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Friday, September 24, 2010

[ALOCHONA] Fwd: Teachings of Krishna to help build secular Bangladesh



-------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Javed Ahmad javedahmad@yahoo.com

"Home Minister Advocate Sahara Khatun yesterday said the teachings of Lord Krishna will play a positive role in building a secular and digital Bangladesh. "Lord Krishna taught us to punish the evil and nurture the good for establishing a peaceful society," she said..."

http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=155586

Note: The name "Sahara Khatun" implies that she is a Muslim, but advocating for Hinduism and secularism? I do not understand why do people who does not believe in Islam keeps a Muslim name and works against Islam? There is "no compulsion in religion", she is free to quit Islam is she doesn't like it!

You are welcome to read the following articles:

1. Politics, secularism and Islam:
http://dailyalochona.blogspot.com/2010/07/alochona-fwd-politics-secularism-and.html

2. Identifying a Muslim: http://bangladesh-web.com/view.php?hidRecord=332778


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RE: [ALOCHONA] How Mujib used Tajuddin to achieve his personal political goals ...



When we will create a  " special court"....to prosecute those moron..... AL leaders , who pushed ordinary, unarmed, untrained

people infront of Pakistani machine guns?

And they themselves, got busy with wine...... women.... fun, in Kolkata, all recorded by RAW.

When we will have the guts to condemn the un-educated, in-efficient, corrupt leadership of AL in the history of Bangladesh?

Khoda hafez.







To: mukto-mona@yahoo.com; dahuk@yahoogroups.com; sonarbangladesh@yahoogroups.com
CC: alochona@yahoogroups.com
From: enayet_2000@yahoo.com
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:57:53 -0700
Subject: [ALOCHONA] How Mujib used Tajuddin to achieve his personal political goals ...



What about Seikh Mujib?
Seikh Mujib and Bhutto were responsible to break up and create cycle of violence.
 
Seikh Mujib started his politics with Muslim League, with Shawardy, Mujib participated in communal politics and Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta. Mujib aka Debodas Chokroborty was born in Calcutta 1920 to an unwed Mom. Later she was married to serestadar Seikh Lutfur Rahman. 3 years old Debodas Chakrabarty named as Seikh Mujibur Rahman and his mother took a name as Saleha Khatun. This record can be found in Calcutta High Court.
 
Seikh Mujib did not attend madrassa until he was 8 years old, and he did not complete his BA degree. Later he was admitted to Dhaka University and expelled from the university. Seikh Mujb was married at 18 years old.
 
 

--- On Mon, 9/20/10, Mohammed Ramjan <mramjan@hotmail.com> wrote:

From: Mohammed Ramjan <mramjan@hotmail.com>
Subject: [KHABOR] RE: BNP's birth -2 How Zia used Jadu Miah to achieve his personal political goals ...
To:
Date: Monday, September 20, 2010, 1:34 AM

 
That means Those Freedom Fighters are the most immoral identities on this earth (like zia and others) who has broken the Pakistan. Enemy of united Muslim Power in the Indian sub-continent.
 
We know dog fight each other, now we see same thing happening among Freedom Fighters - between Zia & Muzib followers.
 

Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:42:31 +1200
Subject: Re: BNP's birth -2 How Zia used Jadu Miah to achieve his personal political goals ...
From: srbanunz@gmail.com
To: syed.aslam3@gmail.com; notun_bangladesh@yahoogroups.com; chottala@yahoogroups.com; khabor@yahoogroups.com; SonarBangladesh@yahoogroups.com; mozammelbabu@hotmail.com; khondkar.saleque@gmail.com; boseasoke@gmail.com; poriprekkhit@yahoo.com; poplu@hotmail.com; ahamed.ahmed@gmail.com; think_tank_habib@yahoo.com; shelley59male@yahoo.com; suvassingho@gmail.com; shaugat@gmail.com; manik195709@yahoo.com; mollaltf@gmail.com

 
জিয়া একজন ধুরন্ধর corrupt ব্যাক্তি। উদ্দেশ্য অন্য কিন্তু প্র্রকাশ ভিন্ন। এই ধরনের মানুষ ব্যাক্তি জিবনে অনেক অর্থ এবং ক্ষমতা অর্জন করতে পারেন কিন্তু দেশ ও জাতির জিবনে কোন ভুমিকা রাখতে পারে না।
 
সেই নেতাই মানুষের মঙ্গল করতে পারেন যে - তিনি যেটা বিশ্বাশ করেন সেইটাই প্রকাশ করেন।
 
Truth will reveal the real cahracter of killer, conspirator, corrupt and naPaki agent general Zia
 
--
"Sustha thakon, nirapade thakon ebong valo thakon"

Shuvechhante,

Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan (ANU)
NEW ZEALAND.

Phone: 00-64-9-620 2603 (Res), 00-64-02 1238 5500 (mobile)
E-mail: srbanunz@gmail.com

N.B.: If any one is offended by content of this e-mail, please ignore & delete this e-mail. I also request you to inform me by an e- mail - to delete your name from my contact list.


On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Syed_Aslam3 <syed.aslam3@gmail.com> wrote:
 বিএনপির জন্ম যেভাবে সেনানিবাসে: ২
 BNP's birth in cantonment - Part 2:
 How Zia used Jadu Miah to achieve his personal political goals ...
 
 
 
Please read:
Zia the brain and Ershad the heart of Murky politics in Bangladesh.
 
 
 
 
 


 

বিএনপির জন্ম যেভাবে সেনানিবাসে: ১

মার্কিন দূতাবাসকে গোপন বৈঠক সম্পর্কে জানাতেন যাদু মিয়া

BNP's birth in cantonment -1 :Some inside stories [Shadows of US connections]
 
 
 
 
Related:
 

bnp

Place of Birth: Dhaka Cantonment Literati: ... BNP Big Shots. Click here to read reports on the corruption of the following BNP bigshots ...
muktadhara.net/bnp.html - Cached

Types of Criminals

... who was just a Major and in Dhaka cantonment during the war. ... People say that she has three or four date(s) of birth. ... Other BNP war criminals: 1. Shah Azizur Rahman - Dictator Zia's Prime Minister, deceased in 1988, 2. ...
ghatok-dalal.tripod.com/criminals.html - Cached - Similar








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[ALOCHONA] Fire in the Hole



Fire in the Hole
 
How India's economic rise turned an obscure communist revolt into a raging resource war.
 
BY JASON MIKLIAN, SCOTT CARNEY
 
The richest iron mine in India was guarded by 16 men, armed with Army-issued, self-loading rifles and dressed in camouflage fatigues. Only eight survived the night of Feb. 9, 2006, when a crack team of Maoist insurgents cut the power to the Bailadila mining complex and slipped out of the jungle cover in the moonlight. The guerrillas opened fire on the guards with automatic weapons, overrunning them before they had time to take up defensive positions. They didn't have a chance: The remote outpost was an hour's drive from the nearest major city, and the firefight to defend it only lasted a few minutes.
 
The guards were protecting not only $80 billion-plus worth of mineral deposits, but also the mine's explosives magazine, which held the ammonium nitrate the miners used to pulverize mountainsides and loosen the iron ore. When the fighting was over and the surviving guards rounded up and gagged, about 2,000 villagers who had been hiding behind the commando vanguard clambered over the fence into the compound and began emptying the magazine. Altogether they carried out 20 tons of explosives on their backs -- enough firepower to fuel a covert insurgency for a decade.
 
More... Four and a half years after the attack in the remote Indian state of Chhattisgarh, the blasting materials have spread across the country, repackaged as 10-pound coffee-can bombs stuffed with ball bearings, screws, and chopped-up rebar. In May, one villager's haul vaporized a bus filled with civilians and police. Another destroyed a section of railway later that month, sending a passenger train careening off the tracks into a ravine. Smaller ambushes of police forces on booby-trapped roads happen pretty much every week. Almost all of it, local police told us, can be traced back to that February night.
 
The Bailadila mine raid was one of India's most profound strategic losses in the country's protracted battle against its Maoist movement, a militant guerrilla force that has been fighting in one incarnation or another in India's rural backwaters for more than 40 years. Over the course of the half-dozen visits we've made to the region during the past several years, we've come to consider the attack on the mine not just one defeat in the long-running war, but a symbolic shift in the conflict: For years, the Maoists had lived in the shadow of India's breakneck modernization. Now they were thriving off it.
 
Only a decade ago, the rebels -- often, though somewhat inaccurately, called Naxalites after their guerrilla predecessors who first launched the rebellion in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari in 1967 -- seemed to have all but vanished. Their cause of communist revolution looked hopelessly outdated, their ranks depleted. In the years since, however, the Maoists have made an improbable comeback, rooted in the gritty mining country on which India's economic boom relies. A new generation of fighters has retooled the Naxalites' mishmash of Marx, Lenin, and Mao for the 21st century, rebranding their group as the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and railing against what the rebels' spokesman described to us as the "evil consequences by the policies of liberalization, privatization, and globalization."
 
India's Hidden War Although it has gotten little attention outside South Asia, for India this is no longer an isolated outbreak of rural unrest, but a full-fledged guerrilla war. Over the past 10 years, some 10,000 people have died and 150,000 more have been driven permanently from their homes by the fighting. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a high-level meeting of state ministers not long after the Bailadila raid that the Maoists are "the single greatest threat to the country's internal security," and in 2009 he launched a military surge dubbed "Operation Green Hunt": a deployment of almost 100,000 new paramilitary troops and police to contain the estimated 7,000 rebels and their 20,000-plus -- according to our research -- part-time supporters. Newspapers run stories almost daily about "successful operations" in which police string up the bodies of suspected militants on bamboo poles and lay out their captured caches of arms and ammunition. Many of the dead are civilians, and the harsh tactics have polarized the country.
 
It wasn't supposed to be this way -- not in 21st-century India, a country 20 years into an experiment in rapid, technology-driven development, one of globalization's most celebrated success stories. In 1991, with India on the brink of bankruptcy, Singh -- then the country's finance minister -- pursued an ambitious slate of economic reforms, opening up the country to foreign investment, ending public monopolies, and encouraging India's bloated state-run firms to behave like real commercial ventures. Today, India's GDP is more than five times what it was in 1991. Its major cities are now home to an affluent professional class that commutes in new cars on freshly paved four-lane highways to jobs that didn't exist not so long ago.
 
But plenty of Indians have missed out. Economic liberalization has not even nudged the lives of the country's bottom 200 million people. India is now one of the most economically stratified societies on the planet; its judicial system remains byzantine, its political institutions corrupt, its public education and health-care infrastructure anemic. The percentage of people going hungry in India hasn't budged in 20 years, according to this year's U.N. Millennium Development Goals report. New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore now boast gleaming glass-and-steel IT centers and huge engineering projects. But India's vast hinterland remains dirt poor -- nowhere more so than the mining region of India's eastern interior, the part of the country that produces the iron for the buildings and cars, the coal that keeps the lights on in faraway metropolises, and the exotic minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to electric cars to iPads.
 
If you were to lay a map of today's Maoist insurgency over a map of the mining activity powering India's boom, the two would line up almost perfectly. Ground zero for the rebellion lies in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, a pair of neighboring, mostly rural states some 750 miles southeast of New Delhi that are home to 46 million people spread out over an area a little smaller than Kansas. Urban elites in India envision them as something akin to Appalachia, with a landscape of rolling forested hills, coal mines, and crushing poverty; their undereducated residents are the frequent butt of jokes told in more fortunate corners of the country.
 
Revenues from mineral extraction in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand topped $20 billion in 2008, and more than $1 trillion in proven reserves still sit in the ground. But this geological inheritance has been managed so disastrously that many locals -- uprooted, unemployed, and living in a toxic and dangerous environment, due to the mining operations -- have thrown in their lot with the Maoists. "It is better to die here fighting on our own land than merely survive on someone else's," Phul Kumari Devi told us when we visited her dusty mining village of Agarbi Basti in June. "If the Maoists come here, then we would ask their help to resist."
 
The mines are also cash registers for the Maoist war chest. Through extortion, covert attacks, and plain old theft, insurgents have tapped a steady stream of mining money to pay their foot soldiers and buy arms and ammunition, sometimes from treasonous cops themselves. The result is the kind of perpetual-motion machine of armed conflict that is grimly familiar in places like the oil-soaked Niger Delta, but seems extraordinary in the world's largest democracy.
 
This isn't just an Indian story -- it's a global one. In the wake of Singh's economic reforms, foreign investment in the country has grown to 150 times what it was in 1991. Among other things, India has opened up its vast mineral reserves to private and international players, and now major global companies like Toyota and Coca-Cola rely on mining operations in the heart of the Maoist war zone. Investors in the region claim that the fighting is taking a toll on their businesses, and Bloomberg News recently estimated that some $80 billion worth of projects are stalled at least in part by the guerrilla war, enough to double India's steel output.
 
But in our visits to the region and dozens of interviews there -- with miners and politicians, refugees and paramilitary leaders, cops and go-betweens for the guerrillas -- we found a far more complex reality. Mining companies have managed to double their production in the two states in the past decade, even as the conflict has escalated; the most unscrupulous among them have used the fog of war as a pretext for land grabs, leveling villages whose residents have fled the fighting. At the same time, the Maoists, for all their communist rhetoric, have become as much a business as anything else, one that will remain profitable as long as the country's mines continue to churn out the riches on which the Indian economy depends.
 
The first sign you see as you leave the airport in Jharkhand's capital city of Ranchi welcomes you to the "Land of Coal," and indeed, mining underlies every aspect of life here. Seams of coal are visible in the earth alongside the rutted roads that connect the jungle hamlets. Travelers learn to anticipate mines not by any road signs, but by the processions of men pushing bicycles heaped with burlap sacks full of coal: day laborers who pay for the opportunity to scrape the stuff out of thousands of off-the-books mines and sell it door to door as heating fuel, for perhaps a few more dollars a day than they would make as farmers trying to eke out a living from Jharkhand's depleted soil.
 
India's coal country was mostly passed over by British colonists until they discovered its mineral wealth in the late 19th century and built the obligatory handful of dusty frontier towns and roads necessary to take advantage of it. Today the region bears the obvious scars of a hundred-odd years of heavy industry. The damage is most visible at road marker 221 of Jharkhand's main north-south highway, about 40 miles outside Ranchi, where a freshly paved patch of asphalt veers sharply west and snakes up a smoky hill through the village of Loha Gate and into an ecological disaster zone. Shimmering waves of heat, thick with carbon monoxide and selenium, waft through jagged cracks in the pavement large enough to swallow a soccer ball. A hundred feet below, a massive subterranean coal fire, started in an abandoned mine, burns so hot that it melts the soles of one's shoes. The only vestiges of plant life are the scattered hulks of desiccated trees. Like the legendary coal fire that destroyed Centralia, Pennsylvania, this blaze could easily smolder for another 200 years before the coal seam is finally burned through.
 
There are at least 80 coal fires like this burning in Jharkhand, turning much of the state's ground into a giant combustible honeycomb. A fire ignited in 1916 by neglectful miners near the city of Jharia has grown so large that it now threatens to burn away the land beneath the entire community, plunging the 400,000 residents into an underground inferno. One mine just outside Jharia collapsed in 2006, killing 54 people.
 
Coal mining and armed rebellion have long gone hand in hand in what is now Jharkhand, both dating back to the mid-1890s, when the British began extracting coal from the area and Birsa Munda, today a local folk hero, launched a tribal revolt to regain local control of resources. The British quelled the uprising with a massive deployment of troops, but the resentment festered. India's government after independence proved a poor landlord as well, with decades of mining disasters -- more than 700 people were killed in them between 1965 and 1975 alone -- and a corrupt, nearly feudal government that made what was then the state of Bihar notorious in India as the country's most poorly run, backward region.
 
By the 1990s, fed-up residents campaigned to carve Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh into their own jurisdictions. The politicians behind the movement argued that the people who lived in the shadow of the mines were the least likely to benefit from them, the spoils instead accruing to large out-of-state corporations and venal government officials in distant capitals. In 2000, India's Parliament acquiesced, forming new states that then-Home Minister L.K. Advani declared would "fulfill the aspirations of the people."
 
But statehood only enabled the rise of a new cast of villains. Absentee political landlords were replaced with home-grown thugs who exploited the new state government's lax oversight to build their own fiefdoms. Madhu Koda, one of Jharkhand's former chief ministers, is awaiting trial on allegations he siphoned $1 billion from state coffers -- an astonishing 20 percent of the state's revenues -- during his two-year tenure. Mining operations, fast-tracked without regard for environmental or safety concerns, expanded at an alarming rate and are now projected to displace at least half a million people in Jharkhand by 2015.
 
The blighted landscape has proved to be fertile ground for the Maoist insurgency's renaissance. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Maoists' predecessors in the Naxalite movement had waged a bloody revolutionary campaign across rural India, only to mostly fade away by the early 1990s. The Maoists who have picked up the Naxalites' banner in recent years are different, and the contours of their rebellion are hard to pin down.
 
These fighters claim to be led in battle by an elusive figure called Kishenji, who depending on whom you ask is either a one-legged, battle-hardened Brahmin, a 1960s-era radical with a Ph.D. from New Delhi, or simply a moniker used by anyone within the organization who wishes to sound authoritative or confuse the police. The guerrillas shun email and mobile phones and rarely communicate with the world beyond the jungle, mostly via letters ferried back and forth by foot soldiers. Over several years of attempted correspondence, we received only a few missives in return. All were written in an opaque style full of the sort of arcane Marxist jargon that the rest of the world forgot in the 1970s.
 
Today's Maoists maintain the radical leftist politics of their predecessors and draw their civilian support from the same rural grievances -- poverty, lack of justice, political disenfranchisement. But they are less an organized ideological movement than a loose confederation of militias, and many of their local commanders appear to be in it for the money alone. They wage war sporadically across a 1,000-mile swath of India, operating without a permanent base, relying on the tacit support of villagers to evade the police and paramilitary forces that hunt them, and periodically raiding remote police stations for resupplies of arms and ammunition.
 
But the rebels' primary revenue comes from the region's mines. Where the Naxalites used to congregate in areas with longstanding conflicts between landowners and laborers, Maoist strongholds now tend to pop up within striking distance of large-scale extractive operations. Such mines cover vast areas and are difficult to secure, making them sitting ducks for well-armed insurgents. "Most of the mines in this state are in the forests, so we are easy targets," says Deepak Kumar, the owner of several such mines in Jharkhand. "The only way to stop the attacks is to negotiate."
 
Kumar comes from a long line of Jharkhandi robber barons. In the 1980s, he used his mining camps as staging grounds for stalking the region's near-extinct Bengal tigers. Today he owns a series of profitable but (by his own admission) illegal coal mines, hidden in the palm forests. Legal mines extract ore with giant machines that carve craters to the horizon; Kumar's are more like secret caves, the coal dug out of deep tunnels with pickaxes by day laborers working for $2 to $3 a day. He told us his revenues run about $4 million a year, typical for off-the-books operations in a state where less than half of raw materials are extracted legitimately.
 
On July 4, 2004, Kumar was closing out the day's accounts in his makeshift office at one of his mines when seven female guerrillas carrying automatic rifles broke down his door, forcing him into the forest at gunpoint. They marched him to a riverbed, where they stopped and held a gun to his head. "I thought I was going to die," he recalls. Instead they demanded $2.5 million for his ransom.
 
Through the night, the Maoists marched him barefoot over crisscrossing trails, until they happened across a police patrol that was searching for him. Kumar escaped in the ensuing gun battle. But after he returned to work several weeks later, Maoist negotiators knocked on his door and let him know he was still a target. So, Kumar told us, he quickly hashed out a business arrangement with the rebels: In exchange for their leaving his operation alone, he would pay them 5 percent of his revenues.
 
The protection money, like the small bribes Kumar says he pays to the police to avoid troublesome safety and environmental regulations, has simply become another operating cost. Kumar says that every mine owner he knows pays up, too. By his back-of-the-envelope approximation, if the other estimated 2,500 illegal mines in the state are doling out comparable kickbacks to the rebels, the Maoists' annual take would come to $500 million -- enough to keep a militant movement alive indefinitely. "It works like a tax," he says with a Cheshire grin, "just another business expense and now everything runs smoothly."
 
Calls by politicians to clamp down on the Maoists' extortion racket ring hollow as long as the politicians themselves are running the same sort of scheme -- and in Jharkhand, they often are. Shibu Soren, a former national minister for coal and chief minister of Jharkhand until he was removed from office in May, has been tried for murder three times, though he was ultimately acquitted. (The crimes' witnesses had a habit of disappearing, or turning up dead.) Last year, local newspapers exposed a case in which two henchmen of another local politician assassinated a children's development aid worker, reportedly because he refused to pay the obligatory 10 percent kickback of his dairy goods after receiving a government contract. What they would have done with 3,000 gallons of milk is anyone's guess.
 
"If you want to be somebody in Jharkhand, just kill an aid worker," T.P. Singh, a Jharkhand correspondent for the Sahara Samay cable network, told us. A large man with a thick mustache, a TV-ready cocksure grin, and a penetrating stare, Singh is the network's crime and corruption exposé king, and a celebrity in the region. He plays the role of the TV cowboy to the hilt, right down to the ubiquitous ten-gallon hat he was wearing when we met him at the local press club in the Jharkhandi mining city of Hazaribagh to ask about the dangers of reporting on powerful people in a land with no effective laws.
 
"You know how I get those boys to respect me?" Singh replied. "With this." He reached into the waistband underneath his knee-length kurta and pulled out a Dirty Harry six-shooter, loaded and ready for action. A former Maoist turned politician, sitting on a couch across from Singh awaiting an interview, nodded his solemn approval.
 
The act is part bluster, but also part necessity. Many of Singh's media compatriots in Jharkhand have been killed, kidnapped, or threatened with death by the Maoists, miners, politicians, or all three at some point in their careers. In some areas, local law enforcement has simply ceded authority to government-sanctioned civilian militias, which are often accused by locals of pillaging even more rapaciously than the Maoists -- and contributing to the fighting by arming poor villagers. The most feared among them is Salwa Judum, secretly assembled by the Chhattisgarh government in 2005 to fight the Maoists; its 5,000-odd members patrol the state armed with everything from AK-47s to axes. Some roam the forest with bows and arrows.
 
"The Maoists have been killing locals for years," Mahendra Karma, the founder of Salwa Judum, told us. "But when [Salwa Judum members] kill Maoists or Maoist supporters, all of a sudden people shout the word 'human rights.' There should be no double standard. If we kill a Maoist, then how is that a violation of human rights?"
 
Karma has the thick frame and round face of a heavyweight boxer a decade past his prime. When we met him in his office, far from the fighting, in Chhattisgarh's capital of Raipur, he was flanked by armed guards. Above his desk was a life-size portrait of Mahatma Gandhi.
 
Karma founded the militia in 2005, when he was opposition leader in the state parliament. In the years since, he has presided over his district's descent into a war zone, as the Maoists and Salwa Judum have taken turns torching villages and raping and killing hundreds of people each year in a spiral of revenge attacks. Some villages have been attacked more than 15 times by one side or the other. Salwa Judum members are also accused of extracurricular killing to settle personal scores, even dressing the bodies in Maoist uniforms to cover up their crimes.
 
When we met, Karma was happy at first to talk about the militia. But when our questions turned probing, his mood soured. Finally, rising to his feet and jabbing his finger into our chests, he shouted, "These questions you ask have come from the Naxalites -- you are the men of the Naxalites!" In Chhattisgarh, Karma's rage could easily amount to an extrajudicial death sentence. We were on the first flight back to Delhi.
 
It was just as well because by that point our attempts to contact anyone in the Maoist rebel camps had yielded next to nothing. After leftist author Arundhati Roy paid a visit to the Maoists this year, the Indian government reinterpreted its anti-terrorism laws to make speaking favorably about the rebels or their ideological aims -- including opposition to corporate mining -- punishable by up to 10 years in prison. This has made the Maoists' civilian allies cagey about dealing with outsiders, and the already reclusive fighters even more difficult to reach. After months of sporadic contact with the Maoists' liaisons, exchanging handwritten notes with couriers who arrived at our Ranchi hotel in the middle of the night, we made a breakthrough: Finally, a rebel spokesman by the nom de guerre of Gopal offered the prospect of visiting a Maoist camp. It would involve being whisked deep into the jungle on the back of a motor scooter and then camping out there for several days, waiting for the rebels to make contact, blindfold us, and take us the rest of the way to their outpost. We were ready to do it, but monsoon rains and a Green Hunt military offensive eventually scotched the plan.
 
Since then, the Maoists have kept busy. In addition to the May bus explosion near Bailadila that killed 35 people, the passenger-train derailment that same month killed almost 150 people, bringing total casualties to more than 800 so far in 2010 alone. The central government has responded by dispatching even more military resources to the area.
 
In a sense, however, India has already lost this war. It has lost it gradually, over the last 20 years, by mistaking industrialization for development -- by thinking that it could launch its economy into the 21st century without modernizing its political structures and justice system along with it, or preventing the corruption that worsens the inequality that development aid from New Delhi is supposed to rectify. The government is sending in Army advisors and equipment -- for now, the war is being fought by the Indian equivalent of a national guard, not the Army proper -- and spending billions of dollars on infrastructure projects in the districts where the Maoists are strongest. But it hasn't addressed the concerns that drove the residents of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand into the guerrillas' arms in the first place -- concerns that are often shockingly basic.
 
In the town of Jamshedpur we visited Naveen Kumar Singh, a superintendent of police who can boast of a string of hard-won victories over the Maoists, which include demolishing training camps, confiscating weapons, and racking up a double-digit body count. But Singh is also responsible for winning his district's hearts and minds. When we stopped by his office, 10 petitioners were lined up in front of his desk. They were mostly poor men and women from rural areas, their clothes dusty from long bus rides. One woman in a purple sari arrived with a limp, leaning heavily on her son's shoulders. She asked Singh for help moving forward a police investigation into the car that hit her. Everyone in the room knew that without his signature on her crumpled forms, nothing would happen.
 
But Singh looked bored and sifted idly through the woman's handwritten papers. Finally, he waved his hand in the air and told her to go find more documents, ushering her back into the endless bureaucratic loop that is India's legal system. Most of the others received similar treatment.
 
Later, we asked him what the police were doing to combat the Maoists. When the police go on missions now, he told us, they pass out literature to the mostly illiterate peasantry and staple on every tree slogans warning people away from Maoism. "We don't only go into the forest to kill people," he bragged. "We also hang posters."  
 
Jason Miklian is a researcher at Peace Research Institute Oslo. Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and contributing editor for Wired.
 


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[ALOCHONA] The Anarchic Republic of Pakistan



The Anarchic Republic of Pakistan
 
Ahmed Rashid
 
THERE IS perhaps no other political-military elite in the world whose aspirations for great-power regional status, whose desire to overextend and outmatch itself with meager resources, so outstrips reality as that of Pakistan. If it did not have such dire consequences for 170 million Pakistanis and nearly 2 billion people living in South Asia, this magical thinking would be amusing.
 
This is a country that sadly appears on every failing-state list and still wants to increase its arsenal from around 60 atomic weapons to well over 100 by buying two new nuclear reactors from China. This is a country isolated and friendless in its own region, facing unprecedented homegrown terrorism from extremists its army once trained, yet it pursues a "forward policy" in Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as soon as the Americans leave.
 
For a state whose economy is on the skids and dependent on the IMF for massive bailouts, whose elite refuse to pay taxes, whose army drains an estimated 20 percent of the country's annual budget, Pakistan continues to insist that peace with India is impossible for decades to come. For a country that was founded as a modern democracy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike and claims to be the bastion of moderate Islam, it has the worst discriminatory laws against minorities in the Muslim world and is being ripped apart through sectarian and extremist violence by radical groups who want to establish a new Islamic emirate in South Asia.
 
Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment, or "deep state" as it is called, has lost over 2,300 soldiers battling these terrorists—the majority in the last 15 months after much U.S. cajoling to go after at least the Pakistani (if not the Afghan) Taliban. Despite these losses and considerable low morale in the armed forces, it still follows a pick-and-choose policy toward extremists, refusing to fight those who will confront India on its behalf as well as those Taliban who kill Western and Afghan soldiers in the war next-door. An army that has received nearly $12 billion in direct military aid from the United States since 2001, and has favored-nation status from NATO, still keeps the leaders of the Afghan Taliban in safe refuge. Pakistan's civilians, politicians and intellectuals are helpless; they cannot make the deep state see sense as long as the West continues its duplicitous policies of propping up the military-intelligence establishment in opposition to popular society while demanding that the Pakistani civilian government wrest back control of the country.
 
Now there is a serious and deadly overlap—Pakistan's extremists are determined to topple the political system and the deep state. The army is not oblivious to this reality, but it seems unwilling or unable to tackle the real issues at hand. "This is nothing but a creeping coup d'état by the forces of darkness, a coup that will spare no one," wrote analyst Kamran Shafi in the Dawn newspaper this summer. "It is them against everyone else—an Islamic Emirate of Pakistan is the goal," he added.
 
The deep state is failing its own people, who are in turn becoming more traumatized by the incessant violence, the lack of justice or security, and the perennial economic crisis. This only leads the civilian government to be even more inept, inconsequential and incapable of improving governance.
 
THE MOTHER of all insurgencies is taking place in the seven tribal agencies of Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, and North and South Waziristan in the northwest-frontier region where the Pakistani Pashtun tribes—under the nomenclature of the Pakistani Taliban—are at war with the state. Amnesty International recently said that 4 million Pakistanis in this and adjoining regions are living under Taliban rule. Every time the army claims to have cleared one agency, the Taliban rebound in another with a vengeance.
 
Also operating from these northern bases are a dozen groups from Kashmir, Karachi and Punjab which were once trained by the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to fight in Indian Kashmir. They have now turned against their former handlers. The Pashtun Taliban have joined with their more sophisticated, better educated urban comrades to plan horrific acts of terrorism in Pakistani cities. Together they want to overthrow the state and establish an extremist Islamic system.
 
The Pakistani Taliban do not just kill police and soldiers in their barracks or even innocent civilians in mosques. On June 8 they launched a brazen attack on a convoy of trucks carrying NATO war materials for troops in Afghanistan in heavily populated northern Punjab—torching 50 vehicles. There is now talk of the Taliban shutting down Karachi port, where 80 percent of NATO supplies arrive. The public fear is that the army is losing control of the country as the extremists become ever stronger, ever more daring and ever more capable.
 
If local tribesmen even attempt collaboration with the state, deadly reprisals ensue. In the supposedly "Taliban-free" Mohmand Agency, people received U.S.-donated foodstuffs on July 8. The next day, while tribal elders gathered to discuss helping the army combat the Taliban, two suicide bombings killed over 100 people and wounded another 115.
 
Since 2004, the area has been hemorrhaging people. Out of a total population of 3.5 million, more than 1 million have fled the tribal agencies while another half a million left during the recent fighting only to become internally displaced refugees in nearby towns.
 
Amid the Pakistani Taliban, vicious Sunni sectarian groups prosper, galvanizing hatred of all minorities, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The Ahmadi sect follows the teachings of a nineteenth-century religious reformer, promoting a peaceful variant of Islam. And yet in the 1970s, the Pakistani government declared the Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority and many Pakistanis today view them as heretics to Islam. On May 28 in Lahore, upwards of nine gunmen and suicide bombers blasted their way into two mosques and killed 90 Ahmadis, wounding another 110. The other minority groups, whether they be Shia, Christian, Hindu or Sikh, have lived in even greater fear since.
 
The Christian community, which makes up less than 2 percent of the population, is already a target. In July 2009, eight Christians were burned alive in the small Punjab town of Gojra, and in riots that followed an entire Christian neighborhood was scorched. The 17 militants arrested for these crimes were not brought to trial, and the police, facing local pressure, later let them go. A year later, riots erupted again in Faisalabad, Punjab, after two Christians were killed while being held in police custody. Since then, any Christians who can have been seeking political asylum abroad in droves.
 
An even-worse fate has befallen Shia Muslims. Prominent Shia technocrats—politicians, doctors, architects, bureaucrats and judges—have been singled out for assassination in all major cities, while in December 2009, 43 Shias were massacred by Sunni extremists in Karachi.
 
Thus the Pakistani Taliban have a two-pronged offensive: the first is to politically undermine the state and its organs through terror; the second is to commit sectarian violence against all those they believe are not true Muslims. This intolerance has developed deep roots in Pakistan over the past three decades, and it has now been boosted by the jihadist policies of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. The government's inability to deal with sectarian threats has led to some Muslim groups arming themselves and taking the law into their own hands. This only leads to further loss of control by the state.
 
AS ISLAMIC extremist violence spreads, the very fabric of the country is falling apart. Mapping how widespread and varied the violence is gives but a hint of the disaster facing Pakistani society. Growing poverty, inflation and unemployment have led to an unprecedented increase in suicides—sometimes of entire families. One hundred ninety-one people killed themselves in the first six months of this year; at more than one death a day, it is one of the highest rates in the world. And when 113 of those happen in the country's richest province (Punjab), it is obvious not a single Pakistani is surviving this unscathed—no matter how seemingly privileged. Violence against women is also on the rise; 8,500 violent incidents took place last year. One thousand four hundred of those were murders. Another 680 were suicides.
 
Freedom of information is quickly coming to a halt. Journalists receive regular threats if they do not report the statements of extremist groups, while extremist literature, newspapers and pamphlets continue to flood the market with no attempts by the state to stop them. And now leading electronics markets in major cities have been repeatedly bombed and shop owners warned to stop selling computers and TVs. Rather than combat the threat, the government has succumbed, closing down Facebook for three weeks starting in May and announcing that major web sites like Google and Yahoo will be censored for "anti-Islamic material." This is shuttering a vibrant society and slowly turning a country that long strived for democratic openness into a closed state held hostage by radical Islam.
 
Meanwhile, the lack of services is creating its own anarchy. In Karachi, with a population of 18 million, violence is so endemic and its perpetrators so diverse that it is difficult to summarize. What we do know is that beyond Islamic extremism, the city is in the grip of heavily armed mafias and criminal gangs, who kill over control of water supplies, public transport, land deals and the drug trade. Car theft is rampant. The most lucrative business is kidnapping for ransom. The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports that there were 260 targeted killings in Karachi in the first six months of this year, compared to 156 last year. Eight hundred eighty-nine murders were reported in the same period. Because the city is the melting pot of the country, much of the violence is between ethnic groups who live in virtual ghettoes and compete for the scarce resources of the city.
 
Ethnic violence is translated into interparty political assassinations. The Muhajir-dominated Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) which rules Karachi is made up of Urdu-speaking migrants from India. They are in a bloody war with an MQM offshoot and in intense rivalry with the largest Pashtun secular political group (the Awami National Party) as well as with the majority Sindhi population. The Muhajirs blame the Pashtuns for introducing the Taliban to Karachi, and ethnic killings are multiplying; party workers of all groups are being targeted.
 
There is another civil war going on in Baluchistan Province between Baluch separatists and the army. A province long deprived of development, political freedom and revenue, this is the fifth insurgency by the Baluch tribes against the army since Pakistan's founding. The ISI maintains that Indian agents based in Afghanistan and the Arabian Gulf states are arming and funding the Baluch. The insurgents launch ambushes and assassinations, and lay land mines every day. They have begun killing prominent non-Baluch who long ago settled in the province. School teachers, university professors and officials have proven the easiest targets—and this in a province that professes a literacy rate of only 37 percent (20 percent for women) compared to the national average of 54 percent. This summer Interior Minister Rehman Malik said that four separatist Baluch "armies" funded by India had forced 100,000 people to migrate from the province. Baluch militants killed 252 non-Baluch settlers from January to June of this year, also assassinating 13 army officers. The army in turn has brutalized Baluch society and several thousand young Baluch are said to be missing, presumed in prison and being tortured. The army's insistence that the entire Baluch problem is caused by India and that the Baluch have no grievances of their own simply leads to further escalation of violence and further alienation of the population. The province erupted in days of riots and strikes after prominent Baluch nationalist leader Habib Jalib was gunned down in Quetta in mid-July.
 
The local justice system in Pakistan is in dire straits. Policemen, judges and lawyers are frequently intimidated by terrorist groups. Evidence is rarely collected against the arrested perpetrators of attacks, and either the police or judges release the suspects. If not, the terrorists are quite capable of freeing their own by force from jails, courthouses and hospitals. After the Ahmadi killings, terrorists attacked a hospital where one of their arrested comrades was being treated under heavy police guard. In June, terrorists attacked a Karachi courthouse, freeing four members of their group undergoing trial for the earlier massacre of 43 Shias in the city.
 
It is now a cliché to describe how a worsening economy and the lack of education and job opportunities have helped spawn Islamic extremism in Pakistan and elsewhere. Yet it is a trope worth repeating.
 
PAKISTAN'S GEOPOLITICAL assertiveness in the midst of all this chaos is a result of the military's overwhelming power. It may be losing its hold on vast amounts of territory to the extremists, but it is taking control of Pakistan's national security and foreign policy away from the government. As the country is now led by weak and widely considered to be incompetent and corrupt civilian rule with President Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of slain leader Benazir Bhutto, at the helm, the armed forces have found it relatively easy to carry out their own programs.
 
Following its election, the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) sought to reform the policies of the Musharraf era. This included improving relations with India, Iran and Afghanistan and ending Pakistan's regional isolation. They failed.
 
Zardari's overtures regarding India were rebuffed, not only by New Delhi, but also by the Pakistan army—such civilian initiatives are considered an encroachment on military territory. And the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai by Pakistani extremists paralyzed engagement with India for nearly two years. India accuses the ISI of having a direct role in the massacre, which Pakistan denies. Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the massacre, has not been curbed.
 
The situation in Afghanistan isn't much better. Although Zardari improved personal relations with President Hamid Karzai, it had little impact on the army's posture—an anti-Karzai, anti-ruling-government strategy. Only recently has the army decided that with a U.S. troop withdrawal starting next year, Karzai and the Afghan Taliban need to be brought together. The Afghan Taliban leadership has had sanctuary and support from the military since its retreat into Pakistan in 2001. Though former-President George W. Bush never attempted to tackle this conundrum, President Barack Obama has privately acknowledged what must be done, trying hard to bring Kabul and Islamabad together. Certainly, any recent success can't be chalked up to the civilian leadership in Pakistan. The army says it wants to see a stable and peaceful Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal, and to that end it is trying to promote talks between Karzai and the various factions of the Taliban. However, many Afghans remain suspicious of an army that wants an Afghanistan free of Indian influence.
 
Zardari and the PPP no longer make any moves that oppose the army's foreign-policy aims. And over the past two years, a strident judiciary, at times backed by the military, has whittled away at the president's power, trying repeatedly to undermine Zardari or force him to resign by resurrecting old corruption charges against him and by asserting its influence over the constitution—which is in fact Parliament's prerogative. This judicial collision with parts of the government has further stymied the country's reputation and put off aid donors and investors. It is destroying Pakistan's democratic character. Making matters worse, the all-powerful General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has just received a three-year extension to his term as army chief. It was a move that stunned the country. Many Pakistanis concluded that this further reduced the power of civilian authority.
 
Political instability is precisely what Pakistan does not need. The country requires a sustained period of democracy under civilian governance—even if it is a bad, poorly functioning democracy. If Zardari is unpopular or ineffective, then he should be removed in the next election, not through a judicial or military coup.
 
FOR DECADES, a cyclical pattern of military rule followed by its collapse and replacement by elected but weak civilian governments has occurred. In time, they too fall—often with a prod from the ISI—and the military returns. Repeated military rule has resulted in the decline of political parties, the exile or execution of civilian leaders, their lack of experience or knowledge when they do come to power, and the unwillingness of young professionals to get involved in politics. The political class has seen no new blood for a generation.
 
The PPP suffers from all these problems and more. However, it remains the only national party in Pakistan, for it has support in all the provinces—Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and the former North-West Frontier (now called Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa). Every other party, including the Pakistan Muslim League–N (the main opposition group), has degenerated. They are now nothing more than regional organizations representing local ethnicities or territories. Only the political alliance the PPP has forged in Parliament can claim to forward a national agenda; it includes regional parties belonging to all ethnic groups. If the government had the total support of the military and the judiciary, there would be a chance of greater stability and better policy options.
 
Despite the severe problems it faces, the PPP has accrued some political successes in which lie hope for the future. After much delay and procrastination, Parliament passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution in April 2010 that incorporates over 100 changes to the 1973 version of the document, virtually restoring it to its original form and doing away with authoritarian amendments made by successive military dictators.
 
From having a de facto presidential form of government under military rule, Pakistan has now reverted back to having a parliamentary form of government with the elected PPP Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani as the chief executive. The amendment also introduces a new judicial commission to choose judges for the higher courts (justified surely, but it has unsurprisingly angered the judiciary and further prolonged the conflict between it and the PPP).
 
The amendment also grants an unprecedented degree of autonomy to the four provinces, increases decentralization, and brings many social subjects such as health care and education under provincial control for the first time. This has long been the demand of the three smaller provinces which have felt deprived by the concentration of wealth and power in Punjab. Now the government is giving an additional 10 percent of the federal tax take to the provinces under a new National Finance Commission Award. And Punjab made a rare sacrifice by giving part of its share to the poorer provinces. Over 70 percent of federal taxes now revert back to Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa. For the first time there is relative peace between the center and the periphery.
 
In an effort to continue these steps toward stability, the PPP has moved to give greater autonomy to the northern areas abutting China. This is especially remarkable because they are part of the territory involved in the Kashmir dispute between Islamabad and New Delhi. Because of the areas' proximity to India, Pakistan has exercised control over the region, which has never had self-government. That is now changing.
 
What is still missing is a plan to bring the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)—the seven tribal agencies—into the mainstream of governance. Currently this territory has considerable autonomy from Islamabad; the government of the former North-West Frontier Province has no jurisdiction over FATA. Instead, the area is ruled by the president and laws drafted by the British during the Raj. This has led to a power vacuum that has produced a terrorist safe haven. Even though the army claims to have a counterterrorism strategy for the area, it is a plan that cannot work until the army is willing to accept a political agenda that brings FATA under the central government's control.
 
DESPITE THE incompetence of the government, the groundwork is now being laid for a genuine democratic dispensation through provincial autonomy, decentralization and the rebuilding of democratic institutions—theoretically making it more difficult for the army to seize power again.
 
If these steps are matched with equivalent advances in restoring economic stability, reviving local and foreign investment, combating terrorism and Islamic extremism on a nationwide basis, and modernizing the judicial and police systems, Pakistan has a far brighter future than is currently portrayed.
 
For now, a staggering foreign debt of $54 billion is crippling the country. An estimated growth rate of 4.1 percent for 2009–10 (a negligible improvement from last year's 1.3 percent) means Pakistan is likely stuck in this financial quagmire. An energy crisis that leads to 14 hours a day of electricity cuts has crippled industry, farming and exports.
 
The irresponsible handling of the economy is only deepening the crisis. This year's $38 billion budget has seen a 30 percent increase in military expenditures from last year. This clearly leaves little money for health and education. With 28 percent of the funds reserved for servicing foreign debt, nearly 60 percent of the budget is taken up by that and defense. The entire development pool of $9.2 billion is provided by foreign donors.
 
Pakistan needs financial aid desperately. Europe is extremely hostile to further bailouts of the country because it is well aware that the military is still spending more money arming itself against India than it is spending to fight the Taliban. On a recent trip to the European Union in Brussels, Prime Minister Gilani was sharply taken to task for his failure to provide good governance and greater transparency on how aid dollars are being utilized.
 
It is to the credit of the current U.S. administration that it sees and understands that progress is being made, and is providing both financial aid and political support to deepen these changes. For the first time, under the Kerry-Lugar bill, there is U.S. aid that is specifically earmarked for civilian rebuilding rather than military spending.
 
However, no real change is possible without a change taking place in the army's obsessive mind-set regarding India, its determination to define and control national security, and its pursuit of an aggressive forward policy in the region rather than first fixing things at home.
 
It is insufficient for the army to merely acknowledge that its past pursuit of foreign-policy goals through extremist proxies has proven so destructive; it is also necessary for the army to agree to a civilian-led peace process with India. Civilians must have a greater say in what constitutes national security. Until that happens, the army's focus on the threat from New Delhi prevents it from truly acknowledging the problems it faces from extremism at home.
 
The army's track record shows that it cannot offer political or economic solutions for Pakistan. Indeed, the history of military regimes here shows that they only deepen economic and political problems, widen the social, ethnic and class divide, and alienate the country from international investment and aid.
 
Today there is much greater awareness among the Pakistani people that extremism poses a severe threat to the country and their livelihoods. There is also a much greater acceptance that ultimately civilian rule is better than military or mullah dictatorship. What is still lacking in the war against extremism, however, is a consistent and powerful message from both the government and the army that they will combat all terrorists—not just those who threaten their security. Pakistan's selective approach to extremism has to end before it can defeat the problem and move on to become what its founders originally intended it to be.
 
Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and writer, is the author most recently of Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Penguin, 2009). His book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale, 2010) has been updated and republished on the tenth anniversary of its original release.
 


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[ALOCHONA] Granta - Pop Idols The Zia years and ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ by Kamila Shamsie



Pop Idols

Before Youth Culture

Granta 112: Pakistan

Kamila Shamsie

http://www.granta.com/Magazine/112/Pop-Idols/1

 

In 1987 I had a lot in common with many other fourteen-year­-olds. I watched the Brat Pack/John Hughes films, repeatedly; I knew the Top 10 of the UK chart by heart; I cut out pictures of Rob Lowe, Madonna, a-ha from teen magazines and stuck them on my bedroom walls; I regarded the perfect 'mixed tape' as a pinnacle of teenaged achievement and gave thanks for not living in the dark days of LPs. But in doing all these things I merely affirmed what every adolescent growing up, like me, in Karachi could tell you – youth culture was Foreign. The privileged among us could visit it, but none of us could live there.

 

Instead, we lived in the Kalashnikov culture. Through most of the eighties, Karachi's port served as a conduit for the arms sent by the US and its allies to the Afghan mujahideen, and a great many of those weapons were siphoned off before the trucks with their gun cargo even started the journey from the port to the mountainous north. By the mid-eighties, Karachi, my city, a once-peaceful seaside metropolis, had turned into a battleground for criminal gangs, drug dealers, ethnic groups, religious sects, political parties – all armed. Street kids sold paper masks of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo; East met West in its adulation of the gun and its hatred of the godless Soviets.

 

In those days, schools were often closed because of 'trouble in the city'; my school instituted drills to contend with bombs and riots, rather than fire. Even cricket grounds – those rare arenas where exuberance still survived – weren't unaffected; all through 1986 and for most of 1987, there was hardly any international cricket played at Karachi's National Stadium because of security concerns. The exception in 1986 was a Pakistan v. West Indies Test match. Still, my parents refused to allow me to attend. They were worried there might be 'trouble'. This was the refrain of my adolescence. My parents and their friends constantly had to make decisions about how to balance concern for their children's safety against the desire to allow life to appear as normal for us as possible. Like all teenagers, though, we wanted to go somewhere – and public spaces, other than the beach, held little appeal.

 

As a result, 'going for a drive' became an end unto itself. A group of us would pile into a car and we'd just drive, listening to mixed tapes with music from the UK and the US, singing along to every song. Sometimes these were tapes one of us had recorded straight off the radio while on a summer holiday in London, and we'd soon memorize all the truncated clips of jingles and radio patter as well as the songs. 'Capital Radio! Playing all over London!' we'd chant while navigating our way through Karachi's streets. 'There are tailbacks on the M25 . . .' We always travelled in groups. You heard stories about the police stopping cars that had only a boy and girl in them and demanding proof that the pair were married, turning threatening and offering an option of arrest or payment of a bribe when the necessary paperwork wasn't forthcoming. There weren't any laws against driving in a car with someone of the opposite gender, but there were laws against adultery – and the police treated 'sex' as synonymous with 'driving' for the purposes of lining their pockets.

 

That was life as we knew and accepted it. Then one day in 1987 I turned on the lone, state-run TV channel to find four attractive young Pakistani men, wearing jeans and black leather jackets, strumming guitars, driving through the hills on motorbikes and in an open-top jeep, singing a pop song. And just like that, Youth Culture landed in living rooms all over Pakistan.

 

Islamization

It didn't really happen 'just like that', of course. Nothing ever does. There are various contenders for Pakistan's first pop song, but everyone seems to agree what the first pop video was. It came to our screens in 1981. I was eight when a brother-and-sister duo, Nazia and Zoheb Hassan, released the single 'Disco Deewane' ('Disco Crazy'). I was too young then to know that something altogether new had arrived in the form of the 'Disco Deewane' video with its dream sequences, dancers in short, white space-age dresses and Nazia's sensual pout. I do remember being mildly embarrassed that a pair of Pakistanis were trying to 'do an Abba'. Somewhere I had acquired the notion that pop music belonged to another part of the world; if the term 'wannabe' had existed then I would have agreed that it applied to Nazia and Zoheb – and everyone who loved their music; never mind that the song played in my head as incessantly as anything Abba ever produced.

 

I'm fairly sure that I wouldn't have been so dismissive of the idea of Pakistani pop videos if I had been born just a few years earlier, and could recall the Karachi of the early seventies, which had no shortage of glamour and East–West trendiness: nightclubs; locally made films with beautiful stars and catchy songs; shalwar kameez fashions inspired by Pierre Cardin (who designed the flight attendants' uniform for Pakistan International Airlines); popular bands who played covers of UK and US hits at fashionable spots in town. It's true, a good part of this world was known only to a tiny section of Karachi society, but I grew up in that tiny section and yet, even so, by the start of the eighties, stories of that glamorous milieu seemed a million miles away from the reality around me.

 

The reason for this dissonance was the dramatic shift that took place in Pakistan's cultural life between the early seventies and early eighties. The shift had a name – 'Islamization' – and a face – heavy-lidded, oily-haired, pencil-moustached. That face belonged to Pakistan's military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, ally of the Saudis and the Americans. As the alliance with the Americans brought guns into Karachi, so the alliance with the Saudis brought a vast increase in the number of Wahhabi mosques and madrasas: these preached a puritanical version of religion at odds with the Sufism that had traditionally been the dominant expression of Islam in much of the subcontinent. Fear of the growing influence of political, Wahhabi-inspired Islam formed a steady thrum through my childhood, and early on I learned that one of the most derogatory and dismissive terms that could be used against another person was 'fundo' (as in 'fundamentalist').

 

By the time I was watching Nazia and Zoheb on TV, I already knew Zia ul-Haq stood for almost all that was awful in the world; he had placed my uncle, a pro-democracy politician, under house arrest. What I didn't know then was that the video of 'Disco Deewane', at which I was turning up my nose, was coming under attack by Zia's allies on the religious right; they had decided it was un-Islamic for a man and woman to dance together, as Nazia and Zoheb did in the video, even if they were siblings.

 

These were the early days of Islamization, when the censors were confused about what was permissible. A few years later, the process of Islamization was sufficiently advanced that a video such as 'Disco Deewane' would have no chance of airing. Although Nazia and Zoheb continued to release albums, the censorship laws and official attitudes towards pop meant they never gave concerts, received limited airtime on PTV, never released another video with the energy and sensuality of 'Disco Deewane', and were seen as a leftover from the days before Zia's soulless rule sucked the life out of Pakistan's youth culture. or, from the point of view of my historically amnesiac adolescent world, by the mid-eighties, when pop music really started to matter to me, they were already dinosaurs from another era.

 

BB (Benazir Bhutto; Battle of the Bands)

But I was soon to learn that some dinosaurs can roar their way out of seeming extinction in a single moment. The person who taught me this was thirty-three-year-old Benazir Bhutto. As long as I could remember she had been the pro-democracy politician under arrest, house arrest or exile. Pakistan was Zia ul-Haq to me, after all; how could someone who spoke of replacing not just the man but the entire system ever be of relevance? Imagine then how my world must have turned on its head in April 1986 when Benazir returned to Pakistan a free woman, for the first time in eight years, and a million people took to the streets of Lahore to welcome her home.

 

Benazir's triumphant return was one of several watershed political moments that marked my young life. My earliest ever recollection is of my father showing me his thumb, with a black mark on it, and explaining that he'd just been to the polling booth, and that the black mark, indelible ink, was to guard against anyone attempting to cast more than one vote. I was three and a half then, and the start of Zia ul-Haq's dictatorship was just months away. I remember the day Benazir's father was hanged, the day women's rights activists marched on Islamabad to protest against misogynistic laws and were set upon by baton-wielding police, the day Zia held a referendum to extend his rule. So, the return of Benazir, after a decade of soul-wearying, dictatorial, oppressive political news was electrifying. For me, this is how it happened: at one moment she was far away, then she was in our midst and nothing was quite the same as before.

 

It seemed just that way with pop music, too. In the mid-eighties, in Lahore and Karachi (and in other pockets of urban Pakistan), groups of students came together in each other's homes for jam sessions; the names of some of those students are instantly recognizable to anyone following the rise of Pakistani pop in the eighties and nineties: Aamir Zaki in Karachi, Salman Ahmad in Lahore, Junaid Jamshed in Rawalpindi. In 1986, Lahore's Al-Hamra auditorium hosted its first 'Battle of the Bands', and the underground music scene cast off its subterranean nature. Some of the loudest cheers were reserved for a Rawalpindi-based group called the Vital Signs. But down south, in my home town, we paid little attention to 'the provinces' and so the Vital Signs remained completely unknown to me until that day in 1987 when I turned on the TV and saw the four young men singing in an open-top jeep.

 

The Vital Signs

Watching the video of 'Dil Dil Pakistan' ('Heart,Heart, Pakistan' or 'My Heart Beats for Pakistan') today, I'm struck by the void that must have existed to make pretty boys singing patriotic pop appear subversive. In a bid to circumvent growing restrictions, TV producer Shoaib Mansoor had the idea of getting a pop song past the censors by wrapping it up in nationalism. Vital Signs and 'Dil Dil Pakistan' was the result. The video, with its guitar-strumming, denim-clad twenty-something males, premiered on Independence Day – 14 August – 1987 and millions of Pakistanis, including my fourteen-year-old self, fell over in rapture.

 

Our reaction clearly wasn't to do with their dance moves. The Vital Signs boys of 1987 seem ill at ease, their gyrations arrhythmic, their posture self-conscious. This is particularly true of the lead singer, Junaid Jamshed, but still, I was in love. They were clean-cut, good-looking and, most shockingly, they were nearby. They were Pakistani after all; one day you might turn a corner and run into one of them. This scenario started to seem even more thrillingly possible the day gossip raced through the schoolyard, telling us that one of the boys at school – a boy I knew! – was Junaid Jamshed's cousin.

 

The first concert I ever attended was Vital Signs playing at a swanky Karachi hotel. It's a safe guess that some of the girls present hadn't told their parents where they were really going that evening. Mine was a co-ed school, and while all the boys and girls were entirely at ease in each other's company, many of the girls had restrictions placed on them by their parents about co-ed socializing outside school hours. Almost no one's parents were classified as fundo, but many were 'conservative' – the latter having more to do with ideas of social acceptability and 'reputation' than religious strictures.

 

The concert took place in a function room, one used for conferences, small receptions or evenings of classical music. I had doubtless been in that room many times for tedious weddings, but I don't suppose I'd ever entered it in jeans before – and that alone must have made the room feel different, unexpected. There was a makeshift stage placed at one end and neat rows of chairs set out for the audience by organizers who obviously had no idea what a pop concert was all about. But we did, we Karachi adolescents. We'd watched pirated recordings of Hollywood teen movies, and Top of the Pops, and we knew that when a pop group started singing no one sat down and politely swayed in time to the music. So, as soon as the band came on, all of us climbed atop our chairs and started dancing. 'You guys are great,' Jamshed said in surprised delight, before breaking into Def Leppard's 'Pour Some Sugar on Me'. I recall telling myself: Remember this. I had never before come so close to touching the Hollywood version of Teenaged Life.

 

By 1988, a slightly reconfigured Vital Signs, having replaced one of its original band members with the guitarist Salman Ahmad, was in the process of recording a debut album when a plane exploded in the sky, killing Zia ul-Haq and allowing Pakistanis to take to the ballot box to declare what we wanted for our nation after eleven years of military rule and so-called Islamization. The answer was clear: no to the religious parties; yes to the thirty-five-year-old woman.

 

Democracy and Status Quo

Given the state of Pakistan today, it is impossible to remember the heady days at the end of 1988 without tasting ashes. Elation was in the air, and it had a soundtrack. At parties my friends and I continued to dance to the UK's Top 40, but the songs that ensured everyone crowded on to the dance floor were 'Dil Dil Pakistan' and the election songs of both Benazir's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Karachi-based Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). There was little concern for political affiliation. At one such party I recall a young Englishman looking perplexed as Karachi's teens gyrated to a song with the chorus Jeay jeay jeay Bhutto Benazir ('Long live Benazir'). 'I can't imagine a group of schoolkids in London dancing to a "Long Live Maggie" number,' he said, and I pitied him and all the English teenagers for not knowing what it was like to see the dawn of democracy.

 

A few months into the tenure of the Bhutto government, with the new head of state's approval, Pakistan TV organized and recorded a concert called Music '89. Nazia and Zoheb Hassan hosted, fittingly; but the event also passed the baton to a new generation, including Vital Signs and the hot new talent, the Jupiters, fronted by Ali Azmat. Tens of millions of people tuned in and religio-fascists fulminated from every pulpit. Benazir, as she would go on to do time and again, gave in to the demands of the religious right and, despite its huge success, the tapes of Music '89 were removed from the PTV library.

 

One of the most distinguishing features of the Bhutto government was the prevalence of the status quo precisely where there was the most urgent need for change. Islamization was no longer the government's spoken objective, but all the madrasas, jihadi groups and reactionary preachers continued as if nothing had changed, with the support of the army and intelligence services. Benazir's supporters argued that she had no room to manoeuvre given all the forces ranged against her; her detractors said her only real interest was in clinging on to power. Either way, the great social transformation we had expected to see, that Return to Before, never happened.

 

Even worse, many of the changes begun by Zia ul-Haq gained momentum. Almost all of rural Pakistan continued to hold fast to Sufi Islam, but the cities, where there was no deep affiliation to a particular religious tradition, became, perversely, more susceptible to the reactionaries. There were signs that a reactionary Islam, which entwined itself with world events, had made its mark on several of my schoolfellows – the male athlete who didn't want to run in shorts on the school's sports day because Islam demanded modesty in dress; the close friend of mine who held up a picture of Salman Rushdie in the months just after the fatwa and said, 'He even looks like the Devil!'; and, most notably, the other friend who told me, in 1991, that Saddam would win the war against the Americans. When I pressed him for his reasons, given the disparity in the two nations' armies, he shrugged and made some cryptic comment about Saddam having a 'greater' weapon. Chemical? I asked, and it was only when he continued to look straight at me, without expression, that I realized what he was thinking. 'Allah?' I said, and he raised both shoulders and dropped them – a gesture that told me I may not believe it, but it was so.

 

Everyone I knew at school had been closely following the Gulf War, though much of that had to do with the excitement of CNN broadcasting into our homes for the first time – after a lifetime of state-controlled TV, we were all hungry for images from around the world. At seventeen I knew certain basic political truths, even if they were never directly articulated on CNN: America had turned its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the Gulf War was about oil; the same America that had embraced the religio-military dictatorship of General Zia was now turning frosty towards the new democratic government and imposing sanctions on the nation. None of this got in the way of the draw of America as a destination for my friends and myself – most of us, including the boy who predicted Saddam's righteous victory, were headed there for university. We knew that America was a wonderful place, if you were in it. There was no struggle to reconcile my conflicting views. I'd always known it was a country that produced both Rambo and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

 

By the summer of 1991, even though political disillusionment with Pakistan's democracy was rife, I viewed the world around me as a source of delight. University beckoned – almost all my friends would be on the East Coast by the autumn. We made plans for meeting in Boston on weekends and over Thanksgiving break. It didn't occur to me that I might be homesick, or that anything would seem remotely unfamiliar. It also didn't occur to me that henceforth Pakistan would be no more than a part-time home, and that I would eventually join the ranks of Those Who Left. I was going away for university, that was all; in four years, I'd return, and both Karachi and I would be much the same as before. And as for those pop stars of my youth – I assumed that some would fade away before others but that in the end they'd all be remembered as 'pioneers of pop'. I certainly never would have imagined that their lives over the next two decades would reflect Pakistan's shifting religio-political landscape.

 

The Sufi Rocker

Weeks before I left for university, I had one concert-going experience that was to prove more potent in retrospect than at the time. The group with whom I spent that summer included a boy called Sherry, whose brother Salman Ahmad had just left Vital Signs to start his own band, Junoon. Junoon's first album, released that year, was greeted with total indifference by critics and the public, but Sherry rounded up all the gang to go to a Junoon concert that summer. We went, but without much enthusiasm. Vital Signs was still the premier band in the country, and Ahmad, the guitarist, who was either jettisoned or parachuted out (accounts varied), had a whiff of second best about him. But onstage, Junoon was electrifying – thanks to both Ahmad and the singer, Ali Azmat, formerly of the Jupiters. Later, when Junoon became the biggest name in Pakistani pop, I would talk about that concert with an 'I heard them before they were famous' tone of superiority. But the truth was, soon after that I went to university and started to see the overwhelming maleness of Pakistani pop as alienating – my musical world now revolved around Natalie Merchant, Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls.

 

I started to pay attention to Junoon again in 1996, when they became megastars with 'Jazba-e-Junoon', the Coca-Cola-sponsored recording of the official Pakistan team song for the Cricket World Cup, and more or less simultaneously Ahmad started looking to Sufi Islam in an attempt to find a sound for Junoon that wasn't merely derivative of Western rock. My own interest in the mystical side of Islam had started at university when I took a course on Sufism and learned how absurd I had been to think subversion via music came in the form of boys in denim singing pop songs in which they pledged their heart to Pakistan.

 

In the Sufi paradigm, God is the beloved and the mortal is the supplicant/lover – the relationship between the individual and God is intensely personal and does not admit the intercession of 'religious scholars' or 'leaders of the congregation'. Small wonder that the Sufis have almost always stood in opposition to those who claim to be the guardians of religion. But the deep-rootedness of Sufi Islam in Pakistan has often meant that the orthodoxy don't dare take it on – through the Zia years, the great singers in the Sufi tradition, such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen, continued to perform, both in public gatherings where the crowds could exceed half a million and on state-run TV. Every note leaping from their throats was a rebuke to the orthodoxy. It wasn't until university that I saw the brilliance of those singers – particularly of Nusrat, who was a worldwide phenomenon by the nineties. You didn't need to understand a word he sang, or feel any religious stirrings, to be struck to the marrow by one of the greatest voices of the century.

 

Nusrat and other qawwals were such a potent force in Pakistan that it's not surprising that Junoon's attempt to encroach on Sufi musical ground deeply divided listeners at first. But within a few years, the term 'Sufi rock' was no longer something spoken with inverted commas hanging around it. Much as I loved the music, though, I was sceptical about the relentless Coke-sponsored marketing that went alongside it. It didn't sit too well with the Sufi idea of stripping away the ego.

 

Of course, there was no reason why musicians singing Sufi lyrics should live by Sufi rules. But Ahmad, who now affected the fashionable garb of a long-haired, bead-wearing, goateed mystic, spoke extensively about his immersion in Sufism. The critical acclaim for Ahmad's music began to fade at the start of the new millennium, and yet halfway through the decade he was more visible than ever before – performing at the UN, talking up Indo-Pak friendship, promoting HIV/Aids awareness, appearing on TV, playing at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. It is hard to separate sense of mission from marketing in all this. Whatever he has done in the last few years, and whatever he does in the future, Ahmad's legacy is Sufi rock, that electrifying blend of the deep-rooted mystical side of subcontinental Islam and contemporary, cutting-edge, rocking youth culture.

 

The Fundo

In Salman Ahmad's autobiography, Rock & Roll Jihad, it is unsettling how often he writes of receiving messages and signs from God, and of his certainty that he is doing God's work through his music. His old friend and former Vital Signs bandmate Junaid Jamshed would doubtless disagree. I still vividly recall the moment in the late nineties when I returned to Karachi after an absence of several months and one of my friends said, 'Have you heard about Junaid Jamshed?' I hadn't given him much thought for some years; other groups, not only Junoon, had come along since and eclipsed those pioneers of pop. 'He's become a fundo.'

 

Junaid Jamshed? The man who wanted Karachi's teens to pour some sugar on him? Surely not. But yes, my friend said when I questioned them – he had joined the Tablighi Jamaat, a proselytizing movement, which believed in following the example of the Prophet in the most literal ways – the length of your beard; the clothes in your wardrobe; the Arab inflection of your pronunciation; the exact words you used to say goodbye. The Tablighi Jamaat had been among the groups to benefit from the state sponsorship of Wahhabi Islam in the Zia years, though they always insisted they were completely apolitical.

 

Rumour had it that some personal crisis had propelled Jamshed into the arms of Tablighi Jamaat, who promised a clear path to salvation. There was no way of knowing if that was truth or conjecture. All I knew was that one day I turned on the TV and there was a man I didn't instantly recognize, with a long beard and white skullcap, quoting from the Quran. Nothing he said was objectionable; he spoke of peace, and the importance of education, and other perfectly right-minded things. But it filled me with despair.

 

Jamshed himself couldn't seem to decide how easily this mantle of righteousness sat on him. For six years, we all watched as he vacillated between pop star and proselytizing man of faith. He declared he was quitting the music business. Then he refashioned his beard into a neat goatee and appeared with Vital Signs at a tribute concert for Nazia Hassan, who had died tragically young from cancer almost twenty years after burning up screens in the 'Disco Deewane' video. When questioned, Jamshed claimed that there was nothing incompatible in Islam and pop music. Later still, he would insist that the U-turn at that concert was a sign that he had not yet been strong enough to do the right thing. At the time, he rationalized, he'd had four international concerts lined up, as well as a new album he'd already recorded, not to mention a one-year contract with Pepsi . . . it just hadn't been the right time to sever his ties with pop music, the pressures were too great. Once free of contractual obligations, Jamshed again declared pop music haram (forbidden) and soon after took to recording religious songs of praise.

 

Today, Jamshed's life is divided between proselytizing for Tablighi Jamaat, recording religious albums and running a very successful designer label – J. (Jay Dot) – with stores in the glitziest malls of Pakistan, and branches soon opening in the UK. According to his MySpace page, it is no problem to reconcile his religious devotion with his designer stores. As he reminds us, 'our Prophet Muhammad, peace be with him, was also a merchant who sold cloth.'

 

There are other ways in which religion can pay. Last year, Jamshed appeared on TV speaking with a tone and urgency that suggested he was about to reveal some deeply important spiritual truth. His message: contrary to rumours, Lay's potato chips are made using only halal products. For this TV spot, which ends with Jamshed munching on a potato chip, he was reportedly paid 2 million rupees (£26,000 – though the comparatively low cost of living in Pakistan makes it a much larger amount in real terms).

 

That Jamshed was outspoken about his religious faith wasn't in itself worthy of comment. In the Pakistan I had grown up in almost everyone identified as Muslim; to do otherwise meant you were either of the 3 per cent of the population belonging to other religious groups, or had adopted a contrarian attitude. But one of my friends aptly put her finger on why the particular form of Islam espoused by the former pop star was so disquieting: 'In our grandmother's generation, when people became more religious, they turned devout. Now they turn fundamentalist.'

 

The Rock Star Fantasist

From his early days in the Jupiters, to his huge success as the voice of Junoon and, recently, his critically acclaimed solo career, Ali Azmat has always been the man who most lived up to the idea of the rock star. He remains the most charismatic performer on the pop scene, with a sartorial flair that sets trends, a turbulent relationship with a beautiful model, a reputation for brashness and a personality that is an appealing mix of contagious good humour and artistic suffering. When the journalist Fifi Haroon asked Azmat how many girlfriends he'd had, he replied, 'I'm a lover, not a mathematician.' While Junaid Jamshed was declaring pop music haram and Salman Ahmad delved into the Quran and Sufism, Azmat just focused on the music. He might have been singing Sufi rock, but he made it quite clear that it was the rock that mattered.

 

Then, in 2009, the rock star shifted his primary vocation from singer to that of cheerleader.

 

The man Azmat has been championing – introducing him at public events, singing his praises on TV, featuring him as the resident 'expert' on his talk show – is Zaid Hamid, a self-professed 'security consultant and strategic defence analyst'. An example of Hamid's strategic thinking was in evidence early in 2010 when he set out a vision for Pakistan's future. 'Pakistan will lead a bloc of Muslim nations known as the United States of Islam,' he declared to an approving, self-selected audience. 'Any nation that wants to lift a foot will first ask Pakistan's permission . . . We have good news for India: we will break you and make you the size of Sri Lanka.' And on and on it went, describing how Pakistani Muslims from 'the United States of Islam' would ensure the security of Muslims the world over.

 

A few weeks after this televised address, Azmat appeared on a talk show hosted by the model and actress Juggan Kazim; the other guest was the feisty actress Nadia Jamil, who savaged Azmat for his association with Hamid, whom she described as a hate-monger.

 

Azmat hotly denied this. 'We're not against any people,' he said. 'We're against a political ideology called Zionism . . . there are all sorts of Zionists. There are Hindu Zionists, Muslim Zionists, Christian and Jewish Zionists.'

 

'What is Zionism?' asked Kazim.

 

'We don't even know ourselves what it is,' Azmat replied, without a flicker of embarrassment. 'It's a political ideology where obviously these guys have taken over the world, through whatever means, through businesses...'

 

Hamid's star has imploded in the last few months, for various reasons, including a murder case against him and attacks from members of the orthodoxy who saw his popularity as a challenge. But the spectacular speed with which he rose to prominence, and the support he gathered, are very telling about the state of Pakistan. A country demoralized and humiliated by its myriad problems could either turn reflective, or it could simply blame everyone else. Large sections of Pakistan have chosen the latter option. Hamid's appeal to the young – who made up much of his following – was that while his talk of Pakistan's glorious future was entirely wrapped in religious-tinged rhetoric, he stayed away from social proscriptions. If the question is 'What kind of Muslim am I?' – and in Pakistan that is often the question – the Hamid answer is 'The kind who fights Zionism everywhere!' Whether you do so in jeans and T-shirt, and with or without a guitar, is largely beside the point. You can become a Better Muslim without disrupting your social life. What more could a Pakistani rock star ask for?

 

It's a strange business, growing up. Your teen idols grow up too, and you realize that the vast gulf of years which separated you from them is actually just a narrow ravine, and that you are all roughly part of the same generation. In the particular case of the Pakistani pop pioneers, you also realize that your nation is growing up with you too – the Islamic Republic of Pakistan came into being in 1971, when the former East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Given the youthfulness of the nation, perhaps it isn't surprising that we of the 'Islamic Republic of Pakistan generation' look at each other and seek answers to the question: 'What do our lives say about the state of the nation?'

 

Largely, our lives say that polarity and discordance are rife. However, although they are few and sometimes difficult to identify, there are still spaces in Pakistan where difference presents opportunities to harmonize. Aptly enough, one of those spaces is the music studio. Coke Studio, to be specific. Corporate sponsorship has been an integral part of Pakistani pop music since Pepsi signed Vital Signs to sing their most famous tune with the slightly rejigged lyrics 'Pepsi Pepsi Pakistan'. Notably, despite the different paths Azmat, Jamshed and Ahmad followed, they all remained linked to corporate sponsors, a fact that didn't seem to get in the way of any of their religious or political beliefs.

 

Now in its third season, Coke Studio is a wildly popular TV show featuring live performances from Pakistan's biggest musical acts, as well as introducing some lesser-known singers. The most glorious thing about the show is the disparate traditions it brings together – pop, qawwali, rock, folk, classical. Qawwals and rock stars duet, the tabla and violin complement each other's sounds. And the man who makes it all happen? The somewhat reclusive and much sought-after producer Rohail Hyatt, who, twenty-three years ago was one of the four boys in jeans singing 'Dil Dil Pakistan' in my living room. More than any of his Vital Signs bandmates or Junoon rivals, he seems aware of one simple and persisting truth: in Pakistan, as all around the world, what we most crave from our musicians is music.



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