Pakistan Resembles One Of The Old Japanese Puzzle Boxes - Comprising Of Secret Compartments And Hidden Traps: Deccan Walsh
By Khaled Ahmed
November
21, 2020
Before his
departure, Walsh posted on Twitter: “72 hours, wheels up. To all friends,
especially in Pakistan, who offered overwhelming support in recent days, thank
you so much.” (Facebook/ Declan Walsh)
Declan Walsh had been working
in Pakistan since 2004. PHOTO: ATHAR KHAN/EXPERSS
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Journalist
Declan Walsh, who was in Pakistan for over a decade and covered it for The
Guardian and The New York Times, has written Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches
from a Divided Nation. Its first chapter is titled ‘Insha’ Allah Nation’. In
2013, according to the Times, he was ordered to leave the country within 72
hours “in view of your undesirable activities”. Plainclothes intelligence
officers had accompanied him to the airport, making sure he flew out of
Pakistan. Before his departure, Walsh posted on Twitter: “72 hours, wheels up.
To all friends, especially in Pakistan, who offered overwhelming support in
recent days, thank you so much.”
The
troubled times in Pakistan that Walsh covered were bad by any Pakistani
yardstick too. Only he explained it graphically, with a wealth of information
based on the “nine lives” he now examines in his book. Perhaps, no other
journalist to date had the kind of access to people and places; and since
Pakistan is run by men in power rather than the law, it is astounding how much
“inside information” he had on everyone, from the clerics of Islamabad’s Red
Mosque, who owed allegiance to Osama bin Laden, to Colonel Imam, the man who
trained the Afghans to fight against the invading Soviets but ended up being
the father of terrorism that was to destroy normal life in Pakistan.
Walsh sums
it up like this: “To me, Pakistan resembled one of those old Japanese puzzle
boxes, comprised of secret compartments and hidden traps, which can only be
opened in a unique, step-by-step sequence. One afternoon, as I sat in my garden
with a friend, considering the latest convulsion, he suddenly threw up his
hands in exasperation. ‘That’s the difference between us,’ he said. You are
always looking for answers. I have trouble with the questions.’ In my darker
moments, it seemed the only thing holding all together was blind faith. ‘Insha
Allah it will happen,’ people said, all the time. ‘Insha Allah’ translates as
‘If God wills it’, and I heard it everywhere… Sure, things were hard, people
admitted. But Pakistan would stumble through, as it had always done — Insha
Allah.”
Walsh
reminds one of the Nobel Prize winner V S Naipaul. He was a West Indian whose
Indian parents had left India a hundred years earlier. He probably had
romanticised India as a child but had the ill-luck of visiting India in 1975,
at the height of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Out of this traumatic encounter
came India: A Wounded Civilisation, which contained paragraphs of lyrical
brilliance that pleased no one in India. He planned it quite deliberately: “A
dead country still running with the momentum of its heyday… I am planning to
write a book about these damned people and the wretched country of theirs,
exposing their detestable traits. Grill them on everything.”
But Naipaul
was in despair about the world in general too and if India took it ill, so must
the others: “Asia today is only a primitive manifestation of a long-dead
culture; Europe is battered into a primitivism by material circumstances;
America is an abortion. Look at Indian music. It is being influenced by Western
music to an amusing extent. Indian painting and sculpture have ceased to
exist.”
Then came
the offensive passages on India: “Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate,
mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they
defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the
streets; they never look for cover… Muslims, with their tradition of purdah,
can at times be secretive. But this is a religious act of self-denial, for it
is said that the peasant, Muslim or Hindu, suffers from claustrophobia if he
has to use an enclosed latrine.”
India
reacted angrily, but it was in 2019 that the government of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi changed India forever. It built a staggering 111 million toilets,
mainly in rural India, at a cost of more than one trillion rupees ($14 billion).
It became the largest toilet-building project in the world, splitting the
funding with the World Bank 60:40.
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Khaled Ahmed is consulting editor, Newsweek
Pakistan
Original Headline: Journalist Declan Walsh’s
account describes exasperation, and hope, in Pakistan
Source: The Indian Express
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