Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  AI 182 had been en route from Montreal to London and Delhi. When it emerged that it had most likely been downed by the detonation of an onboard bomb, suspicion attached to Khalistan militants in Canada. Canada’s police and intelligence had earlier been alerted to bomb-making activity by British Columbia’s Bhindranwale sympathisers; indeed, several Sikh activists were under observation. But the enormity of what had been planned only emerged later. Baggage on the Montreal–Delhi flight was traced back to connecting flights from Toronto and Vancouver. And the exploding suitcase in Tokyo had also come off a flight originating in Vancouver. Moreover, the suitcase had blown up when being transferred from its incoming Canadian Pacific flight to another Air India flight, this time to Bangkok. Thus a second and simultaneous mid-air tragedy involving an Air India airliner had only narrowly been avoided when the bomb detonated prematurely in Tokyo.

  Curiously, these appalling acts provoked less outrage in India than might have been expected. Of the 329 lives lost on AI 182, only twenty-four had been those of Indian citizens though the 268 Canadians included many of Indian descent. It was left to the Canadian authorities to investigate the crime and bring to justice those responsible for ‘the worst mass murder in Canadian history’. The investigation extended over many years. No group claimed responsibility, and the main culprits – those who had bought the tickets, checked in the bags and not boarded the flights – were never certainly identified. Only the bomb-maker was tried and convicted. But the passenger rosters showed the no-shows on both flights as called ‘Singh’, and the bookings had been made by other Singhs. Since nearly all Sikhs have the name Singh, this was taken as evidence that all those responsible were Sikhs, and that they were not averse to being recognised as such. The likely organiser was thought to be a cousin of Bhindranwale; and the main operative was supposedly Talwinder Singh Parmar of the Babbar Khalsa, a militant group linked to the pro-Khalistan Sikh Students’ Association that had been responsible for several bombings in Punjab. Though a Canadian citizen, Talwinder Singh had been born in Punjab, and soon died there. Taken into police custody in 1992, he would allegedly confess to his part in the bombing and then be shot in a police ‘encounter’.

  Coordinated attacks on prestigious civilian targets would soon come to be reckoned the prerogative of well-financed Islamist groups like al-Qaeda. That it was in fact diasporic Sikh militants who pioneered this form of horror has been largely forgotten. The protracted nature of the Canadian investigation left some uncertainty about the identity and motivation of the culprits until well into the 1990s. Meanwhile the Indian government was determined nothing should be allowed to derail its search for a lasting Punjab Accord.

  Nor was it. Some of those arrested after Operation Blue Star were released, the military were partially withdrawn from Punjab, and to address the state’s employment shortage Rajiv announced the setting up of a railway-carriage production facility with the promise of 20,000 jobs. In July 1985, a month after the downing of AI 182, Harcharan Singh Longowal, the Akali Dal leader who had been Bhindranwale’s neighbour in the Golden Temple hostel, finally came to Delhi. There he signed up to the Accord’s eleven-point Memorandum of Understanding. Chandigarh was to go to Punjab in return for just one district being handed over to Haryana; the water dispute and other matters were to be referred to independent commissions. Once again the terms scarcely differed from those offered by Mrs Gandhi in 1984.

  This should have been the end of the matter. But a month later, while announcing the Punjab Accord, Harcharan Singh Longowal was shot dead. His killers claimed the agreement betrayed the Sikh nation. In another sympathy vote, this time for Longowal, the Akali Dal was returned to power in state elections in September. Some of the party’s divided leadership then reneged on the terms of the Accord and renewed contacts with the Khalistan militants. The eminent Sikh writer and historian Khushwant Singh bemoaned the decline of a revered party into ‘a bunch of bearded buffoons bereft of the power of thinking and vision’.22 Terrorist attacks in 1986 were said to have claimed more lives than in 1984, and they spread beyond Punjab, with bombs in Delhi and elsewhere.

  In 1986 and in 1988 Khalistan militants had once again to be flushed out of Amritsar’s Golden Temple. Code-named ‘Black Thunder’, these two operations were conducted with a sensitivity that had been lacking in Blue Star, and were reckoned a qualified success. Heavy policing, sterner direction and more international cooperation in counter-terrorism were finally paying off. With no thanks to the Akali Dal, which had been relieved of power in 1987, and at enormous cost in military deployment and lives lost (including those of ‘over 1,550 policemen’ in 1988–92), ‘by 1993, Punjab had been virtually freed of terrorism’.23 Give or take the conflict in Kashmir, India had emerged intact from its worst decade to date. The economy was in tatters, and Congress could no longer command an overall majority. Yet separatist dissent had been channelled back into the ballot box, and a plethora of local parties with caste-based agendas were breathing new life into the nation’s electoral arithmetic. Above all, the democratic consensus had held. This was not something that could be said of the rest of South Asia. Indeed, India’s abiding commitment to electoral accountability was setting a norm for which the peoples of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal could not but be grateful. A hegemonist tendency, when wreathed in smiles of popular endorsement, was almost acceptable.

  10

  Outside the Gates

  Padding round one of Asia’s most notorious slums in pyjamas and an old pair of trainers was no guarantee of anonymity for Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan. He was too well-known, for one thing; for another, however attired, his patrician stature and air of bespectacled purpose betrayed his Cambridge degree and one-time membership of the vaunted Indian Civil Service. Born in Agra in 1914, Khan had served under the British before opting for Pakistan in 1950, and had then been posted to Comilla in East Pakistan. There in the 1960s he had devised a model of rural development which, while based on the cooperatives championed by the pony-riding Malcolm Darling in the 1940s, carried an additional incentive: the provision of small loans to those, especially women, whose income-generating prospects were insufficiently credit-worthy to interest the banks.

  Known as micro-finance or micro-credit, this pioneering initiative had far-reaching consequences. In the aftermath of the Bangladesh War the practice of micro-credit was adopted by BRAC. Originally the ‘Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee’, BRAC was soon to outgrow its acronym to become ‘the world’s largest non-governmental development agency’. Then in the 1980s the principle of small-scale lending to community-supported individuals was formally institutionalised with the foundation in Chittagong by Professor Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank. Grameen provided the blueprint for a host of other community-based credit agencies right across the developing world, and in 2006 was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize – the only financial institution ever to have been so honoured. ‘By 2010 Grameen had eight million borrowers and was active in every village.’1 Together, BRAC and Grameen gained for unfancied Bangladesh the respect of international finance. More than any official initiatives, such self-help organisations contributed to that country’s gradual shedding of its ‘basket-case’ image.

  Yet little of all this acclaim went to Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan. In 1971, just ahead of the Bangladesh War, he had returned to (West) Pakistan. An inspirational figure, bony, balding, and disarmingly modest, he held a succession of academic posts both there and in the US before again deploying his community expertise, this time on behalf of the urban poor of Karachi. In what was to be as much a research project as a developmental offensive, Khan chose Orangi, Asia’s most lawless bustee and the largest of the several hundred katchi abadis, or self-built slum townships, on the then outskirts of Karachi. To Orangi’s million-strong population of struggling squatters – muhajirs from India, Bihari refugees from Bangladesh, and Pathans, Balochis, Punjabis and Sindis from the rest of Pakistan – Khan devoted the remainder of his life, living and working there from 1980 on
wards. As founder and director of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), he possibly did more for the alleviation of urban distress than any contemporary.

  From a pioneering scheme to educate, organise and support Orangi’s residents in their efforts to lay sewerage systems, the OPP branched out into self-help programmes for house construction, health facilities, family planning, employment cooperatives and of course micro-credit. By the time Khan died in 1999 the community-led principles of his OPP were being adopted throughout Pakistan and beyond. Deployed in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Azad Kashmir and then of the 2010 Indus river floods, they lent to the task of rehabilitation a self-help dimension that was in marked contrast to the top-down interventions of government, international aid agencies and religious charities.

  Khan had no illusions about Karachi. From a pre-Partition total of about 400,000, the city’s population soared towards ten–twelve million by the end of the century. The OPP had not only to contend with appalling levels of deprivation and corruption; it had to do so under conditions tantamount to urban warfare as the different ethnic and religious groups competed for living space, jobs and a tenuous security. Quoting the British socialist Harold Laski, Khan saw the city as an arena in which the political process, ‘the counting of heads’, was so discredited that ‘the cutting of heads’ had come to represent the preferred means of communal assertion. The OPP was therefore as much about introducing some sense of shared purpose into the warring lanes of Orangi as it was about improving their sanitation and services. It could, however, scarcely redeem the city as a whole. ‘I fear terrible consequences within the next twenty years,’ said Khan in 1988.2

  Initially the main conflict in Karachi had been between the incoming muhajirs and the native Sindis. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s preferential treatment of his fellow Sindis had antagonised the Urdu-speaking muhajirs, who saw themselves as Jinnah’s chosen people and the rightful heirs to his one-nation Pakistan. They looked to the political and military establishment in Pakistan’s Punjab province to uphold their claim, and they had few regrets when Bhutto was toppled. Conversely, in the post-Bhutto era of General Ziaul Haq it was the Sindis who felt alienated and marginalised. In the early 1980s Sindi nationalists, with or without encouragement from India, mounted a campaign of lawlessness and secessionism throughout Sind. Three army divisions plus helicopter gunships were deployed to suppress it, yet the fighting spread to Karachi itself. There both sides fielded their own armed vigilantes and laid claim to large areas of the city.

  This situation rapidly deteriorated – and was vastly complicated – as a result of the war in Afghanistan. Arms shipments to the US-backed mujahidin (who were contesting the post-1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) passed through Karachi’s docks in one direction; heroin from the poppy fields of Afghanistan and the NWFP passed through in the other. Consignments of both were easily sidetracked. According to Akhtar Hameed Khan, ‘half the arms that were supposed to go to the Afghan mujahidin were distributed in Pakistan’.3 The profits to be made from the transport and distribution of such spoils spawned a black economy that allegedly dwarfed the official one. Meanwhile, triggered by the influx of some three million Afghan refugees, a population drift from the north and west of Pakistan augmented Karachi’s ethnic mix with a sizeable new infusion of Pathans and Balochis.

  In 1984, second-generation muhajirs, many of them ex-students of Karachi University, met this new challenge to their job prospects and their community’s demographic superiority by launching their own political organisation, the Muttahida (originally Muhajir) Qaumi Mahaz (‘United National Movement’), or MQM. Claiming to represent Pakistan’s ‘fifth nationality’, and with an eye to the creation of a muhajir ‘province’ based on Karachi, the MQM demanded for muhajirs the same sub-national status as Punjabis, Sindis, Pathans or Balochis. By contesting elections the MQM sought the same consideration from the central government, and by enforcing rigid discipline it imposed a comparable solidarity on its members. When in 1985 a muhajir student was run over by a Pathan truck driver, inter-communal warfare brought the city to a standstill. Fifty-three died, a figure which was more than doubled a year later when Pathans armed with AK47s gunned down muhajirs and were slaughtered in their turn. ‘Mohajirs tied the hands of [Pathans] behind their backs and burnt them alive … at least 70 people died on the 15th [of December 1986]. There was so much arson that a pall of thick black smoke covered the city.’4 ‘In scenes reminiscent of the [anti-Sikh] Delhi riots of 1984’, non-Pathan homes and businesses were specifically targeted.5

  By the 1990s it was estimated that between 400 and 600 political murders a year were being committed in the city.6 Altaf Hussein, the leader of the main MQM faction, dodged the bullets plus a string of criminal charges only by emigrating to north London. From there, funded and abetted by muhajir sympathisers, he continued to direct operations in Pakistan while rallying supporters with a deluge of inflammatory audio and video cassettes, satellite TV appearances and internet appeals. Once again, diasporic connections and the globalisation of communications were facilitating the transnational assertion of an essentially sub-national identity.

  General Ziaul Haq’s 1985 restoration of civilian rule, albeit within the constraints of military supervision and an emasculated Constitution, should have given the MQM its big chance. In the 1988 elections that followed Zia’s unexplained death, the MQM won thirteen of Karachi’s fifteen National Assembly seats, to emerge as the country’s third largest party. It continued to repeat this feat in the 1990s, though to little effect. Pacts promising the redress of muhajir grievances, first with Benazir Bhutto’s PPP, then with Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League group, failed to deliver. Holding the balance of power in a hopelessly flawed democracy proved no guarantee of concessions. Rather did a demand for the admission of more Bihari refugees from Bangladesh – who could be expected to swell the ranks of the muhajirs – antagonise the Sindis and serve to revive the earlier muhajir–Sindi hostilities. The shutdowns and the communal killings continued, discrediting elected governments and providing a constant pretext for curfews and military interventions. As a byword for a metropolis in the final stages of self-destruction, Karachi came to outrank Calcutta and trail only Beirut.

  Mazar Ali Khan, the respected editor of the leftist journal Viewpoint, blamed the generals and the politicians.

  Our rulers presented a parade of incompetence and dishonesty – a gallery of quick-change artists, pompous buffoons, naïve imbeciles, clever ignoramuses, and occasionally gangsters capable of every known crime. Whatever our people’s sins, these governments they did not deserve.7

  But in Orangi, Akhtar Hameed Khan detected an even more worrying trend. Pakistan had been predicated on the idea of a Muslim nation; yet Islam, instead of underwriting the nation’s cohesion, was now tearing it apart. The call to arms was coming from the mosques; weapons were being stockpiled there and death squads trained there. Though a ritual bond still existed among all Muslims, ethnic and doctrinal differences were being exaggerated and exploited by sectarian bigotry. Khan blamed ‘the religious schools which are being established with the help of [the Iranian Ayatollah] Khomeini’s funds or Saudi Arabian funds and the literature that’s being taught there, most of it produced in the eighth and ninth centuries which in Islamic history were periods of civil war and great violence’. The effect of this teaching on young and impressionable minds was what left Dr Khan in fear of the future. His foreboding was justified. Through the madrassahs of Orangi and elsewhere were passing recruits for the Afghan Taliban, and from the same madrassahs would come the Pakistani Taliban and their suicide-belted footsoldiers.

  This was all somewhat ironic, given that Pakistan post-1977 had at last begun to live up to its billing as an Islamic state. No government had been more committed to Islamising the nation than the eleven-year regime of Ziaul Haq. Moreover none of his elected successors would dare openly to reverse his ordinances. Personally devout, the General-cum-President had sincerely believed that Islamic re
ctitude held the key to Pakistan’s problems. He even had some experience of Islamic polities, having previously been seconded to the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan in the wake of the ‘Black September’ expulsion of its Palestinian refugees. As Zia saw it, privileging Islam would ‘set Pakistan “straight” ’. It would reorientate the nation’s political qibla (literally ‘direction of prayer’) towards Mecca, so firmly aligning it with Muslim West Asia. In the eyes of the faithful, promoting Islamic values would also afford his unelected regime some much-needed validation.

  Better still, events had obligingly played into Zia’s hands; for Washington’s determination to contain and contest the Soviet presence in Afghanistan had restored Pakistan to front-line status in what would prove to be the final phase of the Cold War. To ensure the flow of arms to the Afghan resistance and to provide its fighters with safe havens, training facilities and funds, the Reagan administration had had to look no further than Zia’s Pakistan. Human rights questions over the execution of Bhutto were brushed aside. So were anti-proliferation concerns over Pakistan’s nuclear programme. To sustain the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, Reagan was happy to direct aid and investment Pakistan’s way, re-equip the country’s armed forces and give Zia carte blanche in his efforts to contain dissent by promoting Islam.

  With everything to gain, Ziaul Haq had consulted Islamic ideologues associated with the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami and launched a programme of what many regarded as regressive Islamisation. Foreign-funded madrassahs were encouraged, as a means of educating a new generation of Pakistanis in Quranic teaching. These schools demonstrated in miniature ‘what an Islamic government is like’, according to one maulana, and supplemented the pitiful education budget of the state.8 More generally the sale of alcohol was banned, all public performances required a licence, strict blasphemy laws bore heavily on the heterodox, and donations to religious welfare organisations became obligatory. The financial system was purged in accordance with Islamic strictures against interest payments; ordinances other than those imposed by the military were subject to scrutiny by Islamic scholars; and, most notoriously, elements of sharia law were enshrined in the legal system. ‘Provided the evidence conformed to the rather elevated standards of proof required by the sharia, religious courts were obliged to convict in accord with archaic notions of criminality, then mete out the draconian and gender-repugnant sentences – including floggings, stonings and amputations – appropriate to the Middle Ages.’9