Imperialist Expansion, Wars and Neo-Fascism

Prabhat Patnaik | 12 Oct 2024

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  GAZA SCHOOL MASSACRE

  
  

Imposition of a neo-liberal economic order and engaging in wars

The “inevitable striving of finance capital”, Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) “to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory”. He was writing, of course, in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry, where this striving took the form of a competitive struggle between rival finance capitals that speedily completed the partitioning of the world, leaving no “empty spaces”; only a repartitioning of the world was thenceforth possible, through wars among rival financial oligarchies. The wars that were actually unleashed, however, led to a weakening of imperialism and the splitting off of parts of the world from its hegemony, through socialist revolutions and the process of decolonisation that socialism helped to usher in.

The further development of the centralisation of capital, leading to its consolidation, has on the one hand muted inter-imperialist rivalry, since capital now wants the entire world, not broken up into spheres of influence of rival powers, as the domain for its unrestricted movement. On the other hand, it has also led to an attempt on the part of now-united imperialism to reassert its hegemony over the territories that had broken off from it earlier.

The two weapons that imperialism uses for this latter objective are: the imposition of a neo-liberal order on the world that essentially negates the effects of decolonisation, and the unleashing of wars where the first weapon alone does not suffice for its purpose.

The neo-liberal regime has meant a weakening of the working class everywhere. In the advanced countries it has placed before the workers the threat of relocation to lower-wage Third World countries saddled with vast labour reserves, because of which their wages have stagnated.

In the Third World countries, such relocation has not reduced the relative size of the labour reserves, because of which the real wages have stagnated there too. Thus, while the vector of real wages across the world has stagnated, labour productivities have increased everywhere (which, after, all is the reason for the relative size of Third World labour reserves not decreasing), causing a rise in the share of economic surplus both for the world economy as a whole as well as in individual countries.

This has not only brought about a sharp rise in economic inequality (and over much of the Third World even an increase in the proportion of the population suffering from absolute nutritional deprivation), but precisely for that reason a tendency toward over-production (since the working people consume a larger proportion of their incomes than those living off the surplus).

The standard Keynesian remedy for over-production, namely larger government spending, does not work under the neo-liberal regime, since the two possible ways in which such spending has to be financed, if it is to boost aggregate demand, viz. a larger fiscal deficit or larger taxation of the rich, are both ruled out under this regime. Both are anathema for finance capital and the nation-state confronted with globalised finance capital that can leave its shores at the drop of a hat, must kow-tow to the caprices of such finance capital.

With this tendency toward over-production, immanent in neo-liberal capitalism, pushing the world economy toward stagnation, there has been an upsurge of neo-fascism, with corporate capital tending to ally itself with neo-fascist elements who provide a diversionary discourse. This discourse is concerned not with the material conditions of life, but with generating hatred against some hapless religious or ethnic minority that is portrayed as the “other”.

Neo-fascist elements have captured power in some countries, and are waiting in the wings in others, though the journey from their capturing power within a liberal democracy to building a fascist state remains a more or less prolonged one.

But even neo-fascist elements being in power within a country does not overcome this tendency toward over-production: as the State remains a nation-state facing globally-mobile finance, its incapacity, even under a neo-fascist government, to increase aggregate demand through government spending that is financed either by a larger fiscal deficit or by taxes on the rich, remains as before.

It may be asked: why should the blame for this inability on the part of the nation-state to counter the tendency toward stagnation, and hence the ascendancy of neo-fascism, be laid at the door of imperialism? The simple answer is that any attempt on the part of any nation to delink itself from the vortex of global finance and use the State to boost demand would be met with the imposition of economic sanctions by the phalanx of imperial states, led by the United States. The first weapon used by imperialism to reassert its hegemony, in short, leads to acute misery for the people everywhere and a neo-fascist denouement.

The second way of reasserting its hegemony over parts of the world that had split off, which is through wars, is now pushing the world towards a catastrophe. Both the two wars that are going on at present are promoted and sustained by imperialism and have the potential to escalate to nuclear confrontations.

Take the Ukraine War first. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev was given the assurance that there would be no expansion of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) eastward. But NATO did expand eastward right up to Ukraine. Ukraine itself did not want to join NATO; its duly-elected president Viktor Yanukovich, who was opposed to any such idea, was ousted in a coup, engineered under the supervision of US official Victoria Nuland, that brought in to government supporters of Stepan Bandera who had collaborated with Hitler’s troops during the Second World War. The new government not only expressed a desire to join NATO but also started a conflict with the Russian-speaking Donbas region that claimed thousands of lives before Russia intervened.

Let us ask the question that is a litmus test in these matters: who stands for a peace agreement in the Ukraine conflict and who opposes it? The Minsk Agreement which had been reached between Russia and Ukraine with the help of France and Germany was torpedoed by the US and Britain, with Boris Johnson, the then British Prime Minister, even flying down to Kiev to dissuade Ukraine from accepting it.

And lest it be thought that different imperialist powers were speaking in different voices, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor of that time, has now admitted that the Minsk Agreement was a ruse merely to buy time for Ukraine until it became war-ready.

What indubitably stands out is that the war in Ukraine is basically a means of bringing Russia under the hegemony of imperialism, which had been the imperialist project after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which almost got accomplished under the presidentship of Boris Yeltsin.

Now take the other war, unleashed with staggering brutality and ruthlessness by Israel against the Palestinian people and now against Lebanon. Total backing for Israel by US imperialism appears at first sight to be a reflection of the strength of the Zionist lobby in American politics, rather than of any imperialist plans per se. This impression, however, is erroneous. Imperialism is not just complicit in Israeli “settler colonialism”, for promoting which Israel is carrying out a genocide today and preparing for mass ethnic cleansing tomorrow; its project is to control the entire region via Israel.

Here again the litmus test is: who stands in the way of peace today? The US formally accepts a “two-State” solution, but every time the proposal to accept Palestine as the 194th member-state of the United Nations has come up in the General Assembly, which would be the first step toward implementing the “two-State” solution, the US has voted against it; clearly it would veto such a move in the Security Council. Its support for an authentic “two-State” solution therefore is a sham.

What is more, whenever some critical point is reached in truce negotiations between Israel and its opponents, whether Ismael Hanieh or Hassan Nasrallah, these leaders are assassinated by Israel. The negotiations for truce, in short, are again just a sham as far as Israel is concerned; and US imperialism is clearly complicit in this charade.

Israel’s own settler colonialism jells with the role earmarked for it by US imperialism, of being the local gendarme of imperialism. And with the war escalating, the danger of a nuclear confrontation looms larger every day.

I mentioned that the imposition of a neo-liberal economic order and engaging in wars were the two weapons used by the now-united imperialism to reassert its hegemony. But if one is leading to neo-fascism, the other is pushing mankind toward a catastrophe.

Nobel laureate Han Kang drives readers to bookstores, online and offline

Korean bookstore websites experienced service outages and connection delays as she topped real-time bestseller lists.

ANN | The Korea Herald
14 Oct, 2024

Major bookstores in South Korea are experiencing a surge in sales of all of Han Kang’s works following the announcement of her Nobel Prize in literature.

On Friday morning at Kyobo Bookstore in Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, people had lined up in front of the branch before it opened. Shortly after business began at 9:30am, Han’s books were already sold out, and the special display set up to commemorate the award from the day before was empty.

By around 10:30am that day, the shelves had been restocked with Han’s books. The area in front of the display, as well as outside the bookstore, was bustling with people eager to purchase her works.

The websites of major bookstores such as Kyobo Bookstore and Yes24 even experienced service outages and connection delays.

On the real-time bestseller lists of Kyobo Bookstore and Yes24, Han Kang was perched in the respective top spots.

More than 130,000 copies of the Nobel laureate’s works had already been sold across two platforms in less than half a day. A majority of the available inventory was exhausted due to the surge in orders, leading to most of her books to be sold on backorder.

According to data from Yes24, all top 10 spots on the real-time bestseller list were occupied by Han Kang immediately following the recent Nobel Prize announcement. Sales of her major works saw significant increases, with Human Acts rising 784 times, The Vegetarian increasing 696 times and We Do Not Part soaring 3,422 times compared to the day before the award announcement.

Additionally, as of Friday, the day after the award was announced, five of Han Kang’s works ranked within the top 10 in the overall bestseller list. Yes24’s bestseller list is a ranking that considers data of the previous seven days. The explosive sales in just a few hours pushed her books on to the weekly bestseller list.

In the real-time bestseller list of Kyobo Bookstore, her landmark The Vegetarian was followed by her other works in the second to ninth spots: Human Acts, We Do Not Part, The White Book, Greek Lessons, I Put the Evening in the Drawer, The Vegetarian (Revised Edition), Human Acts (E-book), and The Essentials: Han Kang.

Originally published in Dawn, October 14th, 2024

BOOK REVIEW

NON-FICTION: HUBRIS AND MISCALCULATION

Ahmad Faruqui 

Published October 13, 2024

DAWN

The Achilles Trap
By Steve Coll
Penguin
ISBN: 978-0525562269
576pp.

The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. In The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of nine books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the decisions that led to the war.

The book is based on more than 100 interviews with several individuals who had first-hand involvement in the invasion of Iraq and transcripts of tape recordings made by the regime of Saddam Hussain. This allows Coll to take a deep dive into the minds of the two men who made the war possible: US President George W. Bush and Iraqi President Saddam Hussain.


The book is a searing indictment of how Saddam governed Iraq and an even bigger indictment of Bush. Not only were some of George W.’s senior advisers opposed to the war, so also was the former President George H.W. Bush, his father. The elder Bush expressed his opposition via his former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, who penned an editorial, ‘Don’t Attack Saddam’ in the Wall Street Journal.

Coll concludes that “The president careered toward an unnecessary war… based on unabashed fear-mongering.” None of Iraq’s neighbours wanted the US to invade Iraq, worried that it would destabilise the region.

The US did not have any evidence that Iraq had ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and Saddam assumed the CIA knew that and thus the US was unlikely to attack Iraq. The book is entitled The Achilles Trap because both sides assumed the other had a fatal weakness, which did not exist.

Washington assumed that Saddam did not have the guts to fight the US. Saddam assumed that the US would never attack Iraq because it did not have the guts to incur large-scale battlefield casualties: “Saddam thought of the CIA as all-knowing. This contributed to his misunderstandings of America, which were at least as profound as America’s misunderstandings of him.”

The CIA’s record in Iraq after 1991 “was mostly one of operational and analytical calamities.” Even within the agency, the Iraq Operations Group was known as “the ‘House of Broken Toys’.” Of course, that did not stop the CIA from being ruthless. As one observer put it, the agency was “completely prepared to burn down your house to light a cigarette.”

Bush just wanted to get rid of Saddam. When his secretary of state presented some made-up evidence on WMDs to the UN, he was met with scepticism. Iraq had no connection with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, yet the US thought it would carry out an even deadlier attack against the US.

Almost to the very end, citing new evidence, the book shows that the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was opposed to the invasion. But Bush was determined to attack Iraq to implement regime change, to turn Iraq into a Western-style democracy.

Saddam comes across as a dual-faced man wallowing in hubris. On the one hand, he had created an extensive social/welfare system within Iraq. On the other hand, he had created an equal system of terror, directed at his political opponents. If anyone dared speak against him, they could be arrested, tortured and executed within a matter of days. He did not have the slightest qualms in killing nearly 200,000 Kurds.

Soon after he came to power in 1979, Saddam plunged Iraq into a senseless war against Iran. It lasted for eight years and cost $500 billion. It left Iraq saddled with a debt of $80 billion, of which $35 billion was owed to Saudi Arabia and $10 billion to Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides.

US troops pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad | Reuters

Unable to repay the debt, Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The US failed to anticipate Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but neither did Saddam realise that the invasion would turn the world against him. After the US captured him, Saddam left his US investigators befuddled by saying: “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?”

Equally naïve was the king of Saudi Arabia. King Fahd knew that the presence of American and European troops on Saudi soil would upset many Saudis and the clergy. But under US pressure, he caved in. Later, Osama bin Laden would capitalise on anti-Saudi sentiments to launch the 9/11 attacks. As shown in the book by Nelly Lahoud, The Bin Laden Papers, he did not expect the US would invade the Muslim world. He thought the US would withdraw from the region.

In March 2003, when the US finally attacked Iraq, Saddam invoked the “Mother of all Battles” metaphor and thought he would defeat “the treacherous criminal Bush … because this is a fight between good and evil.” He also thought the Iraqi army would go underground and fight a guerilla war on his behalf.

But there was no love lost between the conscripts and the dictator. After the US dropped 150,000 “dumb” gravity bombs, killing some 10-12,000 Iraqi soldiers, most surviving soldiers simply took off their uniforms and went home.

The book also paints a damning picture of other actors in the tragedy. King Hussein of Jordan had served as America’s lackey in the Arab world. He fancifully thought that “by helping engineer a regime change in Baghdad, he might somehow restore his own extended family’s royal rule in Iraq.”

Earlier, in 1996, Madeleine Albright, the former US ambassador to the UN, said that even though the economic sanctions imposed by the US after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had killed 500,000 Iraqi children, the price was worth it.

In April 2003, Scott McLaughlin, the former weapons inspector in Iraq and now a CIA analyst, cross-examined the head of Iraq’s nuclear programme, Jafar Dhia Jafar, and said: “We made a terrible mistake.” But that did not slow down the US invasion of Iraq, which would then turn into a multi-year occupation. More than 200,000 Iraqi civilians eventually died. More than 4,400 US servicemen died and more than 30,000 were wounded.

Early on, when Iraq was looking for nuclear weapons, its leaders would often cite the example of Pakistan, which they believed had moved to acquire a bomb to deter and balance India. An Iraqi scientist said that Iraq was at least as advanced as Pakistan and should be able to do it.

Dr A.Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, sensed an opportunity and reached out to Iraq with an offer of assistance that was spurned by Iraq, according Coll. Meanwhile, Israel, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha without the knowledge, let alone the permission, of the US.

There are several lessons to be learned from the tragic history of the Iraq War, which this book vividly brings out. First, wars, instead of solving problems, create more problems. Second, wars are often based on faulty assumptions. Third, military superiority does not guarantee victory. Fourth, the US understands the Middle East even less than the UK, which colonised the region for decades. Finally, dictators, who rule through fear, delude themselves into believing that the population would rise to support them when a war breaks out.

The book leaves some big questions unanswered, however. How competent is US intelligence about other parts of the globe, given how incompetent it was about Iraq? When will the US ever learn any lessons from the wars it wages around the globe? Is it necessary to spend nearly a trillion dollars on the US military, which exceeds the sum of the next 10 countries combined? Would that money not be better spent on human, social and economic development of the US?

Even despite these unanswered questions, the book is a great read for anyone with a serious interest in US foreign policy. It will also interest the general reader, since it reads like a thriller.

The reviewer is the author of Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan:
The Price of Strategic Myopia.
X: @ahmadfaruqui

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2024

NON-FICTION: FISK’S FINAL WORDS

Sahar Shehryar 

Published September 22, 2024

DAWN




Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
Fourth Estate
ISBN: 978-0007255481
672pp.

Robert Fisk’s book Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East was published posthumously and is a reminder of the strength and courage of his voice and words, not only as a journalist but also as a historian.

In the Night Of Power, Fisk ponders over the 35 years he spent as a Middle East correspondent for The Independent, witnessing an almost Dante’s Inferno-level of darkness, bloodshed and tragedy wrought upon that part of the world. His constant struggle to stay true to what he saw underlies all his writing, as he acknowledges, “Our own cowardice, the manufacture of deceit, the safe, formulaic expressions used to mask the reality of this tragic place, have turned us journalists into blood-soaked brothers of the politicians who go to war.”

That is who he was, a journalist who reported from the dangerous side, the ‘other’ side.

It would be convenient to qualify this book as a memoir of an award-winning journalist reflecting upon events that he covered, but it is so much more than that. Night Of Power outlines the cataclysmic events of post-invasion Iraq and its impact on the Middle East as a whole. Fisk navigates his way through a country where, “Killings were now like heartbeats in Iraq”, witnessing the callousness of the occupiers who showed wanton disregard for the path of destruction they paved on their way to their ‘Emerald Cities’, the green zones they allocated themselves.

Journalist Robert Fisk’s posthumously published book about the Middle East is an analysis of his decades of reporting from that part of the world and a reminder of the power his words wielded

He takes stock: the bodies that pile up because of the shootings, bomb blasts, private contractors who kill with a blood lust that would rival the Saddam-era secret police. Then there are the diseases and cancers left behind, children born with deformities, stillbirths, birth defects, a result of the use of phosphorus shells and other uranium-laced weapons. Fisk is matter of fact; he does not allow his pain to distract him from his purpose. He writes, “You go on a story in a war and you’re there to report on the atrocity, to speak for the dead, but not to cry.”

It will be pertinent to mention here that Robert Fisk was perhaps one of the most significant voices of our time. His ability to look past innate biases and identify the context in which events occur has always been immaculate. In the chapter ‘Walking on Windows’, he reminds us of the plague that was Blackwater and other private defence contractors. He recorded their actions with meticulous detail, the contempt and arrogance they showed towards the Iraqis and the shooting down of innocent people with complete impunity.

He reminds us that, “like all wars…[the Iraq war’s] reasons [were] fraudulent, its occupation ferocious, its ‘victors’ ever more cruel in responding to the insurgency that overwhelmed them…” Mercenary casualties were not included in the military fatality/injury lists put out by occupation authorities.

The duplicity is enraging and, as one continues to read the book, Fisk’s own anger is very much tangible. With meticulous detail, he deconstructs the ‘truths’ we have been fed by the media and by our governments and politicians. Language is weaponised, as he illustrates how mainstream Western media has toed the line when it comes to ‘selling’ the Iraq invasion to the public.

Later, when news of torture cells, black sites, mercenaries, and terrifying rebellions began creeping into headlines, many prominent newspapers provided space for advocacy of war crimes that were being committed by occupation soldiers, under the pretext that Saddam’s torturers were attacking US troops. Even today, mainstream media stands accused of promoting a one-sided narrative and working to drown Palestinian voices as the assault on Gaza continues.

Robert Fisk | AP

Mainstream media has never been less reliable and, as governments rush to curtail free speech, we are reminded by Fisk that, “I always believed that those who suffered on the ‘other’ side deserved to have their story told, that Western powers should not have the press corps as their foot-soldiers.”

Fisk was that rare journalist who had the ability to comprehend the enormity of what he was witnessing, stepping back and placing it into context. In this book, he lays it out, calling the Iraq invasion for what it was, a “vast and lamentable occupation.” He makes it clear though that, while Britain and the US have consistently denied that this was also an ‘oil-grab’, let’s be abundantly clear: “if the major export of Iraq had been beetroot, did anyone believe the American 82nd Airborne would really have gone to Fallujah and Mosul?”

Fisk’s ability to use words that cut like the sword of a samurai is, frankly, inimitable. He credits author and activist Naomi Klein for being one of the first to recognise “the boldest attempt at crisis exploration” in Iraq by the US and Britain, as they prepared to re-organise the country’s oil exports.

Fisk is detailed and judicious in his condemnation of the many ‘client states’ of the West, the despots and dictators of the Middle East and South Asia. He explains in great depth how the Middle East has been carved up and divided amongst authoritarian figures who are in a constant state of war with their own citizens. They are tolerated, armed even, and oftentimes ignored for their crimes by the ‘upright, civilised’ world for as long as they maintain a status quo for the US and its allies.

He writes of how the depravity of the Assads, Saddams and Mobaraks birthed a network of ruthless secret police and ‘elite’ army units that work within the shadows, stoking the fires of sectarianism, weaponising religion and crushing even a whisper of dissent. And yet, all dictators are not created equal. The West decides who becomes a liability and when. In the case of Saddam, it was the invasion of Kuwait and not his feared torture cells or use of chemical weapons against fellow Iraqis that made him unacceptable.

Night of Power is a testimony from one of the most prominent journalists of our time. Robert Fisk had called the Arab world home for more than 40 years and so stands as a giant among his peers. One of the first witnesses of history in the making, he was an analyst and interpreter par excellence. Each chapter in this book looks back on moments in history that have shaped the Middle East in one way or the other.

Fisk’s words are clinical and succinct, yet there is heartbreak and pain as he faces the bloody abyss that is the Middle East at the hands of its own leaders and the West. Fisk reminds the reader that this book is not about him, it is not a memoir, instead it is a cautionary tale, a tragedy and the story of betrayal and deceit. He tells the story as it stands, regardless of consequences.

If Robert Fisk were alive today, I wonder what he would report when confronted by the more than 40,000 innocent civilians viciously killed in Gaza and the tens of thousands more buried under the rubble since October 7, 2023? What would Fisk think after seeing photographs of the Haditha Massacre that were acquired and published by The New Yorker on August 28, 2024, showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage carried out by US Marines.

Fisk had covered the Haditha atrocity extensively in 2005, where he asked his readers if this could be the “tip of the mass grave?” (It is pertinent to note that not a single perpetrator spent a day in prison.) How would he respond to the horrific images coming from Gaza that flood our social media timelines? How would he have reported on the brave young men and women studying in high profile universities scattered across the Western world, as they risked their futures to set up encampments in protest for a free Palestine, for an end to the siege that he and many others had reported on and that imprisons the people of Gaza?

It is difficult to read when he writes about the Nakba, and the pain behind his words is difficult to hide. “Keys must always be the symbol of the Palestinian Nakba,” he writes. “That terrible last turning of the lock of those front doors. Goodbye — only for a few days.”

Simple words, but they complete the job and, like a dagger, strike the heart of their reader. This was the power of the pen yielded by Robert Fisk.

The reviewer is a freelance writer with a background in law and literature. X: @ShehryarSahar

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 22nd, 2024

COLUMN: THE FIRE OF LUCKNOW

Harris Khalique 

Published October 13, 2024


Out of the three principal centres of Indo-Persian civilisation that evolved from a fusion of multiple Vedic and Arabo-Persian cultures over centuries, Delhi and Lahore continue to be celebrated, while Lucknow is both celebrated and mourned. During the last millennium, all these cities enjoyed their share of primacy, glory, splendour and opulence, but also experienced bloodletting, conquests, loot and plunder.

Delhi and Lahore regained their significance and survived during and in the aftermath of colonialism. Lucknow could never fully recover from the colonial shock — perhaps also paying the price for being one of the fiercest battle grounds during the 1857 War of Independence against the British.

The region comprising Awadh, which includes Lucknow, is a part of the state of Uttar Pradesh (which was earlier called United Provinces of Agra and Oudh) created during the British Raj. Awadh has a legendary religious and intellectual significance in Indian history. But compared to Lucknow, the cities of Delhi and Lahore had longer histories, bigger cosmopolitan spaces and wider cultural markers to draw upon.

Lucknow had one long period of glory, which was decimated by the British. That period spanned from 1722 to 1856 when Lucknow, which earlier was the capital of the Mughal province of Awadh, became Awadh as a local Indian sultanate. Those 134 years of Awadh inscribed indelible marks on South Asian culture and history.

In post-Independence India, the city remains the capital city of the state of Uttar Pradesh but efforts to erase the historically inclusive and secular cultural milieu of Lucknow continued by constantly invoking communalism, not only incrementally but also systematically. For Lucknow, the journey from Wajid Ali Shah to Yogi Aditya Nath must have been excruciatingly painful and terribly tedious.

In the 19th century, the British particularly vilified three local rulers in India. They humiliated Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi, the emperor whose Mughal empire had shrunk to a city but whose two sons and eldest grandson had to be killed to establish British supremacy. The second ruler was Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab, who had contained the British to the left bank of the Sutlej river until he was alive. It was only 10 years after the death of the maharaja, in 1849, that Punjab could be annexed by the British East India Company.

The third ruler who was ridiculed was Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, whose state was indomitable in terms of both society and culture. He was a musician par excellence, a fine poet, a benevolent ruler and quite popular among his subjects. His wife, Hazrat Mahal, played a significant role in the 1857 War of Independence, after the Nawab had been exiled from Awadh.

The British and those local writers who were inspired by their brush with European modernism or those who decided to collaborate with the new colonial rulers, portrayed the emperor, the maharaja and the nawab as decadent, debauched, devious and disingenuous.

Since the victor writes the history of the vanquished, the three local Indian rulers still hold the same reputation in the imagination of not all but many native South Asians today that was propagated by the British. This remains the case even after alternative accounts of history have been made available by a range of Western and South Asian historians and writers over the last many years — beginning from Bari Alig’s seminal work Company Ki Hakoomat [The Rule of the Company], first published from Lahore in 1937.

This year, Jhelum Book Corner has published an incredible tale of Lucknow in two large volumes. It is a meticulously organised collection of writings by the late Maulana Muhammad Baqar Shams. His grandson, Vaqar Haider, who is now based in New York, has painstakingly collected, chronicled and compiled the two volumes of Shams’ writings, titled Dastan-i-Lucknow [The Lucknow Story] and Dabistan-i-Lucknow [The Lucknow School]. From ancient history to pre-Sultanate days to the rule of the nawabs in the Sultanate of Avadh to the British Raj followed by independence, the collections bring us to the 1980s.

Written in an idiomatic and lucid language, these two volumes bring together incredible details of the Awadhi habitat with Lucknow at the centre. Nothing seems to have been missed in the areas of knowledge, sociology, culture, art or sports. Scholars and their scholarship, religious schools of thought and their leaders, physicians, traders and businesspersons, artisans, artists, poets, linguists, writers, musicians, academics, theatre and its performers and jesters etc, are not only introduced to the reader, their contribution and skills are also mentioned and commented upon. There are some other good works but Shams has written the most comprehensive social history of Lucknow.

In English, the books on Lucknow’s art, culture, music, history, political economy and architecture that are worth looking at, in my opinion, include King Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh (two volumes) by Mirza Ali Azhar, published in 1982 by the Royal Book Company in Karachi, Amaresh Misra’s Lucknow: Fire of Grace — The Story of its Renaissance, Revolution and the Aftermath, first published in 1998 by Harper Collins Publishers India, and a coffee table book on the city’s history and architecture, Lucknow: City of Illusion, edited by Rosie Llewllyn-Jones under the supervision of Ebrahim Alkazi and published by Prestel in 2006.

The fire of grace is perhaps now out but it has left some glowing embers behind.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2024

COLUMN: HUMANISING THROUGH CULTURE

From InpaperMagazine

Published September 30, 2024

During the 1970s and 1980s, some popular slogans among politically charged progressive students in Pakistan included ‘Jamhooriyat ke teen nishaan/ Talaba, mazdoor aur kisaan [The three markers of democracy/ Students, labour and peasants]’ and ‘Loot khasoot ke raj ko badlo/ Chehray nahin samaaj ko badlo [Change the system of loot and plunder/ Don’t change faces, change the order].’ In Urdu, these slogans rhyme perfectly well.

Those were the times when the struggles for democracy and economic justice were waged in unison by students, labour movements, journalist federations and artists and writers’ associations. The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) came about in the early 1980s to challenge the anti-women laws that were enacted under Gen Zia’s martial rule and then to continue the struggle for the realisation of women’s fundamental rights, leading to their empowerment. WAF joined the existing fold of labour and student activists.

We saw a sharp decline in this unity between different class and identity movements after trade unions were suffocated to the level that now less than two percent of our labour is left with collective bargaining agency. Student unions were banned during the same martial rule and journalists and writers were systematically divided within their ranks.


Consequently, the link between literary writers and artists, journalists, labour and students became weaker and weaker. In present times, there is a demonstrated desire in some quarters to strengthen that link, but it still needs a lot of painstaking effort.

Among the very few activists of the old school left from the 1970s and 1980s who remain equally active now, one prominent name is that of Akram Kaimkhani. He was a left-wing student leader in Karachi and a pro-democracy activist after Gen Zia’s coup d’etat.

Kaimkhani was born in Tharparkar and moved to Karachi with his parents at a young age. He studied at Jamia Millia College, Malir, and the University of Karachi. Kaimkhani’s polio-affected leg, which limited his ability to run away in case of a police raid, neither had an effect on his own fervour nor inspired any sympathy in the hearts of the martial law operatives, who tortured him and kept him in prison.

After getting political asylum in the UK, Kaimkhani worked hard to make ends meet. Over the years, he managed to raise his family in a decent, respectable way. Now in his mid-60s, he continues to work long hours to run his household with dignity. All along, nothing could stop him from contributing to just political and social causes in Pakistan and the UK, and towards peace and development in the South Asian region.

From supporting struggles for democracy and economic justice to being a key volunteer for organisations such as the Edhi Foundation in London, he has invested his time, energy and finances beyond the extent of any normal person. Kaimkhani was a part of street politics and also remained a close confidante of both Mairaj Mohammed Khan and Benazir Bhutto, among other political leaders from Pakistan.

Some years ago, Kaimkhani realised that he should focus more of his energies towards promoting art, culture and literature, because they have the innate ability to humanise people of different ilks, which confrontational politics can seldom do. He had always been committed to promoting a culture of dialogue to strengthen democracy and the larger wellbeing of society.

Therefore, he spearheaded the establishment of the Faiz Foundation Trust, along with his friends from the Pakistani diaspora in the UK. They organised some outstanding cultural and literary events in pre-Covid 19 years, and brought together people from different countries, who were provided an opportunity to further the dialogue and deliberate upon issues that common people in South Asia and the developing world face.

Recently, Kaimkhani, along with podcaster Yousuf Abraham, chartered accountant Anjum Raza and physician Dr Umar Daraz mobilised political workers, artists, writers, journalists, culture aficionados and professionals of South Asian origin, along with his other British comrades, to establish the Voices of South Asian Art and Literature (VSAAL) in London.

VSAAL, after coming into being, took only a few months to organise, on September 14, the First South Asian Festival at the prestigious Bloomsbury Theatre in the heart of London, which I too attended. The Bloomsbury Theatre was filled to capacity for the event. Leading Indian dance and theatre curator and promoter Mira Misra Kaushik managed the event.

There was a panel discussion on the composite heritage of South Asian languages, involving writer Jami Chandio, British-Italian academic Prof Francesca Orsin and poet Uruj Asif. It was candid and sharp. Veteran journalist and trade unionist Mazhar Abbas spoke to another accomplished journalist and broadcaster Javed Soomro on current politics, journalism and censorship in South Asia.

There was a discussion led by British-Indian broadcaster Pervaiz Alam on a book by Dr Salman Akhtar, which does a psycho-literary analysis of four master poets Akhtar is related to — Muztar Khairabadi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Javed Akhtar and Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz. There was a launch of a book of poetry by Dr Razi Mohammed. Author and lawyer Saif Mehmood from Delhi made an exquisite presentation on Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir and Bangla poet Qazi Nazrul Islam.

A session was dedicated to veteran journalist, filmmaker, author and former secretary-general of the Progressive Writers Association, Hameed Akhtar, to mark his 100th birth anniversary. Leading actor (and Akhtar’s daughter) Saba Hameed and poet Iftikhar Arif recounted their memories of the times when Hameed Akhtar lived a life with pure ideological commitment and spent three terms in prison. Saba Hameed also read excerpts from her father’s witty pen portrait, written by himself.

The conversations on languages, literature and culture were followed by music performances of singers from South Asia. The mood in the crowd confirmed that it is the composite South Asian cultural heritage that unifies us across our ideological divides. If pursued consistently, it can perhaps make feuding states in the region shed their egos and come together for the sake of common people and their long-lasting prosperity.

The columnist is a poet and essayist. His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 29th, 2024

BLASPHEMY

Pakistan ‘vigilantes’ behind rise in online blasphemy cases


By AFP
October 14, 2024

The families of young Pakistanis say their relatives were duped into sharing blasphemous content by strangers online

 - Copyright AFP Aamir QURESHI

Zain Zaman JANJUA

Aroosa Khan’s son was chatting on WhatsApp but suddenly found himself the target of “vigilante” investigators who accused him of having committed blasphemy online, a crime that carries the death penalty in Pakistan.

The 27-year-old is one in hundreds of young men standing trial in Pakistan courts accused of making blasphemous statements online or in WhatsApp groups, an offence for which arrests have exploded in recent years.

Many of the cases are being brought to trial by private “vigilante groups” led by lawyers and supported by volunteers who scour the internet for offenders, rights groups and police say.

The families of young Pakistanis, including doctors, engineers, lawyers, and accountants, say that their relatives were duped into sharing blasphemous content by strangers online before being arrested.

“Our lives have been turned upside down,” Khan told AFP, saying that her son, who has not been named for security reasons, had been tricked into sharing blasphemous content in the messaging app.

One local police report suggests that the vigilantes may be motivated by financial gains.

One such group was responsible for the conviction of 27 people who have been sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty over the past three years.

Blasphemy is an incendiary charge in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where even unsubstantiated accusations can incite public outrage and lead to lynchings.

While they date back to colonial times, Pakistan’s blasphemy laws were ramped up in the 1980s when dictator Zia ul-Haq campaigned to “Islamicise” society.

AFP has attended multiple court hearings in the capital Islamabad, where young men are being prosecuted by private vigilante groups and the FIA for blasphemous online content.

Among them is Aroosa’s son — who had joined a WhatsApp group for job-seekers and was contacted by a woman.

She sent him an image of women with Quranic verses printed on their bodies, his mother said, adding that the contact then “denied having sent it and asked Ahmed to send it back to her to understand what he was talking about”.

He was later arrested and prosecuted by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).



– ‘Noble cause’ –



The most active private investigation group is the Legal Commission on Blasphemy Pakistan (LCBP), which told AFP they are prosecuting more than 300 cases.

Sheraz Ahmad Farooqi, one of the private investigation group’s leaders, told AFP that more than a dozen volunteers track online blasphemy, believing that “God has chosen them for this noble cause”.

“We are not beheading anyone; we are following a legal course,” Farooqi told AFP outside a courtroom that heard 15 blasphemy cases, all filed by his group.

He said that most of the accused were addicted to pornography and were disrespecting revered Islamic figures by using their names and dubbing voices attributed to them over pornographic content.

He acknowledged that women were involved in tracking and arresting the men, but they were not members of his group.

Cases can drag through the courts for years, though death penalties are often commuted to life in prison on appeal at the Supreme Court and Pakistan has never executed anyone for blasphemy.

A special court, attended by AFP, was formed in September to expedite the dozens of pending cases.



– ‘Vested agenda’ –



The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported that multiple vigilante groups were working in a “dedicated manner” to “witch-hunt” people for online expression or to fabricate blasphemy evidence using social media with “vested agendas”.

“All such groups are formalised by self-declared defenders of majoritarian Islam,” the group said in a report published in 2023.

A 2024 report by police in Punjab province, the country’s most populous province, that was leaked to the media said that “a suspicious gang was trapping youth in blasphemy cases”.

“The Blasphemy Business” report was sent to the FIA with recommendations to launch a thorough inquiry to determine the source of the vigilante groups’ funding.

Two FIA officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that they had received the report but denied that their office was acting on the tips of vigilante groups.

The FIA did not respond to requests for official comment.

An official involved in prosecuting the cases told AFP outside the court: “Not a single person arrested was trapped by any manner. They committed the crime.”

“The law is very clear about it, and we have to enforce it as long as the law is there.”

Arafat Mazhar, the director of Alliance Against Blasphemy Politics, a group advocating against the misuse of blasphemy laws, told AFP that the alarming rise in cases was not because people “are suddenly more blasphemous”.

He said the rise in the use of messaging apps and social media and the ease of sharing and forwarding content was a significant factor.



– Shunned –



The accused struggle to find defence lawyers willing to represent them and the slightest accusation can turn an entire family into pariahs.

Nafeesa Ahmed, whose brother is accused of sharing blasphemous images on WhatsApp and whose names have also been changed, said her family was shunned by close relatives.

“There is a massive cost that families of accused are bearing. First of all, our security or lives are at risk,” she told AFP.

She said some of the families have sold thousands of dollars worth of houses and gold, given to brides on their wedding, to fight the cases.

Dozens of families which have formed a support group have protested in the capital calling for an independent commission to investigate the vigilante groups and their role in prosecuting Pakistanis for blasphemy.

“In this society, if someone commits a murder, he can survive because there are thousands of ways to come out of that but if someone is accused of blasphemy he cannot,” said Nafeesa.

“When it comes to blasphemy, the public has its own court and even family members will abandon you.”

SOCIETY: DEFYING THE MOB

Masood Lohar

Published October 13, 2024 
EOS/DAWN

PAKISTAN

Thousands turn up to demand justice for Dr Shahnawaz Kumbhar in his hometown of Umerkot, Sindh on September 25, 2024 | Social Media


The swiftness with which the blasphemy allegation against Dr Shahnawaz Kumbhar, a 36-year-old doctor at a government hospital in Sindh’s Umerkot district, spiralled into violent bloodlust, reflects the deadly intersection of religious extremism, personal vendettas and mob violence.

It did not matter that the alleged blasphemous remarks appeared on the doctor’s social media account, which he insisted had been hacked. The people wanted blood, and the police, it seems, were too willing to comply. A hardline cleric announced a bounty of five million rupees, while local law enforcement went into hyperdrive to apprehend the doctor.

OF MURDERERS AND SAVIOURS


The doctor was arrested by the Umerkot police from Karachi a day later, on September 18. He was killed a little after midnight on the same day, according to a high-level police report, “in a staged encounter” that took place in the jurisdiction of Sindhri police.

The local police in-charge, Sindhri Station House Officer (SHO) Niaz Khoso, claimed that the doctor was killed “unintentionally”, but the doctor’s family and rights group disputed the claim.

The day after the murder, the SHO, along with high-ranking police officials from Mirpurkhas and Umerkot, were seen in video clips uploaded on social media being feted as heroes by the same hardline cleric who had offered the reward for killing the doctor. The videos also show a local lawmaker, part of the Pakistan Peoples Party, congratulating the policemen.

The groundswell of support for Dr Shahnawaz Kumbhar, who was murdered over blasphemy allegations, eloquently articulates Sindh’s culture of tolerance, rooted in its Sufi traditions…

In one of the videos, the now-suspended SHO can be heard saying that he wasn’t worthy of such a task, but was grateful to God for giving him the opportunity, while referring to Dr Kumbhar’s extrajudicial killing.

Meanwhile, the doctor’s family wasn’t allowed to perform funeral rites, and an enraged mob snatched the body and set it on fire. A brave Hindu youth, Premo Kohli, tried to protest and protect the body, but the mob attacked him as well. Despite that, he still retrieved the badly burnt body once the enraged mob had left.

The incident spread terror throughout Umerkot, the only district in Pakistan with a Hindu majority. There was palpable fear of a blasphemy accusation, like a sword dangling on their heads, and many felt that they could be ‘next.’

But what was truly worrisome was the emerging complicity of the police, who had played the role of the executioner. A week earlier, another blasphemy accused had been shot dead while in police custody in Quetta, with the cop hailed as a hero.

Dr Shahnawaz Kumbhar



AN UNEQUIVOCAL RESPONSE

But unlike the reaction in Quetta, and in the majority of blasphemy cases elsewhere in the country, the public response in Sindh was altogether different.

It likely has as much to do with the brave act of the Hindu youth, who stopped the lynch mob from completely burning the body, as it does with Sindh’s long history of Sufi saints.

A week after the murder, on September 25, thousands of people from across Sindh flocked to Dr Kumbhar’s village to take part in his funeral, in an unequivocal response to right-wing bigotry. Manji Faqeer, a prominent folk artist, sang Sufi tunes at the grave as it was garlanded with petals.

This defiance is the product of the deeply ingrained culture of religious tolerance and interfaith harmony that Sindh has maintained over thousands of years. It dates back to poets and saints of the Sufi genre, such as Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, Sachal Sarmast and Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, who are revered for their message of love, peace and harmony.

This is also reflected in numbers. According to a study by the Centre for Research and Security Studies, published in 2022, 89 people were killed in Pakistan for allegedly committing blasphemy between 1947 and 2021. There were roughly 1,500 accusations and cases during this period. Of those, 1,098 cases — more than 70 percent — were in Punjab. In the same period, Sindh reported 173 cases.

With their latest and most unequivocal response to blasphemy accusations, the people of Sindh have compelled the provincial government to take action. Since then, several high-ranking police officials have been booked in the case, along with the cleric who offered the reward for Dr Shahnawaz’s murder.

A HISTORY OF INJUSTICE

A similar pushback was witnessed in the case of Mashal Khan, who was murdered on the campus of a university in Mardan by a mob in 2017, but it tapered off with the accused acquitted.

Many other cases have followed a similar trajectory, with the blasphemy accused either murdered, going into exile or forced to rot in prison — with the recurring theme being that they are denied the right to fair trial.

It includes academic Junaid Hafeez, who was given the death penalty over social media posts. In 2014, a year after his arrest, his lawyer was gunned down in his office. Hafeez was given the death penalty in 2019 and remains on death row.

The case of 14-year-old Rimsha Tahir of Islamabad is equally chilling, after a court found that she was wrongly accused of blasphemy. The cleric accused of planting the evidence was, however, acquitted after witnesses retracted their statements.

Even in the case of the recent murder of the blasphemy accused at a police station in Quetta, the victim’s family has pardoned the policeman, meaning that he would get away scot-free.

EMBOLDENING FANATICISM

The frequency with which those who instigate blasphemy accusations and take part in mob violence escape justice has emboldened many others. This can be tracked by the increase in not just the number of reported blasphemy cases, but also the recent spate of attacks on places of worship belonging to Pakistan’s persecuted Ahmaddiya community.

The cases in which the perpetrators have to face justice is rare, such as that of the murder of Sri Lankan national Priyantha Kumara. Many in civil society believe that the death sentences handed out to the perpetrators were given due to the victim being a foreign national and the resultant outcry over it globally.

The systemic abuse of blasphemy laws has tarnished Pakistan’s image globally, and gives credence to the perception that there are strong strands of religious intolerance and extremism in the country.

The horrific spectacle of vigilante ‘justice’ inflicted by lynch mobs, captured in real-time on cell phones by individuals taking part in it — and often shared with pride on social media — speaks volumes about how deeply entrenched the exploitation of religious sentiments is in Pakistan.

The strange and chilling fact is that the blasphemy laws themselves are almost never enforced in these cases. The mobs circumvent the legal system to seize power and administer their own form of ‘justice.’

A CLARION CALL OF RESISTANCE

But as opposed to previous episodes of mob violence, where response to the violence and brutality has often been limited — if not completely muted — the response from the people of Sindh has been clear: they want to stand against such injustice.

The groundswell of support for the victim and his family, who continue to face harassment from religious hardliners, has provided a template for people in other parts of the country to take a stand against those preaching violence.

The swiftness of this organic response, which saw a province-wide mobilisation, and support from the rest of the country, is a reminder that the culture of resistance and tolerance remains strong in Sindh. It eloquently articulates the need to protect those accused of blasphemy so that they get a fair trial.

The state must now respond in a similar manner, by instituting legal reforms to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated.

The writer is a climate change expert and the founder of Clifton Urban Forest. He can be contacted at mlohar@gmail.com.
X: @masoodlohar

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 13th, 2024

SMOKERS’ CORNER: SAFEGUARDING SINDH

Nadeem F. Paracha 

Published October 6, 2024

Illustration by Abro

Last week, protests erupted in Umerkot, a city located at the edge of the Thar Desert in Sindh. The protests were held to condemn the extrajudicial killing of a doctor who had been accused of committing blasphemy. The Sindh government confirmed that the accused was killed by the cops who had arrested him. His dead body was then snatched by some ‘fanatics’ and set on fire.


This horrific incident shocked a large number of ethnic Sindhis, who are in majority in Sindh outside the province’s multi-ethnic capital, Karachi. For over two decades now, Sindhi media and Sindhi scholars have been airing concerns about the ‘radicalisation’ of Sindhis.

However, the Sindhi-majority regions of Sindh have not witnessed as many incidents of ‘religiously motivated violence’, as have the country’s other provinces — especially Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). For example, according to a 2022 report, out of a total of 1,415 cases of blasphemy registered by the police between 1947 and 2021, 1,098 were in Punjab and just 173 in Sindh.

Even though there were even fewer such cases registered in KP and Balochistan, these two provinces (and Punjab) have witnessed far more incidents of sectarian violence and Islamist militancy than Sindh. However, Sindh’s ethnically diverse capital Karachi is somewhat of an exception. Its streets witnessed sectarian warfare in the early 1980s and then, from the mid-2000s, the city became a hub for various Islamist groups to raise money for their militant activities, through extortion, kidnappings, robberies, etc.



Incidents of violence and killings in the name of religion in Sindh are the remnants of a state-sponsored project that is no longer in play — but also indicate that secular forces need to secure social spaces they have abdicated to extremists

In 1979, the state had started to roll out an ‘Islamisation’ project. Sindh, apart from its capital Karachi, somewhat succeeded in avoiding the impact of the project. Over the decades, though, the project began to mutate and started to be navigated from below. It eventually fell in the lap of multiple segments of the polity. These segments began to use the contents of the project for lucrative evangelical purposes, and to accumulate social power. In many cases, the contents were also used to bolster anti-state Islamist militancy.

Karachi, despite being impacted by the outcomes of the project, has remained largely secular due to its diverse ethnic make-up, massive size and cosmopolitan nature. The rest of the province, on the other hand, which has a Sindhi majority, has often frustrated many attempts to radicalise this majority. This is largely due to the inherently pluralistic and ‘moderate’ disposition of Sindhis.

In a 2021 study, the Karachi-based researcher Imtiaz Ali noted that “Sindhis have unwaveringly discarded those who have denied their traditions of tolerance.” According to Ali, “the progressive literature widely circulated in Sindh has played a huge role in developing resilient minds.” Ali adds that Sindh’s arts are influenced by Sindhi poetry that is largely feminine in nature and tightly tied to Sufism. This has shielded Sindhis from being overwhelmed by the outcomes of the ‘Islamisation’ project that has wreaked havoc in Punjab and KP.

Those concerned about the rising incidents of religious extremism among Sindhis are of the view that the incidents are the outcome of the resources and effort that the state once invested in its bid to ‘Islamise’ the Sindhis. These efforts were part of a larger scheme formulated by the state that wanted to ‘Islamise’ polities in Sindh, Balochistan and KP. The state believed that ‘political Islam’ and a vigorous propagation of Islamic rituals were effective tools to neutralise Baloch, Sindhi and Pakhtun sub-nationalisms.

The scheme was a success in KP, mainly due to Pakistan’s role in the anti-Soviet ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan, which was lavishly bankrolled by the US and Saudi Arabia. Some political commentators have suggested that, since Pakhtuns by nature are religious, the state was able to lure them towards more extreme expressions of the faith. These expressions were being propagated by the state and by its Islamist assets to romanticise the Afghan insurgency against Soviet troops. As a result, secular Pakhtun sub-nationalism lost a lot of traction in KP.





The scheme to radicalise the ethnic Baloch in this regard was not as successful, though. Baloch society can be conservative, but it is inherently secular. Most Baloch insurgencies before the recent one were driven by leftist ideas. However, Balochistan’s ‘Pakhtun belt’ was more receptive to the ways of the scheme.

Indeed, while the overriding purpose of the scheme was to neutralise Sindhi, Baloch and Pakhtun sub-nationalisms, one of the spillovers of the scheme and of the ‘Islamisation’ project was the eventual radicalisation of Punjab — the country’s largest and most powerful province. In fact, the scheme was often viewed by non-Punjabi sub-nationalists as the work of Punjabi elites. This is thus a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Another ironic outcome has been the recent alliance between secular Baloch separatists and militant Islamists in Balochistan.

However, the claim that such schemes are still being rolled out may not hold much truth anymore. With China firmly in the picture and anti-state Islamist militancy stalling Pakistan’s new economic and regional aspirations, the state is now trying to assert itself against the outcomes of its own schemes. It is clearly planning to completely overcome these, even if this requires an entirely reformed state structure in the areas of economics, judiciary and even within the military establishment. This is unfolding in plain sight.

This is why the increasing frequency of sporadic, religiously motivated violence in Sindh is probably a belated outcome of a scheme that is no longer in play. This violence in Sindh is more the handiwork of groups who, years ago, had entered through a window that was opened in Sindh by the scheme. Gradually, through madrassas [religious schools], these groups began to flex the contents of the now-defunct ‘Islamisation’ project. The groups are trying to accumulate social power and influence because they have found no mentionable electoral traction in the province.

The ‘left-liberal’ Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) remains Sindh’s largest political party. It has won four consecutive elections in Sindh, from 2008 onwards. Its vote bank has continued to swell. The sweeping PPP wins in Sindh have made sure that no Islamist groups or their allies are able to enter the Sindh assembly. Sindhi sub-nationalists, who were once at the forefront of maintaining the indigenous secular disposition of Sindhis, have disintegrated. In fact, recently they were seen riding on the coattails of conservative/anti-PPP Sindhi elites.

With Sindh electorally secured, the PPP will have to invest a lot more in the social areas that have been vacated by the Sindhi sub-nationalists and are being occupied by the radical Islamists. It’s time that the party secures these areas as well.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 6th, 2024

NON-FICTION: A GLORIFIED HISTORY OF SINDH

Soonha Abro 

Published October 13, 2024

Sindhis in a Global Context: Past, Present, Future, and Origins (2600 BCE to…)
By Dr Maqbool A. Halepota
Halo Publishing International, Texas, USA
ISBN 978-1-63765-584-9
444pp.

Dr Maqbool A. Halepota’s Sindhis in a Global Context: Past, Present, Future, and Origins (2600 BCE to…) is an ambitious project that attempts to chronicle the rich history of Sindh from 2600 BCE up to present times. This includes the prehistoric period in Sindh, the Indus Civilisation and discovery of Mohenjo Daro, the Vedic age, the conquest of Sindh by the Arabs, the indigenous Sindhi rulers, and the British colonial period in the province.

He, then, provides an account of the post-1947 period, including Pakistan’s martial law periods, as well as some important political movements, such as the anti-One Unit movement and the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD). The author also touches upon the movements and spread of the global Sindhi diaspora and, briefly, the future outlook for Sindhis.


The book is a rather informative and somewhat enjoyable read. The portions on prehistoric Sindh, especially its origins, as well as the reigns of the Persians, the Greeks and the Arabs, were particularly interesting because these are not very familiar topics for Pakistani readers. In fact, it would be an excellent idea to include more of such material in school history textbooks, so our young children can begin learning about these portions of our local history at a young age, irrespective of whether they are Sindhis or not.

The process of rediscovering the history of the Indus Civilisation and the excavation of Mohenjo-Daro, in much greater detail than the tiny portions on the topic one read in history textbooks during school, proved to be an immensely enjoyable experience and informative. Readers interested in learning more about the various aspects of Sindh’s history can also benefit a lot from the excellent bibliography included at the end of the book.


An ambitious and informative book about the history, culture and politics of Sindh through the ages is not critically rigorous enough but could still serve as a starting point for future research

For a book of such a huge magnitude and potential, it regrettably contains some glaring editorial errors. It includes some unfortunate factual errors, which could have been easily verified through a simple Google search. For instance, the year of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s death is incorrectly cited as 1947 on page 167, instead of 1948. Furthermore, the citations given throughout the text are rather disorganised. Another particularly bothersome aspect of the book is that it lacks an index, without which it is quite difficult to search for any specific information within the book. This will make it rather difficult to use for any scholars researching on Sindh.

Moreover, the book also lacks consistency in the transliterations of non-English words, mostly from Arabic and Sanskrit, and occasionally from Sindhi. This inconsistency adversely impacts one’s reading experience, because one is unaware of how to pronounce an unfamiliar word. The author has also neglected to provide a clarifying ‘Note on Transliterations’ that describes the correct pronunciations of all the non-English words used throughout the book. Such notes are considered an important convention in academic writing.

However, for a book directed at a more general readership, a suitable solution would be to do away entirely with transliterations and corresponding diacritic marks. It is acceptable to do so when writing an academic text directed at a more general audience, instead of a purely academic one. Collectively, these weaknesses spoil one’s general enjoyment of reading this most informative book. This issue could have been dealt with by the text undergoing a much more meticulous editorial process and guidance to the author.

Finally, this book claims to present the ‘glorious’ history of Sindh to the readers, especially directed at those hailing from Sindh. Indeed, the history of Sindh is immensely rich and intriguing for any history enthusiast. It is also true that Sindh has been plagued by numerous serious problems throughout its history, and continues to be affected by them even today. The painstaking research that went into writing this book is undeniable. However, these historical facts are presented with hyperboles, unsubstantiated claims and a complete lack of critique.

For example, the first half of the book, which tells the story of Sindh’s origins, its prehistoric, Vedic and Arab past, is written in an overly glorifying tone. Then, the tone switches to that of lamentation in the second half, mourning the various discriminations and oppressions meted out to Sindhis throughout history. This could have been avoided completely by conducting a critical but deeply sensitive evaluation of the historical facts and examining them for their impact on the currently existing issues affecting Sindh. This would have made this book a truly definitive history of Sindh. By doing so, it would have genuinely benefited numerous generations of readers, Sindhi or not, and academic researchers across the world.

Despite its weaknesses, Sindhis in a Global Context is undeniably an important text about Sindh’s history. It is not the definitive historical work on Sindh that it had hoped to become but, nonetheless, it does provide several points that could help formulate further research questions in the future.

Although the author intends it to be read primarily by Sindhi youth, it would be of greater interest to readers who are actually enthusiastic about history, as well as academic readers and scholars seeking further knowledge about the rich history, culture and politics of Sindh. It would be useful if the book were made more accessible to readers, especially to its targeted readership, by making it available at bookshops and libraries within Pakistan.

The reviewer is pursuing an MPhil in English literature.

Her research focuses on various South Asian literary traditions, including Anglophone literatures of South Asia, feminist literary criticism, resistance movements and resistance poetry, as well as Urdu and Sindhi literatures

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2024

PAKISTAN

Restless natives

Adopting a national security perspective makes a state see the world in terms of threats and conspiracies. 

Umair Javed

Published October 14, 2024

DAWN

IN the national security perspective on Pakistan, the country is besieged by hostile forces seeking to undermine the security apparatus and/or alter its geographic integrity altogether.

On this list, the identity of external hostile forces remains largely unchanged since 1947, though the Americans tend to drop in and out depending on regional considerations.

The list of internal collaborators/ fifth columnists sees a bit more churn. At various times, it has featured communists, socialists, mainstream political parties questioning military rule, mainstream political parties demanding federalism, mainstream political parties seeking constitutional rule, a few shades of Sharia-demanding Islamists, and, of course, ethnonationalists striving for political and cultural autonomy.

While most others go in and out depending on political circumstances, and the communists/ socialists remain a figment of the distant past, ethnonationalists occupy a great deal of head and policy space for national security policymakers and thinkers (the latter term used here very broadly).

A common narration from their perspective is that ethnonationalist movements — principally the Pakhtun nationalists in KP and the Baloch nationalists in Balochistan (Bengalis in the past, and occasionally, Sindhis and Mohajirs too) — never accepted Pakistani statehood. In line with aspirations of self-determination, these groups sought independence or merger with neighbouring states from day one.

This was their default position at the time of statehood, which the Pakistani state — like any other territory-protecting entity — had no option but to deal with as a security threat. In other words, according to this perspective, the state’s relationship with these political groups didn’t turn sour because of the actions of the state; instead, one side was committed to rejecting the state from the outset.

Hard-liners did not necessarily have the upper hand in movements from day one.

Like most ideas that states, especially insecure ones, believe, there may be an occasional figment of truth in it. Hard-liners and maximalists are present in any social and political movement, and there is no reason ethnic movements would be different.

But where the NatSec lot gets its analysis wrong is in its reading of history. Hard-liners did not necessarily have the upper hand in movements from day one. Instead, the turn towards secessionism usually emerged because of the chain of events featuring the state’s national security apparatus and various identity groups.

The clearest example of this phenomenon is in the case of Bangla nationalism between 1947 and 1971. The Muslim League won its heaviest mandate in the 1946 elections in East Bengal on an explicit platform for an autonomous state for Indian Muslims. The same region saw considerable mobilisation for the Muslim nationalist cause in the years leading up to statehood, and Bengali Leaguers formed a central part of the party leadership.

The relationship soured post-1947 because of denial of linguistic rights and the forced centralisation of provincial government functions. The rout of the Muslim League at the hands of the United Front coalition in the 1954 election was, in fact, a symptom of malignant central rule, and not necessarily a reflection of repressed secessionism.

Instead of accommodation through the democratic process, the security state doubled down on centralisation through the One Unit scheme, inequitable distribution of resources, and continued repression of provincial politicians. The final straw was a denial of the Awami League’s popular mandate after the 1970 election.

In its current iteration, the Baloch insurgency appears to unfold broadly along the same pattern. Its origins lie in the heavy-handedness of a military regime against a popular politician, leading to the latter’s killing. Barring occasional efforts by elected central governments to forge a representative arrangement, the province’s governance is outsourced to the security establishment.

In frequent displays of viceregal power, parties are created at a whim, election results are manipulated or repressed, assembly compositions are curated, citizens are disappeared, and non-violent social movements for rights — whether in Gwadar or the BYC — are policed, harassed, and criminalised. If there was a guidebook for how to empower hard-liners, it would likely include all of these steps.

The same pattern is now visible in KP. The case here is even more exasperating, since Pakhtun nationalism was largely accommodated within federal politics by the late 1990s. If anything, the rise of the PTI — a party with countrywide appeal paying homage to Pakistaniat — and its entrenched popularity in the province showed the region’s politics evolving towards a different, more centripetal, direction.

What changed? Militarised rule of the province’s peripheries, regional dynamics created by the imperial excursion in Afghanistan, and the absence of any transparency or accountability of security policies helped provide conditions for ethnic rights-based mobilisation through the PTM.

Whatever its critics may say, there is no denying PTM’s organic appeal. It speaks to the marginalised reality of large swathes of the population; a marginalisation, which the state has enabled, if not outright created. And like clockwork, the response has been to coerce its supporters, subjugate its leaders, and declare it to be a proscribed organisation.

The final, and frankly surreal, straw is the chain of events leading to PTI becoming accommodating of ethnic nationalist undertones in its politics, with parts of its leadership and its support base finding common cause with the PTM. In a truly remarkable feat of own-goalism, the biggest civilian proponent of both Pakistani nationalism and centralised state power is now a sceptic. This is the grand total of what denial of an electoral mandate, harassment and coercion, and pitting province against province will likely achieve.

Adopting a national security perspective makes a state see the world in terms of threats and conspiracies. But there is a reason why most successful states, ie, those with stable, productive relations with their citizens, only draw on this perspective as one among several.

Most will prioritise development, enhancement of human capability, and cultural fulfilment as valuable goals as well. Not the Pakistani state, though. Blinkers on, it stumbles into one conflict with its own population after the other. And then wonders why so many act hostile to it.

The writer teaches sociology at Lums.

X: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2024

Disgraced media

Muna Khan 

Published October 13, 2024 

DAWN

LAST week, I wrote a piece on Western media’s coverage of the war in Gaza for Prism on the Dawn website. I re-read part of Edward Said’s 1981 book Covering Islam on how the Western media distorts the portrayal of Islam and depictions of Muslims as “fanatical, violent, lustful and irrational”. I often return to this book as it remains relevant. It’s a sad indictment on the Western media whose reporting on Muslims and Palestinians has resulted in their dehumanisation over the decades.

Despite knowing all this, I felt foolish when I read how The New York Times told its staff to restrict using words like ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ and avoid ‘occupied territories’ in their reporting on Gaza. This was revealed by The Intercept in April which received a copy of the internal memo the paper sent to its staff. They also told staff not to use the word ‘Palestine’ “except in very rare cases”. It is mind-boggling.

However, acclaimed author Pankaj Mishra was not shocked when the draft of an article wherein he criticised Israel, submitted to a Canadian newspaper, was returned to him with ‘Israel’ removed.

Mishra, the recipient of a $75,000 Weston International Award for his non-fiction writing, was going to deliver a lecture in Toronto last month. Winners get an excerpt from their lecture published in the leading newspaper The Globe and Mail. The paper, however, edited that excerpt with reportedly all 17 instances of Israel cut out. Mishra pulled the excerpt after receiving the edits.


It was a political decision to attempt to edit Mishra’s excerpt.

In an interview to The Breach last month, Mishra said he was not surprised as it was “part of a continuum of such attempts that I’ve personally encountered to suppress and stifle criticism of Israel”.

One of the lines cut from the excerpt said: “My own sporadic attempts to tackle the subject in the past made me aware of an insidious Western regimen of repressions and prohibitions.”

The paper also cut: “Even the liquidation of Gaza, which unlike many atrocities, has been live-streamed by both its perpetrators and victims, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the main organs of the Western media.”

Clearly, it was a political decision to attempt to edit Mishra’s excerpt and speaks to the Western media’s complicity in covering up the true scale of the crimes committed in Palestine and everywhere else. Lest we forget, the US declared war on Iraq under the guise of destroying weapons of mass destruction; they declared war on Afghanistan to, among other reasons, liberate the women. The government of the day finds powerful allies in papers who support (read: cheer) such policies and it is no different in the case of Gaza.

“We have faced a consistent regime of censorship and suppression,” Mishra told The Breach. “Not just Palestinians, not just Arabs, you talk to even some of the most successful writers of non-Western ancestry, and each one of them will tell you many, many stories about editors saying ‘We can’t do this. Can you change that? Can you rephrase that?’”

Non-white writers often have to acquiesce because they want to be published and options elsewhere are limited. This is how the arts and entertainment as well as the publishing industry manages people of colour by ‘keeping them in their place’.

Perhaps one of the most influential intellectuals in the US right now, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is facing the brunt of Big American media’s wrath about his new book The Message which chronicles, among other trips, his 10-day experience in Gaza and Israel in 2023. He has described his trip as “revelatory”; that he didn’t think Americans understood the extent of “what we’re doing there”, adding that he uses ‘we’ bec­ause it wouldn’t be possible without US support.

“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn str­a­nger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes in his book, an excerpt that has widely been shared. But he is subject to much attack, the usual accusations of antisemitism, for telling the truth, which his detractors tell you is ‘his truth’. I find this practice of adding pronouns to truth tiresome; truth is meant to be universal and this idea of my truth reeks of a sense of entitlement in the face of what we can see on TV screens.

I laud Mishra for withdrawing his excerpt and refusing to accept the paper’s discriminatory edits. His is a small example of the pushback we’re seeing to the Israeli-Western media narrative shoved down our throats. Al Jazeera ran a story last week featuring BBC and CNN journalists “alleging pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles”. I’m sorry it took so long for the truth (see what I did there?) to arrive but I hope it will pick up pace and more audiences will see it for what it is: not the journalism everyone deserves.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.
X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2024