| July 11, 2005 | Monday | Jumadi-us-Sani 3, 1426 |
Ayodhya and London
Two ministers outrage Bangladesh
Forging alliances
A dent in PPP’s bastion: Bifurcation of Larkana
LARKANA: It was perhaps the first time in the country’s history that four protesters were killed in Qambar over the renaming of a district.
I COULD have gone on with this privateering business some more but then I heard of the stunningly stupid bomb attacks in London which left many innocent people dead and injured. Newspapers reports have called these diabolic attacks as the deadliest-ever on the British Capital.
I do not know who masterminded these callous attacks. If it is the secret group of Al Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe, I disown and denounce it, it is neither Islam nor yet Jihad. It is barbarism pure and simple and I have no words strong enough to denounce this kind of unspeakable cruelty. If the Londoners are angry and shocked so am I and if the Islamic Human Rights Commission has asked London Muslims to stay at home to avoid any violence against them I am surprised, but how many of them can stay at home and for how long? There must be hundreds of thousands of Muslims of Pakistani origin living in London, Bradford, Manchester and elsewhere in Britain. It is too early to say what will be the consequences of London’s blackest Thursday after the War. For the time being, I can only hope and pray that the insanity of a few will not be held against the innocence of the many.
But, you see, 9/11 was only the beginning. As the IOC President said in Singapore, “No one can say that their city is safe.” Ironically, a British team of security experts has been in Pakistan to see whether my country is safe for cricket or not. Karachi has already been ruled out as a venue for a Test match between England and Pakistan this coming winter. I could be cynical and ask the Australian prime minister: Will you now recall your team from England because it is no longer safe from terrorism, Sir? As I write these lines, the death toll in Thursday’s explosion has risen to more than fifty. This is still well below the Madrid mark. In March last year, 191 people died in similar circumstances in the Spanish capital.
In a joint statement in Gleneagles, Scotland, the G-8 pledged “New joint efforts” to fight terrorism. But they did not have to say a word about fighting the causes of terrorism. Iraq? Palestine? Kashmir? The G-8 leaders promised 50 billion dollars in aid to Africa. For this kindness, a zillion thanks. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the US, China, and India must engage in a joint fight against global warming. The issue was sidelined in the wake of the London bombings. So when the G-8 summit takes place again, the world shall have become a little hotter and a great deal more difficult to live in.
As long ago as November 8, 1989, Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, made a stunning speech at the United Nations. The Guardian, London, published a few excerpts from that speech. By kind permission, I will do the same now. Among other things, Mrs. Thatcher had said: “While the conventional, political dangers —- the threat of global annihilation, the fact of regional war —- appear to be receding. We have all recently become aware of another insidious danger. It is as menacing in its way as those more accustomed perils with which international diplomacy has concerned itself for centuries. It is the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself.
What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate —- all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and its activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.
The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all. That prospect is a new factor in human affairs. It is comparable in its implications to the discovery of how to split the atom. Indeed, its results could be even more far-reaching.
The evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the international community, do about it?
In some areas, the action required is primarily for individual nations or groups of nations to take. But the problem of global climate change is one that affects us all and action will only be effective if it is taken at the international level. It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. We have to look forward not backward, and we shall only succeed in dealing with the problems through a vast international, co-operative effort.
The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.
The work ahead will be long and exacting. We should embark on it hopeful of success, not fearful of failure. Darwin’s voyages were among the high-points of scientific discovery. They were undertaken at a time when men and women felt growing confidence that we could not only understand the natural world but could master it, too. Today, we have learned rather more humility and respect for the balance of nature. But another of the beliefs of Darwin’s era should help to see us through —- the belief in reason and the scientific method.
Reason is humanity’s special gift. It allows us to understand the structure of nucleus. It enables us to explore the heavens. It helps us to conquer disease. Now we must use our reason to find a way in which we can live with nature, and not dominate nature.
We need our reason to teach us today that we are not —- that we must not try to be —- the lords of all we survey.
We are not the lords, we are the lord’s creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged today with preserving life itself —- preserving life with all its mystery and all its wonder. “May we all be equal to that task.”
As you can see, ghosts write well for Presidents and Prime Ministers provided they are well paid.
NOT so long ago, we used to be profiteers and blackmarketeers and hoarders. Not any longer because there is no money in these noble professions. So we have turned to privateering or privatisation as well call it officially. However, I am disappointed at the pace at which we are privateering. It is all piecemeal —- a little something here a little something there.
At the rate at which we are going, it will take generations to privatise the whole blessed country. I am a genius, you know. I have a plan which will speed up privatisation dramatically. Let us begin with the railways and let us be systematic about it. The railwallahs have immense property from Quetta to Karachi and in between. Let us privatise the whole damn organisation, let us go about it methodically, let us privatise it bit by bit but let us be PDQ about it. PDQ has nothing to do with the GHQ. With the Americans it simply means pretty damn quick.
Having decided to be PDQ let us privatise the railways route by route. Let us first of all privatise the Lahore-Sahiwal route and then the Sahiwal-Multan section and soon on down the line right upto Karachi and up the track right upto Peshawar and Quetta. You cannot imagine what will happen then. The new private owners will close all these routes down and establish wonderful new housing colonies for us to live in. The railway business will go to road transporters and then we shall privatise all roads, highways and motorways. Look at the advantages. There will be dhabas at every furlong and there will be cut throat competition among bus and truck owners which will lead to a thousand accidents a day which in turn will bring down the fearsome rate at which we are multiplying. Another cause for mortality will be the wonderfully deadly fumes which will be emitted by the millions of vehicles on our roads. That will take care of our population planning problems.
The railways have other invaluable property, too. What about the Mayo Gardens, for example? Let us privatise it with immediate effect and sell if off to real estate speculators, who will lose no time in the marlafication of the quietest housing district in Lahore. What about the dozens of railway hospitals? What about the Cairns in Lahore? What about similar other facilities in other major cities? And, above all, what about the sprawling railway headquarters in Lahore? It is a white elephant inherited by us from the dirty days of the Raj. We couldn’t do anything about it then because we were slaves. We are a free people today and let us show the world what a free people can do. And think of the railway schools and the acreage they command. Utterly wasteful, I tell you. Let us sell them off to private Greek-medium schools. And look at the Moghalpura Workshops. What an awful waste of prime urban property. No railways, no workshops, no schools. Up for grabs.
Having done away with the railways, let us now turn to the health sectors. What about the Mayo Hospital? a trillion, trillion, trillion dollar property right in the heart of the city. Asia’s biggest hospital, we boast. What tommyrot! Let us demolish the place to make way for private clinics. And what is the Gulab Devi doing on the Ferozepur Road or the General Hospital or the Services Hospital or Lady Wellingdon? Let us all turn them over to private enterprise. Freedom to loot and to plunder. That should be the spirit.
There are other fields, too, in which privateering can be most profitable. But I will come to them some other time. By the way, privateer is a noun which means, and I am quoting from my dictionary, “an armed ship owned by private individuals, holding a government commission and authorised for use in war.” As you can see, I have put the word to different use in this piece. I have, from time to time, given new meanings to old words or coined my own words. Let me give you an example of this latter habit of mine. Lubna is the daughter-in-law of a senior friend of mine. She is a young woman of much grace and hospitality. In fact, she has been so good to me that I have coined a brand new adjective for her. I call her Lubnacious which is the same thing as gracious in old English. Clever, don’t you think?
TO BEGIN with, after the London outrage, there was no demand for the resignation of Prime Minister Blair, which on many recent occasions would have seemed like a legitimate quest for many. The first job there was relief and rescue of the wounded and the distraught with care and stoic efficiency, an instinct possibly acquired and institutionalized 60 years ago when the civil administration became the backbone of Britain’s war effort.
Compare this with the childish brickbats flung at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by Lal Kishan Advani and his Hindutva acolytes after last week’s teeny-weeny Ayodhya incident, blown into some kind of a national calamity. The comparison should never have been made but for the screaming headlines in mainstream Indian dailies that thrust the two situations in London and Ayodhya in our faces as identical in scale and impact.
Singh should resign or his home minister should go, proclaimed the BJP after the Ayodhya outrage. Singh’s response was withering. The Congress didn’t seek to score brownie points when the BJP was in power, when the parliament was attacked, he said. The BJP was indulging in cheap politics. Immature, a novice in politics, cried the BJP. The accusations seemed endless.
How could the two situations be the same? In London, as elsewhere in UK, despite the incipient backlash brewing, there was no social or political sanction in sight to mistrust Muslims. There was not even a faint hint of a subcutaneous itch to punish London’s mosque-goers, much less to boycott their businesses as Hitler’s storm-troopers had done.
On the other hand look at what Narendra Modi’s fanatically driven state machinery has been doing in Gujarat and is still allowed to get away with it. There is a debilitating social and economic boycott of Muslims in the state with the connivance of its police and bureaucracy. Anti-terrorist laws were slapped on the victims not the perpetrators of rape and carnage. The situation hasn’t changed one bit.
In London, if anything there was a sustained effort, as could be gleaned from the media coverage, to reach out to Muslims, Christians everyone alike in their moment of calamity and fear. After prayers at the East London mosque, Muslim leaders joined Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and Christians in a sombre procession down the White Chapel Road to stand vigil at Aldgate subway station and commemorate the victims. This was the most important lesson from London’s tragedy that many of us in India could do well to learn by heart.
Backlashes happen everywhere, even more so in the so-called civilized and democratic societies. And violence may yet erupt in parts of that shell-shocked country as ethnic wounds are peeled for display by rabble-rousers. The faultiness for this eventuality had existed in London since the days of Kalim Siddiqui’s sectarian demand for a parallel Islamic Parliament in Britain or even earlier, since Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood rhetoric, if not 300 years ago, in the logic of colonialism.
In an unusually quick response to stray incidents of reprisals in London, the Indian foreign ministry spokesman here condemned the desecration of Sikh temples and Muslim shrines. He appealed to the British government to catch and punish the guilty. Fair enough. Culprits should be punished and made an example of.
Let’s hope the Indian foreign ministry’s message is also heeded in Gujarat. The difference between a riot and a pogrom is the role of the state machinery. The spokesman rightly appealed to the British government to control the likely fallout of the London outrage. Blair should not be found sleeping as Narasimha Rao did when the Babri mosque was being torn down bit by bit on December 6, 1992.
The way Londoners handled their grief and outrage holds an important lesson for many of us in India and elsewhere for several reasons. Indian political class loves to play politics with religion. In a moment of crisis they are quick to search for clues in ethnicity while calling themselves secular. This tendency was all too palpable after the Ayodhya incident. It was there in Gujarat.
The Indian media, increasingly getting cozy with the Murdochian nightmare of commerce and trivia as its staple fare, stands unwittingly communalized by default. It doesn’t seem to care to know that the zealoutry it sows in Kargil, for example, is what it gets to reap in Gujarat. Prone to manipulation by its official minders with shades of Judith Miller surfacing occasionally, the media was at work on Ayodhya last week.
Muslim names and Muslim organizations were featured in the early version of the armed attack in Ayodhya, until someone found out that the jeep that was detonated to create a passage in the railing to reach the makeshift Hindu temple, the object of the attack, had blown up one of the “terrorists” to bits. He was later identified as a Hindu priest who used to help people perform their prayers.
The BJP is nit-picking with Manmohan Singh’s remarks at Oxford University, in which he had praised some aspects of British colonial rule as worthy of emulation.
“Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian prime minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too,” Dr. Singh said. “Our notions of the rule of law, of a constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age old civilization of India met the dominant empire of the day.”
“These are all elements which we still value and cherish. Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration and they have served our country exceedingly well,” Dr. Singh said. Not as well as they have served Britain, he might have added. That’s the difference between London and Ayodhya.
UNFAZED by Delhi Police’s decision not to allow them to stage their play on the Quaid-e-Azam in the city, the city’s Asmita group has decided to stage it anyway at Delhi University.
Like most great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, the play is said to be “more of a psychological scrutiny than a political retrospective or a historical docudrama”. The director, Arvind Gaur, claims that the visual treatment of the play is unconventional.
He says he has chosen a visual depiction of Jinnah’s introspection, his pain, regret and sorrow as out of body projections. “The facets of his character, emotional outbursts are simultaneously expressed through his body, heart, mind and soul, played by four actors other than Jinnah himself.”
“Let us all join hands together so that democracy may live and our future generations breathe not in a colony but in a democratic nation,” says the group in a message to its supporters.
Email: jawednaqvi@gmail.com
DHAKA: A couple of controversial comments made recently by Finance Minister M Saifur Rahman and Commerce Minister Altaf Hossain Chowdhury have exposed them to severe criticism by the politically conscious sections of the civil society in general and the opposition in particular.
The former accused the country’s women, particularly the housewives, of wasting gas resources, and the latter blamed the farmers for the recent unusual price hike of the essential commodities. The ground realities hardly back the ministers’ observations, and hence the criticism against the two stalwarts of the government of Khaleda Zia.
The finance minister claimed, on July 4, that a ‘huge amount of gas is wasted by domestic users’ in Bangladesh. He particularly blamed the ‘housewives’ for the wastage, because they, according to the minister, ‘do not switch the burners off after cooking, only to save a matchstick’.
Besides, he accused the women in question of ‘drying clothes often using gas burners’. The finance minister made the comments while justifying his plan to introduce gas cylinders in the market for domestic purposes -– a prescription provided by the World Bank.
However, the minister’s accusation against the common citizens in general and the women in particular came when a huge gas field in the northern region of the country has been burning for weeks now, due particularly to the incompetence of a Canadian company, Niko Resources, which was awarded the drilling job by the incumbents, and the government is trying hard to realize some Tk800 crores from a handful of private sector entrepreneurs in arrear gas bills.
Naturally, the finance minister got exposed to serious criticism.
The left political camp has publicly accused the incumbents of striking ‘an underhand deal’ with the incompetent Nico Resources, contributing to the turning of the multimillion dollar Chatak gas field into a vast wasteland, not to mention the huge environmental damages that two blowouts in the gas field have already caused.
The left has a point. “The way the raging fire continues to go wilder, I am afraid the blowout might have driven the last nail in the coffin of 260 billion cubic feet gross reserve,” says Prof Badrul Imam, a geologist at Dhaka University. Notably, the price of the gas resources stands at Tk2,600 crore (322 million dollars).
The women’s rights groups ‘strongly condemned’ the finance minister for blaming the housewives for wastage of gas resources.
Terming the minister’s observation ‘quite objectionable’, one of the women’s rights groups in a statement the next day, on July 5, said that the government ‘is trying to put the blame [of gas wastage] on the women in order to hide their failure in realizing crores of takas in arrear gas bills from the big business establishments’.
Meanwhile, Commerce Minister Altaf Hossain Chowdhury, who was summoned by the prime minister on July 3 to explain the price hike of the essentials, particularly of rice, reportedly told the latter that the farmers were to be blamed for the situation. The minister argued, as was reported by the local media the next day, that farmers were stockpiling the produce in apprehension of flash floods causing a shrinkage in the supply of the staple to the market, which eventually contributed to price hike of rice.
The commerce minister blamed the poor farmers despite the fact that a working paper presented at a commerce ministry meeting the same day attributed the cause to the higher transportation cost consequent upon an increase in fuel prices in the international market and its commensurate impact on domestic pricing. The commerce ministry paper also put the blame of price hike on ‘the syndication of importers and the stockists in the market’.
Moreover, a government constituted taskforce reportedly observed at a meeting on July 6, held again at the ministry of commerce and with the minister concerned in the chair, that ‘a section of the millers across the country have hoarded rice by taking loans, mostly from private banks, causing the price-hike of rice even at the peak of the production season’.
The president of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI), Abdul Awal Mintoo, pointed out at the meeting that the price situation has been adversely affected by contradictory policies. ‘Importers cannot open letters of credit easily even if it is for food item. Unless the issue is addressed right now, price of essential items will increase by at least 20 per cent within next two months,’ the FBCCI leader reportedly told the meeting, seeking immediate government interventions.
The minister nodded his approval to the observations.
Why, then, blaming the poor farmers for the price hikes?
However, the result was obvious: Chowdhury has been swallowing the bitter pills of the opposition criticism.
The announcement of a date for the Karachi local body polls (August 18) has predictably led to an outbreak of election frenzy among most political parties, especially the Jamaat-i-Islami and Muttahida Qaumi Movement. There was no love lost between the Jamaat-led city government and the Muttahida-dominated Sindh government, to begin with. Both have now sounded the alarm about a breakdown of law and order in the run-up to the elections.
The Muttahida, which boycotted the 2001 local body polls, is reported to have arrived at a loose understanding with the Pakistan Muslim League about the formation of the city government consequent upon its success — a foregone conclusion, though detractors maintain that its popularity in the city has dipped over the years.
Known for keeping their cards close to the chest, key Muttahida leaders have not announced the name of their candidate for the post of Karachi nazim. But party cadres say they have reason to believe that three well-known leaders, including a provincial minister, are in the race. However, they feel certain that former Karachi mayor Dr Farooq Sattar will not be a candidate. Deputy convenor of the Muttahida’s coordination committee, he is also the party’s parliamentary leader in the National Assembly and chairman of the standing committee on foreign affairs. He is too important a leader for the party to be confined to the city nazim’s slot.
On the other hand, former Karachi nazim Niamatullah Khan is waging a fiery election campaign. He disclosed some time back that he would seek re-election. (One wonders why political pundits still insist that the slain Jamaat leader, Aslam Mujahid, was tipped to nominated for the same post.) Those acquainted with the working strategy of the Jamaat-i-Islami say that Mr Khan would not have advanced his candidature had he not been expressly asked by the party to do so. In the last fortnight of his tenure, he undertook a flurry of laying foundation-stones and thus seeking media publicity. But it cannot be gainsaid that, on balance, his four-year term in office saw execution of many vital development projects in the teeth of opposition from the Sindh government, although his description of these as “gifts” irritated many citizens.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan People’s Party acquires a stronger bargaining position as the duel between the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Jamaat-i-Islami intensifies. While it recently made it clear that it would not forge an electoral alliance with any component of the ruling Sindh coalition, insiders say that it is in talks with both the Jamaat and the Muttahida. It has also finalized a deal with the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan — not an immensely popular party but certainly an effective spoiler — about putting up a fight against candidates nominated by the Sindh coalition.
As major parties run an undisguised political campaign for their candidates, why does the National Reconstruction Bureau have to insist on describing the local body polls as being on a non-party basis? Why keep up the farce?
Booked up
A colleague who often writes about the poor condition of libraries in Pakistan happily reports that the Defence Central Library faces no dearth of resources and its funds for the procurement of new books and periodicals never dry up.
Established on Nov 3, 1991, the Defence Central Library has a collection of over 52,000 books. It spends Rs800,000 on the purchase of books and periodicals on an annual basis.
And yet the library, situated on the main Sunset Boulevard, is not as largely frequented as any of the seven clubs of Defence, points out the colleague. In a city of over 15 million people, the Defence Central Library has around 9,500 members.
“Most people wrongly believe that non-DHA residents cannot become members of the library. Servicemen and ex-servicemen, civilian members of DHA, students of DHA educational institutions, non-DHA residents, foreigners, senior citizens and children can become members of the library,” says library secretary Rashid H. Khan.
Initially, the library was not a lending one. But now members can borrow three books for 15 days on payment of a refundable amount. Except for reference books, volumes on Islamic history, general history, English and Urdu literature, biographies, English and Urdu fiction, sports and children’s books can be borrowed.
Also, the Defence Central Library is one of the few libraries in the country that have a website. A lot of information about the library and the services it offers can be obtained from www.dclkarachi.com. Membership forms can also be downloaded from the website.
According to Mr Khan, the website will soon have an entire catalogue of the books in stock. When this happens, the library will become the only one in the country to have such a facility.
Needed no longer
“I cannot purchase bread for myself and my family with the respect I get from dancing girls and from their mothers here,” complains musician Iftikhar Ali who plays the harmonium at the famous Bulbul Hazar Dastan on Napier Road, though it’s the xylophone that is his real forte and which he occasionally plays at Radio Pakistan.
Most girls touch the feet of their ustads and respectfully seek permission before starting their dance performances. But they no longer dance to ghazals sung to the accompaniment of the tabla and the harmonium. Fast-paced Indian numbers have replaced ghazals and folk numbers. The ustads twiddle their thumbs as their disciples dance and earn both accolades and money.
“Previously, our services were required by those who wanted their girls to be professional dancers or singers. We taught them the ABC of music. They still respect us, but they know that our services are not indispensable any more,” says tabla player Ghulam Ali.
It is only Radio Pakistan — and to a lesser extent PTV — that gives some sort of employment to musicians. But professional singers and music composers prefer electronic devices capable of producing a wide variety of sounds to musicians.
“I personally prefer my music composer (an electronic device) to a paan-chewing musician who seldom turns up for work on time, nearly never takes an interest in my compositions and often offers unsolicited advice,” says a successful music composer. Electronic music composers do not fall sick and their performance does not become deteriorate with age, he points out.
In his eminently readable memoirs “Sarguzisht”, Z.A. Bokhari deplored that the sarangi is fast giving place to the harmonium. His fears have now come true. At the moment, there is not a single harmonium player in Pakistan. But if we continue to ignore our musicians, many precious musical instruments will go out of fashion.
— By Karachian
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com
Situated 20 kilometres to the west of Larkana, the town had witnessed an intense movement for many days during the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) in 1983 when banks, post office and a sub-jail in the town were set on fire.
Though it was taken over by troops but no killing had occurred as the martial law authorities had used other means, including psychological ones, to quell the civil disobedience.
The town witnessed killings when the government’s decision of renaming the Qambar district as Shahdadkot in haste triggered violent protests.
Police resorted to firing on December 24, 2004, killing four people Nasir Khanzado, 16, Fatah Tunio, 10, Riaz Buriro, 18, and Ali Madad Magsi, 30, and injuring several dozen others.
The government later renamed the district as Qambar-Shahdadkot, triggering protests in Shahdadkot.
The people are demanding that Shahdadkot be declared a separate district by including Qubo Saeed Khan, Sujawal Junejo, Mirokhan and Shahdadkot talukas in it.
Once part of Shikarpur district, Larkana was made a district in 1901 and since then it has witnessed many ups and downs.
It was the home district of PPP leader Benazir Bhutto and chieftains like Nawab Shabbir Ahmed Chandio and Mir Nadir Ali Magsi.
It was at the behest of Nawab Chandio that Qambar was carved out of Larkana, and Shahdadkot taluka, from where Nadir Magsi comes from, was included into it as a taluka.
The PPP leadership saw this decision politically motivated and local people in Shahdadkot reacted as well.
Adviser to the Sindh chief minister, Sultan Khuhawar, who wanted to gain political mileage in the absence of Mir Nadir Magsi, who at that time was in self-exile, met the Sindh chief minister and demanded that Shahdadkot be made a separate district.
The Sindh government somersaulted and gave Shahdadkot the status of district with Qambar as its headquarters.
The murder of four residents in Qambar enraged people so much so that it gave birth to an unending series of protests where police remained silent spectators.
The PPP continued to oppose the bifurcation taking the stand that it was based on purely political considerations to divide the party’s vote bank.
Leaders of the PML, including Nawab Chandio, were happy over the creation of a new district but were trapped unaware of the situation that had arisen after the renaming of the district.
The Sindh chief minister had to undertake a whirlwind tour of the area. He surprisingly made an announcement that a new district of Qambar-Shahdadkot was being made.
Instead of pacifying the situation, the Sindh government with one stroke of a pen created on June 18, 2005, two new talukas Qubo Saeed Khan and Sujawal Junejo. This aggravated the situation even more.
Ignoring people’s protests, the government on June 21 again created two more talukas: Nasirabad and Bakrani.
It then created three new circles: Badah, Dhamraho and Wagan.
The government claims that the district was bifurcated in the people’s interest.
But the PPP took it as a step to weaken the party’s vote bank in the interest of tradition-directed chieftain who is likely to field his son Sardar Chandio for the post of nazim of the Qambar district.
Not only this but Ratodero taluka — the constituency of Benazir Bhutto — was reduced in size when its four dehs — Nazar Detho, Panjo Kinaro, Salar Janveri and Shadi Abro — were detached from it and included in Garhi Yasin taluka of Shikarpur district.
In similar fashion, eight dehs — Shahnawaz Abro, Dadhra, Baqapur, Mahar Wada, Rasheed Wagan, Jamarani, Laungai and Jatoi-Chachar — were included in the newly-created taluka of Bakrani.
Residents of the Badah town, with a population of 80,000, protested against making Bakrani, a taluka with population of not more than 20,000, but to no avail.
The PPP said Bakrani was made a taluka only to favour sitting Sindh minister Altaf Unnar. It was astonishing that Rasheed Wagan was included in Bakrani since it has no direct road link with the new taluka headquarters. Also eight dehs of Larkana which were very close to Larkana and certain union councils earlier included in Larkana municipal limits were incorporated into Bakrani.
Very interestingly, Khairpur Joso which was the part of Qambar, was included in the newly-created Nasirabad taluka.
Union council Thoof Chosool of Mirokhan taluka was included in the newly-created taluka of Sujawal Junejo which is far away from its headquarters.
The Sindh government not only divided Larkana district but even dissected its union councils and dehs. The four old talukas — Mirokhan, Warah, Shahdadkot and Dokri — were divided and further sub-divided in the interest of ruling party.
The organized structure of the district was disturbed at the cost of giving birth to new problems and could rightly be said that in haphazard division and sub-division, government had put the horse before the cart.
Without infrastructure and officers it remains to be seen to what extent the government will manage to run the affairs of the new districts and talukas.
Dividing Larkana into two districts and gerrymandering of talukas and union councils is nothing but a ploy to defeat PPP candidates, says Khursheed Junejo, former district nazim of Larkana.