pakistan " the reality politics portended
The hysterical synchronicity of these happenings is typical of the Pakistan encountered nowadays in the news. It is also Manto-esque, which is to say that it feels like it could have been imagined, in exactly these tones, with just such a flatly ironic counterpoint for an ending, more than fifty years ago by a man called Saadat Hassan Manto, the writer whose centennial is being marked this year in Lahore amid an unshakeable and vaguely shaming sense of déjà vu.
There was in Pakistan at this time at least one remaining source of reassurance for such a writer. About to lock the unstable new state into a Cold War alliance, the U.S. was looking for well-disposed Pakistani writers to help realize its earliest projections of soft power. Manto seems to have come into America’s sights for his attack on the progressive writers. One day he was visited by a man from the U.S. Embassy who offered him five hundred rupees for one of his stories. (The going rate was fifty.) Startled, Manto told the American he wrote in Urdu and not in English. But the American said he needed the story in Urdu “because we have a journal that is published in the Urdu language.”
In subsequent letters this discordance becomes more audible: Manto’s fourth “Letter to Uncle Sam,” written in February 1954, has him brashly telling Uncle that his “admiration and respect for you are going up at about the same rate as your progress towards a decision to grant military aid to Pakistan.” The nephew then gives Uncle Sam some earnest advice: “[You] must sign a military pact with Pakistan because you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world’s largest Islamic state, since our mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism. Once military aid starts flowing, the first people you should arm are these mullahs.” And then, a few lines later, the nephew looks Uncle Sam in the eye: “I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs. I am your Pakistani nephew and I know your moves. Everyone can now become a smart ass, thanks to your style of playing politics.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/the-seer-of-pakistan.html
There was in Pakistan at this time at least one remaining source of reassurance for such a writer. About to lock the unstable new state into a Cold War alliance, the U.S. was looking for well-disposed Pakistani writers to help realize its earliest projections of soft power. Manto seems to have come into America’s sights for his attack on the progressive writers. One day he was visited by a man from the U.S. Embassy who offered him five hundred rupees for one of his stories. (The going rate was fifty.) Startled, Manto told the American he wrote in Urdu and not in English. But the American said he needed the story in Urdu “because we have a journal that is published in the Urdu language.”
In subsequent letters this discordance becomes more audible: Manto’s fourth “Letter to Uncle Sam,” written in February 1954, has him brashly telling Uncle that his “admiration and respect for you are going up at about the same rate as your progress towards a decision to grant military aid to Pakistan.” The nephew then gives Uncle Sam some earnest advice: “[You] must sign a military pact with Pakistan because you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world’s largest Islamic state, since our mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism. Once military aid starts flowing, the first people you should arm are these mullahs.” And then, a few lines later, the nephew looks Uncle Sam in the eye: “I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs. I am your Pakistani nephew and I know your moves. Everyone can now become a smart ass, thanks to your style of playing politics.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/the-seer-of-pakistan.html
posted by Satish Sharma at
21:19
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