Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  I barely noticed a cryptic message on 18 December 2013 that announced the change of guard in the SPD, which marked the end of a long and distinguished career of its director general, Lt. Gen. Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, whose name had virtually become synonymous with the nuclear weapons and strategy management of the country. He was replaced by Lt. Gen. Zubair Mahmood Hayat, the corps commander of Bahawalpur, in one of the quieter moves by the Sharif government.

  It was Nirupama Subramanian, one of my predecessors in Islamabad and one of the correspondents invited for the SPD briefing in 2008, who egged me on to do this important story, and I wrote an article about the change of guard in this elite and secretive institution. That special briefing where the Indians were invited showed the willingness of the SPD to share and discuss concerns with the media, and going by all accounts, journalists were quite impressed. A lot of doubt had been expressed over guarding Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal after Kidwai’s exit and even in 2008, when a similar atmosphere of distrust prevailed, Lt. Gen. Kidwai had invited the foreign press for that extraordinary briefing. At that time, he had reassured everyone that the country’s strategic assets were in safe hands and that there was ‘no conceivable scenario’ in which they could fall into the hands of extremists.

  Lt. Gen. Kidwai had been heading the SPD since its inception in 1999. ‘Within a year of its formation, the SPD had evolved into a true nuclear conclave,’ as described by Feroz Hassan Khan in his book, Eating Grass.17 Reports from the US expressed concern over Kidwai’s exit after some twelve extensions and the future safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. One of his comments during that briefing had anticipated the fear that the nuclear weapons would fall into the wrong hands. He clearly dismissed this and said there was ‘no chance that one day there will be a DG SPD here with a long beard who will be controlling everything’.

  Before I left, there was a day-long seminar on nuclear issues where an excited audience bitterly criticized the US and India civilian deal. I met a suave official from the SPD who said I could fix an appointment and visit them, denying that it was out of bounds for an Indian journalist. I didn’t get the chance to test this unfortunately.

  In a 2014 report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), Pakistan was ranked twenty-two and India twenty-three out of twenty-five countries in terms of Nuclear Materials Security Index conditions; their scores were 46 and 41 respectively. While India criticized the report, the NTI Nuclear Materials Security Index was the second edition of a first-of-its-kind public assessment of nuclear materials’ security conditions around the world. Developed with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the NTI Index was created: (a) to assess the security of weapons-usable nuclear materials around the world; and (b) to encourage governments to take actions and provide assurances about the security of the world’s deadliest materials. The report said, ‘Among nuclear-armed states, Pakistan is most improved through a series of steps to update nuclear security regulations and to implement best practices, though it ranks 22nd overall.’ However, in terms of security control measures, India ranked the lowest below Pakistan among the twenty-five nuclear countries with weapons usable nuclear materials. Pakistan was lowest in the ranking for risk environment, with nineteen points out of 100.

  A bloodless coup

  It was thanks to A.G. Noorani that I came to know of S. Iftikhar Murshed and Criterion Quarterly, a classy magazine with contemporary views. This, along with other magazines like Herald and Newsline, add a touch of quality and innovation to the Pakistani media. I met Murshed and his son at their home in Islamabad and came back very impressed with their work. The buff-coloured magazine, with its analytical articles, has a steady following. I wrote jokingly that Murshed had, in fact, pulled off a coup with a difference in a country inured to military takeovers. Criterion Quarterly, launched in 2005, has gained in stature and is regarded seriously by policymakers. In keeping with the questioning tradition of the media, this is a magazine against religious extremism and terrorism. Murshed was the Pakistani ambassador to Moscow from 2000 to 2005 and the special envoy to Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000. In 2005, he resigned from government to publish Criterion, which is funded by committed overseas Pakistanis not looking to make profits. For him, religious extremism and religious terrorism is Pakistan’s number one problem, and he feels it is linked to the economy of the country, education, and its history, which singly and collectively have an impact on the ideology of terrorism.

  Murshed is as bold as his magazine, telling me he regretted publishing Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s piece but was proud to get Justice Khalil-ur-Rehman Ramde to take five hours off from court and attend a seminar on terrorism, telecast live; it saw some ‘wild views’ being expressed, throwing the government into panic and soon after, former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was reinstated. Justice Ramde at that time was presiding over the bench which was hearing arguments for the reinstatement of Chaudhry. He compared Criterion to Satyajit Ray, not going for the big box office hit but moulding public opinion by not falling for the sex and violence trap. It was an extraordinary interview I had with him, and Murshed took wicked pleasure in his views and criticism of the government. Criterion’s articles prompted the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf to aim for revising the Frontier Crimes Regulation in KPK, and that was the kind of policy change he hoped his magazine would crystallize.

  Police, protests and media

  The police can be just as arbitrary as they are anywhere else, and one day while covering the Musharraf trial, more drama took place outside the court when a young journalist was marched off for no apparent reason. Tayyab Baloch, a staff reporter with a private TV channel, was walking to the courtroom in the National Library when he was rudely interrupted by Jan Mohammed, then inspector general (security) of Islamabad, who asked him who he was before ordering the Rangers officers to check him. Baloch was listening to music on his cell phone which he usually did, and the police asked him why he was carrying his mobile. He tried to tell them that he was going to deposit his mobile at a collection point outside the court but no one listened to him. Mohammed told the police to take him away; he was let off only after some journalists came running and intervened.

  While there was a modest gathering to protest against the attack on Rumi, that was not the case for Hamid where I saw a large gathering of media celebrities and senior journalists, all aghast at what had happened. Rumi was shot at a week after Prime Minister Sharif had said he wanted to make Pakistan a journalist-friendly country. And while meeting the CPJ delegation, he had promised a media commission in order to protect the rights of journalists.

  The fact that freedom of expression was definitely under threat was brought into sharp focus by the murder of Sabeen Mahmud—a leading human rights activist and founder of The Second Floor (T2F)—a café-cum-gallery-cum-discussion place—in Karachi in 2015. Mahmud was shot dead after she hosted a programme with Mama Qadeer Baloch (who heads the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons) called ‘Unsilencing Balochistan’ after a public talk at the Lahore University of Management Sciences had been cancelled on government orders.18 Before that, there was a fracas in the University of Peshawar over a discussion on Malala Yousafzai’s book—the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government stopped a programme organized by the Baacha Khan Trust Educational Foundation, the Area Study Centre (part of the university) and Strengthening Participatory Organization (SPO), where the vice chancellor was the chief guest. I spoke to the director of the Baacha Khan Trust Educational Foundation, Dr Khadim Hussain, who said that a minister from the KPK government from Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Shah Farman, had called him up and asked him to cancel the function, saying it was a banned book. This was followed up by calls from another minister from the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s coalition partner, who said the programme should not be held.

  For a country with a free media, the ban on YouTube for the last two years has been a sticking point. Everyone has found proxy sites to view it on, while the government keeps
reneging on its promises of unblocking the site. There have been many protests in the National Assembly, and resolutions passed demanding the unblocking of the site.

  YouTube was blocked in September 2012 after a controversial film which provoked protests all over the world was not taken off. A little later, the website Queerpk.com was taken off and made inaccessible. ‘The site you are trying to access contains content that is prohibited for viewership from within Pakistan,’ a cryptic message said.

  The BBC Urdu channel that reported the blocking of the website said it had been set up in July and was the first such website for the gay community. While there is widespread outrage over the banning of YouTube, with the government being repeatedly asked to review the ban, it is unlikely there will be a similar storm of protest over this site. I spoke to a gender studies expert in a university who said the state was increasingly becoming repressive, fundamentalist and that it was theocratic to begin with. There were many forms of violence and this was also one of them—to curtail freedom of expression. The retrogressive laws against homosexuality have not been challenged in Pakistan and there is no public movement to change the law. ‘People live out their sexualities in a hidden way,’ she said. In June 2011, the US embassy had held a first-of-its-kind lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) pride celebration in Islamabad which immediately led to protests.19

  The government and the security empire have the upper hand in Pakistan in many ways. Yet, with all the powers at their command, they have not crushed the free spirit of the people who write and report at will. Many have paid with their blood for writing the truth and will continue to do so. Promises to safeguard the press and media freedom and ensure safety are not credible and remain only on paper. That is the tragic state of affairs with the media, and, journalists who take on the establishment are up against forces which are not necessarily accountable for their actions.

  6

  No Lines of Control

  I found some old connections with India in the field of rural development, and the early days of the Aam Aadmi Party’s election in Delhi had inspired many people in Pakistan as it had a David-versus-Goliath ring to it. While Sufi singer Abida Parveen has expressed only feelings of love for India, the textbooks of both countries have depressingly hatred-infusing content to say the least, and there seems to be a curious pride in not knowing the real facts about each other. Ironically, one of the finest breweries in the subcontinent thrives in this country with prohibition, and is run by a Parsi who is keen on launching it in India too. I met MPs from both countries who spoke of peace, and interviewed the late writer Intizar Hussain, survivors of Partition, and Madeeha Gauhar who draws on the forgotten pre-Partition history for her vibrant theatre group, Ajoka.

  The man from Pakistan

  The house was on Embassy Road and the entrance had a forlorn look. I waited for what seemed like a long time after ringing the bell, forgetting that there was no power. Just when I thought I was at the wrong house, an apologetic man opened the door and showed me into a study which opened out on to a lawn fringed with thick bushes. I was looking at the walls full of photographs and mementos when Shoaib Sultan Khan entered. After pleasantries, he pointed, with a mischievous smile, to one of the pictures behind his large desk and asked me if I recognized the person. I was surprised to see that the face turned towards him was Rahul Gandhi’s. Sultan Khan modestly said he was amazed that Rahul had even heard of him and that he was invited to relaunch a programme in India for women. The picture was taken at a workshop for the Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana on 16 July 2008 at Bais in Rae Bareli. Rahul had apparently visited Andhra Pradesh to learn about rural women’s initiatives there and heard about the ‘man from Pakistan’. Sultan Khan seemed very impressed by ‘this young man who has his heart in the right place to do something for the poor’.

  People in India were already familiar with this ‘Pakistani man’ who connected the two countries with his ideas of poverty alleviation. It was his diverse work experience in rural development first as a civil servant in East Pakistan, then in Daudzai and Gilgit Baltistan which he took with him to India as adviser to the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) South Asia Poverty Alleviation Programme (SAPAP). He was to test a pilot project in Kurnool in 1994 and that’s when Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s secretary, K.R. Venugopal, became an indispensable part of it. Venugopal made things easy: ‘I wouldn’t have come to India otherwise and it was he who found Raju for me.’ Raju was K. Raju, a former collector of Kurnool, who was the national coordinator of SAPAP from 1996 to 2000.

  What led to this was the Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation and its report which was adopted by the SAARC heads of nations in 1993. Both Sultan Khan and Venugopal were members. I spoke to Vijay Kumar who was head of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM), and met Sultan Khan in 2000. He said the seminal contribution of this report was that social mobilization would be the basis of poverty alleviation. After this, the UNDP decided to implement a pilot project in each SAARC country and that’s when it took off in three districts of the then Andhra Pradesh—Kurnool, Anantapur and Mahbubnagar in twenty mandals from 1994.

  Sultan Khan’s official designation was chairperson of the board of directors of the Rural Support Programmes Network and the National Rural Support Programme in Pakistan, both not-for-profit joint stock companies. He visited India after my op-ed article on him appeared in The Hindu in October 2013, and joked that he had become a celebrity, which he was anyway. In a way, the poverty programmes led to the NRLM, and he was keen on knowing their progress in states like Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Raju and Vijay Kumar looked forward to his visits and going to the field with him. In fact, after the success of the Andhra Pradesh model, the Indian government changed its anti-poverty strategy, and even though there was the inspiring Kudumbashree model in Kerala it was an outlier, Kumar said, since it involved linkages with Panchayati Raj institutions which were not strong everywhere in India. When I spoke to both Raju and Kumar for my articles, they called Sultan Khan a miracle worker, a man who had worked in a difficult place like Pakistan to provide last-mile support services for the poor.

  The Andhra Pradesh programme which was later scaled up, now has the involvement of more than 11 million rural women. Many remember the ‘Pakistani’ with a lot of affection. During Kumar’s visit to Pakistan in 2008, the North-West Frontier Province government was keen on support from India, and teams from Pakistan who visited the Andhra projects were struck by the fact that it was entirely dominated by women there. In Andhra Pradesh, it was the women who formed self-help groups (SHG), but it was when Raju visited Gilgit in 1996 that he realized the importance of village-level organizations.

  Sultan Khan worked closely with Venugopal to weld a relationship between India and Pakistan and create a model to help the rural poor. While the NRLM is a national programme in India, in Pakistan it has not been scaled up. He has a deep connection with so many Indian bureaucrats and greatly values the over twenty-year friendship with Venugopal, and is especially fond of Kumar and Raju, both of whom learnt a lot from what he was doing in Pakistan.

  He was among the first few people I met in Islamabad, in August 2013. When I met Shandana Humayun Khan, the CEO of the Rural Support Programme Network, she insisted I meet the person who really initiated the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP), Shoaib Sultan Khan. I was more keen on meeting the women who were running the self-help groups, but I agreed and I am so glad I did. I didn’t expect to hear such a fascinating life story from a bureaucrat.

  I thought I would ask him a few questions and leave, but I ended up interviewing him twice on two separate days for almost three hours. There were a few friends with him who had come from Orangi Town in Karachi, and that’s how I met one of his old friends, Zafar Altaf, former cricketer and manager of the Pakistan cricket team who had with him some homeopathic medicine for Sultan Khan’s cough (pollen allergies were common at that time of the year). I would later me
et Altaf for lunch at his house and he gifted me copies of his book on Benazir Bhutto.

  In the frenzied coverage about cross-border firing, terror attacks and mutual animosity, a happy cooperation based on poverty alleviation won’t make headlines. It’s a two-decade- long relationship, the roots of which began when Sultan Khan drove a jeep to his new job in Gilgit to work on the AKRSP in 1982. He started out in East Pakistan as a young civil service officer in 1958. His mentor was Akhtar Hameed Khan who was to play a key role in making young Shoaib a legend in the field of rural development. He met Hameed Khan, then head of the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development, when he was assistant commissioner in Comilla district in what was then East Pakistan. Hameed Khan perfected what would eventually be known as the Comilla Approach.1

  He had identified the police thana as a centre of development—the British had demarcated its location by calculating how far the station house officer could go to the farthest point on horseback and return the same day. That symbol of law and order became the symbol of development. Soon a thana training and development centre was set up in all 410 thanas of East Pakistan. Each had twenty-five government departments, and it was a majestic complex, recalled Sultan Khan. People could visit the thana for their needs and return home the same day and the government was able to raise an army of barefoot workers. Later, as director of the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development at Peshawar, he adopted the East Pakistan experience in the Daudzai programme which became a milestone. The Daudzai thana near Peshawar had some 20,000 households and in three years the model of development was so successful that the government wanted to take it to all 110 thanas in the Frontier. However, there were forces at work against the programme and Sultan Khan faced cooked-up charges which were later withdrawn. Then his political patron, former governor of the NWFP and minister, Hyat Sherpao, who was keen on the programme, was killed in a blast in 1975. Disillusioned with the civil service, he quit to work on UN assignments and finally landed up in India in 1994.