Lahore Notes, March 2000

At the Sahmat conference in early 1999 I ran into Anil Sethi who teaches history at Deshbandhu College, Delhi, and who had recently completed a PhD thesis on the making of religious boundaries in Punjab over the past two or

three centuries. It was more than a decade since we had met last, and we

agreed to meet again. To that meeting came with him Bilal Ahmed, an unusual

journalist from Lahore, who had come for the Sahmat Conference. I told him

of my unsuccessful attempts, since 1967, to visit Lahore. He offerred to

host me in Lahore any time I went there. In the next few months we maintained contact by e-mail, and he put me on to his friends there. Dr. Mubarak Ali sent me a formal invitation to lecture at his institute. Getting visa took time, but in February 2000 I had it. We arranged for me to go in mid-March for what turned out to be an exhilarating week.

I took the famous Bus to Lahore on the morning of March 18. Both Pakistan and India run two trips a week on this route. I went by the Pakistani bus, returned by the Indian. Such security! My suitcase was opened for inspection 3-4 times each way. A police escort jeep went ahead of the bus all the way, clearing the traffic in our lane, all cross traffic held back. Several times it led the bus through red lights! Some weeks ago there was some stone throwing at the bus in Indian Punjab; so in Punjab the escort consisted of two jeeps and a truckful of policemen! It gave me a sense of what it feels to be a VIP! Refreshments and lunch came at stops on the way. Indian and Pakistani currency can be exchanged at Attari in India, Wagah in Pakistan, or any number of money changers in Lahore. Indian currency fetches a premium of 15-20%.

My friends in Lahore met me at the terminus there, and Bilal took me to his

home. For a week he hosted me most graciously, and every day drove me around

everywhere I had to go. Lahore is a lovely city, and its major roads have

faster traffic than nearly any major city in India; Karachi, I was told, is

even better. Quite a few tongas, along with lots of 2-, 3-, and 4-wheelers

of all shapes and sizes, with plenty of new generation large cars. My

friends regretted my lack of interest either in Lahore's historic sights or

in the variety of the city's famous foods. New public buildings have high

architectural quality, and I had occasion also to explore an architect's own

modest but imaginatively designed home. I was able to get a map of Lahore

only towards the end of my stay, so my orientation to the city remained

vague throughout.

I had numerous no-holds-barred conversations in a variety of settings which

included:

- at my host's home with some of his numerous friends,

- an evening at Pak Tea House, off the Mall, attending a meeting of

Hulk-e-arbab-e-zuke, the Circle for Critical Aesthetic Appreciation,

- a visit to the architect's home: there I talked to his mother, who had

come from Amritsar in 1947, his journalist brother who has been doing

research on the jehadis, a sister who has read English literature at

university, another brother who works in a bank, and this brother's wife who

is a journalist and will be studying in London later in the year;

- meeting several teachers in the faculty room of Forman Christian College,

- meeting with a group working in Aurat Foundation, a large, ambitious NGO

active especially on issues concerning women,

- a group at Dr. Mubarak Ali's home which included Mr. Khaled Ahmad, Editor

of The Friday Times, a highly respected independent newspaper,

- a visit to Punjab University which included a long informal discussion

with students in the department of philosophy,

- a wide-ranging interview with an Urdu newspaper, and

- a public lecture on "What has happened to the caste system in India" at

the National College of Arts, arranged by Nadeem Omar Tarar, who teaches

anthropology and critical studies there.

Belying the tense atmospherics that dominate the media in the two countries

when referring to each other, my own experiences could not have been more

pleasant. A participant in the gathering at Pak Tea House proposed that we

exchange a Pakistani Rs 10 note with an Indian Rs 10 note - as a

remembrance. Later that evening, the man who connected me to Delhi on STD

proposed that we exchange the Indian ballpen in my hands with the Pakistani

pen in his hands - as a remembrance! I was able to indulge myself in a

mixture of Punjabi, Hindustani, and English without having to watch my

words, and everywhere I met a great deal of warmth - and insatiable

curiosity.

An earlier version of these notes has been read by several friends in

Pakistan, and also by a wide circle in India, including research biologists

and retired army generals, and aroused much interest. Hence the decision to

put them in print.

CONTEMPORARY LAHORE / PAKISTAN

Indian TV channels are easily available in Lahore - and viewed extensively.

I spent an evening at the Hulk-e-arbab-e-zuke gathering, above Pak Tea

House. This is a 61 years old, wholly independent, association. That

evening the fare covered: a 15-20 minutes' essay on kathak as a dance form

and its emergence in history. There was much debate on the presentation -

though dancing is seen in Pakistan as un-Islamic, and therefore cannot be

presented at governmentally owned auditoria; there is no state patronage

for dancing. This ban was imposed under President Ziaul Haq - and no one

has mustered the courage to revoke it though it is seen as being silly.

(The objection would be to drawing attention to women's bodies; a man may

dance - and one participant was introduced as having learned Kathak from a

teacher in Delhi.) The evening included presentations of a ghazal and two

poems too - and wide-ranging comments from the audience; some were very

hostile, ad hominim.

While I was too ignorant to respond to their request to appraise them about the art scene in India, I spoke of the need to remove the iron curtain between our countries - which leaves us all impoverished, culturally.

Women

Women in Lahore seemed to use the burqa, or cover their heads, only marginally more than in Delhi. However, their participation in public activities may be somewhat less:

- at the gathering in Bilal's home, among about ten of his friends, only one was a (young) woman; she participated in the discussion confidently.

- the literary gathering above Pak Tea House had at least two women (in a

gathering of more than 50) - and they were obviously used to public participation. One, visiting Lahore from Rawalpindi, was invited to present

her poems.

- men were a large majority of the staff whom I met at Aurat Foundation,

which is oriented towards working with women;

- at my lecture, the only women were Dr Mubarak Ali's wife and two daughters

(one of them teaches at the Law College in Lahore, the other studies history

at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi).

- the Punjab University MA Philosophy class that I met had very few boys -

mostly young women students.

PAKISTANI HISTORY

A student in the department of philosophy at Punjab University asked me:

"We feel that there is a good deal common between India and Pakistan. Why

then did we have the Partition?" I gave him a long answer which took quick

looks at the nature of the caste system and how Muslims had fitted into it,

the psychological effects of Saltanat and Mughal conquests, and the

processes of political competition in the 19th and 20th centuries. I

realize now that this explanation, drawing equally on the evidence of

sociology and history, is not widely known; and therefore one may work up a

booklet on this kind of social history, covering a thousand years. My host

in Lahore offerred to translate it into Urdu.

Why the intense focus on Kashmir?

Pakistan's intense preoccupation with Kashmir today is palpable. In

conversations with friends there I suggested that if Kashmir occupies 50% of

public attention in Pakistan, it gets only about 5% in India. Wherever my

discussions began, a majority of them tended to drift towards Kashmir. In

trying to figure out why this was so, I came up with the following:

The tension along the pre-47 Hindu:Muslim interface, which had forced the

Partition, flowed into the India:Pakistan interface subsequently. The

course taken by the integration of princely states left Pakistan feeling

cheated: what defensible principle, apart from India's superior force, can

there be for Junagarh, Hyderabad, and Kashmir, all three, to have been

incorporated in India? The war in 1965 ended in a draw; but Pakistan has

maintained a strong feeling that the split in 1971 was because of India's

hostile intervention; hence the obsessive desire for revenge. [I was told

that Zulfikar Bhutto had ordered an enquiry into the conduct of Pakistani

army in the eastern wing during 1971. The report would have led several

Generals to the gallows; it was suppressed. No one was punished.]

Meanwhile, a pan-Islamic wave has long been building up in reaction to the

perceived humiliation of Islam by the West, on numerous fronts over the past

century and more. In Afghanistan, the United States weighed in "for"

Islamic Afghanistan, against the Soviet sponsored regime, harnessing

religious passions for the Cold War against the Soviets. Jehadis were

lionised. Islamist passions have remained active In the post-Soviet phase,

augmenting now the anti-India passions - with a fixation on Kashmir.

Fighting against the Indian (Hindu) oppression of Kashmiris (Muslims) is

widely seen as a holy cause.

Pakistani debate on Kashmir

Despite the high feelings on Kashmir, there are certainly voices in

Pakistan recognizing contrary considerations which have to be taken into

account:

A. Some people note that the force of the demand for self-determination in

(Indian) Kashmir is weakened when (1) the Constitution of Azad Kashmir

prohibits advocacy of the "Independent Kashmir" option, though this is

canvassed in Pakistan publicly [it leaves Indian authorities cold]; and (2)

the career of democracy in Pakistan has been so unsteady.

B. Pakistan's economic limitations can scarcely be slurred over. I heard

that 6% of Pakistan's GDP goes into defence, against India's 3% (after the

leap in the 2000 budget - which left Pakistani observers gasping); and,

indeed, so large a part of Pakistan's revenues goes into defence and debt

servicing that little is left over for investment. Economic "growth" is

said to be at zero level, though the markets are full of consumption goods.

It is being suggested that rebuilding the economy should have first priority

now; challenging India may have to wait until times are more propitious.

C. International consensus favours freezing the established line of control

as an international border, and is equally opposed to changing borders

through the use of force in any form.

Emergence of jehadi groups

The above debate, however, is muted, for the national mood is set by the

jehadi groups. What Indira Gandhi did to Akali Dal, which led to

Bhindranwale, President Ziaul Haq did to the small religious parties in

Pakistan. These parties lost ground; but in a parallel process, the

breakaway militant groups have since been setting their own agendas.

The leader of one of the religious parties triggered pressure on Shias and

Ahmadiyas. Shias being there in strength responded belligerantly. This

belligerance is repeated especially during Moharram processions - when the

administration, afraid of disorders, accepts every demand by the

processionists, however unreasonable. For the administration, that is an

ordeal.

The jehadis' concerns dominate the media in Pakistan. I found widespred

criticism in private; publicly, they have too many weapons for anyone to

question them. To contribute to their cause is widely seen as an act of

piety. These men are putting their lives on the line in the casue of

Islam. The least that the other faithful can do is to aid their cause

materially. This takes several forms:

- at Eid, it is customary to donate the skin of the goat or sheep

sacrificed, currently worth Rs. 400 to 500 a piece, to a (religious)

charity. A large fraction of these skins these days comes to jehadi camps.

- the jehadis have put collection boxes in numerous shops all over Lahore.

I saw one in a bookshop. I heard someone ask the man at the counter why he

allows it to be kept in the shop. The man said the penalties for refusal

could be unacceptably high.

The relations between the jehadis and the armed forces are close, but it is

not a simple chain of command. Ultimately, if any agency in Pakistan can

control them, it would be the army - and the army would have a tough fight

on its hands, a much larger version of Operation Bluestar.

The lunatic fringes

While my Pakistani friends commented apprehensively on Vajpayee's talk of

Pakistan having to quit Azad Kashmir, and Advani's chatter about undoing the

partition, they reported too their own jehadis speaking of hoisting their

flag on the Red Fort in Delhi.

BOOKS

Apart from the shop where I got some books on "Pakistan Studies" for my

neighbour who wanted these for her students to content-analyse, the Book

Review Delhi had asked me to scout Lahore for books to be reviewed in their

forthcoming Pakistan supplement, and this took me to two publishers: Fiction

House, and Oxford University Press.

Fiction House publishes largely in Urdu and some in English. Its 1999 list

included 48 new titles, and some reprints. Fiction and poetry are

important, but also history, in both languages, and much else. Its standard

print run is 600, and the list price is four times the cost (Delhi's major

publishers use a factor of 5 or 6). Apart from the one shop, it markets

through the book trade. Its strength lies principally in reaching the

individual buyer - not institutional libraries.

In contrast to the modest location of Fiction House - it took some

searching by my host to locate it - Oxford University Press in Lahore is

up-market, in its location, in production values, and in prices. Ms Samina

Choonara, herself well regarded as poet (I presume in Urdu) and as

professional publisher, heads the Lahore operation. She told us that the

present government has directed them to import from India - even from OUP

India - only books on science and on Islam. Books on Islam from non-OUP

publishers in India too were displayed on their shelves.

The enormous bookshop, Vanguard Books, on the Mall, may well be the most

substantial bookshop in this sub-continent. I have seen nothing else quite

like it. It is owned by the gutsy Najam Sethi who outraged the Pakistani

establishment by criticizing Pakistan severely in a lecture in Delhi last

year. He owns too The Friday Times, a liberal (I think weekly) newspaper.

I had the pleasure of meeting the Friday Times editor, Khaled Ahmad, at

dinner at Mubarak Ali's home. The paper and its owner as well as editor

have running problems with the Pakistani establishment.

IDEAS

It should be obvious by now that I encountered in Lahore a great deal of

very active, friendly curiosity about India. Part of their difficulty, I

think, is this: they get fleeting impressions about India on TV channels,

both Pakistani and Indian, and in other media, now including the internet;

but they have not built the kind of scholarly, or even informed,

interpretative, journalistic, resources that would locate those fleeting

impressions for them into frameworks for understanding in much depth. The

difficulty is not merely with India; there has been a more general

impoverishment of the mind --and of collective vision.

Coversations turned repeatedly towards the BJP-Hindutva tendencies. Why

has BJP grown so speedily? How far will the Hindutva pressure go? I

pointed out (1) that political mobilization in terms of caste, language/

region, and religious symbols has turned out to be cost-effective; but

since the system is effectively open, we have a staggering multiplicity of

players competing with BJP, who know how to give it a run for its money;

and (2) the widespread resistance, in Parliament and on the streets, when

the saffron brigade tries to cross certain limits.

My friends recognized, wistfully, the strength of the civil society in

India. After the Babri demolition, they had noticed that public

demonstrations had been widespread in India. Immediately after, a Jain

temple, a well known landmark in Lahore, had been demolished in retaliation,

razed by government bulldozers. The event elicited no public protests.

The Indian culture of public protests has built both on the Gandhian legacy

and on the Left's predilection for the politics of the street. Its

conspicuous absence in Pakistan persuaded me that we have here something to

cherish.

I had a feeling that many Pakistanis have recently come to be persuaded

that Indian society and polity have certain strengths which they had not

previously suspected. I was often asked what accounts for that strength?

I drew on a paper, on the Indian Constitution, which Granville Austin had

presented at a conference in Delhi in late-Jan. 2000. There he had spoken

of its seamless web, woven out of democracy, country's integrity, and the

need for a social transformation, and how these principles had held course,

despite all the buffetting through the past five decades.

The foregoing came up during a long conversation with Asif Sultan, who

writes for an Urdu newspaper in Lahore. Sultan asked me, too, what the

threat from the West portends for us. I pointed out that the West's

pressure today arises in good part from the intellectual power of their

general concepts - especially in science and technology - not from their

arsenal. I mentioned my own agenda: to try to grasp the principal

processes in European history so we may see the key linkages there -- and

then consider what we need to do. Otherwise we would be easy targets for

McDonaldization.

One feeling that remained at the end of the day - or the week - was the

relative thinness of the idea of the "renouncer" in Pakistani public life.

A significant stream in the voluntary action sector of Indian society draws

inspiration from Gandhi's example; but there are no Pakistani equivalents of

Baba Amte, Anna Hazare, Medha Patkar, Aruna and Bunker Roy, or Mihir Shah.

Gandhi re-oriented the idea of the sadhu, so that one foresakes personal

aggrandisement while remaining committed to ambitious public purposes. In

India, the Amtes, the Hazares, the Patkars, the Roys, and the Shahs provide

public counter-weights to the Laloo Yadavs, the Bal Thackerays, and the

Jayalalithas. Pakistan has yet to create this category of public

counter-weights.

The single most interesting idea I heard during my week in Lahore came from

Khaled Ahmad, editor of The Friday Times: the vision of a confederation of south Asian states whose constituent units would be the various states of

India - entering the confederation individually rather than as one India - the provinces of Pakistan, and no-doubt Bangladesh too. It seemed to me to be an eminently sensible vision, say for the year 2050. If Europe could move towards political integration 50 years after a World War, why can we in

South Asia not do better? The future is always open, and I think the next

few years are going to be an exciting time in our part of the world.