| November 12, 2001 | Monday | Shaba’an 25, 1422 |
Living with noble promises: KARACHI FILE
Of women bandits
Letting important people pass
Who is misleading whom?: LETTER FROM ISLAMABAD
A special Dua answered
From a ‘fixed’ test match to Osama bin Laden’s nukes?
Crisis and clarity: COMMENT
The peril of the fisheries policy: DATELINE QUETTA
BLUE on Blue is the US Navy’s slang for its own warships destroying an American aircraft, by accident usually. We don’t have the code for blasting mud-walled huts with Daisy Cutter megaton bombs. Not yet. It still stands to reason nevertheless that the sensational claim by Osama bin Laden of being in possession of nuclear arms is not any less threatening to our safety and survival than the American propensity to go awfully wrong, sometimes tragically so.
PROFESSIONAL street protesters had another field day last Friday, playing their fairly familiar games. At least one of the city’s public transport organizations said it was on strike. The others kept mum but chose to stay inactive. Most of the shops remained closed. For its part, the government had decided to go on a holiday, ostensibly in deference to the birth anniversary of the Poet of the East, Allama Iqbal. That was, for all practical purposes, a lucky coincidence for the government. What would the government have done had it not been so fortunately the anniversary of a national hero? Let us be content to wonder.
KARACHI: Sometimes one comes across situations in the world of crime when it becomes difficult whether to describe them as crime or something done out of innocence by touchy youth, which tend to pave the way for uniting two lovers through the sacred institution of marriage.
Osama’s claim of being the world’s first non-state nuclear player has been greeted by a degree of very genuine fear. According to our friends in the Indian air force, the Uzbeks, whose scientists in the Soviet days had apparently developed a briefcase-fitting nuclear device, could easily be induced to sell their expertise to anyone, including of course to a bunch of religious bigots. And that’s worrying. But there’s no guesswork needed to fear a decidedly more palpable threat, perfected not by our enemies, but by some of the friends who claim to be our scout guides against international terrorism.
We don’t have a direct quote, but US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld has said more or less in as many words that there was no ruling out the use of “small, tactical” nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. Couple this patently demented idea with the track record of American recklessness on quite a few major missions and you will see how unsafe we all are under the command and control of an army that is crawling with potential Mad Majors.
It was bad enough with our own propensity in India and Pakistan to taunt each other to the critical edge of nuclear brinkmanship at any given opportunity; now we have actually imported a prescription for self-induced heart attacks — as a possible prelude to an outright disaster! Who knows? But just look at the record of mishaps, accidents, miscalculations that have visited the so-called nuclear veterans and the scene looks far from reassuring.
We do not know for sure if the Soviets rewarded or reprimanded their cavalier pilots who calmly shot down the Korean Airlines jumbo jet after it had strayed on its way from Anchorage to Seoul, instantly killing all of its 300 or so passengers and crew. What we do know for a fact is that the senior president Bush actually decorated his officer who was commanding the USS Vincennes on the fateful day in the Persian Gulf when in a nervous moment of fear and miscalculation he ordered the shooting of an Iran Air Airbus mistaking it for an enemy warplane.
And since USS Vincennes is back in business, chucking cruise missiles into a hapless landlocked country from the choppy waters of the Arabian Sea, it would be useful to recall what had happened on the other side of the Hormuz in July 1988 so as to be prepared for what could happen yet again.
Although it indirectly contributed to the end of the eight-year-long and bitter Iran-Iraq war, the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 was an appalling human tragedy. According to most American analysts, it damaged their country’s world standing as a safe companion to court. There is also the view that the incident almost surely caused Iran to delay the release of the American hostages in Lebanon. Moreover, it may have given the mullahs a motive for revenge and, according to the Newsweek, “provoked Tehran into playing a role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103.
“For the navy, it was a professional disgrace,” the Newsweek said. “The navy’s most expensive surface warship, designed to track and shoot down as many as 200 incoming missiles at once, had blown apart an innocent civilian airliner in its first time in combat.”
That was not all. The Newsweek claimed after a prolonged probe that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time of the shootdown — in clear violation of international law. “The top Pentagon brass understood from the beginning that if the whole truth about the Vincennes came out, it would mean months of humiliating headlines. So the US navy did what all navies do after terrible blunders at sea: it told lies and handed out medals.
“This is the story of a naval fiasco, of an overeager captain, panicked crewmen, and the cover-up that followed,” the magazine’s blurb on a sensational investigation had read.
How does all this have any bearing on the ongoing operations against Afghanistan? It does, frankly. Just replace Iran Air with PIA or Air India or any other civilian airline that plies the region. To add a nightmare to your disturbed sleep, imagine a civilian pilot turning into a kamikaze maniac who heads for the anti-terrorist armada a la the New York attacks. Or simply imagine a Korean Airlines-type accidental change of trajectory towards a USS Vincennes-type of trigger-happy commander. In a region crawling with nuclear weapons in the air, under the sea, on large masses of land, there could be no better place to start something completely unexpected.
It almost happened the other day, I mean in August 1999, when an Indian air force MiG 21 shot down a Pakistan reconnaissance plane close to their border.
According to the Indian version, the MiG 21s tried to force the Atlantique to land in India, but the “intruder aircraft turned in towards the MiG 21 in an attack position”. According to Pakistan, the Atlantique was unarmed and on a routine training drill within its territorial limits when it was shot, without any warning. From Pakistan’s perspective, the fact that the Atlantique was unarmed and the crew consisted of five officers and 11 other ranks, most of them trainees and the fact that the debris of the plane and all the bodies were found inside Pakistan would seem to support this point.
But Indians see a difficulty with that. They say that the Atlantique is proven to be an anti-submarine-cum-anti-ship maritime surveillance aircraft, capable of delivering Exocet AM 39 missiles that can attack vessels from a distance of 100km. It also carries nine MK 44 torpedoes, four air-to-surface missiles, 12 depth charges and 14 bombs. Also, if it was on a routine training mission, why was it flying so close to the international border? Article 2 of the agreement between Pakistan and India on prevention of air space violations, states: “Combat aircraft (to include fighter, bomber, reconnaissance, jet military trainer and armed helicopter aircraft) will not fly within 10kms of each other’s airspace”.
It is not important to figure out who was right and who wrong in this perversely routine gambit between the world’s two new gung-ho nuclear powers. It is important that we are still alive to ponder the question, until the next close call if we survive it.
ALLO ALLO: On his current three-nation tour, when Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of India, a nuclear weapons power, was on board his aircraft, he could not make a direct phone call to New Delhi’ — or for that matter anywhere, according to an Indian newspaper dispatch from Moscow.
For, Air India One, a 20-year-old Boeing 737-200, doesn’t have the facility now standard in all international aircraft, including Air India flights travelling to London, New York and Paris.
So as he travelled between Moscow and Washington on a 10-and-a-half-hour flight, the only way Vajpayee could send a message to New Delhi was through the archaic “relay-messaging system,” via the pilot, the report had said.
Under this system, the pilot would message the nearest ATC en route, which will then transmit it to the New Delhi ATC from where it was to be “suitably” forwarded.
Why does the Indian PM get such an aircraft? It seems the Boeing 737-200 series aircraft, though safe and airworthy, is an outdated machine that cannot be modified to install a hi-tech communication system. It isn’t compatible with satellite communication at all, so even a simple cellular phone can’t be used on this one.
There are aircraft operated by Air India, for example, the Boeing 737-400 series — where passengers on board can communicate through cellphones. But these aircraft are committed to passenger traffic, a priority in these days of raging recession. Is there a facetious moral to the funny story? Well, let’s suppose that the Indian air traffic controllers can henceforth be a part of the grand nuclear command and control system of which we hear so much these days?
Will some Karachi maulana kindly tell the bemused 13 million people of this virtually besieged city how does burning tyres promote the cause of the Taliban, Afghanistan, Pakistan and also Islam? Where does the Holy Book enjoin upon the people of this bustling metropolis to go berserk for the good of Islam? Equally pertinent it is to wish to know about the value of pelting stones on moving objects like motor cars and buses ferrying people, and crossing nobody’s path. It remains profoundly unclear how we become better Muslims by indulging in these puerile pastimes. There certainly was a time when we were Muslims and crusading Muslims at that, conquering lands and building empires, without any tyres to be burnt and any motor cars to be pelted with stones. In our own time, we won the battle for Pakistan without resorting to such tactics as the good maulanas now urge the street urchins of Karachi to adopt — presumably for the good of Islam.
All of this kind of activity is contrary to the spirit of law. In most cases it can be shown to be irreconcilable with the letter of the law as well. Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider has once again said that he means to enforce law strictly. He also assures the people of Karachi that he intends to deal “sternly” with “anyone challenging the writ of the government, working against the national interest...” It is certainly a great deal of comfort to hear the Interior Minister say so. Indeed, we have heard him say all the right things over an over gain.
We in Karachi have heard Mr Moinuddin Haider promise to be stern about so many things that are a torment to us. Much, if not all, of our troubles in the nature of disregard for law, spring from the uncontrolled proliferation of the ‘deni madaris’. We can recall him promising to bring these institutions within the mainstream of the educational system of the country. He had also spoken wisely about reform in the curriculum of these so-called madaris. Our misfortune is that this kind of wisdom remains enshrined in noble words. Implementation somehow escapes these elevated intentions. As far as these madaris are concerned, have we not heard Mr Haider say they (the madaris) are doing sterling service to the nation by way of imparting education free of cost. What education, pray? Burning tyres and pelting public and private transport with brickbats?
Not long ago, we were told that the government would undertake a study of the city mosques and their sectarian links and loyalties. Quite obviously, the perception was that there has been a phenomenal growth in the number of mosques in the city and this needed to be looked into. Every sensible citizen can see that not all of these are genuinely developed places of genuine worship. In our culture a place of worship is ‘House of God,’ belonging to all. Most certainly not to any one person or party or sect or school of thought or belief. In Karachi most mosques now have sectarian designations. What the government had intended was to conduct a kind of census in order to ensure that mosques are not allowed to become bastions of feuding sects. That decision, like so many other good decisions of the Interior Minister, remains in serene repose in the files of the ministry.
In this city even the smallest mosque in the smallest of localities proudly possesses a minimum of four loudspeakers attached to its sound amplifying system. Very often one would find several mosques in the small tiny colony, standing virtually cheek by jowl. Come the time for prayer, the loudspeakers of all of them would be activated at the very same moment. The result: you may not be able to hear clearly any of the so many Azans. The learned tell us that the ordained discipline on this point is that no two Azans should collide. This discipline is observed in blatant violation by the pious themselves. Had the decision to carry out a survey of the city mosques been implemented this cacophony may have been taken proper care of. Alas, that was not to be, or has not yet come to be.
Concerned citizens of Karachi were assured that improper use (abuse) of loudspeakers, mounted on mosque minarets shall be ‘sternly’ curbed. These sound aids were to be used only, repeat only, for the Azan and Friday sermons. This decision is disregarded with scorn on the very same loudspeakers. These devices are switched on at all odd hours of the day and night.
There is no respect for the sick needing rest, children asleep or students preparing for their tests and exams. What is broadcast on these loudspeakers is more often than not in conflict with the government’s intention to keep mosque sermons above sectarian bias and excesses. Our benign government is not listening.
So, the ‘deni madaris’ continue to flourish, pouring out their ‘taliban’ into our streets every now and again to disrupt life. You see every second day a new mosque in your locality, duly fitted with four loudspeakers, blaring. Nobody quite knows on whose land, and in what consideration it stands. In most cases the sermons preach exactly what the government considers not in the interests of national unity and peace.
This is our tribute to our free society and to our kind-hearted Interior Minister.
It needs to be given some thought why young boys and girls, whose love affairs face stiff opposition from their families, some time take to elopement. One such young man and a young girl were in a police station. They were called for questioning in the SHO’s office after they were apprehended by police. A lady constable was sitting beside them while the questioning was proceeding. When the investigation was in progress at one point the girl denied that she was kidnapped, and said she had eloped with her lover. As she was recording her statement, the lady constable became enraged and slapped the girl on her face. How you dare to misbehave with the officer. You keep quite and reply to questions appropriately, the lady constable reprimanded her. The girl sobbed and sighed and “rectified” her statement and confessed that she had been kidnapped. After this the girl was treated mildly.
Once civil marriage is registered in court, police have to accept lovers as lawfully married couples. However, police can arrest lovers outside courts before they enter the premises to get their civil marriage registered. This happens more often than not.
A foreign girl shared a flat in Clifton with an alleged call girl. She developed intimacy with sons of big landlords. But none of them was prepared to marry her. She became dejected with life and tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The attempt at suicide was hushed up as telephones rattled from Islamabad. The girl was sent back to her home-country.
A woman ran a gambling den in Joharabad. It used to be frequented by women from near and faroff areas in the city. It came to the knowledge of the people when it was smashed by police under the supervision of a magistrate.
Lately, girls have also taken to serious crimes in the city. A gang of women bandits was active in Clifton a few years ago. They committed several house robberies in Clifton and also looted vans at gunpoint. They looted a bakery in Gulbahar and committed robberies in other places of the city beside Clifton. One of them, who came from a a good family, hijacked vehicles in Bahadurabad. She was known as a tomboy as she dressed in jeans and jackets. She was arrested after she hijacked several vehicles.
A call girl ran a prostitution den in the city. Two of her rejected lovers had attempted to shot her dead. Now that woman is old and devoid of any charm. She is said to have disappeared from social life and lives the life of a recluse.
A FRIEND was quite peeved the other day at what he had seen coming back from a valima reception at the Boat Club in the middle of last week. It must have been around five past eleven at night, and he was headed towards the Saudi Consulate road — Khayaban-i-Hafiz. As he came to the Submarine roundabout before Gizri, he saw a couple of traffic constables quickly drive in their motorcycles to the signal and take up positions.
Someone important, it seemed, was about to pass through because traffic from three directions was put on hold. And sure enough a motorcade of around half a dozen cars, led by two pilot motorcycles, passed by. The gentleman in charge of the province was sitting in a brand new black Civic as his vehicle drove by the signal. Both constables directing the traffic left their positions as soon as the VIP convoy went by. The friend was quite angry because the policemen didn’t even bother waiting an extra two minutes to direct the dozens of vehicles that were waiting at the intersection. As soon as the black civic sped past both the constables left their posts, ran back to their motorcycles and sped off.
It seems the traffic police is there only to serve certain people.
No one really knows where the US ships taking part in the air-strikes on Afghanistan are actually located in the Indian Ocean, but they probably can’t be all that far because that would only end up increasing the distance the planes have to fly on their bombing raids. That, obviously, is supposed to be classified information, though spotting a huge aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean can’t be all that difficult. In any case, the presence of these ships — apart from helping rain down thousands of bombs and missiles on the innocent civilians of Afghanistan and the not-so-innocent members of Al Qaeda — has created quite a few problems for Karachi’s cable watchers.
Cable service in almost all parts of the city have been affected by a sharp deterioration in picture quality since the end of September — the time as the US began building up its presence in the Arabian Sea. Cable operators refer to it as ‘cutting’. What has been happening is that the picture keeps getting cut every few seconds or so, and everything turns black and as this happens the sound also gets distorted. This is a problem usually associated with bad reception from the satellite, and cable operators say this is precisely what is happening.
Most of them will readily tell you that as long as the war ships are in the waters of the Arabian Sea, cable reception will continue to be faulty. Apparently, the radar used by these ships for navigational and other purposes, and the radar of the reconnaissance planes flying overhead on their way to Afghanistan are causing all the problems. Some channels are more affected than others. Unfortunately, those that get the most distorted happen to be quite popular, like Star World (which has slightly improved over the past few weeks) and HBO (which is impossible to watch properly for more than two minutes).
Cable operators also say the disturbance is greater for cable users who live closer to the sea. Some people however wonder whether this all isn’t just a handy excuse and that the problem might actually have more to do with faulty equipment or bad wiring and not with war ships parked in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Perhaps people can only hope that the quicker the US forces retreat from the Arabian Sea the better it would be everyone — not just the Afghan people but even for their cable reception.
Beginning November and it’s still reasonably warm. Is it the last gasp of a retreating summer or does it ht have anything to do with the across the border activities? Those yellow coloured parcels with explosives meant for the Afghans, not to be mistaken for the similar coloured food parcels which the US carefully packed with sachets of peanut butter, salt and pepper complete with instructions that the salt can be sprinkled onto pasta, pizza, and baked potatoes.
As people slowly get used to the air strikes next door life is slowly picking up. With holiday season, Christmas, Eid and Ramazan around the corner travellers, here as well as abroad, are entertaining thoughts of a holiday. Preparing themselves to brave the occasional flight. Here airline activity had almost ground to a halt, post-Sept with long dreary office hours filled with idle chatter. Activity resumes with the slew of Umra travellers, those returning home and other leaving for vacations. a friend apparently cannot get a booking from Korea, as PIA, the only flight running, is booked till December.
Those who’d fled the city following the Afghan bombing (Operation some justice?) also seem to be gingerly making their way back. A German Turkish couple had left their lovely swimming pool — and house — in the panic. The first day saw a troupe of servants and families descend on the pool. Lawn clad, Rubenesque ladies, under the protection of a strung-up chadar, waddled in with squeals of delight. The formality of the chadar was done away with after a few days as the bathing became an afternoon ritual. Alas! After many a happy days thus spent the owners returned home. The servants went to their work casting sidelong glances at the pool and at each other.
Gulf and other shopping malls have also returned to their usual busy selves as industrious aunties gear up for Eid and the wedding season. It is said that there is no space to breathe — who said Pakistanis lack foresight and planning?
To add to the madness, in the mayhem of the one o’clock Monday rush hour with schools getting over and office people heading out for lunch, a lone sweeper on a spindly ladder planted right in the midst of Sharah-i-Faisal decided to dust the overhanging traffic signal. Traffic roared past as his two companions held on to the ladder. What was the need to choose that auspicious hour for winter cleaning? Ask no questions.
Have you ever been to a seminar or a dance recital or a book-reading and got up because you found it boring? You probably have. But did you have the guts to tell the speakers that they were boring and should stop lest everyone falls asleep?
So in a situation where you are stuck and have to sit through the whole four hours what do you do? Start looking around and observing your surroundings. And that can be quite invigorating. If you look very closely, you will find that the banner might have a couple of typographical errors, the person on your right has a pen and pad but has not written one word, or that the best looking person in the room keeps going to the loo. The girl in front of you is wearing the latest Bareeze chikan.
Next you observe that most of the questions thrown at the speakers are never questions but long-winded speeches where the questioner, having taken a firm grip over the mike, takes out all his grievances for not being asked to come up on stage. Then there are the last speakers of the day who start off with the “I’ll just take two minutes of your time” or “I know you’ve been patient and I don’t want to keep you from lunch” or “Everyone has said what I wanted to so I’ll be brief” and then go on endlessly. One got a taste of this last week at a seminar organized by a coalition of NGOs, where the US-educated, forever weary and dreary, Dr Hafeez Sheikh, minister for planning and development, promised you the moon but would just not let go off the mike. — By Karachian
PRESIDENT General Pervez Musharraf’s appeal to the US-led coalition for a pause in bombing during Ramazan and for keeping the war short and targeted has now become too repetitive to be heard over its own din. In fact, it now appears as if he is repeating himself simply for the sake of playing to the Islamic gallery the world over rather than for any effect. When he first expressed his hope that the war would be short and targeted, the US President came down on him swiftly and sharply saying: “Who has told the Pakistani president that it would be short campaign...we will continue the war until all its objectives are met”! So, the next time President Musharraf repeated his ‘fond’ hope he hastened to qualify it by adding, in very low undertones though that it would, however, last as long as the war objectives are not achieved.
Now he has been saying three things: “give a pause in the bombing during Ramazan; keep the war short and targeted and; continue war as long as it would take to achieve its objectives”. He has also been implying without making it too obvious that he was not privy to the US-led coalition’s objectives in continuing to bomb Afghanistan day in and day out. And when he was asked as a military man why it was taking the coalition so long in achieving its objectives of the war against Afghanistan, he said: “What is missing is accurate intelligence which is delaying the issue. The moment accurate intelligence is available I am sure the operation can be curtailed to a minimum.”
But then it was Pakistan which was supposed to have provided what he calls accurate information as not only it was one of the only three countries in the world which had recognized the Taliban government, but being the next door neighbour it was sharing with Afghanistan a 2,500km porous border across which population of the two countries moved to and fro with very little restrictions and the thriving smuggling across which had integrated at least the informal economies of the two countries into a loose common market.
But then perhaps all the information that Pakistan had possessed on September 11 had been immediately rendered obsolete by the Taliban the day Pakistan decided on a telephone call from Washington to join the international coalition in its war against world terrorism. The only information that Pakistan had been left with after this was the way the Northern Alliance war lords had ruled when they were in Kabul in 1992. This perhaps was too shocking for the coalition to even contemplate helping the NA to mount a ground campaign against Taliban.
So, perhaps the coalition agreed on the advice from Pakistan to try to instigate a rebellion from within the Taliban and facilitate a take-over of Kabul by what was at that time foolishly called the ‘moderate’ Taliban. But perhaps while what Pakistan knew about Taliban targets inside Afghanistan had been rendered obsolete as soon as Pakistan joined the US-led coalition, Taliban’s access to information from within Pakistan had remained unaffected and therefore, they knew who was coming in, for what and what route he was using. That perhaps was the reason why Commander Haq was quickly arrested and executed and Hamid Karzai had to run for his life.
Even the Pakistan-sponsored two-day conference held in Peshawar in late October to sell the King Zahir Shah option and promote a ‘home-made’ Pashtoon leadership to replace Mullah Omar could not take-off perhaps for the same reason. Clearly the US-led coalition was being misled by Pakistan government into thinking that a campaign from the south rather than from north was the right thing to do to avoid Kabul falling in the hands of the wicked warlords of the north. But as every body saw after having wasted thousands of missiles and bombs in target shooting on Kabul and Kandahar and hundreds of civilian casualties that this was the wrong thing to do. The US-led coalition began making a headway only after it had changed the strategy and began carpet bombing the forward positions of Taliban in the North of Kabul in order to facilitate the NA to move forward. This strategy has paid off within ten days. Mazar-i-Sharif has fallen and the NA seems to be on the roll now. In retrospect it appears as if Islamabad for its own selfish reasons had caused the war to prolong unnecessarily.
And in retrospect it also becomes ever more clear that had the plan by the Clinton administration to mount a clandestine commando operation into Afghanistan to take out Osama bin Laden in the autumn of 1999 when Nawaz Sharif was still the Prime Minister been put into operation, it would have saved the world from the September 11 tragedy and if it had occurred in any case, then the US war ships would not have had any reason to come to this region looking for the perpetrators of the crime. When asked for his comments on the Washington Post story disclosing the details of the Clinton Administration’s get-Osama plan, President General Musharraf had said that it was still on the anvil when he took over the government on October 12, 1999 but finding it impractical he had cancelled it. It would be interesting if somebody could ask him to explain how this plan had differed from what he hopes the US-led coalition should do to keep the war short and targeted. — Yours etc.
“RESTRICTIONS on use of loudspeaker” reads the headline of a news item appeared in Dawn on November 1. I felt elated because I believed that my special Dua to the Almighty last Eid had been answered by Him even although I had not made my request through proper channels, that is, our mohallah maulvi. He is quite an amiable person and so is his congregation, so I have no apprehensions about the law and order situation that might have prompted the government to ban the use of the “lordspeaker” in mosques except for Azaan and Khutba-i-Juma (Friday sermons). The reason for my happiness is quite different as you’ll soon discover. But you’ll have to get into my Time Machine and go back 80 years in time and 5000 miles in space. Here’s how.
As kids in Hong Kong situated in a non-Muslim country (China), we learned what a roza (fasting) was. A cute little Japanese alarm clock in our kitchen, set by our parents for sehri, used to play a delightful tune Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way ... and wake us up. Although we were not required to fast at that tender age, our childish enthusiasm compelled us to spring out of our beds as soon as we felt that the elders had started eating. After the meal followed Fajr prayers, homework left over from the previous day and off to school. This was the daily routine during Ramazan, with two rozas — the first and the last ones — to our credit. Alhamdulilah! And now “fast forward” by 80 years into a country named Pakistan with its capital in Islamabad. Year 2000, month early November, Hijri calendar Ramazan, time two hours before Sehri. A violent explosion measuring 6.4 on the Richter Scale, shook the whole of our mohallah and an air raid siren wailed like a banshee. I was jerked rudely out of my sleep, feeling that the epicentre of the quake was in the neighbouring street or that heavy bombers flying overhead had dropped their “Grand Slams, as the ten-ton bombs were named during World War II. Fortunately both theories turned out to be wrong as soon as the mosque’s “lordspeaker” roared Hazraat! Chaar bajney waley hain! Sehri ki tiyari karen! (“Gentlemen! It is nearly four o’clock ! Get ready for Sehri!”)
What I don’t understand is that when a number of people are addressed, it’s always Khwateen-o-hazraat!. (Ladies and gentlemen”) but during Ramazan it’s always Hazraat! (Gentlemen!). Why so? It’s the poor Begmaat who have to be up to man the kitchen for the Sehri meal and not the menfolk who can continue enjoying 45 minutes more, wrapped up snug as a bug in a rug in their quilts. Why are our “lordspeakers” so shy as to avoid roaring only Begmaat!
After quarter of an hour or so, another marrow-chilling Hazraat! rends the night air, followed by yet another warning that Sehri draws close. Then follow Na’at after Na’at until everyone is summoned for the sehri meal. The azaan for Fajr prayers brings the ordeal to a merciful close.
Last year certain circumstances prevented me from fasting. Thousands of others too might have not fasted for their own reasons: age, health, religious belief, travel compulsions... Hopefully they could be pardoned by the Merciful Almighty Allah. After Eid prayers in our mohallah mosque, I had joined the rest in a collective Dua for Pakistan, Aameen, Kashmir, Aameen, Palestine Aameen, Chechnya, Aameen, Kosovo, Aameen, Muslims all over the world, Aameen, Aameen, Aameen!
Then, in a quiet subdued whisper, I bypassed the “proper channels” and submitted my special Dua to Allah to guide the powers that be to help the helpless and the hapless from the onslaught of “lordspeakers” at Sehri time.
The government ban might have been necessitated by other considerations but as far as I am concerned, I feel that He granted my special Dua and I, along with thousands of others, will not have to undergo this kind of terrorism during the forthcoming month of Ramazan. —N.A. Bhatti
WISDEN 2001 gives the following account of the fifth Test match played between South Africa and England at Centurion on January 14-18, 1999.
History was made on the final day when a match apparently reduced to the deadliest of finishes, following three consecutive playless days, was brought back to life by the captains. For the first time in Test cricket innings were forfeited and this produced a memorable, entertaining climax. When play resumed with South Africa still in the first innings, the many hundreds of travelling English supporters and a few hundred hardy locals had every reason to expect the worst. What they were treated to was a gripping finale that saw England win with five balls and two wickets remaining.
Five months after the match, however, came the bitterness of deceit when Cronje, South Africa’s captain, admitted receiving 53,000 rand (5,000) and a leather jacket from a bookmaker who had urged him to initiate a positive result rather than let the match peter out as a draw. At the King Commission inquiry into match fixing which opened in Cape Town in June (1999), he insisted that his motives were “for the good of cricket,” but the fact that financial reward formed a part of his motivation tainted the match for ever. History would also record that it was the first Test in which ‘fixing’ was proved.
Some 30 minutes into play on the final day, the first rumour of what was about to happen reached the media. Cronje had approached his opposite number, (Nasir) Hussain, half on how before the start and offered to “make a game of it.” His offer was a target of 275 runs in 73 overs based on the premise that South Africa could score another 100 runs in 30 overs on the extended final morning followed by a double forfeiture of innings — England’s first and South Africa’s second. Hussain declined. “The wicket might have been sweating under those covers for three days. It might have become unplayable. I could not take the chance,” he said later. Ten overs into the session, however, having seen how will the pitch was playing under