O P I N I O N S

Guest Column
Nawaz is still the man India should talk to
F. S. Aijazuddin
Sharif must have felt comforted when the army did not step in during the dharnas in Islamabad. He is also fortified in Parliament by the support of Zardari’s
PPP-P.
The history of relations between India and Pakistan is being re-written — this time in vitriol. Their acrimonious separation 67 years ago must qualify as the most protracted divorce on record. No two nations, addicted as its citizens are to television serials, could have for so long provided their viewing public with such a riveting soap opera.

Touchstones
Writing for not just one generation
Ira Pande
Where great literature scores over history is that it is pegged firmly to the bedrock of universal truths: it uncovers events and characters that appear real to us even centuries later.
If she were alive today, my mother would have turned 91 this Dasehra. Each year, when the festive season comes, she enters my thoughts and stays with me for a long time.

GROUND ZERO
Why Pakistan upped the ante on the border
Raj Chengappa
The Pakistan Army and the government are working in consonance to disrupt the forthcoming J&K elections to discredit India internationally. Modi’s big test lies in handling the latest Kashmir crisis, putting it above political interests of the BJP in the state.

Guest Column
Nawaz is still the man India should talk to
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN

Sharif must have felt comforted when the army did not step in during the dharnas in Islamabad. He is also fortified in Parliament by the support of Zardari’s PPP-P.

The history of relations between India and Pakistan is being re-written — this time in vitriol. Their acrimonious separation 67 years ago must qualify as the most protracted divorce on record.

No two nations, addicted as its citizens are to television serials, could have for so long provided their viewing public with such a riveting soap opera. It has all the necessary ingredients: confrontation, conflict and conciliation, suspicion and suspense.

Sadly, Indo-Pak relations are now reduced to single episodes connected by a flimsy storyline. And like most soap operas, it is limited only by the ingenuity of the scriptwriters and by the stamina of the performers.

As a Pakistani attending the Khushwant Singh LitFest in Kasauli from 10-12th October, I was prepared for the slurry of resentment shovelled by my Indian counterparts. Their attitudes ranged from an obsession to reverse the partition of the Punjab in 1947, through a determination to avenge Kargil, the attack on the Lok Sabha, 26/11 in Mumbai, to the more recent firing across the J & K Line of Control. What did catch me off-guard were the strident attempts by an educated audience to stifle the opinions of Indians once regarded as ‘friends’ of Pakistan and now reviled as ‘enemies’ of India.

Nawaz Sharif at the UN Assembly. afp

Once pro-Pakistani Indians were personified by Khushwant Singh whose humane advocacy post-1971 for the return of 73,908 Pakistani military PoWs and 16,413 civilian CUPCs so irked Mrs Indira Gandhi. In time, Khushwant’s pennant passed to Kuldip Nayar, who anticipated the Gujral doctrine with his book “Distant Neighbours”. The latest bête noire is Mani Shankar Aiyar. I was saddened to see him, now unprotected by the shield of a Congress Party in government, being hounded into silence by BJP supporters. Had there been a tree in the auditorium, they would have lynched him.

The BJP followers in that audience were placated only after being reminded that two of their own leaders had been casualties to their firebrand extremism — L.K. Advani for describing M.A. Jinnah as ‘a secularist’ and Jaswant Singh for writing a book that praised Jinnah with too faint damns.

These three ‘friends of Pakistan’ had one thing in common — they were all born in areas that are now Pakistan: Khushwant Singh in Hadali (now Pakistan’s Punjab) in 1915, Kuldip Nayar in Sialkot in 1927, Mani Shankar Aiyar in 1941 in Lahore. Of them, only Mani has lived in a post-1947 Pakistan, when he served as the Indian Consul General in Karachi.

Unlike them, Narendra Modi was born in 1950. He is a post-Midnight’s Child. Unlike Atal Behari Vajpayee, who visited the North-West and Lahore first as a student, then as Foreign Minister and finally as Prime Minister, Modi has never come to Pakistan. He can be forgiven, therefore, for viewing Pakistan through the prism of unfamiliarity, tinctured by a patina of political prejudice.

Since his kneejerk cancellation of the Indo-Pak talks at the Foreign Secretary level, Mr Modi has been more circumspect in his utterances. He refers to the ‘invisible enemy’ now, rather than berating Pakistan by name. He is absorbing gradually the dictum of the Israeli leader General Moshe Dayan: ‘If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.’

And who is the ‘enemy’ that Prime Minister Modi needs to talk to across his western border?

Until the next general election (or any premature snap general election), there is no one else in Pakistan Mr Modi can talk to than Pakistan’s Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif.

As a reward for almost a decade of tapasya in exile, Mr Sharif has been granted rare boons. He has been able to choose his own Chief of Army Staff (General Raheel Sharif) who hopefully will be more loyal to him than his earlier choice General Pervez Musharraf was. Nawaz has anointed a new head of ISI, Lt-General Rizwan Akhtar. And four senior Corps Commanders are due for retirement before the year is out.

Nawaz Sharif knows that he cannot extinguish the fires of ambition in his military. However he must have felt comforted when General Raheel Sharif demonstrated by his abstention during the Imran Khan/Tahirul Qadri dharnas in Islamabad that the Army would not threaten an incumbent lawfully elected government. It was as meaningful an endorsement of civilian democracy as Field Marshal Manekshaw’s refusal to oust Mrs Indira Gandhi during her Emergency in the 1970s.

For the time being, Sharif is fortified in Parliament by the support of Asif Zardari’s PPP-P. However, Imran Khan’s PTI poses a growing threat to Nawaz Sharif, not now but in the future. Imran’s PTI recently won a crucial seat in Multan, vacated in a pique by Javed Hashmi, once president of Imran’s PTI. Imran Khan’s tsunami has converted into a slow water torture, drip by drip, by-election by by-election.

The writer is a Lahore-based art-historian and a columnist for Dawn.

Touchstones
Writing for not just one generation
Ira Pande

Where great literature scores over history is that it is pegged firmly to the bedrock of universal truths: it uncovers events and characters that appear real to us even centuries later.

If she were alive today, my mother would have turned 91 this Dasehra. Each year, when the festive season comes, she enters my thoughts and stays with me for a long time. It took death to separate us and for me to realise how much a mother means to her children. Despite our many differences and violent arguments, we shared a bond that even death has not snapped and among my favourite prayers is a ‘sloka’ she taught us: ‘Putro kuputra kvachit bhav, mata kumata na bhavati’ (A son can occasionally be a bad son but a mother can never be a bad mother).

I am frequently asked what it was like to grow up in a home that had a writer as a mother. Such queries often assume that my mother was some kind of a Virginia Woolf figure who locked herself in a room and, when not holed inside it, was completely self-absorbed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like so many other women writers of her time, Diddi (that is what we called her) wrote when the children were in school and the husband in the office. At a time when other women went to shop, play cards or gossip with each other over cups of tea and coffee, she knitted her eyebrows together and sat and wrote. The dining table was her desk and our old school notebooks her scribbling pads. She wrote by hand and sent hand-written manuscripts because she could not afford to get them typed up.

For so many of her generation, writing was a calling: they wrote because they had unforgettable tales to share. Payments for their stories and novels were so pitiful that judged by the standards of today’s humungous advances, they appear unbelievably mean. Publishers made fortunes out of sales but rarely passed the correct royalty payments to the writers whose work they built their fortunes on. In the absence of a dedicated marketing network or lit-fests, books became popular by word of mouth. My mother’s work was a prime example of this as she wrote all her novels as serials in popular Hindi magazines, such as “Dharmayug”, “Saptahik Hindustan”, “Navneet”, “Sarika” and “Gyanodaya”. None of these survive today because at some point media barons decided to withdraw them in favour of English magazines that brought higher advertising revenues.

I was transported to this age the other day at a discussion of a recently translated work from Hindi into English. The book under discussion was Amritlal Nagar’s “Ghadar ke Phool”, written in 1957 to commemorate the centenary of the 1857 mutiny. Nagar was commissioned by the UP government (at a fee of Rs 1,000!) to travel through the territory of Avadh and record local accounts of the men who fought what is now called India’s first war of independence. Typically, the government awoke to the occasion just a few months before the date by which the publication was to be launched. Undeterred, Nagar put on a pair of slippers, put his pencils and paper into a “jhola” knitted by his loving wife and set off on a journey that is recorded as “Ghadar ke Phool” and translated now by my sister Mrinal Pande as “Gathering the Ashes”.

The task of translating was not made easier as no one had a copy of the original book any more. There were some notes and scribbling that Nagarji’s son Sharad had been working on and he passed them on generously, along with a piece he wrote on the venture as he remembered it, to my sister. Then began the process of sifting, rewriting and research: sadly, Sharad passed away a few months ago and never saw the beautiful result of this homage to a man and a time that we have all but forgotten.

Today, historians would call “Ghadar ke Phool” a record of oral history and debate whether memory can be considered empirical or historical data. Others would claim the work as a valuable piece of subaltern history because it records events that are viewed differently when seen by those who are on the margins. I am not interested in how academic historians may classify this work because they write for each other, not for the common reader. To lay readers history lies all around us and comes in many forms: mythic tales, ballads, personal correspondence and individual memory. Viewed thus, all of us are creators of a collective narrative that often has its roots in one’s social conditioning or ideological persuasion.

Thankfully, writers such as Nagarji were free of such doubts and wrote unself-unconsciously because they wrote from the heart. This is why their works have such an enduring quality and why many writers who are feted for having topped so-called best-sellers list are forgotten within a few years. Fads and fashions have a limited shelf-life. Where great literature scores over history is that it is pegged firmly to the bedrock of universal truths: it uncovers events and characters that appear real to us even decades and centuries later. So while we may endlessly contest historical claims, we never fail to acknowledge that a Hamlet can also be reborn as a Haider.

Nagarji’s centenary falls next year but even after a half-century of his epic journey in search of the truth about 1857, the flowers he gathered retain their fragrance.