At the PIA departure gate, the Pakistanis look apprehensive and the Indians furtive. A kind of collective fear overcomes the Pakistanis as to whether, having got this far, they will be able to return home without further let or hindrance; and a kind of collective guilt among the Indians who seem to think explanations are necessary for their doing something so unpatriotic as visiting our neighbouring country.
No wonder the world looks with amused contempt at these Siamese twins, divided by history but conjoined by geography and millennia of a shared civilizational inheritance, yet unable to work out a viable way of living together.
Bidding me farewell, my wife is concerned that "They" might start asking why I am visiting Pakistan so often. It is my fourth trip in four months. This time I am on my way to Abbotabad at the invitation of the Sungi Foundation, established by the murdered Omar, son of Air Marshall Asghar Khan, over ninety and still going strong, to speak to grassroots workers from Swat, FATA, Gilgit, Baltistan, Dir and "Azad" or "Pak-Occupied" Kashmir, plus a sprinkling of the restive local Hazaras, led by favourite son Gohar Ayub, son of Ayub Khan, who are unhappy at NWFP being renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Pakhtoons utterly thrilled at the name change, about how we in India are tackling (or failing to tackle) our problems of poverty through the political empowerment of the poor. Panchayat Raj apparently excites more interest in distant Pakistan than in our own corridors of governance.
Having set off an hour late from Delhi, we are informed in Karachi, in dreary instalments, of my connecting flight to Islamabad being delayed cumulatively by five hours! But what would otherwise have been an impossible wait is enlivened by a chance encounter with former Senator Iqbal Haider, Benzir Bhutto's Law Minister and Attorney General, who regales me with tales of the many months he spent in jail with my principal host, B.M. Kutty, political adviser to the late Ghuas Baksh Bizenjo, doyen of all Balochistan freedom fighters. (Curious how even revolution in Balochistan requires a Malayali amanuensis!) Iqbal, however, balks at my suggestion that I accompany him to a PPP rally to mourn the anniversary of Zia's overthrow of Bhutto on 5 July 1977.
Boredom is stalled by the subsequent arrival in the PIA lounge of none other than Ahmed Raza Khan Qasuri, the solitary MNA (MP) of the PPP to have defied Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to go to Dhaka for the National Assembly meeting convened after the December 1970 elections, which conferred an absolute majority on Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman's Awami League, a verdict, which the allegedly "democratic" Mr Bhutto refused to acknowledge. Bhutto had warned that he would "break the legs" of any PPP member who attended the (aborted) inaugural session of the National Assembly in Dhaka in early March, 1971. In the event, Qasuri' legs were saved but 18 assassination attempts were mounted on him during the Bhutto regime, the last of which caused the death of his father while he himself, driving the car on which the Federal Security forces opened fire, got away unscathed. That, of course, was the beginning of the end for Bhutto, eventually hung for ordering the assassination.
Ahmed Raza Qasuri is now Pervez Musharraf's chief adviser in Musharraf's attempted return to Pakistan politics as a general who has shed his uniform. As with Benazir, Musarraf's political return is being scripted from exile in Dubai. He is proposing an All Pakistan Muslim League under his leadership as an umbrella organisation that will bring under one roof the numerous factions of the old Pakistan Muslim League, now divided into as many factions as there are alphabets in the English language. It seems a doomed endeavour, but Qasuri is buoyant, and his endless fund of stories as Pakistan's principal raconteur are interrupted with numerous calls from TV channels getting his latest take on Musharraf. For a technological illiterate like me, it is fascinating to listen to Qasuri responding from the sofa next to me and simultaneously hearing his voice on the TV screen opposite.
Getting on the plane at last, dead beat, I am greeted by an ebullient Senator Begum Niloufer Bakhtiar, who lost her ministership under Musharraf for having publicly held hands with a fellow para-glider as they floated down to wild applause from an enthralled Paris audience! (Eat your heart out, Shashi Tharoor!). She keeps apologising for the delay while I reassure her that I have been held up as long at Indian airports and even longer at US airports. But it is a relief to finally fall into bed at 3 am Pakistan time - half an hour later in India by my body clock.
Up and out on the road to Abbotabad at first light next morning, I arrive as a feisty, even fiery lady orator, Tahira Abdullah, carries her 300-strong audience to flights of indignation over the atrocities and injustices being heaped on the poor of Pakistan. But she loses her listeners as she suddenly launches an attack on those sitting in front of her accusing them of collaborating with the Taliban in Swat. Indignantly, they shout her down saying she lives in comfort in Lahore while they fight the Taliban every day in the lanes of their villages and the streets of their towns. Tahira holds her own but one
protestor objects that she is denigrating Pakistan in the presence of a foreigner, and an Indian at that.
So, when my turn to speak comes in the afternoon, I begin by saying Tahira has no need to be ashamed of telling an Indian how bad poverty is in Pakistan because both our countries and, indeed, all of South Asia, are victims of the same evil, India wallowing at position 134 on the UN Human Development Index a full 15 years after it first hit 134 in 1994 despite a 15 times increase in budget allocations over this period for social sector and poverty alleviation programmes. What both countries need is effective local self-government to administer these programmes by, for and of themselves since 85 paise in the rupee is usurped by the bureaucracy as administrative expenditure, as Rajiv Gandhi pointed out two decades ago.
Although I am listened to in rapt silence for over an hour, a note is slipped to me asking whether I will also tell them about the "water issue" and "Kashmir". I readily oblige - and as I have encountered with every Pakistani audience of the close to one dozen I have addressed in recent months, there is a perfect willingness to listen and relief at being reassured of Indian intentions and the mechanisms to resolve such disputes; even to being rational on Kashmir. Why is South Block's public diplomacy unable to leverage the eager willingness of the aam Pakistani hazrat and khatoon to listen to commonsense delivered without hectoring or point-scoring?
The Q&A is even more lively and takes me long past the hour of my return to Islamabad for the High Commissioner's dinner. And gets further delayed with calls for photo-ops with virtually every delegate. It feels just like a Congress party training camp - except that most of the hundred-plus women have elongated eyes tinged with almond-hues and green, the legacy of stragglers from Alexander's army left behind in the Shangri-La of the Northern Areas we lost in 1947.
Stopping off in Lahore on my way home next day, Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, proud descendant of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Foreign Minister and Principal, Aitchison College, tells me that while I say nothing different to what other Indians say, I somehow say it in a way acceptable to Pakistanis. Is that all it takes?
We take off from Lahore for Delhi six hours late. Pakistan Paindabad! Of the last sixty hours, I have spent twenty at airports waiting for PIA to take-off, six in PIA planes, about eight hours on the road, and under eight in bed over two nights.