[Reader-list] The Laying to Waste of the World: a Memory of I.H Burney

[rehan ansari]

The Laying to Waste of the World: a Memory of I.H
Burney

By: Rehan Ansari

November 8,2001

I was talking to an Indian friend about how American
influence can overwhelm. I don't think any Indian has
experienced the transformation of their city under
American money.

It seems like so many statistics that there were a few
hundred heroin addicts in Karachi before the Americans
bankrolled the first Afghan War and then a million
three years into it. That the billions of dollars that
came in to seed, plant and nourish drug and arms
networks that were the Afghan jihad developed certain
mafia elites and transformed public culture in
Karachi.

To the Indian I was trying to convey that if New Delhi
wanted American attention, and sure that can mean
money for some Indians, be warned. Imagine someone
like Zia ul Haq and his values underwritten by the
Americans.

----

I.H Burney used to tell a story about Zia ul Haq.
Burney was a journalist who ran an independent weekly
from Karachi in the early 60s' called Outlook. He
attacked Field Marshal Ayub Khan for being an American
client. His criticisms of Ayub's sham democracy (a
model of "local bodies elections" that has
subsequently been brought out of the closet by General
Zia ul Haq and now General Musharraf) are exactly
relevant today. Outlook was strangled by Ayub Khan's
Secretary of Information, a particularly efficient
Goebbels, Altaf Gauhar.

In the early 70s, with the general elections, Outlook
opened again. This time Burney went after Bhutto and
accused him of being a fascist. He was harsh about
Bhutto's relationship with the Nixon White House and
found lots in common between Nixon and Bhutto, every
week. Bhutto is on record for saying that Outlook has
gone too far. It was shut down. 

Oxford University Press has published Burney's
editorials from the two lives of Outlook, 1962-1964
and 1972-1974, in 1996 the year of his death. The book
is called 'No Illusions, Some Hope and No Fears'. 

Now here is the Zia story I promised. 
Burney welcomed Zia's coup. Anything is better than
Bhutto, he said. Zia invited Burney to be Member of
the Election Commission (Zia promised elections in 90
days) and to author 'The White Paper' on Bhutto. 

Burney said he went to a meeting with Zia. Some other
people were in the room. On the table was a book. It
was the Koran. This puzzled Burney. 

Sometime during the small talk over the course of the
meeting, Zia said, let us, the Faithful, rise up to
say our prayers. Burney commented that he raised his
hands in prayer only when he has the flu. 

"Jab bukhaar charhta hai tab dua kay liyay haath
uthtay hehn."

He did not pray with Zia. Nor meet him again. 'Yay tau
aur bhi zaleel nikla', he said. Burney never wrote
again. 

Zia found an opportunity to become an American client
much like Musharraf has today. Zia rode the whirlwind
for 10 years.

In those years of living through Zia's time I
developed a simple mindedness. A cultivated ignorance
towards people and the subject that they were
referring to, who said Islam Islam too much. So that
if Zia instituted a Majlis e Shuura, instead of a
National Assembly, the fields of meaning indicated by
majlis, shuraa, and democracy became empty. A
collection of Zia-appointed pious-looking men brought
together to form an "advisory council," whose
deliberations became prime time television programming
for the better part of a decade made barren more
concepts of civil life than I care listing.

As a preteen I have a memory of Iqbal Burney from
1980. It is the only image I have of a "Writer" from
when I was growing up (He was the only writer friend
of my father). 

He was sitting in his living room, in the dark, the
only illumination was the light from the adjoining
dining room. He had deep set eyes so that even in the
clear light of day I had to strain to find his eyes in
the shadows of his eye sockets. He was sunk into his
armchair so that I could not tell if there was a body
beneath the kurta. He had caverns for eyes. Behind him
in the shelves of his library, all his books were in
the dark. 

When Arundhati Roy talks of the laying to waste of the
world by American foreign policy I don't multiply in
my head the sightings of heroin addicts or
Kalashnikov-toting mercenaries on Karachi streets. I
remember Iqbal Burney.

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