BENGALI magician P.C. Sircar is credited with making an entire train disappear before the eyes of a fairly large crowd. He is even said to have made the Taj Mahal vanish for a good few minutes in a similar fashion. Prime Minister Vajpayee’s government is now seeking to emulate the celebrated magician. It is trying to make the blot on India’s fair name disappear — that too by denying that it was there in the first place.

Indeed, if Mr Vajpayee and his bone-chilling denial that any carnage took place at all in Gujarat is to be believed, then the only massacre that really occurred there was that of Hindus by Muslims in Godhra.

In fact, each time Prime Minister Vajpayee or Chief Minister Modi raises the magic wand to conjure a reality of their choice you could hear vocal parts of India’s saffronized government exclaim: “There has been no massacre in Gujarat. The world is wrong. The British embassy is talking through its hat. The European Union is prejudiced. The Indian media is a whore, it is ‘utilized’ by foreigners to ferry propagandistic claims that are patently anti- national. Any minor or stray incidents of the killing of Muslims are the result of their own reckless reaction to the peace-loving government’s efforts to restore order in Gujarat.”

Going by this line of seductive argument, Gopal Menon’s brave documentary based on eyewitness accounts of victims of the pogroms, the gang-rapes, the lynchings are all imaginary. Teesta Setalvad had brought along scores of Muslim men, women and children all the way from the camps of Ahmedabad to New Delhi.

For two days they were telling journalists, university professors, housewives, politicians, whoever cared to come to meet them, of their harrowing tales of an unbelievable betrayal — they were all wrong, fibbing, little liars.

If you do not believe that this could be the approach of the government of India to the events in Gujarat, and you are already rubbing your eyes with disbelief, please read on. The story is not over yet.

Even as recently as Sunday, April 28, the government was neither contrite nor accepting any other version. In fact, with each passing day it sounds more and more brazen, even blasi about Gujarat.

Sample the brief but telling interview by Janyala Sreenivas of the Indian Express with Gujarat Home Minister Gordhan Zadaphia on Sunday.

Q. Why has violence again escalated in Ahmedabad?

A. What do you expect when a police constable is stabbed to death? It is a natural reaction of police.

Q. Why is not then the violence confined to just one part of the city where the constable was?

A. The violence is being instigated by the Congress, which is now trying to destabilize the government in the state and Centre. The minority Congress councillors are adding fuel to the fire by instigating retaliation.

Q. Why are your police so one-sided? On Sunday (April 21), they shot nine Muslims dead.

A. On Sunday, the police reacted to the killing of the constable. What do you expect when police chowkis are attacked? It is a natural violent reaction. And the police have been given strict instructions. They have to act whether the mobs are composed of Hindus or Muslims. If Muslims have been shot, they must have been part of the mob.

A government minister who has been lifelong member of the obscurantist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh can be excused for his callous ways, but it’s the job of the ministry of external affairs to do damage control, as indeed it did with a degree of finesse in 1992.

That was before the advent of brazen saffron control of state power. Today there’s a slide show on the net put together by the ministry of external affairs. According to this version:

— The death toll in Gujarat over the last two months is not over 800, it’s 58 in Godhra plus 145 in police firing.

— There are 1.13 lakh people in 99 relief camps across the state. Who are these people? No need to find out.

On its official website (meadev.nic.in), under the heading The Present Situation in Gujarat — The Facts, a 55-frame slide show shies away from the mention of Muslims killed, although there are oblique references to the possibility because the incidents are described by their mohallas such as Darzi mohalla (darji chaali).

— Godhra gets 11 slides: two showing the charred train, two showing the ‘Honourable’ chief minister visiting.

— Not a single slide mentions the revenge attacks on Muslims that followed.

For the ministry of external affairs this situation is a new challenge because in 1992, when the previous major communal flare-up occurred, there was no National Human Rights Commission to blow the whistle when a foul was spotted. Why only for the foreign office, the commission’s observations throw the biggest challenge to the credibility of the Vajpayee government.

In its preliminary rejoinder to the Gujarat government’s attempts to make the pogroms vanish, the NHRC report makes the obfuscation virtually impossible.

“The commission cannot but note that the (Gujarat government) report itself reveals that while some communally-prone districts succeeded in controlling the violence, other districts — sometimes less prone to such violence — succumbed to it,” says NHRC chairman Justice J.S. Verma.

In the same vein, the report further indicates that while the factors underlining the danger of communal violence spreading were common to all districts, and that, “in the wake of the call for the ‘Gujarat Bandh’ and the possible fallout of the Godhra incident, the state government took all possible precautions,” some districts withstood the dangers far more firmly than did others.

Such a development clearly points to local factors and players, overwhelming the district officers in certain instances, but not in others. Given the widespread reports and allegations of groups of well-organized persons, armed with mobile telephones and addresses, singling out certain homes and properties for death and destruction in certain districts — sometimes within view of police stations and personnel — the further question arises as to what the factors were, and who the players were in the situations that went out of control. The commission requests the comments of the state government on these matters.

Now how can the MEA or the prime minister’s office quibble with this without putting their remaining credibility on the line.

In fact if we recall Mr Vajpayee’s uncharacteristically shrill petition in Goa, about the incident in Godhra and how it was being investigated but also how it was already deemed to be the handiwork of Muslims and so on, the NHRC seems to have preempted the scope for mischief.

The commission has noted that while the (Gujarat) report states that the Godhra incident was ‘premeditated’, the report does not clarify as to who precisely was responsible for this incident. Considering its gruesome nature and catastrophic consequences, the team of the commission that visited Godhra on 22 March 2002 was concerned to note from the comments of the special IGP, CID (crime) that while two cases had been registered, they were being investigated by an SDPO of the Western Railway and that no major progress had been made until then.

In the light of fact that numerous allegations have been made both in the media and to the team of the commission to the effect that FIRs in various instances were being distorted or poorly recorded, and that senior political personalities were seeking to ‘influence’ the working of police stations by their presence within them, the commission is constrained to observe that there is a widespread lack of faith in the integrity of the investigating process and the ability of those conducting investigations.

The commission notes, for instance, that in Ahmedabad, in most cases, looting was ‘reported in well-to-do localities by relatively rich people’. Yet the report does not identify who these persons were. The conclusion cannot but be drawn that there is need for greater transparency and integrity to investigate the instances of death and destruction appropriately and to instil confidence in the public mind.

The Gujarat government’s report takes the view that ‘the major incidents of violence were contained within the first 72 hours.’ It asserts, however, that ‘on account of widespread reporting both in the visual as well as the electronic media, incidents of violence on a large-scale started occurring in Ahmedabad, Baroda cities and some towns of Panchmahals, Sabarkantha, Mehsana, etc” in spite of “all possible precautions having been taken”.

The report also adds that various comments attributed to the chief minister and commissioner of police, Ahmedabad, among others, were torn out of context by the media, or entirely without foundation.

Utter nonsense, says Justice Verma. “The commission considers it would be naive for it to subscribe to the view that the situation was brought under control within the first 72 hours. Violence continues in Gujarat as of the time of writing these proceedings. There was a pervasive sense of insecurity prevailing in the state at the time of the team’s visit to Gujarat.

“This was most acute among the victims of the successive tragedies, but it extended to all segments of society, including to two judges of the High Court of Gujarat, one sitting and the other retired, who were compelled to leave their own homes because of the vitiated atmosphere. There could be no clearer evidence of the failure to control the situation.”

THE people of Balochistan have a longstanding complaint that the police of Sindh harass them whenever they cross the provincial boundaries over to Jacobabad or Karachi. On way to Karachi, the Mochka police checkpost has earned a notoriety for fleecing the unwary and uninitiated Balochistan residents whenever they are on a visit to Sindh by public or by private transport.

The victims are mostly residents of Makran or border areas. Police watchmen in civvies frequently prey on such people as are illiterate and poor and who do not know how to complain to authorities. But this does not mean that others are not harassed or discriminated against. In fact, no one — whether an official, a professional or an alien — is spared. Rather the professionals suffer most at police checkposts. Private cars are searched extensively and their occupants questioned intensely, bordering on insults and threats.

People travelling with their families are put to great disadvantage when caught between Karachi and Quetta or Lahore and Quetta. Since they do not know anyone, they are at a loss what to do when a foot constable seizes their papers on not being obliged by the car wallahs.

One such unlucky man, a senior professional working in Quetta, was stopped soon after he had crossed Balochistan into the Sindh district of Jacobabad. He had a real good taste of the Sindh police giving him a tough and rough treatment.

He was asked to produce the papers of the vehicle in which he was travelling with his family. An ASI hotly argued with his driver, asking him to produce a number of documents — from highway code to insurance to Customs papers. Finally, the police officer demanded the anti-car lifting certificate to show that the car was not hijacked or stolen one. Both the driver and the owner were surprised to learn about such an unfamiliar document. As the ASI kept interrogating the driver, a police party at a distance kept their guns pointed at the car. After a heated argument, the ASI was told that the matter concerning the uncalled-for harassment would be reported to his superior.

In other provinces also, most people travelling with their families come across such a situation, but on a different scale. Once a police party stopped a car on the outskirts of Lahore and tried to verify the fact that the vehicle was not a stolen one. The official simply checked the engine and chassis number of the vehicle and when it was ensured that it was not tampered with, the gentleman was allowed to proceed.

However, travelling families are in a fix when caught in such an ugly situation because if the policemen impound the papers of their vehicles for any reason, the car wallahs will have to pay the bribe, whether they liked it or not. It is for the police generals to ensure that the police parties on the highways do not harass the common people.

The second category of policemen is found in Karachi, mainly at the entry points from the Balochistan end. It is normally called the Mochka checkpost where every passing vehicle is stopped and searched for weapons, narcotics, smuggled goods and, at present, for Al Qaeda members. Originally, Mochka was an octroi post of Jam of Lasbela, the princely ruler of the defunct Lasbela state.

It was the point from where the officials of Lasbela state would collect octroi from people carrying goods to Sindh.

A few years ago a police monitoring point was established at the octroi post of Jam of Lasbela. Now the police department has built a full-fledged police station, which is known for harassing the people entering Karachi from Balochistan, mainly from Makran or the border areas with Iran. The people are deprived of their personal belongings and cash on cooked-up charges or under the of threat of being arrested. However, more educated people are spared for fear of complaints. But the people from the Makran region are seldom spared.

Within the police system in Karachi, posting at Mochka is normally regarded as a prized possession. However, the police system in Balochistan is more people-friendly than in Sindh. Presumably, the police are covering a small area of the province, and the rest locally called ‘B’ Area is policed by the Balochistan Levies.

NOBODY can best describe the ANP’s present predicament about the forthcoming referendum than the party’s president Asfandyar Wali Khan himself. He does not know what to say to his party workers.

At a public meeting in Nowshera recently, Mr Khan acknowledged the dilemma he is facing. His party supports Musharraf’s policies, as in his view these are the same policies his party has been espousing all these years. Therefore, the ANP can not say ‘no’ to them. But it can not say ‘yes’ either, for it would mean accepting the mode of president’s election, which the party considers unconstitutional.

The Aawami National Party (ANP), unable to clearly stipulate its course, has come up with a clever answer ‘abstention’— this means that the party neither supports nor opposes the referendum. This, however, gives very little clue to the ANP workers who probably are more confused than their own leaders who have chosen to sit on the fence than joining the line drawn by Gen Musharraf.

Critics say the ANP has chosen a convenient way of a plausible denial. It continues to support President Musharraf’s policies, but opposes his move to get himself elected as president for a five-year term. Officially, it abstains from the referendum, but unofficially it has allowed its workers to say ‘yes’ to the question being asked in the ballot paper. It, therefore, may always be said the party, in keeping with its tradition, opposed Musharraf’s referendum, without really having to oppose it.

The ANP, undoubtedly, is one of the major political parties in the NWFP. Its unequivocal support to Musharraf would have made a difference. The ANP’s decision to abstain from the referendum, therefore, may not have pleased President Musharraf, but backing down from the downright opposition to a mere abstention has nonetheless made his job a lot more easier.

Asfandyar Wali Khan has been going around, addressing public meetings, saying essentially the same things President Musharraf is saying in his public rallies - highlighting the policies of the present government, although Wali Khan’s elder son is putting things the other way around.

President Musharraf claims credit for the domestic and international policies, and the ANP president claims that the policies initiated by the present government are the same which the party has been advocating for long. “ We stand vindicated”, he tells his party workers.

The critics, however, say the ANP has compromised its political image by taking a lame-duck stand on the referendum, as the predecessors of the Pakhtoon nationalist party had boycotted the 1947 referendum that the British held to decide the accession of the NWFP to Pakistan or India.

The Khudai Khidmatgar Movement of late Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan wanted the British to insert a third option of ‘independence’. Later, the party, that had all along played arch-rival to the Muslim League, supported Ms Fatima Jinnah in her bid to oust Field Marshal Ayub Khan. Then came the 1984 referendum of Gen Muhammad Ziaul Haq, and the party, which had initially supported the late military dictator by calling for accountability before elections, opposed him.

Why, then, this change of heart on the referendum issue? Critics refer to the alleged deal that led to the bail-out of former federal communication minister Muhammad Azam Khan Hoti, convicted by an accountability court on corruption charges.

If our memory is not so short, people would remember the ANP’s gleaming when Musharraf took over following a coup and announced his seven-point agenda. The party leaders had clinched at the agenda, claiming it to be theirs. The mood, however, quickly changed when the National Accountability Bureau laid its hand on Mr Hoti, and tried him at the Attock fort. The ANP that until the arrest of Azam Hoti had played along changed its tacks and began opposing the regime. But the party again softened its stand when Mr Hoti was allowed bail by a high court.

Master of political manoeuvring, brother of the party’s provincial president Begum Nasim Wali Khan, enjoys tremendous clout in the decision-making body of the ANP. He had to his credit the ANP’s 11-year long alliance with the Nawaz Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League, which many a political analysts had described a marriage of strange bed fellows. It was because of this crucial role that Sharif rewarded him with the all-lucrative portfolio of communication — an office that eventually landed him into the dungeons of dreaded Attock fort.

Mr Hoti is out and, therefore, the gossips are on again as to the future political strategy of the  ANP in the post-referendum and pre-election scenario. Talk to any of the supposedly pro-Musharraf political parties’ leaders, and they would flatly deny any role assigned to them for the October polls later this year. But it is now more or less common knowledge that the military planners of the present regime have already decided to encourage an alliance between the ANP, PPP Sherpao’s faction the Pakistan Muslim League (Q). The ANP has publicly lent its support to the policies of Gen Pervez Musharraf, and now the release of Mr Sherpao is only a matter of time while the PML (Q) is already doing the government’s bidding.

It remains to be witnessed that whether the government succeeds in its plans to counter the PPP and PML (N).

The PPP (Sherpao) may play to under cut the vote bank of the PPP and work more as a spoiler rather than a real challenger while the PML (Q) on the other hand has yet to prove itself on the husting.

But given the past electoral history of the NWFP, it is evident that an alliance between any of the two political parties — the ANP, PML and PPP— could outdo the other. The interesting thing this time round, however, is that there are now two faction of the Muslim League out in the field— the PML (N) having become an orphan and the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) which now enjoys the establishment’s support.

In this scenario, the ANP stands to gain more as the two PPPs and PMLs get at each other’s throat to undermine each other’s positions. But for now at least the ANP appears to be lost, not knowing which way to move - a fact candidly acknowledged by the senior party leaders, although privately.

IN HIS time Iqbal must have meant all kind of things to all kinds of people unlike the single, unified, haloed, non-incarnate mould we have cast him into now that most of us who do not know him know him by. Our national reverential intellect has this peculiar talent of reducing the most vital of our men to their smallest indisputable denomination. I don’t suppose there is a conspiracy in that because that would imply far-sightedness and long-term policies. But surely there is an unconscious trick embedded in our system that blocks the processes of thought whenever there is a danger we might come upon a truth.

The standard method is repetition of themes to parrot the same wooden ideas year after year till they are pulped down into a shapeless mass. Once again this April the topic chosen to be discussed at the Pakistan Academy of Letters was “Iqbal’s concept of Pakistan”. Even the dunderheads of our filmdom have of late shown greater ingenuity in finding cute titles for the same battered love tale. But Iqbal, poor soul, cannot be freed from a concept that has long since crossed the conceptual stage, become a reality and gone beyond, farthest from any vision that he might have nurtured in his poetic imagination. One may stretch one’s own fancy and for a moment visualize the Allama’s reaction on finding the Prime Minister of his dream country sending his goons to attack his own Supreme Court, namazees being gunned down in mosques by masked maulvis and having no one in sight upto the end of the horizon to awaken “my poor”.

Prof Fateh Mohammad Malik, ace scholar of Iqbaliat, dispelled the impression the Allama had any confusion in his mind about the concept. His vision was clear, as was the Quaid’s. That may be so. But the confusion probably arises when the concept is compared to the faith-shaking reality. It is very much like faulting Islam for the doings of an errant tribe. On a larger and general scale though, the confusion looks like having something to do with the lingering sense of loss Muslims the world over feel for their lost Empire.

Dr. Altaf Hussain, Vice Chancellor of the Allama Iqbal Open University, trying to rejuvenate the concept by giving it a 9/11 twist spoke in this very context of Iqbal’s pan-Islamism and his call for Muslim renascence that crusading propagandists of the West were currently trying to confuse with what they define as terrorism.

Pandit Nehru, in his book, “Discovery of India”, presents a broader social frame to understand Muslim aspirations in the post Khilafat period and Iqbal’s role “when the Muslim mind was searching for some anchor to hold on to”....”He supplied in fine poetry... a philosophic background to the Moslem intelligentsia and thus diverted its mind in a separatist direction”. But the main reasons according to Nehru were the Hindu character of Indian nationalism, the comparative backwardness of Muslim society and institutions and the slow development of a middle class free from feudal influences. “Pakistan... is of course no solution for this backwardness, and it is much more likely to strengthen the hold of feudal elements for some time longer and delay the economic progress of the Moslems,” he asserts.

“Iqbal”, says Nehru in the same paragraph, “was one of the early advocates of Pakistan and yet he appears to have realized its inherent danger and absurdity”. He quotes Edward Thompson in support of this claim. “ Probably he had changed his mind,”... Nehru goes on, “His whole outlook on life does not fit in with the subsequent developments of the idea of Pakistan or division of India”. If, as Pandit Nehru thinks, Iqbal had changed his mind about Pakistan, he could have hinted that to him (Nehru) at their last meeting at the poet’s invitation when he lay dying. But all he said then was that Jinnah “ is a politician, you are a patriot.” Pandit Nehru attributes Iqbal’s alleged lack of enthusiasm for Pakistan to his growing interest in socialism in his last years.

This progressive segment of the Allama’s thought was more keenly discussed at the PNCA the previous week.

Was the Poet of the East an opponent of women’s freedom, a fundamentalist, a rationalist or a true revolutionary who wanted the Ummah to discard all that was old, traditional and hackneyed? Prof Khawaja Masud affirmed the last contention in his stimulating talk on “Iqbal and Creativity”. He based the greater part of his argument on the poet’s Reconstruction Lectures that, he thought, presented the real Iqbal as opposed to the Iqbal the mullahs and their likes painted him to be from their selected readings of his diverse verse. Iqbal, he said, wanted Muslims to unshackle their minds and reject the rigid structures of thought by returning to the ceaseless quest of the new on the path of self discovery as man alone could participate in God’s creativity as a partner.

Khawaja Masud said conformism to Iqbal was akin to apostasy, which meant he wanted Muslims to question everything including the dogma. Khudi meant self-realizatioin, which according to a Hadith of the Holy Prophet was the same as knowing God. Creativity in Iqbal’s thought was the essence of faith. Conformism was the sure path to Hell. The world had to be built anew by breaking the structures raised by the imperialists and their lackeys, the mirs, the pirs and the mullahs, whom Iqbal held to be the enemies of man’s progress.

These provocative assertions about Iqbal’s revolutionary and iconoclastic stance were questioned by Ashfaq Salim Mirza who thought the Allama’s concept of the Ummah was muddled and his philosophical positions in the context of prescribed beliefs were also untenable. Dr Inayatullah went several steps further and said Iqbal could easily be seen as a fundamentalist in the light of much of his poetry; he was against women’s rights and their liberation in society and was not the revolutionary Khawaja Sahib was trying to make him out to be.

Khawaja Masud pointed out there was enough in Iqbal to debunk the forces of oppression and bigotry. We should not use Iqbal to strengthen the hands of such forces that were already in control and were not ready to accept this revolutionary strain in Iqbal’s thought. He said people must organize and remove mass illiteracy to unleash peoples’ creative energy that the establishment wanted to keep chained.

THE provincial excise and taxation department supplies official opium tablets to opium addicts on the doctor’s prescription. There are 800 addicts registered with the department who are entitled to a regular supply of a 10-tablet packet at the prescribed rate of Rs50.

Quite a scene is created when the addicts storm the excise office at the appointed dates every month. They stand in a long queue for hours and create the scene of a fish market.

According to insiders, the sale of opium tablets is a big scam bringing lucrative fortune to excise officials sharing the booty at all levels.

Doctors prescribe half a tablet to three tablets a day depending on to the severity of addiction, but addicts complain that they are never given the full quota on the pretext of short supply from the government. They allege the tablets saved from licensed addicts are sold in the black market at two to six times the government sale price.

According to some addicts, there are some fake addicts who get tablets only for resale to the deprived ones at double or triple the price. Likewise, there are genuine addicts among the social elite who would not expose themselves as opium eaters even before the doctor. They are, in fact, potential buyers and a medium to promote sale in the black market.

The genuine poor addicts are the worst hit due to short supply and have to secure the remaining dose from the black market. They have no voice being sourceless. They allege that 80,000 tablets are issued by the government every month out of which hardly 15,000 are sold to addicts. The remaining 65,000 go to the black market. Even addicts are charged Rs10 above the government rate per packet of 10 tablets while the same are sold from Rs200 to Rs300 per packet in the black market through agents.

Excise officials deny the sale of tablets in the black market, and say only 15,000 tablets are received from the government for 800 addicts and 15 to 20 tablets are given to each one of them which are short of the prescribed dose. They say short supply is the cause of the complaint.

Social sectors suggest that the total tablets received in a month and the total number of tablets sold should be displayed on notice board with a photocopy of documentary evidence. Social workers should be co-opted in the sale of tablets by rotation to make the supply transparent.

It is for medical experts also to evolve ways to reduce drug addiction.