London blasts were heard in Sydney too

IT was not only the distance, temperatures were far apart too. Dubai was boiling at 45 degrees Centigrade when I left and 12 degrees Centigrade after almost 18 hours when I landed in Sydney. It was cloudy and pouring sporadically and wasn’t freezing, but I was shivering with the prospects of going back to 45 degrees Centigrade in just a few days.

It was good to be home again. The good old Sydney was at its best: the smooth running buses, trains and ferries; peak-hour traffic jams; the rush of cheering youths on the stairs of the Town Hall; pub-crawling yuppies in downtown; roaming tourists at the Darling Harbour; people with worried looks rushing to the safety of their homes and happy-go-lucky type enjoying the rest of the evening with poker machines or on street cafes.

Still, something wasn’t right. I used trains to cross the Harbour Bridge almost every day during my seven days in Sydney.

Faces that used to be buried in newspapers and books before were not fully concentrating on their reading or on the harbour views through windows. They were occasionally looking curiously at each other’s shoulders. An aura of fear was there. The faces of security guards strolling in trains were different too.

“I don’t hire our brothers any more,” a Pakistani friend who runs a security agency explained during a dinner party.

“If I do, I will be out of business, losing my contracts.”

Working as a security guard is the best and, at times, the only option for many new immigrants and jobless professionals, especially people with no residence status and for overseas students who are allowed 20 hours a week part-time work. A majority of people from the Muslim communities formed bulk of the force and bearded security guards were a common scene in Sydney.

Not anymore. The balance is now tilting in favour of Pacific Islanders, South-East Asians and people who don’t have Mohammed, Ali, Hussain or Khan as part of their names.

A friend who was aspiring for a job in the aviation sector is now settled to be self-employed saying job hunting was a waste of time.

“I can’t get a job at the airport with Khan as my last name,” he told me. These are really changing times, and Sydney, where Imran Khan is still remembered as a hero, is changing too.

London is thousands of miles away from Sydney but cultural and political proximities make it next door and blasts in London’s subway were heard loud and clear in the underground railway tracks of Sydney’s CBD.

It’s not surprising that Liberal’s government, traditionally not immigrant-friendly, has resorted to security measures similar to those taken by the Blair government following the recent blasts.

Muslims in Australia survived the aftermath of 9/11 and barring a few isolated incidents when some miscreants threw stones and home-made fire bombs at some small neighbourhood mosques, relations between Australian Muslims and other communities remained well and goodwill prevailed.

Australia remained a tolerant and a strong multi-cultural society where different communities live in complete harmony. But a repeat of London incident could make things worse for Australian Muslims.

Universities and educated sections of the society have been showing more tolerance than others and were the main force behind the largest peace rallies in Australia during the Iraq war. They too are starting to lose patience. “A society that tolerates the intolerant will find itself increasingly unable to preserve its freedom,” Professor Dennis Altman of La Trobe University writes in the Melbourne Age , a prestigious Australian daily.

It seems cracks are appearing in walls defending racial intolerance in a tolerant society.

IT was the 11th Annual International Mushaira in Sydney that kept caterers of Pakistani cuisine busy for almost a week. Many prominent poets from Pakistan and India were invited, and Sydney’s Pakistani elites were showing their hospitality and appreciation for poetry by organizing lunches and dinners.

It was the usual agenda: pre-dinner political discourse, then korma-biryani , post-dinner jokes and poetry after the sweet dish. It was a good mix that kept everyone entertained.

The Urdu Society of Australia, the organizer of the Mushaira, is a good outfit under its president Shabbir Haider, the nephew of famous Pakistani poet and writer late Zamir Jafri. The Society conferred Nishan-i-Urdu on invited literary figures and two local poets in appreciation of their services to promote Urdu literature.

The poets invited from India and Pakistan for Mushairas in countries like Australia are usually asked questions about the political situation back home instead of the latest trends in Urdu literature. This was troubling the popular Indian poet, Manzar Bhopali, who is also a political activist.

“Do I really look so miserable? Or the pain of the entire Muslim population of India is painted on my face?” he asked me during a dinner where every Pakistani he met was asking about the conditions of Muslims in India.

Elections without contest

The unopposed election of nazims of 35 of the 44 union councils in four talukas of the Tharparkar district has come as a major surprise to political observers. What is equally surprising is that all the unchallenged nazims belong to the Khushaal Pakistan Group backed by the Sindh chief minister.

It may be mentioned that 1,037 nazims, naib nazims and councillors have been elected unopposed in 11 of the 23 districts of the province. In any country with genuine democratic credentials, the election commission would have ordered a probe to determine the causes of unopposed election of such a large number of candidates, particularly of the re-election of those who cannot claim to have done anything for their people.

The Tharis are as hungry today as they were yesterday. In democracies, people get all kinds of facilities to use their right to vote because only elected representatives can solve their problems.

But in Sindh, police, revenue and irrigation departments appear to have been given a free hand to harass and intimidate the candidates.

The opposition parties have alleged that their candidates in different union councils have been ‘kidnapped’, ‘detained’ and ‘harassed’ on different pretexts to prevent them from filing nomination papers and the government-backed candidates appeared determined to get elected unopposed.

A number of opposition candidates have been implicated in water theft cases and many others have been given false revenue bills by the irrigation department.

A candidate in UC Hamal Faqir Leghari says he was given Abyano (water tax) bill of Rs400,000 although he owns only 30 acres of land.

In Shikarpur district, an opposition candidate for the post of union council naib nazim was disqualified under an allegation that he belonged to the Jaish-i-Muhammad.

The opposition has also said that new districts and talukas were created to serve the interests of feudal and tribal lords.

Constituencies have been altered to the disadvantage of opposition parties.

District nazims were removed on the plea that they would use their influence in the election but the opposition alleges that government resources are being used in the election campaign by ministers, advisers and leaders of the parties in the ruling coalition.

The scenario emerging in Sindh reminds one of another idea “Strengthening democracy in Pakistan: a practical programme” — jointly authored in February 2002 by Shahid Javed Burki, a former vice-president of the World Bank who also served as finance minister of Pakistan, and Dr Mohammed Waseem, a respected professor of the Quaid-i-Azam University.

They had warned against bypassing political parties at the national, provincial or local levels and said that their marginalization would “amorphise, anarchise and atomize society”.

They said: “Parties are ultimately unifiers by establishing linkages across local, district and provincial boundaries”.

The rulers need to study this paper to assess the wisdom of their decision to hold the local polls on a non-party basis.

Analysts believe that the policy of depoliticization is aimed at perpetuating the domination of the Khaki and its hangers-on.

By holding party-less local body elections, politics based on ethnicity and Biradarism has been given chance.

Those elected with support of an ethnic group and a Biradari will employ, construct road, street and school of their own group.

Anywhere else in the world, many leaders are remembered for their role in nation-building and unifying the people.

But in this country, earlier, it was Establishment vs. people, Punjab vs. Sindh, Urban Sindh vs. Rural Sindh and now thanks to ‘enlightened moderation’, it is one town vs. another and one Biradari vs. another.

If sectarianism and ethnocentric politics are a legacy of Gen Zia, the era of Gen Musharraf will be remembered for elections without contest.