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Living in Fear
What if some Shia leader proclaims that ``Shias and Sunnis can never live together`` and demands partition of Pakistan into Shia Pakistan and Sunni Pakistan, will majority people like?
Similar things must have happened before independence , Hindu-Muslim riots etc. and Jinnah decided to have a separate country for Muslims of India. Even then there are more Muslims in India than Pakistan. Moreover Islam the binding force was not able to keep Pakistan intact. Pakistani ideology was based on the fact that the Muslims are a separate nation, having their own civilization, their own customs, their own culture, their own religion and a totally different way of life from Hindus.
Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.
The persecution of Shiites has been the dirty little secret of the Islamic world. If you ask most Muslims, they will tell you that the Sunni and Shia live harmoniously. This is true in a day-to-day sense. You could live in a Muslim country and be unaware of who is a Sunni and who is a Shia. But this peace is partly the result of the comfortable dominance of the Sunnis, who make up over 85 percent of Muslims worldwide. In many Muslim countries there are almost no Shiites. And where they exist in small minorities, relations are fine—as long as the Shia don`t protest their secondary place. The Shia tend to be somewhat marginalized but often not in a systematic sense. (Saudi Arabia is, as always, the extreme, where Shiites who want to get ahead have been known to become Sunnis. The repression in Saddam`s Iraq was also atypical.) Sectarian violence is rare except that every year around the Ashura commemorations, there are attacks on Shia mourners in South Asia, which is one of the few places where the Shia are allowed to openly perform this ritual. In contrast, Sunnis face no such problems in Iran, the only Shiite-majority country that is also ruled by Shiites. (Iraq will be the next one.)
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 12, 2004 08:51 am
Two Nation theory.What if some Shia leader proclaims that ``Shias and Sunnis can never live together`` and demands partition of Pakistan into Shia Pakistan and Sunni Pakistan, will majority people like?
Similar things must have happened before independence , Hindu-Muslim riots etc. and Jinnah decided to have a separate country for Muslims of India. Even then there are more Muslims in India than Pakistan. Moreover Islam the binding force was not able to keep Pakistan intact. Pakistani ideology was based on the fact that the Muslims are a separate nation, having their own civilization, their own customs, their own culture, their own religion and a totally different way of life from Hindus.
Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.
The persecution of Shiites has been the dirty little secret of the Islamic world. If you ask most Muslims, they will tell you that the Sunni and Shia live harmoniously. This is true in a day-to-day sense. You could live in a Muslim country and be unaware of who is a Sunni and who is a Shia. But this peace is partly the result of the comfortable dominance of the Sunnis, who make up over 85 percent of Muslims worldwide. In many Muslim countries there are almost no Shiites. And where they exist in small minorities, relations are fine—as long as the Shia don`t protest their secondary place. The Shia tend to be somewhat marginalized but often not in a systematic sense. (Saudi Arabia is, as always, the extreme, where Shiites who want to get ahead have been known to become Sunnis. The repression in Saddam`s Iraq was also atypical.) Sectarian violence is rare except that every year around the Ashura commemorations, there are attacks on Shia mourners in South Asia, which is one of the few places where the Shia are allowed to openly perform this ritual. In contrast, Sunnis face no such problems in Iran, the only Shiite-majority country that is also ruled by Shiites. (Iraq will be the next one.)
The Secularity of India
AJIT ADHOPIA
OPINION
In the recent parliamentary elections in India, the stunning victory of the Congress Party over its archrival, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and the refusal of its leader, Sonia Gandhi, to accept the reins of the largest democracy on Earth, were not the only surprises.
More interesting is that India now has a Muslim president and a turbaned Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh, both from minority religions. Hindus form the majority — 80 per cent — of the Indian population, Muslims account for 12 per cent and Sikhs are a tiny minority of 2.5 per cent. Media pundits are calling it the victory of secularism over Hindutva or Hindu nationalism.
As a Hindu, however, I find this debate of secularism versus Hindutva meaningless.
What is secularism, anyway? The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a ``doctrine that the basis of morality should be non-religious.``
According to the Webster`s New Collegiate Dictionary, secularism is ``indifference to, exclusion of or rejection of religious considerations.``
To the average person, it means that no single religion should be promoted or supported by the government.
To most Hindus, secularism invariably means ``religious tolerance.``
To me, secularism is an attitude toward religion, the attitude of inclusiveness, acceptance of pluralism, tolerance and respect for all religions; no desire to dominate the people of other religions through conversion by enticement, coercion or force, and no claim on finality or Hindu superiority of any particular prophet or scriptures. These elements of secularism are inherent in the core character of an average Hindu.
Secularism is more than just a theory or concept in Hinduism. It has a long history of religious tolerance, acceptance of diversity of spiritual paths, reasoning and discussion and the right to think, express and dissent. That is why concepts like blasphemy, evangelism, proselytism and crusade or jihad are alien to Hindus.
According to Hindu scriptures,
``Varied are the tastes, many are the paths to a goal.
Some are righteous, some are crooked,
Yet all aim to reach the goal,
Just like all the rivers lead to the ocean.
Similarly, man traverses to Thee.``
Hinduism itself is a collation of many faiths, sects, deities, and a variety of spiritual traditions and reform movements. It gave birth to three other Indian religions: Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. These first emerged as Hindu reform movements and later evolved as independent religions, rejecting the Vedas, the primary Hindu scriptures, without significant opposition. In fact, Hindus declared the founders of these new religions as avatars or divine incarnations. Without respect and tolerance of varied, opposing viewpoints and assimilative tendencies, Hinduism would not have survived the past 5,000 years, despite many external pressures, including aggressive Islamic movements and proselytizing Christian missionaries. Both of these foreign religions flourished in India with complete freedom. In his first news conference after becoming prime minister, Manmohan Singh commented that India was an ancient civilization and the essence of Hinduism was tolerance.
Hinduism is not really a ``religion.`` It is called Hindu dharma. In the English language, there is no single word to describe the true and complete meaning of the word dharma. It is generally translated as ``religion`` due to the lack of an appropriate synonym in English. ``Dharma`` is derived from the Sanskrit word dhr, which literally means ``to hold`` or ``to sustain.`` Hindus translate it as ``righteousness,`` ``duty`` or ``moral obligation.`` Therefore, virtues, values, beliefs, ethical laws, codes of behaviour, moral duties, traditions and righteous actions that sustain human life in peace and harmony, are all aspects of dharma. It is noteworthy that there is no reference to religion or divinity. What concept can be more secular than dharma?
For a Hindu, it is possible to be very religious and secular at the same time. There is no contradiction; one does not have to choose between secularism and religiousness or Hindutva.
To a Hindu, religion is a very private affair; it`s a love affair between him and his ``isht devata,`` his personal deity representing any aspect of God. A perfect example would be Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu who promoted and practised secularism.
Ajit Adhopia is a freelance author who writes about Hinduism.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1086214212719&call_pageid=991479973472&col=991929131147
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 6, 2004 06:57 am
Hindus can be both very religious and secularAJIT ADHOPIA
OPINION
In the recent parliamentary elections in India, the stunning victory of the Congress Party over its archrival, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), and the refusal of its leader, Sonia Gandhi, to accept the reins of the largest democracy on Earth, were not the only surprises.
More interesting is that India now has a Muslim president and a turbaned Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh, both from minority religions. Hindus form the majority — 80 per cent — of the Indian population, Muslims account for 12 per cent and Sikhs are a tiny minority of 2.5 per cent. Media pundits are calling it the victory of secularism over Hindutva or Hindu nationalism.
As a Hindu, however, I find this debate of secularism versus Hindutva meaningless.
What is secularism, anyway? The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a ``doctrine that the basis of morality should be non-religious.``
According to the Webster`s New Collegiate Dictionary, secularism is ``indifference to, exclusion of or rejection of religious considerations.``
To the average person, it means that no single religion should be promoted or supported by the government.
To most Hindus, secularism invariably means ``religious tolerance.``
To me, secularism is an attitude toward religion, the attitude of inclusiveness, acceptance of pluralism, tolerance and respect for all religions; no desire to dominate the people of other religions through conversion by enticement, coercion or force, and no claim on finality or Hindu superiority of any particular prophet or scriptures. These elements of secularism are inherent in the core character of an average Hindu.
Secularism is more than just a theory or concept in Hinduism. It has a long history of religious tolerance, acceptance of diversity of spiritual paths, reasoning and discussion and the right to think, express and dissent. That is why concepts like blasphemy, evangelism, proselytism and crusade or jihad are alien to Hindus.
According to Hindu scriptures,
``Varied are the tastes, many are the paths to a goal.
Some are righteous, some are crooked,
Yet all aim to reach the goal,
Just like all the rivers lead to the ocean.
Similarly, man traverses to Thee.``
Hinduism itself is a collation of many faiths, sects, deities, and a variety of spiritual traditions and reform movements. It gave birth to three other Indian religions: Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. These first emerged as Hindu reform movements and later evolved as independent religions, rejecting the Vedas, the primary Hindu scriptures, without significant opposition. In fact, Hindus declared the founders of these new religions as avatars or divine incarnations. Without respect and tolerance of varied, opposing viewpoints and assimilative tendencies, Hinduism would not have survived the past 5,000 years, despite many external pressures, including aggressive Islamic movements and proselytizing Christian missionaries. Both of these foreign religions flourished in India with complete freedom. In his first news conference after becoming prime minister, Manmohan Singh commented that India was an ancient civilization and the essence of Hinduism was tolerance.
Hinduism is not really a ``religion.`` It is called Hindu dharma. In the English language, there is no single word to describe the true and complete meaning of the word dharma. It is generally translated as ``religion`` due to the lack of an appropriate synonym in English. ``Dharma`` is derived from the Sanskrit word dhr, which literally means ``to hold`` or ``to sustain.`` Hindus translate it as ``righteousness,`` ``duty`` or ``moral obligation.`` Therefore, virtues, values, beliefs, ethical laws, codes of behaviour, moral duties, traditions and righteous actions that sustain human life in peace and harmony, are all aspects of dharma. It is noteworthy that there is no reference to religion or divinity. What concept can be more secular than dharma?
For a Hindu, it is possible to be very religious and secular at the same time. There is no contradiction; one does not have to choose between secularism and religiousness or Hindutva.
To a Hindu, religion is a very private affair; it`s a love affair between him and his ``isht devata,`` his personal deity representing any aspect of God. A perfect example would be Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu who promoted and practised secularism.
Ajit Adhopia is a freelance author who writes about Hinduism.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1086214212719&call_pageid=991479973472&col=991929131147
The Secularity of India
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/englis...tent_335195.htm
Why the East is superior to the West ...
masterkung Updated: 2004-05-31 10:08
Within the religious fanaticism you will find a basic lack of understanding of other religions. A comprehensive study of various religions would support the broader view that one supreme and caring Intelligence has expressed itself to different people at different time and in different ways.
Fanaticism comes to people who feel insecure. This broader view gives a sense of belongingness while still allowing people to be well-founded in their own tradition.
There are ten major religions in the world, six from the far east and four from the Middle East. In the Far East, Hinduism is the oldest. Then came Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Shintoism and Sikhism. From the Middle East, Zoroastrianism is the oldest, and then came Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Three of the Middle Eastern religions are rooted in the Old Testament: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In the Far East Shintoism and Taoism have completely separate sources. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism have roots in Hinduism.
The six religions of the Far East have peacefully coexisted and intermingled over the centuries. Buddhism and Taoism have so completely accepted each other that you can find statues of Buddha in Taoist temples. Hinduism accepts Jainist and Buddhist thought.
Contrarily, the religions of the Middle East with a common root have warred with each other. The brothers of the same house fight while friends live with each other in a coherent manner.
When I was in Japan I met several Shinto priests and Buddhist monks. They told me a story of travelling with President Bush of America. He asked a Shinto priest what the population of Shintoists in Japan was. The priest said, ``Eighty percent.`` And he asked a Buddhist monk what the percentage of Buddhists was and the monk said, ``Eighty percent.`` President Bush said, ``How could that be possible?`` And they said, ``It is possible! Buddhists go to Buddhist temples and Shinto temples and Shintoists go to Buddhist temples and Shinto temples.`` In this story, we have a healthy model of cultures maintaining their identity and at the same time interacting with each other.
And we can find a model in India also. Within one family you will find Jains and Hindus and Sikhs. Individuals are free to choose whatever representation of Divinity they wish. They are not expected to adhere to the choice of the father or mother. This coexistence can happen when we put values first and symbols and practices second.
The above content represents the view of the author only.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 5, 2004 09:41 am
This is from a Chinese newspaper.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/englis...tent_335195.htm
Why the East is superior to the West ...
masterkung Updated: 2004-05-31 10:08
Within the religious fanaticism you will find a basic lack of understanding of other religions. A comprehensive study of various religions would support the broader view that one supreme and caring Intelligence has expressed itself to different people at different time and in different ways.
Fanaticism comes to people who feel insecure. This broader view gives a sense of belongingness while still allowing people to be well-founded in their own tradition.
There are ten major religions in the world, six from the far east and four from the Middle East. In the Far East, Hinduism is the oldest. Then came Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Shintoism and Sikhism. From the Middle East, Zoroastrianism is the oldest, and then came Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Three of the Middle Eastern religions are rooted in the Old Testament: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In the Far East Shintoism and Taoism have completely separate sources. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism have roots in Hinduism.
The six religions of the Far East have peacefully coexisted and intermingled over the centuries. Buddhism and Taoism have so completely accepted each other that you can find statues of Buddha in Taoist temples. Hinduism accepts Jainist and Buddhist thought.
Contrarily, the religions of the Middle East with a common root have warred with each other. The brothers of the same house fight while friends live with each other in a coherent manner.
When I was in Japan I met several Shinto priests and Buddhist monks. They told me a story of travelling with President Bush of America. He asked a Shinto priest what the population of Shintoists in Japan was. The priest said, ``Eighty percent.`` And he asked a Buddhist monk what the percentage of Buddhists was and the monk said, ``Eighty percent.`` President Bush said, ``How could that be possible?`` And they said, ``It is possible! Buddhists go to Buddhist temples and Shinto temples and Shintoists go to Buddhist temples and Shinto temples.`` In this story, we have a healthy model of cultures maintaining their identity and at the same time interacting with each other.
And we can find a model in India also. Within one family you will find Jains and Hindus and Sikhs. Individuals are free to choose whatever representation of Divinity they wish. They are not expected to adhere to the choice of the father or mother. This coexistence can happen when we put values first and symbols and practices second.
The above content represents the view of the author only.
The Secularity of India
Paul Johnson, 06.21.04, 12:00 AM ET
More From Paul Johnson
In economic activities the greatest of virtues is tolerance. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm, and our age furnishes many examples of this. China began its astounding commercial and industrial takeoff only when Mao Zedong`s odiously intolerant form of communism was scrapped in favor of what might be called totalitarian laissez-faire.
India is another example. It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity.
In the last fiscal year India`s GDP grew an estimated 8%, and in the third quarter, 10%. India`s economy for the first time is expanding faster than China`s. For years India was the tortoise, China the hare. The race is on, and my money`s on India, because freedom--of movement, speech, the media--is always an economic asset.
When left to themselves, Indians (like the Chinese) always prosper as a community. Take the case of Uganda`s Indian population, which was expelled by the horrific dictator Idi Amin and received into the tolerant society of Britain. There are now more millionaires in this group than in any other recent immigrant community in Britain. They are a striking example of how far hard work, strong family bonds and a devotion to education can carry a people who have been stripped of all their worldly assets.
Common Denominator
The contrast between China and India--both moving steadily to join the advanced countries of the world--and those countries where Islam is dominant is marked. Whatever its merits may be, Islam is not famed for tolerance. Indeed, of the major world religions it is the least broad-minded and open to argument. With the rise of a new form of fundamentalism in recent decades, its intolerance has been growing--as has the concomitant poverty.
In the past when an Islamic society has been modified by a strong secular influence, economic progress has been possible. Take Iraq. Until 1958 the British-influenced Nuri as-Said regime, which was comparatively tolerant in its outlook, made good use of the country`s oil revenues. The Iraq Development Board was doing an excellent job. Had it been allowed to continue, this enlightened form of capitalist state planning would by now have made Iraq one of the richest countries in the world. Alas, the regime was too tolerant of extremists. In 1958 Nuri as-Said and all his colleagues were murdered by an alliance of Baathist officers and religious fanatics. Since then Iraq`s oil revenues have been wasted on war and armaments, and its people brutalized almost beyond belief.
The tale in Iran is similar. Under the secular regime of the last Shah the economy was going great guns, but then the Shah wasdriven out by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his zealots. Some Iranians believed the modernizing and industrialization were happening too fast. But at least Iran had been moving forward--incomes had risen and poverty was on the wane. Since the Iranian revolution this great and once highly civilized country has stagnated or gone backward, and all the money generated by its oil has been wasted.
There are many other examples. Algeria once had a flourishing agricultural sector, a significant industrial sector and highly productive oil and gas fields, but it has little to show for all that now. Libya`s Muammar Qaddafi may have come to his senses, but a generation of rich oil production has been wasted. Nigeria, where Islam is on the ascent, has also dissipated its oil wealth. Conditions there are less promising today than when Britain was in charge a half-century ago.
Saudi Arabia is another country where intolerance has held back economic advance. No nation has received more cash from its natural resources than has this Sunni Muslim state, with its ferocious tradition of Wahhabi fundamentalism. What`s happened to the wealth? Gone with the wind of bigotry. Some of the other oil-rich Gulf states have done a little better, but in none of them do enterprise and free-market capitalism flourish.
As for the less well endowed Islamic states like Pakistan and Bangladesh, it`s better to draw a veil over their misery. On the evidence of the second half of the 20th century it would appear that Islamic state control is a formula for continuing poverty, and Islamic fundamentalism a formula for extreme poverty.
The more I study history, the more I deplore the existence of those--be they clerics, bureaucrats or politicians--who think they know what`s best for ordinary people and impose it on them. We have a pungent example of this know-all mentality in the EU. The bureaucrats of Brussels have created yet another brand of intolerance that determines by law everything from the shape of bananas to the number of seats in a bus, from apple growing to house plumbing. As a result the German economy is contracting and the French economy is stagnant. There are now more unemployed people in single-currency EU Europe than there have been at any other time since the worst of the 1930s, and many of them will never work again.
Let those of us fortunate enough to live in the U.S. or Britain hang on to our traditions of tolerance at all costs, resisting like fury all those who seek to undermine them with political correctness or any other kind of dogma.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, former president of Mexico, in addition to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing this column. To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/free_forbes/2004/0621/041.html
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 5, 2004 09:41 am
Want to Prosper? Then Be TolerantPaul Johnson, 06.21.04, 12:00 AM ET
More From Paul Johnson
In economic activities the greatest of virtues is tolerance. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm, and our age furnishes many examples of this. China began its astounding commercial and industrial takeoff only when Mao Zedong`s odiously intolerant form of communism was scrapped in favor of what might be called totalitarian laissez-faire.
India is another example. It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity.
In the last fiscal year India`s GDP grew an estimated 8%, and in the third quarter, 10%. India`s economy for the first time is expanding faster than China`s. For years India was the tortoise, China the hare. The race is on, and my money`s on India, because freedom--of movement, speech, the media--is always an economic asset.
When left to themselves, Indians (like the Chinese) always prosper as a community. Take the case of Uganda`s Indian population, which was expelled by the horrific dictator Idi Amin and received into the tolerant society of Britain. There are now more millionaires in this group than in any other recent immigrant community in Britain. They are a striking example of how far hard work, strong family bonds and a devotion to education can carry a people who have been stripped of all their worldly assets.
Common Denominator
The contrast between China and India--both moving steadily to join the advanced countries of the world--and those countries where Islam is dominant is marked. Whatever its merits may be, Islam is not famed for tolerance. Indeed, of the major world religions it is the least broad-minded and open to argument. With the rise of a new form of fundamentalism in recent decades, its intolerance has been growing--as has the concomitant poverty.
In the past when an Islamic society has been modified by a strong secular influence, economic progress has been possible. Take Iraq. Until 1958 the British-influenced Nuri as-Said regime, which was comparatively tolerant in its outlook, made good use of the country`s oil revenues. The Iraq Development Board was doing an excellent job. Had it been allowed to continue, this enlightened form of capitalist state planning would by now have made Iraq one of the richest countries in the world. Alas, the regime was too tolerant of extremists. In 1958 Nuri as-Said and all his colleagues were murdered by an alliance of Baathist officers and religious fanatics. Since then Iraq`s oil revenues have been wasted on war and armaments, and its people brutalized almost beyond belief.
The tale in Iran is similar. Under the secular regime of the last Shah the economy was going great guns, but then the Shah wasdriven out by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his zealots. Some Iranians believed the modernizing and industrialization were happening too fast. But at least Iran had been moving forward--incomes had risen and poverty was on the wane. Since the Iranian revolution this great and once highly civilized country has stagnated or gone backward, and all the money generated by its oil has been wasted.
There are many other examples. Algeria once had a flourishing agricultural sector, a significant industrial sector and highly productive oil and gas fields, but it has little to show for all that now. Libya`s Muammar Qaddafi may have come to his senses, but a generation of rich oil production has been wasted. Nigeria, where Islam is on the ascent, has also dissipated its oil wealth. Conditions there are less promising today than when Britain was in charge a half-century ago.
Saudi Arabia is another country where intolerance has held back economic advance. No nation has received more cash from its natural resources than has this Sunni Muslim state, with its ferocious tradition of Wahhabi fundamentalism. What`s happened to the wealth? Gone with the wind of bigotry. Some of the other oil-rich Gulf states have done a little better, but in none of them do enterprise and free-market capitalism flourish.
As for the less well endowed Islamic states like Pakistan and Bangladesh, it`s better to draw a veil over their misery. On the evidence of the second half of the 20th century it would appear that Islamic state control is a formula for continuing poverty, and Islamic fundamentalism a formula for extreme poverty.
The more I study history, the more I deplore the existence of those--be they clerics, bureaucrats or politicians--who think they know what`s best for ordinary people and impose it on them. We have a pungent example of this know-all mentality in the EU. The bureaucrats of Brussels have created yet another brand of intolerance that determines by law everything from the shape of bananas to the number of seats in a bus, from apple growing to house plumbing. As a result the German economy is contracting and the French economy is stagnant. There are now more unemployed people in single-currency EU Europe than there have been at any other time since the worst of the 1930s, and many of them will never work again.
Let those of us fortunate enough to live in the U.S. or Britain hang on to our traditions of tolerance at all costs, resisting like fury all those who seek to undermine them with political correctness or any other kind of dogma.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, former president of Mexico, in addition to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing this column. To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/free_forbes/2004/0621/041.html
Balkan Tragedy: A Re-enactment of the 1971 Genocide in Bangladesh
But developmental inequality is what pushed the final button. East Pakistan was an economic basket case (as it continues to be today). ``Blessed`` by being at the convergence point of several natural phenomena; the southern third of East Pakistan/Bangladesh sits on the mouth of the Ganges River, where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. Never short of water, they regularly suffer from floods from the Ganges overflow and yearly Monsoons (hurricanes). A former International Relations professor of mine - originally from Thailand - once commented, that Bangladesh is situated in one of the harshest inhabited areas of the world. ``Why would people want to live there?`` He asked. ``It would do the international community good, to simply move the entire population out of there. It would save a lot of lives, money, and time in disaster relief efforts.``
East Pakistan - the more populous area - for years complained that they weren`t getting their fair share of central government budgets. After a period of military rule, in December 1970, the East Pakistani Awami League won absolute control over the newly formed parliament. With the Awami League set to control the government and demanding autonomy for East Pakistan in a federated state, General Yahya - junta leader from West Pakistan - chose to disband the assembly and invaded the East. Civil war broke out and after a half a million Bengalis (East Pakistanis) were massacred, India invaded to establish order. Ultimately India recognized Bangladeshi independence, and so did the international community. But India continues to suffer till today from the Muslim fanatics of Pakistan.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 06:32 pm
For those of you who don`t remember, East and West Pakistan fought a bloody civil war in 1971, and the outcome was Bangladesh, an independent state. Although both parts of Pakistan were Muslim - the only reason for its separation from India in 1947 in the first place - cultural and ethnic differences led to serious animosity between the two sides. But developmental inequality is what pushed the final button. East Pakistan was an economic basket case (as it continues to be today). ``Blessed`` by being at the convergence point of several natural phenomena; the southern third of East Pakistan/Bangladesh sits on the mouth of the Ganges River, where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. Never short of water, they regularly suffer from floods from the Ganges overflow and yearly Monsoons (hurricanes). A former International Relations professor of mine - originally from Thailand - once commented, that Bangladesh is situated in one of the harshest inhabited areas of the world. ``Why would people want to live there?`` He asked. ``It would do the international community good, to simply move the entire population out of there. It would save a lot of lives, money, and time in disaster relief efforts.``
East Pakistan - the more populous area - for years complained that they weren`t getting their fair share of central government budgets. After a period of military rule, in December 1970, the East Pakistani Awami League won absolute control over the newly formed parliament. With the Awami League set to control the government and demanding autonomy for East Pakistan in a federated state, General Yahya - junta leader from West Pakistan - chose to disband the assembly and invaded the East. Civil war broke out and after a half a million Bengalis (East Pakistanis) were massacred, India invaded to establish order. Ultimately India recognized Bangladeshi independence, and so did the international community. But India continues to suffer till today from the Muslim fanatics of Pakistan.
India, Pakistan and America’s Mixed Signals
But developmental inequality is what pushed the final button. East Pakistan was an economic basket case (as it continues to be today). ``Blessed`` by being at the convergence point of several natural phenomena; the southern third of East Pakistan/Bangladesh sits on the mouth of the Ganges River, where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. Never short of water, they regularly suffer from floods from the Ganges overflow and yearly Monsoons (hurricanes). A former International Relations professor of mine - originally from Thailand - once commented, that Bangladesh is situated in one of the harshest inhabited areas of the world. ``Why would people want to live there?`` He asked. ``It would do the international community good, to simply move the entire population out of there. It would save a lot of lives, money, and time in disaster relief efforts.``
East Pakistan - the more populous area - for years complained that they weren`t getting their fair share of central government budgets. After a period of military rule, in December 1970, the East Pakistani Awami League won absolute control over the newly formed parliament. With the Awami League set to control the government and demanding autonomy for East Pakistan in a federated state, General Yahya - junta leader from West Pakistan - chose to disband the assembly and invaded the East. Civil war broke out and after a half a million Bengalis (East Pakistanis) were massacred, India invaded to establish order. Ultimately India recognized Bangladeshi independence, and so did the international community. But India continues to suffer till today from the Muslim fanatics of Pakistan.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 06:32 pm
For those of you who don`t remember, East and West Pakistan fought a bloody civil war in 1971, and the outcome was Bangladesh, an independent state. Although both parts of Pakistan were Muslim - the only reason for its separation from India in 1947 in the first place - cultural and ethnic differences led to serious animosity between the two sides. But developmental inequality is what pushed the final button. East Pakistan was an economic basket case (as it continues to be today). ``Blessed`` by being at the convergence point of several natural phenomena; the southern third of East Pakistan/Bangladesh sits on the mouth of the Ganges River, where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. Never short of water, they regularly suffer from floods from the Ganges overflow and yearly Monsoons (hurricanes). A former International Relations professor of mine - originally from Thailand - once commented, that Bangladesh is situated in one of the harshest inhabited areas of the world. ``Why would people want to live there?`` He asked. ``It would do the international community good, to simply move the entire population out of there. It would save a lot of lives, money, and time in disaster relief efforts.``
East Pakistan - the more populous area - for years complained that they weren`t getting their fair share of central government budgets. After a period of military rule, in December 1970, the East Pakistani Awami League won absolute control over the newly formed parliament. With the Awami League set to control the government and demanding autonomy for East Pakistan in a federated state, General Yahya - junta leader from West Pakistan - chose to disband the assembly and invaded the East. Civil war broke out and after a half a million Bengalis (East Pakistanis) were massacred, India invaded to establish order. Ultimately India recognized Bangladeshi independence, and so did the international community. But India continues to suffer till today from the Muslim fanatics of Pakistan.
The Secularity of India
By M H Lakdawala
Mumbai: With the election season comes a slew of pre-poll surveys predicting the outcome. In this election Muslims are at the center of poll strategy as BJP is repositioning itself as a Centrist party with a space for Muslims.
The leftist argues that BJP should not be trusted and Muslims should not forget the Gujarat carnage engineered by one of its chief Ministers. Non-Congress secularists are trying hard to reinforce the stereotype that BJP is anti-Muslim and secularists are the only protectors of the Muslim community. Congress is still taking the Muslim vote for granted and still pretending that Muslims have no alternative but to vote for the Congress.
What about the Muslim voters particularly its youth? Do they believe the newly discovered love for Muslims by the BJP? How they compare secularist with the Hindutva forces? Does Congress deserve one more chance and hence their vote? Do they consider Leftist as the new ally to fight communal forces?
To find answers to these questions, The Milli Gazette in association with Trends Research and Analysis Center (TRAC), Mumbai, conducted a prepoll survey amongst Muslim youth (age between 18-35) in Mumbai. Survey methodology was based on stratified sampling with the survey population of 418.
The respondents were chosen from different colleges, and slum pockets across Muslim majority areas as well as non Muslim majority areas across Mumbai, professionals, hawkers and Businessmen.
Surprisingly 78% of the respondents said that they are not interested in voting as it does not make any difference to their own personal and their community’s conditions. Though most of the respondents agreed that vote is very precious and they value it but the performance of the political parties and elected representatives had made them cynical.
Will vote or Not in coming election: Not interested in voting 78%; intend to vote 13%; may or may not vote 07%; not yet decided 02%.
Raisa Khan, 18, a BA student has decided not to cast her vote as she finds all candidates equally selfish and self-centered. ``Though in the past I was really exited about casting my first vote when I become eligible I lost interest as none of the candidates deserves my vote. So why waste my vote by casting it to the wrong candidate``, she said.
Tasneem Shaikh, 19, a BMS student intends to vote for the good candidate. `` I would like to vote for the candidate who can represent our constituency problem and also have a vision to tackle the contemporary issues faced by our country. Since none of the candidates is worth my vote I will not vote``, she said.
Rehan Shah, 31, hawker, selling ready-made garments outside Churchgate railway station in south Mumbai is a regular voter. This time he has decided not to vote. `` In the past I did vote either for Congress or third front candidate. But they turn out to be elusive and never bother to visit our constituency and see for themselves how we are living in conditions not fit for even animals``, he said.
Reason for not voting; Makes no difference who rules the country 69%; Congress is better then BJP 18%; Non-Congress secular parties are worth the Muslim vote 4%. Seventy-eight percent of the respondents said all political parties and candidates are more or less same for Muslims. How about forming a political party for the Muslim, as other communities have done. Eighty-three percent of the respondents said no.Saeed Ahmed a restaurateur believes that forming a Muslim political party in a plural country like India is not going to solve the community’s problems. ``Instead of solving the problem of the community a Muslim political front will send a wrong signal and will provide a handle to the communal forces to project Muslims as self-centered and such party can be easily branded as communal``, he said.
Sixty-four percent of the respondents do not believe that secular parties including Congress when voted to power will not play communal politics. Only 22% said that BJP is more communal as compared to other parties. 69% said that Congress as well as other secular parties are equally communal when it comes to the Muslim community.
Rafique, 28,vegetable seller in Bandra East, living in the slums had never voted for the ``so called secular parties``. `` My vote goes to Shiv Sena both in Parliamentary as well as local elections. They can be approached with the problems and Sena leaders do accommodate our interest and help us when we are in dire strait. Hence in our constituency Sena candidate wins as Muslims vote for the party,`` he said. The Konkan region in Maharastra is supporting Shiv Sena since past several elections and Congress and other secular parties are punished by Muslim voters for non-performance.
Issues important to them: Security 22%; Non interference in their Religion 18%; Opportunities in job Market 17%; Inflation 14%; Educational infrastructure 13%; Peace and communal harmony 11%; Corruption 3%; Babri Masjid 2%
How about Muslim political leadership in various parties. Ninety-seven percent of the respondents opined that they are equally unreliable. Rauf Shaikh 27, a networking expert said that the Muslim politician is busy striving to prove himself secular and has no time to concentrate on the Muslim community issues. ``Not a single Muslim politician today enjoys the confidence of Muslim voters of his own constituency leave alone all Muslim`` he said.
Obaid Akhtar 34, Taxi driver was a hard-core supporter of the Muslim league and later Samajwadi Party (SP). This year he intends to vote for Congress.Obaid is completely disillusioned by the narrow vision of the Mumbai SP leadership. ``In the past I had campaigned for the SP candidates. But its Mumbai leadership’s narrow caste based approach giving importance to those from UP and only concentrating on superficial issues led to an exodus of talented people from the party``, he said. SP in Maharastra is now reduced to a party of close supporters of its Mumbai president. Hence I have decided to cast my vote for Congress instead of wasting it on a SP candidate whose basic purpose is to eat into Congress votes which results in the BJP candidate’s victory since the last two elections``, said Obaid.
Leaders they admire: None 83%; Laloo Prasad Yadav 9%; Mulayam Singh Yadav 8%; Atal Bihari Vajpayee Nil; Any Muslim leader: Regional or National Nil.
Forty-three percent of the respondents agree that BJP’s India shining campaign has effectively diverted the public attention from BJP’s communal politics of the past and diluted its image as anti Muslim party. Abdul Rauf a MBA student opines that the BJP brand equity depends on its anti Muslim stance. ``If Muslims start joining the party its brand equity will be compromised and it will lose its potency as Congress lost its position as an umbrella organisation for different communities once it started playing communal politics``, said Rauf.
Does whoever rule at the centre matter to them: Not at all 48%; To some extent 39%; Does matter to a large extent 11%; Do not know 2%. Eighty-three percent said that they are not afraid of BJP coming to power. ``Does it really matter asks Salim Malik, 23, a sales man in a supermarket. In Maharashtra Congress is ruling party but still riots take place. In fact the worst riots in Mumbai took place when Congress was the ruling party. I am not going to vote as it really does not make any difference`` he said.
Muslim youth of today is confident, sure about its decision, well informed and guiltless, minus the historical baggage related to partition. It’s no more a cakewalk for secular parties to garner Muslim votes. They have to perform and win over the Muslim votes. Mere rhetoric is no longer going to work.
http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/2004/16-30Apr04-Print-Edition/1604200420.htm
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 05:37 pm
‘Secular parties are equally communal’By M H Lakdawala
Mumbai: With the election season comes a slew of pre-poll surveys predicting the outcome. In this election Muslims are at the center of poll strategy as BJP is repositioning itself as a Centrist party with a space for Muslims.
The leftist argues that BJP should not be trusted and Muslims should not forget the Gujarat carnage engineered by one of its chief Ministers. Non-Congress secularists are trying hard to reinforce the stereotype that BJP is anti-Muslim and secularists are the only protectors of the Muslim community. Congress is still taking the Muslim vote for granted and still pretending that Muslims have no alternative but to vote for the Congress.
What about the Muslim voters particularly its youth? Do they believe the newly discovered love for Muslims by the BJP? How they compare secularist with the Hindutva forces? Does Congress deserve one more chance and hence their vote? Do they consider Leftist as the new ally to fight communal forces?
To find answers to these questions, The Milli Gazette in association with Trends Research and Analysis Center (TRAC), Mumbai, conducted a prepoll survey amongst Muslim youth (age between 18-35) in Mumbai. Survey methodology was based on stratified sampling with the survey population of 418.
The respondents were chosen from different colleges, and slum pockets across Muslim majority areas as well as non Muslim majority areas across Mumbai, professionals, hawkers and Businessmen.
Surprisingly 78% of the respondents said that they are not interested in voting as it does not make any difference to their own personal and their community’s conditions. Though most of the respondents agreed that vote is very precious and they value it but the performance of the political parties and elected representatives had made them cynical.
Will vote or Not in coming election: Not interested in voting 78%; intend to vote 13%; may or may not vote 07%; not yet decided 02%.
Raisa Khan, 18, a BA student has decided not to cast her vote as she finds all candidates equally selfish and self-centered. ``Though in the past I was really exited about casting my first vote when I become eligible I lost interest as none of the candidates deserves my vote. So why waste my vote by casting it to the wrong candidate``, she said.
Tasneem Shaikh, 19, a BMS student intends to vote for the good candidate. `` I would like to vote for the candidate who can represent our constituency problem and also have a vision to tackle the contemporary issues faced by our country. Since none of the candidates is worth my vote I will not vote``, she said.
Rehan Shah, 31, hawker, selling ready-made garments outside Churchgate railway station in south Mumbai is a regular voter. This time he has decided not to vote. `` In the past I did vote either for Congress or third front candidate. But they turn out to be elusive and never bother to visit our constituency and see for themselves how we are living in conditions not fit for even animals``, he said.
Reason for not voting; Makes no difference who rules the country 69%; Congress is better then BJP 18%; Non-Congress secular parties are worth the Muslim vote 4%. Seventy-eight percent of the respondents said all political parties and candidates are more or less same for Muslims. How about forming a political party for the Muslim, as other communities have done. Eighty-three percent of the respondents said no.Saeed Ahmed a restaurateur believes that forming a Muslim political party in a plural country like India is not going to solve the community’s problems. ``Instead of solving the problem of the community a Muslim political front will send a wrong signal and will provide a handle to the communal forces to project Muslims as self-centered and such party can be easily branded as communal``, he said.
Sixty-four percent of the respondents do not believe that secular parties including Congress when voted to power will not play communal politics. Only 22% said that BJP is more communal as compared to other parties. 69% said that Congress as well as other secular parties are equally communal when it comes to the Muslim community.
Rafique, 28,vegetable seller in Bandra East, living in the slums had never voted for the ``so called secular parties``. `` My vote goes to Shiv Sena both in Parliamentary as well as local elections. They can be approached with the problems and Sena leaders do accommodate our interest and help us when we are in dire strait. Hence in our constituency Sena candidate wins as Muslims vote for the party,`` he said. The Konkan region in Maharastra is supporting Shiv Sena since past several elections and Congress and other secular parties are punished by Muslim voters for non-performance.
Issues important to them: Security 22%; Non interference in their Religion 18%; Opportunities in job Market 17%; Inflation 14%; Educational infrastructure 13%; Peace and communal harmony 11%; Corruption 3%; Babri Masjid 2%
How about Muslim political leadership in various parties. Ninety-seven percent of the respondents opined that they are equally unreliable. Rauf Shaikh 27, a networking expert said that the Muslim politician is busy striving to prove himself secular and has no time to concentrate on the Muslim community issues. ``Not a single Muslim politician today enjoys the confidence of Muslim voters of his own constituency leave alone all Muslim`` he said.
Obaid Akhtar 34, Taxi driver was a hard-core supporter of the Muslim league and later Samajwadi Party (SP). This year he intends to vote for Congress.Obaid is completely disillusioned by the narrow vision of the Mumbai SP leadership. ``In the past I had campaigned for the SP candidates. But its Mumbai leadership’s narrow caste based approach giving importance to those from UP and only concentrating on superficial issues led to an exodus of talented people from the party``, he said. SP in Maharastra is now reduced to a party of close supporters of its Mumbai president. Hence I have decided to cast my vote for Congress instead of wasting it on a SP candidate whose basic purpose is to eat into Congress votes which results in the BJP candidate’s victory since the last two elections``, said Obaid.
Leaders they admire: None 83%; Laloo Prasad Yadav 9%; Mulayam Singh Yadav 8%; Atal Bihari Vajpayee Nil; Any Muslim leader: Regional or National Nil.
Forty-three percent of the respondents agree that BJP’s India shining campaign has effectively diverted the public attention from BJP’s communal politics of the past and diluted its image as anti Muslim party. Abdul Rauf a MBA student opines that the BJP brand equity depends on its anti Muslim stance. ``If Muslims start joining the party its brand equity will be compromised and it will lose its potency as Congress lost its position as an umbrella organisation for different communities once it started playing communal politics``, said Rauf.
Does whoever rule at the centre matter to them: Not at all 48%; To some extent 39%; Does matter to a large extent 11%; Do not know 2%. Eighty-three percent said that they are not afraid of BJP coming to power. ``Does it really matter asks Salim Malik, 23, a sales man in a supermarket. In Maharashtra Congress is ruling party but still riots take place. In fact the worst riots in Mumbai took place when Congress was the ruling party. I am not going to vote as it really does not make any difference`` he said.
Muslim youth of today is confident, sure about its decision, well informed and guiltless, minus the historical baggage related to partition. It’s no more a cakewalk for secular parties to garner Muslim votes. They have to perform and win over the Muslim votes. Mere rhetoric is no longer going to work.
http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/2004/16-30Apr04-Print-Edition/1604200420.htm
Hoping, Without Hope
A sliver of hope for Christian women who suffer beatings, rape, and forced conversions to Islam.
by Deann Alford | posted 06/01/2004
For some reason, Maria`s hands and feet had not been tied by her husband, Mohammed, before he left the house. And none of Mohammed`s family was home—only her year-old son, Joshua, who whined for milk. So the pregnant 20-year-old Christian found 10 rupees and set out with the boy to buy some.
It was the first time in almost three years she had stepped out of the house in northeastern Pakistan. In December of 1997, her Muslim uncle had sold her to Mohammed for $1,400—without ever telling her immediate family, she later found out. Since then, she had endured daily beatings from Mohammed and his family. As she stood alone on the street, she forgot about the milk. Instead, she boarded a bus headed for her home city. Maria then realized she didn`t have enough money to pay the fare and began to cry. A stranger paid her fare.
Maria found her family, who were at first overjoyed to see her. Three years earlier, they had tried to file a missing persons report, but since they refused to pay a bribe, the police took no action. Maria told her parents and brothers about the brutality she had endured and her forced conversion to Islam. She also explained that her husband had changed her name.
Though she never personally embraced Islam, Pakistani society considered her Muslim, and the men in Maria`s family knew they could suffer reprisal for sheltering her. So they told her she had to leave. Frantically searching for help, Maria`s mother learned of a Pakistan-based Christian organization, the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS). Maria presented herself to the organization`s social workers, who immediately found her space in its Christian women`s shelter. In a few weeks, CLAAS lawyers began filing for divorce on her behalf.
Since 1992 CLAAS has helped victims of violence and addressed human-rights issues for religious minorities, women, and children. Founded in 1999, the shelter, called Apna Ghar (``Our Home`` in Urdu), helps survivors of religious intolerance, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and even human trafficking who need assistance, protection, and rehabilitation.
On May 2, 2001, Maria gave birth and named her daughter Jenny.
``God brought me to such a shelter,`` Maria says, ``where my children are loved a lot, where they love me a lot and care for my children.``
Mistreated Minority
Maria, Joshua, and Jenny`s story illustrates some of the problems facing Pakistan`s minority Christian community of 4 million (2.7 percent of the population) in an officially Muslim nation. Ninety percent of the nation`s Christians live in Punjab (which includes Lahore and Islamabad), making them the region`s largest religious minority.
Christian women in Pakistan suffer disproportionately, and their suffering remains largely unknown in the international community and the Western church. Most women live with their husbands` families and are not given much protection if the husband is an abuser. Two western Pakistani provinces have imposed shari`ah (a strict Islamic law) and taken away women`s right to vote. However, Ann Buwalda, U.S. director of Jubilee Campaign, which helps fund CLAAS`s work, says Pakistani women as a whole are not so ``utterly`` dependent on men as those in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Per capita gross national income for Pakistanis is around $420 a year. Pakistani church leaders estimate that at least 85 percent of the Christian minority is poor. Most live in rural areas, have menial jobs and little education, and own no land. Many Christian women work as servants for Muslim families—making themselves vulnerable to rape, forced conversion, and other indignities.
Apna Ghar is many Christian women`s only hope. Eiga Francis Kenny, 33, began the project in 1999. She is daughter of CLAAS`s founder and director, Joseph Francis. She often cried as she heard dozens of mostly poor, unskilled, illiterate Christian women and girls tell stories of rape, batterings, abandonment, forced conversions to Islam, and their attempts to flee violence and persecution. They often had no place to go and no means for a livelihood—except prostitution.
``In Pakistan, the fate of all poor women is the same, whether they are Christian or Muslim,`` she says. ``They`re beaten, tortured, hit, abducted. But Christian women are more subjected to this because they are low [in status], and income-wise, they are very weak, with no political access.``
So volunteers created an emergency women`s shelter in a room above the CLAAS office. In 2000, to improve security and provide a more home-like environment, Apna Ghar moved to a secret group home in greater Lahore.
Few Rights
Muslims use a combination of law and custom to make conversions stick. ``When [a Christian woman] is kidnapped or abducted and taken to court, she has been threatened in such a way that she cannot raise her voice, and she has to accept whatever the abductor [tells] her to do,`` says Sunita Cornelius, CLAAS`s office manager. Muslim witnesses then certify she`s Muslim and force her to marry.
Once a Muslim asserts in court that a Christian woman has converted to Islam, no law enforcement officer will bother confirming consent, though Pakistani law doesn`t support this practice.
These same laws and customs create other injustices. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, as of December 2003 more than 20,000 women languished in prisons under adultery laws. Their crime: they had been raped. Women who reject men`s advances are sometimes doused with acid in reprisal. In a society where a key value of women lies in their ability to bear children, barren women are often abandoned.
According to the World Development Indicators database of the World Bank, the nation ranks below Southern Asia`s average when it comes to education: the country`s female illiteracy rate is 70.3 percent. In 1995 the maternal mortality rate was 200 per 100,000 live births.
Sometimes, though, the danger comes from fellow Christians and even their own families, in part because it is a culture where parents arrange practically every marriage.
There`s Esther, 20, whose drug-addicted Christian husband, who was also her cousin, abandoned her six months into the marriage. She still was forced to live with his family, whose members beat her. Her father stayed out of it. Esther`s mother learned of CLAAS from a pastor and referred her there. Esther lived in Apna Ghar for four years, where she studied tailoring at a trade school for Christian girls.
Or consider Shagufta, who hadn`t conceived a child seven years into her marriage. Her in-laws beat her and finally kicked her out of the house. When she returned home, her stepfather refused to take her in. Penniless, she begged a rickshaw driver to take her to any church. A local Church of Pakistan bishop referred her to CLAAS.
CLAAS knows of no other Pakistani shelters exclusively intended for Christians and which provide legal aid and security. Pakistan`s government and some nongovernmental organizations operate other women`s shelters, but Muslims there tend to harass the Christians. ``It`s not just giving shelter for a person,`` Kenny says. ``It`s protecting them from all danger, taking their case to court, protecting them afterward. It`s a long-term commitment.``
In January, the shelter broke ground on a building that can house up to 50, but it barely scratches the surface of need. ``The work we do is nothing if we compare it to the whole community,`` Cornelius says.
CLAAS networks with churches in Punjab and around Pakistan, and Muslim human-rights organizations refer to CLAAS any Christian women seeking aid. Still, relatively few know about the group, which is partly funded by groups such as Jubilee Campaign and International Christian Concern.
Spiritual Battles
Esther clings to her faith that God has a plan for her. ``All of us living here have suffered from different problems, and I`ve learned we should not stop praying, because God is with us,`` she says. Asked whether she is angry with God for her circumstances, she says, ``Nay``—Urdu for no. ``I`ve never gotten angry with God. I believe whatever God will do to me will be the best.``
It`s hard to overstate the impact CLAAS has on these young women. By the time many of them arrive in Apna Ghar, their self-esteem has been destroyed, and they fear for their lives. Through pastoral counseling, Bible study, and the comfort of a secure environment, the women learn in concrete ways that God loves them.
Because living as a single is not culturally appropriate in Pakistan, especially for a woman, CLAAS helps find husbands for the women. In Esther`s case, CLAAS contacted a pastor who knew of a widower with several children. In late January Esther married him.
CLAAS director Francis`s wife, Monica, manages Apna Ghar and strives to make it homey. At Epiphany, ``Happy birthday, Jesus`` was spelled in Christmas garland and paper letters over the doorway to the bedroom. Christmas tinsel crisscrossed the ceiling and dangled from the walls.
The six women living in Apna Ghar take turns cooking meals. Days are long in close quarters, with few opportunities to get out. But no one seriously complains. All are painfully aware of the danger of abduction—or worse.
A pastor visits regularly. ``The girls do a lot of praying here,`` Monica Francis says. Professional counseling isn`t available because CLAAS knows of no Christian counselors.
``I always want to teach them that all their relatives have left them, but God loves them,`` Monica Francis says. ``Before coming here, most of them think God doesn`t love them, but after coming here, they know God does.``
Restoring their spirits takes time. ``Mostly they are very scared because of all that`s happened to them,`` she says. ``Though they are emotionally very much broken, they have managed to start a new life with people around them caring for them.``
Seeking Rights
To fight forced conversion and marriage, CLAAS and other Christian lawyers have drawn up a bill for Christian lawmaker Akram Gill to present to Parliament. The bill requires underage Christian girls to have their parents` consent for marriage and conversion.
CLAAS`s lawyers are helping Maria gain permanent custody of her children. It is a difficult battle.
Because the couple wed in a Muslim ceremony, and because the children`s father is Muslim, shari`ah declares that the children are Muslim. If she honestly admits she was forced to convert, she will lose custody of her children because she will be viewed as a Muslim woman who deserted a marriage.
As it is, Mohammed has monthly child visitation rights. He has asked the court to call the children by their Muslim names. All legal documents concerning the case refer to Maria by the Islamic name her husband gave her.
Finding a Christian husband for her will not be easy.
Finding one for Shagufta won`t be, either, Kenny says. ``The parents don`t want her,`` she says. ``And who wants a wife who can`t bear children?``
Days can be long at Apna Ghar. Today after lunch, the smell of spicy chicken and rice hangs in the air. The women gather around a metal pan filled with coals in the center of the kitchen. Their smiles and laughter don`t betray the burdens each woman bears. They sing Urdu hymns from a handwritten songbook. Outside, a loudspeaker sounds an Islamic call to prayer.
Deann Alford is a writer and editor in Austin, Texas.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 05:37 pm
The Secret ShelterA sliver of hope for Christian women who suffer beatings, rape, and forced conversions to Islam.
by Deann Alford | posted 06/01/2004
For some reason, Maria`s hands and feet had not been tied by her husband, Mohammed, before he left the house. And none of Mohammed`s family was home—only her year-old son, Joshua, who whined for milk. So the pregnant 20-year-old Christian found 10 rupees and set out with the boy to buy some.
It was the first time in almost three years she had stepped out of the house in northeastern Pakistan. In December of 1997, her Muslim uncle had sold her to Mohammed for $1,400—without ever telling her immediate family, she later found out. Since then, she had endured daily beatings from Mohammed and his family. As she stood alone on the street, she forgot about the milk. Instead, she boarded a bus headed for her home city. Maria then realized she didn`t have enough money to pay the fare and began to cry. A stranger paid her fare.
Maria found her family, who were at first overjoyed to see her. Three years earlier, they had tried to file a missing persons report, but since they refused to pay a bribe, the police took no action. Maria told her parents and brothers about the brutality she had endured and her forced conversion to Islam. She also explained that her husband had changed her name.
Though she never personally embraced Islam, Pakistani society considered her Muslim, and the men in Maria`s family knew they could suffer reprisal for sheltering her. So they told her she had to leave. Frantically searching for help, Maria`s mother learned of a Pakistan-based Christian organization, the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS). Maria presented herself to the organization`s social workers, who immediately found her space in its Christian women`s shelter. In a few weeks, CLAAS lawyers began filing for divorce on her behalf.
Since 1992 CLAAS has helped victims of violence and addressed human-rights issues for religious minorities, women, and children. Founded in 1999, the shelter, called Apna Ghar (``Our Home`` in Urdu), helps survivors of religious intolerance, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and even human trafficking who need assistance, protection, and rehabilitation.
On May 2, 2001, Maria gave birth and named her daughter Jenny.
``God brought me to such a shelter,`` Maria says, ``where my children are loved a lot, where they love me a lot and care for my children.``
Mistreated Minority
Maria, Joshua, and Jenny`s story illustrates some of the problems facing Pakistan`s minority Christian community of 4 million (2.7 percent of the population) in an officially Muslim nation. Ninety percent of the nation`s Christians live in Punjab (which includes Lahore and Islamabad), making them the region`s largest religious minority.
Christian women in Pakistan suffer disproportionately, and their suffering remains largely unknown in the international community and the Western church. Most women live with their husbands` families and are not given much protection if the husband is an abuser. Two western Pakistani provinces have imposed shari`ah (a strict Islamic law) and taken away women`s right to vote. However, Ann Buwalda, U.S. director of Jubilee Campaign, which helps fund CLAAS`s work, says Pakistani women as a whole are not so ``utterly`` dependent on men as those in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Per capita gross national income for Pakistanis is around $420 a year. Pakistani church leaders estimate that at least 85 percent of the Christian minority is poor. Most live in rural areas, have menial jobs and little education, and own no land. Many Christian women work as servants for Muslim families—making themselves vulnerable to rape, forced conversion, and other indignities.
Apna Ghar is many Christian women`s only hope. Eiga Francis Kenny, 33, began the project in 1999. She is daughter of CLAAS`s founder and director, Joseph Francis. She often cried as she heard dozens of mostly poor, unskilled, illiterate Christian women and girls tell stories of rape, batterings, abandonment, forced conversions to Islam, and their attempts to flee violence and persecution. They often had no place to go and no means for a livelihood—except prostitution.
``In Pakistan, the fate of all poor women is the same, whether they are Christian or Muslim,`` she says. ``They`re beaten, tortured, hit, abducted. But Christian women are more subjected to this because they are low [in status], and income-wise, they are very weak, with no political access.``
So volunteers created an emergency women`s shelter in a room above the CLAAS office. In 2000, to improve security and provide a more home-like environment, Apna Ghar moved to a secret group home in greater Lahore.
Few Rights
Muslims use a combination of law and custom to make conversions stick. ``When [a Christian woman] is kidnapped or abducted and taken to court, she has been threatened in such a way that she cannot raise her voice, and she has to accept whatever the abductor [tells] her to do,`` says Sunita Cornelius, CLAAS`s office manager. Muslim witnesses then certify she`s Muslim and force her to marry.
Once a Muslim asserts in court that a Christian woman has converted to Islam, no law enforcement officer will bother confirming consent, though Pakistani law doesn`t support this practice.
These same laws and customs create other injustices. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, as of December 2003 more than 20,000 women languished in prisons under adultery laws. Their crime: they had been raped. Women who reject men`s advances are sometimes doused with acid in reprisal. In a society where a key value of women lies in their ability to bear children, barren women are often abandoned.
According to the World Development Indicators database of the World Bank, the nation ranks below Southern Asia`s average when it comes to education: the country`s female illiteracy rate is 70.3 percent. In 1995 the maternal mortality rate was 200 per 100,000 live births.
Sometimes, though, the danger comes from fellow Christians and even their own families, in part because it is a culture where parents arrange practically every marriage.
There`s Esther, 20, whose drug-addicted Christian husband, who was also her cousin, abandoned her six months into the marriage. She still was forced to live with his family, whose members beat her. Her father stayed out of it. Esther`s mother learned of CLAAS from a pastor and referred her there. Esther lived in Apna Ghar for four years, where she studied tailoring at a trade school for Christian girls.
Or consider Shagufta, who hadn`t conceived a child seven years into her marriage. Her in-laws beat her and finally kicked her out of the house. When she returned home, her stepfather refused to take her in. Penniless, she begged a rickshaw driver to take her to any church. A local Church of Pakistan bishop referred her to CLAAS.
CLAAS knows of no other Pakistani shelters exclusively intended for Christians and which provide legal aid and security. Pakistan`s government and some nongovernmental organizations operate other women`s shelters, but Muslims there tend to harass the Christians. ``It`s not just giving shelter for a person,`` Kenny says. ``It`s protecting them from all danger, taking their case to court, protecting them afterward. It`s a long-term commitment.``
In January, the shelter broke ground on a building that can house up to 50, but it barely scratches the surface of need. ``The work we do is nothing if we compare it to the whole community,`` Cornelius says.
CLAAS networks with churches in Punjab and around Pakistan, and Muslim human-rights organizations refer to CLAAS any Christian women seeking aid. Still, relatively few know about the group, which is partly funded by groups such as Jubilee Campaign and International Christian Concern.
Spiritual Battles
Esther clings to her faith that God has a plan for her. ``All of us living here have suffered from different problems, and I`ve learned we should not stop praying, because God is with us,`` she says. Asked whether she is angry with God for her circumstances, she says, ``Nay``—Urdu for no. ``I`ve never gotten angry with God. I believe whatever God will do to me will be the best.``
It`s hard to overstate the impact CLAAS has on these young women. By the time many of them arrive in Apna Ghar, their self-esteem has been destroyed, and they fear for their lives. Through pastoral counseling, Bible study, and the comfort of a secure environment, the women learn in concrete ways that God loves them.
Because living as a single is not culturally appropriate in Pakistan, especially for a woman, CLAAS helps find husbands for the women. In Esther`s case, CLAAS contacted a pastor who knew of a widower with several children. In late January Esther married him.
CLAAS director Francis`s wife, Monica, manages Apna Ghar and strives to make it homey. At Epiphany, ``Happy birthday, Jesus`` was spelled in Christmas garland and paper letters over the doorway to the bedroom. Christmas tinsel crisscrossed the ceiling and dangled from the walls.
The six women living in Apna Ghar take turns cooking meals. Days are long in close quarters, with few opportunities to get out. But no one seriously complains. All are painfully aware of the danger of abduction—or worse.
A pastor visits regularly. ``The girls do a lot of praying here,`` Monica Francis says. Professional counseling isn`t available because CLAAS knows of no Christian counselors.
``I always want to teach them that all their relatives have left them, but God loves them,`` Monica Francis says. ``Before coming here, most of them think God doesn`t love them, but after coming here, they know God does.``
Restoring their spirits takes time. ``Mostly they are very scared because of all that`s happened to them,`` she says. ``Though they are emotionally very much broken, they have managed to start a new life with people around them caring for them.``
Seeking Rights
To fight forced conversion and marriage, CLAAS and other Christian lawyers have drawn up a bill for Christian lawmaker Akram Gill to present to Parliament. The bill requires underage Christian girls to have their parents` consent for marriage and conversion.
CLAAS`s lawyers are helping Maria gain permanent custody of her children. It is a difficult battle.
Because the couple wed in a Muslim ceremony, and because the children`s father is Muslim, shari`ah declares that the children are Muslim. If she honestly admits she was forced to convert, she will lose custody of her children because she will be viewed as a Muslim woman who deserted a marriage.
As it is, Mohammed has monthly child visitation rights. He has asked the court to call the children by their Muslim names. All legal documents concerning the case refer to Maria by the Islamic name her husband gave her.
Finding a Christian husband for her will not be easy.
Finding one for Shagufta won`t be, either, Kenny says. ``The parents don`t want her,`` she says. ``And who wants a wife who can`t bear children?``
Days can be long at Apna Ghar. Today after lunch, the smell of spicy chicken and rice hangs in the air. The women gather around a metal pan filled with coals in the center of the kitchen. Their smiles and laughter don`t betray the burdens each woman bears. They sing Urdu hymns from a handwritten songbook. Outside, a loudspeaker sounds an Islamic call to prayer.
Deann Alford is a writer and editor in Austin, Texas.
The Vicious Cycle
Karachi`s Lawless Streets Attract Mix of Militants
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
KARACHI, Pakistan -- One block down and just around the corner from the U.S. Consulate, which was shaken by a car bomb this month, stands the restaurant where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared. Three blocks farther along is the Sheraton Hotel, where another car bomb killed 11 French engineers last month. From there it`s just a hundred yards to the bridge where, five years ago, a man with an AK-47 shot dead four Houston oil company auditors on their way to work.
And this would be Karachi`s very best neighborhood.
``Oh yes,`` said shopkeeper Aqeel Ahmed, explaining the inverted logic that governs life in Karachi, a city of 14 million that is almost as violent as it is cosmopolitan. ``Where there`s a lot of security, that`s the most dangerous place.``
Here, on the baking brown coast of the Arabian Sea, 25 years of urban warfare have taught Karachi residents hard lessons only now being brought home to Western guests by terrorist attacks. The strikes are blamed at least in part on al Qaeda, whose recent arrival from refuges elsewhere in the region constitutes just the latest evidence of Karachi`s continuing appeal to the committed militant.
Lawlessness has been the rule here for so long the real wonder may be why hundreds of thousands of migrants appear in the city each year, the decent, respectable and very poor people who hold Karachi together almost in spite of its hapless government. The answer -- survival -- is a byword of Third World struggle, but it carries an extra edge in this peculiarly dangerous city of dreams.
Certainly the U.S. Consulate reflected awareness of its surroundings, its perimeter long ago reinforced to a hardness that prevented serious injuries inside the building when a car bomb killed 12 Pakistanis on the street outside. When consulate offices formally reopened on Tuesday, it was with plastic sheeting over the shattered windows and still-tighter restrictions on access to a building that already resembled a bunker.
The attack also prompted the State Department to accelerate plans to construct a whole new consulate just behind the existing building. The larger 10-acre site will afford greater protection from the car bombings that officials warn are expected to continue in a city where al Qaeda fugitives have found confederates in a sizable community of Pakistani Islamic militants.
But there was no thought of abandoning Karachi outright, U.S. officials said. For one thing, the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan`s capital, Islamabad, and the U.S. diplomatic and military missions in neighboring Afghanistan are all landlocked and rely on the consulate for what Consul General John Bauman calls ``the almost stevedoring work being done here`` of clearing supplies through Karachi`s port.
But beyond that, Bauman said, ``it`s my overwhelming impression that there are so many good things being done in this city that it would be a terrible thing to pull out. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.``
The virtues of Karachi, while not entirely elusive, tend to be obscured by the political and religious violence that has been its scourge for decades. The conflicts played out on its humid streets -- between political parties, religious sects, onetime neighbors -- are the same conflicts that have riven Pakistan in its half-century of independence.
But Karachi, economic engine of this country of 140 million and magnet for its legions of poor, is where everyone comes to fight over them.
``You want to play cricket, but no fastballs? No googlies?`` said anti-crime activist Jameel Yusuf, imploring Westerners to roll with the punches and look on the bright side, as Karachians have learned to do. ``It`s been a month since the last doctor was killed.``
The world`s ninth-largest city began so tiny it took its name from a single fisherman, Kalachi. By many accounts it remained manageable until 1947, when British India broke into two independent countries -- largely Hindu India and overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan -- spurring massive population shifts and a spasm of sectarian killing.
The tidal wave of Muslim immigrants arriving from India first choked Karachi`s municipal services. In the early 1970s came the Bengalis, fleeing the war 1,000 miles to the east that made Bangladesh from what was East Pakistan. They were followed by the Afghans, fleeing their own war for a string of concrete apartment blocks that sit beside the highway yet are so isolated that a yogurt vendor named Faizullah has lived there 20 years without learning Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan.
``People live here the last 50 years and they still don`t know Urdu,`` said Mohammed Mazeer, 18. ``They are happy in their life.``
But most of all, people came to Karachi from other parts of Pakistan, leaving hopelessly poor villages for the city that promised at least a few dollars. Each of the four provinces has its zone: dark Punjabis, thick-featured Baluchis, bearded Pashtuns and rural Sindhis such as Khamisa. (``That`s my whole name,`` he explains.) From his village 300 miles to the north, he travels to Karachi every 10 or 15 days with his saffron turban and his snake, a scabby runt he rouses with a smack of his horn and calls, unpersuasively, ``Cobra!``
``I`m just here for two or three days for the snake charming, then I go back,`` Khamisa said. ``I just come to seek my bread and butter.``
They all live in Karachi, but not together. The mosaic of the city might one day be beautiful, but the pieces have yet to settle down.
``Karachi used to be a very peaceful area,`` said Salim ur-Rehman, who led counterinsurgency operations as an army colonel and now oversees security at Aga Khan University Hospital. ``Very slowly this trouble started, and very unfortunately.``
By most accounts, the problems began with the police force, which current chief Syed Kamal Shah publicly acknowledges ``is not very good.`` Karachi`s constabulary early on doubled as a patronage network, staffed by untrained hacks; residents still complain that they shake down innocents and avoid criminals. The patronage tradition, begun in the early 1970s under Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was continued by his daughter, Benazir, who at one point put Pakistan`s largest city under the authority of a helicopter pilot who had done her a favor.
``If administration and police were good, everything would be good here. But they are not serious in their business,`` said Mohammed Sayed, who captains one of the 16,000 wooden ships registered at Karachi`s port. Behind him, builders hammered pegs into the teak planks of a great tub, towering overhead like an ark.
``If there is a robbery in our neighborhood we go to the police to lodge a complaint, but they don`t lend an ear to it,`` said Mohammed Anwar Hussain, who tends his family`s tiny shop in the Bengali Colony. ``They think Bengalis are not Muslims.``
Karachi, a major transit point in the global drug trade, long has been notorious internationally for its laxness. In 1986, after Palestinian militants hijacked an airliner to Karachi, police mounted an assault that killed 22 people. ``Why did you do it?`` a reporter called to a terrorist being hustled into custody. ``It`s so easy here!`` the hijacker replied.
Domestically, however, the first serious trouble came in the late 1970s, after the elder Bhutto lost power. The ``youth wing`` of his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) took up arms, which soon became plentiful in Karachi as spillover from the war that Pakistan`s military ruler, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, helped mount against the Soviets in Afghanistan with U.S. backing. Suddenly Karachi experienced a wave of armed robberies and kidnappings, carried out by young PPP thugs intent on making Zia look ineffectual.
Zia`s counter-strategy planted the seeds of religious division. His campaign to ``Islamize`` a religiously moderate Pakistan was meant to add legitimacy to his military government by associating it with faith. But the dictator`s edicts favored the majority Sunni branch of Islam, which raised cries from members of the Shiite minority. In a city awash in guns, the sectarian tensions erupted first into militancy, then a cycle of revenge that 10 years later defines mindless killing.
How else to describe a society that is killing its doctors?
In the last four years, more then 70 physicians have been gunned down in Karachi. Most were Shiites assassinated at the wheel of their cars by Sunni zealots leveling Kalashnikovs from the back seat of a motorcycle. In one case, the victim was actually a Sunni ``who died because of his name,`` which sounded Shiite, said Rashid Jooma, a neurosurgeon at Jinnah Medical Center.
But the most intense conflict was ethnic. The immigrants from India, who after two generations in Pakistan felt shut out of the Karachi economy by migrants from upcountry, formed a political party backed by a fearsome militant wing. The battles that followed ``many times were slaughters,`` said ur-Rehman, the former counterinsurgency officer. Daily body counts of 80 or 90 were not unusual, and government agencies such as military intelligence backed factions that were fighting groups believed to be supported by rival governments, such as Iran or India.
``You had militants for political parties,`` said ur-Rehman. ``You had militants for sectarian parties. You had militants for Taliban, fundamentalists. You had all kinds of militants. Some of them trained in Afghanistan. Some of them trained in India. Some of them trained here.``
The violence peaked in 1995, when ``terrorist killings`` in the city reached 1,742. The toll was tallied by the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, a sharply professional, quasi-official group begun in 1989 by local business leaders fed up with the ineffectual police response -- especially when it came to the kidnapping of local business people, including the chairman of the Karachi Stock Exchange.
``It`s our country,`` said Yusuf, the anti-crime activist, clapping a visitor on the back. ``We`ve got to do it. We`ve got to make a difference.``
Without such robust volunteerism, Karachi would be far worse off, say residents, diplomats and officials. While the military government appropriates beach plots to senior officers, including the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the only ambulances in town are run by the Edhi Foundation, begun by an immigrant who, U.S. Consul General Bauman said, ``didn`t want to see dead bodies in the street.`` The foundation also operates an orphanage, homeless shelters, hostels, soup kitchens and hospitals.
The American diplomat, who marvels at the civic spirit of the city, said Karachi raises more than any other in the world for the Special Olympics campaign -- in a society, Bauman added, that traditionally views damaged children as a source of shame.
But then cities have always been places that challenge tradition. If the anonymity of Karachi provides a refuge for al Qaeda terrorists, it also shelters a palpably nervous young engineering student named Imdadali Siyal.
Born in a village in rural Sindh, the province that includes Karachi, Imdadali fled his parents` home rather than accept the marriage they had arranged for him. Arranged marriages remain the rule in much of rural South Asia, but in Imdadali`s case there was a complication: He had already married in secret. His bride is studying medicine. Neither family knows.
``It is a hidden point,`` Imdadali said.
And it must remain hidden. In the culture of rural Sindh, a ``love marriage`` dishonors both families by defying the wishes of the parents. The penalty, for both bride and groom, is death. Often there is a race to kill them, because the executioner is treated as a local hero.
``So I have given up my home and I am living here, lonely,`` said Imdadali. ``I have given up everything, only because of a girl. She also loves me very much.``
He twisted the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, to stop them both from shaking. It might be dangerous to speak of his situation even where he stood, in a crowded lane of shops in the Afghan quarter. It was where a friend had given him a bed, and where he could earn, ``step by step,`` the money that might build a life for his bride and him.
But best, it was where no one from his village would think to look. He spoke of it, he said, only to defend the city that had saved his life.
``Because my story is a typical story,`` Imdadali said. ``It is a tradition to kill both of you, but in big cities this is not the case. Also, I can say every person who wants to build his status and wants to touch the world, he should come to Karachi.``
Special correspondent Kamran Khan contributed to this report.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 05:37 pm
In a Dangerous City of Dreams, Survival Rules Karachi`s Lawless Streets Attract Mix of Militants
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
KARACHI, Pakistan -- One block down and just around the corner from the U.S. Consulate, which was shaken by a car bomb this month, stands the restaurant where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared. Three blocks farther along is the Sheraton Hotel, where another car bomb killed 11 French engineers last month. From there it`s just a hundred yards to the bridge where, five years ago, a man with an AK-47 shot dead four Houston oil company auditors on their way to work.
And this would be Karachi`s very best neighborhood.
``Oh yes,`` said shopkeeper Aqeel Ahmed, explaining the inverted logic that governs life in Karachi, a city of 14 million that is almost as violent as it is cosmopolitan. ``Where there`s a lot of security, that`s the most dangerous place.``
Here, on the baking brown coast of the Arabian Sea, 25 years of urban warfare have taught Karachi residents hard lessons only now being brought home to Western guests by terrorist attacks. The strikes are blamed at least in part on al Qaeda, whose recent arrival from refuges elsewhere in the region constitutes just the latest evidence of Karachi`s continuing appeal to the committed militant.
Lawlessness has been the rule here for so long the real wonder may be why hundreds of thousands of migrants appear in the city each year, the decent, respectable and very poor people who hold Karachi together almost in spite of its hapless government. The answer -- survival -- is a byword of Third World struggle, but it carries an extra edge in this peculiarly dangerous city of dreams.
Certainly the U.S. Consulate reflected awareness of its surroundings, its perimeter long ago reinforced to a hardness that prevented serious injuries inside the building when a car bomb killed 12 Pakistanis on the street outside. When consulate offices formally reopened on Tuesday, it was with plastic sheeting over the shattered windows and still-tighter restrictions on access to a building that already resembled a bunker.
The attack also prompted the State Department to accelerate plans to construct a whole new consulate just behind the existing building. The larger 10-acre site will afford greater protection from the car bombings that officials warn are expected to continue in a city where al Qaeda fugitives have found confederates in a sizable community of Pakistani Islamic militants.
But there was no thought of abandoning Karachi outright, U.S. officials said. For one thing, the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan`s capital, Islamabad, and the U.S. diplomatic and military missions in neighboring Afghanistan are all landlocked and rely on the consulate for what Consul General John Bauman calls ``the almost stevedoring work being done here`` of clearing supplies through Karachi`s port.
But beyond that, Bauman said, ``it`s my overwhelming impression that there are so many good things being done in this city that it would be a terrible thing to pull out. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.``
The virtues of Karachi, while not entirely elusive, tend to be obscured by the political and religious violence that has been its scourge for decades. The conflicts played out on its humid streets -- between political parties, religious sects, onetime neighbors -- are the same conflicts that have riven Pakistan in its half-century of independence.
But Karachi, economic engine of this country of 140 million and magnet for its legions of poor, is where everyone comes to fight over them.
``You want to play cricket, but no fastballs? No googlies?`` said anti-crime activist Jameel Yusuf, imploring Westerners to roll with the punches and look on the bright side, as Karachians have learned to do. ``It`s been a month since the last doctor was killed.``
The world`s ninth-largest city began so tiny it took its name from a single fisherman, Kalachi. By many accounts it remained manageable until 1947, when British India broke into two independent countries -- largely Hindu India and overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan -- spurring massive population shifts and a spasm of sectarian killing.
The tidal wave of Muslim immigrants arriving from India first choked Karachi`s municipal services. In the early 1970s came the Bengalis, fleeing the war 1,000 miles to the east that made Bangladesh from what was East Pakistan. They were followed by the Afghans, fleeing their own war for a string of concrete apartment blocks that sit beside the highway yet are so isolated that a yogurt vendor named Faizullah has lived there 20 years without learning Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan.
``People live here the last 50 years and they still don`t know Urdu,`` said Mohammed Mazeer, 18. ``They are happy in their life.``
But most of all, people came to Karachi from other parts of Pakistan, leaving hopelessly poor villages for the city that promised at least a few dollars. Each of the four provinces has its zone: dark Punjabis, thick-featured Baluchis, bearded Pashtuns and rural Sindhis such as Khamisa. (``That`s my whole name,`` he explains.) From his village 300 miles to the north, he travels to Karachi every 10 or 15 days with his saffron turban and his snake, a scabby runt he rouses with a smack of his horn and calls, unpersuasively, ``Cobra!``
``I`m just here for two or three days for the snake charming, then I go back,`` Khamisa said. ``I just come to seek my bread and butter.``
They all live in Karachi, but not together. The mosaic of the city might one day be beautiful, but the pieces have yet to settle down.
``Karachi used to be a very peaceful area,`` said Salim ur-Rehman, who led counterinsurgency operations as an army colonel and now oversees security at Aga Khan University Hospital. ``Very slowly this trouble started, and very unfortunately.``
By most accounts, the problems began with the police force, which current chief Syed Kamal Shah publicly acknowledges ``is not very good.`` Karachi`s constabulary early on doubled as a patronage network, staffed by untrained hacks; residents still complain that they shake down innocents and avoid criminals. The patronage tradition, begun in the early 1970s under Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was continued by his daughter, Benazir, who at one point put Pakistan`s largest city under the authority of a helicopter pilot who had done her a favor.
``If administration and police were good, everything would be good here. But they are not serious in their business,`` said Mohammed Sayed, who captains one of the 16,000 wooden ships registered at Karachi`s port. Behind him, builders hammered pegs into the teak planks of a great tub, towering overhead like an ark.
``If there is a robbery in our neighborhood we go to the police to lodge a complaint, but they don`t lend an ear to it,`` said Mohammed Anwar Hussain, who tends his family`s tiny shop in the Bengali Colony. ``They think Bengalis are not Muslims.``
Karachi, a major transit point in the global drug trade, long has been notorious internationally for its laxness. In 1986, after Palestinian militants hijacked an airliner to Karachi, police mounted an assault that killed 22 people. ``Why did you do it?`` a reporter called to a terrorist being hustled into custody. ``It`s so easy here!`` the hijacker replied.
Domestically, however, the first serious trouble came in the late 1970s, after the elder Bhutto lost power. The ``youth wing`` of his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) took up arms, which soon became plentiful in Karachi as spillover from the war that Pakistan`s military ruler, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, helped mount against the Soviets in Afghanistan with U.S. backing. Suddenly Karachi experienced a wave of armed robberies and kidnappings, carried out by young PPP thugs intent on making Zia look ineffectual.
Zia`s counter-strategy planted the seeds of religious division. His campaign to ``Islamize`` a religiously moderate Pakistan was meant to add legitimacy to his military government by associating it with faith. But the dictator`s edicts favored the majority Sunni branch of Islam, which raised cries from members of the Shiite minority. In a city awash in guns, the sectarian tensions erupted first into militancy, then a cycle of revenge that 10 years later defines mindless killing.
How else to describe a society that is killing its doctors?
In the last four years, more then 70 physicians have been gunned down in Karachi. Most were Shiites assassinated at the wheel of their cars by Sunni zealots leveling Kalashnikovs from the back seat of a motorcycle. In one case, the victim was actually a Sunni ``who died because of his name,`` which sounded Shiite, said Rashid Jooma, a neurosurgeon at Jinnah Medical Center.
But the most intense conflict was ethnic. The immigrants from India, who after two generations in Pakistan felt shut out of the Karachi economy by migrants from upcountry, formed a political party backed by a fearsome militant wing. The battles that followed ``many times were slaughters,`` said ur-Rehman, the former counterinsurgency officer. Daily body counts of 80 or 90 were not unusual, and government agencies such as military intelligence backed factions that were fighting groups believed to be supported by rival governments, such as Iran or India.
``You had militants for political parties,`` said ur-Rehman. ``You had militants for sectarian parties. You had militants for Taliban, fundamentalists. You had all kinds of militants. Some of them trained in Afghanistan. Some of them trained in India. Some of them trained here.``
The violence peaked in 1995, when ``terrorist killings`` in the city reached 1,742. The toll was tallied by the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, a sharply professional, quasi-official group begun in 1989 by local business leaders fed up with the ineffectual police response -- especially when it came to the kidnapping of local business people, including the chairman of the Karachi Stock Exchange.
``It`s our country,`` said Yusuf, the anti-crime activist, clapping a visitor on the back. ``We`ve got to do it. We`ve got to make a difference.``
Without such robust volunteerism, Karachi would be far worse off, say residents, diplomats and officials. While the military government appropriates beach plots to senior officers, including the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the only ambulances in town are run by the Edhi Foundation, begun by an immigrant who, U.S. Consul General Bauman said, ``didn`t want to see dead bodies in the street.`` The foundation also operates an orphanage, homeless shelters, hostels, soup kitchens and hospitals.
The American diplomat, who marvels at the civic spirit of the city, said Karachi raises more than any other in the world for the Special Olympics campaign -- in a society, Bauman added, that traditionally views damaged children as a source of shame.
But then cities have always been places that challenge tradition. If the anonymity of Karachi provides a refuge for al Qaeda terrorists, it also shelters a palpably nervous young engineering student named Imdadali Siyal.
Born in a village in rural Sindh, the province that includes Karachi, Imdadali fled his parents` home rather than accept the marriage they had arranged for him. Arranged marriages remain the rule in much of rural South Asia, but in Imdadali`s case there was a complication: He had already married in secret. His bride is studying medicine. Neither family knows.
``It is a hidden point,`` Imdadali said.
And it must remain hidden. In the culture of rural Sindh, a ``love marriage`` dishonors both families by defying the wishes of the parents. The penalty, for both bride and groom, is death. Often there is a race to kill them, because the executioner is treated as a local hero.
``So I have given up my home and I am living here, lonely,`` said Imdadali. ``I have given up everything, only because of a girl. She also loves me very much.``
He twisted the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, to stop them both from shaking. It might be dangerous to speak of his situation even where he stood, in a crowded lane of shops in the Afghan quarter. It was where a friend had given him a bed, and where he could earn, ``step by step,`` the money that might build a life for his bride and him.
But best, it was where no one from his village would think to look. He spoke of it, he said, only to defend the city that had saved his life.
``Because my story is a typical story,`` Imdadali said. ``It is a tradition to kill both of you, but in big cities this is not the case. Also, I can say every person who wants to build his status and wants to touch the world, he should come to Karachi.``
Special correspondent Kamran Khan contributed to this report.
Hoping, Without Hope
Karachi`s Lawless Streets Attract Mix of Militants
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
KARACHI, Pakistan -- One block down and just around the corner from the U.S. Consulate, which was shaken by a car bomb this month, stands the restaurant where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared. Three blocks farther along is the Sheraton Hotel, where another car bomb killed 11 French engineers last month. From there it`s just a hundred yards to the bridge where, five years ago, a man with an AK-47 shot dead four Houston oil company auditors on their way to work.
And this would be Karachi`s very best neighborhood.
``Oh yes,`` said shopkeeper Aqeel Ahmed, explaining the inverted logic that governs life in Karachi, a city of 14 million that is almost as violent as it is cosmopolitan. ``Where there`s a lot of security, that`s the most dangerous place.``
Here, on the baking brown coast of the Arabian Sea, 25 years of urban warfare have taught Karachi residents hard lessons only now being brought home to Western guests by terrorist attacks. The strikes are blamed at least in part on al Qaeda, whose recent arrival from refuges elsewhere in the region constitutes just the latest evidence of Karachi`s continuing appeal to the committed militant.
Lawlessness has been the rule here for so long the real wonder may be why hundreds of thousands of migrants appear in the city each year, the decent, respectable and very poor people who hold Karachi together almost in spite of its hapless government. The answer -- survival -- is a byword of Third World struggle, but it carries an extra edge in this peculiarly dangerous city of dreams.
Certainly the U.S. Consulate reflected awareness of its surroundings, its perimeter long ago reinforced to a hardness that prevented serious injuries inside the building when a car bomb killed 12 Pakistanis on the street outside. When consulate offices formally reopened on Tuesday, it was with plastic sheeting over the shattered windows and still-tighter restrictions on access to a building that already resembled a bunker.
The attack also prompted the State Department to accelerate plans to construct a whole new consulate just behind the existing building. The larger 10-acre site will afford greater protection from the car bombings that officials warn are expected to continue in a city where al Qaeda fugitives have found confederates in a sizable community of Pakistani Islamic militants.
But there was no thought of abandoning Karachi outright, U.S. officials said. For one thing, the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan`s capital, Islamabad, and the U.S. diplomatic and military missions in neighboring Afghanistan are all landlocked and rely on the consulate for what Consul General John Bauman calls ``the almost stevedoring work being done here`` of clearing supplies through Karachi`s port.
But beyond that, Bauman said, ``it`s my overwhelming impression that there are so many good things being done in this city that it would be a terrible thing to pull out. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.``
The virtues of Karachi, while not entirely elusive, tend to be obscured by the political and religious violence that has been its scourge for decades. The conflicts played out on its humid streets -- between political parties, religious sects, onetime neighbors -- are the same conflicts that have riven Pakistan in its half-century of independence.
But Karachi, economic engine of this country of 140 million and magnet for its legions of poor, is where everyone comes to fight over them.
``You want to play cricket, but no fastballs? No googlies?`` said anti-crime activist Jameel Yusuf, imploring Westerners to roll with the punches and look on the bright side, as Karachians have learned to do. ``It`s been a month since the last doctor was killed.``
The world`s ninth-largest city began so tiny it took its name from a single fisherman, Kalachi. By many accounts it remained manageable until 1947, when British India broke into two independent countries -- largely Hindu India and overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan -- spurring massive population shifts and a spasm of sectarian killing.
The tidal wave of Muslim immigrants arriving from India first choked Karachi`s municipal services. In the early 1970s came the Bengalis, fleeing the war 1,000 miles to the east that made Bangladesh from what was East Pakistan. They were followed by the Afghans, fleeing their own war for a string of concrete apartment blocks that sit beside the highway yet are so isolated that a yogurt vendor named Faizullah has lived there 20 years without learning Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan.
``People live here the last 50 years and they still don`t know Urdu,`` said Mohammed Mazeer, 18. ``They are happy in their life.``
But most of all, people came to Karachi from other parts of Pakistan, leaving hopelessly poor villages for the city that promised at least a few dollars. Each of the four provinces has its zone: dark Punjabis, thick-featured Baluchis, bearded Pashtuns and rural Sindhis such as Khamisa. (``That`s my whole name,`` he explains.) From his village 300 miles to the north, he travels to Karachi every 10 or 15 days with his saffron turban and his snake, a scabby runt he rouses with a smack of his horn and calls, unpersuasively, ``Cobra!``
``I`m just here for two or three days for the snake charming, then I go back,`` Khamisa said. ``I just come to seek my bread and butter.``
They all live in Karachi, but not together. The mosaic of the city might one day be beautiful, but the pieces have yet to settle down.
``Karachi used to be a very peaceful area,`` said Salim ur-Rehman, who led counterinsurgency operations as an army colonel and now oversees security at Aga Khan University Hospital. ``Very slowly this trouble started, and very unfortunately.``
By most accounts, the problems began with the police force, which current chief Syed Kamal Shah publicly acknowledges ``is not very good.`` Karachi`s constabulary early on doubled as a patronage network, staffed by untrained hacks; residents still complain that they shake down innocents and avoid criminals. The patronage tradition, begun in the early 1970s under Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was continued by his daughter, Benazir, who at one point put Pakistan`s largest city under the authority of a helicopter pilot who had done her a favor.
``If administration and police were good, everything would be good here. But they are not serious in their business,`` said Mohammed Sayed, who captains one of the 16,000 wooden ships registered at Karachi`s port. Behind him, builders hammered pegs into the teak planks of a great tub, towering overhead like an ark.
``If there is a robbery in our neighborhood we go to the police to lodge a complaint, but they don`t lend an ear to it,`` said Mohammed Anwar Hussain, who tends his family`s tiny shop in the Bengali Colony. ``They think Bengalis are not Muslims.``
Karachi, a major transit point in the global drug trade, long has been notorious internationally for its laxness. In 1986, after Palestinian militants hijacked an airliner to Karachi, police mounted an assault that killed 22 people. ``Why did you do it?`` a reporter called to a terrorist being hustled into custody. ``It`s so easy here!`` the hijacker replied.
Domestically, however, the first serious trouble came in the late 1970s, after the elder Bhutto lost power. The ``youth wing`` of his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) took up arms, which soon became plentiful in Karachi as spillover from the war that Pakistan`s military ruler, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, helped mount against the Soviets in Afghanistan with U.S. backing. Suddenly Karachi experienced a wave of armed robberies and kidnappings, carried out by young PPP thugs intent on making Zia look ineffectual.
Zia`s counter-strategy planted the seeds of religious division. His campaign to ``Islamize`` a religiously moderate Pakistan was meant to add legitimacy to his military government by associating it with faith. But the dictator`s edicts favored the majority Sunni branch of Islam, which raised cries from members of the Shiite minority. In a city awash in guns, the sectarian tensions erupted first into militancy, then a cycle of revenge that 10 years later defines mindless killing.
How else to describe a society that is killing its doctors?
In the last four years, more then 70 physicians have been gunned down in Karachi. Most were Shiites assassinated at the wheel of their cars by Sunni zealots leveling Kalashnikovs from the back seat of a motorcycle. In one case, the victim was actually a Sunni ``who died because of his name,`` which sounded Shiite, said Rashid Jooma, a neurosurgeon at Jinnah Medical Center.
But the most intense conflict was ethnic. The immigrants from India, who after two generations in Pakistan felt shut out of the Karachi economy by migrants from upcountry, formed a political party backed by a fearsome militant wing. The battles that followed ``many times were slaughters,`` said ur-Rehman, the former counterinsurgency officer. Daily body counts of 80 or 90 were not unusual, and government agencies such as military intelligence backed factions that were fighting groups believed to be supported by rival governments, such as Iran or India.
``You had militants for political parties,`` said ur-Rehman. ``You had militants for sectarian parties. You had militants for Taliban, fundamentalists. You had all kinds of militants. Some of them trained in Afghanistan. Some of them trained in India. Some of them trained here.``
The violence peaked in 1995, when ``terrorist killings`` in the city reached 1,742. The toll was tallied by the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, a sharply professional, quasi-official group begun in 1989 by local business leaders fed up with the ineffectual police response -- especially when it came to the kidnapping of local business people, including the chairman of the Karachi Stock Exchange.
``It`s our country,`` said Yusuf, the anti-crime activist, clapping a visitor on the back. ``We`ve got to do it. We`ve got to make a difference.``
Without such robust volunteerism, Karachi would be far worse off, say residents, diplomats and officials. While the military government appropriates beach plots to senior officers, including the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the only ambulances in town are run by the Edhi Foundation, begun by an immigrant who, U.S. Consul General Bauman said, ``didn`t want to see dead bodies in the street.`` The foundation also operates an orphanage, homeless shelters, hostels, soup kitchens and hospitals.
The American diplomat, who marvels at the civic spirit of the city, said Karachi raises more than any other in the world for the Special Olympics campaign -- in a society, Bauman added, that traditionally views damaged children as a source of shame.
But then cities have always been places that challenge tradition. If the anonymity of Karachi provides a refuge for al Qaeda terrorists, it also shelters a palpably nervous young engineering student named Imdadali Siyal.
Born in a village in rural Sindh, the province that includes Karachi, Imdadali fled his parents` home rather than accept the marriage they had arranged for him. Arranged marriages remain the rule in much of rural South Asia, but in Imdadali`s case there was a complication: He had already married in secret. His bride is studying medicine. Neither family knows.
``It is a hidden point,`` Imdadali said.
And it must remain hidden. In the culture of rural Sindh, a ``love marriage`` dishonors both families by defying the wishes of the parents. The penalty, for both bride and groom, is death. Often there is a race to kill them, because the executioner is treated as a local hero.
``So I have given up my home and I am living here, lonely,`` said Imdadali. ``I have given up everything, only because of a girl. She also loves me very much.``
He twisted the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, to stop them both from shaking. It might be dangerous to speak of his situation even where he stood, in a crowded lane of shops in the Afghan quarter. It was where a friend had given him a bed, and where he could earn, ``step by step,`` the money that might build a life for his bride and him.
But best, it was where no one from his village would think to look. He spoke of it, he said, only to defend the city that had saved his life.
``Because my story is a typical story,`` Imdadali said. ``It is a tradition to kill both of you, but in big cities this is not the case. Also, I can say every person who wants to build his status and wants to touch the world, he should come to Karachi.``
Special correspondent Kamran Khan contributed to this report.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 05:37 pm
In a Dangerous City of Dreams, Survival Rules Karachi`s Lawless Streets Attract Mix of Militants
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
KARACHI, Pakistan -- One block down and just around the corner from the U.S. Consulate, which was shaken by a car bomb this month, stands the restaurant where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared. Three blocks farther along is the Sheraton Hotel, where another car bomb killed 11 French engineers last month. From there it`s just a hundred yards to the bridge where, five years ago, a man with an AK-47 shot dead four Houston oil company auditors on their way to work.
And this would be Karachi`s very best neighborhood.
``Oh yes,`` said shopkeeper Aqeel Ahmed, explaining the inverted logic that governs life in Karachi, a city of 14 million that is almost as violent as it is cosmopolitan. ``Where there`s a lot of security, that`s the most dangerous place.``
Here, on the baking brown coast of the Arabian Sea, 25 years of urban warfare have taught Karachi residents hard lessons only now being brought home to Western guests by terrorist attacks. The strikes are blamed at least in part on al Qaeda, whose recent arrival from refuges elsewhere in the region constitutes just the latest evidence of Karachi`s continuing appeal to the committed militant.
Lawlessness has been the rule here for so long the real wonder may be why hundreds of thousands of migrants appear in the city each year, the decent, respectable and very poor people who hold Karachi together almost in spite of its hapless government. The answer -- survival -- is a byword of Third World struggle, but it carries an extra edge in this peculiarly dangerous city of dreams.
Certainly the U.S. Consulate reflected awareness of its surroundings, its perimeter long ago reinforced to a hardness that prevented serious injuries inside the building when a car bomb killed 12 Pakistanis on the street outside. When consulate offices formally reopened on Tuesday, it was with plastic sheeting over the shattered windows and still-tighter restrictions on access to a building that already resembled a bunker.
The attack also prompted the State Department to accelerate plans to construct a whole new consulate just behind the existing building. The larger 10-acre site will afford greater protection from the car bombings that officials warn are expected to continue in a city where al Qaeda fugitives have found confederates in a sizable community of Pakistani Islamic militants.
But there was no thought of abandoning Karachi outright, U.S. officials said. For one thing, the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan`s capital, Islamabad, and the U.S. diplomatic and military missions in neighboring Afghanistan are all landlocked and rely on the consulate for what Consul General John Bauman calls ``the almost stevedoring work being done here`` of clearing supplies through Karachi`s port.
But beyond that, Bauman said, ``it`s my overwhelming impression that there are so many good things being done in this city that it would be a terrible thing to pull out. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.``
The virtues of Karachi, while not entirely elusive, tend to be obscured by the political and religious violence that has been its scourge for decades. The conflicts played out on its humid streets -- between political parties, religious sects, onetime neighbors -- are the same conflicts that have riven Pakistan in its half-century of independence.
But Karachi, economic engine of this country of 140 million and magnet for its legions of poor, is where everyone comes to fight over them.
``You want to play cricket, but no fastballs? No googlies?`` said anti-crime activist Jameel Yusuf, imploring Westerners to roll with the punches and look on the bright side, as Karachians have learned to do. ``It`s been a month since the last doctor was killed.``
The world`s ninth-largest city began so tiny it took its name from a single fisherman, Kalachi. By many accounts it remained manageable until 1947, when British India broke into two independent countries -- largely Hindu India and overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan -- spurring massive population shifts and a spasm of sectarian killing.
The tidal wave of Muslim immigrants arriving from India first choked Karachi`s municipal services. In the early 1970s came the Bengalis, fleeing the war 1,000 miles to the east that made Bangladesh from what was East Pakistan. They were followed by the Afghans, fleeing their own war for a string of concrete apartment blocks that sit beside the highway yet are so isolated that a yogurt vendor named Faizullah has lived there 20 years without learning Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan.
``People live here the last 50 years and they still don`t know Urdu,`` said Mohammed Mazeer, 18. ``They are happy in their life.``
But most of all, people came to Karachi from other parts of Pakistan, leaving hopelessly poor villages for the city that promised at least a few dollars. Each of the four provinces has its zone: dark Punjabis, thick-featured Baluchis, bearded Pashtuns and rural Sindhis such as Khamisa. (``That`s my whole name,`` he explains.) From his village 300 miles to the north, he travels to Karachi every 10 or 15 days with his saffron turban and his snake, a scabby runt he rouses with a smack of his horn and calls, unpersuasively, ``Cobra!``
``I`m just here for two or three days for the snake charming, then I go back,`` Khamisa said. ``I just come to seek my bread and butter.``
They all live in Karachi, but not together. The mosaic of the city might one day be beautiful, but the pieces have yet to settle down.
``Karachi used to be a very peaceful area,`` said Salim ur-Rehman, who led counterinsurgency operations as an army colonel and now oversees security at Aga Khan University Hospital. ``Very slowly this trouble started, and very unfortunately.``
By most accounts, the problems began with the police force, which current chief Syed Kamal Shah publicly acknowledges ``is not very good.`` Karachi`s constabulary early on doubled as a patronage network, staffed by untrained hacks; residents still complain that they shake down innocents and avoid criminals. The patronage tradition, begun in the early 1970s under Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was continued by his daughter, Benazir, who at one point put Pakistan`s largest city under the authority of a helicopter pilot who had done her a favor.
``If administration and police were good, everything would be good here. But they are not serious in their business,`` said Mohammed Sayed, who captains one of the 16,000 wooden ships registered at Karachi`s port. Behind him, builders hammered pegs into the teak planks of a great tub, towering overhead like an ark.
``If there is a robbery in our neighborhood we go to the police to lodge a complaint, but they don`t lend an ear to it,`` said Mohammed Anwar Hussain, who tends his family`s tiny shop in the Bengali Colony. ``They think Bengalis are not Muslims.``
Karachi, a major transit point in the global drug trade, long has been notorious internationally for its laxness. In 1986, after Palestinian militants hijacked an airliner to Karachi, police mounted an assault that killed 22 people. ``Why did you do it?`` a reporter called to a terrorist being hustled into custody. ``It`s so easy here!`` the hijacker replied.
Domestically, however, the first serious trouble came in the late 1970s, after the elder Bhutto lost power. The ``youth wing`` of his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) took up arms, which soon became plentiful in Karachi as spillover from the war that Pakistan`s military ruler, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, helped mount against the Soviets in Afghanistan with U.S. backing. Suddenly Karachi experienced a wave of armed robberies and kidnappings, carried out by young PPP thugs intent on making Zia look ineffectual.
Zia`s counter-strategy planted the seeds of religious division. His campaign to ``Islamize`` a religiously moderate Pakistan was meant to add legitimacy to his military government by associating it with faith. But the dictator`s edicts favored the majority Sunni branch of Islam, which raised cries from members of the Shiite minority. In a city awash in guns, the sectarian tensions erupted first into militancy, then a cycle of revenge that 10 years later defines mindless killing.
How else to describe a society that is killing its doctors?
In the last four years, more then 70 physicians have been gunned down in Karachi. Most were Shiites assassinated at the wheel of their cars by Sunni zealots leveling Kalashnikovs from the back seat of a motorcycle. In one case, the victim was actually a Sunni ``who died because of his name,`` which sounded Shiite, said Rashid Jooma, a neurosurgeon at Jinnah Medical Center.
But the most intense conflict was ethnic. The immigrants from India, who after two generations in Pakistan felt shut out of the Karachi economy by migrants from upcountry, formed a political party backed by a fearsome militant wing. The battles that followed ``many times were slaughters,`` said ur-Rehman, the former counterinsurgency officer. Daily body counts of 80 or 90 were not unusual, and government agencies such as military intelligence backed factions that were fighting groups believed to be supported by rival governments, such as Iran or India.
``You had militants for political parties,`` said ur-Rehman. ``You had militants for sectarian parties. You had militants for Taliban, fundamentalists. You had all kinds of militants. Some of them trained in Afghanistan. Some of them trained in India. Some of them trained here.``
The violence peaked in 1995, when ``terrorist killings`` in the city reached 1,742. The toll was tallied by the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, a sharply professional, quasi-official group begun in 1989 by local business leaders fed up with the ineffectual police response -- especially when it came to the kidnapping of local business people, including the chairman of the Karachi Stock Exchange.
``It`s our country,`` said Yusuf, the anti-crime activist, clapping a visitor on the back. ``We`ve got to do it. We`ve got to make a difference.``
Without such robust volunteerism, Karachi would be far worse off, say residents, diplomats and officials. While the military government appropriates beach plots to senior officers, including the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the only ambulances in town are run by the Edhi Foundation, begun by an immigrant who, U.S. Consul General Bauman said, ``didn`t want to see dead bodies in the street.`` The foundation also operates an orphanage, homeless shelters, hostels, soup kitchens and hospitals.
The American diplomat, who marvels at the civic spirit of the city, said Karachi raises more than any other in the world for the Special Olympics campaign -- in a society, Bauman added, that traditionally views damaged children as a source of shame.
But then cities have always been places that challenge tradition. If the anonymity of Karachi provides a refuge for al Qaeda terrorists, it also shelters a palpably nervous young engineering student named Imdadali Siyal.
Born in a village in rural Sindh, the province that includes Karachi, Imdadali fled his parents` home rather than accept the marriage they had arranged for him. Arranged marriages remain the rule in much of rural South Asia, but in Imdadali`s case there was a complication: He had already married in secret. His bride is studying medicine. Neither family knows.
``It is a hidden point,`` Imdadali said.
And it must remain hidden. In the culture of rural Sindh, a ``love marriage`` dishonors both families by defying the wishes of the parents. The penalty, for both bride and groom, is death. Often there is a race to kill them, because the executioner is treated as a local hero.
``So I have given up my home and I am living here, lonely,`` said Imdadali. ``I have given up everything, only because of a girl. She also loves me very much.``
He twisted the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, to stop them both from shaking. It might be dangerous to speak of his situation even where he stood, in a crowded lane of shops in the Afghan quarter. It was where a friend had given him a bed, and where he could earn, ``step by step,`` the money that might build a life for his bride and him.
But best, it was where no one from his village would think to look. He spoke of it, he said, only to defend the city that had saved his life.
``Because my story is a typical story,`` Imdadali said. ``It is a tradition to kill both of you, but in big cities this is not the case. Also, I can say every person who wants to build his status and wants to touch the world, he should come to Karachi.``
Special correspondent Kamran Khan contributed to this report.
Hoping, Without Hope
Kidnappings, bombings, assassinations, extortion, bribery—just another week in Karachi, Pakistan`s largest and most populous city
BY TIM MCGIRK / KARACHI
M.R. sits in a room that is empty save for a few chairs, a drained tequila bottle and back issues of Handguns for Sport and Defense magazine strewn across the floor. In his early 40s, M.R. (who only allowed his initials to be published) has the calm self-assurance of a skilled artisan; a mason or a carpenter, perhaps, a tradesman who is good with his hands. He is known—and feared—for those giant hands and his sweet, clear voice. ``He`ll be smiling and talking, and the next thing, he`s breaking his victim`s neck,`` a colleague says admiringly. ``It was his specialty.`` M.R. is a hit man. And he kills with those sledgehammer hands.
Nowadays M.R. has moved up the Murder Inc. corporate ladder. He subcontracts his work out to a stable of killers, dozens of younger men who prefer a handgun to M.R.`s more intimate way of death by close embrace. He drags on a cigarette, and explains that some of his boys will offer a prayer for their victim, while others try to erase the murders from their conscience with hashish or sex. ``Nobody is a born killer,`` he says.
Maybe not. But murder is depressingly familiar in Karachi; there were 555 cases last year, the most of any city in Pakistan. M.R.`s rates are 50,000-100,000 rupees ($880-$1,760) a hit—unless it involves a ``prominent figure,`` which ups the bill to a million rupees. His boys also do a profitable sideline in intimidation; a Black & Decker drill applied to the kneecap has a wonderful way of loosening tongues and wallets, he says.
Karachi, a port city of 14 million on the Pakistani coast, where the Pab mountain range and the Sindh Desert gather into a brick-and dust-hued urban sprawl before tumbling into the Arabian Sea, is the battlefield in which an assassin like M.R. thrives. In Karachi you have ethnic feuds: gangs of Indian migrants versus the Pathans, Baluchis and Sindhis; you have extremists from rival Sunni and Shi`ite sects battling each other (lately, radical Sunnis are gunning down Shi`ite doctors and lawyers at random); and, of course, there are the radical Islamic groups that shelter al-Qaeda fugitives and are, according to Karachi police officers, helping them plan their next terrorist strikes. In April, a Yemeni national Waleed Mohammed bin Attash and several Pakistanis were caught during various raids in Karachi with more than 600 kilos of explosives. ``This place is under siege,`` says Anwer Mooraj, a Pakistani writer.
Breaking that siege is almost impossible in the face of endemic and systemic corruption. A few sordid examples: in certain colleges, teachers demand payoffs from students wanting to pass exams; some cops earn extra money by selling their bullets; and gangs, operating under the auspices of crooked bureaucrats, police and army-ranger elements, siphon off water before it reaches the taps of most Karachi apartment buildings and sell it in the city from tanker trucks, according to municipal workers. An industrialist who says he refused to bribe health inspectors saw his tiremaking plant shut down when they invoked a little-observed 19th century British law requiring factory walls to be whitewashed. On the Karachi Stock Exchange, insider trading is commonplace and conflict of interest is rife. Some of the exchange`s board members are also leading brokers, and they are able to change regulations overnight to bankrupt an outsider trying to deal in a company`s shares. Brokers sometimes vanish with their investors` portfolios, and no investor has ever won a case against a crooked dealer.
In the courts, it is common for a defense lawyer to pay off witnesses, the judge and even the prosecutor to obtain a favorable verdict for his client. In the end, some would-be litigants find it is cheaper, and more effective, simply to hire a hit man. ``Karachi today,`` says Tariq Amin, a fashion stylist and prominent social commentator, ``is like Chicago in the days of Al Capone mixed in with the Middle Ages.``
In other words, it`s a dangerous mess. And with terrorism breeding in enclaves across the city, Karachi has the potential to spread its menace not only throughout Pakistan but far beyond its frontiers. Several of the top al-Qaeda agents captured by Pakistani officials and the FBI had holed up in Karachi, and many—maybe even Osama bin Laden himself—may still be lurking there, officials say.
How did Karachi become a megalopolis of mayhem? In 1947, when Britain spilt the Raj into India and Pakistan, modern Karachi, more than any other city, was a by-product of this upheaval. Before partition, its inhabitants included Hindus, Parsis, Muslim traders, Goans, and Sheedis, descendants of African slaves shipped over in chains during the 18th century. An illustration of Karachi`s surviving cultural diversity: at a one-room shrine that has more to do with African tribalism than Islam, women flock to see Mushkan, a male Sheedi medium in white, womanly robes. When he goes into a trance, he says he communicates with his jinni in Arabic, Urdu and Swahili. Karachi`s demons, it seems, are cosmopolitan.
At partition, most of Karachi`s 440,000 population of Hindus had left and were replaced by 1.2 million Mohajirs, or Indian migrants. They had followed the dream of Pakistan`s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to create a nation for Muslims. But the Mohajirs were in for a rude shock. Many of the local Punjabis, Sindhis and Pathans regarded them as unwanted trespassers. They still do, except nowadays the Mohajirs have earned wary respect by carrying out vicious ethnic warfare in Karachi throughout the early 1990s. The Pathans and the Sindhis retaliated but the Mohajirs matched them murder for murder, operating torture cells. Today Karachi is in the grips of the Mohajir godfather, Altaf Hussain, a fugitive in Britain charged with more than 100 counts of murder, sabotage and arson, who continues to rule the city from afar.
Like so much of Central Asia, contemporary Karachi is also a product of the Soviet Union`s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the jihad declared by much of the Muslim world in response. To fund their campaign against the Russian occupiers, Afghan warlords used Pakistan as a transshipment point for heroin and Karachi as a major point of export. Paid for in part by those narco-dollars were the vast shipments of small arms and Stinger missiles passing the other way through Karachi before being loaded onto trucks bound for Peshawar and eventually camels headed for Afghanistan`s interior. Those drugs and the guns left a toxic residue that would become, for Karachi, a permanent blight.
Karachi, like Pakistan itself, also suffers from an identity crisis. Aside from Israel (though Pakistanis hate to be reminded of this), Pakistan is the only modern nation forged primarily out of faith. The problem plaguing Pakistan remains that its founders never agreed whether it should be a relaxed country whose citizens happen to be Muslims or an austere Islamic state adhering to Shari`a law. This ambiguity is responsible for the ongoing tug-of-war between the country`s religious extremists and Westernized moderates; Karachi embodies these contradictions. As sociologist Arif Hassan of the nongovernmental organization Urban Resource Center puts it, ``For Karachi`s youth, there are two choices: go to America or join the jihad.``
These ideological fault lines translate at ground level into real, geographical divisions. The poor, who tend to be more fundamentalist, live mostly in dust-blown shanties on the outskirts of town. There, they clan together, Pathans with Pathans, Baluchis with Baluchis, seeking to replicate their tribal life from their homelands. In some ghettos the clergymen have banned television, women wear burqas and the only education on offer for youngsters is the mesmeric recitation of the Koran at local madrasahs. Crimes are punished by elders inside the community according to Koranic law, and the police never hear about the transgressions or the rough justice.
The rich and influential live in the Defence and Clifton suburbs, in the latter along a wide, crescent shore, in faux Grecian- or Californian-style mansions. Every few years their walls grow taller—concrete evidence of the rising tide of instability that engulfs Karachi. The latest fad among the very wealthy is to have a lion cub or a Siberian crane (an endangered species), which clacks loudly when a stranger approaches, roaming in the garden. In a country where more than a third of the population lives below the poverty line, many of the wealthy believe in enhancing their status by importing Filipina maids. The spoiled kids hang out at Karachi`s single mall, listen to heavy metal, and some of them form gangs with cry-tough names such as 9mm, Kryptonite and Outsiders. Every so often, they`ll rumble over a girl and arrange for their bodyguards to trade a few punches in the KFC parking lot. There are no burqas here: the girls wear tight jeans; their mothers prefer designer salwar kameez of watered silk and diamanté Chanel sunglasses.
Here, Islamic prohibitions are the distant constraints of life in the colorless slums. ``What do you want?`` asks stylist Amin, who looks like a brawny pirate. He has two silver rings in one ear and dark eyebrows arched like two hissing cats. He picks up his cell phone and jokingly plays the part of a low-life genie: ``A Russian hooker who looks like Pamela Anderson? Ecstasy? A bottle of Black Label? An AK-47, or a 40-carat diamond? It`s all here—just a phone call away.`` In his sleek, black outfits and his silver bracelets, Amin is a familiar figure at Karachi`s private parties and rave clubs, which never advertise or display signs and are set back from the street in high-walled compounds beyond the hearing of mullahs or cops looking to shake down a few rich kids. Ecstasy and ketamine are the drugs of choice. Back home in their mansions, the élite space out in other ways, too: staring for hours at the TV. ``What we have is the satellite television culture,`` says artist Unvar Shafi Khan. Amin agrees. ``It`s never about individuality. Women in their 40s say, `Make me look like Dynasty [a 1980s soap opera],` and their daughters want their hair styled like the girls` in Friends,`` says Amin.
Bombs may be detonating, journalists beheaded or neighbors kidnapped, but for the people of Clifton and Defence, this violence seldom penetrates their cocoon. They simply build their garden walls a few meters higher or buy another lion cub, this one in darker brown, perhaps, to match that Gucci purse. They`re blithely unaware, for example, that when Qari Shafiqur Rehman, a Koranic teacher with burning eyes and a coal-black beard, walks by a McDonald`s and sees these affluent Karachiites chowing down their Happy Meals, he feels ``a deep rage`` rising within himself. Rehman also belongs to Sipah-e-Sabah, an outlawed extremist group associated with a string of killings and bombings across the city, so his fury should be taken seriously.
Occasionally, reality does intrude into this TV-inspired and narcotics-fueled never-never-land of Karachi`s pampered élite. After Islamic terrorists exploded a car bomb outside the U.S. consulate last year, members strolling on the flower-banked lawn at the colonial-era Sind Club nearby found the severed arm of a woman, with lacquered fingernails and bangles, which had been blown over the wall. The woman was one of the 12 fatalities, and 43 others were wounded in the consulate attack. Club president, Hussain Haroon, whose family owns the English-language Dawn newspaper and has been prominent in Karachi for more than 150 years, says glumly, `` With the Sind Club, I feel like I`m protecting an island in a sea of anarchy.``
Yet no matter how imperiled a Karachiite might feel, calling the cops is seldom an option. Too often, the lawmen are part of the problem. ``You have to realize,`` says a land developer, ``that police stations have no money, not even to change a light bulb or put gas in their cars.`` As a result, he says, police stations become ``revenue-generating centers`` and catching thieves and murderers is a secondary occupation. Police earn money by shaking down prostitution and gambling rings, and they will often demand a bribe even to register a complaint for burglary. A constable`s monthly wage is only $69; a typical middle-class salary in Karachi is $2,000 a year.
Some policemen also perform special favors for politicians and influential businessmen. Wiretapping a pol`s rivals is a big moneyspinner. An assassin (TIME agreed not to publish his name) claims that cops knew he was under contract with a political party. He says he was treated like a ``VVIP`` whenever he visited a police station. ``The police wouldn`t dare touch us.`` He had to laugh when the police took credit, four-and-a-half years ago, for one of his own kills. ``He was a hit man, too, sent down from Lahore by a rival political party to get me,`` the assassin recalls. Except that the assassin tracked the newcomer down first, gunning him down at a crowded intersection. He adds, ``The cops don`t arrest the criminals; they only arrest the weakest.`` This allegation is echoed by a top police officer. He explains that often when a murder occurs, ``We`ll grab somebody—anybody—and beat him until he confesses and even starts blaming his own mother.``
Naturally, when the cops were confronted with real, bad guys—terrorists who last year committed a rash of bombings and the kidnapping of American journalist Daniel Pearl—this squeeze-them-until-they-squeal approach got them nowhere. Agents from the FBI brought in for the Pearl case and the U.S. consulate bombing were also less than impressed by such techniques, according to a Western diplomat. A police officer admits that at first his men were also afraid of the extremists, who had informers inside the police force. They were also well equipped, he says, with guns smuggled across the lawless frontier with Afghanistan and money from Arab donors. ``We have over 800 madrasahs in Karachi, and many of them are nurseries for terrorism,`` the officer claims.
The Americans found a useful ally in Jameel Yusuf, head of the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC). An energetic, well-heeled businessman, Yusuf formed the committee in the early 1990s when Karachi was stricken by several kidnappings and murders a day. ``It was turning into a city of death,`` he says. By setting up a data bank and electronic surveillance of criminals, Yusuf and a few honest cops managed to bust many of the major kidnapping gangs. These criminals were often linked to cells of sectarian killers and terrorists. ``They all steal cars and buy and sell illegal weapons,`` Yusuf says.
With the FBI`s help in monitoring cell-phone calls and e-mails, Yusuf was able to throw an electronic net over the Karachi neighborhoods where terrorists and some of Pearl`s kidnappers lurked. ``Al-Qaeda isn`t like a social club,`` he says. ``They don`t have a posted membership list.`` What he did find was a link between al-Qaeda and two virulent Sunni sectarian groups—Lashkar Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammad—which had trained in Afghan camps alongside Osama bin Laden`s holy warriors. The two groups, in turn, were mixed up in the Karachi underworld. Often, says Yusuf, it was the criminals who rented the hideouts used by al-Qaeda members, sent their coded messages from Internet cafés and helped them vanish into the city`s maze of slums.
Yusuf`s close ties to the Americans proved to be his undoing. On March 22 he was removed as CPLC chief. ``The rumor was I worked for the CIA,`` says Yusuf. ``That`s a laugh. The Americans won`t even let me have a visa after all the help I gave them.`` Because of terrorist threats, Yusuf travels with an extra car of bodyguards and lives in an ultra-secure penthouse as he struggles to win back his old job. He has enough money to leave Karachi, but he likes the place. ``Any other city with 14 million people and so many bad governments would have collapsed long ago,`` he laughs.
A handful of other Karachiites have also refused to give up on their city. Abdul Sattar Edhi, a saintly ex-shopkeeper who goes around after the nightly bout of violence to collect the dead and give them a decent burial, also declines to flee. And that`s a good thing for Karachi: his charity foundation now runs orphanages, mental institutions, clinics and ambulance services. Ardeshir Cowasjee, an irascible millionaire who wears silk pajamas and writes a weekly column for Dawn in which he tracks corruption to the highest places, vows to stay put, as does sociologist and city planner Arif Hassan who campaigns to save the few remaining buildings from Karachi`s regal colonial past. Roland De Souza, whose organization SHERRI fights against illegal land developers whom he says are often in cahoots with city nabobs and some military officers, also insists he will always call Karachi his home. They, along with many other die-hard citizens, find that Karachi possesses a dynamism missing in other Pakistani cities. It`s what lures 3,000 newcomers a day to Karachi, even if it means shoveling rotten fish on the wharf for $8 per 12-hour shift and bedding down with the ubiquitous rats on a stretch of pavement.
Karachi is a city of predators, says M.R., the assassin. He complains he barely makes a profit after he has paid off the cops, government contacts and his political protectors. His cell phone chimes. After taking the call, he says almost apologetically, ``I have dozens of boys working for me. I try to make sure they each get a `job` at least once every two months.`` Then he stubs out his cigarette and slips out of the apartment, trailing two armed thugs for protection. Karachi isn`t safe at night, not even for a killer with connections.
—With reporting by Ghulam Hasnain
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 05:37 pm
To Have & Have NotKidnappings, bombings, assassinations, extortion, bribery—just another week in Karachi, Pakistan`s largest and most populous city
BY TIM MCGIRK / KARACHI
M.R. sits in a room that is empty save for a few chairs, a drained tequila bottle and back issues of Handguns for Sport and Defense magazine strewn across the floor. In his early 40s, M.R. (who only allowed his initials to be published) has the calm self-assurance of a skilled artisan; a mason or a carpenter, perhaps, a tradesman who is good with his hands. He is known—and feared—for those giant hands and his sweet, clear voice. ``He`ll be smiling and talking, and the next thing, he`s breaking his victim`s neck,`` a colleague says admiringly. ``It was his specialty.`` M.R. is a hit man. And he kills with those sledgehammer hands.
Nowadays M.R. has moved up the Murder Inc. corporate ladder. He subcontracts his work out to a stable of killers, dozens of younger men who prefer a handgun to M.R.`s more intimate way of death by close embrace. He drags on a cigarette, and explains that some of his boys will offer a prayer for their victim, while others try to erase the murders from their conscience with hashish or sex. ``Nobody is a born killer,`` he says.
Maybe not. But murder is depressingly familiar in Karachi; there were 555 cases last year, the most of any city in Pakistan. M.R.`s rates are 50,000-100,000 rupees ($880-$1,760) a hit—unless it involves a ``prominent figure,`` which ups the bill to a million rupees. His boys also do a profitable sideline in intimidation; a Black & Decker drill applied to the kneecap has a wonderful way of loosening tongues and wallets, he says.
Karachi, a port city of 14 million on the Pakistani coast, where the Pab mountain range and the Sindh Desert gather into a brick-and dust-hued urban sprawl before tumbling into the Arabian Sea, is the battlefield in which an assassin like M.R. thrives. In Karachi you have ethnic feuds: gangs of Indian migrants versus the Pathans, Baluchis and Sindhis; you have extremists from rival Sunni and Shi`ite sects battling each other (lately, radical Sunnis are gunning down Shi`ite doctors and lawyers at random); and, of course, there are the radical Islamic groups that shelter al-Qaeda fugitives and are, according to Karachi police officers, helping them plan their next terrorist strikes. In April, a Yemeni national Waleed Mohammed bin Attash and several Pakistanis were caught during various raids in Karachi with more than 600 kilos of explosives. ``This place is under siege,`` says Anwer Mooraj, a Pakistani writer.
Breaking that siege is almost impossible in the face of endemic and systemic corruption. A few sordid examples: in certain colleges, teachers demand payoffs from students wanting to pass exams; some cops earn extra money by selling their bullets; and gangs, operating under the auspices of crooked bureaucrats, police and army-ranger elements, siphon off water before it reaches the taps of most Karachi apartment buildings and sell it in the city from tanker trucks, according to municipal workers. An industrialist who says he refused to bribe health inspectors saw his tiremaking plant shut down when they invoked a little-observed 19th century British law requiring factory walls to be whitewashed. On the Karachi Stock Exchange, insider trading is commonplace and conflict of interest is rife. Some of the exchange`s board members are also leading brokers, and they are able to change regulations overnight to bankrupt an outsider trying to deal in a company`s shares. Brokers sometimes vanish with their investors` portfolios, and no investor has ever won a case against a crooked dealer.
In the courts, it is common for a defense lawyer to pay off witnesses, the judge and even the prosecutor to obtain a favorable verdict for his client. In the end, some would-be litigants find it is cheaper, and more effective, simply to hire a hit man. ``Karachi today,`` says Tariq Amin, a fashion stylist and prominent social commentator, ``is like Chicago in the days of Al Capone mixed in with the Middle Ages.``
In other words, it`s a dangerous mess. And with terrorism breeding in enclaves across the city, Karachi has the potential to spread its menace not only throughout Pakistan but far beyond its frontiers. Several of the top al-Qaeda agents captured by Pakistani officials and the FBI had holed up in Karachi, and many—maybe even Osama bin Laden himself—may still be lurking there, officials say.
How did Karachi become a megalopolis of mayhem? In 1947, when Britain spilt the Raj into India and Pakistan, modern Karachi, more than any other city, was a by-product of this upheaval. Before partition, its inhabitants included Hindus, Parsis, Muslim traders, Goans, and Sheedis, descendants of African slaves shipped over in chains during the 18th century. An illustration of Karachi`s surviving cultural diversity: at a one-room shrine that has more to do with African tribalism than Islam, women flock to see Mushkan, a male Sheedi medium in white, womanly robes. When he goes into a trance, he says he communicates with his jinni in Arabic, Urdu and Swahili. Karachi`s demons, it seems, are cosmopolitan.
At partition, most of Karachi`s 440,000 population of Hindus had left and were replaced by 1.2 million Mohajirs, or Indian migrants. They had followed the dream of Pakistan`s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to create a nation for Muslims. But the Mohajirs were in for a rude shock. Many of the local Punjabis, Sindhis and Pathans regarded them as unwanted trespassers. They still do, except nowadays the Mohajirs have earned wary respect by carrying out vicious ethnic warfare in Karachi throughout the early 1990s. The Pathans and the Sindhis retaliated but the Mohajirs matched them murder for murder, operating torture cells. Today Karachi is in the grips of the Mohajir godfather, Altaf Hussain, a fugitive in Britain charged with more than 100 counts of murder, sabotage and arson, who continues to rule the city from afar.
Like so much of Central Asia, contemporary Karachi is also a product of the Soviet Union`s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the jihad declared by much of the Muslim world in response. To fund their campaign against the Russian occupiers, Afghan warlords used Pakistan as a transshipment point for heroin and Karachi as a major point of export. Paid for in part by those narco-dollars were the vast shipments of small arms and Stinger missiles passing the other way through Karachi before being loaded onto trucks bound for Peshawar and eventually camels headed for Afghanistan`s interior. Those drugs and the guns left a toxic residue that would become, for Karachi, a permanent blight.
Karachi, like Pakistan itself, also suffers from an identity crisis. Aside from Israel (though Pakistanis hate to be reminded of this), Pakistan is the only modern nation forged primarily out of faith. The problem plaguing Pakistan remains that its founders never agreed whether it should be a relaxed country whose citizens happen to be Muslims or an austere Islamic state adhering to Shari`a law. This ambiguity is responsible for the ongoing tug-of-war between the country`s religious extremists and Westernized moderates; Karachi embodies these contradictions. As sociologist Arif Hassan of the nongovernmental organization Urban Resource Center puts it, ``For Karachi`s youth, there are two choices: go to America or join the jihad.``
These ideological fault lines translate at ground level into real, geographical divisions. The poor, who tend to be more fundamentalist, live mostly in dust-blown shanties on the outskirts of town. There, they clan together, Pathans with Pathans, Baluchis with Baluchis, seeking to replicate their tribal life from their homelands. In some ghettos the clergymen have banned television, women wear burqas and the only education on offer for youngsters is the mesmeric recitation of the Koran at local madrasahs. Crimes are punished by elders inside the community according to Koranic law, and the police never hear about the transgressions or the rough justice.
The rich and influential live in the Defence and Clifton suburbs, in the latter along a wide, crescent shore, in faux Grecian- or Californian-style mansions. Every few years their walls grow taller—concrete evidence of the rising tide of instability that engulfs Karachi. The latest fad among the very wealthy is to have a lion cub or a Siberian crane (an endangered species), which clacks loudly when a stranger approaches, roaming in the garden. In a country where more than a third of the population lives below the poverty line, many of the wealthy believe in enhancing their status by importing Filipina maids. The spoiled kids hang out at Karachi`s single mall, listen to heavy metal, and some of them form gangs with cry-tough names such as 9mm, Kryptonite and Outsiders. Every so often, they`ll rumble over a girl and arrange for their bodyguards to trade a few punches in the KFC parking lot. There are no burqas here: the girls wear tight jeans; their mothers prefer designer salwar kameez of watered silk and diamanté Chanel sunglasses.
Here, Islamic prohibitions are the distant constraints of life in the colorless slums. ``What do you want?`` asks stylist Amin, who looks like a brawny pirate. He has two silver rings in one ear and dark eyebrows arched like two hissing cats. He picks up his cell phone and jokingly plays the part of a low-life genie: ``A Russian hooker who looks like Pamela Anderson? Ecstasy? A bottle of Black Label? An AK-47, or a 40-carat diamond? It`s all here—just a phone call away.`` In his sleek, black outfits and his silver bracelets, Amin is a familiar figure at Karachi`s private parties and rave clubs, which never advertise or display signs and are set back from the street in high-walled compounds beyond the hearing of mullahs or cops looking to shake down a few rich kids. Ecstasy and ketamine are the drugs of choice. Back home in their mansions, the élite space out in other ways, too: staring for hours at the TV. ``What we have is the satellite television culture,`` says artist Unvar Shafi Khan. Amin agrees. ``It`s never about individuality. Women in their 40s say, `Make me look like Dynasty [a 1980s soap opera],` and their daughters want their hair styled like the girls` in Friends,`` says Amin.
Bombs may be detonating, journalists beheaded or neighbors kidnapped, but for the people of Clifton and Defence, this violence seldom penetrates their cocoon. They simply build their garden walls a few meters higher or buy another lion cub, this one in darker brown, perhaps, to match that Gucci purse. They`re blithely unaware, for example, that when Qari Shafiqur Rehman, a Koranic teacher with burning eyes and a coal-black beard, walks by a McDonald`s and sees these affluent Karachiites chowing down their Happy Meals, he feels ``a deep rage`` rising within himself. Rehman also belongs to Sipah-e-Sabah, an outlawed extremist group associated with a string of killings and bombings across the city, so his fury should be taken seriously.
Occasionally, reality does intrude into this TV-inspired and narcotics-fueled never-never-land of Karachi`s pampered élite. After Islamic terrorists exploded a car bomb outside the U.S. consulate last year, members strolling on the flower-banked lawn at the colonial-era Sind Club nearby found the severed arm of a woman, with lacquered fingernails and bangles, which had been blown over the wall. The woman was one of the 12 fatalities, and 43 others were wounded in the consulate attack. Club president, Hussain Haroon, whose family owns the English-language Dawn newspaper and has been prominent in Karachi for more than 150 years, says glumly, `` With the Sind Club, I feel like I`m protecting an island in a sea of anarchy.``
Yet no matter how imperiled a Karachiite might feel, calling the cops is seldom an option. Too often, the lawmen are part of the problem. ``You have to realize,`` says a land developer, ``that police stations have no money, not even to change a light bulb or put gas in their cars.`` As a result, he says, police stations become ``revenue-generating centers`` and catching thieves and murderers is a secondary occupation. Police earn money by shaking down prostitution and gambling rings, and they will often demand a bribe even to register a complaint for burglary. A constable`s monthly wage is only $69; a typical middle-class salary in Karachi is $2,000 a year.
Some policemen also perform special favors for politicians and influential businessmen. Wiretapping a pol`s rivals is a big moneyspinner. An assassin (TIME agreed not to publish his name) claims that cops knew he was under contract with a political party. He says he was treated like a ``VVIP`` whenever he visited a police station. ``The police wouldn`t dare touch us.`` He had to laugh when the police took credit, four-and-a-half years ago, for one of his own kills. ``He was a hit man, too, sent down from Lahore by a rival political party to get me,`` the assassin recalls. Except that the assassin tracked the newcomer down first, gunning him down at a crowded intersection. He adds, ``The cops don`t arrest the criminals; they only arrest the weakest.`` This allegation is echoed by a top police officer. He explains that often when a murder occurs, ``We`ll grab somebody—anybody—and beat him until he confesses and even starts blaming his own mother.``
Naturally, when the cops were confronted with real, bad guys—terrorists who last year committed a rash of bombings and the kidnapping of American journalist Daniel Pearl—this squeeze-them-until-they-squeal approach got them nowhere. Agents from the FBI brought in for the Pearl case and the U.S. consulate bombing were also less than impressed by such techniques, according to a Western diplomat. A police officer admits that at first his men were also afraid of the extremists, who had informers inside the police force. They were also well equipped, he says, with guns smuggled across the lawless frontier with Afghanistan and money from Arab donors. ``We have over 800 madrasahs in Karachi, and many of them are nurseries for terrorism,`` the officer claims.
The Americans found a useful ally in Jameel Yusuf, head of the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC). An energetic, well-heeled businessman, Yusuf formed the committee in the early 1990s when Karachi was stricken by several kidnappings and murders a day. ``It was turning into a city of death,`` he says. By setting up a data bank and electronic surveillance of criminals, Yusuf and a few honest cops managed to bust many of the major kidnapping gangs. These criminals were often linked to cells of sectarian killers and terrorists. ``They all steal cars and buy and sell illegal weapons,`` Yusuf says.
With the FBI`s help in monitoring cell-phone calls and e-mails, Yusuf was able to throw an electronic net over the Karachi neighborhoods where terrorists and some of Pearl`s kidnappers lurked. ``Al-Qaeda isn`t like a social club,`` he says. ``They don`t have a posted membership list.`` What he did find was a link between al-Qaeda and two virulent Sunni sectarian groups—Lashkar Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammad—which had trained in Afghan camps alongside Osama bin Laden`s holy warriors. The two groups, in turn, were mixed up in the Karachi underworld. Often, says Yusuf, it was the criminals who rented the hideouts used by al-Qaeda members, sent their coded messages from Internet cafés and helped them vanish into the city`s maze of slums.
Yusuf`s close ties to the Americans proved to be his undoing. On March 22 he was removed as CPLC chief. ``The rumor was I worked for the CIA,`` says Yusuf. ``That`s a laugh. The Americans won`t even let me have a visa after all the help I gave them.`` Because of terrorist threats, Yusuf travels with an extra car of bodyguards and lives in an ultra-secure penthouse as he struggles to win back his old job. He has enough money to leave Karachi, but he likes the place. ``Any other city with 14 million people and so many bad governments would have collapsed long ago,`` he laughs.
A handful of other Karachiites have also refused to give up on their city. Abdul Sattar Edhi, a saintly ex-shopkeeper who goes around after the nightly bout of violence to collect the dead and give them a decent burial, also declines to flee. And that`s a good thing for Karachi: his charity foundation now runs orphanages, mental institutions, clinics and ambulance services. Ardeshir Cowasjee, an irascible millionaire who wears silk pajamas and writes a weekly column for Dawn in which he tracks corruption to the highest places, vows to stay put, as does sociologist and city planner Arif Hassan who campaigns to save the few remaining buildings from Karachi`s regal colonial past. Roland De Souza, whose organization SHERRI fights against illegal land developers whom he says are often in cahoots with city nabobs and some military officers, also insists he will always call Karachi his home. They, along with many other die-hard citizens, find that Karachi possesses a dynamism missing in other Pakistani cities. It`s what lures 3,000 newcomers a day to Karachi, even if it means shoveling rotten fish on the wharf for $8 per 12-hour shift and bedding down with the ubiquitous rats on a stretch of pavement.
Karachi is a city of predators, says M.R., the assassin. He complains he barely makes a profit after he has paid off the cops, government contacts and his political protectors. His cell phone chimes. After taking the call, he says almost apologetically, ``I have dozens of boys working for me. I try to make sure they each get a `job` at least once every two months.`` Then he stubs out his cigarette and slips out of the apartment, trailing two armed thugs for protection. Karachi isn`t safe at night, not even for a killer with connections.
—With reporting by Ghulam Hasnain
The Secularity of India
India — A Salad Bowl of Religions?
By The Globalist | Wednesday, June 02, 2004
India is known to be a hodgepodge of religions, languages and cultures. In May 2004, Manmohan Singh became the country’s first-ever Sikh prime minister. We wonder: How big is India’s Sikh community as a share of the country’s population?
A. 1.9%
B. 2.3%
C. 12%
D. 81%
A. Correct
Manmohan Singh, India`s new Prime Minister and his fellow Sikh believers account for 1.9% of the population. They are concentrated in the Punjab region in India`s northwest bordering Pakistan — and the Golden Temple of Amritsar is their holiest place. The Sikh religion`s founder was Shri Guru Nanak Dev Ji (1469-1538). Sikhs follow a strict monotheistic faith and have no caste system.
As opposed to colonial India`s Muslims, the Sikhs never realized their dream of a homeland. Yet, activism for a `Sikhistan` has died down in recent years.
B. Incorrect
India`s Christians make up 2.3% of its population. It is believed that the Apostle Thomas was the first to preach the gospel to Indians about A.D. 52. The majority of Christians in India are Roman Catholic. Among them is Sonia Gandhi, winner of the 2004 elections, the president of the Indian National Congress Party — and widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
C. Incorrect
India`s Muslim community accounts for about 12% of its one billion people, with the country`s President Abdul Kalam as one of its most prominent members. It was the Hindu-Muslim conflict which was mainly responsible for the country`s partition into India and Pakistan in August 1947. The two countries have fought three wars since 1948 — and the Kashmir conflict continues to cause problems.
Ironically, up until a few years ago, more Muslims lived in India than in Pakistan — which now has a population of about 140 million.
D. Incorrect
Hindus are the largest religious group in India accounting for 81% of the population. Hinduism is also the dominant religion in Nepal and among the Tamils in Sri Lanka — and has grown to become the world`s third-largest religion, after Christianity and Islam.
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3955
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 09:00 am
GloboQuiz > Global DemographicsIndia — A Salad Bowl of Religions?
By The Globalist | Wednesday, June 02, 2004
India is known to be a hodgepodge of religions, languages and cultures. In May 2004, Manmohan Singh became the country’s first-ever Sikh prime minister. We wonder: How big is India’s Sikh community as a share of the country’s population?
A. 1.9%
B. 2.3%
C. 12%
D. 81%
A. Correct
Manmohan Singh, India`s new Prime Minister and his fellow Sikh believers account for 1.9% of the population. They are concentrated in the Punjab region in India`s northwest bordering Pakistan — and the Golden Temple of Amritsar is their holiest place. The Sikh religion`s founder was Shri Guru Nanak Dev Ji (1469-1538). Sikhs follow a strict monotheistic faith and have no caste system.
As opposed to colonial India`s Muslims, the Sikhs never realized their dream of a homeland. Yet, activism for a `Sikhistan` has died down in recent years.
B. Incorrect
India`s Christians make up 2.3% of its population. It is believed that the Apostle Thomas was the first to preach the gospel to Indians about A.D. 52. The majority of Christians in India are Roman Catholic. Among them is Sonia Gandhi, winner of the 2004 elections, the president of the Indian National Congress Party — and widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
C. Incorrect
India`s Muslim community accounts for about 12% of its one billion people, with the country`s President Abdul Kalam as one of its most prominent members. It was the Hindu-Muslim conflict which was mainly responsible for the country`s partition into India and Pakistan in August 1947. The two countries have fought three wars since 1948 — and the Kashmir conflict continues to cause problems.
Ironically, up until a few years ago, more Muslims lived in India than in Pakistan — which now has a population of about 140 million.
D. Incorrect
Hindus are the largest religious group in India accounting for 81% of the population. Hinduism is also the dominant religion in Nepal and among the Tamils in Sri Lanka — and has grown to become the world`s third-largest religion, after Christianity and Islam.
http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3955
The Secularity of India
MADURAI, . India has been secular from time immemorial and there is ample evidence in history and Tamil and Sanskrit literature, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, former IAS officer.
Delivering the rector`s address on the topic, `National Integration and Secular Traditions - A search for roots,` at the 114th College Day of the Madura College here on Wednesday, he said there were two misconceptions about the integration of the country, prior to the British rule, and that secular values were at a low ebb during the monarchy days.
Mr. Mahadevan dispelled the misconception that India was not one country and there were 56 princely states, citing references from Sanskrit works like `Raghuvamsam` and `Kumarasambavam` and the epics like `The Mahabharatha` and `The Ramayana.`
According to him, in all these works, the boundaries of the present day India had been clearly mentioned with the Himalayas as the northern end and Kanyakumari as the southern most tip of the country.
To dismiss the misconception that the country had always been steadfast in upholding secular values, he cited references from `Agananooru,` `Pathitru Pathu` and `Mullaipattu` and added that many inscriptions had proof of Kings donating land for opening Jain and Buddhist monasteries in their territories.
Even Madurai had a rich history in this regard, he said, referring to an epigraph at Maangulam.
In the modern era, he quoted songs of Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Subramania Bharati to prove that the country was still rich in maintaining its secular values. Though, the people were divided by culture, religion, race, language, etc., still they remained united as citizens of a nation, Mr. Mahadevan said.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 09:00 am
`India, secular from time immemorial` MADURAI, . India has been secular from time immemorial and there is ample evidence in history and Tamil and Sanskrit literature, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, former IAS officer.
Delivering the rector`s address on the topic, `National Integration and Secular Traditions - A search for roots,` at the 114th College Day of the Madura College here on Wednesday, he said there were two misconceptions about the integration of the country, prior to the British rule, and that secular values were at a low ebb during the monarchy days.
Mr. Mahadevan dispelled the misconception that India was not one country and there were 56 princely states, citing references from Sanskrit works like `Raghuvamsam` and `Kumarasambavam` and the epics like `The Mahabharatha` and `The Ramayana.`
According to him, in all these works, the boundaries of the present day India had been clearly mentioned with the Himalayas as the northern end and Kanyakumari as the southern most tip of the country.
To dismiss the misconception that the country had always been steadfast in upholding secular values, he cited references from `Agananooru,` `Pathitru Pathu` and `Mullaipattu` and added that many inscriptions had proof of Kings donating land for opening Jain and Buddhist monasteries in their territories.
Even Madurai had a rich history in this regard, he said, referring to an epigraph at Maangulam.
In the modern era, he quoted songs of Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Subramania Bharati to prove that the country was still rich in maintaining its secular values. Though, the people were divided by culture, religion, race, language, etc., still they remained united as citizens of a nation, Mr. Mahadevan said.
The Secularity of India
In the antipodes, the Indian election tests comprehension. The dismissal of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalists is seen as a triumph of democracy for the poor.
Then again, the politics that stopped Italian-born Sonia from ascending to her rightful role as Prime Minister was a capitulation to xenophobes; a travesty of the democratic process.
Realists, not least Indian expatriates among Australians, hold up the world’s largest democracy as a beacon.
As one letter to the editor notes, where else is there a Hindu majority nation with a Sikh Prime Minister, a Roman Catholic of Italian origin as president of the ruling party, and, not for the first time, a Muslim President?
As happens, though, talk of values drives the proponents into trenchant, polar camps. Professor Robin Jeffries and Associate Professor Louise Edwards are wary about buying into the debate.
Jeffries, India scholar at La Trobe University in Melbourne, is president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. China scholar Edwards, senior lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra, is secretary.
``It’s a spurious, silly debate,’’ Jeffries tells the New Sunday Times of arguments for the superiority of one set of values against another. People just find it easy to think in opposites, and it doesn’t help.
Edwards worries about the harm such binary approaches does to global advancement. On the one hand, they could lead to complacency in the so-called West, and on the other hand, a retreat into isolation, and the view that all things West are all bad.
Edwards acknowledges that the West has for long been accepted as the keeper of moral values, and that it is the East that has to compromise.
Edwards and Jeffries subscribe to the critique of American philosopher Richard Rorty of the ``essentialist Heideggerian account of the West as a ‘finished-off object’.’’
But Jeffries would rather see Rorty’s preferred alternative of the West as ``a continuing adventure’’ (in conversations with the East) in terms of a global synthesis of understanding.
This would take account of universal human rights understood as access to economic and educational opportunity.
Jeffries, espousing Mahatma Gandhi, is confident the East-West dichotomy will be undermined by a world rising to the challenge of global catastrophe. In Australia, the ``global adventure’’ does go on, especially in academia.
But the public doesn’t see this. ``Academics don’t work the media well,’’ says Jeffries, ``and the media is in too much of a hurry to wait on the academics.’’
Edwards is not as optimistic on the dialogue. ``Fundamentally, the West thinks there is nothing to learn from Chinese and Indian philosophy,’’ she says.
But things are not beyond the realms of possibility. Much as Edwards loathes the thought, she has to agree with Jacques. The promise of China and India as economic powerhouses could pave the way for broader exchange.
``You would like to believe that ideas lead,’’ says Edwards. ``But really, money talks; ideas follow.’’
There is much to be done, not least by the ASAA. Equally, public intellectuals in the East need to challenge the notion that moral behaviour is the preserve of the West.
And not by trenchant reaction, or an appeal to chauvinism.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 09:00 am
Elsewhere, Jacques writes of ``the end of the West’’, where ``Europe is no longer the centre of the world — the future belongs to the might of Asia’’.In the antipodes, the Indian election tests comprehension. The dismissal of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalists is seen as a triumph of democracy for the poor.
Then again, the politics that stopped Italian-born Sonia from ascending to her rightful role as Prime Minister was a capitulation to xenophobes; a travesty of the democratic process.
Realists, not least Indian expatriates among Australians, hold up the world’s largest democracy as a beacon.
As one letter to the editor notes, where else is there a Hindu majority nation with a Sikh Prime Minister, a Roman Catholic of Italian origin as president of the ruling party, and, not for the first time, a Muslim President?
As happens, though, talk of values drives the proponents into trenchant, polar camps. Professor Robin Jeffries and Associate Professor Louise Edwards are wary about buying into the debate.
Jeffries, India scholar at La Trobe University in Melbourne, is president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. China scholar Edwards, senior lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra, is secretary.
``It’s a spurious, silly debate,’’ Jeffries tells the New Sunday Times of arguments for the superiority of one set of values against another. People just find it easy to think in opposites, and it doesn’t help.
Edwards worries about the harm such binary approaches does to global advancement. On the one hand, they could lead to complacency in the so-called West, and on the other hand, a retreat into isolation, and the view that all things West are all bad.
Edwards acknowledges that the West has for long been accepted as the keeper of moral values, and that it is the East that has to compromise.
Edwards and Jeffries subscribe to the critique of American philosopher Richard Rorty of the ``essentialist Heideggerian account of the West as a ‘finished-off object’.’’
But Jeffries would rather see Rorty’s preferred alternative of the West as ``a continuing adventure’’ (in conversations with the East) in terms of a global synthesis of understanding.
This would take account of universal human rights understood as access to economic and educational opportunity.
Jeffries, espousing Mahatma Gandhi, is confident the East-West dichotomy will be undermined by a world rising to the challenge of global catastrophe. In Australia, the ``global adventure’’ does go on, especially in academia.
But the public doesn’t see this. ``Academics don’t work the media well,’’ says Jeffries, ``and the media is in too much of a hurry to wait on the academics.’’
Edwards is not as optimistic on the dialogue. ``Fundamentally, the West thinks there is nothing to learn from Chinese and Indian philosophy,’’ she says.
But things are not beyond the realms of possibility. Much as Edwards loathes the thought, she has to agree with Jacques. The promise of China and India as economic powerhouses could pave the way for broader exchange.
``You would like to believe that ideas lead,’’ says Edwards. ``But really, money talks; ideas follow.’’
There is much to be done, not least by the ASAA. Equally, public intellectuals in the East need to challenge the notion that moral behaviour is the preserve of the West.
And not by trenchant reaction, or an appeal to chauvinism.
The Secularity of India
It is always instructive, whatever the reason, to watch a politician decline to assume power that might have been hers. In the case of India’s Sonia Gandhi, perhaps in an illustration of the pervasiveness of paradox in human affairs, it might lead to her becoming an even more powerful political presence over time than if she had become prime minister Friday. And, once the drama has been played out and the dust has settled, India just might be better off.
Gandhi is the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991, and daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated while prime minister in 1984. As president of India’s Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi presided last week over an unexpected victory in parliamentary elections. That put her in line to be prime minister, but she declined to take the position. Instead, Manmohan Singh, a former finance minister, will become prime minister.
All this creates a fascinating picture. India is 85 percent Hindu, and all its prime ministers until now have been Hindu. But Indian voters last week tossed out the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, gave a majority to a foreign-born Roman Catholic and will watch Friday as a Muslim president swears in a Sikh prime minister.
As Parag Khanna, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, put it, ``India is the clash of civilizations that didn’t happen.`` Instead, people from different cultures have chosen to live together and, to a great extent, to separate their political preferences from their religion or ethnicity.
The choice of Manmohan Singh caused the Indian stock market to rise, perhaps for good reason. He was the architect of economic reforms begun in 1991 that reduced barriers to foreign investment and competition, reduced the miles of red tape previous bureaucracies had tied around businesspeople and those who wanted to start a business, and privatized a number of inefficient government enterprises.
These reforms led to an economic boom that unfortunately has yet to reach the poorest of India’s people, but has created a sense of possibility. Khanna believes Singh will continue such reforms, though he will have to maneuver delicately among various factions to do so. He also believes Congress Party veterans may do as well or better than Bharatiya Janata Party members at reaching a less-hostile relationship with Pakistan.
Sonia Gandhi will remain as president of the Congress Party. Her gesture of renunciation is widely seen as noble (though political and personal calculation were involved), in a culture where self-sacrifice is honored as an ideal though seldom practiced. So she may come out of this with, as the Deccan Herald in India put it, ``an authority that lies beyond power.``
The United States had no first-priority interest in this outcome, but a peaceful and prosperous India wouldn’t hurt. For better or worse, the United States has plenty of problems to deal with in other parts of the world.
http://www.valleystar.com/editorial_more.php?id=53363_0_28_0_M
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 09:00 am
Inside India’s election dramaIt is always instructive, whatever the reason, to watch a politician decline to assume power that might have been hers. In the case of India’s Sonia Gandhi, perhaps in an illustration of the pervasiveness of paradox in human affairs, it might lead to her becoming an even more powerful political presence over time than if she had become prime minister Friday. And, once the drama has been played out and the dust has settled, India just might be better off.
Gandhi is the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991, and daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated while prime minister in 1984. As president of India’s Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi presided last week over an unexpected victory in parliamentary elections. That put her in line to be prime minister, but she declined to take the position. Instead, Manmohan Singh, a former finance minister, will become prime minister.
All this creates a fascinating picture. India is 85 percent Hindu, and all its prime ministers until now have been Hindu. But Indian voters last week tossed out the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, gave a majority to a foreign-born Roman Catholic and will watch Friday as a Muslim president swears in a Sikh prime minister.
As Parag Khanna, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, put it, ``India is the clash of civilizations that didn’t happen.`` Instead, people from different cultures have chosen to live together and, to a great extent, to separate their political preferences from their religion or ethnicity.
The choice of Manmohan Singh caused the Indian stock market to rise, perhaps for good reason. He was the architect of economic reforms begun in 1991 that reduced barriers to foreign investment and competition, reduced the miles of red tape previous bureaucracies had tied around businesspeople and those who wanted to start a business, and privatized a number of inefficient government enterprises.
These reforms led to an economic boom that unfortunately has yet to reach the poorest of India’s people, but has created a sense of possibility. Khanna believes Singh will continue such reforms, though he will have to maneuver delicately among various factions to do so. He also believes Congress Party veterans may do as well or better than Bharatiya Janata Party members at reaching a less-hostile relationship with Pakistan.
Sonia Gandhi will remain as president of the Congress Party. Her gesture of renunciation is widely seen as noble (though political and personal calculation were involved), in a culture where self-sacrifice is honored as an ideal though seldom practiced. So she may come out of this with, as the Deccan Herald in India put it, ``an authority that lies beyond power.``
The United States had no first-priority interest in this outcome, but a peaceful and prosperous India wouldn’t hurt. For better or worse, the United States has plenty of problems to deal with in other parts of the world.
http://www.valleystar.com/editorial_more.php?id=53363_0_28_0_M
The Secularity of India
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2004/05/22/468463.html
India is ethnically, linguistically and regionally the most diverse country in the world. All faiths are represented within India. It is home for more than 800 million Hindus and over 150 million Muslims, making India the country with the second-largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia.
Lok Sabha, or India`s lower house of Parliament, has 543 seats, representing a population in excess of a billion people. The electoral roll for the 2004 election comprised of 668.7 million voters residing in 29 states and six union territories of the Indian republic. Congress elected 145 members to Parliament, BJP elected 138, and the remaining 260 seats went to a mix of regional parties and the two rival communist parties.
India`s parliamentary system of government is a British inheritance, with its roots now firmly secure in Indian soil. Indeed, modern India is in many ways an English creation. Nearly 200 years of English rule have planted in this polyglot of a country much of what Indians now cherish that originated in the British Isles.
Winston Churchill once remarked, ``India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.`` And yet from the game of cricket to the love of Shakespeare, from English as the working language of a people to the legal and political ideas by which Indians live, the success of modern India as a united country is a testimonial to how a colonial power can have a lasting positive effects over a colony it once ruled.
In the furnishing of the Indian political system, the legacy of Britain is greatest. Sunil Khilnani in his book, The Idea of India, noted, ``the period of Indian history since 1947 might be seen as the adventure of a political idea: democracy. From this perspective, the history of independent India appears as the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the 18th century by the American and French revolutions.``
India`s continuing democratic experiment is a lesson for her neighbours, for a relatively less diverse China in occupation of Tibet, and for rulers of Myanmar, formerly Burma, abusing the democratic wishes of her people and their leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But, most emphatically, India`s democracy is a lesson for the Arab-Muslim world, a region stretching from Pakistan across North Africa, in denial of history`s progress measured in terms of people acquiring freedom and democratic maturity.
The story of Indian democracy is inseparable from that of the Congress party now headed by Sonia Gandhi. It was a party established in 1885 by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, in the service of the British Crown in India. Hume, somewhat of an eccentric civil servant with a radical liberal frame of mind, became the first foreign-born president of an Indian nationalist party dedicated to the idea of self-rule.
In the 119-year history of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi is its fourth foreign-born leader. Her two predecessors in this role in pre-independent India were, besides Hume, Dr. Annie Besant and Nellie Sengupta. Two other women, Dr Sarojini Naidu and Indira Gandhi, also led the Congress.
It is Congress that dominated India`s politics until the past decade. Within the Congress, the Nehru-Gandhi family has been its most prominent political dynasty, and since 1947 this family has emerged as India`s democratically elected ``royalty.`` There is no similar phenomenon of a family`s role -- intimately bound with the fortunes of a political party and the life of a country -- to be found in any other democratic society. Neither the saga of the Adams family nor that of the Kennedy clan in the United States reflect the degree to which the Nehru-Gandhi family remains connected to the politics of modern India.
The patriarch of the family was Motilal Nehru (1861-1931), a lawyer by profession, elected president of Congress in 1928. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), Motilal`s only son, became independent India`s first prime minister.
Indira Gandhi (nee Nehru, 1917-84), Jawaharlal`s only child and separated from her husband Feroze Gandhi, not related to India`s nationalist hero, Mahatma Gandhi, became the third prime minister in 1966. She was defeated in the election of 1977, returned to power in 1980 and was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. She was succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi (1944-91) as the leader of Congress and India`s sixth prime minister.
Rajiv Gandhi`s Congress-led government was defeated in the 1989 election. While campaigning in an election called for 1991, he was killed by a Tamil suicide bomber. Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv`s younger brother groomed for political office, died in an airplane crash in 1980 soon after Indira Gandhi was returned to power.
Congress won the 1991 election under the leadership of Narasimha Rao, losing power in 1996. Since then, without a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family at its helm, Congress was relegated to the opposition in Parliament.
The return of Congress to power in 2004 is the amazing story of Sonia Gandhi (nee Maino) entering Indian politics as a duty to her family, her husband`s political party and her adopted country. She had married Rajiv Gandhi in 1968 and gave birth to son Rahul in 1970 and daughter Priyanka in 1971. In 1998, she was elected to the Lok Sabha from the constituency that had once elected her husband, and then became the leader of Congress.
Sonia Gandhi displayed an uncanny understanding of India`s culture and politics. She understood Congress needed to reconnect with the bulk of India`s rural and poor population, and give voice to its anguish and hopes, as urban middle-class Indians prospered from economic gains of recent years.
In some ways, India`s 14th general election was a referendum on BJP`s direction for the country. Its robust Hindu nationalism -- to its critics more akin to an atavistic chauvinism bent on undermining India`s carefully crafted secularism as an equal recognition of its religious diversity -- strained Hindu-Muslim communal relations unnecessarily. Its economic policies widened the gap between rich and poor.
Congress under Sonia Gandhi tapped into the unease beneath ``India shining`` of the BJP. It succeeded because she was also a reminder to Indians voting for Congress of the role of the Nehru-Gandhi family in modern India`s history, providing them with a symbol or focus for unity and continuity in a maddeningly complex country.
Posted by
mumbaikar
Jun 2, 2004 09:00 am
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2004/05/22/468463.html
India is ethnically, linguistically and regionally the most diverse country in the world. All faiths are represented within India. It is home for more than 800 million Hindus and over 150 million Muslims, making India the country with the second-largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia.
Lok Sabha, or India`s lower house of Parliament, has 543 seats, representing a population in excess of a billion people. The electoral roll for the 2004 election comprised of 668.7 million voters residing in 29 states and six union territories of the Indian republic. Congress elected 145 members to Parliament, BJP elected 138, and the remaining 260 seats went to a mix of regional parties and the two rival communist parties.
India`s parliamentary system of government is a British inheritance, with its roots now firmly secure in Indian soil. Indeed, modern India is in many ways an English creation. Nearly 200 years of English rule have planted in this polyglot of a country much of what Indians now cherish that originated in the British Isles.
Winston Churchill once remarked, ``India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.`` And yet from the game of cricket to the love of Shakespeare, from English as the working language of a people to the legal and political ideas by which Indians live, the success of modern India as a united country is a testimonial to how a colonial power can have a lasting positive effects over a colony it once ruled.
In the furnishing of the Indian political system, the legacy of Britain is greatest. Sunil Khilnani in his book, The Idea of India, noted, ``the period of Indian history since 1947 might be seen as the adventure of a political idea: democracy. From this perspective, the history of independent India appears as the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the 18th century by the American and French revolutions.``
India`s continuing democratic experiment is a lesson for her neighbours, for a relatively less diverse China in occupation of Tibet, and for rulers of Myanmar, formerly Burma, abusing the democratic wishes of her people and their leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But, most emphatically, India`s democracy is a lesson for the Arab-Muslim world, a region stretching from Pakistan across North Africa, in denial of history`s progress measured in terms of people acquiring freedom and democratic maturity.
The story of Indian democracy is inseparable from that of the Congress party now headed by Sonia Gandhi. It was a party established in 1885 by a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, in the service of the British Crown in India. Hume, somewhat of an eccentric civil servant with a radical liberal frame of mind, became the first foreign-born president of an Indian nationalist party dedicated to the idea of self-rule.
In the 119-year history of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi is its fourth foreign-born leader. Her two predecessors in this role in pre-independent India were, besides Hume, Dr. Annie Besant and Nellie Sengupta. Two other women, Dr Sarojini Naidu and Indira Gandhi, also led the Congress.
It is Congress that dominated India`s politics until the past decade. Within the Congress, the Nehru-Gandhi family has been its most prominent political dynasty, and since 1947 this family has emerged as India`s democratically elected ``royalty.`` There is no similar phenomenon of a family`s role -- intimately bound with the fortunes of a political party and the life of a country -- to be found in any other democratic society. Neither the saga of the Adams family nor that of the Kennedy clan in the United States reflect the degree to which the Nehru-Gandhi family remains connected to the politics of modern India.
The patriarch of the family was Motilal Nehru (1861-1931), a lawyer by profession, elected president of Congress in 1928. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), Motilal`s only son, became independent India`s first prime minister.
Indira Gandhi (nee Nehru, 1917-84), Jawaharlal`s only child and separated from her husband Feroze Gandhi, not related to India`s nationalist hero, Mahatma Gandhi, became the third prime minister in 1966. She was defeated in the election of 1977, returned to power in 1980 and was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. She was succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi (1944-91) as the leader of Congress and India`s sixth prime minister.
Rajiv Gandhi`s Congress-led government was defeated in the 1989 election. While campaigning in an election called for 1991, he was killed by a Tamil suicide bomber. Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv`s younger brother groomed for political office, died in an airplane crash in 1980 soon after Indira Gandhi was returned to power.
Congress won the 1991 election under the leadership of Narasimha Rao, losing power in 1996. Since then, without a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family at its helm, Congress was relegated to the opposition in Parliament.
The return of Congress to power in 2004 is the amazing story of Sonia Gandhi (nee Maino) entering Indian politics as a duty to her family, her husband`s political party and her adopted country. She had married Rajiv Gandhi in 1968 and gave birth to son Rahul in 1970 and daughter Priyanka in 1971. In 1998, she was elected to the Lok Sabha from the constituency that had once elected her husband, and then became the leader of Congress.
Sonia Gandhi displayed an uncanny understanding of India`s culture and politics. She understood Congress needed to reconnect with the bulk of India`s rural and poor population, and give voice to its anguish and hopes, as urban middle-class Indians prospered from economic gains of recent years.
In some ways, India`s 14th general election was a referendum on BJP`s direction for the country. Its robust Hindu nationalism -- to its critics more akin to an atavistic chauvinism bent on undermining India`s carefully crafted secularism as an equal recognition of its religious diversity -- strained Hindu-Muslim communal relations unnecessarily. Its economic policies widened the gap between rich and poor.
Congress under Sonia Gandhi tapped into the unease beneath ``India shining`` of the BJP. It succeeded because she was also a reminder to Indians voting for Congress of the role of the Nehru-Gandhi family in modern India`s history, providing them with a symbol or focus for unity and continuity in a maddeningly complex country.
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