"Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself" authored by Pamela Constable.
The Chronicler
Pamela Constable has a couple of bad habits.
A reporter’s job ought to be simple. You show up, you take a look, you take notes, you file your piece, you meet your deadline – and then you go home and put it all behind you.
The worst thing you can do is to start taking a serious interest in your subjects – or start thinking of them as individuals. There are strong reasons to eschew closeness. Because if you slip on that score, there is a good chance you could be opening the floodgates – before you realize it, you start liking them and sooner or later, you start seeing things their way and eventually your objectivity is all shot. It is virtually impossible to develop compassion for those who ought to, like lab mice, strictly remain your objects of analysis – often highly interesting objects but objects nevertheless – and still conduct your analyses with accuracy and precision. It can’t be done.
But Pamela Constable has a habit of doing exactly that!
But Pamela Constable is no run of the mill reporter. Wherever she is, she takes a keen interest in her surroundings – first it was Chile when she worked for the Boston Globe – a job she took almost right out of Brown University. And then it was the Indian subcontinent for the Washington Post whose regular readers, present company included; know her well through her reports from New Delhi. Now reading her book “Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself”, it is obvious that she makes good use of her time spent. While the book’s historical narrative is generally well-known from numerous other sources, what is special about this particular account is the practiced eye of the ground-level observer from outside.
So one expects and indeed finds her book to be replete with condensed accounts of her countless interviews which surely took a lot of leg-work. But reading this book is not quite like reading her news reports, the interviews are mostly appetizers – in fact she summarizes most of them using very few sentences – the main course is her own comments. (Her interview with Edhi is an exception – it is the book’s epilogue and the verbatim account later published in the Post.)
Constable’s accounts are crisp, her facts are clear and her comments are precise – but what is truly remarkable is her ability to assiduously hang on to compassion and her refusal to stop trying to see glimmers of hope where others would only notice darkness. And so it happens that in this work of less than 300 pages, she captures it all – the history, the background, the main actors, the current state.
And the trend for the future – that dreaded future!
The Play and the Players
The book starts with accounts of the Sindh floods of June 2010 which, per Constable, exploded several stereotypes about the Pakistani nation – and reinforced many others. From the authorities, there was the less-than-adequate response and overall apathy with Zardari’s uninterrupted foreign trip providing a salient example of what Constable calls the “regal indifference” while the world community at large responded with its now well known “oh no, not Pakistan again!” – all of which sharply contrasted with the overwhelming compassion and helping attitude from the average Pakistani. In that gap between the enormous needs and the paltry response stepped the militant organizations who (as many times before) used a tragedy to further their own goals.
It is not that the country has not had some successes. Karachi epitomizes Pakistan’s enormous potential – a city often violent but also a model of entrepreneurial successes, its thriving middle class symbolizing hope. The middle class dreams live on there – as indeed they live on all over Pakistan but invariably the dreams crash-halt into a stunted economy and a job market which is unable to absorb the growing population and to transform dreams into solid realities.
During her long stays in Pakistan, Constable never met a feudal – or at least never met anyone who admitted to being one – although she met many who fit that description – who were mostly also politicians. Those she met, they mostly agreed that in order to survive in the modern global economy, things needed to change in Pakistan so as to improve the status of its vast illiterate masses, yet – and therein lies the irony – sooner or later they all ended up defending the old rural ways and expressing nostalgia for them – often making them look like beautiful things which are wrapped on the outside with even more beautiful paternalism.
The traditional Pakistani rural system is often at tussle with its modern institutions on issues of “honor”. The traditional system has provided peace and order for ages, but it has done so at the expense of development and it has exacted a toll on its women. The modern institutions (the press, the civil society, the lawyers, and the courts) are only now beginning to find some wing but the traditional system resists stubbornly, often moving underground when facing heat. It strongly impacts the lives of Pakistani women in many adverse ways. While there is remarkable variation by geography – a woman’s quality of life nose-dives away from cities. The tribal life follows strict codes. In it, many families intermarry. Its women are often treated as assets to be used to settle family dues and internecine rivalries. Its long-established practices such as first cousin marriages (often done on a reciprocal basis) can help stabilize the society over the long term but automatically create impediments to independent exercise of will on part of individuals. The Hudood laws, enacted by General Zia and since left virtually untouched mostly out of fear, reinforce the woman’s subservient role. Sadly, not unlike in cases of child abuse, those at its receiving end often become vocal practitioners upon reaching the stage when they assume power themselves – and women are no exception!
She was plump and smiling, a mother of seven in her late forties. Holding a bright purple scarf over half her face, she spoke with impatient politeness, as if explaining something obvious to a fool or a foreigner. “A girl here cannot get a job, so what is the use of her going to school?” The woman demanded, “If she goes out and gets an education, then she may get ideas and want to marry someone of her own choice. If I arrange to give her to my nephew and she refuses, I have to kill her.” The woman was still smiling as she said this, but she glanced sharply at me several times, and for a moment I thought she was exaggerating to gauge my reaction. Then I realized that we had finally come to the heart of the matter and that there was nothing more to say. On the string bed, a slender girl of about twelve was shyly fiddling with her hair. When her grandfather pointed her out to me as recently engaged, she lit up with pride. (Pamela Constable in the chapter “Honor”)
This then, is the heart of the matter – the honor of the clan or the village – the ghairiat – does not belong to one person, it is always collective. Therefore, when Rukhsana refuses marriage to a much older man to whom she was promised as a child (in compensation for a legal dispute) and marries her friend Amir instead, the couple must forever live under a death sentence from the jirga. Temporary safety within the confines of the city is no solution – the clan has a thousand ways to get to them – like arresting her relatives on trumped-up charges or threatening to annul the marriages of his sisters – and so incessant are the attacks that all the dreams the couple ever possessed finally are reduced to a single wish!
The wish to stay alive!
Even that world-renowned symbol of womanly courage and indomitable will, the Mukhtaran Mai, is helpless in such a system and ends up marrying a man she loves not, just so she can save the marriages of two other women in her family.
These are but some example topics you find discussed in the book – and there are many, many others – which bring out in no uncertain terms the simple fact that there is nothing simple about Pakistan. But then we are and have always been well aware of that fact – or are we?
Among other things, Constable meticulously chronicles the rise of Islamic terrorism in Pakistan – providing the history of main groups, their building-up of clout culminating into recent events like the attack on the Red Mosque, the crafting of the “peace accord” with the Taliban in Swat and the inevitable failure of that accord which was so starkly manifested in a blurry three minute videotape of what a future Talibanized Pakistan would look like – which gave many Pakistanis a reason to pause and reconsider, if only momentarily. She discusses the main drivers – the missing economic opportunities, the non-existent system of justice, the constant indoctrination by various agents of socialization, the hesitance and sometimes outright unwillingness of the authorities to push back against hate, and most recently, the impact of the U.S. controlled drone attacks. In totality, they have enough power to transform even Western middle class immigrants into rage-filled Islamic warriors, what to say of the average Pakistani who is often spoon-fed only the officially sanctioned version carefully tailored to forward purported state-sanctioned objectives and where sparks fly often spontaneously into murderous sprees of both high- and low-profile political entities. Constable captures it all thoroughly in her engagingly cool, compassionate yet precise style that only she can summon.
The Fire that Burns
Hope is eternal but sometimes it takes an outsider to see us for what we are – or what we have come to be. When it comes to the country called Pakistan, hardships are many and the country’s well-wishers have countless sources of pain and anguish to choose from.
But even in pitch darkness, Constable can see hope in the indomitable spirit of its survivors. So she can take note of the illiterate Hina who – her family having lost virtually everything in the floods – is still able to see a greater purpose in the cataclysm – “if this flood has brought us to a school then maybe it is in God’s plan” – a plan to bring them to where at long last her girls can receive schooling.
One can sense Constable feel what those people for so long have felt. In stark colors are her accounts and fully bare for all to see is the sense of outrage and impotence that the ordinary Pakistani lives with every day. And the accounts also show how everyone is half-consciously a colluder to the very acts whose end result is own suffering and in own remaining mired in a down from which there seems to be no escape – take for example the case of Baksh the brick kiln worker who sells a kidney to get out of debt and now looks much older than his years – but still has been unable to lose that debt.
For what seems like forever, Pakistani masses have found succor in Islam and only in Islam – the fountain which has provided them an identity and peace and comfort all from one source. In droves they have flocked to those mystical Sufi saints of the past who never let them down – the soothing benevolence watching over them and getting them through the harshest of times – and so has been the trend until now, when harsher variants have taken root and often supplanted Sufism.
Constable is so kind with her words yet is so merciless with truth she readily dispenses with all fudge and spares no culprits. But there is no doubt whose side she is on – her side is the side of the little folks who have so little going for them and so little control over happenings all around them and yet who hang on to hope. They hang on to hope in the face of the menacing fire which, if left untreated, would surely consume them and all that is theirs. They are the ordinary Pakistanis who hurt the most and they are so different from the elite of that country. So what about the elite?
Despite their genteel pretensions and tasteful salons, though, the world of Pakistan’s elite is one that depends on the cowed subservience of others – a silent and invisible class of servants whose function is to clean, to cook, launder, tend the roses, guard the gate, wash the cat, bring the tea. (Pamela Constable in the chapter “Sahibs”)
The subservience of others – many others – and it comes aplenty and there is not a crevice one can imagine touching to bring in any light or other changes. That is why the Western-educated elite will return to their own tribal setups and resume the roles of often benevolent but invariably omnipotent local despots that their forefathers have played forever – such is life!
The elite are the ones who are often most surprised at the rise of the fundamentalist Islam among the impotent poor – and it is the elite who often tend to dismiss the possibility of such rise becoming widespread or permanent – because it is the elite who are in tune with neither the fire nor its fodder. The elite world of timeless exclusivity, repeatedly self-reinforced through marriage and business relationships, improves their political clout, but also insulates them from the vast masses.
The elite are the khakis – who sap the Pakistani Treasury for their own institutional interests and then claim they are boosting the defenses of the country!
The elite are the politicos – who determinedly wag their tails for the khakis and line their own pockets and then claim they are serving the interests of democracy!
The elite are the media persons – who turn into mouthpieces of hate-mongers just to grab that fleeting bit of publicity and of self-glorification and then claim they are serving the interests of free speech!
The elite are the mullahs – not always of the overt kind – who turn on the spigots of hate and violence while amassing power for themselves and then claim they are serving the interests of the Almighty!
The elite are the power holders – the elite are the power brokers – the elite are the power hogs!
The elite are the players who sit in high places and who are always cocksure of what they are doing and who have made sure that no matter how things turn out for the rest, their own situation can only improve with the fire.
The elite are the people who go, “burn baby, burn!” with full belief that the fire will never touch them personally – and so they let burn the baby that is Pakistan! What mostly burns is the flesh of the innocents! And it burns in countless ways – it burns in many places – it burns at the most unexpected of times and it burns incessantly!
The little people are the real victims of the fire, yet sadly and unaware, they are also its greatest propagators. In terms of what can burn – they have gotten the combustibility just right. They have the temperature just right and at this point in time, so many don’t even appear to care if they actually burn up – so dashed are those aspirations! People who have so much to lose and yet are not even the real players in this morbid game of catastrophic dimensions!
In this game of the helpless, everyone is a victim and everyone is also a victimizer. It is not just a lack of exposure to the outside world that keeps the ways of the past going on – it is also the desire to think of one’s own acts in a light which bears little resemblance to truth – virtually every player is deluding everybody else – but mostly oneself!
The fire-players are playing with more than ordinary fire – after all, physical fires can be doused with just a bit of cold water. But there is no water which can douse this particular fire – it is powered by the forces of life itself and can take unnatural powers all its own – and like it there is no other! It requires no sustenance for it sustains from inside and to it the body is just the medium which lets it spread to reach farther and deeper. This fire is not concerned with what happens to the medium that it rides upon –its heat is so powerful it melts everything that crosses its path and it consumes all that it encounters.
In the land where there are many versions of truth, often it is hate which is masquerading in the guise of devotion. When hate has official sanction and is allowed to percolate from top to bottom, it can put excessive emphasis on the very superficialities which result in choosing just the wrong individuals for hero-worship – a mind-set which devalues Abdus Salam and elevates the people likes A. Q. Khan. Then, virtually any atrocity gets a free pass as long as it wears the cover of religion and virtually any outrage is accepted by the ordinary and ignored by the authorities. So when the well-respected Ahmadi priest Mohammed Yusuf is gunned down by miscreants upon the exhortations from a new Sunni mosque – virtually nobody shows up for his funeral yet those very people can solemnly claim they liked the individual and appreciated that he was doing good work.
Such is the hold of the less than wholesome sanctions enacted in the name of religion that an accusation of blasphemy, even vague, unproven, or biased will easily wipe out all reason and objectivity. Murders like that of Salman Taseer and its subsequent events remove whatever veneer remained – exposing where the real center of gravity lies. Such is the mindset that a vast majority of the public may appear quite willing to endorse murder as long as it is done in the name of religion – yet simultaneously remains in a confused state of denial about the potential threat of religious terrorism itself.
Constable has no easy answers for the fire – if she has any answers at all – nor is it clear if it is possible to stop it from spreading. The only thing clear from her accounts is that those who promise easy answers are most likely the same folks who have no clue to the seriousness of the situation.
Not only is this book ideal for the outsiders interested in the subcontinent wanting to keep pace with its fast-moving developments but also for both Pakistanis and Indians (in the subcontinent as well as in the Diaspora). This book is a must-read for all Pakistanis for obvious reasons, but is also a must-read for all Indians to helps them better understand the guys next door – and it is a must-read for the Americans who ought to at least have a clue to the country they have been seemingly funding forever and for whose present predicament they are in no less measure responsible. It also is a must-read for everyone else whose life is affected by terrorism and who wishes to have a deeper insight into how it takes root and propagates itself. That covers a lot of ground.
So if you have not already done so, go buy a copy of the book unless (like me) you are short of money – then you can always make your trudge to the local library which most likely has a copy.
And when you get your hands on it and as you turn its pages, it will take precious little time to realize that Pamela Constable’s two bad habits are not really that bad.
In fact, they are her greatest strengths!
[Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself, ISBN 978-1-4000-6911-8, is authored by Pamela Constable – and was published by Random House, New York, in 2011.]
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MUSSALMAN FREEDOM FIGHTERS LISTEN VT SINGH RAPIST RANSHIT BANIYA FAT LAZY PARASITES
FIGHTER FOR FREEDOM OF INDIA RAPIST VT SINGHS HI List of Freedom Fighters Deported to Andamans ================================================================ ================================================= Submitted by kashif on Sat, 03/11/2006 - 02:24. Freedom Fighters Deported to Andamans List of Muslims is here, for a complete list please follow this link: www.andamancellularjail.org In Connection With First War of Independence, 1857 S.No. Title Name Province Comments 1 Allama Fazal Haque Khairabadi U.P. : died in prison 10 Gulab Khan M.P. 15 Liaqat Ali U.P. 18 Maulvi Syed Aluddin Hyderabad 19 Mahibullah M.P. 22 Mir Jafar Ali Thanesari 24 Noora M.P. 26 Qaim Khan M.P. 27 Sirajuddin M.P. 28 Seikh Formud Ali Assam Mufti Inayat Ahmad Kakorwi ( ref. Muslims in India by Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi) Mufti Mazhar Karim Daryabadi ( ref. Muslims in India by Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi) Wahabi Rabels Deported to Andamans (1860 - 1870) 1 Maulana Ahmadulla Patan Trial, 1865 : died in prison 2 Amiruddin Maldah Trial, 1870 3 Ibrahim Mandal Rajmahal Trial, 1870 4 Md. Sher Ali : Sher Ali was given life imprisonment during the Wahabi movement against the British Raj. He assassinated Lord Mayo, Viceroy of India with a knife on 8th February, 1872. He was hanged on Viper Island. 5 Yahya Ali Ambala Trial, 1864 : died in prison. 6 Mohammad Shafi Lahori ( ref. Muslims in India by Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi) 7 Molvi Abdul Rahim Sadiqpuri ( ref. Muslims in India by Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi) Moplah Rebels Deported to Andamans (1922 - 1924) 1 Neliiparamban Alavi Haji 2 Kolaparamban Kunjalavi 3 Kozhisseri Koya Kutty 4 Ambattuparamban Saidalippa 5 Kayakkatiparamb il Kunjeni 6 Machingal Rayin 7 Kuthukallan Kunjara 8 Chungath Athan 9 Variyath Valappil Ahammed Kutty 10 Mattummal Ahammed Kutty 11 Pooyikunnan Marakkar 12 Machincheri Alavi 13 Pokat Koyami 14 Puthampeedikayi l Kunjikader Molla 15 Mukri Kunjayammu 16 Poolakuyyil Kunhi Moideen Kutty 17 Poovakundil Alavi 18 Neehiyil Kunjeedu 19 Aripra Pocker 20 Mattummal Marakkar 21 Chakkupurakkal Kutty Hasan FREEDOM FIGHTERS INCARCERATED IN CELLULAR JAIL (1909-1921) 1 Ali Ahmed Siddiqui Punjab 5 Mujtaba Husain United Province FEEDOM FIGHTERS INCARCERATED IN (CELLUALR JAIL 1932-1938) 181 Md. Ibrahim Alias Tarapada
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Matrix,
"Pakistani elite has been educated in best of Anglo universities. I wonder why they don't see the same things."
Perhaps they only got a degree had a good time, but never accepted the modern education and progressive ideals.
It is really foxing to realize that why and how even Iqbal and Faiz had such a servile attitude towards regressive religiosity instead of Reason!
Having half a dozen house keepers is in true tradition of British Raj.
What the author fails to see is that Pakistan is going thru a cultural shift and the contours of the new society are barely visible. Major societal changes are not without pain. Watch the history being made.
I for one don't need to read this book to find out the reality of Pakistan.
Malikrashid sahib, thanks for your kind words!
It is a very interesting book and is especially useful for those who wish to put a whole bunch of past events in perspective while thinking of how to plan for a better future.
A wonderful commentary.
At one of the book introduction gathering in USA, Pamela Constable reportedly described that elusive duplicity of Pakistan as; "Pakistan is not a failed state; it is a fake state." Your review has made me look for this book immediately. Thanks.
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