Deceiving looks

IF there is one thing here which matches international standards, at least in looks, it is the petrol service stations. In recent years, most of these stations, whether Shell, Caltex or PSO, have been renovated and upgraded such that they now give the general outlook and appearance of any petrol or gas station in the developed countries, specially with the addition of the colourful convenience store selling snacks, drinks and knick-knacks.

Unfortunately, looks are deceiving. The quality of service at retail outlets of these oil-producing companies do not quite match their new appearance. What is happening behind this facade of new looks ought to put any business corporation to shame. According to a report in Dawn last week, a whopping 90 per cent of the petrol/gas stations in the twin cities are either selling adulterated fuel or giving motorists less fuel than they had actually paid for, or practising both.

In the report, a magistrate in the district administration was quoted as saying that this has been going on unchecked for the past three or so years because no comprehensive campaign has been launched by the authorities to check irregularities at the petrol/gas stations. And it is not that there have been no complaints. Individual consumers and transporters’ associations have been bringing such malpractices by petrol/gas stations to the notice of the district administration but these complaints have fallen on deaf ears.

This is how one Islamabad motorist describes a tactic used by the attendants at the service stations: just at the moment when one attendant is about to start pumping in petrol into your tank, and you are craning your neck from your seat to look at the metre on the pump whether all indicators (rupees and litres) are starting from 00.00, another attendant appears at your window with a hearty assalamoilaikum and asks whether he should clean your windscreen. You turn back reluctantly with a walaikumsalam and say Yes, by all means. At that split second, they would already have done what they had wanted to.

This Islamabad motorist, who fills in on the average per week Rs1,000 worth of high-octane petrol into his 1500 c.c. car, says that this was what happened to him last week at a petrol station in F-7 sector. The result was that he had unknowingly driven out of the petrol station with half the amount of petrol in his tank that he had actually paid for.

He did not realize it until a little later on, and then he went back and gave them a piece of his mind not expecting them to admit to their beimaani. Their argument was that it was “his duty” to check whether he was being given the correct amount of petrol! Surprisingly, they finally relented and gave him the rest of the petrol.

Others have not been so lucky. A “volksy” motorist with a near-empty fuel tank had gone to a service station in F-6 sector market and asked for 10 litres of petrol to be put in. This “10 litres” could not even get him home to I-8/1 sector, which is about 10 kilometres from F-6, because his car stalled before he could reach home. He thought perhaps his fuel tank was leaking and got it checked. He was told that the problem was not a leaking fuel tank but an empty fuel tank. He went back to the petrol station but they denied any wrongdoing and refused to give him his money’s worth of petrol. It was his first and last time patronising this petrol station.

What usually happens if you are a regular customer at a particular station, says the first motorist from first hand experience, is that they usually give you the correct amount of petrol in the first few weeks of your visit. Gradually, they start cheating you, beginning with small unnoticeable amounts and this may eventually lead to as much as a quarter to half of what you had paid for. Within a year, he has changed petrol stations five times.

What is beyond comprehension is why nothing has been done to check this kind of blatant malpractice by the service stations in the capital. It is unbelievable that only the attendants are involved in the racket. Even if this has been going on without the active connivance of the station managers/owners and the fuel producers, the latter two cannot be absolved of responsibility. By keeping one eye closed over a malpractice, specially when one is in the position to check and stop it, they are as much responsible as the attendants who actually carry out the cheating.

To add insult to injury, the government authorities are standing idly by, watching and letting the petrol producers and their retail outlets fleece the consumers. Shortage of staff and resources to do the needful checking of these petrol stations is a lame excuse. This same reason has always been bandied about for many a shortcoming.

The real reason, as often is the case, is influence and power. When you have influence and power in this society, you can get away with anything. And this is what seems to be happening here as well. The owners of these petrol/gas stations are so influential that the authorities cannot take any action against them, the above magistrate in the capital’s district administration was quoted as saying in the Dawn report.

Is it that the authorities cannot take action or they simply do not want to take action? So what are the authorities there for? If the authorities cannot or are unwilling to regulate and control bad business practices, who should then?

Of nuclear tests, militarism, communalism and genocide

IT SO happens that a large number of people in India want to wipe out Pakistan from the face of the earth. Similarly, there are many in Pakistan who, for some bilious grouse they harbour, would be itching to teach India the lesson of its life, not the least by waging a nuclear jihad against their pet bete noire.

Nothing has given this kind of madness more legitimacy, air cover, oxygen, choose a word, than the events of May 11, 1998, also known as Pokharan II.

Next week or thereabouts we shall observe the fourth anniversary of Pakistan’s own tit-for-tat tests as also its arrival as a declared nuclear power.

All this messes up with the world’s own self-centred calculations.

Even as India is cranking up its war machinery to take on Pakistan in a cynical and domestically-driven standoff, Christina Rocca is rushing back again to the region to calm frayed nerves. But serious damage has already been done, irreversibly so.

The rise of militarism in the popular consciousness of India has never been as steep as in the years following the nuclear tests carried out amid psychotic exultation by the BJP government.

There were two distinctly diverse fallouts of the tests —- physical and cerebral. First, the blasts are known to have, even if not so widely reported to have, led to a string of devastating earthquakes, as nuclear tests are often known to trigger, within a fairly large area of their mysterious footprint.

Equally certainly, the nuclear factor has surreptitiously given an unprecedented boost to Hindu-Muslim communalism in India or wherever else zealots from the two communities live, often side by side.

The tragic part of this equation is that it attracts a lot of innocent and reasonably secular people into its ambit. For example, some of the journalists who were very courageous and upright in reporting the carnage in Gujarat would not be averse to crowing the patriotic jingle when war drums begin to resonate.

The dreadful part of their job is that while they are secular and sensitive folks, they are also rather vulnerable to the machinations of the state, and it’s not unusual for fairly decent journalists to behave like bigots when so-called national interests are cited to co-opt them.

Before she was narrating the harrowing tales of rape and murder in Gujarat with her amazing ability to blend in with the scene, NDTV’s Barkha Dutt was reporting from the bunkers and trenches of Kargil, wearing a military helmet instead of her more benign thinking cap. No one should doubt Barkha’s secular credentials.

But in her opinion, and that of many other young and bright reporters, a war with Pakistan cannot, should not be questioned, particularly when the political class has no objection to it.

The reasons for this unquestioning compliance are many and compelling. In a word it is the “system”, of which the reporters also are part, that gets them to behave in a certain way at a given time.

Recently, the truth of this nexus was revealed with considerable candour when India’s main business club (CII) hosted a major discussion with Gujarat as its focus. There was a lot of shrill criticism, uncharacteristically serious criticism of Prime Minister Vajpayee’s handling of the pogroms and the general impact on the immediate future of India’s economy.

Communal carnage is one thing, but when it comes to war drums, CII would not be leading the chorus in protest against the dangerous decibels. That’s exactly what much of the Indian media would also be thinking or saying on the subject.

Barkha Dutt’s problem is not dissimilar to the quandary that lies in wait for Christina Rocca. It was the US official who on her last visit to New Delhi had started the avalanche of foreign criticism of New Delhi’s handling of Gujarat.

She had described the killing spree as horrible and disturbing. But even though Ms Rocca must be familiar with lessons from history that show that fanaticism breeds easily in an atmosphere laced with militarism, she may find it difficult to see how this squares up with the situation in Gujarat.

She will not understand that it’s a bit like malaria or typhoid being more widely prevalent in tropical countries than elsewhere.

And yet it will be difficult for Ms Rocca to see the obvious link. She will not see the reality that her country’s military exercise in Agra, for example, with Indian airmen and troops, barely four years after Washington and the rest of the world cried foul over Pokharan II, will have a direct bearing on the spread of the communal virus across India.

It is not easy for the reporter who saved Muslim lives by blowing the whistle on the BJP’s fascist ideology in Gujarat, to see the link between the anti-Pakistani militarism and the pogroms in the border state.

But the mobs in Gujarat are not so bereft of common intelligence. They brazenly call Indian Muslims Pakistanis before killing them. Since waging a nuclear war is not within their immediate reach, they have found another way of venting their bilious hate. They imagine Pakistanis and incinerate them, in a kind of a make believe, scaled down version of a nuclear inferno.

But nuclear wars don’t allow for rape and other beastly pastimes. Genocide allows for all that and more, at a leisurely pace of a few months.

The BJP’s agenda of spreading communal hatred is nicely under way. Its leaders have been busy preparing the ground to trigger widespread calamity and communal mayhem in a few other states, including Rajasthan, the venue of the Pokharan tests.

A war with Pakistan under the circumstances would almost certainly take the carnage off the headlines. It would be easy to target the quarry at will at home without catching a reporter’s avoidable attention.

The United States may be able to persuade, if it reality wishes to, both India and Pakistan to help ease the situation on their tense border. But Ms Rocca may not find it so easy to steal the candy from the BJP of its only available ticket to a possible win in the next elections that must be round the corner.

Gujarat’s blighted fate-line has been visited by a double tragedy in a row _ the Jan 2001 earthquake that killed thousands and devastated many homes.

Scientific research in this regard is embarrassing to both India as well as the United States.

It has been noted that earthquake activity in our region has significantly increased since the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, which began in October last year.

Some of the bombs used included GBU-28, 5,000-pounds laser-guided weapons, JSOW, air-to-ground smart bombs, AGM-86, air-launched cruise missiles and Daisy Cutters.

When bombs such as Daisy Cutters and other sophisticated ones are dropped on the ground, stresses are induced in the earth’s crust. These stresses are released at weaker locations of the fault sooner or later.

The bombings also increase the seismic activity in the area or areas that are connected below the earth through dense rock. The severe earthquakes that struck Afghanistan in March can be attributed to these bombings.

Similarly, three underground explosions near the India- Pakistan border, detonated by India on May 11, 1998, resulted in a seismic measurement of magnitude-5.2 The fact that only one seismic event was recorded indicates that all three devices were probably detonated simultaneously. This occurred at 1013GMT (or at 3:13pm local time).

Within 24 hours, at 0046GMT on May 12, a magnitude -4.5 quake struck southern Iran, centred at a location approximately 1,800 kilometres away.

Another test, conducted in the same region of India on May 13 at 0620 GMT, was followed less than seven hours later by a magnitude- 4.2 quake in southern Iran. Within 48 hours, occupied Kashmir was hit by a magnitude-4.1 temblor, and northeastern Taiwan (just over 3,000km away) was struck by a 4.6 quake. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Soon thereafter, Pakistan began its own underground testing in response. On Thursday, May 28, at 1030GMT devices were detonated beneath the ground in southwestern Pakistan. A little over eight hours later, some 2,600kms or so due west, in Egypt, a magnitude-5.5 quake occurred.

Closer to ground zero, less than 1400km away, two quakes - 5.6 & 5.3 - hit southern China the same day. The next day, Kyrghyzstan - less than 2,000km away - was struck by a 5.5 temblor.

On Saturday, two quakes - one a small 4.7 tremor, the other deadly at magnitude-6.8 - occurred at the Afghanistan- Tajikistan border, 1,000-1,200kms due northeast.

Incredibly, another detonation was set off by Pakistan about six hours after that deadly quake. Within three hours, a 4.8 tremor struck the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan.

We can look at the possibility of a link between India’s nuclear tests and the Gujarat earthquake. There is a good reason to have that discussion. For that may be the only relevant occasion when the law of action and reaction can be justifiably applied in that hapless state.