| March 6, 2002 | Wednesday | Zilhaj 21, 1422 |
Remembering Nasrullah Khan
The fallout of Thal Canal project
LHC bench in Faisalabad needed
THIS column is due to appear on the morning of the start of the Asian Test Championship final between Pakistan and Sri Lanka and any observations I might have had, runs the risk of becoming null and void. But I am going to make them all the same. There is, first of all, the somewhat thorny issue of dropping Wasim Akram.
THE approval of the Thal Canal project by the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council last Thursday, coinciding with history’s acute water shortage in Sindh, has created unrest among the people of Sindh, who fear that the economy will be hit, specially the political undercuts that lay behind it have made it a dubious project. The question of the Thal project becomes more a source of mistrust when it has remained a disputed project since 1871 when the English rulers had rejected it saying that it would hit the vital interests of Sindh, the last riparian of the Indus.
IN this era of decentralization of powers at the grassroots level for providing relief to people, the inhabitants of Faisalabad, Toba Tek Singh and Jhang districts could not prevail upon the federal government to set up a bench of the high court here on the pattern of Rawalpindi, Bahawalpur and Multan.
Wasim has not been in the best of form, mainly because of fitness problems. Wasim feels that he has been badly done by but I think he has not made a convincing enough case for himself. By his own admission, he opted not to play in the third one-day against the West Indies at Sharjah because he felt that Mohammad Sami, after his hat trick, deserved to play. This noble gesture was self-defeating for he needed a work-out to get back into rhythm and feel fully comfortable about his fitness.
Somewhat unwisely, he chose to go to India to appear in a television programme about the time when the team for the Lahore final was to be selected. He should have been bowling in the nets for all to see that he was fully fit. Surely he is street-smart enough to know that he could not take his selection for granted.
Even Don Bradman had to prove that he was still good enough in 1946 when international cricket resumed after the war.
I am convinced that there is enough cricket left in him to be our key bowler in the World Cup 2003 and he should not be disheartened and take a leaf out of Steve Waugh’s book. Sacked as the one-day captain and out of the Australian one-day team, he has expressed his determination to win back his place in the team.
That Wasim has 400-plus wickets in both versions of the game makes him one of the greatest bowlers of all times. But cricket is a cruel game and reputations count for nothing. What counts is continuing performance.
A lot of promising fast bowlers are coming up but they are not in the same league as a fully fit Wasim Akram, hungry for wickets. He must get back his fitness and the hunger for wickets will come automatically.
I was delighted to see both Shahid Afridi and Shoaib Malik in the Pakistan squad. About Afridi there should be no doubts that he belongs both in the Test team as well as in the one-day team. He has done enough in both versions of the game to be considered a regular.
Indeed he is emerging as a bona fide all-rounder and throw in his fielding and here is a quality player. I have this feeling that he is getting too much advice (well-intentioned) and he is curbing his natural aggression and being made to comply with text-book correctness.
He, sometimes, gives the impression that adrenalin flows too freely. But that’s the way he plays or should play. He should also be given longer spells as a bowler and not just be brought in to break up a stubborn partnership, which he routinely does. Most of all, he is a fine team man and has never left any doubt in anyone’s mind that he plays for Pakistan and gives his hundred per cent.
There are some rumours that Shoaib Malik may be asked to open the innings. I hope there is no basis to these rumours. Shoaib Malik belongs in the middle order and the opening slots should go to specialists, certainly in a Test match. Shoaib Malik is a talented cricketer and he should be nursed. To throw him in the deep end carries the risk of nipping a promising career in the bud.
A lot will depend on what sort of wicket is prepared for this one-off Test match. One would like to see a result. Sri Lanka has become a good Test team and they have, of course, Muttiah Muralitharan who can turn the ball on any kind of surface but they have also got a very useful seam attack spearheaded by the veteran Chaminda Vaas. And a strong batting line-up. It is a team that has got used to winning.
They certainly don’t come to Lahore as the under-dogs and Sanath Jayasuriya is a smart captain, apart from being an explosive batsman. The cap of captaincy fits easily on his head.
The last time the two met in the Asian Test Championship final is Dhaka, it was a one-sided game and Sri Lankans were no match. In that final, Ijaz Ahmed and Inzamamul Haq got double hundreds and Wasim Akram got a hat trick. Now there will be no Ijaz and Wasim and an out of form Inzamam. Still, there is plenty of talent in this Pakistan team and if it plays to its potential, there should be no problems. In any case, we should see some good cricket.
Finally, I am glad to see Wasim Raja back in the cricket mainstream, if only as a match referee. In his days, he was one of the most gifted players around who somehow never fully delivered on his promise.
He was one of my favourites and I have seen him play some splendid innings, none more splendid than his swashbuckling hundred against India at Jalandhar in 1983. He sure could hit a cricket ball.
WITH Nasrullah Khan’s death in the USA on Feb 23 a great era of humorous column-writing in Urdu journalism has come to an end. Now there is hardly any humour writer of note who had made a name for himself before the partition of the subcontinent. Moreover, there is perhaps no one in our midst who is as unassuming, as spontaneous and as prolific a humour writer as was Nasrullah Khan.
As someone who was in charge of the editorial page of daily Hurriyet, for quite sometime, I had the rare privilege of being the first reader of his columns.
There was a time, in 1976-77, when his column-writing took a sudden turn. He chose to be quite hard on the prose-poem movement, thinking that its champions were not serving the cause of Urdu literature with their hysterical urgings to throw off the form of ghazal as it had outlived its utility. Perhaps no humour columnist took prose-poets to task with so much of bitterness as he did. Every editor of Hurriyet with whom he worked regarded him as his senior, and there is no doubt that he was one of the most popular journalists in the country.
Perhaps he liked the idea of having more girls in journalism because they brought both glamour and seriousness to the profession. It was almost a habit with him to pass some of his time in Herald’s office, and whenever he happened to be there, the rooms and the corridors would be filled with peals of laughter.
He would visit Haroon House — and before that the South Napier Road office of Hurriyet — to deliver his column. He would be so excited about it that very often he would read it out to someone while pacing up and down the corridors of Haroon House.
NK had the honour of working with Zafar Ali Khan and was, therefore, a witness to hundreds of anecdotes attesting to the latter’s brilliance and sense of humour. On a number of occasions I had suggested that NK wrote about his impressions of a great journalist and politician of his time. And he did narrate some of the incidents how the censor’s dragnet fell upon the Maulana’s editorials and who was asked to fill in the blank space. Zafar Ali Khan, under these circumstances, would dictate editorials in verse. There are scores of lengthy versified editorials in the files of Zamindar to prove the Maulana’s command over the language.
What a versatile columnist Khan Sahib was! He could write his column in minutes. He would decide which story needed a swipe, and his fertile mind would come up with so vastly unusual comments on the idiosyncrasies or social mishaps or political jugglery of his ‘victims’ that he could make the bad characters on the social scene or the villains of the piece feel that they were caught ‘red-handed.’
However the quality of his humour lay in trying to ‘reform’ them, rather than target them for public ridicule. He believed that humour should be used as a therapeutic remedy, not as a tool of punishment.
The news of NK’s death in Dawn credited him with only Baat Se Baat — a selection of his columns. There could be more than a score collections of his columns. He has written so much and for so long that very few of his columns could be expunged from these selections and one could rely on his columns for a viewpoint which used to be neither Right nor Left.
NK had a world of ideas of his own and he was very clear about what was right and what was wrong. Old values were his favourite area to guard against the encroachments of the new generation who, he thought, were going astray. NK’s humour was steeped in the worldview which could fit in with the requirements of Awadh Punch. His humour was well-disposed to the taste and temperaments of those who were not favourably disposed towards the unpredictable vagaries of change. He was not favourably inclined towards the progressives but when it came to write about the misdeeds of rulers, his views were in corroboration of those of the radicals, without caring for his being in the company of radicals and revolutionaries.
His main forte could be Khaka Nigari (pen-portraits). His book of pen-portraits, Kiya Qafla Jaata Hai, is an enduring contribution. Composed of 52 pen-portraits — mostly senior contemporaries — here his art of reaching out to the essence is at its height. It is surprising that no adequate notice has been taken of this book which should easily rank with the best books in the category of Khaka Nigari. No one has described his important contemporaries with so much intimacy. There is no doubt that his intimate portraitures have come from the wealth of details which help a reader to feel the atmosphere these personalities breathed in.
NK’s pen-portrait of Manto is, for instance, the most revealing. No one could do so much justice to the understanding of Manto — whether we take Abu Saeed Quraishi, Upendar Nath Ashk, Mohammed Asadullah or the subsequent research scholars’ works on Manto as NK’s Khaka did. Manto’s disenchantment with Aligarh, leading to his exit from the AMU, his student days at MAO College where Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Dr Mahmud-uz-Zafar and many other luminaries taught, the general atmosphere in Amritsar, Ghulam Abbas’s Gilli Danda days and a peek into the mind of Faiz of the days when Alys was entering his life, are some enchanting accounts which are absorbing studies. Above all, it is difficult to do any research on Zafar Ali Khan without making use of the wealth of information which NK kept on sharing throughout his life.
He has also provided the account how Zafar Ali Khan was persuaded to join the ranks of the Muslim League. It was one rainy night when NK played the role of an errand-boy of the Quaid-i-Azam and took his letter to the Maulana’s home town in 1937. Until then, the Maulana was known as an opponent of the Muslim League. No one knows what was the content of the letter but within 24 hours the Maulana issued a statement to announce his joining of the Muslim League.
The Maulana was given the Muslim League ticket in the 1937 election and he won. From that day onwards, NK confided to me, he was on the high and, with Hasrat Mohani and Maulana Raghib Ahsan, worked for Pakistan and allayed the fears that the Muslim League was a feudals’ party.
NK was 82 years of age (1920-02) when he died. He served Urdu journalism for over 50 years. His sojourn in the USA for the past few years proved non- productive but he has left behind, in his columns, impressions about a fast- changing society through a humorist’s eye.
The shortfall of water is so acute that the officials concerned have told people that there remains water in canals for only a week while for the coming three to four weeks there will be water available only for drinking purposes. The Sindh irrigation secretary on March 1 told growers in Khairpur that the water shortage for irrigation would continue for three months.
As compared to the developments, the shortage of water may be a harsh period, yet for the people this can be a ‘tolerable’ phase, for the people of Sindh have been facing similar kind of situations since 1985. But the approval of the Thal canal at this juncture may sound a smear campaign for creating a wedge between the two provinces. This can be evident from the uproar expressed by almost all political and other circles of Sindh, many of them calling for immediately undoing the project. Even a leader like Pir Pagara says that this is a move to break the country.
The issue of water has remained a contentious issue between Sindh and Punjab for over a century. Many a time arbitration has calmed the situation, but every time a new issue crops up and the bitter smouldering continues. From the very blueprints of Sindh’s water works in the last quarter of the 19th century to the present day, it appears Punjab has been accused of opposing the rights of Sindh, even though Sindh has a clear case — historically and legally.
In the present sequence of events the row emerges from the rejection of the Kalabagh dam project by the remaining three federating units, and the issue continues to hang on.
In the meantime, the Irsa-Punjab Water Council row emerged on sharing the water shortage. The dispute could not be resolved through meetings and consultations but both beneficiaries were not prepared to budge from their respective stand. The GHQ’s efforts to resolve the issue was to make a headway by asking its own engineering wing to monitor the water outlets and ensure water share according to the 1991 Accord. However, the water storage at the Tarbela reservoir forced Sindh to resort to rotations.
As the water scarcity hit Sindh crops, the Ecnenc session was convened on Feb 28 and was held in mysterious circumstances. Sindh claimed that it was informed about the meeting only a day before it was to be held and it could not represent its case properly. It was also claimed that Sindh was unaware that the item of the Thal Canal project was on the agenda. It was later made known that the approval of the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) and even the Planning and Development Division was also not sought, which was mandatory. Making it more mysterious was the fact that work on the 30.46-billion-rupee Thal Canal project has been on for the past five months and digging of five kilometres had already been made.
The approval of the Thal Canal project has created uproar in every circle of Sindh. While Punjab claims that it will be a flood canal to be used from April 1 to mid-October with a projected discharge of 8,500 cusecs, Sindh says its excavation and use of water will be reducing the share of Sindh.
It has expressed apprehension that the designing of the headworks has been made so that its discharge can be doubled. Even the projected discharge of 8,500 cusecs will irrigate 1,534,500 acres which experts in 1871 termed a barren and wasteland with no hope of producing anything. Most importantly it is the apprehensions of Sindh that it will be deprived of its share which is vital to its perennial irrigation. And the question of letting water downstream Kotri will still be a far cry.
Growers and experts speaking at seminars at Hyderabad and other places have expressed dismay at the hasty decision and termed it a ‘conspiracy to destroy the economy of Sindh’. Some experts even called it a more devastating project than the Kalabagh dam, because it can create a “perennial famine” in Sindh.
The manner in which the project has been undertaken is a natural cause for unrest among the people of Sindh, specially when work has been launched before its approval by the competent authority and a consensus by the federating units. This leaves three ways for Sindh, i.e. to refer the matter to the Council of Common Interests; seek relief from the superior courts and, finally, take the issue to people.
But there is an understandable fear that till the formalities are fulfilled or legal process completed, the canal would have been completed and then there would be no choice but to compromise on an unforeseeable situation which is bound to affect the economy of Sindh, with a permanent disaster to the Indus delta or downstream Kotri Barrage. Thus before things go out of hand, it becomes imperative for the saner elements to resolve the issue — keeping all facts before them — and reach a decision objectively. Only a logical and legal decision depending on technical aspects of the project can resolve the issue without entailing political bickerings which have already marred the scenario.
Lawyers claim that on the basis of population, area and amount of litigation, their demand is justified. They argue that the “duties of the state” as envisaged in the Constitution require the government to ensure provision of courts for providing justice to the people at their doorstep.
One wonders why in the presence of such clear-cut constitutional provisions, the people of Faisalabad are being deprived of a high court bench. If the people of Rawalpindi, Bahawalpur and Multan can be provided an opportunity for the redress of their grievances from the high court, why such a facility cannot be extended to the people of Faisalabad, Toba Tek Singh and Jhang.
These districts have a population of 9,734,137. The number of members of the District Bar Association, Faisalabad, is the highest in the country after Karachi and Lahore. Similarly, the litigation trend which is much more here than in Rawalpindi and Multan, justifies the establishment of a high court bench here.
High courts, under the constitution and other laws, including the Pakistan Penal Code, the Criminal Procedural Code and other minor acts, statutes have vast power to protect the liabilities and other rights of the people. The presence of the high court in this area will help create awareness and education among the masses to protect their rights and liberties and to seek justice from the high court. People invariably fall prey to atrocities of the police, which fleece them either because of meagre financial resources or due to lack of awareness. A check on the misdeeds of the executive and the police by high court is always a source of relief and protection to the people.
The people of Faisalabad have been agitating for the establishment of a high court bench since 1981 by passing resolutions and issuing statements in the print media. However, this time events took a new turn when the local District Bar Association the other day held a joint convention of the three bars — Faisalabad, Toba Tek Singh and Jhang — and unanimously resolved to launch a movement to press their demand for a high court bench in Faisalabad.
Lawyers, including Faisalabad DBA president Rafiq Batalvi, Jhang DBA president Hamid Abdullah, Toba Tek Singh DBA representative Syed Sajjad Shah and office-bearers of tehsil Bar councils of Faisalabad division said a memorandum of protest would be sent to the government jointly by trade bodies, political parties and NGOs in the first phase of the campaign. In case the government failed to reply in the affirmative, a protest movement would be launched.
They vowed to continue their struggle till the setting up of the bench, and added that district and tehsil governments of Faisalabad, Jhang and Toba Tek Singh would be approached for pressing the government to accept the longstanding demand of citizens of the region.
There are 37 courts of civil judges, 17 of additional district and sessions judges, one of district and sessions judge, two banking courts, two anti-terrorism courts, two anti-corruption courts, one labour court and one drug court in Faisalabad. Almost all the civil judges are dealing with 70 to 80 cases daily due to heavy burden of judicial work. The condition of other courts of Faisalabad is similar.
There is a dire need of a bench of the high court in Faisalabad for monitoring performance of lower courts and providing remedy to victims of government departments and speedy justice to people implicated in false cases by the police and other law-enforcement agencies. A high court bench in Faisalabad will also enable the people of Sargodha, Mianwali, Khushab, Hafizabad and other adjoining districts to approach higher courts for speedy justice.
Faisalabad has produced many intellectuals, religious scholars, politicians, journalists, actors, lawyers, judicial officers and experts since its inception, and they made a commendable contribution to their respective fields. However, the city is still lacking various amenities because of the poor participation of the people.
It is sometimes said that the city being relatively new and having no big landlord to voice its difficulties, a number of its problems could not be properly highlighted in parliament and other national forums, which aggravated the miseries of the citizens and deprived them of important institutions like a university, a high court bench, an export processing zone, a stock exchange, a regional collectorate of income tax, income tax tribunals, etc.
Recently a young lawyer of Faisalabad, Malik Amjad Husain, won the election to the top slot of the lawyers’ community in the province — Punjab Bar Council Executive Committee chairman. A reception was held at local press club which was attended by a good number of lawyers, reporters of national newspapers, office-holders of political and religious parties, NGOs, elected representatives and people belonging to a cross section of society. The participants had high hopes that Amjad Husain would be able to tackle the longstanding problems of the city, especially making efforts for setting up a high court bench.
DBA president Rafiq Batalvi eulogized the services of Malik Amjad, especially his efforts to get resolved people’s problems at the personal level.
Muhammad Amin Shad and Sadiq Kissana, former Bar presidents, were of the view that the Faisalabad DBA should make efforts for resolving the problems of the lawyers community in consultation with the PBC. A movement should be launched for pressing the government to set up a high court bench in Faisalabad.
Former MPA Fazal Husain Rahi highlighted the current political situation in the country, and said the lawyers could play an important role in safeguarding the oppressed classes.
DBA secretary Masood Sarwar, Advocate Chaudhry Muhammad Husain, Kausar Husain Shah, Dr. Maqbool Akhtar and others also addressed the gathering.
The PBC Executive Committee chairman said the council had decided to upgrade all libraries of the Bars in the province and provide legal books and journals as gifts. He said the PBC would launch a campaign to mobilize the bars, the legal community and various sections of society to raise their voice against the government policy of re-employing judges in various tribunals, banking courts, public service commissions, ombudsman offices and the Election Commission.
He said such a tendency was, in fact, a bribe and a calculated move of the government to induct judges of their choice into important institutions for achieving the desired results. It is unfortunate that a retired chief justice of Pakistan has accepted the post of chief election commissioner, he said.
He said the PBC had enhanced the rate of compensation of lawyers from Rs60,000 to Rs300,000. The PBC would continue its struggle for the establishment of the rule of law, independence of the judiciary and withdrawal of black laws.