SOME ten years before the British left the Frontier, some reformer pulled it down (the house where Edwardes and Nicholson had resided as deputy commissioners), and built in its place less worthily. The tablet from the old building has been preserved and affixed to the new one, giving the wrong impression, for the inscription claims the present house as the former residence of the great pioneers. The garden remains as beautiful as ever, but the spirit of the place has fled away.

That was Olaf Caroe reminiscing about the great British soldiers turned administrators of the Victorian era who served in the Frontier in his masterpiece titled ‘The Pathans.’ More than fifty years after the publication of the oft-quoted definitive book, the office of the once celebrated office of the deputy commissioner is taking a nosedive, losing much of its prestige, esteem and reverence in the eyes of the public. The deputy commissioners, as we observe and experience them function now, have by and large ceased to be the martinet, and no nonsense administrators that their lofty offices require them to be.

It is thus in no little amount owing to our unreserved sense of charity that when the deputy commissioners speak they still make headlines. One such headline was seen recently adoring the front pages of the vernacular press. The statement read that some deputy commissioners, including those of Peshawar and Charsadda, had through an order imposed ban on the use of tinted glasses in cars, the incidence of wall chalking and, lo and behold, the display or exhibition of weapons in public. There was no mention of the loudspeaker meaning thereby that those wielding the device had full freedom to use it in the manner that suited their designs no matter if it were a source of nuisance to the public.

But just as the deputy commissioner of Peshawar was so ordering, some newspapers reported that a man was firing indiscriminately in Peshawar to announce the arrival of his new born son. The firing, however, would have gone unnoticed, as it does most minutes and hours of the day in our surroundings, if it had not claimed the life of a young boy with in the same locality where the man was celebrating the birth of his son. Since such is the norm here in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and not an exception, many would maintain that the death of an unwary innocent boy is no big news.

The deputy commissioner concerned, burdened as he is most of the time with other mundane affairs, may not have come across the aforementioned sad news. He needs, however, be greatly indebted to the public for their collective sense of magnanimity that no one questioned him as to who in the first place had allowed the use of all those forbidden practices that he was now declaring prohibited. The gentleman could also enjoy unrestrained giggles at the expense of public for not having been questioned as regard the fate of umpteenth similar orders in the past and whether the same had since been rescinded thus allowing for the exhibition of weapons in public in the intervening period.What the newspapers and the public say matters little more than trivial in the society in which the present-day deputy commissioners take refuge and wherefrom they draw sustenance. Reading and writing occupy backseat where nepotism and favouritism are ruling the roost. The much celebrated gazetteer that used to be the The fall and fall of the deputy commissioner sacred scripture of the office of the old deputy commissioners has been thrown to the winds. One could now find the gazetteers meticulously drafted and maintained by the officers of old days only on the shelves of some libraries. It is thus next to impossible to track the record of all orders issued by the present deputy commissioners prohibiting the use of such and such practices, thus effectively absolving them of their nemesis.

At every step that one travels in the province of KP, there is mounting proof of how dysfunctional the offices of deputy commissioners have been rendered by their holders. It is so painful, for instance, to behold the filth-strewn scene in the hill station at Abbottabad and then bring to mind Major James Abbott, the first deputy commissioner of the district, singing the praises of his beloved town, named after him, in these words:

To me the place seemed like a dream And far ran a lonesome stream The stream that once flowed with sparkling cool water is nowadays running thick with sewage, and if by an order of the deputy commissioner all the shops selling food in the dirty bazaar of Abbottabad are washed the cherished stream would be blocked with the filth thereof for all times to come.

In the narrow Masjid Bazaar in Abbottabad, that does no justice to its name in terms of cleanliness, the signatures of the deputy commissioner and that of his deputy and the district food controller hang atop all the shops selling food items. But all three officials seem to be absolutely unaware of the manner that their authority is being made fun of. One recently experienced what a weird concoction the milkman in the said bazaar was selling at Rs60 per liter under the stamp of the deputy commissioner. Is the deputy commissioner really living in a make believe world where the food items are being sold at the prices of his liking? One discovered that at the butcher’s shop where the haggard little fellow was cutting and chopping a whole goat for the absentee officer.

The situation in Peshawar is even worse where butchers inflate the slaughtered goats and sheep with water in order to be able to come up to the price level fixed by the complacent deputy commissioner. The smuggling of cattle has added a new gory aspect to the illicit trade across the Durand Line with Afghanistan. One could now see Peshawar’s leading roads crowded with trucks loaded with cows and buffaloes in inexorably suffocating conditions heading towards Afghanistan.

The deputy commissioners have done their offices such seemingly irreparable harm that in one particular district the officer concerned was literally forced by the public to appear before a committee in order to be able to prove his neat credentials. It is an open secret that militancy in district Swat flourished under the very nose of the administration. The situation reached such a pitch where the career officers left the seat of the deputy commissioner to be occupied by a lower grade officer of the fisheries department.

The deputy commissioners have only recently regained their fetish nomenclature that they had lost during the regime of General (retd) Musharraf. In order to protect it, they will have to come out of their offices to observe the scene themselves and not through the eyes of their minions. General Musharraf could be faulted on so many grounds, but at least not for attempting to bring the office of the deputy commissioner in sync with the realities of life by renaming it as the district coordination officer and making him answerable to the elected district officer. The General was right to conclude that the title of deputy commissioner was far too pompous and vain to meet the exceedingly weighty exigencies of our times.

Robert Warburton of the Khyber fame quoting a local of Hazara says, ‘Abbott Sahib was loved in the district, and the old people reverence his memory even now. His heart was like a faqir’s; he was always thinking of and for his people. My people, my people; the phrase rings like a bell through all that he wrote.’ The present deputy commissioner will have to invoke the spirits of Abbott and his colleagues, in their works and words, if they really wish to be remembered in good words.