| 23 June 2004 | Wednesday | 04 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
Awami League returns to parliament
Who are they?
Tales of suffering humanity
It was the first full-dress press briefing (June 12) in a long time by the director-general of Inter-Services Public Relations. The advent of the multi-channel satellite TV has rendered the use and practice of face-to-face press briefings somewhat superfluous. And yet an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter has its own advantages.
As a former ISPR chief and an invitee to the ISPR DG's first briefing, I felt happy to see how the set-up has grown. The number of officers in attendance at the briefing - including two new women officers - was impressive, bearing no comparison to the handful who worked in the past. The organizational strength and expansion corresponds to the expanded role of the directorate-general.
The meeting was running a good three-quarters of an hour behind schedule when the director-general arrived. He had been held up in a pre-briefing conference to update his information on the Wana operation.
He got into his presentation without the usual preliminaries, and dwelt on three main issues in over an hour-long discourse. These were India's newly-formulated Cold Start Doctrine, Wana, and restructuring in the army.
India's Cold Start military doctrine happens to be the child of the bitter lessons learnt by that country's civil and military establishments through the abortive 15-month-long (December 2002 - March 2003) military stand-off against Pakistan. Reacting impetuously to the terrorist raid on the Indian parliament (attributed to a Pakistan-based Mujahideen outfit), India moved up its land and air forces in an offensive formation to go into action at a moment's notice. However, the time taken in deploying these forces all over the operational area and the subsequent long and tense wait without orders to move all but defeated the purpose of the prohibitively expensive exercise.
On the one hand, the long sitting war - sitzkrieg - impacted adversely on the morale of the front-line troops, and, on the other, cost the public exchequer a horrendous amount of money yet to be precisely revealed.
The Cold Start doctrine, Major-General Shaukat Sultan defined as one in which a quick in-and-out action is undertaken by a hostile army without giving any formal warning to the other country involved.
As for invading a country without an ultimatum or without 'a formal or informal warning', it was an old and established Indian tactic, the DG asserted. It happened in 1965, 1971 and in 1984 (Siachen). Such an interpretation of the Cold doctrine would be hardly credible.
While the doctrine could not be 'ignored', Gen. Sultan viewed it as "not a viable proposition" in the case of Pakistan; it could 'perhaps' work for a small state or "banana republic" but Pakistan was "altogether different".
The point that a massive deployment of Indian forces along Pakistan's border could not go undetected and without evoking a matching response is hardly debatable. Could we, however, deny our intelligence failure, especially in 1965? Just a couple of days before the Indian invasion of West Pakistan, we had little or no information about the Indian build-up along Wagah.
The point here is not so much to expose the weaknesses of the Cold Start doctrine as to see and analyse the lessons we learnt ourselves from India's offensive build up along our borders from December 2001 to March 2003.
We must carefully audit the gains made and losses suffered through this period. Even if the amount of attrition, material and morale we imposed on India as the potential aggressor far exceeded ours, what nevertheless might have been the extent of the damage done to us?
As for the restructuring of the army, General Sultan gave a statistical survey of the savings thus effected. He quoted the figure of Rs. 10-15 billion over the next decade by "reducing the administrative manpower and optimizing technical resources... This is to be done without in any way affecting the "improved combat worthiness of the army".
What engaged the press most and provoked no end of questions, however, was Gen. Sultan's brief on Wana. His response to the various provocative questions corresponded to the tone and substance of the questions posed.
The government, he stressed, would "take the war on terrorism to its logical end till foreign militants were flushed out". The exact toll in lives on the two sides -- locals and foreigners -- he said was still not available.
Would it, however, be possible to distinguish between local people and foreigners? In most cases, the foreigners and the locals look, dress and speak the same language.
Furthermore, while it may be possible to tell the ducks from the drakes in a land operation, air strikes can only see the hard target without identifying its language and ethnicity. The Wana operation is officially said to have concluded, but its echoes continue to be heard.
On the issue of the increase in the military budget, Gen Sultan said it was 'quite meagre'. Besides, he said, it was not the decision of the armed forces. The remark produced a round of light-hearted banter at the finance minister's post-budget conference the next day. - The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.
Awami League returns to parliament
Awami League, the principal opposition party in Bangladesh's parliament, returned to the house on June 15, unilaterally ending its long boycott of the proceedings of the house.
Political analysts are wondering what has made the AL backtrack on the decision not to return to the house until a state minister in Khaleda Zia's cabinet tenders "unqualified apology" for his "nasty" remarks on its leader, Sheikh Hasina, that led to a walkout on June 25 last year.
The state minister has not apologised, nor has the treasury bench had any negotiations with the opposition. There was even no "behind-the-chair" understanding between the leaders of the opposing benches this time as Speaker Jamirudin Sircar reportedly "refused to take any initiative" to bring back the opposition to parliament
So one wonders why the Awami League decided to return to parliament, eating its own words. "We are returning to the house tomorrow," Sheikh Hasina, told reporters after a lengthy meeting of Awami League's parliamentary party on June 14. "People want us to play an effective role in the house."
Many found the statement nothing but empty political rhetoric, because people always wanted AL, or any political party voted to parliament for that matter, to play "an effective role in the house" in terms of asserting the constituents' social, political and economic interests.
But the AL, like the BNP between 1996 and 2001, attributed their prolonged boycott of parliament proceedings to the "desire of the people". Notably, there were 76 sittings between June 25, 2003 an d June 15, 2004, 2003-the day Sheikh Hasina walked out of the house and the day she returned.
On another count, the AL attended only 52 sittings out of a total of 204 sittings that the current eighth parliament had (until June 15) since its maiden one on October 28, 2001.
The opposition lawmakers, who regularly received their monthly remunerations and used all the privileges meant for legislators, however, did not say whether the "people" authorised them to take the money when they were not representing them in the house during the boycott of parliamentary proceedings.
However, only the other day, on April 25 this year, the AL lawmakers found the present legislature "totally useless" and demanded, in a memorandum submitted to the speaker, "immediate dissolution of parliament" to pave the way for mid-term general elections.
Besides, the party's general secretary, Abdul Jalil, repeatedly claimed, to the press and the public alike, that April 30 was going to be the last day for Prime Minister Khaleda Zia in the office.
As the speaker tried to persuade the opposition legislators to return to the house, instead of asking for dissolution of parliament, senior AL leader Abdus Samad Azad told the speaker. "We are not here to take any suggestions from you, we are here to place our demands."
And now that the AL leadership has decided to play an "effective role" in the "useless parliament." Analysts assert that the AL has, in fact, been forced to backtrack on its earlier decision not to return to parliament.
It failed, in the first place, to oust the government of Khaleda Zia by April 30- a deadline repeatedly announced over the preceding months primarily by its general secretary and backed publicly by Sheikh Hasina.
The failure has exposed thousands of the party's lower- and mid-level leaders and workers across the country to a state of social humiliation, not to mention the backlash from the ruling party and the administration.
The bigwigs outside the party, who reportedly promised the AL cooperation to force Khaleda Zia out of power, are now facing "sedition charges" for "conspiring to dislodge an elected government."
Qazi Faruque Ahmed of Proshika, a leading NGO of the country, being a glaring example. Secondly, there was no alternative for AL lawmakers, including Sheikh Hasina, to save their seats in the house after the current session of parliament was over on ground of the constitutional provision under which a member loses his or her seat if she remains absent from the house, without the speaker's permission, for 90 consecutive sitting days.
Until June 15, Hasina was absent from the house for 76 sitting days. The budget session usually gets a lengthy one and the governing party had a plan to drag the session to make sure she loses the seat on ground of "unauthorized" absence.
The BNP policymakers were of the opinion that they would go for by-election to the seats to be vacated by the AL legislators. Sixty in the 300-member house. They believed that the opposition party, discredited at the moment, would not be able to disrupt the by-elections.
Thirdly, there is the temptation for the AL to have nine additional seats in the house. The recently enacted constitutional amendment provides for 45 reserved seats for women in parliament, which are to be distributed among the parties in accordance with their respective strengths in the house.
It was, therefore, a circumstantial compulsion, both social and political, for the AL to return to a parliament that it had found useless. Still the people seem happy to see a vibrant parliament, with the opposition demanding accountability of the government in the house- a scene that the electorates have missed for over a year.
Who are they?
In the span of a couple of months, innocent people have been savagely murdered in two Imambargahs, a religious scholar has been riddled with bullets and an army corps commander has narrowly escaped death - though those who were guarding his life did not.
And now a political worker has lost his life to God knows what and whom. What's even more mind numbing is that all of this happened not in the early hours of the day, but when the sun was beating down on us or in the evening rush hour.
The audacity of those who perpetrated these killings is baffling. It appears that they neither fear anything or anyone nor do they worry about precious human lives. Who are they?
Conjectural finger pointing is even more frustrating. Some put it down to extremist religious elements proliferating by the minute in our society. Some ascribe it to our own secret agencies that have some clandestine agenda to serve.
And some believe a foreign hand is involved that seeks to destabilize our country. No clear evidence. No clear picture. No clear enemy. Terror has become an invisible monster. Who should one blame? Perhaps there is no plausible answer to all these questions.
However, there is no confusion who suffers. Clearly the masses. Men, women, children who haven't the foggiest as to what is going on around them when they step into a street or hit the road to reach a certain destination.
Busy with their daily chores, all of a sudden they're jolted by a blast or ear-splitting sound of bullets coming out of a KK or a TT. They run helter-skelter to find a safe place. Some duck under any kind of shelter they see. Some lie down waiting for the inevitable to happen.
Could it be that whoever is behind these recent spate of killing has another agenda to desensitize the people? Make them completely used to the sound of a bomb blast or the pungent smell of gunpowder? So that when something of a larger magnitude hits them, they're utterly insensitive to it and accept it as their fate.
If that's their motive, it's much more dangerous than mere killing. Sadly, one feels this is precisely what's happening in Karachi. After every gory incident people find themselves hard pressed to do what they're supposed to do. Go to office to earn a living.
Visit the market to buy groceries. Watch TV to amuse themselves. Not that they don't feel the pangs of sorrow and that unbridled violence doesn't affect them. It does, although momentarily. But for how long? For how long will the situation persist? Apathy is not as contagious a disease as some other ailments; but it can slowpoison any society.
Sooner or later, people are going to take violence in their stride and consider it a perfunctory, routine matter. If that happens, politics, economics and sociology may lose their subjectivity - and objectivity. We must dread that time.
Tales of suffering humanity
Do immediate reactions make good literature? This question loomed at last Saturday's launch of the fourth collection of short stories by Dr Shershah Syed, 'Dil Hi Tau Hai'. Dr Shershah Syed is a gynaecologist but 'dil' (heart) is common to the title of all his four collections.
It seems Dr Syed draws his 'raw material' from the pathetic tales he hears and the suffering he sees during his practice as a gynaecologist. But his narratives do not end on sighs and sobs. He delves deep into the causes of the suffering and the person or persons responsible for the trauma involved.
Poet and story writer Fatema Hasan observed at the book launch that Dr Syed had not written research papers on his subjects. These were stories and should be approached as such. The characters he chooses to present are found in everyday life.
Every story, she said, described problems faced by women that were rarely discussed earlier. She only wished that while writing his stories, the author had resisted the temptation to intervene; instead, he should have let events take their own course.
Fahmida Riaz, poet and story writer, also spoke on the occasion and praised Dr Syed for the social work carried out by him in the most tiring and depressing conditions. But, she had some reservations about his stories.
Fine art, she said, was a very 'jealous spouse' and demanded singular attention. She meant that the craft used in the stories was not up to the mark. It was like a doctor or a social worker writing down his immediate experiences at the end of an exhausting day the information gained from different people, with the intention that he would write his story based on these experiences at a later time.
Prof Saher Ansari, who chaired the proceedings, said that the genre of story writing had changed a lot. It could no more be described in a cut and dried fashion. Now 'documentary' stories and 'documentary' novels were also being written. The writer had closely observed the prevailing social conditions and the characters, both noble and ignoble, born out of those conditions, Prof Ansari said.
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Someone was complaining the other day that writers and poets had not reacted the way they should have during the recent rampage by terrorists in Karachi. They should have come out on the road to record their protest and anger.
He said terrorism had dampened the spirit of writers to create something worthwhile. As against this, it was pointed out that it was the task of journalists and chroniclers to record events. Writers and poets did not normally react immediately to an event.
And if they did write something instantly, it had no permanent value. An example is that most of the short stories written during the traumatic partition years depicting the killings of innocent people have now been forgotten while some good novels written several years later have endured.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz was once asked how was it that he did not take part in active left politics (after his initial trade union involvement). He had said that it was wrong to assume that everyone should come out on the streets waving a flag. Poets and writers had their own role to play, political activists theirs.
* * * * *
Two book melas were held by the booksellers of Urdu Bazaar. Books at both places were available at a 30 to 40 per cent discount. But the crowd of the buyers seen at the shops was not very heartening. Perhaps one reason was the heat which stayed with the city for too long. Textbooks were in great demand due to the crisis caused by late printing and supply.
Shops dealing in literary books seemed to attract people. The shelves were packed with poetry collections, travelogues, biographies and books on religion and Islamic history, hardbound, with colourful covers.
This leads one to believe that the book industry is flourishing. But this may be only partly true. Original writings on serious subjects were missing. Some publishers have made it a practice to select an old book that is out of print and reprint it or its translation.
There is nothing wrong with this if the intention is to serve the readers, but the real intention is in some cases to dodge the Copyright Act and avoid payment of royalty.
If a book authored by, for example, Maulana Sulaiman Nadvi or Maulana Ghulam Rasool Mehr, published several decades back, is republished with the title and the year of first publication removed, who can go after the publisher? How does this help our book culture?
It is far better to have translations of quality books from other languages. Some publishing houses have specialized in it. There are some reputed writers who have made valuable contributions.
For example, rendering Tolstoy's War and Peace by Shahid Hameed into Urdu was no mean effort. But some publishers, in their hurry to reach the market first, publish texts without proper revision.
Leaving aside some exceptions, there is no place for an editor in the office of a publisher dealing in Urdu books. The publisher mostly depends on the authors or the translator's reputation and good sense. The rest is taken care of by the proof-reader.