Even as flowers bloom in Committee Bagh, a public park around the imposing facade of the Iqbal Library, the inside of the library, with its deserted tables, broken chairs and dust-covered bookshelves lined with fraying books, speaks of years of negligence.

In a tehsil with a population of 656,978, Iqbal Library has 300 members and 10,000 books. The post of librarian has been vacant for 15 years, during which time there have been no renovations and no new books bought for the library.

The library is instead run by a 50-year-old Sohail Riaz, a grade 11 clerk who was recruited 30 years ago. Despite holding a masters in library sciences, Mr Riaz has continued to work as a clerk on the post of librarian and has not been able to get a job according to his qualifications because the Punjab government has not advertised jobs for librarians for many years.

Iqbal Library used to be known as the municipal library, but neither the library administration nor the office-bearers of the Chakwal Municipal Committee know the exact date on which the library opened. According to some references, it opened somewhere between the late 1950s and the early 60s.

“First, a small room was reserved for a library in Baldia Plaza on Bhoun Chowk, and this was in the early 60s,” recalls senior advocate and political activist Syed Ziaul Hassan Zaidi.

The current two-storey building in Committee Bagh was built in 1989. From that one small room in Baldia Plaza, the library now consisted of a large reading hall for men, a room for women and another hall for the storage of books.

Even when it was run out of a single room, the library had a notable collection.

“Comrades of the first communist leader of the country Gen Mohammad Akbar Khan had placed works of writers belonging to the Soviet Union in municipal libraries at the tehsil level. The translations of the novels and poetry of writers such as Mikhail Sholokhov, Alexander Pushkin, Maxim Gorky and Dostoyevsky were also available at Chakwal’s municipal library,” wrote Khalid Toor in his autobiographical novel Balon ka Gucha. He added: “Later, a radical magistrate had all the un-Islamic books burned.”

Mohammad Akbar, who has been a library member for 30 years, said the reading hall used to be packed with people who visited the library every day .

The library was handed over to the district administration under the Musharraf regime, when municipalities were abolished. Then, the women’s reading room was handed over to a security agency that still occupies the space.

Although the municipality system was brought back in 2015, the Chakwal municipality has yet to regain possession of the library from the education department.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2018