LAST YEAR India and Pakistan were like lemmings rushing headlong towards the cliff to plunge into a waiting nuclear disaster. But last week Indian opposition leader Sonia Gandhi was telling us with credible arguments that the suicidal madness was at least partly a result of the Indian government’s hare-brained security policies, which flowed largely from a divisive domestic agenda.

In a forceful speech after she moved the first no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government, Ms Gandhi charged him with failure on the nation’s defence, weakening national security, wrecking social harmony, subverting the secular character of the educational system, destroying probity in administration and public life, increasing unemployment and dismantling the public sector, adding to the misery of farmers and agricultural labour, denigrating key institutions of parliamentary democracy and undermining the independence of foreign policy.

In particular, she, as also the rest of the opposition, challenged the government on three of its most cherished accomplishments: the Kargil “victory” and defence preparedness, “victory in the proxy war with Pakistan, and the achievements on the foreign policy front.

For that accusation, the treasury benches heckled her for her Italian accent and foreign origins. But they seemed to have little else to say to explain away the main charges she levelled against Mr Vajpayee’s administration.

The burden of the opposition’s argument questioned virtually everything Mr Vajpayee’s government has said or done since the 1998 Pokharan explosions.

The most menacing was the nuclear brinkmanship after the armed attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001. This is where the opposition scored freely over the government with its cogent argument. As Ms Gandhi said, the entire episode — the attack on parliament and the ensuing military escalation — had resulted from a single policy disaster, which could have been avoided.

For example, had the Indian government not freed Maulana Masud Azhar and Omar Saeed Sheikh from prison in exchange for the hostages of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane on Christmas eve in 2000, the attack on the Indian parliament would probably never have happened, nor would journalist Daniel Pearl be killed in Pakistan.

Masud Azhar was after all named by the Indian government as a key plotter in the attack on the parliament. Saeed Sheikh, involved in the kidnapping of foreigners in Delhi, was convicted later in Pakistan for the murder of the American journalist.

Not without a hint of glee therefore do Congress MPs recall the time when as prime minister, Indira Gandhi had got seven Sikh hijackers extradited from Dubai where they had commandeered an Indian Airlines plane in 1983. They were freed as soon as Mr Vajpayee’s government took charge.

Similarly, the treasury benches could only fume helplessly when the Congress party’s Mani Shankar Aiyer charged the government with pulling back Indian troops from the borders with “its tail between the legs” amidst a full throttled international pressure. He said the post-Pokharan history was littered with similar embarrassments for the government. One such was the alleged Chinese incursions into Arunchal Pradesh when Mr Vajpayee was on a visit to Beijing.

The military victory in Kargil claimed by Mr Vajpayee’s government was claimed by US President Bill Clinton to be the result of his own diplomatic efforts. Mr Clinton said so in as many words in his address to the Indian parliament. And the prime minister had merely silently heard him out, Mr Aiyer said.

In a lighter vein, referring to the “decisive battle” that Mr Vajpayee was supposed to launch against Pakistan, when he said “ye ladai aar paar ki hai”, West Bengal MP Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi recited an acid verse in his broken Urdu. He said he had composed it for the occasion. “Aar Mein Reh Gaya Vajpayee, Paar Mein Musharraf, Beech Mein George Bush, Hum Sab Bahut Khush,” he said. For once the treasury benches were seen guffawing.

The Indian opposition’s united assault on the government augurs well for its future electoral strategies. The pro- government magazine India Today said in its latest edition that an opinion poll showed Ms Gandhi closing the lead on Mr Vajpayee.

“Atal Bihari Vajpayee may be a dozen points above Sonia Gandhi,” it said. “But her popularity has risen six per cent compared to his three per cent in the past six months.” Mr Vajpayee was rated at 37 points against Ms Gandhi’s 25.

Also, according to the magazine, 46 per cent of those surveyed did not consider her foreign origin a problem, while only 38 percent did. “The anti-incumbency feeling against the ruling National Democratic Alliance might have helped Ms Gandhi notch a few extra points and become more acceptable,” India Today said, quoting its opinion poll.

On the other hand, speaking of her no-confidence speech, The Hindu said: “It was a performance for which the entire Congress was waiting, with its collective breath delicately bated. It was as if somehow the party wanted to see for itself whether Sonia Gandhi could hold centre stage, as if she was on some kind of personal test.”

Of the government’s response to Sonia Gandhi, The Hindu observed that “in fact, the ruling coalition benches had a game plan. Disrupt her, trip her, throw her out of gear. Do not allow her message of indictment to sink in. Every time she would make a forceful point, the back-benches heckled.”

At the end of the day the opposition lost the no-trust vote by a large margin but its gains were evidently enormous. For it seemed to have found back its voice as well as a focus that does not need to target a Pakistan or a Bangladesh or a China to run its domestic agenda.

IF Sunday morning’s news reports are something reliable to go by, President Pervez Musharraf is to visit Karachi today (Sunday) and presumably devote most of his time to Karachi and see what it looks like. Having endured over long so much studied neglect, occasionally also malice, from the rulers in Islamabad, the people in Karachi are keeping their fingers crossed, and recalling a Ghalib verse that goes something like this:

Woh aain ghar pe hamaray, Khuda ki qudrat hai

Kabhi hum unko, kabhi apney ghar ko daikhtay hein

And when we cast a look at our house, again to borrow words from Ghalib, ‘Aaj he hamaray ghar mein boria na hua’. There are moments when one is irresistibly compelled to borrow words from the poets because the subtlety needed is not available in brittle bits of prose. So, let us now begin at the beginning and extend a heartfelt and grateful welcome to the President.

Even if it would sound something like a repetition, the basic reason why Karachi looks like a city of interminable problems is written large on every wall in this city of 14 million people drawn from the remotest corners of Pakistan. No one in Karachi would fail to acknowledge that all of them have contributed positively to life, such as it has come to be in this city. Not to be forgotten are the Afghanistan refugees who, at best, remain an indefinable and unpredictable element .

A big commercial, industrial, financially active city has a life pattern all its own. Such a city has no room for idlers. Everyone here has to be a working person. This presumes repeated trips between residence and place(s) of work. If this part of life is properly orgnized, there would be less waste of time and cash — both most precious in a modern city of working people. The very first need of a working person (that most of us are in Karachi) is quick and safe mobility. This calls for prompt, efficient, reliable and reasonably accessible means of transport for all and most of the time.

Transport is now Karachi’s problem No 1. Make no mistake on this point. If this problem is sorted out in an intelligent and honest manner, half the physical woes and psychological aches of 99 per cent of the people would be solved. Imagine the waste of physical energy of a city consumed in chasing overloaded buses and zigzagging rickshaws. We talk glibly about lack of efficiency in government offices.

Has any thoughtful citizen ever cared to realize that the government office clerk, the poor wretch we condemn, lives in some distant suburbs of the city some 30 kilometres away. By the time he has arrived in the office he has taken a battering that would put any normal human out of mind. He is out of breath, tired and, above all, frustrated, cursing his existence, before he resumed his chores of the morning. You expect him to give you of his best when you have already drained his best out of him on his way to the office through the dreadful transport.

In a city where most people work, the very first requirement is an efficient, speedy, adequate comfortable and inexpensive means of moving from place to place. On this count Karachi would be about the most inhuman city in the world. By the time an average worker arrives at this desk or machine, he has lost half the energy to work and almost the whole of this will to work. A big city like this that does not provide its citizens with decent means of moving about is bound to have a score of problem, all rooted in the inadequacy of transport.

President Musharraf is no stranger to Karachi of today and Karachi of, say, 40 years ago. The city was then served by a tram service that catered for traffic in the most important segments of the city of those days. After independence the city began to grow by leaps and bounds. The bus service then was a model of public transport facility. Instead of building on the foundations of the transport system that was there and doing so well, the later government of the day (One Unit, presided over by the great Nawab Of Kalabagh) spawned the road transport Mafia. The Tram service was done to death. The Karachi Road Transport Corporation was systematically destroyed to make room for the new road transport entrepreneurs, almost all of them under the Nawab’s patronage. The same happened to the Punjab Road Transport Corporation. The PRTC, too, was a model of efficiency. It was throttled.

It has been stated more than once that the President is not averse to the idea of giving Karachi the urban rail system that it so badly needs if this city is not one day to go completely haywire.

As in the past, if this issue comes up for discussion, the President will be presented with a long series of “plans” to solve Karachi’s transport problems. There are by now about a dozen transport plans that include transport moving on surface, underground, and may be, in the sky. Planning and planning is the indifferently motivated bureaucrats’ favourite strategy to beguile the higher authorities. They have been playing this unholy game over the past many years — including the last three. The time has come for the President to tell everybody concerned to stop this circus. What is needed is a properly integrated urban railway system for the city to grow stage by stage. Rome was not built in a day but built it was because they went on building with honesty. In this story the villain is the officialdom, from one end to the other, with tainted hands and even darker conscience.

The people keep asking the governors, the chief ministers, the transport secretaries of Sindh and the bosses of Pakistan Railway why Karachi cannot have a properly organized and profit yielding urban transport network when Mumbai, Kolkata, Seoul, Pyongyang and Cairo — all Third World countries — can have these services? In answer there is only steely silence which is now deafening. The simple answer is that the bureaucrats have taken refuge in the pockets of the road transport mafia bosses.

Now that President Musharraf has taken all the trouble to spare a moment for Karachi, it may be worth his little while to sort out the problem of all problems of this maliciously dubbed the “problem city of Pakistan”. It can be the pride, not problem, city of this country. The fact is that with all its flaws, Karachi contributes more to the national exchequer than any other city. The benefit that it receives from the same national exchequer is exactly in the reverse proportion. If this is anything it is justice in reverse.