-The pursuit of profit may finally be self-defeating
By Ashok Mitra
The Telegraph, July 29, 2011
It was late afternoon on the fourth day of the third and final Test between India and West Indies at Dominica earlier this month. The West Indies were tottering in their second innings, seven wickets were already down, Rampaul, the pace bowler, had just joined the dour Shivnarine Chanderpaul. A risky run was taken, Rampaul made a dive towards the wicket-keeper’s end, the fielder at square leg made a sharp, accurate throw, Dhoni collected the ball and thrust the bails out. While Rampaul was still clearly out of the crease, the field umpires were not altogether sure though whether Dhoni had the ball actually in his gloves when he broke the stumps. They referred to the third umpire, who took quite a while before making up his mind, looking closely at the video takes from different angles. Seconds ticked by, suspense mounted in the field and among the millions watching the match on the television channels. Time is money, each second works out to perhaps a few thousand dollars or more, the telecast was peremptorily interrupted, what followed was a rush of maybe a dozen advertisements stretching for a full five minutes, the viewer had no way of finding out during this interregnum whether Rampaul had been declared out or not, agony got added to the continuing suspense. It was only after the telecast was resumed to show Fidel Edwards keeping Chanderpaul company that one had confirmation that the eighth West Indies wicket too was down.
A safe wager to take; the same commentary was being telecast by some channel or other in the West Indies, in England, Australia and New Zealand, in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, possibly in South Africa as well, in none of these countries were the viewers denied their right to know the third umpire’s decision the moment it was flashed across the big screen on the field. In India, it had to be different. Capitalism is here rushing to its climacterics. Money-making — maximization of profit — is here not merely a humdrum professional goal of the business and industrial communities; it is the be-all and end-all of their existence. Squeeze to the limit whatever is squeezable is a religious credo, the rate of return must be pushed up and further up. In the context of this overriding objective of profit maximization; all other considerations are of zero worth. A television channel owes its allegiance only to the quantum of money it makes through the display of advertisements, not to the game of cricket; the Test match commentaries are merely a cover for the advertisements that are the source of amassable wealth; letting the viewers watch the proceedings while the game is actually on is reckoned to be enough, the time the third umpire takes to give his verdict cannot be allowed to go to waste. What do the Indian entrepreneurs care about the agony of the cricket buff?
The perpetrators of this kind of outrage that reduces cricket lovers to helpless fury have of course their own point of view. They are not the least apologetic in airing it either. Cricket, they will argue, has long ceased to be an indolent game to be savoured in a lazy, leisurely manner, conforming to the civilities of pastoral life. It is now an industry, an international industry; it is entertainment: at the same time, more than entertainment, like horse-racing or motion pictures. Cricket as business involves investment of millions and millions of dollars. If these millions were sunk elsewhere, the rate of return would have been of a certain order. If investors fail to attain more than that rate from their outlay on cricket they will have no alternative but to move away, that is to say, phase out their investments in cricket and depart with their kitty for other pastures. Among other things, that will also mean the end of global telecasts of cricket commentaries, a surcease of the luxury viewers enjoy, lounging in their living room in Patna or Madurai and watching Sachin Tendulkar launching on a delectable straight drive to the fences — which also fetches him his umpteenth Test century — the moment he launches on it. The viewers have a choice, they either accept cricket telecasts with all their imperfections and alleged crudities or push back the game to the insularity of the pre-information technology revolution era. Indian entrepreneurs, it will also be added, are least bothered about the extent of consideration accorded to the viewers by the channel in Australia, England or South Africa. None of these countries can match India’s scale of civilities or rate of growth. Cricket in India, in the manner it has been organized and managed in recent decades, has played its humble part in propelling this magnificent national growth. Those associated, directly or indirectly, with the business of cricket, including the channels, are determined not to do anything that could adversely affect the prospects of India’s rapid and yet more rapid economic progress. Is not the whole world watching in awe the spectacle of Indian capitalism single-mindedly at work?
Which means here in India cricket telecasts will continue to be choked off the instant someone gets out or an appeal to declare him out is posted with the umpires; no opportunity will be provided to the viewers to learn what the commentators have to say on the nature of the ball that claimed the wicket or the stroke that felled the batsman or the quite unbelievable catch the third man has taken — and of course there is no question of permitting television watchers in Mumbai and New Delhi the privilege of sharing with spectators in the field at Port of Spain the moments of exciting uncertainty preceding the decision of the third umpire on a dicey leg-before-wicket appeal. Pampering such flippancies harms the cause of profit maximization.
In a society assumed to be free, there ought to be some space for devil’s advocates. Consumer sovereignty is one of the essential features of the free market. It puts the imprimatur on the process that leads to profit maximization. Advertisement money spent by the sponsors is intended to win over the legions of cricket fans who sit glued to the television sets. Their number has already reached millions and is likely to grow even faster in future. They are, besides, quickly travelling through the learning curve and coming to appreciate to an increasing extent the charm wrapped in the mystique of this somewhat sophisticated game. Viewer psychology is a complex phenomenon. Once a sufficiently large number of television watchers enters the ethos of cricket, these watchers would conceivably like to experience every moment of it and share, along with the spectators actually present at the Test match venue many thousands of miles away, the excitement and suspense over an appeal pending for leg-before-wicket or a run out or a stumping, they will hate any distractions at this point. Initially, there will be no grouse, they will endure the sales pitches for the goods and services the sponsors are anxious to sell them. One never knows, as capitalism matures, consumer taste too can mature, tolerance can gradually gravitate towards impatience; impatience can beget irritation, that may, in the course of a short time, develop into hostility. When that stage is reached, the advertisements may turn out to be counterproductive. In the recesses of the mind, the wares being advertised can begin to be considered as infernal nuisance, sabotaging the right of viewers to enjoy their cricket. What a calamity, the sales curve may in fact start wobbling.
Such is the problem with resurgent capitalism. It does not at all know, or does not know enough, about the boundary conditions of profit maximization. A rising rate of profit tempts its protagonists to target an even higher rate of profit. At some stage, any sense of proportion gets lost, howlers are committed, howlers that have a negative impact on earnings, dragging down the rate of profit. The seekers of insensate profit, therefore, every now and then, need advice and counsel for their own good. In the present instance, sponsors have to fill in that role, and for their own interest. The consumer is sovereign; an excess of advertisements that cuts athwart the consumer’s right to savour his coveted leisure can be costly beyond measure.
But, then, there is a school of thought which is confident that capitalism of the Indian genre is maturity-proof and consumer preference too will always remain overwhelmingly banal.
Pakistan government defaults on its electricity bill
By Aijaz Maher
BBC News, Islamabad
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Government institutions in Pakistan owe $2bn to the cash-strapped national power company, it has emerged.
Power Production Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf told parliament that the defaulters included the army, the Supreme Court and the presidency.
Pakistan is currently going through a major power crisis which has slowed down the economy and led to riots.
The latest disclosures will embarrass the government which has threatened to jail people who do not pay their bills.
It has launched a massive campaign against private defaulters, accusing them of being unIslamic.
The crisis is due to a massive power shortfalls caused by poor electricity infrastructure and the shortage of new production units. Both problems stem from a lack of finances.
'Raising hackles'
"The biggest single defaulter is the ministry of defence, which includes the three armed forces," Mr Ashraf said in parliament in reply to a question.
The country's energy infrastructure lacks investment "The amount owed by defence comes to a billion rupees ($11.76m)," he stated.
This is about half of what the federal government owes to the country's Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda).
Pakistan's Presidency, on the other hand, owes a comparatively low 20m rupees ($235,294).
The Supreme Court's dues are pegged at 2.5m rupees ($29,400).
The figures are likely to raise hackles across the country as ordinary Pakistanis continue to grapple with long hours of power cuts.
The government's discomfiture over unpaid bills is likely to be enhanced because it has recently launched a new television advertisement campaign which portrays defaulters as working against the national interest.
The government has frequently warned that that bill defaulters are liable to imprisoned and fined as are people who have illegal connections.
The authorities regularly disconnect supplies to those companies or individuals who miss out on even a couple of months' payments.
But it is unlikely that any punitive action will be taken against defaulting government institutions.
BBC News, Islamabad
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Government institutions in Pakistan owe $2bn to the cash-strapped national power company, it has emerged.
Power Production Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf told parliament that the defaulters included the army, the Supreme Court and the presidency.
Pakistan is currently going through a major power crisis which has slowed down the economy and led to riots.
The latest disclosures will embarrass the government which has threatened to jail people who do not pay their bills.
It has launched a massive campaign against private defaulters, accusing them of being unIslamic.
The crisis is due to a massive power shortfalls caused by poor electricity infrastructure and the shortage of new production units. Both problems stem from a lack of finances.
'Raising hackles'
"The biggest single defaulter is the ministry of defence, which includes the three armed forces," Mr Ashraf said in parliament in reply to a question.
The country's energy infrastructure lacks investment "The amount owed by defence comes to a billion rupees ($11.76m)," he stated.
This is about half of what the federal government owes to the country's Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda).
Pakistan's Presidency, on the other hand, owes a comparatively low 20m rupees ($235,294).
The Supreme Court's dues are pegged at 2.5m rupees ($29,400).
The figures are likely to raise hackles across the country as ordinary Pakistanis continue to grapple with long hours of power cuts.
The government's discomfiture over unpaid bills is likely to be enhanced because it has recently launched a new television advertisement campaign which portrays defaulters as working against the national interest.
The government has frequently warned that that bill defaulters are liable to imprisoned and fined as are people who have illegal connections.
The authorities regularly disconnect supplies to those companies or individuals who miss out on even a couple of months' payments.
But it is unlikely that any punitive action will be taken against defaulting government institutions.
Sindh: An oasis of peace and tolerance
By Manzoor Chandio
Published in Sindh Watch in June 2009
Why should we take sides and condemn atrocities wherever they are being committed, with a conviction that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”?
Decades ago, during civil rights movement, Dr Martin Luther King took this stand against racial discrimination in the United States. It would be no exaggeration to say that the same is also the collective wisdom of people of Sindh in southern Pakistan.
Since the start of war on terror, the people of the non-Muslim world have been shown a terrific aspect of Pakistan, which is also home to Sufi Sindhi people. Sindh’s Sufi saint Shah Latif promoted his philosophy of universal brotherhood centuries ago.
The people of Sindh have always stood up for justice and tolerance. Their home, the soil of Sindh, is popular as the land of saints and sages who always preached the message of love and brotherhood.
The world not only highlights the failure of the Muslim world but also points out to a deficiency of an independent Muslim political thought which works out automatically to get the Muslim countries and their people out of ancient thinking.
Sindh has poets like Shah Latif and Sachal Sarmast, who centuries ago, disseminated universal brotherhood. They are the epitome of religious tolerance. Some western scholars conclude that nothing is enlightened with the Muslims through which they can replace obscurantism and extremism. But this is not the case of Sindhi Muslims, who with their Sufi inclination are tolerant to all other religions.
The deficiency of free inquiry and interpretation is so acute among Muslim scholars, that an army General used Wahabi Sect for his own survival and created Taliban who today are the biggest threat to peace. But the people of Sindh rejected Wahabi teachings in Pakistan. Sindhis are the only group of people in Pakistan, who never followed the line of extremist Islam.
For that reason, the extremist Islamabad establishment victimized the people of Sindh. Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands others jailed and sent into exile.
Similar examples of injustice and intolerance have been seen in other parts of the Islamic world. About 300,000 Kurd and Shia Muslims were killed during the Saddam regime in Iraq. The dictator used weapons of mass destruction, not against any non-Muslim country, but against fellow Muslims during the Iran-Iraq war and also used chemical weapons against Kurds in his own country.
Almost five thousand Kurds were killed in just one attack in Halabja in 1988. Iraq fought two wars against fellow Muslim states of Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.Ironically, Israel deterred the Syrian army from invading Jordan on the pretext of supporting a Palestinian uprising in 1970. Syria occupied Lebanon in 1976 and effectively annexed it after 15 years.
In 1982, Syria massacred 20,000 people in the Muslim Brotherhood with strong hold of Hammas.Nearly 100,000 Muslims have been killed at the hands of Muslims in Algeria. After Dr. King, there were a few free thinkers in the West who challenged the perception and stood by the oppressed. If there were no Noam Chomsky (a Jew) and Edward Said (a Christian), perhaps all the Muslim had been dubbed as terrorists.
This is the time the world must know about Sufi Islam followed by the people of Sindh in Pakistan.During East Pakistan crisis, the extremist establishment projected false ideas of military and totally ignored realities on ground. The military massacred thousands of Bengalese. Today, people of Sindh and Balochistan feel that they are being targeted. The extremists in Islamabad, instead of bridging the appalling development gap that separates the Baloch and Sindhis from other nationalities, launched an action against them.
Somnambulists in Islamabad must understand history that the suppression of own people can only invite the ineluctable wrath of the mighty like the one we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The big question before the Pakistani establishment is whether it will ever be able to show its human face?
The collective wisdom of people of Sindh says yes. Before partition of subcontinent, people of Sindh following different religions, such as Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism and Zorastarism, lived together side-by-side.
Therefore, it is necessary for the world to understand the tolerant face of Islam, which is followed by the people of Sindh.
There are shrines of saints and sages across Sindh and mosques and temples inside one compound.Sindh is the soil where there is no room for Taliban. Despite being part of Pakistan, Sindh is an oasis of peace and tolerance.
Sufism Of saints and sinners
Dec 18th 2008 DELHI, LAHORE AND SEHWAN SHARIF
From The Economist print edition
The Islam of the Taliban is far removed from the popular Sufism practised by most South Asian Muslims
By Declan Walsh
“NORMALLY, we cannot know God,” says Rizwan Qadeer, a neat and amiable inhabitant of Lahore, Western-dressed and American-educated, eyes shining behind his spectacles. “But our saints, they have that knowledge.”
Mr Qadeer is standing in the belly of a shrine that he is building to a modern gnostic, Hafiz Iqbal, whom he venerates especially. Cool, and smelling pleasantly of damp earth and mortar, it holds Iqbal’s grave, covered by an embroidered green shroud and sprinkled with pink rose petals. A young man—a Pakistani resident of London, Mr Qadeer says—stands in silent prayer to the saint, who was employed by Lahore’s municipal government as a street-sweeper, and died in 2001. In a tradition of popular Sufism, which mingles classical Islamic mysticism with Hinduism and folk beliefs and is a dominant feature of Islam in South Asia, the saint’s divine essence, or baraka, emanates from his tomb. “Physically, our holy saints do die,” says Mr Qadeer. “But the spirit is still here, because they have reached eternity.”
Echoing down a winding stairwell, a scraping of masonry and clink of chisel on marble signal a remarkable monument rising. It is in the scruffy Lahori suburb of Baghbanpura, where Iqbal lived for six decades. From a narrow alley running alongside the shrine, it is mostly hidden: its high outer walls, of recessed brickwork speckled with multicoloured tiles, rising out of sight to a pair of domes and skinny minarets. A few steep steps lead into a small cloistered forecourt, where masons are at work.
Either side of the forecourt, about ten metres apart, are two false burial chambers. These are beautifully decorated, with white marble lattice and marble mosaics studded with green jade, lapis lazuli and agate. One is for Iqbal and the other for his mentor, a mystic called Baba Hassan Din, who lived in a brick cell on this site and died in 1968. The men’s true graves lie underneath, in brick-walled chambers, faintly murmuring with the sounds of the street outside.
According to Mr Qadeer—who had it from Iqbal—Din was, unbeknown to many of his disciples, an Englishman from Birmingham who, early in the last century, abandoned his family and his job on the railways to become a Sufi ascetic. His real name was Alfred, or possibly Albert, Victor. He received his vocation one fine summer evening, in a visitation from Abu Hassan Ali Hujwiri, an 11th-century Persian saint, who is better known as Data Ganj Bakhsh.
In the 1950s, according to Mr Qadeer, Din arrived in Lahore, and passed himself off as a Punjabi. He also adopted a poor local boy, Iqbal, and raised him to be a scholar. According to Mr Qadeer, Iqbal earned several degrees from Government College University, Lahore—one of Pakistan’s finest. But in the early 1960s he embarked on his own spiritual training: taking a job as a sweeper, under an assumed Christian identity. He could not have sunk lower. In the Hindu caste system, which is still discernible in Muslim Pakistan, many generations after its inhabitants converted from Hinduism, street-sweeping is a profession for “untouchables”. Most Christians in Pakistan and India were originally members of that despised Hindu group.
Mr Qadeer, a well-to-do, secular Pakistani, who studied engineering at the University of Houston, became a follower of Iqbal in 1990. He was referred to him in a state of anguish, which he credits the saint, an irascible chain-smoker, with ending. He also believes Iqbal cured his young daughter of a rare intestinal ailment. Other disciples of Iqbal attribute miracles to him, including curing cancer. They say he was omniscient. They believe that, as the height of Sufi attainment, Iqbal knew God.
The stringent, legalistic creeds of the Taliban and other revivalists are on the rise in South Asia, but only a minority follow them. Most of the 450m Muslims in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh—nearly a third of the Islamic world—practise a gentler, more tolerant faith, in which pre-Islamic superstitions are still evident. It is strongly influenced by Sufism, an esoteric and, in theory, nonsectarian Muslim tradition, which is strictly followed by a much smaller number of disciplined initiates. In its popular form, Sufism is expressed mainly through the veneration of saints, including self-styled mystics like those in Lahore, canonised by their followers.
South Asia is littered with the tombs of those saints. They include great medieval monuments, like the 13th-century shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, founder of South Asia’s pre-eminent Sufi order, in Ajmer. But for every famous grave, there are thousands of roadside shrines, jutting into Delhi’s streets, or sprinkled across the craggy deserts of southern Pakistan. On a single hillside in Pakistan’s province of Punjab, outside the town of Thatta, legend has it that 125,000 Muslim saints are buried.
Pakistan’s southernmost state of Sindh, a vast desert bisected by the Indus river, is perhaps best known for its shrines. A few miles outside the city of Hyderabad, in sight of the Indus, a middle-aged dwarf called Subhan manages one of them. She found the shrine deserted a few years ago, and moved into it. It is a small shack, with a low doorway hung with cowbells, in the tradition of a Hindu temple. A dusty green shroud covers the grave. Incense burns at its foot. Subhan says it holds the dust of a medieval saint called Haji Pir Marad. Sometimes, she says, he wrestles with the Indus to prevent it from changing course. In fits of terrible rage, he has caused pileups on the road. She advises passing motorists to propitiate the saint with a modest gift of rupees. On a good day, she collects around 50 rupees (60 cents) from the travellers who stop to pray.
All the traffic, on that recent sunny day, was bound for the nearby town of Sehwan Sharif, where Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, one of Pakistan’s most prominent Sufi saints, is entombed. It was the 734th anniversary of his death, an event marked by an annual festival attended by several hundred thousand devotees. This event is known as Qalandar’s urs, or wedding-night, to signify his union with God. A three-day orgy of music, dancing and intoxication, literally and spiritually, the urs at Sehwan is one of the best parties in Pakistan, or anywhere.
Outside Qalandar’s shrine, a white marble monument, decorated with flashing neon, pilgrims work themselves into an all-night ecstasy. Tossing their long black hair, a dozen prostitutes from Karachi or Lahore have a place reserved by the shrine’s golden doorway, to dance a furious jig. It is the dhammal, a rhythmic skipping from foot to foot, for which Qalandar’s followers are well-known. Thousands are moshing to a heavy drumbeat. The air is hot and wet with their sweat. A scent of rose petals and hashish sweetens it. In a flash of gold, out in the crush, a troupe of bandsmen in braided Sergeant Pepper uniforms are blowing inaudibly into brass instruments, then lifting trumpets and trombones into the air as they dance the dhammal.
Fighting through the crowd, a stream of peasant pilgrims flows into the shrine. Many carry glittering shrouds, lovingly embroidered by a wife or mother, as an offering for the tomb. They will be bestowed with a poor man’s prayer, for a good harvest, debt relief, or a son. “Last year I told my master [Qalandar] that I would bring him a goat if he gave me a son. I have come to honour that promise,” said Muhammad Riaz Rahman, a shopkeeper from Multan, tugging a calm-looking billy, daubed with pink dye, through the crowd.
To orthodox Sufis, all this is absurd. Islam’s mystical strain, like the Jewish and Christian traditions it somewhat resembles, is a strictly delineated path to self-knowledge. The proper Sufi seeks to attain this state through rigorous disciplines, of which dhikr, the remembrance of God, by reciting or meditating on his name, is the most common. Through self-knowledge, the devout mystic strives to attain knowledge of God Himself. This sets Sufis apart from Islam’s other functionaries, its jurists, or mullahs, and its theologians.
Throughout Islamic history, Sufis and mullahs, dedicated to enforcing Koranic laws, have clashed. Mullahs demand obedience; Sufis tend to stress tolerance. In their poetry, which mullahs shudder to read, Sufis often represent the state of rapture that they seek in the language of physical love or drunkenness. “I have no concern but carousing and rapture,” wrote Rumi, Sufism’s greatest poet, whose followers, of the Turkey-based Mawlawi order, remember him in a whirling dance, the saga, which has become synonymous in the West with all Sufism.
Alixandra Fassina
Building Baba Hassan Din’s shrine
Yet—despite what the hordes at Sehwan may believe—orthodox Sufis are also law-abiding Muslims. There should be no contradiction between these two positions. “Sufism is Islam and Islam is Sufism,” says Khwaja Hasan Thani Nizami, the hereditary keeper of the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. In orthodox Islam, for example, the limits of sainthood are strictly prescribed. Dead Muslim saints cannot intercede with God or perform miracles. If Muslims pray at their shrines, it can only be for the dead man’s salvation. They may not pray to him, which would be shirk, a form of idolatry. According to Ahmed Javed, a bearded Pakistani Sufi and scholar: “You can’t ask a dead saint to mediate, to solve a problem, to fulfil a wish, never, never, never. That is shirk in law and in Sufism.”
But South Asians never have been terribly law-abiding. Nor, during the centuries-old process of Islamisation that they led, have the Sufi orders always insisted that they should be. This really began in the 13th century, soon after the conquest of Delhi by an army of Persian-speaking Afghans. A powerful Sufi order, the Chistis, proceeded to spread across north India, led by Chisti, the great mystic buried in Ajmer.
Chisti’s initiates wore motley, practised poverty, neglected their families and despised the Muslim sultans and emperors who would rule India for five centuries. In the words of a famous Chisti couplet: “Why must you enter the doors of emirs and sultans? You are walking in the steps of Satan!” The Chistis were known for their love of poetry and, especially, music. Pilgrim-poets still gather in the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya, another great Chisti saint and poet, in Delhi, wearing the yellow pixie-hats of the order’s initiates.
Under Chisti influence, low-caste Hindus converted to Islam, to escape their low birth. Women, who are everywhere prominent in Sufism, were also especially welcomed. Perhaps most remarkably, the Chistis accepted recalcitrant non-Muslims as Sufi initiates. This set the tone for an astonishingly harmonious cohabitation between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia which continues, though it is sorely tested, to this day.
In the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, a great poet of Sindh, musicians gather to sing hymns. As their voices rise, in the blue-tiled portico of the shrine, a line of brightly clad Hindu women traipse in from the Sindhi desert which, for nomads like them, is still an open border to India. The Pakistani Muslim crowd, seated cross-legged on the forecourt, stirs to give them room. The women pass through, to give obeisance to Bhitai’s tomb. It is a moving scene.
For its message of tolerance, Sufism has long been fashionable outside the Muslim world. Outside Philadelphia, amid rolling green hills, is the shrine of Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Sri Lankan Sufi saint, who died in America in 1986. In recent times, moreover, Western interest in Islamic mysticism has become urgent. Some American commentators see Sufis as potential allies in a hostile Muslim world. A report by RAND Corporation, an American think-tank, recommended bolstering Sufism, as an “open, intellectual interpretation of Islam”.
On the face of it, this makes sense. In north-western Pakistan, where the Taliban rule, the Pushtuns have often taken against Sufi saints. According to the 1911 Census of British India, the Afridi tribe, having no shrine to worship at, “induced by generous offers a saint of the most notorious piety to take up his abode among them.” They then slit his throat, buried his corpse, and built a splendid shrine over it. These days, alas, they would probably not build the shrine: the Taliban tend to consider Sufism idolatrous. They are in the same puritan camp as Saudi Arabia’s unforgiving Wahhabi sect, their sometime sponsors. In the land of Muhammad, whom mystics revere as the first Sufi, the Wahhabis have bulldozed many old shrines.
At Qalandar’s shrine in Sehwan, a pilgrim called Tanvir Ahmed describes spending four months among the Taliban last year, in Swat, a Taliban fief near the Afghan frontier. He had thought to join the militants. But he was put off by their injunctions against Sufi saints. To a murmur of approval from other devotees, gathering thickly around us, Mr Ahmed says: “No one can deny our respected saints of God.”
But the urs also presents troubling scenes. As dusk falls, and the crowd dancing the dhammal outside the shrine swells, so does an army of men and boys, stripped to the waist. Legs akimbo, they sing a funeral dirge to the Shia martyr Hussain. It describes the battle of Karbala, in which Hussain fell, and Sunni and Shia Muslims were so painfully divided. As their deep voices rise, so the men’s arms lift together. Then each hand slaps down, with a thwack, on its owner’s red and glistening chest.
Alixandra Fassina
Hashish helps a mystic along the path to enlightenment
In daylight, inside the shrine, an even more strikingly sectarian ritual takes place. Shia pilgrims flagellate themselves with chains dangling with knife-blades and cry out to Ali, father of the martyred Hussain, and revered in Shia Islam. As they open their backs, sending blood onto the shrine’s floor, other pilgrims recoil. Many appear disgusted. In theory, Sufism transcends Islamic sects. For example, Qalandar was a Shia; many—or most—of his devotees are Sunni. Yet the shrines of Sindh, where many Shia Muslims live, are increasingly seeing strident sectarian displays. This may be partly a reaction to the attacks Pakistani Shias increasingly face from fundamentalists like the Taliban. It is a sign of popular Sufism under duress.
Sufi scholars, in Karachi, Delhi and Lahore, are concerned by this. But none wants government help—least of all from a reviled Western government. Many also note that Sufism is not, as Westerners seem to think, uniform. The conservative Naqshbandis, followers of another of South Asia’s main orders, have helped spread jihad: there was a Naqshbandi insurgent group in Iraq.
Qalandar, one of Pakistan’s most prominent Sufi saints, was not really of any order. He exists in a tradition of eccentric, mendicant Sufis. He was strongly influenced by Hinduism; many Hindus consider him a manifestation of Shiva. A Hindu performs the opening ritual of the annual urs. During the festival many devotees bring clay dishes of henna to Qalandar’s tomb, as to a Hindu bride on her wedding-night, and spread it on themselves, invoking the name of a Hindu water-god.
Amid syncretism, heresy thrives. Outside Qalandar’s mausoleum, just before dusk, a tall bearded man, wrapped in a black cloak and carrying a silver club, shouts into a loud-hailer: “Ali Allah! Allah Ali!”—“Ali is God! God is Ali!” He is Sayeed Ghafur Ali, a fine-looking dervish, and leader of a sect in Karachi which propagates this fearful blasphemy. In many Muslim places it would cost Mr Ali his head. But in Sehwan no one seems to mind. Asked, in a calmer setting, whether he has been a dervish for long, Mr Ali smiles and removes two tightly-bound parcels, about the size of American footballs, from his trouser pockets. They contain his hair, which grows in thick tresses under his cloak. Mr Ali says he has not visited a barber since he dedicated himself to Qalandar.
Unlike most renowned Sufi saints, Qalandar left little literature. In academic histories, his name hardly appears. To plug the gap, his devotees attribute miracles to him. One tells how Qalandar reconstituted a Hindu disciple, Bodhla Bahar, after an evil raja had made mincemeat of him. The narrator of this story may appear to have been smoking drugs. For Qalandar’s black-clad fakirs, many of whom are full time vagrants, much like Hinduism’s dread-locked saddhus, the urs is a wonderful opportunity to eat, dance and get stoned among friends. “Though I only smoke in the mornings to strengthen the body,” cautions Emir Bux, an elderly itinerant inside the shrine, with an orange hennaed beard and a headdress of curvy wooden snakes.
Sex is also to be had at the urs, but less freely. Sufi shrines have always appealed to prostitutes. This is partly because of the Sufis’ tolerance of sinners, but also because they make good places to sin. At Sehwan, which has a name for licentiousness, a transsexual prostitute—or hijra—called Ghazala says she came from Lahore, with 15 of her eunuch sisters, to pray and dance. Smoking a cigarette down to its filter, Ghazala, a muscular figure with greying temples, claims: “We came here only to worship our saint.” That is an unlikely story.
Presiding over this riot, from a grand house beside the shrine, is Mehdi Shah, a doctor from Islamabad, who recently inherited the title of sajjada nishin, or keeper of the shrine. This is an important office in Pakistan. The wardens of its most important shrines, including some, known as pirs, who claim descent from important saints, are among the country’s biggest landowners. This is partly a legacy of their usefulness to two former invaders of South Asia, the Mughals and British, both of whom patronised the shrine-keepers. Since the early 1960s, Pakistani governments have been taking over the most lucrative shrines, including Qalandar’s. But Pakistan’s pirs are still formidable. By one estimate, pir politicians command 10% of the popular vote. The current prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, and foreign minister, Shah Mahmud Qureshi, are both pirs.
Aaron Huey
A colourful version of Islam
Like so much else in Sehwan Sharif, this tradition has got messy. Mr Shah, the keeper of the shrine, is candid about the responsibilities pir-dom confers: “To guide people and make money.” But he regrets the competition for the office this has engendered. In Sehwan Sharif, several dozen local families claim to be guardians of the shrine. “There may be a thousand Tom, Dick and Harrys claiming to be sajjada nishin,” grumbles Mr Shah.
In a small room next to the shrine, decorated with peacock feathers, one of these wannabes, Paryal Shah, has set up shop. As Mr Shah, a bearded man rattling with amulets, enters the room, pilgrims hurl themselves at his feet. Grunting, occasionally slapping a pilgrim who crushes his toes, Mr Shah dispenses blessings among them. “God will help you,” he growls, doling out white cotton threads, blessed in advance, or a scrap of paper scribbled with a Koranic verse. It is hard to know how seriously anyone takes this charade. Mr Shah’s English-speaking right-hand, Ahmed Bhutto, winks and says that he and Mr Shah’s other disciples practice strict chastity: “I only do it with my wife!”
A more troublesome rival to Mehdi Shah is his uncle, Mozafir Ali Shah. They are locked in a property dispute so ugly that Mehdi Shah refuses even to visit his uncle’s house for a traditional family celebration: a dance performance by a visiting troupe of prostitutes. To the uninitiated, this splendid occasion is not obviously religious. The men of Mozafir Ali’s house sit in proud silence, as prostitutes straddle its courtyard, thrashing their long hair and kissing these hereditary notables’ knees. The women of the house rain rupee notes down on the dancers from a balcony discreetly above. A drummer shouts: “Sakhi Shahbaz Qalandar duma dum mast!”
True Sufis are embarrassed by such scenes. At Delhi’s great Sufi shrine, Mr Nizami, the keeper, says a Sufi must have three qualities: knowledge of Islam; love of God; and sanity. Whatever else they lack, he scoffs, the devotees of Qalandar are insane: “there is no Sufi among them!” Mr Javed, the Sufi in Lahore, agrees. But he contrasts such harmless superstition, as he terms popular Sufi beliefs, with the ruthless literalism of the Taliban. He says: “I feel safe among shallow-minded occultists. I do not feel safe among literalists.”
Scholars like these are Sufism’s true keepers. But in the undergrowth of popular Sufism, it is remarkable how little of their prescriptions survive. It has always been so. The diversity of South Asian Islam is a staggering multicultural achievement. If its mystics, orthodox and popular, are now increasingly besieged by mullahs, fellows of the Taliban, the massive gatherings at Sehwan and other Pakistani shrines suggest they will not be overrun soon.
Moreover, South Asia’s popular Sufism is not all degenerate. Some of South Asia’s greatest artistic achievements, especially in architecture, are expressions of it. The shrine to Baba Hassan Din rising in Lahore is among them.
Mr Qadeer and Mr Niaz, the disciples of Hafiz Iqbal, began work on it a few months after his death. It is being constructed entirely in natural materials, including clay bricks, white marble, gemstones, and lime plaster strengthened, as luck would have it, by the thousands of frogs that perished in it. The craftsmen building the shrine use traditional tools and techniques, some revived especially for the task.
Unsupported by concrete, the shrine’s domes rest on the weight of their own artful construction. Its cloisters are modelled on the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf. Its bejewelled mosaics are copied from the walls of Delhi’s 17th-century Red Fort. On the walls of the false burial chambers, Koranic verses, chosen by Hafiz Iqbal, have been inscribed in an ink made from burned mustard oil, in a style of calligraphy taken from the Taj Mahal. It is a wonderful creation. Kamil Khan Mumtaz, the architect, a Sufi initiate himself, believes there has been no Islamic monument built like it, anywhere in the Muslim world, for 300 years. May it last longer.
From The Economist print edition
The Islam of the Taliban is far removed from the popular Sufism practised by most South Asian Muslims
By Declan Walsh
“NORMALLY, we cannot know God,” says Rizwan Qadeer, a neat and amiable inhabitant of Lahore, Western-dressed and American-educated, eyes shining behind his spectacles. “But our saints, they have that knowledge.”
Mr Qadeer is standing in the belly of a shrine that he is building to a modern gnostic, Hafiz Iqbal, whom he venerates especially. Cool, and smelling pleasantly of damp earth and mortar, it holds Iqbal’s grave, covered by an embroidered green shroud and sprinkled with pink rose petals. A young man—a Pakistani resident of London, Mr Qadeer says—stands in silent prayer to the saint, who was employed by Lahore’s municipal government as a street-sweeper, and died in 2001. In a tradition of popular Sufism, which mingles classical Islamic mysticism with Hinduism and folk beliefs and is a dominant feature of Islam in South Asia, the saint’s divine essence, or baraka, emanates from his tomb. “Physically, our holy saints do die,” says Mr Qadeer. “But the spirit is still here, because they have reached eternity.”
Echoing down a winding stairwell, a scraping of masonry and clink of chisel on marble signal a remarkable monument rising. It is in the scruffy Lahori suburb of Baghbanpura, where Iqbal lived for six decades. From a narrow alley running alongside the shrine, it is mostly hidden: its high outer walls, of recessed brickwork speckled with multicoloured tiles, rising out of sight to a pair of domes and skinny minarets. A few steep steps lead into a small cloistered forecourt, where masons are at work.
Either side of the forecourt, about ten metres apart, are two false burial chambers. These are beautifully decorated, with white marble lattice and marble mosaics studded with green jade, lapis lazuli and agate. One is for Iqbal and the other for his mentor, a mystic called Baba Hassan Din, who lived in a brick cell on this site and died in 1968. The men’s true graves lie underneath, in brick-walled chambers, faintly murmuring with the sounds of the street outside.
According to Mr Qadeer—who had it from Iqbal—Din was, unbeknown to many of his disciples, an Englishman from Birmingham who, early in the last century, abandoned his family and his job on the railways to become a Sufi ascetic. His real name was Alfred, or possibly Albert, Victor. He received his vocation one fine summer evening, in a visitation from Abu Hassan Ali Hujwiri, an 11th-century Persian saint, who is better known as Data Ganj Bakhsh.
In the 1950s, according to Mr Qadeer, Din arrived in Lahore, and passed himself off as a Punjabi. He also adopted a poor local boy, Iqbal, and raised him to be a scholar. According to Mr Qadeer, Iqbal earned several degrees from Government College University, Lahore—one of Pakistan’s finest. But in the early 1960s he embarked on his own spiritual training: taking a job as a sweeper, under an assumed Christian identity. He could not have sunk lower. In the Hindu caste system, which is still discernible in Muslim Pakistan, many generations after its inhabitants converted from Hinduism, street-sweeping is a profession for “untouchables”. Most Christians in Pakistan and India were originally members of that despised Hindu group.
Mr Qadeer, a well-to-do, secular Pakistani, who studied engineering at the University of Houston, became a follower of Iqbal in 1990. He was referred to him in a state of anguish, which he credits the saint, an irascible chain-smoker, with ending. He also believes Iqbal cured his young daughter of a rare intestinal ailment. Other disciples of Iqbal attribute miracles to him, including curing cancer. They say he was omniscient. They believe that, as the height of Sufi attainment, Iqbal knew God.
The stringent, legalistic creeds of the Taliban and other revivalists are on the rise in South Asia, but only a minority follow them. Most of the 450m Muslims in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh—nearly a third of the Islamic world—practise a gentler, more tolerant faith, in which pre-Islamic superstitions are still evident. It is strongly influenced by Sufism, an esoteric and, in theory, nonsectarian Muslim tradition, which is strictly followed by a much smaller number of disciplined initiates. In its popular form, Sufism is expressed mainly through the veneration of saints, including self-styled mystics like those in Lahore, canonised by their followers.
South Asia is littered with the tombs of those saints. They include great medieval monuments, like the 13th-century shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, founder of South Asia’s pre-eminent Sufi order, in Ajmer. But for every famous grave, there are thousands of roadside shrines, jutting into Delhi’s streets, or sprinkled across the craggy deserts of southern Pakistan. On a single hillside in Pakistan’s province of Punjab, outside the town of Thatta, legend has it that 125,000 Muslim saints are buried.
Pakistan’s southernmost state of Sindh, a vast desert bisected by the Indus river, is perhaps best known for its shrines. A few miles outside the city of Hyderabad, in sight of the Indus, a middle-aged dwarf called Subhan manages one of them. She found the shrine deserted a few years ago, and moved into it. It is a small shack, with a low doorway hung with cowbells, in the tradition of a Hindu temple. A dusty green shroud covers the grave. Incense burns at its foot. Subhan says it holds the dust of a medieval saint called Haji Pir Marad. Sometimes, she says, he wrestles with the Indus to prevent it from changing course. In fits of terrible rage, he has caused pileups on the road. She advises passing motorists to propitiate the saint with a modest gift of rupees. On a good day, she collects around 50 rupees (60 cents) from the travellers who stop to pray.
All the traffic, on that recent sunny day, was bound for the nearby town of Sehwan Sharif, where Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, one of Pakistan’s most prominent Sufi saints, is entombed. It was the 734th anniversary of his death, an event marked by an annual festival attended by several hundred thousand devotees. This event is known as Qalandar’s urs, or wedding-night, to signify his union with God. A three-day orgy of music, dancing and intoxication, literally and spiritually, the urs at Sehwan is one of the best parties in Pakistan, or anywhere.
Outside Qalandar’s shrine, a white marble monument, decorated with flashing neon, pilgrims work themselves into an all-night ecstasy. Tossing their long black hair, a dozen prostitutes from Karachi or Lahore have a place reserved by the shrine’s golden doorway, to dance a furious jig. It is the dhammal, a rhythmic skipping from foot to foot, for which Qalandar’s followers are well-known. Thousands are moshing to a heavy drumbeat. The air is hot and wet with their sweat. A scent of rose petals and hashish sweetens it. In a flash of gold, out in the crush, a troupe of bandsmen in braided Sergeant Pepper uniforms are blowing inaudibly into brass instruments, then lifting trumpets and trombones into the air as they dance the dhammal.
Fighting through the crowd, a stream of peasant pilgrims flows into the shrine. Many carry glittering shrouds, lovingly embroidered by a wife or mother, as an offering for the tomb. They will be bestowed with a poor man’s prayer, for a good harvest, debt relief, or a son. “Last year I told my master [Qalandar] that I would bring him a goat if he gave me a son. I have come to honour that promise,” said Muhammad Riaz Rahman, a shopkeeper from Multan, tugging a calm-looking billy, daubed with pink dye, through the crowd.
To orthodox Sufis, all this is absurd. Islam’s mystical strain, like the Jewish and Christian traditions it somewhat resembles, is a strictly delineated path to self-knowledge. The proper Sufi seeks to attain this state through rigorous disciplines, of which dhikr, the remembrance of God, by reciting or meditating on his name, is the most common. Through self-knowledge, the devout mystic strives to attain knowledge of God Himself. This sets Sufis apart from Islam’s other functionaries, its jurists, or mullahs, and its theologians.
Throughout Islamic history, Sufis and mullahs, dedicated to enforcing Koranic laws, have clashed. Mullahs demand obedience; Sufis tend to stress tolerance. In their poetry, which mullahs shudder to read, Sufis often represent the state of rapture that they seek in the language of physical love or drunkenness. “I have no concern but carousing and rapture,” wrote Rumi, Sufism’s greatest poet, whose followers, of the Turkey-based Mawlawi order, remember him in a whirling dance, the saga, which has become synonymous in the West with all Sufism.
Alixandra Fassina
Building Baba Hassan Din’s shrine
Yet—despite what the hordes at Sehwan may believe—orthodox Sufis are also law-abiding Muslims. There should be no contradiction between these two positions. “Sufism is Islam and Islam is Sufism,” says Khwaja Hasan Thani Nizami, the hereditary keeper of the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. In orthodox Islam, for example, the limits of sainthood are strictly prescribed. Dead Muslim saints cannot intercede with God or perform miracles. If Muslims pray at their shrines, it can only be for the dead man’s salvation. They may not pray to him, which would be shirk, a form of idolatry. According to Ahmed Javed, a bearded Pakistani Sufi and scholar: “You can’t ask a dead saint to mediate, to solve a problem, to fulfil a wish, never, never, never. That is shirk in law and in Sufism.”
But South Asians never have been terribly law-abiding. Nor, during the centuries-old process of Islamisation that they led, have the Sufi orders always insisted that they should be. This really began in the 13th century, soon after the conquest of Delhi by an army of Persian-speaking Afghans. A powerful Sufi order, the Chistis, proceeded to spread across north India, led by Chisti, the great mystic buried in Ajmer.
Chisti’s initiates wore motley, practised poverty, neglected their families and despised the Muslim sultans and emperors who would rule India for five centuries. In the words of a famous Chisti couplet: “Why must you enter the doors of emirs and sultans? You are walking in the steps of Satan!” The Chistis were known for their love of poetry and, especially, music. Pilgrim-poets still gather in the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya, another great Chisti saint and poet, in Delhi, wearing the yellow pixie-hats of the order’s initiates.
Under Chisti influence, low-caste Hindus converted to Islam, to escape their low birth. Women, who are everywhere prominent in Sufism, were also especially welcomed. Perhaps most remarkably, the Chistis accepted recalcitrant non-Muslims as Sufi initiates. This set the tone for an astonishingly harmonious cohabitation between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia which continues, though it is sorely tested, to this day.
In the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, a great poet of Sindh, musicians gather to sing hymns. As their voices rise, in the blue-tiled portico of the shrine, a line of brightly clad Hindu women traipse in from the Sindhi desert which, for nomads like them, is still an open border to India. The Pakistani Muslim crowd, seated cross-legged on the forecourt, stirs to give them room. The women pass through, to give obeisance to Bhitai’s tomb. It is a moving scene.
For its message of tolerance, Sufism has long been fashionable outside the Muslim world. Outside Philadelphia, amid rolling green hills, is the shrine of Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Sri Lankan Sufi saint, who died in America in 1986. In recent times, moreover, Western interest in Islamic mysticism has become urgent. Some American commentators see Sufis as potential allies in a hostile Muslim world. A report by RAND Corporation, an American think-tank, recommended bolstering Sufism, as an “open, intellectual interpretation of Islam”.
On the face of it, this makes sense. In north-western Pakistan, where the Taliban rule, the Pushtuns have often taken against Sufi saints. According to the 1911 Census of British India, the Afridi tribe, having no shrine to worship at, “induced by generous offers a saint of the most notorious piety to take up his abode among them.” They then slit his throat, buried his corpse, and built a splendid shrine over it. These days, alas, they would probably not build the shrine: the Taliban tend to consider Sufism idolatrous. They are in the same puritan camp as Saudi Arabia’s unforgiving Wahhabi sect, their sometime sponsors. In the land of Muhammad, whom mystics revere as the first Sufi, the Wahhabis have bulldozed many old shrines.
At Qalandar’s shrine in Sehwan, a pilgrim called Tanvir Ahmed describes spending four months among the Taliban last year, in Swat, a Taliban fief near the Afghan frontier. He had thought to join the militants. But he was put off by their injunctions against Sufi saints. To a murmur of approval from other devotees, gathering thickly around us, Mr Ahmed says: “No one can deny our respected saints of God.”
But the urs also presents troubling scenes. As dusk falls, and the crowd dancing the dhammal outside the shrine swells, so does an army of men and boys, stripped to the waist. Legs akimbo, they sing a funeral dirge to the Shia martyr Hussain. It describes the battle of Karbala, in which Hussain fell, and Sunni and Shia Muslims were so painfully divided. As their deep voices rise, so the men’s arms lift together. Then each hand slaps down, with a thwack, on its owner’s red and glistening chest.
Alixandra Fassina
Hashish helps a mystic along the path to enlightenment
In daylight, inside the shrine, an even more strikingly sectarian ritual takes place. Shia pilgrims flagellate themselves with chains dangling with knife-blades and cry out to Ali, father of the martyred Hussain, and revered in Shia Islam. As they open their backs, sending blood onto the shrine’s floor, other pilgrims recoil. Many appear disgusted. In theory, Sufism transcends Islamic sects. For example, Qalandar was a Shia; many—or most—of his devotees are Sunni. Yet the shrines of Sindh, where many Shia Muslims live, are increasingly seeing strident sectarian displays. This may be partly a reaction to the attacks Pakistani Shias increasingly face from fundamentalists like the Taliban. It is a sign of popular Sufism under duress.
Sufi scholars, in Karachi, Delhi and Lahore, are concerned by this. But none wants government help—least of all from a reviled Western government. Many also note that Sufism is not, as Westerners seem to think, uniform. The conservative Naqshbandis, followers of another of South Asia’s main orders, have helped spread jihad: there was a Naqshbandi insurgent group in Iraq.
Qalandar, one of Pakistan’s most prominent Sufi saints, was not really of any order. He exists in a tradition of eccentric, mendicant Sufis. He was strongly influenced by Hinduism; many Hindus consider him a manifestation of Shiva. A Hindu performs the opening ritual of the annual urs. During the festival many devotees bring clay dishes of henna to Qalandar’s tomb, as to a Hindu bride on her wedding-night, and spread it on themselves, invoking the name of a Hindu water-god.
Amid syncretism, heresy thrives. Outside Qalandar’s mausoleum, just before dusk, a tall bearded man, wrapped in a black cloak and carrying a silver club, shouts into a loud-hailer: “Ali Allah! Allah Ali!”—“Ali is God! God is Ali!” He is Sayeed Ghafur Ali, a fine-looking dervish, and leader of a sect in Karachi which propagates this fearful blasphemy. In many Muslim places it would cost Mr Ali his head. But in Sehwan no one seems to mind. Asked, in a calmer setting, whether he has been a dervish for long, Mr Ali smiles and removes two tightly-bound parcels, about the size of American footballs, from his trouser pockets. They contain his hair, which grows in thick tresses under his cloak. Mr Ali says he has not visited a barber since he dedicated himself to Qalandar.
Unlike most renowned Sufi saints, Qalandar left little literature. In academic histories, his name hardly appears. To plug the gap, his devotees attribute miracles to him. One tells how Qalandar reconstituted a Hindu disciple, Bodhla Bahar, after an evil raja had made mincemeat of him. The narrator of this story may appear to have been smoking drugs. For Qalandar’s black-clad fakirs, many of whom are full time vagrants, much like Hinduism’s dread-locked saddhus, the urs is a wonderful opportunity to eat, dance and get stoned among friends. “Though I only smoke in the mornings to strengthen the body,” cautions Emir Bux, an elderly itinerant inside the shrine, with an orange hennaed beard and a headdress of curvy wooden snakes.
Sex is also to be had at the urs, but less freely. Sufi shrines have always appealed to prostitutes. This is partly because of the Sufis’ tolerance of sinners, but also because they make good places to sin. At Sehwan, which has a name for licentiousness, a transsexual prostitute—or hijra—called Ghazala says she came from Lahore, with 15 of her eunuch sisters, to pray and dance. Smoking a cigarette down to its filter, Ghazala, a muscular figure with greying temples, claims: “We came here only to worship our saint.” That is an unlikely story.
Presiding over this riot, from a grand house beside the shrine, is Mehdi Shah, a doctor from Islamabad, who recently inherited the title of sajjada nishin, or keeper of the shrine. This is an important office in Pakistan. The wardens of its most important shrines, including some, known as pirs, who claim descent from important saints, are among the country’s biggest landowners. This is partly a legacy of their usefulness to two former invaders of South Asia, the Mughals and British, both of whom patronised the shrine-keepers. Since the early 1960s, Pakistani governments have been taking over the most lucrative shrines, including Qalandar’s. But Pakistan’s pirs are still formidable. By one estimate, pir politicians command 10% of the popular vote. The current prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, and foreign minister, Shah Mahmud Qureshi, are both pirs.
Aaron Huey
A colourful version of Islam
Like so much else in Sehwan Sharif, this tradition has got messy. Mr Shah, the keeper of the shrine, is candid about the responsibilities pir-dom confers: “To guide people and make money.” But he regrets the competition for the office this has engendered. In Sehwan Sharif, several dozen local families claim to be guardians of the shrine. “There may be a thousand Tom, Dick and Harrys claiming to be sajjada nishin,” grumbles Mr Shah.
In a small room next to the shrine, decorated with peacock feathers, one of these wannabes, Paryal Shah, has set up shop. As Mr Shah, a bearded man rattling with amulets, enters the room, pilgrims hurl themselves at his feet. Grunting, occasionally slapping a pilgrim who crushes his toes, Mr Shah dispenses blessings among them. “God will help you,” he growls, doling out white cotton threads, blessed in advance, or a scrap of paper scribbled with a Koranic verse. It is hard to know how seriously anyone takes this charade. Mr Shah’s English-speaking right-hand, Ahmed Bhutto, winks and says that he and Mr Shah’s other disciples practice strict chastity: “I only do it with my wife!”
A more troublesome rival to Mehdi Shah is his uncle, Mozafir Ali Shah. They are locked in a property dispute so ugly that Mehdi Shah refuses even to visit his uncle’s house for a traditional family celebration: a dance performance by a visiting troupe of prostitutes. To the uninitiated, this splendid occasion is not obviously religious. The men of Mozafir Ali’s house sit in proud silence, as prostitutes straddle its courtyard, thrashing their long hair and kissing these hereditary notables’ knees. The women of the house rain rupee notes down on the dancers from a balcony discreetly above. A drummer shouts: “Sakhi Shahbaz Qalandar duma dum mast!”
True Sufis are embarrassed by such scenes. At Delhi’s great Sufi shrine, Mr Nizami, the keeper, says a Sufi must have three qualities: knowledge of Islam; love of God; and sanity. Whatever else they lack, he scoffs, the devotees of Qalandar are insane: “there is no Sufi among them!” Mr Javed, the Sufi in Lahore, agrees. But he contrasts such harmless superstition, as he terms popular Sufi beliefs, with the ruthless literalism of the Taliban. He says: “I feel safe among shallow-minded occultists. I do not feel safe among literalists.”
Scholars like these are Sufism’s true keepers. But in the undergrowth of popular Sufism, it is remarkable how little of their prescriptions survive. It has always been so. The diversity of South Asian Islam is a staggering multicultural achievement. If its mystics, orthodox and popular, are now increasingly besieged by mullahs, fellows of the Taliban, the massive gatherings at Sehwan and other Pakistani shrines suggest they will not be overrun soon.
Moreover, South Asia’s popular Sufism is not all degenerate. Some of South Asia’s greatest artistic achievements, especially in architecture, are expressions of it. The shrine to Baba Hassan Din rising in Lahore is among them.
Mr Qadeer and Mr Niaz, the disciples of Hafiz Iqbal, began work on it a few months after his death. It is being constructed entirely in natural materials, including clay bricks, white marble, gemstones, and lime plaster strengthened, as luck would have it, by the thousands of frogs that perished in it. The craftsmen building the shrine use traditional tools and techniques, some revived especially for the task.
Unsupported by concrete, the shrine’s domes rest on the weight of their own artful construction. Its cloisters are modelled on the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf. Its bejewelled mosaics are copied from the walls of Delhi’s 17th-century Red Fort. On the walls of the false burial chambers, Koranic verses, chosen by Hafiz Iqbal, have been inscribed in an ink made from burned mustard oil, in a style of calligraphy taken from the Taj Mahal. It is a wonderful creation. Kamil Khan Mumtaz, the architect, a Sufi initiate himself, believes there has been no Islamic monument built like it, anywhere in the Muslim world, for 300 years. May it last longer.
Indus civilization's industrial town found
The News
April 6, 2008
Lakhyun-jo-Daro, the 5000 years old industrial area settlement of Indus period, is now a modern day industrial site
By Yasir Babbar
Lakhyun-jo-Daro, a repository of nearly five thousand years of history, is a classic example of governmental neglect: The Archaeology Department has ignored it; the authorities of archaeology department of Shah Abdul Latif University (SALU) Khairpur have not properly documented the rich history of this ancient site; the announcement of a museum at the site made by ex-Chief Minister Sindh Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim in 2006 has not been fulfilled either.
Indus, being one of the most enigmatic civilizations, was a herald of numerous developments in human culture. This was a period of aggregation and establishment of metropolitan centres with pervasive interaction networks through which many commodities moved around and consequently arrived in far-flung corners of the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra valley.
According to research, 1500 Indus period settlements existed and still many more await the spade and Lakhyun-jo-Daro is one of them. It is located in the Northwestern part of modern city of Sukkur.
Advocate Shabir Hussain Khoso, a resident of Khosa, a village near the site, in a private excavation discovered certain articles of archaeological worth and showed them to the archaeology department. He also wrote an article about this site which was published in a local Sindhi magazine about 40 years ago.
The site of Lakhyun-jo-Daro is situated near a village and graveyard named Lakha. The area is in the middle of the city in between the industries; the plots for which were allotted in 1970s. Unfortunately the archaeologists did not survey the area at that time. Now this area is under Sindh Industrial Trade Estate (SITE) Department and is called the industrial area of Sukkur.In 1981 Maalik Khoso, a student of Archaeology Department, SALU Khairpur had brought some potsherds (pieces of pots) to M. Mukhtiar Kazi, the Chairman of the Department of Archaeology SALU at that time. In 1988 the first archaeological work was carried out jointly with Federal Department of Archaeology and Archaeology Department SALU Khairpur.
The first research paper was published by M. Mukhtiar Kazi and Qasid Ali Mallah, which drew the attention of archaeologists worldwide to this site. Since then, Lakhyun-jo-Daro became the focus of scholars and archaeologists.Unfortunately, the area has received scant attention by officials of Archaeology Department SALU Khairpur and Federal Archaeology Department in the last three years. SITE Department allotted an area of 2 acres for the construction of a factory to the president, Sukkur Chamber of Commerce a few months ago but it was cancelled after a huge struggle. SITE Department then allotted another plot to a local political leader for the same purpose which was also cancelled. After the cancellation of these allotments, the authorities of Archaeology Department did not make further efforts to secure this site.According to the SALU Khairpur, at least five small-scale excavations in 1988, 1994, 1996, 2000 and 2006 were launched at the site.
During 1988, a drain about 259 meters long and almost one meter wide and deep, running east and west, was dug for the disposal of sewage water by the modern factory owners. During this process, cultural deposits were seen but were destroyed by the local workers. Nothing was left at the site except the section wall of the trench.In 1994, the Archeology Department SALU and the provincial Department of Archaeology and Museums jointly planned a small-scale quarry ((extracting stone or slate) and a total of seven trenches were opened at different parts of the mound. Mud and mud-brick structures, artificially raised platforms and burnt brick structures were exposed along with a huge variety of cultural material.
In 1996, eight trenches were opened where residential features like walls, floors, covered drain, single burnt brick line structures, bathing platforms along with a huge assortment of cultural material was discovered. The evidences of a white paste micro-beads manufacturing workshop, copper implements, copper figurines, semi-precious stone beads, polishers, bone tools, weights of terracotta and banded chert seal and a huge number of terracotta artifacts were discovered. The painted pottery of typical Mature Indus wares, in various decoration styles and shapes, was part of the collection.In 2000, the excavations resumed and only three trenches were partially excavated, where artifacts including terracotta figurines, toy cart frames, cups, and sling balls were discovered. The pottery with several decorative motifs of Mature Indus period (2600-1900 BC) was part of the cultural repertoire.
The inhabitants of this ancient site had a river port on the Indus and were transporting goods through the Indus highway. Materials like copper and industrial objects like jewellery, statues and other goods were exported to Iraq, Bahrain and other countries.Dr. Michael Jansen, a German archaeologist, agreed with Dr. Ghulam Mustafa Shar, Chairman of Archaeology Department SALU Khairpur that people of Lakhyon-jo-Daro planned and built Mohenjo-Daro. Dr. Michael Jansen has done a lot of work on Mohenjo-Daro who visited the Lakhyun-jo-Daro recently.
Dr. G. Mustafa Shar, while talking to TNS, told that according to research the area of Lakhyun is about 3x4 Kilometres (12 square kilometres) whereas Mohenjo-Daro is 2x5 km (10 sq kms). So Lakhyon is bigger than Mohenjo-Daro. Dr.Shar added that the findings from this site are several seals of copper and steatite, which bear Indus period language, workshops of semi-precious stone like agate, lapis, carnelian, and turquoise. One of the most important antiquities is the measuring scale which decoded and measured the length of time.
The next major discovery is the copper figurine or statue. This human figurine is wearing a modern style trouser and a belly belt.Dr.Shar claimed that now it is going to be reported to UNESCO as an endangered site. Dr. Michael Jansen has promised this in recent visit to Lakhyun-jo-Daro. The 5000 years old precious city, proved to be an industrial area settlement of Indus period, is a site where another industrial area has been built.Dr Shar condemned the recent illegal allotments made by SITE officials. "Our own people are damaging the culture for the achievement of temporary monetary benefits. If we could save the site, we will have antiquities for hundreds of museums, and the country will attract tourists and earn huge foreign exchange.
We are the caretakers of most civilized period of our past and it is our responsibility to transfer it to the coming generation without damaging it. We must save it. There is also an Antiquity Act 1975 present in our constitution. The law must act against those who have no respect for their ancient civilization and history."Ali Hyder Gadehi, an officer of Archaeology Department, said while talking to TNS: "Our department is working to secure ancient sites including Lakhyun and others in Sindh. But there is a huge shortage of staff as well as lack of funds in our department."
Height of irresponsibility
The Hindu
Dec 22, 08
If Abdul Rahman Antulay has made his continuance as Minister untenable by blatantly ignoring the facts behind the terrorist attacks on Mumbai and buying into a strange conspiracy theory over the killing of the Maharashtra Anti-terrorism Squad chief Hemant Kharkare, the United Progressive Alliance government has not displayed any great sagacity in prevaricating over his resignation.
In the days since the attack, compelling evidence has surfaced to establish the Pakistani identity of the assassins of Mr. Karkare, Additional Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte, Inspector Vijay Salaskar, and three of the four constables who accompanied them.
In an over-the-top interview to a television channel, Mr. Antulay insinuated a Hindutva plot to kill Mr. Karkare.
Later, speaking in Parliament, he alleged that Mr. Karkare and the other two police officers had been sent to their deaths by a telephone caller who summoned them to Cama Hospital.
He asked: “Why did all three of them go in the same vehicle to Cama Hospital? Who directed them there?”
Mr. Antulay’s indiscretion was the worse because he held the sensitive portfolio of Minority Affairs. The Minister clearly failed to appreciate that in the tinderbox environment terrorism has engendered, the smallest provocation can inflame communal passions. And thanks to the sanctity that attaches to the words of a Minister, there is already some consternation in sections of the Muslim community.
The Mumbai attack had been widely condemned by Muslim organisations; ordinary Muslims wore black bands on Eid to protest it.
Today sundry Urdu newspapers have joined the Antulay chorus.
This is unfortunate given that there are two eyewitnesses to the ambush of the policemen. The account of the surviving Pakistani terrorist, Mohammad Ajmal Amir has been corroborated by Constable Arun Jhadav who was left for dead by the assassins.
There is no disputing the reason why the police officers rushed to Cama hospital, which was the second place to come under attack after Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Mr. Karkare and his two fellow officers had received information that Additional Commissioner of Police Sadanand Date was injured in that attack.
In part as a consequence of the needless twist given to this straightforward story, Pakistan today refuses to accept that the Mumbai terror attack originated on its soil. For the Muslim community, targeted and taunted by the Sangh Parivar for its alleged terror links, Mr. Karkare was a hero, who uncovered the truth of the Malegaon terror blast and established the justness of the Indian legal system.
His death has created a climate ripe for conspiracy theories. As a Minister, Mr. Antulay had a responsibility to advocate calm and reason. Regrettably, he did the opposite.
Dec 22, 08
If Abdul Rahman Antulay has made his continuance as Minister untenable by blatantly ignoring the facts behind the terrorist attacks on Mumbai and buying into a strange conspiracy theory over the killing of the Maharashtra Anti-terrorism Squad chief Hemant Kharkare, the United Progressive Alliance government has not displayed any great sagacity in prevaricating over his resignation.
In the days since the attack, compelling evidence has surfaced to establish the Pakistani identity of the assassins of Mr. Karkare, Additional Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte, Inspector Vijay Salaskar, and three of the four constables who accompanied them.
In an over-the-top interview to a television channel, Mr. Antulay insinuated a Hindutva plot to kill Mr. Karkare.
Later, speaking in Parliament, he alleged that Mr. Karkare and the other two police officers had been sent to their deaths by a telephone caller who summoned them to Cama Hospital.
He asked: “Why did all three of them go in the same vehicle to Cama Hospital? Who directed them there?”
Mr. Antulay’s indiscretion was the worse because he held the sensitive portfolio of Minority Affairs. The Minister clearly failed to appreciate that in the tinderbox environment terrorism has engendered, the smallest provocation can inflame communal passions. And thanks to the sanctity that attaches to the words of a Minister, there is already some consternation in sections of the Muslim community.
The Mumbai attack had been widely condemned by Muslim organisations; ordinary Muslims wore black bands on Eid to protest it.
Today sundry Urdu newspapers have joined the Antulay chorus.
This is unfortunate given that there are two eyewitnesses to the ambush of the policemen. The account of the surviving Pakistani terrorist, Mohammad Ajmal Amir has been corroborated by Constable Arun Jhadav who was left for dead by the assassins.
There is no disputing the reason why the police officers rushed to Cama hospital, which was the second place to come under attack after Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Mr. Karkare and his two fellow officers had received information that Additional Commissioner of Police Sadanand Date was injured in that attack.
In part as a consequence of the needless twist given to this straightforward story, Pakistan today refuses to accept that the Mumbai terror attack originated on its soil. For the Muslim community, targeted and taunted by the Sangh Parivar for its alleged terror links, Mr. Karkare was a hero, who uncovered the truth of the Malegaon terror blast and established the justness of the Indian legal system.
His death has created a climate ripe for conspiracy theories. As a Minister, Mr. Antulay had a responsibility to advocate calm and reason. Regrettably, he did the opposite.
Obama and FDR
The Hindu
Nov 27
Historical comparisons can be powerful, even when they need intellectually to be handled with care. There is a global consensus that the financial crisis of 2008 is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The bursting of asset price bubbles, the collapse of many financial institutions, the freezing of credit, the contraction of effective demand, the economic slowdown that has spared no country or continent, recession across the developed world, the adverse effects on the livelihoods and food security of hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, deep forebodings of worse to come, and an underlying fear that the real economy will not turn round for some years have combined to depress people’s spirits worldwide.
During such a time of troubles, the clock seems to move very slowly — and it has moved very, very slowly for the American people (nearly 67 million of whom voted for ‘yes we can’ change).
They have huge expectations of the role of government in bringing economic order to their lives. They find the transition from a deeply unpopular administration whose policies they hold responsible for the present mess to a new dispensation that will take over in January 2009 excruciatingly long and costly.
They worry over the power vacuum in the world’s largest and most powerful economy, which is in the grip of not depression but what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls depression economics.
He explains what he means by this in his accessible new book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, and also in a recent newspaper column: “for the first time in two generations, failures on the demand side of the economy — insufficient private spending to make use of the available productive capacity — have become the clear and present limitation on prosperity for a large part of the world” and “the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction.”
Doing something, almost anything, to get credit to flow again and create demand to make use of the economy’s capacity are the keys to recovery, which means John Maynard Keynes “is now more relevant than ever.”
For the United States, Professor Krugman favours a major stimulus package of the order of $600 billion. He also advocates throwing out of the window faint-hearted notions of fiscal prudence and adopting, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the 1930s, a strategy of trying things out.
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands,” FDR famously proclaimed in 1932, the year this patrician who was considered a political lightweight swept into historical ignominy an ideologically blinded, do-nothing President Herbert Hoover, “bold, persistent experimentation.
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
These words (ghosted, incidentally, by a reporter) anticipated the New Deal and the thrilling, if flawed, experimentation of FDR’s first hundred days in office. The 32nd President of the U.S. was not known to be well versed in economics: when Lord Keynes, an admirer of his programme, visited him in the White House in 1934, FDR was bewildered by the Englishman’s “rigmarole of figures” and supposed him to be “a mathematician rather than a political economist” while the visitor confessed that he had expected the President to be more economically literate.
Seventy-four years later, an intellectually better prepared, if politically less experienced, President-to-be faces a “crisis of historic proportions” (to use his own words). He knows he won big, by close to 7 percentage points, on November 4 thanks largely to the financial crisis and on the strength of his promises to restructure and reform the economy in a fairer, more equitable, and sounder direction.
But Mr. Obama’s medium- and long-term economic agenda has been overtaken by crisis events. In response, he has promised big, bold, and far-going action to jolt the economy back into shape. He will start his presidency with a huge legislative advantage: a Democratic hegemony in Congress. The Obama stimulus package is widely expected to surpass the expectations of the big league Keynesians. The President-elect has even promised that his economic recovery plan would create 2.5 million new jobs by 2011. He has announced a high-powered economic team — led by Tim Geithner, a fiscal bail-out top gun, and Larry Summers, a card-carrying Keynesian — that seems to have raised confidence levels on both Wall Street and Main Street. The man who would have no truck with the November 15 Washington Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy has now made it a point to emphasise that the economic crisis was “no longer just an American crisis” and that his administration would reach out to countries around the world to craft a global response. But that is not all. Unlike President-elect FDR who in early 1933 rebuffed all efforts by lame-duck President Hoover to draw him into joint proclamations to tackle the banking crisis, who refused to “tie [his] hands” before becoming President, Mr. Obama has found his ‘we have only one President at a time’ gambit to be politically unsustainable. So he has let his good personal rapport with George W. Bush (FDR and Hoover had poisonous personal relations) develop into some kind of coordination to calm the jittery financial markets.
The size, orientation, and details of the Obama stimulus package aside, the key question on the minds of the historically minded is: will President Obama show the history-making leadership qualities — the self-confidence, the spirit of experimentation, the hopefulness, the warm empathy with working and middle class people, the first class temperament — that FDR brought to handling the unprecedented challenge of the Great Depression, which was actually brought to an end only by the Second World War?
Nov 27
Historical comparisons can be powerful, even when they need intellectually to be handled with care. There is a global consensus that the financial crisis of 2008 is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The bursting of asset price bubbles, the collapse of many financial institutions, the freezing of credit, the contraction of effective demand, the economic slowdown that has spared no country or continent, recession across the developed world, the adverse effects on the livelihoods and food security of hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, deep forebodings of worse to come, and an underlying fear that the real economy will not turn round for some years have combined to depress people’s spirits worldwide.
During such a time of troubles, the clock seems to move very slowly — and it has moved very, very slowly for the American people (nearly 67 million of whom voted for ‘yes we can’ change).
They have huge expectations of the role of government in bringing economic order to their lives. They find the transition from a deeply unpopular administration whose policies they hold responsible for the present mess to a new dispensation that will take over in January 2009 excruciatingly long and costly.
They worry over the power vacuum in the world’s largest and most powerful economy, which is in the grip of not depression but what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls depression economics.
He explains what he means by this in his accessible new book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, and also in a recent newspaper column: “for the first time in two generations, failures on the demand side of the economy — insufficient private spending to make use of the available productive capacity — have become the clear and present limitation on prosperity for a large part of the world” and “the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction.”
Doing something, almost anything, to get credit to flow again and create demand to make use of the economy’s capacity are the keys to recovery, which means John Maynard Keynes “is now more relevant than ever.”
For the United States, Professor Krugman favours a major stimulus package of the order of $600 billion. He also advocates throwing out of the window faint-hearted notions of fiscal prudence and adopting, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the 1930s, a strategy of trying things out.
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands,” FDR famously proclaimed in 1932, the year this patrician who was considered a political lightweight swept into historical ignominy an ideologically blinded, do-nothing President Herbert Hoover, “bold, persistent experimentation.
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
These words (ghosted, incidentally, by a reporter) anticipated the New Deal and the thrilling, if flawed, experimentation of FDR’s first hundred days in office. The 32nd President of the U.S. was not known to be well versed in economics: when Lord Keynes, an admirer of his programme, visited him in the White House in 1934, FDR was bewildered by the Englishman’s “rigmarole of figures” and supposed him to be “a mathematician rather than a political economist” while the visitor confessed that he had expected the President to be more economically literate.
Seventy-four years later, an intellectually better prepared, if politically less experienced, President-to-be faces a “crisis of historic proportions” (to use his own words). He knows he won big, by close to 7 percentage points, on November 4 thanks largely to the financial crisis and on the strength of his promises to restructure and reform the economy in a fairer, more equitable, and sounder direction.
But Mr. Obama’s medium- and long-term economic agenda has been overtaken by crisis events. In response, he has promised big, bold, and far-going action to jolt the economy back into shape. He will start his presidency with a huge legislative advantage: a Democratic hegemony in Congress. The Obama stimulus package is widely expected to surpass the expectations of the big league Keynesians. The President-elect has even promised that his economic recovery plan would create 2.5 million new jobs by 2011. He has announced a high-powered economic team — led by Tim Geithner, a fiscal bail-out top gun, and Larry Summers, a card-carrying Keynesian — that seems to have raised confidence levels on both Wall Street and Main Street. The man who would have no truck with the November 15 Washington Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy has now made it a point to emphasise that the economic crisis was “no longer just an American crisis” and that his administration would reach out to countries around the world to craft a global response. But that is not all. Unlike President-elect FDR who in early 1933 rebuffed all efforts by lame-duck President Hoover to draw him into joint proclamations to tackle the banking crisis, who refused to “tie [his] hands” before becoming President, Mr. Obama has found his ‘we have only one President at a time’ gambit to be politically unsustainable. So he has let his good personal rapport with George W. Bush (FDR and Hoover had poisonous personal relations) develop into some kind of coordination to calm the jittery financial markets.
The size, orientation, and details of the Obama stimulus package aside, the key question on the minds of the historically minded is: will President Obama show the history-making leadership qualities — the self-confidence, the spirit of experimentation, the hopefulness, the warm empathy with working and middle class people, the first class temperament — that FDR brought to handling the unprecedented challenge of the Great Depression, which was actually brought to an end only by the Second World War?
Mission perfect
The Hindu
Nov 10, 2008
The successful critical manoeuvre on November 8 that put Chandrayaan-1 in an orbit around the moon marked the completion of the most important phase of the Indian lunar mission.
The rest of the mission involves only standard orbit manoeuvres, the likes of which the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is quite used to, and the performance of the on-board scientific instruments during the mission life of two years.
The precision with which the crucial operation was exe cuted has unequivocally demonstrated ISRO’s capability to take up the more complex deep space missions as distinct from numerous near-earth missions in the past.
The achievement has put India in the exclusive club of space-faring nations that have ventured beyond the sphere of earth’s gravitational influence.
That ISRO brought this off in its first attempt is all the more commendable.
Although ISRO’s inherent scientific ability was never in doubt, Chandrayaan-1 — the maiden deep space endeavour — posed new technological challenges in telemetry, tracking, miniaturisation of on-board systems and devices, novel power packs and special thermal control of the spacecraft to withstand conditions of high solar load hitherto not experienced in the near-earth environment.
Although ISRO’s inherent scientific ability was never in doubt, Chandrayaan-1 — the maiden deep space endeavour — posed new technological challenges in telemetry, tracking, miniaturisation of on-board systems and devices, novel power packs and special thermal control of the spacecraft to withstand conditions of high solar load hitherto not experienced in the near-earth environment.
The performance of the mission so far is testimony to ISRO’s advanced capabilities in all these respects.
Nevertheless, as ISRO plans for Chandrayaan-2 in 2012-13 and a manned mission to space in 2015, when it will face even greater technology challenges, the question is whether the venture is worth the huge cost it will entail. A political factor that is relevant is the world’s constant India-China comparison and the latter’s demonstrated technological prowess in space technology. What is more, given the resurgent interest in tapping the moon’s resources, there is a strategic dimension to space missions.
This becomes particularly relevant if one notes the discordance between the Moon Treaty, which very few countries have ratified, and the Outer Space Treaty, which most nations have. While the former emphasises the principle of ‘common heritage of mankind,’ the latter articulates it weakly. It is from this perspective that the rhetorical question posed by ISRO’s former chairman K. Kasturirangan, “Can we afford not to go to the moon?” and the basic question of whether India should venture into deep space need to be addressed.
At the same time, as ISRO begins to think in terms of manned missions to space, which will cost a great deal more than unmanned missions, the cost-benefit analyses need to be done more rigorously than for relatively low-cost missions such as Chandrayaan. But these are policy issues that can be taken up later. Now is the time to congratulate ISRO on taking India’s exploration of space up a level — which very few developing countries have even aspired to reach.
Financial Times review of book 'Empires of the Indus'
Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River
By Alice Albinia
John Murray £20 384 pages
FT bookshop price: £16
Review by Paddy Docherty
Empires of the Indus is a magnificent book, a triumphant melding of travel and history into a compelling story of adventure and discovery.
Alice Albinia has taken her obsession with the great river and wrought a captivating account of her explorations through Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Tibet, taking us hundreds of miles upstream and back in time to the earliest days.
She begins in Karachi in Pakistan, close to where the Indus enters the Arabian Sea.
By the time she reaches the source of the river in Tibet, we have been drawn through an array of peoples, cultures, landscapes and stories.
The book is deftly structured: the further upriver we journey, the deeper into history we go. This approach does not, however, tie Albinia narrowly to the river itself, and she branches off on numerous adventurous diversions around the cultural watershed of the Indus.
These forays, and her evident determination to track down little-known rock carvings or tribal villages, are enlightening.
I was especially taken by her burqa-clad and highly illegal journey through the tribal badlands of Waziristan, for which she surely deserves a medal.
Elsewhere, we follow her as she walks the path of Alexander the Great as he arrived at the Indus, and – clad in a piece of plastic sheet against the rain – tramping through snowy Tibetan mountains.
These exploits serve to illuminate or uncover rich historical evidence. Most notable is the deeply varied nature of the cultures and religions that grew or coalesced around the river: we learn of Sufi saints, river cults and Kalash practices besides Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism.
There are some surprising tales of collaboration between Muslims and Hindus and between Muslims and Sikhs – reminders that religions do not have to divide us – and many curious cultural fusions.
Hidden history is brought to light, notably a chapter on the Sheedi people of Sindh, descendents of African slaves now living as modern Pakistanis. Another surprise was the sexual current that runs through the book, from Pashtun catamites to Tibetan polyandry.
The entire journey is linked by a thread of the Rig Veda, the ancient Sanskrit hymns of worship which exalted the Indus as the ”Unconquered Sindhu”, river of rivers. Albinia is an engaging travelling companion with a quietly determined and gently humorous voice, often to be heard persuading bemused army officers or incredulous tribal leaders into letting her into forbidden places or across closed borders.
A reader cannot help but be delighted as she describes her discoveries, such as when she is led to an unexpected prehistoric stone circle in Kashmir:
“I hear myself gasping out loud. The circle is resplendent, majestic, isolated – a solid ring of stones in this silent, empty place. On our left is a sheer brown wall of rock, and the blue slither of the river; to our right, a wider, greener river, and a dark mass of mountains in the distance.
In the east, beyond the point where the rivers meet, snow-topped mountains shine fiercely in the afternoon light. I can almost hear, like a whisper, the footsteps of the people who created this circle.
For the first time in my life I want to get down on my knees and worship at this altar to human endeavour, to the power of Nature.”Her passion is infectious throughout; I felt Albinia’s relief and frustrations, her alarms and compulsions as I read. There is concern, too, for the riverside peoples and cultures, and for the river itself.
At times this anxiety even becomes sadness, a momentary lament for the impact of the modern world on the ancient Indus waters. Ultimately, though, this is an inspiring book, and readers with even a fraction of Albinia’s wanderlust will want to set off on their own explorations.
Paddy Docherty is the author of ‘The Khyber Pass: A History of Empire and Invasion’ (Faber)
Baloch provinces of Afghanistan seek independence
Courtesy: Baloch Voice
Different tribal and ethnic groups are trying to control their areas and declaring their autonomy from a non existing central authority in Afghanistan.
Baloch tribes of Nemroz, Helmand and Farah provinces in South Western Afghanistan have decided to secede from Kabul and to declare their independence, the Balochistan News Service reported on Nov 24, 2001.
The decision was taken unanimously by a tribal Jirga recently held in Nemroz province.
A five-member provisional committee was nominated to take the administrative control of the declared autonomous region with Karim Shagzai Muhammad Hassani as its head.
Baloch provinces of Nemroz, and Helmand.
The region is the agricultural back-bone of Afghanistan for its century’s old agricultural channels along the banks of River Helmand, border with District Chagai (Balochistan) of Pakistan in the south and Iranian Province of Seistan and Balochistan in the west.Both the provinces along with the southern part of Farah province is overwhelmingly inhabited by Baloch tribes like Mengal, Barakzai, Gorgegh, Baranzai, Mohamed Hassani, Naroi, Sanjarani and other Rakhshani tribes.
These are cross border tribes, also inhabiting the Chagai and Kharan districts of Pakistan and the adjoining areas of Iranian province of Seistan and Balochistan.The population of these tribes is said to be more than 1.2 million.
The action to take control of the Baloch areas by tribesmen was prompted by the attempts of a group of former Mujahideen supported by “foreign elements” to occupy Nemroz and Helmand after the withdrawal of Taliban warriors from the area in the first week of this month, a source told BNS.Political observers in the provincial capital Quetta, are of the opinion that Baloch Nationalist parties would welcome independence of these areas or the merger of these Afghan provinces into Pakistan.
Meanwhile, former member of National Assembly of Pakistan Sana Baloch in a statement appealed to western coalition not to consider inclusion of Nemroz, Helmand and Baloch majority areas of Farah provinces as part of southern Afghanistan, in a future political dispensation, in case of impending dissolution or disintegration of Afghanistan.He appealed for an autonomous status for the area.
He declares support to the tribes and said that Baloch tribes across the borders are ready to assist their brothers in Afghanistan if they are attacked or their areas are threatened by hostile forces.Political observers believe that in the eventuality of the disintegration of Afghanistan which is on the cards, Pakistan can claim this area for security reasons. It can also control the area indirectly with the help of its own frontier tribes of Chagai and Kharan.
Different tribal and ethnic groups are trying to control their areas and declaring their autonomy from a non existing central authority in Afghanistan.
Baloch tribes of Nemroz, Helmand and Farah provinces in South Western Afghanistan have decided to secede from Kabul and to declare their independence, the Balochistan News Service reported on Nov 24, 2001.
The decision was taken unanimously by a tribal Jirga recently held in Nemroz province.
A five-member provisional committee was nominated to take the administrative control of the declared autonomous region with Karim Shagzai Muhammad Hassani as its head.
Baloch provinces of Nemroz, and Helmand.
The region is the agricultural back-bone of Afghanistan for its century’s old agricultural channels along the banks of River Helmand, border with District Chagai (Balochistan) of Pakistan in the south and Iranian Province of Seistan and Balochistan in the west.Both the provinces along with the southern part of Farah province is overwhelmingly inhabited by Baloch tribes like Mengal, Barakzai, Gorgegh, Baranzai, Mohamed Hassani, Naroi, Sanjarani and other Rakhshani tribes.
These are cross border tribes, also inhabiting the Chagai and Kharan districts of Pakistan and the adjoining areas of Iranian province of Seistan and Balochistan.The population of these tribes is said to be more than 1.2 million.
The action to take control of the Baloch areas by tribesmen was prompted by the attempts of a group of former Mujahideen supported by “foreign elements” to occupy Nemroz and Helmand after the withdrawal of Taliban warriors from the area in the first week of this month, a source told BNS.Political observers in the provincial capital Quetta, are of the opinion that Baloch Nationalist parties would welcome independence of these areas or the merger of these Afghan provinces into Pakistan.
Meanwhile, former member of National Assembly of Pakistan Sana Baloch in a statement appealed to western coalition not to consider inclusion of Nemroz, Helmand and Baloch majority areas of Farah provinces as part of southern Afghanistan, in a future political dispensation, in case of impending dissolution or disintegration of Afghanistan.He appealed for an autonomous status for the area.
He declares support to the tribes and said that Baloch tribes across the borders are ready to assist their brothers in Afghanistan if they are attacked or their areas are threatened by hostile forces.Political observers believe that in the eventuality of the disintegration of Afghanistan which is on the cards, Pakistan can claim this area for security reasons. It can also control the area indirectly with the help of its own frontier tribes of Chagai and Kharan.
India 'not a threat to Pakistan': Zardari
By Barbara Plett
BBC News
Sept 5
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari says India has never been a threat to Pakistan, and that militants in Indian-administered Kashmir are terrorists.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he also seemed to acknowledge that his government has given consent to US air strikes in Pakistan.
The unorthodox views run counter to those held by Pakistan's military, which views India as a threat.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars but have made recent peace moves.
Deep suspicions
Pakistan's powerful military has long-defined India as an existential threat, and in the past it has given covert backing to the militants in Kashmir.
The two regional rivals did take part in a faltering peace process under the former president, General Pervez Musharraf. But suspicions always ran deep, and relations have soured recently.
Mr Zardari's comments thus mark a radical break with the past.
The Wall Street Journal also reports that Mr Zardari acknowledged that the US was firing missiles at militant targets inside Pakistan with his government's consent.
"We have an understanding, in the sense that we're going after an enemy together," it quotes him as saying.
But the Pakistani army is adamant that coalition forces do not have permission for such cross-border raids.
These incursions have stoked enormous anger in Pakistan - and Mr Zardari's comments may do the same.
BBC News
Sept 5
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari says India has never been a threat to Pakistan, and that militants in Indian-administered Kashmir are terrorists.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he also seemed to acknowledge that his government has given consent to US air strikes in Pakistan.
The unorthodox views run counter to those held by Pakistan's military, which views India as a threat.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars but have made recent peace moves.
Deep suspicions
Pakistan's powerful military has long-defined India as an existential threat, and in the past it has given covert backing to the militants in Kashmir.
The two regional rivals did take part in a faltering peace process under the former president, General Pervez Musharraf. But suspicions always ran deep, and relations have soured recently.
Mr Zardari's comments thus mark a radical break with the past.
The Wall Street Journal also reports that Mr Zardari acknowledged that the US was firing missiles at militant targets inside Pakistan with his government's consent.
"We have an understanding, in the sense that we're going after an enemy together," it quotes him as saying.
But the Pakistani army is adamant that coalition forces do not have permission for such cross-border raids.
These incursions have stoked enormous anger in Pakistan - and Mr Zardari's comments may do the same.
Why Begum Khaleda and Sheikh Hasina should talk
The Daily Star
October 4, 2008
By Harun ur Rashid
A lot of articles have appeared in the newspapers recently on the proposed face- to-face dialogue between the two former prime ministers. Some writers and politicians doubt whether any fruitful outcome would emanate from their talks.
Barrister Rafique-ul Huq first raised the matter, expecting that a new dawn could rise in restoring healthy political environment in the country if the two national leaders talked to each other.
This is a commendable initiative, coming from an eminent barrister who, as a citizen of the country, has the right to propose such a meeting.
Furthermore, his standing is greater than other people's because he represented both the leaders before the courts at a difficult time in their personal lives.
The leaders will not talk about their personal matters, or about removing their dislike for each other, but about promoting representative democracy in the country.
The leaders will not talk about their personal matters, or about removing their dislike for each other, but about promoting representative democracy in the country.
There is a saying that the interests of a political party come before self-interest, and the interests of the country come before the interests of a political party.
Briefly, politics in the country since 1991 was characterised by and large by the following unsavoury practices:
-The mutual dislike for each other continued unabated between Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. They did not speak to each other for years. As a result, confrontational politics prevailed.
-If one lady won the election and ran the government, the other lady and her party MPs boycotted the parliament on allegation of the election being rigged and non-cooperation in the parliament by the ruling party.
Briefly, politics in the country since 1991 was characterised by and large by the following unsavoury practices:
-The mutual dislike for each other continued unabated between Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. They did not speak to each other for years. As a result, confrontational politics prevailed.
-If one lady won the election and ran the government, the other lady and her party MPs boycotted the parliament on allegation of the election being rigged and non-cooperation in the parliament by the ruling party.
The issues were raised on the streets and violence would erupt among the supporters of rival parties.
-The prime minister became an authoritarian leader because of dynastic reasons. One is the wife of a slain president and the other lady is the daughter of assassinated president and founder of the nation.
-The prime minister became an authoritarian leader because of dynastic reasons. One is the wife of a slain president and the other lady is the daughter of assassinated president and founder of the nation.
Hardly any cabinet minister or MP had the courage to express different views on the prime minister's decisions.
-Politics became a big commercial investment because if one could become an MP, it was a gateway for him/her to make money by being corrupt and abusing power and privilege. If MPs and ministers became corrupt, bureaucrats were not far behind them.
Suspected corrupt ministers and MPs were never dismissed or put on trial, and corrupt individuals and musclemen moved freely under the patronage of influential politicians. Criminalisation of politics became a routine affair. A section of ministers and MPs had allegedly pampered criminal elements to make money by extortion as long as they could bring enough votes for politicians during the elections.
State institutions became weak, and it is alleged that successive governments appointed their own people in the state institutions.
-Politics became a big commercial investment because if one could become an MP, it was a gateway for him/her to make money by being corrupt and abusing power and privilege. If MPs and ministers became corrupt, bureaucrats were not far behind them.
Suspected corrupt ministers and MPs were never dismissed or put on trial, and corrupt individuals and musclemen moved freely under the patronage of influential politicians. Criminalisation of politics became a routine affair. A section of ministers and MPs had allegedly pampered criminal elements to make money by extortion as long as they could bring enough votes for politicians during the elections.
State institutions became weak, and it is alleged that successive governments appointed their own people in the state institutions.
In the perception of the public, there was almost a complete breakdown of integrity of some of the state institutions. Bureaucracy became politicised, and those who "did not go with the flow" were marginalised.
Given the confrontation between the two major parties since 1991, democratic norms and traditions totally disappeared from ethical standards of most of politicians.
Democracy in the country was dominated by tyrannical rule of the majority and a recalcitrant minority. The conduct of both parties had alienated an overwhelming majority of common people, and when 1/11 came there was a relief in the country.
But everyone realises that the caretaker government has been a stop-gap one and that an elected government has to run the country, and, therefore, politicians have an important role to play in restoring representative democracy in the country.
What should they talk about?It is assumed that the two leaders must have gone through a process of self-analysis and introspection when they were in prison. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living.
The leaders must have taken stock of the past deeds of their parties' stalwarts and realised that there must be a new beginning in politics, which will not be influenced by money, muscle and corrupt elements.
Broadly, they need to talk about the following:
Given the confrontation between the two major parties since 1991, democratic norms and traditions totally disappeared from ethical standards of most of politicians.
Democracy in the country was dominated by tyrannical rule of the majority and a recalcitrant minority. The conduct of both parties had alienated an overwhelming majority of common people, and when 1/11 came there was a relief in the country.
But everyone realises that the caretaker government has been a stop-gap one and that an elected government has to run the country, and, therefore, politicians have an important role to play in restoring representative democracy in the country.
What should they talk about?It is assumed that the two leaders must have gone through a process of self-analysis and introspection when they were in prison. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living.
The leaders must have taken stock of the past deeds of their parties' stalwarts and realised that there must be a new beginning in politics, which will not be influenced by money, muscle and corrupt elements.
Broadly, they need to talk about the following:
Acceptance of the outcome of a fair election with grace.
Role of ruling party and opposition in parliament.
No boycott of the sessions of parliament.
Political issues not to be settled on the streets.
Some guidelines for conduct of supporters during hartal.
Revision of the Constitution.
A few words about revision of the ConstitutionThe 1972 Bangladesh Constution provides for representative democracy in which the ability of the elected representatives to exercise decision-making power is subject to rule of law (not merely rule by law) that places constraints on the government leaders on the extent to which the will of majority can be exercised against the rights of minority parties.
37 years of governance have demonstrated the pitfalls, and misinterpretation, of the provisions of the Constitution. Some of the amended provisions (such as Article 70) tend to be totally against the democratic norms of the Consitution, and they need to be deleted.
What is imperative is that provisions of the Constitution must be made explicity clear, with checks and balances on the separation of powers among the organs of the state --executive, legislative and judiciary. There exists an imbalance between the powers of the president and those of the prime minister, which needs to be rectified.
It does not matter whether their parties or members of civil society initiate the process of talks, if the two former prime ministers can arrive at a consensus on the issues mentioned above it will augur well for the country.
Politics is the art of the possible, as Bismarck said. Both the prime ministers have served the people, and it is always the politicians in all countries who provide service to the community. Politics is the highest call of service to people.
Barrister Harun ur Rashid is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.
Art of War: Are we deceiving ourselves again?
Book written by Arun Shourie
Reviewed by Brahma Chellaney for Hindustan Times
India and China are both adept at playing with numbers. While China invented the abacus, India conceived the binary and the decimal systems.
But India, having forsaken the Kautilyan principles, has proven no match to China’s Sun Tzu-style statecraft.
From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty to Atal Behari Vajpayee’s blithe acceptance of full Chinese sovereignty, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet.
As a result, India has found itself repeatedly betrayed.
Indeed, it wasn’t geography but guns — the sudden occupation of the traditional buffer, Tibet, soon after the communists seized power in Beijing — that made China India’s neighbour.
Jawaharlal Nehru later admitted he didn’t anticipate the swiftness of the Chinese takeover of Tibet because he had been “led to believe by the Chinese foreign office that the Chinese would settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner”.
Shourie’s well-researched, powerfully written book relies on Nehru’s letters, speeches, notes and other correspondence to bring out the significance, in Nehru’s own words, of the events from the 1950-51 fall of Tibet to China’s 1962 invasion.
The author then draws 31 lessons from those developments for today’s India.
After all, there are important parallels, as Shourie points out, between the situation pre-1962 and the situation now.
Border talks are regressing, Chinese claims on Indian territories are becoming publicly assertive, Chinese cross-border incursions are rising, and India’s China policy is becoming feckless.
Indeed, what stands out in the history of Sino-Indian disputes is that India has always been on the defensive against a country that first moved its frontiers hundreds of miles south by annexing Tibet, then furtively nibbled at Indian territories before waging open war, and now lays claims to additional Indian territories.
By contrast, on neuralgic subjects like Tibet, Beijing’s public language still matches the crudeness and callousness with which it sought in 1962, in Premier Zhou Enlai’s words, to “teach India a lesson”.
India’s crushing rout in 1962 hastened the death of Nehru, “a fervent patriot,” according to Shourie, who “misled himself and thereby brought severe trauma upon the country, a country that he loved and served with such ardour”.
The defeat transformed Nehru from a world statesman to a beaten, shattered politician.
A classic example of Nehru’s selfdelusion cited by the author is the following note he wrote on July 9, 1949, to the country’s top career diplomat: “Whatever may be the ultimate fate of Tibet in relation to China, I think there is practically no chance of any military danger to India arising from any change in Tibet.
Geographically, this is very difficult and practically it would be a foolish adventure. If India is to be influenced or an attempt made to bring pressure on her, Tibet is not the route for it.
I do not think there is any necessity for our defence ministry, or any part of it, to consider possible military repercussions on the India-Tibetan frontier.
The event is remote and may not arise at all.”
What Nehru naively saw as a “foolish adventure” was mounted within months by China. What Nehru asserted was geographically impracticable became a geopolitical reality that has impacted on Indian security like no other development since the 20th century.
Right up to 1949, Nehru kept referring to the “Tibetan government” and to Tibet and India as “our two countries”. But no sooner had China begun gobbling up Tibet than Nehru’s stance changed. He started advising Tibetan representatives, as Shourie brings out, to go to Beijing and plead for autonomy.
By 1954, through the infamous ‘Panchsheel Agreement’, Nehru had not only surrendered India’s extra-territorial rights in Tibet but also recognised ‘the Tibet region of China’ — without securing any quid pro quo, such as the Chinese acceptance of the McMahon Line.
From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s blithe acceptance of full Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet — and thereby allowed the aggressor state to shift the spotlight from its annexation of Tibet and Aksai Chin to its newly assertive claims on Arunachal Pradesh.
The irony is that by laying claims to additional Indian territories on the basis of their purported ties to Tibet, China blatantly plays the Tibet card against India, going to the extent of citing the birth in Tawang of one of the earlier Dalai Lamas, a politico-religious institution it has systematically sought to destroy. Yet India remains coy to play the Tibet card against China.
The sum effect of failing to use Tibet as a bargaining chip has been that India first lost Aksai Chin, then more territory in 1962 and now is seeking to fend off Chinese claims to Arunachal Pradesh.
And as Shourie reminds us, India has still to grasp that the Chinese modus operandi of promising a peaceful settlement and then employing force to change facts on the ground is an old practice.
The lessons he paints — from not running policy on hope to ensuring peace by building capability to defend peace — are words of warning no leadership ought to ignore. Shourie’s book is a call for a downthe-earth Indian policy which, without pushing any panic buttons, begins to build better Himalayan security and countervailing leverage to ensure that China’s growing power does not slide into arrogance and renewed aggression.
After all, China’s dramatic rise as a world power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
But just as India has been battered by growing terrorism because of its location next to the global epicentre of terror, it could bear the brunt from its geographical proximity to an increasingly assertive China.
-Brahma Chellaney is a political commentator
Reviewed by Brahma Chellaney for Hindustan Times
India and China are both adept at playing with numbers. While China invented the abacus, India conceived the binary and the decimal systems.
But India, having forsaken the Kautilyan principles, has proven no match to China’s Sun Tzu-style statecraft.
From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty to Atal Behari Vajpayee’s blithe acceptance of full Chinese sovereignty, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet.
As a result, India has found itself repeatedly betrayed.
Indeed, it wasn’t geography but guns — the sudden occupation of the traditional buffer, Tibet, soon after the communists seized power in Beijing — that made China India’s neighbour.
Jawaharlal Nehru later admitted he didn’t anticipate the swiftness of the Chinese takeover of Tibet because he had been “led to believe by the Chinese foreign office that the Chinese would settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner”.
Shourie’s well-researched, powerfully written book relies on Nehru’s letters, speeches, notes and other correspondence to bring out the significance, in Nehru’s own words, of the events from the 1950-51 fall of Tibet to China’s 1962 invasion.
The author then draws 31 lessons from those developments for today’s India.
After all, there are important parallels, as Shourie points out, between the situation pre-1962 and the situation now.
Border talks are regressing, Chinese claims on Indian territories are becoming publicly assertive, Chinese cross-border incursions are rising, and India’s China policy is becoming feckless.
Indeed, what stands out in the history of Sino-Indian disputes is that India has always been on the defensive against a country that first moved its frontiers hundreds of miles south by annexing Tibet, then furtively nibbled at Indian territories before waging open war, and now lays claims to additional Indian territories.
By contrast, on neuralgic subjects like Tibet, Beijing’s public language still matches the crudeness and callousness with which it sought in 1962, in Premier Zhou Enlai’s words, to “teach India a lesson”.
India’s crushing rout in 1962 hastened the death of Nehru, “a fervent patriot,” according to Shourie, who “misled himself and thereby brought severe trauma upon the country, a country that he loved and served with such ardour”.
The defeat transformed Nehru from a world statesman to a beaten, shattered politician.
A classic example of Nehru’s selfdelusion cited by the author is the following note he wrote on July 9, 1949, to the country’s top career diplomat: “Whatever may be the ultimate fate of Tibet in relation to China, I think there is practically no chance of any military danger to India arising from any change in Tibet.
Geographically, this is very difficult and practically it would be a foolish adventure. If India is to be influenced or an attempt made to bring pressure on her, Tibet is not the route for it.
I do not think there is any necessity for our defence ministry, or any part of it, to consider possible military repercussions on the India-Tibetan frontier.
The event is remote and may not arise at all.”
What Nehru naively saw as a “foolish adventure” was mounted within months by China. What Nehru asserted was geographically impracticable became a geopolitical reality that has impacted on Indian security like no other development since the 20th century.
Right up to 1949, Nehru kept referring to the “Tibetan government” and to Tibet and India as “our two countries”. But no sooner had China begun gobbling up Tibet than Nehru’s stance changed. He started advising Tibetan representatives, as Shourie brings out, to go to Beijing and plead for autonomy.
By 1954, through the infamous ‘Panchsheel Agreement’, Nehru had not only surrendered India’s extra-territorial rights in Tibet but also recognised ‘the Tibet region of China’ — without securing any quid pro quo, such as the Chinese acceptance of the McMahon Line.
From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s blithe acceptance of full Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet — and thereby allowed the aggressor state to shift the spotlight from its annexation of Tibet and Aksai Chin to its newly assertive claims on Arunachal Pradesh.
The irony is that by laying claims to additional Indian territories on the basis of their purported ties to Tibet, China blatantly plays the Tibet card against India, going to the extent of citing the birth in Tawang of one of the earlier Dalai Lamas, a politico-religious institution it has systematically sought to destroy. Yet India remains coy to play the Tibet card against China.
The sum effect of failing to use Tibet as a bargaining chip has been that India first lost Aksai Chin, then more territory in 1962 and now is seeking to fend off Chinese claims to Arunachal Pradesh.
And as Shourie reminds us, India has still to grasp that the Chinese modus operandi of promising a peaceful settlement and then employing force to change facts on the ground is an old practice.
The lessons he paints — from not running policy on hope to ensuring peace by building capability to defend peace — are words of warning no leadership ought to ignore. Shourie’s book is a call for a downthe-earth Indian policy which, without pushing any panic buttons, begins to build better Himalayan security and countervailing leverage to ensure that China’s growing power does not slide into arrogance and renewed aggression.
After all, China’s dramatic rise as a world power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
But just as India has been battered by growing terrorism because of its location next to the global epicentre of terror, it could bear the brunt from its geographical proximity to an increasingly assertive China.
-Brahma Chellaney is a political commentator
A fresh start?
Daily DAWN
Sept 27, 2008
IT is hoped that Thursday’s meeting between President Asif Zardari and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will help undo the grave damage that bilateral relations have suffered in recent months.
Among other agreements, a pledge has been made to revive the composite dialogue process which was dealt a severe blow in July this year when the Indian embassy in Kabul came under ferocious attack.
New Delhi, possibly at the instigation of Kabul, was quick to accuse Pakistan of direct involvement in the bombing.
The severity of the charge and the undiplomatic language used by Indian officials was shocking, and tensions were ratcheted up further by subsequent clashes across the LoC and a string of bombings in India.
Hopefully New Delhi will show more tact in the future. Instead of being broadcast to the world, any and all terrorism-related concerns must be addressed discreetly and at the proper forum, which in this case would be the Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism.
Given this backdrop, it will take more than a photo-op meeting in New York to restore trust between the two neighbours but at least a fresh start seems to have been made.
Prime Minister Singh has also vowed to resolve the ongoing dispute triggered by the Baglihar Dam project in Indian-held Kashmir. Pakistan has not been receiving anywhere near its share of water envisaged under the Indus Water Treaty, and agriculture this side of Wagah has suffered as a result. It was also announced that at least four trade routes are to be opened, one of them across the LoC.
This is a welcome move and the plan’s materialisation clearly the need of the day. In this age of regionalism, both countries and their citizens will benefit from freer trade and cheaper goods. In this connection, attention must be given to breathing new life into the comatose South Asia Free Trade Area agreement.
Under Safta, customs duties on most products traded between Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka were to be lifted by 2012. But there has been no movement on this count, to the detriment of the region.
There was also no mention in New York of the popular uprising that is gathering strength in Indian-held Kashmir or the brutality with which security forces there are trying to suppress it. Understandable, perhaps, given that an attempt was being made to ease tensions, not inflame passions.
Still, what President Zardari recently called “the main hurdle in the way towards peace and full normalisation of relations between Pakistan and India” has to be discussed sooner than later. This is not to suggest that the two countries should put everything else on hold until the Kashmir issue is resolved to the satisfaction of all parties to the dispute. But the plight of the Kashmiri people cannot be ignored either.
Global Crises Challenge Leaders
Daily Outlook Afghanistan
The world’s huge challenges such as human rights violations, insecurity, economic and food crisis required an all-out international plan that is reflected in the Millennium Development Goals. MDGs are eight goals to be achieved by 2015 that respond to the world's main development challenges.
The MDGs are drawn from the actions and targets contained in the Millennium Declaration that was adopted by 189 nations-and signed by 147 heads of state and governments during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.
The Millennium Declaration sets the United Nations (UN) agenda for peace, security and development concerns in the 21st Century, including in the areas of environment, human rights, and governance.
Adopting the Declaration, the U.N. General Assembly called upon the whole UN system to assist Member States in the implementation of this Declaration In order to guide the UN system in this task, the Secretary-General prepared a “road-map” for implementing goals.
During the presentation of his first annual progress report on implementing the Millennium Declaration, United Nations’ previous Secretary-General, Kofi Annan warned that prospects for reaching the MDGs on current trends are uncertain, with marked differences between and within regions.
Opening the UN General Assembly's 63rd annual debate, UN Chief Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday stressed the need for "global leadership" as he pressed world leaders not to pursue narrow national interests in the face of hard economic times.
He spoke of a "challenge of global leadership" to tackle the world's worsening financial, energy and food crises. Ban, who has chosen implementation of key poverty reduction goals as a major theme of this year's debate, said he saw "a danger of retreating from the progress we have made, particularly in the realm of development and more equitably sharing the fruits of global growth."
Perusing the current indicators of world development and measurement of eradication of poverty, insecurity and economic and food crisis through out the globe, it comes true saying that global leadership is strongly challenged today.
To prove efficiency of world leaders’ performances, they should, in concert, launch political, social and economic initiatives to overcome today’s big menaces threatening the human community’s interests.
Restore autonomy originally enjoyed by Kashmir
Ajit Bhattacharjea has been writing on Jammu and Kashmir ever since he went there in 1947 to report the invasion of Pathans sent in by Pakistan.
In his 80s, Bhattacharjea has completed a biography of Sheikh Abdullah to complement his previous book ‘Kashmir: The Wounded Valley’.
Humra Quraishi talks to Bhattacharjea:
How has Kashmir changed?
I went to Srinagar the first time in 1947, soon after our troops landed there. I saw how Kashmiris helped to resist the invasion by Pathan tribals sent in by Pakistan.
The same Kashmiris are now crying for azadi from India. When I was there last year, temples were open in the heart of Srinagar and people were visiting them.
There were so many publications about the culture and history of the Valley and there were tourists. There was hope. There’s little hope left today as the situation amounts to a form of occupation because of our repressive law and order approach.
How did the situation deteriorate?
Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru believed in secularism and in socialism. Kashmiris were with India and rejected Pakistan because for them it didn’t stand for either socialism or secularism. Over the years Hindutva outfits have exerted their influence over the government of India. With that several factors came up.
The assurances given to Sheikh Abdullah were taken away, the special autonomy promised to J&K was gradually eroded.
There’s a sense of alienation among Kashmiris. That sense of alienation had always been there but today it has increased. Blocking the highway and connecting roads to the Valley was a disaster.
It made Kashmiris feel that they are not part of the country. And now, this news of curfew being imposed in the entire Valley.
The way forward is to invite all concerned for discussions on specific, time-bound measures to revive the autonomy J&K had enjoyed when it joined the Indian Union.
What kind of political solution do you think will be acceptable in the Valley?
People tend to forget that Jammu and Kashmir cannot be treated like any other state. It acceded to India on October 27, 1947, on the condition of being given internal autonomy.
Though Muslims were in a majority, they supported accession and helped Indian troops resist Pakistan. But gradual erosion of the state’s autonomy planted the seeds of alienation. Azadi became a popular slogan, that could mean independence or full autonomy.
I do not see any prospect of early resumption of talks on autonomy after this heavy dose of repression. Prospects had improved after General Musharraf made his out-of-the-box proposals to increase cooperation between the two halves of Kashmir.
But he, too, is gone. Even so, if the Centre offers talks on restoring the level of autonomy originally enjoyed by the state, a new beginning can perhaps be made. But it must seem to be sincere.
Nepal Maoists seek new order with India
By Sunil Raman
BBC News
Nepalese Prime Minister Prachanda visits India apparently determined to change the terms of engagement with his country's giant neighbour. The visit is being watched with great interest as India prepares to work with a Nepal that looks like being governed very differently from the past.
For years Nepalese leaders have expressed a desire to review a peace treaty which has defined relations between the two countries since 1950.
Prachanda, under pressure from Maoist comrades not to be pro-India, has gone further.
He is being urged to stand up to India and has said he will bring the draft of a new agreement to Delhi.
'Hype'
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru stressed Nepal's importance for a newly independent India in 1959 when he said "we cannot allow anything to go wrong in Nepal or permit that barrier to be crossed or weakened because that would be a risk to our [India's] security".
Prachanda is conscious that his visit to India is unlike trips made by his predecessors. His remarks and body language clearly show that he wants to engage with India as the leader of a sovereign nation and not of a "vassal state".
He has been under pressure from his party comrades and others to scrap the treaty with India. His India trip has dominated Nepalese newspapers, television channels and radio stations for days. Nepal and India have an open border more than 1,800km (1,125 miles) long.
Prachanda is conscious that his visit to India is unlike trips made by his predecessors. His remarks and body language clearly show that he wants to engage with India as the leader of a sovereign nation and not of a "vassal state".
He has been under pressure from his party comrades and others to scrap the treaty with India. His India trip has dominated Nepalese newspapers, television channels and radio stations for days. Nepal and India have an open border more than 1,800km (1,125 miles) long.
Over five million Nepalese people work and own property in India. They do not need visas or work permits and instead have all the rights of an Indian citizen.
Continuing with the British tradition, India recruits Nepalese Gurkhas into its army. There are 40,000 Nepalese Gurkhas in the 1.13m-strong Indian army and thousands of them receive monthly pensions in Nepal from India.
Former Nepalese ambassador to India, Prof Lokraj Baral, says demands to review the treaty are nothing new. The hype, he says, is more to "satisfy" public opinion.
Some recent media reports in Nepal were highly critical of reports that Indian soldiers might be sent to Nepal to protect river projects.
Massive floods in India's Bihar state after a river burst its banks upstream in Nepal are another source of argument.
Buffer
As a landlocked country Nepal is acutely dependent on India. India sells Nepal all its oil and the Himalayan nation's imports and exports transit through Indian ports.
A difference of opinion about the language of a trade agreement saw India bring Nepal to its knees in the early 1990s, with an economic blockade that lasted several months.
India believes that Nepal, as a buffer with China, is integral to its security concerns.
It is for this reason that a controversial clause in the India-Nepal treaty does not allow Nepal to buy arms and weapons from a third country without consulting India. This clause is seen by many Nepalese as subverting the country's sovereign rights.
In the early 1990s King Birendra threatened to buy weapons from China which saw India froth with anger. While Nepal's dependence on India is something that cannot be ignored by Prachanda and his team, experts feel some of the wording of the 1950 treaty should be changed.
One Indian official admitted that the clause dealing with defence matters will need to be revised. "One has to understand that 2008 is not 1950. People's aspirations cannot be brushed aside," he said.
But Indian commentator Inder Malhotra says it will not be easy for India to agree to change the clause dealing with defence. He says Nepal is too important for India to allow it to embrace China.
Given the high Himalayan ranges to its north, Nepal needs India for access to sea ports. Mr Malhotra blames "traditional anti-India sentiment" of the Nepalese elite for the renewed demands to end the peace treaty.
"Just like the elite in India who for a long time remained anti-America in their outlook, so is the elite in Nepal anti-India," he says.
Even so, India is now dealing with a new order in Nepal which demands to be treated more as a partner than a subordinate nation.
Continuing with the British tradition, India recruits Nepalese Gurkhas into its army. There are 40,000 Nepalese Gurkhas in the 1.13m-strong Indian army and thousands of them receive monthly pensions in Nepal from India.
Former Nepalese ambassador to India, Prof Lokraj Baral, says demands to review the treaty are nothing new. The hype, he says, is more to "satisfy" public opinion.
Some recent media reports in Nepal were highly critical of reports that Indian soldiers might be sent to Nepal to protect river projects.
Massive floods in India's Bihar state after a river burst its banks upstream in Nepal are another source of argument.
Buffer
As a landlocked country Nepal is acutely dependent on India. India sells Nepal all its oil and the Himalayan nation's imports and exports transit through Indian ports.
A difference of opinion about the language of a trade agreement saw India bring Nepal to its knees in the early 1990s, with an economic blockade that lasted several months.
India believes that Nepal, as a buffer with China, is integral to its security concerns.
It is for this reason that a controversial clause in the India-Nepal treaty does not allow Nepal to buy arms and weapons from a third country without consulting India. This clause is seen by many Nepalese as subverting the country's sovereign rights.
In the early 1990s King Birendra threatened to buy weapons from China which saw India froth with anger. While Nepal's dependence on India is something that cannot be ignored by Prachanda and his team, experts feel some of the wording of the 1950 treaty should be changed.
One Indian official admitted that the clause dealing with defence matters will need to be revised. "One has to understand that 2008 is not 1950. People's aspirations cannot be brushed aside," he said.
But Indian commentator Inder Malhotra says it will not be easy for India to agree to change the clause dealing with defence. He says Nepal is too important for India to allow it to embrace China.
Given the high Himalayan ranges to its north, Nepal needs India for access to sea ports. Mr Malhotra blames "traditional anti-India sentiment" of the Nepalese elite for the renewed demands to end the peace treaty.
"Just like the elite in India who for a long time remained anti-America in their outlook, so is the elite in Nepal anti-India," he says.
Even so, India is now dealing with a new order in Nepal which demands to be treated more as a partner than a subordinate nation.
Terror attacks can’t break India’s unity
Deccan Chronicle
Sept 14, 2008
In a couple of days we’ll probably have a better idea of the damage caused by the Saturday evening blasts in three important markets in the national capital.
We should by then also be able to make some sense of who the perpetrators might be, looking at the nature of the materials used and by the modus operandi of the terrorists.
Early reports suggest more than 10 people lost their lives and more than 80 were injured. Whether this is a coincidence or not, the Saturday blasts bear a striking resemblance to blasts in Delhi three years ago.
They occurred on the same day of the week and approximately the same hour of early evening. Perhaps this points to the fact that the terrorists expect ordinary people to be out shopping in large numbers on weekend evenings.
But whoever they are, the executors of evil designs against innocent people must be warned that they will be exposed in the not too distant future.
Already, several leading dramatis personae of previous terror attacks on prominent cities are finding the going tough. It is no use getting carried away by claims that terrorists make.
This is usually done to demoralise the authorities and the public, especially when the same agency seeks to appropriate credit on more than one occasion.
This is usually done to demoralise the authorities and the public, especially when the same agency seeks to appropriate credit on more than one occasion.
The intention is to plant the subconscious fear among ordinary people that those who plan to hit them are everywhere, while the providers of security are groping in the dark. These are pretty much standard psy-war techniques.
Ordinary folk should be encouraged to give them short shrift. Terrorist groups sometimes advertise themselves loudly with a view to registering their success with those that dispatched them.
This is a mercenary motive, of course. It is only when the initial impact of a terror attack simmers down and the early excitement abates that it is possible to dispassionately analyse an incident or a chain of events.
The Delhi blasts are also being taken credit for, and the name of a group popping up is the same that tried to foreground its claims on earlier occasions also. It may be no more than a paper front shielding the real culprits, or it may be the alias of another outfit.
Whatever the case, we should await proper identification before jumping to conclusions.
Since the primary purpose of terrorism is to jolt the morale of a people, and create in them a gripping sense of insecurity, as citizens we will do well not to direct suspicion against whole religious communities.
Since the primary purpose of terrorism is to jolt the morale of a people, and create in them a gripping sense of insecurity, as citizens we will do well not to direct suspicion against whole religious communities.
This is a communal reaction that demonises people only on the basis of their faith. The terrorists would have succeeded in their aims if they can elicit such a reaction from us, for the ultimate purpose of the enemy is to disturb the unity of a people.
The terror strike in Delhi should impel us to greater effort to establish a well-coordinated national agency to track and attack perpetrators of terror attacks. Such an agency will naturally need to have strong cooperative relations with police sleuths in the states.
This is because all of India is on the radar screen of those who think nothing of killing innocent people in order to advance their political aims.
Tread with caution
By Abhijit Bhattacharyya
The Telegraph
Sept 11, 2008
Asif Ali Zardari has arrived at last. He was sworn in as the Pakistani president on September 9. What next? What would be the president’s priority — keeping the polity intact by responding to Nawaz Sharif’s call, avoiding conflict with the army, mollifying the mullahs, taking on the Taliban, terrorists and al Qaida, or starting talks with India? It is indeed a tough call for Zardari as the future of Pakistan depends on his diplomatic skills.
There is one thing that Zardari should surely avoid doing — incurring the wrath of the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, keeping in mind the role played by both in Pakistan’s history till now.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ousted from power and hanged to death by the army chief, General Zia-ul-Haq, in 1979. His daughter, Benazir Bhutto, too got it all wrong while dealing with General Mirza Aslam Beg and the ISI chief, Hamid Gul, in the Nineties and ultimately lost her life in 2007 during General Pervez Musharraf’s reign. Zardari’s back room manoeuvring before he became the president to bring the ISI chief under the prime minister’s office backfired badly in July 2008. Hence Zardari needs to tread cautiously.
At present, however, the current army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, does not seem keen on the thorny throne of Islamabad, focussing more on the professionalism of soldiers and skills of the ISI spies. Yet in Pakistan the army still continues to rule, albeit less blatantly, the advent of legal presidency notwithstanding.
The new president should also be careful because he has dethroned an ex-chief of the Pakistani army with the threat of impeachment. Musharraf left, humbled by the civilians. No previous Pakistani army chief had to go like this. In Pakistani tradition, coup is the privilege of the army and not of the civilian, however high and mighty he or she might be.
Cure for headache
The army apart, perhaps the most tricky of all the factors facing Zardari is the geography of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, consisting of the seven tribal regions of Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan and South Waziristan. Endowed with the three characteristics of melmastia (honour and hospitality), nanawati (the pledge never to deny hospitability to a fugitive) and badal (right to revenge), Fata has been renamed by the al Qaida and Taliban as the “Islamic Emirate of Waziristan”. The fight by the tribals for their unique brand of freedom will continue to be a headache even for the best of presidents.
Zardari may also like to decide as to whether or not there is a need to take mid-course correctives, avoiding a repeat of the past actions of Zulfiqar and Benazir, who tried to make the military subservient to the civilians. The Bhuttos also, theoretically at least, had sought better relations with the Pakistani army’s traditional foe, India, and had opposed Islamic extremists whom the army supported.
President Zardari’s greatest test could lie in the fact that he assumed power on the eve of the seventh anniversary of 9/11, when Osama bin Laden continues to be at large and the various factions of the Taliban and al Qaida vie with one another to get the top slot for violence. Zardari now faces the daunting task of balancing the actors and factors in the high drama of Islamabad. First, it is Zardari versus Nawaz Sharif; then the army’s traditional distrust of the Bhuttos; the Bhutto clan’s bitter memory of ruthless Generals; the ISI pursuing its own plans; and finally, the suicide-bombers spanning from Khyber to Quetta, from Mohmand to Multan. Last, but not the least, is the psychology of the Baluch leaders who view the Pakistani armed forces “not as a national military, but a Punjabi force with a mercenary and exploitative character”. Will Zardari succeed?
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