Category: Civil Society

HYDERABAD: Activists of nationalist parties, human rights and civil society organisations have condemned ‘enforced disappearance’ of Punhal Sario, a noted human rights activist and convener of the Voice for Missing Persons of Sindh, a day before.

Mr Sario was picked up by occupants of a double-cabin vehicle at around 11pm on Thursday night near the Sindhi Language Authority (SLA) building. Since then his whereabouts remained unknown, according to his family and friends.

Sughra Sario, his wife, has lodged a report at GOR police station and also sent a complaint to the Geneva-based UN’s Working Group on Enforced Disappea¬rances, according to Sario’s friend Ali Palh.

Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz-Arisar chairman Dr Meer Alam Mari slammed Sario’s ‘enforced’ disappearance in a statement issued here and said that besides him two JSQM-A activists, Bilawal Chandio and Gulsher Taggar, had also been picked up.

He termed it a violation of United Nation’s universal declaration of human rights and urged international rights bodies to take notice of enforced disappearances to save missing persons’ lives.

Sindh National Tehreek leader Ashraf Noonari also condemned Sario’s disappearance.

Writers, intellectuals, lawyers and representatives of civil society held a demonstration after attending ‘Ahle Qalam Conference’ under the banner of ‘Voice of Missing Persons Sindh’ outside the press club on Friday.

They appealed to Chief Justice of Pakistan to take suo motu notice of missing persons and demanded that the Senate, national and provincial assemblies raise voice against disappearances.

They announced that they would stage province-wide protests against enforced disappearances on Aug 6.
The Voice of Missing Persons Sindh deputy convener Sorath Lohar appealed to international human rights organisations to take serious notice of Mr Sario’s enforced disappearance in order to ensure safe recovery of all missing persons.

KARACHI: A joint action committee composed of civil society organisations on Friday vehemently condemned ‘enforced disappearance’ of Mr Sario and called for his immediate release.

In a joint statement issued after a hurriedly-called meeting of civil society and human rights organisations at the Karachi office of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the human rights activists said rights defenders were not being spared by law enforcement agencies.

A number of political workers were already missing and police had failed to find their whereabouts despite registration of cases and petitions in Sindh High Court, they said.

They appealed to Sindh chief minister, inspector general of police and heads of all political parties to take notice of frequent ‘enforced disappearance’ of human rights defenders.

MIRPURKHAS: Hundreds of civil society activists held a demonstration and sit-in outside the press club in protest against ‘enforced disappearance’ of Mr Sario.

Kanji Rano Bheel and Aasan Das advocate who led the protest said Mr Sario was picked up without any charge. He had no criminal record but was only struggling for the release of missing persons, they said.

They urged the government to ensure his safe recovery and demanded the authorities concerned arrest the culprits involved in his disappearance.

MITHI: Rights activists and members of civil society voiced serious concern over ‘enforced disappearance’ of Mr Sario and demanded his early recovery. It would create a sense of deprivation among people of Sindh, they said.

Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2017

Since Pakistan’s foundation in 1947, not one prime minister has served his or her full term. Things like assassinations and military takeovers happen. Today it was money rather than force that did for Nawaz Sharif. The Pakistan supreme court surprised itself by voting unanimously to ensure that he was not going to be the exception.
The court declared him guilty of small crimes and misdemeanours linked to offshore accounts in Panama and undeclared monies in the Gulf, triggering his immediate resignation. Is the Sharif family’s power, which has dominated rightwing politics in the country for so many decades, finally coming to an end? And if so, who will fill the vacuum?

In a cricket-obsessed country where the leader of the main opposition is Imran Khan, the metaphors came fast and furious – Pakistanis have always been good at self-derision: “This is just the 20-20 opener. We’re waiting for the Test Match (general election)” … “The supreme court is the third umpire. Decision is final” … “The Sharifs have been fixing matches for ever”. The mood is one of cynicism: Sharif has looted the country long enough; other parties deserve a chance.

Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, is fighting back, accusing the court of a vendetta – which usually means that his billions could not buy a single judge. This is truly exceptional. Life in Pakistan has not been morally salutary for any of its citizens. The family politics represented by the Bhutto-Zardaris and their rivals, the Sharifs, is swathed in corruption. Each has learned from the other how best to conceal it, minimising paperwork and juggling accounts. Many years ago, when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister, she asked me what people were saying about her. “They’re saying your husband is totally corrupt, but are not sure about how much you know …”

She knew all right, and was not in the least embarrassed: “You’re so prudish. Times have changed. This is the world we live in. They’re all doing it. Politicians in every western country …” Her husband, the president-to-be Asif Ali Zardari, was imprisoned by Sharif, but no actual proof of corruption was discovered: Zardari’s loyalty to his cronies was legendary, and they remained loyal in return. Sharif, it appears, has been less fortunate.
Many are suggesting that the not-so-invisible hand of the army ensured the unanimous verdict of the supreme court. Did force actually trump money? This notion was given a boost when the current interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar, calmly informed the press that the country faced four serious threats, known only to four key players – including himself, of course. The other members of this quartet were uniformed, and therefore unnamed.

The other problem confronting the country is the endemic violence against minorities, women and the poor
What of the threats? The US (as always) is supposedly angry about Pakistan’s closeness to China. Sharif’s servility to the Saudi monarchy is vexing Iran. Then there is Sharif’s continuing obsession with wooing India, despite the revanchist Modi government in New Delhi. Add to this the heavy US pressure to end all support for anti-Nato outfits in Afghanistan, and threats to target drone strikes at Pakistan proper, not just the tribal badlands bordering the war zones. So runs the semi-official interpretation. Sharif was an obstacle and had to be removed.

There is little doubt that political corruption has acquired colossal proportions in Pakistan – but it’s the same in other south Asian states, even China. Attempts by military dictators to harpoon this whale fail because they refuse to acknowledge the scale of corruption in the armed forces’ top layers. The other problem confronting the country is the endemic violence (apart from the jihadist variety) against minorities, women and the poor. Pakistan’s social fabric is damaged beyond repair.

Sharif was brought down on a technicality, but he is out. Sharif was felled by a constitutional clause inserted by his one-time patron, the late dictator General Zia-ul-Haq, stipulating that every MP must be “honest and sincere”. Were this applied, the National Assembly would probably be permanently empty.

The government of Sindh has announced creating approx 50,000 new jobs in the next financial year. The budgetary announcement was greeted with cheers by many who still believe that a public sector job is the dream destination in one’s life.

Youth in the rural Sindh particularly have great enchantment with public sector jobs. Students grow with prayers of getting a government job after acquiring a graduation degree.

Rural areas where agriculture is a key driver of economy and landlords are seen as the most powerful creatures; bureaucrats are seen as the only other entity wielding some power in society. Lure of administrative authority coupled with ill-gotten extra money and a white-collared hassle free working ambience makes the dream further sweetened.

Until the 70s, rural Sindh had a scant representation in bureaucracy even within the province. In the One-unit era most of the bureaucracy came from either Punjab or Karachi and rural Sindh was sidelined in public sector jobs. Z.A. Bhutto provided constitutional cover to the quota system and paved the way for rural middle class to enter the provincial and federal bureaucracy.

Quota system is often misconstrued as a mechanism of sharing jobs between Sindhi and Urdu-speaking communities of Sindh. It was actually an affirmative action to strike a balance of representation between the rural and urban communities to avoid long term explosive ramifications of imbalanced representation in the federal and provincial jobs.

In Sindh, the system was aimed to create opportunities for disadvantaged rural communities to seek admissions in universities and step in the mainstream administrative web. A large number of non-Sindhi speaking people from rural areas also benefited from the allocation of job opportunities under the quota system.

In 1973, when the quota system was given a constitutional cover, the share of rural Sindh in federal jobs was minuscule. According to the census report of the central government, there were only 300 seats of rural Sindh compared to 1900 of urban Sindh against various positions of grade 16 to 22. In class-1 posts, Sindhi-speaking officers were only 2.5 per cent against 49 per cent Punjabi and 30 per cent Urdu-speaking officers. Rural Sindh inherited a disadvantage of lack of education among Sindhi Muslims before 1947.

While quota system mainstreamed Sindhis in the federal and provincial bureaucracy, it induced an addiction of the government job as well. A table-chair job detached Sindhis from rapidly rising private sector job market. Karachi’s huge industrial sprawl remained devoid of Sindhis for decades, mainly because of their tendency of working in a relatively comfortable government job where one gets guaranteed salary irrespective of performance. Those who are deployed against lucrative positions can make even heftier fortunes.
 
Another reason of this indifferent attitude towards private sector jobs was a performing agriculture sector that had been a key source of employment and livelihood in rural areas till recent decades. With the passage of time, agriculture sector suffered a steady decline. Perennial shortages of water, decrepit irrigation infrastructure, manipulation of market prices and obsolete practices brought the sector to its knees. A sizeable entry of rural youth in urban markets will also help rural society to liberate itself from the clutches of an obsolete and tyrannical feudal dominated social structure.
 
Meanwhile, urbanisation reshaped the rural economy in Pakistan during recent decades and Sindh is no exception to the phenomenon. According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan 20016-17, the services sector contributed 60 per cent and the manufacturing sector contributed 21 per cent to the national economy. These two sectors have attained robust growth in the recent years. This shift in the economy is reshaping job market as well.

Although agriculture sector is still a major source of employment, it caters mainly to unskilled masses due to its archaic structure. Educated and skilled human resource finds better opportunities in non-agriculture sectors, mainly the aforementioned two sectors. This transformation has posed new challenges to the rural areas of Sindh where economy has stagnated.

Against this backdrop 50,000 public sector jobs in a province with approx. 60 million population that grows at a rate of not less than 2.5 per cent (unofficial estimates outnumber these statistics) is a paltry figure. With this pace of population growth, the province adds approx 1.5 million people every year. It culminates into a massive unemployment among youth that entails multifaceted social and political repercussions. Karachi has a sizeable private sector market that can absorb a good proportion of these new entrants in the job market.

According to the census of manufacturing units in Sindh, Karachi alone has 1198 manufacturing units out of total 1825 units in the province. The second and third highest number of units were located in Hyderabad (98 units) and Dadu including Kotri and Nooriabad (83 units). This indicates that some 75 per cent of industrial units were located in and between Hyderabad and Karachi. The rest of Sindh has very little industry where agriculture sector dominates the rural economy for decades now. Rural youth ought to realign them with new realities and the changing pattern of economy.

Although a gradual shift has been observed in the recent years, the pace does not match the need. Karachi is becoming more stable as law and order situation has improved after the operation by security forces. It has buoyed up the market creating more space for job-seekers. If peace prevailed, the city will gain new economic boom.

CPEC-related investments are set to propel the market further. These investments will open up new vistas of industrial and commercial opportunities. Rural communities can benefit from these emerging opportunities. Political leadership of Sindh has always been clamouring against influx of non-local population in the urban areas of the province. One major reason behind this phenomenon was the space ceded by Sindhis themselves by confining themselves to rural areas.

Private sector in urban markets requires continued supply of human resource to sustain its growth irrespective of one’s identity or origin. Whereas political leadership of Sindh has been successful in mobilising people against the population influx from other areas, it failed to mobilise and facilitate rural youth to enter in a flourishing urban job market to forestall the menace of influx.

A sizeable entry of rural youth in urban markets will also help rural society to liberate itself from the clutches of an obsolete and tyrannical feudal dominated social structure. Sindhi middle class evolved in the wake of its entry in public sector in the 70s that brought initial ripples in Sindhi society. However, this did not bring any structural shift in the rural society and ultimately lost its luster as the society has entered a new phase of stagnancy.

Successive governments ignored creating any new industrial and commercial centres in rural Sindh. Political leadership doled out munificent charities through politically motivated social security programmes, but paid no attention to modernisation of agriculture sector or industrialisation in rural areas.

Agriculture sector that has been the lynchpin of rural society has plunged into decay. Its overall efficiency has nosedived during recent decades. Hence the engine of rural economy has already started malfunctioning. Skewed landholding pattern, political control over water diversion and a manipulated market have made this sector hostage in the clutches of politically powerful plutocracy. It has lost its potential to alleviate poverty in rural areas. The present structure of agriculture sector will only perpetuate feudal hegemony and abject poverty among rural masses.

The government has no plans of industrialisation in rural areas in the foreseeable future. Public sector engine is losing steam and cannot absorb a large number of unemployed youth being churned out by universities every year. Another crowd of youth which could not acquire a university degree wanders for productive engagement to earn livelihood. This is high time that the rural youth should stop selling their family silver to pay bribe for seeking government jobs and get fleeced by preying commission agents. They can invest the same amount to establish small businesses in urban and peri-urban areas for gainful employment and a decent livelihood.

Political leadership of Sindh can rekindle hopes among the rural youth and liberate them from shackles of feudal servitude by encouraging and mentoring them to accept new realities and adopt new approaches. Rural Sindh can be reshaped if a large number of youth equip themselves with skills and abilities required in the urban markets. It will have to address a range of problems confronted by rural Sindh. It will synchronously reduce unemployment, population influx and excessive control of the feudal over rural society and politics of Sindh.
 
 

A demand by a group of Arab countries to close Al Jazeera Media Network is “wrong”, “ridiculous” and “must be resisted”, The Guardian newspaper has said in an editorial, joining a growing chorus of voices raising concerns about suppresion of press freedom in the Gulf.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt reportedly gave Qatar 10 days to comply with 13 demands to end a major diplomatic crisisin the Gulf, insisting, among others, that Doha shut down Al Jazeera, close a Turkish military base and scale down ties with Iran.

Al Jazeera: Call for closure siege against journalism
“The attack on Al Jazeera is part of an assault on free speech to subvert the impact of old and new media in the Arab world. It should be condemned and resisted,” the editorial published by The Guardian on Friday said.
‘Muzzling journalism’

By attacking Doha-based Al Jazeera, “Qatar’s neighbours want to gag media that raises questions about the way these nations are run,” the respected British newspaper said in a piece titled, “The Guardian view on Al Jazeera: muzzling journalism”.

Al Jazeera was a key source of news as the Arab Spring rolled across the Middle East in 2011, “infuriating many Arab leaders” who “no doubt wished it would be taken off air, permanently”, The Guardian wrote.

“Al Jazeera, which arrived long before the internet in the region, broke the mould by reaching directly into Arab living rooms. Along with social media, Al Jazeera has in recent years stirred public opinion in ways Arab governments could not ignore.

“But now Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates think they can silence it with a blockade of Qatar that will only be lifted if Al Jazeera is shut down.”

While noting that “Al Jazeera is not perfect”, The Guardian said that Qatar abolished formal censorship 20 years ago.

“By comparison, in 2012 the UAE demanded [ex-British Prime Minister] David Cameron rein in adverse BBC coverage or it would halt lucrative arms deals,” it said.

“Abu Dhabi is a regional media player. The UAE’s deputy prime minister owns Sky News Arabia, along with Rupert Murdoch’s broadcaster. According to observers this station put out fake news about Qatar’s ruler.”

Earlier on Friday, media watchdogs, human rights groups and prominent commentators all condemned the demand to close Al Jazeera as “outrageous”, “absurd” and “worrying”.

The Qatar-based network also described the call for its closure as “nothing short than a siege against the journalistic profession”.

“We assert our right to practice our journalism professionally without bowing to pressure from any government or authority and we demand that governments respect the freedom of media to allow journalists to continue to do their jobs free of intimidation, threats, and fearmongering,” it said in a statement.

Earlier this week, the Editorial Board of the New York Times said a “misguided attack” on Al Jazeera was an attempt by Saudi Arabia and its anti-Qatar coalition to “eliminate a voice that could lead citizens to question their rulers”.

KARACHI, Pakistan — For decades, the sight of Abdul Sattar Edhi pleading for donations was enough to press even the most tightfisted of Pakistanis into reaching for their wallets.

Such was the impact of Mr. Edhi, a humanitarian icon in Pakistan who died last summer after a prolonged illness. In a country where many citizens have given up on the government, Mr. Edhi’s expansive philanthropic network acts as a benefactor, providing everything from emergency assistance to welfare services.

Now his son Faisal Edhi is carrying on his legacy and trying to ensure the survival of the philanthropic foundation at a time when donors have grown tired of being asked to respond to a string of disasters and as competition from Islamic charities mounts.

“I would ask him how we would continue in his absence,” Faisal Edhi said. “He would say: ‘I have put up the building. Now you have to paint and decorate it.’”

as support of the foundation in Pakistan has declined. Faisal Edhi has accused the government of impeding the import of vehicles for ambulances, and has reported a drop in donations since his father’s death.
The word Edhi is akin to an SOS call for many Pakistanis. They trust the foundation with their donations and with performing last rites for the dead. The Edhi Foundation runs Pakistan’s largest free ambulance service and its network includes shelters, nursing homes, orphanages and morgues.

Edhi volunteers appear at every disaster zone and crime scene, bearing stretchers and shrouds. It is hard to imagine Pakistan’s cities functioning without the Edhi Foundation. As the noted urban planner Arif Hasan put it in the 1990s, “Without the Edhi Trust one does not know how Karachi would cope with its victims of violence.”

“He carries this huge responsibility on his shoulders,” said Dr. Seemin Jamali, the head of emergency services at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center in Karachi, who has worked with the Edhi Foundation for 25 years. “He is upbeat, and with a lot of public support, he can do it. The foundation has already been set, and now he needs to carry it forward.”

Mr. Edhi, 40, spent time as a teenager in Florida and New York. He has worked with the Edhi Foundation for half of his adult life, mostly handling administrative affairs, and slowly trying to raise the standard of services and digitize record keeping.

The foundation’s systems are antiquated — records and receipts are mostly on paper — and the voluntary nature of the organization comes with its set of challenges.

“The staff is sometimes hesitant when they don’t know how to use a computer,” he said. “We’re trying to train them. It’s a slow process.”

“A revolution causes a lot of damage,” he added with a laugh. “So we’re trying to do this through evolution.”
At the foundation’s offices in the historic Mithadar district of Karachi, where Abdul Sattar Edhi began work in the 1960s, a large painting of him cradling a baby is propped up in the reception area. A “get well soon” card is still affixed to the wall, along with a fading calendar that juxtaposes his image with that of Mother Teresa, and a framed commemorative stamp issued by the government after his death.

In the later years of his life, he made headlines with politically charged statements, like calling for a military takeover of Pakistan, and declaring politicians corrupt, or sounding alarmist notes about the state of the country.

At work, he would meet with the dozens of people who needed assistance with everything from adoptions to ambulances, or answer the phone himself, a rarity in a country where meeting anyone requires going through layers of middlemen and assistants.

It is the part of the job with which Faisal Edhi is still struggling. “I’m stretched,” he said.
The foundation is managed by a trust that comprised its founder, his wife, Bilquis — a philanthropist in her own right — and their children, Faisal and Kubra, while managers from outside the family handle the daily operations.
“The children are all very hard-working and down to earth, and they’re always available,” said Jameel Yusuf, the former head of Karachi’s Citizens-Police Liaison Committee. “It’s a tough job. Edhi covered everything from east to west, north to south; he didn’t leave any stone unturned on all issues involving citizens and their plight.”
Faisal Edhi’s loss is double-edged: He lost a father and his backbone of support at work. “Now I’m alone,” he said. “I don’t feel like leaving his room empty. I still sleep on a cot near his, because that’s where I’d slept for the last few years.”

He is excited about an ambitious new project to train midwives, nurses and paramedic staff at an Edhi-run hospital, just as he worries about the financial health of the organization.

Islamic charities, he said, have undercut individual donations to Edhi by dividing people along sectarian lines, since Islamic charities are often closely linked to a particular sect.

Religious pressures have long been a challenge for the foundation. Detractors of the elder Mr. Edhi accused him of apostasy and questioned why he would rescue and take in abandoned babies, or work for non-Muslims.
Faisal Edhi recalled that people from the family’s Bantva Memon ethnic community would even sometimes refuse to greet his father.

But Mr. Edhi is adamant about upholding the policies set by his father, such as the foundation’s refusal to accept donations from donor agencies or any government. “It has always been supported by ordinary Pakistanis,” he said.

Work at the foundation has not stopped for a day, he said, not even for his father’s state funeral in July.
“The government may have announced a three-day mourning period,” he said. “But we kept working.”

On a Monday morning, volunteers at the Edhi office in Mithadar fielded myriad queries from people stopping by and answered a near-constantly ringing phone. In another corner, a volunteer wrote out donation receipts worth $250 for Edhi to enact the ritual of animal sacrifices and meat distributions on their behalf before the Islamic holiday of Eid. Mr. Edhi occasionally popped out of his office to talk to staff members.

The work of the foundation carries on.
“He wanted to make Pakistan a social welfare state without participating in politics,” Mr. Edhi said of his father. “That was his dream, and this will be my aim as well; to go from village to village, to make a parallel setup that can help improve people’s lives.”

He added that he believed the state was unwilling to help the people. “In smaller districts, you can find advanced weaponry at local police stations, but when you go to the local hospitals, there’s no advanced equipment,” he said. “Our ruling class is not ready to give services to the people.”

50 years ago, 4th March, 1967 marked a watershed event in the post-Partition history of Sindh. It was the day when 207 students were arrested en masse at the G.M. Barrage between Jamshoro and Hyderabad as they staged a rally against the One Unit scheme that had been in place in the country since 1955.

The protests were a culmination of the unrest among Sindhi students that had been simmering beneath the surface for a long time against One Unit. Its causes went deep into the humiliations suffered by Sindh and its people on cultural, political, administrative and economic levels.

Sindhi, a 2,500 year-old language, had no official status in what became the province of West Pakistan. It was stripped of all its rights as a medium of instruction, except in primary schools in the rural areas of Sindh. Sindhis were thus deprived of all opportunities of promoting their culture and language.

Politically and administratively, One Unit meant that Sindh disappeared as an entity and was reduced to looking to the capital Lahore for the pettiest matters.
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On the economic level – and this situation continues to this day – it had to concede much of the lands rendered cultivable by the construction of barrages to the higher bureaucracy and military.
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Last but not the least, the demographic changes due to Partition, which saw mass influx of Muslim migrants from India and an outflow of Sindhi Hindus, meant that the major cities of the province, including Karachi, became virtual no-go areas for Sindhis as far as jobs and economic opportunities were concerned.

Final straw
The movement itself was sparked when the Vice Chancellor of Sindh University, Hasan Ali Abdur Rehman, was dismissed in February 1967 by the Governor of West Pakistan, Nawab Amir Mohammad Khan Kalabagh.

Rehman, the first Sindhi Vice Chancellor of the university, was dismissed for his efforts for facilitating the admission of Sindhi students in professional colleges by allotting quotas for the far-flung districts of Sindh. The students agitated and demanded Rehman to be reinstated.

On March 4, a general-body meeting of students of Sindh University, Liaquat Medical College, and Engineering College was planned in Sindh University’s City Campus in Hyderabad. Students were proceeding to the venue in university buses when the police encircled them near the G.M. Barrage. The students were beaten up and all 207 of them were arrested.

The police brutality resulted in mass protests all over the province. Although the dismissal order against the Vice Chancellor was not taken back, this moment, which came to be known as the 4th March Movement and is commemorated every year, gave rise to wide-scale political awakening in Sindh.

My contribution
I was a first-year student at the university’s Hyderabad campus. I remember it was another pleasant evening when the news of the mass arrest spread.

This development was grave not only because students had been targeted, but because the authorities had been trying to divide the students on linguistic basis. In order to counter the unrest against the dismissal of the Vice Chancellor, the Commissioner of Hyderabad, Masroor Ahsan, had attempted to rally those who were regarded as leaders of Urdu-speaking students behind him.

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The outrage felt by the students against the victimisation of the first Sindhi Vice Chancellor of Sindh University, who had dared resist the attempts by the West Pakistan government to undermine the autonomy of the university, was given a parochial colour.
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Given that most Urdu-speaking students seemed to be supportive of government action, a few of us decided that something had to be done, even symbolically, to prevent the cleavage between the students on parochial lines. This could only be done by showing solidarity with the arrested students. A minimum would be to write slogans on walls against the police action.

So me and my comrade Inayat Kashmiri took up a brush to paint slogans against the police and the Ayub dictatorship in the area around Tilak Charri, where most of the education institutions of Hyderabad were located at the time.

While writing on the walls, we had our eyes fixed on the on-coming traffic on the one-way road, ready to slip into the side streets if a police van came. We were too naïve to know that police in this country does not observe basic traffic rules.

A police van came full-speed from the opposite direction and before we could do anything, we received the full brunt of lathis on our backs, were lifted up and thrown inside the van. Direction: Market Thana. There ensued salvos of invectives in Punjabi centred on one’s lower anatomy.

We were handcuffed and remained tied between two chairs in the SHO’s office for four days and nights. This made of us far greater rebels than the books we had lately become fond of: Maxim Gorky’s Mother and, of course, the Communist Manifesto.

Market Thana was located just near the red light area of Chakla. A large part of police activity in this thana consisted of rounding up prostitutes from the bazaar and bringing them in for extortion and entertainment.
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The language of communication in the thana was Punjabi – not its Heer of Waris Shah variant but an outpouring of its filthiest variety. This made us understand all the more the resentment in Sindh against One Unit, the suppression of the smaller provinces and their merger into West Pakistan with its capital in Lahore.
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During this time, we were hardly given any food and we avoided drinking water as we did not want to beg our unworldly hosts to take us to toilet. After four days, Hafeez Qureshi, one of the leading advocates of Hyderabad and a nationalist leader, came looking for us. He asked the SHO for a copy of the FIR so that he could engage legal procedures for our release. But an FIR there was none.

Apparently the SHO hadn’t even cared to inform his higher authorities of our arrest. He panicked and handed us over to the lawyer and even excused himself, saying that if he knew we were students, he would have let us go after admonition. Luckily for us, it was not yet the era of missing persons and kill and dump.

The discovery of Sindh
This small act of solidarity earned us lot of recognition and friends in the university. I already knew Jam Saqi, the great Sindhi nationalist leader whom I held in awe for his dedication and selflessness. He came from a far-off village in Tharparkar. I was a frequent visitor to his small kholi in a building on Tilak Charri.

He used to cook his only meal of the day late in the evening on a small stove. Even then, he used to insist on sharing it with me. I had never come across such a man in my family environment. I realised that life was much deeper and vaster than what family confines could offer. The real human beings were found where I was taught not to look for inspiration.

4th March served me as initiation into the soul of the province that had offered refuge to thousands of Urdu-speaking families like mine when they migrated to this country after Partition. With time, on becoming proficient in Sindhi language and going to the various cities and rural areas of Sindh as an activist, I impregnated myself with the deeply humanistic substrate of the Sindhi civilisation. With Jam Saqi, I came to meet luminaries like Hyder Bakhsh Jatoi, Ibrahim Joyo, Sobho Gianchandani, Usman Diplai and others.

What struck me the most in these people was their simplicity and total absence of pretension of any kind. I became more and more repulsed by the type of hostility that the great majority of educated Urdu-speakers maintained against the people of Sindh at the time.

The importance of 4th March
It will not be wrong to say that 4th March crystallised the defiance of the people of Sindh against the treatment meted out to them by the dominant players of the country. Ground was prepared for it first of all by an unprecedented flourishing of Sindhi literature in all of its genres, especially poetry. Poets like Shaikh Ayaz felt and mirrored the pain of Sindh in their poetry.

No wonder that after 4th March, a recurrent event Sindhi Sham became the main form of assertion of Sindhi identity and pride. Behind an innocuous cultural façade, Sindhi Sham was a forum for voicing dissent against the unjust policies perpetrated in the name of one nation.

Countless literary periodicals burgeoned in Sindh after 4th March. To this day, the most vibrant daily press of the country, closest to the ordinary citizens, is the Sindhi press.

Unfortunately, most historians and political specialists in and outside Pakistani, with some honourable exceptions like Dr Tanvir Ahmed who wrote the Political Dynamics of Sindh, have failed to take due account of the landmark nature of the 4th March Movement.
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The Movement was an important component of the overall democratic upsurge in Pakistan that led to the falling of Ayub Khan’s dictatorship and dismemberment of One Unit. Even the books written on student movements in Pakistan seem to overlook the fact that Sindh, after having been wiped out from the country’s map by virtue of One Unit, struck back hard and reentered the political frame due to the defiance and courage of its students.
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It is 50 years since that fateful evening of 4th March, 1967. It is long ago but so near that it is impossible to forget it. Time has not erased the deep pride I have always felt in making a very small contribution to that great event.

I will finish with a prayer by the inimitable Latif Sain:
سائينم سدائين ڪرين مٿي سنڌ سڪار
دوست مٺا دلدار، عالم سڀ آباد ڪرين
Saim sadaein karein mathan Sindh Sukar
Dost mitha dildaar Aalam subh aabad karein
My Lord keep Sindh always on top
Dear Friend also make prosperous the entire world
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