| 18 April 2005 | Monday | 08 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1426 |
Cricket prayers
The lack of quality control
LIKE all good diplomats who happen to get declared persona non grata by their host countries, either out of personal pique or in the course of political cross-fires as was evidently the case here, Jalil Abbas Jilani too was given a hero’s welcome when he returned home from New Delhi in February 2003.
Those were the days when many of today’s peaceniks of Delhi would studiously avoid the Pakistan High Commission and its diplomats either out of fear of the rightwing supra nationalist establishment dominant in India those days or because of the convenience of the moment, or simply due to the very familiar middle class chicanery.
But one truly unrelenting peace worker albeit an ageing one – Ms Nirmala Deshpande – visited the Jilani family on the last day of their stay in Delhi. She had sat on one of the packed cartons in his bare drawing room, brooding, saying nothing, smiling occasionally with compassionate eyes, but saying nothing. And with that gesture she said it all.
Within a day of his assignment as the point person for South Asia, but basically riveted to India, Jalil found himself receiving a unexpected visitor from a Mediterranean country with which he had had little to do. This person was the ambassador of a country with a history of India-Pakistan-like rivalry in his patch of the world.
The ambassador heartily congratulated a bemused Jilani on his expulsion from India as also for all the ceremonial receptions he was given from the Wagah border to Islamabad. But in the next breath the visitor was explaining his odd demeanour.
It turned out that he too had been thrown out by his host country as a persona non grata. And he too was the toast of his diplomatic colleagues for a week or two after his expulsion. He too had ceremonial tea with the president of his country to acknowledge his perceived heroism in the wrong capital of the world. But then something went actually wrong for the ambassador.
Having internalized and accepted his new-found status as a state-sponsored celebrity, Jilani’s visitor made a telling revelation. On the first available national day of his country, the envoy allowed himself to walk past the president during the official ceremony. But the president didn’t seem to notice him. So he made a second effort at catching the eye of the chief guest, this time by smiling to him. No response.
“Finally, I walked up to the president to greet him personally. I reminded him of the tea we had and he seemed to remember my face. I repeated my name to him and it seemed to register something. After that one minute of glory as I was leaving, he suddenly called out tome and said: ‘By the way, what do you do?’” This double-edged story was narrated by Jalil himself last summer after he made history of sorts by becoming the rare Pakistani diplomat to have returned to New Delhi on official duty — to the country from where he was sent home so unceremoniously not so long ago.
Everyone knew, but no one better than the officials of a befuddled Indian foreign ministry themselves that Jalil had become a pawn in the nefarious games that the home ministries of India and Pakistan play with each other.
That is why whenever he returned to Delhi on duty — and he must be a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records as the most popular persona non grata who has returned to his former hosts more than half a dozen times already — the Pakistani diplomat was always promptly cornered and monopolized by his Indian number Arun Singh who still respectfully calls him Jalil Bhai.
That is also why perhaps that Mani Shankar Aiyar and the late Jyotindra Nath Dixit both of whom had served as senior diplomats in Pakistan, and became key players in the Manmohan Singh government, could not mask their shock and embarrassment at the raw deal Jilani received in Delhi. They told Jalil so in as many words, not today, in better times, but in February 2003 when the going was tough.
Many people feel, and mostly quite legitimately, that it is the “steel frame” of the bureaucracies of the two countries that stall any major departure from the beaten track of their hobbling, trundling bilateral relations. The trite situation begs the question: how will these hidebound bureaucracies deliver the elusive magic potion called “thinking out of the box” for that is what their governments say is required of them today?
A clue to the way ahead was evident in an unusually warm farewell dinner hosted for Arun Singh by Pakistan’s High Commissioner Aziz Ahmed Khan. “It is my fervent hope that in a few short years from now when I lead a retired life of a former diplomat, I would have the pleasure to welcome Arun as India’s high commissioner in Islamabad,” the envoy gushed as the guests cheered him lustily.
If read between the lines, there was a sub-text. With his familiar diplomatic subtlety, the high commissioner was pointing to a link that would be useful to bear in mind for very good reasons. Less than a week after President Musharraf rounds off his three-day visit to Delhi on Monday, Arun Singh, having finished his duty at the Pakistan desk, would be heading for Israel as India’s new ambassador there.
It just so happens that India’s present envoy in Islamabad Shiv Shankar Menon was also ambassador in Israel not too long ago. Friends have been teasing Jalil Abbas and Arun Singh over the latter’s move to Tel Aviv. “At least there is one place on earth where these two will not be able to monopolize each other,” said one common friend.
That allusion was to the absence of diplomatic ties between Israel and Pakistan, which would make it nearly impossible for Jalil Abbas Jilani to ever go to a city like Tel Aviv. This is how it looks for the moment. But in the shifting sands of diplomacy, flexibility is the pillar on which grand structures endure.
Yesterday’s villains are today’s heroes. Take an example at home. President Musharraf’s second visit to Delhi underscores this maxim. This is also the lesson of the global churning that the Arun Singhs and Jalil Abbas Jilanis are watching and shaping.
There is a story doing the rounds that President Pervez Musharraf is very upset with the story of the Hindi movie Veer-Zaara, which was produced and directed by Yash Chopra. In the movie, Shah Rukh Khan plays an Indian Air Force officer who falls in love with a Pakistani girl, and is illegally imprisoned in a Pakistan jail. After 22 years, a Pakistani lawyer (Rani Mukerji, one of the guests at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s banquet for Gen.Musharraf) rescues him.
Gen. Musharraf is understood to have protested to some Indian journalists that Pakistan had never arrested or kept in confinement any IAF officer. It seems Chopra has been sent a special invitation for a dinner with Gen Musharraf on April 17 in New Delhi’s Taj Mansingh hotel to thrash out the matter.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Probably everywhere in the subcontinent, when Pakistan and India are playing cricket against each other, everyday city life falters. People stay indoors glued to their TV sets, and in the office you can see ordinarily unexcitable people worrying about the latest score.
So it was during the India-Pakistan one-dayer at Kanpur on Friday. But another interesting thing happened that showed that not all maulvis are steel-hearted killjoys. A colleague, a big-time cricket buff, tore himself away from the television to go for his Juma prayers. His head buzzed with the images and sounds of the gruelling cricketing contest that was in progress. He naturally wanted to get away as early as possible, and was pleasantly surprised when the imam, with his hands upraised in supplication, said he knew most people, like him, couldn’t wait to get back home to watch the cricket match. “But please don’t go without praying that Pakistan may win the match,” said the imam. ‘Amen’ said the congregation, and immediately dispersed.
Arts Council find
Years ago a leading musicologist went looking for pictures of vocalists and instrumentalists at the Arts Council. He was informed that the apex cultural and literary organization of the city had no such data bank in spite of the fact that it had held many memorable music functions.
On his way out, he decided to pay a visit to the lavatory of the Arts Council, where he espied a shabby sack lying inconspicuously in a musty corner. Overcome with curiosity, he opened the sack, only to find that it contained a large number of pictures of artists performing at the Arts Council.
Overjoyed at having struck gold, he dashed to his car, carting away with him his invaluable find. Afterwards, the correspondence page of this newspaper played host to a fiery exchange of letters between him and former Arts Council secretary Mushtaq Gazdar – a well-meaning man who wrote the history of cinema in Pakistan – as they crossed swords over the possession of the pictures. The musicologist used some of the pictures in his book on classical music and returned the rest to the Arts Council – only God knows where they are now and in what condition.
But as far as the Arts Council is concerned, things haven’t changed much. Take, for instance, the theatre auditorium of the Arts Council which was inaugurated amid great fanfare just a couple of days before the December elections of the governing body, fuelling speculation that the occasion was used by some candidates to establish their credentials for the love of the performing arts. (The auditorium did not even have an electricity connection when it was opened by Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ibad.)
Four months on, the governing body of the Arts Council has yet to hold a theatre performance at the auditorium. In fact, it has not yet worked out the rent at which the auditorium will be let out to theatre groups. (A couple of interested parties were turned away because the rent structure hasn’t been formulated.) With most governing body meetings resulting in boycotts and bitters recriminations, the auditorium is not expected to become functional any time soon.
Kind no longer?
We don’t teach children to be kind to animals. It’s not uncommon to see kids throwing stones at stray cats and dogs. But children learn from elders, who in many cases are also callous towards the animals. Take, for instance, the donkey cart drivers, who overload their carts and mercilessly whip their beasts. The scene is truly heart-rending, and so is the common sight at traffic signals, where you find men selling sparrows and mynahs which sit cheek by jowl with one another in their tiny cages.
This seldom happened until the end of the 1980s. And it was largely because of Lady Ninette Constantine, who headed the Pakistan chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was affiliated to the UK-based RSPCA. At least in Karachi where the lady lived anybody violating the ethical standards set by the society was fined. Its personnel were constantly on the move. The authorities backed Lady Constantine and the SPCA completely.
Not many people remember the dedicated woman of Swiss origin. When her first husband died, she got married to Sir George Constantine, former chief justice of the Sindh High Court who continued to live in Pakistan even after the Raj ended.
Educationist Anita Ghulam Ali, whose mother Begum Shireen Mirza was a close friend of Lady Constantine, recalls that a donkey was tied in the lady’s Bath Island bungalow. The animal was injured in a traffic accident and was nursed by the lady. The owner was paid enough money to buy another donkey, while the one in her possession led a carefree life even after its wounds healed — no work and ample food. Many people who couldn’t look after their cats and dogs, not to speak of birds, left them in her care.
Lady Constantine and her staff often visited the veterinary hospital close to the broadcasting house of Radio Pakistan to keep a tab on convalescing animals.
Even when the lady stopped playing tennis and table tennis at the Karachi Gymkhana and the Karachi Club and fell prey to the dreadful Alzheimer’s disease, her staff continued to patrol the streets of Karachi and visit bazaars where chicken were kept in cages. A colleague remembers that a chicken seller was fined because he had kept a tall country rooster in a cage and the poor bird was unable to stand straight.
One wonders what happened to the Pakistan chapter of the SPCA. Shouldn’t some socially and morally conscious people revive the body?
Malir contrast
A few minutes drive from Jinnah Airport, on the road towards Model Colony stands the Malir Garrison, an army cantonment area which forms part of the army’s presence in the city. If one passes through this locality, one wonders whether this is part of Malir, a huge area of the city where under a million people live, many in small middle-class housing.
Malir Garrison stands in stark contrast to its surroundings. Outside, the roads are broken, sewage is overflowing and within hundreds of yards the volatile colonies of Malir and Model Town exist where crime and political violence are common occurrences.
The commercial area of the garrison, which comprises shops and restaurants, bustles with activity and crime and trouble are almost unheard of. There are parks, a sports complex and a Defence Housing Society within the boundaries of this area, which give the feeling of safety, cleanliness and a healthy environment. There are two major schools where classes are not disrupted, no shots are fired and children appear happy and content with their studies.
Another important feature of this locality is that the buses that ply within the premises are orderly and quiet. They stop at all the bus stops, do not overspeed and almost always ensure that they maintain proper traffic regulations.
The question that comes to the mind of first-time visitors is one that many from other parts of Malir must ask themselves every day: why can’t the rest of Malir become like Malir Cantonment?
— By Karachian
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com
THE crisis at OPF Girls’ College last week is a perfect example of how a reputable educational institution can be dragged into disrepute by a bureaucracy which is more interested in mere control rather than in quality control.
The violent confrontation between woman police constables and protesting students of the college is a manifestation of a little known long drawn tussle for control of this college by the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation, a registered company established in 1979 which works under the administrative control of the Ministry of Labour, Manpower and Overseas Pakistanis.
About a month ago, the college was finally taken over by the foundation, whose current chief executive and managing director incidentally belongs to the Police Service. The foundation took control of the college after it had won a high court battle against the college’s independent board of directors.
Given this background, it is quite apparent why the college’s status was not being upgraded to university level much before, why the initial arrangement with Iqra University to confer degrees could not be finalized, and why the federal minister for labour, manpower and overseas Pakistanis has only now announced that the college would be elevated to university level soon.
According to Dawn last week, the former principal of OPF Girls’ College has accused the Ministry of Labour, Manpower and Overseas Pakistanis of deliberately sitting on the proposed charter for the college for over a year, and thus delaying the process of granting degree status to the college. She also revealed that the HEC’s predecessor, the UGC, had already issued an NOC to the college for upgrading to degree- awarding status after over a year’s thorough inspection and scrutiny of the college.
The million dollar question now is whether OPF Girls’ College under the foundation’s control can maintain the reputation and status it has built up over the years. According to an article by a retired senior civil services officer in an English daily last week, the answer is negative.
The reason that he cites is the foundation’s working record: a report by the Auditor General of Pakistan had highlighted significant irregularities in the management of the foundation’s housing schemes, educational institutions, hospitals, pension trusts and various other projects. Based on this, the author’s assessment is that the foundation would not be able to manage OPF Girls’ College in the manner that has earned it name and respect as a prized institution under its independent board of directors.
Quality control is definitely not a forte of our nation. Be it the quality of roads/underpasses, utility services, public health services or education. In the case of education, the consequences of poor quality are pretty obvious in the country’s low literacy rates, high dropout rates, and the fact that many of our degrees are not up to international standards.
Yet when a hue and cry is being raised about specific cases of compromise in quality in certain higher educational institutions in Islamabad, e.g., about fake Ph.D. degrees, plagiarism in thesis and research paper writing, or irregularities in admission, etc., the bureaucracy is usually reluctant to investigate independently and amend the situation.
Instead, such criticisms are usually brushed aside as being personally or egoistically motivated. Or that the institutions are new and therefore need time to deliver. The fact of the matter is that if problems pertaining to quality control are not nipped in their buds and such incidents of compromise in quality in our educational institutions are not checked at the beginning, their spread will have very negative consequences later on for the nation as a whole.
Already, two letters-to-the-editor by two professors in the United States have appeared in Dawn early this month, saying that they would never in their lives recommend anyone to do Ph.D. in Pakistan because the quality of doctoral studies here seemed highly suspect. Our higher educational institutions might well end up churning out hundreds if not thousands of doctoral graduates a year who would only be a laughing stock in the world.
Irregularities are also being reported in the free textbooks programme for primary schools in the capital. The programme was supposed to have gone into effect this April, but several poor parents have complained that their children have not received their free textbooks because the teachers have told them that the textbook quotas given to their schools were insufficient.
Not surprisingly, pilferage somewhere along the bureaucratic line must be plaguing the free textbooks programme, just as pilferage has always been a problem in the supply of medicines in public hospitals. This unethical practice is a major reason for the poor quality of many services and programmes in the country.
Even where effort is made to try and promote quality control by outlining certain criteria or pre-conditions, many manage to get round such criteria or pre-conditions in one way or the other. For example, it is well known now that the effort to have a more educated and enlightened National Assembly by setting the graduate condition for MNAs has resulted in many acquiring a not- so-genuine degree in order to make themselves eligible to participate in the 2002 general elections.
At best, some international standard of quality control here is maintained in those units manufacturing goods for export to the developed countries, or in some institutions (e.g., private clinics, private schools, etc.) aiming at capturing clientele from the elite class. Otherwise, scant attention is usually paid to quality control, particularly by our bureaucracy.