2005 Leavers News
Mira Sethi (updated August 2007)
I graduated from CLC in July, 2005. Currently I am interning at a newspaper, The Indian Express, in Delhi. My home is in Lahore, Pakistan. I've been writing for the Indian Express and my articles have appeared on the op-ed pages of the paper. Here's a link for my latest piece:
Victories, small but bright
Mira Sethi
Posted online: Tuesday, August 07, 2007
As Pakistan searches for a 21st century identity, on the eve of its 60th birthday
I have grown up in Lahore and consider myself a Lahori in all the important ways: a committed foodie, lazy and argumentative. But things in Pakistan haven’t been conducive to much conviviality of late. Working in Delhi at the Indian Express this summer and witnessing first-hand India’s bid to be a stakeholder in our globalised world, the situation at home appears gloomy. Less than a decade ago, India and Pakistan were hyphenated in social and political discourse. Things are different today.
Related Story (by Mira Sethi)
Death of a cleric http://www.indianexpress.com/story/204667.html
General Pervez Musharraf’s government is at its most unpopular since the general seized power in a coup in 1999. I remember school got cancelled. I went up to the security guard and asked why. He shook his head: “Just go home.”
I ran into class the next day and as if we were all in on a morbid national joke, “Pakistan Studies” was the first class. Our history teacher told us Pakistan was poised to begin yet another bout of military rule. At home, we watched Musharraf’s first address to the nation, as millions of Pakistanis did, eager to process the general’s inaugural wisdom.
As the years rolled on, Musharraf became a bit of a hero in Pakistan. The press became freer, more women than ever before were elected to Parliament, the economy grew at unprecedented rates, India and Pakistan began talking peace in earnest, the general gave and took as America’s key ally in the so-called war against terror while touting “enlightened moderation” at home. When friends abroad asked how things back home were, I found myself praising Musharraf for his liberal outlook and practical mind.
At the same time, the fundamentalists gained in strength. In Lahore, billboards began to be smeared with paint; balls daubed in black ink were thrown at the faces of models in western attire. Anger at the government’s brazen support of the US grew and Bush effigies were routinely burned on Lahore’s Mall road. Everywhere I looked, beards grew longer and the hijab became ubiquitous. I noticed that some members of our cricket team, too, began sporting the warrior look. The Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, came to dominate the Punjab University campus, once a liberal haven. Separate cafeterias for men and women were created and more women came to class with their heads covered.
I was away during that time, in England and the US, but I felt the changes sweeping Pakistan. When the October 8 earthquake rocked Kashmir, I was at work at a sleepy office in Washington. I remember logging onto the net and reading stories about the religious organisations that were at the forefront of the relief effort. Seventeen Sunni extremist groups previously banned by Musharraf (under pressure from the US) re-emerged with new names. Distributing food and blankets, they opened tent villages, one beneath a banner proclaiming: “Custodian of the blood of 10,000 Mujahideen.” The outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba (reincarnated as the Jamaat-al-Dawaa) set up a field hospital in Muzaffarabad. “Why should we not allow our own people to go there and assist ... whether they are jihadis or anybody?” Musharraf said at the time.
Some weeks ago, the same man clamped down on jihadists in Islamabad’s Lal Masjid. A spate of counter-attacks has followed. A mosque has been taken over and renamed Lal Masjid in Pakistan’s tribal badlands on Afghanistan’s border. The extremists are determined to arrest Pakistan’s development as a modern state. In such times, the reinstatement of the chief justice has taken on extraordinary symbolic value for Pakistani civil society. Things may be bad but important victories can be salvaged; parts of the country may be bristling with fundamentalism but huge swathes are inhabited by a citizenry committed to change.
The lawyers’ movement, led by the educated urban middle-class, has been the silver lining in our national cloud. Thousands of these professionals have waged a peaceful struggle for the reinstatement of the CJ. So, at the cusp of its 60th birthday, Pakistan is trying to marshal an identity for itself: on the one hand there is a strong impulse towards modernity, dem-ocracy and progress and on the other the fundos are trying to suicide-bomb their way back into the Stone Age. I want to believe that the former will win.
The writer is a south asian studies major at Wellesley College, US
