Several prominent Indian journalists and writers
have visited Pakistan in recent years for the first time in their lives. I am
sharing with my readers selected excerpts of the reports from Mahanth Joishy
(USIndiaMonitor.com), Panakaj Mishra (Bloomberg), Hindol Sengupta (The Hindu),
Madhulika Sikka (NPR) and Yoginder Sikand (Countercurrents) of what they saw and
how they felt in the neighbor's home. My hope is that their stories will help
foster close ties between the two estranged South Asian
nations.
Mahanth S. Joishy, Editor, usindiamonitor.com
: (July, 2012)
Many of us travel for business or leisure. But few
ever take a trip that dramatically shatters their entire worldview of a country
and a people in one fell swoop. I was lucky enough to have returned from just
such a trip: a week-long sojourn in Pakistan.
It was a true eye-opener, and a thoroughly enjoyable
one at that. Many of the assumptions and feelings I had held toward the country
for nearly 30 years were challenged and exposed as wrong and even ignorant
outright.
The Western and Indian media feed us a steady
diet of stories about bomb blasts, gunfights, kidnappings, torture, subjugation
of women, dysfunctional government, and scary madrassa schools that are training
the next generation of jihadist terrorists…
Upon arrival in Karachi two uniformed bodyguards with
rifles who were exceedingly friendly and welcoming climbed onto the pickup truck
bed as we started on a 45-minute drive. I was impressed by the massive,
well-maintained parks and gardens surrounding the airport. I was also impressed
by the general cleanliness, the orderliness of the traffic, the quality of the
roads, and the greenery. Coming from a city government background, I was
surprised at how organized Karachi was throughout the ride. I also didn’t see
many beggars the entire way. I had just spent significant amounts of time in
two major Indian cities, Mumbai and Bangalore, as well as several second-tier
cities like Mangalore, and none would compare favorably on maintenance and city
planning, especially when it came to potholes and waste management. This was
the first surprise; I was expecting that piles of garbage and dirt would line
the roads and beggars would overflow onto the streets. Surely there is dirt and
poverty in Karachi, but far less than I was expecting. Karachi was also less
dense and crowded than India’s cities.
My second pleasant surprise was to see numerous large
development projects underway. I had read about
Pakistan’s
sluggish GDP growth and corruption in public works and foreign aid
disbursement. This may be true, but construction was going on all over the
place: new movie theaters, new malls, new skyscrapers, new roads, and entire new
neighborhoods being built from scratch. In this regard it was similar to India
and every other part of Asia I had seen recently: new development and rapid
change continues apace, something we are seeing less of in the West…
Lahore is more beautiful overall than Karachi or
any large Indian city I’ve seen. Serious effort has gone into keeping the city
green and preserving its storied history. Historians would have a field day
here. In particular we saw two stunning historic mosques, the
Wazir Khan and
the
Badshahi , both
of which should be considered treasures not only for Muslims, Pakistanis, or
South Asia, but for all of humanity. I felt it a crime that I’d never even
heard of either one. Each of them in different ways features breathtaking
architecture and intricate artwork comparable to India’s Taj Mahal. These are
must-see sights for any tourist to Lahore…
We did much more in Lahore. We were given a tour of
the renowned
Aitchison College ,
which one of my friends attended. This boys’ private prep school is known for
its difficult entrance exams, rigorous academic tradition, illustrious list of
alumni since the British founded the school, and gorgeous and impeccably
maintained 200-acre campus that puts most major universities including my own
Georgetown to shame. Aitchison has been considered one of the best prep schools
in the subcontinent since 1886…
Pankaj Mishra,
Bloomberg : (April, 2012)
...I also saw much in this recent visit that did not
conform to the main Western narrative for South Asia -- one in which India is
steadily rising and Pakistan rapidly collapsing.
Born of certain geopolitical
needs and exigencies, this vision was always most useful to those who have built
up India as an investment destination and a strategic counterweight to China,
and who have sought to bribe and cajole Pakistan’s military-intelligence
establishment into the war on terrorism.
Seen through the narrow lens of the
West’s security and economic interests, the great internal contradictions and
tumult within these two large nation-states disappear. In the Western view, the
credit-fueled consumerism among the Indian middle class appears a much bigger
phenomenon than the extraordinary Maoist uprising in Central India.
Traveling
through Pakistan, I realized how much my own knowledge of the country -- its
problems as well as prospects -- was partial, defective or simply useless.
Certainly, truisms about the general state of crisis were not hard to
corroborate. Criminal gangs shot rocket-propelled grenades at each other and the
police in Karachi’s Lyari neighborhood. Shiite Hazaras were being assassinated
in Balochistan every day. Street riots broke out in several places over severe
power shortages -- indeed, the one sound that seemed to unite the country was
the groan of diesel generators, helping the more affluent Pakistanis cope with
early summer heat.
In this eternally air-conditioned Pakistan, meanwhile,
there exist fashion shows, rock bands, literary festivals, internationally
prominent writers, Oscar-winning filmmakers and the bold anchors of a lively new
electronic media. This is the glamorously liberal country upheld by
English-speaking Pakistanis fretting about their national image in the West
(some of them might have been gratified by the runaway success of Hello
magazine’s first Pakistani edition last week).
But much less conspicuous and
more significant, other signs of a society in rapid socioeconomic and political
transition abounded. The elected parliament is about to complete its five- year
term -- a rare event in Pakistan -- and its amendments to the constitution have
taken away some, if not all, of the near- despotic prerogatives of the
president’s office…
After radically increasing the size of the consumerist
middle class to 30 million, Pakistan’s formal economy, which grew only 2.4
percent in 2011, currently presents a dismal picture. But the informal sector of
the economy, which spreads across rural and urban areas, is creating what the
architect and social scientist Arif Hasan calls Pakistan’s “unplanned
revolution.” Karachi, where a mall of Dubai-grossness recently erupted near the
city’s main beach, now boasts “a First World economy and sociology, but with a
Third World wage and political structure.”
Even in Lyari, Karachi’s diseased
old heart, where young gangsters with Kalashnikovs lurked in the alleys,
billboards vended quick proficiency in information technology and the English
language. Everywhere, in the Salt Range in northwestern Punjab as well as the
long corridor between Lahore and Islamabad, were gated housing colonies, private
colleges, fast-food restaurants and other markers of Pakistan’s breakneck
suburbanization....
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