 Gweithio. I'm Paul Webley. I'm the Director and Principal of SOAS. It's a very real pleasure to welcome SOAS alumni and friends and also those people who haven't visited SOAS before for this special book launch event. It's really great to see so many of you here this evening. Now you'll be glad to know that I'm not going to give a long welcome speech. You're not here to listen to me, but you enjoy the conversation between Fatima and Michael and ask some questions yourselves. But I do just want to say two things. One to the alumni, and I know because I've checked that most of the audience are actually alumni, but also to people who've not been to SOAS before. So just first to the alumni. Our alumni relations programme at SOAS has grown significantly over the past couple of years. We now have 40,000 alum spread over 180 countries with more than 12,000 based here in London. We've devised and exciting events for our alumni, such as this event this evening. We've just published a new magazine, which I hope you've seen. We've completed our first ever telephone fundraising campaign, which has raised more than £26,000 from our alumni here in the UK. I should tell you that I went to visit this for a couple of evenings, and I have to say I found it really inspiring to hear the conversations from alums about how being at SOAS have been a transformational experience for them. It was really very, very interesting. And that money will be going towards scholarships, hardship grants, the library transformation project and various student projects. Last week, I attended an alumni event in Washington, DC, and I met one student who graduated from SOAS in 1971, and some who graduated a couple of years ago, and most of the years in between were also represented. But despite that almost 40-year span of graduation dates, they all shared something, and it wasn't just recollections of the distinctive scent that used to emerge from the SOAS bar, though that does seem to play a part in the memories of many alumni, I have to say. What they talked about could be summed up in the phrase, a great sense of community. That's what came across. At SOAS, we have a common set of values, a common purpose. Not that that stops us arguing all the time. We are after all a university, and that's what universities are about. So it's great to see you here again reconnecting as part of the wider SOAS community. For the small minority of you who are newcomers, if this is your first visit to SOAS, please don't let it be your last. SOAS offers a wide range of lectures, concerts, exhibitions and other events. There's always something going on. There's something of interest to everyone. Do look at our web pages to see what exhibition is on in the Brunai Gallery or what is coming up in the SOAS concert series or what lectures or panel discussions we're hosting. I'm biased, of course, but I do think SOAS has the most interesting range of events in London, and if you've got your time for it, you could spend every evening here, actually every day here, doing something interesting. And this evening's event is particularly special. Fatima is one of our esteemed alumni. It's wonderful that you're here. It's a pleasure to have her here this evening. Her new book has been widely publicised in the media. It's been reviewed in many publications. Fatima has been a great ambassador for SOAS. She was just telling me in the green room, I love this. She said, before she came to SOAS, she had an offer from Oxford. Did you remember an offer from somewhere else as well? LSE. I went to LSE, another great place, not quite as good as SOAS. An offer from LSE and Oxford, and then she decided to come to SOAS, and apparently the people at Oxford were a bit surprised by this decision, whereas actually, from my point of view, it makes every good sense, but also it's one of the things that makes us such a good ambassador for SOAS. So thanks very much. We're really pleased to have the opportunity to host you here tonight. Now before we hear from Fatima, I'd just like to introduce you to the chair of tonight's talk, and then I'm going to disappear down into the audience somewhere so I can just listen. Michael Redford, an Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter, born under the British Raj in New Delhi. Michael is well-travelled in India and Pakistan. His films are of a political and historical nature. I believe I've been told that you're due to commence shooting your second Shakespeare collaboration. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. Which sounds great. We wish you luck for that. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to have Michael with us here with you to chair this event. We're very grateful for that. We hope that Michael stays in touch with SOAS after the event, though you did tell me that you'd been here before. I have. So you're not actually a newcomer. You've been in this lecture theatre. I've been in this lecture theatre. I saw it over there. So Michael, over to you to give off the event. I'm going to just go and enjoy it like everyone else. Thank you. Over to you. All right. This is exciting. I've got wires dripping from every corner of my body. I don't know quite what sharing this meeting is all about. I thought it was making a speech, but it's clearly not. So I'm going to have a conversation with Fatty. I just want to say a couple of things. First of all, there was a slight rumour going about the place that I'd been invited to do this because I was going to be kind and nice. I don't do kind and nice, and Fatty knows that very well. She is a friend, but I'm going to be as hard on her as I possibly can because I know it's going to provoke her. I was hard on her, she would be with me if I were in her position. So I don't know how many people in here have actually read The Song of Blood and Sword. Could I have a show of hands of people who've actually read it? I'll assume on you. Well, there's a whole bunch of people out there who are going to go and buy it. The reason I say that is because I don't want to kind of assume things that other people might not know. It's a very controversial book. It's controversial for a number of reasons. It's controversial because it puts, it's a very personal memoir, I think, and it puts very firmly the fame, fair and square, for Fatty's father's murder on the President of Pakistan today. It's also controversial, I think, for another reason, and this is something that I'm, I think, a number of critics have picked up on. It's controversial because it's a strange and rather original mixture of personal memoir deeply felt and a historical background, a sort of, if you like, a book about the history and the failures of Pakistan and the events that led up to the murder of her father. Now, those two things don't sit so easily together, and this is what I'm going to ask her about because at times she's, the book has been called superficial, and at times it's been called dazzling. And it's a sort of mixture of the two. It's immensely felt. It's as though, I don't know, I mean if I can say this, Fatty, without meaning to it in any way, to be, it's as though one of the Borgers had sat down and written a book about their family from the point of view of growing up in that family. And inevitably that is contentious and controversial because it's from an insider's point of view. Yes. Are you calling me a Black Sheep Borger now? No, no, no, no, let's talk about that. Did I mention the word Black Sheep? I'd like to put it in there. I'll stop talking anyway. I'll stop talking because there are many things that, and the other thing is that it's a fascinating insight because it's deeply felt, it is deeply, deeply moving at certain moments. How do you deal with all that? Well it is both those things, it is a personal memoir and it is a political take on Pakistan because I never wanted it to be only one of those things. I didn't want it to be one of those dry books that you have to read for research purposes but that you close, put back on a shelf and it doesn't change the way you look at a country or at a people. And I didn't want it to be a sort of collection of my thoughts, my sort of diary as it were. I just did Sir Azradio before this talk and it was when I was at Sir Az that I started the process of researching the book. My so-ask dissertation was on resistance to Zeyl Haq's military regime in the 70s and 80s and Pakistan. I needed that research, I needed that research because the people who could have told me about that period were gone, they were dead. And I found when I was sitting in the library and those of you who go to school here know that Sir Az's library is amazing, it's the vastest sort of treasure trove possible. But I found very little, I found I had to go out and speak to people, I had to go online, I had to go into libraries, I had to go into archive material and that shaped how I did the rest of the book. I think to talk about the responses to the book. I heard Philip Pullman speak at your alma mater at Oxford recently and he said that writing is a despotic exercise, it's tyrannical which is so true because you're sitting there and you have control over what you'd like to focus on or what your voice will be. But reading is a democratic one. So I hope people are able to go through the book and take both those factors out of it. So they're able to take the insiders, eyewitness, personal view of a family, a family built on a mythology in many ways, certainly in Pakistan. And also see that it is a research book that there are pages of footnotes at the back that you can go and follow up on if you want to double check or if you want to re-confirm or if you want to read more. The thing that slightly bemeased me, I have to say, is that when you talk about, for instance, your grandfather, you have a great sort of insight into how he thought and felt because he's part of your family. So when you talk about Ziyal Hook, you give yourself the liberty to say he felt this, but I would, just there, I would have preferred to have just seen the facts done. And I don't mean that I want a dry piece, but I'd rather see the facts and then draw my own conclusions. Well the bit with Ziyal, I mean Ziyal is a ghost that followed my family from before my birth, really, throughout my childhood. And Ziyal and his feelings were gleaned from, we can blame so as, because that's why I did the Ziyal research. But that was all archived material and it was interviews that I did with journalists who at the time were writing on the Ziyal and for those who know, the most extreme censorship was imposed on the media in Pakistan then. You had journalists flogged on the road during Ziyal's time. It was done with interviews, you know, with human rights campaigners, with political activists who were jailed for years under Ziyal. So I suppose that if there were liberties that I took, it was from people, I hope, who did live, who lived through the violence of the Ziyal regime. But I'm wondering, where did I say he feels something? I could cite you the page but we'd probably spend 45 minutes looking at it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's get at the general. But it wasn't my intention. I think that Ziyal, if there is a personal take on Ziyal, it is because Ziyal was like a member of that world that I grew up in, you know, I grew up. I was born three years after my grandfather's birth that I was killed. And he was killed by Ziyal. You know, Ziyal was once asked why he made the decision to kill Zulfaqaliburto when he said it was two men in one coffin and that, well, he wasn't going to be the one sitting in the coffin. And he was a twin ghost at that time in our life. You know, we lived outside the country because of Ziyal. We lost family members because of Ziyal. You know, the people I grew up seeing in the living room at my parents' dinners were people who had been tortured under Ziyal. So I suppose there is a personal side of Ziyal that maybe was difficult to deal with. Mm-hmm. You give a very, you give a very, how to explain it, you give a very, very vivid picture of the chaos that is Pakistan, the enduring chaos of this place. And I just want to know why. It's the question that, to me, I absolutely, I don't know why should it be. Why should it be that this country, which is so rich in culture and in law and has such a vivid people, should live in such chaos? Well, I'll be really so asy and say that we talk about the chaos that is Pakistan. And if we want to extend it and talk about the region and the subcontinent, why is it that we have these countries with legacies of violence, of state violence? And why is it that we have this group of countries, not just with a legacy of state violence, a legacy of silence after the violence, a legacy of dynasty, a legacy of political assassination, and assassinations that happen every day, I mean of journalists and activists. I think we've got to go back to the Raj. I think we have to look at a part of the world born fractured after the push for independence. I mean, one of the great cleavages that the British left us, not you guys, you're all right, but the other British was, the one thing they did better than anything really was to divide and rule, was to limit the field of politics, was to turn it into an exclusive arena. So it's no surprise that we all, whether it's Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, suffer a lot of these same tremors. I think it's part of the colonial experience. I won't even say post really, that's just one of the things I learned so as. But it continues today, it continues to the fact that this is a country yesterday on the 19th of May, the Pakistani government banned Facebook. Today on the 20th of May they've banned YouTube and Wikipedia, and the ostensible reason for this ban, according to the government, is that un-Islamic features were found on these websites. If you have a problem with Facebook, close your account. You don't limit access to millions of people. If you want to protest the fight against Islam, how about you stop letting American drones fly overhead and kill your people? And this happens, and there's no noise. I've been sitting here in England, and I don't hear any noise about this censorship. I don't hear anyone saying this is unacceptable for a so-called democratic country to do. Rather you've got governments in Pakistan that are propped up still by the very foreign powers that we fought to throw out of our country, not just Britain, but the United States too. I've often heard, because India, chaotic and violent and corrupt as it is, has somehow managed to stabilise itself to the point where it can move forwards. I once asked somebody from Pakistan what they thought the reason was, that Pakistan found themselves incapable of doing this. The answer was the Zamindari. Some people have said that the most important thing that Nehru ever did was to abolish, even though it caused huge problems in 1948, was to abolish the Zamindari. If you don't know what Zamindari are, perhaps he will explain it to you. I will be the representative. That's feudalism basically. Certainly it was incredibly important for India to abolish feudalism. That said, there is not just feudalism, there is industrial oligarchy. If we look at India today, if we look at Chattisgaran and the Marist fighting in that region, they are fighting against enormously large corporations backed by Indian billions coming to take over forest land, coming to mines. I think it's not enough just to end feudalism. Certainly it should be ended. But then the stranglehold has to be broken on industrial Zamindari too. Neither country has done that. Certainly India has not done that. Pakistan did have moments of flirting with land reform. The last land reforms down were done under my grandfather. At that time they were the most comprehensive that had been done. A second phase was planned for 1977 that would reduce the private land holdings to 100 acres and 150 acres for irrigated and non-irrigated land. That never went through. What we've seen since then rather is in fact under his daughter Maya Benazir the ceiling on private land holdings was removed. They say about Pakistan that at the time of partition 21 families controlled the wealth of the country and now the number is 27. There is no move at the moment to eradicate feudalism. There is no move to bust monopolies on industry. And there's no push to do so. I said a black sheep bourgeois because it's sort of inconvenient to be talking about the other feudalism when you come from a large feudal family. It's not done. It's one of the things we don't talk about in Pakistan. It's one of the things that always is used to explain our state. I would go so far as to say it's one of the many. But also if we can go back to why it is that Pakistan hasn't run the course of India. I would say and as you said India has chaotic and has corrupt. And certainly there is a civil war happening in India at the moment. We see a similar situation in Pakistan. There is an elite in Pakistan that is quite like the shining Indian elite that has access to enormous wealth, to enormous business, to world markets. But like with India it's a very small minority. I understand that. And also, I mean, why do you think, and this is obviously something that your grandfather, as you say in the book, fought against, why do you think that Pakistan was so susceptible to western influence in the way that it almost became a ffeftum of the CIA? That's probably still is to a degree. Oh, that's the question, isn't it? I remember your grandfather when he made his overtures to China. He always had this kind of rather raffish feel about him. I kind of liked his hair was always sticking all over the place. And I remember, you know, we thought that this was beyond the pale that he would do something like this. We were all wondering what was going to happen to that. We felt, everybody felt that the world was going to explode if Pakistan and China made an alliance. Yes, well certainly it's something that still worries people very much. I don't think China is terribly pushed anymore about having that same relationship with Pakistan that we are still obsessed with. But why is it that America especially had the control it did? You know, it starts very early. And I think we have to look at military rule. I think when you have an army that is the state, and it's a many-headed hydra, isn't it? The army and Pakistan, for those of you who don't know, they're not just in charge of our defence. They're not just in charge of politics. The army owns property. It makes cereal. It makes cement. They have banks. They have water. You know, this was a machinery that needed a lot of funds. And, you know, it's really by the 1960s, you know, less than 20 years after partition, Pakistan is firmly allied with Uncle Sam. In fact, the name for imperialism in Urdu, and those of you who speak Urdu will know this, the name we have for imperialism in Pakistan is Samraj. And that's the Raj of Uncle Sam. I mean, it's in our lexicon. This is how we understand imperialism in Pakistan. And the Pakistani people on one hand very much want that to end. I mean, that's without a doubt. The Pakistani government exists, as it does, because of the support of the United States. And when America is funding, let's say, the army or the political establishment in the billions of dollars, how do we break through that? How do nascent political movements or political parties or activist groups compete with two parties and a military that have received billions of dollars? They can't. So it's become a self-perpetuating, self-funding cycle. You know, one of the things that comes, I mean, as you say that, I'm just thinking that one of the things that comes through in your book is in a way the lives that your father and your uncle led. And to a certain extent, Benazir, too, and your grandfather, is a lives of sort of impotence, in a way. If anybody wants to do anything, they have to go abroad and then sit there. And do you know what I mean? I mean, particularly your father and his brother, there seemed a sort of an impotence about it. I mean, I think that's also due to the fact that when you refuse to play ball with the establishment, which is a military establishment in Pakistan, you are edged out. And part of why Benazir survived for as long as she did, and I think why she was as heralded as she was in the West, was because she understood the importance of playing ball. You know, and I mentioned this in the book, and this is part of the law, really, in Pakistan, and it's part of the mythology built up. But Henry Kissinger is meant to have said to Zulfa Carlybuto, if you go ahead with these plans to build the nuclear bomb, we will make a horrible example out of you. And Zulfa Carlybuto went ahead with the plans, and an example was made out of him. It determines, it determines Pakistani politics, this reach of the army and America. When just months ago the Americans decided to push forward this horrendous Kerry Lugerbill, which is a bill that will give $7.5 billion to Pakistan in five years in development money. And it's development money that, by the way, goes towards a fund set up by the president, as it turns out, surprisingly. And it's a bill that we will give you development aid, provided you open up access to your nuclear arsenal to us, you open up your military files to us, we have a veto power and who gets elected, chosen to be head of the military in Pakistan. Which was met, obviously, the Kerry Lugerbill that was then met with a lot of protestant Pakistan. And at that point Richard Holbrooke, who is in the country more than the president, really, Richard Holbrooke came to Pakistan and said, anyone who is against the Kerry Lugerbills against democracy, anyone who is against the Kerry Lugerbills against progress for Pakistan. When the army launched its war in Swarth last year, if you didn't support the army, you were with the terrorists. All this, of course, is very familiar. But that's what Pakistani politics is shaped by. You don't go along with the army. Good luck. Yeah. But I'm just thinking about what ordinary people are kind of thinking and feeling. Clearly, your family have represented to them a kind of life belt in some kind of way. And there's a strong cult of personality in all that, isn't there? Very. There is, you know, and the way I look at it is this cult of personality has destroyed the political culture. It's one of the things that has destroyed the political culture of Pakistan. Because people, when they are allowed to go and cast vote, they are voting on ghosts and they are voting on the dead. You know, they are not voting for programmes. They are not voting for platforms on platforms. They are not voting on a manifesto. They are voting on a blood debt. And part of this really comes up after Zafir Ghaliburto was killed. There was so much hope placed in Benazir, I think, because people wanted her to succeed because she would have been a blow against that establishment. And they took great risks to support her and to push her forward because that was dangerous business at the time. And when that failed, when by 1990 that was over, you know, and no legislation had been passed, none of Zia's laws had been removed, none of the Huddud Ordinance, not the blasphemy law. Can you just explain to people what they are doing? So the Huddud Ordinance, they are the most violent pieces of legislation in Pakistan today. The Huddud Ordinance says if you commit the crime of theft, you should have your hands cut off. And no doctor in Pakistan, I mean, not till this day, they haven't found one doctor to carry out an amputation in Pakistan, which to me is an immense source of pride. I mean that's Pakistani resistance for you when it's good. And the Huddud Ordinance says that any woman found guilty of the crime of adultery can be put to death. It says any woman who commits the sin of premarital sex can be put to death. So in effect it criminalizes the victim of rape. The blasphemy law is a tool by which Christians, Hindus, any member of minority can be persecuted by the state just for looking sideways at the Quran basically. None of these things were removed in the democratic two years after the junta fell. And when they were asked, when the Pakistani people were asked to try again, to try butto again, to try the party that had failed them now again, they were told they owed them. They failed, they didn't, they owed the people, but the people were told that because the blood of Zulfikari butto, because the blood of Shanawaz was on their hands, they owed it. And it runs today, I mean clearly. And what it means is that you have a nuclear country, and this is one of my favorite facts. You have a nuclear country that missed its millennium goals to eradicate polio. Not because we are not capable. I mean we've got leprosy under WHO control limits since years, you know. But because the state could not guarantee the refrigeration of the vaccines. When you have politicians stamping, someone goes out on this family name really now. And everyone is a butto these days, so there's a good amount of them out there. When people do that, they don't say, we will guarantee that you have electrical supplies for your homes and your businesses, because that's ridiculous. They say because so and so is killed, because such and such blood was spilled. And that's the basis on which they campaign. I mean one of the extraordinary things about the book is the way in which, obviously Benizio's, because she's very contributory, she's much loved over here. The way in which she turns from being your favorite aunt to being the person who puts her brother in jail and eventually is an accomplice to his murder according to your book. Which is really what the heart of the book is about. How does that happen? A power. And I always say to give Benizio her view really, that it is the nature of the beast. I don't believe that something evil happened and overnight something was transformed or some deal was made and that turned her. But the aunt, the Benizio I knew outside of power, was not just a phenomenally courageous woman, but a woman who was a passionate campaigner, who struggled for issues she believed in, at the cost of her freedom, at the cost of her very young life at that point. And continued to do so because these were things she believed in. That doesn't change overnight. I think it is a gradual change. I think unfortunately when she made the choice to enter into power sharing negotiations with the military in 1986, I am power sharing mind you, not to take power from the military, but to share it with the military. She could no longer be that passionate campaigner. She could no longer have the freedom she had had because now she had to abide by IMF dictates set by the army. She had to abide by the foreign policy especially in India and in Kashmir in Afghanistan, set by the army. And compromises were made to do so. I think it is power and I don't think she's alone in it. I tried very much to say that in the books that Zulfikar who enters politics with an idealism for Pakistan, with an imagination for a just Pakistan and an independent sovereign Pakistan also makes mistakes, costly mistakes for power. He changes the constitution that his government brought, that his government was responsible for writing. He changes the constitution to secure his own hold on power. I don't think it's because they're nasty people, they're evil people. I think it's because that's what power does. I keep quoting Republican presidents, but what did Richard Nixon say? He said if the president does it, it's not illegal. I think that's what happens when you become the president unfortunately. It's inevitable. Or is that part of the fact that the Butos in a certain sense became the royal family of Pakistan or the presidential family or the hereditary rulers or whatever it is. I don't think it's all due to them. I mean, certainly they're not the only people who succumb to this pull of power. Pakistan is ruled by deniesies now, whether it's the Sharif family, the army is a dynasty of sorts really. It's a very funny family in itself. I mean, I would be hard-pressed to find an instance of a politician or a ruler, a president who voluntarily gives up power because people have just... I mean, what's his name? I always have these moments on stage where you're lucid and eloquent. Give me a clue. De Gaulle, didn't he? I mean, De Gaulle put forward a referendum, and the people rejected it, and he said, all right, bye, see you later, and walked off. But how often does that happen? In South Asia, never. Never, and, you know, when I said so, as one of my politics class, I was a Bangladeshi student, and he said to me, said, oh, you know, Dhaka is so difficult to navigate, because every time the government changes, all the names of the roads change and the bridges change and the airport changes, is Karachi the same? And I said, no, they're all called Jinnah. You know, we're lucky that way. But I think that's the trade-off, isn't it? You want to be president of a country, you want to be part of a political establishment. Politics is not simple. I mean, let's just, before I throw this out, because otherwise nobody's going to have any time to ask any questions, let's just talk about the personal things. I mean, in the end, this is in a certain sense, this is a book written to Exorcise, the murder of your father. Do you think you've been able to do that? Well, it's still a case, you know, we've been fighting for 14 years for justice in the courts of Pakistan, and anyone who knows the courts of Pakistan knows that this could go on forever. For me, more than exercising anything, it was about putting it down. It was about sort of the justice of memory, I suppose. You know, at the time that Asif Sardari became president of Pakistan just before he became president, he was standing trial in four murder cases, only one of which was my father. But three other murder trials. These are things we know in Pakistan. These are things we're not allowed to talk about. But your father also was in jail for murder? Yeah, well, he was not murder, he was in jail for treason and sedition, and all sorts of other frightening things. And eventually the same courts that accused him of treason and sedition acquitted him. It took years, it took 25 years for those things to happen. At the time when he was going through the process, every judge that acquitted my father was sad. Those are part of the records. It's amazing that anybody has the guts to continue to believe in justice or believe in anything, but nevertheless they do. They do, and I think what is phenomenal about Pakistan is that this is a country against all odds that does believe. It deserves better, and it does. If we look at people who have struggled under dictatorships from time immemorial, really, till the present day, these are people who still go out. We had something like an estimate, it was estimated to be 10,000 men disappeared from the Boloch province after 9-11. And we only know that those men were disappeared. We don't know because of the media, because they played ball and didn't talk about it. We don't know because of human rights groups in Pakistan, because they get awards from the presidency. But we knew because of the families of those men who went out with their photographs, very much like what happened in Latin America during the dirty wars, they went out with those photographs and they were beaten and they were jailed and they were disappeared, but they still did it. For me, that's cause for enormous hope. This book was to write those things down, to talk about those stories that we live with every day in Pakistan. Outside of Pakistan, you only know us for guns, beers and poverty. Certainly, we do have those, but we have so much more. We have people, many people I think, in Pakistan who talk about these issues. But as we know now, the volume is shut. YouTube is closed. There are modes of getting information across each other, a census, whether it's SMS or Facebook. But they exist. I hope and I always say I'm one of thousands. These things tend to come back to bite those. To bite the people who do them. Just one last thing, which I'm dying to ask you, because sometimes you say that you have no political ambitions yourself. You have none, a none at all. She sounds like the Al Pacino in the gods. It's like I'm the one that got away and actually you're the elected leader. Aren't you damned or whatever it is? If you do and damned, if you don't. I wonder. I'm not really Michael in exile in Sicily at this point. That's really what turns them, isn't it? But I am very political clearly and I write on very political issues and I do very political things. But I'm not stupid. Anybody who's lived in the family I have and who's watched power from the outside, you don't see the glitz in the glamour. You become very sensitive to the greed and the violence of power. That never appealed to me. I did, when I was younger, I did flirt with the idea in my head. I did assume that that was the way to enact positive change. Of course, that's not true, is it? If we look at governments, if you want to do absolutely nothing, run for Pakistani government. Everyone wants to be a civil servant in Pakistan because you get paid and you do nothing. Sounds fair enough. But writers and these activists and these community leaders are the ones that push for that change. They're the ones that break the silence. And they're the ones that, at the end of the day, will save this country from the politicians. So I would much prefer to be in that category than the other. Well, inevitably this has turned into a political discussion rather than a discussion of literature, which is what I think we were supposed to be talking about. But that's not my fault. Let's be blamed so. But is anybody out there who would like to ask some, so yes? All that I want to ask you is, as an observer of the South Asian scene for many India kegs, I continue to believe that India is a fragmented entity. It is many nations which have not formalised their fragmentation. Many nations in a subcontinent, which is huge. And the question has remained why India has not disintegrated. The question I humbly put to you is, I also see that Pakistan also is a fragmented entity. There are many identities which are against each other. And the question again is why Pakistan has not disintegrated. I'm not talking of Bangladesh. Aside from that then. No, I'm talking of West Pakistan. My question simply is this, and I'm going to sum up. Yes, please. The glue which keeps Pakistan together is Islam, Islamisation, economic progress or military power at the top. If you will give me some answer, it will help me. Gosh, I'd like some answers too really. I think the idea of border somehow containing everybody perfectly is an outdated one. All countries, aren't they, are now made up of multiple identities and are fragmented then by multiple ethnicities and identities. I think that's true for anywhere, even Britain, as it is for Pakistan or for India. What holds Pakistan together? I disagree that Islam holds it together because Islam didn't keep Bangladesh together. It didn't keep Pakistan within the fold of India, as India has the largest population of Muslims anywhere. I think when we talk about Pakistan, we have to remember that this is a country only 63 years young. At the time that the Great Satan United States of America was 63 years young, they were killing each other in a civil war and surviving on a whiskey tax. I think the progress that America made was not in its 63 years. That came hundreds of years later. Well, not hundreds, hundreds years later and some decades. I think we see countries, on the other hand, like Iran, that were progressive. Thousands, hundreds of years ago, Iran was more progressive than perhaps it is now. But Pakistan needs time, I think. Certainly it's not a failed state. It's not on the road to being a failed state. It's on the government. We've got a good amount of failed government. But it's a country that will survive. These tremors, I think, we have to see as part of that road from Pakistan's infancy, which is in now. That's a really roundabout way of answering a question. That's a very good answer. I think it's a young country. I remember you. You were at King's Place. I'm glad. I just wanted to ask you how you deal with criticism, because I've been reading a lot of reviews of books. In the West, it's pretty... They say nice stuff. But in Pakistan, there are people like Nadine Paracha, Aishwad Zika, and all these people who are coming out and saying, well, that's not the fact. That's not right. How do I deal with that? Well, it's very easy when your critics are hysterical, I have to say. All the attacks that have come at me in the Pakistani press say, oh, this book is full of lies. Which ones? This book is not researched. Has 15 pages of footnotes. But they don't talk about specifics, so it's very easy to dismiss them. In fact, it's to be expected. I've been criticised in my country for criticising my grandfather. There is nothing disloyal about criticism. I've been criticised about defending my father and talking about his murder. It seems to be perfectly acceptable for the state of Pakistan to have killed more than ever to him. I should just stop talking about it. But the one thing they've never criticised me on is the corruption of Benazir and her husband. Nobody has brought that up. Nobody has brought the violence of the state up. But I'm too young, I'm too something, I'm too short, I'm too something else. So, you know, whatever. I find it perfectly easy to ignore. On the other hand, I wrote a column for two years in Pakistan. My email address was public. And my rule was that I, at the time, not now, so don't email me. That I would answer anything, even if it was critical, so long as it was engaging. So, if somebody wrote to me and said, I totally disagree with you because I read this other book and it says da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I'm very happy to discuss that. But when somebody writes to you and says, oh, I hate you because you're obviously a carfer and you hate Islam and you don't cover your head, et cetera, et cetera, you tend to block those noises out. Yes. Thank you. How do you view Jinnah and how do you think it would have been if there hadn't been Jinnah? Oh, well. I think rather the question, if I can reformulate it, is what would have happened had Jinnah not died a year after partition? I think that would have produced a very different Pakistan perhaps. But, again, it is a country born with a region. It is a region really born in blood. Its independence was fought for. We have generations of Pakistan who remember that. Then our Pakistan's independence, again, the partition was the bloodiest, not just the bloodiest, but the largest migration movement in history. The largest displacement of people at the time. All these are things that are incredibly heavy, and, again, not open for discussion in Pakistan. But I think they need to be discussed. I mean, there are certain things of Jinnah that I admire very much, the fact that he said at that time that this is a new country that will not prohibit people based on their temples or based on their religion. That was cut out of his address when he gave it in those early days. So certainly I admire Jinnah for statements like that and for decisions like that which mustn't have been easy to do. But I also wonder, I mean, I also think it's important to ask questions like the fact that when Jinnah was around Jinnah was the president of Pakistan, the head of the armed forces, the head of the Supreme Court, the governor general, the supreme governor general, the provincial minister. He was a lot of things at once. I think we have to talk about those precedents because we live with them until today. Yes, over there. A related question about the objectives resolution that happened in Pakistan in 1949, I think, that enshrined Islam as a guiding principle of the country. I wasn't quite going to go all the way to Qaidaeism, but I was wondering about Liaqat Ali Khan and some of the associates of Jinnah. How did that come about so quickly and do you see that really as a root of what followed afterwards the Ayub Khan coup and the Islamisation process that came much later or was that just an incidental event that could have not really affected Pakistan so much? Well, how it came about, I mean, I think what we know about Pakistan and India and Bangladesh and all these countries is again, thanks to the cleavages left from hundreds years of foreign occupation, is that your pool of decision makers is small in all these countries you had to belong to a family or to one of two parties or graduate from one of two schools to be in a position to put forward resolutions like that. I mean, I think, which makes me wonder actually why we didn't have a constitution, a real constitution rather than something sort of cobbled together much sooner it would have been easy to push through. But the reason that a Ayub Khan came in was because in something like seven years, I don't think it had to do with Islam at all, I think what it had to do with was the fact that in a seven year period we had 11 prime ministers and all these 11 prime ministers were chucked out of office on, guess what, grounds of corruption and being politically incompetent. So when a Ayub Khan came in it was seen as a move for some sort of stability and people took it. It was actually Ayub Khan's government that tried gingerly to suggest that Islamic work be taken out of the title of the country, that it just be the Republic of Pakistan. And that didn't work. But that said, I think is Pakistan an Islamic or what is an Islamic Republic really? Certainly there are those who think it fails as an Islamic Republic and want it to be made more Islamic. There are others obviously who want the opposite. But Pakistan is now an ally in the war on terror against our neighbours of Afghanistan and Iraq, two Muslim countries. Two Muslim countries we've had long relationships with. So I wouldn't take our reputation of being highly Islamic too seriously. Do you see the end to extrajudicial killings in Pakistan? Obviously we've got drone killings now, your father died in the 90s tragically. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel if any? I'm so glad you asked that question because unfortunately no. What we've seen, what we saw last summer in Swarth was graves filled with people who had been murdered in extrajudicial killings. And the BBC reported I think that there had been some 60 cases of incidents of extrajudicial murders being carried out in the month of August of 2009 it was. In the last two years we've seen a resurgence of extrajudicial killings in cities like Karachi and cities like Peshawar. Whether the police come into neighbourhoods like Liari and kill wantonly or whether it is other factions and political parties that do it. The point is it continues. Unfortunately nothing is being said about it. Nothing is being done about it because when drones are being carried out or when people are being killed in Swarth 62 are grave, we're told that they're terrorists and you don't really defend the rights of terrorists. When you talk about even the history of extrajudicial killing that we had in the 90s especially in Karachi we're told again they were criminals. But the fact is if they're criminals or they're terrorists arrest them and take them to the courts. You don't kill people on the road. We've developed now in Pakistan actually you know South Asians are so good with language I think but we've come up now with a new way of talking about extrajudicial killing in all across South Asia. They're not extrajudicial murder they are police encounters. Like you have an encounter at a coffee shop when you meet an old friend. And I think a great problem is that when we talk about again media and human rights groups in Pakistan they're not talking about it. What are they talking about? I don't know what they're talking about anymore. But extrajudicial killing is not one of them and unfortunately every time one of those killings happens it opens the floodgates for many more. I think probably we've got time for one more question. I'm sorry there seems to be a lot of people here. I'm going to ask the lady at the back. I hope this will be a positive question to end with actually. Earlier you said you see yourself as one of thousands in Pakistan in terms of those who are speaking out and I go to Pakistan very regularly and I also feel that there are individual voices that are here. But do you see any collective movements in Pakistan that give you hope for the future? Collective movements? It's tricky to talk about collective movements because everyone talks about this idea of civil society and did they come out with the lawyers movement but not really because they were just people who spoke English. The rest of the country doesn't speak English and has to work every day so they can't go and protest for the next seven months. I suppose there are but they're informal movements aren't they? They disappeared that I was talking about. There were people who came around these men and women who were relatives or colleagues of the people who had been disappeared. I remember when I was in Kweta I visited a family of one man who has since released the police admitted they had him the army admitted they had him because of the noise around his disappearance and he had his nieces and all the children of the neighbourhood would go every Tuesday or something like that to the press club with his photograph the children is that a movement but it certainly put a pressure and three months after his disappearance of the police who at that point had been denying that he was in their custody and had been proclaiming that he was a jihadi admitted that he was in their custody and another four months after that he was released. So those are movements but they are informal women's groups certainly there are informal women's groups that do make some noise every now and again Muhtar Mai a her speaking out about rape and crimes against women has resulted in a sort of informal movement coming up around her but I think I think it's not worrying that they're informal I think there's something positive to the fact that they're informal they haven't yet been taken over as sort of personal vehicles for something I hope that answers the question Well look it's good to end on a message of hope and let's hope there is hope Let's hope there is hope and I have say full we've got to do the reverse of this next time we have to bring Mike back to Soev after your next Shakespeare film is done and then I get to grill you deal there are witnesses here legal contracts are binding An absolute deal King Lear which I'm doing with Al Pacino is actually the story of a dysfunctional family Well who better who better than me to talk to you about that Mike who better I hope you've enjoyed this she's a wonderful talker as you know and she's also a fantastic writer it's an amazing book I think it's number one in India and Pakistan and Pakistan as well there you are it's the Samistat version in Pakistan but she's and as you can see from one of the last of the butos the bloodline has led to and how this very powerful and charismatic family have continued to hold Pakistan in its spell at least the hopes and dreams of the people of that very wonderful country and I have to say it is a wonderful country I went to Karachi recently and despite all the problems that are there there's one thing that absolutely hits you it's that there's a life and a joy the kind of life and joy that you find all over Southeast Asia actually and it's not absent in Pakistan and with that I think more than anything else you can feel a sense of hope so thank you all for coming thank you thank you Mike is that good