I’ve heard of married Pakistani Muslim women having extra-marital affairs and I’ve heard of them killing for love or other reasons, but what Fauzia Sultana has done is truly shocking. A normal woman would never kill her own eight-year old son to avoid giving him to her ex-husband (who demanded custody of the child after divorcing her). Yet she poisoned her eight year-old kid Ali Raza as reported by Dawn.
Her second marriage ended in divorce after two years when she failed to bear a child. Her third husband Tariq Mahmood (father of two sons from a previous marriage) is described by her as a good man who took her to the Holy Land to perform Hajj. One would have thought she’d turn into a truly pious Muslim woman after the Hajj, but this did not happen. She continued her liaison with her lover of 22 years (Mehr Asif) for whom she used to steal jewelry and cash.
Apparently Asif was her lover even before her first marriage. Then she killed her third husband (Tariq) by poisoning him. Why she did it is not known. Maybe he came home earlier one day and found her lover in his house or perhaps he caught her stealing his cash and jewelry. She told everyone that Tariq had died of a heart attack. But then one of her stepsons (Shehzad Tariq) would beat her up (she didn’t say why). Maybe he too suspected her of being immoral. So she and her lover killed the stepson, and she told the cops that some unknown men had killed him. The police, employing their well-known “humane” methods of interrogating suspects, got her to confess to the murders of her husband, her stepson and her own son.
So will she be allowed to live by the state? We know that Pakistanis can get away with murder (after the victims’ near relatives forgive them). If that happens in this case, and she’s not sentenced to death, what about her affair with Mehr Asir? Remember, in Pakistan (and in Islam), the prescribed sentence for a married woman indulging in illicit sex is death by stoning. Will the state decide to kill her? Or will she turn out to have powerful relatives who will save her from execution?
In 1993 I saw Bal Thackeray being interviewed on Zee TV (satellite TV channels had just been introduced in Pakistan). I wish every Pakistani and Indian Muslim had seen that interview. It confirmed what I’ve always known: that Indian Muslims would have been annihilated if India had not been partitioned. When the compere asked him why his party activists had violated the Supreme Court’s order about the Babri Masjid, he said (in Hindi), “The Supreme Court’s order was not to do any construction at the mosque, we didn’t do any construction, we simply did a lot of destruction!” His hatred for Muslims was evident.
Now, 16 years later, this demagogue is in the news again, this time for trying to divide India along ethnic and linguistic lines. A Muslim legislator who preferred to take oath in Hindi instead of Marathi was attacked by his activists, and when Sachin Tendulkar said he was an Indian and that Mumbai belonged to all Indians, he faced the wrath of Thackeray. Thackeray said that Sachin had not even been born when the struggle to make Mumbai part of Maharashtra took place. I remember what happened in those days (it must’ve been in the late nineteen fifties). Even in those days, my mother and aunts used to pronounce Bombay as Mumbee. There were riots almost daily in Bombay, and later we heard from one of my uncles that Gujarati college girls had been stripped naked and paraded in the streets. The slogan of the Maharashtrians was “Mumbai humchee!” (Bombay is ours!).
Ultimately of course Maharashtra got Bombay (after much bloodshed) and the Shiv Sena managed to get it renamed as Mumbai a few years back. It should be interesting to see what happens now. The Shiv Sena did poorly in the recent elections, which may have been one of the reasons why Thackeray suddenly decided to foment trouble along linguistic lines. He apparently knows that language is a divisive factor: one of the reasons for Pakistan’s disintegration in 1971 was the feeling among Bengalis that their language was not being given due importance.
14th November 2009
Aitzaz Ahsan
If Mr Aitzaz Ahsan accepts an important position in the government, it will only prove what we have known all along: any Pakistani politician can be bought. Remember the US state senator who a few years back said that Pakistanis would gladly sell their grandmothers to achieve their aim?
SHAKIR LAKHANI
Karachi
DAWN, 14th November 2009
Salary of a CEO
Friday, November 13, 2009
According to a news item titled "Salary of new KESC CEO up by 35pc" (November 6), the salary of the new KESC CEO is 35 per cent more than what his predecessor was being paid. He will draw Rs1.3 million per month plus free accommodation and other perks. If the KESC had shown some improvement after privatisation, it would have been understandable. But the power company is making losses of Rs15 billion every year and its management has not been able to reduce even line losses. The KESC should reduce its expenses and one of the ways of doing it is to keep the salaries and perks of the senior executives reasonable.
Shakir Lakhani
Karachi
The News, November 13, 2009
Presidential immunity
Monday, November 09, 2009
According to a news item, Aitzaz Ahsan has said that the president will have protection under the “principle of sovereign immunity” and that no court can summon him. This is truly amazing. I always thought all laws in the Islamic Republic were supposed to be in conformity with Islam, according to which, all citizens of the state are equal. Why does the office of president enjoy immunity?
The second caliph of Islam, Hazrat Omar (RA), was publicly questioned in the mosque by a commoner to explain why he was wearing a robe made of a bigger piece of cloth than was allotted to him. If an ordinary man could confront the ruler of the first Muslim state then why can our president not be summoned by the court?
Shakir Lakhani
Karachi
The News, November 09, 2009
