• Cyber security
• Why is data important?
• Data security is personal security
• Need for laws
• Next steps

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.

Read next: This child with a learning disability was expelled from school

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• Courtly origins
• Onset of modernity
• Modernity and its discontents
• Natives are restless
• Constant vigilance
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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-naveesi.

These early-modern akhbar-navees 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-vafees.

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.

• No plan, no leader
• The conspiracy trials
• An inspiration to others

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.

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.

• Lahore Qalandars (Team grade: F)
• Multan Sultans (Team grade: C)
• Quetta Gladiators (Team grade: B)
• Karachi Kings (Team grade: B)
• Peshawar Zalmi (Team grade: A)
• Islamabad United (Team grade: A+)
• Pakistan Super League 2018 (Grade: A++)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• A matter of principle
• Bhagat Singh’s popularity
• The rise of Jawaharlal Nehru

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.

We didn’t know who we were meeting until just a few hours before. All we had been told was to show up.

Perhaps that is why when 20 of us female human rights defenders found ourselves in a room waiting for her to arrive, none of us had quite calibrated what was happening.

Women, many of whom are institutions unto themselves, were teetering with excitement, joy – emotions not common in the lives of activists.

There was Syeda Ghulam Fatima, who works to liberate brick kiln slaves, Anis Haroon, a National Human Rights Commissioner, Khawer Mumtaz, Muniba Mazari, Nighat Dad, Samar Minallah, activists from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.

We all know of each other but our schedules rarely, if ever, bring us all into the same city, let alone the same room.

We started taking pictures to commemorate this moment. It isn’t often you are in the same room as all your sheroes.

As we took our seats, the doors opened.

The first thing you notice about Malala Yousafzai is how small she is – barely clearing 5’3 ft. But her effect on the room was immediate, that suddenly seemed too little to contain our shared pride. We all jumped to our feet and burst into spontaneous applause.

That after six years, she was home. That she had survived being shot in the head. That despite all the media scrutiny, the relentless bullying, the robbed childhood, she was back.

Despite a whirlwind schedule, the world’s youngest Nobel Prize winner had made time to meet the women on the ground to inspire both the old and new generations of activists.

Malala went around the room, greeting each female activist individually by shaking their hand, sometimes leaning in for a quick hug.

Some had met her before. Some, like me, had only ever seen her on television. But the delight of both was the same.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who had organised the meeting, asked everyone to briefly introduce themselves to Malala. But this moment was about Malala, nothing else.

Some told her they had not been able to sleep the night before when they found out they would be meeting her.

Anis Haroon, who has dedicated her life to the cause of human rights in Pakistan, had flown in from Karachi just that morning. The short notice had made it difficult to get a proper token of her affection, she said.

But she had brought with her the iconic Women’s Action Forum scarf, yellow, imprinted with laws and poetry that uphold the rights of women.

Malala got up and went up to Anis Haroon, who draped the scarf around her shoulders, welcoming her into this decades-long battle.

Anis Haroon then invited present and past WAF activists to be photographed with Malala, in a moment of inclusiveness that echoed the generosity and positivity in the room. That is Malala’s power.

In-depth: Malala Yousufzai

Malala is a listener. She speaks when called upon, and when she does, her words take comfort in their wisdom. She sits up straight, she makes eye contact. Her confidence is one fostered over years of experience. Only, Malala is just 20 years old.

Her small stature emphasises this. We all know the battles she has fought. We all know the enemies she takes on. We all know the ambitions she has.

I told her, you are so young. I told her that I have two daughters and as inspirational as she was for them, I hoped that she could still find time to enjoy what is left of her childhood.

There is a collective acknowledgement of this in the room, each looking at her, aware of the normalcy she has traded in for her extraordinary life.

When the introductions are done, Malala takes a deep breath. If she is overwhelmed, she does not show it. She knows how to navigate her distinction without a trace of arrogance.

She is comfortable in a room full of Pakistan’s leading activists. And surprisingly, Pakistan’s leading activists are comfortable in a room with her.

Cover story: The daughter of the nation

Earlier in the day, I had met a fellow activist at a café who was bursting with excitement at having just met Malala at the Prime Minister’s House.

I asked him how she was, and he said she was thronged by people which seemed to overwhelm her. And yet in this room, as we bonded over her arrival, she was calm, collected and eager to listen.

Malala is thrilled to be home. She has dreamed of this moment, and like many of us, can’t bring herself to believe that her dream of returning to her country came true.

She was apprehensive about her reception in Pakistan but was glad to see that she had been welcomed with open arms.

Sure, she manages the Malala Fund for Education. But, she tells us, she has assignments due at Oxford. She worries about homework.

Her friends at university have been texting her constantly, who are in disbelief that she managed to keep her trip to Pakistan secret from them.

We are heartened to hear of these small marks of student life. It is apparent that Malala can have a life, not entirely untouched by her celebrity but still pretty close.

Malala has always been serious about her studies, we know that. Even after she was shot, her first conversation with her father from the U.K. included an impassioned plea to bring her books with him. Her Matriculation exams were right around the corner, after all.

Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, sits next to her. He lets her shine, and speaks with the same respect he has passed down to his daughter.

There was something personal about how we understood what his support had done for Malala.

We all know how enabling having a father-figure that supports our work can be, and the courage it gives you to embark on a path less trodden.

Malala says her home country looks the same. Only, everything is different. There is so much hope, she finds, and is deeply touched by the kindness she has found in just this room.

I have never seen activists in such a good mood.

Last month, the civil society in Pakistan lost one of its giants. There was a sense of foreboding, as if we had lost a compass in a terrain that suddenly had become unfamiliar despite years of having walked it. Even the most steadfast of us felt broken by Asma Jahangir’s death.

Being an activist in Pakistan, being an activist anywhere, is a taxing road. But when we met Malala, the work seemed validated.

That if this young woman could find her way back, after everything she had been through, with her faith and will intact, how could we not keep fighting?

The struggle is long and often a lonely one, but how were we alone if we had each other?

And make no mistake, Malala fights the good fight. She brings nuance to the narrative about Pakistan in the West.

She is accused of being a tool for this narrative, but rest assured, she is no one’s fool.

She was not yet 16 years old when she met President Obama, who had asked her to come at the White House, and raised the impact of drone warfare on her people, reminding him of their murderous consequences.

Her very existence complicates things for the very institutions that paint Pakistan with a broad brush. And she does not let them forget that.

To those who know this, her homecoming was the triumph for the years of standing up for her.

Editorial: Malala returns home

This meeting wasn’t a baton-passing ceremony. None of us marked her out to continue the journeys that many of us embarked on before Malala was even born. That is not what we were there to do.

What it was, was a moment of validation and joy, for what she meant as a global symbol of Pakistani women fighting for a just world.

It is easy to overlook how much courage it took for her to come back home, and in that room, that bravery was infectious.

The best you can do as an activist is to create a path for future activists. You are lucky if you even guide one.

And here was Malala, uniting us all to continue to march forward, demanding more, fighting back and never giving up.

When she left the room, we all looked at each other in excitement. We took some more photos, hugged each other, promising to help each other in our respective battles.

Eventually, we all got up and returned to the work that we do.

This past week, 20-year-old Malala Yousafzai made an emotional return to Pakistan. Her four-day visit included meetings with friends, family, and senior officials, including Pakistan’s prime minister.

Many Pakistanis applauded Yousafzai’s return. Some, however, did not. While she may have received a hero’s welcome, Malala is no national hero in Pakistan.

A small but vocal minority, most of them members of a growing conservative middle class, resent her. They label her as a fraud, traitor, sell-out, or American stooge.

They say that there’s nothing special about her, that many Pakistani children suffer worse fates; that she’s abandoned her nation for fame in the West. Some claim the attack on her was staged by the CIA.

This is a story about an ordinary teenager who survives an unthinkable tragedy, uses that tragedy as inspiration to become a prominent advocate, and ends up in the crosshairs of a hate campaign led by conservative compatriots.

A similar story is playing out now in the United States.

Survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gun massacre in Parkland, Florida. have launched a powerful movement for more gun control.

This campaign has elevated them to prominence and provoked a small constituency of conservative, conspiratorial, gun-loving Americans.

These haters say the grieving victims attract attention they don’t deserve, come off as sanctimonious and self-righteous, are frauds, and are “being funded” and “given scripts.”

The gun massacre survivors are branded as Nazis, targeted in doctored photo campaigns, and even mocked for college rejection letters.

Admittedly, the analogy is imperfect. Malala suffered a more serious physical injury than did most of the Parkland survivors.

Malala is an overseas-based global activist focused on the transnational issue of education, while the Parkland survivors centre their advocacy around the US domestic issue of gun control.

Malala’s advocacy is couched in the language of hope; the Parkland activists are often emotional, angry, and overtly political.

Additionally, while Pakistanis and Americans use the same tactic—character assassination—against their objects of scorn, their respective motivations are different.

For Pakistanis, Malala represents something unusual: A successful case of upward mobility. In a nation of entrenched inequality, where 40 per cent of Pakistani children in the lowest economic quantile are expected to remain there for life, Malala’s rapid transformation from schoolteacher’s daughter to embodiment of the global elite is literally unbelievable—especially for the millions of middle-class Pakistanis who know they’ll never reach such dizzying heights.

As I wrote in an essay last year, this disorienting reality provokes admiration from some—but jealousy, skepticism, suspicion, and hostility from others.

While Pakistanis feel confused, Americans feel threatened. These impassioned, articulate students—who have galvanised many Americans, including elected officials—make them worry about real threats to their cherished gun culture. So, they lash out.

Nonetheless, the same basic dynamic is at play with Malala and the Parkland survivors: Young people suffering unthinkable tragedies and then being subjected to vicious hate campaigns—simply for the sin of being well-known advocates.

There are lessons here. One is the power of conspiracy theories. They convince people that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, children weren’t really nearly gunned down and aren’t really innocent advocates for a cause.

In Pakistan, conspiracy theories have long been ubiquitous, thanks to a troubled education system, extremist sentiment, and the state’s tendency to blame domestic problems on foreign forces.

In America, only more recently have conspiracy theories gained such widespread prominence. Formerly fringe figures like Alex Jones and Erick Erickson have become highly influential, thanks in part to social media. Even President Trump has supported conspiracy theories. In effect, fringe has gone mainstream.

The other lesson is about civility. Restraint is dead in public discourse. No one—including young people targeted by militants and school shooters—is off limits from hate campaigns.

Tragedy is not a sacrosanct shield that confers immunity from abuse—especially when, in Pakistan, America, and beyond, people are harassed or worse simply because of their religion, ethnicity, or political views. Social media, which gives haters the luxuries of anonymity and distance, compounds this incivility.

In a video message to protestors at the March for Our Lives rally on March 24, Malala explained what she and the Parkland survivors share in common: They experienced violence and injustice, and they decided to speak out.

Sadly, something else they share in common is the hate to which they have been subjected for daring to speak out.

18-year-old Sadia (all names have been changed) was brought into a clinic at a bustling tertiary care hospital by her father Noor Khan with high fever for the past three weeks.

She was diagnosed with typhoid and prescribed the standard oral antibiotics suitable to treat this disease.

The next week, Khan returned to the same clinic with his 20-year-old son Habib who had the same symptoms as his sister.

However, his condition was considerably worse and necessitated admission to hospital and intravenous antibiotics.

“Doctor sahiba, Habib has his exams in less than two weeks. Please fix him up soon,” Khan implored.

“We will try our best,” the doctor comforted him.

On the day of discharge, Khan walked into the clinic with heavy steps. Unable to see the doctor in the eyes, he said, “Doctor sahiba, the bill for the hospital admission is Rs 15,000. And the medicine that you have given now to be taken at home is also quite expensive. Can we do without this medicine?”

“If Habib is to get better, then this medicine is required,” the doctor replied.

“I know doctor sahiba, but this will be very difficult. I work in a local factory as a worker. I make Rs 15,000 per month. I have taken out a loan to pay for his treatment,” Khan said helplessly.

The doctor stepped in and arranged for part of his medical expenses to be waived by the hospital. Grateful as he was, Khan didn’t know that his ordeal was far from over.

Related: Superbug typhoid strain behind Pakistan outbreak

After a month, he was rushing his youngest child Mujeeb, 12, into emergency with high fever and convulsions.

“Since when has this been happening?” the doctor asked.

“For the past two weeks. We were giving him medicine from the local medical shop because well…” Khan replied.

“What!?” exclaimed the doctor

“Doctor sahiba, I didn’t have money to bring him to the hospital,” a dejected Khan stated, his eyes downcast.

Mujeeb was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit where he was treated with a number of very expensive intravenous antibiotics. His blood culture indicated multi-drug-resistant typhoid. He remained in the hospital for two weeks.

He was suffering, but so was his family who was now in massive debt. His elder brother Habib had left his studies to work in a motor repair shop to help pay for the household’s daily expenses.

Khan was facing problems at work because of taking leaves for his family’s illness. The mother, Bano Jee, was convinced that someone had done kala jaadoo (black magic) on her children.

Special report: The antibiotics resistance crisis: an emerging public health disaster

Unfortunately, for those within the medical profession, this story is not fiction — it represents a terrible reality, a classic example of how some infectious diseases, almost unheard of in the developed world, have not only lingered as major threats to our lives, but have actually gained in strength to wreak havoc on our populations.

This is evidenced by the fact that 40 per cent of the disease burden in Pakistan can be attributed to infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and malaria.

Typhoid, a household term in our cities and villages, was relatively easy to treat up till recently. Two years back, multi-drug resistant typhoid was found within the localities of Hyderabad and Karachi.

According to reports, more than 800 cases of drug-resistant typhoid were found in Hyderabad alone in a 10-month period between 2016 and 2017.

This bug was sensitive to only two broad-spectrum antibiotics, the cost of which is exorbitant. Infectious disease specialists estimate the total treatment cost for 14 days to be roughly around Rs 50,000.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics are those that can kill a wide range of bugs; they are used when the bug is unknown, but these antibiotics increase resistance if used indiscriminately.

For someone who survives on daily wages, such treatment costs can put the entire household in financial catastrophe.

Read next: ‘Pakistan needs to know, tackle crisis resulting from antibiotic resistance’

What adds to the problem is that broad-spectrum antibiotics are unlikely to be found in small towns and shops, particularly in rural areas, where generic antibiotics availability ranges from 10 to 25 per cent.

Bacteria also know no boundaries — recently, the same bug was found in Swabi. The doctors in that locality reported that the patient was from Karachi.

A World Health Organization poster reads: “Our time with antibiotics is running out.” This is not a dramatic call for attention, but a tragic reality of the times that we live in.

The growing resistance among organisms to different antibiotics has developed and worsened over the course of decades due to our unfavourable systematic practices that lead to prescription of antibiotics, even when they are not medically indicated or required, such as in the case of viral infections.

Overuse of antibiotics is an increasing problem, as the recent Dawn editorial also suggests. This occurs due to the fact that patients themselves come to physicians looking for a quick fix, which they misconceive to be only through antibiotics, and demand to be prescribed antibiotics.

Alarmingly in our situation, it is easy to bypass physicians and just go to the corner store and buy any antibiotic we feel inclined to get, based on the advice of the storekeeper who may have no background even in pharmacy sciences.

A 2016 study from Peshawar demonstrated that 26 per cent of 800 respondents reported self-medication of antibiotics.

Another equally worrying factor is that many medical practitioners, amenable to the influence of pharmaceutical companies, prescribe these antibiotics in large quantities.

Such physicians accept favours and gifts — including simple office stationery, drug samples, trips to exotic destinations abroad among others — from pharmaceutical companies who, in exchange, require them to prescribe the more expensive antibiotics.

The complicity of these physicians, who are honour bound by their medical oath to put the interests of the patients above their own but fail do so, is another influencing factor within developing countries, including Pakistan.

Guidelines by the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council and the National Bioethics Committee on pharma-physician interactions exist but, to date, no physician has been held accountable or had his/her license revoked, although the practice is rampant. Since these guidelines have no teeth, it is hardly surprising that the practice continues to flourish.

Prevention works better than cure and is significantly cheaper in the long run also. This is even truer in cases of infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis, and dengue and so on.

Unhygienic food and drinking water and poor living conditions create a perfect milieu for infectious agents to thrive. The response of health authorities in such situations should not be reactive, but more efforts have to be geared towards primary prevention.

Preventive efforts include measures like vaccination, which is seriously neglected in Pakistan. A vaccination drive was conducted in Hyderabad recently only after cases of drug-resistant typhoid were found by a private university and the authorities duly alerted.

However, vaccination against the more common diseases in Pakistan should become part of the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), which itself faces a number of challenges, including limited resources and inadequate coverage.

General lack of awareness among public with respect to vaccination, along with limited effort by public health authorities, has relegated the importance of vaccination. These need to be revitalised in order to tackle this menace.

Also read: How Pakistan turned around its vaccination programme using technology

Serious efforts by the authorities to provide clean sanitation and provision of hygienic food should be done. With sewerage spilling over streets and vendors selling pakoras to eager buyers right next to a tertiary care hospital is a common site for all Pakistanis that does not even merit raising eyebrows.

While our chemists merrily dispense antibiotics to eager customers, our food stalls dispense fortified salmonella, the bacteria that causes typhoid. If we are serious in stopping infections short in their tracks, we need to get serious in preventing conditions that foster them.

The dangers of antimicrobial resistance are real with significant impacts. To combat this, the medical community has an essential role to play in limiting their prescriptions of antibiotics and raising awareness among public about dangers of self-medication and antibiotic overuse.

Health authorities also have to wake up from their restful slumber and focus their energies on preventive mechanisms as opposed to occasional stirrings when water is already under the bridge.

Are you a medical practitioner working on community and public health issues? Share your insights with us at blog@dawn.com

• Devotion towards fire

I have been to Sargodha many times. In fact multiple times in a year, throughout my childhood. This is where my family comes from — both maternal and paternal.

Despite all my trips, however, I have never visited the shrine of Naghyana in a village called Dharema, about 10-odd km from the city.

Composed of two graves, it is an extraordinary shrine, dating back to the 17th century. The first grave is said to belong to Prince Murad Baksh, the youngest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, who had joined hands with his older brother Aurangzeb to take on their brother, Prince Dara Shikoh.

However, after Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shikoh, he put Murad Baksh to death, clearing the way for him to become the emperor. The story of his grave being at this site, though, is unlikely as Prince Murad Baksh was put to death in Gwalior.

The second grave is said to belong to the saint Naghyana, who is believed to have given refuge to Murad Baksh. The progeny of the saint eventually came to be known as Naghyana.

The word 'naghyana' is believed to have been derived from 'naghe,' an epithet used for nanga sadhus, the naked ascetic devotees of the Hindu deity Shiva.

Covered in ash dust, sporting long untrimmed hair, and known to consume hashish incessantly, these sadhus defy all societal norms and prefer to live in seclusion.

There is also a long established tradition of naked Sufi ascetics, connecting all the way back to udasi sadhus, followers of Shri Chand, the eldest son of Guru Nanak.

In devotional art, Shri Chand is usually depicted almost naked sitting in a yogic position next to a fire. He has long, ragged hair, just like a nanga sadhu.

Like these sadhus, the Sufi dervishes too let their hair grow long, and believe that hair is the source of life-energy.

It seemed that the udasi, as devotees of Shri Chand later came to be known, also borrowed heavily from the Shaivite sadhus, just as the Sufi ascetics or dervishes did. Perhaps Naghyana was one such Sufi ascetic.

There is another legend at the Naghyana shrine about the fire that the saint lit. Fire acquires a particular symbolic and religious significance in ascetic Sufi tradition.

Many popular Sufis are believed to have their dhuan (smoke), which, in this case, specifically refers to the place where they lit their fire and sat.

For many such Sufis, their dhuan became a place of veneration after their death. The situation at the shrine is quite similar.

At the shrine, it is narrated that the fire has remained alive ever since the death of the saint in the 17th century. His devotees have made sure that his dhuan survives.

I am told the fire simmers — emitting more smoke than fire — at the centre of a room that is blackened by this centuries’ old smoke.

Perhaps the fire comes to life during the annual urs celebration, the death anniversary of the saint, the day he is believed to have become One with the Divine.

I saw another similar situation at the shrine of Shah Hussain, the 16th century mystic poet, who is believed to have fallen in love with the Hindu boy, Madhu Lal. They are buried in Lahore together, in a union that signifies the Oneness of the world — Monism.

There is a fire just outside the shrine to Madho Lal Hussain in Lahore, which is lit throughout the year by the lamps of his devotees. Much like the fire at the Naghyana shrine, this one too was simmering when I visited a few months ago.

The situation at the shrine this past week, however, was different as thousands of devotees of the saint converged there to celebrate his urs, also known as Mela Chiraghan or the Festival of Lamps, one of the greatest festivals of the city of Lahore.

The fire must have been alive, thriving, whirling and swinging, imitating the dhamaal of the dervishes around it.

Devotion towards fire

Fire has long been held sacred in the indigenous religious traditions of South Asia. The Zoroastrians are popularly and falsely referred to as fire worshippers. Their religious shrines are known as fire temples, with fire forming a central feature in their religious rituals.

At a fire temple, the fire never dies. The original fire (other traditions assert it was ash from the fire) that was brought from Persia by the fleeing Zoroastrians was set up in a temple off the coast of Mumbai, the oldest fire temple in the world.

There is a deeper connection between the Zoroastrians and the Sufi ascetic tradition of South Asia. The term 'dervish,' popularly used to describe ascetic Sufis, is derived from the Persian word 'daryosh,' which is derived from the word 'drigu,' for devotees of Zarathustra.

While there is an etymological connection between the drigu and dervish, there also seems to be a religious continuity between the two, with fire joining the knot of these two traditions.

For many dervishes, it is not just fire — the ash from the fire of a Sufi saint is also significant. Just like the Shaivite sadhus, they believe ash from this sacred fire has magical properties and use it frequently for healing purposes.

It is around these fires that different dervishes gather and engage in hashish consumption, another connection that binds them with the Shaivite sadhus. In both of these traditions, the consumption of hashish or other forms of cannabis enjoys religious approval.

Sometimes Sufi ascetics perform zikr around the fire — this involves the invocation of God in a liturgical manner, using a breathing technique in a particular rhythm.

Jurgen Wasim Frembgen, a German anthropologist who has worked extensively on the Sufi culture of Islam, finds the origin of this form of zikr — a particular feature of South Asian Sufism — in the yogic tradition.

While fire is important in their religious asceticism, so is the tong or chimta, which is used to maintain the fire.

The chimta is an essential possession of a Sufi dervish. It is used to announce the arrival of a dervish into a village. It is used by him for rhythm when he sings Sufi songs. Often, it is the only instrument a Sufi dervish possesses.

The chimta is also kept by sadhus who not only use it to maintain fire but as a percussion instrument when need be. It is also part of the Sikh tradition where it is used as an instrument to perform religious music, following a trajectory that has its origin in the Shaivite sadhu tradition and their fire-tending necessities.

Scratching beneath the surface, one would find similar traditions of fire veneration in Buddhist and Jain traditions. Moving beyond the demarcations that divide these religions, it becomes impossible to maintain these boundaries in the ascetic realm.

Where does the Shaivite sadhu tradition end and Sufi dervish tradition begin? How does one begin to differentiate between the dervish and the udasi devotees of Shri Chand?

While there are several traditions that join together the threads of these indigenous religious practices, one of those traditions is their communal devotion towards fire, perhaps a tradition all of them borrow from Zoroastrianism.

The article was first published in Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

• Which countries have had some success in broadening the tax base?
• Which countries have not had much success in this endeavour?
• What are the key lessons in tax reforms attempting to broaden the tax base?
• Any lessons on why and how some countries have been able to address corruption in the tax administration?
• Is it necessarily politically harmful for an elected government to attempt to broaden the tax base?
• Is there a significant role for information technology here?
• How would you summarise your views on success stories in broadening the tax base?

Broadening its tax base is perhaps the most significant economic challenge facing Pakistan. After 70 years of existence, the country has less than two million income tax filers, one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the world, and a tax system which riddled with inequity and corruption.

But we are not the only country struggling with tax reforms; other have faced this challenge too. The question is what can we learn from them.

To answer this question, I reached out to Dr Mark Gallagher, an economist who has spent three decades in dealing with tax reforms in developing countries.

He has served as a consultant for different organisations, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter American Development Bank, USAID, US Treasury, German GIZ, and the European Commission. Here is how Dr Gallagher responded via email to my questions.

Which countries have had some success in broadening the tax base?

Many countries have had success in broadening the tax base. But first, it is important to understand that there are basically three ways to do so:

One is to get people into the tax system who have been outside of it but are supposed to, by law, be paying taxes.

Two, reduce tax incentives that allow businesses that are economically active to not pay taxes. These tax breaks or reliefs include measures such as tax holidays that say that, if you invest in such and such area, industry or for export only, you don’t have to pay tax or you can pay a reduced amount.

And three, reduce the number of goods and services that are not taxed or are taxed at a lower rate than others. For instance, basic foodstuffs in some countries are exempt from value-added tax.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 2000s, a big push was made to get businesses to register. This worked and revenues rose quite quickly. Later, they reduced tax holidays for corporations and lowered the corporate income tax rate from 30% to 10% and revenues increased.

In Rwanda over the years, the tax administration broadened the tax base by getting more and more people and companies registered, but they did not reduce exemptions and exoneration; revenue rose steadily for a decade.

In Georgia, the government issued a new tax code, I think in 2009, which lowered the corporate tax rate, but also applied the tax rate to all companies in all industries.

This broadening the tax base by eliminating preferential rates coupled with a lower headline rate for all resulted in considerable revenue increases over the subsequent years.

Which countries have not had much success in this endeavour?

I would say the Philippines. There, tax revenues reached their pinnacle (in relation to the overall economy) in 1997, then dropped for the better part of two decades.

Tax revenue has only recently begun to increase, but remains below the 1997 level. Tax incentives run rampant, as does complexity, and some complain of corruption and evasion.

Afghanistan is another country that has not made much effort in broadening the legal tax base, actually since 1965.

Of course, the tax administration was rebuilt over the past 15 years, but other than reaching out to taxpayers around the country, tax law has remained fundamentally unchanged.

What are the key lessons in tax reforms attempting to broaden the tax base?

I would say:

• Improve the taxpayer registry to make sure it works well. Make special efforts to identify people who are not registered or paying taxes, including identifying companies hiding in the so-called informal sector.

• Take a careful look at all the tax incentives, centralise tax incentive authority in the hands of the Ministry of Finance, but impose a rigorous mechanism for their authorisation.

• Report every year on tax expenditures (the revenue lost to these incentives) to add transparency to the system and help build support for reducing tax expenditures and thereby broaden the tax base.

Any lessons on why and how some countries have been able to address corruption in the tax administration?

This is hard to respond to, but there are some cases and some inklings. Perhaps one of the most successful cases is that of the Georgia, where after the overthrow of a sclerotic, corrupt, long-entrenched regime, the country implemented revolutionary change throughout, including cleaning up its tax administration.

Crooked tax officials were either tossed or prosecuted. Most tax officials were fired and replaced with new professionals. Systems of internal control in the tax administration were strengthened.

In El Salvador, in the 1990s, just after the end of the long civil war, the tax administration and other parts of government took pains to root out corruption.

Similarly, in Rwanda, after their terrible genocide of the early 1990s, top to bottom reform of most public institutions included deep anti-corruption measures.

This is how the tax systems in both these countries were able to produce more and more revenue without raising tax rates.

I don’t want to say a country needs to have a revolution to address its corruption problems, but in these cases, it seems to have set the stage for broad reforms.

That said, from my experience of 30 years, all real efforts to fix the tax system also include efforts to impede corruption.

Is it necessarily politically harmful for an elected government to attempt to broaden the tax base?

No, but it is not easy. Strengthening taxpayer registration can be done without any real political push back, but it is not likely to have great financial return, though in Bosnia and Herzegovina it did.

Reducing tax incentives is very difficult politically. Usually the people who benefit from these so-called incentives are very well placed and wield considerable power.

Going after these tax incentives is very important and needs to be done. But it needs to be done very carefully, with full consideration of who loses, how much, and what will be the force of their opposition and how can this be overcome.

Is there a significant role for information technology here?

Yes, but this depends upon the country. The more backward the country, the less scope there is.

On the other hand, IT systems, and especially linking the taxpayer registry to other information sources, such as vehicle registration, air traveller information, real estate or property registration and transfer systems, can help a savvy tax administration identify people who are likely under-reporting income as well as identify people and activities that should clearly be in the tax system but are not.

I explore this a bit in my article Big Data and Domestic Resource Mobilization: How Donors Can Help Developing Countries Increase Revenue.

How would you summarise your views on success stories in broadening the tax base?

Broadening the tax base is the best way to reform a tax system and to increase domestic revenue mobilisation, which is needed to fund our governments and to invest in the future.

Base broadening allows us to raise more revenue without raising tax rates and without harming the economy and national competitiveness.

Broadening the tax base increases the fairness of the tax system, since it shares the tax burden with more people in the economy. It reduces the distortions caused by tax and investment policy that seek to favour one investment or industry over another.

It's something righteous, but tough. The most powerful interests in any economy tend to be those who benefit from tax incentives and they are not going to release their grip from the throat of the political system easily.

Are you an expert working on policy reforms? Share your insights with us at blog@dawn.com

A significant portion of cricket viewers have the perception that roughening the ball on one side and shinning it on the other will inevitably lead to reverse swing. Herein lies the problem: It's not true. Not even partially true.

It's true that aerodynamics explain why the ball will reverse towards the shiny side, but this doesn't mean that any person who can hurl a ball at the batsman can make it reverse too. Bowlers need to master the art of reverse swing just as they have to perfect it for conventional swing.

The pace must be quick enough, the wrist must be at an angle between 20-30 degrees, and the length the ball pitches at should be full enough to allow the ball maximum time in air. Only then can physics take over.

Not to mention that the ball must be taken care of by the entire team to make sure that one side of it retains some shine while the other one is roughed up, as the ball gets older.

If the skills required to make the ball reverse is as hard to master as conventional swing — if not more — then it begs the question as to why tampering the ball to prepare it for reverse swing is illegal.

As long as no foreign object is used, such as the piece of sandpaper that has put the career of three Australian players into jeopardy, altering the ball otherwise shouldn’t be a problem.

Just like reverse swing, maybe all we need is to re-brand ball-tampering for it to become acceptable by the cricketing fraternity.

When Pakistani fast bowlers wreaked havoc by inventing the art to make the old ball swing, it was labelled as cheating by the English players — only to re-name it as reverse swing when they finally learned how it's done. No surprises there.

I understand that it's extremely difficult for the International Cricket Council (ICC) to draw the line between what are 'natural' means of ball-tampering and what aren't.

Players use all sorts of methods to alter the ball. Some are more subtle about it, such as when Faf Du Plessis had mint in his mouth and he used his saliva to shine the ball, while others like Shahid Afridi prefer to do it more brazenly on TV by sinking their teeth into a leather hardball.

The blurriness between acceptable and unacceptable means of altering the ball is probably what has kept the ICC adamant on not allowing any sort of ball-tampering whatsoever.

I, however, argue that the ball is the bowler’s property and that he should be allowed to tamper it with at least some 'natural' means.

This may spur another debate on why foreign objects shouldn't be allowed if altering the ball isn’t cheating. But in the case of foreign objects, it's important to understand that it takes away hard work from the players because countless tools can help prepare a ball within minutes.

The beauty of reverse swing lies in the fact that it must be earned with whatever is available on the field and watching teams work in sync to reinvent swing from a dead old ball is part of the magic of this dark art.

While the ICC takes a firm stance on zero tolerance over ball-tampering, the game is losing its balance between the bat and the ball, especially due to a surge in flat pitches around the world.

The Test format certainly is in dire need of attracting bigger crowds to keep its relevance alive. Just like T20s are inherently designed for batsmen to entertain the crowd, Test matches can only penetrate the market for viewership if bowlers have the liberty to experiment with the ball.

If tampering the ball can lead to more thrilling Test matches then I am all for it because I will never sign up for watching a five-day run fest on a flat deck that eventually leads to a draw.

Why does the ICC need to go into unknown territory by introducing four-day Test matches to revive Test cricket? Why can't it allow bowlers to have the tools they need to produce exciting bowling? It’s not cheating; it’s a skill to make use of a tampered ball. Know the difference between the two.

To add more flavour, taking a new ball after the 80-over mark could be made mandatory and not optional for the bowling side. This would add new dynamics to the game where the captain would have to decide whether to use his fast bowlers with a reversing ball or keep them fresh for a new one depending on which skills his bowlers bank more on.

The batsman that survives this battle on the other hand will become highly valued. It would take a fighting spirit and immense skill for the batsman to stand his ground while the opposition works on the ball to take him down.

A hard-fought 50 from the batsman will bring more life to Test cricket than a double-hundred on a flat deck in front of empty stands.

To put everything in context, reverse swing is an art and a tampered ball is just a tool that can only do as much as the person using it can make out of it.

Owning a bow and an arrow doesn’t make one a hunter; a tampered ball served on a platter won't make an ordinary bowler extraordinary.

Let bowlers tamper the ball with 'natural' means so that we can get some excitement, balance and fairness back into the game.

• Electable needed
• Why Aamir Liaquat
• But … Aamir Liaquat! Why!?

I have said many things in the past about the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and its politics. However today, instead of taking apart the PTI, I will try to do something different: I will explain why the party is opening the floodgates to let the likes of Aamir Liaquat in.

The not doctor, Aamir Liaquat, recently joined the PTI flanked by Imran Khan and other senior leaders. Unlike other instances of people joining the party, this time around the reaction was completely different.

Instead of latching on to whoever was joining the Tehreek, PTI supporters spoke out against Aamir Liaquat jumping ship.

The resentment against allowing the not doctor to join was real and people even pulled old tweets of his against the PTI to explain why they were not in favour of the move.

And while eventually, like good partisan folk, the PTI cadre online accepted Imran Khan's decision, this whole exercise highlighted two things.

Firstly, the PTI's vocal support base, at least the one online, is idealistic and still sees the party as something unique and different.

Secondly, the PTI leadership is acting like a political party and focusing on trying to win elections in real life rather than Facebook. This is progress for the PTI and future elections in Pakistan.

As we transform Pakistan into a stable democracy with two potent parties at least at the provincial level, a strong PTI with actual seats in assemblies is a good thing.

You might ask why I say that? Well, a strong opposition is the best check on the government.

Op-ed: PTI’s Punjab dilemma

Take for instance every single province in Pakistan at this point. The reason the provincial governments get away with doing whatever they want is because there is practically no opposition to them.

In Punjab, the opposition is negligible. In Sindh, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) is so well entrenched that there is hardly an opposition to push back. Balochistan has a negligible opposition and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's (KP) opposition is too splintered to do anything.

In such a scenario, at the national and provincial levels, a strong PTI in Punjab and Sindh would be a good thing for the country because we can have a real opposition that can force the government to think twice before underperforming.

PTI winning votes would make it a credible opposition and that is a good thing for Pakistan.

So, to get to that point, the PTI is finally making peace with the fact that they will have to take people in no matter who they are and do what needs to be done.

Even if those people include Aamir Liaquat, the PTI has an incentive to have them in the party because they can contribute in one way or another.

We might not like their contributions, but let’s not pretend that Aamir Liaquat's Ramzan transmission is not watched by a massive audience across the country.

Electable needed

To contest elections and give the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) a tough time in Punjab, PPP/Awami National Party in KP and Muttahida Qaumi Movement/Pak Sarzameen Party/Musharraf in Karachi, the PTI needs electable candidates: people who have their own vote bank and can realistically utilise the PTI vote to win a seat. This is not really rocket science.

Idealists believe that somehow if the PTI gives a ticket to its loyal workers, they will magically win a seat or keep integrity even if they lose.

Related: What's behind the rift?

The thing about this myth is that loyal workers, unless they are Jahangir Tareen or Aleem Khan (technically, ‘loyal’ is a stretch for both), lack the financial resources and the political capital required to successfully contest elections.

I am not talking about winning, I am talking about contesting elections only. Let me explain this claim in detail.

A National Assembly (NA) constituency has anywhere between 300 to 400 polling stations in it. For instance, NA-154 had 338 polling stations.

For a candidate to successfully even contest elections, they need hundreds of polling agents. Polling agents do not work for free and do not just pop up on the day of elections. They need to be paid, trained and need transport for their services.

Similarly, at every polling station the candidate needs some sort of a setup: a tent and some staff to help prospective voters cast their ballot or choose.

With an average of 300 plus polling stations, it is not exactly a middle-class person’s game to play. So, while we all enjoy bashing the PTI for welcoming every Tom, Dick and Harry, they are simply doing what reality dictates.

The PTI is trying to win elections, if they happen, this year. The idealistic delusions and moral high ground are finally getting pushed aside in favour of winning seats in assemblies.

In such circumstances, even if Bilawal Bhutto wanted to join the PTI, they will welcome him with open arms.

Why Aamir Liaquat

Simply put, it's cheap publicity. The not doctor is not going to contest and win elections on his own. But what he does bring to the PTI is a foul mouth that can go toe to toe with the new breed of rabid partisanship popularised by the PML-N courtesy of Talal Chaudhry and Daaniyal Aziz.

In a political culture like Pakistan where dignity and decency have nearly been wiped out in favour fanatical cult-like partisanship, the PTI needs someone like Aamir Liaquat to fight back.

Aamir Liaquat might not have a steady vote bank or even a constituency, but what he does have is celebrity. And that has been a permanent fixture for the PTI not only for fund raising purposes but also publicity.

The decision might look wrong on the face of it, but think of it this way: the PTI gets front and centre coverage during Ramzan simply because one of its leaders is on TV every day for four to five hours.

Every single time people look at Aamir Liaquat, they will associate the PTI with him. That association helps. Not as much as a steady vote bank, but it does make a difference.

Secondly, he opens an audience to the PTI message that is currently closed off to them. I am not saying he will put the mohajir vote in play; I am saying he at least gives the PTI a window into that audience that so far has refused to even hear them out.

Given Karachi’s current political engineering work, that kind of window could make a difference between zero seats from Karachi to three seats from Pakistan's largest city for the PTI.

Satire: Diary of Aamir Liaquat

As I mentioned earlier, the news focus may be Aamir Liaquat, the real story here is the flood of potent candidates joining the PTI. Within the last quarter, Saleem Shehzad of the MQM (Karachi), Mian Tariq of the PML-N (Gujranwala), Malik Shakoor of the Jamiat Ulema-e Islam-Fazal (Charsaddah) and Malik Aftab of ANP (Nowshera) are just some of the seasoned politicians who have joined the PTI.

They are doing so because of their own reasons in each case but they are being taken in by the PTI because the party needs a stable of candidates that can realistically push its seats count up in the Parliament.

And yes, by doing all this, the PTI is moving past its naïve approach to politics that existed pre-2013.

They are trying to recruit across the country and most of what they are getting are second-string or third-string candidates, but that is still better than no candidates at all.

But … Aamir Liaquat! Why!?

As I often mention, elections are not won based on how nice and well spoken a candidate is or how good they make you feel. The PTI is doing its job as a political party preparing for the next elections.

Be it Zaid Hamid or Aamir Liaquat, if the party can get any publicity and opening into a new voter segment, they will take them in.

The problem is not the PTI accepting people like Aamir Liaquat; the issue is the delusional understanding of what elections and democracy should look like held by a clear majority of people on social media and in expat communities.

Elections are ugly and ruthless. You cannot expect to stay clean while you dig for coal. And that is the dilemma the PTI’s base needs to get over.

Democracy is a coal mine and you are wearing white; either stop digging or get used to soot.

Sher Muhammad is Kanizan Bibi’s father, a Pakistani woman who has been on death row since 1989. He wrote this letter to the president of Pakistan in 2016, translated here by Rimmel Mohydin of Justice Project Pakistan.

Dear Mr President,

I’m a poor man. I don’t have much. But what I do have is a daughter. Kanizan is my only child. Even when she could talk, she wouldn’t speak much.

She was a timid child, who never talked back. She would do as she was told, and never say no. She would cry easily, as fragile as her little wrists.

Because Kanizan was so delicate, she was very attached to her mother, often seeking shelter in her arms. She looked just like her mother, the same complexion, the same round face.

But this comfort was taken away from her all too quickly. My wife died very suddenly, leaving Kanizan and me completely alone in the world.

I was a farmer, but money had become tough. What little I had eventually turned to nothing. Luckily, I still had Kanizan.

She used to help me around the house but when she saw how difficult it had become to put food on the table, she told me she wanted to work. I hesitated at first. I had been unable to put Kanizan in school. What would she do?

Kanizan began working as a housemaid for a rich, landowning family. She was little more than a child herself.

It is no wonder that she quickly befriended the very children she was charged with taking care of, the children of Muhammad Khan.

Their mother would often admonish her for not being more responsible with them, considering she would play with them more.

She began contributing what little she could. It was not much, but it was a helping hand. I could not be more grateful for this lifeline.

But Sir, this did not last.

The murder took place not too far from where we lived in Kamaliya. I will never forget the way Muhammad Khan screamed when he saw his wife and children murdered.

Muhammad Khan and his family had been involved in a property dispute that had started to get uglier by the day. The police had asked him at the scene of the crime if he had any enemies. He had named four of them, all his cousins. The police registered a case against them.

They were in jail for about two days. Bail is easy to come by when money is not a concern.

One night, Kanizan and I were about to have dinner when there was a knock on our door. Our village elder, Allah Yar, was at the door. He looked solemn, but determined.

He told me that people had started to talk, that someone had to be punished. He looked at Kanizan, who was sitting in the corner of the room.

Allah Yar looked me in the eye, put his hand on his heart, and said, “I swear by the Quran, I know your daughter is innocent, but let me take her to the police station.” They’ll question her, and she’ll be home in the morning, he promised.

She never came back.

Kanizan had played with those children, loved them, cared for them. She would tell me all about them. When she heard of their killing, she was utterly distraught. Naively, she thought she would be helping the police find their killer. She agreed to go.

Allah Yar took her to the police station, and left her there. Kanizan was 16 years old. The police recorded her age as 25.

My nephew lived very close to the police station. He trembles when he tells me of what he heard they did to her.

Women in our village, never interact with men outside of our immediate family. But Kanizan spent nights trapped in a jail cell with strangers. When I went to see her, they didn't let me meet her.

They hung her from a fan with ropes thicker than her tiny wrists, beating her small frame with all their might. They let mice loose in her pants, which they tied from the ankles so that they could not escape. Kanizan had been terrified of mice her whole life.

They electrocuted her repeatedly. I can only hope that she fainted during this ordeal. This is how I comfort myself as a father, forcing myself to believe that my daughter was not conscious during this abuse.

When they had broken her, they forced her to sign a confession. It’s not difficult to see how her mind gave up on her.

I didn’t have the money to go see her for her trial. I did not even know that she had been sentenced to death until much later. I borrowed money from everywhere. Whenever I would have enough, I would try to find my way to her.

But every time I met her, Kanizan was a little bit less. Soon after, her mental state began to deteriorate. Even the jailers were concerned, so much so that, in 2006, she was transferred to the Punjab Institute of Mental Health.

Today I'm told she hears voices, trembles, can’t clothe or feed herself. The hospital wrote a letter in 2015 to the Superintendent of Lahore Central Jail saying she was not fit to be executed.

Mr President, my daughter hasn’t said a word for years. She is terrified, and cries all the time, and needs me and her family to take care of her. She is an unwell woman who does not belong on death row.

I'm a poor man. I can’t do anything in return. But I humbly beg you to find it in your heart to grant mercy to a poor woman who has spent almost her life in jail. Her silence shouldn’t silence what you can do for her.

I know that if this letter reaches you, your good heart will follow.

Yours Humbly,

Sher Muhammad

Sher Muhammad died in 2016. Kanizan continues to languish on death row, despite her diagnosis, strong evidence of innocence, and nearly 29 years behind bars.

The president of Pakistan has not granted mercy in a single clemency appeal since the uplifting of the moratorium on the death penalty in December 2014, as documented by Justice Project Pakistan in their new report, No mercy: A report on clemency for death row prisoners in Pakistan.

Addendum: Chief Justice Saqib Nisar approved Kanizan’s transfer to a secure mental health facility on April 21, 2018, urging the Punjab Mental Health Institute to ensure she receives medical treatment.

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.

Read next: 4 important themes in Cake that you may have missed

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.

Related: Pakistan hasn't seen a film like Cake before, says Adnan Malik of his debut film

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

• Politician soldiers
• Jind Kaur’s revenge

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.

• An interrupted legacy
• The purge of progressives
• Engendering retrogression
• A constrained renewal
• Towards redemption

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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

• Post-Nawaz PML-N
• Survival guaranteed?
• A new PML

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.

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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.

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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.