The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  All the same, in November, Afghanistan’s HPC leaked its document “Afghan Peace Process Roadmap to 2015” to Pakistan’s high officials. It envisaged direct talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban in early 2013, with a Saudi city as the preferred venue, and a truce soon thereafter, followed by arrangements for the insurgents to be reintegrated and their leaders given a share of power. It seemed more a wish list than a realistic plan.

  However, what stood out was its acknowledgment of the centrality of Pakistan in the peace process, a point the Karzai government had been reluctant to concede so far. This was enough to alarm India. Its national security advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon, referred to the red lines agreed on by the London Conference on Afghanistan in January 2010, which required the Taliban to cut all links with Al Qaida and other terrorist organizations and respect the values and ideals enshrined in Afghanistan’s constitution, including women’s rights.56

  In any case, despite repeated promises to conclude the envisaged SPA by a certain date, nothing definite materialized because of the trust deficit between the neighbors. Nor was there any discernible progress in the peace process with the insurgents. Given the exit date of December 2014 for foreign forces, Taliban leaders saw no need to negotiate with Karzai, whom they routinely described as a puppet of America. Lack of progress in these areas suited Delhi.

  Karzai the Juggler

  As NATO forces’ withdrawal date approached, Karzai urged Delhi to step up its assistance to bolster security within the framework of the 2011 Indo-Afghan SPA. During his visit to India from May 20 to 22, 2013, his twelfth since assuming office, he submitted his wish list to boost the security and counterterrorism capability of Afghanistan. It included a supply of attack helicopters, rocket launchers, light and heavy artillery, retrofitted Soviet T-55 tanks, and transport aircraft.

  The Indian government needed to mull over Karzai’s request, taking into account the electoral victory of Nawaz Sharif’s party in Pakistan. Sharif’s return to power in Islamabad augured well for an improvement in Indo-Pakistan relations, with a positive impact on the Afghan situation. Equipping Kabul with heavy weaponry was likely to be seen as provocative by Islamabad. Therefore the Singh government prevaricated, claiming that it needed the Kremlin’s permission before transferring its Soviet-era arms to Afghanistan. There was also concern in Delhi that the successor to Karzai after the 2014 presidential election would be less pro-India than Karzai.

  Back-channel efforts to bring the Karzai government and the Taliban leadership to the negotiating table in Doha collapsed in June 2013, when the Taliban called its newly opened office in the Qatari capital the Embassy of the Emirate of Afghanistan, flaunting the Taliban flag. Karzai was livid.

  As before, Karzai walked a tightrope, intent on showing that Afghanistan’s relations with India were not at the expense of Pakistan’s. During his one-day trip to Islamabad on August 25 to confer with Nawaz Sharif, his session went so well that he extended his stay by a day. Sharif added $115 million to Pakistan’s aid to Kabul, pushing the total to $500 million. At a joint press conference Karzai said that he wanted the Pakistani government to play a mediating role with the Taliban, with whom it had “a high degree of influence.” In return, Sharif repeated Pakistan’s mantra that the Afghan peace and reconciliation process must be “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led.”57

  Responding to Karzai’s request that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a moderate deputy of Mullah Omar who had been arrested in Karachi in February 2010, be released, Sharif did so the next month. But there was no change in the Taliban’s official policy of refusing to confer with the Karzai government.

  The Taliban’s violent activities included sabotaging the fruits of India’s $2 billion sanctioned civilian aid, of which 70 percent would be allocated by the end of 2013. The comparative statistic for Pakistan’s $500 million was only 40 percent. Moreover, Islamabad had failed to construct a road, college, or health clinic that could be a visible example of its openhandedness.58

  At the same time, in the absence of proper auditing and monitoring, the end result was far from the rosy picture painted by Indian officials. For instance, a visit by a Reuters reporter to the village of Achin in southeast Afghanistan found “a gaping hole in the roof of [an India-funded] school, cracked walls and broken desks and chairs.” Its headmaster was surprised that records in Kabul showed that the school was completed.59

  It was worth noting that as of June 2011, India had not launched any major initiatives for the previous two to three years. And the Indian-built Zaranj-Delaram Road, passing through the Taliban-dominated Nimroz province, had become pockmarked by the craters created by the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) detonated by the Taliban.60 The ambitious four-year, $300 million Salma Dam project in Herat, initiated in 2006, remained unfinished in mid-2013 because of the repeated attacks on construction workers with IEDs and because of budget overruns. When commissioned, the dam will irrigate seventy-five thousand acres of land in Herat and generate forty-five megawatts of electricity.61

  Overall, competition between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan covered not only geopolitics and commerce but also soft power.

  Soft Power Competition: One-Sided

  In the field of soft power, India was miles ahead of its rival Pakistan. This was most obvious in television. Starting with Tolo TV (Dari: Sunrise), which went on air in October 2004, commercial TV flourished in Afghanistan, where under the Taliban rule it had been outlawed. Tolo provided a large variety of shows. Among these, Indian soap operas, dubbed in Dari, with an episode aired daily often during prime time, when the power supply was reliable, proved popular. By early 2008 Tolo was broadcasting three Indian soap operas daily, with some rival channels showing six, attracted by their low cost and addictive appeal.

  Of the Indian television dramas on Tolo, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Hindi: Mother-in-Law Was Once Daughter-in-Law)—popularly known as Tulsi, the first name of the daughter-in-law Tulsi Viran—was hugely popular. Its audience of ten million in a country of thirty million was a record. Afghans became so hooked on the drama that almost all activities ceased in the country for half an hour beginning at eight thirty pm. “It’s like an addiction,” said the twenty-three-year-old policeman Nasrullah Mohammadi.62 The cultural impact on the population was so strong that, imitating their Indian peers, Afghan teenagers took to touching their elders’ feet as a sign of respect, a novelty in Afghanistan.

  Several factors explained the phenomenon. Overall, Afghans and Indians shared similar family and cultural norms and traditions. For instance, the archetypical mother-in-law was demanding and oppressive toward her young, diffident daughter-in-law because that was how she was treated by her mother-in-law when she was a young wife living in a joint family. There was total absence of entertainment outside the house, particularly for women. “People in other countries have others means of enjoyment and having fun, but we have nothing,” said twenty-three-year-old Roya Amin, mother of a young daughter, in Kabul, who watched three Indian TV dramas daily.63 These entertaining episodes also helped Afghans forget the endless violence and woes in their country.

  The same reasoning applied to Bollywood movies. Before the advent of the Taliban, these films were the staple of local moviegoers for decades. “Our culture is so similar and the best part is that most of us learn Hindi watching Bollywood movies,” said Afghan actress Vida Samadzai during her visit to Delhi in 2010. “Even before coming to India, I was quite fluent in Hindi, 80 percent of my language was just perfect, thanks to Bollywood movies.”64

  At present, although Kabul had some functioning movie theaters, the Bollywood movies being shown there were pirated because the local distributors lacked funds. Tickets often cost less than half a US dollar. In some cases Indian producers sent prints as gifts to Afghan distributors. The pirated prints were also aired on TV channels.

  “I like Indian dance and song very much and I come to cinema at least once a week to watc
h Indian movie,” said Abdul Wahid, a twenty-year-old student and a breadwinner of his family. “Hard study at school in the morning and boring work in the afternoon to support my family have sandwiched me. To forget the pain, a rational way is to watch Indian movies in cinema.”65 There was also a strong vicarious element at work. “The larger-than-life representations of the Bollywood heroes, in sharp contrast to their stark reality, provide them a vicarious opportunity to immerse themselves into the grandiose reel life fantasies,” explained Sujeet Sarkar in his book In Search of a New Afghanistan. “The chart-busting music is another addictive element.”66

  Compared to the number of TV viewers, the movie audience was miniscule. The unprecedented popularity of Tulsi and other similar Indian serials raised concern among Afghan officials and religious leaders. They objected to the shots of Hindu idols and the worship of them, which clashed with Islam’s strict ban on idol worship, as well as the plunging necklines and bare midriffs, shoulders, and arms of sari-clad Indian actresses.

  In early April 2008 the Ministry of Information and Culture ordered four TV channels, including Tolo, to take five Indian soap operas off the air by mid-April. All complied except Tolo. It chose to pixilate the contentious images. Yet that was not enough. In early May the parliament passed a law banning Tulsi and four other Indian serials. Since then TV channels have employed censors who pixilate any content that could be objectionable.

  As for Bollywood movies, the official censors ordered cuts before giving the distributor the license to exhibit the film. This applied to Pakistan as well, where Bollywood films continued to cast a spell on the public despite the four-decade-long ban on their (official) import in the wake of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War on Kashmir.

  19: Shared Culture, Rising Commerce

  In his quest for a subcontinent homeland for Indian Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had their general welfare uppermost in mind. He had envisaged the existing Punjab and Bengal to become part of Pakistan. As for the bulk of provinces where Muslims were a minority, he imagined that their safety would be guaranteed by the presence of Hindus and Sikhs in the two wings of Pakistan. That is, each independent country would hold the minority community within its frontiers as an effective bargaining chip with the other. That did not happen. As a result of the partition of Punjab, and the subsequent communal bloodbath perpetrated almost wholly in villages, its Pakistani part was cleared of Hindus and Sikhs and its eastern section of Muslims. In the postindependence period, therefore, there were no Hindu or Sikh families separated by the border. Initially, any migration of Hindus and Muslims in divided Bengal was limited.

  The separation of families occurred in the case of those Muslims in the minority provinces who chose to migrate to Pakistan, seeking better economic prospects for themselves and life in an Islamic environment. Most of this voluntary movement was limited to Delhi, United Province, and part of Bombay, especially its capital city and the Gujarati-speaking section of the province. These Muslim migrants were invariably literate and engaged in commerce or government service. They were the ones who complained loudly about the creeping restrictions on Indo-Pakistan travel that followed from the mid-1950s onward.

  The province of Sindh, which remained undivided, had a population of only five million, a quarter of them Hindu. Mainly urban dwellers, they made their living as traders or professionals, forming a large part of the civil service, and had little social intercourse with local Muslims. In the absence of Hindu peasants, there was no large-scale violence in Sindh. However, as the number of immigrants from the Muslim minority provinces of India swelled in Karachi and Hyderabad, the second largest city in Sindh, the authorities let anti-Hindu violence erupt briefly in these cities. That was enough to result in an orderly exodus of about a million Hindus over the next few years to different parts of India, from Delhi in the north to Kolhapur south of Bombay. There was thus no rupture in the families of Sindhi Hindus.

  Any common sharing of cultural values between Hindus and Muslims was limited to Hindustani movies made in Bombay. (The term “Bollywood” is a much later construct.) Since movie theaters existed only in large towns and cities, proportionately fewer Muslims visited them than Hindus.

  All the same, such Indian movie stars as Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar (birth name: Muhammad Yusuf Khan) enjoyed equal fame in Pakistan and India. Raj Kapoor’s 1951 movie Awara (Hindustani: “Tramp”), in which he plays the lead role with Nargis, a Muslim, was as much of a hit in West Pakistan as in India. The healthy rivalry between him and Dilip Kumar as versatile actors ended in 1960, with Dilip Kumar’s dazzling lead performance in Mughal-e-Azam (“The Great Mughal”), which broke box office records on both sides of the border.

  The shutters came down after the September 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. President Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan issued a presidential order declaring Indian movies, which had been exhibited regularly in Pakistan up until then, “enemy property.” The Martial Law Order (MLO) 81 issued by Zia ul Haq regarding registration of cinematographic film decertified all Indian movies released between 1947 and 1981.1 Also Islamabad’s trade protocol prohibited the import of any film whose language or actors originated in India or Pakistan.

  During his rule, Zia ul Haq made two exceptions: Noor Jehan and Kashish (Hindi: Attraction). Noor Jehan, a filmic extravaganza based on the life story of a Mughal empress, was released in India in 1967. Its poor box office returns bankrupted its actor-producer, Shaikh Mukhtar. Driven to desperation, he migrated to Pakistan with the prints of all seven movies he had produced. Over the years his pleas with Pakistani officials to certify the release of one or more of his productions were ignored—until he persuaded Zia ul Haq to see Noor Jehan. He liked it. By a cruel irony of fate, the day the censors gave the green light for its exhibition—May 11, 1980—Mukhtar died of a heart attack. The movie premiered on May 23 and was a roaring success.

  The next break in Pakistan’s blanket ban on Indian films came with another historical tale, Mughal-e-Azam. Directed by Karimuddin Asif, it was the tale of Emperor Akbar and the illicit love affair between Crown Prince Salim (later Emperor Jahangir) and Anarkali, a courtesan. Released in black and white in 1960, it was by far India’s biggest and grandest epic movie, with A-list actors and sumptuous sets and costumes. Its revival came in November 2004, when its digitally colored version, produced by Shapoorji Mistry, a grandson of the original producer, Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry, was screened nationwide in India to great acclaim and a strong box office.

  The next month, Akbar Asif, the London-based son of the director Karimuddin Asif, presented a print of the colored movie to Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf as a gift. Musharraf gave permission for its exhibition in May 2005.2 During the Pakistani president’s London visit in late 2005, Asif and the producer met him and offered to donate the box office takings in Pakistan to the survivors of the October 8 earthquake in Kashmir.3

  Mughal-e-Azam premiered in Lahore on April 22, 2006. “The move to ensure that Mughal-e-Azam turned out to be the cultural bridge between India and Pakistan was to fulfill my father’s dream of getting it to be the first film to get permission to be screened in Pakistan,” said Asif.4 As the first Indian movie to be shown officially in Pakistani movie theaters after forty-one years, it acquired an unrivaled status.

  A few days later another Bollywood flick, Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story, produced in 2005, opened in Lahore. Musharraf made an exception because the movie pertained to the Mughal period, and the lead role of Empress Mumtaz Mahal, in whose memory the world famous monument was built, was played by Sonya Jehan, a Pakistani actress whose mother was French.

  India’s tourism and culture minister, Ambika Soni, joined the Indian delegation in Lahore on the opening night. “It is a welcome beginning,” she said, and she hoped Taj Mahal would pave the way for an eventual lifting of Pakistan’s ban. Islamabad’s official stance was that screening Indian movies would be permitted only after all unsettled issues with India had
been resolved. Soni pointed out that Delhi did not impose any restrictions on Pakistani films and artists performing in India.5 In June 2006, a Statutory Regulatory Order issued by the Pakistani government allowed the import and exhibition of Indian and other foreign films and serials.6

  By then, with the advent of VHS tapes and then DVDs from the mid-1990s, piracy of Indian and other foreign movies had become commonplace. At local markets in Pakistan, the DVD trader selling the latest Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters was a familiar sight. The distributors in Pakistan also managed to import Indian films by producing documents that showed that their country of origin as Britain or the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to an unofficial estimate in 2006, every day an estimated fifteen million people in Pakistan watched a Bollywood movie—10 percent of the population.7

  In 2008, the blockbuster Race, a comic thriller and action film set mostly in Dubai and Durban, gave the Pakistani exhibitors a mouth-watering taste of box-office success scored by an imported Indian film. The resulting upsurge in movie attendance figures reversed the downward trend that had seen the number of movie theaters plunge from 1,300 in the 1970s to 270, leading to the rise of new multiplexes.8

  In his petition to the Lahore High Court in November 2012, Mubashir Lucman, a TV talk host, challenged the smuggling of Indian films and their exhibition in Pakistani theaters. He claimed that since June 2006 at least 213 Indian movies had been shown in Pakistan under a false certificate of origin. The court ordered that the Central Board of Film Censors should not certify films that lacked proper import documents.9