Where is the ‘loot’?

SINCE he took over the reins of the government on October 12, 1999, President General Pervez Musharraf has been accusing Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto of plundering and looting the country during their respective tenures as prime ministers.

So far, however, his NAB has been unable to recover a single penny of the so-called loot from Benazir Bhutto. In the case of Nawaz Sharif, the NAB has been able only to forcibly confiscate some of his property worth no more than a couple of million rupees.

This is not to say that one is trying to whitewash the crimes of the two if they have committed any. But where have the so- called billions that these two leaders are accused of plundering disappeared?

One implication could be that they have stashed away their loot in foreign banks. But since 9/11, all the so-called international financial safe havens have come under such thorough scrutiny by the US and its allies for all forms of questionable international money channelling that it would have been next to impossible for the two to have successfully hidden away their stashed loot. More so because Pakistan today has as its finance minister a person who knows all the tricks of the banking trade. For him to have been deceived by any sleight of hand indulged in by BB and NS or their financial managers is unthinkable.

More importantly, in the power centres of today, President Musharraf is hailed as a dear friend and ally of the US and the West. They could have easily used their new legal powers acquired in the wake of 9/11 to help him recover the ‘billions’ purportedly looted by BB and NS rather than see him roam around the world requesting for concessional assistance to pay back costly loans.

Could it be that there is not enough in the bank accounts of the two to arouse any suspicion of the investigators busy tracing the financial networks of the international terrorist organizations?

While the president does not hesitate for a moment to malign the two former prime ministers, he defends the people whom he has brought into the assemblies through the October elections variously but unconvincingly when similar charges are levelled against them. When one of his friends is named in public as a candidate for scrutiny by the NAB, he simply dismisses the charge as being a media concoction or an unsubstantiated accusation.

At times when confronted with some evidence, he defends his position by stating: “This is what is available in the country.

There is no absolute honesty in Pakistan. There’s much dishonesty and corruption — many imperfections — you got to work with the people you have.”

By implication he is condoning corruption when it comes to his friends and supporters and expects the opposition to be absolutely honest. When his friends are accused of being plunderers and looters, he demands proof but has been accusing BB and NS of looting and plundering without proving this charge in a court of law or recovering from them the so-called looted billions.

What is being attempted here is not a defence of BB and NS. Perhaps they did their bit of looting and plundering when they were in charge. But then where is the proof and where have the plundered billions disappeared? And why is the president talking of their plunder without evidence and does not want to listen to the plunder stories of his friends? Why this double standard? What kind of new traditions is he trying to establish in this country in the name of accountability? A wrong is a wrong, no matter who commits it. You cannot excuse a wrong committed by a friend by hiding behind disingenuous arguments and on the plea of being a political pragmatist.

Such arguments only reinforce the impression that all that President Musharraf is interested in is the perpetuation of his personal power and not the protection and preservation of national interests.

What is more disturbing is, for political support among the masses, he is depending on those very people who according to his own definition are not absolutely honest. For such people it would not take even a single minute to abandon him in a crunch and go over to the other side if they see the other side winning.

Such an eventuality cannot be ruled out. It happened to Ziaul Haq in his last days and to Nawaz Sharif twice — once in 1993 when his government was dismissed by Ghulam Ishaq Khan and then in 1999 when he was toppled by the army. It could happen to President Pervez Musharraf too because the friends he has chosen belong to a class which is always in sync with power and not with principles.

When one is talking about loot and plunder in Pakistan, it is not possible not to mention the case of Asif Ali Zardari as well. He is being kept behind bars for the last six years on a suspicion that he too had looted and plundered during the two tenures of his wife as prime minister. In fact, since 1988 he has either lived in the PM house or behind bars. He must have done something very bad to annoy the establishment so much that it does not feel he deserves to be out even if he has been granted bail in almost all cases in which he has been accused and tried. But what a mockery of justice! Go and meet Asif in the courts when he is appearing in one of his cases. On one occasion, he was seen holding court with at least 20-25 of his fans (some in plainclothes appeared to be from the agencies) sitting around him in chairs under the trees in the compound of the court.

On this particular occasion even the former speaker of the National Assembly, Yousuf Raza Gilani, too was seen attending Asif’s court. On that day one heard a well-informed and seemingly knowledgeable Asif talking on all the subjects under the sun — from the budget to the LFO and the Iraq war as well.

If Asif has committed a crime, it is the government’s duty to prove it and jail him. But you cannot keep him behind bars for ever without proof of his guilt. What the government is doing is inhuman and against all norms of justice and fair play.

—Onlooker

Yahya Bakhtiar fondly remembered

IT is almost like 1984. In that year we lost A.T. Chaudhri, Faiz Sahib, Khwaja Khurshid Anwar and Ustad Daman. This year, I have already lost two distant friends. I don’t think I could call Malik Meraj Khalid even a distant friend except for the early years of boyhood intimacy I drifted away from him, he going his own way and I choosing an entirely different path but the passing of Mr Yahya Bakhtiar has come as a bit of a personal loss. He, too, was distant but he had that rare quality — he could deal with you even if you were a total stranger.

Mr Bakhtiar was much closer to Mr IA Rehman of the Human Rights Commission. It was Rehman Sahib who first introduced me to Mr Bakhtiar who immediately began to treat me as if I had been a long lost friend. He would stay at the Punjab Club whenever in Lahore. I am talking of the days when I used to work for the weekly Viewpoint which the late Mr Mazhar Ali Khan used to bring out from Lawrence Road. I am talking now of a good twenty years ago. One day, I received a call from Mr Yahya Bakhtiar. “I am waiting for Rehman Sahib and some other friends. Why don’t you come over and join us?”

“But sir I am not properly dressed. The club people will never let me in.”

“Oh! you just tell them you are my guest and they will bloody well let you come up.”

And so I went and was expected at the Punjab Club. An attendant conducted me to Mr Yahya Bakhtiar’s suite, he had even then a slight tremor in his hands. He made a glass of sherbet for me and told me I would have to help myself if I needed some more.

Mr Bakhtiar got talking to me while waiting for the other guests to arrive.

“I read your columns but they are getting too darned lengthy. Cut them short. Nobody has the time for more than a thousand words today, or do you want to become as unreadable as Zeno?” (It was the pen name for Mr Safdar Mir who was my teacher at the Government College and he did indeed tended to be a bit long winded, but that’s another story). I took Mr Bakhtiar’s admonition to heart and began to measure my columns at around one thousand words. I will always be grateful to Mr Yahya Bakhtiar’s memory for as long as I continue to write. So you see, like Malik Meraj Khalid this is the only thing I can recall about him.

I forgot to tell you that Yahya Bakhtiar was a mighty handsome man. They don’t come like him any more.

AND now my weekly excerpts from the chronology, The Statesman (1875-1975). The first piece begins:

MR Pramatha Chaudhuri is well known as an authority on Bengalee literature, but he is less well known than he ought to be as the master of an exceptionally effective English style. His “Story of Bengalee Literature”, read as a paper before the Darjecling summer meeting this year, is singularly clear, interesting and well balanced, and there is an undercurrent of irony at times so delicate that it is apt to pass unnoticed. Speaking of Chandidas and Chaucer, for example he says, “that Bengalee and English literature should have been born at the same time is one of those strange historical coincidences whose mystery astronomers try to solve by reference to the periodical appearance of sunspots”. Speaking of the renaissance of Bengalee literature at the beginning of last century he observes, “It was an age of textbooks and translations. Englishmen wrote books for the benefit of Bengalees, and Bengalees wrote books for the benefit of Englishmen, and it seems everybody was anxious to teach everybody else something or other.” (August 30, 1917)

GERMANY surrenders. Armistice signed yesterday. The World War at an end. The news reached Calcutta shortly after 9 O’clock last evening. Within a few seconds afterwards posters and printed slips were issued from The Statesman’s office and were distributed as widely as possible by the members of the staff with the aid of motorcars while the telephone exchanges were also set to work. (November 12, 1918)

WHEN Mr Gandhi launched his passive resistance movement a little more than a month ago, he backed the good horse Satyagraha, if one may adopt a sporting simile, for the double event. He professed complete confidence in the adequacy of “soul force” to override every measure and every authority which failed to meet with his personal approval: but in drafting the “Satyagraha” now he introduced a significant addendum which indicated that, should passive resistance fail, the mundane weapon of active resistance might justifiably be brought into play. The signatory of the “pledge” bound himself not merely to disobey the anti-anarchist legislation but also “such other laws as a committee to be appointed hereafter may think fit”. This clause must have struck many of Mr Gandhi’s warmest admirers as artificial, and as detracting woefully from spontaneity of the opposition to the Rowlatt Bills, but from the point of view of the agitators it had the advantage of enabling them to throw over “soul force” in case it should be found insufficient for their purpose. That contingency has now clearly arrived. (April 9, 1919)

WE have been given the glad tidings by the Punjab chief minister, the Rt Hon’ble Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi that a plan is under way to widen the existing roads in the province. This will certainly widen the circle of his friends. Or perhaps it will not. The chief minister (he looks the part, does he not?) ought to have concentrated more on road management and road engineering. For instance, it is not possible to widen Hall Road without forcing the shopkeepers not to encroach on half the road displaying their goods in the open. The shopkeepers will not cooperate and the road like many others in the city will remain blocked and make the free flow of the traffic impossible. Another problem is the collection of rain water on our roads because it has no proper drainage. Go to Husain Chowk in Gulberg after it has rained just a little. You will find a considerable part of the roads in all directions navigable. So what do we do?

THIS is entirely for your manoranjan. Fazal Mahmood the great pace bowler of the 1950s writes in his book, From Dusk to Dawn:

“Rain dominated the first three days in the Lord’s Test, and the match started on the fourth day. We were all out for 87 runs. England declared its first innings at 117 for 9. Khan Muhammad got five wickets and I got four. However, I shall remember the Lord’s Test for the meeting with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the Buckingham Palace. Because of rain, the customary ceremony was held in the Palace, which was a rare occasion. All the members of the Pakistan team were introduced to the Queen. When my turn came, the Queen, while shaking hands with me, looked into my eyes and went on to meet the other players. After shaking hands with the last player in the queue, the Queen came back to me and said: ‘You are a Pakistani. How do you have blue eyes while the others do not?’ ‘Your Majesty, the people coming from the northern areas of Pakistan do have blue eyes,’ I told her. The Queen was amused. Later, I was also invited to attend the Queen’s garden party.”

Quite modestly, Fazal does not tell us that E II R had fallen for him hook, Line and Sinker.

Mourning not war, but water-deaths

BY the time this was written, newspaper reports said nine people, including some children, had lost their lives and around 2,000 were in severe discomfort, many of them in hospitals — for no fault of theirs. The dead were gone beyond pain but those struggling to survive were under varying levels of medical attention or inattention. Quite a few, it was said, were refused medical first-aid by some hospitals that opened their doors only after they were persuaded to be human by enraged public protests.

All of this adds up to a great deal more than you need to plunge a normal human being into a slough of despair. Those who died, and those who were hospitalized, and those who had to suffer at home, were not war casualties — but water fatalities and casualties. They died, or are now battling with death, had committed no breach of law or morality. These hapless innocents had only drunk water, the only water available to them, in the best of faith. That water was unfit for humans.

What renders this trauma unendurable even for the hardy residents of Karachi, inured to suffering, pain and humiliation, that it has resulted from a tragedy that could be foreseen some years ago. It should have been much easier for the present administrators to see it coming now. Who does not know that in Karachi the quality of water — when available — cannot be trusted in the form it is supplied? In most homes of even modest means, the housewife or the mother, take extra precautions before water is considered fit to be consumed in drinking or cooking.

Let us pay our boundless thanks to the governor and the chief minister. They have acted quickly, though only after the tragedy. An inquiry had been ordered. The bereaved families may receive compensation up to Rs 100,000 for each life lost. This is some consolation — only because we know there was little the bereaved families could do if even this measly consideration was not shown. Many of us may recall a Hollywood film “Give us this day,” in which the wife of a man, killed in an accident on a construction site, was awarded “compensation” that was several times more than what is on offer in Karachi for each life lost to poisonous drinking water. Holding that cheque in her hand, the widow in her inconsolable sorrow only said: “Is this the price of a man!” But in our insensitive culture, something is always better than nothing because the alternative to a pittance is — nothing. So, we have to be grateful for small mercies from our governor.

Water is the most primary of all primary supports of life — all life, human, animal, vegetable. It is time all of us in this city began to do some earnest and hard thinking about water. Is it not something of an unmitigated shame that, sitting by the seaside, we don’t have enough of potable water to drink? And not very far from us is the point where the great Indus pours itself out into the Arabian Sea. What an irony: With endless availability of water in easily accessible vicinity, we know nothing better to do than to be ceaselessly wailing about water!

From Gwadar in Pakistan one can almost swim across to the yonder coast of the Gulf and see how they have turned their desert into lush green parks. One of the finest golf courses in the world is now to be found where until almost yesterday there only were endless deserts. We were never so totally bereft of water resources as the Gulf states were until only a few years ago. In most of the greening of the Gulf States, gardeners from Pakistan have lent a pioneering hand.

What prevents us from doing what has been done just across that narrow stretch of water called the Gulf? We can almost see those green coasts standing at the Karachi harbour. The only explanation put forward is that we do not have the kind of finance needed to treat seawater. Now this is just so much of balderdash. No price is insupportable when the need is water. This excuse or pretext must be abandoned at once. Clean and wholesome water in adequate quantity must be made available. This is unquestionably the very first obligation of the state with pretensions to being civilized. Water comes first, even before bread or bed or law and order later.

How many more water-deaths are we waiting for before we shall settle down to do what expressly needs to be done? One is forced to look for the under-the-surface factors that have muddled all thinking abut the water problem in Karachi? One answer that occurs to mind instantly is “vested interests.” In our situation it is vested interests that cause and promote social and economic distortions. What person with a pair of eyes cannot see that over the years we have come to have a water tanker mafia? It thrives on water scarcity.

It is now a giant vested interest and one that is protected. What happens to it if by some marvel Karachi becomes self- sufficient in water and is no longer at tankers’ mercy? Some of the most intractable problems for Karachi are, in one way or another, the “gift” of some mafia. Most of the crime has some mafia behind it, notably car and motorcycle lifting. A much more menacing vested interest is the road transport mafia. It has destroyed Karachi Circular Railway (KCR) and had nearly stifled the national railway network. So pervasive and pernicious are its tentacles that any effort to restore the KCR to life is shot down instantly. Imagine, the enlightened new governor of Sindh, who is not stranger to the London Underground, has started talking of more buses for Karachi.

There are nations who have been taking land from the oceans and here we are unable to take some water from the sea and make potable. Every civilized city of the size of Karachi is served by urban railway network, most of it underground. In Karachi, where on an average half a dozen lives are lost to road transport, anyone talking about KCR is throttled. More than half of the population in Karachi does not get enough water. We have seen what is the quality of water if it is it is available.

Now, the final question: how long will the government of Sindh go on compensating lives lost to dirty water as a rate of Rs100,000 per funeral?

War against the billboards

Those of us living in Karachi who thought the city would be safe from the crazed fanatics who tore down billboards in Peshawar or Multan better think again. In fact, in Karachi’s case the initiative for a needless ‘war’ against billboards featuring women has come not from those on the fringe right but from the city council itself.

A report carried by the Reuters news agency on June 26 quoted the city Nazim, Naimatullah Khan, as saying that the city council had passed a law banning the “unnecessary depiction of women in advertisements”. He said the practice of using women, apparently unnecessarily, in advertisements was both “vulgar and obscene”. A council member from the PPP, Saeed Ghani, was also quoted and he said that the Jamaat-i-Islami, which controls the city government, had wanted a complete ban on women appearing in billboards but that his party had fought and forced the city council to use the qualification “unnecessary”.

Any sensible person’s gut reaction is that how in the world can anyone in their right mind think that our billboards have ads that could be called vulgar or obscene. A young man and a young woman eating an ice cream cone or a young woman drinking milk apparently seem obscene and vulgar to some people.

Clearly, the perception of vulgarity in that case is coming not from watching the young man and woman eating ice cream or even sipping a cup of tea but from within the mind of the person who finds all this obscene. Perverted and sick people will always fund the most innocent and wholesome of things indecent and vulgar and it is they, like the president recently said, who need to get their heads examined.

Pakistani advertisements are not vulgar or obscene by any stretch of the imagination. What they perhaps are is modern and that is something that the more retrogressive elements cannot stomach. It is time that those who value their rationality and are forward looking — and there are many such people in Karachi — got together and spoke against such antics.

People must not allow the religious parties to shove their rigid and inflexible (and generally flawed) interpretation of faith on all of society, least of all in the form of a law that bans “the unnecessary depiction” of women in billboards. In any case, who is to decide what is ‘necessary’ and what is ‘unnecessary’ since the difference between the two is essentially a matter of opinion and perception. Surely, the city council has other more pressing issues to deal with.

How about passing a law that sets down stiff penalties for water tankers who charge more (all of them do) than the rate set by the Rangers? Seriously, when will our legislative bodies stop involving themselves in complete non-issues and begin passing laws that actually help the people who elected them?

Policeman as neighbour

A very distressed reader from Clifton wrote to the Notebook about the water shortage in his area, thanks to the presence of a senior police officer. Here is what he has to say:

“I am a resident of C-1 in Block 2, Kehkashan, Clifton. I have had a water connection since 1982 and have been paying my water bills regularly since then. For all this period, I had no big problem with the water supply, but for the past few months I am not getting a single drop of water.

“This happened after an additional connection, backed by a suction pump, was given to a vacant plot owned by a police officer of AIG rank. The officer lives in the house next to the plot and ever since the new connection was given many houses have stopped getting water. Besides this, the officer also has been given two additional connections to his house and these two have suction pumps. You can very well imagine that with three extra connections, all supported by suction pumps, the rest of the houses in the neighbourhood hardly get any water.

“I have no objection if someone has more than one connection provided that he or she pays for it according to the size of the pipeline and water discharge. However, that is not the case with this police officer. Many residents have been to this gentleman a number of times and told him of our problem but he doesn’t seem to be bothered at all. They have also approached the managing director of the water and sanitation (W & S) department and its local staff but neither of them could offer any help.”

Harsh or cynical as it may sound, it is probably unrealistic to expect the W & S department to come to the assistance of these residents. The local staff of the department have told the residents that they cannot do anything to help them because they are the ones who probably gave the officer the illegal connections.

It must be extremely frustrating to pay water taxes and then to see your share of the water going to someone who has an illegal connection and is probably not paying a penny for it. The residents should know that according to the water and sanitation department’s own survey report, several police stations in the city, the Sindh headquarters of the Rangers and several army installations all have illegal water connections.

Bad concert

The city has its fair share of music concerts and most them provide an excellent way of getting some entertainment. But once in a while, they can turn unruly.

Recently, a solo show by the increasingly popular Noori at the Marina Club in Defence turned nasty.

Solo shows are not the norm in Pakistan, and the fact that Noori had chosen to do this was a big thing for fans of good music. The show, named after one of their hits, was called ‘Suno key mein hoon jawan’, was scheduled to kick off at 10.30 but did not begin a few minutes before midnight. Why can’t those who organize such shows get their act together because expecting a large crowd to wait peacefully for 90 minutes is asking for too much.

Two versions are doing the rounds as to what caused the trouble that night. Some say that the band started off well, but a few songs into their performance someone accidentally tripped over a power cable which came out and the music stopped. While much of the audience remained calm, waiting for the show to resume, some people began throwing bottles on the stage. First plastic and then glass bottles were thrown. In order to save themselves, the band went off the stage and did not return.

The other version is that the crowd started pelting Noori with projectiles because they arrived so late and so the band called it an early night. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but whatever happened, such things are not good for for those who go to such shows or for those who organize them.

Technical glitches are bound to happen in live concerts. Perhaps the crowd too should have contained its anger because it is difficult to sing when you have glass bottles headed in your direction.

Manhole death

How many deaths is the city government going to tolerate before it gets its act together and does something about the thousands of open manholes in the city. On Friday, a 13-year-old girl studying in Class VI fell into one of these death traps in Korangi and died.

The city’s open manholes have taken a heavy toll on Karachi’s population, especially children in impoverished neighbourhoods who are more likely to venture out of their home unaccompanied. And the problem isn’t restricted only to places like Korangi, go for a drive in Clifton, Defence or PECHS and you will find an open manhole almost on every street.

Will the civic agencies please do something about this before another innocent child is killed?

— By Karachian

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