Aboard the Democracy Train (3 page)

The partition of India triggered the biggest massacres between Muslims and Hindus in recent history. It convinced millions of Hindus to flee the newly-created Pakistan. Fearful that Muslim refugees would retaliate in return for the massacre of Muslims in India, our Hindu neighbors in Karachi left in a hurry.

The newer Muslim arrivals from India took over vacant homes in Sindh and Karachi as “evacuee property.” False and exaggerated property claims by the newer arrivals became the order of the day as Pakistan – rapidly turning into a majority Muslim state – split on the basis of ethnic affiliations and groups lobbied to bend practices in their favor.

It left non-Muslims the most vulnerable and afraid. In the ‘60s, Christians evacuated our Garden East neighborhood in droves. Our British neighbor, Daddy Paterson was long gone. The Pereiras sold their picture-perfect bungalow down the road, across from
St Lawrence School, and left. Our neighbors, Anthony and Norbert, who lived in humble quarters next to our bungalow, vanished too. Apparently they were fearful that Pakistan – which translated as “Land of the Pure” – would treat non-Muslims as second-class citizens.

One evening, I saw my father pause momentarily from his favorite pastime of watering the plants in the badminton court. He had straightened his back to peer over the boundary wall at our neighbor, Frankie as the young man poked around his garden. Frankie and his sister, Coral had inherited the bungalow from their grandmother – the last of the palatial houses owned by Christians in our neighborhood.

My father asked in a tone, which to me sounded friendly: “So Frankie, when are you selling your house?”

Our neighbor apparently misunderstood the intent of the question when he replied belligerently, “When are
you
selling your house?”

“Oh, I have no intention of going anywhere,” my father replied.

That was the word my father kept until his death in 1997. He had been deeply saddened by the exodus of his Hindu friends. Now, the flight of large numbers of Christians convinced him that the neighborhood was changing for good. It was a taste of things to come.

The most wide-ranging transformation of Karachi began outside our privileged enclave as the Mohajirs settled in concentric circles around the heart of Karachi. They had arrived in a region where everyone already had their own ethnic identity – Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns and Punjabis. Even though the term, “Mohajir ” means refugee, the newcomers would use the term in contradistinction, to assert themselves politically as a fifth identity.

As Urdu-speakers flooded Karachi, my Sindhi parents prepared to become an ethnic minority. Indeed, by the 1960s, Karachi had
become a predominantly Mohajir city and Urdu was ingrained into the lingua franca. Like more privileged families, we grew up multi-lingual: speaking the English left to us in colonial legacy, Urdu – due to the newer arrivals from India – and understanding Sindhi because our parents spoke it.

By the 1970s, Mohajirs faced their fiercest contest for jobs from the two ethnic groups – Punjabis and Pashtuns – who had arrived from other parts of Pakistan to look for work in the industrial port-city of Karachi. Faced with shrinking space, the newer arrivals took shortcuts to get electricity, water, sewerage and paved roads. It became the norm to bribe utility companies and government officials to secure illegal connections and permits. The rule of law went out of the door.

As population pressures grew, corruption took on an entirely new meaning. My father came under pressure from the get-rich-quick businessmen to mix dirt and rubble into the goat hair he exported overseas to make carpets. This was the last straw for my father, who was, in any case, more inclined to humanitarian pursuits. Being a fierce crusader against corruption, he threatened to take customs inspectors to the police – forgetting that they, too, had become part of the rotting social fabric.

From my bedroom, I heard the litany of complaints from the Balochi women workers who cleaned the wool and goat hair in his musty godowns in run-down Lyari. The entreaties of the women laborers floated in the air:

“Sir, raise our pay, we can’t support our children with such meager wages.”

It was enough to make my father melt. He had the women workers served with tea and biscuits and promised to raise their pay until they went home thoroughly satisfied. My mother despaired that he would never make a successful businessman. Still, with her gentle and humane nature, she too reconciled with caring for people rather than profits.

The poor Sindhi and Balochi workers, who toiled for my father’s business in Lyari, were a solid voting bloc for Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and later Benazir Bhutto because of their Pakistan Peoples Party’s catchy populist slogans of “
Roti, Kapra aur Makan
” (Food, Clothing and Shelter).

Faced with the maxim, “If you can’t beat them, join them,” my father bowed out of the rat race. He closed down his business and devoted the rest of his life to running over a dozen charitable institutions in an honorary capacity. At the same time, he became the honorary secretary general of the Karachi Theosophical Society – which upholds the lofty motto: “Brotherhood of Man regardless of Caste, Creed, Color or Sex,” and “There is No Religion Higher than Truth.”

Come late evenings, I would sit with my father by our hundred-year-old leafy banyan tree and discuss what constituted “Ultimate Reality.” These conversations stayed with me and hugely inspired me in my journalistic endeavors.

The Mohajirs posed the first serious political challenge to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after he became president and first civilian chief martial law administrator in December 1971. That was shortly after Pakistan’s eastern wing seceded and became Bangladesh. In 1972, Bhutto’s bill to make Sindhi the official language of Sindh triggered language riots in Karachi. It would force Bhutto to back off and amend the Language Bill to deem both Sindhi and Urdu as the official languages of the province.

In 1973 when Bhutto became prime minister, he rewarded Sindhis from the underserved rural areas of Sindh by appointing them in Karachi’s administrative set-up. But simmering ethnic tensions surfaced, as seen in the symbolic shoe thrown at him as he addressed crowds in the predominantly Mohajir settlement of Liaquatabad.

Ethnic and religious opposition to Bhutto fused in the Jamaat-i-Islami to which Mohajirs were largely attracted. The Jamaat argued that millions of Muslims had left India to create Pakistan as an Islamic state. For them, the socially liberal Bhutto – brought up under British rule, educated in Berkely and influenced by the Sindhis’ easy-going mystical interpretation of Islam – imbibed all that was wrong about Pakistan. Indeed, Bhutto’s lifestyle showed
that he really didn’t care whether women walked the streets without a veil or whether the hotels served alcohol.

Under pressure, Bhutto began his dance to appease the Islamic fundamentalist lobby. The PPP government stopped hotels in Karachi from serving alcohol, banned discotheques and imposed censorship on movies. In 1974, the Bhutto government passed a parliamentary amendment, which declared Ahmadis to be non-Muslims. Although Bhutto made these moves out of political expediency, it was the beginning of religious intolerance.

The Islamization drive ushered by Bhutto began to change the cosmopolitan nature of Karachi. The government’s plans to use a peculiar triangular-shaped building along the Arabian Sea to serve as a Casino, which would attract Arab wealth, were shelved. The evening newspapers stopped publishing photographs of women snapped at diplomatic parties and the blue flashing neon sign of a woman with gyrating hips in the Zardari-owned Bambino cinema went blank.

Growing up as a young woman in Karachi, I felt constraints on my freedom. It was not only the more conservative migrants from India, organized in the Jamaat-i-Islami, who changed the freewheeling atmosphere. The traditional Muslim communities from the rural hinterlands had also brought their notions about a woman’s place.

I was in my teens when my family told me that I should stop wearing frocks and skirts and adopt the Muslim
shalwar kameez
(baggy trousers and tunic) with its accompanying veil, called the
dupatta
.

It was a bolt from the blue. In my rebellious heart I knew that no matter what I wore, the newcomers’ eyes would follow my movements. The freedom that I had experienced growing up was all of a sudden challenged by a Karachi transformed beyond my imagination.

Karachi was changing but so was I. I found the martial arts a perfect sport to blow off some steam. At 14 years of age, I enrolled in a judo and karate class, where I released my pent-up anger on a punch bag. My friend Salma – who later moved to New York and married an American Jew, Mark Goldstein – arrived daily in her
dinky car to pick me up for our training at the National Sports and Coaching Centre.

There, the two of us, wearing our white Karate uniforms, were among a handful of girls who trained to fight with men. I was a wildfire of energy, who trained to execute roundhouse kicks and ferocious punches. We were taught to fight men in sparring matches that mirrored real-life situations.

Four years of Judo and Karate taught me to walk confidently amidst crowds of people. I lost physical fear – a sense that haunts all women. One day, as I walked in the crowded Empress Market in Karachi, I felt someone grab the end of my long, baggy tunic. Each time I looked back, the hand disappeared. It was trying my patience and I could feel my anger rising. When my stalker’s hand appeared for the third time, I reached out from the crowd, grabbed him by his collar and executed a swift pseudo-chop taught by my Japanese-trained instructor.

My stalker’s cry rent the air. “I didn’t do anything.” But at that moment, the faceless young man who had tried to blend in with the crowd had no supporters. Instead, the people who gathered around applauded me for doing the “right thing.”

My adulthood coincided with a deep interest in politics. Burgeoning population and rising poverty, coupled with my father’s decision to devote his time to helping the poor and the disabled, inevitably drove me and my siblings to seek justice for the oppressed.

As a college student in Karachi’s Sir Syed Girl’s College, I was sufficiently influenced by my older sister to join the left-wing National Students Federation. I led the English Debating Society in debates throughout the city, carrying out ideological exchanges with the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba – the student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami.

My experiences with the left did not stop me from being critical of then prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – whose rule was
nothing short of paradoxical. On the one hand he invited workers to organize, while on the other he ordered his administration to crack down on trade unions and professional bodies.

In 1973, while I was still in college, thousands of school and college teachers in Karachi held a massive demonstration to demand higher wages. I was part of the rally, where wave after wave of teachers kept marching toward a menacing police cordon. Suddenly, the police – ordered by Bhutto’s government – swung into action, lashed at the teachers and cracked tear gas shells in the air.

I felt my eyes stream and my head implode with pain. Blinded by tears, my friend and I jumped over the wall of a house in the neighborhood. Luckily, we found a big pond, where we washed our eyes and freed them from the stinging pain.

It was the first incident of harsh repression that I experienced under the populist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It shocked me into realizing that Bhutto’s reputation as a firebrand and a rabble-rouser may have been just that: mere rhetoric to attract votes from a people desperate to find a way out of burgeoning poverty.

Fifteen years later, the forces of history would catapult his daughter, Benazir Bhutto into becoming the only female prime minister of the Muslim world. Like millions of people all over the world, I was inspired by the possibility of change. Surely, the Western educated Benazir who spoke convincingly of her determination to change the course of Pakistan’s history would make a difference. As a journalist on the front seat, it fell on me to find out.

I was a college student in Karachi in 1977 when an alliance of political parties, called the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), mobilized thousands of people to demand Bhutto’s removal. The PNA movement was largely led by the Islamic political parties
who, in spite of the concessions made by the secular Sindhi prime minister, accused him of straying away from the raison d’etre of Pakistan.

As the PNA movement gathered steam and their wheel jam strikes paralyzed the city for unending weeks, Bhutto challenged the Islamic fundamentalists at a massive rally: “Yes, I drink alcohol, but I don’t drink the blood of the people.”

But whilst the Jamaat-i-Islami had forced Bhutto toward Islamization, the PNA had now grown into a political movement with a single point agent of removing Bhutto. The crowds kept growing around the Old Exhibition roundabout – near Jinnah’s mausoleum. For weeks, we endured “wheel jam strikes” as the masses kept up the pressure for Bhutto’s resignation. Driving back home, I would spot increasingly large crowds milling around Jinnah’s mausoleum, forcing me to make a detour to reach home.

And then came the moment that people in Pakistan dreaded. On July 5, 1977, the Chief of Army Staff, General Zia ul Haq declared martial law, abrogated the 1973 constitution, suspended fundamental rights and put the elected Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto under house arrest.

Six months later, as I flew to Boston to study history at Northeastern University, Bhutto was to be tried for murder. His wife, Nusrat and their daughter, Benazir were put under house arrest. In April 1979, General Zia turned a deaf ear to international calls for clemency and despite a split verdict in the supreme court, hanged the sitting prime minister.