The cover of a recent issue of an Indian newsmagazine shows a casual group of young Pakistani women in T shirts and jeans atop the roof of a popular café in the old city of Lahore with the illuminated minarets of the Badshahi mosque in the background. Like the cover, the article inside on “Beyond the veil – days and nights in urban Pakistan” has provoked our moral brigade to vent its spleen in the local print and electronic media. They claim that it paints Lahore as an immoral city by concentrating on the lifestyles of its decrepit elites instead of giving a rounded portrait of the eminent city and its historic culture. Some of the rage is also directed at those “socialite” Pakistanis who played gushing hosts to Indian visitors during the recent cricket series and allegedly reinforced such perceptions. The outrage is all the greater because the unprecedented affection and hospitality showered on the visitors by Pakistanis seems to have been repaid by them in the form of reinforced prejudices and distortions about Pakistan in the Indian mind.
These allegations fit the adage of giving a dog a bad name and shooting it. In a nutshell, the article is a “nightcrawl through citscapes in Pakistan” which “yields a surprising yet strangely familiar snapshot album. A Lahore that’s Delhi’s immediate kin, and Karachi, Mumbai’s distant cousin” Is that an unfair comparison? The article says Indian cable TV is popular entertainment, that modern Pakistani girls wear ‘western’ clothes but are not a regular sight on the streets, that fashion shows are not very different from those in India except that mini-skirts and swimsuits are missing on the catwalk and fashion shows have never been disrupted by the moral brigade as in India occasionally, that General Musharraf is popular among young upscale businessmen and professionals who admire his battle against the mullahs, that trendy restaurants are all the rage with the young even though they don’t serve booze, and so on.
Isn’t all this fair comment? A reference to Lahore’s heera mandi and its insipid nautch girls was inevitable, as was dining out in the famous Food Street, but what’s so wrong about that? Snapshots about how the other half lives are captured in scenes of open rooms in the environs of the old city in which people sit and watch Indian video films or young men shoot pool and bet on games. The article sympathetically notes that “with the coming of General Musharraf’s rather practical governance, those rare house sniffs by cops and the street checks to seek out drinkers for eventual fining, imprisonment or Islamic lashings have virtually been abolished” A truer and unprejudiced snapshot for the English reading Indian public couldn’t have been constructed.
Perhaps the pious in our midst would much prefer visiting journalists to paint Pakistan like a sort of Afghanistan – where bombs go off regularly killing fellow Muslims and foreigners alike, where Islamic jihadis in camouflage sport guns and rocket launchers and strut about threatening everyone, where black-shuttlecocked women ply the streets like penguins. Certainly, that’s an image of Pakistan which has sometimes been flogged by eminent western writers in eminent western newspapers. In fact, not so long ago, an article on Karachi in a leading western newsmagazine did just that, portraying the city as infected with terrorists, kidnappers, criminals and unholy mafias, unsafe for visiting businessmen and sportsmen — a perception that eventually led to the cancellation of proposed cricket test matches in the city for security reasons. But surely that’s not what we want the world to think, do we? Aren’t we keen to tell the world that we are as normal and moderate and welcoming and fun-loving and safe and profitable as any emerging-market middle income country in the world?
In part, at least, the furore seems politically inspired. Leading the nasty charge is a rabid anti-India (read anti-Hindu), “thekedar of Pakistan” newspaper whose other virtues are being pro-Nawaz Sharif and anti-General Musharraf. It has been particularly harsh on General Musharraf for wanting to play ball with America and for his flexible and pro-peace policy vis-à-vis India. It has distorted the article in question to try and erode the public goodwill for General Musharraf’s India policy. In part, too, this is simply a case of sour grapes for some frustrated Pakistani hacks who were not invited to, or missed out on, the social GTs where much harmless fun was had by all. There is a surfeit of such pious, self-righteous, killjoys in the Land of the Pure. But their bark is worse than their bite and we should learn to shrug them off.
The fact is that the new-generation Indians who came to Pakistan were overwhelmed by our natural hospitality. The fact is that they universally went back with wonderful memories of Pakistan and Pakistanis. The fact is that they wrote enthusiastically about their trip. The fact is that their writings are serving to erode the prejudices of past generations and reversing the negative image of Pakistan as a land of raving fundamentalists who oppress their women. The fact is that they will become Pakistan’s best ambassadors to India. What more can the cause of peace require?