It was interesting to note that, alas, though the electronic and social media is effective in generating hype and virtual commotions, they do not necessarily impact voting trends the way one was expecting them to.

If one believed in the sustained hype about PTI’s ‘tsunami’ in the social media, he or she was understandably left mouthing incoherent and disoriented gibberish on Twitter and Facebook the moment it became clear that PMLN would bulldoze all opposition, especially in the Punjab.

Not only was PTI drubbed severely in the Punjab by PMLN, it could not even go past the number of seats won by the PPP — a party that was pushed into the corner by threats and attacks by the TTP and came to the election as a highly unpopular outfit after spending five chaotic and mismanaged years as the outgoing ruling party.

In Sindh where, according to the electronic media, PMLF and the Sindhi nationalists were set to finally topple the PPP’s traditional supremacy, they simply failed to even slightly check the PPP’s sprint towards victory. The PPP ended up winning a comfortable majority in both the national as well as provincial assembly elections in the region.

However, the electronic media was correct in predicting the success of the MQM, the major party of Sindh’s capital, Karachi. The party managed to retain its electoral hold in the city, even though PTI accused it of rigging the election.

The truth is, even if one takes back a chunk of the votes that the MQM received, it will still manage to win in Karachi. Those residing outside Karachi, or for that matter, away from the more congested areas of the city, have yet to figure out the rather complex and paradoxical nature of the party’s electoral popularity among the Urdu-speaking majority in Karachi and in parts of Hyderabad.

MQM cannot be defeated in Karachi with lofty middle class idealism and moralism or with flag-waving patriotism. Not only are these perceived by MQM voters to be tools and excuses to undo the economic and political interests of the city’s Urdu-speakers, these also don’t unclog gutters, mend electricity wires, and guarantee regular water supply to areas far way from trendy boulevards and shopping malls of Clifton and Defense.

Apart from PMLN’s stunning show in the Punjab, the other most interesting bits about the election was the way PTI managed to gather a semblance of respectability by winning big in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK).

Though the media did allude to PTI’s growing popularity in KP, however, during the last few weeks of the election campaign, when the province’s outgoing ruling party, the ANP, was suffering a continuous series of brutal assaults by the extremists, TV channels began to float the idea that the ANP might benefit from a sympathy wave.

Nothing of the sort happened and the party was rudely wiped out by PTI that managed to win the largest number of seats in KP.

But perhaps the most noteworthy bit, at least to me, was to see how Peshawar in KP and Rawalpindi in the Punjab voted. Both these cities went to the PTI.

Rawalpindi was swept by the left-liberal PPP in the 1970 and 1977 election. It gave a split verdict between the PPP and the conservative PML (IJI), in the 1988 election, before falling completely in the lap of PMLN throughout the 1990s.

The PPP did manage to win a few seats here in the 2002 and 2008 election, but Rawalpindi remained to be a PMLN stronghold until this year’s election.

PTI dislodged PMLN’s supremely here on May 11, and ironically, it did so in an election in which the PMLN completely swept the rest of the Punjab!

Peshawar where PTI enjoyed a clean sweep on May 11, has turned out to be an even more (if not the most) temperamental city when it comes to elections. Its seats were shared between the left-wing NAP and the right-wing JUI in 1970.

Then between 1988 and 1997, these seats altered between the PPP and the left-liberal ANP before going completely to the right-wing alliance of religious parties, the MMA in the 2002 election.

In 2008, Peshawar re-adjusted itself and once again voted for the secular ANP and the PPP, only to obliterate both these parties in 2013 and give the centre-right PTI all four of its seats.

Some observers believe that whereas voting in Rawalpindi still takes place on the basis of ideology — reflecting Punjab’s shift from left to right ever since 1990 — voting trends in Peshawar however, always exhibit the city’s pragmatic nature where its Pashtoon and Hindko voters are merciless in judging both left and right parties purely on the basis of performance.

Well, I haven’t been to Swat in a long time and I have no idea what became of Atique. But thanks to the rude mushrooming of the rowdy keepers of faith in that part of Pakistan some five years ago, I’m sure his children weren’t even able to walk a kilometre for knowledge, let alone ever visiting China.

Though the 2009 military operation in that area largely cleared the place of the mad men, last year’s shooting of the 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai confirmed the apprehension that these men are still embedded in Swat among its otherwise peaceful populace.

These men were an angry lot. Once upon a time, it is said, they used to let off steam by chopping down trees. That was bad enough, but I guess ever since trees have become somewhat scarce in Swat, the level of their delusions about faith suddenly doubled, rather quadrupled.

As a consequence, they began ranting incoherent loud nothings on clandestine FM radio stations about how extremely angry they were about all the obscenity and injustice in the world and about matters related to the education of little girls. Indeed, a grave danger to faith these young ones certainly are.

Well, the loud FM stations too didn’t seem to satisfy their monstrous appetites for divinely inspired action, so off they went blowing up CD shops and girls’ schools.

Blow ‘em all, became their heartfelt mantra, as they became angrier, louder and, of course, a lot bushier.

Unfortunately, since supposedly their faith was a lot stronger than that of us ‘bad Muslims’, it required more from them. So these angry men started blowing themselves up!

What’s more, for an impressive display and effect, they did this in public places. Off they went with a bang, taking along with them mutilated and severed bodies, dozens of men, women and children. And up they all went to paradise, or so they say, and so they believed.

But what about you and I, the bad Muslims?

What do we have to say about the blowing up of girls’ schools, CD and barber shops in our own backyard? Happenings that are still a reality in various towns, enclaves and cities of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, south Punjab and parts of Karachi?

What do we have to say about men of faith in our very own country who actually believe that suicide and multiple murders in the name of God will land them a cosy little corner in paradise?

The ideological and material clash of two extremes — Bush’s clean-shaven neo-cons and the bushy Islamist terrorists — have left most ‘moderate’ Muslim populations in a scared and awkward state of myopia.

This disposition has helped serve the purpose of the Islamists. Sadly, most ‘moderate Muslims’, instead of forming a third opinion through some sort of a rational consensus, have decided to take sides between the two extremes.

For example, most Pakistanis naturally took an opposing view of Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Fair enough. But since much of this was done without a clear third view, commentaries and opinions against matters like drone attacks, suicide bombings and ‘war on terror’ have regrettably sounded more and more like jerky jingoistic spiels.

Unfortunately, these excitable tirades helped fatten the delusional and self-righteous complexes of the Islamists.

The third view — that is directly linked to the democratic political parties and the self-interest of the military, government and society of Pakistan — was ultimately sacrificed at the altar of hyperbolic political clichés and rants, making the country continue suffering from a scenario in which we went on bad-mouthing one extreme (neo-cons) while uncannily allowing the other extreme to get fatter, bolder and wilder.

As for Atique Ali Khan, I wonder if he’s still alive, or for that matter, if his children are still alive. One thing’s for sure, though. They won’t have many schools left to go to.
But what’s a school compared to a place in paradise, aye?

File photo

Today two forces will be going out to decide Pakistan’s fate: One with the votes and the other with the bombs. History will be on the side of the ones with the votes.  There are no two opinions about this.

No matter who one votes for, each and every party and individual taking part in the election should be hailed and praised for keeping faith in democracy – a system that truly remains to be the only one capable of arresting the country’s downward trajectory.

Also, praise in this context is deserved by the chief of the Pakistan Army, General Parvez Kayani, for repeatedly and clearly emphasising the Army’s support for democracy.

Nevertheless, three of Pakistan’s four provinces are in the grip of fear. Party leaders and workers have been mercilessly attacked by the Islamist and sectarian groups in Sindh and KP, and by Baloch separatists in Balochistan.

If the Caretaker government, the military, the Rangers and the police are not successful in checking those forces with bombs in their hands and nihilist hatred in their hearts today, this most vital election might just fail to safeguard its status of bringing perhaps, the most important event in the political history of this nation ever since the 1970 polls.

Consider: What if a peaceful election is only carried out in the Punjab? There is then every likelihood that those parties whose voters are affected the most by the violence of the nihilists in the remaining provinces will simply refuse to accept the results.

On what grounds then, would the winning parties claim the right to form the government? And if they do manage to form a government, it will be a weak and unstable regime, rejected by millions of those in Sindh, KP and Balochistan who were forced to remain inside their homes on Election Day by the nihilists.

Let’s hope this is not the case. Let’s hope that those deployed by the government to secure a peaceful election are at least largely successful in keeping the nihilists at bay.

This is the only way that the authorities and the winning parties would be able to keep the post-election disgruntlement at a minimum and finally carry out Pakistan s first ever democratic transition of power.

The election campaigning, as we all know was anything but free. The nihilists in three provinces managed to make these areas look like battlefields of fear and furious violence compared to the carnival-like atmosphere that one witnessed and felt in the Punjab.

If the same happens today, then I’m afraid, the anti-Punjab currents that have always flown across polities in Sindh, Balochistan and to some extent, the KP, are bound to recharge the anti-Federalist feelings in these provinces even within those Sindhi, Baloch, Mohajir and Pushtun Pakistanis who have so far maintained their faith in a united Federation.

That’s why it is important that the establishment, and even political parties that have their main vote banks in the Punjab, ensure that unlike the campaigning, elections in the three provinces are not allowed to be decided by bombs and fear.

It is still not known exactly how many people are now willing to go out and vote in Sindh (particularly Karachi), Balochistan and KP. The threat perception is quite real here and intelligence reports suggest that the nihilists are planning to violently sabotage the election, especially in the main urban centers of the mentioned provinces.

But then, the same reports speak about possible terrorist activity in the Punjab as well. I’m sure the government and the military are well aware of the threat. But the nihilists’ terror tactics in Pakistan in the last decade or so have been such that it has become tough for the authorities to predict exactly what kind of tactics the terrorists plan to employ.

In other words, guessing that there will be an attack is easier than determining exactly what kind of an attack it will be.

Most probably the nihilists were expecting their least favorite parties to boycott the polls after the way these parties were attacked. But thanks to the tenacity and commitment of the attacked parties, that did not happen.

But anything can happen today. And maybe nothing. Let’s hope and pray that it is the latter. Either way, at least I will be going out with the greatest weapon of all: The vote. And I hope so will you. Good luck.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

It went something like this: ‘Pak-Cheen dosti wang woye, wang woye, wang woye, wang woye, Pak-Cheen dosti zindabad, zindabad, zindabad, zindaabaaad.’

The words ‘wang woye’ were in Chinese and were the Chinese equivalent of the Urdu word ‘zindabad’ (long live).

What amazing days they were. And what’s more, a bowl of chicken corn soup at Chinese restaurants was not only cheaper but tastier as well.

Some say that was because the Chinese restaurants used pieces from desi Pakistani murghis (chickens) and not from the ones cloned in those inhuman/inchicken poultry farms that sprang up across Pakistan in the late 1970s.

Meat from desi chickens being used by expert Chinese cooks was one of the true reflections of Pak-Cheen dosti (Pak-China friendship). It is the unique chicken corn soup that you can still get from Chinese restaurants in Pakistan that has made the Pak-China friendship so great, legendary, and, well, unique.

Recognising this, the United States tried its utmost to stick a spammer in the relationship between Pakistan and China. It tried to do this by introducing the evil science of chicken cloning in Pakistan. Chicken cloning really became popular among the country’s naïve poultry farmers because it was cheaper to maintain, compared to raising healthy desi chicks.

The US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (also known as Ace Fernley), first visited Pakistan in 1972 right after the country lost a war against Bengali terrorists in former East Pakistan – a war, one must remember, in which the US did not help Pakistan during and which India claimed it won.

Only China came to our rescue. As the US imposed an arms embargo on Pakistan and while the Bengali terrorists were being armed by India that was being armed by the Soviet Union that was being armed by the communist wing of the Illuminati; China sent an army of 77,000 chefs to Pakistan who prepared zabardast, delicious giant bowls of chicken corn soup for our troops. Yum.

Most Pakistanis had tears in their eyes. Cynics said it was just the chilly sauce in the soup, but the truth was, it was this beautiful gesture by the Chinese during the bloody war that made us so emotional. After all, it was a war in which so many true Muslim Pakistanis of West Pakistan were brutally slaughtered by East Pakistani terrorists.

Impressed with the way West Pakistan so successfully got rid of the troublesome and useless East Pakistanis, Ace Fernley arrived for a secret meeting with Pakistan’s new premier, Zulfikar Ali Babutto.

After congratulating Premier Babutto on the conduct of the Pakistan army and its people in their war against Bengali terrorists, Ace unravelled the real purpose of his visit: China.

Conscious of the growing relationship between Pakistan and China – and jealous of the fact that Chinese food at US Chinese restaurants pretty much sucked – Ace asked Babutto to help US start a dialogue with the communist Chinese regime to neutralise the global communist threat being faced by the world from the Soviet Union and an obscure tribe deep inside the Amazon forest.

Babutto agreed and his government helped kick-start talks between Chinese premier, Zhou Ajinomoto, the Chinese Communist Party Chairman, Mao Something-Tung, and Ace Fernley.

The secret talks took place in a comfy little corner of the Great Wall of China and both the parties – the third party, Pakistan, was sent on a sight-seeing tour – agreed to tackle the Soviet menace together.

It was also decided that the Chinese will share its Pakistani recipe of chicken corn soup with the Americans in exchange for 15,000 Levis bellbottoms for the members of the Chinese Communist Party.

Ace Fernley thanked Premier Bubutto for arranging the historic first contact between US and China, saying this has also strengthened relations between Pakistan and the US. Premier Ajinomoto of China too thanked Bubutto saying, ‘the soup can now only get tastier.’

But relations between the US and Pakistan began to strain when in 1974 India managed to construct a nuclear device. It was a nuclear powered toothbrush. It was proudly exhibited on the Indian media by the Indian premier, Prem Chopra.

Prime Minister Bubutto promised the Pakistani armed forces that he will do anything in (and out) of his power to make sure Pakistan too had a nuclear toothbrush. For this, he assembled a team of top Pakistani dentists, one of which was a young man called Dr. No.

Concerned about the concern of its friend Pakistan, the Chinese government sent 60,000 Chinese dentists to Pakistan. Though none of them really helped Pakistan build a nuclear toothbrush, they did end up putting a lot of Pakistani dentists out of work.

This made Dr. No very angry and he began calling Bubutto an atheist and someone who preferred fried frogs legs over fried chicken wings. Dr. No decided to leave Pakistan and travel to Holland.

Meanwhile, the US, through its moles and squirrels in Prime Minister Bubutto’s garden, got to find out about Bubutto’s plan of constructing the nuclear toothbrush. Ace Fernlay asked China to caution Bubutto. The Chinese government did caution Bubutto – but in Chinese.

So, obviously, Bubutto had no idea what the Chinese were talking about, and replied, ‘Yes, yes, thank you. We love you too.’ Not understanding what Bubutto was talking about, the Chinese once more sent him a caution – again in Chinese.

Ace Fernley was livid. He sent a message to the Chinese: ‘Why are you cautioning them in Chinese?’

Not understanding the message, the Chinese replied (this time in English): ‘Yes, yes, thank you. We love you too.’

Frustrated, Fernley is said to have directly called Prime Minister Bubutto, warning him that the US would make a horrible example of him if he didn’t stop his programme of building a nuclear toothbrush.

‘Why?’ asked Bubutto. ‘We have teeth too.’

‘I will break those teeth if you don’t stop,’ said Fernley.

‘Good,’ replied Bubutto. ‘Then we’ll make nuclear teeth as well.’

Only months after the conversation, a movement against Bubutto led by Pakistan’s religious parties erupted. Bubutto accused the Americans for funding the movement. The religious parties denied this and said they’d had enough of a PM who preferred frog legs over chicken wings. They also accused Bubutto of putting thousands of Pakistani dentists out of work.

‘Look!’ said leader of a religious party at a press conference while showing his cavity-stricken teeth. ‘Look! I can’t find a decent Muslim Pakistani dentist anymore. How can a pious Muslim like me go to a Chinese dentist? They don’t believe in God. And eat frog legs!’

As the movement against Bubbuto gained momentum, he turned towards the Chinese for help, only to find that they were still speaking to him in Chinese. Alas, in July 1977, Bubutto’s government was toppled by General Nasim Hijazi.

But this didn’t impact Pak-Cheen dosti. In fact, not only did the Pak-China friendship remain intact, a new chapter of co-operation and friendship began between Pakistan and the US.

This was the time when the US introduced chicken cloning technology in Pakistan. General Nasim and his partners in the religious parties at once endorsed the technology, calling it ‘in accordance with the moral and dietary dictates of faith.’

Bubutto was hanged in 1979, but the Chinese got to know about his demise in 1988 when his daughter Benazir was elected Prime Minister of Pakistan.

‘Really? He’s dead? Like, gone? Wasn’t he in Libya?’ The Chinese delegation had asked Benazir.

‘He died 10 years ago, gentlemen,’ Benazir had replied. ‘Where have you been?’

The Chinese delegates were surprised by the question: ‘Madam, we were helping our friend Pakistan defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. You can still see the giant bowls of chicken corn soup that we sent on the battle fields.’

That they did. They also kept a stable relationship with the US, especially with US President, Ronald Claude Van Damme, who was also a huge chicken corn soup fan.

President Van Damme’s remarkable passion for defeating the Godless Soviets through Pakistan and the Afghan mujahideen made him purposefully ignore Pakistan’s ongoing plans to build a nuclear toothbrush.

He knew that his comrade in arms, General Nasim, had continued the programme and also the fact that the General and his supporters in religious parties were now calling it the ‘Islamic Brush.’

Dr. No too had returned from Holland, smuggling sensitive blueprints from various dental clinics in Amsterdam and leading a group of Pakistani dentists to build a nuclear toothbrush.

China knew about the programme and as a friend asked all right-handed Chinese dentists in Pakistan to become left-handed and left-handed dentists too become right-handed so that the Pakistani dentists would start looking better than their Chinese counterparts. It was a great sacrifice.

China again came to the rescue, when after the Godless Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, the US suddenly abandoned Pakistan and became concerned again by Pakistan’s plans to build a nuclear toothbrush.

US placed economic and aid sanctions on Pakistan and also stopped the sale of halal toothpaste in the United States, leaving many Pakistani Muslims living in the US using Miswak to brush their teeth with. It was a great injustice.

This made the Pakistan armed forces very angry and they pressurised the government to quicken the process of building the nuclear toothbrush.

Dr. No said that the brush should now be used against Western, Zionist, and Hindu US dentists.

During the economic and political crises that Pakistan went through in 1990s – mainly due to US sanctions and, of course, due to the corrupt, unpatriotic and useless civilian leadership – China jumped in to help.

In Pakistan’s hour of need, China sent about 10 million gold fish bowls to Pakistan. Feeling upbeat by the arrival of the gold fish bowls, Pakistan finally announced that it had made the nuclear toothbrush.

The toothbrush made Pakistan a proud nation of strong, shining white teeth.

Dr. No is now hailed as the father of the brush and in a noble exhibition of his love for faith, he even tried to spread his faith in North Korea by sending them certain parts with which the North Korans too could build a nuclear toothbrush; and brush the US and Europe off the face of the earth, yea baby!

Also, though Pakistan’s religious political parties, military, Dr. No and your neighbour still don’t like the fact that the Chinese eat frog legs, they see it being Pakistan’s only true and greatest friend.

Only recently this friendship was once again displayed during the terrible floods that Pakistan faced in 2010.

European countries and the US might have been the first ones to send aid to Pakistan during the floods, but it was our dear friend China who actually put a smile on our faces during the ordeal by sending 10 million stuffed pandas with strings which when pulled made the pandas sing, ‘Pak-Cheen dosti wang woye, wang woye, wang woye, wang woye …’

Relations between Pakistan and China have not only grown on an official and economic level, but on a spiritual level as well. The North West region of Pakistan that hosts Arab, Chechen, Uzbik, Tajik, Somalian and Martian Buddhists, is now fast becoming a training ground for Chinese Buddhists as well.

They are being trained by Pakistani Sufi masters in the mountains to achieve nirvana by exploding themselves at the sight of frog legs. Somehow, the Chinese regime is not very happy with this. Silly people.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

A video grab of the PTI election campaign song, “Chalo chalo Imran Khan ke saath”.

The political campaign song has become a mainstay of the Pakistan election scene. The phenomenon is not exactly new; one of the first songs recorded and released in this context was during the 1988 election, almost 25 years ago.

The song was ‘Dila Teer Bija’ (An arrow to your heart), a meaty ditty based on a funky, beat-heavy rendition of Baloch folk music and sung by Shabana Noshi. The song was recorded in a music studio in Karachi’s vast slum area, Lyari, at the height of what was called the ‘Lyari Disco Scene’ in the 1980s. Lyari being a Pakistan Peoples Party stronghold, the song’s lyrics and imagery depicted the passionate disposition of diehard PPP supporters known as jiyalas.

The song was an instant hit and was used to great effect by the PPP during the 1988 election. The same year the MQM came up with its own campaign song, ‘Saathi’ (comrade), a melodic tribute to its chief Altaf Hussain. These two songs were often heard in PPP and MQM rallies, so much so that their success even made a minor party, the Punjabi Pukhtun Ittehad, release the song ‘PPI Koh Jita Dey.’

Between the 1988 and 1993 elections, political campaign songs remained very much a Karachi-based phenomenon. By the 1993 election, the PPP and MQM had recorded over a dozen songs and made them available on CDs and cassettes. Ironically, it was the right-leaning Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) that picked up on the trend and released a song based on the party’s main slogan for the 1993 election: Zalmoun, Qazi Aa Raha Hai,’ (Oppressors, Qazi is coming).

After 1993, when the post-Zia democratic system began to wear out due to the continuous and exhaustive three-way tussle between the PPP, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the military establishment, the trend of producing political campaign songs also witnessed a dip.

Nevertheless, the PML-N that saw a rise in its electoral fortunes in the 1997 elections did produce a song of its own. The PPP continued to play songs that were recorded between 1988 and 1993, while the MQM failed to reproduce anything new either.

The political campaign song returned to the election scene once again during the tense 2008 elections. The PPP regenerated old material by producing remixes of their song ‘Dila Teer Bija’, and the PML-N matched it with the equally catchy ‘Mera Mulk Bachao, Hun Tey Wardi Lai Gai Ay’ (Save my country now that (Musharraf) has taken off his uniform). The song was sung (in Punjabi) by Bahwal Haq Shah.

It was also during the 2008 elections that the Pakhtun nationalist party, the Awami National Party, for the first time released a campaign song. The hypnotic tune ‘Pakhtunkhwa Zama Watan,’ sung by famous young Pashto singer Aziz Jani, not only paid tribute to Pakhtun nationalist leaders such as Bacha Khan and Wali Khan but also to the Balochistan-based Pakhtun nationalist, Mehmood Khan Achakzai.

But it was in 2011 that the trend of party songs truly revived itself with the rise of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). By then recording and employing specially recorded songs to attract the youth had increasingly become the vocation of right-wing parties.

First the PTI adopted the pop group The Strings’ ‘Mein Tou Deikoon Ga’ (I shall see), then almost immediately recorded its first well-known song, ‘Dil Mein Ho Insaaf’ (If there is justice in the heart).

During the same year the JI released a series of songs as well: ‘Logo, logo’ (People, people), and ‘Pakistan Ka Matlab Kya, La Illaha Illah’.
Interestingly, since the JI is an Islamist party, it explained these songs as taranas (anthems) instead of songs. Also in 2012, the PML-N released ‘Sher Aaya’ (Here comes the lion) — the lion being the party chief, Nawaz Sharif.

As the 2013 elections approach, the competition between centre-right parties, the PML-N and PTI, and rightist parties such as the JI, for the large right-wing vote in Punjab is also accompanied by a competition to come up with the best songs.

The PTI took the lead by hiring famous playback singer Rahat Fateh Ali Khan to sing ‘Chalo, Chalo Imran Kay Saath’ (Come with Imran).
Fateh Ali then went on to sing the PML-N’s ‘Tum Sey Apna Ye Wada Hai’ (This is my promise to you).

This is at least one example of how the intense tussle between these parties has, on many occasions, managed to reduce them to caricatures of populist politics.

The PTI then moved to hire popular Punjabi and Seraiki folk singer, Attaullah Niazi, to sing ‘Banein Ga Naya Pakistan (A new Pakistan will be made), in his typical melodic style.

But while the floodgates have opened to produce tune after tune from the PML-N and the PTI, the PPP, ANP and the MQM have remained largely quiet. One reason could be the way these parties have been attacked by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. Sadly, the MQM and the PPP — the two parties that kick-started the trend of producing party songs in Pakistan — have not been able to keep up with the battery of songs pouring out from PTI and PML-N electoral machines.

However, though unable to freely campaign due to the extremist threat, the PPP has after many years finally found a brand-new party song in late April. It’s called ‘Hum Bhutto Hein, Hum Benazir Hein’ (We are Bhutto, we are Benazir). Though not as catchy as the classic ‘Dila Teer Bija’, it does manage to evoke imagery revolving around the aspirations of the peasant and working classes, bypassing the largely urban middle-class aspirations being highlighted in the PTI and PML-N songs.

The only difference is, in the Stone Ages, these Neanderthals were armed with clubs and stones, but today they are armed with guns and bombs. Remarkably though, they remain as furry as they were millions of years ago.

The modern state of Pakistan was born out of the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 and has faced many regional confrontations, usually brought on by its continuing habit of poking its nose where it doesn’t belong.

Created to meet the demands of Indian Muslims, Pakistan was originally in two parts: Part 1 was called Maula Jat and Part 2 was called Jat in Dhaka.

The east wing — present day Flooded Republic of Bangladesh is on the Bay of Bengal bordering the Bollywood Republic of India and the Miserable Republic of Burma.

The west wing — present-day the Not-Quite-Arab Republic of Pakistan — stretches from the Arabian Sea to the Himalayas and according to famous poet, philosopher, military strategist, historian and judo expert, Zidee Hamid, the country actually stretches all the way to New Delhi, Kabul, Tashkent and maybe even Beijing and many parts of Mars.

The break-up of the two wings came in 1971 when the fish-eating east-wing seceded after fighting an insurgency culled and planned from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and an early draft of the Di Vinci Code.

Civilian politics in Pakistan in the last few decades has been tarnished by corruption, inefficiency, confrontations and bad breath between various institutions and/or whatever institutions that are left in the country. Actually, the word political institution is an oxymoron when discussed in the context of Pakistani politics and the state.

Alternating periods of civilian and military rule have not helped to establish stability. In fact, instability is the only stable tradition in Pakistan; a tradition that is being passionately upheld by a series of TV talk shows because political stability would mean lack of viewership and advertising revenues for the channels and a drastic drop in popcorn sales that can spell disaster for the country’s economy.

Pakistan came under military rule once again in October 1999 after the ousting of a civilian government that had lost a great deal of support because the public lost its appetite for rich dishes such as nihari, paye, and biryani which Prime Minister Naraaz Sharif was a great fan of.

He has since become a vegetarian of sorts and is usually taunted as becoming a sissy by Brig (R) Cookie Monster Gul, the architect of the Afghan Jihad and the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

According to famous poet, philosopher, military strategist and lifestyle fascist, Maria Beep she also took part in the 1857 Mutiny as a gallant needle-worker.

Her gallantry was praised by the famous poet, philosopher, military strategist and flogging enthusiast, Sangsar Abbasi. Maria Beep still has her famous 1857 needles with which she now pokes voodoo dolls of her competitors in Pakistan’s cut-throat fashion industry.

Sanana & Safibarf are her two latest victims who launched a counterattack through their new summer collection that included Persian tea cosies worn as corporate aunty headgear.

After Pakistan’s last benevolent dictator, General Mush P. Bonaparte, eventually relinquished his uniform amidst tears in November 2007, in February 2008, his supporters were defeated in the election, also amidst tears.

The Pakistan Khapay Khapay Khapay Party formed a coalition government led by Asif Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Zardari Bhutto and an impeachment process was launched against Mush, who resigned (amidst more tears) in August 2008.

Pakistan’s place on the world stage shifted after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US. It dropped its support for the Neanderthal regime in Afghanistan and was propelled into the frontline in the fight against terrorism, becoming a key ally of the Elders of Zion and assorted secret Freemason societies.

However, Pakistani forces have struggled to maintain control over the restive Neanderthal regions along the Afghan border, where Neanderthal militants are firmly entrenched with bombs strapped around their tummies which they claim is only a weight reducing exercise. Most Pakistanis entirely believe this to be true.

In the spring of 2009, the government attempted to reduce disaffection in the troubled north-western Swat district by agreeing to the imposition of the Whipping Women Law.

Far from improving security, this move allowed the Neanderthals to tighten their grip on the region, and the agreement broke down after only a few whips.

The government waged a military campaign to flush out the furry Neanderthals — an act that many sensitive Pakistanis such as poet, philosopher, politician and balaybaaz, Lord Jibran Can’t, and Mian Naraz Sharif criticised. Mainly just for the heck of it.

Asif Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Zardari Bhutto won the presidential race of September 6, 2008, by a big majority. His election came after his predecessor General P. Mush Bonaparte resigned amidst tears under threat of impeachment.

General P. Mush Bonaparte’s rule had ushered in increased freedom for the print media and a liberalisation of broadcasting policies. Television is the dominant medium, and there are around 50,000 private channels all babbling about the same things but each calling their individual babbling ‘exclusive.’

More than 100 private FM radio stations have been licensed. Fake American accents and low IQ levels are firm prerequisites for success.

Scores of unlicensed FM stations are said to operate in the tribal areas. They are usually operated by Neanderthal RJs of which DJ Fazalullah In Da Caaaaave is the most popular.

There are around 20 million internet users in Pakistan. A growing number of young Pakistanis have engrossing and intelligent discussions on various internet sites. Here is one example:

Superbilla:
What you think you think you are you kafir anti-Islam Pakistan Afghanistan Israeli Hindu dog!

Pakpunk:
Oh, you shut up you terrorist what you think you are you and I am I am great Muslim and Pakistan jeeay jeeay yea!!

Munchkins:
Oh why you fight you both, we all Muslim ummah and Pakistani patriots so we should make unity and gather and explode atom bum on India!!!!

Superbilla:
Oh you shut up you hypocrite you not real Pakistani but Ahmadi nonsense, oh you bastaaaaaaaa!!!

Munchkins:
Shut up your face you infidel man you destroy unity of Muslim ummah you too bastaaaaaaaa!!!!

Moderator:
Guys please refrain from using bad language. We’re Muslims and this is a respectable forum.

Munchkins:
Oh why you say this to me to me what about superbilla and pakpunk I am tolerant best Muslim in whole wide world like Pakistan best country in whole wide worldly universe.

Moderator:
I said exhibit tolerance and respect, okay?

BobbyBunny:
Thank you, sir, for the tolerant words. I am from the US and …

Moderator:
What? US? Oh, you bastaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

Roots:
Formed in 1967 in Lahore by 39-year-old Sindhi politician, Z A. Bhutto, and veteran Marxist ideologue, J A. Rahim(1).

By the time it went into the 1970 general election, the party had developed four internal lobbies. The most prominent (at the time) was its radical left-wing led by Marxist and socialist theorists and Maoist radicals. The other powerful lobby in the party was led by ‘Islamic Socialists’ who had fused Arab Socialism and Marxism with certain egalitarian notions of the Qu’ran(2) .

The third intra-party faction consisted of ‘progressive’ members of the landed elite, and the fourth, the smallest faction, consisted of moderate religionists.

Z A. Bhutto shares a joke with party ideologues. In the front of the image is J A. Rahim.

The party contested the 1970 election on a socialist manifesto and managed to sweep the National and Provincial election in the Sindh and Punjab provinces (in West Pakistan).

The breakaway and a loss to India in the 1971 Indo-Pak war forced a group of military officers to dismiss General Yahya Khan (who had replaced Ayub in 1969) and invite Bhutto to form the government(3).

ZAB addressing a large rally during the PPP’s campaign trail in 1970.

ZAB addressing a leftist student rally in Karachi in 1970.

The party’s left-wing dominated the proceedings between 1972 and 1974, but its influence began to erode after some of its members were dismissed from the party on ‘disciplinary grounds.’

From 1974 onwards, the policy-making largely fell into the lap of the PPP’s conservative wing that gradually began to shift the party’s ideological orientation.

By 1976 the party’s left-wing had all but withered away and in its manifesto for the 1977 election, the PPP downplayed the word socialism(4) and brought in an increasing number of industrialists and members of the landed elite into the party’s fold.

The party swept the 1977 election. But the right-wing alliance of nine anti-PPP parties, the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), refused to accept the results and accused the regime of rigging the polls.

The PNA unleashed a violent protest movement in the urban centres of the country demanding the resignation of the government and the imposition of ‘Nizam-e-Mustapha’ (Sharia).

Amidst the turmoil, General Ziaul Haq removed Bhutto and imposed the country’s third Martial Law (July 1977).

Members of the student-wing of Jamat-i-Islami, the IJT, took out an anti-Bhutto  rally at Gordon College, Rawalpindi, during the 1977 PNA movement. The rally was led by the then IJT leader, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed. He went on to join the Zia regime as Youth Minister.

Front page of Dawn reporting the imposition of Zia’s Martial Law. Though Zia promised fresh election in 90 days, he backed out of the commitment and decided to rule the country as dictator for the next eleven years.

Bhutto was executed through a sham trial in 1979. During the military regime, the PPP’s radical left-wing revived itself with the support and urging of Bhutto’s widow, Begum Nusrat Bhutto(5).

Begum Nusrat Bhutto being escorted away from a rally she held after ZAB’s arrest in July 1977.

In 1981 the PPP formed a 10-party anti-Zia alliance, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), and was in the forefront of all the major protest movements that took place against the Zia dictatorship.

Hundreds of party workers were arrested, flogged, tortured or simply vanished.

A woman activist of the PPP’s student-wing, the PSF, clashes with the police during a rally against Zia’s draconian laws (Lahore, 1981).

But just when Zia had thought that he had broken the party’s back, its new leader, 32-year-old Benazir (daughter of Z A. Bhutto), returned from exile in 1986.

She directly challenged the Zia regime by holding huge rallies in Lahore and Karachi. She also dismissed a number of her father’s old contemporaries from the party and then reinserted the word socialism in the party manifesto.

After Zia’s controversial death in August 1988, Benazir led the PPP to win the 1988 election.

Benazir waves to the crowd from a bogie of a train during her 1988 election campaign.

She led the party to two election victories (1988 and 1993), but both times her government was dismissed as a consequence of dizzying power games between the PPP, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), and the establishment-backed presidents, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and Farooq Ahmed Laghari(6).

Benazir went into exile and led the party from abroad during the Parvez Musharraf military regime that took over power in October 1999. The PPP emerged as the second largest party in the 2002 election.

In 2007 Benazir returned to Pakistan and unfolded the PPP’s new ideological orientation, describing the party to be a democratic left-liberal entity that would reconcile its differences with other democratic forces, work to end the military’s intervention in politics and rid Pakistan of religious extremism and terrorism(7).

In December 2007 she was assassinated by members of Pakistan’s most extreme militant Islamist outfit, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), soon after she had given a speech at a PPP rally in Rawalpindi.

Her husband Asif Ali Zardari took over the leadership of the party and led it to win the February 2008 general election.

He formed a collation government with two other parties, the Awami National Party (ANP) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM).

The National Assembly elected PPP’s Yusuf Raza Gilani as prime minister and Zardari was elected as the country’s new president.

Asif Ali Zardari

____________________

Fruit

Electoral History (National Assembly)(8)

• 1970 Election (West Pakistan)

Seats won: 81 (out of 138 National Assembly Seats)
Formed government

ZAB in consultation with party members right after the 1970 election results were announced.

• 1977 Election

Seats won: 155 (out of 200 NA Seats)

The election was declared null and void by the military regime that toppled the government and imposed Martial Law.

• 1988 Election

Seats won: 93 (out of 204 NA seats)
Formed government.

Benazir waves to the cheering crowd after her party won the most seats in the 1988 election.

• 1990 Election

Seats won: 44 (out of 206 NA seats)

• 1993 Election

Seats won: 86 (out of 202 NA seats)
Formed Government.

• 1997 Election

Seats won: 18 (out of 204 NA seats)

• 2002 Election

Seats won: 64 (out of 271 NA seats)

• 2008 Election

Seats won: 95 (out of 268 NA seats)
Formed government.

PPP supporters dance to celebrate the party’s victory in the 2008 election.

Areas of electoral influence: Sindh; South Punjab; Parts of KP and Balochistan.

_______________________

Juice

Ideological Evolution
Socialist/Populist (1967-74); Centrist/Populist (1974-77); Socialist (1978-86); Social Democrat (1988-93); Centre-left (1993-2002); Liberal-Left (2002- ).

Views on religion:
Quasi-Secular, but has always been flexible enough to accommodate certain aspects of Political Islam, Sufi Islam(9) and Modernist Reformist Islam(10).

ZAB showering rose petals on the grave of Sufi saint, Data Ganj Bakhsh, in Lahore (1974).

Youth Wings: Peoples Students Federation (PSF) – formed in 1972;
Peoples Youth Organization (PYO) – formed in 1984.

Flag of Peoples Youth Organization

Party website: Pakistan Peoples Party 
Peoples Youth Organization 
2013 election manifesto 

____________________________

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)

Roots

The immediate roots of the PML-N lie in the merging of various PML factions in 1985 into becoming a single entity again. The merging took place on the behest of Pakistan’s third military dictator, General Ziaul Haq(11) who needed a civilian expression of his rule in a handpicked National Assembly.

The factions that came together to form the 1985 version of PML had historical links with two PML groups that had emerged in 1962 during the Ayub Khan dictatorship (Council and Convention).

PML-Convention was pro-Ayub whereas PML-Council oopposed him.

Both the Convention and Council Leagues were mostly made up of members who had been active in Pakistan’s first ruling party, the Muslim League that in turn was an extension of the All India Muslim League (AIML).

AIML was the leading Muslim party in undivided India during the ‘Pakistan Movement’. Though formed in 1906 to represent the economic, political and social interests of India’s Muslims, the AIML shot to prominence from the 1930s onwards.

It claimed to be the sole representative of the Muslims of India, a claim that was bitterly disputed by the Muslim leaders of the Indian National Congress as well as by fundamentalist Islamic parties such as the Majlis-e-Ahrar, Jamiat Ulema Islam Hind and the Jamat-e-Islami(12).

AIML simply became the Muslim League after the creation of Pakistan in 1947. And even though (or since) it also became the new country’s first ruling party, it was soon riddled by serious infighting and power games, especially after Jinnah’s death in 1948.

Top League leaders Jinnah (left) and Liaquat Ali Khan (right) share a smoke just a few days after the creation of Pakistan. Jinnah became the country’s governor general and Ali became the prime minister. Jinnah died in 1948 and Ali was assassinated in 1951.

During the 1970 general election, three prominent ML factions contested the historic polls: Convention, Council and Qayyum League (ML-Q).

All the three factions were routed by the PPP, National Awami Part (NAP) and the Bengali nationalist party, the Awami League in the election, even though the Qayyum League did comparatively well in the former NWFP.

The Q League merged with the PPP(13) after the later came into power in 1972.

In 1973 the Convention and Council Leagues merged to become Functional Muslim League. The party became part of the nine-party anti-PPP electoral alliance, the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) for the 1977 election.

Head of Functional Muslim League Pir Pagaro talking to media men at the Karachi Press Club in 1977.

In 1985 Zia urged the head of the Functional League, Pir Pagaro, to turn the party into a united front by merging all PML factions.

This was also when for the first time the PML shifted radically towards adopting overt religious symbolism and rhetoric.

Muhammad Khan Junejo (left) with Ziaul Haq and Ghulam Ishaq Khan (1985). Junejo became the head of the PML that was revamped by Zia.

In the 1988 election the PML became an important part of the right-wing nine-party alliance the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (IJI). The alliance was narrowly defeated by the PPP.

In 1993 the PML split again when Mian Nawaz Sharif broke away to form the PML-Nawaz (PML-N).

PML-N became the largest faction and the most popular. It came into power (as IJI) in 1990 and then (as PML-N) after the 1997 election.

Nawaz Sharif as PM poses for a picture with the Pakistan cricket team that won the 1992 Cricket World Cut (under Imran Khan’s captaincy). Khan joined politics in 1996 and today his party is posing the stiffest electoral challenge to the PML-N in the Punjab.

Between 1990 and 1997, PML-N emphasised on being a quasi-Islamic and pro-business party. However, after its government was toppled in 1999 by General Parvez Musharraf, PML-N (throughout the 2000s) revived itself as a staunchly pro-democracy party.

It remains to be the largest PML faction with the most electoral appeal compared to other existing PML factions, rapidly evolving in the last decade to become a prominent democratic force in the country – especially in the Punjab and in the Hindko-speaking areas of KP.

Election pundits and a number of popularity polls have put PML-N in the front to become the majority party after this year’s May 11 election(14).

_______________________

Fruit

Electoral history (National Assembly)(15)

• 1988 Election

Seats won: 54 (out of 204 NA seats) (16)

• 1990 Election

Seats won: 105 (out of 206 NA seats) (17)
Formed government.

Nawaz Sharif (third from left) with MQM chief, Altaf Hussain (second from left), in Karachi soon after Nawaz was elected as PM in 1990.

• 1993 Election

Seats won: 73 (out of 202 NA seats)

• 1997 Election

Seats won: 135 (out of 204 NA seats)

Nawaz Sharif behind bars at a police lock-up after his government was toppled in a military coup in 1999. He was later sent into exile.

• 2002 Election

Seats won: 15 (out of 271 NA seats)

• 2008 Election

Seats won: 72 (out of 268 NA seats)

Nawaz Sharif with PPP Chairperson, late Benazir Bhutto, in London, 2006. The two former foes signed a Charter of Democracy and vowed to work together to keep the military out of politics.

Areas of electoral influence: Punjab; parts of South Punjab; Hindko-speaking areas of KP.

_____________________

 Juice

Ideological evolution:
Quasi-Islamic/Conservative (1988-93); Quasi-Islamic/Conservative/Populist (1993-2000); Centre-Right/Populist (2002 – ).

Nawaz Sharif in 2009. His party is popular among Punjab’s business and trader classes.

Views on religion:
Politically moderate but socially conservative, even though recently some liberal leaders have been allowed to come to the front.

Over the years the party is trying to shed its old ‘Ziaist’/Islamic image and cultivate a more moderate and democratic appeal, even though in the last five years it has been accused by opponents of being vague and uncommitted in its stand against religious extremism and terrorism in Pakistan.

Nawaz Sharif with his handpicked president, Rafiq Tarar, who was a staunch member of the apolitical Islamic evangelical movement, the Tableeghi Jamat.

Columnist Ayaz Amir was one of the most liberal and secular leaders of the PML-N. He was however refused a party ticket for the 2013 election on the behest of the party’s ‘hawks.’

Youth Wing: Muslim Students Federation-Nawaz (MSF-N) formed: 1993; Muslim Youth Organization (MYO) formed: 2009.

The MSF flag

Party Websites: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz
Muslim Students Federation 
2013 Election Manifesto

______________________________

 Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf

Roots

PTI was formed by former Pakistan cricket captain, Imran Khan, in 1996. The formation of the party was the political expression of the spiritual transformation Khan had been going through ever since the death of his mother (from cancer) and the Pakistan cricket team’s victory in the 1992 Cricket World Cup (under his captaincy).

Throughout his cricketing career (1971-92), Khan had opted for a flamboyant and secular lifestyle and showed little interest in politics.

Imran Khan as cricket captain: The spiritual wilderness years.

Imran Khan with the World Cup, 1992

His religious transformation also coincided with him coming under the wings of former ISI Chief and close ally of Ziaul Haq, General Hamid Gul.

After Gul was eased out from the ISI by the first Benazir Bhutto government (1988-90), he had formed a party called Tehreek-e-Ittihad and was trying to rope in Khan to join the party(19).

However, not only did Khan moved to form his own party, he married Jamima Goldsmith, a British national. The marriage repulsed Gul’s advances to co-opt Khan into his party and Khan took his own party into the 1997 election to challenge the supremacy of the country’s two main parties, the PPP and PML-N.

The party faced a resounding defeat.

In 1999 when General Parvez Musrraf toppled the Nawaz Sharif government in a military coup, Khan hailed the decision.

PTI managed to win just one National Assembly seat in the 2002 election, but during this period Khan took back his support for Musharraf when the General decided to join the US ‘War on Terror.’

He also became close to the Jamat-i-Islami and echoed the Jamat’s anti-war mantra, emphasising that the conflict was not Pakistan’s responsibility.

But whereas his party remained to be nothing more than a one-man crusade, he did manage to organise an effective youth-wing of the party, the Insaf Students Federation (ISF).

PTI boycotted the 2008 election and was merely drifting as a ‘more good looking B Team of the Jamat-e-Islami,(20)’ when in late 2011, Khan surprised the media and other parties by managing to hold a massive rally in Lahore.

Khan’s constant presence on Urdu TV channels, the groundwork done by ISF, and the prominent role of PTI activists in the social media greatly helped PTI experience a sudden groundswell.

Supporters at a PTI rally in Lahore.

Khan has mixed leftist symbolism with right-wing rhetoric to attack the PPP and PML-N and claims that his party is now in a position to actually sweep the 2013 election.

____________________

Fruit

Electoral History (National Assembly)

• 1997 Election

Seats won: None

• 2002 Election

Seats won: 1 (out of 271 NA seats)

• 2008 Election

Boycott

Areas of electoral influence (possible): Central and northern Punjab; KP.

_________________

 Juice

Ideological evolution:
Right-wing (1996-2002); Centre-Right (2002-2008); Centre-Right/Populist (2010 – ).

Views on Religion
Moderate, even though PTI has come under constant criticism for playing the role of an ‘apologist’ for the Taliban. Nevertheless, PTI has been actively criticising Sunni sectarian organisations for attacks on the Shia community.

Khan continues to clarify that his party’s relationship with religion is like that of Jinnah’s and Iqbal’s.

He usually uses Islamic symbolism in his speeches. Most of his critics label PTI as a right-wing party whereas some have gone on to suggest that Khan is using religion like the ‘socialist’ Z A. Bhutto did in the 1970s.

Khan addresses an anti-drone rally near South Waziristan, 2012.

Khan with one of his favourite pet dogs in Islamabad.

Youth Wing: Insaf Students Federation (ISF)

Party website: Pakistan Thereek-e-Insaaf
Insaaf Students Federation
2013 Election Manifesto

_______________________

Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM)

Roots

MQM was formed as Mohajir Qaumi Movement in 1984 by Altaf Hussain and Azeem Ahmed Tariq as a party representing the political and economic interests of Sindh’s Mohajir (Urdu-speaking) population.

Altaf and Azeem were students at the Karachi University in 1978 where they had first formed the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Federation (APMSO).

The launching of the APMSO outside the Arts Lobby at the Karachi University, June 1978.

The much overlooked reason behind the APMSO’s evolution into giving birth to the MQM is an economic one. According to famous Sindhi scholar, Ibrahim Joyo, ‘Punjabi economic hegemony’ increased immensely in Sindh during the dictatorship of Ziaul Haq(22).

This situation had a negative impact on Karachi’s leading business communities (Memons, Gujaratis and other non-Punjabi business outfits).

In such a situation these communities formed the Maha Sindh (MS) — an organisation set up to protect the interests of Karachi’s Memon, Gujarati and Mohajir businessmen and traders.

MS then encouraged and financed the formation of a ‘street-strong’ Karachi-based party. This party arrived in the shape of the MQM.

Altaf Hussain addressing a rally in Karachi in 1987.

The MQM has continued to win the most seats in Karachi across all elections since 1988 – despite the fact that due to some of its aggression against the media and opponents in Karachi, the state conducted at least three concentrated armed operations against it in the 1990s.

Relatives cry over the body of a MQM worker killed during the military operation against the MQM in 1992.

After it changed its name to Muttahida Qaumi Movement (in 1998), the MQM began to shed off its ethnic skin.

The MQM supported the Musharraf dictatorship (1999-2008) and took this opportunity to regenerate and reorganize itself after the chaos of the 1990s.

In 2008 it became a coalition partner of the PPP-led regime. Like the PPP and ANP, the MQM has come under direct attack from extremist organizations.

______________

Fruit

Electoral History (National Assembly)

• 1988 Election

Seats won: 12
Became part of PPP-led government. Quit in 1990.

Altaf Hussain addressing an election rally in Karachi, 1988.

• 1990 Election

Seats won: 15
Became part of PML/IJI-led government. Quit in 1992.

• 1993 Election

Boycotted NA Election.

• 1997 Election

Seats won: 12
Became part of PML-N led government. Quit in 1998.

• 2002 Election

Seats won: 13
Became part of the PML-Q led government.

MQM’s Mustafa Kamal was elected Karachi’s Mayor in 2006. He rose to become one of the city’s most popular officials.

• 2008 Election

Seats won: 19
Became part of PPP-led government.

MQM supporters rejoice after the party swept the 2008 election in the country’s largest city, Karachi.

Areas of electoral influence: Karachi; Hyderabad (Sindh).

___________________

Juice

Ideological evolution
Centre-left (1984-88); Centrist (1990-2002); Liberal (2002 – ).

Views on religion
Secular. Overtly opposed to radical Islamic groups and thought. Sometimes adopts Sindh’s traditional Sufi Islamic symbolism.

Poster of an MQM rally at the shrine of Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif in Bhitshah, Sindh.

Youth Wing: All Pakistan Muttahida Students Organization (APMSO)

APMSO emblem

Party Websites: MQM
APMSO
2013 Election Manifesto 

_______________________________

Awami National Party (ANP)

Roots

The roots of the ANP lie in the National Awami Party (NAP). NAP was formed in 1957 by leftist Pushtun, Sindhi, Baloch and Bengali nationalists and Marxist Punjabi and Mohajir elements.

In the 1960s NAP was the country’s largest leftist party until the arrival of the PPP in 1967.

NAP mainly comprised of Pushtun and Baloch nationalist leadership. It won a majority of seats in the former NWFP and Balochistan in the 1970 election and formed coalition governments in these provinces.

People gather outside NAP office in Quetta to celebrate the party’s victory in Balochistan during the 1970 election.

In 1973 the PPP/Z A. Bhutto regime dismissed the NAP regime in Balochistan, accusing it of instigating a separatist movement in Balochistan.

The NAP-led coalition government in the NWFP resigned in protest.

NAP leader and Governor of Balochistan, Ghous Bakhsh Bezinjo, escorting foreign delegates at the Quetta Airport in 1973.

In 1975 the Bhutto regime got the Supreme Court to ban NAP after a PPP Minister was assassinated in Peshawar(24).

NAP leaders who were released from jail after the Bhutto regime was toppled by General Zia in 1977, formed a new party, the National Democratic Party (NDP).

However, the NDP split on the question of joining the PPP-led anti-Zia alliance, MRD.

In 1986, Baloch, Sindhi and Pushtun leaders revived NAP, this time calling it the Awami National Party.

Wali Khan: The founding member of ANP speaking at the party’s launch in 1986. Sitting behind him (far right) is his father, veteran Pushtun nationalist leader, Bacha Khan.

However, after Zia’s death in 1988, ANP’s Sindhi and Baloch leaders broke away to form their own parties and ANP became an exclusive Pushtun nationalist party.

But its electoral fortunes have fluctuated. After witnessing a high in this respect in the 1990s, ANP lost ground and orientation in the early 2000s. However, it got back on its feet again during the 2008 election and delivered its best results in an election thus far.

The 2008 election saw ANP’s electoral fortunes rise dramatically in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). What’s more, for the first time it managed to also win a couple of Provincial Assembly seats in Karachi.

Nevertheless, its government in the KP was constantly challenged by extremist Islamist groups that have assassinated a number of ANP leaders.

ANP (along with the MQM and PPP) is under direct threat from these groups.

___________________

Fruit

Electoral History (National Assembly)(25)

• 1988 Election

Seats won: 2

• 1990 Election

Seats won: 6

Joined the PML/IJI led government

• 1993 Election

Seats won: 3

• 1997 Election

Seats won: 9

Became part of the PML-N government. Quit in 1998.

• 2002 Election

Seats won: None

• 2008 Election

Seats won: 10

Became part of the PPP-led government.

Areas of electoral influence: KP; and parts of Balochistan and Karachi.

Head of ANP, Asfandyar Wali speaking at an ANP convention in Peshawar.

_______________________________

Juice

Ideological Orientation
(As NAP): Socialist/Marxist (1967-75); (As ANP): Socialist (1986-88); Progressive/Pushtun Nationalist (1990- ).

Views on religion
Secular/Humanist. Overtly opposed to radical Islamic groups and thought.

A recent poster of ANP showing ANP members assassinated by extreme Islamist organizations.

Youth wing: Pushtun Students Federation

Emblem of Pushtun Students Federation

Party Websites: ANP 
Pushtun Students Federation
2013 Election Manifesto 

_________________________

Jamiat Ulema Islam-Fazal (JUI-F)

Roots

JUI-F’s roots lie in Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind (JUH), a conservative Sunni (Deobandi) party in India.

JUH was opposed to Jinnah’s All India Muslim League and (along with two other Islamic parties, the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) and Majlis-e-Ahrar), accused the Muslim League of being a secular organisation of ‘misguided Muslims.’

During the all-important election of 1945 in the Punjab in which the Muslim League needed to win big, Jinnah gave the green light to sponsor the creation of a pro-Muslim League religious party(26) that could divide the religious vote of the JUH and the Ahrar.

Thus emerged the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI) which, at the time, had leadership from both Deobandi as well as the Sunni Barelvi Muslm communities.

However, after Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the Barelvi leadership of the party formed its own party and the JUI became a strictly Deobandi Sunni Muslim outfit.

Shabir Ahmad Usmani: The founder of JUI

JUI was strongly opposed to the fundamentalist JI and during the 1970 election it became the only religious party that did not oppose the PPP and NAP’s socialist programs.

In fact, JUI showed great interest in forming an electoral alliance with the PPP , but the PPP(27) politely declined. After the election the JUI formed coalition governments in Balochistan and NWFP with the secular and socialist NAP.

Chief of JUI, Mufti Mehmood, with Z A. Bhutto, 1977.

The JUI turned against the Bhutto regime when it dismissed the NAP-led provincial government in 1973. In 1977, JUI became a leading member of the nine-party anti-PPP alliance, the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA).

After the Bhutto regime was toppled by General Ziaul Haq in July 1977, JUI exited from the PNA when some of its parties, especially the JI, decided to join the Zia regime.

In 1981 JUI joined the PPP-led anti-Zia alliance, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD).

Fazalur Rehman who became chief of JUI after Mufti Mehmood’s death seen here (right) sitting with Benazir and Nusrat Bhutto in 1982.

In the mid-1980s, at the height of Zia’s ‘Islamization’, some members of the JUI and its student-wing (the Jamiat Taleba Islam), broke away to form the radical Sunni sectarian organization, the Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (SSP).

JUI had largely been a moderate Islamic party, but from the late 1980s onwards it became increasingly conservative, especially when it took control of the seminaries that indoctrinated religious students who rose up to become the Taliban.

JUI supported the Musharraf dictatorship and became part of a large religious alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) that swept the 2002 election in NWFP and Balochistan.

The MMA collapsed just before the 2008 election and the JUI contested the election with a few minor religious parties.

___________________

Fruit

Electoral History (National Assembly)

• 1970 Election
Seats won: 7
Formed coalition governments with NAP in NWFP and Balochistan.

• 1977 Election
Seats won (As part of Pakistan National Alliance): 36

• 1988 Election
Seats won: 7

• 1990 Election
Seats won: 6

• 1993 Election
Seats won: 4
Became part of PPP-led coalition government

• 1997 Election
Seats won: 2

• 2002 Election
Seats won (As part of Muttahida Majlis Amal): 63
Formed governments in NWFP and Balochistan.

• 2008 Election
Seats won: 6
Became part of PPP-led coalition government. Quit in 2011.

Fazalur Rehman speaking at a JUI rally in 2011.

Areas of Electoral Influence: KP (rural/semi-rural areas); Balochistan (Rural/semi-rural).

__________________

Juice

Ideological Orientation
Moderate/Progressive Islamic (1947-73); Democratic-Islamic (1978-88); Islamic (1990-96); Fundamentalist (1999-2008); Islamic (2010 – ).

Views on religion
Conservative and at times fundamentalist, but pro-democracy.

Youth Wing: Jamiat Taleba Islam (JTI)

Flag of Jamiat Taleba Islam.

Party website: JUI-F
2013 Election Manifesto

_____________________

Jamat-i-Islami (JI)

Roots

Formed in 1941 by Islamic scholar Abul Ala Maududi as a modern fundamentalist Islamic party.

JI was staunchly opposed to Jinnah’s Muslim nationalism, suggesting that nationalism was a European concept that had no place in Islam.

Another problem Maududi had with Pakistan was that he considered the new country to be in a state of jahiliyat(28) – Arab word meaning ‘ignorance’ and describing the time in Mecca before the arrival of Islam.

Nevertheless, the party moved to the newly created Pakistan in 1947 and made its first dramatic entry into the new country’s politics by joining the Majlis-e-Ahrar in an anti-Ahmadi movement in Lahore in 1953.

Abul Ala Maududi delivering a speech in 1955.

Maududi was arrested for inciting religious hatred and rioting and sentenced to death. The sentence was soon overturned.

Lacking electoral pull, the JI recruited educated urbanites into its fold in an attempt to infiltrate the bureaucracy and the vernacular Urdu print media(29).

JI was banned in 1963 by the Ayub dictatorship when it vehemently opposed the regime’s overtly secular policies and liberal interpretation of Islam.

The ban was soon lifted. During the 1970 election, JI aggressively ran a vigorous campaign against leftist parties (particularly the PPP), and in its manifesto claimed that voting for socialist party was against the teachings of Islam.

Maududi in a meeting with some politicians on the eve of the 1970 election.

The campaign came to a naught when the JI was routed in the 1970 election.

In 1974 it again led the agitation against the Ahmadi community. This time it was successful in getting the community relegated as a non-Muslim minority.

In 1977 the party headed a nine-party election alliance against the PPP regime. The alliance was routed, but it refused to accept the election result. It then began a protest campaign on the streets that led to the imposition of Pakistan’s third Martial Law.

The JI joined the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship and was one of the first parties to organise jihadists against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.

During the 1988 election, JI joined the nine-party right-wing alliance, the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (IJI).

Amir of JI, late Qazi Hussain Ahmed (right) with Nawaz Sharif.

It quit the alliance after the 1990 election and went solo during the 1993 election but faced defeat.

It boycotted the 1997 election and then went on to hail the military coup against the second Nawaz Sharif/PML-N regime.

In 2002 it became part of the right-wing religious alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). The alliance fell apart before the 2008 election.

The JI boycotted the 2008 election.

____________________

Fruit

Electoral History (National Assembly)

• 1970 Election
Seats won: 4

• 1977 Election
Seats won (As part of Pakistan National Alliance): 36

• 1988 Election
Seats won (as part of Islami Jamhoori Ittihad) 56

• 1990 Election
Seats won: (as part of Islami Jamhoori Ittihad 106
Became part of the PML-led government. Quit in 1992.

• 1993 Election
Seats won: 3

• 1997 Election
Boycotted.

• 2002 Election
Seats won (As part of Muttahida Majlis Amal): 63
Formed governments in NWFP and Balochistan.

Leading members of the MMA (2002).

• 2008 Election
Boycott

Areas of Electoral Influence: Parts of Karachi (Sindh); Parts of KP.

______________________

Juice

Ideological Orientation
Fundamentalist (1947 – ).

Views on religion
Fundamentalist, even though the party has often expressed it through intellectual means and propaganda.

Youth Wings: Islami Jamiat Taleba (formed: 1948); Shabab-e-Milli (formed: 1994); Pasban (but broke away from JI in 1994).

Flag of the Shabab-e-Milli

Party websites: Jamat-i-Islami
Islami Jamiat Taleba
2013 Election Manifesto

______________________

(1) Phillap Edward Jones, The Pakistan Peoples Party: Rise To Power (Oxford University Press, 2003) p.89
(2) Barbra Daly Metcalf, Islamic Contestations (Oxford University Press, 2004) p.229
(3) Dr. Mubasher Hassan, The Mirage of Power, (Oxford University Press, 2000) pp.7,8.
(4) Santosh C. Saha, Thomas K. Religious Fundamentalism in Developing Countries (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001) p.20
(5) Raja Anwar, The Terrorist Prince: The Life & Death of Murtaza Bhutto (Verso, 1997) p.xii
(6) Farooq Laghari was a member of the PPP from the late 1970s and was made the President by Benazir’s second regime in 1993. He had a falling out with her in 1996 and dismissed her government using his Constititional powers, accusing it of corruption. He was eased out by the second Nawaz Sharif government in 1997. He died in 2010).
(7) Benazir Bhutto, Reconciliation (Harper Collins, 2009) pp.17-80.
(8) Tahir Mehdi, NA Elections in Pakistan (Pakistan/Afghanistan Free & Fair Election Network, 2012)
(9) Ravi Kal, Pakistan: From Rhetoric of Democracy to Rise of Militancy (Routledge, 2012) p.54
(10) Benazir Bhutto, Reconciliation (Harper Collins, 2009) pp.17-80
(11) Hugh Tinker, South Asia: A Short History (University of Hawaii, 1990) p.269
(12) Ayesha Jalal, Self & Sovereignty, (Oxford University Press, 2002) p.457
(13) Link Vol: 17 (1975) p.80
(14) Pildat-Gallup Poll (March 213)
(15) Tahir Mehdi, NA Elections in Pakistan (Pakistan/Afghanistan Free & Fair Election Network, 2012)
(16) PML was part of the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad during 1988 election.
(17) PML was part of the IJI. In a 2012 verdict by the Supreme Court verdict, the IJI was funded by the country’s intelligence agencies and this impacted on the result of the 1990 election.
(18) Imran Khan, Pakistan: A Personal History (Random House, 2012) pp.110-114
(19) Jyotindra Nath Dixit, India’s Foreign Policy & Its Neighbours (Gyan, 2001) p.175
(20) 2010 satirical song Aalu Anday by Bayghairat Brigade parodied the PTI as a ‘good looking Jamat-e-Islami.
(21) Aqil Shah, Apologia Taliban 101 (Dawn.Com, Oct. 2012)
(22) ibd
(23) Tahir Mehdi, NA Elections in Pakistan (Pakistan/Afghanistan Free & Fair Election Network, 2012)
(24) Far Eastern Economic Review (1975) p.3
(25) Tahir Mehdi, NA Elections in Pakistan (Pakistan/Afghanistan Free & Fair Election Network, 2012)
(26) Ayesha Jalal, Self & Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2002).
(27) Phillap Edward Jones, The Pakistan Peoples Party: Rise To Power (Oxford University Press, 2003) p.134
(28) Irfan Ahmad, The Transformation of Jamat-e-Islami (Princeton University Press, 2009) p.6
(29) Vali Reza Nasir, Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution (I. B. Tauris, 1994)

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

The moment contents of his speech became news, some conservative media personnel and columnists could be seen puffing their chests with happy hot air and excitedly wagging their fingers at their more liberal counterparts, reminding them how the COAS had gone on to declare that Pakistan was made in the name of Islam and that ‘no one can take Islam out of Pakistan’.

Much has been written and discussed about exactly what constitutes this ‘ideology’. Liberal scholars, intellectuals, historians and those on the left have for long argued that things like the ‘Pakistan Ideology’ are post-Jinnah concoctions molded by conservative historians, religious parties and the military-establishment to maintain and sustain their undemocratic influence over a diverse ethnic and sectarian polity.

Those on the right, of course, disagree. They continue to insist that Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, used the Pakistan Movement as a roadmap to a destination where Muslims of different languages, cultures and sectarian persuasions would gel together as a monolithic state and nation and be ruled by the dictates of the Quran and the Sunnah.

This has not happened. And it can’t. It’s a fairy tale scenario peddled as history and an ideology that in spite of creating fissure after fissure between sects, ethnicities and between the military-establishment and political parties, is still being unabashedly flaunted.

So much so, that the fissures that it has caused have now gradually created an extreme expression of madness that uses terror and bloodshed to enact a so-called Islamic State.

But more pressing should be the concern about the state of mind of the soldiers who are on the frontlines of a vicious battle against those expressing this extremism in the most brutal manner.

In his last year’s speech at the PMA, the COAS clearly emphasised that the existential threat to Pakistan was largely internal. This year, however, it became external again. Where do such sudden shifts leave the soldiers?

A friend of mine (a former journalist and now a filmmaker) once told me a revealing little tale. To film a documentary, he had travelled up north into a tense battle zone where the Pakistan Army was fighting a bloody war against the extremists. This was during the military operation in Swat in 2009.

There he met a soldier who startled him by saying: “Sir, since you seem to be an educated man and someone I can trust, let me tell you that all these men (extremists) are our own people”.

He then added: “We are told so many things about whom we are fighting. But we know who these people are. These are the people we have known for years, but now they have turned against us”.

The soldier was not saying anything new. Because barring the usual set of so-called patriots who are ever-willing to lie through their teeth just because they believe that certain fibs serve the country’s interests, by now most Pakistanis (at least outside the Punjab) know that the vicious enemy, the people of Pakistan and its army are up against are very much a product of our own naive follies and misplaced arrogance.

Nevertheless, when one hears this coming from a soldier on the frontlines, one is not sure how to react.

Whether one should rejoice or should we see this as a warning?

The debacles faced by the US army in Vietnam and by the Soviet forces in Afghanistan should be taken as examples to be learnt from.

It is easier to raise an army on certain myths about one’s foreign enemies and on an exaggerated sense of patriotism. But the post-World War II scenario in this regard is studded with examples in which, in a long drawn-out armed conflict, there does come a time when armies facing guerrilla warfare begin to lose touch with all the ideological hoopla that they were fed during training.

There are numerous accounts of how whole battalions of American marines and Soviet fighters ended up rebelling against their own superiors because after facing bloodshed and madness on the battlefield they completely lost contact with what they were told by their politicians and generals. All that indoctrination began to melt away and they found themselves awkwardly exposed to a set of truths that they were conditioned to actually repress.

These are the kind of truths that a soldier, especially if he is being readied to take on a ruthless bunch of insurgents, should be briefed about up front.

As one saw in Vietnam and Afghanistan, all that mythical talk about how the soldiers were fighting for a higher cause simply began to melt away and the soldiers were not only left stranded with a rude reality, but they had no clue how to address it. It is a bit unsettling to know that the Pakistan army is preparing its men for the conflict against armed extremists by using rhetoric it originally devised for a possible war against an external enemy.

But it is their own countrymen that the soldiers are facing on the battlefield and/or legions of fanatics who believe that they are the ones serving God, even if that means blowing up women and children.

The enemy in this context is not the saffron-clad battalions on mechanical elephants fitted with nuclear warheads. The enemy is very much from amongst us.

Telling the soldiers the whole truth is better. This should mean organising a re-orientation program with a view to ready them to fight an enemy that is not dropping from the sky or rolling in from across the border, but emerging from our very own mountains and cities. The threat remains very much internal, dear General.

I went looking for them to investigate a possibility of finding the cultural roots of what grew into religious and ideological extremism and myopia in Pakistan.

One can pin-point almost all of Ziaul Haq’s Machiavellian farce in the name of Islam as containing the main roots of the social and political extremism that now plagues the nation.

But I believe it is in the cultural legacy of such reactionary travesty in the 1990s where one can clearly locate the derivatives of the Zia era’s Islamist charade; off-shoots of a destructive legacy that eventually mutated into the kind of fanaticism that has become a troubling mainstay of Pakistani society ever since 9/11.

I will not go into the academic and scholarly details of this observation, but rather discuss the issue by reviewing the three films that I rediscovered. Two were made and released in the 1990s and one in 1980. They are interesting examples of the kind of mindset that many common Pakistanis started to develop at the conclusion of the anti-Soviet ‘Afghan jihad’ in the late 1980s.

Poster of Sangram: Ali takes the countryside by storm and an obedient camel.

But the first one arrived in 1980, or at the start of the so-called Afghan Jihad and during a period when the Ziul Haq dictatorship (1977-88) had begun to roll out his draconian policies (explained as being ‘Islamic’) in earnest. Starring famous Pakistan film actor, Muhammad Ali, it was called Sangram.

The film takes place in a land where there seems to be nothing but mud brick villages separated by miles and miles of rolling sand. One is not quite sure exactly what year, or for that matter, what century the story is taking shape because even though there are no electrical appliances to be seen, there are plenty of pistols and a rickety Jeep driven by an evil Hindu police officer. There is no shortage of camels, though.

Ali is Sangram, a Hindu in a village with a Hindu majority most of whose men prefer wearing tight leather pants and shirts made from what seems to be jute.

Ali’s character is a robber who also has a petite girlfriend (actress Mumtaz) who, however, turns significantly voluptuous while dancing around Sangram during the songs.

One day Sangram bumps into a Muslim holy man who looks like a cross between an ancient Byzantine priest and a 20th century Tableeghi Jamat evangelist.

The holy man succeeds in converting Sangram to Islam and renames him Muhammad Ali – a scene marked by a flash of lightening striking across the night sky on a perfectly sunny afternoon.

From then onwards, somehow, whichever scene Ali appears in, palm trees can be seen and his girlfriend’s voluptuous moves become radically understated but the songs keep rolling.

Sangram’s dramatic conversation.

Of course, like all good converts, Ali makes it his duty to convert his contemporaries whether they like it or not. He gives up his life as a thief, a Hindu thief, mind you, discards his leather pants, takes to wearing the Arab thawb and spending rest of the film on the back of a camel.

Ali beats the conniving Hindu cop to a pulp. That’s not a bandage Ali has around his head and face. It’s his ‘look I’m a bigoted convert’ headgear.

After first converting his gang and then the whole village (with the help of a few emotional speeches and a couple of punches thrown at one of his doubting partners), he decides to lead an army of committed converts (on camels) on a mission to convert the Hindus of all the villages of this unnamed, surreal land populated by bumbling Hindus and a sprinkling of Muslim clerics who seem to emerge from behind sand dunes and then melt back into the sand.

After he is able to convert village after village, and after palm tree after palm tree begins to dot the scenes, a time comes when Hindu holy men begin to worry.

They conspire with the area’s police to eliminate Ali. This pushes him into becoming a guerrilla leader. He cuts down the Hindu priests until he is cornered and killed by the cops. But, of course, by then it’s too late.

By the way, it is only at the end of the film one finds out that the film took place just before the creation of Pakistan because as Ali lies on the sand dying from his wounds he looks up to see a Pakistan flag on a fortress.

Yes, the symbolism is unmistakable  ‘Pakistan is the fortress of Islam’ (albeit created by jihadists and not by cigar-smoking, English-speaking lawyers).

As Ali’s character rolls to his death over the sand dunes, Jinnah must’ve rolled in his grave.

Original poster of ‘International Gorillay’

The second film is 1990’s ‘International Gorillay’ (Gorillay in Urdu means guerrillas, but also gorillas!).

The film is a remarkable celebration of a post-Afghan-jihad resurgence of Pakistan’s convoluted belief of being a ‘fortress of Islam.’ It was a huge hit when it was released in mid-1990 and has become a cult classic amongst oddball Lollywood aficionados.

Directed by eccentric Pakistani film director, Jan Muhammad – who then went on to direct the delicious Lollywood rom-com ‘Kuriyoon koh dalay dana’ (direct translation: Feeding women seed) – the farce was also one of the first Pakistani films to be banned (on video) in Britain.

International Gorillay takes on author Salman Rushdie as the film’s main villain, but the ban on the video was lifted when Rushdie himself stepped in and asked the British censor board to allow its release.

Since the film is a masterpiece of tacky demagogic cinema, one can understand why Rushdie didn’t feel threatened or offended by the content.

Through his direction, Jan Muhammad was simply cashing in on the (largely delusional) high Pakistan as a country was experiencing at the retreat of the battered Soviet forces in Afghanistan and the (CIA aided) ‘victory of jihad.’

But according to some Lollywood insiders, Jan’s original plot of the film was a lot wider, revolving around a group of Pakistani mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan. But the story suddenly took a sharp turn when Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ controversy erupted in 1989, and Jan decided to make Rushdie the film’s main villain.

Thus, instead of seeing mujahids returning from fighting a successful ‘jihad’ against atheists, the film kicks off by presenting Pakistan and the Muslim world gripped by a grave crisis and being swallowed by the evil schemes of a sinister lobby of diabolic men.

This lobby includes Salman Rushdie (played by veteran TV and film actor, Afzal Ahmed), who has inexplicably started leading a menacing social and political onslaught on Pakistan through a gang of anti-Pakistan agents.

Salman Rushdie proves that sword is mightier (and more fun) than the pen.

With Rushdie are some very South Asian looking men in curly blonde wigs whom we are told are Zionists working for a secret Israeli agency.

And, oh, they all speak fluent Punjabi.

Since Pakistan is the leading defender of Islam, the film suggests that if Pakistan falls to Rushdie’s menacing schemes, so shall the rest of the Islamic world.

The band of brothers: Mustafa Qureshi, Ghulam Mohiuddin and Javed Shiekh.

Interestingly, Rushdie’s assault on Islam includes the unfathomable opening of a chain of casinos and discotheques in Pakistan! The fool could have made more money by opening madrassahs and TV news channels instead.

Alas, there is a heroic reaction to such conspiratorial debauchery. In a jarring scene involving some terrible acting and rhetorical dialogue, veteran Punjabi film actor, Mustafa Qureshi, playing an ex-cop, decides to create a ‘mujahid fauj’ (the proto-Taliban?) whose sole aim is to destroy Rushdie and ‘save Islam and Pakistan’ from Jewish conspiracies and, of course, from obscenity too.

The latter is a vital plot tool, giving the director the opportunity to show some lecherous disco and dance scenes without the danger of himself (and the audience) being labelled as soft-porn fans.

Apart from being an Israeli agent and an advocate of gambling, alcohol and free sex, Rushdie is also a master torturer. He torments captive Muslims by making them listen to the blasphemous sections of his book, ‘The Satanic Verses’!

The ex-cop has two younger brothers who are both unemployed (maybe because there are now only casinos, pubs and night clubs to work in?).

To counter Rushdie, he inducts two of his younger brothers in his ‘mujahid force.’

After getting combat training, the three-man ‘jihadi’ army decides to infiltrate Rushdie’s baleful gang by going undercover. And no, they don’t adorn blonde wigs, but slip into Batman costumes instead!

Obviously, who would notice three middle-aged men in 1960s Batman costumes, right?

Batmujahideen, two of them with mustaches.

Two of the brothers, played by known film actors, Javed Shaikh and Ghulam Mohiuddin, were well in their forties at the time, a fact underlined by the wobbling bellies protruding forward from their Batman costumes. Qureshi was in his late fiffties.

After making their way into the conspiring gang of anti-Islam thugs, the three brothers, with the help of zany reactionary one-liners, karate chops, expert gun slinging and a few American SAM missiles, make a meal out of Rushdie and Co. and save Pakistan (and thus Islam).

What’s more they even manage to convert Salman Rushdie’s equally evil mistress called Dolly (played by the lovely Barbara Sharif).

The voluptuous Dolly.

Not even a menacing machine gun burst could stop the Batmujjahideen.

Voluptuous, wicked, scheming, drunk (and blue-eyed), Dolly finally sees the light after watching the wrath of God (attired in Batman suits) obliterate Rushdie.

Rushdie in trouble. A red light strikes his eyes from the unknown regions of the sky. The Batmujahids sweared it was God, critics insisted it was bad FX.

Dolly’s conversion is quite a scene. Lights flicker, clouds thunder, the room whirls round and round, and the music reaches a crescendo as she weeps, sweats and shakes – it’s as if she’d just consumed a highly potent concoction of liquid LSD, magic mushrooms and bhang! Certainly my favourite scene in the film. And, oh, there’s also a shot of a huge palm tree at this visionary moment.

The palm tree again.

International Gorrilay is a stroke of genius when it comes to campy demagogic cinema, and only an idiot can take it seriously as anything beyond being a highly enjoyable cinematic farce with lots of unintentional laughs.

But then, since extremists are usually idiots, I was wondering if, due to its bombastic, chauvinist antics, whether it actually ended up inspiring any future suicide bombers? The film was such a big hit that a sequel of sorts arrived in Pakistani cinemas sometime in 1996.

It was called ‘Alamy Ghuday’ (International Scoundrels). Though directed and plotted by a different director and having different set of performers (except Ghulam Mohiuddin), the film more than alludes to the happenings of its predecessor, ‘International Gorrilay‘.

Many years after Pakistan (and thus Islam) were saved from Rushdie and his gang of obscene blonde-wigged Zionist thugs, yet another anti-Pakistan (and thus anti-Islam) villain has risen (played by the malevolent Shafqat Cheema).

Cheema the heavy-drinking communist.

His mission too is to harm Pakistan (and thus Islam) with the help of diabolical schemes and voluptuous disco dancing and binge drinking.

A group of passionate ‘young men’ (in their mid- and late-forties) and a damsel in distress take on the evil Cheema but are arrested by the cops along with the damsel’s weakling old father. Yes, the government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has sold out to the greedy ways of the villain’s sinister empire, and the frail father is dragged to the Supreme Court.

Here begins a terrific court scene. In it the damsel – in a red dress that is a freaky cross between a Wonder Woman costume and a Bedouin desert tent – is seen fervently arguing with a lawyer who wants the old man to be hanged.

She shouts away, condemning the spread of obscenity in a country made in the name of Islam, and passionately lamenting the practice of dishing out the law according to ‘ghair mulki’ (non-Pakistani and thus non-Islamic) law books.

The red damsel worried about spread of obscenity

Incidentally a pile of such infidel books lies neatly stacked in front of the bewildered judge (played by the great Munawar Saeed).

The damsel then runs forward, picks up the books and flings them high into the air (in slow-motion), pleading that the prisoner’s case should be heard according to ‘Islami qanoon‘ (Islamic law). Well, the sort of qanoon she was pleading for would have first and foremost booked her for her delicious sense of dressing, but that’s beside the point.

We never see the books coming down as they defy gravity and all laws of physics by completely disappearing into thin air.

The judge suddenly sees the light and he flings away whatever books left sitting on his desk (these do manage to hit the floor). He decides to hear the case according to Islamic law. Yes, just like that.

After a lot of shouting and more flinging, the old man is released, and the group is given the green signal by the suddenly reformed state of Pakistan to go forth and demolish the wicked whisky drinking villain.

The scene is a classic example of a populist medium glorifying exactly the kind of self-righteous, isolationist and convoluted mindset we so seriously have to move away from. But I was more interested in my popcorn.

Even though I didn’t take this piece of cinematic nonsense seriously, I did wonder whether some people actually decided to act upon the message that the film was delivering, which, in a nutshell, was that everyone or everything that is not according to a squarely narrow, literalist understanding of the faith is up for spontaneous destruction, never mind the lavish Wonder Woman costume, mate!

Well, the mujahids – this time in Robin Hood costumes – blow the evil man’s empire to smithereens and once again save Pakistan (and thus Islam) from the evils of Zionism and, of course, alcohol and disco dancing.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.