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SECOND OPINION: A Baloch view of the Punjabis —Khaled Ahmed’s TV
Review
 Tribal
society is based on honour. It may be dysfunctional in all sorts of
ways but its sense of superiority never lets the tribal people feel
bad about being dysfunctional. Almost all tribal leaders despise the
Punjabis
Tribal society is based on honour. It may be dysfunctional in all
sorts of ways but its sense of superiority never lets the tribal
people feel bad about being dysfunctional. Tribal leaders despise
the Punjabis. But the clever among them also know a few weaknesses
that the Punjabis suffer from.
Quoted in Nawa-e-Waqt (February 17,
2005) Baloch Sardar Ataullah Mengal said that India didn’t want
Pakistan as its friend, it wanted to convert Pakistan into its mandi.
He said Hindu banya was carrying a scale (tarazoo) in his hand while
negotiating friendship with Pakistan.
Mengal said this to provoke the ‘ideal’ Punjabi man since he is
known to see red when it comes to India. Mengal might even have
known who among the Urdu columnists would swallow the bait. Any
civilised person would have laughed at Mengal’s trap.
Columnist Abdul Qadir Hassan wrote in Jang (February 19, 2005)
that some people were saying that opening trade routes with India
would give Pakistan the opportunity to collect transit fee but
Sardar Mengal was saying that Hindu banya was merely trying to snap
up Pakistan as a home market (ghar ki mandi). Was Pakistan created
to collect rahdari (transit fees)? There is an honourable way of
doing business. Friendship with India would be just like friendship
with America, exploitative and coercive and against the interests of
Pakistan.
Sure enough, our warrior columnist swallowed the bait and ended up
writing his usual qaumi hamiyyat kind of blue streak. The cruelty is
that this kind of overflow appeals to many among us.
According to Nawa-e-Waqt (February 16, 2005) senator from the
NWGP Ilyas Bilour kept naming his province as Pakhtunkhwa during his
speech at the Senate. After some time leader of the house Wasim
Sajjad got up and remarked that no province of that name existed in
Pakistan and if he wanted to talk about another province he should
go to the country where it existed. After this there was pandemonium
in the house and the session had to be postponed sine die.
Wasim Sajjad made a clever rejoinder. The name of the province is in
the Constitution and if Mr Bilour wants to name his province
differently he will have to get the Constitution amended.
Columnist and Urdu stylist Irfan Siddiqi wrote in Nawa-e-Waqt
(February 17, 2005): “May your boards, creaking under viands meant
to regale foreign guests, be blessed; but tell me if we are the
vanguard of America’s crusade and have made sacrifices for it, and
have willingly populated the cages of Guantanamo Bay, if Mullah Umar
is going from pillar to post because of our loyal swordsmanship, if
we have given everything on lease, from our military bases to our
faith and spiritual belief, if we have stuck this policy of shame
and humiliation on our helmet like a panache, then why are the
whiplashes applied to our bare backs? Why are our heroes described
as villains and why are our nuclear assets looked at with the eye of
suspicion and ill-will? Can these courtier spokespersons of the
magic tongue apply the balm of comfort on our lacerated breasts?
Will the bud of truth burst forth from the bough of the tongue of
anyone?”
The above purple patch is a sampling of what Urdu journalism can be.
We are bombarded with this kind of verbal barrage of high emotion,
while confronted with many other spectacles of the weakness of state
requiring pragmatism — and strictly no poetry — for their removal.
Daily Insaf (February 18, 2005) reported that the marriage of
Shahbaz Sharif and Tehmina Durrani was organised through intrigue
and international spying in 2003 by CIA and Pakistani intelligence
agencies. The aim was to separate Shahbaz from the Sharif family and
make him available to Musharraf as an ally. Shahbaz himself was
increasingly isolated within the Sharif clan and wanted a place in
politics for himself. The Sharif family is shaken by the development
and is very upset. Those who favoured the marriage could be Chaudhry
Nisar Ali Khan who was put off by Nawaz Sharif’s decision to keep
Javed Hashmi as the chief of the party in Pakistan. He wanted the
job for himself and was also close to Shahbaz. Shahbaz himself did
not get along with other PMLN members: Zulfiqar Khosa, Tehmina
Daultana, Saad Rafiq, etc. Tehmina Durrani was linked to the
intelligence agencies and had earlier liaison with Shahbaz Sharif.
Nawa-e-Waqt quoted Shahbaz Sharif as saying that his brother Nawaz
was his murshid (spiritual leader) and that he would play a role in
lowering military dictatorship in its lehed (grave).
The paper wanted to believe that Shahbaz’s marriage was a part of
the American plan to divert PMLN away from its Islamist pro-MMA
stance. It was disproved in short order because Shahbaz Sharif is
still president of the PMLN, cashiering the party firebrands like
Saad Rafiq from the PMLN.
Writing in Khabrain, (February 18,
2005) Raja Anwar revealed that during a Punjab University election
one Barkaat was killed and the responsibility for the killing was
wrongly placed on Jamiat and its leader Javed Hashmi. The murder was
actually committed by Prof Azizul Haq, an ex-employee of Atomic
Energy Commission, who thought he could become the Mao Tse Tung of
Pakistan through a violent revolution. He got two members of his
Young People’s Front, Arif Raja and Javed Ali Khan, to open firing
during the counting of the vote. Four months after Barkaat’s murder,
Prof Aziz was killed by one Saeed for having illicit relations with
his wife. According to the writer, Prof Azizul Haq was a jinsi
mareez (sexually obsessive) whose death was described as
naqabal-e-talafi nuqsaan (irreparable loss) by PPP’s Maulana Kausar
Niazi.
We don’t have people like Azizul Haq any longer. Now we have
‘divine’ people — like late Riaz Gauhar Shahi of Tehreek Sarfaroshan-e-Islam
— whose face appears in the moon and who can travel around the earth
mounted on a she-ass after eating an apple offered by Hazrat Fatima.
Reported in Jang (February 20, 2005) magazine, there were 237,000
‘Pakistanis’ in Bangladesh in 66 scattered camps who are at times
called Biharis because they speak Urdu. They are still loyal to
Pakistan and want to be sent to Pakistan although some would like to
take Bangladesh nationality and become normal citizens. They say
that they were nine million to begin with but after 1971 half a
million fled to India and Pakistan while fully eight million are
unaccounted for. They say that three million were massacred and are
buried under the monument in Dhaka that says three million
Bangladeshis killed by Pakistan army are lying underneath. The
‘Pakistanis’ living in the camps say that money was collected in
Pakistan for them but no progress had been made to repatriate them.
Pakistan has collected millions of illegal foreigners in Karachi but
the real Pakistanis who deserved to be repatriated under an
agreement with Bangladesh have fallen through the cracks of unsteady
Pak-Bangladesh relations and Pakistan’s internal unrest.
Daily
Times:Tuesday ,April 19,2005
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