The case of a Kashmiri Casanova

I HAVE come across a wonderful book, Mohan Lal Kashmiri and his Works. It was written by Hari Ram Gupta and carried a foreword by Jwaharlal Nehru. It has been translated by Ibn-Ameen and dedicated by the latter to his father, the late Mr Mohammad Ameen Minhas.

It is infinitely more interesting than Casanova, the Italian adventurer ever wrote in his memoirs.

For Mohan Lal sex might have been a problem but it certainly was not the end all of life. He was interested in everything around him. In his foreword Pandit Nehru says that when he found the book (two volumes) in an old bookshop either in India or England, he felt that he had discovered something new. Had he been born in an independent country, he would have reached the highest station in life. But in the early days of his career, Mohan Lal couldn’t make much headway.

The last days of Mohan Lal’s life were tragic. He was always in debt. Nehru was happy when he came to know that Gupta, a pupil of Dr S K Datta had decided to write Mohan Lal’s life story. Nehru’s foreword was written in Allahabad on July 13, 1940.

Mohan Lal was a widely travelled man. He went from Delhi to central Asia to Ludhiana to Lahore and from Lahore to the river Indus from where he went to Peshawar and then to Kabul and Bokhara.

He travelled from Ludhiana to Lahore between January 3 and 17, 1832. His impressions about the city are as true today as when Mohal Lal saw it. For instance, he says that the streets of Lahore were narrow and muddy and it was impossible to walk through them except at the cost of your shoes and trousers. He might have been writing of Fleming Road of the early 1950s. Thieves were punished by cutting off their noses and ears. Murder was an expensive pastime because the killer had to pay a fine ranging between Rs2,000 and Rs3,000 which was quite a lot of money in 1831 and must have served as a deterrent. In Bahawalpur, he was received by Nawab Bhawal Khan. Mohan Lal studied the commercial situation in that princely state and prepared a report on it. Bahawalpur was then for many varieties of fruit. For example, apples were half a rupee per maund. Mangoes were slightly more expensive at Rs5 while oranges sold at Rs3 to the maund.

Bahawalpur was also known for its silk, especially lungis, which were made in around 300 factories. Each factory produced six pairs of lungis a month, each lungi being nine yards in length. Their prices range from Rs10 to Rs300. Coarse cotton clothes sold at 14 yards to the rupee. Rice was available at Rs3 to 5 per maund, butter sold for Rs10 to the maund while gur was available at Rs1.50 to Rs2. Wheat could be had for 13 to 15 annas a maund while barely sold for an anna-and-a half. Mohan Lal also studied the price structures of at least two dozen vegetables and fruits. However, Bahawalpur’s revenue from the sale of these commodities was only around Rs700,000.

THE chronology, The Statesman, 1875-1975, wrote on September 6, 1922:

The death of Babu Moti Lal Ghose removes perhaps the most remarkable personality in Bengal. For more than half a century he carried on, through his paper, the Amrita Bazar Patrika, what was neither more nor less than a journalistic vendetta against the British Government and against the English race. No incident was too trivial to be pressed into the service of his propaganda, or to be twisted into some real or fancied grievance. Yet Moti Lal Ghose had a warm corner in his heart for individual Britons, even while he insisted on regarding the majority of their countrymen as vampires. He was in many ways a genial soul which, if it had not been warped by a fanatical hatred of everything British, might have done a great deal to promote a mutual understanding between the two races.

And on April 12, 1923, the paper commented:

No part of India is so overlaid with foreign races as Assam. Apart from the persistent Mongoloid penetration from the Himalayas, the province has for years past been accepting immigration from the south and west. At one time, a large part of this immigration was Bengali, but since the country was opened up to tea, there has been an influx of Kolarian tribes purely of Dravidian descent, from Chota Nagpur. Large numbers of the Coolies imported to supply the gardens with Labour have made their home in the province. The building of the Assam-Bengal Railway brought into the country Pathan and Hazara Navvies who settled near the cuttings they had made as shopkeepers or agriculturists. Marwaris too have penetrated into the province, and no corner is too remote to escape the attention of these shrewd traders. This wholesale immigration would in any case alter the character of the population of so sparsely inhabited a country but it is the more difficult to think of the Assamese as a people, because the aboriginal races, or at any rate the races in site when the province was annexed, do not coalesce. The tribes have always kept more aloof from one another than in any other part of India, each restricting itself to certain well-defined tracts, so that there is none of the overlapping which in Hindustan proper has produced the types represented by such names as “Punjabi” or “Madrasi”. The expression “Assamese” conveys no distinct meaning —- it is as vague and general as “Indian” or “European”. Who are the Assamese —- the Nagas, the Khasias, the Kacharis, the Lushais, or which other of the indigenous tribes? It happens no doubt, that the Bengali immigrants are almost the only class sufficiently advanced to take part in the political and other movements which have in these days come to form so large a part of the intellectual life of the Indian. Whether in legislative council or in the congress the “Assamese” today belong to a type hardly to be distinguished from their confreres in Bengal.

How would Rupert Murdoch report Kargil?

IT WAS as though the chorus had decided to leave a slothful bandmaster behind —- singing, screaming, gesticulating Vijay Diwas, Victory Day, Kargil Day. “ July 26 has gone uncelebrated yet again”, complained one leading daily, as it lamented how the Indian government was keeping aloof for the second year in a row from festivities it had itself launched to claim victory over Pakistan on this day in 1999.

TV channels spent valuable time and energy covering the various angles of the low-key commemoration. Some hurled friendly accusations at the government for letting down the team as it were.

Of course, there was an attempt to identify the possible reasons behind the government’s reluctance to indulge in Tarzan-like chest thumping, the kind it had used to win the elections in the aftermath of Kargil. “If it was the tense border stand-off last year which made the (Indian) government rethink, this year it’s the ongoing peace process with Pakistan which the government doesn’t want to hurt by raking up Kargil all over again,” argued the Indian Express. Whatever the merits of the argument, restraint helps the cause of peace, there is no doubt about it.

However, what the media repeatedly fails to mention on this issue, possibly because it dilutes the basis for organized jingoism, was the role the United States and possibly Saudi Arabia had played in getting those soldiers off Point Pedro and other assorted hills. Former army officials too would admit that Kargil was a military disaster for India of Tennysonesque proportions, even if it ended in a political victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In recent days, whether on issues of nationalism or India’s ties with Pakistan, the BJP government and much of the Indian media have acquired a taste for each other like the proverbial strange bedfellows. Those among the few journalists who dare to question the principle behind this arrangement will be ground to dust, as happened with the Tehelka website. But the reasons why this arrangement will hold are solid as gold. For with the advent of big time players like Rupert Murdoch on the Indian scene, the stakes have gone up too high for the proprietor/editor to demur. In all the jostling for markets, inevitably there is a mud wrestling of sorts in the offing within and among the media outfits, and the government is playing the umpire.

Take NDTV, or New Delhi Times TV, for example. The news channel almost single-handedly brought home the images from Kargil’s rugged battlefields in 1999. Its star reporter, Barkha Dutt, wearing a soldier’s helmet in the trenches of Kargil, enthused the nation into an orgy of militarist pride. It was hailed as a model channel and she a heroine. Then came the pogroms in Gujarat. NDTV’s intrepid journalists were at the scene with alacrity, and were reporting the bloody mayhem live. Again, they were dealing with a difficult story. But this time their coverage annoyed the BJP, even though the timely reporting may have saved a few thousand helpless Indian citizens from being massacred by the rampaging mobs.

On March 31 this year, NDTV’s contract with Murdoch’s Star TV ended as they had agreed it would. Now NDTV has its own news channels, one each in Hindi and English, both struggling to get used to life after Murdoch. The news and current affairs programmes on Star News are more seen now as favourable to the BJP. However, there is a problem. Star News needs to be controlled by Indian owners to be allowed uplinking. This is where the government has the levers to mould and shape its future.

But this was not how Star TV CEO Peter Mukherjea put it. In a rare interview (with the Business Standard), he attacked Prannoy Roy’s NDTV and accused it of being biased and hostile on certain issues when it was supplying content to Star TV.

Mukherjea also hit out at media rivals and suggested that Star was impelled to come out with full-page advertisements in newspapers because The Times of India and India Today did not publish their point of view.

“For the average viewer of Star News prior to March 31 (when NDTV was providing the news content) the channel may have been seen as one-sided when it came to certain issues,” Mukherjea said, and added that Star was making “concerted efforts to redress the perception.”

Star earlier had no editorial control over the news content, though many accused it of being biased, Mukherjea said.

“But now that the production is done in-house, we see that the news content is neutral and is not seen as being one-sided.”

What else? NDTV reacted sharply to the charges, saying: “Everybody knows that Star is angling for an uplinking licence with the government, so it (the comment) should be seen in that context.”

We do not know if Rupert Murdoch is planning forays into the Pakistani media market. If he does, we will get a good new grip on Kargil and other issues over which we differ. Imagine Star News India worrying us sick about terrorism in Kashmir and Star News Pakistan giving us saturated coverage of the freedom struggle being waged there — and to have Rupert Murdoch laughing all the way to the bank.

A VISITING Pakistani journalist was sarcastically dismissive about the high profile coverage the two-year old heart patient Noor had got in the Indian media. “ This is your propaganda, a way to avoid the real issues,” he declared.

I went to a meeting of the rightwing nationalist RSS the following day. There too, the subject turned inevitably to the little Pakistani visitor.” Who is this Noor and what light has she brought into India?” thundered an RSS journalist. “ She is just a creation of our pseudo secular media who are blindly in love with Pakistan.”

Now this Pakistani journalist happens to be organising a meeting of parliamentarians and journalists from both countries in Islamabad next month. Is it surprising that he made it a point that there would be no meeting at all if the BJP and the RSS refused to come? A meeting of minds, shall we say?

Conspiracies killed circular railway

THERE is a limit to patience. Let the truth be told about the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR). It was starved, stifled, throttled and then done to death through a cold-blooded, premeditated plot to murder it in broad daylight. It was very much a functional service. It was needed and it was fulfilling that need. What it needed, as any institution would, was proper management and gradual development and expansion. Instead, it was systematically neglected, mismanaged and depleted and then it was unilaterally declared dead by those who had planned its destruction.

These would normally be deemed to be harsh words but in the context of the elimination of the KCR these would sound indulgent. Over the past few years, in this very column, some simple and straightforward questions have been asked which no responsible bureaucrat or elected political personage in high office has cared to answer.

For instance, No 1: Is there another city in the world in our times the size and importance of Karachi that is without a properly organized and efficiently run urban rail system? Take note of the instances of Third World cities like Beijing, Calcutta, Cairo, Pyongyang, Seoul, Singapore, and nearby Bombay.

No 2: Is it not a fact that the planning for the KCR started in the ‘50s and in Mid-’60s it made a promising debut? Why, instead of building on it, the KCR was plunged into studied neglect by the authority assigned to run and manage it? Why was it that in this case the Pakistan Railway, the outfit that runs the entire national railways network, returned such a shameful failure? Is it possible to believe that this failure was genuine and not deliberate and motivated? This called for an inquiry and punishment of those who had failed to perform their functions and duties. But no action was taken. This throws the conduct and intentions of those in political power at that time in the gravest doubt.

No 3: The KCR was planned in 1952 and became fully operational by 1964. By 1991 it operated 104 trains daily. With about six million passengers a year, it was not doing badly. Why it began to go down hill? Why proper action was not taken then? Those responsible for the KCR management should have been asked to explain. They were not. Why?

No 4: Records show that the Pakistan Railway authorities of the time took a unilateral decision to shut down KCR and the governments, neither in Sindh nor in Islamabad, took the trouble to look into this outrage. Why was the PR given the right to pronounce the KCR dead?

There is just one single answer that takes care of all these, any many more questions. Those who throttled the KCR had also all but put the Pakistan Railway out of business. Until about three years ago, the PR, too, was gasping for breath. It has been retrieved literally from the jaws of the road transport mafia that was, and remains, the real enemy to the growth of rail transport, be it urban or national.

In order to throw a veil over this conspiracy, the bureaucrats have been playing their all too clearly exposed game of setting up expert committees. In aid of the conspiracy against the KCR, as many as nine so-called high-powered expert committees have been commissioned and duly paid for surveys, studies and plans to give this city a proper urban rail network.

Nothing at all has so far come out of this jungle of expert committees. This process to camouflage the conspiracy began in 1952 and continues in 2003! By now billions of public money and decades of time have been wasted. And that, precisely, is the grand idea behind these expert committee: gather money and throttle progress.

RESULT: Now, yet another committee. This august body, too, has among its members the tallest of them all. You name them. The governor, the chief minister, the chief secretary, and so many others who have presided over this distasteful saga for so many years. No disrespect to anyone them for all of them are honourable men. Going by experience, we can depend once on their incapacity to see the trees because the trees happen to be in the forest. The hard-boiled bureaucrat nearly always sees which side of the bread is buttered, while the ministers unfailingly remain the innocents that they always are.

The truth of the matter is that since what was virtually the reign of the Nawab of Kalabagh, the potentate who ruled what then was West Pakistan, the whole of Pakistan, that the road transport mafia was set on the march. Now it is on the rampage. Today, this mafia is the most powerful of them all. It can beat the dreaded drug bosses, hands down. For years this mafia had the Pakistan Railway in its pocket — or in the folds of its tall turbans. It had all but made a meal of the national railway network.

For a giant with such voracious appetite, the KCR was but chicken feed. Our road monarchs made a small morsel of the KCR with the assistance of their obedient moles inside the Pakistan Railway. Actually assigned to run the KCR, these PR bureaucrats had no hesitation, first in degrading the KCR service and then had no qualms whatsoever in declaring it mortally sick, dead and finally buried.

If the high-level committee now set up to work for the revival of the KCR really means any business and is genuinely committed to give this city an urban rail transport system that it deserves, its task is easy enough. The committee should tell the bureaucrats that this job has to be done. Failure to come up with an urban railway system, comparable to the best one in the world (in the circumstances and with the means like ours) and in reasonable time, will mean they go out of service and those who can deliver will be called in to do what is perfectly doable. There will be no two ways about it. Enough of humbug is enough.

Ends of justice would remain unattained if a thorough inquiry is not instituted into the causes that led to the unnatural death and unceremonious burial of the original KCR. The KCR did not die. It was killed. The government — at Islamabad and in Karachi — owe it to the people to institute that probe to let the truth come out and the culprits given their desserts fit and proper.

Meanwhile, somebody in the government at the centre, as well as in the provinces, should take the trouble to make a thorough study of how the road mafia operates, evading rules, regulations, laws where they are not audaciously violating or contravening them. Why they issue no tickets to their passengers? How do they maintain their accounts? How much do they pay by way of road tax and excise duties? How strict is the inspection of their vehicles? How proper is the observance of their route permits? what is the quality of the staff they put behind the steering wheels....

There is no end to such questions. And it is common knowledge the mafia gets post all discipline because it make money by the ton and can distribute by nickels to rule the roost.

A lesson in managing water

It might seem a bit out of place to some to talk of water management when the city is in the firm grip of the monsoons. Enough has been said and written about the miseries the recent rains have heaped on Karachi. Just a few months ago, it was quite common to hear people wishing that it would rain. It hadn’t rained properly in at least a couple of years and the streets of the city had become brown and dusty. The rain, so it was thought, would bring a welcome change. At least the city’s polluted atmosphere would be detoxified and it would be good for the trees and the green spaces (the few that remain).

But, in a few months time, probably by the end of August, the rains will be gone, and who knows (given the erratic climate in Karachi) when they will return. And, irony of ironies, just weeks preceding the first cloudburst the city was in the grip of water riots, with people taking to the streets in many neighbourhoods. And now there is so much (lying on the roads and in open spaces) but no one can drink it. Think that if even a small portion of this water could be stored in some way (and here one is talking not of dams but of storage facilities at a very local level like small reservoirs), how much the water shortage would ease.

And if we thought that only Karachi, or other cities in regions where it doesn’t rain that much, face huge problems during the monsoon then we better think again. For example, take the case of neighbouring India where much of the country gets substantially much more rainfall every year than most places in Pakistan.

But as a recent editorial in the environmental magazine Down To Earth showed, several Indian cities, even in the monsoon-awash south, have severe problems when it rains. Published by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (this is the NGO that filed a public interest petition in the Delhi High Court seeking a prohibition on diesel fuel in public transport, and eventually won, and which is why now all buses and rickshaws in the Indian capital run on CNG), the magazine wrote that many cities became flooded, and life is disrupted.

“Rainwater mixed with sewage water flows through crowded urban habitats. Rain has literally become a curse. But the real tragedy is that in a few months, once the rains and the waterlogging are far behind, these same cities will be thirsting again.”

Most Indian cities — Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore are specifically mentioned — get their water, like Karachi, from nearby dams or reservoirs. Much of the demand comes from industrial users, which have been growing and will continue to grow over the years. The same is much the story in Karachi.

Down To Earth says further: “Yet, this [urban-industrial] sector does little to augment its water resources; it does even less to minimize its water use, or conserve water. Worse, because of the abysmal lack of sewage and waste treatment facilities, it degrades scarce water further. Even after all this, its water greed remains unslaked.” Again, the same is pretty much the story in Karachi.

So instead of reducing water scarcity, the rain (because of the sewage problems that are created) actually ends up making things worse. Karachi’s groundwater level has fallen quite rapidly over the years and the situation is not going to get any better unless those who use the water and the government sit down together and think of establishing water storage facilities.

SLEEPLESS IN SADDAR

Nafisa Ali, a resident of Saddar’s Dr Syedna Muhammad Burhanuddin Road (otherwise known as Mansfield street) writes:

“I would like to point out the agony residents of Saddar, especially of Dr Syedna Muhammad Burhanuddin Road (better known as Mansfield street), have to go through every day of our lives. This is purely a residential area but if you visit the road you will find that half of it has been taken over by public buses while the footpath on either side is occupied by drug addicts and beggars. A nihari shop provides them free food, which is good but the issue is that those who come to eat leave no room for pedestrians. As a consequence, those of us who live in the area, like myself, have no choice but to walk on road and constantly risk being run over by a bus or coach.

“Moreover the nihari place has dirtied the area beyond recognition. The shop has no consideration for residents and its exhaust, which is in the direction of nearby flats, emanates a bad smell all the time. Because of this people living in the surrounding buildings have to keep their windows shut.

Also, while one might feel sorry for hungry beggars, it is difficult for parents to allow their children to go out of the apartment buildings unaccompanied. I would like to point out that this road has the biggest mosque of the Bohra community. Since women also regularly go to this mosque, you can very well imagine what a tough time they face, negotiating the addicts, the beggars, and the buses that crowd the area.

Our miseries could be reduced to a great extent if only the city government passed an order to reroute the buses and made arrangements to shift the addicts and the beggars elsewhere. But perhaps that is asking for too much?”

(P.S.: The picture, taken by Fahim Siddiqi, accompanying today’s Notebook is of the area Ms Ali is talking about. Her building is situated on the road which as the photograph suggests is awash with minibuses.)

BUS DISCUSSIONS

To feel the city’s pulse and to get an idea of what ordinary people are thinking, try taking a ride on Karachi’s green buses. A colleague who often uses the green bus on Tower-North Karachi route says that discussions of a political nature often ensue between total strangers.

For a brief while, it seems that nearly every passenger on board becomes a political pundit, offering choice remedies to cure the nation’s ills. Sometimes these casual conversations transform into heated discussions, especially if the interlocutors happen to be from opposing schools of thought. However, perhaps because the majority of the passengers are educated, rarely do these debates degenerate into fisticuffs.

Interestingly enough, the discussion usually starts with a critique of the green bus service itself, with people pouring in their two cents’ worth on how to improve it. Then, as so often happens, they start going on a tangent and begin discussing the water situation, loadshedding, crime and so on.

All this in the time it takes to get from Tower to Golimar!

A FUTILE EXERCISE

The traffic DIG has apparently said that his staff impounded over 1,300 minibuses and coaches this past week because they did not possess route permits. He said this action was taken especially in Saddar, around the Empress Market area, probably the city’s most congested traffic area. The vehicles were released after their owners paid a fine, the DIG said.

All this is well and good but what happens next? Doesn’t the DIG know that sooner or later, the 1,300 buses and minibuses that his staff impounded will be back on the city’s roads, creating the same traffic jams that they were before? What was the net result of this whole exercise except that the traffic department managed to raise a lot of money through the fines paid by the vehicle owners.

And given the not-so-solid reputation of our traffic police, it is quite likely that some of the field officials made a quick buck for themselves too.

— By Karachian

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com