Govt ‘launches’ electioneering

The government has initiated a drive to unite its favourite political parties and cronies at one platform for the forthcoming general elections.

A couple of days ago, the Punjab home secretary and the inspector general of police paid a visit to DG Khan. The home secretary met the local leadership of the PML-QA, the Millat Party and some representatives of the district and tehsil councils. Maqsood Leghari, a former minister and the cousin of former president Farooq Leghari, also attended the meetings.

The home secretary reportedly promised full help for those who would support the government and its agenda in the forthcoming elections.

In Dera, out of four tumandars, former governor Zulfiqar Khosa is opposing the present regime under the flag of PML-N, while former president Farooq Leghari is a staunch supporter of Gen Musharraf. Buzdar and Qaisrani tumandars are still neutral and waiting for a suitable time.

Buzdars were an ally of the Millat Party in the local body elections, and they won the tehsil tribal area’s nazimship. But now differences have surfaced between the Buzdars and the Legharis.

Maqsood Leghari, who has a strong independent group, is also a silent supporter of the present regime. Maqsood had hosted a dinner in the honour of PML-QA leaders during their visit to southern Punjab at his residence in Choti Zaireen.

In Dera, the Millat Party, the PML-QA and the Maqsood Leghari Group are supporters of the government. The Millat Party has district nazimship and tehsil nazimship while Khwaja Sheraz of the PPP is tehsil Nazim of Taunsa Sharif and Usman Khan Buzdar of the tribal area tehsil.

In this scenario, the home secretary had asked the Millat Party, the PML-QA and the Maqsood Leghari Group to evolve a joint strategy for the forthcoming polls.

The Maqsood Leghari Group had contested against the Farooq Leghari camp in the local polls.

On the other hand, the PPP and the PML-N are thinking of an adjustment against king’s supporters in the district. If Qaisranis and Buzdars join hands with the Khwajas of the PPP, they can secure one national and two provincial seats. Buzdars have differences with Khosas, and they have only one option either to join hands with the PPP or the PML-QA. While the PML-QA has no heavyweight in the district.

The Jamaat-i-Islami had made an agreement with the Millat Party during the local polls to get support for its candidate in the general elections for a provincial assembly seat. Due to the agreement, the Jamaat got naib nazimship of the Dera tehsil. Now the Jamaat is part of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal which is opposing the government while its expected supporter in the general elections in DG Khan is supporting the present regime.

There is a mist over the political scene of Dera. However, after the new delimitation of constituencies, political parties and certain groups have initiated their homework regarding the general elections.

Another purpose of the home secretary’s visit to DG Khan was to take stock of the law and order situation there. It is feared that Al-Qaeda men may flee to Karachi and other areas from southern Waziristan through the Indus Highway following a drive against them. Southern Waziristan is an adjacent area to Dera district.

Ambani had shades of Armand Hammer, but his job was more difficult

WHEN Al Gore was first running for the American vice presidency, his country’s rightwing media dug up all manner of dirt on him, including his father’s links with Armand Hammer whose own father was the founder of the American Communist Party.

Armand Hammer rose to become an oil magnate of no mean political clout. He was also famous for being chummy with Lenin. On the minus side, he became notorious for giving kickbacks to Richard Nixon.

Reviled as a Soviet facilitator in his own country, Hammer still dabbled in high politics and was regarded as a major go-between who kept the communications on among the Cold War rivals for almost as long as he lived.

Dhirubhai Ambani, India’s highest-ranking business tycoon, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 69, had betrayed shades of Hammer as he rose to become a major link not only between India and Pakistan, but also between New Delhi and several world capitals. It was said that Ambani, with his easy access to US Vice President Dick Cheney and other world leaders, particularly of the oil-politics variety, had been a major facilitator of India’s entry into the sanctum sanctorum of Washington’s powerful lobbies.

His interest in Pakistan was deep and real. I am sure that had he been alive he would have watched with keen interest the meeting this week between the energy ministers of Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan in Ashkabad where they would formalize technical details of the $4 billion trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline project and an allied liquefied natural gas plant in Gwadar.

As the Indian media pointed out in March 2000, one of the “mysterious” aspects of president Clinton’s visit to South Asia was his 40-minute closed-door meeting with Ambani in Mumbai.

The head of the $350 billion Reliance Group is believed to have talked with Clinton about his interest in a gas and oil pipeline to be brought both from Iran and Turkmenistan to India — both via Afghanistan and Pakistan, or even bypassing Afghanistan, from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The effort might be realized only if the United States helps establish regional peace. A Hindi daily first reported this story, which was taken up by New Delhi’s Outlook magazine. Ambani has built Asia’s largest oil refinery on India’s west coast.

Reliance did not comment on the Clinton meeting but Indian industry sources said that Ambani’s own regional peace process had started the previous year, when after the Kargil war, the Indian government dispatched R.K. Mishra, an Ambani man, on a secret mission to Islamabad to broker peace.

“For the first time in India’s history, an Indian corporate entity driven by business interests took a bold step of playing a crucial diplomatic role between the two warring neighbours,” wrote the Hindustan Times, a major New Delhi daily, during that crisis.

Ambani,s secret diplomacy was shrouded in mystery. Even today, Pakistan diplomats are wary of talking about it, partly because the Reliance Group’s links with Nawaz Sharif were once regarded as thick. But the bare facts gleaned from a variety of media and semi-official sources presents a mosaic of persuasive skill and grit on the part of Dhirubhai Ambani in seeking peace with Pakistan.

It seems that at the height of the Kargil standoff on June 18, 1999, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee sent the Ambani man R.K. Mishra to Pakistan to negotiate a settlement with prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Mr Mishra, chairman of the editorial board of the now defunct Ambani-owned Observer group of newspapers, was accompanied by a joint secretary in the ministry of external affairs, Vivek Katju, who then looked after the Pakistan-Afghanistan desk. Mr Katju would not be there had he not been sent officially by the government with the “secret envoy”.

According to several accounts, Mr Mishra contacted an old friend, former Pakistan foreign secretary Niaz Naik, who reportedly arranged his meetings with Nawaz Sharif and Pakistan’s then foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmed. Mr Mishra and Mr Katju, who had no brief other than facilitating Mr Mishra’s agenda, were in Islamabad for seven hours. Mr Mishra delivered Mr Vajpayee’s verbal message to Mr Sharif for a quick settlement of the Kargil conflict.

The Pakistan foreign office confirmed his secret mission on the same day. The Indian foreign office spokesperson, however, told reporters that he had no information about this particular visit.

Mr Mishra briefed Mr Vajpayee upon his return to New Delhi. Within a week of Mr Mishra’s visit, on June 25, US president Bill Clinton sent the commander-in-chief of the US central command, Gen Anthony Zinni, and state department official Gibson Lanpher to Islamabad to discuss the withdrawal of the Kargil infiltrators.

The same day Prime Minister Vajpayee cut short his visit to Bihar and returned to New Delhi and held a late-night meeting of the cabinet committee on security affairs.

The meeting, according to The Asian Age newspaper, was attended only by Mr Vajpayee, National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and Home Minister L.K. Advani, and discussed “safe passage” for the infiltrators as part of a face-saving settlement suitable to both governments.

The next day, on June 26, Mr Lanpher arrived in New Delhi to discuss the US proposal for safe passage. His visit was followed by Niaz Naik who arrived in New Delhi on a special Pakistan Air Force aircraft on June 27. He met Mr Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra and returned as quietly as he had come.

The news of his visit was leaked from Islamabad by “sources” who were not identified. The Indian foreign office initially denied this but confirmed Mr Naik’s visit the next day. Islamabad, however, continued to disassociate itself from the visit claiming that Mr Naik had gone to India on his own and was not sent by the government.

On June 28, Nawaz Sharif cut short his China visit and rushed back to Islamabad for emergency meetings. Mr Naik confirmed in a radio interview that Mr Sharif was rushing back because of his talks with Mr Vajpayee.

“Once he comes back to Islamabad I think some contact will be made with the Indian side...”, he told the BBC.

On June 28, Mr Vajpayee declared at an all-party meeting that there was no question of a “secret deal.” He said there would be no further dialogue with Pakistan until and unless it agreed to withdraw the infiltrators from Indian territory.

He did not refer even in passing to the fact that he had sent Mr Mishra earlier this month to open a line of communication with the Pakistan prime minister.

On June 29, Mr Naik gave an interview to the BBC World Service Radio and not only confirmed that he had had visited India but also gave some details of his conversation with Mr Vajpayee.

Indeed, as the guns began to fall silent in Kargil, Reliance Petroleum, the crown jewel in Dhirubhai Ambani’s industrial empire, announced the start-up of its refinery in Jamnagar, Gujarat. Built at a cost of Rs142,500 million, the refinery can process a crude oil throughput of 540,000 barrels a day, putting it in the league of the world’s largest. Dependent for the most part on imports of crude oil, the Reliance refinery will engender a rapid rise in freight traffic towards the Gujarat coast, originating in the Gulf and traversing the Pakistan coastline. India is likely to be the biggest oil and gas importer in Asia by 2005.

Significantly, three days after Clinton left Pakistan, its military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf said he would permit a pipeline on Pakistan’s land in consideration of payment. No further reports explained this crisp declaration.

In October 1999, soon after seizing power from Nawaz Sharif, Gen Musharraf ordered an increase in both exploration and production of domestic gas, which currently meets only 40 per cent of Islamabad’s energy needs. Similarly, Bangladesh, with its 23 trillion cubic feet of reserve gas, said it was ready for American companies to come and build large pipeline projects.

During his long and eventful career Armand Hammer had picked up close ties with half dozen American presidents and collected hundreds of international awards, including Pakistan’s prestigious Hilal-i-Quaid-i-Azam. For all the good reasons that we can think of in the backdrop of the existing ties between India and Pakistan, Ambani might not be a bad claimant for that award.

However, Armand Hammer had committed two crimes after Nixon had won the election. The first was violating the campaign finance law that had gone into effect on April 7, 1972, that made it a federal crime to contribute money anonymously to political campaigns.

His second and more serious crime was obstruction of justice. To conceal his illegal cash contribution from the Watergate investigation, Hammer had coordinated a cover-up involving false witnesses, perjury, back-dated promissory notes and false statements to the FBI by a half-dozen individuals.

There are those in India who believe for credible reasons, that Dhirubhai Ambani was not far behind Armand Hammer in collecting this nefarious bit of reputation too, regardless of the political leanings of the recipients of his largesse.

Shame of Meerwala: ban tribal jirgas

COMMENTING on the Meerwala gang-rape incident, Awami Awaz deplores that scores of spectators witnessed the gang- rape and later hundreds of others saw her returning home naked but none dared resist this crime against humanity. On the other hand some participants of the savage panchayat meeting, which gave the verdict to brutalize the young woman for an unconfirmed sin committed by her brother, had reportedly been laughing (!!!) at the door of the room where the victim was frantically crying for mercy/help while being gang-raped. This shows the depth of apathy our society has plunged into, as well as the haplessness of the common man in the rural areas, which are virtually ruled by inhumane tribal lords who exploit the obsolete system of tribal jirgas/panchayats to assert their powerfulness.

And, according to Tameer-i-Sindh , the impotence of law-enforcement agencies, the failure of our judicial system to deliver justice and the importance given to the landed class by successive governments compel the hopeless people to turn to the jirgas. The government, like its predecessors, has been claiming to provide justice to the people at “doorsteps of their homes”.

The Meerwala incident can be taken as a barometer to measure the truthfulness of this oft-repeated claim which has become a cliche. President General Pervez Musharraf should address the nation on TV with regard to this incident to make oppressed women of the country feel that the government, unlike the previous ones, is there to come to their rescue, whenever needed.

There is no end to atrocities against women and other weaker sections of society because those involved in these crimes do not get such an exemplary punishment as may deter others to follow the suit, writes Ibrat. In order to prevent such events, a legal framework is must. In today’s world when civilized societies have provided guarantees for protecting the rights of even animals, inhuman tragedies like the Meerwala incident would make us an outcast in the world community. Whatever the government does, it just cannot compensate the victim and her family for the trauma they have gone through and are going through but it can take concrete steps to safeguard the rights of women (and children).

And the first step towards this direction is to ban tribal jirgas, suggests Kawish. In the presence of the police and the court system it is simply illegal to decide disputes privately through jirgas/panchayats whose decisions may and do lead to crimes against humanity. Besides, reforms should be made in the police and justice departments to make them people-friendly and deliver justice. For the time being, both the departments, like the tribal jirgas, are like a cobweb which, according to a Sindhi proverb, can trap a fly but not a cow.