Sharma in her blogpost, comparing the current situation to the Emergency in India in 1975.

Ironically, the last report Ashwaq Masoodi wrote before leaving Delhi for Kashmir in mid-July was about the Emergency. People she interviewed talked about the “eerie silence” of that time. She experienced it for herself in Srinagar after curfew was imposed and all communications cut off on August 4.

Trauma. Preventive detention. Political leaders and activists placed under house-arrest or jailed, invoking the colonial-era law with which the British used to run India for 200 years, as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen points out.

Trauma. ‘Development’. Investors eyeing a region where a pre-partition Dogra-era law has restricted outsiders from owning land in Kashmir, including children of Kashmiri women married to ‘outsiders’. Similar restrictions exist in other Indian states too — Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Nagaland (Myth No 1 about Article 370: It prevents Indians from buying land in Kashmir, Scroll, May 2014).

Trauma. Implied sexual violence. The videos circulating on WhatsApp of men joking that they are now free to go “get Kashmiri girls” are no laughing matter in Kashmir, still haunted by memories of Kunan Poshpora. Rape is an old weapon of war, used not just by security forces, but also militants.

Visceral Pain

For many, the BJP government’s unilateral revoking of Kashmir’s special status feels akin to “a visceral, agonizing pain, like the blade of a sharp knife slowly cutting into your skin as you lay motionless, unable to scream or resist. After days of psychological trauma and mental exhaustion, Kashmiris finally understood what it was they were preparing for. In the end, it was all about the land…” (Ashwaq Masoodi, States of Kashmir: How to disappear a people, N+1, August 17, 2019).

The Delhi-based rights organisation, Anhad, is attempting to address some of the psychological, emotional and mental trauma through a series of ‘sharings’ for Kashmiri students in Delhi, besides activists and intellectuals. The first such session on August 18, planned for three hours, continued for six. A drop in the ocean of tears.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru initially refused to impose India’s will on Kashmir at the “point of the bayonet” or to “stay against the wishes of the people”. This changed in the late 1950s. The rhetoric has since upheld Kashmir as an integral part of India, its ‘atoot ang’ (jugular vein).

Pakistanis are too familiar with the trauma of oppression. Pakistan’s outrage about Kashmir stems also from seeing Kashmir as rightfully theirs, as part of the ‘unfinished business of Partition’. And, because Kashmiris are fellow-Muslims. The sectarian violence, censorship, political victimisation and human rights abuses in Pakistan add an element of irony and hypocrisy to the outrage.

Trauma. Being treated as a bone in a dog fight. Kashmir is not merely a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, but a matter of the lives and aspirations of the Kashmiri people, who must be consulted on any decisions about their future, as the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy has been saying for the past two decades.

All Kashmiris

The people of Jammu and Kashmir means all the people, not just the Muslims of Kashmir Valley.

The Pakistan view rarely recognises that Kashmiris are not a homogenous entity. Besides the Muslim-majority Valley, there is the Buddhist-dominated Ladakh – where many are celebrating their new Union Territory status – as well as large populations of Sikhs, Hindus and Dogras. The essence of ‘Kashmiryat’ (the spirit of Kashmir) has historically been their strong interfaith relationships, their secular nature, and the Sufi strain of Islam they adhere to.

Until the forced exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in 1990, following a series of targeted killings and attacks, “you couldn’t tell a Rafiq from a Ram”, says New York-based poet Rafiq Kathwari.

The pain of the exiled Pandits is real, even if their losses are miniscule compared to the thousands of Muslim Kashmiris disappeared, imprisoned, tortured and killed.

Acclaimed theatre director MK Raina, tending to his sick mother in a Srinagar hospital, vividly remembers the killings, militants roaming openly, the “Islamic” slogans blasting from mosque loudspeakers, and the panic all this created. Many of his fellow Pandits left secretly, including close friends and relatives. After his mother passed away – her funeral was hard to arrange given the situation – he too left Srinagar with his father and brother. Refusing to let his Kashmiri Pandit identity trump his humanity, he continues to go and work with young people of all faiths on theatre and art projects in Kashmir, helping them process their own trauma.

Existential Issue

Kashmir is an existential issue for Pakistan because all her rivers originate in Indian-administered Kashmir. India needs to appreciate this, but does not, as the late South African water expert and Harvard professor, John Briscoe, wrote in his seminal piece suggesting some ways out of the conflict. His ideas involve eschewing ego, which neither party seems capable of doing.

War rhetoric between India and Pakistan dominates the narrative, amplified immeasurably in the age of social media and made to look more important than if they were contained. The situation is creating a crisis not just for nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, but for the world, as Professor Adil Najam of Boston University points out.

Even US President Donald Trump is trying to get his two “good friends”, Imran Khan and Narender Modi, to de-escalate, even though he has over-simplified the issue into ‘Hindu-Muslim’. To view the situation solely through the lens of an India-Pakistan conflict or a Hindu-Muslim prism is to willfully ignore the Kashmiri people and their ‘Kashmiriyat’.

The dominant narrative gives the impression that there is no alternative but to use force and/or armed militancy. Violence is a slippery slope, a negative downward spiral from which it is hard to emerge. As human beings, we have the ability, intelligence and creativity to find alternatives. While we are at it, let’s put the Kashmiri people at the front and center, and consider what has helped and what has hurt them.

Armed militancy has not helped the Kashmiris. The invasion of Kashmir soon after Independence in 1947 by Pakistani tribesmen catalysed India’s intervention, invited by the panicking Maharaja of Kashmir. In 1999, after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, the Kargil ‘war-like situation’ pushed regional tensions to new heights from which perhaps we have never recovered.

‘Kargil was a mistake’

In 2000, TV journalist Barkha Dutt, accompanying the Women’s Peace Bus to Lahore after the ‘Kargil war’ asked the then dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, if he would admit that Kargil was a mistake.

“Kargil was a mistake…” he repeated. Then, in the brief, stunned silence that followed, he laughingly added, “I will never say that.”

Musharraf tried later to resolve the Kashmir issue and may even have come close. However, the Musharraf-Vajpayee four-point formula died a premature death due to various factors.

Brandishing Pakistani flags at demonstrations in London, New York or Boston does not help the Kashmiris either. It only supports the narrative in India that Kashmiris are traitors and makes it easier to dismiss the Kashmiri struggle for rights as Pakistan-backed. And it takes away agency from the Kashmiris, as if they are not capable of speaking for themselves.

Pakistani involvement also repels Indians who oppose the BJP’s actions in Kashmir. One Indian Muslim woman in Boston who was planning to go to the Kashmir solidarity demonstration last Saturday changed her mind when she saw the word ‘occupation’ on the poster. “I am against what is happening in Kashmir, but I believe Kashmir is part of India,” she said.

Pakistanis would do well to remember how they feel when Indians agitate against human rights abuses in Pakistan.

However, rights activists on both sides can join hands in solidarity, as many Pakistanis have done, joining Indians abroad in expressing solidarity with Kashmir and condemning the Indian government’s undemocratic actions. For example, endorsements to a statement signed by 150 Harvard students, faculty and alumni from around the world, or the letter initiated by a Nepali activist, endorsed by over 250 South Asian activists and academics.

Neither India nor Pakistan have ever acknowledged or apologised for any wrongdoing. Those who blame the insurgency in Kashmir solely on external forces are turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses, brutalities and corruption in the region, and to the Kashmiris’ visible and growing discontent and alienation with India.

India’s beleaguered human rights activists are courageously fighting on; concerned citizens in India, members of Left parties, the National Alliance of People’s Movements, trade unions, students, women, civil society organisations and others are standing in solidarity with the Kashmiri people. They are demonstrating publicly in every major Indian city and dozens of small towns.

Solidarity

Members of the Kashmir Solidarity Team who visited J&K on August 9-13 have given a scathing indictment of the situation. “We state that, as Indian citizens, we vehemently reject the Government of India’s treatment of Jammu and Kashmir and its people. We assert that any decision about the status or future of Jammu and Kashmir that is taken against the will of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, is immoral, as well as unconstitutional and illegal.”

The team found the whole of Jammu and Kashmir “a prison, under military control”. Their demands, clear and bold, are categorical:

* Immediately restore Articles 370 and 35A.
* No decision about the status or future of J&K to be taken without the will of its people.
* Restore communications with immediate effect.
* Lift the gags on the freedom of speech, expression and protest from J&K with immediate effect. “The people of J&K are anguished — and they must be allowed to express their protest through media, social media, public gatherings and other peaceful means.”
* Immediately lift the gags on journalists in J&K.

The battle is also being fought on the legal front. As of August 18, no less than nine petitions had been filed in Supreme Court of India challenging the cancellation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, its bifurcation, and the media clampdown in Kashmir.

There is a tenth petition, filed by dozens of Kashmiri Pandits, Sikhs and Dogras, MK Raina tells me. There may be others.

What is happening in Kashmir is part of a larger fight for democracy and human rights, against totalitarianism, authoritarianism and fascism, as underlined by the National Convention in Defence of Democratic Rights being convened on August 31-September 1, 2019 in New Delhi.

Organised by around 20 people’s groups, the convention will address the “undermining of the cherished constitutional freedoms of association, expression and speech” that threatens human rights activists and people’s movements in India.

I can think of other places where such conventions would be relevant too.

Personal Political is an occasional syndicated column by Beena Sarwar.

Original Story

I wrote this piece for a web dossier produced by Heinrich Boell Foundation for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights‘ 70^th anniversary 2018 – Asma Jahangir – ein bedeutungsvolles Leben, ein inspirierendes Erbe. Sharing now, a year after Asma Jahangir has passed on. This piece doesn’t include her role for peace in the region and in the UN system that I’ve written about earlier and also detailed in a longer essay to be printed in an anthology titled Voices of Freedom from Asia and the Middle East,co-edited by Mark Dennis and Rima Abunasser, TCU, is under publication by SUNY Press. Above: Asma Jahangir at her office; still from my documentary Mukhtiar Mai: The struggle for justice (2006)

By Beena Sarwar

The field on the outskirts of Lahore was full of workers waiting to hear the woman from the city speak. They squatted on their haunches with dull hopeless eyes, the drab greys and browns of their clothes at one with the earth they fashioned into bricks to bake in bhattas — kilns that dot the rural landscape of Punjab and upper Sindh. For their back-breaking labour they were paid in kind, leading to generations of indebtedness as the traditional informal economy transitioned into a cash-based system.

The woman they had come to hear was Asma Jahangir. A petite figure with piercing eyes and short black hair, she clambered onto the roof of a jeep with her driver’s help. As her booming voice with measured pauses rippled across the squatting bhatta workers they “came alive”, recalls Dutch radio journalist Babette Niemel who had travelled to the rally with Asma.

It was a cold winter day in early 1989. On the hour-long car ride over to the field, Asma had pulled out travel mugs of coffee and sandwiches. They returned to Asma’s office by lunch time and Asma got right back to work.

That was Asma. Tremendously hardworking but always a caring and considerate host. Despite the stresses of her busy life, she always made sure there was lunch.

The rally of bhatta workers Asma addressed that day may well mark the moment that she came into her own as a political leader, suggests former finance minister Dr Mubashir Hasan, a founding member of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan that Asma had set up in 1986 along with a host of other eminent personalities.

There are many behind the HRCP’s success as a solid and credible institution. But it was Asma’s consummate skill as an empowering leader who led by example and took others along with her that set the tone.

Her activism coupled with her legal work led to the seminal Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992, a step towards ending the system of generational debt that still holds many in slavery.

Reporting on the issue in those years, I started volunteering with the HRCP. In 1993, Asma got me to contest HRCP Council elections, dismissing my hesitations and leading me by the hand to introduce me to one senior Council member after another. Elected to this policy-making body for six years (three terms) I participated in meetings marked by a high level of debate and discussion. Here I saw and experienced first-hand Asma’s clarity of vision, her persuasive powers, and ability to get people from differing points of view to agree on a minimum common agenda.

I also witnessed her strong sense of media savvy, far ahead of her time. She would send out press releases about important issues she had taken up legally, cutting through the hypocrisy and babble of confusing news. Unlike those who promote their own achievements, she never publicised herself or the awards and recognitions she received.

The cases she took up were at the heart of the social changes and conflicts Pakistan was undergoing in the post-Zia era. This landed her in the cross-hairs of those threatened by the changes that are occur as people become more aware of their rights. The forces of status quo began intensifying their use of age-old weapons like “blasphemy” allegations to suppress different religious communities, and “tradition” and “religion” to keep women in their place.

In 1993, Asma took on the defence of Salamat Masih, an illiterate 11-year old Christian boy accused of writing ‘blasphemous’ words on the wall of a mosque. He and his father Rehmat and uncle Manzoor, co-accused with him, were threatened while under trial. On 12 April 1994 armed assailants opened fire as they left the district court. The hail of bullets killed Manzoor and injured Salamat, Rehmat and several others.

The attack on Salamat Masih was not an isolated incident. Asma was also under severe threat. Glossy colour stickers and posters cropped up all over Lahore, terming Asma a ‘blasphemer’ and urging ‘believers’ to find and kill her. On at least one occasion, such stickers were mysteriously distributed with the morning edition of English language daily Dawn.

One handwritten anonymous letter threatened to hunt her down and kill her, the writer’s stated mission in life. But there was another letter — from a slightly built, clean-shaven Afridi tribesman, Zarteef Afridi who was also Coordinator for HRCP in Khyber Agency. He volunteered to come down to Lahore with an armed ‘lashkar’ (posse) to protect her. Asma politely declined.

In that atmosphere of threats and intimidation, Afridi’s letter of support was a message of hope, particularly coming as it did from an area known for its religious conservatism. The HRCP provided a platform for those willing to counter retrogressive trends even in traditionally conservative areas. (Sadly, he himself was killed in 2011).

On 9 February 1995, the court sentenced Salamat and Rehmat to death. Salamat told Asma, “I am in God’s hands. I am sure that God will give us justice”.

“He seemed shocked yet calm, but when I put my arm around him, he was trembling,” Asma told British writer Danny Smith (Shouting Into the Silence: One Man’s Fight for the World’s Forgotten; Lion Hudson, 2013; pp 114-117).

When it became clear that Asma would file an appeal against the verdict in the Lahore High Court, a violent mob on 16 February called for her to be included among the accused. Frenzied men attacked her car, smashing the windows. Luckily, she was not in the vehicle. “We saved your driver but couldn’t save your car,” her friends told her.

Accompanied by the personal bodyguard she had recently hired, Asma left the court under police escort. Undaunted, she went ahead with the appeal. On 23 February, the case against Salamat and Rehmat was dismissed on the grounds that being illiterate they could not have written the blasphemous words. Asma did not see the acquittal as a victory.

“Don’t start celebrating,” she said.  “It’s not over. The extremists will want revenge and I am sure that there will be other similar cases. The blasphemy law should be changed.” She was right on both counts.

This stand made her more enemies. In October, eight armed intruders broke into her family house and beat up her brother and his wife. Asma who lived next door at her in-laws’, was out at the time. As the security guards opened fire and police arrived, the men fled. They left behind a stolen vehicle containing ropes, cotton wool, knives and arms. An ID card copy in it led to their arrest.

Asma went to see them in the police station because, she said, “I wanted to be sure myself, they had only heard of me… They had been told it would be rewarding for them to kill me.” As she talked to them, she realised “they were pawns in the hands of powerful people, leaders of sectarian groups who actually sowed the seeds of hatred in young minds… The perception they had of me was some kind of a demon, but to see me humanly there, they wondered whether the perception given to them was correct or not.” (Martin Ennals Award, Youtube, 1995).

She sent her children to boarding schools abroad for their safety. She missed them terribly but never considered changing her path. And, incredibly, she forgave the attackers, withdrawing the case against them.

The social changes taking place meant that young people from various backgrounds were also increasingly breaking traditions. Asma stuck to her principled position based on fundamental rights. The conservative lobby was further enraged when she took on the “Saima Waheed Love Marriage Case” in 1997.

Saima Waheed Ropri, a 22-year old business administration graduate and daughter of a well-known religious leader, had secretly married her brother’s tutor. She lived on at her father’s house, hoping to tell her family and bring them round. When she found they had arranged her marriage elsewhere, she donned a burqa and fled in a taxi to AGHS. This was Pakistan’s first all-women law firm founded in 1980, named for the initials of its founders: Asma Jahangir, her friends Gul Rukh and Shehla Zia, and younger sister Hina Jilani.

Asma took on the case as she would for anyone attempting to exercise their fundamental rights. AGHS also ran Dastak, a shelter house for women. Saima was housed there like many other clients of the firm.

The propaganda machine against Asma went into full swing once more. Her detractors accused her of having corrupted Saima. The “evidence” they cited for this included Saima’s new haircut, a bob, and jeans that she wore to court with her kurta rather than the traditional shalwar.

“I used to wear jeans at home too,” Saima told me, explaining that her father didn’t know because he didn’t come to the women’s part of the house. As for the hair, another woman at Dastak had done that.

The case sparked a frenzied debate about the right of an adult Muslim woman to marry of her own choice. It exposed the clash of cultures in a traditional society in the throes of change, especially in urban areas. Saima’s father argued that in his family’s religious sect a woman could not marry without her guardian’s permission “even if she is 60 years old”. This of course has more to do with tradition than religion.

The court upheld Saima’s marriage. But as with Salamat Masih’s case, this was not an unequivocal victory. The couple fearing for their lives, fled abroad.

“Women may have won the battle, but the war is not yet won,” said Asma, prescient as ever.

The case continued to hear the plea against women’s right to marry of their choice. The final judgement some time later called for basic amendments to family laws to enforce parental authority and discourage courtships, extra marital relationships and “secret” friendships and marriages. (It wasn’t until December 2003 that the Supreme Court struck down these opinions and upheld the right of adult women to marry of their free will).

The propaganda against Asma as “westernised”, “anti-religion” and “anti-Pakistan” was far from reality. She proudly represented Pakistan at international fora dressed typically in a kurta shalwar with a dupatta. Although she herself had married for love, she was family-oriented and negotiated a complex joint family system with determination and finesse, as a wife, daughter-in-law, mother, aunt, and grandmother. She fought courageously and consistently for the rights of the most downtrodden in society. Far from being against religion, she was against the misuse of religion or any other institution to exploit people.

At her very core she was someone who believed in equal rights for all regardless of class, ethnicity, or religion. And this is precisely what her detractors, bound for obscurity except in the viciousness of their attacks, found so threatening.

Asma, meanwhile, lives on, her example and legacy lighting the way for future generations of human rights defenders.

When a pioneering journalist pens her memoirs, you pay attention. Especially when she is Zubeida Mustafa of Pakistan, a long-time feminist and champion of social causes who, from her editorial perch at the daily Dawn, witnessed momentous transitions in the country’s media and political landscapes for over three decades. Beyond being a witness to change, she has also, as she realises with a thrill, “been a part of it, at times driving it and at times being driven by it.”

The narrative in this slim hardcover, My Dawn Years: Exploring Social Issues, is quintessential Zubeida Mustafa: direct, understated, deep, nuanced, thorough — and meticulously indexed. Black and white photos, though somewhat grainy, are well captioned, providing a pictorial reference to many of the events and people mentioned in the book.

The strong thread of honesty and integrity running throughout is unsurprising. These are values which the writer cherishes highly. “It is integrity that needs to be safeguarded,” she observes at the end of the chapter ‘Travels and People’, commenting on two greats from India she met: journalist Khushwant Singh and writer Qurratulain Hyder. “That is what matters in the end.”

Mustafa’s unique insights and wisdom pepper her memoir as she explores myriad issues ranging from socio-economic and political changes to changes in the profession she accidentally found herself part of.

What I enjoyed most are the many first-hand accounts and anecdotes, underpinned often by her dry sense of humour. There are countless such nuggets throughout the book relating to years of dictatorship, the women’s movement, the writer’s own attempts to empower her housekeeper — and the candid realisation years later that empowering an individual isn’t sustainable without involving the community — and so much more that make the book a must-read for anyone interested in Pakistan’s history, journalism, politics and issues related to gender and education.

A lovely memory is that of S.M. Mulgaokar, the erudite editor of The Indian Express who was on the One World editorial committee with Mustafa and who, on being roused from “Nodland”, would extricate himself deftly from the discussion with a brisk “No comments.”

Incidents relating to suppression of the media resonate sadly with current times, but what happened then seems almost gentle compared to what we are witnessing now. Mustafa’s editorial on the death sentence of South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung in 1980 “was twice pulled out by a functionary of the Press Information Department as his fertile imagination found too close a parallel between Kim and Bhutto”, both sentenced by a military regime for ‘political crimes’. Yet “another officer — or was it the same person —” passed the same editorial a week later. “Such were the vagaries of censorship which depended on the whims of one person.”

Another example: “An item with the headline ‘MLA shot dead’ had to be removed because an MLA in Pakistan stood for Martial Law Administrator and that might give people ideas. It couldn’t be argued with the censors that the news item was about a Member Legislative Assembly in Bihar, India.”

The good old days, when there was only one source of censorship.

She was in her room a few doors down from the editor’s office when the infamous incident of May 1989 took place: some young men “believed to have some connection” with the MQM barged into the editor’s office and bolted the door from the inside. Terrified, she could hear shouts and screams. On hearing of the drama, proprietor Hameed Haroon rushed down and entered the editor’s room from another door. His large build and “booming voice that can silence any bully” cowed the young men. They “stalked out, threatening to set the building on fire.” This was her first encounter with the threat of physical violence.

What triggered the attack? Twenty-eight years on, scouring the paper of that day, Mustafa could find nothing except a news item about one student group (linked to the PPP) accusing the other (linked to the MQM) of escalating tension after the murder of one of its members. “This was a typical case of my digging up a mountain to find a molehill!”

The narrative, organised thematically rather than chronologically, spans Mustafa’s professional life. Over 30 of those years were at Dawn, from July 1975 to January 2009. She thought about leaving Dawn only once, when former colleagues such as Ghazi Salahuddin, who had joined the new English-language paper started by the Jang Group, tried to lure her away. However, the approach of the manager negotiating her proposed salary — his lack of “the genteel touch” — helped her decide to stay on at Dawn. For Mustafa, old-world values such as “gentlemanliness” always trumped money and opportunity.

Her appreciation of her employers and editors at Dawn and loyalty towards them come across strongly, but Mustafa is not one to blindly overlook flaws and shortcomings. She writes candidly of the irritants and problems she encountered, but never in a complaining way; always with a sense of perspective and a touch of humour.

How she went about teaching herself about the issues she wanted to focus on — such as health and education — that impacted real people, how she struggled to get them into the paper’s main pages overcoming various kinds of resistance, her stance on women’s issues and Pakistan’s relations with India, how she set about reorganising Dawn’s library, and particularly how she got the editor, Ahmed Ali Khan, to agree to having air conditioning installed, all makes for fascinating, and at times amusing, reading.

Mustafa’s narrative stresses the importance of the institution of the editor and keeping the editorial separate from the proprietor and the commercial side of the paper. Working with integrity and dedication, remaining persistent and making your case for what you believe in, compromising and swallowing frustrations and keeping the doors of communication and dialogue open are lessons a discerning reader will learn from her experiences. She illustrates the benefits of the tightrope act in several instances. One example quotes the Dawn editorial when the Zia regime executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, when proprietor Mahmoud Haroon was part of the military establishment. What Dawn’s critics decry as an overly cautious approach, she concludes is in the long run essential not just to the paper’s reputation, but is also part of a strategy that entails being able to survive without being shut down or rendering people jobless, and living to fight another day.

Not a bad blueprint in general.

The cover of the book features a portrait of Mustafa; her cropped hair now all white, looking out with a forthright gaze from which you would not be able to tell that she’s losing her eyesight — a process she chronicles poignantly and honestly in the book. The waistcoat gives a professional touch. These are things Mustafa won’t say about herself directly, but in case you don’t get it through the written word, the photo also speaks of who she is: an educated woman with the confidence, courage and — as she acknowledges — class privilege to counter social norms in her own understated way, whether it’s wearing her hair short and dispensing with the dupatta or fighting for the rights of the vulnerable.

One doesn’t have to know Mustafa to appreciate that writing about herself didn’t come easily. She is part of a generation where journalists assiduously kept themselves out of the story. She alludes to this difficulty while describing how this book came about, and the people who pulled, pushed and prodded her to write about her journey.

The memoirs chronicle how she began her journey and negotiated her various roles at Dawn, initially as the only woman on the team in July 1975, when then editor Ahmed Ali Khan invited her to join the paper. She started as a leader writer and also produced two pages for the new Dawn Overseas Weekly catering to the growing number of expatriate Pakistanis. Later, she headed the now-defunct One World supplement whose journalistic significance she brings to the fore: an unprecedented collaboration by 15 international publications, focusing on shared global concerns. Something such as this would be most relevant today, given the linked challenges of globalisation, hyper-nationalisms and an increasingly interconnected, yet divided world.

Full disclosure: a personal aspect for me is that Mustafa is someone I have known and looked up to since 1982 when she was a senior colleague at Dawn, and I a lowly intern at the evening paper The Star down the hall. In those days, we didn’t go much for ‘Madams’ or ‘Apas’. The foreword is by Zohra Yusuf, my then editor at the The Star (also always Zohra to me despite her seniority), who urged Mustafa to write this inimitable book.

The reviewer is a journalist and filmmaker from Karachi, editor of Aman Ki Asha, and professor of journalism, most recently at Princeton University and Emerson College

My Dawn Years:
Exploring Social
Issues
By Zubeida Mustafa
Paramount, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9696374046
240pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 4th, 2018

source https://www.dawn.com

“If you could visit any place in Pakistan, where would you go?” asks Amardeep Singh whenever he gives a talk to introduce his recently published travelogue Lost Heritage – The Sikh Legacy In Pakistan.

The question, aimed primarily at Sikh members of the audience, invariably elicits two answers: Sikh holy places. Their ancestral village.

It was the same in Boston on June 18, 2016 at the E-5 Center where Amardeep Singh gave his 42nd such talk. He understands the response all too well. After all, he too once had the same “myopic” reasons, as he says, for wanting to go to Pakistan, which he considers his “homeland”, being the land of his ancestors and also where Sikhdom’s holiest sites are located, like Nanankana Sahib, birth place of Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru.

But when Singh did finally fulfill his dream to visit the country in October 2014, he had an epiphany halfway through his solitary trip that changed the meaning of his travels. It also changed the course of his life. He realised that reducing Pakistan to religion was doing a disservice to the country, its people and the larger cause of humanity.

The process may have begun earlier, when Singh applied for a visa at the Pakistan embassy in Singapore, where he has lived for the past 16 years. When the visa officer handed him back his passport, Singh refused to take it.

“I am going to my homeland for the first time,” said Singh, who was born in Gorakhpur, India, in 1966. “And you want to restrict me to ten days?”

The officer laughed and said he would increase the visa duration to 30 days. Emboldened, Singh pushed further. He wanted a visa for the entire country, not just two or three cities, and he wanted it to include “Pakistan Administered Kashmir” – the term that he prefers to use rather than the loaded “Pakistan occupied Kashmir” or “Azad Kashmir”. He suggests using such neutral language, also for “Indian Administered Kashmir” in an attempt to convey an acceptance of the reality that Pakistan or India manage the region, plus “it allows us to balance and focus on the core message of the book”.

Singh is “deeply grateful” to the Pakistan government for granting him a 30-day, non-police reporting country (rather than city-specific) visa – facilities normally denied most Indian / and Indian-origin travellers and vice versa.

But perhaps the story of the metamorphosis of a corporate banker into a photographer/travel writer starts even earlier. Singh was never a “corporate junkie”, even while working with American Express first in Hong Kong and then Singapore as head of revenue management.

He undertook many solitary trekking holidays in remote, far flung areas in India, Tibet and other places throughout his 25-year banking career. Then there was his love for history and travel that led him to devour travelogues like British era explorers like William Mooncroft (1819) and Alexander Burns (1831), and later accounts like Alice Albania’s ‘Empires of the Indus’.

Those experiences — travel with no access to the outside world, reading historical accounts and travelogues, photography, writing — he feels, were “God’s way” of preparing him. The dots joined organically. The Pakistan ‘pilgrimage’ that he initially started with, his life’s pursuit, became not the culmination of a dream but the starting point of another journey powered by secular, universal ideals.

Historical traumas like the cataclysmic 1947 Partition of India with its ensuing bloodshed produces a first generation that doesn’t talk, observes Amardeep. The second is lost. The third, to which he belongs, goes in pursuit of the stories.

His father was born in Muzaffarabad, in the western-most frontier of the former princely state of Kashmir that both India and Pakistan lay claim to and which in turn claims independence. Amardeep turned up to try and find his roots in Pakistan in 2013 like a wanderer on a pilgrimage, carrying three pairs of clothes, his camera, and the contacts of a couple of Facebook friends. “A madman in love” is how one audience member describes him.
In Pakistan, Singh says that he met and connected with 14 Pakistanis who were on a similar pursuit, to discover their common heritage. And all of them were Muslim. Singh realized that the legacy that they shared could not be easily compartmentalised into “Muslim” or “Sikh”.

The “Sikh Empire” touted in the history narrated by the British colonists and their successors, was actually deeply secular. The distortion of history has meant other, more dangerous falsehoods being perpetrated, like the basis-less rumour that Sikhs converted the Badshahi mosque in Lahore into a stable for horses. On the contrary, Ranjit Singh in fact gave financial grants to the Badshahi Masjid.

In the pre-partition era, Sikhs had invested heavily in creating the Khalsa schools and colleges, which imparted excellent education to students of all faiths. Abandoned by the departed community, these today operate as Islamia schools and colleges.

He also came across many non turban-wearing followers of the Sikh Guru Nanak in Pakistan, all of Pashtun origin and from the Khyber area.

These realisations – about the secular or syncretic nature of what he had assumed was a “Sikh” heritage — pushed Singh beyond his original limited goal of taking a fistful of earth back from Muzaffarbad as a momento for his family. It stopped him in his tracks as he picked up some riverbank soil at the site of a bloody massacre of Sikhs soon after Partition.

The place is known as “Domel”, where the Jhelum River meets the Neelum River. (“We even ascribe religion to our natural resources,” comments Singh, referring to the Muslim name, Neelum, for the waters known as Kishan Ganga on the Indian-administered side).

On October 21, 1947, a war cry arose over the hills that the local non-Muslims were ill-prepared to counter: Loot the Hindus, behead the Sikhs. Armed marauders herded some 300 Sikhs to the bridge on “Domel”. Shots rang out. Among the bodies that toppled into the river were the grandparents (Nana and Nani) of Amardeep Singh’s wife.

Also killed were both parents of five-year old Jaswanti. A Muslim neighbour the next morning found the little girl scrambling along the riverbank looking for her father and mother. He took her into his own home, renamed her Noori, and brought her up as his daughter.

Jaswanti/ Noor is Amardeep’s distant “bua” (aunt) related to his father. In his book he relates the stranger-than-fiction story of how she was found in 1998 and connected to her to the Sikh side of her family. At 73 years, today she continues to live in Pakistan as a Muslim.

Amardeep recounts how, looking at the bridge over the river, he let the soil fall back to the earth from his hands at “Domel”. It was what he had come for. But he realised that the lesson he wanted to impart to his children was different. This souvenir could remind them forever of hatred and bloodshed.

“I went to get soil but came back with a book,” he says. The soil would have been just for his daughters. The book however is a reference for coming generations of future traveler and history lovers.

In the two weeks he had spent so far in Pakistan, Amardeep had realised that the “Sikh legacy” of this land went far beyond gurudwaras and ancestral homes, and was in fact not limited to adherents of the Sikh faith. The legacy lived on in human interactions, experiences, memories, music, poetry, spirituality and other aspects of a shared history that belongs not just to Sikhs but also to Hindus, Muslims, Christians and others. For example, others too lay claim to rituals, poetry and music that Sikhs consider to be “theirs” This legacy, he stresses, is secular in nature.

Throughout his journey, Amardeep used the lens, not of a pilgrim, but of a traveler chronicling socio-historical aspects.

An important aspect of this lens is to place the contemporary reality of gurudwaras and havelis built and owned by Sikhs into a historical context without blame or judgment. Many of these buildings are being used as police stations, libraries or people’s homes. The mass cross-border exodus left these buildings abandoned, and those who came to this land were bound to fill the vacuum for their own survival.

Putting things in context also means being able to see the positive aspects, like the fact that the Pakistan government has since 1980s been looking after the holy places of non-Muslims. With the mass exodus of an entire community, the government can’t possibly maintain every aspect of the heritage but clearly the intent is there, as Amardeep stresses. The number of functional gurudwaras in the Punjab has increased from one to twenty-three over the past decades. Several Hindu temples has also been revived. People of all faiths must support and encourage these moves even though they may be, as Singh “the tip of the iceberg” given the magnitude of the issue.

Amardeep also holds responsible for the neglect those who have kept silent rather than being vocal in demanding that this heritage be preserved. Sikhs who visit Pakistan don’t even ask to visit the Lahore Museum, he observes. Due to the lack of demand the Museum’s Sikh Gallery has been closed as Amardeep discovered when he tried to see it.

Pakistani Sikhs, he observes, are in general too poor and focused on their own survival to pay attention to such higher pursuits. It is up to the diaspora — increasing numbers of whom now visit Pakistan for religious reasons — to push for these demands beyond religion.
After Partition, practically the only Sikhs left in Pakistan were those living in the Pashtun areas bordering Afghanistan. Post 9/11 Taliban inroads into the region, accompanied by attacks on religious minorities forced large numbers to flee to the Punjab. Many Sikhs took refuge in the Gurdwara Punja Sahib at Hassan Abdal, says Singh. He notes that Pakistan has for years been combating militancy while also reviving the historical religious sites belonging to religious minorities.

All in all, Amardeep Singh’s message is clearly not limited to Sikhs and Punjab or Pakistan. It is about the need to go beyond surface identities and labels to an interconnected, secular past, and universal values. This is not just about the past but the way to a more harmonious way forward.

Source: blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com