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A TALENT FOR SHROUDS

"Pakistan : eye of the storm" By Owen Bennett Jones

(Yale University Press, 2002, London and New Haven, 316pp  £18.95)

In the late 1970s, I had a "Zorba the Greek" kind of colleague in the World Service of the BBC by the name of Feyyaz Fergar. We all loved him, specially in the basement bar of Bush House in the Aldwych, but alas too many of us discovered too late that he was a wonderful poet, as well as an uplifting companion. A Turk of Armenian origin, he had hidden his heart condition from his family for years and died in a Greek restaurant in the early hours of one morning in April 1993. For his obituary in The Times,  his publisher, David Perman of the Rockingham Press, sent me his collection of poems written originally in English. It was called A talent for shrouds and poked fun at societies in the grip of religious doctrine. (Another volume was published posthumously with an even better title: The bright is dark enough. Both are now among my most valued possessions and are specially effective in raising the moral of mourners at funeral services!)

The author of this much-needed book, Owen Bennett Jones, will probably remember Feyyaz, though he is of a younger generation of broadcasters in Bush House. He will also probably agree that the subject of his book would be one of the top handful of new states that have, since their inception, demonstrated a special talent for shrouds.

You do not have to work hard to find a set of statistics that show what an utter failure has the state of Pakistan been since it split from India in the wake of the second world war. It could justifiably be described as a vast storehouse of human misery. 60 percent of its people are illiterate, a third of them are undernourished and more than half of them have no access to rudimentary sanitation. About 5000 people can be bought or sold as bonded labourers and are sometime kept in chains, while several thousands of women are imprisoned for complaining of rape without producing enough male witnesses to prove their claim.

Other statistics are more comical, but tell of the same tragedy. Some 60 percent of the country's electricity is stolen and, when discovered, the thieves merely receive a polite request to pay back some of the money. Much more important is that less than one per cent of the people who ought to pay tax to the government ever do so. Why should they, if their leader till 1999, the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, with a personal wealth of some £2bn, is found to have paid only about £7 in tax over several years? No-one has ever been jailed for failing to pay tax since the birth of the state.

Almost every page of this book contains a number of such depressing shocks, yet I found it difficult to put down. This was not just because Bennett Jones is informed by that rare objectivity and realism that are the fruits of many years' reporting and presenting on Pakistan for the various current affairs programmes of the World Service. More to the point, it is because his book is not about some poor and remote country whose future does not, frankly, affect too many people outside. We are dealing here with a nuclear power that could go to war with India any day with a population of nearly 140 million that still rises rapidly and gets more divided and angry as it grows poorer. Furthermore, with large colonies of Pakistanis now living here, Pakistan's domestic passions, such as its displeasure with Salman Rushdie in 1989 and the fall of the Taliban more recently, transmit themselves immediately to the inner cities of Britain. Since September 11, Pakistani immigrants here have become a real – and costly – security headache for us all and they are, as a result, becoming ever more alienated from their host country.

The book is all the more readable because it is not written in a continuous chronological manner, but divided into chapters that deal with specific subjects, such as the misbehaviour of the army, the irrational obsession that is Indian Kashmir for Punjabi Pakistanis, why a minority of mullahs have been able to impose their rigid interpretation of Islam on a largely heretical, but cowed, majority, the breaking away of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh, and the challenge that faces the country's latest military ruler, general Parvez Musharraf.

Bennett Jones is pessimistic that the general, though a modern-minded sort of chap himself, will prove any more successful than his predecessors in guiding Pakistan towards becoming a moderately functioning society at peace with itself and the world. He shows how some of Musharraf's colleagues see themselves as 'soldiers of Allah' devoted to spreading Islam to the rest of the world, rather than defending Pakistan's borders. These other generals will probably fight any attempt to reach a sane compromise over Kashmir with India, and, furthermore, Musharraf has already abandoned some of the main aims of his coup of 1999: collecting taxes, fighting corruption and forcing thousands of religious schools to put some modern content into their syllabi.

But Bennett Jones does not totally dismiss Musharraf's chances. He is, the author believes, aware of the failures of the previous periods of military rule, and the army is less likely to move against one of its own. Also, in the new war against terrorism, he has already received several billions dollars in extra western aid to rescue his country from immediate bankruptcy.

There have been a number of books published in English in recent years on Pakistan, but most are written by Pakistanis who are too close to the trees to see the wood. The others are more specialised and less well written. For the general reader who expects Pakistan to give the world some hair-raising moments over the next few years, the cost of the book is justified by its introductory and concluding chapters alone. For presidents and prime ministers, it ought to be in the holiday luggage. General Musharraf ought to keep it under his pillow, beside his pistol. We need him to succeed.

By courtesy of the Literary Review, August 2002.

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