NOTES FROM PAKISTAN
Meena Menon’s book is an introduction to the country’s politics and its people
Having lived in Pakistan for nearly six years, Meena Menon’s Reporting Pakistan was an obvious urgent read. As I enthusiastically flipped through, I revisited my life and times in the “enemy country” nearly four years after my own unscheduled departure. Menon’s extraordinary recall, love for detail and the gregarious tone of the 350-plus book naturally became the reason for my grins, grimaces and goosebumps.
Often the anecdotes left me with that been there, done that feeling – multiplied by six – as I had spent six years there and Menon less than one. A fact she touches upon more than once in the book. However, even a brief stay in Pakistan warrants a life of adventure, and this is what makes any read about Pakistan riveting.
Menon’s biggest adventure was her expulsion after her nine month stay. While she is unsure of the reasons that led to her marching orders, it happened soon after she interviewed Mama Qadeer Baloch, an activist from Balochistan who heads the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons. She was summoned by the Pakistani establishment and accused of portraying their country in a skewed light. Soon after she was asked to leave Pakistan at a week’s notice.
The book captures the meandering thoughts of an Indian in Pakistan beautifully. As resident Indian journalists are wont to, Menon has to rely on secondary sources of information to file stories for The Hindu – even when reporting within Islamabad, the only city she has a visa for. An important point that she brings to the fore is that the two resident Indian journalists in Pakistan – an arrangement that has been annulled since her posting – are seldom granted interviews with people of eminence. When she challenges a Pakistani official who denies her an interview with a minister, he snubs her with a comment about her not being Barkha Dutt.
The chapter on “Covering Terrorism”, the longest in the book, details the problems the minority Shia community faces in Paki- stan, the threats that the Shia Hazaras live with, and how the community is targetted. She writes about how Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are misused – citing cases of citizens who have been killed (Punjab Governor Salman Taseer) or thrown into jail, often to settle petty scores. There is plenty of information on how Pakistan treats its minorities – the Hindus and the Christians. There are other assorted stories of interest such as the one about Dr Shakil Afridi - the man who helped track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden that led to his eventual killing. She documents details of Pakistani journalists who have been shot, kidnapped, threatened and abused – 60 killed between 1992-2017. She mentions the case of one journalist who had been beaten and locked up for 24 hours for interacting with Indians. My favourite story was about the littleknown Shoaib Sultan Khan who has done pioneering work to alleviate poverty in Andhra Pradesh. Menon’s profile of picturesque Islamabad, often described as half the size of a New York graveyard but twice as dead, is near perfect.
Unfortunately, Menon overdoses readers with magnanimous descriptions of the city, of Pakistanis’ legendary warmth. While most anecdotes add colour to the otherwise bland reporting that we see from Pakistan, Menon takes her task a tad too seriously. On the one hand, she bats for peace between the two nuclear neighbours, on the other she unwittingly perpetuates stereotypes of Pakistanis by accentuating their exceptional hospitality or the arrogance of the establishment.
The stories of spooks from Pakistan, at one time thought funny, have been done to death since the time Menon’s senior Amit Baruah from The Hindu wrote about his minders in “Dateline Islamabad” almost a decade ago. While such stories still make for fantastic drawing room conversations, they do not merit any further documentation. It is only in the last chapter that one gets a feeling that Menon was let down by her Pakistani friends who thought she shouldn’t have reported on a controversial issue such as Balochistan. “Some of my Pakistani friends also privately wondered why I had written it and said there was no need for the paper to have highlighted it,” she writes. Menon displays superhuman qualities by not reacting and continuing with her good-hospitable-neighbour narrative. Reporting Pakistan is a compelling read for anyone trying to understand our neighbour and what it means to be Indian in Pakistan.