Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  It was 26 January 2014, our Republic Day, a cold and blue morning, and we were kitted out for a long haul. Not so Beard and Chubby. Dressed in tight, uncomfortable clothes and pointed leather shoes, they heaved up the hill with no food or water, and kept asking the odd person on the trail if there was another way of going down. At the beginning of the leafy trail, every time I looked back they would dodge into the bushes on the side. When we stopped to rest at a lovely rocky pool fringed by palms, Beard and Chubby watched us eat apples and drink water. When I moved on the rocks to take pictures, they moved too. At a particularly narrow path, I almost stepped on Beard’s pointed leather shoe but he didn’t flinch and sat there like one of the many rocks. That was too close for comfort but I refused to be put off by their stupid tactics. Once I had to ask Chubby to move from my camera frame as I didn’t want my picture spoilt by a spook in a muffler. He grinned and moved. Beard was already featured in an earlier shot, looking gloomily into the distance. At one point I could hear him speaking to someone loudly and telling him nothing was happening. The joke was on them. They sat down before the last climb over a bare portion of the hill, waiting for us to come down. The top was lovely with a canopy of trees and a single house. A few other trekkers were lying flat on the ground, looking up at the beautiful sky. It was all so glorious—the trees, the skies, the breeze rustling the leaves. Nothing could spoil it for us. Someone needs to tell whoever is sending these poor guys that hiking is a pleasurable pastime, quite distinct from spying. They didn’t know we Indians are experts at finding shortcuts too! At the top we found a traverse to the other side and trudged a couple of hours, with the route circling the edge of the hills, offering excellent views of Rawal dam and lake. It was doubly exhilarating. And we walked down to the restaurant at Kuch Khaas, for a much-needed meal. It was a cheap thrill, and didn’t last. (That the spying can have a crassness about it, I found out on the last day in the country.) The next morning I went for a business visa meeting organized by the Indian high commission at a five-star hotel, and walking into the lobby, I saw Beard and couldn’t stop myself from greeting him with a bright ‘good morning’! Secretly I wondered what happened after they waited for us on that hilltop. Beard was not amused, he replied with a grim ‘okay’. That was the only exchange we ever had.

  Once on a trail behind the golf course which was supposed to lead up into the hills, which we didn’t find, we came across an old village, including an old and disused haveli. The women had the most extraordinary pink cheeks, and they were amused that we were looking for some trail early in the morning. The village opened out into a clearing with the hills at the back and we didn’t have the energy to look for the trail leading up. Finally we walked around and emerged on a road somewhere near a secured defence area. We kept our heads down and walked fast, worried we would be picked up for snooping.

  The top of the Margalla Hills was ridged with tall trees, even pine in some places, and in the rains we were told the waterfalls were furious. The easily negotiable paths had small rock pools and rocky traverses which didn’t test your stamina. There was one route on Trail 5 with a wooden board pointing downwards saying ‘Dangerous Trail’ and we took that once to find it was steep all the way up to a place where it joined the main trail just before the rocky outcrop at the top. It was a wonderful climb with great views of the hills, but no place to rest. Another trail led us to Daman-i-Koh which has a terrace to view the city. It’s very crowded on holidays, with families on their outing having ice cream. The view is much better from Monal or from any of the traverses on the trails. We preferred hiking to the many social events, but they were a place to meet people and it was fun in some ways. I did not emulate some of my earlier colleagues who threw a lot of parties, and this difference was painfully pointed out to me many times. I was even accused of that stellar crime ‘kanjusi’, or miserliness, and a lack of generosity. Friends of former colleagues from my paper would rave about the parties they had attended, but I didn’t quite see myself in a hostess avatar.

  But Beard and Chubby were a pesky end of the spectrum, and their masters, the sinister side of it. Kindness was the norm and not the exception. I soon ran out of passport-size photographs for various forms and ID cards, and went to a shop near my house. Each time I applied for a pass to cover the National Assembly or Senate or for the visa, I had to provide fresh pictures. The owner of the studio was amazed that I was from India. He shyly confessed that it was the first time he had set eyes on an Indian and was full of admiration. He didn’t suspect me of being a spy, and happily gave me a hefty discount and enough photographs to last me for a couple of years. That morning the Mumbai Press Club delegation was set to meet the foreign secretary, Jalil Abbas Jilani, but I was told we couldn’t go along. The external publicity officer was stern in refusing us permission. He clearly told me I wouldn’t be allowed to accompany the delegation. It was another matter that Jilani had sent a very welcoming mail to my former editor asking me to be comfortable during my stay, which I was. The visiting delegation met the President and other important people, while the two Indians stationed in Islamabad were mostly refused such requests.

  The distance between our countries was not great; it was shorter than some Indian cities but the chasm in our minds was cavernous. Thankfully, the best propaganda had not killed the natural instinct of a human to trust another. While buying DVDs at a music shop, the salesman was so thrilled I was from Mumbai, his dream city, that he gave me a free DVD. He was very solicitous and promised to record any film I wanted which he didn’t have on his list. Once after a TV discussion on business and MFN,1 the charming anchor laughingly told me off-camera that all this hostility and suspicion would end if I brought Kareena Kapoor and other Bollywood stars to the border. A retired general on the show, usually affable, bristled and said, ‘We have so many beautiful women in Pakistan including you [meaning the anchor].’

  Once I dropped my phone in the toilet, causing much mirth, and it was soaked for a while before I found it. The Samsung service centre went out of its way to repair it in record time. I had no hope of getting my numbers, many of which were newly added, but it was a miracle that they repaired the phone. And because I was an Indian, it was free, they said, and even offered me a cup of tea. Of course, my doubting friends said they must have downloaded all my data and I shouldn’t have left my phone with them. In fact, visiting Indian friends cribbed that they were always shortchanged and overcharged!

  Many people asked me how I managed as a woman and if there were any safety issues. I also got some requests asking me to explain how to be a foreign correspondent. I was the third woman to be posted in Pakistan by The Hindu, and by now I thought this question ‘Oh, how can a woman manage alone?’ should have been answered satisfactorily. The curiosity was not only about how I managed as a woman, but as a woman in ‘enemy’ country. ‘How can you live in such a place?’ was the usual reaction from people. Some male colleagues believed that women were unsuited for being posted in Pakistan, though Nirupama disproved that early on. This is largely to do with our perceptions of Pakistan as a country since not enough Indians get to travel there, though the number of visitors is increasing. The same worry wouldn’t be there for people from other countries, say the USA or London, though there are risks. Pakistan has dreadful connotations, and someone going to live and report in that country becomes at once enormously courageous or foolish. There are people who tend to draw similarities with soldiers fighting the enemy. A politician I knew joked when I met him in New Delhi: ‘Why did you go to Pakistan? To fight a war?’ Some people even wanted to shake my hand for surviving for nine months. There are several forces at play in Pakistan which is grappling with a feudal past, fundamentalism and terrorism, and this colours most of our perceptions, with much of the media portrayal reinforcing the image of a backward and failed state. It is little wonder then that visitors are pleasantly surprised when they see glimpses of a country that is different from what they think it is. That is not to say that Pakista
n does not have several problems, as it is shackled by an unequal society, huge income disparities, a shaky economy and sectarianism and terrorism. Viewing it through a hostile lens, a country which is fighting a proxy war with India, and is held to be responsible for the many terror strikes, adds to the contradictions. And so, in the midst of all this, if someone is actually living and reporting from there, it becomes quite a job! You can be admired or denigrated.

  Work kept me busy most of the day, filing stories through the evening. Reporting is often a lonely job and over the years, I found I was happiest being on my own. Solicitous Pakistanis would often drop in and check if I was okay and they sometimes mistook my preoccupation with work as a slight. The charmed circle in the capital which met for dinner at 7 p.m. found it difficult to understand that it was our deadline time, and often I would file stories or answer queries from the desk in the middle of social gatherings. The half-hour advantage in Islamabad was a relief at times. The day when I attended a rally on Defence of Pakistan Day in September 2013, Ayesha Siddiqa had invited us for dinner. The rally finished at 10 p.m. and I was filing my story on the phone. I got to her place in Bani Gala very late and for some reason the story vanished from my email and was not sent. My evening was ruined, though Ayesha tried to be helpful and said I could resend the story on her computer. It just didn’t work. The next day my editor said he didn’t want a routine news story, and I needed to rework it and so it all ended quite well. Once, just as I was going out, the government was returning Sarabjit Singh’s (the suspected Indian spy who died in jail in Pakistan) belongings, and I had to make a few calls and type the story immediately.

  Everyone oozed charm and concern and that can be disconcerting sometimes if you are used to being left alone. Despite war, deep suspicion and hostility I made friends, and I didn’t quite feel I was living in an ‘enemy’ country for most of the time, except when the presence of spooks became hard to ignore and any victory over India was celebrated with unholy glee.

  I was foolish enough to think I could work on a book on the history of cotton with a friend who is a cotton expert, back in India; and in my little spare time I tried to focus on it, but without any success. In Mumbai, other than political party dinners or get-togethers which was for work, social life was really at a minimum, since we worked very late and travelled long distances. Parties were impromptu and there was no calling important people home and socializing. It was mostly close friends who got together, at least in my case. I think Islamabad would probably gasp if it didn’t get that dose of parties and social gatherings.

  One place we felt quite welcome was the foreign office and I rarely missed the weekly briefing by the spokesperson. The thick carpets with floral designs and the elaborate chandeliers which hung from high ceilings gave it an old-world, warm feeling. The delicious hot and crisp samosas with paneer and spinach stuffing were worth coming a little early for; otherwise, you had to settle for the potato ones, which were almost as tasty. We met the then spokesperson and later Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhary who was warm and welcoming. He was one of the few officials who would respond to text messages and was forthcoming, like his successor Tasneem Aslam despite diplomatic guardedness.

  It was a good place to meet people and also a way to get clarity on any new developments, though after a while, the diplomatic answers got on your nerves. The spokesperson was patient, and answered everything as best as he or she could.

  I arrived in August 2013 and the euphoria of a second democratically elected government in Pakistan had not died down. There was a breathlessness about the smooth transition, though Imran Khan kept up a high-decibel campaign of claiming the results were rigged and he went right up to the Supreme Court with his accusation. Prime minister for the third time, Nawaz Sharif was seen as favourable to India, and the Pakistanis were fond of repeating that the election campaign was devoid of India bashing. The new mantra was that the Pakistan government was all for peace with India. Sharif, in his first address to the nation, emphasized the importance of Kashmir, referring to it as the jugular vein of Pakistan in a time-honoured manner. Indians called it an inalienable part, or ‘atoot ang’ (literally, a limb which cannot be broken) in Hindi. My friends in the media in Islamabad often joked about this ‘atoot ang’; it was Hindi they couldn’t understand. For some time after Vajpayee visited Lahore, this reference to ‘atoot ang’ had stopped. The Kashmiris were squeezed between being the jugular vein and ‘atoot ang’, and a syncretic culture fell apart. Young men crossed the border to become terrorists or freedom fighters depending upon which side you were on; the mujahideen trained in Pakistan wreaked violence in the name of liberating Kashmir; the threatened Kashmiri Pandits fled fearing for their lives—those who were not killed that is; and tourists trampled over the valley’s sorrow.

  Sharif, who rose to power with army and religious sections backing him, now wanted to change things. Some said he was the one who was in favour of giving us Indian journalists our visas. He has roots in Kashmir and many of his aides are from that region. There are many stories of his penchant for Kashmiri food or food in general, but people told me that unlike Asif Zardari who was perceived to be a forgiving person, Sharif was not likely to forget his humiliation of exile in a hurry. So it was providential for him that General Musharraf chose to return to his country.

  Between victory and defeat

  Early on in my stay, I was puzzled by news of Victory Day streaming on news bulletins, and then the accompanying celebrations. There were reams of photos of young men killed in action. The government channel, PTV, was full of discussions and programmes on those days and I realized that even if Pakistanis had not really won a single war, the government commemorated each ceasefire as a victory. You could be fooled into thinking that it had emerged victorious in all the wars it had embarked on, starting with sending mujahideen fighters into Kashmir in 1947, on to Operation Gibraltar in 1965, the Kargil operation in 1999 and, most important of all, 1971, when it lost East Pakistan much to its eternal chagrin.

  The sixth of September, Youm-e-Difa, or Defence Day, marked the 1965 war, a cause for much celebration. I thought the war ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire and I was a little puzzled. Hostilities were sparked off by Operation Desert Hawk and later Operation Gibraltar, but going by the Pakistan media, one would think that India suddenly attacked, causing this brave defence. I watched the celebrations on TV, the tribute to the martyrs, and I was genuinely perplexed. I thought I had got it all wrong. But then I realized that this was one of the many wars won by Pakistan and it had never lost one with India right from 1947. War and the blowback from terrorism had cost Pakistan heavily. I met many Pakistanis who didn’t support this need for a security state, and there were many voices for peace. Later (in 2014), I attended a candid discussion on Kargil at the Islamabad Literature Festival. Journalists and top diplomats said that it was an avoidable adventure, and lessons should be learnt from it for better coordination between the civilian government and the military.

  Tensions on the LoC were ongoing and a mandatory item of reporting, but I never managed to go beyond the official press releases from the ISPR. Firing from both sides of the border, sometimes resulting in injuries and fatalities to civilians, had to be reported, even if sketchily. Some years back, during a visit to the Rann of Kutch, the Border Security Force (BSF) had hosted us and they showed us the border fence, which we easily crossed over through a gap into Tharparkar. It was a shrubby desert and the officer showed us a place marked with white where the flag meetings were held. Camels often crossed over and one of the issues discussed was these lost animals.

  It wasn’t so peaceful on the LoC and the discussion tackled more serious issues than stray animals.

  Being a woman but not Barkha Dutt

  I came to realize I had a grave deficiency. I was not Barkha Dutt (for the minuscule minority who may not know her—a celebrity TV journalist who has reported on leading events in India and who, till recently, hosted a popular show). I didn’
t think this was a drawback till a friendly official in the Prime Minister’s Office apologetically told me that an interview with Nawaz Sharif was difficult precisely because I was not Dutt. You see, Sharif had an old equation with her and he was not comfortable giving interviews to people whom he didn’t know, or something on those lines. I agreed and fully sympathized with Sharif’s discomfort. It was, I told the official, next to impossible for me to reincarnate myself at this late stage, and we both laughed about it. This was in response to a written request for an interview with the PM. Later, I learnt that another TV journalist was not granted an interview with Sharif. I was relieved to be in exalted company.

  It was a season of refusals. In the end I didn’t get an interview with the President or the prime minister. The request for the President’s interview, routed through the external publicity office was rejected, while for the PM, it was just kept pending due to the reasons in the above paragraph. The PM’s adviser on foreign affairs and national security, Sartaj Aziz, who was usually happy to accept interview requests was reluctant, even though a close friend had introduced me and I promised him that he could see the transcript. But Aziz brushed aside my assurances and was non-committal about the interview. As I mentioned before, access was granted to a visiting delegation of the Mumbai Press Club to both the President and the foreign secretary—at that time, Jalil Abbas Jilani—and I didn’t hear the end of it from my friends who were able to travel to Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, and meet so many people who were inaccessible to us. The charm is unlocked selectively and for obvious effect. As Indian journalists stationed in the capital on a shoestring visa, we didn’t count as important, and we were at the mercy of the powers that be.