| 08 February 2004 | Sunday | 16 Zilhaj 1424 |
Help ambulances move freely
Three decades ago Indira Gandhi caught a tide in the affairs of India, surprised her friends, stunned her foes and swept to victory with a simple, devastating slogan: 'Gharibi Hatao'. It was the urge of the moment. She alone of all the heavyweights in the Congress saw through the clutter, and picked up the obvious.
Six years and an Emergency later, the opposition did the same. Slogans had not diminished poverty to any significant extent. A desperate Indira Gandhi sought to turn free India into yet another Third World tinpot dictatorship. She threw all opposition leaders into jail. Nothing opens eyes faster than the shutting of prison doors. The opposition united under the Janata banner, and stormed to power in 1977 with an evocative message: 'Indira Hatao, Desh Bachao'.
In December 1979, Indira Gandhi reversed that message. The Janata government could not be severely faulted on governance, but its politics was execrable, stupid, egomaniacal and suicidal. Defections broke the government. Rising prices proved that everything was out of control. This time the Janata had to be removed to save the people.
In January 1984 Rajiv Gandhi did not need a slogan: the iconic image of a martyred mother flooded parliament with Congress MPs. Rajiv, misled by the usual suspects, began to believe that the mandate had been for his youth and sought to reshape the Congress in his image. Sneakers sneaked under the khadi pyjamas. It was a costly error. The opposition, which would have taken a decade to harm the memory of Indira Gandhi, took only a couple of years to destroy an increasingly naive Rajiv. Corruption charges over the Bofors gun deal muddied his reputation.
The slogan that brought V.P. Singh to power was a provocative one: 'Gali gali mein shore hai, Rajiv Gandhi chor hai'.
It was a trifle unfair, but politics is not a game for the squeamish.
A more powerful chant was led by L.K. Advani and the BJP: 'Mandir wahin banayenge'. We shall build a temple to the Lord Ram only at the spot where the Babri mosque stands. Ayodhya entered the centrestage of Indian politics.
Rajiv Gandhi laid the foundations of Advani's dream and P.V. Narasimha Rao fulfilled it. Poorly advised by R.K. Dhawan and Buta Singh, Rajiv sought to appease the burgeoning BJP vote by laying the foundations of the temple. On December 6, 1992 Rao did nothing while the mosque was destroyed. He did more of nothing when a small temple was quickly erected at that spot and worship began.
The young Rajesh Pilot, still hopeful that something could be salvaged politically, argued that even if the destruction had not been stopped the construction could be prevented. Rao ignored him.
A temple to Lord Ram now stands at Ayodhya. The VHP's current demand is slightly misplaced: it is not asking for a temple, it is only asking for a bigger temple.
The home minister of the time, S.B. Chavan remained as studiously loyal to Rao as he is loyal to Sonia Gandhi today. The clutch of Muslim leaders in the Congress, held their tongues and stretched out their hands. Rao bribed each one with promotions in his next Cabinet reshuffle. They took the bribes and lived happily till the elections of 1996. That is when their joy ended.
In 1996 Rao had no slogan, because he had nothing to say. Obviously, he could not appeal to a traditional vote of the Congress, Muslims. That was a remarkable election because Rao believed that a deal with political parties was preferable to a deal with voters. So he concentrated on arrangements like the one he made with Kanshi Ram and Mayawati's BSP in Uttar Pradesh.
Add the Congress vote to the BSP's and - voila! It is extraordinary how the shrewdest politicians forge that an election is algebra rather than arithmetic, that it takes more than one factor to build an equation. It also needs chemistry, but Rao was noticeably lacking in this aspect.
The Congress could have recovered from Rajiv Gandhi's defeat in UP, but it could never recover from Rao's alliance in UP. Rao simply ceded vast amounts of electoral space to Mayawati, who occupied what she got, and refused to vacate it. The Dalits were lost completely to the Congress after 1996.
With the Muslims shifting to either the BSP or Mulayam Singh Yadav, and the Brahmins turning to BJP, the Congress was left with nothing more than memories. Sonia Gandhi's alliance with Mayawati, if it happens, will confirm that Congress has formally accepted its status as a disappearing memory in UP.
Rao could not, or would not, advertise his economic reforms, which he could legitimately claim the credit for. He was trapped by the legacy of 1971. He was an Indira man, and thought that he could sell a dead slogan even after he had personally killed it by dismantling the failed theories of the '70s in order to save the economy of the '90s. Rao thought that economic reforms could be slipped through surreptitiously. The Congress is still confused about liberalization.
Rao's successor Sitaram Kesri had no slogan either, but then the less Kesri said the better. The BJP, on the other hand, found that its two-point programme of mandir construction and an attack on minority-appeasement was still bringing in the voters. This was not surprising, because no one else had anything to offer in a time when strange, illogical coalitions held power in a vacuum. Lottery winners like Inder Gujral and H.D. Deve Gowda could hardly offer their individual good fortune as a platform for political mobilization.
When Sonia Gandhi became leader of the Congress, there was genuine hope in the party that she would shape a new, and youthful dream over the layers of traditional Congress values like secularism and strong governance. It helped that she was not tainted by the devious manipulations that had characterized Congress policy over Ayodhya.
Instead, the only Sonia memory etched in the voter's mind from the elections of 1999 was a number, 272, uttered in an Italian accent. Sonia Gandhi became identified with a search for personal power. Everyone knew what power would bring to Sonia, but no one tried to explain what this would mean to the Indians. More than five years have passed since that self-goal; time enough for course correction.
But the Congress has still not managed to identify itself sharply, deeply with any social or economic policy. What was left of its withered secularism disappeared after Gujarat. Even in the recent Assembly elections, Digvijay Singh thought that cow's urine would persuade the voter to ignore missing electricity, and Ajit Jogi felt that by calling the cow a national animal, he could make the voter forget the venality of his administration. Silly.
The Congress under Sonia Gandhi has not supported Atal Behari Vajpayee's vigorous liberalization programme. This is unexceptional. But neither has the Congress offered an alternative economic policy that anyone can understand. The impression therefore is that Sonia Gandhi opposes merely for the sake of opposition, that it is a negative position rather than a positive one. There is regular rhetoric about the poor of course but even the poor are tired of shibboleths.
When five years ago the vast reconstruction of the national infrastructure was launched, Dr Manmohan Singh argued in parliament that money would never be found for such fantasies. Five years later, the roads have come - as have the elections. Delhi's voters will doubtless ask Dr Singh why he thought roads could not be improved.
Three decades after Gharibi Hatao soared through the national imagination, what does the Indian electorate want to hear?
There are some elements in the BJP who believe that 'Garibi Hatao' should now give way to 'Amiri Badhao'. This would be wrong, and even unethical. Wealth cannot become a slogan as long as the Indians continue to live under the poverty line. The line may have lowered, from 40 per cent to 25 per cent; but that still means that 250 million Indians are without adequate food or shelter, in fact on the edge of despair. 'Amiri Badhao' can be a legitimate slogan only when the poverty line has been completely eliminated.
And yet there is an optimism in the air. Only the blind can deny that. Vajpayee's single biggest success has been to restore hope into the Indian air, and a belief that genuine economic progress is possible, and within our lifetime. His adjacent vision of peace fits in well, because progress shifts from arithmetical speed to geometrical speed with peace. In a sense he has reintroduced the mood that Jawaharlal Nehru created in 1957, when the messenger of world peace meshed his vision with the promise of the Five Year Plans. The voter is not a fool.
He does not expect miracles to happen, and is wary of any false slogans. But what he wants to hear this time can be summed up in two words: 'Taraqqi Dikhao'. Show me progress. Hope for the future will deliver the present.
The Congress seeks to ally with Mayawati's BSP, but the real BSP of the hour is 'Bijli, Sadak, Paani'. Electricity, Roads and Water are the Roti, Kapda, Makaan of 2004.
Some within the BJP - it could not have emanated from anywhere else - has begun the election campaign on SMS. One message doing the SMS rounds says: "If pro is the opposite of con, then what is the opposite of progress?"
The Congress needs to find an answer to that one pretty fast.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.
Help ambulances move freely
Keeping in mind that in this sprawling city of Karachi, scores of ambulances from various hospitals and welfare services are on the roads daily, round-the-clock, ambulance drivers must have felt enormously relieved on Friday. Vehicular traffic was mercifully thin due to the strike, as it is with all strikes that are observed partially or wholly. One assumes that the ambulances moved without the usual hurdles, hindrances, and congestion on that day.
There were fewer maddening obstructions in a kind of chaos that seems to define and characterize the flow of our traffic. One is impatient to observe here that of late time spent on the city's roads for even short distances has risen alarmingly, and with an element of despair.
Ambulance drivers, who seem to go unnoticed as a category of workers for the tough job that they do, must have heaved a sigh of relief on Friday. They were neither being elbowed out by larger vehicles nor bulldozed into perilous corners. The role these ambulance drivers play in saving life is oftenly underplayed, that is something to be thought about.
There is, of course, much more to think about the way the city's ambulances face challenges as they try and find their way through recurring, (as if recycled) traffic jams. These vehicles are sometimes poorly maintained, which is another point to note in passing. One believes that the ambulance drivers undergo a nerve shattering experience each time they rush a patient from his home to a hospital. The very thought of this is harrowing, to say the least.
Somehow, one assumes that this is something that happens to the other person and one is going to be exempted from this forever. Like theft or burglary or car-snatching, which one imagines only happens to the other person, to one's neighbour. Some citizens do talk about it, this trapping of an ambulance, and sometimes newspapers focus on the problem.
In fact, one is reminded of an advertisement from the State Life Insurance Company of Pakistan that calls upon citizens to let ambulances move freely and easily. Here, one would like to express a public appreciation for this kind of public service advertising, and wonder why other public sector organizations, especially those that are doing well financially, not pick up this theme and do a kind of a crusade on this.
Or something like wrong parking that completely blocks vehicles in residential and shopping areas. Sometimes, one wonders whether this society has got its priority list right. For all the sustained focus there is on polio or AIDS for that matter it surely makes one, ask whether our planners, and decision makers, the big ones and the small, have their agenda in order.
Let's face it. To see an ambulance trapped in the Sindh capital is a familiar sight - a disturbing sight- with which many of us can identify ourselves right away. "It can happen to any family, whose patient can get caught in that frustrating traffic jam on the main arteries of the Sindh capital. And he can lose the battle for life only because that ambulance wasn't allowed to move freely, as was its right," says this outspoken resident of Gulistan-i-Jauhar, Tariq Zuberi.
Another person, a working woman, reminds me that one has heard many times about the patients who died on their way to the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases; or others who suffered serious damage to their medical emergency because they could not reach the hospital on time due to traffic congestion, especially during the day. Mind you it is during the day that the traffic jams are infinitely worse for understandable reasons.
With reference to this battle for time and life, in the stifling tearful context of a traffic standstill, let me refer to one particular road called the Rafiqui Shaheed Road on which are located the following: As you enter from the Sharea Faisal, (assuming you have had a clean field on that main artery), there is the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD).
Then there is the Children's Hospital, another large set up; next to it is the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, and the Nursing School within the JPMC. After this is located the Sindh Medical College, and opposite that building is the Kidney Centre, another large facility; second only to the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation.
Perhaps there is no other road or street in the country, which has so many hospitals on it, and which is maintained in a perpetual state of traffic congestion, particularly during working hours. And the manner in which a traffic signal on Sharea Faisal (near Regent Plaza) is automatically operated is awfully disgusting, to say the least. It is, if one is coming from the "hospital road" (Rafiqui Road) and going to Sharea Faisal, an avoidable waste of time, making one wonder why that signal is not manually operated at peak time. That is, if the road is to be retained as a dual carriage.
The question that is appropriately being asked in relevant quarters is whether this road should be retained as a dual carriage, and why is it not possible to make it one way only. That is only traffic coming from Sharea Faisal to Rafiqui Road, is allowed and then made to move out from the other end, via school road in the cantonment area, where apartments of Askari Housing Scheme are located.
However, this brings in another problem, that has recently surfaced. This relates to the parking of those long coaches (which are presumably inter-city coaches) near the Cantt Railway Station on the School Road at various times of the day. And if there is VIP movement at that end, citizens have had it. And only God can help them if they are going to one of the hospitals in an emergency with sudden road closures around the area. Or diversions, the kind of which are faced by residents of Gulshan-i-Iqbal when there is VVIP movement in their area.
Having said all this, let us look at this week's story which details that "govt to ensure free movement of ambulances". Of course, there are the usual cynics amongst us who argue that in a city where the number of vehicles is rising (as indeed is the level of indiscipline), it is impossible to ensure a free movement even for ambulances, unless they are given VIP status and an armed escort is made to move with them. Public opinion is not ready for showing consideration for patients and their ambulances.
However, what the provincial government has said is that it will try to ensure the "uninterrupted movement of ambulances in the city so that patients could get timely medical care." It is reported that the provincial government has directed the city government to find out the solution of traffic jams in connection with ambulance services.
A recent meeting also took into account the fact that most major hospitals, including the Civil Hospital, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, NICVD, NICH, Seventh Day Adventist, Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Holy Family Hospital, Liaquatabad Hospital are located in congested areas, which can render access to them, absolutely impossible, because of traffic bottlenecks and jams. Or as we have seen in the case of the road repair and road sinking that took place on the Rafiqui Shaheed Road, right outside the NICVD premises. That was a terrible experience, I might recall, and underline.
Let us, however, see the whole scenario with optimism for a change. The provincial government has asked the Nazim to convene a special meeting of the concerned departments and work out a feasibility after a "necessary survey" of the surroundings of our major hospitals. This is a good news and so welcomed. But let us keep our fingers crossed. (Bear in mind that another report says that there has not been a traffic survey conducted for the last 12 years in Karachi despite the huge rise in the number of vehicles).
Finally, administrative steps are of course required to ensure that ambulances move freely. But, one would like to insist that without a considerate public opinion and sympathetic people, it is asking for too much to expect other drivers and their vehicles to make way for those siren-blowing ambulances, which are trying to save a human life, in the face of growing complexity. A hopeless complexity!