| April 26, 2002 | Friday | Safar 12, 1423 |
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Intolerance at KU
Lahore’s Ring Road
UNLESS India has something to hide, there is no reason why it should not agree to a judicial inquiry into the blood-letting in Gujarat. There seems to be little logic to Mr Advani’s refusal in allowing a judge of India’s own supreme court to conduct an inquiry. Clearly, the truth hurts, because New Delhi is incensed by what it calls “deliberate leaks” by the missions of some foreign governments of their confidential reports on Gujarat. In fact, other than the European Union, Britain, Germany and Holland have all filed damning reports on the violence in the state and how it reminded them of Germany in the 1930s. The German report, for instance, has only confirmed previous independent accounts of the violence, reported by various international newspapers, calling them “surgical strikes” carried out in a premeditated fashion and with deliberate intent to harm and destroy property owned by the Muslims. However, India sees this in a different light and has asked the European Union and all the other governments, which have had the courage to speak out on the matter, to stay out of its “internal affairs”.
India’s rationale, according to a spokeswoman for the ministry of external affairs, is that there is no need for “foreign interference” when the country’s own media, political parties, human rights bodies, intellectuals, and parliament are all involved in “debating the issue”. If the purpose of this debate is to establish the truth and fix the guilt for the carnage, then inquiries by foreign governments only tend to supplement India’s own debate, and there is no reason why New Delhi should feel slighted. Though the fury of the communal violence that wracked the state after the Godhra train fire has died down, the blood-letting rages on, and lives, invariably of the Muslims, continue to be lost almost daily. As for the Indian media and parties taking part in this “debate”, both have gone out of their way to demand that at least as a symbolic gesture the chief minister of Gujarat be replaced. Narendra Modi’s role in failing to contain the violence that killed close to a thousand people in his state has been universally condemned, yet he continues to hold the trust of the BJP high command.
One is constrained to ask just why New Delhi is so sensitive to such “outside interference”. India should perhaps realize that countries that experience long bouts of horrific violence — violence in which one community repeatedly gets singled out and attacked — open themselves to the scrutiny of the rest of the world. Human rights violations sanctioned by a state can no longer be kept under wraps on the ground that they are a country’s internal affair. If that were the case we would not be seeing Slobodon Milosevic and his likes in the dock. Gross human rights violations — established in some cases by India’s own press and human rights watchdogs — have not goaded New Delhi into taking any substantive action against either the Gujarat government or members of the law enforcement agencies. Had this been done, and had Mr Vajpayee heeded the pleas coming even from his political allies, perhaps “foreign interference” and the press leaks would not have happened. It is not a matter of sovereignty but an issue of justice and fairplay. And, if anything, the reports of the foreign governments could be of much use to India in that regard.
THAT a lecture by Imran Khan, chief of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf, was thwarted by students belonging to a religious party’s student wing at Karachi University on Wednesday was a sad reminder of the polarization that plagues our campuses. Earlier on, when Nisar Memon, the federal information minister, and Jamaat-i-Islami leader Professor Ghafoor Ahmed, were invited to speak at a similar forum no untoward incidents occurred. The rowdy students who sabotaged Mr Khan’s lecture said the PTI chief supported the April 30 referendum, and was, therefore, unacceptable as a speaker. The argument negates the very idea of academic inquiry and free debate that should inform a seat of learning. In fact, this attitude becomes condemnable because other leaders, who oppose the referendum, had had the chance to speak their minds on the subject at the same forum.
The absence of a political culture in the country and regular interruptions of the democratic process must be blamed for this kind of intolerance. Universities elsewhere in the world are centres of free inquiry, where holding debates and seminars on controversial socio-economic and political issues is the norm. Sadly, that is not so in Pakistan. Here, like other national institutions, universities have also become ideological battlegrounds, and reflect the political mayhem that exists in the country at large. There is nothing to suggest that those who wanted to listen to Mr Khan necessarily agreed with him. It was going to be a speech and nothing more. The students who resorted to violence had the option not to listen to him. However, by resorting to violence they served to cast themselves and their parent party in a bad light, and showed how intolerant they are. The incident at KU also reflects on Mr Khan’s regard for a place of learning. His motorcade entered the university with some 300 of his supporters chanting pro-referendum slogans. A lecture ought to have begun like a lecture and not like a political rally.
THE 70-kilometre-long Lahore Ring Road project is still not out of the woods. This is evident from the report that the Traffic Engineering and Transport Planning Agency, the body responsible for the project, is redoing the alignment of the mass transit facility, which has been awaiting construction for over a decade. Resource availability remains the biggest hurdle in its construction. However, an encouraging sign is that the government itself may finance the project. Hopes for an implementation of the scheme, whose feasibility was finalized in 1997, had been revived after a presidential directive instructing the authorities to dust off the plan. Federal assistance was considered necessary for the project, but it is not clear how much and how soon it would be available.
After the construction of the Lahore-Islamabad motorway, bids were invited on a BOT basis for the construction of the Rs 17 billion project. But the scheme hit a snag when the multinational company which showed interest in it proposed to undertake the project if its loans for the motorway project were refinanced. The proposal was turned down by the government. A further delaying factor was the non-availability of foreign assistance after the May 1998 nuclear tests. Prospects of external assistance improved somewhat after the lifting of sanctions, but work can only start when assistance is made available.
The Ring Road project has great significance in the context of Lahore’s expanding traffic and the civic problems stemming from the city’s rapid expansion. That was the reason why the new city government also supported the project and wanted its early completion. The project envisages the construction of a ring road round the city, an elevated expressway from Niazi Chowk to Data Darbar, access roads to the new airport terminal, and many flyovers, and improvements in busy crossings to facilitate the flow of traffic to ease congestion. The government would do well to generate resources for it through its own funds or convince potential investors about the feasibility of the scheme in order to meet one of Lahore’s major needs.