It was called the largest political jalsa in the history of the city. Generous estimates suggested there were over 2,00,000 people. Others put the number at around 1,00,000.29 Many took offence at the statement. Benazir’s jalsa in 1986 was the biggest political gathering, they said. Others suggested Bhutto’s historic jalsa in Lahore was even bigger. But those were different times, making simplistic comparisons difficult. This was 2011. Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) had mastered the tool of social media. Party trolls had learned the art of drowning the voices of anyone criticizing their kaptaan. If elections could be won by popularity on social media, Imran Khan would have been the undisputable leader of Pakistan.
There was no other news on 30 October 2011. News vans had cast their anchors outside Iqbal Park, while camerapersons had set up their equipment in front of the stage since early morning. It was an iconic background—Minar-e-Pakistan, the symbol of Pakistani nationalism—with a backdrop that placed an overblown image of Imran Khan alongside Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Next to Jinnah was a portrait of Allama Iqbal, the national poet, who is buried at walking distance from here, in the embrace of the seventeenth-century Badshahi Masjid, shadows of whose tall minarets fall on this iconic ground.
The story of this ground is as old as Lahore. Several historians suggest that in the Mughal era there was a fruit garden here, between the fort and the river. In fact, just behind the garden is Badami Bagh, the last remaining oral testimony to the almond garden that once existed here.30 It was also used as a ceremonial military parade ground by the Mughals, a tradition that was continued by Maharaja Ranjit Singh.31 During the colonial era it was christened Minto Park, in honour of Lord Minto Gilbert Elliot (1751–1814), the ninth governor general of India from 1807 to 1813.32
It was here that the All-India Muslim League held its three-day general session from 22–24 March 1940. Referred to as the Lahore Resolution at that time, it demanded that Muslim-majority provinces within India be given autonomy. As the movement for Pakistan gained momentum, the resolution was relabelled as the ‘Pakistan Resolution’, a title it continues to hold.
There is some disagreement regarding the interpretation of the resolution. A majority within Pakistan believes this was a clear-cut demand for a separate state, while others feel it was a demand for provincial autonomy within one country.33 For Pakistanis it is a symbolic day, which marks the first time that an unequivocal demand for a separate homeland was formally raised, and which was achieved seven years after the resolution was adopted. Even though the resolution was adopted on 24 March, the country, every year, celebrates 23 March as Pakistan Day, marked by a national holiday. It is in the spirit of the resolution that after the creation of Pakistan, Minto Park was renamed Iqbal Park, and the junction close by came to be referred to as Azadi Chowk. Sometime in the 1960s, Minar-e-Pakistan was installed at the centre of the garden to further solidify its importance in national memory.
For Imran Khan, on 30 October 2011, the choice of the city and the garden were of paramount importance, a fact he mentioned in his speech that evening. He said that Lahore had been in the vanguard of all significant political movements in the history of Pakistan, as the images of Iqbal and Jinnah looked on benignly from the background.
More than its historical significance, perhaps it was the city’s contemporary political symbolism that was on Imran Khan’s mind. Lahore, since 1985, when Nawaz Sharif first became the chief minister of the province, has been the hub of PML-N’s political strength. Besides a decade of military rule, from 1999 to 2008, when the province was ruled by his cronies, most of whom were former allies of the PML-N, the party for the most part has been in power in the province. Many of the party’s bigwigs, including Nawaz Sharif, Shehbaz Sharif, Ayaz Sadiq, Saad Rafique and now Hamza Shehbaz (Shehbaz’s son), contest elections from Lahore. For decades they have swept Lahore, symbolic of their control over the political landscape of the province. While Punjab retains its hegemonic grip over the country, it is Lahore that becomes a symbol of that power, the ultimate crown, representing the pinnacle of political strength.
In 2008 the PML-N won eleven out of thirteen seats in Lahore, reflective of its dominance over Punjab. In 2013, its grip tightened even further, with twelve out of thirteen seats, a result replicated in other regions of Punjab as well, where it secured many more seats than in the previous elections, completely rooting out any other political party.
Perhaps not anticipating such a clean sweep of Lahore by the PML-N, Imran Khan felt that his party had more than a fighting chance in Lahore. His political rally in 2011 had taken the nation, and perhaps even his own party, by storm. Prior to the jalsa, no serious politician or political commentator had taken him seriously. He was still regarded as a political pariah who at best would win a couple of seats. But the Lahore jalsa forced political commentators to sit up and take notice. He had made an impression on Lahore and those who are successful in seducing this city always gain politically.
The tsunami, a word that Imran Khan, quite inappropriately, used for his political movement, started gaining momentum. His next jalsa in Karachi was claimed to be a bigger success. The PTI had emerged as a third wheel in the almost dual political party system of Pakistan, and the social and electronic media was loving it.
Right until the elections, Imran Khan was everywhere. Many felt he had a fair chance of becoming the next prime minister. He was contesting elections from four national Assembly seats, one of which was in Lahore, his home town. He was standing against his old college mate from Aitchison College, Ayaz Sadiq. Both the PTI and the PML-N knew that in terms of numbers, a victory for the PTI in Lahore would be the same as any other, but symbolically it could have far-reaching political repercussions. The incumbent PML-N government had to make sure that it retained Lahore.
It is perhaps because of this that following the elections, and the complete dominance of the PML-N, not just in Lahore but also in the entire province, allegations of rigging by Imran Khan and the PTI outshouted any other political narrative. In August 2014, when Imran Khan, along with a large contingent, sat in Islamabad in protest, the entire federal government came to a gruelling halt. Several other political parties and candidates raised concerns of rigging, but it was Imran Khan’s voice that was getting the most ears. The allegations of rigging were concentrated in four constituencies, all of them in Punjab. Two of these seats were in Lahore. It is hard to believe that a similar hue and cry would have been raised had these constituencies not been in Lahore.
In one of the by-elections in these contested constituencies, the PML-N once again emerged victorious, giving the incumbent government enough political armament against the PTI, but what both the parties eyed carefully was the decreasing margin of victory. In fact, this is a pattern that can be noticed in all the twelve seats the PML-N won in Lahore in 2013, in most of which the PTI gave it a run for its money.
Cracks are appearing in the Takht-e-Lahore. The PML-N knows that if Lahore is lost, all is lost. Standing on the stage on 30 October 2011, Imran Khan perhaps saw these cracks appearing.
2
A CITY OF DISSENT
It is a perfect metaphor for the city of Lahore, a city in transition, between two worlds, a city unsure of itself. Sabzazar Housing Scheme skirts the imaginary boundary of the city, fenced by Motorway, Multan Road and Bund Road on three sides, all marking the breached limits of Lahore. This was before the river, the lifeline of the city, the reason for its existence, was turned into sewage, with industrial pollutants being dumped into it and no source of fresh water.
The housing scheme promises a suburban lifestyle to its residents, which continues to evade them. Its geometrical avenues and aligned trees give the illusion of an upper-middle-class neighbourhood, yet, engulfed by three major highways, it can never rise above its geographical surroundings. Its broken roads, vast empty plots converted into dumping grounds and the congestion right at its doorstep render its suburban dream a farcical joke. As I drive through the locality, I
notice Avicenna School, named after an eleventh-century Persian intellectual, one of the great minds who ushered the Muslim civilization into its Golden Period. His original name was Ibn-e-Sina, Avicenna being its Latin corruption. Yet today, in a country that claims to take immense pride in its Islamic heritage, he is referred to by the Latin corruption of his name.
As if consciously trying to shatter the illusion of suburban utopia, the Khadak nala flows on one side of the housing scheme, containing within it the filth of hundreds of small-scale industries operating within the locality of Khadak that lends its name to the nala. The nala forms the division between two contrasting localities—one acting out a fantasy, the other true to its element. Here houses, buildings, schools, factories, showrooms crawl upon each other. There aren’t any straight roads. There is no apartheid either. Pedestrians, rickshaws, trucks, cars, bicycles, vendors, schoolchildren, beggars all share these roads equally. There is dynamism on the streets. Sometimes it is expressed through festivals.
A few years ago, I visited the locality on the occasion of Eid Milad-un-Nabi, an annual celebration of the birthday of the Prophet of Islam. The locality of hundreds of thousands appeared as one big family. Houses turned inside out, flowing into the streets. Families had decorated the corners of their homes with symbols of Islam—Kaaba, Mount Hira, the shoe of the Prophet. There was no one indoors. There was a sense of friendly competition, with each corner trying to outdo the other with its decorations.
Sometimes this kind of raucous dynamism can explode, burning the people caught in its radius. In the year 2012, a fire in a factory operating in the locality took the lives of fourteen people.1 For a few months after, there was much government scrutiny as hundreds of factory owners and workers looked on with bated breath. Public memory soon faded away, and nothing changed in Khadak.
Facing Khadak is the popular housing scheme Allama Iqbal Town, one of the largest such schemes in the country. Now infested with numerous housing societies, this area was once a vast jungle, interspersed with a few settlements, one of which is Khadak, formed in the eighteenth century, during the time of the three Sikh warlords.2 Due to its vulnerable location, Khadak was subjected to raids by bandits. Eventually, the people of the community decided to take up arms and protect their village. ‘Khadak’ in Punjabi means an exhibition of strength, the name an oral historical testimony of the violent times the community faced.
Sabzazar, Allama Iqbal and several other housing schemes were constructed on the agricultural lands of Khadak and other surrounding villages. Now caged in from all sides by housing schemes eager to protect themselves from the defiling touch of Khadak, the village has become a collective dump for all of these communities. In the avenues, communities and markets of suburban localities, much of the city’s folk history is lost. Their desperation to disassociate from their ‘mother’ villages is reflective of a schizophrenic postcolonial mentality. The transition from ‘village’ to ‘city’, from ‘old Lahore’ to ‘new Lahore’, becomes a class symbol and a lifestyle choice. Progress and modernity are understood as breaking away from traditional communities, architecture and precolonial urban planning. The colonial blueprint of a perfect ‘planned community’ finds crass replicas all over the city.
However, there is sometimes a whiff among suburban communities that is reminiscent of a Lahore unaware of colonial sensibilities. At times it is the graveyards that continue to accumulate tales of these localities and their origins. For instance, the graveyard in the middle of Sabzazar. Surrounded by a complex network of roads, dominated by vehicles of all sorts, honking loudly, negotiating for space, is a small island of serenity. At its entrance is a seventeenth-century Sufi shrine that lends its name to the graveyard—Shah Fareed. It’s a new building, freshly renovated, with a green dome on top. There is an old keekar tree at the entrance where a handful of malang, devotees of the shrine, sit together smoking cigarettes and sharing tales of political intrigues. Their thick bangles, several rings and beads set them apart from others who enter and exit the shrine to pay homage to the saint. A small plaque records nothing other than the dates of the birth and death of the saint interred here.
There are several such shrines across the city, raised in hundreds of graveyards dotting its landscape. Much like the uncodified Hinduism of the precolonial era, these too represent local cults, which might not necessarily be connected with any meta-theological narrative. Even though there has occurred an unprecedented formalization and uniformity of religious practices after the advent of mass media, several of these shrines continue to attract devotional followers looking for a localized, immediate intermediary.
At the other end of the graveyard of Shah Fareed, protected by a small enclosure and accompanied by the graves of his wife and daughter, under the cool shade of a giant peepul tree, is the final resting place of the ‘poet of the people’—Habib Jalib. His verses are inscribed on plaques on the wall of this enclosure. I stood facing his grave, unsure of what to do next. A committed communist, Habib Jalib was an atheist, hence sceptical of religious ritual and dogma.
While Lahore is undoubtedly a symbol of hegemonic authority, it is also the city of Habib Jalib, the rebel poet, who challenged this hegemony his entire life. His was one of the loudest voices against the first military dictator of the country, Ayub Khan. At a time when all intellectuals, poets, writers and artists were silenced by the military regime, Jalib defied convention. Instead of focusing on romanticism and beauty, he talked about the streets of the country under military rule. Defying all guidelines, on a live mushaira being aired by Radio Pakistan, a state-run enterprise, Jalib went on to recite:
The stench of teargas lingers
The hail of bullets persists . . .3
His rendezvous with incarceration began after this episode and continued till the end of his life.
‘Mein ne us se yeh kaha’ (I said this to him), a satirical poem, is one of his most memorable verses from that era. The poem reminds the dictator how only he can salvage Pakistan, how only he can take it from night to day. It reminds him how a hundred million people of Pakistan are the ‘epitome of ignorance’, ‘completely mindless’, and how the dictator is the ‘Light of God’ and ‘Wisdom and Knowledge personified’. Jalib does acknowledge in the poem that there are a handful of people who oppose his rule and he, Ayub Khan, should ‘tear out their tongues’ and ‘throttle their throats’.4
Jalib was a member of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, a left-leaning literary organization that aimed to use writing to inspire people to create a just and equal society for all. After Partition, Lahore became the centre of this organization in Pakistan, earning the city yet another title, that of the cultural capital of the country. It is through the Progressive Writers’ Movement that writers like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Saadat Hassan Manto, Ahmad Faraz and Hameed Akhtar challenged a state that was cosying up to the United States of America and increasingly defining itself in religious terms. Even in the poem quoted above, Jalib mentions China and its ‘system’. He mentions the friendly relationship between China and Pakistan and yet the paranoia against leftist politics in his country. ‘Stay clear of that [system]’, he suggests, these masses ‘could never become rulers’. At the end he expresses the desire, ‘You [Ayub] remain our President forever.’5
Even today, as Pakistan flirts yet again with democracy, the nostalgia for one-man authoritarian rule continues to surface sporadically. The narrative of a messiah who would save the country continues to dominate political discussions. Imran Khan’s entire political career is based on these romantic notions of a true Pakistani hero, who would finish off corruption and restore Pakistan to the glorious stature it is meant to achieve. Even Shehbaz Sharif’s success in Punjab can be attributed to a ‘messiah’ image he has successfully crafted for himself over the years—one man, with an iron determination to get things done.
In the past, however, such romanticization has been associated with the men in khaki, who have ruled the country three times directly
and continue to exert immense pressure on the civilian government indirectly. Despite their failed attempts at governing and providing stability, parts of the populace continue to be enamoured of them.
Particularly in the past few years, the cult of Raheel Shareef, the former army chief, exemplifies what Jalib was talking about in the 1960s. As the ratings of politicians fell, Shareef’s popularity continued to soar. All good things in the country became associated with him, while all the failures were blamed on the politicians. On various occasions, posters exhorting him to overthrow a ‘corrupt’ democratic system to establish a dictatorship were raised in various cities of the country.
Ayub’s dictatorship marked a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s foreign policy, the effects of which can be experienced till today. Breaking away from non-alignment, the state under him openly sided with the US in the Cold War that was being fought in every continent of the world through the respective proxies of the US and USSR. In compensation for US military aid, Pakistan’s airbases were leased out to the CIA to spy on the Russians. The balance of domestic politics in the country also shifted forever, in favour of the military establishment. American support for military dictators, beginning with Ayub, then Zia and finally Musharraf, has been fundamental in not only the dictators’ international legitimization but also in suppressing domestic democratic resistance to them.
For all his atrocities, Ayub Khan today is remembered fondly in Pakistan. His image plastered to the rear of trucks is a ubiquitous sight. While dictators after him were worshipped during their time in power and vilified after they exited the scene, Ayub continues to be held in esteem. School textbooks recall his time as the ‘Golden Period’ of Pakistan, a narrative that continues to dominate popular political discourse. ‘Ideologically’ aligned with the Americans, Pakistan under Ayub saw a rapid introduction of liberal economic reforms. While poverty remained rampant, the elite benefited from these policies and hence the narrative of ‘economic growth’ became dominant. Many today acknowledge that wealth at that time remained confined to twenty-two of the richest families in the country. Talking about this uneven distribution of income, Jalib observed:
Imagining Lahore Page 4