| May 07, 2008 | Wednesday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1, 1429 |
Spectator sports
Misery of housemaids smears Islamabad’s beautiful image
The Malik of all he surveys!
RAhman Malik, the PPP henchman for all things discreet and controversial, has finally landed in the soup. The controversy over his alleged role in having the by-elections postponed made him the most sought-after person in the Senate.
SO what can one make of the NWFP chief minister’s faux pas? It was innocence bordering on naiveté. Was Ameer Haider Khan really so innocent that he allowed himself to walk into the trap, allegedly set by Advisor to the Prime Minister on Interior, Rehman A. Malik?
It doesn’t just make any sense. Even Akram Khan Durrani would not have committed the blunder, whose government could rightly have claimed a position amongst the top-ten most incompetent administration by all standards of imagination.
With his uncle killed by militants and militants poised to over-run major towns and districts, Mr Durrani was in perpetual denial. As far as he was concerned, the NWFP was facing a grand conspiracy -- too grand perhaps, for him to make even a feeble effort.
No wonder then that while things were falling apart, he was a contended man, hoping God would intervene on behalf of the ostensibly pious people and extricate them of the difficult situation.
By contrast, Mr Hoti could certainly have done well. Barely a month ago, he won praise from British Foreign Minister, David Miliband, who described him a wise young man -- a characteristic Mr Hoti could have demonstrated well by scorning back at Mr Malik for suggesting to issue a bad situation certificate.
Alas, that was not to be. The chief minister made a serious error of judgment by issuing a bad character certificate of his own province, knowing full well that the law and order situation had registered remarkable improvement since February.
That the NWFP Home Department dutifully dished out a letter to oblige Mr Malik is hardly surprising. Officers have long lost the spine to stand up for the right and sign along the dotted lines, even if it goes against conventional wisdom, let alone one’s moral conscience.
What however, indeed is regrettable that the NWFP allowed itself to be used to fulfil some one else’s political agenda without realising its political and economic fall out.
It should have known as to why was Mr Malik so pushed about postponing the bye-elections by relentlessly pursuing Chief Minister Hoti to agree to the decision. He made six calls including one from Dubai, surprisingly, while both his party co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari and PML-N chief Mian Nawaz Sharif were in the Gulf state to iron out their differences on the judges’ issue.
It is unlikely that Mr Malik would not have consulted Mr Zardari before going about the task of postponing the bye-elections. If he did not take Mr Sharif into confidence, it is not too difficult to understand why it was not done.
On the same token, it is not likely that Mr Hoti would not have taken his party leadership into confidence before taking such a major policy decision. If statements by the NWFP Minister for Information Mian Iftikhar Hussain are anything to go by, Rehman A. Malik has been at it for some days. It did not happen overnight. So, why this hoopla? Whatever the motive behind the move to get the bye-elections postponed, it appears that the parties involved in this whole business had miscalculated.
The ANP does not appear to be miffed at misrepresenting the fact about the state of law and order situation in the province, the reason why it is pulling its hair is that it has been singled out and made to bear all this embarrassment alone.
It feels that Mr Malik ‘lied’ to it by claiming to speak for the centre and the other three provinces in order to get the NWFP on board and get it to agree to postpone the June 18 polls.
And this explains the unusually angry reaction from the NWFP government to what it perceived was an attempt to put the entire blame on it for postponing these elections.
That this has caused political embarrassment is an understatement. It has made the ANP to appear to collude with the PPP to achieve whatever goals it wanted to achieve by putting off the bye-elections.
Therefore, the assertion by the NWFP government that it agreed to play along since it had been assured by Mr Malik that the centre and three provinces had already agreed to delay the polls does not hold much water. That it deliberately twisted the fact on the law and order on Mr Malik’s repeated requests but was turned into a scapegoat nonetheless, it feels, has rubbed salt to their wounds.
But political costs aside. What does one make of a government, who is out on a limb trying to bring back the scared local and foreign investors on the ground that the security situation in the NWFP has improved? While the NWFP has had its unfair share of travel advisories by foreign missions to discourage tourists and investors from visiting this God-forsaken province, its own government has lent it a semblance of credence by issuing its own bad situation report for what appears to be a short-sighted political gimmick.
On November 3, when President General Pervez Musharraf pulled the plug on news broadcasting, a great uneasy hush fell over the country. After the constant chatter of political talk shows, round-the-clock news updates and live coverage, the silence was bewildering. It demonstrated two things: the first was that Musharraf’s inner dictator finally came out of the closet after years of teasers, the second was that the new drug of choice for the country was television news.
Think of 2007, and its many historic events come to mind in freeze-frame television images. From deposed chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry being pulled by the hair like a pack animal; to reporters in bullet-proof vests talking over pounding gunfire near Lal Masjid in the heart of Islamabad; the fire and panic of a bomb blast, swarms of black-coated lawyers beaten back by sticks and smoked out by tear-gas; Benazir Bhutto’s last triumphant wave before blood and chaos spilled across the country; masked gunmen let loose in Karachi on May 12, 2007.
Two thousand and seven then is not just the Year of Consecutive Cataclysm, but also the year when the revolution was actually televised. In other words, the medium assumed the equivalent importance of the message. President Musharraf realized this and tried to shoot the medium. But the need for information is like perfume, once sprayed, you can’t really put it back in the bottle with a stick and a net. It’s basic physics — the physics of mass communication. And here’s another law while we’re at it: in the absence of information, rumours will fill the void (remember the mobile phone network afire with ‘news’ of a counter-coup against General Musharraf after November 3?)
Imagine how the public would’ve reacted to the 1997 storming of the Supreme Court being broadcast live, or Murtaza Bhutto’s assassination? American media critic, journalist and philosopher Walter Lippman called the result ‘the pictures in their heads’, how people form opinions not on the basis of critical judgment but on messages condensed into symbols or pictures. So television is not just reporting on history, it’s shaping history. It’s hard to envisage a PML-N victory and the MMA and PML-Q’s clear defeat without its influence. The lawyers’ movement would not have gained as much street cred had it been conducted left of the TV camera. Only in Pakistan can suo moto become a catchphrase like “rocking” is to the Indians.
Politicians have come to realise television’s sway. When security dampened campaigning before the elections, television became the rostrum from which to speechify. Talk shows are now marked on the after-dinner schedule of politicians. Interviews with particular channels are an integral part of the public relations exercise. Press conferences have replaced action on issues, as if what is said is more important than what is done. Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif’s joint press conference proclaiming their ‘complete agreement on all issues’ is a case in point. Several days later, there is still an impasse despite the complete agreement.
Yet. There needs to be a pause for reflection. Because a 24/7 news channel is a beast with an open mouth and a bottomless gut, its need for more and juicier news is threatening to turn the news-gathering process upside down. News is broken or made like pottery rather than investigated or verified. Ordinary statements from politicians are dressed as news alerts and flashed hysterically across the screen. (This is perhaps a legacy of newspaper journalism where statements are given undue prominence). Digital Satellite News Gathering devices to capture news live are dispatched indiscriminately to press conferences just because ‘everyone else is doing it’.
Were it not for the fact that Pakistan often lurches from one crises to the next, today’s channels would find it hard to fill their bulletins. News coverage has increasingly become banal because events and politicians are setting the news agenda rather than the other way around. Take the election of the ‘first Muslim female speaker’. Dr Fehmida Mirza’s election was fairly straightforward and colourless, so anchors and reporters struggled to fill airtime with distractions over a minor fracas between mediamen and security or repeated the historicity of the first Muslim female speaker ad nauseum.
The riots in Multan over the power outages were split- screened on one channel with a Shahbaz Sharif press conference, MNAs outside the National Assembly and a flummoxed anchor. This kind of gratuitous excess could have been avoided had some editorial judgment been exercised. And in the absence of real news about the judicial crises, speculation and empty rhetoric are given priority over a Hindu man being beaten to death in a factory after being accused of blasphemy.
Pakistan is a country whose film industry is all but dead. India has Bollywood, we have politics as entertainment to bind the national narrative. To quote media prophet Lippman again: ‘Politics’ is a spectator sport for the great unwashed. ‘By all means, political flip-flops are better than Britney’s meltdowns, but surely the news agenda should be set by journalists rather than by the whims of the governing elite.—Amber Rahim Shamsi
THREE housemaids dying in mysterious circumstances in Islamabad in four weeks makes one think if the genere is at particular risk in this “civilised city of the privileged?”
All three were young, unmarried, from poor classes and were staying with their employers. Police are investigating their deaths as murders, in fact as “double murder”, because they were either pregnant or had undergone abortion when they met their tragic ends.
Abortion, unless carried out to save the life of would-be-mother, is treated as murder by Pakistani law.
Autopsies determined that two housemaids were definitely murdered while the third died of complications arising from a badly done abortion.
What makes the situation more grim is the police’s belief that “innumerable number” of housemaids suffer at the hands of lustful employers but are not reported because the victims are too poor to fight legal battles and too ashamed of “bringing dishonour” to the family.
Worse the corrupt system seeks to suppress even the cases which circumstances thrust into public view.
City police have picked up some suspects in investigating the three recent cases but are reluctant to frame the charge of murder until “pending matters” are cleared.
Police say it would know whom to charge as “the killer” - the maids’ employer, relatives or any other - after the results of DNA tests arrive. These tests take from two to four weeks to produce a report - time enough for the guilty to vanish or to manipulate innocence.
In the meantime the investigators are not willing to discuss the suspects, perhaps because they are “big shots”.
They say the killers were rapists but point out that the victim might have consented to it and hint at “the loose type housemaids who would do anything for money”. So the matter to be investigated is whether the crime was committed with the consent of the victim or by force. After that is determined the question will arise whether the rapist caused the pregnancy and turned a killer to hush it up.
The first case surfaced on March 29 when some passers-by informed police that the body of a woman was lying in a nullah near Jamia Faridia in the foothills of the Margallas.
Autopsy found that SB, as police identified her by the initials of her name, was seven months pregnant. She was believed to have been murdered in the name of honour or to hush up a rape.
Later it turned out SB was a native of Abbottabad, unmarried and been living as a maid in a house in F-11/3 for 18 months.
Her employer, a Railway Hospital doctor, told police that two or three days earlier SB had complained of abdominal pain to his wife who asked her to report to Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) where she worked as a doctor. But SB instead took leave to visit her family and left on March 28.
She was found dead the next day, bleeding from the nose and ears and an injury mark below her eye. Autopsy found her pregnant but not how she died.
It was suggested that SB might have been smothered with hand, pillow, cloth or plastic bag to leave no evidence. Only a professional killer or someone very close to the victim could be so meticulous, according to doctors.
A second housemaid was found murdered in her employer’s flat in Sughra Tower in F-11/3 on April 28. She also was identified as SB and had her throat slit. Signs of a struggle and some missing jewellery from the flat gave the appearance that she was killed by robbers.
Police however suspected her employer, a property dealer with two wives kept separately.
His version, according to the police, was that he had taken his family living in the flat to Faisalabad on April 25 and returned to Islamabad same day to stay with his second wife. The maid phoned him on April 26 to say she was going to Wah Cantonment to visit her family. On April 27 she called to say she was back in the flat.
On April 28 he went to the flat at 11am but found it locked from inside. He found a window open and entered the flat through it to see the maid lying in a pool of blood.
But police say its investigations found that he was seen at the flat around 10am and he informed it about the crime around 3pm after he allegedly failed in his attempt to take the body to her native town.
Autopsy on her body put the time of her death between 9:30am and 11am and found that she was not virgin and been strangulated before her throat was slit. But the unmarried maid bore no signs of rape.
Police arrested the employer on the complaint of the maid’s family but consider it premature to hold him responsible.
In the third incident, housemaid TB, 19, was brought to the Emergency Ward of Pims by one Sikandar complaining of abdominal pain and in bad condition around 2am on the night of April 23.
The hospital staff provided her emergency treatment and told Sikandar to arrange blood as she needed immediate surgery. But the man disappeared making the doctors to call the number of her employer she gave them.
Her employer, a lady, arrived and arranged the blood.
SB’s father claims the lady later called him to the hospital, obtained his thumb impression on a blank paper and told him to wait outside. She reappeared after 10 minutes to announce that his daughter was dead and gave him Rs14,000 to take the body for burial to his hometown Sargodha.
Autopsy conducted on the insistence of the father however found that the girl died of complications caused by an abortion carried out improperly on her two or three days earlier. The autopsy also revealed that it was her second abortion.
The deceased was an unmarried maid in a house located at sector F-10/2. She got salary Rs4,000 and used to live along with her employer.
On the compliant of her father the police registered a murder case against her employer, charging that her son had impregnated her.
The nosey journalists had their mikes ready for an array of explosive questions: Why did he mislead the Frontier government to extract the letter that was made the basis for the postponement of the by-elections? Who asked him to do that and, importantly, what was the game plan?
It was interesting because everybody, from Asif Zardari to Nawaz Sharif, condemned the postponement minutes after the announcement. Rahman Malik, funnily, also joined the bandwagon, saying that he would hold an inquiry into the matter, something he loves to do on a daily basis these days. But the cat got out of the bag when the Frontier government spilled the beans. The Frontier spokesman claimed it was Mr Malik who had misled them and asked them to join the governments at the centre and in three other provinces in getting the polls postponed. That says something about the gullibility of the youthful NWFP chief minister. But it says more about the state of affairs. After all, who is Rahman Malik working for; our pundits at the parliamentary cafeteria seemed intrigued.
Some believed it was aimed at delaying Shahbaz Sharif from taking reins of power in Punjab. Others thought Asif Zardari wants more time to decide whether he will contest the elections and then perhaps replace Yousuf Raza Gilani as the prime minister. Still others believed, more plausibly, that it was done at the behest of the presidency that does not want the coalition number strengthened for any possible impeachment of the president.
Whatever the real story, many believed that Asif Zardari could not just disown the move and then not do anything about the man and his action.
The man who was in the thick of the controversy, Rahman Malik, was found playing hide and seek with the snoopy pen-pushers. He made a screeching U-turn from the Senate’s main entrance when he saw a barrage of journalists sharpening their knives. He chose the back door, again something that he is good at, to reach the Senate.
Once inside the house, he was suddenly his usual confident self completely at ease, with his newly acquired pinglish and jet black hair dye. He was quick to take up Senator Razzaq Thaheem’s query about the mounting incidents of kidnapping for ransom along the banks of the River Indus near Shikarpur and Jacobabad. While assuring the House that he was aware of the grave situation, he could not help bragging that he was appointing an Inspector-General of Police (IGP) who will see all IGPs in the province. “Now that amounts to interference in the provincial affairs,” Deputy Chairman Jan Jamali could not resist saying to journalists in his chambers. Mr Jamali was right as the law and order was a provincial concern. Imagine Shahbaz Sharif and Haider Hoti being instructed by Mr Malik as to how they should handle the provincial affairs. The poor thing, RM had generated another controversy before he was through with the earlier one. “How much power does this man want,” quipped another Senator in Mr Jamali’s chambers.
The question may not be so wrong. The general feeling at the cafeteria was that Rahman Malik was the most powerful person in the government. More influential than Yousuf Raza and may be even Asif Zardari. No matter what the issue, RM is found at the centre-stage of all things newsworthy. If Musharraf needs to convey something to Asif, RM is the man that his aides look for. If Asif has to deal with judges, or negotiate with allies, or even go to Dubai on an undisclosed agenda, RM is always the key man. He is the one who arranges private plane from a real estate tycoon who wants new friends in the new government to save his billions.
RM is in-charge of all departments that governments need to sort out the bad lot, particularly journalists, whose phones, we are told, are already being tapped with abandon. So much is the range of his interests and power that he is now found even brokering a deal between the incorrigible Nasim Ashraf and Shoaib Akhtar.
RM has got his influence spread from London to Washington with connections in ‘agencies’ everywhere. Not bad for a person who started off from a humble background near Sialkot to become one of the richest Pakistanis in London. The problem is that he is still not giving up at power grabbing. He has to be seen either sitting next to Asif Zardari or in the queue that stands behind him in all media events. Even if it takes elbowing colleagues or competitors out.
All this may explain what is wrong with the PPP-led government. The first 40 days that were supposed to unleash a new revolution have given the impression of a government which has no idea how, why and what it is doing and for whom.
The Asif Zardari-led team has already confused everybody -- the lawyers, judges, journalists, their allies and may be the public. It was clear at the time of election result that people had voted against the forces of the establishment in the hope of a change.
What seemed like a straight fight between those who supported Musharraf and those who did not has now become a mish-mash where the Raphman Maliks of the world are adding to the confusion every day. Each day brings a list of new ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ on issues for which the two leading parties were voted into power.
The ultimate loser in this chaotic mad race, say our cafeteria buffs, is Asif. The public may not be concerned over what deals he may or may not have made with the powers that be, everybody expects, at the end of the day, a better government. A government dealing with everyday issues of electricity and flour, not pussyfooting on crucial issues that can be handled in no time. RM or no RM.
