Quetta Chawni (Cantonment, or Quetta Cantt.): Then and now

 Quetta Chawni (Cantonment, or Quetta Cantt.): Then and now

"All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." 

                                Herman Goering, Hitler's minister of propaganda

"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities."  

                                                                                         Alan Bloom

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It is early evening in late October, just before sunset when the shadows grow longer by the minute under the azure Quetta sky. The air is crisp, soon to turn even crispier, drier and colder with the approach of the night. The perennially dusty streets are littered with shriveled, reddish-brown leaves that are blown around, often in circles, by the gently whistling autumn winds. I look up at the exquisite, cloudless sky, trying to imbibe the vast, serene expanse of that ocean above with all my senses, and utter something that seem to gush from some secret crevice of my consciousness, the meaning of which is lost to me and to my companions standing next to me. “What? Did you say something?” one of them asks me. “Did I? Maybe, I did---I don’t know” I respond without taking my eyes off the blue heavens above us. Having lived in several countries on three continents, I can claim with some certainty that nowhere I have seen autumn skies as beautiful as in Quetta. But I guess this is just the prejudice of an exiled and nostalgic Quettawaal. We are all waiting in front of our friend Daud’s house for him to come out so that we can embark on our long evening walk to Chiltan Market in Quetta Chawni (Cantt.). As we wait, Daud’s father walks out of the door, smiles at us, and quietly informs us that his son will be out soon. A religious man with a long beard, he waves at us, and then walks in the direction of the local masjid (mosque) to offer his maghrib prayer. Minutes later, Daud appears. He joins us and we start our walk.

On most days, there would be the four of us on these all-season evening walks: Mehdi, Jabbar, Daud and yours truly. Sometimes a friend of Mehdi’s or of Daud’s would join us, too. We would start from Daud’s house, off Toghi Road, next to the Tel Gudam area, and walk some 5 to 6kms to Chiltan Market and back. Sometimes we would take the Jinnah Ground route, walk past the TV station building, turn right at the corner across the spacious compound that housed the huge pinkish and white communication tower, walk all the way to the roundabout over which loomed the giant concrete National Bank building, turn left and onward to Chiltan Market tea houses. At other times, we would take the uncomplicated route, via the beautiful, tree-lined Gulistan Road, turn left at the end of that long road and then all the way to the same National Bank roundabout. I enjoyed the autumn walks the best, something that I still do in the small town where I live now far, far away from Quetta.

Chiltan Market, Quetta Chawni

But more than the walk itself, or at least equally interesting and enjoyable as the walk, were our discussions en route to and at the chai shop where we would sip the steaming hot, sugary beverage as we indulged in arguments about subjects ranging from the strictly philosophical (existence of God and the truth of other religions!), to trivia such as Bollywood actors and singers. No matter what the topic, there was always enough disagreement to ensure that the discussions remained lively and generated as much heat as light. We would usually sit outside in the open area behind the old, concrete building of the market. The tea shops were in the rear and in the evening the place would be abuzz, the cheap plastic chairs fully occupied most of the evenings by people like us: civilians who had either driven or walked from different parts of the city to this popular spot in Quetta Cantt.

Except for Jabbar, the three of us would engage in long discussions, often without any meaningful resolutions and which would sometimes continue for days and weeks. Jabbar, because he was the youngest, and temperamentally a bit taciturn---- still a university student at that time----would intermittently jump in and ask something. His often irrelevant, and at times naïve, interruptions, however, had a wisdom-like function of their own: they would become necessary reminders to us that we needed to come to our senses, that we had gone off-track, or that we had transgressed the norms of civilized discussion and debate. Now that I think about it, perhaps they were moments when “the child is the father of man” as Wordsworth has aptly said. Or, perhaps they were even instances when what we usually look down upon as the pathologies of irrationality prove superior to the pathologies of rationality, rationality being something that we---the “educated”, grown up ones--- value and cherish so much that we often become blind to its partial and passionate nature. Modernity places this faculty of ratiocination above all else within man whereas traditional cultures have always considered it part of the passionate soul, as part of an inner hierarchy and below what the ancient Greeks called nous, and other (religious) traditions, Intellect or Spirit of which 'the heart' is the seat, hence the Arabic ayn al qalb, the Persian chashm e dil and the Sanskrit third eye. "The heart has reasons that the reason knows not of" as Blaise Pascal has reminded us.

A digression, but, oh, how I miss those days!

Gulistan Road, Quetta Chawni

That was then. Things are very different now. Quetta Chawni, as we knew it then----the location of so many of our best memories, from the weekend visits to, and swimming in, the famous Hanna Lake, picnics with family and friends in the cool Urak Valley and Wali Tangi, the bicycle races to Spin Karez, the motorcycle trips to Digari to eat the famous truck-driver tarka daal, and the long jogs and walks-----is no longer accessible, or not in the way it used to be, at least not to those of us who belong to that odd colonial category of mortal beings known as “civilians” in the godforsaken country of Pakistan. This often pejorative term, “civilian”, or its more civilized and politer version, “bloody civilian”, when used by a certain uniformed, booted usurper class gains more in crudity and ugliness in a brutalized and brutally neglected corner of the country, such as the city of Quetta in the internally-colonized province of Balochistan. On my recent visit to Quetta, I tried the impossible task of re-living those rather innocent bits of the past, for memory’s sake, for the good old times' and good old friends' sake. I soon found out the futility, if not the outright stupidity, of my intention of strolling over to Jinnah Ground in the Chawni area.

Pani Taqseem, Quetta Cantt.

Now, as soon as you walk off the Ajab Khan Pul (bridge), as we used to call the bridge that marks the boundary between the civilian and the military areas, you get stopped by a bunch of six-plus-feet tall uniformed men who demand from you, in addition to your usual IDs, four or five different kinds of “entry passes” before they allow you to cross the line that separates the two species of Pakistanis: the civilians and the wardi wallas, or the Chawni people. “But I live here, my forefathers, ancestors have lived and died here, have lived here for many generations, grew up here and this is our public area, our town, our land. Why do I need a pass just for an evening stroll?”, I protest naively. “Saab ka order hai” or “Ooper sei order hai, paas dikao” comes the dry, monotonous, machine-gun-like reply in a dialect that is an insult to both proper Urdu and Punjabi. Clearly, arguing with them is useless, even dangerous. After all, these brutalized, thoroughly dehumanized, deprogramed and then re-programmed, unfeeling automatons in uniform and boots are just doing their “job”, following their SOPs, as the jargon goes. They have “orders from above”. And it is that “above” that decides who can enter and who cannot, or who can enter with what kind of entry pass or parchi.

In some of my posts here on this blog site I have talked about glittering generalities, those sacred cows---words, expressions, concepts or categories of knowledge---that compartmentalize and colonize our imagination. They imprison us with narrow, suffocating intellectual categories that kill meaningful conversations, halt critical questioning, marginalize alternative worldviews, criminalize dissent, and which are often deployed as masks by hypocritical wielders of power against the powerless and the marginalized. Whether they deliver the goods that they claim to deliver is not the concern here; what we need to understand is that what else is carried out in their name. The political psychologist and cultural critic Ashis Nandy has argued that, "Today, the really powerful and the truly dangerous are those who justify themselves in the name of science, rationality, universality, equality, democracy and other such lofty Enlightenment values."

One such potent glittering generality is the term “security”, a convenient shorthand term used frequently these days for all sorts of nefarious and criminal ends. Like its siblings----development, progress, democracy, care, hope, humanitarian, sustainable, terrorism, social justice, stakeholder, community, empowerment, liberty and so on----security is now the demagogues’ word of choice the world over. For example, in the western world, but especially in the USA of post 9-11, this dumbing generality has been the most important justification, the raison de'tre, for the systematic erosion of civil liberties, for invasion of privacy, for demonizing critical inquiry and dissent, for the institutionalization of a pervasive and perverse system of surveillance that extends to peoples’ bedrooms and even toilets; in short, for the radical transfer of power from the people to the criminal oligarchies that lord over those lands and their peoples. Security is, first and foremost, about anxiety and fear. Fear, after all, is an effective tool: invent a hobgoblin, a boogeyman---the menacing other, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Yehudi, the barbarian at the gates---parade and analyze its evil nature ad nauseum on the mass media through obscene talking heads, all those rented anchors and hired pens that one critic has called "the presstitudes", make people afraid and then you can do anything you want to do to them. The more afraid they are, the easier it will be to manipulate them. Fear provides the most effective justification for silencing dissent and for oppression. Fear causes confusion and disorientation and nobody is more susceptible to control than a disoriented person. It is the oppressor demagogues’ favorite tool in his or her arsenal of control and domination.

Quetta Club, Quetta Chawni

It is in this context that one needs to understand what has happened, and is still happening, in certain areas of Pakistan, as well, and especially in a place like Quetta, Balochistan. In fact, in Pakistan as a whole, this one particular glittering generality---security---has been the epistemic category or methodological narrative framework of choice for the powers-that-be for more than six decades. The ruling classes, the masters of the country who have kept their deadly grip on the levers of power like a giant killer squid either directly or indirectly through their front men and women----those cowardly and opportunist puppets who always sell their souls and do Faustian deals with the most powerful or highest bidder----have perennially used “security” or “national security” as the main justification for the oppressive status quo and, therefore, for their illegitimate political experiments and adventures.

A relevant and close to home example of this “security”, “parchi” and “entry pass" culture is on display in Gwadar. As it gets fenced, gated and “secured” (secured for whom, from whom, one might ask?), the poor fishermen of Gwadar and surrounding areas, who have been fishing in the Arabian Sea for hundreds, if not thousands, of years now have to beg some low ranking, semi-literate sentry from Sahiwal, Sialkot, Cheecha Watani or Jehlum for a “parchi” so that they can do, even on a very limited basis, what they have been doing for ages freely, without any restrictions. This is, we are told once again, “development” for them----Chinese style, this time around! But it is already obvious, to those who have eyes to see, who is getting developed at whose expense. No multi-million dollar pizza franchises in western metropolises, no plots and luxury SUVs, no advisory and consultancy portfolios in high corridors of power for the locals of Gwadar, but more systematic marginalization, mini-genocides, violent exclusion from their own ancestral lands and resources.

Gwadar and "development"

One word: “development…a debauched word, a whore of a word whose users can’t look you in the eye” as Leonard Frank once wrote.

These excluded "stakeholders" of peripheral regions like Gwadar are lectured with the toxic rhetoric of "care", "empowerment", "charity" and even "social justice", and who "struggle towards their graves...listening to the lofty verbiage promising poverty alleviation, the right to work, development, progress, human rights and democracy...development has claimed more lives than outright war or race-based genocides in the twentieth century", say Ashis Nandy and Vinay Lal. The historian and cultural critic Vinay Lal has argued that, "Modern, largely invisible, holocausts are being perpetrated on significant sections of the world's population....there is every possibility that the twenty-first century might be richer still in other, hitherto still invisible, holocausts. Nothing furnishes more vivid illustrations of this argument than the idea of 'development', which remains indubitably the clearest example of genocidal violence perpetrated by modern knowledge systems on the integrity of human communities. The saga of Soviet terror originated in the brutal collectivization of Russian agriculture and in the impulse to industrialize rapidly, and consequently increase productivity, by the use of forced labour. Millions of deaths were achieved, not by superior forms of armament, but by coolly and rationally conceiving of these deaths as the necessary price to pay for development. In a similar vein is the Chinese Communist Party's heartless embrace of ruinous economic policies, the attempt by political functionaries to make the subjects of the state partake in the Great Leap Forward, and the consequence of this extreme folly: 25 - 30 million people dead from starvation." (The concentration camp and development: The pasts and future of genocide, Vinay Lal, 2005.)

One needs to observe that the fruits of this new variety of “development” in Gwadar is being distributed in a rather brutally asymmetrical manner among the “stakeholders". Given its ugly, violently exploitative and Eurocentric history, especially in the non-white South in the latter half of the ”century of terror” (Eric Hobsbawm’s term) that ended some twenty years ago, to say that "development is genocide" (as many cultural critics and historians have argued) would not be an exaggeration. It is now a thoroughly discredited concept for authentic human well-being----to the point that it is even seen as a form of racism. (See, for example, The Development Dictionary ed. Wolfgang Sachs, The Post-Development Reader ed. Majid Rahnema/Victoria Bawtree and Encountering Development by Arturo Escobar, among many others)

My friend Sardar Kharkaftar of Helsinki (another exiled Quettawaal who now lives up-north in Finland and who also laments the sorry state of the city of his birth) says that “Quetta is now more like a war zone, like a huge concentration camp”. In his last email to me, after I wrote to him about my recent trip to Quetta and the story of “entry passes”, he wrote back the following, and with which I am going to end this meditation on Quetta Chawni:

Cantonments, DHAs and other gated communities in Pakistan

“We need to see through these pathological charades like development and security. We especially need to understand the sick political shows that are staged every few years in the name of "elections" by the real masters of the land. The problem, the crisis, is decades old, structural and systematic and no amount of cosmetic whitewashing will do. For any real, humane and long lasting change to take root in Pakistan, and especially in its internally colonized and plundered peripheral lands like Balochistan, first and foremost, the decadent and humiliating colonial culture of batman and bungalow, officers’ clubs/mess, golf courses and gymkhanas, of lucrative allotment of plots, of the apartheid-like townships called cantonments, DHAs and Bahria Towns and all the other gated colonies and exclusivist enclaves that create demeaning hierarchies and divisions in society, for example, those between the intellectually bamboozled, morally corrupt brown sahibs that make up the class----the criminal cabal, the oligarchic Lahore-Pindi Shudra mafia often referred to with the atrocious euphemism of “establishment"----and the “bloody civilians”, the rest of us, that is, all these will have to be completely abolished because they are insulting relics of a racialist, colonial past, a past with which there should have been a radical break in 1947 but which has survived and even thrived in different forms in contemporary (both old and naya) Pakistan. A real, dignified and just Pakistan will be a place where there will be real justice and the rule of law, or more relevantly here, a place where you and I, civilians and others alike, will not need a parchi or an entry pass from some lowly sentry, or semi-educated uniformed chowkidar, in order to fish in our ancestral waters, to till our ancestral lands and to just go for a stroll in the public spaces of our towns and cities”.

For more, click: The Hollow Men , The Picture , A Lament

Quetta: Hazara Ethnic Cleansing

Illuminations 5