Police watch Shabab take over billboards

Activists of Shabab-i-Milli Pakistan, the youth wing of Jamaat-i-Islami, defaced pictures of female models on billboards at Kumharanwala Chowk of the city as part of their “anti-obscenity campaign” last Friday.

Police personnel, more in number than the activists who were purging the signboards of female faces, were there to “avert any untoward incident”, but they stayed on the sidelines. However, the law-enforcement agents did register a case later on against some 20 activists of the youth organization under MPO-16.

Though some senior officials were also present on the scene, the authorities made a sub-inspector scapegoat and suspended him for failing to restrain the miscreants.

Among those nominated in the case registered with the New Multan police under MPO-16 were Shabab-I-Milli’s divisional president Saad Kanju and district president Shahzada Babar Mann. The police claimed that they were conducting raids to arrest the accused.

However, both Kanju and Mann made a mockery of police claims by holding a press conference on Saturday at the local office of Jamaat-i-Islami to announce that now their campaign would not be limited to defacing the signboards depicting female faces and that they would now resort to burning all such hoardings.

They challenged the police to arrest them from the Jamaat office saying that arrests could not deter them from waging a war against obscenity.

The police on the other hand softened their stance with DPO Hamid Mukhtar Gondal calling upon the youth organization to provide him the list of signboards that its activists termed objectionable, and the police would remove them on their own.

On the local front, only the Civil Liberty Council and some of the PPP office-bearers have dared to condemn the act and demanded action against those creating harassment in the society.

Jerry, a well-known Ghazal singer in this part of the country, mesmerized an audience of more than 400 people the other day with his rendition of the works of legendary Urdu poets Ghalib, Mir, Dagh, Faiz, Nasir Kazmi, Hafeez Hoshiarpuri and Fraz.

The venue was a well-kept lawn of the Multan branch of a famous chain of schools, Lahore Grammar School. Though regarded as the second cultural station in the Punjab after Lahore, the literary and cultural landscape of Multan is dull at present mainly due to official neglect.

People with a taste for quality music seldom find an opportunity here to satisfy their aesthetic sense and whenever they get a chance to ‘feed their spirit’ they do not want to lose it. Same was the case with Jerry’s tribute to the legends. The school management had made arrangements for an invited gathering of some 250 people but the number of audience surpassed all expectations.

Jerry sings Ghazals with the help of a blend of eastern and western instruments. At the LGS performance, Ustad Ghulam Shabbir was playing Tabla, Kameel was at the drums, Goshi at the keyboard, Kashif at the bass guitar and Pitras at the accordion. Jerry sang for three hours, but people were still making requests for more Ghazal numbers when he finally stood up to say good-bye.

He also sang some numbers from his forthcoming album of Ghazals Khab, which were equally appreciated by the audience. Jerry has not only given music to his album but also written some of the numbers. Though he does not belong to any Gharana, his critics say he sings Ghazals with a command usually attributed to the Gharana people.

Multan has produced great female singers, such as Iqbal Bano, Surraya Multanikar and Naheed Akhtar. Local music critics hope that Jerry will fill the gap on the male front.

Recently, an Urdu daily organized a seminar on the country’s political situation.

The country’s top political leadership was there to throw light on the subject according to their respective points of view and affiliations. Besides the veteran Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, former president Farooq Leghari, former National Assembly speaker Yousaf Raza Gilani, PML-N acting chief Javed Hashmi, PPP’s Shah Mehmood Qureshi, MMA’s Hafiz Husain Ahmed and Liaquat Baloch were prominent among those who spoke on the issue.

The same daily organized a seminar on the same subject last year as well, and the speakers were more or less the same except for Yousaf Raza Gilani, who was then in NAB custody, and Farooq Leghari, who was then represented by his son and Dera Ghazi Khan district Nazim Jamal Leghari.

The Legharis make no bones about their infatuation for the Musharraf rule and leave no chance to advise the opposition to behave wisely. But, the audience in the seminars held on political issues usually happens to be either the diehard workers of the opposition parties or the intelligentsia who normally opposes military rules. So, both the Legharis had to face hooting by the audience during their respective appearances.

Whereas the inexperienced Jamal Leghari had failed to deliver his full speech as the audience refused to listen to him, the elder Leghari showed he knew how to swim with the tide. In his speech when he cautiously started to advise the people to avoid confrontation with a military ruler to save whatever civil rule they had at present, the audience started chanting Go Musharraf Go and Go Leghari Go. He however faced the situation with a smiling face and then gave some bold statements that won him a round of applause from the audience. For instance, on the matter of Gen Musharraf’s speech to the joint session of the Parliament, he said: “If I could face as a president a hostile opposition twice to fulfil the constitutional obligation of address to the parliament then why a Fauji cannot do the same.”

Talking gibberish

ONE would have thought that the award for talking the most gibberish would have gone to none other than US President George W. Bush for his periodic pearls of wisdom, and which have come to the attention of all and sundry, thanks to the media. However, in recent days, while browsing through various international wire services in the course of work, one happened to come across a worthy challenger to Mr Bush’s hitherto unrivalled status.

That man is none other than Mr Bush’s secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, or known to admirers and detractors alike, as ‘Rummy’. On June 10, on his way to Europe for a four-nation tour, America’s defence secretary was asked a host of questions regarding the increasing number of attacks on American soldiers in Iraq and the rising number of US casualties. The questions seemed pretty straightforward — as could be seen by reading the story carried by the wire service, Agence France Presse (AFP), but the answers that Rummy gave clearly weren’t.

Readers are invited to make sense of what America’s chief architect of the invasion of Iraq said.

On the question of whether the attacks were in any way linked to Saddam Hussein, whose whereabouts the US has been unable to pinpoint (after initially claiming that he died in a US bombing raid), Mr Rumsfeld said: “To the extent it’s not proven that he is not alive, there are people who might fear he could come back. If they fear he could come back, they might be somewhat slower in an interrogation to say what they know. It might give heart to the Baathists who may want to hope they can take back that country, which they are not going to succeed in doing. So I think to some extent that is a fair comment.”

One can make little sense really of his first remark, the one that begins with the phrase ‘To the extent’. Are attacks against US soldiers happening because Iraqis “fear he [Saddam] might come back? Well if they “fear” his return why in the world would they [the “people”] be attacking the Americans? Probably the defence secretary wanted to say that there are ‘people’ in Iraq who ‘want’ Saddam to come back, but he didn’t say that probably because he doesn’t want the outside world to know that there are people in Iraq who still want Saddam back. This sounds like an on-the-spot or ‘censor-as-you-speak’ job and Mr Rumsfeld clearly made a hash of it.

The story, without a byline, then gave a brief backgrounder about the most recent attack against US forces in Iraq in which a soldier was killed at a checkpoint. It said that he was the 29th American soldier to die since Mr Bush declared major combat over in Iraq on May 1.

Responding to questions about the role of US intelligence in not being able to read the situation on the ground in post-occupation Iraq, Mr Rumsfeld denied the obvious and talked more gibberish: “There’s no one [among the US intelligence community] who believes it is a well-organized national campaign. There are some who would say that in certain parts of the country it looks as though it has an element of organization to it, as opposed to being random.” Well, obviously if something is organized, or even has an “element of organization” then it cannot be called random.

He said that recent attacks on US forces were not the same as previous cases of violence or looting. ‘The attacks on our forces, coalition forces, is (sic) something other than that.”

He said that many components of Saddam’s forces like the Baath party activists and the Fedayeen militia especially in the north of Baghdad, had chosen not to fight the advancing US army and might have remained intact. He then put a counter-question: “What’s that mean? That means our forces are going to have to take an assessment of how we are arranged, what kind of forces we need. See if we have all the forces we need and go about finding those folks and putting them out of business.”

Clearly, Mr Rumsfeld is not one for the preservation of the beauty, elegance and clarity of the English language. The funny thing is that the defence secretary happens to be, or was at least till things began to hot up after the US could find no trace of the promised weapons of mass destruction, of the mainstream American media who could find no fault in him. — OMAR R. QURAISHI

(email:omarq@cyber.net.pk)