JUSTICE Amirul Mulk Mengal was completing his two years as governor of Balochistan as he laid the foundationstone of the new building of the Press Club here the other day. Speaking on the occasion, he urged newsmen to keep uppermost the national interests as the country was passing through a critical situation. Barring a few violent incidents during his office until now, the law and order situation in the province remained stable and the people enjoyed relative peace.

During the early period of his office, the province was in the grip of drought. As the governor is from the Chaghai desert, he was able to make high officials see the reality that the drought would have a devastating effect if steps were not taken to combat it. Thus the army was employed to carry out relief operations, such as establishing camps on the sources of water. Generally, the impact of the drought was lessened but the governor was criticized for not appealing for international assistance, presumably for political reasons. Foreigners are generally not welcome in Balochistan since the days of the Raj, with the bureaucracy retaining the British legacy.

That is why foreign correspondents based in Quetta hotels are rarely allowed to make visits to Chaman or other townships close to the Afghan border for reporting to their organizations. The drought is still prevailing in almost half of the province where no rain was reported during the monsoon. However, the government has pumped in over Rs2 billion, providing relief to the drought-affected people in general.

The second challenge the governor faced was rampant corruption, which was patronized by almost all the previous governments. A two-pronged strategy was adopted. Efforts were first made to clean up the administration and check corruption so that public money was utilized for development. The government generally succeeded in containing corruption by arresting many people. As a matter of policy, high-profile corruption cases were taken up, investigated, tried. The accountability courts found guilty all the people involved in the cases.

The second aspect was the forged bills and illegal withdrawal of public funds from the public exchequer through fraudulent means by the officials. It was also plugged and a score of officials were arrested and punished in the courts of law. It was the biggest source of leakage of public funds in Balochistan.

The third challenge related to the ghost employees. The provincial government paid salaries to tens of thousands of such employees. There were reports that some tribal chiefs also shared the salaries of ghost employees. Still there are thousands more who are drawing salaries for no work. Government departments of health, education, agriculture and communications and works are the organizations where the overwhelming majority of ghost employees are given shelter.

As regards the cleaning up of the administration, many senior officials were retired prematurely, though some political leaders termed it victimization. However, a number of ex-officials are contesting their premature retirement.

The government has scored a number of successes as regards the economic development. First, there was no disruption in the flow of funds from the Centre. There was no slashing of the gas development surcharge for the province during the office of the present government. The past governments had diverted this money to their political constituents providing them gas connections in remote corners of Pakistan, mainly in other province. So far the present government is yet to create its political constituency, the money supply to Balochistan on this head is uninterrupted.

Secondly, the government made significant savings by unearthing and firing the ghost employees and plugging the forged bills. The commission mafia has been contained during the past two years. Thus more funds were made available for financing uplift schemes under the governor’s packages, the Khushal Pakistan and the Public Sector Development Programmes of both the federal and provincial governments.

A major achievement was the launching of several mega projects in the province. The development projects are financed by the federal government. They are: Gwadar deep-water port, coastal highway, Mirani dam, Greater Quetta Water Supply Scheme, the Kachhi Canal in the Naseerabad division, and the rural electrification schemes. In brief, the government will be spending Rs70 billion in next five years.

The governor took personal interest in seeking early revival of the Saindak project. Talks were held with the Chinese diplomats and officials without any publicity. The Chinese were convinced to take the Saindak copper and gold mines on lease and resume production. An agreement between the ministry of petroleum and natural resources and the MCC of China was signed and they are expected to reach Saindak and start their work.

LET’S stop waffling for a minute. Do you believe or not that you are children of apes, as Charles Darwin discovered for us or do you prefer to think that our forebears had evolved from Adam and Eve as good Jews, good Christians and good Muslims would have us believe? Or would you go along with something more esoteric, like the good Brahminical belief that it was the cosmic, ethereal, humanly unpronounceable sound of “Om” that heralded our arrival on planet Earth? Or are you one of those who couldn’t care less?

In the great search for liberal Muslims, liberal Christians and liberal Jews or liberal Hindus, unleashed no doubt by the tragic events of Sept 11, we are being forced to forget that a truly liberal person is by definition a rational person who keeps all his cerebral windows open every minute for any arriving correction. A religious person begins with do’s and don’ts. A kink. He can be tolerant, even moderate, but not liberal. Let’s see how this rigid, if accurate, definition is playing in the current political flux.

For many long, bitter, brutal years, the forces of President Bush and Osama bin Laden were locked in a mighty embrace as only true believers would, together fighting the evil empire represented by the godless Soviets. They were both Ahl-I-Kitab (People of the Book), joined in a common cause to cleanse society of a nefarious, Satanic, intellectual challenge. (That was way before Samuel Huntington cried foul and took us back to civilizational atavism as the building blocks of our dominant identities.)

According to Selig Harrison, the renowned expert on Afghanistan, the CIA alone spent over $3 billion to help foist a government based on Islamic tenets to supplant communism in Kabul. That it would trigger a decidedly prolonged and debilitating side-effect in neighbouring Pakistan may or may not have been part of the script. Whatever be the case, it took only 10 or 12 years for the inevitable religious devaluation to hit rock bottom. That is clear. Hence the $50 million charity as opposed to the billions, thrown in recently before the government of Pakistan to dislodge the faithfuls, yes the very people it once helped produce and so caringly reared too, literally, in American-funded hatcheries.

So let’s zero in on someone like Imran Khan, a passionate Muslim, a cosmopolitan socialite, to find out if he believes in Adam and Eve or in Charles Darwin. Imran has been very vocal against the American attack on Islam. So, is he teaching his children the tenets of Creation from the Quran or the history of evolution of Darwin? If he says both are fine, he is missing the point, perhaps deliberately. So let’s drop the quest before it gets embarrassing. Let’s turn to our hero of the moment, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider. I can clearly recall what he told us, a bunch of Indian journalists and parliamentarians in Islamabad last year, or perhaps the year before. “This Qazi fellow is sending his son to America to study information technology. And he is sending other people’s poor children to his madressahs. We’ll soon sort him out.” No marks for guessing which Qazi Mr Haider was fuming at.

In a crucial way the war in Afghanistan will decide also the victor and the vanquished in the ongoing duel between Mr Haider and his quarry, the ubiquitous Qazi. For many of us in India and in Pakistan too that is the real battle to watch, although at the wider, more obviously global level, the war in Afghanistan is being fought between two jilted lovers. To many of us Osama and Bush look rabid in their own ways. Pure undiluted rightwing stuff. One gets funds from anachronistic bigots, the other gets votes from people who bomb abortion clinics back home. Why is it so difficult for the hyped-up Western media to understand that people at large need a choice, a quaint word patronized by Americans themselves, a choice other than the coerced endorsement of either the self-righteous George Bush or the mediaeval cohorts of Osama bin Laden. And that we can still be reasonable people.

That was the point both Shabana Azmi and Sharmila Tagore were trying to make when they joined an anti-war demonstration in New Delhi recently. Unfortunately for them there is no Moinuddin Haider in India to lock up the mullahs, both the Muslim and the Hindu variety, hence an unseemly standoff developed with the so-called Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid which needs to be reported and understood properly because it could find a wider echo elsewhere.

Shabana Azmi is a gifted film actress. She is also a social worker, fighting for the civic rights of Bombay’s slum-dwellers. Her father Kaifi Azmi was once an active communist and a popular poet of the masses. Shabana says she is a Muslim, I am not sure if Sharmila Tagore became one too after marrying the Nawab of Pataudi. Sharmila inaugurated her brilliant career with Satyajit Ray, Shabana’s long and impressive innings was launched by a great filmmaker of more recent fame, Shyam Benegal. They are both highly accomplished women, persons. But there’s a problem, or two problems may be. They are both being hailed as the liberal face of Indian Muslims. At a function organized by leftist intellectuals last week Shabana sang Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sharmila too recited something appropriate for the occasion, something in opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

As it turned out, the orthodox and rabid face of Indian Muslims has also been opposing the war in Afghanistan, but for a diametrically opposite reason. The Shahi Imam, not an ordinary plebeian imam mind you, has been shouting from the pulpit for a Jihad against America. There are few takers for his bile except the rightwing Hindu fanatics who watch the proceedings at Jama Masjid on Fridays more religiously than many Muslims would. Shabana, appearing in a TV programme last week, scoffed at the Imam’s credentials to represent Indian Muslims. She snidely told her audience to send the bearded man packing to Kandahar if he really wanted to launch a Jihad against America. Then the Imam something which riled everyone but amused me no end. “I don’t talk to nachaniyas and gawaiyas,” the Imam barked crudely. I thought it was a foul unacceptable reply. But in some ways it was factual too. And this was not the first time that the Muslim rightwing had used foul words against their moderates.

I once accompanied playwright Habib Tanvir and filmmaker Saeed Mirza, and perhaps Shabana was there too, to meet Rajiv Gandhi over the Shahbano issue. We wanted the divorced Muslim woman to be given all the rights that other Indian women enjoyed from their former husbands. Rajiv Gandhi made polite noises. It was nice to meet liberal Muslims (uf uf) and would we be able to convince the mullahs of the Muslim personal Law Board to consider our beautiful point of view. That was the end of the conversation. We were livid. The state of India was up to communal mischief. It didn’t want liberal opinion to gain any voice in the affairs of the state. The issue became the launching-pad for a major rightwing Hindu thrust on India’s political centre-stage. The next day all the conservative Urdu papers were calling us names. nachaniyas and gawaiyas was one of them. But that’s what we are basically. Without a liberal political cover, which has been shrinking steadily, not gaining ground, we are nachaniyas and gawaiyas.

That’s the lot of liberals. This is true of India, of Pakistan and quite evidently now of America too. Shabana’s father wrote brilliant poetry as did Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Where are the people on the streets to recite them? Find out from the Qazi.

KARACHI: If light generates heat, it is heaven, and if it burns, it is like hell. A match stick is struck to lit the family hearth to prepare food to keep life going. But if a spark is left to fly off unguarded and falls on something that immediately catches fire it spreads quickly and creates havoc with life and all that supports life, consuming everything that comes in its way, killing and injuring human beings and animals and reducing other things to ashes.

Recently a fire broke out in a shanty town. It began with a simple spark and in no time turned into leaping flames, spreading destruction, panic and terror. Everyone of those then present in the shanty town was panicked. They ran here and there to save their near and dear ones and their scanty belongings. Children, who were caught in the fire, cried and called to their parents to save them. Some children, away from the fire, huddled into the laps of their wailing mothers, cried endlessly. Within minutes the fire left several people dead and injured, several houses destroyed and turned most of the belongings of the poor people into ashes.

The injured were rushed to a hospital. The hospital staff, on their toes, in a hectic way, began attending to the patients. Some of the injured were saved. Some of them died one after another over a period of several days.

Two children, caught in leaping flames, died when a fire swept through their house in Preedy area. It was a heart-rending scene, one could hardly believe it, witnesses said. What was more shocking that the tragedy occurred in front of their parents who looked helpless while crying for help.

The residents of Karachi can hardly forget the horrible fire in Bohri Bazaar. The fire wreaked havoc. Shops were gutted. An elderly couple who were living in an apartment building were trapped in the fire. They died in their flat. After the fire was put out, their charred bodies, with their hands and arms locked together, were brought out. They bid farewell to the world clasping each other’s hands and arms.

Desperate situations, it is said, promote voluntary cooperation among all living beings. One prays for voluntary cooperation among human beings in all situations.