Champions Trophy an unhappy event for Pakistan: SWINGING DRIVES

TO rain on a parade means, roughly to spoil the plans of someone. It is not meant to be taken literally. Yet that is what happened to the final of the ICC Champions Trophy. Not a single match had been affected by rain. Jupiter Pluvius, it would seem, has a wry sense of humour.

The final had been set up to be a real humdinger. The television commentators had kept us abreast of the banking of clouds, some said they are banking in the east, and some said west, a clear indication that as far as the weather was concerned, at least, they didn’t know whether they were coming or going.

As I write this, the final is to be replayed, too late for the deadline of this column. But it will be something of an anti-climax.

Aravinda de Silva, making his last appearance before his home crowd, was given a rousing reception and when he was out, he saluted the crowd by waving his bat in a fond farewell. Now he will have to repeat it, that is, if it does not rain on the parade again.

The ICC Champions Trophy was an unhappy tournament for Pakistan. Not only was Pakistan bundled out, effectively, in the very first match but it appeared to have got unstuck as a team. To add to the misfortune of injuries to key players, there were reports of discord among the team.

Some senior players, Wasim Akram among them, opted out of the forthcoming Test series against Australia because they needed ‘rest’. And then the coach Mudassar Nazar was relieved of his duties and sent back to the National Cricket Academy and Yawar Saeed, the manager resigned for personal reasons. The most cheerful construction that one could place on all this was that something was not clicking, and it was sheer bad luck, that so much was happening, all at the same time.

I have received a number of telephone calls from friends and well-wishers of Pakistan cricket asking me what was wrong. In the beginning, I

did not know what to say but since then I have pointed to South Africa and Australia, the two tournament favourites, who fell by the wayside and in circumstances that should invite the curiosity of the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit but that is no consolation for what is clearly a lean patch for the Pakistan team. Morocco, Nairobi and Colombo, all bore the marks of a team under-performing.

To hold the manager and coach responsible for this, is to absolve the captain and the players of their responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. It is said that success has many friends but failure is an orphan. In this particular case, it seems to me that failure has many ‘friends’!

I bitterly resented the fact that the ICC Anti-Corruption Unit should have singled out Pakistan and asked to see the tapes of Pakistan’s match against Sri Lanka with special reference to Yousuf Youhana’s run out. The ACU apparently “smelled a rat” in the words of the newspaper that first ‘broke’ the story. The ACU’s hasty assurance that it would watch the tapes of all the matches was far from convincing and appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction.

One would like to hear from the ACU with special reference to the matches that South Africa and Australia lost. South Africa was in an impregnable position and then the batting collapsed like a house of cards. We are entitled to know how such a disciplined team like South Africa should have played such atrocious cricket.

We would particularly like to know the views of Ali Bacher who had accused Pakistan of match-fixing in the match against Bangladesh in the 1999 World Cup.

He did not offer a shred of evidence but got away with it scot-free, and succeeding in planting a huge stigma on the Pakistan team. Perhaps, those who had joined the chorus at that time may wish to enlighten the cricket public with their views.

Then there was Australia’s match against Sri Lanka. It can happen that batsman can have a rush of blood, as Matthew Hayden apparently did, but in the very next over, Adam Gilchrist too had a rush of blood? The Australians are too professional a team to play this kind of irresponsible cricket.

Someone with an ironic sense of humour pointed out that it was in Colombo that Shane Warne and Mark Waugh had met the bookie Mr John a few yeas ago when the match-fixing scandal first broke. I cast no aspersions. I make no accusations. But the ACU should not take any chances, as it did not in the case of Youhana’s run out. Otherwise we would be led to believe that it is guilty of racial profiling.

I found the news report that “crooked players backed by prostitutes and sign language experts” had beaten the Sri Lankan police in the battle against match-fixing, hilarious. Surely there is a book in it for those who write mystery novels and there would be not one but many Mata Haris in it.

I wonder what the odds were on rain washing out the final? Was someone in the Met department involved? Why have bookies and police become the main event and cricket the side-show? The ICC may like to provide an answer.

Remembering Amir Meenai

AMIR Meenai (1826-1900), whose 102nd death anniversary falls this month, was a poet of rare attainments. Having ruled over the Mushaira culture, along with Dagh Dehalvi, for a considerable period of time - from the 1860s up to 1900, he was a typical scholar and Hakeem in the true sense of the word.

The list of his works makes an interesting reading. Be it Lughat, Amir-ul Lughat, counsels for the kings, Ghazal & Naat poetry, collection of choicest collection of Persian and Arabic poetry, works dealing with religious instruction, Urdu idioms and proverbs, Tazkirah-writing, Tazkira-i-Shura-i- Rampur, composing of Musaddas and Wasokht, a collection of poetry, titled Sanam Khana-i-Ishq (literally soaked in romantic fervour), and music, one could go on admiring his versatility and fertility.

A deeply religious man that Amir Meenai was, he was not insensitive to other arts; hence he accorded well with T. S. Eliot’s definition of an artist - with which one may or not agree - that it is only when a man of religion is also a man of culture that we come to have an usual cultural blend.

Both Dagh Dehalvi and Amir Meenai have been very popular with the people and rulers alike. There was a time when Ghalib stood almost eclipsed by these two poets. Everywhere in the sub-continent young poets aspired to be their pupils and their ‘tutelage’ was considered to be the ultimate achievement.

Allama Iqbal had celebrated with great pleasure Dagh’s Islah on his ghazal; and some scholars think that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was so much impressed by Amir Meenai that Azad’s poetry is considered to have a distinct stamp of Amir Meenai. Azad’s elder brother also was a pupil of Amir Meenai. The question then arises what made Dagh and Amir thrive in an era when Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was busy in crusading against the ‘traditional’ literary taste, rampant among the Muslim aristocracy of northern India.

The scene which Maulana Abdur Razzaq Kanpuri (of Al Baramaka fame) has narrated about Sir Syed’s address to Oudh’s Zamindars in his remarkable book of reminiscences Yaad-i-Ayyam should fill a conscientious reader with shame. Most of them had come with the Kabaks of their pigeons and quails and only a handful of them was sympathetic towards Sir Syed when he chided them for not having enough members in their midst who could be nominated to the Imperial Legislative Council. He had told them what while the majority community had a problem on its hands in choosing from amongst a great number of capable aspirants, he (Sir Syed) saw before him a group that could not enter the portals of the Assembly.

No wonder, then, that Ghalib was a neglected person in this social milieu and the aristocrats who had no purpose left in their lifestyles could only be epicureans at their best. It was a dismal scenario and the importance of a poet like Amir Meenai lay in the fact that he only followed the mannerism, not the lifestyle of his age.

Dagh’s relationship with Allama Iqbal and Amir Meenai’s influence on Abul Kalam Azad’s family shows that these two poets enjoyed a fair degree of high esteem with the two great men of their time. Azad has written in one of his letters that the influence of Amir Meenai was so great that even mystical poetry could not be conceived without clothing it in the linguistic apparels of the courtesan culture.

A relevant point arises when we intend to discuss Amir Meenai in relation to Dagh. Who influenced whom? There are writers who would like to suggest that it was Dagh who influenced the poets who had assembled in Rampur following the annexation of Oudh by the British and the 1857 uprising. Some poets went to Hyderabad Deccan and some to Bhopal, Junagadh, Mangrol and Manavadar. The Nawab of Rampur wanted to convert his Darbar into a mini-Lucknow Darbar, and he would take pride in claiming that Rampur had become ‘the second Lucknow.’ So it was a bit natural that Rampur promoted a culture which accorded its poets a distinct Oudh style.

Dagh, after having joined the Rampur Court, had to give up all those colloquial and Delhi-specific words in his poetry and the pure, chaste and a highly standardized Urdu that Dagh so masterfully uses has the stamp of Rampur. There are scores of words which the Delhi school of poets were prone to regard as ‘proper,’ but the Lucknow and Rampur schools did not agree with this contention and held them to be contrary to good taste. Jalil Manikpuri in his well-known book Karnama-i-Amir Meenai and some contemporary researches on the peculiarities of the Delhi and Lucknow/Rampur schools seem to be concurring with this highly interesting consensus that it was Amir Meenai and his circle of poets who were chiefly responsible for Dagh’s abstinence from Delhi-specific pronunciation of some words, hence the noticeable difference in Dagh’s poetic language. Either we accept him to be a Nasikh of the Delhi school or we agree with some scholars that it was with a view to be compatible with the Amir school’s language that he condescended to try with success a language that makes Dagh an important poet of Urdu.

Urdu’s development as a language has an interesting record. We know about Delhi and Lucknow schools of Urdu Literature. Hyderabad, Azimabad and Lahore schools also staked their claims and so have done many centres such as Sargodha and Karachi.

Baba-i-Urdu encouraged all such claims thinking that it only proved that Urdu was a popular language. It also proves that it is truly a lingua franca along with spoken Hindi. The only difference which marks off one from the other is the script. Amir Meenai has put forward his own views on the origins of Urdu. He was of the view that Urdu is the product of the interaction between the languages of Muslim conquerors and those of the conquered.

It is against this background that some men of culture and literature appear to be like oases in the desert. They contribute a great deal to the diversity of cultural attainments along with other men of comparable stature.

There were some men of letters in the twilight era of our political and economic decay who kept the torch of our composite culture blazing bright. Amir Meenai was certainly one of them.

12 aspirants for two Chitral PA seats

TOO MANY STAKEholders are at war for the two provincial assembly seats in Chitral, where six major political parties and their splinter groups have fielded their candidates.

The district has been allocated two seats - PF-89 and PF-90 - after delimitation of constituencies. Earlier, too, there were two seats, but thanks to Gen Zia’s political shenanigans one of the seat was taken away without any plausible reasons.

PF-89 Chitral-I consists of the Chitral subdivision, including tehsils Chitral, Drosh, Ayun and Garamchashma, excluding a number of contiguous villages with the Mastuj tehsil of upper Chitral, which have been merged into PF-90 (Chitral-II), to bring the population of both the constituencies at par.

About 52 per cent of the population lives in Chitral and the rest in the Mastuj subdivision.

PF-90 (Chitral-II) includes all areas of the Mastuj subdivision, including the tehsils of Tor Khow, Morr Khow and Mastuj.

In PF-89, the contestants are: Mirdullah Jan (PPP), Sherin Khan (PML-QA), Fazal Rahim (PML-N), Maulana Abdur Rahim (MMA), Hussain Ahmed (PPP-SB) and Mohammed Ajmal Khan (PPP-S).

In PF-90, Chitral II, also there are six contestants from as many parties: Zahiruddin (PPP-S), Saeed Ahmed Khan (PML-Q), Syed Burhan Shah (PPP-SB), Shahzada Nisar Ahmed Jilani (PPP), Mumtaz Zareen (PML-N) and Maulana Jehangir Khan of the MMA.

A former princely state, Chitral, with a population of about 320,000, is inhabited by numerous clans with their sub-groups.

The district, with an area of about 15,000 square-kilometres, is sparsely populated and none of the clans is concentrated in any particular constituency. Because of this, there has never been a compact clan-based political alliance.

In 1988, eleven candidates were in the field for the then lone seat (PF-71). Mohammed Wali Khan of the PPP won the seat by securing 22,277 votes against Maulana Abdur Rahim of the IJI (12,398 votes). Others were: Saeed Ahmed (9,624 votes), Bakhtiar Ahmed of the ANP (3,520), Zafar Ahmed (2,493), Mohammed Wazir (2,658), and Khurshid Ali of the JUI (F) (2,462).

In 1990, the IJI’s Maulana Ghulam Ahmed returned on the seat with 32,447 votes, while Ghulam Nabi of the PDA secured 21,020 votes. Other contestants were: Amir Khan Jalali (4,701 votes), Mohammed Ajmal Khan of the JUI (F) (2,026) and Mohammed Yousuf (1,333 votes). The turnout was 50.75 per cent, while the number of registered voters was 116,400.

In the 1993 elections, out of the 121,197 registered voters, the turnout decreased by almost 5 per cent with 45.66 per cent using their right of franchise. The seat went to the PPP’s Zainul Abeddin, who got 26,229 votes against Maulana Ghulam Mohammed of the PIF (14,346 votes). Afzal Ali of the PML (N) got 8,958 votes, while 982 votes went to an independent candidate, Ghulam Nabi.

In 1997, the PML (N)’s Saeed Ahmed won the seat with 20,664 votes. His close rival Sardar Hussain got 12,641 votes followed by Fardad Ali Shah (6,069 votes), Najmur Rehman of the JUI (F) (4,470), the PPP (SB)’s Begum Sulaiman (3,719), Ghulam Hazrat (1,026), Inayatullah Asir (974) and Sharif Hussain (414 votes).

The turnout again dropped by about 5 per cent to 41.10 out of 124,469 registered voters.