The arithmetic of Election-2002

President General Pervez Musharraf has done to his opposition what his predecessors, both the military dictators as well as the democratically-elected ones, had done to theirs in their respective tenures. In Pakistan’s political culture the opposition has always been identified as something of a nuisance and not as the all important ‘check and balance’ clog in the proper functioning of parliamentary democracy. Branded as a bunch of ‘traitors’ or ‘corrupt’ or both the opposition has always been hounded out of the arena by the ruler of the day. Ayub did this to all those who refused to go along with him. Bhutto did the same to his opponents. Zia went and hanged his opponent and persecuted the PPP all through his 11-year reign. Benazir went hammer and tongs against Nawaz and Nawaz paid her back in the same coin when in power. The last time around he made it so hot for her that she had to leave the country in such a haste that she forgot to take her hubby along. And now Musharraf has made it so that not only Benazir and Nawaz cannot contest the next election, but they probably cannot even return home as long as he remains in power.

While persecuting the opposition, the rulers in Pakistan have always taken care to be on the right side of the law which has always obliged them by remaining where the ruler wanted it to be no matter where he or she stood in relation to the law. Musharraf too has taken care of this by first making his word the law of the land and then allowing the judiciary ‘full independence’ to function in accordance with this law for taking care of the opposition. And like all his predecessors, Musharraf too is doing everything in his power to ensure that in the national interest he continues to remain in power even after the elections. He has, therefore, set for himself three objectives: One, to keep Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif out of the October 10, 2002 contest, come what may; second, to smash both the PPP and the PML(N) to smithereens by the election time making it impossible for their followers to know whether these parties are coming or going; and third, to get a parliament elected which would help him give the Army a permanent role in the governance of the country.

As of today Musharraf seems to have succeeded in achieving his first objective; he has, seemingly, almost reached the winning post on the second objective as well; and, seemingly, he has succeeded in ‘paving’ the way for achieving the third objective on October 10. Some of his supporters believe that his success on this count is so complete that he would not need to resort to any kind of rigging on the election day.

Resort to ‘paving the way’ is being, seemingly, done only in rural Punjab where the elections have been so engineered as to cause a complete rout of the PML(N) and PPP. Since the MQM in urban Sindh, the MMA in Balochistan and the alliance of PPP(Sherpao) and PML(Q) in NWFP appear reasonably strong enough to stop the PML(N) and PPP from winning any significant number of seats in these areas, the establishment, it appears, does not feel it necessary to apply the hatchet in these locations. On the other hand it has decided to let the two parties have a free hand in urban Punjab because of the fear of adverse reaction to any pre-poll rigging from a public which does not dread the thana and kutchery as much as its rural counterpart. Rural Sindh is said to have been handed over to SDA of Imtiaz Shiekh to snatch away as many seats as possible from the PPP through its own on-location pre-poll engineering.

The tactics being used in the rural Punjab are said to be very simple and time-tested. Candidates with good winning record in the last four elections, irrespective of their party and biradari affiliations or their involvement in white collar crimes in the past, were approached and made to join the PML(Q) by using the stick and carrot method. This is being followed up by reinforcing the impression that the government had adopted the PML(Q) as its own Party. In this the print media without realising what it was doing is said to have played an important role as it kept harping on the fact in order to malign the PML(Q) which is said to have only helped in giving the Party a bigger than life image in those constituencies in the rural Punjab where the voters have always known to have gone with officially-sponsored candidates. This simple pre-poll engineering is estimated to yield as many as 106 seats to PML(Q) out of a total of 272 general National Assembly seats, making it the single largest Party in the parliament.

So, everything appears to be under control. But is it? And that, unfortunately, is the question which is seemingly turning the dream into a nightmare. What if despite everything you still get a hostile parliament? There are already those detractors who give the PML(Q) no more than 36 seats in the Parliament no matter what the extent of pre-poll engineering. So, one is tempted to think the unthinkable — selective rigging on the polling day!! But what if something went wrong with so many international observers roaming the country and one is caught with his hand in the till as happened during the referendum? Then you would be confronted not only with a hostile nation but also a hostile world. But what would happen if the pre-poll engineering fails to achieve the desired results and the government advisedly does not resort to rigging on October 10? The answer to this question could well be found in the following arithmetic:

If one went by the results of the last four elections and made adjustments for the addition of about 17 million new registered voters plus the addition of 65 extra seats in the National Assembly, one comes to the conclusion that the total votes that would be polled on October 10 would not be more than 30 million. Again going by the trends in the last four elections, of these 30 million votes PML(N) perhaps could claim 11 million as its vote bank while the PPP’s vote bank could be estimated at about 10 million. While this 10 million voters of the PPP would remain intact and perhaps come to the polling station if their Party conducted its campaign judiciously and ensured their physical turn-out on the e-day, the same could not be said about the PML(N)’s vote bank. The split in the League has seemingly caused an erosion in its vote bank which, perhaps, has been reduced to about 7 million. But then if the PPP and PML(N) on the one hand and PML(N) and the MMA on the other do some intelligent seat adjustments, one cannot rule out the possibility of the three parties winning as many as 195 seats among themselves with PPP romping home with 100 seats, PML(N) getting about 85 seats and the rest going to MMA. On the 77 odd seats, PML(Q) would perhaps get 36, the ANP 10, the MQM 8 while the remaining would be shared by the smaller parties contesting in Balochistan and other parts of the country.

A parliament with such a party profile can hardly be expected to endorse the President’s proposal to give the armed forces a permanent role in the governance. The President has already warned that in such a case he would be constrained to use the renewed Article 58(2b). But would not that be too costly a way, in political and financial terms, to come back from where you started from within a couple of months. So, why undertake the journey at all? And Bush too would not mind it as long as you are ‘tight’ with him on international terrorism.—Onlooker

Wheat game in Sindh!

AS much as Rs10 billion is at stake, but more than this it is the health of the people which will be at risk. This is about a recent war of words between flour millers and officials of the Sindh food department that has brought to the fore the fact that the two want to feed the people with old and ‘vulnerable’ wheat.

The Sindh government is anxious about selling this stock from previous years. It wants to export the wheat bought this spring from the farmers, but the millers say that this stock is ‘vulnerable,’ i.e. unfit for human consumption, and hence have not responded so far to the government’s offer reducing by Rs23 the jute sack price late last month.

The officials say that the flour millers are ‘black mailing’ the government by putting pressure on it for reducing the prices of wheat stock from government godowns. The millers, however, are demanding that this wheat stock be auctioned. Here they overlook the fact that if this stock is unfit for human consumption, why anyone should buy it.

After the Sindh government decided to cut down by Rs23 on the jute sack price, the food department issued instructions to deputy directors in Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Mirpurkhas and Larkana where wheat stock is being maintained to “ensure that the stock pertaining to the crop in 2000 only be cleared”. After a week the food department allowed the release of the ‘vulnerable’ stock, and now the stock pertaining to the crop in 2001 may also be issued.

Naeem Ahmad Malik, chairman of the Pakistan Flour Mills Association, Sindh chapter, maintains that out of 950,000 tons “there is a sizable quantity of wheat pertaining to the crops of ‘99-00 and ‘00-01, most of which is weevilled and unfit for human consumption”.

The Sindh cabinet wants quick disposal of this ‘vulnerable’ wheat stock, and there is all the possibility that the provincial government will succumb to this pressure and offer all this stock in auction at which cartels and syndicates of millers and traders will take care of the prices.

By the way, what is this ‘vulnerable’ wheat stock? It is the leftover unsold wheat from 1999-00 and ‘00-01 crops, stocked in most unhygienic conditions in godowns of the Sindh government. The Sindh food department now desperately wants to sell this stock.

That the Sindh government is so anxious about selling this stock is because of the fact that of the 950,000 tons of wheat it had procured against bank loans of over Rs10 billion almost 700,000 tons of wheat is from 1999-00 and ‘00-01 crops. To be exact, there are 375,000 tons of wheat from the 1999-00 crop against which there is a bank loan of Rs4.72 billion; 310,000 tons of stock from the 2000-01 crop on which there is a loan of Rs3.2 billion. The Sindh government procured 257,000 tons of wheat last spring against a bank loan of Rs1.9 billion.

There is a 685,000 ton stock of ‘vulnerable’ wheat from ‘99-00 and ‘00-01 years on which the Sindh government had obtained about Rs8 billion loan. Nobody knows the total accumulated financial liability on this amount, with interests.

This huge stock of wheat has been allowed to be damaged and lose quality in a province where half of the rural people live below the poverty line. In five rural districts of Sindh, the people live in unbelievable conditions. No one knows how many of them might have died of starvation. In this God-forsaken province almost 700,000 tons of wheat, against which the people of Sindh have to pay Rs8 billion, has been allowed to rot and perish.

A clarification issued by the Sindh food secretary a week back claimed that all the money that is borrowed and the mark-up paid is to help the small growers and to encourage them to cultivate wheat.

The fact is that only politically influential farmers, with big land holdings, get an opportunity to sell their wheat stock at government procurement centres. Small growers at subsistence level are forced to sell their produce to the middleman at prices much lower than fixed officially.

The Sindh government wants to export 100,000 tons out of 257,000 tons from the last crop because it will bring a subsidy of Rs3,000 on every one ton of wheat exported. This subsidy can be shared by all the players in the wheat game. Consumers in foreign market will be provided wheat at Rs6.50 a kilogram or even less as against Rs8.50 to Rs9 a kilogram in Pakistan.

Big sharks have already started taking advantage of the confusion in wheat market, and the latest report suggests a rise in flour price by one to two rupees on a kilogram. The nexus of feudals, corrupt officials of the food department and unscrupulous millers is working overtime to manipulate to cheat small growers and consumers.

The real US objectives

SO ‘LITTLE Bush’ (as Iraq calls him) and his poodle, Tony Blair, have gone and done it. Anglo-American aircraft have hit targets in Iraq in an alleged attempt to “remove air defences to allow easy access for special forces helicopters to fly into Iraq via Jordan or Saudi Arabia to hunt down Scud missiles before a possible war, a Telegraph report said on Friday (September 6).

This means that the raids took place a day earlier. And all this despite the fact that international opinion was building up against an American attack on Iraq. However, reports were coming in that the US was about to disregard public opinion in a shameless bid to topple Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, a French specialist on Iraq said only the other day that he was convinced that the US had already decided to attack Iraq. He said he was convinced that the US “plans to stage its attack” whether or not such action was vetoed in the UN Security Council. The UN Security Council? Well, our own George Bush is not pushed, because his aims and objectives in the Middle East are most laudable and most honourable. As the French specialist cited above said that the goals being pursued by the US were meant to ensure control over this highly strategic zone — Iraq in particular and Central Asia in general — to dominate petroleum reserves, create a strategic partnership with Israel, aid in establishing a Turco-Israeli military alliance, and prevent the emergence of any strong and independent Arab state or group of States.”

The Americans are determined to convince as that the “world will be better off without Saddam Hussein.” (White House spokesman Ari Fleischer).

There are times when I think that the world be better off without George Bush who thinks that he is there in the White House for keeps. That’s why God keeps those He loathes on a long, long leash.

AHMAD RAHI who died here the other day, has left behind innumerable songs which he wrote for Punjabi (and some Urdu) films for almost half a century. A very dear friend has sent me a list of some of his better remembered songs which I want to share with you.

My friend’s list is:

1. Tenun bhul gayyan sadian chahwan

Nimmi nimmi wa wagdi.

Many of Rahi’s best songs have been sung by Nur Jehan. In more ways than one, Rahi and Nur Jehan went together. Indeed, sometimes it looks as though God had willed that Rahi should only write for Nur Jehan and that Nur Jehan should only sing for Rahi.

Let’s have some bridges: KARACHI FILE

LIFE in this city moves at a very fast pace. It is more or less the same in all cities of this size in our times. We have a lot more of accidents in our streets than in comparable cities of the world, even the Third World. Once in the street, one is not sure of the safety of life or limb. If the child or husband is late in returning home, the lady of the house is haunted by all manner of apprehensions.

This should be entirely avoidable agony, if only we were a trifle less disorganized. For instance, if there are fixed and prominently visible bus stops, and bus drivers are obliged to not to stop anywhere except at these designated points, a great deal of risk of accidents would be reduced. If not eliminated. The comfort of the commuters will be additional bonus.

Why this bit of discipline is not enforceable is anybody’s guess and everybody’s worry. The indiscipline on our roads is so close to chaos that one simply has to conclude that our traffic police may be engaged in any activity (some of it ‘exotic’), except traffic control. What prevents these gentlemen in white from doing the needful about bus stops?

This is not the first time this simple question has been posed. One answer that occurs to mind straightaway is that you have to have properly marked and designated bus stops, in the first place. There certainly are some stops still to be seen. The public transport drivers do not respect these. Why should the drivers respect what the traffic police do not?

How many buses display their route numbers? Few and far between. Under the rules, every public transport permitted to ferry passengers is supposed to indicate its route. This is obviously necessary to ensure that public transport do not stray out their authorized routes. One reason why this is not insisted upon is to give them a free hand. Can this favour be for free?

Over-crowding in public buses is chronic. Maybe, this is inevitable in the life of the Third World poor. If it is a torment for the commuter, it is so much more of money for the busowner. Is it ever reflected in his income tax return? You can be sure, it is not. Transporters, who can dodge road tax, can dribble their way out of the tax collector’s obligingly slippery fingers.

Getting into an over-crowded bus from the middle of the road, or getting out of it in a similar way, is fraught with the most terrible of risks. Imagine women and children exposed to this harrowing danger. Apparently nobody is horrified. We do feel like shedding a tear when we read of these accidents in the newspaper. Then we wait for the next, merely hoping for the best and unafraid of the worst.

What about crossing fast traffic on our busy roads? Every time a citizen crosses the road, because of an unavoidable compulsion to do that, a human life is put at stake. Maybe not one but many lives. Is there no way to reduce this danger, if it may be impossible to eliminate? There are countless places in this a city where we need pedestrian overhead bridges. This facility will reduce the risk to life enhancing the speed of vehicular traffic underneath.

Here we seem to have some cause to feel good. It is reported that the city government is already thinking of overhead pedestrian bridges. If this is really so, we may be moving in the right direction in respect of at least one major civic concern. Bridges in the life of the human race have played extraordinary roles. Imagine how many bridges that enlightened ruler Sher Shah constructed as he built that road across the north of this subcontinent.

Let us return to pedestrian bridges across our busy roads. It is quite possible to begin this process, confident that with just some imagination and some goodwill, these bridges can be self-sustaining in financial terms. We know that imaginatively-planned bridges can become the pride of a city and of a community. Bridges do the city of Paris proud no less than that steel tower. One bridge — across the Bosphorus — links two mighty continents!

There would be many ways of going about this idea of pedestrian bridges over our traffic-choked roads and highways. Why not float the idea of these bridges as highly visible advertising and sales promotion landmarks across the city.

The first step is to nominate the points where such bridges are needed, in the first phase. The Town Nazimeen should invite the public concerned to the proposed sites. This idea is to be developed for their benefit.

The broad and basic criterion here is the number of people likely to see a bridge as they drive past it, the number of people likely to use it. These most probably would be the considerations of the prospective ‘bridge-sponsors.’ Shall we say, we have twenty sites selected in the first phase. It would be interesting to see architects and artists coming forward to join in this campaign by entering into an open competition for bridge design.

If there are to be such bridges, in the first place these must be good to look at. The people of the locality should be able to see their bridge as something much more than a facility to cross a busy road — a matter of local pride.

A promised prize of around Rs50,000 for each selected design should attract architects to join in this wonderful enterprise. The designer should be assured his/her name will be displayed on both sides of the body of the bridge.

All of this should be very exciting and rewarding. A ‘Bridges Campaign,’ intelligently organized, will offer the people of Karachi a subject to think, talk and work about in a constructive spirit. We in Karachi so acutely need something to feel good about. This could be one.

Grossly insensitive

While September 6 is invariably accompanied by an outpouring of patriotic sentiment, there is no need to use the occasion to promote hatred against other faiths.

The Darakhshan branch of a well-known chain of private schools clearly crossed the line during its Defence Day celebrations. During assembly, students were made to enact a tableau in which a group of children playing Muslim soldiers gleefully machine-gunned a group of cowering ‘Hindus’ (symbolically dressed in black) to depict the Pakistan Army’s heroic performance in the 1965 war.

What was distasteful about the show was that the opposing forces were depicted in religious terms and not as two nations at war. It must be remembered that Pakistan has a sizeable population of Hindu citizens. Putting up a performance that incites young children against other religions is not just grossly insensitive but could be extremely distressing for the Hindu children at the school. Ironically, this kind of casual Hindu-bashing was not taking place in some B grade Lollywood blockbuster but at a school that prides itself on its progressive credentials.

Given the alarming rise in intolerance and religious violence in the country, it is important for school managements to teach their students the virtues of tolerance and refrain from exposing young and impressionable children to this kind of blind prejudice. Commemorating September 6 should be about paying homage to the bravery and sacrifices of the armed forces and not an excuse to poison young minds against other religions.

A friend was quite peeved the other day by the very elaborate security arrangements the Karachi police made for President Pervez Musharraf. Sabahat Qadri writes of her experience last week: “Bringing traffic to a standstill from the airport to Metropole Hotel seems to be a necessity when it comes to the security of our government executives. The residents of Karachi are fairly used to the inconvenience of long traffic delays, and the occasional, overbearing, pushy policemen that are part and parcel of heightened security. There has to be a limit, however, to the aggravation our presidents and prime ministers expect us to endure.

“I was mildly surprised, when I came out of my office building on Monday, to find that my car, along with the long line of legally parked cars in the side lanes of Sharea Faisal, had been towed away. Since the president was expected to pass through the city that evening, the strongest precaution that the police could think of was to remove all parked cars from the road (here’s a thought: ever heard of satellites? Tall buildings with multiple windows and sharp-shooters?).

“I was told that I might find my car in any one of the lanes along Sharea Faisal, if I cared to trudge up and down and look for it, which, unfortunately, I did. By the time I discovered that it was actually at the Ferozabad Station, my temper had risen several notches. But when I heard that I was going to be fined for parking in a place where I have parked for the last year (and paying Rs. 25 every day), and that I would have to pay for the tow-truck too, my temper shot through the roof. If I hadn’t been with my colleague, I may well have paid them and then lit a bonfire in the middle of the station. Luckily, he restrained me and we were able to search out a senior officer and extricate our cars without incurring any loss other than the 45 minutes we spent searching going up and down Sharea Faisal, and the 90 minutes listening to the police vent their own fury against the security arrangements and complaining how thirsty they (as in the police) were.

“While I have to admit that the police did inform the maintenance department of the buildings that cars parked outside would be towed, many offices within each building were not passed on this information. Additionally, I have to give full marks to the city government for making sure that they recovered from me that day’s full parking charges. “Coming back from a meeting at 2.30 pm (the impending removal of the cars, apparently, was announced by the police at 1 pm), a colleague of mine parked his car outside the building, paid the parking charges, saluted the KMC worker, and strolled inside. He wasn’t informed of the day’s activities, and saw no movement of the cars to alert him. Nor did any of the hundreds of traffic police and Rangers strolling about bother to tell him that his car just might not be there when he came down again. Policemen of Karachi: I take my hat off to your inefficiency — nobody but nobody does it better!!”

One of the problems that I often experience has to do with trying to buy a good book. A shop that is frequently visited is the well-stocked Liberty Books place in Park Towers. Unfortunately, the only problem is that many of their titles are quite expensive. In fact, this doesn’t just apply to Liberty but to all other major book retailers like OUP or Vanguard. It’s no point going into why English books are often so expensive since the arguments have all been heard before. But how do you explain a two hundred page book by say, Noam Chomsky, priced at eleven hundred rupees? I guess this has to do with the dollar price of the book which was around fourteen American dollars. And then the retailer has to have his margin on it.

Keeping all this in mind, it’s a very good thing when our bookstores do decide to have sales. September is a good month because that’s when two major outlets, OUP and Paramount Books, hold their annual sales. The Paramount sale began around a week ago and will go on till Wednesday (Sept 11) while the OUP one will carry on till the end of the month. I happened to go to the Paramount sale a few days back and managed to find quite a few decent bargains.

The following five books: Satellites Over South Asia (David Page and William Crawley); Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Seutonius); The Macmillian Good English Handbook; Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International (Jonathan Power) and the Penguin edition of Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases cost just a little over eleven hundred rupees. The same Noam Chomsky book that I had wanted to buy earlier was selling at a 25 per cent discount.

The sale has quite a few Indian literature books on sale and a large collection of Penguin Classics. The only problem with the latter is that even after the discount they are pretty expensive. There is even a section on Dilbert the comic strip, with several of creator Scott Adams books available at reasonable prices.

Hopefully, the OUP sale will be as good.

Since the two bomb blasts most of the activities organized by the various foreign cultural centres in the city have come to an unfortunate stop. Alliance Francaise, the French cultural centre, did continue with its French classes courses and summer camps till the end of summer vacations but for now it has been closed, at least till October with several planned events postponed.

The Pak American Cultural Centre however has been functioning normally and one reason for this might be that all its staff is Pakistani. Their English conversation courses for children and adults are going on as usual and the PACC auditorium is being used by various local theatre groups.

As for the Goethe Institut, a colleague called its numbers but there was no response. Earlier a notice on the notice board outside their gates read that the place was closed for summer vacations until August 5. Well, it is still closed. The guards posted there say that it may reopen by December.

The British Council, which had become very active under its new director, Charlie Walker, has decided to close down indefinitely its library and many other services. All library members are being refunded and the borrowed material can be returned at the Hotel Regent Plaza. One wonders, though, about the people who work at these places, since most of the staff are hired locally.

Tailpiece: A sticker seen on the rear windscreen of a Charade in the Boating Basin area read: “Pakistan Army: We don’t overtake, we take over”.

—By Karachian

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com