Pakistan: a very modern history

Pakistan occupies an area which was home to some of the earliest Neanderthal settlements, some of whose decedents can still be found hiding in caves in the mountains of North West Pakistan.

The only difference is, in the Stone Ages, these Neanderthals were armed with clubs and stones, but today they are armed with guns and bombs. Remarkably though, they remain as furry as they were millions of years ago.

The modern state of Pakistan was born out of the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 and has faced many regional confrontations, usually brought on by its continuing habit of poking its nose where it doesn’t belong.

Created to meet the demands of Indian Muslims, Pakistan was originally in two parts: Part 1 was called Maula Jat and Part 2 was called Jat in Dhaka.

The east wing — present day Flooded Republic of Bangladesh is on the Bay of Bengal bordering the Bollywood Republic of India and the Miserable Republic of Burma.

The west wing — present-day the Not-Quite-Arab Republic of Pakistan — stretches from the Arabian Sea to the Himalayas and according to famous poet, philosopher, military strategist, historian and judo expert, Zidee Hamid, the country actually stretches all the way to New Delhi, Kabul, Tashkent and maybe even Beijing and many parts of Mars.

The break-up of the two wings came in 1971 when the fish-eating east-wing seceded after fighting an insurgency culled and planned from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and an early draft of the Di Vinci Code.

Civilian politics in Pakistan in the last few decades has been tarnished by corruption, inefficiency, confrontations and bad breath between various institutions and/or whatever institutions that are left in the country. Actually, the word political institution is an oxymoron when discussed in the context of Pakistani politics and the state.

Alternating periods of civilian and military rule have not helped to establish stability. In fact, instability is the only stable tradition in Pakistan; a tradition that is being passionately upheld by a series of TV talk shows because political stability would mean lack of viewership and advertising revenues for the channels and a drastic drop in popcorn sales that can spell disaster for the country’s economy.

Pakistan came under military rule once again in October 1999 after the ousting of a civilian government that had lost a great deal of support because the public lost its appetite for rich dishes such as nihari, paye, and biryani which Prime Minister Naraaz Sharif was a great fan of.

He has since become a vegetarian of sorts and is usually taunted as becoming a sissy by Brig (R) Cookie Monster Gul, the architect of the Afghan Jihad and the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

According to famous poet, philosopher, military strategist and lifestyle fascist, Maria Beep she also took part in the 1857 Mutiny as a gallant needle-worker.

Her gallantry was praised by the famous poet, philosopher, military strategist and flogging enthusiast, Sangsar Abbasi. Maria Beep still has her famous 1857 needles with which she now pokes voodoo dolls of her competitors in Pakistan’s cut-throat fashion industry.

Sanana & Safibarf are her two latest victims who launched a counterattack through their new summer collection that included Persian tea cosies worn as corporate aunty headgear.

After Pakistan’s last benevolent dictator, General Mush P. Bonaparte, eventually relinquished his uniform amidst tears in November 2007, in February 2008, his supporters were defeated in the election, also amidst tears.

The Pakistan Khapay Khapay Khapay Party formed a coalition government led by Asif Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Zardari Bhutto and an impeachment process was launched against Mush, who resigned (amidst more tears) in August 2008.

Pakistan’s place on the world stage shifted after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US. It dropped its support for the Neanderthal regime in Afghanistan and was propelled into the frontline in the fight against terrorism, becoming a key ally of the Elders of Zion and assorted secret Freemason societies.

However, Pakistani forces have struggled to maintain control over the restive Neanderthal regions along the Afghan border, where Neanderthal militants are firmly entrenched with bombs strapped around their tummies which they claim is only a weight reducing exercise. Most Pakistanis entirely believe this to be true.

In the spring of 2009, the government attempted to reduce disaffection in the troubled north-western Swat district by agreeing to the imposition of the Whipping Women Law.

Far from improving security, this move allowed the Neanderthals to tighten their grip on the region, and the agreement broke down after only a few whips.

The government waged a military campaign to flush out the furry Neanderthals — an act that many sensitive Pakistanis such as poet, philosopher, politician and balaybaaz, Lord Jibran Can’t, and Mian Naraz Sharif criticised. Mainly just for the heck of it.

Asif Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Zardari Bhutto won the presidential race of September 6, 2008, by a big majority. His election came after his predecessor General P. Mush Bonaparte resigned amidst tears under threat of impeachment.

General P. Mush Bonaparte’s rule had ushered in increased freedom for the print media and a liberalisation of broadcasting policies. Television is the dominant medium, and there are around 50,000 private channels all babbling about the same things but each calling their individual babbling ‘exclusive.’

More than 100 private FM radio stations have been licensed. Fake American accents and low IQ levels are firm prerequisites for success.

Scores of unlicensed FM stations are said to operate in the tribal areas. They are usually operated by Neanderthal RJs of which DJ Fazalullah In Da Caaaaave is the most popular.

There are around 20 million internet users in Pakistan. A growing number of young Pakistanis have engrossing and intelligent discussions on various internet sites. Here is one example:

Superbilla:
What you think you think you are you kafir anti-Islam Pakistan Afghanistan Israeli Hindu dog!

Pakpunk:
Oh, you shut up you terrorist what you think you are you and I am I am great Muslim and Pakistan jeeay jeeay yea!!

Munchkins:
Oh why you fight you both, we all Muslim ummah and Pakistani patriots so we should make unity and gather and explode atom bum on India!!!!

Superbilla:
Oh you shut up you hypocrite you not real Pakistani but Ahmadi nonsense, oh you bastaaaaaaaa!!!

Munchkins:
Shut up your face you infidel man you destroy unity of Muslim ummah you too bastaaaaaaaa!!!!

Moderator:
Guys please refrain from using bad language. We’re Muslims and this is a respectable forum.

Munchkins:
Oh why you say this to me to me what about superbilla and pakpunk I am tolerant best Muslim in whole wide world like Pakistan best country in whole wide worldly universe.

Moderator:
I said exhibit tolerance and respect, okay?

BobbyBunny:
Thank you, sir, for the tolerant words. I am from the US and …

Moderator:
What? US? Oh, you bastaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

Pulp fantasies

A recent editorial in Dawn appropriately wondered about this year’s speech by COAS General Parvez Kayani at the annual passing out parade at the Pakistan Military Academy.

The moment contents of his speech became news, some conservative media personnel and columnists could be seen puffing their chests with happy hot air and excitedly wagging their fingers at their more liberal counterparts, reminding them how the COAS had gone on to declare that Pakistan was made in the name of Islam and that ‘no one can take Islam out of Pakistan’.

Much has been written and discussed about exactly what constitutes this ‘ideology’. Liberal scholars, intellectuals, historians and those on the left have for long argued that things like the ‘Pakistan Ideology’ are post-Jinnah concoctions molded by conservative historians, religious parties and the military-establishment to maintain and sustain their undemocratic influence over a diverse ethnic and sectarian polity.

Those on the right, of course, disagree. They continue to insist that Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, used the Pakistan Movement as a roadmap to a destination where Muslims of different languages, cultures and sectarian persuasions would gel together as a monolithic state and nation and be ruled by the dictates of the Quran and the Sunnah.

This has not happened. And it can’t. It’s a fairy tale scenario peddled as history and an ideology that in spite of creating fissure after fissure between sects, ethnicities and between the military-establishment and political parties, is still being unabashedly flaunted.

So much so, that the fissures that it has caused have now gradually created an extreme expression of madness that uses terror and bloodshed to enact a so-called Islamic State.

But more pressing should be the concern about the state of mind of the soldiers who are on the frontlines of a vicious battle against those expressing this extremism in the most brutal manner.

In his last year’s speech at the PMA, the COAS clearly emphasised that the existential threat to Pakistan was largely internal. This year, however, it became external again. Where do such sudden shifts leave the soldiers?

A friend of mine (a former journalist and now a filmmaker) once told me a revealing little tale. To film a documentary, he had travelled up north into a tense battle zone where the Pakistan Army was fighting a bloody war against the extremists. This was during the military operation in Swat in 2009.

There he met a soldier who startled him by saying: “Sir, since you seem to be an educated man and someone I can trust, let me tell you that all these men (extremists) are our own people”.

He then added: “We are told so many things about whom we are fighting. But we know who these people are. These are the people we have known for years, but now they have turned against us”.

The soldier was not saying anything new. Because barring the usual set of so-called patriots who are ever-willing to lie through their teeth just because they believe that certain fibs serve the country’s interests, by now most Pakistanis (at least outside the Punjab) know that the vicious enemy, the people of Pakistan and its army are up against are very much a product of our own naive follies and misplaced arrogance.

Nevertheless, when one hears this coming from a soldier on the frontlines, one is not sure how to react.

Whether one should rejoice or should we see this as a warning?

The debacles faced by the US army in Vietnam and by the Soviet forces in Afghanistan should be taken as examples to be learnt from.

It is easier to raise an army on certain myths about one’s foreign enemies and on an exaggerated sense of patriotism. But the post-World War II scenario in this regard is studded with examples in which, in a long drawn-out armed conflict, there does come a time when armies facing guerrilla warfare begin to lose touch with all the ideological hoopla that they were fed during training.

There are numerous accounts of how whole battalions of American marines and Soviet fighters ended up rebelling against their own superiors because after facing bloodshed and madness on the battlefield they completely lost contact with what they were told by their politicians and generals. All that indoctrination began to melt away and they found themselves awkwardly exposed to a set of truths that they were conditioned to actually repress.

These are the kind of truths that a soldier, especially if he is being readied to take on a ruthless bunch of insurgents, should be briefed about up front.

As one saw in Vietnam and Afghanistan, all that mythical talk about how the soldiers were fighting for a higher cause simply began to melt away and the soldiers were not only left stranded with a rude reality, but they had no clue how to address it. It is a bit unsettling to know that the Pakistan army is preparing its men for the conflict against armed extremists by using rhetoric it originally devised for a possible war against an external enemy.

But it is their own countrymen that the soldiers are facing on the battlefield and/or legions of fanatics who believe that they are the ones serving God, even if that means blowing up women and children.

The enemy in this context is not the saffron-clad battalions on mechanical elephants fitted with nuclear warheads. The enemy is very much from amongst us.

Telling the soldiers the whole truth is better. This should mean organising a re-orientation program with a view to ready them to fight an enemy that is not dropping from the sky or rolling in from across the border, but emerging from our very own mountains and cities. The threat remains very much internal, dear General.

Evil popcorn

I finally managed to get my hands on the DVD versions of three Pakistani films that I had once seen on the big screen many years ago, and was looking to do the same again, but this time in the privacy of my TV lounge.

I went looking for them to investigate a possibility of finding the cultural roots of what grew into religious and ideological extremism and myopia in Pakistan.

One can pin-point almost all of Ziaul Haq’s Machiavellian farce in the name of Islam as containing the main roots of the social and political extremism that now plagues the nation.

But I believe it is in the cultural legacy of such reactionary travesty in the 1990s where one can clearly locate the derivatives of the Zia era’s Islamist charade; off-shoots of a destructive legacy that eventually mutated into the kind of fanaticism that has become a troubling mainstay of Pakistani society ever since 9/11.

I will not go into the academic and scholarly details of this observation, but rather discuss the issue by reviewing the three films that I rediscovered. Two were made and released in the 1990s and one in 1980. They are interesting examples of the kind of mindset that many common Pakistanis started to develop at the conclusion of the anti-Soviet ‘Afghan jihad’ in the late 1980s.

Poster of Sangram: Ali takes the countryside by storm and an obedient camel.

But the first one arrived in 1980, or at the start of the so-called Afghan Jihad and during a period when the Ziul Haq dictatorship (1977-88) had begun to roll out his draconian policies (explained as being ‘Islamic’) in earnest. Starring famous Pakistan film actor, Muhammad Ali, it was called Sangram.

The film takes place in a land where there seems to be nothing but mud brick villages separated by miles and miles of rolling sand. One is not quite sure exactly what year, or for that matter, what century the story is taking shape because even though there are no electrical appliances to be seen, there are plenty of pistols and a rickety Jeep driven by an evil Hindu police officer. There is no shortage of camels, though.

Ali is Sangram, a Hindu in a village with a Hindu majority most of whose men prefer wearing tight leather pants and shirts made from what seems to be jute.

Ali’s character is a robber who also has a petite girlfriend (actress Mumtaz) who, however, turns significantly voluptuous while dancing around Sangram during the songs.

One day Sangram bumps into a Muslim holy man who looks like a cross between an ancient Byzantine priest and a 20th century Tableeghi Jamat evangelist.

The holy man succeeds in converting Sangram to Islam and renames him Muhammad Ali – a scene marked by a flash of lightening striking across the night sky on a perfectly sunny afternoon.

From then onwards, somehow, whichever scene Ali appears in, palm trees can be seen and his girlfriend’s voluptuous moves become radically understated but the songs keep rolling.

Sangram’s dramatic conversation.

Of course, like all good converts, Ali makes it his duty to convert his contemporaries whether they like it or not. He gives up his life as a thief, a Hindu thief, mind you, discards his leather pants, takes to wearing the Arab thawb and spending rest of the film on the back of a camel.

Ali beats the conniving Hindu cop to a pulp. That’s not a bandage Ali has around his head and face. It’s his ‘look I’m a bigoted convert’ headgear.

After first converting his gang and then the whole village (with the help of a few emotional speeches and a couple of punches thrown at one of his doubting partners), he decides to lead an army of committed converts (on camels) on a mission to convert the Hindus of all the villages of this unnamed, surreal land populated by bumbling Hindus and a sprinkling of Muslim clerics who seem to emerge from behind sand dunes and then melt back into the sand.

After he is able to convert village after village, and after palm tree after palm tree begins to dot the scenes, a time comes when Hindu holy men begin to worry.

They conspire with the area’s police to eliminate Ali. This pushes him into becoming a guerrilla leader. He cuts down the Hindu priests until he is cornered and killed by the cops. But, of course, by then it’s too late.

By the way, it is only at the end of the film one finds out that the film took place just before the creation of Pakistan because as Ali lies on the sand dying from his wounds he looks up to see a Pakistan flag on a fortress.

Yes, the symbolism is unmistakable  ‘Pakistan is the fortress of Islam’ (albeit created by jihadists and not by cigar-smoking, English-speaking lawyers).

As Ali’s character rolls to his death over the sand dunes, Jinnah must’ve rolled in his grave.

Original poster of ‘International Gorillay’

The second film is 1990’s ‘International Gorillay’(Gorillay in Urdu means guerrillas, but also gorillas!).

The film is a remarkable celebration of a post-Afghan-jihad resurgence of Pakistan’s convoluted belief of being a ‘fortress of Islam.’ It was a huge hit when it was released in mid-1990 and has become a cult classic amongst oddball Lollywood aficionados.

Directed by eccentric Pakistani film director, Jan Muhammad – who then went on to direct the delicious Lollywood rom-com ‘Kuriyoon koh dalay dana’ (direct translation: Feeding women seed) – the farce was also one of the first Pakistani films to be banned (on video) in Britain.

International Gorillay takes on author Salman Rushdie as the film’s main villain, but the ban on the video was lifted when Rushdie himself stepped in and asked the British censor board to allow its release.

Since the film is a masterpiece of tacky demagogic cinema, one can understand why Rushdie didn’t feel threatened or offended by the content.

Through his direction, Jan Muhammad was simply cashing in on the (largely delusional) high Pakistan as a country was experiencing at the retreat of the battered Soviet forces in Afghanistan and the (CIA aided) ‘victory of jihad.’

But according to some Lollywood insiders, Jan’s original plot of the film was a lot wider, revolving around a group of Pakistani mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan. But the story suddenly took a sharp turn when Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ controversy erupted in 1989, and Jan decided to make Rushdie the film’s main villain.

Thus, instead of seeing mujahids returning from fighting a successful ‘jihad’ against atheists, the film kicks off by presenting Pakistan and the Muslim world gripped by a grave crisis and being swallowed by the evil schemes of a sinister lobby of diabolic men.

This lobby includes Salman Rushdie (played by veteran TV and film actor, Afzal Ahmed), who has inexplicably started leading a menacing social and political onslaught on Pakistan through a gang of anti-Pakistan agents.

Salman Rushdie proves that sword is mightier (and more fun) than the pen.

With Rushdie are some very South Asian looking men in curly blonde wigs whom we are told are Zionists working for a secret Israeli agency.

And, oh, they all speak fluent Punjabi.

Since Pakistan is the leading defender of Islam, the film suggests that if Pakistan falls to Rushdie’s menacing schemes, so shall the rest of the Islamic world.

The band of brothers: Mustafa Qureshi, Ghulam Mohiuddin and Javed Shiekh.

Interestingly, Rushdie’s assault on Islam includes the unfathomable opening of a chain of casinos and discotheques in Pakistan! The fool could have made more money by opening madrassahs and TV news channels instead.

Alas, there is a heroic reaction to such conspiratorial debauchery. In a jarring scene involving some terrible acting and rhetorical dialogue, veteran Punjabi film actor, Mustafa Qureshi, playing an ex-cop, decides to create a ‘mujahid fauj’ (the proto-Taliban?) whose sole aim is to destroy Rushdie and ‘save Islam and Pakistan’ from Jewish conspiracies and, of course, from obscenity too.

The latter is a vital plot tool, giving the director the opportunity to show some lecherous disco and dance scenes without the danger of himself (and the audience) being labelled as soft-porn fans.

Apart from being an Israeli agent and an advocate of gambling, alcohol and free sex, Rushdie is also a master torturer. He torments captive Muslims by making them listen to the blasphemous sections of his book, ‘The Satanic Verses’!

The ex-cop has two younger brothers who are both unemployed (maybe because there are now only casinos, pubs and night clubs to work in?).

To counter Rushdie, he inducts two of his younger brothers in his ‘mujahid force.’

After getting combat training, the three-man ‘jihadi’ army decides to infiltrate Rushdie’s baleful gang by going undercover. And no, they don’t adorn blonde wigs, but slip into Batman costumes instead!

Obviously, who would notice three middle-aged men in 1960s Batman costumes, right?

Batmujahideen, two of them with mustaches.

Two of the brothers, played by known film actors, Javed Shaikh and Ghulam Mohiuddin, were well in their forties at the time, a fact underlined by the wobbling bellies protruding forward from their Batman costumes. Qureshi was in his late fiffties.

After making their way into the conspiring gang of anti-Islam thugs, the three brothers, with the help of zany reactionary one-liners, karate chops, expert gun slinging and a few American SAM missiles, make a meal out of Rushdie and Co. and save Pakistan (and thus Islam).

What’s more they even manage to convert Salman Rushdie’s equally evil mistress called Dolly (played by the lovely Barbara Sharif).

The voluptuous Dolly.

Not even a menacing machine gun burst could stop the Batmujjahideen.

Voluptuous, wicked, scheming, drunk (and blue-eyed), Dolly finally sees the light after watching the wrath of God (attired in Batman suits) obliterate Rushdie.

Rushdie in trouble. A red light strikes his eyes from the unknown regions of the sky. The Batmujahids sweared it was God, critics insisted it was bad FX.

Dolly’s conversion is quite a scene. Lights flicker, clouds thunder, the room whirls round and round, and the music reaches a crescendo as she weeps, sweats and shakes – it’s as if she’d just consumed a highly potent concoction of liquid LSD, magic mushrooms and bhang! Certainly my favourite scene in the film. And, oh, there’s also a shot of a huge palm tree at this visionary moment.

The palm tree again.

International Gorrilay is a stroke of genius when it comes to campy demagogic cinema, and only an idiot can take it seriously as anything beyond being a highly enjoyable cinematic farce with lots of unintentional laughs.

But then, since extremists are usually idiots, I was wondering if, due to its bombastic, chauvinist antics, whether it actually ended up inspiring any future suicide bombers? The film was such a big hit that a sequel of sorts arrived in Pakistani cinemas sometime in 1996.

It was called ‘Alamy Ghuday’ (International Scoundrels). Though directed and plotted by a different director and having different set of performers (except Ghulam Mohiuddin), the film more than alludes to the happenings of its predecessor, ‘International Gorrilay‘.

Many years after Pakistan (and thus Islam) were saved from Rushdie and his gang of obscene blonde-wigged Zionist thugs, yet another anti-Pakistan (and thus anti-Islam) villain has risen (played by the malevolent Shafqat Cheema).

Cheema the heavy-drinking communist.

His mission too is to harm Pakistan (and thus Islam) with the help of diabolical schemes and voluptuous disco dancing and binge drinking.

A group of passionate ‘young men’ (in their mid- and late-forties) and a damsel in distress take on the evil Cheema but are arrested by the cops along with the damsel’s weakling old father. Yes, the government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has sold out to the greedy ways of the villain’s sinister empire, and the frail father is dragged to the Supreme Court.

Here begins a terrific court scene. In it the damsel – in a red dress that is a freaky cross between a Wonder Woman costume and a Bedouin desert tent – is seen fervently arguing with a lawyer who wants the old man to be hanged.

She shouts away, condemning the spread of obscenity in a country made in the name of Islam, and passionately lamenting the practice of dishing out the law according to ‘ghair mulki’ (non-Pakistani and thus non-Islamic) law books.

The red damsel worried about spread of obscenity

Incidentally a pile of such infidel books lies neatly stacked in front of the bewildered judge (played by the great Munawar Saeed).

The damsel then runs forward, picks up the books and flings them high into the air (in slow-motion), pleading that the prisoner’s case should be heard according to ‘Islami qanoon‘ (Islamic law). Well, the sort of qanoon she was pleading for would have first and foremost booked her for her delicious sense of dressing, but that’s beside the point.

We never see the books coming down as they defy gravity and all laws of physics by completely disappearing into thin air.

The judge suddenly sees the light and he flings away whatever books left sitting on his desk (these do manage to hit the floor). He decides to hear the case according to Islamic law. Yes, just like that.

After a lot of shouting and more flinging, the old man is released, and the group is given the green signal by the suddenly reformed state of Pakistan to go forth and demolish the wicked whisky drinking villain.

The scene is a classic example of a populist medium glorifying exactly the kind of self-righteous, isolationist and convoluted mindset we so seriously have to move away from. But I was more interested in my popcorn.

Even though I didn’t take this piece of cinematic nonsense seriously, I did wonder whether some people actually decided to act upon the message that the film was delivering, which, in a nutshell, was that everyone or everything that is not according to a squarely narrow, literalist understanding of the faith is up for spontaneous destruction, never mind the lavish Wonder Woman costume, mate!

Well, the mujahids – this time in Robin Hood costumes – blow the evil man’s empire to smithereens and once again save Pakistan (and thus Islam) from the evils of Zionism and, of course, alcohol and disco dancing.

Middle Indo-Pak: A Survey

This is the season of surveys. This is the survey of surveys. A survey that depicts the true state of the mindset of urban middle-class Pakistanis and Indians.

Pakistan

•    73 per cent of middle-class Pakistanis want Honda and Suzuki to begin assembling camels.

•    84 per cent of middle-class Pakistanis want Santa Claus to be tried for blasphemy.

•    69 per cent want to see Saudi King’s portrait in the President House and his horse’s picture in the PM House.

•    97 per cent of middle-class Pakistanis think corruption is the main issue, even though 89 per cent of these accepted bribes to take this survey.

•    95 per cent think Musharraf was wrong to attack the Lal Masjid; 90 per cent of these wanted him to raid the Hindus temples instead and run away with the booty.

•    99 per cent of Sunni-Deobandis in Pakistan believe Sunni-Barelvis are heretics; 99 per cent Sunni-Barelvis think the same about Sunni-Deobandis; 97 per cent of the Sunni Deobandis and Barelvis think Shias are heretics; 95 per cent of the Shias think Sunni Deaobandis and Barelvis are heretics, along with Sevener Shias; 99 per cent of Sevener Shias think Sunni Deaobandis and Barelvis and Twelver Shias are heretics; 100 per cent Sunni Deobandis, Berelvis, Twelver and Sevener Shias believe Ahmadis  suck.

•    69 per cent of middle-class Pakistanis say the Saudis are right to wipe out Pakistan’s houbara bustard population because the name of the birds sounds like a very bad English word.

•    77 per cent want sausages to be labelled as obscene food.

•    94 per cent hate America; 70 per cent of these couldn’t get a US visa.

•    87 per cent of middle-class Pakistanis say they trust the media; 82 per cent of these also trust Jerry Springer.

•    77 per cent of middle-class Pakistani men want women to be forced to wear hijabs; 74 per cent of the women agree.

•    70 per cent wanted colas to be banned because they looked like whisky. 60 per cent say water too should be banned because it looks like vodka and gin. They believe Muslims can survive without water by chewing on palm tree leaves as long as they are chewed fresh and their juice is not allowed to ferment.

•    79 per cent believe pop music is un-Islamic; 66 per cent of these were pop musicians themselves.

•    97 per cent believe India and the US pose the greatest threat to Pakistan; 54 per cent of these were later blown up in assorted suicide attacks by Pakistani extremists.

•    88 per cent don’t want to sell their honour for American money unless it is for their private hospitals, textile exports, NGOs, or for completing degrees at American universities.

•    102 per cent Middle-class Pakistanis believe Democracy is a deeply flawed system that has destroyed the world. They believe that totalitarian monarchies with entrenched security and bureaucracies are much better and in line with their Arab origins.

•    99 per cent of them do not like to be compared to Indians because they have nothing in common with them except their DNA, culture, cuisine, language, music, and geography.

India

•    79 per cent of middle-class Indians believe Mahatma Gandhi would have made a great software engineer, or at least a very soft-spoken call-centre-guy.

•    99 per cent wanted to become Bollywood stars; 68 per cent of them joined private TV news channels as the next best alternative.

•    78 per cent of them think Sonia Gandhi was a former Bollywood actress who appeared in ’70s films as Helen.

•    90 per cent believe ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was the wrong portrayal of India; they believe Karan Johar’s costume dramas and TV soaps are the true reflection of the country; 88 per cent of these were suspected of being high on helium.

•    83 per cent think China poses the greatest threat to India, followed by Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the greener, seaming wickets in England.

•    95 per cent of them believe Tandulkar is God who uses MRF Tyres, drinks Pepsi and loves Parle-G baby biscuits.

•    81 per cent believe the Naxalites are a satanic heavy metal boy-band which sings loud anti-Hindu harmonies, mostly in Bengali.

•    71 per cent think it would have been more appropriate had Arundhati Roy married Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik instead of Sania Mirza.

•    77 per cent of middle-class Indians believe Pakistanis want all of Kashmir because it’s a great filming location.

•    71 per cent of young Indians know very little about Indian political parties such as INC, BJP, CPI, etc. When asked who they’ll vote for in the next elections, 69 per cent said IPL.

•    98 per cent of them speak very fast and speak English in a very weird manner. They believe this helps tone their muscles and prepares them for the next stage in their Karmic life. i.e. ‘Indian Idol.’

Past tense

Recently, a shocking display of self-righteous tactics employed by the Returning Officers (ROs) while whetting the moral standing of candidates for the May 11 election triggered a series of heated debates in the media.

The controversy revolved around Articles 62 and 63 in the Constitution which were introduced by a reactionary military dictator in the 1980s.

Yet, even after the demise of the dictator, about 15 years of civilian rule couldn’t put the controversial articles up for any worthwhile democratic scrutiny or debate.

The mentioned articles are based on almost entirely abstract allusions about Pakistan’s founding ideology. No matter how much the term Pakistan Ideology is mentioned in the country’s school textbooks and by the mainly right-wing intelligentsia, the truth is that the term has never been fully defined and/or agreed upon.

But it is also true that in spite of the fact that the so-called Pakistan Ideology (Nazariya-i-Pakistan) is at best a figment of lofty and illusionary thinking with very little connection to any substantial historical reality, it remains a widely used term among a majority of Pakistanis.

The main reason for this has been the kind of history almost each and every Pakistani has been taught at school and college ever since the mid-1970s. School and college students are actively discouraged from understanding history as a set of facts based on literary and archaeological evidence.

They are also asked to blindly consume history (especially that of Pakistan) even when facts in this context suggest that much of it was written to fulfil certain manipulative ideological ends and to popularise political and social episodes that have little or no link to any historical reality as such.

No matter how aversely some Nazariya-i-Pakistan enthusiasts in the media, the ‘establishment’ or the intelligentsia may react to the above-mentioned scenario, the truth remains that the whole Pakistan Ideology bit is a comparatively recent construct (if not an outright convolution).

Scholars like Ayesha Jalal, Rubina Saigol and A.H. Nayyar, historians K.K. Aziz and Dr Mubarak Ali, and authors like Hussain Haqqani, Ian Talbot and Stephen P. Cohen have all provided reliable evidence to substantiate that the term Pakistan Ideology was nowhere to be found in the speeches and documents related to the founders of the country.

The ‘Pakistan Movement’ was based on the ‘Two-Nation Theory’ which considered the Muslims of India a separate political and cultural entity from the region’s Hindu majority and was dynamic enough to deserve a separate Muslim homeland. Nevertheless, even after Pakistan was created in 1947, there were more Muslims in India than there were in Pakistan.

The founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was quick to realise this and according to two of his colleagues, Chaudhry Khaliq-uz Zaman and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, this is why in his first major speech to the Constituent Assembly (August 11, 1947), he emphasised Pakistan to be a Muslim nation-state that was broad-based in its make-up.

In his 1961 book, Pathway to Pakistan, Khaliq-uz Zaman suggests that the speech “effectively negated (and put to rest) the faith-based nationalism of the Pakistan Movement”.

So if Jinnah dropped the Islamic aspects of the movement, then what is the Pakistan Ideology?

Subscribers of this ideology explain it to be a belief in the ‘Two-Nation Theory’ and in the conviction that Pakistan came into being in the name of Islam and was destined to become an ‘Islamic state’.

Detractors, however, point to the fact that the Two-Nation Theory collapsed the moment the majority of Muslims stayed behind in India, making Jinnah affirm his idea of Pakistan as a Muslim-majority nation-state where the state will have nothing to do with religion.

Detractors also suggest that the Theory was contradicted once again in 1971, when Bengali Muslims in the former East Pakistan broke away to form a separate country on the basis of Bengali nationalism.

They further point out that had the founders conceived Pakistan as an Islamic state, they would not have been opposed by Islamic fundamentalists, many of whom were staunchly anti-Jinnah and thought the idea of Pakistan was an un-Islamic abomination.

Jinnah justified Pakistan as a Muslim majority state that would encapsulate the political, economic and cultural genius of the Muslims of South Asia without evoking the theological aspects of their faith.

He was also conscious of the history of polemical conflicts between the many Muslim sects and sub-sects Pakistan had inherited.

Unfortunately, his concerns and vision were rudely ignored after his death in 1948, and the ruling elite haphazardly began to give shape to a monolithic idea of Pakistan in which Islamic laws would be central (1949 Objectives Resolution).

The 1956 Constitution again spoke of an Islamic Republic, but the problem was, all this was being suggested without putting the plan up for any authentic democratic scrutiny or consensus in front of a multi-sectarian and multi-cultural polity.

Most nation states have a history of creating an idealised past to sustain their justification. It was during the secular military regime of Ayub Khan (1959-69) that the myths required to build a nationalist narrative began in earnest. He formed a Council of Islamic Ideology but populated it with liberal Islamic scholars.

The Council was more an exercise in painting Ayub’s polices as being close to Jinnah’s thinking, who, according to the Council, only believed in ‘controlled democracy’ and a centralised government. The Islamic aspect was given mere lip-service in the 1962 Constitution.

Ayub’s policies were opposed by the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) that, in 1962, for the first time used the term Nazariya-i-Pakistan.

Over the next few years, JI, without mentioning Jinnah, continued to call for the creation of an Islamic state by claiming that it was a natural outcome of Nazariya-i-Pakistan.

Leftist thought and groups ascending in the late 1960s trashed JI’s claims by countering that Pakistan was conceived as a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Muslim-majority country based on democracy and socialism.

Interestingly, it was during the populist and left-liberal government of ZA Bhutto (1972-77), that the term Nazariya-i-Pakistan first began to appear in textbooks and official lingo (especially after the passing of the 1973 Constitution).

The government rationalised the separation of East Pakistan as a natural occurrence because the real Pakistan was always West Pakistan or the region that ran along the mighty River Indus.

Though more friendly to the idea of the country being multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, the Bhutto regime explained that a largely homogenous understanding of Islam was the glue that kept all the ethnicities together (in the Indus region).

For this, the 1973 Constitution gave power to the state and government of Pakistan to define this so-called homogenous understanding of Islam.

In a land riddled with numerous sects, sub-sects and varied religious interpretations, the move was bound to alienate and even offend a number of Pakistanis who disagreed with the state’s version of Islam.

The Constitution actually took away the right of a Pakistani Muslim to interpret Islam for him or herself without state interference. But it was under General Zia, the man who toppled Bhutto in 1977— all that was first part of public debate (in the 1960s), and then a constitutional allusion in the 1970s became strict state policy — that Nazariya-i-Pakistan finally became an official creed.

Flushed with petro-dollars and an increasing confidence in his power, Zia unfolded a number of Islamic laws culled from interpretations of certain puritanical branches of Islamic thought and then (through textbooks, constitutional amendments and state media), weaved them to become the central planks of the Pakistan Ideology.

Ever since the 1980s, Nazariya-i-Pakistan has come down to mean the belief in the right of the Islamic state and Islamic constitution to not only define faith, but to also judge and measure the faith of the faithful as well as denounce and prosecute those deemed to be threats to the Pakistan Ideology.

All this has created sectarian and sub-sectarian divisions; justified state interference in matters of faith; and rationalised non-democratic intervention in the name of defending the ideology.

Consequently, the mindset has trickled down and armed people to openly manipulate faith as a means to meet self-righteous as well as cynical ends.

Lastly, the so-called called Pakistan Ideology has also left the youth of the country thoroughly confused about its identity in a rapidly changing and complex world.

For starters, instead of looking for their roots upon the ground that they stand on, many of them now look for these roots in the ways and trends of booming desert lands hundreds of miles away, as if Pakistan was conceived in Arabia.

Generation landslide

An extensive survey by the British Council Pakistan  released on the 3^rd of April this year points at an emerging middle-class with a growing number of young people in it.

Though the survey attempted to examine and assess the politics and sociology of youth from across the classes in urban and rural Pakistan, its main focus seems to be on how the country’s middle-class youth is shaping up for the coming election.

Dr Durr-e-Nayab, Chief of Research at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, uses a multi-dimensional index to define class, based on data that is drawn from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey that was conducted in 2010-11.

According to her definition[1] middle class Pakistanis are likely to live in a house where at least one person has a college education and where the head of the household is in non-manual work; have incomes at least double the poverty line; and own reasonably spacious houses and a range of consumer goods.

Dr Nayab’s research shows that the strict middle class now makes up 24per cent of Pakistan’s population, from 19 per cent in 2007-2008, with nearly 40 per cent of urban dwellers falling into the middle class bracket.

The most important thing is that this makes the middle class a powerful economic, social and political force, especially in towns and cities.

The British Council survey investigates the economic, social, cultural and, of course, the political reasons why a young middle-class Pakistani would (or not) vote in the forthcoming general election scheduled for May 11.

However, even a few days after the findings of the survey were released; two of these findings have already begun to stand out, promising to generate the most debate.

5,271 Pakistanis between the ages of 18 and 29 were interviewed by the surveyors across Pakistan[2]  (including FATA, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan).

64 per cent of the interviewed males and 75 per cent of the women described themselves to be as being conservative/religious.

When asked what they thought was the best political system for Pakistan, 38 per cent said ‘Islamic Shariah,’ 32 per cent preferred a military dictatorship and 22per cent thought democracy was the best system for the country.

Even though the two findings (Shariah rule and military dictatorship) are being treated separately by some alarmed analysts, in all probability these findings are quite related, if not being one and the same.

On the strong assumption that the majority of the youth interviewed for the survey belonged to what the report defined as the middle-class, one should not be so surprised by the mentioned findings.

_________________________

From middle to right

From the early 20^th century onwards, political-economists have described the middle-classes to be a largely conservative entity.

But according to political philosophers like Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie (middle and lower middle-classes) had played (in Europe) ‘a most revolutionary role’ (until about the early 19^th century)[3] when it started to successfully wrest away political and economic power from the old centres of power dominated by monarchs, the Catholic clergy and the landed elites.

By the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries the European and American middle-classes had not only grown in size, they had driven and then rode on the crest of age defining historical epochs like the Renaissance, the ‘Age of Reason’, French and American Revolutions, trade linked to European colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, to become the new ruling classes in the West.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the political philosopher whose writings on democracy greatly influenced the anti-monarchical drift of the French Revolution (1789) that was politically and intellectually constructed by the French middle-classes.

From then on, a concentrated effort was afoot to consolidate their new-found economic and political gains. This mostly translated into the middle-classes now gradually reversing their old revolutionary character by grounding themselves in any political system that (they believed) best secured their economic and other class interests.

Democracy remains to be this preferred system because not only is it based on the thoughts and efforts of intellectuals and political activists that largely belonged to the middle-classes of Europe and America, it successfully absorbs both the right and left sides of the conventional ideological divides without disturbing the economic and social dynamics from which the middle-classes mostly derive their influence and power.

But what happens when, due to a grave economic or political crises, democracy begins to lose its footing, or uncannily allows in forces that do begin to threaten the middle-classes’ economic and political interests?

The 20^th century is packed with incidents reflecting how the middle-classes changed their democratic trajectory and became willing political and economic allies of anti-democratic and reactionary forces that were generated by widespread economic and political crises.

When the First World War (1914-1918) ravaged the economies of various European countries and these countries spun further down the spiral after the global economic crises set off by the 1929 Wall Street Crash in the United States, a number of European countries saw the sudden rise of fascist outfits.

Though the fascists appeared in almost all European countries, they gained the most ground in Spain, Italy, Germany and France.

On one important level at least, 20^th century European fascism eventually became to be recognised as a reactive expression of the middle-class fear of losing its economic and political ground to another extreme that rose due to the economic and political crises of the period: Communism.

When large sections of the Italian, Spanish, French and German middle-classes sided with the main fascist parties[4] in their respective countries, they were doing so in the belief that their economic interests and influence will be protected by the iron gloved fascists against the rising spectre of communism and from the anarchic ravages of collapsing democracies.

The rise of fascism and Hitler in Germany was celebrated and supported by large sections of the German middle and upper classes.

When the fascist regimes in Italy, Germany and France fell after the Second World War, Critical Theorists (Critical Theory) – a strain of intellectual discipline and movement associated with ‘Neo-Marxism’ – were one of the first to point out the treacherous nature of the middle-classes’ towards democracy. [5]

It is from this point onwards that the idea of the middle-classes inherently being a conservative grouping of people gained an even stronger foothold, in spite of the fact that in the West democracies have frequently allowed the democratic entry of leftists who were once believed to be antagonistic towards middle-class interests.

Nevertheless, over the decades democracy softened much of the left’s original radical orientation, encouraging it to look for a democratic middle-ground between unhinged capitalism and an all-encompassing form of socialism and communism.

It is, however, also correct to suggest that even in established democracies, most of the movements based on reactionary views on democracy, liberalism and socialism still emerge from within the middle-classes.

But these views and movements have not always come from the rightist sides of the middle-class. Because between the late 1950s and mid-1970s (in the West), the bulk of anti-democracy activity in Europe and the United States was the prerogative of urban middle-class youth labelling themselves as Marxists, Maoists, radical socialists and anarchists.

According to a number of sociologists and political scientists, this happened mainly due to a burden of guilt that the 1960s generation of young Europeans carried.[6] Guilt associated with the fact that most of the parents of these urban, middle-class young Europeans had either openly supported the violent rise of fascism (in the 1930s and ‘40s), or had remained silent during fascism’s bloodletting against ideological opponents and minority groups.

Andreas Badder and Ulrike Meinhof of Germany’s militant Marxist outfit, the Red Army Faction (RAF). Badder (a university student) and Meinhof (a journalist) in 1970, the group was mostly made-up of radical middle-class college students. RAF was involved in a number of bombings (of property owned by German multinationals and government), political assassinations and for having links with left-wing Palestinian organizations. Badder and Meinhof were arrested and jailed in 1976 where they (allegedly) committed suicide.

But whereas leftist extremism among sections of middle-class youth burned too fast to last any longer than a decade or so, the inherent conservatism in this class wielded a much greater influence – especially in the wake of the erosion of the economics and politics of the Welfare State that was enacted in Europe and the United States from the 1940s onwards but had begun to exhaust itself by the mid 1970s.[7]

It was eventually in the 1980s that the historic middle-class conservatism began to once again assert itself politically and socially and on the economic front.

This tendency was kept in check and in balance by the Keynesian ‘mixed-economics’ of the democratic Welfare states and governments. But when mixed-economics struggled to face the challenges triggered by the 1970s global oil crisis and unavailability of jobs for the ever growing number of college and university graduates that Europe and the United States began to produce, the failing policies were voted out, making room for the electoral entry of radical middle-class conservatism.

UK’s Margaret Thatcher and US’ Ronald Regan were the main political architects of the reassertion of Western middle-class conservatism in the 1980s in which a staunch capitalist structure was built on the ashes of the Welfare State. Social moralism too was used as an electoral appeal and tool to achieve this in what were/are largely secular states.

Western middle-classes’ conservatism had come to the front once again, but this time, as disillusionment with the Welfare State and the weakening of economy again threatened middle-class economic and political interests, this class did not retard its consequential trajectory by backing anti-democratic tendencies in the society.

Instead, it cleverly used democracy in such a manner that the democratic system itself became a reflection of bourgeois conservatism, making it tough for any worthwhile alternative from the liberal-left to come in with the power of the vote.

Of and on it has come in, but it has always faced a barrage of conservative middle-class movements that accuse it of reversing the gains made by the political and economic expressions of bourgeois conservatism from the 1980s onwards.

For example, the UK’s Labour Party had to drastically alter its socialist orientation to defeat the Conservative Party (in 1997), whereas even moderate liberals like the US Democratic Party’s Bill Clinton and (recently) President Obama, faced demonising tactics from the increasingly conservative media.

A man at an anti-Obama rally in California. A series of rallies took place during Obama’s first term against some of his Welfare policies that were termed ‘socialist’ by his detractors.

Even in India, the moderate left-liberal Congress Party government has continued to face movement after movement driven mainly by the middle-classes.

In all cases charges are of corruption and failed economic policies. Though these may stand true, but the unspoken reality is more about growing middle-class segments now ready to react through the media and street protest against even the slightest hint of fear in them of a party or political entity trying to reverse the economic and political gains the middle-classes the world over have achieved ever since the 1980s.

A man scribbles his comments on a writing board placed at an Anna Hazare rally in India. Hazare, a veteran Indian politician, became the darling of urban middle-class India and was also courted by right-wing parties throughout his campaign against the ‘corrupt Congress government.’

__________________________________

 In the box

In its concluding notes, the British Council survey suggests that Pakistan today has a ‘conservative generation.’

True, but one can also add that compared to the ideological orientation of the generations of young middle-class Pakistanis of decades between the 1950s and 1980s, this may as well be the most conservative generation that has graced Pakistan (thus far).

The report touches upon a number of recent economic reasons that have triggered this conservative mindset; nevertheless, one can understand it a lot better if it is studied in its historical context.

Though agreeing that before the 19^th and 20^th centuries the middle-classes in Europe were a revolutionary class (before they turned conservative), many Pakistani sociologists and historians believe that, since Pakistan appeared on the map in the mid-1950s, its middle-classes never went through a revolutionary period.[8]

The roots of what today constitutes middle-class activism in Pakistan lie in the involvement of Muslim middle-class intelligentsia and students during the so-called ‘Pakistan Movement’ that led the call for the formation of a separate Muslim homeland in South Asia.

However, though the Pakistan Movement did have elements that were using overt religious expressions and slogans, [9]  they were too few in numbers compared to those who (quite honestly), had very little idea about exactly what it was that they were actually agitating for.

For example, there is no secret any more about the fact that the founder of the country, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was hoping for some sort of a reconciliation between the Muslims and the Hindus of India to emerge only a year (or maybe less) before the final creation of Pakistan in 1947.

In his party, the All India Muslim League’s historic resolution in 1940, there is no mention of creating a separate Muslim state.[10]

But even when Jinnah’s League did give the final call for a separate Muslim country, the party had to campaign hard in a number of areas where there was a Muslim majority.

The League’s leadership was mainly made up of educated Muslim elite groups and its main support came from urban middle class Muslims of North India.

All of these had a direct as well as indirect link with 19^th century Muslim scholar and Islamic rationalist, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s ‘Aligarh Movement’.

It had been set into motion to build an ‘enlightened’ and modern Muslim middle-class in South Asia that would lead an intellectual and political movement to guarantee the Muslim minority of India a distinct and separate political and cultural identity.

The separate identity aspect became an important plank of the League’s narrative but it did not necessarily appeal to all the Muslims of India.

For example, in what is today Pakistan’s Punjab province, the initial reception to the League was at best lukewarm, whereas in the Khyber Paktunkhwa (former NWFP), Pushtun nationalism was a strong component and rejected the idea of a separate Muslim country.

The narrative was also rejected by the Islamic fundamentalists who, apart from finding the League leadership to be too secular, did not agree that the Muslims were a nation.

They criticised the idea of Muslim nationalism to be a concoction of the European concept of nationalism that was alien to Islam.

This is why some sections of the League resorted to using ‘Islamic slogans’ (such as ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya, laillaha illalah’, ‘Islam khatrey mein’ [Islam in danger’) to get the attention of the Muslims of those areas that were not responding to the League very well.

It is important to mention that the League’s activists came from varied ideological backgrounds. The majority were Urdu-speaking middle-class folks from North India whose political ideas had been shaped by modernistic and nationalistic ‘Aligarh School of Thought.’

A group of Muslim student activists gather around Jinnah.

But also in the League were communists and socialists[11] who understood the Pakistan Movement as a platform to initiate an ‘anti-imperialist class struggle’ in the region.

The fringe that was using Islamic slogans during the movement was not ‘Islamic’. This was a desperate act to counter both the Pushtun nationalists as well as the fundamentalists.

In just two years after the creation of Pakistan, (and one year after the unfortunate death of its founder), the ruling League suddenly found itself struggling to define Pakistani nationalism.

Pakistan had come about on the pretext of the Muslims of South Asia having a separate political and cultural identity (as compared to those of the region’s Hindus).

But the founders were at once faced with the reality that the new country was not only made up of distinct ethnic groups (Sindhi, Punjabi, Pushtun, Baloch, Bengali and Mohajir [Urdu-speakers]), but also various Muslim sects and sub-sects.

Each one of these sects and sub-sects had their own interpretation of the faith, the holy book and Islamic laws. They also had a history of battling against one another (through highly polemical commentaries).

In his first major speech after the creation of Pakistan[12], Jinnah tried to give some shape to what Pakistan as a Muslim country was supposed to mean.

Maybe his intention was that the speech would be taken as a reference for future rulers of Pakistan to build its constitution and identity on, but that didn’t happen.

The speech alludes about of a democratic and progressive Muslim country where the Muslims of India would be able to practice their faith without any hegemonic interference from the region’s Hindu majority and British Colonialists.

But Jinnah clarified that the practising bit would be the individual’s personal and private prerogative and that the state would have nothing to do with religion[13].

Jinnah leaves a meeting with leaders of Pakistan’s Hindu and Christian minorities on a happy note, January, 1948.

Pressed by daunting economic problems, rising ethnic tensions (especially in the Bengali-dominated East Pakistan), and the increasing cases of in-fighting in the League, in 1949 (one year after the death of Jinnah), its leadership bypassed the outline sketched by the speech and retorted to the desperate act of evoking Islamic sloganeering that was first used by a fringe group in the League during the Pakistan Movement.

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 The landslide

So why is it important to understand the phenomenon of the current trend of conservatism found in Pakistan’s young middle-class youth in a historical context?

First of all, the phenomenon is not a sudden occurrence. It has been an ongoing process that actually precedes the disparaging ‘Islamization’ project set into motion by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s.

Secondly, the thoughts and opinions put into print (in the British Council report) of the 38 per cent young Pakistanis who want Shariah, remarkably sound like echoes of the language used by a variety of constitutionalists, ideologues, politicians, ulema and military dictators who over the last 65 years unleashed laws, policies and ideological projects that have contributed the most in eventually turning Pakistan into a country riddled with religious and sectarian strife, terrorism and bigotry.

Let’s briefly look at some of them:

• The 1949 Objectives Resolution is passed by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. It was one of the first attempts to define Pakistani nationalism[14] that had never been identified by the architects of Pakistan beyond the narrative that it was supposed to be a Muslim country separate from ‘Hindu India.’

According to the Resolution, Pakistan was to be a federal, democratic and an ‘Islamic entity.’ However, the ruling League government did not put the Resolution up for democratic scrutiny and it was largely rejected by Sindhi, Pushtun and Bengali nationalists as well as by the country’s Christian and Hindu minorities who alleged that it went against the idea of Pakistan envisioned by Jinnah.

Though the Resolution remained nothing more than a piece of inanimate rhetoric, it did allow some opening for the fundamentalists to seep into the scene. They had dismissed the creation of Pakistan as a non-Islamic abomination, but now saw in the Resolution the hope to use politics and constitutionalism to steer the country towards their own idea of Pakistan.

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan reading out the Objectives Resolution, May 12, 1949.

• In 1953 anti-Ahamadi Riots erupted in Lahore. Though orthodox Sunni scholars and clergy had for long been involved in a polemical battle with the Ahmadiyya sect[15] (ever since its inception in the 19^th century), and accused it of rejecting the finality of the Prophet’s mission, the 1953 riots were one of the first incidents in which violence was used against the Ahmadiyya community.

Ironically, it wasn’t the fundamentalist ulemas’ rhetoric and literature that instigated the violence. At least not initially. The onus lay with the veteran and secular Chief Minister of Punjab, Mumtaz Daultana[16], who quietly encouraged fundamentalist parties like Jamat-e-Islami (JI) and Majlis-e-Ahrar to take to the streets[17].

Daultana is said to have done this to humiliate and dislodge Prime Minister Khwaja Nizamuddin who had earlier rejected the JI and Ahrar’s demand to declare the Ahamadiyaa as ‘kafir’ (infidel).

An aspirant to the PM’s post, Dultana used the anger of the fundamentalists towards Nizamuddin to turn Lahore into a battlefield in which Nizamuddin’s credibility was to become the main causality.

The riots were crushed by the military and Martial Law was imposed in Lahore.

The nation was shocked. Only six years before the riots, Muslims of the region had been in bloody street battles with the Hindus and the Sikhs, but now here they were rioting against a community of Pakistanis that had played an active role in the Pakistan Movement.

Daultana’s gamble did not pay off and he was dismissed. JI’s chief and Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Mauddudi, was arrested and sentenced to death for instigating bloodshed and religious hatred. His sentence was then withdrawn.

Justice Muhammad Munir who led the commission that investigated the riots, interviewed dozens of ulema from different sects and sub-sects, but only to conclude that each and every ulema had his own interpretation of a ‘true Muslim’.[18]

Justice Muhammad Minir.

The fundamentalists were taken to task, but they had understood how effectively they could become the foot soldiers of political forces and possibly manipulate the situation to finally enter the corridors of state power.

• In 1956, even nine years after the creation of Pakistan, its politicians had failed to draft a proper constitution and thus define exactly what Pakistani nationhood actually meant.

The anti-Ahamadiyya riots and the growing disenchantment with the Pakistani state among its non-Punjabi and non-Mohajir ethnicities made it necessary for the politicians to finally get down to drafting a constitution.

Another reason for this was that the politicians were fast losing ground to the military and the powerful bureaucracy of the country.

A new assembly was formed (through indirect elections) in 1955 with the specific purpose of drafting Pakistan’s first proper constitution.

Jinnah had described Pakistan to be a Muslim majority country where the state and faith would be separate. The 1949 Objectives Resolution claimed it was to be an Islamic country, albeit democratic and progressive.

The 1956 Constitution was mainly authored by veteran Muslim League leader, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali. It described Pakistan to be a democratic ‘Islamic Republic’ where all laws would be constructed in the light of the Qu’ran and Sunnah.

To the religious minorities this was yet another attempt to adulterate Jinnah’s vision of the country, while the Sindhi, Pushtun, Baloch and Bangali nationalists accused it of enshrining the political, economic and cultural hegemony of the Punjabi and Mohajir ruling elite.

Actually, there were two drafts of the constitution. One was being worked in by Choudhry Muhammad Ali and another by the Law Minister, I I. Chundhrigarh.

Though it is true that Choudhry’s draft was only slightly ‘Islamic’, Chundhrigarh’s draft was almost entirely secular.[19]

When the Islamic parties, led by Maududi, rejected Choudhry’s draft and the debate in the Assembly reached a deadlock, Chundrigarh’s draft was given the go-ahead by the military and the bureaucracy.

Seeing this, the religious parties changed tact and suddenly gave their blessing to Choudhry’s constitution by endorsing it as being ‘Islamic.’

Parliamentarians take a smoke break after passing the 1956 Constitution.

• When Filed Martial Ayub Khan imposed the country’s first Martial Law in 1959, his regime reverted Pakistan’s name back to Republic of Pakistan and struck out Islamic Republic of Pakistan that was enshrined in the 1956 Constitution.

In 1960 he got himself elected as President and in 1962 sanctioned the authoring of a brand new constitution.

Apart from striking out the word Islamic from the name of the country, Ayub’s constitution was squarely based on his philosophy that ‘when religion and politics mix, both become detrimental to one another and neither remains pure.’[20]

Ayub Khan: His dictatorship presided over perhaps the most secular periods in Pakistan history.

Where on the one end, Khan’s aggressive pro-US and state-backed capitalist policies were drawing sharp reactions from the leftists, his overtly secular manoeuvres left the religionists gunning for his head.

It was during one such reaction in 1962 that the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) for the first time used the word, ‘Pakistan Ideology’. [21]

This term that today has become an integral mainstay in the country’s political, constitutional, judicial and nationalistic narrative and discourses, did not exist during the Pakistan Movement and nor was it present at the time of the country’s creation.

It was used by JI in a sentence aimed at Ayub’s policies that were attacked by JI as ‘being against the Pakistan Ideology.’

Though the contents of the expression and term were not defined, one assumed they had something to do with Islam.

What was ironic is the fact that the term was coined by a party that was originally against the creation of Pakistan!

Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi: First to use the term ‘Pakistan Ideology’ in 1962.

The term was adopted by middle-class Mohajirs whose power within the ruling elite had begun to diminish. To them the Pakistan Ideology was about ‘the sacrifices (the Mohajirs) had given to create Pakistan’ and then migrated from their former homes in North India to an uncertain future in Pakistan. A Pakistan that was made to meet their dreams and aspirations.

Of course, nobody (not least the state of Pakistan) could figure out exactly what these aspirations of dreams were, other than of creating a country where the Muslims would be in a majority.

The term Pakistan Ideology reared its head again in the late 1960s when the Ayub dictatorship was rapidly eroding in the face of a concentrated protest movement led by leftist student and political groups such as the National Students Federation (NSF), Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and National Awami Party (NAP).

During the commotion, a widespread and passionate debate erupted on the pages of newspapers, magazines and pamphlets between the JI and the PPP.

JI attacked the leftists of being atheists and anti-Islam and thus working against the Pakistan Ideology.

The leftists, in this respect led by progressive poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and journalist, Safdar Mir, responded by first mocking the JI for calling Jinnah an infidel (in the 1940s), and then asked the party scholars to define what they meant by Pakistan Ideology.

JI suggested that Pakistan Ideology was about turning Pakistan’s society and laws according to the dictates of the Shariah so that the country’s ‘Islamic culture’ could be safeguarded from intrigues of anti-Islam forces (mainly leftists and secularists).

Faiz responded by authoring a long essay (in 1969)[22] explaining how Pakistan’s culture was a combination of various ethnic and religious cultures of which Islam was one. ‘We do not have a monopoly on Islam,’ he concluded.

The whole concept of Pakistan Ideology seemed to have evaporated into thin air (that’s where it came from in the first place) when the religious parties were resoundingly defeated in the first ever direct elections in the country (1970).

The secular and left parties won the most seats in all four provinces in West Pakistan (PPP, NAP) and in East Pakistan (Awami League).

• One wonders had Pakistan not gone to war with India in 1971 (and lost), and consequently the country would not have broken (Bangladesh), how different would have been its political and ideological trajectory?

The separation of East Pakistan after the 1971 war sent the ‘two nation theory’ upon which Jinnah had driven the Pakistan Movement hurling into oblivion.

The Bengali Muslims had united with other Muslims of South Asia to campaign for and then achieve a separate Muslim country. But 24 years later the same Bengalis separated from the rest of Pakistan on the bases of Bengali nationalism.

When the PPP’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took over as President from the disgraced military dictator, Yahya Khan in January 1972, there were secular progressive parties at the helm at the centre and in the provinces.

Bhutto’s PPP had won the 1970 election in West Pakistan on a radical socialist manifesto, but his regime could not completely ignore the religious parties, in spite of the fact that they had been heavily defeated in the elections.

One of the main reasons for this was that the religious right in Pakistan had reacted to the 1971 defeat by weaving a narrative that quickly appealed to the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie segments of the country.

According to JI the war was lost because the Pakistan armed forces were too ‘westernised’ and morally corrupt and that Pakistan broke because its rulers did not turn it into a ‘true Islamic Republic.’

Bhutto who in the beginning seemed to be struggling to heal a country suffering from the humiliation and the economic and political impact of an expensive war, took JI’s narrative and turned it to his own advantage.

In 1973 he called a conference of both secular and religious scholars and intellectuals in Islamabad and asked them to thrash out an ideology on which Pakistan could be rebuilt.

A blueprint emerged that was a fusion of Faiz’s ideas of what Pakistani culture was and that of the religionists.

It weaved together a new ideological narrative that (in a nutshell) went something like this: ‘Pakistan was really West Pakistan because it was situated in an area along the river Indus that since the 9^th century always had a Muslim majority.  This area had regimes that largely remained independent from the monarchical thrones in Delhi. Though the area has diverse ethnic groups and cultures, their views about Islam were quite similar[23].

The government then decided to infuse this narrative into school text books, but this practice was bound to take a life of its own.

Pakistani historian and ideologue, I H. Qureshi, spearheaded the campaign, but the more rewriting of history books he attempted, the more convoluted the narrative became.

I H. Qureshi.

On the other end the JI successfully tapped into the disgruntled disposition of young middle-class Pakistanis, especially in the Punjab and Karachi, who were not happy with the way the regime had responded to the humiliation of the 1971 war.

From the early 1970s onwards membership to the JI’s student-wing, the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT) grew rapidly and it was through the IJT that the JI successfully fought its battle of narratives against the ruling secular parties at the centre and in the provinces.

JI’s narrative was straightforward, but found willing ears among middle-class youth in the Punjab and Karachi. It suggested that Pakistan broke because the rulers failed to make it what it was supposed to be: An Islamic State.

Furthermore, Pakistan was being punished by God because after gifting the Muslims of South Asia a country with the promise to become a bastion of Islam, Pakistani Muslims were dabbling in atheistic concepts like secularism and socialism and Western cultural influences.

It is interesting to note that though the religious parties hardly had any worthwhile number of members in the National Assembly, they, with the help of their youth wings and Urdu media, were able get Bhutto to reinstate the word Islamic in the official name of the country in the 1973 Constitution.

Rhetoric about forming laws that would not contradict the spirit of the Qu’ran and Sunnah too made its way back in.

• After the 1973 global oil crises, Bhutto decided to closely court oil-rich Arab countries. He also opened the way for middle and working class Pakistanis to travel to these countries for work.

In the Arab countries, the largely Barelvi Pakistani Muslims came into contact with the strain of faith practiced by the Arabs and encouraged by their monarchs.

Some call it ‘Wahabism,’ some explain it as being ‘Salafi’ and some describe it as ‘Ahle Hadith.’

All these definitions have separate historical trajectories, but all three do come and settle on a common ground that does not allow any Islamic sect, sub-sect or strain that has anything whatsoever to do with Sufism, shrines or rituals smacking (to them) of heresy and shirk.

When most Pakistanis came into contact with their Arab employers, they were initially disoriented by what they saw as a somewhat dry and non-spiritual strain of Islam and became even more perturbed when their beliefs were ridiculed and they were asked to mend them.

But money trumped faith. Never before had the Pakistani working and middle-class folks (who managed to travel to countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE), made the kind of money they began to make in those strange, spiritually dry but rich lands of the limousine-driving Bedouins.

However, more than these Pakistanis being persuaded to give up their old version of the faith and take up what their Arab paymasters insisted was ‘true Islam,’ it was the money that they made and the sudden rise in their social status back home, is what convinced them to shed their old beliefs.

After all, the old beliefs now reminded them of days that may have been more fun and open-ended, but these were also days when they struggled to own their own TV set, freezer, air-conditioning unit and refrigerator.

• The 1974 anti-Ahmadiyya riots were mainly about the religious parties reasserting their demands that were rejected in 1954.

This time around they knew that they had far more support among    middle-class Pakistanis who simply understood these riots as an expression of protest against Bhutto’s ‘socialist policies’.

So this time JI’s agitation against the Ahmadiyya included active    support from religious parties and groups representing the more religious sections of Barelvi, Deobandi and even Shia populations.

Even though the ‘Khatam-e-Nabuwat’ (the Finality of Prophethood movement), by these groups managed to force the Bhutto regime to declare the Ahamdiyya as a non-Muslim minority, it is the result of this movement that would eventually go on to spring open a Pandora’s Box from which a series of demons would begin to emerge that today are playing havoc with the lives and existence of even those sects and sub-sects (Shia and Barelvis) that had originally supported the movement and applauded the Ahmadiyya’s excommunication.

Anti-Ahmadiyya graffiti on a wall in Lahore in 1974.

What’s more, after the 1974 constitutional amendment that declared the Ahmadiyya as non-Muslim, instead of hoping to appease the rightists, Bhutto uncannily gave them exactly the kind of stature and space they had been searching for ever since 1947.

In Jully 1977 the Bhutto regime was toppled in a reactionary military coup, a move applauded by most religious parties.

Shortly before the coup their was a violent movement against Bhutto mainly undertaken by the urban middle-classes who responded enthusiastically to the opposition’s call for enforcing the Shariah.

A 1978 edition of the PPP’s party paper, Musawat, carrying old quotes of Maududi against Jinnah and democracy.

So a narrative that was constructed in 1973 to rationalize the separation of East Pakistan, and then evolved into becoming a hotchpotch of reactive ideologies of both the left and the right had now been carried into the mainstream on the backs of Punjab’s and Karachi’s middle-classes as a suggestion that the imposition of the Shariah was always the main purpose of the founders of Pakistan, and that Shariah alone could keep Pakistan from further disintegration.

Jinnah rolled in his grave.

_______________

Zia had shrewdly noted how even some of the most secular Pakistanis had largely remained silent when Bhutto declared the Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslim and began to use Islamic symbolism in his post-1974 populist narrative.

Islam was the perfect kind of excuse for a tyrant to flex his muscles, especially in a country where the middle-classes and related upstarts who had travelled to oil-rich Arab countries had confused the power of the Petro-Dollar with the power of a strict strain of Islam that they came into contact with there.

Ziaul Haq announces the dissolution of Assemblies and imposition of ‘Islamic laws’ on PTV.

Maududi’s Pakistan Ideology that had been battered by the voters in 1970 but mutated into meaning something closer to Bhutto’s equally convoluted ‘Islamic Socialism,’ fell into the hands of Zia who gave it his own big twist.

But he did not only make it as part of school text books and the constitution, he also began to actually express it through draconian laws that he described as being ‘Islamic.’

Law after law based on a particular and orthodox understanding of Islam was rolled out, so much so that by the time of his death in 1988, the 1973 Constitution, that had originally been a product of progressive and democratic intent, became the enshrinement of laws, rules and clauses that until today give both a religious as well constitutional cover to what are indeed acts of religious violence and bigotry.

No civilian government has dared touch these laws in fear of being declared ‘anti-Islam’ and ‘anti-Pakistan Ideology’.

In the last two decades, whole generations of educated, middle-class, young Pakistanis have grown up believing that Shariah was Jinnah’s main aim, and that the so-called Pakistan Ideology emerged from the sacrifices rendered by their elders during the Pakistan Movement.

A famous cartoon (by Zahoor) satirizing the Islamization of Jinnah’s image.

Of course, Sindhi, Baloch and some sections of Pushtun nationalists have continued to oppose these views and moves as being tools of the Punjabi-elite and military dominated establishment and their religious and bourgeois allies with which they keep certain ethnicities (and now sects) on a tight leash, but the truth is, with the help of the private Urdu media and the economics of the growing economic, judicial and political influence of the urban middle-classes, the Pakistan Ideology is what that defines most young Pakistanis today.

Even if, ironically, it is more likely to make them say they are Muslims first and Pakistanis later.

_________________________

 Who made who?

When we look at the salient features of what has been propagated (through various state initiatives, history text books and the media) as ‘Pakistan ideology’ over the decades, the following assertions stand out:

• The idea of a separate Muslim state (Pakistan) emerged to counter a possible post-colonial domination of the Hindu culture and politics in the region.
• Pakistan also came into existence to blunt historical conspiracies by the Hindus to absorb Islam and Muslims into their own belief system.
• The Muslims of Pakistan are a nation in the modern sense of the word. The basis of their nationhood is neither racial, linguistic nor ethnic; rather they are a nation because they belong to the same faith, Islam.
•  Pakistanis may share a common history with the peoples of other faiths of the region (especially Hindu), but their faith is more importantly rooted in the history of Islam beyond the sub-continent.
•  Since Pakistan came into being to assert the fact that Muslims and Hindus are two different nations, Pakistan should be a state where the Muslims should have an opportunity to live according to their faith and creed based on principles and laws of Islam.
• As a Muslim ideological state it is also the duty of the Pakistani state to defend the interests of other Muslim states and countries.
• Pakistan’s ideological and geographic borders are such that various anti-Islam forces are constantly conspiring against the Pakistani state from within and outside Pakistan.
•  Pakistan needs a thorough security apparatus to fend off such forces.
•   Such forces constitute countries driven by Hindus, Christians, Jewish/Zionist, secular and Communist doctrines (from the outside), as well as groups and individuals propagating distinct ethnic nationalisms (from within).
• Though Pakistan does not recognise sectarian divisions between Islamic sects, it remains to be a Sunni majority country where Islamic laws based on historical legislative narratives of Sunni Islam have every right to take precedence.
• It is the duty of the Pakistani state to promote Islamic laws and practices in the society so the society can be prepared to collectively embrace without hesitation the emergence of an Islamic state run on the principals of the Shariah.
• Pakistan does not discriminate against non-Sunni Islamic sects and minority religions, but Sunni Islam (constructed on the modernist Islamic thoughts of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Iqbal as well as on the Islamic scholarship emerging from friendly Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia), will rightfully dominate in the social, cultural, religious and political policies of the state.

The critique of the ideology is based on a more rational and deconstructive study of it; a study initiated by leftists and Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun nationalists (in the late 1960s) and (in the last 30 years or so), by the liberals.

• Pakistan even as a separate Muslim majority state is not a homogenous phenomenon. It is teeming with a varied number of ethnicities, religions and Islamic sects and sub-sects.
•  A unified version of Islam and nationalism constructed by the state and then imposed upon the varied ethnicities, religions and Islamic sects was an insensitive, undemocratic attack on their respective cultural heritages.
•  In the absence of a viable democratic system and process, Pakistan will continue plummeting as a nation state, and consequently its ideology will become more and more myopic, suspicious and tyrannical – especially when it entirely becomes the domain of the establishment.
• The establishment will then incorporate the conservative Islamic forces as allies to justify its undemocratic political domination and to legitimise its Islamic credentials.
• The only thing that can help Pakistan avoid such a scenario (and a possible state failure), is the granting of democratic rights, participation and autonomy to its various ethnicities.
• Pakistan should be a secular Muslim majority state where all Muslim sects and non-Muslim minorities are free to practice their faiths according to their own cultural norms, within their homes and places of worship, whereas the state should be discouraged to propagate any single or preferred form of Islam or ethnic culture. The public sphere too should be free from any religious interference or presence of any one particular denomination of the faith.

References:

1 Next Generation Goes To The Polls, British Council Pakistan, pp.6,7
2 The interviews were conducted by AC Neilson
3 Dror Wahrman, Imagining The Middle Class (Cambridge University Press) p.152
4 Ronald M. Glassman, The Middle Class & Democracy in Socio-Historical Perspective, (BRILL, 1995) p.210
5 Dale L. Johnson, Class & Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle-Class (Sage Publications, 1982). p.113
6 Michael Burliegh, Blood and Rage (Harper Collins, 2009) pp.189, 190
7 Evelyne Huber, John D. Stephens, Development & The Crises of the Welfare State (University of Chicago Press, 2010) p.206
8 Zaid Haider, The Ideological Struggle for Pakistan (Hoover Institute Press, 2010), p.41
9 Alyssa Ayres, Speaking Like A State: Language & Nationalism in Pakistan (Cambrige University Press, 2004) p.194
10 Aysha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
11 Sunanda Sanyal, Soumya Basu. The Sickle & The Crescent: Communists, Muslim League & India’s Partition (Frontpage Publishers, 2011)
12 Text of Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/legislation/constituent_address_11aug1947.html
13 Ibid
14 Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, (Brookings Institute Press, 204) p.57
15 The Ahmadiyya were considered to be a Muslim sect in Pakistan till 1974
16 Mathew J. Nelson, In the Shadow of the Sharia (Columbia University Press, 2011) p.112
17 Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, (M.E Sharpe, 2004) p.21
18 Report on the 1953 Disturbances in the Punjab (PDF) http://www.thepersecution.org/dl/report_1953.pdf
19 Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, (M.E Sharpe, 2004) p.31
20 Ayub Khan, Altaf Gohar, Friends, Not Masters, (Oxford University Press, 1967)
21 Ayesha Jalal, Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining (Middle Eastern Studies, 1995)
22 Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Culture & Identity (Oxford University Press, 2005)
23 Aitzaz Ahsan, The Indus Saga (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Lahore, Barcelona

As a college student and a fancy ‘Marxist revolutionary’, back in the mid-1980s, one of the historical events that interested me the most was the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

When in 1930 a military dictatorship in Spain fell, a coalition of communists, socialists and anarchists (the Republicans) swept the country’s municipal elections, forcing the Spanish monarch to flee the country.

The Republicans took over the reigns of the new Spanish government and state and authored a constitution that was hostile towards the military, monarchy and the Catholic clergy.

The new government nationalised all public services and land, banks and the railways but these radical steps created tensions between the leftists (the Republicans) and the coalition of monarchist, Catholic priests and the landed elite (the Falange).

In July 1936, General Franco, on the behest of the Falange, attempted to launch a military coup against the Republican regime, but failed. The failure however, resulted in an all-out civil war between the Republicans and the military-backed Falange.

The first shots of the bloody war were fired in the Spanish city of Barcelona. Even though after four years, Franco’s forces were finally able to defeat the Republicans, but what happened in Barcelona during this period is most interesting.

As the state and government crumbled during the civil war, Barcelona was almost entirely run by its residents supported by Republican forces.

Everything was nationalised and taken over by the people, including factories, buildings, transport and policing duties.

The event baffled a number of historians because what in theory sounded like an improbable and highly Utopian proposition — i.e. common civilians running a whole city on their own without any state or conventional government in place — actually transpired in Barcelona, and that too for a full four years.

This episode used to fascinate me to no end. However, even more fascinating is a piece of local history that I only recently stumbled upon.

In his 2001 book, The Mirage of Power, former PPP ideologue and founder, Dr. Mubashir Hassan, writes in detail about an event that has been inexplicably ignored and forgotten about by most Pakistanis.

The event is about a Barcelona type situation in the Lahore of 1972.

The PPP had swept the 1970 election in Sindh and Punjab in the former West Pakistan on a radical socialist manifesto.

Though elections were held under a military dictator, the dictatorship was forced to relinquish its power after the Pakistan armed forces were defeated in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, and what was once East Pakistan separated, becoming the independent republic of Bangladesh.

The dictatorship’s fall paved the way for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s PPP to form the country’s first ever democratically elected regime. But almost immediately it began to face daunting economic problems, and hostility from the rightists and even from those forces that had passionately campaigned for the PPP during the 1970 election.

But since in the early days of its inception, the regime was genuinely popular among a large number of people residing in Punjab and Sindh, it found itself being actively supported by the masses in the face of various issues that had cropped up due to Pakistan’s military defeat and the consequential break-up of the country.

For example, when the regime failed to break a crippling police strike in Peshawar (in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), it asked the Army to intervene. But the Army refused and Bhutto’s ministers had to get into lengthy discussions and deliberations with the striking policemen to resolve the issue.

But just as the government was about to achieve a breakthrough in Peshawar, an even more crippling strike by the police broke out in Lahore.

Short on resources, time and men, the Bhutto regime struggled to juggle between handling strikes in Peshawar and Lahore. The military refused to intervene in Lahore, claiming that the city was in shambles after the 1971 war and thus, lacked the influence and resources to pacify the striking policemen.

Unable to get appropriate attention of the government, police officers and their subordinates (including those from traffic police), simply abandoned their posts and stations, and went home.

Bhutto and his governor in the Punjab, Mustafa Khar, panicked. Lahore was lingering without any police protection whatsoever and there was fear that if habitual criminals come loose, anarchy would engulf the city.

The fear was realistic. A major city was without any police presence; a city of a country that had lost its pride due to a humiliating defeat at the hands of a hated enemy and consequentially facing a daunting economic and political crises.

But instead of anarchy and free-for-all bloodletting, something entirely unexpected happened. After finding absolutely no cops directing the traffic and the police stations totally empty, the people of Lahore decided to run the city themselves.

Almost everyone participated — fruit and vegetable vendors to labour, college and university students to white-collar office workers.

College and high school students used abandoned stools and sheds to control traffic. And what’s more, they were all obeyed by the car, taxi, rickshaw and bus drivers.

As the students ran the traffic, the labour and office workers moved in to take over police stations. As some police stations were not abandoned by the striking cops, they were asked to leave. Those who refused to go were thrown out by large crowds.

In some areas these crowds chose common working class men as the station’s new thanedaars (SHO). Masons, carpenters, school teachers, and in one case, an unemployed old man were chosen to run police stations as awami thanedaars (people’s officers).

The old man had initially refused the offer saying that since he couldn’t even recover his lost goat, how could he ever catch any thieves?

But the crowd around him persisted and the man relented when someone from the crowd appeared with three goats and handed them to him.

This continued for almost two days and Lahore newspapers reported that traffic violations and incidents of theft had dropped considerably during these eventful and unprecedented days.

Khar exploited the event brilliantly. After failing to get the cops to end their strike, he held a large rally in Lahore (televised by PTV).

In the rally he warned the policemen that if they did not return to their posts, they would be dismissed and common civilians would be given their posts and perks. The cops returned, almost immediately.

It is interesting to note that this was the same city that would eventually go up in flames due to the 1974 anti-Ahmadi riots, and these days is making a name for itself for generating mobs of hatred who go about killing supposed ‘blasphemers’ and burning down whole residential areas populated by Pakistani Christians.

Signs of the Times

August 2012 marked the 25th anniversary of the arrival of one of the most popular seminal Pakistani pop bands, the Vital Signs.

Apart from Nazia Hassan, the only other Pakistani pop act that has retained such intense interest and popularity after its demise has been the Vital Signs.

But whereas, Nazia’s classic status and popularity were duly propelled by her working relationship with famous British disco producer, Biddu, the Signs had more of a struggle, trying to play and sell the kind of pop that was still a risky anomaly in the Pakistan of the mid and late 1980s.

Today, more than two decades after their formation in 1986 and 17 years after their last album, even the vaguest rumour about a possible Signs reformation generates widespread interest – even among a whole new generation of local pop fans, most of whom were only toddlers when the Signs were first formed.

From the urban underbelly of melody …

The Vital Signs were launched in early 1986 in Rawalpindi by two teens, Rohail Hayatt (keyboards, synthesisers), and Shahzad Hassan (bass).

They were soon joined by Nusrat Hussain (guitar, keyboards). Interestingly, they were not yet called the Vital Signs.

Not even when lead singer Junaid Jamshed, a young engineering student from Lahore, joined.

This was a time when the wily General Ziaul-Haq was reigning supreme as dictator masquerading as a “democratically elected” President with a puppet parliament sanctioning his every move reeking of a Machiavellian brand of so-called “Islamisation.”

Even though the country, at the time was covered by a thick, smoggy façade of strict conservatism and awkward moralistic pretence, its urban underbelly was clogged with raising ethnic tensions, gang violence, corruption and state-sponsored terror partaken by Zia’s various intelligence agencies to suppress dissent against the dictatorship.

Ironically, it was these political and economic tensions and pretensions, power plays and freak economic prosperity that also propelled the gradual expansion of the country’s urban middle and lower-middle-classes.

And it is the youth cultures that emerged from these classes that launched the first shots of the kind of pop culture, scene and music we now call modern Pakistani pop.

Change was in the air. Tensions were running high and something had to give. This was the underlining feeling among the time’s youth. They could not pin-point exactly what or how this change would happen, but the moment Benazir Bhutto returned from exile in mid-‘86 and led a mammoth rally in Lahore, the country’s major urban centres saw a quiet but certain outpouring of brand new pop bands who wanted to sound somewhat different from the time’s top pop scions.

Video:

Before the ‘revolution’: Nazia and Zoheb Hassan performing on the state-owned PTV in 1981. She (along with her brother Zoheb Hassan) was Pakistan’s biggest-selling pop act, even though their album sales and TV appearances were briefly banned by the Zia regime in 1981. The ban was lifted in 1983.

Video:

Alamgir was another seminal pop wonder of Pakistan and a star. This is a 1979 song of his.

Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar …

Most of the new acts that began appearing after 1986, played at private parties and weddings and at college functions. The Signs by early 1987 were firm favourites in the period’s college function circuit.

The Signs performance also included ambitious and bold covers of vintage Pink Floyd, Rush and A-ha songs, apart from the usual popular Pakistani filmi-pop and Indian film tunes of the time.

The band never took itself seriously, though. Music was just a hobby. But all that changed, however, when they were discovered by ace PTV producer and director, Shoaib Mansoor, a shy, introverted bohemian and a keen music lover.

Wanting to cash-in on the charisma he found in the way the band looked and sounded, Shoaib asked them to record a national song he had written and wanted to air (as a video) on PTV. The song, of course, was “Dil, Dil Pakistan.”

By now the band had started to call themselves the Vital Signs, inspired by the title of a song on the 1981 Rush album, ‘Moving Pictures.’

It was Nusrat Hussain who took the initial shot at composing the song. Shoaib hated the first draft. He wanted it to be a lot catchier. Nusrat had another go and came up with an intro that was appreciated by the other members. Encouraged by it, the others (especially Junaid), lend in their own in-puts and ideas until the tune was completed, approved by Shoaib and recorded.

It was released in the summer of 1987 as a video (directed by Shoaib), in which the Signs are shown singing the song over what looked like the lush hills of Murree.

It was an instant hit. The new generation loved it, as it was the first time ever, since the Zia regime had restricted the wearing of western dress on TV (in 1982-83) that young men in denim, leather jackets and guitars were seen (and allowed) on PTV.

Shoaib had certainly pulled off a smart coup. For years now, ‘Dil, Dil Pakistan’ is regarded to be the ‘second Pakistani national anthem.’

Video:

The ‘Dil, Dil Pakistan’ video that appeared on PTV in the summer of 1987. Director Shoaib Mansoor spent days trying to convince the censors to allow the airing of this video. PTV thought a video showing young men riding bikes in leather jackets reminded one of hooligans. The video was eventually allowed to air, mainly because of its patriotic lyrics.

But the song’s success was not seen by the Signs as something that would turn them into professional musicians. At least, this is what Nusrat Hussain and Junaid Jamshed thought.

Nusrat, training to become an airline pilot, flew out to Karachi and Junaid who wanted to become a professional engineer, didn’t want to have anything to do with music other than just treating it as a hobby.

However, the allure of instant success and the amount of interest Shoaib was ready to invest in the band kept Rohail and Shahzad going. They managed to convince Junaid to hang around for at least the recording of their first album.
But as far as Nusrat was concerned, there was no coming back. The band was now without their main composer and guitar player.

Rohail purposed looking around for a “proper guitarist.” And ironically, it was Nusrat who suggested Salman Ahmed (a medical student living in Karachi).

Shoaib’s clout had already gotten EMI (Pakistan) interested in helping the band record their debut album. This saw Rohail, Junaid and Shahzad travelling to Karachi.

The album was recorded at EMI’s studio, but almost all of it was written and composed at new guitarist Salman Ahmed’s residence in Karachi where the band had been lodged.

Shoaib did all the lyrics while Junaid and Rohail shared the bulk of the composing duties. And even though Salman wanted more guitars on it, he agreed to keep the instrument in the background when EMI’s Arshad Mehamood and Shoaib insisted that they should play it safe and straight on the first album.

However, he was allowed to have a go on the rocking “Doh Pal Ka Jeewan” and played rather beautifully on the moody “Yeh Shaam.”

Cover of the first Vital Signs album released in 1989. From left: Salman Ahmed (Guitar), Rohail Hayatt (Keyboards), Shahazad Hassan (Bass) and Junaid Jamshed (Vocals).

The sound and words of the album are (though indirectly), influenced by an important turning point in the history of the troubled nation.

On August 18, 1988, the country’s ubiquitous military dictator, General Ziaul Haq, was assassinated when a bomb went off on the C-130 plane he was flying in.

Party-based elections were announced for November and by October, thousands of young Pakistanis thronged the streets with huge, spontaneous car rallies, dancing and waving flags, with “Dil, Dil Pakistan” blaring out from car stereos and music stores.

It was a euphoric time, of great hope and anticipation.

Released in early 1989, VS:1 was a massive success. It was a happy album. It reflected well the mood of the time. It was all about hope and the safeguarding of national pride, coupled by the new generation’s respect and liking for individuality, independence and free will.

Audio:

‘Doh Pal Ka Jeewan’ (From VS-1, 1989)

However, the album’s last two songs were rather enigmatic. The melancholic “Musafir” and “Yeh Shaam,” opted for a more reflective outlook, pleading moments of introversion to come to terms with the other side of the euphoria.

In fact, these two compositions can be seen having the seeds of the deep blue sound and mood the Signs would become known for. These songs are also the first by the Signs on the theme of someone fearing the sudden loss of happiness; a theme they would eventually continue to address in all their albums.

Audio:

‘Musafir’ (1989)

Change changing places …

The debut album’s success saw the Signs rapidly rising towards stardom, leading a wave of fresh new acts that came to the front at the expense of the old stars.

Most of the new guns were a prominent part of the many “youth festivals” that began to do the rounds in Karachi and Lahore, especially after one such show was specially conducted and televised by PTV in late 1989, (‘Music ‘89’).

Directed by Shoaib Mansoor, it went down in history as being Pakistan’s first ever modern pop program; an impressive one-off headlined by Nazia and Zoheb, but stolen by a crackling performance by the Vital Signs.

The Signs greatly admired Nazia and Zoheb. Like all young Pakistanis who entered their teens during the Zia regime, the Signs too looked at the dynamic brother and sister duo whose music helped young men and women cope with the frustrating moral and myopic idiosyncrasies of the Zia dictatorship.

The Signs looked forward to meeting the duo after their performance, only to be given a cold shoulder by Zoheb.

Junaid and Salman were greatly disappointed. They did not realise that their band and the many acts that they were inspiring had already started to be seen as threats by the old guard.

This was true, because by the early ‘90s, almost all top pop guns of the ‘80s had been overshadowed and siphoned out by the new lot.

Festivals apart, the Signs soon went on a whirlwind tour of the country, playing sell-out concerts in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar.

Some of these, especially the two concerts held in Karachi in late ’89, are still remembered as some of the best by the band.

Vital Signs in Karachi, 1989.

But during this tour, cracks started to appear in the Signs otherwise shiny armour.

The Signs were made up of four very different personalities. Rohail, in spite of being introverted and not at all interested in getting a lot of attention, was somehow treated as the leader.

And though his quiet disposition helped him cultivate a good balance between artistic aspirations and sound business sense, he did carry a mighty hefty ego and a pretty potent penchant for sly Machiavellian intrigue.

Salman on the other hand, was an outright extrovert. At times crudely so, even though on most occasions he was only trying to speak his mind. He too carried a hefty ego and an almost ruthless ambition to make it big. Things soon fell apart.

Junaid was tricky business; but not in a malicious way because even in those days, Junaid was a volatile character, as emotionally impressionable and contradictory as he is today as a Tableeghi Jamat member.

He went about as a man tormented by a sense of burdensome guilt – guilt about something no one, not even himself was able to define. And even though all the Signs enjoyed numerous fleeting affairs during their early hay days, it was Junaid who ended up stuck in an awkward, tearful romantic fling.

He was close to both Rohail and Salman, but could not defuse the tension between the two. In the end, when the Signs were approached by Pepsi (in late 1990), Junaid decided to side with Rohail when he managed to completely isolate the capricious guitarist.

The Pepsi contract was signed in December 1990, (ironically in the presence of Salman), but by January 1991, Salman was gone.

Mother should I build the wall …

Salman’s idealistic nature bordered on being clumsy and naïve. But it was his passionate focus and ambition to become a big time rock star that first made him launch Junoon with former Jupiters’ vocalist, Ali Azmat and ex-Signs man, Nusrat Hussain.

Cover of Junoon’s first album (1990).

But to be a popular rock star, Salman was bold enough not to become yet another Signs clone. His idea for long-term relevance lay in introducing socially conscious rock music to the mainstream Pakistani scene.

Many believe that Rohail planed to give Salman the boot in mid-1990 when Rohail (along with Junaid and Shahzad), saw guitarist Rizwan-ul-Haq play with a local band at a concert in Islamabad.

On a number of occasions, Rohail complained about Salman’s “interfering ways” and what Rohail called, “Salman’s Imran Khan complex.”

Pressured by Pepsi to come out with a brand new album, the Signs called in Rizwan as Salman’s replacement.

Rizwan’s more subdued personality and his talent to play a lot more melodically compared to Salman’s riff-friendly ways, was more to the liking of Rohail’s plan to construct the Signs’ sound as a crisp cross between vintage late-80s pop (ala A-ha and Duran Duran), with the aura of ‘70s Progressive Rock (especially Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis).

Junoon Mk:2. Ali Azmat (vocals), Salman Ahmed (guitar), Brian O’Connell (bass) and (not in the picture), Malcom (drums).

Sohaib’s lyrics remained to be reflective musings about lost chances and of urban existential crisis being tackled by a highly romanticised version of the concept of nostalgia.

Junaid was a huge admirer of these lyrics, and sang them with great commitment and meaning. It was as if he was tackling his own awkward emotional crisis of the self with these songs.

And it was these very crisis that saw him suddenly announce his departure from the Signs, right in the middle of the recording process of the band’s second album.

He huffed out of Rohail’s studios in Rawalpindi, returning to study engineering in Lahore, though the bulk of the vocals had already been recorded.

This is precisely why the Signs’ second album, VS:2 is such a departure from the first album’s more upbeat ways.

Cover of Vital Signs second album, VS:2 (1991). From top left: Shahzad (bass), Rizwaul Haq (guitar); Junaid (vocals); Rohail (synthesisers/drum-machine/acoustic guitars/production).

Rohail was left in a lurch in his studios as he sat down to produce the final mix of the album, unsure of the band’s existence.

The resulting sound emerging from the intra-band turmoil and uncertainty was heavily melancholic and introverted (“Rahi,” “Yaad Kar Na”, “Ajnabi”), suddenly jumping towards thumping anger with the powerful, “Aisa Na Ho.”

Audio:

‘Ajnabi’ from VS-2 (1991)

Video:

 ‘Yaad Kar Na’ (1991)

This is also perhaps the Signs’ most political album as well, alluding to the loss of innocence, hope and euphoria that bloomed in 1988 with the demise of the Zia dictatorship and the election of a young Benazir Bhutto as the country’s new prime minster.

By 1991 such hope and euphoria lay crushed under the weight of a new round of ethnic and sectarian violence and political corruption. The late ‘80s street dancing revolution was over.

The Signs’ rued this loss with a warning shot on “Aisa Na Ho” and masqueraded their taunting of America’s deceptive ways with third world countries like Pakistan on “Mera Dil Nahi Available.”

Hardly anyone knew that the song’s narrator was a cynical, stereotypical American politician and not a hearty teenage flirt! Cheeky stuff, but pulled off with an ironic sense of humour.

Audio:

‘Aisa Na Ho’ from VS-2 (1991). The Signs ruing the slipping away of hope.

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away …

With VS:2, the Signs’ music had shown strong signs of maturity and versatility. And even though the album was a commercial success, some fans were not happy with the album’s downbeat sound.

However, it was this album that was able to draw the attention of many “serious minded” listeners.

The success prompted Pepsi to revive its sponsorship deal with the band, raising the stakes enough for the band to, (for the first time), seriously start treating making music as a career.

Junaid made the final break with his ambition of becoming an engineer as the band prepared to go on another gruelling tour of the country. But more importantly, they were now set to become the first modern Pakistani pop act to go on a tour abroad. The United States was the destination.

The tour also changed the way the band looked. No more were they clean-cut Ah-Ha clones, as they let their hair grow, slipped into heavy cowboy boots, Levis 501’s, leather jackets and chunky metal jewellery!

Vital Signs in 1993: From Top Left: Rizwan, Rohail, Shahzad, Junaid.

The early ‘90s that saw the emergence of grunge and a revival of interest in ‘70s music and fashion were the instigators.

The change also saw Rohail, Shahzad and Junaid moving to Karachi (Rizwan decided to stay back in Islamabad), as Rohail started constructing a brand new studio in his Karachi apartment.

They entered the studio in early 1993 almost the same time as Junoon did the EMI (Studios) to record their second album, Talaash (the first album, though promising, had bombed in the market).

Pepsi had also raised the stakes for it to meddle in the ways the new Signs album should sound.

They had not enjoyed VS:2’s “depressing tone” and pressurised the band to make the new album sound a lot like the first one. And this time there weren’t to be any songs alluding to politics whatsoever.

However, the general theme of the new songs remained the same. Shoaib again penned songs ruing about lost opportunities and the need to look towards an idealised version of a nostalgic past to counter modern urban existential pangs.

One such song also became the title of the new album: Aitebaar. Built around some marvellous piano playing by Rizwan-ul-Haq, Junaid gave voice to what would become one of the local scene’s finest ballads. And this was also the highlight of the album which was otherwise studded with tunes that were nothing more than a cosmetic exercise in making easy-to-swallow pop music.

Cover of ‘Aitebar’ (1993).

Aitebar remains to be the Signs’ weakest album. Highly predictable, it did have its moments, though. But these were too far and in-between.

Audio:

‘Aitebar’ (1993)

A lot more was changing. A wave of brand new acts had come tumbling in, mostly via Ghazanfar Ali’s weekly pop show, ‘Music Channel Charts’ (Yatagaan, Awaz, Collage, Fringe Benefits, Sequencers, Jazba, Nadeem Jaffery, along with, of course, a rapidly galloping Junoon).

Though still the land’s top pop act, the Signs now had some serious competition.

The Pepsi Therapy: VS washed down their demons with Pepsi.

On the surface they seemed not to be so perturbed. In fact, Rohail produced the first Awaz album, a band that was being tipped by Pepsi to be the next Signs.

It’s another matter that though a commercial success, the album was nothing more than a predictable exercise in one-dimensional boy-pop.

The Signs then toured the country to record the Shoaib Mansoor directed Geetar ’93, a compilation of videos of the Signs’ biggest hits thus far, shot across the four provinces and financed by Pepsi.

Made for PTV (and now available on DVD), Geetar ’93 was an entertaining document of the Signs’ progress as a solid pop act. However, the only thing in those videos that stuck out like a sore thumb was the not-so-aesthetically and strategically placed Pepsi bottles in the videos. They seemed surrealistically ridiculous placed there in songs about broken hearts, emotional isolation and soft existential angst.

1993 was also the year in which the Signs played the most number of concerts. The biggest taking place at the KDA Stadium in Karachi, headlined by the Signs and also consisting performances from the Milestones, Awaz and the newly formed Arsh.

Another note of interest at the concert was the presence of Salman Ahmed in the audience and the fact that it was after this concert that Rohail first started to show signs of agitation regarding his growing dissatisfaction with Rizwan-ul-Haq’s playing.

Run, rabbit run, dig that hole forget the sun …

Rohail wasn’t counting his blessings as far as Rizwan was concerned. He was a pretty competent player. Not flashy but highly melodic and understated. His playing was near perfect for the Signs’ sound.

However, the prospect of getting guitar whiz Aamir Zaki became too good an opportunity to let go. Rizwan was quietly siphoned out (he joined Awaz), and in came the moody and temperamental Zaki.

Amir Zaki. (Picture courtesy Maryam Shah)

Pepsi were breathing down the band’s neck to come out with a new album. To compensate, the band released a hurriedly compiled “Best of …” package. Rohail did not want another Aitebar, deciding to construct a sound that was similar to the one discovered on VS:2 but a lot meatier.

Rohail and Zaki wanted it to be like a cross between Floyd, Eagles and Fleetwood Mac.

Much talk (and smoking) took place but little work was done as Rohail also ventured out to try publishing the country’s first music magazine and a possibility of recording actress Atiqa Odho’s debut album.

Rohail seemed to be spending more time planning Ms. Odho’s album than he was in the one coming up for the Signs’.

Already signs of tension and friction between Zaki and Rohail had started to emerge. And then came the announcement that the Signs would be touring the States.

Rohail flatly refused saying that he has a magazine to publish and albums to produce.

Rohail’s refusal did not go down well with Junaid who sided with Zaki’s suggestion of making the tour without Rohail. Which they did.

Ticked off, Rohail announced his departure from the band.

On returning, Junaid reproached Rohail and along-with Shahzad coaxed Rohail to rejoin. The meeting did not have Zaki in it, and when the Signs were interviewed in a TV show in mid-’94, here too Zaki was missing from the line-up.

But Zaki was still there with the band when they finally started work on the new album. The process was broken when the Signs flew to Dubai for a couple of concerts. They were seen embracing each other after the concerts in a show of reviving their trust and mending fences.

Zaki in the studios with the Signs, 1995.

The recoding of the new album was again interrupted when the band toured England.

In between shows, Rohail took the band (along-with Awaz’s Asad Ahmed and Junoon’s Ali Azmat), to see Pink Floyd live in London.

Rohail had always wanted a guitarist who could sound and play like Floyd’s David Gilmore. Now, more than ever.

But he was shocked when Zaki came out of the concert severely criticising Gilmour’s playing. This was the final straw. After a heated argument, Zaki was asked to leave.

Some even blamed too much indulgence in hallucinogenic paraphernalia by the band.

Zaki was finally replaced by Asad Ahmed to help the band complete their new album.

Cover of 1995’s ‘Hum Tum’. By now VS had moved from EMI to Virgin Records.

It was no secret that Asad always wanted to jump Awaz and join the Signs, but Rohail wouldn’t accept him as anything more than a hired hand.

In early 1995, the Signs finally completed and released their fourth album, Hum Tum.

This was to be the last time the Vital Signs could be seen with their long locks, cowboy boots and denim. Hum Tum also sees Rohail expanding the Floydian ambience and the moodiness that he injected in VS:2  enough to come out clean as one of the local pop scene’s finest producers.

And even though lyrically Junaid Jamshed and Shoaib Mansoor again did well to compliment the album’s Floyd-meets-Eagles aura and VS:2-type moodiness, Hum Tum is really Rohail’s baby.

Audio:

‘Jana Jana’ (1995).

Audio:

‘Mein Chup Raha’ (From Hum Tum, 1995)

Asad Ahmed on stage with the Signs in London, 1996. He had replaced Zaki.

The aesthetic and commercial success of the album wasn’t enough to roll back another happening: Rohail and Shahzad were both emotionally, creatively and, if I may, philosophically, drifting away from Junaid Jamshed and Shoaib Mansoor. Nothing much seemed in common anymore between the two camps.

And though the Signs’ demise was never officially announced, by 1998 when the band were offered a deal by Pepsi for another album, Rohail declined, signalling the folding of what still remains to be one of most important and volatile chapters in the history of Pakistani pop music.

And then there were three: Vital Signs in 1997. They finally ran out of guitarists and time.

The same old fears …

Junaid had already started his gradual slip (flip?) towards a state of mind which would eventually land him as the puritanical Tableeghi Jamaat’s poster boy, while Rohail and Shahzad decided to shift their energies into producing new acts and advertising jingles.

Many years later, looking back I have no hesitation in also suggesting that Junaid’s band mates, Rohail Hyatt and Shahzad Hassan, and mentor, Shoaib Mansoor, did absolutely nothing to help him tackle the crisis plaguing him and whose solution he ultimately found in the shape of the Tableeghi Jamaat.

There was nothing wrong with him finding solace in the Jamaat, but the problem was that since Junaid had already tasted the fruit of success and fame as a pop star, his need for attention did not evaporate even when he decided to bid farewell to music.

On the contrary, his rather obvious desire to remain in the picture saw him continue to make news by first dipping in and out of music, varying the length of his beard according to where he stood on the subject of music and Islam, and then ultimately, announcing that music was not allowed in Islam.

This is what apparently took both Shoaib and Rohail by surprise and also caused disappointment because both had planned important future projects with Junaid.

Junaid’s conversion was not sudden. It was a gradual, slow and rather painful process, unfolding piece by piece right in front of his band mates and Shoaib Mansoor.

Ironically, he was the hungriest for success and stardom, not only in pop music but also in film and television. This made him one of the hardest working members of the band who actually wanted to continue playing beyond Hum Tum. He is on record as saying that music was his life as he went on to release two impressive post-Signs solo albums.

But more and more he was falling prey (rather willingly) to his frustrations, as his desire to work again with Vital Signs got no serious response from Rohail.

Though his two closest allies in the music business had by now become aware of the growing conservatism in the religious and social ideas held by Junaid, they still couldn’t see through the obvious fact that in front of them was a man spiralling downwards towards a situation in which he would ultimately start questioning their faith.

Even though Rohail’s liberal mindset, tastes and lifestyle always clashed with Junaid’s idea of being an artiste (even though he himself was leading a rather lavish life), this undercurrent eventually turned into open resentment by the time Rohail did come around and agreed to reform the band in 2002 for a special Nazia Hassan tribute concert.

It was interesting to note how Junaid responded to Rohail’s call. Only a few days prior to the concert, Junaid had already announced to the press that he was joining the Jamaat full-time and would quit making music.

In fact, he had been spending his time preaching and being preached at in a congregation in Raiwind, when he suddenly reappeared on the day of the concert flanked by two members of the Jamaat but with his long, flowing beard now trimmed into a neat, stylish goatee.

When asked by the press about his earlier statement regarding his retirement from music, Junaid said that after consulting with some elders in the Jamaat, he has been assured that there was nothing wrong with playing music.

Wearing a T-shirt, denim and with a stylised goatee, Junaid played an excellent set with Rohail, Shahzad and the original VS guitarist, Salman Ahmed.

However, by the end of the concert he looked anguished as he started making his way towards his two Tableeghi comrades waiting in the wings to gather him back.

A common acquaintance of Salman and Junaid told me that Junaid boiled when Salman Ahmed declined his offer to join the Jamaat and he was never happy with the kind of band Rohail wanted Vital Signs to become.

He said Junaid thought that Rohail, who was trying to ring in bands like Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac as influences in the Signs’ music, was trying to turn VS into a “druggie” band.

Junaid shared these views with Shoaib as well, and yet the latter saw nothing wrong with the way his protégé was turning out to be.

Junaid has publicly criticised the way Mansoor has portrayed jihadis and Islamic evangelists in his 2007 film ‘Khuda Kay Liye’. He has alluded that it is Shoaib who is confusing the youth about Islam and not him.

But, of course, Junaid’s own confusion regarding the subject is now well documented and his lectures and statements never fail to sound contradictory as he goes about denouncing the material and the ungodly nature of music and showbiz, but continuing his long-standing stint as an expensive clothes’ designer and a naat-reciter. He releases his naat albums through exactly the same immoral promotional and distribution channels used by the pop music counterparts.

After finally deciding to let go of his need for fame and attention through music, he has found almost an equal amount of fame and fortune as a naatkhuaan, televangelist and designer.

Where are they now?

Rohail Hayatt with his wife, Amber, in 2011. Today he is a successful music producer and pioneered the Coke Studio in Pakistan.

Junaid Jamshed, after quitting music and becoming a full member of the puritanical Islamic evangelical group the Tableeghi Jamat.

Shahzad Hassan may have lost his hair but not his passion for music. Today he is a successful music producer.

Rizwanul Haq still moonlights as a musician with his own band.

Salman Ahmed folded Junoon on 2005 and moved to New York. Today he is an active member of Imran Khan’s PTI.

Amir Zaki teaches music.

*The blog is based on the many interactions the author had with the band as a journalist between 1990 and 1999.

The hate vote

Recently a number of non-religious political parties have come into focus for having electoral links with certain banned sectarian outfits.

This is a disturbing thought on two counts. First, in a democracy, mainstream political parties are expected to use the national and provincial parliaments to enact laws that can guarantee the smooth activation of the country’s security agencies and outlets. So as to be able to take direct action against violent acts of sectarian and religious hatred and as well as crack down on all possible triggers that generate or encourage this nature of violence.

Secondly, if some political parties are striking electoral deals with the banned organisations, does this mean that the bigoted ideologies that these outfits propagate actually have voter support from certain sections of the society?

This question becomes all the more important to ponder, considering the fact that religious parties have almost always fared badly in elections in Pakistan.

When parties like the centre-right PML-N enter into electoral deals with banned militant outfits, are they not openly acknowledging the fact that these organisations have enough number of votes to cut deals with?

Yes, equally disturbing is the fact that some members of the centre-left PPP and recently, the overtly secular MQM, too were embarrassed by the liberal sections of the media for trying to cultivate electoral links with banned outfits, but their move in this respect pales in comparison with what the PML-N’s provincial regime in the Punjab was up to in this respect.

If the outgoing PPP-led coalition government was all at sea in controlling rapid spats of extremist violence in the country, the PML-N regime in Punjab was equally bamboozled by rising cases of mob violence against Christians and perceived ‘blasphemers’ in the province.

However, whereas the PPP regime at the centre was clearly incompetent to manage the extremist menace, was not the PML-N regime in Punjab actually allowing banned militant outfits and their front organisations to create havoc in the lives of Pakistani Christians, Ahmadis, and as well as those Muslims whom these outfits accuse of being heretical and apostate?

The final decision to take action against outfits responsible for encouraging and organising violence against the minorities and Shias in the Punjab lay with the Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif. Not the police alone.

The CM hardly moved during the many episodes of this magnitude.

That’s why PML-N critics convincingly claim that this was mainly due to the Punjab regime’s ‘understanding’ with banned outfits. An understanding that saw the Punjab regime looking the other way as long as the banned outfits carried out their violent activities in other provinces and only touched non-Muslim sections of the population in the Punjab.

So often we have heard apologists maintain that Pakistan is mostly a country of moderate Muslims. If so, then what are moderate centre-right parties like PML-N doing bending over to accommodate banned sectarian organisations? And/or those voters who are inclined to vote for the banned outfits’ crooked line of thinking?

How many votes do radical sectarian groups actually have in ‘moderate Pakistan’?

A close look at the voting trends and stats of elections in Pakistan between 1970 and 2008 is one way of extracting an answer.

And when one does that, the following points emerge:

— The radical Sunni Muslim vote bank is (comparatively) a recent phenomenon. It was largely missing from the 1970 and 1977 elections.

— The radical Sunni Muslim vote bank began emerging from the mid-1980s (especially in Punjab) during Ziaul Haq’s reactionary dictatorship when, to facilitate ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan and neutralise the impact of the ‘Shia Iranian Revolution’ in Pakistan, the regime encouraged the formation of extreme Sunni Islamist groups.

— The radical Sunni Muslim vote bank has largely remained within certain areas of the Punjab, especially in Jhang.

This does not mean that Pakistan’s main radical sectarian organisations like Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) — now Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamat (ASWJ) — have managed to sweep these areas in an election.

But what it does mean is that this party generates enough votes to attract the accommodating interests of centre-right parties; especially the PML-N being in the best position to bag these votes (through electoral deals with Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) and maintain its electoral hold in the Punjab.

Let’s see exactly how many votes does ASWJ has in its main area of influence, Jhang, ever since the mid-1980s.

In the 1988 election, Jhang had 5 NA seats. NA 68 in Jhang constituted areas that the then called SSP had the strongest influence in.

Here Syeda Abida Hussain contesting as an independent, defeated SSP’s Haq Nawaz Jhangvi.

Abida received 47,374 votes whereas Jhangvi received 38,995 votes. Jhangvi was contesting the election on a JUI-F ticket, even though he had formed the SSP in 1985.

Jhangvi was assassinated in 1990, allegedly by Shia militants incensed by his anti-shia rhetoric.

In the 1990 election, SSP’s Maulana Israrul Qasmi was persuaded by establishmentarian elements that had helped form the PML-led right-wing alliance, the IJI, to contest for Jhang’s NA 68 seat on an IJI ticket.

He won the seat by bagging 62,486 votes, defeating the PPP’s candidate who garnered 33,031 votes. A year later, Qasmi too was assassinated.

In the 1993 election, SSP’s new chief, Hafiz Azam Tariq, took SSP into the extreme right-wing Deobandi alliance, the Muttahida Deeni Mahaz (MDM). He won the NA 68 seat in Jhang (on MDM ticket) with 55,004 votes.

However, in the 1997 election, Tariq lost the seat to PML-N’s Amanullah Khan who bagged 60,490 votes to Tariq’s 44,796.

It should be mentioned that the PML-N regimes at the centre and the Punjab that came into being after the 1997 election led a drastic police operation against the SSP and its more militant expression, the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LeJ).

In the 2002 election, Jhang’s NA 68 and 69 constituencies became NA 89. SSP had been banned by the Musharraf regime so Azam Tariq contested the election as an independent here.

He re-won the seat by receiving 41,425 votes, defeating the head of the moderate Barelvi Sunni party, Tahirul Qadri, who bagged 34,183 votes.

A year later, Tariq Azam was assassinated near Islamabad in 2003. In the 2008 election, the NA 89 seat was wrested away from SSP by PML-Q’s Shiekh Waqas who got 51,976 votes. He defeated the new SSP chief, Ahmed Ludhianvi who received 42,216 votes.

Shiekh Waqas recently joined the PML-N and he is expected to contest the forthcoming election from the same constituency against Ludhianvi. Though Ludhianvi has reacted negatively to the news and has accused the PML-N of hoodwinking him (because he had helped the party get votes in Jhang and Bhakkar), many observers believe the PML-N accepted Waqas into the party to dispel the view that PML-N continues to have links with ASWJ. It is interesting to note that the PML-N chief, Mian Nawaz Sharif simply responded by saying that the decision to take Waqas into the party was not his but of other party members.

 

Clever naïveté

One of the most common comments one still hears from the cricketers who played in Imran Khan’s captaincy during the 1992 cricket World Cup is that despite the fact that more than half way through the tournament, the Pakistan team looked beat and was on its way out of any practical contention, Khan insisted that they would win the cup.

In a stunning display of positive reversal, the team did rise from the bottom of the pile and go on to win the cup. Many attributed Khan’s optimism as a mixture of unwavering self-belief and a dose of naivety. Something he seems to have carried over into his political career as well.

But I believe the naivety aspect that many have pin-pointed in Khan’s thinking is largely self-imposed.

It seems, he does this to keep in check his cynical side because he thinks leaders who lead during desperate times cannot afford to pace their manoeuvres according to events that can make people find refuge in cynicism.

But is he really that naïve? Well, apart from embracing naïveté as a deterrent to cynicism, he would rather see this as a well thought-out tactic.

Let’s get back to cricket for an example. In 1982 when he replaced Javed Miandad as captain, he picked Abdul Qadir in the squad that was to travel to England for a Test series.

Qadir, a leg-break bowler, had been discarded by the selectors after he failed to impress in the Tests that he was played in between 1977 and 1980.

And also, by 1982 leg-break bowling was already on its way out in the international Test arena.

Khan bumped into Qadir at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore where the Pakistan team was practicing. Qadir was there on his own, bowling in a T-shirt and a shalwar!

Khan made up his mind that the English batsmen who hadn’t played quality leg-break bowling for years would struggle against Qadir.

The selectors thought Imran was being, yes, naïve. They refused to pick Qadir. Khan insisted and finally managed to bring Qadir into the fold.

Khan’s ‘naivety’ was vindicated when Qadir bamboozled the English batsmen.

The point being that it wasn’t naivety, as such, but a gut feeling turned into a theory (the English would struggle against leg-spin).

The naivety bit was simply Khan’s way of banking on his gut and theory without letting cynical stats derail his belief.

Another reason to believe that it was largely Khan’s mind at work here was when he not only told the British press that Qadir was a ‘wizard with the ball’, but went on to ask Qadir to keep a striking goatee to look the part!

So it was a gut feeling, turned into a theory and then implemented with a dose of mind play, fanfare and posturing.

Khan had disarmed the opposition players with his self-imposed (and cleverly self-manipulated) naivety of inducting a discarded cricketer, leaving them unprepared for a jumpy, volatile leg-break bowler with a telling wizard’s goatee coming at them in ways that they (now believed) they were not used to tackling. They’d been successfully psyched.

Over and over again Khan, as captain, would use this combination of outrageous ploys.

In the late 1980s, during an ODI tournament in Australia, he made even his own teammates raise their eyebrows when he told the Australian press that — the otherwise mediocre all-rounder, Mansoor Illahi — ‘was the hardest hitting batsmen in the world’!

Of course, Khan knew he wasn’t. But the ploy worked when opposing teams went into a defensive mode every time Illahi came into bat, giving Pakistani batsmen enough space to gather runs in twos and singles.

The same year the Indian team and press thought Khan was being naïve when during a tournament in Sharjah, he went on record suggesting that the Kashmir issue between Pakistan and India should be settled on the cricket pitch! Pakistan won that tournament.

It seems that apart from the fact that Khan has found a still largely enigmatic middle-ground between faith and fun, he has held on to his old cricketing combination of ploys even in politics.

Gut feeling turned into a theory, then kept away from the cynicism of cold facts and imposed with great fanfare and pomp to great effect.

After all, it was a Qadir that he pulled in Lahore two years ago and shook the PML-N out of its compliancy in the Punjab.

The Sharif brothers and their merry men laughed when Khan confidently announced that he was about to host the largest political rally ever in Lahore.

He actually did pull it off. Yes, there is little doubt that this was done with more than a little help from former ISI chief, Shuja Pasha, but between then and now, Khan seems to have broken away from the establishment’s orbit.

He wasn’t the first. Z.A. Bhutto was part of the Ayub Khan dictatorship when he pulled out to form his own party. Not only did he break away from the orbit, the orbit eventually sucked him back in the most unfortunate manner by killing him!

PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif was the establishment’s blue-eyed boy for over a decade before he too broke away and became his own man.

MQM was alleged to be a party formed on the behest of Ziaul Haq’s intelligence agencies, but by 1988 it had quickly spun away from the influence of its supposed moulders.

And here we are today, with a ‘naïve’ Imran Khan, now threatening to topple the applecart mounted with all types of apples placed there by the country’s two largest parties, the PML-N and PPP.

Experts still suggest that Khan’s PTI would play the role of nothing more than a spoiler in the upcoming general election.

But once again Khan is banking on his beloved combination.

Recently after disarming his opponents with ‘naïve talk’ about sweeping the election and doing away with economic issues and the law and order problem within 90, 120 or how many ridiculously few days, he stole the limelight by denouncing sectarian attacks by banned Sunni outfits and mob attacks on Christians in the Punjab.

The timing was perfect. Whereas the PPP-led coalition regime is being massacred for completely failing to address sectarianism and extremism in Pakistan, PML-N’s government in the Punjab has come into focus for cutting deals with banned extremist organisations.

Suddenly it is the naïve ‘Mr. Taliban Khan’ who has become the hope of not only a majority of young new voters-to-be, but perhaps also a large number of Shia Pakistanis and the Christian community in the Punjab.

Yes, ‘naivety’ remains Khan’s cleverest ploy. And what is now more disconcerting for his opponents is that this ploy actually works, and maybe it is them being naïve about being so ‘realistic’?