Has the Indian opposition finally found its voice?

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.

TARUN Tejpal, the Tehelka journalist, is not sitting idle. Even as a government commission continues to slowly plod through the defence scandal files, Tarun has been busy preparing the blueprint for a weekly newspaper for investigative journalism. On Friday he announced the paper was ready to be launched in October.

A host of pro-democracy activists and civil rights leaders are helping the project as a cause to uphold. Among those who were present at the pre-launch news conference were writer Arundhati Roy, lawyer Ram Jethmalani, social reformer Swami Agnivesh, actress Nafisa Ali and filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

First things first, please

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.

Fiery celebrations

At 11.30pm, half an hour prior to joining the nation in Independence Day celebrations, a friend was trying to make his 23-month-old son say Pakistan Zindabad. Accustomed to going to bed early, the child was about to doze off. Still, with his small stuttering tongue he tried his utmost to utter the phrase with proper cadences: Pa’tit’aan gin’bad. The friend felt he was being too hard on the toddler and asked his mother to put him to sleep. She did. He switched on the television to find out what the many channels that have lately mushroomed were offering as a forerunner to the celebrations. He kept the volume low in order for his son to sleep undisturbed.

Out of the blue, ear-splitting sounds of blaring horns and full-throttled motorbikes without silencers were heard. He scampered to the balcony to find out what had happened. There were about a dozen bikers, with Pakistan flags tied to their two-wheelers whose silencers had been purposefully yanked out, pressing the horn button with one hand and keeping the accelerator at maximum speed with the other, showing off their style of paying tribute to those who had taken part in the independence movement in 1947.

He asked his wife to close the door to the bedroom where his son was fast asleep so that the cacophony of horns wouldn’t disturb him. He could see that his son had begun twisting and turning in bed. Mercifully, after a little while, the aspiring honky-tonk band dispersed or moved on to some other destination. He heaved a sigh of relief.

The family were some moments away from the 56th birthday of Pakistan. As soon as the clock struck 12, and just when the friend was about to wish his wife happy Independence Day, a fusillade of gun shots from within the compound of their apartment almost ruptured their eardrums. The child woke up and leaped into his mother’s arms. She held her son tight and, taking evasive action, ducked under the bureau. The sound was nerve-shattering. They hadn’t the foggiest idea as to what had triggered the firing. The mother wondered what had prompted people to fire into the air on the eve of Independence Day. The friend told her it’s some of their neighbours who were trying to celebrate the occasion in their own style. She looked nonplussed. The fusillade went on for no less than five minutes. And when it did stop, the agony continued. Countless children, accompanied by their parents with beaming smiles on their patriotic faces, set off firecrackers (a hair-raising variety of bangers and squibs) on the staircases, the compound and the roof of the apartment. The child, by that time, had fully woken up and was terrified. His droopy eyes had turned bleary, but he wasn’t crying. The whole building was stinking of gunpowder. It took approximately an hour for the ‘celebrations’ to subside. He was finding it hard to go to bed for a second time. His mother somehow convinced him that the hullabaloo was about some children (and their parents) taking part in a cricket match. The friend opened the door to the balcony to show him that things were all right. He shut his eyes gingerly and stuttered, Pa’tit’aan gin’bad.

The people of Karachi will soon begin to regret owning cars. Their misery will be compounded by the absence of adequate public transport on the roads of the city.

As it is, driving time has increased considerably, much to the discomfort of those who drive to work and back home daily. Distances that previously took half an hour to traverse now take nearly twice as much time.

In the aftermath of the rains which battered the roads last month, a drive from Gulshan-i-Iqbal’s northern-most end to I.I. Chundrigar Road takes an hour and a quarter.

More and more cars continue to come on the roads; so do buses and mini-buses. The scope for surface transport has now reached a saturation point. If this continues, in about a decade’s time it should take two hours for someone in North Nazimabad to reach his office in the bank district at the southern end. This would be catastrophic, because a mass transit system is nowhere on the cards.

By international standards, Karachi does not have many cars. The city’s vehicle population, including cars, is 1.1 million. This is less than what Cairo, Tehran or Istanbul have. All these cities have mass transit systems. Cairo’s underground system (phase one) was built by the French in the 1980s. The Turks developed mass transit systems for Istanbul and Ankara in the late 1990s, and the Chinese built one for Tehran only recently.

Karachi does not have a mass transit system, and is unlikely to have one, even though Z.A. Bhutto drew up plans for a five-and-a-half-mile underground “spine” from Liaquatabad to Tower way back in the 1970s. Ziaul Haq wound it up.

May God bless Mohammad Khan Junejo: he revived it but the plan was shelved after he was sacked. The Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif governments toyed with the idea, but nothing practical was done. This government has finally abolished it.

The only appropriate reaction should be: may the plan rest in peace.

All those who are fond of books gravitate towards libraries. As they settle down in a comfortable armchair in the quiet reading room of a well-stocked library, with glass-fronted bookcases containing invaluable leather-bound volumes in sight, they banish all worries of life from their mind and concentrate on the book at hand.

It is a great pity that there are not many well-maintained public libraries in Karachi. A friend, however, insists that Taimuria Library in North Nazimabad is a relatively well-run library in Karachi. A medical student now, he has been frequenting the library for many years. (The library was established by the defunct Karachi Metropolitan Corporation in September 1983.)

The friend, who is familiar with the staff because of his frequent visits, says that the library has started to feel the pinch. Recently, a young boy asked for the latest copy of Harry Potter. The boy, who feared that the book would be out to somebody else, was terribly disappointed to find that the library did not have it. He found it hard to believe that this best-seller was not present in a public library.

Another student saw red when the library refused to grant him membership of the research centre. He was told that the research centre could only accommodate 32 students. The student was unable to figure out why resources could not be made available to the library on a priority basis so that it could offer research facilities to as many students as possible.

Nevertheless, the friend points out, the library offers quite a few facilities to both common readers and research scholars. It is also the favourite place of a large number of medical students who come here to study for long hours without being disturbed. Some of these students spend their entire day at the library when their exams are near. The friend insists that it does not matter if the library does not possess a proper cafeteria. Rickety chairs can be mended; and old-looking walls can be whitewashed. The worth of a library, he declares pensively, should be determined by the quality of books it has.

Certainly, the friend has a point there. For even if the library possessed an enviable cafeteria but offered its readers only best-sellers and other light reading material, it would prove a severe disappointment to a large number of people. Happily, this is not the case here. — By Karachian

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