Benazir was No Suu Kyi

Over the last few months, even steadfast supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi were questioning her decision to keep her party, the NLD from participating in Burma’s first elections in 20 years. However flawed the vote, the argument went, it offered a tiny window of opportunity for democratic-minded parties to get a foothold in Burma’s political life, and Ms. Suu Kyi should have seized it.

Ms. Suu Kyi’s party even split on this question.

Burma’s military regime introduced new election laws in March making it mandatory for political parties to register for the elections. Parties with members who had been convicted could not register unless they expelled those members. Suu Kyi had been convicted for violating the terms of her house arrest after an American swam to her Yangon lakeside home, where she was under house arrest, and stayed for two days before swimming back.

Ms. Suu Kyi faced two choices: stand down from the party so that it could contest the elections, or disband the NLD. She chose the latter. The decision was opposed by some members of the party who left and formed another party and fielded candidates in the election.

The international community too was somewhat disappointed that Ms. Suu Kyi had decided to forego pragmatism in her dogged and principled resistance to the junta. In the last few years, the campaign to have the Nobel Laureate released was flagging. The international community has been eager to do business with Burma, rich in all kinds of resources including minerals and natural gas. China got an early foothold, Pakistan followed, India did not want to be left behind.

The ASEAN community, never big on democracy activism, was also suffering from Suu Kyi fatigue. The U.S and Europe imposed sanctions in the 1990s, but they hurt the Burmese more than the junta. Plus, the U.S made exceptions to the sanctions.

It would have been convenient for the world’s conscience had Ms. Suu Kyi relented, and agreed to fight the elections that were held earlier this month under the junta’s thumb. But this simple longi-clad woman, shut away by the junta, remained unrelenting.

If only Ms. Suu Kyi had been a Benazir Bhutto, those tired interlocutors might have thought as they burnt the air miles between world capitals and Yangon in their efforts to have her freed.

Common factors

After all, there is so much in common between the two. Both were daughters of national leaders, born into privilege, educated in liberal political traditions. Both lost their fathers to the military’s machinations in their respective countries. Ms. Suu Kyi and Benazir both took their countries by storm when they returned home in the 1980s.

But the similarities end there. Benazir was a pragmatist. Helped by the U.S and the U.K, Benazir entered into negotiations with General Musharraf, to return to political life in Pakistan.

The General passed an ordinance that shut the files on corruption cases against her, and her husband Zardari. In return, Benazir assisted Gen. Musharraf’s November 2007 re-election as President.

The expectation was that she and Gen. Musharraf would rule Pakistan together, she as the Prime Minister and he as President. That would have eased the world’s conscience as it supported a military ruler seen by the West as essential to its plans in the region. He had become extremely unpopular in Pakistan but Benazir’s democratic credentials were to come to his and the world’s rescue.

That the rest of the script did not work out exactly in the way either side desired is another story. The deal with Gen. Musharraf was also not Benazir’s first compromise with the khakis. Even as Ms. Suu Kyi was spending her first year under house arrest in 1989, Benazir had decided that capitulation was the better part of valour, when it came to dealing with the Pakistan Army. Despite this, she was sacked in 1990, the Army playing a direct role in it. Re-elected in 1993, she went along with the military’s proxy war in Kashmir and its backing to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In 1999, Ms. Suu Kyi’s husband died of cancer in the U.K. She had refused the junta’s permission to go and see him in his last days as it was clear she would not be allowed to return. That same year, Benazir left Pakistan to live in self-imposed exile in Dubai and London as the corruption cases against her began to pile up.

Benazir preferred to speak of her arrangement with Gen. Musharraf, worked out over two years, as a process of “reconciliation” and a “transition to democracy”. When questioned about it after her return to Pakistan in October 2007, she pointed to how she had extracted from him the promise that he would become a civilian president by the end of that year. As for the criminal charges against her, she dismissed them as having no basis and being politically motivated. She was certainly able to bargain for more concessions from Gen. Musharraf as his troubles grew through that year.

On the birth anniversary of its leader, the PPP instituted a new prize called the Benazir Peace Prize, and the first recipient was none other than Ms. Suu Kyi. The irony of it was lost on the party. In the PPP’s mythology, Benazir was the greatest democrat in the world and her killing only vindicated this.

Would it have been better for Burma and Ms. Suu Kyi had she done a Benazir-like deal with Senior General Than Shwe, aided perhaps by India and China? Politics, is after all, the art of the possible. Would the NLD not have fared better, had she allowed it to contest the elections, as compared to the pro-democracy parties that participated only to be wiped out by the pro-junta parties? Her boycott helped to expose the vote for the sham it was, but in the process, did she lose an opportunity to fight the system from within?

The answers can perhaps be found in Pakistan, where despite the transition to democracy, an illusion of people’s rule barely covers the reality of military dominance. The PPP holds the elected offices, but those who hold these offices know the limits of their powers.

Gen. Musharraf’s infamous National Reconciliation Ordinance which wiped out the corruption charges against Benazir left a bad taste in the mouths of most-right thinking people, and was hardly a mechanism for political reconciliation, as subsequent events have shown. It left Benazir’s and the PPP’s reputation in tatters. Had Benazir lived, she would have no doubt made the accommodations with the military necessary for her government’s survival. But she was killed, and her party holds the same people with whom she negotiated her re-entry to Pakistan responsible for her death.

Perhaps then, the question to ask is how different it might have been for Benazir and Pakistan had she done a Suu Kyi.

“O God! If I Worship You for Fear of Hell, Burn Me in Hell”

More interesting than her absolute asceticism, however, is the actual concept of divine love that Rabia introduced. She was the first to introduce the idea that God should be loved for God’s own sake, not out of fear—as earlier sufis had done.

She taught that repentance was a gift from God because no one could repent unless God had already accepted him and given him this gift of repentance. She taught that sinners must fear the punishment they deserved for their sins, but she also offered such sinners far more hope of paradise than most other ascetics did. For herself, she held to a higher ideal, worshipping God neither from fear of hell nor from hope of paradise, for she saw such self-interest as unworthy of God’s servants; emotions like fear and hope were like veils—i.e. hindrances to the vision of God himself.

She prayed: “O God! If I worship You for fear of hell, burn me in hell, and if I worship You in hope of paradise, exclude me from paradise. But if I worship You for your own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.”

Rabia was in her early eighties when she died, having followed the mystic way to the end. She believed she was continually united with God. As she told her Sufi friends, “My beloved is always with me” She died in Jerusalem in 185 AH.

Philosophy
She was the one who first set forth the doctrine of divine love and who is widely considered to be the most important of the early Sufi poets. The definitive work on her life and writing was a small treatise (written as a Master’s Thesis) over 50 years ago by Margaret Smith .
Much of the poetry that is attributed to her is of unknown origin. After a life of hardship she spontaneously achieved a state of self-realization. When asked by Sheikh Hasan al-Basri how she discovered the secret, she responded by stating:
“You know of the how, but I know of the how-less.”

One of the many myths that surround her life is that she was freed from slavery because her master saw her praying while surrounded by light, realized that she was a saint and feared for his life if he continued to keep her as a slave.

While she apparently received many marriage offers (including a proposal from Hasan al-Basri himself), she remained celibate and died of old age, an ascetic, her only care from the disciples who followed her. She was the first in a long line of female Sufi mystics.
It is also possible that she helped further integrate Islamic slaves into Muslim society. Because of her time spent in slavery early in life, Rabi’a was passionate against all forms of it. She even refused a slave later in life, despite her heightened spiritual status.

Anecdotes
• One day, she was seen running through the streets of Basra carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When asked what she was doing, she said, “I want to put out the fires of hell, and burn down the rewards of paradise. They block the way to God. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of God.”

o In his Life of St Louis, Jean de Joinville reports this story of a woman, but no name or religious affiliation is given to the woman, and the report appears to be contemporary (when in fact Joinville lived three centuries after Rabia).

• At one occasion she was asked if she hated Satan. Hazrat Rabia replied: “My love to God has so possessed me that no place remains for loving or hating any save Him.”

• When Hazrat Rabia would not come to attend the sermons of Hazrat Hasan Basri, he would deliver no discourse that day. People in the audience asked him why he did that. He replied: “The syrup that is held by the vessels meant for the elephants cannot be contained in the vessels meant for the ants.”

• Once Hazrat Rabia was on her way to Makka, and when half-way there she saw the Kaba coming to meet her. She said, “It is the Lord of the house whom I need, what have I to do with the house? I need to meet with Him who said, ‘Who approaches Me by a span’s length I will approach him by the length of a cubit.’ The Kaba which I see has no power over me; what joy does the beauty of the Ka’ba bring to me?”

Israel: Asset or Liability?

by Ambassador Charles Freeman

Is Israel a strategic asset or liability for the United States?   Interesting question.  We must thank the Nixon Center for asking it.  In my view, there are many reasons for Americans to wish the Jewish state well.  Under current circumstances, strategic advantage for the United States is not one of them. If we were to reverse the question, however, and to ask whether the United States is a strategic asset or liability for Israel, there would be no doubt about the answer.

American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25 percent of Israel’s defense budget (depending on how you calculate this).  Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products.  Uniquely, Israeli companies are treated like American companies for purposes of U.S. defense procurement.  Thanks to congressional earmarks, we also often pay half the costs of special Israeli research and development projects, even when – as in the case of defense against very short-range unguided missiles — the technology being developed is essentially irrelevant to our own military requirements.  In short, in many ways, American taxpayers fund jobs in Israel’s military industries that could have gone to our own workers and companies.  Meanwhile, Israel gets pretty much whatever it wants in terms of our top-of-the-line weapons systems, and we pick up the tab.

Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel total over $140 billion since 1949. This makes Israel by far the largest recipient of American giveaways since World War II.  The total would be much higher if aid to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and support for Palestinians in refugee camps and the occupied territories were included.  These programs have complex purposes but are justified in large measure in terms of their contribution to the security of the Jewish state. 

Per capita income in Israel is now about $37,000 — on a par with the UK.  Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it.  Annual U.S. government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren’t available to any other foreign country. 

These military and economic benefits are not the end of the story.  The American government also works hard to shield Israel from the international political and legal consequences of its policies and actions in the occupied territories, against its neighbors, or – most recently – on the high seas.  The nearly 40 vetoes the United States has cast to protect Israel in the UN Security Council are the tip of iceberg.   We have blocked a vastly larger number of potentially damaging reactions to Israeli behavior by the international community.  The political costs to the United States internationally of having to spend our political capital in this way are huge.

Where Israel has no diplomatic relations, U.S. diplomats routinely make its case for it.   As I know from personal experience (having been thanked by the then Government of Israel for my successful efforts on Israel’s behalf in Africa), the U.S. government has been a consistent promoter and often the funder of various forms of Israeli programs of cooperation with other countries.  It matters also that America – along with a very few other countries – has remained morally committed to the Jewish experiment with a state in the Middle East.  Many more Jews live in America than in Israel.  Resolute American support should be an important offset to the disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented security and prosperity.

Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us.  Yet it’s pretty much taboo in the United States to ask what’s in it for Americans.   I can’t imagine why. Still, the question I’ve been asked to address today is just that: what’s in it — and not in it — for us to do all these things for Israel.

We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning.  It began with President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to personal sentiment and political expediency.  We had an arms embargo on Israel until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater.   In 1973, for reasons peculiar to the Cold War, we had to come to the rescue of Israel as it battled Egypt.  The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly.   And then there’s all the time we’ve put into the perpetually ineffectual and now long defunct “peace process.”

Still the US-Israel relationship has had strategic consequences.  There is no reason to doubt the consistent testimony of the architects of major acts of anti-American terrorism about what motivates them to attack us.   In the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus “the American people  … on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people ….” As Osama Bin Laden, purporting to speak for the world’s Muslims, has said again and again: “we have . . .  stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of ourdisagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine ….”  Some substantial portion of the many lives and the trillions of dollars we have so far expended in our escalating conflict with the Islamic world must be apportioned to the costs of our relationship with Israel.

It’s useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us.  In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders.  They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations.  They help recruit others to our coalitions.  They coordinate their foreign aid with ours.   Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with “host nation support” that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory.  They store weapons for our troops’, rather than their own troops’ use.  They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.

Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them.  Perhaps it can’t.  It is so estranged from everyone else in the Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it.  Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection.  It has no allies other than us.  It has developed no friends.  Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others.  Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole.  The notion that Israeli taxpayers might help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even those undertaken at Israel’s behest, would be greeted with astonishment in Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill. 

Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational concepts.  But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel that was initially proposed y our men and women in uniform.  All originated with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf.  Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.

Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air.  It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses.  There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that.  Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat.  Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study.  Israel’s army, however, has had lessons to impart.  Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan.  Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns.  These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious.  Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not.   I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify. 

It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the money and weapons to fight them on its own.  Leave aside the question of whether Israel’s battles are or should also be America’s.  It is no longer true that Israel does not ask us to fight for it.   The fact that prominent American apologists for Israel were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq does not, of course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure.  But the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran explicitly to protect Israel and to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.  Their advocacy is fully coordinated with the Government of Israel.  No one in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country pressing Americans to go to war over this. 

Finally, the need to protect Israel from mounting international indignation about its behavior continues to do grave damage to our global and regional standing.  It has severely impaired our ties with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.  These costs to our international influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the economic and other burdens of the relationship. 

Against this background, it’s remarkable that something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States.   Perhaps it’s just that as someone once said: “people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.”  Be that as it may, the United States and Israel have a lot invested in our relationship.  Basing our cooperation on a thesis and narratives that will not withstand scrutiny is dangerous.  It is especially risky in the context of current fiscal pressures in the United States.  These seem certain soon to force major revisions of both current levels of American defense spending and global strategy, in the Middle East as well as elsewhere.  They also place federally-funded programs in Israel in direct competition with similar programs here at home.  To flourish over the long term, Israel’s relations with the United States need to be grounded in reality, not myth, and in peace, not war.

Thailand Has the Highest HIV Rate in SE Asia

Health experts in Thailand say the odds are stacked against them in combating one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in Asia, with only 2 percent of the country’s AIDS budget going on condoms.

“The belief is that it is the responsibility of the people who want to buy sex that they have to protect themselves,” said a senior member of Thailand’s Department of Disease Control’s Anti-AIDS Division. “But when they get infected, then it’s the government’s responsibility. It’s silly.”

The only Southeast Asian country with an HIV prevalence of more than 1 percent, Thailand’s earlier success at containing its epidemic has stagnated. With 481,770 HIV infected people already living in the kingdom, there are more than 10,000 new HIV infections every year, according to the UN’s 2010 report from the General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS.

The most-at-risk groups are injecting drug users and men who have sex with men (MSM), but this infection trend is broadening to include couples in committed relationships where condoms will never be the norm, said Steve Kraus, director of the UNAIDS regional Asia and Pacific support team.

Thailand’s Epidemic Model has projected that more than one-third of new HIV infections in 2010 in Thailand will occur in long-term relationships and 7 percent from risky sex.

Despite these figures indicating that the epidemic is shifting to the general population, most of the government’s US$775,000 condom marketing and distribution budget continues to target commercial sex workers.

“Thailand thinks there are enough condoms easily available and affordable in the market, and they don’t see the need for providing them,” UNAIDS country coordinator for Thailand stated.

Visiting Karachi After 12 Years

Twelve years ago, I arrived in London from Karachi with eight suitcases, a new wife and a three-year job contract. Before leaving for London, we had put our books, furniture and even some of our kitchen utensils at our relatives’ houses. When I told my friends and family that we would be back after exactly three years, they gave us a knowing smile and encouraged us to sell that sofa instead of putting it in their store room.

Two months from now, we are planning to return to Karachi with a container full of furniture, more pots and pans than we left behind and a 10-year-old son. Friends and family in Pakistan are aghast. From London to Karachi? Why are you coming to Karachi? Do you know what happened to Sana’s friend the other day? Do you have any idea how you’ll live without electricity for 10 hours every day? And, by the way, have you discussed this with Channan? How does he feel about it?

I will return to Sana’s friend’s plight and my own plans for living without electricity later, but let’s deal with the Channan question first. It’s a heart-wrenching one. He was born in Chelsea and Westminster hospital. He goes to a Church of England school in south London where he is the self-styled star of the school cricket club. His school people are divine, and not because of the church connection. His trumpet teacher has finally managed to get him into a school concert. His closest friends live in the neighbourhood. Obviously, he doesn’t want any of that to change.

It doesn’t help that we have had a Pakistani news channel turned on round the clock during the past year because of one crisis after another in Pakistan. When he sees a news report about another bomb blast and the news presenters giving graphic details about how the police found the severed head of the suicide bomber, he gives us that “are-we-still-going?” look. His questions are genuine, tinged by a 10-year-old’s emotional pull. My responses come partly from parental responsibility, partly from yearning for the Karachi sea breeze. Lately I have added a new, rather self-serving, argument to my discourse: If London is so much safer than Karachi, how come kids your age are being knifed every day?

He has been to Pakistan every year and that is where he has learned cricket and his cool dance moves. We only have to be in my village in Pakistan for half an hour and there are a dozen boys his age shouting at him to bowl faster and keep his bat down. It doesn’t take him long to find playmates and make friends. Recently he has also visited some of his best friends from south London who have moved to Pakistan during the last couple of years, made new best friends and settled into schools that are more challenging and even more fun. Even his uber-nerd friend, who will be called S for reasons of privacy, has a girlfriend. And during our house hunt he saw a house that had a little swimming pool, which seems to have brought about a considerable change in his attitude. Our conversations have shifted from, “Why are we going?” to “I’ll only move if we get that house”. But how can we justify filling a swimming pool when most of our neighbourhood doesn’t have running water? He strikes another bargain. “Can I have a TV in my room?” Failing which, “I’ll only go if we get the latest Mario Kart game for Nintendo Wii because everyone in Karachi has it.”

Everyone in Karachi has a personal crime story to share. Advertising executive Arif had his iPhone snatched at gunpoint – at a traffic light as a police squad looked on. Jimmy’s sister was driven around the city by robbers and made to take money out of cash points across Karachi. Raja’s colleague went on a blind date a month ago and hasn’t come back; his family has not even received a ransom note. And these are all middle-class professionals with two cars and five servants per household. But what people don’t need to remind me is that Karachi is a city of 16 million people, where even the poor are robbed in broad daylight at gunpoint, where robbers, when caught, are burned alive. And those who cannot be robbed are made to stand in day-long queues to buy flour. Everyday crime in Karachi is only slightly higher than in Bombay and slightly less than Rio. Twelve years ago, when I left Karachi, people were being kidnapped for a few thousand rupees. Everybody’s cousin had been robbed at gunpoint. Carjacking was rampant. Even an obscure journalist like me had a gangster or two stalking him. So no change there then – a phrase I have learned in London and come to like.

But the city couldn’t have stayed frozen in time for my return. So, of course, there is a new texture. There is the urban legend of the suicide bomber who gets a lift from a family in a car, asks them to drive around looking for a target, all the while trying to convince them that they will go to heaven with him. He fails to find a target and the car runs out of fuel. As the bomber leaves them, the head of the family tells him that if he wants to carry out God’s mission he should at least learn to drive. Another discernible difference between then and now is that they didn’t use to snatch mobile phones at gunpoint. One reason for that could be that hardly anyone had a mobile phone back then.

More learned friends constantly remind me of something called the myth of return. I have been told many times that the place I want to return to doesn’t exist any more. But during the 12 years that I have lived and worked in London, I have also seen eroded the conventional myth that people come to London for better lives. Increasingly people, especially people with young children, are heading back home, in search of better schools, cheaper domestic help and sometimes, because of a vague feeling of duty, to partake of the suffering of the people of the country they left behind, sometimes out of an acute sense of nostalgia.

Neither does the London that I came to exist any more. When I came to London, Labour had just swept into power. Tony Blair’s grin symbolised a nation’s sunny mood. A pint cost a pound. Broadsheets were broadsheets and tabloids were tabloids. And men with beards were just hairy freaks, not a threat to the existence of western civilisation. As I prepare to leave, we have a mayor whose first priority is to ban drinking on public transport. Some would say that should be reason enough to leave London. But as a citizen of the world, I feel that one can’t find happiness in the same city after a decade. I have already overstayed my welcome.

London and Karachi: both are cities of my imagination, made real only through mortgages, the price of a meal and quality of domestic help. After a decade in London, Karachi appears to have some very obvious advantages: no one ever talks about the weather. Working actors are rarely out of work. There are more television channels than trained journalists.

And wouldn’t you agree that there is something quite primal about life without electricity? It’s not as apocalyptic as it sounds. If I go without air conditioning for a few hours, what will happen? If the fridge doesn’t work, you can always go out and eat. You can always read in candlelight. And when all else fails, you can do what every one else does: buy your own generator. If you want to do your bit to reduce pollution levels, you can buy a generator that runs on natural gas.

For most of our 12 years in London, the only violence we have seen has been restricted to aggressive bouts of tennis on Wii. But, increasingly, I find myself reading stories about kids being stabbed. Channan insists that they are teenagers, not 10-year-olds and he has no patience for detail. I saw an advert recently, which said that if you carry a knife you are more likely to be stabbed. Every day I count my kitchen knives after dropping him to school.

I asked Channan the identity question once, a term that seems to have been invented basically to make life more difficult for people with a different colour or accent, and easier for privileged PhD students short on dissertation ideas. This was a time when he was creative enough to invent words if he didn’t know one. He said that he was a Londoni. Although I wasn’t born in Karachi, I always call myself a Karachiite because that’s where I found love and work and the sea. So if a Karachiite can live in London for more than a decade, surely a Londoni can be a Karachiite.

And did I tell you what happened to Sana’s friend? She got stuck in a beauty parlour for six hours with no electricity and a generator failure and almost missed her own engagement ceremony. I guess I am not going to have that problem at least.

The Indian Media Continues to Ignore Kashmir

Across India, there is a bonding of searing pain, especially in its northern and eastern peripheries. The hurt and tumult envelops families and communities in a shroud of despair, whether it is in the Northeast, Jammu and Kashmir or earlier in Punjab.

It has its roots in a political definition articulated by regional non-state groups (armed and civil society) that posits ‘mainland’ India as the ‘other’. The political challenge to the state, backed by armed revolt, has not been crushed despite deploying the army and paramilitary forces for over 50 years in the Northeast, and in Kashmir for over two decades. It appears to have been successful in Punjab but at an unacceptable cost. India truly has been at war with itself—locked with adversaries who have refused to blink or budge for the most part—but that appears to be changing.

This is different from the groundswell of anger which has spread in central India as well as parts of Maharashtra, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. The Maoist campaign has grown from an acute frustration at the lack of delivery on promises, from bad government and governance, from the system’s failure to provide basic health, education and livelihood opportunities 63 years after independence. The focus here is more on inequity and ineptitude of the state than on sovereignty. It should be clearly recognised that the politics of J&K and the Northeast have little or nothing to do with issues of underdevelopment that drive the Maoist agenda. The country’s media misses and messes this up time after time because they don’t have a memory of even contemporary history, forget what happened a century ago.

It could be argued though that poor basic services and slothful, insensitive and corrupt administration have aggravated the political crisis both in the Northeast and Kashmir. This is often where the media fails to make the connection—insurgency and bad governance are part of the same coin, the same story—and often misses the point that lack of services exacerbates alienation. These are the kind of stories that must be leadership-driven, by editors of vision and perspective. For that, you need the kind of determined editors represented by the ilk of B.G. Verghese and P. Sainath. There aren’t many of them around.

The challenge in the Northeast—once India’s primary security threat—has abated in the past decades. On the ground, group after group, tired of unrelenting security pressure and living on the run, have opted for a cessation of hostilities or opened negotiations. The earlier power and romance when they even enjoyed some popular support is truly a thing of the past. Corruption has seeped into the core of their existence, a condition rarely reflected by the media. This is not to discount their capacity to re-emerge because of the Indian state’s ineptness and failure to take political advantage of favourable conditions. Few in the media reflect on this at any depth, for want of space, time or interest or all three.

On the other side, the men in uniform and government officials wonder why the media focuses on them and not the ‘anti-national activities’ of those opposed to the idea of India.

Amid this, the changing nature of conflicts is overlooked. There seems to be a tacit understanding within groups and civil society that an agreement assuring great political power within the Indian Union is better than no agreement i.e. a constitutional settlement, which till recently was anathema.

But the media, especially television, with its desperation for trp ratings (which for the most part are fudged anyway), is totally inconsistent and uncommitted to following up such issues in a sustained manner. Instead, it gives the impression of being a bull in a china shop with noisy, celebrity anchors and breathless reporters.
Thus, whenever the media raises the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which empowers soldiers to kill on suspicion and still not be prosecuted for murder, the discourse often focuses on an individual or the most visible sights of protest in Manipur. These discussions and the articles should have taken place and been written over the years. Too much is taken for granted: the metro media has made the mistake of focusing primarily on AFSPA as in Kashmir, forgetting that the act has been in place in the Northeast for over 50 years and that for most part of the decades where other parts of India had awoken “to light and freedom”, people in this region were being shaken by midnight knocks, destruction of homes, granaries and villages. Even basic facts are not stressed—for instance, in areas of maximum unrest in Kashmir, it is not the army that’s been deployed but the state police backed by central paramilitary forces. Indeed, our focus is limited; our viagra is the immediate, not the consequences or the sustainability of the story.

Yet, in the Northeast, the media’s fractured credibility would still be higher than the government or underground organisations. The reason for this is simple. Time and again, especially in Manipur and Assam, journalists have been the target of arbitrary killing and intimidation by armed non-state groups for their courage in speaking, writing and representing the truth. As far as the state is concerned, what it seeks to hide is extensive and devious—whether it is the atrocities committed under AFSPA or other legislation. Its credibility or otherwise is not helped, for example, when a group of reporters in Assam band together to write a stunning expose of the secret killings of relatives of ULFA members during the regime of Prafulla Mahanta.

That’s why while AFSPA must go, it represents just one challenge. This law reflects impunity, built into the system and mindsets of those who rule, and we have been inept at covering both. Unless we understand that, we’ll get the story wrong and keep talking about street fights when the battles are elsewhere.

Kashmir’s Fruits of Discord: Arundhati Roy

A week before he was elected in 2008, President Obama said that solving the dispute over Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination — which has led to three wars between India and Pakistan since 1947 — would be among his “critical tasks.” His remarks were greeted with consternation in India, and he has said almost nothing about Kashmir since then.

But during his visit to India, he pleased his hosts immensely by saying the United States would not intervene in Kashmir and announcing his support for India’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. While he spoke eloquently about threats of terrorism, he kept quiet about human rights abuses in Kashmir.

Whether Mr. Obama decides to change his position on Kashmir again depends on several factors: how the war in Afghanistan is going, how much help the United States needs from Pakistan and whether the government of India goes aircraft shopping this winter. (An order for 10 Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, worth $5.8 billion, among other huge business deals in the pipeline, may ensure the president’s silence.) But neither Mr. Obama’s silence nor his intervention is likely to make the people in Kashmir drop the stones in their hands.

I was in Kashmir 10 days ago, in that beautiful valley on the Pakistani border, home to three great civilizations — Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. It’s a valley of myth and history. Some believe that Jesus died there; others that Moses went there to find the lost tribe. Millions worship at the Hazratbal shrine, where a few days a year a hair of the Prophet Muhammad is displayed to believers.

Now Kashmir, caught between the influence of militant Islam from Pakistan and Afghanistan, America’s interests in the region and Indian nationalism (which is becoming increasingly aggressive and “Hinduized”), is considered a nuclear flash point. It is patrolled by more than half a million soldiers and has become the most highly militarized zone in the world.

The atmosphere on the highway between Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, and my destination, the little apple town of Shopian in the south, was tense. Groups of soldiers were deployed along the highway, in the orchards, in the fields, on the rooftops and outside shops in the little market squares. Despite months of curfew, the “stone pelters” calling for “azadi” (freedom), inspired by the Palestinian intifada, were out again. Some stretches of the highway were covered with so many of these stones that you needed an S.U.V. to drive over them.

Fortunately the friends I was with knew alternative routes down the back lanes and village roads. The “longcut” gave me the time to listen to their stories of this year’s uprising. The youngest, still a boy, told us that when three of his friends were arrested for throwing stones, the police pulled out their fingernails — every nail, on both hands.

For three years in a row now, Kashmiris have been in the streets, protesting what they see as India’s violent occupation. But the militant uprising against the Indian government that began with the support of Pakistan 20 years ago is in retreat. The Indian Army estimates that there are fewer than 500 militants operating in the Kashmir Valley today. The war has left 70,000 dead and tens of thousands debilitated by torture. Many, many thousands have “disappeared.” More than 200,000 Kashmiri Hindus have fled the valley. Though the number of militants has come down, the number of Indian soldiers deployed remains undiminished.

But India’s military domination ought not to be confused with a political victory. Ordinary people armed with nothing but their fury have risen up against the Indian security forces. A whole generation of young people who have grown up in a grid of checkpoints, bunkers, army camps and interrogation centers, whose childhood was spent witnessing “catch and kill” operations, whose imaginations are imbued with spies, informers, “unidentified gunmen,” intelligence operatives and rigged elections, has lost its patience as well as its fear. With an almost mad courage, Kashmir’s young have faced down armed soldiers and taken back their streets. Since April, when the army killed three civilians and then passed them off as “terrorists,” masked stone throwers, most of them students, have brought life in Kashmir to a grinding halt. The Indian government has retaliated with bullets, curfew and censorship. Just in the last few months, 111 people have been killed, most of them teenagers; more than 3,000 have been wounded and 1,000 arrested.

But still they come out, the young, and throw stones. They don’t seem to have leaders or belong to a political party. They represent themselves. And suddenly the second-largest standing army in the world doesn’t quite know what to do. The Indian government doesn’t know whom to negotiate with. And many Indians are slowly realizing they have been lied to for decades. The once solid consensus on Kashmir suddenly seems a little fragile.

I WAS in a bit of trouble the morning we drove to Shopian. A few days earlier, at a public meeting in Delhi, I said that Kashmir was disputed territory and, contrary to the Indian government’s claims, it couldn’t be called an “integral” part of India. Outraged politicians and news anchors demanded that I be arrested for sedition. The government, terrified of being seen as “soft,” issued threatening statements, and the situation escalated. Day after day, on prime-time news, I was being called a traitor, a white-collar terrorist and several other names reserved for insubordinate women. But sitting in that car on the road to Shopian, listening to my friends, I could not bring myself to regret what I had said in Delhi.

We were on our way to visit a man called Shakeel Ahmed Ahangar. The previous day he had come all the way to Srinagar, where I had been staying, to press me, with an urgency that was hard to ignore, to visit Shopian.

I first met Shakeel in June 2009, only a few weeks after the bodies of Nilofar, his 22-year-old wife, and Asiya, his 17-year-old sister, were found lying a thousand yards apart in a shallow stream in a high-security zone — a floodlit area between army and state police camps. The first postmortem report confirmed rape and murder. But then the system kicked in. New autopsy reports overturned the initial findings and, after the ugly business of exhuming the bodies, rape was ruled out. It was declared that in both cases the cause of death was drowning. Protests shut Shopian down for 47 days, and the valley was convulsed with anger for months. Eventually it looked as though the Indian government had managed to defuse the crisis. But the anger over the killings has magnified the intensity of this year’s uprising.

Shakeel wanted us to visit him in Shopian because he was being threatened by the police for speaking out, and hoped our visit would demonstrate that people even outside of Kashmir were looking out for him, that he was not alone.

It was apple season in Kashmir and as we approached Shopian we could see families in their orchards, busily packing apples into wooden crates in the slanting afternoon light. I worried that a couple of the little red-cheeked children who looked so much like apples themselves might be crated by mistake. The news of our visit had preceded us, and a small knot of people were waiting on the road.

Shakeel’s house is on the edge of the graveyard where his wife and sister are buried. It was dark by the time we arrived, and there was a power failure. We sat in a semicircle around a lantern and listened to him tell the story we all knew so well. Other people entered the room. Other terrible stories poured out, ones that are not in human rights reports, stories about what happens to women who live in remote villages where there are more soldiers than civilians. Shakeel’s young son tumbled around in the darkness, moving from lap to lap. “Soon he’ll be old enough to understand what happened to his mother,” Shakeel said more than once.

Just when we rose to leave, a messenger arrived to say that Shakeel’s father-in-law — Nilofar’s father — was expecting us at his home. We sent our regrets; it was late and if we stayed longer it would be unsafe for us to drive back.

Minutes after we said goodbye and crammed ourselves into the car, a friend’s phone rang. It was a journalist colleague of his with news for me: “The police are typing up the warrant. She’s going to be arrested tonight.” We drove in silence for a while, past truck after truck being loaded with apples. “It’s unlikely,” my friend said finally. “It’s just psy-ops.”

But then, as we picked up speed on the highway, we were overtaken by a car full of men waving us down. Two men on a motorcycle asked our driver to pull over. I steeled myself for what was coming. A man appeared at the car window. He had slanting emerald eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard that went halfway down his chest. He introduced himself as Abdul Hai, father of the murdered Nilofar.

“How could I let you go without your apples?” he said. The bikers started loading two crates of apples into the back of our car. Then Abdul Hai reached into the pockets of his worn brown cloak, and brought out an egg. He placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it. And then he placed another in my other hand. The eggs were still warm. “God bless and keep you,” he said, and walked away into the dark. What greater reward could a writer want?

I wasn’t arrested that night. Instead, in what is becoming a common political strategy, officials outsourced their displeasure to the mob. A few days after I returned home, the women’s wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the right-wing Hindu nationalist opposition) staged a demonstration outside my house, calling for my arrest. Television vans arrived in advance to broadcast the event live. The murderous Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu group that, in 2002, spearheaded attacks against Muslims in Gujarat in which more than a thousand people were killed, have announced that they are going to “fix” me with all the means at their disposal, including by filing criminal charges against me in different courts across the country.

Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don’t understand the subversive strength of warm, boiled eggs.

Kidnapping Has Become a Lucrative Business in Pakistan

Kidnapping for ransom is fast becoming a lucrative business in Pakistan; it has become commonplace in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially Peshawar.

The worst affected are businessmen. The kidnappers pick people and demand huge amounts for their release. In the past, the kidnapped people were usually taken to tribal areas, but now the criminals have become so bold that they keep their captives in the same localities and strike deals somewhere else.

People are of the opinion that some elements in police are hand in glove with the kidnappers. Otherwise, the frequency would not have been so high, they feel. Complaints about non-registration of kidnapping cases are common. Police usually dodge people and hardly register their complaints in the Roznamcha (register).

A large number of people belonging to a cross section of society, including diplomats, doctors, students, educationists, engineers, artists, journalists, businessmen and activists of peace bodies have been kidnapped and some of them are still missing. About 450 businessmen had been kidnapped this year and most of them got freedom after payment of ransom.

The policemen were also involved in the kidnapping, but the victims were not ready to bring it on record fearing reprisal from the gangsters and police as well.

People have to run their businesses at all cost and they cannot afford to unveil faces of the culprits. Some white collar people posing as sympathisers of the government and law-enforcement agencies were also involved in the crime, but they were yet to be netted.

Many believe that if police stopped supporting criminals, the crime rate would drastically come down.

Peshawar SSP (operations) Ijaz Khan admitted that 130 people had been kidnapped, about 60 of them for ransom. He said some 50 people had been recovered without payment of ransom. “We have recovered some high-profile people without payment of ransom during raids,” the SSP said. He said that gangs of Afghan nationals and tribesmen were involved in most of the kidnapping cases. In reply to a question, he admitted that car lifting had increased manifold in Peshawar. The SSP said police had been directed to register cases and those found guilty of supporting the criminals would be taken to task.

KP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar linked peace in the province to restoration of peace in Afghanistan. He said that crimes had increased because of spillover of militancy to parts of Pakistan. The Nato forces, the Afghan government and Pakistan should collectively devise a strategy to curb militancy. Otherwise, crimes like abduction would keep flourishing. “A captive is sold to many hands — from a local informer to tribesmen — and Taliban leaders too get their share in the ransom amount,” he said, adding that the kidnapping was aimed at fundraising for militant actions or getting their hardcore associates freed. Mian Iftikhar claimed that nobody was released without paying ransom, but relatives avoided disclosing it because of threats from captors. For militants everyone was significant who could pay money. He said that eradiation of terrorism was the only solution to such crimes which had taken roots in Afghanistan over the past 30 years. The minister did not rule out police involvement in kidnappings, alleging that militants had contacts with policemen.

Media in Pakistan is More Open, Free & Vibrant Than that in India

Noam Chomsky has a veritable cult following among those who are sceptical about views the liberal media espouses and government propaganda machinery spawns to suit their often overlapping agendas.

Compelling is his criticism, breathtaking is his knowledge, persuasive is his voice, and deep runs his humanity.

This 82-year-old Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, has written over 100 books and is considered the doyen of modern linguistics.

To the world outside the academia, though, he’s more famous as America’s leading dissident intellectual whose instinct it is to expose the hypocrisy of the powerful. His awesome credentials inspired The New York Times to describe him as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”.

Excerpts of his interview given to the Indian weekly Outlook:

Why do you say the idea of a liberal media is a myth?

I don’t. Some of my friends and colleagues do. My own view is that the media, the major media, the New York Times and so on, tend to be what is called liberal. Of course, liberal here implies highly supportive of state power, state violence and state crimes. I, though, don’t deny that liberal means, more or less, being in favour of civil rights, social programmes, roughly what’s called social democratic in much of the world.

Do you think the so-called liberal media really serves that purpose?

Yes, to some extent, but their major commitment is to the centres of power—state and private. For example, there are major attacks on civil rights today but because those are coming from the Obama administration, the liberal media barely discusses the violations.

You have in mind America’s recent wars?

As soon as the plan to invade Iraq was announced, the media began serving as a propaganda agency for the government. The same was true for Vietnam, for state violence generally. The media is called liberal because it is liberal in the sense that Obama is. For example, he’s considered as the principled critic of the Iraq war. Why? Because, right at the beginning, he said it was a strategic blunder. That’s the extent of his liberalism. You could read such comments in Pravda in 1985. The people said that the invasion of Afghanistan was a strategic blunder. Even the German general staff said that Stalingrad was a strategic blunder. But we don’t call that principled criticism.

You once said, “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.” Do you mean that propaganda enables the elite to dull the will of people, depriving them of the capacity to make political choices?

That clearly is its goal, in fact its stated goal. Back in the 1920s, it used to be frankly called propaganda. But the word acquired a bad flavour with Nazism in the 1930s. So now, it’s not called propaganda any more. But they were right in the 1920s. The huge public relations industry, for example, has its goal to control attitudes and beliefs. Liberal commentators, like Walter Lippmann, said we have to manufacture consent and keep the rabble away from the decision-making. We are the responsible men, we have to make decisions and we have to be protected—and I quote Lippmann—“from the trampling under the rage of the bewildered herd—the public”. In the democratic process, we are the participants, they watch. And the task of intellectuals, media and so on is to make sure that they are quiet, subdued and obedient. That is the view from the liberal end of the spectrum. Yes, I don’t doubt that the media is liberal in that sense.

What is the mechanism through which the media becomes the voice of the government and elite?

It is very straightforward. In his introduction to Animal Farm—virtually nobody has read the introduction because it was not published—George Orwell writes that the British (the audience for which he was writing) should not be too complacent about his satire on the crimes of the totalitarian enemy. He said in free England unacceptable ideas could be suppressed voluntarily, without the use of force. He says the reasons are that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. In the more modern period, generally, the media are either big corporations or parts of mega corporations or closely linked to the government. The other reason—maybe more significant—is just that if you have a good education, you would have instilled into you that there are certain things that it just wouldn’t do to say.

Like what?

For example, you don’t say or even think that the invasion of Iraq is a criminal aggression of the kind for which people were hanged in Nuremberg, that what you say was a strategic blunder was precisely what the Communist party said in the 1980s. They were under coercion. In the West, it is not coercion, it is just voluntary submission to an intellectual culture which remains overwhelmingly within narrow limits that restrict analysis, reporting, and condemnation of government action. Take this morning’s (October 5) New York Times. There is an article by a good correspondent, Steven Lee Myers, who says that Iraq is having serious problems with sectarian conflict, with chaos, which are all the results of democracy. I don’t think so. I think it is the result of the American invasion. But you can’t say or think that.

So, in a sense, the structure of the media is basically reflecting the unequal structure of our society.

Yes, it’s reflecting the structure of power, which is not surprising.

In such a scenario, do you think the truth is bound to be elusive?

Take the same New York Times article. Anyone who has paid serious attention to what has been happening in Iraq the last seven years can see, for example, that the sectarian conflict was stirred up not by democracy but by the invasion and atrocities after the invasion. But that’s not what you are going to read in papers. When you read day after day and watch television day after day, a certain picture tends to sink into an overwhelming majority of the population. They don’t have the time to do research projects.

Do you think the people in the West—and it is now happening in India as well—are giving up newspapers and turning to the internet largely because they do not believe what the newspapers say?

In the US, it’s partly true. But that’s also part of a much broader phenomenon which you can easily see in polls. A large majority of the population is disillusioned with everything. They are anti-government, anti-business, opposed to the political parties, Republicans even more than the Democrats; they dislike Congress, they don’t believe the professions, the scientists. It’s as if their lives are falling apart. So, yes, they don’t like the media. Then there is also the propaganda—how the media is socialist and so on.

There are lots of discussions about how the media won’t be able to survive in the days of internet. I am very sceptical about that. I was in Mexico last week—and Mexico, mind you, is a poor country. The second largest newspaper in Mexico, La Jornada, is a very high quality newspaper, one of the best I know. It gets almost no commercial advertising because the government hates it, business hates it. They survive on readership support. Why can’t it happen in a rich country? That’s because people in Mexico trust La Jornada. They are doing their job, you can see people reading it on the streets. You learn from it.

I spent three weeks in India and a week in Pakistan. A friend of mine here, Iqbal Ahmed, told me that I would be surprised to find that the media in Pakistan is more open, free and vibrant than that in India.

In Pakistan, I read the English language media which go to a tiny part of the population. Apparently, the government, no matter how repressive it is, is willing to say to them that you have your fun, we are not going to bother you. So they don’t interfere with it.

The media in India is free, the government doesn’t have the power to control it. But what I saw was that it was pretty restricted, very narrow and provincial and not very informative, leaving out lots of things. What I saw was a small sample. There are very good things in the Indian media, specially the Hindu and a couple of others. But this picture (in India) doesn’t surprise me. In fact, the media situation is not very different in many other countries. The Mexican situation is unusual. La Jornada is the only independent newspaper in the whole hemisphere.

So what is the solution to all this? Is the internet the only way out?

What has to be done is not really specific to the media. It is to develop a more functional democratic society, a more democratic culture. As far as the elites are concerned they want the public to be disciplined, passive, obedient and directed to other things. Take a look at the history of the huge public relations and advertising industry that we have today. It developed in the freest countries in the world—England and the US—around the time of the First World War. Incidentally, that was the time Lippmann was writing. It was developed very consciously, out of the understanding that enough freedom had been won by popular struggle and the population could not be controlled by force. Therefore, it was thought necessary to control attitudes and beliefs. In the business press of the 1920s, you can read very openly about the need to divert people to what they call the superficial thing in life like fashionable consumption. If we can direct people to that, they will keep out of our hair, we can run things. You see that in India, certainly.

 Family-owned concerns dominate the Indian media. Some people believe it is an advantage because you can play upon the vanity of the owners to have them take up important issues. For instance, the way Katherine Graham took risks by featuring the Watergate scandal in The Washington Post.

The Watergate scandal was just a cover-up. It was almost nothing. Right at the same time as the Watergate exposure—and this tells you a lot of about the media and the culture—a state terrorist government operation was exposed in the courts. It was called Cointelpro, it was essentially an fbi programme that ran through the Johnson, Kennedy and Nixon administrations. It began with targeting the Communist party, Puerto Ricans, the anti-war movement, the women’s movements, the entire new Left….It was a very serious thing, going all the way to political assassination, literally. That was exposed at the very same time as Watergate. No attention was paid to it; it was too serious. Cointelpro really told you something about the government. Therefore, it was basically suppressed, it is still suppressed so that people don’t know anything about it. Watergate, on the other hand, was a minor scandal. The main scandal about the Watergate was that Nixon went after the relatively rich and powerful people.

So Watergate was akin to intra-elite fight?

It was a kind of small intra-elite fight that became huge. The Washington Post did a good thing to write about the Watergate scandal, but I can hardly regard it as requiring great courage.

But are family-owned newspapers better in comparison to the corporatisation?

It is hard to choose. Take Rupert Murdoch. He owns a good part of the press. Is that a good thing? What would be a good thing is democratic control.

How do we bring about this democratic control? Do you have in mind community-based ownerships or community-supported media?

Perhaps the period of greatest real press freedom was in the more free societies of Britain and the US in the late 19th century. There was a great variety of newspapers, most often run by the factory workers, ethnic communities and others. There was a lot of popular involvement. These papers reflected a wide variety of opinions, were widely read too. It was the period of greatest vibrancy in the US. There were efforts, especially in England, to control and censor it. These didn’t work. But two things pretty much eliminated them. One, it was possible for the corporate sector to simply put so much capital into their own newspapers that others couldn’t compete. The other factor was advertising; advertiser-reliance. Advertisers are businesses. When newspapers become dependent on advertisers for their income, they are naturally going to bend to the interest of advertisers.

If you look at the New York Times, maybe the world’s greatest newspaper, they have the concept of news hole. What that means is that in the afternoon when they plan for the following day’s newspaper, the first thing they do is to layout where the advertising is going to be, because that’s an important part of a newspaper. You then put the news in the gaps between advertisements. In television there is a concept called content and fill. The content is the advertising, the fill is car chase, the sexy or whatever you put in to try to keep the viewer watching in between the ads. That’s a natural outcome when you have advertiser-reliance.

Of course, these things affect the tenor of the newspaper. Suppose a newspaper started publishing the truth—that the invasion of Iraq was a criminal invasion that destroyed the country. That newspaper or the TV station is not going to get any ads. We, again, come back to Orwell’s point—about an intellectual culture in which elites and great universities are inculcated with the understanding that there are things that just wouldn’t do to say.

Lawrence of Arabia Married a Lahorite

Tariq Ali in his book Bitter Chill of Winter makes a startling revelation to add to the Nedous’ history: Col T.E. Lawrence. He says that  ’Lawrence of Arabia’ was not the lifelong bachelor he has been made out as.
He went through a brief marriage in  Lahore. This was revealed to Tariq Ali by a senior civil servant from Kashmir who had been told by Benji Nedous, the brother of the bride. Ali said, ”While Lawrence was stationed in India he used to go to the city of Lahore like many other  officers, to relax. It was known as the Paris of the East and the Nedous family had a hotel there that was popular with  soldiers wanting to rest and drink and so on, and that is where he met her.’
 
‘Akbar Jehan was the daughter of Harry Nedous, and Mir Jan, a Kashmiri milkmaid. Harry Nedous first caught sight of Mir Jan when she came to deliver the milk at his holiday lodge in Gulmarg. He was immediately smitten, but she was suspicious. ‘I might be poor,’ she told him later that week, ‘but I am not for sale.’ Harry pleaded that he was serious, that he loved her, that he wanted to marry her. ‘In that case,’ she retorted wrathfully, ‘you must convert to Islam. I cannot marry an unbeliever.’ To her amazement, he did so, and in time they had 12 children (only five of
whom survived).

Brought up as a devout Muslim, their daughter Akbar Jehan was a boarder at the Convent of
Jesus and Mary in the hill resort of Murree.

Non-Christian parents often packed their daughters off to these convents because the education was quite good and the regime strict.
 
In 1928, when a 17-year-old Akbar Jehan had left school and was back in Lahore, a senior figure in British Military Intelligence checked in to the Nedous Hotel on the Upper Mall.
 
Colonel T.E. Lawrence, complete with Valentino-style headgear, had just spent a gruelling few weeks in Afghanistan destabilising the radical, modernising and anti-British regime of King Amanullah. Disguised as ‘Karam Shah’, a visiting Arab cleric, he had organised a black propaganda campaign designed to stoke the religious fervour of the more reactionary tribes and
thus provoke a civil war. His mission accomplished, he left for Lahore.
 
Akbar Jehan must have met him at her father’s hotel. A flirtation began and got out of control. Her father insisted that they get married immediately which they did. Three months later, in January 1929, Amanullah was toppled and replaced by a pro-British ruler.
 
On 12 January, Kipling’s old newspaper in Lahore, the imperialist Civil and Military Gazette, published comparative profiles of Lawrence and ‘Karam Shah’ to reinforce the impression that they were two different people.

Several weeks later, the Calcutta newspaper Liberty reported that ‘Karam Shah’ was indeed the ‘British spy Lawrence’ and gave a detailed account of his activities in Waziristan on the Afghan frontier.
 
Lawrence was becoming a liability and the authorities told him to return to Britain. ‘Karam Shah’ was never seen again.
 Nedous insisted on a divorce for his daughter and again Lawrence obliged. Four years later, Sheikh Abdullah and Akbar Jehan were married in Srinagar.
 The fact of her previous marriage and divorce was never a secret: only the real name of her first husband was hidden. She now threw herself into the struggle for a new Kashmir. She raised money to build schools for poor children and encouraged adult education in a state where the bulk of the population was illiterate. She also, crucially, gave support and advice to her husband, alerting him, for example, to the dangers of succumbing to Nehru’s charm and thus
compromising his own standing in Kashmir.