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A sketch courtesy the 90’s British mock news show ‘The day today’. Watch this hilarious clip and tell me it doesn’t remind you of certain Indian and Pakistani news anchors. 
It seems a near consensus has been reached by all the major political parties in Pakistan, except the MQM, that India is aiding the Taliban in Swat and Waziristan.
In a press conference today ANP leader and NWFP Chief Minister Ameer Hoti joined the fine group of Pakistani political leaders who have blamed India for the Taliban problem. This came after reports in the Pakistani media that Fazlullah had managed to escape safe and sound and was now residing peacefully in Afghanistan. It is indeed hard to fathom how the NWFP govt. could have possibly prevented Fazlullah from escaping when the Indians are fully behind him.
The list of fine Pakistani political leaders who blame India for the Taliban problem also includes the PPP leader and current Interior Minister Rehman Malik. ‘We have solid evidence that not only in Balochistan but India is involved in almost every terrorist act in Pakistan,’ said the Interior Minister. Yikes! Indians are behind almost every terrorist act? Well, then the minister must know who the culprits are that carried out the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team. It would be wonderful if he could share this information with the public so we could, maybe, catch them.
JI chief Munawar Hassan is not only one of those fine politicians blaming India, but he also believes that America are to blame for the security situation in Pakistan. While launching the ‘Go America Go’ drive aimed at ending US intervention in the country’s internal affairs he said that the Taliban had not attacked the GHQ, rather, India and the United States were directly behind the attack. Please note that the JI’s current ‘Go! America Go!’ drive aimed at ending American interference in Pakistan is not to be confused with JI’s ‘Go! America Go!’ drive in the 1980’s aimed at increasing American influence in Pakistan.
It is not yet known what evidence these incredible claims are based on, besides of course, Munawar Hassan’s beard. Yes, its true, Munawar Hassan’s beard is proof of American and Indian interference in Pakistan. How could it possibly get so long and lush without CIA and RAW support?
We should all ask from our state and these right wing politicians: Why?
Cross posted : Sherryx Weblog
Ayesha Siddiqa
Friday, 13 Nov, 2009. With thanks. Dawn online
A few days ago I came across a letter to the editor in Dawn in which the writer had protested against the use of the word ‘Taliban’ to describe the brutal killers currently terrorising the nation.
In the writer’s view, such people should be termed ‘zaliman’. I thought I would advise the writer to watch more television and read newspapers to get rid of his anger against the Taliban.
Perhaps the writer would have benefited tremendously by watching a programme aired recently on a TV channel in which three distinguished maulanas — including Jamaat-i-Islami leader Fareed Paracha — argued that the Taliban were being needlessly maligned since there was no evidence available to prove that the attacks were being carried out by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.
Furthermore, it was said that the TTP’s claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks inside Pakistan did not add up to much since anyone could make those calls just to malign the organisation of non-state militants.
The above interview came a couple of days after the army claimed to have found evidence of India’s involvement in the conflict in Waziristan. Islamabad should take the evidence to the International Court of Justice since it does not hope to get a fair hearing from anyone else in the world, certainly not the US. Since India and America are viewed as being ‘hand-in-glove’, Pakistan cannot afford to share the above information with Washington as New Delhi did in the case of the Mumbai attacks.
The evidence of India’s involvement should be sufficient to put the aforementioned letter writer’s mind at rest. Now we no longer need to search for internal sources of violence.
Since the responsibility of the conflict in the region is now the responsibility of the US followed by India, we need not even look at the fact that Pakistan witnessed about 45 terrorist attacks before 9/11 which many in this country view as the sole cause of strife and bloodshed in the entire region. We can no longer argue that 9/11 just expedited the process of bringing to the surface all those elements or networks that later caused violence in the region.
I would go further and apprise the writer of another crucial fact that technically, there are no home-grown terrorists in Pakistan since there has never been any conviction in a major case of terrorism. The significant names that are associated with extremist terrorist activities such as Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, Riaz Basra and Malik Ishaq of the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)/Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), Qari Saifullah Akhtar of Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islami (HuJI) or Masood Azhar of Jaish-i-Mohammad (JM) and many others are foreign concoctions.
The country’s legal system is such that the onus of proving an individual or organisation’s responsibility in an act of terror lies on the state. So, if the police are unable to bring concrete evidence before the court it is difficult to convict those accused of terrorism by the law-enforcers. Moreover, the legal procedures take so long that the prosecution (being the state) is unable to hold on to witnesses. They either die, are killed or are too scared to give evidence against organisations and individuals with a particular reputation.
Technically, it is but fair to let people go if nothing can be proven against them. This was essentially the position which Pervez Musharraf took for not pursuing action against those who were swapped for the hostages of Indian Airlines flight IC 184 which was hijacked to Kandahar in 1999. Why arrest someone if even the enemy had failed to convict the people after keeping them in jail for so many years?
Hence, it is not surprising that there are hardly any convictions. In a couple of cases where this has happened, as in the case of American journalist Daniel Pearl’s murder, the death sentence has not been carried out. We now know that Khaled Sheikh Mohammad of Al Qaeda and not Omar Saeed Sheikh committed the murder. Probably, it was in appreciation of Sheikh’s innocence that his jailers in Hyderabad allowed him access to several SIMs and mobile phones that he then used for very naughty activities, which we will not report here as acts of potential terrorism.
One might just wonder about the killings of Shias in the country, which have been going on since the mid-1980s when the SSP was reportedly established to fight the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqh-i-Jafria by the state. We hardly notice that last year there were systematic killings of Shias in Dera Ismail Khan and before that of Shia doctors in Karachi. The killing of Shias in Balochistan by the Taliban also goes unnoticed by the media and the authorities.
Surely one cannot discuss Balochistan at all where there is much more serious evidence of India’s involvement. The maulanas might argue again that sectarian violence in Balochistan is an Indian/American conspiracy.
The person who wrote the letter might decide to respond to this piece and might argue that the behaviour pattern of the Pakistani establishment and the bulk of the people remains the same. We accused the East Pakistanis of being Indian agents and said the civil war was caused by Hindu teachers in collusion with the Indian state. Any signs of India’s involvement very naturally mar our ability to look at other possibilities or threats.
In East Pakistan’s case, for instance, the internal crisis had nothing to do with the unfair treatment of the Bengalis by the West Pakistani civil and military establishment. The only truth about that era was that the Mukti Bahini was trained by Indian intelligence.
We in Pakistan are coming close to a point where we can comfortably forget that we have elements within that want to take over (perhaps not physically) the state in pursuance of their pan-Islamic agenda. The war being fought by Pakistan due to international pressure is what has caused all the violence.
I would like to refer to the golden words of Punjab’s Law Minister Rana Sanaullah in response to the allegation of south Punjab turning into a hub of extremism and terrorism.
The minister felt there was no training taking place in the region and if people were getting recruited to fight in Afghanistan or other places, how could the government stop this. After all, we live in a free country. Under the circumstances, my only advice to the writer of the letter is that if he begins to feel unsafe vis-à-vis the presence of the ‘zaliman’ within, he/she should build additional bunkers outside the house. The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.
(All emphasis in bold has been added)
Talk about still living in delusion and misplaced priorities. I would like to know what percentage of Pakistanis believe the popular myth spread by Zaid Hamid and Co. that the Pakistani Taliban are the agents of US and India.
Read the complete survey here.
by Freethinker
Cross Posted at Sherryx’s Weblog
Through the last month, Pakistani media celebrated the recognition of the citizenship rights of the hijra community by a Supreme Court ruling which declared them entitled to ‘protection guaranteed under Article four (rights of individuals to be dealt with in accordance of law) and Article nine (security of person) of the Constitution’. The ruling has been hailed as an important step toward the integration of ‘the Third sex’ into Pakistani society, who are now going to be registered and surveyed (with ‘Third Sex’ designating their gender on ID cards and forms) so as to enable them to access the services of state social welfare departments and financial support programs.
What does it mean – recognition of citizenship rights? It means enfranchisement, access to avenues of power and justice, along with better opportunities for education and health-care. But those lofty goals of modernity that always excluded the hijra are still going to remain out of their reach – the future of economic empowerment for anyone on the margins of the Pakistani economy is bleak, the road to justice is not particularly favorable to the poor and the illiterate, and the hijra as yet do not enjoy any special ‘minority’ rights that are needed for political mobilization and combating discrimination in a liberal democracy. Yes, modernity in Pakistan does not seem likely to empower our social outcasts.
There has been little serious discussion of this SC ruling online or in the print media: no speculation whatsoever over the meaning of gender in Pakistan, or whether this ruling is right in creating a hijra subject for the purposes of bureaucracy. What is going to constitute ‘the Third sex’? And what happens to those who do not qualify for this category? What about those ‘gender-confused’ people who do not want to be identified as ‘Third sex’, preferring instead to be identified as ‘male’ or ‘female’? According to the article quoted above, the hijra are ‘left by the society to live by begging, dancing and prostitution’, to be exploited by the ‘self-styled guru’ – does it mean that after this ‘social uplift’ program, they will be made to give up their lifetyle? What if they can’t? Does discrimination go away after formal barriers to progress have been removed, or does it merely become invisible and more difficult to fight? With the avenus of empowerment formally open to them, wouldn’t the society find it easier to blame them if their ‘begging and dancing and prostitution’ continues? Will they be persecuted or will we realize that a ‘respectable’ life is just not possible for the hijra without a radical change in the society, its institutions and maybe our ideas of ‘respectable’?
These questions do not surface because of the complete exclusion of a view from the transgender standpoint in our media. This not only means that the interests of the transgendered go largely unarticulated in our media, but also that the experiences of hijra remain shrouded in mystery. With a bourgeois mentality that is reluctant to recognize gender deviance (‘inverted’ gender identification, same-sex desire, transvestitism, and other inappropriate behavior, all of which, it can be argued, find a measure of acceptance among the more traditionally minded who allow their sons and daughters to join the hijra), the hijra are comfortably assigned a ‘Third sex’. Online, a few articles can illustrate this: it is thought that the hijra are ‘almost invariably hermaphrodites’, when in fact they are not, consisting in a large number of ‘biological’ males who would be described in the West as ‘transgendered’ and ‘transsexual’. Because of that, you find people talking about ‘the true hijra‘ and ‘the cross-dresser’ who only tries to pass off as a hijra. The castration ritual evokes feelings of fascination and horror; it is something that goes against the ‘rational’ sensibilities of most Pakistani moderns. Of course most of us are conditioned to react with feelings of revulsion and pity for their lifestyle, associated with shameless beggary, singing bawdy songs, dancing in the streets, prostitution and even theft and kidnapping. But these feelings also show under the ruse of rationality in articles like this and this. Such write-ups also show the hijra as the enigmatic, untamed Other of Pakistani society. This is why it is easy to link the hijra with the rise of prostitution, the spread of HIV and other ‘evils’, especially for those who do not want to criticize the system of relationships that produces these problems. It seems as if we do not want any understanding of the hijra; we have always wanted to find a way to ‘deal with’ them.
An understanding of the hijra begins with an understanding of the society. Ours is a society where, in traditional spaces, you find life strictly segregated on the basis of gender, and where it’s not segregated, there is blatant male privilege. The (patriarchal) family reigns supreme as an institution that organizes much of life, based on appropriate gender role socialization, a preference for sons over daughters, early marriages marked by ceremonies that are a public spectacle, and an exclusive system for the care of the young and the old. Transgendered children have an awkward presence in this life - they cannot take the responsibilities of a son, nor can they be married off. And who will take care of them when they grow old? All this makes the marginalization of all ‘gender-confused’ a necessary condition of our social organization. And the ‘unfortunate condition’ of the hijra as a community becomes even more understandable when you think about the effects of urbanization and modern life itself, which have taken away their traditional place in the society and exposed them to sexual exploitation.
And so, I do not find this Supreme Court ruling very heartening. There’s nothing radical about it: by proposing that ‘the hijra problem’ can be solved by ‘registering and surveying’ them, it locates the problem in a few particular conditions of the hijra life, and not in the society. And of course no real change will be achieved: the program will suffer from the usual pitfalls of an inefficient bureaucracy. Moreover, the cause of the hijra is in danger of getting co-opted, who do not need to worry now that the State is doing all it can to save them. Gender injustice is a site of revolutionary potential, and that can be lost with the State apparatus formally committed to the ‘social uplift’ of the hijra. But, like I said before, there will be no real ‘social uplift’ because the focus is on saving them from this unfortunate situation, rather than working to change the deeply embedded norms of our society.
But perhaps the greatest danger, to which I’ve only alluded so far, is further entrenchment of the gendered order. The hijra have traditionally aroused feelings of awe in the rest of the society, because they defied gender as taken for granted by everyone else. Increasingly, people’s attitude toward them is changing, as people rid themselves of ‘silly superstition’ and see the hijra as part of the lumpen masses. And I can see this official recognition of ‘the Third sex’ taking the demystification of the hijra further along. When they are seen as another sex category, the gendered body politic of the society comes to regulate and control them as well, their bodies becoming ‘sexed’ and providing the basis of a sex role, a body ideal, and a clothing distinction that applies to their sex. Much more likely is a medicalized view that ‘pathologizes’ their condition as defective maleness or femaleness (‘intersex’ as the medical classification goes), like it did in late 19th century Europe and became part of the notorious eugenics movement. The concept of ‘intersex’ is heavily criticized by transgender activists in the US. In Iran, an adherence to this concept has led to a State-funded program of SRS operations which has both religious and scientific backing. The rationale behind these potentially life-threatening operations is the ‘integration’ of their ‘hijra’ into the society, but that does not necessarily mean a better life (from the documentary ‘Transsexuals in Iran’) for the gender-ambiguous of Iran.
At this point, we cannot project anything about the future of the hijra of Pakistan. But what is clear is that there are good reasons to be skeptical about this Supreme Court ruling. Perhaps then, the wise thing to do is to see this decision as inevitable in the given political context (as Basim Usmani reflects toward the end of his article), and not to endorse it as a positive step toward the liberation of the gender-ambiguous from an oppressive social structure.
- Free Sajjda still awaits Freedom!
3 Quarks Daily is supposed to be a well-reputed blog, having even won an award for high quality content. I tend to have more respect for blogs with original material than blogs that merely link to found articles, so I would prefer something like Popehat to 3 Quarks Daily. In fact, I would say the latter is more of a kiosk than a real blog. However, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins’ approval of 3 Quarks Daily has granted it great credibility in the eyes of many, which I am doubly critical of both because celebrity approval is a bad reason to like anything, and because Dawkins and Pinker are only as impressive as academics tend to be, and even that only in their own fields, and compromise whatever respectability they might otherwise have had with their politicization of science and patronizing, popular lessons to the general public.
The phenomenon of the ‘public intellectual’ is an interesting subject of sociological analysis. The public intellectual is a teacher-figure appointed by the powers-that-be, usually to give a veneer of scientific or philosophical respectability to the status quo. Notice how convenient such characters as Steven Pinker are to the standard patriarchal narrative: the genders are innately different, and all inequality between women and men can be explained in terms of that innate difference.
The public intellectual is usually a scientist in this day and age. Science has gained esteem as a way of knowing, and other ways of knowing are unfairly and dangerously dis-esteemed. In some cases this power dynamic is so extreme as to merit the title ‘scientific imperialism’. One symptom of scientific imperialism is the usurping of the philosophical role by scientists, who feel at liberty to comment on matters about which they have no more to say than the average plumber. By this I do not mean that they are unintelligent, just that philosophy is not their area of expertise; and if you think a training in science gives you the skills to be a philosopher, you’re wrong. Evidence of your wrongness is, among other things, in the bad arguments that books like The Blank Slate are littered with, which show not only an impoverished and reductionistic manner of analysis, but also a pathetic lack of understanding of basic social science and political theory.
Public scientists comment on ethical matters, pretending to be philosophers. This would be all right if their being scientists had no effect on how their comments were received; but it clearly does. But what does science teach a person about ethics? You cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, and science is supposed to be concerned only with the ‘is’. Given that ethics is concerned with the ‘ought’, it follows that science cannot entail any ethical positions. So, if a scientist does express his views on ethics then he is speaking about the topic in an unprofessional capacity. But it isn’t treated thusly. Why do we not see as many philosophers being interviewed to answer the questions of Life, the Universe and Everything? Isn’t it more their field anyway?
The Congress party wins big in this year’s elections in India:
NEW DELHI — In a shockingly one-sided victory, the ruling Congress Party’s secular alliance defeated the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in the month-long Indian general election, local media reported Saturday as results flooded in.
The surprise outcome means that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not only return to power, but also that his government won’t depend on support from the Left, as exit polls predicted. With more than 70 percent of the votes counted, Indian television channels called the election for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), reporting that the Congress Party alone would win 200 parliamentary seats, and 257 seats together with its allies.
. . .
The verdict vindicated Singh’s steadfast refusal to give up last year’s path-breaking nuclear pact with the U.S., which freed India from sanctions related to its noncompliance with the global Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was a vote for Congress-style secularism and acknowledgement of India’s diversity over the BJP’s ideology of ethnic chauvinism. And it proved that UPA programs like a national rural employment guarantee scheme, a huge waiver of loans to farmers, and an expansion of the quotas for the so-called lower-caste Indians in higher education resonated with voters.
“Overall, it is a resounding vote for development and good governance,” said Congress Party General Secretary Prithviraj Chavan.
Congratulations to the Indians. Now if both India and Pakistan would be willing to let go of the past, and build an alliance with each other, it would go a long way toward stabilizing the South Asian region.
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