OR at least no purpose that rational man/woman can readily identify. Forty odd years after the fact no one has been able to satisfactorily explain why Pakistan’s one and only Field Marshal, Ayub Khan — victor of battles unknown to military history — laid the foundations of Islamabad.
As students we were told it was more central than Karachi, geographically safer, presumably from Indian attack. An argument which looks rather dated now that any kind of confrontation with India, warranted or unwarranted, seems to be the last thing on the minds of the new breed of generals dedicated more to such useful pursuits as real estate development than to anything as antiquated as war or national security.
In General Headquarters operational plans and maps may not have changed — after all, appearances have to be kept — but the ethos of things has. Our embattled or endangered frontier was always the Indian border, the army looking east and training its guns in that direction. Not any more. For the first time since 1947 — when Pakistan was born amidst darkness and confusion and Punjab’s rivers became red with blood — the army’s principal focus has shifted westwards.
Doing sentry duty for the United States along the Pak-Afghan border and garrisoning restive, mineral-rich Balochistan are its topmost priorities, next of course to the real estate mania gripping its higher echelons. Every piece of untouched or virgin land, be it next to Islamabad or Rawalpindi or as far away as Gwadar, and some enterprising soul, usually with impeccable defence credentials, is seized with the idea of turning it into another glittering resort.
Houses for the poor or even the middle class? Forget it. Farmhouses or mock-haciendas for the moneyed and tasteless is the new art form at which the country is excelling. There’s almost a race on to get ahead in the property business but, Allah be praised, defence housing authorities are beating all other comers.
This is not to forget property developers (developers?) from the Gulf who, thanks to their high-level connections, are also making sharp inroads into this business. Along Islamabad’s roads hang endless adverts about their plans. And in Karachi of course two entire islands have been given/sold by the federal government to their kind, over the feeble protests of the Sindh government which is murmuring disapproval, saying it wasn’t consulted. But who cares? Since when did the objections of the Sindh government count for anything?
Although it must be said that the Sindh chief minister, Arbab Ghulam Rahim, very much a child of the establishment (which high-rise politico in this dispensation is not?), stands up for Sindh when he has to.
He took an unequivocal position against the Kalabagh Dam which I am sure could not have endeared him to the powers-that-be at the centre. He does what he can to resist the MQM’s never-ending demands, co-existing with the MQM being among the toughest political acts to perform in Pakistan today.
And he somehow manages to avoid the kind of unabashed, no-holds-barred Musharraf flattery at which the Punjab chief minister, the honourable Pervaiz Elahi, has come to excel. Pervaiz Elahi’s signature tune these days is that Gen Musharraf, in the higher national interest, must be elected president-in-uniform not just once but over and over again. Better music for presidential ears would be hard to compose.
Arbab Rahim may have his faults but he is yet to soar to such heights. Which doesn’t mean he has been able to stop the ‘sale’ of the two islands. As for the fishermen being evicted from them, they are howling, but what do their protests matter?
Before I forget, a day or two ago there was an advert splash in most newspapers commemorating MQM Governor of Sindh Ishratul Abad’s four years in office. A four-page supplement (hopefully paid for) sang his praises and supposed accomplishments, almost making him into a super-hero.
We all know how Rahbar-i-Tehreek (Guide of the Movement) Altaf Hussain (whose friendship, God be praised, I can lay claim to) recently railed against ‘feudal’ tendencies in the MQM. Indeed, so strong were his feelings on this score that he announced his retirement from politics. For such well-wishers of the MQM as I, it was no small cause for thanks that this turned out to be a Maulana Fazlur Rehman announcement: announced and then indefinitely deferred.
What will the Rahbar make of the governor’s extended exercise in self-glorification? Even Chaudry Pervaiz Elahi, who in the last four years has conclusively proved he is behind no one in self-promotional adverts (some of them truly amazing), could not have done any better.
Consider also the case of the bright kid who is MQM Karachi Nazim. Every advert about something happening in Karachi comes under the bold headline: “The vision of City Nazim Mustafa Kemal”. Trying to upstage his betters, he must be out of his mind. Such tendencies in the Chinese communist party usually merited a long spell in a re-education camp.
But I started from Islamabad, always a shehr-i-bemaqsad — city without purpose — but now in the last four or five years the biggest monument to the screw-up theory of development. Other Pakistani cities have also been screwed up but none faster than Islamabad. The chairman or unelected mayor of the capital for the past few years seems to have a deep-seated hostility towards all things green. Green patches have never been dug up more mercilessly nor useless roads more assiduously built.
The result is not smoother traffic but gridlock and chaos. A badly-planned city to begin with (the Greek architects of Islamabad having a lot to answer for in this respect in the hereafter), Islamabad is now a showcase of civic mismanagement.
By the way, how many more years before the dug up side of the Islamabad highway from Rewat to the airport crossing is finally re-carpeted? It’s been like this for more than two years. Towards afternoon when trucks begin to move, huge traffic jams build up. But government worthies (what we call VVIPs) don’t travel on this road, preferring to fly out from the airport. So who cares?
On two of the many diversions on this longish stretch of road, the CDA (Capital Development Authority, more than its share of irony in this title) has stuck up this sign: “Thanks for patience and inconvenience”. Thanks for inconvenience: about sums up the story of Pakistan these days.
They have eased things in Delhi, the conversion to gas of most public vehicles taking care of much of the pollution which used to hang heavy over the city. An underground rail service, so far along a single axis, is a pointer to the future. Islamabad is moving backwards, creating anarchy and calling it development.
In Rawalpindi successive corps commanders have destroyed much of Saddar (once a beautiful, relaxed part of the city) turning it into a traffic nightmare, all by the simple expedient of laying an eight-lane autobahn (four on either side) through it. Has travelling been made easier? You should see this autobahn in the evenings.
Any focus on public transport in the broad spaces of the republic? You must be joking. Public transport has never been a priority and still isn’t. Railways are a shambles although the new railway minister, Shaikh Rashid Ahmed, another guy with a gift for self-publicity, keeps announcing new train services which are really old services under new names.
Recently he was bold enough to unveil a Buraq Express (Buraq being the legendary steed which flew across the heavens and carried the Prophet, peace be upon him, into the presence of the Almighty). On its first run the Buraq Express was five hours behind schedule.
Tailpiece: The real estate sector is proving a great spur to creative fiction. Prospective ‘developers’ buy land later, print exciting brochures first. Next to the second interchange on the Motorway as you travel from Islamabad to Lahore is Balkassar. Like every other piece of yet-to-be-bulldozed rural land, it is attracting the greed of property agents.
Beating everyone to the draw is a retired major-general hawking the delights of a vision on paper he chooses to call the ‘Islamabad Country Club’. Existing only in his imagination at the moment, the land advertised has no access to any road. But after reading the brochure you could be forgiven for thinking it was not of Balkassar the enterprising general was speaking but of the Swiss Alps.
The booklet, glossy and very expensive, is entertaining throughout but to give a taste of it here are the membership conditions, in the irreproachable English that graduates of the Pakistan Military Academy end up speaking if they are from an Urdu-medium background: “Following eligibility criteria is (sic) determined to provide opportunity to all including overseas Pakistanis to be part of this super scale (I jest not) prestigious community: parliamentarians, senior civil/military officials, district and tehsil nazims (God help us), overseas Pakistanis, industrial/corporate sector, professionals.”
When the rampaging mob in Julius Caesar, fired up by Mark Antony’s oratory, catches hold of one Cinna and he, pleading for his life, says he is not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet, someone from the crowd shouts, “Hang him for his bad verses.” If only this principle could be applied on a larger scale.