Peanut gallery … Shahzad Sharjeel
PAKISTAN’S military dictator, Ziaul Haq, rejected $400 million in American aid in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as ‘peanuts’. It was a not-so-subtle dig at then-US president Jimmy Carter. He is remembered in these parts as much as a peanut farmer as he is for the failed commando action to get the US embassy hostages freed in Iran.
The Iranians got lucky: US military aircraft supposed to evacuate the hostages crashed into each other in the Iranian desert some 320 kilometres southeast of Tehran. The heroically named Operation Eagle’s Claw ended as a damp squib; bodies of US troops were left behind by their retreating compatriots. We had a mixed bag of fortune decades later; one of the US Black Hawk choppers crashed while others killed their prey and took the dead body with them for an oceanic burial. Ghalib would turn in his grave for being quoted out of context; ‘Why couldn’t I be interned to the seabed; no funeral, no shrine.’
Chakwal, a town in Punjab’s Potohar plateau, is famous for its peanuts, its gold and silver inlaid footwear, and, more recently, its grape and olive farms. From Rawalpindi, if you take the Grand Trunk Road toward Jhelum, turn at Dina, which is famous for being the birthplace of Sampooran Singh, aka Gulzar, the Indian lyricist. Some hundred or so kilometres from there, one of Chakwal’s most famous sons was born in a small village named Gah. Mohna, as he was then known, was to become India’s 13th prime minister. He is known to the world as Dr Manmohan Singh, the only economist PM the country has so far had.
Who could have guessed in 1932 that this boy from the Salt Range would one day be the man credited with putting India on the path to market reforms — first as finance minister and then as the PM — as the country was brought back from the brink of bankruptcy? In the early ’90s, India was left with all but two weeks’ worth of foreign exchange for imports and had to pledge not the ‘family silver’ but its reserve gold bullion to meet foreign debt obligations. Planeloads of gold were flown to foreign destinations in return for what today appears to be a puny little first tranche of $240m. To Dr Singh and all subsequent policymakers’ credit, India has not looked back since then, at least not in economic progress; its judicial, political, and human rights track record has, however, come under severe criticism at home and abroad lately.
How surreal that Manmohan Singh and Jimmy Carter, both with a connection to peanuts, left us only three days apart. Carter visited Pakistan in 1986, four years after leaving the White House. Manmohan Singh was invited aplenty. Some accounts would have one believe that circumstances did not permit him to set foot in Pakistan since leaving at the age of 15, in the wake of the bloodshed witnessed during partition in 1947. Others leave little doubt that he could not bear to be back as his grandfather was murdered during the frenzy in the erstwhile sleepy village. After Dr Singh became the PM, both governments took token development initiatives in Gah. The word has various meanings depending upon the language you pronounce it in: in Urdu and Persian, it means a place and time; in Punjabi and Persian, a pronunciation variant would mean grass. Though all Dr Singh’s friends in Gah predeceased him, another of Ghalib’s verses, in perfect yet sad context this time:
(I was the strand of grass binding the bouquet; my companions fell out after me.)
In Hindi and Punjabi, mohna means enchanter; its root word, mohan, is also the nickname of lord Krishna. Our Nepali friends call something as sweet as a gulab jamun ‘lalmohan’. In the subcontinental culture, any-one who sports a dimple while smiling is also called mohni, a variant of ‘mun mohna’, the enchanter of hearts. Hadali, Dina, Hingol, and Gah are places where Khushwant Singh, Sampooran Singh, Jaswant Singh, and Manmohan Singh traced their roots. Our dear and recently departed friend Ajmal Siraj wrote:
(The pathway that was both a rest stop and destination; what! I would just walk through it now?)
Mohna could never bring himself to do that. Let us hope he watches us without rancour from the peanut gallery now.
Courtesy DAWN