News & Views … With Minimum Comments
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“Where There Is a Will, There Is a Way”
India Today, November 26, 2007: “Best maintained city…Surat, Gujrat. For the moneyed but filthy city of diamonds and silks, the 1994 plague was a wake-up call. Since then, its transformation has been nothing short of a miracle. What differentiates Surat from the rest of the county? Six-lane roads, a rare sense of public awareness when it comes to civic cleanliness, and a municipal body which takes its job seriously. Thanks to S. R Rao, former municipal commissioner of the city and Gujrat’s urban development secretary, the city with a population of 35 lakh has a zero-garbage system on its 28 main roads. Littering on these roads, which are scrubbed clean by 1,600 sweepers every night, entails a fine. Gaurav Path, the road that leads to the airport, might be flanked by 300 odd slums, but its parking spaces, street furniture and service roads make it look like a street in Singapore. Even the slums - 95 per cent of them are covered by the city’s solid waste management system - have basic infrastructure. And Rao puts it. ‘Where there is a will, there is a way.’ ”
Can we in Pakistan cite a single city, or a single bureaucrat, or a single ruler to match the record of Mr. Rao?
The Bureaucratic Broom
India Today, November 26, 2007: “In Ghaziabad, Muncipal Commissioner, Ajay Shankar Panday takes up broom as his first step in his office every day. ‘If Gandhi could clean his home, toilet and even his cell in the prison everyday, during the freedom struggle, why couldn’t I’ ,., says Mr. Ajay. Sweeping his office, collecting the garbage in a dustbin and emptying it in a box outside, says Panday is a little step in that direction. The 16 lakh people who throw garbage outside, and generate thousands of tonnes of waste everyday, it is just not possible for the odd 4,000 sanitation staff to keep the city clean. Spare 10 minutes everyday for cleaning your surroundings, and you would create 160 lakh minutes of daily cleaning without putting any financial burden on the city revenue.
Panday further became a news when he officially routed the 10-15% commission which otherwise the contractors paid under the age-old ‘commission system’ to the city officials, now came to be legally to the city Muncipal Corporation. This step alone, ‘made the city richer by Rs. 50 lakh in just six months’.”
Comments: a few years ago, some 100 fresh Indian Administrative officers, popularly known as IAS officers, (equivalent to our DMG cadre officers), wrote a petition to the government against a dozen secretaries, their ultimate bosses, stating that these secretaries being absolutely corrupt were a cause of disrepute to them. Holding a broom in that sacred hand which has just cleared the CSS examination…Are we crazy to expect such lowly services from such lofty minds?
Rot at the Top
India Today, November, 2007: “In six years, 17 officers of the rank of Brigadiers and above have been indicted in corruption and misappropriation of funds. In a series of raids conducted by the CBI, Major General Anand Kumar, a serving high ranking officer in uniform, who had recently been awarded the 3rd highest peacetime award, with the permission obtained from the Defence ministry for the first time, and in an unprecedented manner, was arrested, and an amount of some 50 crore rupees was recovered from him. He has his real estate spread all over the country.
“One, Lt. General Sahni says, ‘They, (officers), cannot remember a time when the army had caught so many of its generals with their hands in the till, but one loathes to call it an epidemic’.
“Despite exemplary punishments being meted out to senior officers of the Indian army, a series of graft cases shows that the malaise is deep-rooted. In the army it used to be an exception to be honest, (Indian army has 732 brigadiers, 213 major generals, and 60 Lt. generals), the 17 of such cases are a friction.
“Vijay Oberoi, a former vice chief of the army, says, ‘The army must be commended for speaking about misdemeanors of its officers’ “.
Comments: The army in Pakistan follows a wonderful motto within its own perimeters, which is, “Mun Tora Haji Bag-0-yum, To Mura Haji Ba-go”. Corruption resides outside cantonments.
The Most Dangerous Country: Pakistan or Iraq or…?
Newsweek, October 29, 2007: “The most dangerous nation in the world isn’t Iraq, it’s Pakistan”. The greatest danger is that the whole nation seems to be saying that this is not our watch, this is not our war… few Pakistanis have any desire to live under the militants rule. The trouble is, the country’s moderate alternatives have become almost as unpopular. Musharraf won a third term as president by a unanimous Electoral Assembly vote on Oct. 6, (heavily boycotted by the opposition). In a recent nationwide poll by the International Republican Institute, however, he earned a dismal 21 percent approval rate, Bhutto fared little better, scoring a pitiful 28 percent.
Comments: no comments.
Time of Flux
The Economist, October 20th, 2007: “In Larkana, in this time of flux, Miss Bhutto’s estranged uncle and political rival, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, stands as a symbol of the political status quo. On the forecourt of his splendid hacienda, surrounded by his family’s 10,000 acres of land, he says of his niece’s putative deal-making, ‘It’s disgraceful and any government that emerges from it won’t last six months. Then we will have another military dictatorship’. Meanwhile, in a courteous and timeworn ritual, he beats off a large crowd of his followers, as one by one, they line up to clasp his knees.”
Comments: President Musharraf has recently visited Data Darbar, and he may also visit other shrines via Washington. The prediction of six months is so wrong that it hardly warrants any comments.
People’s Moral Like aTent
Time, November 19, 2007: “Morale has folded like a tent. (The troops) don’t have the equipment, and they don’t have the support of the populace”, says retired Lt. General Talat Masood.
“Pakistan’s state of emergency….Pervez Musharraf infuriates his people, and embarrasses Washington, by cracking down on democracy. Will that help him fight the war on terrorism? Probably not … but it was not the extremists who bore the brunt of Musharraf’s wrath. Indeed, even as his regime cracked down on lawyers, journalists and human-rights activists, it agreed to a ceasefire with a powerful militant leader who had taken 213 soldiers hostage in the lawless northwestern region. The irony was not lost on Asma Jehangir, Pakistan’s best-known human rights activists, who wrote in an e-mail from house arrest, ‘Those (Musharraf) has arrested are progressive, secular minded people, while the terrorists are offered negotiations and cease-fires.’ “
Comments: President Musharraf himself answers these flimsy charges when he says, “The overall situation has improved considerably, the democratic system is functioning according to the program and terrorism has been controlled to a great extent”.
Exit Wound
Time, December 10, 2007: “Pakistan’s leader leaves the army, but his war on the constitution continues. …But regardless of what outfit he wears, Musharraf has left Pakistan with a tattered constitution patched with amendments and filled now with so many loopholes justifying his rule that it resembles a crocheted doily, ready to be thrown over whatever ugliness the next ruler creates in pursuit of power.”
Comments: “We understand our society, our environment better than anyone in the West (…which has an) unrealistic obsession with your form of democracy, your human rights and civil liberties… which you took centuries to (evolve), but you want us to adopt in months…this is not possible”. - President Musharraf.
The Next Cop in Kabul
In his article “Daughter of the West” Tariq Ali,writes at the end, “The generals who convinced Benazir that control of Kabul via the Taliban would give them ‘strategic depth’ may have retired, but their successors know that the Afghans will not tolerate a long-term Western occupation. They hope for the return of a whitewashed Taliban. Instead of encouraging a regional solution that includes India, Iran and Russia, the US would prefer to see the Pakistan army as its permanent cop in Kabul. It won’t work. In Pakistan itself the long night continues as the cycle restarts: military leadership promising reforms degenerates into tyranny, politicians promising social support to the people degenerate into oligarchs. Given that a better functioning neighbor is unlikely to intervene, Pakistan will oscillate between these two forms of rule for the foreseeable future.”
Who Appeared Most on the Title Page of India Today?
India Today, November 19, 2007: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf can’t stop making news. India Today did 15 cover stories on him in the past eight years, making him one of our most featured leaders.
Comments: Bhutto senior died yearning to appear even once on the title page of Time, while General Zia appeared more than once. Gandhi, even though recommended twice for the Nobel Prize, yet could not get it, though now they repent for the lapse. The people of Pakistan rejoice at the singular honor accorded to President Musharraf by India Today.
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