Who Was Going to Dismiss Nawaz Gov Last Year

I'm a supporter of none but democracy" -- Zaheda Hina

When she learned that she had won the coveted President's Pride of Performance Award for 2006, she took the news with a pinch of salt. She thought someone must be playing a hoax on her as her views about the military-led government were well known. Or perhaps there was some confusion about the winner's name.

When it was confirmed that it was none other than Zaheda Hina, the renowned fiction writer, columnist and rights activist, on whom "the president will be pleased to confer the award", she spurned the offer saying there was no pride in receiving an award from a dictator whom she had been criticising relentlessly.

"If I accepted the award, I asked myself, how would I face the Baloch people, whose struggle I have been supporting and against whom the regime has launched a military operation? How would I face the innocent people being killed and crippled in bombardments in the name of the 'war on terror' to please the Americans?" says Zaheda.

In an interview at her Gulshan-i-Iqbal office, when I ask her to explain the paradox of her at once being a champion of secular causes and a supporter of Nawaz Sharif rather than that of Benazir Bhutto or Pervez Musharraf, she says she is a supporter of none but democracy. "I have been writing in support of Nawaz Sharif since Oct 13, 1999, a day after his government was toppled by retired general Pervez Musharraf, because I thought it was unjust to dismiss and humiliate an elected prime minister."

When Zaheda poured out her grief in the columns that she wrote in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, people said she was a supporter of the PPP. "I had supported Benazir Bhutto also but criticized, or praised, her government on an issue-to-issue basis."

Calling herself an Urdu-speaking Sindhi, Zaheda hopes that the PPP which has formed its government in Sindh will bring about prosperity in the province. Of the five different columns she writes every week, one is for a Sindhi newspaper that she writes in Urdu and is translated for her Sindhi-speaking readership. Most translations of her books and articles, which have been rendered into various local and foreign languages, are in Sindhi.

When the 'operation silence' was carried out against the Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa and hundreds of men, women and young girls were reported to have been killed, Zaheda Hina wrote with a pen seemed to have been dipped in blood. She grieved for the victims and vehemently condemned the operation. She said it was "the height of cruelty" and urged human rights bodies to condemn it forcefully.

She claims that the two seminaries had been nurtured by the establishment to use them when a need arose. "To get rid of a key witness to the scripted drama," she wrote in a column, "Rasheed Ghazi was eliminated despite his willingness to surrender in the presence of the media." Although on the left of the political divide and the common perceptions associated with it, she defended the right of the girls to get religious education, which she says was available to the poor girls and boys free coupled with board and lodging.

Her collection of essays on women titled 'Aurat: Zindagi ka zindan' is a depiction of women's plight and issues. However, she is not a feminist in the common sense of the word. She insists that she is a defender of rights of every segment of society and is against compartmentalizing people. "We should not divide people into sections. Both poor men and women are exploited -- women twice as much, one, because of poverty and, second, because of their gender. If a man suffers injustice at the hands of a woman, I would raise my voice against her also."



Who Was Going to Dismiss Nawaz Gov Last Year by Fashionindopak