| November 11, 2001 | Sunday | Shaba’an 24, 1422 |
A false sense of security!: NEWS ANALYSIS
Salat committees again? : LAHORE DIARY
AMIDST reports that the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR) is soon to be revived on a permanent basis, and that the Pakistan Railways has “dumped” the KCR, somehow one’s thoughts turn to what this city’s transport scenario would have been like if it had had a decent and regular circular railway for all the years that it has been the capital of Sindh.
THE October 28 tragedy in which the terrorists had cut short the lives of 18 persons and wounded another 12 while they were saying prayers in a Bahawalpur church has shaken the people’s confidence in the law-enforcement agencies (LEAs). What kind of security it was that the terrorists were able to enter a place of worship and kill people at will in day light and then disappear, nobody knows where.
What, then, would have been the pressure on the public transport system, which is now among the sources and causes of humiliation and harassment of poor citizens as they travel to work and back every day, as children suffer the ignominy of being stuffed into horrid school buses, as women demean themselves when they wait for a rickshaw or taxi as lecherous men target them. It is such a sorry picture — our transport scene.
As one contemplates the fact that the circular railway and the local trains have steadily taken the back seat in our official priorities, one is reminded of the times when it was common to hear that people had the above trains as part of their daily lives. People from different localities of this city of distances, saddled with a rising population, used these trains. Had they been looked after by the Federal and Provincial or local governments, there is every reason to believe that our transport shortage would not have been as acute or frustrating.
I have read with a deep sense of disappointment what the Federal Minister for Communications and Railways, Javed Ashraf Qazi said sometime in early September: He threatened to “stop the KCR service” because of what he said was the ‘indifferent’ attitude of the Sindh government (Bear in mind, for some reason, that the PR is also in a mess and that it has corruption as its main problem, which the minister does talk about).
At this reported press conference, the minister said that the KCR is “a metropolitan service and should be run by the metropolitan government”. He complained of the lack of response by the Sindh government and felt that there was no need to see, for this reason, the City Nazim. He also spoke of the frustrations and difficulties that the PR was facing with regard to the KCR. Amazing really. Does he intend to give up the railways itself because of the problems being faced?
There is another question that arises. Traditionally, we have not looked after our buses, roads and hospitals in this city. But we haven’t given up the concept.
Let us state it unambiguously. The KCR is needed. No one particular network will solve the problems that citizens face when it comes to their daily lives. It is the failure of the public transport network that has steadily, but disturbingly, increased the number of private vehicles in this society. Its ugly impact on the environment and a poor vulgar reflection of the nouveau riche are other major side-effects.
The city government was due to have taken up the issue of the KCR several weeks ago. That has evidently not yet happened in a context where there are reported delays in numerous other projects and a Dawn report said that “the fate of projects of the Economic Development Council appears to be no different from the much-trumpeted scheme of the Mass Transit Project which, after spending millions of rupees on preparing PCs in the past decades, stands shelved”.
It is being emphasized currently that the Lyari Expressway project is a better proposition than the KCR. Perhaps that is not the case. They are two different propositions and one should not be considered and advocated at the cost of the other. If the expressway is a cargo-related proposition, the KCR is a commuter- related one. It serves the interests of the citizen, the commuter that is being advocated here. The commuter has suffered for decades now, and it seems that the situation is getting worse. That is what prompts one to attach the highest priority to the circular railway here.
If both these projects are considered for the city, an obvious question relating to resources would arise. The expressway would cost Rs4 billion at this stage and the KCR’s revival would cost Rs2 billion. Is this kind of money available in a context where there is a shortage of it? Is privatization the answer. Would the private investor be interested in either of them? One does not know but can only imagine.
The citizen is tired and weary at the transport problem he grapples with, in a city that is extending well beyond its imaginable frontiers. It is getting polluted as more and more vehicles ply on its poorly-maintained roads, and an expressway with more trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles would only aggravate matters. What happens in the affluent Clifton and Defence areas when such heavy vehicles ply on its roads is a matter of concern and shame. These are the new faces of urban Karachi and they bring images of horror to mind as every evening places such as Teen Talwar and Boat Basin remain miserably clogged and huge trucks deface the horizon.
And remember the rising cost of fares. The more the city expands and the more there are buses and taxis, in expensive fuel and other costs’ scenario, the more un-affordable will be the cost of travel for the common man. And travel he has to, if he wants to live! A circular railway, or local trains, which most developed cities of the world have, is what the city needs. It will give Karachi a character and personality befitting the metropolitan city that it seeks to be.
Right now, an argument is going on and a perception is emerging that there are interested quarters altogether out to drop or discourage the proposition of the KCR. Better sense will prevail, one hopes, and that Karachi will eventually get the trains that it has had and deserves even more now.
What a fine image comes to mind, to think that one day resident families of this city will travel from one part of the city to another in a train. From North Karachi to Gulshan-i- Iqbal, Cantonment to Malir or somewhere else in the city where distances inhibit travel even for necessary reasons today!
Will they ever be tracked down? Or do LEAs possess no such training as to track down high-profile criminals? Is there anyone who owns any responsibility towards the hapless citizens of Pakistan? After every such carnage, the people are treated to a spectacle of ‘high alert’ or ‘beef-up,’ either of the terms is redundant in our system of law-enforcement.
It’s all rituals: the police patrol up and down the roads in vehicles (usually parked near small restaurants or tea-shops) and set up unnecessary road blocks where the usual hunts are the poor motorcyclists. This is an exercise in futility, and rather increases corruption instead of fighting crime. Such cosmetic measures and public declarations by officials after every such mayhem have failed to create even any false sense of security among the people.
October began with the killing of five in Karachi’s Mahmoodabad mosque in a terrorist shootdown. Another six were injured, three of them seriously. The perpetrators escaped despite the high alert. This chain of terrorist killings continued when a mosque and a madressah were attacked in the central district. This was perhaps in retaliation for the killing of six persons at an Imambargah a couple of days back. The retaliation was expected but despite the security beef-up the catastrophe could not be averted.
The Sindh Technical Board chairman was the next victim of the unabated terrorism. As if this was not enough, the Karachi police did not lag behind when they shot dead two people while controlling protest marchers against the Anglo-American attack on Afghanistan. Quetta, Peshawar and Karachi had their share, with Punjab on the top of the list because of the killing of many people in two bomb blasts in Sialkot, a religious leader in the Sheikhupura district and the Bahawalpur carnage.
The law and order situation seems to be out of the control of the government while terrorists, sectarian or otherwise, are on the rampage. The police and the intelligence network have failed miserably to meet the challenge — not because they are short of resources but because they lack the will to fight back.
In the light of the current public concern about the threat of terrorism it is necessary to think critically about the magnitude of the problem and what could be done to control it. In the wake of unabated use of lethal weapons the much-bloated claims of recovery of illicit arms look to be a big joke. Perhaps the interior minister and the former governor of Punjab were not briefed properly about the gravity of the situation by the bureaucratic setup around them. With the politicians declared outcasts, no public channel is open to them to know the ground reality?
The district Nazims at their recent meeting with the new governor did highlight the need to induct politicians in the provincial cabinet to effectively meet the challenge of public disillusionment with the government policies. The present set of ministers, because of their being political non-entities, has created a big gulf between the government and the masses. The suggestion made by the Nazims needs serious consideration by the rulers as politicians bring a spirit of reasoned optimism into the public life.
The bureaucrats and technocrats have always failed — whether it is law and order or the economy — because of their failure to feel the pulse of the people. The bureaucratic failure to control crime has always been attributed to the failure of the ‘colonial laws’ introduced by the Raj. Somehow this was so much hammered that our military rulers have developed a strong belief that emancipation lies in the introduction of new laws which are directly in conflict with the human rights and have distorted the penal and criminal codes left by Lord Macaulay.
The new ordinances and new laws were introduced not for public welfare but for the protection of the rulers and subjugation of the opposition. The concept of equal excess to justice is not there. It is a new spectrum of emerging justice, which has shaken the faith of the people in fair play, and justice.
The new governor of Punjab has made law and order one of his top priorities. The country is faced with a dismal law and order situation, and Punjab is specially being targeted by the terrorists. The Bahawalpur carnage is a challenge to the governor. His predecessor was always claiming that the law and order was under control while the ground realities belied his claim. There had been a number of terrorist attacks on mosques and most of the time the perpetrators were not traced. What else could it be other than the failure of the administration?
The governor should guard against the hangers-on who are always painting a rosy picture to misguide the provincial chief.
Antagonisms are always intensified by threats. The question is, should we put our own house in order or leave the citizens at the mercy of terrorists while the government, with the US, is busy fighting the war against terrorism? There is no military solution to terrorism. Pacification requires a government capable of enlisting the cooperation of the people. Efforts to establish rule of law, restoration of the powers of the legislature and to use the state as an engine of public welfare are the factors which can contain terrorism. A decisive precondition for controlling terrorism is the emergence of a rough balance between the rulers and the ruled in which the state power predominates but leaves a substantial degree of independence to the subjects.
A PRESS report this week said the provincial governments had been asked for their recommendations on a proposed law to create Salat committees at the federal, provincial, district, tehsil and union council levels. If approved by the president, it said, the new law would be called Salat, Amr Bil Maroof wa Nahi Anil Munkar Ordinance (the ordinance regarding prayers, enjoining the good and prohibiting the evil).
Deja vu? Those old enough probably remember the Nizam-i-Salat of the Zia vintage.
Did the citizens approve of it? Universal approval is, of course, a fiction. That being so, such matters have to be discussed in relative terms. Most people would agree that it was one of the less criticized laws promulgated by the regime. While there was no Gallup Pakistan in those days it can be safely said that its approval rating was better even than the Afghan policy of the present government.
Were there objections? Plenty. To be fair, the law did not require unwilling religious minorities to join in Muslim prayers. Actually, it excluded even the willing Ahmadis. For obvious reasons, even most of the unwilling Muslims could not oppose it openly. The objections, phrased differently, boiled down to two.
One, if fear of God is not enough of a motive for a person professing faith in Islam to offer his prayers regularly, what good is a prayer extracted from him through the Nazim? Two, how can the state recruit a large enough number of Nazims to achieve more than a token compliance?
Did it change things? Plenty. Every departmental head in a government office was designated the Nazim-i-Salat and made responsible for ensuring that the faithful regularly offered at least their noon prayers. Space was identified in all offices for the purpose and those selling bathroom slippers and skullcaps made a quick buck. A column was added to the annual confidential report, requiring all reporting officers to judge their subordinates’ adherence to ritual and their motivation level. The public service commissions and recruitment committees added a member each to ensure that only the adequately religious people got the job, the scholarship, the promotion or whatever temporal reward they controlled. The number of people attending community prayers — even the Friday and Eid prayers — did not, however, increase significantly. There was thus no need for expansion of mosques or building many new ones. Neighbourhood Nazims were also nominated for the lesser citizens but in the absence of a reporting and reward-and-punishment system never became very noticeable. It is probably a sign that unlike their colleagues nominated to Zakat bodies they were never seen at a distinguished citizens’ banquet for a state guest. This, in fact, may have been its undoing. Since the law did not create a privilege anybody treasured, it lapsed quietly.
One of the lasting changes has been that the lunch break has been called the Lunch and Prayer Break or simply the Prayer Break ever since.
The report says this time the proposal is to have committees rather than Nazims and that besides representatives of the government and the ulema there would be some ‘men of integrity’ serving on each. The layers and the quota suggest the National Reconstruction Bureau at work. But the relevant question, of course, is not the authorship of the draft. It is the necessity and efficacy of the law.
The report says that in the Punjab, secretaries of Information, Social Welfare, Higher Education and Local Government and Rural Development Departments were consulted. It does not say what the conclusion was. If there is still time, might one suggest that the Finance Department and the National Accountability Bureau, too, be consulted on the crucial questions of necessity and efficacy.
WAS their a strike observed in the city on Friday?
Yes. The Pak-Afghan Defence Council, which called the strike, certainly thinks so. The strike, its leaders said, had been a resounding success. They thanked the people, specially the traders and the transporters who, they said, had shown their solidarity with the PADC cause despite pressure from the government. The government, they said, had lost the referendum on its policies, particularly its policy on Afghanistan.
No. The government certainly does not think so. Particularly the district government. Nazims from many districts issued statements the same evening thanking the people, particularly the traders and the transporters for disregarding the PADC call. The Directorate-General of Public Relations even supplied pictures showing business as usual.
Just goes to prove the adage that you cannot trust your ears. Eyes alone are the worthy guide. And most people saw closed markets and extremely thin traffic. Does that vindicate the PADC? Not quite. Unless a strike is totally voluntary, it cannot be the kind of referendum victory the Council wants to claim.
While most of the traders were silent or diplomatic about it, many transporters said they had stayed off roads for fear of being attacked. There were also reports of a large number of arrests and the police attributed most of these to attempts at enforcing a strike.
The PADC denied that. It said the arrests represented government pressure against the strike. It alleged even that the city district Nazim and senior administration officials had been trying to coerce traders and transporters into ignoring the call. The Nazim denied the charge, saying he only went so far as saying those wanting to open their businesses would be protected.
But can the government agree that the strike was enforced? Hardly. That would practically be admitting to anarchy.
Hence the statements on both sides that do not go well with newspaper pictures or what you have seen yourself.
THE Afghan ambassador in Pakistan, Mullah Abdus Salam Zaeef, whose presence in Islamabad is considered useful even by the United States, has been banned from talking to the press. The Foreign Office regretted that the Taliban envoy had been speaking in violation of diplomatic norms. While the FO was not more specific than that, it was understood that it resented his criticism of the host government’s policy and its alliance with a coalition hostile to his own government. But, what else should the Mullah be expected to say? Besides, his stated differences with the administration in Islamabad have been over perceptions, doctrines and opinions — arguably a fair domain for debate.
By comparison, the US envoy has been more vocal about things, practically contradicting even President Gen Pervez Musharraf after he had spoken. But then she is the US envoy.
THIS being the season, a Dawn reporter recently received an invitation that stands out for its language and spelling given even our meagre literacy rate and the haste ahead of Ramazan. Having invoked “bleesings” of the Almighty for the “relation ship” of the would-be couple “to its ultimate of prosperity, understanding, happiness & success”, the hosts announce that they “will be honoured by your August presence on the Auspicious occasion of weeding of their beloved Doughter.” —ONLOOKER