Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  The media anywhere, not just in India and Pakistan, but especially in these two countries, has to function in a free atmosphere and using the power of expulsion is arbitrary and imperious. More journalists need to be stationed in each other’s countries but it cannot be on restrictive terms—the price for being there cannot be that you are held prisoner in one city with no access to travel, with clods breathing down your neck and suspicion about everything you do. The continuing atmosphere of paranoia cannot die down unless you take a rational approach that journalism is not spying and journalists do not travel to each other’s countries for espionage. Each story that you do is not an attempt to denigrate the country but to show up aspects of life and tell stories about people and their lives which is the essence of journalism. As long as governments and establishments control movements across the borders and decide what is kosher in terms of reportage, and have no accountability to anyone, journalists can only protest and defy these norms. That Pakistan was carved out from India and the paranoia that India will always attempt to wreck Pakistan is visible even in the textbooks which are drilling this into children’s vulnerable minds. General A.A.K. Niazi in his book The Betrayal of East Pakistan1 talks of the Agartala conspiracy not being a fabricated story to implicate Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He writes that Indian intelligence activities in East Pakistan had started with the inception of Pakistan. And that they were actively aided by the Hindus settled in East Pakistan. This, Niazi said, has been confirmed by Asoka Raina in his book Inside RAW: The Story of India’s Secret Service.2 Every time I had been invited to be a participant in a TV discussion in Islamabad, the very friendly—and mischievous—PTV anchors would suddenly pop the Baloch question out of nowhere and then claim later that I had wriggled out of it. I had to keep telling them that I was not a representative of the Indian government and was an independent journalist working for a newspaper which had no government affiliations. It was an obsession that India is destroying Pakistan once again. I actually heard a question at the foreign office briefing when someone asked if Prime Minister Sharif had said that India and the RAW were responsible for the bombing at the F-8 sector district court in March 2014. The spokesperson flatly denied that the PM had said anything to that effect.

  At one level, we, as journalists, function in a quasi or total government mode. While reporting on Kargil, I heard one celebrity Indian journalist say she felt patriotic standing on the LoC, and it was difficult to contain one’s passions when one’s soldiers were being killed on the front.

  When it came to India and Pakistan, we must necessarily let our feelings of jingoism triumph over truth and forgo any rational understanding of events. So, if Indian journalists are expelled, they must obviously be spies. That is patriotism for you, exercised to the fullest in both countries.

  There is little change in any understanding between the two countries and the blame game continues with renewed strength. Yet at different levels, from diplomacy down to the common people, there is a call for peace and reason, however faint it may be, and it is coming from an invisible majority which is yet to come into its own. For the ordinary people of the two countries to smash this iron curtain of paranoia and emerge triumphant as true democracies where cooperation and not collateral damage is the norm, may be inevitable, as some have said, but it is certainly taking its time.

  In a speech in 1949 on foreign policy, Nehru said, ‘There is also no doubt in my mind that it is inevitable for India and Pakistan to have close relations—very close relations—sometime or the other in the future. I cannot state when this will take place, but situated as we are, with all our past, we cannot be really indifferent to each other. We can either be rather hostile to each other or very friendly with each other. Ultimately, we can only be really very friendly, whatever period of hostility may intervene in between.’3 We seem to be at the ‘rather hostile’ stage for the longest time.

  Like boxers warily circling each other and sometimes jabbing powerfully, but yet to deliver that knockout punch (thankfully—as we are both nuclear powers, and that would mean extinction), the two countries refuse to leave the ring. Ordinary people, the spectators in this game, pay the price.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. Imran Fazal, ‘Laden Nagar, Chhota Pak in Nalasopara’, http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-laden-nagar-chhota-pak-in-nalasopara-1784060. Accessed on 26 January 2016.

  2. TADA court order, 12 September 2006, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/database/mumbai_blasts_judgement.htm.

  3. http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/lsdeb/ls10/ses6/0521049301.htm.

  4. Meena Menon, Riots and After in Mumbai (New Delhi: Sage, 2012).

  5. ‘Kargil “misadventure”, was “stab” in Atal Vajpayee’s back: Nawaz Sharif’, 18 February, 2016, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/kargil-misadventure-was-stab-in-atal-vajpayees-back-nawaz-sharif/articleshow/51035959.cms.

  6. Raj Chengappa, ‘The Kargil War—in search of the truth’, 10 February 2013, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130210/ground.htm.

  7. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2015).

  8. Krishna Kumar, Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan (New Delhi: Viking, 2001), 3.

  Chapter 1: Oh, for a Visa!

  1. Piloo Mody, Zulfi My Friend (New Delhi: Thomson Press, 1973), 148.

  2. Sonup Sahadevan, ‘Karan Johar on Ae Dil Hai Mushkil controversy: I will not work with Pakistani talent in future’, http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/karan-johar-breaks-his-silence-i-will-not-work-with-pakistani-talent-in-future-ae-dil-hai-mushkil-3089881/.

  3. Mohammad Ayub Khan, Friends, Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 12.

  4. Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2015).

  Chapter 2: Islamabad, Unreal City

  1. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 192.

  2. Mohammad Ayub Khan, Friends, Not Masters (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).

  3. Ibid., 96.

  4. Piloo Mody, Zulfi My Friend (New Delhi: Thomson Press, 1973), 82–83.

  5. Arshad H. Abbasi, Fareeha Mehmood, Ayesha Wasti, Maha Kamal and Zohra Fatima, Rethinking Pakistan’s Energy Equation: Iran–Pakistan Gas Pipeline (Islamabad: SDPI, 2013).

  6. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006—first printed in 1954 by John Murray).

  7. Piloo Mody, Zulfi My Friend (New Delhi: Thomson Press, 1973), 64.

  8. A.O. Mitha, Unlikely Beginnings: A Soldier’s Life (Karachi: Oxford University Press, Karachi, second impression, 2007).

  9. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007).

  10. A.O. Mitha, Unlikely Beginnings: A Soldier’s Life (Oxford University Press, Karachi, second impression, 2007).

  Chapter 3: On Being a Foreign Correspondent

  1. MFN is a status or level of treatment given by one state to another in terms of international trade—by way of lower tariffs on imported goods or high import quotas.

  2. Dilip Mukerjee, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto: Quest for Power (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1972), 169.

  3. Kuldip Nayar, Distant Neighbours: A Tale of the Subcontinent (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1972), 213–14.

  4. Ibid., 214.

  5. Piloo Mody, Zulfi, My Friend (New Delhi: Thomson Press, 1973), 18

  6. Raza Rumi, Delhi by Heart: Impressions of a Pakistani Traveller (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012).

  7. Sartaj Aziz, Between Dreams and Realities: Some Milestones in Pakistan’s History (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  8. The release of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was criticized by the Afghan government saying he was being kept a prisoner. Pakistani officials kept denying this
and said he was a free man and could go anywhere. But the fact remained he was still in Pakistan, reportedly in safe custody and drugged. So the AHPC really couldn’t get much out of him when they met him. Baradar, a close associate of Mullah Omar and once the second in command of the Afghan Taliban, was freed in September 2013, to help in the peace negotiations with the Taliban. He was arrested in 2010 by the ISI after the agency found out that he had been mediating between the Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother and the Taliban without its knowledge a year earlier. In Ahmed Rashid’s Pakistan on the Brink (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2012), 114–15.

  9. Aitzaz Ahsan, The Indus Saga (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2005).

  10. Victoria Schofield, Bhutto: Trial and Execution (London: Cassell, 1979), 178.

  11. Pamela Constable, Fragments of Grace: My Search for Humanity from Kashmir to Kabul (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 2004).

  Chapter 4: Covering Terrorism

  1. Since Ahmadis are not legally considered Muslims, they cannot invoke the name of Allah in any form.

  2. Saba Imtiaz, ‘Pakistani Police Investigate Fire at Christian TV Station’, New York Times, 26 November 2015.

  3. For a good analysis of the Ahmadi issue as well as the Munir Kayani report on the 1953 anti-Ahmadi violence, please see Ali Usman Qasmi’s The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion (London: Anthem Press, 2015).

  4. ‘The National Assembly of Pakistan Debates Official Report’, 30 June 1974 and 7 September 1974.

  5. ‘The National Assembly of Pakistan Debates Official Report’, 30 June 1974.

  6. ‘The National Assembly of Pakistan Debates Official Report’, 7 September 1974.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Victoria Schofield, Bhutto: Trial and Execution (London: Cassell, 1979), 178

  11. ‘State of Religious Freedom in Pakistan’, Jinnah Institute, 2016.

  12. Dilip Mukerjee, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto: Quest for Power (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1972), 170.

  13. A.O. Mitha, Unlikely Beginnings: A Soldier’s Life (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 229–30.

  14. Khaled Ahmed, Sectarian War: Pakistan’s Sunni–Shia Violence and Its Links to the Middle East (Karachi: Oxford University Press, second impression, 2013), 7.

  15. Ibid., 9.

  16. Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan 1966–1972. Edited and annotated by Craig Baxter (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 115–16.

  17. Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam—The First Muslim Nobel Scientist, Kindle edition, location 4933.

  18. Adil Najam, ‘Salam Abdus Salam’, http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-228553-Salam-Abdus-Salam. Viewed on 26 November 2015.

  19. ‘Salaam Abdus Salam’, http://www.dawn.com/news/674855/salaam-abdus-salam.

  20. Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam—The First Muslim Nobel Scientist, Kindle edition.

  21. Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam—The First Muslim Nobel Scientist, Kindle edition, location 4912.

  22. Computerized National Identity Card is an identity card issued by Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority.

  23. ‘State of Religious Freedom in Pakistan’, Jinnah Institute, 2016.

  24. Ehsan Rehan, ‘US Mosque Hosts Celebration In Honor of Pakistani Killer’, https://www.rabwah.net/us-mosque-hosts-celebration-honor-pakistani-killer/.

  25. ‘Religious Minorities in Elections: Equal in Law, Not in Practice’, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 2013.

  26. ‘We have suffered 60,000 casualties in this war. This includes 10,000 security personnel. According to the last economic survey, the economic losses so far have been 110 billion US dollars.’ From the press briefing of the PM’s adviser on national security, Sartaj Aziz, on 26 May 2016.

  27. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords (London: Pan Books, 2001), 93.

  28. ‘Strategic depth’ has been described as the distance between the frontlines or battle sectors and the combatant’s capital cities, core industrial areas, military installations, heartlands and population centres. Assessing ‘strategic depth’ is related to how vulnerable all these are to an offensive, and whether the military can withdraw into its own territory, absorbing the thrust and then enable its own counteroffensive. (Lt. Gen. Prakash Katoch, 23 June 2014, indiandefencereview.com.)

  29. Mohammed Yunus, Persons, Passions and Politics (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980), 6.

  30. Aamir Khan, ‘Ajmal Kasab “never asked” for mutton biryani, I cooked it up: Ujjwal Nikam’, http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/kasab-never-asked-for-mutton-biryani-i-cooked-it-up-ujjwal-nikam/.

  31. Imran Gabol, ‘Govt issues order to place JuD chief Hafiz Saeed under house arrest’, https://www.dawn.com/news/1311671.

  32. ‘India Presses Pakistan to Re-investigate 26/11 Mumbai Attack and Put Hafiz Saeed on Trial’, http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-presses-pakistan-to-re-investigate-26-11-mumbai-attack-and-put-hafiz-saeed-on-trial-1665060.

  33. A covert Pakistani intelligence operation to topple Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1989.

  34. Syed Irfan Raza, ‘Cabinet approves steps for FATA’s merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’, https://www.dawn.com/news/1318095/cabinet-approves-steps-for-fatas-merger-with-khyber-pakhtunkhwa.

  35. I used to go to the court often and being such a small room, I stood out being the only woman. Finally the judge called me in and asked what I wanted. I said I needed the case details and he instructed his clerk to show me the FIR, and he translated it for me as it was in Urdu. Of course, I told him I was an Indian journalist and he was welcoming and helpful. Most judges in India would have thrown me out. As an Indian, I was shown this special courtesy but I didn’t see any reporter who I recognized in court during my vigil.

  36. Pakistan reported 306 WPV cases in 2014 (compared to ninety-three in 2013), which accounts for 86 per cent of the global case count. In 2015, the figure was fifty-four—a decline by 82 per cent compared to the year 2014. The number of infected districts reduced from forty-three in 2014 to twenty-three in 2015. The majority of WPV cases continue to appear in the known ‘reservoir’ areas. Although reported cases have risen, access breakthroughs in North and South Waziristan give some cause for optimism. The large-scale displacement of populations afforded opportunities to vaccinate at transit points and in host communities. http://www.endpolio.com.pk/polioin-pakistan. Viewed on 26 June 2016.

  37. There were over 20,000 cases of polio before the WHO started its immunization programme in 1994, but after that, the cases were brought down to 2000 (interview with Dr Elias Durry, Emergency Coordinator for Polio Eradication, Pakistan). From 199 cases in the year 2000, it went down to twenty-eight in 2008, and in 2012, it was fifty-eight. But in 2013 till October, fifty-three cases were detected, thirty-seven of them in FATA, a hotspot. The only remaining reservoir of wild poliovirus type 3 in Asia is in Khyber Agency and FATA. http://www.polioeradication.org/dataandmonitoring/poliothisweek.aspx. Viewed on 16 January 2016.

  Chapter 5: Shooting the Messenger

  1. From his speech on ‘The Condition of the Press in India’, at the Imperial Legislative Council (19 September 1918).

  2. Zamir Niazi, Press in Chains (New Delhi, Ajanta Publications, 1987), 28–29.

  3. Ibid., 178–79.

  4. Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2006), 159–60.

  5. Ibid., 135–36.

  6. Zamir Niazi, Press in Chains (New Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1987), 61.

  7. Ibid., 68.

  8. A.A.K. Niazi, The Betrayal of East Pakistan (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1998), 127.

  9. Zamir Niazi, Press in Chains (New Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1987), 210.

  10. Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001–2014 (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2014).

  11. ‘60 Journalists Killed in Pakistan since 1992/Motive Confirmed’, htt
ps://cpj.org/killed/asia/pakistan/.

  12. CPJ reports, https://cpj.org/killed/asia/pakistan/murder.php and https://cpj.org/killed/.

  13. Elisabeth Witchel, ‘Getting Away With Murder’, https://cpj.org/reports/2016/10/impunity-index-getting-away-with-murder-killed-justice.php.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Asad Hashim, ‘Pakistan detained more than 5,000 after Easter bombing killed 72’, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-blast-idUSKCN0WV0FC. Viewed on 29 April 2016.

  16. BBC, ‘Leading Pakistani Geo TV channel is ordered off air’, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27733077. Viewed on 18 December 2015.

  17. Feroz Hassan Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 331.

  18. Asad Hashim, ‘Pakistani rights activist Sabeen Mahmud shot dead’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/04/pakistani-rights-activist-sabeen-mahmud-killed-150424210251526.html.

  19. ‘Pakistan: Religious groups condemn US embassy gay event’, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-14010106.

  Chapter 6: No Lines of Control

  1. This was documented by the Michigan State University in a book, Rural Development in Action, in 1963.