WHY would — or rather should — a government/civic agency whose primary task is to ensure that buildings are constructed according to the relevant rules and regulations involve itself with holding an “international enlightened moderation exhibition”?

In most situations, this would be a hypothetical and fanciful question. But not in the case of Karachi. According to an advertisement printed in national newspapers on Sept 5, the Karachi Building Control Authority (KBCA) has announced that it plans to hold just such an exhibition on “enlightened moderation” from January 5-7 of next year at the city’s Expo Centre.

According to the advertisement, which has a picture of President Pervez Musharraf and saluting with an image of the Quaid’s mazar next to him, the proposed exhibition is divided into eight sections. The first is called ‘Cheap and Quality Construction’ and includes sub-topics such as “Emphasis on façade of buildings” and “gadgetry for better quality of life”. The second is called ‘Electrical Equipment and Quality of Life’ and includes sub-topics such as “air conditioning”, “refrigeration”, “fire alarm system”, “security alarm system”, “TV” and “mobile phones”. In keeping with the times, the KBCA also has a section related to women called ‘Women-folk Empowerment’ which has the following sub-topics: “Equal rights”, “Dress Designing and Display of Fashion”, “Education in Fine Arts, Paintings”, “Aids to Better Get-up”, “Cooking” and “Handicraft, etc.” Yet another is ‘Minorities in Pakistan’, and includes the following sub-categories: “De-Polarization”, “Electorate”, “Preservation of respective Heritage Buildings”, “Rights and Integration” and “Shared values and respect for places of worship”.

It should be obvious from the text of the advertisement that someone at the KBCA seemed to be in a great hurry to piece this planned exhibition together. Since the authority is a government agency, funded from taxpayers’ money and has a particularly crucial role to play in a city as burgeoning as Karachi, several questions need to be asked.

The most basic is that why should the KBCA (which is a local and not a federal agency) be holding an exhibition on enlightened moderation in the first place? What can be the possible link between the concept of enlightened moderation and construction of buildings in Karachi? Why is money being squandered on such things which will probably prove to be non-starters? Also, if a ministry like the federal ministry of commerce or the federal ministry of human rights were to hold an exhibition on the president’s concept then it would perhaps make some sense, but for an agency whose only job really is to ensure that buildings in Karachi are built according to the government’s rules and specifications to plan to do such a thing borders on the preposterous.

It would be good if the KBCA were to leave the holding of such exhibitions to other agencies (that is, if something like that has to be done at all) and should stick to performing its role with a bit more dedication and diligence. If it were to do that even half-heartedly, Karachi might have been rid of hundreds of high-rise apartment buildings and commercial plazas built on residential plots in complete violation of the laid down rules.

IT WAS in the far away city of Cambellpur (now Attock) when we were college students back in the early 1950s. ‘We’ means Munno Bhai (then Muneer Ahmad Qureshi) and Inayat Elahi Nalik, who was closely associated with music. We were deeply influenced by the Progressive Writers’ Movement which had come under a cloud after the Rawalpindi conspiracy case.

Our heroes were Faiz, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and the others who were active on that front. We used to collect information about the activities going on in Lahore and other cities. Naqoosh, Savera and Adab-i-Lateef were our favourite magazines. Manzoor Arif, a lawyer and poet, was our guru. He used to recite the poems produced by Lahore’s progressive poets and once he quoted a verse:

Ik ajab boo-i-nafas aati hey deevaron sey, Haey kaya loag thhey zindan mein bhi hum sey pehley

Arif said that the lines were by a comrade called Hasan Abidi, who was detained in the same cell of the Lahore Fort where Bhagat Singh was kept before he was hanged by the British on charges of terrorism. This was my first introduction, though in absentia, to Hasan Abidi whom I was to meet years later in Lahore.

The story about Hasan Abidi was that he was engaged as a courier for the Communist Party of Pakistan’s secretary-general, Sajjad Zaheer, when the latter had gone underground. Abidi’s personality gained a further mystifying aura when we learnt that he used to wear a black burqa when on a mission to convey the party chief’s messages to other top men of the party. We used to come to Lahore to participate in inter-collegiate debates and mushairas but failed to meet this mysterious poet and political activist.

We left Campbellpur in 1953. Late the next year, I heard that Hasan Abidi had been detained in Cambellpur jail. I decided to go and meet him there. I found my facilitator in Malik Jaffar, a prominent progressive lawyer of that city (Malik Jaffar became minister of state in Z A Bhutto’s cabinet in 1972). He accompanied me to the prison where two of our other heroes, Syed Sibte Hasan and Comrade Afzal, were also detained.

But in spite of Malik Jaffar’s best efforts, we were not allowed to meet Abidi, and instead we left some magazines, books and ‘sabooni halva’, a specialty of that area, for the detained activists. Later we came to know that everything we had left was distributed among the jail staff. The only message that reached the inmates was that two persons had come to see them.

My first meeting with Hasan Abidi took place in Lahore when he was working with the weekly Lail-o-Nahar. An article by the eminent scholar of Attock, the late Dr Ghulam Jeelani Burq, had appeared in the journal. Burq had sarcastically said that the total Punjabi publications could be accommodated in one almirah. Abidi did not like that sweeping statement and asked that the old man be challenged. On Abidi’s insistence, this was done. He was extremely happy when Burq sent a written apology to the weekly in response to the rebuttal of his claim.

Hasan Abidi was once a very active participant in meetings of the Progressive Writers’ Association in Lahore, but when some extremists started dominating the proceedings and declared Iqbal as a fascist, Abidi did not like that. He used to say that once at Allahabad University he himself had the same opinion about Iqbal, influenced by Firaq Gorakhpuri, but when he had read Iqbal thoroughly, his views had changed. Iqbal, he thought, was a great enemy of colonialism and capitalism who believed that only Russia could challenge the scourge of western capitalism.

Abidi was still in Lail-o-Nahar when the controversy of Punjabi vs Urdu was blown out of all proportion by the high-ups of the Pakistan Writers Guild. Abidi appeared among the most ardent supporters of Punjabi and, with reference to his underground days, asserted that no clandestine work could be done without proper knowledge of the language of the people. Abidi was one of the signatories of the statement issued by the Lahore writers against the ban imposed on the Punjabi group of the guild by Qudratullah Shahab and his associates.

Abidi was not a social or talkative person. He was sober, polite and self-effacing by nature, but he was always found in an animated mood when in his office, whether at Lail-o-Nahar or at the daily Mashriq. He was cross with those Punjabis who had labelled Waris Shah as a pornographer. He could not read Punjabi but one of his friends, Muhammad Asif Khan, a prominent scholar, helped him understand Waris Shah. He became a staunch admirer of the poet’s scathing criticism of feudal society. Abidi also used to refer to the Masnavi Zehr-i-Ishq, about which he used to quote an article by Sajjad Zaheer in which the latter had supported the author and his social criticism of feudal values.

Asif Khan, who worked for the housing department, was close to Abidi. He suggested that Abidi should have his own house and he got him a quarter allotted in the Rahmanpura scheme which was then a deserted place.

Abidi shifted to the house. They all looked the same, and absent-minded Abidi once entered someone else’s house late at night. The residents raised a hue and cry, and Abidi was going to face the music when one of the neighbours heard the racket. He was the late Hamid Rana who immediately rushed and saved the innocent late-comer.

Hard working, shy but far from being a recluse, Hasan Abidi’s journalistic engagements never allowed him to fully exploit his poetic potential. He concentrated on poetry at a very late stage but even then he gave us three worthy collections, much of which consist of a poetic documentation of social and political conditions. That shall remain his enduring contribution to Pakistani literature.—Shafqat Tanvir Mirza