‘Citizens Against Weapons’ is holding a `Walk a Cause’ on Nov 27 in Karachi to demand an end to the 12 million illegal weapons floating in Pakistan
The march will begin at 10:45 am on Sunday the 27th November 2016 at Sea View. (Walk from in front of McDonald’s Restaurant to Chunky Monkey and back), to demand that no citizen, regardless of his/her status be allowed to possess, carry or display any weapon of any kind – licensed or otherwise.
All private militias regardless of their patrons be completely disbanded in compliance with Article 256 of the Constitution.
No weapon licenses be permitted and those issued earlier be canceled.
Import, sale, transportation, delivery and display of all kinds of weapons be banned.
Please spread the word among your family, colleagues, students and those on your fan list.
Citizens Against Weapons demands are endorsed by hundreds of peace-loving citizens and the following organisations:
CAW Citizens Against Weapons
CPLC Citizens-Police Liaison Committee
HRCP Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
PILER Labour & Education Research
Shehri Citizens for a better Environment
Shirkat Gah Womens’ Resource Centre
Tehrik-e-Niswan Cultural Action Group
PMA Pakistan Medical Association
CTAC Citizens Trust Against Crime
CLF Children’s Literature Festival
AF Aurat Foundation
Robert thought hard about the exact number of Syrian refugees he wanted to place in Native American reservations.
He originally had decided on 50,000 but thought that sounded too believable. It needed to be more ridiculous. So he wrote his headline:
US to House 250,000 Syrian Refugees at Navajo, Standing Rock Indian Reservations
Of course, that isn’t true in the slightest. But on Facebook, a lie can go around the world before the truth has even been posted.
Robert – who asked that his last name not be used – considers himself a satirist. A glance through his site, Real News Right Now, indeed shows a light, if perhaps too subtle, touch of humor.
Of course, that means not everyone got the joke. Fox News’s Sean Hannity was soon parroting the 250,000 refugees claim. Soon, so was Donald Trump.
Robert was shocked. “That was very unsettling,” he said. “I was, like, this is incredible.”
Social media has made it easy to live in filter bubbles, sheltered from opposing viewpoints. So what happens when liberals and conservatives trade realities?
Robert is 34 and works in hospitality in Washington. “I make a little bit of money each month through ad revenue, but it all goes toward the site’s upkeep and promoting my articles through various social media platforms,” he said. “This is more of a labor of love for me than a profitable enterprise.”
He said he counts his site as satire, like the better-known the Onion.
But the boundary between satire and real news is a vast grey area. Distributed – largely on Facebook – alongside deliberately false stories and partisan coverage, whether pumped out to suck up advertising revenue or for ideological reasons, it might not be immediately obvious to some that Real News Right Now is satire.
The signs are subtle: the fictional journalist behind the site, R Hobbus, is listed as having won the 2011 Stephen Glass Distinction in Journalistic Integrity award – mocking a journalist who was revealed to have falsified sources and information for stories – for one thing. But there is no full disclaimer.
Nor would it necessarily stop people taking his stories seriously if there was; even a site as well-known as the Onion is often mistaken for real news.
Facebook has a serious fake news problem, a major contributor to what has been called the “post-truth” era.
An indispensable summary of the media industry headlines in your inbox before 9am. We dig out the most important stories from every and any newspaper, broadcaster and website.
There is no satirical value, for example, in the story “Taylor Swift SHOCKS Music Industry: ‘I voted for Trump’”.
But the fact that it was a complete fabrication didn’t stop the story, which was posted on Sunday on a fake news site called LifeEventWeb, from being widely shared across Facebook and accruing more than quarter of a million views in three days.
Another widely shared pre-election story by the Denver Guardian claimed, falsely, that an FBI agent investigating Clinton had been killed in a house fire in Colorado. The Denver Post – Denver’s actual major newspaper – had to write an article to clarify that there is no such thing as the Denver Guardian, pointing out that the story was fake and the site’s supposed Denver address actually led to a tree in a Denver carpark.
In a way, the problem is not a new one. Publications such as the National Enquirer in the US have long bent the truth, often shamelessly. But now, a fake story can much more easily masquerade as real because in Facebook’s walled garden all the posts look largely the same.
Even the most savvy news consumers can be tricked this way. Who can expect everyone to know there isn’t really a Denver Guardian – or that Real News Right Now is satire – when it pops up in your feed?
The ease of deception has given birth to a new cottage industry of lies. In November, BuzzFeed discovered that many of the pro-Trump fake news sites – more than 100 of them – were being operated as for-profit click farms by Macedonian teenagers.
Many such sites have their registration protected by a system called WhoIsGuard, which protects the owner of the website from having their details looked up on the WhoIs database of internet domains and their owners. LifeEventWeb, the site that posted the fake Swift story, is one of those.
Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, said that she was concerned about some of the sources her students were using, so she started listing a number of sites. The guide has since gone viral.
Not all of them are fake – many are satirical sites such as the Onion, the New Yorker’s Borowitz Report or Real News Right Now, while others are news organizations whose stories are often slanted, including Breitbart on the right or Occupy Democrats on the left.
“One thing readers can do is to read what they’re sharing, and after that if you read something and have a strong reaction to it, read more about it,” Zimdars said, “rather than just accept what you originally read as complete information.”
For his part, Robert said that it was “worrisome” to him when people take the satire written on Real News Right Now as fact. “I don’t take any joy out of that. I wish people would factcheck me.” He said that he tries to embed links into his stories to take people to true information about the stories he is satirizing.
“The ones that seem to take off, that people seem to believe,” he said, “are the ones I find most unbelievable.”
He said that there isn’t any topic he would avoid. “If something is an important news story that affects the world, or social issues, I’m going to address it.”
That extends even to fake news. On Thursday, Real News Right Now posted a new story: “Twelve in Custody After FBI Takes Down ‘Major’ Counterfeit News Operation in NYC.”
A chronically ailing education sector in Sindh has prompted a belated emergency by the incumbent chief minister. Before enduring this inexorable rot during the recent decades, Sindh was the torch-bearer of education in the country. Decay of education indicators in Sindh coincided with an overall failure of education sector in the country.
Although no province has shown enviable performance in the education sector, the pace and magnitude of decline is mind-boggling in Sindh.
It is widely believed that education in Sindh was subjected to a systematic degeneration since the Zia-regime. Following the footprints of the martial law regime, successive governments converted education department into a graveyard of talent by wholesale recruitment of incompetent teachers and officers.
Being the largest source of public sector employment, the department became a perennial stream to quench the thirst of nepotism and corruption of every government. Competent and dedicated teaching and non-teaching staff was gradually replaced by flocks of meritless personnel, resulting in a nosedive of education standards and key performance indicators. A pernicious corrosion of education over the years eventually became too conspicuous to ignore.
More recently, a series of reports issued by independent think-tanks and research bodies have referred to a distressing state of education in the province.
A recent study by Bengali and Durrani (2014) states that there were over 13 million eligible children (age group 5-15) in Sindh out of which around 4 million (30 per cent) are in the public education system, about 2.5 million (19 per cent) are in private schools and the rest (51 per cent) are out of school. The public sector enrollment dropped from 4.4 million in 2010-11 to 4.2 million in 2012-13. According to UNESCO, 2.8 million children (5-9 years) in Sindh are out of school. Nearly 38 per cent of those who get enrolled in schools do not continue education beyond grade 6 and those who are lucky enough to stay in schools do not perform well enough to show optimal learning outcome. This leads to a low literacy rate and eventually an inferior quality human resource in the province.
A district education ranking conducted by Alif Ailaan in 2014 depicts a dismal situation of education in Sindh. The report notes that of the total 12 million children between the age of 5 and 16 years, more than half i.e. 6.1 million are out of school in Sindh. These include 3.5 million (i.e. 56 per cent) girls. The report reveals that Sindh’s children score poorly in reading and mathematics compared to rest of the country. 59 per cent students in grade-5 couldn’t fluently read Sindhi or Urdu, 75 per cent couldn’t read a sentence in English fluently and 71 per cent couldn’t do simple two digits division.
According to overall district ranking, no district from Sindh found place in top 50 districts of the country, whereas Balochistan had three districts in the list. In the ranking of primary schools, Karachi was the only district of Sindh that appears among the top 50 districts, whereas Balochistan had three districts in the list. Likewise in the middle schools ranking, Hyderabad was the only district of Sindh among the top 50, compared to four districts of Balochistan.
Similarly, Annual Status of Education Report (ASER)-2013 made startling revelations on plummeting quality of education in Sindh. On certain accounts, even FATA outshined rural Sindh. According to the report 67 per cent of grade-3 children could not read sentences in Urdu/Sindhi compared to 64 per cent in FATA who could not read sentences in Urdu/Pashto. Similarly, 43 per cent of grade-1 children could not read letters in Urdu/Sindhi as compared to much lesser 23 per cent in FATA. In mathematics, only 29 per cent children enrolled in grade 5 in rural Sindh could perform two digit division compared to 37 per cent in FATA.
The situation exacerbated in 2016 when under the ranking on primary education, the first district of Sindh Karachi appeared on the 43rd rung outperformed even by Layyah district of south Punjab which has otherwise very low human development indicators.
All these figures are only a tip of the iceberg. Having five to seven thousand ghost schools and countless absentee teachers is a unique ignominy earned by the province. A former provincial minister of education belonging to the ruling party has been accused of a record breaking 23,000 irregular appointments in the department dwarfing all past records of corruption. The party leadership never expressed any remorse on this faux pas of its senior minister. This pitiable state of education in Sindh has surfaced in tandem with a pronounced comprehensive governance failure in the province. Pervasive corruption and nepotism in the province became a breeding ground for all ills in the education department.
Against this backdrop, declaring an education-emergency is a cogent initiative if it is not a perfunctory announcement for media consumption only. The announcement ensued by administrative restructuring of the department. Education emergency, however, entails a broader spectrum of actions leading towards a comprehensive makeover of the system. Saving it from becoming an optical illusion, the emergency should unfurl a clear strategic direction and a set of integrated targets to bring a radical shift in the overall governance of the department. A strong and sincere but disjointed and impulsive administrative action will bring little change.
A fundamental shift is required in the practices in vogue. While an administrative overhaul, new infrastructure, database, free books and scholarships are of immense significance, the teacher is the lynchpin of the education system. A merit-based and transparent recruitment of teachers would help reversing the rot. Distributing teachers’ jobs as bribery to political loyalists had been the root cause of the damage.
In the old good days, a competent and responsible teacher was the cornerstone of a performing education system. Schools deprived of basic infrastructure and modern-day facilities produced legions of best brains mainly because of zealous teachers. Teachers’ recruitment has remained a lucrative trade for political leadership, bureaucrats and their cronies in Sindh. No emergency will bring fruition until teachers’ recruitment process is liberated from clutches of the influential people within and outside the government.
Next, even if all teachers are miraculously recruited on merit, the quality of more than 145,000 existing school teachers will remain a riddle to resolve. It will be a Herculean task to enhance capacity of all these teachers. The department should contemplate a 5-7 years plan to work synchronously on capacity enhancement of the existing teaching staff. It is easy said than done but emergency is all about conquering unchartered territories.
Teachers’ training of this scale will require a meticulous planning, injection of resources and well-defined outcomes. The third cardinal element is presence of the teachers in classrooms. Some recently taken measures have yielded some results and the teachers’ absenteeism is being checked. Consistent technological surveillance and community mobilisatoin can bring teachers to their schools.
The education department itself requires a purge of unscrupulous elements. Unfettered corruption has become a norm in the department that guzzles more than 20 per cent of the annual budget of the province. The department’s bureaucracy in cahoots with the treasury has invented marvels of innovation to siphon off large sums of money. They have perfected the art of tempering with documents to devour money without leaving a paper trail. Nevertheless, employing technology and strict monitoring can reduce rampant corruption in the department.
More than six millions out-of-school children (compared to currently enrolled four million) and minimising their dropout is a strenuous challenge. Deficit of public sector facilities is being exploited by an under-regulated money-minting private school system. A major reason of this colossal number of out-of-school children is lack of access to affordable education. The problem is even graver for girls whose access is further circumscribed by social barriers. Brining all these children to schools requires a rational planning and not just emotional slogans and impromptu announcements.
Enormity of the challenge demands consistent political commitment and a serious planning. No government alone can bridge this yawning deficit of services. The government of Sindh should engage all concerned stakeholders to develop a roadmap and a congruent institutional mechanism to convert the lofty slogan of emergency into credible action.
Cyril Almeida (Credit: northbridge.com)AT the request of the overseers of these pages, I have been asked to write about myself today — my past week or so, really.
A request categorically not because there is any restriction on writing about the week’s events, but because there may be some interest in a personal perspective.
I found myself unable to decline.
When the story landed that Thursday morning, there was already never any question about any part of it being retracted by the paper or I.
Because nothing of the reaction had been unanticipated, nothing had been left to chance before the story was put out in print.
The story had arrived fairly quickly after the fateful meeting, but it was only published on Thursday. The gap was all about verifying, double- and triple-sourcing and seeking official comment.
Nothing about the process was left to chance.
For me, and for the paper, there were only two questions that mattered. Did the meeting take place? Could I verify through multiple channels what was said?
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Yes, the heart races a bit faster when you do something out of the ordinary. Yes, there is always some concern for the self.
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The second part is trickier than it would appear, but it is also not as hard as it is made out to be. Stick around long enough and you get a sense of how this place works. And the place gets a sense of you.
You know the camps, you know the divisions and splits, and you know at any given time who may be interested in selling what. They exist in civ as much as they do in mil.
With a meeting like this and a story like that, you sniff around until you get a bunch of overlapping facts from camps that have no obvious reason to overlap.
Sometimes that means leaving on the cutting floor a juicy quote or significant reference — but this paper stands guard over the editing process closely.
So what landed that Thursday was something that the paper and I were already very comfortable with.
Which meant little fear of the paper buckling or me retracting.
There was one underestimation on my part. In writing the story, I was aware that a grenade was being dropped in the news cycle. It has since turned out to be a surgical strike followed by a nuclear attack.
So do I regret doing it?
Not one bit. I have worked for two editors at this paper and from each I have learned a foundational thing about the business of news and analysis in this country of ours.
Abbas Nasir, perhaps the more reckless of the two for hiring me in the first place, gave me the courage: whatever you do, remember they’ll be gone one day, you’ll still be around.
Several prime ministers, chief justices, presidents and army chiefs later, Abbas has been proved right.
Yes, the heart races a bit faster when you do something out of the ordinary. Yes, there is always some concern for the self — you’d be stupid not to be concerned in a place like this.
But if you can just somehow remember that they will be gone and you’ll still be around, courage may see you through.
The current editor has drummed in a reporter’s message, one that he himself is an exemplar of: you’re only as good as your sources.
In a place like this, that is a two-way street: in return for not exposing your sources, you get a fair reading of the land.
Not impartial — fair. You always expect spin and you can’t always disaggregate it from the facts, but if you can build enough such relationships, a verifiable and triangulated truth can emerge when necessary.
That fateful Thursday was one of those necessary days.
But it’s usually the best-laid plans that are the most monumentally disrupted. By Monday, I believed the story was about to fade and the news cycle ready to move on.
Then came the ECL decision. At that point alarm set it — for personal safety and freedom. Because before the ECL decision it had not even occurred to me that I could be put on the ECL.
Once something new, unprecedented and unexpected happens, the old rules can go out the window — and that’s where real danger lies. Because then you just don’t know if there is a new game and new rules.
It was, I think, a combination of two things that rescued me and rescued me quickly. For all the global coverage, the system here ultimately responds to local concerns. First, and immediately, this paper swung into violent and fierce action.
Second, the wider media, battered and fractured by violent convulsions of its own in recent years, mostly united — perhaps as much out of self-preservation than indignation.
To both, my sincere gratitude.
So now what?
With the end of the ECL, comes relief. But with a pledged inquiry not yet under way, the matter is far from settled. Personally, I’d like it to be over with quickly — or as quickly as official process allows.
There is acute discomfort at having become the story.
Because it makes you radioactive and because the longer this stays a story — I stay a story — the more problematic it will become to separate spin from fact in future.
Getting tagged a certain way — leaning this way or that, pro-this and anti-that — means you attract a certain kind of spin and faux-information, and are at the risk of being frozen out from access to unadulterated facts, such as they can be.
But perhaps mostly a quick resolution so that the overseers of these pages do not ask me to write about myself again.
In most Western (and, in fact, Muslim) countries, it is unlawful to slaughter animals in homes, on roads, in public spaces or residential areas. This can be done only in designated areas approved as slaughterhouses and located well away from human dwellings. These purpose-built premises include facilities for the housing and movement of the animals; veterinary care; professional slaughtering equipment and methods; and the segregation and disposal of waste and body parts such as blood, hides, hooves, heads, horns, offal and other inedible parts. Many of these are sold and recycled.
Slaughter in places other than approved and licensed locations carries many hygiene and public health risks. Recently gaining prominence is Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF), having hit the headlines due to the growing incidence of this highly fatal disease. It is caused by a virus that is carried inside the Hyalomma tick, which lives on the skin of farm animals. Nonetheless, awareness of this risk has only reached a fraction of the people who are likely to acquire the infection. Thus, the vast number of adults and children who are in contact with cattle know or understand little — or wish not to know, trusting their lives to fate.
CCHF is just one of the many zoonotic diseases (infectious diseases transmitted from animal to man) commonly known to most lay persons or practising doctors. There are at least several dozen viral, bacterial, fungal and protozoal infections that are responsible for serious infections in humans. These infections are difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat. Unrecognised and misdiagnosed illnesses lead to mistreatment, complications, and prolonged chronic illness.
This year’s Eidul Azha has come and gone. The rivers of blood have been washed away or, rather, may have been absorbed by the earth. Stray cats and dogs, crows and kites will scavenge the leftover flesh, and one may get accustomed to the city’s perpetual stink. Days, weeks, even months later, diseases will begin to surface. Unreported by the press, many adults and children will enter hospitals’ and clinics’ outpatient facilities with fever and body pain, perhaps bleeding from internal organs. Others may suffer from fever and liver disease due to parasitic hydatid disease; prolonged, indolent fever from brucella; pneumonia from Coxiella; bovine tuberculosis; chronic intestinal infections from parasitic worms; and skin infections from anthrax.
In Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia — where animals are sacrificed on a massive scale, particularly after Haj — roadside slaughter is unheard of. Gulf countries do not have CCHF or zoonotic infections because they handle animal slaughter in a coordinated and hygienic manner. Pakistan, too, could learn from their examples.
Keeping, breeding, even entry, let alone slaughter, of farm animals in or around residential areas, roadsides or public spaces ought to be declared unlawful. This would, however, call for establishing organised, scientific, lice¬nsed and hygienic abattoirs in all cities and urban centres. If our government is prudent regarding the health and hygiene of its citizens it could build abattoirs close to all urban residential areas in a manner that caters to both public health and convenience.
Naseem Salahuddin is a specialist in infectious diseases. Naeem Sadiq is a freelance writer on social issues.
WE grew up with our grandmother often making references to the ‘Sulaimani topi’ , the proverbial cap that made the wearer magically disappear from view. Much, much later, the concept came into play in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books in which Harry used the ‘cloak of invisibility’.
In both instances, the disappearing act was pure fiction. Tragically, in Pakistan today 24/7 news channels and all media houses (the honourable exception being just that) seem to be making increasing use of the Sulaimani topi.
This week the Akhtar Mengal-led Balochistan National Party held a public meeting in Quetta which, going by the photos/clips on social media, was one of the biggest public gatherings in the provincial capital in a long time.
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What the Baloch see as a burning issue ie disappearances, has more or less been ‘disappeared’ from the media thanks to the cloak of invisibility.
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As I scanned the various news channels and newspapers, I struggled to find even a small mention of it. Sardar Akhtar Mengal and his party contested the 2013 general election and do not fall in the ‘separatist-terrorist’ category by any stretch of the imagination.
But in an environment where a suicide bombing that wiped out an entire generation of lawyers — many of whom were staunch believers in human rights and were forever striving to further that cause — was blamed on the enemies of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor rather than the religious extremists who claimed responsibility for it, the patriotic media prefers to err on the side of caution.
After all, Sardar Akhtar Mengal and his party talk of the rights of the Baloch people. Such politicians and activists, in the eyes of the patriotic media, are walking a very, very thin line that divides the ‘acceptable’ from the treasonous. So why should they take chances? Better to use a collective Sulaimani topi — and bingo! The thousands-strong gathering disappears from view.
In any case, what the Baloch see as a burning issue ie disappearances, has more or less been ‘disappeared’ from the media thanks to the cloak of invisibility. In late July, a Karachi social worker Comrade Wahid Baloch was returning home on a coach after a visit to interior Sindh when, on the outskirts of the city, plainclothesmen took him away after stopping the vehicle.
Four weeks later, the media continues to hold a Sulaimani topi over his head, with hints coming from unnamed official sources that some ‘separatists’ may have met Wahid Baloch in Digri where he had gone to condole the passing of a friend. Someone has also advised those making inquiries about the missing man to wait as he might return one of these days after he has been debriefed.
Then, there is the case of MQM worker Aftab Ahmed who was tortured to death (as the autopsy established) in custody in early May this year. After the army chief ordered an inquiry into the incident, the Rangers said the personnel involved had been suspended and would be proceeded against. Four months on, we await the details of action against them.
Where the authorities, followed by the media, have the capacity to ‘disappear’ people and issues, the Sindh Rangers have also been able to do the reverse. As news reports of a Senate sub-committee proceedings have told us, there now exists a ‘Human Rights Commission South Asia’ which, a Rangers submission to the Senate said, has given it a clean bill of health in terms of its record in Karachi.
Apart from an obscure website, nobody can find this organisation or any of its functionaries especially after one of the two men cited as its representatives in Pakistan has disavowed any association with it. In fact, he says he has not even heard of the body. The other rep is not reachable using his contact information provided on the site.
This report was wholly unnecessary simply because ask anyone in Karachi and they will tell you that the Rangers and police have done a great job in clipping the wings of the various parties’, most notably the MQM’s, militant cadres.
This is remarkable indeed in a city which resembled a lawless jungle with various armed groups holding sway over its different parts. These ruthless armed groups also appeared to be at liberty to indulge in land-grabbing and extortion, and carry out targeted killings, till the start of the Rangers-led operation a mere three years back. Now most of their networks have been smashed and trades shut down.
It is only fair to the bulk of the Rangers in Karachi and their khaki counterparts in the terrorist-infested areas in the north-western reaches of the country, who have offered blood sacrifices and fought back the existential threat to Pakistan that where some of their colleagues stray from the lawful path these are also mentioned for the purpose of course correction.
When some of us cry ourselves hoarse over the free rein that certain religious militant groups enjoy, leading to confusion about the direction of the operation against terrorism, I am not using the words of Sushma Swaraj and John Kerry as some in the media have taken to alleging. How could I?
I remember well Ms Swaraj was the person who briefed the press on behalf of the Indian hardliners and thwarted the only sane course for her country to extricate itself from the Kashmir quagmire when Pervez Musharraf and Atal Behari Vajpayee were nearing agreement at Agra in 2001.
Given the popular, indigenous (yes, indigenous) uprising in India-held Kashmir and the repressive measures being used to crush the renewed azadi movement, as we speak, frankly makes me livid even after all these years at the pain Ms Swaraj and her political stablemates have caused.
Such views, and that too across the whole range of issues, don’t make someone a super-patriot or whatever is the exact opposite. Saying what is right and what is wrong is something some of us, no matter how few, are not prepared to give up. The ultrapatriotic critics are welcome to have a go. That is their right.
Islamabad, July 10: Abdul Sattar Edhi, the founder of one of Pakistan’s largest public welfare charities, has become the first Pakistani in more than a quarter of a century to be honoured with a state funeral.
Edhi, believed to be in his early nineties, died of kidney failure in a Karachi hospital on Friday night having become increasingly frail in recent years.
Abdul Sattar Edhi runs a sprawling health charity from a Karachi slum, but that doesn’t stop the religious right condemning him for not saying his prayers
The pomp and military ceremony of his funeral at Karachi’s national stadium on Saturday was in stark contrast to the famously humble style of the man who only owned two sets of clothes and lived in a windowless room next to his small office in a Karachi slum.
From there, Edhi and his family ran a massive nationwide enterprise that relies almost entirely on public donations to sustain hundreds of medical centres, maternity wards, orphanages and women’s shelters.
More than 1,200 minivan ambulances ply the country’s roads, always seeming to reach the scene of the country’s frequent terrorist attacks within moments, while thousands of people owe their lives to the Edhi Foundation taking in abandoned babies who otherwise would have been left to die.
Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, said the country had “lost a great servant of humanity”.
“He was the real manifestation of love for those who were socially vulnerable, impoverished, helpless and poor,” he said. “This loss is irreparable for the people of Pakistan.”
Sharif announced a national day of mourning and a state funeral, the first time anyone has been so honoured since General Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who died in a plane crash in 1988.
“If anyone deserves to be wrapped in the flag of the nation he served, it is him,” Sharif said.
Although the prime minister remained in London following heart surgery last month, the funeral was attended by most of Pakistan’s ruling elite.
Edhi’s body was wrapped in Pakistan’s green and white flag and honoured with a gun salute by the army. Afterwards he was due to be buried at the Edhi Village, a shelter on the outskirts of the city for the mentally ill, older peaople and abandoned women.
In a final act of modesty, his family said he had insisted on being buried in the clothes he died in. He offered his organs for donation, although only his cornea was healthy enough for transplantation.
As a young man, Edhi first moved to Karachi from Gujarat in India just six days after Pakistan was formed as an independent, Muslim-majority state.
It was in the port city that his charity empire first emerged in the 1950s when, appalled by the suffering he saw around him, he established small drug dispensaries.
In 1957, his efforts shifted up a gear when he established a makeshift hospital to take care of the victims of flu epidemic that had ripped through the city.
He bought his first ambulance in 1965 in the wake of a war with India in which Karachi was bombed. He took it upon himself to collect up body parts of dead civilians and organise dozens of funerals.
“My heart became so hard after that,” he told the Daily Times in 2009. “I made humanity my religion and devoted my life to it.”
Despite its scale and complexity, Edhi and his wife, Biquis, always remained at the helm of the lightly managed organisation, often answering emergency calls himself or heading out in one of his ambulances to the scene of disasters.
that plague Karachi would spare his vehicles emblazoned with the red Edhi lettering.
In a country increasingly afflicted by sectarianism and religious intolerance, Edhi won praise for caring for anyone who needed help, with many Pakistanis arguing he should have been recognised with a Nobel prize.
His open-mindedness earned him the distrust of some hardliners and militant groups that have increasingly sought to set up their own welfare organisations modelled on the Edhi Foundation.
In a 2015 interview with the Guardian, Edhi dismissed his critics on the religious right who have smeared him as an infidel who will not be granted access to heaven. “I will not go to paradise where these type of people go,” he said. “I will go to heaven where the poor and miserable people live.”
Bahria town (Credit: twitter.com)KARACHI, May 16: Towns such as Bahria coming up in the rural areas around the city will change the demographics of Karachi. They are a big game being played in the name of development; they bulldoze the rights of the indigenous people and are like atom bombs to wipe off the poor population of this country.
These were some of the views expressed by writers, historians, researchers and experts at a seminar, ‘Bahria Town: Development or Destruction’, organised by Save Sindh Committee at PMA House here on Monday.
“Malik Riaz did not own even an inch of land when announcing the Bahria Town project and yet he collected billions through bookings. The land came later thanks to some big bribes for politicians,” said historian and chronicler Gul Hasan Kalmati.
“Today, work is under way on 23,300 acres though the target is grabbing 43,000 acres of land for this project because already we can see activities beyond the boundaries where there are some eight to nine Goths, or villages. Actually, their activities affect 45 such villages as their animals can no longer graze inside the boundary, etc,” he explained the repercussions that, according to the expert, were only just the ‘tip of the iceberg’.
“It is obvious why the PPP and PML-N have turned a blind eye towards Bahria Town but why are the sardars quiet?” said Kalmati. “That is because they have also been bought. Ten per cent from Bahria Town goes directly into their pockets,” he answered his own question. “The sardars are so powerful that had they wanted, there would have been no Bahria Town.”
“There are some 30 projects around the Superhighway that have been on hold for years due to the issue of utilities such as water and power reaching there. But for Bahria Town everything has been arranged, like getting power by laying a cable from Gadap and water lines and boring water that was meant for agriculture, and for which even a company as big as Nestle was not allowed to operate from there, is now diverted towards the town,” Kalmati said.
Architect, development expert and town planner Arif Hasan said that the rural areas around Karachi were reserved for agriculture in the first plan of Karachi in 1953, something that was repeated in the 1958 plan and the 1989 plan for 2000. “Some work on this started, too, but then it stopped due to pressure from land-grabbers,” he said.
About all this land being developed for townships for the elite, Arif Hasan shared that 350,000 plots lay vacant in Karachi. “This is how the rich invest, by holding land. Phase eight in the DHA was started some 28 years ago and most of it still remains bare. Now we are told that two million people will live in DHA City and 3.5 million will live in Bahria Town. Will they all come and live there like they do in Phase eight of the DHA? Live there or not, they will own land there, of course,” the development expert explained.
“Malik Riaz was able to acquire the most land here. He also has projects in Lahore and Islamabad but some transparency still exists there to stop him from having his way,” he said.
Arif Hasan had a few suggestions that can stop such high profile land-grabbers from having their way such as not allowing anyone to own more than 500 yards, not giving loan for constructing a house to anyone twice and heavy fee or tax on non-utilisation of land. “But will our assemblies pass such laws?” he said.
Finally, Baloch leader and president of the Awami Workers Party Yousuf Masti Khan said that Sindh’s weakness lay in its feudals willing to do anything to remain powerful. “But we the middle class and the poor must struggle against such elements. Your land is your ‘mother’. Do not let go of it so easily. Guard it with your life,” he said.
“Make no mistake about it. This is investment, not development. Had it been development, we would have seen the building of schools and hospitals for the indigenous people of these areas. Instead they are being driven away. Bahria Town and others like it are atom bombs for wiping out the poor,” he said.
Writer and columnist Abdul Khaliq Junejo and researcher and journalist Fahim Zaman also spoke.
A prominent Pakistani journalist and human rights activist, Khurram Zaki, has been shot dead in Karachi.
Mr Zaki was dining in a restaurant in the city’s north when suspects opened fire from motorbikes, reports say.
He was an editor of the website Let us Build Pakistan, which condemns sectarianism and is seen as promoting democratic and progressive values.
The spokesman for a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban has said they were behind the shooting.
He said they killed him because of his recent campaign against a cleric of the Red Mosque in Islamabad.
Mr Zaki and other campaigners had filed a court case charging Abdul Aziz with incitement to hatred and violence against the Shia minority.
The case was brought in response to the cleric’s refusal to condemn attacks such as that on a school in Peshawar in 2014 in which 152 people, most of them schoolchildren, were killed.
Islamabad’s Red Mosque
Founded by Abdul Aziz’s father in 1965
Centre for hardline Islam in Pakistan since the 1990s
Attracts students from North-West Frontier Province and tribal areas where militant groups are strong
More than 100 killed as mosque raided by police in 2007 to dislodge heavily-armed militants sheltering there
Library named in honour of Osama Bin Laden
Video by female madrassah students in praise of so-called Islamic State
The school that says Bin Laden was a hero
Two other people were badly wounded in the Karachi attack, on Saturday night – a friend who Mr Zaki was dining with and a bystander.
Staff at the website paid tribute to their murdered colleague, and vowed to continue to stand up to militant groups.
Their statement said his contribution as a citizen journalist in supporting the rights of minority groups was “much bigger than [that of] all journalists combined in Pakistan”.
“His death is the grim reminder that whoever raises voice against Taliban [and other militant groups] in Pakistan will not be spared. And when they have to murder, they never fail.”
Mohammed Hanif (Credit: aitkenalexander.co.uk)One recent afternoon, the writer Mohammed Hanif climbed out of his car at the Benazir Bhutto Martyr Park, in Karachi. Hanif, who is fifty, has a square jaw that juts from a square head, and he walks with the easy stride of a fighter pilot, which he once was. He was wearing a pair of knockoff Ray-Bans, which cost about fifty cents at a local stand, and smoking a Dunhill cigarette.
The park—built to honor the former Prime Minister, who was killed by a suicide bomber in 2007—is a kind of urban oasis. Karachi is a sprawling, chaotic city of some twenty-two million people, riven by ethnic strife and gang wars; its main crime-fighting force, the Pakistan Rangers, patrols the streets in pickups mounted with heavy machine guns. Hanif has made his home there since 2008, when he returned from London, where he worked for twelve years as a reporter for the BBC. As a novelist and a journalist, he has become perhaps the foremost observer of Pakistan’s contradictions and absurdities.
At the entrance to the park, a statue of Bhutto faces the street, waving toward the boisterous Karachi traffic. Hanif is writing these days about Bhutto, who is a divisive figure in Pakistan’s modern history and therefore exactly the sort of character that he is drawn to. “For a lot of people, Bhutto symbolized some kind of future that was going to be semi-normal, semi-peaceful, where people could get on with their lives without things always going bang, bang, bang,” Hanif said. But she stole one and a half billion dollars in public money; her husband, Asif Zardari, became known as “Mr. Ten Per Cent” for allegedly keeping a share of every government contract. Her military helped foster the creation of the Taliban, empowering terrorist groups that still plague Pakistan. When the park was finished, in 2010, the Bhutto statue was surrounded by a steel fence, to keep it from being defaced.
Inside the gates, the traffic noise receded; kids played cricket on a broad green lawn. Hanif lit another cigarette. He has a laconic, understated way of speaking, as though he were trying to downplay the outrage and the hilarity that animate his prose. “I used to come here quite a lot, when it was just a lake and some grass. There’d be couples making out, that sort of thing,” he said. “It’s nice that the government was actually able to build this—that the land wasn’t handed over to the usual people.”
In Pakistani cities, valuable land is often seized by powerful gangs or businessmen and cleared for construction. In the distance stood a line of high-rises, at least one of which was rumored to be owned by Zardari, who was President from 2008 until 2013. Within the park, Hanif spotted another illegal building, beside a lake. “Navy guys have built a ‘sailing club’ there,” he said. “You never see a single yacht, but they’ve just grabbed some land to make a private club.”
Hanif says that his novels only happen to be set in Pakistan, and that he has no great desire to explain the place to outsiders. But he acknowledges that the peculiar difficulties and injustices of the society help to give his fiction its manic edge. “I tried once to write a story about another galaxy, and it began to sound like Karachi,” he said. As a journalist, he has written boldly about the military’s repression of domestic dissent and its support of terrorist groups. In a pair of novels, he’s been more slyly devastating, portraying a country run almost entirely by backstabbing mediocrities, and a society where a woman who shows any gumption or intelligence usually ends up dead or disfigured. This kind of critique can be dangerous in Pakistan. While the constitution allows for a broad measure of free expression, people know better than to speak or write publicly about the powerful intelligence services or about crimes committed in the name of Islam. Since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, thirty-one Pakistani journalists have been murdered.
Hanif discourages the image of himself as a risk-taking dissident. When a fan at a reading a few years ago asked if he was a target of the security forces, he joked, “Stop giving people ideas.” In private, he is mindful of the connections that allow him latitude: he has a following in the West, and, as a former employee of the BBC, he holds a British passport. Ultimately, though, he hopes that what will protect him is his connection to the country itself. “I was born here,” he said. “I went to a government school in a village. My brother and sister still live here—all my childhood friends are still here. I served in the armed forces,” he went on. “Some writers become foreigners, even when they are living here. I don’t think I am a foreigner. Even the people who don’t like me, I’m one of them. I speak their language. I don’t travel with guards. I didn’t just fly in from England.”
When Hanif was born, Pakistan had been an independent nation for just eighteen years and an Islamic republic for nine. Notionally united by religion, it was divided by almost everything else: class, sect, language, ethnicity. Hanif grew up in a village in Punjab province, the home of the country’s historically dominant ethnic group, the Punjabis. His father was a farmer, like nearly everyone else there, and neither of his parents could read or write; the only book in the house was a copy of the Koran. Hanif borrowed books and read widely, starting in his first language, Punjabi. Then, as a teen-ager, he learned Urdu, the national language, and also English, which gave him access to British and American novels and to Russian and Latin-American works in translation. “English is the language that I associate with fiction,” he said.
Hanif felt stifled by small-town life. When, at sixteen, he found an Air Force recruitment ad in the local newspaper, he saw it as a way out; he signed a contract to serve for eighteen years.“My father couldn’t believe I had actually signed up,” he told me. In most of the world, the Pakistani military is not an esteemed organization; it has lost every war it has ever fought, including one with India, in 1971, in which a third of the Army was taken prisoner. Inside Pakistan, though, it has established itself as the preëminent arbiter of money and power. Until 2013, no elected civilian leader had ever handed power to another; generals always intervened.
In the Air Force, Hanif trained as a fighter pilot, flying an American-made T-37 twin-engine jet. But, he said, “I hated every minute I was there.” Whenever he could, he shirked duty to immerse himself in novels by Graham Greene and Joseph Heller; sometimes he read to his fellow-officers from “Catch-22,” which seemed especially relevant. “This was the life we’d been living, minus the war,” he said.
One afternoon in August, 1988, Hanif was sitting with friends in the officers’ mess, planning the evening. “The only TV channel in Pakistan suspended its normal transmission and started playing recitations of the Koran,” he said. “It was a big sign that something was up.” The recitations were followed by an announcement: a plane carrying Pakistan’s military dictator, General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, had exploded in midair. (The explosion also killed many of Zia’s senior advisers and the American Ambassador Arnold Raphel.) Zia had taken power a decade earlier, when he overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—Benazir’s father—and ordered him hanged. “With the help of the Almighty Allah, the armed forces will do everything we can to insure stability,” Zia vowed. Instead, he presided over a vast, American-funded campaign to drive the forces of the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. The war, along with the huge quantities of weapons and money that streamed into the country, helped to radicalize Pakistan. On the day his plane blew up, Zia was headed to an Army base after inspecting American tanks that he wanted to buy.
When Hanif and his fellow-officers discovered that Zia had been killed, they celebrated, pooling their money to buy a bottle of illegal whiskey. “I mean, we were really happy,” he said. “Toward the end of Zia’s reign, he was completely losing it. He’d been around forever, and when leaders are around forever they start doing stupid things. Every couple of years, he’d come forth with a new version of the ‘True Islam.’ ” Zia had instituted a sweeping Islamization of Pakistani society, making such offenses as adultery and theft punishable by stoning and amputation. He took thousands of political prisoners, and ordered Bhutto loyalists flogged. “When he got blown up, it was kind of his due,” Hanif said. “It was clear that somebody had bumped him off.”
Three months later, Hanif left the Air Force, a decade ahead of schedule; his father had died, enabling him to leave on compassionate grounds. He became a journalist, writing about fashion, show business, and boxing; he also began to report for Newsline, the country’s most aggressive news magazine. It was an unglamorous life—he lived in run-down Karachi neighborhoods, where his roommates included gangsters and heroin addicts—but he loved the work. One of his early scoops was about student activists in Karachi, who were operating branches of violent gangs at their universities. Hasan Zaidi, a journalist who worked at a rival publication, recalls marvelling at Hanif’s sources: “We would read his stuff and say, ‘Why don’t we have this guy?’ He always had his fingers on the pulse of the street.”
In 1996, Hanif got an offer from the BBC to come to London and work for the Urdu-language service. He was newly married, to Nimra Bucha, an actress, and the job seemed to promise a break from the difficulties of life in Karachi. In an essay written later, he recalled, “People were being kidnapped for a few thousand rupees. Everybody’s cousin had been robbed at gunpoint. Carjacking was rampant. Even an obscure journalist like me had a gangster or two stalking him.” He told Pakistani friends that he’d return after three years. Instead, he stayed for twelve.
He became the head of the Urdu service, supervising a staff of sixty, and the job kept him enmeshed in Pakistani politics. In his sixth year, he got word that one of his reporters had been kidnapped by the I.S.I., the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Hanif feared that the reporter would be killed, but, on the advice of a contact in the I.S.I., he assigned a series of stories about the abduction. “The guy inside the I.S.I. said that if we wanted him released we should make a lot of noise,” Hanif said. “So we made a lot of noise.”
Before moving to England, Hanif had dabbled in writing plays that criticized the military. One of them was “What Now, Now That We Are Dead?,” written during a period of extrajudicial killings in Karachi. In the play, victims of the killings come back to life to survey the world they departed, then decide that it’s better to return to their tombs.
In London, he became consumed with figuring out who had killed Zia. He made phone calls and researched the lives of those around Zia, trying to assess potential culprits: the C.I.A., the Israelis, the Indians, the Soviets, rivals inside the Army, and even, according to one theory, a case of mangoes that had been carried aboard the plane for a celebration and then had exploded spontaneously. He was met with silence. “No one would talk—not Zia’s wife, not the Ambassador’s wife, no one in the Army,” he said. “I realized, there’s no way in hell I’ll ever find out.”
If he couldn’t solve the mystery, he could address it in a novel, he decided: “What if, fictionally, I raise my hand and say, ‘Look, I did it’?” The idea grew into “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” a satirical thriller built along the lines of a Pakistani “Catch-22.” Hanif’s narrator and proxy is Ali Shigri, an Air Force trainee who escapes the absurdities of military life by marching obsessively and by smoking high-grade hash, bought from the squadron’s laundryman, Uncle Starchy. Shigri has a good motive to attempt an assassination: his father was murdered on Zia’s orders. But, in Hanif’s telling, nearly everyone in Pakistan wants to kill Zia. His intelligence chief conspires to pump VX gas into the cabin of his plane; a mango farmer plants a bomb, hoping to inspire a Marxist-Maoist revolt. Zia is even pursued by a crow, carrying a curse bestowed by a blind woman whom he condemned to a dungeon.
The historical Zia was humorless and self-regarding, a violent autocrat who liked to be spoken of as a “man of faith” and a “man of truth.” In “Mangoes,” he is a buffoon—paranoid that his underlings are plotting against him, distracted by a long-running fight with his wife, who has kicked him out of their bedroom, and tormented by an itchy infestation of rectal worms. At one point, trying to determine what his subjects think of him, he disguises himself with a shawl and rides into the city on a borrowed bicycle. The disguise works so well that he is detained by a policeman, who mistakes him for a vagrant and gives him a humiliating mandate: “Say ‘General Zia is a one-eyed faggot’ thrice and I’ll let you go.”
If the book’s satire seems cartoonish at times, it is also fearless. The military men are hapless schemers, in thrall to American advisers; the narrator is involved in a gay relationship with another pilot. (“I thought I needed to put some sex in the novel, but it was set in an Air Force barracks,” Hanif said.) Hanif has spoken of fiction as “the opposite of journalism.” But he acknowledges that the book was informed by his years of reporting, and by interviews with survivors of Pakistan’s dungeons. The most sinister figure is an I.S.I. officer, Major Kiyani, whose name evokes that of Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army’s notorious chief of staff. To Americans, Kayani is known for presiding over an elaborate double game, in which Pakistan took billions in U.S. aid to help with the war in Afghanistan while covertly sponsoring the Taliban. The fictional Kiyani is both a dandy and a demented torturer, “the kind of man who picks up a phone, makes a long-distance call, and a bomb goes off in a crowded bazaar.” He, too, is involved in a plot to kill Zia.
As Hanif refined the manuscript, he told no one in Pakistan what he was working on. He and Bucha sat up nights in their apartment in London and wondered what the reaction would be. “At one point, I decided I should change the names of the characters,” he said. “But I wrote a few pages like that, and it just wasn’t any fun, so I switched back.” He drew inspiration from Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and politician, whose novel “The Feast of the Goat” tells the story of Rafael Trujillo, the longtime dictator of the Dominican Republic. In the book, Trujillo is depicted as a brute, but also as an impotent bed wetter. “I realized it was O.K. to do this,” Hanif said. “It gave me a kind of permission.”
When he finished the novel, in 2007, he pitched it to a Pakistani publisher he knew. “She wouldn’t even look at it,” he said. His old employer, Newsline, agreed to publish the book, but the printing company that it hired refused to be involved. Finally, Random House in India—Pakistan’s neighbor and archenemy—bought the manuscript and agreed to ship several thousand copies to Pakistan. According to Chiki Sarkar, who was then the head of Random House in India, the potential for controversy was appealing. “I insisted that Zia’s face be on the cover,” she said. “We pitched it as the book that no one in Pakistan would publish.” One early shipment was held up when a customs agent opened a box and saw Zia’s image. Soon afterward, Hanif, along with his wife and son, returned to Karachi to live.
When “Mangoes” was released, Hanif’s Pakistani friends were shocked: after a decade of repressive martial law, he was brazenly mocking the military. “He will just say anything,” Kamila Shamsie, a fellow-novelist, remembers thinking. For many people, though, the satire was welcome. “Hanif is essentially saying, Let’s not see Zia as a big man, as a monster—let’s see him as a pathetic man,” Shamsie told me. “This book feels like revenge.” It got stellar reviews in Pakistan, not least because the country was enduring another military dictatorship: General Pervez Musharraf had seized power in 1999. The critic Husain Nasir described the book as “engaging in rhythm, innovative in style, sardonic in voice, facts oozing out with beguiling charm.” It was long-listed for a Man Booker Prize.
A few times, Hanif had indications that “Mangoes” had reached powerful people. A general approached him at a party and asked who his sources were; others asked how he had managed to unravel the assassination plot. Zia’s son sent a message to complain—but, Hanif said, it was clear that he hadn’t read the book. Remarkably, there was no official backlash. “I think I was helped by the fact that no one in the military reads novels,” he said.
The book’s other great advantage was that it was written in English. The English language occupies a paradoxical place in Pakistani society: it is a holdover from colonial times, which are not favorably remembered, yet it remains the language of government, of the military, and of the upper classes and those who aspire to join them. Nearly half of Pakistanis are illiterate, and many of the rest speak Urdu, or one of the local languages; the audience for journalism and fiction in English is an impassioned but relatively tiny élite. This situation presents both limits and opportunities. Writers in English have far more latitude to criticize authorities, both secular and religious, without retribution. Clerics tend not to read English, or to care much about the opinions of upper-class intellectuals; politicians are largely concerned with the vastly greater numbers of people who read primarily Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, or Balochi. When Hanif’s English-language reporting has exposed corrupt or mendacious leaders, the official reaction has often been benign. “Sometimes you get this feeling that you are basically writing for like-minded people,” he said.
The success of Hanif’s début elevated him to the first tier of Pakistani writers in English, joining Mohsin Hamid (“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”) and Daniyal Mueenuddin (“In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”). But, while much Pakistani fiction centers, like Hamid’s, on the lives of the upper class, or, like Mueenuddin’s, on fading feudal traditions, Hanif focusses on the sordid elements of society, and on the failures of the country’s self-styled guardians. Chiki Sarkar, the publisher, said that Hanif was distinguished by his relatively humble origins. He grew up in a middle-class family, went to a government school, and stayed in Pakistan for college; his work as a journalist has brought him closer to the struggles and disappointments of ordinary Pakistanis. “Hanif writes in English, but his world and his imagination and his humor come from a non-English language,” she said. “He writes in a spirit of delinquency.”
Hanif lives in Defence, a neighborhood of stately homes on the Arabian Sea. It’s one of the nicest parts of Karachi, filled with the kind of people who might buy Hanif’s books, but its affluence is deceptive. Many of the homes are barricaded by sandbags and cement walls and protected by armed guards; the residence of the current Home Minister of Sindh province, a few houses down from Hanif’s, resembles a fortress. Generators counter the city’s chronic electricity shortage. Defence may be a neighborhood of oligarchs, but, as one Pakistani writer told me, in Karachi you can live like an oligarch on a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Hanif lives in a comfortable two-story house, which, like most of the others, is surrounded by walls. But he does not employ an army of servants, and, inside, the place is homey and unostentatious. When you walk through the gate, you are greeted by Hanif’s two pet dogs, a conspicuously Western touch; in a Muslim country, dogs are generally seen as supersized vermin.
Hanif does what he can to stay in touch with the “pulse of the street.” He regularly returns to his home village to see old friends. He often writes in Urdu—plays and song lyrics as well as journalism—and he appears on Urdu-language television. The effect of his work in Urdu is more pronounced, he says; more people call him to comment on his pieces, and his criticisms of the government or the military carry more punch. But his most transgressive writing doesn’t always reach the largest audience. Eight years after its publication, “Mangoes” has yet to be published in Urdu. When he and Bucha, who acts in Urdu-language films and soap operas, appear together in public, she is recognized more often than he is.
For years, as Hanif read the Pakistani newspapers, it seemed that every day there was at least one story about an attack on a woman: shot by her brother, or stoned to death by a mob, or sentenced to death after her husband’s family accused her of insulting the Prophet. When I arrived in Karachi, the story was about a woman who had been set on fire by relatives.
In 2008, Hanif began to imagine a story about a female avenger fighting back against Pakistan’s patriarchal society. “I just had this idea of a female superhero flying around and kicking ass,” he said. He was also inspired by his boss at Newsline, an editor named Razia Bhatti, who pushed him to go after powerful public officials. “The stories back then were printed on these long rolls of paper, and she used to sit with me and go through my stories line by line. She was a real crusader—absolutely fearless.”
After a few tries, Hanif found himself uncomfortable with the superhero conceit—“I was afraid I was writing a bad Hong Kong type of movie”—and he gave it up. Then another scenario occurred to him. Years before, his mother had fallen ill and was taken to the hospital. He sat with her for days, in a ward staffed around the clock by female nurses, most of them Christians, a tiny minority in Pakistan. “So many institutions in Pakistan don’t work at all, and I was struck by how dedicated the nurses were,” he said. “Their salaries are very low. No one was supervising them—it was the middle of the night—and yet they carried on in the most dedicated way.”
Hanif got the idea of writing about a nurse in a decrepit hospital. Alice Bhatti (named for his old editor) is a ferociously strong young woman: smart, independent, and rebellious to the point of recklessness. She works as a nurse in the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, a shambling Catholic institution in Karachi that is corrupt, underfunded, and horrifyingly filthy: rats make nests of human hair; gunnysacks filled with body parts sit in a corner. Alice is Christian, the daughter of a faith healer, from a Christian slum called the French Colony, where Jesus is known as “Lord Yassoo.” She comes from a family of “sweepers,” or janitors, a job performed overwhelmingly by Christians. At the hospital, Alice sees the most vicious tendencies of Karachi—murders and molestations that go unreported, bodies that go unclaimed. She freely mocks the Islamic faith, in concert with her father, who warns her, “These Muslas will make you clean their shit and then complain that you stink.” More than anything, Alice is determined to defend herself from an endless wave of insults and assaults:
There was not a single day—not a single day—when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his honour, father protecting his honour, son protecting his honour, jilted lover avenging his honour, feuding farmers settling their water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body.
When a wealthy patient’s relative tries to force Alice to perform oral sex, she slashes his genitals with a razor and dispatches him to the emergency room. “Go to Accidents. And no need to be shy, they get lots of this sort of thing during their night shift,” she says. “And stop screaming.”
In another city, Alice might have called the police. Instead, her primary contact with law enforcement is Teddy Butt, a bodybuilder who works nights on a police death squad. Butt—a simpleton with a steroid abuser’s high-pitched voice—becomes infatuated with Alice, and professes his love while holding her at gunpoint. When she rebuffs him, he leaves the hospital and, in despair, fires his pistol into the air. The bullet wings a truck driver, who slams on his brakes, which causes a rickshaw to swerve, which kills five schoolchildren crossing a street, which sets off a riot that spreads across Karachi, as thousands of aggrieved citizens sack restaurants, burn tires, and overturn cars. The mayhem lasts for three days; eleven people die and entire neighborhoods are destroyed before things settle down. “Newspapers start predicting ‘Normalcy limping back to the city,’ ” Hanif writes, “as if normalcy had gone for a picnic and sprained an ankle.”
“Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” is a funny book, more light-footed than its subject matter suggests, but its power lies in its portrayal of how Alice is relentlessly crushed. Finally, Alice agrees to marry Teddy—largely to move into a roomier apartment—but he is bewildered by her high-spiritedness and sets about trying to make her behave like a proper wife. When she tries to leave him, he feels “dishonored” and seeks a time-honored remedy: he throws acid in her face. Alice may have been a superhero, Hanif suggests, but in Pakistan not even female superheroes can prevail.
The Karachi Press club is situated in a mansion built during colonial rule, with high wooden shutters to keep out the heat and palm trees on either side. Reporters sit at tables on the grounds, smoking and chatting. Every afternoon, people with grievances against the government gather to demonstrate, sometimes by the thousands. It’s a curious ritual—the demonstrators coming to the reporters, rather than the other way around. “It works this way because the reporters are too lazy to go out,” Hanif, who visits the club occasionally, told me.
The Pakistani press corps works with a strange mixture of privilege and constraint. Pick up one of the better English-language newspapers—the News or the Dawn—and you will find penetrating coverage of national security, poverty, and governmental corruption. But, beyond shifting and mysterious boundaries, no journalist may stray without risk. In 2010, Umar Cheema, who had written about dissent within the military, was picked up by men in police uniforms who were widely presumed to be I.S.I. agents. They shaved his head, sexually humiliated him, and dropped him miles from his home, with a warning to stop. The following year, Saleem Shahzad published stories asserting that the armed forces had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda. He was beaten to death and his body dumped in a canal.
The infiltration of the armed forces by Islamist militants has long been a dangerous topic; the country’s blasphemy laws are another. In the past few years, there has been a third: the bloody insurgency in the state of Balochistan, where the military and the intelligence agencies have been accused of a campaign of kidnappings, torture, and executions. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, thirteen reporters covering Balochistan have been murdered since 1992. In 2014, Hamid Mir, the country’s best-known television journalist, who has criticized the Army and the I.S.I. in his pieces, was shot six times by unknown gunmen as he drove to work. Since then, Mir says, his television station has stopped reporting aggressively on Balochistan.
In 2012, Hanif was asked by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to write a series about dissidents who had disappeared in Balochistan. Hanif’s reporting was compiled in a small book, “The Baloch Who Is Not Missing & Others Who Are,” and also published in English-language newspapers. After the stories came out, Hanif received a call from an old Air Force friend who had become a general. “I heard some people talking badly about you,” the friend said. “Why do you put yourself at risk?” Hanif interpreted the call as a calculated warning: “He was passing me a message.”
There were other signs that even the English-speaking élites were no longer safe. In January, 2011, the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by his bodyguard after he denounced the death sentence of an impoverished Christian woman, who was charged with insulting the Prophet after a group of Muslim women refused to drink from a bowl that she had touched. “That was a seismic shift,” Kamila Shamsie, the novelist, said.
Last April, Sabeen Mahmud, a close friend of Hanif’s who ran a local event space called the Second Floor, was planning a panel discussion involving Baloch leaders. Worried that the I.S.I. would react badly, she turned to Hanif for advice. He told her that it would be very risky, but Mahmud decided to go ahead anyway.
Hanif was out of town the night of the discussion, but he followed it on Twitter, and was relieved when it came to an end without incident. A few minutes later, he got a call from a friend: gunmen had pulled alongside Mahmud’s car and opened fire, killing her and wounding her mother. “It really shook me,” he said. “I used to think, like Sabeen, that we were really small fry. Who the hell cares about a hundred and twenty people sitting in a room talking, a bunch of like-minded losers?” Mahmud’s death was a measure of how much things had changed in Pakistan. The stories Hanif had published about Balochistan were “impossible now,” he said.
The police announced that they had arrested a suspect in the killing, but nothing about him fit the profile of an assassin: he was a student at one of the most prestigious universities in Pakistan. Many of Mahmud’s friends suspected that she was killed by the I.S.I. In September, her driver, who witnessed the killing, was also shot dead. After Mahmud was killed, a large group of supporters gathered at the Karachi Press Club, planning a series of protests to demand the truth about what had happened to her. Hanif joined them. “I am not a protester by nature, but it seemed like the decent thing to do,” he said. There was a good crowd, he said, nearly two hundred people. But it rapidly petered out. On the twentieth day, Hanif told me, only three people came.
Hanif’s audience seems not to have lost its appetite for outrage, or at least for comic relief. During a discussion at the Karachi Literature Festival, a woman in the audience stood and asked him to write another coruscating novel, like his first one. “ ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ was so close to the truth,” she said. “My copy is in tatters now, because ten of my friends borrowed it.”
Hanif’s most rambunctious new work is “The Dictator’s Wife,” a musical that he wrote with the composer Mohammed Fairouz, which will have its première at the Kennedy Center in January. The main characters are unnamed—known only as the First Lady and her husband, Himself—but they bear an unmistakable resemblance to Pervez Musharraf and his wife, Sebha. The dictator in question never appears onstage. As his wife scrabbles with angry protesters and gripes about her compromised marriage, he is sequestered in the bathroom, represented only by a mordant song that his aide-de-camp sings on his behalf:
When you’re forced to bugger
200 million people
You need time to recover.
After you have rigged the elections
After all your positive actions
You need a few moments of self–reflection
Me time.
This kind of antic effect has grown scarcer in Hanif’s writing, which has become increasingly tragic. Last year, Fairouz asked him to collaborate on an opera about Benazir Bhutto. Hanif had considered writing a book about her, but decided that her life—filled with death, corruption, and betrayal—was too dramatic. “It’s too over the top,” Hanif told me. But opera seemed like a fitting medium. “In opera, everyone gets killed, and everything is over the top anyway,” he said.
Hanif knew Bhutto glancingly; while he was living in England, she was also there, having fled arrest warrants in Pakistan after the collapse of her scandal-ridden government. On occasion, she came into the BBC office to talk about the news from home.
In 2007, Bhutto was granted amnesty, and that October she returned to Pakistan to run for a third term. Less than an hour after she arrived, a suicide bomber attacked her motorcade, killing more than a hundred and forty people. “No one thought something like that could happen again,” Hanif said. “Once she survived it, she’d be safe.” Two months later, she was attacked again, by a suicide bomber and men firing weapons. This time, she was killed.
The Pittsburgh Opera plans to stage “Bhutto” in 2018. As Hanif revises the libretto, he and Fairouz sift through ideas in long telephone calls. The libretto has moments of Hanif’s anarchic humor: one of the main characters is a cabinet minister named Maulana Whiskey (essentially, Whiskey Priest), and Benazir is called by her childhood nickname, Pinkie. But most of the story seems haunted by thirty years of political and social tumult. It consists of three acts, each centering on a momentous death: Zia’s hanging of Benazir’s father, the explosion of Zia’s plane, and Benazir’s assassination.
“Bhutto” will no doubt cause a stir in Pakistan, whether or not it is staged there. A large part of the population holds the memory of Benazir’s family sacred, and the question of who killed her is unresolved. Musharraf, who was President at the time, is now on trial for the murder in Islamabad. He has maintained that, when an intelligence report suggested Bhutto might be attacked, he did everything he could to protect her. But Bhutto’s lobbyist in the United States, Mark Siegel, testified that Musharraf denied a request from Bhutto for more security, telling her, “Your security is dependent on the relationship between us.”
Bhutto’s legacy also lingers in more urgent ways. The Taliban, which flourished during her Administration, is surging in Afghanistan, and its affiliates are at war with the Pakistani state. In a recent Op-Ed piece in the Times, Hanif recounted a series of attacks in Pakistan, including a raid on a school that killed a hundred and forty children. Afterward, the Army claimed the attacks were evidence that “hard targets,” such as airports and military bases, had become too difficult to strike. “The language used to report and commemorate these massacres is sickeningly celebratory and familiar,” Hanif wrote. “The students are called martyrs. Their courage is applauded.” He went on, “How much courage does it require to take a bullet in the head? . . . This is imposed martyrdom, and it isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a sign of utter helplessness.”
For the first time in years, Hanif has begun to wonder about his future in Pakistan. Bucha, his wife, has asked him to stop appearing on television, out of concern for his safety. “It’s something I think about all the time,” she told me. “In Pakistan, you don’t have to be outspoken to be killed. The people we might be afraid of are people we don’t even know.” She and Hanif talk about whether the family should leave the country again. In the meantime, he sometimes encourages rumors that he’s living abroad.
When Hanif worked at the BBC, he used to go to the office each day hoping that Pakistan would not make the news. It seldom happened that way. For a writer engaged with politics, there has been a benefit. Politically turbulent societies often produce extraordinary literature: Russia in the twilight of the tsars, India after independence, postwar Latin America. Pakistan, reliably chaotic since 1947, has served Hanif as a wellspring of characters and ideas. Still, he insists that he would be happier if the country somehow became calm. “I never want to leave,” he said. “If Pakistan were normal and boring, I would love that. I’d shut my mouth for a while, if that was the price.”
