45

An innocent abroad
In 1975, while serving in the Pakistan Narcotics Control Board, I was sent on my first official foreign tour, to attend an international congress on alcoholism in Bangkok. Salman Farooqui, Secretary, Excise and Taxa­tion, Sindh, was the other delegate from Pakistan. He has a fascinating per­sonal­ity and is very dynamic and imaginative in his official work. Like me, he is a great believer in consultation and public participation in administra­tion. These methods had helped him in increasing many times the receipts of pub­lic revenues in Sindh. In Bangkok, we would walk most of the time. He was a very pleasant company.
The Prime Minis­ter of Thailand inaugurated the congress on alcoholism. Everybody spoke against alcoholism but the ceremony ended with alcohol being served along with other refreshments! The delegates from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, like us, noted the contradic­tion in precept and prac­tice.
We were later taken to a pleasant and comparatively conservative city, Chiang Mai, third largest in the country, in the extreme north. I called it La­hore of Thailand and Bangkok as Karachi, to the dislike of Salman. We were then taken in a helicopter to the tribal area along the border, where poppy was grown and the United Nations had started a crop substitution pro­gramme. (The area covering parts of three neighboring countries – Thailand, Burma and Laos – is called the “Golden Triangle” as it is still one of the largest suppliers of nar­cotics in the world.) The project was successful though many poppy farmers enjoyed the backing of the warlords of Burma and Laos. The programme included on-the spot agricultural loans to cultiva­tors and also arrangements for marketing of their crops. The tribal area was hilly, green and without any roads. The inhabitants were primitive, with their own mores. The women covered only the lower portion of their bodies. An unmarried girl could mate with anybody she liked but never after mar­riage.
On our return from Chiang Mai, we traveled by a bus from the airport to our hotel and were surprised to find the Prime Minister of Thailand and his ministers in the same bus. It turned out that he was using the public transport to emphasize the need for austerity in public life.

At the popular Pattaya beach, near Bangkok, a woman delegate from Brazil was constantly looking at me while I was en­grossed in a discussion with a delegate from the Netherlands at our lunch table.
“You appear quite civilized,” she said to me. I was flabber­gasted.
“Beg your pardon?” I expected an explanation of her remark.
“Are you from Pakistan?” A question came instead.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Oh! I thought Pakistanis were uncivilized brutes but you speak softly and in good English,” she said with amazement. I was shocked and also an­gry.
“I am sorry, madam,” I told her firmly, “you are insulting my country. Do you think speaking English is a sign of being civilized? I do not bother about myself but you have no right to insult my country. You owe me an apology.”
“I am really very sorry,” she said, “but I read somewhere that Pakistani soldiers raped millions of Bangladeshi women. That was horrible. But I am very sorry. I should not have said that to you.” She got up in a hurry.
“That was only Indian propaganda,” I told her while she was leaving.
I remained extremely upset that evening and could not sleep. It was the worst thing that could happen to me. I suffered a bout of un­controllable mo­tions that happens whenever I am very disturbed and upset. A Pakistani was suffering for the misdeeds of Gen. Yahya Khan and his ilk.

Begum Salman Farooqui joined her husband towards the end of our visit to Thailand. She helped me in my shopping for my wife and daughters. We later travelled together to Singapore.
While marveling at the cleanliness of Singapore, I carelessly threw the butt of my cigarette on the road. My friend from PIA picked it up immedi­ately. I felt extremely embarrassed and apologized to him. He was not being merely civil.
“If you had been caught,” he told me, “there would have been a heavy fine.” The reason for Singapore being so clean was no longer a mystery.

Peace precedes progress. In October and November 1975, I at­tended a seminar on narcotics in Tokyo. I, like other trainees and partici­pants, stayed at the Tokyo International Center. It was quite an experi­ence meeting with people from so many countries. A pleasant subject for a Pakistani was cricket and the worst possible was the army action that had led to the creation of Bangladesh.
While visiting Yokohama, I came across a Sikh cloth merchant, who originally belonged to Lahore. He was very hospitable. When he found out that I was also from Lahore, he flatly refused to charge me anything for a suit length that I had bought from him. It took me quite an effort to persuade him to charge me at least his own cost.
Aftab Sahib of Pakistan Television, who had been there for about three months and was quite familiar with the city, took me to an Indian restaurant at the Shinju-ku railway junction. Although it became a familiar scene later on, my first view of the underground and surface station was fascinating and spell-binding. A sea of humanity seemed to be on the move, smoothly and noiselessly. Everybody was moving purposefully, with measured but fast steps. The place, in spite of con­gestion, was without any litter or dirt. No­body threw anything on the ground except in the dust bins. It seemed to be grooming from the childhood that kept the huge city clean and was not the result of coercion, as in Singapore.
The police had the latest equipment made in Japan. The move­ment of traffic in the entire city could be monitored from a small hall in the police headquarters, with closed circuit television network on the roads and streets feeding the control room. There were thousands of police kiosks, mobile cars and motorcycle patrols on the roads, all connected with the control room through wireless, tele­phone and built-in computers in vehicles.
Nothing could escape their notice, it seemed. Up to 1950s, the same was said about an SHO in Pakistan but then he was left way behind after the society denied him the needed resources. I asked a Japanese police officer whether the police felt any con­straints on resources.
“No, no constraints at all,” he replied. “We get everything for the ask­ing because security of life and property has always been assigned the first priority. Even after the defeat in the war in 1945, police ex­penditure was a top priority as it was realized that no reconstruction or progress could be made without internal peace. Police was recon­structed and developed as an essential element for industrial develop­ment.”
There is a definite correlation between peace in society and eco­nomic development. Peace must come before progress is made. Miamoto, the President of Pakistan-Japan Friendship Society, said, “We are lucky in a way that the 1945 defeat removed our foggy think­ing and we are now marching for the conquest of the world through peace rather than war. Our most im­portant peace, however, is internal. That is why we place police require­ments at the top of our agenda.”

Indians eat a humble pie. In the seminar on narcotics, the case studies and country reports provided useful information for planning strategies to fight the menace of supply and addiction of narcotics. The ex­change of in­formation about criminals was frank and forthright. The Americans and Australians particularly emphasized that violence and crime were on the in­crease in their countries because of the drug ad­diction. They had facts and figures to prove it. The smugglers, when in a tight corner, did not hesitate in killing police­men and judges, they said. The addicts were committing bur­glaries and kill­ing their own parents to satisfy their needs. The entire social and moral order seemed to be breaking down. Such a situation appeared to be far off in Pakistan in 1975.
In my country report, I described the steps being taken for narcot­ics control with the help of charts, graphs and maps. The measures being taken in Pakistan were appreciated widely, except by Indians. The Turkish and Sri Lankan delegates later spoke to me and resented the Indian attitude. I waited for an opportunity to strike back.
In their country report, the two Indian delegates claimed that India had no problem inside the country. The only one had been created by smuggling of all kinds of narcotics from Pakistan. They built-up an elaborate theory that the smuggling of narcotics was generated and backed by China with all its might and resources, and in collaboration with Pakistan, to destroy the hu­man resources of India. It was a very mean attack against both Pakistan and China and I had to defend both. (China was not represented in the seminar.) I could have said that the baseless allegation was of a purely political nature but I did not want any delegate to carry a suspicion that Pakistan might be in­volved in some kind of international intrigue against India. The Sri Lankan delegate raised a strong protest against the Indians. I told the Chairman that I would like to reply to the Indian allegations. The Chairman wanted that no acrimoni­ous exchanges should take place. I assured him that I would dis­cuss the subject only in a professional manner.
I was cool and candid in my reply. I pointed out that smugglers of all nationalities were involved in the illicit trade, including Indians and Pakis­tanis. The law enforcement agencies of all countries were en­gaged in the war against them. The smugglers were the enemies of entire mankind, espe­cially of the countries to which they belonged. No country or government was or could be a party to their nefarious activities. They were the criminals of the worst order and deserved no mercy anywhere. Pakistan, for one, would never defend a Pakistani smuggler of narcotics. Then, suddenly rais­ing my voice, I demanded, “The Indian delegates have accused Pakistan and China of collabora­tion in smuggling narcotics into India. I would like them to pro­vide me here and now any concrete proof that they have so that sever­est pos­sible action may be taken against the criminals.” Then I sat down. The hall fell so silent that one could hear a pin dropping on the car­peted floor. Of course, the Indians had nothing concrete to say in re­sponse and had to eat a humble pie. Nobody seemed to have briefed them that they could not get away with baseless accusations against other countries in an international seminar. They never tried to be troublesome again, however.
The seminar ended with the delegates singing their folk songs. I pre­sented, in my absolutely unmusical voice, a couplet of ma­hiya, a popular form of Punjabi folk poetry.
On my way back, the plane stopped at the Beijing airport for five hours due to technical reasons. The Chinese at the airport showed special regard to the Pakistanis. A Japanese sitting next to me in the plane became ecstatic while looking forward to tasting a well-known Chinese rice wine after a long time, as he had been able to visit China again after 21 years. I made it sure that I did not sit next to him on our take-off from Beijing.
At the airport, I noticed that there were two clocks with a differ­ence of 12 minutes. It could not be the indication of two different time zones. In­trigued, I probed and found that one of the clocks had fallen behind for the last three days and it would take at least another day to correct it after proper authority was received. In 1975, China had a long way to go to catch up with the rest of world.

In late 1976, I was at the other end as a host to the dele­gates to an inter­national workshop on treatment and rehabilitation of ad­dicts, held in the Inter-Continental Hotel, Rawalpindi. WHO and PNCB organized it jointly. Many countries, including Tur­key, attended the work­shop. I took the Turk­ish delegates to Taxila and Swat for sightseeing. Among many other interest­ing things, they told me that Afyun was the name of a city in Turkey around which most of the country’s poppy was grown. I told them that afyun was one of the common names for poppy in our country also. Urdu and our regional languages share many words with Turkish.

First visit to England... I was nominated for a seminar on nar­cotics, to be held in Washington DC in January 1978. I left Rawalpindi for London in late December. It was my first visit to UK and USA. Mian Muhammad Sarwar, a friend and a relative settled in Manchester, also traveled by the same flight after spending his vacation here.
After arrival in London, we left for Manchester by road. It was quite an experience to travel on the motorway. It would have been built soon in our country also, thanks to Nawaz Sharif, but Benazir turned it into a simple highway after coming into power again in 1993.
Mian Abdul Majeed, the elder brother of Mian Sarwar, took me around to see places in and around Man­chester. The family was most hospitable. Humayun Sarwar, the elder son of Mian Sarwar, a very pleasant and hand­some young man, looked after me like a son. I developed great liking for him. Later he was married to my second daughter, Saira.
Mian Majeed took me to London by rail on my way back. I was very keen to visit the city as I had heard and read so much about it, like every child born in the British colonies, but seeing it was an anti-climax and dis­solved all those romantic visions. I did see the well-known places that in­variably attract most tourists. Wajahat Latif had been posted to London by that time and we had our dinner with him.

... and to the U.S. After the brief but very pleasant stopover in Eng­land, I flew to Washington DC An officer of the Drug Enforce­ment Agency received me at the airport.
A friend and a relative, Dr P.M. Toor, an aeronautics expert, who lived in Atlanta, Georgia, came all the way to Washington for three days and took me around to introduce the city to me.
Dr Muhammad Yaqub, my class fellow in college, worked in the IMF. (In 1993, he became the Governor of the State Bank of Pakis­tan.) He and his charming wife often took me to shopping malls in and around the city. It was my first experience and I enjoyed walking around and looking at im­mense variety of things under a single roof.

One day, while walking on my way back to my hotel, I was caught in snow and a strong wind. I was carrying a few things in my hand but it was so cold and chilly that I could hardly keep my hands out of my pockets. I would shift the shopping bag from hand to hand again and again. The dis­tance of just about one kilometer looked such a long journey that I thought I would not live long enough to make it. Having lived all my life in warm cli­mate, I am always afraid of cold and snow but this experience was really frightening. It was a very pleasant change when I went to see Dr Toor in warm Atlanta. He took me around in his multi-purpose Wagoneer. The seminar organizers took us to Chicago, Kansas City and other places.

U.S. still a tribal society. The exchange of information was of im­mense value at the seminar on the enforcement methods and meas­ures against narcotics as the delegates presented their country reports, followed by lively discussions. An American, while describing the difficulties of en­forcement, said that the primitive and tribal societies, like Turkey, Afghanis­tan, Iran, Pakistan, etc., posed a serious problem and law enforcement agen­cies there sometimes had to fight almost a war. There was nothing very de­rogatory but the delegations from Turkey and Afghanistan took serious ex­ception to the statement. There was quite a crisis and a heated debate started. Though Pakistan had also been mentioned, I initially remained silent. The Turkish and Afghan delegates asked me to join them as they found them­selves handicapped in English in spite of the available translation facilities. In view of the special relations between Turkey and Pakistan, I joined the dis­cussion with full gusto.
The point I tried to make was that the U.S. society was also still tribal by any definition. The communities retained their separate ethnic identi­ties and groups according to their area or country of emi­gration. They still practiced some of the customs of the countries of their origin like England, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, etc. I quoted from a few books and the weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. I re­ferred specially to the still unab­sorbed and unsatisfied Black population despite its having lived in the U.S. for gen­era­tions. I made a long and vigorous presentation to prove that the U.S. so­ciety was as tribal as any in the world. The Turkish, Afghan and some other dele­gates were so happy that they elected me as their spokesman. The Americans were also not unhappy. In fact, they agreed to a large ex­tent with my argu­ment except that the tribal laws were not practiced anywhere in the US. My reply was that the Red Indians, now called Native Americans, did practice tribal customs among themselves.

The price of liberty. I found the police in America to be well equipped, well trained and very efficient. And yet the crime, espe­cially the organized and violent crime, worried them very much. To get an answer, I observed their working very closely. I watched the court proceedings, visited the jails and even joined them in night pa­trols. In one instance, a car ahead of our patrol car attracted the sus­picion of the patrolman. He pushed a few buttons and the full infor­mation was available to him from the control room within 2-1/2 min­utes. It was a stolen car, snatched 23 minutes earlier. A street battle appeared imminent to me. Within less than a minute, a number of po­lice cars, including two armored vehicles, reached the spot. The thief and his car were overwhelmed without giving him any opportunity of any re­action. I was very impressed but thought it might be a put-up show for me with a decoy in the so-called stolen car. I checked up with the other record at their elaborate and impressive control room and found that it was a genuine case. Their reaction time to a distress call was less than five minutes on the average and, in most cases, even less than a minute.
I asked many American police officers why the crime was out of control in spite of such elaborate arrangements for fighting it. They gave several rea­sons, including too many guns, social inequity, le­gal difficulties, heteroge­neous immigrants, deprivation of the Blacks, and so on. Their consensus was that the society was paying the price for civil liberties, and voluntarily. They ad­mitted that crime in many countries of Europe and Asia was under better control but they also felt that the crimes committed in the name of state and soci­ety in those coun­tries were also of much darker dimensions. In the name of public or­der, coercion and tyrannies prosper. The forefathers of America re­volted against that system and their descendants were not going to re­turn to the dark ages. The policemen were very proud that they sub­mitted to judicial scrutiny and would not prosecute anybody unless they had sufficient convinc­ing evidence.

Wherever I went in the U.S., people asked about the fate of Bhut­to, who was then under trial, and showed their concern. On the last leg of my visit, I went to the forest of concrete called New York. My old friend, Nasir Husain Shamsi, came to pick me up. He was extremely happy to see me af­ter a long time. We talked about our days in the Government College, La­hore, our ac­tivities in the Friends Circle, a body we had formed as students for free dis­cussions, our scholarly discussions with Mian Mu­hammad Shafi, later my father-in-law, and, of course, Bhutto’s case.
Nasir’s father was my headmaster in Toba Tek Singh and was known for his piety. Nasir was in the Income Tax Service that he had joined through the Central Superior Services competitive examination. The axe fell on him during the “screening” of public servants in the early days of Bhutto government. As a result, he had to leave the country and struggle long and hard in a for­eign land to make a new start. For these very personal reasons, he could be justified in hating Bhutto from the core of his heart. But he too did not like him to be hanged.
Nasir and his charming wife showed much warmth and took me to see the World Trade Center, the Wall Street, Statue of Liberty, UN building, the Times Square and other places of interest.
Dr Khursheed Ahmad, another friend of college days, was also in New York. He and his wife also looked after me for a few days in New York.

Seeking forgiveness. On the way back, in February 1978, I flew from New York to London and stayed for a day in a hotel with my friend, Ch An­war Zahoor, who was attending a course there on labour problems.
I had planned to perform umra on my way back and had asked Bilqis to join me in Jeddah from Lahore. At the airport, I was received by ever-smil­ing Iqbal Mueen, the Counselor in the Pakistan Embassy. Iqbal Mueen, a very dear friend, was my class fellow in college. I stayed with him while Bilqis joined me the next day. Iqbal and his wife were wonderful hosts and we enjoyed our stay with them. They made our stay very comfortable and took us around for shopping and sightseeing. Tariq Mahmood, a nephew of mine, was also in Jeddah and met me at the airport by chance. He was quite fluent in Arabic although he had been there only a few months.
Iqbal Mueen, his wife, I, Bilqis, and Tariq performed umra on a Friday in Rabi-ul-Awwal, the month in which Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was born. We started in the morning. On the way, we saw the site of the Hudaibiya peace agreement between the Holy Prophet and the Quraysh of Makkah (formerly Mecca), the greatest act of statesmanship in human his­tory. From there, the road passes through a slightly more hilly area. I was getting emotional as we were getting nearer. The high minarets of the Masjid al-Haram were visible from afar. Then came the city of Makkah. I was al­most shivering with emotions, hav­ing seen in reality what I had dreamt of my whole life. Here were the hills, the streets and the places where the holi­est of the holy and the greatest of the great of the entire mankind had walked in flesh. When we entered the holy precincts, the first look at the Ka’ba froze me. I was overwhelmed by the experience and the sight and felt extremely dwarfed and overawed.
After Juma prayers, we performed the umra through a guide. Bilqis and I were lucky to be able to have kissed the holy black stone every time during the seven circles around Ka’ba. We offered nafal prayers at Maqam-i-Ibra­him and sipped water from the perpetual fountain of Zam Zam.
Many friends and relatives had asked me to pray for specific submis­sions but on my first visit to Makkah I forgot everything. In fact, I was lost even to my own self. It was on the second visit on the way back from Madina that I remembered the requests. Mian Riaz-ul-Haq had no male issue and had asked me to pray for a son for him. I prayed with devotion twice for a son for him and both times the face of a handsome child emerged before me. I thought Allah, the Merciful, had granted the prayer. I also heard being said that the baby should be named Jamal Mustafa. Allah gave a son to Mian Riaz the same year and the parents named him Yusuf Jamal Mustafa. Mian Riaz is the son of Mian Ahmad Ali, who helped arrange my marriage and was a very close friend of Mian Muhammad Shafi, my father-in-law. Riaz is also the maternal uncle of my son-in-law, Humayun Sar­war.
After umra, we went to Mina and Arafat, visited Mount of Mercy and saw the Hira cave from a distance as I found it difficult to climb. The visit was extremely rewarding in spiritual terms. We asked for for­giveness for our sins and lapses and prayed most fervently to Him to keep us on the right path.
After umra, Bilqis and I traveled to Madina by road. On the way we stopped at Badr and prayed for the souls of the martyrs of the Battle of Badr. We reached Madina in the afternoon. The high minarets of the Mas­jid-i-Nabawi were visible from far away. Approaching the dream city of my life, I felt ecstatic and lifted up spiritually. I felt having achieved my cherished goal of life.
We stayed in the Pakistan House situated in front of the Bab-i-Jibreel of the mosque. We paid our respects every day and that gave us great peace of mind and comforted our hearts. We were lucky to have prayed in the holy mosque on the place where the Holy Prophet himself used to pray. We also vis­ited the historical places around Madina.

Second visit to the U.S. I developed an eye defect and was advised a lens transplant in the U.S. I went in October 1987 and got my eyes treated in Pittsburgh, where Dr P. M. Toor, my friend and relative, was then living. Toor was Ph.D. in aero­nautical engineering and was holding a high position in the Lockheed Corpo­ration, among the largest in the world.
The operation of my eye was over in half an hour but I had to spend two hours more in the hospital for stabilization. The doctors applied local anes­thesia and I could feel their tinkering with my right eye. I was advised occa­sional check-up every fourth day for a fort­night. During that period, Dr Toor took me around for sight-seeing. I was enthralled by the famous Niag­ara Falls. Both my sons, Haroon and Irfan, then studying in the States, were also with me. They pointed out how people were going behind the big fall in their boats. I noticed that the boats were entering from the sides of the fall into the hollow between the rock and the fall. The very idea of going behind that huge fearsome fall gave me shudders.