| November 13, 2006 | Monday | Shawwal 20, 1427 |
Lara's men pay dearly for poor bowling, fielding
Some Muslims are missing, give or take a few million
It was another grey day, and a greyer one for West Indies. Coming from the land of glorious beaches and sunsets, they were faced here with a beachhead and no sun and the situation for them is, well, greyer than the first day.
IF Muslims constitute 13.4 per cent of India's population of just over one billion, as is officially acknowledged, there should be 134 millionof them in the country. But the Saudi king who recently visited India estimated the country's Muslim population to be 150 million. Other independent estimates come close to the Saudi version. There was no official correction, if one was required, to the royal claim made on Indian TV. Which means there could be 15 per cent Muslims in India and not 13.4. Nations that care for their own are not so wayward in counting their citizens.
Last Thursday’s newspapers carried pictures of yet another batch of jobseekers deported from Muscat in their usual miserable conditions.
Before they were cleared out, they sat in the bottom of the boat on the bare wooden floor, with nothing else to sit on comfortably or properly. The curve of the boat made it more uncomfortable for them to adjust their postures to.
Splinters of glass from shattered soda bottles, like their cherished dreams, were littered around them. An iron ladder climbed up from the bottom. Obviously, the boat was built to carry cargo, not humans. Other pictures run by the news agencies highlighted other aspects of their plight.
In a sharp contrast, pictures carried by the newspapers on Wednesday showed a ship ready to sail off to the Gulf. This ship had, among other facilities and luxuries, as a report said, five-star hotel dining, complimentary room service, snacks, a 24-hour restaurant, arrangements for concerts, comedy shows, magic shows, movies and dance floors and a swimming pool. It had 540 rooms to accommodate 1,250 passengers and a crew of 400 people. Onshore activities it offered included horse and camel races and golf playing arrangements.
The ferry, dubbed as a `dream cruise’ and set to run between Dubai and Karachi on a weekly basis, will certainly remain an elusive dream for members of the middle class as it charges what appears to be an unreasonably high fare for the five-day trip, including a day-long stay in Dubai. The federal minister for ports and shipping announced at a reception that more such ferries would be launched to ply between Karachi and other destinations.
But, for that matter, everything that the government does seems to be doing for the luxury of the rich. This may remind one of the prime minister’s approval of the plan to establish what is dubbed as a `Diamond Bar Island City’.
To be built by a Dubai-based firm, the name of the place itself suggests what it would be like. The details of the project, which will come up on the twin islands of Bundal and Buddo, are really enchanting. There will be a diplomatic enclave, an offshorew financial district, hotels, restaurants, recreational spots, water sports, and so on.
Meanwhile, demonstrations, hunger strikes and seminars are being held from Karachi to Islamabad to protest against the project. Concerned people fear that this project will deprive a large chunk of the 500,000-strong fishermen community of their livelihood as they are dependent wholly on fishing along the coast.
On the other hand, Sindh Chief Minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim, his aides and top officials defend the project for what they foresee as the inflow of huge foreign investment to the province. They say the benefits of the $43.13 billion project will trickle down to the poor segment of society and thus bring about prosperity in the province.
There are a lot of counter arguments. But no arguments, no protests are going to make the government budge from its stance on the twin islands’ future status. After all, when the luxury of the rich is to be catered to, nothing can stand in its way. Of course, not the 253 or so hectares of mangroves, a few abodes of fishermen, meadows for camels, breeding places for marine life and waterfowl and the means of livelihood for the poor fishermen’s community.
An unsung hero
HE was the victim of a society that promotes mediocrity and crushes talent. A world class footballer, who became a maestro of classical singing, Saleh Mohammad alias Ustad Swali lived a dog’s life in the last decade of his life, and died last year, with the custodians of sports and culture simply unaware of his existence.
Born in Gul Mohammad Lane, Lyari, Ustad Swali found football and music all around him since his childhood. First he fell in love with soccer and became a member of the national team at the age of 16.
After remaining a spare player for a couple of years, when he entered the ground, his extraordinary speed and strength earned him the title of `Flying Horse’. The hearts of rival team players sank when Ustad Swali snatched football from one of them. He received a standing ovation from the crowd when he scored a goal through a single kick from the middle of the ground.
Having represented Pakistan in different foreign countries, including England, he was often hired by the renowned South Asian team, Colcatta Mohammadan, even after Partition. However, he quit football at the peak of his career, and once told this scribe that he decided to do so after looking at legendary boxer Mohammad Ali Clay degrading himself while sticking to the ring when he should have retired long ago.
After quitting football, Ustad Sawli started learning classical music from one of his fans, Ghulam Dsastagir, son of Mubarak Ali Khan. He went through a rigorous training requiring a lot of patience as his teacher made him play Teen Taal on the tabla for three years. Ghulam Dastagir died after training him for 15 years.
At his Chehlum, Ustad Manzoor Ali Khan asked who would succeed - ie sit on the Gaddi of Ghulam Dastagir. “Ustad Swali,” came the voice of the late singer’s wife from across a purdah separating men and women present on the occasion. After Ustad Swali gave his first public performance (he refrained from doing so while his teacher was alive), Ustad Manzoor Ali Khan said: “Ghulam Dastagir has died but his art lives in Ustad Swali.”
Like his teacher, Ustad Swali was opposed to adopting music as a profession as they believed that commercialisation may harm the spirit of classical music. Moreover, Ustad Swali believed that since he had the art, the TV and radio people should approach him instead of him frequenting producers’ rooms, preceded by an insulting hours-long wait at the reception to get a gate pass, to get a programme. He was taken to the TV and radio studios by his admirers, one visit to each, but the arrogant attitude of programme producers made him make up his mind never to visit these places again.
But whenever a guest came from India, a nephew of his teacher, who is a music director at the PTV Karachi station, requested Ustad Swali to come to their home to represent their Gharana. Once, Ustad Fateh Ali Khan of Lahore visited his home after listening to him on an audio cassette.
Alone and unattended, the ailing Ustad spent the last days of his life in a tiny house whose rooms resembled the sleeper compartment of a train. He was financially so hard-pressed that he took a rusk with tea lacking milk as a meal and could not afford medicines for heart and other diseases.
Similar is the plight of his childless widow who is still waiting for his pension to be released (as Ustad Swali was also a food department employee). This is how we treat our heroes.
Book sale on street corners
PAKISTANIS have never been famous for their love of books. Foreign visitors are struck by the absence of a reading culture in our society. It is therefore amazing how President Musharraf’s book In the Line of Fire has attracted the interest of people all over the city.
You can find the newspaper boys, who normally sell eveningers and magazines, trying to thrust the book with a serious-looking president on the cover into the car when the traffic lights turn red. The book is selling like hot cakes otherwise why would these youngsters lug around the load of a 300-plus pages hardbound book. Unfortunately the price continues to be very high - Rs 1295. Liberty Books which is marketing In the Line of Fire says that nearly 35,000 copies have already been sold. This is quite a record if one recalls that the normal print-run of locally published books is at the most 1,000 for very popular editions.
Now that the Urdu version is out, it has joined the ranks of the English original on the street corners but at a lower price of Rs 495. It can hardly be called a translation because changes have been made in the text. First of all the title is different — Sub Say Pahlay Pakistan is how the Urdu book is called. Some errors in the dates of major events that had been pointed out in this newspaper have been duly corrected. More intriguing is the disappearance of a sentence from the chapter “Manhunt” that reads in the original, “We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars.” Has the money been accounted for? One wonders. Not in the federal budget.
In the Line of Fire has only one map - of FATA. Sub Say Pahlay Pakistan is richer cartographically. It contains five maps - one of Pakistan, one of FATA and three of Kashmir. They could have been of better quality and no good editor lets maps go without captions.
— Karachian
Email: naseer.awan@dawn.com
While it was Lara's batsmen who let him down on the opening day, it was his fielders and bowlers who disappointed on the second. They were, of course, gifted a wicket early through the rising eccentricism of Younis Khan who is fast eroding the maturity he has gained through the year.
Some will say that's the way he plays which is wrong. The developing batsman is one who adapts his strokes to the pitch and then, whatever the pitch, doesn't go for such strokes in the first 30 minutes of the day's play. That is the only element that is stopping him from being ranked alongside Inzamam and Yousuf, and with Miandad from days past.
It was ironic that Yousuf replaced him and displayed what Younis should have been doing. His batting yesterday was the finest personification of his Patron's Enlightened Moderation. He cut and drove skillfully but with some daring thrown in and if the fielders had been apprised of his conversion rate from 50s to 100s, Ganga would have been sharper at gully and followed the coach's age old instruction to the close in fielders: Don't rise too soon, lad.
Yousuf's year of conversion to the Islamic faith has also given him one of the highest conversion rates for a batsman in a calendar year — two half centuries (one of them 97) to six hundreds. What is still not too late for the calypso's to gather is his conversion rate from century to 150 plus which is also quite impressive considering scores of 173, 202 and 192 and those of 126 (run out) and 128. Altogether, he now has 1230 runs in 2006 at almost 100 per innings!!
It was pleasing to see Malik dig in and if it wasn't for Yousuf he would have carried the accolades. He scored a hundred in his previous Test innings in Sri Lanka and could repeat it here seeing the dedication with which he is batting. He too was a fusion of aggression and rock solid defense. His straight driving was above par. Pakistan have their all rounder at No.6.
Woolmer must be kicking himself for not bringing in Hafeez earlier in his tenure. He has shown all the true grit and the will to stay at the wicket that the coach has yearned for. Yesterday, one could see the focus in his eyes. He could not hide his shortcoming in technique but he makes up for it with guts. Can't remember the last time a Pakistani opener scored back-to-back half centuries. He got 95 at the Oval and, remember, never got to bat in the second innings because of a private quarrel.
The last time Inzy made a comeback to the team in 2003, he also got a duck. Don't you wish you'd bet on it. I'm sure someone did and is laughing all the way to the bank by now.
Despite seeing that from close up, I felt Lara lost the plot on the second day. He should have bowled more spin. The ball is not coming on to the bat and his medium pacers are all of the same type. Dave Mohammad was the pick and was underbowled with 12 overs out of 76 delivered on Sunday.
Even my driver agrees and he insists on calling him Deen Mohammad. But Deen or Dave, he was very, very brave. It was delightful to see a spinner toss 'em after a long time. That he did to Inzamam spoke of his courage - and self belief. It paid off with Inzamam playing inside the line but to the bowler's credit, it curled in to castle the king himself.
I feel if Lara had not changed him with Gayle, it would have been more rewarding. He should have also delayed the new ball and got his spinners to bowl at both ends to avoid giving the batsmen the option to walk off for bad light. West Indies desperately needed a late wicket to stay in the game.
The entire population of Sri Lanka is 19.7 million, including 7 per cent Muslims. At least Sri Lankan Muslims know precisely how many they are. The staggering "clerical error" surrounding more than 15 million people would be a raging scandal in any part of the world save India.
Whether they are 134 million or 150 million of them, the Sachar Committee set up by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to investigate the deplorable condition of India's minorities, says Muslims rank today lower than the erstwhile untouchable caste of Dalits in terms of education, job opportunities and other key indices. With such a huge margin of purported error it is strange that the Sachar Committee has come with statistics in terms of percentages of Muslim drop outs from school and so on. Be that as it may, the nub of the problem – social problems, and not gaping arithmetical errors -- lies elsewhere.
Dalit leader Ms. Mayawati has accused Muslims of being in a sorry state because they tend to follow obscurantist community leaders. No one can deny that Mayawati is an enlightened Dalit leader. But her criticism of Muslims is only half of their story. The truth is that since the days of Mahatma Gandhi, if not earlier, the Congress party, India's political behemoth, has, for reasons of its own, bred obscurantism among Muslims. It's tedious to recall, but how can we live down Mahatma Gandhi's campaign for the Khilafat Movement, a mediaeval institution that moderate Turks were fighting against but Indian Muslims were being mobilized to demand its protection. In a more recent context, during the crisis thrown up by a Muslim divorcee's case for alimony the Congress government, headed by the genial Rajiv Gandhi, overturned a secular verdict on the issue by the Supreme Court. And thus the Shahbano case became the rallying point for right wing Hindus against alleged Muslim appeasement. What this appeasement has fetched for the poor minorities is part of the story that the Sachar report seeks to tell. The answer is, untold misery.
Mayawati is right that Muslims are increasingly leaning on fanatical leaders. That's But what happened when liberal Muslims approached then Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi to stall his move in parliament to overturn a secular court verdict in the Shahbano case? "It's nice to meet so many liberal Muslims," Rajiv had exulted with a characteristic warm smile. His Brahman law minister H.R. Bhardwaj, who advised him on the disastrous Ayodhya mosque strategy, was ensconced at a whispering distance from him. "I acknowledge you have a major role to play in welding the country into a cohesive nation. But the Shahbano matter should be tackled by the Muslim Personal Law Board. I would urge you to use your influence with their leaders to consider a change in their approach." This is what Rajiv had told a small group of visitors consisting of a galaxy of Indian Muslims, including writers, film-makers, theatre personalities, journalists and women activists.
The right wing Muslim press, on cue from the law board, promptly dubbed the meeting as one of "nachaniyas and gavayyas" (dancers and bards). And that was the end of the liberal effort to advise the supposedly secular government on the community's affairs.
With Hindu revivalist groups making up the main opposition to the Congress, political options before India's Muslims have been reduced to a toss-up between a rock and a hard place. Some of the progressive Muslim supporters of the Congress party trooped out recently to join the BJP. That these people have remained loyal to Hindu revivalist opposition even after its government in Gujarat unleashed an orgy of massacre and rape against the state's Muslims speaks volumes for the dire straits the Muslim leadership finds itself in. BJP's menagerie of Muslims include former minister Arif Mohammed Khan and the former deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, Najma Heptullah both formerly with the Congress and now firmly parked with the BJP. These Muslim supporters of the BJP are quick to point out that the Congress seeks Muslim votes and not their welfare. Part of the explanation rests with the coterie that surrounds and advises Congress president Sonia Gandhi as it did her husband. The fact that Sonia was prevented from visiting the home of a former Congress MP who was cut into pieces and burnt by a mob in Gujarat is cited as an example of the party's increasing core thrust towards the Hindu right, a far cry from the Nehruvian vision it had set out to implement in free India.
It is this basic vision that more than anything needs to be restored to implement a respectable strategy for India's Muslims. As of now the task looks well nigh impossible for a country that is finding it difficult to raise the required six percent of the GDP for educating its school-age children, including the children of 134 or so million Muslim community. So far the government has been merrily looking the other way as funds to educate a substantial chunk of population are outsourced through the medrassah system to far away country's such as Saudi Arabia. By handing over millions of Muslim children to the care of the usually secretive and often obscurantist medrassahs, the Indian government is able to save a substantial sum of the educational budget, but at what cost. It comes as a surprise therefore that suddenly one day it orders a Sachar Committee to throw up details and suggest solutions to the problem. To be fair to the quest this exercise was carried out even earlier, 26 years ago to be precise, by Indira Gandhi. So there's little that is new in the Sachar report.
In broad strokes the report shows that 13.4 per cent Muslims (that's the figure now arrived at from the 2001 census) contribute just 6 per cent of the GDP.
Across 12 states with an average Muslim population of 15.4 per cent, only 6.4 per cent of government employees are Muslim. In 15 states where Muslims average 17 per cent of the population, they are 8 per cent of the lower judiciary, which decides eight out of every 10 cases in the country. But prison is one place where Muslims' proportional representation is higher than their population percentage. In eight states where they average 14.82 per cent of the population, they account for 23.4 per cent of prison inmates. Although Muslims in jails were not part of the Sachar Committee's terms of reference, prison is the only place where they have been found to be over-represented.
Former MP Syed Shahabuddin has compared the present condition of the Indian Muslim to that of blacks in the United States — an analogy once reserved only for Dalits. Ironically, Syed Shahabuddin was the key campaigner for Muslim leaders who forced Rajiv Gandhi to make a law that was to send their women into the medieval era. Is this the raw material that the country has to work with to pull the Muslims out of the deepening quagmire? In which case let's accept the margin of error of a few million Muslims missing here and there. The bigger error is in the attitude, forget the numbers.
We have heard of religious mendicants praying for rain. In the parched rain-deficient Gulf states, their rulers have led prayers for rain.
Only in India would you find farmers who pray desperately for their land to be spared the generosity of the rain-gods. Farmers in the region of River Noyyal in Tamil Nadu too look up at the sky and listen to weather forecasts. But this is neither for bountiful rain nor for dams to fill up fast. The prayers are for rains to stop so that the neighbouring dam bed remains dry. Farmers say they do not want rain because it brings in polluted water, carrying effluents that dyeing and bleaching units in Tirupur discharge into the river. They also refuse to carry out farming using the water.
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