By The Sydney Morning Hearld

Left-arm spinner Abdul Rehman took a career best 6-25 to help Pakistan humble England by 72 runs in the second Test in Abu Dhabi, to giving Pakistan unassailable 2-0 lead in the three-match series.
The 31-year-old twice took two wickets in successive overs to dent England’s chase after Andrew Strauss’s side was set a 145-run target on a weary fourth-day Abu Dhabi Stadium pitch.

England was all out for 72 – its lowest total against Pakistan in all Tests.
Rehman’s effort overshadowed Monty Panesar’s 6-62, in his first Test for England in 30 months, which finished Pakistan’s second innings at 214 in the morning.

This is England’s first series defeat after being unbeaten in its previous nine since a loss to the West Indies in early 2009 – a sequence which saw it rise to world No.1 in the Test rankings in August.
Pakistan won the first Test in Dubai by 10 wickets. The third Test will also be played in Dubai, from Friday.

Skipper Misbah-ul Haq said Pakistan wanted to make a match out of it after setting a tricky target.
“We knew that it would be difficult so we wanted to make a match out of it,” said Misbah, who has now won eight Tests with one defeat since taking over the captaincy in October 2010.

“Our bowlers, led by Rehman, responded well and this is a great win.” Strauss showed his disappointment at England’s woeful effort.
“It’s pretty disappointing,” said Strauss, whose side last lost two Tests in a row against South Africa in July 2008. “We must acknowledge how well Pakistan bowled and they thoroughly deserved the series win.”

Rehman was ably assisted by off-spinners Saeed Ajmal (3-22) and Mohammad Hafeez (1-11) in a match in which spinners dominated from the first day.
England lost its top four batsmen in the space of just 37 balls after an extra cautious start on a difficult pitch. Strauss top scored with 32 before he became one of Rehman’s victims during his maiden five-wicket haul.

In the penultimate over before tea, Rehman trapped Kevin Pietersen (one) and two balls later bowled Eoin Morgan (duck) to raise hopes of an unlikely win for Pakistan.

Sensing it could only upset its rival through early wickets, Pakistan opened the bowling with Hafeez, who responded well by catching Alastair Cook (seven) off his own bowling after England had edged cautiously to 21 by the 15th over.
Ian Bell, promoted to No.3 after Jonathan Trott was unwell, was all at sea against master spinner Ajmal and his tentative push went through his legs to hit the stumps. He made only three.

Pietersen, who has been woefully out of form with just 16 runs in the series, managed one before Rehman trapped him and in the same over had the equally out-of-form Morgan bowled to dent England’s hopes of a victory. Rehman then accounted for Trott (one) and Stuart Broad (duck) in the same over to leave England 7-68.

Ajmal dismissed Graeme Swann (duck) and Matt Prior (18) to reach 100 Test wickets in his 19th match, before James Anderson was caught off Rehman to give Pakistan a sensational win.

Earlier, Pakistan lost its last six wickets for 89 runs after resuming at 4-125, with all hopes pinned on Azhar Ali and Asad Shafiq. Panesar took three of those wickets to finish with his eighth five-wicket haul in Tests. Azhar Ali (68) and Asad Shafiq (43) added 88 for the fifth wicket before Panesar struck.

Filed under: cricket, England, Pakistan, Pakistan Cricket Tagged: Abu Dhabi, Bangladesh, cricket, Dubai, England, England Cricket, Misbah-ul-Haq, Pakistan Cricket, Saeed Ajmal, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe

ETIHAD AIRWAYS APPOINTS AREA GENERAL MANAGER FOR PAKISTAN, BANGLADESH AND NEPAL

Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, has appointed Amer Khan – its current Country Manager in Pakistan – to the position of Area General Manager for Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

In his new position, Mr. Khan will be responsible for managing Etihad’s commercial operations across these three countries from his base in Karachi.

He had no doubt of  his place in literary history and left behind the following epitaph for himself: “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried the arts of short-story telling. Here he lies underneath tons of mud still wondering if he was a better short-story writer than God.”

Saadat Hasan Manto died in Lahore in 1955. He was forty-three years old. The life of  one of our greatest short-story writers had been prematurely truncated. I was eleven years old at the time. I never met him. I wish I had. One can visualise him easily enough. In later photographs the melancholy is visible. He appears exhausted as if his heart were entrenched with sadness. In these his face displays all the consequences of a ravaged liver. But there are others. Here his eyes sparkle with intelligence, the impudence almost bursting through the thick glass of his 1940’s spectacles, mocking the custodians of morality, the practitioners of confessional politics or the commissariat of the Progressive Writers. ‘Do your worst’, he appears to be telling them. ‘I don’t care. I will write to please myself. Not you.’   Manto’s battles with the literary establishment of his time became a central feature of his biography. Charged with obscenity and brought to trial on a number of occasions he remained defiant and unapologetic.

It was the Partition of India in 1947 along religious lines formed his own attitudes and those of his numerous detractors. The episodes associated with the senseless carnage that accompanied the withdrawal of the British from India loom large in Manto’s short stories. A few words of  necessary explanation might help the reader to understand the corrosive impact of  Manto on the reading public.

The horrors of 1947 were well known, but few liked to talk about them. A collective trauma appeared to have silenced most people. Not Manto. In his stories of that period he recovered the dignity of all the victims without fear or favour. Even the perpetrators of crimes were victims of a political process that had gone out of control.

In these bad times when the fashion is to worship accomplished facts real history tends to be treated as an irritant, something to be swatted out of existence like mosquitoes in summer, it is worth recalling that something terrible happened fifty years ago today when India was divided.  It is time to recognise it and see if it can be understood and transcended. The survivors owe it to those who perished. At least a million men, women and children lost their lives during the carnage of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that overcame Northern and Eastern India as the Punjab and Bengal were divided along religious lines.

In the months that preceded Partition,  Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other glared into each other’s hate-filled eyes before embarking on  frenzied blood-baths. The character and scale of the butchery was unprecedented in Indian history. In fact even Jinnah, as late as June 1946, was prepared to consider a federal solution as proposed by the Cabinet Mission sent to India by the Labour Government. It was the Congress Party which made that particular solution impossible.

This failure meant that exactly one year before Partition, the Hindu-Muslim riots started in Eastern India. During four days in August 1946, nearly 5000 people were killed and three times that number wounded in Bengal. The mood in the Punjab became edgy. Fear overcame rationality.

My mother, an active member of the Communist Party, often recalls how in April 1947, heavily pregnant with my sister and alone at home, she was disturbed by a loud knock on the front door. As she opened the door  she was overcome by anxiety. In front of her stood the giant figure of a Sikh. He saw the fear on her face, understood and spoke in a soft, reassuring voice. All he wanted to know was the location of a particular house on a nearby road. My mother gave him the directions. He thanked her warmly and left. She was overpowered by shame. How could she, of all people, without a trace of prejudice, have reacted in that fashion. Nor was she the  only one. Manto’s stories help us to understand the madness that grippped [everyone].

Trains became moving graveyards as they arrived at stations on both sides of the new divide, packed with corpses of fleeing refugees. As always, it was  the poor of town and country who were the main victims and they were buried or burnt in  hastily dug pits. Neither the song of the nightingale nor lamps or flowers would ever grace their graves. They are the forgotten victims of that year. No memorial in India or Pakistan marks the killings. The Partition of India was a tragedy and a crime. It was neither inevitable nor necessary and  its traces are only too visible in the unending anguish of the great  sub-continent. Faiz Ahmed Faiz,  one of the greatest of 20th century Urdu poets,  born in what  became Pakistan, spoke for many  in his poem Freedom’s Dawn on August ‘47:

This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled—
This is not that long -looked-for break of day,
Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades
Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void
Somewhere must be the star’s last halting place,
Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,
Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.

But now, word goes, the birth of day from darkness
Is finished, wandering feet stand at their goal;
Our leaders’ ways are altering, festive looks
Are all the fashion, discontent reproved;–
And yet this physic still on unslaked eye
Or heart fevered by severance works no cure.
Where did that fine breeze, that the wayside lamp
Has not once felt, blow from—where has it fled?
Night’s heaviness is unlessened still, the hour
Of mind and spirit’s ransom has not struck;
Let us go on, our goal is not reached yet.

A year later, another poet Sahir Ludhianvi, who crossed the border and came to Pakistan could not bear the atmosphere and returned to India. He sent an explanation in the form of a dirge addressed to fellow-writers in Pakistan:

Friends, for long years
I have spun dreams of the moon and stars and spring for you,
Today my tattered garments hold nothing
But the dust of the road that we have travelled.
The music in my harp has been strangled
Its tunes buried by wails and screams
Peace and civilization are the alms I crave
So that my lips can learn how to sing again.

Saadat Hasan Manto, was moved to write ‘Toba Tek Singh’. Manto wrote sparsely, each word carefully chosen. His diamond-hard prose was in polar contrast to the flowery language of many  contemporaries. He wrote about sexual frustration and its consequences, of jealousy and how it often led to murder. One of his stories, ‘Behind the Screen’, describes a wife’s revenge once she discovers her husband has a secret mistress. The wife takes the husband to his lover’s apartment and in his presence has her body chopped into tiny pieces. The story was based on an accrual event that took place in the North West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan. Manto spared his readers the real life ending: the wife had her rival’s flesh cooked and forced her husband to eat the cooked flesh, a striking demonstration of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction (1).

‘Toba Tek Singh’  is a masterpiece set in the lunatic asylum in Lahore at the time of Partition.  When whole cities are being ethnically cleansed, how can the asylums escape? The Hindu and Sikh lunatics are told by bureaucrats organising the transfer of power that they will be forcibly transferred to  institutions in India.  The inmates rebel. They embrace each other and weep. They will not be parted willingly. They have to be forced on to the trucks. One of them, a Sikh, is so overcome by rage that he dies on the demarcation line which divides Pakistan from India. Confronted by so much insanity in the real world, Manto discovered normality in the asylum. The ‘lunatics’ have a better understanding of the crime that is being perpetrated than the politicians who have agreed to Partition.

Few politicians on either side had foreseen the results. Jawaharlal Nehru’s romantic nationalism portrayed independence as a long-delayed “tryst with destiny”. He never imagined that the tryst would be bathed in countless gallons of Indian blood. This was partially the result of a failure by the Congress High Command to make the large Muslim minority an offer it could not refuse.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was a second-rate politician, but with a first-class lawyer’s brain. Initially he had used separatism as a bargaining ploy. Even later, he genuinely believed that the new state would simply be a smaller version of secular India, with one difference. Here Muslims would be the largest community. He really believed that he would still be able to spend some time every winter at his mansion in Bombay, the only city where he had found love and happiness.

Jinnah conceived of Pakistan as an amalgamation of an undivided Punjab, an undivided Bengal together with Sind, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. This would have meant that forty percent of the Punjab would have consisted of Hindus and Sikhs and forty-nine percent of Bengal would have consisted of Hindus. It was, alas, a utopian nonsense. Once confessional passions had been aroused and neighbours were massacring each other (as in the former Yugoslavia during the last decade of the 20th century) it was difficult to keep the two provinces united.
“I do not care how little you give me,” Jinnah is reported as saying in March 1947 to the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, “as long as you give it to me completely.”

A dying old man in a hurry, who could have been a willing collaborator in establishing a single state with important safeguards for the minority, had the Congress been capable of strategic insights, but now he wanted his own statelet, however small and awkward it might appear on the map.
India had come a long way in 1947. All previous rulers had attempted to govern with the consent of the ruling elites of whatever religion. The Mughal Emperors, themselves Muslims, had learnt this lesson very quickly and Akbar had unsuccessfully attempted to create a new religion synthesising Hinduism and Islam. Even the last of the great Mughals, the religious-minded Aurungzeb did not attempt any Islamisation of his army:  his ablest Generals were Hindu chiefs!

The British, when confronted with the nightmare of actually governing India, realised that, despite their more advanced technology, they would not last too long without serious alliances. They could only govern India with the consent of its traditional rulers.  The raj was maintained by a very tiny British presence: in 1805 the pink-cheeked conquerors numbered 31,000; in 1911 they had grown to 164,000 and in 1931 there were 168,000. In other words the British in India never comprised more than 0.05 of the local population.

It was this fact that concentrated the finest minds of the raj on politics and strategy. The civil servants trained by Haileybury and other imperialist nurseries in Britain to govern a mighty sub-continent were political administrators, often of the highest order. They learned to speak Urdu and Bengali so that they could, when necessary, communicate directly with peasants and administer justice. They also learned how to divide local rulers from each other and how to fan religious prejudices. The birth of modern Sikhism and Hinduism owes a great deal to the British presence in India. In return, local potentates were permitted to learn English and taught the etiquette of nibbling cucumber sandwiches with His Excellency at Government House.

If the British had granted India self-government on the Canadian and Australian pattern after the First World War it is unlikely that the sub-continent would have been divided. Partition was not a planned conspiracy by either the British or Jinnah. It came about because of a combination of circumstance during the Forties, including the Second World War. Jinnah backed the war effort, the Congress demanded Independence. Some scores had to be settled. Pakistan was imperialism’s rap on the knuckle for Indian nationalism.

Nehru and Jinnah were both shaken by the orgy of barbarism. It offended all their instincts.  But it was Mahatama Gandhi who paid the ultimate price. For defending the right to live of innocent Muslims in post-Partition India he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a fundamentalist Hindu fanatic. Godse was hanged, but two decades later, Godse’s brother told Channel Four that he regretted nothing. What happened had to happen.
That past now rots in the present and threatens to further poison the future.  The political heirs of the hanged Godse are shoving aside the children of Nehru and Gandhi. The poisonous fog of the religious world has enveloped politics. History, unlike the poets and writers of the sub-continent, is not usually prone to sentiment.

Partition was a disaster, adjacent to which there lurked another. The two parts of Pakistan were divided by a thousand miles of India, culture, language and political tradition. The predominantly Punjabi military-bureaucratic elite belonged to West Pakistan, while the Bengali majority of the population (60%) lived in East Pakistan. The refusal of the military rulers to permit democracy led to a successful uprising in 1968. A dictator was toppled. In the elections that followed the Bengalis of East Pakistan won a big majority. They were not permitted to take office. The Army invaded the Eastern part of its own country.  There was a massacre of intellectuals and mass rape (Punjabi soldiers had been told to ‘change the genes’ of Bengalis forever) followed by a civil war. Bangladesh was born. One partition had led to another.

India, too, was severely damaged by Partition. The Nehru years (1947-64) disguised the processes underneath, but now the Furies are out into the open. Bombay, once the centre of cosmopolitanism is now Mumbai and under the sway of a neo-fascist Hindu organisation. In their absurd search for a new Indian identity, the scoundrel parties have re-discovered Hinduism and sections of the ‘secular’ Congress have fallen into line.  Communal riots have claimed tens of thousands of lives over the last fifty years.

Manto was amongst the few who observed the bloodbaths of Partition with a detached eye.  He had remained in Bombay in 1947, where he worked for the film industry, but was accused of  favouring Muslims and was subjected to endless communal taunts, even from those who had hitherto imagined to be like him, but the secular core in many people did not survive the fire.  Manto came to Lahore in 1948, but was never happy. He turned the tragedies he had witness or heard into great literature. He wrote of the common people, regardless of ethnic, religious or caste identities and he discovered contradictions and passions and irrationality in each of them. In his work we see how normally decent people can, in extreme conditions, commit the most appalling atrocities. ‘Cold Meat’ is one such story. In 1952 he wrote: “My heart is heavy with grief today. A strange listlessness has enveloped me. More than four years ago when I said farewell to my other home, Bombay, I experienced the same kind of sadness…”

Years later he was still trying to come to grips with what had happened:

“Still, what my mind could not resolve was the question: what country did we belong to now, India or Pakistan? And whose blood was it that was being so mercilessly shed every day? And the bones of the dead, stripped of the flesh of religion, were they being burned or buried? Now that we were free who was to be our subject? When we were not free, we used to dream about freedom. Now that freedom had come, how would we perceive our past state?

“The question was: were we really free? Both Hindus and Muslims were being massacred. Why were they being massacred? There were different answers to the question; the Indian answer, the Pakistani answer, the British answer. Every question had an answer, but when you tried to unravel the truth, you were left groping.

“Everyone seemed to be regressing. Only death and carnage seemed to be proceeding ahead. A terrible chapter of blood and tears was being added to history, a chapter without precedent.

“India was free. Pakistan was free from the moment of its birth, but in both states, man’s enslavement continued: by prejudice, by religious fanaticism, by savagery.”

In a series of Open Letters to Uncle Sam he marked his displeasure at the state of world politics and Pakistan’s Security Pact with the US. Hedisplayed a remarkable prescience as expressed in this extract from his ‘Third Letter to uncle Sam’, written shortly before his death:

“Another thing I would want from you would be a tiny, teeny weeny atom bomb because for long I have wished to perform a certain good deed. You will naturally want to know what.

You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them. You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust and you caused several thousand children to be born in Japan. Each to his own. All I want you to do is to dispatch me some dry cleaners. It is like this. Out there, many Mullah types after urinating pick up a stone and with one hand inside their untied shalwar, use the stone to absorb the after-drops of urine as they resume their walk. This they do in full public view. All I want is that the moment such a person appears, I should be able to pull out that atom bomb you will send me and lob it at the Mullah so that he turns into smoke along with the stone he was holding.

As for your military pact with us, it is remarkable and should be maintained. You should sign something similar with India. Sell all your old condemned arms to the two of us, the ones you used in the last war. This junk will thus be off your hands and your armament factories will no longer remain idle.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is a Kashmiri, so you should send him a gun which should go off when it is placed in the sun. I am a Kashmiri too, but a Muslim which is why I have asked for a tiny atom bomb for myself.

One more thing. We can’t seem able to draft a constitution. Do kindly ship us some experts because while a nation can manage without a national anthem, it cannot do without a constitution, unless such is your wish.

One more thing. As soon as you get this letter, send me a shipload of American matchsticks. The matchsticks manufactured here have to be lit with the help of Iranian-made matchsticks. And after you have used half the box, the rest are unusable unless you take help from matches made in Russia which behave more like firecrackers than matches.”

Given the circumstances it is hardly surprising that he sought solace in alcohol and drank himself to death. He had written over 200 short stories and had no doubt of  his place in literary history and left behind the following epitaph for himself:

“Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. With him lie buried the arts of short-story telling. Here he lies underneath tons of mud still wondering if he was a better short-story writer than God.”

Notes:

Khalid Hasan, ‘Sadat Hasan Manto: Not of Blessed Memory’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 4, 1984, P.85

(From Viewpoint Online)

© 2012, Tariq Ali. This article may not be reproduced in any form without providing an active attribution link/ reference to The Pakistan Forum. All attribution links within the article must also be retained.

by Sunil Sharan

CELEBRATED Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz described how the `fog of war` causes facts to be fudged. Indian army chief Gen V.K. Singh has surely studied von Clausewitz.

How then has he allowed himself and his force to become embroiled in fuzzy mathematics over the churlish matter of his age, that too in peacetime? V.K.`s predicament stems from three sources: (a) the contentious circumstances of his appointment as chief in 2010, (b) the resentment that many army personnel feel towards the neta-babu nexus, and perhaps most significantly, (c) V.K.`s tendency to shoot from the lip.

V.K. became chief against the wish of his immediate predecessor, Gen Deepak Kapoor. As Kapoor`s subordinate, he had recommended probing the alleged corruption of one of Kapoor`s pet staff officers, effrontery that would have stymied most military careers. Fortunately for him, Defence Minister A.K. Antony took his side, and what is more, got him the top job.

At this time, the discrepancy in his age records was noticed, but the matter was seemingly laid to rest. Kapoor`s tenure had been controversial enough, and the government wanted to move on. The handing-taking over ceremony between Kapoor and V.K. Singh, normally a bear-hugging affair between an outgoing chief and an incoming one, was so frigid, it might as well have occurred on the Siachen glacier. `War of the generals` shrieked the headlines.

Shortly afterwards, Kapoor was accused of misappropriating prime property in Mumbai when he was still chief. V.K. proclaimed on national television that Kapoor`s behaviour had shamed the army. Quick to implicate, V.K. forgot about the principle of presumption of innocence. Another cardinal rule, of a serving chief refraining from publicly condemning his predecessors, too was violated. Kapoor met Antony to clear his name, and while V.K. threatened to court-martial Kapoor, the government let the matter die.

If 2010 was bad for Manmohan Singh, 2011 was annus horribilis. Anna Hazare galvanised the nation`s anti-corruption rage into a gale, leaving Manmohan Singh teetering. Anna became afour-letter word for the government. V.K., unable to contain himself, came out in public support of Anna. Little did he realise then that he had just cooked his own goose.

If Indira Gandhi had been prime minister, loose lips as his would have been sealed quickly. Manmohan Singh is more deliberate. Behind wispy facial hair though, there are some fangs for sure, to be bared only every few years, as he did while pushing for India`s nuclear deal, or when he thwarted a nation baying for Pakistani blood after 26/11.

After becoming chief, V.K. sought a correction, from 1950 to 1951, to his date of birth. If granted, he would have secured an additional 10 months of service. But even his benefactor, A.K. Antony, was becoming wary. V.K.`s request was turned down.

He filed a formal complaint, which too was rejected. By now, the soap opera of age, starring birth certificates, enrolment forms, claims, counter-claims, had become all the rage.

Two camps pitted heads. On the one side were the retired army officers, who, almost to a man, supported V.K. A question of izzat, they fumed through their handlebar moustaches.

Ranged against them were the pot-bellied politicians and Indian Administrative Service bureaucrats, who cited chapter and verse ofrules andlines of succession.

Many in India`s military chafe at what they consider as shackles imposed upon them by the `bloody civilians`. It galls them that the army chief, head of the world`s second-largest army, is ranked 12 in the order of precedence of Indian officialdom, all the way down from two in pre-Independence India.

It rankles them when they see the coveted privileges enjoyed by armies to their west (Pakistan), north (China), east (Bangladesh, Myanmar), or south (Sri Lanka). Pakistan`s `womb to tomb` army culture is markedly absent in India, with officers often put to pasture in the prime of their lives, ill-equipped to cope with civilian life`s wheeling and dealing. So unattractive has the career become that India`s army faces a lacuna of over 10,000 officers, almost a quarter of the desired strength.

Since Nehru`s time, the government, fearful of a coup, has kept the army on a tight leash. Once in a while a charismatic army chief comes along, as was the case with K. Sundarji. His over-exuberance though almost precipitated a war with Pakistan, as well as nudged Rajiv Gandhi into a catastrophic misadventure in Sri Lanka, for which the latter paid for with his life subsequently. Even as India`s military seeks to break free, many abroad hail how assiduously the civilian government has tethered it.

`Don`t treat me as if I am Pakistan`s army chief,` V.K. has reportedly wailed to his government. Rumours abound that Manmohan Singh talks directly to Gen Kayani. Surely he accords him due courtesy! Jokes apart, Manmohan Singh promises a makeover this year. He has issued an unprecedented New Year`s resolution, and has visited the Golden Temple to steel himself.

Neither he, nor his patron, Sonia Gandhi, will allow an uppity general to waylay their plan for 2012, which is to ensure an orderly ascension to premiership for Rahul Gandhi. Successors to V.K. have already been short-listed, five months before his tenure is to end, rendering him a virtual lame duck.

Instead of making veiled threats of going to court, which step would in all likelihood invite the sack, or resigning in a huff, it would be best if he were to declare the matter as closed, and treat it as so. And if, to sweeten the pill, the government offers him an ambassadorship or state governorship, he should decline. He took charge promising to restore the army’s morale.

Climbing down and bowing to his political masters is the only way out now.

sunil_sharan@yahoo.com

Constitution of Pakistan has been amended seventeen times since its promulgation in 1973; however the ninth and eleventh amendment bills were not passed. The importance of legislation is incontestable; it is the prerogative of parliament to set the rules of business but does it make any difference for a commoner either President has more power or Prime Minister. What matters for him is good governance, availability of basic needs with in affordable price. 

Below are all amendments in a summarized form 1974 onwards…

First Amendment May 04, 1974

• Article 1 – Amendment revised units, provinces and territories of the federation
  
• Article 17 – Amendment allowed citizens other than those in service of Pakistan to form political party and every political party to account for the source of its funds by law.
  

This amendment had become necessary as East Pakistan had emerged as a new independent state “Bangladesh” and Pakistan had officially recognized it.

Second Amendment September 17, 1974

• Article 106 – Quadiani group or the Lahori group (who call themselves ‘Ahmadis’)” was declared minorities.
  
• Article 260 – the definition of a Muslim was made part of constitution which is, ” A person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of The Prophet hood of MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), the last of the Prophets or claims to be a Prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after MUHAMMAD (Peace be upon him), or recognizes such a claimant as a Prophet or religious reformer, is not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or law.”
  

Third Amendment February 13, 1975

• Article 10, 232 – the amendment addressed the issues of preventative custody by curtailing the rights of detainee and by conferring more powers for detaining authority.
  

Fourth Amendment November 21, 1975

• Articles 8, 17, 19, 51, 54, 106, 199, 271, 272, 273, First schedule and Fourth Schedule. The amendment added 6 reserved seats in National Assembly, curtailed the powers of High Courts for cases related to preventative detainment, Land reforms, economic reforms and several regulations promulgated by President prior to Constitution were made part of constitution.
  

Fifth Amendment September 16, 1976

• Articles 101, 160, 175, 179, 180, 187, 192, 195, 196, 199, 200, 204, 206, 212, 260, 280 and First Schedule. The amendment established the rules for appointment of Governors, Chief Justices and the discretionary powers of the High Courts and Supreme Courts, abolished joint High Court of Sind and Baluchistan, constituted separate high court for each province.
  

Sixth Amendment December 13, 1976

• Articles 179, 195, 246, 260 – The Amendment extended the appointment of the Chief Justices of Supreme Courts and High Courts beyond their retirement age limit for when they have not completed the term of office.
  

Seventh Amendment May 16, 1977

• Articles 101, 245 – New Article 96 A inserted which was supposed to stay in force till September 30, 1977 Amendment suggested to hold a referendum to seek vote of confidence for the Prime Minister by General Public.
  

Eighth Amendment November 9, 1985

• Articles 48, 51, 56, 58, 59, 60, 75, 91, 101, 105, 106, 112, 116, 130, 144, 152 A, 270 A and addition of new Schedule, the Sixth Schedule, The constitution restored to the position of July 5, 1977 with amendment which conferred the powers upon the President to nominate Prime Minister, appointing the services chiefs, other key state positions and dissolve the National Assembly and Governors could dissolve provincial assemblies.
  

Ninth Amendment Bill 1985 (It was not passed and still remains a bill)

• In consonance with the provisions of Article 2 and 227 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which respectively offer that Islam shall be the State religion of Pakistan and that all laws shall be brought in conformity with the Injunctions of Islam, as also the Objectives Resolution, this Bill seeks to amend Articles 2, 203B and 203D of the Constitution so as to provide that the Injunctions of Islam shall be the supreme law and source of guidance for legislation and policy making and to empower the Federal Shariat Court to make recommendations for bringing the fiscal laws and laws relating to the levy and collection of taxes in conformity with the said injunctions.
  

Tenth Amendment March 25, 1987

• Articles 54 and 61 Amendment curtailed the working days of National Assembly and the Senate from 160 to 130 per year.
  

Eleventh Amendment Bill 1989 (It was withdrawn by the movers.)

• Article 51 the amendment bill was moved in Senate suggesting the restoration of 20 Women Seats in the National Assembly. It was withdrawn by the movers after government assurance.
  

Twelfth Amendment July 28, 1991

• New Article inserted: 212 B Provisions amended: Fifth Schedule. Amendment allowed constitution of special courts for heinous crimes as well as increase the salaries of Judges.
  

Thirteenth Amendment April 3, 1997

• Article 58, 101, 112, 243 – Amendment was to withdraw Eighth Amendment powers of the President and Governors to dissolve National and Provincial assemblies, the Prime Minister was conferred the powers to appoint Services Chiefs and other key position.
  

Fourteenth Amendment July 3, 1997

• New Article inserted 63A Amendment to provide disqualification of a member of Parliamentary party on the ground of defection, floor crossing, abstaining or refraining from vote or voting against the party policy.
  

Fifteenth Amendment August 28, 1998

• Insertion of Article 2B in view of the fact that the Objectives Resolution is now substantive part of the Constitution, it is necessary that Quran and Sunnah are declared to be the supreme law of Pakistan, and the Government is empowered to take necessary steps to enforce Shariah.

Sixteenth Amendment August 5, 1999

• Insertion of Article 27 which safeguards against discrimination in services, Quota system was extended till 2013.
  

Seventeenth Amendment August 21, 2002

• New Article Inserted 41, 58, 112, 152A, 179, 195, 243, 268 and 270AA Amendments were made to the constitution for the approval of Gen. Musharraf to stay President in uniform, his coup on October 12, 1999 and inclusion of the Legal Framework Order (LFO) into the constitution which empowered President again.
  

Eighteenth Amendment April 19, 2010

• Articles amended or substituted 1, 6, 17, 25, 27, 29, 38, 41, 46, 48, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 63A, 71, 73, 75, 89, 90, 91, 92, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 112, 116, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 147, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 193, 194, 198, 199, 200, 203, 203D, 209, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 224, 226,228, 232, 233, 234, 242, 243, 260, 268, 270A, 270AA, 270B
  
• Articles inserted 10A, 19A, 25A, 140A, 175A, 267A, 267B, 270BB
  
• Articles omitted 71 and Omission of sixth and seventh schedule
  
• Summary: Parliament declared the 17th Amendment to the Constitution and the Legal Framework Order (LFO) given by a dictator as without any legal authority. NWFP renamed as ‘Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa’. Good Governance by restricting the size of the Cabinet in to 11 per cent of the members of Parliament and respective Provinces. Four seats, one from each province, to be allocated in the Senate for the minorities to increase their strength. Education to each child up to the age of 16 years made compulsory. Formation of the council of common interests revised with prime minister as its chairman. The council should meet at least once in 90 days besides abolition of the Concurrent List. Prime Minister shall keep the president informed on all matters of internal and foreign policy and on all legislative proposals the federal government intends to bring before the Majlis-e-Shoora (parliament). President could use the power of dissolution of the National Assembly when a vote of no-confidence having been passed against the prime minister, no other member of the National Assembly commands the confidence of the majority of the members of the National Assembly, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, as ascertained in a session of the National Assembly for the purpose. For the determination of his civil rights and obligations or in any criminal charge against him, a person shall be entitled to a fair trial and due process. Under-representation of any class or area in the service of Pakistan may be redressed in such manner as may be determined by an act of Majlis-e-Shoora (parliament). Restriction imposed on the attorney general for doing private practice. Inexpensive and expeditious justice should be ensured to the people as also the right of access to information without any hurdle. The prime minister shall, in consultation with the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, forward three names for appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner to a parliamentary committee for hearing and confirmation of any one person. The parliamentary committee, to be constituted by the speaker, shall comprise 50 per cent from the opposition parties, based on their strength in Parliament to be nominated by the respective parliamentary leaders. In case there is no consensus between the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, each shall forward separate lists to the parliamentary committee for consideration, which may confirm one name. The total strength of the parliamentary committee shall not exceed 12 members out of which one-third shall be from the Senate. Provided that when the National Assembly is dissolved and a vacancy occurs in the office of the chief election commissioner, the parliamentary committee shall comprise the members of the Senate only. There shall be no restriction on the number of terms for the offices of the prime minister and chief ministers. Prime minister would advise the president on appointment of the chairman of the chiefs of staff committee and chiefs of three armed forces. The Senate shall consist of 104 instead of 100 members with the addition of one minority member from each province. Working days of the Senate have been increased from 90 to 110. Restriction on a person who has been dismissed from the service of Pakistan, service of a corporation or office set up or controlled by the federal government or the provincial government on ground of misconduct has been lifted. According to this amendment, a person could be elected as MP, three or five years after dismissal from the service. A person shall be disqualified from being elected or chosen as, and from being, a member of parliament if he has been dismissed from the service of Pakistan or service of a corporation or office set up or, controlled, by the federal government, the provincial government or a local government on ground of misconduct, unless a period of five years since his removal or dismissal; or unless a period of three years has elapsed since his removal or compulsory retirement. The restriction on a person being elected as member of parliament, who has been convicted by a court of competent jurisdiction for propagating any opinion, or acting in any manner, prejudicial to the ideology of Pakistan, or the sovereignty, integrity or security of Pakistan, or integrity or independence of the judiciary of Pakistan, or which defames or bring into ridicule the judiciary or the armed forces of Pakistan, unless a period of five years has elapsed since his release. Chairman of the Federal Public Service Commission would be appointed by the president on the advice of the prime minister. Similarly, chairmen of the provincial public service commissions would be appointed by the governors on the advice of chief ministers. Proclamation of emergency in the province due to internal disturbances would require a resolution from the provincial assembly. If the president acts on his own, the proclamation of emergency shall be placed before both houses of parliament for approval by each house within 10 days. On dissolution of the assembly or completion of its term, or in case it is dissolved under Article 58 or Article 112, a caretaker shall be selected by the president in consultation with the prime minister and the leader of the opposition in the outgoing National Assembly. Similarly, a caretaker chief minister will be appointed in consultation with the chief minister and the leader of the opposition in the outgoing provincial assembly. Proclamation of emergency of the fourteenth day of October, 1999, the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) No 1, the Oath of Office (Judges) Order, 2000, Chief Executive Order No 12 of 2002, Chief Executive Order No 19 of 2002, the amendments made in the Constitution through LFO, 2002, (Chief Executive Order No 24), the LFO (Amendment) Order, 2002, Chief Executive’s Order No 29 of 2002) and the LFO (Second Amendment) Order, 2002 (Chief Executive Order No 32 of 2002), notwithstanding any judgment of any court, including the Supreme Court or a High Court, are hereby declared as having been made without lawful authority and of no legal effect. Judges of the Supreme Court, High Courts and Federal Shariat Court who were continuing to hold the office of a judge or were appointed as such, and had taken oath under the Oath of Office (Judges) Order 2000, shall be deemed to continue to hold the office as judge or appointed as such as the case may be, under the Constitution and such continuance or appointment, shall have effect accordingly. Appointment of judges to the Supreme Court, there shall be a judicial commission. For appointment of judges of the Supreme Court, the commission, headed by the chief justice of Pakistan, shall also consist of two most senior judges of the apex court, a former chief justice or a former judge of the Supreme Court to be appointed by the chief justice in consultation with two member judges for a period of two years, federal minister for law and justice, Attorney General for Pakistan, and a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to be nominated by the Pakistan Bar Council for a period of two years. The judicial commission for the appointment of High Court judge, headed by the chief justice of the High Court, would also include two most senior judges of the High Court, provincial law minister, a senior advocate to be nominated by the provincial bar council. For appointment of judges of the Federal Shariat Court, the judicial commission shall also include the chief justice of the Shariat Court and the most senior judge of that court as its members. Article 58-2(b) should be repealed and substituted with “Dissolution of the National Assembly”. The substitution clause says that the president shall dissolve the National Assembly if so advised by the prime minister, and the National Assembly shall, unless sooner dissolved, stand dissolved at the expiration of forty-eight hours after the prime minister has so advised. Notwithstanding anything contained in Clause 2 of Article 48, the president may also dissolve the National Assembly in his discretion where, a vote of no-confidence having been passed against the prime minister, no other member of the National Assembly commands the confidence of the majority of the members of the National Assembly in accordance with the provision of the Constitution, as ascertained in a session of the National Assembly summoned for the purpose. Passing of the bills: Recommended substitution in Article 70 with “introduction of passing of bills”, adding that a bill with respect to any matter in the Federal Legislative List may originate in either house and shall, if it is passed by the house in which it originated, be transmitted to the other house and if the bill is passed without amendment by the other house also, it shall be presented to the president for assent. Bills presented in the house but not passed within 90 days of lying in the House shall be considered in a joint sitting of parliament. Islamabad High Court established and the judges of the Islamabad High Court should be taken from the federal capital and four provinces.
  

Nineteenth Amendment January 1, 2011

• Articles 81, 175, 175A, 182, 213, 246 – Amendment introduced a new system for appointments in the superior courts; the amendment also raised the number of senior judges as members of the Judicial Commission to four. Under the amendment, recommendations for the appointments of ad hoc judges in the superior courts will be made by the Chief Justice of Pakistan in consultation with the Judicial Commission. Moreover, in case of the National Assembly’s dissolution, members of the parliamentary committee will be from the Senate only.
  

Part 2 – Mood on the Ground

Also Read: Part 1: Many Barrels of a Gun

“There’s this contagion of protest,” Richard Stengel, managing editor of TIME, told NBC television as he discussed the naming of “The protester” as Time magazine’s person of the year, 2011. “These are folks who are changing history already and they will change history in the future.”

People across the SAARC region took to streets to protest against administrations failing to deliver governance

While he was referring largely to the people on streets in the Arab world, from Tunisia to Syria, who are shaking the plates of autocratic regimes in the region, the one story from the SAARC region that captured the imagination of the world in much the same way was the anti-corruption movement in India led by veteran social activist Anna Hazare and his team, known together as Team Anna.

In a protest that replicated the span and fervour of the Tahrir Square protest in Egypt, Team Anna’s agitation at Ramlila Maidan in India’s capital city of New Delhi towards a strong anti-corruption law drew not just tens of thousands of supporters (largely from the middle class) to the venue, but also inspired hundreds of simultaneous mirror agitations across the nation of 1.2 billion.

With more than 100 Indian news channels in over 20 languages and thousands of newspapers and magazines from across the globe providing saturation coverage to the movement, the Indian political class was forced to call an unscheduled debate on the subject in the parliament. It was an unprecedented instance of people power prevailing over the mighty political class in the nation’s 60-year-old parliamentary history.

There has yet not been any conclusion of the debate, both inside and outside the parliament, but what has now been established beyond doubt that people’s pressure in a nation that is home to the world’s fastest growing middle class may set the tone for future government-civilian dynamics.

Already, the Indian government is facing unrelenting resistance on ground over issues ranging from environmental and health impact of nuclear power plants to prices of essential items like food and fuel.

Clearly, the tone for the future is now set in India. People’s pressure would increasingly ensure that governance delivery becomes one of the prerequisites for electoral victories.

The thread carries through neighbouring Pakistan too. Hundreds of thousands of people have been flocking the political rallies of one of the nation’s favourite sons, Imran Khan. The only reason that can describe the massive surge in support for a person whose party has never, in the 15 years of its existence, won a single election is the unprecedented levels of public frustration in the nation about the current state of affairs.

Social media savvy middle and upper class youth are flocking Khan’s rallies across Pakistan in the hope that the charismatic personality would turn around things in the poverty and terrorism-stricken nation.

Sweeping one city after another by his present crowd pulling charisma, Khan has sent both the current ruling coalition and the principal opposition in a tizzy at the same time. Out of nowhere, Khan is now seen as a serious prime ministerial choice by an increasing number of people in the country.

Most of the support group of Khan see him not just as an alternative, but also as an extension of their own belief. In other words, Khan is just a representative of the present mood, which may just as easily turn against him should he compromise on any of the urgent expectations of the man on the street on the subject of transparent and corruption free government.

It is a thread that seems to be running across the SAARC region.

Bhutan, which famously talks of Gross National Happiness in place of Gross Domestic Product, saw an unprecedented Facebook campaign in February that challenged the government’s decision to ban smoking at public places. Though most of the supporters of the Facebook group had attacked the government from behind hidden identities, the rise of people’s voice in an otherwise serene kingdom did not go unnoticed. What also brought into sharp focus was the opportunity for administrative corruption in the process of the implementation of the law.

Three months later, thousands of people protested in Male, Asia’s smallest city and the capital of Maldives, against what they dubbed as corruption of unacceptable proportions in the government.

All of the above instances are significant as they belong to a region that is traditionally identified with corruption. A recent report by Transparency International on corruption in daily lives and public opinion in South Asia, based upon a survey of 7500 persons in six countries—India, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, revealed that more than one in three people in the SAARC region who dealt in public services said they paid bribes to get things done.

The report further said that people in the SAARC region see political parties and police as the most corrupt institutions. The two Ps are closely followed by further two Ps—parliament and public officials.

In such an environment of near pathological acceptance of corruption as a part of the society, rise of masses against corruption is not only a welcome sign, but might also signify the fight back of an extremely aggressive beast that feels itself to be cornered from all sides.

And therein lay SAARC region’s sunshine story of the year 2011.

End of Part 2

Part 1 – Many Barrels of a Gun

South Asia is often described as the most dangerous place on earth and the most promising emerging market – both in the same breath. The year 2011 illustrated in ample measure the implausible irony.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden was described as the biggest international news of the year 2011

The biggest international story of the year, according to The Associated Press’ annual poll of U.S. editors and news directors, was the killing of Osama Bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan on May 2.

Coming close on the heels of a serious diplomatic row between the US and Pakistan over the issue of Raymond Davis, an alleged CIA operative, killing three men in the busy streets of Pakistan’s second biggest city Lahore in late January, Pakistan brought frequent – and hugely unwelcome – spotlight to the South Asian region during the year.

The year of turmoil, which was preceded by the country losing hosting rights of many sporting events including South Asia’s biggest sporting event, the ICC Cricket World Cup, ended with one of the most public spats in recent history between the democratically elected government and the omnipotent Pakistan military.

In a spat that could spell serious trouble for the fragile democracy of the nation, President Asif Ali Zardari is alleged to have sought US assistance to quell a possible military coup in the aftermath of Osama’s killing. Called the ‘Memogate Scandal’, for the unsigned memo – allegedly crafted by former ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani – that was used to convey the Pakistani request to the US administration, the matter has taken the scalp of Haqqani and dragged both Zardari and chiefs of military and Pakistan’s secret service agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to nation’s supreme court.

Conflicts like these have in the past acted as the precursor to military rule in the country, which the nuclear-armed nation has been under for more than half the period of its independence from British rule in 1947. Though the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, decisively denied on December 22 the possibility of any extra-constitutional measure against the democratic system, a cursory glance at the nation’s volatile history informs that the military usually manages to have its way.

Unfortunately, Pakistan was not the only South Asian nation where dead bodies talked the most during the year. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal grappled with the aftermath of armed conflicts of recent history, even as India played host to a fleeting visit by terror in 2011.

A tribunal, headed by Nizamul Haque Nasim and known as ‘International Crimes Tribunal’, was formed in March 2010 in Bangladesh to hold trial of those accused of their involvement in ‘crimes against humanity’, including genocide, murder and rape during the nine-month ‘Liberation War’ – the period between declaration of Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in March 1971 and attaining freedom with India’s military help against Pakistan in December 1971. Many unofficial accounts put the figure of dead people at three million and those of women raped at 200,000. Hundreds of thousands of other, the then, East Pakistanis ended up as refugees in India.

Following up on the formation of the tribunal, the nation took its first step towards addressing that dark chapter of its young history when the police arrested three top Jamaat-e-Islami leaders in June 2010, two of which were cabinet ministers in the 2001-06 Bangladesh National Party (BNP) administration of the present opposition leader and then prime minister of Bangladesh, Begum Khalida Zia.

Khaleda Zia, in a statement to press, said that the tribunal is “nothing but a servile, rubber-stamp organisation” out to victimise the government’s political opponents.

The tribunal began its first trial in October this year when it charged Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a top authority of Jamaat-e-Islami and allegedly one of the leaders of a pro-Pakistan mercenary group, with involvement in the killing of more than 50 people, torching villages and forcibly converting Hindus to Islam.

Sayedee, who denies the charges, could be given the death penalty if found guilty.

International observers have cautiously welcomed the trials. With neutral researchers noting that about 1800 people collaborated with the Pakistani army in committing the ‘war crimes’, many more arrests in the case are expected.

In another case involving war in the SAARC region, to the south-west of Bangladesh, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) of Sri Lanka submitted its final report to the government on November 20. Established by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in May 2010 to look into alleged war crimes committed during the final days of the 26-year-old civil war in Sri Lanka that ended with the defeat of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) at the hands of the Sri Lankan army in May 2009, the LLRC – expectedly – exonerated the Sri Lankan government of any wrong doings between 21 February 2002 to 19 May 2009.

The commission is not recognised by most of the international rights groups because of its failure to satisfy the fairness and transparency criteria. But the Sri Lankan government, which has steadfastly resisted vociferous global support for external accountability mechanisms such as the UN Secretary General’s Panel of Expert, said that the LLRC report is impartial and objective, and would be presented verbatim at the next session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in March 2012.

Up north in the Himalayas, the erstwhile monarchy and the presently constitution-less fledgling democracy of Nepal struggled, for another year, to draft a new constitution and pave the way for a stable democracy.

On November 28, members of parliament extended the Nepalese parliament’s term for a fourth and final time to allow the drafting of a new constitution that adheres to a peace accord brokered between political parties and the Maoist rebels, after the civil war ended in 2006.

Formed in 2008 after Nepal relinquished its monarchy, the current 601-member parliament, or Constituent Assembly (CA), was given an initial two-year mandate to write a new constitution for the young republic.

But three years since, the CA has not been able to produce even a first, consolidated draft. The previous three extensions of the assembly – first for a year and then two of three months each – failed to resolve differences between the various political parties on issues like federalism, presidential or prime ministerial formats and election procedures.

But the nation made some progress in what it called the ‘regrouping process’, entailing the re-integration of the cadre of Nepal’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the mainstream Nepalese society. PLA was the military wing of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M) when the party was at civil conflict with the Nepalese monarchy.

19,500 PLA combatants who were living in a total of seven cantonments in different parts of the country after the commencement of the peace process in 2006 began appearing before a committee on November 18 to register their choice of either joining the Nepal army or taking a voluntary retirement.

The process is seen is one of the only successes of Nepalese democracy since the abolition of constitutional monarchy in 2006.

India, the SAARC nation that has the biggest stake in the Nepalese peace process, meanwhile continued to answer its own geo-political needs – supporting the Maoists in Nepal, while going after the group in India and gunning down one of its biggest leaders, Kishenji.

Indian analysts, however, point out that there is no contradiction in the approach, as while the Nepali Maoist are now firmly in the Himalayan nation’s mainstream polity, the Indian rebels are still caught in the time warp of trying to overthrow the government to establish their own ideological republic – through the barrel of a gun.

The South Asian giant, however, faced none of the security-related anxiety of the other SAARC nations mentioned in this year-end wrap; barring a jolting bomb blast outside a court premises in New Delhi. But it was kept on the tenterhooks by another kind of challenge – that of popular anger.

End of Part 1