Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  There were furious statements made by both sides and yet this was just another regular event in the life of our two nations. Barbaric acts are meant to provoke but despite everything, events didn’t escalate to war. Nawaz Sharif was elected prime minister for the third time, and Pakistan was enjoying another rare burst of democracy. He was proud that his election campaign was not full of anti-India barbs and he extended a warm hand of friendship to his neighbour. Great hopes rested on Sharif to tackle terrorism and bring economic stability. The previous government had approved the MFN status for India in 2012, but it was still to be fully granted. The composite dialogue had been disrupted by the 26/11 terror strike, and the trial of the seven accused in this case was dragging along.

  Indo-Pak relations can lead to heated debates, and opinions can fly thick and fast. For every expert in India, there is an equal and opposite expert in Pakistan and vice versa. The whole relationship between the two countries is dominated by two streams: a somewhat compulsive peace narrative dented by hostility; and a hawkish line. The peaceniks and well-wishers are part of a small but dogged and vociferous minority, often laughed at for their aim of ‘Aman ki Asha’ (literally, Hope for Peace). Among the ordinary people, for the most part, there is a feeling of camaraderie and those with blood relations across the border would like to meet each other, but find it hard to do so. There have been changes over the years and the Indian high commission regularly held briefings on business visas to Pakistan. In fact, the number of visas have been increasing every year and despite all the bad news, there is a lot of people-to-people exchange. There are confidence-building measures, but things tend to get caught in patriotic inertia. We cannot even resolve the question of fisherfolk in each other’s jails though there is a judicial commission to address the matter, and it makes periodic visits to assess the situation. Everything seems to be stuck in lethargy and red tape, including the agreements to ease trade and customs clearance. It takes months to verify the nationality of dead fishermen while their families wait for their bodies. If a truck driver is arrested in Kashmir, then the entire cross LoC trade gets blocked for weeks. Our DGMOs meet or call each other as part of a routine exercise, but in case of an extraordinary event, for instance, the beheading of an Indian soldier, things tend to fall apart. In a proxy war, fought precisely for that reason, it is difficult to pinpoint accountability. India and Pakistan agreed to a ‘comprehensive dialogue’ instead of a ‘composite dialogue’, in December 2015, and the glass is half-full; we are at least talking to each other on paper and not sulking. Not talking is not an option any more. Besides, as someone said, it’s more fun to be an optimist. A joint investigation is going on in the Pathankot terror attack in India in 2016, but whether this will lead to anything is anybody’s guess. On the other hand, there is a massive trust deficit, and India and Pakistan appear to be perpetually cross with each other on the question of what it calls ‘non-state actors’. The trial of 26/11 is meandering in Pakistan, which is a bugbear with India, and the alleged mastermind of the plot, the founder of LeT, Hafiz Saeed, has only been under house arrest since January 2017. Again, only time will tell if he will be prosecuted in the case. But Pakistan fails to rein in terrorists like Masood Azhar of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, in the limelight after the Pathankot attack who was briefly detained, and others like Mast Gul who escaped the Charar-e-Sharif gun battle and is an active member of the TTP. Anti-Indian hate speech goes on unchecked and unpunished. The BJP has formed a government in Jammu and Kashmir with the Mehbooba Mufti-led Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) but the promised ‘healing touch’ seems missing so far. This is also a time when the government in Afghanistan is unstable, and the Taliban and ISIS are relentless in inflicting violence in that country. The Taliban is gaining ground in many areas (nine districts as of June 2016);1 bringing them to the table seems out of question as stated by President Ghani. Pakistan is still aspiring for strategic depth and is not about to give it up at a point when it seems so close to achieving it.2

  At the end of Attia Hosain’s beautiful and haunting pre-Partition ode to a dying Lucknow, Sunlight on a Broken Column,3 Saleem, one of the characters, scoffs at the idea of visas to visit each other in the newly created nations. That Pakistan would be another country and people there would have a different nationality seems incredible. It’s something that struck me forcibly when I was reading the book and I realized it must have been unthinkable to have visas to visit a country that was till a while ago, a single entity, now torn apart but retaining so many ties of blood. Those who left for Pakistan, including the Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, seemed to think that they could keep their property and there was this expectation in most people’s hearts of returning to visit their old homes. It is this wrenching aspect of Partition that will haunt people forever and visas serve to rub the proverbial salt into the wound.

  The division of the Indian subcontinent has left a bitter and antagonistic aftermath. It has created two bickering nations which are vying with each other to increase their military expenditure, with India becoming the largest arms importer in the world in 2014. As Maulana Azad said, ‘Partition was a tragedy for India.’4 And this word has often been used by many to describe Partition and its aftermath. Sardar Patel called it a ‘cataclysm’, without which ‘we would have been much better off’.5 Jinnah, who had once said ‘better a moth-eaten Pakistan than no Pakistan at all’,6 aimed for the moon and got it. We became enemies by design, not destiny, and as Maulana Azad lamented, ‘The most regrettable feature of this situation is that the subcontinent of India is divided into two states, which look at one another with hatred and fear.’7 Both countries are constantly testing newer weapons and stockpiling a formidable nuclear arsenal in the name of deterrence, though that hasn’t prevented hostilities. We are not exactly neighbourly. Partition wasn’t the beginning of a beautiful friendship. At another level, the separation and the resultant bloodshed has been mind-numbing and the human cost of that divide is staggering. While Indians need visas to cross the border into Pakistan, and vice versa, the irony is compounded by the ease with which one can walk into Nepal, or Sri Lanka or even Thailand.

  The two countries got off to a disastrous start with the war over Kashmir in 1947–48 and there was this fear that India was keen on taking over Pakistan or that it was hoping it would implode at some point. Pakistan’s first Muslim army chief and later President, Ayub Khan’s prime concern was the defence of Pakistan as ‘India’s aim is to expand, dominate and spread her influence. In this she considers Pakistan as her enemy number one.’8 Justifying the reasons for building an army, he said he ‘learnt from Sheikh Abdullah that Pandit Nehru told him at the time that Pakistan would disintegrate in a couple of years. He wanted to come to some arrangement with Sheikh Abdullah on the assumption that Pakistan would cease to be a political entity.’9 He was convinced that ‘India was an implacable enemy and wanted to cripple Pakistan at birth’,10 and also created a mindset that while Pakistan didn’t want to be India’s enemy, India insisted on treating it as one.11

  Nehru, too, didn’t help with statements like ‘even if Kashmir were to be handed over to Pakistan on a platter, Pakistan would think of some other way to keep its quarrel with India alive because Kashmir was only a symptom of a disease and that disease was hatred of India’.12 Sardar Patel referred to Pakistan as a ‘diseased limb that had to be amputated’13 and that it would one day return to the fold. If some Indian leaders thought Pakistan would cease to exist soon, Ayub Khan said, ‘India would crumble under the weight of her own problems. It was only a matter of time: all that was required was to leave her to her fate.’14

  Rhetoric aside, in the Punjab it was clear that the division hadn’t hampered mutual affection and there were hopes for better relations. As Rajmohan Gandhi said when he came to launch his book, Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten,15 in December 2013 in Islamabad, ‘The hearts of the people of both sides of the Punjab and in the subcontinent want a coming together of our governments.’ The ove
rflowing hall at the Institute of Strategic Studies was a measure of how much Partition and its memory were still festering in the Punjab. People were so wrapped up in their divided history that they launched into their own memories, instead of asking him questions. Gandhi’s talk on ‘Understanding Pakistan and India through the prism of Undivided Punjab’ was lapped up in silence. He was one of the few who called for a ‘wide enough consensus’ to find a solution between the two countries. His book deals with an under-reported aspect of 1947 which saw the worst killings—there were many in the Punjab who protected each other. The people who protected others from both communities were far more numerous than those who killed, he said, much to the appreciation of his audience. The vast majority helped one another and there were brave and successful attempts. That seems to be a forgotten and little-known aspect in the subsequent war, proxy war and terrorism which form one layer of this mutual lack of admiration.

  Keeping the people apart and perpetuating stereotypes about each other becomes another part of the game. In this sabre-rattling and cat-and-mouse play, the mundane visa has become a weapon in the hands of two hostile countries, and as a Pakistan minister said, it is the biggest non-tariff barrier in bilateral relations. It can be an agonizing wait to get one and it can come with strings attached. In my case, it took over eight months and I had almost given up hope, and there were these sarcastic opinions of my colleagues who were quite sure I wouldn’t get it. Pakistan issues a city-specific visa for Indians and vice versa. I didn’t know this till 2008 after the Mumbai terror attack when I was hoping that Nirupama who was then The Hindu’s correspondent in Pakistan, would be able to visit Okara and check on Ajmal Kasab’s family. An American journalist managed to get there and do a story. To my surprise, I did come across a few exceptions where people did get liberal visit conditions, but for the most part, there was a dread. Will you get a visa or not was the question.

  As a correspondent, I was warned that I could be asked to intervene for visas but the change in rules which directed people to courier their applications directly to the embassy well before I got there, was a relief. The visa issue for correspondents is coloured by the strained relations between the two countries.

  Marooned Malayalis

  During my travels, I do run into Malayalis in the most unlikely places, (they had even made it to the moon before Neil Armstrong and were ready to greet him with a glass of tea—so runs an old joke), but I didn’t imagine there would be a community in virtual exile in Karachi (during my 2011 visit), and it was thanks to ‘Mr Kutty’, or ‘Kutty saar’, as he was called, that we met the group of stranded Malayalis in Pakistan. When B.M. Kutty arrived in Karachi on 14 August 1949, there was already a sizeable Muslim community from Kerala there. He described himself as an ‘educated shuttlecock’ and he came to the port city for no rhyme or reason. As a leading trade unionist and peace activist, he is the secretary of PILER and the secretary general of the Pakistan Peace Coalition. He visits his ‘beautiful’ home in Vylathur in Kerala’s Malappuram district often and by now is a familiar figure in India as well. I did meet him once later in the Delhi Press Club where he was his usual chatty self though not in such good health.

  When he left his home in 1949 and inexplicably headed for Karachi, there were no passports. They were welcomed as Mohajirs and in Karachi he found a thriving Malayali community, mostly engaged in small businesses, and running hotels and bidi-making units.16 In 1986, a survey by the Malabar Muslim Jamaat identified 64,000 Keralites there, mostly those who had fled after the Moplah rebellion in 1921. That number may have dwindled to less than half by now. C.H. Mahmood of the Malabar Muslim Jamaat (formed in 1921) puts the figure at 10,000 Keralite Muslims in Karachi. Kutty married Birjis, a Muslim from Uttar Pradesh. His language skills were limited but it didn’t matter at that point. We met in his modest flat in Karachi, and his room with several black-and-white photographs of his beautiful wife and children, and lots of books, was evocative of his simple yet strenuously active life. He spent two years and eleven months in jail during Ayub Khan’s dictatorship.

  He mentions in his book that the Jamaat has a small portion of Karachi’s old Merva Shah graveyard set apart exclusively for burying Kerala Muslims. He was active in political life in the Awami National Party and a close associate of Baloch politician Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo whose autobiography he edited, and later with the National Democratic Party. Despite poor health, he continues to travel and is a strong and sane voice for happier relations between the two countries.

  The visa question that perplexed a fictional Saleem would haunt a real-life Keralite nearly thirty years after Partition when he landed in Karachi after being told it was Dubai. Those were the years of the ‘Gulf boom’ in Kerala and unsuspecting job seekers were deceived by many an agent. Kader, in his late fifties now, is a naturalized Pakistani citizen, but he told us that his visa application was rejected and he couldn’t visit his ailing wife in Kerala. On that night in 1976 when he got off the ship in the darkness, he couldn’t really tell if it was Karachi. He paid an agent the princely sum of INR 800 to get him on a ship to Dubai. He did go home in 1981 to get married, and has four children, with his eldest son working in his dream destination, Dubai. Though he used to visit his family and spend a month or two in India, he could never bring them to Karachi, and the Indian authorities didn’t listen to his pleas that he was not born in Pakistan and to let him return to Kerala.

  This was another perplexing fallout of Partition—when a person’s nationality is Indian, he has to prove that first and then apply for a visa to go back. There are many like Kader who were deceived into going to Karachi and they have demanded Indian citizenship. After another visa refusal, Kader said in disgust that both countries had one thing in common and that was to torture people. I tend to agree—while there are so many major issues confronting our relationship, not the least of them Kashmir, little is done to resolve them; instead, people are made the target of the tension and mutual discord. The visa becomes a weapon in this discord to harass and intimidate citizens who have a right to travel across borders and visit each other’s families. People like Kader, the fisherfolk, ordinary citizens who have relatives—they are some sort of collateral damage to the hostility between the two countries. Most of the Malayalis are shopkeepers in Karachi, and they are spread out in the old Mohajir housing colonies, with their dull buildings, much like Indian middle-class neighbourhoods. They mask their yearning for home with a bravado that has been worn thin by helplessness.

  I was to do another story there later when I was posted in Islamabad—of an unfortunate family stuck in Karachi with no hope of ever getting back home. They did eventually go back and credit must go to Kutty for pestering the Indian high commission for their return visas.

  Of plebiscite and the right to self-determination

  Relations between India and Pakistan, as Ayub Khan once told Nehru, ‘had been dictated by drift rather than any rational design. The reason I thought was that neither side had drawn up any plans for neighbourliness.’17 Ayub felt Nehru wasn’t responsive to his various plans and concluded that India would never agree to live as equal and honourable neighbours. ‘It was Brahmin chauvinism and arrogance that had forced us to seek a homeland of our own where we could order our life according to our own thinking and faith. They wanted us to remain as serfs, which was precisely the condition in which the Muslim minority in India lived today.’18 He went on to speak of ‘India’s deep pathological hatred for Muslims and her hostility to Pakistan stems from her refusal to see a Muslim power developing next door. By the same token, India will never tolerate a Muslim grouping near or far from her borders.’19

  Like a dark, foreboding cloud which hangs low, there is something ominous about our relations and unlike most dark clouds that proverbial silver lining seems absent. Writers like Stephen Cohen feel the India–Pakistan rivalry will endure up to 2047, making it a century since the two nations were formed.20 Relations are marked by one-upmanship and defeat any
moves to look forward. The two countries drift on a path of enmity and peace, and the two-nation theory seems to have come apart in 1971 itself, much to the despair of Pakistan and its people whose worst fears that India was out to destroy the fledgling Muslim nation, were confirmed. Right from Partition, there were differences in perceptions—for India, freedom from the British came with the sorrow of Partition, or batwara, and for Pakistan, it was a celebration of Independence.

  There are deep complexities and preconceived notions which colour the relations between the two countries. Ayub Khan in his diatribe against India said that ‘Indian nationalism is based on Hinduism and Pakistan’s nationalism is based on Islam’21 which at that time was untrue, but increasingly veering towards accuracy. Before my first visit, I thought Kashmir was the main problem between India and Pakistan. I believed that once this was resolved, everything would be fine. ‘Kashmir was the touchstone for Pakistan to test India’s sincerity to befriend it’22 and increasingly, the reason for hostility. In fact, while the various Kashmiri groups in the capital held regular programmes, I didn’t see too many others joining in support. That ‘beautiful body’ which both India and Pakistan desired, to repeat Sheikh Abdullah’s unedifying turn of phrase, was still unattainable.23