| March 25, 2002 | Monday | Muharram 10, 1423 |
The limits of a military government
Overreacting to Nonentities
The curse on Sultan the contractor
Now a ‘Kunda’ worth billions
A job well done
MARCH 23 was the Pakistan Day. The Awami League was going to observe it as the Resistance Day. The day dawned on an ominous note as the Bangladesh flag went up the rooftops alongside the black flag, as far as one could see. The only Pakistan flags seen were at the Flag Staff House in the cantonment, the HQ, MLA, in the second capital and the president house. At other public buildings the Bangladesh flag flew side by side with the black flag. All the major English and Bengali dailies came out with special Bangladesh supplements hailing Mujib as the great national leader.
WE live to learn. This world of ours is more fantastic than the most fantastic of our dreams or fears. Only think of the thieving around us. An average of up to 20 vehicles stolen everyday, day after day. Now power is the name of the game. Be it military power, political power, or electric power. We have seen the theft of so much of political power.
At Baitul Mukkaram outside the Stadium, retired Col M.A.G. Osmani, who was later to emerge as the commander of the Bangladesh forces, organized a rally of the Bengali ex- servicemen. Lorryloads of young Bengalis came to the town from far and wide to see the parade and take part in the mass rallies. The slogans of Joy Bangla and Sheikh Mujib Zindabad were heard all over. There was complete hartal throughout the city. Only crowded lorries sped along the main airport road connecting the suburbs with the city.
March 24 was a day of high tension. The cantonment looked like an armed camp. Things had actually started changing for the worse ever since the arrival of Bhutto and his partymen on March 21. It seemed as if the point of no return had already reached. But the talks were still continuing. Quite a few of the non-PPP West Pakistani leaders were in Dhaka; they were, as far I could recall, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani, Maulana Mufti Mehmood and others. The president had been there and it could still be hoped that a miracle might after all happen. Tension, however, continued to mount. The army transit camp inside the cantonment also looked fuller. There had been obviously fresh re- enforcements from the West.
March 23 being a holiday, there was no paper on the 24th. Papers appearing on the 25th morning carried a statement by the Awami League secretary-general Tajuddin saying that the ‘ball was now in the court of the president and his team.’ His party had already declared March 27 as the protest day. It looked like a cliff- hanger. I was due to leave for Rawalpindi on 26th and, so, I drove to the president house, first thing in the morning to take my formal leave of the PSO and MS to the president.
Outside the president house there was a crowd of young rowdies shouting anti-Yahya slogan. It was an angry crowd in sharp contrast to the one I had seen four days earlier in front of Mujib’s house. I was in uniform in my star-plated jeep. Outside the barbed-wire perimeter I was mobbed by a number of young men. They spoke angrily in Bengali using abusive language. The one word which I clearly picked up was Punzabi Sala Punzabi. One of the young men closed up to the jeep. He looked straight into my eyes. I didn’t see such hate, such black fury in my life as at that moment. It looked like he was going to attack me and pull me out of my seat. I sat quiet and still in my seat and tried to look as brave as I could, until the gate was opened and I drove in.
First to meet at the president’s house was MS to the president and the ADC. I asked the ADC to send for staff officer to PSO, Col Mehmood Chowdhry, a Bengali. The ADC rang up Col Chowdhry to come and see me. Col Chowdhry came in presently. I told him that I was there to see the PSO urgently. The MS asked me casually about the situation. ‘Couldn’t have been worse,’ I answered. ‘It has taken a sudden ugly turn. The AL is on the warpath.’
‘I know and understand these people. They would settle for nothing less than complete independence. Awful! Isn’t it?’ the MS remarked.
Mahmood came to tell me that the PSO was waiting for me out on the lawns. ‘Please make it short — five minutes or so — ‘ he entreated. I went out and found Pirzada waiting. We exchanged our greetings. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘what’s up?’ I began by telling him that I was off to ‘Pindi next day (March 26). Then I gave him a quick run-down on the situation as I saw it hastening to draw his attention to Tajuddin’s statement. ‘It’s the sort of now-or- never message,’ I said.
Pirzada reflected awhile before he said how deeply unhappy the president was over the happenings on March 23 (the raising of Bangladesh flag etc). There was a limit to everything. That it all happened while the head of state was himself there made it quite intolerable. He also spoke of some rude demonstrations against the president on his way to the cantonment where he drove on 23rd for lunch with the commander.
‘It appears’, he said, ‘that they have all gone berserk. This is certainly not the best way to press for one’s demands. They are helping nobody by pressing the president too hard. After all it’s his (the president’s) job to ensure the solidarity of the country. You cannot throw it to wolves. Can you?’
He went on to recount all that the president had done to restore democracy through fair and impartial elections. He spoke of the president’s desire to satisfy the political aspirations and their demands of East Pakistan. The president had restored their majority by holding election on the basis of one-man-one vote. All that was done in good faith — out of conviction and not out of weakness. Mujib made the silliest mistake of his life by resorting to unconstitutional means by usurping power and provoking the armed forces. He should never have provoked the armed forces.
I left the president house with mixed feelings of elation and frustration. I felt gratified for the time and attention which the PSO had given me and frustrated because of the impression I got about the failure of the political talks. I had a feeling that the president had already decided to ‘shoot his way through’. Back home, my host, cousin and brother-in-law Lt-Col Naqi, said: ‘It seems the action is on about midnight, tonight. Kishwar (Mrs Naqi) informed me of a call from Maj Jalal, staff officer to Gen Hamid. The message was that I was not to proceed to Rawalpindi the next day. Instead, I was to report to the Eastern Command Headquarters first thing in the morning.
I went to bed about 1030 hours. Around 1130 I woke up with a start to the crump of rocket-launchers, the bang of tank shells and the stutter of the automatics. The action had been launched already — about one hour and a half before the hour which was to be at 0100 hours. The fire was concentrated and mixed with small automatics and artillery: the noise was absolutely deafening. Machineguns bursts interspersed with the thunder of rocket- launchers and tank fire.
Everybody in the house was awake. The big bay widow to my right looked out at the street. Kishwar (Mrs. Naqi) drew the curtains apart; and we saw the horizon lit up by red flames. It was all so horribly eerie: Dhaka was burning. She recited under her breath versus from the holy Quran. It had begun after all: days of suspense and uncertainty had suddenly given way to stark horror. I was stunned, unable to think and then resigned to the terrible reality and lay down again to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a long day and I had to get some sleep. I must have dozed off but woke again about half an hour later. Kishwar was awake and sitting in a chair. ‘The telephone has gone dead!’ Good’, I thought.
The firing continued with unabated intensity; but sounded more distant. The morning sky was aglow with the deep orange of flames and the timorous rays of the rising sun. The sound and fury of the guns was interspersed every now and then by the Joi Bangla slogans. The slogans were not concentrated, they didn’t issue forth from masses of people but small groups of individuals under attack. These were too soon silenced and the trail of fire seemed to travel deeper into the town and away from the cantonment.
Screams, chants and machineguns bursts pierced the cover of darkness like so many flying darts. While concentrated heavy firing receded into the distances, nearer home sporadic bursts of machineguns and fire could be heard. The chants of the slogan- raisers decreased and then virtually disappeared in proportion to the increasing volume of fire. I lay strangely calm in my bed wide awake. Let alone answers, even the questions were impossible to form. It was a total chaos — a total collapse — the dark and tragic finale to an era of constant pulling and pushing and mounting tension between the East and the West.
The twain had fallen apart, once and for all.— The writer is a retired brigadier of the army.
THE fig leaf of legitimacy provided to President General Pervez Musharraf by the Supreme Court will disappear the day the electoral college of the President would come into being and the Constitution is revived after the October 2002 elections. So, before that happens he needs to get himself legitimized somehow as he seems to have no intention of going back to the barracks or home after the elections. Let us see what would happen if he does not legitimize himself before October 2002. In the first place being an in-service officer he would be barred under the revived Constitution from contesting for an elective office. Secondly, there is no guarantee that once elected, the members of the President’s electoral college would agree to provide him with the exemption from this rule. But then even if he is allowed the exemption, would his institution permit its chief to contest the Presidential polls against civilian candidates who would, most certainly, base their own campaigns for the office on the military dictator’s failures as a ruler in the last three years? And again, if no candidate is allowed to contest against him and the electoral college simply endorsed the COAS for a five-year Presidential term, how would the setup function under the Constitution no matter what kind of amendments are introduced to create the so-called checks and balance. The same question will arise even if the President were to get this endorsement through a referendum. But at least the President in that case would not be beholden to the elected representatives for his power. He would draw his legitimacy from the referendum and thereby hold the whip-hand over the elected Parliament. That was perhaps the reason why President Gen Ayub and President Gen Zia too had preferred the referendum route to the Constitutional route for perpetuating their hold on power.
To be fair to Gen Musharraf, it seems he has no option but to take the referendum route. He has already convinced himself like his predecessors — Ayub and Zia — that he knows what is best for Pakistan. Therefore, he perhaps feels that he would be betraying his nation if he were to go back to the barracks or home after the October elections. The West as well as the US also seem to have convinced him that he is the answer to all their fears of Islamic extremism in this region. Perhaps when the Supreme Court gave him three years to hold elections and transfer power, this time-frame then had looked more than enough for him to use his military wisdom to open the floodgates of milk and honey in the country, after which the fictional silent majority, he perhaps thought, would not want any other mortal to replace him from the seat of power, and he could rule forever after that without the need to hold elections. But at the end of these three years, nothing like this has happened. The silent majority is still silent. And even after all these three years of his ‘good work’ to lift Pakistan out of the ‘depths’ the previous democratic governments had pushed it into, the only voice he hears frequently, warning Benazir and Nawaz not to come back and try to replace him, is his own.
In the beginning perhaps because he felt he was more intelligent than Ayub and Zia, he thought he could afford not take the route that these two military dictators had taken to their doom. He thought he could be more innovative. So, immediately after banishing Nawaz to Saudi Arabia he tried to get the suspended assemblies revived to get himself and his reforms endorsed. But very soon he found out that he would be taking an unnecessary risk by taking this route. The King’s party, which he had formed with the help of Chaudhries of Gujrat, was found to be totally incapable of taking over the revived Parliament. To his consternation this Party even failed to get him the needed numbers among the 200,000 counsellors elected to the local governments. He had, perhaps, thought he could turn these counsellors into an electoral college for getting himself elected as the President. Instead, the PPP and the PML(N) swept the local government polls and shattered the hopes of Gen Musharraf. Now again, he seems to be banking on the King’s Party to get him through the referendum. And the Party is likely to fail him again because it has only winnable leaders, no workers. Also, by associating himself with this Party, Musharraf, perhaps, has already lost a good number of his supporters who have a pathological disliking for the leaders of this ilk.
Secondly, Musharraf in his attempt to be different from Ayub and Zia has not taken the precautions which the two dictators took before they conducted their respective referendums. Ayub first got elected 80,000 basic democrats and then bought them all out before asking them to endorse his Presidency which he won with a margin of 98 per cent. Zia, before going out and asking the nation for endorsement through the referendum, had banned under a Martial Law Order all public opposition to the referendum which he won by a margin of over 97 per cent. But in the case of Musharraf’s proposed referendum public opposition to the idea has begun even before the President could formally announce his intention to hold one.
The Rawalpindi rally of Jamaat-i-Islami on Saturday has vociferously rejected the referendum idea. And the government by forcibly stopping the ARD from holding a meeting in Lahore and other parties from staging a rally in Quetta on March 23 has in effect created the impression that the silent majority was not in favour of holding the referendum. More importantly, it was his Islamic gimmickry that had saved Zia from the ignominy of being rejected in his referendum. But Musharraf has already burnt his Islamic card on September 17, 2002 and whatever was left of it he turned that into ashes on January 12, 2002. He has only one card left with which to play his referendum game and that is the America card. But this card is likely to be met head on by a growing anti-American vote in the country. This vote is as much anti-terrorism and anti-religious extremism as it is anti- American. So, the more the impression of his being Washington’s man in Islamabad is reinforced in the eyes of the general masses, the lesser are Musharraf’s chances of winning the referendum no matter what the question and no matter how disingenuously he frames it.—ONLOOKER
WHAT’s this about the referendum the president wants to hold? Let’s have it by all means. After all, the question of legitimacy in an office of vital importance for president is at stake. Now, I am quite positive in my mind that the referendum Gen Musharraf has in mind will put an indelible stamp of legitimacy on the number of years he intends to be at the helm. And then, of course, there can be another referendum and another and another until the cows return home.
But we have in our midst a Killjoy who has been saying ‘No’ to any sensible proposal ever made by successive chief executives of this luckless country. And this Killjoy is Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, the greatest champion of democracy you will ever know. He thinks democracy, he talks democracy, he dreams democracy. He holds a news conference every time he feels like it and the funny thing is that he gets the newsmen he wants and he gets the coverage he has never deserved in the newspapers the next morning and he spends the whole day following the press conference answering calls from his ‘spoons’ (they are called chamchas by the locals), praising him to high heaven.
Half a dozen such calls and the Nawabzada (I do not know who was the nawab whose zada he is. Such is my abysmal ignorance) but as I told you, he fancies himself as the champion of jamhooriat.
Now what about his latest press conference? You must have known the contents of the conference even before it began. Briefly, he rejected as extra-constitutional “Gen Musharraf’s reported plan to hold a referendum during the next few months to have himself elected president”.
A friend has just told me that the Nawabzada is a product of the British. He fought the 1946 elections on a Majlis-i-Ihrar ticket but lost to a Muslim Leaguer. In the 1951 elections, he joined the Muslim League and won. How he left the League is a separate story and does not concern us here. Suffice it to say that right through his distinguished public career, he has been an honourable man. Most honourable, I tell you.
The ARD, headed as you know by the redoubtable Nawabzada, was due to hold a public meeting at the Mochi Gate Bagh on Saturday (Muharram 8) but the government asked the alliance to shift the venue to the Iqbal Parks. Now this was a blow below the belt. The ARD chief said that “while all preparations had been completed, the administration had asked the ARD leadership to change the venue or date of the meeting.”
“The meeting programme had been given wide publicity and it was morally unjustifiable for the government to call for a change of venue at the eleventh hour,” he added. I think that right or wrong, the Nawabzada does have a point here. The government did react late in making the change of venue request. It was known to everyone that Pakistan Day, March 23, would fall on Muharram 8 a dashed-sight too close to Ashura for comfort. It should have reacted the moment the ARD announced to hold a public meeting on the day.
But no matter. The ARD should have been allowed to go ahead and hold the meeting as announced. The government should learn better than to say ‘No’ to nonentities. I write these lines a day before March 23. So, I am in no position to tell you precisely what ought and ought not to have been. These are (or were) delicate matters and I am not sticking my neck out.
I am, however, reasonably certain of one thing. The Nawabzada is our own version of Don Quixote. Just tell him you have seen (an imaginary) windmill near, say, Rang Mahal. In no time at all, the Nawabzada will mount his charger and, going at full gallop, reach Rang Mahal from his Nicholson Road residence, and seeing the non-existent windmill, go tilting at it and the devil with the consequences.
THE WASHINGTON POST reported the other day that president Bush planned to visit Latin America “at a time when the region cries out for American engagement. Colombia’s drug-fuelled war is deepening, despite American efforts to shore up the government”. Across the continent, the paper added, various countries were faced with various problems.
The paper said: “Mr Bush will try to use his trip — to Mexico, Peru and El Salvador — to restore a sense of American leadership. ....”
How did Latin America respond to the Bush visit? Agency reports said on Friday: “Two powerful car bombs exploded on Wednesday night near the US embassy in Lima (Peru), killing nine people, three days before a visit here by US president George W Bush.” More than 30 people were also reported injured. Among those killed was a private security guard at the US embassy.
What is this? A warm reception, of course. Perhaps the Al-Qaeda terrorists had a hand in it. Who knows? The only thing I know is that the whole world loves the United States and, above all, we all love Mr Bush, don’t we?
AS you know, the federal government has clamped a 15 per cent general sales tax (GST) on all drugs, imported and locally manufactured to generate an additional revenue of Rs5 billion.
Also, the import duty on raw duty for drug manufacturers has been reduced from 10 to 5 per cent. A Dawn report said on Friday: “The slapping of the GST on medicines was one of the strings attached to an IMF tranche of Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) to be disbursed later.”
This is excellent news and is bound to alleviate poverty across the board. You see, it is like this: the benefits of the reduction in the import duty on raw materials needed for manufacturing drugs will not reach the consumer but the burden of the 15 per cent GST on all drugs will certainly break his back.
As it is, drugs are even today beyond the reach of families with modest means. For instance, I need medicines worth a little over a thousand rupees a month to survive. A 15 per cent GST will mean that they will shoot up to Rs1,150 a month. Which means I’ll have to pay Rs1,800 a year extra in GST alone. This will definitely improve my standard of living and in about five years time, I’ll be rolling in money.
This is what is called financial wizardry. And all wizards are to be found at the IMF — living and fossilized.
TO return now to the pubic meeting the ARD planned to hold in the Mochi Gate Bagh. On Saturday, the day for which the meeting was scheduled, the ground was extensively watered and barbed wires were put around it. Large-scale arrests of ARD leaders were made overnight and an unnecessary state of emergency seemed to have been declared. The administration had over-reacted. The Nawabzada was being needlessly adamant. Muharram has a mood of its own, especially in and around Mochi Gate. Nobody is interested in politics.
The meeting would not have attracted more than a couple of hundred bystanders (not participants). And the meeting would definitely have ended in abject failure. The Mochi Gate Bagh has never heard of a more ill-timed tamasha. Now the ARD has an excuse. But for the local administration’s ham-handedness, the ARD meeting would have marked the beginning of the end for Gen Musharraf, it would have shouted from the housetops.
As Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan used to say, it were the police who brought the British down and not the Congress-Muslim League freedom movements. The great Khan could be accused of over-simplifying things but he certainly had half a point.
MANY years ago, Habib Jalib was arrested for violating the prohibition law. An Indian poet who was in town, promptly commented:
Ghar se pi kar sharab nikla tha
Yeh khata thi Habib Jalib ki
Sar zamin-i-Pak mein nadan
Naql karta tha Mirza Ghalib ki
Poor Jalib, he never knew nothing from nothing.
IN EVERY disaster lies an opportunity. Every street, every brick of Lahore speaks a story of opportunities taken. One such tale is that of Muhammad Sultan the thekaydar, contractor, whose unique contribution to Lahore lies in his ability to use bricks from the ruins of war to reconstruct an array of new buildings and bazaars ... carving for himself a unique place in the annals of the city.
He started life as a poor man living inside Delhi Gate, working in the last days of Maharajah Ranjit Singh as a casual labourer in the markets. The Sikh era had seen hundreds of mosques going into disrepair, mainly because they were used as stables or ammunition depots. Once the British had defeated the Sikhs, all within ten years of the death of the maharajah, they consolidated their power by beginning the construction of the Lahore Cantonment. Among the first contractors to be used by them was Muhammad Sultan of Delhi Gate. How this unknown and poor casual labourer became a contractor has remained an enduring myth among scholars of the British era, but one story goes on to say that he posed as a contractor and was given a small job of constructing a house in the cantonment among the hundreds planned.
Sultan moved swiftly, and the first thing he did was to buy out a few derelict mosques inside the old walled city. He then set about removing all the bricks from the mosques, and though many protested against this practice, he managed to feed the poor in large numbers to win the sympathies of the starving population. So good was Muhammad Sultan at finding old mosques and flattening them within days, that many predicted that a curse would soon fall on the man who specializes in “martyring mosques”. But no such curse ever befell Sultan, for it seems that his wealth just kept on growing.
Among the first brand new British bungalows that came up in the Lahore Cantonment were those made by Sultan, and the quality of his work impressed the British, who started giving him more and more work. He demolished many a famous building of Lahore, including the famous Pari Mahal, Masjid Neem Bismil, Jahan Serai, Chowk Shahzada Dara Shikoh, etc. But then he set about building his own Serai Sultan just outside Delhi Gate. Along with this ‘serai’, he built a small bazaar, and so small was it that the people of the walled city nicknamed it lunda bazaar, the crippled bazaar. Today that very bazaar is known as Landa Bazaar.
The particular skill of Sultan the Contractor was to find out from the elderly folk of the walled city about old buildings and how they were built. Once he was sure that considerable masonry work had been undertaken and that the structure of the building clearly showed that its foundations had a lot of bricks used in it, he would set about digging up the foundations.
One such building was the ‘haveli’ of Wazir Khan also known as the Pari Mahal. It had considerable water courses under its gardens and its entire foundations had an intricate water channel system which made sure that throughout the hot summers exceptionally cold water was always available, and it was clean filtered water, the type of filter that existed outside the Shalamar Gardens. The gardens of this building provided Sultan with an exceptional collection of bricks. With these bricks, laid as they were with clay mortar and easy pickings for him, he made his immense fortune. The rule of thumb was that each worker had to produce at least 1,000 bricks a day to qualify for his daily wage.
All these bricks he used, as he did from other sites of derelict mosques all over Lahore, to build his serai and the lunda bazaar. Some of the best bricks he used in the construction of some of the finest houses in the old cantonment. A man of immense wealth with an army of ‘friends’ who fed off him, Sultan went into high gear when the Prince of Wales visited Lahore in 1876. The entire lunda bazaar area was decorated and he spent a lot of money in the construction of special houses and rest houses, all from his own resources. To fill up the bazaar he invited traders from inside the walled city and for many years did not take any rent from them. By the time the Prince arrived, Sultan the Contractor was at his zenith.
But then like every fairy tale, the story of Sultan had its downside. He remained without any children from his wife, and she died before he did. Once his health began to give way, his lavish ways led him into a deficit from which he never recovered.
Very soon, all his property began to be sold off. The British government tried to assist him by helping to raise loans to pay off old ones, but when the chips were down, nothing but his own assets were left to bank upon. These he mortgaged with the Maharajah of Jammu, and to him they ultimately went, including his prized Pari Mahal, stripped as it was of its gardens. The rumour went round that the curse of demolishing mosques had caught up with Sultan the Contractor.
He died in debt and the son of his uncle got some share of some old shops constructed from the bricks of old Lahore mosques. He also died in circumstances unknown, and it was decided by the elderly of Delhi Gate that any money accruing from the shops of Sultan the Contractor would go to three old widows, who would pray to Allah to forgive him for his deeds. The rest is local legend, which says that ultimately these three women also fell into debt and refused to take the money that came their way. In this was their salvation. Here the story ends of a man who rose from the ashes of the destroyed Sikh empire, by selling the bricks of derelict mosques and ultimately died a pauper, cursed by the legend of his own misdeeds, if you can call it so. I, for one, do not. — MAJID SHEIKH
Now look at the theft of electric power. In Karachi “nearly 80 per cent of industrial consumers are using more load (power) than what has been sanctioned.” This, be it noted, “without informing the KESC.” There are several interesting sides to this fascinating phenomenon which, in plain words, is a case of power theft.
This is not a new game. It has been played for quite some time. But it is only just now that the KESC has discovered that it is being bled white. After the very first step taken to stem this haemorrhage, the KESC has earned Rs270 million. So far only 9.5 per cent of the 3,600 major big units have been touched.
If around 30 per cent of the industrial consumers are regularized, the KESC would make another Rs one billion. If all industrial units are brought into some discipline this figure should be well above Rs three billion. Simple arithmetic. Out of around 26,000 small industrial units, 8,000 are seen to be playing the same tricks with the KESC as their big brothers. It runs in the family.
Is it possible to convince anyone that this ‘Great Game’ has been going on and the KESC just did get the wind of it? Power worth billions of rupees was being consumed off the record, as it were. The consumers were not small fries but mighty big industrial units. But nobody among the KESC top brass knew anything about it. Not until the other day, so to say.
Power theft has been a favourite theme of the KESC for as long as you would remember. However, the culprits in the eyes of the KESC were the ‘Kunda’ consumers. These are the dwellers of the ‘informal’ habitations that do not have even a name. The ‘Kunda’ power consumers are the poorest of our poor in this city of immense wealth. Doesn’t matter if quite a bit of this wealth is off-white, if not pitch black.
Accepted that the ‘Kunda’ consumer does not pay for power he consumes using an illegitimate device. What is the size of this consumer’s home? How many power points in his shanty? Compare this ‘Kunda’ trickle with the drain by power guzzlers among the ‘irregular’ consumers in the big industrial league? For years the KESC has been squealing about ‘Kunda’ connections. Not a word about the big industrial units. Now is the KESC’s moment of truth.
How interesting, the big industrial consumers have not questioned the KESC charge that it was being short-changed by big-time consumers. These big shots only complain of inspections without prior notice. In other words, if there was a warning, the consumers would have done the needful to make the inspection infructuous.
Another complaint, even more amusing, is that the KESC’s inspection and the resultant action to ‘regularize’ power connections has resulted in loss of industrial production. How very unthoughtful of the KESC to ignore the demands of national economy. Power supply must not be interrupted, merely because the power connection is not regular. The big consumers say there is so much else that is not regular. So why fret about power theft?
Here logic (such as it has come to be in our culture) is on the industrial consumer’s side. There has to be a certain allowance for the ‘irregular’ as the appetizer, if our industry is to deliver. The industrial consumer must be left free to draw more power than he pays for. He must be given extra latitude in payment of taxes. If everything is regular and transparent, profits will fall, life would be so dull. No irregularities, no thrills.
Shorn of the irrelevant, this KESC saga is like any other story. We are performing an act that is as much of a miracle as voyaging in a boat that leaks. The KESC has been getting along merrily while its consumers are doing it down by billions of rupees. Our CBR is keeping its head above water. Never mind the billions that slip through its otherwise tight grip.
For many of us life would be such a bore if all of us kept to rules. Like, for instance, driving on the left side of the road or stopping at every red traffic light. If you are a Pajero-owner you would know what fun it is leaving the officers in white gaping as you whizz past a red light.
As between the KESC and its big industry clients, deep down it is between friends. What’s a few billion of rupees among life partners? One’s loss is the other’s gain. Giants like the KESC and the Big Business are siblings. Not much different is the nexus between the KESC field staff (children of a lesser god) and the slum-dweller drawing power through the ‘Kunda.’
FORTY odd students who can rightly be called high achievers for their brilliant performance in the May/June 2001 Ordinary and Advanced Levels examination were called recently at the British Council in Karachi to meet representatives of the press. And it was about time these bright young minds of the O and A levels system were given an opportunity to speak their mind.
It was an open forum and they were given a chance to talk about their problems and their views vis-a-vis higher education prospects and job opportunities in the country.
For one things, the students discussed in detail the problems they would face if choosing to study further in Pakistan after doing their A levels. They regretted that some professional colleges, especially those run by the government like the Dow Medical College and Sindh Medical College, actively discourage A level students — though one wonders, a bit cynically perhaps, why such bright students would want to even think about studying in the local university system.
A colleague from work who attended this meeting said that these students did agree that the gulf between the quality of education taught in the matric/intermediate and the O/A level systems was vast and needed to be bridged. They said that perhaps a middle path could be chosen with the introduction of an intermediary system, like is the practice in some overseas countries. However, they stressed that there should be no compromise on the standard. That, though, seems a near certainty given the present state of these two widely divergent systems of education.
The high achievers also said that the law and order situation was not helping matters at all since the country was getting a very bad name and because its persistence recurrence had put new investment on hold. This was why, they said, qualified people were leaving the country in such large numbers. Another valid point brought forward was the lack of any forum or platform for students to express their views.
It was a good opportunity for these young high achievers to discuss their problems and speak their mind. It was suggested by many at the meeting that more such forums should be organized and that not only high achievers but ordinary students be invited to come and air their views.
The confidence and articulation with which these young people were expressing their views reminded the colleague of the importance of good basic education and the grooming it gives. These high achievers were presented with awards for their performance this past Friday and congratulations are in order.
The development gurus of Karachi must share part of the blame for last Tuesday’s gory accident in Karimabad, a colleague recently pointed out. The speeding bus ran over college students at a bus stop, killing two of them, a motorcyclist and critically injuring nine others.
The bus was on a wild chase behind another over the Liaquatabad flyover, and the students had crowded the stop near the lower end of the flyover’s ramp. The speeding driver, after failing to apply his brakes, ran over a crowd waiting at the bus stop. And why were they waiting there, at evidently such a dangerous place? Because there was no other place for them to stand.
The Liaquatabad flyover is not the only one in the city that has not made any provisions for the pedestrians and public transport commuters. The two flyovers each in Gulshan and Nazimabad, one in Clifton and another one at the junction of Jaffer Gardezi Road and Sharah-i-Faisal, are no exceptions.
The last one is particularly accident-prone as the ramp leading to it begins on the right side of Sharah-i-Faisal, with a bus stop right at the beginning of the ramp and in the middle of the main road. Commuters who get off on Sharah-i-Faisal do so at their own peril, with motorists racing past. There is no signal to regulate the traffic before the ramp, since doing so will clog up the intersection between the preceding and the approaching ramps of the flyovers. The result is that commuters often jaywalk across the busy road as they get on and off the slowly moving buses.
Obviously this cannot go on forever and someone responsible needs to do something to put the commuters and pedestrians out of harm’s way. It seems that senselessly built flyovers and widened roads have become just another excuse for reckless drivers to speed their way through the city roads with impunity. Perhaps the accident in Karimabad would have been avoided if the builders of the Liaquatabad flyover had made adequate provisions for the pedestrians and the public transport commuters.
This kind of hit-and-run driving claims more than 500 lives in Karachi alone. According to the police data, 590 people were killed on the streets of Karachi last year. The figure includes both the victims of terrorist attacks and those killed as a result of reckless driving. Compared to countries at a similar stage of development, like India for example, this number is very high and only goes to show how neglected the field of traffic engineering and management is in Pakistan.
That said, Pakistan needs a national driving and road sense programme aimed at training the traffic and highway police, the public, and town planners alike.
Recently, a friend saw something near Clifton’s Uzma shopping centre that left her quite confused. She isn’t sure what to make of it. To tell you the truth even I am not sure what seems to have happened when she narrated the incident to me. I am writing here what occurred. Maybe you all can make something of it.
A blue Datsun 120 Y driven by a woman caught my friend’s attention. After some initial difficulty she managed to park her car, got out and walked into the shopping centre. A few minutes later another woman pulled up behind the Datsun, this time in a white Toyota Corolla, and she also went inside the building.
My friend then noticed the driver of the blue Datsun — parked in front — coming out. But instead of getting into her own car she opened the door of the white Corolla, got in and drove off. A little while later, the woman who had come in the Corolla came out of the centre, got into the Datsun and drove off. Now what do you make of that?
This colleague at work also says she saw something similar at the main Khayaban-i-Shaheen and Shamsher signal. A car drove past her just as she was about to stop for the red light. This man — driving the car — stopped right in front of her and waved his fist. The gesture angered my colleague and just as she was about to respond, she realized that the man wasn’t really looking towards her.
He was gesturing to a pedestrian in a silver shirt, who then casually walked up to the car from across the road and handed the man in the car a matchbox. The driver took it and gave him a matchbox in exchange. The light turned green and the car sped away.
The colleague is extremely bewildered, to say the least, by these goings-on and would like someone to tell her what in the world happened between this driver and the man in the silver shirt.
Well, some people have all the time to be worried about such frivolities.
Karachian would like to know who teaches the DJs who come on FM 100 and 101 English because whoever it is they do a terrible job.
If these people can’t speak the language well — which should be a minimum at least for the English segments of the programming — then one wonders the rationale of hiring them. In fact, if you really want to spoil your English, or if you want to get a good laugh at the end of a tiring day while driving home from work, all you have to do is tune into either of the FM stations and hear their DJs talk.
The problem, incidentally, is confined not only to the English shows but even to the primetime hour where the DJs — who are talking mostly in Urdu — feel the urge to use every three seconds or so an English word. And they normally make a hash of it.
Another piece of advice to the DJs. Please, when you introduce an English song stop talking once it begins, so that listeners can hear it in peace.—By Karachian