Culture of violence in Pakistan

Culture of Violence in Pakistan

Resort to violence in the interest of individual, group, creed, language, religion, political philosophy, nation and economic class has evolved with biological evolution. But I will restrict my remarks to Pakistan since independence.
Subjugation of peasants in all the provinces of West Pakistan except in the NWFP where the Khudai Khitmatgat movement led by Ghaffar Khan of blessed memory and the inherent egalitarianism of Pushtoon society had brought a measure of equality, required occasional acts of high handedness like abduction of women and whipping of the odd recalcitrant upstart. For the habitual offenders private jails were (and are) maintained.
The state inherited a vicious kind of violence from colonial rulers and added a novel twist to it. Any one against the establishment was automatically against the country and Islam and therefore use of state coercive machinery justified.
During the initial three to four years the state was too weak, opposition too disorganized and things on the ground were too chaotic for any substantial exhibition of state or street power except for aerial bombing on Charsadda in NWFP and Jinnah sent troop to the place of Nawab of Kalat as he was reported to be wavering after signing the instruments of accession. Protagonists of Bengali were also manhandled rather roughly.
With acceptance of PM’s office by Khawaja Nazim things started unraveling. The Karachi branch of Democratic Students Federation initially formed in Lahore by Barrister Abid Manto and A Naqvi in 1948 was launched in 1950. Soon the branch overtook the center and launched a campaign for lower school fees, free books and higher academic standards. Police went after the protestors with Lathis (batons) and broke a few heads. Enraged the students gave a run around to the police and were “lucky” to find police minister Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani’s car in a shopping center in Karachi with the man inside the vehicle. Those were “peaceful” days. There was no cavalcade of armed escort vehicle with the minister. Students put a torch to the car and the high personage, overcome by smoke, had to be carried away in a pitiable state.
He took “sweet” revenge soon. An all Pakistan conference of students was in the offing. A.K. Brohi, minister of law and the sole “liberal” intellectual in the cabinet had agreed to make the keynote speech.
His cabinet colleague not withstanding, Gurmani arranged with A.T.Naqvi the commissar of Karachi to send hoodlums to disrupt the proceedings. Police was sent to rough up and arrest those who tried to escape.
Punjab had been subjected to ant-Qadiani riots ostensibly to suppress a deviant sect, but in actual fact to destabilize the provincial and central governments. That was to have far-reaching and deleterious consequences. It was the fist post independence use of the military to deal with civil unrest.
In the same rough time frame police had fired upon and killed eight students of Dacca University protesting against imposition of Urdu as the sole official language of the country.
Bureaucrats led by Ghulam Muhammad, aided and abetted by the landowners of West Pakistan, had in the meanwhile dismissed Khawaja Nazim and replaced him with Muhammad Ali Bogra, a political ancestor of Zafrullah Jamali. Ghulam followed up with dismissal of the constituent assembly. His successors played a veritable game of musical chairs with political parties.
It would occupy too much space into the issue, but the landed interest of West Pakistan would not allow representation to East Pakistan commensurate with its population. But they were coerced to accept over all parity with the Western wing, a constitution was passed, elections scheduled and political campaigning started with a vengeance.
The establishment could not countenance the idea of an empowered assembly. Law enforcement agencies engineered disturbances, fights broke out on the floor of assemblies and there were some riots. The “crowning” achievement of the agencies was the death of the deputy speaker Shahid of East Pakistan assembly who had the misfortune of getting in the way of a flying chair.
Using that incident and the general break down of” law and order, Iskander Mirza who had succeeded Ghulam Muhammad as Governor General and subsequently had himself elected the first president of Pakistan, dissolved the assemblies, cancelled elections, declared martial law and appointed army chief Ayub as the chief martial law administrator.
Army was in the ascendant. It no longer needed bureaucratic cover for its work and dispatched Mirza into exile barely three weeks after being given the run of the country.
The public was sick and tired of antics of the rulers and welcomed Ayub as a savior, much more ardently than they would Musharraf in 1998.
Among other things Ayub initiated the illegal precedent of firing civil servants
(out of the 301 officers who were axed 300 were non-son of the soil-NSOS) with out due process, an act endorsed by the Supreme Court. The court had already undermined its reputation by giving judicial cover to the 1954 dissolution of the constituent assembly and by accepting the “doctrine of necessity” for Ayub’s martial law.
Ayub one of the architects of “mutual” security pacts of 1954 on pioneered free market concept in Pakistan. The rich got much richer, the poor poorer. The public after the initial euphoria, started chafing under numerous restrictions of free expression, banned student and trade unions and circumscribed political activities.
Confident of winning an election against any comers, especially under the restricted Basic Democracy franchise, he announced elections at the end of 1964, but he had reckoned with out the wily the “Red” Mulla, Maulana Bhashani who persuaded miss Jinnah to throw her hat or rather Dupatta in the ring.
With the state machinery doing its utmost, Ayub managed to win, but Karachi and Dacca wont play ball. His son Gohar who had resigned his commission as a captain in the army and had morphed almost over night into the leading business and industrial magnate was a hood around town in the fashion elevated to art form by sons of Saddam Husain.
Cut to the quick by the les majeste of Karachi walahs, Gohar led a gang of marauders and looters, pillaging, maiming, burning and killing. (I was a resident in surgery at the civil hospital in Karachi and personally treated scores of the injured. My colleagues told me that Jinnah hospital received more injuries). Hundreds were killed thousands hurt.
Gohar who attained a degree of respectability in later years “serving” as a speaker of the national assembly and foreign minister under Zia and successor regimes, was the pioneer in Pakistan of the first massive scheme of amassing wealth through government connections, collective/group punishment for political opposition and victimization of the residents of Karachi.
After Ayub was ousted Yahya Khan organized the first and last election based on universal franchise held in Pakistan and promptly declined top accept the public verdict. In the ensuing struggle Mujeeb was able to take over the reins of power for a while and his minions unleashed a reign of terror on “Biharis”, their term for all non-Bengalis.
The enormous barbarity unleashed on East Pakistan by the army, aided and abetted by the establishment which had now matured into the full evil quad-army, landowners, bureaucrats and Mullahs-was unprecedented for a ruling group to perpetrate genocide on its own people, at least since times of Halaku Khan.
After the civil war Awami league government took over the Bangla Desh and renewed violence against collaborators and non-collaborators.
Bhutto took over in West Pakistan now renamed Pakistan and after settling scores with army officers who were not with him scraped the bottom of the barrel-Yahya had dismissed mid-level NSOS officers. He also imposed a highly discriminatory rural-urban quota system and instigated language riots in urban Sindh.
Bhutto had been given a leg up by the “progressives” and trade unions. They wanted him to keep his promise to empower them. After consolidating his hold on levers of power, he came down hard, had union demonstrations brutally assaulted and during one of them Mairaj, whom Bhutto had once introduced as a co-successor, the other was Mustafa Khar, set some kind of record for a sitting minister by being beaten by the police in public. The head of the premier Islamic organization was, reportedly sexually assaulted in jail and threats of abduction of female members of the family were routinely given to judges and others who did not toe the line.
Bhutto set up a proto-fascist regime and had his mentor J.A. Rahim manhandled in the latter’s ministerial residence for a perceived slight. After Zia over threw him, scores of his opponents were found held in communicado and hundreds released from undisclosed concentration camps.
He sent thousands of troops to pacify the uppity Baluchi Sirdars reportedly at the behest of the Shah of Iran.
But his greatest “achievement was reclaiming the country for his feudal class by indiscriminate nationalization of banks, insurance companies, trade and industry which had developed during Ayub time and was fast approaching the status of a credible rival to land owners.
News Week Asia Edition of some years ago made a claim that Jinnah on his deathbed had prophesied that every government of Pakistan would be worse than the previous one. Zia “elevated” violence to an art form. Opponents were whipped in public and raped women punished for the outrage, all for the greater glory of Islam. But his greatest “achievement” was the Jihad in Afghanistan, which left a trail of drug and guns and a culture of gang warfare, which were patronized by his military governors who had raked in billions of dollars in drug-arms smuggling. The campaign of subjugation of Baluchis was continued.
As though this level of “service” was not enough, he organized MQM. Punjabi-Pukhtoon Mohaz (PPM) and Jeay Sindh (JH). That was akin to letting wolves loose on starving Russian peasants. The student wing availed of the friendly dispensation to develop goon gangs named thunder squads. These hoods later transferred their allegiance to MQM and perpetrated terror on opponents regardless of whether they were Mohajir or not.
Zia crashed and burnt his premature way to his cherished heavens. BB wheeled and dealed her way to semblance of power. Her coalition with MQM not withstanding, her goons aided by PPM and JH had running gun battles with amply armed MQM squads. Her cronies mounted a siege on hundreds of thousands of residents of Purana Qila of Hyderabad, cutting off gas, electricity and water during the height of summer season. General Aslam Beg had to order his Corp commander Karachi Asif Nawaz to send troops to lift the siege.
MQM fell out with its patron in chief, the ISI and collective punishment on a massive scale descended on Karachi. The ordinary mortal suffered. Except for an odd lowly functionary all MQM workers went underground or escaped to a luxurious exile Whole Mohallas were surrounded and young men picked up, taken to police stations and their bones broken unless the parents paid a hefty bribe.
Nawaz followed BB, but his cordial relations with Altaf Bhai repression of urban Sindh continued.
Urban Sindh eventually settled into low-key urban guerrilla warfare. Law and order broke down completely with a spate of kidnappings of man, woman and child, car and wallet snatchings, and robberies especially before and during wedding receptions and armed robberies. The National Institute of Cardio-vascular diseases, some how, caught their fancy. Lt General Najib (not retired) was once found bound and gagged at his home and a Cardiologist Dr Shah had his home burgled during the same week of the year for many years.
Nawaz Sharif managed an “overwhelming” mandate for his second term, grew too big for his britches, fired a navy chief, asked for and got the resignation of the army chief and appointed a non-SOS Musharraf as army chief under the illusion that the man with no ethnic roots in army ranks will be a docile will function as a docile subordinate. He repeated Bhutto’s mistake except that ZAB thought he was appointing the village idiot.
Musharraf came in making appropriate noises and added the twist of enlightened moderation. He coasted along merrily, getting the judiciary to sanction all the unconstitutional measures, suborning the all too willing erstwhile supporters of BB and Nawaz, getting himself elected Zia style and permitting unprecedented liberty to print and radio/TV media (this was in all likelihood a function of near uncontrollability of internet). 9/11 Had taken care of his pariah status and he had handed over air/land/sea space to the crusade against Taliban and al-Quaida.
They all fumble at some point. He had appointed his buddy Shaukat Aziz, lately of Citi-Bank to bring the country in line with the edicts of the World Bank and IMF. Shaukat went on his merry way selling national assets to Global corporations at fire sale price, getting I expect a hefty cut in the process. But when it came to the plum the Steel Mill, some one found out that the group buying the mill was owned by Mittal of India. Now this was an existential issue and some sought relief from the Supreme Court, which forbid the sale.
Shaukat went running to the boss that a mere CJ of SC could not be allowed to defy the PM of the Ghazi of Kargill. Duly incensed the Ghazi called the CJ, read him the riot act and demanded his resignation. Uncharacteristically the CJ defied him.
Now this was les majeste of great proportion. The Ghazi dys-functionalized the CJ. That brought forth all the latent resentment. The CJ became the focus of wide spread campaign for restoration of democracy. The CJ went on a triumphant tour of cities and towns but when it came to Karachi good old Altaf Bhai pulled him up short with wide spread rioting.
Musharraf enhanced his credentials with the only power that mattered by mounting an assault on the Red mosque. It sent BB to the rescue. A spate of suicide bombings followed.
In due course the constitutional court restored the CJ and the SC in an oxy-moronic decision permitted Musharraf to get himself elected for the next five years by an assembly whose term had expired but forbid publication of results. The restored CJ let out or the “agencies” found out from his “tapped” phone that he was planning to undo Musharraf’s election on the grounds that holding an office of profit (sitting army chief) he was ineligible for election to the office of the President.
The best word for his next move is “shabkhoon”. He dismissed dozens of judges, appointed replacements and ordered that elections be held on January 08, 2008.
In the aftermath BB’s procession was ambushed in Karachi. Hundreds died.
Fate finally caught up with BB and she was assassinated on December 28. 2007. Teenage Bilawal was named the chairman and spouse Zardari pitched in to keep the throne warm for the crown prince.
Elections were postponed to February 18, and offered the hoped for divided mandate. Zardari emerged as the king maker and after lulling the suspicions of the PM designate Amin Fahim, threw him over ostensibly at the demand of coalition partner Nawaz Sharif for the transgression of dealing with Musharraf on behalf of BB. He also set up the process of getting his own men and women (not BB’s, the former head of Asian American Network Against Abuse (AANA) had gone hot footing to Pakistan at BB’s behest and left moaning pitiably). To preempt Amin Fahim he went to pay tribute to Altaf Bhai to “90” and recited such a “Qaseeda” in Quaid e Tahrik’s honor as would shame an old time courtier, much to the chagrin of rank and file PPP Jiyalas.
Whether it was a reaction to Zardari’s tactics or an expression of pent up emotions is any body’s guess but Arbab Rahim was greeted with “jootai se pitai’ and female assembly members of MQM were ‘insulted”. Altaf Bhai protested vociferously
Not to be outdone, a mob led by Lahore lawyers roughed up Sher Afghan.
Karachi descended into chaos of near anarchy.
Some would say that it was all machinations of ISI and would like it to be suppressed. But that would be akin to treating a secondary metastasis (for example dealing with an enlarged gland in the neck while ignoring breast or lung cancer).