Where do they land? : KARACHI FILE

WHENEVER the Minister of the Interior deigns to visit Karachi, the citizens get something for which they heave a smile (not a sigh) of relief. This time round he has given us the gift of a new ‘vehicle authority.’ It is still on the drawing boards, presumably in Islamabad. Though much of this blessing remains unrevealed, the slip that is showing suggests we shall have some extra colour to our lives. Each car number plate shall wear the colour awarded to the province of its original registration. This to facilitate instant identification.

We certainly can do with a bit more of colour, if only on our car number plates. After 9/11 in the United States, life had become a narrow, single-track trudge. All of us were tracing terror of a sort so different from the types of terror we were familiar with, like shootouts at mosques, Imambargahs, graveyards. Or targeting medical practitioners. All that now looks trivial when we have suicide bombers and, for all we know, remote-control blasts.

Thanks to our city police boss, for a while we were helped back to our routine car thefts. As compared to our 5/10, that is the blast of May 10, or 6/14, that is of June 14 with its much more devastating blast, car thefts are not even flea-bites. Thanks to our police intellectuals, the usual crime now looks innocent as a child at play.

Primarily for the benefit of the Minister of the Interior, there was a command performance to tell him what is what about car stealing/hijacking in Karachi. The police chief rattled off a star-studded saga covering January-May, 2002. The unerring Anti-car Lifting Cell (ACLC) recovered 123 cars and 63 motorcycles. It busted an inter-provincial gang, catching 223 car hijackers and thieves.

There is a neat difference of one hundred between car hijackers/thieves (223) caught, and cars (123) actually recovered. It is so much easier to catch men than to recover mobile machines. Five months, with 150 days, make the recovery of 123 cars less than one a day. The average motorcycle recovery is precisely 0.42 a day.

Let us put the average at six cars and eight motorcycles daily stolen/ hijacked. At Rs5,500,000, the average price of a car, 180 cars gone a month means Rs99,000,000 lost. From January to May this would add up to Rs495,000,000. In words this would read four hundred ninety-five million rupees. On account of motorcycles lost during the same period, the damage would be Rs86,400,000 — the total Rs581,400,000.

Translated into rupees, recovery of 123 cars is worth Rs67,650,000, and 63 motorcycles worth Rs3,780,000, — total Rs71,430,000. Compared to the total loss of Rs581,400,000, the deficit would work out to Rs509,970,000. Let us round this off at the lower figure of Rs500,000,000 and work out the damage per head of the 13.5 million citizens in this never-say-die city. Each one of us — you and I included — is paying nearly 40 rupees to bring paradise down on earth for the Car Thieves & Associates.

It emerges that our Karachi police are proud of the recovery 123 cars. Don’t be a spoil sport. Forget the 777 that remain unrecovered. The recovered 63 motorcycles leave 1,136 unaccounted for. This again be better consigned to the safe-keeping of oblivion.

After all, the motorcycle is the vehicle of the lower middle class that doesn’t count for much, anyway. If there was a foolproof case for looking at the brighter side, leaving the hindmost to the devil, here is one pleaded by our protectors in Karachi.

That car-lifting is an inter-provincial romance has also been very tidily portrayed with the help of precise statistics. The 223 suspects arrested during January-May present a fascinating mosaic of us as a many-splendoured people. The place Number One 1 on the victory stand in this sport is taken by Karachi — the host team — with its contribution of 77 to the total of the trapped 223 alleged car-lifters. For the Second Place there is a tie. The Sindh interior and Balochistan have landed 43 each in the police net. Punjab stands third with 20 and, close as close can be, is the Northwest Frontier Province, with 19. This makes car-related crime a very, very inter-provincial enterprise. A team work, if you like.

Our city police are very adroitly assisted by the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), which is about the most sophisticated public-service institution east of Suez. With its experience, information aids, satellite- tuned tracking devices, and refined intellectual input, we should expect soon to witness the last of car-lifting. We know where elephants go to die. Now we only need to know where do our stolen/hijacked cars go to be driven happily ever after.

Let us get down to earth and think of the basics. How do the cars spirit away? Where do they actually land? Another allied question, who takes the enormous profits from this billion-rupee commerce? Of course not police? Most certainly not the ACLC. The CPLC be counted totally out.

Surely, somebody is thriving on this commerce. Let us find out who.

Taking on the parking mafia

IT WAS certainly good to read that some people had finally decided to take on the charged parking mafia in the city. Residents of several apartment buildings in Clifton — around Uzma shopping plaza and Clifton centre to name a few — have filed a suit in the Sindh High Court against the charged parking scheme in their area.

The plaintiffs have said that the parking charge of ten rupees for three hours, or two thousand rupees for a month, was not only exorbitant and arbitrary but also that it went against common sense. They said that the buildings should have had car parks inside them but since there weren’t any they (the residents) had no choice but to park on the road. And, to charge them for that was unfair. The areas mentioned above also come under the jurisdiction of the Clifton Cantonment Board which has often been criticized its failure in taking into account the wishes of those who live within its limits (this is quite a common feature).

The residents are right in saying that neither the city government nor any other executing agency ever publicized this scheme. They say that if any decision had been made to introduce charged parking in their neighbourhood it should have been properly announced in some major newspapers so that those who had any objections to it could be heard.

One particular aspect of the scheme that piqued me was the fact that the official notification exempted all vehicles with government and official number plates from paying the fee. This might be all right in a country where official cars are used only for official purposes. But we all know that in Pakistan this is hardly the case.

People are sick and tired of being pushed to the wall by governments that continually pile on taxes and other charges but offer little in return. Let’s see and wait how this case fares before the courts.

The terrible bomb blast outside the US consulate in Karachi not only left a trail of death and destruction in its wake but has also seriously disrupted the lives of thousands of people.

The closure of Abdullah Haroon Road, the vital artery that takes you from the city centre to Clifton and beyond to Defence, has created the most horrible traffic snarl-ups and almost doubled the commuting time for the unfortunate residents of those areas. On Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road, for example, there is bumper-to-bumper traffic during the morning rush hour and once again in the evenings. A journey from Chundrigar Road to Clifton, which would normally take a mere 10 to 15 minutes in the past, can now stretch to close to an hour thanks to the slow moving traffic and the bottlenecks on both the Clifton Bridge and the flyover.

Once within Clifton, the entire area beyond the Do Talwar roundabout and within the ‘diplomatic enclave’ opposite 70 Clifton has taken on the look of a war zone, with barbed wire strewn across roads and heavily armed men menacingly pointing guns at you from numerous points. Getting in and out of this area, which houses many of the most sensitive consulates, can be a nightmare. Once you’re lost in this maze unable to find a way out, your car, circling round and round the ‘Auntie’ Park, begins to look suspect to the armed men who are responsible for security.

Many people are now saying that they wished some of the consulates, specially the strategically located US consulate, would move to some less central and more easily guarded part of the city. For all the grumbling about the inconvenience caused by the blocking of roads, there are some people who are happy to see this situation prevail. Some residents of the main Clifton Road, for example, are secretly happy to see their road blocked off to through traffic.

One resident of a flat says that the area has become wonderfully quiet and peaceful since the road was blocked off. In the past, the road was the main thoroughfare for the hordes of weekend revellers heading to Clifton or Seaview. Motorbikes without silencers and donkey cart racers noisily egging on their animals had become the bane of their existence. But those happy with the current situation are a tiny minority. Most residents of the area are praying that the blockade soon ends and Abdullah Haroon Road is once again reopened. Their feelings are echoed by the thousands of people denied the pleasure of strolling around in Frere Hall since the bomb blast

A leading international tea brand has decided that the time is ripe for it to enter the Guinness Book of World Records by making the world’s biggest tea bag. A colleague who went to the hotel ceremony where this gigantic tea bag was unveiled came back saying that it surely was the largest she had ever laid eyes on.

She said that because of the recent terrorist attacks she had to park very far from the hotel and this was quite a problem. Not only this, even the representatives of the Guinness World Records declined an invitation from the organizers to come and attend the ceremony and see for themselves just how large the tea bag was.

The hall was decorated with red and yellow balloons and the FM 100 radio channel was transmitting live from the venue. However, the evening did have its share of small mishaps though. Just when the chief guest was about to unveil the teabag, one of the props fell and after it was set right, the curtain got stuck.

Compared to a normal tea bag, which is 2.5 inches by 1.8 inches in size, this one is 60 times bigger. It is 10 feet high, seven feet wide with an eight feet long string — which looks more like a rope — attached to a tag two feet by 2.5 feet. It contains seven kilogrammes of tea.

Now that we apparently have the biggest tea bag in the world, what’s to follow? Perhaps, a competition for the biggest wind bag?

Of the numerous major roads in Karachi, the Baloch Colony expressway connecting Defence with Sharea Faisal and the airport is perhaps one of the more important ones. Stretching several kilometres, this road is used by thousands of commuters and motorists every day, especially since this route has cut the travelling time between Defence and KDA and the airport by a considerable margin.

A colleague who uses this route frequently thinks that travel on this road has now its share of hazards. The road surface is fine, actually quite smooth, but the problem, he says, has to do with the number of people who dart back and forth the expressway trying to cross it in the face of fast oncoming traffic.

Residents of Manzoor Colony and adjoining localities often cross the busy highway and given that it has quite a few sharp turns this can sometimes be a dangerous proposition.

However, it should be remembered that like most large projects, the expressway was basically thrust on the residents of this neighbourhood. Manzoor Colony has been around for years, and was certainly there before any highway was built past it. Had city planners built the expressway in a manner that did not cut through an otherwise vibrant neighbourhood there probably would have been little need for people to cross roads and unnecessarily put their lives at risk.

The colleague, though, has one valid point. He says that sometimes children walking along it throw large stones at passing cars and that perhaps someone should tell them about the very real danger of doing that.

TAILPIECE: A reader of Karachi Notebook has sent an email with reference to the piece Metro Fuss last week. S. Babar wrote: “Bravo to the lady who sought justice from the Metrobus driver... If more people stood up for their rights in every field of life things might improve some day....”. — By Karachian

But if I am for myself alone

DEXTER MASTERS wrote The Accident some time before 1955. It was first published in Britain that year. The blurb says: “This is the story of the eight days it took a man to die at Los Alamos while the doctors of the nation watched him. On the inside of the title page, the following lines appear:

If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am for myself alone, what do I amount to?

I would like to share with you some of the quotes from this book. Quite early on, Masters says:

“It is now possible for people to pass each other in the streets and on the walks without recognizing each other, a thing which was possible but difficult a few years ago.”

Then again :”... as the philosopher Comte noted, with the development of man’s great concepts: they proceed from the theological or fictitious stage to the metaphysical or abstract (in which the word is often formulated) and finally to the scientific or positive (in which the word is said) .... the word had been formulated. And then, while scientists danced with excitement in their laboratories like priests and medicine men at a fiesta, and circled the fires of their oscilloscopes all through many nights on end, the word was said: fission. The magic was brought in, and from that point everything was potent.”

Says Masters yet again:

“A lone individual on a mountaintop is most likely to be a prophet, and it is significant that Moses and Zarathustra and indeed most prophets retired either to mountaintops or, what is not so different, deserts.”

And look at this:

“It was harder to put a finger on what he was talking about but the last words he had used were “(the) irresponsibility of self-appointed intellectual tyrannies. He had not said them; he had muttered them, partly because he was not used to putting together so many words like that and partly because he had begun to lose his grip on what the hell they were talking about at all.”

Yet again,

“What meaning did life have if its obliteration could be contemplated as one possibility in anything?... Didn’t people have a responsibility to life itself, if not to other people, not to go this far? .... Well, then, was this not of the nature of evil? Or worse, didn’t this reduce both good and evil to a whim?

“... and the town itself has the special enchantment that many towns have before the people who live in them are up and around.” “He was thinking to himself about a line from a writer, a Russian writer he thought; the line was: ‘All prayers come to this: ‘Dear Lord, please make two and two not equal four.’”

Yes, this is what I have often prayed for: Please God, do not make two and two equal four. That’s when I want to cheat or to get something I do not deserve or to prevent something from happening which is inevitable.

Lahore is not an enchanting place before the people who live here are up and around. For one thing, the people who live here are always up and around. There is traffic all night on Ferozepur Road, for instance. And no place can be enchanting with so many ugly, heavy-duty vehicles ‘up and around.’

However there are places — not the whole city — which can still be enchanting. One of them is the main park in Model Town. You go there early in the morning and you will feel that this is the very first day of all Creation. But come back home before the Model Towners are ‘up and around.’ These people kill Model Town every day — by just being ‘up and around.’

A GULF newspaper holds that Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, Raquel Welch and Greta Garbo are the five most beautiful women of all time. Surprisingly, all five are twentieth century women. And the paper should have qualified its choice by saying that Kelly, Dietrich, Bergman, Welch and Garbo were the five most beautiful women since the camera was put to professional use. This ‘all time’ claim is a bit too much. And why select only those women who were film actresses?

Think of the other women down the centuries, from the first to the twentieth. I think the ‘all time’ status should be conferred on Eve. Think of the man she enticed out of paradise. Must have been some woman.

MIRZA Samar Ahmad, formerly of Okara and now of Rabwah, writes:

Some time ago, in order to show to the world how liberal, tolerant and forward-looking and how eager the present government was to weld together all the people of Pakistan into a single, harmonious polity, it was decided and announced by no less a person than the president himself that the elections would be held on the basis of joint electorate and that the right of vote would be based on a person’s citizenship, not his faith, sect, creed or ethnicity. Now joint electorate by its very definition means a joint voters’ list of all citizens irrespective of their beliefs. For getting registered as a voter, a person has to be a citizen of Pakistan and the election commission has no business to ask him or her about his or her political affiliations or religious faith, creed and sect.

Unfortunately, the government has succumbed to threats from some maulvis and beaten a hasty retreat and the election commission has issued “The Conduct of General elections (Second Amendment) Order, 2002” which says:

“If a person has got himself enrolled as a voter and objection is filed before the Revising Authority notified under the Electoral Rolls Act, 1974, within ten days from the issuance of the Conduct of General Elections (Second Amendment) Order, 2002, that such a voter is not a Muslim, the Revising Authority shall issue a notice to him to appear before it within fifteen days and require him to sign a declaration regarding his belief about the absolute and unqualified finality of the Prophethood of Muhammad (peace be upon him) in Form IV under the Electoral Rolls Rules, 1974. In case he refuses to sign the declaration as aforesaid, he shall be deemed to be a non-Muslim and his name shall be deleted from the joint electoral area (sic) as a non-Muslim.”

So much for the so-called joint electorate. As is obvious, this is an amendment specifically directed against the Ahmadis. Why beat about the bush and indulge in all this lengthy rigmarole couched in legalese? The General is the monarch of all he surveys. Why does he not simply issue an ordinance that in his wisdom he has decided that the Ahmadis have no right of vote? This would endear him to the maulvis for all time to come as Mr Bhutto made himself their darling after the Second Amendment to the 1973 Constitution.

I think what Mirza Samar Ahmad had in mind was what Dexter Masters referred to as the “irresponsibility of (the) self-appointed intellectual tyranny” of Gen Musharraf. The General, Mirza Sahib, is never naked, not even in his own bath. Again, if he is not for himself alone, what does he amount to?

INDIAN Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said recently:

“Unfortunately, in recent times, the logic of conflict resolution through dialogue has had a formidable enemy. Its name is terrorism, sustained by religious extremism. Its epicentre is in India’s neighbourhood.”

Quite a seismologist is Mr Vajpayee. But he is, at the same time, really rather blind. Had this not been so, he would not have failed to detect another and far more active epicentre of “terrorism sustained by religious extremism” — Ahmadabad in Gujarat. But if he is not blind, he certainly is as faint-hearted as he is mean-spirited. Or so the dictionary tells me.

BUT hold on! Here’s the joke of the century — 1902-2002. “Country Needs Benazir, says Nasrullah Khan”, says a Dawn headline (June 22).

Talking to newsmen at Bilawal House, Karachi, on Friday (June 21), the Nawabzada said: “Benazir is the need of the hour for the country as her role in the democratic movement counts most... We have a natural alliance (sic) with Benazir Bhutto because we have all struggled together for the restoration of democracy in the country.” Fancy finding Ms Bhutto and Nasrullah Khan on the same side of the fence! Nasrullah is the man who shouted “Benazir Must go” when she had been prime minister for barely a few months in 1989. Nasrullah is the man who played a decisive role in her father’s ouster by the army. Nasrullah is the man who led her father to the gallows. Or at least he was an accessory before the fact. Ah, with a friend like Nasrullah who needs enemies like LK Advani and George Fernandes or even Vajpayee?

Who is behind the terror incidents?: VIEW FROM MARGALLA

PUNJAB HAD remained completely calm and peaceful in the days immediately following our decision to join the international coalition against the Taliban. Some extremely hostile public protests were, however, witnessed in some pockets of NWFP, Balochistan and Karachi. But these too died down within a matter of weeks. And Punjab continues to remain calm even after the President’s January 12 and May 27 speeches. And these speeches did not excite the people of the other three provinces one bit. Of course, three major terrorist incidents have occurred in the country since January. Karachi was the venue of two of these incidents while one has taken place in Islamabad. In the first incident, some 12 Frenchmen were killed in a bus in front of a Karachi hotel and the second incident in which only the local people lost their lives occurred in front of the US Consulate in Karachi. The Islamabad incident occurred in the International Protestant Church located in the Diplomatic Enclave. Clearly, foreigners and not Pakistanis were the target of all these three incidents.

And since, after the church incident the law and order situation in Islamabad had remained by and large stable, it seems that the reach of those behind these terrorist incidents has been severely curtailed and now they seem to be finding it increasingly difficult to operate outside Karachi. And even in Karachi their movement seems to have been notably cramped by the heavy presence of foreign investigation agencies. However, these elements seem to have found Karachi a safer place to operate from than any other part of Pakistan because in the first place this sprawling metropolis offers them quick and easy entry and exit points. Secondly, since the hay days of MQM, the city has virtually become a safe haven for various mafia and criminal gangs who are ready to do anything for money. And the law enforcement agencies in the city have never been known for their efficiency and integrity.

Since so far these elements have not tried to cause any direct harm to Pakistan by attacking any high profile government personality or the people at large except adding to the country’s already very bad investment situation, it is perhaps safe to assume that those among us who do not agree with the present government’s brand new Kashmir strategy are not behind these incidents. In fact it appears as if the government has successfully switched off what it had switched on in the mid-’90s in the name of Kashmir Jihad. And now it seems the remnants of Al-Qaeda, which escaped with their lives into Pakistan after the fall of Kabul to the international forces, are trying to regroup in Pakistan to hit back at the interests of the West and the US. However, the incident, in which French submarine technicians were killed, has caused a serious setback to our Navy, a development which in these times of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with India would benefit only New Delhi. Therefore, one cannot at this juncture rule out the possibility of the RAW trying to stage its own side-show under the cover of the dust being kicked up by the Al-Qaeda. So, it could be Al-Qaeda alone or Al-Qaeda and RAW both trying separately to carry out their own respective missions inside Pakistan. The danger, which is real and menacing, needs to be tackled with all the force at our command and quickly too because a couple of more incidents like these would prove to be too costly in terms of our nationhood.

And more importantly, by controlling these incidents, the government could put to rest the suspicion among outsiders that these acts of terror were being perpetrated by those within the government who are opposed to giving up Jihad as a strategy in Kashmir. Pakistan’s is a one man Army. Once a decision is taken by the Chief in consultation with the top commanders, it is never challenged, either at the top, middle or lower echelons of the institution. That is unity of command for you. It would certainly seem very strange to those who had perhaps confused Pakistan Army’s post-1990 Kashmir Jihad strategy with some kind of a religious cause. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the hindsight it seems that the Kashmir Jihad was perhaps adopted under given circumstances as a strategy but not as a cause by the Army. And every one within the institution who was responsible for promoting, implementing and operating it on the ground knew it as a strategy and never practised it as a cause. So, one is not likely to see any trauma or a major upheaval within the institution in the wake of a change in the strategy leading to any significant opposition to falling back on our historic strategy of calling on the world to get India to honour the UN resolutions and hold a plebiscite in Kashmir as well as providing to Kashmiris all kinds of moral, diplomatic and political help in their struggle against foreign occupation. And also for the same reason there seems to be no need for any personnel changes in any department of the institution. The same persons who were implementing the earlier strategy would execute the new one with equal fervour and zeal. In order to understand this fine point one only has to recall how enthusiastically and passionately General Musharraf used to sell the Taliban to the world in the pre-9/11 period and then compare this sales pitch of his with his September 17, 2001 speech in which he had made a highly convincing case for abandoning the Taliban. Similarly recall his ardent advocacy of Jihad in Kashmir until January 12 and then compare his equally convincing arguments since then in favour of a new strategy. And since there have been no large scale public protests, specially in the Punjab against this change in the strategy, it is perhaps safe to assume that it has a popular sanction as well! The whimpers of protests which one has heard so far from people like Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan and a couple of not so popular leaders of PML(N) could be easily disregarded as none of them are going to make any significant impact in the coming elections, if at all they are held!! —ONLOOKER