Rangers personnel baton charge on PIA employees near Jinnah International Airport, Karachi, February 2, 2016. PHOTO: AFP

Three Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) employees protesting against the privatisation of the national carrier have died as the Singh Rangers countered their peaceful demonstration with water cannons, tear gas, baton charge, and bullets. The victims include PIA Assistant Manager Inayat Raza and engineer Saleem Akbar while a third victim, Zubair, succumbed to his wounds in hospital yesterday. The knee-jerk response of the administration to citizens exercising their right of peaceful assembly and protest is not new, and it has always backfired.

Instead of condoling with the families of those killed, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (who is believed to have a vested interest in privatising the airline), has suspended the PIA employees’ right to protest under the Essential Services Act, and threatened the them with loss of job and incarceration.

Killed by a bullet to the chest, Inayat Raza was a former student union leader with the National Students’ Federation (NSF) in Karachi in the 1980s. He is survived by his wife and three daughters. Below, a moving tribute to him by activist and researcher Mansoor Raza in Karachi:

PIA Assistant Manager Inayat Raza, former NSF activist, died of a bullet to his chest during the protest.

INAYET BHAI AS I KNOW HIM
By Mansoor Raza

May 1983…. At the impressionable young age of sixteen, as a pre-engineering student waiting for admissions to open up at NED University, as I sat in the drawing room of my home in North Nazimabad, a smart, confident young fellow in his early twenties approached me. He asked why I and my parents hated Zia-ul-Haq… Our house (North Nazimabad) in the midst of many Jamaat-e-Islami minded households was distinguished for supporting PPP.

“Because he hanged Bhutto”, I responded.

“It was not a clash of personalities… it is a battle of ideas”, he said vehemently

“What do you mean by that?” I asked

His response and the ensuing process changed my life. The man was Inayet Raza, the former President Union of Shipowners’ Government College, Karachi, 1977 – 78, and the Head of Progressive Students Council of National Students Federation (NSF), comprising 22 educational institutions.

Forward…  Feb 1984, General Zia and his flirt with the religo-elite of Pakistan banned  students’ unions. NSF shook Karachi and put an halt to all academic activities for 100 days. Inayet Bahi remained a mentor for the strategies of protests and how to stay safe while maintaining the struggle against the dictator. Later, the ever-increasing coziness of IJT with the state-sponsored Islam, betrayed the cause of students. “Never bow down to injustices”, he often said.

Forward… on the night of April 15, 1985, he came after dusk. “Look, Bushra is killed and Najma is in dire straits, Police lathi charged on protesting girls and it needs to be stopped. We have to do something.” We did and pushed the police on back foot.

“Always fight for the helpless”, that should be the objective of a human life, he said to me a couple of times. His thunderous voice and the earth shaking slogan “marshal law ke aewano ko aag lagado… aag lagado” (set fire to the houses of martial law), rocked the streets of North Nazimabad more than once.

Fast forward… mid ninetees – we both were professionals and had got married. He kicked one of his coworkers on the butt who had sexually harassed a female co-worker. “Women should be supported to make them strong, so that they can live their lives”, said Inayet Bhai.

Throughout his 58 years of a well-lived life, he remained a fighter, a relentless supporter of the poor and a teeth-cracking opponent of religious orthodoxy.

He often said to me, I don’t want to die lying on my bed…. and he did that. On Tuesday February 02, 2016, while protesting the PML-N government’s flawed privatization policy of PIA, he braved a single bullet on the right-side of his chest and died.

He remained a life long fighter. He lived like hero and died like a hero.

As now he is gone, it’s a matter of triviality who fired from where. His killers don’t know that they can kill a person but not his thoughts.

He remained a man of dissent and his legacy continues…. as more people are ready to die for progressive ideas, if that is the cost one has to pay for dissent and difference with the narrative of the elite.

The lion will never roar again.

And dear is the roar but dearer is the courage behind the roar. Inayet Bahi died and so does the roar… The courage survived and so does the message.

(Article received via email, slightly edited for punctuation and clarity)

My first monthly column for Himal Southasian (Feb 2016 issue), a Kathmandu-based magazine I’ve been associated with since its launch in 1997. The headline derives from something I remember a Naga woman from India saying at a conference I attended in Colombo, Sri Lanka many years ago. I focus my piece on what links the Pathankot and Bacha Khan University attacks, Modi’s Christmas Day visit to Pakistan and beyond – the issue may have died out from the headlines, but remains relevant. Article below with additional links and photos.
By Beena Sarwar

If Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stopover in Lahore to meet his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif on 25 December last year came as a surprise, the subsequent militant attack in India barely a week later on 2 January did not.

Indian security forces respond to the attack at Pathankot

Given past patterns, many had been expecting something to happen that would to ruin the bonhomie between Pakistan and India that Modi’s Christmas Day visit generated. Some expressed their apprehensions privately, some on social media. Indian intelligence officers said that they had been tracking information about a forthcoming attack on the air base in Pathankot for a few days before it took place. The attack was launched from Pakistani soil, going by telephone intercepts and other evidence. Had it not been for this information, they said, the damage and casualties would have been far greater. (The attack could have been much worse, but due to the alerts the terrorists were kept away from the technical area).

Pakistani security forces respond to the Charsadda attack

This was soon followed by another tragedy in Pakistan on 20 January, 2016 when gunmen attacked Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, near Peshawar, killing 21 students and staff. The university is named after Pashtun nationalist leader and freedom fighter Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as ‘Badshah’ (king) or Bacha Khan.

Gandi and Bacha Khan during a prayer meeting

A devout Muslim who stood for a tolerant version of Islam that the Taliban oppose, he led a non-violent red-shirted army of Khudai Khidmatgars (servants of God). He was also known as the Frontier Gandhi due to his insistence on non-violence and close friendship with Gandhi. The university was commemorating his 28th death anniversary on 20 January with a mushaira, poetry recital.

Bacha Khan had initially opposed the creation of Pakistan but pledged allegiance to the new nation after 14 August, 1947. He spent the rest of his life in and out of jail for opposing Pakistan government policies. When he died in Peshawar in 1988 while under house arrest, India declared a five-day mourning period. Bacha Khan was buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in accordance with his wishes. Despite the security establishment having portrayed him as a ‘traitor’ for years, hundreds of thousands of mourners attended his funeral, termed as a caravan of peace.

***

Relations between Pakistan and India had been inching towards improvement, as seen during the two Prime Ministers met in Ufa, Russia, in July 2015. They sought to improve Indo-Pak relations, agreeing that their National Security Advisors would meet. However, that was not repeated in September at the United Nations General Assembly in New York when they did not interact except to wave at each other,despite staying in the same hotel.Before this, the scheduled meeting in August between the National Security Advisors was cancelled because “the two sides dug in heels, not leaving any room for flexibility”, as the Indian Express reports.

Still from the silent video in Paris

But at the sidelines of the Climate Summit in Paris, on 30 November, 2015 their meeting made quite a few headlines. A brief video shows them speaking intently to each other. (Some creative souls used the inaudible recording to make their own versions of the conversation with voiceovers in different accents and languages)

Back home, both Prime Ministers stressed the need for better relations.

On 6 December, national security advisors Nasir Khan Janjua and AjitDoval of Pakistan and India respectively held a ‘secret meeting’ in Bangkok and agreed to take forward the ‘constructive’ engagement. Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj attended theHeart of Asia conference in Islamabad on 9 December arriving“with the message that ties between the two countries should be good and move forward”.

It was in this background that Modi posted hisapparently casual tweet on 25 December whileon a state visit to Afghanistan:“Looking forward to meeting PM Nawaz Sharif in Lahore today afternoon, where I will drop by on my way back to Delhi”. He had apparently rung Sharif from Kabul to wish him for his birthday. Sharif mentioned that his granddaughter was also getting married and invited him to drop by on his way back.

Hours later, the world was treated to a highly photogenic ‘drop in’ –the two Prime Ministers beaming, hugging, holding hands. The scene provided a glimpse of what is possible when such spontaneous visits are allowed unencumbered by the restrictive visa regime between the two countries.

Of course, Modi’s visit was not expected to usher in great changes overnight in terms of official relations between the two countries. But it was a start. And as opposed to earlier instances, after the Pathankot attacks the wheels already set in motiondid not come to a grinding halt. The meeting of foreign secretaries expected to take place in mid-Januarywas only postponed to February, not cancelled.

Multiple factors contributed to the shift in the governments’ reactions to the terror attacks. Usually, it is the right wing in both sides that makes the loudest protests when there are moves towards peace. But when the right wing is in power and attempts to mend fences, the liberals who have always supported better ties can, at the most, call out the hypocrisy, but they will not oppose the rapprochement. This is the situation at present since both elected governments in power in India and in Pakistan have right wing, business-oriented constituencies.

Furthermore, chances of peace tend to increase when the democratic political process is underway on both sides. As elected leaders, both Modi and Sharif have made efforts to distance themselves, even if only cosmetically, from their right-wing springboards. Their political parties still have links with extremists but being centre stage in the world as heads of aspiring democracies they have an image to uphold.

Even former President Musharraf who, as the army chief, was responsible for the Kargil ‘war-like situation’, attempted to mend fences when in power. But he was not an elected leader. He had no constituency to answer to. When he left office, political parties could not follow through on the advances he had made in terms of reviving relations with India. No longer dependent on a nod from a one-man band, the issue had to be discussed and taken forward in Parliament.

Going by a Reuters report, Pakistan’s military seems to be on board this time, supporting Sharif’s overtures towards India. This supposedly stems from “ownership” of peace talks by the military and the appointment of recently retired general Khan Janjua as the new national security advisor.“This round is different because there is backing from the top where it matters … the army chief is himself on board,”Reuters quotes a “top diplomat” as saying.

If that is really the case, then they have realised what many have long been saying: Pakistan has enough to do, fighting the enemy within.

Collage by Farhan Ahmed, Aman ki Asha

Along with all these factors, a popular inclination towards peace has been increasingly visible. Social media platforms allow people to make their voices heard, for example, through the #ProfileForPeace campaign launched a couple of days after the Pathankot attack. Many ordinary people as well as stalwarts from both sides of the border participated in this effort, putting up photos on their social media profiles holding placards addressed to the leaders of India and Pakistan, urging them to #KillTerrorismNotTalks – or, as some prefer, #StopTerrorismNotTalks.Prominent among them are actor Nadia Jamil, directors Mahesh Bhatt and AnandPatwardhan, and musician TaimurRahman, to name a few.

The people’s push for peace has been steadily increasing over the last few years, given impetus by new means of communication across the hostile border. There seems to be a growing realisation that the citizens of both countries are not as dissimilar as political leaders project. Both face similar issues of poverty, gender violence, unemployment, lack of education and clean drinking water, maternal mortality and so on.

The commonalities of culture across the Punjab, divided between Pakistan and India in 1947, include language, food, festivals – and issues like agricultural and water wastage.In an attempt to work together to resolve common problems, in December 2013, the chief ministers of Indian and Pakistani Punjabs signed a joint statement – an unprecedented move bypassing the respective central governments –that called for the free movement of academics, students and interns.

Businesspeople from both sides have expressed a desire not just to work with each other and hire people from the other country, but to invest in each other’s countries in diverse fields such as textiles, energy, information technology, education and skills training, healthcare, and agriculture.

Peace groups have long been calling for both countries to remove the restrictions on each other’s media, ease visa restrictions, and telephone connectivity. India and Pakistan are probably the only two neighbouring countries in the world that disallow each other cell-phone roaming (I wonder if the Indian cellphones of the over-100 strong Indian delegation that visited Lahore with Modi work in Pakistan, or if the roaming stopped, as it does when Indians and Pakistanis cross the border).

The dividends from such cooperation will in the long term be far greater and benefit a far greater number of people than the agenda being pushed by warmongers and the weapons and security industries. At present, much of the trade between the two countries takes place mainly via the Middle East, leading to higher prices at the retail level. According to some estimates, bilateral trade between the two countries has the potential to rise from the present paltry $2 billion a year to $40 billion if relations become normal.

In Pakistan there is a consensus among all political parties on the need for peace with India. Every political party that the people voted into power in the democratic interludes between army rule has stood for peace with India. Nawaz Sharif, thrice elected Prime Minister, is no exception.

Yes, hate-mongering continues as some chose to lay the blame squarely on India for the attack on the Bacha Khan University. But as evident from former intelligence officer retired Brigadier Asad Munir’s tweets, not many are buying that.

RAW is not likely to fund an attack on #BachaKhanUniversity on his death anniversary.These murderers are Pakistanis, don’t blame others.

— Asad Munir (@asadmunir38) January 20, 2016

A mess that has taken over six decades to make cannot be resolved overnight or in the tenure of one or two elected governments. But perhaps some wheels have been set in motion that will yield dividends.

It is important to remember that peace is just that – a process, not an event.

Something I wrote for The News on Sunday, published Feb 14, on a thoughtprovoking series of discussions and Anila Quayyum Agha’s stunning installation ‘Intersections’ at the cornerstone of ‘Imagine, South Asia’ at the historic Peabody Essex Museum

Intersections by Anila Q. Agha: an immersive, mesmerising experience. Photo: Beena Sarwar

In an age of divisiveness and conflict, with media attention focused on power politics and high profile acts of violence, Imagine, South Asia, a weekend-long series of events at the Peabody Essex Museum was a welcome reminder of the healing and inclusive power of the arts.

Stunning in its simplicity of concept and contrasting intricacy of patterns, the immersive piece will remain on view through July 10, 2016.

The work, envisaged as a space that that welcomes and embraces all those who enter it, regardless of religion, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or nationality, emerged from concepts that percolated in Agha’s mind for decades. Excluded from public spaces while growing up in Pakistan she has since moving to the US experienced the alienation of a migrant.

The single-room installation features a suspended cube (6.5 feet square) in the centre of the space. A single, 600-watt strong light bulb in the middle of the cube casts intricate, symmetrical patterns on the walls, ceiling and floor of the space.

Visitors stepping into the room are bathed in the light and shadows cast from the cube. Voices lower, movements slow down, as if it is indeed a sacred space. This is a piece to be experienced, one that touches even those who know nothing about Islamic or South Asian art or culture.

Agha, an Associate Professor of Drawing and Foundation Arts at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Indiana, completed the original laser-cut wood installation in December 2013. At PEM, the dense black 600 lb steel version provides dramatic contrast to her delicate geometrical and floral filigree patterns, inspired originally by a visit to Alhambra, Spain.

The artisans who created Alhambra belonged to different religions, brought together by their ability to create beauty, as Agha points out. It was this experience that drew her to create her own artistic version of an inclusive place of beauty.

The patterns also reference Mughal architecture that is part of the common heritage of India and Pakistan — like the latticed marble from behind which Humayun’s favourite wife Nur Jehan would whisper counsel in the king’s ear as he held court at his magnificent fort in Lahore.

Sona Datta draws attention to this in the documentary “Pakistan Unveiled“, the first episode of “Treasures of the Indus” (BBC,2015), that she wrote and narrated. The three-part documentary series delves into South Asia’s interconnected, multi-faith history, stemming from its ancient Indus Valley civilization and Buddhist heritage – both primarily in what became Pakistan. The series traces these influences to the Mughal Empire and the temples of south India.

A still from the documentary ‘Pakistan unveiled’, part 1 of the BBC series ‘Treasures of the Indus’ (2015)

The documentary premiered in the US at Imagine, South Asia. Panel discussions after each hour-long screening allowed audiences to interact with experts, filmmakers and artists. Besides Datta and Agha, speakers included BBC director Hugh Thompson, historian Ayesha Jalal, London-based Pakistani artist Faiza Butt, collector Nirmalya Kumar and Trevor Smith, PEM’s Curator of the Present Tense.

The need to affirm and embrace multiple identities — whether of individuals, communities or countries — rather than insisting on a single one, was a common theme for much of the discussion.

“This is not a museum built on plunder, but on trade,” says Sona Datta, PEM’s Curator of South Asian Art who accepted the post in 2013.

PEM houses one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary Indian art, donated by North Shore businessman Chester Herwitz and his wife Davida. Visiting India in the early 1960s to buy accessories for the handbags they manufactured, they chanced upon the work of M.F. Husain and other artists.

Over the next 30 years, they developed friendships with Indian artists, acquiring over 3,000 pieces. Some 850 of these are now in PEM — including, besides Husain, works by Jamini Roy, Nasreen Mohamedi, S.H. Raza, Ravinder Reddy and Souza.

Datta wants to expand the Indian collection to work from around South Asia. As a British-born Bengali of Indian origin, she has a particular fascination for Pakistan due to the countries’ shared history and culture. As she says, “You can’t understand one without the other”.

Other events included a khayyal recital by Jawwad Noor, disciple of Shahid Parvez Khan, on the sitar, accompanied by tabla player Nitin Mitta. An alternative, participatory museum tour, Mi(s)guide, by Indian performing artist Mithu Sen led visitors through the galleries. Spouting nonsense-speak as she placed a crumpled tissue on a glass case or pulled off a jacket from a mannequin and tried it on, Sen clearly had fun unpicking museum etiquette.

Carla Power: beyond stereotypes

The discussion “Sacred Spaces” featured an all-woman panel moderated by Kirun Kapur, with Anila Agha and London-based American journalist Carla Power, author of “If The Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran” (Holt, New York 2015).

Islam is equated with the Middle East in the public perception, but there are more Muslims in South Asia, noted Kapur, founder of the Tannery Series, a local community arts organisation that put together the event.

Both Agha and Power have strong South Asian connections. Agha was born and raised in Lahore. Power has lived in India, visited Pakistan, and her book is an account of her year spent studying with the traditional Islamic scholar Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi from India.

A sold-out two-hour long creative workshop conducted by Agha, Power and Kapur aimed at facilitating the participants (interestingly and coincidentally, all women) to create art that “accommodates contradiction and makes space for multiple possibilities”.

Embracing these contradictions and possibilities may be a way out of the current climate of conflict and violence, and in the US, a contentious presidential campaign.

There is clearly, as Carla Power says, a hunger for knowledge and information— which the media tend to flatten out and ignore.

Imagine, South Asia underlined the need for more fluid, inclusive ways of seeing and interacting — and how beauty and creativity emerge from conflict and adversity.

(ends)

I earlier posted about resistance to the stifling of dissent in India, and why as a Pakistani it matters to me. The trend is visible in other parts of Southasia too, including of course Pakistan about which I’ve written a fair amount. Here’s an update from Bangladesh, where defamation, sedition cases and the attempts to silence the independent media are underway, as well as Chattisgarh, India.

Smiles and sedition. Photo: Andrew Biraj, Reuters

“Mahfuz Anam, the editor of the leading English language newspaper The Daily Star is the subject of an orchestrated vilification campaign following comments that he made on a talk show relating to the publication in his paper eight years ago of uncorroborated corruption allegations against the current prime minister and others. As of now, governing party activists of the Awami League have filed 62 criminal defamation and 17 sedition cases – and both the Prime Minister and her son have heavily criticised him personally,” writes David Bergman in an email update sharing some articles dealing “this rather extraordinary situation”:

• Daily Star, Media ethics and hypocricy – 12 things you need to know (13 Feb, Politico)
• In Bangladesh, the govt is making a concerted effort to stifle dissent (16 Feb, Scroll)
• Four factual blunders by the Prime Minister’s son, Sanjeeb Wazed (19 Feb, Politico)
• How High Court order in Amar Desh case can help Mahfuz (24 Feb, Politico)

Budhri, the wife of an undertrial villager, charged with being a Maoist, waits outside the Dantewada court. Photo: Chitrangada Choudhury

Meanwhile the Orissa-based journalist Chitrangada Choudury in a detailed recent report on the intensifying violence against women reminds us to also spare a thought for Bastar. “In Delhi, our rulers are telling us there can be only one kind of nationalism. In Bastar, through the intensifying violence against women and the intimidation of journalists, activists, teachers and lawyers, our rulers are ensuring there must be only one narrative: of a manly police state that is “work(ing) perfectly here”.

Very happy to be able to write about some good news – the recovery of Salmaan’s Taseer’s son Shahbaz Taseer, kidnapped nearly five years ago. Wrote this piece on March 8, 2016, for Scroll.in

Zeenat Shehzadi: “Quaid and daughter of Quaid” – her own caption, 2014.

Tragic news from Salman Lateef, brother of the young Lahore-based journalist Zeenat Shehzadi who was trying to help the Indian national Hamid Ansari in detention in Pakistan and was herself ‘disappeared’ in August 2015. Zeenat and Salman’s younger brother Saddam Hussain, 18 years old, who had been pining for his ‘Api’, killed himself last night – hung himself from a tree near their house. They’ve taken him to Sheikhupura / Manawan for burial after Friday prayers. Can’t bear to think of the parents.

Another tragedy: Zeenat Shehzadi’s beloved younger brother Saddam Hussain, 18, missed his Api terribly. He took his own life last night.

Salman was beside himself, couldn’t stop crying. He said that Saddam often asked about Zeenat – he was her special favorite and she would never let anyone scold or hurt him. ‘Humarey paeron taley zameen nickal gayi hai, ham barbad ho gaye…inn logon ko kab sharam aye gi…’ (the earth has gone from under our feet, we are destroyed… when will these people feel any shame). He said the police had come to the hospital and taken the family’s statement that Saddam killed himself in despair about Zeenat ‘but who knows what report they’ll make’ 

For details on Zeenat and Hamid’s case, see my article in The News on Sunday, Of two disappearances:   Pakistan should release Indian national Hamid Ansari who has already spent more than three years in detention — and the young journalist Zeenat Shehzadi who was trying to help him.

I wrote this for the Huffington Post after the attack on the Lahore park on Easter Sunday.

How Pakistan’s Religious Right Uses ‘Blasphemy’ to (try and) Usurp Political Power

Aamir Qureshi/Getty Images

The horrific suicide bombing at a park in Lahore on Sunday that killed over 70 people, mostly women and children, is one of many assaults by religious hardliners in Pakistan who are striving to remain politically relevant and in the media limelight.

Attacks on soft targets like parks on holidays or schools (the Dec. 16, 2014 attack at the school in Peshawar that killed over 140 children, for example) are the most desperate, sensationalist optics of a multi-pronged strategy with a savvy media component. The aim: to grab political power and impose a harsh version of Islam on a country founded in the name of the religion.

It is no coincidence that the Lahore attack took place on Easter Sunday and targeted Christians. Attacks on other religious communities such as Shiites or Ahmadis — and there have been many — just don’t grab world headlines in the same way.

The tragedy overshadowed a “religious” — in quotes because their real agenda is political — gathering in Islamabad to observe Mumtaz Qadri’s chehlum, a prayer for departed souls held 40 days after death. Sunday marked 27 days, not 40, since Qadri’s execution. The timing and venue, Pakistan’s Parliament, indicate a political motivation.

Pakistani children hold candles during a vigil on Dec. 15, 2015 to pay tribute to the victims of the Peshawar school massacre. Xinhua/Umar Qayyum via Getty Images

On official duty as a bodyguard, Qadri shot dead Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer on Jan. 4, 2011; he was inspired by the “religious” rhetoric against Taseer, who had supported Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death in 2010 for alleged blasphemy.

In Qadri, the religious right — including the well-organized lawyers’ consortiumbehind most blasphemy accusations in Pakistan — have found a potent, emotive weapon that bridges sectarian divides. Muslims of one sect targeting another sect of Muslims form about half the nearly 4,000 cases filed under the blasphemy laws since 1986. When investigated, such cases are often found to be based in some enmity, rivalry or jealousy.

Qadri belonged to the Barelvi sect of Sunni Islam, a generally peaceful branch of Islam compared to the hardline Wahhabis and Deobandi. Holding up this son of a vegetable seller as warrior of Islam, the Barelvis can assert themselves.

A supporter of Qadri at a protest in Islamabad on March 4. (REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood)

Since the 1980s, patronized by the security establishment, the religious right has gained political ground. Pakistan, along with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, nurtured the mujahideen to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. After the Cold War, these religiously motivated fighters provided Pakistan with plausible deniability in the disputed territory of Kashmir and with strategic depth in Afghanistan.

These policies led to the rise of an extreme interpretation of Islam, including Takfiri ideology — apostatizing other Muslims. Morphing from the mujahideen, the Taliban stepped into the vacuum created after America’s departure from Afghanistan and imposed a rigid version of Islam similar to Saudi Arabia’s.

The Taliban, al Qaeda and other similar groups oppose Saudi Arabia as a monarchy friendly with the West, even though their rigid ideology originates from Saudi Arabia. This also goes for the death cult — the so-called Islamic State — that also has support in Pakistan.

Their goal is to grab political power and impose a harsh version of Islam on a country founded in the name of the religion.

Pakistan’s security establishment distanced itself from extremist groups after 9/11 but has been slow to move against its erstwhile “strategic assets.” A terrorist attack on Karachi’s international airport in 2014 finally catalyzed the military operation in North Waziristan that borders Afghanistan. The lack of transparency remains troubling.

So does the security establishment’s continued obliviousness to the anti-India, homegrown jihadis ensconced in Punjab. Since these groups were not attacking Pakistan, the army didn’t want to open more fronts.

This changed after the Lahore attack, according to an army spokesman. Several “suspected terrorists and facilitators have been arrested” in raids in cities across Punjab.

Pakistani soldiers patrol during a military operation against Taliban militants in North Waziristan on July 9, 2014. (AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images)

But the terrorist mindset cannot be eliminated through force alone. There has to be a multi-pronged response, which includes attention to rule of law, due process and the overhaul of curricula at schools and religious seminaries that propagate an extremist mindset.

Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah insists that all 15,000 madrassas in the province have been scrutinized and are not engaged in any “anti-state activity.” But then again, he is one of the many politicians who broker electoral alliances with extremist groups to get more votes.

The Pakistani electorate has consistently rejected religious parties at the polls, bringing very few of their candidates to the assemblies. Religious parties in the political system as well as those that reject democracy are united against any moves towards pluralism and inclusivity. This includes the recent parliamentaryresolution to declare the Hindu festivals of Holi and Diwali, plus Easter, as holidays, and the provincial Punjab Assembly’s women’s protection bill that would provide redress against gender violence.

Pakistan must empower its police to counter crime at the local level — such as attacks on barbershops for shaving men’s beards — which feeds terrorism on the larger stage.

Gender violence often takes place on the pretext of honor, and there is widespread impunity, if not in law then in practice. Such impunity also applies to violence on the pretext of the honor of religion. Inaction against perpetrators is particularly obvious when they target the persecuted Ahmadi community, which was declared non-Muslim by a constitutional amendment in 1974. Last December, for the first time, the government removed posters from shops banning the entry of Ahmadis.

Pakistan must move to redress these injustices, including addressing the anti-Ahmadi legislation in its constitution, which continues to fuel the extremist mindset.

Simultaneously, as I’ve argued before, Pakistan must empower, train and equip its police force to counter organized crime at the local level and counter the extremism that feeds terrorism on the larger theater — attacks on barbershops for shaving men’s beards or on shops selling music videos, defacing women’s faces or limbs on billboards or attacking a Valentine’s Day activity.

Students at a madrassa in Karachi on March 4, 2015. Religious schools in Pakistan are sometimes the only source of education for children. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)

Since the 1990s, when the religious right began misusing blasphemy laws systematically in pursuit of their political agenda, vigilantes have killed over 60 people who allegedly committed “blasphemy.” Some, like Taseer, were never charged and tried. Others were killed after being acquitted or by other prisoners or even by prison guards. Victims include lawyers and judges.

Qadri is the first to be punished for such a murder. Reservations about the death penalty aside, taking that step indicated the government’s resolve to not be bullied by extremists. The dharna in Islamabad will test this resolve.

Chants of “Go Nawaz go!” targeting the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif are reminiscent of the dharnas in 2014, led by opposition politician Imran Khan and the Canadian-Pakistani cleric Tahirul Qadri (no relation to Mumtaz Qadri). Both were seen as being supported by the security establishment that still controls much of Pakistan’s policies behind the scenes.

Their demands undermine rule of law and constitutionality in Pakistan.

These protestors’ slogans are also targeting the army, forcing the more mainstream Jamat-e-Islami to distance itself from the event that it initially supported. Protestors are also using abusive language towards women in Sharif’s family.

Their demands undermine rule of law and constitutionality in Pakistan. They want Pakistan to officially declare Qadri as a martyr, execute Aasia Bibi (her case is pending in the Supreme Court), release their activists (some 200 have been arrested), remove all Ahmadis from government service and expel them from the country.

Attacks like the one in Lahore will not end by appeasing such anarchists. Any move to do that will undermine the democratic political process upon which the country has embarked since the last two elections. That is precisely what the extremists want. To counter them, Pakistan must stay the course — the democratic political process in the long run is an antidote for extremism. The international community must support this.

(ends)

My oped for The News International, Pakistan, published March 29, 2016. 

Polio-free Pakistan: one last push

Beena Sarwar

“Not since the eradication of smallpox in 1980 has the world had a chance to wipe out an incurable, but preventable, human disease, “ says Dr Hamid Jafari, former director of the World Health Organization’s Global Polio Eradication Department.Each year of delay in stopping the wild poliovirus, transmitted person to person through contact with infected human faeces, costs the global community a billion dollars. That’s what it takes to maintain the immunisation programme that must be sustained as long as even one case of polio is detected.

Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the wild poliovirus is endemic, i.e., never stopped transmitting. This year, Afghanistan has detected one polio case and Pakistan six so far.

Both countries are still hoping to interrupt transmission, working towards that goal, and tantalisingly close to becoming polio-free. If no wild poliovirus case is detected for 12 months, there is a good chance the transmission has been interrupted – something that is confirmed once a country has been polio-free for an additional two years.

Once Pakistan and Afghanistan reach this goal, it would pave the way for the world to be polio-free, eliminating the risk of children becoming cripples or, in rare cases, dying.

Consider the progress made since polio vaccines were developed in the 1950s. Polio crippled about 35,000 children a year in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States alone. By 1979, the USA was polio-free. Worldwide, polio declined from 350,000 cases in 1988 to 74 in 2015.

March 27 this year was the second anniversary of the WHO-designated South East Asia region being certified polio-free. Nigeria stopped the spread of polio in 2014. If it remains polio-free by July 2016, the entire continent of Africa will have not detected any wild poliovirus for two years.

In 2012, India was declared polio-free – a country that had appeared to have no hope of emerging from its polio-endemic status given the size of its population and large pockets of vulnerable populations.

India carried out an aggressive, sustained and innovative programme. The National Polio Surveillance Project, 2007 to 2012, was headed by Dr Hamid Jafari, assigned by the World Health Organization as the main technical advisor to the Indian government.

Dr Jafari, whom I’ve known since he was a medical student in Karachi, supervised a staff of over 2,300 and supported the efforts of the government, Rotarians and other partners to ensure that polio vaccines reach 172 million children each year. As in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they were mostly from migrant families or lived in remote or hard-to-access areas.

India’s dramatic success against polio. Courtesy CDC

Dr Jafari’s multi-faceted, research-based and “tight net” strategic approach ensured that vaccinators reached the most vulnerable, particularly in areas with poor sanitation and high rates of diarrhoea.

This involved targeting high-risk areas like flood-hit districts and migrant and mobile populations for vaccination campaigns and routine immunisations. Mobile vaccination teams used motorcycles and boats, and even waded through water to reach children. They administered vaccines at bus stops and on trains and went house-to-house to routinely register new-born babies and ensure they were vaccinated.

India’s last known polio case, discovered on 13 January 2011, was 18-month old Rukhsar Khatoon in West Bengal.

“I never met Rukhsar, but I’ve seen lots of photos,” says Dr Jafari. “She was a mild case and has largely recovered.”

Why should Pakistani or Afghan children remain the only ones in the world at risk of being crippled with polio? In both countries, the polio is now only found in pockets, mostly conflicted areas and communities of displaced people and mobile populations. And it’s not the communities that resist vaccinations – fewer than one percent of parents refuse.

The question is how to reach the vulnerable areas. We must examine which children are not getting vaccinated and why, says Dr Jafari. Why are children from areas around Peshawar, Gadaap, or Quetta being missed?

“This requires a continuous probing in a way that doesn’t get people defensive but focuses on the barriers that must be overcome. The key is to involve and empower the affected communities and engage people in their own language and on their terms,” says Dr Jafari.

Shehnaz Wazir Ali (right) with cricket hero Shahid Afridi and Aziz Memon of Rotary Pakistan: partners against polio

There is no shortage of dedicated teams and community leaders in Pakistan. Plus, in 2015, the government made important structural changes to enable health workers to reach every child through the National Emergency Action Plan (NEAP).

The NEAP places the responsibility for the vaccination campaign at all levels of administration, each accountable to the other — polio eradication committees, task forces and steering committees at union council, district, divisional and provincial levels, further linked to provincial task forces, the Prime Minister’s Focus Group on Polio Eradication and National Task Force on Polio Eradication.

Pakistanis can no longer blame ‘the government for inaction’. The onus now lies on the regularity of the coordination committees’ meetings and their determination in identifying and closing the gaps, whether transport, security, or salaries.

“A lot depends on the vaccinators, how they are being trained and treated and how are they working and communicating,” says Dr Jafari, “and the level of follow up with the command and control, emergency and accountability structures.”

Since these structures were implemented, Pakistan has seen a dramatic decrease in polio – 80 % in 12 months, from 306 reported cases in 2014, to 54 in 2015. No small feat for a country beleaguered by so many other issues.

The odds are not worse than those in India or Nigeria. Yes, there is an insurgency – but not all militants oppose polio vaccinations. Taliban leader Mullah Omar actually issued a letter in 2010 endorsing the polio vaccination campaign. Afghan Taliban allow polio vaccination campaigns to take place, observing a truce during campaign days.

Looking ahead, we need a paradigm shift, says Hamid Jafari. “We have to find ways to get women educated and children vaccinated even where there is fighting and long running conflicts. Important lessons are being learned in the fight against polio in Pakistan. These lessons could guide strategies that may not only maintain delivery of essential services to the most vulnerable populations rather than waiting for the conflict to end, but will also enhance the potential for building peace..”

The argument that Pakistan can’t eradicate polio unless Afghanistan does, because of the porous borders, is a false narrative, he says. Both countries export polio to each other but Pakistan as the larger, more complex country, has to be the major driver.

“Polio will disappear much faster from Afghanistan once Pakistan ends it,” he predicts. If Afghans are bringing it in, Pakistan can stop it from further spread by vaccinating all children.

Pakistan is not the world’s poorest, most conflicted or fragile state. Pakistanis have shown tremendous resilience and determination in overcoming all kinds of odds. This too, is a fight that we can win. We must win. It just needs one last push.

(ends)

Kanak being arrested at a pro-democracy rally in Nepal, 2006. Photo by Shehab Uddin

Press Statement: media figures call for release of Himal Editor Kanak Mani Dixit

New Delhi, April 23 — Editors and media figures as well as intellectuals and scholars from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, UK, US, Australia and Sri Lanka have called for the release of Himal editor and prominent Nepali journalist Kanak Mani Dixit who was arrested yesterday in Katmandu by anti-graft officials.

The following is the text of the statement:

It is with deep concern that we have learned of the arrest today of Kanak Mani Dixit, the widely respected founder-editor of Himal Media and a courageous voice for transparency, freedom of expression and democratic rights in Nepal and across South Asia. The charges are related to alleged corruption but Kanak Dixit says it is part of a vendetta pursued against him by people in Government.

We have known Kanak Dixit as a true professional, human rights defender and energetic journalist whose credentials are built on robust research and tremendous courage. Himal Media, a pioneer in South Asia journalism, has published Himal South Asia, Nepali Times and Himal Khabar Patrika (in the Nepali language). He has written extensively for international media including leading newspapers in India and is chairman of Sajha Yatayat, a state run transportation company, which he has been turning around from a loss-making entity.

Kanak Dixit’s detention comes at a time of increased pressure on free media across South Asia. We call upon all national and international media organisations, individual journalists and editors, defenders of media under pressure, on those who believe in the freedom of expression, to seek Kanak Dixit’s immediate release and a fair and transparent trial, free of bias.

We call upon the Government of Nepal to issue a transparent and unequivocal statement on his detention for we are deeply concerned about his safety and rights. We condemn all forms of pressure tactics on editors like him and other courageous media figures such as Mahfuz Anam of the Daily Star in Dhaka, who is facing over 80 cases of sedition and libel in Bangladeshi courts, and other media persons who are committed to the rule of law and justice.

Kanak Mani Dixit: in solidarity with Pakistani journalists at Azadi Gali, Karachi, November 2007. Photo: Beena Sarwar

• Sanjoy Narayan, Editor, The Hindustan Times, New Delhi
• Rajdeep Sardesai, Chief Editor, India Today TV Group, New Delhi
• Siddharth Varadarajan, Founder Editor, The Wire, New Delhi
• TN Ninan, Chairman, Business Standard Pvt Ltd, New Delhi
• James Astill, Political Editor, The Economist
• Maja Daruwala, Director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi
• Sevanti Ninan, editor, The Hoot, New Delhi
• Salil Tripathi, Journalist and Author, London
• Imtiaz Ahmed, Executive Director, RCSS, Colombo
• Mahfuz Anam, Editor, The Daily Star, Dhaka
• Sara Hossein, Lawyer, Bangladesh Supreme Court
• Zafar Sobhan, Editor, Dhaka Tribune
• Afsan Chowdhury, Senior Journalist, Bangladesh
• Dr. Naila Zaman Khan, Professor of Child Neurology and Development, Bangladesh
• Lubna Mariam, Cultural activist, Bangladesh
• Kalpana Sharma, independent journalist, Mumbai
• Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Political Studies, Bard College, New York, US
• Bina D’Costa, Australian National University
• Pradip Phanjoubam, Editor, Imphal Free Press
• Patricia Mukhim, Editor, The Shillong Times
• Seema Mustafa, Editor, The Citizen, New Delhi
• Lalita Panicker, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindustan Times, New Delhi
• Laxmi Murthy, Consulting Editor, Himal Southasian
• Seema Guha, senior journalist (freelance), New Delhi
• Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, The Wire, New Delhi
• Aruni Kashyap, Writer and Asst Professor of English, Ashoka University, Haryana
• Dr. Xonzoi Barbora, TISS, Guwahati
• Dr. Sanjeeb Kakoty, Associate Professor, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Management Shillong
• Dr. Anjuman Ara Begum, Forum-Asia, Katnmandu
• Sanjoy Hazarika, independent columnist, New Delhi
• Geeta Seshu, Journalist, Mumbai
• Beena Sarwar, journalist, Karachi / Cambridge MA
• Nalaka Gunawardene, columnist, Ravaya newspaper, Sri Lanka
• Urvashi Butalia, founder, Zubaan Books, New Delhi

Please use extensively — those who wish to can sign on by copy-pasting and circulating, putting your name at END of list

Kuch Khaas, 2011: Flood Relief concert featuring folk artists from interior Sindh (Thar) along with musicians Todd Shea, QB, Arieb Azhar and Yasir and Jawad. Photo courtesy – PakiUM

My oped published in The News, April 24, 2016

I sit down to write this on April 21, the birthday of one of my oldest, dearest childhood friends, universally known as Poppy – Shayan Afzal Khan, to use her full name. On Feb 21, 2015, Poppy lost her second battle with cancer, which she had fought with her characteristic grace, courage and humour. One of Poppy’s enduring legacies is her book ‘Unveiling the Ideal: A New Look at Early Muslim Women’, published by Musawah-Sisters in Islam, Malaysia in 2007. For this book, she drew on her writing skills, faith, feminism and history degree (Girton College, Cambridge, 1985).

But what Poppy’s name has become synonymous with is Kuch Khaas – the cultural hub she established in 2010 in Islamabad. For this, she took inspiration from The Second Floor (T2F) in Karachi, set up in 2007 by another dear friend, Sabeen Mahmud.

“Having an open mind and an open-door policy has let us fulfil dreams beyond my wildest imagination,” wrote Sabeen in an essay titled ‘Creative Karachi’, in the Accelerating Entrepreneurship edition of Innovations Quarterly, published by MIT Press in 2013. This applies equally to Poppy.

Three months after Poppy passed on, Sabeen was shot dead in Karachi. This Sunday, April 24, marks the first year of that ghastly event. Determined to celebrate Sabeen’s life and legacy and sharing her belief that the show must go on, her friends, family and co-workers arranged a two-day event at the Alliance Française, the Creative Karachi Festival (CKF) (yesterday and today – from 1pm to 10pm).

This is the second edition of a weekend mela that was one of Sabeen’s many out-of-the-box ideas. A “non-stop party in the park!” is what she called it when she first curated it in 2014 as a fundraiser for T2F. The festival aims to keep alive Sabeen’s “vision for a more creatively conscious city, by sustaining the creative forces that she generated together with us”.

Some of Pakistan’s best visual artists, contemporary and traditional craftsmen, performers, writers, poets, dancers, film and documentary makers, qawwals and musicians are contributing their skills to the event. There will also be film screenings and panel discussions, food stalls, demos, and tastings. The entry fees, priced at Rs350 per day or Rs600 for both days, make it affordable – at least as a one-time expense – for a large section of society.

Both Sabeen and Poppy were driven by the desire to create inclusive spaces where people could gather to imbibe music, poetry, dance, art, drama, and new ideas at discussions, film screenings and book launches. Poppy took the T2F concept further by organising regular classes for creative writing, guitar, dance, and other creative skills. She quietly gave scholarships for these classes to children from low-income families. The Kuch Khaas lawns also became the venue for a farmers’ market, featuring organic fruit, vegetables and dairy products.

Sabeen at the Creative Karachi Festival 2014, delighted with her find

The key requirement for such activities, besides creative thinking and open-mindedness, is space and funds. A fairy godmother of a landlord literally gave Sabeen the use of the first two floors of a building he owns, for a token rent of one rupee a month. That generous contribution takes care of the biggest expense (rent) for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, supporters will donate more than the entry fee at the Creative Karachi Festival this weekend to enable T2F to keep going.

Sadly, Kuch Khaas remains shut since September 2015, as the Capital Development Authority (CDA) cracked down against ‘non-conforming use of residential property’, despite the fact that it was a non-commercial, family-oriented space that the neighbours had no objection to. Plenty of commercial outfits are still being run in residential areas as the authorities turn a blind eye, but never mind that.

In October last year, Kuch Khaas applied to the CDA for a space at the back of the immense Arts and Crafts Village in Islamabad.

“We received good feedback and to keep matters transparent we requested a public announcement of a bid for the space for non-commercial, not-for-profit organisations that work in this field with a varied expertise and hoped to compete based on our experience,” says Kuch Khaas director Michelle Tania Butt.

In her memory, Poppy’s family is still paying the Kuch Khaas employees their salaries rather than letting them go, but they can’t carry on much longer. If accepted, the proposal would fill a vital cultural gap in Islamabad, as well as bring life to a barren and unused area in the Arts and Crafts Village, for which Kuch Khaas is willing to pay a reasonable rent. The village already houses several (unused) restaurants and an art gallery, besides the CDA training centre. There was no public bidding process prior to these allocations.

In a meeting with Kuch Khaas representatives on Feb 22, 2016, the CDA committed to announcing the bid in ten days. Two months later: no bid, no announcement, no venue for Kuch Khaas. The file remains obstinately unmoving, despite Kuch Khaas’s project in partnership with the CDA for Earth Day celebrations in Islamabad on April 22 of this year.

As the Pakistan government and security forces chase down Chotu gangs and terrorists, perhaps someone in a position to decide will realise the importance of public spaces like T2F and Kuch Khaas. It is such venues that provide citizens a space to breathe and nurture their creative selves – something that indirectly, and sometimes directly, challenges and counters the militant narrative.

As I write this on Poppy’s birthday, with the Creative Karachi Festival for Sabeen and T2F on April 24 and 25, I hope that the government, as well as individuals, will consider supporting the arts and creativity with even more commitment. The time to act is now.

In Karachi last week, I wrote about Sabeen Mahmud and the Creative Karachi Festival held to commemorate her life and work. PRI published it with the titleRemembering a Pakistani woman who died because she wanted everyone to have a space to speak freely along with my radio interview with Marco Werman of PRI’s The World. Below is the unabridged text including with more links and photos. Also see our friend Afia Salam’s tribute to Sabeen in The Wire, Why Sabeen Mahmud Will Always Matter.

A poster with Sabeen’s photo at CKF 2016 on a divider between a stall and walkway at the Alliance Francaise. Photo: Beena Sarwar

Beena Sarwar

Early on Sunday morning in Karachi, a small, eclectic crowd converged at The Second Floor, the iconic coffee shop-cultural hub founded by my young friend Sabeen Mahmud in 2007. 

Tofiq Pasha waters the baby amaltas (laburnum) planted for Sabeen as Mamoo looks on. Photo: Beena Sarwar

This time, we were not there to participate in an event at this cutting-edge curated space but to join Sabeen’s mother Mahenaz in planting a baby Amaltas –  a yellow-flowering native tree also known as laburnum– at the grassy divider by the traffic light where Sabeen was killed on this day last year.

“I have been dreaming of this moment for months,” Mahenaz told me serenely, smiling. “Every spring it will flower in memory of Sabeen.”

Mahenaz had been in the passenger seat next to her only child, driving home after an event at T2F on April 24, 2015. Their driver (shot dead later) was in the back seat – Sabeen often preferred to drive herself. As the vehicle stopped at a red light before turning on to grandly named Sun Set Boulevard, two young men on a motorcycle drew up by the car, “too close for comfort,” remembers Mahenaz.

The pillion rider raised a hand holding a 9 mm pistol and fired five shots directly at Sabeen’s head and chest. Within seconds, the motorcyclists had vanished. Sabeen died instantly. A bullet that passed through her arm hit her mother. Another ricocheted in the car and got lodged in Mahenaz’s back, where it remains as a permanent, physical reminder of the loss.

By the Amaltas being lowered into the ground is placed a grey flagstone inscribed with Sabeen’s name in elegant Urdu calligraphy as well as in English as well as the years she walked this earth, 1974-2015. One by one, led by Mahenaz, Sabeen’s friends put fistfuls of earth into the amaltas bed, just as many had done for her grave a year ago – a symbolic ritual at Muslim funerals. Dust to dust.

After watering the amaltas, we walked back to T2F. White sheets covered the floor, with colourful bolster pillows against the red brick walls of the cool interior. A long table against the back wall looked festive, laden with T2F’s signature mugs, a big flask of hot water for coffee and tea, and plates, and sandwiches and coffee cake brought by Sabeen’s friends.

One year on: Friends and family remember Sabeen at T2F. Photo: Beena Sarwar

Walking in, Mahenaz stopped to take in the scene, then smiled and thanked the old man who had set it up. “Mamoo” (uncle) is what she respectfully calls the white-bearded Mir Daad, who has worked for her for the past 30 years. He was also Mamoo to Sabeen, then all the T2F community. Few here accord employees and paid staff such respect.

Mamoo is among the thousands of internal migrants who flock to what is now one of the world’s largest cities with a population of over 23 million, seeking work. A city that never sleeps. A city that Sabeen passionately loved, with its sprawling concrete jungles, undulating shoreline along the Arabian Sea, flowering trees and indomitable spirit.

Mamoo hails from a village near the garrison town of Abbottabad, now infamous as Osama Bin Laden’s hideout, some 740 miles north of Karachi. Standing by the tree planting, he told me quietly that he had known Sabeen since she was 12 years old.

Instead of her home, T2F is where Sabeen’s funeral procession began last year – as Mahenaz said, it was also her home and the T2F community was her family.

Then too, Mamoo had spread white sheets on the floor, like people do at their homes here when friends and relatives come to pray for a departed soul.

At T2F on Sunday morning, at Mahenaz’s request, those gathered shared stories about Sabeen. But beyond the personal reminisces of Sabeen’s quirky humour, compassion, egalitarianism, activism, love for music, poetry, dance and technology and the love and respect she inspired, is Sabeen’s broader significance. Why does Sabeen matter? She was not only an icon of the progressive and democratic ideals towards which Pakistan aspires or should aspire to, but also provided a platform and a space for others sharing these aspirations.

Mahenaz at CKF 2016: Sabeen would hate for her or any of us to give up. Photo: Beena Sarwar

How does Mahenaz keep going? Because she knows that Sabeen would hate for her to give up?

“Yes,” she replied simply. “That is what keeps me going.”

Raised by such a mother, Sabeen’s inclusive vision, open-mindedness and respect for all life, made T2F not just a safe space for Karachi’s English-speaking, westernised ‘burger’ youth but also for its ‘bun kababs’ – those from more traditional backgrounds with less exposure to the West but who share those aspirations.

One of them is the young lawyer turned social and political activist Mohammad Jibran Nasir who has movingly testified to Sabeen’s enabling vision and proactive approach.

As Sabeen wrote in an essay titled ‘Creative Karachi’, having “an open mind and an open-door policy” had allowed the T2F community to “fulfill dreams beyond my wildest imagination” (Innovations Quarterly, MIT Press, 2013).

T2F became a launching pad for those with no other avenues of expression or who were restricted by lack of access to resources and social or political patronage – important in a highly class-conscious society where who you know matters as much as who your family is. For those mired in traditional mindsets, Sabeen’s egalitarian vision of a class-less society is anarchy.

“I’ve never known a space in Pakistan to be so inclusive of class, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, and cultural scope,” wrote the novelist Uzma Aslam Khan. “…Her death cannot mean the end of the dream she made real: an inclusive public space where it is possible to evolve – regardless of your background and beliefs, or who you know and don’t know.”

The mix of people was evident at the buzzing two-day Creative Karachi Festival (#CKH2016) held in her memory last weekend. People young and old from around the city thronged the sprawling grounds of the Alliance Francaise, braving a heat wave to show up.

At the end of the garden sat the truck artist Haider Ali, Ali Salman Anchan and their Phool Pati (Urdu for ‘flowers, leaves’, the original term for the English ‘truck art’) team displaying colorful work, including a roller bag for sale. Haider Ali always acknowledges Sabeen’s unflinching support for their work, that she included at the Dil Phaink exhibition she curated for the Alchemy Festival at London’s Southbank Centre in May 2015.

“People would ask her why she is bothering with us, when no one else knew us,” he told me some years ago. “But she didn’t care.”

Truck artist Haider Ali and his team – behind them the ‘Fasla na rakhein, pyar hone dein’ banner from the Dil Phenk series Sabeen curated. Photo: Beena Sarwar

At around 10 pm on Sunday, the time Sabeen was shot dead on that day last year, there was a moment of silence for her. Soon afterwards, Zoe Viccaji, one of Pakistan’s top fusion artists, rocked the concert venue. She was among the over 150 artists who contributed their time and skills to the festival.

The event at the French cultural center took me back to the 1980s when Alliance Française and the Goethe Institut were two safe spaces in Pakistan for political dissent and activism expressed through cultural activities — street theatre, seminars, discussions — during the military dictatorship of Gen. Zia ul Haq. Pakistan was then a frontline state in the US Cold War against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

The Mujahideen unleashed in those years morphed over time into various other militant groups, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

In Pakistan, religiously motivated militants are linked with criminal gangs around the country — gunrunners, kidnappers, land and drug mafias and murderers for hire. A young business school graduate who has confessed to killing Sabeen has also confessed to various other murders.

Artists Niilofur Farrukh and Shehrezade Alam with Marvi Mazhar in front of Desi Writers’ Lounge at CKF 2016. Photo: Beena Sarwar

Since 2007, T2F was a space for political activism and cultural expression, like Alliance Française and the Goethe Institut were in the Zia years. Sabeen’s friend Marvi Mazhar, a conservation architect who now runs T2F, says closing it down would have been like a second death in the city.

The risks remain, because, as activist and environmentalist Tofiq Pasha put it, “every now and then, they slap us down to tell us to stay within our boundaries.” The festival for Sabeen took place in the enclosed, secured premises of Alliance Française, not in a public park.

Sabeen matters because she gives people the courage to carry on despite the risks. As she famously said, “Fear is just a line in your head — you can choose which side you want to be on.”

There are no real spaces anywhere for those who challenge the status quo, added another activist friend, Amima Sayeed, pointing to the US. She recalled Noam Chomsky talking about how dissenting voices are forced to stay within their boundaries, and how Chomsky’s own voice is marginalized, “allowed to speak at alternative platforms, but never really given any mainstream space.”

What Sabeen reminds us to do is to determinedly keep claiming our spaces and to refuse to accept the status quo.

Check out and support the different projects, including T2F, that Sabeen started

Also, writer Bina Shah has launched an online campaign to get a street in Karachi named after Sabeen

Nergis Mavalvala: “The key to my success is the education I got as a girl in Pakistan”

Mavalvala to be keynote speaker at fundraiser for high-quality, low-income schools in Pakistan

BOSTON, May 04: Nergis Mavalvala, the Pakistani-American astrophysicist at MIT known for the part she played in the breakthrough on gravitational waves, will be a keynote speaker at the Third Annual The Citizen’s Foundation (TCF) Boston Fundraiser on Saturday, May 7, 2016.

Ateed Riaz, TCF co-founder and chairman of TCF’s Board of Directors, visiting from Karachi, will be the other keynote speaker. Starting with five schools in 1995, TCF now has over 1,75,000 students enrolled in its 1,112 purpose-built schools and 90 adopted Government schools in low-income localities in 109 towns and cities across Pakistan. The award winning non-profit has won global accolades for its high quality education, transparency and exemplary administration.

Accepting the invitation to speak at the event, Mavalvala, a MacArthur Fellow, said that her achievements are based on the education she received as a girl from a middle-class family in Karachi. “My only ticket to success is the education I got in Pakistan,” she said, expressing her support for TCF.

Poster for the TCF Boston fundraiser

TCF also runs the 141schools.org project, building a school for each student killed in a terrorist attack on APS, Army Public School, on December 16, 2014, in Peshawar.

“Our only hope to fight fundamentalism and extremism and give our children an alternative and opportunity, especially those who are at high risk from extremism is education,” believes Boston-based entrepreneur and community leader Mahmud Jafari, whose Dover Rug & Home is sponsoring the event.

141Schools.org – Introduction from 141 SCHOOLS on Vimeo.

“Poor localities and poor schools do not mean poor education,” points out Andover resident and TCF volunteer Masooma Bhaiwalla who has visited several TCF schools in Pakistan. “TCF’s labs and libraries and the children I met all reflected very high education standards. The schools in these localities are like lotuses in dirty ponds.”

This year’s fundraiser will be held at the Best Western Royal Plaza in Marlboro, MA. Tickets are available online (adults: $50; children 6-12 years: $25).

Besides dinner, including pizza for children, the event features a live auction and performance by the talented Shujat Ali Khan, grandson of legendary classical singer Ustad Salamat Ali Khan.

TCF USA is a professionally managed, tax-exempt non-profit organization with a network of chapters across the United States.

TCF Boston supports a school in Karachi and another in Lahore. Additionally, two TCF Boston families are building a school each in Karachi and Lahore.

This year’s fundraiser aims to complete the construction of another school in Khushab, Punjab, that last year’s event helped to start.

(ends)

My piece about the TCF fundraiser in Boston last weekend, published in The News on Sunday, May 15, 2016

Adil Najam, Nargis Mavalvala, Ateed Riaz at the speakers table. Photo: Beena Sarwar

Pitching in for education in Pakistan from Boston and beyond

Beena Sarwar

“The Citizens’ Foundation is doing an amazing job, and I’m honoured to be here,” said Nergis Mavalvala, giving the keynote address at the sold-out Third Annual The Citizen’s Foundation (TCF) Boston Fundraiser on Saturday, 7 May, 2016.

Propelled to celebrity status by her role in the recent breakthrough on gravitational waves predicted by Einstein, the Pakistani-American astrophysicist at MIT added, “TCF is fantastic – give generously”.

Volunteers tally the donations at the TCF Boston fundraiser. Photo: Beena Sarwar

“They didn’t ask me to say that,” she added, raising a laugh from the appreciative audience that filled the spacious hall of the hotel in Marlborough, MA. The entirely volunteer-run event glittered doctors, lawyers, accountants, professors and other successful professionals from diaspora families, mostly of Pakistani origin, as well as Indians and others.

Many of them afterwards crowded Mavalvala wanting their photos – and their children’s photos – taken with her. Down-to-earth and gracious, she patiently and smilingly obliged.

The award winning non-profit TCF has won global accolades for its high quality education, transparency and exemplary administration. Starting with five schools in 1995, it now has over 175,000 students enrolled in 1,202 school units in low-income localities in 54 districts across Pakistan. TCF also runs the 141 Schools project, building a school for each student killed in a terrorist attack on APS, Army Public School, on December 16, 2014, in Peshawar.

Recounting her experiences of growing up in Karachi where she attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Mavalvala said she “had many teachers, many of them not in school” — like the bicycle repair shop guy and electrician who taught her how to use tools and “build things”.

She said more than her formal education, it was her love for building things that got her accepted as a Ph.D student at MIT 25 years ago with Rainer Weiss who heads the gravitational waves experiment that Mavalvala predicts will soon win him a Nobel Prize.

“Education,” she noted, “comes in many forms. The most precious gift to a child is to let her curiosity grow and cultivate it.” It is also about mentoring and taking children “along on the journey”.

Referring to the financial aid package that enabled her to attend Wellesley College, Mavalvala stressed the importance of investing in education. Basic rights like food, shelter and health are important, “but without education, nothing else is worth it.”

Nergis Mavalvala (centre) with TCF volunteers Zeba and Mahmud Jafari, whose Dover Rug & Home also sponsored the event. Beena Sarwar

Introducing Mavalvala, Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, highlighted Article 25 of Pakistan’s Constitution that stipulates the right to education. The National Assembly in November 2012 unanimously passed the Right to free and Compulsory Education Bill 2012 to ensure enrollment of all children aged five to sixteen years.

Pakistan’s current rate of school enrollment is its highest ever, noted Najam, but it needs to increase by 400 per cent to reach this goal by 2030.

No wonder a sense of urgency drives TCF supporters, who have grown it into a movement beyond borders by chipping in to push the cart that says “Educate Pakistan!” to quote Ateed Riaz, TCF co-founder and member of TCF’s Board of Directors in Karachi, who also addressed the gathering.

Riaz noted that besides obtaining a good education and skills training helping them to earn a decent living, TCF students learn to respect others. TCF’s co-ed classrooms and female teachers positively impact children’s ability to deal with the opposite gender and to see women as role models.

TCF also provides alternatives to people, enabling them to enter the mainstream. TCF graduates have done well not only at institutions like the prestigious Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, and the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), but are also entering the coveted Civil Services of Pakistan.

“These are stories that motivate us to go forward,” said Riaz.

Enabling students to study in the same institutes as those who have more resources also chips away at class barriers. In a film shown at the start of the event, the son of a factory watchman recalls how, looking around his new classroom at IBA, he realized that a girl seated nearby was the daughter of the factory owner for whom his father worked as a chowkidar or watchman for 35 years.

Stories like this recounted at the event and shown through films moved many of those present, motivating them to pull out their cheque books and credit cards to donate – in some cases more than once, handing over their donations to the volunteers going around the room.

For accounting professional Yasmin Causer, the motivating factor, besides her trust in TCF, was the footage of children walking in the ‘keechar’ (puddles) and the desire to get them into school. “That’s the most painful part of going home,” she said – referring to Karachi despite having lived in the USA for over 30 years.

High school chemistry teacher Khalida Hakam, originally from Peshawar, said that there are so many organisations doing so many good things in Pakistan. For her, “education is the most important cause, and TCF is doing great work.”

This year’s Boston fundraiser helped raise over USD 100,000 – 75,000 of it within half an hour of an appeal by Mahmud Jafari, community leader and entrepreneur whose Dover Rug & Home was an event sponsor.

“We can either be part of the problem or part of the solution,” said Jafari, noting the challenge of changing “dreams into bigger aspirations” for the over 24 million children who are out of school in Pakistan. “We must educate them. We have the choice to turn them into assets or turn them into liabilities.”

TCF USA is a professionally managed, tax-exempt non-profit organization with a network of chapters across the United States. Support for TCF worldwide is evident in registered non-profit organizations elsewhere – see TCF UK and TCF Canada.

TCF Boston supports a school each in Karachi and Lahore. Two TCF Boston families are also building a school each in Karachi and Lahore. Contributions from this year’s TCF Boston gala will complete another school in Khushab, Punjab, begun by last year’s fundraiser.

The event included a live auction featuring high quality artwork, rugs and carpets, as well as sports and holiday packages. It culminated with an electrifying performance by the talented Shujat Ali Khan, grandson of legendary classical singer Ustad Salamat Ali Khan.

Shujat Ali Khan: an electrifying performance. Photo: Beena Sarwar

Shujat Ali Khan also performed at TCF fundraising galas in Washington DC and elsewhere. Other TCF events in the USA this year range from small events organised by young professionals in New York to information sessions in Sacramento, CA, besides fundraising galas featuring crowd-pullers like Humaira Channa in February-April across the USA — in Houston, Phoenix, Silicon Valley, San Antonio, and New Orleans.

More TCF fundraising galas and events are planned in cities around North America during 2016. Stay tuned.

My column in Himal Southasian, published 10 June 2016 –  Harsh Mander on why we should raise our voice against injustice

By Beena Sarwar

Harsh Mander: Committed, consistent and soft-spoken. Photo: Beena Sarwar

Cross-border solidarity isn’t exactly a new idea. The rallying cry, “Proletarians of all countries, unite!…” that emerged in 1848 from The Communist Manifesto has resounded around the globe in many forms since it was first articulated.

Meeting Harsh Mander, one of India’s foremost activist-intellectuals and a courageous former civil servant, again revived the idea for me, but this time, beyond workers. I had first met the soft-spoken Mander in Karachi, when I worked for Geo TV. He had been part of a small delegation from India visiting Pakistan in early 2004, a visit aimed at improving understanding between India and Pakistan, organised by the social-cultural group Act Now for Harmony and Democracy (ANHAD).

Mander, along with activist Shabnam Hashmi (sister of the slain theatre activist Safdar Hashmi) and Marxist historian Prof K N Panikkar, is one of the founding members of ANHAD, established in March 2003 in response to the massacre in Gujarat the previous year. The death and destruction in Gujarat in 2002 galvanised Indian intellectuals and activists as never before. Many of those who rose up then had long been fighting for justice, some publicly and some, like Mander, through the system.

An Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer who left his post in the aftermath of the Gujarat pogroms, he had been fighting the battle in his own way throughout his 22 years of service, refusing to fall prey to politics. Posted in various districts across India, he meticulously followed the letter and spirit of the law to tilt the balance in favour of the dispossessed. Just four years into service, as Additional Collector in Indore, he took the bold step of calling in the army to quell attacks on the district’s Sikh population in 1984 following Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

“The District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police had given instructions that unless they personally ordered force, none was to be used; then they disappeared. And in two hours I saw things that I hoped never to see again but have seen too often,” Mander told the Business Standard in a 2015 interview.

Remembering that the senior-most magistrate on the spot – in this case himself – is authorised to call in the army, he moved quickly to do so. With shoot-at-sight orders and curfew imposed, the violence was quelled within six hours – unlike places where it dragged on for weeks – all “because one greenhorn officer just took a decision”.

“The bureaucracy,” he added, “is a strange profession in which the early years are the best because you are in the middle of nowhere and have a great deal of autonomy. You are the one who actually implements programmes for the poor. So I know it is possible for the government to act on the side of the poor.”

Sadly for all the lives lost in communal riots, not all bureaucrats, greenhorn or otherwise, are as decisive, principled, or well-versed about their own legal authority – or courageous enough to act despite the consequences. Mander’s action in Indore led to him being immediately transferred – just one of 22 such non-routine transfers in 17 years. Other transfers were catalysed by acts such as his refusal to use force against Narmada Dam protestors, arresting people who led communal riots, or redistributing 2200 acres ceiling surplus of land belonging to a senior political leader. “But these were such worthy battles to fight – and there was always the challenge of getting something done before they transferred me!”

The tipping point for him was the Gujarat carnage. He realised then that “there are many battles you can fight within government but when the Constitution itself is challenged then you have to fight the battles outside”. That was when I, like so many others, first heard of Harsh Mander – his essay ‘Cry, My Beloved Country’ (later expanded into a book calledFear and Forgiveness: the Aftermath of Massacre, Penguin India, 2006) was widely shared via email in those pre-social media days.

What Gujarat witnessed, he wrote, “was not a riot, but a terrorist attack followed by a systematic, planned massacre, a pogrom.” One where the violence was “organised like a military operation against an external armed enemy.”

Shortly afterwards, he left the IAS, and since then has devoted himself full time to activist work and teaching. When he visited Karachi in 2004 with the ANHAD delegation, I and my colleague Asadullah Khan produced a series of panel discussions for Geo TV with the Indian visitors, which went a long way towards shattering stereotypes and misconceptions about ‘the other’ in Pakistan.

Since then, Mander has continued steadfastly along the same path, building bridges, countering stereotypes and doing what he can to fight injustice. When we met in Boston before his lecture at Tufts University in March, the activism at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi where the student leaders were fighting charges of “sedition” was still going strong.

“If the students are guilty of sedition, so are we [meaning those who support values of pluralism and democracy],” Mander told me. Taking a public stand on this issue, he hadwritten an article along these lines published just a month before we met. During our meeting, he reflected on the need to develop a new way of looking at nationalism, to find ways to “talk about ways of loving the nation that are not aggressive or militaristic, rather than [us] being defensive and ceding ground.”

Mander is full of admiration for the JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who “represents youth, idealism, equality, solidarity”. He points out that, contrary to the propaganda against them portraying them as hedonistic, entitled, alienated elites, the JNU students are mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds – “It is disingenuous to paint them as anything else”. He also points to how these students are crossing borders, refusing to only stand up for their “own” people but taking up cudgels on behalf of others, on principles.

A paradox of the flag-waving hyper nationalists in India is that the RSS had refused to fly the national flag in their own institutions

Kanhaiya Kumar was raising a voice on principle against the hanging of Afzal Guru – as incidentally, had Mander himself, along with Arundhati Roy and many other Indians whom the right wing reviles as “traitors”. Umar Khalid is fighting for tribal rights, while the Hyderabad University PhD student Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student, who committed suicide last year, had raised a voice against the targeting of Muslims in the “Muzaffarnagar riots” and the hanging of Yaqub Memon charged with terrorism. “What we learn from these students is new lessons in solidarity– across borders,” said Mander, quoting Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

The students in India are crossing borders of caste and religion in their expressions of solidarity. These values apply equally to the people of Southasia, who keep trying to connect and express solidarity with each other even as our governments try to demonise “the other” and keep us apart.

He talks about the Bhagat Singh Shaheed lecture he gave at Punjab University, where he suggested that the JNU student leaders who have gained prominence in India could, in fact, be seen as this generation’s “heirs and progenies of Bhagat Singh” – ideas he later articulated in an essay about the issue.

The polarisation resulting from the “nationalism” debate – who is a patriot and who is not – is not limited to India, of course. A bolstered far right across the world brings together a combination of extreme nationalism and market economy, a trend that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher began. This has allowed a style of public discourse to develop in our time that is abrasive, strident and over the top; one that catches media headlines.

Mander agrees. “Ultra right discourse is making ideas of pluralism defensive and shaky. Hope is the odd guy like Sanders,” he adds. “We were made defensive about being secular and pro-poor in an earlier era. That has to stop.” A staunch believer in non-violence, he firmly stands against strident hyper-nationalism and militant religiosity in his own low-key way. “We have to forge a new narrative that is about loving your country differently.”

These are important ideas in a world where the media amplify the voices of shrill flag-waving, hyper-nationalists, from India and Pakistan to the US. Nuance is the biggest casualty in the polarised narrative perpetuated in the post-9/11 “you are either with us or against us” era.

In India, notes Mander, the election of Narendra Modi to power “represented a country deeply divided”. “If Modi was a statesman he’d have tried to heal – instead, he has made the divide wider and more indivisible,” says Mander who openly and courageously questions the Indian PM’s affiliations with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). A paradox of the flag-waving hyper nationalists in India is that the RSS had refused to fly the national flag in their own institutions, I learn.

However, the biggest, most profound division in India is that of poverty, not religion. “In between the divide, are the aspirational young,” notes Mander. With a million people joining the workforce every month, and every second Indian under 25, many latched on to Modi’s promise of ‘achey din’ (good days). Two years down, there is a growing realisation that “no one can deliver jobs at this scale unless there’s a different economic model.”

That model, suggests Mander, should focus “on fixing a broken education system from school to university, and building and expanding effective demand by ensuring that small amounts of money are in millions of hands, rather than relying on FDI and the middle class alone as engines of growth” rather than simply band-aiding it through skill development.

What he finds particularly troublesome is how the growing inequality is accompanied by indifference – we must “stop looking away”… from the unpalatable, the ugly, the poor. It’s about “public compassion,” he offers. These are ideas he explores in his just-published book titled, aptly, Looking Away – Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India. On the cover is a monochromatic photograph of a pair of feet – apparently lying on the footpath. He has brought a copy for me that I ask him to sign. He obliges and adds a note: “In celebration of a world of new solidarities”.

It’s only when I look at the photo on his book cover again that I notice the missing element – a gaping void where the big toe should be.

~ Beena Sarwar is a Pakistani journalist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also an editorial advisor at Himal Southasian.

Author Amardeep Singh shares a story from his travelogue. Photo: Beena Sarwar

“I experienced nothing but love in Pakistan,” says Amardeep Singh, author of the photo-illustrated travelogue “Lost Heritage – The Sikh Legacy In Pakistan”, published in January 2016 (Himalayan Books). 

He is also grateful to the Pakistan government for granting him a non-police reporting, 30-day, countrywide visa that enabled him to travel around the country with no restrictions.

Boston was the last leg of his hectic 10-day US-tour. He is now headed to the UK, where he has five speaking engagements — in London, Leicester and Birmingham — between June 22-26th, 2016.

Singh makes it a point of only speaking at events entirely organised by local community members who take care of his travel and stay. His US visit was made possible by a grant from Boston-based tech entrepreneur Dr Amar Sawhney, who also hosted Singh at his own home. Dr Sawhney’s mother, who was also present, is a Partition-survivor, born in what became Pakistan after 1947.

The Boston event was organised by friends from the local South Asian community — Umang Kumar, Hardeep Mann and Jaspal Singh. My role in the event was that I had connected Singh to them following our email correspondence. They managed to find the perfect venue — a book-lined room in the Encuentro 5 (e5), a collaborative project and space for progressive movement-building downtown, run by Massachusetts Global Action (MGA) and TecsChange: Technology for Social Change.

Animated Q&A session following the talk, at a well attended gathering (considering the holidays and beautiful day). Photo: Beena Sarwar

He urged audience members to make the trip and experience the country and people for themselves, beyond religious pilgrimages and organised tours. He himself is eager to return to Pakistan – this time, with his book.

Born in Gorakhpur, India in 1966, Singh is a Singapore-based former banker who has also lived and worked in Hong Kong. His own trip to Pakistan proved transformative, catalysing him to leave his 25-year career in the corporate world – most recently as head of revenue management at American Express credit cards in the Asia Pacific region — to pursue his passion for photography, travel and heritage.

“I did not go to write a book” – Singh in Boston. Photo: Beena Sarwar

Since the book’s publication, he has given over 40 presentations on his “labour of love” in various cities around India, besides Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Bradford.

After his upcoming UK tour, Singh will return to Singapore, then head to India for a well-deserved holiday with his family.

His motivation in traveling to Pakistan was initially to explore his father’s watan (homeland) and re-connect with his family’s past but he ended up making much wider and deeper connections beyond that.

He said he felt his month-long journey across Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Pakistan-administered Kashmir was driven by “an invisible force” that led to the weighty, 504-page coffee-table volume.

For details on the project, visit Singh’s website.

A sad, sad day. Rest in peace, Amjad Sabri, qawwal, shot dead in a target killing in Karachi today. Shortly afterwards, the young naat-khwan, Farhan Ali Waris escaped a murderous attack on his way home from a recording where he had in fact waiting for Amjad Sabri to join him.  A continuation of the trend of killing Shia and Ahmadi doctors for their faith, now musicians…? But Amjad Sabri was not just a ‘musician’.

He was the most famous of Pakistan’s qawwals – an exponent of the faith-based music that ‪#‎fasadis‬ consider haram. The extremist Saudi-inspired Wahabi mentality doesn’t like qawwali. Or Shias. Sabri represented both through his music (though he himself wasn’t Shia).

Qawwali is part of the uniquely Southasian syncretic Sufi culture through which Islam spread in the Indian subcontinent. It is a form of devotional music that transcends religion, touches hearts belonging to all faiths. Except cold hearts full of hate and bigotry. Uplifting, inspiring, transformative.

Here’s an old recording of what is possibly the group’s most famous qawwali (the start has a couple of seconds of audio glitch):

From a friend in London: “Tragic days for the world….a woman murdered here for her humanitarian causes and a man murdered there for his cultural traditions…. Nothing is sacred and no one is safe”.