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General Zia-ul-Haq: Why is he often detested by a lot of Pakistanis?
- Thread starter Hitman
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Oh, for God sake, Pakistan would have been like Malaysia, Indonesia , Veitnam , a progressive developing country but Zia derailed it for his own persona agenda. Pakistan is not even close to its potential, thanks to two main culprits, Zia and Bhutto.
Don't be silly, we would not exist if we didn't have the nuclear capabilities he bestowed us with.
why is zia given credit for the nulcear programme initiated by bhutto and abdul qadir khan?
minamino
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Pakistan would have been like UAE and Singapore if Zia had not brought in draconian and useless laws in the country. Pakistan would have been way better economically.
minamino
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Benazir came after him so why blame her? The country was already in a drench before she came and Zulfiqar is not liked at all.
Hitman
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What would have India done, nuke you? Let’s get real.
WebGuru
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Afghan Taliban appeared in 90s and it was Benazir and her govt who supported their Taliban Govt in Afghanistan and her interior minister called them humaare bache
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Greenstorm
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Zia's obsession with extreme, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam was his main drawback along with lack of foresight related to economic growth and nation building. We had to pay dearly for that in later decades.
Otherwise, he deserves praise for defeating Soviets in Afghanistan. Our foreign policy was at its best under him. He kept India at its place and had he not died in that air crash, the map of subcontinent would have been different by now. It was under him that ISI became a truly menacing organization running operations from Bengal to Europe and North Africa. We were leaders of the Islamic bloc and a real force to reckon with back then.
There is a reason as to why there was no other option but to eliminate him.
WebGuru
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Agree with most of what you said. Interestingly on one side we had liberal milt dictators like Ayub and Mush and on the other side we had fundamentalists like Zia
Good to see some kids are also joining the discussion.
Kept India at its place? As far as I know, there have been no changes in the India-Pak border from Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan etc.
You think the stupid wars Zia led your country into did Pakistan any good? His nurturing of terrorists utterly destroyed any possibility of Pakistan developing modern industries and it remains stuck exporting low-tech goods. The direction he took the country has resulted in the need for repeated bailouts by the IMF.
WebGuru
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Another wrong fact it was Bhutto's nationalization that destroyed the industry in 70s and we never recovered from it he destroyed all the good work of Ayub in industrial sector and FYI Bhutto took multiple bailouts FROM IMF
Pakistanian
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He shut down Freemasonry in Pakistan, he took over their lodges and sent them into hiding. Currently the few Freemason lodges in Pakistan are now in government control. I don't like the guy, but there's a reason why he died in a fiery plane crash. When you die in a fire your sins are cleansed and you become an angel like Enoch in the Book of Genesis, so we should forget about Zia's mistakes because he made up for it.
Sit back down my son.
We would be america and india's little play thing.
our children would be like those in palestine.
Our country would be like that of syria/iraq, our natural mineral and gas reserves among other things would have been looted and the country would be finished.
If you don't understand the deterrent and power nuclear capabilities bring then sit back down my son and do some more research.
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uberkoen
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lol what fairy tale nonsense is this
uberkoen
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The program was started by Bhutto and finished under Nawaz. Why are you giving credit to Zia for this?
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Hitman
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So if Pakistan didn't have nukes, India would have been able to bully them? How exactly?
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Pakistanian
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India would've just nuked Pakistan, burned it down to ashes and brutally murder every single Pakistani.
Hitman
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Seriously, nukes are a thing to shine, polish and place it in the cupboard. Can't believe that poster seriously believes India would have wiped Pakistan off if not for their nukes. In fact it's laughable that the likes of Zaid Hamid believe the same.
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India is a dangerous country with a vile government, they have a pathological hatred for Pakistan and Pakistanis.
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And that would have made us nuke Pakistan? We would have been nuked after that by the rest of the world.
Bigboii
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It's not about nucking they would bully us around and they wouldn't be hesitant to start a full scale war if they had too
you are aware that zia was a puppet of america?
Bigboii
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Lots of people suffered under his regime and because of his laws many people are still suffering so he should be getting all the hate he gets and plus some may he rot in hell with Hitler
Bigboii
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Why Zia is getting credit for nuclear program he just carried on from Bhutto and he didn't even face that much pressure because of our involvement in Afghanistan. Please explain!!
DeadBall
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Yes we had a collective spirit and actual critical thinkers back then instead of just Mullahs brainwashing the populace now. The point is that such voices of dissent were just oppressed by dictators and tyrants back then but now the whole awaam will be behind it if just a blasphemous charge is added to the sheet.
The damage done is almost irrevocable.
ManFan
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He made a mistake of giving ground to the extreme voices in society but he was not as terrible as nostalgia make it out to be.
From individuals who lived under him, it was no different then before.
From individuals who lived under him, it was no different then before.
Interesting article by Kamini Masood:
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/674416-discreet-feminist-resistance-to-zia
Discreet feminist resistance to Zia
Kamini Masood
Art & Culture
June 21, 2020
Haseena Moin’s heroines defied repressive policies of the ’80s
In a memorable scene from the sixth episode of Haseena Moin’s celebrated 1987 television serial, Dhoop Kinaray, protagonist Dr Zoya Ali Khan is seen sitting in a hospital break room with her colleagues. A playful argument breaks out when a male physician suggests that women should not be working in the hospital, and should learn only the skills required to run the household. Zoya answers testily: “Tab hi tou humari quom taraqqi nahi karsaki, kyunke humaray mardon ki zehniyat aisi hi hai!”
I first saw Haseena Moin’s television serials in late 2018. Born in the late 1990s, I belong to a generation that did not see the serials in their heyday: the ’80s. The 1980s were the decade of a particularly regressive shift in societal attitudes towards women engendered by the regime of General Muhammad Ziaul Haq. I grew up hearing about the ruthlessness of Zia’s regime and the importance of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy and Women’s Action Forum in the fight back. However, I never heard about how people lived through that time. What I saw in the serials in 2018 floored me. Here were television serials from what has been painted as one of the darkest periods of Pakistani history, where female protagonists were shown having male friends, walking outside without covering their heads, and being the breadwinners for their households. These were incredibly popular plays, widely seen and praised. In fact, a survey conducted by the Department of Mass Communication at the University of Karachi reported that Tanhaiyan was still the most popular serial among women in 1998, a decade after it first aired. What was going on here? What could explain the existence and remarkable popularity of these television serials in a period notorious for relegating Pakistani women to the status of second class citizens?
The 1980s saw Zia push his agenda of rolling back women’s rights and the modest reforms that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had made, empowering the male citizens of Pakistan to engage in the moral policing of women. The Zia regime shelved basic freedoms, tortured dissidents, and weaponised notions of family and community. With the state aggressively peddling a singular image of life as a Pakistani woman — predictably, that of a wife and mother — and propagating the sanctity of chaadar and chaardivari, possibilities for life seemed to be increasingly limited. Importantly, Zia was trying through his policies to dictate how Pakistani women should live, not describe the way they actually did live. This is an important, but seldom articulated distinction to be made when we consider that existing historical scholarship tends to privilege state-centric narratives that take the ‘official party line’ as evidence for how people were living, instead of acknowledging it as a method of exerting control. To be sure, even as draconian laws were promulgated, there were women in Pakistan who were making complex negotiations to make life livable.
In Zia’s Pakistan, Haseena Moin’s television serials portrayed women who seldom covered their heads (if at all), had successful careers, and roamed the streets freely — sometimes entirely alone. Moreover, Moin’s characters were subservient to no one. “Main ne larkiyon ko yeh message dene ki koshish ki hai ke aap ko himmat pakarna hai, kisi ke saamnay jhukna nahi hai,neecha nahi banna,” she told me on the phone in early 2019. They chose where they worked, who they married, and how they lived. In most cases, her casts were populated by women. With her serials, Haseena Moin constructed a world in which women seemed to find room to breathe, free of any and all constraints imposed on them by Zia’s government. When compared to the stories of the Zia era that I was told growing up, Moin’s television serials depict a strange island of freedom in an ocean of unprecedented repression. How was it possible for Moin to pull this off?
Haseena Moin mentioned to me that her shows were never censored during the 1980s. When I spoke to a friend about Moin’s work, she mentioned that no one had ever called them controversial, and there had never been any calls to ban them. Most people took her serials on face value - as stories of love and family. It was exactly this facade of frivolity that she exploited to relay her message to the women of Pakistan, telling them to be courageous and bargain with the patriarchy to achieve what they wanted from their lives, while peppering enough romance and comedy in her scripts to make the message go down easy, so to speak. By her own admission, she exploited the prevalent depoliticization of ‘women’s culture’ to get away with these serials without piquing the interest of the state and its censors.
In this way, Moin was able to slip under the radar of a regime bent on eliminating opposition, and create a realm of possibility for Pakistani women to draw comfort and may be even courage from.
Further, Moin’s television serials took seriously the priorities of the ordinary Pakistani woman, and in doing so portrayed them as something entirely outside the binary of passive victim versus bold feminist activist that is generally found in scholarship about the Zia regime.
Most Pakistani women at the time were interested in making exactly the autonomous decisions that Moin’s heroines made, about employment, education, and marriage — priorities that other scholars have dismissed as ‘symbolic dissent.’ It is this idea that prevented me from ever referring to what Moin or what the women watching her serials were doing as ‘resistance.’ Overt political resistance that engages with ideas of systemic oppression and structural changes requires interrogation of notions of family and society which were and still are central to Pakistani women’s sense of self.
Moin’s work can also help to frame larger arguments about the reductive nature of historical scholarship on Pakistan, many of which have already been made by later scholars.
First, there is a distinct absence of reflection on the lived experience of Pakistani people. As yet, the prevalent narrative on the history of Pakistan tends to exclude Pakistanis completely — instead, we argue about the same revolving cast of characters that loom large in our historical imagination. This also pushes a narrative that positions the state as the primary agent in history, robbing an already disenfranchised people of their rightful place as part of the story.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, continuous rebranding of state-centric arguments lead to a possibly unintentional affirmation of the state’s version of events, which are often prescriptive rather than descriptive. What has been obscured, in the quest for knowledge of the machinations in the topmost tiers of the Pakistani leadership, is an appreciation for the lived realities of Pakistani people — which are often divergent from and even in opposition to the state narrative. Moin’s work, dismissed as apolitical and frivolous first by the state and then by scholarship on the Zia regime, is an important example of the value of these kinds of histories in helping us complete the half-stories we’re told, especially where women’s lived realities are concerned. Thus far, Pakistani history has been telling and retelling the stories of a few, but there is room, as historian Gerda Lerner says, for a broader range of heroes and heroines than we have hitherto included.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/674416-discreet-feminist-resistance-to-zia
Discreet feminist resistance to Zia
Kamini Masood
Art & Culture
June 21, 2020
Haseena Moin’s heroines defied repressive policies of the ’80s
In a memorable scene from the sixth episode of Haseena Moin’s celebrated 1987 television serial, Dhoop Kinaray, protagonist Dr Zoya Ali Khan is seen sitting in a hospital break room with her colleagues. A playful argument breaks out when a male physician suggests that women should not be working in the hospital, and should learn only the skills required to run the household. Zoya answers testily: “Tab hi tou humari quom taraqqi nahi karsaki, kyunke humaray mardon ki zehniyat aisi hi hai!”
I first saw Haseena Moin’s television serials in late 2018. Born in the late 1990s, I belong to a generation that did not see the serials in their heyday: the ’80s. The 1980s were the decade of a particularly regressive shift in societal attitudes towards women engendered by the regime of General Muhammad Ziaul Haq. I grew up hearing about the ruthlessness of Zia’s regime and the importance of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy and Women’s Action Forum in the fight back. However, I never heard about how people lived through that time. What I saw in the serials in 2018 floored me. Here were television serials from what has been painted as one of the darkest periods of Pakistani history, where female protagonists were shown having male friends, walking outside without covering their heads, and being the breadwinners for their households. These were incredibly popular plays, widely seen and praised. In fact, a survey conducted by the Department of Mass Communication at the University of Karachi reported that Tanhaiyan was still the most popular serial among women in 1998, a decade after it first aired. What was going on here? What could explain the existence and remarkable popularity of these television serials in a period notorious for relegating Pakistani women to the status of second class citizens?
The 1980s saw Zia push his agenda of rolling back women’s rights and the modest reforms that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had made, empowering the male citizens of Pakistan to engage in the moral policing of women. The Zia regime shelved basic freedoms, tortured dissidents, and weaponised notions of family and community. With the state aggressively peddling a singular image of life as a Pakistani woman — predictably, that of a wife and mother — and propagating the sanctity of chaadar and chaardivari, possibilities for life seemed to be increasingly limited. Importantly, Zia was trying through his policies to dictate how Pakistani women should live, not describe the way they actually did live. This is an important, but seldom articulated distinction to be made when we consider that existing historical scholarship tends to privilege state-centric narratives that take the ‘official party line’ as evidence for how people were living, instead of acknowledging it as a method of exerting control. To be sure, even as draconian laws were promulgated, there were women in Pakistan who were making complex negotiations to make life livable.
In Zia’s Pakistan, Haseena Moin’s television serials portrayed women who seldom covered their heads (if at all), had successful careers, and roamed the streets freely — sometimes entirely alone. Moreover, Moin’s characters were subservient to no one. “Main ne larkiyon ko yeh message dene ki koshish ki hai ke aap ko himmat pakarna hai, kisi ke saamnay jhukna nahi hai,neecha nahi banna,” she told me on the phone in early 2019. They chose where they worked, who they married, and how they lived. In most cases, her casts were populated by women. With her serials, Haseena Moin constructed a world in which women seemed to find room to breathe, free of any and all constraints imposed on them by Zia’s government. When compared to the stories of the Zia era that I was told growing up, Moin’s television serials depict a strange island of freedom in an ocean of unprecedented repression. How was it possible for Moin to pull this off?
Haseena Moin mentioned to me that her shows were never censored during the 1980s. When I spoke to a friend about Moin’s work, she mentioned that no one had ever called them controversial, and there had never been any calls to ban them. Most people took her serials on face value - as stories of love and family. It was exactly this facade of frivolity that she exploited to relay her message to the women of Pakistan, telling them to be courageous and bargain with the patriarchy to achieve what they wanted from their lives, while peppering enough romance and comedy in her scripts to make the message go down easy, so to speak. By her own admission, she exploited the prevalent depoliticization of ‘women’s culture’ to get away with these serials without piquing the interest of the state and its censors.
In this way, Moin was able to slip under the radar of a regime bent on eliminating opposition, and create a realm of possibility for Pakistani women to draw comfort and may be even courage from.
Further, Moin’s television serials took seriously the priorities of the ordinary Pakistani woman, and in doing so portrayed them as something entirely outside the binary of passive victim versus bold feminist activist that is generally found in scholarship about the Zia regime.
Most Pakistani women at the time were interested in making exactly the autonomous decisions that Moin’s heroines made, about employment, education, and marriage — priorities that other scholars have dismissed as ‘symbolic dissent.’ It is this idea that prevented me from ever referring to what Moin or what the women watching her serials were doing as ‘resistance.’ Overt political resistance that engages with ideas of systemic oppression and structural changes requires interrogation of notions of family and society which were and still are central to Pakistani women’s sense of self.
Moin’s work can also help to frame larger arguments about the reductive nature of historical scholarship on Pakistan, many of which have already been made by later scholars.
First, there is a distinct absence of reflection on the lived experience of Pakistani people. As yet, the prevalent narrative on the history of Pakistan tends to exclude Pakistanis completely — instead, we argue about the same revolving cast of characters that loom large in our historical imagination. This also pushes a narrative that positions the state as the primary agent in history, robbing an already disenfranchised people of their rightful place as part of the story.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, continuous rebranding of state-centric arguments lead to a possibly unintentional affirmation of the state’s version of events, which are often prescriptive rather than descriptive. What has been obscured, in the quest for knowledge of the machinations in the topmost tiers of the Pakistani leadership, is an appreciation for the lived realities of Pakistani people — which are often divergent from and even in opposition to the state narrative. Moin’s work, dismissed as apolitical and frivolous first by the state and then by scholarship on the Zia regime, is an important example of the value of these kinds of histories in helping us complete the half-stories we’re told, especially where women’s lived realities are concerned. Thus far, Pakistani history has been telling and retelling the stories of a few, but there is room, as historian Gerda Lerner says, for a broader range of heroes and heroines than we have hitherto included.
I found it interesting because it looks from a different angle at the Zia years; more from the ground up. So much that is written on this period and more generally on post-independent Pakistan has been cast in a statist mode. General histories on Pakistan - whether by academics or journalists - have tended to focus on the governing elite. Though, certainly, many of these accounts are useful, the “lived experience of Pakistani people” gets somewhat lost.
An understanding of Pakistan’s history, even its political history, is enriched by a greater consideration and feeling for culture. Many of the posts of [MENTION=22846]Nostalgic[/MENTION] on this forum are in fact an eloquent testimony to how sensitivity to culture can deepen understanding of history.
Kianig89
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Zia was about to conquer Kashmit seeds of la
Khalistan were also near to ripe but the incident happen
Khalistan were also near to ripe but the incident happen
Kianig89
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Zia was about to conquer Kashmit seeds of la
Khalistan were also near to ripe but the incident happen
Khalistan were also near to ripe but the incident happen
Nostalgic
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I'll have to go through this article in my copious leisure time, but one detail that immediately springs to mind vis-a-vis Hasina Moin serials in the 80's is the classic Ankahi, from 1982. An edict from Zia that all "heroes" be shown wearing the national dress, and all "villians" be shown in Western clothing, arrived while the serial was being shot and televised.
If you watch the serial on YouTube, you will notice that all of the male characters start off in Western clothing, whether in the scenes at Sana's home (Mamu, Jibran, Moby, Timmy et al) or at her office (Taimur, Siddiqui Sb, Faraz). Abruptly, in one episode, all of them shift to shalwar qameez, even the executives at her office.
When looking at history from below in the Zia years, it also strikes me that it is very important to acknowledge the role of migration, particularly to the Gulf. Remittances from Middle East peaked during the early 1980s. Punjab and KP benefited the most, Sindh much less so. This perhaps explains partly why Sindh was more unquiet during the Zia years.
Migration also shaped the emergence of, what Ammara Maqsood has called in her fine study, the new middle class - a class that became more visible in the 1980s during the Zia years. The old middle class had tended to rely on state employment and was in Maqsood’s words, “inflected with ashraf etiquette.” The new upwardly mobile middle class was more visibly religious and represented a shift towards personalised piety and ethical self-cultivation. For Maqsood, this had "been accompanied by increased participation in a broader culture of religious consumption, which includes Islamic television programs, banking services, and veiling fashions, that both fosters and displays a global Muslim identity.” It is a class that seeks material progress, better education and a desire “to become a better Muslim.”
Migration also shaped the emergence of, what Ammara Maqsood has called in her fine study, the new middle class - a class that became more visible in the 1980s during the Zia years. The old middle class had tended to rely on state employment and was in Maqsood’s words, “inflected with ashraf etiquette.” The new upwardly mobile middle class was more visibly religious and represented a shift towards personalised piety and ethical self-cultivation. For Maqsood, this had "been accompanied by increased participation in a broader culture of religious consumption, which includes Islamic television programs, banking services, and veiling fashions, that both fosters and displays a global Muslim identity.” It is a class that seeks material progress, better education and a desire “to become a better Muslim.”
When looking at history from below in the Zia years, it also strikes me that it is very important to acknowledge the role of migration, particularly to the Gulf. Remittances from Middle East peaked during the early 1980s. Punjab and KP benefited the most, Sindh much less so. This perhaps explains partly why Sindh was more unquiet during the Zia years.
Migration also shaped the emergence of, what Ammara Maqsood has called in her fine study, the new middle class - a class that became more visible in the 1980s during the Zia years. The old middle class had tended to rely on state employment and was in Maqsood’s words, “inflected with ashraf etiquette.” The new upwardly mobile middle class was more visibly religious and represented a shift towards personalised piety and ethical self-cultivation. For Maqsood, this had "been accompanied by increased participation in a broader culture of religious consumption, which includes Islamic television programs, banking services, and veiling fashions, that both fosters and displays a global Muslim identity.” It is a class that seeks material progress, better education and a desire “to become a better Muslim.”
Migration also shaped the emergence of, what Ammara Maqsood has called in her fine study, the new middle class - a class that became more visible in the 1980s during the Zia years. The old middle class had tended to rely on state employment and was in Maqsood’s words, “inflected with ashraf etiquette.” The new upwardly mobile middle class was more visibly religious and represented a shift towards personalised piety and ethical self-cultivation. For Maqsood, this had "been accompanied by increased participation in a broader culture of religious consumption, which includes Islamic television programs, banking services, and veiling fashions, that both fosters and displays a global Muslim identity.” It is a class that seeks material progress, better education and a desire “to become a better Muslim.”
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