Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  Among most of the population in India and Pakistan, peace moves are greeted with catcalls of derision and often after a terror attack in India, the brunt of this animosity is borne by Pakistani artists, singers and even cricketers who are much loved all the same in India. Post-Partition, the hostility stems from Pakistan’s suspected involvement in terror attacks on Indian soil and Pakistan, too, blames the RAW for various operations aimed at destabilizing the country. The arrest in 2016 of a suspected RAW agent, Kulbhushan Jadhav, by Pakistani authorities and his summary trial and death sentence announced on 10 April 2017 has brought the relations between the two countries to a fresh low.

  Even before Partition, a disgusted Jinnah who was leaning towards the two-nation theory, referred to Congress as the Hindu party and Gandhi as the Hindu leader. President Mohammad Ayub Khan said, ‘Freedom as far as we were concerned, meant freedom from both the British and the Hindus.’3 Hindus are often portrayed as deceitful people who have no fighting acumen, though I didn’t come across any such remarks directed at me. There is, however, a stereotype that Indians tend to haggle too much or undercut prices and that we are not a generous people.

  The peace process between the two countries takes place on different tracks, and continues despite the odds. Candlelight vigils on the Wagah border have become a firmly entrenched activity and also the frenzied daily tourist trips to the border from Amritsar. Diplomatically, there are many backchannel efforts and often a handshake between two leaders or a statement can be the result of many strenuous efforts which are not widely written about or photographed. These backchannel negotiations have been significant contributions to the peace process. My perception about diplomats changed somewhat when I met many of them in Islamabad. They seemed to be rather honest and not all of them lied for their countries! I could be wrong, of course, on both counts! When I ran into the former Pakistan high commissioner to India, Salman Bashir, he said I was a very important person to have in his country. I don’t know if he was being polite. There are many well-meaning track-two efforts by institutions like the Jinnah Institute, Pugwash, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad (ISSI), which take place with great regularity and both Indians and Pakistanis have an opportunity to clear the air and discuss bilateral issues in an unfettered manner. These meetings often issue strong statements on resolving the impasse between the two countries. And, people-to-people exchanges are increasing despite the hostility, but peace efforts dented by terror and proxy war come up against the armies of the two countries, the rising fundamentalist forces, and political expediency.

  Like a seesaw our relations go back and forth. Former Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove4 had a controversial launch in Mumbai in October 2015. The organizer from the Observer Research Foundation, Sudheendra Kulkarni, had his face painted black by the Shiv Sena to protest against the event. Before that, singer Ghulam Ali’s concert in Mumbai was cancelled after protests and threats from the Sena to disrupt it. Cricket ties between the two countries are often snapped by dips in relations. However, a T20 match did take place at Eden Gardens on 19 March 2016 in Kolkata, with Imran Khan and other celebrities in attendance.

  Even before Narendra Modi was elected prime minister, there was a lot of hope from a BJP government at the Centre; the Pakistanis remembered Vajpayee’s overtures and the famous bus trip to Lahore in 1999. It is the BJP and not the Congress which seems to give Pakistanis hope. I sensed a lot of support for the BJP since Vajpayee’s time and there is a feeling that this party can do something to change the relations or resolve Kashmir, even if it may not necessarily be true.

  Just when everyone had given up on talks being revived and the dreary brinkmanship seemed to have reached a dead end, Modi did one better with a stopover in Lahore in December 2015 on his way from Kabul to greet Sharif on his birthday. There was a brief revival of cordiality with a proposal for comprehensive talks in December 2015. Soon after came the Pathankot terror strike, creating another storm of accusation, though this time it resulted in a ‘joint investigation’. But the Pathankot airbase attack in January 2016, blamed by India on the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, and later on 18 September, the terror strike on an army camp in Uri, snuffed out whatever little chance there was of peaceful negotiations. India responded with surgical strikes across the border in September 2016, the details of which were not publicized till a press conference by the director general of military operations (DGMO), Lt. Gen. Ranbir Singh, on the morning of 28 September 2016. Before that, in March 2016, Pakistan had caught a major prize—an alleged flesh-and-blood RAW agent and spy accused of creating trouble in Balochistan. Our relations seem characterized by overtures which are half-hearted and the pas de deux is somewhat strained. So a liberal visa regime has to wait in the wings once again.

  2

  Islamabad, Unreal City

  A midnight welcome

  We didn’t have time to savour the fact that we had landed in Pakistan, in Lahore, a city I couldn’t visit. Ignorant of visa restrictions, people would ask me in amazement—have you not visited Lahore? As if it was so easy for me to just pop across. Yes, yes, I know if you haven’t seen Lahore, you haven’t lived, etc., and this was repeated to me with great condescension. I had to stay content with Asghar Wajahat’s play, Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya O Jamya Nai in JNU which I had watched while on a visit to Delhi.

  My husband, Venkat, and I had just enough time to board the connecting flight to Islamabad. The twin-engine aircraft looked incapable of even taking off but the small cabin was cosy and we could see the lights as we flew low over the countryside. We touched down in the capital in less than an hour—it was that easy. On the flight from New Delhi was journalist, writer and activist Beena Sarwar whom I hadn’t met for a long time and we were glad to see each other. The Press Trust of India correspondent, Snehesh Alex Philip, and his wife, Ruchira Hoon, also a journalist, were travelling with us. It was almost midnight when we got into Islamabad, and we stopped for water at a medical shop near the house where we were to live. Aurangzeb (the driver), whom we nicknamed Emperor, was quite a personality with his round Chitrali cap, had been waiting to pick us up. My predecessor as The Hindu’s Islamabad correspondent, Anita Joshua, had, with some difficulty, rented a house for two years, so I didn’t have to go through what could have been a painful process of finding a place to stay, since it was not so easy.

  Shops are open late and the salesman, looking at us, wanted to know where we were from. On hearing that we were Indians, he smiled warmly and said, ‘Welcome to Pakistan.’ Finally, I had crossed the real border. The only two people I knew from Islamabad were journalists who were with me on an environment-related trip in Kathmandu. At that time, we had never thought we would encounter each other again. I didn’t feel even for a moment I was in a strange country—a neighbour who was friends with my colleagues invited us for tea at midnight when we reached home, but we were tired after the long journey from Mumbai and it was an offer we had to refuse.

  Home was a huge four-bedroom one-storeyed bungalow with a small lawn in front and a porch to park the old beat-up Suzuki sedan, Margalla, bought by Amit Baruah in August 1997. After he had bought the car with a ‘normal’ registration number, the vehicle registry department sneakily got the number plate changed to a yellow one with the number 27 used to identify Indians. It was a like a beacon proclaiming our identity. I didn’t know that this number plate would get me into trouble, but it did, with my yoga-cum-Pilates teacher. On the mornings when I went for class, the car would be parked outside her house. One day, some policemen asked her tall security guard who always scowled at me, what the car was doing there. The teacher, who tried to be nice, asked me to park my car elsewhere. But after a month I realized she was not too keen on having me. I had a great time there and met some charming women from the city, including some expats. She had a sunny terrace, a portion of it enclosed with glass which was heated mercifully
for our classes, and served us chilled juices after the one-hour workout. Her lovely furry grey-and-white cats would sneak into the warm room at times. It was too good to last.

  When I sold the car, the buyer was in a great hurry to change the dreaded number plate on the same day. He said he knew my colleague B. Muralidhar Reddy who had been posted there. I had asked my editor for a new car and I was thankful for not having had to go through the legwork of buying it. Earlier, a friend familiar with the politics of car stealing had advised me against buying a new car. He said if you can get from place A to place B with this old Margalla, don’t change it. Car robbery was rampant in the city, with the Taliban assisting an organized mafia to steal the cars and take them to Afghanistan and sell them in the two countries.1 When I went for lunch to his house, the direct route from the main road was lined with concrete roadblocks, the kind which you can’t move easily. I had to take a roundabout road to get there. There was a perfectly logical explanation. It was to deter car thieves. He also told me a hilarious story. A man who owned a fancy car had parked it outside a building where he had work. When he came out, he couldn’t see his car. He asked someone hanging around if he had seen a black car, and the man said no. The anguished owner went to file a police complaint. Meanwhile, the car thief who had blithely fobbed off the owner, took the cover off the new car and drove away. By covering the car, he had made sure it wouldn’t be seen! Simple yet effective, and difficult to beat in terms of ingenuity.

  Pakistan’s best-kept secret

  Nothing quite prepares you for a sojourn in Islamabad. You realize that it is not among the top-ten tourist destinations in the world and while I did read the perfunctory descriptions of it on the Net, I had to rely on my colleagues posted in Islamabad who told me about the beautiful capital, its hills, and the hospitality. Even so, everything was a big surprise. It is, after all, Pakistan’s best-kept secret! The hills, the sprawling bungalows, tree-lined avenues, the posh markets give it a distinction above most cities in the subcontinent. It’s all new and the absence of colonial architecture sets it apart from Karachi or Lahore. The buildings are concrete and squat, somewhat low on aesthetics, not architectural marvels but modern and spacious. The mushrooming suburban sprawl is hidden from the main city and the squalor of the slums is not immediately visible and neither are the poor, unlike in Karachi. Writer Shobhaa De said the capital reminded her of a small European city, even Bonn. Islamabad is also a city of gardeners. My neighbours obsessively cut and pruned their hedges to resemble flowers or animals—topiary. On the many green strips, you would see men in salwar kameez at all hours of the day, trimming leaves, cutting grass, pruning flower beds. When I first heard I was to have a gardener, I was amused. The man who came to work in my house in his free time was dedicated to tending the small lawn and the plants, watering them lovingly and planting whatever I wanted. In the leafy, well-tended lanes of Islamabad, you can be lulled into thinking all is well, and it’s difficult to believe that some distance away, young boys are being trained to become suicide bombers, and the country is ravaged by bombing and sectarian killings. The anomaly lurks in the background—a leisurely green capital, with its elegant drawing rooms. I was reminded of T.S. Eliot: ‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.’

  So I should not have been surprised when the sylvan calm was shattered one winter morning by staccato gunfire and the sound of at least two deafening blasts. The huge glass panes shook fearfully and I thought my house would collapse. It was past 9 a.m., the TV was on as usual and I was in my ‘office’ searching the Net for news. There was nothing, no news, I tweeted. Soon the ticker started playing out a horror story—the district court complex behind my house was under a bomb attack. Even the capital wasn’t as safe as it was made out to be—charming Islamabad was under attack, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. For a moment, life stood still as I waited for more sounds, and they kept coming, while the windows trembled. I would soon venture out across the street to see the bloody aftermath of the suicide bombing and gun attack that I could report on without any permissions and applications. More on that later.

  A capital on a plateau

  It’s a carefully created capital with its neatly laid-out sectors, each with its own market, and every tree planted in its chosen place. It is difficult to imagine that once this was a plateau, with ‘natural terraces and meadows’2 and a few trees. The tall kachnar blooms in winter and its stubby pink flowers can be sautéd into a delicious dish. Towards spring, there are plenty of blue-purple jacaranda. In winter, the trees turn into shades of russet. The long avenues are dotted with brightly coloured flowers. Compared to the bustle of Karachi and its myriad cultures, the capital can seem a little soulless and sedate like the bureaucracy it is meant to house. Far from the madding crowd as President Mohammad Ayub Khan wanted it to be, the low-ranging Margalla Hills, on the outskirts of the Himalaya, lift it from a certain mundaneness.

  On a clear day, Islamabad shimmers in a glowing haze from Monal, a popular restaurant perched on the edge near the highest point in the Margalla Hills, a little before the pass that drops into Abbottabad. You can see the spiralling roads below and the capital city beyond. On the way is a memorial to the 152 people killed when Airblue flight 202 crashed into the hillside on 28 July 2010. The first evening we went to Monal, there was a sudden thunderstorm and we had to move to an inner table so that the downpour didn’t drench us. The inky night was serrated by lightning and jagged bolts fell all around us. We preferred the continental section and the food was outstanding. Often on Sundays, we would trek up the many trails in the hills and traverse to Monal to dig into a well-earned breakfast. In winter, a light fog would blanket the city and we could see very little of it.

  In the now touristy but ancient village of Saidpur, next to an empty old temple and gurdwara, is a hall with black-and-white pictures of Islamabad being developed into the capital of Pakistan. In the evenings a man comes to play the rebab for visitors. There was something sad and appealing in his music, and we sat in the verandah and listened to him for a while. Saidpur village was given a facelift some years ago and is full of restaurants, and one of them was recommended for its Indian food. Sadly, it didn’t live up to its reputation. In the pictures, I was surprised to see the vast empty terrain which had since been converted for habitation. Islamabad is designed by a Greek architect, C.A. Doxiadis, and in the photographs, President Ayub Khan is showing the plans to a number of leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai is planting a tree. It was President Ayub Khan’s idea to create a capital in a more salubrious place than Karachi which he said had an enervating climate, along with unhygienic conditions which wore out the administration. He was worried about the intense political nature of the city and the corrupting influence of business.3 The location of the capital on the Potwar plateau ringed by the Margalla Hills was chosen by a commission under General Yahya Khan. The capital narrowly missed being named after Ayub Khan, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s classmate from Mumbai and friend, Piloo Mody, takes some credit for the naming:

  That evening I wrote a small footnote to Pakistan’s history. I was talking to President Ayub Khan and I told him how happy I was that they had decided to build a new capital for Pakistan, but that to make a city like that a living thing, it was necessary to give it an inspiring name so that it could fire the imagination of the people; it was no good just talking about a ‘federal capital for Pakistan’. I remember this very distinctly. It was a Sunday night. On Monday I returned to Bombay, and on Wednesday morning, I read in the Bombay papers that Pakistan had named its new capital Islamabad. At the time I dismissed it as a remarkable coincidence but later I learned that Ayub had been taken up with my idea. On Monday the cabinet had moved to Rawalpindi. On Monday afternoon there was a circular that a Cabinet meeting would be held on Tuesday morning—no agenda. When the cabinet met on Tuesday, Ayub informed them that he had met me and that I had suggested that the
capital should be named immediately. Several suggestions were made including Ayubabad, then somebody mentioned Islamabad, and Ayub said that’s right—and so the capital of Pakistan was named. For weeks thereafter Ayub told the story, so I hear, to several people at social gatherings.4

  Mody, a classmate of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was then a minister in Ayub’s Cabinet, was in the thick of things those days.

  Settling in

  In the winter mornings, the tree pies would hop around in the branches blurred by mist. Through the tall glass windows, while having my morning coffee I could see the magpie robin or the hoopoe flitting across the smooth lawn, lovingly tended to by Jan Mohammed. A thick cluster of white bougainvillea and tall pine trees screened off the road outside. The house was close to the market, in a quiet, leafy corner of the sector. Early mornings were precious, often it would be the only peaceful time of the day.

  My entire flat in Mumbai would have fitted into the large, well-appointed drawing room, with glass doors opening into a dining area and a swing door concealing the kitchen. The day after we arrived was a Sunday and Aurangzeb, despite it being his weekly day off, kindly agreed to drive us to the Itvar, or Sunday Bazaar, for supplies. After a quick breakfast—Sajida the cook-cum-help had left bread and eggs in the fridge—we left for the bazaar near Peshawar Mode for supplies. It was a large, sprawling market with second-hand goods and everything under the sun, including fresh vegetables, cold-pressed oils and other provisions. There were long rows of stalls neatly demarcated with sections for vegetables, snacks, pickles, dried fruits, fresh fruits, clothes, furniture, and even at times, home linen. There were people who sold large, blue plastic bags in case you forgot to bring your own carrier bag, and trolleys for the big buyers, with helpful men who would wheel them around; but we carried our own bags. The vegetable vendors didn’t like us to choose the stuff; they would snap at us, but soon we learnt to work our way around their bad tempers and found some nice stalls. The freshly pressed oils, especially coconut, were a treat, and in winter we managed to buy some natty jackets for a song. Instead of ready-made bed sheets, you could buy yards of cloth, and there were tailors who stitched them up for you. Compared to the upmarket shops in the various sectors, this was more down to earth and accessible to everyone. It was a colourful place with a rustic air, as people from the nearby villages also shopped there. The parking area was jammed with cars, and if you didn’t go early, the policemen would direct you to a place a little far off. Nurseries alongside the main road sold the prettiest and most exotic flowers, and I bought up a whole lot in winter to line the pavement outside the house and to skirt the lawn. They looked bright and fresh when I left thanks to the tender care of the gardener.