A facebook friend opined on his facebook timeline that famous Pakistani fiction writers Mumtaz Mufti and Ashfaq Ahmed
were worse than the Latin American drug lords El Chapo and Pablo
Escobar. Here is my reply to this statment, where I explain that it
wasn't just Mumtaz Mufti and Ashfaq Ahmed or Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi or Fahmida Riaz or Faiz Ahmad Faiz or Habib Jalib or Qamar Yurish (labor leader whose book of pen sketches, Yaraan e Maikada, mentions how he and others were tortured by the Pakistan Establishment) or Mohammed Aslam Muznib or Hassan Nasir (revolutionary poet, Sec. General Communist Party of Pakistan
who was tortured to death in 1960 on General Ayub Khan's direct orders)
but in fact all leading Pakistani thinkers, poets and fiction writers,
non-fiction writers (historians, political analysts, political
cartoonists) who were silenced by the Pakistan Generals who have been
ruling Pakistan since the 1950s with the help of a brutal cadre of spy
agencies, secret operatives, torture cells to the extent that in the
Pakistan of 2017 we have university professors abducted in broad
daylight from an Islamabad campus, tortured, forced to sign documents
accepting a liftime ban on operating any social media web site and
banished from Pakistan. In modern day Pakistan, groups of fanatics
openly lynch progressive minded, liberal thinking students like Mashal Khan, where political activists like Sabeen Mahmud are killed on the streets of Karachi, where outspoken lead journalists like Hamid Mir
are shot 8 times by assailants on a busy road in Karachi, where
Pakistan is considered the most dangerous country for journalists . . .
So, it is not the fault of Mumtaz Mufti or Ashfaq Ahmed that they became
silent but that of Pakistan Generals who silenced them with coercion
and threats of torture . . .
Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, which started in 1968 and was officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America.
An excerpt from Fehmida Raiz's long poem .... Kyaa Tum Poora Chaand Naa Daykho Gay?
My Urdu language literary web site Dareechah has a web page dedicated to Pakistan's labor leader and short story writer Qamar Yurish
I urge Pakistan's political activist and poet, Yousuf Hassan to continue describing the struggles of Pakistan's Progressive Writers Movment in Pakistan from 1947 to the present time ...
What is happening to Pakistan's thinkers, writers, poets, political activists is just like Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church ...
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