The Dawn News - In-depth (2024)

Part one

Hameed Jan Haji knows what it means to be inside a coal mine. A septuagenarian, he no more does heavy work of cutting and extracting coal but still clears coal dust or cooks for the miners in Machh, Balochistan — making 400 rupees a day. Gap-toothed but sturdy, he confidently fishes out an identity card as if his whole being is dependent on it. The card is issued by the Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation (PMDC), a public sector agency, and shows him as a registered miner.

It does not seem to matter to him that the mere mention of PMDC invokes memories of a spate of tragic incidents over recent years. In 2011, methane gas accumulated in a poorly ventilated PMDC-owned mine in the Sor Range area outside Quetta, causing multiple explosions that decimated the colliery and killed 45 miners. In May last year, 23 miners died in two separate incidents on the same day in different parts of Balochistan. Seven of them were working in a PMDC mine.

It was also in one of the subterranean burrows of another PMDC mine that Haji got trapped. He was busy doing tikkum – breaking coal – when the mountain above him groaned. It was a ‘bump’ — a seismic event caused by an explosion or the collapse of wooden cross-beams that support a mine’s roof. On hearing the rumble, he told his companions to leave. He was about to pick up his implements before rushing to the exit when the roof collapsed and blocked the mine’s shaft. He found himself confined in a narrow space with his back against the coalface.

“When a mountain falls inside [a mine], it sucks away all air,” says Haji. Wrinkles in his face deepen as he strains to recall that day in the year 2000. Or was it 2002? He is not sure. “It got suddenly hot in there. I turned and buried my face in coal.” It was moist from water sprayed to keep coal dust from rising.

Three days and nights, he stayed trapped in that spot — no more than a foot in length and width because he could only either sit or stand. He would stand when his legs ached from crouching, hurt from being pressed against the rock face, and would sit when he got tired standing. Occasionally – only when he heard the mountain creak, afraid it would come down on him – he turned on his headlamp, mindful that its battery may run out.

“I did not know what would happen to me,” he says, solemn in the way characteristic of miners resigned to the inevitability of a disaster or having survived one. “I knew death was inevitable but my only regret was that my family would not find my grave. And if they did, they would only find my bones here.”

Haji had no way of knowing that his colleagues, busy digging up the place for days to rescue him, had brought along a coffin to carry his supposedly decomposing remains for a quick burial.

He waited and prayed. Sometime during that long agonising wait, he fell asleep. “I was terribly thirsty. I dreamt that two men, their faces black from soot, came to me with a bottle. They asked me to drink from it. I took a sip and woke up protesting that it was some medicine. There was nobody around but I felt refreshed as if I had drunk from a cool well.”

On the third day, his limbs gave up. “My body went lifeless but my hope was intact.” Some air, he says, must have trickled in from somewhere to keep him alive.

Later that day he heard the diggers plowing. ‘Digging’ in mines entails a lot more than just removing layers of earth. It means supporting a dug-up tunnel with wooden cross-beams before moving ahead. It is a painfully slow and painstaking process.

Eventually they came, having dug a hole barely enough for him to squeeze through. “I did not cry on seeing them but they did,” Haji says.

After he walked out alive, he did not think for a minute that his was a dangerous vocation. He could not give up mining. If not for himself, he had to work for his dependents — his wife and nine-year-old son. And he did not know what else to do.

Back in Shangla district, in northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, his family did not know what he had been through. He went home to see them soon after his rescue but returned to work in coal mines only a few days later — like he has been doing since 1953 when, as a 12-year-old, he first came to Balochistan along with his father. To get a job, he told a mine contractor he could cook.

That is exactly what he does now after having spent decades working inside mines. “I have ended up where I started,” Haji says. “What did I do with my life?”

As one goes down a mine, claustrophobia immediately sets in. It is like the panic one may feel at being buried alive. Only, at 3,700 feet under, it is much worse than being in a grave. A mine has the feel of an ocean without the weight of water. The only burden one feels is that of emptiness, of darkness swirling around. One does not even feel the weight of tonnes of land mass above the mine’s roof held aloft by cross-beams made out of eucalyptus or poplar, the most fragile of trees.

Being inside a mine dissipates all sense of time except one associated with darkness. It is like an endless night. There is no view beyond what the spotlight of a headlamp reveals: the maw of a tunnel that disappears into the bowels of the earth or a wall that abruptly ends the possibilities of vision and movement. The limited sight one has inside a mine makes one realise why moles are blind, why cavefish do not have eyes and why miners suffer from nystagmus — an ocular condition caused by living in poorly-lit places for long periods of time.

In evolutionary terms, darkness degenerates eyesight. Inside the pit of a mine, however, one may be grateful for a limited vision. Even if one could see, one would only be looking into a black hole — through the narrow confines of a tunnel that goes on and on without an end in sight.

Darkness and the limits of sight allow one to imagine. One could assume there are no walls around, no roof above; as if one is in an otherworldly place. The feelings – fear and shock – that come along with being in a mine can be called only as phobias. As with fear of depths, heights, tight places, the panic it causes can be felt but not described.

Miners are ‘terra-nauts’, negotiating the subterranean. Their experience is as surreal – and scary – as of those who go into the space or under the ocean. In Balochistan, there are mines as deep as 7,000 feet, much deeper than the average depth of Arctic Ocean. No one can survive at those depths without oxygen tanks — except that miners do somehow.

This comparison of mines with space and ocean is not an idle thought. The subterranean is as perilous as the aqueous and the airless. For if one stands vulnerable against hostile forces of nature in sea and space, then in mines there are parallels aplenty.

“In space, no one can hear you scream”– the ominous tagline for the 1979 horror/sci-fi flick Alien – rings just as true inside a coal mine at 3,700 feet below the earth’s surface. If a disaster strikes within these dark subterranean dungeons, no one can hear coal miners scream.

The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.
– Wilfred Owen

The West needed colossal amounts of coal for the Industrial Revolution. Among the nameless multitudes of miners who made it available was Ellison Jack. ‘Ellison who?’ one may ask.

An eleven-year-old girl in Britain, she did 20 journeys a shift carrying a tub of coal that weighed 200 kilogrammes. And if she slackened on the job, she got whipped.

Her story was a part of the shocking Mines Report the British parliament published in 1842 to shed light on the terrible state of coal mining in Britain. It brought to public knowledge how children under five years of age worked underground — for 12 hours and for two pennies a day. Carrying coal far too heavy than their own bodies caused deformities in them.

In Pakistan, we have no miner girls but we do have boys, some as young as 13, who regularly leave homes to work in mines.

“Most of those who die in mine accidents are between the ages of 15 and 30 because, being young, they are physically fit to do hard labour underground,” says Alibash Khan, a social activist. He lives in Shangla from where hail a large number of colliers working in coal mines scattered across the country.

As Pakistan carousels on its great coal ride, the electricity we get from power plants, the homes we build with bricks made in coal-fired kilns and bags of cement we churn out in millions each year — all owe to the sweat and blood of young miners like Pir Mohammad, 13, in Dukki, Balochistan; Abdul Salam, 30, in Shangla, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; or Hameed Jan Haji, 70, in Machh, Balochistan.

Like Ellison Jack, they are the nameless and faceless dynamos of our development. With stories and characters straight out of a bleak Dickensian world, these toilers of the dark, invisible subterranean places live, work and die far from sight, away from the luxuries built and developed on their labour.

They grow old in some distant, soot-blackened land at the end of unpaved roads no one but the miners take, their lives often spent living in hovels and holes in the hills. In the day, they toil in poorly-lit mines, coming out at night to live in settlements without electricity.

Mining landscapes – because they are remote and far removed from our everyday lives and experiences – challenge the visual quality one commonly associates with reading about a landscape. As Edge Effects, a digital magazine of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, notes:

“Many mining activities take place deep beneath the earth, in hidden warrens of shafts and chambers which sometimes leave only the slightest material traces above ground. Because of this inaccessibility – and also because of the cultural ambivalence of remembering a kind of labour that some would prefer to forget – the historical memory of these places is often buried away. Mine shafts become both literally and metaphorically sealed.”

Coal may be a source of carbon that is choking the planet. In Pakistan, however, it is the new gold. From Thar in Sindh – with reserves of over 175 billion tonnes – to Dukki in Balochistan, it is lightening up lives with the happy prospect of employment and power generation.

As of today, however, little of it is being used for producing electricity. Most of it goes into firing smoke-spewing brick kilns which forced the smog-choked Punjab province – that guzzles most of the coal produced in different parts of Pakistan – to seek their closure in October last year.

The World Energy Council estimates that Pakistan’s total coal reserves are “some 185 billion tonnes”. Out of these, 3.45 billion tonnes are already “measured” reserves, nearly 12 billion tonnes are “indicated” reserves and 57 billion tonnes are “inferred” reserves. The rest – 113 billion tonnes – are only “hypothetical” reserves. The country’s daily production of coal amounts to 2.33 metric tonnes (of oil equivalent) so far.

The world’s romance with coal bloomed with the Industrial Revolution but has lately cooled down. Many parts of the globe have fully or partially banned coal mining (Meghalaya in India, Wales in the United Kingdom, many regions in Australia, Germany and other European countries).

Pakistan is certainly behind the rest of the world as far as its relationship with coal is concerned but now that we have started using it, the industrial prosperity of the developed world could well be our own. At the very least, that is what the official rhetoric tells us even though many an energy expert has already warned us against a ‘misguided’ pursuit of the black gold. The prosperity will not come without a price, they say.

The human cost of our intensifying love affair with coal is already too obvious to ignore.

Spin Karez is a vast expanse of land outside Quetta, bleached and baked hard by the harsh sun. It is a haunting terrain where wind howls and dust devils rise out of nowhere to waltz jauntily before disintegrating and disappearing. Low hills, with barely any human habitation or vegetation, swell and surge like ripples in land on both sides of the road that leads to the place. Further ahead, mountain peaks take on anthropomorphic contours: Koh-e-Murdar looks like a sleeping beauty gazing at a cloudless sky.

Along the way to Spin Karez is a coal depot, a land basin with low buildings and heaps of coal out in the open. Mining units are spread over a soot-blackened landscape here, livened up by colourful and bright trucks — some parked, others moving along the road, still others being loaded with coal. All day long, small trucks arrive at the depot from nearby mines to unload coal which is then loaded on to bigger trucks that take it to other parts of the country.

On a wintry Friday last year, the road from Spin Karez to Quetta has trucks and pickup vans carrying coal as well as coal miners, their faces covered for protection against wind and dust. These men, mostly from Swat, are going to Quetta to spend a weekly holiday. Next week, they will stay back at coal mines and another group will go on leave.

In Quetta, they meet friends and family members working in other mining areas in Balochistan. They also send money to families back home through miners going back to Swat. They crowd restaurants on Tughi Road, the focal point for miners from Swat, watching Bollyood films on a satellite television.

Contractors, too, frequent these restaurants to recruit coal miners, brandishing advance money as an incentive. On joining a coal mine, a labourer may make as little as 10,000 rupees a month or as high as 60,000 rupees a month — depending on his experience and the physical strength the work requires.

Mining season peaks in winters so the demand for miners increases between October and March every year. In summers, coal production goes down as miners stay in their villages doing farming.

While at work, miners stay in the pits from 6:00 am to 2:00 pm and return to their dwellings to sharpen pickaxes, wash themselves, cook for themselves and, in some places, feed donkeys they deploy for transporting coal from mining pits to warehouses. As bent and broken as these men are in body and spirit, the plight of donkeys working alongside them is no better — or no worse.

The wind that leaves a mine is damp and thick with choking coal dust. It is also heavy with the smell of human bodies and the whiff of the beasts’ urine and dung. As one miner puts it, mines are where “donkeys and men live as one, with no difference in their living conditions.”

Dukki is a small mining district in Balochistan — 228 kilometres to the east of the provincial capital, Quetta. It has more coal mines than any other part of the province. Leave its eponymous headquarter town and you will see mounds of excavated coal piled on lands along a road that goes to Barkhan and then onwards to Dera Ghazi Khan, farther in the east.

In places, mining seems to be happening right underneath the road or even beneath houses on the sides (whose owners get a royalty of 800-1,000 rupees a year).

Dukki town can be mistaken easily as an Afghan settlement. For one, members of a Pashtun tribe, Nasar, form a majority of its population and they have close relatives across the border in Afghanistan. Secondly, a large number of colliers working here are also Afghans. Together the two give the town a peculiarly Afghan ambiance that no other mining area in Pakistan has.

By the look of it, the state of Afghan miners is more desperate than of those from Pakistan. They are willing to work in conditions where no one else dares to tread — sometimes working in pits that are as deep as 7,000 feet.

They also exist in a legal vacuum — without valid documents to stay and work in Pakistan. Pakistani miners can invoke the law of the land when negotiating with mine owners or mine contractors. Afghans, like Abdul Manan – who comes from Kalat province in Afghanistan – are entirely at the mercy of their employers.

A miner for 35 years, Manan has not received any of his wages from a mine where he worked the whole of last year. A bearded, turbaned man with a grimy waist jacket and a grey wrinkled face – coal soot deposited like pigment in the folds of its skin – he claims the mine contractor has expelled him rather than paying his wages. His cousin, too, has not received any salary for the last three years, he further claims.

To get paid, Manan cannot do anything but request his employer — and then wait and pray. “If a contractor does not pay local miners, they can force him to pay by taking away his car. If we even threaten him, he reports us to the police,” he says. “If we report against a contractor for not paying us, the police puts us in jail [for not having a work permit] instead of him.”

Rolling rosary beads with his fingers, Manan describes how unpaid wages are not the only problem that Afghan miners face. “When one of us dies, the contractors do not give us identity cards showing us as mine workers so that we can take our dead back home through regular routes.”

When they travel without those cards, the Frontier Constabulary (FC), a paramilitary force, and the police harass them, he says. “We cannot even go to Quetta for treatment if we get injured or fall sick.”

Travelling to and from Afghanistan is similarly fraught with risks. To cross the border, they need proof that they have been registered as Afghan refugees even if they carry cards that show them as mine workers. When they cannot produce the proof of registration, they become suspects, liable to action by the police or FC.

Mining department employees in Quetta admit that some of these complaints are true. If and when an Afghan miner dies in a mining accident, his contractor puts his body on a truck, gives some money for travel and burial to his relatives working at the same mine and sends them off, say these officials. That is where the contractor’s responsibility to the dead miner, or his heirs, ends. They never get any compensation.

##Part Two

In Quetta, people are fond of pets — particularly birds. If you know the city, you would also know how so many folks here own a mynah, a dove, a canary, a parrot or two: birds of the singing, talking kind. In some crowded street, it is not rare to come across a shop with a bird cage hanging by the door or placed atop a counter.

Quetta also has a large bird market but no one there would say they have ever sold a canary to a miner. Until the year 2000, if you went to any of the mining regions in Balochistan – Machh, Muslim Bagh, Dukki, Chamalang or Quetta – you would find a small aviary at every colliery. The miners kept pigeons and some canaries, their cages hanging out in the vast silences of drought-stricken, barren mining zones where the wind howls like phantoms and no bird sings.

It was not for their songs that the miners kept birds. They brought birds to mines to die so they themselves could live.

A canary in a coal mine serves as an advance warning system about things not going well. British physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) was responsible for giving currency to this expression. He experimented on himself – and on his three-year-old son who, like his father, went on to become a great scientist – by breathing in a co*cktail of lethal gases like methane and carbon monoxide, which are both naturally found in underground mines, to record their effect on human mind and body. He found out that carbon monoxide, when combined with haemoglobin in blood, turns the skin a deep cherry red. This is why when colliers die of carbon monoxide poisoning, they have flushed, red faces.

Haldane suggested miners use a “sentinel species” like the canary, as an early warning system. On exposure to lethal gases, a canary gets sick quicker than a human being, alerting miners of an impending disaster and allowing them time for an escape.

All through the 20th century, it was the humble canary that came to the rescue of miners. Here in Balochistan, miners would place a cage with a canary atop a steel trolley going down a mine shaft on iron rails. If the canary came up alive, they knew the mine was free of dangerous gases.

Mercifully, canaries are no more sacrificed so colliers can live.

In time, mines have shifted to using safety lamps whose flames help detect poisonous gasses in a mine. If the flame gets smaller, it indicates the presence of blackdamp — a mixture of asphyxiating gases like nitrogen and carbon dioxide that suck oxygen from the air. If the flame enlarges, it indicates the presence of methane, an explosive gas.

Lamp flames, though, can be hazardous. They can cause explosions in the presence of methane — an occurrence common to mines in Pakistan. An alternative to them is an electronic gas detector which, being expensive, is not something mine owners in Pakistan often invest in.

But even when mine managers insist on the use of safety lamps or electronic gas detectors, frequent mine accidents suggest that there is something else that needs to be fixed: the casual attitude miners have towards their own safety. So, while the canary lives, miners continue to die in isolated, out-of-the-way places mainly because they go into mines without taking the required precautions.

If their death toll is high, media rushes to bring home the horror of it. What does not make news is the anguish of those in homes and hospitals who suffer and die in silence due to chronic conditions inflicted on them by occupational hazards of being in the coal mining industry. Nor does the human and environmental cost of mining figures anywhere in the policy debate over coal and development.

The dilemma of coal miners is that they work underground, invisible to the rest of the world. A collier in Choa Saidan Shah in Punjab’s Chakwal district puts it eloquently: “We only become visible when we are dead.”

Mohammad Atif is a mine inspector in Quetta. He has a mop of greying hair and a tentative but helpful manner.

On a recent workday, he goes inside a PMDC mine along with a supervisor, Mamoula Khan, their headlights illuminating spots that look rather precarious to a layman: the mine roof in these places is held back with broken shale rock which, in turn, is supported by thin eucalyptus logs. Many of these logs are snapping under the weight of rock above them and have been chalk-crossed for replacement.

Mining engineers advocate that a mine’s roof must be supported by cross-beams made from keekar (wild acacia) tree and not from eucalyptus which snaps easily under pressure. But keekar is expensive and eucalyptus cheap — it makes economic sense to mine owners to use the cheaper option.

Labour union leaders like Manzoor Ahmad Awan argue that the safety standards spelled out in the 1923 Mines Act can reduce deaths if stringently adopted. Yet mining coal from the earth’s bowels throws up many challenges that no amount of safety precautions can overcome.

Deep inside the earth, mine shafts are only as wide as to allow a small steel trolley to pass through as it runs between several levels, each one deeper than the one that comes before. This trolley is so small that it can carry only three men together — that too, if one is crouching in its belly and two are standing on his sides. The trolley is held on rails with steel wires attached to an engine operated by a mechanic sitting in a cold and ill-lit chamber at some level inside the mine. With no way of seeing into the black hole below, he operates the trolley with sign language. Above him is a bell hooked to a wire that goes deep into the mine shaft. Occasionally, it tinkles three times — a signal from an underground level that the trolley is full of coal and ready to be pulled out. In case of an emergency, the bell will ring five times.

The trolley comes and goes every now and then. It appears as if from nowhere and then disappears into the dark maw of the tunnel, carrying a haul of coal or men. Being on the trolley is like being on a rattling train journey to the centre of the earth, only many times more uncomfortable and terrifying.

Shafts plunge precariously downwards, perpendicular to the earth’s surface. At right angles to them are tunnels leading to the coalface. The colliers work inside those tunnels with the single-mindedness of a beaver. They play music on their phones as they cut and carry coal, their naked torsos glistening in dim light and the white of their eyes showing prominently in their blackened faces. The tunnel around them is dark and damp, its air redolent of their oily sweat. In this particular mine being visited by Atif, miners are breaking the coalface 3,700 feet below the earth’s surface. They load the mined coal into wheelbarrows and carry it to the mine shaft where they load it into the waiting trolley. They are also busy putting in place wooden arches to support the tunnel as the coalface advances further as a result of excavation.

Along the shaft run ‘intakes’ — pipes bringing air and water inside the mining tunnels from all the way up. Each mine tunnel has two openings above the earth — located as close to each other as nose is to mouth on a human face. These openings help air to filter through a shaft and allow the mine to breathe.

For ventilation to be effective, air pressure in the tunnels is kept at 5,000 cubic feet per minute. Anything more than that causes spontaneous combustion because coal here is volatile. Anything less causes the highly inflammable methane gas to accumulate. The level of methane concentration in a mine needs to stay below one per cent — a level that can only be achieved through efficient ventilation. Any concentration between five to 15 per cent can be highly explosive.

Ventilation, therefore, is cardinal to the safety of a mine. “An explosion’s intensity increases by 50 per cent if a mine is not properly ventilated,” says Asmatullah Awan, a contractor at Habibullah Coal Mining Company in Sor Range.

Deadly gases like methane are naturally trapped inside coal seams. The thicker a coal seam, the more gases it will have. Mines in Quetta, with seams as thick as three feet, are gassier than those in Dukki, for example. Also, underground mines have more gases trapped inside than open-pit mines which, in Pakistan, are present only in Thar desert.

The other dangerous gas found inside coal mines is carbon monoxide. It is formed as a result of oxidation (spontaneous combustion) of coal in cold temperatures. It does exist inside mines at all times and can be removed only through active ventilation. There is one small consolation for miners exposed to it: their death is not painful. “You just fall asleep and die,” says Atif.

The average emission and prevalence of various dangerous gases in Pakistani coal mines, particularly in Balochistan, exceed the internationally permissible limits, says Dr Salahuddin Azad who teaches at the National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad. These gases, he writes in a paper titled Impacts of Coal Mining in Balochistan, “are the source of high death ratio” in the province’s mines.

Azad notes that the “concentrations of coal dust” in Balochistan’s mines too, exceeds the permissible thresholds. It “is not only a source of health problems like routine headache, irritation in throat, nose, and eyes, drowsiness, shortness of breath, nausea, pneumoconiosis, tuberculosis, chronic obstructive bronchitis, heart problems, respiratory irritation, [asthma] and even lung impairment and lung cancer…but is causing severe damage to the environment.”

As daunting as these odds are, the risk of accidents multiplies manifold when unskilled workers either do not know or violate safety protocols knowingly. Some of them, according to Atif, “die for having lit up a cigarette inside a mine”.

Digital multi-gas detectors attached to the waist belts of Atif and Mamoula Khan show zero readings for gases as the two go down a coal mine near Quetta. Like earliest versions of mobile phones, these detectors are chunky and have illuminated screens.

Imported from China, the United States, Germany and Japan, the detectors are expensive and require resetting every two years. They need to be sent back to manufacturers abroad for the purpose — a process that also requires money.

Mine owners and contractors do not want to pay for their purchase and resetting. Consequently, a tax of five rupees per tonne of coal a miner extracts is deducted from his salary and is deposited in a government account which is then used for purchasing and maintaining the detectors.

Money in the same account is also used for providing safety training which remains in short supply. Even when some training is offered by local or international labour support organisations, workers do not turn up unless training organisers offer them money as an incentive. They do not want to lose the day’s wages.

Labourers, mining union leaders and government officials all agree that the most effective way of ensuring that miners attend safety trainings is that these are organised by their own employers. But contractors such as Awan will not invest any of their money in them. “I have no way of knowing if a trained miner will stay with me,” is how he explains his unwillingness to spend money on this count.

Training is also expensive. It takes as much as 40,000 rupees to train a single miner in safety protocols, says Irfanullah, a director at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s labour department. Many mining operations are not large enough to afford that kind of money.

Most mines are so small that they operate informally — being unregistered with the government, and owned and operated by individuals, not companies. A single mining zone spread over, say, a four-square-kilometre area may have as many as 200 mines all owned and operated by different people, says Irfanullah. “It is not financially feasible for such small mine owners to fully implement occupational safety and health regulations,” he adds.

It is for the same financial reason that Pakistani mines do not have the latest mining equipment. It can increase work safety but is expensive. A hydraulic fixer – which prevents broken rocks from falling – costs about 1.8 million US dollars. Even a stone cutter costs about 200,000 US dollars. Mining companies do not invest in these gadgets lest their profit margins come down. Mining practices in Pakistan, therefore, remain undeveloped — even primitive.

Where a mine offers better working conditions, it provides less wages to workers because of having to invest money in safety measures. Workers themselves leave such a mine because they can earn more elsewhere. “Mines are poisoned with asbestos in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Hangu district. No mine driller can survive its poisonous effects. And still they go there to work because mining companies give an extra 50,000 rupees a month for drilling work,” says Awan. “The miners do not ask why a contractor who does not give them 1,000 rupees in loan is offering them 50,000 rupees extra each month,” he adds. “Everyone here is ready for suicide.”

Roshaan Wazir, a mining inspector working with the Fata Development Authority in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has something similar to say about the casual attitude that coal miners have towards their own safety. He has met mine workers who have all the safety gear they need but do not use it. “They say helmets make them sweat and masks interfere with their breathing.”

It is a Wednesday morning and Atif is on his way to Sor Range, a mining zone in Spin Karez. Some of the leading coal mining companies operating in Balochistan run their mines here. These are not rathole mines — the ones that dot Dukki in the east. Working conditions at mines in Spin Karez are relatively better than those at countless other informal mines.

Atif’s trip is not aimed at inspecting mines but to talk to managers at a PMDC colliery so as to convince them that they provide on-site residence to mine inspectors. Their presence in the field will ensure safety, he says. The coal depot near Spin Karez shows that mines do not just need to be secured from inside but also from the outside. An FC-managed truck weighing station is operating here even though there are no uniformed men in sight.

Depending on the size of a truck and the amount of coal it can carry, operators of the weighing station charge it a certain amount of money as security fee. This is in lieu of the protection FC provides to local coal mines against attack by Baloch separatist insurgents or from tribal clashes over mine ownership. A few years ago, there were no security personnel in most mining areas in Balochistan but then the Baloch Liberation Army, a separatist militia, abducted and killed seven miners and one doctor from Sor Range in July 2012. Similarly, Marri Balochs have been fighting Luni Pashtuns over the ownership of coal mines in Chamalang, a remote area in Balochistan’s Kohlu district, for years. These mines are known to have 500 million tonnes of coal worth 2,000 billion rupees but no mining could take place there due to tribal rivalries. It was only after the paramilitary personnel took over the security of mining fields in 2006 that excavation of coal started in Chamalang.

Dukki faced a similar situation.

Back in the 1980s, when the land was cheap here, members of the Nasar tribe bought much of it. A large number of local coal mines, therefore, fall in the lands owned by the tribe. Its members also built the local truck terminal to facilitate the transportation of coal. The advent of industrial coal mining since then has intensified the tribe’s pre-existing feuds with other local tribes. Dukki is now divided into nearly exclusive neighbourhoods controlled by Nasar, Tareen and Luni tribes. Clashes between them became so frequent and deadly over the past decade that the FC finally stepped in to restrain them.

Elsewhere in Pakistan, too, mines and miners are not always safe. In Darra Adam Khel, for instance, coal mines are guarded by the personnel of the FC against tribal feuds as well as attacks by militants associated with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). They charge a fee – 1,500 rupees – for each truck that passes through FC checkpoints to get out of Darra Adam Khel.

Local mine owners also have to maintain detailed records of their workers so that no anti-state elements get mixed among them. Miners, too, are kept away from local population to avoid conflicts between the two.

Bad things keep happening still. Law enforcement agencies had to conduct an operation in January this year for the release of 14 miners kidnapped after a dispute between mine owners and a local jirga in Darra Adam Khel.

And Abid Yaar, a member of a coal miners association in Shangla, carries with him a list of 11 missing miners. They were all working in mines in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s tribal districts along the Pak-Afghan border when they disappeared.

The presence of security forces has been a godsend for the mine inspector posted in Dukki. Since the district is a tribal area, with no formal police force and government-run courts, enforcement of official rules and regulations here has always been a big challenge. Mine owners would not allow the inspector to check mines let alone close one for violations of rules.

Now that FC is deployed in the district, mining officials take action without having to fear retaliation from powerful tribal chieftains. Their work, however, has made few improvements, if any at all. This is because there are too many mines in the province and too few inspectors, argues Iftikhar Ahmad, Balochistan’s chief inspector of mines. Dukki alone has 800 coal mines but it has only one mine inspector.

Ahmad and his subordinates are tasked with keeping 5,000 mines safe for nearly 80,000 workers in Balochistan’s five different mining zones: Quetta, Loralai, Shahrag, Machh and Kalat.

Each zone includes areas which are sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart from each other. Quetta zone, for instance, starts from the provincial capital and goes all the way to Taftan on Pak-Iran border in south-west. Loralai division includes Dukki, Chamalang and Muslim Bagh areas; Shahrag division comprises Shahrag, Khost and Harnai regions; Machh division is spread from Machh in central Balochistan to Naseerabad on Sindh-Balochistan border; and Kalat division includes Mastung in western Balochistan and Hub that is in the south-east of the province.

A single inspector oversees mining operations in each of these five divisions. Two sub-inspectors are supposed to be working under each inspector but most of these positions are lying vacant. (For the whole of Chakwal district in Punjab, similarly, there are only two inspectors. They are supposed to oversee as many as 1,200 mines.)

Inspectors are first responders and rescuers when accidents happen in mines, often facing the ire of miners’ families and questions from the news media. Their meagre number suggests that it is not possible for them to inspect each mine at regular intervals.

Given that distances between Quetta and other parts of the province are extremely long, a mine inspector can spend no more than three days a week in the field before returning to the provincial capital to report to his superiors. In those three days, he can inspect no more than three to four mines because often a single mine requires a whole day for inspection. Imagine how long it will take to inspect a 3,500 feet long mine which has 35 to 40 mining tunnels at different levels.

Going by this weekly rate, an inspector will be able to revisit a mine after many years. Atif and his colleagues in the mines inspectorate are aware of their limitations. To make up for their small number, they keep themselves available 24/7. Since mining never really stops and a crisis can unfold anytime, they are available on call any time of the day, any day of the year — “even Eid and Independence Day”.

Miners, contractors and trade union workers still blame mine inspectors for not turning up frequently for inspections. And when they do, goes the allegation against them, they largely depend on a mine supervisor to report if a mine is safe for work. Some inspectors do so because, according to Mamoula Khan, they have a fear of pits. “Who would want to enter into a lion’s jaws?”

The reliance on supervisors for mine inspections is not altogether unlawful. The Coal Mines Regulations 1926, which still form the bedrock of mine safety rules all over Pakistan, in fact, make it mandatory for a mine manager or a mine owner to prepare a daily report on mine safety. The mining permits issued by the inspectorate of mines necessitate that the owners/managers inspect their mine every day, maintaining a log for safety concerns so that a visiting inspector can check them later.

Mine inspectors can lodge cases against mine owners for not maintaining these logs as well as for neglecting safety inside mines. Many of them have been prosecuted in recent years. Just in Balochistan, as many as 300 cases have been registered against mine owners over various violations of safety rules.

Yet, this number sounds suspiciously low considering that there are thousands of mines in the province and hundreds of miners lose their lives in Pakistani mines each year. What makes this number even more insignificant is the fact that hardly any of these cases leads to the imposition of penalties.

Mine owners are often influential – and political – figures who have the clout and the capital to avoid being punished. When, for instance, a recent accident killed seven people at a mine owned by a senior member of the Balochistan Awami Party, that leads the coalition government in the province, a judge ordered him to be present in a court to stand trial but he did not.

The Mines Act 1923 does provide that a mine closed down due to a safety breach can be allowed to reopen — but only once its owners make repairs and take measures to ensure safety. In this particular case, the owner submitted no safety clearance report to mining authorities before reopening the mine.

Some recent legal changes, too, have proved ineffective to improve the situation. The number of accidents has remained the same as before – if not increased – even though penalties for violating safety rules were revised upward under the Balochistan Mines (Amendment) Act in 2011 from a negligible Rs 2,000 to Rs20,000 in one case. The consequences of a loose oversight are quite obvious. Hardly anywhere in Balochistan, Punjab or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa one finds a mine that is fully equipped to deal with, let alone pre-empt and prevent, emergencies. And knowledge about safety protocols remains abysmally low among mine workers in every mining zone. Their primary concern, and that of their employers, is to get to work without wasting a moment in preparations or trainings.

“The labourers do not think in terms of psychological or physical hazards of mining. They are not moved by accidents big or small,” says Atif, the mine inspector. “Years of work in mines have hardened their bodies and spirits.”

He describes how a miner did not go back home with the dead body of his son who had lost his life in a mining accident. “He thought someone else would replace him in his job,” says Atif. “So he put his son’s body on a bus and returned to work.”

Atif himself has undergone some kind of a psychological transformation. “When I came to the mines first, I could not look at a dead body without losing sleep. Now I see them often and nothing stirs in me.”

The government’s response, too, remains casual. It usually forms a committee to investigate a big accident, says an official in Balochistan’s directorate of labour welfare, but this committee never does any research on the ground or makes any useful recommendations.

No other official action is taken. Political and economic considerations often take precedence over the lives of coal miners.

When All Pakistan Labour Foundation, a workers’ welfare association, recently suggested to the Senate’s functional committee on human rights to close down mines where owners compromised on safety standards, the committee chairman Senator Mustafa Nawaz Khokar expressed his inability to so. ”We cannot close down mines because of the peculiar political dynamics of Balochistan,” he is quoted as saying by a source in the foundation.

These political dynamics could include the influence of mine owners and a fear of protests by Baloch nationalists groups who could portray the closure of mines as a conspiracy to choke the provincial economy.

Ahmad, the chief mine inspector, also advances an economic argument to justify the government inaction. “We can close a mine in no time but what will thousands of people – directly or indirectly attached to the mining sector – do since the province has nothing else to offer by way of employment opportunities?” he asks. “Those people will either die of hunger or become terrorists.”

In many parts of Pakistan, coal is mined by unregistered contractors from privately owned lands. These mines and their operations are not under any active government supervision.

In Dukki district, in the frontier regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in the province’s tribal districts such rathole mining is rampant. Even in Choa Saidan Shah, where all coal mines are leased out by the government, only less than half of 300 local mines are registered with the Employees’ Old-Age Benefit Institution, a government department that takes care of old and infirm workers.

It is at these unregistered mines that a majority of accidental deaths occur each year. If an International Labour Organization (ILO) report is to be believed, the number of deaths in such mines may be rising.

“In Pakistan, we have to ‘enforce’ the law, as opposed to the West where people willingly follow the law,” says Irfanullah, a former mining engineer who now works as a director in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s labour department. Mine owners here, according to him, hire managers or supervisors who know how to dodge the law.

Even in registered, formal coal mining, owners hire workers for less than 90 days because an employment for three months or more makes them eligible for benefits such as overtime, paid leaves and pension. Being migrants, workers also rarely stay at the same mine for three months. Sometimes, they switch jobs frequently as a way to increase their wages.

Sharafuddin, who heads Quaid-e-Azam Union, a trade union of mine workers in Choa Saidan Shah, has a solution to the problem. “Miners do not need to work with the same company for three months to be eligible for benefits,” he says. “Once a worker has been enlisted anywhere in the country, he should be considered a bona fide miner regardless of whether he works with one company or another.”

On a recent morning, Sher Alam is sitting with a labour union leader in Choa Saidan Shah. He has been running around for quite some time to get injury compensation for a paraplegic cousin whose spinal cord was broken while working in a mine in the nearby Kallar Kahar region. The mining company did initially pay for his surgery but it owes him compensation now that his condition has worsened.

The union leader makes a few phone calls in order to facilitate the release of compensation. He speaks to a mine supervisor who informs him that the mine owner has gone abroad. He has been saying this for eight months now.

The owner does not want to support the injured worker, arguing that the mine was being run at the time of the accident by a manager without his permission. There is no help from the mine inspectorate either. Officials there say the mine was closed as per their record and, in any case, there is no evidence that the injured miner worked there.

Injured, incapacitated labourers or the heirs of miners killed in mine accidents spend a lot of time, money and energy on getting compensation. They travel great distances, frequently appearing before labour tribunals and other government officials.

When they cannot get the compensation, they engage union leaders, lawyers, the inspectorates — basically, anyone who can help. In the process, palms are greased and favours are given in exchange for bribes. Alam claims to have paid 80,000 rupees to different people, including the officials of a mine workers union.

Mine owners, on the other hand, spend more money to win a case than what they may need to pay as compensation. In one instance, an owner spent 400,000 rupees to avoid the payment of 20,000 in compensation. They do this to prevent a precedent from being established. Once a certain amount of compensation has been won by a worker, they argue, it will only encourage others to make similar claims.

Mine owners – who actually do not own mines but get them on lease either from government or from individual land owners – erect multiple buffers between themselves and mine workers to avoid responsibility for an accident. This is mainly done through subletting coal mines even though the Balochistan Minerals Rules of 2002 clearly state: “No licensee or lessee shall sublet the mine for the purpose of extraction of the mineral”.

And, yet, there is hardly a mine in Pakistan that is not subcontracted. Some mines have been sublet twice or three times over.

The lease agreement is done only with a lessee, says Irfanullah. This means the government can exercise its authority only over him as far as the protection of the rights of miners are concerned. “Since coal mines are sublet to middlemen and from there to contractor and sometimes even to workers, many barriers to the implementation of the law arise.”

Aseer, a miner at Choa Saidan Shah, lost his brother to a mining accident in June 2014. Since then he has been expecting the government to give him a death grant of 500,000 rupees from its Workers Welfare Fund.

The fund collects money from employers all over the country – two per cent of their “accessible” income – and distributes it among workers (and their families). There are four major heads under which the money is distributed in Punjab — educational fees and scholarships (ranging from 800 rupees a month per child to 3,500 rupees per month per child), marriage grants (100,000 rupees), death grants (500,000 rupees) and subsidised housing schemes.

Until September last year, according to a worker union leader, the fund had been holding back a massive 124 billion rupees in unpaid death grants. That month the Supreme Court ordered it to release the grant for the families for 327 coal miners who had died in various parts of Balochistan and in Darra Adam Khel over the previous eight years.

The case of Aseer’s brother has been made complicated by the fact that he came from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but died in a mine in Punjab. The mine owner and officials in the latter province have to process his case first and send it to the government in the former province which will then make the payment.

The payment of grant is also conditional. The government pays it only if mine owner has already paid a similar amount in compensation to the family of a deceased miner. If owners do not pay – which they often do not – labourers stand to lose the government’s assistance as well.

Workers allege that they do not get a fair deal even while they are alive and working. Desperate as they are, they cannot refuse when they are asked to sign on salary receipts that are sometimes 20 per cent higher than what they actually get. These receipts are allegedly produced in front of government officials and courts if and when a mining company is accused of paying its workers less than the official minimum wage of 13,000 rupees a month. To address these allegations, the government has now made it mandatory that salaries and other benefits are transferred through cheques but the workers and their unions are still unhappy. Most workers are illiterate while many of them do not have official identity documents so they cannot open bank accounts, they contend.

Abdul Rashid, an assistant mines labour welfare commissioner in Choa Saidan Shah, believes workers have to suffer all this exploitation because of “poverty and lack of solidarity” among them. “Even when they threaten to go on a strike, many of them are so financially desperate that they will come in to work anyway,” he says. This desperation came to the fore one more time in September 2018. After the Punjab government decided to close down brick kilns to address the problem of smog caused by the burning of coal – among other things – miners all over Punjab and Sindh went up in arms. As brick production went down and coal piled up unsold, they feared millions of them will lose their jobs so they came out in the streets to protest.

Towns like Dukki and Choa Saidan Shah will, indeed, go bust if coal mines there get shut down. “Business from shopping done by miners touches 20 million rupees on each Friday in Choa Saidan Shah Bazaar alone, says a local shopkeeper. “Every bazaar from here to Kallar Kahar is full of miners shopping on Friday when they get their wages.

##Part Three

There is little to excite children in Dukki. On a recent Friday, 13-year-old Pir Mohammad and some others of his age are busy clearing a truck of black coal dust in the town’s truck terminal. Their faces are as grimy as their clothes.

Pir Mohammad is a local resident — as are his young co-workers. Cleaning a truck earns them 300 rupees. For now, they are happy with the money they have made.

Several other children stand leaning by or sitting on the bumpers of trucks they have just cleaned, counting and comparing money they have earned. Their conversation betrays a streak of competition even when they appear friends. They exhibit a certain maturity beyond their age — a worldly, wise manner learnt from being exposed to a world of adults.

For a small town, Dukki has an unusually high concentration of men. It also has a very high incidence of death. Deadly accidents in coal mines here are more frequent than anywhere else in Pakistan.

Every Friday, though, death seems to be farthest from everyone’s mind. Many thousand miners – estimates vary between 35,000 and 50,000 – descend on the town from nearby mines. There is a feeling of release in the air as crowds of colliers move about local markets, reminding one of the flight of subterranean termites growing wings after rain and reaching out for a source of light.

Kohl-eyed and black-nailed from the ash in mines that even the hardest of detergents can barely remove, they ripple through streets like water after a dam break. They hang around in groups, seeking entertainment and largely finding it in the act of consumption. They throng at restaurants, tea stalls, grocery shops, garment sellers and mine supplies stores.

They also meet their kin from other mines whom they have not seen for an entire week. Over cups of tea and plates of rice and meat, they socialise and exchange news from a distant home.

At Pishin Hotel, its owner Daroo Khan says he looks forward to Fridays. “I make 3,500 rupees on an average day. On a Friday, my earning is 13,000 rupees,” he says, juggling between making tea and filling plates with cakes and biscuits for customers.

In the next shop, old Haji Sardar Nasar is sitting wrapped in a woollen shawl. He looks like a lord surveying his little kingdom of mining implements as his sons deal with customers. He is warm and hospitable. Before becoming a hardware store in response to demand from the burgeoning mining sector, his shop sold cloth. Nasar claims coal business in Dukki is at least 60 years old. “A labourer would buy a bag of coal for 12 annas (75 paisas), take it to Harnai and from there to Punjab,” he says of the earliest days of coal trade. “As people in Punjab moved from rural to urban settings and demand for bricks increased, so did the demand for coal to be used as fuel in brick kilns.” Other than miners, it is the truckers who abound in Dukki. Like colourful beetles, their trucks crawl around the town — on roads, at filling stations, outside restaurants.

At the heart of the town is a truck terminal where, Haji Adam Gul, its owner, sits in a chair outside his office, dozing in the sun on a cold day. Around him trucks wait for their turn to move out and drivers sit on ground in front of a restaurant, sipping tea.

From this terminal alone, everyday 250 trucks are loaded with up to 35 tonnes of coal each and sent off to other parts of the country. The amount of money involved in local coal trade is staggering. Consider the numbers below:

One tonne of coal is worth 14,000 rupees. If one truck carries coal worth 490,000 rupees, the total worth of coal loaded in 250 trucks can be as high as 122.5 million rupees. The price of coal transported from this terminal each month, thus, can easily reach a whopping 3.67 billion rupees.

“There is no other job here,” says Gul. “No agriculture. Just minerals.”

Dukki did have agriculture once. Even though coal mining has existed here long before the recent spells of drought, local people still believe mining became possible after drought over the last few decades devastated their farmlands.

Whatever the truth, one thing is certain: Dukki remains among the least developed districts in the least developed province of Balochistan despite its thriving coal mining business. A member of the Senate (Yaqoob Nasar), a member of the National Assembly (Israr Tareen) and a member of Balochistan Assembly (Masood Luni) all belong to the town and yet it remains without basic services.

The three cases of polio identified in Pakistan in early 2018 were all spotted in Dukki.

The golden statue of Ajab Khan is standing in the town square of Darra Adam Khel. Carrying a gun on his shoulder, he looks fierce. A central character in the kidnapping of Molly Ellis, the daughter of a British officer Major Ellis who was posted here during the colonial rule, he is remembered as a freedom fighter in the folklore of Afridi tribe that lives in and around the town.

Darra Adam Khel, 45 kilometres to the south of Peshawar, is known for crafting guns. It is just as well that the statue is not made of bronze or iron. The Darawalls – as the local denizens are called – would have taken the statue and turned it into guns and bullets, says Saif-ur-Rehman, a journalist turned health worker in the local coal mines.

Of late, the place has acquired another reputation — of being a coal mining hub. According to some estimates, 1,000 tonnes of coal are already being extracted daily from Darra Adam Khel — as well as from some other parts of what until recently were the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). Deposits in Akhorwal part of Darra Adam Khel alone are reported to be larger than those in the rest of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province put together.

Coal mining officially started here in 2010 even though it has been going on in a rudimentary, and also illegal, way since 2006 — the year the Taliban militancy reached here. The TTP presence in the area and frequent military operations to get rid of it did not allow local coal mining to flourish earlier.

The mountains of Darra Adam Khel are now speckled with lights as miners work through night shifts in around 300 coal mines. About 70 per cent of the 15,000 miners working here, according to the manager of a mining company, come from Shangla and Swat.

People avoided coming to these mountains once. They were known as the abode of jinns. That fear is gone after people have seen, in the shape of Taliban, fiends more ferocious than those fabled beings of fire.

Colliers working in local coal mines, too, are not so much worried by jinns in mountains as they are scared of death lurking underground. When nine miners were trapped inside a mine at Akhorwal after an explosion in September last year, their colleagues had to remove 700 tonnes of coal debris to reach their dead bodies. Two more mine accidents around Darra Adam Khel claimed another five lives last October.

Now that Fata has been merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, provincial authorities promise to improve safety inside local mines. As a first step, the writ of the province’s inspectorate of mines will be extended here soon, they say. “We did not have access to Fata which resulted in lack of supervision of mining activities there,” says Shaukat Yousafzai, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s minister for information and public relations. “Now that we have access, the situation will improve.”

To streamline working conditions for coal miners, he says, the provincial government has also “proposed a monitoring unit that will ensure that mine inspections happen regularly”.

Compared to their workers, mine owners are already enjoying a higher lifestyle. Breaking with tribal traditions of trafficking in guns and narcotics, they are sending their children to schools and colleges. Many have shifted to Peshawar due, in part, to their new-found fortunes in coal.

Their prosperity is quite visible in and around Darra Adam Khel.

This could be due to a peculiar property ownership structure here: each local mountain is owned collectively by a whole clan. Some clans own more than one mountain. The profits from mines located in these mountains, locally called sarsaya, are also distributed among the whole clans. Each adult clansperson gets 25,000 rupees on average. Even a child gets as much as 8,000 rupees a month. On average, a whole household gets 120,000 rupees each month from mining profits. For a bigger family, the amount may go up to 400,000 rupees.

To cite just one example, there are as many as 1,420 shareholders in a single local mining complex situated in Old Bazikhel area. Its mining activities are supervised by a management committee on behalf of all the shareholders. “The day a woman marries into a family of shareholders, she also becomes a shareholder. When she gives birth, her child also becomes a shareholder,” says Zafar Afridi, whose clan owns and operates a number of mines in Darra Adam Khel. It does not come as a surprise that families here are generally large.

The whole local economy has changed due to coal mining. Hardware stores and wood stockyards have opened up everywhere. The amounts of money changing hands are alluring: a single mine uses wood worth 3.1 million rupees a month to support the roofs of its mines; it also uses 23,000 litres of petrol in a single month and pays 300,000 rupees every month for buying gunny bags to carry coal.

Coal miners complain the benefits of this coal bonanza do not flow to them. Their monthly earnings remain as meagre as 25,000 rupees each and their living conditions are horrible. They use water from an open tank that contained dengue larvae last year. They contract malaria frequently, living and working as they do under the sky. Contagious diseases like tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and hepatitis are common among them, so is trauma from bone fractures and spinal injuries.

“The mining inspector comes here once a month but he does not inspect mines,” says a miner. “How can then conditions improve?” Mining companies here do not allow miners to unionise to seek their rights through collective action. As Zafar Afridi contends, once unionised, they “do not work and become a nuisance.”

##Part Four

Saeed Khattak’s father was a soldier who became a coal-cutter after his retirement from the army. He brought his son from their native Karak district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Choa Saidan Shah in 1976 and enlisted him in the army. When he retired from the army, Khattak joined irrigation department in Bannu (in his home province). Soon afterwards, he would became the general secretary of Kurram Trade Union Federation, an alliance of associations formed by workers employed by the government and the private sector.

In 1982, his father came down with a pulmonary condition. He was “hollow from inside,” the doctors told Khattak.

It was the death of his father from pneumoconiosis that prompted him to mobilise miners against the dire working conditions in coal mines. “At the time, there was no trade union, no trained leadership,” he says. When Khattak first organised a protest, it was not against a mine owner but against the police who, he alleges, were used by mine owners to torture, arrest and imprison miners on flimsy charges if they demanded their rights. “As a leader, you organise people against an immediate problem,” he says as he explains the rationale for the protest. As the chairman of Pakistan Mine Workers Federation, Khattak tried to change things around by changing the idiom usually employed by trade union leaders. He would talk of setting up “welfare facilities” for workers as opposed to given them their “rights”. Owners agreed with him in that they did not want sick and disabled labourers on their hands, he says. This is how he managed to realise his biggest goal — a hospital for mine workers in Choa Saidan Shah.

Khattak has developed what he calls Ra Saeed Vision 2015. A little pompous perhaps and also past its time already, the vision imagines a model coal mining operation. One that not only offers safe working conditions but also addresses the dire economic condition of colliers.

This vision notwithstanding, the general impression about trade unions is negative. Mine owners consider them as a disruptive, blackmailing nuisance out to pitch workers against employers. Colliers call them frauds, always prone to siding with owners for the personal benefits of their leaders. Many trade unions, indeed, are known as ‘pocket unions’ for being the agents of the employers. Union leaders also become mine contractors over time because they have sway over labour and are knowledgeable enough to extract the most tonnage out of a mine.

There are also groupings as well as rivalries – sometimes even deadly – within trade unions. Established unions usually discourage rival neophytes from taking roots.

In Choa Saidan Shah alone, there are two trade unions: Khattak’s Pakistan Mine Workers Federation and Sharafuddin’s Quaid-e-Azam Union. The former is dominated by workers and leaders from Karak, which, like Shangla, is home to a large number of coal miners, and the latter’s members mostly come from Swat. Depending on which union one talks to, it is always its rival that is corrupt.

“Union leaders are not angels,” says Khattak, “but it is important to take into account the need to make compromises.” He, then, gives an example: If workers are asking for 100 rupees and the owner is not willing to pay anything, should we not ask for 50 rupees then? “Maybe we can bring the owner around to pay 100 rupees later.”

Also, as Khattak argues, trade unions tackle labour rights only within a state’s existing legal framework. “We do not have the power to influence policy. We are not organised enough to do that.”

The workers, though, have the right to participate in a “tripartite mechanism”. This is based on the principle of dialogue and cooperation between governments, employers and workers as enunciated by the ILO. It allows workers to not just critique policies but also call for their revision and reform.

Admittedly, this right is limited in Pakistan in many ways, most importantly because the country is not a signatory to the ILO’s convention on safety and health in mines. Union leaders attribute the government’s unwillingness to become a part of the convention to the fact that mines in general and coal mines in particular are owned by powerful politicians and influential industrialists.

##Part Five

[“T]here is a patient here in every house,” Abdul Salam points at a green valley so scenic it is hard to imagine that disease is eating away at its vitals. His eyes look large and luminous in a gaunt face. His complexion is pallid like a cloth washed too often. His thinning hair is plastered to a skull that looks shrunken like the rest of him.

It is late in the afternoon and Salam is sitting on a charpoy on the edge of his house, looking out at life in the valley below. A narrow tree-lined path links his house with a broken road down the mountain. The path runs past baskets full of persimmons – locally known as Japanese fruit – lying under trees heavy with their orange-red produce. The road snakes further downwards along steep cliffs, all the way to a river cutting through the rocky heart of Shangla.

Sunlit houses, their corrugated-sheet tops winking silver, dot mountain cliffs surrounded by poplars ablaze with the flaming colours of autumn. Deep green conifer trees turn the valley into pools of dappled light and cloak villages in their silent, shaded dignity.

Salam’s house falls somewhere in the middle of a mountain’s incline. There are layers of terraces above and below where people reside. He sits at his home all day, hardly ever leaving his perch, always looking down at the path and people who traverse it. Around him, bees buzz about on their way to a hive in the wall of his mud house. Quietly, they settle on the whitewashed wall, a blurry traffic of moving wings, limbs and antennae, single-minded in their pursuit of nectar, hurrying into a round hole.

“That is the guard bee,” says Naseebdara, Salam’s mother, pointing at a watchful insect at the entrance of the hole. Small and wizened, she is 70 but moves around in quick bursts of energy that belie her age. Much like the bees in a hive, she hovers around her sick son, fussing over him just as she might have done when he was a baby.

Naseebdara goes inside the room where a small box is fixed on the other side of the hole. Inside it is a beehive. Put an ear to the wooden box and you hear the bees buzzing inside. They sound like a thousand low volume conversations taking place in a small room.

“God sends them,” Naseebdara speaks of the bees as a sign of good luck, “so I take care of them.” Her own name means “a lucky woman”.

Honey in the hive draws insects, ants and spiders. She cleans them up. The bees do not sting her as she scoops up a plate of honey directly from under them.

Beekeeping was once a hobby for Naseebdara. Now it is a necessity. Salam needs the goodness of honey, its fabled healing powers, to cure his failing lungs. He has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) – or the ‘miner’s disease’ – caused by coal dust. In his case, it has been caused by asbestos.

The disease turns lung cells into a hard plaque overtime. Every day, the room for air in Salam’s lungs shrinks a little. He coughs and sputters when he talks, breaking conversation to catch his breath. It is November in Shangla, cold and windy, but he is drenched in sweat from the enormous effort of talking.

“You are lucky to reach 50 here without catching COPD,” rasps Salam. He is only 30 but looks as old as 60.

He caught the disease in the coal mines of Hangu, a district in south-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where asbestos fibre runs through coal seams. He operated a drill to break the seams made hard by asbestos. “The rock is even harder than iron. On drilling, it melts due to heat and gets into lungs,” says Salam.

Even though mine owners and managers usually know about the presence of asbestos and its toxicity, uneducated labourers like Salam have little awareness about it. He, therefore, initially believed that he got COPD not because of asbestos but from ‘iron’ fibre in the coal seam, which is how the contractors and owners describe asbestos — as iron.

As toxic as asbestos is, wearing a mask while drilling could have protected his lungs. Mining rules, too, state that labourers working in mine should always wear masks. But asking for one, says Salam who worked for nine years in Choa Saidan Shah and Quetta before moving to Hangu, means asking to be laid off. “If we do not work in mines, we run the risk of baypardagi (social humiliation).”

On his bed are several plastic bags, full of medications, lung X-rays and medical prescriptions. When Salam first came down with COPD, the damage to his lungs was 15 per cent. It has worsened since then. His lungs are now 80 per cent damaged despite the fact that he has been taking many medicines, he says.

He knows there is no treatment for COPD. No cure. “Every patient deteriorates to a 100 per cent.”

What he needs is a lung transplant for which he has no money. He has already spent 1.5 million rupees – a huge amount for a poor family like his – on his failing health. The expenditure wiped out all that he had earned from working in mines. “He worked nine years in the byabaan (wasteland), earned a lot but now it is all gone,” says Naseebdara.

Salam’s brothers, also coal miners, now foot his medical bill.

The mining rules say mine owners should pay compensation to labourers but that is in case of death or a trauma that needs emergency treatment. Debilitating diseases like COPD and injuries that need long-term treatment – leaving miners like Salam bedridden or wheelchair bound – are left for labourers themselves to pay for.

In case of a medical emergency, Salam goes to a healthcare centre in Alpura, district headquarters of Shangla. The doctors there give him medication for tuberculosis. All the patients at the centre are miners, he says. The total number of COPD patients in the district, according to one estimate, is as high as 1,700.

Winters worsen his condition because people in his village burn coal to stay warm. But worse than living with a disease is the realisation of a creeping death. He cannot lose sight of it even if he wants to.

His village of Mian Kalay, dubbed locally as da yatemmano kalay or “the village of orphans”, gives him almost a daily reminder about the inevitability of death. From his bed on the terrace, Salam watches the village, each day anticipating the news that someone there has died of COPD. After hearing the news, he goes to sleep thinking it will be his last night alive. Every time, he has a respiratory seizure, he fears death is coming. “When I hear that those in a better condition than mine have died, I lose hope.”

Once it snowed heavily in mountains in Shangla. The snow melted slowly, water seeping imperceptibly into the ground. Local streams and aquifers were recharged and the soil stayed moist for cultivation throughout the summers. There were beans and corn in abundance both for people and their cattle.

In warm season, they grew crops and saved their produce for winters. Villages got by on the back of their own bounties. Poor though they were, the villagers knew no disease except fever or flu. Even when they left to work in mines in distant places, it was only to pay off debts or make some money to marry off a sister or a daughter. After a few months of work, they returned to resume life in their villages.

Now in the village of Kundao – which means ruins in Pashto – young men can be found with their families only during eids. As if they are guests in their own homes, they leave on the third day of the two festivals for remote coal mining towns — Darra Adam Khel or Hangu in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Khushab and Choa Saidan in Punjab, Quetta or Dukki in Balochistan, Thar or Hyderabad in Sindh.

They cannot stay away long from their jobs lest these are taken by someone else. It does not snow in Shangla anymore — at least not as much as it used to. Environmental degradation due to deforestation and climate change has stunted sustenance received from nature. As water becomes scarce, people in mountains – almost the entire Shangla population – are getting increasingly desperate. They are going down from their villages to live and work by the river along the road – opening a teashop here, a workshop there. There are no jobs in Alpura either. Still they go looking – if only to cover the cost of travelling – in the town’s small market or beyond that.

Like others in his village, Hussain Ali Hairan also wants to go down to work in Alpura. His family worries about the diminishing water supplies but he has his own reasons for wanting to go. In his house in Mian Kalay, he can only move inside a large open room on the first floor. A veritable prisoner, he is wheelchair-bound.

To traverse even an inch beyond the door of his house, someone has to carry him and his wheelchair. To go down the mountain or travel beyond, he depends on his brothers to piggyback him to a car. He must stay close to the road if he is to overcome this dependence.

A poet with an innocent, childlike demeanour, Hairan has a broken back. He leaves his bed and returns to it with help from his brothers. At 17, he followed his father to the coal mines of Balochistan. Later, he went to Punjab and Kurram in former tribal areas and then moved back to Balochistan. It was from there that he was brought home on a gurney. His back broke when the roof of a mine shaft fell on him, fracturing his spinal cord. “Since that day, I have been looking at the door for the company owner or the contractor to come to me but no one has,” he says.

Now 28, Hairan also went to a labour court with a broken back to secure compensation from the owner of the mine where he had met the accident. The lawsuit helped him get 300,000 rupees. He has already spent double that amount on his treatment.

Since Hairan suffered the injury, he has taken up the cause of paraplegic miners of whom there are 200 in Shangla. He is on phone all day, speaking to miners incapacitated like him by accidents, assuring them of help.

Mohammad Qayyum, a blind man with nine children, is visiting Hairan on a recent winter day. He went to Quetta for mining when he was 19. From there, he moved to Hyderabad and Cherat to work in coal mines there. In Cherat in 2009, while digging in a mine 1,600 feet deep, his pickaxe hit a live explosive left behind by someone.

Miners are not allowed to handle explosives. Sometimes, in a bid to dig more because wages correspond to the tonnage of coal they extract, they ignore safety instructions and clandestinely take explosives inside the mines to shatter coal with them. It was one such ghal surang – a thief explosive – that Qayyum hit with devastating effects.

His cousin, who was with him in the mine that day, says Qayyum was brought out of the mine a “misshapen lump” of flesh and bones. His shin bones stuck out of skin, marrow oozing out of them due to the intense heat from the blast. A stone had lodged in one of his eyes and the other had been licked by flames. They wrapped him in a gunny bag and brought him to the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar where doctors had no time for him because of a terrorist bombing in the city’s Khyber Bazaar that day.

With many dead and injured to attend to, they neglected his eyes and bandaged his legs in a hurry. Stones are still visible in his deformed shins, like lumps under his skin.

Qayyum has spent 500,000 rupees to treat his legs and another 100,000 rupees on the treatment of his eyes. The mining company gave him only 100,000 rupees and that too only after he went to its office “to beg them in this broken state”.

For many others, injuries just prove fatal. In May 2018 alone, 23 dead bodies were brought to Shangla and its neighbouring districts after mine accidents in Balochistan and Punjab. The month before, 19 men from Shangla and Swat had died in different mine accidents. August came with more bad news: 19 miners died in a single accident at Sanjidi, near Quetta, on the 12th of the month. On average, says Fiaz Mohammad Khan Papa, a Shangla notable, the district receives a dead miner a day.

In Mian Kalay, there are as many dead miners as there are living ones. Their children are often left in the care of family members who may also be taking care of other relatives with debilitating injuries or diseases inflicted by coal mining.

The miners are caught in a seemingly endless cycle of death and poverty. Most of them stay poor, spending the money earned from mining on debilitating health conditions caused by mining. They then pull their children into mining because there are no economic opportunities in their home region. This is how – and why – men like Qayyum end up sending their children to coal mines.

The inverse is just as true. Even if people do not get sick or disabled, they see mining as the only industry that offers employment even to the unskilled. Miners just need to be strong. Wages in coal mining are also higher compared to the price of physical labour of other kinds.

“Coal mining is also inherited,” says Gul Rehmat, a miner at Sor Range near Quetta. “Our fathers and grandfathers used to do it. Now it is us.” So, when it is time for a miner to leave mining due to old age or injury, he is replaced by his children.

Colliers from Shangla also pull in others from their villages to work in mines — just as Azad Kashmiris in Bradford and Pashtun tribesmen in Dubai do. When someone among the miners manages to escape the cycle of poverty, disease and debt, he becomes a contractors who then brings more unskilled relatives and acquaintances from back home to work in coal mines. Jobs are given as favours, with wages paid in advance to keep labourers obliged to work for the same contractor till the time advances are paid off. Coal mining, thus, becomes a regional profession — perpetuated by the poverty of the people caught in it. Many of the miners in Shangla – as well as in other mining zones – have stories of adversity and survival writ large on their bodies and souls. They sit in ill-lit rooms, in isolated coalfields or back home in their villages, sharing a camaraderie that is not unlike the military’s — men bonding in the face of calamity, watching out for each other. They crack jokes over cups of tea – black humour that turns their pathetic condition into a laughable nuisance – to blunt their sharp-edged reality.

Every time they hear someone is dead, they murmur a quiet Inna lillah-e-wa inna alaih-e-raje’oon — surely we belong to Allah and to Him shall we return. They are resigned to the fact that their death, whenever it comes, will be in a coal mine or because of it. So, they go on with their lives, taking risks even when they know from others around them that such attitude can only bring grief.

This fatalism makes them indifferent to the human cost of mining; perhaps the indifference helps them keep fear at bay. It helps them live — disregarding disease and death around them.

In Mian Kalay, everyone laughs when Hairan’s father, a birdlike man who eats crushed cornbread in lassi and smokes despite a rattling cough, says he has an MA in mining — a self-mocking reference to 40 plus years spent in coal mining doing every imaginable labour in subterranean dungeons.

You eat with them and think: amazing that these people can laugh.

The author is a Peshawar-based freelance writer.

The article was published in the Herald's May 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Illustration by Marium Ali

On a dark night when clouds enveloped the sky and rain and lightning forced people indoors, the residents of a village heard a roar and a thud louder than the loudest of cloud thunder. Many of them rushed out and saw a fighter plane crashed in the nearby fields.

Some of them thought its pilot must have died during the crash. Others surmised that he could be hiding somewhere and might try to attack them. As this chatter was going on, a boy and his sister heard a weak knock at their door. Someone was crying outside in pain. They opened the door and found a man in military uniform standing outside. He was the pilot whose plane had crashed.

For a moment, they hesitated. He was, after all, a combatant from the other side. He could also be armed and might hurt them. But he was also badly injured and bleeding. They called their father and all three helped him get in. They offered him food and water, cleaned and dressed his wounds. Next morning, they quietly went to a nearby military post and handed him over to the soldiers there.

This story was told in a Pakistani textbook back in the 1970s.

Abhinandan Varthaman, the Indian pilot whose fighter plane crashed on Pakistani soil late last month, could say that this is not the way villagers in Azad Kashmir treated him. After they saw him descend from the sky with a parachute, they rushed and found him by a stream. Some of them immediately started beating him up and continued doing so until a contingent of the Pakistan Army arrived and rescued him.

The earliest images of the captured Indian pilot showed his face bloodied by the beating he got. A black eye and a swollen cheek were still visible in the images of him being handed over to India on March 1.

What has changed between the 1970s and now? What has made real life Pakistanis behave differently from their storybook version? Context. Mindset.

The context for the textbook story was a government effort to pacify the Pakistani public’s opinion towards India in the aftermath of a lost war in 1971. People were hurt. They were angry. They did not want to accept the creation of Bangladesh even though it was already a reality. They felt deceived and stabbed in the back by India.

The government needed to revive their essential humanity in order for them to see that blind hatred towards their big neighbour to the east was neither helpful nor desirable in making them good human beings — both individually and collectively. A mindset needed to be changed and a new mindset required to be inculcated so that the hurt and anger could be replaced with kindness and care.

Since those distant years, the context has changed drastically. Beginning with the early 2000s, the situation has only gotten worse. A strategically strident, politically powerful and economically confident India has spared no opportunity to browbeat Pakistan in almost every field — from diplomacy to sports and from competition in the international arena to bilateral cultural exchanges. Except for a brief period around the Agra Summit between General Pervez Musharraf and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2001 and some helpful behind the scenes diplomacy over the thorny issue of Kashmir more than a decade ago, the two countries have moved apart with a mutual ferocity they previously displayed only during and around wars.

Pakistani attitudes towards India have gone through multiple war, peace and then war again sequences during these years. This could be because Pakistanis have received an overtly aggressive education vis-à-vis India in recent times — one that emphasises their difference from the people on the Indian side of the border. They have been made to see the political and geographical divide between India and Pakistan as a war between good and evil, as a battle between an Atal-Bihari-Vajpayee-neighbourhood bully and its smaller, but virtuous, nemesis, and as a conflict between two religions.

Same has been the case on the Indian side — only more so because a shrill news media there has come to believe that there is money to be made from selling war. The hostility towards everything Pakistani has often manifested itself in rabidly anti-Pakistan rhetoric coming out of India’s chatterati — including politicians, actors, former bureaucrats, ex-soldiers and sometimes even intellectuals and writers.

In its most recent manifestation, this schooling in hate has led to multiple lynchings of Kashmiris working and studying in different parts of India. They are increasingly seen as Pakistani agents out to destroy India.

That the two sides need to change this context and their mutually hostile mindsets to one that induces peace more than it breeds war, is something that cannot be over-emphasised. There is so much to lose from war — money, men, our essential humanity. And there is so much to gain from peace — human development, security, our long-lost kindness and care.

By F.S. Aijazuddin

We are at war, yet never really at war.
We are at peace, never truly at peace.
What is this land in which we live -
seeded by hate, by the sword tilled,
by Death scythe-harvested?

Since neither of us can win,
let our unequal gods meet,
bury arms instead of limbs,
and negotiate a mirror’d defeat.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has achieved the unthinkable: he has pulled his country back from the precipice of peace.

Modi was not even born in April 1948 when India, after it lodged an appeal to the United Nations for help in Jammu and Kashmir, was handed the toothless Security Council Resolution No 47 which called for “a free and impartial plebiscite” to determine the wishes of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. That plebiscite was never held. India’s action created a precedent, though, for after that, whenever there was any tension or confrontation between India and Pakistan, one or the other or both scurried to third parties for mediation.

It did not matter whether it was the United Nations Security Council, the United States, the Soviet Union and latterly China. The two irascible neighbours have always expected someone else to coax them into accepting what they doggedly denied each other. For example, the World Bank acted as the broker for the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 and the Soviet Union midwifed the Tashkent Agreement in 1966. It was only in the aftermath of the war over Bangladesh in 1971 that Pakistan and India conceded the unavoidable. They agreed to talk to each other, not at each other.

The preamble to the Simla Agreement of July 1972 was piety incarnate. Both countries admitted that they needed to “put an end to the conflict and confrontation that have hitherto marred their relations and work for the promotion of a friendly and harmonious relationship and the establishment of durable peace in the Subcontinent, so that both countries may henceforth devote their resources and energies to the pressing task of advancing the welfare of their peoples”.

Its first clause reiterated their acknowledgement of the supremacy of the United Nations Charter (that is, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs and respect for each other’s sovereignty).

The second clause expressed the resolve of both India and Pakistan “to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them”. Both countries decided to let the Security Council Resolution No 47 hang out to dry while they washed their dirty linen in private.

Before leaving for Simla in the last days of June 1972, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was all too aware that he was hamstrung: over 5,000 square miles of his country’s territory was occupied by India; over73,900 prisoners of war and 16,400 civilians under protective custody (not protected by the Geneva Convention) were held in concentration camps scattered across India; and the United Nations had been palpably ineffective in getting India to hold the promised plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir. To Bhutto, bringing India to the negotiating table yielded parity to Pakistan with a larger, stronger and adversarial neighbour.

For Indira Gandhi, a concession to hold bilateral negotiations cost her nothing. She had succeeded in removing the United Nations’ flailing fly off the table and she had decided in her mind that she would delay all bilateral negotiations on Jammu and Kashmir by postponing them. She knew that no one – neither the United States nor the Soviet Union – could coerce her to sit at any negotiating table with Pakistan to settle the issue of Kashmir.

By 1999, with Pakistan’s misadventure in Kargil and India’s swift retaliation, the dynamics in the Subcontinent changed. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif hurried to Washington DC and, over a July-fourthholiday weekend, implored President Bill Clinton to protect him from the Indians in Kargil and from his own military in Rawalpindi.

This was an ironical replay of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s panic-ridden appeal during the 1962 India-China conflict. He had approached not the Non-Aligned Movement, of which he was a founder, nor the communist Soviet Union, of which he was a close ideological ally, but President John F Kennedy of the arch capitalist United States for “two squadrons of B-47 bombers” and “twelve squadrons of supersonic fighters manned by American crews”. This plea went unfulfilled.

Even if had been fulfilled, conditions attached to arms supplies by the United States remained clear — weapons sold to the nations in the Subcontinent were intended for use only against communist states, not against each other. That is why during the current crisis, India, which could not prevent the purchase of F-16 fighter jets by Pakistan from the United States, is desperate to have the United States condemn Pakistan for violating the small print of the supply contract.

Subtly, the United States has responded by telling India that F-16s in Pakistan’s possession could not be used offensively. It reminded the Indians that they had been the aggressors in the attack on Balakot. They had violated Pakistan’s territorial boundary, therefore, technically, Pakistan was justified to use F-16s (if it had) in self-defence.

China – “Pakistan’s all-weather friend” – has no such qualms. It does not mind where its arms are used or against whom. In its armaments supply policy, China follows the dictum of its former president Deng Xiaoping:it does not matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.

China, however, could not have been unconcerned when its JF-17 aircraft (manufactured by Pakistan with Chinese assistance) engaged in actual combat against India’s Russian-designed MiG-21s and Su-30s. It needed to know if the aircraft was any good. The JF-17 passed the test and vindicated Pakistan’s decision to rely upon China rather than the United States, which asks for its money in advance and then delays delivery.

The military cooperation and collaboration between Pakistan and China has come a long way since the middle of the 1960s when China would give in to Pakistan’s petulant and importuning demands for military hardware. Pakistan’s former ambassador to China, Sultan M Khan, in his book,Memories & Reflections of a Pakistani Diplomat (published in 1997), describes a visit to China in 1966 by a Pakistani delegation of senior military personnel. They had come to seek replenishment of their country’s weapons stockpile, depleted by the 1965 war with India.

The ambassador recalled that, on the final day of its stay, the Pakistani delegation called on Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. He told them that “all the requirements on their list would be met” and then remarked that he had seen the Pakistani list but was not sure on what basis the quantity of ammunition had been calculated. One of the Pakistani generals replied that the calculations were based on reserve supplies for 14 days.

This prompted Enlai to ask, “And what happens after fourteen days? How can a war be fought in that short time?” The general explained that Pakistan hoped that, during that time, the United Nations Security Council would meet and call upon both parties to cease fire and withdraw their armed forces to their respective borders.

“Please forgive me,” Enlai said, “if I appear to be confused by your reply. But if the outcome of a conflict has been predetermined to be a restoration of the status quo ante, then why fight at all? Why unnecessarily waste human lives and economic resources? Wars cannot be fought according to a time-table, and one has to be ready for a prolonged conflict.”

That conversation took place in the mid-1960s, before China became a nuclear superpower and before Pakistan developed its own nuclear capability. It was a time when the threat of nuclear attacks and retaliation could begin and end within 48 hours. Many people, even pseudo-statesmen, talk glibly about nuclear war today, as if it is a Republic Day parade in which nuclear-armed missiles will be ignited instead of fireworks.

They have perhaps forgotten that the last time a nuclear device was detonated, it was way back in August 1945 when the United States President Harry S Truman authorised his forces to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In retrospect, Truman’s diary entry about his decision to drop the bombs seems almost naive in its expectation: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between [July 1945] and August10th. I have told the [Secretary] of War, [Henry Lewis] Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.”

The bomb that detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima was nicknamedThe Little Boy. It contained about 64kilogrammes of uranium-235 and took 44.4 seconds to fall from the aircraft. Its descent was slowed by a parachute to allow the B-29 bomber aircraft, which carried and dropped it, to fly clear. The bomb did not distinguish between military and non-military victims nor was it gender sensitive. Everyone within a four-mile radius from where it detonated either died or was unspeakably maimed. On the whole, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in the deaths of 220,000 people.

Since that searing August, no nation has dropped a nuclear bomb on another. They have tested them, certainly, to assess their efficacy but the world has yet to see a nuclear conflagration. And with good reason. No one will live long enough after a nuclear attack and retaliation anywhere in the world to find and read any diary entries, as we do with Truman’s, about the approval for using those bombs.

Historians trying to make sense of these past few weeks need to understand this background, if only to comprehend why the conflict began with Balakot and had to end with a mirrored de-escalation, brokered by guess who? the United States. Both India and Pakistan have decided that (to borrow Winston Churchill’s juvenile phrase) “it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war”.

The earliest cautious step in this direction was taken in the first week of March when contact between the director generals of military operations (DGMOs) of the two countries was restored. The second step – to ensure that their respective high commissioners return to their posts in New Delhi and Islamabad – is already being undertaken by both sides. The all-important third step would be a meeting between the two prime ministers in a neutral venue.

Saigon last month proved to be unlucky for President Donald Trump and his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un. Helsinki in 2018 might have succeeded had Trump not tried to avoid any discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Russia’s alleged interference in the United States presidential elections in 2016. Tashkent and Simla are out — too many ghosts.

For the time being, the venue of such a prime ministerial meeting is less important than the outcome of the Indian general elections in May 2019.If Modi returns to power with a working majority (albeit in coalition with some smaller parties), he might interpret that as an endorsem*nt of his belligerence. He could blunt that with an invitation to Prime Minister Imran Khan to attend his swearing-in ceremony in New Delhi.

Will Imran Khan peck at the olive branch just as Sharif did in 2014? But, as Imran Khan has demonstrated, he has stronger nerves than Sharif showed during Kargil. He has not run to Washington and begged for protection from the Pakistan Army. He stayed put in Islamabad and remained silent.

He may have begun his stewardship, as his detractors still claim, as a ‘selected’ prime minister but they forget that no prime minister in our history has had to face a war within the first seven months of assuming office. In 1939, Winston Churchill came over-prepared for World War II; he had been the Lord of the Admiralty. In 1945, when Truman succeeded Franklin D Roosevelt as president of the United States, he had already served as vice-president, albeit for only a short time.

It is clear from his brief but pithy speeches that Khan does not intend to be swayed by sentiment in his dealings with India. He can afford to wait until the May elections in India and some years thereafter. If there is anyone who is feeling the heat, it is Modi. He is having to watch ministers from his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) trip over each other’s lifeless lies. He has had to listen to the Indian Air Force chief who, when asked about the number of actual terrorists killed in Balakot, passed the buck to the government in New Delhi.

Modi’s ambition to violate Pakistan’s borders with a swift, surgical strike has festered into a gangrenous failure. His hopes of uniting India under his singular unquestioned command have disintegrated into a non-nuclear ash, incinerated not by Pakistan but by opposition parties within India.

Had Modi read history instead of trying to make it, he would have learned that on October 22, 1971 just before the India-Pakistan conflict over Bangladesh, Dr Henry Kissinger (then working as an assistant on national security affairs to president Richard Nixon) met Zhou Enlai in Beijing. They discussed the fomenting crisis in the Subcontinent. Enlai had already conveyed to Kissinger China’s principled stand on the sanctity of international borders and on non-interference.

Kissinger’s reply has not lost its relevance even after 48 years: “[United States is] totally opposed to Indian military action against Pakistan. I do not normally see ambassadors, but I have warned the Indian ambassador [L K Jha] on behalf of the President that if there is an attack by India we will cut off all economic aid to India. We have told the Russians of our view, and they have told us they will try to restrain the situation, but I am not sure that I believe them. We believe there is a good chance that India will either attack or provoke the Pakistanis to attack by driving the Pakistanis into a desperate action in the next month or two.”

A generation of Indians and Pakistanis lived through the subsequent Armageddon. Another generation has these days seen a vision of the next Armageddon. They see no future dying in it.

By Siddharth Varadarajan

Just when we thought India-Pakistan relations had hit rock bottom, a suicide blast on a convoy of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) travelling from Srinagar to Jammu has helped push the bilateral relationship several notches further down. The attack exacted the highest death toll for a single incident over the 30 years of insurgency in Kashmir.

Its scale (more than 40 troopers were killed) and its timing (coming just weeks before what is going to be a closely fought general election in India) were destined – and perhaps even designed – to generate a military response from India. In September 2016, the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had responded to an attack on an army camp in Uri and the threat of “infiltration by terrorists” from the Pakistani side with what it said were “surgical strikes” on “launch” pads across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir.

Pakistan denied the surgical strikes had taken place but these quickly became part of the political narrative of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) inside India. In fact, barely weeks before the Pulwama attack – which, ironically, the 2016 surgical strikes were meant to deter – a Bollywood film, Uri, was released to tremendous public response. Two lines from the film seemed tailor-made for the BJP’s electoral playbook.

“How’s the josh?” the commanding officer of one of the units, tasked with a surgical strike, asks his men and they reply, “High, sir!” And in a pivotal scene, the Indian national security adviser says of the war on terror, “This is a new India. We will enter their homes and kill them there.”

With Modi and several of his ministers using “How’s the josh?” phrase, it became politically impossible for the government not to react militarily to the Pulwama attack. This was especially so given the scale of the attack and the fact that its victims came from virtually every part of India. Within minutes of the news of the attack, hypernationalist television anchors quickly upped the ante, demanding that the government take military action against Pakistan.

A day later, Modi told a public gathering in Jhansi that he had authorised the military to give a fitting reply to the Pulwama attack at the time and place of its own choosing. He also told his audience that India needed a strong government and that they should strengthen his hands once again in the election.

While the nature of the Indian response was more or less hard-coded into the circ*mstances in which the attack occurred, Pakistan did not help matters by prevaricating in its initial statements. The Foreign Office in Islamabad issued a mealy-mouthed statement only to revise it quickly. Notwithstanding his offer to move on any actionable evidence India provides against the Pulwama plotters, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s own statement on February 19 was seen by the Indian side as lacking in sensitivity.

He could have helped defuse the tension which was clearly building up by immediately initiating a crackdown against the Jaish-e-Mohammad and its leaders. Muhammad Hassan, the official spokesperson of the militant organisation, was, after all, quoted in all Srinagar-based newspapers as claiming credit for the attack.

A video recording of a young man from the Indian side of Kashmir was also available in which he had acknowledged the Jaish’s role in the Pulwama blast. The fact that the Pakistani establishment was “in touch” with the Jaish has been admitted by no less a person than Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, albeit indirectly, in an interview to the BBC.

Instead of acting against the Jaish and its leader, Masood Azhar – as it was obliged to do given its international commitments and as it ought to have done given its own national interest – the Pakistani establishment went into lockdown. At an official briefing, the director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Major General Asif Ghafoor, not only failed to acknowledge the possibility of the Jaish’s involvement in the Pulwama attack but he also went on to insinuate that the attack on the CRPF (and, indeed, a host of other high-profile terrorist incidents) might actually be false flag operations.

He warned India against taking any military action and said Pakistan would “surprise” its neighbour with its response and would “dominate the escalatory ladder”. For added measure, and with an eye on the international community, Major General Ghafoor brought in the nuclear factor by referring to the convening of a meeting of Pakistan’s National Command Authority which supervises the country’s nuclear weapons.

By this point, it was clear the die was cast. Pakistan knew Indian military action was coming and India knew the Pakistani military would strike back. Neither side had any sense of the specifics but India was confident it could contain the danger of escalation.

Since the Jaish was seen as the public face of the Pulwama attack, the Indian side decided it would use its military to send a message to the militant organisation and its support infrastructure inside Pakistan. In the early hours of February 26, India launched an aerial strike against what it said was a Jaish training facility near Balakot, a town in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, many kilometres inside the LoC.

Major General Ghafoor scooped the Indians by breaking the news of the airstrike to the world’s media via Twitter at around 6:30 am. He also declared the attack to have been unsuccessful. Later the same day, the Indian foreign secretary held a press conference to say that a “large number” of terrorists and their trainers had been killed in an intelligence-led “non-military pre-emptive strike” on a Jaish target.

The details of the airstrike are still not clear since neither India’s Ministry of External Affairs nor its Ministry of Defence or the Indian Air Force have provided any details on record. Going by the accounts of India’s reputed defence writers, it does appear as if the operation involved the deployment of four Mirage 2000s of the Indian Air Force near but not across the LoC. These planes fired precision-guided munitions in ‘stand-off’ mode on to a madrasa complex that sits atop a hillock at Jabba village south of Balakot.

The fact that Pakistan has not allowed reporters access to the madrasa suggests the Indian airstrikes did cause damage. The extent of the physical damage and the casualty rate, however, remain, unclear and will likely be debated by image analysts and munitions specialists for months if not years to come. Indian politicians have put out figures like “350 terrorists killed” for public consumption, ignoring the fact that the metric for measuring the effectiveness of the airstrike is not necessarily a body count but the message that was sent to a group like the Jaish: that it should not consider any part of Pakistan to be a safe haven.

The airstrikes were also designed to send a message to the Pakistani establishment and to the world’s big powers. For the former, the Indian message was that its strategy of using jihadi groups as a reserve army would henceforth involve military costs. For the latter, the message was that New Delhi would no longer consider itself constrained by Western fears of Indian kinetic operations triggering the dreaded ‘nuclear flashpoint’.

For the nuclear bluff to be called, it was essential that any Pakistani military response be brushed aside and not responded to. That, in turn, required the Pakistani military response to be calibrated in such a manner that it could tell India it had the ability to pay back in similar coin while not actually striking in a way that wider hostilities get triggered.

In the event, Pakistani military chose the tactic of aerial ingress and the targeting of military facilities. While the Pakistani military spokesperson said the Pakistan Air Force deliberately detargeted at the last minute so as not to escalate, the Indian side simply says the Pakistan Air Force “missed” its targets.

Whatever the truth in these claims and counter-claims, the fact is that Pakistan was able to ‘respond’ militarily to India’s strike in Balakot in a manner that Indian military officials described as “an act of war”. Yet, this tit-for-tat action drew the hostilities to a close without either side contemplating the next step up the ladder of escalation.

The downing of an Indian MiG-21 and the capture of an Indian pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman, certainly played its part in the de-escalation, especially since the Indian side also claimed to have shot down a Pakistani F-16. Pakistan denies this but the truth will only be known with certainty when the United States conducts its next round of end-use verification — an exercise that will involve, at the very least, an inventory count.

From the Indian point of view, the first-order risk that the strike in Balakot entailed – of gradual or even open-ended escalation – appears to have been contained. But there is a wider risk involved here: of getting locked into a predictable military response each time a terrorist group launches a major strike inside India. This means it is the terrorists and their backers who keep the initiative on their side, drawing India out and escalating tension whenever they wish to.

The swift return of the Indian pilot was a shrewd move on the part of Imran Khan. It was more realpolitik than magnanimity because the longer he remained in Pakistan’s custody, the greater were the chances of conflict escalation.

The fact that none of the world’s major powers and none of the countries in the wider neighbourhood saw fit to condemn India’s military action in Balakot – which Pakistan had officially described as an act of aggression – would also have weighed on the minds of Imran Khan and Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa. Returning Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, at least, allowed Islamabad to shore up its diplomatic capital and give itself leverage over the big powers to call on India to de-escalate.

Where do India and Pakistan go from here? The Imran Khan government has responded to the aftermath of Balakot with a crackdown against the Jaish and other groups but just how far these measures go is not clear. Judging by the past, Islamabad is likely to take only reversible steps so long as it believes India remains vulnerable in Jammu and Kashmir.

Unlike the years of Pervez Musharraf’s rule in 2000s, when Pakistan seemed committed to an end-game that involved ‘out of the box’ steps in Jammu and Kashmir short of any change in the territorial status quo, Islamabad believes it holds better cards today.

If the desire of United States President Donald Trump’s administration to leave Afghanistan has raised the salience of Pakistan and even made Russia get warm to it, Modi government’s disastrous handling of the situation on the Indian side of Jammu and Kashmir has also dealt Pakistan back into that game. Yet, the experience of the years before 2001 is proof that Pakistani support – whether ‘moral’ or armed – for militancy in Kashmir is a strategic dead-end that will yield no solution. Worse, Pakistan’s failure to take action against militant organisations will, in the event of further terrorist attacks, only invite further military responses with an uncertain outcome.

On India’s part, the recent crisis is a reminder of just how poorly conceived and untenable its line of ‘talks and terror cannot go hand in hand’ actually is. Attacks in Pulwama, Nagrota, Sunjuwan and other such incidents which happened earlier are all proof of the fact that the absence of talks does not deter or disincentivise terror.

The Balakot airstrike has added one more element to the Indian menu of options but its utility, if any, will be diminished if New Delhi steadfastly refuses to use diplomacy too. Cessation of trade and travel between the two countries is hardly a lever that bothers the jihadi groups. It is a fact that levels of terrorist violence have declined precisely at those times when India and Pakistan were engaging with each other on all issues, including Jammu and Kashmir.

Any decision on engagement before the Indian elections is perhaps too much to expect but a meeting between the two sides to open Kartarpur Corridor for Sikh pilgrims has been scheduled. This means progress is certainly possible.

After the election, whoever is prime minister in New Delhi will have to find ways to talk to Pakistan. Balakot and its aftermath gave both India and Pakistan a glimpse of the abyss that lies ahead if the only form of engagement left on the table is military.

This article was originally published in the Herald's March 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

By Aliyah Sahqani, Sarah Dara and Aliya Farrukh Shaikh

Photos by Mohammad Ali, White Star

Anchal Mirza fell in love with a 22-year-old man when she was 35. She would talk to her beloved every day before she “bought a ticket and went to see him” in his village in rural Sindh. Soon, they decided to get married. The wedding took place in a marriage hall in Karachi and was attended by Anchal’s friends and members of her community.

After the wedding, her partner said he wanted to take her to his village. She wore her most decent clothes and went with him even though she was apprehensive that his family would not accept her as his spouse. When she reached the village, her worst fears came true. On the very first day, her partner took out his phone from his pocket and switched on a recording of her groans and gasps. She was aghast: the recording had been made during one of her pre-wedding rendezvous as a sex worker. “My blood went cold,” she says. Her partner went mad with rage and started torturing her. His whole family called her a prostitute.

Anchal ran away — arriving back in Karachi and resuming her life in the big city as a sex worker. Looking back at those days, however, she is rather forgiving and says she understands why he was upset. “How can anyone tolerate their spouse getting physical with someone else?”

In a photograph taken around that time, she looks attractive — even seductive: it shows her prominent nose, a heavily made-up face, high cheek bones, jet black hair falling smoothly below her shoulders and an exposed cleavage.

Anchal looks nothing like that now. Her face has become dark and wrinkled, her cheeks have sunk, her hair has visibly thinned and frizzed and her body looks haggard. Around eight months ago, she was diagnosed with hepatitis C. “I lost a lot of weight. I used to cry every night,” she says as she recalls the days and nights before the diagnosis.

Anchal moved to her hometown, Lahore, sometime after her ‘marriage’ broke down but continues to visit Karachi and other parts of Sindh to meet customers. Now that she is ill, she can no longer engage in sex work and works as a manager for some other sex workers. They all live with her in a small house where they also entertain their customers.

Anchal was born as Mirza Waseem in 1980. She was uncomfortable in her male body from the beginning and always wanted to be a woman. She was still a teenager, having passed her 10th grade, when her parents died. Since her siblings did not accept her feminine ways, she had to leave her house and become a sex worker in Lahore. “If you think like a female and dress like one, you also want to join this line of work,” she says.

Her siblings would tell her to stop being a sex worker. They would call her friends, asking them to bring her back home. She also craved their acceptance — but on her own terms. She offered them more than 110,000 rupees so that they could have her turned into a woman through surgeries and accept her as their sister. But they refused. “We would rather piss on such money [given how it is earned],” is how they dismissed her offer.

A few years later, she expanded her clientele to various towns and cities in Sindh and started living in Karachi. It was then that she became romantically involved with her future partner. Since theirs was a marriage between two men, it did not seek approval of the state and the society. Instead, a guru – an older transwoman who has the self-assumed status of being an elder of the community – supervised the wedding ceremony. The marriage deed, though legally unenforceable, had the weight of a whole group of transwomen and their guru behind it. One of its many provisions covered infidelity: the partner found guilty would pay heavy fines to the other.

In retrospect, Anchal would have liked some provision against mental and physical torture as well — and perhaps also a mention of some kind of a medical insurance.

A few months ago, a man poisoned himself in Faisalabad. He survived but the police and his family turned up outside the Karachi apartment of a transwoman, Mehek. They knocked at the door, asking her to come out. She ran away with a friend.

“I met that man at a dance event. He kept giving me money later so that I gave him all my attention. When I did not, he consumed poison,” she says in a recent interview in Karachi.

Mehek’s voice is deep like a man’s but her face is feminine. She dyed her hair blonde a few months ago and is proud of how it compliments her olive skin. She has a long nose and kohl-rimmed eyes that appear to be hiding some mystery.

She also takes time to open up and does not tell much about her early life. It is only after a few meetings that she pulls down her shirt and reveals a faded tattoo on her right breast. It reads ‘Usman’ written in Urdu.

Mehek says she fell in love with Usman when she was 13. “We met at someone’s outhouse. He was drinking and I was looking at the moon. Then I looked at him and he looked back at me. We were in love instantly.” The two were together for the next seven years but then he left her for a woman.

After Usman abandoned Mehek, she took to drugs and alcohol to heal her emotional wounds. When that did not work, she started slashing her forearms. The scars have healed but the pain remains.

What made it worse for Mehek was that Usman’s wife would show up at her house and heckle her loudly, calling her khusra — a Punjabi word for a transwoman. Mehek cursed her back, retorting, “May you never have a baby.”

Those brawls took place a year ago and Usman’s wife has been unable to get pregnant during this time. “There is this popular superstition that the curse of a transwoman does not go unrealised. I never used to believe it but I started doing so after Usman’s wife could not conceive for months,” says Mehek — neither sad nor happy over this turn of events.

Usman recently came to see Mehek and begged for forgiveness. She forgave him but does not know if the curse has ended too.

Shehzadi Rai is a big fan of Indian actress Aishwarya Rai whose last name she has also adopted. She was born a boy – and was named Shehzad – to a father who worked as a deputy manager at the Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi and a mother who was a school principal in the same city.

Shehzadi left her home soon after she turned 18 and started staying with another transwoman. Later, she moved into a rented apartment with three other transwomen — fearful that her older brother might beat her to death. She now lives in an apartment of her own in Karachi’s Gulistan-e-Jauhar area.

Shehzadi is lean and lanky. Her hair is long and wavy, her facial features are soft, her lips thin and her almond eyes small. The only apparent sign that she is not a woman is her prominent Adam’s apple. She says she is 30 years old.

Early one evening a few weeks ago, Shehzadi has just woken up and is sitting on the floor inside her house. Like most people in her community, she sleeps during the day and stays awake at night. She stopped being a sex worker a few years ago. She also no longer performs as a dancer at private events — something most young transwomen do for a living.

She, instead, is in relationship with three men whom she calls her ‘husbands’. Together, they take care of all her expenses. Two of them come to see her daily, she says. “We sit together and smoke hashish at night.”

The third one is married. “He introduced me as a friend to his wife,” she says. The wife also became friends with Shehzadi — until she read text messages exchanged between Shehzadi and her husband and found out about their relationship.

Shehzadi has had similar relationships with other men too. One of her former ‘husbands’ gave her one million rupees after she spent time with him in Dubai some years ago. She spent the money on buying the house she now lives in.

It was a cold night in January 2011 when Sarah Gill renounced her identity as a boy and left her family apartment in Karachi’s posh Defence area. She moved to the house of a transwoman she had met through a social media platform. The woman helped her become a dancer and a sex worker. Sarah was only 14 at the time.

Sarah has undergone facial surgery to make her lips fuller and cheekbones higher so that she can look like her idol, Indian film actress Kareena Kapoor. She also gets Botox injections regularly and has had part of her male genitals removed. “The things God did not give me have been given to me by doctors,” is how she describes these changes.

Sarah does look a bit like Kareena Kapoor. Fair and slender, she has thick lips and delicate facial features. Her dyed dark brown hair fall smoothly on her thin shoulders. If anyone sees her in a public place, they will never think that she was born a man.

Now 23 and a fourth-year student of medicine at a private university in Karachi, she is regarded as a ‘sex symbol’ among her fans and friends. Men throw money at her when she performs at dance events and pay her an asking price to have sex with her. “As long as prostitution is helping me earn my medical degree, I don’t mind it,” she says in a matter-of-fact manner.

Sarah lives in a three-room rented apartment in a commercial neighbourhood of Defence area. Her bedroom is painted orange. It has velvet curtains and yellow lights. She shares the place with Payal, another transwoman who, according to some members of her community, has undergone many sex reassignment surgeries (SRS). They claim that her posterior, calves and chest have been reconstructed by surgeons in Thailand. But Payal denies these claims vehemently.

Shehzadi, on the other hand, dreams every night of getting SRS – so that all her male genitals are removed and replaced with female ones – but the cost is prohibitive and the fear of medical complications strong. She knows of a transwoman who underwent SRS but has been left with decomposed genitals.

When Shehzadi was 13, and was still regarded as Shehzad by her family, she recalls, her breasts started growing in size — an unusual development for a boy. Her family sought to ‘fix’ the ‘problem’ through traditional means. Her mother would put an ironed towel on her chest to stop her breasts from growing and a practitioner of indigenous medicine gave her testosterone to consume with milk every night for a year. This led to excessive hair growth on her body.

Five years ago, she took some medical measures in the opposite direction. She got silicone implants to make her breasts look bigger and had a part of her genitals removed. To avoid legal complications, the doctors who did the latter procedure wrote in her medical record that she had undergone radical prostatectomy — a surgical procedure done on those suffering from prostate cancer.

Simmi Naz is a ‘fully-operated transwoman’.

She was born 30 years ago as Asif Ali in Lahore and was initially raised as a boy alongside two sisters. But, much to the wrath of her mother, she would sneak out of her house at night, wearing her sisters’ clothes, jewellery and make-up. Her mother would beat her up, though her father would let her be. By the age of 13, she took up her female name and became a transgender person publicly.

Simmi now lives in a one-room residence in Jinnah Colony, a poor neighbourhood behind Karachi’s Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre. She is short, has broad and bulky shoulders, and a big belly.

Simmi has spent a lot of money on reconstructive surgeries. She got breast implants three years ago. The surgery, involving the insertion of silicone gel pads into her chest tissue – costing 100,000 rupees – was done overnight in Lahore, with no follow-up visits required. She was only instructed to keep the stitches warm for a week. A year later, she had female genitalia implanted from Dubai. The procedure cost 500,000 rupees.

Simmi’s reason for undergoing these elaborate and costly surgeries is to attract male attention and, thereby, earn money. “Men come to us when we look like real women,” she says.

The surgeries seem to have worked — at least as far as attracting attention is concerned. Her boyfriend says he cannot take his eyes off her. If she goes to a dance event, more men are attracted to her than to other transwoman. And even though she lives at her boyfriend’s house along with his family, her ex-boyfriend keeps calling her. He wanted to marry her but his family rejected her, calling her a man. That was before she had undergone the surgeries. Now his sisters themselves request her that she marry their brother.

But all is not well with Simmi. Her animated face turns solemn as she complains that the surgeries have left her weak, rendering her unable to dance as she used to. Her bones ache if she does anything strenuous and she irritatingly mentions how various procedures have led to the release of hormones that have caused excessive hair growth on her body — something she did not have to worry about when she was regarded as a man.

She gets a regular laser treatment to rid herself of facial hair and calls a waxing lady home for the removal of bodily hair.

Given a choice, most transwomen in Pakistan will opt to undergo some form of a sex reassignment procedure to complete their transition from being a male to becoming a female. Many of them want to be castrated to decrease the growth of their male hormones. Others want breast implants. Some want both. A complete sex change is termed an orchiectomy and involves the replacement of all genitalia.

The process usually starts with estrogen injections that increase the growth of female hormones and make breasts grow. Before any surgeries are performed, tests for hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV – the most common diseases among the transgender community in Pakistan – are conducted to prevent their spread afterwards. (Data put together by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS – UNAIDS – in 2018 states that 5.5 per cent of all members of the transgender community in Pakistan are HIV affected.)

Insertion of breast implants is probably the most widely conducted procedure in Pakistan. A lot of transwomen have gotten implants for as low as 80,000 rupees from unauthorised hospitals operating within residential areas in Lahore and Karachi. “No one knows what is going on inside those hospitals,” says a chest specialist at a private hospital in Karachi.

Some countries – such as Iran, Syria and Egypt – have legalised sex reassignment procedures but there is no clear prohibition or permission for them in Pakistani laws. A urologist at a private hospital in Karachi says there is nothing illegal about them — provided they are necessitated strictly by medical reasons. Some children, he says, are born with either genetic or physiological defects that make the determination of their gender difficult. These defects must be caught early and corrected by medical professionals, he adds. At just his hospital, according to the urologist, 25-30 surgeries are carried out every year on such children.

News media also frequently reports cases in which doctors prescribe and perform sex reassignment surgeries even for adults. For instance, an 18-year-old girl became a boy after undergoing a gender change surgery in December 2018 in Gilgit-Baltistan’s Diamer district; two sisters in Chichawatni town (in Central Punjab) underwent sex reassignment surgeries in 2006 and 2014; in 2013, a woman in Toba Tek Singh (also in Central Punjab) converted to a man through surgeries two years after her marriage.

But, in many other instances, doctors have refused to perform sex change surgeries without explicit permission from legal authorities. Two women – one in Islamabad and the other in Peshawar – moved high courts in 2018 for permission to undergo surgeries for the change of their gender. One of them, 22-year-old Kainat Murad, stated in her petition that she was “almost a male” but could not undergo a sex reassignment surgery because the doctors wanted her to “get the high court’s permission”. The verdict is awaited in both the cases.

Surgeries might be justifiable in all such cases – both in legal and medical terms – but removing one set of human organs and replacing them with another for non-medical reasons is certainly prohibited in Pakistan. In children, it constitutes genital mutilation, says Dr Sana Yasir, Pakistan’s first intersex educator.

The cosmetic surgeries desired by transgender people fall in the prohibited category because, as the urologist says, it is impossible to decide whether they have a medically treatable problem or they are seeking a sex reassignment surgery for some other reason.

Many transwomen in Pakistan still want to – and do – undergo such surgeries. Those who can afford to, get these procedures done by qualified doctors both within the country and abroad. Those who do not have enough money resort to cheaper – and also dangerous – methods. For as low as 15,000 rupees, a guru in a remote rural area will cut the undesired genitalia with crude tools and unsafe mechanisms.

These guru-led surgeries seem like violent orgies. The transwoman seeking the surgery is made to consume alcohol before the procedure so that she does not feel pain. Then her genitals are cut with a sharp knife and the wound is doused with hot mustard oil and some ointment. The whole process is carried out in a secluded place to keep it secret.

Anything can go wrong during these rudimentary surgeries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that transwomen undergoing such procedures usually lose consciousness for an inordinately long time but, to maintain secrecy, they are not taken to any healthcare facilities. In other cases, they receive scars that refuse to heal.

Sometimes a surgery conducted by a guru results in excessive bleeding and also leads to death. If and when a transwoman dies as a result of a surgery gone wrong, she is quietly buried then and there.

On an early winter night in Karachi last year, an all-male gathering inside an empty plot next to a police station in Lyari neighbourhood is waiting for the arrival of some transgender dancers. No woman is allowed inside the venue. It is strictly a men’s-only event. The dancers arrive dressed in revealing female clothes. Over the next few hours, they dance to film and folk music while men congregate around them, cheering them up and also throwing money at them.

Dance events – or ‘functions’, as they are called by those involved in them – are a major source of income for transwomen. They usually take place around midnight. Their locations vary — some are arranged in secluded areas outside big cities, others take place inside ‘safe’ houses or empty lots blocked from public view. These events often become possible with the connivance of the concerned police station.

The function organisers contact performers either through men who have already seen them perform or through their gurus. The modes of communication between the two sides range from phone calls and text messages to various social media platforms. Many performers have their accounts on social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and Vigo Video, where they post seductive photos and videos of themselves and receive private messages from prospective clients.

These functions get rowdy and violent quite often. Sometimes men ask dancers for a dance off; on other occasions, they order them how to dance and how not to. Occasionally, they clash over the choice of dancers —different groups supporting different sets of dancers. Fights erupt, sometimes resulting in injuries.

Men also vie to attain the attention of dancers — usually by giving them more money than others. Occasionally, violent force is also used to achieve the same objective.

A good-looking and young transwoman dancer, known among insiders as a mashooq, sits at the top of an internal hierarchy of Pakistan’s transgender community. She also engages in sex work but selectively. Below a mashooq is the professional sex worker, or a peshaver, and then come the beggars, or toli.

Looking as much like a woman as they possibly can is important for pashavers and mashooqs since their earning depends on their looks. The most feminine-looking among them can earn as much as 100,000 rupees per event as dancers. Their sex work also fetches a high price. “We have to do a lot of things to get attention,” Sarah says. This includes attempts to have the best hair, get the most attractive make-up and find the most fitting dresses, etc. “If we wear one dress at a function, we will not wear it again because people notice.”

There are some regional variations in how a mashooq is treated by men around her. In Punjab, sex work is considered dirty. A mashooq doubling as a peshaver is considered impure and loses her appeal. If a mashooq becomes a sex partner of one of the men at a particular function, others present there will not invite her to perform at any other function. The word then spreads about her and she becomes a persona non grata.

Men in Punjab also do a ‘full-body survey’, scrutinising a mashooq from head to toe, says Simmi. Even the feet of a mashooq need to look smooth and fair, she says as she gently rubs a foundation cream on her feet. Some men touch a mashooq’s face to see how much make-up has been applied. Look pretty, they demand, but also look natural.

Not that sex work does not take place in Punjab. It does but it is a discreet and underground affair. This is not the case in Sindh in general and Karachi in particular.

Transwomen also sometimes prefer sex work over dance performances. “I will get 3,000 rupees if I perform at a function in Karachi but I will get around 10,000 rupees if I do sex work twice a night,” says Simmi.

Some mashooqs are so popular that their fans take them abroad both for performances and company. Sarah and her roommate, for instance, were asked to perform in Bangkok recently. There they also found themselves to be in high demand as sex workers. “Pakistani, Indian and Filipina transwomen are most in demand there,” says Sarah, giggling.

While part of a transwoman’s appeal lies in looking like a woman, most men are attracted to her for what she can offer and a woman cannot: she can play both, a catamite and a sodomite.

All this works as long as the bodies of transwomen are young and taut. Once they start wearing out, opportunities to earn money from dancing and sex work also shrink. Most of them then either become gurus or they join a toli to seek vadhai, or alms, by singing and dancing.

Simmi is on the cusp of having to make these choices soon. She plans on working as a dancer and a sex worker for another couple of years and then she will “find an old guru and start seeking vadhai”.

Chhanno is more than 50 years old and lives in a small room in Azam Basti, a slum off Karachi’s Korangi Road. Her lodging was bought years ago by her parents and is part of a bigger structure consisting of many rooms of similar size and shape. These are occupied by her relatives. “I have lived here all my life and I will die here,” she says.

Chhanno, a guru of the transgender community in her area, is obese and dark and spends most of her time inside her residence where she sleeps on the floor and plays with her little nieces and nephews. She has a man’s voice and her hands are rough. In pictures from her younger years, she looks fairer and thinner.

Chhanno attends every celebration in her neighbourhood. If a child is born or if someone is getting married, she will go to their house along with her chelas – or disciples – who will sing and dance in anticipation of vadhai. “The people who perform at functions are different from those who go from house to house to sing, dance and beg,” she says. The latter group is usually older, darker and not so good-looking.

On a Sunday evening late last year, Chhanno is getting ready to attend a pre-wedding event not far from her house. She applies heavy make-up on her face and adorns herself with heavy jewellery. She gets into a pink laacha, a long skirt of sorts that has golden embroidery on it. All the while, she is waiting impatiently for her two chelas – Anjali (who, like many other transwomen, is a trained make-up artist and has worked at a salon in Islamabad) and Aarzoo – to show up. The bride’s family has already reminded her twice that she is running late.

When her chelas finally arrive, all three have a quick, small meal. Then they set out of the room in the setting sun — but only after praying quietly for a few minutes.

Chhanno prays regularly. Being a Christian, she goes to a local church every Tuesday and is warmly welcomed by the nuns there. She also celebrates Christmas with fervour, spending the night before it in worship at the church. On December 25, after early morning service ends at 4:00 am, children in her family decorate her palms with henna. She then visits her neighbours, wishing them a merry Christmas and celebrating with them. She follows the same celebratory routine on Eid days.

Her own guru was a Muslim who told her that every religion was as important as the other. There is no religious discrimination within the transgender community, says Chhanno. “It does not matter what religious beliefs its members have.”

As Anjali and Aarzoo gyrate and sing in their male voices, Chhanno provides the occasional beat with her loud clapping. The audience throws money at them while they perform. The family of the bride also gives them some cash in vadhai – essentially a handout given to have better luck – as they end the performance profusely wishing the bride and her parents well.

Throughout the performance, Anjali and Aarzoo vie for the attention of their guru. They crave her approval and want to be the centre of her attention. This sort of competition often results in odd occurrences: a chela may like to dress herself again if she finds that another chela is looking better than her and is, thus, getting more attention from the guru.

A guru, indeed, is revered by her chelas more than anyone else. “If [my guru] tells me to bring eggs for her, I will get those for her before doing anything else,” says Shehzadi. Though she is relatively young, she has her own chelas who revere her similarly.

Most transwomen in Pakistan try to get into this guru-chela system in order to have access to a stable clientele – both as sex workers and as dancers – and also to protect themselves against exploitation, violence, as well as police raids and arrests. Young transwomen, who have to leave their own families, find alternative families – and also shelters – by joining the guru-run networks. Usually, a guru and her chelas live together in the same house, creating a family structure of their own.

An elaborate ceremony is held when a chela enters a guru’s network. Members of the transgender community are invited from far and wide. Food is served generously. Many song and dance routines are also performed.

The central event of the ceremony is the adoption of the chela by the guru. How it is done varies slightly in different transgender communities. Sindhi gurus pierce the nose of their chelas as a token of acceptance whereas Urdu-speaking gurus put a red dupatta on their chelas’ heads to fomalise their association. A new name is also chosen for the chela –— sometimes by the guru but often by the chela herself.

A guru is as much a mentor, a teacher and a protector as she is a manager. It is the guru whom the organisers of a dance event have to talk to in order to sort out the logistical and financial details — as well as the number of performers required. A guru also guides her novice chelas on how to dress up and how to attract male attention during a performance.

In return for all this, a guru gets a share of the earnings by her chelas. “You have to give to the guru [because she] gives you her tutelage and her name,” says Shehzadi.

The system also works as a survival insurance for ageing – as well as aged – transwomen.

After their looks fade and their bodies grow old, transwomen start performing at vadhai events (that are informal and short compared to events organised by men who seek entertainment). Older transwomen are preferred for vadhai because of a popular perception that their prayers are more likely to be accepted.

This stage in a transwoman’s life also signals the start of her career as a guru — a stage in which she will not be doing anything herself but will be living off her chelas who willingly contribute to her expenses.

A guru also plays an important role in hitching a transwoman with a man — the former providing sex and company and the latter financial security. The guru becomes both the guarantor and the enforcer of the terms and conditions of their relationship.

Some of the strictures of such relationships have been eased with the changing financial needs of young transwomen. Those requiring more money for their upkeep often get into relationships with more than one man and men, too, find it expedient to share expenses with others like themselves.

Like most of their internal affairs in Pakistan, transgender people in the country also have their own particular language that outsiders seldom understand. A male partner is called a girya; a transwoman is known as a moorat — a curious mix of mard (man) and aurat (woman); and a chamka is a man willing to spend money just for the sake of company. The chamkas sometimes also escort transwomen at dance performances.

The transgender language has a sentence structure loosely based on Urdu and a unique vocabulary of at least a thousand words, according to a 2018 paper, Hidden Truth about Ethnic Lifestyle of Indian Hijras, written by Sibsankar Mal and Grace Bahalen Mundu, both students at an Indian university. It is used as a survival mechanism by the community, the authors note. It helps them communicate among themselves in times of emergencies and distress, or when they do not want to share their secrets with anyone else but their own ilk.

Transgender people have, in all likelihood, existed in the Indian subcontinent forever — and possibly with all their internal divides. They are variously known as khusras (in Punjabi), hijras (in Urdu and Hindi), chhakas and khadras (in other local languages). The most socially conscious among them want to be known as khawaja saras — a term originally used for eunuchs working for Muslim rulers in the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia, mainly for communication within the gender-segregated royal palaces.

Others, the educated and politically aware ones, prefer such modern terms as transgender. Many among them do not use any masculine or feminine pronouns for themselves — instead of being addressed as ‘he’ or ‘she’, they want to be addressed as ‘they’.

Biologically, a transgender person may lie anywhere on a spectrum that includes males with partial physiology of females and vice versa. In between, there lies a whole range of transgenders who deviate from the two dominant genders – male and female – in varying biological degrees. The term transgender can broadly cover everyone on this spectrum — from a gender-neutral person to an intersex person. Medical practitioners, however, insist that not all intersex people are transgenders — only those are who at some stage in their lives make a transition from one gender to the other.

There can be more than 30 types of biological conditions in which an individual’s sense of personal identity and his or her assigned gender may not match. In Pakistan, the most common conditions are congenital adrenal hyperplasia – that causes excessive production of testosterone in females, making them develop manly features – and androgen insensitivity syndrome — that makes a genetically male person resistant to male hormones, giving them some or all of the traits of a woman. Many of the latter end up being transwomen.

Occasionally, biology plays its own tricks and gives the same person both male and female organs — making him or her an intersex person. The urologist from Karachi cites the case of a bearded Muslim cleric who needed to have a surgery for the removal of hernia. “When we opened him up in the operation theatre, it turned out that he had a uterus and ovaries,” he says.

According to Dr Sana Yasir, Pakistan’s first medical educator on gender issues, 1.7 per cent children are born as intersex globally. Given that Pakistan’s population is more than 210 million according to the latest census, their total number in the country should be as high as 3.57 million.

Almost all of them seem to be registered as either male or female as their actual number does not show in census records which puts the number of all types of transgender people in Pakistan only at 10,000. A vast majority of intersex people either do not know about their intersexuality or they – or their families – hide it.

Even though the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2017, passed by Parliament in May 2018 under the directives of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, provides that transgender people have the right to register themselves as a third gender, most are yet to exercise this right.

Apart from biological variations, there are also many psychological scenarios in which people may not like the genders assigned to them at birth. Someone born a woman may want to be a man. Such individuals are called transmen. Or a man by birth may seek to be seen as a woman. Such people are called transwomen. They could be at various psychological stages of transition between the two genders. Transvestites – people who dress and behave like members of the opposite sex – are perhaps the most obvious manifestation of these psychological phenomena.

The society at large, though, does not recognise these biological complications and psychological compulsions. It portrays members of the transgender community as being sexually deviant, socially shameful and religiously undesirable.

Mani’s first job was as a physical education teacher at a girls’ school. He was only 18 years old at the time. The job did not pay him well so he started working for a shipping company. This was before he made his transition from a woman to a man.

Mani always had many masculine traits growing up. He wore jeans and a T-shirt at home. People in his neighbourhood called him a ‘dada’ (goon) affectionately. Yet, he took time to figure out his gender. “Because we lack access to medical technologies, we do not know a lot about ourselves,” he says as he explains reasons for the delay.

Mani was around 22 years of age when he realised that he wanted to be a man. When he turned 27, he finally told his parents about his wish.

“Our families are very weird,” he says. “When, while still being a woman, I came back from work, my father would say here comes my sher (lion). Even my mother would say that my mind worked just like that of a boy’s.” When, however, he finally decided to call himself a man, his parents could not accept it. “They said Allah did not make you a man. All of a sudden the lion became a lioness.”

After coming out, Mani left his hometown (which he wants to keep unidentified) and moved to Lahore along with his girlfriend. He was able to have his gender changed to male on his Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) a couple of years ago and runs a foreign-funded non-governmental organisation (NGO), HOPE, to work for transgender rights.

On a day early in January, he is sitting behind a well-polished wooden desk in his office that doubles as his residence near Lahore’s Cavalry Ground area. A portrait of a woman holding a candle hangs above him as he keeps playing catch with a small ball on his desk. He is dressed in an oversized grey jacket and loose pants, making him look bigger than he actually is. His eyes are dark and piercing and a thin stubble covers his pale face.

Transmen like him have different issues from the ones faced by transwomen, he says in an interview. “We are raised in female bodies so we have to face whatever a female faces in our society.”

For one, transmen do not want to leave their families — as most transwomen do. “Our biggest problem is that we are too attached to our families to leave them,” says Mani. “Our families also do not abandon us.”

Transmen are not welcome in the transwomen community — because they neither want to dance nor indulge in sex work. They also find it difficult to fit into the society at large after coming out because of having little experience of life outside home.

They similarly face many bureaucratic hurdles before they can register themselves as transmen. If a woman goes to the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and wants to be identified as a man, the officials will not immediately accept her request, Mani says. He will have to provide many medical records to prove his gender.

This could well be because of the social impacts of such a gender change. “For instance, if a woman claims to be a man, her inheritance rights change,” Mani says.

Only legal and administrative reforms will be insufficient to deal with problems arising out of such a situation. “A lot of changes need to take place in the society in order for these things to become acceptable.”

[“Y]ou will be surprised to know that a million transgender women [in Pakistan] are living … double lives,” said Jannat Ali, at a TED Talk event held in Lahore in 2017. “Some who come out are shunned by the society and kicked out by their parents,” she added and argued that coming out is a turning point for a transperson “because coming out, living life as naturally as possible, is very important for your physical health, for your sexual health and for your mental health”.

Jannat hails from Lahore. She is a business administration graduate from a private university but her interest always lay in dance. She finally got the chance to learn it from Nahid Siddiqui, one of Pakistan’s best known classical dancers.

Jannat is also the founder of Saathi Foundation, a Lahore-based non-governmental organisation that works on issues related to the transgender community. One of its main objectives is to provide vocational training to transwomen so that they do not have to resort to selling their bodies and begging.

Sitting in a lavender room in her NGO’s office near Lahore’s Chauburji area, she says she has attended pride marches in Copenhagen and Amsterdam and has always been keen to hold a trans pride march in Pakistan as well.

Her hair comes undone from a loosely tied ponytail as she describes how dozens of transpersons carried blue and pink flags, as well as colourful banners and balloons, and marched from the Lahore Press Club at Shimla Pahari to the Alhamra Arts Council on The Mall on December 29, 2018. The participants were dressed in wedding clothes and were decked out in heavy jewellery. Some of them rode in flower-covered horse carriages while others danced all the way.

At the end of the march, they held a press conference and then presented a number of performances. These included theatre plays, skits and music by Lucky and Naghma, transwomen who have performed in a co*ke Studio song.

“Members of the khwaja sara community are always celebrating someone else’s birth or wedding but we never get to celebrate ourselves. This trans pride was an opportunity to do just that,” Jannat says.

It, though, did not attract as much publicity as she had hoped. The press coverage was scant and the money collected for it – through donations – fell short of the expenditure, says Jannat. She still has to pay 34,000 rupees to the arts council in outstanding rent for using its premises.

The march nevertheless marked an important milestone in transgender activism in Pakistan. An earlier milestone was a petition moved by a lawyer, Dr Mohammad Aslam Khaki, in 2009, asking the Supreme Court of Pakistan to direct the government to officially recognise transgender people as being different from men and women. The petition was prompted by public outrage over mistreatment and sexual abuse experienced by transwomen returning from a wedding at the hands of some policemen in Taxila. The petitioner also sought the court’s directions for ensuring the economic and social welfare of the community so that they did not have to resort to sex work, dancing and begging.

The petition was heard by a three-judge bench, led by the then chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. In June 2009, the court ordered the four provincial governments to carry out surveys to ascertain the size of their transgender populations, identify facilities available to them and suggest ways and means to punish parents who give away their transgender children to gurus. The judges also directed NADRA to register transgender individuals as members of a third sex.

Following the court’s directives, Pakistan became one of the few countries in the world to legally recognise the third sex. By 2012, transgender Pakistanis got the right to have their gender mentioned in their CNICs.

In 2017, Nadra made another important change in its rules for the registration of transgender people: they no longer need to present the CNICs of their parents; they can also get registered by presenting the CNICs of their gurus. This has helped many who have either left their families or have been abandoned by their parents.

Also, as a result of the Supreme Court orders to count the transgender population, the government included them for the first time in the national census held in the first half of 2017. The census revealed that the total population of transgender people in Pakistan stood at 10,418 — constituting about 0.0005 per cent of all the people living in the country.

The number is deemed incredibly low by many transgender activists. Some of them cite a 2018 survey by UNAIDS that puts the population of the transgender community in Pakistan at 52,646. Even this figure is disputed by many. News reports suggest that the number of transgender Pakistanis can be anywhere between 50,000 and 500,000. “Karachi alone is home to more than 15,000 transgender individuals,” claims Bindiya Rana, a transgender activist and the chairperson of an NGO, Gender Interactive Alliance.

If nothing else, the controversy over their population suggests that the conversation about transgender people and their rights is no longer static and limited to a few activists. The biggest proof of this came about when Parliament – after prolonged consultations with many transgender rights activists – passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act last year. The act grants the transgender community many sought-after rights including the right to be identified as they perceive themselves to be, the right to obtain a driver’s license and passport, the right to inheritance, the right to vote and contest in elections, the right to assemble and the right to access public goods, public services and public spaces.

The act provides that there should be no discrimination towards transgender people in education, employment, healthcare provision and transportation. It also includes provisions for the safety and security of transgender people against all kinds of harassment and abuse, the setting up of shelters, vocational training institutions, medical facilities, counseling and psychological care services, and also separate jail wards for them. Importantly, it stipulates that anyone forcing a transgender person to beg could attract up to six months in prison or a fine of up to 50,000 rupees — or both.

But, as is the case with almost every law in Pakistan, the implementation of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act leaves a lot to be desired. Socially and economically, says Bindiya, the community is still where it was before. “Little has been done to support it.”

Aradhiya Rai is perhaps taller than most women in Pakistan. She has an expressive round face made prominent by a pointed chin, parted in the middle. On a recent winter day, she is wearing a royal blue kameez, looking a bit tight on her broad shoulders, coupled with black tights and a black dupatta.

Last year, when she was 19, Aradhiya got a job at a fast food outlet in Karachi. She was initially hired as a cashier but was later moved to the kitchen because customers would get offended by her presence at the cash counter. She was repeatedly asked by her employer to cut her hair even though she kept them tightly hidden under a cap. Since she was unwilling to cut her hair for a job that paid her only 14,000 rupees a month, she was made to leave on the pretext that she took medical leave without proper documentation.

Mehlab Jameel, a graduate of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, who does research work for various NGOs on transgender issues, says such job-related discrimination towards transwomen is widespread. They have to hide their identities especially in order to get low-paying menial jobs, Mehlab says, and have to dress and behave like men to retain those jobs. Otherwise, Mehlab adds, they fear they will never be accepted at the workplace.

On the higher rungs of the social ladder, says Mehlab, transgender people get more and better job opportunities — such as working as make-up artists in salons, beauty parlours and even television studios. But those on the lowest rung always face the harshest discrimination, making it difficult for them to continue with their jobs and many of them soon return to the traditional ways of earning their livelihood, Mehlab argues.

Aradhiya narrates how discrimination is not limited to workplaces. During a recent trip to a fast food joint with her brother, she was pulled out of the women’s toilet by a male staffer. Letting transwomen use women’s toilet is not our policy, he informed her.

Transportation is another problem. Even though some restaurants and food outlets in Karachi have a policy to hire transgender people, Aradhiya is unable to find a convenient mode to commute to work and get back home safely in Gulistan-e-Jauhar area on a daily basis. Rickshaws and taxis are expensive and public transportation is embarrassing if not entirely dangerous, she says. “If I go into the women’s compartment, they get uncomfortable but I myself feel uncomfortable if I have to travel in the men’s compartment,” she says.

A lot of discrimination and abuse are either not seen as such or blamed on the victim. Aradhiya claims being treated as a curious object while she was studying in secondary school. Her teachers would invite her to their rooms to introduce her to other staff members as an odd person.

She also recalls how a senior in school raped her when she was 12 years old. When she reached out for support, those around her blamed her for it. They criticised her for the way she carried herself. She suffered depression over the next five years but told no one in her family about the rape.

It was only a few years later that she confided in her brother and started meeting others like her, eventually becoming a transgender activist three years ago. Although she is known in her neighbourhood for her activism, she says she still faces threats. People make prying glances into her home and send her messages telling her that they know where she lives and where she moves.

A few weeks ago, Aradhiya organised a well-attended music event. To others it might have seemed like a huge success. For her, it provided yet another proof that the society at large does not accept her the way she is. “Men in the crowd were looking at me in a perverse manner,” she says.

Aradhiya works with a microfinance organisation at a school in Karachi and is critical of the way NGOs treat transpersons. They get in touch with members of the community only as a publicity stunt, she alleges. They do interviews and take photographs but do not provide jobs or even maintain regular contact with them, she says.

Though Aradhiya is part of the guru-chela system, she steers clear of sex work. Her guru keeps asking her to start sex work in order to support her family but she says she does not want to. “My guru says to me raddi ki bhi qeemat hoti hai (even waste paper can fetch a price).” Then she asks her: “What is the price you are fetching?”

The writers are staffers at the Herald.

This article was originally published in the Herald's February 2019 issue under the headline 'Caught in the middle'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

On January 9, 2018, Zainab Ansari, a six-year-old girl, was found raped and murdered in Kasur. For months, her piercing grey eyes haunted every parent who feared the same could happen to their own children. Quick justice was served in the case and the culprit was hanged within nine months of his arrest.

A Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, also received justice towards the end of last year when she was acquitted in a long-running trial over blasphemy charges. Her acquittal was followed by a violent, though mercifully brief, countrywide shutdown by champions of the blasphemy law. Aasia Bibi was consequently barred from leaving the country and is still living in state custody — as are many of those who are opposing her exoneration.

The case of Naqeebullah Mehsud, a 27-year-old aspiring model, originally from South Waziristan tribal agency, still lingers. He was killed in Karachi on January 13 last year in an alleged police encounter. His family accused Rao Anwar, a senior superintendent of police in Karachi, as having orchestrated the killing. The incident became a rallying cry for the Mehsud tribesmen who gathered, initially in Karachi and then in Islamabad, for a prolonged sit-in to demand justice for Naqeebullah. Their agitation later transformed into the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM).

A former prime minister, his daughter and his son-in-law were also clutched by the long arms of law and justice last year for owning assets beyond their means. Many assets of a former finance minister and his family were taken over by the state for his failure to stand trial over allegations of helping his boss, the former prime minister (and also co-father-in-law), abuse his financial powers. A former president and his sister, too, are facing investigation and trial over corruption, money laundering and unlawful business practices. A former chief minister has been, similarly, detained over allegations of corruption and misuse of authority while his sons, as well as a son-in-law, have also been accused of abuse of power for personal gains. A federal minister and his brother have also been arrested and are being investigated for their alleged involvement in a real estate scam.

In between these landmark cases, and perhaps overshadowed by them, an elected Parliament completed its term and an election was held to bring in a new Parliament and a new government.

Now, look back at all this again and you will find a common thread. Each of these developments has Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar written on them –– often in large print but sometimes rather finely.

He was everywhere: from guaranteeing security to Rao Anwar before he surrendered to law-enforcement agencies to taking a suo motu notice of Zainab’s killing; from acquitting Aasia Bibi to taking note of corruption in high places; and from lording over the election commission on the conduct of the July polls to ordering a countrywide anti-encroachment drive that has rendered many homeless and jobless. He has also chastised a chief minister for arbitrarily transferring police officers and hauled journalists, owners of media houses, politicians and other public figures to courts on contempt of court charges.

Justice Nisar frequently raided hospitals, not just to check the quality of the medical care they provide but also to see how some under-trial politicians were being kept there. He was enraged to find them living in luxury –– and in one famous case, possessing bottles containing suspect substances. He inspected courts — and in one widely covered incident, reprimanded a judge for using his mobile phone during court hours. He also hauled mineral water companies to court, telling them to pay for the water they were extracting from the ground.

His single most significant initiative, however, has been his untiring championing of the construction of at least two large dams in the country. He has appeared on television, addressed public seminars and travelled as far as England to collect funds for them.

All this should make it easy to nominate him as the Herald’s Person of the Year 2018.

If anyone believes that someone else should have attained that status, they must consider the fact that Justice Nisar has touched thousands of lives – certainly not always in a positive way – with his remarks, rulings and verdicts. Politicians fear to tread where Justice Nisar walks; government functionaries cower when he calls them to his court; lawyers think twice before arguing in front of him and everyone else expects either to attain prompt justice or a summary dismissal from him. Driven by his motto that the judiciary will not let “anyone suffer from injustice”, he never holds back his words or his judgments.

People look towards him to have their grievances addressed. In one instance recorded by television cameras, a woman spread out her dupatta in front of his car outside the Supreme Court’s Lahore registry, telling him that her son had been killed in a police encounter, asking him to intervene in the matter. Justice Nisar told the woman and her male relative to be present in his court the very next morning.

Justice Nisar has also made headlines with his manner of speech. “Don’t speak until I speak,” he once cut short an official of the National Hospital and Medical Centre, in Lahore, who was trying to explain something. In another instance, he scolded a principal for coming in late to school. His comparison of the length of a speech with the length of a woman’s skirt was dwarfed only by his courtroom dialogue with a highly respected octogenarian journalist and human rights campaigner, Husain Naqi.

How history will judge Justice Nisar – as a chief adjudicator who did much for public good or as a do-gooder who did not brook any judicial restraint – is not something that can be decided here and now. He has done things that many among us see as positive. He has also done things that some of us see as not so positive –– prompting the Women Action Forum to file a reference against him in front of the Supreme Judicial Council that he himself heads as chairman.

What everyone will probably find easier to agree on is that no other individual in the country has had an impact on so many facets of national life in the last calendar year as he has.

Justice Nisar is popular but this is not the only reason why he is the Herald’s Person of the Year. His contribution to national life, whether positive or negative, is also not the only criterion for his selection.

The process of finding the Person of the Year starts every year with the selection of 10 nominees from a long list of a few dozen. When the process begins every September, we, at the Herald, experience and exhibit the same confusion that everyone has: is Person of the Year a popularity contest; is it a measure of a nominee’s goodness; is it a way to give voice to the voiceless and highlight people and causes that remain missing from the national discourse? What is it that makes one eligible to be among the top 10 nominees –– and, thus, be a candidate for Person of the Year?

Here is a short answer to these questions: the single most important parametre here is how much a candidate has been in the news in a calendar year (though, of course, the impact they’ve had is also an important consideration).

However, public attention and impact do not always coincide.

Look, for instance, at the Election Commission of Pakistan that conducted a countrywide general election in July 2018. No single event from the previous year has been as momentous as the polling process itself since it has determined who will rule Pakistan until the next election. (The only other incident that came closest in historical significance is the imprisonment of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif –– which, arguably, is also largely linked to the electoral calculus). The election commission has remained under the public scanner for months – before, during and immediately after the election – for the manner in which it has conducted an election that is still perceived by a number of political parties as rigged, besides being also seen as a major contributing factor in sharpening political divisions across Pakistan.

The outcome of the election is also important because it has determined both the pace and the direction of an ongoing anti-corruption drive which, by the way, could have been a strong reason to include the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) among this year’s nominees. Throughout 2018, the bureau has been on an arrest-and-investigate spree that could be enormously significant in determining the future political layout of the country. Going by the same token of significance, the armed forces have the strongest impact on almost all aspects of national life almost every year — the previous one being no exception.

But these institutions cannot be put in a list that seeks to focus on individuals rather than on collective entities. (When a single army commander, Raheel Sharif, dominated everyone else within the military and beyond, we did nominate him –– as was the case with Ashfaq Parvez Kayani a few years ago).

It is precisely for this reason that missing persons, victims of terrorism, members of minority communities and women (as a whole) have never made it to our list of nominees even when every one of them can be found in the news every single day. Quite like the armed forces, the place of, and the space for these communities and groups in Pakistan have remained more or less constant in the recent years and decades.

If there was a strong case for including a whole section of the society in the Person of the Year nominees for 2018, it was for the children of Pakistan. Thousands of them were abducted, abused and murdered last year. Many more died of various avoidable causes. Others suffered for lack of education. We hope that the inclusion of Zainab Ansari in the list will help us highlight not just her own tragedy – and that of her parents – but also the plight of Pakistani children as a whole.

But what about groups or communities that enter or exit the national milieu depending on social, political and economic changes?

News media, for instance, has itself been in the news in 2018. Hundreds of journalists have been sacked. Many newspapers and at least one television channel have shut down. Censorship is rampant and self-censorship is endemic. On the flip side of it, social media has expanded its digital footprint in the public sphere with a rapid increase in the number of Internet users. Online propaganda wars, trolling and various experiments in disseminating news and views through social media, all made a splash last year — as did the use of social media campaigns for the July elections.

In the age of such massive social media presence, some may argue, it is unfair to focus solely on headlines from mainstream media to choose the nominees. There are, after all, many issues and people who seldom get coverage in newspapers and news channels, but are widely discussed, even celebrated, or denigrated, on social media. Manzoor Pashteen and his PTM, to cite just one example, have had a strong social media presence in spite of their virtual absence from the mainstream news media.

That Pashteen is on our list of 2018 nominees is an acknowledgment of just that: it is impossible for us to ignore social media if we want to keep our Person of the Year project credible.

Another problem that the Herald cannot do anything about is the availability of a limited space to write about the nominees. With the magazine being limited to a certain number of pages, there cannot be more than 10 nominees each year even though some people would easily make it to the nominations –– if the list could be expanded. Here are only a few of the most probable nominees for 2018 who could not make it to the final list:

Asma Jahangir died earlier last year and in her death we lost one of our most ardent champions of human rights. Her work has been so fundamentally important to the Pakistan of today that she continues to get international awards even months after her death.

Novelist Kamila Shamsie, too, has been winning awards internationally (for her book, Home Fire, which came out in 2017). And Mohammed Hanif has also made yet another forceful entry into the national literary scene with his latest novel Red Birds (though the jury is still out on the book and the manner of its reception will only become clearer once we have our annual run of literary festivals in spring).

Former Punjab chief minister Shehbaz Sharif and former president Asif Ali Zardari have both become members of the National Assembly after more than two decades. The two have also been on the wrong side of the law through most of last year. The former is in prison already, while the latter is seemingly making strides towards it.

Another political nominee who really came into her own in 2018 is Nawaz Sharif’s daughter Maryam. She addressed large public meetings across Pakistan in the run-up to the election and then, quietly, went to jail along with her father. It was only last year that she staked a serious claim to the political legacy of her father –– only to be disqualified to contest an election.

This time round, the total number of nominees is not even 10.

One of them had to be dropped midway through the three-way process that we use every year to find our Person of the Year: opinion of a panel of 10 eminent Pakistanis; a ground survey from a carefully chosen sample of around 1,600 Pakistanis (representing all the various localities, regions, provinces, ethnic communities and genders); and an online survey conducted on the Herald’s website.

While two of these processes went as smoothly as ever, the online survey became controversial immediately after it was opened for voting early last month. While we received some usual criticism for putting together people from different walks of life in the same list of nominees, as well as for mixing ‘good’ people with ‘bad’ ones, an online campaign began to discredit the entire Person of the Year exercise. A hashtag #IndianDawnHerald began trending on social media, accusing the Herald of being an enemy agent. The criticism was particularly vicious over the inclusion of Khalai Makhlooq, or aliens – a term used as a euphemism for the powers that be – in our nominees.

We withdrew the online survey. We also dropped Khalai Makhlooq as a nominee.

We, instead, devised a focus group comprising people working at the Herald as well some others who work closely with the magazine. Given the gender, age and education of the members of this group, it was an attempt at approximation to the Herald’s online readership, except that all members of the group came from Karachi. During the voting process, the group was deeply divided among Justice Saqib Nisar, Manzoor Pashteen, Meesha Shafi and Zainab Ansari (validating a confirmation bias among the well-off and educated urbanites against politicians).

The final count of the three-way polling showed Justice Nisar ahead of others, even though he received fewer votes (three), in the panel of eminent Pakistanis, than Pashteen (four). On the other hand, Imran Khan polled around 600 votes more than those garnered by Justice Nisar in the sample-based field survey. Even Nawaz Sharif and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari received more votes in the field survey than Justice Nisar. Confirmation bias among people at large (in favour of politicians) was clearly as strong as the one against them in the panel of eminent Pakistanis and the focus group.

We came to understand that there is no such thing as ‘Aik (one) Pakistan’, a term Imran Khan used extensively in his 2018 election campaign. There are as many Pakistans as there are Pakistanis who never seem to agree on anything. That, though, is what democracy is all about: agreeing to disagree.

Vive la democracy.

Field survey coordination by Fatima Shaheen Niazi, Hussain Patel, Sameen Hayat, Aliya Farrukh Shaikh and Manal Khan.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This was originally published in the Herald's January 2019 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

By Momina Manzoor Khan and Manal Khan

A 50-year-old villager, Wajid, took a tikli, a small tablet, in 2017. He did not know what it was.

He was smoking hashish along with 20 other people inside an autak, a drawing room of sorts, at a village in Sindh’s Dadu district. Someone gave him a tiny piece of some substance — white as paper, hard as cardboard. The person warned him that he needed to be careful with it. “I have lived a wild life. I am a village animal. What can this tikli do to me?” Wajid responded.

After he had the tablet, he says in a recent interview, his “mind started working faster” and went back in time. “I started becoming aware of things which I had probably done or seen in my childhood.”

Calling it the best experience of his life, Wajid says he cannot even begin to explain what world he got into. “All my past life suddenly came back to me. I could recall everything that I had long forgotten.”

A few hours after consuming the tablet, Wajid gathered about 40 people, men and women, and started making a speech in front of them about how they could make life in the village better. “I was enjoying giving the speech a lot,” he recalls. “I wanted to tell the villagers what the future held in store for them.”

A villager who heard the speech remembers seeing Wajid laugh a lot and talk about how we should stop wasting time and make use of the resources we have. “He talked about moving forward and maintaining unity,” says another member of his audience.

Wajid is otherwise known to be a quiet person and is not in the upper tiers of the social hierarchy in his village. His speech left the villagers bewildered. What was it that he took and became so fearless as to give a sermon to everyone and that too in the dead of the night, they wondered the next morning.

What Wajid ate that night was 80 microgrammes of a psychedelic substance called lysergic acid diethylamide – or LSD – also known as acid.

Akmal Shah was four years old in 1994 when a civil war broke out in Yemen. The country was divided into two states at the time — one in the north and the other in the south. That year, the north invaded the south with the self-declared objective to unify the country.

Shah was living with his family in the coastal city of Aden in South Yemen. He remembers cruise missiles blowing up a bridge that connected the city with the rest of the country. His family had to escape in a dinghy to be able to board a ship carrying arms to Pakistan. The ship could not come to the port because of the war. For 30 nautical miles, he reminisces, they travelled in the boat, “watching dolphins”.

Shah moved back to Yemen with his family in 2001 and started living in Sana’a, the country’s capital. In 2008, he moved to the United States for his undergraduate studies. Halfway through his freshman year, one of his college friends offered him LSD.

He had no idea what it could do to him but, as he says late this summer, he was also not “afraid or wary”. Early experiences of war and displacement and living in a foreign country as an expatriate Pakistani, Shah says, had hardened him against many worries. “I don’t think I have ever been worried much probably because of how I grew up.”

He had LSD that night with four other people. “It was probably one of the coolest experiences of my life,” he now says. “It was mind-blowing and very exciting.” The substance made him “really introspective”. It showed him who he was and who he wanted to be, he says.

Shah was studying pre-medical at the time but LSD made him decide that this was not his field.

When he went back to Yemen in 2012, another war broke out there. Electricity and water became rarities and blasts and loud bangs became common. “We were some of the last foreigners to leave in December that year,” he says. “The Houthi rebels were about to invade Sana’a. We got out just in time.”

When he left Sana’a, he also left behind a huge part of his life. His family lost almost everything they had –– home, stable income, luxuries of life. “We saved what we could and we left behind what we could not save,” he says, “because we did not have a lot of time to leave.” He also had to breakup with his girlfriend before his departure.

When Shah moved back to Pakistan (where he now lives and works as a content writer for a multinational company), he had to deal with “a lot of loss in a really short amount of time”. In the first two-and-a-half years after his arrival in Pakistan, he says, he was extremely depressed. “What really started helping me was a revival of basic social interactions and positive thinking.”

And both of these, according to his own claim, were made possible by LSD. “I have been consuming it after almost every three months.”

Shah acknowledges the side effects of using LSD. If you continue using it, he says, “it is obviously going to take a toll on your body”. Here is how he recounts the negative effects he has experienced: “You will have this internal shiver that goes through your body. You will be very stiff. Your muscles will not be very relaxed.”

LSD has also “killed” his “ego for the most part” which he counts as a positive development.

Shah calls this “state of ego death” as an out-of-body experience: “You forget who you are. You just feel very insignificant. The entire human race seems to be no more than a speck of dust.” What is the point of having an ego, he remarks, when your life is but a tiny fraction of the universe?

Dr Ben Sessa, a Britain-based consultant psychiatrist on adult addictions, explains why people like Shah have such out-of-body experiences on LSD. “Normally our brain consists of independent networks that perform separate specialised functions, such as vision, movement and hearing –– as well as more complex things like attention,” he says, quoting Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, who is heading psychedelic research at the Imperial College London and is the first scientist in 40 years to test LSD on a patient. Under LSD, Sessa says, “the separateness of these networks breaks down and instead you see a more integrated or unified brain.”

This unified brain on occasions leads to what people call “ego-dissolution”, he says. It means that the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnecting with oneself, others and the natural world, he adds. “This experience is sometimes [also] framed in a religious or spiritual way.”

A video clip prepared by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an American non-profit research and educational organisation, provides an etymological explanation for this “state of ego death”. The clip shows that LSD and a range of other similar substances are known as psychedelics, a word that has its origin in the Greek language and means “mind-revealing”. A psychedelic substance, thus, is one that allows the human mind to reveal itself in unexpected ways.

When psychedelic users report altered states of mind – such as the one described by Shah – they are only stating how their own mind revealed to themselves in a way they had not anticipated.

In Shah’s case, LSD seems to have led him through a series of changed states of mind, consequently bringing him rather full circle in life: from knowing who he wants to be, to forgetting who he is.

Does such a 360-degree transformation contribute to a healthy life? The answer may depend on how much psychedelic substance one consumes — what for and in what kind of company and circ*mstances.

Zaed was studying in the United States in the 1990s when he first took LSD. His face gleams as he talks about how the substance took him into the haze of a transcendent energy that the Chinese call qi — or life force.

Now a media person and in his forties, he recalls how he took “two small tabs” and went to attend a music festival. The drug made him see rays of light that no one else was seeing. “Those rays piled over each other to form a tunnel. The walls of the tunnel appeared to be decorated with various symbols associated with different religions,” he says. “Maybe that was [a manifestation of] my internal conflict at the time, one that I was not aware of,” he surmises. “[But] the idea that I was alone in that moment of divinity made me highly upset and I cried cathartically for hours.”

Zaed owns a book, The Anarchist Cookbook. written by an American author, William Powell. It was published in 1971 and contains methods for making sabotage devices, manufacturing weapons and producing LSD — all at home. One of its formulae to produce LSD involves the use of wood ether, ethanol and morning glory seeds — ingredients which, Zaed says, “are all easily available”. He, however, has never tried making LSD himself “because who will try it first?” He won’t.

Zaed gets philosophical as he talks about the impact LSD has made on him. It has made him realise, he claims, that “darkness is not really a physical thing” but just “the absence of light”. So, he says enigmatically, “the only thing that really exists is light — and the light loves you.”

According to him, control is the worst trait to have if one wants to have a meaningful LSD experience. After you have had LSD, “you just need to let it guide you, fearlessly” because, as he says it, there is nothing to be afraid of “except the monsters in your own head”.

While this state may sound easy to achieve, it does not always produce – at least, not for everyone – the same level of self-awareness that Zaed claims to have. The way to attaining that level, ironically, lies in regaining control after having lost it, he says, making it all sound extremely esoteric. “Some people can control or direct energies on psychedelics. If I am not boasting, I am one of them,” he then claims.

He describes how, while on a trip (a term used widely for a psychedelic experience), he made his friends imagine things that were not there. “I was surprised that it worked,” he recalls, but warns: “There are natural diversions [of that power] and there are unnatural diversions [of it].” Just to cite one example of an unnatural diversion, he says, “using it selfishly, say, to seduce someone”.

Zaed also cautions that this is exactly the kind of power that can be misused into forming cults and propagating ideologies that might be harmful to humanity.

Dr James Fadiman, one of the leading experts on psychedelics, dismisses the notion that psychedelics can help anyone exert psychological or emotional power over others. “It is a terrible idea,” he says in an email interview. He agrees that psychedelics may result in out-of-body experiences where their users could feel either disconnected or confused about the real world around them. Users, however, need “a guide to help them understand” such experiences, he explains.

Sessa, who has written two books on psychedelics – The Psychedelic Renaissance and To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic – is also not sure if there is any connection between psychedelics and some kind of a higher knowledge and understanding of the world and life. When people report such experiences, he says in an email interview, it forces psychiatrists to ask some interesting questions about how the brain works. “Can exploring these mental states be useful for understanding the nature of consciousness and, crucially, can they have therapeutic value in psychiatry?”

Hamraz Ahsan is a poet, writer and columnist based in London. He was born in Pakistan but has been living in England for more than three decades. His Urdu columns appear frequently in a Lahore-based Urdu newspaper.

Ahsan has written a novel, Kabuko The Djinn, that “talks about psychotropic plants and draws on actual ceremonies that Sufis undertake in the Subcontinent,” his daughter Tania Ahsan says in an email.

Being her father’s daughter, she has been interested in shamanism and Sufism since an early age. The magazine she went on to work for also covered all types of spiritualities. One of her favourite contributors to the magazine was Ross Heaven, a Britain-born shamanic healer who died earlier this year.

Heaven conducted mystic retreats in Peru, South Africa and France. These retreats replicate traditional shamanic practices of indigenous Amazonians living in various parts of South America and, more often than not, involve a concoction called ayahuasca. It is brewed from various vines and plants found in the Amazon forests and contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT) as one of its most active ingredients. DMT is a highly powerful psychedelic substance extracted from both plants and animals.

Tania was at a bit of a crossroads in her life in April 2006 when she embarked on a journey to Le Tourne town in south-west France to have ayahuasca and experience its attendant psychospiritual states. “The retreats often take place in remote locations so you do need to think long and hard before deciding” if you really want to take part in them.

Around 15 other people joined her in Le Tourne. “Most people were in their twenties and thirties. The youngest was perhaps 22 and the eldest perhaps 50,” she says.

Two shamans were there to guide participants through the experience. They had brought the brew all the way from South America where it was prepared by Heaven and another healer who had blessed it by singing traditional South American chants, called icaros, as it brewed.

The retreat was to last three days but ayahuasca was to be administered only on two of those nights. It started with the shamans explaining how it would proceed. The participants had to follow a special dietary regime before and during the retreat: their food would have no spices and no salt.

They would eat nothing, apart from herbal tea, after lunch on the first day they were to consume ayahuasca. “[We] were expected to stay as relaxed as possible during the day and not do anything too stimulating — such as a gym session or even have long or loud conversations.”

As night set in, the shamans sang some icaros and did some drumming. “Then they blessed the brew and asked participants to come up one by one to consume it,” she says. “I believe one could drink again if one wanted to but that night I did not.”

All the participants then lay down in a large hall. The shamans blew tobacco smoke over them to bless the room and did some more singing and gentle drumming. “One of the shamans each night took a little bit of the brew in order to be there with us and understand the energy of the room,” Tania says.

After the first night, the participants could decide if they wanted to stay and consume the brew for another night. Some chose not to, perhaps fearing that the strong brew may harm them physically or psychologically even though, Tania says, “nobody needed a doctor’s assistance”.

Her own experience varied on each of those nights. She felt okay with everything on the first night and did not throw up – as some others had – but the second night was like a “dark” descent into her own soul. “I felt bereft, lonely and freaked out,” she says. Her feelings were not bearable for her. “It just wasn’t comfortable.”

Tania says she avoids confrontations and conflicts. If she had known that she would have to contend with her internal demons after consuming ayahuasca on the second night, she “would never have done it”.

Once she was through with the experience, though, it became “completely bearable and healing for me”.

Ayela is an underground psychotherapist in Karachi. She has been practising for nine years. She also has a deep affection for LSD and strongly believes in its healing powers.

For the past two years, she has been trip-sitting some of her clients. She gives them an LSD dose – ranging between 50 microgrammes and 250 microgrammes – and then pairs it with therapy. The pairing, she says, provides much better chances of healing.

Ayela, though, claims that she also takes all the required cautions before putting people on LSD for therapy. “Risk assessment is absolutely necessary in therapy,” she says. “I can never put a patient on a trip without making them go through a screening process to determine their history of mental illness.”

Any traces of schizophrenia in a client’s family mean that they could be prone to it too. “I will not recommend LSD to them.” Similarly, she says, those who have been using antidepressants must be off them for at least three months – or more if the level of their mental illness is high – before they trip.

Each client needs to set aside at least 24 hours of their life for each guided trip. Approximately twelve of these hours will be consumed by the trip itself and the remaining for resting afterwards. She also meets the client for lunch or breakfast immediately after every trip for a debriefing session.

Ayela says she has treated three patients with LSD so far and none of those cases have gone wrong. “One of the patients was dealing with cocaine addiction and the fear of isolation; the other had accidentally unlocked some past trauma that they were not ready to deal with; and the third person I would rather not talk about.”

Fadiman has authored many books on psychedelics including, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic and Sacred Journeys. In an email interview, he says psychedelics help people “realise something about themselves and the world they live in”. This, he says, “is called learning” and it “lasts longer than any biochemical effect” of a drug.

He himself was introduced to psychedelics in 1961 when he was living in Paris and was visited by his former undergraduate advisor, Richard Alpert (who later converted to Hinduism and came to be known as Ram Dass). Alpert was on his way to Copenhagen with American psychologist and writer Timothy Leary and British writer Aldous Huxley. There, at an international conference, he was to make a major presentation on the positive potential of psychedelics. This was to be the first-ever academic presentation on the subject on a global scale.

Huxley, who has written many books including a fictional dystopia, Brave New World, had already converted to the cause of psychedelics by then. He has narrated his experiences with psychedelics in his book The Doors of Perception and famously wrote in it: “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

In Huxley’s point of view, psychedelics open those doors and help their users move from known realms to the unknown one. His writings have been extremely influential in creating a romantic mystique around psychedelics.

A few years later, in the spring of 1965, some members of a British rock band, The Beatles, would consume LSD unknowingly. Their dentist John Riley mixed it in their coffee at a dinner party. After the party, John Lennon, the co-founder of the band, drove around London in a Mini Cooper car along with his wife Cynthia and another band member George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd, believing that the whole city was on fire. This brush with The Beatles further solidified the romantic aura of psychedelics, making them the choice drug for many an artist and escapist — including The Beatles themselves.

LSD, according to Sessa, was soon dubbed as “the love drug” and “became for the hippie generation a validation of a peaceful way of life”.

When its use spread to the general population in the United States, “Young Americans realised they didn’t want to fight any more [in the Vietnam War],” wrote Professor David Nutt, director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit at the Imperial College London, in an August 2014 article published in the Independent newspaper. This led to a ban on LSD in the United States.

Recently, microdosing on psychedelics has resurfaced as a fad among highly-paid techies and executives in California’s Silicon Valley. An August 2018 opinion piece in the New York Times explained under an obvious headline – How and Why Silicon Valley Gets High – as to how a large number of programmers and computer engineers were trying psychedelics to boost their energy and creativity.

In Pakistan, psychedelics are being used for different purposes in different places. According to one insider who does not want to be named: “In Karachi and Lahore, people want to incorporate psychedelic experiences into their daily lives. Peshawar has more of a ‘burner culture’ — revolving around ecstasy and meth. Islamabad is different. People there want to trip all the time.”

“But psychedelics are not for everyone,” says another source who has been selling psychedelics for many years, mostly to clients from among the middle class, the upper-middle class and the rich in Karachi. As a quote taken from a Facebook group puts it: “One person’s therapy is another person’s spiritual journey is another person’s party is another person’s nightmare.”

Let us call her Mira.

She ingests about 10 microgrammes – one microgramme being equal to one millionth of a gramme – of LSD every fourth day. For her, it is like taking a cup of coffee. It gives her the energy to do things she otherwise would only lazily dream about, she says.

Mira is 31 and works for a non-governmental organisation in Karachi that works mainly with drug addicts. Her first experience with LSD was in Goa, India. She wanted to try it after reading the microdosing theories of Fadiman.

Fadiman has explained in his works how microdosing on psychedelics, under the supervision of psychiatrists, who are also knowledgeable about the chemical and psychological properties of psychedelics, can be curative rather than being hallucinogenic. Microdoses have different effects from those of higher doses, he says. They are “less exciting” and, therefore, “it is seldom that people on microdoses report any unusual experiences”.

Fadiman claim the users of psychedelics in microdoses “report better eating habits [and] better sleep.” They also become “nice to others and more productive”, use “less coffee or tea or cannabis” and often exercise more. Microdosing, according to him, has only a few negative effects, if any at all. “If a person does not like the effect, they can stop taking the psychedelics.” They are not addictive.

But he warns that the amount of microdoses, and the duration for which they can be taken, vary from person to person and should only be prescribed by experts. He also likens the use of psychedelics to driving a car. The more you know about driving and cars, the better driver you become. “You need to know a lot [before starting to use psychedelics] but if you do know a lot, it is safe and wonderful to be able to drive.”

Mira – and thousands of other users of psychedelics in Pakistan – seem to have neither the guidance nor the understanding that he talks about. She has been microdosing on her own for two years.

She started by using 0.2 grammes of magic mushrooms or shrooms — natural fungi that have psilocybin, a psychedelic substance, as their most active ingredient. There are more than 180 species of mushrooms that contain psilocybin or its derivative psilocin.

After two months, she switched to LSD. This was her way of curing herself of alcoholism. And it worked, she says. “From drinking every day, it slowly went down to drinking three nights a week and then to drinking only on weekends,” she says. “Now, I don’t feel like drinking at all.”

Mira has a set LSD routine. “If I have it on Monday, Tuesday is a good day and Wednesday a decent day but then I will need to dose again on Thursday,” she says.

Mira’s 60-year-old aunt, Mrs Lotia, is also microdosing on psychedelics to cure her post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. She now feels less agitated and lucid at night than before. She was on antidepressant pills for a long time but has stopped consuming those now. The pills do not work 70 per cent of the times and even if they do, people end up getting addicted to them, Mira says.

Does Mira also feel more cerebral and productive after she has taken psychedelics? “Yes,” she says. Is this feeling entirely because of psychedelics? “Hard to say.”

She has also been eating healthy, exercising, undergoing psychological therapy and also doing meditation. Microdosing alone, she concedes, could not have helped her quit drinking.

She and Mrs Lotia are among a small but growing group of middle-to-upper-middle class people in Karachi who are mixing psychedelics with a changed lifestyle in order to feel and live better. Mrs Lotia explains it eloquently: “Let us put it this way. Mira has become a vegetarian.”

Faiz is a young choreographer and a dance teacher in Lahore. He has been microdosing on LSD for two years. “I don’t have any dependency,” he says.

He was also using psychedelics when he was studying critical pedagogy during his masters and credits microdosing for giving him the idea of teaching math through dance. “It has been pretty successful,” he says. “I incorporate various angles, measurements, probabilities in dance moves to explain them to the students. I give them various steps to work around. They have to figure out what moves to make at what angle and in what combination to make them work. It is like an algorithm that they have to create.”

This explanation may not make any sense to someone uninitiated in either math or psychedelics. To Faiz, it is all about being creative — and, going by his own claim, psychedelics have helped him immensely. If he were to explain what psychedelics do for him, he would say “they make the music speak” to him.

Faiz believes microdosing has allowed him to innovate in all his artistic endeavours. “The kind of choreography and artwork I do is very interpretive. It is not commercial. It works a lot better for me if I can see things from different lenses [to do this kind of work],” he explains.

Faiz usually takes LSD during the day, and not as the first thing in the morning. He has also used methamphetamine, or meth, but found it not even partially as helpful as psychedelics. And, he felt as if he would get addicted to meth even while he was using it for the first time. “I could feel the craving for it and that is why I do not do it now,” he says.

Psychedelics, Faiz says, are not addictive though he concedes that they can have negative effects. “I have been diagnosed with anxiety. I feel there are times where it gets triggered when I am on LSD,” he says.

To avoid that, he sometimes consumes shrooms which, according to him, have only had salutary impacts on him as far as his anxiety is concerned.

Sarah, a 28-year-old business trainer in Pakistan, also swears by shrooms. She was studying in the United States some years ago when she suffered from anxiety and panic attacks so severe that they rendered her dysfunctional. It was then that she tried microdoses of shrooms to get back on her feet. It worked and since then has become an essential part of her life.

Every day as she gets ready for work, Sarah makes herself a smoothie and dissolves a quarter to half gramme of shrooms in it. “The results have been pretty substantial,” she writes in an email, “and include improved mood and increased energy.” These changes, she claims, have allowed her to “connect the dots” while addressing problems and have also increased her “overall sense of well-being”.

Sarah is very cautious about the amount she takes and warns that even microdosing can be harmful if not gotten right. “Dosing is a problem with shrooms,” she says, “because their contents are so inconsistent”.

It is obviously not easy to get the dose right with a plant whose chemical properties can vary widely, depending on where it is grown and how it is tended and harvested. To address the problem, Sarah, at one stage, was growing her own shrooms in her apartment while studying in Chicago.

Natasha grew up in Lahore in the 1970s and 1980s. “I had only a few experiences outside the parameters of my house,” she says. “The boys around me could gallivant outside but girls were kept indoors in silk chains.”

She had no exposure to or experience of such intoxicants as hashish and alcohol. These were taboo words in her conservative household. “I grew up seeing my parents occasionally taking valium or diazepam pills to sleep at night.”

Natasha got married at the age of 20 and was introduced to Lahore’s party crowd, with people drinking around her routinely. “That set me even more against drugs,” she says.

She vaguely remembers how her children first suggested that she used some natural relaxants. “My son told me how important it was for my own sake to not be a control freak.” For years, she thought about it but was never fully convinced to try any substance.

In 2015, her son offered her 0.9 grammes of shrooms. Before anything could make her change her mind, she consumed them all in one go. “Within 20 minutes, I was on my trip,” she says.

The trip “opened the door to consciousness — a whole new realm” for her. Now, three years later, she finds it rather strange why she did not try shrooms earlier.

Her trip was nothing like the wooziness often shown in movies after characters have consumed some drug. It was a quiet and relaxed state of mind, she recalls. Half an hour into her trip, she says, she started having an internal dialogue with her mother whose long illness and death she had been carrying as an emotional baggage for more than 20 years. “I felt a weight had been lifted off my chest. I felt much lighter after my trip.”

Natasha says drugs that induce psychedelic experiences “help people deal with issues rather than block them”. If she could she would give some psychedelic substance to her 70-year-old sister “who is a widow and is suffering from psychosis in New York”.

Natasha likes to plan her trips and describes them as “a slow, smooth transition and a slow, smooth descent”. She also enjoys writing down the thoughts that occur to her during her trip and which, according to her, are not evident in everyday life. “In normal life, we are always running from one thought to the other, from one distraction to the next.”

She recently tripped along with her children (who are now in their twenties) and her husband near Murree. Around sunset, they found a spot in a pine forest in Bhurban and consumed some shrooms. Natasha remembers how she could see waves in a nearby stream creating beautiful shadows on the banks — as if animals were slowly walking by. As the sun set, their conversations became funny. They saw spy satellites in the sky and joked if they were observing them. “We all laughed together, waving at the satellites,” she says, still laughing at the thought.

They played games and chased each other as if they were small children. “At the end of the trip, we got into a group hug and said a prayer of gratitude for our togetherness,” she says. A family that trips together stays together, is how she sums up the whole experience.

Such experiences happen on LSD or shrooms because, as one expert puts it, psychedelic substances are “non-specific amplifiers”. They accentuate every feeling, every sensation, every thought but it is difficult to specify whether this accentuation would be for the better or for the worse. They work in such a way that “any emotion, good or bad, benign or destructive, can be magnified to dramatic proportions”.

Naseem is a 57-year-old single mother. She works in Lahore as a research consultant in various fields such as healthcare and gender, and has never had alcohol or even smoked a cigarette. “My system is very sensitive to these things,” she says.

Yet, she has been “intrigued” by psychedelics.

Naseem says this intrigue started after reading a book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences. Published in 2000 and written by Rick Strassman, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine, it recorded the findings of a research project approved and funded by the United States government. Running between 1990 and 1995, the project involved 60 volunteers who were using DMT.

The book and other similar literature made Naseem scared of psychedelics but, ironically, they also pulled her towards them. She only wanted to try a microdose in the beginning but did not know how small an amount would suit her. Even nine microgrammes of LSD – generally considered a safe microdose – turned out to be too much for her. “I could not leave my house even on such a little amount.”

Two weeks later, she tried another, smaller, dose. “I felt growth, productivity and clarity after that,” she says of her experience.

Naseem has microdosed on both LSD and shrooms but prefers the latter. “They are milder and suit someone my age.” LSD would leave her mouth dry for 24 hours and also caused her blood pressure to drop. “It made me feel slightly cold. I would ask someone to cover me with a blanket every time I consumed LSD,” she says.

She now takes a small teaspoon full of crushed mushroom powder every week. She keeps it in her freezer just like many other spices and condiments. “Mushrooms give me depth and understanding. They make me productive.”

She has also made her younger sister a regular user of psychedelics but her own son is not convinced if his mother is doing right by herself.

He has studied medicine at the Imperial College London and does not approve of the use of psychedelics for the same reason that many doctors oppose it for: there is not enough research on psychedelics yet to know whether they help or harm the human mind and body.

The question that most doctors and psychiatrists ask – and do not yet have a definite answer for – is this: while microdosing certainly changes the mood, does it also reset the human body’s internal clock?

Dr Tania Nadeem, a psychiatrist at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi, has seven years of experience in adolescent psychology and she categorically states: “There is no medical research to prove that microdosing has zero side effects.” A frantic person in need of an instant way to make their day better may not think that it can be detrimental to their mind, she says.

Many people who come to her for treatment have tried other ways, including psychedelics, of healing themselves. “We have to realise that there is a problem and that is why they are coming to me.”

Even the most ardent advocates of microdosing admit that its benefits remain unproven. There is scepticism, both in the psychedelic space and outside it, in terms of the benefits of microdosing, Paul Austin, the American author of a popular book, Microdosing Psychedelics: A Practical Guide to Upgrade Your Life, is known to have said: “There’s no scientific research there yet.”

Sessa, who these days works as a senior research fellow at various universities for a PhD in psychotherapy and has worked on several Britain-based human trials in which test doses of LSD and psilocybin are administered and received, is also not entirely convinced about the positive impacts of microdosing. “I know it is popular,” he says. “[So] it might be real … but there is no placebo-controlled data to verify this as a real effect,” he says. “Until we get that data, microdosing remains merely an anecdotal, subjective report. We shall have to wait and see.”

The gate of a house located in one of the most upscale parts of Islamabad opens to a barking Labrador. Next to the dog is her owner — a young man in his early thirties who does not want to reveal his identity. He walks to his bedroom where two other people – of the same age as he is – are sitting. They all went to school together and have a lot of common experiences, including those of consuming psychedelics.

One of them, Nadir Furqan, initially trained as an architect but is now studying anthropology. He studies in Lahore but has his home in Islamabad. Dressed in a multi-pocketed button down shirt and sporting a thick moustache, he is seated next to a huge red, wooden bed.

Furqan has been experimenting with drugs since the age of 13 and had his first trip on LSD in the fall of 2006. “I have been hooked since then,” he says. He also made his close friends try it. “Soon the word got out. I became famous as the guy who has acid,” he says.

In the summer of 2009, Furqan got together with a few friends at his home in Chhattar valley, north-east of Islamabad. They wanted to see if LSD would change their experience of listening to music. “The music was curated by a friend who is obsessed with Jimi Hendrix,” Furqan says.

That night, he adds, he was able to see sound and hear smell – a phenomenon known as synaesthesia – for the first time ever. “It was baffling. Acid shows you the beauty of the smallest things in a larger than life way.”

Furqan walked out of that experience as a changed man. He wanted everyone to see the world through the “acid eye”. He also used his music soiree on psychedelics for his final project of architecture studies at a private university in Lahore. With shards of glass, he made what he called the Temple of Hendrix.

“It led to a great bonding with my professor who had tried LSD in Ottawa,” Furqan says. But then people started considering him a junkie and teachers began refusing to grade him well. “It affected my overall progress in life so much that I stopped having LSD for almost three years.”

He also stopped feeling any affinity with architecture and quit studying it. The users of psychedelics perhaps should be ready for such changes in their lives.

Another thing they must be ready for is getting the set and the setting, or S&S, right before consuming psychedelics. “Aspiring users should not be suffering from any psychological or emotional trauma. They should be comfortable with their surroundings and fine with ingesting something that may not suit their sense of taste. They should also have enough free time to have a 12-14-hour trip,” he explains.

A “sitter” is also an integral part of a psychedelic S&S, Furqan says. “The sitter does not consume any substance. He essentially oversees a trip and stays around those who are tripping so that he can take care of them in case of an emergency or a bad trip.”

Also known as a psychedelic crisis, a bad trip happens when the drug triggers an extremely negative psychological and neurological response in the brain.

Sessa is also a proponent of S&S. “When one hears horror stories of ‘bad trips’, it is invariably because of a lack of attention paid to the set and the setting,” he says.

One must, according to him, pay attention to the set and the setting in order to minimise the negative – and maximise the positive – effects of psychedelics. The set, according to him, includes a whole range of cultural attitudes, beliefs and expectations about what will happen after one uses psychedelics. “This includes whether the users [have] religious expectations, their prior experience of a particular drug, what they have heard from others, what the media tells them and what they know of the drug’s physiological effects.”

A user’s preconceived mindset, he says, will also influence and be influenced by his or her “fears and fantasies about what might happen and what [he or she] wishes to gain by taking the drug”.

The setting, Sessa says, includes the physical environment in which the drug is taken, including who the users are with at the time, what music is played (if any), whether they know the place, how hot or cold they are, how physically active they are during the session and whether they have things to do the next day. Even broader issues, such as “the social climate and attitude towards drugs” are also included in the setting.

The users must also ensure that the substances they are using are not adulterated or contaminated. “If exposed to light and heat, LSD can evaporate and lose its potency. Mushrooms get fungus if they are not kept in a dry place,” Furqan says.

After S&S are in place, the users, referred to as psychonauts, embark on a psychedelic-induced journey to explore various states of consciousness. Things can still go wrong and if they do during a trip, the consequences can be serious.

Two years ago when Furqan first tried mushrooms in Karachi, all his S&S did not prepare him for the experience. “They hit me like a wall. I could not even stay conscious,” he says. “I was passed out on the floor.”

At another occasion, Furqan’s father walked into his room at their Chhattar home while he and his friends were tripping there. It was a Friday and just about time for Friday prayer. Furqan’s father told them to accompany him to a mosque and join the prayer there. It was impossible to say no. “So we got up and headed for the masjid,” says Nihaal Khan, the third man in the room along with the Labrador’s owner and Furqan.

He is playing Imagine, a song by John Lennon, on his ukulele before he starts speaking.

“We positioned ourselves somewhere towards the back of the rows forming for the congregation, trying not to attract attention,” he says. What happened next was not just embarrassing but also potentially dangerous. “There was an empty spot in the row in front of us and one of us stepped ahead to take it. Another person was meanwhile also moving to take the same spot and managed to do so before our friend could,” Nihaal recounts. “He got stuck in the middle of the two rows. By then the prayer started so he had to do all the moves in a cramped space between two rows.” Nihaal looked at his friend and burst out laughing.

He says he started experimenting with smoking at the age of 14. Since then, he says, he has experimented a lot with drugs — every experiment being the outcome of an innate curiosity. “If I am to [explain] my relationship with drugs, it all happened because everyday life was mundane,” he says. “I was looking for altered perspectives and exploring the different states of consciousness on each drug.”

Before he started using LSD, he says, he would consume a hallucinatory stimulant called dextromethorphan (DXM) that is found in a cough syrup available over the counter. “It is in the morphine class of medications with sedative, dissociative, and stimulant properties,” says Nihaal, adding that he will never recommend it to anyone. “It is a dark drug. It plays with shadows and murky spaces.”

When he once had DXM, he says, he felt like his vision had all gone wrong.

“I felt the faces on posters in my room had become angry — all their eyes on me.” He saw some faces melting in anger. “I immediately felt rejected by them.”

Nihaal has a theory about why people feel things differently when they are on psychedelics: if generally you are imagining 10 thoughts per second, you will have 30 thoughts per second while on LSD. “Your mind is still taking time to process all those 30 thoughts in a very limited time which makes you believe that you have been at it for hours when, in reality, you started only five minutes earlier,” he says.

“This realisation of being stuck in the moment might freak one out, leading to a bad trip.”

Naveed Mushtaq walks into the room while Nihaal is winding up his experiences. Mushtaq is dressed in a white t-shirt and cotton trousers and is introduced as a passionate rock climber.

He studied in the United States and, like others in the room, has consumed many drugs including hallucinogens. “I have had magic mushrooms, DMT and many other medicinal drugs,” he says.

He has also had the experience of using amphetamine in the form of Adderall tablets during his university days. “It can keep you awake for almost 30 hours,” he says.

Mushtaq has also had methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). Commonly known as ecstasy, molly or XTC, it was first synthesised by Dr Alexander Shulgin, an American medicinal chemist. He tested it on himself in 1978 and, thus, earned the title of the “Godfather of Ecstasy”.

In the 1980s, MDMA started to be used in psychotherapy and was said to increase the patients’ self-esteem and facilitate therapeutic communication. Since then it has been primarily used as a recreational drug that causes euphoric feelings, increased empathy with others and enhanced sensations.

Ecstasy is most commonly taken orally in tablet form and comes in a variety of shapes and colours. It can also be snorted or smoked. It can be deadly when combined with other drugs. At high doses, it can be deadly on its own.

MAPS, that works on what it calls “the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana”, claims that marijuana and MDMA are psychedelics in the same way any other mind-altering substance or activity is. “Dreams are psychedelic, meditation can be psychedelic. Non-drug techniques like Holotropic Breathwork, hyperventilation, ecstatic dancing — all sorts of things are psychedelics,” says Rick Doblin, the MAPS founder, in a video clip.

Fadiman does not agree. He insists that MDMA is not a psychedelic. “It is not even a borderline psychedelic,” he says, “[but] is often confused or classed with psychedelicsbecause most of the work done with it, therapeutically, is done by MAPS that also works with psychedelics.”

The host in that Islamabad house has also taken the drug many times.

When he was in college in the winter of 2011, he says, everyone would pop ecstasy during birthdays. When its effects started to fade – a state known as a ‘downer’ – people would jack them up with ketamine, an anaesthetic. “One bottle of ketamine would be good to make half-a-dozen people go into deep sleep,” says Furqan.

The host has also had Ritalin. Scientifically called methylphenidate hydrochloride, it is used for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and belongs to a class of drugs known as stimulants. He took it every other day for a month while working on his masters thesis. “I could not eat or sleep till my 15,000 word thesis was all written.”

He once also had LSD to evaluate where he “was standing” in his love relationship. “After the trip ended, I called the girl and told her that this was probably not working out,” he says. “It is shocking how I became so sure of my own feelings all of a sudden but this is exactly the kind of clarity that LSD leaves you with.”

Hamad Naqvi and Asif Ali, too, have experimented with drugs.

Belonging to Rawalpindi, they are both in their thirties and look entirely different from each other. Naqvi is dressed in formal pants and a tucked-in dress shirt. His brown leather shoes pair perfectly with his navy and sky blue attire. Ali is in jeans and has a wild beard and moustache. His curly hair are tied in a loose ponytail.

Naqvi has been suicidal since his early years. He has also been diagnosed with other borderline personality disorders. In the last 10 years, he has tried three different therapists and several types of medication but nothing seems to be working for him.

Using various intoxicants, including psychedelics, has been an “escape” for him. He sees it “as a way of dissecting my brain, soul and ego out on an operating table and examining it under a microscope”.

Among many other substances, he has also tried a pill called dimenhydrinate and a liquid known as diphenhydramine. These are delirium-inducing hallucinogens which are quite different from psychedelics. They produce vivid and generally highly unpleasant hallucinations in addition to potentially dangerous side effects. Using them was “not an enjoyable experience”, he says. “They leave you constantly scared.”

He experimented with these drugs for around six months but they interrupted his studies and made things really bad for him, he says.

At the age of 18, he took a cough syrup that contains DXM, a dissociative psychedelic. “It turned out to be a satisfying experience,” Naqvi says.

In one of his DXM trips, he says, he left his “body on Earth and travelled to the inside of the moon”. He claims seeing a huge ball of light. “The light was God,” he says, “and God told me that I was not living my life right and that I need to sober up and quit drugs.”

Ali has not tried as many substances as Naqvi has. But even his limited experiences have not been always pleasant.

In his first brush with psychedelics, he consumed 3.8 grammes of magic mushrooms, quite a heavy dose for a beginner. He was with Naqvi at the time in a park in Islamabad. Almost two hours into the trip, Ali says, the trauma of his mother’s death came gushing to him like a cyclone of emotions. “I remember crying my guts out till I found peace.”

Osho, a self-proclaimed namesake of the Indian guru Rajneesh, has had a similar experience. A short man nearing 30 years of age, with curly hair and black-rimmed glasses, he went to Hunza in the summer of 2015 to experience, aided by LSD, the beauty of the area’s mountainous landscape. He, instead, had a nightmare.

Three hours down his trip, Osho felt he was experiencing all the sadness in the world. “I started crying inconsolably,” he says on a late summer evening at a chai stall in Karachi’s Defence area. “I felt like I was responsible for all the sorrows in the world, for the rich corrupting the poor, for the powerful abusing the labour and for men annihilating female wisdom.”

All these experiences narrated by different people sound more or less the same even when they do not always accrue from the same class or type of drugs. Experts like to point out that they are not.

Fadiman, for one, argues that the effects of “designer drugs” and “cognitive enhancers” such as Adderall and Ritalin differ from those of psychedelics, especially when psychedelics are taken in microdoses. “These other drugs stimulate parts of the mind and body but “they do nothing related to healing mental or physical conditions as microdoses of psychedelics do”.

As far as ecstasy/MDMA is concerned, he still concedes, it shares at least one major characteristic with psychedelics. The two, he says, can be broadly put together in the same category of “mind-changing drugs”.

Ahmad, 21, is three years older than his brother, Zubair. They were both in school in Peshawar when they first started DJ-ing for private events. Their father, a leading member of a religious political party, is opposed to any musical activity but they have kept their passion for music hidden from him. As they also have their predilection for psychedelics.

In a basem*nt inside their friend’s house on Warsak Road, they have set up a sound system and depleted red LED lights that release only as much light as keeps the darkness away. In a meeting this late summer, they smoke Spice, a synthetic marijuana, as they talk about their frequent mixing of psychedelics with music.

Their bodies seem to be in perfect poise as they lean against the wall, blowing smoke out of the window right above their heads. “Our friends at school used to pop ecstasy pills daily. Imagine, daily,” says Ahmad. “I did not understand why would one want to take a party drug every single day,” particularly when “half the stuff available in Peshawar is fake”.

Here, he says, manufacturers and dealers make copies of ecstasy at a large scale.

Aizad, a Peshawar-based drug dealer who has named himself Apocalypse, readily agrees. He claims a large number of ecstasy pills being sold in Islamabad and Peshawar are made in underground facilities in Khyber Agency along the Pak-Afghan border.

On a late summer evening, Apocalypse displays an LSD tablet – a tiny square with 250 microgrammes potency – inside a parked car in Khyber Agency. The tablet is sufficient for a long trip. He cuts it into about 10 pieces and is out to sell those.

Another man suddenly opens the back door of the car and hurriedly gets inside. He seems nervous. His large blue eyes, wavy golden hair reaching his shoulders and pink face make him look like a 15-year-old though, in reality, he is about five years older. His name is Bahadur Khan.

Bahadur supplies ecstasy to the whole of Peshawar, claims Apocalypse. “The whole of Peshawar knows him.”

Bahadur himself is addicted to ecstasy. “After I consume a pill, I am not scared of anyone or anything anymore,” he says. “When I am sober two days later, then I feel scared for myself.”

He first heard about ecstasy from friends of his friends when he was 15 years old. He started buying it from a dealer to use it himself and also to sell it to his friends. “Slowly, I started my own small ecstasy business.”

Bahadur speaks in a soft, almost purring, voice — as if he is perpetually trying to calm someone down. He, however, is the one most in need of calming. Due to his past experiences with drug lords and law-enforcement agencies, says Apocalypse, Bahadur is prone to obsessive fretting.

Personnel of the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF), a federal entity, kept him in detention for a month some time ago, he tells Apocalypse in Pashto. “They beat me up, asking me where I get ecstasy from,” Apocalypse translates him as saying. They also asked him what LSD was, where it came from and who sold it in Peshawar.

Bahadur chuckles as he recalled how the ANF personnel did not have any clue about LSD. “I have heard when people consume it,” he quotes one of them as saying, “they end up in hell”.

Bahadur denies that the ecstasy he sells is made in facilities around Peshawar. He claims he either smuggles his pills from Afghanistan by hiding them in car engines or orders them online, through the dark web, from Netherlands, receiving them through couriers.

Bahadur, though, concedes that the pills he sells sometimes lead to medical emergencies. “Some consumers have had attacks of paralysis. Their hands and feet have become stiff and their faces have become contorted.”

This, he believes, happens because consumers either overdose or mix substances without knowing their chemical properties. Sometimes the problems occur because of the way MDMA is pressed to turn it into ecstasy. Cocaine, meth and heroine are often used in the pressing process, he says.

Bahadur recounts how one of his regular customers started losing weight rapidly. “So, his father became concerned and took him to a hospital where they did some blood tests on him.” The tests revealed that he was using heroin.

Bahadur says his customer claims that he had never touched any drug other than ecstasy. The pills he was using must have been mixed with other substances.

Faisal Nabi Malik was doing well for himself. He worked as a banker initially and then started his own business. By 2013, he was already eight years into his marriage, living with his wife and three-year-old daughter in an apartment in Karachi’s Clifton area.

Malik also had a large circle of friends including a young film-maker Mansoor Mujahid, an amateur painter Anab Zehra Hameed and a former radio host Masooma Zainab Abidi. They all belonged to the same age group: between late twenties and early thirties.

On June 19, 2013, Malik picked up Masooma at 9 pm from her parents’ house in Defence area and, together, they went to the apartment of a cousin of Malik’s. Two other friends joined them there but left about three hours later. A little after 2 am, Malik and Masooma also left. They got into a car again and drove to an apartment in Zamzama area where Mujahid and Anab were living together. Once there, they all sat and talked in an air-conditioned bedroom.

At around 4 am, Mujahid suddenly took out a pistol and fired at Malik. Then he fired a second bullet at Malik. While Malik lay dying, Masooma ran into a bathroom where she hid herself and Anab helped Mujahid cut Malik’s throat and nose with a kitchen knife.

Mujahid then ordered three burgers from a fast food joint that the three of them ate. Masooma then went to sleep under the influence of sleeping pills administered to her forcibly by Mujahid and Anab.

When Masooma got up at 4 pm, she saw Mujahid and Anab getting ready to go out. Mujahid told her that they would drop her at her parents’ house. He also threatened her that he will not let her stay alive if she ever told anyone about the murder. All this while, Malik’s body was still lying around in the same apartment.

A day later, on June 21, Mujahid and Anab wrapped the body in bed sheets, put it in a car, dumped it outside an apartment building in Clifton and threw acid on the face to make it unrecognisable. The same night the two were arrested along with a lot of incriminating evidence — including the weapon with which the murder was committed.

Mujahid confessed to the killing in an initial statement he gave to investigation officers. As did Anab. Their accounts were corroborated by Masooma and some other witnesses including Malik’s driver who was waiting in a car outside the apartment when the murder took place.

Mujahid told investigators he killed Malik because he had assaulted Anab whom Mujahid was planning to marry. He later also said the whole incident was an accident, that he was drunk and that the pistol went off accidentally as he held it in his hand.

A court is hearing the case and is yet to determine whether the murder was deliberate or mere happenstance. “There are different versions of the incident and the motive for the murder is still not clear,” says the head of a police station in Clifton where the murder case was registered.

Mujahid and Anab, meanwhile, have been released on bail.

On an October evening this year, they are joined inside Anab’s bedroom at the house of her parents by two others friends — a man and a woman. The room is small but cozy and is lit with a single white light bulb. A diverse mix of artworks is on display on one wall. Anab says she created those under the influence of LSD. A puddle of dried candle wax on a coffee table and the floor, a large bookshelf and a pink chest of drawers add to the room’s arty ambience.

Anab rummages through a pile of things and pulls out a small, pink blow dryer. Drying her pink-dyed hair, she talks about her plans for this coming Saturday night. She does not talk about the murder.

Mujahid looks a little weaker and paler in person than he does in pictures flashed in the media after the murder. While others in the room smoke joints and consume meth, he speaks in a hurried but confident tone.

Refuting one of his earlier statements, he denies being intoxicated on the night of Malik’s murder. “I was the only sober person that night. The rest were fully intoxicated,” he says.

“What drugs were being consumed?” Mujahid does not respond; Anab does: “Cocaine, crushed Ritalin and ecstasy.”

Names have been changed in this story to protect identities except while quoting experts and mentioning incidents that are already in the public domain.

A previous version of this story published a photo stating that the woman shown in it was consuming acid while reading tarot cards. This is factually incorrect. The woman was not consuming acid. We have made the correction and we apologise for the error.

Opening image: A screenshot of ecstasy pills | Manal Khan

The writers are staffers at the Herald.

The article was originally published in the December 2018 issue under the headline 'Mind over matter'. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic — that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared this division within themselves.
– Carl Jung, Swiss psychoanalyst

When winter arrives, the village folk come down from the mountains to their villages, bringing back cattle fattened on the highland grass. Soon there will be snow, confining them to their homes. They will slaughter an ox or a goat and salt and dry its carcass — as part of Nasalo, their winter festival. This, along with fruit dried and grain harvested in summer months, will sustain them through a long, cold winter.

But before the villagers move into closed indoors, they must exorcise evil spirits that have moved in while they were away.

The spirits are quiet and secretive. From their hiding places, they are expelled through a rite of noise — villagers knocking walls and doors with a pickaxe or a rolling pin. Residents are not allowed to sleep inside their houses during exorcism because if they do, the spirits will possess them to stay on with them. The ritual done, the villagers have a feast of goli – bread rolled in butter – to declare their houses safe for habitation.

In mountain valleys of Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan, communities are as disciplined and single-minded as ants. The clockwork of their lives is regulated by nature – through its bounties and scarcities, through the harsh and kind turns of seasons – as they work through summers to save for winters. Their naturalist outlook on life, and a mountain culture conceived and preserved in isolation from the rest of the world, hint at their region’s Shamanic past even when these communities have long embraced Islam. Largely symbolic than being an article of faith today, doman koh, or the rite of exorcism, is a throwback to an age covered in mists of time like the mountain peaks in clouds on a rainy day here.

Of late, though, the mountain folks have returned home to find that evil spirits have hardened themselves to withstand the ritual. Not only do they insist on staying, they demand a sacrifice far bigger than slaughtering a goat or a co*ckerel.

While the elders were in the mountains beseeching fairies for fecund cattle and bountiful harvest, their children left villages to get education in cities. They returned disabused of myths, divested of faith in fairies their forefathers bow to and seek counsel from in time of adversity. Drawn to the gods of globalisation – Oracle, Nike, Hermes, Mars: brands, not deities from mythology – the children have become split personalities, torn between an ancient world and a new one.

As the culture, festivals and traditions that give the locals a sense of self and sociocultural identity die so do the bonds that hold mountain communities into a cohesive whole. As those bonds die, they leave a curse behind. The locals find themselves amidst a zone where the self stands on shaky ground between the solid world it once inhabited and the virtual one that lacks a core.

The self stands lost. And there is no help from fairies in the face of an onslaught from fiends – the relentless, faceless forces unleashed by modernity, globalisation, sectarianism, radicalisation and state oppression – that snuff all hope for self-realisation.

At the altar of these raging demons, the mountain communities must sacrifice their own lives and those of their children. With a co*ckerel, a goat, a prayer, they cannot be allayed.

When life blooms in spring, they go to die.

You would not know it from the young hopeful faces of children in school uniforms, saddled with colourful bags and holding hands as they walk to school from home through poplar-shaded streets.

You would not know it from the retired soldier, feather-crest in his pakul cap, who stops to buy muntu – dumplings made with onions and mincemeat – from a shop along the road; or from the young man wearing a jeans folded half way up his shins and a red T-shirt, leaning forward on the seat of his motorcycle, who stops along the way so he can text on his phone. You would not know it from the shadows on the tree-lined street leading up to the river, from the wind that suddenly rises in the evening as a dying sunlight lingers over peaks surrounding the valley, or from the blazing, bright afternoon that leaves eyeballs scalded, hot and itching from sunlight.

Neither would you from the child who laughs as he runs across the street, chased by a young father who plants his rosy cheeks with kisses, laughing as he tickles the child’s face with his own.

You would not because Ghizer has valleys redolent with the scent of bairer trees. Its villages resonate with the song of mayun, the golden oriole, that echoes in the small hours before dawn and seems to celebrate nature’s bounty: “the apricots are ripe, the apples are rotten,” is how local residents interpret its fragile notes.

These, as anyone would tell you, are the sights, sounds and scents of eternity. Of life as it always was and always will be — thriving and exuberant.

You only know it from a ping that makes Sharafat Ali, an Ismaili social activist who works with the youth, pick up his phone and announce anxiously: another suicide.

You do not want the news of another suicide, not here in Gahkuch town, the district headquarters of Ghizer. First, because if life and death are mutually exclusive, how can they coexist in the same space with the same intensity? Second, you have come to dread suicide as if it is a madness you might also catch.

The news reinforces observations, speculations and fears you are out to challenge and hopefully lay to rest, hoping against all hope that Ghizer’s reputation for a high rate of suicides is wrong or, at least, blown out of proportion. That the river snaking through the heart of this paradise is no serpent; that there is no worm eating into the vitals of life here; that there is no tragedy lying in wait for the village folk, like the cracks from several earthquakes in the walls of their houses that perhaps would not survive another.

Sharafat Ali’s phone receives a picture: a sturdy young man with a clean crew cut and bulging muscles that strain against the tight sleeves of his T-shirt. Merely 25. A life cut short, now frozen in a picture of a hopeful face. A hope that is lost.

Who else lost hope when he died — a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend?

They say suicide in these parts has become a fashion, a rage for the copycat youth. He, too, is a role model for them. Young. Handsome. Dead.

The only consolation is that he is not from Ghizer. He is from Hunza. But how is that a consolation? Is it not ironic that Hunza, a place where the old are known to live to ripe old age should also have a reputation for the young killing themselves prematurely?

From Buni town in Chitral to Yasin valley in Ghizer, young men and women in Pakistan’s north are choosing death when they should be alive with ambition and hope. In Ghizer, more girls than boys are committing suicide; in Hunza, it is the boys. Local settlements, scenic and placid on the surface, have suicide points just like they have picnic spots or lover lanes.

Every suicide has a story and you wonder about the story of the young man whose photo Sharafat Ali has received.

In Ghizer, there are 203 stories of those who have committed suicide between 2006 and 2017. Everyone here has a story of a suicide to tell, sometimes even two or three. Of a brother who shot himself, of a sister who jumped into the river, of a cousin who took poison. It is not unlike the time when terrorism peaked in Pakistan and in your hometown you knew someone – a friend, a family member, yourself – who had survived a suicide bombing or lost someone to it. It is that random but it is also different.

Suicide bombers die for what they believe is a cause. Those who commit suicide have none to live for. The motives of suicide bombers may be “altruistic” — as defined by French sociologist Emile Durkheim whose suicide theory is considered seminal in sociology. They think they are dying for a shared ideal or a collective purpose that is larger than their own lives. A suicide is “fatalistic” when in reaction to oppression from the state or the system, or “egotistic” when an individual commits suicide because he or she fails to integrate in a social set-up.

In Chitral, people report a surge in suicides every spring — between February and April. “It must have something to do with a psychotic disorder that tends to aggravate around spring,” says a local associate of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

A young doctor in Ghizer, who routinely performs autopsies on those who have committed suicides or treats suicide survivors, confirms the same. The local season of suicides, he says, follows international trends. Change in seasons and effects of light on hormones, he says, prompt suicides between April and June in northern Pakistan — just as they do in the rest of the world.

But it is August and the young in Chitral are still killing themselves for scoring low in exam results. In Ghizer, too, they are dying of reasons other than seasons and sunlight.

On a recent night, knots of young boys lean on the railing of a bridge over the Ghizer River, looking down, casting long shadows under the lights. From below the bridge rise the roar and the rattle of the river, wild waves rippling like scales on a serpent.

Night after night, young men in Ghizer are drawn to the river like moths to the lamplights on the bridge. To some, it is the river’s soothing sound that strangely deepens the night’s silence. To others, it is a call.

In Chitral, they say do not go near the river when it is the season for grapes to ripen because the river calls for blood then.

Her name was Aasia. She was 23 and married to a man in Ashrait, a village near Chitral city. Her husband, a distant cousin of hers, wanted to keep her with him but Aasia and her mother-in-law did not get along. For nearly a year, she intermittently lived with her father while the two families tried to reconcile but her mother-in-law would ask her to leave every time she moved back into her husband’s house. Through all this, she had a daughter who did not live long.

Aasia got divorced three months before she walked to the river with her six-year-old sister. On that day, she told her aunt, with whom she was staying in Chitral city, that she wanted to go home to her father. Out on the road, she stopped a car and told the driver to take her to the river bridge. “We are going to a park there,” she told him.

There Aasia flung herself into the river, leaving her sister standing on the bridge. A man found her there, lost and crying.

“Those who intend to commit suicide go to the river because it is easily accessible,” says Inayatullah Faizi, a college principal in Chitral. “Since they are in a state of anguish, the river is the first place that comes to their mind. They do not have to ask for money to buy pills or poison or to seek other devices for suicide.”

The river is there. And it calls.

The Chitral River has its origins in Chiantar Glacier in Broghil Valley, high up in the northwest where Chitral and Gilgit meet the Wakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan – a narrow strip of land that extends to China and separates Tajikistan from Pakistan. From the river flow 32 streams for 32 valleys of Chitral, says Faizi, so that each village is settled around a stream. River is the locus of all life in these settlements — some as ancient as 600 to 800 years.

Poets in the region see the river as an obstacle to love, with the lover and the beloved living along its separate banks. “Oh beloved, your abode is on the other side of the river and there is no boat to cross it,” says one of them.

Another, Mirza Muhammad Siyar, whose verse people know by heart, uses the river water as a symbol of life. “I am near death in your love, like a fish out of water gasping for air.”

In love and then divorced, Aasia must have been a fish out of water. Is that why she jumped into the river?

On a recent night when a cold rain is falling over the valley, I go out to trace Aasia’s footsteps. The bridge over the river is a mere suggestion of itself, a black brushstroke on the inky canvass of the night. Yellow and black railings on its sides glisten wet with raindrops. Below, the river flows invisible. Its rustling sound is like the wind echoing through the valleys: it follows you. You can hear it no matter where you are — in mountains, villages or towns.

Ghizer valley is at its most enchanting in the mornings, with the mountains covered in mist. Think ravens calling, think pine smoke drifting over houses, think the song of mayun, think maple trees swaying and think the rustle of discarded wrappers driven by wind on the river’s bridge.

On the phone all morning, Sharafat Ali finally gets to trace Syed Noorul Hussian who has been out in Ishkoman valley – recently in news for a glacier melt that created an artificial lake and inundated an entire village, like the one in Attabad, Hunza, in 2010 – where the communication network is patchy. Hussain’s Safety Life Organisation works on suicides — monitoring, documenting and creating awareness about them.

Given the number of suicides happening in the valleys of Ghizer, he has his hands full. The backseat of his car is littered with papers. It looks as much like an office as a means of transport. He is always on the move on bad roads between remote villages to meet families of those who have committed suicides. They are often reluctant to speak because of the stigma or due to causes best not spoken of.

“Versions of each story keep changing. I had to interview a family 10 times to get to the heart of one story,” says Hussain. Once he phoned a family 17 times to find facts and was beaten up for that. A letter from the home department of Gilgit-Baltistan’s regional government that shows him as a government monitor saved him from police action.

“Finding the truth is especially difficult with reference to women who commit suicide,” he says. “Families hide the factors that lead to their death. This also hampers police investigation.”

Hussain lays out papers on a lawn table. These carry data on the number of suicides in different valleys of Ghizer district: Punyal has had the most suicides — 76; it is followed by 50 cases in Yasin, 32 in Gopis, 26 is Ishkoman and 19 in Phandar. More women – 107 – than men – 96 – have committed suicide in the district over the last 11 years. Students between the ages of 11 and 20 are the largest group among them, followed by married people.

Of all the cases recorded by Hussain, 102 have been deemed as definite suicides. The remaining 101 have been registered with the police for inquiry and investigation due to an element of doubt about the circ*mstances of death. Many of these may also turn out to be suicides, confirming what Hussain’s data suggests: that suicides are happening in Ghizer in numbers far greater than homicides.

In Gopis tehsil, for instance, there have been 28 confirmed suicides as opposed to only four cases being investigated as murders. In Yasin tehsil, murder is suspected in just five of the 50 cases. For Punyal, the ratio of suicides to suspected murders is 73:3. It is 24:2 in Ishkoman.

Punyal tehsil – where the district capital Gahkuch is located – is the most developed part of Ghizer district. Literacy rate here is very high. It is also where the number of suicides is the highest in the entire Gilgit-Baltistan region. Within Punyal, Gahkuch has seen more suicides – 24 – than the rest of the tehsil. This trend persists in all the five tehsils in Ghizer: their headquarters have higher suicide rates than the rest of them.

Hussain’s own sister-in-law, Nadia, attempted suicide recently. She lives in Birgil, the last village in Punyal before Ishkoman, a valley on the Pak-Afghan border, begins. The road to Birgil is rough, getting rockier as it moves away from Gahkuch. The terrain is sandy and grey. Occasional settlements can be spotted along a river. The mountains seem to be pressing in on the valley.

Along the way, the road suddenly throws up a stark metaphor for social change in these isolated mountains: two young men pulling a cow. Alone in the middle of nowhere, they are dressed in jeans and T-shirts; sharing a red bottle of an energy drink like city boys anywhere, they tug along that constant, universal fixture of pastoral life — livestock.

“We are surrounded by mountains. We live in a box,” says an Aga Khan Rural Support Programme official in Chitral city where the rate of suicides has alarmingly spiked in recent months and years. This isolation, according to him, is geographical, ethnic, cultural and perhaps even religious. “If a young person in Punjab’s Sargodha or Sialkot district returns home after studying in Lahore, he may find employment locally. Even if someone educated from a village in Punjab does not want to do farming, he can easily go to a nearby city. What has Chitral or Gilgit-Baltistan to offer for someone educated?”

This is why a girl from Hunza is “forced to collect firewood” even after she has done her PhD.

Birgil, with its wheat fields, mulberry trees and women tending cows, is a pleasing sight. Nadia lives in a small two-room house that has its own vegetable patch, a grapevine and poppy plants with fragile orange-red flowers. She is 22 and edgy.

She seems to cry and smile simultaneously as she speaks about her suicide attempt, not making eye contact. The varnish on her nails is cracked and she has a distracted look about her. “I mostly sleep,” she says, “because I keep thinking when I am awake.” Thinking hurts her head.

Nadia has friends but she mostly stays to herself. She says girls in her village have “tense lives” because brothers and fathers are always angry with them. “It is the immediate family that adds most to their distress,” she says.

Nadia could not continue studies “because of stress”. She loved a cousin who is working in Dubai. He told her he would marry her but his parents did not want him to. Sometime ago, he came to Pakistan to get engaged to another girl without telling Nadia but he continued talking to her over the phone, giving her hope. “I could not tell that he was lying because I was stressed out all the time.”

When Nadia found out about his engagement, she told his fiancée about her own associations with him. It led to a family dispute. When he would not talk to her anymore, Nadia took a bottle-full of pills. “[Dying] was better than listening to all the talk behind your back,” she says.

Does she regret taking pills? “I do not regret anything. I did not do anything wrong.”

Gilgit-Baltistan, except its Diamer district, has a reputation for educating girls, especially villages and towns with an Ismaili population. Women move freely about; they go to schools and run businesses. In Chatorkhand, the headquarters of Ishkoman tehsil, there are markets for women, run by women. Travelling in the mountainous outback between villages, it is not unusual to come across a shop with a woman at the counter.

On the way back to Gahkuch from Birgil, Hussain takes the car over a rattling, swaying suspension bridge on the Ghizer River. On the other side of the bridge is a valley with tall poplars lining a potholed dirt road where the car sputters and stalls. He leaves the vehicle and walks to a nearby village, Hatoon, where a girl recently attempted suicide.

There is little that sets Hatoon apart from other scenic villages in the district. Its stone-walled streets are long and winding, lined by poplars, willows and a tree the locals call bait, its leaves used as fodder for goats. Through a narrow dark street, shaded by mulberry and persimmon trees and dank from a stream running along its side, Hussain walks up the hill anxiously, led by a local young man, to the girl’s house. He is not sure if her family will want to talk about her attempted suicide. The street is quiet, except for distant voices of cows mooing, goats bleating and people talking behind low stonewalls and ancient wooden doors.

The man who opens the door is the girl’s uncle. He says she has gone to another village and shuts the door politely in the face of Hussain’s guide. That evening back in Ghizer, the body of a woman from Hatoon is brought to the district hospital for autopsy.

All the time Hussain was out looking for the girl who had survived a suicide attempt, another woman in the same area was planning to take her life.

One wonders what her story is. But the dead tell no tales.

Early this summer in Hunza, six boys from Passu in Gojal valley go out wearing roller-blades, lurching back and forth along the Karakoram Highway like the traffic headed for China.

All of them have stayed in cities like Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi. One is a graphic designer, another a chef. Others are still in colleges and universities. One of them is a Marxist, another an artist.

They stand along the roadside in Passu, in the shadow of a mountain. “In cities, there are opportunities and facilities,” says Maqsood Arif, the graphic designer. Others around him nod in agreement. “But we cannot stay there. We have to come back here and work for our community. It is part of our vision — to contribute to the well-being of our community.”

You find tradition ascendant in Ghizer. In Hunza, it is somehow the enterprise — focused on tourists, restaurants, eateries and bakeries. It is not enough, however, to keep the young – educated, skilled, idle and bored stiff – engaged even when they are trying out all kinds of small initiatives. Their dreams are always on the cusp of realisation but never fully realised because they need a market to flourish and Gilgit-Baltistan has none, tourists and mountaineers becoming fewer each year for reasons of security. So they go out, wearing roller-blades, to kill time — and sometimes to kill themselves.

On the night Inayatullah went to hang himself by a tree outside his house, he had sat late editing selfies he had taken with friends that evening in his picturesque village, Khyber, in upper Hunza, known for its successful ibex conservation project. His mother found him dead at six in the morning. That was in June this year. In July, another young man killed himself in the same village.

In village after village, there have been many cases of suicides recently and the trend is on the rise. “We have had cases of suicides but they were always of women,” says Sher Afzal, Inayatullah’s uncle. “In the last 20 years, the trend has shifted to boys.”

Inayatullah’s family is sitting in a large room built in the traditional Ismaili manner, with several pillars signifying the Prophet of Islam (may peace be upon him) and his family members. It is the sixth day of mourning with relatives still coming in for condolences.

“Nobody attempts suicide on a whim,” says Afzal, explaining why Inayatullah, 25, chose death over life. “The minds of the youth are etched with the belief that the world is an ideal place. When they get a jolt to their belief in the fairness of the world, it acts like a kindle to the fuel,” he says.

In Inayatullah’s case, the trigger came from the arrest of his father in China. He was close to his father who had worked as a contractor on the Karakoram Highway. After he lost the contract, he started working, like many others in the area, as a courier of goods to Sost, a dry port town on the Karakoram Highway, and onward to China. On November 9, 2015, he took a consignment to China that had cream jars full of heroin. He was given a prison sentence of 10 years.

His family has not heard from him. Their only contact with him is through a cousin of his who is also in China. They went to the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the Chinese Embassy and to the media. There was no hope from anywhere.

Inayatullah worked for the Chinese on a construction project on the Karakoram Highway in Abbottabad. When he went on leave to come home this summer, he was upset about his father but nothing about him suggested suicidal tendencies.

There was a spike in suicides between 2000 and 2003, says Israruddin Israr who works for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in Gilgit. A research conducted by Aziz Ahmed, Sultan Rahim Barcha and Murad M Khan in 2009 speaks of a similar trend. Their paper, Female suicide rates in Ghizer, says that 49 women committed suicide in Ghizer district between 2000 and 2004. The numbers increased in 2010 and reached alarming proportions in 2017 when 12 to 15 suicides were reported in Ghizer in the month of May alone.

“Where most cases are concentrated in Ghizer, other areas like Gilgit, Gojal, Baltistan and Diamer follow closely,” says Israr.

But contrary to the popular perception that suicides in Gilgit-Baltistan started in the 2000s, Samina Sher and Humera Dinar of the department of anthropology at the Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi, claim in a research paper that it is a much older phenomenon. They quote a newspaper, the Ghizer Times, as saying that 300 cases of suicide were registered in different police stations of Ghizer district between 1996 and 2010.

Several research reports show that suicide trends in Chitral are identical to those in Gilgit-Baltistan. They are highest among students aged 13-20, followed by married women who have had bad relationships with in-laws.

A 2016 study, Trends and Patterns of Suicide in People of Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan conducted by Zafar Ahmed and his associates and published in the Khyber Medical University Journal, said suicide was common among individuals aged 20-24 in the district. In just three days — between 7 and 10 August in 2018, seven people committed suicide in Chitral; five of them were students unhappy over their result in the secondary school certificate exam. In the first four months of 2018, the district had 22 reported cases of suicide — 5.5 cases per month on average.

Even earlier, the situation was bad. Chitral’s District Police Officer Mansoor Aman says there were 64 suicides in Chitral city between 2012 and 2017. The number of murder cases for the same period was 36. “The district’s population is 450,000 — the size of an area under the jurisdiction of one police station in Lahore. For a population of this size, it is an alarming trend.”

In the picturesque town of Buni, headquarters of upper Chitral district, a police officer says there is no other crime there but suicides. Two nephews of Bibi Ara, a nurse in the district hospital of Buni, both brothers, have committed suicide. The elder was 25. The younger was a fourth year medicine student at the Aga Khan University in Karachi where he killed himself.

People’s understanding of the crisis remains superficial though. Their explanation of something as inexplicable, and complicated, as suicide borders on the resigned and the casual.

Both Aziz Ali Dad, a Gilgit-based sociologist and commentator, and Israr, who take personal and academic interest in the issue, say the research on suicides has failed to look below the surface. Given the co*cktail of causes, they emphasise the need for qualitative, inter-disciplinary research led by experts who will ensure an ethnographic approach to understand and address the issue.

Samina Sher and Humera Dinar, in their research paper, titled Ethnography of Suicide: A Tale of Female Suicides in Ghizer and published in The Explorer Islamabad: Journal of Social Sciences in 2015, cite various reasons for suicides among women. They note that marital and family relations, divorce, depression, disempowerment in decision-making, lack of freedom, academics, mental illness and demand for male child – in that order – are the reasons why women in Gilgit-Baltistan are killing themselves.

Women also get depressed from long winters when they are confined to their homes. Drug addiction is another silent killer. Iskhoman, for instance, has an opium problem, as does Ghizer. Men take drugs and sell lands to feed the habit. When they cannot look after their families, they commit suicide.

There are as many reasons as there are suicides.

II

To commit suicide, from Gilgit to vanish,

Is preferable by far to this life we lead. —Jan Ali, Shina poet

Raja Sher Jahan initially comes across as an opinionated person. A government official, he speaks with the vehemence of someone who knows what ails the mountain communities. In Islam, he says, suicide is haram (forbidden). “But when it happens, parents and families create circ*mstances that make it appear halal (kosher).”

As Muslims, he says, mothers and fathers should condemn the suicides of their children. “There should be no funeral for a person who has committed suicide, no matter what his or her sect — Ismaili, Sunni, Shia or Noor Bakhshi,” he says referring to the members of four Islamic sects living in Gilgit-Baltistan.

On the other hand, says Jahan, whenever there is a suicide, people converge on the house of the dead person due to close social networking. “Instead of grief, it becomes a celebration. This could develop a psychology of suicide among impressionable children who see this all around them.”

In Gilgit, Dr Aziz Ali Dinar, a member of the Ismaili Tariqah and Religious Education Board, voices a similar concern: “In the last two years, whenever a suicide occurs, it sets off a chain of occurrences in a family, a tribe, a village and a community, no matter what the sect of local residents. It is like a madness that is contagious.”

Could it be that something in the structure and culture of the community acts as a catalyst for suicide?

Since most suicides happen among local Ismailis, the common perception – albeit biased in a society deeply divided along sectarian lines – is that the members of the sect have moved away from religion. This, many people argue, has led to a spiritual void among Ismailis. Suicide is just a manifestation of that.

Ismailis are liberal, yes, but they are also more tightly-knit than the members of other sects here. Their jamaat khana – the house of the community – is more than a place of worship; it is at the heart of community affairs, a locus for strengthening identity and facilitating intellectual and social development of its associates. Durkheim, the French sociologist, viewed such religious affinity as a source for social cohesion that would decrease the likelihood of suicide.

Then there are projects run by the Aga Khan Development Network, an Ismaili organisation, in education, healthcare, agriculture and disaster management — seen inside and outside Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral as community development models fit to emulate. These have also played a role in raising awareness about the need for social integration among local residents.

Still, many people often blame the very work of the Aga Khan Development Network as a major reason for suicides. Its projects have brought about a social change without ensuring corresponding opportunity for self-realisation, goes the argument.

Others say this is an unfair argument. In a region where the state has had little interest in socio-economic development – except in projects linked to the recently launched China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – could one blame a humanitarian organisation for filling the gap?

People in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral often talk about how their regions were long kept in isolation by state apathy, distances and geography. Valleys like Ghizer and those further up north were long cut-off from even Gilgit city, leave alone the rest of Pakistan.

This changed with the recent lifting of the curtain through extensive telecom coverage, proliferation of media and the awareness it brings with it and, of course, education and the exposure to other parts of Pakistan it afforded to local residents.

Northern Pakistan saw a lot of development activity during General Pervez Musharraf’s regime. He was dazzled by the Northern Light Infantry’s impressive show in the Kargil operation in 1999 and grew close to the region where mountain men have served gallantly in armies, including that of the British whose annals speak highly of their soldierly heroics. In post-9/11 Pakistan, when Musharraf grew increasingly paranoid about his safety, he inducted men from the Northern Light Infantry in his security corps.

A bridge over the Ghizer River, a modern landmark, is part of a road network that Musharraf built. He also started work on the Lowari Tunnel, the lifeline of Chitral, in 2005 to connect the remote district to mainland Pakistan. This helped him win over hearts and minds. His party, the All Pakistan Muslim League, won a National Assembly seat from Chitral in the 2013 elections, the only one it could secure in the entire country.

The physical communication infrastructure, along with access to information technologies, opened up Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral to globalisation, to modernity and to market forces that celebrate individualism and competition. The insulated tribal mountain communities built on collectivism and mutual support have been unable to cope with these developments. “Obviously change happens fast when there is education and a communications revolution,” says Dinar. “People here were not ready for that.”

Local residents earlier knew everyone in their own village and those in the next; absence of roads and bridges required them to stop and spend time in places that fell on the way in their travels. Now highways have people bypassing villages. Sociocultural bonds are coming unstuck with this.

But even before the 2000s, there were at least two major waves of change that transformed the sociocultural dynamics of northern Pakistan. The First Wave came in 1947, when Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral became part of Pakistan.

“Before 1947, the region had its own languages that shaped the local cultural idiom. Those languages were formed in isolation from the rest of the world,” says Farman Ali, an Islamabad-based politician from Hunza. “With independence came Urdu. Since it was the official language of Pakistan, you could not conduct business with the rest of Pakistan without communicating in it. This put local languages such as a Burushaski, Balti, Shina, Khuwar and Wakhi out of currency and then stunted their growth.”

In Gilgit-Baltistan’s and Chitral’s oral culture, these were not just languages, they formed what Dad calls the “cultural vocabulary” of these regions.

Since these languages are not taught in schools locally and they do not have standardised scripts in which they can be written and transferred to the next generations, a common cultural vocabulary that informed people’s world view and their understanding of life and nature was lost, says Karim Madad, an Urdu instructor at a government college in Ghizer. Consequently, a sociocultural transformation or fragmentation – depending on how one looks at it – set in, creating a split in the region’s character and psyche.

Also, according to Farman Ali, Gilgit city was a common market for people from Hunza, Chitral, Kashmir, Xinjiang, Afghanistan and Central Asia before 1947. “The mountain milieu was enriched by travelers and stories of the Silk Road that contributed to its culture,” he says. After Pakistan came into being, Gilgit-Baltistan became a strategic region due to its location at the confluence of India, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan and was, therefore, closed to the very influences that had created its culture.

“The indigenous sources of self in Gilgit-Baltistan have dried up and the individual is invested with ideas and a cultural vocabulary that do not help him or her make sense of self,” Dad once wrote in the English daily, The News. “Such is the situation that the new generation of Gilgit-Baltistan can easily explain the psychology of African hyenas, but are oblivious to the social dynamics in their own hamlets or neighbourhoods.”

Even when palpable inside, the sociocultural change under the First Wave was still invisible to outsiders. The so-called “Northern Areas” were made exotic by their remoteness from and unfamiliarity to the rest of the country except in the context of tourism, mountaineering and, yes, dry fruits. They were only integrated into the administrative structure of Pakistan in the 1970s. Even after that, Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral were administered for a long time under a black British-era law, the Frontier Crimes Regulation, which they shared with large parts of Balochistan and the tribal areas on the Pak-Afghan border.

These political changes still did not change the local economy much. Before the 1980s, people in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral lived off the land. The relatively educated among them opted for government service. Along came the Second Wave.

In 1984, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme came to the region. It brought along with it a culture specific to NGOs. “Fresh graduates were paid high salaries and material acquisitions became status symbols. With it came competition and corruption because government officials, earlier content with their earnings, started aspiring to a high life,” says Farman Ali. “This culture … created a socio-economic dissonance.”

This is when the youth first started committing suicide after they could not get what they aspired to, he says.

But why the young? Because even back then the youth were educated, courtesy of the schools opened by various organisations linked to Aga Khan, the head of the (Nizari) Ismaili community.

The first school was opened in Gilgit-Baltistan in 1905, says Sharafat Ali, the Ghizer-based social activist. Soon after independence, Aga Khan Diamond Jubilee schools were built in the region. Initially they were all boys’ schools. In the late 1980s, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme set up two academies for girls in two Ismaili-dominated areas, Gizher and Hunza.

The Aga Khan Education Service now runs 107 schools in Gilgit-Baltistan and 58 in Chitral. In addition, there are five Aga Khan higher secondary schools and more than 50 community schools in the two regions.

These institutions have revolutionised education, having increased literacy rates by leaps and bounds. The 2015 Annual Status of Education Report, generated by a civil society initiative, says 85 per cent of all children in Gilgit-Baltistan are enrolled in schools as compared to the national average of 81 percent. Education rankings for 2017 prepared by a foreign-supported advocacy and research project, Alif Ailaan, placed Gilgit at 36, Ghizer at 41 and Chitral at 46 out of 141 districts in the whole of Pakistan.

Where these educational developments have truly left a mark is female education — save in the Sunni-dominated Daimer district. In Ghizer, female enrollment rate is as high as 98. As remarkable as this leap has been, it uprooted students from their cultural context.

In the 1990s, says Farman Ali, schools introduced a westernised education system — with well-trained teachers and English as the medium of instruction. Girls and boys from villages suddenly had access to education that gave them a modern outlook on life and the world even though the places they lived were still tribal, pastoral and patriarchal.

Emphasis on education and academic excellence has also led to intense competition to excel in exams in order to enter higher education institutions. Come exams or results and many children choose death rather than to countenance failure — hence the high rate of student suicides.

While the young are dying of suicide, the old die of salt. Consumption of salty tea is causing heart attacks among people aged between 50 and 65, resulting in a big death toll, says Abdul Rashid, a resident of Passu town in Hunza. Sodium chloride, then, is perhaps a bigger killer.

Suicide? It is only a symptom of a bigger malaise.

The crowd at an Iftar party is almost entirely young. There is still time before the fast is broken so guests sit in chairs laid out at the pavilion of an open air restaurant in Gilgit city. The venue commands a view of the Gilgit River as well as of a road that leads to the Karakoram International University – the only one in Gilgit-Baltistan – set up in 2002 under Musharraf’s rule. The river during twilight looks like a living entity, its shiny water rippling and eddying around in thick waves.

In the restaurant’s courtyard, young men mill around, ushering in guests towards Nawaz Khan Naji who stands up to receive them. He is a member of the Gilgit-Baltistan Legislative Assembly from Ghizer but he is less of an elected politician this evening and more of a veteran rebel.

Naji and his friends formed the Balawaristan National Front in 1992, seeking autonomy for Gilgit-Baltistan. They claimed the state of Pakistan was attempting to alter the demographic profile of the region, reducing the indigenous people to a minority.

Among the guests at the party is a young man who works with a private telecom firm after having received a master’s degree in business administration from the Dadabhoy Institute of Higher Education in Karachi. He returned to Gilgit in 2014 and has been applying for a government job since then. “The private sector here is zero,” he says, “so everybody competes for government jobs.”

If there are three vacancies, he says, 5,000 candidates turn up. “Many students from Gilgit-Baltistan who studied with me are still jobless which is why many students here commit suicide.”

Whatever government jobs are there, claims Naji, they go to people on sectarian basis, not on merit. He then offers a political perspective on suicides: if you do not get what you want, if you have no power over the system, you either kill yourself or become a rebel.

A lawyer based in Gilgit-Baltistan advances a similar argument when he says that questions about the status and identity of Gilgit-Baltistan within Pakistan are, indeed, the source of many factors that act as catalysts for suicides and nihilistic tendencies among local people. Like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), he says, Gilgit-Baltistan is in the stranglehold of forces of coercion, at work to disempower the region’s residents. “Our problem is not suicide but the environment which forces it. It is lack of social security, it is lack of governance and it is our status which has put our region and our youth at a disadvantage,” he argues.

In recent years, Gilgit-Baltistan has seen arrests, torture, harassment and use of blasphemy as a tool to silence human rights activists. An Awami Workers Party member, Baba Jan, is in jail for life for demanding rights for the people displaced by a 2010 landslide in Attabad. In July 2018, the region’s government added several dozen activists, political workers and religious leaders to a terrorism watch list.

The state’s paranoia and the people’s disaffection in Gilgit-Baltistan evoke Balochistan, Swat and Fata when these regions were facing their worst troubles. It is best described in the words of Shina poet Jan Ali who says: Speak not loud, beware the time; it spies on you.

That evening at the Gilgit restaurant, another poet stood up as the Iftar came to an end. He did not recite a verse of his own. Instead, he chose to read Faiz Ahmad Faiz: We shall witness/ Certainly we, too, shall witness/ That day that has been promised/ When these high mountains of tyranny and oppression/ Turn to fluff and evaporate.

Even when people’s pursuit of education both in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral borders on the religious, the society itself remains beholden to its traditions. According to Farman Ali, in districts where both men and women are going to universities in large numbers, social attitudes are as backward as they are in any other conservative part of the country. “Men do not look kindly upon women [being] in public view,” he says. “We are liberal in terms of education but as rigid as the people in Diamer when it comes to patriarchal attitudes.”

Chitral is even more split between tradition and modernity since it is also influenced by Pashtun mores of Khyber Pakhtunkwa of which it is a part. It has seen migration from Mohmand and Bajaur tribal agencies in recent years that has brought with it rigid sociocultural attitudes, especially towards women.

In a society that embraces material modernity and its requisites like education but shuns the intellectual progress and individualism they bring, a cognitive dissonance is only a logical outcome. Dad puts it evocatively when he says, “we release minds but we don’t celebrate them”.

The local community’s ambivalence towards modernity, he says, “has created a schizophrenic, paranoid culture that does not allow the individual to emerge even when exposed to international standards of education and knowledge technologies”. The individual, in his point of view, “is fighting a lonely fight” in the presence of a communication rupture between the younger and older generations “that has resulted in the breakdown of traditional social contract”.

In his interaction with the youth, says Dad, he has observed existential angst and anger towards elders who try to control them.

A broken social contract has created new fault lines in communities that were once arranged along caste lines — the Shin are spiritually pure rulers, the Yashkin are landowners, the Kamin are lowly artisans and the Dom minstrels. Ambitious young people now want jobs not meant for their caste group. They aspire to marriages in castes above them. When denied by elders beholden to tradition, they find themselves thwarted.

When, for instance, a young person falls in love with someone from another community, neither religion nor society approve of it. “If the boy commits suicide, the girl follows or vice versa,” says Faizi, the college principal in Chitral.

The communities are now also divided along material lines, between haves and have-nots. Whereas needs of the poor were taken care of in the traditional system – for instance, Nasalo fed the less privileged also – the poor now find themselves without a support system that could feed, dress and shelter them.

When the people of Gilgit-Baltistan or Chitral speak of challenges emerging from modernity and development, they could just as well be speaking of a state hanging on to a status quo that is untenable in the face of change. When Dad mentions empathy and Jahan stresses the need for love, they could be talking about the state – a guardian to the people – having gone callous.

“The government is the mother but its milk does not trickle down here,” says Jahan.

The Sunni residents of Diamer could not be more different from Gilgit-Baltistan’s dominant Shia population. The district is home to banned sectarian outfits that the Balawaristan National Front claims were settled in the region by the state – first for Afghan jihad under General Ziaul Haq when Gilgit-Baltistan first saw sectarian violence that resulted in the killing of 400 Shias; and later under Musharraf when Gilgit-Baltistan, like Fata, became home to militant outfits that locals claim were engaged in militancy in both Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Sectarian violence rose again in 2012 when more than 60 Shia travellers were killed by militants near Chilas, the headquarters of Diamer district. Shia groups retaliated with violence in Gilgit town and suburbs, raising the spectre of the 1980s.

In recent weeks, many girl schools have been burnt down in Diamer where female literacy rate is as low as two per cent. The district’s male literacy rate, at 40 per cent, is also the lowest in Gilgit-Baltistan.

This could be due to a dialectical relationship between sectarian identities and social and economic changes. When one sect adopts a modern outlook, the other, as a reaction, shuns it as an attribute of the ‘other’. In Gilgit, says a Sunni resident, banned militant outfits exhort local Sunnis against sending their children to schools run by Aga Khan-led organisations. “As a result, if there are 420 students in a school, only 20 of them would be Sunnis.”

The Ismaili community also focuses on inculcating a collective spirit and voluntarism among the young. “They train their children to be boy scouts with a community spirit while we train our children to spew hatred. This could only lead to a society that breeds suicides,” he says.

Ironically, the ideas of collective good and selfless service to the community clash with the very notions of individualism and competition that come hand in hand with modern education and development. Young Ismailis, as result, find themselves torn within.

Mir Waz, a Ghizer-based social worker, points to another associated effect of the voluntary spirit that drives its strength from the notion that the world is as good or bad as one turns it to be with one’s efforts or lack thereof. “When [Ismaili children] grow up, they realise that the world is far from being good; they find it rather hostile,” he says.

Angst, thus, takes root among them.

They, though, direct it towards themselves rather than at the society because those imbued with a strong sense of community cannot bring themselves to commit murder. “That would be a crime against society for a child brought up with loving care for the world,” says Waz.

Then there is the state.

At the Iftar in Gilgit, a Sunni student leader from Diamer speaks of the “top-down alienation” of the youth in Gilgit-Baltistan. “Ismailis work hard and get educated but the system does not want them to excel. They doggedly pursue role models like Bill Gates but eventually it is the system that crushes them. It does not allow them to become Bill Gates,” he says.

In Dad’s words, education brings awareness and consciousness about political and fundamental rights and when these rights are suppressed, anger seethes within the young. “Right now the anger is internalised, manifesting itself in suicide. If externalised, it could lead to homicidal behaviour,” he warns.

As exogenous causes for suicide, all these arguments makes sense. Together with other endogenous conditions, these lead to stress and mental health issues – ignored not just in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral but also in the rest of Pakistan – such as depression which can lead to suicide.

“Problems related to academics, religion, identity, domestic issues, etc, result in uncertainty about how to deal with life,” says Dr Sadiq Hussain, who heads the department of behavioural sciences at the Karakoram International University. “This is where suicide comes in as a pathological mechanism to cope with troubles of everyday life.”

Why people in Gilgit-Baltistan are increasingly choosing this “pathological coping mechanism”, he says, is because the social environment is vitiated by pressures from multiple quarters.

When several suicides happened in Ghizer in May last year, the government in Gilgit-Baltistan was compelled to take notice. Rani Atika, a woman representative in the region’s assembly, moved a resolution and a committee was formed, with Naji as one of its members. Workshops and group discussions were held; seminars were organised; academics and experts were invited to present their theses and highlight reasons for the surge in suicide cases. Recommendations were made to tackle the crisis.

Dr Mohammad Iqbal, minister for law back when the committee was established, speaks of the measures to “motivate youth towards life” through awareness campaigns involving district administration, religious institutions, civil society and academia. These have not been regularly held though, he concedes.

In the long term, the government plans to set up a psychiatry hospital, induct psychiatrists and psychologists in the local healthcare system, build a shelter for women, create economic opportunities and nurture conditions for employment and empowerment of women.

Rani is not happy with the way the government is handling the problem. “The recommendations I gave have not been implemented or have been implemented half-heartedly. Suicide is a social issue and we need to work with society and its institutions like media, NGOs and communities to create awareness about it,” she says.

One good thing that came out of the recommendations is that Gilgit-Baltistan Chief Minister Hafeezur Rehman has announced that an autopsy would be mandatory in every suicide case to establish that it was not a murder.

This directive will take some time before it is implemented in both letter and spirit.

“The police, being a part of the community, hush up cases before they reach the court,” says Mumtaz Ahmad, a district and sessions judge in Hunza. “The family, the community and the police kill cases at the level of local investigation. We only come to know about them through local newspapers or social media,” he says, making an extremely troubling claim that only two per cent of the reported deaths are suicides; the rest are all murders.

From Chitral to Ghizer and Hunza, this collusion of the criminal investigation system with the community obfuscates an understanding of suicides. It also lets murderers get away with impunity, taking advantage of the “blanket of suicide”, as Ahmad puts it.

Sometimes there is no news for days and weeks of girls who fling themselves into the rivers. For their families, they just go missing. The boys do not go missing because they opt for rope or a gun to kill themselves.

As the river flows through valleys and villages, someone downstream will find the body of the drowned girl sooner or later. They pull her out, wrap her in cloth and go around asking if a woman or a girl from someone’s family has gone missing. It is done quietly, no-questions-asked. The finders know it happens all the time and it can happen to them as well. Just as they would not want it brought out in the open, so do others. Once a dead body reaches its home, it is buried quietly, without informing the police, without an autopsy.

From Yasin in Ghizer to Hunjgool in Chitral and Gojal in Hunza, the villagers live by this law of silence because they are of the same culture, the same stock, tied in ethnic and blood bonds. The geography favours this silence. Distances are big, villages remote. The police often do not get to know about a death before the dead person is already buried.

Yet, one often hears in conversations with local social activists that suicides could be masks for murders. Israr, from HRCP, for instance, points out that a suicide is not always the reason for the sudden and unnatural death of a woman. “Of the total suicide cases reported in Ghizer, 10 to 15 per cent are honour killings,” he claims.

Drug trade and inter-agency rivalry are two other factors that lead to killings that are then concealed as suicides.

Both Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan are located on major drug routes due to their proximity to China, Afghanistan, Central Asia and India. With little prospects of employment for youth, some of them easily fall prey to drug traffickers. “The youth take drug consignments and are killed when caught or when deals go wrong. Their families show these as suicides,” says Farman Ali.

Rival intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan, according to him, are also active in Gilgit-Baltistan. “They employ youth as informers and eliminate them when not needed anymore.” These, too, are later portrayed as suicides.

Durdana Sher, a Ghizer-based reporter, who is lauded for frequently reporting on the issue, also believes many cases are murders covered as suicides. “Ask the police how many postmortem reports have been prepared, how many cases identified for what they are – murder or suicide – and how many killers punished,” he says.

People also widely believe that the reported cases of suicide – or honour killing or murder – are just the tip of the iceberg, made visible by an active media in, say, Ghizer. This is not the case in Hunza where the media is not so active. So, there is a lot that goes unreported.

Local media, in fact, is under pressure from local communities not to report in many places. That is the sense one gets while talking to local journalists who seem to share with their community the perception that reporting suicides brings disgrace to Gilgit-Baltistan. Others who have reported doggedly on the issue now feel defeated. “I have been reporting on suicides since 1995. Now I am blamed for bringing a bad name to the district,” says Durdana Sher.

He also points out that local authorities lack the expertise, tools and resources to investigate reported suicides properly. Doctors at the district hospital in Ghizer examine the dead but they have to send out the viscera to forensic facilities in Lahore and Peshawar for a detailed report.

A single postmortem costs about 50,000 rupees which the police usually do not have, says Durdana Sher. “The police do not even have proper containers to send the viscera for postmortem.”

And so bodies are emptied out in plastic bags. They are sent out over long distances without proper cooling. They go bad; they are perhaps examined, perhaps reported on, perhaps thrown into the incinerator or a garbage dump.

“Postmortem reports do not come in for as long as a year by which time the case is dead given local attitudes to suicide,” he says.

“In the absence of a report, who can establish what the cause of death was.”

This article was published in the Herald's September 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The 2018 elections have changed Pakistan’s political landscape and power structure from what they were till less than three months ago. Those in the government till recently are now gearing up for agitation and those who have been protesting since 2013 are now preparing themselves to take over the government.

All the losing parties are crying foul and some of them are calling for the election results to be countermanded. This is unlikely to happen. Nor would democratic opinion wish the confrontation on the electoral process to continue for long. The ground reality is that a regime change has taken effect. By the time these lines appear in print, Imran Khan should be getting ready to take oath as Pakistan’s new prime minister.

His victory speech, widely described as splendid rhetoric, has already won him considerable goodwill at home and abroad. He said many things that people, especially the poor and all those who feel strongly about corruption and extravagance by public representatives, wanted to hear. One of the main things missing was that the captain of the victorious team forgot to pay customary tribute to the losing side for putting up a good fight.

Going back to the election results, the final tally proved most political pundits wrong as Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) won more seats in the National Assembly than its main rival, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN), did. Even in the Punjab Assembly, the former party fell only a few seats short of the latter. PTI also suffered no incumbency disadvantage in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and surprised everybody by bagging more seats in Karachi – both for the National Assembly and the Sindh Assembly – than the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQMP) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) put together.

PMLN won fewer seats in the National Assembly as well as in the Punjab Assembly than most observers had predicted. These observers perhaps could not fully assess the pro-PTI environment created prior to the polls and the impact of Imran Khan’s aggressive campaigning.

Still the credit due to PMLN for its plucky fight should not be held back. It entered the electoral arena with its hands and feet tied – though the fact that it was on the rack matters less than its actual electoral position – and yet it raced neck and neck against the odds-on favourite. In the end, it got seats in the National Assembly commensurate with its share of the popular vote — winning 23.7 per cent of all the contested seats with 23 per cent of polled votes. Compared to this PTI won 43 per cent share of the National Assembly seats with a 31 per cent share of polled votes. This is likely to revive the on and off debate on the shortcomings of our first-past-the-post electoral system.

Much noise had been made about the importance of ‘electable’ candidates in the run-up to the election but all assessments in this regard were largely proved wrong. The candidates acquired by PTI from other parties on the assumption of their electability generally failed to do well.

Many of them – including former Punjab governor Sardar Zulfiqar Ali Khan Khosa and former PPP bigwigs Nadeem Afzal Gondal, Nazar Muhammad Gondal and Firdous Ashiq Awan – could not win their seats. Quite a few PTI candidates who were given party tickets on the basis of their electability lost to the party’s own supporters who had been denied election nominations.

Some of the heavyweights (such as former interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Prince Abbas Khan Abbasi, a descendant of the Nawab of Bahawalpur), who considered themselves unbeatable on the strength of their personal standing, entered the fray as independent candidates and fared badly. This strengthens the impression that political parties in this election have mattered more – just as they have done in the past – than individual candidates. This can be considered a good omen for a transition to democracy though the way political parties have frittered away such advantages in the past dampens such optimism.

What does not look good is that the competition between political parties and candidates for citizens’ votes often degenerated into hateful encounters and permanent-looking divisions in society. Instead of winners shaking hands with losers and the latter congratulating the former, the competing camps have passed on the baggage of mutual hatred and enmity to their supporters in the larger communities. This is closer to the tradition of vulgar feudal feuds than to a decent democratic competition.

The result is incidents like the arrest of two young men in Bannu for allegedly shooting a dog after draping it in the flag of a party that they opposed. The harm that such perpetuation of electoral enmities causes to politics, public administration and cultural life is truly enormous. All parties have a duty to develop a culture of respect for their opponents.

There were signs of genuine public participation in polling in Balochistan in terms of the voter turnout after several general elections. In the National Assembly constituency that spans over the districts of Lasbela and Gwadar, the winner and the runner-up both polled more than 60,000 votes which is a record for Balochistan. The voter turnout in this constituency was more than 56 per cent, around four percentage points above the national figure.

A new political entity, the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP), created after the Senate election earlier this year, did well and emerged as the largest single group in the provincial assembly though it did not do equally well in the elections to the National Assembly. And Shahzain Bugti, who won a National Assembly seat from his ancestral Dera Bugti district, was given to believe that his claim to be the political heir to his slain grandfather Nawab Akbar Bugti could be accepted. One would have felt happier if some understanding with the dissident Baloch nationalists had also been reached.

The other major positive development was that election candidates included a large number of women who contested general, rather than reserved, seats for both the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies. This could be due to the legal requirement that made it compulsory for all political parties to grant at least five per cent of their election nominations for general seats to women. Some of these candidates had contested elections earlier as well but they were outnumbered by those who ran for the first time.

Out of all these, eight have become members of the National Assembly (four from Sindh, three from Punjab and one from Balochistan). Nine others have won provincial assembly seats. This is an improvement upon the 2013 figures (when only six women won seats in any of the five directly elected legislative forums) and slightly better than the 2008 number (when women secured 16 general seats) and 2002 results (when they won 13 general seats).

The growing acceptance of women as people’s representatives on general seats ought to be welcomed as a progress towards the deepening and strengthening of democratic norms. That a majority of the women candidates belonged to politically known and influential families does not matter. If the transition to democracy continues unhindered, women from the lower rungs of society might also start winning seats in the legislatures.

There was some good news for members of minority communities too. Dr Mahesh Malani became the first Pakistani Hindu, after 1970, to be elected to the National Assembly from a general seat. He had been elected to the Sindh Assembly from a general seat in 2013 and had won recognition as a conscientious and diligent legislator. Two other Pakistani Hindus – one from Jamshoro district and the other from Mirpurkhas district – also won seats in the Sindh assembly from constituencies that have large Muslim majorities.

The credit for consolidating the system of joint electorate and secular politics through this small but significant development can be claimed by PPP. The party has also enabled the first Pakistani woman of African descent to enter the provincial assembly of Sindh by nominating her on a reserved seat. Similarly, PTI deserves credit for getting a member of the Kalash community, Wazir Zada, into the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly by including him in its list of nominees for the seats earmarked for minority communities.

Also welcome was the ability of the Hazaras of Quetta to maintain their presence in the Balochistan Assembly. One of the beleaguered community’s own political entities, the Hazara Democratic Party, has won two seats in the house (though the winner of one of these seats has been barred from taking oath as a legislator unless he can prove that he is a bona fide Pakistani citizen and not an Afghan refugee).

The defeat of many political stalwarts in the election needs to be pondered over. The media has only sensationalised their ouster from Parliament but there are other aspects of their failure to make it to the assemblies which should not be ignored.

The absence of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) chief Mehmood Khan Achakzai, the head of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUIF) Maulana Fazlur Rahman and top Awami National Party (ANP) leaders such as Asfandyar Wali Khan and Ghulam Ahmed Bilour will make the Parliament poorer as far the quality of its debates and legislative battles among its members are concerned. One would have included Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) emir Sirajul Haq in this list as well but he has retained his seat in the Senate so he can have his say there.

The case of Mehmood Khan Achakzai and Fazlur Rahman deserves special notice as they – the former more than the latter – are known for defending the supremacy of Parliament and for presenting a democratic perspective on the crucial issue of imbalance in civil-military relations. If they have been punished by the voters – or by someone else – for espousing such views, Pakistan is the loser.

The religious-political parties that had banded themselves together under the banner of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) suffered a loss of face as they got one less National Assembly seat than they had won separately in 2013 when JUIF had secured 10 seats and JI had won three. They were not able to pose any challenge to PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It is possible that they did not have the external support they had in the 2002 elections when General Pervez Musharraf was working out his thesis on the unity of command in the electoral arena.

It is also possible that this time it was deemed necessary to test the strength of some new religious groups.One of them, the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, that emerged in 2017 and staged a successful blockade of Islamabad the same year, has reason to be happy with its showing in the 2018 elections. It won two provincial assembly seats in Sindh – both from Karachi – and polled more than 1.8 million votes in Punjab and around 400,000 votes in Sindh.

The containment of parties in MMA, the free run allowed to the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and the permission granted to members of banned sectarian and militant outfits to contest the polls by adopting a registered party as the vehicle for satisfying their electoral ambitions could have serious repercussions for the polity. Moderate voters supporting the MMA’s constituent parties could come under pressure to join outfits like the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan or other new and more militant organisations. One wonders whether such a development will be in the interest of a democratic consolidation in the country.

Significant changes have taken place in Sindh’s political landscape if one were to take the election results at their face value. PPP managed to beat off the challenge from the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) in the province’s interior and it increased its share of the National Assembly seats from Karachi — from one in 2013 to three in 2018. Yet it could not prevent PTI from recording extraordinarily high gains in Karachi. PPP will run into greater troubles if it fails to read the winds of change properly. For the time being, it will retain its hold on the provincial government in Sindh but PTI, that has the second largest number of provincial assembly seats, will be a formidable opposition and more so if it also takes GDA under its wings.

A change in the strategy of Sindhi nationalist and other ethno-political groups in Sindh cannot be ruled out. Instead of challenging PPP with their own strength within the province, they could seek the patronage of the new PTI-led political elite in Punjab that will not only be in power at the federal level but also seems to be in the good books of the establishment. PTI has already thrown a bait to MQMP (the party it has dethroned in Karachi) — and MQMP seems keen to bite that bait. With its slim majority in the Sindh Assembly, PPP may have to face tough competition from an opposition alliance of around 45 members.

If, with federal support, PTI can satisfy even a fraction of the yearning among Karachi’s citizens for relief from mismanagement and corruption, its challenge to PPP all over Sindh could increase enormously and PPP might find itself in serious trouble during the next general election. An additional worry for the party will be the accountability drive against its top leadership that has already gained renewed momentum. One cannot say how it will fare under pressure from such a drive.

Another party that is seriously threatened by PTI’s rise in Karachi is MQMP. Pakistan’s largest and only post-feudal city has embraced PTI in a big way as its representative, electing its nominees to 14 of its 21 National Assembly seats and 21 of its 44 provincial assembly seats. This could mean the beginning of the end of muhajir politics as conducted since MQM was founded under the patronage of General Ziaul Haq’s military dictatorship.

MQMP has certainly paid a price for the immaturity shown by the leaders of its warring factions and there may be some truth in their complaints of interference in election by unmentionable elements, but its leadership will do well not to attribute its stunning defeat to these two factors alone. It must carry out a realistic appraisal of its political strategies, especially its reliance on the stagnant politics of narrow ethnic identity and on securing the Urdu-speaking community’s following allegedly through fear, intimidation and violence. If MQMP cannot evolve a new and democratic thesis and persuasive methods of winning friends, it should be prepared for even harder tribulations.

Another challenge for both PPP and MQMP comes from the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan which, quite obviously, has found support among Karachi’s lower and middle classes whose amenability to populism in religious rhetoric is well-known. The party’s ability to challenge the city’s other political stakeholders is likely to grow with the passage of time.

No discussion on a general election can be complete without an assessment of the performance of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).The conduct of the 2018 election leaves a lot to be desired on this count.

The election was conducted under a new law, the Elections Act of 2017, which was formulated on the basis of recommendations by a large parliamentary committee set up in 2014 with the express objective of suggesting much needed reforms in the election system. Leaving aside controversies over the long time taken to draft the law, more attention was paid after its passage to the agitation by religious parties over changes in some mandatory declarations by election candidates than to the many not-so-good features of the new law or any of its significant omissions.

But the fact is that the new law gave election commission more powers to conduct elections than it ever had. For instance, it acquired powers to annul the polls in any constituency if the number of votes cast by women voters there fell below 10 per cent of the registered women voters. The commission was also empowered to regulate election expenses and ensure that women and members of minority communities were fully enrolled as voters and represented as candidates. (The law, however, did not extend the benefit of joint electorate to the members of the Ahmadi community and that continues to detract from the state’s claims to be a genuine democracy.)

Even more significantly, the law gave election commission sweeping powers to regulate the working of political parties. These powers included the mandatory registration of political parties with the Election Commission of Pakistan in order to be eligible to contest elections — a condition that was struck down by courts in 1988.

Still it was a stupendous task even for an empowered election commission to hold elections for the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies simultaneously on a single day. The commission deserves credit for carrying out the technical part of the election exercise fairly well but some of its decisions did not satisfy democratic opinion.

Firstly, the Election Commission of Pakistan assigned unprecedented responsibilities to the military which was fair neither to the cause of a free and democratic election nor to the military itself. As is being alleged, it was not possible for election officials to ensure that the job of security forces was limited to just the maintenance of order during polling.

Secondly, election authorities failed to accord equal importance to all the political parties. As a large number of people were still waiting to cast their votes outside polling stations when voting hours ended, mainly because the vote casting process was manifestly slow, several parties pleaded for extension of polling time by one hour.

The only party that did not support this demand was PTI though those waiting in queues must have included its supporters too. Heavens would not have fallen if polling had been allowed to continue for another half an hour or so. A similar request by PTI for an extension in voting time by an hour, on the other hand, had been readily granted days before the polling.

In the Election Commission of Pakistan’s defence, it can be argued that the Elections Act, 2017 does not make very clear provisions as far as changes in polling hours are concerned. Since such questions may arise in the future too, it may be useful to refer to relevant provisions of the law.

Section 70 of the act deals with hours of the poll. It says: “The Commission shall fix the hours, which shall not be less than eight, during which the poll shall be held and the returning officer shall give public notice of the hours so fixed and hold the poll according to the hours fixed by the Commission.”

This section does not refer to the possibility of changing the polling hours after they have been fixed probably because the matter is covered by a proviso which says: “Provided that the Commission may extend polling hours in one or more polling stations in exceptional circ*mstances to be recorded in writing but such decisions shall be taken at least three hours before the close of the poll, enabling the returning officers to convey the decision of the Commission to all presiding officers under his jurisdiction well before the time already fixed for close of the poll.”

The flawed text of the proviso seems to be the cause of confusion as the need to extend polling time is usually felt during the last hour. Nobody can, in most cases, decide the matter three hours earlier than that. This flaw is especially glaring given that returning officers can now communicate with presiding officers by just pushing a single button on their mobile phones.

It should be possible to resolve the matter by appropriately amending Section 70 of the act.

The other, and frequently heard, complaint about polling was its slow pace. All poll observers have confirmed this. European Union observers have attributed the long time taken to cast a vote to the procedure introduced by the Election Commission of Pakistan. Sometimes the shortcomings of the staff borrowed from provincial government departments for polling day were to be blamed for the slow voting process. In any case, a proper probe will be in order.

There was only one entrance to five polling booths at the Fatima Jinnah Medical College in Lahore where I was able to cast my vote, thanks to a helpful presiding officer. Voters had to stand in lines for hours. The polling staff and polling agents were sitting cramped in small and inadequately lighted rooms. Some polling booths were reported to be without any fans — a major inconvenience for both the voters and the staff in stifling July heat. These matters could have been taken care of by wide awake assistant returning officers (usually taken from the provincial administration, educational institutions and banks, etc).

This brings us to the question of the quality of services rendered by the staff acquired for the election. Their assignment demanded proper motivation and some degree of commitment to democratic ideals. Those who thought they were being made to do forced labour or those who complained of inadequate reward or lack of regard were unlikely to be duly useful. The Election Commission of Pakistan will do well to streamline its training programmes for election staff and also by scouting for motivated and efficient talent outside its limited pool of government officials.

A greater confusion was caused by the failure of the result transmission system (RTS) than from the ineptness of polling staff. When results stopped getting routinely updated, even from the constituencies in major cities such as Lahore and Karachi, people suspected the worst. They did not understand why the results were being delayed in the presence of a sophisticated electronic system put in place for the direct transmission of vote counts from polling stations to the Election Commission of Pakistan’s headquarters in Islamabad.

This was perhaps the result of acquiring a software too delicate to be properly handled by semi-skilled hands available at both ends. No surprises there. In Pakistan, old hands often take more time composing their reports on computers than they used to take while writing them in long hand and most people supplied with computers use them only as typewriters. It should be possible to make RTS fully operational during the coming by-elections in order to test it thoroughly and remove the flaws in its working as well as its handling.

Another sticky problem on the hands of the Election Commission of Pakistan was the handling of political ambitions of those associated with banned religious and sectarian outfits. Many of them had taken refuge inside parties that were already registered. There were few restrictions on their attempts to highlight their association with banned groups as a means to attract voters. At least one television advertisem*nt stated candidates contesting elections under a particular symbol enjoyed the support of a banned group. It was only later that the reference to the banned entity was dropped in the advert.

The Election Commission of Pakistan considered itself bound to allow anyone holding a registered/enlisted party’s ticket to join the electoral contest. Maybe the law needs to be amended to deal with parties found involved in terrorist activities after they have been registered or enlisted but one would not like to press the point hard in view of a possible abuse ofthe law’s restrictive provisions.

Another issue that calls for urgent attention from both the government and the Election Commission of Pakistan relates to the high number of rejected votes. That in this election 1.67 million votes – more than three per cent of the total votes cast – were rejected and that in more than 30 constituencies the rejected votes exceeded the margin of victory is more serious a matter than a mere scandal. Obviously a much greater investment needs to be made in raising awareness among citizens about political and electoral subjects. Civil society organisations can offer meaningful help in this regard provided the state can shed its irrational hostility towards them.

Above all, the Election Commission of Pakistan can be an efficient and fair-minded institution only to the extent that Parliament can provide for through legislation. The need for Parliament and the public to go on improving the electoral framework is manifest.

This was perhaps the most expensive election in Pakistan’s history, mainly due to an excessive use of television for publicity campaigns by political parties. The Election Commission of Pakistan says it has taken note of the high-cost television advertisem*nts and these were being monitored during the election but there is little that it can do beyond that.

The Elections Act, 2017 provides that a National Assembly candidate cannot spend more than four million rupees on canvassing voters. The expense limit for a provincial assembly candidate is two million rupees. Most of the candidates, however, spent way more than these amounts and sometimes out of sheer necessity. For instance, polling staff refused to entertain voters unless they brought a slip carrying their vote number and other identification details. These slips were available at the camps run by various candidates and often the expense on setting up these camps alone could have approached the expense limits imposed by the law.

To reduce election expenses so that people of modest means could also join the electoral race, the Supreme Court of Pakistan had issued a verdict in June 2012 on a petition filed by Abid Hassan Minto. The verdict had restricted candidates to use only a specially opened bank account for making all election-related expenses. The amount of money spent through this account could not exceed the relevant expense limit given in the law.

In theory, this restriction allows the Election Commission of Pakistan to monitor a candidate’s expenditure more easily than it could earlier. One, however, doubts if effective mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that no expenses are made from other accounts or by other individuals on behalf of a candidate. It is generally believed that a large number of candidates succeed in concealing their actual election expenses by making them through other persons and, for a variety of reasons, the Election Commission of Pakistan is unable and incapable of proceeding against the offenders.

The election expenses of a candidate under the law do include, in addition to money spent by himself, “the expenses incurred by any person or a political party on behalf of the candidate”. A candidate is required to include in his expense account any expenditure incurred by a friend/supporter on “stationery, postage, advertisem*nt, transport, or for any other item”. But these limitations are yet to be enforced fully.

Where the law is almost silent is on money spent by political parties on their collective campaigning. Unfortunately, the authors of the Elections Act, 2017 did not heed persistent public demand for putting in specific restrictions on election-related expenses incurred by political parties which tend to believe they are free to spend as much money as they can on advertising and other propaganda material. They also think that they do not have to worry much about the sources that money is generated from.

In a broader sense, however, they are not as free in making these expenses as they may like to believe. Each year, they are required to submit their audited accounts showing their annual income and expenditure, sources of funds, and assets and liabilities. They are also required to submit to the Election Commission of Pakistan details of their expenses during a general election as well as the names of all those who have given them 100,000 rupees or more for an election campaign.

Although the language of the relevant section of the Elections Act, 2017 – Section 211 – is somewhat obscure, in as much as it does not refer to the total amount of contributions received by a political party, it should be possible for the Election Commission of Pakistan to ascertain how much money a party had before an election and how much money it acquired for its election campaign and from where.

Given the various shortcomings of the election law, it is also not possible to proceed against extravagant candidates/parties. What, however, can still be done is that information about all campaign expenses should be made public in order to increase the level of electoral transparency. People should know how the means of ruling over them have been acquired.

The question whether the 2018 elections were free and fair needs to be answered in three parts corresponding to the pre-poll environment, the process of polling and post-polling developments.

There is little doubt that the pre-poll environment was tilted heavily in PTI’s favour because its main rival, PMLN, had been in the doghouse for a pretty long time. Its leader had been ousted from the prime minister’s office, disqualified for life and eventually sent to prison. It could not escape the effects of a media-propelled corruption narrative against its leadership. The timing and the nature of court decisions against some of its prominent members, such as the imprisonment of its National Assembly candidate Hanif Abbasi in an anti-narcotics case and the electoral disqualification of its former minister Daniyal Aziz on contempt of court just before the polls, also went against it.

As against this, PTI was drawing strength from its crowd-pulling capacity. It was also being backed by a greater part of the media, especially television news channels. A preponderant majority of the people believed that PTI in general, and Imran Khan in particular, enjoyed the patronage of the most powerful elements in the establishment. The military has firmly denied any involvement with electoral politics but, perhaps, people still believed what they wanted to believe and concluded that the pre-election environment was not neutral.

The frequency of migration of outgoing legislators to PTI was above normal for a pre-election period and stories in circulation suggested that many of them had been persuaded to change their party labels by persons in authority.

Additionally, while PTI faced little problem in holding meetings and rallies anywhere in Pakistan, the leaders of PMLN had difficulty in organising and addressing public meetings in many parts of the country and PPP leaders, including its chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, were not given clearance even to enter their own constituencies. It was difficult to reject the impression that the electoral process was being managed by elements capable of doing so. This impression was just another way of describing pre-poll rigging which the people of Pakistan are quite familiar with.

Polling day was by and large peaceful though a powerful bomb blast outside a polling station in Quetta took as many as 31 lives. There were also a few other incidents of violence before the polls. Two suicide bombings in Peshawar and Mastung, for instance, resulted in the killing of two election candidates along with more than 130 others.

The casting of votes could be described as fair but there were issues that vitiated the climate required for a free polling. Arrangements for prisoners and physically challenged voters were not adequate. Other voters were strictly told to secure their vote numbers from the camps set up by candidates — a practice that infringes upon the secrecy of voting. Those who went to polling stations with information obtained through an SMS service run by the Election Commission of Pakistan were more often than not told to go back and bring with them slips from the candidate camps. Those armed with slips issued by a particular party had smoother sailing in the polling booth than holders of slips from other camps.

Also, contrary to the declarations by the Election Commission of Pakistan, military personnel were present within polling booths. Although they treated the voters with courtesy, their presence where the law prohibited them from being present was contrary to the requisites of a free polling. Indeed, the only people completely free and relaxed at many polling stations were policemen who whiled away their time near the gates of polling stationsor somewhere else in the shade. Some of them thanked the military for saving them from standing guard in rooms where heat and humidity would make breathing difficult.

The situation changed for the worse after the close of polling. Many candidates complained that their polling agents were thrown out of polling stations during the counting of votes and tabulation of results and that Form 45 – that recorded the detailed vote count at each polling station – was neither given to their agents nor was it put on the Election Commission of Pakistan’s website. These complaints and the rejection of a large number of ballot papers constitute the core of the clamour about what is being seen as a large-scale post-poll manipulation of voting outcomes.

In his victory speech, Imran Khan laid considerable emphasis on austerity. He reiterated his aversion to staying in the Prime Minister House and his ideas of turning the various governor houses into universities. Both are hugely popular ideas but not necessarily as beneficial as is generally assumed.

The idea that holders of high political office in a poor country should practise austerity is embedded in our political tradition. Those who ridicule Gandhi’s decision to wear the simplest possible dress, travel in third-class train compartments and live in scavengers’ colonies or the Indian political parties’ practice of conducting their deliberations while squatting on the floor as cheap political ploys should do well to reflect on the politicians’ need to identify themselves with the have-nots. Two of the most important members of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s first cabinet, Dr Mubashir Hasan and Sheikh Muhammad Rashid, never occupied bungalows requisitioned for ministers and chose to stay with relatives or friends in quarters for middle-tier civil servants. Quite a fewPakhtun political leaders prefer living simply even today. Imran Khan himself has derived benefit from the way he dresses for public functions — in clothes that do not appear too expensive or too formal.

But where a head of government lives is less important than what he does. All the occupants of the White House and 10 Downing Street are not known to have discharged their responsibilities equally well.

Likewise turning the governor houses into universities is less important than improving the overall performance of educational institutions and making quality higher and technical education affordable by the poor.

The real issue in Pakistan has been to overcome constraints to democratic governance and this did not receive due attention in Imran Khan’s first address. No Pakistani prime minister has enjoyed the freedom of action the high office requires. Indeed, all those who tried to be real prime ministers came to grief.How will Imran Khan maintain the authority and dignity of his office is something people are going to watch with much interest.

In addition, the new government will also be watched for making, or not making, efforts to shed practices associated with majoritarianism. It needs to move towards more participatory governance so that it can guide the country beyond the problems associated with the implementation of the 18th Constitutional Amendment and the last National Finance Commission award for the distribution of finances among the centre and the federating units.

Another area where the new government’s performance will be closely watched is economy. Even before PTI has taken over power, notice has begun to be taken of its likely resort to the International Monetary Fund for a financial lifeline. The new economic team, however, deserves to be given time to learn the ropes and acquire the ability to review and rectify mistakes of the past. Managing a country’s affairs and campaigning for gaining power are different ball games altogether. Imran Khan and his party will not be the first in history to adopt policies for which they have lambasted their opponents for years.

The immediate task for the incoming government, however, is to wind up as speedily as possible the issues generated by the general elections. Imran Khan did well to call for burying the hatchet and offer the reopening of as many boxes as necessary to address the grievances of losing candidates about unfairness of the polls.

In order to honour a national consensus on the need to move on, the phase of recounting of votes as well as hearing of election petitions must be completed as expeditiously as possible. No government should like to live with doubts about the legitimacy of its rule.

The writer is a senior journalist, peace activist and human rights advocate.

Graphs compiled by Aliyah Sahqani, Maham Hashmi, Hammad Motiwala, Mikhyle Anthony and Arnold Anthony using official data.

This was originally published in the August 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

The crime

A wazir once said to a king: “Seeing something with your own eyes or hearing it with your own ears does not necessarily mean it is true.”

The king was baffled.

“How can something be false if I have seen it with my own eyes or heard it with my own ears?” he said.

The wazir persisted. The king grew irate.

“If you fail to prove what you have just said, I will send you, your wife and your child to the gallows and hang you to death,” the king warned.

The wazir accepted the challenge.

Sometime later, the king went hunting.

Back at the palace, a servant made the king’s bed – as he did every day – and then, sensing that the king was away and no one was watching him, he lay in the royal bed and fell fast asleep. A little while later, the queen came into the room and, believing that the man in the bed was her husband, lay by his side.

When the king returned from his hunt, he saw his wife sleeping with his servant. He pulled out his sword and proceeded to kill them. The commotion woke up the servant and the queen. The king was flabbergasted as both protested their innocence. He had seen them both in the bed together but had also heard them claim that they did not know how they had ended up being there with each other. So what was true? That what he saw or that what he heard?

He called the wazir who reviewed the situation carefully and turned to the king. “If you had killed them, their murder would have been on your hands,” the wazir said, and then reminded the king of what he had said earlier: “Seeing something with your own eyes or hearing it with your own ears does not necessarily mean it is true.”

A long time ago, a man belonging to a Baloch tribe called Gopang moved from Dera Ghazi Khan to the outskirts of Rahim Yar Khan city. He built a home, raised cattle and cultivated sugarcane and wheat in nearby fields.

Ghulam Farid, Ghulam Qadir, Ghulam Sarwar and Ghulam Ghaus, all brothers, descended from the Gopang man generations later, living where he had lived but doing many different things to get by: working as carpenters, repairmen, mechanics and electricians. The women in their household worked as farm labourers.

Their life was difficult. It was also mundane.

Then something extraordinary happened.

Ghulam Qadir’s daughter Salma, about 14 years old, was kidnapped in early 2001. She was different from the other children in the family. She stitched her own clothes and spent her time doing embroidery. She was also good at drawing trees and people on paper.

Her kidnapper, Muhammad Akmal, was the son of a relatively well-off land owner who lived a kilometre away from where she lived. Salma’s family heard that he took her to Sibbi, a district in central Balochistan. They also heard that she went with him voluntarily because the two were in love.

Salma’s father approached a Gopang chieftain in the area to try to get her back. The chieftain put pressure on Akmal to return the girl. So he did around six months after he had taken her away.

After returning home, Salma would cry incessantly. She was worried that she had inflicted shame upon her family and was unable to cope with the trauma of her kidnapping.

Consolation came a few months later. Akmal’s family agreed to marry him to Salma after her family had so demanded. The wedding date was fixed for February 3, 2002.

The evening before the wedding day, Salma’s father, Ghulam Qadir, visited Akmal’s home to finalise some last minute arrangements. The groom’s parents and an uncle were also present. They continued talking till 11:00 pm.

From then onwards, different people saw and heard differently, depending on which family they belonged to.

Here is the version of Akmal’s family:

When Ghulam Qadir got up to leave, Akmal walked with him to the door. The moment the two reached the door, Ghulam Qadir pulled out a pistol and fired several straight shots at Akmal who fell on the floor. Ghulam Qadir’s brothers and a few cousins were also waiting on the street. They entered Akmal’s house and one of them, Ghulam Farid, opened fire at the rest of Akmal’s family, killing his father and hurting his mother and uncle. The assailants then ran back to their own house where Ghulam Qadir and his brother, Ghulam Sarwar, shot Salma dead.

This is the other version:

Ghulam Qadir, his brothers and cousins killed or injured no one. Another wedding was taking place near Akmal’s house. Someone opened fire there. Nobody knows who or why. These shots killed Akmal and his father. The rest of his family ran after Ghulam Qadir and his companions, believing that they had killed the two. When they could not catch up with them, they went to Ghulam Qadir’s house and killed Salma instead.

Ghulam Qadir, his brothers and cousins initially ran away from the area but came back a few hours later and were arrested. Their trial continued for three years in a court in Rahim Yar Khan. The trial court convicted Ghulam Qadir, Ghulam Sarwar and Ghulam Farid of killing Akmal, his father and Salma. Their fourth brother, Ghulam Ghaus, and their cousins were acquitted. Ghulam Qadir and Ghulam Sarwar were given the death sentence. Ghulam Farid was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The convicts filed appeals, first at the Multan Bench of the Lahore High Court – which upheld their conviction and sentences in a verdict given on May 26, 2009 – and then at the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2010. Six years later, a three-member bench of the apex court sustained their respective punishments for killing Akmal and his father but decided to hear their appeal in Salma’s murder case separately.

During subsequent hearings, the judges came upon something unusual. Those acquitted by the trial court had been given the benefit of the doubt because statements by witnesses were either contradictory or unreliable. The judges concluded that the sentences given to Ghulam Qadir, Ghulam Sarwar and Ghulam Farid were not justifiable because they had been based on the same flawed testimonies. In October 20, 2016, the three were acquitted.

Ghulam Qadir and Ghulam Sarwar were already dead by then. They were hanged in a jail in Bahawalpur on October 12, 2015.

Asma Nawab woke up at 7:00 am on April 6, 2018. She got out of bed and immediately sat on the floor. This had been her routine for the past 20 years. She did not realise that she no longer needs to do it. She is no longer in jail where it was a mandatory part of an early morning prisoner count every day. She then stood up and went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.

It took Asma a while to understand where she was. Released a day earlier, she went to live in a small apartment in Karachi’s Saddar area with the family of her lawyer, Javed Chhatari. She saw the door and realised she could walk out if she wanted to — in prison, her cell had a locked iron grill.

Life in a prison is a test of patience. Seconds turn into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days, days into weeks, weeks into months, and then years go by without any sign that your life is changing. Some make peace with it. Others lose their mind.

Imdad Ali, a death row inmate, was suffering from schizophrenia and paranoia when he was in jail. When his black warrant – the official order to hang him – was issued in October 2016, he was not in a stable state of mind to know what it meant. He did not understand why his relatives were crying during what could have been his last meeting with them. “They might have given me the black warrant but they do not know that I have a white warrant,” Imdad Ali is quoted by a legal aid worker to have told his family. He had started believing that he could resurrect himself.

When death row inmates are kept in solitary confinement, the loneliness becomes so acute that they hanker after any sort of company. One former inmate, who has spoken to many death row prisoners, narrates how those in solitary cells save the best part of their meals for the cats that wander through the jail — to secure at least some company. “There is no one to speak to. Only empty walls to stare at,” says the former prisoner.

Asma experienced all this. She spent nine months in a solitary cell. For a very long time, she was the only woman on death row in Karachi.

The first few days in jail were the hardest for her. No one came to see her except her lawyer. Over time, though, she became accustomed to prison life. She spent her time studying and writing court appeals for other prisoners. She watched films and television shows and listened to songs with other inmates. She met female prisoners from many parts of the world and made friends with many of them. They all left one by one while she could not.

The entire jail celebrated when Asma was ordered to be released. She felt like it was her wedding day, or Eid. Perhaps it was more special than that. How many death row inmates get out of jail alive?

On the night after her release, Chhatari and his family took her to the beach and then for dinner. She seemed to register nothing. The sea, the food, the fashion trends, the roads — nothing looked like it had in 1998 when she lost her freedom. The unfamiliar world around her was making her anxious.

A few days later, she decided to cook her first meal. When she picked up a knife to chop onions, it felt strange. It was after two decades that she was holding a knife.

Asma is now living in northwest Karachi with a family friend of Chhatari and is slowly getting used to life outside jail. Her host, who looks too young to be the mother of seven children, makes sure that Asma does not have an idle moment. She takes her out for shopping and got her a makeover: her hair has been cut and straightened, mascara highlights her eyelashes and her lipstick matches her dress.

Asma’s face lights up when she starts talking about some of the happier times in jail, but mid-sentence her face drops as she recalls the difficulties.

On Wednesday, December 30, 1998, Asma stood outside her house in Karachi and screamed. It was around 8:00 am. Some neighbours approached her and asked what the matter was. Her mother, father and brother were lying dead inside the house, she said. Their throats were slit and their bodies covered in blood.

Asma made a phone call to her mother’s elder sister from her house – D-2/133 in the Saudabad neighbourhood of Malir area – and her son called the police to inform them about the murders. Asma, then 20, was arrested the next day after her aunt accused her of murdering her own parents and brother.

Two days later, a young man named Javed was arrested. The police record shows him having revealed that he and two other young men, Farhan and Waseem, had killed Asma’s family with active help from her. The police also claimed to have recovered bloodstained knives, plastic pistols, broken toys and burnt shirts from Javed’s possession as evidence of the crime.

The two remaining suspects were arrested within 24 hours. Gold ornaments and prize bonds stolen from Asma’s house were retrieved from them. One of them, Farhan, was identified in police records as her boyfriend.

All those arrested, according to an investigation report, confessed to committing the murders. A magistrate duly recorded their confessional statements as is required under the law.

When the trial started at an antiterrorism court in early 1999, the four pleaded innocent. They said their confessional statements were obtained by the police through coercion.

The prosecution’s star witness was Asma’s own cousin. “She says she was in college when the murder happened but the college was closed that day,” he testified. The court took only a few months to arrive at a decision. Farhan, Javed and Asma were sentenced to death. Waseem received 10 years in prison.

They immediately filed appeals at the Sindh High Court. Almost a decade later, a two-judge antiterrorism appellate bench of the high court delivered a split judgment on their appeals. One judged acquitted them. The other upheld their conviction and sentences.

The chief justice of the high court referred the case to another judge to decide on which verdict to implement. The referee judge took about six years to make up his mind. He sided with the judge who had upheld the conviction and sentences.

Waseem had already served his sentence by that time. The remaining three filed another appeal — this time at the Supreme Court.

A three-member bench of the apex court finally ruled on April 3 this year that there was no evidence available on record to directly link Asma, Farhan and Javed with the murders. “The court observed that the prosecution had failed to establish its charges as the evidence put forward before [the judges] was not sufficient,” reads a report in the daily Dawn.

Even otherwise, the newspaper quoted one of the judges as pointing out, “The accused persons were behind bars for the last 20 years which is itself a punishment.”

Hardly anyone living and working on Lahore’s Raiwind Road knows where Firdaus Colony is but many know about the encounter that took place there on July 16, 2014.

The colony is a nondescript, unplanned working-class neighbourhood. It has fields to its north and east. To the south, it is bound by a small road that juts out eastward from the Lahore-Raiwind road at a place called Chowk Araiyan. The colony is about five kilometres to the east of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s private residence in Jati Umrah.

The encounter took place inside a two-storey house located near the end of a street.

On a March day this year, the street is abuzz with life. In the middle of it rests a heap of sand. A house is being built nearby. Some doors are open, covered only with thin cloth curtains. Women shuffle in and out of their homes, wiping sweat from their foreheads with their dupattas. Two stand with their men, hands clenched into fists and on their hips. They seem to be arguing.

The residents of the street say they never spotted anything suspicious about the house where the shoot-out took place. None of them know the people who lived there – what their names were, where they came from, what they did for a living – beyond the fact that they had moved in sometime in May 2014.

The locals saw the residents of the house only in the morning when they left on a motorcycle and then late in the evening when they returned. “I think one of them was a student,” says a boy in his late teens.

A summary of the official first information report (FIR) thus records the encounter:

A contingent of Military intelligence (MI) took position in front of the house on the night of July 16, 2014. Personnel of Raiwind police joined the MI officials at 12:30 am. The members of the two forces then proceeded towards the house but a hand grenade was thrown in their direction from the inside when they reached the entrance. A lieutenant colonel and a soldier got hurt when the grenade exploded. The latter died a little later. Those present in the house fired at the raiding party. The officials called for more personnel who arrived immediately. They surrounded the house, threw tear gas shells inside and fired back. Shooting by the occupants of the house, meanwhile, injured some members of the police’s elite commandos as well. The crossfire stopped at around 12:00 pm on July 17 — presumably after the shooters operating from inside the house had managed to escape. One of them was later found dead on the first floor. Many weapons, including 11 hand grenades, five rounds of submachine gun bullets and imported magazines, were recovered from the house, as was pro-jihad and anti-military literature.

The FIR, while elaborate on how the encounter unfolded, is silent on the identity of the men living in the house. It does not even name the dead shooter.

Even today, the local police officials seem to have little clue. “Were they students?” asks Asif Khan, who headed the police in the area when the shoot-out took place. He does not have an answer to his question. Another police officer who participated in the encounter is now working as a deputy superintendent of police in Lahore’s Dolphin Squad that specialises in preventing street crimes. He says the police were not given much information about the men. It was a military case so the police were kept out of it, he says.

News reports about the encounter only add to the mystery. They quoted police sources claiming that two shooters, not one, had died in the encounter.

One of them would be later named as Aqsan Mehboob, son of Asghar Ali, a resident of Okara district and a student at the University of Education in Lahore.

The official motto of the University of Education is: “Truth, the ultimate virtue”. Mehboob was a student here for less than a year between October 2013 and June 2014, studying for a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He was number 11 on the merit list for admissions.

Dr Muhammad Umer Saleem, the university’s director of student affairs, contacts Mehboob’s teachers on May 4 this year, seeking details of his time on the campus. The teachers remember him as a tall boy with grey eyes and a short beard. They say he was emotional and impulsive. They also say he was a bright student.

These two sides of his personality become split when his class fellows and other students talk about him. Some of them remember him as having awkward body language, like that of a rural person trying to adjust to an urban milieu. He walked and talked like a robot, they say, and mostly kept to himself. If his class grouped together and sat with one another, Mehboob chose to sit by himself.

Others say he was an impressive public speaker — having won second place in a speech competition in his native district in 2008. He argued strongly and passionately, they say. According to one of his teachers, he often cried while giving speeches. His favourite topics, according to the same teacher, were the Pakistan Army, of which he spoke favourably, and the fall of Dhaka in 1971.

Mehboob was also said to speak openly against Shias. It was also around the same time that his class fellows heard him speak against the army.

His performance at university also changed between the two semesters. His grades at the end of the first semester were good, ranging between 65 per cent and 90 per cent. He obtained his highest marks in Pakistan Studies.

In the second semester, he did not appear for two papers and did not score more than 70 per cent in any of the others. He got only 62 per cent in Islamic Studies — his worst score.

Mehboob’s lack of interest in studies was rather obvious during the second semester. He was once kicked out of his organic chemistry class for laughing at something and disrupting the lecture.

After he missed a midterm paper during his second semester, his teacher remembers seeing him walk up to her with a limp. He said he had injured his leg in a motorcycle accident.

Mehboob was also having problems at his home — a flat in Faisal Town, about three kilometres from the university. He lived there with a childhood friend and some others. In February 2014, he stormed out of the flat after an argument with his roommates.

“He used to argue about the correct way to pray, and about Shias,” says one of his roommates.

He came back to the flat only once to apologise. None of them knew where he had moved.

The sky on a recent April night is pitch-black. An electricity outage makes it even more so. A tractor’s engine runs in the distance to power a lone fan and a single bulb inside a bricks and mortar house. Moths and mosquitoes swarm around the dim yellow light of the bulb, dimming it further. Crickets, out of sight, engage in a monotone chorus.

A strong wind starts blowing from the west and sweeps across the village where the house is located. It tosses and turns everything that comes in its way. Trees sway wildly. Crickets go silent. Mosquitoes, flies and moths take shelter in their hideouts and the distant noise of the tractor’s engine is drowned out by the sound of the gale. It also brings an unexpected wave of pleasant weather.

The next morning, everything is covered in a layer of dust.

Asghar Ali and his extended family, living in the village of Chak 18-D in Okara district, are hoping for something similar. They are praying for an unexpected boon to accrue from something that has shattered their lives.

Asghar Ali is a lean, middle-aged man with a long grey beard and no permanent source of income. He usually works in potato and maize fields owned by others. When he cannot find work in his village, he travels to Hujra Shah Muqeem, a town about nine kilometres to the south, to work as a carpenter. His daily income never exceeds 500 rupees unless it is supplemented by what his wife Mussarat Bibi occasionally earns from her farm labour.

Their son, Aqsan Mehboob, was born on March 11, 1996. Since then, they have had six more children – three boys and three girls — but he remains their favourite.

Asghar Ali always wanted his son to do well at school so he gave him the beating of his life for failing in grade five. Mehboob never failed again. His relatives as well as many others in the village say he became a bookworm. He was never seen playing with other boys again. He secured 952 marks out of a total of 1,050 in his matriculation exam in 2011, topping his entire district. Two years later, he got 859 out of a total of 1,100 marks in his intermediate exam.

Mehboob was studying one night at home when the electricity failed. He went to his paternal aunt’s house, looking for a matchbox to light a lantern. One day, he said, he would stop asking her for such small favours. He often made such promises. His three aunts once held draws to decide which one of them could have him as their son-in-law. Mehboob promised to marry a daughter of each aunt. He wanted to arrange free medicine for his village. He also wanted to join the army.

Some months after Mehboob joined the university, his father had a dream. He saw police surrounding his house, their guns pointed at him and his son. They seemed to be waiting for an order.

When Mehboob visited his village a few days later, Asghar Ali shared his dream with him. He feared something bad might happen to his son. Mehboob consoled him and told him that God would take care of everything.

A few days later, Mehboob was reported dead.

His family first heard the news on television. Soon the news media swarmed his village, filming his humble house and narrating his journey from a poor but high-achieving student to a dead terrorist.

Mehboob’s mother asked the local police for his body be returned to his family, but she was not even shown the body. Days later, he returned to her — in a dream. He called out to her and said, “Mother, I am back.”

Mehboob was not among the two men who died in the Firdaus Colony encounter, the police soon found out.

One of them turned out to be Muhammad Tufail, a resident of Okara’s adjacent district, Pakpattan. The police accused him of “assisting” Mehboob “in carrying out” terrorist activities in Lahore. The other was identified as Zulfiqar Nazir, a resident of Malik Hans town, also in Pakpattan district.

A counterterrorism department team soon raided Mehboob’s house in Chak 18-D. They were looking for weapons but did not find any. Another police party came to the village a few days later and arrested around six people from the local mosque, including Mehboob’s first cousin Zulfiqar Nazir — a namesake of the second man who was found dead in the encounter.

Muhammad Ishaq, a local imam, was also among the arrested. He taught religion to children in Chak 18-D and was associated with a madrasa set up by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) about four kilometres from the village. His affiliation with the madrasa was known to everyone around him. Mehboob was once among his students.

The police released all the detained men — except Ishaq. He returned a year later — dead. The police claimed he was killed in a shoot-out near Multan. There were wounds on his wrists and fingers and he had a bullet hole in his head and two in his chest, says a young man from Chak 18-D who saw the body.

A police report describes Mehboob as an “aggressive young man” who “got inclination for jihad and got proper training” but there is no evidence to suggest that it was Ishaq who trained him in terrorism or introduced him to jihadi groups. Investigators linked to the case, however, say Mehboob, like Ishaq, was initially linked to LeT but later joined al Qaeda.

Mehboob’s family, meanwhile, had no idea where he was — or even if he was alive. They had no money to conduct a search, no influential contacts to find him.

And then he came back. Not in person, but in the form of an official statement that verified that he was alive.

On January 1, 2016, the military’s public relations department, Inter-Services Public Relations, released a terse press release. It stated that a military court had sentenced Mehboob to death for being associated with al Qaeda and for killing members of the security forces.

Asghar Ali lost consciousness when he found out about the death sentence. But his prayers had been answered. His son was not dead — even though death was still stalking him.

The first challenge for Asghar Ali was to find out where Mehboob was being kept in custody. The news media solved the mystery. He was in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail. The second hurdle was to find a lawyer and file an appeal against Mehboob’s conviction and sentence.

One of his nephews, Abdul Sattar, came to know through some friends about a lawyer, Inamul Rahiem, a retired colonel based in Rawalpindi with vast legal experience in military-related cases. He is known for having moved the appeals at the military’s appellate tribunals on behalf of a number of people convicted and sentenced by military courts.

Mehboob’s mother first moved a petition at the Rawalpindi bench of the Lahore High Court through Rahiem, contending that her son had been tried at a military court with mala fide intentions. She pleaded that his conviction and sentence be overturned. The judge hearing the case rejected her plea.

Mehboob’s parents also lodged an appeal at the military’s own appellate tribunal but a letter sent from the military general headquarters in Rawalpindi to the superintendent of Kot Lakhpat jail states that the appeal was rejected on March 22, 2016.

Next, they went to the Supreme Court and filed an appeal through another lawyer, former colonel Muhammad Akram, who also specialises in military-related cases. A three-judge bench stayed Mehboob’s execution in June 2016 — until a final order was passed on his appeal.

The final order came on August 29 of the same year. The judges dismissed the appeal. Within a month, Mehboob’s lawyer filed a review petition in front of a larger bench of the Supreme Court. It was accepted for hearing – thus delaying his execution – but no major proceedings have taken place on it since then.

For the last two years, Mehboob has been imprisoned in Sahiwal. His father and brothers meet him inside a high-security prison almost twice a month.

“It is a graveyard for the living,” Asghar Ali says, as he talks about Mehboob’s solitary life in a prison cell. He is allowed to leave the cell only for two hours each day – in two breaks staggered by 12 hours. His cell is clean but small. His meetings with his family are strictly monitored and his communication thoroughly scanned.

Mehboob has managed to send a handwritten letter to the lawyer fighting his case. It is essentially a plea to the authorities for justice but it also offers his version of how his life changed from that of a student to that of a convicted terrorist on death row.

Below is a summary of the letter:

On July 17, 2014, Mehboob was returning to his apartment in Faisal Town from a nearby house where he worked as a tutor. Some unknown persons picked him up near Faisal Town Police Station. He was blindfolded, masked and handcuffed. He was also informed that he was in MI’s custody and that he would be allowed to leave after interrogation. He was moved to an undisclosed location where he was asked a series of questions: are you a terrorist? What do you think you are going to get out of your studies?

When he answered the second question by saying that he wanted to join the army, somebody hit him. Then he was beaten repeatedly. He was told to admit that he was a terrorist. During the beatings he eventually lost consciousness. When he regained his senses, he was tortured again and asked the same questions. This continued for approximately three months.

During one of the interrogation sessions, Mehboob claims he received a head injury that affected his mental stability. He also claims he was given electric shocks and made to stand upright day and night. This last act would make him dizzy and unconscious. He also lost his appetite. Another episode of torture, he said, ripped some flesh off his left thigh.

One year and two months after he was picked up, he was produced in a military court, but he was not mentally fit to stand trial so he was sent to a hospital for treatment. Mehboob claims to have no memory of going to a court again. On January 4, 2016, he was shifted to Kot Lakhpat jail.

“I request the government of Pakistan to give me a free medical check-up so that everyone can see the physical abuse I have gone through,” his letter states at the end.

It is impossible to verify or deny the veracity of his claims — except perhaps by those who know the secret details of his interrogation and trial. One of his claims immediately stands out though: he says he was still living in the Faisal Town apartment on July 16, 2014. His roommate says he was living somewhere else at the time.

When Sohail Yafat arrived in Sahiwal jail in 2001, he felt he was walking into a quagmire — both physically and metaphorically.

Behind its solid brick walls, the prison was a dirty mess. It was also a horribly boring place. He did not know how to spend his time. He also did not know when he would get back to the world outside, if ever. Life seemed like an infinitely long moment in which nothing remarkable happened.

Yafat stayed in jail for nine years. He managed to get through his time by forming bonds with other prisoners and getting in on all the inside jokes — many of them about jail food. The meat served to the prisoners was called ‘diesel’ because of its gooey, oily texture and when cauliflower was cooked in the jail kitchen, its stench would make everyone run for cover. He also worked on building a church inside the prison for himself and other Christian inmates.

Yafat was sent behind bars for a murder he says he had no role in, yet it took him almost a decade to prove his innocence. He points to several problems that delay the criminal justice system, starting with flaws in investigation. The police usually collect whatever rudimentary evidence that they can from a crime scene. They back it up with oral statements from witnesses as well as confessions by any suspects they arrest.

An initial investigation report based on these elements is often full of contradictions. The evidence is never analysed, witness statements are not thoroughly vetted and confessions are routinely obtained through torture — and therefore retracted during court proceedings. The irony is that entire trials depend on whatever story an investigating team puts together, Yafat says. Bribing the police to get a favourable investigation is not only tempting for the parties to a crime, it is also rampant.

On the flip side, investigators complain that they never get the resources they need. A sub-inspector working in Lahore’s Gulberg area says policemen often do not have the money to even revisit a crime scene. They also do not have enough time to investigate each crime in their jurisdiction. The crime rate is always higher than the human resources available to counter it.

What happens in court is another long story. Yafat’s own case illustrates some of the problems the justice system is saddled with. Consider the following facts:

Yafat was a college student and was also working simultaneously in the marketing department of another college in Lahore. One day in May 2001, he went with a friend to a hospital in the same city, where his friend’s father was undergoing treatment. Yafat was to spend the night there, taking care of the patient. A police party came to the hospital in civilian clothes sometime during the night. They took him into custody, blindfolded him and drove him to a police station where he was asked to identify two people already under detention. He did not know them. The police asked him about another person. He knew him, though he did not understand why the police were asking him about someone who was not even around.

The police booked Yafat and the other two for a murder that had taken place in Sahiwal in January 2001. There was another suspect involved but he was on the run.

In January 2003, a trial court acquitted the two men arrested along with Yafat but gave him life imprisonment. He filed an appeal from jail against his sentence but it made no progress. In 2005, police arrested the absconding suspect but he was released after 90 days.

It took five more years for his appeal to be heard by a high court — and another five to overturn his sentence. “Ideally, it should have taken two to three years,” he says.

Trial courts are usually overburdened and understaffed. Judges have very little time to hear every case in detail. Adjournments are a norm. The chances of an innocent person getting convicted and a guilty one being acquitted are as high – or as low – as the chances of survival of a mosquito swatted with a sledgehammer.

Yafat was released on bail in 2010 and was acquitted in 2015. After his release from jail, he has been working as an investigator with the Justice Project Pakistan.

Sarah Belal is a foreign-trained lawyer. She is the founder and executive director of the Justice Project Pakistan. Her organisation focuses on the rights of prisoners in the country. Sitting in her office in Lahore’s neighbourhood of Zaman Park, she points out flaws in the death penalty system.

In order to talk about the death penalty in Pakistan, she says, one needs to frame the debate within the structural problems that the judicial system faces. “[Most] people might be in favour of the ultimate punishment but the question really is: are we getting the right people?” she asks. “And is it having the affect that we want it to have?”

The answer to the first question, according to her, is a “resounding no”. We have juvenile offenders, mentally ill and innocent people who have confessed to crimes under duress, she says.

Human rights groups and the news media have highlighted some cases recently in which people suffering from severe psychological problems are waiting to be executed. Imdad Ali’s case stands out among them because it has put the Supreme Court of Pakistan on the horns of a dilemma. The court has to make up its mind as to whether schizophrenia is a mental illness and whether those suffering from it deserve reprieve from the death penalty. So far, the judges have given contradictory signals.

According to the brief facts of Imdad Ali’s case, he is a resident of Burewala area of Vehari district in southern Punjab and was sentenced to death in 2002 in a murder case. All legal forums, including the Supreme Court of Pakistan, have upheld his death sentence.

Imdad Ali has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia since the beginning of his sentence. Dr Tahir Feroze, a consultant psychiatrist at the government-run Nishtar Hospital in Multan, has treated him for several years in jail and, according to the daily Dawn, deems his mental illness chronic.

When a black warrant was issued for Imdad Ali’s execution in July 2016, his wife approached the Lahore High Court’s Multan bench, pleading that his execution be stopped on medical grounds. The high court rejected her petition on August 23 that year.

She immediately moved a similar petition at the Supreme Court. A three-member bench headed by Chief Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali heard her petition and ruled on September 27, 2016 that schizophrenia did not fall within the legal definition of mental disorders. “Schizophrenia is not a permanent mental disorder, rather an imbalance, increasing or decreasing depending upon the level of stress,” the judges stated, clearing the way for Imdad Ali’s execution.

Within less than a month, his wife filed a petition at the Supreme Court for a review of the verdict by a larger bench that stayed his execution on October 31, 2016. The bench later formed a medical board to re-examine his condition and submit a report in two weeks. The proceedings in the case have been pending since then.

In a similar case, Khizar Hayat, a former policeman, was scheduled to be hanged in January 2017 but the Supreme Court stayed his execution at the last moment on an appeal filed by his mother. Sentenced to death in 2003 for killing another police official, he has been in jail for more than 15 years. He has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia since 2008.

A 2016 report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent civil rights monitoring group based in Lahore, points out that problems in dealing with mentally ill crime suspects start at the initial stages of the trial. The “litmus test” for judges at trial courts “to assess an undertrial person’s sanity [is] to ask them to state their name”.

Some other death row prisoners are known to have developed debilitating and chronic physical conditions during their long imprisonment. Mazhar Hussain, a resident of Islamabad, died in jail in 2014 due to coronary failure. He had spent the previous 12 years on death row for a 1997 murder. In October 2016, the Supreme Court took up his long-delayed appeal against his conviction and, not knowing that he had already died, exonerated him from the murder charges.

Abdul Basit, another death row prisoner, became paralysed from the waist down after suffering from meningitis in prison in 2010. He was sentenced to death a year earlier. The Supreme Court approved his execution on September 21, 2015, but for various reasons it has been delayed since then.

Pakistan is one of five countries with the highest number of executions in the world – the others are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. According to an HRCP report, Pakistan executed 333 people in 2015 – the first full year after a six-year moratorium on the death penalty was lifted. Another 87 people were hanged in 2016. Their number fell to 44 in 2017.

The data put together by the Justice Project Pakistan differs a little: seven people were executed in Pakistan in 2014, 325 in 2015, 88 in 2016 and 55 in 2017. One out of every 70 prisoners added to an overpopulated jail has been executed in the three years since late 2014, the organisation states.

Some other numbers corroborate this data. President Mamnoon Hussain has rejected 513 mercy petitions filed by the families of death row inmates in the last five years. These petitions more or less correspond to the number of people executed over the same period of time.

The Justice Project Pakistan highlights that executions spiked in the weeks following a terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar in December 2014, but it also points out that 88 per cent of those executed in those weeks had no links to “any crimes reasonably defined as terrorism”.

The death sentence is awarded for as many as 27 offences in Pakistan. These include murder, terrorist activities, rape, high treason, blasphemy, apostasy, drug trafficking and kidnapping intended for murder. Pregnant women, children and mentally and intellectually handicapped persons cannot be given the death penalty (though this exemption does not apply to blasphemy cases registered under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code).

It is difficult to ascertain the total number of death sentences awarded across Pakistan every year since the government does not collect and collate such data. The only statistics available pertain to military courts that have been authorised, under a constitutional amendment passed in 2015, to hear terrorism-related cases. Between January 2015 and May 2018, these courts have given the death sentence to 207 people. Out of these, at least 56 have been executed.

The government also maintains no countrywide data set about death row prisoners. The figures collected by the Justice Project Pakistan put the total number of inmates on death row at 8,200.

To decrease these numbers, the organisation has recommended, in a briefing paper titled Reducing the Scope of the Death Penalty, that the government: 1) reinstate the moratorium on the death penalty with the aim to eventually abolish capital punishment; 2) initiate a legislative process to revise the Pakistan Penal Code to limit the death penalty only to cases in which intentional killing has taken place; 3) provide judicial remedies to death row convicts in whose cases new evidence has been discovered which may serve as a basis for reducing their sentence; 4) commute the death sentence of all juveniles and those suffering from mental illnesses.

Faisal Siddiqi, a Karachi-based human rights lawyer, believes some of these demands are not realistic. Abolishing the death penalty in Pakistan is impossible, he says, because it is an integral part of Islamic punishments. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan cannot remove it from its statutes, he says.

There is also a lot of public support for the death penalty, he says. There are terrorists, sectarian killers and murderers out there who are a menace to public order and it makes sense to eliminate them through the justice system so that they do not get out of jail and resume their heinous activities, he argues.

Siddiqui, though, is supportive of the demand to limit the application of the death penalty. It should not be applied in each and every situation, he says. Implement it the way India does, he adds. “In the rarest of rare cases.”

Siddiqui is also not sure if Pakistan can reinstate the moratorium it placed on executions between 2008 and 2013. He wonders if the government has the power to place a moratorium in the first place. “What law does it even come under?”

Even the President of Pakistan does not have the power to impose a moratorium in spite of his authority to pardon a death sentence under Article 45 of the Constitution. He can use this power only in individual cases in which his power to pardon is specifically invoked, says Siddiqui. “What he cannot do is to say that he is suspending all death sentences.”

Siddiqui also argues that a moratorium results in delays in execution which, in turn, means that death row prisoners will stay in jails longer than they otherwise would.

Farhatullah Babar, a former senator and the secretary general of the Pakistan Peoples Party-Parliamentarian (PPPP), acknowledges that the moratorium placed on executions during his party’s government in 2008-2013 was not really a moratorium. “Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani made a statement in his inaugural speech in the National Assembly that the government would review [the] death penalty. This statement was then used by President Asif Ali Zardari who would write on death warrants. [Zardari said] ‘since the prime minister has stated that we will review the death penalty, let us place a hold on it for now,’” reveals Babar who worked as Zardari’s spokesperson during his presidency.

His party’s own history is a major reason why it takes a rather dim view of the death penalty. Its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979 by a military government after his trial in a murder case that most jurists regard as a sham. Many of the party’s activists were also executed during General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship under various trumped up charges.

The party, therefore, has always wanted to do something about the death penalty — short of getting rid of it altogether. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir Bhutto first came to power in 1988 after years of martial rule in the country, she commuted the death sentence of as many as 1,889 convicts to life imprisonment. Babar and many other senior leaders in PPPP – as well as in its earlier avatar, PPP – are convinced that the “death penalty does not end crime”.

They also have another reason to oppose it: “It is irreversible.” If there is a miscarriage of justice in trials, Babar says, the death penalty will result in the killing of innocent people.

Saroop Ijaz, a Lahore-based lawyer who also works for Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy and monitoring body, believes the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance of 1990 has strengthened the legitimacy of the death penalty to the extent of making it irreversible. Since qisas is the Islamic principle of ‘like for like’, it requires that trials for crimes involving harm to human body result in similar harm to the body of the criminal. This perhaps was the reason why a judge in Lahore in the early 2000s ruled that Javed Iqbal – who surrendered in 1999 for raping and killing scores of children – be put to death by tearing his body into a hundred pieces since he had done the same to his victims.

Ironically, diyat, or financial compensation, is the only provision in Pakistani law that allows a murderer to escape the death penalty by paying a court-sanctioned amount of money to the legal heirs of his victim. What the courts or the Constitution cannot do, money can: it offers an alternative to the death penalty, though, as many jurists and legal experts have pointed out, it also creates a discriminatory legal regime. Those who can afford to pay diyat can literally get away with murder but those who cannot must go to the gallows.

The twin concepts of qisas and diyat, according to Ijaz, also illustrate something deeper. They put the conversation about the death penalty in Pakistan in the context of revenge and retribution. Such contextualisation, he says, explains why the state is often called upon to exact revenge and inflict pain upon one’s tormentors — so that the victims do not have to do it on their own. This desire to hurt and harm criminals also explains why there are always public calls for stringent laws and even more stringent penalties for every crime — from mugging to murder to mutiny.

When Nawaz Sharif announced an end to the moratorium on executions in the wake of the 2014 Peshawar school attack, says Ijaz, he did not do so because there was public demand to use the death penalty as a deterrence to violence and terrorism. The announcement was made in response to people’s demand for imposing summary justice and inflicting exemplary punishment on those who had taken the lives of around 150, mostly children, in that attack. The man on the street wanted them to be hanged publicly to avenge their dastardly act rather than to make an example out of them for other intending terrorists.

We witnessed a similar situation in the wake of a six-year-old girl’s rape and murder in Kasur early this year, Ijaz says. Demands for the public hanging of her killer were so loud and so widespread that even those in government had to endorse them — even if for the sake of placating public sentiment.

Ejaz Ahmed alias Pappu was the son of a business professional, Ahmed Dawood, who worked as a textile adviser for the Saigol Group of Industries. Pappu was abducted from outside his house in Lahore’s Gulberg area on December 18, 1977. His kidnappers sexually assaulted him before they killed him. They then threw his body in a pond. He was only 12 years old — and the lone brother to eight sisters.

There was a public outcry of anger and grief. Newspapers carried statements by anyone who was anyone in the country at the time, demanding the immediate arrest of the culprits and asking for an exemplary punishment for them.

Those were times of great change. General Ziaul Haq had deposed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a coup only five months earlier in the wake of a movement for the implementation of Nizam-e-Mustafa — the system of the Prophet of Islam or sharia. Summary military courts were operating across the country, prosecuting mostly political activists but also all kinds of crooks and delinquents. Bhutto was also in jail, facing a murder trial.

The military regime wanted to assure the public that it was sincere in implementing sharia. It also required that popular attention be diverted from Bhutto’s trial, which had become a spectacle in spite of comprehensive censorship of media coverage.

When police in Lahore arrested three people (who were working as domestic help in the city but belonged to a village in Kashmir) for Pappu’s rape and murder, the state was more than willing to accept the public’s demand for their quick trial and execution. Indeed, it happily went a step further by ordering their public execution.

An official press note issued on March 12, 1978, at the end of a trial that concluded in less than three months, reads: “In Ejaz Alias Papoo’s murder case, convicts Mohammad Afraq Ahmad s/o Mohammad Aslam Khan, Mohammad Hanif s/o Abdul Khan and Sher Alam s/o Dost Mohammad were sentenced to death by a Special Military Court ... The sentence of death in respect of the above three convicts will be carried out in public. They will suffer death by being shot to death.”

A week later, Justice Zakiuddin Pal of the Lahore High Court rejected a writ petition filed by the three convicts who questioned the legality of their trial in a military court. The day for the execution was set for March 22 that year. The government, though, changed its mind about the mode of execution. The convicts were to be hanged rather than being shot.

Lahore’s local administration, working with jail officials and military authorities, made special arrangements for the public hanging. The execution needed to be carried out at a place where a large crowd could gather. It also required trained jail staff to be available at hand to administer death. There was also the additional risk that onlookers may erupt into political protests.

The gallows were set under a peepal tree just outside Shadman jail — right opposite where Tollinton Market stands today on the road that connects Ferozepur Road with Jail Road. Barbed wire was placed over a large area to keep the crowd away from the tree. Heavily armed security personnel stood guard along the barbed wire. Much before the convicts were brought to the site of their execution, half a million people had already gathered there. They were shouting in jubilation: “Islam zindabad! Zia zindabad!” The atmosphere was almost festive.

Just before 5:00 pm, the convicts were taken to the gallows together — their faces covered with black masks and their hands tied behind them. A hangman fixed the noose around their necks. Seconds later, he pulled a lever. Wooden planks under their feet gave way and they were suspended in air, the thick ropes tightening around their necks. The crowd burst into cries of, “Allah-o-Akbar!”

At 5:30 pm, Tara Masih, the chief hangman, checked the bodies of the convicts and declared all of them dead. The bodies were removed from the gallows as the crowd began to disperse.

Lights are switched off on the top floor of the Punjab Prisons Foundation on February 15 this year, but there is plenty of natural light streaming in through the windows facing west. Four men are working quietly at tables scattered across a large room. The only sound is of paper being pushed and shuffled.

An elderly man with a greying beard removes his glasses and holds them in mid-air as if they will help him revive his memories. He looks curiously around the room, as if to find clues for his mind to rush back 40 years. Then he gazes out of the window.

He witnessed the execution of Pappu’s murderers.

He walks down the stairs, steps out of the building – quiet, as though still trying to remember something – and goes over to a black wrought iron gate next door. The address on a silver nameplate outside the gate reads: 444 Shadman I. The old man points to a peepal tree about 25 feet inside the house. “That is where they built the gallows,” he says.

A flurry of public hangings followed that of Pappu’s killers. Here is just a sampling of the cases reported by the newspapers:

Two public hangings occurred on two consecutive days in the third week of January 1988. In the first, a man named Dost Muhammad was hanged in front of thousands of people at a stadium in Mianwali. He had killed a woman after attempting to rape her. The second hanging took place at a stadium in Sahiwal where a notorious robber by the name of Lalu was executed.

Similarly, on February 1 and February 2 that same year, two public hangings took place — one in Multan’s Qasim Bagh Stadium and the other in Faisalabad’s Dhobi Ghat ground.

Their impact on the crime rate remains largely undocumented. The government maintains no consolidated, countrywide statistics on crimes in any case. The Justice Project Pakistan, however, has sifted through newspaper archives and found that at least 11 children were raped in Pakistan between 1983 and 1992.

Additional research contributed by Aliyah Sahqani and Sarah Dara

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This story was originally published in the June 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

In most developed democracies, an important component of a pre-election analysis is to look at changes in victory and defeat margins for major political parties. The underlying assumption in this type of analysis is that there is stability within political parties, a certain level of consistency in their respective constituencies and a high degree of certainty in the larger political system. It also assumes that many voters maintain a fairly stable set of electoral preferences across different election cycles while many others remain undecided till the very end of an election campaign.

These undecided voters are usually swung one way or the other by the economic or social policies (taxation, investment in certain social services, job creation, etc) that different contenders for power promise to follow. In constituencies where victory (or defeat) margins between two contenders are narrow, this swing proves decisive in determining the outcome of elections.

Democracies in developing countries are generally much less stable, with many unpredictable factors playing crucial roles in determining the outcome of their elections. This is mainly due to instability in party structures, volatility in voter turnouts and a general uncertainty in economic, political and social spheres. Consider how the issues that determined voters’ behaviour before and during the 2008 elections in Pakistan (Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, suicide bombings, intensification of public anger against Pervez Musharraf, etc) changed entirely before the 2013 elections.

The issues that had a major impact on the last general poll included the almost sudden rise of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Nawaz Sharif’s return to electoral politics after 16 years, serious security threats and a large-scale resentment, particularly in Punjab, against the government of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) led by Asif Ali Zardari.

The sheer number of factors that may impact voters’ preferences and their willingness to come out to cast their votes for the 2018 elections renders the predictive power of a swing analysis uncertain. It is, therefore, important to look into some of these factors in order to carry out a meaningful analysis of victory or defeat margins and swing votes as a means to forecast the likely outcome of the upcoming elections.

First of these factors is demographic.

After the 2017 census, the Constitution required that electoral constituencies in all four provinces as well as in Islamabad and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) be revised to accommodate changes in the country’s population. Parliament, working under severe time constraints, decided to keep the total number of constituencies constant but allowed a revision in their numbers and boundaries both within and across regions and provinces.

As a result of the subsequent delimitation exercise, Pakistan’s entire electoral map changed. Karachi, for instance, gained one National Assembly seat but another district in Sindh, Kashmore, lost one; Islamabad, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa got one, two and four additional National Assembly seats respectively but Punjab’s seat count came down by seven.

Since the total number of constituencies has not increased, the number of people living in each of them has dramatically increased. The average population of a National Assembly constituency was roughly 316,000 in 2002 but it has increased to over 780,000 in 2018. This means that the money required by election candidates to reach out to their constituents will be much higher during this election than it was in the past. This increase alone has made it difficult for many less resourceful candidates and parties to be viable electoral competitors.

An even more important issue is how constituency boundaries have changed after their post-census delimitation. A rough estimate suggests that constituency areas have shifted by a minimum of 20 per cent and by a maximum of more than 50 per cent in a majority of the 272 National Assembly constituencies. Comparing constituency-level outcomes of the three elections that have taken place between 2002 and 2013 and projecting them onto the 2018 elections will, thus, be akin to comparing apples and oranges.

Alterations in constituency boundaries have also had an important effect on those contestants who have been running in the same constituencies for close to two decades now. The communities, biradaris (clans) and factions they have politically and financially invested in for long have ended up in other constituencies in many cases. As such, they now need to cultivate new groups and factions and that too on a much larger scale given the massive increase in the size of population per constituency. These changes further complicate forecasts about electoral fortunes of specific candidates or parties, especially when this has to be done with reference to what happened in previous elections.

The second factor is premised on a public perception of the prevailing political situation. Hawa – a colloquial term for the expected direction of political change – has always played a crucial role in election outcomes, particularly in Punjab and to a lesser degree in Sindh.

The cobbling together of Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PMLQ) in 2002 on the debris of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) or Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and Nawaz Sharif’s return from exile in 2007 or PPP’s tattered image in 2013 — all signalled to ‘electables’ as well as to the electorate as to who will form the next government in the centre and the provinces. The subsequent voting patterns, thus, became self-fulfilling prophecies.

In 2018, signals have been sent out loud and clear that PMLN will not be allowed to form the federal government and possibly also the provincial government in Punjab. This is likely to turn the tide in many a constituency in Punjab — a change that is already quite apparent in northern and southern parts of the province where a large number of ‘electables’ previously associated with PMLN have jumped ship either to join PTI’s ‘Naya’ Pakistan bandwagon or to contest as independents, using ‘jeep’ as their electoral symbol.

Whatever victory margins PMLN commanded in these areas in the last election may swing a long way to its opponents along with the candidates who have left the party and joined the opposite camp.

Whether this headwind blowing against PMLN sweeps central Punjab as well is conditional upon how successfully Nawaz Sharif can mobilise popular opinion on the slogan of vote ko izzat do (honour the democratic verdict). It is this region that will decide whether the hawa has been successfully resisted or not.

Although the political situation has become even more fluid than it already was after Nawaz Sharif’s – and his daughter Maryam Nawaz’s – conviction in a corruption reference and his subsequent defiant posture, it is obvious that victory margins and vote swings in central Punjab will be significant factors in determining the outcome of the upcoming election. It is also highly likely that electoral outcomes in this region end up deciding who will form the next federal and Punjab governments.

The third factor is statistical though it is directly linked to politics.

Any analysis of victory margins and possible swing in votes is highly contingent on how many people turn out to cast their ballots on polling day. In 2013, aggregate turnout in Pakistan crossed the 50 per cent mark for the first time since 1970. It was actually 55 per cent, a good 10 per cent higher than it was in 2008. A significant change in turnout, say of 10-20 per cent, can substantially alter margins of victory or defeat as the case may be.

PPP’s voter is said to have not turned out to vote in Punjab in 1997 so the party lost all seats in the province in that election regardless of how large – or small – the winning margin of its candidates was in the previous election. In 1993, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) boycotted the National Assembly election – national and provincial elections were held on different days back then – so the turnout in Karachi declined by a good 20 per cent.

If voter turnout increases significantly, it can similarly disturb past electoral patterns. In the upcoming elections, too, the number of people getting out to vote will have an important impact not only on election results but also on government formation later. Turnout in central districts of Punjab, in particular, will have an important bearing on the fortunes of PMLN. If the party’s resistance to the trials and tribulations of its leaders finds resonance among the electorate and the turnout hovers around 60 per cent in this area – just as it did in 2013 – this will help PMLN in countering the impact of the hawa that is working in PTI’s favour.

A 10-15 per cent reduction in turnout in central Punjab, on the other hand, will signify that the hawa has prevailed and the PMLN voter has stayed home after seeing the writing on the wall. In that case, PTI may win seats it had lost even by a wide margin.

As compared to the 2013 elections, voter turnout may change significantly in 2018 in at least three regions.

It is expected to go down in Karachi, considering that there will be no stuffing of ballot boxes that MQM would indulge in during past elections. With its ability to capture polling booths gone and its unified leadership structure fizzled out, the party is struggling to mobilise its supporters. This may also cause many of its genuine voters not to turn up to vote. Both MQM’s margins of victory and the seats it has been winning will be affected negatively.

Another region where the turnout is expected to change significantly is Fata. People in the tribal areas are expected to cast their votes in significantly larger numbers than before because of a substantial improvement in law and order and the full participation of political parties in electioneering. A higher turnout, in turn, will change the pattern of election outcomes in Fata, helping a larger number of candidates contesting on party tickets to get elected.

Another factor that will increase voter turnout in the tribal areas is the legal requirement that election in any constituency will only be valid if at least 10 per cent women voters have cast their votes in it. Earlier, women participation in voting in Fata used to be minimal. Their participation even this time round, however, may not alter results on its own because women in these area usually vote the same way men from their families do.

The fourth factor concerns ‘electables’ who are all the rage these days — as is their likely impact on elections.

The term ‘electable’ essentially refers to those individuals who exert control or have influence over a large number of biradaris, communities and political factions within their constituencies. It goes without saying that they have sufficient financial resources to fund their election campaign and, perhaps more importantly, run an efficient network for patronage distribution locally. It is, thus, money and influence and not necessarily the “science of elections” as Imran Khan would have us believe that defines the phenomenon of ‘electables’. They tend to change party affiliations almost every election cycle after assessing whether a party will come to power or not.

The influence of ‘electables’ is the most salient in Punjab where their current crop belongs to two main categories. Many of them who have abandoned the perceptibly sinking ship of PMLN are fair-weather hunters. They had earlier abandoned PMLN in 2002 to join PMLQ but after 2008 they ditched PMLQ to re-enter PMLN. Now they are nesting in PTI. Many others are erstwhile PPP bigwigs who have joined PTI simply because their former party’s political brand has collapsed in Punjab.

Within Punjab, ‘electables’ have the highest presence in southern parts of the province where their electoral impact has the potential to obliterate PMLN, at least in the upcoming election. In central Punjab, ‘electables’ will have a significant impact mostly in rural areas. In this region’s urban areas, their impact will depend on the extent to which Nawaz Sharif’s call for resistance resonates among the electorate. In either case, we should expect wild swings in electoral outcomes.

Balochistan is another region where the phenomenon of ‘electables’ changing parties in the run-up to an election is quite pervasive. A large number of them – including former ministers in the last provincial and federal governments – have recently joined a newly formed political entity, Balochistan Awami Party (BAP). In Balochistan’s chaotic and fragmented political landscape, they are expected to dominate electoral outcomes at the expense of other mainstream and federal parties.

The last important factor is the competitiveness of political parties and candidates at the provincial level. Its level can be directly gauged from margins of victory and defeat in the National Assembly constituencies in a province: higher margins mean low competitiveness and lower margins signal high competitiveness. By this measure, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan turn out to be the most competitive provinces in the country on the basis of the 2013 election results.

Victory (or defeat) margin on more than 40 per cent of the National Assembly seats in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was 10 per cent or less. This means that ‘electables’ did not matter on these seats as much as they do elsewhere. The competitiveness level in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is so high indeed that only a few National Assembly candidates in the province have been able to hold on to their seats for two consecutive elections since 2002.

Also, on most seats in the province, there were more than two parties – or candidates – that polled more than 10 per cent of the votes in 2013.

The vote share of different parties is also quite dispersed in the province rather than being concentrated in a single region. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUIF) polls votes in Mardan and Charsadda just as it does in Dera Ismail Khan and Bannu. Similarly, both Awami National Party and PPP have been receiving votes in many parts of the province — Peshawar district, Malakand division and Dera Ismail Khan. Same is the case with PTI. It polled sizeable number of votes in all the regions of the province in 2013 — even in areas where it candidates lost the election.

Elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa may become even more competitive if, as is being expected, turnout increases as compared to what it was in 2013.

Higher competitiveness in Balochistan could be a result of severe curbs on free and fair participation in elections in the province since the 2006 insurgency. Voter turnout has been low for the last two elections and results have been often contrived to keep Baloch nationalist parties out of power.

The most surprising reduction in competitiveness has happened in Punjab after both victory margins and the rate of retention of seats rose dramatically in the province in 2013. This perhaps has to do with PMLN’s landslide victory in the last election and the concomitant collapse of PPP vote. One should expect competitiveness to increase this time round, particularly in northern and central Punjab.

In southern Punjab, electoral competitiveness could be lower in 2018 than it was in 2013, especially if PMLN’s support collapses in this region due to the party’s unwillingness to back local calls for a separate province and a comprehensive victory for ‘electables’ who have changed sides from PMLN to PTI. The only likely factor that can keep the competitiveness level high in southern Punjab is a revival of PPP’s historical vote share in the region.

In contrast to Punjab, Sindh became marginally more competitive between 2008 and 2013. The question is whether the province will become more, or less, competitive in 2018.

The recently cobbled together Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA), comprising pro-establishment parties, powerful ‘electables’ and Sindhi nationalist groups, is expecting that electoral competitiveness continues to improve in Sindh. To ensure that, the alliance has entered into multiple seat adjustment deals with other parties and candidates — as is the case in Thar and Umerkot districts where GDA and PTI are cooperating with each other or in Ghotki and Badin districts where the candidates opposing PPP have the backing of almost all the major parties and alliances in the province. As the evidence suggests, a similar union in 2013, the Sindh Democratic Alliance, did manage to increase competition on some seats though victory margins on most others were big enough for PPP to sail through without much of a hiccup.

Given that Punjab-centric mainstream parties – PMLN and PTI – have not taken any interest in institutionalising themselves in this province, and hence giving an electoral blank cheque to PPP, not much is expected to change. Even if hidden hands wish to upset the political applecart, victory margins are generally so high in rural Sindh in PPP’s favour that any behind-the-scenes manoeuvring is unlikely to make a major difference.

Urban Sindh, however, is altogether a different country in 2018 when it is compared to 2013. With MQM having fragmented in at least two parts (MQM-Pakistan and Pak Sarzameen Party) and with continued internal differences hampering it from functioning smoothly, electoral space in Karachi and Hyderabad has opened up for the first time after 1988. Who will benefit the most from this window of opportunity is perhaps the biggest blind spot of the 2018 elections.

The problem has been compounded by some very peculiar constituency delimitations done in Karachi. Boundaries of the constituencies have been altered in such a way that some of them barely have geographical contiguity. Delimitation of certain other constituencies in the city looks like a painstaking exercise in creating ethnic hom*ogeneity within them.

Regardless of such purported gerrymandering, keen and competitive elections in most, if not all, constituencies in urban Sindh are expected. Since Karachi and Hyderabad have around 40 per cent of the province’s National Assembly seats, an increase in competitiveness in these cities will also increase the aggregate level of competitiveness in the whole province.

For the purpose of this analysis, those constituencies have been considered to be competitive where the winner’s victory margin over the runner-up was 10 per cent (or less) of the total votes polled in 2013. To overcome the problems posed by recent delimitations, competitiveness data has been collated district-wise rather than constituency-wise. A district has been deemed competitive if more than 50 per cent constituencies in it have been won or lost by a margin of 10 per cent (or less). Here is how these numbers may help us explore trends for the 2018 elections:

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

In 2013, nine out of the 23 districts in this province were competitive. One of them, Charsadda, is home to the leadership of ANP and Qaumi Watan Party (QWP). It saw its traditional representatives losing ground to others in the last election: JUIF secured one local seat and came second on the other. This election will be a test for both ANP chief Asfandyar Wali and QWP head Aftab Sherpao. The question staring them in the face is whether they will be able to salvage themselves electorally in their home base in the face of stiff competition from MMA and PTI.

Mardan, similarly, was a stronghold of ANP and PPP but they were virtually drowned by a PTI tsunami in 2013. ANP’s Amir Haider Hoti, who was chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between 2008 and 2013, could win his seat by a margin of less than two per cent of polled votes. Two other seats in the district were won by PTI. Will the older parties make a comeback in Mardan? Signs are that all – except one – contests in the district are going to be between ANP and MMA rather than between ANP and other parties.

Hangu, the most electorally competitive district in the country, has never chosen the same candidate for two consecutive National Assembly elections. PTI is hoping that it can buck the trend in the district — as well as in the whole of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It won Hangu’s lone National Assembly seat in 2013 by a narrow margin and is not quite comfortably placed to win it in the upcoming election.

Battagram and Haripur – two of the eight districts in Hazara division – also figure high on the competitiveness index. They have been PMLN (or, generally, Muslim League) strongholds but PTI and JUIF won local constituencies in 2013 though by the thinnest of margins. The incumbents look set to win again. If they do, their achievement will prove that some parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not as keen on throwing out the incumbents as they have been in the past — something that PTI’s leaders have been claiming for quite some time now.

In the northern, mountainous regions of the province, Chitral, Buner, Shangla and Lower Dir are also competitive districts. In Buner and Lower Dir, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) won seats with very narrow margins. With JUIF vote added to that of JI under their collective MMA banner, these seats will be under close scrutiny. They will determine how much electoral life is still left in JI which, otherwise, is fading out across Pakistan.

Punjab

Since electoral and political dynamics are different in different geographical areas in Punjab, it is best to assess its competitiveness by dividing it into northern, central and southern regions. Three out of four northern Punjab districts were competitive and this is where a major political change in expected once again. Rawalpindi is the biggest district in this region and one where a number of political luminaries contest elections. In 2013, four of the seven constituencies here saw the star-studded cast of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, Imran Khan and Shaikh Rasheed Ahmad all struggling to win their seats. In this election, PTI may carry the district thanks to the hawa and local ‘electables’ who have joined the party in droves. An aggressive Pakistan Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan eating into PMLN votes in almost all the constituencies in Rawalpindi will also end up benefitting PTI.

PMLN won the districts of Chakwal and Attock by very narrow margins in 2013 — as it did in Rawalpindi. These districts are expected to go to PTI this time round — and for the same reasons that exist in Rawalpindi.

Then there is an additional reason too.

A large part of the army recruitment is traditionally done from Chakwal and Attock. It is, therefore, unlikely that Nawaz Sharif’s politics of resistance against the army-dominated establishment will find much resonance here.

PMLN’s dominance in 16 districts of central Punjab, however, was so absolute in 2013 that only four of them – Jhang, Hafizabad, Gujrat and Mandi Bahauddin – were competitive. If the party can maintain its electoral domination of the non-competitive districts, it may still be in a position to at least lay a legitimate claim to form its government in Punjab and have a shot at coming back into power at the federal level as well.

Conversely, the same region is critical for PTI. The results of 80-odd National Assembly seats in central Punjab will decide if the party will be able to form governments in Islamabad and Lahore and whether this will be achieved with or without help from other parties.

What works in PMLN’s favour is that its resistance narrative is resonating strongly in this region. What goes against the party is that many of its star candidates have already joined PTI in many places. And, as in northern Punjab, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan has the ability to get a few thousand votes in almost every constituency in central Punjab, hurting thereby the electoral prospects of PMLN.

Some other signs are also emerging in districts such as Jhang and Gujrat that suggest that PMLN is in trouble in some parts of central Punjab. Local ‘electables’ have either joined PTI or have opted to contest elections as independents in the former district; and PTI has made a seat adjustment deal with PMLQ in the latter. In both places, PMLN’s presence has been shrinking of late.

These developments suggest that the momentum is not on PMLN’s side even in central Punjab and may remain so unless Nawaz Sharif’s legal troubles and defiance mobilise his supporters in this region to a degree not observed before. The so-called hawa being contrived in PTI’s favour may, additionally, help the party win not just competitive seats but also secure many other previously non-competitive ones through ‘electables’.

One important reason to temper this assessment is that PTI may have overplayed the ‘electables’ card. Its award of election tickets to people of all political hues and colours to ensure victory has caused widespread and intense resentment among its own associates and supporters. Many who have failed to secure a PTI ticket are now either contesting elections as independents or they have decided to support the party’s opponents. In tight races in Punjab’s heartland, the votes secured by some of these spoilers will be the difference between PTI winning an outright majority and forming governments on its own in Islamabad and possibly Lahore and it having to depend on other parties and independents to get into power.

In southern Punjab, PMLN won big in 2013 though only after a keen contest with both PPP and PTI and that is why nine out of 13 districts in the region were competitive in the last election. While PMLN secured close to two thirds of the seats in these districts, a fair number of independents went past the post first because of a large presence of ‘electables’ in the region. Most of them were big land owners. Others were custodians of some famous shrines. Some were both.

Four factors suggest that PMLN will not be able to win most of the seats that it won in this region in the last election. Firstly, the defection of local ‘electables’ to PTI has been almost total. Secondly, some ‘electables’ who have not joined PTI are contesting as independents with ‘jeep’ as their election symbol. Seven of them, in fact, had returned their PMLN nominations to run independently only a day before the election authorities finalised the candidate lists, leaving the party high and dry since it could no longer field alternative candidates.

Thirdly, PMLN is not taking a clear position on creating a separate province in southern Punjab which may lose the party a sizeable chunk of Seraiki-speaking voters throughout the region. Lastly, even though PPP lost the 2013 elections in southern Punjab, as it did elsewhere in the province, its vote share in these 13 districts was higher than in other districts in the province. If the party increases its vote bank in the region that will also put a dent into PMLN’s vote share.

The combined effect of all these factors is likely to take away many seats from PMLN in southern Punjab, with PTI benefitting the most from this change.

Sindh

As observed earlier, Sindh has traditionally been the least competitive province. PPP and MQM have accounted for around 80 per cent of the vote share in the province in most elections and have usually won with large margins in their respective strongholds. Interestingly, all the competitive districts in the province in 2013 happen to fall in the rural parts of the province which suggests that various challengers confronting PPP have secured some solid ground for themselves in certain areas. This competitiveness will cost the party between three to seven National Assembly seats out of the 38 that lie outside Karachi and Hyderabad.

One of these seats is spread over the desert region of Khairpur district and the other is in the neighbouring district of Sanghar — both strongholds of Pir Pagara’s Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PMLF). A third seat in Naushahro Feroze district has been traditionally held by the family of former prime minister Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi.

PPP may also lose in Ghotki due to defection by the chieftains of the local Mahar tribe who have joined hands with GDA and other anti-PPP players. Similarly, in Badin district, former PPP leader Zulfiqar Mirza and his wife Dr Fehmida Mirza are challenging the party with help from all its traditional opponents. Apart from a family vote bank that the Mirzas have cultivated over the years, some ‘extraneous’ influences may also be working in their favour.

On at least three other seats, PPP is facing tough challenges. Two of them – one in Jacobabad and the other in Thar – were actually won by the party in 2013 by very narrow margins.

In Karachi, however, PPP may outperform itself compared to 2013. It won only one National Assembly seat from the city last election but for the upcoming elections it is in the lead in at least three out of 21 local seats.

As pointed out earlier, the level of competitiveness in Karachi is expected to increase significantly as compared to the past due to constituency delimitations and MQM’s troubles. This is best illustrated by the fact that heads of three major parties – PMLN, PTI, PPP – are contesting elections from the city. No one can recall if that has happened before.

The new delimitations have created a number of ethnically hom*ogenous constituencies thus incentivising further what is already a norm in Karachi: voting along ethnic lines. This may benefit PPP, which tends to get Sindhi and Baloch votes in the city, in at least one constituency in district West. PTI and MMA could, similarly, be the beneficiaries of the consolidation of Pakhtun votes in the same district.

With its Bahadurabad and PIB factions having finally come together after a lot of bad blood, MQM is expected to win votes from Urdu-speaking communities – as it has always done – in Central, East and Korangi districts. Its share in seats, though, may decline significantly from 17 out of 20 in 2013 to somewhere between 10 and 12 out of 21 (since the city has got an additional seat in new delimitations).

Balochistan

The province is divided into three distinct regions with their own unique political dynamics. The northern parts are predominantly Pakhtun, with Quetta city being the only mixed population area. Then there is the old Kalat state area which is inhabited by the Baloch and is also the hub of Baloch nationalist politics. The third distinct region comprises areas bordering Sindh and Punjab – Lasbela, Jaffarabad and Nasirabad, Dera Bugti – which have been traditionally pro-Pakistan and relatively stable in political terms (except, of course, Dera Bugti which has experienced a lot of violence as well as military operations since the 2006 assassination of Nawab Akbar Bugti).

Nine out of the 14 National Assembly seats in Balochistan were competitive in 2013 — five of them being in Baloch areas. Much has changed since then though.

The Senate elections last year unleashed a flurry of events that have culminated in the elimination of PMLN from the electoral scene of the province. Concomitant to this has been the emergence of a pro-establishment entity, Balochistan Awami Party (BAP), which mainly comprises of former provincial heavyweights of PMLN and members of the pro-Islamabad political elite. Their coming together suggests that electoral outcomes in the Baloch-dominated National Assembly constituencies will be decided as much in polling booths as in back-room pacts and deals.

BAP is trying to make its electoral debut in areas traditionally dominated by Baloch nationalist parties — Akhtar Mengal’s Balochistan National Party (BNP)and Hasil Bizenjo’s National Party (NP). The latter is facing two major problems: criticism by voters over its failure to deliver on its development promises as well as its inability to address human rights abuses – such as the missing persons phenomenon – that arise out of separatist violence and military operations to counter that violence. NP is also considered close to PMLN, another reason why it may not do well in the polls.

As far as Akhtar Mengal and his BNP are concerned, it is not yet clear whether their relationship with the establishment is of cooperation or of hostility. He may get some electoral traction because of the multisided electoral deals he has made — with PPP in southeastern Balochistan, with MMA in central parts of the province and with BAP elsewhere.

The region comprising Lasbela, Nasirabad and Jaffarabad districts is the least electorally competitive area in the province. It is dominated by Pakistani nationalist politicians such as the Jams of Lasbela, Bhootanis, Jamalis and Khosos. Electoral competitions on seats in these districts are usually intra-tribe or inter-tribe affairs. In Jaffarabad, for instance, an interesting contest will take place between two Jamalis: a PTI candidate backed by former prime minister Zafarullah Jamali is pitched against Changez Jamali, a PPP leader whose father Taj Jamali was once chief minister of Balochistan.

In Pakhtun areas, the four seats that were competitive are mostly contested in each election by the representatives of JUIF and Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP). The two parties also dominated the 2013 electoral contests for those seats — as winners and runners-up on most of them. PKMAP, that has been firmly pro-Nawaz Sharif for more than a decade now, may be at a disadvantage for the upcoming election for the same reasons that are hurting PMLN nationally. The likely beneficiary of this will be MMA (of which JUIF is a major component). PTI, and to a lesser extent PPP, may also gain foothold in some of these constituencies.

The writer is a senior research associate at the Collective for Social Science Research.

Data coordination: Namrah Zafar Moti

Data compilation: Amal Hashim, Saad Sohail, Maisam Hyder Ali, Sarah Dara, Umair Javed and Kabeer Dawani

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of the Herald. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

Everything looks fine as a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight is readying to takeoff from Karachi to Islamabad. The ground staff is making last minute checks and the cabin crew is welcoming passengers, directing them to their seats. As soon as some passengers take their seats, they start feeling unusually stuffy. They pull, twist and roll the overhead air conditioning vents but nothing works. Many others are struggling to stow their luggage in the compartments above their seats. The commotion blocks the way for other passengers. Requests for room to pass are made, only to be ignored. Nothing seems to be in order.

By the time the chief pilot asks the ground staff to leave the plane, flight PK 308 is already 10 minutes behind its scheduled departure time of 4 pm on October 8, 2017. It takes several more minutes before the plane finally takes off.

Not without a few more hiccups though.

Lights in the cabin suddenly go off as the engines start rolling. “Only PIA shuts down power supply of the aircraft before takeoff and landing,” says a passenger still trying unsuccessfully to open the air vent. Another passenger, who wants to read something, tries to switch on the reading light after the cabin goes dark. The light does not work. He places his finger on the call bell. To his dismay, that also does not work. He then uses his vocal chords to call a flight attendant. She comes to his help but cannot switch on the light. After poking at the switch panel several times, she leaves the passengers to his own devices.

The cabin in another Karachi-Islamabad flight, PK 372, on October 20, 2017 is so cramped that passengers cannot recline their seats even by a couple of inches without hurting the legs of those sitting behind them. Trying to eat during the flight is an exercise in gymnastics as the food tray opens and rests on the passenger’s ribs. “The plane has been leased from an airline that served no in-flight meals,” a flight attendant responds rather sheepishly to complaints by many passengers struggling to keep food and drinks spilling on to their clothes.

This, in a nutshell, explains the state of affairs at PIA. The airline seems incapable of running its planes on time and in an orderly manner. It also does not appear to be making informed decisions on what kind of planes it needs.

The two flights also make it obvious that PIA is cutting costs where it should not — since those cuts are reducing the quality of its service. Pay regular prices but expect only budget airline facilities — that is Pakistan’s national flag carrier for you.

When Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) came into power in 2013, the airline was in very bad shape. It posted a staggering annual loss of 44.5 billion rupees at the end of that year. In his budget speech in the summer of 2014, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said the government wanted to restructure PIA in order to improve its performance as well as its financial health so that it could be sold to the private sector at a good price.

The restructuring had, indeed, started already.

In June 2013, after just a month in office, the government took away civil aviation and airport security from the control of the Ministry of Defence. It created a new aviation division, putting the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority (PCAA), the Airport Security Force (ASF), the Pakistan Meteorological Department and PIA under it. The position of an adviser to the prime minister, equivalent to a minister, was created to head the division and Shujaat Azeem, a former air force pilot, was appointed to it. He was then working as the chief executive officer of the Royal Airport Services, an Islamabad-based private company that specialises in providing ground handling services to airlines in Pakistan, including PIA. His brother, Tariq Azeem, once served as state minister for information in Pervez Musharraf’s regime but switched sides to the PMLN in 2012. Shujaat Azeem had also worked as the personal pilot of Rafic Hariri, a Lebanese business tycoon who became his country’s prime minister twice and was considered close to Nawaz Sharif before he was assassinated in February 2005.

The appointment became immediately controversial —and not because of Shujaat Azeem’s personal links.

In July 2013, the Supreme Court called into question his posting while hearing a constitutional petition on the allegations of corruption in the construction of a new airport in Islamabad. The court cited his removal from the Pakistan Air Force after a court martial, his Canadian nationality and the potential conflict of interest involving his position at the Royal Airport Services as sufficient grounds for him to relinquish his job. So he did.

Less than six months later, Nawaz Sharif reappointed Shujaat Azeem as his special assistant on aviation while court proceedings against him were still going on. In December 2015, the Supreme Court restrained him from exercising his powers as special assistant and subsequently – in March 2016 – declared him ineligible to hold any public office. He had to quit his job. Again.

Controversy over Shujaat Azeem’s appointment was one major reason why the government’s plans for restructuring and privatising PIA fell apart even before they could take off.

Then came another blow.

In January 2016, the parliament passed the Pakistan International Airlines Corporation (Conversion) Act 2016 that repealed the Pakistan International Airlines Corporation Act 1956 and changed PIA’s status from a government-owned entity to a public limited company. The legislation was meant to be a precursor to the airline’s complete privatisation. PIA employees were immediately up in arms. They observed countrywide strikes disrupting flights and holding sit-ins at their offices as well as major airports. They demanded an immediate repeal of the law and rejected even a partial privatisation. The stand-off became so intense at one stage that there were physical clashes between the striking employees and the security agencies. In one such melee in Karachi, two employees lost their lives, leading to the resignation of PIA chairman Nasir Jaffer.

These debacles coincided with another important development.

In February 2016, the government appointed Bernd Hildenbrand – a German citizen who has 40 years of work experience in the aviation industry – as PIA’s chief operating officer. In May that year, he was given additional charge of acting chief executive officer of the airline. Like Shujaat Azeem, controversy dogged him from the start.

####If there is one phrase that can describe the PIA’s condition it is that the airline is in the ‘stone age’ today when compared to other airlines from the Gulf States and South Asian region.

The security and intelligence agencies did not give a security clearance for his appointment. This was followed by criticism of his fat pay cheque and massive perks and privileges that came under serious scrutiny at multiple hearings in the Senate’s standing committees. In December 2016, he was barred from leaving Pakistan after reports emerged that he had sent a flightworthy aircraft (A310) to a German airport without first finalising an agreement for its sale.

Three months later, he was alleged to have caused a loss of 1.8 billion rupees to PIA through a premier service he had launched for business class travel between Pakistan and the United Kingdom, leasing a plane from the SriLankan Airlines at an exorbitant price. He tendered his resignation in April 2017 and left Pakistan — but not without generating another controversy: who let him leave when his name was on the exit control list?

All these fiascos meant that there could be next to no development on privatisation. As part of the restructuring efforts, however, the government had already brought in a couple of chairmen from the private sector and also expanded PIA’s board of directors, mostly through inductions of businessmen and management professionals.

Safdar Anjum, general secretary of PIA’s Senior Staff Association, sees the change as he has seen similar measures taken by several other governments in the past — cosmetic and ineffective. “I simply could not make out what the government wanted to achieve from [legal and administrative changes in PIA],” he says.

After Shujaat Azeem’s resignation, Nawaz Sharif made Sardar Mehtab Ahmed Khan his adviser on aviation. He has been a federal minister and a chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the 1990s and has worked as the same province’s governor between April 2014 and February 2016 but he has no previous experience in aviation.

On a recent October afternoon, he offers his prayers inside his office on the fourth floor of a government building in Islamabad’s Blue Area before sitting down for an interview. “The employees treat [PIA] like any other government department, undermining its commercial importance,” he says as he sets out to explain the airline’s decline. “They refuse to improve their performance and thereby bring improvement in the overall working of PIA.” In his opinion, various employees’ unions and staff associations have assumed the same disruptive role that they have been playing in other government-run institutions.

Then he offers an additional explanation. “PIA has been working without any business plan for a long time [and has] become a directionless entity.” If it has to survive as a commercial entity, he says, then it needs new rules and regulations and a new work culture so that it could fulfil the demands of a modern aviation industry. It was these objectives that resulted in the legislative change in PIA’s status, he says.

Changing the law was easy.

The changes it intends to usher in have yet to matrialise even after the passage of more than 20 months. The ownership pattern of the airline still remains the same: the government owns more than 90 per cent of its shares; the rest are in the ownership of its employees and some private institutions. And its operational and financial performance is as bad as it has ever been.

Khan acknowledges all this. For the situation to take a turn for the better, he remarks, the airline requires the induction of a modern aircraft fleet, introduction of latest technology, appointment of an efficient management and preparation and upgrading of travel packages in accordance with the market demands. A tall order for an airline that has an ageing fleet of only 33 planes – operated by a massive staff of 16,500 regular employees and 4,500 contract officials – and suffers from structural complexities made worse by the gross mismanagement of its affairs for more than two decades.

“PIA’s plane-to-employee ratio is far higher than that of other airlines,” says Khan. He then realises that his comments can be construed as hinting at staff dismissals so he immediately adds: “I am not making this comparison because we intend to make any decision which is against the employees but the comparison is aimed at highlighting the reality.” His nervous explanation is a strong indicator of how powerful and disruptive the employees’ unions and staff associations can be.

Representatives of the staff, however, have often forcefully argued that the plane-to-employee ratio is calculated incorrectly. It does not take into account the fact that PIA does many things on its own such as maintenance and engineering, ground handling, ticketing and reservation, in-flight catering — things that most other airlines outsource. Khan conceded there may be some weight in the argument but it still does not justify overstaffing in many departments. “The engineering department has 4,500 engineers, technicians and other support staff (including both regular and contractual employees). Such a large number of people should have been handling at least 450 aircraft,” he says.

The entire ground handling department, according to him, is also redundant. It provides no services to PIA because its equipment is all faulty and broken down, he says. “The airline has to hire ground-handling manpower and machinery from other companies.” The large-scale catering department, similarly, exists at all the stations where PIA operates but its services are used only in Karachi and Islamabad. “Catering has been outsourced for all the rest of the stations.”

The strength of its staff and the facilities PIA offers to passengers, he says, do not match. “If there is one phrase that can describe PIA’s condition it is that the airline is in the ‘Stone Age’ today when compared to other airlines from the Gulf States and South Asian region.”

Saleem Mandviwalla briefly served as federal finance minister in 2013 and has also worked as state minister for finance and investment during the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government in 2008-13. These days he heads the Senate Standing Committee on Finance, Revenue, Economic Affairs, Statistics and Privatization and maintains a regular watch on PIA’s affairs.

He recalls being in a government briefing given to parliamentarians before the passage of the new law to govern PIA. He remembers the officials providing the briefing as saying that a new company – Pakistan Airways – would be set up to handle the airline’s flight and cargo operations while the rest of its departments – ground handling, catering, engineering, booking and reservations, etc – would stay under the charge of the old company. When PIA employees got wind of these plans, they feared that new staff would be hired for the new company, relegating all of them to the old one that would be made redundant and eventually sold or closed down, he says.

So they started protesting.

The parliament took note of their protests and made it mandatory for the government to hire staff for the proposed Pakistan Airways only from the existing PIA employees, says Mandviwalla. The government then practically shelved the plan to create the new company (even though it still exists on paper) since that was what its intention was — to engage new staff and dump the old one, he claims.

The structures within the PIA are obsolete. The company is overstaffed by far and its internal administration has reached ridiculously low levels.

Mandviwalla says he and his party, PPP, do not oppose the privatisation of loss-making, state-owned enterprises including PIA but “we are against the way the privatisation is being done under this government.” He cites the example of how Heavy Electrical Complex, a government-owned company based in Hattar, was being privatised. “The government almost sold it to a Kenyan company – Cargill Holdings Limited that had paid-up capital of only 1,000 US dollars – on the pretext that no other company had submitted a bid [to acquire the complex].” The deal could not go through because banks refused to honour cheques issued by the Kenyan firm, he reveals.

Mandviwalla is also critical of the fact that Irfan Elahi, federal secretary of the aviation division, is simultaneously working as PIA’s chairman. By virtue of his former job, Elahi heads the CAA that regulates all airlines operating in Pakistan — one of which he heads by dint of his latter position, the senator explains. This creates a serious conflict of interest, he says, possibly hurting the working of both the organisations. “Along with six other senators, I have submitted a call attention notice in the Senate to press the government to take one position back from him.”

Khan, the aviation adviser, says it was his decision to appoint Elahi to the two positions together in order to “create a sense of responsibility and accountability” in PIA. This arrangement is temporary, he argues, because PIA requires an effective supervisory role during its restructuring. The airline, he says, has developed a habit of not taking the regulator’s notices and warnings seriously. “This has completely eroded its sense of responsibility and has been a major reason why its flights have been banned in different regions across the globe in recent years.” To rectify the situation, “regulations are strictly needed to be implemented”, he says, suggesting that giving the task of running the airline and enforcing the regulations to the same person makes that task easy.

And, Khan insists, the arrangement does not involve any conflict of interest because “the regulator is a government department and the organisation it is regulating is also owned by the government”.

Pakistan has an open skies policy. Any foreign airline can get landing rights in the country through an agreement with the government — a policy that, many people allege, has contributed to PIA’s financial demise. The national flag carrier certainly cannot compete with foreign airlines with deep pockets, modern fleets and high-quality hospitality services.

That is true, Khan says, and mostly because the open skies policy has been very broadly and liberally implemented. This has not only hurt PIA’s interests but also the interests of other airlines based in Pakistan, he says. “We should ensure that foreign airlines are not given landing rights liberally in the future. We shall also see how we can reduce the frequency of [existing] flights by foreign airlines [within the provisions of the agreements signed with them].” But, he hastens to add, PIA cannot thrive even if it is provided the most protected market.

The airline will never get back the monopoly it once enjoyed. The open skies policy is here to stay. It is an important component of this government’s aviation policy — announced in 2015 and formulated by Shujaat Azeem. Firstly, reads the policy, open skies are an international trend: “In 2003, there were 87 [open sky] agreements. In 2012, there were over 400. [And] … the trend is increasing.” Secondly, according to the authors of the aviation policy, average traffic growth due to open skies agreements has been 12-35 per cent. Nothing seems to beat these numbers — certainly not a loss-making airline.

The only option for PIA is to adapt to the latest trends but it’s failing to do that too.

Landing rights agreements are reciprocal, says Khan. They give PIA the right to operate as many flights to and from other countries as their airlines are operating to and from Pakistan, he says. If PIA is not fully using these allotted slots, it is because of its own weaknesses, he says.

Mandviwalla agrees that PIA can utilise the open skies policy to its advantage. He cites the example of a deal the PPP government was working on with Turkish Airlines in 2009. If that deal had gone through, he claims, PIA would have become profitable by getting 80 per cent share of the revenues to be generated from the Turkish Airline’s flights operating to and from Pakistan. Most of the passengers being taken by various Gulf airlines from Pakistan to either Dubai, Doha or Abu Dhabi for their onward journeys to Europe and the Americas could have travelled to Istanbul, earning PIA massive revenues, he argues. In addition to that, he says, the national flag carrier was to retain the right to operate flights to the United Kingdom and France. “[PIA] was also going to become a part of the powerful Star Alliance network of airlines.”

The employees did not like the deal. As soon as a pre-agreement memorandum of understanding was signed, strikes erupted in the airline and the government was forced to call off the whole thing. PIA’s managing director who was pushing the deal had to resign. “I still could not understand why our government succumbed to the baseless allegations of selling out routes while the deal was heavily in favour of PIA,” says Mandviwalla.

Stories about an Airbus A310 aircraft having gone missing from PIA fleet hit headlines a couple of months ago. Mandviwalla claims credit for being the first to point out the missing plane. Another senator, Tahir Mashhadi of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, appeared on news television channels on October 9, 2017 and claimed that Bernd Hildenbrand had taken the plane with him to Germany.

Hildenbrand’s own version – not as sensational as some of the stories doing the rounds in the media – offers a peak into the sorry state of both PIA’s fleet and its affairs.

He claims the 2015 National Aviation Policy deemed that four A310 planes owned by PIA had reached their structural life. No other airline in the world uses these old aircraft – that were built in the early 1990s – for passenger services anymore, he further claims. The planes malfunctioned on a number of occasions — with their landing gear not functioning, flaps not working and other parts getting stuck, he says. “Keeping them flying was a grave safety risk and PIA’s board of directors was duly informed about it.” The airline’s own maintenance and engineering department as well as the CAA endorsed the idea of taking the planes out of operations, he says.

The aircraft were duly grounded.

PIA tried, unsuccessfully, to get rid of them when Nasir Jaffer was its chairman between October 2014 and February 2016, says Hildenbrand. The airline approached Airbus, the manufacturer of the planes, seeking to exchange them with A330 aircraft. Airbus did not show any interest in the deal. It was in these circ*mstances that PIA decided to sell the aircraft while they were still fit to fly, Hildenbrand says.

An international tender was floated on July 31, 2016. Airbus as well as some other possible buyers – such as passenger airlines, cargo airlines and leasing companies – were directly approached to invite bids from them. “[But] not a single bid was received,” he says. Only an airport in the German city of Leipzig showed interest in buying one aircraft to use it for an exhibition and possibly for training, he says.

####When compared to the leading airlines [of that time] like Swiss International Air Lines, Qantas, Air France, British Airways or Lufthansa, it was at best an average airline in the 1960s and 1970s.

Here is what happened next, according to Hildenbrand: in August 2016, PIA management decided to invite another round of bids to fulfil the requirements of the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority; the tender was issued on November 9 last year and the airport authorities in Leipzig duly participated in the bidding process with their offer. Before the sale of the plane could go through, a London-based company, M-S Aviation, approached PIA to acquire the plane on a short lease so that it could be used in a movie; the aircraft was flown to Malta and earned 210,000 euros for its part in the movie.

After the short lease ended, the plane went to Leipzig where it was to take part in an exhibition. It has been parked there since then.

“The airport authorities there have approached PIA several times to find out what the airline wants to do with the plane but so far nobody has answered them,” Hildenbrand claims. Back home in Pakistan, media and parliamentarians are crying themselves hoarse over the fact that the Leipzig airport has not paid a single penny for the plane so far.

Aviation adviser Khan says PIA’s management and the government knew about the departure of the plane since it left Pakistan only after CAA had granted it special permission to fly. But then he offers a few correctives to Hildenbrand’s account: the deal for the plane’s sale was never authorised by the top management of the airline, he says, citing an internal PIA inquiry. The inquiry also holds Hildenbrand and PIA’s then director of procurement and logistics responsible for the plane’s journey to Leipzig, says Khan, stopping short of naming the director.

Mandviwalla identifies him as Air Commodore Imran Akhtar, brother of Lieutenant General Rizwan Akhtar who recently sought early retirement and was the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s top spy agency, between November 2014 and December 2016. “[Imran Akhtar was instrumental in] giving permission for the plane to fly out of the country,” says Mandviwalla.

He claims to being privy to another issue involving Imran Akhtar.

In early 2016, PIA decided to replace seats in the business class section of its five Boeing 777 airplanes. Before the bids were invited, alleges Mandviwalla, Imran Akhtar selected a contractor and paid him four billion rupees as advance without following the government’s procurement rules to do the job — but the seats were never replaced. “During [a subsequent] hearing of the Senate’s standing committee, I asked him how he could give the money [without tenders]. “His reply was he had the approval of the managing director,” says the senator. “I asked him if he could have done the same thing in the Pakistan Air Force. He replied, “No sir”. When I asked him how he could be doing something in PIA that he could not do in the air force, he kept quiet.”

Such allegations of corruption and tales of mismanagement and misconduct among PIA staff are legion. Khan concedes that indiscipline, leakages and irregularities were tolerated in PIA in the past but he has decided to put an end to them. The airline’s internal inquiries into leakages and irregularities will be completed promptly and cases will be referred to other agencies and institutions for investigation and trial without delay, he says.

This is only half as good in practice as it sounds and Khan knows that. The problem is that the employees facing action often move courts and get stay orders on proceedings against them, thereby maintaining their posts, he adds.

Khan also complains of the frequent negative press the airline gets.

He arrived in Karachi on October 9 this year to inaugurate a refurbished Boeing 777 aircraft. The refurbishing consisted of minor repairs and other adjustments done on all Boeing 777s and A330s in the PIA fleet by the airline’s own engineering and maintenance department with a small sum of one million US dollars. “They had been in the same depressing shape for years. The cabin crew had to face embarrassment due to their shabby and untidy interiors,” he says.

The next day, he flew back to Islamabad in the refurbished plane along with a media contingent that he had brought with him from the federal capital.

A few days later, he appears unhappy at how the media covers PIA negatively, almost always. “I must say with regret that PIA faces bashing from the media and parliament on a daily basis. Even the government’s own ministers do not spare it from criticism. Nobody realises what damage their words cause,” he says. “They shatter the passengers’ confidence and cause insurance premiums to go up besides [sometimes] leading to supplies being stopped.”

Bernd Hildenbrand has become synonymous with scandal. Parliamentary hearings are going on to investigate his departure from Pakistan earlier this year as well as some major operational and financial decisions he took during his tenure as PIA’s acting chief executive officer.

Yet, nobody questions his knowledge and understanding of the airline business.

He believes PIA still has the chance to turn itself around. “Pakistan is a huge and growing country and has many cities with several million inhabitants. Pakistanis have also spread over the world, especially to England, Canada, the United States, Australia and the Gulf,” he says. All this theoretically provides the airline a market full of possibilities.

But to realise these possibilities, he says, PIA must change a number of things that have contributed to its current dire state. The biggest negative factor, he says, is the strong government interference in the working of the airline. Rather than ensuring that people with strong professional backgrounds get top management positions, every political administration has tried to appoint its partisans to PIA even when they had no vision or knowledge of aviation, he says. This has given rise to an unhelpful trend: every time the government changes, PIA’s management changes too. Sometimes, the airline’s management changes more than once within a single government’s tenure. Since the PMLN government came into power in 2013, for instance, PIA’s management has changed at least three times — if not more.

Very little time is given to successive managements that, consequently, cannot make any medium and long-term plans, Hildenbrand says. The vacuum thus created has been used by unions and associations, he adds. “They basically manage PIA in many areas and, of course, they are not interested in the economic success of the airline but in [the interests of] their own clientele [that ranges] from a loader to a pilot.”

Even more importantly, says Hildenbrand, no major investments have been made and no good infrastructure developed in the airline since the 1970s. “The structures within PIA are obsolete. The company is overstaffed by far and its internal administration has reached ridiculously low levels.” That is why new, innovative and rich airlines have emerged and have stripped PIA of thousands of passengers, offering them better service, better reliability, better time maintenance and better connections to the world, he argues. Even within Pakistan, he adds, other airlines have newer aircraft, lower ticket prices and better online support systems than PIA.

[Bashing in the media] shatters the passengers’ confidence and causes insurance premiums to go up besides [sometimes] leading to supplies being stopped.

Hildenbrand dismisses the nostalgic view that PIA was once among the best airlines in the world. The simple truth is that this perception was never really true, he says. When compared to the leading airlines [of that time] like Swiss International Air Lines, Qantas, Air France, British Airways or Lufthansa, it was at best an average airline in the 1960s and 1970s.

The sentimental rhetoric of taking the airline back to its glory days is also seldom backed up with rational decision-making.

Hildenbrand talks of a March 2016 meeting with the prime minister to illustrate how whimsical decision-making has been vis-à-vis the PIA. The government gave him the task to improve the airline on a short notice – that is, by August 14 of that year – and bring in “brand new aircraft” to launch what became PIA’s premier service. This despite the fact that the “introduction of new aircraft takes three to five years”.

The only possibility, he says, was to lease a recently-made aircraft which could compete with planes from Emirates and Etihad airlines. Even this option had its limitations, he claims: PIA’s financial reputation is so bad that no leasing company wants to take the risk of leasing aircraft to it; the demand to start the premier service came at a time when rising airlines like Turkish Airlines were buying and leasing almost every aircraft available in the market. “Only three A330 aircraft from SriLankan Airlines met the requirements put forward by the prime minister.” And, Hildenbrand claims in an email correspondence from Germany, the then chairman of the airline and its entire board of directors endorsed the plan to acquire those planes.

In the end, PIA acquired just one A330 that landed in Pakistan on Independence Day in 2016. It was meant to fly on the Islamabad-Lahore-London route. All its flights were on time and its resonance within the clients was fantastic,” Hildenbrand says.

Good customer reviews did not earn the service the money it needed to sustain itself. In documents presented to the National Assembly in March 2017, the aviation division said the premier service earned a gross revenue of 1.8 billion rupees by December 31 last year whereas total expenditure on it by the same day stood at 3.9 billion rupees. “A single aircraft can never become profitable,” Hildenbrand argues. If the service had expanded up to five aircraft, as was originally planned, it would have achieved a break-even, he says.

Less than eight months after its launch, the premier service was shut down in March this year and PIA returned the aircraft to SriLankan Airlines along with 19 million US dollars as lease charges.

When the PMLN government came into power in the summer of 2013, PIA’s long-term loan stood at 32.67 billion rupees. Within one year, it jumped to 50.53 billion rupees. According to a PIA report, the amount of this debt skyrocketed to 94.85 billion rupees by March 31, 2017 — just short of 200 per cent more than what it was in 2013.

The government has also provided the airline several bailout packages either in the form of financial guarantees to secure loans from commercial banks and other financial institutions or through cash injections for debt servicing. In 2013 alone, the government gave PIA 14.7 billion rupees both as guarantees for securing new loans and for repayment of the old debts. In 2015, the airline received another sum – 3.97 billion rupees – to help it conclude a deal for 124.9 million US dollars worth of plane overhauling. Between 2013 and 2017, the federal government’s guarantees helped PIA secure loans of 341.7 million US dollars from foreign lenders and 15 billion rupees from local ones.

Most of these funds have been spent on overhauling, refurbishing and leasing of planes. If the airline subsequently failed to improve its performance and revenue generation, says Safdar Anjum, general secretary of PIA’s Senior Staff Association (SSA), someone should have been held accountable for incurring debts that did not yield any positive results. “If the decisions are not paying off or are proving wrong, the management and the government should take responsibility for them.”

Instead, he alleges, PIA employees are often made scapegoats for anything that goes wrong in the airline. He cites figures from PIA’s annual report for 2016 to explain that the entire salary bill of the employees – including all their benefits and perks – stood at 15 billion rupees in that year. This constitutes only 20 per cent of the total expenditure on what PIA counts as ‘cost of services’ that stood at a little over 76 billion rupees in 2016 and does not include expenditure on fuel and debt-servicing. If these two expenses are also taken into account, the salary bill comes further down to 13 per cent of the airline’s overall annual expenses, Anjum claims.

The official auditors of the airline went a step ahead and disclosed in their 2016 report that the airline is not fulfilling some of its financial obligations towards its employees. It did not deposit 10.20 billion rupees along with its markup of 4.18 billion rupees that it was required to as its contribution to its staff’s provident fund “within the stipulated time”.

The auditors also pointed to something even more worrisome. PIA, they said, “incurred a net loss” of 45.38 billion rupees in the year that ended on December 31, 2016, resulting in the ballooning of its accumulated losses to 316.74 billion rupees. This, they observed, made its “current liabilities exceed its current assets” by 195.55 billion rupees. “These conditions along with other factors … indicate the existence of a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt on [PIA’s] ability to continue as a going concern,” they noted.

The management says it is taking mitigating measures so that the airline remains a going concern. For how much longer, nobody knows.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of the Herald under the headline 'Twilight zone'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Allahdad was woken up in the middle of the night by the thunder of shelling and what sounded like Kalashnikov fire. Half-asleep, he and his neighbours stumbled to the rooftops of their mud-brick homes in Chaman city to determine the source of the ominous sounds. A battle seemed to be taking place a couple of kilometres to the west, near a border crossing that links Chaman with the town of Wesh in Afghanistan.

Allahdad went back to sleep only to wake up again at 5:30 am. He was to report for duty in less than two hours as the member of a census-taking team in his native area. At 7:00 am, he arrived at a local base of the Frontier Corps (FC) about 2.5 kilometres from the Afghan border. The officers there told him that he and another enumerator were to conduct census in Roghani check post area behind Chaman’s Government Degree College. As soon as they left the base in an FC vehicle, they found that they were instead headed westwards. Allahdad was surprised. He asked the FC officials accompanying him why they were going towards the border where fighting was taking place. He received no answer.

Allahdad and his companion spent the next five hours within the battle zone, sandwiched between two militaries exchanging heavy fire. “We took cover behind a wall,” he says on the phone from Chaman weeks later. A tank was posted right behind them. It was firing shells inside Afghanistan. Carrying only green waistcoats that had ‘Pakistan Census 2017’ written on them and carrying stationary needed for census taking, they felt like sitting ducks. Allahdad says he repeatedly asked the FC soldiers to provide weapons to him and his two associates. “If you want us to fight for our country, then at least give us a weapon,” he said to the soldiers.

Allahdad, a school teacher with 20 years of experience, would later find out that firing from the Pakistani side on that day in early May this year was in retaliation to what a military spokesman called “unprovoked” hostility from the Afghan side towards census takers and the FC soldiers accompanying them. The number of people who lost their lives in the crossfire remains disputed — it could be anywhere between 15 and 50 depending on who is counting. The dead include Afghan soldiers, Pakistani security personnel and civilians from both sides.

Prior to the skirmish, tension had been building up for days between the border forces of the two countries over Pakistani efforts to conduct the census in two border villages — Killi Luqman and Killi Jahangir. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan claim that the villages are located on their side of the Durand Line, a 2,600-kilometre border that has been often contested since it was drawn to separate Afghan territories from British India in 1893.

Following the border clash, Allahdad took a break for a few days before returning to his census duty, but he was still wondering why he and the other enumerator were taken right into the middle of the battle. Such scepticism towards the state in general and security forces in particular is not uncommon in his native Balochistan — a province where the army and other paramilitary forces are not always treated with love and respect.

This perception of the security forces could have had serious implications for a task recently assigned to the army: to accompany census teams and note down and verify demographic information about the occupants of households — in addition to the documentation done by civilian enumerators. The ostensible objective of this move, as explained by Rana Mohammad Afzal Khan, parliamentary secretary for finance, revenue, economic affairs, statistics and privatisation, during a speech in the National Assembly last year, was to add credence to the data collected during the Sixth National Census carried out in two phases between March 15 and May 25.

Asif Bajwa, chief statistician of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) and the man in charge of the census exercise, also said that the soldiers were meant to be “neutral observers” who would conduct an on-the-spot verification of the demographic data collected.

Their neutrality, however, has never been a given.

The United Nations stipulates that every country conduct a national census every ten years. The 1973 Constitution requires the same, though Pakistan has twice failed to do so since 1981. The census due in 1991 was carried out in 1998 and the one to be conducted in 2008 was finally done in 2017.

Nine years in the making and marred with a failed attempt in 2011, the latest census had a tough crowd to please even before it began, including a three-member Supreme Court bench — headed by then chief justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali. After hearing multiple petitions for months and listening to one reason after another for the delay – including the unavailability of security officials to provide protection to census staff in strife-torn areas – the judges lost their patience in December 2016 and told the government to hold the census within the next three months — or face legal action. The PBS – formed in 2011 through a merger between the Federal Bureau of Statistics, the Population Census Organisation (PCO) and the Agricultural Census Organisation – scrambled to make arrangements to get it done within the short time given to it, leaving many gaps and lacunae in its procedures and processes.

Fieldwork for the census was carried out with the active involvement of 200,000 soldiers from the army. They were not just meant to provide security to 91,000 civilian census workers but were also tasked to complement data collection and cross-check it on the ground. In most areas, other security agencies such as the navy, FC, Rangers, police and Levies were additionally engaged in providing security to census teams.

This was not the first time that the government had turned to the army for assistance in collecting demographic data. The soldiers’ involvement in the exercise was first considered shortly after the controversial house count in 1991 that showed that Sindh’s population had more than doubled since the previous census in 1981 — from 19.03 million to over 50 million people. That the province’s population remains below that figure by two million people even after the 2017 census suggests how flagrantly flawed the 1991 numbers were. The reason for the highly inflated numbers, analysts speculate, was that the Mohajir Qaumi Movement, which later became Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), forced enumerators to overcount households in urban parts of the province, especially Karachi, where the party’s support was concentrated.

The then federal administration of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) consequently decided that it needed the army’s help to go ahead with the next phase of the census — a headcount. But the entire census had to be called off indefinitely after it became apparent that even the army would not be able to move, and count houses and people freely, in many parts of Karachi and Hyderabad due to resistance by the MQM cadre.

When the census finally took place in 1998, it did have soldiers accompanying enumerators. Their presence was meant to ensure that political parties and groups with vested interests could not influence or harass civilian census takers into fudging the data. The soldiers were also supposed to double-check if members of any community, group or political party were lying to census officials in order to inflate their numbers.

Yet, various sections of society in various parts of the country rejected the results of the 1998 census as being flawed, if not entirely false. In Balochistan, many Pakhtuns refused to be counted at all because of what they perceived to be a biased approach towards data collection. The Sindh Assembly also rejected the numbers as being doctored. “When things come to Islamabad they are cooked up and somebody else takes the broth,” Benazir Bhutto, then heading the parliamentary opposition, said in the National Assembly. She was apprehensive that the census results were fudged to benefit the then ruling party, PMLN.

The 2011 survey, too, could not go beyond house count even when it was conducted under the army’s supervision. Asif Bajwa, who was working as the PBS chief at that time too, refers to its results as “atrocious”. Habibullah Khattak, then chief census commissioner, also admitted before the National Assembly’s committee on economic affairs and statistics that the house count in Sindh did not match the trends of previous censuses and various demographic studies.

The same pattern of dismissing – or at least disputing – demographic data persisted after the PBS released the preliminary “summary” results for the 2017 census late this August, putting the country’s total population at 207.8 million. Several political parties, including the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) that rules in Sindh, believe that the province’s population – put at about 47.9 million people and showing an annual growth rate of 2.41 per cent – is grossly understated.

According to MQM’s estimation, the census data is a conspiracy to undermine the party’s urban vote bank since it shows Karachi’s population to be 14.9 million people — far below many previous guestimates. Farooq Sattar, the chief of his own faction of the MQM, called the data “rigged”. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf has also expressed doubts over the population of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) being five million. The party said the census did not seem to have taken into account the people displaced from tribal areas.

A policeman was injured when a census team came under attack in the Mandni area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Charsadda district within a week after the census had started. On April 5, four army soldiers, an employee of the air force and two passers-by died while 18 others were injured in a suicide bomb attack on a census team in Lahore’s eastern outskirts. Less than 20 days later, a security official lost his life and another was injured when unknown attackers hit a census team near Pasni town in Balochistan’s Gwadar district. In all these instances, security officials accompanying the census officials could not prevent terrorists from striking.

The presence of heavily armed soldiers in combat fatigues might have protected the census teams from possible coercion, even violence, by groups, communities or individuals bent upon preventing data collection or trying to mould the statistics in their own favour. But it can also be argued that, rather than being aimed at civilian census officials, the attacks mentioned above were a continuation of the strikes security forces have been facing for years at the hands of different militant organisations ranging from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan to Baloch separatist militias.

Sending out soldiers to streets and neighbourhoods across the country under such circ*mstances might have made them more vulnerable to hostile acts than before. In retrospect, it looks like a necessary risk — one that, fortunately, has not led to as many attacks as feared.

But the other risk involved in sending out army officials into civilian areas is the sense of harassment that people may feel, especially in Balochistan and Karachi where the army has a history of carrying out security operations. In some cases, this feeling was enhanced due to attempts by soldiers, taking down demographic data, to find information they were not supposed to collect. At places, particularly in Sindh and Punjab, they wanted to know if the household they were enumerating had any licensed or unlicensed weapons. A senior officer involved in the census in Karachi acknowledges that the army wanted to utilise the opportunity to know how many weapons there were in a certain area. His name cannot be revealed because he did not have permission to speak to the media. Another officer claims it was just a scare tactic so that people possessing illegal weapons got rid of them, fearing government action.

But considering that census teams were not permitted to enter or search homes or lodge cases over weapon seizures, the likelihood of this tactic succeeding looked low from the beginning. No one voluntarily discloses the possession of illegal weapons, let alone giving them up. Also, the fact that residents in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were not asked about weapons suggests that no countrywide policy existed to link the collection of demographic data with a deweaponisation drive.

Bajwa also says just that — queries about weapons were not a part of the census officials’ mandate. A few army officers acted on their own in some areas, he says, that too in the early part of the census process. “As soon as we received reports about it, we took up the matter with the army … They said some local commander must have asked [questions about weapons].” The queries then stopped, he adds.

It is 1:00 pm and Anjum Kashif is rushing through her lunch. Since the census began about a week earlier on March 15, she has constantly been attending to phone calls from census workers reporting hurdles from the field. She works as a statistical assistant at the PBS and has set up a control room at the Government Degree College for Boys in New Karachi, also known as North Karachi.

In census jargon, the control room is called ‘charge centre’ and she uses it to coordinate among the army, PBS personnel and other government employees – mainly school teachers and lady health workers – engaged in the collection of census data.

Anjum is a self-proclaimed perfectionist, always willing to go the extra mile to produce quality results. This makes her an ideal candidate to oversee census activities in North Karachi, one of the city’s most densely populated areas. She is taking no days off, sometimes attending meetings at the district administration’s offices or at the local chapter of the PBS after having already spent an entire day in the field. She often goes home late at night even though she has two young children to attend to. Sleep is a luxury for her. “My only wish is to ensure that the work that comes under my watch is done accurately,” she says.

Accuracy, indeed, is the holy grail of any census. In Pakistan’s case, even a perceived lack of accuracy can easily lead to public and political outcries and protests. As far as the recent census is concerned, some of its accuracy seems to have been compromised due to the haste with which it has been conducted. Dr Muhammad Iqbal, a statistics teacher at the University of Peshawar and member of a census advisory committee constituted by the PBS, acknowledges that the government was unprepared for the census. “Due to lack of time, even the census questionnaires used are the ones created back in 2008. These things cause a big impact.”

Outdated maps used for dividing neighbourhoods into census blocks – each consisting of around 250 households – constituted another major problem, says a report prepared by observers deployed by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to monitor the census process.

Anjum concurs. She received frequent complaints about the census blocks from many of the 500 or so census enumerators she worked with. About 10 per cent of the 905 blocks under her jurisdiction turned out to have more households than they were supposed to, she says. Some of them exceeded their supposed size by three times. One enumeration supervisor working in Khwaja Ajmer Nagri neighbourhood of Karachi discovered a block that had 700 households, she says. He immediately contacted Anjum who visited the area herself. Trudging up a steep slope to get a proper view of the settlement, she realised why the supervisor was right. The neighbourhood was too big and too thickly populated to have only a few census blocks. On her recommendation, it was remapped and divided into 22 blocks.

Size was not the only problem with the blocks. Based on old maps, they were sometimes also difficult to locate. In many cases, their geographical reference points – such as street names and locations of local landmarks – had changed so much that they had all become mixed up. Anecdotal evidence from various districts in Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa suggests that many maps used in the census process could have been made as far back as 1998.

A PBS representative in central Punjab’s Kasur district guestimates that 20 per cent of the maps in that district were not updated after 2011. Similarly, a school teacher conducting the census in Mastung district of Balochistan says that census blocks were based on mapping conducted 17 to 20 years ago. In both places, outdated maps were a major reason why a census block had 700 to 800 households — a number that was impossible for a single enumeration team to cover within the census timeline.

Bajwa concedes that there were some “areas where nobody was living when the maps were updated but now there is a 14-storey building standing there”. The PBS, therefore, had anticipated that there could be problems with blocks, particularly in peri-urban areas (located on the outskirts of a city/urban area) where population has increased rapidly and construction of new roads/streets and buildings has taken place at a very fast pace, he says. But he rejects the suggestion that some of the maps were two decades old. Official mapping for the purpose of forming blocks was carried out in 2014 in rural areas and it was completed by the end of 2015 in urban areas, he says.

Shahid Mehmood Tahir, 50, is a newspaper distributor and public school teacher in Sheikhupura, about 50 kilometres to the west of Lahore. Working as a census enumerator in his home town, he got an extraordinary assignment — counting prisoners in a local jail.

When Tahir and his census associates reached the jail they found that there were 2,200 people imprisoned there. “The life of a prisoner is completely different from the life of an ordinary person,” he says about his experience of being inside the prison. “It is a separate world.” Soon he also found that many prisoners had no interest in being counted as part of the national population and were extremely reluctant to share their personal information. “They did not like to give answers immediately. We had to wait for them to respond to our questions,” says Tahir.

“Sometimes they gave such odd answers, one did not know how to write them down.”

He remembers meeting one prisoner and asking him to show his Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC), or shanakhti card in local language. “What is a shinakhti card?” said the prisoner. Some prisoners wanted to share their life stories with enumerators. A 10-year-old boy, in prison on murder charges, narrated to Tahir how he got into an altercation over a game of cricket and ended up hitting another player fatally with his bat.

In the case of female prisoners, the enumerators had an additional problem. Women were kept in a part of the jail where men were not allowed to enter. Tahir and his colleagues had to stay where a female constable was standing, guarding the prisoners. The jail staff helped them get the information they required, he says.
These difficulties in a confined place offer a micro-level picture of the obstacles that census enumerators were up against in streets and neighbourhoods across Pakistan.

Some residents in “posh” neighbourhoods were difficult to get a hold of, says Tahir. Many in places such as Karachi and Quetta mistook census officials for the much-shunned polio administering teams. One of the biggest logistical difficulties was access across many rural and conservative parts of the country. A census official in Kohat, for instance, had to speak to a woman through an iron gate.

Also consider the case of Killa Saifullah district in Balochistan. The recent census has put the district’s population at 342,814, having increased at an annual rate of 3.05 per cent since 1998. Women account for 46.95 per cent of the local population and yet an outsider will be hard-pressed to find even a single woman in public — not even in bazaars.

If they have to go for shopping or they need healthcare, they will go to either Quetta or Karachi but will not venture out in their own district, says a local resident. “There is a restriction on women here.” Out of respect for men in the family and the strict social code prevalent in the area, adds a local teacher, some women do not utter even the names of their husbands and male in-laws. A woman in Killa Saifullah having to encounter a male enumerator would not have even disclosed the names of men in her family let alone provide personal details about herself.

Many enumerators did not have sufficient training. For instance they did not know the difference between literacy and education, says the report by UNFPA observers. As a result, the report adds, people who were literate but had not attended school were considered illiterate. Observers have also reported problems with the enumeration of transgender individuals and persons with disabilities in all four provinces, says a report in daily Dawn.

Some of these flaws can be attributed to the timing of the census — coinciding with the busiest part of the academic calendar. “… government schools conduct their internal exams in February and March. Board exams for classes five and eight (in Punjab) also take place in these two months. This year, these activities overlapped with the census enumerators’ training,” this magazine reported in March 2017. “These are then usually followed by matriculation and intermediate exams in April and May — happening almost concurrently with the two-phased census exercise this time round.”

It was perhaps this coincidence that made Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif initially announce that no teachers were to participate in census taking in the province. He later revoked his decision but his reluctance hampered the training of many teachers for their census duties. “Up to 170 teachers did not show up for training” in Kasur alone, says a census official.

The Punjab education department also barred headmasters from joining census teams, he says. Constituting more than 20 per cent of primary school teachers in the province and being the most experienced and the most qualified members of the staff at schools, they could have brought with them the experience and authority the PBS so needed in its census operations.

It was in order to remove – or at least reduce – the impact of such flaws that the PBS set up an advisory committee of experts including people such as Dr Iqbal of Peshawar University, Dr Mehtab Karim, vice chancellor and executive director of the Centre for Studies in Population & Health at Karachi’s Malir University of Science and Technology, and Dr Zeba Sathar, director of the Pakistan Population Council, a non-governmental organisation working on family planning and family healthcare.

One of the most important recommendations the committee made was a post-enumeration survey to determine what percentage of the population was not counted or was under-enumerated during the census. The PBS rejected the recommendation. Its officials are said to be worried that any discrepancies found as a result of the survey would expose them to hostile criticism. Instead of seeing it as a useful tool to identify errors of omission and commission in the census, they feared it might jeopardise the credibility of the whole census exercise. Even in 1998, they pointed out, no such survey was conducted.

Making a case for the survey, Karim argues that it is not essentially meant to find fault with a census or the takers of a census. He makes a distinction between “undercounting” and “under-enumeration”. The former, he says, implies deliberate omission while the latter suggests defects in methodology. A post-enumeration survey will at least show if any people have somehow been left out of the count and what their possible number is, he says, and adds that a census conducted in a vast and thickly populated country like ours is likely to under-report some numbers. Even a developed and thinly-populated country like Australia has recorded 2 per cent under-reporting in its census, he says.

His own calculations – based on annual population growth rates derived from the Pakistan Demographic Surveys conducted intermittently between 1982 and 1997 – show that the population was under-reported by about five per cent in the 1998 census. This equals to around six million people. The surveys he relied on were discontinued after 2008, making a post-enumeration survey even more important to track problems in the census.

Karim believes the major problem in the 2017 census pertains to Sindh and Punjab’s data [Figure 1A]. How is it that the average household size has been dropping in Sindh regularly? From seven persons per household in 1981 to six persons in 1998 and to 5.6 persons in 2017 but it remains the same for Punjab – around 6.4 persons per household – between 1981 and 2017, he asks.

This, he says, contradicts the findings of the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey, published by the National Institute of Population Studies in December 2013, which suggest that family planning programmes in Punjab have fared better compared to the ones in Sindh. The survey states that decline in fertility rate since the 1990s has been highest in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (at 29 per cent) and slowest in Sindh (at 23 per cent). Even Balochistan (at 27 per cent) had a steeper decline than Sindh.

Bajwa of the PBS, however, dismisses the need for a post-enumeration survey. A “neutral observer” – an army man – accompanied each enumerator during the census which means that the data collected is already double-checked, he says. There is, therefore, no need for any other survey, he adds.

Karachi’s Orangi Town is home to a large number of ethnolinguistic communities — Pakhtuns, Baloch, Afghans, Sindhis, Bengalis, Biharis, Banarasi and other migrant groups with Indian antecedents. A picture of government neglect, the town is known to be one of the world’s largest slums and has an estimated population of 2.4 million people (the 1998 census put its population at 721,694). This densely populated area is plagued by water shortages, poor sanitation, lack of schools and healthcare facilities, to name just a few of the civic amenities that are either non-existing here or are in bad shape if they can be spotted at all.

Within the northeastern periphery of Orangi Town lies Baloch Goth. Meandering through its narrow and congested streets, one may pass by several neighbourhoods each with its distinct ethnic makeup. From the elusive and isolated Afghans to Banarasi silk weavers who had migrated to Karachi after Partition from Banaras, present-day Varanasi in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, the goth offers a slice of Pakistan’s demographic pie with every ethnic taste in it.

Only 2,500 people lived in Baloch Goth in 1998, says Muhammad Juman Darwan, a local political activist associated with the PPP. He guestimates that figure has increased at least threefold. Residents here are hoping that the latest census will help them make a case for their civic needs. If the government has the most updated figures for population, it will be in a better position to plan and provide resources and services to those who need them the most — goes the local logic.

If government money and census data are closely linked, then it is important to ensure nobody is left out of the count — or is overcounted. Darwan, a two-time head of the Baloch Goth union council, therefore, has been monitoring the census exercise very closely. “We have conducted a census of our own and we will tally it with official results,” he says.

Wearing a crisp white shalwar kameez and a red Sindhi cap on a late March day, Darwan knows Baloch Goth, his birthplace, like he knows the back of his hand. He has lived here all fifty or so years of his life. Although an MQM man won a Sindh Assembly seat from the area in the 2013 general elections, Darwan says it is his duty to ensure that distortions in the census process do not harm the interests of local residents. Sitting outside his office located inside a single-room structure and furnished with a lone table, a few chairs, and a poster showing Darwan shaking the hand of PPP chief Bilawal Bhutto, he is greeted warmly by a census team accompanied by several officials of the Pakistan Navy and the police. He has established a friendly rapport with them since the census began a few days earlier.

“We would not have trusted school teachers alone,” Darwan says. His mistrust is rooted in his experience of the 2011 census when teachers were pressured by a political party into using an impermanent pencil to note down information on census forms, he says. This made it easy for the party to change the information before sending it to senior census officials, he adds. As a result, he claims, one household was counted as three. This time around, “the military’s presence is reassuring”.

A few months later, as the initial census results are released, Darwan is anything but assured. “Now you can see for yourself. It is a mess, isn’t it?” His doubts are strengthened when the district administration invites him to a meeting to verify the boundaries of certain census blocks in Manghopir area. “Why are they going into this [verification] after the census results have already been released?”

Darwan says his worst fears have come true: the census does not reflect the immense migration to Sindh that has taken place, specifically to Karachi (where population has risen by only 5.56 million people since 1998). According to the previous census, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan and Rawalpindi together received the same number of internal migrants between 1981 and 1998 as Karachi alone did. Every fifth person who left his native village or town ended up in Karachi during that period. Considering that far more migrants have moved to Karachi than any other city over the last decade and a half, the population of migrants here seems to have been under-reported if not deliberately undercounted.

Khawaja Ajmer Nagri illustrates this. Cordoned off on one side by a hill where some people have built their shacks and a dilapidated road, strewn with trash and sewage running on its other side, the locality – like Baloch Goth – is home to people from across Pakistan. About a kilometre from Power House Chowrangi, it has residents who come from a number of ethnolinguistic backgrounds — Seraiki, Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi and Urdu. The locals dismiss the botched house count of 2011 as “ridiculous”. They claim it put their neighbourhood’s population at 2,500 even though the 1998 census had recorded it to be 19,000.

That this data was flawed became apparent when the census blocks in Khawaja Ajmer Nagri had to be revised upwards by 200 per cent in the latest census. Another proof of the neighbourhood’s high population comes from polio vaccination campaigns which suggest that just the number of children under the age of five living here is around 14,800. This number, according to estimates by international organisations such as the World Health Organization, represents about 17 per cent of the locality’s total population. Going by this formula, the number of people living in Khawaja Ajmer Nagri should be around 87,500.

Census authorities have not yet revealed locality-wise data for settlements such as Baloch Goth and Khawaja Ajmer Nagri but Karachi’s overall statistics have political activists like Darwan worrying. He speculates that the PBS must have included many migrants living in Karachi in the population of the districts they originally belong to.

The other problem with the census data for Karachi is the confusion about non-Pakistanis living in the city — Burmese, Bangladeshis, Afghans, Iranians among others. Does the census data include them or will they be counted separately? A large, but unspecified, number of them may have already been counted as Pakistanis since they have acquired Pakistani identity documents.

Experts like Karim believe that counting aliens separately is not what a census ought to be doing. “A census has nothing to do with citizenship. [Its requirement is that] everybody must be counted irrespective of whether he or she is a Pakistani citizen or not,” he says. “It is simply about knowing how many people live in a country or a locality.”

Fazal Amin, 21, belongs to the Sipah subtribe of Afridis and is a resident of Bara tehsil in Khyber Agency, which is one of the seven Pakhtun regions along the Pak-Afghan border that together form Fata. He has recently completed his bachelor’s in business administration from a university in Peshawar and is working as the head of Sipah Youth Organisation, a local activist group. He is one of the many locals who claim that Fata’s population has been deliberately undercounted in the latest census.

“I can point to so many instances where the discrepancy is obvious,” he says. “For example, the Akakhel tribe living in Khyber is known to have at least 90,000 voters but they have been counted by the census to be between 30,000 and 35,000 people.” Many Akakhel families, he claims, have not even been approached by census officials. He is concerned about the census data because he understands that it has serious financial and economic implications. “An undercount will adversely affect Fata’s development funds, our share in the National Finance Commission (NFC) award, quotas in government colleges and jobs and our representation in the provincial assembly in case we are merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”

Amin’s organisation guestimates Fata’s population to be around 8.5 million — far higher than most other estimates. The Fata Research Centre, a research organisation based in Peshawar, estimates the tribal areas’ population to be around 4.6 million — roughly in line with the latest official figure of 5,001,676.Yet, Amin insists that census figures are unreliable because they have not taken into account internally displaced people (IDPs) — tribesmen living in different parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after being displaced by conflict and violence in their native areas. “There were about 1.2 million IDPs, according to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, back in 2009,” he says. That number should have increased since then, he adds, considering that there have been subsequent displacements from North Waziristan and South Waziristan as well as from Kurram, Khyber and Mohmand agencies.

Official estimates indicate that the number of IDPs has gone down rather than having gone up. Only 500,000 tribespeople – or 75,000 families – are waiting to return home, says the government. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Pakistan, on the other hand, claims that “a total of 5.3 million people in Fata have been displaced since 2008”. If this figure is to be taken as a basis for the population of the tribal areas, then far more than five million people should be living there. But, perhaps, the UN data is counting a large number of IDPs twice or thrice since many of them have been displaced more than once over the last nine years.

All these various figures are confusing, if not worse. “As per my observations, the enumeration of the IDPs during the census has been completely disorderly,” says Amin. One of his biggest complaints is that many IDPs have been included under the population of districts where they are temporarily residing. “Why have they been counted as residents of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa when they are ultimately going to return to Fata?”

Iqbal, the statistics teacher, explains that census teams have justifiably counted those IDPs as residents of the province. “The rules of our census clearly state that any person living in a place for over six months must be counted in that place,” he says. “A huge number of people from the tribal areas have now permanently settled in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. They are no longer IDPs. It is unlikely that they will ever return [to their native lands],” he says. “You can’t be expected to be counted in Fata if you have been an active socio-economic resident in Peshawar for years.”

Bajwa, however, explains that the IDPs have been temporarily counted among the population of those districts they are residing in. “During the [data] processing stage, they will be adjusted to their original areas based on coordination with the Fata disaster authority.”

Ismutullah Shah, a teacher of Seraiki language at one of the oldest colleges in Bahawalpur, is apprehensive that speakers of Seraiki may have been undercounted in the latest census. The 1998 census put their number at about 10 per cent of the country’s total population and at 17.4 per cent of Punjab’s population. In Bahawalpur district, more than 60 per cent of the population was shown as Seraiki-speaking. Shah fears that these numbers may have changed for the worse for Seraiki speakers.

Activists like him fear that many younger Seraikis, especially in urban parts of Seraiki-speaking areas, might have listed Urdu as their mother language in forms for the recent census. In a 2014 interview with this magazine, Shah had lamented that people from his community discouraged their children from speaking Seraiki at home due to what he called a “misconception” that learning Urdu provided more job opportunities. “Homes have become slaughterhouses for Seraiki language,” he had said.

In rural areas, there was the opposite problem of people not really knowing the importance of registering themselves as Seraiki speakers. Bahawalpur has a rural population of about 70 per cent (as per the last two censuses) and, according to the 1998 census, about 80 per cent of Seraiki-speaking residents of the district lived in rural areas. Most of them are also illiterate, especially those scattered in the vast Cholistan desert. Seraiki activists like Shah fear that Seraiki speakers in these parts might have ended up noting down Punjabi as their mother language. Being illiterate and simple village folk, they could have confused their language with the province they are residing in. Most census enumerators in Seraiki areas were also Punjabis, activists further allege, and they might have attempted to undercount Seraiki speakers.

To preempt all this, activists embarked upon a campaign to raise awareness in the months leading up to the census, says Shah. One Facebook video – shared by a Seraiki activist – shows a gathering in the “rural areas of Cholistan” where a speaker is instructing a crowd to ensure that they are registered as Seraiki speakers. The campaign seems to have not achieved much since Seraiki nationalists have rejected the latest census figures as inaccurate. Though the PBS is yet to issue language-related demographics, Shah calls the census data “politically motivated” and “economically biased”.

Abdul Hakim is a senior public school teacher in Hub, a city in Balochistan’s Lasbela district. At 9:00 am on an April morning, he is sitting in a small room at a charge centre off Hub’s Adalat Road, recounting his experience of going to a local family as part of his census-taking duties. His first encounter was with two children.

He asked them about their mother language.

“Urdu,” they said.

Hakim was surprised at their response. He knew their father — he is a Sindhi.

He sent the boys back inside the house to confirm their mother language through an elder in the family. They returned and still insisted on Urdu being their mother language.

He ended up noting two different mother languages spoken by the family — the two boys and their father were recorded to be Sindhi-speaking and their mother as Urdu-speaking.

A situation like this mostly resulted from an enumerator’s failure to explain what mother language is or confusion amongst people to understand its definition correctly. Does mother language mean the language of general conversation within a family; does it refer to the first language we learn at home; or is it the language that also connotes our ethnicity? “This is a grey area and it is confusing,” says Hakim.

Due to its proximity to Karachi and its own expanding industrial and commercial activities, Hub has drawn people from all parts of Balochistan as well as from Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunhwa and Punjab over the last two decades. There is anecdotal evidence that suggests that many Baloch families displaced from strife-hit districts such as Awaran have shifted to Hub — as well as to other parts of Lasbela district. It is not unusual to hear local residents speak in diverse languages such as Pashto, Gujarati, Seraiki, Gilgiti and Punjabi alongside the local dialects of Balochi and Brahvi. Local journalists and government employees claim that population-wise Hub is the second fastest growing settlement in Balochistan after Quetta.

The 50-kilometre drive from Quetta to Mastung town resembles most other journeys by road between major towns and cities in Balochistan — miles and miles of a desert landscape dotted with green shrubs, arid mountains and power pylons. Hours may pass before one sees signs of human settlement.

On May 13, 2017, the town of Mastung is unusually quiet. A day earlier, a terrorist attack here targetted the convoy of Deputy Chairman Senate Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, resulting in the death of 26 people. His party, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl, is observing a strike. Shops and businesses are closed.

For the census officials, however, it is business as usual.

Three FC officials and one civilian enumerator sit on the floor of a local baithak, or temporary community centre, owned by a tailor. It is a room, about 150-square-foot big, with no furniture. A sewing machine is lying in one corner and pieces of fabric are strewn across the room. The heads of many families living close by are all gathered here – identity documents in hand – eagerly sharing information with the census officials. Four policemen stand guard outside as Mastung is an officially declared “sensitive” area because of its long history of sectarian violence and anti-state insurgency. It is from this district’s mountainous area that the bodies of two Chinese nationals were discovered in September this year, around five months after they were kidnapped from Quetta’s Jinnah Town.

Mohammad Wafa, a local teacher, is noting down information as people around him talk in a local dialect. “We are all Baloch here,” says one of them, “even those who speak Pashto.”

The link between language/ethnicity and politics runs deep in Pakistan — even more so in Balochistan where different ethnic/linguistic communities do not trust each other. Pakhtuns living in many areas in Balochistan, including the provincial capital, Quetta, boycotted the 1998 census because the provincial government at the time was headed by a Baloch nationalist party – Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNPM) – and the Pakhtun parties feared that census authorities would undercount their electorates, regarding local Pakhtuns as Afghans. Killa Saifullah was one of the districts where Pakhtun nationalist parties claimed to have successfully campaigned for the boycott. Many local residents and Pakhtun activists, therefore, dispute the official figure of 193,553 people living in the district in 1998. It was far below the actual number, they say.

This time round, it is the Baloch parties that are pointing out flaws in the census — and they point to places like Mastung to make their case.

The district had around 160,000 people, according to the 1998 census, and most of them were Baloch. Its population has increased rapidly since then. Mud houses now stand along narrow bumpy streets where green crops once swayed in lush fields, the locals say. Most of the people living in these new localities are not Baloch but Afghan refugees who have settled here in large numbers after having acquired Pakistan identity documents. “They should not be counted because they are not a part of Pakistan,” says a man from among the people gathered at the baithak.

Baloch activists claim that a census conducted without repatriating the Afghans – 85 per cent of them being Pakhtuns, according to the United Nations – will result in an extraordinary increase in the number of Pakhtuns in the province.

The BNPM, indeed, filed a petition first at the Balochistan High Court and then at the Supreme Court, seeking the exclusion of Afghan refugees from the census and ensuring the inclusion of the Baloch displaced from their native areas. Many Baloch leaders demanded the government defer the census until all Afghans living in the province were repatriated. Agha Hassan Baloch, the party’s central information secretary, remembers meeting Asif Bajwa, the PBS chief. He was assured that his party’s concerns would be addressed but when nothing happened, “we went to the courts”. In March 2017, the Balochistan High Court ordered census authorities to ensure that Afghan refugees were excluded from the population count and the displaced Baloch were shown in it.

Baloch is not sure if the court order was obeyed but, as Bajwa says, the PBS, as per census rules, had to include in the count all those Afghans who are not living in refugee camps.

He claims hearing reports from Quetta’s Hudda neighbourhood, just three kilometres from the provincial government’s offices, that some census-related documents were being distributed among the local residents. These were copies of the census forms. The locals were supposed to fill personal and family information in them and give them to the census officials. Mother language on all of them was noted as Pashto, says Baloch, calling it “a very big conspiracy”. It is not clear how those forms could have impacted the census. The officials were not allowed to accept filled-in forms from people and each census form, to be accepted, had to have a special computerised code which could not be copied or forged.

Such incidents are a manifestation of the scare that Pakhtuns will outnumber the Baloch if the latter do not make an effort to be counted. According to the 1998 census, about 55 per cent of Balochistan’s population spoke Balochi while 30 per cent of people living in the province spoke Pashto. The Baloch cannot be allowed to become an ethnic minority in their ancestral lands, goes the refrain among Baloch nationalist activists. That is why “most people [in Mastung] want to be counted”, says Wafa.

Baloch politicians point to the phenomenal rise in the number of people living in Quetta district as evidence of a Pakhtun predominance in the province. The district’s population has risen from 773,936 people in 1998 to about 2.28 million people in 2017. Killa Abdullah, a district right on the border with Afghanistan, has registered an equally strong population growth — from 360,724 people in 1998 to 757,578 people in 2017.

The entire Pakhtun-dominated Quetta division has registered above average population growth. The number of people living here has gone up from 1.7 million in 1998 to 4.2 million in 2017, showing an annual growth rate of 4.8 per cent — much higher than the provincial average of 3.37 per cent and more than double the national average of 2.4 per cent.

Another factor important for Baloch politicians and activists is the displacement of thousands of Baloch people from their native areas because of the ongoing conflict between security forces and Baloch separatist militias — this displacement was also mentioned in the BNPM petition as another reason why the census in Balochistan needed to be postponed. Data suggests that the displacement has had serious impact on the population growth rate in many Baloch areas. Awaran – a district wracked by insurgency – has registered only 0.15 per cent annual population growth, possibly due to large-scale displacement of local residents.

Population growth rate, in fact, remains lower than the provincial average in all but five Baloch-dominated districts. One of them is Kech, where population has increased from 413,204 people in 1998 to 909,116 people in 2017. This could be a result of migration to its headquarters, Turbat, from its nearby rural districts of Dasht and Panjgur where clashes between security forces and Baloch militants are common.

"Until they drive us out with sticks, we will never leave,” says Sabir Khan, a teenage resident of Killa Saifullah, a predominantly Pashtun district about 180 kilometres north-east of Quetta. His father, Haji Mohammad Rasool, was born in Afghanistan. Sabir Khan, his bothers and all his nephews were born in Balochistan.

“Why would we go back to Afghanistan?” he says, sitting on the floor of a large room with no furniture in a mud house, located at a 10-minute drive from the main road passing through Killa Saifullah town. When one enters his house through a small metal gate, one has to pass through a thick curtain, walk past the resident livestock and navigate dung and hay strewn all over the floor before entering a room. He is the only male adult at home this evening as his four brothers and father are out taking care of their business.

A tall and thin boy of 15 years of age with a hint of a moustache, Sabir Khan spends most of his days manning one of the two grocery shops his family owns in the town. He had to drop out of school a few years ago after one of his brothers passed away and his father needed him at the shop. Families like his – that came to Pakistan more than a generation ago – own 80 per cent of the businesses in Killa Saifullah, says Ziaur Rehman, a local school principal. Many of them left for Afghanistan earlier this year after the federal cabinet announced a deadline for the repatriation of Afghan refugees.

Those who are left behind are scared these days, says Rehman. They suspect that government officers will nab them and send them to Afghanistan. “They do not get out of their homes and hide their Afghan identity cards.” According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 300,000 Afghans live in Balochistan as registered refugees. Many others are still unregistered even though they have been living in Pakistan for three or so decades. Given their fear of the authorities, it is easy to understand if they had any apprehensions about sharing their information with census officials, particularly those accompanied by men from the army.

Afghans living in refugee camps in different parts of Pakistan have not even been approached for a count. According to daily Dawn, UNFPA observers based in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa “were not allowed to observe enumeration in refugee villages because no census was taking place there … because of a government directive”. This exclusion, the observers point out, breaches the principle of universality that requires everyone present in a certain place at the time of a census to be counted regardless of their nationality.

Moving through farmland in Mirpurkhas district in Sindh, nine-year-old Radha Bheel and her brother would pick up some watermelons on their way home from school to sell them to people in their village. They used the money to pay their school fee or defer other expenses. Growing up as a member of the schedule castes within the local Hindu community, Radha was pretty independent and was never made to feel that she could not do something because of her gender or religion.

Back then, children belonging to Hindu and Muslim communities mingled together without anyone resenting it. She remembers going out in her early teens with a group of boys – both Hindu and Muslim – to collect grass or sort red chilies or pick cotton. If they encountered a stream on the way, they would swim in it for hours. It was as if I was their sister, she says. The years before she was married, at the tender age of sixteen, played a crucial role in forming her world view.

Originally from nearby Thar, her family moved to Mirpurkhas before Partition and has been living here along with other Bheel families since then. Her father was a farmer but he was well-respected by the local landlords because he was an “untrained lawyer” of sorts and a social activist. “The landlords would often consult him when making decisions.” That is where Radha’s activism comes from.

At 40 years of age, she has five children and a reputation for being the champion of the downtrodden and the voiceless, especially those from the scheduled castes in Mirpurkhas district. Poor and mostly illiterate, according to the 1998 census, around 90 per cent of them live in rural areas. The days of harmony between members of different castes and religions are long past. Members of the scheduled castes face marginalisation not just at the hands of Muslims but also experience discrimination by upper-caste Hindus as well. They, therefore, want the census to count them as Hindus but separate from their upper-caste co-religionists.

Census forms do mention scheduled castes as a separate demographic identity but the text on the form does not make a distinction between a scheduled-caste Christian and a scheduled-caste Hindu. The 1998 census shows that there were about 332,000 people belonging to scheduled castes in Pakistan at the time while the population of Hindus was shown to be 2.1 million. Representatives of the Hindu scheduled castes have been contesting these figures for years. They believe many members of their community have not been counted as members of the group they belong to — they could have been counted as Hindus.

This is how it happens, Radha explains: when census officers ask a scheduled-caste Hindu in Sindh about his or her religion, their obvious response is that they are Hindus. The enumerators note them down as Hindus rather than belonging to the scheduled castes, leading to the under-reporting of their numbers.

In the wake of the 2017 census, several groups that work for the rights of scheduled-caste Hindus in Sindh – such as Dalit Sujag Tehreek, which Radha is associated with, and Bheel Intellectual Forum – have run awareness campaigns within their own community. “We want to be counted as a separate subset of Hindus in the census,” she says. There are two reasons for this demand. Getting clubbed together with upper-caste Hindus deprives the scheduled-caste Hindus of their political significance. The former use the latter for attaining political and economic patronage for themselves. But counted as members of scheduled castes alone and not as Hindus, they lose their religious identity.

Pakistani Christians, just like members of the scheduled castes, believe they too have been undercounted in the past.

“We are the largest minority community in Pakistan,” says Zahid Farooq, a Punjabi Christian living in Karachi. The 1998 census recorded the Christian population to be around 2.1 million and showed Hindus (including those from scheduled castes) to be the biggest non-Muslim community in the country — putting their number at about 2.4 million. That count was inaccurate, he says. Church records of births, deaths and marriages suggested the total number of Christians in Pakistan at that time to be 2.6 million, he claims. “This is an authentic record.” Anyone who contradicts it must visit the four divisions of Punjab – Faisalabad, Lahore, Gujranwala and Sialkot – and they will realise how big the Christian community is, he says.

Farooq has been actively involved in the campaign to have all Christians in the country counted – and counted correctly – in the latest census. He has been living in Karachi’s North Nazimabad area since the 1970s and is no stranger to numbers and demographics. As a director at the Urban Resource Centre, a Karachi-based non-governmental organisation focused on urban and environmental planning, he is always dealing with some kind of demographic data about Karachi — how many people use the city’s roads every day; how many buses and other vehicles are required to transport them; how much land there is in the city; how much of it is available to house low-income communities.

Christian politicians and various church organisations have carried out campaigns to disseminate information about the census and ensure maximum participation in it by their community. Apart from distributing leaflets during prayers at churches, activists made a dummy census form in order to educate members of their community on how to fill it. “We told them to hand over one copy of the filled-in dummy form to the church and the other to the enumerator so as to make it easier for the census teams [to note down data],” he says. This, however, was not taken well by some census officials who thought it was akin to meddling in their work.

Other non-Muslim Pakistanis have fared even worse across different censuses. Buddhists and Parsis were marked as separate religious groups before the 1998 census when they were dropped from the census forms and included in ‘others’. Ahmadis were counted as Muslims before the 1981 census when they were first listed as a non-Muslim community. Sikhs have never found a mention as a separate community in the census. They lodged a petition at the Peshawar High Court to be recognised as a religious community apart from ‘others’. The court ruled in their favour but by then census forms had already been printed. It was impossible to change them, given the money and time required.

Some of these developments reflect the state of non-Muslims in Pakistan who accounted for 23 per cent of the population of the country in 1947. According to the 1951 census, the population of Hindus in Pakistan was 12.9 per cent. The country had the second largest Hindu population anywhere in the world at the time. Many migrations and massacres later, non-Muslims were reduced to 3.7 per cent of all Pakistanis in 1998. What all these minority groups have in common is the feeling that the state has failed them. They also share the hope that recording their numbers accurately will somehow change their status for the better. At the very least, they see a correct count as a step in the right direction.

In theory, says Karachi-based architect, urban planner, researcher and activist Arif Hasan, a census is a very important tool for planning. Information about indicators such as population density, literacy and age may help a government to determine which section of society needs what kind of amenity — by how much and how urgently.

Hasan, however, is concerned about the small number of demographic indicators covered during the recent census. He points to the 1998 census that included a sample survey involving a form known as 2A. Enumerators filled this form at every tenth household they visited, asking questions pertaining to migration such as district of birth, time spent in the current district, the reason for migration, etc. Other important indicators that form 2A addressed concerned infant mortality and reproductive health. It had questions designed for women between the ages of 15 and 50 — how many children have they given birth to; how many of them were alive; how many were born in the last 12 months?

None of this information is collected in 2017. The rate of internal migration, depth of educational attainment including field of study, unemployment, infant mortality and vaccination are other statistics missing in this census. These omissions render it impossible to track social and demographic changes over time and, thus, make it difficult to plan development schemes that are consonant with changes in society. These are massive data gaps in a census that is costing 17 billion rupees to the federal exchequer.

Without information about these important indicators, how will we know the direction and extent of change in society, argues Hasan. “The government and planning institutions are going in one way but society may be going in the other direction.”

PBS chief Asif Bajwa says there is a reason why collection of information about these indicators has been left out of the census. Planning for the census was contingent on the availability of army personnel, he argues. He had originally requested for 500,000 army officials to help with the data collection. If his request was accepted, he says, the entire census exercise – including the filling of form 2A – would have taken 20 days to complete. But his request was not accepted and the army could spare only 200,000 of its troops for census duties — forcing the PBS to complete the census in two phases, each taking 14 days. Filling out form 2A, even if from a select number of households, would have significantly increased this time, he says. The army was not ready for that.

Bajwa also clarifies that the decision to exclude form 2A in the census data collection was not made by him or by the PBS. It was made by the Council of Common Interests – a constitutional body that includes senior representatives from the federal administration as well as the four provincial governments – that decided that form 2A would be filled seperately at a later date.

Dr Mehtab Karim of the Malir University of Science and Technology remains sceptical of the government’s ability to conduct another survey in the near future. “Sample surveys are very expensive because you have to find the households that match your sample.” It was easier to fill form 2A during the census, he says, since you only needed to collect additional information from every tenth household that you were already visiting.

The other problem with the census, experts point out, is breach of confidentiality. The minute you ask someone to hand over their identity card number and then have a soldier in uniform verify it on site, you have violated a basic census principle, says Karim. Ideally, an enumerator is not required to take down a person’s exact age either. They just need to note that an individual is within a certain age bracket.

It is precisely this verification by soldiers that UNFPA observers have also objected to in their report. Age records were mainly obtained from CNIC data and most often verified by army officers accompanying enumerators through text messages to the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), says the report, published in the press on September 24, 2017. This constituted a “breached confidentiality”.

The report is critical of the army’s involvement in the census. It says the army’s participation in the process was “not at all a recommended international practice”. The observers point out that the “data collection by the military… amounts to a parallel census and this is not internationally acceptable.” The army also asked questions about the nationality of the heads of households, the report says. “This is very unusual and questionable especially given the fact that the main [census] questionnaire had no provision for [details about] nationality.”

The advisory committee set up by the PBS had made about a dozen recommendations along similar lines. One of these was the exclusion of the armed forces from the enumeration process. “However, I must admit that, considering the security situation in many areas, I can see why it had to happen,” says Dr Muhammad Iqbal of the University of Peshawar and a member of this committee.

The committee also unsuccessfully recommended that the census be done in one phase — doing it in two phases might have resulted in some people getting counted twice, as Iqbal suggests. Other issues that the committee highlighted concerned the inclusion of Khowar – a language spoken in Chitral – and Sikhs as separate categories. But, as Iqbal says, these recommendations were dropped because there was no space available for them on the already printed census forms.

Another important recommendation by the committee was that showing of CNICs should not have been required for a person or a family to be counted during the census. “It was primarily made mandatory to identify those living illegally in Pakistan,” says Iqbal. “But that is not the job of the census takers.”

His fellow expert on the advisory committee, Karim, is also concerned. Up to 30 per cent of people in Sindh alone do not have CNICs. Hundreds of thousands of other CNICs have been blocked by NADRA on the suspicion that they have been obtained by foreigners. Our concern was that those who do not have CNICs – and many people in Pakistan do not – may be missed by the census takers, says Karim. The 1998 census did not require people to produce their national identity cards in order to be counted.

Bajwa says enumerators were instructed to count everyone regardless of whether they had CNICs or not and whether they were Pakistani citizens or not. But he adds that 99 per cent of the “33 million families” in Pakistan have at least one member who carries a CNIC. “Unless you are a hermit sitting on top of a hill, you will need an identity card” — if for nothing else then at least for interaction with the state.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that you do not need to be a hermit on a hill to not have a CNIC. Mubashar Ali, an enumerator in Sheikhupura district, met a family in a village only 14 kilometres from Sheikhupura city and none of them had a CNIC. “I asked them to show the CNIC of anyone living in the house. They said none of them had one,” he says.

His fellow enumerator, Mohammad Yaseen, takes out a list of 15 households. Not a single person in those households had a CNIC, he says. He recalls requests by many people for help in getting their CNICs made. “They told us that they have visited the NADRA office multiple time but were unsuccessful [in obtaining the cards].”

The national census, just concluded, puts the population of Punjab at about 53 per cent of the total population of the country — only three per cent below what it was in 1981 and 1998 even though, according to a 2012-13 report by the National Institute of Population Studies, births per woman have fallen in the province more rapidly relative to Sindh and Balochistan. The total population of Punjab has gone up by around 36 million – from about 73.6 million to 110 million – since 1998.

Increase in the population of Lahore, Punjab’s capital city, is even more dramatic. The number of people living in Lahore has increased from about 5.1 million in 1998 to 11.1 million in 2017 — going up by 116 per cent. The fact that Karachi’s population since the same year has risen only by less than 60 per cent makes Lahore the fastest growing metropolis in the country even though evidence suggests that there has been a much bigger influx of people into Karachi from different areas – especially from various conflict zones such as Balochistan, Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – over the last decade and a half.

PBS Chief Asif Bajwa addressed these apparent contradictions while briefing the Senate Committee on Satistics. He argued that earlier (in January 2015), the Punjab government extended the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Corporation Lahore (to even the rural and peri-urban parts) of Lahore district that were not counted as part of the city in the 1998 census. Today’s population of Lahore, therefore, is not the population of Lahore city alone but of the entire Lahore district. “… A lot of agricultural land has been included in the Lahore metropolitan area,” Bajwa says. If the city’s 1998 boundaries could be revived, he speculated, its population would be around eight million only.

On the other hand, the government in Sindh has excluded some areas of the Karachi division from the jurisdiction of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation. In the 1998 census, 94.8 per cent of the division’s population was counted as urban; it has now reduced to 92.9 per cent.

Even these considerations (that is, including the people living in its erstwhile rural areas to determine its population growth rate) put growth in Lahore’s population at above 75 per cent since 1998 whereas the population of the entire Karachi division has risen by less than 63 per cent since the same year. This is in spite of the fact that Karachi’s rural areas have experienced an exceptionally high population growth in this time period. In the 1998 census, these rural areas were recorded to have 407,510 people; the number of their residents stands at 1.14 million in 2017 — suggesting a growth rate way above the national average.

Something similar has taken place in Peshawar too. “Urban Peshawar is demarcated only as the cantonment and the old city,” says Iqbal. Numerous suburbs surrounding the city have been designated as rural areas, he says. But, like Bajwa, he points out that it is not the responsibility of census takers and statisticians to set a city’s limits. “It is the government’s job.”

It is precisely these discrepancies in the definition of urbanisation that make Arif Hasan sceptical about the entire census process. “We first changed the definition of ‘urban’ in the 1981 census,” he says. Previously, all those areas where land was mostly used for non-agricultural purposes and where a minimum of 5,000 people lived together in a single settlement were deemed as urban. Census commissioners also had the discretion to consider any area as urban that had ‘urban characteristics’.

The new ‘standardised’ definition marked only those areas as urban which fell under the jurisdiction of a town committee, a municipal committee, a municipal/metropolitan corporation or a cantonment board, regardless of its population density and land use. The change resulted in 54 areas moving from urban to rural in the 1981 census, making it difficult to compare the census results with those of previous censuses conducted in 1961 and 1972.

“So today you have settlements of over a 100,000-150,000 people [that] are not urban because they don’t have an urban governance system,” says Hasan. “… if you bring back the old definition, then more than 50 per cent of Pakistan is urban today.” But only 36 per cent of Pakistan’s population has been officially recognised as urban, according to the recently released census data — just two per cent higher than it was in 1998.

Why does it matter?

“There is a constant fear among rural politicians because urban growth threatens their rural vote bank,” says Hasan.

One of the most significant political outcomes of a census in Pakistan is the delimitation of constituencies in the federal and provincial legislatures. Clause 5 of Article 51 of the Constitution says that seats in the National Assembly shall be allocated to each province, Fata and the federal capital on the basis of their respective populations according to the latest published census data.

It is not confirmed if the total number of contested National Assembly constituencies increases or remains unchanged at 272 after the census has been carried out. If it does not change, the respective regional and provincial shares – Balochistan has 14 National Assembly seats, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has 35 seats, Punjab has 148 seats, Sindh has 61 seats, Islamabad has two and Fata has 12 – will undergo some adjustments to conform to the census results. An increase in the number of constituencies will require a constitutional amendment; the adjustment in their allocations and boundaries will only need an administrative/executive action by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).

But it is not yet clear if the ECP will be able to adjust the constituencies in time for the general election due in 2018. As per Bajwa, the complete results of the census will only be released by April next year. Election authorities may not have enough time to redraw constituencies – a process that needs about six months to complete – in time for the next polls.

The other equally, if not more, important aspect of the census is its link with national revenue distribution through the NFC award. According to the most recent NFC formula, population is the single largest factor in distributing federally collected taxes among the provinces — with an 82 per cent weightage. The rest – development needs or poverty (10.3 per cent), contribution in collection of federal revenues (five per cent), and the inverse population density or vast thinly-poplated area (2.7 per cent) – did not have even the tiny weightage they now have in earlier NFC awards.

How population has come to dominate revenue sharing offers a peep into the working of the Pakistani state. Before 1971, revenue was distributed between West Pakistan and East Pakistan on the basis of revenue collection — the area that collected more money in taxes got to have a bigger share of that money. This formula favoured West Pakistan and put East Pakistan at a disadvantage even when the latter needed more money considering its larger population and relatively higher economic needs as a less developed part of the country. Post-1971, population became the cornerstone of the NFC formulas since it favoured Punjab, the most populous and the most powerful province in the truncated country.

This puts Pakistan in a league of its own as far as controversies over census are concerned, says Karim. The issue concerning the census in the country is neither ethnicity nor religion – two factors that are extremely important in many other countries, he says – but “in Pakistan [a census has] more to do with the domination of one province over others”. Given his experience of demography locally and in other countries, as well as his association with organisations such as the Pew Research Center in Washington and the United Nations, he has a wealth of information from across the globe to bear upon his analysis. He says censuses in several developing countries are controversial but in places such as India and Ethiopia relative numbers of various religious groups have more political significance than they do in Pakistan.

Early results of the latest census confirm the status quo — that is, the dominance of Punjab over all others. Many experts as well as political parties and civil society activists have dismissed the numbers as doctored or simply inaccurate precisely because of this. “[Census officials] have done a great disservice. All that the census is doing is maintaining the status quo," says Hasan.

Disconnect the census data from electoral politics and it will be less controversial, recommend senior PBS officials as well as the country’s most experienced demographers. Go one step further and delink job quotas and revenue shares from the census and perhaps no one will want to doctor the demographic data (as was widely suspected in the 1991 and 2011 house counts), they say. After the failed house count in 2011, the PBS formally proposed to the Council of Common Interests to do just that, but its suggestions were not accepted.

The PBS has raised the issue several times with senior government officials in the years leading up to the 2017 census. “Delink population figures from National Assembly seats, the NFC Awards, Recruitment Quota … so that ethnic elements may not influence census activities,” reads a 2015 newsletter it published, listing the minutes of a meeting of its governing council at the Prime Minister Secretariat in Islamabad.

Experts both within the government and outside it point to India where seats in the lower house of the parliament, Lok Sabha, have remained constant since 1976 even though there have been massive changes in India’s population as a whole as well as within each of its many states since then. Consequently, a census in India does not get linked to political and electoral representation even though keeping the number of constituencies fixed might have resulted in huge differences in their size in different parts of the country.

A similar development in Pakistan may create a similar result. Freezing the number of seats in the National Assembly may soon lead to under-representation of certain provinces/districts and over-representation of others. That may not be a good bargain in a fragile federal democracy like ours. And it will require a constitutional amendment which may find few takers in a parliament where the move to fix the number of National Assembly seats can easily be seen as yet another attempt by Punjab to maintain its hold on political representation and economic resources of the country.

Change may be a little easier to effect in the NFC’s case.

The parameters for the distribution of revenue between the federation and the provinces are outlined in Article 160 of the Constitution. It states that the NFC must be set up every five years in order to devise a new formula for revenue sharing. This leaves ample space for gradually decreasing the salience of population. This process, in fact, has already started and was set off by the seventh NFC award (announced in 2009) that, for the first time since 1973, came up with a formula that reduced the weightage of population from 100 per cent to 82 per cent in deciding which province should get how much money. Reducing the weightage of population further in the NFC award, which is already overdue, may have the desired effect of a more equitable distribution of revenues.

The authors of a 2006 essay on the NFC awards in Pakistan, Nighat Bilgrami Jaffery and Mahpara Sadaqat, made the same argument. “… the unit cost of provision of services is very high and the share of divisible pool is insufficient to cover it” for a province like Balochistan, they wrote in a journal, Pakistan Economic and Social Review. “Therefore, in order to have equitable distribution of resources it is necessary that backwardness must be given high weight by the national government in the allocation from the divisible pool.”

But democracy and demography are linked. Both are about people – as the first half of the two words suggests – and about numbers. Demographic data will continue to be important as long as we have provinces with unequal number of people living in them with unequal development needs.

Additional reporting by Danyal Adam Khan

This was originally published in the Herald's October 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a former staffer of the Herald.

Usama Munir thought the end was nigh. He was standing in the basem*nt of an Ahmadi prayer hall inside Lahore’s Model Town area on May 28, 2010 wondering what might hit him — a bullet or a bomb. As visions of an imminent death circulated in his head, he saw someone falling into the basem*nt from the floor above. The man landed in front of Munir, struck by a bullet in the back.

An unknown number of attackers had entered the ground floor of the prayer hall a few minutes earlier. They first hurled a grenade to create space for themselves. Then they stood in the middle of that space and started shooting indiscriminately. Many worshippers, hit by shrapnel and bullets, ran downstairs to the basem*nt for cover. “A man had a bullet injury in his abdomen. He came downstairs, lay down and breathed his last,” recalls Munir, sitting in his house in Lahore in December 2017.

The mayhem continued for about half an hour. It ended only when the police, a bomb disposal squad and ambulances rushed in to clear the prayer hall off the attackers as well as the wounded and the dead.

Munir tried calling hisfatherMunirAhmad Sheikh while he was still in the basem*nt.A retired judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Sheikh was also theamirof Lahore’s Ahmadi community at the time. He was offering his prayer at another prayer hall in Garhi Shahu, around 12 kilometres to the northeast of Model Town.

The call did not connect. Sheikh would later call his wife to tell her that the Garhi Shahu prayer hall was also under a terrorist attack and that he had been hit by a bullet in the leg.

Three hours later, Munir and other members of his family were sitting inside their house in Garden Town, glued to the television and desperately seeking updates on the Garhi Shahu attack. Calls were being made to those outside the prayer hall there but no information was coming through. After an agonising wait, someone got the latest news and it was bad. Sheikh had not survived.

Around 98 people, including Nasir Ahmed Chaudhry, a 90-year-old retired major general of the Pakistan Army, also lost their lives in the twin attacks.

“Threats were there,” says Munir. His father was getting letters from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan that they would attack Ahmadis in Lahore. One of the letters arrived right when Munir’s younger brother was getting married in December 2009. Those who sent the letter knew about the wedding and threatened to attack it. “My father deployed extra security at the periphery of the wedding’s venue,” Munir says.

He and his younger brother shifted to Rabwah shortly after the attacks.

They happened to be visiting Lahorein December 2017 for a family event when they faced something unusual. “My wife went to a grocery store to buy a toothbrush. A couple of people sitting inside the shop looked at each other and told her that they did not have toothbrushes even when she could see them on a shelf,” he says.

They knew she was an Ahmadi and would not sell anything to her.

Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old girl from Swat, was being treated at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham on October 27, 2012 when 22-year-old Ummad Farooq was flown into the same hospital from Karachi. Both Malala and Ummad Farooq were shot in the head. Both were targeted by religious extremism back home in Pakistan.

Three days earlier, Ummad Farooq was returning home in Karachi’s Baldia Town after attending aFridaycongregation. He was riding a car along with his father Farooq Ahmed Kahloon and his brother Saad Farooq’s father-in-law Nusrat Chaudhry. Saad Farooq was escorting them on a motorcycle. Before they could realise that they were being followed, two men riding a motorcycle approached Saad Farooq and shot him dead. Next, they fired several bullets at the car, injuring all three of its occupants. One of the bullets entered Ummad Farooq’s forehead and got lodged in his skull.

Saad Farooq, 26, had gotten married only three days earlier. Flowers still hung from his wedding marquee in a part of his family home. “Look at these pictures of his wedding,” says his mother Kausar Farooq as she opens a grey photo album resting on a coffee table in her Connecticut house in the winter of 2016. Snow from the previous week still lines the roads leading to her residence in the village of South Glastonbury in the United States. She has been living here along with her family since 2013.

At the time of the shooting in Karachi, Kahloon was working as the head of the Ahmadi community in Baldia Town. He was under pressure to either relinquish his post or leave the area. Threatening messages laced with hatred would often appear on the gate or the boundary wall of his house. His community had engaged private guards for him yet Saad Farooq would insist on being with his father all the time. “Saad would always be the first one to get suspicious if someone was following his father,” Kausar says with her eyes shining brightly as if in pride over her son’s courage.

About five weeks before Saad’s assassination, police constable Muhammad Nawaz left his house in Karachi’s Orangi Town area to go to work. A few minutes later, his 17-year-old son Saqib Nawaz was rushing to the spot where his father lay dead in a pool of blood. The body was so disfigured that Saqib Nawaz could identify it only from the feet.

Nawaz was one of the 13 Ahmadis killed in various parts of Orangi Town within a few months that year. All these killings were part of a long-running campaign of violence againstAhmadis in Pakistan. The data collected by Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya, an organisation that, among other things, watches the religious, economic and political interests of Ahmadis in Pakistan, shows that 260 of its members were killed in the country between 1984 and 2017.

According to Nawaz’s widow, his was a planned murder. A day after her husband was killed, two people from the neighbourhood knocked at her door and asked her if she was an Ahmadi. When she confirmed she was, they told her how they had overheard several men talking about the murder of an Ahmadi. The neighbours heard one of those men asking another if he had killed the right person. The other confirmed that he had followed the victim since his departure from his house and was certain about his identity.

For many days after Nawaz’s murder, his wife would gather all her five children in one corner of her house to avoid bullets being fired from outside. The local grocery store refused to sell them food, some unknown people cut their electricity connection and their regular electrician refused to fix it.

Eventually, they had to leavetheir home to stay safe. As did 83 other Ahmadi families living in Orangi Town, says Chaudhry Munir Ahmad, an Ahmadi activist in Karachi. He, too, was shot at in 2016 by two men riding a motorcycle but was lucky to have survived the attack.

Dr Abdul Khaleeq was not that lucky.

A member of Karachi’s Ahmadi community, he broke his fast on a day in June 2016 along with his family at his house in the Gulzar-e-Hijri neighbourhood near University of Karachi and left for his clinic located about five kilometres away in Sikandar Goth. A little later, some people barged into the clinic where two patients were waiting for their medical examination. The intruders shot Khaleeq, told the patients to go away, pulled the shutters down and left.

Someone who ran a pharmacy opposite the clinic immediately informed Khaleeq’s family about the shooting. The doctor’s son wasted no time in reaching the clinic. He put his father in a car and rushed to a nearby hospital. Khaleeq was already dead when they reached the hospital.

The very next day, his widow, Bushra Khaleeq, heard about some suspicious looking men doing rounds of the streets where she lived with her children. Her brother brought them all to his own house in Azizabad area to ensure their safety. “It seems some people wanted [Gulzar-e-Hijri] cleared of Ahmadis just as they have in Baldia and Orangi towns,” he says in December 2017.

Work started in a routine fashion on Friday, November 20, 2015, at a chipboard manufacturing factory owned by Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya in Jhelum. The process of burning waste paper started as early as6:00 am.It was all done by 8:00 am, allowing the workers to perform other tasks.

At around3:30 pm, when work resumed after a prayer break, some workers came to Qamar Tahir who was in charge of waste disposal that day. They told him about reports doing the rounds in the factory that papers burnt earlier in the day included pages of the Quran. He went to the part of the factory where some people were discussing the issue. They showed him a partially burnt copy of the Quran and told him that they had found it when they were taking out the ash.

The copy was burnt around the edges but there was no damage visible to the area where verses were written, Tahir says in an interview in December 2017. This did not make sense to him. “Temperature inside the site where the paper was burnt could be anywhere between 900 and 1,000 degrees centigrade. It would be impossible for any paper to remain undamaged or partially damaged once it was thrown into that space that had only a 10-feet diameter,” he says.

In less than an hour, the police arrived and arrested him. “They tortured me and kept me in a lockup in Jhelum,” he says. Later that evening, a mob torched the building, the machinery and the raw material at the factory that remains closed even today.

Tahir was then taken to a jail in Gujrat city where he spent two months before he was shifted to Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi. A court later sentenced him to imprisonment for 25 years for ordering the desecration of the Quran. He appealed to the Lahore High Court against his sentence and the judges ordered his release on August 30, 2017 saying there was no evidence against him.

Tahir is among 516 Pakistani Ahmadis alleged to have committed blasphemy since 1987;nine of them have been killed by lynch mobs or in targeted attacks.According to the data compiled byPeter Jacob of the Lahore-based research and advocacy group, Centre for Social Justice, Ahmadis constitute about one-third of all those who have faced allegations of blasphemy in Pakistan in the last 30 or so years.

Tahir insists the blasphemy allegation against him was motivated by something other than his religion. The whole episode, he claims, had its origin in an agitation by some workers who wanted to unionise. He also alleges these workers were being egged on by some real estate developers in the area who were eyeing the factory’s land to set up a housing scheme. “The management did not want to sell it.”

Close to two and a half years after that fateful day, Tahir is still not sure if he could go back to Jhelum and be safe there. “I want to spend another year away from my hometown so that the incident gets erased from people’s minds,” he says.

Until then, he will be biding his time in Rabwah.

Rabwah is almost midway on the highway that connects Sargodha in the west with Faisalabad in the east. Located just opposite Chiniot city, it is spread over 1,500 acres of land lined with low brown hills on the southwest and the river Chenab on the east.

A large cemetery calledBehishti Maqbara,or heavenly graveyard, can be seen on the right where a narrow road diverges from the highway to go to Chenab Nagar. Secured by barbed wire with just one heavily guarded entrance, this burial place is reserved for Ahmadis who donate a certain portion of their income to their Jamaat. The space is allocated on the basis of who has given how much to their community both in cash and kind.

Paths within the cemetery look smooth and well maintained. The graves, covered in pebbles, all have tombstones. In one of them is buried Pakistan’s most known physicist, Dr Abdus Salam. “In 1979, [he] became the first Nobel laureate for his work in Physics,” reads his tombstone in Urdu. In September 2014, someone erased the word ‘Muslim’ between ‘first’ and ‘Nobel’, making the epitaph inaccurate.

One Maulana Zulfiqar Ali Khan Gauhar is buried on a raised platform to the right of Salam’s grave. He was the elder brother of Maulana Shaukat Ali and Muhammad Ali Jauhar, the famous Ali Brothers, who led a movement of Indian Muslims for the protection of the Turkish Muslim Caliphate in the late 1910s.

A separate enclosure is dedicated to the successors of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadi faith, their wives and other prominent members of Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya. The tombs are bigger in this section, the epitaphs are more descriptive and the graves are given more space. It is here that Pakistan’s first foreign minister Sir Zafarullah Khan lies buried.

The road that leads in to the residential part of Rabwah is lined by small shops and tea stalls. Autorickshaws and motorcycle-driven autotongas wait for passengers outside a large hospital just at the start of the town. This medical facility is run by Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya and caters to a large number of patients every day. Many of them are non-Ahmadis living in nearby towns and villages.

Rabwah is home to about 70,000 Ahmadis. It offers them a safe haven if and when they feel unsafe elsewhere in Pakistan. “[It] is a temporary refuge and a shelter,” says Amir Mahmood, spokesperson of Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya in Rabwah. “People find a sense of security in this town because the Ahmadi community lives here together.”

Except that Rabwah is not always safe.

An Ahmadi heart surgeon, Dr Mehdi Ali Qamar, was murdered in 2014 as he was leaving the graveyard just outside the town. A 26-year-old Ahmadi, Bilal Ahmed, was gunned down on a street inside Rabwah in 2016 while he was on his way home from his shop.

Rabwah was set up as Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya’s headquarters in 1948 on land purchased from the government. “The city was to serve as a centre or a foundation for the Ahmadiyya movement,” says Mahmood.

Mujeebur Rahman, an 83-year-old lawyer in Rawalpindi, remembers the day when the foundation stone for the town was laid. “It was barren land … Samples of the soil were sent to the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, and it was found to be completely infertile,” he says.

Vegetation is still rare in Rabwah. A big meeting ground, which has not been used for years, is grassy but sprinklers work regularly to keep it so. A number of trees can be seen around the Jamaat’s secretariat, its guest house and the residences of its main leaders. The roads leading to these buildings are also smooth and clean. Deeper inside the town, the streets are sandier, narrower and bumpier. Patches of greenery there are also small and tree cover is thin.

The road leading to the town’s main prayer centre, Baitul Mehdi, is heavily barricaded. Policemen and young volunteers stand guard outside the centre as theFridaysermon is being delivered inside.Twenty minutes later, worshippers leave in twos and threes. They do not exit en masse to avoid becoming targets of a mass attack.

Muslim religious leaders never liked the idea of Ahmadis living in a town of their own. They first made the government allot some land to Muslims on the periphery of Rabwah. Then they created additional pressure to force the government to change the name of the place in order to erase its Ahmadi identity. The Punjab Assembly consequently changed Rabwah’s name to Chenab Nagar on February 4, 1999 against the wishes of 95per cent of its residents who happen to be Ahmadis.

They also do not have any representation in the local government, which is run entirely by the representatives of the remaining five per cent. As a result, government-provided amenities remain scarce in Rabwah. “Development work here is done cursorily. [The town] is not the government’s primary concern,” says Mehmood. Why would an exclusively non-Ahmadi government care about a much-hated community’s welfare, he asks, especially when “they do not get any votes from here”.

And that is one of the main reasons why Ahmadis are not represented in the local government. They stopped taking part in the polling process four decades ago as a protest against voter registration and public representation laws that are discriminatory towards them (since they require a mandatory declaration of faith by all Ahmadi voters as well as Ahmadi contestants). “We want to vote but we will not as long as were are being discriminated against for our faith,” saysMehmood.

Parliament tried to do away with some of this discrimination when it passed the Elections Reforms Amendment Act 2017 in October last year. The act changed, among other things, a phrase from an oath about the finality of prophethood that all election candidates must take while filing their nomination papers — from “I solemnly swear” to “I declare”. The new law also rescinded Sections 7-B and 7-C of the Conduct of General Elections Order, 2002. The first of these sections reiterated the constitutional status of Ahmadis as non-Muslims and the second provided for the deletion of a candidate’s name from a joint electorate if he or she failed to sign a declaration on the finality of prophethood.

Within five days, the government backtracked and reversed the changes.

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, born in 1835, is recognised both as a messiah and a prophet by his followers who are known as Ahmadis — or derogatively as Qadianis and Mirzais.Since Muslims believe that no prophet will follow the Prophet of Islam (may peace be upon him), most of them see Ahmadis as apostates.

The emergence of the Ahmadi community in the second half of the 19th century was also seen as part of a colonial conspiracy to keep Indian Muslims divided and, thus, subservient to the British.

The Muslim antagonism towards them soon made it to courts.

Ali Usman Qasmi, a teacher at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, cites in his book, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan, the case of a woman from Bahawalpur who filed for divorce from her husband in 1926 on the ground that he had become an apostate by converting to Ahmadiyyat. The chief court of Bahawalpur initially rejected her petition but she filed a review petition at the Supreme Judicial Council that sent the case to a trial court. A lengthy trial followed in which religious arguments for and against Ahmadis were presented in detail. A final verdict, issued in 1935, decreed that Ahmadis were non-Muslims and converting from Islam to Ahmadiyyat was an act of apostasy.

Yet, in the political sphere, Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya worked in tandem with other Muslim political organisations such as the All India Muslim League. Ahmadis supported the movement for Pakistan (whereas most ulema-led religious parties opposed it). Sir Zafarullah Khan, a prominent Ahmadi lawyer, in fact, became one of the main leaders of the movement. He was also chosen as the Muslim League’s representative in the commission that drew the boundary between the Indian and Pakistani parts of Punjab. He would soon be criticised for letting India have the Gurdaspur tehsil of Sialkot district even though it was a Muslim-majority area. The reason why Gurdaspur is so central to the anti-Ahmadi narrative is that it is here in the village of Qadian that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born.

After Pakistan came into being, Sir Zafarullah Khan became a close aide of Muhammad Ali Jinnah besides being the foreign minister. But when Jinnah died in 1948, he would not offer his funeral prayer, providing more grist to the propaganda mills that alleged that his act of not participating in the funeral prayer was occasioned by his belief that the Father of the Nation – like all non-Ahmadis – was a non-Muslim.

Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya spokesperson Mehmood says the reason why Sir Zafarullah Khan did not offer the funeral prayer was because “it was led byMaulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani who believed Ahmadis to be apostates”.Sir Zafarullah Khandid not think it right to offer the prayer behind someone who considered his community as non-Muslim, Mehmood adds.

Coming as it did immediately after Gurdaspur going to India, this generated a massive amount of public anger against Sir Zafarullah Khan in particular and Ahmadis in general. Demands for his sacking from the government grew louder with each passing day.

These demands pushed the government into a bind.Pakistan was facing a severe wheat shortage at the time and his services were needed to reach out to the United States and other western countries for help. This made it impossible for the government to sack him.

The animosity between Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis, in the meanwhile, was becoming so intense that the two sides deployed whatever means and resources they could muster against each other — including popular media such as newspapers and magazines. Sensing the threat to law and order caused by these incendiary publications, the government banned several journals and newspapers brought out by various religious parties as well as by Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya.

This stoked public anger further rather than quashing it. People came out on to the streets across Punjab in February 1953 and large scale anti-Ahmadi agitation started throughout the province, leading to the murder of hundreds of Ahmadis. The governmentimposed Section 144that bans public gatherings but this, too, did not work.

Qasmi describes how rumours about mass killings of protesters at the hands of the administration helped the agitation to maintain its momentum.

On March 4, 1953, a police official was lynched to death near Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore after someone alleged that he had desecrated a book of religious verses while dispersing a crowd of protesters. In subsequent riots and the police attempts to suppress them, 24 people were killed and as many as 100 others were injured. When the situation became too difficult for the civilian administration to handle, the government imposed martial law in Lahore and deployed the army in various parts of the city to restore public order.

The martial law authorities acted quickly and arrested a large number of protest leaders, including Abdul Sattar Niazi, a firebrand mullah from Mianwali, and Abul A’la Maududi, the founding head of Jamaat-e-Islami. Both were given the death sentence in May that year for inciting hatred against Ahmadis.

The government also set up acourt of inquiry comprising then chief justice of Pakistan, Mohammad Munir, and a Lahore High Court judge, Rustam Kayani. It was directed to look into the events that had resulted in the deadly violence. After detailed hearings, the two judges compiled their findings in a report that stated that various political leaders and government representatives were largely to be blamed for letting politics take precedence over law and order and thereby allowing the situation to worsen under their watch.

During the hearings, the judges also sought explanations from Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya on its statements that referred to non-Ahmadis askaffirs (apostates). They also asked ulema and religious leaders to define what a Muslim is so that this definition could be used to determine the religious status of Ahmadis.

No unanimous definition emerged at the end of the day. “On the basis of the ‘definition’ given by the ulema, the Munir-Kiyani report made its best-known statement,” notes Qasmi. This statement stated: “If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslim according to the view of that alim but kafirs according to the definition of every one else.”

The infamous ‘Rabwah incident’ started in an unlikely manner. A train stopped at Rabwah railway station on May 29, 1974. Some members of the local Ahmadi community got into it and started distributing their religious literature — as they would do in all trains passing through the town. That day a number of students from Nishtar Medical College, Multan, were riding the train. They took umbrage to the distribution of Ahmadi literature and were beaten up by some Ahmadi residents of Rabwah.

The incident resulted in violent protests and mob attacks on the Ahmadi community and its properties and businesses across Punjab. Ahmadi men were abducted and tortured; in several cases, whole Ahmadi communities were expelled from where they had been living for generations. The violence continued sporadically for more than three months and resulted in the killing of at least 18 Ahmadis, mostly in central Punjab.

The government appeared utterly helpless in quelling the unrest that was often instigated by the ulema and led by religious activists. The failure to restore law and order put the federal administration of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto under severe pressure to resolve what at the time was called the ‘Qadiani Question’. Religious groups, indeed, accused Bhutto of having a soft corner for Ahmadis because they had supported his Pakistan Peoples Party in the 1970 general elections.

As a first step to address the problem, the government set upan inquiry tribunal headed by a LahoreHigh Court judge, K M A Samdani. It was mandated to look into the ‘Rabwah incident’ and apportion blame for it. The tribunal completed its report in August 1974 and handed it over to the Punjab government that never made it public.

Sadia Saeed, an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco, has included an interview with Samdani in her book,*P**olitics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan.*The judge told her on January 30, 2008 that the tribunal had nothing to do with the religious difference between Ahmadis and Muslims that, according to him, was “at one level … a matter of opinion” and a matter of faith at another.

Samdani also told Sadia that initial reports about the level of violence perpetrated by Ahmadis were wildly exaggerated. His inquiry did establish that Ahmadis had beaten Nishtar Medical College students but the beatings had been provoked by aMay 22altercation instigated by the students of the same college.

After setting up the inquiry tribunal rather involuntarily, the government was then forced to take another step.

Even before the Samdani-led tribunal had submitted its report, writesAli Usman Qasmi, a“resolution was also moved by 37 members of the [National Assembly]”. The resolution described “Mirza Ghulam Ahmed as a false prophet and condemned the adulterations he had allegedly made in the teaching of Islam … [and] suggested converting the [National Assembly] into a special committee” to resolve the Ahmadi issue once for all.Bhutto was left with no option but to say that he would follow Parliament’s decision.

The National Assembly “held 21 in-camera sessions” between August 5 and September 7, 1974 and Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya actively participated in its proceedings. As Qasmi points out, the Jamaat presented the findings of the Munir-Kiyani report in its favour to stress that various Muslim figures had been declared apostates by their sectarian rivals at different points in Muslim history. “The religious parties put forward what they deemed as controversial statement by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad about Prophethood and [about] excluding non-Ahmadis from Islam among others.”

In an eerie similarity to a recent ruling by the Islamabad High Court, the then attorney general (AG) raised many questions on how one person falsely claiming to be the member of a religious community infringed the fundamental rights of that entire community.Qasmi has recorded a dialogue between the AG and Nasir Ahmad, the most senior representative of Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya at the time, to highlight this controversy.

“AG: Do you agree that if a person makes a false declaration or any kind of declaration, somebody else has an authority to examine it, enquire into it, question it, about his religion? If I fill in a form …

Nasir Ahmad: Not about his religion, but about his declaration.

AG: Yes, in the declaration, a falsehood lies in the fact that he is not a Muslim and he says that he is a Muslim.

Nasir Ahmad: The authority is concerned with the declaration, not with his faith.

AG: No, the authority is concerned that no Non-Muslim should get in there.

Nasir Ahmad: The authority is concerned with the man who submits the false declaration.”

Nasir Ahmad then followed it up with this statement: “A declaration that I am a Muslim, if I make it in good faith, then it should be accepted. If I make it in bad faith, that means that I am not honest to God.”

Towards the end of the hearings, the AG raised another question: can a non-Ahmadi be a Muslim. Qasmi quotes Nasir Ahmad as responding that “according to his faith no non-Ahmadi in the Muslim community could be of this standard”.

Muslim religious leaders immediately picked this statement to assert that Ahmadis considered all non-Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Another statement by a Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya representative that the window of prophethood was still open also came in handy for these religious leaders.

On September 7, 1974, the National Assembly voted in favour of emending a part of Article 260 of the constitution to declare that“non-Muslim means a ‘person who is not a Muslim and includes a person belonging to the Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or Parsi community, a person of the Quadiani Group or the Lahori Group (who call themselves ‘Ahmadis’ or by any other name), or a Bahai, and a person belonging to any of the scheduled castes”.

Abdul Shakoor,83, owns a shop in Rabwah that sells assorted items ranging from religious books to spectacles to scents to table clocks.

The space above the shop’s shelves is lined with Shakoor’s photos. In one of them, he can be seen in police custody. The photo was taken on September 27, 1986. His crime: a sticker carrying thekalima(the Muslim vow of faith) was found in his shop in Sargodha.

The then government of Ziaul Haq had only recently added two new clauses, 298-B and 298-C, to the Pakistan Penal Code, prohibiting Ahmadis from doing or saying anything that could help them pass off as Muslims. This included a ban on them referring to their places of worship as masjid or mosque, reciting or displaying thekalimaand Quranic verses in their shops and other public places belonging to them, and referring to their prayers as namaz,like Muslims do.

Shakoor wasbooked under Section 298-C but was releasedthree months later. He was booked again under the same law onJune 21,1989 for displaying thekalimaand Quranic verses in his shop. The trial court sentenced him to two years of imprisonment and imposed a fine of 1,000 rupees on him. A district and sessions judge, however, ordered his release on December 9, 1989.

Three months later, he was facing the court again — this time for wearing a ring that had the word Allah written on top of it. A magistrate in Sargodha sent him to jail for three years but a district and sessions judge allowed his release on January 21, 1992.

Shakoor’s most recent arrest was on December 2, 2015. The charge against him this time was that he was selling copies of the Quran. Shakoor’s nephew, who runs the shop in his uncle’s absence, says a man came to the shop that day, asking for a copy of the Quran that also had translation andtafseer(exegesis).

The customer then wanted to get behind the counter where Shakoor was sitting but his nephew “told him to stay outside and wait”. While the nephew was looking for a copy, the man made a call to someone and sat across from Shakoor. Soon a car came to the front of the shop. The people who got out of it arrested Shakoor and told his nephew to leave the shop.

The latest charges against the old man include clauses of an antiterrorism law as well, prompting an antiterrorism court to award him five years in prison. He received an additional three years in jail for violating Section 298-C. Shakoor has appealed against his sentence at the Lahore High Court where a decision is still pending.

He remains behind bars in the meanwhile.

Kanwal* vaguely remembers her childhood in the mid-1970s. Her father worked in the population planning department at the time and was travelling when his wife and children had to leave their home in Sargodha and move to Rabwah for safety in 1974. Enraged mobs were torching Ahmadi houses and businesses and their lives were under imminent threat.

It was in this atmosphere that her father returned home unaware of the anti-Ahmadi frenzy. As he approached his residence, he realised a big mob was following him. “My father went to the rooftop to save his life,” she says.

A friend of his rushed to his house and told him that he would not be able to escape through the roof. “The friend led my father out from the back door, wrapped him in a blanket and made him lie in the back seat of his car. When the crowd followed the car, the friend chanted anti-Ahmadi slogans along with them. That is how my father was rescued.”

Kanwal also remembers how difficult it was to live under the constant threat of violence while she was studying in a college in Sargodha a few years later. “Whenever my brothers stepped out of our house, boys and men would threaten to kill them,” she recalls. “Stones were often thrown at our gate.”

She moved to the United States in 1989 but had migrated from Pakistan to Canada earlier. “When people here talk about Donald Trump and his hateful campaign against Muslims, we find it funny. We grew up with this hatred.”

It is aSundayand roads in Long Island, a suburb in New York, are almost deserted. Around 50 women of different ages have gathered inside Baitul Huda, a prayer hall in the neighbourhood. Its building looks more like a house than a place of worship.

The women, all Ahmadis, sit facing another woman talking to them from a podium in a basem*nt. Most of them have migrated to the United States from Pakistan. Some of them are originally from India and Bangladesh.

Sadia*, who is a housewife in New York, is one of them. Before moving to the United States, she lived in Rabwah and does not have fond memories of her life there. She recalls how she and other women in her community always stood out — if not for their religion then for their dress.

“Back in Pakistan, our burqas would give us away,” she says, explaining how an Ahmadi burqa is distinct due to the way its scarf is stitched. “I was 12 years old when I went with my family to Faisalabad from Rabwah for shopping. On our way back, our car broke down so my father decided to put the women and girls in a bus but no bus would stop for us. The drivers would look at our burqas, shake their heads and continue driving,” she says at her New York home.

Muneera*, 52, another participant of the Long Island congregation, has a similarly harrowing experience of living in Swat as an Ahmadi woman. “If Mashal Khan was not spared and if Zainab’s case can become what it became, how can I ever be safe in Pakistan?” she says when asked as to why her family left Pakistan.

Mashal Khan was murdered last year by a lynch mob, at a university in Mardan where he was studying, over allegations of blasphemy and Zainab’s father rejected a government-appointed investigation team into her rape and murder in Kasur early this year because the probe was headed by an Ahmadi police officer.

Sadia, Muneera and some other women move to a community centre next to the prayer hall after the sermon is over. It is lined with tables and chairs and a buffet of lentils, rice and chicken curry.

“Each family gets to host a lunch at the end of ourSundaygathering. It is a time to meet each other,” says Sadia as she puts a spoonful from each dish into paper plates for others who are all chatting and laughing.

Ahmadi immigrants had started making their way to the United States as early as the 1930s. A larger influx of them took place between the 1950s and the 1970s. On the whole, about 100,000 Ahmadis live in North America. Sixty per cent of these are of Pakistani origin, according to Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, USA.

Gatherings such as the one at Baitul Huda are common for Ahmadi communities living in various parts of the United States. According to Professor Hussein Rashid of the department of religion at Columbia University, they are more a manifestation of a shared insecurity than of anything else. “Staying together does not tell anything about the community except the fact that they are a minority, and a besieged minority,” he says. “This is often the case with immigrant groups and those who are persecuted in their home countries that they tend to stay within themselves.”

About457,103 Ahmadis still live in Pakistan, as per the 2017 census.Saleemuddin, aspokesperson of Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya in Karachi, says the community has never considered the option of mass migration. “We are among the makers of this country,” he says.

Those who have migrated also continue to face threats and harassment.

Tanveer Ahmed, ataxi driver from Bradford, England, stabbed an Ahmadi shopkeeper, Asad Shah, to death outside his shop in the same city. The following year,a ‘Final Prophet Conference’ was held in Springfield, Virginia, where, according to a tweet by one of the participants, most speakers were of Pakistani origin. They urged Muslims to use all their energy to stop Ahmadis from spreading within the United States. Funds to spread awareness about Ahmadis were also elicited at the conference, according to the tweet.

Zeeshan*, a Pakistani stand-up comedian popular on social media, recalls his experience from the time when he used to wait tables. He says how an uncle of his refused to have a Shezan cold drink because it is reportedly manufactured by an Ahmadi-owned company but he really enjoyed his Pepsi made by a company owned by white Christians. The Lahore Bar Association, a forum of lawyers, once famously barred the sale of Shezan products on the premises of Lahore’s district courts.

Shezan International Limited complains in a written statement that religious discrimination against its products is rampant in markets across Pakistan. “We have observed in different areas that [a] number of groups consisting of four to five people … go shop to shop to convince and threaten [Muslim retailers that they should not] continue their business with Shezan …”

Even in schools and colleges, discrimination against Ahmadis is rampant.

For Salman*, who spent his early days in Rawalpindi and migrated to Germany in 2013, his faith became a sticking point when he was seeking admission to a school of his choice. He was a student of class seven at a school run by the Pakistan Air Force in the 2000s and wanted to join a cadet college in Rawalpindi. During his admission interview, he was asked to fill a form about his faith. “I was shocked. That is when it started to hit me that we are different from others,” he says.

Salman has an active social media presence. He took to twitter recently to disclose his faith. It was scary and mentally exhausting, growing up as an Ahmadi in Pakistan, he said in a tweet. He decided to declare his faith in the wake of a sit-in protest just outside Islamabad by Muslim religious activists against a change in election nomination forms that was perceived as diluting, if not entirely obliterating, the difference between Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis in Pakistan. “I thought people should know what exactly happens to people of the Ahmadi community. Getting their sympathies was not the point.”

Back home in Pakistan, Ahmadi students have far worse to deal with. In 2011, as per media reports, 10 Ahmadi students were expelled from two schools in a village in Faisalabad district. They had to move to another district to re-enroll. In a similar incident in the summer of 2008, the Punjab Medical College, Faisalabad, first expelled 23 Ahmadi students but later suspended them for two weeks on charges of preaching their faith on campus.

Stories of discrimination against Ahmadis are ubiquitous but lately they have been more pervasive than before in the national documentation of citizens.

When Aisha* applied for her National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistanis (Nicop) in 2015, she received an email from the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) telling her to submit a copy of her foreign/Pakistani passport as well as that of her mother. After she sent the copies, NADRA officials asked her to clarify as to why her mother’s religion was given as Ahmadiyyat on her passport but her own was recorded as Islam.

She did not receive any reply from NADRA afterwards. When she pestered the officials through repeated emails, they told her that her religion needed to be changed to Ahmadi on her Nicop that she finally receivedtwo years later.

Aisha wonders what would have happened to her if she was in Pakistan. She could have been accused of either having hidden her real religious identity, which is a crime for Ahmadis in Pakistan – or, worse still, could have faced the allegations of apostasy – for changing her religion from Islam to Ahmadiyyat. “[Someone] would probably have hauled me to a court for changing my religion,” she says.

In February 2018, the Islamabad High Court did something similar. It ordered NADRA to submit a comprehensive report about more than 10,000 Ahmadis who have changed their religious status from Muslim to Ahmadi while applying for the renewal of their Computerised National Identity Cards in the last decade or so. When the court was told that more than 6,000 of them have already left Pakistan, the judge directed the federal government to show their travel history to him.

A month later, the same judge made it mandatory for all Pakistani citizens to declare their faith in oath before joining the armed forces, civil services and the judiciary. This could well be motivated by rumours that often circulate about people being given high-profile jobs — that they are Ahmadis. The most recent object of these rumours has been Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Chief of Army Staff. In the past, former chief minister of Punjab Manzoor Wattoo has faced the same allegation.

According to Peter Jacob of the Centre of Social Justice, religious minorities in Pakistan rightly feel that enhancing the scope of religion in national documentation, as has been ordered by the high court in Islamabad, “will expose them to more religious discrimination”. He, however, points out that the judge’sruling is not unprecedented. “A Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) government in 1992 had tried to introduce a column for religion in the National Identity Cards, a move that was thwarted bya nationwide protest by religious minorities and the civil society,” he says. “What is striking this time round is that [the directive for emphasis on religion in identity-related documents] is coming from the bench [that] is supposed to [ensure the implementation] of the constitution in the light of fundamental human rights.”

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, therefore, has called on the government to seek a reversal of the ruling through an appeal at the Supreme Court. “Forums for justice … should play their due role in safeguarding the fundamental rights of the most vulnerable sections of society. It is therefore unfortunate thatPakistan‘s religious minorities should feel more unsafe as a result of a ruling by the honourable court,”the commission said in a recent statement.

Officials at the state’s ownNational Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) have a similar point of view. They say they are asking the federal government to challenge the ruling. “This decision [has been made] on a petition by a single judge,” says Chaudhry Muhammad Shafique, an NCHR member. “Human rights of citizens cannot be left at the mercy of one individual,” he says. “Such sensitive legal or constitutional issues should be raised and decided in a full court setting of [the] Supreme Court [working] as a constitutional court to settle [such] constitutional issues.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

The writer is a graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism and a freelance reporter based in Karachi.

This was originally published in Herald's April 2018 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

Muhammad Saleem, 37, grows wheat, cumin, watermelons and onions in Balochistan’s Nushki district. He uses an electricity-run tube well to irrigate 100 acres of land that he owns. Over the last several years, he has seen his crops suffer every season due to water shortage since availability of electricity for his tube well has become highly uncertain. Not only have scheduled hours for power outages been long, unscheduled outages have become even longer.

“We get electricity hardly six hours a day,” says Saleem. “That is insufficient to cater to our irrigation needs.” During peak seasons for such crops as wheat, cumin, watermelons and onions – that coincide with the summer months of May, June, July, August and September – unscheduled power outages can be as long as four to five days. This ruins crops and causes grave financial loss to farmers, he says.

Farmers in a number of areas in north-western and central Balochistan, such as Loralai (where almond farming has virtually collapsed), Chagai, Mangochar, Pishin and Kalat, have migrated to cities where they work as vegetable/fruit vendors and shop assistants, mostly living with relatives. Their farms are turning into a barren land mass because they are unable to irrigate them, Saleem says.

Even in Quetta, Balochistan’s provincial capital, electricity is not available five to six hours every day. In some areas of the city, duration for outages stretches to eight hours a day and this has been the case since 2007. “Load-shedding has brought me to the brink of closing down my business,” says Ghafoor Ahmed, who runs a tailoring shop on Sariab Road. While most other local shopkeepers use diesel generators to produce their own electricity during outages, Ahmed says he “cannot afford a generator”.

Shopkeepers, flour mill owners and those associated with the cottage industry have been affected the most. Tariq Mehmood, a former furniture dealer, has closed down his “furniture workshop due to non-availability of uninterrupted power” supply. “I was not able to fulfil commitments to my customers,” he says.

Also, unlike many other parts of Pakistan where decrease in temperature reduces electricity’s demand and subsequently decreases load-shedding, electricity vanishes in Quetta and many northern and central parts of Balochistan the moment it starts to rain and snow. Whenever it rained and snowed heavily in January and February this year in these parts, inclement weather disrupted power transmission lines and people had to make do without electricity for days.

Whenever people pray for rain and snowfall (which has become rarer in recent years), they also pray for continuous supply of electricity, says Mirza Nadeem Baig, a 56-year-old shopkeeper in a market on Quetta’s Jinnah Road.Officials of the Quetta Electric Supply Company (Qesco) do not deny these claims and complaints. They acknowledge that Balochistan is not receiving electricity “according to its requirement”. Rehmatullah Baloch, Qesco’s chief executive officer, says the province needs around 1,650 megawatts of electricity but is getting only 650 megawatts from the national grid.

That is only half the problem, though. Even if the national grid wants to transmit to Balochistan all the electricity it requires, Baloch says, transmission lines cannot handle that load. “We could only get up to 900-950 megawatts when we tried to [increase the transmission of electricity],” he says. “When we tried to get more electricity than that, the main transmission lines started tripping.”

A related problem is electricity lost and stolen during transmission. The province loses anywhere between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of its electricity (depending upon the area and the state of the transmission lines) to these two factors.

And, lastly, electricity bills amounting to 190 billion rupees have remained unpaid for the last seven to eight years in Balochistan. Owners of 29,000 or so tube wells comprise the largest number of these defaulters, even when the provision of electricity to them remains heavily subsidised: every tube well operator gets 10,000 units of electricity each month at a lump sum price of 75,000 rupees but he pays only 10,000 rupees out of it. Of the remaining amount, the provincial government pays 60 per cent and the federal government pays 40 per cent. The total amount of this subsidy reaches 22 billion rupees every year.

All these problems are emblematic of what is wrong with the electricity sector, not just in Balochistan but all over Pakistan. Are there any efforts to fix them?

This is an excerpt from the Herald's April 2017 cover story. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

Rail ki bahali, quam ki khushali
Rail ka safar araam deh aur aaloodgi se pak hai
Mehnat say kaam karain aur railway ki service ko umda bana’in

(Rehabilitation of rail is enrichment of nation;
Rail’s journey is comfortable and free of pollution;
Work hard and turn rail into a high quality service)

These slogans grace the wall of a small room kept intact by some mysterious force. Bricks are coming out of its walls and its roof stands unstable. A flight of stairs inside it leads to a run-down and non-functional bathroom. Both the stairs and the bathroom paint a picture of sustained neglect. Outside, the trees seem to have comparatively aged with grace.

This is where foremen and supervisors working at a washing line on the eastern edge of Karachi’s Cantt Railway Station congregate before they start their day’s work.

Through the old trees, one can see some rail coaches — their newly painted steel bodies gleaming in the sun. Lined up like animals in a stable, they are waiting to be washed and cleaned before their next journey.

It takes about 40 people and about four hours to wash and clean a single train. Two cleaners rinse the coaches. Four others are assigned to sweep the floors. A number of sanitary workers clean the bathrooms. Two clean the seats and two others take care of the windows. A number of pipe-fitters handle the hoses and hydrants, supplying water to wash its outer body. People can be seen on all sides of the train, sweeping and rinsing it before washing it clean with powerful water jets. The washing-line bays go several feet deep so that the workers can get underneath the carriages and wash them from below.

These workers wash about 10 trains every day — repeating the same routine over and over again. They do not have waterproof uniforms. They wear no safety helmets and walk barefoot amid the slush created by water perpetually running into mud around them. Once the work is done, each one of them takes a shower on the edge of the muddy bays using the same slimy hoses that they wash the trains with.

The trash that the passengers leave in trains ranges from polythene wrappers, food leftovers, plastic bottles, cigarette stubs (often extinguished on the floor) and just about anything that people use inside a train. The passengers do not bother picking the trash they themselves create, says Abdul Jabbar, a 50-something worker wearing a worn-down shalwar kameez. He has been working at the line since 1990. His father, too, worked here. “The passengers rather tend to throw trash underneath the seats.” It is only at the end of a journey that all of that is collected, he says.

Once collected, the trash is left to rot with existing piles of rubbish that have been gathering on the sides of the bays for decades. The decrepit platforms along the bays only add to the seemingly irreversible state of decay that the entire washing area is in.

Parallel to the washing line is a small shed. Called ‘sick line’, it is used for checking trains experiencing minor faults that can be addressed without taking the train to a workshop. An old train is rusting here. It has certainly been here for more than day, possibly for over a week.

A sick train rotting in a shed – either abandoned or forgotten – tells the story of Pakistan Railways: a state institution that has allowed its minor problems to pile up over decades, to an extent where they have become chronic diseases.

The wrong signal

Most of the passengers aboard Awam Express on September 15, 2016 were returning to work in Karachi after spending Eidul Azha holidays in their home towns and villages. The train left Multan Cantt Railway Station at2:27 am and reached Buch Railway Station on the southern outskirts of Multan three minutes later. It was supposed to whistle past the station at 50 kilometres per hour when its driving staff spotted something unusual. A goods train was parked right on the track that Awam Express was using and there was no time to change the track. They did not even have that option. Deciding which train will take which track is the exclusive prerogative of people operating outside the train. The drivers just follow their signals.

After the two trains collided, at least four people died and over 100 were injured. One of the dead was crossing the railway line when he was run over by the goods train — just before it was hit by Awam Express. A railway guard on duty immediately reported the accident to railway police. Subsequently, a case was registered at Shershah Police Station against A R Shamoon, head driver of Awam Express, among others.

Shamoon joined Pakistan Railways in 1978. Highly respected for his skills, he has driven special trains carrying senior Pakistan Railways officials as well as prominent politicians.

Ghulam Shafiq, a railway staffer, was one of the first people to reach the site of the accident. He saw the driving staff get out of the tumbled train and walk to a nearby farmhouse to contact the control room in Multan so that the rescue operation would begin. He remembers seeing them at the site till6:00 am.

By that time it had become obvious from statements by the railway administration that the blame for the accident would be placed on them.

To clear the air, Shamoon and his driving associate spoke to a local television reporter. He said Awam Express had entered Buch Railway Station only after receiving a go-ahead from a guard. Shamoon said he saw the goods train only after it came in the range of Awam Express’s headlight. He blamed the signal system for confusing the guard. “This signal … system has been … working on a trial basis. Officers have noted that it is not working properly. We have complained about it before,” he told the reporter. “No driver in Pakistan has received training about the system,” he claimed.

Azhar Qaisar, the assistant driver, repeated more or less the same details, with the addition that he was in touch with the guard via text messages as well.

Their superiors at Pakistan Railways did not agree. They suspended the entire driving staff of Awam Express. Six months later, a departmental inquiry committee would find Shamoon at fault. He would be sacked from his job. The rest of the driving staff would be allowed to get back to work.

Shamoon’s supporters say the real culprit was the signal system, recently introduced at the cost of 300 million rupees at seven stations along the Peshawar-Lahore-Karachi railway line. These stations fall between Shahdara station on the northern outskirts of Lahore and Lodhran station, about 77 kilometres to the southeast of Multan. Rest of the stations along the same line still use the old German-built signal system installed in the 1970s. (An even older system is used at some branch lines such as the one between Sukkur and Sibi.)

Before Shamoon’s dismissal, the railway administration also ordered taking the new signal system out of operation. Since last November, it has not been used at any of the seven stations between Shahdara and Lodhran.

The system was first installed at railway stations between Hyderabad and Karachi in 2009 and conversations with drivers suggest that it was never flawless. Those operating between the two cities often complain that due to land gradient they see multiple signals at the same time while approaching Karachi’s Landhi railway station.

It was around this very area that Bahauddin Zakaria Express coming from Multan crashed into Fareed Express on November 3, 2016. At least 22 people died in the accident and more than 40 others were injured. The collision took place at Jumma Hamaiti station, about nine kilometres to the east of Landhi. The signal system, however, did not cause the crash. Officials and drivers claim the man who was supposed to be driving Bahauddin Zakaria Express was sitting with his family in another part of the train.

A railway supervisor based in Karachi blames the lack of coordination among drivers, stationmasters and guards as a major reason for the rising number of accidents in recent years. The company has not provided latest communication devices to these officials as they communicate with each other either by using their own cell phones or the old hand-dialled analogue phones, he says. Using cell phones is a personal expense and using analogue phones means that messages can get lost due to bad lines, he explains, seeking anonymity.

Professional rivalries among officials also hamper communication between them. Drivers, stationmasters and signal workers are unhappy with guards who were given raises and their service structure was improved in 2014, he says.

Railways minister Khawaja Saad Rafique informed a Senate standing committee on March 7, 2017 about another reason for increase in train accidents: unmanned sites where road transport passes across train tracks — called level crossings in rail jargon. In the last three years, 140 rail accidents have occurred at level crossings. A federal government survey has identified 550 level crossings where accidents are highly likely to take place, he said.

The government has penalised 120 railway employees over accidents that have taken place since July 2013, Rafique told the Senate panel. Two of these employees have been removed from service, he said.

Other than resulting in tragic loss of life, these accidents have also caused a massive loss to the national exchequer. In a single accident that took place on May 13 this year, the railway incurred a total loss of 437.7 million rupees. The accident took place when a goods train coming from Karachi crashed head-on with another goods train about five kilometres from Kotri Junction in Jamshoro district. The driver of the train coming from Karachi is said to have fallen asleep on duty.

Right next to the boundary wall of a railway police office just outside Karachi’s Cantt station is an old overhead pedestrian bridge. It passes above the railway tracks and lands into a neighbourhood where railway workers live. The Railway Colony – as the area is called – has rows of paan stalls and its streets are littered with sewage and piles of rubbish.

Ghulamullah Billah, a former rail driver, who retired in 2005, lives here. “When I joined the railway, my father told me one thing: do your work honestly and you will always benefit from it,” he says, as he starts speaking about the increase in the number of rail-related accidents. When he joined the company in 1965, he was first assigned to drive cargo trains. It was only after he had gained sufficient experience that he was allowed to drive passenger trains.

His son, Sanaullah, also works in the railway but at a workshop. Before he leaves for his night duty, Sanaullah brings out copies of some old certificates awarded to his family members recognising their rail-related service. His great-grandfather, Bhag, was the first member of the family to join the railway in 1895. He retired in 1920. Sanaullah’s grandfather, Khuda Bakhsh, became a railway employee in Karachi in 1927 and continued working till 1967.

Before the 1990s, Billah says, a protocol was in place to prevent accidents from taking place. This was introduced by the British and it put the driver at the centre of the train operations. Even a general manager or a minister would not interfere in a driver’s work or force him to do anything against that protocol, he says. The drivers were also highly conscious of their responsibility, he says. “Whether it was day or night, they would always be alert.”

They were also mindful of how they looked. They wore well-tailored neat uniforms, with shining insignias, and they donned them with pride and dignity. Both the uniforms and insignias were provided by the railway every year, says Billah. This changed in 1985 when the railway administration started providing oversized uniforms that required alterations before they could be used, he says, adding that they were so oversized that their sleeves would be a foot longer than required.

He remembers mobilising train drivers in Karachi to protest about the uniforms in front of an operations general manager visiting the city. He suggested the drivers wear their unaltered uniforms when they meet the officer. “When he came around, he inquired what this was all about. We responded by saying the administration needed to give us uniforms that fit. We do not have time and money to get these altered.”

The protest changed nothing. “In the end, an officer is an officer,” says Billah.

In the 1990s, the administration cut back on the provision of uniforms. The yearly provision changed to a two-yearly routine first and then to a three-yearly one. In a not-so-unexpected coincidence, this was also the period when the railway’s performance began nosediving.

By the time Billah retired in the early 2000s, the drivers had stopped receiving uniforms altogether.

Kashif Khan, a young assistant stationmaster at Sukkur Railway Station, is hidden behind files and papers piled up on his small desk. A large television screen is occupying the remaining space on the desk. It is showing routes for various incoming trains. A small red light blinking on it indicates that a train has arrived safely at its designated platform.

Association with railways is something that runs in the family, says Kashif Khan, 28, his chubby face partially covered by a thick moustache. But he does not come from a railway household. He landed this job after taking a test, he says. He was sent to Pakistan Railway Academy in Lahore for training before he was appointed at his current position in 2013.

He likes his job — the power to decide routes and platforms trains will traverse as they roll into Sukkur station. He uses an ancient analogue phone to communicate with workers in the signal cabin outside the station.

Unlike Kashif Khan, those who work with him at the signals system do not seem entirely happy. Sub-engineer Abdur Razzaq, who joined the railway in 1980, is perhaps the unhappiest among them. A rather short man in his late fifties, he operates from a cramped, crumbling office at Sukkur station. Sporting a thick beard and wearing a Sindhi cap, he seems to be perennially grumbling about an assistant station manager who oversees platforms, his own salary and grade that have remained unchanged over the years and the railway administration that has divided the workers in various tiers so that they do not unite to fight for their rights.

But his strongest complaint is about the workload: he is responsible for keeping all signals in working condition and all communication flowing smoothly between Sukkur and Dadu — a 180-kilometre stretch of railway lines. “If we have to go out in the field, we have to pay travel costs from our own pockets,” he says. “We have to sleep on platforms if and when we go out of Sukkur to fix something. And we are supposed to be on duty 24 hours a day even though we do not get paid additionally for the extra hours we put in.”

Razzaq soon joins three workers sitting in an elevated cabin supported by four iron pillars just outside the station. The cabin houses multiple levers — colour-coded and numbered. These levers are used to lock a track for a train entering or leaving the station. The workers have an old analogue phone to coordinate with the stationmaster. The cabin and its occupants are an important part of the railway’s signal section in Sukkur.

A little later, Razzaq walks along the railway line towards the far end of the station where he and a gateman, Junaid Iqbal, explain how the signal system works. As explained by them, the process appears so methodical that it leaves ample room for rectification if and when someone misses one of its multiple steps: if the gateman does not close the gate to block road traffic passing across train tracks, the man responsible for signalling the clearance of the track with a flag should not issue his signal; if he, too, falters, the levers meant to change the signal should not move as long as the gate is open. When a stationmaster finally allows the signal to go red or green, he does so only after all the previous steps have been taken correctly. If a wrong signal still gets issued, a special key used for locking and unlocking the gate can be used as a safety switch to issue an alert.

This seemingly flawless system has failed to prevent three major accidents near Sukkur over the last three decades. The latest of these took place in July 2005 when three trains collided at a railway station in Ghotki district, leaving at least 133 people dead and many others injured. Officials later said the accident had occurred because a signal was interpreted wrongly by one of the drivers. About 100 people lost their lives in a similar accident in June 1991. About 18 months prior to that, Pakistan’s deadliest train wreck had also taken place near Sangi village in Sukkur district. It had resulted in about 300 deaths.

An overhead iron bridge at Karachi’s Cantt Railway Station leads to a small shed where several relief trains (that provide emergency services such as first aid) and relief cranes (that remove damaged trains from tracks) are parked. Their bright orange colour makes them distinguishable from a distance. The oldest among these contraptions is a crane from 1930. It is still functional and has a capacity to lift around 60 tonnes of weight off the tracks.

In 2013, railway administration added a new crane which can lift around 170 tonnes. But the workers still like the long-standing dependability of the old one. “This is a really good machine. It has never let us down,” says Ghulam Qadir, a relief crane helper, as he pats the crane.

When Bahauddin Zakaria Express collided with Fareed Express last year, Qadir and his colleagues were among the first railway officials to reach the site of the accident. “The nature of the crash was such that it was really difficult to rescue the injured,” he says. Many people had their body parts stuck in between the two trains. “It is hard to describe how we removed their limbs. We had to use gas-cutters and welding machines to tear through [steel sheets and metallic equipment],” he says.

“We also removed a child’s body from beneath an engine.”

Train to Pakistan

Construction of Lahore Junction Railway Station, according to William Glover’s book, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining A Colonial City, started shortly after the 1857 Indian rebellion against the British. It was a period when securing British civilians and troops against future native uprisings was foremost on the British administration’s mind, Glover writes. The station, therefore, was designed like a “fortified medieval castle complete with turrets and crenellated towers, battered flanking walls and loopholes for directing rifle and cannon fire along the main avenues of approach from the city”.

During the Partition riots in 1947, the same station would receive trains full of dead bodies.

Apart from these historic links to violence, railways have frequently been targeted and attacked in our part of the world. Terrorists and political activists of all types – from anti-British underground networks of freedom fighters to Baloch insurgents and even ordinary Pakistanis protesting against electricity outages – have disrupted rail traffic and damaged railway infrastructure every now and then. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, there have been 136 terrorist attacks on railway installations and trains between 2000 and 2017 alone, resulting in 96 deaths.

Passengers enraged over the dismal quality of rail service have also enforced multiple disruptions in recent times. In October 2010, passengers waiting to board the delayed Narowal Express in Lahore occupied the track Quetta Express was to use. According to a report in daily The News, they were upset over delay in the departure of their train. Similarly, people enraged by long electricity outages torched a train in Gujranwala in June 2012, halting the operations of 25 trains.

Sometimes, angry passengers attack railway staff too. A station manager working in Lahore says he was beaten up by passengers when he was posted in Raiwind a few years ago.

The most damaging attacks on rail installations, however, took place in December 2007, following the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Angry agitators destroyed 35 train engines, 139 coaches, 65 stations, 36 bridges and 27 manned level crossings, according to a report in daily Dawn. They also uprooted signals, communication systems and tracks, besides damaging six cranes in Karachi and Sukkur divisions. The total cost of the damage, according to Dawn, was estimated to be 12.3 billion rupees. The destruction increased travel time between Karachi and destinations in the north of the country by three to four hours for over a year.

At 1:45 in the afternoon, Tezgam reaches a platform at Lahore railway station. Passengers begin to enter the coaches immediately. Everything inside the train looks clean and tidy. Doors to air-conditioned sleeper cabins can be shut for privacy; there are beds in the cabins for passengers to take a nap.

The sleepers do not seem to have many passengers though. Railway officials can be seen occupying some of them.

A team of ticket collectors strolls by. One of them quickly checks the ticket (that costs 1,500 rupees for a one-way journey between Lahore and Khanewal). These tickets can be bought at the booking office at the station, a reservation office in the city as well as online.

Soon the train rolls out of the station. As it hurtles down south, two young journalists, Lahore-based English newspaper Daily Times’ Muhammed Asim and Karachi-based news channel Samaa TV’s Ali Tahir, sit in the exit door of a compartment, taking in some of the scenic beauty of Punjab’s agricultural plains. They are travelling to Karachi on vacation and are happy that the train has left on time and is not overbooked. “Anyone who has travelled on the rail or has followed its history knows that under Ghulam Ahmad Bilour the train service had completely deteriorated,” says Asim, referring to the tenure of the previous railways minister. “The current government seems to have put in a lot of effort to get these trains running on time,” he says.

A three-year performance report issued by the Ministry of Railways also marks the difference between then and now: only 12 per cent of the express/mail trains travelled on time in 2012-2013; the figure increased to 27 per cent in 2013-2014 and stood at 35 per cent in 2014-2015 but jumped to 53 percent in 2015-2016. Improved punctuality has also had a positive impact on the earnings of Pakistan Railways, the report mentions. More passengers, it seems, are seeing the rail as a reliable way to commute than they did in the past.

The two journalists talk about how 16 major railway stations – Karachi Cantt, Karachi City, Hyderabad Junction, Sukkur, Quetta, Bahawalpur, Raiwind Junction, Lahore, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Okara, Sahiwal, Narowal Junction, Nankana Sahib and Hasan Abdal – have been renovated and now offer improved seating, waiting, washing and dining facilities.

They also mention areas that still need improvement: the staff requires training about interaction with passengers; guards need better uniforms (their existing dark blue uniforms look like they have never been washed, says Tahir); waiters serving food within trains need to be dressed in proper liveries; and both the food’s variety and quality can improve.

There is always an atmosphere of urgency at Khanewal Junction. Passengers leave parked trains to have a quick cup of tea along with pakoras on the platform or buy something they need but cannot get in the train, like cigarettes. They have to be quick lest the trains depart without them. Dozens of hawkers running up and down the length of the platform add to the sense of urgency as they cater to the needs of the passengers who do not want to get out of trains.

The station looks well-maintained. Food stalls – usually selling mix chai, chaat, pulao or chicken – have a fresh and sleek look about them.

Khanewal is the meeting point of three different lines — one that comes from Peshawar via Lahore and goes onwards to Karachi; the second that connects Khanewal with Multan and the third that links Faisalabad and Khanewal. Pakistan’s first electricity-powered trains, hauled by 29 engines imported from England and introduced in 1965, operate only between Lahore and Khanewal. Their introduction was part of the first post-Partition modernisation of railway infrastructure.

Muhammed Irfan runs a spacious dining hall at Khanewal Junction but serves only basic foods such as rice and lentils. A bearded man in his late fifties, he is wearing a white shalwar kameez drenched in sweat. His father and grandfather both worked in the railway. He found it natural to follow in their footsteps. “Mochi ka beta mochi hi hota hai (A cobbler’s son will also be a cobbler),” he says, laughing. “This is what our culture is.”

He has a team of around 10 people working for him. His income remains meagre though, he says. He has to pay what he believes is an exorbitant sum of money to Pakistan Railways in annual rent for the dining hall and he cannot serve multi-course meals because most rail passengers – belonging to working and lower-middle class – cannot afford them. The few passengers who can afford to spend good money on food, according to him, do not like the facilities and furniture in the non-air-conditioned dining hall (which has not changed a bit in decades).

At a few major stations, fast-food chains such as Pizza Hut and McDonalds have opened their outlets but they have done so only after Pakistan Railways helped them set up air-conditioned halls and bring in fashionable furniture.

In the (distant) past, catering at dining halls (which were present at all major stations) was run by the company itself. Everyone associated with the rail, whether directly or indirectly, is nostalgic about the quality of customer service in that bygone era. Irfan, too, talks about that time nostalgically. His father donned a crisp uniform as he worked in the dining hall at Khanewal. The quality of food served and the level of customer care matched those of a high-end restaurant.

Khanewal Junction’s VIP waiting room – a hall with a high ceiling, arched wooden entrance and big windows – looks like it was last painted before Partition. Its furniture is also old. The few chairs with seats and backs made of woven rattan, wooden benches and a hammock that unsuccessfully try to give the room a sophisticated look must have been brought here by the British. Its bathroom is at an advanced stage of disrepair.

At around nine o’clock on a recent evening, the waiting room is closed. It is only opened after a couple of passengers travelling in the sleeper cabins tell the station staff that they want to use it. An old man wearing a light blue shalwar kameez and covering his head with a traditional Sindhi cap is one of the people who get to use the room. He says he works in the oil industry and combs his beard with his fingers every now and then as he comments on every topic under the sun — from religion and politics to the weather and the state of the rail.

The train that he is supposed to take for Hyderabad is late. Nobody knows why. The officers with their faded uniforms only offer him evasive responses.

When finally the announcement for the train’s arrival is made at about 11 pm, he walks to the platform with his shalwar raised above his ankles. The train is filled to capacity. One has to be sure about one’s seat in order to avoid censure for entering into compartments usually occupied by families.

The train reaches Rohri at around 4:30 am. As it begins to slow down, an almost empty platform can be seen in the early morning twilight. A few passengers are huddled together in small groups. The station’s premises do not seem to have been repaired in decades. Paint is peeling off the buildings and the concrete floor of the platforms has come off in large patches, leaving behind dirt and pebbles strewn everywhere.

The only recent development here is a reservation office. A banner displayed by its sidewall shows two of Rohri’s prized monuments — the Lansdowne Bridge built in 1887 and the Ayub Bridge built in 1962. The two bridges link the town with Sukkur, located just across the River Indus.

It is here that trains to Balochistan leave the main Karachi-Peshawar line and turn westwards to Quetta.

Rohri is a ghost of a town, with next to no economic activity other than rail. At one point, it was a vibrant industrial town. Muhammed Nawaz Dayo, a bitter man in his late sixties, has witnessed days when the town bustled with activity. He joined a local state-owned cement factory in 1976 and, after 24 years of work, retired as its foreman, tasked with monitoring other workers.

The factory was built in 1938, according to a 2013 report in a journal, Asia-Pacific Finance and Accounting Review. It was set up in Rohri “due to easy access to its raw materials — limestone, clay, literite, gypsum and sand” that came from various districts of Balochistan. Ease in transportation was the other factor — Rohri being “a major junction, which was at the centre of the country connecting all four provinces of Pakistan”.

Dayo remembers how a railway line came straight into the factory, right where cement was packed in bags.

If we have to go out in the field, we have to pay travel costs from our own pockets. We have to sleep on platforms if and when we go out of Sukkur to fix something. And we are supposed to be on duty 24 hours a day even though we do not get paid for the extra hours.

Post-Partition, the factory was Pakistan’s second largest cement manufacturer. It was nationalised in 1965 along with another factory in Wah, near Rawalpindi. By 1972, the report says, it could produce 800 tonnes of cement every day.

In January 1999, according to the report, the Privatization Commission of Pakistan discontinued production at the factory and terminated its 531 employees. Five years later, a private business group “acquired it [with] 250 million” rupees. By 2009, the factory’s accumulated losses had risen to 50 million rupees, forcing its owners to shut it down.

Jaffar Express is named after Mir Jaffar Khan Jamali, a Baloch leader who played a prominent role in the Pakistan Movement. One of the only two trains that link Balochistan with the rest of Pakistan, it leaves Sukkur for Quetta at 3 am.

Kashif Khan, the assistant stationmaster, advises against taking the train since it frequently comes under attack by Baloch insurgents. An April 2014 attack at Sibi Railway Station left at least 17 people dead, including two women and four children. There have been numerous other smaller attacks on the train over the last 10 years or so.

This year the threat level has been so high that the government had to call off an annual mela in Sibi, a small desert town about 240 kilometres northwest of Sukkur. Troops belonging to Frontier Corps (FC) regularly patrol the train track around Sibi and sometimes also inspect and frisk passengers. Between Sibi and Quetta, passengers are not allowed to open the train’s window shutters.

The other unusual feature of the rail system between Sukkur and Quetta is that it still uses the British-era signal system, one that employs kerosene lanterns on signal posts and a token, passed from one group of the signal staff to the next, to ensure that there are no gaps in communication.

It is early noon when the train reaches Sibi. Quetta is still another 160 kilometres to the northwest.

FC soldiers are guarding the platform of Sibi’s small station. A portion of its building is demolished and darkened by soot — evidence of a bomb explosion that killed at least seven people here in June 2012. Walls of its lone waiting room are covered in unintelligible graffiti.

A police station is located right outside the railway station. The main bazaar and the town are a 10-minute walk away.

In the sick line to one side of Sibi Railway Station stands the wreckage of a train that came under a terrorist attack recently — huge carriages lying in an empty lot. Some are crushed and compressed. Others are blackened with soot. All of them are rusting away in Sibi’s infamous heat.

Mehr Express is empty even though it is time for it to leave Rawalpindi. An economy-class -only train, it’s operated from a platform at the farthest end of the station. It sways and wobbles precariously as it moves out of its bay. The windows are covered with dust and the floor is a layer of concrete. The train has no air-conditioning.

There are not many passengers inside the train when it starts its journey. Most of the occupants of the almost empty carriages are working-class men who are returning home to Mianwali and other western parts of Punjab. There are also a few families scattered around different carriages because no specific compartments are marked for women or families.

Zulfiqar, an aged worker with a grey beard and a sturdy body, has secured his luggage underneath the seat he occupies. He seems relaxed at the prospect of returning home in Layyah district after a month of hard work in Rawalpindi. “I would probably reach home in six to eight hours in a bus but it’s peaceful on a train.” There is so much noise in the compartment that it drowns out his voice.

He recalls how during the government of Pervez Musharraf a train would get him to Layyah in two days and how there were countless delays on the way due to engine failures and accidents. But then he adds rather resignedly that delays and wait are part of the travel routine for trains plying on branch lines. Even now, passengers travelling from Rawalpindi to Mianwali, for instance, routinely face delays, he adds. The only difference that he sees is that trains are no longer overbooked. “You had to pay money under the table” to get a ticket in the past. Now, tickets are easily available over the counter, says Zulfiqar.

A flood of pilgrims barges in the train as soon as it reaches Golra Sharif Railway Station. They are returning home after visiting the shrine of a Sufi located in the town. They are joined by labourers who work in Islamabad. The train suddenly becomes packed, overflowing with passengers.

Everyone is carrying a lot of luggage with them. The compartment seems to be bursting at the seams. Zulfiqar appears a little less relaxed. He takes out some naswar, a local intoxicant, from a packet and puts a pinch full in his mouth — perhaps to divert his attention from the mess around him.

Muhammad Arshad, a 23-year-old labourer working at a market in Golra Sharif, needs a seat for his aging father. He negotiates with some young Pakhtuns to get the old man to a sleeper board above the seats. All of them lend a hand to haul his father up. Arshad says he is not travelling in a bus because a bus does not have a washroom — a mandatory requirement for those travelling along with children and the elderly.

At the small nondescript junction of Jand in Attock district, the train gets even more passengers. Most of the new entrants have been travelling by another train which is said to have broken down. The only way for its passengers to reach home is to board other trains.

In the journey from Jand to Mianwali, more passengers stand in the aisle or in between seats, pressed tightly against each other, than those on seats and sleepers.

The only ones seated are women and older men accompanying families.

Even Arshad and his father lose their seats — but to a group of men.

As the train leaves Jand, seven people enter the compartment and tell Arshad that he and his father are occupying their seats. The ticket-checkers who could potentally settle the matter are nowhere to be seen. However, the train is too crowded for any official to maintain order. There is no amicable way of ascertaining which seat belongs to whom. The seats are cleared for their new claimants anyway.

Suddenly, there are more men and boys standing in whatever space they find. Yet everyone is making the most of the situation. Some young boys from Lahore are cracking jokes and there is a constant hum of voices floating above the passengers’ heads.

The rush, however, slows down the train. It takes seven hours to reach Mianwali from Rawalpindi — a distance of about 250 kilometres at a speed of about 35 kilometres per hour.

Mianwali Railway Station offers no solace after this harrowing journey. It looks like a bombed-out site under siege. To the right of the unkempt station stands a decrepit ‘third class’ waiting area. It was once meant for passengers who travelled in the cheapest compartments. It is now a resting area for stray dogs. A dry port that was part of the railway infrastructure in the city is all but abandoned. Once used for inspecting, taxing and distributing goods brought in from abroad, it is now occupied by local fruit vendors.

Ghulam Rasool, the local stationmaster, says he does not have sufficient staff to maintain the station. Many staff members work extra hours to keep installations and fixtures in working condition as well as take care of a small green patch outside the VIP waiting room. Rasool has heard that Mianwali station will be upgraded as part of the rail improvement projects being devised under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) but no survey or assessment for that has taken place so far.

Rasool advised an outsider intending to travel to Peshawar against taking a train. Take a bus, he says. “The train will most likely be late.”

Haji Muhammad Shafi sells tobacco in a small market just outside the railway station in Mianwali. For the last five years, he has been publishing advertisem*nts in local newspapers, seeking the revival of railway in the city.

Falak Sher Awami, a former president of a local association of traders, has also been sending applications to the divisional superintendent of the railway’s Peshawar region to increase the number of trains connecting Mianwali with other parts of the country. He recently formed delegations that included traders from the nearby town of Kundian as well and met many senior railway officials. They were promised that Mianwali will get a new train connection by March this year but nothing has happened on that front so far.

“Ours is a backward district. Access to roads here is limited,” says Awami. An increase in rail services will help locals, who are mostly poor, in their small businesses, he says.

Once, says Awami, 12 major trains passed through Mianwali every day — going to major cities, such as Lahore, Multan, Rawalpindi, Karachi and Peshawar. Many smaller trains shuttled regularly between Jand and Mianwali. Only two trains pass through the city these days.

Ziauddin Khan, a lecturer at a local college run by Pakistan Air Force, is also disheartened by the lack of rail links for the residents of his city. He is compiling the history of those from Mianwali who played a prominent role in the Pakistan Movement.

He says Mianwali was once a hub of rail transport for being a meeting point between Punjab to its east and Pakhtun lands to its west. Transportation of salt to the rest of the subcontinent from mines in the nearby Kalabagh area was another reason why so many trains passed through Mianwali. Railway lines passing through the city, according to Ziauddin, were also used by the British to transport guns, troops and other supplies to tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan.

He also mentions a narrow-gauge railway line that once ran through the area around Mianwali. It linked Kalabagh with such places as Tank and Bannu to the west of the Indus river. The only remnant of it is a bridge near Kalabagh. The line is said to have been sold as scrap during the first government of Nawaz Sharif between 1990 and 1993, says Ziauddin.

Mian Yousuf, a local spokesperson for the National Logistics Cell (NLC), a military-run construction and transportation company, is sitting inside his small office in Sibi Bazaar. He narrates how Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Zehri visited Harnai Railway Station in March 2016 and announced plans to reopen a railway line that links Sibi and Harnai with Khost, a small Pakhtun village in the northern mountains of Balochistan. The village and its defunct rail infrastructure were made famous by the 2015 Pakistani film Moor that was shot here.

Yousuf says the rehabilitation project will cost five billion rupees and will be carried out by the NLC. He has recently visited the entire length of the 133-kilometre line, closed for traffic in 2006. Ten of its British-era bridges have all but collapsed. Six railway stations between Sibi and Khost lie in ruin. The abandoned line was once used to transport minerals and coal from Khost and Harnai to the rest of Pakistan. Many of the raw materials transported through this route would land in the cement factory at Rohri.

Yousuf then goes to the local office of the NLC where Muhammed Arshad, a tall burly official, is waiting to provide more information about the project. He says the NLC has started reconstructing the longest bridge on the line. It is a 900-foot-long structure and 75 per cent of work on its protection walls is already complete. The main problem is logistical — how to take construction machinery and workers to those isolated areas which have few roads, says Arshad.

“Big coal dealers always contact [the provincial government] and say that a train will take three days to fetch coal from Khost to major towns as compared to the trucks that take about 10 days, he says. “These trucks often get stuck for days due to rain and landslides.”

It was Sir Charles Napier, a British administrator and general, who in the middle of the 19th century first saw Karachi’s potential as a port city. Sir Bartle Frere, who worked as commissioner of Sindh at the time, deployed his administrative energies to realise that potential. One of the first steps that he took was to propose the construction of a railway line linking Karachi with Kotri, a river port on River Indus next to Hyderabad. The objective was to provide a communication link between Karachi and steamers plying on the river ferrying cargo and passengers to and from the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. This was the beginning of what came to be known as the North Western Railways under the British Raj.

At the starting point of this rail network was Mcleod Road station, now known as Karachi City Railway Station. Today, this historic station predominantly serves as the administrative headquarters for the railway’s Karachi division. Fewer trains start or end their journeys here compared to the Cantt station where effectively every train travelling to northern and western parts of the country pass through.

A large number of people are gathered on a recent day in a chaotic huddle outside the office of the divisional superintendent at the city station. All of them want to get into the office where they can lodge a complaint. Railway workers, administrative staff members and passengers – pretty much anyone who can have a complaint against the railway – are here. Across from the queue is a notice board on the wall of the 19th century Wallace Bridge that provides entry into the station from I I Chundrigar Road (McLeod Road of old). An advertisem*nt pasted on the notice board seeks applications for some vacant posts in the railway.

The divisional superintendent is giving an interview to a television reporter as part of a public-relations campaign aimed at highlighting some of the latest initiatives such as e-ticketing service and a mobile-phone application that allows passengers to make reservations and find train timings. “I can tell you that this has been the result of collective dedication,” says Nasir Naseer, the officer sitting inside, as he starts giving details of the rail’s performance in the last four years.

What about the large number of complainants outside his office? Most of them are former employees who have not been paid their pensions and other dues for months — in some cases for years. Efforts are being made, he says, to clear their bills “as early as possible”.

Divide and rule

A narrow road that starts from the end of a platform leads to the railway staff’s residential colony in Khanewal. Not a single person in sight, the colony’s streets are occupied by a large number of stray dogs.

Simultaneously scenic and desolate, the colony stretches into green fields as far as the eye can see. Rows of green leafy trees line its large green belts parted in the middle by narrow roads. Small and decrepit housing units are located on either side of the green belts. The buildings that once housed officers look like they will collapse any moment. Next to them, only foundations survive on a large tract of land where once various workshops, officers’ mess and housing units were located.

A relief train is parked on one side of the colony. Its parking spot is called a loco shed in railway jargon. Engines and trains are checked and repaired here. The shed is a vast green and white structure with a corrugated iron roof on pillars. Train drivers sometimes use it as a resting place.

Nearby, a group of rail employees, mostly working with relief trains, is gathered on a green belt under the deep shade of old trees. They are having tea together. One of them, Asghar Ali Jutt, is a middle-aged mechanic. He has completely given up on the railway. “I can give you a tour of this colony so that you get an idea about just how bad the situation is for the workers at the lowest tiers of the railway,” he says.

It is obvious that no additions and improvements have been made to their residences that were built before Partition. “I have spent more than 1.5 million rupees from my own pocket to repair my residence. The department has never spent a single penny on it,” he says. Yet the department charges five per cent from every worker’s salary in the name of maintenance expenses.

There used to be a sewerage system here but it has disappeared over time, Jutt claims. The colony gets canal water to drink — something that has not changed since British times. “This water is mixed with sewage and carries solid waste particles,” he says. “If the railway minister even consents to wash his hands with it, I will stop complaining.”

The colony appears inordinately expansive if one looks at the number of railway employees in Khanewal. Abandoned in large parts and neglected, it has become vulnerable to encroachment. The residents of a number of houses in the colony, according to Jutt, are not the railway’s own employees. “Those workers who do not need official housing have sublet them to people who are doing other jobs.”

From many other housing units, bricks and other materials are slowly disappearing. “People just come in [without any let or hindrance] from the outside and take away these materials,” says Jutt.

Another person in the group is Chaudhry Muzammil, a member of a union of railway workers associated with the religious political party, Jamaat-e-Islami. He remembers a machine shop in the loco shed where wheels for steam engines were repaired. Another workshop repaired other train parts and there was a separate shed for maintaining goods trains, he says. “There used to be a lot of activity here when I first arrived here [in 1990],” says Muzammil. Hardly any repair work is taking place in Khanewal now. “There is a lot of waiting around for work.”

Jutt is cynical about everything. He makes fun of Muzammil over how unions have failed to unite workers. When he joined the railway, he says, he would receive a travel allowance every time he needed to leave Khanewal on official assignment. He also received his salary on time — a practice discontinued at many railway stations over the last few years even though, as he acknowledges, those working in Khanewal have started to get their salaries without delay again. “We had to hold protests to get our salaries [during the previous government’s tenure],” he says.

Both Jutt and Muzammil claim the number of rail workers in Khanewal alone was more than 1,000 a couple of decades ago. At the loco shed and workshops alone, close to 200 people worked in each of the three shifts every day, says Muzammil. Many others worked at the station and in the signal section. Now, according to him, the strength of railway staff in Khanewal is slightly over 200.

The decrease has been an ongoing process for a very long time. According to Pakistan Railway’s yearbook, the department’s total strength was recorded to be 75,242 in 2015-2016. A year earlier, it was 78,031 and it stood at 81,880 in 2012-2013. In comparison, the total number of the rail staff in 1987 was 128,047 whereas it was 136,649 two decades before that.

Ghulamullah Billah shares a residence with his son Sanaullah inside Karachi’s Railway Colony. The lodging provided by the railway has unplastered and unpainted walls. Its roof is caving in at a number of places and puddles form on the floor when it rains.

They moved here only recently. “My son had to travel for two hours to get to work [next to the station]. It was getting difficult for him,” says Billah, 70, as he explains the reason to leave their rented house in Bhittaiabad, a working-class neighbourhood on the edge of Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal area. Sanaullah pays five per cent of his salary for its upkeep, something that makes his father extremely angry.

He also has many other grievances. During the British Raj, he says, railway workers were promoted every five years but that changed sometime after Partition. “People who joined as helpers when they were young have white beards now but they are still working as helpers,” says Billah.

He would love to see his son become a driver but the railway is no longer hiring drivers from among its own staff. There used to be a 10 per cent quota for those employed in workshops if and when there were vacancies for assistant drivers but that quota has been abolished as well, he says. Assistant drivers recruited from the workshops had experience of maintaining and looking after train engines, he says. “They knew how to identify faults.”

As the conversation progresses, Manzoor Razi, an elderly man in his late seventies, enters Billah’s dilapidated home without much fanfare. He is chairman of the Railway Workers Union’s open-line section — one of the two main operational sections in the railway; the other being workshops.

Razi retired from the railway in 2004 but continues in his role as the head of a labour union that has about 17,000 members. It is still one of the largest trade unions in the railway. As he struggles to takes off his sandals, he becomes quite agitated when he speaks about the deplorable condition of housing for rail workers.

He says he was never inclined to become a labour leader. His colleagues and his father pushed him in that direction.

Razi’s father, Noor Mohammad Khan, was also a railway employee. He had migrated to Karachi from Punjab in 1928. “I was born in the railway colony next to Karachi’s City Railway Station in 1945,” says Razi. “Outsiders were not allowed to get into the workers’ colonies then. Even the police could not enter the colonies without permission,” he recalls.

Railway colonies all over Pakistan got electricity and sewerage systems in the 1950s and 1960s, much before many cities and towns did. They also had their own schools and healthcare facilities. The administration would organise movie nights for railway employees and their families. The films would be screened through a projector on a special train that moved from town to town with its stock of films and equipment. His list for amenities railway workers enjoyed in the past goes on and on — until suddenly a train is mentioned.

In the 1960s, many newly employed railway workers in Karachi lived in areas such as Shah Faisal Colony, Malir and Landhi — at a great distance from the Cantt and City stations where most rail-related jobs were located. The administration decided to run a local train to help these workers travel easily between home and work, say Razi. This was the beginning of what is now known as the Karachi Circular Railway.

The Railway Workers Union organised a strike in October 1967 in solidarity with a student movement protesting against the military regime of Ayub Khan. The strike resulted in a complete shutdown of the rail service for 13 days.

Razi was a poet and writer at the time. He wrote on political subjects but was not interested in joining protests and strikes. His father, however, was a close associate of Mirza Ibrahim, a veteran of a crippling rail strike against the British Raj in 1946 and a legendary labour union activist with a long history of fighting against military dictatorships and struggling for improvement in the working and living conditions of railway employees.

“One day I went to the strike camp at Cantt station. It was occupied by hundreds of workers. Many leaders there were tired after having made speech after speech. Suddenly someone announced that here is this young poet, his name is Manzoor Razi and he will now recite a poem. I read a poem I had written about the Vietnam War and against American imperialism,” he reminisces. The police arrested him for reciting the poem. “They thought I was a leader or something.”

Razi started crying when he first landed in jail. He spent around one month and 14 days there along with hundreds of other labour and student activists. He was also sacked from his job as a booking clerk in the railway.

Ayub’s regime would fall not long afterwards and the new government would reinstate him. The success of the movement would also launch his career as a labour activist. He would later go to jail many times but he claims he never cried again.

The following day, Razi goes to see Muhammad Naseem Rao who works as a head clerk with the railway. He is one of the founders of the Railway Mazdoor Ittehad, an alliance of the railway workers that cuts across ideological and sectional divides. Its founding objective was to resist the trifurcation of the rail system and the likely privatisation of it – in parts or as a whole – as was proposed in 1997 by the then federal railway secretary, Javed Burki.

“The problem is that there has never been an attempt to include the unions in any policymaking,” says Rao. “If the unions are not involved in making policies, how can one say that they have a role in the railway’s decline?” he says, responding to the often repeated criticism that inefficiency and corruption among railway employees and protest and strike politics have together hampered positive change in the Pakistan Railways.

If workers and unions were behind the problems plaguing the railway, those problems should have been addressed, at least partially, by now because the number of workers today is almost 50,000 less than it used to be about three decades ago, he observes. “Where there were four people working in the past, there are only three now,” he says.

These retrenchments, carried out under the directives of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have hardly improved the performance or productivity of the railway in any significant way, say Rao. On the other hand, he says, “the situation for labour has become really dire”.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the first ruler to divide the railway workers by introducing a union associated with his own Pakistan Peoples Party in the 1970s. He also introduced separate unions for workshops and open-line sections. “During the heyday of union activity under Mirza Ibrahim, workshops were the centre of activism among the railway workers but the split between the two sections broke their unity,” says Rao.

Then Ziaul Haq put an outright ban on labour unions and maintained that ban throughout his rule. Election for collective bargaining agencies (CBAs) – elected bodies of the workers legally mandated to negotiate with the administration in different sections of the railway – did not take place for many years after 1981. Zia also promoted the union backed by Jamaat-e-Islami. “The government understood the workers’ power,” says Rao. “One of the first major rallies as part of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy against Ziaul Haq was taken out by railway workers.”

The next shock to the unions came in 1993 during the government of interim prime minister Moeen Qureshi. Even though the Zia-imposed ban on unions was lifted by then, the government declared the entire open-line operations of the railway as an essential service, effectively barring the workers from going on strike. When Pervez Musharraf came into power in 1999, union activity in all parts of the railway was banned again.

The impact of these external shocks was only increased by the inept and non-committed leadership of the unions, says Abdul Razzaq, the sub-engineer in Sukkur. Many sections of the railway staff – drivers, guards, stationmasters – have become disenchanted with unions. They now have their own associations. But unlike the unions, these associations do not have internal elections. They are also ineligible to contest referendums to become CBAs.

Razzaq himself is a member of the All Pakistan Railway Signal Association. In 2016, his association announced a country-wide partial strike. Its members were to work for eight hours rather than 24 hours. He remembers not attending a call to fix snapped wires. But what he and his colleagues got out of the strike was only a meeting with the divisional superintendent who promised that their demands will be met. That promise was never fulfilled.

Railroad to nowhere

Numerous documents are gathering dust at a library inside the Railway Headquarters in Lahore. Many of them date back to pre-Partition times. It is obvious from some of the old reports that outside consultants were issuing regular warnings as early as the 1960s that Pakistan Railways needed modernisation of its operations.

Among the documents at the library is a 1973 speech given by Ghulam MustafaJatoi, then minister for political affairs and communication. The speech presents a gloomy picture of the railway at the time.

Jatoi started his speech by saying that Pakistan inherited a railway system that was extensively used during World War II but its replacement and rehabilitation was deferred or neglected for one reason or another before Partition. The situation the railway was in at the time of independence was critical but the plans to address it were no more than listings of urgent needs for obvious repairs and replacement, the document states.

He then highlighted the state of the railway in the run-up to the time of his speech. “The result has been that the overall condition of railway assets, considered an integrated unit, has continued to deteriorate.” Given the situation, “the operational and financial performance of the railways is bound to suffer”.

A decade later the deterioration in performance predicted by Jatoi became painfully obvious to the government as well as passengers. Pakistan Railways entered dire straits and there it remains.

Everyone who was in the know understood the need for a complete overhaul and not just partial reforms. In 1987, a private firm, Canadian Pacific Consulting Services Limited, compiled an assessment report for the purpose. Titled Action Programme for Pakistan Railways Restructuring, it points out four outstanding problems: a sharp decrease in the rail’s share of the transport market (from 66 per cent to 15 per cent in just 25 preceding years); a general deterioration of the standard of services offered and the inability of the railway to match the services offered by road transport services; financial losses the railway incurred each year — it was put at 1.3 billion rupees at the time; the unnecessary involvement of politicians in affairs which should ideally be handled by a professional management.

The entrance to Pakistan Railway Carriage Factory in Islamabad is closed. Inside, the first thing that comes into sight are trees planted by various railway ministers and secretaries of the past.

The factory was built in a year’s time in 1970 and is the only facility in Pakistan for manufacturing new carriages for passenger trains. Built with around 89 million rupees, it is sprawled over 76 acres of land though its buildings – that include 667 residences for staff – covers only 13 acres. The factory can manufacture up to 150 carriages every year and employs 735 people.

Asad Farooq Chishti is deputy mechanical engineer here. The factory’s original technology came from Germany, he says. For a very long time, carriages used in Pakistan were manufactured only with that technology.

The first change came in 2003 when, according to Chishti, the then railway minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed signed an agreement with a Chinese company to manufacture 175 coaches each year for Pakistan Railways. Out of these, 120 were to be manufactured in Pakistan under a technology transfer clause in the agreement, says Chishti.

Another agreement with another Chinese company, signed in 2009, provided for the manufacturing of 202 coaches every year for Pakistan Railways with the latest available technology. This technology has also been transferred to Pakistan where 70 of those coaches are being built each year, he adds.

The factory consists of many workshops and sheds where different processes are carried out — from the construction of bogeys to their attachment to chassis frames and wheels and from paint to the installation of interiors and other fixtures. Once the exteriors and interiors of a carriage are complete, it is put to a water test to check for and mend leakages. A finished carriage is then transported to Rawalpindi Railway Station.

Abdur Rehman, a young engineer at the factory, excitedly walks to a shed where a rusting carriage awaits rehabilitation. The rehabilitation is part of an attempt by the railway to save money. The run-down carriage is being stripped down. Side walls, roof, seats, bathrooms, windows, chassis frame, wheels — everything is being taken out for repair, refurbishing and replacing, if required. “This carriage is made with German technology,” says Rehman.

Some brake vans can be seen a little distance away. These are to be used as safety coaches for trains transporting coal from Karachi to power stations being built in central Punjab. The railway is inducting 15 such brake vans — five of which have been made.

Rehman then walks towards another workshop where a newer Chinese bogey is being readied to be placed on chassis and wheels. These Chinese carriages are fit to travel at 160 kilometres per hour, he says proudly.

A new gleaming locomotive made by General Electric, an American company, is parked at the locomotive shed inside Karachi’s Cantt Railway Station. It is one of the 55 locomotives purchased recently from the United States. By the end of this month, according to a performance report, all these engines will arrive in Pakistan. Procured at a cost of 213.689 million US dollars, these are reportedly able to haul around 3,400 tonnes of coal in a single trip.

The engines are going through trial runs in Karachi. Recently, consultants from United States and China visited the shed to teach local workers how to maintain them. These will be used to haul coal from Port Qasim to power plants in Sahiwal and other areas in Punjab.

The locomotive workshop in Lahore is assembling freight wagons to be attached to these engines.

An old steam engine is perched on a raised platform inside the locomotive workshop built in 1912 to manufacture and overhaul steam engines. These days it only repairs and rehabilitates imported diesel engines. (Another factory located in Risalpur town of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, about 145 kilometres to the northwest of Islamabad, employs more than 550 people and assembles diesel-electric engines “with the collaboration of different countries”, as per its Facebook page.)

The workshop employs 1,843 people — 473 short of its sanctioned strength. The biggest gap between the sanctioned strength and the actual number of employees is in the ‘skilled labour’ category where 1,181 people work against 1,465 approved posts — that too at a time when the workshop is getting massive amounts of work.

Ahsan Zamir, a young assistant works manager, points to some stripped down trains parked in one corner of the workshop. Their wheels and chassis frames are being rehabilitated. The project also involves the rehabilitation of 27 diesel engines that have been taken apart completely. Their faulty parts are being replaced and additional components are being added to them to modernise their functions. Only 12 of the 27 engines remain to be rehabilitated, says Zamir. The cost to rehabilitate them stands at 6.284 billion rupees.

The Pakistan Railways has 457 engines in total but only a little more than half of them are functional. The ratio was even worse a few years ago.

When Khawaja Saad Rafique took over the ministry in 2013, the department had only 180 operational engines, says Shahid Aziz, a mechanical engineer at Railway Headquarters in Lahore. “We are now operating 290 engines,” he says. Out of the recently added engines, says Aziz, “53 have been purchased from China, 20 are rehabilitated old engines and the rest have been made functional through a special repair project [costing around five billion rupees]”.

These improvements have helped the railway to operate on average 10 freight trains a day. Four years ago, only two freight trains were operating per day.

Junaid Qureshi lives a comfortable life in Karachi’s Defence area, making regular visits to his son who lives in the United States. The soft-spoken man, in his mid-sixties, worked as general manager operations of Pakistan Railways between May 2012 and August 2014. It was a time when the railway’s performance was at its lowest. Its public image was even lower.

Only a couple of months before Qureshi took charge, Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, then chief justice of Pakistan, ordered National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to initiate an investigation into the disposal of 39,000 metric tonnes of railway scrap allegedly sold in violation of prescribed rules. Those who received the contract to buy the scrap were allegedly close to Ghulam Ahmad Bilour who was then railway minister.

Saeed Akhtar, who was working as general manager of operations at the time, was due to retire on March 14, 2012 but the then prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani gave him an extension, allowing him to retain the post. The Supreme Court hit back and ruled that the extension was illegal. Akhtar was arrested by NAB on March 29, 2012, for his role in the scrap contract as well as for the purchase of 69 engines from China during the government of Pervez Musharraf at a price of 98 million US dollars without checking whether they suited the local lines and railway stations.

Qureshi, however, does not blame Bilour for the railway’s woes. In his opinion, the biggest setback to the railway over the last couple of decades has been its trifurcation in 1997 under the recommendations made by former cricketer Javed Burki who at the time was working as federal railway secretary. The objective of the move was to split the rail’s entire system into three smaller entities – a passenger unit, a trade unit and an infrastructure unit – in order to facilitate private-sector investment in each of them. The government hoped the private sector would be interested in getting the control of trade and freight operations, thereby generating revenues that could then be invested in other parts of the railway.

“This plan was tried for three years,” Qureshi says, but was rolled back after it did not bring in the much-anticipated investment and revenues. It was also not efficient as it deprived the rail system of its unity of command, he says.

The second major move in the wrong direction was the decision during the government of Pervez Musharraf to downsize by banning new hiring. “What the government did not realise was that rail system works like a nursery,” says Qureshi. Drivers are not hired directly, for instance. They are promoted from apprentices and assistant drivers. Once a ban was imposed on hiring apprentices and assistant drivers, it gradually started having an impact on the number of drivers, thereby depleting the railway’s human resource over time. One of its major effects was that labour morale went down, he adds.

The third major problem, according to Qureshi, have been the ambitious targets set in Vision 2025, a planning document prepared by Ahsan Iqbal, federal minister for planning and development. The document envisions expanding the rail’s share in transport from the existing four per cent to 20 per cent. This will require a massive upgrading of the rail network. It is not clear how this upgrading will be financed, says Qureshi, given that the railway is still running at a loss even when it has increased its revenue. “The railway is a capital-intensive organisation. You need a huge amount of money to run it.”

A major hurdle that expansion plans face is that every piece of equipment and machinery has to be imported, says Qureshi. Various efforts at technology transfer and import-substitution in engine manufacturing and carriage-building have been either insufficient or flawed, he says.

A related issue is the time rail-related imports take. Other than in India and Pakistan, broad-gauge rails are not used anywhere in the world. Any order that Pakistan places for imports takes about three years because the manufacturers have to comply with our specifications and requirements, he points out.

The fourth floor of the building where the railway ministry is headquartered in Islamabad is cramped and congested but the staff here is accessible. This is where the policies are made. It has a completely different ambience – of austerity and simplicity – from the decadent bureaucrat-is-king culture at the headquarters in Lahore from where operations are run.

Muhammad Aftab Akbar, spokesperson for the ministry and secretary Railway Board, says the rail’s large infrastructure requires funds before it can generate returns. Highlighting the problems, he says: “Until recently, there was uncertainty. Trains were not adhering to their schedule. No safety standards were being maintained. Rail officials did not know when a train’s engine would stop working,” he says. He then lists the achievements of the current administration: revenues have doubled to 36 billion rupees in 2015-16 as compared to 18 billion rupees in 2012-2013.

Akbar claims the political leadership has started to pay attention to the railway and has begun to allocate funds to it. Khawaja Saad Rafique has brought professionals from the private sector into the management and has stopped the tradition of shuffling officers from one post to the other, the secretary says.

A senior ministry official, Mazhar Ali Shah, has been working closely with the Chinese on CPEC-related projects. He travels to China frequently and is often in meeting with the Planning Commission in Islamabad. He says the government has declared the improvement and upgrading of the main Karachi-Lahore-Peshawar railway line as a high priority project under CPEC. The railway has already completed its feasibility report, he says, adding that the bidding process will start as soon as the final agreement is complete.

Shah expects work on the line to begin by August this year. It will be completed in the next five years, he says, and will transform the entire railway system. “The current 65-70 kilometres-per-hour train speed will go up to 160 kilometres per hour.” The Chinese will also help Pakistan in connecting Gwadar with Jacobabad and Quetta and also Quetta with Dera Ismail Khan, he says.

With these projects in the pipeline, Akbar rules out privatising the railway, a policy almost all previous governments have pursued since the 1980s. “Privatisation is not an option. What we are interested in is public-private partnership in areas other than main operations,” he says.

Javed Anwar Bobak is effectively the chief executive officer of Pakistan Railways. Working as general manager operations, he operates from a spacious office at Railway Headquarters in Lahore. He joined the railway in 1984 and has worked in almost all sections, except workshops.

A major problem with the railway, according to him, is that none of its secretaries or chairmen since 1991 have been individuals familiar with this field. Officers from police, customs, commerce, and audit and accounts services have worked on these two top posts, he says, but no one from the railway. Someone who has worked in the railway is supposed to know more about its functions and flaws than someone from another department, Bobak argues.

He gives the example of Javed Burki. “He was not a rail man.” That is why his trifurcation plan only created a lot of chaos. There was “no unity of command” left as a result of it. Though the government reversed major parts of the plan, it was “never fully undone”. The railway has been in free fall since then, says Bobak.

The other disastrous move, according to him, was reconstitution of the Railway Board during the second government of Nawaz Sharif (in 1997-1999). The original board included senior most officers from all sections within the railway. The government, instead, constituted a board to be headed by the railway minister and to have all but one member from the private sector. The reconstituted board never became fully functional, allowing the chairman to set up an ad hoc body for taking decisions, Bobak points out.

He argues that Pakistan never had an integrated transport policy. And whatever policy there was, he says, it was never consistent. In the absence of a focus on policy, governments chose to pump money into their pet projects. That, he claims, has been changed by the current administration. “We are not just showcasing one new train. We are making changes that will last.”

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

This was originally published in Herald's June 2017 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.

Dr Shahid Masood started his talk show on January 24, 2018, on the NewsOne television channel in his usual cryptic style. He called Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi an intelligent man who had taken a wise decision by appointing a certain jurist as prosecutor general of the National Accountability Bureau. “Otherwise, [Abbasi] would have been arrested and handcuffed upon his return from Davos [Switzerland, where he was attending a conference],” Masood said. “Aik aur lohay ka chana (another bitter pill swallowed),” he said, without explaining why the prime minister would have been arrested and who was making him swallow a bitter pill. “This whole political situation in the country should be seen this way … ”

He left his sentence incomplete. Before he discussed politics, he said, he wanted to make a request to Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Mian Saqib Nisar. He said he did not know if the judges watched his show but requested his audience to convey his message to the Supreme Court or, for that matter, any other court in the country. He also asked the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), the Military Intelligence (MI) and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to investigate what he was going to say and take action.

He then drew a deep breath, tapped his right hand on his desk and started speaking slowly and deliberatively: “… the Punjab government has lied about the murderer of Zainab [the little girl who was raped and killed in Kasur city in January this year]. Utter lies, a pack of lies. And I am saying this with utmost responsibility.”

Masood next mentioned his recent visit abroad. “When I went abroad a few days ago,” he paused, “in fact, I came back only yesterday morning.” He pondered for a microsecond and resumed, “I returned on the morning before yesterday.”

Details of his foreign visits over the last one and a half years followed. He said he had been to Lebanon, to Syria, to the Kurdish towns of Kirkuk and Erbil in Iraq as well as to Tunisia, Libya and Yemen to study the conflicts there first-hand. “I could not share my location or my photos because … there is so much chaos there that you cannot trust anyone,” he said. “If the rulers came to know that I was at those places, they would have had me killed through someone there,” he said, laughing.

He also mentioned that he was a trained doctor in medicine and had pursued his postgraduate studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the United States, where internationally renowned scholar Vali Nasr was his thesis supervisor. After this long diversion, apparently to establish his credentials as an intrepid journalist and a distinguished scholar, he finally went back to talking about the Kasur incident and said he heard it being discussed everywhere while he was abroad.

“[Zainab’s murderer] Imran is neither a mason nor is he mentally sick,” Masood eventually said and raised his voice, gesturing with his hand as if he was pointing to something. “The thing that I am now going to say, I am saying it addressing Mian Saqib Nisar directly,” he said and looked straight into the camera. “[Imran] is an extremely active member of an international mafia or gang that has the backing of Pakistan’s high-profile and powerful personalities,” he said.

He looked at his co-host, took a long pause and resumed: “And this man has at least 37 bank accounts. Most of them are foreign currency accounts. This man, who is being presented as mad and mentally sick, has 37 accounts,” he repeated for emphasis. “The accounts he operates have transactions in euros, dollars and pounds from abroad … this is a game involving hundreds of millions [of rupees]. He has the support of important political and non-political personalities. This man is a member of a racket involved in [trading] violent child p*rnography.” Later, Masood would add that a federal minister was among Imran’s backers.

Social media went crazy over his ‘revelations’. Screenshots of a sheet of paper carrying details of Imran’s national identity card, his cell phone numbers and information about his alleged accounts soon started doing the rounds on various news sharing platforms.

Chief Justice Nisar also took note, as desired by Masood. He asked the talk show host to appear before the Supreme Court immediately and give evidence, if there was any, of his allegations.

When Masood came to court, the only ‘proof’ he gave to the chief justice was a piece of paper on which he reportedly wrote the name of the federal minister allegedly supporting Imran. After his court appearance, he told news reporters that he had evidence to prove all his claims.

Justice Nisar seemed to have taken Masood’s allegations seriously. He set up a high-level committee to investigate and told Masood to give its members proof of what he had said on his show. The committee would summon him multiple times over the next two days but each time he would have a different excuse to avoid appearing before it.

His entire story then collapsed.

The investigators appointed by Justice Nisar found no bank accounts that Imran operated. The State Bank of Pakistan endorsed their findings in a public statement issued on January 26, declaring that Imran had no “local or foreign bank account”. But Masood and some other talk show hosts still continued to repeat the allegations in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Embarrassed, the court sought advice from some of the most seasoned and well-known journalists. Many of them suggested that Masood should be let go after he apologises; others said he should be banished from television for spreading falsehood.

In the end, he neither apologised nor was he taken off air.*

Masood has faced much worse in the past. In his BOL News show on January 24, 2017, he alleged that two ministers – one who then handled the finance department and the other who at the time looked after the defence department – were summoned to the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, and given a shut-up call for implicating the military leadership in political and judicial developments around the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s trial over his allegedly illegal offshore properties revealed by the Panama Papers. Ishaq Dar, one of the two ministers, moved the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra), which banned Masood’s show for 30 days and imposed a fine of one million rupees on the television channel for airing baseless allegations “with the malafideand ulterior motives of attacking the integrity of the federal minister”.

His show was also suspended in 2016 for 45 days after he accused the then Sindh High Court chief justice, Sajjad Ali Shah, of taking bribes. He alleged that the judge’s failure to honour a commitment made to his alleged benefactors had led to the kidnapping of his son.

That these stories – and many others that Masood has told over the years in his shows – have been proven false, fabricated and without any basis whatsoever has done little to dent his reputation as a much watched and followed talk show host. He has 507,000 followers on Twitter, his show on NewsOne has a Facebook following of 172,493 and one of his two unofficial Facebook pages is followed by 164,678 people. If nothing else, these followers ensure that any news he peddles stays alive in some form or shape in some corner of the media.

And Masood is not the only practitioner of this dark art. There are others who have a much bigger fan following and thereby a much larger impact on public opinion. One of them, Dr Aamir Liaquat Husain, has been banned multiple times from appearing on television for spreading false news.

Mesha Saeed came to Pakistan along with her husband Ahmad Waqass Goraya and their son, Arastoo, towards the end of 2016 from the Netherlands, where they live. They were visiting to attend the wedding of Goraya’s sister in Lahore.

After the wedding, Mesha went back to the Netherlands where she studies pharmaceutical oncology but her husband and son stayed back. One night in early January last year, she received a call from Goraya’s brother. He sounded worried. Goraya had not returned home and it was already long past midnight in Pakistan. Tired after a long day at work, she told her brother-in-law not to worry and went to sleep.

What leads people to believe in such news is their readiness to remain unquestioning about anything that conforms to their political world views.

Mesha would discover the next morning that her optimism was misplaced. Goraya had become a missing person.

She returned to Pakistan immediately. By that time news about some other people – all human rights activists and social media junkies like her husband – having gone missing had become public.

It was the most difficult time of her life, she says. For days, she could not eat or sleep properly. When a ‘source’ informed her on January 11, 2017 that “her husband’s name has been cleared” and that he would come home soon, it was a moment of great joy for her. She finally sat down to have a full meal that night with her in-laws. Their happiness was short-lived.

As they were having dinner, a relative called. He asked them to watch a television channel where a talk show host, Orya Maqbool Jan, was going on and on about how Goraya and other missing activists had blasphemed through their social media posts. Jan particularly highlighted three Twitter accounts, Bhensa, Mochi and Roshni, as the source of the allegedly anti-Islam, blasphemous content. He accused Goraya of being the administrator of one of the three accounts. “Why do you need to commit blasphemy to be called human rights activists?” asked Jan.

“I was gutted. I felt hopeless,” Mesha recalls. “Everyone in the house started crying because we knew what this meant — that Waqass was never going to come back.”

Several news channels would air the same accusations over the next few days. On BOL News, Dr Aamir Liaquat Husain claimed repeatedly that the missing activists were in fact Indian agents who had run away to India after their anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam activities had been revealed. “They are present in India … they are being supported by RAW … They have not actually been abducted,” he said again and again. “The allegations that they have been abducted are being made to malign the military, the agencies and the ISI.”

A similar campaign simultaneously started on social media. In posts on January 9, 2017, an online forum, Pakistan Defence, displayed photos of three missing activists – Salman Haider, Ahmad Waqass Goraya and Aasim Saeed – with a caption in Urdu that read: “A group of atheists running blasphemous pages on Facebook has been defeated. Meanwhile, the so-called secular elements are giving the whole matter a political colour through media.”

Hashtags such as #HangSalmanHaider and #WhoAreTheyDefending – a reference to those who were demanding the return of the disappeared – soon started trending on Twitter. Overnight, banners also appeared in several cities, including Gujranwala and Rawalpindi, demanding death for the missing activists.

One Muhammad Tahir, the self-proclaimed head of an unknown organisation, the Civil Society of Pakistan, went as far as seeking the initiation of blasphemy cases against them. He submitted an application on January 16, 2017 at a police station in Islamabad to book Haider, Goraya and others who had disappeared with them under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, which covers insults to the Prophet of Islam and carries the death penalty.

Four of the five missing activists came back home by January 28, 2017. Three of them, including Goraya, immediately left the country. Haider stayed at his home in Rawalpindi for a couple of weeks before he, too, left Pakistan. All of them feared for their lives.

The fears put paid to plans made by Mesha and Goraya to eventually settle in Pakistan. They were concerned about the future of their son in the Netherlands. He felt isolated on foreign soil. “My husband is now a marked man,” Mesha says. “His face is all over social and mainstream media. We fear he might be killed by someone in the name of Islam.”

The scare has persisted in spite of the fact that the Islamabad High Court recently cleared the missing activists of blasphemy charges. The court’s ruling came in February this year, after months of investigation ordered by a judge hearing a petition filed in February 2017, in which the petitioner had sought the trial of the activists for blasphemy. The FIA’s investigators had told the court in December 2017 that the activists “were not involved in blasphemy”.

Lately, Husain also acknowledged their innocence. After leaving BOL News a couple of months ago, he apologised for purposively hurting “several personalities” through his show. He claimed he had done it all at the behest of the channel’s owners.

The acquittal and the apology do not mean much to Mesha. The allegations of blasphemy against her husband continue to swirl around with no end in sight. “The fake news which spread throughout social and mainstream media about my husband being a blasphemer has forever endangered his life. Nothing can undo it.”

Husain was in his characteristically aggressive, mocking mood on his BOL News show on January 19, 2017. “Do you think people supporting the blaspheming [activists] through their writings and speeches are right?” he said, angrily. He marked one of their defenders, lawyer and human rights activist Jibran Nasir, as a target for his vitriol and went to the extent of claiming that the so-called blasphemous social media accounts were actually run by Nasir.

Civil society organisations, journalists and the families of the missing activists by then were already protesting that the accusations of blasphemy were baseless. Yet, BOL News continued levelling the same accusations over the next two weeks, showing little by way of evidence except a few screenshots of some social media posts.

In an effort to rope in the institutions of the state to counter these allegations, Nasir complained to Pemra against BOL News and Husain. He accused the channel and the show’s host of running a “malicious, defamatory and life endangering campaign” against him and the missing activists.

Pemra banned Husain on January 26, 2017. “[He] wilfully and repeatedly made statements and allegations which [are] tantamount to hate speech, derogatory remarks, incitement to violence against citizens,” a Pemra statement noted. It also said he was making an unsubstantiated “accusation of being anti-state and anti-Islam” against various individuals.

This did not stop the accusations from spreading. The Twitter hashtag #WhoAreTheyDefending continued to question the motives behind protests for the disappeared. Another account, @NewPakistan2020, with more than 38,000 followers, tweeted: “All Pakistani social media users know Bhensa’s language against our Prophet (pbuh) and @MJibranNasir asks for proofs.”

Accusations of blasphemy against the missing activists, as Nasir pointed out, first appeared on Pakistan Defence. The administrators of this digital forum describe it as an “online community with an objective to provide a platform for debates and discussions on topics regarding but not limited to defence, national security, military, industry and global security issues”. The community, the administrators claim, has 70,000 registered members and an audience of 20 million visitors across different social media platforms. The name of the forum notwithstanding, they deny any link to any military or security organisation.

Pakistan Defence suffered a serious setback in November 2017 when its official handle was suspended by Twitter. The action was taken after the forum posted a doctored photo of an Indian student activist, Kawalpreet Kaur. In her original photo, she held a placard in front of Delhi’s Jama Masjid to protest against mob lynching. The placard read: “I am a citizen of India and I believe in secular values.” In the changed photo, the text on the placard read: “I am an Indian but I hate India because India is [a] colonial entity that has occupied nations … ”

A Pakistan Defence administrator insists in an email exchange with me that the photoshopped image was uploaded due to “a human error”. The anonymous administrator also denies levelling accusations of blasphemy against the activists. “Sharing public debates is what we do and the opinions we share do not reflect the policy of Pakistan Defence forum,” is how he explains the posts carrying accusations of blasphemy.

It is not known if Pakistan Defence is included in the list of 45 Twitters accounts, 94 Facebook pages, 101 Youtube accounts and 15 Instagram accounts that the Pakistan Army wants the FIA to investigate and block. “These accounts are being operated by unauthorised individuals [who have] assumed the role of speaking on behalf of the armed forces and they have been gaining attention on social media, giving a misleading impression that statements posted from these accounts are official statements by the armed forces of Pakistan,” reads a news report about the army request, published on February 16, 2018.

Renowned Indian actor Paresh Rawal went on a rant on his Twitter account around 4 pm on May 17, 2017. Criticising Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, he wrote: “Her birth certificate is a regret letter from maternity ward!”

He referred to an incident in Indian-administered Kashmir where the Indian army had tied a young Kashmiri to the front of a jeep to humiliate him and to show other youngsters that similar treatment awaited them if they pelted stones at Indian military personnel. “Instead of tying stone-pelter on the army jeep tie Arundhati Roy!” Rawal suggested.

His tweet, shared thousands of times, initiated an aggressive debate between his supporters and those of Roy; but what had sparked his outrage to begin with? It was a statement attributed to Roy in which she had reportedly said: “Even 70 lakh Indian army cannot defeat the Kashmiris.”

The statement was carried by several Indian news websites known for their right-wing, Hindu nationalist slant. In Pakistan, both Geo Television and the daily The News published it on the same day – May 16, 2017 – on their websites. The latter also published it on its front page the next morning, quoting the Indian media as its source.

There was a small problem with the statement: it was fake.

Speaking to Delhi-based news website The Wire, Roy vehemently denied having made it. The website of Geo Television removed the report about it after this disclosure but the website of The News still carries its story.

So, where did the statement come from?

One of the first places where it appeared was the Times of Islamabad. A self-designated news agency operated from Lahore, the Times of Islamabad carried a report on May 16, 2017, on its website that said: “Speaking during her visit to Srinagar, [Roy] said India cannot achieve its objective in the occupied valley even if its army deployment raises from 7 lakh to 70 lakh, further adding that Kashmiris have remained committed with their anti-India sentiments from many years.”

As it turned out, Roy had never visited Kashmir.

The Times of Islamabad, in turn, had quoted Radio Pakistan as its source. The related link has since been removed from the website of Radio Pakistan but screenshots of its archives show that the news was indeed uploaded on its website on May 16, 2017 — the same day it appeared on the Times of Islamabad website.

The version of the news available on the Times of Islamabad website, however, carries many additions to the original story published by Radio Pakistan. Apart from recording Roy’s alleged statement about the Indian army, the Times of Islamabad story also said: “Taking a jibe at the Indian government she said that pity on the government which stops its authors from expressing their thoughts and put in jail those who raise their voice against injustices, however, sets free corrupt, rapists and other criminals.”

The Times of Islamabad is registered as a “Private Limited” company with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan. Its official address is that of a house in Satellite Town, Sargodha. Local residents there say the house belongs to a retired air force officer.

The website of the Times of Islamabad claims to enjoy one million views a month but several online tools indicate its total page views are less than a quarter of a million.

The “About Us” section of the website – which is full of typos – indicates that it has a special focus on “defence and military news, foreign policy and diplomacy”. The most important feature of the website, according to its own reckoning, is its op-ed section that carries the writings of “illustrious scholars and PhD researchers in the field of Politics and International Relations”.

Most of the news stories and op-eds carried on the website, however, are without a by-line — “News Desk” has penned them. In a telephone interview, Shahid Imran, the website’s designated contact person, claims several retired military officers and researchers from various universities contribute to the Times of Islamabad. He fails to name anyone in particular.

The scanned copy of a letter allegedly issued by the Directorate of Indian Military Intelligence, and stamped SECRET, started doing the rounds on Twitter and WhatsApp groups both in India and Pakistan on November 16, 2017. It was titled “Present Status of Motivation Among Personnel of Indian Armed Forces” and read like a damning indictment of the Indian military. It claimed that morale among Indian military personnel was going down due to several reasons, including an “exponential increase in cases of hom*osexuality” and discrimination among soldiers and officers based on their caste and religion. Curiously, not a single mainstream Indian media outlet reported that day that such a letter had been either written or released.

Pakistan and India’s mutual hostility has also offered fake news a perfect breeding ground.

Praveen Swami, a senior Indian journalist who has worked as editor for national security for The Indian Express newspaper, tells me in a telephone interview that he did not know anything about the letter. The additional directorate general of public information for the Indian military also issued a statement on Twitter, claiming the letter was fake.

It was first published by Daily Mail News, an Islamabad-based website, as part of an “exclusive” story that did not quote any sources, either on or off the record. Several mainstream news channels, including Dawn News, NewsOne and Abb Takk, broadcast the story later. Then it became a hashtag on social media – #DemotivatedIndianArmy – that trended rapidly through several Twitter accounts.

The Daily Mail News story was written by one Christina Palmer from New Delhi, with additional reporting by Anjali Sharma and Ajay Mehta. Research reveals that no journalist with the name of Christina Palmer works in Delhi. Her name, however, is mentioned by Cafe Pyala – a defunct blog that once critiqued Pakistani media – in a 2010 post about a network of websites purposively misinforming readers. The blog suggested that Christina Palmer is a fictional character.

Back in 2010, too, Daily Mail News had published several news stories that turned out to be fake. One of them claimed that the Indian intelligence agency, RAW, was behind spot-fixing by Pakistani cricketers during a 2010 tour of England. (Some mainstream Pakistani newspapers also carried the news without verifying it.)

The same year, Daily Mail News reported that the Indian military had “deployed 200 prostitutes” along the Line of Control to counter the “alarmingly increasing incidents of suicides and killing colleagues by soldiers of Indian army that are deployed in the Indian occupied Kashmir to fight the Kashmiris”.

Several attempts to reach the management of Daily Mail News through email remained unsuccessful. The editor-in-chief of Daily Mail News is one Makhdoom Babar. When I contacted him on the phone, he told me to send him an email with all the questions I had regarding the authenticity of his organisation’s news reports and the existence of Christina Palmer. I sent the email but he never wrote back.

Dr Ayesha Siddiqa, a prominent research scholar and the author of Military Inc., a book on the Pakistan military’s business interests, was in London in October 2016 to attend a conference organised by Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States. A few days after the conference, while Ayesha was still in London, a previously unknown news outlet, Classified Journal Post, uploaded a video on Facebook, accusing her of meeting Indian intelligence officials during a secret trip to Afghanistan.

The video, watched and shared by thousands, consisted of a montage of Ayesha’s photos shown alongside photos of some unknown men labelled as Indian intelligence officials in Afghanistan. Not a single photo showed her meeting any of those men.

Ayesha wrote a response to the video in an article, An unending trial, that appeared in the daily The News in November 2016. She said she had not gone to Afghanistan secretly but to attend a conference along with six other Pakistanis including a former ISI chief. “The malicious campaign against me from approximately a hundred social media accounts on different forums – all sounding the same – is truly pathetic,” she wrote.

The website of Classified Journal Post has more than 160,000 followers on Facebook and more than 14,000 on Twitter and it promises to “bring those hot issues to [readers] that are ignored in the main stream media, News that needs equal attention”. One of its photo montages accuses Maryam Nawaz Sharif of trying to become prime minister “using shortcuts”. She is also alleged by the website to be supporting India, defaming Pakistan and endorsing blasphemy.

Most of the news stories carried by Classified Journal Post are written by one Janet Mayson. Others are written by “Web Desk”. No personal details exist about Janet on the website.

Most of the website’s so-called news videos are presented by foreign-looking women. Internet searches show that at least two of them are freelance actresses. One of them, Allie Madison, is featured on a freelancing website Fiverr which states that she is available to produce videos on any topic for a price as low as five US dollars.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Urdu service claimed in a report published on January 13, 2017, on its website that the family of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif had remained the only owner of their London flats since the 1990s. The flats at the time were at the centre of an ongoing case at the Supreme Court.

Less than a week later, Pakistan’s state news agency, the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP), released a story claiming that the BBC had started investigating the reporter, Ather Kazmi, who had filed the news report on the ownership of the flats. “The BBC has been put into a very embarrassing situation,” the APP report said. It quoted unnamed BBC sources as saying: “The article carries nothing new. Our reporter misled the duty editor who thought the article was carrying new information.”

A news report being accepted as wrong would require retraction but the BBC did not do that — something the writer of the APP story seemed to realise. He went about offering a justification: “Now if we take it down, it will result into a bigger scandal and will make headlines,” he quoted the sources as saying.

The News carried a similar story in its January 19, 2017 edition. The story had no by-line and claimed that the BBC had accused its own reporter of misusing the platform of the British broadcaster and of playing into the hands of a Pakistani political party.

In order to strengthen its story, the newspaper also reported how the BBC’s Urdu service had faced “another big embarrassment in July 2015” when it was “called inefficient and loose” after one of its reporters had “sent a tweet mistakenly claiming the [British] Queen had died”. According to The News, the tweets were accepted as “a grave error of judgement” by the BBC itself.

Except the two cases are widely different — one concerns a staffer setting off the Twitterati through a personal mistake and the other seems to suggest that a whole media organisation was hoodwinked allegedly by a reporter bent upon mischief for personal gain.

The BBC was prompt to deny the APP and The News reports. “There is no internal investigation into this BBC reporter (Ather Kazmi),” it said in social media posts. “We stand by our journalism and are satisfied that this story meets our editorial standards including accuracy and impartiality.”

The BBC also rejected the suggestion that it was contacted by any Pakistani news organisation to inquire about Kazmi’s report. “Nobody has contacted the organization with regard to the story.”

The state news agency never retracted the story in spite of its categorical rejection by the BBC. The News, too, still carries the report on its website in its original shape, without any correction or clarification.

One of the most watched Pakistani news channels, Dunya News, reported in July last year that 158 Indian soldiers had been killed in a clash with Chinese forces in Sikkim. The channel cited China’s state-owned television channel, China Central Television, as its source.

Both Indian and Chinese officials quickly refuted the “groundless” news report. The denials did not lead Dunya News to retract the news, and it is still available on its website.

Mainstream media organisations, as is obvious from the many instances cited above, have often fallen to the allure of false and fake news stories. Senior government representatives, too, have sometimes been swayed by them.

Khawaja Asif, who was Pakistan’s defence minister before becoming the foreign minister in the middle of 2017, made international headlines when he issued a nuclear warning to Israel in December 2016. His hasty and unnecessary warning came after a website, AWD News, known for releasing fake news, published a fabricated story, claiming that Israel “will destroy” Pakistan if it sent “ground troops to Syria on any pretext”.

The foreign office also recently reacted rashly to a news report about the treatment of an Indian journalist who had written a story for an Indian news website, The Quint, about the Indian spy arrested in Pakistan, Kulbhushan Jhadav. The story claimed that two RAW chiefs knew that Jhadav was on a secret assignment and that they had opposed his recruitment for spying missions. The website retracted the story the next day, reportedly under pressure from the Indian government. Rumours on social media suggested that the reporter concerned had gone “missing”. Believing the rumours to be true, foreign office spokesperson Dr Muhammad Faisal tweeted: “Journalist Chandan Nandy who filed the story is “missing/gone in hiding”, was last spotted at Khan Market Delhi and since then has been untraceable for family and friends. Freedom of press?”

Nandy was fine but avoiding the media.

Bytes For All, a human rights organisation and a think tank that has offices in Lahore and Islamabad and focuses on information and communication technologies, issued a report (which I co-authored) in 2017 about Pakistan’s Internet landscape. “Cyber armies hired and organised by different state and non-state actors” have become a new phenomenon in Pakistan, the report said. “These cyber armies will manipulate truth and seed campaigns against individuals or like-minded groups to undermine their opinion by inciting violence, life threats and shrinking spaces,” it added.

Zarrar Khuhro, a senior journalist and talk show host who actively challenges misinformation and fake news on social media, cannot agree more. Calling fake news an endemic problem everywhere in the world, he says it must be seen as an active form of propaganda by certain quarters against their opponents. “What leads people to believe in such news is their readiness to remain unquestioning about anything that conforms to their political world views,” he says.

Indian journalist Praveen Swami sees the problem of fake news in a similar light. “The public is always eager to consume news that confirms their biases.” Fake news, thus, finds an active readership.

In the echo chamber of digital and social media, people like whatever they see as endorsing their own ideas and points of view, without bothering about authenticity and verifiability. This process receives a boost of validity when mainstream media becomes a part of it — often willingly. As Khuhro points out, many fabricated news stories are initiated on social media but they reach mainstream media due to a “breach of journalistic protocols”. Some fake stories in Pakistan have spread the other way round as well — starting on mainstream media and then spreading to social media.

Pakistan and India’s mutual hostility has also offered fake news a perfect breeding ground, says Swami. With mainstream media in both India and Pakistan willing to act as the official mouthpieces of their respective states, the fake news phenomenon easily moves into a space that can lend it both authenticity and credibility. “In such polarised environments, it is difficult for journalists to function independently and to continuously remain vigilant about the information they receive.”

For Abbas Nasir, a senior journalist who has served at senior editorial posts including as the editor of the daily Dawn, fake news is not something altogether new or novel. The past, he says, was not entirely without attempts, mostly by intelligence agencies, to plant fake or distorted stories in newspapers. Often these stories were aimed at discrediting a civilian politician or a political party or to “explain away a blatant [government] failure”.

Nasir, however, agrees that, without social media, disinformation or misinformation may not have attracted as much attention as it does today.

Alt News, an Indian website, is focused on debunking fake news emerging from the social media rumour mill on a daily basis. According to its co-founder Pratik Sinha, “much of the fake news in India is originated by right-wing Hindutva sources”.

He believes it is not really difficult to debunk fake news. “We use single frames in videos to find the original source of the visuals in case we suspect a video may contain fake images,” he says. To verify and cross-check news stories, Alt News stays in touch with government and police officials and continuously checks for facts on government websites.

No such project exists in Pakistan. Shaheryar Popalzai, a Karachi-based journalist who has just completed a fellowship with the International Center for Journalists in Washington DC, plans to launch one some day. His project, if and when it materialises, aims to provide an insight into how propaganda works in Pakistani social media. “What we have seen over the past few years is that a hashtag campaign starts on Twitter and all of a sudden hundreds of users start tweeting using the same hashtag,” he says. “Often, the text in one tweet is replicated by 20 other accounts which gives an insight into how organised these campaigns are.”

Aware of the impact that the same text and images tweeted and retweeted from many accounts can have on the reach and believability of social media posts, Twitter announced on February 21, 2018, that it was banning the use of “any system that simultaneously posts identical or substantially similar tweets from multiple accounts at once, or makes actions like liking, retweeting, and following across multiple accounts at once”.

Tools such as Alt News or Twitter’s ban on the tweeting of identical text by multiple accounts may or may not work in Pakistan. Nasir, who himself is a regular on social media, thinks it is never going to be easy to counter fake news, especially for journalists working on news desks. Verification of fake news is often impossible because journalists dealing with it are not always equipped with the technological tools and know-how to trace its origin, he says.

Yet, according to him, it is the responsibility of news organisations to ascertain if the story they are publishing or broadcasting has originated “from a trusted source with a track record of providing irrefutable facts”. If the news is plucked from other media organisations then, he says, “it is imperative we confirm it by cross-checking through more than one source”.

But Nasir concedes that only newspapers have the resources to do all this due diligence. Television and digital media in Pakistan seem “years away from” being able to filter fake news from real news. They do not have adequate staff to keep a check on fake news all round the day, he says.

So, what is the solution if there is any?

It is only after the number of discerning news consumers increases considerably that we will see the required checks put in place, Nasir says. “That expansion will be gradual.”

Note: *The Supreme Court put Dr Shahid Masood off air for three months on March 20, 2018.

The writer is a freelance journalist who is currently pursuing a masters in Journalism, Media and Globalisation in Denmark.

This article was published in the Herald's March 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

It is quiet here, in this lane, at this hour. I have spent the morning with her parents: Muhammad Amin Ansari and Nusrat Bibi, dignified even under the weight of an unbearable calamity. Ansari has large, grey eyes. Behind the spectacles, they seem to be brimming over with sorrow. Perhaps it is just a reflection, for otherwise he is composed, speaking softly, alert to the arrival of guests and relatives, members of the media, neighbours just checking up with a family suddenly catapulted into the middle of a story of colossal loss.

His wife appears to be considerably younger than him. She is in her room, veiled, a blanket crumpled and turned aside, the bed unmade, as if she was not expecting to get up and to start the day, as if she did not want to relinquish the space she shared with her youngest child, her youngest daughter, a child of striking beauty, her grey eyes clear and expectant, like the summer sky just before the rain.

I am not sure how to justify my presence amidst such profound emotions, the outrage held back, dammed behind walls of what could be, at times, brimming anger, or withering resignation or just the state of shock that numbs one, paralysing the heart in order to bear the anguish of what has happened. The house is clean and orderly; a well-used washing machine squats in a corner, an ironing board in another.

In the space where Ansari receives largely male visitors, a young child’s school uniform hangs from one of the shelves that house religious books. It is her uniform, possibly washed in that machine, clearly ironed on that board, lovingly cared for by a diligent mother who wished the best for her children, the eldest a son, followed by three girls, all beautiful, all capable, all striving to better their lives.

Zainab was the youngest, born after an agonising delivery that almost cost her mother’s life. “She was a gift, an angel gifted to us,” Nusrat Bibi whispers, her eyes dry, face still, hands clutching at some invisible thing: a ghost, a memory, a fragment, a fragrance. She is remarkable in her poise, her eloquence, her ability to endure the scrutiny of strangers who come and go through the door like seasonal birds. There is no need for her to allow the invasion of her privacy at a time of such searing pain but she does not flinch at the constant invasion, the limp, sometimes hurried expression of sympathy, the often hollow words that are offered by persons such as myself, unable to hold her gaze for long, ashamed of my own impotence.

It is a small room, just large enough to fit a double bed, a table, a fridge and a sofa, a narrow, rectangular patch left bare. A young woman sits on the bed with Nusrat Bibi; a tiny, fragile girl stands beside the fridge, her head veiled. Both have grey eyes, fringed by dark lashes, chiselled features shaping the lovely contours of their faces. One is Zainab’s aunt, the other her cousin, a few years older than the girl who has brought us all to this house in Road Kot, near Kashmir Chowk, Kasur.

In the corner of the room stands a clothing rack. Among the half-dozen items of clothing hanging off it, a pink jacket catches my eye. It is the same jacket that Zainab wore the day her last photograph was taken. The jacket seems familiar, like something that belongs to all of us, like something that was taken away from all of us.

Across the rack, sitting in another corner, is a pink backpack embellished with images of Barbie dolls. This is also Zainab’s, and inside it are her books, lined with meticulous writing, telling the story of this little girl as if it was just another life, an ordinary girl who would grow up and live just like other young girls in this country, dreaming of good things, aspiring to do good things, given the chance to do so.

Zainab did not have that opportunity. She did not live long enough. She was brutalised and murdered before completing her seventh year of life. She was abducted, assaulted, strangled and disposed of in a garbage dump, like yesterday’s refuse. Her body was coming out of rigor mortis when found, the face blue, tongue injured, caught between clenched teeth. There were bits of garbage clinging to her hair, weighing down her eyes. A streak of blood ran from her nose across her lips that were injured too. Zainab’s last moments must have been so agonising that she had bitten down on her own tongue, cutting it as she crushed it between her teeth. It was as if the person who brutalised this little girl wanted to make sure that she would never speak of the unspeakable things done to her.

When Dr Qurratul Ain Atiq speaks about Zainab’s body she does not meet my eyes. She looks away, almost as if the words are an unbearable burden. Qurratul Ain is a young medical officer at the District Headquarters Hospital in Kasur. In two years, she has performed three autopsies, all of them girls between the ages of five and seven. All of them raped and strangled to death. A fourth girl survived a similar ordeal; she fights for her life at the Children’s Hospital in Lahore. Qurratul Ain says she has no words with which to describe Zainab’s defiled body.

A police officer enters her office and hands her a file from the Punjab Forensic Science Agency located in Lahore. It contains the autopsy report and will be delivered to the joint investigation team constituted by the Punjab government. I see the words describing Zainab’s clothing: pant, trouser, upper, vest, socks 1, socks 2, and I think of the neat, penciled words in her notebook, the last assignment Zainab did on January 3, 2018, the day before her disappearance: Head, eye, shoulder, mouth …

He would push the girl’s head down and place his hand on her mouth while assaulting her, ensuring that she would not scream in agony and cry out in protest. In his violent frenzy, he would suffocate the girl, choking her to death with the force of an unbridled psychosis. He said that he did not intend to kill the girls; that he was sorry about their deaths; that he would atone by helping other girls with dowries and expenses for their weddings. He begged for mercy and asked for a job that would enable him to fulfil his promise to assist with the marriages of other girls. He was terrified and could barely speak, unable to look at Zahid Nawaz Marwat, the district police officer (DPO) who had ordered the arrest of Imran Ali from his house just less than a hundred meters away from Zainab’s home. He was a frequent visitor to Ansari’s home, and even joined the sympathisers as they reached out to condole with the grieving family once Zainab’s body had been discovered.

I look up from the patch of sunlight casting patterns on the cold cement floor and ask Nusrat Bibi if Zainab had a favourite toy, a game she liked to play. “Zainab studied hard and prayed regularly, often chiding me if I neglected to wake her up for Fajr [prayer]. When she was done with her schoolwork, she would learn the Quran. She didn’t need toys, she was very religious, like the rest of our family. She had memorised many duas and would recite them frequently. She knew which dua to recite when leaving home and the dua recited when one returns …” I look away, wanting to become part of the shadows in the corners of this room, sucking in my breath at the mention of these prayers, these rituals we practice to ensure that all remains well, that we remain safe, that we return to our homes unharmed.

I don’t know if Nusrat Bibi notices the fact that I do not face her, unable to ask the questions that present themselves like uninvited guests on a winter’s cold night. I turn to the young girl leaning against the fridge and ask her if she remembers the prayer for a safe return. The girl recites the prayer in Arabic, looking at me with her stunning grey eyes. I ask her if she knows what the words mean. She shakes her head from side to side, smiling shyly, as if this was a question that was unfair, snuck into the conversation, unexpected and unnecessary. I ask Nusrat Bibi if she knows the meaning of the Arabic words, not expecting an answer, for it is, indeed, a question that is not asked, nor answered, not welcome in a society where asking questions more often than not leads to opprobrium.

But there are many questions that need to be asked, many to do with the sheer survival of the state as a responsible entity and that of a society teetering on the edge of self-annihilation. Where would I start? To whom would the grieving parents of countless abused girls and boys turn? Who would answer the obvious question regarding responsibility towards the safety of citizens? Where does one go to seek justice? Who would ensure that perpetrators are found, arrested, prosecuted and punished?

When Marwat was transferred to Kasur, he took over an explosive situation. Zainab had disappeared and the fury at the perceived inaction of state institutions was directed at state installations. Enraged mobs attacked the district courts, the deputy commissioner’s office, the office of the DPO and the District Headquarters Hospital. In the ensuing mayhem, two protestors were killed by police fire. The DPO officiating at the time was made an Officer on Special Duty, a euphemism for relieving him of his usual assignments, and replaced by Marwat who immediately launched a search operation, sending teams on a house-to-house search within a two-and-a-half kilometre radius.

A constable had earlier found Zainab’s body and samples for DNA testing were collected and immediately sent to the forensic lab for analysis. The crime scenes for the 12 minor girls who had been abducted and assaulted between 2015 and 2018 were visited and a hypothesis was developed about the nature, pattern and modus operandi of the crime. Geofencing captured the nature and number of phone calls made within the area of interest.

Footage from Close Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras located along the route that the suspect might have taken was studied in the information technology centre at the office of the DPO. Sketches were generated of the suspect, based on two eyewitnesses. One of them had scuffled with the suspect in 2015, accosting him in a house that was under construction, as he was just about to assault a minor girl. Like the suspect, this witness is also a mason and came forward when the police made an appeal for eyewitnesses to provide information. Not many others stepped up to offer clues; no one seemed to know the suspect; no one recalled seeing him take Zainab away that evening.

Silence was the preferred option taken by most, including the arrested suspect’s mother and grandmother who admitted that he was “different” from the others in their extended family; that he also disappeared after Zainab’s disappearance, returning only after pressure from the police was exerted on the family to produce him. Otherwise no one identified Imran Ali as the perpetrator; no one talked about the fact that predators sometimes lurk within the supposed safety of homes. I ask Ansari if he suspects anyone within his extended family, or within the neighbourhood, given that his daughter seemed to be familiar with her abductor, that she appeared to trust him enough to walk off into the narrow lanes with him.

In response, I am told that the accused had the ability to hypnotise his victims, that in some cases he used black magic to lure his victims into his evil scheme, that he intoxicated them with some substance that blinded the children’s judgment. No one talks about the fact that children are left to wander on streets on their own, that in a neighbourhood where many other girls have gone missing, found dead or nearly dead after being raped and sodomised, it is criminal negligence on the part of the family to allow their young children out of their homes, especially after dark.

Who will have the courage to talk about the fact that the abuse and exploitation of children goes unnoticed, rarely condemned, because we live in a society predicated on a dynamic of dominance and submission? Who will go the length and say that we are responsible for the acceptance of values that are barbaric, that sexual abuse occurs within the sanctity of homes as well as in the dark, dank hideouts of criminals with warped minds? Who will quote figures on the abuse of minors in custody or the regular assault of young children by religious leaders? Who will dare to challenge the notion that the family itself is a safe place, safe from harm, where children are loved and nurtured and protected?

Some of these questions have been asked repeatedly by civil society organisations that have worked diligently to collect data on such crimes and to offer help, providing legal assistance and psychosocial counseling. In 2016, one such organisation, Sahil, recorded over 4,000 cases of child sexual abuse from across the country. A total of 6,759 abusers were involved in 2,810 of these cases. In the remaining cases, the abusers were not numbered. Most of the perpetrators in 2016 were identified as acquaintances.

In the same year, cases of children’s abduction showed an increase by almost a fifth (19 per cent) as compared to similar cases in 2015. From January 2013 to June 2017, over 16,000 cases were registered with Sahil. In almost half of these cases (43 per cent to be exact), the perpetrators were acquainted with the victims. From January 2017 to June of that year, 1,067 girls and 697 boys were sexually exploited. These are just the cases that are reported; many are not reported for fear or shame that sexual abuse of children brings to their families.

Young children are abducted and assaulted every day across the country, many of them murdered and found in drains, in fields, in abandoned properties, in under-construction buildings or even within the vicinity of their own homes. In similar crimes in Kasur, the abused girls lived within a two-and-a-half kilometre radius of each other. They were abducted from outside their homes, sexually assaulted, asphyxiated and left for dead. The method of disposal of their brutalised bodies has been similar; the accused left several of the corpses in garbage dumps and some at close quarters of the victim’s house. Zainab was found just 400 metres from her father’s house in Road Kot.

A wall runs along the edge of the dump where her body was found. To the other side of the wall stands a double-storied, under-construction bungalow. A dog rummages through the piles of garbage; blue plastic bags fly in the putrid air, skimming across the surface of dark, fetid mulch. In the distance, a bulldozer scrapes the earth and pushes tons of refuse into a heap, clearing the area in patches, finding other places to dump its putrescent burden. Could it have occurred to anyone that the accused actually lived just a stone’s throw from the dump, and less than a hundred metres from Zainab’s house? Could one imagine that the man who committed this terrible crime had befriended Zainab, that he had been a visitor to her father’s home?

I want to ask Nusrat Bibi these questions, I want to know why elders in a family allow their young children to leave their homes unsupervised. I do not have the courage to look into her eyes, for I have not suffered such a calamitous loss as she has and I could not be a judge of the circ*mstances in which Zainab left her home that fateful evening of January 4, 2018. It was an evening like any other, except for the fact that it was exceptionally cold and blustery, the dead of winter in Punjab.

Zainab wore two pairs of leggings to keep her warm, a green velour pullover, an orange knitted pinafore and a black and white striped hoodie on top. She took her young cousin, Usman, also six years old, along with her. They stepped out of their home, located in a side street that shoots off the main bazaar at Road Kot, and walked past a mosque where worshippers had already offered their evening prayers and gone home, leaving the door slightly ajar. Zainab and Usman turned left into the bazaar and as they neared her aunt’s house, just 50 metres from the corner, Zainab started running further into the bazaar, leaving Usman behind.

We can see Zainab as she runs into the bazaar, her silky hair bobbing up and down like sheaves of grain in a wheat field. At a certain point, not far from her aunt’s house, she stops. A man appears out of the darkness behind her. He may have called her name; Zainab turns towards him. He signals to her to follow him. Zainab turns. He disappears into an alley. Zainab steps after him, unaware of the fact that this is to be her last journey through the streets of her hometown Kasur, the birthplace of the melody queen Noor Jehan, the resting place of Baba Bulleh Shah.

Nobody could have known that this was the last time that little Zainab was to be seen in the bazaar where she must have often strolled, with her mother, her siblings, cousins, neighbours. This is the bazaar that houses multiple shops with attractions for children: sweet shops, mithai shops, gaming arcades, shops with nail polish and lipstick. As I walk past these tiny establishments, squeezed between a tandoor and a hairdresser’s salon, I try to imagine those last few seconds when Zainab stood, facing a camera that caught that chilling moment of decision. I stand at the very place Zainab must have stood and imagine a man calling out to me. We know now that he was not a stranger. Once she had turned that corner into the alley branching off from the bazaar, following that man, Zainab did not return.

He said he lured her into his trap by offering to take her to see her parents who had supposedly returned from umrah. She came willingly, excited, keen to see her mother and father who had been gone for several weeks. He took her far from familiar lanes and alleyways, far from her home and far from anyone who knew her. He took her on a journey with no return.

I walk the distance that Zainab and her captor covered between 7:08 pm and 8:45 pm that evening, a fateful journey captured on several CCTV cameras installed outside commercial establishments. They moved through a narrow alley, bordered on both sides by houses and an occasional yarn weaving loom, past a private school and then disappeared until they were captured again on a CCTV camera installed at a building materials store across Kasur’s main artery of Ferozepur Road. This road leads from Lahore and cuts Kasur down the middle. The distance between the school on one side of Ferozepur Road and the building material stores on the other is almost three-quarters of a kilometre. With every step she took, every tiny footstep, she was moving closer to the macabre doom that awaited her.

The path Zainab and her abductor seemed to have taken runs along a main road and is lit only in patches. The ground is uneven, dusty; desolation spreads itself out like a fraying veil. I try to imagine a little six-year-old girl traversing this rutted terrain in the dark of night. I cannot conceive of anyone her age travelling this distance without getting tired, without panicking. At every step of this journey, the many pitfalls of living in a poorly governed state threaten to swallow one. Zainab’s last journey took a route that was ill-lit. There was no path for pedestrians, heaps of garbage lay piled up at the edges of unregulated settlements, sewage flowed unchecked. In a country with hardly any space for people to walk safely, no waste management, no proper drainage, inadequate electrification, no regulation over growing cities, could one expect that there should be adequate protection for children?

This is the question that Karachi-based lawyer Zia Ahmed Awan asks in his petition to the Supreme Court of Pakistan, filed under article 184 (3) of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Concerned that in recent years incidents of violence against children have increased and that the agencies responsible for the protection of women and youngsters have failed, Awan asks the apex court to ensure that mechanisms are developed for the protection of children.

Pakistan is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by our government in 1990. Under the convention, the state is bound to take measures for the protection of children. The state is mandated to enact new laws and develop mechanisms to support and implement those laws. The respondents in Awan’s petition are jointly under legal obligation to take all measures to curb crimes against children.

The Ministry of Human Rights, for instance, has the mandate to report the status of children in Pakistan to the United Nations (UN) but there is no strategy or mechanism to coordinate and collect data from all provinces despite a five-year plan that was developed some time ago to do the same. Awan states that there is a lack of political will to focus on setting up specific, measurable, realistic and time-bound goals. He submits that the police are not trained to deal with cases of child abuse, that they are not aware of the special laws pertaining to women and children, that there is no reference material in police stations that can help policemen understand the nature of such crimes.

The state has failed to establish monitoring and response systems. The state has failed to collect and maintain composite data on missing and abused children — let alone have a mechanism to share this data with the civil society, and other organs of the state such as the judiciary and the UN. The police fail to register first information reports due to the lack of knowledge of relevant laws. Awan reminds the apex court that all provincial governments were to adopt a National Policy on Children after the 18th Constitutional Amendment. They have failed to do so.

Indeed there are many failures that mark the treacherous journey that Zainab took on January 4, 2018. At a certain point, before she and her abductor crossed Ferozepur Road to go to the other side of the town, one comes across a recreational park, protected with iron railings all around. Through the railings one can see swings and a merry-go-round provided for the children of Kasur. Displayed on the main gate of this large green area are posters announcing an urs, a milaad, and a Ya Rasool Allah Conference to be addressed by Hafiz Mufti Khadim Hussain Rizvi.

The city of Kasur is plastered with such posters for religious gatherings. The young man who accompanies me on my quest for answers speaks with great relish of the miracle that took place on January 4, 2011 exactly seven years before Zainab’s disappearance. He speaks about the religious obligation that was carried out by Mumtaz Qadri when he shot at and killed Punjab governor Salman Taseer in Islamabad for demanding a reform of the blasphemy laws. He speaks about the supposed 2.5 million men who attended Qadri’s chehlum at Liaquat Bagh, Rawalpindi. Cognisant of the fact that the venue has a capacity of perhaps less than a tenth that number, he rejoices in yet another “miracle”. This young man is Zainab’s cousin.

Like many young men across the country, Imran Ali believes that his salvation lies in wearing the garb of religiosity, in becoming part of the swelling ranks of religious groups and parties that command allegiance to literalist interpretations of Islam. Hours after he was arrested and interrogated, a video was circulated on social media. In this chilling clip, Imran Ali addresses an all-male audience of “believers”, raising religious slogans in a voice strained with fervour. He then makes a short speech, praising Bibi Fatima Zehra for enjoining “daughters” to veil themselves when they leave their homes, repeating the words over and over again. The men around him raise their hands in praise of the Prophet (may peace be upon him): “Labaik Ya Rasool Allah, Labaik”.

The lanes and alleys of Road Kot are strung with tinsel buntings and paper flags, remnants of the celebration of the twelfth of Rabiul Awal, the birth anniversary of the Prophet (may peace be upon him). Across the neighbourhood, on the other side of Ferozepur Road, lies a densely wooded area. I am told that is a secure area, a military installation in this border town, cordoned off and protected by barbed wire and high walls.

I look away, trying not to see in my mind’s eye images of children murdered in cold blood on a December morning in my father’s city of Peshawar. Children shot in the head and in the back, slumped on the floor of the auditorium of their school, located just minutes away from a military installation, also protected by high walls and barbed wire. Where are the walls to protect our children from predators of all kinds? Where is the vision to save our future generation from such agonising despair?

I continue the journey, crossing the road to what appears to be a poorer part of Kasur. A private school stands at the beginning of a desolate bazaar, empty except for a donkey cart carrying fodder and a broken wheelchair straddling an open drain. On the high walls of the school, colourful cartoon figures act out the games that children play. The boys in these images wear shorts, the girls wear head scarves. There are flowers and trees and lush green grass painted on the wall. When Zainab walked past this school, she might have seen the painted children waving to her, smiling at her, inviting her in to their school where children “Come to Read, Leave to Lead”.

I do not know if Zainab saw much that cold winter’s night. I do not know if she saw the young boys playing in the gaming arcades or the men sitting by the tea stall telling tales or the women hurrying home to their makeshift shelters in what appears to be a squatter settlement. There is a hammam and a hajaam (barber) here; freshly washed towels flutter on wires strung across the breadth of the lane.

At the corner of the lane, just before one leaves the bazaar and steps into an expanse of uneven terrain, is the nondescript office of Chairman Musalahati (reconciliation) Council who happens to be a former Naib Nazim and also a former vice president of Punjab’s ruling party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PLMN), for Kasur city. It is here that we see the last images of Zainab being led by her captor towards the bridge beneath which flows effluence from two local neighbourhoods, Madina Colony and Ali Park. There is no knowing what was going on in the man’s mind or hers. The only thing one knows is that Zainab was never seen alive again.

He says that he was sexually abused as a child. That he found pleasure in his ability to have power over these young girls. That he went into a trance when he assaulted them, that he had no control over himself. He says that he is poor, that if he was given a job, he would work hard and reform himself. He says that the compulsion to do these terrible things came over him suddenly and he was helpless in the face of this force that possessed him.

I awake every morning with Zainab in my head, smiling her beatific smile, those grey eyes gentle and clear. I know that soon this memory of a little girl whose life was snuffed out brutally will eventually fade, that the significance of this crime will be overtaken by yet another one. I know that it will be a long time before the state and our society will be able to effectively address issues of the abuse of young children, women, the poor and the powerless. It will be perhaps even longer before we, as a nation, as the body politic itself, shall be able to cleanse ourselves of the many illnesses which plague us, of the hypocrisy that cripples us, preventing us from taking a collective journey in search of the truth.

A few days later when I return to Kasur, fog softens the harsh outlines of buildings looming over Ferozepur Road. By the afternoon, winter’s chill diminishes and the sun rises into clear skies, casting its brilliance all around us. A gentle warmth caresses the wings of birds as they sing their odes to life and the living. A haze hovers over mustard fields sandwiched between brick kilns and walls that appear to have emerged out of the belly of the earth, scarring the landscape with their hard edges.

It is Thursday; I have paid my respects at the mausoleum of Hazrat Baba Bulleh Shah, staying to listen to the qawwali as it spreads like a balm over lacerated flesh. I listen carefully, holding my breath so that I can hear Baba Bhulleh Shah reminding us that the truth can never be concealed, that all else is fleeting:

Kittey sacchi gal vi rukdi ae

Ik nuktey vich gal mukdi ae

(Nothing can stop the truth from revealing itself/the sole point that puts an end to all conversations.)

Additional reporting by Momina Manzoor Khan

This article was published in the Herald's February 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is an actor, film-maker and human rights activist.

Water sparkles at a luxury golf club and water resort just off Multan Road. The environment inside its premises is rarefied — meticulously manicured lawns, well-maintained golf greens and artificial sandpits are lined by diligently designed tree plantations. Water sport facilities are interspersed over a large area. The clear blue sky above the resort and the crystal clear water raining down from what its management calls a “splash zone” belie its surroundings. It is located amid one of the most heavily industrialised – and also highly polluted – tracts of land near Lahore. Factories and plants of all types emit poisonous smoke and spew dangerous waste right around the bucolic atmosphere of the resort. Groundwater in the area is poisonous, the land is singed with chemicals and the air noxious with hazardous fumes.

Located about 36 kilometres south of Lahore’s Thokar Niaz Beg flyover, this area was agricultural country before industry arrived here in the 1990s. Rice, vegetable, wheat, sugarcane and many other crops grew here in abundance. Soon after industrial units started draining their waste water into these fertile lands, they started losing their virility and vigour. The worse was yet to come.

Lahore-based Urdu daily Khabrain reported in 1998 that a large number of children studying in Kulalanwala village in this area were developing bone deformities. Most people were initially incredulous due to the sensational way the newspaper had covered the story but everyone was shocked when similar stories appeared in other and better reputed newspapers.

Basharat Ali, a young man in his late twenties, lives in Kot Asadullah, a village adjoining Kulalanwala. He was one of the hundreds of children whose cases were reported in the 1990s. All of them had developed limp legs, rotten teeth and skewed arms. Even after growing up, their ailments did not go away. Ali lurches both forward and sideways as he walks. “Whether old or young, we all have pain in our joints,” he says. “We experience difficulties in getting up and sitting down. A lot of people have problems with their teeth,” he adds.

Immediately after the discovery of widespread bone and joint diseases in the area, many government teams, non-government agencies and journalists descended on Kulalanwala and Kot Asadullah. Some started taking soil and water samples for testing, others began collecting personal narratives of misery and suffering, and a third group set up camps to provide whatever medical services they could offer through their makeshift facilities. The Punjab government – headed by incumbent Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif back then too – transported scores of children to various government hospitals in Lahore for corrective surgeries and other treatments. Ali considers himself lucky for being one of those children.

####How long must the residents of Kulalanwala and Kot Asadullah wait for this departmental musical chairs to end?

Water and soil tests later revealed that levels of arsenic, fluoride and various other metals and minerals, which are injurious to human health, were much higher than is medically permissible in the drinking water available to residents of Kulalanwala, Kot Asadullah and other villages in the area. The revelation prompted the provincial administration to promise that water filtration plants will be set up in the two villages without any delay.

Instead, the issue soon shifted to the inside pages of newspapers. The provincial government’s attention was also diverted towards the myriad other problems it was facing, including threats to its own existence, which came to an end in October 1999 when Pervez Musharraf’s military regime took over. Approximately twenty years have passed since the problem of poisonous water first surfaced in the twin villages and they still do not have a functional water filtration plant. “The situation has not really improved,” says Ali.

Weak, hobbling figures emerge from a thick blanket of smog – a toxic mixture of early winter fog, industrial and agricultural smoke and general environmental pollution – in Kulalanwala. They limp to their destinations on a recent November morning. Most of them work in nearby factories. Others have office jobs or small shops and businesses to run. Agriculture has all but died in and around the village. Some local residents have sold their farms to the water and golf resort, others have given it to factories in exchange for money even when they blame industrialisation for poisoning their water and environment.

“People have to live with their pain,” says Ali. This, in spite of the fact that stories of their medical problems have been resurfacing — though not as prominently as they did when their plight was first discovered by newspapers. In 2000, many cases of bone and joint deformities were found among residents of Shamke Bhattian, a village just 15 kilometres outside Lahore on the road leading to Multan. Ali’s father decided that he needed to attract the media’s attention to his village again. He contacted a local reporter who filed a small news report that appeared in an Urdu newspaper along with a picture of Ali. It is the only picture he has of himself from those days. He looks shrivelled and crumpled in it.

After the issue made headlines again, Lieutenant General (retd) Muhammad Safdar, then governor of Punjab, visited the area and promised setting up a water filtration plant in Kot Asadullah. The plant was set up in less than a year but it stopped working soon afterwards. Its sad remains now lie all shattered. Another plant was built in Kulalanwala months before the 2013 general elections. It was inaugurated by Rana Muhammad Iqbal, speaker of the Punjab Assembly. It remained functional for a brief period before starting to fall apart due to oversight and lack of maintenance. It now stands abandoned and deserted in the middle of the village.

Earlier this year, Nasir Iqbal, a senior officer of the Punjab Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department in Kasur district – to which Kulalanwala and Kot Asadullah belong – visited the two villages and told locals that the provincial government’s Khadim-e-Punjab Saaf Pani (clean water) Programme would soon set up a water filtration plant for them, using the most advanced technology. He promised to a local politician that the plant will be capable of separating all the dangerous minerals, metals, bacteria and pathogens from the water that would be pumped from the ground and supplied to people at a central location. That promise is yet to materialise. “If you look around, nothing has really improved after 2000,” says Ali. If anything, the problem of industrial effluents and residential sewage stagnating around the villages has become more pronounced than ever before.

Some change has lately arrived though — and from an entirely unexpected source. A charity, Human Necessity Foundation, opened a solar-powered, state-of-the-art water filtration plant in Kulalanwala, to honour the deceased singer-turned-preacher Junaid Jamshed, in February 2017. Yet, many local residents have not given up their earlier routine. They still place large plastic jerrycans on the street in front of their doors, waiting for the delivery of drinkable water to arrive on motorcycle rickshaws from the nearby town of Manga Mandi. Sometimes their water supply arrives from as far as Lahore.

Before Shehbaz Sharif resumed his job as Punjab’s chief minister in 2008, the province was receiving funds under a drinking water supply project financed by the federal government through money provided by the World Bank. Its executing agency was the Punjab Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department. For the next five years, a large number of filtration plants were set up across the province by the department — covering 10 to 12 per cent of Punjab’s population. Most, if not all, of these plants started becoming dysfunctional due to lack of an efficient mechanism to maintain them regularly and keep them operational in a cost-effective way. Many of them went out of service because the government could not pay for the import of replacement filter membranes as regularly as the plants needed. In other cases, the electricity bill to keep them running ran too high to be affordable by a provincial administration that badly needed money for other projects such as a metro bus service for Lahore. Bad engineering, faulty construction and low-quality construction material also contributed to reducing their lifespan.

When Shehbaz Sharif started his third stint as chief minister in 2013, he was already thinking of something else. Addressing a conference on water issues that year, he announced that he would introduce corporate-type structures to deliver civic services – including clean drinking water – in a manner more efficient and more cost-effective than what the government departments could manage with their tedious, archaic rules and insufficiently trained human resources. He also promised that the entire province, under his charge, would get access to clean drinking water by the end of June 2015.

Within a year, Punjab Saaf Pani Company came into existence — like dozens of other companies in other sectors. Registered under Section 42 of the 1984 Companies Ordinance as a non-profit corporate entity wholly owned by the government of Punjab, it is to be run – at least in theory – by a chief executive officer (CEO) selected from the private sector by the chief minister on the basis of his or her management experience in the water sector. It is also to be overseen by an independent board of directors, mostly chosen from the private sector — again by the chief minister.

The company is not required to follow lengthy government rules and regulations to have its projects approved and executed — at least that is what its foundational rationale is. All it needs is a project proposal, vetted and endorsed by its board of directors and approved directly by the chief minister without having to go through the usual departmental route. The funds for execution too come from what in official terminology is called “block” allocation — vast amounts of money at the discretion of the provincial chief executive. Centralisation of power in the hands of the chief minister has been built into the company’s very structure. Its ostensible objective has been to save the working of the company from official red tape and allow for quick decisions.

Yet, this power has not always functioned the way it was supposed to. Its first manifestation has been seen in the appointment of the company’s CEOs. Four of them have come and gone in about three years and all of them belonged to the same provincial bureaucracy blamed for being inefficient and laggard, rather than from the private sector. Its second manifestation has been even more problematic: the design, scope, timelines and financial parameters of a project envisioned by the company have changed so frequently that its ultimate shape is way off its original conception. In its third, and perhaps most worrying manifestation, the differences between the chief minister’s own thinking and that of the various CEOs of the company have often led to leakage of funds and massive delays in getting things done.

Back to square one.

Shehbaz Sharif was chairing a meeting on July 2, 2015 at his Model Town office in Lahore. Major figures in the Punjab government were among the participants. These included provincial finance minister Dr Aisha Ghaus Pasha, who was also the chairperson of Punjab Saaf Pani Company, Hamza Shahbaz, the chief minister’s own son who is a member of the National Assembly besides being the head of the Public Affairs Unit tasked with being the Punjab government’s internal watchdog, and a large number of advisers and department secretaries.

The outgoing CEO of Punjab Saaf Pani Company, Farasat Iqbal, informed participants of the meeting that 135 schemes for the provision of clean drinking water – as a pilot project – had been shortlisted for “rehabilitation in Bahawalpur region” at a cost of 896 million rupees. The contract for these schemes was already awarded to KSB, a Lahore-based firm that makes water pumps, after competitive local bidding. The main objective of the project was to revive water filtration and supply schemes in four tehsils – Hasilpur, Minchinabad, Khanpur and Lodhran – of Bahawalpur division. They were set up during the Musharraf era but had become defunct.

The chief minister, as per the official minutes of the meeting, “desired that high-quality third-party international consultancy should be hired to validate” that all the payments made to the project contractor are done on the basis of completed work. He also “desired” that no “contract would be awarded” without first showing him the bid evaluation process for the finalisation of the contractor and seeking his approval for the same.

Shehbaz Sharif’s desire to appoint third-party validation consultants was his intervention in the design of the project. His desire to have the final say on the bidding process and the award of the contract was his interference with its execution. The impact of his desires was twofold: what Punjab Saaf Pani Company had envisioned as a simple project of setting up water filtration plants (based on imported membranes) soon changed into a complex design requiring larger amounts of money and an even greater amount of time.

####Every single CEO of the company left it in ignominy — starting from Waseem Mukhtar, who headed it when it was still in the process of being corporatised.

The chief minister also insisted that the project be carried out in, what in government jargon is called, EPC mode. The contractors operating in this mode do not need to adhere to a preconceived standard design. They can devise their own engineering, planning and construction strategies for each part of the project, depending on the terrain, weather and other social and physical circ*mstances of the project sites. These variations more often than not result in variations in expenditure too and could easily lead to escalation in the cost of the project.

It was around the time of the same meeting that Farasat Iqbal was replaced by Waseem Ajmal as the CEO of Punjab Saaf Pani Company. The new boss was also present at the meeting.

After he took over, he changed the design of the project. Instead of rehabilitating the old schemes, he proposed that the company set up a tube well and a filtration plant along the bank of a canal at a location central to a cluster of 12-15 villages; filtered water would be piped to a designated point in each village where all the local residents could access it easily. The villagers would pay minimal delivery charges while the government would bear the cost of running the tube well and maintaining the filtration plant, which was to use local technology since one of the most cited reasons for the failure of earlier filtration plants was the use of expensive imported filtration membranes in them. The company also envisaged that all water supply schemes would follow a standard design and there would be no major variations for each scheme. The chief minister was not in favour of any of this.

By the time KSB started working on the project, its entire technical and financial design had changed. The company was required to set up solar-powered reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration plants for the treatment of brackish water in four tehsils of Bahawalpur division. Rather than catering to a cluster, each plant was to be based in a specific village. The estimate of the total cost of the project had escalated to 1.13 billion rupees by the time KSB began working on it.

Punjab Saaf Pani Company issued an advertisem*nt on April 1, 2015 to invite foreign and local companies to bid for the next phase of the project to be carried out in 17 tehsils across Punjab. The process started by the advert resulted in the shortlisting of five companies that were to work on more than 35 separate schemes. This progress, however, soon fell apart. “There was a strong apprehension that these companies could have captured the bidding process through pooling,” read the minutes of a meeting held on February 19, 2016 with Shehbaz Sharif in the chair. In one evidence of this pooling, bids for all three contracts for Pattoki tehsil quoted engineering estimates exceeding one billion rupees, notwithstanding the fact that none of the bidding firms was qualified under government rules to carry out works worth that much money.

In order to address the problem, Punjab Saaf Pani Company embarked upon what it called a “post-qualification” process. It “was adopted to save time, ensure more transparency by inviting more firms, and [change] criteria” so that firms capable of carrying out larger projects could take part in it. The CEO of the company told the meeting that these steps were in line with the “usual practice” in many engineering departments and donor agencies and were also in accordance with the rules of the Punjab Public Procurement Regulatory Authority, a public sector watchdog for government-awarded contracts.

The chief minister agreed that no procurement rules were violated but he added that a better option was to take a “pre-qualification route” for the inclusion of more firms “because that was the hallmark of all mega projects happening in Punjab”. He also “expressed his concern over lack of interest from international companies in” the contracts “despite foreign visits” by the minister and the secretary of the Punjab Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department and “other officers associated with” Punjab Saaf Pani Company. He “observed” that the company needed to club “small contracts into big contracts” to “attract” international firms of “reputed brands” in the water sector. Punjab Saaf Pani Company “should have devised a strategy to bring those companies” into the bidding process, he said, and suggested the “holding [of] international road shows in different countries” to reach “out to those companies”.

Waseem Ajmal, the CEO of Punjab Saaf Pani Company at the time, told another meeting, convened on February 27, 2016 and chaired by Shehbaz Sharif, that a committee set up previously to look into the award of contracts found “no adverse substance” in the “experience and credentials of the recommended contractors”. The process adopted for awarding the contracts was “legal, transparent, bona fide and in accordance” with procurement rules, Ajmal said. He also repeated what the chief minister had earlier suggested – that “larger projects” involving international firms should be devised “in the future” – but this sounded more like a concession he was willing to make only after the project being discussed was approved.

Shehbaz Sharif changed tack and this time criticised the escalation of the project cost. It had increased from the original estimate of 121 billion rupees to 190.34 billion rupees. Shehbaz Sharif ordered Ajmal to “submit a detailed report to explain” the increase within three days. He, however, approved the award of the contracts “with a heavy heart” and as “a stand-alone” case, subject to the condition that he himself “will thoroughly monitor the project execution” and that a third-party validation “will be vigorously conducted” of all works.

Before his conditional approval could become formal, the chief minister made another move.

He chaired a high-level meeting through a video link on March 1, 2016. The chairman of the Planning and Development Department informed the meeting that Sinohydro Corporation Limited, a Chinese company working on a number of water sector projects in Pakistan, has been “briefed” on the Punjab Saaf Pani Company “and the contracts being offered” for setting up clean drinking water supply schemes in Pattoki tehsil. He said, “Sinohydro has shown willingness to participate even for smaller contracts”. Shehbaz Sharif directed the chairman to “constitute a committee to visit China in order to interact with Sinohydro”.

####Punjab Saaf Pani Company’s records show its total expenditure so far to be at slightly less than three billion rupees. And yet the company has nothing to show for it all.

He also “agreed to the suggestion” of holding road shows in China as well as in “Dubai where all major international companies can participate”.

All these meetings essentially ended up taking the entire project back to the drawing table. The ongoing bidding process was all but scrapped even though it had the chief minister’s conditional approval and renewed efforts were launched to attract foreign companies.

The road shows held in China were extremely successful — that is, if the minutes of a meeting held on April 29, 2016 are to be believed. The participants of the meeting were told that “48 companies in Shanghai and 22 in Beijing attended” the road shows “and showed interest in working with” Punjab Saaf Pani Company. In his briefing, Ajmal said that the size of each contract had been “worked out” to 10 billion rupees “to attract well-reputed international companies”.

Shehbaz Sharif had developed other concerns by that time. He said he was told at the beginning of the project that making clean drinking water accessible for the whole of Punjab would require 70 billion rupees “but now it is [increased to 118 billion rupees] for 35 selected tehsils of 12 districts”. He directed Punjab Saaf Pani Company to “revisit estimates and come up with valid justifications for this escalation in cost”.

Ajmal explained there were two major reasons for cost escalation: addition of solar panels to provide electricity to water filtration plants and operations and maintenance expenditure for five years after they start functioning. The chief minister said “the solar component itself needed to be reviewed considering the expected increase in energy supply in coming years [and its] high-maintenance cost”. A few months later, he would reject the solar option for a different reason.

In a meeting held on May 7, 2016, Ajmal stated that the project would be divided into three phases. According to him, 33 tehsils in high priority districts would be covered in the first phase that would cost 117 billion rupees. The second phase would cost 50 billion rupees and the third 133 billion rupees, he said. “All costs of the project may reach 300 billion [rupees],” he pointed out.

It was obvious from the different numbers being bandied about that the confusion – and consequently the concerns – over the scope and cost of the project were becoming quite pronounced.

Shehbaz Sharif made another move that further exacerbated the confusion. He raised questions about the studies being carried out by the engineering management consultants working with Punjab Saaf Pani Company to find out the financial, social and environmental costs of the project. He suggested their work “should be validated by an independent, internationally recognised consultant firm”. At the same time, he was pushing for very strict timelines: he wanted work on the first phase to begin in May 2016 and be completed by December 2017. The second and the third phase, he said, must be completed by February and April 2018, respectively. Ajmal’s argument was that these timelines could only be met if work started immediately and all the required money was made available instantly.

The two men were clearly not seeing eye to eye.

The meeting was followed by another advertisem*nt in international and national newspapers – published on May 17, 2016 – to invite local and foreign firms to bid for the contracts. The last date for submitting bids was set to be June 17, 2016. The chief minister directed that Pakistan’s embassies in China, Turkey, the United States and European countries “should be approached to attract good and renowned companies working in [the] water sector”.

The deadline for submitting the tender came and went. A meeting held on the day of the deadline was told that 33 companies had purchased bidding documents. The chief minister was not entirely satisfied. He directed Punjab Saaf Pani Company to “ensure that no substandard company” is shortlisted for the bidding process. He also directed other senior officials to “ensure that only top-class and worldwide recognised companies” are shortlisted.

Some inside sources claim that the bidding process was stalled because a French company, Vinci Construction, had approached the chief minister through his former aide Dr Tauqir Shah, expressing its willingness to take part in the bidding process and seeking an extension in the deadline. The firm has experience of working in Pakistan, having helped Faisalabad city modernise its water supply and sanitation systems. A 20-day extension was given. The company, however, failed to fulfil all the documentary requirements within the new deadline, submitting only a financial proposal without a technical one. The entire bidding process was held back — one more time.

The process of shortlisting the firms that qualified for bidding was not complete even by July 23, 2016 when the provincial chief secretary told the participants that 64 international companies had submitted the bids. Vinci Construction was conspicuous by its absence.

By August 23, 2016, Shehbaz Sharif was having second thoughts about the entire operation of Punjab Saaf Pani Company. He ordered its large-scale restructuring. As a first step, it was divided into two — along the geographical lines of north and south Punjab. Its board of directors was also reconstituted and the government hired a German firm, Fichtner Water and Transportation, to review its working.

That the chief minister was about to reinvent the wheel became apparent when he directed the chairman of the Planning and Development Department to come up with “formal” medium and long-term plans within 30 days with help from Fichtner Water and Transportation for the water sector, “keeping in view the challenges of groundwater availability and sanitation issues of Punjab”. This was a recourse to the old bureaucratic approach that worked through different departments starting with the one responsible for planning and development. Shehbaz Sharif once saw it as a stumbling block for quick progress on development projects.

He told a representative of the German consultancy firm that his government expected it to carry out “an independent review” of all “components and stages” of the project being carried out by Punjab Saaf Pani Company. He also ordered the firm to evaluate the shortlisting of “contractors and consultants and assess whether they have been appointed as per the approved terms and conditions/parameters”. It was a complete vote of no-confidence in the performance of an entity he had himself envisioned and put in place. Something somewhere did not seem to be working the way he wanted.

####Approximately twenty years have passed since the problem of poisonous water first surfaced in the twin villages and still they do not have a functional water filtration plant.

In a subsequent meeting on September 30, 2016 he was even more categorical. He told Fichtner Water and Transportation to “evaluate/review the hiring process” of engineering management consultants by Punjab Saaf Pani Company. The consultancy was requited to find out whether these consultants included foreign experts as team leaders and whether locally-based consultancies engaged by Punjab Saaf Pani Company had ‘lead’ foreign partners. The next logical step was to probe if these consultants had shortlisted contractors with the right kind of financial and technical resources to bid for the contracts. The entire project was now up in smoke unless Fichtner Water and Transportation found that there was nothing wrong with it.

It did just that. It reported that engineering management consultants were local firms working in partnership with international firms as joint ventures and are led by international team leaders. It pointed out that the condition to engage foreign/international firms as lead partners was “not available” in the minutes of any meetings chaired by the chief minister. It further said that feasibility studies done by the engineering management consultants “have been elaborate with sufficient thoroughness … they are generally comprehensive and very detailed” and that “the contractor has the possibility to adopt the best technical solution” for water treatment and renewable energy “on the basis of the outcome of these feasibility studies”. It, similarly, rejected concerns about the shortlisted contractors. “These 19 firms are well renowned in the water treatment sector” and they have “worldwide experience to design, execute and operate the drinking water supply projects”.

Nobody could read the chief minister’s mind. He probably was not going to accept any of this.

In a meeting he chaired on November 6, 2016 he asked what kind of energy solutions were being proposed for the project. Ajmal responded that some companies were suggesting hybrid solutions — solar power along with grid electricity or solar power complemented by generators. Shehbaz Sharif observed that solar panels might be too expensive for use in the project so the money to be spent on them must be saved and used for some other project by Punjab Saaf Pani Company.

In plain words, all the companies that had solar power as an energy component in their technical proposals needed to revise and rewrite their proposal — further delaying the awarding of contracts. The German consultancy he had himself engaged warned that the entire first phase of the project would take 15 months to complete. If it started in December 2016, it would only be completed by February 2018.

The chief minister inexplicably let the process linger. While chairing a meeting on November 25, 2016, he stated that the processes being followed in the project might be legal but his concern was with “the quality rather than legality”. His preference was on full display in the meeting. He would not brook any argument otherwise.

Kashif Padhiar, who at the time was working as the chairman of Punjab Saaf Pani Company’s board of directors, argued in favour of awarding the contracts as per the bids submitted by 19 companies earlier. He argued that engaging new contractors from abroad “would take time” at a juncture when the government was under massive social pressure to “provide water at the earliest”. Managing director of the Punjab Public Procurement Regulatory Authority argued that the firms that had submitted the bids “do not have [an] innovative or modern approach” but the award of the contracts must be approved. The chairman of the Planning and Development Department, too, voted for approving the contracts — though he said this should be done only “if time is a constraint”.

Ajmal meekly tried to save the project by saying that the contractors were bringing in contamination-free water treatment plants and deploying solar energy. The chief minister dismissed his contention by saying that the whole project had the same old approach that was once adopted by the Public Health Engineering Department – the one he wanted to overturn through Punjab Saaf Pani Company. He ordered Ajmal to restart everything and “embark upon [an] innovative and modern approach through [the] best water companies in the world”.

If only he had named some of them, all his subordinates would have rushed and brought them onboard, no matter how much it cost the exchequer and the taxpayer.

Ajmal was already on his way out by then. On December 31, 2016, the Punjab Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department sent a letter to the director general of Punjab’s Anti-Corruption Establishment, stating that the top management of Punjab Saaf Pani Company had spiked up the cost of project contracts from 121 billion rupees to 194 billion rupees without informing its own board of directors about the increase in a proper and timely manner. The letter mentioned a news report published in daily *Business Recorder* and alleged that “doubts/issues were raised by certain quarters on the bidding process” carried out on May 13, 2016 to select companies for the execution of the project. Anti-corruption authorities were asked to conduct an investigation with “special reference to the appointment of officers/officials of the company related to the execution of the project [and] Engineering Management Consultants (EMCs) and possible wrongdoing/corrupt practices in estimates” and increase therein.

The Anti-Corruption Establishment immediately ordered an inquiry and set up a probe team that found out that Punjab Saaf Pani Company made “illegal/excess payment amounting to 10,069,144 [rupees] on account of weather shield [paint]” to KSB; that an “attempt was made to deprive the public at large” of scarce financial resources through unjustified and non-uniform application of risk/cost factors to increase the project estimates; that engineering management consultants were selected through favouritism and were paid even when they had not completed their required tasks; that the company made an illegal payment of 58.995 million rupees to its third party validation consultant, Alpha Consult, as salary for its international staff “without verification of their arrival, stay [and] departure status”; and that “excess payment” was made to KSB “without applying reduced rate as per contract agreement”.

The inquiry report was finalised on October 5, 2017 and it recommended the filing of a case against 22 people including Ajmal and other senior officers of Punjab Saaf Pani Company. A first information report (FIR) was subsequently registered at the Anti-Corruption Establishment’s directorate on October 25, 2017 under legal provisions that cover such crimes as fraud, deception, forgery, criminal breach of trust and misappropriation of funds among others.

The matter is pending further investigation and trial.

Apart from these allegations, government officers interviewed for this report allege that some foreign companies were the reason why the project has never gone ahead. These firms could not legally become a part of the bidding process but are being backed by influential personalities in the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz as well as by some serving and former senior government officials. At least one Turkish company is said to have submitted an unsolicited proposal for clean drinking water schemes in Sahiwal district. It is alleged to have the backing of Hamza Shahbaz. It did not get any contracts though.

The impact of all this internal wrangling has been devastating for the people in Punjab thirsting for clean drinking water. Slightly more than three years have passed since Punjab Saaf Pani Company was set up. More than 30 months have passed since the process began for inviting and shortlisting companies to take part in the construction of clean drinking water supply schemes. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars have been paid as consultant fees. Millions of rupees have been spent on foreign tours and road shows. Hundreds of millions of rupees have been expended on staff salaries as well as office and administrative costs. Punjab Saaf Pani Company’s records show its total expenditure so far to be at slightly less than three billion rupees. And yet the company has nothing to show for it all.

Many sources in the Punjab government blame it on the whimsical way the chief minister has handled the company and its working. He has constantly shifted the goalposts and added layer after layer of reviews and monitoring by outside consultants even before the project moved beyond its documentation and preparatory stages. And, at the same time, he successfully blamed the top management of Punjab Saaf Pani Company for the delays and bottlenecks in its execution. Every single CEO of the company left it in ignominy — starting from Waseem Mukhtar, who headed it when it was still in the process of being corporatised, to Farasat Iqbal to Waseem Ajmal to Khalid Sherdil. Before each one of them was kicked out of the post, a probe into their conduct as the head of the company had already been ordered, though an FIR has been registered only against Ajmal and his associates.

The Punjab government’s spokesperson Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan acknowledges that there have been multiple problems with the functioning of the project but he first wants its success stories mentioned. “Pilot project in south Punjab has produced good results.” Issues arose when the government tried to take the project to a larger level, he says.

Khan claims the project designed by Punjab Saaf Pani Company envisioned laying down pipelines to carry water from filtration plants to homes. It was soon realised that this was not a feasible option in already settled areas, he says. The other problem, he points out, concerned extraordinary increases in project costs. “[The chief minister] had doubts over the pricing due to his past experience with projects of this nature.”

Shehbaz Sharif, according to Khan, did not micromanage the project but he was only ensuring that the public’s money was not misused. One reason why multiple CEOs were appointed and replaced at Punjab Saaf Pani Company was that they had all failed to address design problems in the project, Khan says. The other reason was that they abused their power, he adds.

It was for these reasons that the chief minister initiated an inquiry which revealed that “Ajmal had over-invoiced the project cost by 62 billion rupees and had hired consultants at higher than market rates”. He and his associates in the management were also found to have been involved in the overbilling of 20 to 40 million rupees, Khan alleges.

How long must the residents of Kulalanwala and Kot Asadullah wait for this departmental musical chairs to end and all the turf wars between the powerful to conclude before they can have easy and ready access to clean drinking water? The answer is obvious: as long as Shehbaz Sharif is unwilling to stop micromanaging the affairs of Punjab Saaf Pani Company.

Additional reporting by Nasir Jamal

This article was published in the Herald's December 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

It is raining on March 8, 2017 at the Torkham border post on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Half a dozen women and some children are sitting in an office compound out in the open. A security official approaches them and orders them to vacate the place that houses the offices of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the tribal militia Khyber Khasadar Force and the civilian administration of Khyber Agency, the tribal area where the post is situated. He wants them to move to the Afghan side of the border. They all request him to let them remain on the Pakistani side.

One of them, Deeba, 29, is adamant. Clad in a shuttleco*ck burqa and crying incessantly, she insists: “I won’t go back to Afghanistan, come what may!” A resident of Khwar Nabi, a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Swabi district, Deeba is carrying her Pakistani Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) with her.

A few weeks earlier, she went to Jalalabad, the capital of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province about 70 kilometres to the west of Torkham, to attend a family event at the house of her sister who is married to an Afghan. Before Deeba could return home, a blast at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan on February 16 killed over 70 people, and Pakistan stopped all cross-border movement at Torkham, blaming the blast on terrorists who had come from Afghanistan.

By March 7, people and vehicles waiting to cross over stretched for kilometres on both sides of the border. Pakistan temporarily lifted the ban for a couple of days to let them pass. When Deeba came to know about the border opening, she rushed to Torkham along with her three children, including a two-month-old baby, but was stopped at the border post and told that she could not enter her own country because she had not left for Afghanistan with a visa. She protested that nobody had asked her for a visa when she went to the other side. Border guards had only looked at her CNIC and allowed her to exit Pakistan.

Stranded at Torkham, Deeba and her children, along with many others like them, spend a freezing night between March 7 and March 8 without proper shelter. The next day, they are neither willing nor equipped to pass another cold night in the open. “You have the power to kill me by opening fire with the gun you are holding,” she challenges the security official telling her to leave the compound. “But I won’t go back to Afghanistan.”

Deeba moves out only after the guard assures her that she will be allowed to go to her home in Swabi.

The assurance turns out to be a trap. As soon as she steps out, she is pushed back into Afghan territory. Realising that she has been deceived, she holds onto a steel railing as a female security official tries to push her into Afghanistan. “Za khpal watan ta zam(I have to go back to my country),” Deeba says in Pashto as she cries continuously.

“Why don’t you understand, sister?” asks a male security guard belonging to the local Afridi Pakhtun tribe. He is visibly softened by her crying.

“I do understand but you do not understand Pakhtunwali (the Pakhtun social code),” she responds.

The Afridi guard is annoyed over having to treat women unkindly, something that Pakhtunwali forbids, but he has no other option. “I am not at peace when I go to bed at night due to the way women are treated at the border,” he says. “But defying orders means termination from [my] job and I cannot afford that. I am the sole bread winner of my family.”

Gul Hasan, a Frontier Corps official responsible for managing the media, is taking photos in the meanwhile. He trains his camera on Deeba, clicks and sends her photo to his bosses as she is being pushed through the border rail.

An hour later, Colonel Umer Farooq, a Frontier Corps commander, circulates the photos to journalists in Landi Kotal, the headquarters of Khyber Agency about 10 kilometres to the east of Torkham, on the road that connects the border with Peshawar. He portrays Deeba as someone “going back to Afghanistan” and claims that the female security guard is helping her “as she could not handle all three children by herself”.Later the same day, Deeba and 470 other Pakistanis are allowed to enter their own country.

Khurshid Shinwari’s mother came from Ghazgay area near the Gardi Ghaus shrine in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. After her marriage many decades ago, she shifted to her husband’s house in Landi Kotal. When she fell terminally ill in 2001, her brothers came to see her from Nangarhar. They wanted to maintain links with her children after her death. “My eight-year-old daughter was thus engaged to the son of one of my uncles,” her son Shinwari says, a thickset man in his fifties.

He married his daughter off when she turned 20, after which she went to live with her in-laws in Afghanistan. She would cross the border frequently – and without any trouble – to meet her parents in Landi Kotal. In September 2016, she gave birth to a baby boy.

Around the same time, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) declared her Pakistani identity card invalid because she had shifted to Afghanistan. Towards the end of January of this year, her son fell seriously ill and needed medical treatment not available in Afghanistan. She tried to bring him to Pakistan but was not allowed to enter the country of her birth because of her invalidated CNIC. “On February 4, her four-month-old son died,” Shinwari says, his green eyes looking wistful.

Pakistan is a favoured destination for a large number of Afghans seeking medical treatment, though as the case of Shinwari’s grandson shows, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to get to the Pakistani side. Until late last year, Pakistani border authorities did not bother assessing their medical condition before letting them in. Only in November 2016, the civilian administration of the tribal areas appointed two doctors at Torkham to screen ailing Afghans trying to enter Pakistan. Even then, the bar to entry remained low and the number of Afghans crossing the border to visit Pakistani doctors and hospitals ran in the hundreds each day.

Since last December, screening has become more stringent and is undertaken by an army doctor. “[Just] 10 to 20 Afghan patients are allowed to enter Pakistan for medical treatment each day,” says an official of the civilian administration of Khyber Agency. Only those suffering from heart disease and cancer and those with bullet injuries are allowed instant entry, he adds. The rest are either sent back or told to bring in more documentary evidence to prove that they need urgent medical attention.

The border closure in February-March of this year also resulted in a large number of Afghan patients getting stuck on the Pakistani side. Even those who had valid travel documents were not allowed to cross the border at the time.

Hundreds of them are stranded in an under-construction mosque in Landi Kotal bazaar on a cold, early March day this year. They have been spending freezing nights in half-built shelters with next to no provisions. Misery and suffering abound.

Consider the story of Sardar Kareem. A slim man in his mid-forties with a black beard and wrinkled face, he has just one brown shawl to protect himself from night temperatures touching zero degrees. He belongs to Mohmand Darra area in Jalalabad and had his right leg amputated at Peshawar’s Hayatabad Medical Complex on February 17 because of complications caused by diabetes. “I have been staying in the mosque for the last five days because I have no money to stay in a hotel in Peshawar,” he says.

An ailing Afghan woman is sitting on a rough patch of land in Landi Kotal along the road that leads to Torkham. She underwent backbone surgery in January at a private hospital in Peshawar’s Dabgari Garden area and came back for a follow-up in February. As soon as her check-up was completed, she embarked on her return journey because she had left behind her nine-month-old child. Before she reached Torkham, cross-border movement was halted. Alone and almost penniless, she had no choice but to seek shelter in the mosque.

Many among the stranded are not ill but their stories are equally painful.

One of them, Raheemullah, wants to go home to Afghanistan because increased surveillance and checking have made it difficult for him to work anywhere in Pakistan. “I have been stranded here for the last five days,” says the 51-year-old labourer from Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. He has a visa to stay, but not work, in Pakistan and was employed building mud walls in Nankana Sahib district in Punjab when the local authorities arrested him in the wake of the Sehwan blast and put him in jail for a couple of weeks. He counts himself lucky that he was released.

Immediately after getting out of jail, he rushed to Torkham to go back to Afghanistan. By the time he reached the border, it had already closed. “The Pakistani government does not let us live on its own soil but at the same time it is not letting us go back to our home country,” he says.

Alam Gul Stankzai, a resident of Afghanistan’s Maidan Wardak province, starts crying out for help as soon as he sees someone approaching him. He used to sell dry fruit from a hand-driven cart in Rawalpindi where law enforcers would often stop him to check his identity papers. He moved to Peshawar hoping the situation would be better there. It was not. He sold his wares at throw-away prices and decided to leave Pakistan. “I will never come back [to Pakistan]. For God’s sake let me go back to my own land,” he implores.

Shafeeqa’s case is rather unique. She is a Pakistani but is marooned in Landi Kotal because she is desperate to be in Afghanistan. Her 19-year-old daughter died in Kabul earlier in the day and she wants to attend her funeral. With her three little daughters – still clad in their school uniforms – she is crying loudly and needs to be in Kabul at any cost. “My husband and relatives are waiting for me to be at the funeral but [the border guards] are not letting me cross into Afghanistan,” she says.

Shafeeqa came to Pakistan along with her family in the early 1980s after the Soviet Union invaded her native Afghanistan. Asif Shah, a Pakistani resident of Peshawar, fell in love with her and the two married. This was over two decades ago. Her husband now works in Kabul at an air-ticketing agency and their daughter was also married there before she was divorced a few months ago. She was living with her father in Kabul when she died.

Shafeeqa’s request for permission to cross the border has been turned down on the ground that she does not have an Afghan visa. She still hopes to see her deceased daughter one last time before she is buried. The burial, however, has already taken place without her knowledge. “My wife threatened to commit suicide if I buried our daughter in her absence,” says her husband by phone from Kabul the next day. But he could not put off the burial indefinitely.

Residents of Landi Kotal feel obliged to help the stranded under Pakhtunwali. A local tribesman says his family alone can accommodate as many as 20 Afghans in their hujra (an informal community centre), providing them shelter and three meals a day. However, he says, officials have warned the locals verbally against providing assistance to Afghans lest some militants benefit from their help. “We cannot afford to antagonise the authorities,” he explains.

AFrontier Corps official working at the Torkham border post explains why it is difficult for the authorities to tackle hardship cases on an individual basis. Between 6,000 and 7,000 people come to Pakistan from Afghanistan through the post every day, he says, not wanting to disclose his name for security reasons. Almost the same number of Pakistanis go to Afghanistan from the same spot daily, he adds.

Out of these, at least 400 people go to the other side of the border every morning and come back in the evening of the same day. They are mostly traders and manual labourers. About 20,000-25,000 Pakistanis live in Afghanistan as expatriate workers. Close to 1.3 million Afghans live in different parts of Pakistan as refugees, according to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. Hundreds of trucks carrying goods to Afghanistan also pass through Torkham each day. The scale of movement at the post is too great to allow the border authorities the time to help individuals in distress, the official says.

Before January 2016, the number of Afghans coming into Pakistan was as high as 20,000 per day and the checking of their documents was lax, if not entirely missing, says Shamsul Islam, a passport officer at Torkham border. He explains that Pakistan uses three different mechanisms to regulate border traffic at the post: immigration on valid travel documents examined through an integrated biometric system, movement of Pakistani Shinwari tribespeople to Afghanistan through a NADRA-operated system and, finally, movement of Afghan nationals on transit permits, known as rahdari passes, first issued by Pakistan on September 23, 2015.

Rahdari passes require renewal after every six months and were originally available to any Afghan sponsored by a Pakistani living in Landi Kotal tehsil of Khyber Agency. Four months later, their provision was restricted to Shinwari tribesmen living in Haska Maina, Speen Ghar, Acheen, Nazyaan, Dur Baba and Ghani Khel villages of Afghanistan. The total number of passes reached 16,000 when they were first issued, but went down to 3,800 by February 2017. Those who come to Pakistan using rahdari passes cannot travel beyond Shaheed Morr area, a crossway two kilometres east of the border post.

It was only after a terrorist attack at Bacha Khan University, Charsadda, in early 2016 that the Pakistani authorities started vigorously implementing these mechanisms to stop the infiltration of terrorists from Afghanistan. To that end, a four-layer security and clearance system was set up at Torkham. It is manned by the Khyber Khasadar Force, the Frontier Corps, Customs officials and the immigration cell of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) operating in that order. “Everybody crossing the border is required to pass through a proper system now,” says Islam.

Other measures include building an elaborate physical infrastructure.

A heavily-guarded concrete and steel portal, with multiple entrances, stands tall at the Torkham border post. A high steel-wire fence starts from the portal and stretches on both sides of a road in the Pakistani territory all the way to Shaheed Morr. Within the fenced-in area, different lanes are reserved for human and vehicular traffic going to Afghanistan. Vehicles and people intending to enter Pakistan from Afghanistan have separate lanes reserved for them. No cars or buses are allowed to cross through the post. Those wanting to cross to the other side are made to leave their vehicles near Shaheed Morr. They have to cover the rest of the distance on foot. The sick and the elderly are usually pushed in wooden wheelbarrows.

All these systems have been put in place over the last 12 months or so, according to Islam. They started when the National Logistics Cell (NLC) was assigned the task of streamlining the “haphazard” cross-border activities, he says. The cell built proper trade terminals and fenced the post, creating pedestrian and truck lanes and separate counters for departure and arrival.

Departments such as the FIA that check passports and visas, and Customs that levies taxes on imports and exports, meanwhile, have increased their strength at the post, says the Frontier Corps official. Security pickets have been reinforced, patrolling has been increased and the presence of security and intelligence agencies has been strengthened around Torkham, the passport officer says.

He believes that the Afghans stranded in Landi Kotal must have incomplete travel and identity documents. The security agencies, he says, have detained 400 or so other Afghans who were trying to cross the border without legal documents, he says. They are to be thoroughly investigated: Those who are found not to be involved in any militant or terrorist activity in Pakistan will be declared ‘white’ and will then be handed over to the civilian administration which will release them after charging 5,000 rupees in fines for attempting to cross the border illegally. The ‘grey’ detainees will be subject to further probes and the ‘black’ ones will be presented before the courts.

Pakistani security forces have also blocked three rather unfrequented routes near the Torkham border known to have been used by terrorists and militants to enter Pakistan, says the official. Shoot-at-sight orders have been issued if and when anyone is found trying to use those routes, he adds. “The infiltration is nil now.”

Construction of permanent structures on the border – marked by the British-era Durand Line that Afghanistan has historically refused to accept – has been seen in Kabul as a disagreeable act. The Afghan government’s attempt to stop Pakistan from going ahead with the construction of various facilities at Torkham led to a clash last year between the border forces of the two countries. On June 12, 2016, Major Jawad Changezi, an army officer working with the Frontier Corps at the post, lost his life to firing from the Afghan side.

His death made Pakistan slow down commercial traffic that takes all kinds of goods, including food and home appliances, from Pakistan – both by legal and illegal means – to Afghanistan. Border guards were told to strictly enforce the provisions of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) of 2010 that aims at, among other things, curbing illegal re-entry of Afghanistan-bound goods into Pakistan. Imported from China, Japan, East Asia, Europe, North America and the Gulf, theoretically for use in Afghanistan, these goods often end up in bazaars and markets in border towns such as Peshawar and Chaman.

Under one of the most important clauses in the agreement, every truck carrying imported goods to Afghanistan is required to make a security deposit of 600,000 rupees to Pakistani authorities at Karachi Port. The money is returned only if the truck has crossed over to Afghanistan and unloaded all its goods in that country. If it does not exit Pakistan or comes back to Pakistan without unloading its contents, the security deposit is forfeited.

Though the agreement was signed about seven years ago and rules and regulations for its implementation were formed in 2011, it is only recently that Pakistan has deployed the required tools and human resources at Torkham and Chaman to enforce it strictly. As a consequence, say civilian officials in Khyber Agency, trade traffic has witnessed a sharp decline at Torkham. In previous years, more than 800 trucks per day crossed the border to go to Afghanistan, says one official. This number has deceased by half, he adds.

Irfan Muhammad, a clearing agent who coordinates between Afghan traders and truckers and Pakistani taxation authorities at Torkham, also believes that Pak-Afghan goods traffic has gone down by at least half in recent months. His firm would help at least 100 trucks to clear the customs procedures each day before the border controls became strict. This number has gone down to 40-50 a day, he says.

More than anything else, the decline is having a serious impact on Pakistan’s exports to Afghanistan. About 500-600 trucks carrying cement used to cross into Afghanistan on a daily basis in the not-so-distant past. “Now their number has declined to 150-200 a day,” says Muhammad.

Afghan officials love to point out that Pakistan is hurting its own commercial interests with tighter border controls. “We have a number of other trade options like Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Iran and we are using them after restrictions have been placed on trade through Chaman and Torkham,” says Dr Abdullah Waheed Poyan, the Afghan consul general in Peshawar. He confirms that annual trade between the two countries has gone down to about 1.5 billion US dollars from its peak of 2.5 billion US dollars a few years ago.

The other direct impact of the changes in border trade has been on truck drivers. Earlier, drivers and their helpers from the two countries could cross the border without passports or visas, says Poyan. Now, Pakistan requires Afghan truckers to acquire multiple-entry Pakistani visas. They have to spend additional time and money to obtain them, he says.

The drivers who do not require a visa even now are also unhappy. Muhammad Saleem, a 38-year-old former teacher, was once so enticed by the prospect of making a decent living from cross-border traffic that he quit his job at a school for Afghan refugee children in Haripur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2008 and became a taxi driver.

He would earn 18,000-20,000 rupees a month driving a cab between Haripur and Torkham four to five days a week. This was a great improvement over his 7,000 rupees a month salary as a teacher. But commercial traffic between Pakistan and Afghanistan has gone down so much in recent months that he can get work only once a week. “It has become extremely difficult to make ends meet,” he says.

Decline in demand for trucks and containers has led to a reduction in their fares. A truck that could be hired for 350,000 rupees for a single consignment early last year is available for 260,000 rupees now. The truckers also have to wait longer than in the past at Karachi Port due to the increase in time that Afghan transit trade now takes to clear. While this raises costs for importers who have to pay the shipping companies an additional 80-90 US dollars per day for each container, the wait for each truck to get its consignment often stretches to about six days, says Muslim Khan, a 33-year-old truck driver.

A Shinwari tribesman from Afghanistan, he has been driving a goods container for the last four days. On January 3 of this year, he arrives at Takhta Baig, a place just outside Peshawar in Jamrud tehsil of Khyber Agency, after starting his journey at Karachi Port four days earlier. He will need to drive for another six hours or so to reach Jalalabad.

His long hair falling from beneath his red cap, Muslim Khan sets off from Takhta Baig for Torkham early in the morning. His younger brother, Shamullah, is sitting next to him in the driver’s cabin. Their 22-wheel vehicle is moving at a very slow pace because of the massive amount of goods it is carrying. They stop as they approach a checkpoint.

Shamullah gets down and hands some money to an official. The vehicle moves to the next checkpoint where the same act is repeated. Shamullah performs the same routine until their vehicle has crossed all the 14 checkpoints between Takhta Baig and Torkham. “It is impossible to pass a checkpoint without paying kalang (extortion),” says Muslim Khan. Both Pakistani and Afghan truckers pay kalang worth many thousand rupees before reaching Torkham, he claims.

Shakeel Ahmed, a customs clearing agent at Torkham, makes a similar claim. Various Pakistani departments, he says, have set up a number of checkpoints on the 45-kilometre stretch of road between Peshawar and Torkham (many of these have been set up only in recent months) where each trucker pays about 7,000 rupees.

This money never goes to the national exchequer. Instead, it lands in the pockets of those manning the posts, he alleges.

A stretch of shopping centres on the northwestern outskirts of Peshawar marks one side of a road that links the city with Jamrud and then onwards to Torkham. Multistorey shopping complexes and small stores located here are brimming with all types of goods — automobile spare parts, lubricants, tyres, electronics, crockery, blankets, toys, cosmetics, clothes, shoes, canned foods, chocolates, drinks, even dry fruits. This is the famed Karkhano Market, perhaps the biggest and the most known place to buy smuggled goods in Pakistan.

Buyers from many parts of northern and central Pakistan find it a convenient and cheap source of luxury goods that may cost an arm and a leg if purchased from superstores and markets dealing in legal imports.

Gul Sher (not his real name), a Shinwari tribesman from Landi Kotal, has been involved in smuggling goods to Karkhano Market for years. He describes how he would carry smuggled goods through Torkham on hand-pushed carts. Once on the Pakistani side, those goods were transferred to trucks that carried them to Peshawar. A truck full of smuggled items would cost 450,000 rupees, says Sher. The cost included the bribes required to buy officials manning the checkpoints (approximately 300,000 per truck) and the fare (approximately 50,000 rupees). Each month, Sher and his associates would bring to Karkhano Market four to five trucks containing smuggled goods. Hundreds others from the Shinwari tribe did the same.

Most of that traffic is gone now. Business has been bad for shopkeepers at Karkhano Market for quite some time. Many shopping centres wear a deserted look. Smuggled goods cost almost as much as legally imported ones now.

Fazle Wahid, a middle-aged trader at Karkhano Market, has been dealing in smuggled blankets for the last 16 years. He complains his business has come to a halt due to “extraordinary restrictions” on the border. “For the first time after I started this business, I am suffering a loss of 30,000 rupees to 35,000 rupees a month,” he says. A double ply blanket available at Karkhano Market was cheaper by 1,500-2,000 rupees than the ones legally imported, but that difference has diminished to the extent that customers belonging to Punjab do not see any benefit in shopping at Karkhano Market anymore, he says.

Businessmen in Landi Kotal, another major hub of smuggled goods from Afghanistan, face a similar situation. Shah Noor, a local trader in his mid-forties who deals in tyres smuggled from Afghanistan, is worried about the future of his business. A pair of smuggled tyres used to be available at 34,000 rupees in Landi Kotal before restrictions at the border, while the legally imported ones cost 43,000 rupees. The price difference has all but vanished, he says.

If Wahid Khan Shinwari, secretary general of the Landi Kotal Customs Clearing Agents Association, is to be believed, half of Landi Kotal’s roughly 25,000 people have been affected by the strict border management. Others point out that 1,300 taxi cabs and 800 buses plying between Torkham and Peshawar have almost stopped their operations because of the declining number of people crossing the border. Many of the 700 or so customs clearing agents working at Torkham are also left with next to no work. Hundreds of people working as carriers of smuggled goods and earning 500-1,000 rupees a day have become jobless.

Wahid Khan Shinwari recalls a meeting between local tribal elders and the Frontier Corps commandant on March 1 of this year. The objective of the meeting was to discuss the impact of changes in border management on local trade and employment. “We warned the commandant that unemployed youth may join terrorists who offer 20,000 to 25,000 rupees a month to those willing to work with them,” he warns.

Not that smuggling has entirely vanished.

The only traditional smuggling route where cross-border movement of goods has come to a complete halt over the last two years lies to the north of Torkham in Shalman area. Security there has been highly tightened to stop the infiltration of militants belonging to Daesh and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar from the Afghan side, so much so that even cross-border movement of local tribespersons has been banned.

Shalman is inhabited by the Haleemzai and Tarakzai sub-clans of the Mohmand tribe. They have blood relations with people living on the Afghan side of the border. Many of them would go to Afghan villages without any hindrance until a few years ago. “For the last seven years, we have had no links with our relatives and friends in Afghanistan,” says Gul Haq Khan, a resident of Sheen Pokh village in Shalman. Afghan security forces let them cross the border even now but, he says, “When we return, Pakistani security forces subject us to a thorough probe in their lock-ups.”

Pakistani pickets dot the area at two-kilometre intervals to keep a strict watch on the border. Commuters to Shalman from other parts of Pakistan are stopped at the Ghakhay checkpoint manned by the Swat Scouts.

A signboard to the side of the picket warns: the camera lens is watching you. The locals advise outsiders against introducing themselves as journalists. “[Security officials] will never let us cross the picket if they come to know that you are journalists,” one of them says. Only a few metres ahead, there is another checkpoint, manned by the Khyber Khasadar Force. Pakistani mobile phone signals do not reach here. If your phone is on international roaming, you may catch signals from towers installed in Afghan territory on the other side of a river that marks the boundary between the two countries.

Khasadars warn all visitors to discontinue their travel to Shalman and go back. “We do not want to put your lives at risk as both Daesh and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militants are present on the other side,” says a 50-something Khasadar official. On May 21 of this year, the Khyber Agency’s civilian administration “ordered thousands” of residents of Sheen Pokh “to vacate their houses” after a mortar shell fired from Afghanistan killed a woman and critically injured a boy, according to a report in the daily Dawn.

Smugglers, instead, are using a new route — through Zakhakhel Bazaar located to the southwest of Landi Kotal amid high mountains and narrow passes. Due to the presence and movement of militants through the area, outsiders are not allowed to enter it without permission from security agencies.

To overcome this hurdle, smugglers find local partners from the Zakhakhel clan of the Afridi tribe who help them smuggle goods from Afghanistan’s border areas to Zakhakhel Bazaar on mules and camels. From there onwards, the goods are shifted to Landi Kotal and Karkhano Market on trucks.

Smugglers also need to pay protection money (500,000 rupees for each truck) to Tauheedul Islam, a pro-government militant organisation that has been fighting against the fighters of another militant organisation, Lashkar-e-Islam, since 2011.Before that year, the two groups were united and waging a war against Pakistan in collaboration with the Pakistani Taliban.

Tauheedul Islam has a presence all along the smuggling route. Its commanders have a monopoly over trucking operations and they have disallowed the entry of any vehicles into the area other than those they themselves own. It helps them charge high fares (300,000 rupees per truck). It also keeps the volume of smuggled goods low because of the limited number of trucks the commanders can deploy. If smugglers want to expedite goods transportation, they have to pay an additional 200,000 rupees to Tauheedul Islam for each consignment.

The result is an increase in the price of smuggled goods and a decline in their volume, thus leading to a decrease in the money that a smuggler can make. By the time a truck reaches Karkhano Market from Zakhakhel Bazaar, its total transportation cost amounts to 800,000 rupees — more than twice as much as the cost of transporting a truck from Torkham to Karkhano Market. This erodes the profit margins shopkeepers in the market once enjoyed.

The road that leads to Zakhakhel Bazaar branches off from the Peshawar-Torkham highway a little to the east of Landi Kotal. It veers southwest for many kilometres to reach a mountaintop overlooking the bazaar. On a February day this year, officials of the Frontier Corps and the Khyber Khasadar Force are bunkered inside a small checkpoint on the hilltop to avoid the harsh winter wind. They stop every vehicle passing by, check the identity of its occupants and disallow all non-locals, including mediapersons, from travelling downhill. Only the commandant of the Frontier Corps and the political agent of Khyber Agency have the authority to grant them entry.

Smuggling through this area is unthinkable without the knowledge, if not connivance, of security personnel and civilian officials. A member of the civilian administration of Khyber Agency acknowledges that much, but he hastens to add that his department is not aware of any formal or informal, verbal or written, agreement between the state and Tauheedul Islam to allow smuggling. “The agreement, if there is any, has been reached between the non-civilian officials (that is, security forces) and the long-haired people (that is, militants),” he says.

Local sources say Tauheedul Islam makes about 150 million rupees a month through its patronage of smuggling. They say the money helps the organisation pay for its anti-terrorism operations. It maintains a force of around 1,100 fighters to keep peace in the area and has lost 196 of its associates in clashes with the militants of Lashkar-e-Islam, they point out. It is to compensate for this that Tauheedul Islam has been given this incentive, says a local journalist who attended meetings with security officials where information about the arrangement was shared.

Fayyaz Khan, a resident of Shabqadar tehsil of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Charsadda district, is waiting to cross the border at Kharlachi, a border post in Kurram Agency. He is going to Afghanistan to participate in a football game. The Frontier Corps personnel posted at the crossing look at his CNIC and give him the go-ahead to move to the other side of the border. “Hopefully I will manage to come back,” he says.

Kharlachi does not have anything like the elaborate security arrangements that Torkham has. There are no immigration officials to check passports and visas. A handful of Afghans can be seen crossing the border without visas and passports. Most of them claim to be coming to Pakistan to seek medical treatment. A few Customs officials examine trucks passing through the post and levy export taxes on their contents.

For some unknown reason, Kharlachi is a no-go area for journalists. Earlier this year, local facilitators advised a team of journalists visiting from Peshawar against disclosing their professional identity to the officials at the border post. When one journalist took photographs with his camera, a Frontier Corps official grabbed the camera and deleted all the photos of the crossing.

Security is strict on the road to Kharlachi. The first major picket is located at a place called Hindu Dhand, just before a road coming from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Hangu district enters Parachinar city, the headquarters of Kurram Agency. All vehicles – cars, vans, buses, trucks – wait at the picket in a long queue before a young soldier with green eyes, a brown beard and a fair complexion examines their papers. Outsiders are required to show their original CNICs and get a pass to enter Parachinar.

Those who want to go to Kharlachi have to pass through another checkpoint at a place called Ghulam Jan. Before a third picket arrives at Malli Kalay village, about eight kilometres north of Parachinar, the road turns southwest through a valley surrounded by snow-clad mountains of the Koh-e-Sufaid range. Population is sparse here. Houses are scattered at the foot of the hills.

A couple of other security pickets appear on the 19- kilometre road before it reaches Kharlachi. The officials at these pickets ask routine questions: if all vehicles have valid registration documents and whether all commuters carry their CNICs.

Until last year, Kharlachi was a bustling trade post. Every day 400 or so trucks loaded with such goods as fresh fruit, rice, wheat, cooking oil, clothes and footwear would go to Afghanistan from here, says Haji Rauf Hussain Turi, a tribal elder in Parachinar. About 150 trucks a day exported Kinnow alone during the winter of 2016, he says. Now, this entire traffic has been reduced to 150-200 trucks per day, he adds.

A mud track passes through the modest border gate at Kharlachi. A bevy of shiny new cars is parked on the Afghan side — waiting to be smuggled into Pakistan.

“Eight to 10 vehicles on average are smuggled every day through certain border crossings in Kurram Agency,” says Habib Hussain, who has been running an automobile business in Parachinar for over 20 years. He puts the total number of smuggled vehicles in the agency at 10,000. These are known as ‘non-custom paid vehicles’ since they are brought into Pakistan without paying any import taxes.

The Frontier Corps personnel seized 50 non-custom paid vehicles early in January of this year. Enraged over the seizure, local tribal elders met the general officer commanding of the corps, asking him to order their release. They submitted to him that he should rather take to task those border security officials who let the vehicles into Pakistan in the first place, says a source privy to the meeting.

Local traders dealing in smuggled vehicles say the only change their business has seen in the wake of tightened border controls is a rise in the rate of the bribes they pay to the officials at various checkpoints. “A year ago, we would cross the border, buy a vehicle and hand it over to a carrier to give it back to us in Parachinar,” says Habib Hussain. The carrier would charge only 5,000 rupees. Now his rate has increased manifold.

Talib Hussain, who has been working as a carrier for years, says he has started charging 25,000 rupees to bring a smuggled vehicle to Parachinar. Of this, he claims, 20,000 rupees go to the officials of various departments.

The other much-smuggled item is urea-based fertilizer. Since Kurram Agency in general and Parachinar in particular have suffered a number of bomb blasts and suicide attacks over the last few years, the government banned the sale of urea fertilizer there because of its usage in bomb manufacturing. The ban came into effect on November 20, 2015 but has not eliminated the sale of urea in the agency. “[The fertilizer] is being smuggled from Iran, Russia and Tajikistan,” says Haji Rauf Turi Hussain, the tribal elder.

Kurram Agency is a fertile region with 144,280 acres of cultivable land. Its farmers grow wheat, rice, potatoes, tomatoes and many other vegetables. “Our tomatoes go to Rawalpindi, peanuts and turnip to Lahore and potatoes to Karachi,” says Shabir Hussain, who owns a 20-acre farm in Parachinar. More than 80 per cent of households in the agency are dependent on agriculture, he adds.

Local farmers have only two choices in the wake of the ban on urea and both are financially unfeasible: they can avoid using fertilizer, which will reduce their yield and consequently hit their income, or they can use smuggled fertilizer available at a high price which will increase their input cost and decrease their profit margin.

A bag of urea is available at 1,450 rupees in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Hangu district that abuts Kurram Agency in the east, says Shabir Hussain. In Parachinar, it is available at 3,000-3,300 rupees per bag. “This has inflicted a colossal loss on our economy.”

Tribal elders apprised the military authorities about the problem last year. “They assured us that it would be resolved soon,” says Khurshid Anwar, another farmer in Parachinar who owns 50 acres of agricultural land. So far, nothing has come out of that promise, he says.

The Ghulam Khan border crossing is quiet and calm even though it is located in North Waziristan Agency where a military operation against the Taliban has been going on since 2014. A two-lane road that connects it with Miran Shah, the headquarters of the agency, is deserted on a sunny day early this year. Built with financial support from the United States, it was inaugurated by then Chief of the Army Staff General Raheel Sharif in November 2016.

It passes through a newly-built gate at the border, enters the Afghan area and continues moving westwards before disappearing into the horizon. A short, 120-metre patch of land on both sides of the border has been left unpaved since its ownership is disputed between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a small but significant sign that all is not well between the two countries.

Pakistani security forces keep a close watch on the border crossing but no Afghan soldiers or officials are visible on the other side. They have set up their post on top of a hill that overlooks the crossing, says a Frontier Corps official. The first Afghan checkpoint on the ground is located about a kilometre from the line marking the boundary.

Kamran Afridi, who works as a political agent, the highest civilian official in North Waziristan agency, expected the border to open for commercial traffic and human movement soon after the road was inaugurated. He says his staff had made all the required arrangements. “We had meetings with Afghan customs officials and the representatives of the Afghan chamber of commerce. We also made arrangements to install machinery for scanning goods to be traded,” he says. But terrorist attacks in February put paid to his plans. “The escalation of tension on the border [after the terrorist attacks] became a stumbling block,” he explains.

Border tensions have also hampered the repatriation of North Waziristan’s residents from Afghanistan, says Afridi. About 9,070 families had moved to the other side of the border when the military operation, Zarb-e-Azb, started in the agency three years ago. Only 1,735 families returned to Pakistan by March 23, 2017, he says.

Bab-e-Dosti, a towering structure that marks the Pak-Afghan border near Chaman in Balochistan, has two wide gates for the movement of vehicles and two side doors for people to pass through. Queues of 22-wheeler trucks and containers, carrying different types of goods, stretch as far back as two kilometres into Pakistani territory from the border. Hundreds of people, both Pakistanis and Afghans, can be seen crossing the border at any time of the day. To regulate this massive flow of people in an orderly and secure fashion, heavily-armed personnel of the Frontier Corps in their camouflage uniforms have been deployed everywhere around the border post.

Pakistanis living in a 15-kilometre radius from Bab-e-Dosti can cross into Afghanistan without passports and Afghan visas. Afghans living within the same distance from the border, too, do not need passports and Pakistani visas to enter Pakistan. Under this arrangement, thousands of Achakzai tribesmen from Pakistan go to Afghanistan every morning as traders and labourers to Wesh Mandi, a trade hub about three kilometres west of Bab-e-Dosti. They all come back in the evening. A similar number of Afghan labourers come to Pakistan to work in Chaman during the day and return in the evening. Pakistanis only need to show their CNIC to move across the border. Afghans are required to produce their tazkiras, or biodata forms, to do the same.

The problem usually occurs over the authenticity of Pakistani CNICs and the verification of Afghan tazkiras. Afghan border guards do not accept photocopies of Pakistani CNICs. They want to see the original. Pakistani border guards also need to see the original tazkiras but the problem with these tazkiras is that, unlike Pakistani CNICs, they are neither computerised nor issued by a central authority.

On April 1 of this year, a clash erupted between Pakistani security forces and the people crossing the border after the latter protested against delays in the scrutiny of documents. The subsequent firing by border guards left three civilians injured and led to a closure of the border for about three hours. Yet, those Afghans wanting to cross the border on foot were allowed to do so. Only those riding trucks or other vehicles were not permitted to move across. Afghan border guards, however, did not stop any Pakistanis carrying original CNICs from crossing over from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Even an officially closed border was not really closed after all.

Pakistan also allows a free flow of edibles to Afghanistan in small quantities. At a little distance from Bab-e-Dosti, Afghans can be seen taking bags of flour and other kitchen items in wheelbarrows after unloading them from trucks parked on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line.

Another type of goods – vehicles – also move across the border without let or hindrance.

Saddam Achakzai, a car dealer in Chaman, discloses that smuggling of vehicles from Afghanistan did not stop even when the border was closed due to terrorist attacks earlier this year. Strict border security has increased the money given in bribes at different checkpoints, he alleges, but it has not halted smuggling.

He shows off a 2008 model Toyota Corolla Axio car a carrier has brought for him in March of this year. He claims to have purchased it paying 400,000 rupees to its Afghan owner. The carrier charged him 35,000 rupees to drive the car through the border to his showroom in Chaman. He will sell it at 450,000 rupees. “My profit is 15,000 rupees.”

Izzat Khan, a 23-year-old science graduate, is a car carrier in Chaman. “I mostly smuggle Toyota Fielder cars,” he says. According to him, the money he charges for bringing a vehicle from Afghanistan includes 2,500 rupees paid to Afghan border officials and 20,000 rupees given to officials at Bab-e-Dosti. When the border is closed for some reason, money paid to Pakistani officials jumps to 60,000-70,000 rupees for each car, he claims.

A Levies Force official still believes that cross-border movement is heavily controlled at Bab-e-Dosti as compared to the past. “Chaman was like home to Afghans. [Spin Boldik, the Afghan town on the other side of the border,] was the same for Pakistanis,” he says, talking about the situation a few years ago. “Visitors from Karachi could cross the border in their vehicles. They would come back at their own convenience.”

"We are lying between paradise and hell,” says 20-year-old Saifullah, a slim man with a bearded, smiling face. He is a resident of Killi Mazal village, named after his father Haji Muhammad Afzal (also known as Haji Mazal) and located right on the border to the south of Bab-e-Dosti. The paradise to him is Pakistan.

Back in 2013, the Frontier Corps established a checkpoint, known as Iqbal Picket, at the lone road that passes outside his village. No village resident can pass through the picket without carrying their original CNIC. Outsiders are not allowed to enter the village even when they have their identification papers with them, unless they are accompanied by a local. The restrictions have only become more stringent after the border clash between Pakistan and Afghanistan at Torkham in June 2016.

Entrance to the village is blocked by a wire fence. Villagers cannot exit the fenced-in village before 7:00am. Those who are already outside the village cannot get back in before noon. By 7:00pm, entry and exit are both prohibited till the next day. This has resulted in some tragedies.

“In January last year one of my cousins was stabbed. He died of excessive bleeding because we could not take him to a hospital in time due to the closure of the picket,” says Abdullah, a young villager. There is an alternative route through a nearby village, Killi Jahangir, but to use that route the villagers have to enter Afghanistan and pass through an Afghan checkpoint. “This is an uphill task,” he says.

Afghanistan claims the two villages, as well as a third one, Killi Luqman, fall within its territory. Electricity supplied to these villages has a Pakistani source, the Quetta Electric Supply Company, and education and communications are provided by the Pakistani state and businesses. All this has not abated Afghan claims. In March this year, Afghan border police, while patrolling Killi Luqman, directed the villagers to remove Pakistani flags from their houses.

On May 5, the dispute over the villages erupted into a full-blown armed clash between the two countries. Pakistani authorities claim Afghan border guards fired at a census team working in Killi Luqman and Killi Jahangir; Afghanistan claims heavily armed Pakistani border guards intruded into Afghan territory to occupy it.

At least nine people, four of them Frontier Corps personnel, were killed in firing from the Afghan side.

My beloved is on other side of the border and I am [lingering] on this side

[I] swear I cannot cross it over

[Because of the] dividing line of Torkham

My beloved is on other side of the border and I am [lingering] on this side

I said which place is this

[My beloved] said this is Afghanistan

I said I would go there at any cost where my beloved lives

I said I would just cross over to it

[My beloved] said no you’re not fortunate enough

Shahnawaz Tarakzai, 40, sings these lines in Pashto as he reaches Bab-e-Dosti. A Mohmand tribesman and a journalist, he comes from Michni, a village located 29 kilometres northwest of Peshawar in Mohmand Agency. His area is replete with the dreaded militants of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction.

Tarakzai’s impromptu song is a reiteration of the fact that many Pakhtuns living on both sides of the 2,590-kilometre long Durand Line, drawn in 1893 to mark the border between British India and Afghanistan, do not accept it as a legitimate international frontier.

Dr Abdullah Waheed Poyan, the Afghan consul general in Peshawar, echoes these sentiments when he says Pakhtuns living along the Durand Line have centuries-old ties with each other. He is critical of Pakistani measures to strengthen border controls and fence most parts of the Durand Line. “Restriction on the free movement of people … is creating problems for two brothers,” he says in an interview. “Thieves do not force their way into a house through the main gate, but they use other options,” he responds to the Pakistani argument that militants based in Afghanistan enter Pakistan through various routes across the Durand Line to commit terrorist activities. He insists restricting cross-border movement is not “a step towards the solution” of this problem.

The history of the Durand Line remains so controversial that it is almost impossible to reconcile the differences between those who see it as a legal boundary and those who see it as an illegal imposition by a colonial administration.

Those who see the Durand Line as a British construct argue that Pakhtun areas included in British India through its demarcation were actually leased by the Afghan king for 99 years — a lease that expired in 1992.

Their second contention is that the Durand Line was drawn on paper and was never physically demarcated on the ground. Their third argument is that many parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and almost all of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) were historically parts of Afghanistan and were annexed by the British under the Durand Line Agreement of 1893, which itself was skewed because it was not among two equal parties but between the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman Khan, who needed help to quell an insurgency and the British Empire that would not assist him without receiving something in the bargain.

Abdur Rahman Khan, who ruled Afghanistan between 1880 and 1910, was the first to make claims over certain territories now in Pakistan. In his autobiography, published in London in 1900, he stated: “… the Indian Government took all the provinces lying to the south-east and north-east of Afghanistan, which used to belong to the Afghan government in early times, under their influence and protection. They gave them the name of ‘independent,’ and … called them the neutral states between Afghanistan and India.”

A map of the ‘independent’ states, or Yaghistan as they are known in Pashto, which a viceroy of India provided to Abdur Rahman Khan, included the Waziri areas, New Chaman, Chagai, Buland Khel, the whole of Mohmand, Chitral and Asmar, the latter of which is now in Afghanistan. The Afghan amir subsequently renounced his claims over the railway station of New Chaman, Chagai, part of the Waziri areas, Buland Khel, Kurram, the Afridi areas, Bajaur, Swat, Buner, Dir, Chilas and Chitral.

The text of the Durand Line Agreement, signed on November 12, 1893, between the Afghan monarch and Henry Mortimer Durand, categorically declares these areas out of the king’s jurisdiction. “The Government of India will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of Afghanistan, and His Highness the Amir will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of India,” reads the agreement.

But decades after the accord was signed, Afghanistan continued making territorial claims over Pakhtun lands that had become part of British India. In the early 1940s, the Afghan government sent “a series of dispatches” to the British government in India that “expressed its desire to absorb the Pakhtun areas located along the southern part of the Durand Line”. The Indian government, however, categorically turned down this demand, says Lutfur Rehman, a PhD student at the National Defence University, Islamabad who is also a radio broadcaster.

When the British announced their plan to partition the Indian subcontinent on June 3, 1947, he says, Afghanistan again sent a dispatch to London and Delhi saying that the people living in the Pakhtun regions east of the Durand Line “should be given the option of becoming independent or of joining either Pakistan or Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan also opposed Pakistan’s entry into the United Nations as an independent state without addressing Afghan claims to Pakhtun areas. Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 30, 1947, Afghan envoy Hussain Aziz said: “… we cannot recognize the North West Frontier Province (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) as part of Pakistan so long as the people of the NWFP have not been given an opportunity free from any kind of influence – and I repeat – free from any kind of influence, to determine for themselves whether they wish to be independent or become a part of Pakistan.”

Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga, or Grand Assembly, passed a resolution on June 30, 1949, to unilaterally revoke all treaties, conventions and agreements signed between Afghanistan and British India. During the 1950s, Pakistan and Afghanistan engaged in several border clashes, prompting Pakistan to stop the transport of petroleum shipments to Afghanistan for three months. In 1953, the Afghan government unilaterally abrogated the Anglo-Afghan Treaty of November 1921, under which Kabul had acknowledged the Durand Line as an international frontier between Afghanistan and India. In 1973, Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan became Afghanistan’s president and officially started celebrating Pakhtunistan Day to mark unity among Pakhtuns living on both sides of the Durand Line.

Lutfur Rehman claims that many of the Pakhtun areas on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line were never under Afghanistan’s political control. Those that were a part of Afghanistan were so either for a brief period or through arrangements that gave them a large amount of internal autonomy. Peshawar remained under the full control of Afghanistan only between 1747 (when Ahmad Shah Abdali defeated its Mughal governor Nasir Khan) and 1822, when Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh snatched it from Afghan king Shah Shuja, he says.

In the region that constitutes today’s Fata, he adds, the Afghan government had a limited and weak influence, if any at all. Areas such as Chitral, Bajaur, Dir and Swat, according to him, were all autonomous states which neither the Mughals nor the Afghans could ever successfully bring under their control.Pakistan-based Pakhtun nationalists have never found such arguments easy to accept.

Aurangzeb Kasi, a Quetta-based Pakhtun leader who until recently was heading the Balochistan chapter of the Awami National Party (ANP), recalls accompanying Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the legendary Pakhtun nationalist leader also known as Bacha Khan, when he made a month-long visit to Balochistan in 1986. Wherever Bacha Khan talked to people, he would say that he “wanted to materialise the dream of Ahmed Shah Abdali to unite Pakhtuns from the Jhelum river [in Pakistan] to Amu Darya [in Central Asia] under the umbrella of [an independent state of] Pakhtunistan.” Abdali, who came from a Pakhtun tribe, was the first Afghan ruler to unite the tribal society of Afghanistan into a state in 1747, says Kasi who visited Kabul to attend Pakhtunistan Day in 2015.

Now that Pakistan has started fencing its border with Afghanistan, Kasi sees it as an attempt to make the Durand Line a permanent frontier. “Afghans will not accept that,” he warns. Pakistan, he says, could not convince even its diehard supporters such as the Afghan Taliban’s founding amir Mullah Omar and former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to accept the Durand Line as a permanent border between the two countries.

Dr Khadim Hussain, a Peshawar-based political analyst and a Pakhtun nationalist, argues that the Treaty of Rawalpindi, signed in 1919 between British India and Afghanistan, has superseded the accord which brought the Durand Line into being. According to that treaty, he claims, any future arrangement regarding Pakhtun areas on the east of the Durand Line was to be negotiated with Afghanistan. The treaty does not seem to have this provision, however.

But Khadim Hussain adds that Pakhtun nationalism has nothing to do with the validity or invalidity of the Durand Line and that the geographical unification of all Pakhtuns was never the objective of Pakhtun nationalist politics in Pakistan. He sees Pakhtunistan Day as a “pressure tactic and a ploy” vis-à-vis Pakistan. “Pakhtun nationalist parties have never accepted this tactic,” he says.

He also likes to point out that the Pakistani ruling elite has always seen Pakhtun nationalism from a territorial perspective, treating it as a threat to the territorial integrity of Pakistan. “It was due to these fears that the nascent Pakistani state toppled the elected government of Dr Khan Sahib [Bacha Khan’s brother] on August 22, 1947, and arrested Bacha Khan in 1948, despite the fact that he had taken an oath [of allegiance to Pakistan] as a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan.”

A senior Pakistani government representative, who has experience working with the foreign office at a senior level, acknowledges “the fact that Afghanistan does not accept this border”. Pakistan, he suggests, “should have got it accepted during the Taliban government” in Kabul. “It is our mistake” that we did not do so.

He says Afghans have protested over border fencing and have also resorted “to open[ing] heavy fire on us”. But, he adds, “we are determined to fence” the border. “We have suffered a lot during the last 20 years due to this border. All the terrorists and miscreants have been infiltrating Pakistan through this border because it was open for anybody who wanted to come to this side,” he says, without wanting to be identified by name because of the sensitivity of the issue. “If 50,000 people come from Afghanistan daily for business and jobs, we do not know how many of them go back.”

Dr Timothy Nunan, assistant professor at the Center for Global History, Free University of Berlin, and author of the 2016 book Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan, believes debates about the Durand Line are laden with emotional and fundamentally political ideas about the character of the Afghan state. “Since as early as the 1930s, but especially since the 1950s, Afghan intellectuals and governments have promoted the idea of Afghanistan as a Pakhtun state with responsibilities towards Pakhtun and Baloch groups in the territories east of the Durand Line. For this reason, Afghanistan … for decades championed the formation of an independent ‘Pakhtunistan’ [consisting of] Balochistan and NWFP.”

Nunan says Pakistan has had its own specific sensitivities about the role of Pakhtuns in the state. “Consider, for example, debates before the [recent] census about the number of Pakhtuns in Karachi, Quetta or Balochistan, or about the administrative future of Fata.”

But he points out that Pakistan’s attempts to resolve a political problem with an infrastructural solution – erecting a fence on the border – will weaken its case to defend its legitimate domestic security interests. “By inflaming nationalist sentiment in Kabul, the unilateral decision to build the fence makes it impossible for elements within the Afghan government to make unpopular decisions that could lay the groundwork for improved relations —for example, a closure of Indian consulates [in Afghanistan] and recognition of the Durand Line.” The fence, he says, will likely only boost the Afghans’ conviction that closer ties with India and nationalist rhetoric are their best tools for dealing with Pakistan.

Nunan suggests the only sustainable solution that Pakistan may have will be found through engaging Afghanistan in meaningful dialogue. “However intractable the debate may seem, it is worth reflecting that in the late 1970s, Mohammad Daoud Khan made serious efforts to settle the border with [Pakistan’s prime minister] Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This process ended with the murder of the former in 1978 and the arrest of the latter in 1977 but it does perhaps offer a precedent for high-level diplomacy.”

Additional reporting by Namrah Zafar Moti

In response to the above article the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent the Herald the following letter:

The people of Pakistan and Afghanistan enjoy centuries old bonds of shared history, culture and religion. Pakistan has always encouraged and facilitated people to people contacts between the two countries. Our current efforts of border management do not envisage hindering the movement of legitimate travelers, rather, our efforts would encourage and ensure safety and security of people travelling between the two countries.

Our efforts of better border management are geared towards curbing the cross border movement of terrorists, clamping down on traffickers and smugglers, enhance trade, transit and facilitate movement of people. We therefore, are upgrading infrastructure at our existing custom terminals to enhance their capacity to process larger quantities of goods and transiting vehicles and swift and convenient clearance of people.

[In response to the question posed regarding] the steps that Pakistan is taking to ensure that the fencing of the border does not harm or hamper the traditional family links between the Pakhhtun tribes living on its two sides, Pakistan has always encouraged and facilitated people to people contact between Afghanistan and Pakistan as we understand that such interactions solidify our bilateral relations. We are aware of ground realities and have undertaken multiple steps to ensure that life of common citizens on both sides of the border are not adversely affected by our initiative of effective border management.

Afghan students who attend schools on Pakistani side of the border have already been issued with RFID cards and a proposal to extend similar facility to the common people along the border is currently under consideration. A system of facilitative visas for medical treatment by Pakistani missions in Afghanistan is already in place and we are also working on a proposal to introduce a visa on arrival for those requiring urgent treatment at Torkham, Chaman and other border points.

[In response to the question posed regarding whether the people living in the border regions will be] taken into confidence over the border fencing and other border management mechanism, especially considering that there are still people present on both sides who see the Durand Line as an arbitrary, controversial line drawn by the British colonial rulers, the Government is fully mindful of the sentiments of the people living in the vicinity of both sides of the border and the social connections that exist between them. Therefore, it remains our endeavour that border management measures take into account this aspect and that we try to make the legal travel and trade easy but block the movement of terrorists and other undesired elements. People living along Pak-Afghan border understand the importance of these measures and they stand-by our efforts of effective border management.

[In response to the question posed regarding talks going on between Pakistani and Afghan security forces on border management], all issues of mutual concern are discussed in our bilateral consultations with Afghanistan. As far as the security forces are concerned there exits a hotline between the DGMO’s of the two countries and the channel is utilised to address Pak-Afghan border issues. Recently, the representatives of the two security forces met in Peshawar to discuss issues related to Pak-Afghan border security to the etc. We believe that the border management measures are mutually beneficial to the two countries as they would check movement of terrorists and smugglers, encourage and enhance bilateral trade and transit of Afghan merchandise to other countries and also facilitate and make the journey between the countries safe.

[In response to the question posed regarding] Pakistan considering any options/proposals to manage/control its border with Afghanistan in such a way that it does not negatively impact bilateral trade, Pakistan hasn’t introduce any restrictions for legal trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan, rather we are reinforcing and upgrading the existing trade terminals with the aim to increase their capacity, make them more efficient, also, we are exploring new trade terminals/crossing points to facilitate trade/transit and encourage legal movement of people and goods. We have recently opened a new border crossing for trade and transit of vehicles, at Kharlachi, Kurram agency. In addition we are investing in human resource as well as technical surveillance means to increase our reach to frequented and unfrequented routes used by smugglers and other undesired elements to curb illegal trade and smuggling. With these efforts we are hopeful that the trade between the two countries would increase and the traders of the two countries would be facilitated.

This was originally published in the Herald's September 2017 issue under the headline 'The thin red line'. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

It’s 5:45 am. Thousands of people walk towards a ground. Some of them are carrying a dead body draped in a woolen blanket. Others are throwing rose petals on it. The crowd is taking Burhan Muzaffar Wani to his final destination.

By 9:30 am on July 9, 2016, his funeral prayer has been offered. Tens of thousands of mourners are still pouring in. A small band of young fighters arrives by noon in combat fatigues carrying automatic weapons, standing out amid the sea of people.

Wani was only 21 when he was buried in his village, Tral, 42 kilometres south-east of Srinagar. He was an acclaimed commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, a militant organisation engaged in an armed insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir. He made a name for himself by using social media to promote the cause of resistance against India. His photos and rebellious messages often appeared mysteriously on Facebook pages. The photos show him sitting in front of a camera, often with the Quran, Kalashnikovs and other rebels by his side, issuing warnings to Indian security forces and calling young Kashmiris to arms. His social media images romanticised the life of a rebel, making him a youth icon and winning the fading rebellion many new recruits.

These photos and videos showed him in various poses and guises — wearing a hoodie, sporting a green bandana, carrying automatic weapons, in full military uniform complete with a helmet. He looked relaxed, sometimes doing what every young man does in this part of the world in his free time: loitering, playing cricket, enjoying meals with his associates. His bearded oval face became etched in the minds of his social media fans, many of them aspiring to follow his footsteps.

Wani’s life also became the stuff of legend. His followers started giving him attributes usually reserved for mythical or cinematic heroes. According to one story, he once called an army officer to tell him that he was bathing in the Jhelum river but when the officer arrived, Wani was nowhere to be seen. All he could find was a freshly used bar of soap.

Once Wani was like any boy in Tral, attending school and playing youthful games. One day in 2010 some security officials beat him along with his elder brother Khalid and a friend as the three passed by a military checkpoint near their village. He did not take the beating lying down, shouting and resisting as much as he could instead. The same year he joined the rebels. He was only 16 years old.

For Kashmiris, those were particularly trying times: in 2010 alone, Indian security forces had shot dead 120 civilians in different parts of Jammu and Kashmir, as the Indian-administered part of the former princely state is officially known. Young men like him were both agitated and frustrated. Pro-India political parties were more interested in spoils of power than in empowering Kashmiris to become masters of their own destiny. All Parties Hurriyat Conference – an alliance of mainly pro-Pakistan parties – and other groups and individuals had lost vigour and unity. Rebel militias did not have popular support, mostly because their fighters came from outside Kashmir and their leaders operated from the relative safety of their headquarters in Pakistan. New Delhi and Islamabad, meanwhile, used Kashmir as a bargaining chip in their ceaseless competition for strategic superiority.

Wani and his associates knew of only one solution to these problems: attacking Indian security forces and targeting government sites and installations. By late 2013, his name rang across Kashmir as a fierce, fearless fighter. At the age of 18, he had become the poster boy of the movement for Kashmir’s freedom, azadi — an apt symbol of resistance in a state teeming with youngsters.

Wani was six years a rebel. He became very religious in those years and developed an intense attachment to militant ideology.

The government jammed data service on cell phones across Kashmir that day. In southern areas of the state, where Tral is located, even phone signals were blocked.

These measures, however, did not stop the news of Wani’s funeral from spreading like wildfire across the valley — an area marked by Pir Panjal Range on the west and the mighty Himalayan peaks on the east and north. By the time he was buried in the afternoon, Kashmiris had taken to the streets in many cities, towns and villages. At least 16 of them were shot dead by Indian soldiers.

The protests and the killing spree continued months after his death. According to Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a human rights group, security forces killed 145 civilians in 2016. Another 15,000 of them sustained injuries during protests, including over 1,000 hit in the eyes by pellets fired by police and paramilitary forces.

Violence was not restricted to the protests. According to the coalition, 138 rebels and 100 security officials were also killed last year. Indian government data put the number of rebels killed in 2016 at 165 — the highest figure, compared to those of each of the preceding six years.

The epicentre of protests and casualties has been Kashmir Valley’s southern region — comprising the districts of Pulwama, Anantnag, Kulgam and Shopian. During 2016 many areas in these districts slipped out of India’s control on occasion. Boys in south Kashmir do not hesitate to publicly pronounce their support for the insurgents. “Today, these rebels are our only heroes,” declares one of them.

Young rebels are routinely seen in public. Carrying Kalashnikovs and offering gun salutes to people, they openly participate in public rallies. Often they stay overnight with villagers while moving from one area to another.

Even where the rebels’ presence is known, Indian security forces find it difficult to launch siege and search operations to nab them. Protesters come out in large numbers to support the rebels, shouting slogans and hurling stones at soldiers. Young civilians develop an informal intelligence network to help rebels move around undetected. They know they can die in the process. ‘We can sacrifice our lives to help our brothers,’ is a sentiment shared by many among the youth.

Indian soldiers directed Abdul Majeed Reshi and his family to step out of their house at 11 pm on the freezing night of February 12, 2017. They suspected some rebels were hiding inside.

Reshi, a frail old man in his sixties with a grey beard, lives in Frisal, a beautiful village surrounded by plantations and dense trees in Kulgam district, 55 kilometres south of Srinagar. The soldiers cordoned off his residence and ordered his sons – Ashiq Ahmed and Muhammad Shafi – to accompany them inside as Reshi and other family members shifted to his brother’s place.

The soldiers initially found no one inside, eyewitnesses say. Soon gunfire boomed in the air and a fight started. Four rebels had taken positions somewhere within the house, the locals say. The exchange of fire continued overnight.

Next morning, hundreds of young boys from across south Kashmir arrived in Frisal and started throwing stones at the soldiers to help trapped rebels escape. By the time the armed clash ended at 11 am and security forces had blasted the house to the ground, four rebels and two Indian soldiers were killed. Locals claim three other rebels had managed to escape in the dark of night.

The rebels who died in the encounter – Mudasir Ahmad Tantray, Wakeel Ahmad Thokar, Farooq Ahmad Bhat and Younus Lone – all belonged to Kulgam district. The former two were associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and the latter two belonged to Hizbul Mujahideen. Lone had joined the rebels only a month or so earlier.

Reshi and his family went back to their demolished residence only to find the soldiers had taken Shafi with them and Ashiq had gone missing. Hours later, Ashiq’s body was recovered from the debris of the house.

Ashiq was 38 when he died. He worked as a grade-four employee with a government department, earning a meagre 3,000 Indian rupees a month. His wife and young daughter are now in the care of his ageing parents.

The Indian army says he was killed because the rebels had held him hostage. “It might be the first case of militants taking a civilian hostage,” an army statement read. The soldiers, the statement added, “made [their] best possible efforts to rescue the civilian”.

Reshi’s family and other residents of Frisal say Ashiq lost his life because the soldiers had used him as a “human shield” — a tactic security forces often deploy in gunfights with rebels.

Two months later, I went to Frisal from Srinagar along with two other journalists. As we stop by the site where Reshi is building a new house, an army jeep screeches to halt next to us. Some armed soldiers alight from it.

“Who are you? What are you doing here? Show us your cell phones, IDs,” one of them shouts.

It takes a while for the soldiers to examine the phones and identity documents.

An officer in his twenties is sitting in the front seat of the vehicle. He tells us: “Come over to the junction ahead.”

Speaking in fluent English, he points to a blind curve on the road with orchards on either side. The jeep goes there ahead of the visitors. As the officer gets out of it, soldiers can be seen taking positions in the orchards.

Finding every step towards the bend heavier than the previous one, our apprehensions grow.

“Who are you?” the officer asks.

We produce our press cards.

“What is the story here?” he asks again.

“The story is about civilians being killed at gunfight sites,” I respond.

The officer lets us go back to Reshi’s house. Soldiers still stand guard in the distance.

Reshi’s wife, Haneefa, is grief personified. Her colourful maroon pheran, a traditional Kashmiri overcoat, and purple headscarf, fail to hide her agony. Her hands tremble as she speaks. “We had spent around 40 lakh rupees on our house,” she says, pointing towards her under-construction house.

She has no idea how the rebels got in. “Some informer gave the army a tip that the mujahids were present at our place. The soldiers arrived within no time and entered the house. They started checking one bathroom in particular but they did not find anyone,” she recalls. “Later we could only hear gunshots.”

Mushtaq Itoo, 23, took out his motorcycle after he heard about the gunfight in Frisal. He travelled 15 kilometres north from his home in Hatigaam village, Anantnag district to take part in the funeral of the killed rebels.

A clash was already underway between protesters and security forces when he reached. Young men were throwing stones at Indian soldiers. The soldiers responded by firing tear gas shells, shotgun pellets and live bullets. By the end of the day, around 25 people were struck by various objects. Mushtaq received a bullet in his abdomen and died at a nearby hospital. The motorcycle’s keys were still in his pocket when the body was brought home.

His father, Mohammad Ibrahim Itoo, a 58-year-old well-to-do businessman-cum-landowner, was in Amritsar, in the neighbouring state of Punjab, when he heard about his son’s death. “Someone called a relative of mine who was with me,” he says in an interview at his three-storey house in Hatigaam, a village of about 400 households located on a small hill surrounded by orchards.

Mushtaq was a laboratory technician and had a special interest in religion. “The day he died he was scheduled to deliver Hadith lessons at a local seminary,” says Ibrahim, whose simple clothes, greying beard and white skullcap suggest his own preference for a religious way of life. “He often went to religious gatherings at different mosques.”

Mushtaq was also a loving son who took special care of his parents. He took them to meet relatives ahead of their travel for hajj last year. Most of his day would be spent at his laboratory, his father reminisces. He would divide the rest of his time between home, the mosque and friends.

Even at the young age of 20, Suhail Ahmad Shah knows a thing or two about the deadly pull of these protests. His elder brother, Arif Ahmad Shah, died in December last year while protesting during a clash between rebels and the Indian military.

Suhail and his wife then lived in Hatigaam at a little distance from Itoo’s residence in a house owned by his uncle who had adopted him years ago. Arif used to live with their parents in Sangam, a village 42 kilometres to the south of Srinagar.

Their mother Firdousa, wearing a purple headscarf and a black pheran with red embroidery, is caressing the head of a granddaughter in the kitchen of her single-storey house, at the edge of a street, on an April day this year. Kitchen cabinets have shards of broken glass in them. The windows are all shattered. Some have wood planks nailed over them. Stone-throwing Indian soldiers seem to have used the house for target practice.

Firdousa knew about Arif’s participation in protests around gunfight sites. When asked about her son’s death, she calls her husband Muhammad Amin Shah.

Amin works as a carpenter at a nearby workshop and, at the age of 48, appears too young to have two married sons (one of them already dead). His trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and skullcap mark his lined visage. His rough hands suggest that life has been tough on him. He looks exhausted as he steps into his house and takes a seat against a pale green wall.

The story he tells is a familiar one.

On December 7, 2016, a group of militants were trapped in Hassanpora, a village six kilometres from Sangam. Security forces got wind of their presence and rushed to the house they were in, to lay siege. A gunfight ensued.

Among the rebels was a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander, Majid Zargar. He had instituted a trend to snatch weapons from Indian security personnel as an entrance test for young boys intending to join the rebels. The test was an instant hit. It gave the rebels new recruits who were already armed.

When the gunfight started in Hassanpora, youth from several neighbouring villages reached the spot to pelt stones at security forces. Many other villagers started an impromptu protest.

On the first night of the gunfight, Arif, 23, asked his wife before going to bed: “Who would be so powerful to help these rebels escape?”

Next morning, on December 8, he was asked to go to Srinagar by his uncle – a contractor with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), a telecom company – for whom he worked as a driver. Arif was to stand in for a driver who had not been able to make it to work that day.

He took a shower, wore new clothes and left home at around 11 am. He never reached Srinagar though. Instead, he went to the site of the gunfight. “He offered his afternoon prayers there, joined the protesters and started throwing stones at the soldiers,” his mother recalls what she heard from eyewitnesses later. The soldiers fired tear gas shells, shotgun pellets and live bullets at protesters, hitting at least 30 people. Arif received three of them, one hitting his nose. He died on the spot.

Many months later, Amin looks like he is still in mourning. “When tragedy befalls this is what happens to you,” he says, as he recounts his miseries.

Hizbul Mujahideen lost a fighter, Tauseef Ahmad Wagay, a resident of Kulgam district, on March 28, 2017. He was trapped in a house in Chadoora area of Budgam, a district in central Kashmir.

When a gunfight began between him and Indian soldiers inside a two-storey house, young boys from various areas reached there within no time. Dozens travelled on motorcycles from as far as Pulwama district, 20 kilometres away.

At around 10 am, Wagay was killed and the house was destroyed but the stone-throwing youth continued protesting. It was then that Zahid Rashid Ganai, a 22-year-old student who also ran a cell phone shop in Chadoora, started live streaming the protest on Facebook. The last video he aired was taken a few minutes before two bullets hit him — one in the chest and the other in the neck.

“The police targeted him,” says a friend of Zahid. “[The soldiers] did not let us take his body home either. The cell phone he used for shooting the videos was taken away.” Police also stopped the ambulance carrying his body to a hospital in Srinagar — an event streamed live on Facebook by his cousin.

Zahid, who was the lone brother of his five sisters, was not the only civilian killed that day. Sixteen-year-old Amir Ahmad Waza, a 10th grader, and 24-year-old Ishaq Ahmed Wani, a mechanic, were also shot dead in Chadoora.

Police also barged into a local hospital where many of the injured were taken for treatment. “They came to beat me up,” says a hospital employee. “They attacked us as if we were terrorists … We hid ourselves in bathrooms.” He does not want to reveal his name because he is a government official. “An ambulance driver was beaten up too,” he says.

A friend of Zahid, who also refuses to be identified, fearing police action, adds, “We support the militants because they fight for us against the Indian occupation repressing us.”

He believes no one can start or stop the protests. “People are coming out to protest on their own,” he says. Even the All Parties Hurriyat Conference will not be able to stop them, he says.

Nearly three dozen civilians sustained bullet and pellet injuries at the gunfight site in Chadoora. Among the injured was Shahid Ali — a resident of Kakapora village of Pulwama district, 24 kilometres to the south of Srinagar. He was hit by a bullet in the chest.

When Shahid reached his native village, almost everyone went to see him at his home — everyone except Haleema Bano.

A middle-aged woman who lives in a modest single-storey house at the entrance of the village, she is sitting against a bare wall in her house. “The graveyard is on the way to [Shahid’s] house. I would not have returned home alive if I had gone [past it],” Haleema says.

Her youngest son, 14-year-old Amir Nazir Wani, is buried there. He was the same age as Shahid when he died on March 9, 2017.

That morning, he wore his school uniform, bade his mother goodbye and disappeared behind a blind turn in the street. This was his daily routine. Haleema continued doing her household chores as he left home; as did her daughter Saima, 20, who was knitting cardigans. Haleema’s husband had left home earlier to work at a brick kiln.

Amir broke away from routine when he heard about a gunfight in Padgampora, eight kilometres away. Two rebels were besieged in a house, exchanging fire with security forces. Instead of going to school, he went there along with some of his friends. They joined other protesters there, chanting slogans and hurling stones at the soldiers.

The clash ended when the rebels were killed. Two civilians had also died by then. Amir was one of them.

Back in Kakapora, people started gathering outside Haleema’s house as soon as they heard of Amir’s death. “I went out and saw people coming to my house,” she says with moist eyes. “I tried calling some young boys in the street. They were glued to their cell phones and were not coming near me. My daughter then went out and a neighbour told her that her brother had been martyred,” she recounts. “I told them he was in school.”

Amir was still in his school uniform with a pheran draped over it when his bullet-riddle body was brought home. “He used to keep the pheran in his bag because the weather was still cold then,” Haleema says. Whenever she sees a boy of her son’s age wearing a school uniform, she starts to cry.

Haleema fondly recalls how Amir used to oil his hair and how he helped her in growing vegetables at home. Her other sons – one just about to finish his degree in civil engineering and the other a graduate in fisheries – “do not do any household work [but] he used to do everything,” she says while weeping softly.

Haleema believes her son was not killed at the site of the gunfight. He was shot two kilometres away from where the fighting took place, she says. He was too young to have gone to a protest, she insists.

Around eight kilometres from Amir’s house, 21-year-old Jalaluddin Ganai was buried in Tahab village after he, too, was killed during the March 9 protests. A short-haired man with a square face, trimmed beard and thick eyebrows, he had just finished high school and was aspiring to get admission in college. He would be the first person in his family to do so.

His mother, Saara Baano, asked him not to venture out of the house after she came to know about the Padgampora gunfight. “He was at home till 12 pm and then he went [to join the protesters] along with his friends. No one was at home at the time. We were all at our farmland,” she says.

Sitting across from another son of hers, she lovingly remembers how Jalaluddin used to tease her. “He once said to me, ‘Be happy, I have failed the exam’, even though I already knew that he had passed,” she says.

Jalaluddin and his friends took a cab to reach Padgampora. They all pooled in for the fare — 50 rupees each. After a few hours, news spread in Tahab that someone from the village had been injured in clashes. Hearing these reports, one of his brothers went to Padgampora in order to bring Jalaluddin back home. Still on his way, he received a call from a hospital where a dead body was lying. A doctor from Tahab had identified the dead person as Jalaluddin.

Srinagar, the state capital, has always been the hub of anti-India protests and shutter-down strikes. Whenever Hurriyat Conference leaders give a call for agitation, usually after the Friday prayer, the city’s residents close down their businesses and take to the streets.

But the city has witnessed far fewer protests over the last year or so than what the towns and villages of south Kashmir have. This, however, has not resulted in any downward revision in security measures in Srinagar. If anything, the security forces have increased their visibility. Checkpoints are ubiquitous and body searches a way of life for residents.

On April 9 this year, the relative calm in Srinagar came to a deadly end. A by-election for the Lok Sabha, India’s national assembly, was scheduled for that day and pro-freedom and pro-Pakistan parties and rebel organisations had called for its boycott. People listened and mostly stayed away from the polling process. There were far more protesters on the street than there were people inside polling stations. Voter turnout was just 7 per cent.

Perhaps frustrated by the negligible turnout, security forces went berserk. They had killed eight civilians by the end of the day.

In districts north of Srinagar, protests may not be as deadly and frequent as they are in the south but rebels have grown in strength there too. In areas such as Baramulla, Bandipora, Kupwara and Uri, attacks on government forces have increased of late.

North and south Kashmir still differ in one crucial respect. Official reports suggest most rebels operating in the south are locals and those active in north are mostly outsiders. In south Kashmir, the reports claim, the total number of rebels is 112; out of these, only 13 are non-locals. On the other hand, 118 outsiders and 23 locals operate in north Kashmir.

These numbers appear miniscule as compared to the 30,000 who operated in different parts of Kashmir during an insurgency in the late 1980s. Three decades later, the rebel head count has decreased drastically. Public support for them, however, has risen extraordinarily. It could be higher than it ever has been.

There is history to this change.

People in Kashmir have been seething with rage for years. In 2008, their anger channelled into mass protests. Another, even more intense, wave of public demonstrations started two years later. The popular uprising that began in the wake of Burhan Muzaffar Wani’s death has surpassed most previous protests in intensity and public participation.

Their frequency and ferocity indicates a major shift, says Siddiq Wahid, the historian. “[This] means less reliance on the acquisition of arms from Pakistan and greater reliance on internal [sources to fight] for our rights.”

The Indian government has responded to the popular upheaval by increasing its use of force. Authorities have imposed strict curbs on communication and information dissemination. They have kept large areas under curfew for days and have often conducted mass arrests.

All this has done little to quell the uprising. Kashmiris are so frustrated and tired of being treated brutally that they are refusing to budge. They see that a positive, sincere and practical resolution of the dispute is nowhere in sight, says Wahid. They also see that they are demonised as miscreants and terrorists whenever they protest against the violation of human rights, he says.

Naeem Akhtar, a senior leader of Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which rules the state in a coalition with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), blames tensions between India and Pakistan for a resolution not materialising. “I still say that I am an Indian but we have issues to resolve,” he says and then asks: who dies every time firing between India and Pakistan takes place along the Line of Control that passes through Kashmir or when infiltration of militants takes place from the Pakistani side? “A Kashmiri.”

Akhtar, who is also a minister in the state government, adds: we request Pakistan and India to spare us this agony. “Partition happened 70 years ago and since then you have settled your disputes over Punjab and Bengal borders. You are having trade through Wagah,” he says, addressing the Pakistani and Indian governments. “But Jammu and Kashmir continues to suffer. We suffer a partition every day.”

Akhtar also blames protesters for the deadly force being used against them. Those who get killed “in police action” do not lose their lives “sitting at home”, he says. It is not that some policeman comes and shoots them, he adds. “Ten thousand people come out in a village … and make it possible for militants to escape. These are very unfortunate developments.”

What is making people so angry and fearless that they care little about their lives to save those fighting against India? Akhtar’s answer: Islamic radicalisation. He is worried by the “abandon with which [radicalised] boys invite trouble”. They have developed a “suicide mentality” which results in “the loss of stakes in life and building of stakes in death”.

India and Pakistan, meanwhile, are so caught up in their bilateral rivalry that the search for a resolution of their long-running dispute over Kashmir has fallen by the wayside. The two countries have often exchanged fire along their mutual border in recent months. They regularly accuse each other of cross-border interference and sponsoring terrorism in their areas. It looks implausible that they will soon find time and reason to talk to each other on any issue, leave alone Kashmir.

Instead, they have been talking at each other. Early in May 2017, Pakistan accused India of scuttling all opportunities for a “meaningful” dialogue to resolve the Kashmir dispute. “India’s contention that the Kashmir issue is, primarily, an issue of cross-border terrorism is a claim that no one in the world is prepared to accept today,” a statement issued by the Foreign Office quoted the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, Sartaj Aziz, as saying.

India’s home minister Rajnath Singh acknowledged later the same month that “Kashmir has been burning and the problem is decades old” but he insisted his government would not accept any solution that involved a “compromise on the territorial integrity of India”. He rejected talks with pro-freedom groups and said whoever, instead, wanted to talk about “development and peace” was welcome.

Like Akhtar, Singh also attributed recurring protests and gunfights to the radicalisation of youth in Kashmir à la youth everywhere in the world. “Radicalisation is a global phenomenon. We are aware of it and we will tackle it,” he said.

The international community, meanwhile, has mostly watched from the sidelines. If and when an offer is made to India and Pakistan for mediation on the issue, it is promptly welcomed by the latter but immediately rebuffed by the former. When, for instance, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested, during his visit to India in May this year, that there should be multilateral talks on Kashmir, Indian response was to instantly reject that the dispute is about history, politics and human rights. “We clearly conveyed [to Erdogan] that the issue of Kashmir is essentially an issue of terrorism,” said a spokesperson of India’s foreign ministry.

Only some international efforts have survived such rebuffs. One of them is being spearheaded by the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. He disclosed on June 21, 2017 that he was engaged in bringing about a dialogue between India and Pakistan on Kashmir. “Why do you think I met three times the prime minister of Pakistan and two times [with] the prime minister of India,” he said at a press conference.

The outcome of his initiative remains mysteriously unclear, but one thing is obvious: diplomacy has done little in making India feel the need to address the Kashmiris’ demands.

Neither have intensified protests and violence forced New Delhi to change its stance that Kashmir is India’s integral part. As historian Siddiq Wahid says, there seems to be no hope, at least in the short-run, that India will come around to the idea of addressing the problem through any means other than force. “In the longer term, however, there is always hope,” he says. In the long run, we are all also dead, British economist John Maynard Keynes once quipped.

Where will Kashmir go from here? Wahid says the answer depends on a number of factors. Will resistance expand andconvinceall the people in the state thatdispute resolution should not be held hostage by Islamabad’s and New Delhi’s interests? Will New Delhi and Islamabad permit a dialogue within various parts of Kashmir — including the one administered by Pakistan?Will Kashmiris start believing that they can come up with a solution from within? “Neither New Delhi nor Islamabad can come up with a solution,” says Wahid.

Akhtar believes discounting external factors is well-nigh impossible. Trouble in Kashmir waxes and wanes in tandem with the state of India and Pakistan’s relationship, he says. The biggest window of opportunity opened between 2002 and 2005, he adds, “when people thought that something was happening [between the two countries]”. In the end, nothing came out of it.

Additionally, the state’s political landscape is deeply divided. State elections in 2014 threw these fractures into sharp relief. BJP, that won almost all the seats in Jammu region, secured 23 per cent of the total votes polled. The two Kashmir-based parties secured 44 per cent of votes together but they won all their seats from the valley. The rest of the 33 per cent votes went to other parties, with the biggest share – 18 per cent – going to Indian National Congress. No party won the simple majority of 44 seats to form a government on its own.

A little less than 11 months after Burhan Muzaffar Wani’s killing, Tral was filled with anger and frustration again. A Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Sabzar Ahmad Bhat, 28, was shot dead in the village in a brief gunfight on May 26 this year. He was a close aide to Wani and was seen as his successor. The other young man who lost his life along with Sabzar in the gunfight was 15-year-old Faizan Bhat, perhaps the youngest fighter killed in Kashmir so far.

Sabzar was a well-built man with a thick beard and a fondness for covering his head with an Arab-style keffiyeh. He is said to have engaged an Indian soldier with bare hands to snatch his weapon during a 2015 protest over the killing of Khalid Wani, Burhan Muzaffar Wani’s brother. His pictures in military fatigues and combat gear circulated widely on social media even before his death.

Stone-throwing protesters embarked on a new wave of agitation after Sabzar’s killing. Renewed clashes between them and Indian security forces soon spread across Kashmir, prompting the state government to impose a strict curfew. Pro-freedom politicians were left with little choice but to give calls for protests and shutdowns.

Thousands of people gathered in Tral immediately after Sabzar’s death. They were raising anti-India and pro-azadi slogans and had arrived from all over the valley. Each one of them wanted to catch one last glimpse of Sabzar’s face before his burial.

This article was originally published in the Herald's July 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a freelance journalist who has written for several international publications including Al Jazeera and The Diplomat. He edited the anthology 'Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings from Kashmir' and is founding editor of 'The Kashmir Walla'.

Abdul Sattar Edhi devoted his own life to saving other lives. It started when his mother fell fatally ill and his family received zero support from the state. He first took to the streets of Karachi in 1951, asking for donations to set up a modest network of clinics and ambulances. By the time he died in the summer of 2016, his work had expanded to 335 Edhi Centres (where emergency and rescue services are provided throughout the year) and 1,800 ambulances across Pakistan.

His welfare projects encompass rehab centres, maternity homes, clinics, homes for the disabled and the elderly, orphanages, shelters for runaway children, schools and a small hospital — all run by a small staff with the help of around 7,000 volunteers. He raised about 20,000 abandoned babies, trained 40,000 nurses, provided homes to 50,000 orphans and facilitated one million deliveries at Edhi maternity homes. And he did not make any distinction between the recipients of his help on the basis of their caste, creed and colour even though the mullahs did not approve of this.

He also set up offices in Afghanistan, Nepal, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Canada and the United States. When Hurricane Katrina hit the American city of New Orleans in 2005, he donated 100,000 US dollars for relief efforts there.

He also dedicated himself to giving the unclaimed, the unrecognised and the dispossessed dead a proper and dignified burial.

“I … brought back bloated, drowned bodies from the sea. Black bodies that crumbled with one touch. I picked them up from rivers, from inside wells, from roadsides, accident sites and hospitals. I picked them up from manholes and gutters, from under bridges, from railway bogies, from tracks, watersheds and drains ... When families forsook them and authorities threw them away, I picked them up and brought them home … spreading the stench in the air forever,” Edhi said in his biography, A Mirror to the Blind. A graveyard that his organisation maintains on the outskirts of Karachi has about 80,000 graves, most of them marked by a number rather than a name.

But the more he wanted to be among the ordinary, the more we wanted to put him on a pedestal. “I come from ordinary people. And to find me, look among the ordinary people. My story is there,” he said in a 2013 documentary, These Birds Walk, which also shows him giving a bath to a little boy.

Even after his death, we want to make a celebrity out of the self-effacing humanitarian that he was. His image adorns advertising billboards, commemorative coins and postage stamps, office walls and Facebook profile photos. Last year when the Herald ran its annual ‘Person Of The Year’ segment, many of our readers were indignant that we had not included Edhi in it. Contrast this with a revelation by his son, Faisal Edhi, that donations to his charitable foundation dropped after his death, endangering some of its life-saving activities. Edhi would have hated his exaltation at the cost of his work.

He did not like it when he could not do what he always did. In 2008, immigration officials detained him at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport and seized his passport. “I am a man of emergencies; I need to be on the move, to be where the suffering is but here I have been sitting idle for 20 days … ,” he told the BBC at the time.

Edhi won about 17 international awards, including a Guinness record for running the world’s largest voluntary ambulance service, but he did not work for awards and recognition. He would have instead said: the best way to remember me is to ensure that my life’s work is never disrupted.

Imran Khan has nearly 6 million followers on Twitter, more than any other Pakistani, more than the entire population of Singapore. His party polled the second highest number of votes in the 2013 general elections — nearly eight million. Yet more than 75 per cent of Pakistanis did not vote for him in the same elections and his electoral support starts going down as we move back in time. He could be the most famous Pakistani of the current era but what about the rest of our 70-year history?

A research project at the MIT Media Lab declared Jinnah the most popular Pakistani based on internet searches and Wikipedia entries. Imran Khan was not even near the top. Allama Iqbal came second even though he died nine years before Pakistan came into being, which also explains why the Herald did not include him in a list that uses Jinnah’s 1948 death as a departure point. Iqbal also did not come after Jinnah — temporally as well as politically. As our greatest poet-thinker, he has a stature equal to that of Jinnah’s.

The person who came fourth on MIT’s list was Dr Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s only Nobel Prize winner in a scientific discipline, a rare honour in a country that does not pride itself on either science or education. So why is he not on the Herald’s list? The reason: many Pakistanis are loath to accept him, an Ahmadi, as one of them, let alone be influenced by him.

But what is the measure of influence? Here is our criterion: anyone who treads a new path (consider Noor Jehan who mothered children while also being a movie star way back in the 1940s-50s); anyone who sets the direction for the future (like Liaquat Ali Khan did by envisioning Pakistan as a modern Muslim democracy); anyone who changes that direction (as Ayub Khan did by staging the first military coup in the country).

In short, anyone who has determined or changed the course of Pakistan’s history in a way that has been difficult, if not entirely impossible, to reverse, and has spawned copycats, fans and followers (also foes) in the process.

Even this criterion will admittedly lead to different lists depending on who is making them. The Herald’s list, for instance, does not include Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the physicist whom many Pakistanis credit for making Pakistan a nuclear power.

To us, his role in inventing our nuclear bomb is as much a matter of debate as his subsequent role in an illicit nuclear proliferation network (for which he apologised on national television). Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme was the brainchild of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who is included in our list) and Munir Ahmad Khan, the founding head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (whose contribution has received a short shrift in military-approved official histories).

Intizar Husain is arguably one of the finest Urdu fiction writers in the second half of the 20th century but we have left him out of our list because he only perfected what others before him had been practising already. Notwithstanding his excellent craft, his encyclopaedic knowledge and his syncretic cultural sensibility, his writings never had as big of a following as those of Qudratullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmed and Bano Qudsia. Or of Saadat Hasan Manto and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Jamaat-e-Islami founder Abul A’la Maududi does not get a place in our list because his influence has manifested itself through others — most notably through Ziaul Haq. The influence of religious personalities remains restricted anyway due to sectarian and political factors.

This has been most pronounced in Maududi’s case. Though his books were read widely by the first two generations of middle-class Pakistanis, he has never had a mass political, or even religious, support base.

Three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif has failed to make the cut for an opposite reason — for being a carrier of someone else’s influence. He was a protégé of the establishment and a champion of Ziaul Haq’s (and Jamaat-e-Islami’s) right-wing conservatism in the first half of his career and a reluctant and inconsistent follower of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s anti-establishmentarianism in the second half.

Pervez Musharraf falls in the same category. His dealings with politicians were carbon copies of actions taken by previous military-led administrations and his pursuit of seemingly opposite strategic objectives vis-à-vis India, Afghanistan, the United States and religious extremist elements at home had past precedents, though in his era its consequences were far more lethal than ever before.

Akhtar Hameed Khan is another major omission. His pioneering work in Karachi’s slums manifests the power of grass-roots level activism but the impact and scope of his model of community-centred development have been limited so far.

The list could only have ten names. That alone explains why many activists, performers, artists, businessmen, technocrats, educationists, judges, lawyers, administrators, academics, politicians and prominent women are not in it. To somewhat make up for the omissions, we have come up with a supplementary list of five more nominees (though they have not been put to the test of opinion polls).

This still leaves one question unaddressed: why is Jinnah being kept above completion and comparison? The reason is that no other Pakistani has achieved what he could. To paraphrase his biographer Stanley Wolpert, he is the one who single-handedly altered the course of history, changed political geography and created a new nation. He cannot be compared to those who have only followed where he led.

To make the process of choosing the most influential Pakistani after Jinnah simultaneously representative and inclusive, we carried out a public opinion survey across Pakistan on the basis of a demographic sample stratified at four levels (province, ethnicity/language, location and gender) and randomised on the basis of age, education and profession.

The sample, consisting of 1,398 Pakistanis, was derived from the latest available official data (collected in the 1998 census) and its field work was completed during the month of June 2017. Edhi came on top with 31.76 per cent of respondents voting for him; two Bhuttos and Imran Khan together received about 52 per cent votes (almost evenly distributed among them) and two military dictators combined got about nine per cent of the responses. Take Edhi out and this gives you a rather typical view of Pakistan’s divided politics. The result of the survey has helped us decide the order in which the nominee profiles appear in subsequent pages.

A panel of ten historians offers insights into how people and experts view history from two different, if not mutually exclusive, prisms. If the public has chosen a saviour of the underdog and put prominent politicians from the present and near past at the top of the list, the historians seem to have taken an impersonal and long-term overview, looking at the depth and intensity of a nominee’s influence regardless of whether it has been positive or negative. Their unsurprising pick – Ziaul Haq – has undoubtedly changed Pakistan’s course more drastically than anyone else coming before or after him has so far.

A third part – an online poll – also offers a curious contrast. Imran Khan garnered almost half of around 4,500 responses received in the second week of July this year. Edhi came a distant second and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto an even more distant third. All the remaining seven nominees together received only around 22 per cent of the votes. If these results manifest the choices and biases of online readers of the Herald and Dawn.com, they don’t come as a surprise.

Additional input by Ayesha binte Rashid, Fatima Niazi and Adeela Akmal.

This was originally published in the Herald's August 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Project Consultant: Shaheryar Popalzai (ICFJ Knight Fellow)

Field Survey Coordinator: Adeela Akmal

Online Survey Coordinator: Ayesha binte Rashid

Print design by Creative Department, Xpert Services (PVT) LTD

We are also grateful to all the Herald interns and field surveyors including Sameen Khan, Faareha Siddiqui,Fariha Parvaiz and Hafsa Saeed, Sattar Zangejo and Zulfiqar Shah (in Sindh), Fareedullah Chaudhary, Rizwan Safdar, Shafiq Butt, Tauqeer Mustafa and Atta Ullah (in Punjab, Islamabad and Rawalpindi),Akbar Notezai and Nasir Rahim (in Balochistan), and Ghulam Dastageer (in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata).

Vehicles await passengers in front of Al-Asif Square, a jumble of matchbox apartment buildings in Sohrab Goth on the northern exit from Karachi. Buses are available here to travel to most parts of Pakistan — except to Jamshoro, a university town on the western bank of the Indus River, 150 kilometres to the northeast of Karachi.

Jamshoro-bound passengers have to take a bus going to Hyderabad. They disembark either a few kilometres short of the vehicle’s final destination, take a motorcycle rickshaw and go to Jamshoro, or they go straight to Hyderabad and then from there take a rickshaw to Jamshoro. Either way, it is an uneasy – albeit short – commute.

The rickshaws are rigged motorcycles. Their original rear part is removed and replaced by a canopied steel structure to accommodate as many as six passengers at a time. Their presence reflects the paucity of public transport as much as it highlights ingenuity.

Such inventiveness is a way of life for transporters and their clients on the approximately 1,200-kilometre stretch of the road that connects Jamshoro with Peshawar. Popularly known as the Indus Highway and marked as N-55 on government maps, it was originally built in the 1970s as an alternative to the highway that links Peshawar with Karachi through Rawalpindi, Lahore, Bahawalpur, Sukkur and Hyderabad.

One rationale for its construction was commercial: cargo trucks take this road throughout the year without having to negotiate heavy passenger traffic in thickly populated urban centres — as is the case with the Peshawar-Lahore-Karachi highway.

The second reason was strategic. Running mostly along the west bank of the Indus, it is hundreds of kilometres inside the country from both eastern and western borders. The river protects it from the east and the mountains of Kirthar, Sulaiman and Hindu Kush ranges protect it from the northwest.

There were also some political considerations. The Indus Highway passes right through the geographical heart of the country. It connects some of the most marginalised parts of Pakistan — western Sindh, southwestern Punjab, southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas. It also links the previously isolated parts of post-1971 Pakistan.

Roads are meant to bring disparate people and places together. The Indus Highway, it seems, has hardly done that.

The locals call it a ‘flying coach’ — a van with an original capacity to accommodate 15 people, it is restructured to make enough space for 22 passengers, seated so close to each other that none of them can bend or stretch their limbs. When it runs at high speed, it seems as if it is floating in the air because of its light weight.

A ‘flying coach’ is the only mode of public transport between Jamshoro and the small town of Sann. It stops by a tall flag, red and white, fluttering about 78 kilometres to the north of Jamshoro. The flag represents the Sindh United Party (SUP), a self-proclaimed Sindhi nationalist organisation.

A narrow asphalt road branches off the Indus Highway at the flag-post to the east and leads into Sann. The centre of the town is decorated with banners carrying the face of the late Ghulam Murtaza Shah — G M Syed to his supporters, opponents and everyone else. He is the godfather of modern-day Sindhi nationalism. His family has enjoyed a spiritual following in and around Sann for generations.

The town’s name, according to Syed’s grandson Jalal Mehmood Shah, comes from the history of local agriculture. In the olden times, he says, jute was a major crop in the area because it grows easily in flood-irrigated marshlands along the river. Jute is called patsann in Sindhi language; of the word, only Sann remains today, he says.

Agriculture, still the main source of livelihood for people in Sann, has benefitted a lot from irrigation by tube wells. Farmers here now grow all kinds of cash crops.

The old part of the town has narrow streets and brick and mortar houses. The newer part has wider avenues and bigger houses with walls and roofs made with reinforced concrete. Cows dominate empty streets in the evenings in both parts.

Riaz Mallah is a 38-year-old resident of Sann. He lives right next to the river bank and owns a small wooden motorboat that he uses to transport people to and from Sann. His passengers are mostly rural folk from the east of the river who need to be in the town for shopping, working on constructions or for getting medical treatment.

On a cold December day, Mallah is wearing a purplish shalwar kameez with a thick white jacket streaked with dirt — betraying his meagre means. A red muffler covers his head and neck to ward off the cold. Stubble frames his face — he has not shaved for a couple of days. His well-oiled black hair covers his forehead as he helps a passenger bring a motorcycle up the boat.

Mallah charges 10 rupees from each passenger for a one-way ride. The fare for transporting a motorcycle is 50 rupees. This way, he earns a few hundred rupees every day. After paying for the fuel and maintenance of the boat, he says, he makes about 4,000 rupees a month.

Mallah was once a fisherman but fishing in the Indus River is not even as productive as running the boat. The catch has dropped, he says, because most of the river water has been diverted for agriculture upstream.

Muhammad Ibrahim is a peasant in Sann. He is also a singer. Every evening, he goes to a barbershop in the town’s main bazaar for a get-together with his friends. His thick, pointed moustache, dyed black hair and Sindhi cap hide his age. The only indicator that he would be in his mid-forties is his overgrown greying stubble.

The shop is a hole in the wall. A wooden bench, two barber seats and a big mirror are crammed into its narrow, nondescript interior. Ibrahim and his friends discuss poetry, politics, religion and society here.

He sometimes bursts into a song — the same song that he sings every Thursday at Syed’s mausoleum in Sann. “Our comrade, come back to us. Our land has been taken over by the outsiders. Come back and let’s fight together and share the pain,” he sings in a plaintive voice in Sindhi. “[The song] is about struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor,” he says.

He uses the barbershop as a metaphor to explain. “A client comes to this barbershop, gets his haircut done and then pays some other barber in the market. This is how Punjab is behaving — receiving payment for the work other provinces are doing.”

Ibrahim says he does not hate the speakers of any language. He sings poetry by Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shah with as much passion as he sings the poetry of Sindh’s most famous poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. Punjabis, however, like to sing only in the language of power or in their own language, he argues. Ayub Umrani is another follower of Syed’s nationalist ideology.

Every workday, he takes a motorcycle rickshaw from Sann to the town of Sehwan where he teaches Sindhi literature at a government college. He has written a 26-episode play aired on Sindhi television channel Dharti TV.

It depicts two villages, one on the lower end of a river and the other on its upper end, making an obvious reference to the respective locations of Sindh and Punjab. The upstream village is powerful. It has built a canal toirrigate its fields and, in the process, has blocked the flow of water to the village downstream.

Ayub is also working on a novel on Syed’s life. He has completed the first part, which covers Syed’s life from 1906 to 1950. The second part, still being written, covers the ideologue’s life from 1950 to his death in 1995. “The novel is a true story.”

Ayub believes his novel will clear “misconceptions” about Syed’s life and politics. Syed, for instance, presented a resolution for the creation of Pakistan in the Sindh Assembly just before independence in 1947 but few, if any, people know about it, says the 51-year-old writer.

Syed’s life story is, indeed, a political rollercoaster worthy of being fictionalised. From being a proponent of Pakistan, he became a champion of what he and his followers call Sindhu Desh — an independent state consisting mostly of the present-day Sindh province.

Mixing language-based identity politics with religious and spiritual elements of Sindhi culture and couching the mixture in a socialist idiom, he founded the Jeay Sindh (long live Sindh) movement. It was not to be a political party but a campaign to raise public awareness, eventually leading to the secession of Sindh from Pakistan.

In practical terms, it did not go very far and started facing splits even in Syed’s lifetime. Today, it is divided into a wide spectrum of political organisations, none with mass appeal.

The most prominent of them is Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (JSQM), which has some support on the outskirts of Karachi as well as in Larkana and Sukkur divisions. It is further divided into more than two factions.

JSQM does not believe in electoral politics and instead, seeks to create a public uprising leading to the creation of the Sindh state. One of its splinter groups – Jeay Sindh Muttahida Mahaz – has accepted responsibility for many bomb blasts at government installations and attacks on law enforcement personnel in the province over the last few years.

On the other end of the spectrum is Jalal’s SUP. Though an offshoot of Jeay Sindh, it does not renounce parliamentary politics as Syed had ordained. SUP regularly takes part in elections.

For the public celebration of Syed’s 100th birth anniversary in Sann in 2004, Ayub wrote a play, Yaum-e-Hisab (day of reckoning). It shows a people’s court conducting summary trials of those who oppose Sindh’s independence. They are sentenced to death and are hanged publicly. “The audience was in tears as it watched the play.”

Jalal, 52, is proud of his family’s political and cultural legacy. In December last year, his neighbour Ali Haider Shah shows a visitor the personal library of Jalal’s illustrious grandfather. Located in central Sann, the library – spread over three rooms, one of them a vast hallway – is part of his family home. In the centre of the hallway lies old wooden furniture that Syed once used — a double bed, tables and chairs.

When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto put Syed under house arrest in 1972 for propagating the idea of Sindhu Desh, it was in this library that he spent most of his time, meeting visitors, reading books and making notes in his copious diaries that he had maintained since his early days in politics during the British Raj.

Jalal recalls how his grandfather hid the books so that Bhutto could not confiscate them. They were packed in steel boxes that were then dispersed in different houses in Sann. Jalal was among the few members of the family who knew which book was in which box and where that box was hidden. “Whenever G M Syed required a book, he would ask me to go and bring it.”

The books have been brought back to the library — 5,364 of them are recorded in a catalogue; another 3,000 or so are still undocumented. They are on all kinds of subjects — religion, politics, philosophy, poetry and fiction. Two dates are written on each book — the day Syed started reading it and the day he finished it.

The collection also has manuscripts and documents handwritten by Syed. “Struggle to get freedom from the empire should be one’s faith. Urdu language is the language of the empire. Make the empire your enemy, not its language. Stay connected with your roots and the people of Sindh through equality,” reads a paper he wrote in Sindhi.

Jalal does not live in his family home. He does not even live in Sann and has shifted to Jamshoro. In political terms, too, he has shifted away from his grandfather’s credo. Having sensed long ago that the space for separatism has all but vanished in Sindh, he has pivoted towards parliamentary politics.

Success, however, has eluded his party. The only time his SUP came to political limelight was in 1997-99 when Jalal became Sindh Assembly’s deputy speaker, the highest political position he has ever attained, thanks to an alliance with Punjab-dominated Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN). Since then, he has lost three consecutive elections to his rivals from the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

Motorcycle rickshaws are lined at a bus stop on the Indus Highway. They take commuters to Sehwan which, like Sann, is a couple of kilometres to the east of the road. Rickshaw drivers scramble to get hold of passengers as they disembark from the buses. Most of them are zaireen, pilgrims, to the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar that towers above the town with its golden dome and four minarets.

The town’s lone road winds through a labyrinth of markets that remain open all through the night. Shops here sell everything — food, souvenirs and trinkets associated with Qalandar. The first floors of most of these shops are used for providing boarding and lodging to the zaireen.

A boundary wall with multiple entrances runs around Qalandar’s shrine. Policemen guard every entrance, frisking visitors before letting them in. This, however, did not stop a suicide bomber from entering the shrine on February 16 and blowing himself up amid hundreds of devotees gathered for the daily devotional dance of dhamaal. Close to 90 people died in the incident and more than 250 sustained injuries.

All life in Sehwan revolves around Qalandar and his zaireen. Drums start beating at the shrine, echoing throughout Sehwan, as evening sets in. Men and women of all religions, ethnicities and ages come together in the shrine’s courtyard – men to the west, women to the east – everyone facing Qalandar’s grave.

They point their index fingers towards the sky and start jumping and stomping the earth in a rhythm sustained by the beat of the drums and the sound of horns — this is how dhamaal is done. As the drumbeat gets faster so does the dhamaal. Some zaireen do it with such abandon that they seem to have entered a state of ecstasy — perpetually moving in circles like the whirling dervishes at Rumi’s shrine in Turkey.

Dhamaal goes on for more than 30 minutes every day, often recorded and sometimes broadcast through smartphones. People can be seen taking selfies with dhamaal dancers. Others can be spotted streaming it live to relatives back home.

Hawkers weave their way through the devotees as soon as the dhamaal comes to an end. They sell everything — from bottled water and juice to boiled eggs.

On a recent evening, a woman cries as she touches Qalandar’s grave through a steel fence meant to keep pilgrims away from the sarcophagus. She laments loudly, invoking the name of Qalandar and addressing him as one addresses one’s closest kin. She asks him to take her prayers to Allah so that her son regains his health. She stays next to the fence until she is pushed away by another devotee wanting to talk to Qalandar.

A water container, sheathed in an ornamental steel cover, hangs above one corner of the grave, just outside the fence.

Devotees call the water Qalandari paani. It drips slowly, drop by drop. Visitors put their hands below the container, catch a few drops in their palms and run their wet hands on their faces and body. The water is believed to have healing powers.

Dil Jan is happy to be back at Qalandar’s shrine. Draped in an ajrak, the 40-year-old folk musician from Sehwan is singing Dama Dam Mast Qalandar, a popular song associated with the saint. Three other musicians – including his father and 36-year-old brother Rajab Ali – accompany him. Devotees give them some change, not because they are inspired by their singing but as a tribute to Qalandar.

Jan and his companions are singing after a break of more than a month. The government put a ban on singing at the shrine after a suicide bomber attacked the shrine of Shah Noorani in Balochistan, killing at least 52 people, in November 2016. When these singers could not sing, they made do with buying groceries on credit.

Now that a suicide strike has happened at Qalandar’s own shrine, it is not clear if singers like Jan will be allowed to continue their practice here.

Ramzan Bhatti, 32, is also dependent on the shrine for his livelihood. He is among 50 photographers working in and around it. He makes about 300 rupees a day to support his family of seven.

A small point-and-shoot camera hangs around Bhatti’s neck and he holds many photo samples in his hands. A family approaches him. He gives them directions on how to stand next to the fence around the Qalandar’s grave. He tells them to raise their hands in prayer.

Then he presses the camera’s button. After snapping the shot, he goes to a stall in the backyard. Some computers and printers are placed there. He gets the photo printed and gives it to the family, charging 50 rupees. The photo shows the family as if they are praying standing right by the grave.

A small locked door is the only way to get inside the fence. It is opened only when some special guest needs to lay a wreath or a sheet of usually green or black cloth with Islamic inscriptions on the grave. Ordinary devotees push their hands through the fence to touch the sarcophagus.

They can get inside the fence if they are willing to part with some money. The door will open for those who pay a bribe of a few hundred rupees to the government employee who keeps it locked.

A man with chubby cheeks and a huge belly is busy performing another ritual near the eastern exit of the shrine. Dressed in a black kurta, he arranges a few clay lamps on a tray in front of him. He then takes out a 1000-rupee banknote from his pocket and puts it in the tray.

A devotee comes along, bows his head to the lamps and sits down. The man in black pats the devotee on the back and shouts, “Haq Qalandar”. Then, he points towards the tray. The devotee takes out some money from his pocket and puts a 100-rupee banknote next to the lamps.

Syed Wali Muhammad Shah and his family are not happy with such ‘businesses’ around the shrine. A respectable looking man in his mid-sixties, he claims he is gaddi nasheen – “occupant of the seat” – of Qalandar, just like his father and grandfather were before him. He says his grandfather Syed Gul Muhammad Shah was the custodian of the shrine when the government took control of it in 1961.

Qalandar never got married so he has no biological descendents. A number of people claim to be his gaddi nasheens. Some are the offspring of the saint’s relatives; others the heirs to his companions.

Once on a recent visit to Multan, a woman told Wali that he was not the gaddi nasheen as she knew someone else who was. “I found out later that she was referring to Azhar Shah who actually works as an electrician at the shrine.”

Being a gaddi nasheen entitles one to claim respect – and money – from Qalandar’s followers. “The more followers you will have, the more money you will get,” Wali says.

His paternal aunt, Tasneem, is a 66-year-old cancer survivor. She is the self-designated daughter of Sehwan and is involved in a number of social welfare activities in the town. She claims most of the mendicants around the shrine are fake. She also says they make more than what the gaddi nasheen does. “One of them has just bought a house worth 2.5 million rupees.”

Tasneem was visiting the shrine recently when some local children approached her for money. “I took permission from lal saeen, the Qalandar, if I could take money from him,” she says. She then took some change scattered on the sarcophagus and distributed it among the children.

As she walked out, government-appointed caretakers came running after her and told her to return the money. She said the money belonged to Qalandar so they had no right to demand its return. It was then that one of the caretakers claimed it was his money. He had scattered it on the sarcophagus to inspire the zaireen to do the same.

Her ancestral home is located behind the shrine where a street ascends to the main part of Sehwan town. Passages are narrow and crowded here and houses are mostly small, brick, mortar and mud structures.

Tasneem reminisces about her childhood when she used to play hide and seek along with her friends on the shrine’s premises. There was no fence around the grave and daily visitors to the shrine were not in the hundreds — as they are now.

There was a spiritual calm at the shrine then, she says. “Now it feels like a disco, with lights blinking everywhere. Qalandar’s spiritual influence is lost with all those lights, music and loot.”

A few blocks from Qalandar’s shrine, 55-year-old Zamir Hussain is talking to a cat. Wearing a red turban, a manifestation of his love for the lal (red) Sufi that Qalandar is known as, he wears a bead necklace with a circular metallic locket and a stone in the middle. When he finishes talking to the cat, he goes into deep thought, closing his eyes and holding his forehead with his fingers. Then he starts writing in a notebook he always carries.

Hussain is seated outside the shrine of Bodla Sikandar (one of Qalandar’s companions) and takes care of the shoes the pilgrims leave behind before entering the shrine. He picks up shoes taken off by some visitors, arranges the footwear in order, gives the visitors a piece of paper as a receipt for the shoes and goes back to his seat.

Hussain’s association with Qalandar started when he heard the song Shahbaz Karay Parwaz Te Jaanay Raaz Dilaan De, first sung by Madam Noor Jahan a few decades back. He was so moved that he instantly felt the need for a spiritual mentor. He then came across the teachings of Wasif Ali Wasif, a Sufi writer from Lahore. Hussain kept seeking guidance from Wasif for a number of years.

He was sitting at his guru’s shrine in 2016 when a woman came there and placed a garland around his neck. When he asked who she was, she said her name was Tasneem — the ‘daughter’ of Sehwan. With tears in his eyes, Hussain complained to her, “Why does Qalandar not call me to Sehwan?”

Tasneem arranged for his travel to Sehwan. Hussain left his printing and advertising business to the care of his employees and reached Qalandar’s town. He shaved off his head, beard, moustache and eyebrows and dressed himself in a long red robe.

After spending time at Qalandar’s shrine, Hussain decided to explore other shrines in the country, including that of Bhitai and those of saints buried in Makli and Uch Sharif. Back in Lahore, he kept wearing the red robe. He had not received a ‘call’ to change it.

Hussain also kept looking for an opportunity to return to Sehwan. A few months later, he found someone who was quitting his duty of guarding shoes at Bodla Sikandar’s shrine. Hussain volunteered for the position, to be able to spend 40 days in the town. “I feel in a trance throughout the day,” he says. “I respect each pilgrim, rich or poor, old or young,” Hussain adds as he touches the sole of a pilgrim and rubs his hand on his face.

On his 30th day in Sehwan, he takes a break around noon, goes to a courtyard behind the shrine and starts to read from his notebook. Visitors make a small circle around him, listening carefully. “After Qalandar accepts his seeker, he formats his hard disc and installs the software of pleasure and ecstasy,” he reads. “Pilgrimage to Qalandar’s shrine is a powerful antivirus.”

Hussain receives a call from his wife during the reading. She has arrived in Sehwan along with their three sons. He sends one of his friends to bring them to him. When his family arrives, he hugs the four of them with tears in his eyes. He introduces his cat to them and then takes them to different people around the shrine whom he has befriended. His family will stay with him for a few days.

Hussain plans to go back to Lahore after completing 40 days at the shrine. Once back home, he will resume his business. He may also publish the contents of his notebook.

No bus goes directly from Sehwan, the spiritual hub of Sindh, to Larkana, the province’s political nucleus. The passengers have to wait for a bus coming from Jamshoro, which is mostly jam-packed. A couple of agents stand on the bus stop, offering a seat at a higher-than-regular fare. The seat, however, becomes available 48 kilometres later when some passengers disembark in Dadu.

Raza Baloch is swiping through photos on his smartphone inside the bus. These were taken at a farewell dinner the previous evening at a university in Jamshoro. Wearing a dark blue suit, a light blue shirt and a matching tie, the 22-year-old looks good in them.

He is returning to his village in Larkana district after taking his final examination for a master’s degree in physics. Two of his friends accompany him. They clap and sing along as Indian film music from the 1990s plays in the bus.

When the music changes to a song by Jalal Chandio, a famous Sindhi folk singer, the three stop chatting and start listening intently. Every time the singer ends a portion of the song, they erupt into an impromptu praise. Wah wah, they say.

(He submits a freshly made CV to a private school for a teaching job as soon as he lands in Larkana. He is hired instantly to teach mathematics and physics to high school students on a monthly salary of 10,000 rupees. This is not what a person holding a master’s degree should earn, he says.)

Larkana is the home district of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the PPP, Sindh’s ruling party, which should have created better livelihood options here. But the area has experienced next to no industrialisation since 1967 when the party was founded. The district remains a largely agricultural zone.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s white marble mausoleum, in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh village about 23 kilometres northeast of Larkana city, is visible from afar. A narrow road leads to it, passing through wheat fields and small clusters of human abodes that appear to have come straight out of the pages of a book on Mohenjodaro, the oldest human settlement in this part of the world.

The mausoleum houses the graves of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (hanged by the state), his son Mir Murtaza Bhutto (killed by the police) and his daughter Benazir Bhutto (assassinated by Taliban militants in a gun and bomb attack). A helipad marks the entrance to a huge open space to one side of the mausoleum. To one side of that space is a bomb-proof raised platform.

Whenever Asif Ali Zardari, former president of Pakistan and the co-head of the PPP, and his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, land here to address the party cadres and voters, they use the secured platform as a stage. They also make speeches from behind a bullet-proof glass screen. Security in Sindh remains precarious under the party’s watch.

Inayat Hussain Umrani is sitting with another party’s workers inside Al-Murtaza, the ancestral home of the Bhuttos in Larkana. They hold a similar gathering every week. They represent PPP-Shaheed Bhutto, a breakaway faction founded by Mir Murtaza Bhutto before he was slain by policemen in 1996 near his home in Clifton, Karachi.

“We do not want to be a party of feudal lords. We have party workers from the middle class,” says Inayat as he complains that the bigger PPP has become a party of feudal lords who cannot care less about ordinary people. It was only under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that development projects were carried out in Larkana, he says. “A lot of corruption has been done in the name of Bhutto.”

Inayat points to a recent newspaper column written by Amar Jalil, a noted Sindhi intellectual. In the column, Jalil writes of an imaginary visit to the Bhutto mausoleum: people gathered in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh are beaten up by the police as Zardari arrives there; as Jalil takes flight to avoid the beating, he bumps into an old man also running away; he is no other than Zulfikar Ali Bhutto himself.

Zardari delivers his address at the mausoleum from a bullet-proof, bomb-proof stage, reiterates Inayat. He comes from above and goes back above. “How can he interact with the people?”

Abdul Razak Soomro is a founding member of the PPP. He claims whatever development is there in the area is because of the Bhuttos and their party. At the time of Partition, there were only three high schools in Larkana, he says. “There was no college in Larkana district. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came into power, he started providing roads, dispensaries and a medical college to the city. Thousands of villages and towns got electricity [after Benazir Bhutto became prime minister twice in the 1990s].”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, indeed, brought the rural backwaters of Larkana to the political centre stage. The place became synonymous with his tendency to concentrate all powers in his own hands. He appointed his cousin Mumtaz Bhutto, another native of Larkana, first as the governor of Sindh and then as the province’s chief minister. Al-Murtaza became the most sought-after political rendezvous for politicians trying to curry favour with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Rebel poet Habib Jalib satirised all that in a memorable verse: “Larkanay chalo varna thanay chalo” (Move to Larkana, otherwise you’ll be taken to a police station).

Soomro, 89, divides his time between Larkana and Islamabad where he works as a Supreme Court lawyer. He was appointed by the PPP regimes as Pakistan’s ambassador to Oman (1989-90) and to the United Arab Emirates (1994-96). Walls in his drawing room are adorned with framed photographs — many of them show Soomro and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto together.

Since the departure of the Bhuttos from the political scene, Larkana has lost its political significance. The centre of PPP’s power has shifted elsewhere — to Bilawal House in Karachi’s Clifton area.

Neglected and overlooked, Larkana is disappearing behind layers of dust, looking more and more like Mohenjodaro, the city of the dead.

No bus links exist between Sindh and Punjab on the Indus Highway. Anyone who requires travelling from Larkana in the former province to Kot Mithan in the latter, will need to change multiple vehicles on the nearly 300-kilometre journey: take a passenger van from Larkana to go to Kandhkot — distance 137 kilometres; take another van to travel to Kashmore at the border of the two provinces — distance 50 kilometres; wait at a border checkpoint for a bus coming from Karachi and going to Peshawar, hop onto it to travel to Kot Mithan bus stop on the Indus Highway standing in the aisle throughout the way — distance 100 kilometres; take a motorcycle rickshaw to reach Kot Mithan — distance 6.3 kilometres.

Kot Mithan is the home town of Khawaja Ghulam Farid, a 19th century Sufi poet who is also buried here. His collection of poetry, Diwan-e-Farid, was first published in 1882. An entire branch of literary studies – Faridiyat – has evolved in the 20th century to study his life, time and works.

Mujahid Jatoi claims to be an expert in Faridiyat. “Farid and the struggle for Seraiki [identity] are in my blood. You cannot separate the two,” he says. He sports a flowing white beard and his slicked-back hair is tied in a small ponytail. He wears a green cap made of cloth (just like the one Farid wore) and a colourful cotton shawl, known as Faridi chador, is draped around his neck. Mujahid is a native of Khanpur, a town in Rahim Yar Khan district, about 50 kilometres to the east of Kot Mithan and on the other side of the Indus River. But his love for Farid is so intense that he spends most of his time in Kot Mithan.

At 3 am on a chilly morning in December last year, when the temperature outside has dropped to 10 degrees centigrade, Mujahid is sleeping inside a guest room at Farid House, reserved for devotees requiring to stay overnight, in central Kot Mithan. His cell phone suddenly rings. He speaks to the person on the other side, giving him directions on how to reach Farid House.

The man he is talking to is 54-year-old Munawar Iqbal Hussain, an MPhil student at the University of Lahore’s campus in Pakpattan. He is visiting Kot Mithan as part of research for his thesis — a comparative analysis of three Urdu translations of Farid’s writings. One of the translations is compiled by Mujahid.

Munawar reaches Farid House at 5 am. Mujahid vacates the bed for him and goes to sleep on a wooden sofa next to the bed. Munawar will stay in town for six days, spending most of his time studying at Farid’s museum and library, managed by the Khawaja Farid Foundation. Mujahid happens to be a director of these establishments.

After Munawar is sufficiently rested, he is taken to the Indus for a walk. At the bank of the river, right where the agricultural fields end, two abandoned boats are parked — one of them is named Indus Queen.

The other was used during the 19th century for transporting goods between Karachi and Multan.

Indus Queen became a private property of the Nawab of Bahawalpur after the British left the Indian subcontinent in 1947. When the state of Bahawalpur was abolished in 1955, the boat was given to the Government of Pakistan.

It was used by residents of the area to cross the Indus between Kot Mithan and Chachran Sharif — both places figuring prominently in Farid’s spiritual and poetic quest.

Today, the boats are rusting amid sandy dunes on the river bank. Next to them is a makeshift floating bridge. It is the only way to cross the river here. The nearest available permanent bridge is 130 kilometres upstream in Dera Ghazi Khan — or 108 kilometres downstream in Kashmore.

Mujahid remembers travelling on the boat. On board, musicians would sing Farid’s poetry, which celebrates deserts, forests and waterways of his native region, to the delight of the passengers. Mujahid then uses the boat as an analogy to explain how Punjab has treated what he calls “occupied Seraikistan”: everything has been taken from locals and is then left to rot.

Mujahid was 11 in 1962 when his father Murid Hussain Jatoi took part in a conference in Multan. It was at that conference that the participants decided that the language spoken by the majority of the residents in southern and southwestern Punjab would be called Seraiki — all other localised names such as Multani, Riyasti (spoken in the former state of Bahawalpur) and Deraywali (used in Dera Ghazi Khan and Dera Ismail Khan) would cease to exist. The conference also came up with maps of the proposed Seraiki province.

The “biggest atrocity against the Seraiki people”, Mujahid says, “was committed when our land was merged with Punjab” after One Unit (that brought together the four provinces of West Pakistan into a single administrative and political entity) was abolished in 1970. The move resulted in public protests.

A young Mujahid saw his father taken to jail due to his participation in the protests. That is when the activist in him was born. He subsequently became one of the founders of Seraiki Qaumi Movement, a small political organisation.

“It is an insult when our region is called south Punjab. [It is] not a part of Punjab. I am not Punjabi. Why can’t you call me a Seraiki instead,” he says angrily. “Why are you afraid of my identity? Why can’t I call myself what I am?”

He concludes his harangue by calling Pakistan a four-wheel vehicle that has three wheels of a car but the fourth one of a truck. That bigger wheel to him is Punjab. “We, the people [of Seraiki areas] are a labour colony of Lahore.”

Paritewala, a village 40 kilometres to the north of Taunsa town, is the birthplace of Dr Muhammad Ahsan Wagha. He is a linguist and former broadcaster who wrote his doctoral thesis, The Development of Siraiki Language in Pakistan, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1997. It examines the evolution of Seraiki language with reference to an ethno-national movement for Seraiki identity.

“The Seraiki movement has a centre but it lacks a circle,” says the tall, clean-shaven Wagha who is in his late sixties and lives and works in Islamabad. A Seraiki geographical entity does not exist on the map of Pakistan, he explains.

Wagha says the Seraiki movement started with the construction of irrigation canals at the beginning of the 20th century. This was closely followed by massive settlement of Punjabi peasants in areas that constitute the southwestern and southern parts of Punjab today.

The same process continued after Partition. It was, in fact, expedited with the arrival of Muslim migrants from East Punjab who were allotted businesses, properties and lands left behind by Hindus and Sikhs who migrated to India in 1947.

Fears soon emerged that Punjabi dominance of agriculture, industry, politics and military power may result in the disappearance of culture, customs and the language that existed in southwestern and southern Punjab before the arrival of the Punjabis. Seraiki language was seen as a tool to resist that trend. It became instrumental in developing an ethno-national consciousness in the 1960s, Wagha says.

Ashiq Buzdar is one of the leading champions of that consciousness. Sitting on a charpoy made of palm leaves on a sunny winter morning in Mehraywala village in Rajanpur district, he holds a newspaper in his wrinkled shaking hands.

With his thick, untrimmed white moustache and white and uncombed long hair, he looks like a stereotypical poet. His wrinkled clothes and unpolished black shoes show that life has been unkind to him. For the last 18 years or so, he has had no stable source of income.

A friend once asked Buzdar how old he was. “I am as old as Pakistan” — born on August 14, 1947. Then the friend inquired about his health. “My health is just like Pakistan’s. I am crippled; I have pain in my knees; it is difficult for me to even walk.”

When Buzdar was hospitalised recently, he applied for free treatment. A doctor came to investigate his plea and asked him about his profession. “My profession is written within my name. I am Buzdar.” Buz in Persian means goat and dar in the same language means keeper.

“I am a shepherd,” he said. “How low can you go? Just to get [free treatment], you have become a shepherd,” the doctor commented. Buzdar replied with a verse by Allama Iqbal: Agar koi shoaib aye muyassar, shabani se kaleemi dou qadam hai (If one gets the right guide, talking to God is only a couple of steps away from being a shepherd).

Buzdar’s poetry revolves around his native land and the struggles of its people. His books were banned during the military dictatorship of Ziaul Haq. One of his poems from those days is titled Court Martial.

It talks of two Seraiki-speaking Hindu soldiers who migrated to India in 1947. During a Pakistan-India war, they caught a Muslim soldier from Pakistan. When they asked him where he was from, he said he was from Dajal (a small town to the west of Rajanpur).

Hindu soldiers had also migrated to India from Dajal. They started crying and asked their prisoner how their motherland was, how its festivals and food were. They asked him about Farid’s shrine and his songs. Then they let him go.

Next day, when the Pakistan Army opened fire on the Indian post, the soldier refused to participate, fearing that his bullets might kill the soldiers from his motherland. “How will I go back to my land after spilling the blood of its sons,” he said. He threw his weapon away and presented himself for a court martial.

Buzdar’s other famous poem is titled Qaidi Takht Lahore De (Prisoners of the Throne of Lahore). It was also banned in 1985. Since then, it has become an emblem of Seraiki politics and a much-used symbol to criticise Lahore’s pre-eminence in Pakistan’s political, economic and administrative structures.

Buzdar and some other Seraiki activists, poets and intellectuals got together in the mid-1980s and formed a non-political organisation called Seraiki Lok Sanjh or Saraiki Peoples’ Association. “ … we have embarked on a journey through sizzling sand. Only those willing to let their feet burn will join this caravan,” is how Wagha explains the founding ethos of the organisation.

Buzdar has been arranging an annual Seraiki festival for the past 31 years in his native village of Mehraywala. The objective of the festival is to unite the residents of the Seraiki-speaking region and celebrate Seraiki identity.

Demand for creating a separate Seraiki province is one of the most recurring themes at the festival. Senior PPP leader Yousaf Raza Gillani attended the festival some years ago (before he became the prime minister in 2008), as have many other prominent politicians in the region.

Attendees also include Sindhi nationalists — such as Rasool Bakhsh Palijo who leads a linguistic, cultural movement called Qaumi Awami Tehreek. (His son Ayaz Latif Palijo has taken part in elections from the platform of his Awami Tehreek with no success.) “Our enemy is the same — Punjab,” Buzdar says.

Around 60 motorcycle taxis are parked in Kot Mithan’s main bazaar. They charge 100 rupees each for taking passengers to Rajanpur. Those who wish to travel to Dera Ghazi Khan from there onwards can hop on to an 11-seat van that departs every hour.

Dera Ghazi Khan is located on the confluence of the Indus Highway and the N-70 that comes from Multan in Punjab and goes on to Qila Saifullah in northeast Balochistan. The district marks the geographical centre of Pakistan — most of Punjab (of which it is a part) to the east; Sindh to the south; Balochistan to the west and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the north. Unsurprisingly, trucks and their crew from every part of the country can be spotted here.

Mushtaq Gaadi, a teacher at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, believes Dera Ghazi Khan could have been an ideal location for Pakistan’s capital. “Now only Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab have easy and ready access to the capital in Islamabad.

If Dera Ghazi Khan was the capital, people from all provinces would have equal access to it.” This, in turn, would have had positive impacts elsewhere. “There would have been no division between south and north within Punjab,” says Gaadi.

As of now, geography is more a bane than a boon for Dera Ghazi Khan. It gives the city, and by extension the district, all the problems combined that exist in different parts of the country — poverty and marginalisation of the Baloch (who form a large part of its population); linguistic and ethnic politics of Sindh; religious militancy of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and low-quality urban growth of Punjab.

Its main bazaar is crowded – with pushcart vendors selling all kinds of wares from clothes and electronic equipment to vegetables and fruits – and in need of an urgent clean-up. Roads and streets here are dilapidated, even though they criss-cross the city in and from every direction. Colourful but noisy motorcycle rickshaws are lined up everywhere.

Other than low-level commercial activities in the city (and agriculture and livestock rearing in the rural areas), there are next to no job opportunities in Dera Ghazi Khan. Yet, Hafiz Abdul Kareem has prospered here, both financially and politically.

A member of the National Assembly from Dera Ghazi Khan city, he has been running a large mosque and madrasa since 1986. He has been active in electoral politics since 2008 when he almost defeated Sardar Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari, one of the strongest Baloch tribal chieftains in Dera Ghazi Khan who worked as a federal minister before becoming the president of the country in 1993.

Kareem is associated with Jamiat Ahle Hadith Pakistan, a salafi group affiliated with PMLN. He owns many businesses in Dera Ghazi Khan – a petrol station, a restaurant, a shopping plaza and a housing colony – as well as some in Multan.

Opposite his madrasa, which is protected by private armed guards, is a two-storey building where his family lives. His son, Osama, points to a big stock of firewood just outside the house. This is used for fueling cooking stoves and heaters inside the house as well as in the mosque and the madrasa.

“There is no natural gas in the area,” says Osama, “not even at [our] house.” One of the main natural gas pipelines that links central Punjab with gas fields in Sui, Balochistan has been passing not far from the city for decades.

Pointing to the performance of the PMLN’s Punjab government, Osama says in Seraiki: “Demokaresi kujh na karesi” (Democracy means doing nothing).

Sanaullah, 24, holds a bachelor’s degree in applied geology from the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and gives tuitions in Sakhi Sarwar town, about 33 kilometres to the west of Dera Ghazi Khan. He teaches mathematics and other science subjects to three students, charging each of them a monthly fee of 200 rupees for each subject. He makes about 2,400 rupees every month.

Sanaullah is the first graduate in his Baloch tribe of about 10,000 people. His native village, Rakhi Gaaj, is located within the dry, brown mountains of Sulaiman range, more than 60 kilometres to the west of Dera Ghazi Khan.

It has no electricity, no healthcare facilities, no running water. It has only one primary school but its lone teacher never shows up. Local women walk many kilometres every day to get water from mountain streams.

When Sanaullah graduated in June 2016, he heard about a Japanese firm building steel bridges in the mountains on the road that links Dera Ghazi Khan with Quetta. He thought he could get a job in the project. But then he was informed that all the jobs were already taken — mostly by people from central Punjab. “Even vegetables and rental cars come from Punjab. Why are locals not given any priority [in jobs],” he asks.

Sakhi Sarwar town’s only link with Dera Ghazi Khan is a narrow potholed road. Stone crushers work ceaselessly on both sides of it, preparing raw material for roads being built elsewhere. The dust rising from crushing plants envelops everything along the road, reducing visibility even during the day. Within the town, not a single street is paved.

A British-era fort towers above a mountain, about 50 kilometres to the west of Sakhi Sarwar. Overlooking the border between Punjab and Balochistan from an altitude of around 1,900 metres, it is one of the highest and coolest places in the entire Sulaiman range.

Named after Colonel Munro, Dera Ghazi Khan’s commissioner at the time, Fort Munro was used as a hill resort by the British. Since then, the place has developed into a small town.

The road to Fort Munro is steep and turns at sharp angles. As the altitude increases, the temperature starts dropping dramatically. The road passes through multiple checkpoints, manned by the Border Military Police, before it takes a turn towards the left, just before the provincial boundary and ascends into town.

The entrance to Fort Munro is dominated by colourful billboards carrying the names and contact information of local hotels and guest houses. In late December 2016, there are no tourists around. Only four local men can be spotted in the main bazaar.

They are lazing around under the warm sun, discussing local politics in their native Balochi language. The rest of the place seems abandoned. All shops, except one, are closed and not a single individual is visible on the streets.

Saleh Leghari, who owns the lone open shop, is one of the four men. He says most of the residents of the town have migrated to either Dera Ghazi Khan or Multan to avoid the cold weather. Temperature here drops below freezing at night and there is no electricity available for days on end. Only 12 or so families are still here, he says.

When the weather is pleasant – during the summers – Fort Munro attracts many tourists from southern Punjab and northern Sindh. “Our hill station is not inferior to Murree but life there goes on because Murree has basic facilities, including water and natural gas, throughout the year,” says Saleh.

Local women travel many kilometres to a stream to fetch water. People also pay a local supplier who sells water from a tanker at asking price. Saleh says he pays 1,200 rupees for water that lasts two weeks.

His friend, 40-year-old Sona Leghari, is full of complaints about the lack of healthcare in Fort Munro. “I suffered a back spasm and went to the town’s only hospital. There was no doctor there.” He had to seek help from a relative to travel to Rakhni, a village in Balochistan about 22 kilometres to the west of Fort Munro, on the backseat of a motorcycle to seek treatment.

“People say Punjab is the most developed province in Pakistan and we say we are the least developed area in the entire country,” says Saleh.

Taunsa is a large town about 83 kilometres to the north of Dera Ghazi Khan. It is the last resting place of Khawaja Muhammad Suleman Taunsvi, a 19th century Sufi saint who came here from Loralai in Balochistan. His descendents actively participate in the area’s politics. They regularly contest elections, sometimes against each other and at other times against the chiefs of the local Baloch tribes.

A major feature of the town is its long history of anti-Shia activism. One of the first and foremost exponents of the movement to declare Shias infidels was one Abdul Sattar Taunsvi, a local sectarian firebrand.

Starting in the 1960s, he developed a large following across Punjab. When he died in 2012, tens of thousands of people attended his funeral.

A narrow street in central Taunsa leads to a mosque and madrasa he built in 1967 under the banner of Tanzeem Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, a precursor of many anti-Shia organisations, including Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

Around 90 students from the surrounding Seraiki-speaking area are studying here as resident scholars. “Our graduates go to different parts of the country to teach in madrasas and as prayer leaders,” says Abdul Samad Taunsvi, the madrasa’s administrator.

Over the last decade or so, a number of anti-Shia terrorist attacks have taken place in and around Dera Ghazi Khan. Some Sufi shrines in the area have also seen suicide blasts and bomb explosions — most prominent among them being the shrine of 12th century Sufi, Syed Ahmad Sultan, in Sakhi Sarwar town.

The shrine attracts thousands of devotees from across Pakistan throughout the year. In the late 2000s, fliers appeared in the town, one of them pasted on the shrine’s entrance, saying that many rituals practised here – dhamaal, beating of drums and self-flagellation (a Shia practice signifying mourning) – were un-Islamic and needed to be stopped forthwith. Otherwise, the fliers warned, there would be consequences.

Two blasts hit the shrine on April 3, 2011, taking 52 lives and injuring 172 people. The victims included many women and children.

The Indus Highway enters Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Dera Ismail Khan district about 70 kilometres north of Taunsa. A commuter unfamiliar with the local administrative geography will not notice when they have left one province and entered the other. Even the language remains the same — Seraiki. A large number of people travel on a daily basis between Taunsa and Dera Ismail Khan.

It is in Dera Ismail Khan city that the transition from Seraiki to Pashto starts becoming visible. In local markets, people can be heard speaking both languages.

Syed Hafizullah Gilani lives on the outskirts of Dera Ismail Khan with his wife, a son and two daughters. He is the author of six books, all written in Seraiki and Urdu. He has also been writing plays for Radio Pakistan since 2007.

Hafizullah is frustrated over the way Radio Pakistan, the state-run broadcaster, treats his writings. “How would you feel if your legs and hands were tied and then you are thrown into a river and asked to swim? How would you be able to swim?”

One of the characters in a skit he wrote was not allowed to utter the word Panama because Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is “sensitive” about it. “My thoughts are not what my words are.”

Hafizullah, 56, is also the author of a critically acclaimed novel written in Seraiki. It is an extended metaphor for the deprivation of Seraiki-speaking people and narrates the tale of a Seraiki widow who is desperate to feed her children but is exploited by a prayer leader.

He conducted extensive research before naming the prayer leader. He wanted to avoid using the name of some real-life person. “Otherwise I would be in trouble.”

Hafizullah has been working for years to open a Seraiki language and literature department at Dera Ismail Khan’s Gomal University. In 2012, the university authorities laid the foundation stone of the department’s building but construction has not begun. “Now we are told that there are no funds to open the department,” he says.

The biggest hurdle, according to him, is Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUIF) and chairman of the parliament’s Kashmir committee. “The department will not be opened as long as there is Maulana in Dera Ismail Khan,” says Hafizullah. “His mother language is Pashto, not Seraiki, and he has conservative views [whereas] Seraiki literature is secular in nature.”

Rehman lives about eight kilometres north of Dera Ismail Khan city. A mosque with multiple domes stands in front of his bungalow, located along the Indus Highway.

A barbed wire fence sits atop the mosque’s boundary wall. Many JUIF flags – black and white stripes – and the party’s slogans are painted on the wall. One of them reads: “The message from the Ummah is that [it wants] the system of God.” The entrance to the mosque is guarded by police.

Next to the mosque is a madrasa built in the late 1990s. In one of its rooms, full of religious books, is a three-dimensional model of a two-storey building. This is how the madrasa was originally supposed to look but the plan was abandoned to avoid creating security threats to Rehman’s residence.

The madrasa was built with funding from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government. Libya’s ambassador to Pakistan at the time was one of the chief guests at its opening. It provides religious studies to 260 students — all, except 30 of them, are resident scholars.

About 65 kilometres to the north of Dera Ismail Khan city, a road branches off from the Indus Highway and turns towards the east. It leads to the small village of Abdul Khel, the burial place of Rehman’s father, Mufti Mahmud, who was a pioneer of the Deobandi branch of Sunni Islam in these parts.

Mahmud briefly served as chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the 1970s, heading a right-left coalition that also included the National Awami Party, a conglomerate of Baloch and Pakhtun nationalists.

He resigned as chief minister in protest against the sacking of Balochistan’s provincial government by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in February 1973. He later headed the opposition movement – known as Pakistan National Alliance – that led to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s ouster from power in 1977.

The village is sandwiched between two mountains — Koh Ratta (The Red Mountain) and Koh Neela (The Blue Mountain). A narrow street that turns into a sandy path passes through the village, leading all the way to a mosque built by Mahmud, who is buried in a graveyard next to it.

Right at the entrance of Abdul Khel is the camp of a construction company. It is building part of a road that connects Grand Trunk Road with Quetta through Zhob and constitutes the western route of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The road will pass right through Rehman’s village.

Ashfaq (not his real name) is an MPhil student at Gomal University. He regularly participates in an annual congregation of Muslim missionaries in Raiwind, near Lahore, and calls Rehman his uncle because of some familial ties. Growing up, the 34-year-old seldom saw his father — who is always travelling with the missionaries of the Tableeghi Jamaat.

On a day in late December 2016, Ashfaq is standing with his friends inside the university, talking about jihad. He is wearing a long, plain kurta with an ankle-length shalwar. His head and shoulders are covered with a black and white keffiyeh. Putting his bag and diary to his side, he says he is ready to leave for jihad right away but his mother does not let him.

He has been to jihad before when Dera Ismail Khan became a major recruitment ground in early 2000s for those willing to fight in Afghanistan against the American-led forces that had invaded the country in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York. “I was inspired by one of the rallies [led by Rehman] to fight against the infidels,” he says.

Ashfaq went to Kabul in 2002 with a group of militants without informing his family. “It was like being in heaven. There were guns everywhere,” he says. Conditions were harsh, he acknowledges, but “to kill as many Americans as we could” was a strong motivation. “I stayed there for four months and went through a strong military training under Taliban commanders.”

But his mother was distraught. She used her family connections with Rehman and called back her son from Afghanistan. “I was forced to come home. The commander tied [my arms and legs], threw me in a car and brought me home,” says Ashfaq.

He experienced serious depression when he saw people in Pakistan going through their daily business as usual – going to college, listening to music, women roaming freely in bazaars – when their Afghan brethren were fighting the Americans.

He often talks about what he experienced while he was in Afghanistan. I felt being at peace by killing the infidels, he says. “My dream is to die as a martyr while fighting the infidels.”

On January 4 this year, the Indus Highway was blocked. A remote-controlled bomb had targeted a police van on the road, injuring 15 people, including five police officials. All vehicles traveling from Dera Ismail Khan to Bannu were being diverted to another route.

Bannu city, 108 kilometres to the north of Dera Ismail Khan and 62 kilometres to the west of the Indus Highway, is home to thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the tribal areas.

Tahir Dawar, a barrel-chested young man of 33, is one of them. His round face, trimmed black beard, thick curly hair and narrow almond eyes betray his Pakhtun identity even in a cursory glance. He runs a small medical laboratory in Bannu city.

Dawar is originally from Miranshah, headquarters of North Waziristan agency, 70 kilometres to the west of Bannu. He is doing an MPhil from the Allama Iqbal Open University in language and communication. Dawar is also a poet.

He believes the ongoing military operation against Taliban militants in North Waziristan is the biggest tragedy to befall the people of the agency after the imposition of the Frontier Crimes Regulation by British authorities in the early 20th century. He used to organise poetry recitals, mushairas, in his native area before the start of Operation Zarb-e-Azb in 2014, he claims.

His entire tribe relocated to Bannu and its surrounding areas after the operation began. Since then, they have been living as IDPs in government-run camps and rented accommodations. Dawar used to own 25 shops in Miranshah bazaar. The “bazaar is no more” — it was demolished by the military.

On January 1, 2017, Dawar is reading newspaper reports about New Year celebrations across the world. He complains the change in the calendar has brought no change in the situation in North Waziristan.

Last year, at the end of the fasting month of Ramzan, he went to Baka Khel camp for the IDPs on the outskirts of Bannu. He was so depressed to hear the plight of the people there that he instantly wrote some verses. “I do not have a house. Neither a village nor a neighbourhood … What do I do with this morning, afternoon and evening? … I live in a tent. How am I to celebrate Eid?”

Dawar says he has not registered himself as an IDP. The registration requires the acquisition of a special identity paper – a Watan Card – which the government issues after a government-appointed tribal elder, or malik, verifies that the applicant for the card is loyal to the state.

A malik receives a monthly salary from the federal government under the provisions of the FCR that also makes him responsible for all the acts of omission and commission of his tribespeople. The malik that Dawar needs to get verification from is uneducated. “How can an uneducated person verify the identity of an educated person,” he asks.

Ghulam Khan Wazir, 43, is a tribal malik from North Waziristan. A burly man with a thick moustache and round face, he lives in Bannu, as do most of the members of his 30,000-strong Madakhel tribe. Their native area in Datta Khel tehsil of the tribal agency is right on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“When Operation Zarb-e-Azab started, my entire tribe had to migrate overnight,” he says. Around 14,000 of them went to Khost in Afghanistan. Others moved to different parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Those who went to Afghanistan took all their belongings – vehicles, livestock, etc – with them. Now that the border between the two countries is sealed in North Waziristan, Wazir says, “it is getting difficult” for them “to come back from Afghanistan”.

Those who are in Pakistan have other problems to tackle.

Bannu Township is a newly built housing facility 10 kilometres northeast of Bannu city. It is a well-planned neighbourhood with asphalt roads, a central library and two-storey houses. North Waziristan’s highest civilian officer, the political agent, has an office in a rented house at the far end of the township.A typist is sitting outside the office’s boundary wall.

He types and prints applications for IDPs for the issuance of Watan Cards and for other government-provided services, such as rations and monthly stipends. Men of all ages are standing inside the courtyard of the office — not in a queue but in a rambling arrangement. They are all waiting for a tiny entrance to open.

The political agent, a tehsildar and three clerks are sitting inside the building — having their lunch of pulao. The men outside keep knocking at the entrance; the men inside keep ignoring them, engrossed in their meal.

As Wazir walks into the courtyard, IDPs flock to him with their demands. He has already signed their documents. Now they need the signatures of tehsildar Muhammad Rafiq. Wazir cannot offer them any help.

He is carrying a folio with him. It contains documents pertaining to the case of one Bada Gul who has been in jail in Saudi Arabia for the last six months. Officials in Pakistan’s embassy in Saudi Arabia have called Wazir to verify if Bada Gul is a Pakistani citizen.

Wazir has collected and signed all documents to prove just that but tehsildar Rafiq is still reluctant to issue a character certificate for Bada Gul. “If the tehsildar does not sign the character certificate, Bada Gul will spend the rest of his life in jail in Saudi Arabia,” Wazir says. He then enters the buildings and gets into a fight with Rafiq.

This is not the only case of official apathy, Wazir says. Every time he comes here, he feels “humiliated”. He says the political agent and tehsildar are not from North Waziristan and do not understand the tribal culture. “They just exploit the tribesmen and create trouble for them.”

Wazir is also the general secretary of a committee of those displaced by military operations. Many of them, he says, are staying in unofficial camps – mostly along the Bannu-Kohat road – without any official assistance and surviving on rations provided by the World Food Programme.

Shelters at these camps are basic — blue canvas sheets pulled over walls made from dried reed. “It gets really cold at night here in winters,” says Razmat Khan, 45. His family of eight siblings and five children is among 25 or so families living in an unofficial camp. “There is no school in or around the camp. My children are deprived of education,” he says. A more urgent problem is that the camp has no running water and no sanitation.

Muhammad Fawad, assistant commissioner of Bannu, agrees that 8,000 or so IDPs are not registered with the government and are living in unofficial camps. Bannu has only one official IDP camp — in Baka Khel. The camp, according to him, houses 450 families. The total number of registered IDPs in the district is 17,000, he adds.

When the operation started, he says, “we did not have the capacity” to take care of all IDPs. The IDP influx “brought a sudden increase in the population of Bannu and put an increased burden on the provincial government”.

Gunshots echo in the mountains, shot after shot, a little ways away from the Indus Highway. This goes on for a whole day as arms manufacturers and arms traders test their newly-made weapons. This is the tribal area of Darra Adam Khel – about 35 kilometres to the south of Peshawar – known for its arms manufacturing that dates back to the early British period.

All kind of guns are on display in Bismillah Jan’s small shop in Bakht Zaman Plaza, located in Darra’s main bazaar. These are all made by him. There is an AK-47 Kalashnikov, a 12-gauge gun, a pistol and much more. Every shopkeeper in the plaza has a display centre on the ground floor and a small factory on the first floor. There are 70 such establishments in the building.

Bismillah Jan is working on a new gun. He has downloaded its design from the internet. “I only saw the photograph of the gun made in Germany. Now I am making an exact copy of it,” he says. Once he finishes his job, he claims, no one will be able to differentiate between the original and the copy.

This skill at copying proved a big boon for local arms manufacturers in the late 1980s. At the end of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, the Americans announced they would buy back weapons from the Afghan mujahideen.

Factories in Darra worked overtime to manufacture copies of the sophisticated American and European arms the mujahideen had. These copies were smuggled to Afghanistan in thousands where the Americans paid in dollars to get hold of them. That way the mujahideen got to keep their weapons and also made a lot of money.

The same process was repeated, after 2001, when the Americans offered Taliban fighters money in exchange for surrendering their weapons.

Arms manufacturing runs in Bismillah’s family, though he does not know when and how it started. His father did it, his grandfather did it and so did his great-grandfather. The business witnessed its first boom during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s. Thousands of arms were supplied from here to the mujahideen trained by the Pakistani military and funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia.

“That was a glorious time,” says 40-year-old Bismillah, though he does not have any personal recollection of those days. Everyone had “high regard” for arms manufacturers for their contribution to the war against the Soviets. Business is not as brisk these days as it used to be in those distant years. Bismillah makes around 20,000 rupees each month.

He had to close down his shop between 2009 and 2013 when the government put a ban on arms manufacturing to stop weapons being supplied to the Taliban and other militant groups fighting against the Pakistani state and society. He migrated to Peshawar city where he earned his living by driving a taxi.

The tribal law now allows manufacturers to make arms but they cannot sell them within Pakistan. Most manufacturers smuggle their wares to the Pak-Afghan border in Torkham where traders from Peshawar buy them and take them to shops in the city. Often weapons are intercepted and confiscated during smuggling.

And government officials who help smuggling have increased their commission due to increased checking at multiple points along the route. Profit margins have dropped significantly.

Bismillah will readily leave the business if he has another option but he does not know what else to do. “The glorious time is gone. The military has now entered our region … [It] does not allow any weapon to get out of the area.”

Haji Raees Khan, 71, has similar complaints. Sitting with local residents in his outhouse – with a small mosque and a big courtyard of its own – he explains how security agencies view the residents of Darra with suspicion. “We are not considered Pakistani citizens,” he says.

The military’s clampdown on arms trade, according to Raees, is having a negative impact on the local economy. “There were 10,000 shops in the area [in the 2000s]. Now we are left with only 2,000,” he says. If the situation does not change, he adds, Darra’s tradition of arms manufacturing may be lost.

Raees concludes his conversation with a story. “We all celebrated by opening gunfire when Pakistan won a cricket match against India in 2012. Next day, a soldier from Punjab asked local tribesmen why they were cheering for Pakistan.” This, he says, was upsetting. “Punjabis think [Darra] is not part of Pakistan.”

It is evening in Peshawar. Sardar Charanjeet Singh, 40, is thinking of closing his shop for the day. He owns a small grocery store on the Indus Highway just before it enters Peshawar city.

Singh, father of three young children, is scared and wants to get back home before it gets dark. In 2014 and 2015, a number of Sikhs were attacked in Peshawar. The victims included Sardar Sooran Singh who at the time of his murder was working as special assistant on minority affairs to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister.

There are around 700 Sikh households in Peshawar. They have been living here for more than two centuries. They speak flawless Pashto, a language their ancestors acquired while living in the tribal areas.

Singh is also an activist for the rights of non-Muslim Pakistanis as well as interfaith harmony. He complains the government does not confer all citizenship rights on non-Muslim Pakistanis. There is no law to register Sikh marriages for instance, he complains.

He is also unhappy with how history is written in textbooks. “My religious hero, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, is mentioned in our textbooks as a thief just because he was not a Muslim.” One of his missions is to get comparative religion introduced in the syllabus in order to “remove all the hatred that is there [among Muslims] for other religions and sects”.

Singh believes he has a better claim to be a Pakistani than many others in the country: many sites he considers holy, including Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Sikhism’s founder Guru Nanak, are located in Pakistan.

But he rues how Pakistani Muslims do not think that way. After the 2012 cricket match that Pakistan won against India, even his regular customers came to his shop and said how ‘their’ team had beaten ‘his’ team.

“That broke my heart,” he says. “We have been living on this land for centuries but people think I am not a Pakistani just because of my religion.”

A narrow lane lined with shops selling mobile phones leads to a small staircase inside Peshawar’s crowded Qissa Khawani Bazaar. The stairs ascend into a multi-storey building with poorly-lit, small rooms on each floor. Hanif Afridi is sitting in one room on the second floor, rehearsing for a performance at a wedding two days later. At the age of 42, he is the sole provider for his family that consists of his wife, two sons and a disabled sister.

Afridi belongs to Tirah, a valley in the tribal areas that has become a major centre for the Taliban and other religious militants over the last decade or so. He has been singing since his childhood and was once quite famous in his home town for his voice. He was often paid to sing at private and public gatherings.

After militants took over Tirah in 2006, Afridi’s name was announced from a local mosque one day. He was told to see a militant leader the next day. He, instead, fled to Peshawar along with his family. He then shifted to Karachi, hiding there over the next three years or so.

Afridi came back to Peshawar in 2010 and started driving a taxi to earn his living. When that did not earn him enough money, he had to sell his favourite rabab for 15,000 rupees — a move he regrets even today.

Displacement and security concerns have impacted his singing too. Instead of crooning only love songs and cheery melodies, he now also sings about the problems of the tribespeople.

In one recent function, he sang the poetry of Raza Khan Hazir, a poet from Waziristan — “Our houses are bombed. What should we do? We live in tents. Do something so that we get back to normal life.” The audience had tears in their eyes as he sang.

Dr Faizullah Jan was giving a lecture on extremism at the University of Peshawar in November 2008. He told his students a joke about the Taliban. Everyone laughed except one student who warned his teacher: “Please watch your words. You are forcing me to demolish this entire department.” Faizullah did not take the threat seriously.

Two days later, the same student was arrested from the university. He wanted to blow himself up as a suicide bomber. Faizullah was livid when he heard the news about his arrest. “I carefully select words I use in my class. Any student can get offended. I do not know who follows what extremist ideology,” says the 49-year-old teacher of mass communication.

Faizullah has written a book, The Muslim Extremist Discourse: Constructing Us vs Them. It was originally his doctoral thesis. He worked on it while studying in Washington DC in 2009.

The book offers a comparative analysis of publications by different religious groups in Pakistan. “Identity construction is crucial for the extremists,” he says. “They use history, bringing past into present and taking present into past. They have no concept of co-existence.”

Faizullah recalls an incident from his teenage days. General Ziaul Haq was ruling the country at the time and the Soviet-Afghan war was raging. He went to a library to look for a book, titled The Battle of Ideas in Pakistan, written by leftist writer Sibte Hasan.

The catalogue showed the book was available in the library but it was not on the shelves. “I went to the library’s assistant director.” He was associated with Jamaat-e-Islami. The book was piled in his room along with many other volumes by leftist writers. “When I asked him why those books were not on the shelves, he gave me a lecture on why one should not read such books as they take readers away from religion.”

Faizullah says it was, in fact, a state policy to remove such books from libraries and instead introduce a state-imposed ideology. There was a systematic induction of extremist ideologies in universities through student organisations and faculty recruitments, he says. “That is how religious extremist groups became powerful.”

Faizullah advocates the initiation of a robust deradicalisation plan to buck the trend. He remembers reading the book Myths to Live By, written by American author Joseph Campbell. In one of its chapters, Campbell describes how native American tribes treated their soldiers and fighters after they came back from a military expedition.

“Tribal elders stopped them at a distance from the tribe’s members and performed different rituals on them so that young soldiers did not become violent within their own community,” he quotes from the book. “They had to stay away from their tribe as long as it took for them to become normal human beings from warriors.”

Faizullah often travels to Islamabad on weekends with his family. After he crosses the Indus near Attock on his way from Peshawar to the federal capital, he feels he has entered a different world. East of the Indus is a safe, developed Pakistan, he says. West of the river, however, remains “marginalised and terrorised”. This is so because it serves Punjab’s “strategic interests”.

This was originally published in the Herald's March 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

All photographs are by the author, who is a travel writer and photographer. He tweets @DanialShah_

An old man once wandered the mountains and deserts of Balochistan. He asked to be buried wherever death came to him. One night, he fell asleep in the pleasant and soothing embrace of a breeze – called sargosh (whisperer) in Balochi – never to wake up again.

People buried him at the same spot and the place came to be called Wabshut (‘to fall asleep’ in Balochi). Today it is known by a variant — Washuk.

Centuries later, Haji Muhammad Bukhsh wandered the same area in the same way. So well did he know the place that only a few hints – sometimes as small as the mention of a rainwater drain or a mountain or even a tree – were enough for him to recognise a location.

Bukhsh claims to be approaching 90 and has married four times. In a conversation laced with profanities, he narrates how certain foreign visitors to Washuk would call him on a wireless phone whenever they were lost in the hostile expanse of the landscape around them and how he would retrieve them within hours, requiring very little information about their whereabouts.

Washuk town is located almost in the centre of Balochistan — more than 455 kilometres to the south of Quetta, about 800 kilometres to the north of Gwadar, 150 kilometres to the east of the Pakistan-Iran border and over 200 kilometres to the west of Balochistan’s border with Sindh.

Washuk’s eponymous district – carved out from Kharan district in 2005 – is surrounded by the mountains of Central Makran Range and shares a border with Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province.

A newly-built 235-kilometre road – part of the highway that constitutes the western route of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and connects Quetta and Gwadar – criss-crosses Washuk district, which is so vast that its land area is equivalent to almost 40 per cent of the entire land area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Yet, its population, by some local estimates, is not more than 115,000. It is easy to get lost in this sparsely populated vastness, never to be found without help from local wanderers — the likes of Bukhsh.

A large number of under-construction brick and mortar buildings mark the road that links Washuk with Kharan. As the road moves out of the town, human settlements start becoming thinner and the vacuous immensity of nature takes over — except for occasional mud huts and rows of date palms.

About 30 kilometres to the north-east of Washuk town, a concrete and steel structure suddenly comes into view, made even more prominent by the empty landscape around it. It is an airstrip, complete with a residential complex and a hangar.

The airstrip is located next to the small village of Shamsi (pronounced ‘Shamshi’ by locals). Currently under the control of the Pakistan Navy, the base is not functional these days — well, almost.

Once every 10 or 12 days, a plane arrives here to deliver provisions to officials guarding it. Before the navy, Frontier Corps (FC) was controlling it and, before the FC, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato).

When the base was under Nato control, the United States first used it as a logistical hub for its Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban government in Afghanistan, launched in 2001 right after 9/11.

Later, the facility was used as a launching pad for unmanned aerial bombers known as drones that would target militants along either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The Guardian, a London-based newspaper, was one of the first media outlets to report about drones being flown from the base in Shamsi. In 2009, it said that America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a private security contractor, Blackwater, were working together at the base.

The newspaper said Blackwater patrolled “the area round the Shamsi airbase” and helped to load missiles on to “CIA-operated drones that target al-Qaeda members”. An American newspaper, The New York Times, had reported a similar story four months earlier.

A couple of years later, helicopters belonging to Nato forces in Afghanistan attacked a military checkpoint, known as Salala, in north-west Pakistan.

The November 26, 2011, attack left 28 Pakistani soldiers dead. In protest and retaliation, Islamabad asked Americans to vacate the facility in Shamsi. The airbase did not belong to Pakistan though.

The first Arabs arrived in the area in the late 1970s. The most prominent among them was Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan who at the time ruled Abu Dhabi as well as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a federation that includes the sheikhdoms of Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah and Umm al-Quwain alongside Abu Dhabi.

His son and the current UAE ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has also visited Washuk multiple times.

In the early 1980s, the Arabs who used to land some 80 kilometres north of Shamsi decided to build an airstrip of their own, close to their hunting grounds.

They approached Haji Abdul Karim Mirwani, a resident of Shamsi village, to acquire land for the project. By 1987, he had given 360 acres of his own land as a “gift” to the sheikhs.

Where he once grew wheat and watermelons arrived massive construction machinery to build the airstrip. Mirwani says he transferred the land to the sheikhs through a zubaani, verbal, agreement (it was turned into an official lease agreement between Pakistan and the UAE in 1992).

The sheikhs initially built a lean strip for the landing of their C-130 aircraft. They expanded it in 1990 to its current shape and size.

The UAE rulers became extremely jittery about their security after reports emerged that the airbase in Shamsi was being used by Americans for drone attacks.

Given that the sheikhs from Abu Dhabi hardly ever visit Washuk these days, the government decided to let the sheikhs from Qatar hunt in the area

A May 2005 diplomatic cable, revealed by Wikileaks in 2011, quoted Ahmed Al Musally, director of the Asian and African affairs department at the UAE’s ministry of foreign affairs, expressing his “displeasure [over] some details of the UAE’s cooperation with the US military in Pakistan [having] become public”.

He stated that “there are 500,000 to 600,000 Pakistanis residing in the UAE and that [the] members of the UAE’s ruling families frequently visit Pakistan for hunting”.

Al Musally was concerned about the security of those royal hunters. “ … maybe they can’t do anything here [in the UAE], but they might try there (ie: Pakistan), especially when our leaders travel there.”

Arab dignitaries were wary of their security even before that. A rectangular compound next to the airstrip has grey walls as high as 20 feet.

These walls mark the boundary of a palace that the UAE sheikhs built in Shamsi — as per Mirwani, in 1990. The compound sprawls over 20 acres of land, also gifted by him.

‘Authorized Persons Only’ is written very prominently on its lone steel entrance — as high as 10 feet. A small patch of greenery lies just outside the gate — a testament to the Arab opulence that keeps the patch well-irrigated and pruned in a bone-dry, scraggy desert.

A vast open ground strewn with sand and gravel is what comes into view after one enters the compound. A path starting right after the entrance leads to an administration block.

The first thing one spots on the path is a petrol station that looks out of service. Its pumps are covered with cloth, apparently to protect them from dust. Next to the petrol station is a garage complex with the capacity to hold 400 cars.

Over a dozen four-wheelers and seven plough trucks are parked inside it. The manager of the palace sits in an air-conditioned office opposite the garages. A portrait of Sheikh Khalifa hangs on the wall behind his seat.

Residential quarters are located behind the administration block. The architecture is simple and functional and the furniture inside the large dining halls and guest rooms is cozy.

Once it was changed every year. These days, it is not even touched except when it requires cleaning.

The palace has 24 full-time employees — maintenance staff, auto mechanics, cooks, electricians, etc. Even though the sheikhs have not visited the palace for over 15 years now, the employees get their salaries regularly.

The compound is disconcertingly quiet. A year ago, its manager shot himself to death. Nobody knows why. A senior reporter in Quetta who maintained occasional contact with the manager speculates he could have been depressed.

The palace employees do not speak about the incident but at least one of them admits to feeling lonely at times.

The current manager was transferred here from Rahim Yar Khan where the UAE sheikhs own many vast properties.

Given that the sheikhs from Abu Dhabi hardly ever visit Washuk these days, the government decided to let the sheikhs from Qatar hunt in the area during the outgoing hunting season (November 1, 2016 to January 31, 2017).

Mir Abdul Karim Nousherwani, one of the first people to look after the interests of the rulers of Abu Dhabi in Balochistan, narrates how General (retd) Abdul Qadir Baloch, a federal minister from Balochistan, brought a Qatari hunting party with him and asked the FC to protect their camp.

Sheikh Khalifa immediately expressed his disappointment over the allotment of his hunting grounds to the Qataris, says Nousherwani, who later visited Abu Dhabi to meet the sheikh.

The locals, too, did not welcome the new guests and protested against the permission to let them hunt in Washuk. “This is Sheikh Khalifa’s area,” says Haji Muhammad Bukhsh, who has worked as a guide for the UAE royals since the 1980s.

The Qataris have been in the crosshairs of Pakistan’s chaotic politics of late — and not just for hunting in the wrong places.

During the last two months of 2016, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al-Thani, a former prime minister of Qatar and a prominent member of the Qatari royal family, sent two letters to the Supreme Court of Pakistan that was hearing petitions over alleged corruption and money laundering by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

The letters attempted to explain the sources of money Nawaz Sharif and his family have invested in various businesses and properties since the 1980s.

Al-Thani wrote that his father had “longstanding business relations” with Sharif’s father who had “expressed his desire to invest a certain amount of money in the real estate business of the Al Thani family in Qatar … an aggregate sum of around Dirhams 12 million”.

The letters were subjected to intense media debate and judicial scrutiny before the Supreme Court rejected them late last month.

The judges ruled that they do not offer a sufficient and credible explanation for the offshore businesses, properties and other financial dealings of Nawaz Sharif and his family.

The Qataris, however, ensured they remained in the news even otherwise, all the while the Supreme Court was hearing the case. Consider the following case:

In Balochistan’s Nushki district, 16 members of a houbara-hunting party from Qatar were arrested on February 1, 2017. A report in daily Dawn said “an advance party of Qatar’s ruler ... ignored Levies personnel’s signal to stop at their post for checking and tried to escape by breaking the barrier”.

Another houbara-hunting convoy from Qatar was attacked in the same province’s Musakhel district by unidentified gunmen on the evening of January 15, 2017. Daily Dawn quoted a Levies official saying that the local district police officer and two other security officials were injured in the incident.

On December 17, 2016, farmers and tribespeople protested in Balochistan’s Kachhi district against allotment of land in their area to the Qatari princes for hunting houbara bustards, according to a report on news website Dawn.com.

The protesters blocked a road, claiming that agricultural lands in the entire Sani Shoran tehsil of the district had been allotted by the government to the royal hunters from Qatar.

A photograph carried by Quetta-based newspaper Balochistan Express showed around half a dozen men displaying a banner that said they would not allow the destruction of their crops for the sake of the Qatari princes.

A week earlier, chickpea farmers in Punjab’s Bhakkar district were enraged over a Qatari hunting party driving over their crops and not compensating them for their loss.

Mankera is a small town in Bhakkar district. It falls on the far west side of Punjab, near the province’s border with Khyber Pukhtunkhwa.

Hunting areas here are part of the Thal Desert that is spread over parts of Bhakkar, Khushab, Mianwali, Layyah, Muzaffargarh and Jhang districts.

It is an unusual place for a desert — sandwiched between the Chenab river on the east, the Indus river on the west and ringed by thick forests, its white sand dunes offer a highly suitable terrain for chickpea farming during winters.

When the low, thick chickpea plants line the dunes, they look like an undulating green carpet spread across the desert.

Two farmers in Mankera, who mobilised others to protest against the damage to their crops, have pictures showing a hunting party driving sport utility vehicles (SUV) right through chickpea fields.

Other images show vehicles parked amid fields while their occupants retrieve a hunted houbara bustard from a falcon’s claws. Men in traditional Arab dress can be seen gathered around the dead bird.

The farmers are upset — not only because their crops have been damaged, but also because the Qataris have not carried out any significant development work in the area even though they have been coming to Mankera to hunt houbara bustards for many years.

They have built a mosque here but, as one farmer complains, its control has been given to the affiliates of a sect that does not have much following in the area.

Last year, they promised to build a dispensary but its construction is yet to start. A 50-bed hospital is being built in Haiderabad – deep inside Thal – by Jassim & Hamad Bin Jassim Charitable Foundation.

However, farmers in Mankera say it will not benefit them much since it is more than 26 kilometres away from their farms and villages.

In any case, the farmers see the projects as no substitute to the livelihood they have lost as a result of damaged crops. The Qataris, however, cannot be blamed for compensation money not reaching them.

The farmers acknowledge the hunters have given some money to Ghazanfar Abbas Chheena, a Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) lawmaker in the Punjab Assembly, to distribute among farmers whose crops had been damaged.

But nobody knows the exact amount of that money – some say it is as low as 300,000 rupees; others put it at 600,000 rupees – and everyone complains that they have received none of it.

The farmers also reveal how the opposition party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), approached them to facilitate their protest against the Qataris. “The [party] said it can send over 15 to 20 buses from Islamabad and provide food as well,” says one of them.

The PTI did lead the farmers protesting in Kachhi, Balochistan, where its district chairman Sardar Khan Rind also addressed the protesters and accused PMLN of “punishing” local residents for siding with his party.

But PTI’s involvement in protests against Qatari hunters could be just that — an attempt to criticise and browbeat PMLN rather than an effort to stop the Qataris from hunting.

Farmers in Mankera held a second protest in February this year, complaining that they had received no compensation — two months after the damage to their crops and just a day before a Qatari hunting party had left their area.

A few hundred protesters gathered near Mahni village, raising slogans for the acceptance of their demands. Nobody listened to them, they grumble. Even the media did not cover their protest this time round.

Chaar Makaan is a series of low sandy hills about 47 kilometres to the south of Kot Diji. Four paths converge here (hence the name that translates as ‘four houses’) — one each coming from Thari Mirwah (in the west), Choondiko (in the east), Nawabshah (in the south) and Khairpur (in the north).

It is a perfect location for finding houbara bustards that prefer to live in deserts, away from large water bodies.

A large tent is perched on a hill here on a cold mid-January morning, made colder by the previous night’s rain. Inside the tent, mattresses and blankets are strewn in a disorderly way. A compact SUV with an Abu Dhabi licence plate is parked outside.

The vehicle indicates that an Arab hunting party could be around — it is the vehicle of choice for sheikhs travelling to Pakistan’s hinterlands for hunting.

The sand is damp from the rain and dark clouds loom over the desert — a perfect day to be out in the wilderness. But the sheikhs have left a day earlier — their luxury tents, fitted with air-conditioners, carpets and sleeping bags, are nowhere to be seen.

They have also taken with them their fancy hunting paraphernalia of high-powered binoculars, wireless phones and highly-trained falcons. The tent still standing is being used by their staff.

The hunting season is about to end in two weeks and private security guards working with the hunters are still on duty. Another, smaller, hunting party is expected to arrive soon.

It will be the last of the three hunting parties to have arrived in Kot Diji this hunting season. One of them included the two sons of Sheikh Khalifa.

In the past, each party would hunt for a month. Now the government has imposed stricter regulations — each party now has a maximum of 10 days for the hunt and it cannot kill more than 100 birds in the allotted time.

Locals working for the hunters get to work in September, much before the first hunting party arrives on or after November 1, when the hunting season starts.

And they continue to work till the end of February, weeks after the last hunters leave. (The hunting season is dependent on the migratory cycle of houbara bustards: they leave their breeding grounds in Central Asia around August, enter Pakistan through Balochistan in August and subsequently make their way to Sindh and parts of south-west Punjab in September before flying back to their original habitat through Iran and Afghanistan in late February and early March.)

The sheikhs stay in a palace they have built for themselves in Kot Diji — once the seat of power of Sindh’s Talpur rulers. Today, the town is known as much for its ancient Talpur fort (after the night’s rain it looks as if parts of it have been washed away) as its shiny Abu Dhabi palace.

Administrators from the UAE arrive in Kot Diji weeks before the hunters do — to hire locals as security guards, helpers, drivers, cooks and cleaners and also to collect provisions such as groceries, dishes and tents.

Next, they set up tent settlements in the desert around Chaar Makaan. Reconnaissance groups (some of whose members have been working with the sheikhs since the 1980s) split the hunting grounds in sectors to make patrolling easier.

For days, they roam around the desert to ensure that no one hunts houbara bustards there. “We check the desert for tracks left by private cars,” says a senior member of a reconnaissance group.

He does not want to be named because he is not supposed to talk to the media. Let us call him Mujeeb. Members of these groups get into SUVs, leave their tents at Chaar Makaan at 8 am and return by the evening.

Each vehicle has at least three people in it — a security supervisor, a driver and an official from the Sindh wildlife department. The government officer is there, ostensibly, to ensure that no rules and regulations are violated during the patrol.

His actual function is to catch local poachers and non-Arab hunters. For this, he gets money from the sheikhs, over and above his government salary.

A week before the sheikhs arrive, reconnaissance groups start a daily survey to spot houbara bustards whose sandy brown feathers camouflage them well in the desert.

Unlike ducks and geese that generally flock together, these birds prefer to stay alone, making it even more difficult to spot them. The surveyors create a detailed report, complemented by a map, to describe the location and the number of birds they have spotted.

“When a sheikh lands [in Kot Diji], the first thing he asks for is a map,” says Mujeeb. The manager of the palace presents the map to the sheikh who selects the area where he wants to hunt. “That is when we lose all sleep,” Mujeeb says.

Reconnaissance groups have to leave on their mission of spotting the birds at 4 am and, on most days, they come back only by 7 pm.

On the day of the hunt, at least 10 to 12 SUVs accompany the sheikh’s car — including three vehicles carrying personnel of Sindh Rangers for security. All the vehicles are imported from Abu Dhabi.

The cars swerve and skid at approximately 120 kilometres per hour through the desert to reach close to the place where the birds are supposed to be.

Some locals, trained in spotting recent footprints of houbara bustards, are the first ones to step out of the vehicles. The bird travels mostly at night. If the night is a warm one, it is likely to stay put but it will keep moving if the night is cold.

It is known to walk even longer distances on moonlit nights. As and when the footprints are found, the experts warn everyone in the hunting party to maintain some distance from the birds — of at least a few kilometres.

Then the experts report to others in the reconnaissance group about the direction the birds are taking. The sheikh and his entourage are informed through wireless phones.

Within no time, about a dozen SUVs start making their way to the place where houbara bustards are expected to be. A falconer sticks his head out through a vehicle’s sunroof — with a falcon perched on his arm. Everyone waits patiently for the houbara bustards to fly.

The falcon is released as soon as the houbaras spread their wings and take off in the air.“It’s a life or death situation,” says Mujeeb.

Not only for the houbara bustards but also for the local staff. If the birds escape before the sheikhs get them, the hunters could get very upset. “[But] the falcons never let the birds go,” Mujeeb adds.A full day in the desert may result in the killing of 10 birds — even 15 if the hunters are lucky.

Syed Tasvir Husain is a hunter by passion and a lawyer by profession. He is also an avid conservationist and has conducted extensive research on the need for protection of Pakistan’s wildlife sanctuaries.

His family owns a bird farm of its own. Known as Tauqeer’s Wildlife, it is approximately 10 minutes away from a palace owned by the royals of Abu Dhabi on Lahore’s Raiwind Road.

Sitting in a house built by his mother – illustrious singer Malika Pukhraj – near Punjab University in Lahore, Tasvir reminisces about his encounter with Sheikh Zayed.

It was in the early 1980s. Zulfiqar Shah, a former army colonel and a close aide of the sheikh, called Tasvir’s elder brother Tauqeer Husain. “His Highness would like to visit your farm,” Shah said.

Tauqeer was not in the town at the time so he asked his younger brother to receive the guest. “He was wearing a T-shirt,” Tasvir recalls. It was a sunny day and Sheikh Zayed had wrapped a kaffiyeh around his head casually rather than sporting his regal head dress. “He was a very fit man, good looking in his own way.”

Sheikh Zayed spoke to Tasvir through an interpreter. Pointing to peaco*cks roaming around the farm, he asked: “How fast does this bird fly?”

“It is fairly fast when it is in full flight, but it is not nearly as fast as the houbaras that you hunt,” Tasvir remembers telling Sheikh Zayed.

When the interpreter repeated his words in Arabic, the sheikh looked straight at Tasvir.

“How do you know about the houbara?” he asked.

“I hunt too,” responded Tasvir.

“Where do you hunt?” came the next question.

“I hunt on the same grounds where you hunt.”

Tasvir’s paternal ancestors belong to Rahim Yar Khan. “Our forefathers have been hunting in that area much, much before you came here,” he told Sheikh Zayed.

“In fact, we still hunt [in the same area],” Tasvir tells me.

Hunting the houbara bustard, commonly known as tilor, is prohibited by various wildlife protection laws in different parts of Pakistan.

“We are not fond of hunting [the] houbaras but we still hunt to make a point — if hunting them is not allowed under the law, why are foreigners allowed [to do it]?”

Mir Abdul Karim Nousherwani was a member of the district council of Kharan in 1980 when Sheikh Zayed first came to hunt houbara bustards near Washuk. He remembers the sheikh staying in the area for 15 days and, subsequently, receiving a 90-year exclusive lease of land to hunt there.

Nousherwani says Sheikh Zayed would hunt only in Washuk until the government allotted him other hunting grounds in Rahim Yar Khan.

Since those distant days, Nousherwani has won a Balochistan Assembly seat from Kharan four times, including in the last general election (his son Shoaib won the same seat twice – in 2002 and 2008 – and has been provincial home minister in 2002-08).

Over the same period, he became one of the main facilitators of Arab hunters in Kharan and Washuk. His assignments included escorting them to different places, providing them with food and other necessities and making sure they were protected.

He would receive a new car from the sheikhs every year as well as money to perform hajj and umrah. But Nousherwani is not the only Pakistani facilitator of these royals from Abu Dhabi. Maybe not even the first.

There was also the late Agha Hasan Abedi, a Karachi-based banker who would set up the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), mostly with money from Sheikh Zayed’s family.

As a senior employee of the United Bank Limited in the 1970s, he had developed close ties with the UAE sheikhs.

There were three other bankers among their early facilitators — Zafar Iqbal, who worked as a senior official of the National Bank of Pakistan in the UAE; a man named Islam from Sialkot; and another person named Mohsin from Karachi, says Nousherwani.

It was through the combined efforts of these bankers and Nousherwani that the military government of General Ziaul Haq allotted land to Sheikh Zayed, first in Washuk and then in Rahim Yar Khan.

Chaudhry Munir came into the picture a little later but seems to have surpassed all other facilitators as far as proximity to the Abu Dhabi royals is concerned.

A businessman from a settler family of Rahim Yar Khan, he has put together a social and political capital, slowly and steadily, that few others in Pakistan have.

Munir’s sister is known to be married into the royal family of Abu Dhabi; his son is married to the granddaughter of Nawaz Sharif and his daughter is married to the son of Lieutenant-General Naveed Mukhtar, director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

“Have you sent a plumber to the Qataris?” an inquisitive Major (retd) Tahir Majeed asks Major (retd) Abdul Rauf, with one hand in the pocket of his khaki jacket, the other holding a smartphone to his ear.

Rauf tears a bite out of peeled sugarcane (taken from a field nearby), looks at Majeed, jogs his memory and then shakes his head in the negative.

“They have been talking about some plumber,” Majeed repeats.

Rauf suddenly switches to speaking in Punjabi and asks someone to bring more sugarcane for him.

Both former Pakistan Army officers are employees of Houbara Foundation International. Majeed looks after visiting dignitaries from Dubai but this season he has also helped the Qataris set up their hunting camps in Layyah and Bhakkar.

The 50-bed hospital in Kharan, built by Abu Dhabi in 1992, has an operation theatre locked from the outside.

The two former majors are sitting on the west bank of the Indus river in Rojhan, a town in Rajanpur district. It is winter in southwestern Punjab and the Indus is as still and clear as the sky above it.

Their location is marked by a pontoon bridge that links Rojhan with Rahim Yar Khan district on the eastern bank of the Indus.

The royals from Abu Dhabi have financed the bridge. It helps the locals transport their sugarcane crop to sugar factories in Rahim Yar Khan without having to take a longer, and therefore more expensive, route.

A permanent bridge is at some stage of construction about 15 kilometres upstream but work on it is on hold. The pontoon bridge, available for all kinds of human and vehicular traffic, is open except in the months when the river has too much water to allow the pontoons to remain stable.

About 15 people work permanently on the bridge to keep it running. Around 100 more are hired temporarily every now and then to help the permanent staff with maintenance.

“The [Abu Dhabi] government has carried out quite a few development projects in Rojhan,” says Sardar Shabab Hussain Mazari. A short man in his early forties, he is wearing a black leather jacket to protect himself from the cold.

He is one of the many coordinators for the UAE government who together oversee 258 uplift works carried out in all four provinces of Pakistan.

Out of these, according to a list prepared by Houbara Foundation International, 28 are dispensaries and outpatient clinics, 14 are major roads and six are bridges.

Six airports, 26 housing projects for the poor that include accommodation for doctors and nurses working in the UAE-provided healthcare facilities, shops and toilet blocks mostly in Rajanpur, Rahim Yar Khan, Cholistan, Kharan, Mirpur Sakro, Washuk and Larkana, 30 schools and colleges in Peshawar, Swat, South Waziristan Agency, Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan, Rajanpur, Islamabad, Washuk, Kharan and Dera Ghazi Khan are also listed among them.

Generators to produce electricity in Washuk and Kharan, at least three major hospitals (one each in Lahore, Quetta and Rahim Yar Khan) and at least three centres for Islamic studies and research in universities in Karachi, Lahore and Bahwalpur are other Abu Dhabi-sponsored projects. There could be many others.

Houbara Foundation International ensures that construction for these projects runs smoothly and their eventual handover to provincial governments goes ahead without a hitch.

By its own claim, the foundation has expedited the pace of work on the projects.

"[Back] in 2002, a project would be handed over to the government five years after work on it started,” says Rana Kamaluddin, a senior official of Houbara Foundation International.

He also retired from the Pakistan Army as a colonel before he joined the foundation. “Now it takes about two years,” he says.

Kamaluddin’s job is to send “over a report about the issues of the projects to the [concerned] chief minister so that he issues directions [accordingly]”. That is done regularly to complete projects on time.

Even after being handed over to provincial governments, however, many projects have not achieved their intended development objectives. The 50-bed hospital in Kharan, built by Abu Dhabi in 1992, has an operation theatre locked from the outside.

No surgeon is present at the facility. The hospital does not offer medical care to local women because it does not have female staff. For complicated deliveries, women still have to travel to Quetta — a four-hour journey by road.

Many locals of Kharan and Washuk feel overlooked even otherwise. If the sheikhs spend 10 million rupees in Pakistan, 90 per cent of it is spent “on the other side of the country”, says Haji Abdul Karim Mirwani.

By the “other side” he means Rahim Yar Khan. Even employees at the palace in Washuk, many point out, are not locals. They always come from Rahim Yar Khan or some other part of Punjab, they say.

Nousherwani does not entirely agree with this. He says Sheikh Khalifa and his family employ more than 200 people in Kharan. He believes the reason why the palace staff comes from Rahim Yar Khan is not that there is any discrimination towards the locals of Washuk and Kharan.

These employees have been loyal to Abu Dhabi for years and have gained experience of managing a royal palace from their long years of work in Rahim Yar Khan, he argues.

Development projects in Rahim Yar Khan also seem to be doing better than in other parts of the country. The H H Sheikh Khalifa Public School has a state-of-the-art auditorium with close to 500 seats and a Cambridge-system curriculum.

A dispensary set up and mainly run with money from the UAE (Houbara Foundation International also pays for the running costs) offers cheap healthcare to patients from low-income homes. People come here for treatment sometimes even from Sindh.

A letter sent recently to the Chief Justice of Pakistan carries photographs of 27 checkpoints spread across Cholistan Desert in Rahim Yar Khan and its neighbouring Bahawalpur district.

These checkpoints, the letter alleges, are manned by a “private army” consisting of the staff of UAE royals working “under the garb of game and hunting supervisors”.

Headed by one Major (retd) Irfan, alleges another letter sent to the Herald, the “private army … has divided Cholistan in ... [nine] different sectors”.

These checkpoints are set up along various roads that link Abu Dhabi palaces in Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan with either hunting grounds in Cholistan or with two private airstrips – called Al-Habieb and Al-Ghaba – in the heart of the desert.

Pick-up trucks and jeeps can be seen patrolling here. A large part of Cholistan, criss-crossed by Abu Dhabi-built roads – which have milestones and signposts in Arabic – becomes virtually off limits for locals during the houbara-hunting season.

Officials at Houbara Foundation International deny these allegations. They say the only checkpoints in the area are set up by Punjab’s wildlife department and are manned by government functionaries only.

The letters do acknowledge the presence of wildlife department officials at some of the checkpoints but insist that theirs is only a token presence to legitimise operations of the private force.

Evidence suggests some use of force by patrolling personnel in the area. One video shows members of the wildlife department holding a local man by his arms and legs. It is not clear what for.

Another video shows some gunmen going through a villager’s cell phone to check if it has pictures of houbara hunting.

The letters list many similar incidents: a local landowner, Nawaz Nangiana, was “badly tortured” after he was taken to a checkpoint at Bijnot village; an old Cholistani, Mureed Las, was kidnapped by the private force; the son of one Haji Gul Mohammad Mahr was kidnapped and kept in custody for three days; his kidnappers also snatched 8,000 rupees from him.

The letters accuse the employees of UAE royals of committing other wrongdoings as well. These actions, according to the writer of the two letters, who wishes to remain anonymous, include kidnapping and even rape and murder.

He cites a story known publicly in the area that accuses some men at a checkpoint of killing two doctors of Ahmadpur Sharqia government hospital.

Munir insists that those not allowed to hunt houbara bustards are making up stories to make UAE royals look bad when, in fact, they have done a lot for Pakistan.

“In [the] 1980’s three young girls of Khanpur were taken to the palace by one of the supervisors on the pretext of showing them around the palace. All three of them were [raped] … and the matter was hushed up …”

The letters also allege palace officials have blocked a canal in Rahim Yar Khan and diverted its water to irrigate an Abu Dhabi-owned plantation called Salluwali farm.

Abdul Rub Farooqi, executive director of Jaag Welfare Movement, set up in 1997 as a non-profit organisation for social uplift in Rahim Yar Khan, is even more direct in his criticism. In his opinion, the presence of sheikhs from Abu Dhabi has not had a benign impact on the area.

Farooqi has also worked for the United Nations Children’s Fund as a child protection consultant and claims that more than 15,000 children were taken from Rahim Yar Khan to the UAE between the 1970s and 2005 to work as camel jockeys.

“Thousands of women were also taken [to the UAE along] with those children,” he says. “Not only would they be [employed in] prostitution, they would also give birth to children of the [camel] farm owners,” he claims.

Munir denies these allegations, even when he explains that he has nothing to do with development projects being undetaken by UAE rulers.

He dismisses claims that a “private army” is operating in Cholistan and says the division of the desert in sectors is a mechanism for easy navigation, rather than a tool for control.

“These are wildlife department officers [deployed] to [check] locals from hunting [houbara bustards] illegally.”

If you visit the desert and see the various projects built by royals of Abu Dhabi and those from other Arab countries, he says, “you cannot possibly believe that there is a private army” harassing the locals here.

The suggestion is unambiguous: Arabs are facilitating the locals, not making their lives difficult.As far as camel jockeys are concerned, Munir says no illegal trafficking of children ever took place.

“No such thing happened in the past. Nor does it happen now,” he says. Those who went to the UAE to work as jockeys were taken there after their parents had agreed and received substantial amounts of money, he adds.

As for allegations of murder, rape, harassment and women trafficking, he says, “These are false stories and there is no real, tangible basis for these claims.”

In January this year, officials at Rahim Yar Khan’s Sheikh Zayed Airport received a fax, alerting them about a plane carrying 14 passengers claiming to be an advance team for a sheikh’s hunting expedition — seven of them were guards, the rest were waiters.

They were all Indian nationals. The plane was just about to land when the fax arrived.Concerned about the safety of the airport and its staff, aviation authorities switched off all lights at the airport.

They called in security and asked the plane to turn around and leave. Some sources claim that all 14 passengers were from the Indian army but there is no evidence to verify this claim.

A different version of the same incident claims the plane was made to wait but the Indian nationals were never allowed to get off. They waited a few hours in the plane while an outraged UAE official spoke to Pakistan’s foreign ministry officials in Islamabad.

The passengers, however, left Pakistan after that conversation. Earlier the same month, six Indian nationals belonging to the “advance team” of a dignitary from the UAE landed in Badin, Sindh. They managed to leave the airport even when they did not have security clearance.

Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan certainly had these incidents in mind when, on April 25 this year, he approved a new set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for all foreigners visiting Pakistan to hunt animals.

The new procedures require the ministry of foreign affairs to “share information of the staff associated with foreign dignitaries with all relevant quarters a week before they arrive in Pakistan”, a report in daily Dawn said.

Under the new SOPs, “Foreign guests and dignitaries are now required to share information regarding their travel details [with] the relevant authorities at least 72 hours prior to their arrival.”

The government has also banned “the issuance of landing permits (a visa for 72 hours issued upon arrival) and requires all foreigners, intending to hunt in Pakistan, to obtain a visa before they arrive in the country”.

Such departments as “the Federal Investigation Agency, the Anti-Narcotics Force, [Pakistan] Customs and the local administration” have been directed “to provide immigration, customs, security and other facilities at the designated landing points” for the hunting parties and their staff.

The protocol division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has three types of assignments: it receives foreign dignitaries, makes special logistic arrangements when a foreign head of state or government visits Pakistan and provides foreign missions, such as consulates, with security and cars.

It is also responsible for issuing special hunting permits for foreign heads of states or governments on behalf of the Pakistani government.

The permits are issued after the federal government makes “special relaxations in the provincial wildlife legislation … to respect bilateral relations with the Gulf countries,” says Mahmood Akhtar Cheema, country representative of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international non-profit organisation.

The process goes roughly like this: a royal hunting party approaches the Prime Minister’s Office that directs the foreign ministry to issue the permits, specifying the hunting area, number of houbara bustards that can be hunted and the number of falcons that can be brought in for the hunt.

These decisions are made in close coordination with the concerned federal and provincial departments, including wildlife departments.

Where hunting can be done and where it is prohibited is decided on the basis of information available with these departments. Security arrangements are made accordingly.

After the permits are issued and handed to the foreign hunters, the protocol division steps back and the customs and immigration departments take over.

Each falcon that enters Pakistan with the hunters has its own passport — to ensure that the same number of falcons are taken back and not more. The staff and other equipment coming with the hunters also go through similar controls — at least on paper.

Many hunting parties land at private airports or airstrips, arriving in their private planes. It is not clear if the customs and the immigration operations are carried out there — and how strictly, if at all.

The question is: why should Pakistan bother to issue special permits for hunting a bird that the Pakistanis themselves are not allowed to hunt?

Because we need to maintain close ties with the rich Arab countries, suggests a report prepared by Houbara Foundation International. It mentions multiple economic and financial benefits that Pakistan can get by keeping Arab monarchies happy through incentives such as hunting permits.

“Due to huge Sovereign Reserves with these countries, their economic managers actively try and locate avenues of investment which are safe and profitable.

For example, Abu Dhabi has a reserve of $1 trillion. Saudi Arabia $800 billion. Qatar has the largest reserves of gas in the world. Saudi Arabia has the largest reserves of oil in the world.

Dubai, in a very short time, has become one of the largest hubs of finance and commerce,” the report states.

These countries also offer lucrative markets for Pakistani products. “Pakistan has developed modern tanks, JF-17 aircraft … likely to be purchased by these countries,” the report points out.

It then issues a warning. “The Royal families have many other choices and hosts available to them in other countries. It would be unfortunate for Pakistan and the local economies if the Royal families were to stop coming for their favourite sport …”

The Arab hunters also provide funds and resources to provincial wildlife departments that they otherwise do not have, says Kamaluddin.

Each hunting party brings in nearly 15 vehicles with it for the hunt and these are also used for patrolling, he says and adds that these vehicles help the wildlife department officials to protect hunting areas “from private hunting parties and poachers”.

The ability to patrol easily helps these officials to also “protect the habitat” of other animals such as deer.

If these protections are not available, says Mukhtar Ahmed, the number of houbara bustards in Pakistan will decline due to illegal hunting and poaching.

Poaching is a serious threat in poverty-stricken parts of Pakistan where the bird is generally found. A single houbara bustard caught alive can fetch as much as 35,000 rupees.

The poachers sell the birds in the UAE to those who want to train their falcons for hunting. Houbara meat is also considered an aphrodisiac.

If Houbara Foundation International is to be believed, issuing special permits to Arab dignitaries for the hunting of houbara bustards is in Pakistan’s ecological, economic and diplomatic interests.

But why should an Arab dignitary take so much trouble for the transitory thrill of seeing his falcon kill a bird? More specifically, why should dignitaries from the rich Arab monarchies spend so much money in securing hunting rights in Pakistan?

They want to pay back, says Kamaluddin. They are thankful to Pakistan for having looked after them, especially the UAE, he says. “Their banking system was established by the BCCI and they call Pakistan their second home.”

Another reason, according to Kamaluddin, is that the rich Arab countries are worried about their future. “They are not nuclear powers, nor do they have big armies. So they turn to Pakistan … And the world knows we are capable of retaliating. So they find a future in us, find help in us.”

Seen from this national security and foreign relations perspective, anyone opposing the arrival of Arab hunting parties must be playing in the hands of Pakistan’s enemies.

Kamaluddin emphasises that by pointing out how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the UAE almost coincided with a ban on houbara hunting imposed by a bench of the Supreme Court in 2015.

In order to totally isolate us, the Arabs have to be pushed away from us, Kamaluddin says. “If the [Indians] wanted us to get into a conflict with our allies, they found the easiest way [through the ban].”

A three-member bench of the Supreme Court had been hearing, for some time, multiple petitions seeking a ban on houbara bustard hunting. It announced its verdict on August 19, 2015, just two days after the head of the bench, Justice Jawwad S Khawaja, had assumed office as chief justice.

The bench declared: “Neither the Federation nor a Province can grant license/permit to hunt the Houbara Bustard.”

The judges directed the federal government to fulfil “its obligation under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flaura and Fauna (CITES) and the Convention on [Conservation of] Migratory Species (CMS).” Pakistan is a signatory to both.

The court also prohibited the government from permitting “the hunting of any species which is either threatened with extinction or categorized as vulnerable”.

Not everyone was happy with the court’s decision. Some locals took out rallies in Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan in November 2015 protesting the ban.

Participants of the rally in Rahim Yar Khan, particularly, insisted that Arabs have brought a lot of development and jobs for them and banning them from hunting would affect the well-being of the area.

The federal and provincial governments also challenged the decision before a larger bench of the Supreme Court that lifted the ban on January 22, 2016.

The judgment stated that the CMS did not impose “a duty upon the federation or the provinces to place a ban on the hunting of the species” that has an “unfavourable conservation status”.

The convention only obliges its signatory states “to enter into bilateral or multilateral agreements or treaties for the conservation of such (migratory) species”. As far as CITES is concerned, the bench said it was not relevant to the hunting of houbara bustards since the issue at hand was hunting, not trade.

The bench, therefore, concluded that no law exists in Pakistan to impose a permanent ban on hunting the bird. The judges, however, recommended that a strict code of conduct be implemented to regulate the hunt.

The judgement also contained a note of dissent penned by Justice Qazi Faez Isa.

He wrote:

“Code of Conduct for hunting [the] Houbara Bustard … to show that considerable care regarding over-hunting of the Houbara Bustard has been taken ... was issued without jurisdiction as the present matter did not fall within the domain of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, therefore, an officer of the said ministry too had no jurisdiction to issue the said code. Said code also had no statutory backing of any law, rule or regulation.”

Other judges did not address the matter regarding jurisdiction to issue the code of conduct — leaving it unclear as to whether the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still has that jurisdiction or not.

Advocate Sardar Kalim Ilyas, who is representing a petitioner at the Lahore High Court in a petition filed in 2013 against the hunting of houbara bustards, believes the jurisdiction for issuing the code of conduct and the hunting permits actually lies with the provincial governments. According to him, all codes and permits issued by the foreign ministry should be considered illegal and unlawful.

But, as Ilyas points out, provincial governments cannot declare something legal for foreigners that they have declared illegal for locals.

The Lahore High Court has still to make a decision on the petition even though its chief justice has once remarked that sustainable hunting can be allowed — that is, if the population of the houbara bustards is either stable or increasing.

The wildlife department of Punjab claims the population is increasing. The same department in Sindh claims it is stable. The two departments are said to have conducted detailed surveys to calculate the number of houbara bustards in Pakistan. “They spend quite a number of months working on the surveys.

They visit every place and they personally spot the houbaras,” says Kamaluddin. Houbara Foundation International, he says, assists them in the exercise.

Figures collected by Punjab’s wildlife department in these surveys state that there has been a 10.11 per cent rise in the population of houbara bustards in Cholistan between 2012 (when 1,680 birds were spotted) and 2015 (when 1,850 birds were spotted). Increase in their number has been even steeper in Dera Ghazi Khan and Rajanpur districts — 1,512 birds were spotted there in 2012 but this number rose by a whopping 33.27 per cent in 2015.

The number of birds spotted in these two districts, according to official statistics, was as low as 279 in 2010. According to the Sindh’s wildlife department, 8,100 birds arrived in the province in 2012-2013; 690 of them were hunted and 7,410 flew back to their breeding grounds. In the 2014-2015 hunting season, 6,350 birds arrived in Sindh; 580 of them were hunted and 5,770 returned to their breeding grounds.

According to department officials, the number of houbara bustards arriving in Sindh did not decline because of hunting but “due to unfavourable [meteorological] condition”.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s hunting party from Dubai killed 120 houbara bustards in Bahawalpur this last hunting season, an official of Houbara Foundation International says. (He also claims to have deposited 8.7 million rupees in government accounts on behalf of the UAE government, though he does not explain what the money is for since, officially, Pakistan does not charge foreign dignitaries for their hunting expeditions.)

The number of birds hunted by Al Maktoum, however, appears to be a violation of the code of conduct provided to each hunting party: no more than 100 houbara bustards can be hunted during one expedition which is to be completed within 10 days.

The number also contradicts official statistics. A ‘Field Report Regarding Houbara Hunting In the Allocated Areas of Punjab [2016-2017]’ signed by Muhammad Naeem Bhatti, deputy director of Punjab’s wildlife department, states only 57 birds were hunted in Bahawalpur this season. If that number is to be believed then Al Maktoum’s expedition certainly left after much less game than the official of the Houbara Foundation International claims.

Whatever the reality, both figures cannot be correct simultaneously. The department’s numbers, in any case, are highly suspect. Al Maktoum’s party was not the only one that hunted in Bahawalpur in the last hunting season. There were many others. If each of them hunted even a part of the birds allowed to them, the number would easily cross the figure of 57.

Does that mean that official surveys about the overall number of houbara bustards in Pakistan are also suspect? If one listens to non-governmental organisations, those numbers look really dicey.

According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, published in 2016, the population of houbara bustards, also known by their scientific name Chlamydotis macqueenii, has undergone rapid decline over three generations (20 years) owing largely to unsustainable hunting levels, as well as habitat degradation. The list declares the bird as a ‘vulnerable’ species — just one stage away from being an ‘endangered’ species.

Total global population of houbara bustards is estimated to be anywhere between 78,960 and 97,000. But the compilers of the red list are careful to point out that determining the exact number of the birds is a major challenge and, thus, any data must be taken as a “tentative best estimate”.

BirdLife International, a global non-profit that has local partners in 120 countries and territories across the world, also confirms “ongoing declines” in the number of the houbara bustards in “some regions”. In Kazakhstan, which is home to 50 per cent of the global population of houbara bustards, their numbers are estimated to have declined by 26-36 per cent. “Anecdotal evidence indicates that there has been a recent decline in Iran and hunting pressure has been very high in Iraq … and Pakistan … in recent years.”

Houbara Foundation International was set up in Lahore in 1995, facilitated by a company called Security Consultants and Services Private Limited that employs 750 people, mostly former servicemen.The two entities operate from the same premises in the Upper Mall area of Lahore.

The foundation has two stated missions: to assist government departments in “enforcing the law of the land” in wildlife-related fields – with help from UAE dignitaries – and to facilitate the construction of welfare projects in areas where Arab dignitaries come to hunt.

Pakistan provides land for these projects and the Arab dignitaries fund them. The foundation does not deal with any financial transactions — it does not even have a bank account.

Kamaluddin, who is chief executive officer of Security Consultants and Services Private Limited besides being a senior member of the foundation, does not accept the statistics that suggest a downward trend in the global population of houbara bustards.

“When people say that the population is declining, we ask them [as to] what is the basis of [their] statement, especially in our country,” he says.

He doubts if any counting can be done while the birds are migrating from one country to another. If they are really counting the birds during migration, “that means they are doing surveys in Central Asia, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Balochistan, Punjab and Sindh”. Something almost impossible, he suggests.

Kamaluddin also insists that he has never heard about any of the international organisations “doing this survey” in Pakistan.

UAE rulers still seem to agree with these international organisations. As early as the 1970s, Sheikh Zayed realised that the population of the bird was decreasing. He initiated a programme dedicated to sustainable hunting and the protection of houbara bustards.

That programme culminated in the formation of the International Fund for Houbara Conservation (IFHC).

One of the main functions of the fund is to breed the houbara bustards in captivity and release them into their natural habitats. In 2016 alone, according to the fund’s own figures, 53,743 houbara bustards hatched across its facilities.

In 2014, 46,014 houbara bustards were produced by the fund’s facilities and 33,685 were released in the wild.

The main question around these efforts is: how do houbara bustards bred in captivity survive once they are released in the wild? According to IFHC’s director general, Mohammed Saleh Al Baidani, the survival rate was 30 per cent last year which, according to him, is not a bad figure.

According to IUCN, promoting the breeding of houbara bustards in its natural habitat is a preferred solution over captive breeding. Each female bird on average lays two to three eggs.

If arrangements can be made for the hatching of those eggs in the wild, the newborn birds may have a better survival rate than those nurtured in captivity, the organisation argues.

On the evening of March 1, 2017, a four-member IFHC team landed at Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International Airport. It brought with it 500 captive bred houbara bustards.

The team, led by Al Baidani, set out the same night for Sheikh Muhammad Bin Zayed Deer Breeding and Houbara Research Centre at Lal Suhanra National Park, a few kilometres south-east of Bahawalpur city. They arrived at their destination early next morning.

The research centre is set up on an area 15 kilometres long and four kilometres wide. Fenced off from the rest of the park, it has two entrances and is not open to the public — security towers surround it on all sides.

That day, scores of media vans and government officials made their way to the centre where 200 captive bred houbara bustards were to be released into the desert.

When the scheduled time for the release arrived, the birds were picked up one by one from their cages and helped into the air. Many of them flapped their wings and flew away. Many others made just a short flight before getting down to the earth to walk back near the crowd.

The team then hurried to Bahawalpur airport where a private jet was ready to take them to Rahim Yar Khan for the release of the remaining 300 birds. Poles with flags of Abu Dhabi and Pakistan fluttering in the desert wind indicated the release site.

As the afternoon temperature soared, birds were taken out one by one from more than 20 cages and set free.

One bird was found dead even before it could be taken out of its cage — an electronic tracking device around its body was removed and was attached to another bird.

Within the next couple of days another 70 to 80 houbara bustards were spotted dead close to where they had been released. Some were attacked by wild animals; others died because of the heat.

The remaining birds could very well have been hunted by a prince from Abu Dhabi who happened to hunt in Rahim Yar Khan a day or two later.

An earlier version of this article was published in the Herald's May 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

Muhammad Saleem, 37, grows wheat, cumin, watermelons and onions in Balochistan’s Nushki district. He uses an electricity-run tube well to irrigate 100 acres of land that he owns. Over the last several years, he has seen his crops suffer every season due to water shortage since availability of electricity for his tube well has become highly uncertain. Not only have scheduled hours for power outages been long, unscheduled outages have become even longer.

“We get electricity hardly six hours a day,” says Saleem. “That is insufficient to cater to our irrigation needs.” During peak seasons for such crops as wheat, cumin, watermelons and onions – that coincide with the summer months of May, June, July, August and September – unscheduled power outages can be as long as four to five days. This ruins crops and causes grave financial loss to farmers, he says.

Farmers in a number of areas in north-western and central Balochistan, such as Loralai (where almond farming has virtually collapsed), Chagai, Mangochar, Pishin and Kalat, have migrated to cities where they work as vegetable/fruit vendors and shop assistants, mostly living with relatives. Their farms are turning into a barren land mass because they are unable to irrigate them, Saleem says.

Even in Quetta, Balochistan’s provincial capital, electricity is not available five to six hours every day. In some areas of the city, duration for outages stretches to eight hours a day and this has been the case since 2007. “Load-shedding has brought me to the brink of closing down my business,” says Ghafoor Ahmed, who runs a tailoring shop on Sariab Road. While most other local shopkeepers use diesel generators to produce their own electricity during outages, Ahmed says he “cannot afford a generator”.

Shopkeepers, flour mill owners and those associated with the cottage industry have been affected the most. Tariq Mehmood, a former furniture dealer, has closed down his “furniture workshop due to non-availability of uninterrupted power” supply. “I was not able to fulfil commitments to my customers,” he says.

Also, unlike many other parts of Pakistan where decrease in temperature reduces electricity’s demand and subsequently decreases load-shedding, electricity vanishes in Quetta and many northern and central parts of Balochistan the moment it starts to rain and snow. Whenever it rained and snowed heavily in January and February this year in these parts, inclement weather disrupted power transmission lines and people had to make do without electricity for days.

Whenever people pray for rain and snowfall (which has become rarer in recent years), they also pray for continuous supply of electricity, says Mirza Nadeem Baig, a 56-year-old shopkeeper in a market on Quetta’s Jinnah Road.

Whenever people pray for rain and snowfall (which has become rarer inrecent years), they also pray for continuous supply of electricity.

Officials of the Quetta Electric Supply Company (Qesco) do not deny these claims and complaints. They acknowledge that Balochistan is not receiving electricity “according to its requirement”. Rehmatullah Baloch, Qesco’s chief executive officer, says the province needs around 1,650 megawatts of electricity but is getting only 650 megawatts from the national grid.

That is only half the problem, though. Even if the national grid wants to transmit to Balochistan all the electricity it requires, Baloch says, transmission lines cannot handle that load. “We could only get up to 900-950 megawatts when we tried to [increase the transmission of electricity],” he says. “When we tried to get more electricity than that, the main transmission lines started tripping.”

A related problem is electricity lost and stolen during transmission. The province loses anywhere between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of its electricity (depending upon the area and the state of the transmission lines) to these two factors.

And, lastly, electricity bills amounting to 190 billion rupees have remained unpaid for the last seven to eight years in Balochistan. Owners of 29,000 or so tube wells comprise the largest number of these defaulters, even when the provision of electricity to them remains heavily subsidised: every tube well operator gets 10,000 units of electricity each month at a lump sum price of 75,000 rupees but he pays only 10,000 rupees out of it.

Of the remaining amount, the provincial government pays 60 per cent and the federal government pays 40 per cent. The total amount of this subsidy reaches 22 billion rupees every year. All these problems are emblematic of what is wrong with the electricity sector, not just in Balochistan but all over Pakistan. Are there any efforts to fix them?

Mohammad Bilal clambers into the back seat of a dusty pickup truck making its way from Muzaffarabad up into Neelum Valley in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. He courteously apologises for the state of the vehicle. Conditions here are rough, he says.

A stout man in his mid-forties with an untidy beard, Bilal serves as deputy director (geology) at the Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project. He hails from a Gilgit Baltistan village near Chilas. Bilal received his college education from Muzaffarabad and when work commenced on the project almost nine years ago, he left his ancestral home to shift to his workplace along with his family.

We twist around snow-capped mountains and race up a dirt road as the site camp for Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project comes into view: Pakistani offices, Chinese offices, temporary access roads, barracks for security personnel, living quarters, kitchens. Bilal’s own work includes analysing various types of soil, rock and fault lines at different levels in the ground to ascertain which area is suitable for which kind of construction.

Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project is small compared to Tarbela Dam — firstly, because its purpose is just to divert, not store, water; secondly, Tarbela happens to be the largest earth-filled dam in the world. But it is hard to forget that at least seven people have lost their lives building the former and at least another 19 have been injured in multiple accidents at the site.

Donning a white construction helmet, Bilal tries to explain various parts of the project in layman’s terms. “Water coming from upstream is stopped at the spillway by three floodgates. It is then diverted into six canals where sediment is separated from it before it is channelled into an 11-metre wide tunnel on the side of the mountain.”

He demonstrates on a map how this tunnel slopes down at a gentle gradient, divides into two and then becomes one again, making a total fall of 421 metres before reaching an underground power house, 28 kilometres away from the spillway. After the waterfall runs the power house’s turbine and the national grid gets 969 megawatts of electricity, water will be discharged into the Jhelum river. It is an engineering marvel, he says excitedly.

"We get a lot of criticism for projects like Nandipur andNeelum-Jhelum but these are problems we inherited."

The project was approved back in 1989 at an estimated cost of 15.23 billion rupees. But political foot-dragging and repeated remodelling kept it on hold until 2002, when cost estimates were revised upwards to 84.5 billion rupees.

Then, in 2005, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck Azad Jammu and Kashmir and neighbouring parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, leaving at least 86,000 dead and 2.6 million displaced. Its epicentre was a mere eight kilometres away from the site of the project. That forced the planners to factor in the changed geographical and seismic realities.

In 2007, a Chinese consortium consisting of China Gezhouba Group Company Limited and China Machinery Engineering Corporation was awarded the contract to commence construction on the project at an estimated cost of 90.94 billion rupees.

Work began in early 2008 but the estimated cost swelled to 274.8 billion rupees within the next four years. Damaged machinery that required replacing, changing structure of the river after the earthquake and high interest on loans and taxation were some of the reasons cited for the extraordinary hike.

Around the same time, Transparency International Pakistan wrote a letter to the prime minister and heads of National Accountability Bureau, Public Procurement Regulatory Authority, Public Accounts Committee and Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda). The letter alleged that Wapda officials had received kickbacks worth at least 74 million US dollars in the procurement of two tunnel boring machines for the project. The amount was huge since the total cost of the machines – used in order to avoid highly time-consuming manual drilling and blasting – was reported to be about 2.5 times that: 184 million US dollars (excluding insurance).

That did not deter the project’s board of directors to reveal on March 30, 2015 that, under a newly revised proposal, the cost of the project had increased to 414 billion rupees. This revision, again, was done to compensate for the changing technological and geographical needs.

The news prompted a consortium of investors from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to refuse a 433-million US dollar loan for the project. In the blame game that ensued, Chinese contractors accused Wapda and the government of failing to procure money; Wapda alleged that the contractors had created “design problems” and made costly “mistakes”.

All this wrangling has delayed the completion of the project — first scheduled for 2015, then for 2016, and now for 2018. Each round of delays has exponentially increased the fears of investors and made it all the more difficult for the government to raise money.

A consortium of 16 Pakistani banks came to the government’s rescue in May 2016 and offered a loan of one billion US dollars — that amount still did not cover all the costs, says Nayyar Alauddin, project director for Neelum-Jehlum Hydropower Project.

In its desperation, the government went to China’s Exim Bank which offered a loan of 576 million US dollars, but at an exorbitant seven per cent interest rate. The loan deal is still in the works, he says. This is hampering the long-delayed financial closure of the project which, otherwise, is set to be completed next year.

Even earlier, the government had been employing other methods to raise money. In 2007, it came up with the ingenious idea of collecting a portion of the cost from electricity consumers.

Total money then required for the project was 130 billion rupees so the government imposed a per unit surcharge of 10 paisas on all electricity bills for eight years to raise half of that money.

The surcharge was extended for one more year when the cost of the project inflated to 414 billion rupees in 2015 — and for another 18 months beginning early 2017 as the cost estimate rose to 464 billion rupees.

Electricity consumers have, thus, paid 70 billion rupees over 10 years for a project that is still incomplete and is expected to provide electricity at a very high rate of 20 rupees per unit in the first 10 years of its operations.

Electricity consumers have paid 70 billion rupees over 10 years for aproject that is still incomplete and is expected to provideelectricity at a very high rate.

Baffling arithmetic aside, Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project is strategically crucial for Pakistan. Firstly, it is being built in an area that remains disputed between India and Pakistan. What makes it even more significant from a Pakistani perspective is that a mere 100 kilometres upstream, India is building Kishanganga Hydroelectric Plant on the Neelum river. The plant is scheduled to be completed around the same time as Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project.

Pakistan feared Kishanganga Hydroelectric Plant was meant to divert water required for Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project — a possible violation of the World Bank-guaranteed Indus Waters Treaty between Islamabad and New Delhi.

That is why Pakistan took the matter to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in Netherlands. After almost two years of deliberation, the court ruled in 2013 that India could divert a minimal amount of water to generate power but the country that completed its project first would have priority rights over water usage.

As a former senior Wapda official puts it, Pakistan started pursuing the construction of Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project earnestly and aggressively only when it came to realise that it might lose its rights over the water.

Other than that, most people in the industry do not see any serious problems being caused by the Indian project. “It is not big enough to have an impact on our project,” says Bilal. “In any case, there is more than enough water [at least] in the peak summer season to fulfil everybody’s needs and that is also the season when most electricity is required.”

“How far is India from here?” I ask.Bilal points to a snow-capped peak towering over Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project: “Behind this mountain.”

Industry veterans nostalgically remember the days when Wapda had jurisdiction over all things related to water and electricity — from dams and canals to power plants, transmission lines and grid stations. It employed a staff of at least 140,000 at its peak circa 2007 and earned enough to cover its own expenses, pay back its loans and yet save money for reinvestment. Over time, though, it became riddled with corruption and incompetence. Its failure to address the perennial shortage of electricity eventually ensured its slow decline.

Zafar Mehmood was Wapda’s chairman for about two and a half years before he tendered his resignation in August last year. He cited personal reasons for his departure but industry insiders suggest Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not satisfied with his performance.

Sharif’s political necessity to bring an end to load-shedding before the 2018 elections clashed with persistent delays in power projects — especially at Neelum-Jhelum and in the latest extension of Tarbela.

On a clear winter afternoon, Mehmood walks into the patio at Lahore Gymkhana, a private club for the rich and influential in Lahore. “[Wapda] was known to be a success story,” he begins with a hint of dejection. “It was meant to be an independent institution set up by international experts in 1959. [It was] modelled after the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States — its wings in East and West Pakistan reported only to the head of the state.”

At the time of Independence, Pakistan was producing only about 50 megawatts of electricity in major cities that had their own small generation and distribution systems. “Some major breakthroughs were achieved with the establishment of Wapda,” says Mehmood. “Beginning with Warsak [Dam],” he says, we built many dams including Mangla and Tarbela that “boosted electricity generation and, as a result, the economy”.

He cites a recent study that places the present net worth of projects completed by Wapda in the first 15 years of its operations at 23 billion US dollars. “All those projects were completed on time and within budget.” Pakistan, he says, was “the second country in Asia after Japan to build a unified national electricity distribution system”.

The downward slide started in 1974 when people from outside Wapda were first brought in to head it, says Mehmood. “Not to say there have been no brilliant individuals since then but Wapda’s greatest time was its initial years.”

Wapda “really hit a bump” with the controversial Kalabagh Dam project on the Indus river in the 1980s, the same time when electricity consumers across Pakistan first experienced load-shedding — or scheduled outage.

The project has been one of the most hotly debated topics in the country since it was first proposed in 1984 and elicits two extreme opinions: “We have to build it for our economic survival” versus “we have to bin it for the survival of our federation.” Although the latter has evidently won, the former has not forgotten or forgiven this ‘indiscretion’.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh are particularly vocal in their opposition to the dam, citing adverse ecological impacts and an unfair distribution of water and royalties. Punjabi politicians, along with a number of bureaucrats, engineers and energy sector experts, have generally spoken for the dam, claiming it will increase Pakistan’s ability to store water during monsoon months for use in drier months (an estimated 80 per cent of Pakistan’s water flows through its rivers in four months over the summer); it will help the country manage floods and will generate much-needed electricity.

General (retd) Pervez Musharraf did try to lobby for the dam but gave up soon enough, says Mehmood. “We were lucky to have initiated Ghazi-Barotha Hydropower Project (a 1,450 megawatt diversion canal power project on the Indus completed in 2003),” he says.

When the power crisis hit in 2004, Mehmood says, we had no project inthe pipeline to address it.

Pakistan also set up a number of oil-based private power plants in the mid-1990s, producing surplus electricity for three to four subsequent years. “In 1999, we had 1,000 megawatts of excess electricity,” says Mehmood. “When Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to visit Pakistan that year, India expressed interest in buying electricity from us” though “that did not work out because of a disagreement over tariff”.

That surplus gave the planners a false confidence while the public imagination was still focused firmly on Kalabagh Dam. The result: no investments were made in the electricity sector for an entire decade. When the power crisis hit in 2004, Mehmood says, we had no project in the pipeline to address it.

This was also the time when Pakistan started finding it difficult to arrange money for large infrastructure initiatives, he says. International donors such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and European banks had funded the two billion US dollar Ghazi-Barotha Hydropower project but were not willing to do the same for other hydropower projects such as Diamer-Bhasha Dam and Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project. “They were not keen to invest because they felt India would object.”

Initial investment in hydropower is steep. A run-of-the-river project such as Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project – in simple words, a power station built on a river without an attached reservoir to store water – requires billions of dollars.

If a reservoir is added, costs skyrocket further.“Tarbela, Mangla and even Warsak were not intended for electricity generation but for water storage and irrigation, which justified the huge expense on them,” says Mehmood. “Producing hydroelectricity from them [as a by-product] was, therefore, cheap.”

Wapda has been looking for other ways to produce electricity since the 1980s when it set up its first major thermal plant in Guddu, Sindh. It was to run on furnace oil. Similar plants were set up in Jamshoro in Sindh and in Kot Addu and Muzaffargarh in Punjab. These projects were meant to cover lean hydropower generation during winter and spring months when river flows drastically decrease, leaving little water to run electricity producing turbines, says Mehmood.

Later, private investors, known as independent power producers (IPPs), set up multiple thermal plants. It was with their arrival that Wapda’s monopoly over power generation came to an end. This necessitated a change in the authority’s structure as well.

Nawaz Sharif, who the prime minister then too, approached the World Bank in the late 1990s for ideas on how to restructure Wapda. After a slow transition, the organisation underwent “bifurcation” in 2007 — separating generation of electricity from transmission and distribution. Wapda’s remit was reduced to generating only hydropower.

All public sector thermal plants were handed over to four entities called GenCos (or generation companies). Bulk transmission of electricity was given to an organisation called the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC). Distribution of electricity to consumers became the responsibility of 10 regional distribution companies (DisCos). And the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) was set up to regulate all these entities.

The real test for Wapda’s successor organisations lies in their ability to generate their own money for their operations, Mehmood says. That is what Wapda failed to do, he adds.

He believes the government’s eventual goal is to privatise Wapda and its successor organisations entirely. “But nothing other than Kot Addu power plant has been privatised so far.”

Outgoing Federal Water and Power Secretary, Younus Dagha, agrees that “many steps were taken without a clear road map in mind” while handling Wapda. If privatisation was the goal, he says, it should have been implemented wholeheartedly. “And if privatisation was taking too long then steps should have been taken to strengthen Wapda’s successor departments in the interim.”

Dagha is critical of the way Wapda’s successor entities have been constituted. A real corporate culture will require putting those people in their boards who are financially invested in their operations so that they have pressure to perform, he says. He favours increased private sector participation but wants it to be balanced with public sector investment. “The government will always need to step in for bigger or less profitable projects that have long-term strategic importance.”

This is what the government is attempting under his watch. We are bringing in 29 private sector projects but we are also investing heavily in hundreds of our own initiatives, he says. “This kind of public-private participation works well for everybody.”

Or does it?

If you ever find yourself on the road from Gujranwala to Sialkot, look to your right as you cross the Upper Chenab Canal. You will see three gigantic towers, known as ‘flue-gas stacks’ in industry jargon. Adjacent to these are at least 10 other structures known as cooling towers and no less than 10 mammoth camouflage painted fuel tanks. Together with machines invisible from the outside, they comprise the Nandipur Power Plant — a government sector project always mired in controversy.

The plant is situated on the eastern bank of the canal but water is diverted to go around it, turning the site into a peninsula. A road dotted with several barricaded checkpoints goes inside the plant. A separate entrance from the main Sialkot-Gujranwala road leads into a residential colony, populated primarily by Chinese engineers. Security protocol in place makes the site seem less like a power plant and more like a secret cloning facility.

The power plant shares premises with Nandipur Hydropower Plant — a small run-of-the-canal facility set up in 1963 with an installed capacity of 13.8 megawatts. The site’s proximity to water was a crucial factor in its selection for building the new plant here — thermal power plants need massive amounts of water to keep their machinery cool.

The second factor was Nandipur’s location at the heart of an area that consumes 60 per cent of Pakistan’s electricity — the quadrangle of such industrial hubs as Lahore, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Sialkot that generates only 3 per cent of Pakistan’s total electricity. Experts have been advocating for a long time that power plants should be built near the area where electricity is consumed. This minimises electricity losses incurred in transmission, they argue, as well as the expense on transmission lines.

Plans for an electricity plant at Nandipur were first devised during Musharraf’s regime. China’s Dongfang Electric Corporation was given the contract to construct it in 2008 at an estimated cost of 23 billion rupees. It was to run on furnace oil and/or diesel.

“Nandipur and Neelum-Jhelum are frequently quoted as examples of powerprojects gone wrong from conception to execution.”

The project was initially estimated to be completed in 2011 but its handling by the federal law ministry caused a delay of more than two years as expensive machinery procured from General Electric lay abandoned at Karachi port. Dongfang Electric Corporation eventually pulled out of the contract, citing “colossal losses”.

The government, however, convinced it to carry on with construction with added incentives: the firm was to get 80 million US dollars as “remobilisation advance”. (Critics said the concession was illegal as it revised the original contract without inviting fresh bids.)

Soon enough it turned out that the machinery ordered for the plant was of smaller than required capacity. A second round of orders also proved to be miscalculated. A scandal – that adulterated furnace oil was used to run it later – was the last thing the already controversial project could suffer.

Simultaneously, every delay kept pumping up the cost — by 2013, it had more than doubled to 58 billion rupees. In May of that year, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif inaugurated the plant anyway. It remained operational for an embarrassingly minuscule duration of five days before sputtering to a halt. The electricity it produced during that time cost an astounding 42 rupees per unit. The reason: the plant was made to run on costly diesel oil to facilitate its early inauguration.

Those running the plant went so far as to say that they would not be responsible for any damage to the machinery as a result of hasty inauguration. Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, specifically, received a lot of criticism for what industry insiders perceived as his egoistic interference in the project.

After a tussle with the Federal Water and Power Minister, Khawaja Asif, he had appointed a bureaucrat instead of an engineer as managing director of the plant while it was still incomplete — the arrangement did not last more than a month. Grapevine says the reason for the bureaucrat’s appointment was that he had “made beautiful parks in Lahore”.

Nandipur remains idle at the moment – as it has largely been since its inauspicious inauguration – save for spurts of inefficient activity since July 2015 when the government came up with plans to spend another 30 million US dollars to switch it to liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The objective was to lower the cost of production, improve fuel efficiency and increase electricity generation capacity from 425 megawatts to 525 megawatts.

For the time it was operating, the plant’s production cost was still among the highest in Pakistan. In November 2015, for instance, it generated electricity at 10.25 rupees per unit. Much older plants in private and public sectors were, at the same time, producing electricity at 5 rupees and 8.3 rupees per unit, respectively.

Frustrated, the government first tried to handover the plant’s operations to a Malaysian firm, later to an American one, eventually giving it to a Chinese firm in February 2017. The new operator was allowed to charge the NTDC a tariff 80 per cent higher than what Nepra had originally determined. The tariff the consumers will pay as a result of this steep hike will be 11.64 rupees per unit — that is, if and when the plant becomes operational.

“Nandipur was an ill-conceived project,” says Dagha, not mincing his words. “Nandipur and Neelum-Jhelum are frequently quoted as examples of power projects gone wrong from conception to execution.”

But he sounds optimistic that the switchover to LNG will prove to be an efficient move since other LNG plants in the country are doing great. “Our LNG-powered mega projects of 1,200 megawatts each in Bhikhi (Sheikhupura district), Haveli Bahadur Shah (Jhang district) and Balloki (Kasur district) will be globally comparable for running at 60 per cent plus fuel efficiency (a measure of how much electricity a plant generates in comparison to the amount of fuel it consumes).”

He says the government has been able to save “over 100 billion rupees through close monitoring of the procurement process” for these plants. This will make their electricity cheap for consumers as their production tariff has “come down from the original estimate of 9.5 rupees per unit to 6.5 rupees per unit”.

The recently transferred secretary says the government is also pursuing a policy of shifting to indigenous fuels for power generation, mainly in order to protect electricity consumers from fluctuations in global fuel prices. As of now, private companies are setting up plants with a total capacity of almost 4,000 megawatts that are to run on imported coal.

These are located in Sahiwal (Punjab), Port Qasim (Karachi), Hub and Gwadar (Balochistan). A state-owned plant to run on imported coal is also being set up in Jamshoro with the capacity to generate 1,320 megawatts.

“Other than these projects, all thermal projects in the future will only be set up using local fuel — especially Thar coal,” says Dagha.

The question is how efficient will that be.

In a village in the desert district of Tharparkar in Sindh, a tall woman clad in shalwar kameez was welcoming mainly male guests at the entrance of a temporarily erected tent hall. She would then lead them to seats on a raised platform.

The day was February 17, 1995 and the woman was no other than then prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The occasion was the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the government of Pakistan and Consolidated Electric Power Asia of Hong Kong’s business tycoon Gordon Wu.

The MoU was expected to result in the setting up of two electricity generation plants of 316 megawatts each at Keti Bandar in Thatta district. These were initially to be run on imported coal but were to shift to coal mined from Thar desert as soon as it became available.

Khatau Jani, a journalist in Mithi, headquarters of Tharparkar district, was present at the event. In his fifties now and serving as the president of Mithi Press Club, he says Bhutto was so invested in the project that she herself was briefing journalists, ignoring official protocol. About 20 months later, her handpicked president, Farooq Leghari, sacked her government. The new administration in Islamabad, led by Nawaz Sharif, revoked the MoU.

It was in the late 1980s that reserves of about 175 billion tonnes of lignite coal were first reported to exist in Thar over an area of 9,100 square kilometres. Out of these, 27 billon tonnes of coal have been proven to exist since then.

The area where these proven reserves are located is in Islamkot subdivision of Tharparkar district. Sindh government has earmarked 1,000 square kilometres in the subdivision for coal mining, underground coal gasification and power generation. The area has been named Thar Coalfield and has been divided into 12 blocks of various sizes.

Work is at an advanced stage in four of these blocks, according to the website of Thar Coal and Energy Board, a government organisation supervising Thar Coalfield from its headquarters in Karachi. Three companies have been issued mining leases; one of them has achieved financial closure for its project, the website states.

That firm is Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company, a joint venture of Engro PowerGen Limited and the Sindh government with 60 per cent and 40 per cent shares, respectively. The company is also setting up a 660 megawatt electricity generation plant in Thar Coalfield.

Surrounded by books and piles of documents, Jani remains an unsatisfied man. He criticises Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) for failing to use Thar’s coal reserves for power generation over the last seven years. “Sindh got full control over Thar coal reserves after the adoption of the 18th Amendment [in 2010] but two successive PPP governments in the province have failed to make even a single electricity generation plant operational in Thar,” he says.

On the other hand, Jani says, the party’s handling of social and environmental issues related to coal mining in Thar “has left several question marks on its intentions, integrity and sincerity with people”.

According to a report prepared by Hagler Bailly Pakistan, a consultancy based in Islamabad for Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company, 55,150 people live in 61 villages located in Thar Coalfield; there are nine villages with 7,570 residents in the block where Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company is working.

Local residents complain they have not been compensated for their lost homes and livelihoods in the lone block where mining has started (people living in other blocks are not yet told to leave their villages).

Sitting on a carpet outside Islamkot Press Club, some 350 kilometres south-east of Karachi, is a man in his late twenties. On an afternoon that feels too hot for February, he is writing addresses on envelopes and stuffing them with papers. Every now and then, he stops writing to shake hands with visitors.

The man is Leela Ram Manjiani. He is running a protest campaign against the construction of a reservoir near his village, Gorano, 25 kilometres south of Thar Coalfield, to dispose effluents produced during coal mining. “We are not against development but we want it to be sustainable and beneficial for the indigenous people of Thar,” says Manjiani.

A petition filed by a local resident at the Sindh High Court states the original disposal plan envisaged a pipeline bringing effluents to a reservoir at the village of Dukkur Shah, 10 kilometres from Gorano, for further drainage to marshes of Rann of Kutch on the border between India and Pakistan.

In early 2015, Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company’s officials started a survey near Dukkur Shah. During the survey, they realised that Gorano was a better place for a reservoir. They could acquire 1,500 acres of land there (as opposed to the 600 acres they could acquire in Dukkur Shah) and two tall sand dunes formed a natural depression in the land near Gorano, thus reducing the cost of construction. But, most significantly, a huge reservoir at Gorano could spare the company money that would be spent on drainage of effluents to Rann of Kutch.

In May last year, the company started acquiring land and began building the reservoir without first getting a mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment approved by relevant authorities, the petition states. The provincial authorities had not even issued a statutory notification for acquiring land around Gorano at the time.

It was only after local residents moved the Hyderabad circuit bench of the Sindh High Court on July 1, 2016 against the construction of the reservoir that a land acquisition notification was finally issued on September 13, 2016, says Manjiani.

Zubair Ahmed Abro is appearing pro bono before the Sindh High Court as the lawyer of the petitioners. He says Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company presented an EIA in the court that does not pertain to the reservoir at Gorano but is about the drainage pipeline from Thar Coalfield to Dukkur Shah.

Even later in the proceedings, the company submitted a report by a committee constituted by the Sindh Environment Protection Agency to ascertain whether effluents would be contaminated with heavy metals and whether such contamination would exceed limits set by the National Environment Quality Standards.

But Agha Wasif, secretary of Sindh’s energy department, has no doubt about Gorano being a part of the effluent disposal scheme from the very beginning. “Gorano was always there as a secondary storage or spillover option after the reservoir in Dukkur Shah was to be filled to capacity,” he says. The decision to build a percolation/evaporation reservoir near Gorano, he adds, was taken after the wildlife department said the release of effluents with high total dissolved salts beyond Dukkur Shah could affect Rann of Kutch, which is protected under the Ramsar Convention, an international convention on wetlands.

At least one official document contradicts all this. Minutes of a meeting held on September 16, 2016 at the office of Commissioner Mirpurkhas division state the site at Gorano was discovered after it became known that a Rann of Kutch salt lake, known as Trisingri Dhand – where effluents were to be drained – is part of a protected Ramsar site.

The other reason the minutes cited for preferring Gorano was that the proposed Dukkur Shah pond was found to be of smaller capacity than initially thought. The minutes also disclose that the construction of Gorano reservoir started well before the process of land acquisition for it was completed.

Two other documents raise serious questions about the construction of a percolation/evaporation reservoir or pond in or near Gorano. The first is a bankable feasibility study report prepared by RWE Power International, a German firm that does feasibility studies for power generation projects.

It proposes that effluents should be treated and water, thus obtained, should be used for cooling of electricity generation plants (for which water will be brought from a drain many kilometres away) as well as for other industrial and domestic purposes.

The second document is an environment and social impact assessment report prepared by Hagler Bailly Pakistan. It was this report that became the basis for the granting of a mining lease to Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company.

The report discusses five options for effluent disposal: drainage to Rann of Kutch; drainage to the Left Bank Outfall Drain, which is waterway built by the federal government for drainage from waterlogged lands; creation of evaporation ponds; reinjection into ground; and disposal to salt lakes.

The report discards the first four options — the first can impact wetlands and create transboundary issues with India; the second involves high cost of pumping; the third requires large-scale resettlement of people; the fourth option has possible adverse affects on mining in other Thar Coalfield blocks. Yet, Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company is going ahead with the third option.

Two recent developments have made everything related to Thar coal look even more suspect. On March 24, 2017, the Supreme Court of Pakistan stated that high-level appointments at the Sindh Coal Authority were illegal. The judges stated the authority’s director general, deputy director hydrogeology, inspector of coal mines and prosecuting inspector were all “improperly hired”. About 10 days earlier, the Supreme Court ordered the sacking of the Sindh Environment Protection Agency’s director general, saying he was not qualified for the job.

Time now to look at the private sector.

The Private Power and Infrastructure Board (PPIB) was created in 1994 as a one-window facilitator to promote private participation in the power sector, says Tanveer Alam, a public relations official at the board, as he carefully reads out from his department’s website open in front of him.

The PPIB identifies sites where thermal and hydroelectric projects can be installed; it advertises those projects nationally and internationally to look for investors and opens a competitive bidding process. “When investors approach us, we scrutinise their portfolio,” says Tanveer. “Then we pick the best candidate and issue a letter of intent.”

Following this, the PPIB hands the candidate a ‘to-do’ list — registrations, tariff approvals and power-purchase agreements with the NTDC. Once all this is accomplished, a final contract is signed.Tanveer picks up the phone and punches in an extension. A phone rings somewhere outside and he jots down the details provided to him.

“We currently generate about 9,000 megawatts or 48 per cent of the total electricity in the country through 30 IPPs — 29 of these projects are thermal.” The lone hydroelectric plant under the PPIB remit is located near Mangla Dam and has a production capacity of 84 megawatts, he says.

He claims 29 more power plants – 14 of them hydroelectric, 11 coal-fired, three RLNG-based and one natural gas-based – will be set up by the private sector in the next few years with a combined capacity of 18,922 megawatts. Hydroelectric projects will be based mostly in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, coal-based ones mostly in Sindh and those running on RLNG all in Punjab.

Although hydroelectric projects take much longer and require bigger investment, Tanveer says, return on them is so high that those who can afford the initial investment do not necessarily mind it.

If a single IPP were to take the government to an international court,saying we have defaulted on payment, who will ever give us a loanagain?

High return on investment, indeed, is a norm across the electricity industry and partially explains why the IPPs (almost all of them running thermal power plants) tolerate circular debt that hit a 400-billion rupee mark earlier this year.

In spite of their recent newspaper adverts, threatening to cash the state’s sovereign guarantees in case payments due to them are not made urgently, the IPPs will be happy to get the government retire some part of the debt so that they do not face cash flow problems and, consequently, have to stop their operations.

The enigma of circular debt is essentially a yawning gap between the cost of producing electricity and the price paid by consumers, with line losses and electricity theft thrown in for good measure.

Let us consider this simplistic explanation: Pakistan State Oil sells 100 rupees worth of fuel to an IPP (step 1) to generate electricity worth the same amount to sell it to the NTDC (step 2) which, in turn, transmits that electricity to a DisCo (step 3) — by this time, 18 rupees worth of electricity is lost due to bad transmission lines; the DisCo sells the electricity worth 82 rupees to the consumer (step 4) but receives back only 75 rupees due to electricity theft and non-payment of bills.

In each cycle from step 1 to step 4, the system incurs a total loss of 25 rupees that continues accumulating as circular debt.

“It’s the same cycle we follow every time,” says an amused Tanveer. “The IPPs bring the issue to us, we forward it to the water and power ministry which tosses it to the finance ministry. The angrier ones serve the government notices and threaten to initiate legal action but each time they settle [to a compromise].”

He says the government is aware of the consequences of this cycle getting out of hand. “If a single IPP were to take the government to an international court, saying we have defaulted on payment, who will ever give us a loan again?”

Is there a permanent solution to circular debt?

Dagha stresses the need for developing “a more realistic tariff-making mechanism” in order to get rid of circular debt. He says Nepra assumes almost 100 per cent recovery while determining electricity tariff for consumers (making a minor allowance for line losses). This is impractical even in the most developed countries, the secretary points out.

Across the hall from Dagha at the Federal Secretariat sits Khawaja Asif, the water and power minister. He is reading A People’s History of the United States as I walk into his office. “I think the IPPs have been given unnecessary leverage,” he says. “They have recovered their investments years ago [through] high tariffs and fixed capacity charges.”

Asif says some IPPs have been running on fuel efficiency rates as low as 30 per cent and are still not legally obliged to conduct a test known as the heat-rate audit, which is compulsory for public sector power plants. “Yet they complain about how circular debt is affecting them,” he says. Suggesting that these problems will be over soon, he points out that contracts of most of the IPPs are set to expire in the next five or so years.

He, however, rules out the possibility of Pakistan defaulting on its commitment to pay to the IPPs. “The government has never defaulted on its sovereign guarantees and the IPPs will get their payments even though they charge exorbitant interest rates of over 4 per cent [on money the government owes them]. It is highway robbery.”

Each room in Salahuddin Rifai’s house in Rawalpindi is stacked to the roof with files, reports and papers. Before he can begin talking, Rifai must fumble around in the dark to determine why his uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is not working. He presses a few buttons, tugs on a couple of wires and the glaring white tube lights come to life.

Rifai looks overworked — and he says he is. “I was a part of Wapda before its bifurcation, as general manager of the National Power Control Centre in what later became the NTDC,” he says.

After his retirement in 2007, Rifai has worked as senior adviser at Nepra for two years and served the government and international agencies numerous times in advisory capacities. I ask him why the power sector finds itself in the twin binds of circular debt and electricity shortages.

“There was a meteoric growth in electricity consumption by 1985,” he says, almost nostalgically. “The number of households connected to the grid had increased, rural electrification had spread and, most importantly, agricultural and industrial advancements of the 1960s and the 1970s had really increased demand for electricity. This, coupled with lack of money at Wapda, meant there was load-shedding in the peak hours of the summer months.”

The government took a shortcut, seeking to involve the private sector in electricity generation. “It started with a three-page policy,” he says, [but] “it took another three years to sign the first MoU.” Wapda, he adds, “was involved nowhere in it”.

The government invited first bids in 1988 and received numerous offers to build smaller, cheaper plants, including one from a Saudi firm called Xenel, but it ignored all of them, according to Rifai. Jam Yousuf, the then water and power minister, had already earmarked land from his own constituency in Lasbela district, Balochistan, where he proposed – in the words of a World Bank inquiry report – “a monster of a power plant”.

“This was the birth of Hubco,” says Rifai.

Hydroelectric projects had stalled because of a lack of money and thestalemate over Kalabagh Dam.

The government brought all private bidders together and proposed a joint venture to set up a power plant of 1,292-megawatt capacity — unheard of in the private sector anywhere in the developing world at the time. The companies were instructed to arrange money in two and a half years and complete the construction of the plant in 32 months after that.

The government, in the meanwhile, had stopped Wapda from setting up new thermal plants. Nuclear projects built with China’s help would materialise only a couple of decades later. Hydroelectric projects had stalled because of a lack of money and the stalemate over Kalabagh Dam. “Where was the electricity going to come from?” asks Rifai.

The government relied on the private sector to deliver on time. “And it didn’t,” he continues. “The financial closure [for Hubco] took about seven years.”

He also accuses the IPPs of inflating their costs. “At the time, higher efficiency and newer technology plants were being installed in Bangladesh and Egypt for one-third the price.”

Terms and conditions of agreements with the IPPs were not favourable to Pakistan, Rifai says. The government allowed them to retrieve 80 per cent of their investment back in 10 years, he says. They also got guaranteed returns on their investment for the next 30 years, whether they made electricity or not, he adds.

The fixed costs charged by the IPPs have gone up to 18 US dollars per kilowatt of electricity they sell to the NTDC each month, Rifai says. “It is preposterous.”

It was mainly because of those fixed charges that Wapda went into a loss for the first time in its history in 1996, he claims. This burden inevitably spilled over to consumers, making electricity bills soar. Increase in the price of electricity created surprising outcomes: the number of units lost in transmission was the same before and in 1996 but their worth changed from 6.8 billion rupees before that year to 15.6 billion rupees that year, he explains.

Rifai’s argument on tariff sounds plausible but it is not entirely correct. Once the initial 10-year period of guaranteed returns was over, tariffs for most IPPs dropped substantially. Official reports indicate that higher fuel efficiency helped many of them outperform their state-owned counterparts. Most private sector plants now generate electricity at five rupees per unit compared to a GenCo that takes at least eight rupees to produce the same unit.

Rifai reaches for a small vial inside his pocket and takes out a pill that he gulps down with a glass of water. “I used to work 20 hours a day while I was at NPCC,” he says, suddenly looking older than before. “No time for my family, no time for food,” he adds with a laugh. “In that time, though, I stretched our current infrastructure to its limit.”

In more ways than one, that infrastructure is lagging way behind growth in electricity generation. We do not have “the amount of money, infrastructure and expertise required to transmit” the additional electricity, Rifai points out.

He knows of an NTDC plan to improve the transmission system in five years with 600 billion rupees. “But who will give them this money?” When the NTDC goes to Nepra, seeking the inclusion of this money in electricity tariff, he says, it ends up getting just eight or 10 billion rupees for a year.

One wonders what all of this would look like if the entire electricity sector was run by the private sector.

Almas Naeem lives with her small family in a three-room house in the Madina Society neighbourhood of Karachi’s Nazimabad area. She was shocked when, in September 2016, she received an electricity bill of 178,227 rupees.

When she contacted K-Electric (KE), the private company responsible for electricity provision in Karachi, she was told that she has been fined for using an illegal connection alongside her legal one. She rejected the allegation and moved Nepra and federal ombudsman against KE. Her case is pending decision.

In the meanwhile, she has been told by KE to keep paying her monthly bill in accordance with the units consumed until the case is resolved. She has been doing just that but the outstanding amount against her name has increased to over 212,000 rupees over the last six months. She does not know what to do about it.

Sajida’s story is not very different. She lives alone in a two-room apartment in a middle-class locality in Karachi and has been paying 1,000-1,200 rupees as her monthly electricity bill. In January 2015, she received a bill of 60,000 rupees. “I use just a bulb or two, a fan and a refrigerator. I do not even use an air conditioner,” she says.

Sajida is now paying that bill in monthly instalments and has so far paid 20,000 rupees to KE.

The two women are not the only consumers in Karachi to have received extraordinarily high bills. Officials of Jamaat-e-Islami say “over 2,000 people have approached” a cell the party has set up to help electricity consumers in the city in the last few months. When presented them before the federal ombudsman, “70 to 80 per cent of those complainants have been proven right,” says Imran Shahid, who heads the cell.

KE spokesperson Khayyam Siddiqi offers a contrasting picture. “In the past six months, 79 per cent of rulings by the federal ombudsman have been in favour of KE.” He says fines are imposed only when electricity theft or metre tampering is detected and that, too, is done on the basis of regulatory guidelines.

KE includes additional units in the bill for each consumer in an areawhere electricity theft is high, so as to recover the price of stolenor lost electricity.

Aneel Mumtaz, who worked as an associate engineer with KE until recently, blames the company for another type of ‘excessive’ billing. He says KE includes additional units in the bill for each consumer in an area where electricity theft is high, so as to recover the price of stolen or lost electricity. When KE already recovers those costs through billing then it should not punish individual consumers with excessive bills, he says.

The company is also said to use load-shedding to punish consumers who do not pay their bills. It carries out load-shedding in 39 per cent areas of Karachi under what it calls a segmented load-shed policy. Karachi has been divided into four categories under this policy — low loss, medium loss, high loss and very high loss. The areas in the last two categories, that comprise 30 per cent of the city, remain without electricity between four and a half hours and seven and a half hours a day. Areas in the other categories experience one hour to three hours of load-shedding each day.

“We face three spells of two and a half hours of load-shedding each day,” says Aziz Memon, a resident of Lyari area. He acknowledges that some of his neighbours use illegal connections but “we pay our bills regularly and do not steal electricity so why does the KE punish us for a crime we do not commit?”

Siddiqi says the drive against power theft and illegal connections is aimed at reducing load-shedding, not punishing consumers. The campaign has brought transmission and distribution losses down to 22 per cent in 2016 from 36 per cent in 2009. This has resulted in relieving 61 per cent of Karachi from load-shedding, he adds.

Dagha, too, is one of the critics of KE. In a letter he wrote to Nepra on January 26, 2017, he pointed out that KE had earned an additional profit of roughly 62 billion rupees in the last seven years by not passing on the benefit of quarterly tariff adjustments to the consumers.

Nepra dismissed his allegations, though. It stated the conclusion he had drawn was not only incorrect but based on a sheer misunderstanding of the tariff regime. The regulatory authority said no excess amount was charged from KE consumers since they were being billed according to what it called ‘uniform tariff’.

Yet another issue pertaining to KE is its inability to add substantial amount of electricity to its grid. When it was privatised in 2005, its power generation capacity stood at 1,307.7 megawatts. The company has set up new plants but it has also discarded some old ones. In the process, its generation capacity has improved by a paltry 324 megawatts.

KE also gets 1,184.86 megawatts from external sources — including 650 megawatts from NTDC/Wapda. Together, all the electricity at its disposal amounts to 2,816.17 megawatts. This should be more than sufficient for a city that has a usual electricity demand of 1,900-2,200 megawatts. Even when electricity demand touches its peak during the summers, it does not exceed 2,500 megawatts.

That only means the company is not utilising all the production capacity it has at its disposal. (In December 2016, according to Mumtaz, KE generated electricity from its own plants at an average of only 781.452 megawatts.) Otherwise, there would have been no load-shedding in Karachi at all.

All these issues have remained unaddressed even as KE is in the process of changing its ownership. KES Power Limited, which owns 66.4 per cent shares in the company, is selling its stake to a Chinese firm, Shanghai Electric Power Company Limited. The sale process is awaiting final approvals from the government.

Critics of the deal say KES Power Limited is making billions of rupees out of it, without any benefit to electricity consumers. Chaudhary Mazhar Ali, general secretary of KE Shareholders’ Association, says “KESPL purchased its shares for just 16 billion rupees but it is going to sell them for 180 billion rupees.”

This huge profit, he said in a letter to Nepra, has been attained through unfair means such as bogus bills, government subsidies worth 300 billion rupees and free electricity from NTDC. “I requested Nepra that KE be made to refund all the money received from consumers through illegal means before the change of ownership is permitted.”

Consumers and shareholders are not the only unhappy stakeholders in the electricity sector.

Bakhtiar Labour Hall on Lahore’s Nisbat Road is home to the Wapda workers’ union. On a recent day in February, it is hosting a convention of metre readers from across Pakistan who are agitating against their working conditions.

The building’s reception area is stuffed with people — some engaged in heated debates, others raising slogans about their rights. Bookshelves in the reception are stacked with volumes on labour law and adorning the walls are portraits of an old man, Bashir Ahmed Bakhtiar (who died about a quarter of a century ago). He was the founder of the labour hall and one of the stalwarts of trade union movements in Pakistan.

His son-in-law and successor, Khurshid Ahmed, is known to everyone in Wapda. A self-professed socialist, he has been the unchallenged general secretary of the union since the 1980s. Nestled in a chair against a wall, Ahmed keenly observes the goings-on around him through sharp grey eyes. Some of his closest associates linger around him. A young man standing nearby raises his mobile phone to take a selfie with him. The respect he enjoys is evident.

Ahmed believes Wapda is facing a serious shortage of staff at a time when its workload has exponentially increased. Even in today’s meeting, he points to the reception, workers are complaining that they have to work on Saturdays and Sundays. “They are all highly demotivated; we need more incentives for them so that they do their job better.”

Ahmed reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat and digs out two small photographs. “These are two of our linemen who were electrocuted to death,” he says. “Their relatives handed these photos to me to get them justice. What justice can I give them except to ensure that we try and improve their working conditions?”

According to information gathered by the union, at least 150 linemen lose their lives every year; many more are left disabled. Some of them die in attacks by consumers stealing electricity. “Our men have been killed in [the highly secured and posh] Defence Housing Authority area in Islamabad. So you can well imagine what must be happening to them in the rest of the country.”

Ahmed acknowledges the recent creation of a directorate at Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco) as a positive step to provide safety training to workers and to give them safety equipment. That is why there has been no accident in Lahore for the past three months, he says. The nationwide working conditions, though, will not change until all DisCos take similar steps.

One of the key hindrances, Ahmed stresses, is that Wapda’s controllies in the hands of a board of directors that has no stake in it.

Ahmed has a habit of keeping his eyes half-closed when he is in deep conversation. Just when you feel like he may have dozed off, he will counter you with a sharp response. “The resources of this country have been utilised more for luxuries and less to satisfy basic needs,” he responds when asked about flaws in electricity policies.

“Provision of water and cheap electricity are examples of such basic needs in any modern nation. But due to the lack of attention given to this sector, electricity is under-produced and expensive while water has become so scarce that many households, even in bigger cities like Karachi and Islamabad, are forced to buy [it from private] tanker [operators].”

One of the key hindrances, Ahmed stresses, is that Wapda’s control lies in the hands of a board of directors that has no stake in it. The organisation should be run directly by the federal government, he says. He also advocates the creation of a “specialised commission” on electricity that includes “industry experts, workers, engineers and members of Parliament”.

The Paris Agreement signed in April 2016 is considered a historic point in the quest for clean electricity. After the accord, Sweden, for instance, announced its intention of becoming the first country in the world to generate all its electricity through renewable sources by 2040.

Back in Pakistan, any talk of renewable sources remains shrouded in smog. According to the latest Economic Survey of Pakistan, just under 32 per cent of the country’s installed electricity generation capacity is in the form of renewable sources: hydroelectricity 30 per cent; wind, solar and bagasse burning only 2 per cent.

Here are two major examples of renewable electricity generation:

Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park set up in 2015 outside Bahawalpur produces 100 megawatts. The project, being built by Chinese contractors, is expected to have a net installed capacity of 1,000 megawatts someday — out of that 300 megawatts are said to be “near completion”.

If one leaves the Karachi-Hyderabad highway near Nooriabad and turns right towards Jhimpir, one may soon find oneself amid a jungle of windmills on both sides of the road: 13 companies are producing 650 megawatts of electricity from wind here and elsewhere in Sindh.

By the end of 2017, according to a senior official in Karachi, this will go up to 1,000 megawatts. Seven years ago, windmills produced only 50 megawatts, he says.

Another 82 megawatts of alternative energy comes from the burning of sugarcane residue, also known as bagasse.

Zoom out to a global scale and Pakistan’s renewable energy figures are not particularly unimpressive — United States produces 11 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources, China 23 per cent and India 28 per cent.

What makes these statistics worrying is that Pakistan’s electricity mix has been inverted in the past two decades — from an approximate 70:30 ratio in favour of hydroelectricity to the current 30:70 ratio in favour of non-hydroelectric sources.

Rafay Alam, one of a handful of environmental lawyers in the country, offers an explanation. “Warning bells went off in the Musharraf era with the realisation that we will have to wait another 10 or 15 years for more hydroelectric power,” he says sitting in a veranda of his house in Lahore. “In that panic, we relied on quick fixes like rental plants and inefficient second-hand machinery the Chinese are offloading because they are switching to renewable sources.”

“Once the system becomes digital, stealing electricity will becomeimpossible.”

He feels the government should have, instead, used the situation as a window of opportunity to invest in renewable sources. “There are examples of renewable sources doing amazing things across the world. We can benefit from them if only we pay attention.”

He cites the example of a tariff policy adopted in Germany. “A country which has four or five months of no sun has introduced a system where private individuals can sell their excess electricity to the grid. This has created a financial incentive for homeowners to put up solar panels on their rooftops and for companies to lease unused rooftops for the same purpose. This added 13,000 megawatts of solar electricity to the grid between 2008 and 2013.”

A Yale World Fellow, Rafay has also worked as Lesco’s chairperson between 2011 and 2013. He was removed from his position over policy differences. “I can safely say that 23 per cent of electricity is stolen in Lahore.” A megawatt saved is cheaper than a megawatt generated, he argues, but nowhere in our energy sector is the use of electricity planned.

There is a steady beeping in the background as he talks. “That sound, incidentally, is coming from my solar unit,” he says, pointing a finger towards the roof. As technology is improving, prices are coming down, he adds. “Four years ago, you could purchase a three kilovolt-ampere system for about 800,000 rupees and run pretty much everything in your house except for the air conditioner. Today, you can get a five kilovolt-ampere system for 300,000 rupees and operate an air conditioner or you can buy a 12 kilovolt ampere-system and operate the whole house.”

He suggests that Lesco can rent out solar systems to individual consumers, inserting in them a chip that the company can control. “If Lesco does not receive the rent, it can switch them off.”

“Think of it this way,” he explains. “The highest demand for electricity comes from our cities and suburban areas. Most of this demand is by rich homeowners. Consumers in rural and lower-income urban areas do not need thousands of megawatts.” They can be provided electricity through renewable sources producing small amounts of electricity, he says.

Younus Dagha gets excited as he talks about the future. “I am highly optimistic about the possibilities of solar energy,” he says. “It has shifted drastically from being an unaffordable alternative to a viable one, competing in price with even thermal plants.”

Under his watch, solar tariff has dropped from 17 rupees a unit to 5.2 rupees a unit in Pakistan. Wind energy tariff has also decreased from 15 rupees a unit to 6.75 rupees a unit in the same period and that of LNG from 9.5 rupees a unit to 6.3 rupees a unit. (Tariffs may well have dropped because they no longer need to include high initial investments.)

But, like many others in the water and power ministry, the secretary is of the opinion that Pakistan should wait to benefit from the steady drop in global prices of alternative technologies — that is one reason why work on the 700 megawatts at Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park is being delayed. He is hopeful of going “for alternatives in a big way” once Pakistan has overcome its existing energy shortage, which he believes will happen next year.

Once there is surplus electricity, his boss Khawaja Asif vows that a merit order will be established — the NTDC will buy electricity from the cheapest source first and from the most expensive last. “Let them compete,” he says with a raised eyebrow. “Let them invest in machines that produce 61 per cent fuel efficiency.”

In his opinion, private investors have had an entirely risk-free investment which is not a good model for efficiency. “There needs to be some challenge posed for an investor to improve.”

Asif was a petitioner against rental power plants — a 2008 scheme under which five-year contracts were awarded to private companies to bring rented power plants into Pakistan to overcome the yawning electricity deficit quickly. The process was reported to be so riddled with corruption that even the prime minister at the time, Raja Pervez Ashraf, is facing accountability references involving corruption of 22 billion rupees.

Just like the government has inherited a corrupt-to-the-core officialdom of the power sector, Asif says, there have been other holdouts from the past that he had to tackle. “We get a lot of criticism for projects like Nandipur and Neelum-Jhelum but these are problems we inherited,” he says. “We know the problems associated with these projects but we cannot abandon them after all the time and money spent.”

He is aware that there is a lot to fix in the electricity sector and that he, or his ministry, alone cannot fix all of it. “A whole lot of ministries, like water and power, finance and planning commission, have to work together like one unit to do a comprehensive analysis of what our energy requirements are, what they will be, and what we need to do in order to meet them.”

Asif is particularly enthused by the technologies being incorporated into the sector. “We have started metre reading with mobile phones,” he says. “You must have seen there is a photograph of the metre in the bill. We are also looking to introduce smart metering, first at the grid and feeder level and then at the consumer level.”

The “smart-metres” are intended to automate the entire electricity system — from beginning to end. Electricity distribution companies in Islamabad and Lahore have started working on the idea and it has attracted the attention of World Bank and Asian Development Bank. “Once the system becomes digital, stealing electricity will become impossible.”

But it requires massive amounts of money and at least 10 to 12 years to weave the new metres into the system — that is, in a best-case scenario.

As I get up to leave his office, my eye is caught by three panels on a wall. Painted on them are names of every minister of water and power since the 1970s — from Hayat Sherpao to the incumbent. Each has announced grand plans; most have not delivered.

This story was originally published in the Herald's April 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald. Additional reporting by Maqbool Ahmed, Moosa Kaleem and Saleem Shahid

A small compound in Gwadar town’s old area is littered with coils of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Around six workers calibrate a moulding machine mounted inside a parked truck and pass the coils through it. Pipes of different diameters and sizes come out from the other side. This is Gwadar’s first pipe manufacturing plant.

The rudimentary contraption belongs to a famous PVC pipe manufacturing company based in Karachi. All its workers have also come from Karachi. There is no other machinery here. No engineers in protective helmets oversee the manufacturing processes. No clerks or administrators run the facility’s day-to-day affairs. The place is as humble as any other compound in town. And the pace of work here is leisurely.

The plant’s operations are part of a 300-million-rupee sewerage project for Gwadar inaugurated on April 15, 2015. The scheme, envisaged during the tenure of former Balochistan chief minister Dr Abdul Malik Baloch, includes the laying of several kilometres of PVC pipelines to carry storm and sewerage water from the town’s streets and roads to three cemented wells located at different places on Gwadar’s outskirts. From these wells, water will be pumped to a treatment plant located in the foot of Koh-e-Batil, the mountain that rings Gwadar port on one side. The treated water will be used for developing and maintaining green belts.

Construction and mechanical work is complete at the treatment plant; wells for waste water storage have also been built. The rest of the sewerage system is only partially built. An inauguration plaque at the treatment plant states that the whole project is to be completed by April 2017. That does not seem likely.

Local residents complain the pace of work on the project is very slow and is causing problems for them. The process of burying the pipes underground, for instance, has ruined the few metalled streets that existed in Gwadar, says Khuda Bukhsh, head of the Rural Community Development Council (RCDC), a local community-based organisation. The ones that were not metalled have turned into potholed dirt tracks, he says.

Many local residents believe Gwadar Development Authority (GDA), thegovernment agency executing the project, is neither competent norefficient.

The quality of work also leaves a lot to be desired. Materials and technology being used are rather elementary, some local residents complain. Others point out design flaws: Bukhsh says pipes – with a diameter 12 inches – are being laid to drain storm water that requires pipes of much bigger size.

Many local residents believe Gwadar Development Authority (GDA), the government agency executing the project, is neither competent nor efficient. It is known for not completing development schemes, says Muhammad Ishaq, a general councillor of Gwadar Municipal Committee. The authority is also known for letting completed schemes go to ruin, he adds.

Ammanullah Askani, a senior engineer, exhibits maps and slides on a projector screen at the GDA office to explain how Gwadar has been divided into several zones for laying sewerage pipes and storm-water drains. Streets are narrow inside the old part of town, he says. Mechanical shovels cannot be employed here, he adds, so the work is being done manually. That is what is causing the delay, he argues.

When there was no port in Gwadar, the town’s limits were confined to what is now known as the old town. A master plan that the GDA created for Gwadar’s expansion in 2005 showed the whole old-town area as part of the port. As per the master plan, a number of housing projects and markets were conceived to replace the old town. That foretold the fortunes of the Gwadaris living here: they were to relocate whenever the port was expanded to its fullest. The old town was to be shifted about eight kilometres to the north where the coastal highway to Karachi starts (or ends), Askani says.

Now the old master plan has been scrapped and the federal government has assigned a Chinese company the task to create a new one for what is being called Gwadar Smart Port City. No officials in Gwadar can say if relocation of the old town will form a part of the new master plan as well.

Dostain Jamaldini’s friends believe he was punished. The then Balochistan chief minister Dr Abdul Malik Baloch made him chairman of the Gwadar Port Authority (GPA) in the winter of 2013. At the time, Jamaldini was working as the finance secretary, one of the most powerful bureaucratic positions in the provincial government. On the other hand, there was almost no work at the authority and its headquarters in Gwadar was hundreds of kilometres from the provincial capital of Quetta.

Jamaldini’s friends felt sorry for him. They thought he had landed a dead-end job. Three years later, he finds himself at the centre of Pakistan’s most talked-about development plans — of turning Gwadar into a 21st century hub of regional and international sea trade. He spends more time attending meetings in Quetta and Islamabad – sometimes even in Beijing – than in Gwadar. His friends now envy him.

Jamaldini is also one of the busiest men in Gwadar. As GPA’s head, he is handling a number of important development projects — an expressway, a tax-free zone, a vocational training institute, expansion of the port and the creation of a business complex.

Regular visitors to Gwadar immediately notice that the work on these projects is one of the few signs that demonstrate the difference between the town’s past and its present. Others include an increased presence of security forces and their armoured vehicles, particularly near and in the port area, and a dual-way metalled version of the old, narrow track called Fish Harbour Road. It has been renamed as Marine Drive.

Local residents claim all these schemes were conceived and designed years ago. Most significantly, they say, these have not materialised because the much-hyped China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has come to town. Nasir Sohrabi, a local development activist and an RCDC representative, says some other projects – including parks, a sports complex and a hospital – also predate CPEC.

Away from these projects, life in Gwadar goes on as usual — at the same old lazy pace, along the same old dusty roads and streets. Most of the town remains as much a slum as it always has been — devoid of all civic amenities. Electricity is intermittently available for less than 12 hours a day and tap water is supplied only two hours a week.

The electricity shortage makes Akhtar Jan Mengal, a former chief minister of Balochistan and the head of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNPM), extremely unhappy. “The entire Makran division [of which Gwadar town and Gwadar district are parts of] is provided electricity for only six hours a day,” he says. The total electricity that Balochistan needs is hardly 1,600 megawatts but it is getting only 300 megawatts, he says.

The gap between the supply and demand of water is similarly glaring. Akra Kaur Dam – built in 1995 over an area of 17,000 acres about 22 kilometres to the north of Gwadar – is the main source of potable water for the town. It has been drying up for the last two years due to less-than-usual rains. The town also has two seawater desalination plants — one in the private sector and the other set up by the government. While the former, according to a recent report in daily Dawn, is selling “100,000 gallons of drinking water to the public health engineering department daily”, the latter has been out of order for years.

The one-billion-rupee government plant has the capacity to desalinate two million gallons of water per day but requires a huge amount of money for its repairs. A hearing of a Senate standing committee recently revealed that it needs up to 700 million rupees “for its repairing and reoperation”.

The gap between the supply and demand of water is similarly glaring.Akra Kaur Dam – built in 1995 over an area of 17,000 acres about 22kilometres to the north of Gwadar – is the main source of potablewater for the town.

The major source of water supply to Gwadar these days is Mirani Dam, more than 170 kilometres north of the town. Tankers bring water from the dam to a pumping station, run by the public health engineering department, which then supplies it to local residents.Mengal remarks: “Gwadar and its rural suburbs have been facing extreme water shortages for the last five years but nothing has been done to solve the problem.” There is a lot of talk about desalination plants, he says, but nobody is saying how much electricity is needed to run them and who will bear the cost of their operations.

Gwadar has two development authorities, GDA and GPA, and an elected municipality. The three entities have overlapping jurisdiction, making it difficult to apportion responsibility for the lack of civic amenities in the town.

The sewerage and rain water drainage system being laid down in Gwadar exemplifies that confusion. The GDA by-laws state that it will regulate, rather than execute, projects financed by the federal and provincial governments, yet it is the executing agency for the project. Will it keep running the project once the sewerage system and the treatment plant become functional? Nobody knows, says Ishaq, the general councillor, though the only government entity that has the human resources – essentially the sanitation staff – to keep the project running is the municipal committee.

Abid Sohrabi, chairman of the Gwadar Municipal Committee, finds it hard to explain the difference between the town’s media image as the driver of Pakistan’s economy in the future and its present-day reality. He complains that GDA and GPA do not take him into confidence when implementing even small development projects. “We are left to deal with the negative impacts of development projects,” he says.

Abdullah Usman, a local social activist, says most of the GDA projects are being carried out without consideration for the needs of the people. Their design and the manner in which they are operated provide little benefit to local residents, he says.

Usman gives the example of a sports complex built five years ago. It’s so far from the town that people need transport to reach there, he says. No one uses its facilities. Its fields, tracks and enclosures are already coming apart as is its commercial area that was supposed to provide money for running and maintaining the complex, he adds.

Likewise, a 50-bed, GDA-built-and-operated hospital – which will be expanded to a 300-bed facility under CPEC – could not start functioning till May 2016. Even though its construction was completed six years earlier. It was only on the personal instruction of former army chief Raheel Sharif that it finally started its operations. Yet, healthcare provided here remains basic, says Usman.

An officer from the Army Medical Corps has been made the medical superintendent of the hospital. Other doctors have been brought from Gwadar District Headquarters Hospital and rural health centres. A couple of them have been brought in from Turbat. These doctors examine patients only in the outpatient department, Usman claims. For the treatment of serious and complicated ailments that require surgeries and hospitalisation, people have to travel to Karachi, he adds.

Even routine procedures such as child deliveries cannot be conducted at the hospital because it has no gynaecologist. There is not a single gynaecologist in the entire town. Pregnant women have to be shifted to Karachi for deliveries, says Usman.

The case of a local primary school is even more curious. It was recently renovated by the GPA. With funds provided by China’s Communist Party as a gift, the authority has added six new beautifully-built classrooms to it. The impact of infrastructure improvement was immediate — the number of its students swelled from 50 to 300. Yet, it does not have a sufficient number of trained teachers. The provincial government has appointed only one teacher here, says Usman, and Gwadar’s deputy commissioner has engaged two untrained teachers on a temporary basis.

Weary of such lacklustre development, many local residents initially welcomed the announcement of development schemes to be carried out under CPEC. But, they say, they have become disillusioned – even apprehensive – over time. They fear new plans for the town may deprive them of their traditional sources of livelihood.

Fisherfolk – who constitute the largest part of Gwadar’s population – have already been hit hard. They lost some of their prominent fishing spots with the construction of the port back in the 2000s. Now, with the port’s expansion, they will lose all of them.

The town’s old fish harbour and jetty are still functional but they fall within the port’s limits and fishermen and fish traders face daily problems in accessing them because of the security checkpoints in the area. With the arrival of Chinese personnel working on the expansion of the port, security has been tightened further.

A road built as part of CPEC’s western route passes by the home of Muhammad Rehan, a 27-year-old schoolteacher. If the Planning Commission’s deputy chairman Ahsan Iqbal is to be believed, the 650-kilometre road between Gwadar and Sorab via Turbat has “revolutionised” the lives of the Baloch living along it. As the first direct road link between Gwadar and Quetta, it has reduced travel time between the two cities from two days to just eight hours, he says in an interview in Islamabad.

Rehan should be “building boundary walls around [his] landed property” as so many other Baloch are doing, according to Iqbal, since their “land has become valuable” with the construction of the road.

Rehan, however, has not been to his village in Shahrak union council of Balochistan’s southern Kech district for more than two years. The village was caught in the middle of skirmishes between security forces and Baloch insurgents. The latter fired at the former from within the village and then fled. Unable to get hold of the insurgents, the security forces shelled the village and took all its men with them — some of them never came back.

The 'shining' Gwadar of official description seems like a mirage- onthat haunts the town's residents amid security cordons, poverty,illiteracy, and economic and political marginalisation.

Rehan and his family have been living in a makeshift shelter on a private compound, enclosed by low mud walls, in Turbat city for the last two years. They are among thousands of families that have migrated from the restive districts of Kech, Awaran and Panjgur. Only a few of them can afford to live in rented houses.

Estimates about their numbers vary. Some locals estimate that the number of displaced people living in Turbat alone can be as high as 10,000. Many more are living in Hub town of Lasbela district, as well as in different parts of Sindh province, including Karachi.

Hasil Bizenjo, the federal minister for ports and shipping who is also the president of the National Party (NP) that is part of the tripartite coalition government in Balochistan, believes the total number of displaced Baloch is so high that it will have a significant impact on the upcoming national census. Those who have migrated to Karachi and other provinces of Pakistan due to the insurgency in Balochistan should be brought back before the census takes place, he said at a press conference in Islamabad in December 2016. Otherwise, he warned, the Baloch will become a minority in their own province.

These political considerations are hardly the reason why displaced people like Rehan want to go back home. They have been unable to settle down in their new environs without a proper roof over their heads and in the absence of stable sources of livelihood. He wants peace restored in his area, first and foremost, so that he can resume a normal life. “How can I think of any benefit from CPEC if I cannot live in my own home?” he asks.

Peace seems as remote as ever. Statistics suggest violence may be increasing in Balochistan rather than decreasing. The number of attacks on security forces, according to Balochistan home department officials in Quetta, was higher in 2016 than in any previous year since 2011 — 48 attacks, including suicide bombings, were carried out against the police, 39 against the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) and 12 against the tribal border force, Levies, during the last year.

Security forces have also increased their operations in Balochistan during recent times as compared to those of the past, the officials say. And the operations launched during 2014 and 2016 were not confined to the province’s Baloch areas alone; some of them were conducted in Pakhtun areas as well, says a senior official, requesting anonymity.

He says security forces conducted as many as 5,600 combing operations between 2014 and 2016 and killed 470 suspected militants. The FC, which operates mostly in Baloch areas of the province, alone conducted 3,963 operations and killed 402 suspects involved in attacking security forces, hitting government installations, bomb blasts, launching sectarian attacks, committing suicide bombings and carrying out target killings, the official discloses.

“The operations were massive,” he says, in comparison to the ones conducted “against banned militant outfits in Kalat, Khuzdar, Awaran, Turbat, Panjgur and some other Baloch districts between 2012 and 2014”.

Other markers of violence are equally grave. The number of bodies dumped and found in Balochistan in 2016 stood at 94, according to the official. The figure for 2015 was 129, he says. There has been a decline in the phenomenon though: in two previous years (2013 and 2014), he says, the total number of bodies found from different parts of Balochistan was 371.

Most of the bodies found last year were of Baloch men — in line with the overall trend on this count: 539 out of 1,027 bodies found in Balochistan between 2011 and 2016 have been of the Baloch. (Actual number for the bodies of the Baloch could be even higher since 193 bodies remain unidentified and 125 have been placed in the unspecified category of ‘others’.)

All this violence coincides with a push by the government for CPEC’s implementation, with civilian and military authorities in Quetta and Islamabad insisting that the two are linked. Ahsan Iqbal, for instance, says 45 soldiers of the Frontier Works Organisation – the army’s road-construction firm – were killed while building the Gwadar-Sorab road.

“There were attacks [during] the construction of the road,” he says. “[The Baloch separatists] did not want the road built. They are the biggest enemy of connectivity and education. That is why they attacked our projects.”

Baloch politicians and activists believe the conflict in Balochistan is not about development projects — at least not exclusively about them. Tahir Bizenjo, NP’s senior vice president, says that even the National Action Plan (NAP) against terrorism and extremism, devised in late 2014, acknowledges that there exists a “political” conflict in Balochistan. And that conflict precedes CPEC, he says.

Decent Tailors is a small shop on Quetta’s Sariab Road. It is an old establishment and is known all over Balochistan for its trendy and quality stitching. Its lone shelf is stacked with stitched shalwar kameez outfits — all placed in transparent plastic bags that carry the names and addresses of their owners, written neatly with a ballpoint. Its proprietor, Ali Asghar Bangulzai, has been missing for more than 15 years now.

Ali was working behind the counter on June 1, 2000 when several double-cabin vans stopped in front of his shop. He was dragged out and bundled into a van under the scared gaze of other shopkeepers. He was released 14 days later without a charge. He was severely tortured and felt disoriented for weeks after his release, says his nephew Nasrullah Baloch who now runs the shop.

Ali was then a member of the Baloch Haq Tawar Party, a political organisation set up by the Marri tribe chieftain, the late Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri, who played a leading role in a Baloch insurrection in the 1970s.

Nasrullah claims Ali met an army major during his detention. The officer was also detained but his family was told that he had gone abroad on assignment. After Ali was released, he found the major’s family and conveyed his message to them. The major was later released but soon after Ali was picked up again.

Sameer turned up dead on October 9, 2011. His body was found dumped inNilhat area near Gwadar. His family came to know about his death fromnews on television.

That happened on October 18, 2001. He was with his friend Muhammad Iqbal on Sariab Road when both of them were taken away. He has not come back since then, though his companion was released 24 days later.

As the head of an activist group, Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, Nasrullah has been running a campaign for the release of his uncle as well as other missing Baloch all these years. He has also been receiving occasional reports that Ali is still alive.

In 2011, a deputy director of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) revealed during the meeting of a joint investigation team held at the office of Quetta city’s police chief that it was his agency that was keeping Ali in detention. The officer is said to have told Nasrullah that the ISI will not make the mistake of releasing Ali — like it did in the case of such separatists as Dr Allah Nazar Baloch (chief of the Baloch Liberation Front) and Amirullah Bangulzai.

When another missing person, whose name cannot be revealed due to concerns for his security, came back home in April last year after spending seven months in detention, he, too, confirmed meeting Ali in custody.

Abdul Karim Rind left his home town, Buleda, in southern Balochistan soon after he got married in the late 1970s. Along with his wife, he moved to Bahrain where he had found a job in the police. His eldest son, Sameer, was born in Bahrain in 1983.

Rind came back to Pakistan after two decades and settled in Turbat. Sameer completed his graduation from Atta Shad Degree College in the same town and was making plans for further studies when, on October 14, 2010, he was picked up from his home, allegedly by FC personnel.

His sister Sumiya was a student at a Turbat college at the time. She left her studies to work for the recovery of her missing brother. Her pursuit took her to Quetta and Islamabad multiple times for participation in protests against enforced disappearances of the Baloch and to attend the hearings of a commission set up by the Supreme Court for the recovery of missing persons. All that came to naught.

Sameer turned up dead on October 9, 2011. His body was found dumped in Nilhat area near Gwadar. His family came to know about his death from news on television. Reports quoted official sources alleging that Sameer was a senior commander of the Baloch Republican Army, a separatist group affiliated with the Baloch Republican Party set up by Brahamdagh Bugti, a grandson of Baloch chieftain and politician Nawab Akbar Bugti who was killed in a military operation in 2006.

Sitting in her drawing room in the Gulshanabad neighbourhood of Turbat city, Sumiya points towards a flier pasted on a wall. It states that her brother was picked up by the intelligence agencies. It also carries an appeal for his release. “My brother was never involved in any kind of politics. It was only after his body was found that we heard of claims by some unknown officials that he was a senior [separatist] commander,” Sumiya says. He would not be living in his home if he had been a commander of some separatist organisation, she says. He would have been hiding in the mountains and fighting security forces like other rebel Baloch men, she adds.

Sumiya and two other girls living in a small rented house in Quetta’s Sariab area heard loud bangs at around 2 am on October 4, 2015. Someone was violently knocking on the door. When the girls, all university students, opened the door, the men outside introduced themselves as officials of law enforcement agencies. They told the girls to hand over their cell phones and entered the house. A little while later, they singled out Sumiya and told her to accompany them.

“There was no female official around,” she says, sitting in her Turbat home. The men “made me sit in one of the several vans” parked outside the house. “Then they blindfolded me.” After an hour-long ride, she found herself in a small room with a single chair.

Nasrullah claims the number of missing persons has registered a suddenincrease in the last year or so. The number of the Baloch who wentmissing in 2015 was 463. This increased to 667

Men claiming to be from intelligence agencies subjected her to questioning for the rest of the night, she says. They were asking her if she knew the men whose names appeared on a list shown to her. “They claimed to know that I knew those men.”

Sumiya’s captors gave her breakfast in the morning which, she says, she refused to have. “I demanded that they tell me the whereabouts of my housemates.” Later, she was presented before another man who had her laptop and was trying to open it. “He asked me to tell him the password which I did.”

The laptop had photos of Sameer, her brother. “So, you are his sister,” the man said. He showed Sumiya photos of some other men and asked her if she knew them. “Again, I said I do not know any of them.”

The officer told her that her friends had been released and she would also be released, as no evidence had been found against her. “He gave me a cell phone with a single number saved in it. He asked me to provide information on that number regarding members of banned Baloch organisations,” Sumiya claims. She never used the phone.

The men then blindfolded her, put her in a car with tinted glasses and left her near the area she was picked up from. Soon afterwards, she left the university without completing her education and went back to Turbat to live with her family.

[On] the night of September 16 last year, several FC vehicles stopped outside a house on the outskirts of Turbat. The house belongs to one Sartok, a peon at the town’s general post office. The officials stormed inside, looking for his son Amjad Sardar. Sartok told them that Sardar was not in and was living with his sister. The FC men told him to take them there.

Sartok says he tried asking the officials about the allegations against his son but he was told to keep his mouth shut and do what he was being ordered to do. As soon as they reached his daughter’s house, the FC men barged into it. They picked up Sardar, forced him into a vehicle and drove away, says Sartok.

Sardar was a pale, lanky man, just 18 years of age when he was taken away. An intermediate-level student at Atta Shad Degree College, Turbat, he used to help his brother-in-law run a medical store in Turbat bazaar. In the first half of 2016, his brother-in-law died and Sardar started living with his widowed sister. His entire day would be spent studying and running the medical store, says his father.

Sartok took his other son Wajid with him the next morning and tried to see the commissioner of Makran division. He wanted to make a personal plea for the release of his son to the senior-most civilian official in his area. The lower staff at the commissioner’s office, however, did not let the meeting happen. “I am a poor man; I have no access to the authorities,” Sartok says in an interview weeks after his son was taken into custody. “I cannot do anything for the recovery of my son except wait for his return — alive or dead.”

Nasrullah is pursuing his case in court as well. He has filed a petition at the Supreme Court for the recovery of Ali and other Baloch missing persons. It was earlier dismissed for non-prosecution but has been revived and clubbed with other similar petitions filed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and the Defence of Human Rights, an organisation run by Amina Masood Janjua whose husband went missing from Punjab in the early 2000s.

Nasrullah claims the number of missing persons has registered a sudden increase in the last year or so. The number of the Baloch who went missing in 2015 was 463. This increased to 667 — most of those missing have disappeared from Makran division and the districts of Naseerabad, Mastung, Awaran, Kalat and Bolan/Sibi.

Officials in Quetta see the numbers cited by him as gross exaggeration. Only 47 missing persons’ cases were lodged with the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances in the last two years (2015 and 2016), a senior official in the Balochistan home department says, requesting anonymity. He says the total number of cases registered with the commission is 342 — out of these, 121 persons have been traced (of which 94 have reached home safely) and the bodies of 27 other missing persons have been recovered; 102 cases have been found unfit for proceedings because of incomplete particulars and fake evidence. The remaining number of missing persons cases is just 119, the official claims.

The government figures seem to understate the problem. When the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances started functioning under the Supreme Court orders in 2011, it recorded only 90 cases from Balochistan, even though human rights activists and many Baloch politicians were claiming that the number could be in the hundreds, if not thousands. That this was so became evident as the commission initiated the process of discovering people who were reported missing: after it had updates (person traced to be in custody, found dead, returned home, living abroad or still missing) on all the cases it had registered in 2011, it started receiving new complaints. The number of missing persons cases it was dealing with went up in 2013 to 122 — many of these people had gone missing in earlier years. The figure had jumped to 265 by July 2016.

Abdul Hafeez Jamali has spent years in research on the anthropology of globalisation and development. Within this broad academic discipline, the focus of his doctoral thesis has been on the history of Indian Ocean trade and the politics of identity and place in Balochistan. A professor at Habib University, Karachi, he has also worked with the provincial government in Quetta.

Jamali argues that creating a Dubai-like city, with a big port, skyscrapers and a road network connecting it to all parts of the country, has been a long-held dream of Pakistani policymakers. Central to that dream was the idea to locate it in Balochistan, at the periphery of the Pakistani nation state, he says.

Jamali argues the projects being implemented under CPEC are a manifestation of similar dreams, showing Pakistan’s predilection for mega-development plans as a means for achieving quick economic growth. The desire has been ubiquitous among former European colonies of the global South that want to catch up with the industrialised West in terms of material wealth, physical infrastructure and other modern indicators of development, he says.

Then there is a flip side to mega-development plans. Their economic,social and ecological costs are disproportionately borne by the peopleinhabiting the areas where those plans are implemented, says Jamali.

That is despite the fact that the success rate of mega projects all over the world has been very low, Jamali says. He cites the example of the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway, built in the 1990s at a huge cost to the national exchequer. “It is generating much less revenue than anticipated at the time of its planning and construction.”

Such mega projects are conceived and advocated by the elites, he says, and they tend to create the expectation of a quality life among the middle class. Pakistanis, for instance, are being ceaselessly told that CPEC will bring in unprecedented prosperity and improvement in communication infrastructure, besides creating jobs and boosting economic growth.

If nothing else, CPEC’s focus on building infrastructure is projected to be boosting steel and cement production in Pakistan. At least one cement manufacturer has already placed an order for a new and bigger plant, daily Dawn reported on January 18, 2017. Another company is also investing 235 million US dollars to purchase a new cement plant that, according to a newspaper report, will “be completed in the next two years”.

This bullish approach may need some tempering. China will want to send at least some of its surplus industrial products to Pakistan under conditions inbuilt in the agreements for the CPEC-related projects. This, indeed, has happened at least once in recent months.

Daily Dawn reported on October 29, 2016 that a Chinese ship, MV Chang Han Hai, had berthed at Gwadar port the previous day and had “brought construction material and equipment, including bulldozers, trucks, dumper trucks, cranes, rollers, generators, electric cables, pipes, 20,000 tonnes of cement and other accessories”. The newspaper quoted the port authorities as saying “the accessories would be used for construction work at Gwadar Port Free Zone”.

Then there is a flip side to mega-development plans. Their economic, social and ecological costs are disproportionately borne by the people inhabiting the areas where those plans are implemented, says Jamali.

While planning a deep-sea port in Gwadar, the authorities had the opposition of the local people in mind. They, therefore, felt the need to reassure themselves and their anxious audiences elsewhere in the country and abroad about the security of the project.

It was portrayed to be vital to the future of Pakistan. “The public was made to understand that the dispossession of the Baloch in the wake of mega projects is not only good for the Baloch themselves but also critical for the long-term survival of the nation,” Jamali says.

The public was informed that foreign powers, including India, have set their evil eyes on strategically important geographical locations in Pakistan such as Gwadar, he says. The state’s information machinery kept releasing stories that emphasised Indian “interference” in Balochistan’s affairs.

One such story published on December 31, 2016 in all Pakistani newspapers said that a “dossier on captured Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav and evidence of attempted violation of the maritime boundary by an Indian submarine [on November 14, 2016] will be handed over by Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations Dr Maleeha Lodhi … to [the new secretary general of the United Nations] Mr [António] Guterres on his first working day at the UN headquarters in New York”.

The report described how “Jadhav, a serving Indian navy officer and an operative of India’s intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was caught by Pakistani security forces earlier in 2016 as proof of Indian interference and state-sponsored terrorism” in Balochistan. “In his recorded confessional statement, Jadhav accepted that he had been assigned by RAW to promote unrest in Balochistan and Karachi and had been working with the Baloch student organisations and insurgents and terrorist groups for the purpose.”

The massive venture is being portrayed as the cause of the Balochinsurgency rather than the insurgency being the manifestation of someother long-standing factors.

This narrative, Jamali says, has helped legitimise the militarisation of empty places such as the entire Makran division — and by extension, many other parts of Balochistan where energy pipelines and highways will be constructed. The projects in these areas have been declared “national assets which need protection”.

This explains why senior government functionaries have been trying to portray an old insurgency into a new threat — an India-sponsored effort to fail CPEC, Jamali argues. The massive venture is being portrayed as the cause of the Baloch insurgency rather than the insurgency being the manifestation of some other long-standing factors.

Akhtar Jan Mengal is extremely critical of CPEC’s impact on Balochistan. In their current form, the projects being devised and implemented under CPEC will be harmful to the province and its people, he says in an interview.

Official figures say 1.5 billion US dollars are being spent in Balochistan out of 50 billion US dollars or so that will come to Pakistan as loans and investment from China under CPEC. Most of the projects being implemented in the province are concentrated in Gwadar — construction of an expressway, expansion of Gwadar hospital, Pak-China Technical and Vocational Institute, a water desalination plant, two power plants with the combined capacity to produce 300 megawatts of electricity, an international airport as well as the expansion of the port. Two major projects outside Gwadar are a road – known as the western route that links Gwadar with the Karakoram Highway through Turbat, Sorab, Quetta, Zhob and Dera Ismail Khan and has already been completed – and a coal-fired power plant at Hub.

The seaport, the airport and power generation plants will all be run by the federal government, Mengal says. “Balochistan’s job share in the federal projects is a tiny 5.5 per cent — for every 100 persons hired for these projects, 95 will come from outside the province.” Even for minor jobs – drivers, electricians, machine operators – the workforce will come from outside Balochistan as the locals are not trained in these skills, he says.

(Ahsan Iqbal counters this, saying these are not federal government projects but will be run by the private sector and, therefore, are not subject to the job quota system.)

The influx of job seekers from outside Balochistan, Mengal says, will change the demography of the province in general and of Gwadar in particular. “During the next 10 years or so, there will be a huge influx of non-Baloch people in Gwadar. The Baloch will be reduced to a minority here,” he says.

He cites the example of a 1,292-megawatt power plant set up by the Hub Power Company (Hubco), a private sector enterprise, in Lasbela district’s Hub area to explain how development projects based in Balochistan do not necessarily benefit the people of the province. Who is using the electricity being generated there, he asks. The high-tension transmission lines that take this electricity to the national grid pass right above hundreds of Baloch villages that are without electricity, he says.

Uch power plant in Dera Murad Jamali, another private-sector project with the capacity to produce 586 megawatts of electricity, runs on gas solely provided by Balochistan but “everybody knows where the electricity produced by it is going” — to the national grid. The conversion of Hubco power plant to a coal-fired facility under CPEC will similarly accrue no benefit to Balochistan, says Mengal.

He claims a part of the road inaugurated by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and former army chief Raheel Sharif in February 2016 as the western route of CPEC was built with loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank obtained during Pervez Musharraf’s regime. “Not a single penny has been spent from CPEC funds on the construction of the road [from Gwadar to Sorab],” he says. “I challenge the authorities on this to prove me wrong.” (Ahsan Iqbal agrees that it is not a Chinese-funded project.)

Creating a Dubai-like city, with a big port, skyscrapers and a roadnetwork connecting it to all parts of the country, has been along-held dream of Pakistani policy makers.

Mengal also claims the quality and capacity of the western route – as well as the security along it – are not good enough to make it a suitable road for the movement of trade convoys between Gwadar and the Chinese city of Kashgar. This means eastern routes – via the Gwadar-Karachi coastal highway and the Gwadar-Khuzdar-Ratodero highway – will be used more frequently. This also suggests that planners knew the potential of the western route and did not invest much money in it to turn it into an international-standard highway.

Tahir Bizenjo says his party is not against CPEC but it has many concerns about it. “When Dr Abdul Malik Baloch (a leading member of the NP) was chief minister of Balochistan, we used to raise these concerns with the federal government,” he says.

Since Gwadar is the CPEC’s gateway, Tahir says, its people must get all the civic amenities they need, without having to wait for the completion of long-term projects such as the expansion of the seaport and the construction of the international airport.

He says the Baloch are rightly concerned about the influx of people from other provinces with the completion of port-related projects. The Baloch living in Gwadar in particular and in Makran division in general should be given priority in jobs, he says, to slow down – if not altogether avoid – that influx. Vocational training institutes should be set up on war footing to help local people acquire skills necessary to get employment in CPEC-funded schemes.

Officials in Islamabad dismiss these arguments as political rabble-rousing.

One of them, Syed Hijazi, says the people who are claiming that the western route is being ignored, are doing so purely for political sloganeering. “They have nothing to back their arguments.” They agree on all points in official meetings but when they go out, he says, they restart their claims that the bigger province (Punjab) is eating up everything. “The media gives this a lot of attention.”

Hijazi says the western route consists of a road used mostly for smuggling or by the army for border security. “[It] also passes consistently along the slopes of mountains. Every time there is heavy rainfall, it is washed away by landslides.” Major investment was required to ensure that this did not happen again, he says.

He concedes the division of CPEC funds “is not even” but quickly adds that this is due to “many factors” including population and the level of industrialisation. As a member of the Planning Commission and the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) – the highest decision-making body on mega projects – till November 2016, he was closely involved in planning new roads and power generation plants under CPEC. “Balochistan’s population is about 6-7 million – (in reality, it is estimated to be 13-14 million, maybe even more) – and [the province] has a small industrial base. Its demand for electricity is far less than that of Punjab which has a population of over 100 million.” So, he says, the government obviously needs to set up more electricity generation plants in Punjab, under the CPEC, than in Balochistan.

Similarly, Hijazi remarks, the plan to build an international airport in Gwadar instantly elicits the question as to why a city which has a population of 78,000 (another major understatement) needs it. “Our argument is that the airport is not for just these 78,000 people but for international transit. Air traffic in the Middle East has increased considerably. Many international airlines may stop by in Gwadar now instead of Dubai, even if only for refuelling.”

He also claims the focus over the western route is overblown. “Pakistan has proposed four routes to the Chinese … None of these four routes is based on new roads,” he says. “We are merely expanding existing roads where we need to.”

He believes soon more routes will require similar expansion and improvement because all the existing ones will be jam-packed once CPEC-facilitated trade gets into full swing. “The Chinese have proposed a new railway track and a highway linking Mansehra [in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] with Gwadar directly.” That route will eventually become a necessity after the existing roads fail to accommodate the traffic, he says.

He insists that the federal government is not oblivious to the interests of the Baloch. To safeguard the interests of Gwadar’s local population, “I proposed that any business that [wants to] come into Gwadar should have a mandatory local partner, something like the kafala system in the United Arab Emirates.” This system can be phased out in five or 10 years “but at least it will give enough time to the locals to establish and train themselves” in business. “The government needs to provide incentives to Gwadar’s own population” for starting joint ventures with Chinese companies.

If Gwadaris cannot become businessmen because they do not have money and skills to do that, there will still be huge job opportunities for them — as low-skilled workers. “The Chinese need 40,000drivers alone.”

Hijazi does not mind the change in Gwadar’s demographics. He expects the town’s population to reach one million people in the next five to 10 years “and about 0.9 million of these will be Chinese”. Gwadar will become an international port, he says.

Hijazi’s unguarded and unqualified optimism echoes in every government chamber in Islamabad. Senior government officials say the official strategy to implement CPEC projects in Balochistan is based on three elements — increased mobility, increased connectivity and the spread of technical and managerial education among the Baloch youth.

In Ahsan Iqbal’s prognosis that will take care of what he calls the biggest problem that Balochistan’s people have been facing — lack of connectivity with the rest of the country. The central theme of the government strategy is increasing that connectivity, he says. “ ... if their mobility and connectivity increase, that will bring better jobs to them.”

Ahsan Iqbal says the government is “expanding education facilities in Balochistan for developing human resources at managerial, technical, and engineering levels.” He points out that a government technology college has already been established in Gwadar to benefit the local people (though it has not started functioning yet). From this year, we will open a university campus in Gwadar, he says. “In the next three years, we are planning to open a university campus in every district of Balochistan so that the province’s youth can get an education.”

Fishermen and fish traders face daily problems in accessing the town'sold fish harbour and jetty because of security checkpoints

He rejects the criticism that only 1.5 billion US dollars are being spent in Balochistan from the financing available under the CPEC. “There is an allocation of 1.5 billion US dollars for Gwadar alone. So to say that there is an allocation of 1.5 billion US dollar for the whole of Balochistan is not correct,” he says. He mentions many projects – power plants in Gwadar, Hub and Gadani, for instance – to claim that their cost alone is nine billion US dollars.

He also dismisses reports that instances of enforced disappearances have increased in southern Balochistan. “I have not heard any such reports about an increase in the number of missing persons. There are no such reports. Our policy is to bring stability and peace in Balochistan through development.”

He then goes on to describe how Gwadar has been transformed over the last three years. “I went to Gwadar in 2013 with a Chinese delegation. It was nothing more than a fishing port,” he says. The only five-star hotel in town was locked, he adds. “We had to get it opened on special request.”

The Gwadar of official imagination, as portrayed by Ahsan Iqbal, was on full display on November 11, 2016. “The first trade convoy carrying Chinese goods for export through the western route” and “a Chinese ship” arrived at the town’s port that day, daily Dawn reported.

The Gwadar Yakjehti Council, a small group of local businessmen, former political activists and freelance agitators, took out a procession in support of CPEC, Dawn said. Its participants “termed CPEC a game changer for the region, especially Balochistan, as it would bring about progress and prosperity”. The newspaper quoted one of them saying that they “are happy that Gwadar is at the centre of CPEC because this will remove poverty and create jobs for the local people”. The participants “praised the role of the Pakistan Army and said the corridor could not have been completed without the support of the armed forces”.

Pakistan’s political, military and bureaucratic elite, along with foreign diplomats, businessmen and mediapersons from Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi descended on Gwadar two days later. At a glittering ceremony, Pakistani and Chinese musicians sang of the long and deep friendship between the two countries as more than 350 guests listened, some of them clapping.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, former army chief Raheel Sharif, Chinese ambassador to Pakistan Sun Weidong, NP President Hasil Bizenjo, Balochistan Governor Muhammad Khan Achakzai and Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Zehri were among the most prominent participants at the ceremony. “ … this day marks the breaking of the dawn of a new era,” Nawaz said in his address on the occasion.

The Gwadar of reality was also visible on the sidelines: each truck in the convoy was scanned thoroughly before it was let into the port; guests were cordoned off by two layers of men in uniform.

Outside the venue of the ceremony, the already high security was raised even higher on all entry and exit points to the port area. Marine Drive was blocked for all traffic except the official one and local fishermen were told to stay off the sea. The most visible Gwadaris around were about 100 schoolchildren brought to line the approach of the marquee where the ceremony was being held and shower the arriving guests with rose petals brought from outside Gwadar. Inside the marquee, local residents were not more than 10 per cent of the participants. Many local residents who had received invitations to attend the ceremony were, in fact, disallowed entry at the last moment due tosecurity concerns.

The ‘shining’ Gwadar of official description seems like a mirage — one that haunts the town’s residents amid security cordons, poverty, illiteracy, and economic and political marginalisation.

This article was originally published in the Herald's February 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald. Additional reporting by Umer Farooq, Saleem Shahid and Danyal Adam Khan.

The Panama Leaks case is the latest instance of trial of a politician, and a sitting prime minister at that, in a long sequence of efforts to establish the rule of probity and propriety in politics that have been going on since independence. The case came to the court through a tortuous route as, for quite some time, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif contested the idea that he was answerable at all.

When the contents of the Panama Papers hit headlines in Pakistan, people were shocked to learn that many of their privileged countrymen, including some prominent politicians, had set up offshore companies or had links with them, and that they included Prime Minister Sharif’s three children. The people were also shocked to learn later on that Imran Khan, the Mr Clean of Pakistan’s political menagerie, had also set up an offshore company and that he was not afraid to admit that, since he was not a British national, he saw no harm in evading payment of taxes to the government of the country where he was earning good money as a much sought-after cricketer.

People were shocked by these disclosures but not outraged because they never expected their political leaders to be paragons of integrity. They had grown accustomed to corruption in politics as they got used to it in all other spheres of life, religion not excluded. They judged their leaders not by their capacity to resist corruption but by their record of doing good to the people while looking after themselves, though within certain limits. They had a soft corner for political lords who were known for sharing the spoils with the commoners, at least with their favourite commoners.

However, when they learnt that a prime minister and a couple of other politicians in foreign lands had resigned after being named in the Panama Papers they, certainly a large number among them, expected their prime minister to similarly rise to the pinnacle of glory. Sharif’s long narration of his family’s tribulations and its remarkable skill in making a financial fortune without any capital, and certainly without taking any capital out of Pakistan, did not persuade many Pakistanis to change their view of where his duty lay as the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Sharif stuck to his defence that he had not directly been accused of any wrongdoing and that he was not responsible for his children’s doings if they had done anything improper. He also had the benefit of one of the most firmly-honoured traditions in Pakistan (in the whole of South Asia, in fact) which protects the right of a person to be elected as a legislator and to occupy a high public office so long as criminal charges against him, however serious they may be, are not proven in a court of law. The idea that occupants of public offices could acquire the means to circumvent the judicial process, at least to delay it indefinitely, has occurred neither to the lawmakers nor to the masses.

People were shocked by the Panama disclosures but not outraged becausethey never expected their political leaders to be paragons ofintegrity.

In India, lawmakers went to the extent of allowing a person who was convicted of a crime of moral turpitude, after being elected as a legislator, to complete his term. It was only before the last general election that the election commissioner there started efforts to get this law changed. Meanwhile, the chant to get the legislatures purged of known criminals off and on rises to a crescendo in both countries.

Some people nevertheless believed that Sharif had a historic opportunity of founding a noble tradition in the domain of accountability of public figures by stepping down, at least till his name was cleared of all charges beyond any shadow of doubt. These people drew inspiration from an ancient tale to the effect that good rulers/holders of high office were required to be, like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. One could also recall the following observation by British constitutional theorist Sir Ivor Jennings, who tried to guide the government of Pakistan in constitutional matters in the 1950s.

“ ... [T]he most elementary qualification demanded of a minister is honesty and incorruptibility. It is, however, necessary not only that he should possess this qualification but also that he should appear to posses it.” (Quoted by AG Noorani in his essay, When a Minister Ought to Resign, from Jennings’ book, Cabinet Government)

It was also possible to remind the public of an obiter dictum by British jurist AV Dicey that “with us every official, from the Prime Minister down to a constable or a collector of taxes, is under the same responsibility for every act done without legal justification as any other citizen”.

The most prominent politician punished under this law [The Public andRepresentative Offices (Disqualification) Act (PRODA) of 1949] wasIftikhar Husain Khan of Mamdot, a former Punjab chief minister.

Had Sharif declared that, although he was completely blameless, he was ready to step down till his innocence was established through an independent and transparent probe, he would have greatly raised his and his party’s stock. His party would have remained in power under a new leader. Sharif could have returned to his post after his name had been cleared. His party’s chances of winning the next election could have improved. But this was not to be.

Perhaps it is not fair to blame Sharif alone for the national tradition, according to which almost all party leaders consider themselves indispensable for their outfits. The factors that prevent political supremos from vacating their seats even for a short period can be traced to the underdeveloped state of national politics, especially in the country’s failure to develop a credible, efficient and democratic party system. It has been assumed that a political party owes more to its leader than what the leader owes to the party. The argument is that since all important decisions are taken by the leader on behalf of the party, their absence from the helm of affairs, even if temporary, would destroy the unity of the flock, undermine its capacity to meet unavoidable challenges, and possibly render its members vulnerable to the guiles of rival or non-political claimants to their loyalties.

Thus, it is improbable that Pakistan will have, in the near future, political leaders who would value their reputation as morally upright individuals more than the glamour of office, and consider stepping down for a moral principle a duty and not a sacrifice.

Prime Minister Sharif did, however, offer himself to be judged by a competent body. The opposition called for an independent judicial commission and the government indicated its concurrence. But the opposition stumbled into a barren exercise for agreed terms of reference (ToRs) for the commission.

The government invited embarrassment when two former chief justices of Pakistan declined the offer to head the commission. It was with considerable difficulty that it could persuade a retired judge of the Supreme Court to accept the assignment. But then the opposition parties said they wanted a sitting Supreme Court judge or judges to probe the allegations against the prime minister. They did not reject the government’s plea for investigations into charges against all political figures but insisted on the case against Sharif being taken up first. The haggle over the proposed commission’s ToRs dragged on and neither side gave way to the other.

The efforts to set up a judicial commission received a serious setback when Chief Justice of Pakistan Anwar Zaheer Jamali declined the request to create a commission on the ground that a commission formed under the Pakistan Commissions of Inquiry(Amendment)Act 1975 would be a toothless body. This was a fair indication to the government and the opposition both that a new law to establish an effective commission was needed. Subsequently, the government did table a bill in the National Assembly on the formation of commissions but, as all eyes are on the Supreme Court, nobody seems to have the time to discuss this bill.

Meanwhile, the pressure on Sharif increased as a result of two developments.

Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif (now retired) suddenly issued a call for across the board accountability and took the rather unusual step of announcing the sacking of a lieutenant general, a major general, three brigadiers and a colonel for corruption. Neither the significance nor the thrust of these actions was lost on any political observer. Imran Khan, chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), lost his patience with his parliamentary allies and held rallies and a march to the Raiwind residence of Prime Minister Sharif.

The argument in favour of keeping political matters out of courts hasbeen strengthened in the eyes of both legal experts and enlightenedpoliticians by unhappy precedents.

He finally concluded that he had the means to lock down the federal capital and force the government to capitulate. But the government this time around succeeded in preventing its hands from being tied behind its back and was thus able to thwart the PTI bid to enact its entire script. The dharna of 2016 failed but Khan was enabled to save his face when the Supreme Court intervened and decided to take up his petition for Sharif’s disqualification.

This petition, as well as an earlier one filed by a lawyer, had been rejected by the registrar of the Supreme Court on grounds of it being frivolous and that the petitioners needed to approach a proper forum. Later on, Sheikh Rashid Ahmad and Jamaat-e-Islami chief Sirajul Haq also filed petitions against Sharif in the Supreme Court. The ruling party, too, filed petitions against Khan and his party’s secretary general, Jahangir Tareen, but the Supreme Court declined to club them with the petitions against Sharif.

Throughout these days of hectic activity, the inadequacies of the accountability mechanisms ever tried in the country were acknowledged on all sides.

Corruption began at independence. Quite a few experts on graft and accountability like to recall Quaid-e-Azam Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s historic address of August 11, 1947 in which he described the primary tasks of the government in this order: maintenance of law and order so that “the life, property and religious beliefs” of the citizens could be fully protected; putting down “with an iron hand” the “poison” of “bribery and corruption”; tackling the “monster” of black marketing; and crushing the “evil” of “nepotism and jobbery”. He added, for emphasis, his own resolve to “never tolerate any kind of jobbery, nepotism or any influence directly or indirectly brought to bear upon me” and also not to countenance such practices if found in vogue anywhere in the country.

The targets of the Quaid’s attack quite obviously included, besides state employees and traders, holders of political offices.

There is also the story of the Quaid’s unhappiness over plans of his young nephew, Pirbhai, to serve the new state in the capacity of a judicial officer or a legal practitioner because his success in either field could be attributed to his relationship with the Quaid. This possibility of a clash of interest was completely unwelcome to the Quaid. As a result, a frustrated Pirbhai had to go back to India.

The reasons for suspecting politicians for abuse of their power and privilege were surely rooted in the country’s feudal culture and the patron-client relationship between the elected representatives and their electors that had grown in the subcontinent under the British rule.

These tendencies were further strengthened during the stampede to grab evacuee properties in which only political workers of exceptionally strong moral character remained untainted. But that is not a point at issue in this brief article except for recording the fact that efforts to deal with corruption in services and politics began on the very morrow of independence. And seven initiatives, including five legal instruments, have been devised since 1947 to deal with this subject in addition to the provisions of the Penal Code and special laws. These initiatives are:

1. The Prevention of Corruption Act (1947) that could be used against a public servant (including politicians wielding executive authority, such as ministers) for accepting bribe or other forms of illegal gratification or for living beyond their known sources of income. This law is still in force.

2. The Public and Representative Offices (Disqualification) Act (PRODA) of 1949. This law was made exclusively to punish holders of public office and members of any elective body for misconduct, which included bribery, corruption, jobbery, favouritism, nepotism, wilful maladministration, wilful misappropriation or diversion of public money, any other abuse of official power/position or abetment. The most prominent politician punished under this law was Iftikhar Husain Khan of Mamdot, a former Punjab chief minister. The law was repealed in 1954 when members of the Constituent Assembly briefly enjoyed their freedom to defy Governor General Ghulam Muhammad’s authoritarian practices (including the sacking of Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin), and tried to put an end to the use of the law, or the threat to use it, to frighten legislators/ministers and compel them to fall in line behind the governor general’s diktat.

3. The Elective Bodies (Disqualification) Order (EBDO) of 1959 was the Ayub regime’s principal instrument to punish politicians for misconduct, which was defined, in addition to offences listed in PRODA, as any subversive activity, preaching of any doctrine or committing an act that contributed to political instability. In actual fact, this law was meant to demonise politicians (as a means to justify military dictatorship) and drive them into wilderness. Those who were disqualified under this order, as well as those who voluntarily accepted disqualification, were barred from taking part in politics for seven years, that is, till December 31, 1966. The law expired after meeting its immediate purpose. While leading politicians, such as Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Abdul Qayyum Khan, were ‘EBDO-ed’, in the final analysis, the measure did not help Ayub Khan much because many targeted politicians won election to the National Assembly in 1962 and forced him to abandon his scheme of non-party parliament and government.

4. General Ziaul Haq introduced special courts and tribunals. He justified the breach of his own pledge to hold election within 90 days, that he had made after toppling Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, on the ground that accountability had to precede elections. He then created 13 special courts, headed by high court judges, to try politicians, including former ministers and legislators, for a variety of offences. Subsequently, he included a serving brigadier in each special court. Many Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leaders were disqualified. In the long run this measure fared no better than EBDO and eventually Zia too had to make peace with politicians who had survived his plans for a partyless democracy.

5. Sharif set up an Ehtesab Cell. Soon after the dismissal of Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1990, the government created an Ehtesab Cell under Saifur Rahman to go after politicians suspected of corruption. The cell specially targeted Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari and sometimes ignored the requirement of due process to the extent that international legal experts were moved to protest against what they described as political vendetta.

6. Sharif brought in the Ehtesab Act of 1997. This law was applicable to both politicians (who fell under the definition of public servants) and members of federal/provincial assemblies and was designed to punish those charged with misconduct, especially corruption. The law did not apply to members of the judiciary and armed forces except in cases in which military and judicial officers held a public office.

7. Pervez Musharraf promulgated the National Accountability Bureau Ordinance in 1999. The bureau created under this law has wide powers to investigate complaints of corruption against holders of public offices or any other person. The scheme has come under attack for its dependence on information that the government may or may not part with and for the sweeping powers of the bureau’s chairman. The law has also attracted the Supreme Court’s strictures over its provisions for plea bargain and voluntary surrender of the public funds that have been misappropriated.

In addition, four regimes – headed by Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Ziaul Haq – dismissed/demoted thousands of state employees for corruption or for being seen to be corrupt.

Commenting on the failure of these laws and schemes to curb corruption, Karachi-based political economist Asad Sayeed, in his admirable paper, Contextualising Corruption in Pakistan, observes that the most common lament about laws and investigation agencies is that they “are seen to be discriminatory and particularly focused on politicians (in the main) and civil bureaucrats”. He adds: “As such politicians have often questioned the legitimacy of anti-corruption mechanisms, citing it as a form of victimisation in a country where the civil-military tensions have dominated politics.

Their recriminations get further credence from the fact that these legislations consistently exclude the military and the judiciary.” Sayeed might as well have taken notice of the Zia-made provision in Article 63 of the Constitution that renders any legislator liable to disqualification for defaming the judiciary or the armed forces. That demonisation of politicians carries a premium is no secret.

Unfortunately the practice of holding ministers accountable through parliamentary commissions or tribunals or judicial/quasi-judicial probe bodies, which have been quite popular in England and India, has not developed in Pakistan.

The inability of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to take up the case against Sharif was found extremely distasteful by all concerned. The Supreme Court censured the NAB in no uncertain terms for its uselessness. Here, again, the government missed an opportunity of establishing its commitment to an honest probe by making changes in the NAB law so as to remove any excuse for not investigating the allegations against the prime minister.

It can be said that, by its failure to demonstrate the existence of a credible accountability mechanism, the government pushed the matter into the hands of the Supreme Court. The case has come up before the Supreme Court at a time when more and more people have come to believe that the judiciary should not be burdened with deciding political issues. Also, this is the time when the apex court is recovering from the legacy of Justice (retd) Iftikhar Chaudhry.

The argument in favour of keeping political matters out of courts has been strengthened in the eyes of both legal experts and enlightened politicians, as well as a wide section of the lay public, by unhappy precedents set by judicial verdicts in political matters.

The Supreme Court gave a verdict against the military establishmentonly in the Asma Jilani case and declared General Yahya Khan ausurper, but this was after Yahya Khan had been abandoned by his ownfellow officers and was confined to a house in Rawalpindi.

Khawaja Nazimuddin did not go to the court when he was sacked by Governor General Ghulam Muhammad but Maulvi Tamizuddin did when the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. He won his case in the Sindh High Court but Justice Muhammad Munir came to the governor general’s rescue with a federal court judgment that has caused endless embarrassment to the judiciary.

The same court covered itself with ignominy when it legitimised a martial law regime and ruled against the people’s right to democratic governance.

Then came the Nusrat Bhutto case in which the Supreme Court dismissed a plea against the chief martial law administrator for want of jurisdiction and relief was awarded to the respondent by giving him a licence to amend the Constitution.

The Supreme Court that heard the challenge to General Pervez Musharraf’s coup against Sharif’s government in 1999 went beyond the decision in the Nusrat Bhutto case in giving the military ruler – in the guise of a chief executive officer – the power to clip even fundamental rights.

The Supreme Court gave a verdict against the military establishment only in the Asma Jilani case and declared General Yahya Khan a usurper, but this was after Yahya Khan had been abandoned by his own fellow officers and was confined to a house in Rawalpindi. However, the Supreme Court did oblige the Sharif government when the judges overturned President Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly and thereby get rid of the prime minister who had defied the president publicly.

The most serious blow struck by the judiciary in favour of coups was the development of the myth that the military had a right to intervene when the Constitution offered no solution to a political crisis. The fact is that there can be no situation that cannot be resolved in accordance with the state’s basic law.

Two instances will be sufficient to prove the point.

The Lahore High Court struck down Zia’s order whereby he had dissolved the National Assembly in order to sack his hand-picked Prime Minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, but did not restore his government by arguing that a general election was about to take place and it was advisable to let the will of the people prevail. The decision was upheld by the Supreme Court. Political dynamics were, thus, allowed to overrule judicial strictures.

During the 1994 crisis caused by the tug of war between President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Prime Minister Sharif, General Abdul Waheed Kakar resorted to extra-constitutional intervention by sending both the contenders packing and facilitated the holding of a general election. It became the only example so far of a military chief’s intervention in a political crisis without advancing his personal or group ambition.

Evidence from history suggests that, by and large, the judiciary has been able to rule only against civilian governments/politicians while it has been unable to curb the military’s appetite for endless powers, to say nothing of the court’s inability to enforce Article 6 of the Constitution that concerns high treason for abrogating, subverting or suspending the Constitution or even holding it in abeyance.

While Justice Munir was looking for a theory to legitimise the usurpation of power by Ayub Khan, a story, apparently apocryphal, became popular in gossip parlours. When asked as to why he had chosen to validate the military regime, Justice Munir was reported to have pointed to the sergeant standing outside the courtroom and his extraordinary powers. (This was much before Hamid Khan revealed in his History of the Judiciary the intrigue that led to the appointment of Justice Munir as head of the Federal Court by depriving the senior most judge of this honour.) It seems the sergeant has never been recalled.

Whatever the outcome of the case, the government will come underincreased pressure to remove inadequacies and flaws in itsaccountability regime.

The fact that the Supreme Court is dealing with the Panama Leaks case at a time when it is going through a transition is not without significance. Had the matter come up before Justice Chaudhry’s court, its approach to the case could have been anticipated and the outcome predicted, for that court derived vicarious pleasure from putting the politicians on the mat. Neither the muted voices of protest at home nor the friendly advice of external observers, such as the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, to avoid appearing to be vindictive, could dampen its messianic zeal to clean up all the Augean stables single-handedly.

But Justice Chaudhry’s successors, at least two of them, successfully strove to tamper judicial activism with due exercise of restraint and thus made the court’s policy of infrequent interventions in the affairs of other organs of the state not only more effective but also more satisfying. While the court will have reason to avoid looking like its pre-2000 predecessor or the Chaudhry court, it might find it hard to give up the possibility of a meaningful intervention that the situation all too clearly demands. At the same time, it might not like to be known, in view of earlier decisions against Yousuf Raza Gilani and Raja Pervez Ashraf, as the chopping block for prime ministers’ heads. For that reason, Chief Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali has declared that extreme action against Prime Minister Sharif will be taken only if it is justified by 100 per cent credible evidence.

Although all sorts of comments on the case are being made in the media, respect for the Supreme Court demands avoidance of speculation on the course of events. Fortunately, the relevant issues have been reduced to two questions: Did any money go out of Pakistan and whether the prime minister was a party to it; and has the prime minister failed to file a correct statement of his assets?

The question as to where the burden of proof should lie will, of course, receive due attention. The court will no doubt weigh the evidence presented by the parties and decide on the basis of facts established before it. In case of lack of conclusive evidence, the court will be free to accept the prayer to create a commission to investigate the matter or it may refer the issue to the people.

Whatever the outcome of the case, the government will come under increased pressure to remove inadequacies and flaws in its accountability regime. Nothing short of an independent, autonomous institution, duly protected under the Constitution, enjoying all necessary powers and being answerable only to the parliament, is likely to satisfy the public demand for effective accountability.

However, neither stiff laws nor efficient institutions will succeed in establishing the rule of propriety in politics in due measure until the people can mobilise a social force to guide and oversee a transformation of the country’s politics in favour of a genuinely representative and responsible dispensation. Such a force can materialise only if the society is freed of the feudal culture and the mindset that obliges the people to suffer corrupt and inefficient rulers and tolerate the denial of their rights.

Until that happens, the people will have neither true democracy nor an impeccable system of accountability. Nor perhaps even a justice system capable of upholding the rights of all the people, regardless of their belief, gender, social status or domicile, in accordance with the highest standards of fair play and equity.

Wisdom warns against delaying legal reform till the society begins to accept its challenges or putting off social change priorities till an accountability mechanism is perfected. Both undertakings must be taken up simultaneously for they are interdependent; success on either front will yield dividends on the other one. If that happens, the time and resources expended on the Panama Leaks affair will not have been in vain.

This article was originally published as the cover story in the Herald's December 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

On the far-east side of Karachi’s coast, the wind is always strong. Except that on a recent day in August, not a leaf is stirring. The ride on a road that branches off Karachi Thatta National Highway and leads to Pakistan Steel Mills is as suffocating as it is bumpy.

Right where the road enters the vast premises of Pakistan Steel Mills, a verse from the Quran is displayed on a billboard: “And we have sent down iron, wherein is great military might and benefits for the people.” A few feet away, close to 25 men can be seen sitting under a shamiana — they have been staging a sit-in here since August 3, 2016.

Right next to them is the Mills’ main entrance, named after Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Behind it lies 19,000 acres of land that houses various constituent parts of Pakistan Steel Mills: 20 different plants, including a thermal power station, forklifts, warehouses, conveyor belts, railway tracks, stockyards.

Dozens of industries, including vehicle manufacturing factories and a steel mill, are located on a part of the same land. They were originally meant to draw their raw materials from Pakistan Steel Mills. No machines whir, no plants hum, no furnaces radiate inside the Mills.

All 20 of its processing plants are shut. In an area fenced off to block entry without permission, 5,000 tonnes of rusted metal sits untouched — or so it seems. This was produced when the plants were running.

Operational furnaces produced so much heat that no one could walk underneath them without protective gear. Now, they look like museum pieces.

An insulated two-way conveyor belt – about 4.5 kilometres long – appears to be in perfect shape, even though it has not moved an inch for over a year. It used to carry raw material such as coal and iron ore from the docks at nearby Port Qasim and transported manufactured goods to the port. Its insulation ensured that those materials were not exposed to the elements and their surface temperature was maintained at a desirable level — a marvel of technology and architecture.

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Large deposits of iron ore lie in an open yard. Amidst them sits a giant Soviet-era forklift. It is under maintenance. A similar contraption in the empty coal yard looks like it is still in the middle of finishing its last task.

These machines are capable of shifting 1,000 tonnes of coal or iron ore in one hour from the yards to the conveyor belt that then carries them to different plants. Something written in Cyrillic script appears right on top of them. When these machines were operational, they kicked up a storm of dust so thick that no one could see them from a distance.

Twelve railway coaches are parked inside a wagon shop. They once fetched molten iron ore from one part of the Mills to another. They are regularly maintained and can be put back to work at short notice.

Two blast furnaces at the Iron-Making Department stand idly, held steady by their frames. The giant ladles that once shifted processed iron ore from the furnaces onto the railway coaches stand motionless and empty — like the outstretched hands of a beggar.

The smell of gas that once fuelled the furnaces still pervades the environs. Insulation around the pipes that carried gas, compressed air and water to the furnaces is coming off. When the department was functional, this insulation required continuous maintenance.

Operational furnaces produced so much heat that no one could walk underneath them without protective gear. Now, they look like museum pieces, with onlookers inspecting them from all possible angles, without the fear of any hazard or harm.

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The Mills has an integrated structure. All its plants and machines work in tandem. If one of its parts closes down, the rest also comes to a standstill. When the Mills shut down on June 10, 2015, it was not the result of any of its parts going out of order and gradually closing down the rest of the production process. Instead, all the plants and machines were shut down abruptly, at once.

It was, however, not entirely unexpected. The Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC), that supplied natural gas to the Mills, had been demanding that its bills of nearly 35 billion rupees be cleared. After sending a final notice to the management of Pakistan Steel Mills early last summer, SSGC cut off the gas supply, bringing Pakistan’s largest steel producer to a sudden halt.

An eerie silence surrounds Pakistan Steel Mills today. Its machines and plants – that have the capacity to produce close to 1.1 million tonnes of steel in a year – run the risk of becoming permanently dysfunctional if they do not start running again soon. The longer they remain turned off, the costlier it will be to reboot them.

Management officials at Pakistan Steel Mills are waiting for a miracle that sets it rolling again. They are waiting for an injection of money from the federal government to pay outstanding salaries and other dues of former and working members of the staff. They are waiting for a missive from the Privatisation Commission. They were told that the financial adviser appointed by the commission to supervise the sale of the Mills to some private buyer would soon contact them. Many weeks have passed since that information reached them, but they have not received a single phone call or a letter with the latest updates.

They are not even sure if privatisation will ever go ahead, at all.

This ‘nothing happens’ state of affairs did not develop overnight. It has been almost 20 years in the making.

On May 29, 1997, the Council of Common Interest (CCI) approved the Mills’ privatisation because, according to a petition filed at the Supreme Court, “it could not prove to be a commercially viable project”. Immediately after the approval, however, the government started having second thoughts. It dropped the idea of privatisation and, instead, decided to reform the Mills’ financial and management structures to make it profitable. The restructuring was made possible by hefty injections of money (secured by the government as loans). The move worked and the Mills started earning profit 2002 onwards.

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Audited accounts confirm the improvement. In 1999-2000, the Mills made an annual loss of 1.141 billion rupees, taking its total accumulated losses to 9.326 billion rupees. By 2005, the accumulated losses were all gone. On the other hand, the Mills had an accumulated profit of 4.866 billion rupees.

The production capacity also increased in that period: from 76 per cent in 1999-2000 to 86 per cent (in 2000-2001); 81 per cent (in 2001-2002); 92 per cent (in 2002-2003); 94 per cent (in 2003-2004) and 89 per cent (in 2004-2005).

Management officials at Pakistan Steel Mills are waiting for a miracle that sets it rolling again.

On April 11, 2005, the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation again decided to privatise Pakistan Steel Mills. In light of this decision, the government published newspaper advertisem*nts, inviting Expressions of Interest from parties interested in acquiring the Mills. Sometime later, 19 parties applied, seeking approval for their qualification to partake in the privatisation process. These included Al-Tuwairqi Group (Saudi Arabia), in partnership with Arif Habib Group (Pakistan), and Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (Russia).

During this time, the government appointed Citi Group as the financial adviser to evaluate the assets of Pakistan Steel Mills. The adviser submitted its evaluation report to the Privatisation Commission, which deliberated upon it and also took into consideration the replacement cost of some of the machinery. The commission then suggested that the total worth of the Mills stood at 500 million dollars.

Based on this calculation, the price for 75 per cent stake in the Mills was put at 375 million dollars. Since one US dollar at the time was equal to 60 rupees, the price of a single share in local currency was calculated to be 17.43 rupees (the total number of shares being privatised was 1,290,487,275).

When the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation went through these statistics, it revised the shared price downwards at 16.18 rupees.

The Arif Habib Group and Al-Tuwairqi Group – two of the parties the government qualified to take part in the privatisation process – formed a consortium to offer a joint bid for the purchase of shares. Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works also joined the consortium on the day the bids were to be made. This consortium, according to the petition filed at the Supreme Court, offered to pay 16.80 rupees per share, a price higher than those offered by their competitors.

The government accepted the offer and issued a letter of acceptance on March 31, 2006. The successful bidders signed an agreement with the government representatives on April 24, 2006. They were all set to take over the Mills.

Except that it never happened.

Days before the letter of acceptance was issued, a little-known group, Wattan Party, and Peoples Workers Union (the elected trade union representative of the Mills’ workers at the time) challenged the privatisation before the Sindh High Court in Karachi. The petition claimed that there were “omissions” during the privatisation process and that the Mills was being sold at a “throwaway” price of 21.68 billion rupees.

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The Sindh High Court referred the petition to the Supreme Court on March 30, 2006. The apex court examined the privatisation process over the next few weeks and declared the letter of acceptance as null and void on June 23, 2006.

This was the first time, according to Mohammad Zubair, the current head of the Privatisation Commission, that the privatisation process of a government-owned entity was completed and then reversed by the Supreme Court.

When Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of Pakistan at the time, took the decision against the privatisation of Pakistan Steel Mills, it seemed like a victory for the workers. Later, events would suggest that it was a pyrrhic one.

Zubair says 2006 was the best time to privatise the Mills. Today, it is in the worst possible shape, he says, making its privatisation a very slow process, with little interest being shown by prospective buyers. The Mills, for instance, ran at only six per cent of its production capacity between 2013 and 2014. Its accumulated losses reached 118.529 billion rupees by the end of the 2013-2014 financial year. In that year alone, the Mills made a net loss of 23.532 billion rupees.

The rot started much before 2014.

Many blame it on the way the federal government of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – that came to power in the first half of 2008 – handled Pakistan Steel Mills. That year, the government appointed a new chairman, Moin Aftab Sheikh, to head the Mills’ management. The same year, election for the Collective Bargaining Agency (CBA) – empowered to bargain with the management on the workers’ behalf – were held. Peoples Workers Union, a labour organisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills’ workers affiliated to PPP, won that election.

The combined impact of a PPP-appointed chairman and the victory of its affiliated union as CBA was far from benign. The two sides, instead of keeping an eye on each other as they ideally should, seemingly joined hands to the detriment of the Mills.

The alleged collaboration between the chairman and the CBA has been recorded in a corruption case registered in 2010. The case was in “respect of award of Canteen contract wherein it is alleged that Mr Moin Aftab Sheikh…in connivance with other accused persons fraudulently scrapped the already floated tender.” This, according to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), caused a loss of 81.041 million rupees. One of the co-accused in this case is Shamshad Qureshi, the chairman of the CBA.

Even otherwise, Sheikh’s tenure was extremely controversial. All kinds of allegations swirled around him. In 2009, a case was registered against him and three others for causing a loss of 49 million rupees to the Mills. He was alleged to have “fraudulently manipulated a spot purchase of 50,000 [metric tonnes] of coal” from Australia “on highly-inflated price and on extremely higher freight rates despite declining market rate.”

The combined impact of a PPP-appointed chairman and the victory of its affiliated union as CBA was far from benign.

The same year, Sheikh, along with a few others, was booked in another case. This pertained to the “manipulation” in the acceptance of 40,000 metric tonnes of metallurgical co*ke, which “arrived from China … without opening of [Letter of Credit] or obtaining necessary permission … on highly-inflated price and on extremely high freight rates resulting in loss of 1 billion rupees…”

Again, in 2009, he was among those who had allegedly manipulated “10 shipments of coal” from Australia and Canada on a “highly-inflated price and extremely high freight rates, causing loss of billions of rupees”.

In a case registered in 2010, Sheikh was among 13 individuals who had caused “wrongful loss” to the public exchequer “to the tune of millions of rupees regarding the sale and purchase of various finished products, including billets". A 2012 case accused him and 26 others of collusion that “caused wrongful loss” to Pakistan Steel Mills in “sale/purchase of various finished products”.

Sheikh’s alleged involvement in large-scale corruption also allowed his subordinates to pocket public money at will. In one of the four other major cases of corruption pertaining to his tenure, the senior management staff at the Mills caused a loss of 3.65 billion rupees by selling 49,000 metric tonnes of steel billets below market prices. In the second case, senior members of the management “extended illegal benefit of 90 days free credit without mark-up to Amrelli Steels Limited” in Karachi.

The third one was regarding the violation of Pakistan Steel Mills’ rules (which state that the same company cannot be a trader and a consumer dealer) by two traders who, in connivance with the Mills’ management, sold products they had purchased as consumer dealers in the open market. The last case makes the same allegation against the representatives of Gujrat Steel Private Limited who sold products they had purchased from Pakistan Steel Mills for four of their registered consumers. Their main accomplice from among the management was one Ghafoor Pathan, who worked as deputy manager of Customer Service Marketing at the time.

These cases were registered after the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of the allegations of corruption at Pakistan Steel Mills. The court directed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to investigate those allegations. The public furor over stories of corruption in the Mills led the then Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to sack Sheikh on August 18, 2009.

Those responsible for investigating plunder at Pakistan Steel Mills, however, have failed to move briskly enough to ensure the prosecution and conviction of those involved. Three years after the Supreme Court gave the FIA the task of investigation, the judges became unhappy with the agency’s progress. “We do not find any serious effort on the part of the FIA towards prosecution of the cases,” they declared.

In 2012, they handed over the investigation to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), which, too, has failed to achieve any results. While forwarding the cases to the NAB, the Supreme Court had ordered it to take action within three months. More than three years later, that order exists more in disregard than in compliance.

In June of this year, the Ministry of Industries and Production in Islamabad sent a letter to the NAB, calling for the “latest/updated compliance report for the cases … pending with NAB.” The letter has elicited no response so far.

Even when anti-corruption institutions have failed to bring the corrupt to justice, the data vividly paints the disaster their activities wreaked on the Mills. In the financial years 2006-2007 and 2007-2008, it was running at a capacity of 82 per cent and 89 per cent, respectively. Its net annual profit stood at 3.159 billion rupees in 2006-2007 and at 2.081 billion rupees in 2007-2008. In the following year, there was a massive reduction in its production capacity, which fell to 65 per cent. The Mills incurred a loss of 26.526 billion rupees in 2008-2009.

While forwarding the cases to the NAB, the Supreme Court had ordered it to take action within three months. More than three years later, that order exists more in disregard than in compliance.

Avais Hyder Liaquat Nauman, an audit firm that the Mills’ management engaged on the orders of the Supreme Court to gauge the impact of Sheikh’s tenure, made startling revelations: Pakistan Steel Mills suffered a loss of 9.99 billion rupees due to corrupt practices in that year; mismanagement and negligence caused a loss of 11.84 billion rupees; and business losses stood at 4.68 billion rupees.

If Pakistan Steel Mills had not lost those 26.526 billion rupees under Sheikh, that money could have been sufficient to pay around 2.04 million rupees to each of the Mills’ 13,000 employees awaiting salaries.

But even after Sheikh had left, the situation at the Mills went from bad to worse. Between August 2009 and July 2013, five people successively served as chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills — three of them held that position only in an acting position or as an additional charge. That, obviously, had a negative impact on the working of the Mills.

In 2009-2010, its production capacity dropped to 40 per cent; in 2010-2011, it fell further to 36 per cent. By the end of 2012-2013, it had dipped to as low as 14 per cent. The Mills’ accumulated losses at the time stood at a massive 94.997 billion rupees.

In a span of only six years, between 2007 and 2013, the Mills not only eroded its previously accumulated profit of 9.536 billion rupees, but also added almost 10 times as much money in losses. That means that the total money Pakistan Steel Mills lost in this period stood at a staggering 104.533 billion rupees. With that kind of money, one can buy 5,226 two-bedroom apartments in a posh neighbourhood in Karachi, each costing 20 million rupees.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif decided to resume the process of Pakistan Steel Mills’ privatisation in October 2013. It was included among 69 state-owned enterprises that the government wanted to sell to the private sector. Over the next three years or so, however, the Mills’ privatisation made little progress.

There were hurdles at every stage. Even the task of finding a financial adviser was not smooth. When the Privatisation Commission advertised in the press that it needed a financial adviser for the privatisation of Pakistan Steel Mills, no one came forward in the 30-day time frame given in the advert.

The Privatisation Commission issued another ad after three months or so. Finally, towards the end of 2014, one consortium – comprising the Pak-China Investment Bank, the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and human resource consultancy Abacus – came forward. Even though the consortium is not the best adviser that the Mills should get, the commission – according to Zubair – had no choice.

Another challenge for the Privatisation Commission was to make the Mills an attractive business for prospective buyers. Zubair decided to ask the federal government to inject 18.5 billion rupees into the Mills to improve its operational and financial status.

When he took his plan to the Economic Coordination Committee of the federal cabinet in April 2014, he explained that his goal was to raise the production capacity from zero to 60 per cent (estimated to cost nine billion rupees) and pay the long-overdue utility bills and outstanding staff salaries (estimated to cost 9.5 billion rupees). His objective was to keep the Mills in working condition until the privatisation process was completed. The committee approved his plan.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif decided to resume the process of Pakistan Steel Mills’ privatisation in October 2013.

It also worked — at least initially. The production capacity did pick up and reached close to 60 per cent by early 2015.

A few weeks later, came the biggest hurdle: disconnection of the gas supply shut down the Mills completely. Zubair and his Privatisation Commission have been unable to overcome that hurdle so far.

He took another route to bypass it. The Privatisation Commission organised roadshows in September 2015 in Beijing and Shanghai to attract foreign buyers for Pakistan Steel Mills. Many Chinese companies showed conditional interest. The Cabinet Committee on Privatisation also approved the structure of the privatisation transaction on October 1, 2015, showing what assets were to be privatised and how many liabilities were to be transferred to the private buyer.

While these developments were taking place, the government of Sindh showed interest in acquiring Pakistan Steel Mills. The Cabinet Committee on Privatisation directed the Privatization Commission to formally approach the provincial government to see if it was interested in acquiring the Mills with all its assets and liabilities.

By the end of April 2016, the Sindh government said it was no longer interested. It said the federal government was not willing to provide even those financial incentives that any private buyer would have gotten anyway. A report published in the daily Business Recorder said that the Sindh government had sought financial assistance from the federal government, but the latter denied that request and told the former to buy the Mills on an “as is, where is” basis.

For the next few months, the privatisation process was completely stalled. In June this year, the Cabinet Committee on Privatisation again authorised the Privatisation Commission to restart the process. A meeting was held in Islamabad on September 21, 2016, to finalise a new transaction structure. “We will go back to the cabinet committee for the approval of [the] transaction structure in a couple of weeks,” says Zubair.

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That approval will face many roadblocks. Firstly, losses are piling up, and so are the liabilities. Secondly, Zubair says, the interest shown by Chinese companies is no longer as strong as it was last year, when eight of them were ready to take part in the privatisation process. Now, only three to four of them are willing to do so. Thirdly, frustration among the employees of Pakistan Steel Mills is growing by the day over non-payment of their salaries and other dues. They want to get their money back before the Mills is privatised.

Zubair knows all this. Even the highest bid will be nothing compared to what was offered in 2006, he says. “[The Mills] is non-functional and it owes 66 billion rupees to the National Bank of Pakistan and 40 billion rupees to the Sui Southern Gas Company,” he says. Whoever buys the Mills, their ability to borrow money from banks will be limited because of this credit history, he adds.

Zubair also argues it will be a wise move to sell the Mills at whatever price it attracts. That will, at least, ensure the resumption of its operations, he says.

The first benefit of an operational Mills will be that money being given to it as a subsidy from the public exchequer will no longer be required. Secondly, the new owners will invest money to upgrade plants and machines. Thirdly, an operational Mills will absorb 8,000 to 9,000 of its existing employees, if not all of them. “We will at least save it from complete shut down,” Zubair says, considering the government does not have the resources to restart its operations.

Pakistan Steel Mills has not paid salaries to its staffers since May 2016. It has not paid gratuity to its former employees who have retired since May 2013 and it has failed to give provident fund to retiring staffers since 2015 (the total number of employees in these two categories is 3,000, according to a trade unionist). The Mills’ total losses and liabilities, according to one source, stand at 400 billion rupees. Its management acknowledges it is losing seven million rupees per day, even when all its plants and machines are shut down and its staffers are not being paid.

The Mills’ accumulated losses and liabilities are more than 150 per cent of the total expenditure on setting it up back in 1974. That expenditure was recorded at 25 billion rupees. That money is equivalent to 2.52 billion dollars (considering that the dollar was equivalent to 9.9 rupees in 1974). In today’s dollar prices, the Mills’ construction cost would be 264.6 billion rupees even by conservative estimates.

Back in the day, Pakistan Steel Mills was the “backbone of the nation”.

At its official inauguration ceremony on January 15, 1985, General Ziaul Haq said it was “the greatest and most precious new year gift to the nation”. Lieutenant General Saeed Qadir, then federal minister for production, declared the Mills as a “milestone on the road of economic freedom, all-around progress and national honour”.

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At the ceremony, Vitali S Smirnov, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Pakistan at the time, said that the Mills would become a symbol of friendship between the two states. The entire funding for setting up the Mills came from the Soviet Union — some in the form of cash for constructing the buildings, roads, railtracks, conveyor belts, etc, and the rest in the form of finished products.

After the ceremony, Haq spoke to reporters and claimed that the Soviet Union had offered to set up a second steel mill in Pakistan. “We welcome this gesture and will consider it at the right time,” he said. The irony is that Pakistan, at the time, was also waging a proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.

Sometime in the 1950s, Ghulam Faruque, a senior bureaucrat, established the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) with the objective of promoting industrialisation, both in the public and private sectors. His corporations would arrange money and technology for prospective investors.

One of its earlier projects was building a steel mill because it was considered essential for the industrialisation of the country, says Haq Nawaz Akhtar, one of the first chairmen of Pakistan Steel Mills. The project was first proposed in the first five-year plan (1955 -1960), according to the Pakistan Steel Mills’ website.

By 1956, Pakistan had received a proposal from the Soviet Union, offering technical and economic assistance to build the proposed steel mill, says a report by the Area Study Centre, a university-based think tank in Peshawar. In April 1965, President Ayub Khan visited Moscow. Subsequently, his government decided to set up a steel mill in the public sector.

By July 2, 1968, reads an entry on the Pakistan Steel Mills’ website, “Pakistan Steel Mills Corporation was set up as a … company in the public sector in accordance [with] the Companies Act of 1913, with the objective to establish and run steel mills [in] Karachi and other parts of Pakistan.”

The following year in January, the corporation finalised an agreement with Tiajproexport, a company in the Soviet Union, “for the preparation of a feasibility report into the establishment” of a steel mill. A couple of months later, Ayub Khan had to resign.

The interest shown by Chinese companies is no longer as strong as it was last year, when eight of them were ready to take part in the privatisation process.

When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became prime minister, he decided to set up the steel mill at its current location. He also approved the construction of Port Muhammad Bin Qasim, dedicated to fulfil the proposed mills’ logistic requirements.

Between 1972 and 1977, Bhutto visited Moscow twice. As pointed out by the Area Study Centre, there was an “improvement in economic and scientific relations” between the two countries. In 1973, a number of Soviet economic delegations and steel experts visited Pakistan. On December 30 that year, Bhutto laid the foundation stone for Pakistan Steel Mills.

By the early 1990s, however, the Mills was already showing signs of sluggish performance. Sabeeh Qamaruz Zaman was a serving lieutenant general at the time. He took over as the chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills in January 1992 and immediately embarked on a plan to cut costs. His first savings were in “overtime, incentive, medical, transport, financial expense and consumption of stores,” according to a 1994 article written by defence and political analyst Ikram Sehgal and published in The Nation, a daily newspaper. Within 18 months of taking up his job, Zaman was able to bring down the total expenses from 223 million rupees to 165 million rupees per month.

The medical expenses of employees would amount to 30 million rupees a month at the time, says a knowledgeable source. Some workers were applying for the reimbursem*nt of their medical expenses, which were up to 25,000 rupees. Zaman set up a committee to address the issue: anyone who needed more than 5,000 rupees in medical expenses had to appear before the committee and justify the expense. The committee discovered that some employees were seeking reimbursem*nt for money spent on cosmetics, house-building and repairing and other non-medical expenses. Within two months, the medical expenses dropped down to 10 million rupees.

After his retirement from the army, Zaman became one of the founding directors of The Citizens Foundation. He is now running a non-profit organisation for girls, Quality School Foundation, and lives a quiet life with his wife, children and grandchildren in Rawalpindi.

Zaman managed to run the Mills in 1994, at its highest ever production capacity of 95 per cent, producing 1.04 million tonnes of steel in that year. In order to make that happen, he had to fight the unions, the Russian staff and even the government.

He took on the Russians when they did not cooperate with him. After a Russian engineer declared a machine dead and demanded new machinery be bought from Russia, Zaman urged Pakistani engineers to rise up to the occasion and put the machine back to work. They passed the test with flying colours. He then told the Russian engineers to pack up and leave as they were no longer needed. Hundreds of them left as a result of his orders. These days only a handful of Russian engineers work at Pakistan Steel Mills.

His next target were workers affiliated with political parties.

In the early 1990s, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) had 15 registered trade unions in Pakistan Steel Mills and a total of 600 labour activists. They considered themselves exempt from work, but got salaries and overtime regularly, along with other benefits, Sehgal wrote. Zaman also discovered that 3,800 of the Mills’ employees existed only on paper. They never came to work. He immediately removed them from the payroll. It was later discovered that their salaries went directly to Nine Zero, MQM’s headquarters in Karachi, says a source, without wanting to be named.

Incensed by his move, MQM threatened to close down the Mills as well as the city of Karachi. Under pressure from the party, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called Zaman for a meeting and tried to convince him to take those people back on the payroll. Zaman refused to undo what he had done. He told the prime minister that he could sack him if he liked.

Sharif, instead, decided to form a committee to tackle the situation. Before this committee could even begin its work, the government started a security operation against MQM in Karachi. Zaman never had to worry about the issue any more.

“I stopped all outside interference by the labour unions, government and political parties,” he says, in an interview conducted in his home. “All decisions were made in-house, in the interest of Pakistan Steel Mills and not in the interest of anybody outside,” adds Zaman.

Naureen Farooq remembers the good old days fondly.

A native of Faisalabad, she joined Pakistan Steel Mills as a volunteer in its education department in 1985. The schools within the area where Pakistan Steel Mills’ workers lived were only up to the primary level at the time and were not in the best of conditions. In 1987, the management set up a committee to improve the quality of education. As recommended by the committee, the management gave full-time jobs to all those working as volunteers like Farooq. That gave a big fillip to educational activities.

Today, there are 21 educational institutions in the residential part of the Mills. These include primary schools, Sindhi medium schools, degree colleges and a cadet college. There are more than 5,000 children enrolled at these institutions.

Farooq has albums containing photographs from her time as a teacher. In many of them, she can be seen standing confidently next to her colleagues and the Mills’ management. Many pictures show annual school functions, stage performances by students, visits by Chinese delegations, sports events — and greener, brighter residential blocks.

“People keep complaining about what has happened to Pakistan Steel Mills,” says Farooq, “but they never ask what part they have played in it.” An industry does not reach point zero overnight, she adds.

Farooq recalls how Muhammad Afzal, who worked as the Mills’ chairman until his untimely death in 2003, once gathered all the employees of the education department and informed them that Pakistan Steel Mills was no longer running in losses. “You can proudly call yourselves the employees of Pakistan Steel Mills, because we have finally paid off all our debts,” she quotes him as saying.

Inside Karachi Steel Mill Township, a residential neighbourhood built exclusively to house the Mills’ staff, pride in the institution is the last thing one expects. Not a leaf rustles here on a suffocating August day. The streets that divide the workers’ colony from the officers’ residences are deserted — in tandem with the stillness at the nearby premises of the Mills.

Built on approximately 715 acres of land, the township has 3,700 houses. It has its own schools, markets, recreational facilities, a dispensary, a mosque, a church and a temple. Many of the Mills’ existing and former employees live here.

The officers’ residences that dot the streets all look the same: plain, concrete blocks with two floors, each marked by circular windows. Most have unkempt lawns. The paint on their walls is wearing off.

In the workers’ colony, houses are smaller. Some do not even have doors; curtains made of discarded bed sheets block off their entrances. The streets inside the colony look like they were abandoned years ago.

Public places and main roads in the township are a different affair. On one September evening, amateur footballers and cricketers from nearby areas are out practicing their skills in the cricket grounds. The Mills’ workers can also be seen there in the evening, returning home after finishing their day’s work.

Some of them take a stroll to Pakistani Market, a strip of grocery stores and teashops, to buy items of daily use; others gather at the nearby Russian Market, once meant to cater to the Russian employees of the Mills.

“People keep complaining about what has happened to Pakistan Steel Mills,” says Farooq, “but they never ask what part they have played in it.”

Now it is almost deserted, with just a few shops open. The proprietor of one of them has reportedly sold so many groceries to the residents of the township on credit that his store appears abandoned, with empty shelves and a few items carelessly displayed.

According to some local residents, people in the township owe him as much as 5.5 million rupees. The sole reason why people are unable to pay him back is that they are no longer receiving their salaries and other dues as regularly as they should.

Taj Begum knows what living without money is like. Inside the living area of her two-bedroom, single-storey house, her economic conditions are hard to disguise. A single couch bravely tries to fill space enough for a five-seat sofa set and its accompanying tables.

It is time for the customary electricity outage. Begum’s husband, Bashir Khan, is asleep, after having worked during the night shift at the Iron-Making Department. His job involves monitoring the casting process, which requires working right next to moulds that contain liquid iron with a surface temperature of nearly 1,200 degrees Celsius. These days, he spends seven hours at work, sitting with other workers and roaming around idle machinery.

Khan and Taj Begum have been married for nearly 30 years. They have seen better times. Taj Begum remembers the time when workers received their salaries as early as the 26th or 27th of the month, rather than waiting for the end of the month. And not just salaries — bonuses, too. Today, with no salary, she is finding it almost impossible to run her household. She has no money to send her four children to college and eventually marry them off.

She does not complain though and wonders out loud about the families of those workers who do not live in the township and, instead, reside in rented houses.

Even when the workers get salaries, they do not know how much of it has been deducted in lieu of house rent and electricity bill because they are not being given their pay slips. Malik Waqas, a resident of the township and an employee of Pakistan Steel Mills, says his father’s salary is around 65,000 rupees — but he received only 9,000 rupees the last time. The rest was deducted under various heads.

Some workers complain that those living in two-bedroom houses are told that as much as 20,000 rupees have been deducted from their salaries as electricity bills. “An electricity bill of 21,000 rupees was deducted from the last salary I received,” says Naimatullah, an employee of the Mills. Next month, the management again deducted the same amount as the price of electricity he had consumed. “Half of my salary is going into paying for electricity. I cannot pay this amount every month,” he says.

Shabbir Jumani, 63, cannot deal with such pecuniary anxieties. On the steps of the township’s administration office, he breaks down.

He joined the Mills in 1980 and retired in December 2014 as a machinist. “I have not received a single penny after retirement,” he says. He lowers his head every now and then, trying to hold back tears.

Close to two years have passed, but he continues to wait for the receipt of his provident fund and gratuity. He does not know if he can get any other job. “I am turned away from wherever I go looking for a job because I am too old to work,” he says.

Others complain that the Mills’ management is failing to provide them health facilities at a time when they do not have the money to pay for them. Waqas, who has just returned from a visit to the Mills’ hospital, sheds light on the healthcare facilities available to the workers. “You cannot even get an X-ray done there,” he says. They have no syringes, no medicine; the doctors are there only to sign sick leaves.

Health facilities are in a dire state mainly due to rampant corruption among the management. According to a recent story published in the daily Dawn, the FIA has found enough “evidence” against the senior management of Pakistan Steel Mills to prove that it was involved in misappropriating funds worth millions of rupees meant for procurement of medicine supplies.

Medicine purchases were also “made from unregistered sellers of medicines and from ‘freelancers’ who were originally engaged in the supply of hardware, tools and general items” to the Mills, the newspaper stated on October 1, 2016.

A stage is being set in front of the Jinnah gate of Pakistan Steel Mills. Imran Khan, chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), is scheduled to arrive here to address the Mills’ workers. Before his arrival, his party’s activists grab as many PTI flags as they can and throw them towards the workers, waiting for Khan’s arrival.

Most of them are not PTI supporters. They, however, are here because they say Khan is at least showing up to express solidarity with them, unlike other political leaders who are least concerned about them. They are grateful to him.

When Khan finally arrives, he does not speak to anyone and heads straight to the stage where he sits in a chair for a while as local leaders of his party and some of the Mills’ workers deliver speeches. When his turn comes, he wastes little time in formalities and gets to the topic of Pakistan Steel Mills straight away. “This industry has been robbed,” he says to a crowd of about 150 people. “And those who have robbed it are residing as billionaires in big palaces.” The crowd erupts in agreement and cheers him on. Khan continues: “And who has paid the price for it? The workers of Pakistan Steel Mills.”

Between his speech, some in the crowd chant “Go Nawaz go”, but their slogans are drowned by his voice blaring from the speakers. It is obvious that he knows very little about the Mills. “Today, I am here with you because an industry that was making a profit of eight billion rupees in 2007 has been closed for five months.” As he pauses, someone standing behind him tries to correct him — “it has been closed 11 months,” he says. Another person corrects him again. “It has been closed for 13 months,” he intones.

In the workers’ colony, houses are smaller. Some do not even have doors; curtains made of discarded bed sheets block off their entrances.

Fajar Ahmed, 62, is sitting among the audience. He is part of a labour organisation called the Insaf Workers Ittehad. It is not affiliated with PTI or any other party. It is just another group of workers, demanding their rights through a sit-in right next to the Mills’ entrance. They have been protesting for close to two months now.

Ahmed has a large family — consisting of his wife, two sons, two daughters and his parents. He has worked at Pakistan Steel Mills for 26 years — first as a daily wage worker and, since 2010, as a regular employee. His job involves handling four different machines at the co*ke oven plant.

He and others in his group took out a protest demonstration outside the Mills on August 3 this year. They marched from Pakistan Steel Mills to a nearby highway, demanding the release of their salaries, improvement in medical facilities and the clearance of post-retirement dues, among other things.

The Mills’ management did not bother to heed their demands. Instead, it sent show cause notices to all those workers who had participated in the protest, asking them to explain why they had marched on to the streets — as if everything was perfectly fine with the Mills and there was absolutely nothing to complain about.

It was perhaps under pressure from such protests that Finance Minister Ishaq Dar approved the payment of salaries for the months of April 2016 and May 2016, amounting to 760 million rupees, on September 7, 2016. He also approved the payment of gratuity and provident funds for some of the retired employees, amounting to 322.021 million rupees.

In the middle of last month, Ahmed and his fellow protesters are sitting in their sit-in camp. They are discussing problems that the workers and their families are facing. One of them says some shopkeepers around the Mills have placed signboards outside their shops telling Pakistan Steel Mills workers to stay away.

The discussion then moves on to the role of the Peoples Workers Union: the CBA. A pamphlet issued by the Insaf Workers Ittehad gives details of the official vehicles being used by the CBA members — as well as the fuel and maintenance costs of those vehicles. According to a trade unionist, scrap stocked at a place called China Plant is being picked up illegally and sold at reduced prices.

But what exactly is scrap? Since the Mills is not operational, it has tonnes of raw materials or half-finished products that cannot go into the next stage of production. These products are mostly in the form of metal slabs and rolled sheets kept outdoors in stockyards. Over time, rain and dew have corroded them, leaving them rusted and making them appear like scrap.

Rehan Shah, a trade unionist and chairman of the Workers Welfare Trust, a non-profit organisation, recently wrote a letter to the Privatisation Commission after he came to know that the management of Pakistan Steel Mills had sought permission from the ministry of industries and production to sell those articles as ‘scrap’.

When the management is given permission for the sale, it sells that ‘scrap’ to private buyers at the price of “dust”, he wrote. Since there is a history of selling scrap at extremely low rates, as Shah pointed out in his letter, it is likely that the raw material and half-finished products now lying around in the Mills can one day be sold in a similar way. “The sale of scrap is a form of corruption,” Shah noted.

According to a trade unionist, scrap stocked at a place called China Plant is being picked up illegally and sold at reduced prices.

Other workers allege that a large racket is operating in the Mills to illegally transfer the raw material and unfinished products out of the Mills and then sell it at reduced rates. The workers say those involved in the theft take the materials out of the warehouses and leave them out in the open to rust. These are then loaded on to mini-trucks, which take them out of the Mills for sale. All of this, the workers allege, is taking place with the connivance of the CBA, the management and the security staff.

These allegations are almost impossible to substantiate. Firstly, it is not easy to lift those very heavy articles without cranes and forklifts. Without a concerted activity by a good number of people and without the help of machines, loading them onto trucks that then take them out of the Mills’ premises seems impossible. It must involve commotion at a scale that cannot go unnoticed. The management adds that the entrances and exits to the Mills are well-guarded and no vehicle can move in and out without official permission.

The account of at least two incidents of theft on a much smaller scale, though, can be found in a police record. On the morning of March 31 this year, various types of cable wires – including telephone cables and polyvinyl chloride wires used to make flexible tubing, upholstery and flooring – were stolen from two different stores located close to the Mills’ transport department. Ikramuddin, son of Alauddin, an employee of Pakistan Steel Mills, had a police report registered about the theft on April 3, 2016, at Bin Qasim Police Station, “on the direction of his senior officers”. The length of the stolen wires was reported to be 2,370 metres for one type and 164 metres for the other.

Rehan Shah has invited all the serving and recently retired employees of Pakistan Steel Mills to attend a court hearing on September 2, 2016. He filed a petition at the Sindh High Court on March 18, 2015, for the payment of staff salaries. “It is mandatory for all employees to be present at the Sindh High Court at 8 am,” reads the text message that he has sent around.

Nobody shows up, except one former employee: Muhammad Akram.

Shah is agitated. With a file full of documents in one hand and his phone in the other, he is nervously walking in and out of the courtroom. The rest of the workers, Shah tells me, are getting on the buses and will soon be heading to the court. His hopes do not materialise.

Shah is known among the workers as Comrade Rehan. A soft-spoken, simple and unassuming man, he began to fight for the rights of labourers when he joined Pakistan Steel Mills in 1993 as a junior assistant. He initially worked in the accounts department, but once the management discovered his union activities, it transferred him to the co*ke oven plant. When you work there, he says, the black dust from the coal is so thick around you that it covers your entire body.

When the Mills had been operational, the co*ke plant could generate enough electricity to pay off the salaries of all the workers, he claims. And not just electricity, Shah says, but three different types of gases that then help run the thermal power plant. (That plant once generated 165 megawatts of electricity. After fulfilling the Mills’ needs, the management would sell the surplus for distribution in other localities.)

Shah’s transfer did not stop him from doing what he had been doing. New employees were hired at the time and Shah discovered that they were not receiving any hazard benefits. He helped all of them fill in a form to claim those benefits. That is how he came to be known as Comrade Rehan. From then on, Shah stepped in where and when workers’ rights were being compromised. He has received 20 show cause notices for his activism, he tells the Herald, laughing.

Since Rehan filed his petition, there have been about half a dozen hearings. There has been no substantial progress in the case though.

As the judges rise to leave for Friday prayers at 12:30 pm on September 2, Shah and his lawyer, Nadeem Shaikh, go to their desk and plead for a hearing. This is a matter of life and death for 13,000 employees of Pakistan Steel Mills who have not been receiving their salaries, Shaikh quickly tells the judges (who are scheduled to hear over 30 other cases that day).

The judges listen to him briefly and give him the date for the next hearing: September 21.

On that day, too, no more than two workers join Shah at the court. The judges hear the case for a few minutes and adjourn it to October 25. The only development that day: the court summons the Mills’ chief executive officer (CEO) to be present at the next hearing.

That will only start substantial proceedings — provided the CEO turns up. How many more hearings will the court take before it issues a verdict is anyone’s guess. And it is not certain if the verdict will be in the favour of the workers.

The vague promise of the petition’s outcome inspires no one back at the Mills. More importantly, the machines will not whir, the plants will not hum, the furnaces will not radiate — even if the judges decide the case tomorrow.

Shamshad Qureshi, Chairman of the Peoples Workers Union (CBA), Pakistan Steel Mills, responded to the story after it was published, in a letter to the Herald. Here is the edited version of his reponse:

This refers to the article “Burnt Out: The demise of Pakistan Steel Mills”, that appeared in the Herald’s October 2016 issue. The article stated that I was accused in the Pakistan Steel Mills canteen case, which is incorrect. The reporter never contacted me or took my point of view and made allegations against me that are totally baseless and untrue. As CBA chairman, I have no role to play in the award of a canteen tender. I was never implicated or nominated in the First Information Report (FIR) as mentioned in the article.

Peoples Workers Union won the 2008 referendum, held under the supervision of NIRC, with a substantial margin. The registration of all seven of its opposing unions was cancelled by the government.

To imply that PPP appointed Chairman and CBA is in any way responsible for decline in performance of the Mills is incorrect. It is the job of the federal government to appoint the management of steel mills and monitor their performance. The chairman was sacked on corruption charges by the then Prime Minister at the floor of National Assembly on 18-8-2009; the case was then directed to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) for further investigation.

Peoples Workers Union won the referendum for a third time in a row in November 2013 during the tenure of the present PML-N government. This proves the confidence of the workers in the union.

This article was originally published in the Herald's October 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a staffer at the Herald.

Anila Ilyas was wide awake, keeping an eye on the road outside from her fifth-floor apartment. All her belongings were packed and she was trying her best to stop her three teenage sons from falling asleep. When she saw a group of policemen arrive at her apartment building in Bangkok’s Pracha Uthit area, on that night in September 2015, she moved quickly but silently and evacuated from the back door along with her children.

Forty-five-year-old Anila was an Urdu teacher in a missionary school in Lahore before she left for Thailand in September 2013, joining thousands of Pakistani Christians living there illegally. They are constantly in hiding or on the run to escape arrest, detention and deportation. After arriving in Bangkok, Anila, too, had changed more than 10 houses.

In the Pracha Uthit building, 35 Pakistani Christian families lived in single-room apartments — 66 people were arrested from there that night for overstaying in Thailand.

“We cannot go out because of the fear that the police may arrest us,” says Anila. (This is not her real name — which is being held back to protect her from arrest). “We force our children to keep their voices low to avoid detection by police. Neighbours make a complaint to the police if our children make a noise,” she says in a phone interview from her latest hiding place in Thailand.

Language barrier and illegal status together hamper these migrants from getting jobs. Anila works as a teacher to make ends meet while her husband has remained unemployed since their arrival in Bangkok.

Faced with cultural, political and economic isolation, Christians inPakistan embarked on two different trajectories of migration.

Immediately after arriving in Thailand, mostly on visit or transit visas, Pakistani Christians approach the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), hoping they will be resettled in Europe, Australia or North America. Though they start receiving some financial support from charity organisations to buy their daily meals but usually they have next to nothing to pay for other utilities. “Paying the monthly house rent is the biggest challenge,” says Anila. A single-room accommodation can cost as much as 2,400 baht (7,250 rupees) a month.

World Watch Monitor, an international Christian news wire, notes that about 11,500 Pakistani Christians have approached the UNHCR to get refugee status in recent years. Though exact country-wide statistics are difficult to find out, a large number of these requests have been filed in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand.

The Thai government, however, does not want Pakistani Christians to enter its territory. “[It] has made it extremely difficult for Pakistani Christians to obtain Thai visas,” says Pastor Mubarak Masih, 40. If a Pakistani Christian manages to obtain the visa, he is highly likely to be found out at a Pakistani airport since his passport shows his religion, says Mubarak Masih who arrived in Thailand in 2013 with his wife, two sons and one daughter. Once detected as Christians, the passengers are often off-loaded from flights leaving Pakistan. Those who still manage to fly out are taken to the Immigration Detention Centre (IDC) once they arrive at their desitation. Their relatives or UNCHR have to bail them out.

Mubarak Masih used to run a small church from his home in Lahore’s Youhanabad area and was “always fearful for security”. Those were not idle fears. In March 2015, two suicide bombers attacked two churches in Youhanabad, killing 15 people and hurting more than 70 others.

Another constant in the pastor’s life was a Punjabi word – chuhra – used as a derogatory term to categorise people in his racial group. Difficult to translate, the word connotes dark skin, low social status and untouchability.

In Thailand, he and other Pakistani Christians are facing another identity crisis. “Even taxi drivers call us ‘bomb’ and ‘Bin Laden’ when they find out we are from Pakistan,” he says.

Hameed Masih, 75, had a big family. His wife, eight sons, the wives of six of his sons and his many grandchildren all lived in a small two-storey house in a Christian neighbourhood, along a railway line in Gojra town of Punjab’s Toba Tek Singh district. In August 2009, hundreds of angry protesters set ablaze more than 50 houses and a couple of churches in the neighbourhood. They were enraged over reports that a Christian family living in another locality, Korian, a small settlement a few kilometres outside Gojra, had blasphemed.

The arson took the lives of Hameed Masih and five members of his family: his 55-year-old son, his two daughters-in-law (both under 30 years of age), his four-year-old grandson and his eight-year-old granddaughter. They had a guest that day — a daughter-in-law’s 50-year-old mother. She was also killed in the attack.

About 11,500 Pakistani Christians have approached the UNHCR to getrefugee status in recent years.

Once the dead were buried, the rest of the family decided to leave Pakistan. All of them, except Hameed Masih’s son Ilyas Hameed, went to Thailand and filed an application with the UNHCR for refugee status. “So far, the UNHCR has resettled five of my brothers along with their families in the United States,” says Ilyas Hameed who lives in Rawalpindi with his wife and children. His brothers live in Pennsylvania where they work as day labourers, he says. His sixth brother, Babar Hameed, is still living in Thailand waiting to be resettled in Canada.

The successful resettlement of Hameed Masih’s family has become a popular narrative among Christians living in different parts of Punjab. Thousands of them have sold their properties and left for countries where they can file a request for refugee status.

Talib Masih, a waste-paper collector, found a crowd gathered outside his house in Korian on July 30, 2009. The people at the head of the throng were alleging that he had committed blasphemy by setting fire to papers carrying Islamic text. The mob blocked the nearby road, raised passionate religious slogans and finally attacked the houses of Christians living in Korian, burning them all down.

Before the attack started, every Christian living there had fled except Hanifan Bibi, 73, and her 80-year-old paralysed husband Sharif Masih. “I pleaded with the attackers that we could not run. They did not harm us then,” says Hanifan.

Also read: Acts of faith: Why people get killed over blasphemy in Pakistan

She claims the mob attack was a premeditated plan to grab the land where Christian houses were built. “The place was still on fire when people brought measuring tape to see how much land they could take over.” The Christians did not own the land. It belonged to the government – recorded as shamlaat-e-deh, the extension of the village land earmarked for collective usage.

The Christian neighbourhood razed only days later in nearby Gojra is also housed on government land. “It is a prime location. The main bus terminal and the railway station are only at a walking distance from here,” says Yasir Talib, a local resident. Many here believe the attack that killed Hameed Masih and his family members was an attempt to take away the neighbourhood’s land from Christians.

A few years later, a similar pattern was in evidence in Lahore. Joseph Colony – a Christian slum of more than 200 houses also situated on government land – was set on fire by a rampaging mob in 2013 after allegations that a local Christian had committed blasphemy. The neighbourhood is surrounded by industrial units and is next to the bustling commercial area of Badami Bagh. The residents of the colony claim they have been under pressure since long to vacate the land. During the March 2013 proceedings of a suo motu hearing about the attack on Joseph Colony, the Supreme Court, too, suspected that land grabbing could be the reason behind it.

The Punjab government later paid 500,000 rupees to each Christian family that had lost its house in the attack. But there has been no announcement that they will also own the land where their houses stand, says Billa Masih, who runs a grocery store in the locality.

It is difficult to verify these claims — that land grabbing has been the only – or even the major – motivation behind these incidents. Many scholars believe that such killings actually took place because of the perceived association between local Christians and the United State of America. “… [A] general anger against the United States has caused large numbers of people to target Christians, whom they associate with America, as scapegoats,” wrote Akbar S Ahmed – who holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University in Washington, DC – in a 2013 op-ed piece in The New York Times. Mob attacks, by their very nature, are difficult to reduce to a single reason.

Yet, the presence or absence of farmland and housing facilities has been at the heart of recurring patterns of migration among Punjabi Christians over the last many decades.

In 1947, there were two types of Christians in what was then known as West Pakistan: landless, unskilled, poor labourers and peasants living in villages across central Punjab, and educated Christian professionals, mostly Anglo-Indians and Goans, who lived in big cities such as Karachi and Lahore. The former are generally converts to Christianity from low-caste Hindus and the latter from upper-caste Hindus as well as Muslims.

The Christians did not own the land. It belonged to the government –recorded as shamlaat-e-deh, the extension of the village landearmarked for collective usage.

Anglo-Indians and Goans immediately faced discrimination in jobs and business opportunities in the newly created Pakistan. Their rather privileged social status under the Raj – that prized their English language skills and British cultural mannerisms – started waning. Punjabi Christians, on the other hand, were always treated with contempt due to their caste and their dark skin.

Faced with cultural, political and economic isolation, Christians in Pakistan embarked on two different trajectories of migration. Punjabi Christians started leaving villages to shift to Church-developed Christian-only neighbourhoods in, or just outside, main cities. Anglo-Indians and Goans left in droves to Europe and North America.

They formed the bulk of the first wave of Pakistani migrants to Europe and the United States in the 1960s and the 1970s, according to Patricia Jeffery, a British researcher who investigated migration trends among Pakistani Christians in the early 1970s.

At Partition, S P Singha was the most prominent leader of Punjabi Christians. Before joining politics, he worked as a registrar at the Punjab University during the 1930s. In 1947, he was Punjab Assembly’s speaker and one of the three Christian members of the assembly who voted in favour of Punjab becoming a part of Pakistan.

His decision was based on pragmatic considerations. He thought Hindus discriminated against Punjabi Christians more than Muslims did. “In non-Muslim villages, we have no graveyards and are not allowed to draw water from the wells,” he told Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s boundary commission.

Additionally, the partition of Punjab being proposed along religious lines meant that there would be more Punjabi Christians living in Muslim-dominated western regions of the province than in the eastern parts dominated by Hindus and Sikhs. When the boundary commission announced its scheme for partitioning Punjab in June 1947, eastern (Indian) Punjab had only 60,955 out of 511,299 Punjabi Christians at the time.

Indu Mitha, 86, a famed educationist and renowned exponent of Bharatnatyam who now lives in Islamabad, has vivid memories of those days. Her mother was S P Singha’s cousin and her father, Gyanesh Chandra Chatterji, was a professor of philosophy at Government College, Lahore. (Indu Mitha’s husband, Aboobaker Osman Mitha, retired as a major general from the Pakistan Army and is credited to have founded its Special Services Group, the commando unit.)

“S P Singha, whom we called Purke Maamoon, one day called my father and told him that he had met with Mr Jinnah and told him that Christians were very poor and could not travel to India and that they wanted to live in Pakistan,” says Indu Mitha. “Jinnah assured Singh of full protection for the Christians.”

The military government of General Ziaul Haq – that took over power in1977 – only expedited Christian departures.

Renowned Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal records this turn of events in her book, Self and Sovereignty, albeit from a different perspective. “In their dress, poor economic status and religious beliefs, Christians in the Punjab were closer to the Muslims,” she wrote and quoted Singha as saying that Christians “trust the Muslim more.”

Right after 1947, Singha was removed as the speaker of the assembly through a no-confidence motion. Reason: He was not a Muslim. That turned out to be a symbol of how life was to change for Punjabi Christians in Pakistan.

Singha addressed the assembly on January 20, 1948 to highlight that change. “Kindly pay attention to the mess created by the Sikhs who, after living for centuries in this province, have at once left and have created a huge problem for [Christians]. The government may have better information but our estimates show that about 60,000 families or 200,000 people of our community, who worked as saipis (landless service providers) or atharis (farmhands), have become homeless after the commotion of Partition,” he said.

The lands vacated by the Sikhs were being allotted to Muslim refugees coming from eastern Punjab and these new owners of land either did not want Christian saipis and atharis due to religious reasons or they did not know them well enough to trust them with such jobs. “They hired us for a while but then they engaged their coreligionists,” says Nazir Masih who was about 13 years old at the time of Partition and was living in Harichand village in Sheikhupura district.

In some cases, Christians were forcefully evicted even from places where they were tilling lands for the state institutions – such as in a few villages set up on the military farms. “Christians are being evicted from some of the villages reserved for them,” Singh said. “They are being replaced with [Muslim] refugees.”

Singha argued that Christians in Pakistan deserved protection from the government because they “have taken refuge in this House of Islam”. When no one listened to him, he suggested to the government to either place the homeless Christians in refugee camps or “bury them alive”.

The number of homeless Christians kept on increasing in the meanwhile. C E Gibbon, another Christian member of the Punjab Assembly, noted in his statement on the floor of the house in April 1952: “I beg to ask for leave to make a motion … to discuss a definite matter of urgent public importance, namely, the grave situation arising out of the policy of the government in respect of the wholesale eviction of Christians … from their home holdings, thus rendering nearly 300,000 Christians homeless and on the verge of starvation, the consequences of which are too horrible to imagine.”

Earlier, in 1948, Singha had highlighted another problem. He described how young Muslim students were harassing Christian nurses, insisting that Christian women in Pakistan were like war booty and the Muslims possessed the right to use them whichever way they liked. “If this mindset continues, then I fear there will be no Christian nurses left in Pakistan,” he warned.

Also read: Brotherhood thrives in Karachi's religiously diverse quarters

Singha also talked about how Christians in Pakistan were viewed with suspicion. “… [the Christians] are ready to assure the government of Pakistan of our loyalty but sadly we are being accused of committing strange things. One group of people says we are spies and another says we are agents of Hindus.” He went on “to humbly state” that the government should “stop demanding” that Christians prove their loyalty to the state everyday as “Muslims are required to do in India”.

It was natural, says Michelle Chaudhry, 48, a Christian activist in Lahore, that “every Pakistani Christian was feeling low because they were always suspected of spying for India”. Her late father, Cecil Chaudhry, was a flight lieutenant in the Pakistan Air Force during the 1965 war and a squadron leader in the 1971 war. He and other Christian military officers earned official and public recognition for their courage and military exploits during those two wars. That stemmed the tide of anti-Christian sentiments to some extent, she says.

But only to some extent. “After the 1965 war with India, there were some reports of ‘reprisals’ against Christians in Pakistan,” noted Patricia Jeffery, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Edinburgh, in her book, Migrants and Refugees: Muslim and Christian Pakistani Families in Bristol.

The National Council of Churches Review, a journal published by the Wesley Press, noted in 1971: “It has become a fashion in West Pakistan to accuse Christians of espionage and they are being told to migrate to other countries, particularly Canada and the United States.”

Singha argued that Christians in Pakistan deserved protection from thegovernment because they “have taken refuge in this House of Islam”.

Though S P Singha’s son, D P Singha, who was also a member of the Punjab Assembly, declared that those who “thought that Pakistani Christians had sympathy with India were wrong,” the Muslim perception of local Christians did not improve. The journal quoted the Bishop of Lahore, Inayat Masih, as saying the government exhibited a step-motherly attitude towards Christians.

In early 1971, all this culminated in what is perhaps the first mob attack against Christians in Pakistan. A Pakistani living in Manchester wrote to Lahore-based English daily Pakistan Times, “complaining about a book called The Turkish Art of Love in Pictures (first published in 1933), which he said … contained insulting assertions about the Holy Prophet.”

The publication of the letter led to large-scale attacks on Christians in Lahore. Churches were ransacked and liquor shops (which were legal at the time) were looted. Jeffery quoted one Christian woman as imploring during the violence that “Christians in Pakistan should be seen as ‘true Pakistanis’ and that there should be no stigma attached to being Christians.”

Nationalisation of education further heightened social tensions between Muslims and Christians. Christians were enraged when, on March 29, 1972, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – then working as chief martial law administrator of the country – nationalised private educational institutions, including those run by the Christian missionary organisations. Muslims were happy that Christians would not be able to use education to spread their religion.

Angry Christians in Rawalpindi took out a protest procession against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s decision. They marched towards the Governor House to present a memorandum. In an attempt to stop them, the police opened fire on them – killing two people, Nawaz Masih and James Masih, on the spot.

Muslim protesters, too, came out against Christian missions. “There were protests by Forman Christian College Lahore students and others against foreign missionaries after which they hurriedly left the country,” says a Sri Lankan missionary who was working in Pakistan at the time. He wants to remain unnamed due to security reasons.

Soon a resolution was tabled in the National Assembly. Pauline A Brown, a former American missionary who worked in Pakistan between 1954 and 1988, recorded it in her 2006 book, Jars of Clay: Ordinary Christians on an Extraordinary Mission in Southern Pakistan. It reads: “…the resolution calls for the taking over by the government of all institutions known or running as missionary schools, colleges, hospitals, and nursing homes ... The resolution also demands that foreign missionaries should leave Pakistan and no visas or any permission in future be granted to foreign missionaries to operate in this country.”

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By that time the exodus of educated Pakistani Christians was already well under way. “Most immigration took place for economic reasons,” says Victor Gill, who was a teacher of physics at the Forman Christian College Lahore in 1976 when he decided to leave Pakistan. “Higher education, sponsorship by relatives and theological training were few of the vehicles used for migration,” he says in a phone interview.

Gill went to Philadelphia which, according to him, has the largest Pakistani Christian concentration in North America after Toronto. The choice of the destination has its roots in Presbyterian missions’ activities in Punjab dating back a century. With its headquarters in Philadelphia, the Presbyterian Church had sent such prominent missionaries as Dr Samuel Martin (who founded a Christian-only village in Punjab), Andrew Gordon (after whom the Gordon College Rawalpindi is named) and Dr Charles William Forman (the founder of the Forman Christian College Lahore).

Nationalisation of education further heightened social tensionsbetween Muslims and Christians.

Jeffery, too, found a sizeable Pakistani Christian community living in the English city of Bristol. They wanted themselves to be seen as Christians first and Pakistanis later, she noted. She also found out that Pakistani Muslim migrants maintained ties with their relatives back in Pakistan but “the Christians mix more with people who are not kin, including British people, and the ties which they retain with kin in Pakistan are very weak.”

That did not guarantee easy assimilation. Several Christians, she wrote, “complained that British people refuse to accept their claims to common [religious] allegiance”.

The military government of General Ziaul Haq – that took over power in 1977 – only expedited Christian departures. Many prominent Pakistani Christians, including Michael Nazir Ali, left Pakistan in those years to avoid religious persecution at the hands of a dictatorial regime that had the self-declared agenda of Islamising every part of public and private life in the country.

Ali was working as Bishop of Raiwind when he left Pakistan. “I was asked by the then Archbishop of Canterbury to leave for [some] time because of difficulties and threats to the family resulting from my work with the very poor, – especially in brick kilns – and in resisting some of Zia’s policies affecting women and minorities,” Ali says in an email interview. “Local extremists, vested interests and some related elements in our community were involved” in creating the circ*mstances that led to his exile. Ali now works as Bishop of Rochester in England.

Presbyterian missionaries from the West started setting up schools and colleges across Punjab during the last quarter of the 19th century. They set up Forman Christian College in Lahore in 1864, Gordon College in Rawalpindi in 1883, Murray College in Sialkot in 1889, St Stephen’s College in Delhi in 1881 (Delhi at the time was a part of Punjab province), Edwardes College in Peshawar in 1900, Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore in 1913.

The stated objective of these educational institutions was to educate the upper classes in the subcontinent and introduce them to Christianity. “A plan to build up a Christian community in Delhi became instead a plan to promote Christian influence among the non-Christian elite by creating Christian institutions to serve them,” wrote Jeffrey Cox, a professor of history at the Iowa University, in his book, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940.

The British records in 1855 show there were no native Christians in Punjab at the time. But because of the huge missionary efforts, there were about 4,000 native Christians in the province by 1881. They were a scattered and diverse urban community.

The missionaries were also working simultaneously on converting the native villagers to Christianity. Mass conversions started at places in Sialkot district in 1870 and spread to adjacent districts of Sheikhupura, Lahore and Gujranwala. Because of the mass conversion, the Christian population of Punjab increased from about 4,000 in 1881 to 511,000 by 1941.

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Patricia Jeffery noted in her book that this dramatic swell in the number of Christians also changed their educational composition: “According to the 1936 Gazetteer for Lahore District, 58.5 per cent of Christians were literate in 1901, while only 16.3 per cent were literate in 1931. In the interim, the number of Christians (in Lahore) had risen from 7,296 to 57,097.”

That explains why there always have been two distinct classes within Christians in this part of the world – a small educated urban community and a much larger population of illiterate, unskilled, landless rural folks.

“[Being] indiscriminately associated with the word chuhra has playedhavoc with the psyche, identity, self-image and well-being ofPakistani Christians.”

The United Presbyterian Church, which was also the church of the downtrodden back in the US, took the initiative to bring the most marginalised and oppressed caste of scavengers, described in missionary reports and British census documents as chuhras, into the fold of Christianity. The people belonging to this community were socially excluded, living outside villages and facing serious discrimination in their everyday lives.

Denzil Ibbetson, Punjab’s deputy superintendent in the 1881 census, who later also worked as the province’s Lieutenant-Governor, has written in detail about these converts. “They prefer to call themselves Chuhra,” he wrote. He also noted their occupations. “In the east of the Province he sweeps the houses and villages, collects the cow dung, pats it into cakes and stacks it, works up the manure, helps with the cattle, and takes them from village to village”. In other areas, they worked as “agricultural labourer” and “receive a customary share of the produce”.

Because of their landlessness, Ibbetson associated them with gypsies. “Together with the vagrants and gypsies they are the hereditary workers in glass and reeds, from which they make winnowing pans and other articles used in agriculture.”

Manu Smriti, or The Laws of Manu, the most authoritative Hindu scripture on the caste system, categorised them as executioners. “[You] shall always execute the criminals, in accordance with the law,” it said while assigning Chuhras their duties. The jail employee who tied the noose around Bhutto’s neck in 1979, Tara Masih, came from the same community as did his father who had executed the anti-British hero Bhagat Singh in 1931.

Dr J W Youngson, a Scottish Presbyterian cleric, wrote in detail about these converts in James Hasting’s classical 1910 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics: “The Chuhras of the Punjab and Central India ... were, until a comparatively late period, an unnoticed race; but the fact that many of them are becoming Christians has made them better known, and created an interest in their history and religion. It was observed by Ibbetson, in the Punjab Census Reports, that the religion of the Chuhras is nearer Christianity in its principles than any other religion in India. Briefly, these principles are as follows: There is one God; sin is a reality, man is sinful; there is a High Priest (Bala Shah), who is also a Mediator, to whom they pray; sacrifice is part of the worship of God; the spirit of man at death returns to God; there will be a resurrection of the body; there will be a day of judgment; there are angels, and there are evil spirits; there is heaven, and there is hell. The Chuhras have no temple, but only a dome-shaped mound of earth facing the east, in which there are niches for lamps that are lighted by the way of worship.”

A settlement for local converts to Christianity in what is now Nankana Sahab district is called Youngsonabad. It was set up to celebrate Youngson’s work among local Christians.

There has been an early realisation among the converts about the pernicious impacts of the word chuhra on their lives. Dr Azam Gill, who teaches English at a college in France, has written in an article that highlights the problem: “[being] indiscriminately associated with the word chuhra has played havoc with the psyche, identity, self-image and well-being of Pakistani Christians.”

They have been trying different things to get rid of the social stigma attached to the word. By the 1930s, they were being called Isai – after Isa, the Arabic translation of Jesus. In the 1961 census in Lahore, all those who had been categorised as belonging to chuhra caste in previous censuses were now classified as Isai, noted John O’Brien, a Christian priest who has written an exhaustive ethnographic account of the native Punjabi converts to Christianity.

The same 1961 census put the profession of Isais as sweepers. That association has turned the word Isai also as infected, generating an ongoing movement among Punjabi Christians to change their last names and their caste to Masih and Masihi, respectively. A heated theological debate rages on whether these words – which both refer to Christ – can be used for ordinary Christians, but that has not stopped Punjabi Christians from shedding Isai in the favour of Masih or Masihi.

Baba Sadiq is close to a century old. A tall man with sunken cheeks, he was born in a village called Nazir Labana in Sheikhupura district. He was one of the first people in his village to convert to Christianity. “We used to worship Bala Shah, a statue made of mud. There was no religious scripture or ritual, except that we bowed before the statue and distributed choori (crushed bread mixed with ghee and sugar),” he says.

His relatives – Maulu, Lahnoon, Kama, Kala, Sohan, Gahnoon – who lived in a nearby village, Taamkay, converted to Christianity and pressurised his family to also convert. “They brought religious preachers from Sialkot and converted my father Sundar who was head of our clan in the village.” Following Sundar, all members of his caste living in Nazir Labana – about 40 households – converted to Christianity.

Sadiq continued to live in the same village till Partition but then shifted elsewhere. He now lives in a Christian Colony in Lahore district’s Wandala village. His movement represents a larger pattern.

It was observed by Ibbetson, in the Punjab Census Reports, that thereligion of the Chuhras is nearer Christianity in its principlesthan any other religion in India.

The United Presbyterian Church, Church of Scotland, the Salvation Army, Church of England and, later, the Catholic Church and Methodist Church set up about 20 villages in Punjab in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to bring together scattered local converts in order to improve their socio-economic conditions. Most of these villages are in Khanewal, Kasur, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Sheikhupura districts. Probably the most famous ones among them are Martinpur and Youngsonabad, both in district Nankana Sahib.

Martinpur was founded in 1898 by Dr Samuel Martin who belonged to the United Presbyterian Chruch. “Christians were brought from Sialkot and Gurdaspur to inhabit the village,” says Jehangir Fazal Din, whose great grandfather, Fazal Din, came from Jammu to Punjab to attend a missionary school and converted to Christianity. “His family excommunicated him due to his conversion so he settled in Sailkot with his wife and children. When Martinpur was founded, he came here along with his family.” The other inhabitants of the village worked as farmhands of Sikhs in their native areas.

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A 1911 report in Southern Workman, a Christian journal published by Hampton Institute, portrays Martinpur as a model settlement: “… it will serve as an ideal illustration to show what Christianity does for the pariah.”

Living up to its founding objective, Martinpur has produced several people who stand out for their educational and professional achievements. Jehangir, for instance, is working as a high court lawyer while his father, David Fazlud Din, retired as a district and sessions judge in 1960. Perhaps the most prominent native of Martinpur is Samuel Martin Burke. He was a diplomat (having worked as Pakistan’s envoy for Scandinavia and Canada) and the author of a number of books including Pakistan’s Foreign Policy: An Historical Analysis (1973), The British Raj in India: An Historical Review (1995) and Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah: His Personality and his Politics (1997).

Henry Felix is another major founder of Punjab’s Christian-only villages. A scholar on Tibetan studies, he arrived in Punjab in 1891 and founded the village of Maryamabad in Sheikhupura district in 1893. “[Felix] attracted to Maryamabad hundreds of untutored aborigines. He settled them on the mission lands, and taught them … how to earn an honest living. Living amidst the natives, far from the haunts of civilization, he came to speak and write Urdu and Punjabi,” an America-based Catholic journal wrote in 1912, with an unmistakable whiff of white man’s burden to civilize the darker races.

In 1900, the British government of India put land at his disposal for setting up another village. The new village, now in Faisalabad district, came to be called Khushpur — “happy town, Felix-Town,” as the journal noted. Shahbaz Bhatti, federal minister for minority affairs, who was murdered in early 2011 in Islamabad, was a native of Khushpur.

Around 1909, Catholic missionaries also encouraged Punjabi Christians to settle as tenants and peasants in the vast tracts of land given to the royal Indian army to grow cereals and produce dairy products for its internal consumption. “Father Felix brought Christians here from Sialkot including my great grandfather Labba Masih,” says Younus Iqbal. He heads one of the two factions of the movement that Okara military farms’ tenants are running, demanding ownership of the land their ancestors have been cultivating for more than a century.

These model villages were able to provide decent living conditions to a few thousand Christian converts. Still most of them remained dependent on Sikh landlords and worked for them as their hired hands. That changed in 1947 — only for the worse.

In Harichand village in Sheikhupura district, a well was reserved for local Christians. After Partition, a Muslim migrant from India came to the village and claimed the government had allotted him two acres of land around the well. When he stopped local Christians from using the well, they sought help from Christians in neighbouring villages. Together, they formed a fighting group armed with guns. The migrant was also helped by other migrants in the same manner. The two sides were on the verge of opening fire at each other when some men came on horses from nearby villages and urged them not to fight. A panchayat then went through the records and found that Christians had no valid claim over the well because it was built on land under collective ownership as shamlaat-e-deh.

“We had to leave the village,” says Nazir Masih, an old man who lived in a Christian neighbourhood in Lahore till two months ago when he died. The displaced Christians settled on unoccupied land in what would be Lahore’s first Christian katchi abadi, or slum, along Ferozepur Road near where Shama Cinema was later built. “Our houses would wash away every year with rains.”

After they landed in the cities, Christians had limited economic opportunities. They could work at brick kilns – that were springing up next to big cities to cater to the booming housing and construction sectors. Those who took up that option set themselves up for bonded labour for life.

According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the number of bonded labourers in different sectors of Pakistan’s economy could be anywhere between three million and eight million. A large portion of that number works as brick layers and Christians form one of the biggest groups within them. “Relative to their percentage of the total population, a high proportion of bonded brick-kiln workers in Punjab are Christians,” as is noted in Contemporary Forms of Slavery in Pakistan, a recent report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based research and lobbying group.

The earliest Punjabi Christians in Quetta lived in two coloniesestablished by the municipal authorities.

The other option was to take up menial government jobs as sanitary workers. Traditionally, low-caste Hindus worked as sanitary workers in the cities that became part of Pakistan but, in 1947, most of them went to India.

Alice Albinia in her book, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River, described how the aftermath of anti-Hindu violence in early 1948 in Karachi, then the capital of Pakistan, underscored the problems created by these departing Hindus. “Within a month of the riots, the government realised, to its alarm, that something entirely unexpected was happening: among the fleeing Hindus were the city’s sweepers and sewer cleaners.” She wrote that the “outraged residents of Karachi … regretted, cajoled and complained” in letters they wrote to daily Dawn.The city “had become an unhygienic disgrace” where “streets were littered with stinking rubbish.”

According to Albinia, “there were enough jobs for two thousand cleaners, and not enough people to do them.”

The government thought Punjabi Christians would be happy to do that kind of work. When offered those jobs, however, they were anything but happy. “I have heard that Christians are refusing to work as sweepers,” S P Singha said in his 1948 speech. “One deputy commissioner complained to me that Christians do not want to do menial tasks and refuse to pick up cow dung and dead animals,” he added.

He then told a tragic tale. In Nathain Khalsa village near Bhai Pheru (a town about 60 kilometres to the south of Lahore), Muslim migrants from India demanded that local Christians remove dead animals. The Christians refused. The migrants then cordoned off Christian houses and killed five of them, including a pregnant woman.

The story stresses the wrong stereotype that migrant Muslims had of local Christians — that by virtue of their dark skin and low social status, they should be doing the dirtiest jobs. Many, if not all, Punjabi Christians, however, only had the experience of working as farmhands and agricultural labourers. “We had never thought of picking up a broom and cleaning streets,” says Mehtab Masih, born in 1936 in a village in Sheikhupura district.

Yet, in 1952, he shifted to Mirpur Khas in Sindh along with his family and worked there as a sweeper for almost four decades. Scores of others now living with him in an exclusively Christian colony in Mirpur Khas have the same story.

Quetta’s Christian community is in mourning. Just a day earlier, on August 6, 2016, five young Christians from the city died when flash floods hit Zardalo area in Balochistan’s Harani district, about 110 kilometres to the east of Quetta, where they were picnicking.

The mood is somber at the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church, near the city’s railway station. The faithful – over a hundred in attendance on this Sunday, August 7, 2016 – are gathered to offer prayers for the departed. The pastor, Simon Bashir, is giving a sermon on the fruits of faith, knowledge and the gift of prophecy. His voice echoes across the worshippers, listening attentively as their children chase each other through the pews. When he finishes his lecture, two volunteers begin collecting alms and the choir, accompanied by a tabla and sitar, breaks into a hymn in Punjabi:

Oh Lord, our heavenly King

Thy name is all divine

Thy glories round the Earth are spread

And over the heavens they shine

In the first row of pews stands William Jan Barkat. A man with a slight built and approaching 70, he is rarely seen without a rosary in his hand. For the past 15 years, he has been a central committee member of the Pahtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) – a part of the provincial coalition government in Balochistan.

Although not affiliated with the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church, Barkat still comes here every Sunday for mass. His reasons are sentimental: his father – Barkat Masih who moved to Quetta from Daska town in Punjab – was once a pastor here. “I was born here. I grew up here,” he says, as he strolls along the church ground.

The church was originally built by American missionaries in 1888. Like everything else in Quetta, it was destroyed in the 1935 earthquake and was later rebuilt. Barkat explains how he is currently in the midst of renovating a memorial site dedicated to Christians killed during the earthquake. Almost buried among shopping plazas and various under-construction sites on Quetta’s Jinnah Road, the memorial is a piece of local heritage that can be easily overlooked.

When the British built Quetta, Punjabi Christians came along with them, working in the army, in hospitals, in schools and in menial municipal jobs. “Christians from Punjab started coming to Quetta much before Partition,” says Asiya Nasir, a Christian member of the National Assembly who lives in Quetta. “My maternal great grandfather was serving in the British army and he came from Gurdaspur (now in Indian Punjab) before the famous earthquake,” she says.

The trend continued. After Partition, many Punjabi Christians began moving to Quetta for employment or missionary work. Nasir’s father came to Quetta from Sialkot in 1965 as part of this wave of migration. There are, according to data put together by the church and community organisations, around 30,000 Christians in Quetta; another 40,000 to 50,000 of them live in the rest of Balochistan. But these figures are both old and disputed. Nasir, for instance, says there are more than 100,000 Christians in Quetta alone.

After they landed in the cities, Christians had limited economicopportunities.

Then there is also evidence that Christian migrants from other parts of Pakistan continue to shift to Quetta. One of these recent migrants is the pastor at the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church. Bashir moved to Quetta about eight years ago and is doing a PhD on early Christian arrivals in Balochistan. “In Karachi, there is so much competition and there are fixed and narrow views about Christians in Punjab,” he says as he explains the ongoing phenomenan of Christian migration to Quetta.

The earliest Punjabi Christians in Quetta lived in two colonies established by the municipal authorities. Over the years, as they grew in social status and became more educated, they moved out of these colonies. Some settled in neighbourhoods with mixed population. Others founded new Christian-only neighbourhoods.

Many Christians who retired as sanitation workers from the army once lived in the garrison area but they were asked to vacate their homes during General (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s regime. “Most of them shifted to Nawa Killa (a village on the outskirts of Quetta). A small Christian colony, however, continues to exist within the cantonment,” Barkat explains.

Later the same day, a Sunday school is being held at the church’s ground. The children are re-enacting a Biblical story about Samson and Delilah. At the end of it, volunteers ask them to explain the lesson they have learnt. One of the older boys eagerly raises his hand: “From Samson’s story, we learn that we should never trust anyone.” He uses the Hindi word vishvaas for trust before one of the volunteers sternly corrects him. “Bharosa,” he says and smiles, slightly embarrassed, as his class-fellows burst into laughter.

Protectively watching them from the corner of the room is their teacher, Margaret James. “Have you seen the children’s work?” she asks as she points towards religious paintings on the wall. An elderly woman with a white dupatta wrapped around her, James has been teaching at the Sunday school for the past 20 years. She is a bit of an institution in the city herself, having been in the profession of teaching for over 50 years. She has taught the children of many prominent residents of Quetta, including the sons of Jamsheed Marker, a former senior diplomat who has represented Pakistan in many capitals as well as at important international forums. “Wherever I go, I meet an old student of mine,” James says in a clear, authoritative tone that indicates her sophisticated upbringing and education.

Her grandfather migrated to Balochistan from Sialkot in 1902. A Muslim convert to Christianity, he worked as a librarian. After her father died, her mother was appointed as a tutor in 1945 for the children of the Khan of Kalat who headed a confederacy of Baloch chiefdoms before 1948 when it was merged with Pakistan. “He gave my mother a lot of respect: he sat with her, ate with her. When my mother would recite from the Bible in the morning, he would come and listen to her,” James recalls the Khan of Kalat.

Her mother also taught the children of various other Baloch chieftains, including the Raisanis and the Bugtis. “We lived among the Baloch. There was no discrimination. When Pakistan was created, the Khan of Kalat said no one would disturb the minorities in his kingdom,” says James. Even today, “we feel very safe in our places of worship and are provided sufficient security”.

So why is Quetta, a city known for suicide bombings, sectarian violence and deadly disturbances related to Baloch separatist politics, considered a haven by Christians?

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“Not a single case of blasphemy is registered against Christians in Balochistan,” says Nasir. “There are no incidents of forced conversion of women, and Christians enjoy equal economic opportunities.” Many of them are in civil service. Others are working in education and medical sectors.

Barkat, a Punjabi in a Pakhtun nationalist party, says this is because politics in Quetta is still largely ethnic and tribal (as opposed to religious) and the dominant political narrative remains secular (though there are many who doubt that). “The young ones in Balochistan still follow the ideologies of [such Baloch and Pakhtun nationalist leaders as] Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo, Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai, Ataullah Mengal and Akbar Bugti,” Barkat explains. Religious minorities align themselves with either Baloch or Pakhtun groups and, in return, get their religious, economic and security problems attended to.

Kaleem Siddique, editor-in-chief of Urdu-language weekly Aftab, mentions a time when Punjabis in Balochistan – all seen as settlers, their religion notwithstanding – faced serious threats after Nawab Akbar Bugti’s assassination in a military operation in 2006. “We were being targeted on the basis of our ethnicity,” he says, but then adds quickly: “The situation is much better now.”

When the British built Quetta, Punjabi Christians came along withthem, working in the army, in hospitals, in schools and in menialmunicipal jobs.

His newspaper focuses on covering non-Muslims living in Balochistan and is distributed in 20 to 30 cities and towns in the province. He hails from Narowal and moved to Quetta about 25 years ago.

One of the major reasons for better economic and social life for Christians in Quetta is the high rate of education among them. When the British left the city, Punjabi Christians inherited all the schools built by the colonists. Many of the top schools in Quetta are still owned by Christians and run by church organisations. Even when Bhutto nationalised missionary educational institutions elsewhere in Pakistan, in Balochistan he could not. “Baloch chiefs took a bold stand for our schools so priests and nuns kept providing education in the province,” says Nasir.

Yet, this island of peace and harmony is surrounded by a very volatile sea. “If anyone says we are not provided security, they would be wrong. But the entire Pakistani nation is in a state of war,” says Bashir, the pastor.

As if to underscore that, a suicide blast hit Quetta’s Civil Hospital the very next day, leaving 69 Muslims and one Christian dead.

Sixty-five-year old James Masih – slender and beset with breathing problems – is an unlikely candidate for becoming a malik, a title reserved for Pakhtun tribal chiefs in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). He is neither a Pakhtun nor does he head a tribe. He has been living in Parachinar, the capital of Kurram Agency, all his life along with his family and about 1,500 other Christians. Yet, in 2012, the government made him a malik, with the right to represent his Christian community in local disputes and the responsibility to work with the administration of tribal areas if and when needed.

James Masih and three of his five sons are sweepers by profession as were his father and grandfather. The latter, a Punjabi Christian, migrated to Kurram in the early part of the 20th Century when the British were consolidating their military presence here.

Today, thousands of Christians live in six of the seven tribal agencies. Orakzai is the only agency with no recorded Christian population. Even the tribal agencies of South Waziristan, North Waziristan, Bajaur and Mohmand – all wrecked by religious militancy and military operations to counter that – house 1,500, 2,000, 500 and 700 Christians, respectively, according to the 1998 census data. Their ancestors all came here from Punjab.

Wilson Wazir, one of the 1,500 or so Christian residents of Khyber Agency, says his grandfather Said Masih came to Landi Kotal in 1914 from Sialkot. In March 2015, the government decorated Wazir with the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, one of the most prestigious civilian awards in the country, for his services to his religious community in Fata.

Not a single case of blasphemy is registered against Christians inBalochistan.

The objective of his work is to raise the economic profile of his community. None of the Christians in the tribal areas, for instance, own property. They all live on government land. He wants that to change. Most Christians in Fata work as sweepers. That is another thing he wants to change though it is much easier said than done. When the youngest son of James Masih managed to secure a bachelor’s degree, the only job the tribal administration could offer him was that of a sweeper. He has now moved to Turkey.

“Until recently, Christians here could not even acquire a domicile certificate or the national identity card,” says Wazir. “But now there are several educated Christians who are serving as nurses and teachers and are doing clerical jobs in government offices,” he says.

On September 22, 2013, two explosions at Peshawar’s All Saints Church took the lives of more than 80 people and injured 100 or so others, almost all of them Christians. This was a terribly tragic wake-up call for the city’s tiny Christian community.

Like everywhere in Pakistan, most Christians living in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have Punjabi origins. And, again like elsewhere in the country, they are not immune to security threats. In many cases, those threats are compounded by social and economic isolation.

Patras Masih, one of the 450 or so Christians living in Swat, complains his coreligionists suffer from a serious crisis of employment and housing. “Most of us can find jobs only as sanitary workers,” he says.

Around the time of Partition, his family was living in Rawalpindi. After he grew up, he came to find work in Swat where his paternal aunt was working at the house of the area’s commissioner. “The social and economic conditions of Christians are very bleak in Swat,” he says. “We do not even have a graveyard to bury our dead.”

Ayub Khawar, 43, is a pastor at the Victory Pentecostal Church in Youhanabad, a massive Christian slum in southern Lahore. His family shifted to Youhanabad when he was a child. “We used to live in Jamshair Kalan village in Kasur but we got no respect there. People of the majority faith in many instances would not even like to eat with us,” he says.

The Christians also could not have businesses of their own in the village, he adds. All his six brothers and their families now live in Youhanabad. “Everyone around here is our coreligionist.”

Willy Van den Broucke, known as Father Henri, a Belgian missionary, set up Youhanabad and Bahar Colony in Lahore in the 1960s. These settlements offered Punjabi Christians land that was heavily subsidised by the church, discrimination-free social and business environment and Church-provided civic amenities such as education. Francisabad, a Christian village in Gujranwala, came about in 1978, also through the efforts of foreign missionaries, with the same objectives.

Derek Misquita, one of the six members of the religious minorities elected on reserved seats to the National Assembly in 1977, set up Derekabad along the same lines. During Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, the slogans of “roti, kapra aur makan” (food, clothing and housing for everyone) were ubiquitous. Misquita had close ties with Bhutto who encouraged him to settle Christians from across Pakistan in Thal desert, in the west of Punjab, as a way to realise those slogans. “We started coming to Derekabad around 1975,” says Sardar Masih, 76, a local resident. “The land was completely barren. We did not have even charpoys. We made makeshift houses of tents and dug trenches and filled them with water so that no scorpions, snakes or other venomous insects bite us. At night, we lit up fire to keep prey animals away.”

Like everywhere in Pakistan, most Christians living in KhyberPakhtunkhwa have Punjabi origins.

Baba Lahoria, an 80-year-old resident of Derekabad, came here with the hope of getting farmland for his family. “It was a jungle. We levelled mounds and irrigated the land, employing camels to fetch water.”

Sardar Masih explains the rationale for shifting to such an inhospitable place: in villages in Punjab, “We used to work as saipis and in cities we could find work only as sanitary workers”. It always looked tempting, according to him, to try settling in a place where they could get farmland of their own. That dream has not materialised — not so far, in any case.

Close to 40 years after coming to Derekabad, Sardar Masih, Baba Lahoria and thousands of others living with them still do not formally own the farmland here in spite of a generally sympathetic judiciary and occasional administrative orders issued in their favour. “Now that the land has been made cultivable, local influential people are steadily snatching it from us with the help of the revenue department,” says Sardar Masih.

It is necessary to identify the fact that most katchi abadis [in Islamabad] are under the occupation of the Christian community, read a late 2015 letter by the Capital Development Authority (CDA), submitted to the Supreme Court that was hearing a case against the eviction of slum dwellers from the federal capital. These slums are destroying the look of Islamabad’s many residential sectors, making them resemble ugly villages, the letter noted before hitting out at the non-Muslim residents of the slums. “[The Christians] have shifted from Narowal, Sheikhupura, Shakargarh, Sialkot, Kasur, Sahiwal and Faisalabad and occupied the government land so boldly as if it has been allotted to them,” it pointed out. Then it went on to make its most strident observation: “This pace of occupation of land may affect the Muslim majority of the capital.”

The letter sounds as if Christians have launched a clandestine invasion of Islamabad and, secretly but steadily, they are working towards occupying it, one slum at a time. Yet, when the CDA finally demolished hundreds of homes in katchi abadis, none of them were found to be inhabited by Christians. And there was little to no resistance against the demolition — especially none from Christians.

In another part of the federal capital, life has been easier for Christians. Their abode, Francis Colony – a warren of low-slung mud houses built on the banks of a drain near F-7/4 sector – was recongnised as legal settlement back in 1988 when Benazir Bhutto first became prime minister. “We are better off here than we were in the village where we were treated as untouchables,” says Iqbal Masih, a paralysed resident of Francis Colony. He shifted to Islamabad from his village Charwind, in Sialkot district, as a young man in his twenties, to work in the construction sector in the new capital that was then being built.

It happened in Ramzan in 2012, recalls Haroon Mairaj, a resident of Karachi’s Essa Nagri area. Essa Nagri is a cluster of multi-storey shacks built to accommodate more than 20, 000 Christians of Punjabi origin in a cramped space of merely 20 acres or so. The city was undergoing a lot of tumult then, with various political parties and their militant wings competing for control of the streets. Crime was on the rise. Essa Nagri, wedged between Lyari Expressway in the west and University Road in the east, was being particularly targeted by thieves and bandits. Businesses were routinely attacked with demands for extortion and Christian women living in the neighbourhood were frequently harassed. Men from a neighbouring colony would flash torch lights on women sleeping outside their homes. All of this was followed by a string of targeted killings. Five men were murdered in a span of just two weeks. “We had just buried one body when more followed,” says Mairaj.

Residents of Essa Nagri decided to guard the area at night. One night, a patrol party spotted two men passing through the neighbourhood an hour or so before dawn. They looked suspicious and were asked to explain their presence in Essa Nagri. A scuffle ensued and Christian men beat up the two men.

Mairaj and some others residents of the neighbourhood then called the police. That started a series of unexpected events. “The police turned on us,” Mairaj recalls.

The two injured men alleged that the Christians had forced alcohol into their mouths during the fasting month of Ramzan. A criminal issue became a religious one, says Mairaj. “There was a jirga to settle the case,” he says. “Can you imagine? In this city, in this century, we had to partake in a jirga?”

The jirga asked local Christians to pay 100,000 rupees and two goats in compensation to the men the patrol party had manhandled. Essa Nagri’s residents collected the money and handed it over to the other side — mostly out of fear. “They said our lives were spared because of the month of Ramzan,” Mairaj reveals.

Essa Nagri, wedged between Lyari Expressway in the west and UniversityRoad in the east, was being particularly targeted by thieves andbandits.

Today Essa Nagri is fenced behind a 13-feet high boundary wall, partly custom-built, partly consisting of existing barriers. Residents of the neighbourhood mention the sense of security they have been feeling since the boundary was built in September 2012. Its construction started at 10pm and finished by 7am. “Overnight, we cordoned ourselves off,” Mairaj says. That, however, did not address all their existing and potential problems.

About eight Muslim households living within Essa Nagri soon started complaining about the boundary wall. They needed easier exit points to get to the mosque and madrasas. After much haggling and argumentation, the Christians were forced into constructing three gates — rendering the boundary wall less effective and letting the old fears of crime and violence rebound and escalate.

Hamida Begum was born in 1946 in Gujranwala. She moved to Karachi soon after marriage and worked as a midwife. “There was a lot of poverty in Punjab,” she says. Like most Punjabi Christians, her family worked in the fields. “If you did not want to work, they would take you away, anyway,” she says.

Her family’s travails, however, continued in Karachi. “My father worked at a toffee company here and he spent all his money on alcohol,” she says. In 2012, the police picked up her son, Nasir, along with another young man, suspecting them to be criminals. (Such arrests are a routine, say many local residents.) “We haven’t had a day of peace in this city.”

Essa Nagri’s history is as turbulent as Hamida Begum’s life. The neighbourhood has suffered some serious incidents of violence. In 1975, some Christians living here were accused of blasphemy. A local council was formed to deter violence but Muslims opened fire on Christians on the day the council was to meet. That was May 5, 1975. Three Essa Nagri men – Bashir, Khursheed and Gulzar – were killed and many others were injured.

Aziz Fazal was one of the injured. “I am a dead man walking,” he says as he points to a depression in his forehead. On that fateful day, a bullet scraped through his forehead.

Born in 1932 in Gujranwala, Fazal migrated to Karachi in 1947 to get away from the oppressive working conditions and lack of economic opportunities back in Punjab. A skeleton of a man with a propensity for exaggeration, he animatedly talks about how he was brought back to life by the grace of God.

He represents the first generation of Essa Nagri residents — mostly illiterate and unskilled. Many younger Christians here are either studying or working in health and social-work sectors. They speak fluent English and are politically and culturally aware. They are also conscious of how the rest of the society views them. “ ... these are the chuhras of Pakistan,” says a local young men, mocking the way others Karachiites refer to the residents of Essa Nagri.

The boys here are also disgruntled. Water supply and sanitation are very poor in their area. There is a lack of quality education – a government school built recently is completely abandoned – and there is widespread discrimination in school admissions and job interviews. “Hundreds of Christians work at the Aga Khan Hospital. Perhaps only one of them is on a managerial position. It is not as if they are not capable or qualified,” a bespectacled boy says.

Hanif Masih, a member of the older generation of Essa Nagri residents, is as bitter as the boys here are frustrated. “We did not get anything from Pakistan: no land, nothing. We do not get any rights or liberties. People from Afghanistan come here and prosper but we – Pakistanis, sons of the soil – have been neglected.”

Though he thinks Karachi has afforded people from his community a better economic life, he is extremely upset at the lack f security for Christians in Pakistan. A young man, silently listening to the conversation, adds: “Punjab is no good. Karachi is no good. Punjab main bhattay main maartay hain, Karachi main bori main dafnatay hain (in Punjab, they kill us in brick kilns; in Karachi they dump us, dead, in gunny bags).”

This article was originally published in the Herald's September 2016 issue under the headline "Caste away". To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Asif Aqeel is currently pursuing his MPhil in public policy and governance from Forman Christian College in Lahore.

Sama Faruqi is a former staffer of the Herald.

Ambreen Riasat woke up one summer morning and realised she was getting late for school. Her elder brother, Nauman, was already awake and she could hear him pack his school bag. Outside, the sun was already glaring down on the tall green trees and the grass rustling in the air on the mountain slopes. She rushed to the bathroom, a tiny space just outside her house with a pit and a tap. She washed her face, came back in, zipped up her school bag and ran to school. She was wearing a bright red shalwar kameez, a dress she had slept in.

Even at the tender age of around 14, Ambreen knew what part of her clothing she could not be careless about — a face-covering niqab that left a small space for her eyes to peer out. The stony path from her home to the paved road went steeply up the mountain. With the ease of someone who has been walking up and down that path for years, she hopped and skipped and ran all the way. Nauman was leading her as the two went past the trees bearing blood-red pomegranate blossoms and parrot-green walnut fruits.

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The government school in her village, Makol, is tucked away, almost invisibly, at the end of a narrow path covered by thick trees. A small peak, jutting out of a mountain, obscures its front gate. Most teachers at the school – including the principal – are men, and girls and boys study in the same classrooms. Girls wear niqab so that the men and the boys cannot see their faces.

When Ambreen returned home that day, her mother, Shamim Akhtar, was livid. Why did she not change her bright red clothes before going to school where there were so many men around, she asked her daughter. Ambreen tried to argue that she did not have time to change. Shamim would not hear it. “You are not going to school again,” she told Ambreen.

Shamim took her books away from her and confined her to the house.

Farmaan Ali, a teacher at the school, remembers Ambreen as an intelligent girl, a bright student. She could be naughty and easily distracted because she was so young, but she was smart and curious and a good daughter to her mother, he says. After classes, he had often seen her carrying large water containers home for her mother’s cooking and washing.

Her obedience, however, did not stop Ambreen from resisting her confinement. She kept protesting. She wanted to go back to her studies. She would often pick up her notebooks and start scribbling in them or she took her brother’s notebook and copied his lessons word for word. She was restless and often received beatings from her mother for talking back and asking to go back to her school. After her protests became too frequent to ignore, Shamim allowed her to go to a nearby madrasa for daily Quran lessons.

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All that happened in 2015.

Exactly a year after she had been banished indoors, Ambreen walked back to school. She was careful to keep well behind her brother so as to make sure he did not see her. She was more worried about her mother. Sooner or later, Shamim would find out that Ambreen was missing from home.

She quietly walked into her old classroom. It had changed. Other children had moved into it.

“The entire Makol came to see the vans but Ambreen’s mother did not,” says Mustafa.

After her arrival at school, a cousin of hers, who also studied there, went to the teacher Ali and asked him not to give Ambreen any books. She is not supposed to be in school, the girl told the teacher.

Ali discussed the matter with the principal, Khaliquz Zaman, and they decided to summon Ambreen’s brother, Nauman. They sent her back home with him. An angry Shamim gave Ambreen a serious thrashing but soon everything went back to business as usual. Ambreen helped her mother clean the house before everyone went to bed. Lying in his cot, Nauman could hear Ambreen sob.

That was April 29, 2016 — a moonlit night. Everything outside seemed to be bathed in a heavenly glow. By 11 pm, Shamim and Nauman fell fast asleep. Between midnight and 2 am, some men came in and took Ambreen away. Whether or not her mother knew is not clear.

Zarnab Gul lives on a hilltop in Makol. It was very early that morning when he heard screams. He opened the window of his room and looked out. He saw a big blaze below — at a place where a dusty shoulder jutted out of the village’s sole paved link with other villages and towns. Such shoulders are common on roads passing through hilly areas and are meant to provide parking space for broken-down vehicles or for travellers to wait for a bus.

Gul called his wife and they went to their rooftop to see what was burning along the road outside. They could not make out anything. He shouted loudly to see if whoever was screaming would answer. He heard back nothing but screams.

Gul eventually went down to the road. He saw a van on fire. The flames were leaping towards another van parked nearby.

Gul knew the owner of the second van – a twenty-five-year old local driver Ghulam Mustafa. He dialled Mustafa’s cell phone number and asked him to come over. By the time Mustafa reached the spot, the fire had died out but his vehicle was all burnt down.

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Gul and Mustafa went closer to the vans to see their condition. Both froze with horror when they saw that there was a person sitting inside the first van — burnt to a cinder. The arms and legs of the body, relatively recognisable, suggested it was a girl. The two also spotted a school bag inside the van. “I was surprised that the bag was still intact,” says Mustafa. “Nothing could have survived that blaze.”

It was dawn by then. Ali, the school teacher, heard an announcement from a local mosque about a dead body lying in a van on the roadside. He walked down the hill from his house and saw a crowd moving in the direction of the van. When he reached the place where the van was parked, he saw the singed body of a young girl tied to a seat. There were notebooks inside a school bag tucked in her hands. Those belonged to Nauman, Ambreen’s brother.

The girl in the van, according to her autopsy report, was strangled before she was set on fire. Her hands and legs were also tied with some plastic material to ensure that she did not move out of the van. When the police arrived, they concluded from the notebooks that the dead girl was Ambreen.

While everyone rushed to the spot where the body was found, Shamim stayed at home even though she lived only a short walk away. “The entire Makol came to see the vans but Ambreen’s mother did not,” says Mustafa.

Shamim says she did not notice anything unusual when she woke up that morning, except that the door of her single-room house was open. She went out to the bathroom, washed herself, offered her prayers and went back to sleep. She says she heard announcements about the burnt body of a young girl but she did not pay attention. When Nauman was leaving for school at around 7:30 am, Shamim asked him to wake Ambreen. That is when, she claims, they realised that she was missing.

Shamim ran out of the house and checked in the bathroom and the thickets close by but Ambreen was nowhere to be found. She went to the neighbours and asked them about her daughter but no one had seen her that morning.

Her statement triggers some troubling questions. She was sleeping right next to her daughter in a small room. How could she not know if someone came in and took the girl away? Why did she not notice Ambreen’s absence before her son told her about it?

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The police detained Shamim and Nauman and took them to the police station. They were both beaten up. Shamim was slapped and the soles of her feet were struck hard with sticks. “You can beat me as much as you want,” she cried, “but I have not killed my daughter. Why would I kill my own flesh and blood?” She was released, along with Nauman, for lack of evidence.

Shamim’s husband, Riasat Khan – a small, gaunt old man with a shrunken, bearded face – is a labourer working in a ship-breaking yard in Gadani, Balochistan. He stays at his workplace, hundreds of kilometres away from Makol, for most part of the year. He was at work when his daughter’s body was found. He reached home a couple of days after Ambreen had died. He says he has no clue what happened to her.

Shamim, younger than her husband and also more articulate and worldly-wise than him, does not like to talk much about her daughter. Instead, she mourns the death of her eldest born, a boy named Waseem, who had died of an unknown cause a few years ago. He was fine one day and then the next day he was bleeding from the mouth, she says. Within hours he was dead.

Shamim has a photo of Waseem. He seems to be in his early teens at the time the photograph was taken. She has no photograph of Ambreen that can enable an interested outsider to know what she looked like.

There is a notebook in his hands. Ambreen used to scribble and doodle in it. He is also drawing something — a mishmash of lines and spirals, like the mystery surrounding his sister’s death.

In the sparse room where Ambreen’s family lives, there is almost nothing that suggests that the girl even existed. A small stove next to a low wooden shelf in a corner of the living room-cum-bedroom marks the kitchen area where a few tin containers carrying cooking oil and some spices are lined neatly. Next to them are pots and pans and a couple of trunks with clothes in them. The bright red dress Ambreen wore to school last year could be in one of those trunks, but there is no way of knowing that. Next to the trunks, charpoys are lined against a long wall facing the only opening in the room: its door. Ambreen used to sleep on one of those cots.

As Nauman starts talking about Ambreen, his mother looks at him. He is sitting on a charpoy right opposite the door. There is a notebook in his hands. Ambreen used to scribble and doodle in it. He is also drawing something — a mishmash of lines and spirals, like the mystery surrounding his sister’s death.

Makol, located about 10 kilometres from the military’s premier training facilities in Abbottabad district, is a typical settlement in the mountains: houses are scattered, separated by small hills, pathways and tree-lined courtyards. It consists of a few hundred houses. Most of them are built with bricks and mortar and have concrete roofs but a few are mud huts with thatched ceilings – like the one Ambreen’s family has.

In this village lives a rich man: Muhammad Pervaiz. His family owns vast tracts of land and many houses here. He is also the elected chairman of a union council of which Makol is a part, along with a few other villages.

Last year, Pervaiz’s young daughter Saima disappeared from home, allegedly with a man she wanted to marry. Her parents looked for her everywhere they could but did not find a clue of her whereabouts. There were rumours in Makol that Ambreen knew where Saima was. She reportedly was the human link through which Saima communicated with the man she loved.

Pervaiz is known to be unhappy about Ambreen’s role in his daughter’s disappearance. He is reported to have convened a council of the elders of the area in his home some time in 2015 where it was allegedly decided to punish Ambreen. It was not a jirga, a tribal judicial council, in the exact tribal sense because those living in Makol are not bound by any tribal affinity (they all come from different castes and working groups) and it had no legal and political legitimacy as the jirgas have in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. It is still reported to have the sanction of the rich and the influential in and around Makol.

Shamim alleges it was Pervaiz who came to her house along with some other men on the night Ambreen disappeared. He took her away to question her about Saima’s disappearance, Shamim says, but she does not have any evidence to substantiate her allegation.

Others in the village speculate that she knew all along that Pervaiz was out to get her daughter. That is why she took Ambreen out of school soon after Saima had disappeared and the jirga had taken place, they say.

Something she has noticed in many similar cases: That a woman who leads a life of moral laxity always ends up dying in ignominy.

Pervaiz’s wife, Rubina, a housewife reluctant to speak to an outsider, swears by her husband’s innocence. “He was at home with me on the night of Ambreen’s murder,” she says. She also denies the allegations that the punishment for Ambreen was approved at a jirga held inside her home. “That was not a jirga. After Saima went missing, a few elders from the community talked to each other inside a closed room. There was no discussion on the subject ever afterwards,” she says.

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Rumours continue to swirl around the case. One of them joins Pervaiz and Shamim as secret lovers who killed Ambreen after she had come to know about them. According to another rumour, Shamim could have killed both Waseem and Ambreen for some unknowable reason.

Many weeks after Ambreen’s murder, Safeer Ahmed, a junior court official in Abbottabad, a few kilometres to the north-west of Makol, insists that Shamim was “involved” in some kind of a “racket” and that is why she had her own “daughter killed to cover up her crime”. Makol is a small place where everyone knows everyone, he says. “It is not a city. How can the mother not know the person who took her daughter away? There is some great secret here.”

Pervaiz and around 10 others – including the owner of the van in which the body was found – were arrested in early May 2016 and are in jail pending a trial. The police are yet to release a complete forensic audit of the crime scene. A judicial inquiry into Ambreen’s death, ordered by the provincial government, is also going on.

Whoever killed Ambreen was both meticulous and methodical. According to police investigations and statements of witnesses who discovered her body, the killers had cut off electricity to the nearby street light and damaged the water pipeline passing through the place so that water to extinguish the fire could not be secured easily. Ambreen was dumped on a seat right above the van’s gas tank. When the fire started, she did not burn slowly. The fireball cause by the gas roasted her body instantly.

Her teacher, Ali, remembers how many in the crowd that April morning took photos and made videos of the crime scene. Those grainy and terrifying images and the recent renaming of the local school after her are the only signs that Ambreen did once exist.

Even her grave in Makol graveyard remains unmarked: a small mound of dried earth with a shapeless piece of rock placed where a tombstone should have been.

Dewal Sharif is like Makol in many ways. Both are located in the same mountain valley that links the tourist resort of Murree in the south to Abbottabad in the north-west through scattered settlements nestled amid forest-covered ravines and snow-capped peaks. But Dewal Sharif is much bigger and, with its own commercial areas and multiple road links with the rest of the country, is more economically developed than Makol.

And there are more private schools in Dewal Sharif than there are shops in Makol. Maria Sadaqat, a tall 19-year-old girl, was both a beneficiary and a contributor to this sprawling private education system. Her death on June 1, 2016 is also linked to it — albeit indirectly.

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Many in this town of more than 10,000 people agree that Maria was a bright girl. Even when she was studying at a local school, she taught other students in her class. By the time she reached the second year of college, there was competition among the owners of private schools to hire her as a teacher. The head teacher at Al Abbas School – where Maria had done her primary and secondary schooling – was certain that she was going to teach at his school. Shaukat Abbasi, proprietor of the Suffa School of Modern Studies, believed she would join his institution. He was, after all, a close friend of Maria’s father Sadaqat Abbasi.

Sadaqat and Shaukat had become friends some years ago. The former was working as a driver then and the latter as a Grade-17 government officer. They, respectively, came from the relatively poor lower part of Dewal Sharif town and its better off upper part. It was originally a case of a small man trying to be seen as being close to a big man; a way of gaining some social and financial traction in a highly hierarchical society. Then Shaukat gave Sadaqat some money to set up his own chicken coop.

Perhaps to return his favour, Sadaqat decided that Maria would teach at Shaukat’s school after she passed her intermediate exam. All her younger siblings – five sisters and a brother – were also to attend the same school as students.

Her colleagues at the school liked Maria but they thought she was a little odd for a girl of her age. Firstly, she was a couple of inches taller than most women around her and then she did not wear any make-up other than an occasional application of kohl to her eyes. The teachers felt “embarrassed standing next to her”, a member of her family recalls.

She had one foible though — she liked spending money on buying watches. One of her watches had a small dial with a long thin leather strap. She wore it on most workdays. The other one looked like a gold bracelet that she paired with pearl earrings. Recently, she had started wearing a delicate gold nose ring that her grandmother had bought for her.

These distinctions apart, she wore a black abaya, as did all other teachers working with her, while walking to and from the school. It had a sprinkling of black shiny objects on the shoulders and across the front. And like most teenage girls, she loved bags. Her shoulder bag was made of imitation fur and leather — a popular design sold everywhere in Murree’s bazaars.

Maria was friendly and confident and had the talent for putting people at ease with her conversation. Her friends and family say she always had a story or two to tell. She was obviously an object of envy among her peers.

Her father was very proud of her. Maria had brought him prestige in the community and additional cash to his family kitty.

Some months after Maria started teaching at Shaukat’s school, Sadaqat developed business problems with her boss. Accounts differ. Sadaqat says Shaukat was his business partner — they shared profit and loss. When the business was doing well, Shaukat was receiving his share of the profit but when sales and profits were badly hit, he started asking for his money back. Shaukat says he had given the money to Sadaqat as a loan.

At first Shaukat did not press his demands much. Sadaqat, in the meanwhile, went to Saudi Arabia on a work visa as a labourer. It was then that the environment started changing for Maria at the school. Rumours began circulating that Shaukat had sent a marriage proposal to Maria for his son — an already married man with a child who also taught at another private school. Others suggested that Maria and Shaukat’s son were having a secret affair. To avoid the scandal to blow up in her face, she quit her job. Her siblings were also transferred to a different school.

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The relationship between Sadaqat and Shaukat was steadily souring all this while, especially after Sadaqat came back from Saudi Arabia, abandoning his contract halfway. Almost penniless, he started a vehicle repair shop in the market area in lower Dewal, where Shaukat appeared regularly, demanding his money back in full view of other people. The two often exchanged hot words.

One day in May this year, the two men almost came to blows. But Shaukat backed off, sensing that the much younger and fitter Sadaqat would outdo him easily in a fist fight. Sadaqat, though, believed the quarrel was not over.

The next day, he left Dewal to attend a funeral in the nearby town of Phagwari. All the elders of his family and five of his children went with him. Maria was left at home to take care of her special-needs sister, six-year-old Habiba.

At 11:45 am that day, Shaukat – along with four or five other people – arrived at Maria’s house, a small three-room stand-alone house on a hillock. He called her outside. As soon as Maria opened the gate, the men slapped her and pulled her to a clearing where some goats were tied. They ripped her clothes and beat her in turns, making a circle around her. “You are stalking my son. Today, I will set you on fire,” Shaukat said to her. The men forced her to the ground. Shaukat took out a plastic container, threw kerosene oil on Maria and set her ablaze. She screamed for help but no one came to her rescue. The men then threw her down a nearby mountain slope. She landed on a path, many feet below. This is how the events of the day transpired, according to the statement that Maria gave to the police from a hospital bed and the accounts of her family.

Her neighbour’s son, a 12-year-old, was playing on the rooftop of his house when he heard someone screaming. He rushed to Maria’s house where the screams were coming from. He found her lying on the path, still in flames with her clothes ripped at many places. He called his sister. She gave Maria water to drink and called Sadaqat, who came back home and took Maria to a government hospital in Phagwari.

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The hospital did not have any facilities to treat burn victims. He eventually shifted her to Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) in Islamabad for treatment.

Maria lay there in a bed, fully conscious for 36 hours. She recorded her statement – an audio and a video – describing her attackers in detail. On her last day in the hospital, an uncle roughly the same age and with the same white beard as Shaukat, came to see her. She screamed in terror. “Master Shaukat is here to burn me,” she cried. “Baba, throw him out.”

She died the same day.

Seen in her pictures, Maria looks like a younger version of her grandmother, Subeda — same height, same straight nose, same high cheekbones and same curious brown eyes. Subeda wants the courts to give Shaukat the same punishment he has inflicted on her granddaughter — death by fire. Maria’s father has the same demand.

Sadaqat and his family, however, seem more sad than angry. “For me, she was a son,” he says. “All my children are very bright but Maria was exceptionally intelligent.”

While the financial dispute between Sadaqat and Shaukat is well known in Dewal Sharif and rumours about the latter’s desire to make Maria his daughter-in-law are widespread, few men outside Maria’s family believe that he killed her. Many of them are willing to vouchsafe for Shaukat’s good character; others remember him as one of the best and the most respected educationists in the area.

After the police arrested him and put him behind bars, there were, indeed, public marches in Dewal Sharif in his favour. Many female teachers and students also participated in those.

“She is already dead and she has also named me, but as a human being I feel sad over her death,” he says calmly

Members of Maria’s family allege that Shaukat was enraged because she had refused to become the second wife of his son. “He kept threatening her,” says Maria’s aunt Sobia. “If you don’t marry my son then I will make sure you marry no one else,” she quotes Shaukat as telling her niece.

I manage to sneak inside Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail on June 28, 2016, to have a meeting with Shaukat. We talk in a room full of people where the prisoners stand on one side in a cage-like iron structure and their visitors on the other side, both groups trying to have a conversation through tiny holes in steel sheets separating them.

He looks older than he did in a video of him available online. He also appears withdrawn. He acknowledges his verbal squabble with Sadaqat and also claims that he backed off that day in May in the market so that he could avoid getting hurt. But he denies even being in Dewal Sharif the day Maria was burnt. “I had gone to a village 45 kilometres from Dewal to enquire about an ailing friend.”

Shaukat says he came to know about the incident through a phone call. “Then I heard Maria’s father had nominated me and my neighbour for the crime. We ran away initially but surrendered a few days later.”

He insists that he never saw Maria after she had left his school. “She has given her pre-death statement under dictation from her father,” says Shaukat.

Maria’s family members say they kept asking Shaukat to come forward and clear his name while the girl was still alive. He did not do that. “The media was baying for blood. How could I risk my life by going there?” he responds.

Shaukat also denies that he ever asked for Maria’s hand for his son. “I swear I never talked about marrying the two,” he says.

As I start to leave, he stops me. “She is already dead and she has also named me, but as a human being I feel sad over her death,” he says calmly, showing no outward signs of agitation, anger or animosity. “I really feel sorry for her,” he adds.

In his online video, apparently made when he was being investigated by the police, he makes a passionate plea about his innocence. “I have a grown-up daughter of my own. Those who have grown-up daughters of their own don’t eye other people’s daughters.”

Given Maria’s last statement and the media’s coverage of the incident, it looked unlikely that Shaukat would be released from jail any time soon.

The police investigations, however, soon absolved him of the accusations. A few weeks ago, a committee formed by Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif to investigate Maria’s death declared that she had “committed suicide and was not murdered.”

According to a report published in daily Dawn on July 2, 2016, the “committee headed by Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Abubakar Khuda Dad Khan, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Khuda Bux Cheema and Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Ghasud Deen analysed forensic data, obtained polygraph tests, mobile phone records, fingerprints, medical reports, talked to doctors and conducted interviews in order to ascertain the cause of death.” The officers recommended releasing Shaukat and two of his alleged accomplices.

They were released on bail soon afterwards.

The police are also said to have leaked Maria’s cell phone data. It showed she was exchanging amorous messages quite regularly with Shaukat’s son.

Asma Jahangir, the renowned human rights lawyer and activist, visited Maria’s home as part of a three-member fact-finding mission sent by the Supreme Court Bar Association soon after the incident of her burning. Jahangir has seen her autopsy report and spoken to her family. She has also met Maria’s neighbours who were the first ones to hear her screams.

She says she found Dewal Sharif divided along gender lines over Maria’s death. The women were “in full sympathy with the victim whereas the men were either justifying [the] crime or denying it totally,” says the mission led by Jahangir in its recently released report. “There was a concerted effort to paint the occurrence as a suicide rather than murder,” it adds.

“It was obviously not a suicide. It was murder,” Jahangir says in her office in Lahore.

They are straightforward murders, disguised as honour killings to escape punishment

She cites Maria’s postmortem report to say that her hands, feet and head were unburnt. This, she says, suggests that more than one person held her down to the ground while she was being set ablaze.

The fact-finding mission report quotes one Ejab Abbasi, chairman of union council Dewal Sharif, as saying that he met Maria in hospital twice to probe her thoroughly. “The victim was absolutely certain and remained consistent about her version of the incident,” he is reported to have told the members of the mission.

Jahangir says she also tried to meet Shaukat’s family but they were unable to meet the mission for unspecified reasons. She clarifies that it was not her mandate to find out who had killed Maria. “My mission was to ensure that the investigation was carried out independently. There was obviously a lot of prejudice against the girl. I wanted to ensure that the rumours did not sidetrack legal proceedings.”

The fact-finding mission initially “was quite satisfied with the inquiry” but its members were “shocked to know that the investigation had declared the main accused as being innocent”. They also point out that a magistrate hearing the case did not accept the police recommendation to release the accused “and yet bail was granted” to him.

The report lists developments that might have had some negative impact on the investigation. “There was a campaign of character assassination of the victim and her family and … there were credible reports that the family members were being threatened and induced to accept some reward for their silence.”

Jahangir points to a widespread public perception, especially among men, in Dewal Sharif — something she has noticed in many similar cases: That a woman who leads a life of moral laxity always ends up dying in ignominy.

He passed through her street every day. She waited for him half-hidden behind a half-open door. “Why don’t you look my way? Why don’t you talk to me?” she gathered the courage to ask him one day. “I have nothing to offer,” he replied. “I want nothing,” she said.

Muqaddas Bibi was a young girl with a soft face. “She was the daughter of a potter but she looked like she belonged to a family of Rajputs,” the boy’s mother says.

Taufiq Ahmed is a handsome young man with a thick mustache and thick wavy black hair, oiled and slicked back stylishly. One of his legs is shorter than the other but that is barely noticeable. He works as a tailor.

The two lived in the same Buttranwali village, a nondescript settlement a little off the road that connects Gujranwala with Sialkot — nestled amid green fields being steadily taken over by ramshackle housing and brick kilns. They came from two different castes and their financial status varied. Though the girl’s family was poor a couple of generations ago, they have been doing well of late and are regarded well off by the village’s standards. Ahmed comes from a family of carpenters which struggles to make ends meet even when some of its members have branched into other professions. They had no chance of having an arranged marriage.

Three years ago, the two ran away and got married in a court.

At first Ahmed’s family was hesitant to accept Muqaddas into its fold but she took to her married life wholeheartedly. “She made rotis every day for the family, washed clothes and was always helping everyone,” says Ahmed’s mother. Everyone in the family and the neighbourhood soon started liking Muqaddas. An elderly woman living next door to her would come to her complaining of headache and Muqaddas would apply oil to her hair to massage and soothe her.

Ahmed lives in a small single-storey home made of red bricks, unplastered and unpainted. It is hard to distinguish from other houses in the village. His entire family has one room to sleep in — a simple structure with bare walls, save for a couple of framed images of the Kaaba.

Ahmed works from 7 am to 11 pm in one corner of the house, making about fifteen thousand rupees a month by stitching clothes. Muqaddas would serve him tea every few hours.

“Once women become independent, they also get a mind of their own and want to marry of their own choice. This is seen as a major contravention of family boundaries.”

About a year ago, they had a daughter. A few months after her birth, Muqaddas became pregnant again. She was happy about her second child. The delivery was still two months away but she made new clothes for herself to wear after she had given birth.

One day this June, she felt ill and Ahmed’s mother offered to take her to a hospital. They were to take a bus to Gujranwala, slightly more than 10 kilometres away. While Muqaddas and her mother-in-law were waiting at a bus stop, her mother arrived there and grabbed Muqaddas by the hair and the neck. “It all happened so fast,” says Ahmed’s mother, “that I did not know what to do.” Before anyone could come to their help, Muqaddas’ mother had dragged her daughter into her house and closed the door from inside.

As a crowd gathered outside, the mother screamed at the daughter. “Why did you marry a cripple?” Other members of the family were also present inside the house and they are known to have beaten up one of Muqaddas’ sister-in-law for trying to help her. Within minutes, the mother took out a knife and slit the daughter’s throat.

As Muqaddas lay dying, people waiting outside tried to enter the house but could not. “They must have planned for a long time,” says a visibly angry Ahmed. “Our women seldom leave the house. They have been waiting for a chance all this time to grab her.”

The old woman who liked Muqaddas for oiling her hair curses the girl’s mother. “The whole neighbourhood is in shock,” she says crying. “This is not about honour. Once the girl had become a mother, the question of honour died there and then.”

Ahmed’s mother now looks after his daughter. “What will this little girl think when she grows up?” she asks before she starts crying. “I am going to take good care of our child,” Ahmed says, lifting his daughter in his arms.

Muqaddas is buried in a grave behind a wall forming the village’s boundary. There is an empty bottle of camphor and fresh flowers lying on the grave.

Back at his home, Ahmed takes out an album carrying the photos of the couple. In one photo, a heart pierced by an arrow overlaps them as they pose for the camera. “I want to ask the world, if love is forbidden then why did God give us a heart,” he says. “If these people call themselves believers, do they not believe that couples are made in heaven?”

The months of May and June this year have been the cruelest. Violence against women has been rampant during this period. In May alone, the national media reported at least five cases in which women were murdered — in most instances by their close relatives.

Zeenat Bibi’s killing stands out among all these cases for multiple reasons. An 18-year-old girl living in a working class neighbourhood in southern Lahore, she was burnt to death on June 8 by her mother, Parveen Rafiq. This is the first known incident this year of a girl torched to death by her own family. Zeenat also did not belong to a village where some supposedly primitive anti-women social code operated. She lived and was killed in the second biggest city in the country where tribal concepts of male honour look distinctly unfeasible to follow. And she was killed by her mother — not by her brother or father though they may have a role in it.

Yet the cause of her death is what it has always been in such cases: “bringing shame to the family,” as her mother put it, according to a report published by daily Dawn.

Parveen, who confessed to her crime and is undergoing trial, set Zeenat on fire more than a week after the girl had reportedly eloped with one Hassan Khan. The two had married in court. “Hassan had agreed to let his wife return [to her parents’ home] after her family promised ... to organise a traditional wedding reception for the couple,” the newspaper reports.

Less than a week before the girl was murdered, the neighbours had seen her brother carrying home a jerrycan of petrol. The fire that killed Zeenat was so big that it was extinguished only with help from the official rescue service.

Ammar Majeed, who works at Jahangir’s law firm, AGHS Associates, as a media officer, has been visiting homes from where violence against women is reported. He has seen cases similar to that of Zeenat’s. In his reckoning, these “are crimes of ego” that “have nothing to do with honour.” A mother, upset that her daughter did not listen to her before deciding who to marry, resorts to killing not in order to redeem her honour but to satisfy her pride.

From experience, Majeed knows that such pandering to the self often has a destructive outcome. He once asked a boy why he had killed his sister. “Because it was satisfying,” is the answer he got.

Khawar Mumtaz, a veteran of the women’s rights movement in Pakistan, has worked in different capacities over the last three and a half decades — first as a member of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF), then as a founding member and head of the Aurat Foundation, a Lahore-based lobbying and research group on women’s rights, and recently as the chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women. “Most cases of violence against women in the 1980s were reported from tribal areas in Sindh and Balochistan,” she says. The situation has only worsened over the years as similar cases are being reported from everywhere in the country.

One reason, according to Mumtaz, is that the economic, social and political environment is changing in Pakistan. “Women are doing much better economically, politically and socially as compared to the past,” she says. “Women are marrying late. More and more women are working.” This, she says, is one of the major factors in the backlash against them.

Mumtaz points to “a total disjuncture” between how the society is moving ahead and how social structures and social roles are still playing out in the same old ways. She gives an example: “Once women become independent, they also get a mind of their own and want to marry of their own choice. This is seen as a major contravention of family boundaries.”

That explains why it has become acceptable that a woman can work to provide for her family but it is still not acceptable if she exercises choice in marriage. “Violence then is likely. It is part of a control mechanism.”

Shahnaz Rouse, a professor of sociology at the Sarah Lawrence College in the United States, has also written about social and political changes that have led to an increase in violence against women in Pakistan. In her book, Shifting Body Politics: Gender, Nation, State in Pakistan, she sees the crucial shift in attitudes towards women having resulted from the militarisation and progressively increasing masculinisation of society itself since the military regime of General Ziaul Haq.

Freely available arms and ammunition and Pakistan’s status as a frontline state during the war in Afghanistan and the drug trade are some of the contributing factors to the social changes she highlights. “The militarisation of the state and civil society [is] a result of the international/global politics of the last two decades, combined with the collapse of the liberalisation policies of regimes following Zia … the continued reliance by all three [regimes] on “Islamic” ideology as constructed by increasingly militant and conservative religious groups for “strategic” and/or ideological purposes, have resulted in an alarming masculinisation of public space.”

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia goes another step backwards. Her book deals with one of the most brutal manifestations of the notion of shame and honour being linked to women and their bodies on a mass scale. Women were humiliated by being paraded naked in the streets or forced to abandon their religion and marry their rapists, never to see their families again during the cataclysmic events of 1947. Thousands of them died willingly at the hands of their own men to avoid bringing shame and dishonour to their families.

“They are straightforward murders, disguised as honour killings to escape punishment,” Butalia said in an interview about some recent incidents of violence against women in India.

The word honour invariably appears in news reports covering violence against women. Maqsooda Solangi, who has been working for the Aurat Foundation for six years, believes that many crimes are seen as honour killings because the media portrays them as such. “News contents are spiced up,” she says.

The situation is particularly bad at relatively small Punjab-based Urdu language newspapers. Whenever an honour crime occurs, it is covered in a way that focuses on the love marriage aspect of it, Solangi says. She adds that the coverage of crimes against women in local-language newspapers in Sindh is not as salacious as it is in Punjab.

It was during Zia’s era that honour killing first entered the lexicon of the news media and human rights activists, Mumtaz says. It has its origin in a 1979 judgement by the Peshawar High Court that declared that Islamic concepts of qisas (retribution) and diyat (compensation) must be taken into account before deciding any cases involving the death penalty. Awarding capital punishment without any provision for forgiveness is un-Islamic, the court ruled.

In politics, this put Zia’s self-professed Islamist regime in an uncomfortable position as far as hanging – without provision for forgiveness – of deposed prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was concerned. The verdict also raised alarm among women’s rights activists. It will lead to impunity for those men who kill their women because they can benefit from forgiveness – which in such cases is the prerogative of their own next of kin – is how the activists looked at the possible impacts of the law. They were proved right. The next decades saw a spike in crimes against women but most of them did not lead to conviction and punishment. The accused, the police, the prosecutors and even the judges used family honour as an excuse to condone such crimes as crimes of passion, committed on the spur of the moment by someone incensed by the injury to his or her own honour.

This led activists to demand that the state and the courts treat murders in the name of honour as a separate category of crimes in which forgiveness, qisas and diyat did not apply. As a term, “honour killing” thus became a part of everyday language.

In March 2015, after multiple failed efforts to reform the law, the Senate, the upper house of the parliament, finally approved a piece of legislation the activists have been asking for all along: honour killing became a crime against the state; the parties to it could not reach an out-of-court settlement in such cases. Women’s murders became “non-compoundable” — provided that the prosecution was able to prove that those were honour killings. Tabled by Senator Sughra Imam in 2014, the legislation, however, lapsed because it could not win approval from the National Assembly, the lower house of the parliament, mainly due to opposition from the religious political parties.

“Every murder should be seen as a crime against the state, not a matter between two individuals that they can resolve mutually,”

Jahangir believes the focus by activists on the term honour killing has hardly been helpful. Lawyers now spend all their energy and time on proving the crime to be an honour killing, she says. If they can’t do that, she says, the parties to a case can still go and affect a compromise no matter how gruesome the murder.

Additionally, qisas and diyat, as Islamic instruments to settle murder disputes, still stay on the statute books. The legal heirs of a victim also have the right to drop the charges at any point during the proceedings.

Jahangir blames non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for this state of affairs. “If they can write in English, they think they can also draft laws,” she says. Their advocacy has only added multiple layers of litigation that women face in courts, she says. Any benefit that could have come about in terms of stricter penalties for honour killing has been apparently cancelled out by these additional legal complexities, Jahangir adds.

Many in the NGOs seem to recognise these problems. A report commissioned by a group of women’s rights organisations and development foundations in 2015 attributes major hurdles in justice for women to a number of legal and judicial problems. There are hardly any female judges; availability of a lawyer is as low as 2.5 per 100,000 people and there are not enough female police officers, says the report entitled The Laws of Honour Killing and Rape in Pakistan: Current Status and Future Prospects.

The report cites surveys conducted by local human rights organisations that reveal a general lack of faith in the judiciary and very low levels of contact with the courts, especially among women. Most importantly, it points out that the reformed laws have changed nothing on the ground. The lack of sympathy encountered by survivors of rape and other forms of violence against women and the tendency among the police officers to encourage out-of-court settlements seem to have survived despite changes in the law, it says.

Nafisa Shah, a long-time campaigner for women’s rights and a member of the National Assembly affiliated to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), readily agrees that the criminal justice system needs reforms. In an interview at her residence inside the parliamentary lodges in Islamabad, she argues that the recent cases of women’s murders are far more complex than they are made out to be.

In the past, she explains, the manner of killing women was different. “Most murders were spontaneous acts committed with such weapons as axes or clubs and they usually happened in rural areas,” she says. “Now there seems to be premeditation in these killings.” The existing laws, she says, do not define honour killing in such a way as to cover cold-blooded murders.

Shah is soon to publish a book, Honour Unmasked, which contains the results of her own field research on the subject.

“Patriarchy is violent against women. It is particularly violent against fearless women.”

Shah, as well as Jahangir and Mumtaz, agree that distinguishing one type of crime from the other – as has been the case with honour killing – has created more problems than it has solved. Ideally, all three say, all crimes should be treated alike – investigated, prosecuted and adjudicated in the same manner regardless of the gender, caste, creed, ethnicity and the social status of both the perpetrators and the victims.

“Every murder should be seen as a crime against the state, not a matter between two individuals that they can resolve mutually,” says Mumtaz.

Fauzia Azeem was a small-town girl from Punjab’s southern backwaters of district Dera Ghazi Khan. Her father, Muhammad Azeem, was a tenant farmer in his native village of Shah Saddar Deen on the Indus Highway.

Fauzia was married off at an early age — she later said she was less than eighteen at the time. She got a divorce after giving birth to a son. Next, she worked as a salesgirl and as a bus hostess in Multan.

In 2013, she made her first media appearance, as a contestant for Pakistan Idol, a music show aired on television — not as Fauzia Azeem but as Qandeel Baloch. She was rejected in the auditions. She then chose social media platforms to post videos that, her critics said, were bold to the extent of being provocative by Pakistani standards. She dallied online with sports stars, politicians and, finally, with a mullah.

Qandeel Baloch developed a mass fan following. Her videos were liked and shared by over 700,000 followers on Facebook and by more than 40,000 people on Twitter.

One the night of July 15, 2016, her younger brother, Waseem, and cousin, Haq Nawaz, killed her (exact details of her murder are yet to be fully known). Their reason in a confessional statement: she was bringing dishonour to the family.

In the First Information Report her father registered with the police in Multan -- where she was found murdered in her rented house -- he gave multiple motives: “Waseem … used to stop Fauzia from working in showbiz … my son Waseem has killed my daughter Qandeel Baloch in the name of honour … he has done this for money…Waseem has killed Qandeel Baloch on the instigation of my other son Muhammad Aslam Shaheen who is a subedar in the army.”

A week after her murder, The Second Floor (T2F), a meeting place for discussions on political, social and cultural issues, organised a panel discussion. Titled Bold Women, Bad Women: How to talk about Qandeel Baloch, the discussion moved from looking at her private and public life, her views on sexuality, independence and feminism and public reactions to her online activities, to the issue of violence against women in general and honour killing in particular.

Dr Nosheen Ali, who taught sociology at the New York University recently, said at the discussion that a limiting framework of morality divided women into good and bad. We need to ask who has created this divide, she said. “How is it enforced and who does this benefit?” These questions, she said, take us from “a framework of morality to a framework of patriarchy.” She, then, observed: “Patriarchy is violent against women. It is particularly violent against fearless women.”

Abira Ashfaq, a Karachi-based lawyer and another panelist at the discussion, agreed with Nosheen Ali but she added that all murders should be treated just like honour killings are so that people who are killed in the name of ideology or religion also get the justice they deserve. She gave the example of the murder of Zafar Loond, a leftist Seraiki activist living and working in Kot Addu town, less than 100 kilometres from where Qandeel Baloch was killed.

He was shot dead outside his house only a day before her murder. It is not clear who killed him. What is known is that, fearing opposition from religious activists, his family did not bury him in his ancestral town of Shadan Loond, which, like Qandeel Baloch’s ancestral village, is also in district Dera Ghazi Khan.

There were allegations that he was an Ahmadi.

Loond’s funeral prayers were offered in Dera Ghazi Khan city where he was buried in an unmarked grave.

An earlier version of this article was published in the Herald's August 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a freelance journalist and photographer.

The writer was earlier referred to as Annie Ali Khan. The name has been changed on her request.

Even though the rally had ended late, even though the night sky over Gangapur was turning translucent, Falak Sher’s wife insisted we stop by her house for kheer. There was no electricity all across the village, so she stumbled about in the dark, rattling pots and pans, intent upon hospitality. Outside, the lanes hummed with festive chatter: the village – birthplace of Sir Ganga Ram, the father of modern Lahore – had been looking forward to this rally for months now: a celebration of the glory of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) and an assertion of the finality of his prophethood. Sher, who worked as a police constable in Lahore, had asked for leave weeks in advance for the rally but the Zimbabwean cricket team happened to be in town, the first international team to tour Pakistan since the attack on Sri Lankan cricketers six years ago, and all vacation had been suspended for the police force. Sher paid no heed and came home anyway. He had never missed a khatm-e-nabuwwat rally in his village, said his wife.

It was the 26th of May, the death anniversary of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadi faith, which considers itself a sect of Islam. This was no coincidence, for everyone at the rally agreed that Ahmadis, whom they disparagingly referred to as Qadianis, were fifth columnists, aasteen kay saanp, and that the death of their founding father was something to celebrate. Indeed, the showpiece of the rally was a nephew of the current Ahmadi leader, Mirza Masroor Ahmed, a large moon-faced man who had recently split ranks with his uncle and converted to Sunni Islam. All of Gangapur, a part of the central Punjab district of Faisalabad, seemed to roar when he came on stage to speak. When he paused, loudspeakers blasted the rally’s signature soundtrack, a rousing refrain of ghustakh-e-Muhammad teri ab khair nahin hai, khair nahin, khair nahin, khair nahin hai (O blasphemer of Muhammad, you are done for now).

From the edge of a neighbour’s rooftop, where the women of the village had gathered to watch the proceedings, Sher’s wife sang along, not caring that she did not know all the words. Back at her house, she fussed over the chief guest’s wife, pressing a second serving of kheer into her hands, ensuring it had enough pistachios and, by way of small talk, directing her attention towards the top right corner of the room where rainwater had seeped through the wall, leaving a large damp mark amid curlicues of peeling paint. If you looked at it closely, said Sher’s wife, wiggling her torch in that direction, if you tilted your head a certain way, the mark resembled the name of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him). She paused, then clambered on top of a trunk and brought down a small pink frame. Inside was a piece of old roti, its overcooked centre similar in shape to the mark on the wall. “Subhanallah,” murmured the chief guest’s wife admiringly. Her host beamed, luminous with pride.

A hundred or so kilometres to the north, in Saroki village in Gujranwala district, Nazeer Cheema rose to offer his fajr prayers. His house was silent: his wife was still asleep, his three daughters, married now, all had their own homes and his only son, Aamir, dead at the age of 28, lay buried next door. He would have been 37 had he not walked into the office of Die Welt, a German daily that had reprinted caricatures deemed offensive by Muslims, to try to murder its editor, Roger Köppel — and, after six weeks in a jail in Berlin, hanged himself with a noose made of his own clothes. Nazeer Cheema, a retired college teacher, does not think his son took his own life; he believes Aamir was tortured to death by German authorities. So do the thousands who continue to flock to his shrine; they consider him a martyr, a modern-day Ilamdin. In the portrait that hangs above his grave, Aamir Cheema even appears to resemble his early 20th Century predecessor: the same moustache, the same meticulous side parting, both unnervingly young.

Also read: Swan song—Amjad Sabri

He was a quiet child. His parents say they never heard him utter a single swear word and that he never lied. He was studying textile engineering at a German university, with one semester left towards the completion of his degree. Earlier, when some Pakistanis had gathered outside their consulate in Berlin to protest the publication of the offensive cartoons, he did not join them. “Nothing will come of it,” he told his cousin’s husband. A few weeks later, he barged into Die Welt office with a knife. His family back home was not aware of what he was going to do, which may have been for the best, says his mother. “We wouldn’t have been able to help ourselves—we would have tried to stop him.” It was early in the morning and she was not wearing her denture, so her lips sank into her mouth as she sighed, making her appear very old and very young, all at once. “In doing so, in persuading him otherwise, we might have sinned against the Prophet ourselves.”

A love lyric, a ballad, a legend, an opera, an epic: there are many descriptions of the dhola, a genre of Punjabi folk music. It was through a dhola that a young Hanif Shaikh first learnt about Ilamdin, the 21-year-old carpenter’s apprentice who murdered the Hindu publisher of a “scurrilous” pamphlet about Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him). Rajpal had already escaped two attempts on his life when, on an April afternoon in 1929, Ilamdin stabbed him eight times inside his bookshop in Lahore, relenting only when hapless bystanders began flinging books at him. Executed six months later – his final appeal fought famously by one Muhammad Ali Jinnah – Ilamdin grew into a folk hero of sorts, inspiring popular accounts of his exploits in many formats: film, poetry, prose and what can only be described as fan fiction. In the 1970s, an unabashedly hagiographic biopic titled Ghazi Ilamdin Shaheed hit cinemas, directed by Rasheed Dogar whose later credits would include the salaciously titled Pyasa Badan, Husn Parast and Madam X. When Shaikh went to watch Ghazi Ilamdin Shaheed, he wept.

Shaikh is something of an authority on Ilamdin. He wrote an extensive account of the young vigilante’s life, tracking down his family home in Lahore’s Mohalla Sirian Wala. Originally named after the siris (slaughtered animals’ heads) sold there, it was later rechristened Mohalla Sarfaroshan to commemorate Ilamdin’s bravery. He recounts meeting Ilamdin’s bhabhi, sister-in-law, who reportedly cooked sweetened rice to celebrate the assassination of Rajpal. With equal familiarity and fondness, Shaikh lists other men who took the law into their hands: Abdul Rasheed, who stabbed the Arya Samaj missionary and shuddhi (reconversion) advocate Swami Shraddhanand in Delhi in 1926; Abdul Qayyum, who, in 1932, attacked a Hindu leader, Nathu Ram, in Karachi while he was in court on trial over a provocative book on Islam; Mureed Hussain, who murdered a Hindu veterinarian in 1935 in Palwal town of Gorganwan district, now in Haryana, India, because he had named a donkey after a beloved Muslim figure. Shaikh has written books on all of them; he is a bit of an expert on this particular brand of the subcontinental ghazi. But when the conversation turns (inevitably) to Mumtaz Qadri, the security guard who, in January 2011, pumped 28 bullets into Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab at the time, he hesitates, looking troubled.

Also read—Controls on blasphemy lead to more violence: Paul Marshall

“If someone were to actually insult the Prophet, I’m afraid even I might not spare him. But Taseer didn’t blaspheme, not really — he only criticised the law.”

Shaikh, whose real name is something else, so wary is he even of musing out loud on this subject, has been thinking about this lately, this creeping expansion of what constitutes blasphemy. Suppose someone who cannot read, buys food from a street side stall, suppose what he buys is wrapped in newspaper which has the name of the Prophet written on it. If the wrapper is thrown away, wonders Shaikh, if the person who cannot read unthinkingly tosses it into the trash — insult would have occurred, but without intent.

“That isn’t blasphemy,” he says. “Is it?”

On the last page of the post-mortem report, the medical examiner had dismissed, with a large cross, the silhouette upon which she was meant to identify injuries, scribbling instead: “whole body is completely burnt, almost to ashes, only a bony skeleton identifiable.” She reiterated this six months later before a roomful of lawyers wilting in black blazers, patiently describing to the defense counsel how the victims were delivered to her in plastic bags, one labeled Shama, the other Shahzad. It was a mid-May afternoon, and the power was out in the antiterrorism court – load-shedding, Lahore – so the lawyers fanned themselves with their files, casting beseeching looks at the air conditioner as they listened to witness statements. Outside, the hallways were filled with villagers from Chak 59 and nearby settlements of Kot Radha Kishan tehsil – 104 in total – handcuffed to one another. Inside, the medical examiner’s voice was getting smaller with each sentence, describing bones retrieved from the site – “small, mostly fractured” – and “organs, completely charred, matted together.”

The court stenographer paused.

“C-H-E-R-R-E-D,” said the judge impatiently. “Red, like cherry.”

The lawyers looked pointedly at their feet.

According to the Centre for Social Justice, a Lahore-based research and advocacy group, at least 62 men and women have been killed on mere suspicion of blasphemy between 1987 and 2015. So far, no one has been executed by the state. In this particular manifestation of an increasingly familiar phenomenon, on the morning of November 4, 2014, Shama and Shahzad Masih were dragged out of the 10-by-10 feet room in which they had sought refuge earlier that day, bludgeoned with sticks and hatchets by a mob that eyewitnesses say numbered in the high hundreds, then – and here accounts diverge – tied to a tractor, lugged across crushed stones on a half constructed road, doused with petrol and flung into the brick kiln where they would both have gone to work the next day, had Shama not been accused of desecrating the Quran. She was one of at least 1,472 people who have been accused under the blasphemy laws between 1987 and 2015 — specifically under sections 295-B, 295-C and 298-A of the Pakistan Penal Code. As estimated by the Centre for Social Justice: 730 of these are Muslims, 501 are Ahmadis, 205 are Christians and 26 are Hindus. The religion of the remaining 10 could not be ascertained — they were killed before any legal proceedings were initiated.

There was initially a great deal of public fury, and wholesale condemnation, after Shama and Shahzad were burnt to death, followed by what some chose to view as heartening signs, whatever that could mean in a situation of this sort. Human rights campaigner Asma Jehangir thought that the response from the religious parties was positive. The state said it would be chief complainant in the case. People were rounded up and arrested. But slowly attention moved on to other things: the factory fire in Jhelum that targeted Ahmadis who were alleged to have blasphemed, the boy who cut off his own hand in Hujra Shah Muqeem town to punish himself for what he considered as constituting blasphemy. “Woh joh bhattay pe sarr g’ay,” recalled one man, himself Christian, but from Lahore, about six months after Shama and Shahzad’s death in the adjoining district of Kasur. Consider the curiously passive construction of his sentence: those who burnt to death at the brick kiln, not those who were burnt to death, as if spontaneous combustion were somehow the cause.

In district Kasur’s Chak-59, a stone’s throw away from the murder site, Muhammad Ilyas says his son had nothing to do with it.

On the morning of November 4, 2014, Shama and Shahzad Masih were dragged out of the 10-by-10 feet room in which they had sought refuge earlier that day, bludgeoned with sticks and hatchets by a mob ...

He pauses to light a cigarette, holding it between two trembling fingers. He exhales slowly. It is the only plume of smoke in the distance: the brick kilns lie dormant on that summer day in 2015. Every Wednesday, Ilyas visits his son, who he says is unjustly locked up in Shadman jail in Lahore. He himself spent four days there in November 2014, released only when his cough, a hacking sound that wells up from inside him, even as he continues to smoke, became worse. The scale and pace of life in Lahore both exhaust and unsettle him: when he tried to cross the road outside the jail last week, a motor-cyclist nearly trampled his toes. He wiggles them now, for effect.

No one in Chak 59 would say who the hundreds of men were whose rage led to the death of Shama and Shahzad, though they all concede, with an air of pronounced reasonableness, that the deaths did take place. “They came from outside,” Ilyas insists, referring to the mob. This is Conspiracy Theory Number One in almost all mob attacks over accusations of blasphemy. The crowd that has assembled around Ilyas nods in agreement.

As Ilyas continues speaking – “Shama’s sister had converted to Islam, that was at the heart of everything” – a voice emerges from the crowd.

“You’re not speaking the truth.”

Ilyas stops speaking entirely, surprised into silence by a man who makes his way to the centre.

“I didn’t know those two. I have no reason to defend them,” the stranger says, his words tumbling forth with great urgency and deliberation. The effect is of a man trying to tiptoe across a crocodile pond as quickly as possible. “I don’t. But the truth is you’re — we’re — all just repeating things we’ve only heard.”

Ilyas tries to interrupt. The man next to him puts a hand on his shoulder. “Let him say what he has to say.”

The speaker hesitates, then decides to wade ahead.

“It was a misunderstanding. The girl’s father-in-law made amulets; that’s what the Arabic verses were for — she couldn’t even read. It was all a misunderstanding. Think about it. In a country like this, you have a majority and you have a minority. The minority is the ghulam qaum, slave nation — it knows it has to live by the terms of the majority. Why would anyone deliberately go out of their way to insult the majority, which has all the power?”

Silence. “I have no reason to defend them,” he repeats. “I didn’t know them.”

“How long have you lived here?” asks the man sitting beside Ilyas, observing the stranger closely.

“About a year.”

“Have you ever had any trouble here? Has anyone ever given you any trouble?”

“Never,” declares the man. “Not once.”

Ilyas leans forward. “You’re Christian too. So why are you alive and well?”

When Muslims ruled Spain, 48 Christians were said to have been executed on various charges of blasphemy and apostasy, between the years 851 and 859. They are remembered today as ‘the martyrs of Cordoba’. Their accounts were related by Eulogius, a monk who encouraged public declarations of faith as a way to assert the identity of a Christian community. Death that resulted from these declarations was the perfect solution: “ … not only did it epitomise self-abnegation and separation from the world, but it also guaranteed that there would be no opportunity to sin again,” Eulogius wrote. He was also eventually put to death, and it is unclear if more Christians after him rebelled in a similar manner.

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Blasphemy as political or personal protest seems somewhat far-fetched in Pakistan’s current climate, but proponents of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws often cite this episode in response to the question of why someone would deliberately insult the majority religion. But even as the laws pertaining to blasphemy have grown stronger, the aftermath of accusations is increasingly unfolding outside the courtroom, presenting a strange and seemingly unsurmountable dichotomy. The court in sweltering Lahore, after all, wasn’t adjudicating on the issue of blasphemy but rather on murders that resulted from it. How has blasphemy become such a deadly issue in Pakistan?

It is possible, of course, to blame colonialism. When Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, of “a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” fame, drafted the Indian Penal Code of 1860, he introduced a blasphemy law, imported from the British common law with some additional provisions — for instance, even words uttered out loud could be deemed offensive.

Macaulay thought the people of the subcontinent were a particularly emotional lot, predisposed to symbolic offense: “A person who should offer a gross insult to the Mohammedan religion in the presence of a zealous professor of that religion; who should deprive some high-born Rajpoot of his caste; who should rudely thrust his head into the covered palanquin of a woman of rank, would probably move those whom he insulted to more violent anger than if he had caused them some severe bodily hurt.” Indeed, he warned, “there is, perhaps, no country in which the government has so much to apprehend from religious excitement among the people.”

Whether or not religion was the main dividing line among the residents of the subcontinent – after all, no one really knew the relative numbers of various groups, or the demarcation of what exactly separated one group from the other, until the first census was carried out in India in 1871 – Macaulay incorporated religion into criminal law, noted anthropologist Asad Ali Ahmed in Spectres of Macaulay: Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament. He referred to religion as the “inaugural site of difference” in the subcontinent. It was a classic colonial move: for the imperial power to fashion itself as the impartial umpire between antagonistic religious communities to create or at least highlight differences and then step in to arbitrate. Even at the time, Ahmed wrote, there was concern about making wounded religious sentiments, even when they did not lead to public disorder, a cause for action. The English lawyer Fitzjames Stephen warned that it would be fine as long as English magistrates continued to interpret the law restrictively but it “might lead to horrible cruelty and persecution if the government of the country ever got into Hindoo or Mohammedan hands”.

Ilamdin grew into a folk hero of sorts, inspiring popular accounts of his exploits in many formats: film, poetry and what can only be described as fan fiction.

But as the British colonial state helped to shape patterns of community redefinition and conflict, it stood in self-definition apart from these processes, noted David Gilmartin, an American historian. It saw itself as a mediator standing outside the structure of society, rather than assuming the role of a cultural patron, as earlier states in the subcontinent had done. And so, “with the state no longer defining the moral parameters of the community or its political forms, individuals remade the community in the public realm by attaching their hearts to Muslim symbols and making their inner [feelings] public in open contestation.” This “love” manifested itself in the increasingly popular emphasis on public ceremonies such as the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) and the public agitations in the early 20th Century that mobilised the devoted for the protection of Muslim traditions and icons under threat — the Ottoman Caliphate, or the “martyred” mosques in Kanpur and Shaheed Ganj (Lahore). It transcended divisions of interests and status, wrote Gilmartin, creating “an image of moral unity that transcended everyday political conflict”. He add: “Calls for devotion and sacrifice in defense of symbols of community often drew heavily on the gendered language of male honour, namoos, an idiom that not only evoked the universalism of patriarchy but also the particularistic (and highly competitive) loyalties attached to tribe, family and other kinship-based identities.”

“Ki Muhammad se wafa tu nay tou hum teray hain” (only if you are to be loyal to Muhammad, will I be yours), wrote Allama Iqbal in Jawab-e-Shikwa, as part of God’s address to the Muslims. Indeed, the uproar for protecting the honour of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) was such during Ilamdin’s trial that the British were forced to intervene and add an additional clause to the blasphemy law. Nearly a century later, in the events that led to the murder of Governor Taseer, the verse was invoked again and again.

The blasphemy law was hardly ever invoked in all the early 20th Century instances. Very few cases of blasphemy were, in fact, registered until the time of General Ziaul Haq, when new and stricter laws were added to those already existing. Religion had made a comeback of sorts all across the world then, thrusting itself into the public arena of moral and political contestation. The Islamic revolution in Iran, the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in protest against God-less communist suppression, the role of Catholicism in the Sandinista revolution and in other political conflicts throughout Latin America, and the bloody occupation of the holy mosque in Makkah by a highly radicalised Salafi group gave religion the kind of global publicity that forced a reassessment of its place and role in the world. In our own backyard, the invasion of Afghanistan, a Muslim country, by a purportedly atheist imperial power, the Soviet Union, turned our society into an extended religious laboratory and our state an extended jihadi camp.

But even before Zia came to power and made Islamism official, the cultural work for this had been done, wrote Manan Ahmed Asif, an assistant professor of history at Columbia University, in a 2011 article, titled Forfeiting the Future, published in the Indian magazine, Caravan. The blasphemy riots of the 1950s, when Ahmadis were violently resisted by Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious groups, had taught one clear lesson to the religious right: the veneration of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) made great political theatre, with infinite appeal for nearly every segment of the Pakistani population, he added. The emergence of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) as a centralising and orienting raison d’être for Pakistan, however, was not, in Asif’s words, merely an organic outgrowth of a religiously inclined society; it was a deliberate state policy, aided by Islamist parties, to mould public faith. With the explicit support of Ayub Khan’s military regime, the figure of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) quickly became central to national political memory — the celebration of his birth, the mi’raj (his ascension to the heavens) and other milestones from his life were “heavily funded and carefully orchestrated events, with the massive participation of the religious elite across Pakistan.”

The blasphemy law was hardly ever invoked in all the early 20th Century instances. Very few cases of blasphemy were, in fact, registered until the time of General Ziaul Haq.

These changes could be seen in the sort of books that were being produced in those years: Islamic polemics against the Ahmadis and the leftists by the likes of Agha Shorish Kashmiri, Islamic fiction by the likes of Naseem Hijazi and Islamic poetry by the likes of Hafeez Jullandhri who composed Shahnama-e-Islam, a verse history of the Muslim governments of the past (Jullandhri, at the time of writing the book, was working as an adviser to Ayub Khan). “So the person who read these [in the 1980s] is now a middle-aged man with set views,” Asif says in an interview.

During the Zia era, the ideological framework of the blasphemy laws also became more complicated than it was during the British period: they were no longer intended to demonstrate state neutrality, but were an explicit state-administered defence of sacred Muslim persons and texts. This was a state that was shaping society as much as it was being shaped by it.

“Underlying the original laws and their postcolonial additions is an unstable dynamic of incitement and containment — that is, the laws’ attempt to regulate wounded attachments and religious passions can conversely constitute them. They have in actuality enabled social groups to organise in order to ensure the state takes cognizance of blasphemous events and practices,” Ahmed, an assistant professor at Harvard University’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, wrote in his paper, Spectres of Macaulay.

But, importantly, there have been no executions as yet. State officials have been particularly reluctant to intervene in disputes between Muslims, for fear that trials and executions will further sectarian conflict, he pointed out. The attempt to forge a bond between the state and the nation, according to him, founders on the numerical preponderance of blasphemy cases registered by Muslims against Muslims.

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The anecdote that Ahmed narrated in his paper to demonstrate this concerns a stand off between Ahle Sunnat – or Barelvis – and Ahle Hadith – or Wahhabis – over what transpired at a conference about the life of Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him). And it is pretty instructive: some young Barelvi men in Kamoke town near Lahore attended a gathering of Ahle Hadith. They claimed that two Ahle Hadith clerics implied during the gathering that Barelvis were like “dancing girls” and made fun of the Barelvi insistence on the Prophet’s intercessory role and perpetual presence.

The Barelvis responded insult for insult 12 days later. The Ahle Hadith lodged a blasphemy case against them, invoking sections 295-A and 298 of the Pakistan Penal Code. The Barelvis responded to this by lodging a case under section 295-C that carries the death penalty. The state dragged its feet, so, eventually, they had to compromise. But no one was entirely happy.

Having seeped into almost all aspects of national life, the spillover of the blasphemy issue has now, understandably, entered the political sphere as well.

“It is this gap between the filing of the case and their inability to prosecute,” wrote Ahmed, “between their expectation that the government would perform its sovereign duty and its refusal to do so, between the law’s incitement to action and the administration’s tenuous regulatory capability that had led the blasphemy laws to become a site of passionate attachment and mobilisation, and a site of disaffection and betrayal by the state.” That explains both violent protests over the caricatures deemed offensive and mob attacks that follow the real or perceived instances of blasphemy.

For Barelvis, it is also a matter of waning political power — the realisation that Deobandis have institutional presence in a way that Barelvis do not. Through political parties such as Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUIF) and, to a certain extent, Jamaat-e-Islami, which, by its own claim, is non-sectarian but most of its individual members are either Deobandi or Ahle Hadith, through government institutions such as the Council of Islamic Ideology, Federal Shariat Court, moon sighting committees, and through the possession of state-built mosques and madrasas, Deobandis far outweigh Barelvis in the organised social sphere, even though the latter claim to be as numerous as the former, if not more. This then explains why Qadri and his death sentence became such a major flashpoint — it provided Barelvis an opportunity to demonstrate that they have street power like any other religious group in Pakistan.

Having seeped into almost all aspects of national life, the spillover of the blasphemy issue has now, understandably, entered the political sphere as well; when Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) had a political spat year before the last, the former lodged a blasphemy case against the latter’s prominent leader, Syed Khursheed Shah, claiming the remarks he had reportedly made about the muhajirs, the migrants from India that MQM represents, constituted blasphemy because Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him) was himself a muhajir.

Wednesday is meeting day at Shadman jail in Lahore. Irfan Prince hands over his identity card and his cell phone to the guards at the entrance hall to the prison and receives a parcha in return. He then peers at the clock at the opposite end of the room. It is loadshedding time, which means that only the central column of ceiling fans, directly above the cubicles of jail officials, is functioning. A woman in the ladies section fans herself with her white chador and keeps looking up at the ceiling and then glaring at the police wallas. The walls have Quranic verses displayed on them -- sponsored by Shezan, a soft drink maker.

As soon as the clock strikes 2pm, the time when the meeting starts, Prince rushes to the security counter, gets his food checked, and then rushes to the tuck shop and gets a cold bottle of mango juice. In his hurry, he looks younger than he is. He then dashes towards what is titled mulaqaat shed, or the shed for the meeting. He hangs his backpack on a nail at the entrance, turns around the corner and disappears into a narrow pathway that ends at a gate with iron bars. Behind the bars are inmates. Most of them have been jailed for blasphemy. Among them is Prince’s brother Adnan, a former pastor.

Those who say the blasphemy laws do not target non-Muslims are right in that more Muslims have been accused of blasphemy than non-Muslims — but the counter-argument that non-Muslims are disproportionally targeted is also correct. And this vulnerability extends beyond mere accusation. Consider, for instance, what the trial court wrote in its judgment in the case of Aasia Bibi, who became internationally known when Governor Taseer took up her cause and was later killed because of his stance. “[Aasia] admitted that she exchanged ‘hot words’ with those two Muslim sisters [who are the accusers in the case]. When a Muslim and Christian exchange ‘hot words’ the blasphemy was a natural outcome. And, thus, she committed blasphemy.”

Adnan was accused of writing blasphemous words on a book, about a month and a half after the twin bombing of the All Saints Church in Peshawar in 2013 had killed 80 Christians (rights groups say there was a rash of blasphemy accusations immediately after that attack — they are not entirely sure why). He said the book did not belong to him and that it was found in a shop in Lahore where he was covering a shift for his brother, Prince.

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He was accused of blasphemy the very next day after the offending words were found written on the book. He fled. He, his mother and his brother went to their family in Youhanabad, a Christian slum on the southern edge of Lahore. But the community there, worried by what had happened in Joseph Colony, another Christian neighbourhood in Lahore set on fire just a few months ago, told them to leave. Adnan went into hiding. Prince and his uncles – his father having passed away a long time ago – were arrested and told they would not be allowed to leave until Adnan surrendered himself. And so he did.

Adnan sips the mango juice, the bottle steadily perspiring in the heat, with the straw that his brother has carefully angled through the bars. His own face glistens with sweat. “We’ll see you next week,” Prince tells him. But the judge hearing his case goes away on holiday. Next week stretches into next month. Even as freedom becomes increasingly elusive for Adnan, the spectre of a death sentence looms large — or, worse still, death at the hands of an inmate or a police guard incensed by his alleged act of blasphemy.

Those who say the blasphemy laws do not target non-Muslims are right in that more Muslims have been accused of blasphemy than non-Muslims.

John Joseph, a Roman Catholic bishop in Faisalabad, was highly wary of the treatment of Christians facing blasphemy trials. In May 1998, he shot himself with a pistol in front of a court in Sahiwal in protest against a death sentence handed down to one Ayub Masih. Yet, not every Christian in Pakistan opposes the blasphemy laws. Many activists – both Muslim and Christian – and many church leaders have argued that the Islam-specific provisions of the blasphemy laws, indeed, should cover the holy personages and religious texts of all religions. It was precisely this position that the former Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Tassadduq Hussain Jillani took when, according to Dawn, he remarked during the hearing of a case in May 2014 that “offence against any religion comes under the blasphemy law”.

Nobody no longer says openly that the blasphemy laws need to be repealed on the ground that they violate human rights.

The first trial that Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry – the Lahore-based head of the Khatm-e-Nabuwwat Lawyers’ Forum – formally worked on was that of Muhammad Yusuf Ali, who was accused of posing as a prophet in 1997. This is not the name by which Chaudhry refers to him, however. He calls him Yusuf Kazzab — kazzab meaning ‘liar’ in Arabic, an epithet given throughout Muslim history to people claiming prophethood or betraying Islam in some way. An epithet popularised in this case by daily Khabrain, which was then a relatively new Urdu newspaper and was trying to establish its readership. Yusuf Ali is said to be a shareholder in the office building on Lahore’s Lawrence Road that houses daily Khabrain’s headquarters. It is not clear whether or not this point came up during his trial.

At least 62 men and women have been killed on mere suspicion of blasphemy between 1987 and 2015.

Yusuf Ali was convicted and sentenced to death in 2000, three years before the parliament would make the last real – but eventually aborted – effort to amend the laws. As it were, he was murdered while in prison by another inmate, Tariq, who was on death row (the gun with which Yusuf Ali was fired at was taken into the prison reportedly by an employee of daily Khabrain). The murder inspired the movie Aik Aur Ghazi, directed by Syed Noor and released years later in 2011 — curiously just months after yet another ghazi had entered the public consciousness: Mumtaz Qadri. Noor insisted that he was not trying to cash in on the prevailing sentiments on the subject. In any case, the film flopped.

Chaudhry, who was a part of the legal team for Qadri’s defense, says he has full faith in the legal system. If the courts do justice, there will never be any problem, he says on a hot summer day in 2015. At that point Qadri’s case was in its final appeal. Chaudhry proclaims that Qadri was justified in doing what he did because there was no way that Taseer, the sitting provincial governor, could have been taken to a court for making remarks about the blasphemy laws.

Chaudhry does not think that his association takes up blasphemy cases disregarding whether they are fake or genuine. All cases are investigated before the lawyers take them up, he says. As of last summer, they were handling from 500 to 600 cases. He says he did not take up the case that led to arson at Joseph Colony because the complainant was said to have been drinking with the accused. The imbibing of alcohol, turned Chaudhry off. But even in a state of inebriation, he insists, a Muslim will not tolerate an insult to Islam.

The wings of the ceiling fans in the hall of the Presbyterian church had drooped in the heat, like wilted petals, and this, people later said, was proof that it had been no ordinary fire. It must have involved special chemicals, the sort that were not readily available in Sangla Hill, wedged between Lahore, Sheikhupura and Faisalabad — and, they further reasoned, this meant that the fire must have been planned by outsiders, carefully orchestrated, rather than resulting from a spontaneous outburst of passion. Perhaps this was easier to stomach than wondering which of your neighbours had tried to attack you. In any case, there was no way of knowing whether the 88 arrested from the town were actually the ones who had set fire to the three churches, a convent, a girls’ hostel and a pastor’s house. So Reverend Tajammal Parvez and his Catholic counterpart decided to forgive them.

In return, a local Muslim, Kalu Suniara, withdrew the case against Yusuf Masih whom he had accused of setting fire to a shed that stored fragments of old Qurans. The two communities – Christian and Muslim – approached the courts and assured the judges that the matter had been resolved. It helped that no lives had been lost in the mob attack. It also helped that the small town of Sangla Hill was fairly integrated and that the elders of its various religious communities –Barelvi, Ahle Hadith, Shia, Catholic, Protestant – were well acquainted with each other.

In an influential study, political scientist Ashutosh Varshney investigated why some cities in India experienced more Hindu-Muslim violence than others, and concluded that this variance depended on how strong ‘cross-communal’ civic associations were. In Sangla Hill, old relationships did not prevent violence but they did help the healing process afterwards. Still, Yusuf Masih had to leave town so that the other Christian families, who had fled when their homes were attacked, could return — though local leaders insist he was not forced to leave, but chose to do so himself. When he died a few years later, in 2008, his wife is reported to have blamed his death on injuries sustained during his time in government custody under the blasphemy charge.

Her youngest son, traumatised from watching the mob haul away his father, refused to speak for months afterwards and compulsively picked at his own skin.

In the renovated Presbyterian church, immediately after delivering a Sunday sermon, Reverend Pervez says the incident is firmly in the past. “The only change here is that no one takes out a procession in protest anymore — we are all too scared of what it might lead to. Last month, there were load-shedding protests all over the province, but no one came out on to the streets here. Ten years have passed. It is behind us now.”

In another part of the province, healing has never happened. Hafiz Farooq Sajjad’s wife in Gujranwala has not forgotten the murder of her husband 22 years ago, although she has also pardoned the killers. For years, she pursued the case, ensuring that at least four of the murderers remained behind bars. Then her own father died and her spirits flagged. Her father was the one who dealt with the lawyers and sat in on the hearings. She had six children to care for, and little time or money, or emotional energy. When she reached a settlement, she received 200,000 rupees from each of the four perpetrators, she says. The money did not last her very long. For a while, the local chapter of Jamaat-e-Islami provided a monthly stipend of 3,000 rupees to her but that too stopped eventually. “Now if I ask anyone for money, they think it’s just my habit,” she says bitterly.

Her youngest son, traumatised from watching the mob haul away his father, refused to speak for months afterwards and compulsively picked at his own skin. At the local police station, where police briefly sheltered Sajjad after he was dragged out of his house and into the city streets, he begged for a bullet to the head instead of being handed over to the crowds outside. Beaten, bludgeoned and burnt to death, he was buried in Lahore because authorities feared his grave in Gujranwala would be frequently desecrated. These are the details his wife remembers. She cried continuously for months, bewildered: how could this happen to a religious man — a hafiz-e-Quran? “My father didn’t let me bury my own husband. He said I wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of his mutilated corpse. I’ve had no closure … sometimes I still think he’ll come back. I can’t believe it; I can’t forget it.”

Others around her seem to have forgotten. The lane where Sajjad’s family lives has changed over the years; old neighbours have moved away, new ones have moved in; the woman who accused him of blasphemy has died. Two doors down from his house, a group of women sitting in the outer veranda of their house struggle to recall the incident. “Oh yes,” says a young woman finally, “God only knows, of course, but I heard [Sajjad’s wife] had her own husband killed…”

Maulana Zahidur Rashidi believes there is room for tobah, for seeking divine forgiveness.

Rashidi, a religious scholar based in Gujranwala, is the founding editor of Al-Sharia, a journal that examines matters pertaining to Islamic legal thought. Sometimes, the opinions espoused in Al-Sharia can swerve dramatically away from mainstream religious opinion: the notion, for instance, that it is not permissible on religious grounds for non-Afghan Muslims to fight against international forces in Afghanistan. On other occasions, they are less innovative, such as on the status of Ahmadis. Still, Rashidi appears to be one of the few clerics in Pakistan willing to show flexibility on the blasphemy issue. “We talk about this in our circles,” he says. “The majority believes that blasphemy cannot be pardoned, but I firmly belong to the camp that thinks pardon is permissible in certain conditions. At the end of the day, naturally, the voice of the majority is the one that is heard.”

Our circles. Rashidi belongs to Deobandi sect for which the issue of blasphemy, in particular against Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him), is a little less emotive than it is for Barelvis. But when it comes to the issue of the blasphemy laws, particularly with regard to their repeal, Deobandis and Barelvis band together as one — it is almost as if religion becomes a monolith only in the face of an external threat.

Very few cases of blasphemy were, in fact, registered until the time of General Ziaul Haq, when new and stricter laws were added to those already existing.

Still, Rashidi admits, without caveat, that the laws are extensively misused. After a young Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, was falsely accused of blasphemy, Rashidi’s son, Ammar Nasir, who now edits Al-Sharia and teaches Islamic studies at a private university in Gujranwala, noted: “The practice of charging individuals with blasphemy is thriving in Pakistan. As a consequence, it is not totally unforeseeable that in time even committed religious people and those dedicated to faith might be forced to consider the repeal or suspension of the blasphemy laws as a better option than enduring the deteriorating situation where the law is abused against innocents. And if the situation comes to this, I will proclaim without any fear of contradiction that the blame falls squarely on those persons of faith who aided and abetted the unbalanced public conduct in this matter. I will say this even if they ostensibly defend their innocence in claiming that such moves to repeal the blasphemy laws were a conspiracy conducted by the enemies of Islam.”

It matters who is talking, says Arafat Mazhar, a young researcher committed to reforming the blasphemy laws through Islamic jurisprudence. Others, of course, have also tried taking the same route, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi being the most famous among them. Ghamidi has argued that prosecuting blasphemy is not, for the most part, the business of the state. He was hunted out by hardliners, and now lives in Malaysia after he received serious and frequent threats to his life.

Days before Mumtaz Qadri was executed in February 2016, a handful of students stood before the gates of Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail on Valentine’s Day, bearing gifts for him. It made no sense, and was a source of amused horror for many. “We admit it is not our tradition and it is wrong to celebrate Valentine’s day, but it is now widely celebrated and the media is full with Valentine’s day activities,” the students are reported to have said. They knew that this was how to catch the attention of the media. Perhaps it was for the same reason that two weeks later when Qadri was hanged, in a move that caught many off guard for its suddenness, young men attended his funeral wearing placards that read I am Qadri – an apparent appropriation of I am Charlie placards that cropped up all over Europe during protests against the attack on Charlie Habdo, the French magazine that had published the offensive caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him. Irony aside, it appeared to be an attempt to connect to a global protest, to speak the same language as the “other”.

A false binary has been created, argues Arafat Mazhar: human rights abuses versus respect for religion; the victim complex of the majority versus the persecution of minorities;repeal of the law versus making it even more stringent. Perhaps it is time to start speaking each other’s language.

In a dusty office in Nankana Sahib, a district town near Lahore, three lawyers and a cleric were huddled together last summer. They were conversing heatedly about Aasia Bibi, whose death sentence by a trial court was upheld by the Lahore High Court in 2014 though the Supreme Court suspended the sentence in 2015 until her appeals were decided. One of the lawyers had successfully prosecuted the case at the district level: the cleric, a neighbourhood moulvi, was the one who had first reported the case to the police. He had heard Aasia Bibi confess, heard it with his own two ears, though he could not repeat her words now for that too would be a sin. He failed to understand how any true believer could feel sympathy for her: she had ridiculed the Prophet, nauzubillah, and the only punishment for ridicule was death. The other men in the room nodded vigorously.

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“But what about that story we’re all told as children,” I ventured, “the one about the old lady who would throw trash on the Prophet (may peace be upon him) whenever he went to the mosque? He never said a harsh word to her.”

“A story?” the older lawyer repeated in alarm, eyebrows raised, tone admonitory. “You cannot call it a story.”

At another time, in another place, many conversations could have been had: whether ordinary men and women can forgive an offense against the Prophet (may peace be upon him); whether to follow his practices of Makkah or only of Medina after an Islamic state had been established there; whether the word story, kahani, is indeed offensive, implying something that is not true; and why violence has become the predominant proof of love. Perhaps someone more articulate, more knowledgeable and less paranoid would have brushed off this policing of speech, and pressed on. But fear is a great conversation-stopper: unnerved, I fell silent and let them talk, about love and honour and the irrefutable glory of Islam.

An earlier version of this article was published in the Herald's July 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

The writer is a former staffer at the Herald and is currently a graduate student of comparative politics at New York University.

When Mohammed Ismail was 11 years old, his maternal uncle disappeared from their village in Gujrat. Nobody heard from him; nobody knew where he had gone. Some worried he might have had an accident, or died, but Ismail’s mother was insistent that the dead don’t pack belongings for their graves.

Two months later, he called on a landline phone — the only one in the neighbourhood. It was a few streets away from Ismail’s home and was installed at the house of a woman whose husband worked as a labourer in Dubai.

Ismail’s uncle was in Greece. He had found work on the docks in one of the islands, he was safe, he was also sorry. He had to sell some family heirloom, jewellery, to be able to venture that far but he would be compensating his sister for that soon. He apologised for making everyone worry but there had been no time to explain. The immigration agent arranging his journey demanded immediate departure.

Travelling without official documentation required both secrecy and urgency.

For the next 10 years, Ismail heard stories about his uncle’s life abroad. His uncle would travel often, sometimes for work, sometimes on the run from immigration authorities; he moved around inside Greece, then left for France, eventually settling in Spain.

He opened a shop on the famous La Rambla street in central Barcelona, a place with such a dense population of migrant business owners from Pakistan that people from Punjab speak of finding long lost relatives there while buying cigarettes.

Ismail also came to know of other migrant settlements, like Southall in London, where some of his distant relatives were now running a grocery store. Just two years after starting college at the University of Gujrat as an engineering student, he dropped out, put together some money, packed his bags and decided to try his luck abroad as well. This was 2008; he was 21 at the time.

Back when he had both his legs.

When I met him in early 2016, Ismail was sitting on a chair supported by crutches. His left leg was in a resting position and his right was stumped above the knee.

“It still hurts sometimes even though the doctor says it’s just in my head,” he says, lighting up a cigarette. Ismail is 29 now but looks much older; his face has scraggy lines; he tells me he sits out in the sun all day, smoking, thinking.

“The bullet entered right here,” he points to where his kneecap would have been. “It was agonising.” Ismail was shot just inside the Turkish border a few nautical miles from Greece.

Eight years ago, he got a telephone number of an immigration agent from a friend whose brother had recently gone to Turkey. He saved it on his cell phone. For a week he did not call, every night he would lay on a charpoy in the courtyard of his house, staring at the stars, wondering whether some great destiny awaited him on foreign shores, whether to take the plunge like his uncle had.

Fifteen young men on a warm August morning: backpacks slung across their shoulders; all with the same instructions — to wait for a phone call.

What swayed him was the monotony of that week. The same tired old routine, the same tired old faces. He was young and full of energy; what was the point of wilting away like this? It would be another two years before he graduated. Then he would start the struggle to find a job. Some of the graduates from his village were now working as clerks.

Dead end vocations did not appeal to Ismail.

He started asking people for small loans; friends, relatives, anyone who could lend him a few thousand rupees. He needed to put together 300,000 rupees in total. Some of that he got from his father on the pretext of college semester fees. He sold his motorcycle and borrowed from his uncle, who assured him he would be taken care of in Europe. The money would get him three attempts to go abroad. There was no refund on a foiled attempt.

Also read: Closing the gates of Lahore

He sent the agent half the total in advance, through a visa consultancy on the Grand Trunk Road in Gujrat.

“My heart was pounding. It was a lot of money. I was afraid he might run away with it.”

Ismail got a call the next evening, confirming his deposit. He was told to get to Quetta in a week’s time. He got his train ticket and confided in some close friends so they may tell his parents after he had left. He did not want to tell them himself.

He left in the dead of the night. Just like his uncle. He took a night coach to Rawalpindi and then boarded the Jaffar Express to Quetta. The agent had told him to wear sneakers and jeans and to bring a jacket along with him. It gets cold in the mountains he would have to traverse. On the train, he spotted other people who carried backpacks as big as his. He recognised one of them as someone from a nearby village.

“Are you also here with Sheikh sahib’s man?” Ismail asked the other traveler, who nodded in affirmation.

Sheikh sahib was the reference through which to contact the agent, one of the many aliases and pseudonyms people in the immigration business use; agents come and go but aliases stay. It makes it easier for potential clients and harder for law enforcers to find them out.

Ismail stepped down onto the platform at Quetta’s railway station as the train whistled to a stop, and saw policemen standing close by. For a minute he panicked. Then he remembered he had others with him and quietly followed them out.

Fifteen young men on a warm August morning: backpacks slung across their shoulders; all with the same instructions — to wait for a phone call.

The agent called Ismail and told him to exit the station. There was a wedding hall opposite the main gate where a rickshaw driver was waiting, phone in hand.

“Where do you want to go, brother?” He asked, taking the phone off his ear.

"Very far," replied Ismail.

The rickshaw took Ismail to a dilapidated house; three other boys were already sitting there. There were mattresses on the floor; they could rest until nightfall when a rented car would come for them.

The car was a diesel saloon. They were to go through mountainous terrain.

“The road was terrible,” recalls Ismail. “The driver would sometimes turn off the lights and I wondered how he could see where he was going. What if we fell off the side of the mountain?”

The drive was long and treacherous.

Also Read: Who feels safe in Pakistan?

The distance between Quetta and Taftan, a town on Pakistan’s border with Iran, is about 650 kilometres. Summer rains wash away the makeshift roads, which are taken not just to avoid being apprehended – though, technically, no laws are being broken moving within Pakistan – but also to save money on bribes. The Frontier Corps (FC) personnel in charge of the western border regions have a reputation here; as do the local police.

The idea was to get to Taftan when the border gates open at dawn: to blend in with Shia pilgrims headed for Iran and local residents crossing the border to visit friends and families living on the other side. Ismail was told that he had a genuine visit visa to Iran; his handler in Quetta gave it to him in exchange for the other half of the money.

He did not know if this was true but he was about to find out.

They reached Taftan at daybreak and Ismail and his fellow migrants joined the swelling crowd. He walked up to the Iranian border guard, trembling; he produced his documents; there was a moment of silence; everything came to a standstill; he could hear his pulse in his ears, feel it in his neck, then the guard nodded dismissively and pointed him onwards.

Ismail could breathe again.

“I was given a SIM to use in Iran and another agent’s number. He told me to keep walking until I saw a line of Khodro pickups.”

He did not have to walk far. He saw them parked at a little distance and his fellow backpackers heading in that general direction. Some of the drivers were busy conversing with Iranian border guards.

He boarded one of the pickups; five others joined him in the back of the same vehicle and they took off for Tehran. It was a long drive. Ismail remembers feeling cramp, tired, hungry. They only stopped once for food, at a roadside stall, where the people in the front switched seats and the man who had been sleeping all day drove all night.

It took two days to get to a seedy rest house in Tehran.

A 2015 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)puts the number of deportees sent back to Pakistan at more than 50,000annually in recent years

They were again ushered into a tiny room where they had to improvise a good night’s sleep because now their real journey began: first to Bazargan (an Iranian town on the border with Turkey) and then on to Turkey. They would have to travel much of the way on foot.

The walking was the worst part of his journey. Their handlers kept a relentless pace. “We were carrying enormous weight on our backs; we could not keep up. But if we stopped for breath, they would shout at us, push us; they had sticks, one of them had a gun.”

There were 20 people in Ismail’s group — and three handlers. They walked for what seemed like an eternity, until his feet were covered in blisters and his calves burned. The handlers did not speak his language; they only knew a few phrases about food, rest and, most importantly, moving. By now, there were Afghans and Bengalis with him as well. They could not communicate with each other either — except about food, rest and the dread of having to continuously move.

Also read: Silk Road to (economic) heaven

They camped on rocky terrain for a few hours every night. Feeding on scraps. They slipped on mud and sleet, fell down, bruised their knees, tore their clothes; they walked to an abandoned looking trucking station where they were instructed to get into the back of a lorry and hide inside a container, it took them a while to realise they were just inside Turkey.

Ismail remembers the suffocating feeling, the claustrophobia. Sitting inside the metal box – scrunched up, body aching, the stifling darkness – and being terrified of never seeing daylight again. The truck would stop for ages in between its noisy motion, Ismail would hear loud conversations going on outside, sometimes hands would bang against the container door, and sounds of anger. He was told to remain silent and not cause a commotion; they all were.

Live merchandise had to slip through the inspection cracks just like other forms of smuggling. Bribes had to be paid here like everywhere else.

The agony lasted forever. When the doors opened again Ismail was almost in a state of delirium. Dehydrated, disoriented. New handlers waited to drive them to the outskirts of Istanbul, where they were fed again and put up in a shack, like cattle. The farther he got from home, the less human Ismail felt.

“I started regretting it then. But I was too far into it. I thought if I could just survive till Greece, I would be safe, I would be okay.”

In Istanbul, he was given two choices. “I could either sit in another container or I could go to Greece by speedboat.”

His handlers insisted on the container route through Bulgaria. They said the weather was rough and the Aegean Sea was perilous. There was a high chance that an overloaded speedboat with dozens of migrants would capsize. “But I chose the speedboat. I was exhausted. I did not want to go near another container. I wanted it to be over.”

A choice he would regret almost immediately.

Ismail was sent near the city of Canakkale from where he was to reach one of the Greek islands close by. The speedboat operators here make money off migrants and they readily abandon them if the going gets tough, having no personal stake in their lives.

As soon as Ismail’s speedboat left shore, it started swaying and swinging on the tides. It tilted several times and just stopped short of tipping over, the tumult of the sea forced the operator to turn around and head back to Turkey. It was not at the same spot from where they had left, having veered in the storm.

They had hardly touched back down when they heard the loud blast of a rifle.

An air shot, followed by sirens. The men in the speedboats shouted something to each other and started running away. Ismail and the others followed them in the confusion.

More shots were fired; their reverberations getting louder. Ismail heard a soft whooshing sound and felt searing pain in his leg. He let out a cry and collapsed. Nobody stopped to help him.

Ismail remembers uniformed men coming to pick him up; he remembers receiving medical attention and then he remembers sleeping a lot.

He was arrested and deported. First to Iran and then to Pakistan. By the time he got to Quetta again, his leg was constantly in pain and the medication he was given was not helping him at all.

There were mixed emotions on his return home: anger, relief, admonition, love. He was taken to a doctor in Gujrat. The doctor examined his leg and told him that it was badly infected and that the infection would spread if left unchecked. In the end, they decided to amputate it.

“It was hell, I came back with less than what I left with.”Would he have tried a second time had he not met with such a tragedy?

“No, never. I would have never tried again.”

But many do.

Unlike Ismail, most migrants travel to Greece in rubber dinghies from the coastal areas around Izmir, Turkey. Over 800,000 refugees and migrants traversed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to get to Greece in 2015, accounting for 80 per cent of the people arriving irregularly in Europe by sea.

This year, Pakistanis make up the fourth biggest group of undocumented migrants arriving in Greece — after Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis. When these migrants are registered in Greece, they get 30-day transit papers and are subsequently sent back. Usually they end up at the Turkish port of Dikili in Izmir.

Some of them apply for asylum in Greece to prolong their stay since they cannot be deported before their asylum request is processed. But what most are looking for is time, and an opportunity to run away to Italy, Germany, France, England and Spain.

Beginning in April this year, Greece began deporting asylum seekers whose applications were rejected; many of the deportees are Pakistani. Nearly 400 people have been sent back and 190 of them are Pakistanis. Others are from Morocco, Iran, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

This year, Pakistanis make up the fourth biggest group of undocumentedmigrants arriving in Greece — after Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis.

In violation of the terms of the Geneva Convention, European authorities appear to be judging asylum claims based on nationality, not individual cases. Pakistanis are generally being categorised as ‘economic migrants’ and not refugees. Simultaneously, Turkey has worked out a readmission agreement with Pakistan in order to deport Pakistanis back to their homeland.

A 2015 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) puts the number of deportees sent back to Pakistan at more than 50,000 annually in recent years. It also puts applications for asylums by Pakistani nationals in Europe at an average of around 11,000 a year. Those who attempt to stay undocumented and are intercepted later also number at around 10,000 on average — with a considerable spike in 2012, when the figure jumped by nearly 50 per cent from 2011. Considering there are many who never get caught, it is safe to say that well over 71,000 people try to leave Pakistan annually.

Moria is a detention facility on the Greek island of Lesbos. Barbed wire fences surround a primitive tent camp that is guarded by the Greek police. Inside the camp, there are a dozen shipping containers surrounded by more fences. The immigrants call that place ‘jail’. There are frequent protests and fights here due to food shortages and squalid living conditions.

Hassan, a father of four from Lahore, reached through a cell phone inside the camp, explains that people are typically placed inside the ‘jail’ before being deported. Pakistanis, who make up a sizable portion of those locked inside Moria, have held many protests, including hunger strikes. A couple of months ago, one protest turned violent after a fire broke out in a cell where juvenile migrants were imprisoned. Asylum seekers threw rocks at the police who retaliated with tear gas. Some migrants escaped from the camp in the melee. After hours of clashes, police rounded up the escapees and brought them back to Moria. The chaos repeated itself on June 1. According to preliminary reports, the violence and ensuing fire erupted due to a clash between Afghan and Pakistani migrants.

Also read: Borders that separate—A daughter longs for the family she left behind after the 1971 war

Back home in Pakistan, Hassan’s life was under serious threat. He escaped multiple assassination attempts that stemmed from a family feud. He moved his family to a village for safety and then fled to Europe, hoping to bring his family later.

In Istanbul, Hassan was taken hostage. He was locked in a basem*nt for more than a month, along with other migrant prisoners, beaten and told he would be killed. He was finally released after his family paid 3000 Euros in ransom. “Turkey is not a safe country,” he says.

Pakistanis living at an informal camp – called No Borders Kitchen – on the island of Lesbos repeated different versions of the same story. No Borders Kitchen was raided by the police in late April this year and more than 300 immigrants living there, mostly Pakistani, were moved to Moria.

Pakistanis and other immigrants in Greece are feeling increasingly desperate. Michael Eder, a psychologist from Austria volunteering at No Borders Kitchen, believes half of the migrants are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “If [the police] use force, the people can be re-traumatised. In severe cases, this can lead to suicide,” he explains.

In April, Naser Baloch, in his twenties, climbed an electric pole at Moria and threatened to hang himself with a scarf. Hassan is an eyewitness to this. Eventually, other immigrants coaxed Baloch down but he fainted and was transferred to a hospital. After a medical examination, he was sent back to Moria where he is imprisoned with Pakistanis, North Africans and other immigrants not likely to get asylum.

Another Baloch man – Omer, 35 – is in a jail in the Greek town of Kavalla and is suffering from some psychological disorder: he does not speak any more.

Last December in Idomeni camp, on the Greek side of the Greece-Macedonia border, hundreds of pop-up tents littered fields running adjacent to the border and train rails. During the cold nights, immigrants from many countries burned whatever combustible materials they could find, ripping branches from trees and burning dirty clothes, plastic and blankets. Denied permission to cross the border, dozens of Iranians and Pakistanis held daily protests that sometimes turned violent.

A week after the protests, Greek authorities forcibly moved the men to large camps in Athens. Greece now has dozens of camps spread across the country. Several are in Athens while many others are located in other cities, villages and remote areas. Many are run by the Greek military where the migrants are provided with military-type food rations and army tents.

The more desirable camps consist of empty shipping containers. At least one container camp exists near Athens and another in Lesbos. These camps are filled with Syrians and Iraqis. Others, who are less likely to get asylum, like Afghans and Pakistanis, are living in cramped camps like the one at Eliniko, the abandoned former Athens airport, or at the ferry port of Piraeus where they wait — their fate unknown.

At an asylum office in Athens, Qadeer Sagar Baloch, 27, and his friends tried to explain their situation to an asylum officer. They carried with them a letter written by one Faiz Mohammed Baloch who runs the International Voice for Baloch Missing Persons from an office in London. It read: “We are convinced if these individuals are forced to return to Balochistan … they will be arrested, tortured and killed by Pakistani army and security agencies. Therefore, we request the government and immigration authorities of Greece not deport these individuals to Pakistan.”

“It is a really sensitive case,” says Danish activist Henriette Holm who is trying to help them. Their lives are in danger in Balochistan, she says.

The security situation in Balochistan has deteriorated in the past years, says Faiz. His group investigates claims about disappeared persons who he says number more than 20,000 (the government in Pakistan insists the number is not more than a few hundred). “We want to provide some comfort to their families, even if they are killed, so that their relatives do not have to live in limbo.”

Michael Eder, a psychologist from Austria volunteering at No BordersKitchen, believes half of the migrants are suffering frompost-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Faiz has prepared a list of ten Baloch activists who arrived in Greece around the same time as Sagar did earlier this year. He knows of another ten who tried to go to Italy. Countless others have been trying to reach Western Europe but he cannot determine their numbers unless they reach out to his organisation.

A group of Baloch men, including Shahrukh, 23, was staying in the camp at Idomeni in December, 2015. He says he was treated as an alien in his own country and claims to have lost 36 family members in the violence that plagues Balochistan.

Sagar and his three Baloch companions share a room with six Punjabi men in a dirty and drug-infested neighbourhood of Athens. Each pays 50 Euros monthly in rent. The room is dark and there are mattresses on the floor. A single light illuminates the corroded walls. Days are spent in desperation, as they consume their diminishing savings and see the door to Western Europe closed. Still, they hope that the EU authorities will come to understand their plight, their reason for leaving home and their legitimate fears of being targeted for imprisonment, torture and death at home. For Sagar and his friends, the chances of reaching Germany or the United Kingdom are increasingly remote.

He [Sagar] insists he did not leave his homeland for economic reasons butbecause of real threats he experienced due to his political work.

Sagar has been active in the Baloch National Movement, an organization which aims to create an independent state for the Baloch, divided in areas that are part of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. For years, the Baloch have received asylum protection in European countries but nowadays Sagar and his companions, along with many others, are stuck in Greece, a country suffering from widespread unemployment and in deep economic crisis.

With the largest annual influx of immigrants to Europe in recent history recorded in 2015, the EU countries have closed their borders in March, and made agreements with other countries to be able to deport asylum seekers. The Baloch are worried about being categorised as citizens of Pakistan which the EU considers a safe country.

“Here in Greece,” Sagar says, “we are in deep trouble.”

He insists he did not leave his homeland for economic reasons but because of real threats he experienced due to his political work. “I was threatened by phone,” he recalls. The voice on the other end said, “I will kill you.” A month later, two men entered the metal shop he owned in Mand town in Turbat, carrying Kalashnikovs. Sagar hid and then ran out through the back of the shop. He changed his mobile phone number and stopped going to the shop, which he later sold for about 10,000 Euros in order to finance his trip to Europe.

When Sagar left home in January 2016, he was informed that the European borders were open and it would be possible to travel to Germany or even the United Kingdom. Leaving behind his wife and 11-month-old son, he traveled from Pakistan to Iran, and then into Turkey. “We walked nine hours through the mountains in order to get to Turkey. It was cold and icy and Turkish police were firing at us. One of our friends was caught near the border and sent back to Iran.” He made it across Iran in his third attempt.

From Turkey, they took a rubber dinghy across the sea to the Greek islands. The journey was grueling and dangerous. The small boat was packed with immigrants. The driver, an Afghan and an immigrant himself, had never before captained a boat. Halfway across, the petrol ran out. They were stuck in the water, battling waves and wind. After dialing an emergency number, they were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard. They were taken to the island of Lesbos where they boarded a ferry to Athens and then they could move no farther.

Also read: Train to Balochistan

Weeks before Sagar’s arrival in Greece, the European borders were closed to many asylum seekers. About 54,000 migrants of various ethnicities are stuck in Greece.

The concept of transit migration really emerged in the last two decades as stricter migration policies and airport security in destination countries forced people to take dangerous routes, travelling through places that could offer shared borders with their European destinations.

Pakistan has served as a source, transit and destination country for migrants and human traffickers due to its porous western borders.

The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) claims to have arrested as manyas 1,310 human smugglers last year, mostly facilitators andsub-agents...

The effects of great upheavals in the region, like the 1979 revolution in Iran, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, have had tremendous impact on human movement. The mass exodus of asylum seekers and political refugees from Iran, both legal and illegal, opened routes to Europe and connected them all the way to villages in northern and central Punjab.

Many transit migrants also end up settling in Turkey and Greece, unable to afford going further. This is the explanation proffered by authorities in Pakistan when asked why networks of immigration agents are so widespread and efficient: The agents were originally migrants, mainly from Pakistan and Iran. They have contacts both in their home countries and their adopted ones.

The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) claims to have arrested as many as 1,310 human smugglers last year, mostly facilitators and sub-agents, launched 7,500 enquiries and recovered 11 billion rupees as a result. It also claims to have intercepted around 6,600 intending migrants in 2015. A mere trickle in the deluge of outward migration.

America’s State Department publishes an annual Trafficking In Person (TIP) report which ranks countries on a three-tier rating system based on their compliance with international human trafficking regulations. In 2014, Pakistan was demoted from its long-standing Tier 2 rank (which includes countries where human smuggling and trafficking originates from, like India) down to the Tier 2 Watch List, joining a group of some 44 countries including Afghanistan — a rank which is only a small step above Tier 3, which includes countries that exercise no border control, like Syria.

Iran, incidentally, is also ranked in Tier 3.

There is, therefore, mounting international pressure on Pakistan, the Ministry of Interior and through it the FIA, to curb attempted migration and improve border control, clamping down on both human trafficking and smuggling. This pressure does not translate into performance for a multitude of reasons, says Mahr Usman, the FIA’s additional director for immigration.

He is functionally in charge of a dedicated immigration desk at the FIA headquarters in Islamabad. Its regular function is to collate data from all FIA circles around the country and coordinate with the Ministry of Interior which oversees the FIA and signs repatriation and extradition treaties with other countries.

Usman has three years of field experience working at the FIA’s airport checkpoints. His job was to check suspicious documents and make judgment calls based on tip-offs; these could come from any source — neighbours, relatives, even agents themselves at times. The FIA officials at airports work closely with customs offices, airport security forces and civil aviation authorities. People with suspect documentation are detained and interrogated on the airport premises.

Immigration was first made an FIA concern in 1974, after the first wave of overseas employment agreements saw thousands of Pakistanis migrating to the Gulf states, Usman explains. The sheer volume of migration encouraged illicit means of traveling that allowed paperwork to be circumvented and travel and visa costs paid in installments; thus came about the demand for illegalimmigration agents.

Law enforcement lagged far behind these developments. It was only in 2002 that the Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance was passed. Usman explains that no specific law existed prior to the promulgation of this ordinance to deal with offences and culprits related to human trafficking and human smuggling.

The FIA was largely toothless before this ordinance, Usman contends. It still is in many ways.

Usman recalls the migratory swell of people from Mirpur (in Azad Kashmir), Mandi Bahauddin, Gujrat and Jhelum (all in Punjab) in the 1970s and 1980s when labourers first went abroad en masse. They started sending remittance, their families back home bought lands and cemented their houses. Their neighbours and relatives would see the material improvement and wish it for themselves.

Able-bodied young men willing to travel to another country became a family dream. They were family investments, and immigration agents were suddenly much sought after.

Usman says Dubai’s construction boom started the cascade. Contractors needed cheap labour which was imported from countries like Pakistan, legally at first, through overseas employment visas, but the demand for a larger and even cheaper workforce grew at a faster pace than the legal supply. Many migrants, since they knew the process, became agents to cater to this demand. The contractors did not care how the labourers arrived.

The global network of travel agents, visa consultants and human smugglers traverses lines of legality and illegality with consummate ease.

“A lot of people still get genuine visas to Iran, Dubai, even Turkey, and then try to abscond from there into Europe,” Usman explains.

Facilitators, sub-agents, document forgers, they are everywhere. “It is not just our problem. Has Iran or Turkey managed to eradicate their agent networks? It takes two to tango. If people go from here, they also get help from the places they are traveling to.”

This is a valid point. Earlier last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed a press conference about the perennially ongoing negotiations between Turkey and the EU over what the latter feels is insufficient border policing by the former. Erdogan made it clear that Turkey would improve border control only if the EU allowed free movement for Turkish citizens inside Europe. It is clear from the statement that Turkey can do more; it just wants more incentives to do so.

Pakistan likewise does not have great incentives to better police its borders, says Usman. There is a distinct perception among official circles that it is a case of ‘better their problem than ours’. A huge expatriate population that contributes to the economy via remittances is an advantage that Pakistan wants to maintain even if parts of it are functioning beyond legal channels.

Then there are turf battles over jurisdiction within government departments.

“Firstly, the FIA does not control the border. The FC controls the land border. The Coast Guard is in charge of the marine border. The FIA has only two border checkpoints along 3000 kilometres of land border with Afghanistan and Iran. Even these checkpoints are understaffed,” Usman says. “The FIA does not have the resources to pursue people inland. We have no legal authority to arrest anyone before they have attempted to leave the country.”

The FIA also does not have the capacity to detain all the migrants who come back on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The detainees are produced before a magistrate who then imposes a nominal fine on them for attempting illegal migration. The fine may range anywhere between 500 rupees and 2,500 rupees. In accordance with the existing laws, they are then set free.

This lack of punishment is one major reason why most migrants make second and third attempts when the first is foiled, argues Usman. “The FIA does not have the human resources to keep tabs on them, their numbers being so high.”

He also explains how economic downturn in Pakistan directly raises migration rates. “Sialkot has become a huge exporter of illegal migrants after the manufacturing industry has regressed. Migration is not just a problem of policing borders, it’s also a matter of internal conditions and policies.”

Usman states that an alarming number of students are being deported these days because of stricter visa regulations in Europe and the United States. “There is no rehabilitation programme for these deportees. We do not have the infrastructure to deal with them. They come back, have nothing to do and some of them turn to street crime, target killing or even terrorism.”

When I visited the FIA Gujranwala office in January this year, the officials there had just arrested 14 intending migrants from a nearby railway station. Three entire families were trying to escape to Muscat.

They were all in detention. They had paid 250,000 rupees each to an immigration officer who provided them fake birth certificates, family registration forms, bank statements and forged travel documents.

After paying nominal fines, all these people will go back to Quetta, some to take trains home, others to turn around and head straight back to Taftan to make another attempt.

Going to Muscat from Karachi was a popular route during the heyday of labour migration. The Gulf of Oman is still the conduit for a sizeable amount of human trafficking. The agent named by the detainees, Naeem Sarwar, was picked up by the FIA officials in a raid at his house. Many visa stamps were found on the premises for South Korea, Bangkok, Indonesia, Iran, South Africa and even Libya.

The eastern routes take migrants to Sri Lanka or Bangkok and then onwards to Indonesia and Australia. Getting asylum in Australia is reportedly easier than in Europe. The FIA officers confirm that embattled religious minorities in Pakistan and political activists with genuine threats to their lives prefer to venture this way.

Sarwar, also under investigation for an earlier nomination in a human trafficking case, had an unexplained 36 million rupees in his bank account. The account, frozen on the FIA’s request, was later made operational on a court order. Though the raid on his house had produced some documentary evidence, the court required witnesses too, and none were willing to testify.

These people still wanted to go abroad — and Sarwar was still their best bet.

Khalid Anees, deputy director at the FIA Gujranwala office, is furiously shouting away orders at his subordinates. He is a busy man and does not have time to entertain queries from his staff, something that he establishes by continuously swearing at them. In between phone calls, he is interrogating one Akram Mughal who has been in the FIA’s custody for a week.

Anees refers to him as ishtihaari mujrim — a proclaimed offender. The FIA put out his photo in local newspapers as a suspected felon and they found him during a raid on a travel agency after receiving an anonymous tip-off. He has been nominated in 26 complaints, all stating that he received hundreds of thousands of rupees, promising migration to as many as six different countries.

No witnesses came forward to testify against Mughal in the first four days of his detention. Then a woman, Amna Bibi, contacted Anees and offered herself as a witness. She told him that Mughal posed as a travel agent and took 140,000 rupees from her, promising her a visa to Dubai, but he never delivered on this promise. She claimed she still had a piece of paper signed by Mughal that was meant to act as a receipt, and that he had her passport in his possession.

Bald, with a creased forehead and grey stubble on his face, Mughal has the kind of constant cough that betrays a lifelong smoking habit. He asks sullenly for a cigarette, which he is promised after he is back in lockup. He is sitting on the wooden bench on one side of the deputy director’s desk and is leaning against the wall, staring at the floor with sunken eyes, half mumbling his words.

Amna Bibi is sitting on the other end of the same bench.

While there is only one witness, all 26 complainants want their money back from Mughal. The FIA is struggling to comply. Mughal does not have much in his bank account. He will have to sell his house to return all the money.

With one ear on his telephone receiver, Anees dangles the carrot of cooperation in front of Mughal’s eyes. His house does not need to be sold if he names his accomplices and tells the FIA where they are hiding. Mughal says he does not have any accomplices.

Anees is convinced that Mughal is a sub-agent for someone known as Mithoo whom he suspects of having fled to Muscat since Mughal’s arrest, taking all the money with him. He calls Mughal crazy for not cooperating with the FIA. “He will ruin his own life but will not name others. What are we to do? There is no convincing these people.”

Mughal’s reticence compels Anees to call in the next batch of complainants. A group of 10 burly men accuse one Ikram Butt from Shakargarh, Punjab, of absconding with 60 million rupees he received from them and many others for umrah visas. Anees shakes his head at them and asks if they ever bother to do background checks when giving money to agents. “Why do you just hand over money to anyone? Don’t you watch news? Read newspapers? Thousands lose their money every year. Why doesn’t anybody learn from other people’s mistakes?”

Anees is going to have another long day at work.

The FIA Quetta office is right in the eye of the immigration storm. Intending migrants from Punjab flood to Quetta before going onto Taftan where, the FIA estimates, 500 to 1000 people cross the border every day. A fair few of them are illegal trespassers. Some are stopped at the border but many filter through.

When I visited the circle office in January this year, 450 migrants had just been deported from Iran. A little while ago, this would have been a logistical catastrophe. The FIA’s old detention centre in Quetta had space for 15-20 people. This is true for most FIA circles across Pakistan.

Now, though, the FIA has built a sizable detention centre at Taftan border. The deportees are being kept there, waiting for their appearance before a magistrate who also sits at Taftan now to avoid a huge backlog of cases.

After paying nominal fines, all these people will go back to Quetta, some to take trains home, others to turn around and head straight back to Taftan to make another attempt.

An FIA additional sub-inspector at the Quetta office tells me about the problems his department faces because of the sheer number of migrants that flow through here. “We get the same resources as any other FIA circle but our work burden is tenfold.”

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He is a smart, energetic man, sporting a moustache and an air of congeniality. It is raining outside; he points to the weather and explains. “They are not cattle. They are human beings. They are citizens of Pakistan. The state in which we find them after they are sent back is often deplorable.”

He says the FIA should have much more power if the government is serious in putting an end to illegal migration. “We want to get to the smugglers, the traffickers, but all we are doing is dealing withthe deportees.”

There are bad days and worse days when it comes to dealing with deportations. There are never any good days. “I’ll give you a recent example,” he pauses as he looks out the window. “A dead body came back from Iran a few months ago. The man had died inside a container. His body lay there for two days at the train station. Nobody came to claim it.”

The dead can often go unclaimed. It takes time for news to get back to their families, if it ever does. Some do not even have identification documents with them. They have to be buried in unmarked graves in Quetta.

Workers at the local train station dread shrunken corpses that sometimes accompany the deported migrants.

Turkey wants Pakistan to penalise both agents and illegal migrants, something it feels Pakistan has not been doing. Just before a fresh round of talks over a repatriation treaty between Ankara and Islamabad early last year, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said human traffickers defamed Pakistan abroad and took advantage of poverty stricken citizens.

He failed to realise that Turkey was not talking about human trafficking; it was talking about illegal migration. Even if human traffickers and illegal migrants largely end up using the same networks, they represent distinctly different phenomena.

Human trafficking victims are transported under coercion. Illegal migrants act out of their volition. Intending migrants are primarily male, from northern and central Punjab; whereas around 60 per cent of trafficking victims are women, from all over Pakistan, sold into forced prostitution or paper marriages.

Migrants get bullied and blackmailed too, but they retain some form of agency: to continue on or turn back. Trafficking is plain abduction.

The FIA, by all independent accounts, has in the recent past overcome one particularly brutal form of human trafficking: camel jockeys. Children under 14 years of age were sold to rich Arab camel racers in the Gulf to spur the animals on – without encumbering them under their own meager weight – during competitions. These children often received serious injuries. Many were left traumatised for life. Some even died.

According to the FIA’s Red Book, the number of most-wanted Pakistani human traffickers was 141 in 2013, up from 95 in 2011. A majority of them belonged to Gujrat and Gujranwala districts of Punjab.

An overwhelming majority of people shown by the FIA as traffickers are, however, agents for illegal migrants. The top 20 human traffickers on the FIA Karachi’s most-wanted list are all migration agents and fake visa consultants — most of them operating through the Mand-Bullo border between Iran and Pakistan, others using the route between Jiwani and Muscat.

The lack of distinction between people complicit in their own tragedies and those who are mercilessly exploited for profit has been one of the major hurdles in the implementation of the internationally accepted Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).

“These people are arrested as human traffickers but the charges against them are mostly of document forgery and fraud,” Anees tells me on the phone. They get bail, abscond, and their cases linger. “Often they go back to their consultancies and businesses.”

He tells me about a recent raid against alleged human smugglers working at the Pakistan Overseas Employment Promoters Association. As the FIA officials reached the association’s office, they met with a massive protest, launched against the FIA’s own investigations. “Human smuggling is connected with so many other things. It is difficult to issue arrest and search warrants and to have a clear cut case that holds up in court. We need better laws,” Anees says.

An even bigger problem is the involvement of government officials themselves. In 2014, Shahzad Gul, an FIA immigration official in Islamabad, was arrested along with a Pakistan International Airline (PIA) officer, Khurram Shahzad, for issuing boarding cards to three passengers later caught with visibly fake documents at London’s Heathrow Airport.

In 2015, five officials of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) were arrested for issuing fake national identity cards to Afghan nationals. In May of this year, a Foreign Office director, Shafqat Ali Cheema, was arrested for owning assets whose worth is well above his declared sources of income. He was also accused of aiding human trafficking and smuggling.

A National Accountability Bureau (NAB) investigator says that Cheema was accused of facilitating human smuggling back in 2000 and was almost expelled from the Foreign Office but he managed to procure a restraining order from a court. He worked at Pakistan’s embassy in Spain and was accused of passport fraud by the Spanish authorities. He allegedly faced similar charges when he got a subsequent posting in Korea.

Pakistan is planning to issue biometric passports from next year to halt the outflow of undocumented human beings. This follows an earlier effort to improve border monitoring through Computerised National Identity Cards (CNICs) and may turn out to be another futile exercise. As the case of recently slain Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour shows, owning a Pakistani CNIC for any Afghan is not a difficult thing. As long as illegal migrants and human smugglers are able to enlist the help of complicit government officials, chances of border trespassers being discovered with forged or illegally obtained biometric passports will not necessarily diminish.

If migration is such a socioeconomic and political headache across the globe that these can impact the outcomes of elections – as London’s mayoral and the United States’ presidential campaigns can attest – then why are international borders so open? Smuggled goods, smuggled armaments, exported ideologies and militancy — there are many problems associated with porous borders and yet the solutions never go beyond placing razor wires and erecting flimsy walls.

In a manner of speaking, the answers to this predicament are in the borders themselves. The imaginary lines that look arbitrary on a map become even more whimsical when you arrive at a border checkpoint, say the one between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The border in Chaman surreally divides families, houses and villages, making people from the same communities residents of two different countries.

There are labourers who work on one side of the fence and sleep on the other; some cross the border just to grab a cup of tea.

Their movement is regulated under the age old rahdari system. Under agreements in place since the time of the British Raj, local communities do not need federally approved travel documents or visas to commute across the border. They can travel on rahdari, a border pass, issued by local authorities.

This makes sense from a sociological point of view, but it causes problems in regulating cross-border movement. Thousands of Afghans cross over into Pakistan through the Chaman border under the rahdari system, before they attempt migration to Europe or Australia.

Passing through the Iran border is similarly easy, even though passports and visas come into play there. This is because of ziarat visas, meant for Shia pilgrims from Pakistan wanting to visit holy shrines in Iran. Thousands of non-Shias get this visa, often from the Iranian consulate in Quetta, to try and get to Turkey.

Complicated? It gets better.

On my first day in Jiwani, a town on the southwestern coastal edge of Balochistan and only 25 kilometres from the coast of Iran, I saw a boy sitting on beach stones next to the sea. He seemed to be waiting for someone, I assumed someone who had taken a boat out for fishing, but my assumption was a bit off the mark.

“I am waiting for my cousin,” he explained.

Where was this cousin coming from?

“Iran.”

Iran?

“He goes there to study.”

Every day?

“Every day. His mother’s family lives over there but he lives here with us. I am waiting for him to come back so we can go play football.”

Their life is one of toil and turmoil and their only reward is to be able to send money home to their families.

Jiwani was a high-traffic route to Iran before the Coast Guard set up a permanent outpost here. Local clinics and hospices talked about the injured and the dead that washed back ashore. They were running out of beds for the locals.

In the FIA office in Gwadar, 20 men from northern Punjab sit huddled in the courtyard over a white sheet of cloth. The lockup where they ought to be is occupied by other, more serious offenders. These migrants will sleep out in the open tonight. They are being given dinner as I approach them, each sitting with his backpack in front of him and sneakers placed on one side. Their forlorn faces speak of regret — some for having tried to flee abroad, others for getting caught.

You can tell the first-timers from their terrified faces. The second and third-timers are calmer, they know they will be free in a few days.

The person I talk to first is barely 19 years old. He is from Sialkot. He is educated and he attempted to migrate with his father’s help and permission. The agent offered him only the sea route.

He was told to take the Shalimar Express to Karachi and get to Yousuf Goth bus station. “I was to call the agent when I got there. When I did he told me to board a certain bus going to Gwadar. I saw many others like myself, phones in hand, bags on their backs, boarding the same bus so I figured that it was the right one.”

He remembers an uneventful journey into Balochistan before problems emerged. They were stopped at a checkpoint and uniformed personnel came on board for inspection. Intending migrants are not hard to spot, especially when they are travelling in groups of over a dozen. “They asked for money, 1,500 per person. There was a man on the bus who negotiated with them.”

Before long, it was late in the evening and the bus driver was getting agitated. “He said this wasn’t supposed to happen. He had a short argument with the negotiator.” Something in the negotiations was breaking down. Some of the migrants, including the young man from Sialkot, tried calling the agent but his number was switched off.

After a lengthy sojourn, the bus started moving again. The negotiator got off at the next stop. “I knew something was wrong; I was getting very tense. The agent called us one by one a little afterwards. He said there was a change of plans. We would have to get off the bus at a certain stop and walk to the shore where speed boats were waiting. Somebody would be there to show us the way.”

This is how most attempted migrations get foiled. The failure of one agent to pay another, or the failure to negotiate with the relevant authorities. The boy from Sialkot was a nervous wreck by the time they made it to the coast. “When I first saw the sea rise and fall, I felt dizzy. I had never seen the sea before. I did not even know how to swim.”

He wanted to turn back but his companions egged him on. Someone took his arm and settled him into a speedboat. He started praying more and more fervently as the motor started and the boat began its uneven movement.

“I thought I was going to be sick. I didn’t notice when the lights started flashing at us.”

The Coast Guard intercepted their boat before the coast of Balochistan was out of sight. They arrested the intending migrants and handed them over to the FIA.

Drenched, defeated, scared, he had been sitting in the detention centre for a day now and had contacted his family back in Sialkot. “I just want to go home,” he says.

The investigating officer of the FIA Gwadar circle begs to differ, quite cynically. “He will be back. He has already paid the money.” The officer’s tone is harsh, dismissive of the boy’s plight. “I have seen hundreds like him; they are a little scared after the first time but the fear never lasts.”

He takes me to the people making their second and third attempts. He starts interrogating them about the hows, whys and where froms. “What did you do back in Mandi Bahauddin?” he asks a 31-year-old man.

“I have some agricultural land and buffaloes. I am a farmer.”

“So why do you want to go abroad. Here you have a home, a family, a living, self-respect. Why do you want to throw it all away to be a beggar in another land?” The officer’s tone gets harsher as he moves from one person to another.

“What about you?” he addresses a younger man.

“I am a civil engineer.”

“Did you have a job here? A home? A decent life?”

“Yes,” he replies.

“There it is,” the officer looks at me, shaking his head and smirking at the same time. “They are all well-fed, living comfortably. They are just fools.”

He interrogates every person he passes by. College graduates, shop owners, clerks. There were only two seasonal labourers among the group and few of them were illiterate. It did not quite fit in with the classical narrative concerned with the economic migration of unskilled labour.

There was a time before the world’s migration migraine when crossing borders was not as tricky as it is today.

In the 1980s, Mudassir Nazir was an unemployed member of a lower middle class family in a village near Gujranwala. His father was a headmaster in a government school. One of his friends was an emerging bureaucrat in Lahore and was part of a trade delegation being sent by the government to the United Kingdom.

Nazir begged his friend to take him along. A large number of unwarranted aides and attaches accompanied the delegates.

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The official trip ended in two weeks but Nazir never boarded the flight home. There was not much to come back to in his village. “I saw clean cities and beautiful women. I wanted to stay there and make a life,” he tells me in December last year during one of his infrequent trips to Pakistan. He is a short, stout man with soft, pudgy hands. He is also an expert chef.

With nowhere to go in England and carrying little money, he set about finding some distant relatives who had legally migrated a few years before his arrival. He hid in their house for a few months, helping with domestic chores and cooking. He would eventually be hired as a store clerk by a Bangladeshi proprietor. He earned below minimum wage and slept behind the counter.

In a couple of years, he saved enough to open a small food stall of his own, with a little financial help from other established immigrants he had become friends with. He sent word back home through these friends that he was fine and in good health; when his family wrote back asking when he would come home, he could only offer silence.

Going back was not an option. Not in those first ten years. Such are the travails of living as an undocumented migrant. He would get into trouble at times; somebody he might have upset, somebody who didn’t get along with him, or did not like the colour of his skin would call the immigration authorities to inform on him; he was forced to move his establishment twice.

A decade after he had taken that flight to England, he saved enough money to open a desi cuisine restaurant in Manchester. It was a surprising hit with the locals. In time, his economic fortunes took a turn for the better. He got married to a British national, bought a house in her name, hired an immigration lawyer and started his naturalisation process.

He could demonstrate good character and a history of paying taxes on his business. It still took another three years and some token palm greasing for his application to be approved.

“It was the happiest moment of my life. That constant fear of everything being taken away one day, all of a sudden was finally gone.”

He came back to Gujranwala 13 years after he had left. He wore an expensive Marks & Spencers suit, put on gold cufflinks and a gold watch and rented a car from Lahore. It was more a coronation than a visit, an announcement of his newfound status.

The restaurant exists to this day and is reasonably popular but behind the exotic food it offers to what Nazir says are largely white and drunk patrons, there is a secret story of migration. “Over the course of my twenty years in the restaurant business, I have facilitated hundreds of migrants from Pakistan to Britain; young men from my village, from nearby villages. When I first got a cell phone, I used to get calls all day from people begging me to help their sons, brothers, fathers to get abroad.”

Nazir contributed to agent fees and provided the migrants shelter and refuge in his restaurant after their arrival in Manchester. He did not do so out of mere sympathy, though he insists sympathy was also a motivation. Undocumented migrants make a pliable work force; longer working hours, smaller wages, no place to complain and the threat of deportation alwayslooming large.

The reasons to leave are plenty; the reasons to stay not quite so.

“They used to sleep on wooden slabs above the pantry, like I did when I first went there — half a dozen of them in a space small enough to be yours ormine bed.”

Nazir has no qualms. “But what else was there? They couldn’t be out in the public; they could hardly speak the language; they had nowhere else to go; they had no money. I was their only hope.”

He insists he did nothing wrong. “I did it to help them and to help myself. People say I did not pay them enough but I paid them more than what they would have earned elsewhere. More than they would have earned back home.”

British authorities raid shops, restaurants and general stores regularly for stowaways and undocumented people living in the United Kingdom. Nazir has had run-ins with law enforcement officials for hosting and employing illegal migrants. He has faced charges. His restaurant has been fined. And yet he takes everything in his stride. “These things happen. I wouldn’t have made so much money on the back of a legal workforce. So you take these risks,” he laughs.

Not everybody is as lucky as Nazir. A dozen people who waited tables at his eatery as well as two of his managers and one accountant were all deported back to Pakistan. Nazir lends them money now and again. Some of them are trying to make their way back into Europe; others are unsure how to continue their interrupted lives.

Death, mutilation, humiliation, monetary loss and incarceration; the reasons never to attempt unlawful migration are many. On the other hand, the reasons to do so become more convoluted the more research is conducted.

The basic economic argument still holds much merit, the idea that even if nothing else changes, it is better to be a poor person in a rich country than a poor person in a poor country.

A large number of people who have genuine concerns for safety in their home countries often do not have the luxury of time to put together legal documents before going abroad to seek asylum. They flee in emergency, under duress.

There are Baloch nationalists escaping abductions and disappearances and targeted attacks. There are Pakhtuns escaping from the war-torn north. There are journalists and social activists escaping threats to their lives. There are people escaping family feuds and enmities. There are Christians, Ahmedis and Hazaras escaping religious and sectarian discrimination.

The Pakistani winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace is in self-exile as are many of the top intellectuals, politicians, activists, even religious leaders.

But beyond security and economic compulsions, academic research and popular depictions of migration increasingly suggest complex motives.

Ali Nobil Ahmad is a professor at the Lahore University of Management Science (Lums). He has written a book recently, Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration, arguing that the primary reason for migration might be rooted more in ideas of masculinity and sexuality than economy.

He interviewed dozens of migrants, both who had spent considerable amount of time abroad and those whose attempts had been aborted. His queries produced vague, uncertain replies, but always coming back to women and a liberal lifestyle. The major recurring theme was a sense of personal betterment out ‘there’ — not economic betterment but independence, sexual freedoms, self-discovery and the conquest of the unknown.

Atther W Qureshi, a Pakistani migrant now settled in Switzerland, is an educated migrant who went abroad to find adventure and a new life, to start form zero; to remake himself. He is a writer now, something he would never have been able to achieve here. A Refugee in Switzerland, his semi-fictional account of landing in Switzerland, seeking asylum and sharing a refugee camp with other migrants is instructive as far as the migrant experience is concerned.

He describes the sense of calm that prevails in a refugee camp — an otherwise seemingly hopeless situation: cordoned off from the rest of the world, migrants wait patiently for their applications to be processed. It serves to illustrate how getting ‘there’ alone is half the achievement: being there and not being ‘here’ — the ‘here’ they are trying to escape.

It seems a counterintuitive idea: willingly uprooting oneself from home, family, identity and culture; to take apart all these things and start all over again in an alien land, as an alien person. Adrift, anchorless. But it is also a powerful one.

The 2012 film Zinda Bhaag is about the unrelenting appeal of this idea. It tells the story of three unhappy young men from Lahore, trying to migrate abroad. It shows them unable to find any outlet here for their energy and spirit. It shows them skirting the law with a gambling ring. It shows them making ambitious plans beyond what their social stations permit. It finally shows them paying for forged documents to travel abroad, the same forged documents that a friend of theirs used to try his luck, and died.

The last scene of this otherwise tongue in cheek film is a harrowing focus shot of one of the young men as he is asked whether he still wants his picture on his deceased friend’s passport, knowing that he may meet the same fate. He stares straight into the camera, somber as if at a funeral - his own - and says yes. The film’s title means ‘run away alive’, a comment on what it means to migrate.

The film was a hit with local audiences who have seen these expressions on many young faces. This ambivalent attitude towards migration is a far cry from the migration experience shown in cinemas only a couple of decades ago. Dubai Chalo was a cinematic appropriation of the labour export mania. It advertised working class life in Dubai as this exotic, bountiful dream. The idea was to generate enthusiasm for labour exchange agreements signed by the Pakistani government at the time.

Such ideas, as we have now come to know, were far removed from reality. Pakistani labourers working in the Gulf live in appalling conditions, as second-class citizens, with barely any basic rights or social security. Their life is one of toil and turmoil and their only reward is to be able to send money home to their families.

But this erosion in the popular imagination of the good life abroad has not stemmed the tides of migration. In fact, migration has hit its highest rates ever. Part of the problem is confirmation bias. An intending migrant here in Pakistan only sees or hears of the success stories — fewer in number but with a disproportionatequalitative impact.

The message accompanying these stories is too inviting to be refused.

“Just get here and I’ll take care of everything,” was what Ismail’s uncle said to him. The reasons to leave are plenty; the reasons to stay not quite so.

*Names have been changed to protect the identities of the migrants.

This was originally published in the Herald's June 2016 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.

Haseeb Asif is a staffer at the Herald. Jodi Hilton is a photojournalist and a grant recipient from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.