| June 05, 2006 | Monday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 8, 1427 |
Leaflets from our racist history
Korangi was humming with activity last Sunday. It was the concluding day of a three-day trade and cultural festival that began on May 26. People were streaming in and out of the sports ground at Korangi 3, where scores of stalls displaying various products, mostly manufactured or assembled in Korangi’s own industrial area, greeted the visitors.
The items on sale ranged from spices, fabrics, crockery to cars and mini trucks. Some of them offered good discounts. A women’s exclusive stall particularly pulled big crowds of girls and women. Among other services it offered on concessional rates, it charged only Rs5 for applying henna on each pair of hands. Another crowd-pulling stall sold telephone sets of a particular brand with lines for less than half of its market price. Of course, there was much more on display and sale.
In fact, all the three days were packed with colourful events. Birds and balloons were released to inaugurate the event. Federal ministers Safwanullah and Shamim Haider, Sindh advisers Waseem Akhtar, Fatima Surayya Bajia and Salahuddin Haider, Karachi Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal and his deputy Nasreen Jaleel visited the venue on separate occasions, making politicall speeches and provoking slogan chanting. TV artists and singers were at hand to entertain the audience. The capable scion of the Sabri family, Amjad Sabri, sent the audience into raptures with his home-grown Qawwalis.
A humour poetry recital session was spared for the last day of the festival. Those who recited their poems included such popular names as Athar Shah Khan Jedi and Anwar Masood. These recitals provided local poets with an opportunity to also show their talents in this genre of Urdu poetry. Amateur comperes seemed to be honing their skills by making repeated announcements from the stage. When nothing else was happening on the stage, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s loyalist songs blared from the loudspeakers: ‘Saathi, mazloomon ka saathi hay Altaf Hussain’.
There were lucky draws for visitors which offered, among other things, motorcycles to winners.
Around a dozen food stalls catered to the culinary tastes of the visitors. But deplorably, instead of offering discounts, they charged higher rates for poor quality foodstuffs and lower service. For example, a cold drink cost Rs12, as in the market. The difference was that there cold drinks were lukewarm. If a family wanted to eat out at the stalls, they would have to part with a big chunk of their monthly budget.
Korangi has its share of interesting places. There are, for instance, four cinema houses and a stadium in it. These spots of entertainment and sports are decades old, showing that the past administrators were not less caring to the entertainment needs of their generation. And few people know that Korangi too has a zoo. The zoo houses neelgais, ostriches, monkeys, deer, peacocks and other exotic birds. In the afternoon, the place is crowded with families.
Next to the sports ground at Korangi 3 is a beautiful park built by the previous city government. It serves as a cool outing place for people living around. The Korangi Town nazim says people will have parks nearer their homes as every union council is going to have a small park.
The Korangi Industrial Area produces many export items. And there is the National Refinery, a number of factories and tanneries in it, which generate revenue for the government and thousands of jobs for local workers.
Korangi has an array of beautiful wedding halls. Educational institutions in the town include some well-known names.
It was an effort on the part of the town nazim to bring the town into the limelight, though the event did not get the publicity in the media it deserved. Once Korangi enjoyed the dubious distinction of being a ‘no-go area’. The festival may help transform its image. Political rivalries are still there, but the rival groups seem to have learned to coexist.
On the negative side, one cannot understand why it is taking so long for the town administration to finish a road which has been under construction for several years and lies dug up right next to the festival venue.
Town Nazim Arif Khan, however, explains that the stretch called 12000 Road had been completed, but it had to be dug up for laying a sewerage line. Yes, it had been completed and then dug up!
Qarar to Ali Haider
Popular singer Ali Haider gave in to the persistent demand of friends and arranged a valima-cum-get-together last Wednesday. He had tied the nuptial knot with Sabika, a science graduate, on April 20. It was declared that there would be only Nikah and the rukhsati would wait till October. But, as he told Karachian, under pressure from the family the rukhsati took place the same day.
Wednesday’s valima was also to be a low-key affair, but a large number of showbiz personalities turned up and made it a high-class festive occasion. Many popular singers plus TV personalities had thronged the belated valima. The guests included Moin Akhtar, Fakhir, Fakhr-i-Alam, Nadeem Jafri, Bahroze Sabzwari, Bushra Ansari, Zaheer Khan, Badr Khalil and so many others.
Ali Haider’s was already a known name when he graduated from the NED University of Engineering and Technology in 1993. Hits such as ‘Purani jeans aur guitar’ and ‘Qarar…’ were already in circulation. It charted the course for Ali and he decided to become a singer instead of a civil engineer. He has never regretted this decision.
With 13 albums behind him, he is one of the most prolific singers in this region. His hit songs include: ‘Zalim nazron say mujh ko …’, ‘Mahi…’, ‘Chahat teri…’. His forthcoming release will be ‘Janay Dau’, an album he has been working on for about three years. Besides singing, he has established himself as an accomplished actor. He has a long list of TV plays and serials to his name. He is now busy working in three such TV projects. ‘Chalo ishq larain’ was the only movie he performed in, and he was hero with Meera being the leading lady.
In April Ali had insisted that his age should be mentioned as 35. He does not look a day older. Ali’s fans, however, wish he achieve maturity and real Qarar in his future life.
Jasmine joys
Unfamiliar with the arcane principles of botany, a colleague says he has no idea whether jasmine remains in flower all year round or not. And yet, he says, he notices that it is only in summer that jasmine garlands are sold at various traffic signals in the city.
So, every summer this colleague discards the air freshener he ordinarily uses for his car, and, instead, buys a garland of jasmine on his way to work every day. He places the sweet-smelling blossoms on the dashboard, close to the steering wheel. Much to the colleague’s delight, the fragrance from jasmine shortly fills the car. And his joy knows no bounds when he returns to the car after a day of hard work and is greeted by the soothing fragrance again.
The colleague says it is a good idea to replace old jasmine flowers with new ones before they have wilted. He says he has noticed that as their white petals turn pale, their otherwise refreshing smell acquires a bit of pungency.
— Karachian
email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com
IT IS often thought that the job and education quota issue that has polarised India between upper caste Hindus and the rest somehow resembles the American affirmative action movement to empower the blacks and the concomitant white backlash. This is not really the case. In the United States black icon Muhammad Ali had preferred to be sent to jail than be drafted to fight in Vietnam. There were draft dodgers from other races too, including the whites.
In India, there are not enough jobs available in the army or anywhere else for a Muhammad Ali to have the luxury to refuse an offer, much less be punished for turning down an employment opportunity. Quite to the contrary, a mere query recently by an empowered probe committee about the racial mix of the army — how many Muslims etc — kicked up such a storm in parliament, mainly led by Hindutva ideologues, that the government had to go down on all fours to seek forgiveness.
It is also said that the US army has plenty of room, if not race-inspired preference, for blacks and coloured American recruits for potentially dangerous campaigns when they cannot find Third World cronies to do the job. This was at least true of the First World War even if it is only rumoured to be the case in present day Iraq. After all, the Germans made it a point to exploit this chink in the American armour during the First World War. They dropped leaflets behind American lines addressed to ‘the coloured soldiers of the US Army’.
Nearly 370,000 African Americans were drafted into the US Army starting in the fall of 1917. These soldiers were apparently not allowed to join the Marines, and the Navy took African Americans only as cooks and kitchen help.
Although more than half of the black troops were in combat units, they remained segregated from white troops. By stressing racist conditions that existed in the United States, German leaflets attempted to destroy the morale and encourage desertion among African-American troops.
“What are you doing here? Fighting the Germans?” asked one leaflet. “Why? Have they ever done you any harm? Of course some white folks and the lying English-American papers told you that the Germans ought to be wiped out for the sake of humanity and democracy. What is democracy? Personal freedom, all citizens enjoying the same rights socially and before the law! Do you enjoy the same rights as the white people do in America, the Land of Freedom and Democracy? Or aren’t you rather treated there as second class citizens? Can you go into a restaurant where white people dine, can you get a seat in a theatre where white people sit, can you get a Pullman seat or berth in a railroad car or can you even ride, in the South, in the same streetcar with the white people?”
There was a bizarre punch line too. “All this is entirely different in Germany, where they like coloured people, where they treat them as gentlemen and not as second class citizens!” Since its inception during British colonial occupation, when it followed the spurious theory of martial races to set up a fighting force, India’s army has come a long way, and has indeed been transformed into a secular professional outfit loyal to a republican constitution.
Aberrations in Kashmir and Nagaland not withstanding, the fact remains that when a racial crisis hits us like the one prevailing in Gujarat, the targeted communities literally plead for the army’s help to neutralise a rogue civilian administration.
So when the jobs are not readily available, be it in a secular army or a secular state administration or in a secular private sector, the question of job quotas can only exacerbate the existing communal divide facing India. The desperation of job-seekers is such that Brahmin candidates have applied in Uttar Pradesh for work as sweepers in state units. These jobs are usually reserved for the low-caste Dalits, which itself should be a good reason for the dispossessed lower castes to look beyond the fiction of job quotas.
It is monsoon time in India, when the sewers will be clogged in Delhi. There will be many young men working for a pittance to climb down naked, barring a loin cloth, into the overflowing sewers that line Delhi’s flood-prone roads.
Where else in this world would you find a human being ready to wade into rotting human waste to earn his keep? Indians justify this with the help of the caste system. These people are of the scavenger community — so goes the argument. If the sewer system is improved the hapless ‘scavengers’ would be jobless. But now, if the story from Uttar Pradesh is true, the threat to their livelihood also comes from upper caste competition, from those who are also willing to wade through unbelievable filth for a demeaning job.
Education quotas will eventually lead to the question of job quotas and if the size of the cake is too small, as it has nearly always tended to be, to cater to all the new entrants to the employment exchange, there would be the inevitable friction. In states like Gujarat, Hindutva administrators have come up with a short-term remedy to improve the lot of erstwhile untouchables. They have been swapped with the region’s Muslim community.
Now a politically explosive report by the prime minister’s high-level committee says that Gujarat has been communally divided after the 2002 state-sponsored attack on Muslims.
The report, which is scheduled to be submitted in October, is believed to state that most cities and towns in the state are uncompromisingly divided into Muslim and Hindu quarters. Sometimes they even have physical barricades running between them. And Muslims in the state continue to face economic and social discrimination and alienation.
Says G. N. Devy, a Gujarati professor, of the state of affairs in his state: “Mahatma Gandhi, I have to say, is not a popular man in Gujarat; they merely pay him lip service. You do not become a bad man in Gujarat if you hate Muslims; you are normal. Decent people hate Muslims. And it is not a city phenomenon alone; this is true of villages as well. If a Muslim is traumatised, it is a normal thing.”
The Hindutva campaign against Gujarat’s Muslims is often seen as an attempt to keep the Hindu society together by conjuring a common ogre. If education and job quotas cause the fissures to increase, the system would have to invent a whipping boy to keep its flock together. And some more leaflets would be out.
THE home secretaries of India and Pakistan may have come out empty handed from their recent talks to check the menace of drugs trafficking. But now they can thank a drug overdose scandal involving well-connected youth for a nationwide crackdown that has already yielded 200kg of cocaine in Mumbai. Rahul Mahajan, son of late former BJP minister Pramod Mahajan, has survived an alleged cocaine overdose but not so his secretary.
The incident is said to have galvanised the narcotic sleuths.
In a separate crackdown, the police have seized 25kg of opium from two drug peddlers who were arrested in Bhopal.
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