The Laying to Waste of the World: a Memory of I.H Burney

I was talking to an Indian friend about how American influence can overwhelm. I don't think any Indian has experienced the transformation of their city under American money.

It seems like so many statistics that there were a few hundred heroin addicts in Karachi before the Americans bankrolled the first Afghan War and then a million three years into it. That the billions of dollars that came in to seed, plant and nourish drug and arms networks that were the Afghan jihad developed certain mafia elites and transformed public culture in Karachi.

To the Indian I was trying to convey that if New Delhi wanted American attention, and sure that can mean money for some Indians, be warned. Imagine someone like Zia ul Haq and his values underwritten by the Americans.

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I.H Burney used to tell a story about Zia ul Haq. Burney was a journalist who ran an independent weekly from Karachi in the early 60s' called Outlook. He attacked Field Marshal Ayub Khan for being an American client. His criticisms of Ayub's sham democracy (a model of "local bodies elections" that has subsequently been brought out of the closet by General Zia ul Haq and now General Musharraf) are exactly relevant today. Outlook was strangled by Ayub Khan's Secretary of Information, a particularly efficient Goebbels, Altaf Gauhar.

In the early 70s, with the general elections, Outlook opened again. This time Burney went after Bhutto and accused him of being a fascist. He was harsh about Bhutto's relationship with the Nixon White House and found lots in common between Nixon and Bhutto, every week. Bhutto is on record for saying that Outlook has gone too far. It was shut down.

Oxford University Press has published Burney's editorials from the two lives of Outlook, 1962-1964 and 1972-1974, in 1996 the year of his death. The book is called 'No Illusions, Some Hope and No Fears'.

Now here is the Zia story I promised. Burney welcomed Zia's coup. Anything is better than Bhutto, he said. Zia invited Burney to be Member of the Election Commission (Zia promised elections in 90 days) and to author 'The White Paper' on Bhutto.

Burney said he went to a meeting with Zia. Some other people were in the room. On the table was a book. It was the Koran. This puzzled Burney.

Sometime during the small talk over the course of the meeting, Zia said, let us, the Faithful, rise up to say our prayers. Burney commented that he raised his hands in prayer only when he has the flu.

"Jab bukhaar charhta hai tab dua kay liyay haath uthtay hehn."

He did not pray with Zia. Nor meet him again. 'Yay tau aur bhi zaleel nikla', he said. Burney never wrote again.

Zia found an opportunity to become an American client much like Musharraf has today. Zia rode the whirlwind for 10 years.

In those years of living through Zia's time I developed a simple mindedness. A cultivated ignorance towards people and the subject that they were referring to, who said Islam Islam too much. So that if Zia instituted a Majlis e Shuura, instead of a National Assembly, the fields of meaning indicated by majlis, shuraa, and democracy became empty. A collection of Zia-appointed pious-looking men brought together to form an "advisory council," whose deliberations became prime time television programming for the better part of a decade made barren more concepts of civil life than I care listing.

As a preteen I have a memory of Iqbal Burney from 1980. It is the only image I have of a "Writer" from when I was growing up (He was the only writer friend of my father).

He was sitting in his living room, in the dark, the only illumination was the light from the adjoining dining room. He had deep set eyes so that even in the clear light of day I had to strain to find his eyes in the shadows of his eye sockets. He was sunk into his armchair so that I could not tell if there was a body beneath the kurta. He had caverns for eyes. Behind him in the shelves of his library, all his books were in the dark.

When Arundhati Roy talks of the laying to waste of the world by American foreign policy I don't multiply in my head the sightings of heroin addicts or Kalashnikov-toting mercenaries on Karachi streets. I remember Iqbal Burney.