Vajpayee speech makes Pak media bristle

The shoddy but deliberate manner in which the Vajpayee government shot downthe Hizbul Mujahideen initiative is just another watermark of this policy.

…Vajpayee’s terrorism hoo-ha at the Millennium Summit is meant to cover upthe inherent weakness of Delhi’s position. The Kashmir struggle was in fullswing during Vajpayee’s happy sojourn in Lahore. The groups that he nowprefers to call “terrorists” were still at work during the Lahore Fortsoiree, where he regaled himself with Pakistani delights.

Then he did not see “terrorism” as an impediment in the way to reaching anagreement. The argument that Kargil destroyed Indian trust has beenovermilked. The Lahore process would have come unstuck in any case becauseit was way too ambitious and was predicated on the assumption that two menand a superpower can arbiter the fate of a nation which has lost a wholegeneration for freedom.

Pakistan is a medium-sized state with a weak economy and India is huge,booming economically. The world would rather look at Delhi’s markets thanexpose the hypocrisy of its rulers whose hoodlums burn Christians alive,make priests walk naked, destroy mosques, desecrate temples, demean Muslimsand ridicule their religion, while they glorify themselves as the essence ofhumanity…

— The News (Pakistan)Pak’s fall in Dhaka
Dateline IslamabadWith parts of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report on the fall of Dhakaappearing in a section of the Press, many a skeleton has walked out of ourclosets. It has disturbed some of the characters of the story so much thatthey have started throwing the blame on others dead or alive.

In the process, the real causes of the fall of Dhaka have been convenientlyignored. Dhaka was the cradle of Pakistan. The movement for Pakistan wasnurtured in Bengal. Yet we hate to face the fact that the Bengalis wereforced to opt out of Pakistan. They were more in number than the entirepopulation of the rest of the provinces of Pakistan….The leaders ofPakistan inherited a nearly sacred mission of making Urdu the nationallanguage of the country… and refused to recognise Bangla as the languageof the majority of the people living in Pakistan. Riots broke out inFebruary 1952 between the police and the restive sections of Bengalistudents…

–The Dawn, Pakistan…Later, when in the 1956 constitution Bangla was recognised as the secondnational language it was too late. By then,… Bengali nationalism hadalready taken roots. Bengalis had no voice in the early federal government.

The first prime minister of the country had no constituency in Pakistan. TheQuad-i-Azam himself was the governor-general and Liaquat Ali Khan, anUrdu-speaking person, was the prime minister, a slot which in normalcircumstances ought to have gone to the Bengalis. East Bengal was hundredsof miles away from rest of the country with an inimical India intervening inbetween.

–The Dawn (Pakistan)Pak’s Godfather
Dateline dhakaLong Island and New York are a long way from Raiwind and Lahore but a recentinterview with Mian Mohammad Sharif, father of former prime minister NawazSharif and Abbaji as he is widely known, shows that godfathers are alive andwell. In any country and in any age they remain the same. Mario Puzo’sfictionalised saga of a prominent mafia family had “olive oil” as the corefamily business, for the Sharifs it is “steel”.

…Vito Corleone and the eldest Sharif, both dominant personalitiesdisplaced from their roots, rise from humble origins in the new country tocontrol large, powerful “families” comprising blood relations and closeassociates.

One does not see Abbaji going around brandishing a pistol knocking offpeople in his young age as did the elder Corleone, but a notorious factionof Kashmiri origin of Lahore, generally believed to be the muscle of theSharif family, specialised in physically taking over property, helplesswidows being a special target of the “Qabza” group.

It may be no mean coincidence that their “Capo” is residing in New York,what better safe distance from where to fulminate and conspire than the homeof the original Godfather?

…Despite military rule, Abbaji continues to wield commensurate influencein the police and bureaucracy… Corleone’s plans ran into trouble becauseof the cross-purpose ambitions of other gangsters, but Abbaji is far luckier one of his sons became the prime minister of Pakistan twice and anotherthe chief minister of Punjab. Abbaji names a long list of luminaries inpolitics, uniform, bureaucracy, business, etc visiting, first Model Town andthen later Raiwind (on his shifting residence), to do him homage and pledgetheir loyalties in person.

…While it speaks very well of the Sharif brethren to give devoted respectto their father and to seek his advice about all the important issues, theyhardly have the right to surrender the democratic mandate given to them bythe people to the veto of one man.

…Abbaji’s recollections are a sorry indictment of what politics inPakistan has become, mostly the privilege of a few elite families, themanipulations of the landed gentry giving some way grudgingly to the nouveauurban rich. For those who believed in Nawaz Sharif, and I am one of them,eroding of the delusion we had been living in for years was veryupsetting.

— The Daily Star (Bangladesh)