FOR more than 10 days Sindh has been facing a series of agitations by the people of all classes against the reported demand of Punjab to hand over 17 Dehs of the Ghotki district, Sindh. The protesters, after staging many rallies, have announced that after Eid they would stage large-scale protests that would include blockades of the National Highway.

As press reports suggest, the move is based on Punjab’s assumption that these Dehs offer hospitable environment to bandits, highway robbers and their harbourers, and the Punjab government will try to contain the problem, as these Dehs lie on the Sindh-Punjab border. ( A Deh is not a village but an agricultural units, varying in size and comprising many villages and wide area of agricultural land, including urban areas.)

Sindh Governor Mohammedmian Soomro has not yet visited the area in question, but has tried to pacify the agitators, but agitations can assume larger proportions. Talking to Nazims and Naib Nazims of Nawabshah on Nov 21, he made an statement which bore two contradictory aspects. At one stage he categorically said that the Dehs in question were not being given to Punjab, and on the other hand he said that revenue officials of Punjab and Sindh were studying the boundaries of the two provinces and were “working on the record to ascertain anew the boundaries of both the provinces”.

Shifting the responsibility to ‘unclear demarcation of these boundaries’, he said those areas had become a hub of criminals and were shared by the police of the two provinces.

What lies beneath the move is still unclear though public protests, rallies and arrests have been continuing all over Sindh, with leaders pointing at some elements who might have initiated the move, ostensibly for some personal gains still to be established.

While talking to newsmen on Nov 20, Gen (retd) Naseer Akhtar claimed that a similar move was made way back in 1992 when he was corps commander of Sindh, but, according to him, “... he got the move put off, arguing that its fallout could create other issues”.

This, at least, underlines one fact that the tampering with the province’s borders had remained an objective on someone’s agenda for quite some time, maybe beyond 1992. Or, as nationalist activists claim, a similar move was put in motion during the last days of the late military ruler Gen Ziaul Haq but the Bahawalpur accident threw the scheme in cold storage.

Now that the Sindh governor and a former corps commander have come out with some pointers, there remains little doubt that all such manoeuvrings have been taking place on one or the other pretext. This time it is the bandits and their harbourers who, the planners claim, have made the lives of the local people miserable and created legal problems for the police of the two areas. The question of law and order is another area which needs a different approach to deal with. But one could still be sceptical about how the issue is being related to its administration by Sindh or Punjab.

During the first meeting of Nazims of Sindh with President Gen Pervez Musharraf on Nov 19 the district Nazim of Ghotki, Sardar Ali Gohar Mahar, did not take up the issue, for which he was severely criticized by his fellow members, but later he clarified that the Sindh governor had urged him not to take up the issue with the president at the Islamabad meeting, as it would be amicably settled. Following the governor’s Nawabshah meeting, the revenue staff of the two provinces were asked to examine the record of the Dehs in question before a settlement could be arrived at.

To a certain extent, this only endorses the claims made by political activists that a scheme had been chalked out to take over about 78,000 acres which fall in these 17 Dehs in Daharki and Ubaoro tehsils of the Ghotki district, which have also the gas reserves of Qadirpur.

According to their claims, this land is located on the left bank of Ghotki Feeder at the point of Mir Kosh from where Sehar Minor, Trilsi branch, Allhyar branch and other water channels draw water. They claim that this is a fertile land and after the commissioning of the Guddu Barrage these areas have become very attractive.

According to the figures released by various political activists, now protesting the transfer of Dehs, half-a-million acres were to be irrigated on the left bank of the barrage. Out of this land, 100,000 acres were allocated to the serving and retired civil and military servicemen, 80,000 acres were allocated to the people displaced by Mangla and Tarbela dams, 46,000 acres were allocated for various projects like self-financing. Only 120,000 acres were given to the local landless tenants.

The law and order situation is the most-talked-about pretext on which the Sindh lands had been distributed to the people of various categories, specially after the commissioning of two post-Independence barrages — Kotri and Guddu. Although these waterworks changed the economy of the province, ironically it also opened a floodgate of exploitation of the original inhabitants on flimsy grounds.

After the Kotri Barrage, both the serving and retired civil and military personnel got lands in Thatta and Badin districts with all facilities while the local barefoot tiller is still in tatters. Even the Bengalis, brought from the then East Pakistan, were settled here. Similar was the case in the command areas of the Guddu Barrage which has created a situation not conducive to the social homogeneity in the area. Here one can find the lands granted to artists, serving and retired officers and people from every walk of life while the landless tiller has to work as peasant for the whole of his life.

Ironically, the schemes were engineered by both political and military governments, whose functionaries became instrumental in grabbing whatever they could and in every possible manner. Our politicians only colluded with the master planners.

The recent reports about the plan to hand over 17 Dehs came to the fore on the pretext of handling the law and order situation in upper Sindh and southern Punjab. This is perhaps a camouflage because the law and order situation has nothing to do with transfer of land and its administration.

History and criminology stand testimony to the fact that the law and order situation, specially in the backdrop of our present circumstances, cannot be improved upon with the change of the administration. It is absolutely a different area where only a well-planned methodology is applied. Crime is a local phenomenon. It is born in reaction to the anomalies in society. It is a form of protest against the social injustices and has to be tackled within the social, economic and historical parameters of that society. A mere change of hands cannot and will never end a crime.

The plan to transfer the 17 Dehs to Punjab cannot, therefore, be justified. It would be unwise, rather harmful, if any attempt is made to implement it.

I KNOW and you know there are Muslim friends around the world who drink wine and eat everything — snakes, monkey brains, horse meat, beef, camel, pork, everything. According to their religion they will go to hell. So be it. I know and you know that we have Hindu friends who eat everything, including beef. I don’t know where they are headed; chances are it could be nark rather than swarg. But if they are caught eating cow meat in Delhi they are in for a right royal hiding, although in southern India they are assured a far more savoury time for no one is really bothered enough to peep into your plate of a high cholestrol red meat steak.

Frowning on cow meat is largely confined to the so-called cow belt comprising almost all of the most populous northern states. Yet, I am quite certain that there are many people in Indian parliament today, as they were there indeed during the past 50 years, who have all violated their religions at the dinner table. But there was only one GG Swell, a Christian parliamentarian from the predominantly tribal northeast, who actually berated the Lok Sabha one day when he plainly told his fundamentalist interlocutors that if Indian citizens in his part of the country stopped eating beef, they would all starve to death. I also know Israeli diplomats whose religion forbids them from eating bacon, something they love so much they cannot resist having a strip or two with their English breakfast, on the sly of course.

And it was Dalit minister Ram Vilas Paswan who taunted Hindu fundamentalists for being always too eager to quarrel about cows which they regard as equal to a mother. “The only trouble is that when their real mothers die, they do not call a Dalit chamar to lift the dead body as they do in the case of dead mother cow which no one wants to touch,” Paswan angrily once told a meeting of intellectuals in Aligarh.

Even as the world, including Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews, is turning to vegetarianism as a matter of choice, in India we have an emerging Neanderthal issue of dietary injustices of history inflicted by Muslim and Christian rulers, and more recently by secular historians who happened to be pseudo-Hindus, or so the argument goes.

Since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is the political arm of a quasi-fascist group that wants to make India so intolerant as to stop people from eating their normal food, it is hardly surprising that historical accounts of Brahmins eating cow meat has often turned into a major political controversy in parliament. For many years now the BJP has been campaigning to have school text-books censored for their alleged religious insensitivities. Last week, the Indian government ordered the deletion of passages from the tex-books that were regarded as offensive to Hindus.

Academicians for their part have objected to the deletion of certain portions of officially-sponsored history books and branded the move “blatantly communal”. They alleged that the changes had been carried out at the behest of ‘historians’ of the BJP family who “perceive history in accordance with their philosophy”.

A look at the deleted paragraphs, which the government on Friday described as “objectionable and containing factual errors,” suggests that they contain facts and little interpretation. The deleted paragraph of the Class VI book, written by Romila Thapar, says that beef was served to guests in the Rig Vedic Age and that cow was the most important possession of people then.

Ram Sharan Sharma, whose book (Ancient India, Class XI) has suffered maximum damage from the saffron censorship, quotes Rajendra Lal Mitra (1822-1891) on the same issue. This paragraph too has been deleted by the latest order.

Sharma, a former professor and head of the department of history in the Delhi University, had established that the Rig Vedic society was primarily pastoral, semi-nomadic, largely egalitarian and that the chief possession of people at that time was cattle. These facts come out forcefully in his books. Few have been able to refute Sharma’s arguments logically.

Another paragraph of Sharma’s book says that archaeological evidence does not support the existence of Rama’s Ayodhya in 2000 BC and of Krishna between 200 BC and AD 300. The government has objected to this paragraph too, disregarding that archaeology, and not literature, is the most scientific basis of research. Literature is prone to subsequent alterations and deletions. The sub-chapter on Vardhaman Mahavira has been deleted. The paragraph on the evolution of the varna and the caste system and the Brahminical reaction as the downfall of the Mauryan empire has also been censored on the ground that these are “interpretations”.

The deleted paragraph of Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev’s book, Modern India (Class VII), mentions that the Jats founded their kingdom at Bharatpur and plundered regions around Delhi and participated in court intrigues. This has been brought out in almost all works of Jat history. Satish Chandra, whose entire sub-chapter on Sikhs in his book Medieval India (Class XI)’ has been deleted, is unhappy at the unilateral and totalitarian stand of the government. The paragraph merely mentions that there was no clash between the Sikhs and the Mughals till 1675. It also details the reasons behind the conflict after the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur. He appreciates the simplicity of the religion and its appeal to the peasantry of Punjab, something unpalatable to the mandarins of the education ministry.

All this naturally led to a confrontation in parliament. Former eduction minister Arjun Singh accused Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government of Talibanizing education. The treasury benches objected to the word but the chair decided that it was used in a context that did not make it unparliamentary The real issue, however, is ignorance. I can,t understand why a government that is deemed by its opponents to have all the defining characteristics of fascism should desist from propagating its dangerous philosophy.

The opposition has lost Uttar Pradesh where you cannot make a film on Hindu widows, come what may. Liberal Indians have lost almost all the space on the streets of Delhi to saffron brigades and their other rightwing offshoots. Almost. And above all this controversy about re-writing of history and subjugating and perverting the minds by the dominant classes is as old as the hills. Today the religious right is a dominant force in India. Unfortunately some of the idioms it parrots today are lifted straight out of its slavish past.

To give just one example, there was a time when all-white clubs in colonial India used to hang a placard outside their premises saying: “Indians and dogs not allowed”. In post-colonial India many of its free citizens today call their dogs Tipu, evidently inspired by the bilious and insulting British tradition of naming their domesticated canines after the legendary ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, one of the handful who really gave the white man a run for his money. For the record, Tipu Sultan, who happened to be a Muslim, fought the same Lord Cornwallis, and nearly defeated him too, who was humbled earlier by the American freedom struggle. Tipu was defeated and killed eventually when the neighbouring forces of the Hindu Marathas and the Muslim Nizam were bought over by the British to get even with their most dangerous quarry.

Today, the rightwing Hindu movement regards the legend of Tipu Sultan as a threat to its own philosophy of rabid communalism, so much so that when a prominent film-maker made a TV serial on the life of the Lion of Mysore, he was allowed to show it on state-run Doordarshan only after declaring that the episodes were a work of fiction. No such warning or caution was affixed to the subsequent flood of obscurantist tripe that was to become the staple choice for entertainment vendors across India.

These are difficult times. Religious intolerance has become the order of the day. Quasi-fascist groups have been spurred by the global fight against terrorism to direct their wrath against Indian Muslims and Indian Christians and all of those millions of Indian Hindus who dare to cross their path. It is sougth to be forgotten that many years before the advent of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or if you prefer in Peshawar, religious fascism was making huge inroads into the Indian political system.

In 1992 the Babri Masjid was destroyed by a mob as revenge for the alleged sacking of a temple there by Mughal Emperor Babur. But what can we do about those millions of Indians who have violated the laws of Hindusim as preached by the far right in their daily dietary habits? Someone suggested building a large marble vomitorium where all the sinners will be forced to throw up their gastronomic excesses.

CONGRATULATIONS to you, O people of Karachi. Your transport woes are going to be resolved before you can say abracadabra. At the very latest, before this soul-testing year is out. Surely, the worst of your hundred woes is public transport. Now they are going to computerize it. Sooner than you ever expected. After computerization, forget transport problems. Something to celebrate in these rather grim times.

No questions, please. Computerization is computerization. Haven’t we already computerized the National Identity Card (NIC) regime? Each one of us already has the magic NICs, all delivered at our doorsteps — exactly as promised. Now all’s well in Pakistan and God is in His heaven. Long live computerization!

What exactly it is about public transport that they are going to feed into those magic boxes? As far as an average citizen knows, there is hardly anything about public transport that is systematically on record anywhere in particular. How many public transport units do we have in the city? How many enter the city and leave it every day? You bet, the transport registration office has no idea. Its records are fairy tales.

If you expect that you will find any statistics of any value with the motor driving licence authority, you must be either ignorant or innocent, probably both. How many bus and truck drivers have proper driving licences, obtained in a proper manner — after due test, without paying anything on the side? How many of these drivers have even the vaguest idea of traffic rules? Forget road manners, do not mention basic courtesies. Will the computer answer these inquiries?

No less exotic would be the story about motor vehicle inspecting authority. How many public transport vehicles are inspected at all? Then, how many with any serious regard or concern for the rules prescribed to determine the roadworthiness of a vehicle? Roadworthiness is the other name for safety on the roads. Who cares? Not the bus-truck drivers. Nor do the traffic controllers.

Some questions about public transport are better answered in terms of rupees. How many owners of public transport — rickshaws, wagons, buses, trucks, tankers — duly pay normal levies? And do so in full and on time? It is not clear to the most well informed how many taxes and excise duties there are for the public transports to pay, to whom, on what frequency. Computers must be fed first. Questions later.

Of more than mere academic interest it will be to get to know the man behind the steering wheel of a public transport — from the lowly rickshaw to those fearsome 22-wheelers. Let computers know about his education, family background, experience of life before he began driving and since. What is his income from his employer and other sources related to his driving privileges. Yes privileges, because these gentlemen do not have any obligations or duties as most of us understand them to be.

Many of us may wish to know about the regulations that the transporters on their side believe they have to observe and the traffic control authorities on their side feel duty bound to enforce. Somehow the general impression remains that this is a region in which both sides — the transporters and the traffic controllers — insist upon unilaterally enjoyable sovereign independence.

Going by the established norms, it would depend on the set of circumstances of each case. In some cases stern action on the spot would be the categorical imperative, and in others mercy would be the poetic justice. The two men would work it out to mutual satisfaction and then both will call it a day. It invariably ends that way. Instant justice, on your way, if not on your doorsteps. All’s well that ends well!

Anyone taking notice of the legends that adorn public transport would wonder where these moving machines have descended from. Almost all of them would be seen to be outlandish by the Karachi’s norms. The slogans and the poetic sentiments painted on these public transports strongly suggest imported inspiration. Some actually still proclaim allegiance to the (late) Taliban and Afghanistan. Let us hope computerization will help us introduce ourselves to these jihad’s on four, six, ten, twenty, and twenty-two wheels.

A related subject is the prosperity that public transport in Karachi spreads to the far corners of the country — and the region. Less than one per cent of this industry-cum-service would be Karachi-based. No harm in that. But it would still be useful to know the public transporters in Karachi — though not of Karachi.

Finally, let us say that we in this city would be eternally grateful to computerization of public transport if this grand design would help compute the amount of wealth generated in this field. About the most fascinating aspect of this would be the information about this wealth changing hands, between transporters and their monitors in that spotless ermine white costume.

Our computer minders might also try to include data such as the original price of the vehicle, the income already earned, expected income in time to come, rates of wages to employees, hours of their work, payments made en route to men in gray and white uniforms. Also a word about taxes paid, if any — OR EVER.

ON anniversaries, all you can do to Faiz is pay him glowing tributes. The fire is out. A thick layer of ash covers the burning coals. All that is left of the flame is a faint glow. Anecdotes. Accounts of last meetings and views of the man through intimate chinks. At an old friends house where he used to stay when he was in town the lore could drip with sentiment. The meeting in Islamabad to remember him was probably a last minute arrangement of this kind but Faiz, the quiet socialite, could always manage to bunch up a bouquet of fond memories from the fading flowers that remained in the field.

In the wilderness of my heart, O love, waver the shadows of your voice the mirages of your lips In that wilderness of loneliness there, under remote dust and straw of separation ——— are unfolding the jasmines and roses of your lap

Jasmine and roses. Memories. ‘Bring up some wine, it’s a poet’s anniversary’, Faiz had said. But glowing tributes is all we can offer. Recalling his first meeting with Faiz in Hyderabad (India) the translator of the lines from Yad (selected poems), Shiv K. Kumar traces the secret of his charisma in “that utter humility which is so rare in most contemporary writers”. And Faiz’s reply when Kumar said he sought sustenance for his soul in his poetry and that of Ghalib and Iqbal’s: “It’s the music of words, I guess. Hasn’t Urdu its unique aura of sound and meaning. Also, an emotional charge of such high voltage as is not found in most western poetry.” Kumar responded by quoting Faiz’s famous quatrain:

Eyes drunk on your beauty, I rise —— the air feels spruced up like your robe. The breeze must have wafted through your bed chamber, so redolent of your body is my dawn.

“There was a flicker of a blush on his face, and then a smile; a smilet, in fact”, writes Kumar in his lucid introduction to the translation which is perhaps one of the best among English renditions of Faiz’s verse in its closeness and fidelity to the original text.

Kumar sees him as an “irrepressible rebel” who thought art should never be divorced from social reality. But his commitment to Marxism and his country’s emancipation from tyranny are not his principal themes. It is romantic love that often emerges as his supreme concern. Kumar quotes the following lines to make his point:

All these themes are there indeed — and many more; but the gently parting lips of that beauty—- and oh, the alluring contours of her body—- now tell me yourself, could there be such witchery elsewhere? Well, for me this is it————

A poet’s mental province can be none other than this, yet he admits that Faiz’s all embracing poetic vision is ‘like a mighty river that takes in its sweep countless tributaries. Faiz denies no experience, excludes nothing to project reality in all its baffling complexity. He is a poet of many moods, and his work is a mosaic of diverse elements and concerns —- of classicism and modernity, of political commitment and romantic love, of affirmation and denial.’

Faiz’s other love was his country that he yearned for during his long periods of exile. Kumar quotes Edward Said: ‘To see a poet in exile —- as opposed to reading the poetry of exile —- is to see exile’s antinomies embodied and endured. Several years ago, I spent some time with Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the greatest of contemporary Urdu poets. He had been exiled from his native Pakistan by Ziaul Haq’s military regime and had found a welcome of sorts in the ruins of Beirut. His closest friends were Palestinians, but I sensed that although there was an affinity of spirit between them, nothing quite matched —- language, poetic convention, life history. Only once, when Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani friend and fellow exile, came to Beirut, did Faiz seem to overcome the estrangement written all over his face.’

But this estrangement, says Kumar, enables Faiz to view his country and himself in a wider perspective. He could look at the western man from an oriental point of view and the oriental from the western standpoint.

The interplay of the old and the new has been mentioned in many commentaries. Kumar thinks Faiz’s commitment to tradition is somewhat Eliotesque ‘in that he feels that no writer should deliberately try to forge new poetic forms merely to establish his identity as an innovator. This, he believes like Eliot, is the mark of a mediocre poet. Faiz stands for forms that integrate with tradition. There are two things, he said, ‘continuity and renovation.’ In the words of Edward Said: The crucial thing to understand about Faiz ... is that like Garcia Marquez he was read and listened to both by the literary elite and by the masses.’ Such was the resonance of my silence it seemed answers echoed from all directions

‘It is difficult to sum up a poet ‘, says Kumar, ‘whose multi-splendoured genius encompassed human experience in its entirety —- body, mind and soul.’

How profoundly desolate is all concourse of life —- O pain of love, where are you today?