Today’s Columns – 19 March, 2010

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Deshetgerdo, Please… by Mubashir Lucman

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Uzer Ghunah… by Nazir Naji

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Kaanch Sey Nazuk… by Ayaz Khan

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Sofi-Izem… by Hamid Akhtar

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Women’s bill can wait by Kuldip Nayar

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Kuldip Nayar
Friday, 19 Mar, 2010

Jihad has different meanings. Islamist terrorists have one meaning. Leaders of Other Backward Classes (OBC) in India have another.

The latter have used the word ‘jihad’ to raise the standard of revolt against the government. The Congress party had the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, endorse the controversial Women’s Reservation Bill.

The OBC, a caste between the upper castes and the lowest caste, fear that the 33 per cent reservations in the two houses of parliament and the state legislatures would benefit primarily the elite and the affluent (today 68 per cent of woman MPs are millionaires) and leave their womenfolk still more backward.

Many male MPs of different parties are also having second thoughts. The bill when enacted will curtail 181 seats for men in the 545-member Lok Sabha, the lower house. It is laid down that after every general election, reservations for women will rotate to embrace new constituencies. The process, covering the entire country, will end after 15 years when the reservation period ends.

The three OBC leaders who are leading the agitation are Mulayam Singh Yadav from UP, Lalu Prasad Yadav from Bihar and Sharad Yadav, president of the Janata Dal (United). They have threatened not to allow the government to function if their castes are not accommodated. Their apprehension is exaggerated. Yet they have a point when they argue that reservations may come to work against the women from their castes and the minorities.

The remedy they suggest is, however, worse than the disease. They demand a quota within quota, 10 per cent for the OBC and five per cent for Muslims. This proposal may evoke a feeling of separation.

There is no doubt that the legislation fulfils the call by parliamentary democracy for gender equality. But was it necessary to take such a step when the country is plagued by numerous problems, from Maoist violence to dismal poverty? True, the bill has been languishing for 14 years. But no span of time is long enough when the alternative is cleavage in society.

India has not yet developed into a polity where differences over caste or religion have been allayed, much less settled. Indeed, it is tough for a liberal or a democrat to ignore what the modern world achieved long ago. Yet a nation has to define its own priorities. I do not think that the bill should have been on top of the agenda when consensus was lacking.

Prosperity and pluralism may make exploitation in the name of caste and creed irrelevant one day. Till such time, the leaders have to resist the temptation to hit the headlines, because the gain of a few may spell the ruin of millions.

Unfortunately, all three OBC leaders have played the caste card. They are trying to reignite the fire that was quenched some 20 years ago by implementing the Mandal Commission report and giving reservations to OBC. Still the country remained on the boil till the report was implemented. A similar situation can take place if the women’s bill is sought to be passed. Hamlets and neighbourhoods would become a warfront. OBC leader Lalu Prasad has said that the bill would be passed over his dead body.

A better suggestion is that political parties should be legally bound to allocate 33 per cent of seats to women in parliament and the state legislatures. I am told that all parties except the Left are agreeable to the proposal.

Why the communists are against it is not understandable. Another suggestion that Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has given is that the 33 per cent seats can be converted into dual constituencies so as to accommodate women.

There is no option to conciliation. The Congress which has in the Lok Sabha 208 seats, 65 short of a majority, cannot afford to alienate the Yadavs because their support is crucial to the government’s viability. The Congress has, perforce, assured parliament that all parties would be consulted before proceeding further.

The party should not be in hurry. In any case, it has already announced that it would present the bill after the budget was passed. The ugly scene witnessed in the Rajya Sabha, resulting in the physical ouster of seven members, brought parliamentary democracy to the level of a mobocracy.

The demolition of the Babri mosque was the fallout of the Mandal agitation. Bharatiya Janata Party leader Atal Behari Vajpayee admitted after the demolition that if the Mandal agitation had not taken place, “we would not have picked up kamandal (a vessel used by hermits)”. The nation is still paying for the sins committed at that time. Must we add to our miseries?

It is welcome to see Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s nemesis catching up with him. This is also a slap in the face of the leading industrialists who gathered at Ahmedabad some weeks ago to announce that the next Indian prime minister should be Modi.

The corporate sector should realise that the people elect a ruling party which in turn appoints the prime minister. Moneybags have a limited say. What Modi did was to spread extremism which the industrialists should know is the anti-thesis of development.

Modi has at last been summoned by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) on the basis of a complaint filed both by the wife and the son of former Congress MP Eshan Jaffrey. The latter rang up everyone, including Modi, for help when his house was surrounded by rioters during the Gujarat carnage. No help reached him until 69 people were butchered and the house burnt.

The SIT was appointed by the supreme court to inquire into 10 cases relating to the murder of Muslims in the Gujarat pogrom in 2002. The report may not set every wrong right. Yet it is expected to name the guilty. Families of the victims have been waiting for the last eight years to see that those whose hands are soaked with blood do not go unpunished.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi.

Shahbaz Sharif’s faux pas by Ayesha Siddiqa

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Ayesha Siddiqa
Friday, 19 Mar, 2010

Shahbaz Sharif’s comments asking the Taliban not to attack Punjab have caused a furore in many parts of the country. In imploring the Taliban to not attack the PML-N-ruled Punjab since both had a common enemy in Pervez Musharraf, the Punjab chief minister is being accused of pleading for peace for only his own province.

He is being attacked from all directions despite his later claim of having being wronged by journalists who quoted him out of context.

Notwithstanding the fact that this is a typical excuse used by most people in high positions, the Punjab governor and others might just forgive him considering that unintelligent statements could be a family trait. One is reminded of the 1980s, when jokes used to circulate in the country regarding the older Sharif brother’s fondness for food and his inability to concentrate on food for thought. In fact, Shahbaz Sharif had the reputation of being the brightest of the Sharif lot and was loved by many, including Gen Ziaul Haq. His recent statement, however, shows that he does not think before he speaks. While the older Sharif may have learnt a few lessons from having been in exile, the younger one looks ready to shoot from the hip.

But then, why get angry, given that all political figures tend to talk unthinkingly? Perhaps Shahbaz Sharif did not intend to make such a statement but was so dumbfounded by the recent terrorist attack in Lahore that he was simply unable to hide his surprise at the jihadis breaking their promise yet again. Wasn’t it just a fortnight ago that his police officials gave him the assurance that Punjab was safe from terrorist activities? A fly on the wall might have overheard him mumble his frustrated thoughts on what had propelled the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LeJ) to deviate from the agreed-upon peace formula.

It’s not fashionable in Pakistan to talk about deals being brokered in Punjab, just like they were in the tribal areas. In our earnestness to accuse outside forces, we often forget that the main perpetrators of violence sit inside.

A number of people claim to see an Indian hand in the recent attacks in Lahore in the same manner as they suspected our neighbour of all earlier acts of violence. Let us assume for a minute that the Punjab government and the various intelligence agencies are able to prove that some outside agencies were involved in financing the attacks. Such an assumption still doesn’t answer the question of why the Punjab government is holding on to those terrorists who then engage in terrorist activities.

The case of Omar Saeed Sheikh planning a war between India and Pakistan, while in Hyderabad jail, after the Mumbai attack, allegedly organising the murder of Maj-Gen Faisal Alavi and even threatening Pervez Musharraf from his jail cell goes to show that such people cannot be controlled even if they are behind bars. Punjab has Malik Ishaq, who is the head of the LeJ and is currently incarcerated in Multan jail. And there are many others who traverse the length and breadth of the province, including some lethal proclaimed offenders, involved in various terrorist activities.

Anyone in the Punjab chief minister’s place may be equally shocked and disappointed to see the jihadis not delivering on their part of the bargain which was concluded over a year ago: not to attack Punjab in return for certain concessions. The agreement seemed to have gone awry even earlier when terrorist activities were carried out in and around Lahore, such as the attack on the Sri Lankan team. Sources claim that the LeJ leadership was probably involved in those cases.

Malik Ishaq of the LeJ is accused of carrying out hundreds of murders but was not convicted because of lacunas in the legal system and the police’s inability to collect evidence or run a sound witness protection programme. Resultantly, he is being kept in jail under the Maintenance of Public Order act; there is no other substantive case against him. Let us also not forget that there are many in the lower judiciary who are sympathetic towards the jihadi mindset. Not surprisingly, Malik Ishaq was apparently allowed to cross-examine prosecution witnesses inside jail even in cases not related to him. The police official who tried to stop this practice was later murdered.

Shahbaz Sharif is responsible for agreeing to keep silent on the jihadi ‘assets’. According to one source in the government, there was an understanding that he would take care of these elements, especially while the military was busy in the tribal areas. Therefore, the Punjab chief minister and his loyal law minister, Rana Sanaullah, deflected attention away from Punjab. There were even occasions when senior police officers covered up the jihadis’ tracks and maligned those that warned about such threats.

The younger Sharif brother was not keen to upset the apple cart he was trundling, since such a disturbance would have had a direct impact on the possibility of his riding the tide of the future of the PML-N. It is sad to see the elder Mian, who has learnt a few lessons from his exile, being gently sidetracked for the sake of political expediency. Shahbaz Sharif appears to have his footprints all over the PML-N’s future.

Then, there’s the fact that other politicians have also made deals with banned outfits to win seats in parliament. Hardly anyone in there or in any of the provincial assemblies has the capacity to challenge the growing tide of radicalism and jihadism in the country, especially in the two major provinces. For the leadership, it is convenient to blame ordinary people for being conservative, although the leadership has itself never tried to deliver any better message.

The problem with strategic assets, as Shahbaz Sharif may realise, is that they often bite the hand that feeds them since they can also feel insecure. Some ‘boys’ may interpret the arrest of Mullah Baradar and others as a strategy which may result in local networks being finally wiped out. The ‘boys’ who feel they are not getting the right signals are likely to jump the gun and turn into splinters of the splinters. It is up to the Punjab chief minister to face this reality before it’s too late.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

Talibangate by Cyril Almeida

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Cyril Almeida
Friday, 19 Mar, 2010

Shahbaz Sharif’s boo-boo had everyone up in arms. Even his party folks struggled to explain it away with a modicum of believability.

But nobody wanted to talk about what he was really doing. Shahbaz is first and foremost a politician. Like all politicians, he’s always thinking about votes. And like most politicians, he can sometimes go over the top in the pursuit of said votes.

The Punjab CM’s words to the Taliban were ugly and crass, absolutely, but the Taliban weren’t really his intended audience. Shahbaz was channelling what his party’s average voter is thinking. Spare us, the Punjabi trader, the bedrock of the PML-N’s support in the province, has been pleading.

Whatever your fight, whatever your dispute, don’t bomb our markets and bazaars. It’s costing us money, Taliban. We have families to feed, stocks to replenish, things to sell, but your bombs and bullets are keeping the customers away. Please stop.

There’s no acceptable way for a politician to say this. Whichever way it’s framed it sounds like or is appeasement because it’s an economic argument to stop fighting what is an ideological war.

Shahbaz, though, went ahead and said what his core voter is thinking because that’s what comes to him and his brother naturally: a lowest-common-denominator race to the bottom for votes.

The party’s opponents pounced on the bit they could gain some mileage out of: look, it’s the same ol’ PML-N, up to no-good provincial politics as is its wont. Forget about voting for them if you happen to belong to a land other than the one with five rivers.

But none of the PML-N’s opponents wanted to criticise the subtext of Shahbaz’s exhortation to the Taliban: after all, the Punjabi trader is a powerful political force and you don’t want to alienate that votebank unnecessarily

Attention will soon switch, if it hasn’t already, from Talibangate and the furore over ‘spare Punjab’. This is a land of many crises and the next media frenzy is only a matter of time.

Shahbaz’s comments, however, underline what many have been quietly arguing: that the Sharifs are unreconstructed provincialists who will exacerbate centrifugal forces in the federation in their quest for power.

This whole business of ‘principled politics’ since the Sharifs’ return to Pakistan has been a product of happenstance. They, like all politicians, are in the business of politics to win.

Winning for the Sharifs in the last days of the Musharraf era was a happy coincidence of smart politics and principles. Oppose the deeply unpopular dictator, support the wildly popular chief justice and then just ride the wave of populist support back into the corridors of power. It’s what every politician dreams of: being hailed as heroes while playing politics.

But once in power, as the Sharifs are in Punjab, a familiar problem rears its head: the fact that a broken and corrupt system of governance cannot be fixed just because you had promised the voter it would be fixed. The hype of the campaign trail gives way to the reality check of office.

Listen to Chaudhry Nisar and the other PML-N attack dogs’ rants against the PPP government in Islamabad and you can’t help but think, hang on a minute, isn’t all this stuff applicable to the Sharifs’ government in Punjab?

A bloated, useless cabinet? Check. An autocratic leader? Check. Poor fiscal management? Check. Running roughshod over the bureaucracy? Check. Inability to improve the provision of basic services? Check. Rampant crime? Check. Inability to control prices? Check. The list goes on.

When things aren’t as great as you had promised the voters they would be, you need to reach out to the party base and remind them that you’re on their side in other ways. Enter the TTP and its violent campaign against the Pakistani state.

Bombs aren’t good for business. And yet everyone in the political mainstream has been telling the businessmen who are haemorrhaging money that this is a necessary war, that the Taliban need to be defeated, that this counter-insurgency must be won.

What Shahbaz did was see an opportunity and seize it: wave the flag of disgruntled traders and businessmen and merchants. It’s all well and good to be told that you must tough out the present for the sake of improved security in the future, but if you’ve got a business you’re probably wondering what good security will do when you’re broke and struggling to feed your family after your business has been shuttered.

Hang on, Imran Khan and the Jamaat-i-Islami have cried themselves hoarse opposing the war against the Taliban but they’ve got nowhere with the electorate, you say.

True. But the Punjabi trader isn’t an ideologue. His credo is ‘Allah, country and family’. He wants a moderately Islamic Pakistan, a strong Pakistan and an economically flourishing Pakistan.

Imran Khan and the JI offer a vision of a pure Islamic Pakistan: Islam first and everything else a distant second. This isn’t very appealing to the Punjabi trader, and it’s not hard to see why.

The trader is an economically oriented guy. He believes in the Creator but also puts his faith in His willingness to forgive. Doing business in Pakistan is dirty business: there are bribes to be paid, arms to be twisted, taxes to be avoided and laws to be skirted. The trader justifies this because he’s a pragmatist. Remember, he’s got a family to take care of. He’ll seek forgiveness by never skipping Friday prayers and making sure he goes on Haj at least once in his life.

That’s the guy Shahbaz was really reaching out to this week. Shahbaz was saying, I get it, God, country and family is my motto, too. I feel your pain. Support me and I’ll take care of you.

Not convinced? Pick up a copy of Sartaj Aziz’s excellent memoirs and flip to the page where he discusses the background to the legendary ‘I-will-not-take-dictation’ speech of Nawaz Sharif in 1993. Some of the figures involved in the Sharif-GIK war thought a truce was possible and were trying to nudge Sharif in that direction.

But he went ahead and gave the speech, knowing full well his government would be sacked (it was the next day). Why? Because Sharif knew the speech would go down well in Punjab and create a wave of support for him and his party in the province.

With Talibangate it seems the Sharifs are up to their old tricks again.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Jewish life under Muslim rule by Dr Muzaffar Iqbal

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Quantum note

Friday, March 19, 2010
Dr Muzaffar Iqbal

No one should speak of Muslim life under Jewish rule, especially in the land that was promised to the Jews and then denied; for such speech (or writing in this case) is simply not allowed in the ‘civilised’ world where I happen to be living now.

The ‘civilised’ world is only interested in Muslim ‘terrorists’ whose lives can be taken out any time, for example, by a drone flying over Pakistan–a sovereign country that cannot protect its sovereignty. No one in our ‘civilised’ world is interested in knowing that a drone has no way of distinguishing between a little baby sleeping peacefully by her mother’s side and a real terrorist sitting thousands of miles away in an office from where the drones are controlled. No, such matters require hearts that can feel pain and anguish. Pain and anguish over human suffering is not allowed across the length and breadth of this vast continent, which the writer of the Heart of Darkness could have easily used as his locale.

Thus any speech or writing about Muslim life under Jewish rule will never find its way into the ‘free’ media of this land; it would immediately be labelled anti-Semitic, pushed under the rug, swallowed. But, mercifully, one can still talk about Jewish life under Muslim rule, even though that opens a window onto a past that no one wants to remember. And those who should remember that time, mostly Muslims, are unable to, simply because of their long sleep of four centuries–the siesta during which the entire world around them has been transformed.

So, it is no surprise that this window onto an enchanting past is being opened by Amnon Cohen, a Jew, who spent years in deciphering documents of the Ottoman Court at Jerusalem and published several articles on the subject in various journals. It is, however, his two volume work, A World Within: Jewish Life as Reflected in Muslim Court Documents from the Sijill of Jerusalem that is our key to the window we wish to open to a bygone past in this column. Even the story of finding this sixteenth-century document is fascinating.

Cohen’s research interests led him to the office of the waqf administration and the Higher Muslim Council in East Jerusalem, where he was granted access to the archives of the Ottoman times: 420 leather-bound volumes hardly touched by foreign or local scholars. These documents were kept in the court building for centuries but during the World War II they were moved to the newly established offices of the administration of the waqf on East Jerusalem’s main street named after the man whom every Muslim now wants to return to rescue their brethren from their degrading situation: Salah al-Din.

The documents Cohen discovered are actually drafts of the court cases describing the daily proceedings. Each volume contains approximately 450 pages. Each page includes several cases. These daily proceedings of a Muslim court at Jerusalem during the Ottoman times contain a variety of cases, but an interesting part of this archive is those cases which involve Jewish litigants. These are part of the daily court records, without any distinguishing mark. That is, they were treated as normal court cases even though they pertained to a religious minority living under Islamic laws.

These documents provide a wealth of information about the daily life of Jews of Jerusalem. They slaughtered their own meat, followed their own religious laws in all matters. As money changers, they were the fiscal pillars of the local economy, and they lived under complete freedom. There was a very active guild system encompassing butchers, money changers, millers, grain merchants, jewellers, and other trades.

Cohen provides some insights into the Jewish life. Noteworthy among these are the reasons due to which the Jews went to the Shariah court, rather than their own courts, as these court cases do not only involve conflicts between Jews and Muslims or Jews and Christians; they are also replete with cases involving Jews only. So, why would Jews go to a Shariah court?

“They turned to the Shairah authorities,” Cohen concludes, “to seek redress with respect to internal differences, and even in matters within their immediate family (intimate relations between husband and wife, nafaqa maintenance payments to divorcees, support of infants, etc.). Other matters of purely religious nature were also introduced into the Muslim court; Jewish prayer shawls and phylacteries, Jewish traditional and communal institutions, Jewish holidays and even Jewish dreams…”

Some examples would suffice: Volume 58, for the Gregorian year 1578-1579, contains a document (no. 122c), dated 7 Rabi al-Awwal, 986, which states: “The Jew Yaqub b. Yusif declared in the court that from now on he would not contradict his father and will involve himself deeply in the study of reading and writing. The father undertook to marry him to a Jewish woman from Safed since he formally declared himself unattached to a certain other Jewish woman.”

On the 17th of Shawwal, 986, the same Yaqub b. Yusif was again in the court. On that day he declared in the court that he was divorcing his wife Sara bint Ibrahim from Safed, who was identified by two Jewish witnesses. Both parties, i.e. Yaqub and his father on the one hand, and Sara and her mother on the other hand, absolved one another from any obligation or debt whatsoever.

Less than a month later, the same Yaqub b. Yusif appeared in the court on 9 Dhu’l-Qa`da, “alleging that another Jew, Shmuil b. Khalifa, had promised him his minor daughter, Mazaltuf, in marriage for 25 gold coins as bride-money. Shmuil denied it and referred the court to an earlier deposition by the same plaintiff in which Yaqub specifically referred to his daughter as totally unrelated to him.”

Fascinating accounts. Another time, another era. Yet, so much to learn from. Only if Muslims would wake up and start learning from their own history.

The writer is a freelance columnist.

Email: quantumnotes@gmail.com

Gut reaction by Lubna Jerar Naqvi

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33 per cent counts

Friday, March 19, 2010
Lubna Jerar Naqvi

After 14 years of living in cold storage, finally on March 9, the Indian upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, made history by passing the Women’s Reservation Bill by a two-third majority, a day after it was moved in the House.

During two whole days, the sessions of parliament were disrupted nine times, suspension of seven members took place and things took such a bad turn that the marshals had to be called out to maintain peace and provide security to the speaker of the Rajya Sabha.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the allies of the Congress led United Progressive Alliance, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), threatened to break their alliance and move a no-confidence movement. At one time, things looked very bleak for the government, however, the Congress leader Sonia Gandhi stood her ground and managed to get this bill over the first hurdle. Interesting enough, the opposition stood alongside the Congress on this bill, although they had their reservations about the government not holding a debate before putting the bill up for vote.

India’s Women’s Reservation Bill will allow a 33 per cent reservation for women in India’s Lok Sabha and state assemblies. According to experts, this bill will benefit women belonging to scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backward classes, poor women and Muslim women.

Most countries in the world have seats allotted for women. In many Asian countries women representation is 18.5 per cent, which according to international standards, is extremely low. India and Sri Lanka have the lowest number of women in their parliaments. The Indian women have only eleven per cent representation in parliament, while in Pakistan’s National Assembly the allotted quota for women is 17.5 per cent but on ground the total number of women on women and general seats is 22 per cent.

Now the question arises why there was such a ruckus regarding this bill. The Indian Lok Sabha has a total of 543 seats, the number of women in this house is only 59, whereas in the upper house, Rajya Sabha, the total number of seats is 248 with only 21 female members. This means that the Indian parliament is basically male dominated. Out of the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha, 122 are for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, leaving the total number of general seats to be 421. If women get 33 per cent of these, this will leave them with 364 seats. With this bill the number of female seats in Lok Sabha will be 181, leaving the men with 282 seats, women can also contest for the general seats which will mean lesser seats for the men.

Throughout history women have held important posts at various levels in India. They fought in battles and ruled states, such as in Bhopal. One also led the post-partition India as prime minister. However, some critics hold the view that Indira Gandhi wasn’t chosen to run the country because of being an extremely intelligent and strong woman, which she was no doubt, but because she was the only child of Nehru, the great Congress leader and the first prime minister of India. When this bill becomes law it may metamorphose the male-dominated Indian parliament and give the women of India a voice to reckon with.

The writer works for Geo TV. Email: lubnajnaqvi@yahoo.com