A parliament and a world bereft of Nehru

JAWAHARLAL Nehru’s 39th death anniversary on May 27 went largely unnoticed. This should not surprise anyone since this has been so for many years now, to slowly, possibly deliberately, erase the memory of India’s first prime minister and its most prominent secular ideologue.

However, there has been a string of remarkable coincidences of late that recall a few relevant facets of Nehru.

Take Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajayee, for instance, who is rumoured to model himself in the Nehruvian mould. A few, including the venerable American diplomat Richard Haass, have even suggested that Mr Vajpayee could be tantalizingly close to a Nobel Prize if he succeeds in turning around relations with Pakistan.

But what did Prime Minister Vajpayee say or do to deserve the world’s gratitude? (Not that it matters much since rightwing politicians such as Menachem Begin have been decorated with the Nobel in the past.) Mr Vajpayee’s most recent statement vis-a-vis his peace initiative with Pakistan — that the real issue to discuss on Kashmir is the part controlled by Islamabad — could scarcely be considered statesman-like. Nor did he exude peace with the nuclear threat that emanated from a year-long military standoff that he ordered.

As for Mr Vajpayee’s rivals, it was during the Congress’ tenure of the P.V. Narasimha Rao period that parliament passed the laughable resolution on Kashmir that Mr Vajpayee has recently leaned on. That resolution is now cited ad nauseum by Indian bureaucrats and politicians alike to push a hawkish line on Kashmir.

Nehru may be accused of a million weaknesses and shortcomings, but compare the new “POK the only issue” stance with Nehru’s bold and straight-from-the-heart address to the Indian parliament on June 26, 1952 on Kashmir:

“The goodwill and pleasure of this parliament is of no importance in this matter (of Kashmir),” he told the MPs. “Not because this parliament does not have the strength to decide the question of Kashmir but because any kind of imposition would be against the principles that this parliament upholds.

“Kashmir is very close to our minds and hearts and, if by some decree or adverse fortune, Kashmir ceases to be a part of India, it will be a wrench and a pain and torment for us. If, however, the people of Kashmir do not wish to remain with us, let them go by all means; we will not keep them against their will, however painful it may be to us”.

“Our strongest bonds with Kashmir are not those that are retained by our army or even by our Constitution, to which so much reference has been made, {but} by those of love and affection and understanding and they are stronger than the Constitution or laws or armies.”

It is not difficult to turn most parliaments of today into a mob with just a single shrill call to nationalist duty. Nehru does not look a ready example of a nationalist zealot. And yet, as recalled in a remarkable new collection of his letters, interviews and speeches, he was possibly the first person to warn of the scourge of “terrorism” in the context of Kashmir.

Praising the resistance by Kashmiris to what he saw as Pakistan-backed incursions in 1947, Nehru said in a radio broadcast in November of that year: “They (Kashmiris) were determined to protect their country from the ruthless invader who was destroying their country and trying to compel them by terrorism to join Pakistan.” So, not exactly a namby-pamby romantic that the rightwing hawks strive to paint him as nor a ranting nuclear Tarzan.

There is hardly a facet of Nehru that is left out of the purview of the two-volume edition of “The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru”, edited by the late Professor S. Gopal and Uma Iyengar. That he had taken clear positions on some of the issues that are grabbing the headlines of today’s Indian and foreign media is truly amazing.

On the raging issue of today that found India in a serious bind, of the uncertain future of the United Nations, Nehru had his own invaluable insights although they were offered in the context of a 1955 review of the UN’s statutes. “Many policies are being pursued in Asia and Africa, which are the reverse of policies meant to preserve the independence or the national cultures or the way of life of any particular country. So that before we start putting the rest of the world right, the part of the world that is not right should be put right.” Think of inviting Ariel Sharon as guest when Nehru was alive.

In another realm, Mr Vajpayee’s periodic hints at quitting politics pale before Nehru who had done one better with no controversy to mock him.

In October 1954, Nehru the poet wrote to the Congress party of his offer to retire as “a feeling of staleness, which I suppose is almost inevitable, if someone has to function like a machine. I can function effectively even as a machine, but it does come in the way of freshness of thought and outlook.”

Again, if Prime Minister Vajpayee was greeting Sir Edmund Hillary on the 50th anniversary of the conquest of Everest recently, Nehru was expressing his own views on the world’s highest peak to one of his keenest listeners, Edwina Mountbatten. “I am greatly attracted to these wild regions of snow and blizzard, but my body, I suppose is no longer capable of enduring them,” he wrote to her in June 1953. “There are many Everests in this world, perhaps more difficult of conquest than even the mountain of that name.”

WITH much of India reeling under a heat wave that has killed more than a thousand people in Andhra Pradesh alone, many explanations are being proffered for the seemingly endless suffering caused primarily by the delayed monsoons.

But the explanation doing the rounds in Madhya Pradesh, one of the four Congress-ruled states that go to polls later this year, would be deemed insane if it were not uproariously funny. It seems Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh has told his voters that India is suffering nature’s “curse” because both the president and prime minister are bachelors.

According to this interpretation Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and President Abdul Kalam had offended the Hindu gods by remaining bachelors.

Bushfire burns through ‘coalition of the willing’

LONDON-NEW YORK-SYDNEY: Every week senior senators in the United States Congress sit down to a policy-makers’ lunch. It is usually a pretty ho-hum affair — an occasion for political backslapping. But last Tuesday as the grand panjandrums of the Grand Old Party assembled, Vice-President Dick Cheney had pressing business on his mind. That business, unusually, was to reassure the assembled senators that the administration of George Bush was not, as some had alleged, lying about weapons of mass destruction. It was to tell them that it did have credible evidence before American soldiers were sent to war that Iraq retained those weapons.

A day later it was the turn of Douglas Feith, the media-shy Pentagon Number Three, to appear this time before the cameras to — as he put it — lay some ‘urban myths’ to rest about the involvement of himself and his Office of Special Plans in allegedly manipulating intelligence on Iraq to give the impression that Saddam Hussein was more dangerous than he really was. By Thursday it was the turn of President Bush, speaking to US troops in Qatar, vowing to ‘reveal the truth’ about what he has described as the former Iraqi leader’s weapons of mass destruction.

But the most extraordinary performance was still to come — that by the director of the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby, who would declare that, despite the leak of a September paper by his agency stating that it had no ‘reliable evidence’ of Iraqi weapons facilities or even whether it could produce chemical or biological weapons, he still had no doubt that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Suddenly the questions over the existence or not of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have become like a bushfire burning through the ‘coalition of the willing’ that went to war against Iraq. If the fire has been damped down for the time being in the UK, it has sprung up again in the United States and Australia and threatens to catch fire in Spain.

Where once Bush and Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar stood together, the three most prominent members of the coalition now stand alone in their political problems, assailed at every turn by those who question their account of the threat posed by Saddam’s WMDs.

The way that the allegations have caught fire in the US is all the more extraordinary in that the Bush administration — unlike the government of Tony Blair — has not had to rely on the existence or not of weapons of mass destruction as a casus belli, committed as the US was to a policy of regime change in Iraq.

But the Democrats and Republicans leading the charge to investigate allegations that intelligence was fabricated have an agenda that goes beyond the issue of Iraq. What is driving them, as much as a desire to find out the truth, is a desire to limit the huge influence and power that has been accumulated by the Pentagon and the coterie of hawks gathered around Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, which many fear is now dominating America’s relations with the rest of the world. At the heart of the burgeoning controversy is whether those Pentagon hawks deliberately misused intelligence gathered by the CIA and DIA to make the case for war.

AT THE VERY CENTRE of the allegations is the special intelligence analysis group and a terrorism war planning group — both intimately connected — set up in the Pentagon by Donald Rumsfeld after September 11, 2001, called the Office of Special Plans and headed by Douglas Feith, the man forced on Tuesday to defend his actions before the media.

It was these officials — under Feith — who dug out the now discredited claims of a meeting between Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 suicide pilots, and Iraqi intelligence in Prague (in fact Atta was in the US, as proved by evidence uncovered by the FBI). It was these officials too who cherry-picked the most alarmist claims made by Iraqi defectors supplied to the US by the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, and whose debriefing programme had been transferred from the State Department, which distrusted the INC, to the Pentagon’s department of Humint (human intelligence).

And what has emerged in the last week is how deeply their interpretation was at odds with that of America’s intelligence professionals.

During the lead-up to war, the US intelligence community advised continually on its reservations about the White House and Pentagon’s claims over Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and connections to the Al Qaeda group.

Analysts at the CIA, Defence Intelligence Agency and State Department Intelligence Division said in different papers and at different times that they could find no evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda network, and were wary of claims being made over WMD.

And it was more than simple wariness. One official told the New York Times: “As an employee of the Defence Intelligence Agency, I know this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq”.

It is a view that is gaining increasing currency among the former US spooks who speak for the intelligence bureaucracies. But it is not only the suspicion that the intelligence has been deliberately manipulated by Pentagon hawks that has emerged in the last week.

Others have claimed that huge pressure was put on the intelligence agencies, by the same Vice-President Dick Cheney who was reassuring Republican senators on Tuesday, to come up with the goods required to start a war and who, sources claimed last week, made repeated visits to the CIA creating a culture of fear within the organization.

THE DIFFICULTIES of the coalition’s leaders have not been made any easier by the parting shots of Dr Hans Blix, the retiring head of Unmovic, the body charged by the UN Security Council with finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the outbreak of war. And what Blix had to say last week was the intelligence he had been given by the US and the UK was fundamentally useless in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.

Three snippets of British intelligence did lead the inspectors to a cache of conventional ammunition hidden in a farm house, some hidden documents relating to Iraq’s nuclear programme and some missile warheads — but no WMD.

In hard-hitting comments to the BBC, he said he was disappointed with the tip-offs provided by US and British intelligence, saying: “Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say.”

He said UN inspectors had been promised the best information available. “I thought — my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?’

Blix’s puzzlement is shared by many politicians in the coalition countries as well as their media, many of whom were faithfully promised that, when they went into Iraq after the country’s ‘liberation’, post facto legitimacy for the war would be instantly supplied by the WMD sites that they would be shown.

With the lack of hard evidence, intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have been told to make a case for WMD in a more subtle form.

British counter-intelligence, MI6, say sources, has been instructed to compile a composite picture of Iraq’s missing WMD in the form of a new dossier that so far has managed to establish that Saddam Hussein possessed banned missiles but little else palpably concrete.

The change in emphasis amid the raging controversies has already seen one member of the coalition carefully disassociate his government from the intelligence that he was shown. Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he had followed intelligence advice from the US and Britain, and did not doctor it.

AS THE ROW over intelligence flared up in the United States, in Britain this weekend Downing Street was determinedly mending bridges with its intelligence services and its own MPs over allegations that it had spun intelligence to harden it up.

Senior sources said that Number 10 (the Prime Minister’s official residence) intends to be candid and open in its dealings with the Intelligence and Security Committee in its investigations into the charges.

The committee will be given the original Joint Intelligence Committee report on Iraqi weapons. Downing Street insists that, although the JIC assessment was ‘reordered’ and some sections ‘slightly rewritten’, every fact that appeared in the JIC document also appeared in the first Number 10 dossier on Saddam’s WMD.

But Number 10 also knows that it will have to give ground on two key issues. Firstly, when Blair is called to give evidence before the committee he will admit that the second intelligence report, the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ based in large part on a PhD thesis by a Californian student, was flawed.

He will also admit that there are ‘serious questions’ to be answered about the claim in the first dossier that Saddam was attempting to procure nuclear material from Niger. The International Atomic Energy Authority later disclosed that such claims were based on ‘crudely forged’ documents.

But Downing Street believes that by making the initial concessions the committee will then be able to concentrate on the substance of the issue — namely, was the intelligence actually any good?

A growing number of British government figures are becoming convinced that the UK’s security services have been involved in an elegant pincer movement against the Cabinet in an attempt to cover-up their own intelligence failures. Spy chiefs briefed journalists first that the politicians had tried to overplay what they were telling them.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

The Chaudhrys in trouble

PML-Q President Chaudhry Shujaat is a man at war with himself as he does not want to give up his friendship with either Gen Musharraf or president’s bitter critic Maulana Fazlur Rehman. At the same time, he also wants to be seen as a democrat in the classical mould.

Mentally, he seems to be in complete accord with the idea of letting the president keep his uniform for as long as he wants. But in spirit, he is with the MMA all the way. He also seems to be striving, at the same time, to restore the supremacy of parliament as well. Hence, the war within himself.

He takes immense pride in having persuaded the MMA to relax its position on the issue of the president’s uniform. He believes that after having conceded that the president could keep his uniform for one year, the MMA has lost its principled position on the issue and that it would now even agree, with some more persuasion, to give the president two years in uniform which, he appears confident, could be extended to even five years.

Shujaat also believes that by accepting the 10-point Islamization plan of the MMA, he has actually endorsed only what is already allowed under the 1973 Constitution.

However, his detractors, who reportedly have the ear of the president, have accused him of promoting the cause of the MMA rather than that of the president. In fact, his own ruling alliance is said to be trying to sow the seeds of distrust between him and the president by presenting his successes with the MMA as the failure of the Jamali government to enlist unconditional support of the religious alliance for the LFO and the uniformed president.

He is a known hater of the PPP because he and his family still think that the PPP was somehow involved in the murder of his father, Chaudhry Zahur Elahi. And his political animosity towards Nawaz Sharif is well known. But lately, he has started talking of a grand national reconciliation to save the country from the dangers of the present divisive drift. Sources who claim to know his mind understand that he is no more averse to letting Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif play their due roles in the context of efforts for national reconciliation. He is said to believe that it is only through such a process that the present democratic process can be protected and sustained. If there is a crunch, he seemed prepared even to contact the two exiled leaders on his own. But his friends say he would prefer the president to take the initiative in this regard, because Benazir Bhutto had made it clear on many occasions that she is not prepared to talk to anybody other than the president on the proposed roles for herself and the president in the future scheme of things if a grand national reconciliation is being contemplated by the government.

There are many in the country who believe that for a man like Shujaat, it must have been very painful to see the opposition members in the Punjab assembly arrested and manhandled by the police. Those who claim to know say the plan as originally authored by him was to have about 10 or so ‘naughty’ members of the opposition shifted, with full parliamentary protocol, but under police escort, to their respective home towns. But the officer in charge not only made a hash of it, but is also supposed to have informed the Press where the arrested opposition MPAs had been taken. That is when all hell broke loose, his friends insist.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain is said to believe that a conspiracy is being hatched against him to make him and his cousin Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi political scapegoats, in case the present system is to be rolled up at some point in the near future. The ugly incident in the Punjab assembly was purportedly engineered by the invisible hands to open the score against the Chaudhrys for future use.

According to the sources close to him, he is convinced that Federal Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat had counter-manded his orders with regard to the handling of the Punjab assembly situation and issued instructions of his own to the police. He is also said to have been peeved by Faisal’s misrepresentations to the president about his (Shujaat’s) overtures to the MMA. He is very unhappy with the other members of the ruling alliance, including Millat Party’s Farooq Leghari, PML-J’s Hamid Nasir Chatta and PML-Z’s Ijazul Haq as well, all of whom he believes were only creating problems for the government by back biting against him in the presence of the president.

His friends claim that to re-establish his credentials with the president, he felt it necessary to ask Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi to get a resolution passed by the Punjab assembly through which, for the first time in the history of parliamentary democracy, an elected house would express its willingness to be ruled by an unelected, in-service General.

The Chaudhry of Gujrat knows that he is in deep trouble. He also appears totally disappointed with the performance of the prime minister and the chief minister of Sindh. He is said to be keeping the PML-Q intact at a great cost to his own credibility as most of the lucrative portfolios have gone to the smaller groups of the ruling alliance. He is under attack not only from the opposition, but also from his own ruling alliance, including his own party and even those of his party who lost in the elections.—Onlooker

Death in London

An awful lot of poetry is gone with her. Ask the dying, nobody’s death is timely. Hers absolutely was not. This second collection, Left-Hand-Speak, cannot be her summation; will never be. Hima Raza could have disappointed us as a poet after so much promise, could have dissipated herself in agonies that come uninvited to the most bright and fortunate, brought herself a bad name or faded away behind damp walls of my candy-pink room. Denying even that or worse fate to her would have been a callous unjustness, but to be dying far away from home ... without the comfort of hot rain or the music of wet sparrows in this land of grey flood and flu... when so much of living to be done remained, and so many days of countless hours to pass in boredom, hope, and waiting awaited her on the long road. Sheer loss of God’s good work. That’s what her death amounts to.

I am stories she said in one of her more poignant poems, in Munir Niazi’s vein, dreamt before birth - beyond death in a stranger’s imagination. It is a strange measurement of life’s span she is calling our attention to. The distance before birth and beyond death can be eternity itself or twenty and some years, the time a falling star takes to blaze through night’s darkness. Barrister Raza Kazim, her broken hearted father who but days before was devastated by his brother’s patricide, will have no measure to weigh his grief, for his is not the loss of a talented star but of a living child. A parent’s love is absolutely tactile, like intimacies of love. The bereaved parent is hollowed from inside, that many years that went into the child’s growth are deducted from his body, they lie wasted, like quicksand devouring the future’s joyless days. Iftikhar Arif told me she was named after her grandmother, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali Rodolvi’s wife and Raza Kazim’s mother.

Hima’s poetry is closer to modern English verse than that of most of our home grown poets who use the medium not only more conservatively but dare only as much as to scratch the outer skin of modern expression which is highly explorative in both form and content. I am not saying this because Hima tries spatial arrangements of her line and stanzas which I have seen only few doing. Most still prefer the geometry of alliteration and the arithmetic of meters. And there is no harm in that. There is lot of poetry in geometrical configurations but poetry itself, in its essence, is neither rectangular nor circular. A very linear line, ae meri hamraqs mujhko thaam le, can hold a river of poetry and posses massive body of thought and passion. Hima was young; her poetry ventured out in all directions. She experimented with space. Can words vibrate differently if their placement is shifted to a different location. Perhaps they would but it is not in our experience. It is the same with music. Running frantically with the mike on the stage does not make the song very moving but new music is made all over the stage and all the young singers the world over are doing that.

Hima’s poetic sentiment is largely personal and very feminine. It is about relationships and memories and how the collision of genders results in quaint equations. A young person in an open ambience has more ways than just meditation to explore the conduct of sexes, and the forms love adapts to, the subtle play of hypocrisies; despair.

The truest love is never had

But we spend a lifetime

Imagining its taste.

The sensuousness of her imagery can be humid, heavy and erotic when not breezy and oblique:

Flesh soft like moon glow

The rising wet withdraws

From hollow bellied need

Slips silently in and out as

Empty hands unfold on icy

Dreams and fading echoes.

There is nostalgia as there is in all people with deep roots in their society of origin; she misses the hot rain, the toasted trees and the wet sparrows. The subtle racism that expresses itself in condescending politeness towards darker shades of skin irritates her. She cannot fail to detect the immigrant’s pathetic effort to become acceptable.

And then there is this chance encounter with death, not as a premonition, for she is too full of herself to look for signs in the teacup, but as a romantic notion: I am held together by the promise of holding you in death.

Left-Hand-Speak is blunt but tender, very fluid and flowing. Appearing in print to coincide with her end, when she lay dying or was already dead (I do not know) it looks like a continuation, not just an echo. Words have this cruel power. They live on.

Four unpublished Faiz lines

NOT long ago, an Urdu language newspaper published the text of an interview given by Faiz Ahmad Faiz to a Kashmiri intellectual in 1983, a year before his death. Politically, there is nothing exclusive or exciting in the interview except for four unpublished lines from Faiz Sahib. He is claimed to have written:

Hum aisey haal mein guzrey jahan-i-guzran se

Nazar mein raat liey, dil mein aftab liey

Hum aisey haal mein puhnchey Huzoor-i-Yazdan mein

Labon pe hamd liey, haath mein sharab liey

The second line is Faiz, I am sure. But if all four lines are by him, why did they fail to find space in any of the poet’s published works?

(IS IT) hot enough for June? I had asked last week but than refused to discuss the weather because I was no Brit. But whether I am a Brit or not, the weather is forcing the truth out of me. Yes, it is hot enough for June here in Lahore. In fact, it is hotter. A friend says the city is hot enough for hell these days. Well, since I have not been to hell and back, I wouldn’t know.

There is an old story according to which Lahore has a patio which leads to hell. It is said to be considerably cooler than hell but the difference is known only to the jahannamis. The lucky devils. But the saying is:

Az dozakhian purca keh Lahore bahaisht ast

I AM now getting impatient with giving you excerpts from The Statesman (1875-1975), A Chronology. I have covered hardly 32 years and I promise, therefore, to make haste now. On July 19, 1908, The Statesman wrote:

IT was on the 16th of July, 1907, that The Statesman was first printed on a rotary machine, and Thursday last, the 16th July, 1908, was therefore a somewhat interesting anniversary in the history of this journal.

The installation of printing machines of the most modern type was necessary in the nature of a very costly experiment. As the public are aware, The Statesman then became, as it still remains, the only newspaper in India or the East produced on rotary presses; and the change from printing from the flat to printing from cylindrical plates was in its way as great an advance as the change from hand presses to steam presses. Few even among friendly critics were willing to admit that the venture was likely to be a success. The experts enlarged upon the difficulties of rapid stereotyping with native labour. Others predicted that the complicated machinery of the presses would come to grief in the hands of Indian mechanics. Such were some of the gloomy predictions of practical printers who were acquainted with the exceptionally trying characteristics of the Indian climate and the difficulties that beset the innovator in this country.

Happily not one of these forebodings was fulfilled, for the simple reason that all the difficulties had been foreseen and provided for. The splendid Goss presses have not caused one moment’s anxiety since they were started up, while the stereotyping department has worked without a hitch. After a year’s trial it is gratifying to be able to say that in spite of the many difficulties that had to be surmounted as they arose the new installation has proved to be absolutely reliable, the most conclusive proof of its efficiency being that there has been no stoppage or mishap of any kind, and that no edition whether for Dak or town, has been lost or even seriously delayed, through any fault in the working of the plant. The enterprise has in short been rewarded with unequalled success.

It will perhaps interest our readers in this connection if we recall the claim of the proprietors of the London Daily Telegraph to have made a record in English journalism on June 18th last by the publication of a 24-page daily newspaper as the complete product of a single printing machine. Calcutta, has however, in this matter forestalled London. The feat on which our contemporary prides itself was first accomplished by The Statesman in the early part of last cold weather, and has been repeated a dozen times since or oftener. There could scarcely be a more striking proof of the thoroughly modern character of the equipment of The Statesman than that it should be a matter for jubilation on the part of the biggest London newspaper to print such a paper as we had produced several months before.

We have pleasure in intimating that our circulation now averages over 10,000 copies daily, a figure which would have appeared incredible to the pioneers of Indian journalism and which we think it is safe to assert is double that of any other journal in India at the present day.

Soiled hands — price of a clean city

SINDH’s footloose governor has been up and about. Some weeks ago he personally launched a drive to start cleaning up this megalopolis of more than 140 million people. There is no doubt that some parts of the city have been cleaned up to some extent. What has been achieved so far in bits and pieces only helps to highlight the enormous deal that remains to be achieved. Indeed that has not even been touched so far.

No reasonable person would deny that in the best of circumstances, keeping this city even moderately clean is literally a Herculean task. This city in its present state, prize of years of neglect and cynical mismanagement, is a veritable collection of Augean Stables. Hercules had river Alpheus hard by and the power to divert it in one mighty flourish. We do have the Indus, not very far, if not very near. Much of its water gets siphoned off long before the great river touches the vicinity of Karachi. So, we have to look elsewhere.

In this city, the problems are rather complex. Perhaps the worst part is not the disposal of the day’s solid waste and sullage. It is the piles and hillocks of garbage accumulated over the years. Karachi has been without a city management, let alone an organized city government. Even the remnants of what once was a city government, have faded away because of disuse, inertia and lethargy.

Succeeding rulers of Pakistan have been, as a class, afraid of Karachi and hence adversely disposed towards it. Simply because the people of this city have a mind of their own. What is worse, they insist on using it when using their vote. What man or woman in right mind would vote for a “political party” when that political party for the time being should be predetermined to be the “party of the government, vote or no vote?”

So Karachi voted against General, later self-elevated, Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan. They vocally disapproved of General Zia. They have consistently voted against Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. The only exception has been Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. For quite some time, Karachi and ZAB had a happy affair.

During that spell Karachi grew by leaps and bounds. Much of what is still presentable in this city is ZAB’s gift. Or what of his gifts that have survived the sabotage by Benazir and Nawaz regimes. Nawaz gave “Operation Clean-up”. Benazir messed up everything.

This bit of background has been recalled in an attempt merely to explain why cleaning up Karachi now is such an exasperating job.

For so many years, this city has been deliberately defiled physically, humiliated psychologically by Ziaul Haq and then twice each by Karachi-born Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and a pathologically scared Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Nawaz Sharif’s magnum opus for Karachi was “Operation Clean-Up.” For her part, Benazir messed up almost everything. Remember how her brother died? Benazir was in full cry then.

This work of cleaning up has been undertaken after a lapse of almost an age. The remnants of what once may have been a sanitation infrastructure have almost faded away. Those settling down to clean up the city are having to begin to locate where the garbage of 15 years ago might now be. It has to be explored and then virtually excavated before they arrive at the stage of its proper disposal. For that you need adequate manpower and mechanical back-up.

What has been accomplished in the first phase is revival of an attitude of mind that differentiates between a clean city and one that is squalid and sordid and smelly. Most people have forgotten what a clean street actually looks like. They haven’t seen one for so many years. Meanwhile, they have developed a sort of tolerance for insanitation. They wade through a street overflowing with gutter water without so much as batting an eyelid. This is no exaggeration. When people begin to live with filth, it becomes part of their scheme of things.

Returning to mind at this moment are two lines from Lord Gordon Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon” read in Class Seven at school. He says:

“...So much a long communion tends, That even I and my chains, Grew friends...

The prisoner was an uncompromising freedom-fighter and for that offence was serving a long jail term. With enforced long communion, even freedom-fighters and chains grow friends. The elder citizens of this city remember they once lived in the cleanest city in Asia. Now they seem to have come to terms with one of the least clean cities.

What the city fathers (and now we have city mothers, too!) may be missing in their drive to clean up the city is the realization that there may be a PR side to this campaign. A clean city would remain a dream if the cleaning up is to be an adventure without the active and committed participation of the average citizen. We would not have a really clean city that has become clean unless the citizens also mean to see to it that it stays clean. This is an all-time exercise in which all have to be ready to soil their hands, as the price of getting a truly clean city to live in.

Development, but for whom?

Sindh’s advocate-general told a bench of the Sindh High Court this week that all those who had filed petitions seeking proper compensation from the government for the demolition of their homes as a result of the Lyari Expressway were encroachers.

Group by group, he told the court that the demand for increased compensation made no sense because in all cases, as he tried to demonstrate, the occupants had never been granted any proprietary rights. He also said that the government had not even designated any of the settlements affected by the project as kutchi abadis, as required by a 1979 law. One group, living in Garden West, had claimed ownership rights to their land, and hence a much larger amount in compensation, arguing that the federal government had given them title to the land. The advocate-general, however, said that the claim had no standing because the land was very much owned by the provincial government and the federal government was not authorized to lease it out to anyone.

Even if the Sindh government has a case, in terms of facts and figures relating to who legally owns the land, the point is that for decades the government did nothing for its development. It was the people, mostly poor and underprivileged, who inhabited it, and borrowed money to build their homes on it. And now one fair day, when the government feels that the city desperately needs an expressway, it brings in the bulldozers and demolishes everything. To make matters worse, the people who have lived on this land for years and tried to eke out a subsistence living are made to feel as if they are ‘encroachers’ and offered peanuts in compensation.

Government officials and officials of the National Highway Authority (supposed to be in the forefront of the project) should read this account of a maid and how she and her family tried to make a home on land which now must be cleared of all settlements, thanks to the planned Lyari Expressway. It was sent by a BA English (Honours) student at the University of Karachi:

“This woman who works as a maid in my house and in the houses of many others, is Bengali-born, but now a Pakistani national and lives in Ziaul Haq Colony in Gulshan-i-Iqbal. Her home must now be demolished to make way for the Lyari Expressway. I came to know that she has lived there for the past 11 years, buying a small house after borrowing Rs 150,000 from a relative in Bangladesh. To get electricity and gas connections she borrowed another Rs 11,800, also from the same relative. In order to return the money, she and her family work day and night and at times, if necessary, do not even mind missing out on a meal. This is a family that has lived their 11 years on this land and in that house. Eleven years form a large chunk of any person’s life — and now they find out that the house that they have bought after enduring so much hardship will have to be demolished. The lives that they are leading will be stolen from them.

“I don’t know who actually owns the land but what I know is that these people did not do anything that bad to deserve this fate. They are now being given a place in some other colony which lies almost out of the city. How will they be able to commute to their places of work is obviously something that the government officials are least bothered about.

“Besides, I have seen this settlement — where my maid lives — for the past 17 years, during which time the authorities never did anything for its development. And what can we do about this, I ask. The answer is: ‘Nothing!’. Excuse me for my pessimism but how can we stop anyone from doing anything however wrong it may be since those who have authority in our country do not bother letting others know the reasons for taking any major decision.”

Blaming everyone else

Pakistanis seem to be experts at blaming everyone but themselves for the misfortune that happens to them. Usually this takes the form of even educated persons blaming the west for all the problems of the Muslim world. However, some instances are more mundane and trivial.

Take the recent case of a report in this newspaper which had said that television viewers had a gripe against local TV channels who, they said, were “minting money” by “inducing” people to make expensive calls to become eligible for winning all kinds of prizes.

The government’s electronic media regulator, PEMRA, was even asked to look into the matter since the viewers felt that they were being taken for a ride by the TV channels.

How? Anyone who has seen adverts placed by these channels or watched their transmissions would have seen that the cost of a call (sometimes as high as Rs 24 per minute) is clearly written for the benefit of everyone. Now, if you choose to call this number and can’t hang up just because you’ve been put on hold, then how in the world can you possibly blame the TV channel? Don’t call if you don’t like the cost.

Confused bird

A fairly recent arrival in the city from upcountry is mystified by the constant calls of the koel that he hears all over the city these days. He says he always thought koels sang when the mango trees blossomed or in the monsoon and the rainy season.Neither fits the current state of weather in Karachi.

In Lahore, he says, you always waited for the first of the koel’s songs with the arrival of the “bor” on the mango trees or, later, the season’s first rains. “But it seems Karachi’s weather, which hardly ever changes, has confused the koels also,” he says, quite exasperated by what he believes to be the unseasonal cooing of the bird and feelingly recalls, although out of context, Begum Akhtar’s “Koelia mat kar pukaar, kalejva pey lagey kataar (O, koel, sing not for your call hits the heart)”.

Annoying people

People here have this generally annoying habit of not getting out of the way when their work is done. The most common example of this is people who are ahead of you in the line at the bank or at the supermarket and refuse to vacate the place for you once their work is done.

This means that at the bank, the person who say has just withdrawn Rs 30,000 will not move to the side to let the next person come up to the teller but will insist on counting - and double counting — the bills right in front of the window. To make matters worse, the teller will not have the sense to tell his valued customer ‘Sir, could you kindly move to the side and let the next gentleman come to the window?’. At the supermarket, this annoying phenomenon takes the form of usually a begum who decides, after the sales clerk has typed in all the 47 items that she has brought to the counter, that she wants to get her brand of tea changed.

Actually, she takes her sweet time in deciding what to replace it with. The item that needs to be replaced is given to a supermarket employee who then walks to an aisle which invariably is situated very far from the counter. All this time, you have to wait agonizingly behind this lady. And again, to make matters worse, this begum does not even pretend to be apologetic for wasting everyone else’s time with her whims. In fact, try telling her to hurry up or give her a dirty look and she will just shrug her shoulders or look the other way. The nerve of such people!

Ship to Bombay

India and Pakistan have decided to resume the bus service between New Delhi and Lahore and the date has tentatively been set for July 1. Well, why not a steamer or ship service between Karachi and Bombay?

A colleague says that in the good old days such a link existed between these two great cities and that he even travelled on it. — By Karachian

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