Corruption in tehsil administration

CORRUPTION in local government departments is an established practice. But the size of embezzlement by an architect and a tracer of the defunct Sargodha Municipal Corporation (now Tehsil Municipal Administration) may shock the readers.

Together, the two caused a loss of Rs1.5 billion to the SMC during the last 10 years. Their corruption surfaced when former SMC deputy mayor Malik Khalid Rafi sent a written complaint to the Anti-Corruption Establishment with documentary evidence.

It transpired during investigation, carried out by ACE director-general Muhammad Anees Qureshi, in August last that architect Mureed Sultan and tracer Abdul Razzaq had been posted in the Architect Branch for the last 12 years, and both had allegedly misused their authority and committed forgery and through blackmailing caused a loss of Rs1.5 billion to the corporation and minted money under the approval of site plan and conversion of farm land into a residential colony.

Mureed Sultan had set up a private firm on College Road in his name and another firm Messrs Faizullah Gondal with a fake proprietor and was operating them under his signature. Both the firms were considered most favourite in the Tehsil Municipal Administration as without the signature of the architect and seal of the firms, no site plan could be approved.

There are some 101 unapproved private colonies within the jurisdiction of municipal corporation while 49 colonies are situated within the jurisdiction of Cantonment Board, Sargodha. According to bylaws, the owner of five acres willing to convert agricultural land into residential colony has to spare space for street, post office, mosque, primary school and a park, besides the provision of sewerage, streetlights and mortgage of 20 per cent plots of front row in favour of the municipal corporation/TMA till the deposit of royalty and development charges, and if the owner defaulted, the TMA is authorized to carry out development works after selling the plots.

Similar conditions are to be fulfilled for conversion of excessive land; however, the allocation of area increased with the increase of area for residential colony. The TMA/municipal corporation has to receive fixed penalty of Rs1,000 and Rs100 per day, besides the usual corporation fee.

The TMA has not observed any of these conditions and allowed the owners of agricultural land to set up residential colony. The other subject of corruption is the site plan of buildings, including residential and commercial. According to reports, the architect allowed a large number of people to save a big amount by allowing setting up of commercial buildings and plazas with the approval of residential building.

Another source of corruption is approval of commercial buildings without sparing for parking after receiving extra money from the owners of commercial buildings. There are hundreds of plazas and hospitals which have been allowed to raise commercial buildings without leaving for parking by the architect after extorting a handsome amount.

Yet another source of corruption in the TMA is the challan of buildings raised without prior sanction of site plan to the court of magistrate. The TMA is authorized to collect penalty and fine, while the contractor is authorized to collect usual fee of the site plan. But the architect with the connivance of the contractor got issued receipt of usual fee and submitted the same to the magistrate without any penalty which might be up to millions of rupees.

A contractor of site plan alleged he left the contract due to alleged blackmailing of the architect who, according to him, had deceitfully received Rs219,000 in 2000, while the tracer had received 60,330 under the head of penalty and fine, but the amount was not deposited with the account of TMA/municipal corporation.

The owner appeared before the anti-corruption department and alleged that both the employees had been receiving fine and penalty for the last 12 years but not a single penny had been deposited by them with the accounts of TMA/municipal corporation.

Malik Khalid said he pointed out 104 cases of embezzlement under the head of non-deposit of fine and penalty depicted during three months, and it may increase to over 0.1 million sites.

Another example of embezzlement is approval of site plan of a commercial plaza owned by former deputy mayor Rana Shahiduz Zaman near Jamia Qasimul Aloom, constructed some 15 years ago on the main road, but its site plan was got approved about a couple of years ago against a receipt issued by the then contractor, but not even a single penny of penalty of 13 years was deposited with the TMA account.

During inquiry, it was admitted by the architect that he had a 10-marla bungalow in the area of Cantonment Board which he had purchased for over Rs2 million and renovated with a similar amount, but he had deceitfully got approved a loan from the House Building Finance Corporation for the construction of a house, though the building on the plot was already existing.

In another case, one Sohna Khan has alleged that the administrator of the Zakat Committee, Sillanwali, received Rs1,000 and Rs1,500 from Allah Ditta and Muhammad Khan, respectively, while distributing Zakat to them.

Anti-Corruption also held the administrator guilty of deducting amount from the Zakat recipients.

The Sargodha range deputy inspector general of police has constituted an anti-narcotics committee to combat drug addiction and trafficking in the district.

The committee will work under the supervision of Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, chairman, Neeli Bar Group of Industries, Bhalwal.

Shinwari’s poetic eminence

AMIR Hamza Khan Shinwari is being rightly acknowledged as one of the best Pashtu and Urdu ghazal poets. Quite a few term papers and books have been written on his achievements but an upcoming critic Hanif Khalil’s book Baba-i-Ghazal in Urdu deserves special mention.

In a Pashtu literary sitting last week the book came under discussion and I was surprised that the rise and decline of nationalism also affects the fate of other languages at the hands of a nationalist. There was a time when Pashtu readers acknowledged Pashtu and Islam the reverse and obverse of the same coin. They thought that the Pakhtuns were the only people who had embraced Islam en bloc and not only that the Pakhtun elders - at least the majority of them - believe that they were the descendants of a Semitic tribe. They do not take into cognizance that they are considered to be part of the Aryan stock and the archaeological excavations in their area - and well beyond that encompassing Afghanistan and some parts of the central Asia, irrefutably confirm that Buddhism was the predominant religion when Muslim conquerors reached there.

In fact the areas comprising Pakistan have been Buddhist majority areas up till the 750 AD and the Hindu historians are right that it was Buddhism which had given way to Islam in the eastern and western Muslim majority rimlands of the sub-continent. Had there been a convincing historical proof that it is Hinduism and not Buddhism which ruled the roost in this part of the world it would have been easier to take the Aryan origin of this area’s population irrelevant. Even Abdul Ghani Khan and other nationalist scholars have agreed with Grierson of the Linguistic Survey of India that Pakhtuns were Aryan in origin. Anyhow I do not want to sit in judgment on the issue - though I would like to tilt a bit more for the Aryan origin theory - for the simple reason that the majority of ethnologists were on the side of the Aryan theory. However Hanif Khalil’s book Baba-i-Ghazal goes at great lengths to content himself with Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari’s firm belief that the Pakhtuns were Semitic. Shinwari’s Pashtu Ghazals - profusely translated into Urdu in this book - go a long way to prove that he is not the only poet to be a bilingual poet. There are quite a few NWFP poets who have shone bright on the firmament of Urdu poetry.

Starting with Farigh Bokhari, Mohsin Ahsan, Ahmed Faraz, Khatir Ghaznavi, Qatil Shifai, Taj Saeed, Shaukat Wasti, Saeed Akhtar, Asif Saqib, and Hashim Babar to some upcoming poets today we could go back to Shayan Barelvi’s magnum opus Tarikh-i-Shuara-i-Rohilkhand in four volumes there are hundreds of Pakhtun-origin poets who have been bilingual specially in the Rohilkhand belt of the United Provinces of India. The moment this argument is allowed to cover all the Pakhtun poets, living in all the nooks and corners of the sub-continent, the figure could touch the four-figure mark with Josh Malihabadi, an Afridi, sitting at the Olympian heights.

A common characteristic of the Pashtu poets is their regard for the centuries-old tradition of Pakhtun Wali - a code of conduct. Perhaps Hanif Khalil is right in concluding that Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari was, perhaps, the most vigorous implementer of Pakhtun-Wali ethos in his poetry. Going through Shinwari’s Pashtu (of course in translations) and Urdu Ghazals one would like to believe that Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari was a pantheistic mystic - quite a rare phenomenon in Pashtu poetry. Heavily influenced by Hafiz Shirazi who has been the apple of Sufi poets, Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari shows an exceptional high flight of imagination, setting his sights higher. He thinks that he has to serve the Pashtu poetry in a big way and he does it convincingly. All the important Pashtu critics such as Samandar Khan Samandar, Qalandar Momind, Ajmal Khatak, Salim Raz, Maulana Abdul Qadir and Khatir Ghaznavi have applauded Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari for being the pick of Pashtu poets of the second half of the 19th century and having done that he easily joins the galaxy of great Pashtu poets.

This writer has had the privilege of meeting him some three decades ago and discussing his poetry in this column. Amir Hamza Khan was highly appreciative of Raees Amrohvi in his interview with him. He regarded Raees Sahib as his ‘Pir’ and his letters kept on appearing in Raees Amrohvi’s columns.

Amir Hamza Khan has another credit. He was associated with the first Pashtu film Laila Majnun in Bombay in the 50s. He had written the script of the film. He had had an interesting comment as to why he thought it worthwhile to write the script of the first Pashtu film. He said: “I did it to prove that Pashtu film was worth making.” He said that it was wrong to believe that the Pashtu poets were a world apart from the Urdu poets.

An interesting point in Hamza Khan Shinwari’s Ghazal is that he, like Hafiz, does not hide his impatience for the hypocrite religious scholars. He thinks that they have disgraced Islam and he would place mystics at a level higher than the men of jurisprudence who could use Durre Mukhtar only to coin a Hila to favour the one they would like to favour. Quite an unthinking lot. In one of his couplets he says it was surprising why some people try to bring God to the level of their own perceptions instead of rising up to the true level of perception which could do justice to God’s unmanipulatable Being showering His Blessings to all of His creations. He is the Creator of all, not of any particular group of believers.

There are many a thing in Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari which makes him a really catholic poet. However he does not seem to be generous to the progressives because he, somehow, has come to believe that the progressives are essentially atheists. Quite an arbitrary assumption. I don’t mind atheists being progressives if they believed it to be a right combination but to equate progressives with the atheists is preposterous. One should know where one would put many enlightened Muslims who could not barter away their religion for any progressivism. They are prone to regard that a truly religious person has to be an egalitarian and humanist and he cannot think ill of any human being unless the stance of difference of opinion - and even opposition - was well-merited on the basis of principles.

A tale of requiem and rumpus: Sindh assembly session

SPEAKER Muzaffar Hussain Shah probably derived some sadistic pleasure from allowing everybody to nameany dead man or woman for whom any MPA wanted the House to offer Fateha.

The order of the day provided for a vote of confidence for Ali Mohammad Mahar, who had been administered oath of chief minister earlier in the day in the Governor’s House. But as soon as the proceedings begun on Tuesday evening, several MPAs stood up, one after another, asking the chair to order a requiem for the departed souls. It seemed every elected member wanted the House to invoke the blessings of the Almighty in order to allow the departed souls to rest in eternal peace.

It all started with a PPP deputy, suggesting to the chair to order Fateha for a paternal aunt of Benazir Bhutto and the mother of Asif Ali Zardari. Every other member picked up from there. One MPA asked the House to offer special prayers for all those young and old who had committed suicide in Karachi on account of unemployment. Another MPA sought a two-minute silence for the Christians killed in Karachi and Bahawalpur. Yet another MPA wanted Fateha for those martyred in Aligarh Colony and the Dhaka fall. Joining the queue, Hafiz Naeemur Rahman of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal asked the House to offer Fateha for his neighbour who had died three days back.

As there seemed no end in sight to this long list, Abdur Rauf Siddiqui of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement suggested that there should be special prayers for all those who had died since the coming into being of the Sindh assembly. At long last, the official assembly cleric offered an all-embracing special prayers, not only taking care of the concerns of the assembly members but also invoking God’s mercy for the martyrs of Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia.

Immediately after this exercise was over, Nisar Khuhro of the Pakistan People’s Party stood on a point of order, arguing that the ascertainment proceedings on Monday were not according to the rules and traditions of the House. Ignoring the interruptions of the Speaker — for which Muzaffar Hussain Shah is never willing to miss an opportunity — Nisar Khuhro maintained that the speaker on Monday had not allowed the reading of the proposing motions for the ascertainment of the other side’s candidate. Ruling that Mr Khuhro’s point of order was out of order, Muzaffar Shah said that in his ascertainment Mr Mahar had secured 89 votes. Had the head-count been 85 or less, “I would have definitely taken up motions from other side,” said the speaker.

The ruling created a rumpus in the House and amid an exchange of hot words between Nisar Khuhro and Muzaffar Shah, the women MPAs of the PPP, well-equipped with formidable agitational skills, stood up en masse and what followed was nothing but commotion and pandemonium.

Muzaffar Shah, who knew how to set it on fire but did not know how to extinguish it, watched all this helplessly for a while and then decided to proceed with the order of the day despite the unruly atmosphere in the House. Amid the total collapse of order and discipline in the House, Sardar Ahmed of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement read out the resolution for Mr Mahar’s vote of confidence.

As those in favour were asked to stand up, the MPAs belonging to the PPP and the MMA decided to boycott the proceedings and filed out of the House. Assembly staff counted 90 heads in favour, one more than Monday’s count, declaring the man from Ghotki fit to preside over a fragile coalition and to rule the volatile Sindh province.

In between, to counter the agitation and protests by the PPP and the MMA deputies and to make their presence felt, the MPAs belonging to the PML-Q and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement launched a 15-minute-long thumping of desks. They were joined in by all those sitting in the governor’s and visitors’ galleries, where people mostly hailing from Ghotki were seen pushing and pulling one another to find a place in the narrow passages. — Abu Ayesha

One-Day Internationals becoming a tamasha

THERE is first of all the injury to Shane Warne that may keep him out of the World Cup. If that should happen, it would upset all the plans of the Australian team. Warne is Australia’s key player, more than just the world’s best leg-spinner. He is the team’s standard-bearer and cheer leader.

I have always believed that matches are won and lost in the dressing-room as much as on the field. Warne has been an integral part of the Australian machine. I also feel that the game of cricket would be poorer without larger than life characters like him.

Those were wonderful shots that television captured of his young daughter looking somewhat lost as her father was carried out on a stretcher. I wish Warne a speedy recovery.

The World Cup is a few weeks away. The entire cricketing world seems to be revolving around this event. It was not always like this. The first three World Cups were played in England and there was no disruption to the cricket season. It was when the World Cup came to the subcontinent that national pride reared its head and when it went to Australia and New Zealand that it was seen as a marketing bonanza.

Thereafter, the World Cup has becomes cricket’s biggest prize. A combination of national pride and marketing is a heady mix and Test cricket has been elbowed out. When the World Cup in South Africa is finally over, cricket will find itself at a cross-road. Which way will the game go?

The amount of money being invested in cricket is unreal. The world’s economy is not in the best health. Sponsors may not be all that forthcoming. There will be cut-backs. Consider the obscene sums of money that South Korea and Japan invested in infrastructure for the Soccer World Cup. As investments go, any banker will tell you, there will be no return on that investment. Ultimately, cricket too will have to be governed by economics.

The next World Cup will be played in the West Indies and the countries that make up the West Indies do not have the kind of money that South Africa has. Cricket has been financially sustained by the one-day game, which in turn has been sustained by television.

Not many people watch Test cricket either at the ground or on television. Yet the future of this game is Test cricket. The one-day version is becoming to much of a tamasha and with variations like Max Cricket, even this tamasha will become something like a circus. The ICC should be looking seriously at the future of cricket.

Pakistan had started the one-day series with a flawed selection. That is to say by playing only five bowlers. The drubbing that Pakistan got at Durban should have taught us that a second chance does not mean a chance to repeat the mistake. This is what happened precisely at Paarl, in a game that was of crucial importance, one that Pakistan had to win to keep the series alive.

It was sheer bad luck that Wasim Akram has an injured hand. No prizes would have been offered to guess who would replace him. It should have been Mohammad Sami. It wasn’t Wasim was replaced by Faisal Iqbal!

But having selected him, Faisal Iqbal was then sent number 7 to bat. It made sense to play Kamran Akmal but no sense at all for him to open the innings. If a pinch hitter was needed, there was Shahid Afridi already in the team.

The South Africans, on the other hand, learnt from every match they played. They may have made few mistakes. They did not repeat mistakes. The selection of Gary Kirsten was an inspired choice. Against a quality attack like Pakistan, South Africa called back one of their most experienced batsman. And to prove the point, Kirsten made a hundred.

It is not the loss of the series that I regret. It is the fact that these were the last One-day Internationals we would be playing before the World Cup and we appear not to have learnt anything from them. We should have got a stable batting order. Taufiq Umar was not picked after the first ODI. Yet he had gone to South Africa as the main opener.

There are some positives. The fielding has improved though not the running between wickets. The run-outs at Paarl were not only needless but foolish. I don’t want to seem harsh but I am disappointed. A great opportunity had been provided to the Pakistan team to tour South Africa just before the World Cup. And we appear to have squandered the opportunity.

My heartiest congratulation to Pakistan’s Blind team winning the World Cup at Chennai. During its preparations, the team was desperately short of cash. The PCB did help but many others who were asked to help, proved to be blind in heart. I hope someone will come forward to reward the team. It was a stupendous achievement against great odds.