19th March, 2011
It’s raining buckets and the sun is peeping out every now and then. It’s going to be a quiet weekend after last weekend’s jaunt outside Islamabad to see what’s left of the Mogul buildings about 3-4 hours drive into the Punjab country side.
Islamabad isn’t a rocking city by any standards, but after visiting Lahore and Karachi, sister cities that get better press from locals and foreigners, I am growing to like it. I can see the Margella Hills, the foothills of the Himalayas, in the distance from my bedroom window. The city is lush, green and the air is crisp, fresh, and inviting.
This weekend is the first weekend since Raymond Davis, the alleged CIA contractor arrested for killing two Pakistanis, has been released and handed back to the US authorities. Nation-wide protests and demonstrations are taking place. Most of these demonstrations are taking place near Parliament buildings and the Diplomatic Enclave, the red zone in the city. Ever since I have arrived in Islamabad the Raymond Davis case has coloured politics, making it difficult to work on other areas.
Anyway this isn’t a political rant, it’s about my weekend. I haven’t updated this blog much, in fact there’s been quite a gap since I left Nepal; and you wouldn’t know I spent 2 years in China. I didn’t write much on China because well, I was always paranoid about the Chinese authorities picking something up and it landing me in trouble. I am not a coward as such, but you’d have to be a fool to live in China as a foreigner and constantly rant about human rights. Now might be a good time to start – with distance as comfort.
Back to Islamabad. I went to a party last night. Beforehand we went to dinner at a restaurant in town called Rok my café – a new restaurant set up a business man who owns a fleet of Harley Davidson motorbikes, including some rare motorcycle model from 1912, one of only 3 in the world. The evening drove home to me the different parts to Pakistan that escape the world when we report and talk about Pakistan. While it’s only a partial and unrepresentative insight into Pakistan, it still is Pakistan. I was introduced to a novelist who had just written a book called Invitation, about a Pakistani who returns back to Karachi after a long exile in the 1970s and finds himself in the middle of a dispute. The backdrop with Bangladeshis of then East Pakistan is prevalent in the novel, though not by any means a central story, and it’s this, which sparked my interest.
The one prevailing thought I keep having about Pakistan, though, is how much Islamabad thinks of Pakistan as if it was just the Punjab. Punjab is one of several provinces in Pakistan – but by no means the poorest (this is Baluchistan in the north where donors and NGOs fear to go, but some do). I suspect this is a big problem for Pakistan – until the government starts thinking about Pakistan, as more than the Punjabi population, quite a lot of the country’s problems will remain unsolved. Punjabis dominate decision-making in the country, but Punjab isn’t where the country’s intractable problems lie – these are elsewhere, so any solution to these big problems have got to come from working with the other provinces and beyond federal/national politics. The political tide seems to be going this way, with the enactment of the 18th Amendment to the National Constitution, which directed power and responsibility to the four provinces directly in April 2010, but it’s still a long way to go.
Posted by halimabegum 
