| 31 May 2004 | Monday | 11 Rabi-us-Saani 1425 |
Exit Mira, enter Ira
Will the real Mrs Gandhi stand up?
Sad echoes
The merger exercise of various small factions and the tiny pro-government Millat Party into a combined Pakistan Muslim League culminating in the naming of MNA Mushahid Hussain as the newly-unified PML secretary-general is a breakthrough in national politics.
So also, the unprecedented thaw and improvement in Indo-Pakistan relations since the Saarc summit in Islamabad in January 2004 is a major breakthrough in regional politics.
But the above atmosphere of communication, dialogue and resolution, however, has failed to filter down to inter-provincial relations within the country. The past few months has seen increased division and greater distrust than ever amongst the provinces and between the centre and the provinces on at least three major issues - the National Finance Commission (NFC) award, water distribution and wheat procurement.
An impasse on a new NFC sixth award has persisted despite months of negotiations and last ditch efforts by the prime minister to evolve a consensus on resource distribution before the 2004-2005 federal budget presentation in the first or second week of June. The federal government is said to be still trying to make a final effort to break the deadlock between the centre and the provinces on a sixth NFC award.
Similarly, the impasse over the question of sharing water among the provinces persists despite IRSA, the 1991 water accord, and a new initiative to evolve a consensus in the form of the establishment of a parliamentary committee on water resources headed by Senator Nisar Memon in October 2003.
The wheat crisis, which earlier saw the surplus production, Punjab, banning the inter-provincial movement of wheat, is the latest issue fostering distrust among the four provinces, particularly between Punjab on the one hand and Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan on the other.
The latest meeting of the Inter- Provincial Wheat Disposal Committee chaired by the federal food and agriculture minister could not reach an agreement on the amount of wheat to be supplied by Punjab (who is reportedly offering only 0.33 million tons) to Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan (who are said to be demanding 4.3 million tons altogether).
The inability to reach an apparent consensus on the NFC, water and wheat issues has taken place in a situation where the central government and three provinces are of the same political alliance.
If this is the level of cooperation among supposedly like-minded governments, one wonders what would have been the state of affairs if the governments at the centre and the four provinces were made up of completely different political alliances.
Such non-compromising attitudes may have been fuelled in part by politics and the role played by various interest groups, but the basic underlying factor causing division amongst the provinces and between the centre and the provinces, at least in the three issues above, must surely have something to do with the shortage of resources relative to the demand.
Had there been sufficient funds to distribute amongst all in the case of the NFC award, and plenty of water and wheat supplies to go round the provinces, the differences and distrust between the provinces would probably not have been as sharp as they have become.
Resources in general have been dwindling to a point where every province is now feeling the crunch. In the case of the NFC award, the provinces are asking for a bigger slice of the "pie" when the federal government's role in spheres like foreign affairs, defence, administration, macroeconomic framework, and debt repayment is demanding more resources than ever before.
In the water and wheat issues, the smaller provinces in general are asking Punjab to be charitable when the latter is apparently facing water and more lately, wheat supply, problems of its own.
The water issue is a classic example of how dwindling supply of this precious commodity has created distrust among the provinces. The reasons for the apparent water shortage in the country include: the failure to execute any major dam and water- storage project since Tarbela and Mangla dams; wastage from wanton seepage and leakages; and ironically, the 1960 Indus Water Treaty which restricted Pakistan's water supply to only the three western rivers, Chenab, Jhelum and the Indus.
Now, even this limited supply is being threatened further by India's Kishan Ganga hydroelectric project on River Jhelum and the Baglihar hydropower and dam project on River Chenab, both of which could cause Pakistan to lose thousands of cusecs of water every day.
Given this state of affairs, the likely scenario can only be sharper and sharper water conflicts within the country, particularly between Punjab and Sindh.
It is, therefore, not surprising that prospects of implementation of the 1991 water accord for equal distribution of water among the provinces is looking dimmer than ever before, and IRSA is already practically dead because of the lack of water! (A report last week said that the IRSA secretariat is functioning without members from the Centre, Punjab and Sindh.)
Thus, the failure of successive governments to improve the resource situation of the country as a whole to meet growing demands appear to have led to a situation where any sharing mechanism is unlikely to be agreed upon let alone work because there is just not enough of resources around to distribute and share.
Resolution of issues lies not only in dialogue, parliamentary committees and other CBMs (confidence building measures) to foster trust and confidence amongst the provinces, but also in executing concrete plans to improve the resource situation for the country as a whole, whether it be external/internal earnings, water or wheat supply.
Exit Mira, enter Ira
It has been left to me to record the retirement of one of the most illustrious educationists of my city, Dr Mira Phailbus the principal of the Kinnaird College. When she took over Kinnaird, it was coming apart at the seams.
The place had been nationalized by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and all of us thought that Kinnaird would not survive the glow. But not so Mira Phailbus. Welding her staff into a well-oiled machine, she turned the college into a centre of excellence.
With a faith that moves mountains, Mira Phailbus fought off the evil effects of an ill-advised nationalization which had devalued and degraded similar institutions elsewhere in the city and in the country.
Mira Phailbus led Kinnaird from the front and she led it triumphantly into the 21st century. Her successor, Dr Ira Hasan, faces an uphill task, people will judge her by comparing her with Mira Phailbus.
One of the abiding qualities of the outgoing principal was that she did not rule. She reigned one of the pillars of British constitutional life is that the queen does no wrong and that for everything she does, someone else is responsible. I hope Ira Hasan will follow this golden principle and learn to delegate authority where such delegation is prudent.
To end on a personal note I saw Dr Mira Phailbus at a Lion's Club function some thirty years ago. Malik Ikram Ilahi, the district governor of the club, had invited Mira Phailbus at the Intercontinental (now Pearl Continental).
Many singers, professionals and amateurs performed at the function. But they went unheard because without even wanting to do it Mira Phailbus had stolen the show. It was during that function that I told Mira that I wanted to do away with her husband so that I could run away with her up into the mountains and spend the rest of my days at her feet in a little hut unknown to man and beast.
But this is an aside. I have had nothing but the greatest respect for the greatest principal of any educational institution that I have known in my life. Principals like Mira Phailbus should never retire.
I hope Kinnaird will, under Ira Hasan's stewardship, continue to draw upon the immense reservoir of knowledge and wisdom that Mira Phailbus is leaving behind. The queen has retired. Long live the queen.
* * * * *
I joined The Muslim a few days before it was to come out from Islamabad on May 17, 1979. The late Mr Ahmed Hasan was to be my news-editor. To his everlasting credit, he introduced me to Santosh Kumar, then a secretary at the Indian Embassy.
Mr Kumar in turn introduced me to Kunwar Natwar Singh, the Ambassador. In the weeks and months that followed I became one of the most welcome guests at the Indian Embassy.
I cannot say that I and Natwar Singh ever became friends but we were definitely more than mere acquaintances to the extent that I could call the Ambassador Nat Khat Singh and he would smile at it.
Nat Khat means naughty, mischievous or playful. Now Mr Singh was neither naughty nor mischievous nor yet playful. He was, more often than not, a serious, dedicated diplomat who loved his job and wanted to go higher.
After his stint at Islamabad he became a rather important member of Mrs Indira Gandhi's kitchen cabinet. And now he has gone and become his country's foreign minister.
Unfortunately his views on Kashmir have not changed a bit over the years and I fear there may be difficult days ahead for Pakistan over the issue. As I have always said it is better by far to be an honest Hindu than to be a simulating secularist.
Age does not appear to have mellowed him for old times sake, I would still like to request him to dig up Santosh Kumar from somewhere in Delhi and ask Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to send him as India's high commissioner to Islamabad, or atleast give him a roving job so that Mr Kumar can visit places other than Islamabad in my country.
Santosh Kumar is being wasted in Delhi and should be put to better use now that Kunwar Natwar Singh heads the foreign Ministry. This sounds sentimental but I am sentimental.
* * * * *
Nasser Hussein had announced his retirement from all forms of cricket. The former England Captain says that he has done so before any body comes up and tells him that he is no longer good enough to play for his country.
This reminds me of Neil Harvey, the great Australian left-hander. When he retired several decades ago, he was in top form. His retirement took many by surprise but Harvey defended it by saying: "I want to go while the going is good." This is how it should be not only in cricket but all walks of life. Some of our politicians, especially, would do well to follow this golden rule.
* * * * *
I am delighted, and the reason for my delight is that Mr Mushahid Hussain has become the secretary-general of the "Unified" Muslim League. He served the Mians of Model Town to the best of his own ambition and he will serve the Chaudris of Gujrat until their very last days in power.
Time there was when Mr Hussain used to advise Mian Nawaz Sharif to play on the front foot against all corners. So one day Mian Sahib used his front foot once too often and lost his middle stump.
I hope Mr Mushahid Hussain will not advise the Chaudris of Gujrat to play on the back foot because if they do so and miss the line of the ball, they will be sure to be given out leg-before.
Here is another thought, though. If Mr Hussain continues to advise people in power as honestly and as sincerely as he has been doing over the years, there will be no one left in the field looking for the top slot. That will be the day for Mr Mushahid Hussain to have the cake and eat it too.
Will the real Mrs Gandhi stand up?
Inida envies China's booming economy, and China's phenomenal success in removing poverty is finally catching the world's attention. According to a dispatch in The Guardian on Friday, the communist state has "offered the world a lesson in how to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty."
The World Bank too agrees that the number of Chinese people subsisting on less than $1 a day has fallen from 490 million in 1981 to 88 million. During this period the country's output has increased more than eightfold and the average income has risen by seven per cent year, passing $1,000 for the first time in 2003.
This has lessons for India. When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the country's finance minister he had remarked on more than one occasion, not without envy, that China had a "supremo" who could take decisions he thought best for the country, unlike India, which had to go to the people every five years.
Indeed, Dr Singh's 1991-96 economic liberalization programme came as a bitter pill for the less entranced Indian people. So they threw out his Congress Party in the 1996 elections for well over eight years, the party's longest innings in the wilderness. By contrast the people's reaction to Indira Gandhi's 'emergency rule' had kept her out of office for fewer than three years. There is one more lesson for India here.
Unlike Dr Singh's liberalization-induced electoral rout of the P.V. Narasimha Rao Congress government, Indira Gandhi's emergency appeared to have alienated only the Hindi heartland of the north; you would notice that she had actually swept the 1977 polls in the southern states.
What was the reason for Mrs Gandhi's popularity that despite her emergency she lost the north Indian states for barely three years while never letting her charisma wane in the memerized south?
To understand her strength it is perhaps best to recall what her emergency rule 20-point economic programme was all about. It is important to figure out who could really have been hurt by her programmes, and so badly that they even joined forces with the Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) to overthrow her, even by urging the armed forces to disobey her government.
Four of Mrs Gandhi's 20-point programme pertained to agriculture and urban land ceiling, equal distribution of wealth, minimum agricultural wages, and expansion in irrigation schemes.
Three of her "points" governed worker's participation in industry, a national apprenticeship scheme and relief from bonded labour. Three other points stressed eradication of tax evasion, economic offences and smuggling activities.
Two points governed the procurement, distribution and price control of essential commodities. Another two stressed the development of handloom sectors, improvement in the supply of quality cloth. Two more sought the provision of housing and relief from indebtedness of the weaker sections of the society.
Lastly, there were four points, one each for accelerating the power generation with liberalized investment, optimum use of import licences, speedy goods transportation on the national level, and books, stationery, food commodities supplied to schools at subsidized rates.
Almost all these resolutions are enshrined in the Common Minimum Programme unveiled by her daughter-in-law, India's unchallenged kingmaker, Ms Sonia Gandhi.
Now, who could be hurt by this resolve: the poor or the rich? Who was evading taxes that Indira Gandhi wanted to pursue? And what could be morally wrong in seeking to free bonded labour? Much has been made of the suspension of civil liberties and press censorship during the emergency. But let's take some insight on this.
Remember that of India's two main communist parties of the time, the pro-Soviet CPI was supporting Mrs Gandhi's tough rule against a "fascist threat of the RSS", while the pro-China CPI-M was staunchly opposing her, thereby unwittingly compromising with the RSS. The day the emergency was lifted some leftists students strolled to Jama Masjid, Delhi's old quarter, to savour and share the joy with the local people.
When someone handed a packet of sweets and samosas to a rickshaw-puller, the poor man wondered why?. "The emergency is over, we are a free people again," declared our student friend, his joy overflowing.
"But my emergency is coming right there," said the rickshaw-puller, pointing to a paan-chewing police constable, who walked up to him, his cane raised threateningly.
A mouthful of expletives only north Indian policemen are familiar with and one solid whack on the wobbly wheel of the rickety rickshaw and our definition of civil liberties and "authoritarianism" was already cartwheeling away.
Much of India lives in a state of undeclared emergency, much of it socially enforced even if not politically acknowledged. If we consider the treatment meted out to the Tehelka news hounds quite recently and what happened with Kashmiri journalist Iftikhar Geelani, not to speak of the thousands of arrests of innocent Muslims, Dalits and tribes-people during the democratic Vajpayee regime, we would be clearer about our perspectives.
The difference is that Mrs Gandhi's authoritarian rule had targeted the rich; the Vajpayee regime, with its own shades of the emergency, was naturally biased against the poor. This month's poll results showed it.
Therefore, recently, when several presidents and heads of numerous international institutions paid homage to the Shanghai conference on poverty reduction, putting to one side their concern for human rights, the brouhaha over Mrs Gandhi's brief fling with dictatorial powers also began to seem strangely agreeable. Such a perception would be branded unreasonable, even reckless if India had not tasted the recent rightward lurch.
On the other hand such are the shifts taking place in India's neighbourhood, in China, that World Bank president James Wolfensohn has found himself in the unusual position of praising the Chinese Communist party's five-year economic plans. With a communist-backed middle of the road coalition easing into the saddle in India, it has fortuitously rehashed Indira Gandhi's 20- point programme, adapting it mildly to a more market savvy economy.
Give or take a few obvious differences from its 1974 version, the Common Minimum Programme hammered out by Sonia Gandhi's United Progressive Alliance has a genuine chance of succeeding but only when pursued ruthlessly, somewhat like the Chinese minus their recklessness, on behalf of the 700 million Indians who have remained outside the magic lure of the market - and not for the 300 million who may have arrived there by hook or by crook.
* * * * *
A poor rickshaw-puller committed suicide by hanging himself from a statue of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, icon of India's downtrodden, in Hyderabad on Saturday morning. Police said the victim, identified as Bikshapati, a Dalit follower of Dr Ambedkar, ended his life because of financial troubles.
Suicides forced by penury are not uncommon to southern India. But laying down life at the guru's feet was hitherto considered a concept from India's multi-faceted mythology.
Sad echoes
Sixty-year-old Jafar Haider often forgets that his youngest son, Agha Ghulam Haider, no longer pays him a visit on Thursdays. The son, who was married and had three children, was injured in a bomb blast in Hyderi mosque on May 7. The young banker died at the Aga Khan Hospital six days later.
"My son was standing by a pillar that fell down on him as the bomb blast ripped through the mosque. His son had celebrated his first birthday a couple of weeks back," recalled Ghulam Haider's grief-stricken mother.
She and her husband are not the only parents mourning the death of a son killed in sectarian terrorism. But they are probably among the few who have lost a second child in this way. In 1983, their eldest son, Syed Abbas Haider, also lost his life in sectarian violence.
According to a report compiled by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, titled "Sectarian violence in Karachi 1994-2002", as many as 86 people were killed by religious extremists in the period.
"Abbas was a final-year student at a medical college. His younger brother, Taqi Haider, was with him when terrorists killed him. Actually he died in Taqi's arms. The incident left him so devastated that he has not been able to get over the trauma," says the father.
For cut's sake
There was no "no-parking" sign on that part of Zebunnisa Street. A traffic constable stood at one corner. He seemed to have no objection when this friend parked his motorcycle there.
The friend went across to a shop for a little while, about 10 minutes, and when he came out he found his bike missing. He ran towards the traffic constable, who professed total ignorance about what might have happened and advised recourse to the nearest police station.
When the friend wondered how somebody could have lifted the bike without the constable noticing it, the latter said it was not his job to keep an eye on all vehicles parked there.
The friend first went to the Preedy traffic police station and found that his bike wasn't there. He was advised to go to the Artillery Maidan traffic section. He got on a rickshaw, and heaved a sigh of relief when he saw the bike standing in one corner of the traffic section.
The friend thought that the crisis was over. He was wrong. He was told that his bike was parked in a "no-parking zone". He was asked to produce his papers. Leafing through the document, a traffic police official said that the motorcycle was not registered in the friend's name.
The friend said that the name on the registration papers was his brother's. The official asked for a document authorizing the friend to ride the bike. The friend said he didn't have such an authorization letter.
The official said that he would give the bike only to the friend's brother. However, when the friend offered some inducement, the official let him take away the bike. The friend realized that if the traffic police constable on Zebunnisa Street had stopped him from parking his bike there, he would not have had to go through so much trouble, including paying a bribe to spare his brother the trouble of a trip to Saddar.
Trees plan
The city government has been successful in cutting down over 1,600 eucalyptus trees in Karachi over the past two years or so, according to a concerned citizens group.
The reason given for this sacrilege has been that these variety of trees clog drains. At the same time, trees have also been cut down to make space for advertisement hoardings and have been sold in the market for Rs5,000 per trunk.
But that money is not being spent on planting more local trees. In their place, the city government has planted under 200 palm trees, many of which have since withered away.
It is time the city nazim came out with some action plan on how to make up for the trees that have been cut down, particularly in North Nazimabad and other suburbs. Also, some effort should be made to plant local varieties like Neem, which give shade as well as other benefits against palm trees that are largely ornamental and serve little purpose.
Incidentally, the eucalyptus is not without its uses. Crush a leaf with your fingers and smell it - it will smell the same as the active ingredient in some anti-cold and anti-cough rubbing mixtures.
If you ever happen to walk into a grove of eucalyptus trees, you will immediately notice the invigorating air. There used to be such a grove, a colleague nostalgically recalls, in Lucknow's Banarsi Bagh (zoo).
'Sattoo' hits town
With his earthenware pot wrapped in a red, wet piece of cloth and perched precariously on a four-wheel cart, Naveed has been selling various thirst-quenching drinks for the past six years. Every summer he comes to Karachi from Khanewal and sells "sattoo", fresh lime and other sherbets.
"The season lasts from four to six months. When it ends, we pack up and go home, where we sell fruit and vegetables," he says. These drink sellers appear at roundabouts and bus-stands every May. They sell their drinks, mostly in tin glasses, to bus conductors and pedestrians. They disappear with the onset of the monsoon.
According to Naveed, "sattoo", a drink of barley and sugar or "gur", is immensely popular in rural Punjab. In Karachi, it is fast becoming the poor man's summer drink. "The people of Karachi have taken to this drink in a big way. Actually "sattoo" is also replacing traditional Sindhi thadal," he says.
"People usually want the barley to be in a fine powder, but this is usually not the case. The particles never dissolve and you have to twirl your glass at regular intervals to stop them from settling down," he says.
Naveed sells a regular glass for Rs5 and a large one for Rs10. He says the "gur" in "sattoo" gives you the energy boost that the body requires in this weather. The drink is called garmi ki dushman and is also reputed to be good for the stomach.
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com.