Straying sense of direction

Confusion and chaos have reigned supreme during the first three months of the new district government system. It has been a story of lack of coordination among tiers of the government and administration. The officials faced confusion regarding duties and rights. Even at the union council level, there is no understanding between neighbouring union councils over different issues like tax imposition.

If the elected representatives failed to find harmony, bureaucrats remained silent spectators. The development schemes initiated by the previous local governments could not see any shape nor was there any new scheme by the government.

The district development committee, a band of bureaucrats that prepares and recommends development schemes, has failed to envisage the needs of the people in the area. The committee discussed the ‘Dug Well Scheme’ in mountainous tribal area of Dera Ghazi Khan which is strange for the tribal people. They need ‘guttas’ (small ponds on the hill torrents for irrigation and drinking purpose).

The areas need means of communication like roads. However, the DDC has rejected the Kadka Road Plan after spending millions of rupees on it.

The district government could not obtain flood relief fund for at least 55 mauzas affected by hill torrents. At least 11 people died in flash floods. The work on zero headworks on Dera Ghazi Khan canal, which feeds Rajanpur and Dajil areas, could not be initiated despite promises made by the government and Nazim Jamal Leghari.

The Executive Revenue Officer did not conduct proper survey of the flood victims. Repeated requests by people demanding irrigation water and remission of water rate and agriculture tax failed to stir the authorities concerned.

Similarly, the Manika canal could not be restored despite the tall claims of the Nazim. The canal was closed in 1968. Originally meant to beautify city and its cultural life, it is being used for disposing of contaminated water from every corner of the city. It was planned to restore the canal as an alternative channel to provide irrigation water after the demolition of zero headworks by hill torrents. Millions of rupees went down the drain as the plan met no headway.

A probe was ordered to trace out the corruption. It was learnt that before the completion of national drainage plan, restoration of canal was not possible. Thus money spent on cleansing the canal was an attempt to mint money.

The district council constituted monitoring committees for various departments without going through its rules and regulations. These committees were made without any consensus among members of the council. Chairpersons of two committees resigned within 15 days of the establishment. No female of the council was appointed chairwoman as they objected to the formulation of the committees.

At tehsil level, Dera Ghazi Khan invited objections over its new tax scheme which could not be accepted by the concerned quarters. It introduced local tax on services. The 100 per cent increase in taxes imposed by tehsil had already been rejected by all the concerned quarters.

Similarly, people are facing dearth of potable water as the subsoil water is not fit for drinking. There is a need to establish three more water filtration plants at rest of the three corners of the tehsil for the provision of pure drinking water to the people. However, the district and the tehsil councils have not even thought of it.

The city needs scent of plantation. The only round garden here is without life. There is no park in the city. Trees had been removed from the roads. Similarly, the stadium is fast becoming a jungle, although, Rs10 million have been granted to give it a new look.

The tehsil Nazim is more interested in establishing markets and plazas on the sites of parks and gardens. Spots for small gardens have been fixed on every chowk to give it a refreshing look according to the original plan. However, the site along the old grain market is being used as parking lot. It is in fact suitable for the construction of Arts Council hall with a garden. The Dera Ghazi Khan Arts Council has no establishment hall and it is housed in district council building. The tehsil council is blind to the actual needs.

About dispensing of funds to different tiers of the district government, there are a lot of complaints by members and Nazims of various union councils about the provision of funds to the favourite people.

The problems of common man have gone from bad to worse. Long-term policies regarding the development projects in the district need to be framed. From the availability of pure drinking water to improvement in every field, the government requires a sense of direction.

The two-day training workshop on Juvenile Justice system organized by the Social Welfare Department in collaboration with Unicef concluded here in a local hotel.

Participants met the captives in the Central Jail, Dera Ghazi Khan. Only 57 of the 105 captives were allowed to meet the visitors. The youths were reluctant to express their complaints regarding maltreatment by the jail administration. A majority of them told this correspondent that they had been facing unending problems. Some of them were found suffering from scabies.

They complained those who could not grease the authorities’ palms had to undergo physical ordeal. Some of the detainees were not allowed to continue their studies.

However, the whole activity to highlight juvenile justice system was restricted to paper work.

On the concluding day, senior civil judge Zulfiqar Khan Nasir was the guest of honour. He told audience that he, along with the DCO, regularly visited the jail to check the condition of the captives.

The juvenile captives demanded that they should be provided with proper facilities of health, education and hygienic food.

Hali — a multi-faceted writer

Maulana Hali’s 87th death anniversary on Dec 31 demands a critical appraisal. His Musaddas-i-Islam has enveloped his personality with a halo which doesn’t let his predominant literary contribution come to the fore. He was not only a great poet but the first high priest of Urdu criticism and a pioneer of Urdu biography.

Born in 1837 in Panipat in an Ansar (of the Semitic origin) family he was married at the young age of 17. He migrated to Delhi and got a job of teaching Nawab Mustafa Khan Shaifta’s children. After Shaifta’s death he went to Lahore and joined the Punjab Book Depot where he corrected Urdu translations of English books. It was in Lahore that he, along with Maulana Muhammad Husain Azad, tried to introduce new canons of Western literature. He worked hard to propagate the cause of topical poems, exhorting his countrymen to give up traditional poetry which ran against the demands of time.

Hali’s Kulliyat has quite a good deal of the poetry he thought to be an impediment in the progress and rejuvenation of his community. It is sensuous and lyrical — a real precursor of Hasrat Mohani’s poetry. If one wants to study the mainsprings of Hasrat Mohani’s poetry one need not go anywhere else but to Hali and further still to the poets of the Rampur School. Now this part of his contribution came under fire and he himself being the iconoclast. He tried to popularize the new Nazm and succeeded in doing so. Musaddas-i-Islam, which Sir Syed thought as a poem that could guarantee him his salvation, got, perhaps, the best spokesman in Hali.

But the lasting feather in Hali’s cap is the Preface to his Kulliyat, better known as Muqadamah-i-Shair-o-Shairi. Perhaps there are two Muqadamas which don’t require any suffix after them — one is the Muqadamah of Ibn-i-Khaldun and the other is that of Hali. If a well-read man is talking of Muqadamah, it could be safely concluded that it is one of the two Muqadamahs he may be referring to.

Hali made a statement in this Muqadamah which his contemporary Marx also made in one of his literary writings. I am sure that Hali had no access to Marx. Even Sir Syed who fervently talks of Addison and Steele besides many English writers was not aware of Marx. Hali wrote in his Muqadamah that the basis of the power of imagination was materialistic. Not before long the progressives were emphasizing the same point basing their argument on the Marxist concept of art.

Hali, thus, becomes the founder (Bawa Adam) of Urdu’s progressive criticism — an accolade which is his right. No critic of Urdu whether Mumtaz Husain, Mujtaba Husain, Abdul Aleem Nami, Zoe Ansari, Ali Sardar Jafri or Ehtasham Husain has questioned Hali’s pre-eminence as an Urdu critic. I was wonder struck when an Urdu critic, soon after the publication of Mumtaz Husain’s book, Hali Ke Shairi Nazariat, had the audacity to say that Hali had been misquoted by some progressive critics. He thought that Muqadamah-i-Shair-o-Shairi didn’t have any such statements. I wish he had gone through the Muqadamah a little before making this sweeping statement.

Hali laid all the ailments of Urdu poetry at the doorstep of Ghazal. He thought that the condition of Radeef and Qafia robbed Ghazal of a genuine form of poetic expression. He went to the extent that poetry could be written without Radeef and Qafia. This was a radical departure 110-120 years before and Hali, thus, became a source of strength for the practitioners of prose-poem. He thought that even the blank verse — employed by Shakespeare so successfully in his dramas — could be far more authentic a form than the crippling format of Ghazal. Hali’s stricture of Ghazal created a storm and many a book — for example Masood Hasan Rizvi Adeeb’s Rooh-i-Shaeri was a disclaimer against Hali’s views.

His book Hayat-i-Saadi is Urdu’s first biography and when we see a spate of biographies today it becomes all the more necessary to appreciate his efforts. The other important biography which would be fondly remembered as the best tribute to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan is Hayat-i-Jawaid. The only flaw which this biography should be known for is that its hero is flawless. Hali differed with Sir Syed on many issues. We know that he was not happy over Sir Syed’s playing second fiddle to Theodore Beck, the principal of M.A.O. College.

Some critics of Sir Syed, such as Maulana Imdadul Ali, Wajid Ali Khan, Ghulam Tapish and Maulana Ali Bakhsh Khan, went to the extent of using ‘uncivilized language’ for Sir Syed but Hali’s Hayat-i-Jawaid steers clear of controversy. He didn’t refer to an Azad Musalman’s letter published in Mayo Gazette on Dec 25, 1972, in which it was claimed without any qualms of conscience that Sir Syed had embraced Christianity. To rub salt into the wound it was also said that it was a net gain to Christianity and also a big loss to Islam. This equation of gain and loss is not understandable but the detractor of Sir Syed conceded that the Christian Sir Syed had served Muslims to the best of his ability before embracing Christianity.

Hali was a true friend of his community and India. In one of his rare letters addressed to Payare Lal Shakir Meeruti (Dated 18 June, 1913) he wrote that he regarded Hindus, Muslims and Christians of India as “real brothers” but he lamented at the same time that this was not possible within one hundred years.

Maulana Hali came to Karachi in 1907 to attend the All India Muslim Educational Conference and his sympathies for the Muslims of Sindh have been expressed in a poem which is included in the collection of poems read at the Conference’s annual meetings.

A sorry state of Pakistan soccer affairs

Soccer in Pakistan during the year 2001 continues to move in a persistent downward slide which it has been undergoing for the last many years, the main reason for this being the organisational disarray in which it has fallen.

A sad and worrying fact is that no steps have been taken to reverse the process of decline. Lack of funds is usually cited as a factor responsible for deteriorating standard of any sport, however, the Pakistani football authorities cannot attribute the decline to this factor owing to the fact that a million US dollars is being pumped into the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) funds by the International Football Federation (FIFA) of which the PFF has already received $ 750,000 in three tranches.

The last instalment of $ 250,000 will also be received in due course of time. The question arises as to what development plans have been made by the PFF to utilise those funds to arrest the declining standard of the game in country, which is being kept as a well-guarded secret.

The PFF is to receive another hefty sum of $ 400,000 under the “Goal Project” from the FIFA provided it fulfils the requirement of submitting the plan by mid January 2002. The plan must detail the construction of a “Football House “ at Lahore, having  offices and a modern hostel. The FIFA representative Manilal Fernando, who controls the “Goal Project”, visited Pakistan during the current month and asked the PFF authorities to send the plan to him so that he could forward it to the relevant authorities before mid February. This gives an ideal opportunity to the PFF to pull the Pakistani soccer out of doldrums.

Not many years ago, Pakistan had won the SAARC football title and soccer event of the SAF Games. Last year, Pakistan won qualifying round of the Asian Youth Football Championship at Colombo. But, unfortunately, the Pakistan lost all subsequent matches of that round.

The Pakistan teams did participate in the international youth and senior competitions and Asian qualifying- round events during the year 2001 but results were as disappointing as ever! It is a tragedy that Pakistan has slumped to 192nd position in world ranking (only above Guam and Bhutan) and 42nd in Asian ranking.

Through the courtesy of Asian Football Confederation (AFC), the PFF has been getting the services of FIFA coaches to train Pakistani players in the youth and senior camps. However, the desired results are not forthcoming.

The best thing that could have happened to the Pakistani football during the year 2001 was the beginning of the construction (although by fits and starts) of an international-standard Punjab Stadium near the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore.

Although last deadline given to the builders was November, 2001 but that has now been extended to March, 2002 on their latest request. The stadium is being built for football but will also have an international-standard tartan track for athletics also.

In the main stadium, six hospitality boxes and a VIP enclosure will be built. Two commentary-boxes will be constructed on its top.

The stadium will have warming-up areas, gymnasia, rooms for match delegates, foreign and local officials. A modern press centre, with all latest facilities for print and electronic, is being built. The stadium, on completion, will have seating capacity of eight thousand. After completion of next phases, the seating capacity will be raised to twenty-eight thousand

However, no provision has been made to make the stadium self-supporting for its maintenance.