Dianarama: Deception, Entrapment, Cover-Up — The Betrayal of Princess Diana
By Andy Webb
Pegasus Books
ISBN: 979-8897100880
432pp.

Andy Webb is a senior journalist who worked for decades with the BBC and Channel 4. Like others, he was moved by the plight of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, who felt compelled in November 1995 to give a very candid interview about her feelings to Martin Bashir (of the BBC) for Panorama.

Her admission of adultery in that programme, coupled with her statement that Prince Charles (whom she indicated was an adulterer himself) should be passed over as king in favour of Prince William, eventually led to Queen Elizabeth II requesting that Diana and Charles divorce. The interview’s ramifications gained traction because the BBC has long been considered one of the finest reporting and journalistic venues globally. Andy Webb’s Dianarama, however, elucidates that the BBC initially engaged in a massive cover-up of how Martin Bashir utterly unethically manipulated the princess to obtain this famous interview.

Perhaps Webb would not have been able to publish this exposé without the help and support of Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer. According to Webb, Bashir commissioned Matt Weissler, a graphic designer, to create forged bank statements, implying that Earl Spencer’s head of security, Alan Waller, was receiving payments from the media in order to provide information to them on the Earl’s activities.

When shown these statements, Spencer apparently was taken in, and later introduced Diana to Bashir. Gaining momentum, Bashir displayed ‘financial proof’ to the princess of disloyalty on the part of her private secretary, Patrick Jephson. In a private meeting with Diana and Spencer at Knightsbridge, Bashir claimed that both Jephson and Prince Charles’s private secretary, Richard Aylard, were benefitting financially by leaking royal insider information to the press.

A former journalist’s book on Princess Diana’s infamous 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir expects readers to consider Bashir and the BBC’s top brass as the only villains

Why Charles Spencer and the late princess were so easily fooled is anybody’s guess. Bashir, a second-generation Pakistani immigrant who converted to Christianity in his teens, had risen rapidly through the ranks of the BBC, largely due to his charm and persuasiveness. According to Webb, Bashir then played upon the princess’ internal paranoia by convincing her that her children’s nanny, Alexandra ‘Tiggy’ Legge-Bourke, was in a sexual relationship with the Prince of Wales, who would divorce his wife in order to then legally roll in the hay with the nanny.

However, for a reader to believe that both her and Earl Spencer (scions of one of the richest and most established noble households in Britain, and no strangers to the intricacies of high-level political drama) had gullibly fallen for Bashir’s alleged traps requires a stretch of the imagination to say the least. Diana didn’t hold a single O-Level, but Spencer attended both Eton and Oxford. To quote Uncle Digory from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, ‘Bless me… what do they teach them at these schools?’

Though Webb underscores that a paranoid Diana told her law firm, Mishcon de Reya, that the Palace was planning to exterminate her, it was ridiculous of the law firm to hold back about nipping such thoughts in the bud. On a side note, this might explain why they could only come up with a paltry 17 million GBP divorce settlement for her, chump change for the former Prince of Wales, who pulled tens of millions from the Duchy of Cornwall alone.

I’m not saying that Martin Bashir was a saint. The so-called mock-ups may well have been used illicitly to create the pathway to bagging a phenomenally sensational interview, but Webb also wants us to believe that Bashir acted independently and that higher-ups, such as the BBC’s Director-General John Birt, were unaware of his nefarious actions at the time.

Given that Bashir was going to interview one of the most famous women in the world, it is highly unlikely that his bosses would have been completely clueless about what was happening. Oddly enough, during the immediate aftermath of the interview, Earl Spencer remained taciturn about his involvement in introducing his sister to Bashir. The nobleman only became far more active in trying to take the BBC to task years later, ie when his sister had passed away and could not be actively asked to confirm or deny anything.

Bashir was undeniably a pro. His plan was carried out with extraordinary skill, overcoming, as very few reporters were able to do, first Charles Spencer’s bristling hostility to the media and then penetrating the very inner sanctum, Diana’s sitting room at Kensington Palace. Once there, he was able to conjure just the right words and spill them in such a way that Diana, no fool she, was entranced, then terrified, then done up like a kipper. Those are fearsome skills, as darkly admirable as the paparazzo who can snatch sharp photos single-handed from a racing motorbike or snap the million-dollar picture from a hiding place half a mile away. — Excerpt from the book

Webb notes that Tony Hall (a later director-general of the BBC) conducted a half-hearted inquiry into the matter in 1996 and, even though BBC executive Tim Suter knew Charles Spencer personally and could have contacted the earl about various concerns, he chose not to do so. Webb’s claims that Spencer was somewhat removed from matters in 1996 by having relocated himself and his family to South Africa make for a relatively thin argument, especially since Spencer himself is a journalist and writer and would hardly have been unaware of the shockwaves emanating from the interview on both the public and private scales.

What irritates me most about this book is how readily we are expected to label Bashir and the BBC’s top brass as being the only villains in this story. Apparently, Earl Spencer provided Webb with a copy of a disturbing fax sent to him by Bashir during the months leading up to the interview (a document which the author reproduces in the book). But Webb never breathes a word about whether the fax was authentic or not; he simply assumes that it is genuine. Or rather, he wants the reader to assume that that fax was truly sent from Bashir to Spencer.

I am sure that when the Panorama matter was more closely examined in 2020 by Lord Dyson, his shrewd legal mind would not have missed this basic point. I’m not saying that Spencer’s guilt and grief at his sister’s death in a car accident in 1997 were not genuine. But that does not mean that the fax he proffered, underscoring Bashir’s alleged villainy, was.

The book is an engaging read, though parts of it are undoubtedly racist. Noting that Diana trusted Bashir because he had Pakistani roots, like her penultimate major lover Hasnat Khan did, or that she liked dark-skinned men, comes across as silly at best and xenophobic at worst.

Bashir himself was obviously not above playing the victim and stating in writing that his ‘second-generation immigrant’ status had irked upper-class Brits, but this was utterly disingenuous of him since he holds a Master’s degree in theology from King’s College London (hardly a shabby school; its current patron is King Charles III himself). Indeed, during the latter part of his career, Bashir was granted the post of the BBC’s editor of religion. The white-skinned Weissler, however, ended up having to take on menial jobs in order to survive.

Intriguingly enough, Queen Elizabeth II is alluded to only once in the book, although I have absolutely no doubt that she was being briefed about the situation throughout. In a rather foolishly heroic move, Webb used the Freedom of Information Act (which came into force in the UK in 2005) to seek emails related to the Panorama fiasco, but the 3,288 messages were so heavily redacted as to be almost useless.

Using license fees, the BBC eventually paid compensation to individuals such as Alexandra Legge-Bourke (her married name is Pettifer), Patrick Jephson and Matt Weissler, among others. Regardless, the whole affair turned out to be a storm in a teacup, except the teacup was the size of the Grand Canyon. Still, a storm in a teacup.

The reviewer is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the Institute of Business Administration. She has authored two collections of short stories, Timeless College Tales and Perennial College Tales, and a play, The Political Chess King

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 22nd, 2026

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During the hardening positions in the 1940s of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Muslim League (ML) on the creation of a new state for the Muslims of India, there were other groups and parties that envisioned different resolutions to the “Muslim Question.”

Among these voices was that of the Communist Party of India (CPI), which was aligned with the INC in the late 1930s, yet slowly diverged from it in the 1940s. A major figure who articulated the CPI’s perspective on Muslim politics was Dr Kunwar Mohammad Ashraf — whose contribution has remained somewhat marginal in the received history of this period.

THE PALS OF MEWAT

Dr Ashraf was of Rajput stock from the Mewat region and hailed from a lower middle-class family that had settled in United Provinces (UP) in the 19th century. The Mewat region extends across Haryana and Rajasthan, where the majority population were Muslims (called Meo) and Chattriya (Rajput). A distinctive feature of the Meo community was that those Hindus who abided by the rules of the pals (the tribal groupings) were incorporated into the group, with loyalty to the pal overshadowing religious belonging.

Studies of the Mewat area from the early 20th century have shown how — in matters of birth, death and marriages — the pals would follow rituals and ceremonies of both religious communities.

Dr Ashraf’s grandfather, originally from Alwar in Rajasthan, had settled in the town of Daryapur near Hathras (Aligarh district) after 1857. The family had followed the tradition of intermarrying with Hindus and keeping Hindu names — Dr Ashraf’s father was born Murlidhar Singh, only changing his name to Murad Ali Khan when he passed the entrance examination for railway service as a guard.

A scholar, a communist and an anti-colonial activist, Dr K.M. Ashraf spent his life arguing that India’s Muslims and Hindus shared a future — and paid for it with exile, imprisonment and marginalisation from history

Dr Ashraf was born in 1903 in Daryapur, where he spent his early childhood before moving to Moradabad for schooling. At school, he was influenced by teachers who inculcated the spirit of anti-colonialism in their pupils. In due time, Dr Ashraf joined political activist Ubaidullah Sindhi’s group, Hazb Allah, and took an oath to fight the colonisers.

In 1918, Dr Ashraf passed his intermediate exams from MAO College in Aligarh and re-entered for his BA degree in 1920. These were the days of the Khilafat Movement, led by Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, which was joined by Mohandas Gandhi, with his call for boycotting English goods and Satyagraha (non-cooperation) that would lead to Swaraj (independence).

Dr Ashraf joined the non-cooperation movement and, along with his friends, agitated for the MAO College to not take aid from the British sarkar [government]. In retaliation, the college administration expelled the students. This expulsion led to the founding of Jamia Millia Islamia (October 1920) as a nationalist alternative to MAO College, which Dr Ashraf and his friends joined.

However, Gandhi’s withdrawal from Satyagraha due to the Chauri Chaura incident — in which riled demonstrators killed 22 policemen — and the abolishing of the Ottoman caliphate by Turkish revolutionary Mustafa Kamal — both in 1922 — ended the non-cooperation/ Khilafat movement.

This curtailment brought a period of disillusionment for many of the movement’s cadres and Dr Ashraf returned to MAO College in 1923. He completed his BA honours and MA, and topped his class in the LLB course by 1927.

LONDON AND THE MAKING OF A MARXIST

During the college’s jubilee celebrations in 1927, Dr Ashraf was introduced to one of the guests, the Maharaja Jain Singh of Alwar state. In his address as vice president of the student union, he reminded everyone of Aligarh’s secular tradition and spoke of his own ancestral ties to Alwar.

The impressed Maharaja arranged a scholarship for his studies; Dr Ashraf joined Lincoln’s Inn for his Bar-at-Law and enrolled as a PhD candidate in mediaeval history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, UK.

During this first trip to Britain, Dr Ashraf lived with Maulana Mohammad Ali, also supported by the Maharaja for medical treatment in the UK. Through the Maulana, he was introduced to Shahpurji Saklatvala (1874-1936), the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB) member elected to the British parliament.

In 1928, the Maharaja of Alwar invited Dr Ashraf and Maulana Mohammad Ali back to Alwar for his jubilee celebrations. Dr Ashraf was made in-charge of the preparations and oversaw the entire event. After the celebrations, Dr Ashraf was offered the position of personal adviser to the Maharaja, but declined — having witnessed firsthand the wealth, wastage and oppression of a major princely state. In 1929, Dr Ashraf received a scholarship from a foundation in Hyderabad and, with some support from his father, he returned to the UK to complete his PhD.

This time he had a more economically difficult life but he was connected to a range of young radicals studying in Britain, who were also his friends and comrades. They included Dr Z.A. Ahmad, Shaukat Omar, Sajjad Zaheer, Mahmuduzzafar, Hajra Begum (the only female in the group) and Imtiaz Ali Khan. Under Shahpurji Saklatwala’s initial guidance, this group started to work closely with CPGB in organising Indian students on nationalist grounds.

While involved in these activities, Dr Ashraf defended his PhD thesis (University of London) in the early 1930s. The thesis, Life and Conditions of the People of Hindostan (1200-1550 CE), was a pioneering work of social history regarding the Sultanate and early Mughal period in India.

THE MUSLIM QUESTION AND THE COMMUNIST ANSWER

Due to his affiliation with CPGP, Dr Ashraf returned as a committed Marxist to India in 1932-33 and soon joined the CPI under the leadership of P.C. Joshi. In 1935, he joined Aligarh University as a history lecturer.

From the mid-1930s, the CPI had aligned itself with some progressive section within Congress — figures like Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Jayprakash Narayan — who were trying to lead Congress in a potentially revolutionary direction. Therefore, when Jawaharlal Nehru was elected president of the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) in 1936, Dr Ashraf accepted a position at Nehru’s office in Allahabad, becoming secretary of the political bureau and also responsible for the Muslim Contact Cell of the INC.

In his writings, Dr Ashraf argued that the ML could exploit the resentment among Muslim masses stemming from the halted non-cooperation movement of 1922, compounded by the Nehru Report’s (1927) rejection of separate Muslim electorates and rising communal tensions. Yet he emphasised that his invitation was for Muslims to join the progressive groups within Congress. As a communist, he maintained that politics was organised essentially around class interests, which drove the exploitation of the poor and the marginalised.

In a 1938 letter to a friend, Dr Ashraf forcefully defended his work for INC, despite understanding the major reservations that a large portion of the Muslim population held against Congress politics.

In a nuanced position on Muslim politics, he suggested that his friend need not join INC and continue to work with the ML (despite Dr Ashraf’s reservations), provided he could steer the League toward holding democratic elections within the primary bodies of the party, increase its membership and organise it at the local level. For Dr Ashraf, this would lead to the Muslim community to stand up against British imperialism and not be subordinate to its dictates.

The Congress ministries resigned in October-November of 1939, as they opposed the British government’s action of declaring India as a party in the Second World War without consulting the Indian elected representatives.

The start of the War tested the alliance between the Congress and the CPI. Both parties initially labelled the war as anti-imperialist, yet the CPI went further, calling for a national revolution and mass insurrection to achieve independence. By 1941, this somewhat radical line led to the British detaining scores of CPI members, including Dr Ashraf, in the notorious Deoli Concentration Camp.

By early to mid-1940s, the CPI had also started to rethink the issue of Muslim separatism (exemplified by the 1940 Lahore Resolution), being put forward by the newly invigorated ML. In response to this shift in Muslim politics, Dr Ashraf (representing CPI) had started to hint at the nationalities question and the idea of self-determination, which would be developed later as a major policy agenda by the CPI.

According to the CPI, the linguistic and religious diversity of India had brought forward two major issues in Indian politics: the Hindu-Muslim divide and the linguistic-states problem. Was India one nation or were Hindu and Muslims separate nations and, similarly, did Bengalis or Tamils deserve different or autonomous states?

CPI’s more overt support of the ‘Muslim Question’ followed its policy of openly opposing Congress’ Quit India Movement. Although all communist members of the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) at the Bombay session in August of 1942 voted against the resolution, it was passed by an overwhelming majority.

The CPI vote was reflective of how, by 1942, the party had reversed its earlier line, moving from calling the War an ‘Imperialist War’ to a ‘People’s War.’ It now linked itself to the international drive against Germany’s fascist regime. This led to the unbanning of the party and the release of the leaders. Dr Ashraf was also released in 1943, though his health had suffered due to prison hardships and a prolonged hunger strike.

After their leadership’s release, the CPI condemned the British imprisonment of nationalist leaders while simultaneously urging Congress to collaborate with the ML and accept it as the representative voice of India’s Muslims.

In September of 1942, the CPI, echoing Dr Ashraf’s earlier formulation on self-determination, presented a resolution that sought to take the question of India not as a cultural whole, but as constituting various cultures, language groups and national sentiments. In this larger context, for the CPI, the slogan for Pakistan was understood as a call for self-determination and democracy for all nationalities.

Clearly, the right of self-determination came with the right of sovereignty, equality and the right to secession. Following this argument, the CPI’s manifesto for the 1945-1946 elections demanded immediate independence and transfer of power not only to two governments (India and Pakistan), but to 17 interim ‘sovereign’ national assemblies.

However, by late 1946, the CPI had started to change its position on the partition of British India. The party was critical of both the Congress and the ML for accepting the Partition plan. Eventually, although the CPI finally accepted the creation of Pakistan by arguing for the division of the party itself (in 1948), a deep suspicion of ML politics and the agony over British India’s division was the overwhelming sentiment that was shared by most party workers.

STATELESS

The violence during the partition of British India did not spare the Mewat area. The harmony and coexistence that was the hallmark of the Meo palbandi system was breached during the months of August and September of 1947, when unexpected communal riots broke out. Within this atmosphere, rumours circulated that Dr Ashraf was mobilising a large group of Meos to create a “mini-Pakistan” in the Mewat area.

Based on the policy of self-determination related to linguistic and ethnic identities, Dr Ashraf and Syed Mutalabi (an activist and friend) in 1942 had put forward the idea of a province that included Mewat and adjoining areas (not dissimilar to the creation of new provinces in post-independence India). Closer to independence, this idea included the abolition of princely states (especially of Alwar and Bharatpur).

The Maharajas of these two states and their right-wing allies used the idea of the “Pal Province” to instigate communal riots and broke the Hindu-Muslim unity that had been guaranteed through ages by the palbandi process; a community of historically mixed religious heritage was being forced to leave. In return, Dr Ashraf was accused by the police of instigating communal violence and a case was made to arrest Syed Mutalabi and him. It was decided that both travel to Pakistan for some time.

As Dr Ashraf travelled to Pakistan, his name was sent to the Pakistan intelligence services as someone wanted as a member of the CPI, along with the additional charge of spreading communal violence. Soon after his arrival, he was detained at Karachi Central Jail, even as he battled ill health.

In prison, his health condition further deteriorated. The government of Pakistan only agreed to release Dr Ashraf on the condition that he leave the country. At this juncture, the government of India did not give him permission to return. The only option was that he left for the UK as a British subject.

While in the UK, his health remained unwell, but he put himself through a gruelling routine of research in the British Library on archives related to mediaeval India, his area of expertise. After spending five years in the UK (1949-1954), he returned to India as a British subject, with a six-month visa. On arrival, he requested Maulana Azad, his mentor and friend, to assist him in staying in India. At the expiry of his visa, no action was taken.

Dr Ashraf spent two years in Kashmir working on a state history of the region and was later appointed as visiting professor of mediaeval history at Kirori Mal College at the University of Delhi. In 1960, with his college contract not renewed, he travelled to Humboldt University in East Berlin (GDR) to conduct research and take a position as visiting professor of mediaeval Indian history.

In his later writings, Dr Ashraf reflected on the 1940s and was critical of the division of British India due to the communalist politics propagated by the British. However, he did maintain that, to fight colonial imperialism, CPI’s policy (and his own) of bringing Jinnah and Gandhi together, and to give due respect to ML’s emerging popularity among Muslims, some concessions had to be offered to their demand for a separate region.

Dr Ashraf’s close relatives were practising Hindus, including his paternal aunt, instilling in him a lived sense of coexistence and mutual respect that he carried directly into his politics. His youth and early middle age were dedicated to the struggle for the freedom of his country, and for equal rights and social justice for the masses. He bore all kinds of sufferings, deprivations and imprisonment. However, once colonial rule ended, Dr Ashraf found himself stateless and exiled in London, without income and with very little social support. Yet he persevered and continued to write and teach in Delhi and then in Berlin.

A mesmerising public speaker, a scholar of Arabic, Persian and Urdu, who wrote poetry, short stories and plays, Dr Ashraf passed away due to a heart attack at the age of 59 in East Berlin on June 7, 1962.

He is buried at the Cemetery of the Socialists in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, where he lies with the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and others who fought for democratic rights, against fascism and for socialism.

The writer wishes to thank Alisher Karabeav (ZMO Library, Berlin), Dr Razak Khan (Freie University, Berlin) and Ananya Iyengar (St Stephens College, Delhi) for their input.

The writer teaches anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, in the USA. He can be contacted at: asdar@austin.utexas.edu

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 22nd, 2026

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ON THE NIGHT OF THE HANGING

Every thing is as calm and orderly as it should be in a jail devoted to the safety and care of one very important man. All prisoners but one are asleep in their cells, restless, dreaming of their victims or their loved ones, which in most cases are the same people.

The Rawalpindi sky is clear and full of stars; all the talk about omens is rubbish: there are no meteor showers, no storms brewing on the horizon, the sky is not going to shed tears of blood, the earth is not about to split open and swallow its wretched inhabitants and their grief.

The man who is awake has asked for a safety razor, claiming that he doesn’t want to look like a mullah in death. After consultations with superiors, the jail superintendent has sent for a barber, who shaves the man gently, making sure to clear the fuzz from his earlobes. The man asks for a cigar and the jail superintendent doesn’t need to ask for his superiors’ permission. No man who is about to be hanged in three hours and forty-five minutes has ever tried to kill himself with a Montecristo.

The jailer makes sure to light it himself; the man chews on his cigar, takes two deep puffs and regrets it, thinking maybe he should have quit when he had the time. The man asks for his Shalimar perfume, sprays himself and lies down on the floor. A mosquito buzzes near his ear. On any other night he might have called in the jailer and given him a dressing-down for infesting his prison cell with poisonous insects, might have accused him of being a tool of the White Elephant, his favourite invective for the United States of America, but tonight he just shoos the mosquito away half-heartedly, listening to the rising and fading whirr of its wings. He is grateful for the company.

Everyone agrees on the above events. Those who wanted to hang him, those who wanted to save him, those who wanted a martyr in the early morning whose blood could help them bring about a revolution, even those who were indifferent, all agree up to this point that the man lay down on the floor, pulled a sheet over himself and stayed still, dress-rehearsing being dead.

The latest novel by Mohammed Hanif is set in the immediate aftermath of the hanging of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but revolves around an eclectic cast of characters, including a disillusioned socialist who runs an English tuition centre for the children of peasants in OK Town, his childhood friend who is a mosque imam and who provides him space in his compound, the on-the-run young daughter of a former comrade and an ambitious young army captain deputed to gather intelligence against the martial law regime’s foes. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from Rebel English Academy, published recently by Maktaba-i-Danyal in Pakistan…

Although everything was still and orderly in and around the cell where an about-to-be hanged man practised his death pose, there was activity, quite a lot of activity, around the country in some crucial spots. Many would later say, especially journalists and diplomats who made a living out of exaggeration, that it was the longest night of their lives, that they knew something historic, something catastrophic was about to happen. But only those who had been woken up without warning with a degree of rudeness would remember this night when their own time came.

An imam was hauled up from his small room adjacent to his small mosque and ordered to get ready to lead the funeral prayers of a very important man. One of the world’s sturdiest planes, a C-130, was on standby at Rawalpindi air base to ferry the body to the man’s village. A military truck followed by six machine-gun-mounted jeeps made its way towards the airport, with some sleepy, some alert soldiers, their commander wondering why a dead man needed so much protection. Elites stay elite even in their death, he thought.

Some soldiers sang a tea jingle: “Chai chahyie, kaunsi janab.”

“Shut up,” barked the commander. “We are on VIP duty.”

A caretaker at the village graveyard was asked to start digging a grave, and when he asked what size, he was slapped. “Your own size,” he was told.

Above are the facts that everyone agrees upon. As with every hanging, there are differing accounts about the man’s walk to the gallows. How did he walk? Some say he never actually walked. That he collapsed on the shoulders of his jail guards and had to be carried. His jiyalas say that he walked on steady feet, head held high, climbed onto the podium as if addressing the nation one last time, kissed the noose and put it around his neck.

Others say he was carried on a stretcher and two policemen, themselves shaking at the gravity of the moment, had to prop him up by his armpits before fitting the rope around his neck. You can’t hang a man when he is horizontal on a stretcher.

There was one oversight by the jail superintendent, but that was taken care of by the ingenuity of a captain who happened to be on the scene on a top-secret mission. After discovering that the jail administration had forgotten to order a coffin, the captain barged into the jail armoury, looked around, saw a body-sized wooden crate that was used to store the jail guards’ rusting guns, shouted at them for not having any respect for their weapons and handed the crate over to the jailer who, in gratitude, leapt forward to kiss his hands.

The captain put his hands behind his back and reminded him that he was on post-hanging photo-shoot duty and would like a few private moments with the body after the man was hanged. The jailer agreed, knowing he had no choice in the matter, and asked the captain if he would like to witness the hanging. The captain declined the offer, saying he wasn’t on hanging duty.

He was here on a different mission.

Before being taken to the waiting cargo plane, the hanged man was left alone in the jail superintendent’s office for a few minutes with the captain, who had brought a professional photographer with him. In those few minutes, the photographer had to perform the most shameless, and as these things go hand in hand, the most high-powered assignment of his otherwise mediocre career.

He pulled down the hanged man’s soiled shalwar and, with the flash on, took half a dozen photos of his genitalia. It was done in the forlorn hope of confirming the persistent rumour that the hanged man was not circumcised and hence a Hindu. The very fact that photos were never processed or released was proof enough that the man was indeed circumcised and hence a Muslim.

The man himself might have argued forcefully that the one didn’t prove the other, that many Muslims in his hometown never bothered to circumcise their children. But this little episode ended when the captain made a phone call and reported that the bastard was dead and circumcised. There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. The director of Field Intelligence Unit’s internal security said that the bastard was lying and cheating even in his death. “And you, Captain, you had one job. What are we going to do with you?” said the director and put the phone back on its cradle with historic disappointment.

The nation was thus spared the indignity of waking up to newspapers with pictures of a hanged man’s genitalia on the front pages.

The captain was punished with a transfer to a town where car number plates started with the letters OK and where people from far-off districts came to get their vehicles registered. The captain had done a brief stint in OK town cantonment after getting his commission three and a half years ago and knew that the vehicle registration plates were the only exciting thing about the city. He knew he would need to create his own entertainment and come up with a mission to shine on this punishment posting.

Three nights after the hanging, when our captain, let’s call him Captain Gul, is inspecting his room in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters and testing the strength of his bed, all the while looking at himself in the dressing table’s smudged mirror, admiring a hint of a cleft in his chin, his wild sideburns and lush black moustache, a few miles away there is a knock on the door of the Rebel English Academy which, despite its misleading name, is a law-abiding and affordable tuition centre for basic English. Its founder and sole teacher, Sir Baghi, is about to receive a young lady guest he is not expecting at all.

ALLAH’S WILL

Molly Rafique must have planned it this way, although he would insist forever that it was all Allah’s will. When Molly sneaks his young lady friend into the academy, Sir Baghi is finally enjoying an afternoon of solitude.

He had sent his students home the moment they heard a newspaper hawker shouting in the street about the hanging. Baghi knows that it will be a very long weekend. He wants to use this unexpected holiday to mark papers, review his syllabus and read the fourth chapter of To the Lighthouse.

He also plans a visit to Venus cinema for a matinee in the hope of finding some random afternoon love. It’s not in his nature to be optimistic but he is hoping that the cinema won’t be shut down.

Molly’s lady friend carries a faded sea-green sports bag, with the logo of a panther in the middle of a leap, ‘Pride of OK Town’ inscribed under the panther in fading gold letters. She is wearing baggy tracksuit bottoms, a white dupatta embroidered with white and yellow nargis flowers loosely draped around her neck, a girl old enough to know that she needs a dupatta but young enough not to know what to do with it. She has the air of somebody about to take a leap and start running, somebody who is being chased by their own past or, at least, what they hope is their past.

Molly is sweating, his forehead a network of the entire world’s troubles. A sheen of sweat covers his shaved upper lip, his famous beard quivering. “Can you look after my guest while I do the funeral prayers?”

Funeral prayers? Baghi groans, the veins in his neck bulge because of the unspoken words. He always buttons up his always-black shirt’s collar, less a sartorial choice and more an attempt to hide a crimson hammer and sickle tattoo on his upper chest. Baghi is past his shouting days but he still gets the occasional urge.

He knows the mosque is Molly’s business but why does Molly want to have a funeral in absentia for a man hanged two hundred miles away and buried in his village in the dead of the night three days ago? A man who was clearly a feudal despot in the clothes of an awami pseudo-socialist, bald and squeaky and certain of his own immortality, the type of man who, from his death cell, writes a threatening pamphlet titled ‘If I Am Assassinated’ … and is assassinated anyway, someone who says you can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea. Baghi wants to tell Molly you can’t have a funeral in absentia for an idea. But the mosque is Molly’s business.

On another day he might have said, Molly, surely you don’t want to start a socialist revolution in your mosque? Better not to start it anywhere — look at me.

“What can I do? The bazaar is full of jiyalas and they want a funeral. I know he wasn’t very nice to you but he is gone to Allah now, where we all must go one day, and we must honour the dead,” says Molly, moving towards the door.

Yes, we must honour the dead, Baghi wants to say, even if the dead once had a chilli-powder-laced rod rammed up my ass for writing a letter.

Baghi also wants to say that this is a teaching institution and not a resting place for girls with hurriedly packed sports bags but, before he can say it, Molly is gone, leaving behind the smell of his favourite ittar, a confused mixture of rose and jasmine, and his guest with large, searching eyes, scanning the place for something familiar.

She puts down her bag, moves towards Baghi and holds out her hand. Baghi observes her hand, hesitates before taking it. When was the last time he had shaken hands with a woman? This was not the kind of town where people shook hands with women, not the kind of neighbourhood where people left single women in bachelors’ quarters to be entertained. Her handshake is determined and it forces him to look her in the face.

Ruin, he thinks, she is going to ruin us.

In five years of teaching English to sons and daughters of peasants and shopkeepers, Baghi has developed a revolutionary technique: single words spring up to describe a moment in life. In order to teach these students, you didn’t need proper sentences. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and qualifying adverbs could wait. Usually, a word was enough to describe a given situation, an intention or, in this case, a sense of impending doom.

Baghi rarely gets to say that he was right because it has been proven, often enough, from matters of politics to affairs of the heart, that he was almost always wrong. Later it would turn out that he was right in this moment when he forgets all the flourishes of a successful English tutor and a closet revolutionary, looks at her and comes up with the perfect word: ruin.

Baghi doesn’t much care for the native language tradition which has evolved many ways of describing a face, especially a woman’s face — in fact, most of classical poetry was devoted to capturing a woman’s features. Snakes and wine goblets featured prominently. You looked for wine goblets in the eyes, poisonous vipers in the hair, and the face was always book-like. To Baghi’s enduring irritation, nobody ever said which book, a slim T.S. Eliot volume or a copy of the Original and the Biggest Heer. The English language, Baghi believed, was more accommodating, more precise, yet more expansive.

You could do away with wine goblets and coiling, hissing snakes; you could just say her nose was sharp and quivered gently when she breathed, a little dimple on the left cheek, which still had baby fat, set off a mole on the right cheek. If he was into women, he would say she could probably set anybody’s bed on fire and turn their life to ashes by loving them and then abandoning them to waste away their life writing below-average poetry, invoking as many snakes and broken goblets as they pleased.

Baghi had wanted to do many things in life: bring a violent revolution, make the rich suffer, give all the peasants’ children a world-class education. But right now he was content doing small courtesies; he was going to ask his lady guest to have a seat and politely inquire if they had met in a past life.

But before he can say it, she plonks her bag on the floor and takes a seat. He offers her tea, he offers her water. She refuses with a wave of her hand and sits on the chair; she looks towards the ceiling, the bookshelf, the blackboard, then speaks suddenly, and while native poets may have heard a koel cooing, Baghi only hears a dry-throated, husky voice which some men with unresolved sexual urges might find desirable, a voice defeated but refusing to surrender, the voice of someone ready to get up and go looking for a fight again.

“Do you often entertain his friends?” The question sounds like an accusation to Baghi.

“No,” Baghi says. “Not like this.” He fingers his buttoned-up collar, stutters and finds himself defending his friend and landlord Maulvi Rafique’s character, not that his character needs defending: he is a man of God, a rising star of the spiritual marketplace; people offer him mutton qorma and cash in advance to listen to him telling them how to live their lives and how to prepare for the afterlife.

She is waiting, still looking at him, as if urging him to explain his life as the entertainer of stray women.

“I mean, sometimes we have friends over, common friends, and we talk, but if you are asking if he has brought a woman to my academy, I would have to say no. This is an institution of learning and not a…”

She is not listening to him any more. She is the kind of woman who tunes out when a man starts to bullshit. That’s one of the many reasons on Baghi’s list for staying away from women.

“I didn’t know he was the Bhutto type,” she says.

“Not a good day to be his jiyala,” Baghi says.

“There never was a good day to be a jiyala,” she says, looking up at him, expecting him to say more.

“He’s a maulvi, offering prayers for the dead is his job.” Baghi shrugs.

Baghi doesn’t like to talk politics with women… He has learnt his lesson and likes to keep his affairs away from female comrades.

“Can I get you something cold or maybe a hot drink?”

Repeating oneself is the essence of life. When he tells this to his students, he attributes it to Virginia Woolf but he is not sure if she ever said it. That is under the category of Things Virginia Woolf Might Have Said, an evolving list in his teaching career. The bourgeois comrade who caught him in the study circle also accused him of never having read a word written by a woman. Baghi is trying to prove her wrong.

“Water,” his guest says.

Baghi takes out one of the two glasses he keeps aside for guests. Students drink from plastic tumblers — no casteism in this academy, no hierarchies, but they are young and careless and Baghi has no patience for glass shards in the feet and blood on the floor. She accepts it without a word, gulps it down in one go.

“And how do you know Maulvi sahib?” He is deferential and doesn’t call him Molly in his absence as he has called him to his face since they were children… Molly used to bristle when he started calling him Molly but Baghi could tell that he secretly enjoyed it. He was his Molly boy before he became a serious scholar of religion who accepted cash only for his sermons and refused to eat farm-bred chicken and knew people who could spring you from a police dungeon.

She looks at Baghi as if trying to decide if she should lie to him or just slap him. “I pray behind him. This is the only mosque where women can pray but you wouldn’t know because you don’t believe in God.” Baghi is startled. He doesn’t believe in God but over the years he has learnt to keep his non-faith to himself and his academy students. She has probably heard it from Molly.

“He’s a friend, more like an elder brother to me. There was a fire at my house so he offered to put me up, temporarily,” she says and watches him for a reaction.

Molly has friends? Baghi knows that he has followers, many, many followers, worshippers who prostrate behind him feverishly, broken people trying to put themselves back together, repentant paedophiles, proud murderers, lovers, addicts, heartless traders, all flock to him for salvation. Baghi believes he is the only friend Molly has, the only one who refuses to pray behind him or anyone else. But no, Molly has another friend-sister who is here sitting in his chair, a friend with hazel eyes and roasted-wheat skin who has landed in the academy with an oversized sports bag because, obviously, Molly has no other place to take her.

Does Mrs Molly know that her much-respected husband — my god on this earth, my companion, my protector, mera sohna — has a lady friend-sister who is sitting in the same compound a few metres away?

The mosque loudspeaker turns on and Molly’s friend-sister seems surprised at the proximity of the electric crackle and the piercing sound of prayers that follows. She takes her dupatta and covers her head, probably realizing for the first time that she’s sitting in a mosque, in Allah’s own house.

“You don’t remember me?”

Baghi is blank for a moment. “Were you a student? I would have remembered.”

“Not to worry. I was here only for two weeks. I failed. Are you still a good English teacher?”

Nobody has ever asked him that. Nobody. Because they all know that he is the best there is. They might also say that teaching English is the only thing he is good at. The revolutions he had hatched lay in dust. The Mazdoor Militia he had started folded after one industrial action with two dead and even the defunct militia expelled him after his open letter to Ummah. Brief visits to police lock-ups and picnics in shabby rehabs were all in the past.

But yes, he is good at something. Something useful. Send a peasant’s son to Baghi’s Rebel English Academy, a young boy who can’t even call his own cow ‘cow’ in English, and within three months he would write a perfectly composed essay called ‘Our Cow’ that would get him passing grades in high school. Send him for another three months and he might get a job as a clerk, six months and he might pass the police recruitment exam and become an official torturer.

“I try. This is the most I can do, I just help them.” He doesn’t tell her that some of them go on to become police officers and diplomats. He is trying to be humble like you should be with a young woman you have just met. You are supposed to rub your own nose in the dust in the hope she will pick you up by the scruff of your neck and say, oh come on, don’t be humble. She has no such plans. She sits there waiting for him to pick himself up.

“Some of my students have become UN diplomats — one almost became a foreign secretary. But they were hard-working children, no credit to me.”

She has no interest in his glorious career where he grooms future UN diplomats. “I failed my English in FA,” she says as if he was personally responsible for her failure. “Second division for every subject and F for English. Zero, anda.” She makes an egg with the forefinger and thumb of her right hand. “I went to college for a year on sports quota. District gold medal in 400 yard hurdles.’”

“I am sorry to hear that,” he says. He doesn’t remember her name but it seems rude to ask her now so he continues. “I wish you had stayed longer than two weeks because the system I have devised —”

He gets an appreciative smile out of her but then she cuts him off mid-sentence. “I used to come with my friend. My friend became a doctor and she says you gave her a new life, English life. Now she lives in Norway. Maybe you should try teaching me again.”

Baghi blushes. And also panics. “Are you planning to stay?”

Excerpted with permission from English Rebel Academy by Mohammed Hanif, published in Pakistan by Maktaba-i-Danyal

The author is a journalist, playwright, film scriptwriter and novelist. He has published three previous novels, including A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti and Red Birds

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 22nd, 2026

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