I can't decide who was more evil: Bhutto, or the man who overthrew and executed him (Zia). While we can never forgive Bhutto for his indiscriminate nationalization of industries and colleges, which set the country back by 50 years, Zia dealt the death blow to education. The rampant illiteracy we see today is due not only to nationalization of colleges, Zia's so-called Islamization policies have a lot to do with it.

I was talking to a man who proudly boasts of having two degrees, but who can't write a sentence in English. He (being a member of a religious, fundamentalist party), naturally thinks that a man and a woman working alone in an office, do nothing but engage in sexual intercourse all the time. He once told me that this kind of thing happens in multi-storeyed buildings, when most men are at work, and their wives have sex with their unmarried male neighbors. When he saw the picture of men and women having lunch together at a restaurant in Saudi Arabia, he immediately said they would soon be indulging in sexual intercourse right there, now that the veil is no longer mandatory and segregation is no longer compulsory. 

What really got my goat was when he said that he has seen naked men and women fornicating in Karachi's streets at eight in the morning, because now (according to him) there is a law which prevents cops from arresting them. I asked him to go to a lawyer and get a copy of this "law" (which, according to him, was promulgated by Musharraf). I know that he was referring to Musharraf's instructions to the cops not to arrest couples for sitting on a bench in the parks or sitting next to each other in movies. In fact, the other day, the police at Karachi airport refused to allow a woman to travel alone to Saudi Arabia, as they thought it was still mandatory for women to be accompanied by close male relatives. In Zia's days, couples were asked by the police to show their marriage certificates, and were arrested if they were not married. Often the women were taken to another room and gang-raped. 

With such people around, no wonder there are no tourists coming to Pakistan. 

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