Letters and Bombs

First of all, we`re talking about the war between India and Pakistan right here and I know that Afghanistan and the taliban have some sort of problem here but not in the biggest way. All India wants basically is to get more land without breaking a world law. The law states that they`re not supposed to destroy people for land. Sure fighting over differences is bad but this is much worse. Pakistan on the other hand is basically trying to protect the Kashmiris and put a stop to all this madness. And of course, a wise man once siad, it starts with arrows, then goes to guns, then goes to worse-but the worse will be just as bad as arrows with its time. So really nuclear fire power is just death but with more than a couple gone unlike the arrow. But back to what you were saying, sure different religious groups will get descriminated against. It`s life and people have to start either accepting nowadays, that it`s O.K. to be different, or like father, like son. If their parents knew it was bad, you will to because they know best. As for the taliban (which may I remind you is straying from the main subject of Pakistan and India), it`s their religion, let them do what they want. And if other muslims don`t like it, accept it or don`t. I frankly think that they should though.
-Back to the main subject- Pakistan had to follow suit with the nukes because if they didn`t, they`d be dead right now unless India was smart and didn`t do it because once a nuke touches down they`re both dead. It`s all a matter of who will scare who into forfeiting the war. Thus, the victor gets the right over what to do over Kashmir-which is basically the reason for all of this in the first place. -Back to your comments- Don`t worry, I know how hard it is to be different in religious/skin color ways etc. I`m half Jewish and my people survived two world wars staging off German attacks-not to mention Moses and the Egyptian problem-and over 5,000 years of other problems/differences to go with that. Plus, I`m on a student exchange right now going from America to New Zealand-imagine trying to fit in for the first couple of weeks here. They`re real nice, but it was still very tough. So remember man, just stay strong and try, and you`ll do the best you can.

Final notes: Pakistan deserves this war to be over and Kashmir need to have a voice. And they might just be able to restore order in India and Pakistan if their voice is loud enough.

Mohajir - 91

Thankyou for a most interesting read.

Have to get dear solemate to digest this.

Eklavya has put is v succintly - More power to Amitav & his soulmate

Mohajir #91

Very interesting. We need people who are proud of their mingled identities. It is the drive for inventing purity that often lies at the root of much conflict.

More power to Amitav.

Re Truth 90

I take your point. We are all complicit, we are all in the same village. You may not be aware, but having and keeping a Muslim name is CIS is a distinct social and economical liability, with real costs. You may also not be aware that more than 200K Bulgarians have opted to go to Turkiye and other countries because they would not change their Muslim names to Slavic names.

Real costs are also incurred by Muslims in China, simply for being Muslims. I have been there and seen the pressure for myself.

Are the Taleban then a true representative of Islam? Obviously not. Does their behaviour withregard to requiring men to keep a beard and women to remain uneducated and at home, or the smashing of religious Icons merit praise? Indeed not, quite the opposite. (Remember it was just last year in India that Laws were debated to smash the oppression of CHULA, CHADAR and CHARDIVARI) - Give it time baby, we`re workin on it.

As to why only Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia recognize the Taliban: The Taliban movement began in Pakistan, it recieved support from Pakistan after it was decided that engineer Gulbudeen Hikmatyar had lost the support of the US and had failed to united the various factions. Continued warfare in Afghanistan is not in the interest of Pakistan. As you are an astutue student of history you may recall the stunning success of the Taliban in uniting warring factions and bringing an end to the brigandry that had become pervasive. Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia and a good number of influentials from Kuwait and especially Iraq, wish to maintain the the political influence of the Sunni majority. Iran does not. India and Russia have also joined the Iranian effort, with India providing helicopters for troop transport, Russia providing ``Technical Advisors`` and Iran providing Intelligence and Funding for the operations of Northern Alliance. The leader of the Northern Alliance is Ahmad Shah Masood, He has been in Iran`s pocket since the begining and is pathologically anti Pakistan. All attempts to win him over have failed. He realizes that he has no future in Afghanistan, unless he secures a piece of it for himself.

To add to this confusion, most other Muslim nations have simply kept out of this ideological battle because regardless of the choice they make, they will end up souring their relations with either Iran or with the Sunni front.

The reckless, medieval behaviour of Taliban is an additional source of irritation to these nations. While they go around building schools, educating their peoples, the Taliban manage to infuse the world with fear with a most backward interpretation of Islam, thereby shunning further recognition.

Within the Taliban leadership councils, the decision to creat a function government and a standing army has been defered (much to the chagrin of Pakistan). The reason for this deferment is influx of private funds to support the Taliban. Pakistan want a functioning government (by definition, it will defuse poweras a good number of regionals within Afghanistan will have to be accomodated) and a standing army as it will increase the scope of Pakistani operations and will give them numerous other levers of influence within Afghanistan. Which in turn will enable Pakistan to get ``business`` done with Central Asia. it will also provide the American with a stable point of entry to Central Asia (at present the only point of entry is via Russia and China is not about to open up Xianshang -Turkestan - to American influence as they remember what happened to the USSR) and can provide India with access to the central Asian market.

The Taliban know and understand Pakistan`s geostrategic and economic compulsions, they also realize that Pakistan will jettison those persons in the leadership councils who do not play ball, so to speak.

Also within the leadership council, the most hardline elements are dominant. This dominance can be challeneged not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan by applying pressure on the JUI, SSP and by especially by securing Mr. Riaz Basra.

Therefore, in the present situation, Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia cannot withdraw recognition without securing a leadership that will bear it`s interest in mind. However; be assured that Mullah Omar risks not only his continued leadership but also his well being by testing Pakistani patience further.

http://www.outlookindia.com/website/full.asp?fodname=20010319&fname=travelogue&sid=1

`We Are All Converts`

Amitava Kumar on his marriage to a Muslim, his `conversion` and his first visit to Karachi

Amitava Kumar



ON my arrival in Karachi, Nani asked me to sit beside her on the sofa. Nani is my wife Mona’s maternal grandmother. She told me that she was throwing a party that night in my honour. Nani wanted me to meet everyone in the family. The guests, she said, had been informed of Mona’s marriage to me the previous year. She said in Urdu: ``I told them that the groom is from Hindustan. And then I told them, ‘He has accepted Islam.’``

Nani said that people had congratulated her. ``Sabhi mujhe mubarakbad dene lage. Kehne lage ki Mona ko jannat milegi (Everyone began congratulating me. They began saying Mona will be assured a place in heaven).`` I think Nani knew that I did not think of myself as a Muslim. Her account about the guests for the dinner that night was her way of orienting me to her world.



That evening, the people I met were polite and even affectionate. Many of them did not call me by my usual name. They called me Safdar. When dinner was over, one guest, my mother-in-law’s cousin, turned in my direction and asked loudly, ``Safdar, how did your parents take the news of your conversion?``

It was difficult for me to tell her that I had never thought that I had converted although, if folks wanted to talk about it, I was not opposed to being considered a convert either. As to my parents, I didn’t know what they thought. I hadn’t told them anything at all.

``Marriage among Hindus is no simple matter,`` wrote Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography. But, in the case of my marriage, distance had made matters very simple. My parents and most of my family were in India. I was living in New Haven in the US. I was the only one making decisions.

It was only when I was at Mona’s parents’ home in Toronto, deep into the discussion of dates suitable for our marriage, that I decided to inform my parents of my decision to marry. I called them in India to give them the news. At that time, Mona’s father was still in Karachi. When I went up to Toronto, Mona’s father was visiting from Pakistan. Mona’s mother had moved to Canada the previous year. She already had a teaching job and was now waiting for her husband to join her. Mona’s family is a well-to-do liberal family; Asma Jehangir, the human rights lawyer, is her mother’s first cousin; on the father’s side, they are distant relatives of General Pervez Musharraf.

Two years before that phone call from Toronto, I had told my parents in a letter of my having met Mona in New York City. I had written that she was a Muslim—and a Pakistani. Then, I had called my parents to talk to them. My father had rightly anticipated that I might be concerned about their opposition to my being in love with a Muslim. He came to the point immediately. ``You have our blessings,`` he said. My mother too could not say no. But she had been a bit reluctant. She said: ``Yes...but can’t you find anyone from...?``

Later, when I called them from Toronto, the war in Kargil had already begun. My mother asked me what Mona’s family thought of the war. She said: ``Woh log us tarah ke Musalman to nahin hain na (They are not those kind of Muslims, are they)?`` A suitable gloss on that would perhaps be: ``They are not fanatical, are they?`` On more than one occasion, I have heard people close to me in my family say that Muslims are fanatics.

Ten days later, I was married. Several of Mona’s relatives came to the wedding. I was alone on the groom’s side.



It was a bright, warm day. Mona and I went to the marriage registrar’s office. Inside the building, there were many offices. Mona, wearing a blue silk sari, walked to the window marked ‘Tax and Water Inquiry’, and then we were pointed in the right direction. An Irishman now settled in Canada officiated. He filled out our religions, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’, on the marriage form and asked: ``Isn’t that a bit like a Catholic marrying a Protestant back where I’m from?``

We also had a brief Islamic ceremony at Mona’s parents’ home. One of her uncles officiated as the qazi. Both Mona and I were required to just say ``yes`` thrice to the question about our intent to marry. There were two lines from the Quran the qazi asked me to repeat after him. I did so, haltingly. The name that was used for me during this ceremony was Safdar Ali. The previous week, I had got a call from Toronto. Mona sounded a little upset, and then her mother came on the line. I was asked to choose a Muslim name. I was told that in Pakistan, the marriage of a Muslim to a non-Muslim is not recognised. So, it was suggested that I perhaps choose a name that could be used during an Islamic ceremony. Mona’s mother thought the name ‘Aftaab’ would be suitable because it resembled my present name. I said no. I chose the name ‘Safdar’ after Safdar Hashmi, the dynamic, young theatre-activist who had been killed on the streets outside Delhi by political goons.

I was a little disturbed by all this. Was this a conversion? No one from Mona’s family had actually used the word. It is possible that they didn’t want to think in those terms, just as I didn’t, though that is what they wanted it to be.

But, I also had the opposite thought. In the subcontinent, we increasingly identify ourselves in religious terms. The erosion of pluralism means that we participate in a kind of negative identification. As Eqbal Ahmad put it, this means saying that ``we are so-and-so because we are not the Other. We are what we are because we are different from the West, or from the Muslims, or from the Hindus, or from the Jews, or from the Christians.`` In such a scenario, doesn’t conversion promise the presence of more people in society who would have roots in many communities?

During my visit to Karachi, a boy I met first apologised for posing a personal question, and then asked me if I had converted. I repeated to him the lines of poetry my friend Ajai Singh had written in Lucknow: ``Main aadha Hindu hoon, aadha Musalman hoon,/Main poora Hindustan hoon (I’m half a Hindu, half a Muslim/I’m all of India)``. I told the boy about Nani calling me Safdar. I was also the one who responded to the name I’ve had since I was a boy. I wasn’t only one or the other; I was prepared to be both.

Perhaps, conversion is not the right word for what I have in mind; it has more to do with a notion of plural identities. But conversion does help me attack the intransigent border between religions.Maybe my choice of the word is also partly to protest V.S. Naipaul’s dismissal, in Beyond Belief, of all Muslims who are not Arabs as ``converts``. He writes that Muslims in a country like India, because they are converts to Islam, have an unreal sense of who they are. Their condition, Naipaul writes, has ``an element of neurosis and nihilism``. This implies that Muslims have no local histories, they’re only tied to an elsewhere in Arabia. It erases the centuries of adaptation and growth of Islam in places like India; it also plays into the hands of the bigots in India who don’t tire of calling present-day Muslims ``outsiders`` or ``invaders``. Against Naipaul’s idea of purity and fixity in religion, it’s necessary to see how communities have grown historically in dialogue with each other. Their influences are mixed and shared. If you go far back in time, surely all of us are converts.

In recent years, in India at least, the idea of conversion has become a political scandal. Right-wing Hindu fundamentalists have whipped up the rhetoric of Hinduism under attack by saying that Muslims and Christian minorities are converting poor Hindus. Theirs is a far cry from what writer Intizar Husain said: ``I’m a Muslim, but I always feel there is a Hindu sitting inside me... I still feel I’m an exilé who wanders between Karbala and Ayodhya.`` Born in India, Husain migrated to Pakistan post-Partition. I was struck by the beauty of his words, and his sense of sublime rootlessness. In his worldview, the sense of belonging to different, distant, places was not a sign of neurosis but humanity. Unlike Naipaul—born in the diaspora, and repulsed by what he had once considered home—Husain celebrates his ties to the places that are a part of his past; even his exile’s a pleasant longing for the places he belongs to.

After my return from Karachi, I visited poet and film director Gulzar in Mumbai. Over dinner, Gulzar, a Hindu, told me he had been fasting for Ramzan for several years. A Muslim friend of his had been advised by his doctor to avoid the strain, and so Gulzar offered to keep a fast instead. I wanted to tell Gulzar: ``You should stop keeping the fast. It’s my turn now.``

(Amitava Kumar is the author of Passport Photos, Penguin India.)

hobbyty:

In a very metaphysical way, India IS complicit in the suffering of Burma, China & CIS. yes it is true, India has not sent men & material to end suffering there. But that is neither here nor there. By that logic, Pakistan too is complicit in the suffering of Burma, China & CIS. But I think the issue is different. Surely there is a difference between not doing anything to end suffering and contributing directly to that suffering.

In my mind, Taliban is a movement to be fought, to be resisted and at the very least shunned. So yes, I`d rather talk at them than to them. Ask yourself, why do only 3 countries in the world recognize them? And ask yourself if your analogies to Burma, China & CIS are stretching matters so far so as to be meaningless. None of these countries require men to have beards, women to be covered, adulterers to be stoned, Buddhas to be demolished. There is a limit to all comparisons. GO see www.rawa.com or rawa.org to see what the Taliban do.

See the numerous reports on the net which show Pakistan regulars and equipment being used in support of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. The difference between all the other cases of Burma, China & CIS and this is that the Govt of Pakistan, in both military and democratic regimes, has been a contributor to the regression of Afghanistan. Ask yourself why a country that prides itself in never allowing a religious party win more than a few percent of the vote would allow itself to be an ally of such a retrogade movement? Whatever the motives of Pakistan, it is clearly wrong. At least to me.

Pakistan should be fighting against the Taliban, not with it. And the first step is derecognition.

Re truth #88

Truth

I`m not supporting the behaviour of the Taliban, and I offer the following observations:

India formally recognizes Myanmar, Does that mean India is responsible for the treatment of An San Sue hki?

India recognizes China, does it mean it is responsible for the treatment of Falong gong?

U.S. recognizes CIS and provides a great financial aid to it, does that mean it is responsible for the Genocide of the Chehans?

Not recognizing the Taleban regimne only means that one cannot talk to them and instead has to talk at them. Which is the preferable, more sane way of conducting International relations? You decide.

Scout:

Pakistan officially recognizes the Taliban. Pakistan has sent men and material to help the Taliban. The Taliban are obscurantist in their outlook - the destruction of the Buddhas is just a window into their mind. Cannot the Govt. of Pakistan be criticized for their support for Taliban generally?

I dont blame you Scout personally but who is to be held responsible for Pakistan`s well documented support of the Taliban?

thanks for clarifying anamika. whatever would i have done without you :)

sadna,

``You dodot admit that Pakistani women have insconsistent views when it comes to themselves, Afghan women and Indian women, well thats your

choice.``

Please explain my inconsistent views? I don`t remember having a discussion about the three different kinds of women recently.

And if you`re referring to my comments about Indian women dropping their clothes more frequently these days, dont` worry, it`s happening in Pakistan too. and I feel the same way about those women as I do about the former.

Please be happy and get rid of the mental wedgie.

anamika #85,scout #83
``jo tumko ho pasand wahi baath kahengey`` wouldnot work here unless I also said ``tum din ko agar raath kaho raath kahengey``

Re Agni, well, FYI Pakistani regulars are reported to be fighting for the Taliban presently. We wouldnot want to start off an Indo-Pak ...

Well, Happy Woman`s Day! May the next year be a happier one.

#83 scout

Yes, Sadhna, why don`t you discuss things that scout is interested in. Otherwise she gets bored.

scout #83
People like myself make a big noise about the Taliban and its treatment of women and Pakistan`s supoort of the regime, thats our choice. You donot admit that you feel the need to jump in whenever the Taliban is mentioned, thats your choice. You dodot admit that Pakistani women have insconsistent views when it comes to themselves, Afghan women and Indian women, well thats your choice.

And its my choice to make you a comprehensive reply when you make me the subject of a number of mails totally unrelated to the issue being discussed as you have done on this thread.

Donot try to regulate thought, its been tried and doesnot work in real life much less on a discussion board. And donot make a difference of opinion into a difference in intelligence levels, thats a nonstarter too.

Sadhana

sadna,

Don`t make a mountain out of a mole hill (esp. if the mole hill is a comment from a Pakistani), unless you get some kind of orgasmic pleasure out of it.

The bottom line is, I don`t support the Taleban and there are more pressing issues to discuss than their destroying some stone buddhas.

You`re a bright woman, you should know better.

By the way, actions speak louder than words.

Why don`t you encourage your government to drop the Agni or whatever that missile is called on Kabul.

Case closed, qissa khatam.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/080301/detcit18.asp

scout #80
`` I told Indians not to use the Taleban as a anti-pakistan propaganda issue, and beat the dead issue up.``

Thats not how I remember it, so I went back to the Gardezi board just as example.(I cannot be bothered to go back further). The Taliban and the Buddhas are first mentioned #179
http://www.chowk.com/bin/showr.cgi?f=hgardezi_feb2101&n=220#reply179

You must have a third eye spotting anti-Pakistan propaganda in the succeeding posts or a very guilty conscience because until your post berating Indians #213, there is no anti-Pakistani statement in the Indians` discussion of the Taliban`s actions. One of the posts infact mentions that a Pakistani heritage society had registered its strong protest.

I donot see any anti-Pakistani connection made by a single Indian poster at all except in response to your persistent scolds.

The Taliban may be a dead issue for you, but I believe its futile to keep scolding others who want to discuss it. You or anyone else are free to ignore such posts. And if you donot, its best to expect a response.

Sadhana

sadna #79,

Please read my posts carefully dearie. I told Indians not to use the Taleban as a anti-pakistan propaganda issue, and beat the dead issue up.

Most of us don`t support the Taleban`s actions.

Is that fact so hard to digest sadna?