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Environmental degradation
The Sindh government adviser on environment recently ordered the sealing of a factory which he had raided and found manufacturing polythene bags of less than a certain standard (30 microns) of thickness. He also asked officials to take punitive action against factories making low quality bags and thus adding to the environmental pollution.
Adviser Noman Saigol has been campaigning to stem the environmental degradation and making surprise visits to factories in the industrial areas of the city in an effort to curb industrialists’ avarice for money made at the cost of environment.
Plastic bags are the worst polluters as they do not decompose even in decades. The recent clogging of gutters all over the city has manifested the phenomenon once again. It is a worldwide phenomenon, indeed. But elsewhere effective measures are taken to make its impact less severe. Here, serious efforts are rarely made and things are only shown to be done.
But then, someone may say, many strange things happen in Pakistan. For instance, the other day a 'deranged’ old man drove a locomotive out of the marshalling yard in the Pipri area and reportedly tried to ram it into a fast moving train, the Baba Farid Express. Mercifully, a disaster was averted by some alert staff, who diverted the train onto a loop line. How could the man take the locomotive out of the yard and onto the main line undetected? Was the man really insane or an Indian agent? Many questions are being asked and their answers are wrapped in mystery. And how could Rehman Baloch, better known as Dakait, slip out of police custody where he had been for more than two months? Stranger still, the city police chief said Rehman Dakait had never been arrested!
Of course, plastic bags are handy to carry groceries, fruits, fluids, books and other such things. But using them as disposables is a most serious offence. The cheap plastic bags carpet vacant places, pile on roadsides and even fly and cling to overhead electricity and telephone cables all over the city. Most of them finally make their way into sewerage lines and storm-water drains. In case of a heavy rainfall, they flow into drains and sewers in bulk and block them. It either causes the lines to burst or overflow from damaged points or manholes.
Experts suggest that thick and expensive bags may be an answer to this problem as people would tend to use the same shoppers repeatedly. The Sindh governor has already promulgated an ordinance banning polythene bags below a certain thickness.
The city’s pollution problem, however, has many facets. There is water pollution, air pollution and noise pollution. It is difficult to assess which one is more damaging to human health and the city’s environment.
The industrial waste released into the sea is destroying the country’s marine life. Mangroves are depleting. So are the fish species that grow under these forests. Thus the loss is both ways – that of environment and economy.
The factories already have laws on how to dispose of their waste. They must treat it before it is released into drains leading to the sea. There are only two sewage treatment plants that were built about half a century ago and are still in use. One is in Shershah and the other in Mehmoodabad. A third one was later built in Mauripur, but it remains inoperable. A treatment plant is being built in the Korangi Industrial Area. Even with its completion, the facilities will not be sufficient to treat the industrial waste, and domestic waste treatment will need many more plants as the city’s population has grown manifold since the first two were built. The population of Karachi was hardly three million then in comparison to the present 15 million.
And there is the deafening noise pollution. We experience all kinds of honks, screeches and shouts. In many cases people seem to be unnecessarily pushing their horn buttons. And by habit, they keep honking even when they are stuck in one of numerous traffic jams, knowing well that their horn won’t be able to make the driver ahead to move forward or make way for him. Vehicles, particularly the old ones with faulty engines, contribute a lot to both noise and air pollution. Campaigns to discipline smoke belching vehicles have never produced the desired results. Experts suggest that many people develop psychological problems because of noise pollution. They may get irritated at the slightest of provocations.
The city district government has planned a ‘Mission green Karachi’ in which, officials say, millions of saplings will be planted along roads, in playgrounds, parks and schools. The plan that proposes to involve people from all walks of life includes distribution of saplings and training of volunteers. It was to be launched on August 14, but the rains delayed it and now the launch is set for Aug 30.
If it succeeds, it will improve the city’s environment a great deal. But experience shows that such campaigns announced regularly hardly produce any results as saplings are either not planted in adequate numbers or they are not given due attention after they are planted. Instead, more trees are chopped down in the name of development than are nurtured to maturity. Health reasons are cited for the felling of the fast-growing eucalyptus trees, which experts say help fight pollution more effectively if planted along drains.
We certainly cannot stop environmental degradation altogether as development is its antithesis. But, with concerted efforts, we can slow down its relentless advance. The laws made for this purpose need to be enforced effectively.
‘No-posh’ localities
Suraiya Abbas Maseeh is an extraordinary woman. Her husband is a drifter, he doesn’t work in one place for a long time. She has shouldered the responsibility of bringing up her five children. The boys aren’t interested in studies but the three girls are. One of them is married, the other two are studying in a missionary school and are bound to rise above their station. Until her aged mother died recently she looked after her too.
Suraiya, 40-something, has worked hard all through her life. She lives in Eesa Nagri, opposite Gulshan-i-Iqbal. At an early age she got a job with a family living in Hasan Apartments Extension. Thanks to her honesty and efficiency, not to speak of her willingness to work, she endeared herself to everyone in the family. When the family moved to DHA, Suraiya agreed to commute everyday. She was monetarily rewarded, naturally.
Two of Suraiya’s many qualities are her punctuality and regularity. Even during the recent downpours, she didn’t absent herself from work. The other day, she said laughingly that while the posh DHA was flooded, the modest Eesa Nagri remained normal. “The secret is that we have kept our sewerage in good shape. We see to it that plastic bags don’t find their way into the drainage system. The waste water flows smoothly through the gutter line and falls into the nearby Lyari river. We have no problem on this count,” she said. On the 17th when it rained heavily for two hours, it was the muddy water from the overflowing Lyari river that came out of the manholes and flooded the lanes of Eesa Nagri, but as the water level in the river subsided, the lanes cleared. Said Suraiya: “Bada bol naheen bolna chahye.” The closest translation would be “You should never brag.”
Legal ethics
To demonstrate their resentment against the bail granted to what they alleged a 'fake lawyer’, lawyers in the city courts stayed away from work on Tuesday. The protesting lawyers also demanded the dismissal of the judicial magistrate who granted bail to the alleged offender.
That the legal fraternity should have acted the way it did is not understandable. It was too trivial a matter to warrant a boycott of court proceedings or a demand for the removal the law official from his post. It was, to me, an act of interference in the country’s legal system, whose freedom the lawyers community should strive to protect.
What the lawyers should have done can be assessed from their answer to simple questions such as: If the man had posed himself as, says a doctor, an engineer or a policeman, what would the lawyers have done? Had they boycotted court proceedings, or tried to bail him out for a fee?
— Karachian
Email: naseer.awan@dawn.com
Searching for Atticus in Gujarat, Kashmir, Ayodhya & Mumbai
This was the advice Atticus Finch gave his two young children in the 1950’s book-turned-movie ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Atticus, by just being himself -– a flawlessly humane southerner, scandalised a white neighbourhood in Alabama when he chose to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. That this venerable Atticus-like quality still lingers on in swathes of the American society is an incontrovertible fact. That this is possible in an age when Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are the dominant images coming from their country says something for the American people’s persistent faith in fair play.
In India though, which is trying hard to clone the American way of life, not the least by switching from a pseudo socialist democracy to a more opprobrious free market democracy, the soul of the people as symbolised by Atticus Finch seems to have gone missing. A key test of a democracy is the quality of its judiciary and the legal redress it gives to all its citizens alike.
But there are at least four examples that come to mind from different parts of India where legal access to ordinary people stands blocked by forces that are akin to fascism of the 1930s Europe. In Gujarat, for example, Harsh Mander and other human rights activists have been tirelessly working to put together a team of lawyers to defend the Muslim victims of the February-April carnage in 2002. The state’s Hindu lawyers have decided not to represent the victims and the Muslims advocates who are willing to stick their necks out are demanding hefty fees of their hapless clients.
Says Nyaya-agrah, an NGO working to arrange lawyers for the victims of Gujarat pogroms: “As a climate of fear and hostility, as well as economic and social boycott, continues to prevail in many parts of Gujarat, many thousand survivors continue to languish without hope, security, homes and livelihoods. The government still refuses to reach out with resources and support to enable people to rebuild their lives. It also continues to subvert the legal justice system in unprecedented ways to deny justice to the survivors.”
Two years ago, human rights activists were able to secure a historic judgment from the Supreme Court for re-examination by a high level committee of the state government, the decision to close without trial more than 2000 cases registered after the carnage, and also to look into appeals of more than 300 cases where the accused were acquitted. The orders of the Supreme Court continue to be flouted by the state’s Hindutva government.
“There are many villages in Gujarat today that have proudly been ‘cleansed’, fully and probably permanently, of their erstwhile Muslim residents, settlements that have accomplished the next decisive phase of the on-going genocide which was initiated in the bloody spring of 2002,” says Nyaya-agrah . Gaily painted boards greet you at the entrance of these villages, in ominous greeting: “Welcome to this Hindu village in the Hindu Rashtra of Gujarat”. “These are villages where their Muslim residents are too terrified to return home even today. Many now despair that they will ever be able to go back to the soil of their ancestors,” says the NGO.
In the Indian-ruled Kashmir, the state government has picked up several High-ranking security and civilian officials as also senior politicians for their alleged involvement in a raging sex scandal whereby young Kashmiri girls were targeted for exploitation. In a region where human rights violations by security forces are common, it is odd that the predominantly Muslim lawyers’ union has decided not to make a difference. They have refused to defend the alleged culprits named in the sex scandal. This attitude is of a piece with the mentality of biased lawyers elsewhere.
How can lawyers judge the culpability of the accused in any legal system, much less in a democracy? If this is found acceptable then human rights activists will have no leg to stand on in Gujarat. What is happening in Kashmir with a handful of accused in a given case, looks all set to become a norm in Mumbai on a wider scale. Immediately after last month’s terror attacks in packed commuter trains, police and media began profiling members of Muslim organisations. Sensing a potential kill, the Shiv Sena issued a warning that no lawyer would defend the accused even though none had been named until then. Even worse, some lawyers whether out of fear or because of their misplaced nationalist convictions appeared on TV to promise that they would never defend anyone in the case. In other words the verdict was out in the gruesome case even before it could reach the courts.
What has been proposed for Mumbai by the city’s fascist groups is already being implemented in Faizabad district of which the temple town of Ayodhya is a part.
A year after an abortive suicide attack on the makeshift temple that stands on the site of the razed Babri mosque there, the trial of the accused is not getting anywhere because there is no one to argue their case. Five people were arrested last year on charges of supplying weapons and cellphone SIM card and offering shelter to the five suicide bombers who were killed in the attack on July 5, 2005.
They had stormed the complex housing the Ram temple, but were gunned down before they could reach the sanctum sanctorum. The Faizabad Bar Association adopted a resolution that its members would not defend the accused. “We thought helping the accused persons in the case would amount to betraying the nation. We still stick to this,” said an advocate in Faizabad court where the trial is being held. In June, an advocate from Kashmir, where two of the accused were arrested, arrived to fight the case but had to leave after some local lawyers allegedly manhandled him.
The legal battle has thus got stuck in the routine production of the accused from Naini Jail in Allahabad, where they are being held, and their return to face the judge. As a way out, the district administration is reportedly thinking of shifting the trial to a neighbouring district. But that’s about the only consolation the alleged terror accomplices can expect from the judiciary for now.
It would be interesting to compare the situation in Ayodhya with the state of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The world’s most powerful democracy and the world’s largest democracy (this is how they scratch each other’s back) have shown some startling similarities. It is doubtful though that Guantanamo would be any worse than the quality of justice meted out to Ayodhya’s accused. India may need to learn to respect the spirit of Atticus Finch before the country is swamped by growing prejudices that aim to subvert the constitutional guarantees that are promised to all its citizens.
After the Sonia Gandhi episode when she resigned from parliament to contest again following charges that she held an office of profit outside her duties as MP, it is the turn of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram to face the music. A petition seeking their disqualification as Members of Parliament was recently forwarded by President Abdul Kalam to the Election Commission. It claims that as trustees of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, the two hold offices of profit.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
For the sake of cricket
It could easily have been avoided if the relevant cricket bodies, namely, the Pakistan Cricket Board and more so the International Cricket Council, had the foresight to take appropriate action much earlier.
Just as our cricket team is indignant at being accused of ball tampering and thus cheating, umpire Hair is resentful of being called names like “racist” and “mini-Hitler”.
All this could have been prevented, with both sides spared the infamy of such accusations and the reputation of the sport kept intact as well, if timely measures had been taken to address certain issues in international cricket that had been persistently ignored and swept under the carpet.
Our cricket team and officials had already been feeling piqued by Hair’s umpiring attitude for some time, particularly so during England’s tour of Pakistan last year when Hair was involved in a run out incident against Inzamam at Faisalabad.
The smart thing for PCB to do was to protest through the proper channels about Hair’s behaviour to officially register our unhappiness at least, if not to ensure that he did not supervise Pakistan’s future matches.
But PCB apparently did not file such a complaint. According to former ICC president Ehsan Mani who was interviewed (strangely) over an American radio station, he had advised PCB to register a formal complaint against Hair after last year’s incident so that ICC could take action, but PCB did not do so and ICC could not take unilateral action.
ICC cannot absolve itself of blame now by pointing the finger at PCB.
Pakistani cricketers and officials are not the only ones who are upset by Hair’s umpiring attitude. The Sri Lankans and Indians have long been critical of Hair’s umpiring and both have serious concerns regarding Hair officiating their matches. (In fact, complaint by the Sri Lankans had managed to get them some respite from Hair’s supervision of their matches.)
The wise thing for the ICC to do was to resolve the issue once and for all and “let the game get on”. It should have addressed the concerns of their member teams, look carefully into the issues, and take remedial measures, including amending certain laws to make umpires more accountable and introducing available technology to help umpires get more of their decisions right, as it is already being done in some other sports.
Instead, however, the ICC merely sat and watched the controversy fester and grow, emboldening Hair and other ICC umpires to continue handing down questionable judgments. As a western cricket commentator wrote last week: “...the indignation aroused by his (Hair’s) control of the Faisalabad Test last November meant that to appoint him (Hair) to stand in the last two Tests in England was inviting trouble”.
As the view and judgment of the umpire is supposed to be “right”, the laws of the game should be such that they ensure as far as possible that his view or judgment of “right” is in line with the facts and not with his personal biases.
Nowadays the application of modern technology to a large extent can help to ensure this by providing independent solid evidence for an umpire’s view. This helps to make it less possible for umpires either to make judgments based on personal opinion or to be over zealous in applying the correct laws of the game, and then claim immunity of official regulations.
In reality, however, persistent inconsistency in defining certain actions of different cricketers in international matches has shaken the confidence of cricket teams in the objectivity of the umpire’s judgment.
It is well known that while western cricketers like Flintoff and Jones are said to have mastered the art of reverse swing, the same action by Asian players like Imran, Waseem, Waqar and now Asif, is labelled as ball tampering. Similarly, while Shane Warne is a great spinner and Brett Lee the fastest bowler, the same kind of skills displayed by Murali and Shoaib earn them the name of chucker.
Granted that umpires are human and all humans can make mistakes. But this is all the more important to have laws and technology that help to determine whether the umpire’s mistake is human or intentional error.
South Asians are not the only ones complaining. The West Indians also have a bone to pick with ICC’s umpires.
In the aftermath of the fiasco at The Oval last Sunday, the captain of the West Indies cricket team revealed last Tuesday that the West Indies Cricket Board had complained to the ICC regarding 16 or 17 biased or incompetent umpire decisions after the Australia-West Indies series in Australia last year. (Note: Hair did not officiate in this Australia-West Indies series.)
No doubt cricketers should not be allowed to intimidate umpires and the ICC should continue to be strict on players. But at the same time it is the ICC’s responsibility to ensure that the integrity of umpires should not be controversial or questionable which is as bad for the reputation of cricket as unruly spectators chanting racist slogans at matches. Both need to be strictly discouraged if not stamped out for the game to maintain its integrity and entertainment value.
Hair’s bowing out of the international cricket scene however, either by resignation or by ICC action, is not going to solve cricket’s problem. The ICC still needs to revamp some of the laws of the game.
