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SECOND OPINION: Is Mian Nawaz Sharif losing sleep over Israel? —Khaled Ahmed’s Review of the Urdu press

In 1998, there was false alarm about Israeli planes scrambling for Pakistan. Foreign minister Gohar Ayub lost his cool and blubbered most incoherently about it on TV. Things don't remain the same in politics for long

In Pakistan the recent ‘contact’ with Israel has predictably opened the sluice-gates of all kinds of complex hypocrisy. No one knows when the recognition will come, but one thing is certain, no government can think of it just yet and face a bruising debate about it in parliament.

Columnist Javed Chaudhry wrote in Jang (8 September 2005) that, starting with Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan was contacting Israel through its diplomats. It began with Pakistan’s first foreign minister Chaudhry Zafarullah Khan and reached a height with General Zia who told the Arabs they should recognise Israel.

Later Benazir Bhutto continued these contacts and under Nawaz Sharif ambassador to the US, Syeda Abida Hussain, made a public suggestion that Pakistan should recognise Israel. In answer, Shehbaz Sharif told Nawa-e-Waqt that Nawaz Sharif hated Israel so much that when he heard in 1998 that Israel could attack Pakistan he could not sleep all night because of rage.

In 1998, there was false alarm (raised by interested parties?) about Israeli warplanes scrambling for Pakistan. Foreign minister Gohar Ayub lost his cool and blubbered most incoherently about it on TV. What happened in 1998 is being referred to to stop Pakistan from talking to Israel. Things don’t remain the same in politics.

Writing in Nawa-e-Waqt (8 September 2005) Dr Zahur Ahmad Azhar stated that if Pakistan recognised Israel then Islamabad will have two enemy embassies. Indian embassy already existed although India did not accept Pakistan from the heart and was always busy trying to undo it. Now India was happy that Pakistan had begun talking to Israel. It is happy that another embassy in Islamabad would be busy doing what the Indian embassy already does.

Dr Azhar forgot that there would be more than just two enemy embassies. What about his pet hatred America, the eternal foe? And what about the dastardly British who are now pretending to help us in the earthquake? And the Russians who are still licking their wounds from the defeat we inflicted on them in 1988. If you wear the thinking cap of Dr Azhar, there are at least 20 enemy embassies in Islamabad.

Columnist Abdul Qadir Hassan wrote in Jang (10 September 2005) that he had always told the Musharraf government that NGOs were not loyal to Pakistan but it had paid no attention. The NGOs were funded by foreign states and were therefore loyal only to them. They had no interest in the welfare of Pakistan.

But any criticism of the NGOs was considered a criticism of roshan khayali because all these NGOs were considered roshan khayal. These NGOs were not mindful of how the women in the West were being played around with, but have become touchy about women in Pakistan, and to highlight their activity, they had chosen the police as rapist. They get these women to come on TV and count the number of men who had raped them. But President Musharraf himself has found out what these NGOs were really up to.

No one can convince the Urdu columnist to stop spreading the falsehood about the NGOs. The NGOs are mostly funded by the anti-US leftwing organisations in Europe. The NGOs in Pakistan are mostly anti-US. (This includes the Human Rights Commission under Ms Asma Jehangir which may not be anti-US but which is definitely not pro-US.) The unpleasant truth is that the rightwing Islamists don’t want the NGOs to be counted inside their anointed latter-day anti-US consensus.

Writing in daily Pakistan (10 September 2005) Nasim Shahid expressed his shock and grief at reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which the Jewish leaders planned to conquer the world in a secret meeting in 1897. The document said that Jews were spreading hatred and prejudice so that the world may fight.

Another protocol said hat Muslims were like sheep while the Jews were wolves. The columnist said he was greatly shocked and surprised at the effectiveness of the Protocols today, meaning that the plan to conquer the world was still on.

The Protocols were a Tsarist forgery debunked repeatedly in the European courts. Europe inflicted a lot of cruelty on the Jews making the Protocols its moral basis. Hitler revived them. Now the Muslims are readying themselves as the political descendants of Hitler. The Protocols stand as the 20th century equivalent of the Gospel of Barnabas.

According to Dr Saleem Akhtar in Nawa-e-Waqt magazine (11 September 2005) Allama Iqbal believed in separate electorates in Punjab and, therefore, quarrelled with the Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Ali Jauhar who wanted to compromise on this principle to get weightage for Muslims at the all-India level. In Punjab, under limited suffrage, Muslim vote was only 40 percent, and under joint electorates Muslims would have lost their majority dominance.

In Punjab the Unionists and some intellectuals like Allama Iqbal wanted to retain separate electorates to identify the province as Muslim-majority. But movements like Khilafat, linked to Congress, were undermining the Unionists and laying the foundation for an ultimate Hindu-Muslim split. Allama Iqbal foresaw separatism in separate electorates, Jinnah saw it later.

According to Jang (12 September 2005) literacy rates were low in South Punjab. For instance, Mianwali, considered to be backward, had 48 percent literate population, the same as Sheikhupura near Lahore, but Rajanpur had the lowest literacy rate in the province at 31 percent.

Rawalpindi had the highest literacy rate at 70 percent, followed by Lahore at 67 percent, Sialkot at 66 percent, Jhelum 65 percent, Chakwal 62 and Gujranwala 61 percent. The Seraiki-speaking region had a generally low literacy rate.

The education deficit in southern Punjab goes hand-in-hand with backwardness of all sorts. Pakistan is weak ‘on the limes’, which is a sign of break-up. All over, it is on the frontier either of the province or the state itself that populations live in a limbo of national deficits of all sorts. South Punjab should actually be a separate province with its own budget which should be spent there and not in Lahore where the southern MPAs live in their luxurious residences. *

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