Author: Shekhar Gupta
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 24, 2002
Notes on an airport lounge, a hotel
lobby and a wary General
The UN would probably never accept
it as a yardstick for its human development ratings. But put this away
under mpey name in the appendices of some new book on theories that determine
the state of a nation. The strength of a nation should now also be measured
by the way its immigration police deal with incoming and outgoing travellers.
At the top of the scale are countries where they put you through the scanner
on your way in, but mostly wave you off cheerily when you are leaving.
Good riddance, old fellow, one likely illegal less to bother about. In
the US, you usually do not even see the immigration fellow on the way out.
The airline official is authorised to let you go. At the other end of the
spectrum would be the old socialist and authoritarian states where you
require an exit visa to leave.
How does Musharraf's Pakistan measure
on this scale? At the international arrival hall in Islamabad, you walk
in with the man taking one look at your passport, one at your face. He
does not even have a computer to punch your name into. Not necessary for
those coming in, you'd presume. But, on the way out at Karachi, it's a
scene out of the Hollywood film, Minority Report. It is so high tech, it
dazzles your eyes. Literally. You are told to step back and look dead on
at a tiny camera that takes in the biometric scan of your eyes and transmits
it to the computer which matches it with those of the wanted men wishing
to escape Pakistan. You move on when the computer says ''no matchings.''
But there is still another line of defence, manned by none else than the
army. Bemused and very young NCOs of the AJK (Azad Kashmir) Regiment, look
at your passports and boarding passes and wave you on. There was none of
this on any of my dozen or so visits to Pakistan in the past. Nor even
on the last one, in the winter of 1999, a couple of months after the Musharraf
takeover.
Ladies pack more wealth in diamonds
than in Burkina Faso's GDP
Not everything has nose-dived like
this. Certainly not the Karachi stock exchange - month on month, it has
done far better than our own BSE over the past three years and this isn't
only because they harbour Dawood Ibrahim in this city and not the Harshad
Mehtas and the like. The Pakistani rupee has recovered dramatically since
9/11, from 63 (to a dollar) and sliding, to 58 and rising. In spite of
the drought in the rest of the subcontinent, it has poured in upper Punjab,
filling Pakistan's formidable reservoirs. Infrastructure, certainly the
airports, look better than India's - new four-laned highways are coming
up fast, you even have free internet at the Karachi airport lounge. An
inexplicable notion of stability has persuaded the very rich to bring some
of
their money back to their country and, certainly, at a lunch hosted by
my publisher friend Hameed Haroon (chief executive of the venerable Dawn
group), the ladies pack more wealth in diamonds than the GDP of Burkina
Faso. War, they say, is not going to happen. Never. Musharraf has moderated
his behaviour. You Indians are not so stupid. And, of course, the Americans
are there.
They are not there in Karachi any
longer, though. The consulate has been closed on security fears, though
my grapevine tells me that good old ego hassles had something to do with
this as well. The Americans wanted the road in front of the consulate,
linking the city to Karachi's showpiece Clifton, to be closed to all traffic
other than theirs. The local corps commander said, go take a walk. So the
consul-general and whatever remained of his staff walked out. The roads
are not closed yet, simply restricted, and from the window of your penthouse
suite in the Avari Towers hotel when you see children playing cricket on
the one behind the Scinde Club, you can sometimes get confused into thinking
it's a holiday, or more like the day of a Left Front bandh in Kolkata.
Post 9/11, only the Marriot at Islamabad
is celebrating
The owner of the hotel, Byram Avari,
though, is an unhappy man, I am told, as any hotelier should be post 9/11,
particularly in Pakistan. But he's been particularly unlucky in that he
does not own a hotel in Islamabad, whereas his arch rival, Sadruddin Hashwani
(Marriott), does. The Marriott at Islamabad must be the only hotel in the
world where business boomed after 9/11. Hordes of journalists descended
on Islamabad and Hashwani doubled his room tariffs overnight. There as
stories of how much the networks paid for a full floor, for Christiane
Amanpour's suite, and even for slices of the terrace where they set up
their dish antennae. That hotel is still choc-a-bloc. But you can't say
the management has not upgraded the services a bit.
At the coffee shop, gone is the
old three-man synthesizer band (I always found the three of them there
between 1985 and 1999) who used to play boring, sad, old Hindi film tunes
(suhani raat dhal chuki, na jaane tum kab aaoge... was a favourite). Now
you have real singers, including a woman, and her rendering of Madonna's
La Isla Bonita is quite acceptable. There is more to the change. A Thai
restaurant with genuine Thai hostesses in off-shoulder wraps and tight
sarongs that are such a distraction for the army of spooks that always
hang around the lobby of the only five-star hotel in the capital. Tough
to keep your eye on your ward, the visiting diplomat, journalist, politician,
in such a cluttered environment. You almost feel like going up and tapping
the guy on the shoulder and tell him, hey, you are supposed to be keeping
an eye on me, my friend.
There are happier distractions for
the guests as well. On the desk in your room sits a flier from the health
club, inviting you to a 'dry' massage by a ''qualified and experienced
Thai masseuse.'' There is a footnote though that says ''in-room massage
is available for ladies only.'' You want to get your back kneaded by the
Thai lady, you take the trouble of going to the health club. But it is
a serious improvement in a city usually described by the expat community
as being half the size of the Arlington cemetery and twice as dead. And
where the salesgirl at the upmarket Generation boutique had turned from
pink to red to crimson in the Zia era when I took (my then editor) India
Today's Aroon Purie there and he wanted for his wife only the salwar-kameez
displayed on the body of one of the mannequins. ''We can't take it off,
sir, it will be indecent,'' she had said, scandalised. ''Come back tomorrow
morning. We can only do this after the shop closes at night.''
Why Musharraf's Indepedence Day
Ceremony went indoors
This is change Musharraf would welcome.
He has been - actually, quite seriously - working to rid Pakistan of its
fundamentalist, mullah influence. You never saw too many burkhas or maulvis
on the street in Pakistan but now old friends tell me the chill winds of
conservatism are dissipating. The jehadi donation boxes have disappeared
from shops. So have the bearded ones who used to stop people on the street,
hand them jehadi pamphlets and taunt them for living in homely comfort
while 'your Muslim bretheren were fighting in Kashmir'. Jehadi posters
have disappeared from the walls. There are fewer Kalashnikovs at weddings.
The press is looking as free as it did in Benazir's times. Surprise of
surprises, three private television news channels have come up and so many
of my old print journalist friends are walking around with cameramen in
tow. The fashion pages in Pakistan's best newsmagazines, Herald and Newsline,
now even display a hitherto unseen depth in cleavage.
What hasn't lessened, at the same
time, is the Kashmir campaign. One evening, I heard five times that the
massacre of the Amarnath pilgrims was carried out not by a terrorist but
by a 'dejected' Indian soldier. While the hotel may offer Thai massage
inside, on the outside it is ringed by massive Kashmir banners. Therein
lies a simple dilemma Musharraf is not willing to take head on.
People no longer dispute his intention
to make Pakistan a modern, liberal, growing nation, shedding its jehadi
image. His crackdown on the mullahs, at least internally, has been real.
So is their hatred for him. Not many in India noticed last week that on
Pakistan's independence day, he spoke at a ceremony held indoors, in a
hall. Unprecedented, but necessary, given the fundamentalist threat to
his life. Even in Srinagar we insist on holding the Republic Day and Independence
Day functions in a stadium. Not so in Islamabad. Musharraf's dilemma lies
in his wish to curb fundamentalism at home while keeping at least some
kind of jehad alive in Kashmir. He wants a liberal, modern Pakistan but
knows that he cannot achieve that if hostility continues with India. To
preserve Pakistan, he needs to de-Islamise his polity. To fight India,
he must keep religious fervour alive. At some point, sooner than later,
he will have to make a choice.
(Write to Shekhar Gupta at sg@expressindia.com)
