The Dawn News

There is a lot to commend the Asim Abbasi-directed and Sanam Saeed and Aamina Sheikh-starring Cake for.

There is its deftly constructed story, the varying strands of which creep up on you in an organically and satisfyingly slow way as the narrative progresses.

There are the carefully explored relationships – between sisters, between parents and children, between friends and lovers – that have enough room for complexity and contradiction within them to make them feel real and lived in.

There is the film’s insistence on touching upon difficult issues of class and privilege, of aging and accountability, and of our obligations to the people we love, and its subsequent refusal to resolve those issues neatly.

Review: Cake raises the bar for Pakistani cinema and left me wanting more

But there is also something else – not entirely unconnected to these strengths of the film – which is noteworthy, and that is the film’s quiet feminism, which can be seen not only through the two main characters but also through their relationship to the wide narrative of the film.

Feminism, particularly as it relates to popular culture and the media, is a tricky thing to talk about. The term has become highly charged and often contentious, particularly in the context of social media, with its rapid, unnuanced, meme-efied reactions and rampant misinformation.

It is a term that both Sanam Saaed and Aamina Sheikh have publicly grappled with and distanced themselves from, ostensibly due to this same misinformation.

But while the stars’ lack of clarity about the term is unfortunate, it is also somewhat irrelevant to the film’s ethos, whose feminism is subtle and quiet and, I would argue, no less potent for that.

In that regard, the film can be seen as the cinematic heir of Haseena Moin’s television dramas of the 1970s and ’80s, whose feminism, like Cake’s, also lay in fully formed, multi-faceted female characters who went about living their complex lives, building careers and falling in love, being sisters and friends and children and parents without feeling the need to monologue bluntly and grandiosely about things like Female Empowerment and Women Are People, Too.

Cake begins with a series of scenes exploring an ordinary day in the life of Zareen (Aamina Sheikh), as she goes about managing the needs of her exuberant, aging parents (Beo Raana Zafar and Mohammad Ahmad) and looking after the family’s landowning business in the absence of her two siblings who live abroad: Zain, her brother (Faris Khalid) with a young family of his own, and Zara (Sanam Saeed), a sister with a high-stakes career who, the narrative implies, left the country and the family in difficult circumstances.

In the midst of this, Zareen carves out quiet moments of privacy for herself, exchanging emails with her confidante and friend-but-almost-something-more, Romeo (Adnan Malik), furtively enjoying a cigarette in the bathroom and then flushing away the evidence.

These first few scenes manage to convey a lot about Zareen – how she has taken up the mantle of caretaker for the family, how she feels alternately proud and resentful of her indispensability in the smooth functioning of her family, how she longs for things for herself that she isn’t sure she has a right to want.

The film shows fully formed, multi-faceted female characters without feeling the need to bluntly monologue.

Things come to a head when her father’s already fragile health takes a turn for the worse, prompting Zara to return home after a long absence.

The sisters’ loving but contentious dynamic, and each sibling’s own specific relationship to their parents and their role within the family is what the rest of the film explores, with a difficult family secret that informs all of this in different ways.

It is this deft centring of these two complex women and the conflict between their own selves and the roles they have to play within their family and the larger world that feels truly feminist.

It is the way in which Zareen is allowed to be difficult without being demonised that feels refreshing, almost revolutionary, considering the kind of roles women are allowed to inhabit in Pakistani media today.

She feels specific, her class privilege, her place within her family and within the larger Pakistani society and her own self coming together to form a multi-dimensional, complete person.

She takes care of everyone, sure, but she is not depicted as a self-sacrificing martyr or a saint (a reductive trope that, unfortunately, a plethora of contemporary Pakistani television and film relies on).

Instead, the film allows her moments of unkindness towards the people close to her, and she grapples with the weight of her own wants in ways that frequently come across as unfair to those around her.

It is the deft centring of complex women that feels truly feminist.

In her relationship with Zara, too, the film triumphs. When Zara first returns to Karachi, their relationship is strained and somewhat cold, with grievances both said and unsaid hovering between them. As the narrative progresses, their dynamic is explored and deepened.

A scene with the two of them driving home from a party is a good example of the way in which the nuances of their relationship are brought to light without necessarily offering a neat resolution to their conflicts.

The car ride, with Zareen driving and Zara beside her, has moments of them arguing balanced by moments of vulnerability as well as moments of levity and silliness, and the way in which both sisters weave in and out of these range of emotions rings true to the way relationships between sisters – or indeed any relationship between women which is loving and complicated – really are.

In many ways, the Zareen-Zara duo are the contemporary descendants of the sisters of Haseena Moin’s Tanhaiyan (1985). In that drama, too, two sisters (Shehnaz Shaikh and Marina Khan) grapple with personal ambitions and obligations to each other and to their family, and like Zareen and Zara, their relationship, too, was at turns supportive and difficult.

Cake’s treatment of its women is reminiscent of Haseena Moin’s dramas in other ways as well. What makes Moin’s dramas so beloved and enduring is that they felt real and true in the casual manner in which they afforded their female characters the right to be difficult, to be conflicted and unfair and wrong, to make mistakes and learn from them.

It didn’t come across as Moin trying to Make a Point. It was subtle and quiet and it made her characters human, and that’s what made her work so feminist.

Feminism boils down to an argument for refusing to deny women the fullness of their humanity.

Subtlety and quiet moments that ended up saying a lot is a trademark Moin move, especially when it came to her women characters falling in love – and in that regard, Cake feels reminiscent of Dhoop Kinaray (1987), where Zoya (Marina Khan) falls in love with Dr Ahmer (Rahat Kazmi) in a series of small, intimate and largely quiet moments.

In Cake, the primary romance between Zareen and Romeo develops quietly, such as the scene where Romeo joins Zareen in her house’s courtyard at dusk as she is reading a book, and wordlessly, sits by her and opens a book of his own.

Even the complications of their potential romance, with the class difference and consequent power imbalance between the two of them (Romeo works as a nurse to Zareen’s parents, and his working class family has long been in service to Zareen’s much more privileged and affluent zamindar family), is explored with a lightness of touch that nevertheless seems cognisant of the social inequities within which their romance exists.

Despite what the confusion and mistrust of the term that is rampant on social media circles would have you believe, feminism really boils down to an argument for refusing to deny women the fullness of their humanity.

Cake feels feminist not merely because it puts women, their interiority and their relationships at the centre of the narrative, but because it does this quite casually and organically, giving, without much fanfare, the stories of Zareen and Zara the narrative empathy that is commonly and widely given to the stories of men. For this alone, the film deserves to be applauded and celebrated.

Are you a researcher or enthusiast with insights on Pakistani cinema? Write to us at blog@dawn.com

Maharani Jind Kaur could only look on as her brother and the wazir of the Lahore Durbar, Jawahir Singh, was executed by soldiers of the Khalsa Empire in 1845.

The Khalsa Army was no longer under the command of the crown or its appointed commanders. In the years following Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, as the empire went through a period of political instability, the soldiers had found themselves increasingly drawn into the political arena.

In quick succession, various claimants to the throne had bribed segments of the army to back their claim. Their numbers had increased drastically since the days of Ranjit Singh.

Towards the end of the maharaja’s life, the Khalsa Army was around 80,000-strong. It was an overgrown military machine that had helped Ranjit Singh expand his empire from a small fief to an area that included parts of Kashmir, Afghanistan, Punjab and Bahawalpur.

Many claim he would have swept the entire Indian peninsula had he not been hemmed in on all sides by the British. Unlike the Marathas, Ranjit Singh realised that his military might will not withstand a British onslaught. Hence, he chose to sign a peace deal with them rather than go the way of confrontation.

On the eastern bank of the Sutlej river, the British monitored the unfolding of the Lahore Durbar carefully. They had seen the assassination of one maharaja after another. They observed as powerful wazirs found themselves at the mercy of the Khalsa soldiers.

At the time of Jawahir Singh’s assassination, the army had expanded to 120,000 soldiers with their salaries increased manifold since the time of Ranjit Singh. But despite their size and the fact that they possessed the latest technology, the British did not think much of the Khalsa Army.

Various British officers, in their letters, referred to the army as a mob. The British were of the impression that the increasing political role of the soldiers had rendered them ineffective on the battlefield. Thus, in the years following Ranjit Singh’s death, the British started the process of militarising Punjab.

Politician soldiers

With their growing involvement in politics, the soldiers had developed a bureaucratic mechanism of their own. Instead of exhibiting loyalty to their commanding officers, they reported to panches selected by themselves.

These were soldiers appointed from within their ranks to represent the grievances and concerns of the soldiers. The system was modeled on the panchayat system from where the word panches is derived.

Given the political turmoil that followed Ranjit Singh’s death, the soldiers took it upon themselves to protect the sanctity of the Khalsa Empire, a glorious empire bequeathed to them by their Sher-e-Punjab.

Shortsighted nobles were sabotaging the crown for their own interests with the commanding officer a part of this corrupt elite.

And with the grave threat on the eastern frontier in the form of the British, the soldiers started believing they had to take charge to ensure the empire’s survival.

The ruling elite also knew they needed the support of the soldiers if they were to secure the throne for themselves. After the freak death of Ranjit Singh’s talented grandson Nau Nihal Singh in 1840, Sher Singh, one of Ranjit Singh’s sons, started vying for the throne, convinced he was the right person for the job.

However, in Lahore, Nau Nihal Singh’s mother Chand Kaur had taken over the throne as regent, as she claimed her daughter-in-law was pregnant with Nau Nihal Singh’s son.

To weaken the Lahore Durbar, Sher Singh started bribing sections of the army. And in 1841, he besieged the Lahore Fort, capturing the regent and her supporters. The Khalsa Army had already been bought.

But even with the rise of Sher Singh, the panches remained an important, independent power house.

Maharani Jind Kaur, the youngest wife of Ranjit Singh, also knew where the real power lay when in 1843, after the assassination of Sher Singh, the army declared her six-year-old son Duleep Singh the maharaja.

She turned to the army to get back at the wazir, Hira Singh, for a slight. She appealed to the passion of the soldiers, protectors of the Khalsa Empire, to avenge the humiliation the wazir had wrought on their maharani, the wife of Sher-e-Punjab.

A decision was made and the panches put Hira Singh to death. The maharani had won her battle. And her brother, Jawahir Singh, took up the post of wazir.

Jind Kaur’s revenge

But the tide soon turned. This time, the panches wanted to put her brother to death. The justification was another insult, meted out to another family member of the great maharaja – his son Peshura Singh no less.

After the ascension of the boy king, Peshura Singh had risen in rebellion against the Lahore Durbar and was put down by the wazir. He was captured, ordered to be brought to Lahore and executed on the way on the orders of Jawahir Singh.

The panches would have none of it. How dare a wazir take the life of a scion of Maharaja Ranjit Singh! The panches met and it was decided that Jawahir Singh would be put to death.

The maharani pleaded with the soldiers but they had made up their minds. On September 21, 1845, Jawahir Singh was executed outside the walls of the Lahore Fort.

A new wazir, Lal Singh, was appointed. He was rumoured to be the lover of the regent. But it was the soldiers who held the true power.

As for the maharani, still reeling from the loss of her brother, she had other plans. She decided, along with Lal Singh and the head of the army Tej Singh, that it was time to cut the power of the soldiers.

An anti-British frenzy, which had been part of rhetoric for a few years given their rising military presence on the eastern front, was unleashed from the top, while representatives of the Lahore Durbar started reaching out to British officers across the Sutlej, expressing their fidelity.

The plan was to put the soldiers in a war in which their defeat was assured.

On December 11, 1845, urged on by their commanders, the soldiers crossed the Sutlej and thus began the First Anglo-Sikh War. A few months later in March, the Treaty of Lahore was signed, assuring the British over-lordship over the affairs of the Lahore Durbar.

The maharani and her entourage had achieved their purpose of reducing the might of the soldiers but a new setup brought with itself a whole new set of problems.

In April of 1848, a little incident in Multan provided the British with an excuse to begin the Second Anglo-Sikh War, paving the way for the annexation of the Khalsa Empire on March 30, 1849.

Cover photo and thumbnail from Wikipedia.

This piece was first published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

Much has been said about what the lynching of Mashal Khan revealed about Pakistani society – from the brutal consequences of mob hysteria to the degree to which fanaticism has seeped into the social fabric.

That the tragedy took place in a university, however, spoke to another process that has helped bring the country to its current impasse – the political and ideological brutalisation of its students by the state.

The on-campus lynching of a student by a mob of his peers solely on the basis of his progressive ideas was chilling to all who witnessed it; yet it was also simply the logical culmination of a decades-old state project to neutralise the potential of student politics for resistance and dissent in Pakistan.

This project has largely been successful. Today, with the exception of a few campuses, the Pakistani university is not a space of freedom for learning, ideological debate or critical thinking, but one of apathy, ideological conformity, and moral conservatism, often enforced through a nexus between the state, university administrations and unelected right-wing student groups.

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The Pakistani university has become a space of institutionalised apathy, where students can be arrested with impunity for celebrating Sindhi culture; where they can be attacked by rightwing vigilantes for performing Pakhtun dance or for talking to a member of the opposite sex; where they can get killed for playing music; and where bright, progressive young men can be mercilessly lynched simply for imagining a less bigoted and unequal society.

An interrupted legacy

How did it come to this? Such poverty of political imagination among students was not always the norm. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Pakistani students were not a rag-tag mob but a collective, organised force to be reckoned with. They stood up to exclusionary education policies, organised strikes in support of organised labour and formed the core of the movement that brought down the dictatorship of Ayub Khan in 1969.

Campuses in the 60s and 70s were rife with healthy ideological contestation between Left and Right, with progressive groups like the Democratic Students Federation (DSF) and National Students Federation (NSF) often electorally ascendant over their right-wing counterparts.

Explore further: I was handcuffed and tied but it was worth my fight against One Unit

At the zenith of student politics in the 1970s, student power could be gauged from the presence of union representatives in all university decision-making bodies through legislation that mandated student consent for university policies.

Some student radicals even got elected to Parliament, like the NSF socialist Mairaj Muhammad Khan, who won on a PPP ticket from Karachi and became Labor Minister under Bhutto in 1971 (eventually resigning after 2 years once Bhutto began to renege on his socialist pledges).

Things changed drastically of course under Zia. As an autocrat opposed to the very idea of popular democratic participation itself, Zia saw student unions, dominated as they were by the Left, as a nuisance that required a permanent solution.

His regime began by arming right-wing groups like the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT) in 1979, which started conducting armed assaults on progressive student leaders in major universities, fueled by the anti-communist hysteria of the Afghan War.

When this failed to stop the progressive fightback, in 1984, soon after the country-wide electoral rout of the IJT by the student Left in union elections, student unions were permanently banned by the military regime.

A newspaper photo of Democratic Students Federation members protesting against the government at Karachi’s DJ Science College in 1953.

Predictably, the regime cited campus violence – that it had itself initiated and facilitated – as the basis for the ban. The actual reason of course was Zia’s fear of the risk posed by a young, well-organised constituency that had publicly committed itself to his downfall.

Zia’s ban – briefly removed by Benazir but ultimately reinstated by the then deeply conservative and compromised Supreme Court in 1993 – was more successful than he could have imagined. It fundamentally transformed both popular student culture as well as progressive politics, which relied heavily on student cadres in its mass organising efforts.

Over time, campus character mutated from the ethos of politico-ideological resistance of the 70s to the puritanical right-wing conformism of today. From once being a bulwark against military dictatorship and religious extremism, the majority of Pakistani students transformed into unthinking imitators of state ideology – formally disengaged from politics but channeling the dominant religio-nationalist discourse through both their actions and inertia.

The purge of progressives

Campus politics did not disappear altogether after the ban but, over time, gradually degenerated to a shadow of its former self. Unions had allowed students a reasonable amount of collective power – they were institutionally recognised as collective bargaining agents by universities and could negotiate student concerns from fees to accommodation to broader policies that affected them.

They had also allowed a recognised space for ideological debate and non-violent electoral competition, which meant students from varied ethno-linguistic and religious backgrounds could form coalitions around common ideas – as they did in the diverse array of independent student organisations that existed.

When this space was snatched away, the ties that it facilitated for students across ethnic and religious lines also withered. The basis for the informal student politics that remained gradually became reduced to the lowest common denominators – those of ethnicity, religion or sect.

In depth: Mob mentality: How many hands is Mashal's blood on?

While progressive groups were violently persecuted under the ban’s cover, student organisations under the patronage of the military or ruling parties – such as the IJT or the Muslim Students Federation – were allowed to operate.

A steady stream of funds and arms enabled such organisations to continue functioning informally, reinforced by the state where necessary (particularly in the smaller provinces), to eliminate any remaining progressive resistance on campuses.

Without formal, elected organisational structures and legitimate collective authority, student organisations turned into personal mafia-like fiefdoms, sustained by distributing patronage – in the form of hostel space, university admissions or physical protection – and establishing their authority through the exercise of brute force, mirroring the clientelism logic of the state and ruling parties.

Over time, groups like the IJT helped realise what the state had set out to do – wipe out progressive campus politics while ingraining a popular suspicion of the very idea of student politics in the wider social consciousness.

With institutional student politics now a distant memory, the idea of student unions came to be synonymised with the violent thuggery of groups like the IJT. It was, in part, this embedded perception of the illegitimacy of student activism that allowed Abdul Wali Khan University (AWKU) to demonise Mashal as a blasphemer simply for raising legitimate concerns about financial corruption on campus.

Engendering retrogression

Of course, the union ban and its prejudicial implementation did not, by itself, achieve the state’s objectives. It was accompanied by Zia’s manipulation of the education system through policies that sought to induce in students a ‘loyalty to Islam and Pakistan’ and ‘a living consciousness of their ideological identity’.

The social and natural sciences came under particular attack in universities, as anti-communist and anti-science propaganda funded by Saudi petrodollars came to replace critical scientific inquiry.

Ideological conformism on campuses was reinforced by hounding out leftist teachers, replacing them with conservative hardliners, and introducing retrogressive content into the curriculum that demonised religious minorities, vilified critical thinkers, glorified war, and erased popular movements.

On the same topic: Promoting anti-science via textbooks

This legacy of thought control did not die with Zia – as recently as 2014, the Higher Education Commission issued a circular prohibiting educational content that ‘challenged the ideology of Pakistan’ in universities.

It was this same anti-progressive venom that reared its head in AWKU, evidenced by one of Mashal’s professors reportedly declaring at a faculty meeting that the university ‘did not need communists on campus’ even as the leftist student was being hunted by the mob.

As is now evident, the impact of this curricular propaganda on students’ ideological worldviews has been deeply damaging. Instead of being equipped with the analytical means to understand and critically engage with their surroundings, most students have been conditioned to think of complex natural, social, economic and political phenomena in black and white terms – and to conceive of most social contradictions as requiring simplistic moral, technical – and often violent – solutions.

This conservative shift in student opinions has been well-documented. A study by scholar Ayesha Siddiqa found that majority of Pakistani students were suspicious of the democratic process, supported the military’s role in politics, harboured nostalgia about a romanticised theocratic past, agreed with the Clash of Civilisations thesis, opposed a federalist decentralisation of power, and considered political parties to be ‘inherently corrupt’.

Concerns about students’ own rights and collective well-being did not rank highly among student priorities; especially ironic in an era where students have suffered from breakneck educational privatisation and skyrocketing costs, plummeting public standards, on-campus repression by paramilitary forces and even murderous attacks by the Taliban.

A constrained renewal

In this historical context, Mashal Khan’s lynching represents the grisly depths to which student political culture has regressed. Yet, there have been some glimmers of hope amid the gloom in the past decade.

Several campuses rose up briefly against Musharraf’s 2007 emergency, a process that helped weaken the dictatorship and politicised a new generation of student activists, albeit a minority.

Sporadic protests have been generated by Pakhtun, Sindhi and Baloch students against the hegemony of fundamentalist groups in Punjab or state's high-handedness in Sindh. The Baloch Students Organisation (BSO) has continued its politics of resistance to atrocities in Balochistan, often in the face of brutal repression (including enforced student disappearances).

Cover of a radical leftist Urdu magazine showing NSF leader, Rasheed Ahmed Khan, being led out of a military court in 1968.

More recently, progressive student organisations of the past, including NSF and DSF, have also seen a revival, while new ones like the Democratic Students Alliance and the Progressive Students Collective have been formed to reorganise students and revive their alliances with workers and farmers.

However, the ban on unions continues to prevent these periodic expressions of progressive student action from coalescing into broader movements. The continued absence of both institutional legitimacy and inter-campus networks for student politics hinder generational continuity, coordinated action, and solidarity.

Unlike in 2016 in India, when thousands of student across dozens of Indian campuses demonstrated in solidarity with Jawaharlal Nehru University students facing a state backlash for questioning the dominant narrative on Kashmir, few Pakistani campuses rose in solidarity with LUMS students when they faced similar state censorship for attempting a dialogue on repression in Balochistan.

Towards redemption

Today, fascism is on the rise globally; yet from the United States to Greece to India and elsewhere, it is being met with stiff opposition whose ranks, more often than not, consist of thousands of progressive students.

In Pakistan on the other hand, the state has stunted the political imagination of the bulk of its students and snatched from them both the capacity to think critically and the mechanisms to act politically, such that they are either indifferent to or complicit in the rising fascist tide.

Reversing this decades-long generational rot will take time, but there are ways forward. In the first instance, this history must be popularised among students as a central component of the answer to why Pakistan has fallen prey to such violent radicalisation with such weak progressive resistance.

NSF activists celebrate victory against IJT in the 1983 student union elections at Dow Medical College, Karachi.

The destructive ban on unions has to be overturned. The decrepit curriculum that produces the poisonous bigotry that killed Mashal needs to be comprehensively overhauled. The armed thuggery of groups like the IJT and other vigilantes needs to be met with stern state action and the concerted de-militarisation of campuses.

But there is little evidence in the hollow words and actions of the ruling elite that they will willingly undertake these tasks. A pliant and conservative student body is far too convenient to their interests for them to realise that its character has jeopardised the very future of the country.

Ultimately, these tasks will have to be taken on by students themselves; those who recognise what the state has done and possess the will to become, like Mashal, the conscious agents of history that will help reverse the tide.

This article was first published in April 2017

Are you a student or teacher in Pakistan who wants to see progressive changes in universities? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com

As they say, the second shoe finally fell for the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). The disqualification of Nawaz Sharif is for life. That effectively means that the PML-N is in its post-Nawaz era and things are not looking good.

The narrative that is being pushed through the mass rallies has created differences within the party. Chaudhry Nisar as well as others are against the harsh tone taken against the judiciary and the military.

Their argument is that the narrative being peddled is putting on edge any chances the party has of survival in the long run.

Even the current president of the party, Shahbaz Sharif, seems to be reluctant to follow Nawaz's narrative as he sees it as a threat to the future of the party under him. They are not entirely wrong.

Editorial: Unsurprising verdict

In a country like Pakistan, going up against the security establishment is not the most ideal path and often hurts any party. And this is where the biggest divisions in the PML-N are coming to the front.

Most of the defections seen in recent days, from Gujranwala as well as Sheikhupura, have made a point to explain that their reason for defection is partly that narrative.

The question then is what now? What is the future of the party given these splits that are becoming clearer by the day?

Post-Nawaz PML-N

Nawaz Sharif is gone. Next up may well be Maryam Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif. Maryam has a contempt of court petition against her in the Lahore High Court, as well as a National Accountability Bureau (NAB) case in relation to the Avenfield apartments.

Shahbaz has enough cases against him that any one of them around the Sasti Roti Scheme, Multan Metro, the Ashiana Scheme or the Model Town case can render him useless.

And while the talk of bringing in the grandson, Junaid, into politics may seem like an option, it is too early and will not have the expected impact.

Part of the reason being that, like the rest of the world, Pakistan is slowly moving to a point where the average voter is over the family business model of political parties.

People associate corruption with dynastic politics as a given and the appetite to tolerate that is no longer there.

Secondly, in the absence of party professionalisation, party members have little incentive to be loyal as there is no growth potential for them.

Unfortunately, the political dynasties are too insecure to let anyone else head the government or the party.

That creates a situation where an electable with their vote bank would rather contest as an independent and then choose where they wish to end up rather than opt for a party. And those that do wish to join a party have very limited options.

In the post-Nawaz era, the PML-N will witness a lot more defections, but a bulk will come in the shape of electables choosing to go independent before the elections.

We can realistically expect a group of 40-50 independent candidates contesting under the same symbol and as an informal group that will have more sway rather than being associated with a party.

This will create a new set of issues for a PML-N that is still not over the idea that they are being taken to the cleaners.

With the family out of the party, what will be left is a PML-N with senior leaders, all battling to keep the structure in check.

And with the rising threat of further defections, the party may be contesting elections against its former candidates in a host of constituencies across the country.

Survival guaranteed?

With the prospect of key disqualifications and contesting against its own former candidates, the reality has still not sunk in completely. The party is fighting for its survival.

The loyal workers are disgruntled, in large part, about being dumped to the way side for the last five years. The provincial assembly candidates have their own set of grievances for being completely forgotten by the chief minister.

That creates a realistic situation where Punjab is ready to vote in a different group of people to power.

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The PML-N has held Punjab for over 10 years and in that period, a certain part of Punjab has seen explosive growth while other parts have been ignored or forgotten. The neglected parts are unlikely to fall in line through the power of the narrative alone.

They need clear incentives and in case of further disqualifications, the biggest question would be, who is going to give the guarantees and the incentive? Whose word are they supposed to believe?

That is the kind of unpredictability the party is not thinking about right now. They are no where near having a plan for that. Because the advisers around the leadership lack the capacity to think that far out.

In such a scenario, one must then ask about the survival of the party going forward. Yes, it will survive, but not with the same kind of influence or might.

Punjab is likely heading towards a coalition government if the elections are to happen on time, and the most probable chief minister seems to be coming from the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf.

Similarly, at the centre it seems that with the falling fortunes of the PML-N, we are looking at a hung parliament where independent candidates will have the role of kingmakers in whatever party comes to power.

And while the PTI and Pakistan People's Party are refusing to consider a seat adjustment right now, there is a good chance that they may think of coming together to form a government with the help of the independents.

A new PML

I realise that the picture I am painting is a grim one but that is the reality we are dealing with. We can fawn over the narrative and question the judiciary and the military, but that really does not change the facts.

A PML without the Sharifs is going to happen because the wheels are in motion to achieve that. Once that takes place, the question the party would need to ask is how they plan to function and operate. Who will take the lead and what kind of agenda are they willing to work on.

Analysis: What next for Nawaz Sharif?

Chaudhry Nisar is one good option to head the party but so are people like Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Ahsan Iqbal. The party any of them inherits will be a distinctly new party.

There will be a need to come up with new decision structures, brand new ways to push the message, and creation of new party leadership that can move forward. That is a daunting task and will not be achieved any time soon.

What has hurt the party the most over the years has been the clear lack of succession planning; now that the time is here, the problem is hitting home harder than people had assumed.

We are in for a period of political restructuring not just at the PML-N, but also at other parties.

The PPP will have to also go through a similar fate eventually whether they like it or not, because dynastic politics is done given the trajectory of democracy in our country.

The sooner parties realise that, the better it is for them.

In 1970, Rasheed Araeen stood at St. Katharine Docks, near his studio in London, and invited friends to throw 16 fluorescent red discs in the water.

It was an exercise in breaking the symmetrical structure of the discs and observing how they created their own random movements in the water.

This performance, titled Chakras, can be considered one of the originating points of Pakistani performance art.

Of course, it feels inappropriate to anoint Araeen as the beginning of any canon: his life and artistic practice have been dedicated to destabilising the canons of the art world.

As a pioneer of minimalist structure as well as public and performance art, Araeen worked tirelessly against racist and exclusionary art institutions.

His performance work, which includes Paki Bastard, where he put on dark glasses and gagged himself, and Burning Ties, where he set fire to a row of red neckties, took on increasingly radical tones.

Araeen is not alone in this. The history and practice of public and performance art is intimately tied with transgression and subversion, especially in the Global South.

A worthwhile step in this direction was taken by the initiative House, in March at a house in EME-DHA, as a collaborative effort by writers, thinkers, artists and designers to study the relationship between the body and its environments through performative means of expression.

The organisers and participants of House set out to explore sites outside of galleries and museums for the production and performance of art in the city of Lahore.

The series culminated with a performance inside a suburban house, where many of the performances, which had previously been performed in public, were repeated with slight alterations.

By domesticating their work of art in such a direct, forceful way, the performance provided insights into how performances are received differently in public and private settings.

According to Natasha Jozi, founder and creative director of House: "A house is a unique communal space which brings together living bodies and objects. Inherently it serves as a fulcrum for initiating dialogue, interactions and shaping identities. You often tend to question, what houses you? Which house do you belong in?"

Natasha Jozi, founder and creative director of House. — House Ltd

Upon entering the house where the performances were taking place, I immediately came across a woman bound from head to toe in a long, brown rope, the kind often used to secure large packages of cargo.

Over the course of the performance, participants untied and tied her again and again, applying the rope to her body in different arrangements and configurations, securing the artist to different walls, sometimes even securing her to the installations of other artists.

The haunting, visceral passivity of the performer invited participants to move her, rearrange her, untie her, re-tie her in different styles, and in these ways, change the scope of her mobility.

This tension between the interactive openness of the performance and its physical restrictions allowed for a complex, even contradictory, array of meanings to develop: both playful and painful, both unfixed and restricted.

This performance, Abeera Saleem’s Tie Untie, was first performed inside Lawrence Gardens.

Abeera tied herself to a tree in this famous, historic park, which is central to the geography and community of Lahore, and attracts hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors on any given day.

Lawrence Gardens was first developed in 1863 as part of the modernising and civilising mission of the British colonial forces, which saw the Lahore of Mughals and Sikhs as insular, chaotic, and backwards.

Curators were brought from the Kew Gardens in London to give the park an ordered and symmetrical geometry, which was opposed to the organic growth of the older, walled city of Lahore.

In fact, the supposed contrast between the order of the new British developments and the chaos of the older parts of the city became an accepted trope, constantly invoked by historians, novelists, tour guides, administrators, and policymakers — in short, the whole gamut of colonial functionaries.

This Manichaean division between the good, modern, British section of the city and the bad, backwards, native section of the city is typical of colonial missions in India and Africa.

It often masked the reality that the native sector was deliberately underdeveloped, ignored and exploited, not to mention policed and surveilled.

The site of Lawrence Gardens is a vital reminder of the way violence is engineered by such hierarchical binaries of colonialism as good/bad, modern/traditional, chaotic/ordered, private/public.

Developed soon after the 1857 War of Independence, in which Indian sepoys rebelled against their colonial masters, the park was meant to serve as a memento of British superiority, of their ultimate victory in a ruthless campaign that destroyed cities and whole communities.

By tying herself to a tree in Lawrence Gardens, a possible descendant of the trees planted by experts from the Kew Garden, but also — at the same time — a local variant, an adaptation, Abeera embodied and performed the binds that keep us attached to the violent histories of colonialism.

It is also crucial to understand that the history of colonialism — at its fundamental core — is a gendered history.

The binaries that upheld British colonial efforts were mapped onto gendered bodies. Abeera’s performance doesn’t just centre any post-colonial body, but a body identified as female.

It is an unapologetic comment on the way these histories are not simply abstract texts or ideas, relegated to an unknowable past, but embodied experiences, painful and vehement, felt and lived every day by gendered and racialised bodies.

At the same time, I do not want to limit the interpretation of Abeera’s performance to a narrative of powerlessness.

Abeera’s interactive performance also enacts a resistant playfulness, handing over agency to other participants, especially women, who could change the narrative of the performance with their own engagement.

As I was leaving the house where the exhibition was taking place, I noticed two women making intricate patterns with the rope and adorning the performer with them.

When I asked them what they were doing, they simply responded: “We’re just trying to give her a pretty headdress; make some jewelry.”

Another performance that caught my eye was Abrar Ahmed’s Untitled. Abrar set up nine slates on raised platforms.

He drew a grid on each one, like a hashtag sign, using colourful chalks, and invited the participants to play a game of goodkata — similar to tic-tac-toe, but played with ticks and crosses instead of zeros and crosses.

At the beginning, the participants played with Abrar, but gradually, the participants began to play by themselves, inviting each other.

Abrar explained to me that he preferred ticks and crosses because he grew up playing with those symbols in his neighbourhood in Lahore.

He wanted to explore how certain supposedly universal signs — specifically, for this performance, the hashtag — are evolving, their historical and semiotic trajectories hybridised by routes of colonialism, capitalism, globalisation, and urbanisation.

The invitation to play with the sign within the performance felt like another attempt to explore the semiotic fluidity of the sign.

In fact, participants intuitively interacted with the hashtags in multiple ways, drawing and mixing different symbols to create their own games. Some used the sign to express famous Twitter slogans like #BLM.

The final game, played with acrylic on a canvas, resulted in ticks and zeros, a curious combination of goodkata and tic-tac-toe: a chance encounter with the syncretism of symbols.

A few days later, Abrar took me to the Taxali Gate in the walled section of Lahore, where he initially performed the piece by painting the hashtag sign on a public wall.

He was interested in the hyperreality of places like the Taxali Gate, curiously located between fact and collective fictions.

The area around Lahore Fort is a place that seems almost unreal, or, we can say, its actual reality matters little when faced with all the fictions attached to it.

I felt that the Taxali Gate itself had disappeared under its own narratives and representations. All that was left — even as I walked around the place itself — was a tourist brochure.

Abrar’s hashtag, conspicuously announcing itself on a public wall, became a co-conspirator in this game of invisibility, highlighting how our contemporary world often privileges a tidy and accessible virtual reality over the complexities of centuries-old cultures.

On our way back, we came across Lahore Fort Food Street. The space has been recently gentrified to attract tourism in the area, with no efforts to confront any of the various economic, political, and social problems afflicting the surrounding communities.

And what did we find at the very entrance of the Food Street? A big hashtag sign, proclaiming #LOVELAHORE, the O’s in love and Lahore substituted with Pepsi’s round logo. Reality, unfortunately, really was disappearing.

People inside the Food Street sat on the rooftops of old havelis, looking around at even older neighbourhoods, concocting fantasies from a safe distance without stepping into the streets.

As I walked, feeling myself part of a modern, developing city, observing neighbourhoods designated as "antique" and "traditional," I was reminded of the colonial juxtaposition between the new, ordered Lawrence Gardens and the old, chaotic areas around Lahore Fort.

It was easy to see in that moment how colonial and patriarchal binaries continue to inform our ideas and policies, interminably repeating their violence.

In December 2016, Shahbaz Sharif declared (as he has many times before and since) that transparency and merit were the hallmarks of his government, and that the Punjab government’s zero tolerance for corruption from the bottom to the top of the administrative hierarchy was producing results.

Certainly, a number of schemes were introduced to ensure that 'corruption' was eliminated across the administrative departments that make up the government of Punjab, most prominently through the use of monitoring and technology (e.g. the use of smart phones and computerisation of records).

In 2017, the chief minister declared that his government’s policies have led to there being "no room for corruption as idols of sifarish, nepotism and corruption have been broken in the province."

However, a problem arises where the CM’s plans for transparency run into electoral realities, particularly politicians’ desire to dispense patronage to voters.

Well aware of this clash, Sharif and his allies developed a method to have their cake and eat it too — they started differentiating between 'good' sifarish and 'bad' sifarish: the latter was to be condemned and dismissed as 'corrupt', but the former was to be catered to with speed and efficiency.

This distinction allowed the government to achieve success in select anti-corruption measures while simultaneously ensuring that some, favoured politicians’ patronage demands were met.

In what follows, I will briefly outline the market for bureaucratic appointments in Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PML-N) Punjab, and then focus on reforms introduced in the name of merit and transparency in teacher appointments in the School Education Department.

By making strategic appointments to key posts within the bureaucratic hierarchy, the CM Secretariat was able to control the implementation of its anti-corruption measures.

As a result, the CM Secretariat empowered a group of politicians and bureaucrats above others, while still maintaining the government’s image as an advocate of merit and transparency.

***

The PML-N is not an ideological party. Its appeal to voters (particularly those in urban areas) lies in the ability of elected party members to 'get things done' — the laying of a sewage line, acquiring an electricity, gas or telephone connection, and, most importantly, getting a voter (or their family member) a job with the government.

Therefore, moves to eliminate corruption and improve transparency may sound wonderful in theory, but in reality, they do not sit well with constituency politicians seeking to dispense patronage amongst voters.

Government jobs, ranging from Class IV posts such as cleaners or watchmen to teaching staff, are particularly in demand as a form of patronage for a couple of reasons.

The first is relative security of tenure and a pension, attractive prospects for anyone looking for some long-term stability for themselves and their family.

And second, government jobs allow the person being posted to exercise a bit of power themselves, particularly if they manage to advance up the bureaucratic hierarchy.

This power may be nothing more than getting a family member or friend an audience with a senior bureaucrat, but the ability to do even this much denotes prestige and access to power within the person’s immediate social circle.

Therefore, the distribution of government jobs by politicians has long been a means of winning votes within communities.

The reality of patronage politics in Punjab outlined here will come as no surprise to any observer of Pakistani politics.

What is of interest is how a government touting its anti-corruption policies (transparency, monitoring, open access to information, etc.) balanced the introduction of these measures with the demands made by politicians of their own party’s administration.

The uniform implementation of anti-corruption measures would close down avenues of patronage, threatening the political economy that exists in constituencies (and by extension, the province as a whole), thus endangering future electoral prospects for not just the Members of Provincial Assembly (MPA) and the Members of National Assembly (MNA), but eventually the party itself.

So, in implementing these measures, the government determined who must conform with anti-corruption policies when it came to distributing government jobs, and who may be exempted from having to do so.

***

During the time that the PML-N felt secure in its political position in Punjab, the provincial government’s implementation of favoured policies, projects, and anti-corruption measures relied on appointing a group of favourite bureaucrats (most of whom belonged to the Pakistan Administrative Service – PAS) to key posts – e.g. departmental secretaries, heads of authorities, and district coordination officers (DCO).

These would typically be officers who had worked closely with the CM or the chief secretary in the past and had a proven record of ‘getting the job done’.

As one example, Fawad Hasan Fawad was such an appointee. When the PML-N formed the government in Punjab in 2008, he was posted as Secretary Services where he was in charge of assembling the team of bureaucrats who would staff senior district posts (DCOs and divisional commissioners) in Punjab.

A few months later, Fawad was appointed Secretary Communication and Works to 'accelerate the pace of work and purge the department of corrupt officials and contractors'.

It is important to note here that the appointment of these bureaucrats by the CM Secretariat (often through the manipulation of regulations on bureaucratic appointments) was not regarded as 'corrupt'.

For example, Fawad Hasan Fawad’s appointments to various Secretary posts (Services, Communication and Works, Health) were made while he was still too junior (in terms of Basic Pay Scale) for these offices. However, no action was taken to prevent this widespread practice.

Instead, appointments that are not strictly in line with the rules — for instance, the hiring of retired bureaucrats on contract basis or the appointment of junior bureaucrats — are justified as discretionary, made to ensure that the government has access to the best officials to carry out its mandate.

Bureaucratic reshuffles that take place after an election is held are a key example — they allow the new government to assemble their own people around them.

In 2013, for instance, the PML-N was on the hunt for "a team of experienced and honest bureaucrats," particularly for the federal government under Nawaz Sharif.

In light of these practices, the feeling amongst the mid-tier and junior bureaucracy I interviewed was that anti-corruption policies that enhanced monitoring and transparency targeted them but left the higher echelons of the bureaucracy — where ‘corruption’ usually involved having a finger in the pie alongside senior politicians — largely untouched.

The PAS’ reaction to Ahad Cheema’s arrest by the National Accountability Bureau over the Ashiyana scam seems to suggest the truth of this perspective. Elite bureaucrats are unused to having their (allegedly 'corrupt') actions investigated.

This attitude is by no means unique to the Cheema case though — in 2015, for instance, the senior bureaucracy resisted attempts to make officers in BPS 20-22 subject to investigations by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

The bureaucrats appointed to key posts in Punjab emulated the CM’s missionary zeal and micro-management within their own departments, and followed the CM Secretariat’s instructions on the implementation of policy.

Mirroring the actions of the CM, the secretary of a department would influence appointments to posts in the department’s secretariat offices and in key districts.

The secretary would be under pressure to ‘deliver’, and, in turn, he would pressure the officials working under him in secretariat offices and in the districts to ensure that targets set by the CM Secretariat were met.

In return, the CM Secretariat protected the secretary from investigations, smoothed the way for him in the implementation of policy, and ensured that, once he ‘delivered’, he moved on to a lucrative new post.

For instance, Ahad Cheema was transferred from the post of DCO Lahore when the legality of his appointment was questioned before the Lahore High Court and was appointed the director general of the Lahore Development Authority and put in charge of the Lahore MetroBus project.

And when Cheema was in charge of the Lahore MetroBus project, the CM took a personal interest in the project, pushed for its speedy completion, ensured that financing (including compensation payments) was swiftly approved, and dealt with questions regarding the project’s transparency quickly and quietly.

The dynamics between bureaucrats and the CM Secretariat allowed the former (and through him the CM Secretariat) to shape the behaviour of bureaucrats throughout the department’s hierarchy, thereby ensuring that the work of the department was transparent and merit-based, but only to the extent desired by the CM Secretariat.

***

When the PML-N formed the government in Punjab in 2013, the government implemented policies that regulated the recruitment and transfer of frontline staff — teachers — in the School Education Department.

Rather than allowing politicians to influence the recruitment or transfer of teaching staff for personal or electoral gains, the department decided to improve the recruitment process by computerising merit lists and displaying them publicly for candidates to check them.

In addition, the department decided to control teacher transfers by imposing a ban on all transfers during the academic year. Transfers would only be permitted during department announced transfer windows, and teachers would have to apply for a transfer by identifying an appropriate vacant post.

In my observations of bureaucrats at work in the School Education Department, however, it soon became evident that, for all the claims of merit and transparency in teacher appointments, the reality was much more mixed.

In theory, bureaucrats in the department were not permitted to entertain politicians’ requests (made either in person, on the telephone, or through parchis attached to an application form) asking them to expedite an application, to give an applicant a few extra points on his interview, or just give the applicant a job or transfer.

But, in fact, bureaucrats’ responses to sifarish varied, as per the instructions of the department secretary.

The department secretary at the time had a reputation amongst his colleagues for resisting political pressure, a function of his close ties to the CM Secretariat from a previous posting as DCO Kasur.

This connection between the CM Secretariat and the secretary of the School Education Department was critical to the regulated implementation of anti-corruption measures in the appointment of teachers.

Certainly, bureaucrats in the department offered no hope to ordinary citizens asking for jobs and teachers asking for transfers, stating that there was a policy that had to be followed, that the secretary would not bend, that things had changed as per the CM’s emphasis on merit and transparency in appointments.

A few people were given the courtesy that bureaucrats hung on to their parchis till after they had left the office, as if they really meant to at least think on their sifarish.

These applicants were junior bureaucrats or applicants whose sifarish came from politicians that bureaucrats considered insignificant to the CM Secretariat.

As soon as the door closed behind these people, the slips of paper joined the rest of the parchis on the floor under the bureaucrat’s desk.

But I observed a third category first hand — those with a sifarish from a prominent politician or bureaucrat — caused the official to sit up straight and immediately summon a member of his office staff to usher the person, parchi in hand, to the office of the secretary down the hall.

No questions or reassurances were necessary — this was a sifarish that would be fulfilled regardless of merit and transparency.

Such variations in bureaucratic behaviour came as no surprise to opposition MPAs and MNAs, nor to ruling party MNAs and MPAs, who did not have a close association with the PML-N leadership.

They were well aware that their demands for teaching jobs or transfers for their voters were not considered sufficiently pressing by the CM Secretariat and would therefore not be accommodated by officials in the School Education Department.

Their discontent sometimes arose in the form of complaints to the press regarding the CM’s disinterest in his own party’s politicians’ electoral needs, or privilege motions in the Punjab Assembly regarding bureaucratic high-handedness.

In 2017, for instance, an MPA complained through a privilege motion that the regional manager of Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Ltd in Sargodha had made him wait for an hour despite not being busy, and then responded rudely to the MPA’s queries about public works.

In another case, an MPA complained about the behaviour of a superintendent in the Communications and Works Department through a privilege motion, claiming that the officer had refused to act in accordance with the law and had said that he would not follow the law because "it has been created by those without any shame."

In both cases, the bureaucrats had to present themselves in front of the Committee on Privileges and apologise to the MPA.

Though privilege motions allow politicians to impress their dignity and position on bureaucrats by dragging them in front of the committee, and press interviews allow them an avenue to vent their grievances, the politicians I spoke to were nonetheless well aware that any sifarish they made would be subject to the rules set by the CM Secretariat.

While a sifarish from an ordinary citizen, or someone not close to the CM could be ignored, a sifarish from someone in the CM’s inner circle would be catered to immediately.

***

The sheer volume of appointments that go through the School Education Department’s bureaucrats (with over 400,000 employees across the province and teaching posts in such high demand) make the distinctions drawn between different kinds of sifarish particularly visible.

However, these distinctions were not unique to the School Education department — similar practices prevailed in the Higher Education Department, and likely in others as well.

They allowed the CM Secretariat and its chosen bureaucrats to maintain the veneer of reform, touting merit and transparency as its hallmarks, while consolidating power in the hands of the CM and his closest political and bureaucratic allies.

Those with access to the CM were still able to dispense patronage at will, meaning that teacher appointments continued to be politicised.

But the exclusion of ordinary citizens and some politicians and bureaucrats from government largesse allowed the CM Secretariat to claim that the government’s anti-corruption measures were producing results.

As the Punjab government became more and more centralised, entwining the party’s leadership with a small coterie of politicians and a cadre of politicised bureaucrats, excluded politicians had to either seek alternative means of satisfying their voters or convince the CM to compromise his anti-corruption measures in order to accommodate electoral realities.

Luckily for the ruling party politicians at least, political realities change and the party leaders’ priorities change with them.

With the 2018 election approaching, and the party facing a leadership crisis, the electoral calculus shifted.

Though the CM continues to advocate for merit and transparency, the PML-N government can no longer afford to ignore its politicians.

Are you a researcher or policy advocate working on government reforms? Share your insights with us at blog@dawn.com

"Why weren’t the Muslim rubabi protected? They held such high status in Sikhism? Why were they allowed to leave East Punjab at the time of Partition?" I asked.

The question was directed at Ghulam Hussain. I was in his home, deep within the older part of Lahore, close to the shrine of Data Darbar, the city’s patron saint.

Dressed in a white shalwar kameez and maroon waistcoat, a white scarf tied around his neck, the octogenarian had only recently recovered from what had become for him a recurring sickness. He had nevertheless agreed to my request for an interview.

Behind him, the walls and cupboard were adorned with symbols of the Sikh religion — a picture of a kirpan, the Golden Temple — and numerous awards he had received from Sikh organisations over the years.

Along with them were a few Islamic symbols, including a poster with a verse from the Quran. It was February of 2014 when I met Hussain. He died in April the following year, and this was possibly his last interview.

I had searched for Ghulam Hussain for a few years, having heard that he was a descendant of Bhai Mardana, Guru Nanak’s Muslim rubabi.

Bhai Mardana played an important role in the development of the Sikh religion. Not only did he accompany Guru Nanak on his travels, he also played the rubab while Nanak sang his divinely inspired poetry.

Since their time, Muslim rubabi had been given the responsibility of performing the kirtan at gurdwaras — till the tradition was abruptly disrupted during Partition.

From kirtan to qawwali

"Everyone was only concerned about their own selves at the time," Hussain recalled.

"We were Muslims, therefore we had to leave. It did not matter if we were rubabi. What mattered was our Muslim identity. That became our only identity. In fact, a couple of our rubabi even lost their lives during the riots. My father-in-law, Bhai Moti, was one of them. He used to play tabla at a gurdwara in Patiala. Another rubabi who used to perform at Guru Amardas' gurdwara at Goindwal was also killed."

He continued, "My chacha, Bhai Chand, was a rubabi at the Golden Temple. He had three houses in Amritsar, all of which were three storeys high. He was a millionaire at that time. He used to live in Bhaiyyon ki gali, named after the rubabi family. He became a pauper in Pakistan."

Elaborating on his Sikh heritage, Hussain said his family’s ancestral gurdwara was Siyachal Sahib, which lies between Lahore and Amritsar. His father was a gyani — one who leads the congregation in prayer — who also gave lectures on Sikhism.

"My father was the gadi nasheen of the rubabi seat there, which meant I would have taken over his position eventually," he added.

But Partition changed all that.

"Not only did we lose our money, we also lost our profession," Hussain said. "While we knew the [Guru] Granth by heart, we knew nothing about being Muslim, besides the kalma. The Muslims had no interest in our profession. Thus, we began doing odd jobs — selling samosa, kheer, meat."

However, Hussain soon found a second calling in qawwali, after receiving an invitation to a performan at a local cultural organisation called Nizami Art Society.

"At one of these meetings, not many years after Partition, I was invited to perform qawwali," Hussain said.

"In those early days, I struggled because my Urdu pronunciation was weak. I couldn’t even read the script, having been trained in Gurmukhi. However, I practised and gradually mastered singing in Urdu. My financial condition also began improving."

I asked him, "How similar or different are these two traditions, of kirtan and qawwali?"

He answered, "There is an old Punjabi saying — a hundred wise men sitting together will end up saying the same thing, while in a group of a hundred fools each one will say a different thing. Bulleh Shah reiterated what Nanak said. Guru Arjan’s and Sultan Bahu’s message is the same as that of Shah Hussain. Their kalam overlaps. In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that Guru Nanak expounded the Quran. Thus, to answer your question, qawwali and kirtan are part of the same tradition."

In 2005, Ghulam Hussain finally got the opportunity to visit the Golden Temple, with which his family has deep ties. —AFP

A dying connection

But not everyone shares his view of syncretism.

Hussain’s son, sitting quietly with us as the interview progressed, suddenly jumped into the conversation.

"A few Sikhs say Mardana was nothing but a funny character in Nanak’s Janamsakhis, who was always either hungry or thirsty," he said. "I would choose to disagree. It was Mardana who brought out the divinity of Nanak. It was for Mardana that Nanak turned sweet the bitter fruit of a Kekkar tree."

Hussain had a personal story of his own about Mardana’s importance in the history of Sikhism. "Once, before Partition, my father was at Gurdwara Panja Sahib in Hassanabdal," he said.

"He was in the sacred pool taking dips when one Sikh got offended and complained to the office. He accused my father of polluting the water. My father was summoned to the office. When questioned why he had taken a dip in the water, he asked the official, 'Who did Nanak create this pool for? To quench Mardana’s thirst. This is, therefore, Mardana’s pool and I being a rubabi am his descendant. Now let me ask this question, who are you to claim ownership over this pool?'"

He let out a loud chuckle at the end of this story, but quickly became serious as he spoke of his visit to India and to the Golden Temple in 2005 — for the first time after Partition. "I wanted to perform at the Golden Temple," he said.

"My family had performed there for seven generations. We are the descendants of Bhai Sadha and Madha, who were appointed at the Golden Temple by Guru Tegh Bahadur. Such was our honour that we used to receive a share from the offerings at the shrine, which was then equally distributed among all the rubabi families. Throughout Sikh history, the rubabis have displayed their loyalty to the gurus. It was Bhai Bavak, a rubabi with Guru Hargobind, who rescued his daughter, Bibi Veera, from the Turks, when no other Sikh dared cross into their territory."

But Hussain’s wish to perform at the gurdwara was not to be fulfilled.

"Our family has a deep connection with the Golden Temple but now it has become extremely difficult for a rubabi to perform kirtan there. The officials there told me only Amritdhari could perform there," he said, referring to Sikhs who have been initiated or baptised by taking amrit or "nectar water".

He added, "I wanted to tell those officials that my ancestors had been performing kirtan here before Gobind Rai became Guru Gobind Singh. There is no tradition of any rubabi ever converting out of Islam. When the gurus never asked us to become Sikhs, then what right did these officials have?"

The article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

Last Tuesday, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) sentenced additional district and sessions judge Raja Khurram Ali Khan and his wife Maheen Zafar to one year in prison for neglecting their 10-year-old maid, Tayyaba.

The case had sparked outrage in December 2016, as it brought to further light the rampant but often ignored illegal practice of child labour abuse.

At one point, the Supreme Court had to intervene suo motu to set aside the convicts’ compromise with the accused.

The IHC held that the evidence exhibited beyond a shadow of a doubt that under Section 328-A of the Pakistan Penal Code, the convicts "neglected and/ or willfully harmed and abandoned Mst. Tayyaba Bibi which resulted in harm to her or had the potential of causing harm."

The IHC did not find sufficient evidence to convict on other charges (wrongful confinement, criminal intimidation, shajjah-i-khafifah and damihah etc; classifications of physical harm, or hurt, defined by the Pakistan Penal Code).

It can be reasonably inferred that the convicts were convicted under Section 328-A due to the specific crime requiring a lower threshold of culpability.

What the law says

A reading of the section demonstrates that an accused’s act of omission, which has the potential to injure a child by causing psychological injury, may be punishable by imprisonment.

Within a few hours of the verdict, however, the IHC accepted the convicts’ application to suspend their sentences and granted them post-conviction bail against surety bonds of Rs50,000.

The accused were given seven days to appeal the verdict. During the seven days, the accused were released on bail, not in jail and were free to roam in public with no restrictions.

Today, the division bench of the IHC suspended the IHC's one-year sentence, and adjourned the next date of hearing till the second week of May.

The appellate bench’s rationale for suspending the original IHC verdict is not yet clear. Questions remain unanswered.

However, the whole matter highlights an unnoticed disturbing fact: courts granting bail after conviction in potential matters of public safety.

Section 426 (2-A) of the Pakistan Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) empowers a court to exercise its discretion to suspend a convict’s sentence under certain circumstances pending appeal, while allowing a convict to be released on bail.

The period during which a convict’s sentence is suspended and the convict is released on bail is excluded from the total period of sentence the convict has to eventually undergo.

Recognising convicts on bail as a risk to society

The legal remedy of bail pending appeal after conviction is not exclusive to Pakistan. It is a well-recognised doctrine throughout the world.

Since the defendant's conviction rebuts the prior presumption of innocence, the defendant bears the difficult burden of convincing a court to grant an appeal bond after conviction. Courts throughout the world are careful in entertaining such bail applications.

For example, under the United States federal criminal law, a defendant’s eligibility for bail after conviction depends on whether the defendant poses a flight risk, a safety concern and/or whether the defendant’s appeal raises substantial questions that offer the prospect of success.

US federal courts have held that no right to bail exists where charges against a defendant indicate a strong threat to society and where a defendant poses a threat to a key witness.¹

Individual states within the US, which have their own laws, often prohibit bail after convictions for certain serious offences, which include child abuse or neglect.²

English jurisprudence is similar to the extent that bail is only granted in exceptional circumstances, such as where the merits of the case are overwhelming (e.g., good past behaviour, strength of case on appeal) or where the applicant will otherwise have served his sentence before the appeal can be heard.

In Pakistan, the model is somewhat similar. Interpreting Section 426 of the CrPC (except for 1-A), the SC has held that bail pending appeal is not allowed unless it is shown that the conviction was based on no evidence, based on inadmissible evidence or that it is ultimately not sustainable.³

A court examining suspension of sentence/bail application is only required to tentatively assess the evidence, as the court is not deciding the innocence or guilt of the convict.

Therefore, an appellate court through a cursory glance ascertains whether there exist strong grounds for suspension of judgment.

High courts have granted bail after convictions in certain fact-patterns that showcase glaring errors on the surface (e.g., appeal not disposed of even after expiry of three years,⁴ glaring contradiction in trial record as to arrest,⁵ accused having gone through significant portion of sentence,⁶ no overt act attributed to accused in the First Information Report⁷ and prosecution suppressing evidence).⁸

How gaps in the law leave victims vulnerable

Interestingly, there is no real jurisprudence in Pakistan on a convict’s bail being linked with safety risk, threat to the society or threat to victims or witnesses.

In 1999, the SC, without getting into the merits of a convict’s case, granted bail on the basis that the convict’s sentence, which was increased from three to five years, was fit for exercising discretion of bail in favour of the convict.⁹

Although the SC did not address it, the fact that the convict was convicted for criminal breach of trust (as opposed to a more heinous crime) may have played a part in the granting of bail without getting into the merits of the case.

In light of the above and otherwise, high courts within Pakistan have exercised suspension of sentences/bail application on a liberal basis where original sentences are short.

High courts have cited the aforementioned SC judgment to suspend various kinds of short sentences that span up to five years (e.g., mischief, carrying unlicensed firearms & bribery) whereby the hearing of the appeal would take some time.¹⁰

While the rhetoric on the surface is sound (i.e., short sentences are related to crimes of a less heinous nature), it is not entirely applicable towards the Tayyaba case.

The judge and his wife were sentenced to a short term imprisonment (i.e., one year) and reportedly have no criminal history. Their appeal was theoretically accepted by the division bench due to flaws apparent on the surface in the original IHC verdict.

However, the notion that persons convicted of a crime of neglect against a minor child under their care are roaming free, and that too on the submission of a paltry surety bond of Rs50,000 each is concerning.

With the acceptance of bail, the victim and her family may be exposed to potential threats by the convicts.

This is especially in light of the fact that the apex court in 2017 set aside a coerced compromise agreement between the victim and the accused, along with the chief justice of the SC insisting that there was no doubt that a criminal act had been committed.

Furthermore, since the appeal has now been entertained within seven days, it could not have been argued that bail last week was granted due to an uncertain time-frame for the appeal.

Courts, in deciding whether to suspend a sentence and to grant an appeal bond, must take into account various factors.

This includes the exact nature of the crime, whether there is a substantial risk that the convict will pose a danger to others in the community, whether there is a substantial risk the convict will intimidate the victims/witnesses and whether it appears that the appeal is filed only for the purpose of causing delay.

Pakistani law has not developed jurisprudence focused on convicts/accused being required to prove and establish that they do not pose a substantial risk of harm and safety to the public and/or the victims.

Instead, a suspension of sentence/grant of bail is based primarily on the merits of the convict’s case, the time-frame of appeal and a de facto statutory reading of the term of sentence.

Such standards of law, while beneficial, do not address the underlying adverse consequences of post-conviction bail, as showcased by the Tayyaba case.

For now, the victim, through the operation of law, stands potentially vulnerable in more ways than one.

¹Bail, 45 Geo. L.J. Ann. Rev. Crim. Proc. 383, 407 (2016)

²§ 31:3. Release pending appeal, Tn. Criminal Trial Practice § 31:3 (2017-2018 ed.)

³2007 SCMR 246, Supreme Court of Pakistan (Javed Hashmi v. the State)

⁴1999 MLD 351

⁵1991 P Cr. L.J. 1352

⁶2006 YLR1211

⁷PLD 2008 Lah. 306

⁸2006 P.Cr. L.J. 749

⁹1999 SCMR 2589, Supreme Court of Pakistan (Abdul Hameed v. Muhammad Abdullah)

¹⁰2005 PCr. LJ 657, Sindh High Court, Karachi (Nazeer Ahmed v. State), 2017 YLR Note 241, Sindh High Court and 2016 YLR 2600, Sindh High Court

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Just as I’m about to enter Shah Hussain’s 16th-century shrine in Baghbanpura, Lahore, I scan for a lone tomb to offer a prayer, only to find a pair next to each other — one of Shah Hussain and one of Madhu Laal — and both marked with a single emblem reading, "Sakhi Sarkar Madhu Laal Hussain."

Baffled at the sight, I had to halt and contemplate over this rather odd finding, reminiscing about Shah Hussain’s own words on the trials of love and separation:

Man atkeya beparwah de nal
Us deen duni de shah de nal

My soul is entangled with the indifferent one
Lord of all things visible and invisible

For many, these words denote one’s infatuation with God, but on a second thought, I think about how these verses might have been a double entendre, encapsulating the love of two human beings, Madhu Laal and Shah Hussain.

The two conflicting personalities, both socially and economically, later combined into one singular being, defying all social statures and norms — Madhu Laal Hussain.

In another instance, I hear some familiar verses being sung from a distance:

Maye ni main kinnu aakhan
Dard vichoray da haal ni
Dukhan di roti, soolan da saalan
Aahein da baalan baal ni
Jungle belay phirann dhoondandi
Ajjey na payonn laal ni

Oh my Mother, whom shall I tell my torments of separation?
Bread of despair, with a curry of thorns
Kindles a fire of cries in me
I have wandered forests and deserts
But not found that ruby stone [the Beloved]

Lamenting his mother's early demise and the separation in meticulously chosen words is not a task undertaken by some ordinary man.

These are the heart-wrenching texts of Shah Hussain, who neither belonged to a direct lineage of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) nor a wealthy merchant household, but to a low caste Muslim weaver family.

He was endowed with two highly proclaimed names in Islam, Shah and Hussain — Shah referring to a ruler, and Hussain, to the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, but these "given" names had little significance for the poet himself. He preferred to be called a fakir — shunning all worldly possessions.

Kahe Hussain faqeer numanha, theewan khaak daware di

Says Hussain the worthless fakir, I am the dust on your doorstep

After spending years learning the teachings of the Holy Quran and what his sheikh would refer to as the "true path" towards salvation, Shah Hussain was quick to realise that mere rituals do not reveal the true essence of God.

Attaining a state of ecstasy was a lifelong pursuit of the Divine truth and could not be salvaged through a mullah’s orthodoxy. In his own words, he once said:

Qazi mullah matti dainde, kharay siyyane rah dasende, ishq kee lagay rah de nal

Judges and clerics are full of advice, the righteous and wise show you the path, but love itself needs no guidance

Shah Hussain’s life took a turn when he came across a Brahmin Hindu boy, Madhu Laal, riding a horse from Shahdara, across the river Ravi. Shah Hussain followed the boy back to his town, overwhelmed by the feeling of love and enchantment. The locals started to refer them both as one entity.

The bond between the two went so deep that Shah Hussain put his name after his beloved's, becoming Madhu Laal Hussain. Beyond the personal bonding of the two, Shah Hussain's union with Madhu was a metaphor for the people's unity in South Asia — negating all religious and social institutions through their mode of life.

Devotees come from all backgrounds — wanting a break from the woes of life. —Photo by author

Shah Hussain spent the second half of his life under Akbar’s rule, during which, the Mughal capital was moved to Lahore (1584-1599). According to historical accounts, Prince Saleem, who later ruled under the name of Jahangir, ordered one of his officials to write a diary of whatever Shah Hussain did or said every day.

Some argue this was done due to reverence while others claim that it was to keep an eye on him because of Hussain’s large following and outright denial of religious orthodoxy.

Today, the death anniversary (urs) of Hazrat Madhu Laal Hussain is celebrated with full fervour at his shrine, adjacent to the Shalimar Gardens.

A dervish performing dhamaal to the dhol beat. —Photo by author

The urs and the mela (festival) were two separate events, one carried out at the shrine and the other in the Shalimar Gardens, until they were both combined into one, Mela Chiraghan (Festival of Lamps), by Ranjit Singh.

The spring mela, revered by the Hindus, and the urs, celebrated by the Muslims, signified union and harmony among the two faiths when combined into one celebration — remembering the bond of Shah Hussain and Madhu Laal.

The shrine is marked by a massive "fire well" which is lit throughout the urs by the devotees using wax, oil, wood and cotton. Visitors mark their presence by adding to the already lit fire or by igniting cotton lamps decorated all over the shrine complex.

The Mela is a time to taste some of Lahore’s finest local sweets, including jalebi and qatlama. —Photo by author

The massive fire from the well keeps most of the devotees at a distance except for the few devout dervishes that perform dhamaal next to it. The dervishes refer to the fire of devotion ignited in their hearts by the sufi saint that shields their inner self from the exterior distractions, the literal fire.

The festival, much like the fire, has been a continuous affair for centuries. During Ranjit Singh’s rule in 18th century, the emperor would lead a procession from his palace to the shrine barefoot, accompanied by thousands of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus.

Held on March 24 this year, Mela Chiraghan is still regarded as the biggest festival of Punjab, both east and west, and has been a symbol of love, devotion, harmony and defiance of social customs.

The ground adjacent to the shrine is divided into different sections during the Mela. Each section has a langar (community kitchen) and some form of charaagh — be it large wooden logs or smaller candles. —Photo by author

Even though the Mela holds immense significance for Lahoris, the teachings of Madhu Laal Hussain continue to spread throughout South Asia, especially over the last four decades through the saint’s kafi form of Punjabi poetry, featuring four to five stanzas.

These kafis have been popularised by a diverse set of musicians, including Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Hamid Ali Bela, Noor Jehan and Junoon.

Recalling the story of these two lovers at their shrine, I start to realise the immense significance of this revered sufi. His poetry on love and devotion speaks to millions, but what about the relationship between Shah Hussain and Madhu Laal?

This section of the shrine had qawwali playing all night — a break from the hypnotising beats of the dhol. —Photo by author

Since Partition, the religious plurality of the two has become a far-fetched idea in Pakistan today, something deemed too elusive at a time when Islam in Pakistan is not only at crossroads within itself, but in conflict with monotheism in South Asia as well.

Apart from learning devotion and losing of "self" to attain a path towards God, Madhu Laal Hussain, shows us that, perhaps, Muslims and Hindus can live — and thrive — in complete harmony, as they have for many centuries.

Have you experienced places or events of religious or cultural significance? Share your experience with us at blog@dawn.com

As I entered the samadhi of Sir Ganga Ram in Lahore, I took out my phone to photograph the small yellow, domed structure standing on one side of a vast enclosure.

I managed to sneak in a couple of photographs before a middle-aged man jumped up from his chair under the shade of a tree near the building, wagged his finger, and asked me to stop.

He was a government official posted here to look after the memorial where the ashes of the philanthropist who designed and built several of Lahore’s landmarks are interred.

Indeed, his tenure as the executive engineer of Lahore towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, is now referred to as the "Ganga Ram architectural period".

Traveling around Pakistan, I have become accustomed to the attitude of government officials at historical structures. I have often been barred from photographing these buildings.

Sometimes, the officials relent when I tell them I need the photographs for a journalistic assignment, but even that does not always work.

The samadhi of Ganga Ram. —Haroon Khalid

This official was adamant. He told me to go to the office of the Evacuee Trust Property Board, the department responsible for looking after the abandoned properties of non-Muslims in Pakistan, including temples and gurdwaras, and return with permission to take photographs. I did not do so as I already had a few pictures of the samadhi from one of my earlier visits.

But I continue to be baffled by the government’s policy of not allowing people to photograph some historical structures that it is in charge of.

An old man who lives in a hut behind the samadhi, within its enclosure, walked up to me and gave me a guided a tour. He told me how the entire enclosure had been encroached upon.

It had housed several refugees of Partition till the 1980s, when the government decided to take charge and renovate the structure. Only one house was permitted — that of the old man, as he was given the responsibility of guarding the building.

He told me how, in the name of renovation, a pool that was constructed along with the samadhi, was also filled with earth, becoming the courtyard upon which we now stood. The walls outside were painted, while marble was laid on the floor and on the building’s interior walls.

The samadhi stood at the centre of a hall. It was a little platform tiled with marble, one side of which bore a brief history of Ganga Ram, along with his photograph in which he wore a suit and a hat. He died in London in 1927.

A city transformed

Lahore, in the middle of the 19th century, was not the city we know today. For almost half a century it had served as the political capital of the Khalsa empire, but it was far from the provincial capital it was under the Mughals.

Its dilapidated Mughal mausoleums and remains of the vast Mughal gardens that were unkempt and encroached upon reflected a lost glory.

Under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Lahore’s neighbouring city, Amritsar, had emerged as the economic hub of the empire. In the first comprehensive census of British India in 1881, the population of Lahore was 149,000 compared to 152,000 of Amritsar.

The city transformed under the colonial state that used it as a symbol of its imperial power. A narrative was crafted, of a city rising from the ashes of its Mughal past. After the turn of the century, Lahore became one of the largest cities of the Indian subcontinent.

It became a city of migrants. According to the 1911 census, 46.3 percent of its residents were those who were not born in the district.

Ganga Ram and Lahore

In many ways, the story of Ganga Ram is the story of Lahore, a city that he helped transform into the symbol of the colonial state. He too was a migrant who, after acquiring a degree in engineering, migrated to the city for better economic opportunities.

This is a time when the colonial state, in the aftermath of the war of 1857, was redefining itself. The British increasingly began appropriating indigenous Indian symbols of authority to present continuity between former empires of India and the new British Empire.

Architecture played a pivotal role in this depiction, and led to the emergence of the Indo- Saracenic tradition. In this architectural approach, an effort was made by the colonial state to incorporate traditional structural techniques with colonial architecture.

The Archbishop of Canterbury (second from right), the most senior bishop of the Church of England, and others at the Anglican cathedral in Lahore in 2014. —Reuters

This was a conscious effort to depict British symbols of authority in traditional visual forms for the local populace to marvel at.

Architecture was a powerful propaganda tool at the hands of the colonial state.

Lahore, along with other major cities of British India, served as the canvas upon which this narrative was painted.

The Lahore High Court, the museum, Post Office Building, Aitchison College, the Anglican Cathedral, and National College of Arts are a few of the several examples constructed following this hybrid tradition.

In these structures, balconies, columns and watchtowers, interact with domes, chattris (canopies), arches and screens.

In Lahore, all of these iconic structures were raised by Ganga Ram. Working with the colonial state, he transformed the landscape of the city to reflect the glory of this new empire.

A new city, even more glorious than the former, had been raised from the debris of its Mughal past. Lahore had a new master and its architecture was a testimony to this fact.

In many ways, the Lahore of today is a continuation of this colonial city. It continues to serve as a symbol of the state. Its Metro Bus and now the Orange Line projects are meant to be stamps of authority.

Ganga Ram helped build this narrative. He transformed the city into a proverb that it continues to be. The Lahore of today owes much more to Ganga Ram than it would care to admit.

The article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

Since the restoration of democracy in 2008, Pakistan has witnessed extensive constitutional and economic reforms, the main ones being the 18th Amendment, National Financial Commission (NFC) 2010, Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), Kisaan Package and of course the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

While the 18th Amendment and the BISP were feathers in the Pakistan People’s Party’s cap despite their turbulent five years in government from 2008-13, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz has never shied from brandishing their credentials when it comes to megaprojects.

As the outgoing government presents its budget on April 27, 2018, it’s pertinent to survey Pakistan’s economic performance in the last 10 years and see some of the most persistent trends in the country’s economy, no matter the party in charge.

This is part 1 of a two-part series looking back at the last 10 years of Pakistan's economic performance. Read part 2 here.

Rising debt

Domestic debt increased by five times and external debt by 1.4 times in between 2009 and 2018

Servicing of debt is an overarching theme of the Pakistani economy. Despite the government’s self-congratulatory claims, the fact remains that the entire paradigm of economic development continues to be underpinned by debts and subsidies.

CPEC is very much going to perpetuate the paradigm, as well as the defence budget, which weighs heavily as ever on the public exchequer.

Rigid tax structure

Pakistan’s taxation system continues to be rigid and reliant on indirect taxes. The ratio of direct versus indirect taxes remained around 38:62 in last 10 years.

Of those direct taxes, more than 60 percent are collected as withholding taxes, which are easy to collect and monitor and therefore betray government inaction when it comes to diversifying the tax net.

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar has been generous in relaxing the tax rate for direct taxation. While corporate tax rates and salaried tax rate were reduced, and exemption limits were raised at the same time, indirect taxes were increased. Most indirect taxes were added to the goods and services with inelastic demands such as electricity and gas.

The main issue with indirect taxes is that they lead to higher inflation as they are added to the cost of a product.

One of Dar's most contentious decisions was the imposition of withholding tax on withdrawal of cash from bank accounts. It led to a crisis of deposits and the percentage of total deposits declined from 27.6 to 25 percent right after it was introduced.

As for the provinces, the service sector makes up around 55 percent of the economy. With the General Sales Tax (GST) devolved to the provinces after the 18th Amendment, taxation on services had increased scope. Unsurprisingly, GST on services constitutes major chunk of provincial revenue.

But with majority of tax revenue dependent on a single source, the provinces are not making significant effort to reform and expand the tax net.

The tax mix of the provinces shows an overriding reliance on indirect taxes, which leads to inflation, and the same is likely to continue in future.

Agriculture tax can be one of the most significant sources of tax revenue for the provinces, but remains untapped — as it has been since the Government of India Act of both 1919 and 1935.

In fact, the agriculture sector is heavily subsidised and more so when the PPP comes to power, which helps the landed elite. The subsidies are 20-25 times higher than the income tax collected from this sector.

Trade and deficit

Pakistan’s exports are constrained by product and market non-diversification. 60-70 percent of the country's exports come from a handful of products. With the passage of time, Pakistani products have also lost their competitiveness.

Pakistan was in a serious balance of payments crisis in 2009 when the current account deficit was as high as 5.5 percent of GDP.

But the PML-N was fortunate to get Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus status in 2013 and managed to bring down the trade and current account deficits.

Agriculture sector and policies

During the PPP government, the price of wheat doubled due to its insistence on increasing the support price for wheat. This resulted in overall food inflation and increased hardship for the poorer segments of the society.

Support price is an incentive given to producers or growers that the government guarantees to purchase their output at a price set by the state.

The PML-N, on the other hand, did not allow the level of support price to fluctuate. It also directed the subsidies to tubewells, electricity, fertilisers, seeds, etc.

In September 2015, the prime minister announced the Kisaan Package worth Rs341 billion, which included benefits in terms of tax reduction on agriculture machinery from 45 percent to nine percent, reduction in sales tax from 17 percent to seven percent on cold chain machinery, tax holidays and mark up-free loans for farmers with less than 12.5 acres of land holding.

Due to input subsidies instead of support price subsidies, the PML-N managed to control food price inflation. Nonetheless, the overall structure of agriculture subsidies in Pakistan is inefficient and does not work to reduce inequality and support poor farmers.

Subsidies are based on number of units consumed, which implies marginal piece of the pie for small farmers, as their consumption of electricity, fertilisers and seeds is very little.

Large farmers, on the other hand, use more fertilisers, tubewells, electricity and machinery imports and therefore enjoy larger subsidies.

As the outgoing government presents its budget today, it’s pertinent to survey Pakistan’s economic performance in the last 10 years and see some of the most persistent trends in the country’s economy, no matter the party in charge.

This piece concludes a two-part series looking back at the last 10 years of Pakistan's economic performance. Read part 1 here.

Subsidies

The power sector continued to enjoy heavy subsidies throughout the tenures of both the PPP and the PML-N. This was by far the most subsidised sector of all, receiving 96 percent of total subsidies provided by the government at one point.

Given the pattern, it is unlikely that the support to the power sector will waver any time soon. Fewer funds, therefore, would be available for other areas.

Restructuring the National Finance Commission

In 2010, the PPP government brought landmark changes to the NFC award in order to address grievances and the pervading sense of deprivation among the smaller provinces of Pakistan.

The most important move in this direction was the structural shift towards multiple criteria of distribution of finances, rather than just population alone, which formed the basis of previous awards.

Poverty, area, and revenue collection and generation were added to the mix, which benefits provinces other than Punjab.

Punjab’s share will further decline after the results of the 2017 census, while funds for the other provinces will increase further.

However, provinces are not bound to allocate money for social welfare programmes. Even though poverty is one criteria of distribution of the NFC award, social welfare expenditures by the provinces have been unimpressive.

Karachi continues to be a contentious point. Despite being the biggest contributor to taxes at both the provincial and federal level, as well as the country's most populous city, Karachi’s share in allocated funds is negligible, which does little to ease political, social and ethnic tensions in the metropolis.

Welfare and safety nets

In 2009, the PPP government announced a well-acknowledged framework of social welfare for the country’s poor in the form of the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP).

Initially a monthly cash grant of Rs1,000, the amount given out under the programme was increased in subsequent budgets to Rs1,200 and then Rs1,500.

The system of payments has been computerised and transactions are facilitated through the BISP card, which works just like an ATM card.

Though the BISP should remain in place, it has a few loose ends that need to be tied up.

For one, the BISP has no graduation strategy. A beneficiary in 2009 is still a beneficiary today, likely to be one in 2030, and will remain in poverty.

This is because the grants are inadequate if we are to lift its beneficiaries out of poverty. The main reason is that the grants are worth less and less every year because they do not keep pace with inflation.

Continuous resource allocation for the same person for years on end also constrains the government’s ability to widen the scope of the grant for others. This calls for an objective reconsideration of the programme.

For example, the transfers under the BISP are unconditional at the moment but, in future, they can easily be linked with some conditions such as health vaccination from government hospitals and sending children to government schools, as is the case with a social programme in Mexico called PROGRESA.

The recent notification from Careem to its customers regarding the hacking of its database of users and Captains raises various concerns about how much we can trust technology companies with our critical personal information, and what the next steps should be.

Careem is a ride-hailing mobile phone app that makes moving around urban areas convenient in cars owned and often driven by contractors or individuals that share the profit with the company. The company is based in Dubai, UAE and was founded by two former McKinsey consultants, one of whom is Pakistani.

In order to register as a Captain or a customer of Careem, one has to share details such as full name, telephone number, email address, and by virtue of using the app, addresses of all the locations one frequents regularly. The application also supports adding a credit card as an alternative to cash payments.

On April 23, 2018, Careem in an "Important security announcement" via email and its website informed customers that "on January 14th of this year, we became aware that online criminals gained access to our computer systems which hold customer and Captain account data".

The hack affected user data of over 14 million users and 558,880 Captains in the 13 countries and 90 cities that Careem operates in.

According to Careem’s announcement, the data acquired by hackers includes names, email addresses, phone numbers and trip data of customers.

They have stated that credit card information on the app is secured by "an external third-party PCI-compliant server" that "uses highly secure protocols".

Perhaps similar protocols should be implemented for the rest of the data at Careem as well.

Cyber security

Careem acknowledged in its announcement that no company is completely immune from cyber attacks, and that is true as far as the evolving nature of technology that enables these attacks is concerned.

It is, however, concerning that Careem announced this data hack more than three months after it had been intercepted, apparently because the company "wanted to make sure they are providing the most accurate information before notifying people."

But the company has provided very little specific information other than the type of data that was breached and when it happened.

Perhaps Careem had learnt from the backlash its rival Uber faced last year after it was exposed for hiding a breach of data of over 57 million users and drivers and paying hackers $100,000 to delete data and to keep silent about it. The Chief Security Officer of the company was also fired.

Careem only asked customers to reset passwords, monitor their credit card activity, and not click on links in emails they do not recognise three months later.

This is key advice that the company should have given their customers as soon as they discovered the hack.

The risk the company put its customers through during this time merits scrutiny and calls for corporate accountability.

Why is data important?

Data is now being tipped as “the new gold”, as companies pay millions to acquire it from those that have access to it.

It is data that forms the backbone of the most profitable companies in the world such as Facebook and Google which rely on analysis of users' personal data that companies then use to target advertisements.

The hackers who attacked the Careem data server are likely to have the objective of selling this data to other companies interested in data.

The company has so far not identified the hackers, or informed users if the hacked data has been deleted, so it can be assumed that the data of 14 million Careem users is currently in the data black market.

Data security is personal security

The hacked data could be misused in several ways, and further threatens the safety of Careem users, because it includes critical information on the movement patterns of its users, including home and work addresses and other regularly visited locations.

Access to such information can expose users to risks of criminal threats such as burglary, mugging and kidnapping, as well as potentially endanger activists, journalists and political workers.

Further, it has the potential to make women in particular more vulnerable.

Need for laws

Careem has promised to continue to strengthen its information systems, but customers and governments both need to hold the company accountable to higher standards of information security as any breach in information systems impacts us.

Whereas the data hack took place on Careem servers based at its headquarters in Dubai, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 criminalises interference with information systems and data under sections 3 to 8 in Pakistan.

However, there are currently no laws in Pakistan that protect individuals' data, despite Article 14 of the Constitution guaranteeing that "dignity of man, and subject to law, the privacy of home, shall be inviolable".

There is a need for legislators and courts to consider the right to privacy in the realm of the internet where vast amounts of data on each citizen is stored.

A recommendation for the federal government to make regulations to provide for “privacy and protection of data of subscribers” exists in Article 43 (2)(e) of the Electronic Transactions Ordinance 2002, but little has been done in this regard.

The current IT ministry has talked about a prospective data protection bill, but none has been introduced in parliament, and Pakistan does not have a privacy commission so far.

Next steps

On an individual level, it is important for users to be aware of the associated risks of using technologies that make our life more convenient, and the ways in which our personal data can be misused for profits and ulterior motives.

Hence, steps must be taken to secure our information as much as possible by setting strong passwords, ensuring that a different password is used for each account, two-step verification enabled for all accounts that offer the option, screen locks turned on for phones, and minimal information shared on social media.

Additionally, if one uses the Careem app regularly, it would be helpful for safety reasons to change frequent routes from time to time so no single easily traceable pattern is identifiable, and changing drop off and pick up locations to walkable distances rather than the exact location of residence or work.

On a corporate level, Careem should, as promised, implement stricter cyber security protocols, similar to those used by financial companies, in order to value and protect personal information of customers and Captains.

Companies should inform customers of data breaches in time in order to protect them rather than waiting for investigations as that can tarnish the credibility of the company.

On an official level, the government must ensure that data protection and privacy laws are put in place to provide legal relief to citizens whose personal information is misused or breached not only by technology companies, but also mobile phone service providers, hospitals, schools, banks, public relations companies and so on.

Further, the government should set standards and protocols of cyber security for all corporations and organisations without which they should not be allowed to deal with personal information of citizens.

A privacy commission should be set up that citizens can access easily in the event of breach of data.

Whereas customers will continue to use services that make life convenient, they should at the very least be making an informed decision when divulging personal information to companies, and at the same time, both citizens and the government should hold these companies accountable to higher standards of safety when dealing with private information.

Are you an information security expert working in Pakistan? Share your insights with us at blog@dawn.com

From where I sit in my wheelchair, the world seems a pretty insensitive place to a differently-abled person’s plight.

I became paralysed from the neck down following a car accident in 2002 on the Lahore-Islamabad motorway. My sister, who was in the car with me, lost her life on that fateful day.

The subsequent professional nursing care that I received was severely inadequate. Sandbags and neck collars to stabilise the neck were unavailable at hospitals.

Unable to talk after a badly done operation, my main way of communication was by blinking. To get the attention of sleeping nurses, I would often bite on my ventilator tube to stop the oxygen supply and set off the alarm.

Lack of proper paramedic care left me with little chance of any substantial recovery. But subsequent rehab treatment in Aylesbury, England provided me with a ray of hope, with excellent nursing care and accessibility of wheelchair users to all socioeconomic backgrounds helping in my rehabilitation.

Editorial: Rights of the disabled

I came back to Pakistan with a renewed sense of hope and determination, and tried to not let circumstances dictate my life.

However, it soon became apparent that I would not be able to enjoy the basic comforts of life due to lack of access to buildings for wheelchair users.

I was routinely inconvenienced in going to school, clinics, weddings, movies, restaurants, stores, banks etc. due to the lack of ramps and lifts for those in a wheelchair.

Far too often, my access was dependent on whether good Samaritans and/or staff would help carry me up the steps.

Never mind the fact that being physically lifted each time created a health hazard for me, as I was exposed to further injuries and paralysis.

I spoke out on print and digital media about my story, and the importance of making sure access for the differently-abled was included in building plans.

However, without tangible ways to effectuate my goals, the media and the public’s initial enthusiasm naturally waned with time.

My impatience grew, and recently, I engaged with a civil advocacy law firm to explore this subject.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) had mandatory tailor-made provisions for differently-abled persons in public buildings.

Regulation 6.2.3 of the LDA Building and Zoning Regulations 2007 states that:

In all commercial buildings, public buildings and apartments a ramp of minimum 6-feet width and having maximum gradient of 1:6 should be provided. In case of non-provisions of lifts, each floor should be accessible through this ramp. A toilet for disabled must also be provided.

Needless to say, this provision has not been implemented by the LDA, nor has it been adopted by commercial/public buildings and apartments.

Most places do not have ramps for wheelchair users. The seldom presence of wheelchair ramps is often an afterthought and, as a result, poorly designed and promoted.

I have yet to see a single toilet within the LDA’s jurisdiction (or otherwise) that accommodates “disabled” persons.

A few restaurants in recent times have been generous to build ramps (or have portable ramps) after I highlighted the issue to them.

I authored letters to the LDA on behalf of the marginalised wheelchair community, imploring them to implement their own regulations.

After the initial forwarding of my letter to the concerned department for action, there was the predictable lack of correspondence afterwards.

My impatience reached fever pitch, and I was constrained to personally visit the LDA head office in Johar Town, Lahore.

Upon entering the head office (through a ramp), I was directed to go to the first floor to meet the concerned LDA officials.

There was only one problem: there was no functioning lift to take me to the first floor. The irony was not lost on me.

Upstairs, my colleagues had to speak on my behalf to the officials, and I was left out of meaningful discourse (barring one official coming down to see me later).

While the officials acknowledged the legitimate grievances to my colleagues, they used insubstantial reasons to justify the lack of past and current enforcement.

This included stating that the regulations did not apply to buildings that were made before 2008 (notwithstanding the fact that the regulations were written as applicable to all buildings irrespective of construction date) and that the enforcement required a lot of surveying man-power, which required extensive preparation and time (notwithstanding the fact that the regulations have existed for 10 years).

Also read: Angels in adversity

We exited the building with a semblance of hope and expectation. However, recent communications with the LDA have been met with muffled concern, as they have showcased lack of urgency on their part.

Apart from sending notices to the buildings identified by us, no documentary evidence has been shared to demonstrate substantial overhaul.

This is notwithstanding the fact that it is an open secret that LDA regulations have been violated for the past decade with impunity, with little to no action taken.

I am cautiously optimistic that the LDA will take concrete action in the near future on my rather simple demands.

Access to buildings in a safe and secure manner is a gateway for wheelchair users in their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

This does not just impact quadriplegic wheelchair users such as myself, but also other people having to use wheelchairs, such as persons suffering from amputation, arthritis, cerebral palsy, multiple-sclerosis, post-polio syndrome, back disorders and old-age weaknesses.

The state has systematically made wheelchair users feel invisible, unwanted and unwelcome as a part of its fabric.

With the continual lack of facilities for wheelchair users to access buildings, we as a marginalised community have been systematically deprived of meaningful access to basic healthcare, education, employment and enjoyment of life.

With lack of enforcement by bodies regulating buildings over the past decade, one would think that the courts of law would be a decent avenue for enforcement of rights.

However, far too often, public interest petitions seeking for enforcement of differently-abled persons’ rights become muddled with various state entities seeking time to respond.

This ultimately leads to a slow decay of interest in such cases, with little to no progress.

The last ray of hope, for better or worse, is the LDA developing a conscience and acting on its own volition. We, the wheelchair users, are at the LDA’s mercy.

Access for us is not just about putting in ramps, but without ramps, we have no gateway to a meaningful life.

Have you ever felt marginalised by society owing to your disabilities? Share your experiences with us at blog@dawn.com

I’ve always been fascinated by the desert. The idea of a giant land of distant horizons, framed by a flawless canopy of blue sky, and complete silence.

In my mind, being in a desert is like existing in a vacuum — no beginning, no end, and nothing around but space.

A perfect, silent void.

Few people appreciate the sheer beauty of a desert — far from the barren wastelands that we imagine them to be, they are dramatic, almost spiritual places, filled with life.

Being from Australia, I had experienced deserts long before visiting Pakistan. My native country, an entire continent, is filled with deserts which in some cases stretch thousands of kilometres to the seashore.

I’ve flown over them countless times, and even driven through them. But I had never stayed any length of time in a desert — until now.

It was a few weeks ago that I received an invitation to stay on a friend’s relative’s farm in Hyderabad Thal, the desert west of Jhang in western Punjab.

My friend Ali and I left Lahore in the middle of the night, and arrived at the desert just after the ringing of the Fajr call to prayer — a perfect time to witness the sunrise.

Sunset after a long day in the desert.—Photo by author

A giant tangerine sphere rose in the distance, bathing the surroundings in an atomic crimson hue — an otherworldly spectacle which seemed to greet us to the place which would be our home for the next few days.

Far from being desolate, the desert in Hyderabad Thal is lush green in February and March — this land is used for the cultivation of green chickpeas (hara choliyan), and the squat plants' elastic branches and chubby little fruits jiggle in the desert breeze as far as the eye can see.

The sea of green is interrupted only by the odd sand dune, where the faded yellow sand occasionally rises up in undulating waves, reminding us of what lies beneath.

When the harvest is picked, the roots die off and the desert returns to its usual naked emptiness.

To find life in the desert, sometimes one has to look closer.—Photo by author

However the desert is far from dead; as we walked from the drop-off point towards the farmhouse, we spotted tracks in the sand; tiny scoop shapes that stood as evidence to the existence of insects and birds in the vicinity.

My friend, a local, and I tried to imagine what could have produced the footprints; a sparrow, a small lizard, a scorpion, perhaps?

What was clear was that while the animals that made it were long gone, the desert around us was teeming with life.

The days we spent at the dera were long, dry, sweet and mesmeric. In March, the heat hadn’t yet built, and respite from the sun’s rays could be found under the boughs of a grand old banyan tree.

We spent hours lolling about on charpoys, eating ber picked straight off a tree across the yard.

Lying on the string beds with only the sun’s position to indicate time, I felt that my life itself was slowing down.

With no cellphone signal, no internet, little electricity to speak of, and no form of entertainment besides our own creative minds, I detected a gentle yet pleasant decalibrating of my sense of time.

With the sun’s migration from one side of the sky to the other, we moved the charpoys to follow the shade.

Respite form the heat in the dera.—Photo by author

At one point, we ended up at a roll of sand next to a row of chickpea plants. A few small birds darted about in the greenery just metres away, diving and swooping at breakneck speed.

The slightest movement by either of us would send them shooting off in a different direction, only to flitter back moments later.

Laying on my stomach, I dragged myself lazily to the edge of the charpoy and stretched my chin over the edge. I was now looking straight down at the powdery, sandy earth, and was amazed by what I saw.

Scores of insects were marching beneath the charpoy into the field of crops, each leaving behind their distinctive footprints.

Ants, both tiny and large, something which resembled a crab in its sideways gait, tiny spiders... they were all on the move to the shady green microforest, possibly in the hope of finding cover from the birds above.

The other thing that strikes you about the desert is the sense of sheer quiet. Nowhere is the phrase 'deafening silence' more apt.

So expansive is the sky, so distant the edge of the earth, so clear the visage, and so subtly alive the surroundings that it’s almost overwhelming.

In such a situation one is forced to appreciate the humbling truth of how small one truly is in the grand scheme of things; for the thoughtful, it could inspire them to inner dialogue; for the uninitiated it could be simply terrifying.

To get some groceries for dinner, we would ride a motorbike 10 kilometres to the nearest town. The trail through the desert was lonely — the whole time we didn’t pass another soul, bar the odd snake which slithered across the path, or guard dog from a nearby farm which would bark at us until we were out of sight.

Even in the most desolate environs, there is life.—Photo by author

Endless skies and distant horizons.—Photo by author

Somewhere out there, in the middle of nowhere, we saw what looked like a mud brick building in the sand hills. Ali rode towards it to investigate; upon closer inspection it was a tiny mosque.

"Why would they build a mosque out here?" I asked.

"For travellers. People travelling on foot," he replied.

In all my hours indulgently lost on the charpoy, wondering dreamily about the enormity of it all, I had forgotten that, in fact, humans had, for millennia, conquered the desert by foot.

Once again, but in a very different sense, I was struck by how small I was in this land of might and extreme. I kicked off my Peshawari chappals and sank my feet into the soft, soft sand.

Beneath, the surface was cold, a sea of cool earth that hadn’t seen the heat of the day. The tiny grains trickled in between my toes, sensually massaging the soles of my feet, and I lay back in the field, staring at the milky blue sky.

The sun was getting low in the sky, and I was partially shielded from its rays by a sand dune. An ethereal glow enveloped the remains of the day.

A lonely mosque in the desert.—Photo by author

Turning around, we traced our tyre marks back through the sand to the main trail. We had just made it back to the trail when day began to turn to night, and as luck would have it, our bike suffered a punctured tyre.

We parked the bike for a bit, and sat down to watch the sunset. The blazing sun, so blindingly white hot just a few hours earlier, had once again turned an inflamed red, before sinking behind the sand hills.

The day’s azure canopy above was flushed with an iridescent indigo, shimmering with the lights of a thousand stars.

With no other option, we walked back the last few kilometres to the farm, pushing the bike as we went.

It was tough, the sand slipping beneath our feet and the bike’s wheels, but nothing compared to the feat of crossing the desert by day; the thought of thirsty nomads arriving at the mosque, parking their droves outside and taking refuge kept recurring in my mind.

We arrived at the dera, and our charpoys had been dragged to the top of the nearest sand hill. Shaking the dust off our feet, we reclined on the beds and stared at the universe above.

This time, however, the desert wasn’t silent, but alive with the sound of a million beings which had come back to life, singing back to us the stories of the day which we had witnessed.

Later still, we slept, our thick blankets wrapping us away from the cold of the night, and as we dreamt beneath the heavens, the theatre of the desert unfolded around us.

Have you ever ventured into off-the-beaten tracks? Share your experiences with us at blog@dawn.com

In the 21st century, we can note that Pakistani journalism has experienced an organic development of professionalism, periods of draconian suppression and frequently innovated new modes of resisting extraneous control.

Journalism in Pakistan has indeed progressed over the past decades in discursive, technological and institutional terms.

With the dissemination and subsequent regulation of satellite and broadcast technologies, journalism has morphed into a form characterised by 24-hour "breaking" news, colloquially referred to as "the media".

At the same time, virtual spaces on the internet, driven by social media sites, have opened up new spheres of debate and discussion.

It would, however, be a misnomer to conflate these forms of progress with the attainment of "Freedom".

As long as it remains true that there is a fine line demarcating what can and cannot be said in public discourse, journalistic or expressive freedom, in a political sense, in fact, is never truly attained.

It can only be strived towards — that in itself is a constant struggle.

While it is important to look to the future for advances in expressive freedoms and journalistic liberties, it is equally important to look at the struggles of the past.

Pakistan’s history is peppered with incidents of centralised control, repression and censorship that have left their marks on the character of this emergent 21st century news media.

At the same time, the fact that the struggle for attaining Pakistan, the anti-colonial freedom struggle of Muslims in the subcontinent, was catalysed by newsprint, continues to stand as a source of inspiration and vitalisation to continuing strands of serious journalism and news reporting in Pakistan.

It is paradoxical, then, that the very medium which took on the struggle for freedom of expression and self-determination of Muslims in British India is the same format that is most hotly contested in our country today.

How can the state, or the powers that be, ever see it justifiable to repress that very mode of expression which breathed life into the struggle for this country?

Courtly origins

The history of Pakistani journalism undoubtedly stretches further back than the birth of Pakistan. Two of the largest print and electronic media houses in this country — Dawn and Jang — were formed well before Partition.

However, the roots of Pakistani journalism cannot be confined within the chronological bounds of 1947-present, nor can it be simply tied to the anti-colonial movement of Muslims in the subcontinent, which eventually spawned Pakistan.

The pre-history of Pakistani journalism actually stretches further back than the 1940s, before the journalistic interventions of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan for a Muslim identity, even prior to the closure of Muslim periodicals such as Sultan-ul-Akhbar, Gulshan-i-Nowbahar and Siraj-ul-Akhbar through the Indian Press Laws promulgated by the British authorities in the aftermath of the 1857 War of Independence.

In fact, the history of Pakistani journalism is the history of a format and a technique of articulating and disseminating information — the history of the production and dissemination of newsprint, along with the emergence of news-reading publics.

Even prior to the rise of the printing press and mass production, historian C. A. Bayly has traced a subcontinental tradition of newswriting and political reporting enshrined in the tradition of akhbar-nafeesi.

These early-modern akhbar-nafees or newswriters in Bayly’s account were neither journalists nor public intellectuals, but closer to information runners who used to report on matters of different princely courts for the benefit of the sovereign who commissioned them. Their activities comprised an admixture of diplomacy, espionage and reportage.

It is no wonder that the honourific title of the Mughal sovereign included the terms hoshyar and khabardar, for he would be alert and aware of developments in his own and surrounding territories and the affairs of his subjects, thanks to briefings delivered by the akhbar-nafees.

The arrival of the printing press at the dawn of modernity and the emergence of a new colonial public abruptly pulled this pre-modern informational membrane inside out:

With the rise of commercial and political newsprint, a newly emergent newsreading public now demanded to know more about the affairs of the sovereign, about politics, commerce and war.

Onset of modernity

Soon after the East India Company (EIC) set up dominions in their presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay, the first printing presses and typesets also arrived in the subcontinent.

The earlier uses of the press included printing calendars, bibles and almanacs by the missionaries, and this technology was not utilised for news reporting until the end of the 18th century.

It is James Augustus Hicky who is widely attributed by historians to be the founder of modern print journalism in the subcontinent. As noted by Graham Shaw in Printing in Calcutta to 1800:

"It remains an interesting fact that printing was introduced into Calcutta in 1777 only on the whim of a bankrupt businessman who whilst in prison resorted to his former calling of printing simply as a convenient means of paying off some of his debts!"

The Company’s government was not thrilled by the prospect of privately published newsprint broadsheets circulating in its territories, where its rule over the populous native inhabitants was held together by only a fragile veneer of appearances and illusions.

Hence, the first governor general of India Warren Hastings pursued a gruelling extra-legal strangulation of Hicky’s Gazette by instructing postmasters to suppress its distribution in the dawk.

Hicky is now granted accolades for maintaining a stringently critical editorial line against Hastings and the Company’s arbitrary rule in his Gazette, and consistently lampooning powerful colonialists in his signature satirical style.

In fact, Hicky spent much of his days as a printer indebted and in prison. After being forcibly deported from India, the ill-fated founder of modern news-media in the subcontinent died penniless on a boat to China.

Modernity and its discontents

It would appear that modern journalism in colonial India was born in a prison. Since then, journalism in the subcontinent has scarcely, if ever, escaped these incarcerating walls of fear and coercion.

Colonial documents from the early 19th century on the topic are ripe with the "fear" or "dangers of a free press in India".

The EIC’s administrators and shareholders were constantly anxious about the potential of the new medium of the press to disrupt their colonial rule and depriving Britain of its bejeweled possessions.

It is a common misapprehension of colonial times that the British brought along with their rule a modern, liberal understanding to the subcontinent. The history of colonial journalism in India would in fact have it the other way.

The East India Company actively tried to suppress this new medium, as it drew adventurers and private profiteers to the lucrative market of selling newsprint commodities to European inhabitants of the three presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.

The repression employed by the Company was neither liberal, nor was it progressive. From 1780 onwards, the Company carefully monitored each piece of newsprint that was being circulated within its territories.

The first infraction in the press recorded by the Company was of Irish-American William Duane, proprietor of a Calcutta paper called The Indian World, where he published reports with an American revolutionary flair considered damaging by the Company.

Having no legal mechanism to apprehend such infractions, Governor General John Shore retorted to brute force against Duane.

On a number of occasions, peons and domestic servants were sent to rough up and forcibly abduct Duane and hold him without warrant.

In the meantime, the Company contrived a way to get rid of Duane by rescinding his license to reside in their colonial territory, and effectively deported him.

Soon after Duane’s extralegal deportation, the EIC, under Governor General Cornwallis, enacted the first printing press regulations in India with the following five precepts:

1stly — Every Printer of a Newspaper to print his name at the bottom of the Paper.
2ndly — Every Editor and Proprietor of a Paper to deliver his Name and place of abode to the Secretary to Government.
3rdly — No Paper to be published on a Sunday.
4thly — No Paper to be published at all until it shall have been previously inspected by the Secretary to the Government; or by a Person authorised by him for that purpose.
5thly — The penalty for offending against any of the above Regulations to be immediate embarkation for Europe.

With these five simple but comprehensive draconian maxims, the EIC formally enacted censorship in early 19th century India.

A government censor would scrutinise the proofs, prior to the publication or distribution of any printed matter.

The only printers and publishers in India at the time were of European descent, hence the threat of deportation to Europe was a formidable threat.

The Company’s anxieties with print stemmed from the fear that the Europeans would discuss the news amongst themselves, and this news would spread to the natives, who would soon come to know the truth and ultimately overthrow the yoke of European domination.

Some liberal proponents of the press as a means of delivering enlightenment to the natives also became vocal about the positive aspects of a press in India.

One such man was an adventurer and mariner by the name of James Silk Buckingham, who arrived in Calcutta in 1818 and soon bought The Calcutta Journal.

Prior to this, the liberal-minded Marquis Rawdon had relaxed the censorship regulations to a set of rules for editors by which they may regulate themselves.

J.S. Buckingham took advantage of this regulatory lapse in order to publish articles critical of the colonial authorities.

As the government lacked the authority to deport Buckingham at the time, it attempted various strategies to strangle The Calcutta Journal, until finally his enterprise was suppressed and he was shipped back to England.

The fear that Buckingham's Journal aroused in the Company administrators had little to do with his liberal-minded critique.

Rather, it stemmed from the fact that the natives had begun setting up their own printing enterprises in local languages, and that they would take inspiration from Buckingham and criticise government policy in public discourse.

These native printers and publishers, as the administrators would note, could also not be deported to Europe as they didn’t require a license to reside in their own territories.

Hence a new regime of press regulations was swiftly put in place in 1823. Writing against the colonial government would be penalised by revoking the license to print — and printing without a license would result in jail time.

Natives are restless

Ram Mohan Roy, an influential scholar and reformer, set up one of the first local language printing presses in Calcutta. He began issuing two newsprint broadsheets, Meerat-ul-Akhbar in Persian and Sambad Kaumudi in Bengali.

After these regulations were put in place, Roy travelled to London to pursue a legal case against the Company and publicly voiced his disapproval, eventually shutting down his paper in protest.

The first ever Urdu language newspaper Jam-i-Jahan Numa (Mirror of the World) was also published in Calcutta during this time by a Hindu proprietor.

Innovations in typefaces for local languages spurred local publishing in the early 19th century, mushrooming towards the middle.

This was the time of the great rebellion of 1857, in which the printing presses played an important part in disseminating information about the conflict throughout the territories.

As the events of the ‘mutiny’ unfolded, the native language press became active and issued statements about freedom that the colonial authorities found deplorable.

In the June of 1857, a new press regulation limiting the circulation of books, pamphlets and printed matter was put into force, which later came to be known as the Gagging Act.

This is also the period when Muslim news periodicals began to formulate critiques of colonial rule. However, as Margarita Barns notes in The Indian Press, a majority of the Urdu newspapers in this time were edited by Hindus.

Through the aftermath and brutal repression of 1857, a Muslim identity began emerging through the press, and it was through the press that they voiced their earliest calls for freedom.

In the 20th century, newspaper editors and journalists greatly aided the birth of a new political consciousness in the colonial subcontinent.

Political parties such as the Congress and the All India Muslim League were sustained and supported by affiliated print organs, which voiced their concerns and reservations to negotiations with the British authorities.

Since the first decade of the 20th century, the British Raj enforced a draconian regime of press censorship fueled by the same anxieties about the dangers of a free press and free-thinking public opinion.

The origins of the printing press, and along with it the history of Pakistani journalism, lie in the dawn of colonial modernity.

In this colonial realm, the freedom to discuss collective issues has always been a contested space, freedom to print and publish was a constant struggle, and there is scarcely a period where this was completely attained.

Even if this freedom is attained on one occasion, it could be easily yield to forms of constraint.

As Margarita Barns concludes about freedom of expression in her own monograph on the press written a few years before the creation of Pakistan:

"World conditions today have jeopardised this supreme ideal. Experience of totalitarianism leaves no doubt that once liberty is lost, nothing short of a revolutionary situation would seem to hold out any prospect of its return… Above all, there is the persistent danger that, because the times are critical, emergency powers devised to meet the needs of the moment may have the effect of permanently restricting the freedom which has been so dearly won."

Indeed, when Barns was about to publish her history of Indian journalism in 1939, war broke out which imposed a new strict regime banning the publication and distribution of anything "to influence public opinion in a manner likely to be prejudicial to the defence of the realm or the efficient prosecution of war."

These measures only convinced her to rush the publication of her monograph, as "never was there a more opportune moment to recall phases of the struggle for the liberty of expression."

Constant vigilance

Today, as World Press Freedom Day encourages us to think about the current state and future of the freedom to print and publish without constraints, we must, at the same time, also recall the continued struggles fought over two centuries for the ever-fleeting right to print and publish freely.

It is paradoxical to think that any Pakistani policy maker would have ever felt justified in curtailing the use of the very press that has been so instrumental in making Pakistan into a realistic outcome through the constant labour and advocacy of journalists, editors, printers, publishers and hawkers.

The freedom of expression is a delicate yet important right, generations have fought for it — it should always be cherished when one has it, and it should be constantly struggled for when one doesn’t.

A special tribunal was set up to hear what eventually came to be known as the First Lahore Conspiracy Trial. Under it, multiple cases were heard, the first batch of which began on April 26, 1915.

The judgement was read on September 13 — 24 of the accused were sentenced to death and 27 to transportation for life, while the others received varying sentences.

One of those sentenced to death was 19-year-old Kartar Singh Sarabha, who had returned to Punjab from San Francisco to take up arms against the colonial state. During his trial, he spoke eloquently and passionately about the injustices committed by the colonial state.

Sarabha had been associated with the revolutionary Ghadar magazine in San Francisco since it was founded in October, 1913. The magazine was published in several languages and distributed to Indian expatriates all over the world.

Sarabha had taken up responsibility for the Gurmukhi edition, even contributing poetry and articles to it.

With the onset of the First World War in 1914 and the decision of the committee responsible for the magazine’s publication to wage war against the British state in India, Sarabha headed home along with thousands of others, convinced that their heroism would inspire the local population to rise against their colonial rulers.

They could not have been more wrong.

The majority of the revolutionaries were originally from Punjab, having been inspired by the Ghadar magazine. But on their return, they found Punjab firmly within the embrace of the colonial empire.

Most of the villagers had benefited from the agricultural policies of the state while the recruits to the army were pro-empire.

Thus, upon landing in the various cities of British India, many of the revolutionaries were betrayed by their fellow villagers and arrested. Those who escaped were forced to go underground.

What also did not help was the lack of discretion shown by the revolutionaries. Infused with an inspiring patriotism, many preached on their ships in an attempt to recruit more to their cause. To keep the passion alive, many sang patriotic songs on the way.

Thus, even before the first boat had landed on the shores of British India, the colonial state, through its network of spies and the vocal proselytising of the Ghadari revolutionaries, was prepared.

No plan, no leader

There was also never a particular plan of action or a central revolutionary party organising the movement. It was entirely centred on a magazine published in San Francisco.

While the articles that appeared in the magazine were high on rhetoric and passion, it never offered any concrete plan of action for the imminent revolution.

Perhaps Hardayal, Sohan Singh Bakhna and Pandit Kanshi Ram, the founders of the committee that published the magazine, had anticipated that revolution was a distant reality.

Hardayal, particularly, the intellectual inspiration behind the magazine, was more inspired by Russian anarchist political thinkers than Marxist literature. For him, revolution was spontaneous individualistic acts of bravery against an oppressive regime.

The anarchists, unlike the Marxists, did not believe in one party guiding the revolution, for they believed that, eventually, even this party would form the ruling class.

People needed to be prepared for this eventual uprising. Hence, the need to set up a magazine to create an environment conducive to a revolution.

While the magazine romanticised arms, bombs and violence and promoted their use, it never set out to plan the course of action to be taken.

The situation, however, changed drastically after the First World War broke. With multiple powerful forces joining hands against the British, it was felt the opportunity was ripe for an armed revolt against the colonial state.

Indian migrants all over the world were exhorted to return to the motherland to free her from the shackles of slavery. Thousands responded to the call, embarking on boats from various ports of the world.

But there was no clear plan as to what was to be done when they reached home. It was imagined that individual acts of bravery would inspire the entire country to rise against the colonial state.

The conspiracy trials

Those who managed to avoid arrest returned to their home towns and villages, forming little groups, each one working on its own, independently. Many of these groups began reaching out to Indians within the army.

The plan was to instigate a rebellion similar to the war of 1857 — when Indian sepoys at the Meerut cantonment had rebelled against their British officers, starting a year-long struggle for freedom.

Other groups continued with their own efforts to collect arms, raise funds through armed dacoities and manufacture bombs.

A semblance of a central leadership was given to the movement in January, 1915 when Rash Behari Bose was convinced to take up the mantle.

Bose was a revolutionary nationalist from Bengal who had gained popularity in radical circles because of his involvement in a plan to assassinate Lord Hardinge, the viceroy, in 1912.

Connections were established within several army units, including Lahore, Ferozepur, Meerut, Agra, Benares and Lucknow, who gave assurances that they would defect when called upon by the leadership. February 21, 1915 was fixed as the day the general revolt would start.

The British, however, had already learned of this plan and before the date, many of these army units were either moved or disarmed, while several leaders of the movement were arrested.

Bose managed to escape to Japan. He later set up the Indian Independence League in exile, a precursor to Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army.

Others who were caught were tried in the First Lahore Conspiracy Trial.

The Ghadar movement received a semblance of a central leadership when Rash Behari Bose took on the mantle in 1915. After the revolution failed, he escaped to Japan, where he got married and went on to set up the Indian Independence League in exile.—Wikimedia Commons

An inspiration to others

For all practical purposes, the Ghadar Movement failed to achieve its political goals. The colonial state remained deeply entrenched in Punjab. However, something had changed.

The spontaneous acts of bravery of these revolutionaries became part of folklore. While in their lifetimes they failed to see the fruits of the seeds they had sown, for generations to come after them, tales of their bravery were recalled to instill nationalist fervour in people.

Bhagat Singh was one such young man who was moved by the passion of these revolutionaries. It is believed he always carried a picture of Kartar Singh Sarabha in his pocket. And that all the meetings of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the party he founded, had a picture of the young revolutionary as well.

16 years after the First Lahore Conspiracy Trial, a second Lahore Conspiracy Case was heard against Bhagat Singh, which he — taking a leaf out of Sarabha’s book — used to promote his ideas of revolution.

Like Sarabha, he became another young intellectual-revolutionary, whose sacrifice was meant to prick the conscience of the people.

Many other revolutionaries of the Ghadar Movement who escaped the wrath of the empire eventually formed other political organisations, the most prominent of which was the Kirti Kissan Sabha, a Marxist party particularly popular in the rural areas of Punjab. In 1928, they formed a crucial alliance with the Naujawan Bharat Sabha.

Thus, while the Ghadar Movement failed to achieve its revolutionary purpose, it managed to set into motion a series of important events — Jallianwala Bagh, the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, the demand for Purna Swaraj or complete self-rule — and inspired key figures in history such as Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose and the Kirti Kissan Sabha.

Through their heroism, it may be said the Ghadaris managed to spark a revolution.

This article was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

The curtains fell on the third edition of the Pakistan Super League (PSL) with a spectacular final in front of a capacity crowd at the National Stadium in Karachi last Sunday.

As the month-long tournament — contested by six teams with games played in Dubai, Sharjah, Lahore and Karachi — comes to a close, let's look at how each team fared.

Lahore Qalandars (Team grade: F)

What can be said about the Qalandars that hasn't already been said. The Lahore-based franchise, for the third straight year, was a mess. Messier, in fact.

After finishing at the bottom of the table in the inaugural tournament, the Qalandars had shown some improvement in their second season — although they finished last that year as well.

It was expected of them to build on that this time around but it didn't happen. The Qalandars regressed. So much so that they lost all six of their opening matches.

They did win three of their final four matches and briefly threatened to not finish last but those wins were mere consolations and came too little too late.

The Qalandars were a disappointment through and through. —PSL

Their main problem was not having a middle-order batsman who could just stay at the crease, not lose his head, and keep the scoreboard ticking. Think of a Babar Azam type.

T20 is about hitting the ball out of the park as often as possible but it is also about maintaining a level of calm and not panicking every time a few wickets fall.

Sadly, the Qalandars did not have a single player cut out for that role. They chopped, they changed, they tried everything but nothing worked.

It's highly unlikely they will retain captain Brendon McCullum, for they need to go back to the drawing board and reboot.

Multan Sultans (Team grade: C)

The league's newest franchise played safe during player recruitment, stockpiling veterans rather than youth. And their strategy reflected in the kind of debut season they had.

The Sultans started off brilliantly, winning four of their opening six games before their challenge fizzled out. Halfway through their campaign, the same experience that was considered their strength turned into a weakness.

Shoaib Malik's side made an impressive start but eventually tailed off. —PCB

A side chock-full of 30-something veterans and devoid of any notable young blood had fatigued. They lost each of their last four league games, eventually settling for second-last in the league standings.

The Sultans' campaign wasn't a complete failure but they must learn that T20, unlike the other two formats of the game, is more about raw talent rather than technique. Next time, they recruit, they must take risks and accommodate a few youngsters as well rather than opting for safe options with known ceilings.

Quetta Gladiators (Team grade: B)

Like the Qalandars, the Gladiators too were plagued by the same problems. They were impressive during the league stage but what's new there.

They always do well in the games held in the UAE. It's the Pakistan leg where their inability to convince their foreign talent to travel leaves them exposed.

So, like the year before, the Gladiators were without Kevin Pietersen, Shane Watson and several others as the PSL 2018 moved to Pakistan for final two play-off matches and the final.

Quetta's two main foreign players refused to play the Pakistan legs.

On paper and with their international stars, the Gladiators were clearly the better side than Peshawar Zalmi. Even without key players, they lost to Zalmi by just one run.

Had they had the players who had no qualms in travelling to Pakistan, it would almost certainly have been the Gladiators playing Islamabad United in the final. This team had all the talent and grit but no luck.

Karachi Kings (Team grade: B)

The Kings were the team to beat at the start of this year's PSL, winning three straight matches and soaring to the top of the table.

They eventually finished the league stage in second spot before being knocked out by Zalmi in the second eliminator.

Imad Wasim's men were unable to make it to the final being held in their home city.

They were unlucky with ill-timed injuries to their captain Imad Wasim and star man Shahid Afridi, and their stand-in captain Mohammad Amir perhaps didn't have the experience to make the right calls during that high-pressure chase.

With the final held in the City of Lights, Kings' fans would have loved to see their home team play at the National Stadium. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

The Kings, disappointing in the first two PSLs, were much better this time around but were found wanting during the play-offs, losing both their games.

A bit more composure in crucial games will help them take that final leap next year.

Peshawar Zalmi (Team grade: A)

The 2017 champions were clearly not themselves in the 2018 campaign. They lost Shahid Afridi to Karachi Kings during off-season and were troubled by injuries to star players when the tournament began.

Yet, they managed to drag themselves to the final — a testament to their luck and big-game nous.

Darren Sammy led his team valiantly as ever. —AFP

However, had things not gone in their way, Zalmi could easily not have even qualified for the play-offs, let alone make the final.

Deep into the league stage, they were second-last in the standings and better only than the horrible Qalandars.

Had they not won their last two league matches, there was a genuine possibility that they, and not Lahore, could've finished last.

But their problems stemmed from injuries, which cannot be prevented. Even then, they made it to the finals and could've won the tourney had Kamran Akmal not pulled a classic Kamran Akmal.

In all, this was a decent campaign. Zalmi should still be proud of themselves.

Islamabad United (Team grade: A+)

The champions. Correction: two-time champions.

Islamabad United have become a benchmark and an example to follow for their PSL rivals. They're an incredibly well-run franchise that goes about its business and has quickly developed a tradition of winning, just like so many other sports franchises with United as their moniker have around the world.

They managed a perfect mixture of experience and youth, with the likes of Mohammad Sami, JP Duminy, Faheem Ashraf and Asif Ali.

They barely had a tale, thanks to a long list of all-rounders they had in their ranks. They also boasted the tournament's hottest batsman: Luke Ronchi.

Shadab Khan celebrates with teammates after taking Darren Sammy's wicket. —AFP

United were so strong, even injuries to their captain and vice-captain couldn't derail their campaign. They were a little slow off the blocks — two of their three defeats came in their opening three matches — but once they were warmed up, they steamrolled every team that came in their way.

Barring a defeat in a dead-rubber to Karachi when they rested several key players, United won eight of their last nine matches. They were by far the best side in the competition and completely deserved their second title.

Pakistan Super League 2018 (Grade: A++)

The third edition of the tournament was thrice the fun. With the addition of a sixth team, the competition was tougher and entertainment was aplenty.

While the PSL 2018 did not see a 200-run game, it had more cliffhangers, super overs and nail-biters than we've seen any cricket league produce in recent times.

Karachi came out in full force to witness and celebrate the return of cricket to the city. —AFP

One cause of concern for the organisers could be the low attendances at the stadia in Dubai and Sharjah, but with the tournament planned to be phased out of the UAE and moved entirely to Pakistan in the next few years, that one blip will go away too.

All in all, the PSL 2018 exceeded the fans' expectations and we cannot wait for it to come back next year.

Did you attend the PSL final in Karachi? Share your experiences with us at blog@dawn.com

The American West with its wilderness, vastness and pristine beauty has always attracted the trekker and hiker in me.

Those mountains, hills, deserts, canyons, lakes and rivers present an open invitation and challenge for all those who like nature in its purest form.

Every summer, while growing up in Pakistan, I felt an insistent drive to go to the mountains — I considered these to be the best days of the year.

A decade later, a visit to Yellowstone and other national parks in the western United States sparked the same energy and enthusiasm in me.

I planned to take a road trip of about 10 days exploring as many national parks as possible.

As always, being a Pakistani citizen, I was anxious about going through the security clearance before boarding the plane at the airport. However, the flight to Salt Lake City was uneventful.

I was all prepared for travelling for a few days. I knew it would be long, physically tiring and challenging at times, but the idea of a relaxed vacation is not for me.

The journey began the next day with a short tour of Salt Lake City. Then I started north towards Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

My lungs really appreciated the cool and clear air of the mountains. It took a few more hours to get to Jackson Hole.

As soon as I entered the city, we saw a moose grazing in the bushes. There was even a ‘moose stop’ on the traffic signs.

I finally reached the house of friends in nearby Wilson, an upscale and well-maintained gated community with a golf course and indoor tennis courts.

Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, also owns a house in the community.

The house was simple but elegant with high ceilings and glass windows on two sides of the house, giving a spectacular view of the Teton Mountains.

Seated in this serene location, surrounded by wilderness, a stream running through the yard, I felt connected with nature.

The interior of the house was filled with French Impressionist-style paintings and other works of art including sculpture and glass.

The next day started with a boat tour of Jenny Lake and then a 1.5-mile steep hike in the mountains. The trail reminded me of my trekking and mountaineering in Pakistan.

Many times when our host referred to the Grand Tetons as “mountains,” I wanted to correct him; in Pakistan these would be considered foothills.

I had the same reaction on the trail. I saw hikers loaded with stuffed backpacks, a Swiss Army knife on the side, a flashlight in another pocket, two bottles of water, a bear repellent spray, hiking sticks and many other small gadgets and smartphones just to hike a trail of 1.5 miles.

A couple of women had even guns hanging at their sides.

Consumerism and capitalism really drove these tourists to prepare for every possible thing that might happen on the trail.

In Pakistan, we carried less than this to walk for days in terrain that was many times more difficult and posed very serious challenges.

It seemed excessive to see people loaded with stuff to walk an hour. But the view of the lake from the top of the hill was spectacular and worth the climb.

That night we ate around a bonfire in the backyard at the edge of the creek. While we were eating dinner, a deer and her young fawn came close.

They looked a little confused at what these humans were doing in “their” place.

For dessert, I had the most delicious raspberries that I’d ever tasted. They came fresh from bushes in the front garden from which I picked more the next morning.

The next day we started our hike at the Laurence Rockefeller Conservation Area and walked for a mile and a half along the river to Phelps Lake.

Later, I spent the afternoon in art galleries and stores in Jackson Hole. Most of the art was about the American West and was overpriced.

I did not find it exciting except for a miniature truck that was painted and decorated like a typical Pakistan truck.

The famous antler arches in the main city square attracted many tourists. We also visited a local art show and enjoyed some wood and glasswork and photographs.

In the evening, we took a gondola to the top of the hill at Teton Village, where we also had dinner. From 9,500 feet, the valley looked beautiful.

The air was cold and it was chilly on top of the hill. In winter, these slopes are used for skiing and the valley for cross-country skiing.

There were many bushes with colourful wildflowers. The valley was wide open below with a river flowing in the middle, inviting visitors to explore it.

I was very excited the next morning about going to the Yellowstone Park, the oldest and most admired national park in the US.

Before entering the park, we drove through areas where wildfires had burned thousands of acres of land.

Our first major stop was Old Faithful Inn, a gigantic structure made mostly of wood and some stone, a true work of art located right next to the famous Old Faithful geyser.

As expected, the Old Faith erupted on time. Thousands of people circle around it to observe the eruption that sends water and steam more than a hundred feet into the air. There were a few Indian and Pakistani families as well, some of whom I talked to.

The next stop was the Grand Prismatic Spring, another place of geothermal and biological activity, with different bacteria giving its water turquoise, blue, orange, yellow, green and other shades of colour.

Geothermal activity at Grand Prismatic Spring. —Hassan Majeed

After making short stops at several small geothermal ponds, we drove to Hayden Valley where bison sighting was expected.

Sure enough, dozens of bison appeared close to the road. I found a perfect parking place and got out of the car in excitement.

To my surprise, the herd started to walk directly towards us and soon they were only a few feet away.

One of the calves started to scratch its neck against my car. Soon a papa bison came and stood next to the car.

The bison was so huge that my rental car (a Toyota Corolla) seemed small next to him. I was sure if he got his horns under the car, he could turn it over easily.

When bison come to the road, they take their time to move across, causing mile-long traffic jams.

At a pullover spot, with guidance from fellow tourists and with the help of binoculars, I was able to see a grizzly bear sitting next to an elk on the bank of a stream.

After that excitement, I drove towards the inside-the-park hotel to spend the night. There are very few lodges inside the park and the accommodations are limited.

On the way to the hotel, all of a sudden, a small grizzly walked in front of the car. He crossed the road and then disappeared into the woods.

It a highlight of my day. He was only a few metres away yet I felt safe inside the car.

Baby bison scratching its neck. —Hassan Majeed

The next morning, we drove over the state line and had breakfast in Montana. The next stop was Lamar Valley, where there were hundreds, if not thousands, of bison.

I was also able to spot a few antelopes and other animals from the deer family. Someone spotted a wolf eating the carcass of a bison, but I missed it. Later in the day, I saw another big black bear and spotted other wildlife.

There are several waterfalls all along the park. We walked almost a mile to see the gigantic ‘upper falls.’ There was a huge rainbow across the valley over the falls.

Over the years, I have noticed that every South Asian resident or tourist in North America wants to visit the Niagara Falls.

Here I was more excited about the geothermal activity and seeing animals like bison, bears and antelopes.

These are things you can only experience in Yellowstone; falls and trails you can see in other places too.

Upper Falls with a rainbow. —Hassan Majeed

I spent the night in Roosevelt Lodge in Yellowstone Park. I was able to experience a wood stove for heating for the first time; it kept the room warm for a few hours.

But around 4am the room felt ice-cold even under the layers of blankets covering the beds.

I got up and threw some chips into the stove and started the fire again. Soon after the room became cozy.

Maybe it was the sight of fire or the smell of wood or smoke, but it had a calming effect.

The scenery of the mountains was beautiful, but I started to sense some disappointment building inside me.

For me, mountains present the challenge of hiking, not seeing them from a distance. Because of park restrictions, there were only a few areas you could explore on foot.

This was not my idea of visiting mountains. I knew it was time to move on and explore the deserts of southern Utah.

Native American petroglyphs. —Hassan Majeed

Fortunately, in planning the trip I had left room for the unexpected. I am very happy I did, for it allowed an unforeseen turn of events that sent us on a new adventure.

We took the western exit of the park and entered Idaho. Soon the land became flat with miles of wheat and potato crop fields.

The scenery was very different from Yellowstone, yet both were magnificent and beautiful in their own way.

After two days — and several stops — I finally arrived in Bryce Canyon, in southern Utah. It is an impressive configuration of many rock towers standing next to each other in the desert.

We took a two-mile hike, going down to the base of the canyon from which the upward view of these amazing naturally carved stone towers was spectacular.

It is amazing how nature has carved stones into these towers. It took centuries for the wind to carve these delicate sculptures. I have not visited anything parallel to these canyons in Pakistan.

On one side of the valley, the wind and erosion have done some impressive work carving tall caves reminding me of the caves of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.

The Toadstools in Escalante National Monument. —Hassan Majeed

After Bryce, I headed to Waves Canyon, taking a wrong turn and spotting a wolf, the best experience of the day.

I spent the night in a Spanish villa-styled bed and breakfast in Kenab, Utah. The place was peaceful and serene.

I visited art galleries and local handicraft stores and indulged in freshly made ice cream at a food parlour.

Next door was a gallery where the owner and artist were present. They provided information about some interesting local destinations that were not listed on tourist websites or in brochures. Locals wanted to keep certain things a secret to avoid the tourist crowd.

Mud towers in Bryce National Park. —Hassan Majeed

This was very useful information and we visited several sites the next day. The walk to Toadstools, a group of balanced rock formations in Escalante National Monument, started in a dry riverbed very close to different layers of red, brown, black, white and mixed-coloured rocks.

There were no tourists in the area and the internet did not provide information about it.

The trail ends on a beautiful plateau on which there were many small rock formations shaped like mushrooms.

It was a beautiful sight, but it was not possible to stay very long due to the scorching heat. I enjoyed the walk as it was the first time I was so close to nature without crowds of tourists.

These caves in Bryce Canyon reminded me of Bamiyan. —Hassan Majeed

After driving for an hour, we entered Arizona for the next stop at Horseshoe Bend Canyon. The Colorado River was a few hundred feet down in the canyon, following a course shaped almost like a circle.

There were no fences at the edge of the canyon’s vertical drop, and I was amazed how many tourists were standing or sitting close to the edge to get a perfect picture, just a few inches away from certain death in case of a slip.

We drove on through Bear Ears, past several lakes and valleys, on the way to Monument Valley, a symbol of the American wilderness.

I have seen it in countless movies and advertisements. A few red flat-top or tower-like rocks standing in a flat valley, it has always fascinated me.

Moab is a cool little town that serves as a gateway to Arches National Park. It has a fine independent bookstore, local handmade craft shops, and many other boutique stores.

There was also an advertisement for an upcoming music festival. The galleries sell stunningly beautiful photographs of different landscapes of the American West.

We started hiking to visit the world-famous Delicate Arch early in the morning before the temperature got high. It was a good decision. The 1.6-mile hike was all uphill with some steep parts at the edge of the rocks.

I walked through the contrast of dusty soil and soft red clay in the middle of the sandstone rocks. Delicate Arch is a stand-alone structure, probably five stories high on top of a rock which has one flat side. The other side looks like the edge of a circular trench.

A lone standing rock in Arches National Park. —Hassan Majeed

Stepping just a few feet in the wrong direction can land you in a valley hundreds of feet below. I walked very carefully to the centre of the arch, and sat down in the shade of the petrified sand dunes to rest and enjoy the beauty of the arch.

Here I caught the first glimpse of a hawk on this tour. It was exciting to be part of the beauty, feeling powerful and significant as a human being, but insignificant and small in the larger picture.

Years ago I had seen this arch from a distance. This time I was able to climb right up to it. The sandstone structure seemed a beautiful piece of art; I was stunned by its beauty.

Soon the temperature soared up to 41 C; I believe it was the highest temperature I experienced in the US.

Horseshoe Bend, Colorado River. —Hassan Majeed

The next and last stop was Salt Lake City. We visited the Mormon Temple Square and walked near the Tabernacle and into the Old Temple, all majestic and opulent.

At the end of the trip I felt tired, physically exhausted and worn out, but my heart was happy and my mind had stored many images of fascinating scenery and exciting experiences.

It was the right way to spend my vacation as a fond reminder of those wonderful summers in the mountains of Pakistan.

Have you ever explored well-known or off-the-beaten tracks around the world? Share your adventures with us at blog@dawn.com

The reaction to the assassination was not what Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev had anticipated. On December 17, 1927 the three freedom fighters shot dead JP Saunders, assistant superintendent of police outside the Superintendent’s Office in Lahore.

The act, originally intended for Superintendent of Police James Scott, was meant to avenge the death of freedom fighter and Congress leader Lala Lajpat Rai.

Rai had died exactly a month ago, a few days after he was thrashed by the colonial police led by Scott outside the Lahore Railway Station, where he was protesting against the Simon Commission.

The British had set up the commission to report on the progress of constitutional reforms in India, but it was criticised for not including a single Indian member.

Rai had been a mentor to Bhagat Singh. He was a former ally of Ajit Singh, Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary uncle and role model.

The young leader had also studied at Lahore’s National College, which Rai had established, and had imbibed revolutionary literature at the Dwarka Das Library that Rai had set up in the city.

A matter of principle

A committed communist, Bhagat Singh had ideological differences with Rai, who was regarded as a Hindu communalist.

Besides being a member of the Congress, Rai was also part of the Arya Samaj, an organisation that had played an important role in the communalisation of national identity in India.

However, despite his differences with Rai, Bhagat Singh and his comrades felt it was essential to avenge the death of one of the leading politicians of the country.

Rai was a former president of the Congress and he, along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal – known as the Lal-Bal-Pal trio – had been responsible for adding fervour to the Indian national struggle.

For Bhagat Singh, Rai’s death was a blow to the honour of the people of India.

However, when the honour was avenged with the death of Saunders, it failed to inspire the revolutionary reaction Bhagat Singh had anticipated.

Many prominent leaders and politicians distanced themselves from what was described as a “terrorist” act, while numbers at the regular meetings of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the parent organisation of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, also dwindled.

Even The People, a weekly newspaper Rai had founded in Lahore, called the assassination a desperate action.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades reasoned that a more courageous act was required to inspire the revolutionary spirit of the people – an act that would “Make the deaf hear.”

Thus it was decided that a bomb would be thrown in the Legislative Assembly in Delhi, making sure no one was harmed in the process. But Bhagat Singh realised that even that might not achieve their objective.

He then suggested that the bombers court arrest thereafter. He argued that they would use their trial to educate the people about their revolutionary ideas, thus setting up the conditions for an eventual communist revolution in the country.

However, the country’s leading politicians also condemned the bombing in the Legislative Assembly, much like they did with Saunders’ assassination.

Gandhi equated the bombing with the murder of the Hindu publisher Rajpal in Lahore for publishing a controversial pamphlet on the Prophet of Islam.

Motilal Nehru declared that the choice for the people of India lay between Gandhi (the adherent of non-violence) and “Balraj”, a pseudonym used by Bhagat Singh for the assassination.

At this stage the young revolutionary leader was far from the hero he was to become shortly after.

Bhagat Singh’s popularity

The situation began to change dramatically during the record-breaking hunger strike that Bhagat Singh and his comrades undertook in jail to protest against the deplorable conditions there.

Overnight, the public sentiment changed in their favour. Meetings arranged by the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and other organisations sympathetic to Bhagat Singh’s agenda began attracting thousands of people.

The zeal increased even further following the death of their comrade Jatin Das, who lost his life on the 63rd day of the hunger strike due to the damage to his lungs after being force-fed.

The hunger strike touched the conscience of the people, making the nationalists household names. Many argue that around this time, Bhagat Singh began rivalling the popularity of Gandhi.

In the meantime, the Indian National Congress was also experiencing a transition. A new cadre of leadership, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, was emerging.

They were both leftist in their ideology and critical of the existing leadership, which included Gandhi and Motilal Nehru.

At this point, the Congress was demanding Dominion Status from Britain, which would have allowed India autonomy within the monarchy, like Australia and Canada.

To the younger leaders, this was a compromise. Jawaharlal Nehru particularly had serious reservations about it, but eventually accepted the idea after being persuaded by Gandhi.

However, the rise of Bhagat Singh’s popularity meant that the Congress started losing its influence over the youth, who were being increasingly drawn towards his political rhetoric.

Jawaharlal Nehru was already sympathetic to the nationalist leader, whom he visited in jail. He also published the defence statement of Bhagat Singh and his comrades in the Congress bulletin, for which he was criticised by Gandhi.

The slogan of “Inquilab Zindabad” being used by Bhagat Singh and his comrades started replacing the slogan of “Vande Matram” popularised by the Congress.

Towards the end of the 1920s, it became increasingly clear to the older leadership of the Congress that they would isolate their young followers if they did not accommodate their political agenda.

The rise of Jawaharlal Nehru

On September 28, 1929 much to the surprise of everyone, Nehru, backed by his father and Gandhi, was chosen as the new Congress president. This was to mark a shift in the Congress’ policies.

A couple of months later, on New Year’s Eve, the tricolour flag of independent India was hoisted on the banks of the Ravi in Lahore, as the Congress changed its demand from Dominion Status to Purna Swaraj or complete independence.

Bhagat Singh’s popularity was at its peak in Punjab, with Lahore being his political home. He, Rajguru and Sukhdev were executed there on March 23, 1931, a little more than a year after the Congress called for Purna Swaraj.

Their last rites were performed on the banks of Ravi by Bhagat Singh’s supporters who had snatched their remains from the colonial state.

It is impossible to predict how things would have turned out had Bhagat Singh’s rhetoric from jail not captured the imagination of the people.

Would it have been possible for Jawaharlal Nehru to rise so quickly to the top in the Congress? Would the largest political organisation of the country have changed its demand from Dominion Status to Purna Swaraj so soon after first demanding Dominion Status?

There is, however, no doubting that Bhagat Singh’s popularity and rhetoric made it easier for Jawaharlal Nehru to convince the senior leadership of the Congress to revolutionise their agenda or risk losing their popular support to other more radical organisations.

This piece was originally published in Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.