The Thinkable Has Happened!
Understanding Pakistan Project Team November 5th, 2007
Reporting from the site of London Protest.
This 2:53 pm UK Time. I am sitting right now in front of the Pakistani Embassy in where the protest is going on. There are about 200+ people here. A while back a gentleman was singing a very beautiful “nazm”"Aisay dustoor ko mein nahin ma’anta” and the rest of the crowd was chanting with him. Local leaders are addressing the gathering. There is great sense of excitement. However, I am also thinking that somehow this is inadequate. We need to do more. When we talk about the people of Pakistan and on behalf of people of Pakistan, I keep on thinking as to where those people are? The majority of 160 million or so Pakistanis are still silent, as always.
No matter what we do here, and what we say, Pakistan will not get democracy unles Pakistanis–a vast majority of us–demand democracy. Where are the people???
As the imformation blockade continues in Pakistan, thoughts are racing through my mind at the speed of light. I will try to pen more of my thoughts on this blog in the coming days. Ahmad Faraz has written the following about my country…
Meri bustee say paray bhi meray dushmun hongay (There might be my enemies away from my land…)
Per yahan kub koi aghyaar ka lushkar utra (But when did a foreign army invade here….)
A’ashna haath hi aksur meri janab lupkay (It always familiar hands that attacked me…)
Meray seenay mein humaisha mera khunjar utra… (It was always my own knife that tore through my chest…)
I leave you with Faiz’s famous poem “Hum Daikhain Gay” and its video depiction adopted from Adil Najam’s All Things Pakistan that comes to mind as a very apt representation of the present circumstances…
Signing off Now.
Athar Osama
P.S. I have a confession to make to UPP audience. I’ve been kept away from UPP for the last month or so because of some domestic issues. I intend to return to our Story of Pakistan as soon as I can–hopefully within a week or so. The battle for constitutional rights of Pakistanis must go on and is never ending. Our country needs us today more than ever before.
The origins of the 1965 War between Pakistan and India, its conduct over the course of several weeks, and its consequences are quite complex for one to be able to do justice with it. Add on top of that the fact that countries engage in one-upmanship to try to make exaggerated accusations of who started the war and claims of victory after it ends, primarily in order to manage “public opinion” at home, and it really gets very difficult and tricky. One additional unfortunate factor in lack of quality reporting on the 1965 War was the attempt by Pakistani leadership—both military and civilian—to attempt to destroy the evidence of the circumstances that actually led to this war. General K. M. Arif, in his biography “Khaki Shadows: Pakistan 1947-97” for instance writes that in the immediate aftermath of the 1965 War:
By: Athar Osama
In the last episode of this series, we looked at Pakistan under Ayub Khan’s “Presidential” Democracy during the second part (1962-65) of his three-part 11-year tenure at the helm of the affairs. Prior to that, we had also looked the early-years of the Martial Law regime that, owing to the intensity of its policy activism, saw some dramatic changes in a whole array of policy domains. In this episode we dig deeper into two key areas policy change in Ayub Era, namely, economic and foreign policy.
In the last episode, we looked at the first four years of Ayub Khan Martial Law in Pakistan. This period, as the write up indicated, was marked with tremendous amount of progress, policy activism, and legislation on a number of different fronts. Philip E. Jones, in his doctoral dissertation titled “Pakistan People’s Party: Rise to Power”, notes that Ayub’s martial law regime evolved its policies around three main objectives:
With the power firmly in the hands of the Chief Martial Law Administrator, he set upon the task of creating country of his vision. Feldman (1967, p. 44) describes the state of the President’s mind in the following words:
dominion. With the constituent assembly now gone, the question arose as to who was to carry forward the task of constitution-making in Pakistan? Could a new constituent assembly be legitimately elected to replace the older one? What would be the “ground-rules” for electing such an assembly? Who would set those rules and whether they would be acceptable to all parties?