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 Last Night I went to 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.