Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  One of the stories I could not do justice to from a long distance was the situation in Karachi which had reached a point of no return. The city was always in the news, if not for murder and arson, then for terror strikes, and one January afternoon in 2014 for the death of a policeman often referred to as Dirty Harry in news reports. It was on a day when Chaudhry Aslam Khan did not have a bomb-proof vehicle. Khan, the Karachi superintendent of police and also heading the counter-terror operations in the city, was killed in a suicide bombing on the Lyari Expressway, along with his gunman and driver. It was not the first time he was targeted. He survived his house being bombed in 2011 which killed eight persons. His statement that he was not going to be scared by such tactics and the terrorists had in fact ‘put their hand in a lion’s mouth’ had got a lot of publicity. That was one of nine attempts on his life, but his luck ran out that day on 10 January 2014. Before his death, he had launched an operation which killed three Taliban militants in the Manghopir area which he spoke about in a press conference. For the man who dressed simply in white, with a reputation for being trigger-happy, death brought more fame and accolades. Predictably, the TTP claimed the killing.

  Pitched battles, murders, looting and arson were the norm. In Lyari many Kutchis had to flee their homes fearing violence. In Karachi alone, 3218 people were killed in violence, up 14 per cent from 2012, according to the HRCP in its annual report of 2013. Over 40,000 cases of crime were reported. Chaudhry Aslam, not widely respected among his peers, was only the latest of more than 200 police and security personnel who had lost their lives.

  4

  Covering Terrorism

  I. Minorities in Terror

  A place of worship

  The prayers were almost over. It was a cold Friday afternoon. People with drawn faces were making quick getaways in their cars, trying to pretend they weren’t there. It could have been any corner of the capital. The road was leafy and quiet, and the trees lightly burnished by the winter sun. There were random yellow barricades placed half-heartedly, and there was a police vehicle or two. When I went up to the barricade, a young man appeared out of nowhere to ask me what I wanted. I gave him my visiting card and said I wanted to meet the priest in charge. He came back and said it was not possible and asked me to try again next Friday. I stood on the roadside watching people: the women had their faces covered with only the eyes exposed, while the men looked straight ahead and drove off quickly. A week later I had better luck and I was allowed up to the entrance of the building. On the high walls above, there were thick rolls of barbed wire all around. This was some place of worship. The gate was heavily barricaded and next to it there was a small cubicle. Someone handed me a receiver through the barred windows and a voice at the other end asked me to identify myself and my purpose. I repeated my request. While speaking, I could see the gates open narrowly to let out people who had finished prayers, and again there was this quiet urgency to leave. The tension radiated from the stiff circles of barbed wire, down to the barred gates to the young men who were grim but courteous. The man said they were not allowed to speak to anyone and I certainly could not enter the place. Disappointed, I thanked him and walked away. I turned back to see the parking lot nearby emptying out.

  The law had pulled a veil over their existence and they were mere shadows. Constitutionally, the Ahmadis or Ahmadiyya or Qadianis had no right to be called Muslims. They could do nothing other Muslims could. They were heretics, according to the law, and could pray only in ‘a place of worship’ which could not be called a mosque. The Ahmadis are followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a self-styled leader from Qadian in Gurdaspur district of Indian Punjab whose interpretation of Islam has invited the ire of some who perceive him to be an upstart prophet. Ahmadis are often taunted as agents of Israel or Western imperialists, and it is held that their belief in their leader amounts to apostasy. The anti-Ahmadi riots of 1953 led to martial law in the Punjab, and Maulana Maududi of the Jamaat-e-Islami got the death sentence for his role in the riots, though it was later commuted.

  It was with help from a friend that I found one such place of worship. It was surprisingly close to a popular marketplace and I went there on Friday, as instructed. It was not easy to locate it since obviously there was no sign advertising its existence. This was before Beard and Chubby started following me, so I was free to walk and check things out near the place. I had to regretfully abandon the story, till one day in December 2013, I got a call from a stranger who said he had got my card from the ‘place of worship’. He knew that I had been there a couple of times and was ready to meet and speak to me. He even said I could use his real name. But I am not doing that. He will be X for the purposes of this story. It was in early January 2014 that we arranged to meet at a popular café, and as I was waiting, seated in a plush sofa, the two spooks who had careened into me that morning at the visa office decided to stage a comeback. It was Beard trying to look sinister; he pushed the glass door open and shut it on seeing me. That was to make sure I knew I was being followed just in case I had any doubts. I called X and found he was waiting downstairs. He was a chartered accountant and travelled widely. He seemed well-to-do but that didn’t mean he could escape his identity or the lack of it. He was open about it; he told everyone who he was and went on with his business. ‘We would never pass any remark against the country. We also never asked anyone for help after the constitutional amendment. God is with us. The majority of the Islam community is not against us, only the mullahs,’ he said. The million Ahmadis in Pakistan are not allowed to pray in mosques. Three months before I met him, his relative had put up a small board, saying ‘Subhanallah’1 over his new house. He was immediately asked to take it down. He did so in front of the protesting community and the police so that there would be no case afterwards.

  ‘Anybody can kill us any time and no case will be registered,’ X said matter-of-factly. He had a narrow escape in Lahore some years back during prayers when the ‘place of worship’ was bombed. That’s when he saw death up close and what it meant to be a ‘heretical’ minority. Over ninety people were killed in the two bombings, and he relives it almost every day. He said religious persecution started with the Ahmadis and when that was successful, with the government doing all it could to declare them non-Muslims, other communities were targeted, like the Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. X promised to give me a detailed interview after he returned from his travels abroad, but it never happened. I left some months later and lost contact.

  Most Ahmadis huddle together in a town in the Punjab called Rabwah, renamed Chenab Nagar, which was constantly under threat. They are peace-loving and don’t believe in protest which is why they have to suffer so much, said X. Like the blasphemy law which is often used to cook up cases and jail people, it can take very little if you are an Ahmadi to get you killed. The community lives on a razor’s edge. The promise to safeguard the interests of the minorities remains only on paper.2 In November 2015, a fire destroyed a Christian cable TV station in Karachi. Gawahi TV employees were certain that this was a deliberate act. There were two attacks on churches in March 2015 in Lahore, and a factory and mosque of the Ahmadis were burnt after allegations that workers had set fire to the Koran in Jhelum, and the army had to be called in to restore the peace. Ahmadis were excommunicated by the second amendment to the Constitution in 1974. A special house committee of the National Assembly had debated the issue secretly for nearly four months before that. Those proceedings of the secret sessions are not available in the Parliament library in Islamabad, and the librarian said the report was not yet declassified. However, copies are online, according to a book I read.3 What I did manage to get was the debates on the issue in the National Assembly and the passing of the resolution on 7 September 1974 which declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims. I was shocked when I met a journalist from this community who had been forced to leave his house and decided to write about it. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be, and despite my research, I didn’t get around to doing a story. Few p
eople are willing to stick their necks out and even friends who helped me were unwilling to go on record, and reminded me not to publicly call their mosques by the name and to always remember to use the phrase ‘place of worship’. Not even Dr Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s first Nobel Prize winner, could escape his Ahmadi identity.

  On 30 June 1974, the National Assembly appointed a special committee to discuss ‘the status of Islam of persons who do not believe in the finality of the Prophethood of Mohammed’. Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, then law minister, said that he didn’t think such a committee would be opposed. On 13 June the same year, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in his broadcast to the nation, had said the issue of the finality of the prophethood and the consequential matters that have arisen out of it, shall be taken by him to the National Assembly for an effective, just and final solution. Pirzada was also confident that the Opposition would not speak up against this committee. He said, ‘And there is one other aspect. There has been any amount of speculation in the Press. It has been said the issue is going to be put in the cold storage. The issue is not going to be put into the cold storage.’4

  And so, on that day, Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani Siddiqui was allowed to move a resolution on the status of the Qadianis (Ahmadis):

  Whereas it is a fully established fact that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian claimed to be a prophet after the last prophet Muhammed, and whereas his false declaration to be a prophet, his attempts to falsify numerous Quranic texts and to abolish Jihad were treacherous to the main issues of Islam and whereas he was a creation of imperialism for the sole purpose of destroying Muslim solidarity and falsifying Islam, his followers by whatever name they are called, are indulging in subversive activities internally and externally by mixing with Muslims and pretending to be a sect of Islam, now this assembly do proceed to declare that the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, by whatever name they are called are not Muslims and that an official Bill be moved in the NA to make adequate necessary amendments in the Constitution to give effect to such declaration and to provide for the safeguard of their legitimate rights and interests as a non-Muslim minority of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.5

  Sahibzada Ahmad Raza Khan Kasuri was one of the twenty-two movers of this resolution. I was to meet him when I covered General Musharraf’s treason trial; he was part of the defence team and vociferously endorsed the ban.

  That House committee was the last nail in the coffin for the Ahmadis. On 7 September 1974, the report of the ‘special committee of the whole house on the Question of status in Islam of Persons who do not believe in the finality of Prophethood of the Holy Prophet Mohammed’, was adopted and the Constitution sanitized accordingly. Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, once again at the helm of affairs, said the entire National Assembly converted itself to a special committee to discuss this matter. All the sittings of this special committee were held in camera. In the entire three months of the sittings there was consensus and unity, said Pirzada in the National Assembly. The special committee even called in witnesses, including the heads of Sadr Anjuman-Ahmadiyya, Rabwah, and Anjuman-i-Ahmadiyya Ishaat-Islam (Lahore), before approving a new clause in Article 260 which would define a non-Muslim.6

  Speaking after the report was adopted in Parliament, Prime Minister Bhutto said:

  I do not want to make political capital when I say that this is a unanimous decision of the entire House. We have had elaborate discussion with all members of the House representing all shades of opinion and all Parties in the National Assembly. And the decision which has been reached today is a national decision. It is a decision of the people of Pakistan. It represents the will and the aspirations and the sentiments of the Muslims of Pakistan. I would not want the government to take any credit for it. I would not want any individual to take any credit for it. I would say that this difficult decision, and in my humble opinion in many respects the most difficult decision, would not have been taken without democratic institutions and with democratic authority. This is an old problem. The problem is 90 years old, and with the passage of time it has become more complicated. It has aroused much bitterness, much division in our society and to this day it has not been resolved.7

  The anti-Ahmadi riots in 1974 (there were riots earlier in 1953) and the need to placate fundamentalists put pressure on Bhutto, though he denied it and he defended this decision in Parliament by saying that it was both a religious and secular decision. It was Pakistan’s achievement, he said, and the National Assembly met in a secret session since it wanted to approach the problem in the spirit of finding a final solution to it. ‘It was important for the NA to meet in secret session. If the NA had not met in secret session, do you think Sir that all this truth would have come out? That people would have spoken as freely and as frankly as they did because it was the secret session of the House,’ he said.8 There was also the usual noise about guaranteeing constitutional rights, which if you see what happened afterwards, don’t exist for the Ahmadis. The second amendment was passed 130 to nil. The Speaker made a plea for secrecy of the sessions over four months to be maintained and that mandate has not been lifted, though Bhutto did say it would be revealed in the fullness of time9—bureaucratic-speak for never.

  Bhutto also defended this decision in his appeal before the Supreme Court in December 1978 against his death sentence by the Lahore High Court. Outlining what he had done as a good Muslim, he included the decision on the Ahmadis. He countered aspersions that he was a Muslim only in name and defended his good Muslim-ness by saying he had ‘solved the 90-year-old Ahmadi problem’.10 He and his tormentor, Zia-ul-Haq, left behind a trail of continuing persecution against the community.

  In 1984, the military government of General Zia-ul-Haq, via a Martial Law Ordinance, added sub-clauses 298B and 298C to Section XV, Article 298A, of the PPC [Pakistan Penal Code]. Under the amended law, Ahmadis have been prohibited from proclaiming themselves as Muslims, referring to their beliefs as Islamic, preaching their faith, terming their places of worship as ‘mosques’, practising their faith in non-Ahmadi worship places, including public prayer areas, performing Muslim call to prayer, publicly quoting texts of the Holy Quran, and saying Muslim greetings in public, among other restrictions. These ‘crimes’ are punishable with imprisonment of up to three years, with a fine.11

  Despite the antipathy towards the Ahmadis, when it came to a situation of having little choice, Bhutto did appoint a member of the community as head of the air force. Some months after Bhutto took over from Yahya Khan after the 1971 war, the air chief, Rahim Khan, was replaced by Air Marshal Zafar Ahmad Choudhary. Indian journalist Dilip Mukerjee writes that Choudhary might have been passed over for the top job but for Bhutto’s drastic reshuffle.12 The armed forces, as a rule, remained free of such prejudices, but Major General A.O. Mitha points to the contrary. The Ahmadi officers were gradually replaced under General Ayub Khan’s orders.13

  We will never know how the Quaid-i-Azam, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who stood for secular values would have taken this. The man whose idea it was to create a separate homeland for Muslims was also not spared this excoriating sectarianism. The public funeral of Jinnah, an Ismaili who converted to an Isna Ashari (also spelt ‘Ithna Ashariyya’) Shia (or Twelver Shia, a sect of Shias believing in the twelve Imams),14 was according to Sunni ritual. His sister, Fatima, who died in 1967 was also given a private Shia funeral before the public one according to Sunni rites.15

  There was an initial Namaz-e-Janaza at her residence in Mohatta Palace in accordance, presumably with Shia rites, then there was a Namaz-e-Janaza for the public at the Polo Ground. There an argument developed whether this should be led by a Shia or a Sunni; eventually, Badayuni [a Shia priest] was put forward to lead the prayer. As soon as he uttered the first sentence, the crowd broke in the rear. Thereupon he and the rest ran leaving the coffin high and dry. It was with some difficulty that the coffin was put on a vehicle and taken to the compound of the Quaid’s Mazar, where she was to be buried.16

  In his Nobel Prize-winning speech in
1979, jointly awarded for Physics, Dr Abdus Salam said, ‘Pakistan is deeply indebted to you for this.’ But his country has chosen to obliterate his memory because he was an Ahmadi. In a famous exchange with Bhutto, when Salam resigned as scientific adviser, Bhutto tried to placate Salam and said, ‘This is all politics. Give me time, I will change it.’ Salam asked Bhutto to write down what he had just said on a note that would remain private. ‘I can’t do that,’ replied the master politician.17 Dr Salam’s memory is not allowed to garner pride, though he was given the highest civilian honour, Nishan-e-Imtiaz, by Zia-ul-Haq, after winning the Nobel Prize.18 Fraser writes that the highest-ranking Pakistani official present for his funeral was a superintendent of police.

  The word ‘Muslim’ (the inscription on his grave had said the ‘first Muslim Nobel Laureate’) was removed by court orders. As a journalist wrote, ‘This son of Jhang is less known in his own country today than the terrorist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, even though he had founded and led an abler lashkar (brigade) of some 500 Pakistani physicists and mathematicians over the years whom he arranged to send to UK and US universities on scholarship for higher studies.’19

  In the end, this ‘secular’ constitutional amendment vilified men like Dr Salam despite the guarantee to respect the rights of the minorities. Gordon Fraser20 writes of how Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, an Ahmadi, was a target for criticism, though Jinnah had resisted demands to remove him from the cabinet. The anti-Ahmadi protests spun out of control into violence in the 1950s and Abdus Salam was caught in this vortex of hatred when he returned from Cambridge in 1951. When Bhutto amended the Constitution, Salam’s diary entry for that day said, ‘declared non Muslim, cannot cope’.21