| November 19, 2002 | Tuesday | Ramazan 13, 1423 |
Pitfalls of manipulation
If history were a horse-cart named Chaos, Ayodhya would be the route to Judea
Lead playing havoc with human life
GENERAL Pervez Musharraf was sworn in as president shortly before the National Assembly convened for its inaugural sitting on Saturday. His new term of five years is predicated on the referendum held last April. The Legal Framework Order and most of the controversial ordinances have also come in the wake of the referendum. It should thus be seen as an important constitutional and political benchmark
KARACHI: The government has cut down the level of lead, a toxic heavy metal, in gasoline, from 0.35 gm/lit to 0.05 gm/lit. “Although this is a positive step, what we need is completely lead-free gasoline,” says Ahmed Saeed, an environment expert who heads the Environment Assessment Services, IUCN.
AFTER the Oct 10 election, the Nov 16 swearing-in of the National Assembly members marks the second step in the country’s third transition in history from a military dispensation to a political one. Needless to say, this transition will not be complete so long as the Constitution is not fully restored, the upper house or Senate is not in place and the president remains the sitting COAS.
At the last military-to-civilian transition which began in 1985, with election and the subsequent revival of the National Assembly, the civilian-military coexistence in state affairs lasted three years. It ended suddenly in 1988 by a strange twist of fate rather than by actual conscious effort on the part of the then military president to work out with parliament a smooth transfer to a totally civilian dispensation.
This time round the MNAs of the various political parties elected into power on Oct 10 have been trying hard since the election to work out appropriate arrangements with the military president for transfer of political power. Unlike in 1985, however, today’s MNAs have not only to deal with the issue of a military president with the powers to dismiss the National Assembly, they also have to address the very procedure by which Gen Musharraf had himself confirmed and sworn in as president without following the requirement of the president being elected by parliament as laid down in the Constitution.
This time the MNAs are also being confronted with the delicate task of deciding whether to accept institutionalization of the role of the military in political affairs through the National Security Council. Their decision will, in fact, be a crucial yes or no to civilian-military power-sharing in future.
So far, clear-cut decisions are being hampered by the lack of understanding or consensus among the MNAs on the above issues. There appears to be at least three schools of thought among the MNAs on this. At one end, there are those MNAs who oppose the National Security Council outright and believe that the military should not have any political role whatsoever in running the nation. A sitting COAS as president is completely out of the question for these MNAs. Members of the ARD generally fall in this category, particularly the PML-N, and the PPP (minus the Faisal Saleh Hayat group).
Outside of the National Assembly, members of the lawyer community (although not the judicial community) strongly support the notion of no political role for the military. Demonstrations have been staged by lawyers across the country protesting against the LFO, questioning its very legality as under the Constitution any constitutional amendment proposal can only come from within the National Assembly and the proposal will come into effect only after being passed by the National Assembly.
At the opposite end, there are those MNAs who have been brought round to accepting a permanent civilian-military co- existence in the political affairs of the country in the form of the NSC and the president remaining as chief of army staff. Members of the PML-Q and the Grand National Alliance generally fall into this category.
Then there are those MNAs who are willing to accept something in between these two schools of thought, for instance, having the NSC as an advisory rather than executive body and a retired rather than a sitting military officer as the president. Judging from the intense political consultations and negotiations during the past few weeks, it would seem that many members of the religious alliance, the MMA, are inclined to this line of thinking, along with perhaps the PPP’s Faisal Saleh Hayat group.
For a quarter of a century after independence, the country’s politicians and the military had been discussing these very issues, upon which they all finally reached a consensus that was enshrined in the 1973 Constitution. Yet every time a military leader re-opened the debate on the system of government which the country ought to have and on the role of the military in the country’s political affairs, some MNAs or political parties would invariably rally behind him supporting whatever new constitutional reforms that are being proposed or implemented.
Worse, MNAs to this day cannot even agree on the very procedure which these constitutional changes should be made, and the proper procedure through which the president should be elected. Aren’t the procedures for both already clearly laid down in the Constitution? Why is it then that they have to go through the motion again and again, decade after every decade, discussing and negotiating what new constitutional changes to make, to accept or to reject, and how these constitutional reforms should be made and executed?
Granted the fact that countries do make constitutional changes occasionally. But these are done within parliament and within the constitution, not stage-managed and executed outside of parliament.
The shape of democracy in Pakistan rests upon the 324 MNAs sworn in last Saturday. When or whether this time round the democratic transition will eventually move towards a totally civilian dispensation at all will depend in large part on these 324 MNAs.
The government had claimed an approval rating of at least 90 per cent in the referendum. General Musharraf had later apologized for instances of rigging, but he had not dismissed the entire referendum as a bogus exercise. It was boycotted by most of the country’s political parties, but General Musharraf had claimed that the silent majority had participated in it and expressed its support for his policies. These, in the words of the proposition framed for the referendum, included his efforts to “combat extremism and sectarianism for the security of the state and tranquillity of society”. There were no electoral lists for the referendum, and even the condition of producing one’s identity card to vote was at some point held in abeyance. Almost every adult citizen could take part in it.
That was in April. Presumably many of those who voted in the referendum also cast their ballots in the October elections. If the government’s contention about the support reflected in the referendum is accepted as correct, how are the general election results to be evaluated? What has happened to the “silent majority”, which must have included people in the Frontier and Balochistan provinces, in these six months?
The largest parties to have emerged in parliament as a result of the October polls are the PML(Q), the PPP, and the religious grouping, the MMA. In terms of the popular vote, the PPP is ahead of all other parties. Together with the PML(N), it had declared itself staunchly opposed to military rule and Gen Musharraf’s policies. Some of the components of the MMA had adopted a similar position. So, suddenly the verdict obtained in the referendum comes in clash with the general election results. Such a sea change in attitudes in such a short period of time requires, at the very least, some rational explanation.
Both the referendum and the election came post- 9/11, and public opinion in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan should have been as exercised about the US-led campaign in Afghanistan in April as it appears to have been in October. Indeed, there should have been greater resentment then because the campaign was at a greater level of intensity in that period. Yet we find that forces commonly identified with extremism and sectarianism have emerged with greater electoral backing than ever before in Balochistan and the NWFP, making inroads in the other provinces also. Clearly, this phenomenon is attributable to the strong anti-US sentiment among large sections of the people.
The obvious conclusion should be that the referendum was a totally contrived affair and did not reflect ground realities. At this stage, this can only be a source of vicarious satisfaction for critics of the government. But what is perhaps more important is that it underlines the pitfalls of over-manipulating the electoral or political process. The October election result itself is evidence of that: the PML-Q got fewer votes than the government wanted and the MMA more than it wished.
This in turn has led to new attempts at manipulation — and accusations that the military-led administration is resorting to the same tactics of buying legislators and putting pressure on them that politicians have often been blamed for. The military’s credibility as an honest broker in national affairs was dented by the referendum and has since been further eroded.
Wouldn’t a more upfront approach have been less bruising? Instead of a referendum, President Musharraf could easily have opened talks with the PPP, the PML-N, the religious and other parties and worked out the terms of an agreement whereby he could remain president and be ratified as such by parliament. But in those days before April the regime was riding high, and its spokesmen making contemptuous references to “corrupt” politicians and ruling out any dialogue with them. Now we have daily reports of high-level government contacts with politicians and confidantes of the two leaders most reviled by the regime, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
A STORY ascribed to the late Josh Malihabadi has him asking the tonga-driver from somewhere in Old Delhi to take him to All India Radio’s broadcasting station where he had been found a job by his friend and admirer Jawaharlal Nehru. The “tangeywala” had never heard of All India Radio. So Josh had to explain to him the route to the red-brick building with a clock tower on Delhi’s Parliament Street.
“Oh, there!” exclaimed the burly man with a knowing smile and a far-away look. “Why didn’t you say so? You want to go to the office of the whores.” The Urdu phrase used was tawaifo’n ka daftar. For a variety of relevant reasons, some Urdu expletives have been duly excised from the tangeywala’s pithy but powerful comment.
What the tangeywala wanted to convey to the Revolutionary Poet of the East actually covered the domain of involved sociology. In other words, in the early days of broadcasting the respectable ladies of yore would not tread anywhere near such a house of ill-repute as the AIR address was seen as, but, mercifully, no longer is. So the singers and their paraphernalia had to hitch a ride to their “office” from their kothas in the red-light district astride some burly man’s tonga!
AIR Bhawan, Parliament Street, is a popular landmark in today’s Delhi. The red-light district is called GB Road. If you were to spell it out as Gaston Baston Road, you would probably confuse the cabbie.
Names of city streets and town lanes have interesting anecdotes, sometimes even telling history to reveal.
There are more than 100 Parisian streets, squares, boulevards named after mathematicians. Mostly, of course, they are French but there are some others too. For example, there is a place on the Avenue Marceau about 300 metres from the Arc de Triomphe where streets named after Newton, Galileo and Euler all come together. Perhaps the most surprising fact is that there is no street named after French wizard Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, famous for his mathematical calculations of heat flow.
In Delhi, there are streets named after all the Great Mughals from Babur to Aurangzeb. And there is even one named after the last Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who died in exile in Rangoon. The one surprising exception is Emperor Jehangir a ruler and builder of no mean repute, but whose name is mysteriously missing from Delhi’s streets.
Some English names have been changed in Delhi. Curzon Road has become Kasturba Gandhi Marg. Connaught Place is sought to be called Indira Chowk, after the late prime minister, but people still prefer to call it by its older colonial name.
Similarly, Ayodhya was more popularly known by other names. Buddhists called it Saket. Recently it was known as Awadh in the time of the Nawabs. Awadhi, not Ayudhwi, is still the dialect in which people like Kabir and Tulsi once wrote. Ram Chartimanas, the story of the warrior king Ram by Tulsidas, is composed in Awadhi. English colonialists changed the name to Oudh.
As far as Ayodhya is concerned, there was another Ayodhya which was equally or even more popular, but which is far away from the centre of today’s religious strife in India. This was the capital of the former kingdom of Siam, today’s Thailand.
If we look up the Hobson Jobson dictionary, not such an unreliable means to collate historical usage of colonial terms, we would find that the Siamese Ayodhya, also known as Ayuthya, was at one point also, perhaps mistakenly, called Judea too.
Now if you were a crackpot, mumbo-jumbo-spewing guru, you would try to trace the links between Ayodhya to Judea, the land sacred to the Jews. And lo and behold you would have a very good theory on the abiding historical links between the Hindus and the Jews! And if you are a convoluted thinker endowed with some wee-hour strategic visions of mythical proportions, you might even conclude why there should be a greater cooperation between India and Israel. Why? Because Judea and Ayodhya once had a common origin, or so you may conclude. Here’s a how a seed is sown for obscurantism to blossom when the time is ripe.
Historical obscurantism serves a purpose, it is not just there due to ignorance. The more obscurantist among the right-wing Hindu nationalists, led by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s former leader Guru Golwalkar, claimed that the Aryans were originally inhabitants of the North Pole but — and this is an important but — that particular part of the North Pole was once located on the border between the modern Indian states of Orissa and Bihar!
All this embarrassing myth-making just to stop anyone concluding that like so many other hordes who came to India as invaders, the Aryans too had similarly come from distant lands. To prove that they are the true sons of the soil, even the North Pole is conveniently shifted to India. Worse, people exposed to this myth-making soon start believing it to be true.
I have similarly found some Pakistani friends to be equally peevish on several counts. I haven’t the foggiest idea why they must go out of their way to avoid using words like Indian subcontinent, Hindustani music, even Indian Ocean. Fortunately, Lahore and Kasur, said to be named after Lav and Kush, the twin sons of the Hindu mythical hero Ram, have not been changed. My friend and idol in journalism, the late Aziz Siddiqui, used to live on Lahore’s Temple Street. His wife Shahida once showed me a busy Lahore street called Lakshmi Chowk.
Indians and Pakistanis, essentially similar in many ways, can be peevish and generous. They are cosmopolitan and utterly provincial. They are communal and very secular. However, by and large when they go abroad they tend to end up in a huddle, what is known in Indian terms as South Hall mentality, after a veritable ghetto they have created for themselves in a London district. There must be some reason, other than their self- proclaimed total innocence, that they are in trouble with the local people, from Fiji to South Africa to Europe.
And now there is this trouble brewing in a beautiful place with a beautiful name like Sunnyvale in California. It seems the Hindu community from India have built a temple for themselves in Sunnyvale which is located in a place called Persian Street.
There should be no problem with that. But the Indians want the street to be renamed as Mandir Street, or Temple Street. What is patently unfair in all this is that the Hindu community has gone to town insidiously campaigning, according to one report, against the name Persian Street because to them it looks like an Islamic name.
They are playing on the American establishment’s tinctured view of Islam which they feel is in bad odour and, therefore, dispensable.
Now the Americans have a much older nexus with Iranians than they have with Indians. The Americans may have been thrown out of Iran by the mullahs, but Col Saunders, the goateed creator of Kentucky Fried Chicken, is very much in evidence in Islamic Iran as vending jujeh kebab if not the original Texan recipe!
Sunnyvale’s Persian Street, in my view, harks back to the old Iranian-American ties.
It was, therefore, very rewarding for everyone involved in the Sunnyvale row to listen to a Persian scholar on how the two cultures of India and Persia are rooted in the common history, pre-Hindu and pre-Islamic culture.
“Persian”, he told his Indian tormentors, comes from the Anglicized word “Persia.” The original word is “Parsa.” It is in what the scholars call Old Persian. Its Avestan form is “Parsu”: and the Sanskrit form is “Parshu.” It means “side” only because an earlier Aryan (Iranian) nation was called “Mada” (Sanskrit: “Madhya,” Greek “mesos,”: Latin “medius,” and English “mid”), meaning “Middle” because of its prominent location amid other Iranian nations. Others were called Parsu/Parthu as: “side” neighbours around the Mada.
“Parsa” applied to both the people and their land. It was the southern part of the Iranian plateau and although diminished in size, there is still the province of “Pars/Fars” in modern Iran and its natives are called “Parsi” or “Farsi” by other Iranians. The word “Parsa” appears first 2500 years ago in the bas-reliefs of Darius the Great (552-486 BCE), the Achaemenian (Avesta/Old Persia “Hakhamanah” and Sanskrit “Sakhamanas,” Friend-of-Mind, Mentally-Awake).
The Achaemenians founded the first world Empire of 26: nations from Libya to the Chinese border, including Gandara/Gandhara and Hapta-Hindu/Sapta-Sindhu of the Indian subcontinent. They were of the “Parsa” nation.
Alexander of Macedonia brought the downfall and Macedonians broke the empire into four pieces and ruled for 80 years.
All the three, Achaemenians, Parthians and Sassanians were Zoroastrians, followers of historically the first founder of Monotheism, Zarathushtra (Sanskrit “Jarathushtra”) of the Rig- Vedic times — 3710-3757 years ago. His message, in Rig-Vedic metres, is the “Gatha,” seventeen sublime songs of Good Guidance.
The Sassanians ruled from 224-652 CE and their empire was brought down by the Muslim Arabs. The Parsi community in India are the descendants of the Zoroastrians who sought asylum from the then Hindu Raja Yadav when the Muslim Arabs ran over the empire and began forced conversion of the inhabitants. Although all along a minute minority, the Parsis have played a prominent part in serving India, originally their asylum and now their own land.
Because of the prominent part played by the “Parsa” people in the Iranian history, the entire land of Iran has been called Pars, Fars, Perse or Persia by the people who did not know the history well. Their prominence made their language to become the dominant language of the entire empire as Parsi, Farsi, Persian. It was the international language from India and Central Asia in the east to Turkey in the west. It has been diminished only by the growth of the imperial powers since the 18th century.
With a brilliant record in world history and the part played in promoting world civilization to a collective harmonized state for over 1,000 years, every Iranian is proud of the word Parsi/Farsi and its Anglicized form Persian.
Now if the Hindus of Sunnyvale are the followers of Praveen Togadia and Ashok Singhal of Babri Masjid notoriety, there is little gain in discussing the issue with them for their minds are closed. But if the people are of a different ilk, and are inclined to listen to reason, then Mir Taqi Mir’s couplet applies to them as it does to the poet’s sectarian Muslim quarries. Mir says:
Mat ranja kar kasoo ko ki apne to eteqaad
Dil dhaaye ke jo kaaba banaya to kya kiya?
(What kind of Ka’aba is it that its construction entails breaking of hearts?)
This is because the cumulative effect of emissions from more than one million vehicles that ply Karachi roads alone, can still impact badly on health. Emission from automobiles is the single largest source of lead in the atmosphere.
Lead, once it enters the body, affects the central nervous system. It causes mental dullness and retention problems among children, who are far more affected than adults. “Studies have shown as much as 5.8 decline in IQ for every 10 microgramme increase of lead in blood levels,” says Saeed.
A study conducted by Dr Franklin White, Professor at the Department of Community Health Sciences at AKU, in 2001 shows reason for concern. He examined the lead level of 400 children aged 3-5 years, from randomly selected households in Karachi. Some 80 per cent children in the sample had blood lead levels of 10 microgrammes, and 18 per cent had lead levels of 20-30 microgrammes and 2 per cent above 30 microgrammes.
The findings show that “the majority of children in Karachi are likely to suffer some degree of intellectual damage as a result of environmental lead exposure.” Some may even suffer “additional harm” such as “biochemical disturbances.” Although the average blood lead level in children was half of that reported in a study conducted earlier in 1989 by a team of AKU researchers, it still calls for “public health concern.” Generally, elevated blood lead level causes loss of appetite, anaemia, malaise, headache, irritability, etc. In 1994, Dr Syed Mashadi’s study of 100 policemen in Karachi showed that about one-third of the healthy men recruited from rural areas developed loss of concentration, headaches, even vertigo, within two years of being posted in the city streets. Besides vehicular emissions, thermal power stations and industries are also emitting lead among other pollutants “that exceed the NEQS standard.”
Lead can also enter the body through the food chain. This occurs because lead vapour in the air is deposited, among other things, on leaves and grass. When people eat contaminated vegetables or drink milk of cows that have grazed on these plants, they also absorb the lead. In a survey conducted by the Quaid-e-Azam University, milk from many dairy farms along the Grand Trunk Road contained more than 2-3 times lead than the “safe level” recommended by the WHO.
Saeed reminds that lead is still being used by most paint manufacturers in Pakistan. “Although one company makes lead-free paint, most people don’t know why they need to use such paints. This can be conveyed to consumers through ads of such paints,” he says. Such paints are also priced high which discourages their use.
Similarly, the common household practice of polishing brass cooking utensils or qalai “contains a high level of lead” and this permeates into the food cooked in such utensil. Glazed earthen pottery also contains lead, and so does the food cooked in such a utensils, as is “the practice in some restaurants.”
Most worrisome, he says, is that old water pipelines contain lead, which is then carried in the drinking water. One measure he advocates is making catalytic converters, meant to contain the harmful gaseous emissions from motor vehicles, “a standard feature in all new vehicles sold in the country.” The government should also step into the manufacturing sector and introduce regulations to control, if not eliminate, the use of lead in items of common use.