ONE major preoccupation since Ramazan began has been how to avoid watching the federal minister of state for religious affairs sing and declaim and act on television. But other issues press.

For one, General Musharraf’s autobiography is in the line of fire. Much has already been written on it, and much will be said during the week. The point has already been raised whether it is wise for a sitting president or prime minister or even minister to write his memoirs that may contain passages relating to delicate, ongoing domestic and foreign policy issues. Inevitably works of this kind by politicians also contain an element of one-sided bombast and self-righteousness that can only create complications and invite denigration. There are thus bound to be many repercussions, however some may praise the general’s bravado in writing on sensitive subjects while in office.

It is to be hoped that some of the questions the book raises or the questions that may be asked by reviewers and critics will be as frankly answered by the author as he says he has been frank in penning them down. For instance, how did the millions of dollars given by the US as bounty money for the capture and handing over of Al Qaeda militants to Washington were accounted for? To whom did they go? Has a record been kept and shouldn’t it be made public? At the very least, a full list of the recipients should be placed before parliament.

Second, did the general consider that in declaring that he was left speechless when then CIA director George Tenet confronted him with centrifuge designs sold by the Qadeer Khan network, he is confessing to a colossal intelligence failure on the part of his own services? How blissfully unaware we come out looking in the book of what was going on and how nuclear spare parts were being smuggled out in air force plane under the noses of the military and the security ring around Kahuta. Doesn’t this strengthen the theory of complicity at some level of the intelligence and defence services? (Interestingly, the day excerpts from the book were splashed across the newspapers, with their implied acceptance of our intelligence failure, our smiling prime minister was pictured inaugurating of all things the mess of the Intelligence Bureau).

Mr Musharraf may have stirred up a hornet’s nest and some of his remarks may be greeted with reservations even within the defence establishment. How would Dr Khan’s supporters and fervent admirers in and outside the establishment regard the timing of the disclosures about the nuclear czar’s letter to his daughter — which is about one of the few revelations actually made by the book — and his other allegedly clandestine activities when the good doctor is recovering from serious surgery? At the very least, it is an unfortunate coincidence.

With regard to the Richard Armitage controversy, the former US deputy secretary of state also now seems to go along with the view that General Mahmud Ahmad, the ISI chief, may have sexed up the message he was supposed to have conveyed to General Musharraf. Gen Ahmad was accompanied to that fateful meeting in Washington by then Pakistan ambassador to the US Maleeha Lodhi. Although based in London now as our high commissioner, she was with Gen Musharraf on his visit to the United States. Why doesn’t anyone bother to get her version of the meeting with Mr Armitage? The journalist in her must be dying to tell the real tale.

Gen Musharraf has said, separately from the book issue, that he draws his power from the military and has been able to accomplish many things that he might not have been able to do otherwise. He is probably being true in both his rejection of any notion that he enjoys popular support or that he became president and chief executive on that count as well as in asserting that his position as COAS allows him to take initiatives which may not otherwise have been possible and which his own military would have opposed — the efforts at rapprochement with India, for instance, and thinking aloud about ‘out-of-the box’ solutions for Kashmir.

In this particular case, certainly more power to his elbow, no matter if it flows from the military, but no one should be under any illusion that if the army had not been in power and Gen Musharraf had not been president as well as COAS, the two of them together would have been opposing a civilian government’s overtures to India. In this connection, you just have to recall the sullen attitude of the armed forces chiefs during Mr Vajpayee’s bus journey to Lahore and the negotiations leading up to the Lahore declaration.

If Gen Musharraf has been able to suitably reform military thinking and made the army realise that its perks and privileges are dependent on Pakistan adopting peace as the new way, good. But then why does he still have to keep on making all these hawkish noises, some of which are also reflected in his book?

His claims to enlightened moderation have been preceded by the clumsy handling of the women’s rights amendment bill — an episode from which all political parties have come out looking weak and confused. The ruling party’s backtracking after the bill was cleared by a representative parliamentary committee can be explained by the threat raised by the MMA that it would resign from the assemblies if the bill as approved was passed. But perhaps the MMA leader Hafiz Hussain Ahmad, who sounds both milder and more prescient than the Qazi, had the better explanation.

He said in an interview that some elements in the PML-Q — unerringly pointing the finger at the Shujaat cabal — didn’t want to be seen as aligning themselves with the People’s Party in getting the bill through and therefore found the MMA intervention a blessing in disguise.

Gen Musharraf seems to be quite beholden to Chaudhry Shujaat and apparently feels no contradiction in harbouring politicians of that kind within the PML-Q, a party that he says in his book he helped assemble — a formal confession that has already been dubbed an act violative of the offices of both president and COAS. This hypocrisy will continue to dog the regime as long as it refuses to accept the PPP and the PML-N as the country’s major political forces.

When the PPP noticed the first signs of pusillanimity on the part of the PML-Q, it should have withdrawn its support to the bill. The PML-N took no position, which is running away from a challenge, but at least it had the sense to abstain from the debate that followed. After Balochistan and the Bugti murder, the MQM again proved its penchant for empty threats on the women’s bill, criticising the mullahs who are its main rivals on the political pitch in urban Sindh but still sticking to its partnership with the PML-Q. The inability of the MQM, the PPP and the PML-N to take decisions on their own without referring to their leaders in exile was again exposed.

Probably the present situation where the leaders of the three major parties keep pulling the wires from abroad knowing that they will not be returning to Pakistan any time soon is quite unprecedented in the political history of the subcontinent. This only provides an opportunity to the government to mock the parties and say they wait for instructions from abroad even for the simplest things and also genuinely robs the leadership within the country of credibility.

Anyway, allowing a minister of state to express opinions on religious matters on TV and letting the MMA government in the Frontier to seek to ban cinema shows during Ramazan are hardly indications of the enlightened moderation that Gen Musharraf attempts to project in his book. What is this that Mr Imran Khan has been saying these past few days — that it will soon become clear as to who forms the real opposition and who is in league with the establishment?

Lastly, anyone who writes a book or even thinks of writing a book deserves some credit in these barren days when the reading and writing habit is decreasing in inverse proportion to the rise in verbal verbosity. However, Gen Musharraf, after all the self-promotion that he has already done, will be well advised to ask his officials and lackeys to refrain from such signs of sycophancy as were shown following publication of Ayub Khan’s ‘Friends not Masters’: the Pakistan Writers Guild had sent a message to the dictator welcoming him into the fold of writers.

LAND acquisition for private- and public-sector projects is becoming an increasingly contentious issue. In the past, even mega projects like Tarbela and Mangla generated less controversy than some recent schemes of vastly lower profile. Small, isolated campaigns for compensation and resettlement continued long after the dams became operational but went almost unnoticed.

It is a sign of the times that the Punjab government’s acquisition of land for a Mercedes assembly plant (Dawn, July 22, 2006), as well as the plight of affected landowners, received wide press coverage two months ago. ‘A questionable land deal’ (Dawn editorial, July 23) raised real issues and particularly stressed the need for transparency and public information.

The last few years have seen the emergence of a vibrant property market, courtesy a monumental increase in housing projects with a seemingly insatiable appetite for land. The entire district of Gwadar — comprising largely barren terrain devoid of water, vegetation or infrastructure — became prime land shortly after work on a deep seaport in the area started in earnest. The urge for possession was so overpowering that land in Gwadar fetched prices comparable to those commanded by prime urban real estate. In Lahore, a strategically sensitive — and therefore vulnerable — area close to the Indian border has been converted into a housing estate where property is available at astronomical prices.

The thriving property market has created powerful land mafias that can seize land almost anywhere in the country with impunity. With the market rife with deceit, fraud and extortion, there has been a sharp increase in land-related litigation, a boon perhaps for the legal profession.

Matters are complicated by the fact that there is no specific law regulating the purchase of individually owned land by private-sector firms engaged in the business of housing schemes. Private housing societies obtain land mostly through voluntary sale, but those who refuse to come to terms often find themselves on the receiving end of strong-arm tactics. Some lose their assets or suffer in other ways for not toeing the line.

There is, however, a Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (LAA) that governs the expropriation of private land by the government for public purposes and for non-state companies. Part VII of the LAA (sections 38 to 44) deals with “acquisition of land for companies” but the term ‘company’ is loosely defined. It includes entities registered under the “Companies Ordinance, 1984 or under the [British] Companies Acts, 1862 to 1890, or incorporated by an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom or by a Pakistan law, or by Royal Charter or Letters Patent and includes a society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, and a Registered Society within the meaning of the Co-operative Societies Act, 1912 [LAA section 3(e)].”

Such property-acquisition exercises tend to be carried out without any consideration of justice for the affected individuals and families. The person whose land is taken away is defined in the LAA as someone who is “interested in compensation”. Nothing could be more callous.

The “interested” person is entitled to compensation determined by the collector in the light of market rates. The LAA has provisions for compensation for buildings, trees and other assets tied to the earth. Compensation at the market rate is often determined in relation to the average price of land sold in the area in the current year or over the last three years. Prices recorded in land mutations for that period are used to compute the average.

Mutation deeds show great distortions in prices, for two reasons. If there is a fear that someone may challenge the mutation under the law of pre-emption, the price shown in the deed is fictitiously inflated. A person who successfully challenges the mutation then has to pay the inflated price of the land. And if there is no fear of the mutation being contested, the price shown is slashed to absurd levels to avoid the high cost of mutation tax.

The average price calculated is usually the primary indicator of the market value of land when it is acquired under the LAA. Anyone challenging the award of compensation can go to court for a settlement. In the meantime, the collector will acquire the land and deposit compensation in court.

In many countries, land is acquired in this manner by governments for projects funded by the international financial institutions (IFIs). Projects which dispossess people and ruin their livelihoods have been criticised on this count despite their other wider benefits.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the World Bank began developing policy guidelines for acquisition to mitigate the harmful effects on the losers of land. Now, all IFIs have developed detailed guidelines on the subject and loan-recipient countries must follow these recommendations. Instead of land acquisition, the IFIs introduced the concept of resettlement, calling for far broader action that includes compensation at replacement value (of land, structures, trees, crops and all assets and facilities tied to the earth), restoration of livelihoods and provision of living standards at par with those enjoyed prior to land acquisition. The land loser is described as an “affected person”, as opposed to a person “interested in compensation”.

The IFIs stress the rights of all affected persons whether they are landowners or users without proprietary rights, such as tenants, graziers and others entitled to usufruct of land in any manner. Illegal occupants of land are also treated as legal title holders. Even though the loss of community and social networks cannot be compensated for — and here the main sufferers are women — this is still a major achievement and gives a human face to development.

The resettlement plan is required by the IFIs at the project preparation stage and it entails high costs usually not covered by the loan. Affected persons must be consulted and provided with all relevant information. Since government officers are accustomed to just passing orders, these provisions are often circumvented in project implementation.

On projects requiring small-scale land acquisition, the IFIs frequently do not monitor the acquisition process and in many cases people are dispossessed without fair compensation. On large projects, the resettlement plan is followed but is often manipulated for personal gain.

The Ghazi Barotha hydro-power project is a case in point. The total land acquired for the project was 11,125 acres, most of which was riverbed, and its cost was estimated at Rs1.8 billion. A collusion of vested interests, including government officials and a few landowners, resulted in the acquisition cost escalating to Rs7.5 billion. NAB investigated the case and found that the exchequer suffered a loss of Rs4 billion on the project. The Chotiari dam in Sanghar district allegedly experienced similar corruption in land acquisition.

The Lyari Expressway project funded by the Government of Pakistan is a particularly tragic case. The IFIs reportedly refused funding because of the absence of a resettlement plan. The project is likely to displace 200,000 persons in low-income areas of Karachi. The poverty, misery, livelihood losses and social, economic and psychological problems caused by this project beggar description.

Since 2002, every new phase of this project has been heralded by the arrival of demolition squads supported by paramilitary forces to evict people from their homes by force. They have been offered 80-yard plots, often in undeveloped areas, and Rs50,000 towards construction costs. Over 25,000 houses have been expropriated under this project and hundreds are demolished periodically. Not everyone who has been dispossessed has received compensation, and the ‘successful’ ones have allegedly had to pay for it. Can anyone construct even a room with Rs50,000? Is there any element of justice and fair play in this brutal expropriation of property? The LAA and the resettlement plan are two extremes: one is simple expropriation and the other calls for extraordinary compensation. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has prepared a draft resettlement policy and ordinance, titled ‘Project Implementation and Resettlement of Affected Persons Ordinance 2001’, which is a major improvement on the LAA and also covers land acquisition by housing projects. Whether this draft, languishing in cold storage for five long years, will ever reach parliament is a moot question.

The EPA and its donors should have known that land acquisition is a provincial subject not included in the concurrent list of the Constitution. Article 152, relating to “acquisition of land for federal purposes”, clearly states that if land is required by the Centre it will ask the provincial government to acquire the same on its behalf.

Land records and rights are highly complex subjects dealt with by the trained staff of the land revenue department while the EPA has no such professional skills. The draft prepared by the EPA should be sent to the provincial governments for comment, amendment and legislation. It is high time that justice and fair play became part and parcel of the process of land acquisition.