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Bihar’s Bahubali Oil at a new high |
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Break for Army
A criminal force?
Flying footnotes
Bad English is not Inglish ‘The Knowledge’ seekers of London Inside Pakistan
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Bihar’s Bahubali IT is said with a tinge of resignation that many areas of Bihar may not have a government, but there are parallel governments galore run by criminals-turned-politicians. They are a law unto themselves and rule their fiefdoms with the brutality of the worst kind of dictators. Anant Singh, the MLA from Mokama, is an archetypal “Bahubali”. He was in his elements on Thursday and took two TV journalists hostage and beat them black and blue for daring to ask him about a case of alleged rape and murder of a woman. Such incidents take place so often in Bihar that they don’t make big news. But what happened after the assault was unusual. Not only the entire media community rose against the muscleman but he was also taken into custody.
Apparently, this could not have happened without a clear-cut signal from Chief Minister Nitish Kumar himself. To that extent, it is a major improvement, although earlier there was no response to Reshma Khatoon’s entreaties that she had been raped by the MLA and his henchmen and that they had threatened to kill her. The murdered woman’s brother alleges that the MLA had told him that he had killed the woman and was going to kill him also if he squeaked. To cap it all, Anant Singh when being taken to jail threatened the assaulted journalist that “tumko jail se hi marwa doonga”. That should not be treated as a power-inebriated man’s boast. Many such incidents have actually taken place. Mr Nitish Kumar must not only ensure that the man is expelled from his party and the Assembly, but also see to it that his goonda raj comes to an end. The Chief Minister’s decision to hand over the murder case to the CBI is a good augury. Not quite unexpectedly, former Chief Minister Lalu Yadav has used the incident to berate the Nitish government, conveniently forgetting that even his administration and that of his wife Rabri Devi were witness to many similar incidents. The best way to prove his solidarity with the forces of good will be to throw out such men from his party. The bandh that he and others have organised has caused inconvenience to the public. |
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Oil at a new high THE global oil price peaked at $96 a barrel on Wednesday and then fell to $93 on Friday. Normally this would have shaken economies worldwide. But it is business as usual. The world is learning to cope with a price of even $100 a barrel. A possible pick-up in US economic activity, fuelled by two interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, has also led to the price hike. Asian economies and stock markets, too, are booming. China and Taiwan have just raised the retail oil prices to make consumers bear partly the rising burden. India has frozen the retail oil prices till March next year. There are two reasons for this. One, the assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh are scheduled for December. Two, a hike in the oil prices will trigger an upswing in inflation. The government and the RBI get uncomfortable if inflation goes beyond 5 per cent. Because of the high global oil prices, the RBI did not cut the interest rate despite inflation being around 3 per cent. However, a freeze on the retail oil prices encourages consumers to splurge unmindful of the price. High growth rate and Indians’ craze for cars are driving up demand. However, this time of the year global demand for oil usually slows down and picks up in winter. Speculators are reportedly pushing up the prices. Funds released by the Federal Reserve’s two rate cuts are finding their way into commodity and share markets. OPEC, meanwhile, has agreed to raise its output this month, though it feels the existing supplies are sufficient. The Government of India need not rush in with a price hike. At best, the state and Central taxes on oil can be slashed. The government can draw comfort from Goldman Sachs’ prediction of the oil price being at $80 a barrel by April next year. |
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Break for Army THE Parliamentary Committee on Defence has only reiterated a long-standing demand of the armed forces and strategic experts with its recent call to withdraw the Army from internal security deployments and hand over the task to paramilitary and police forces. It has long been recognised that using the Army to police its own people or even fight sustained insurgency movements has many negative consequences, even if the Army on the surface is able to contain violence with its own forceful presence. When the task is as much about “winning hearts and minds” as about putting a bullet where it is needed, the military can find itself out of sorts. And using the military for non-military objectives can be a losing battle anywhere — as the NATO forces in Afghanistan are discovering. The Kargil Committee recommendations and the subsequent recommendations of the Group of Ministers have dwelled extensively on this matter, and some progress has been made. For example, the Border Security Force (BSF) is being withdrawn in phases from internal security duties and assigned to what is its actual domain — the task of guarding our borders. Dedicated units of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), after special training, have already been moved into areas like Kashmir to replace them. These are steps in the right direction, and the momentum must be maintained. But it is clear that for the ideal to be achieved — where no personnel of the armed forces is tasked with internal security missions — the country’s paramilitary and police forces need to be drastically overhauled. An incremental, piecemeal approach will keep us forever behind, and the Army will never be able to extricate itself. The government would do well to arrive at a schedule for withdrawal, as called for by the House panel. That way, it would commit itself to a planned programme of strengthening our supplementary forces. |
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If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day.
— Alex Noble |
A criminal force?
THE ghost of an outspoken judge is haunting the Indian establishment. A pronouncement by Justice Anand Narain Mulla of the Allahabad High Court nearly half a century ago is often quoted even today. He said: “There is not a single lawless group in the whole of the country whose record of crime comes anywhere near the record of that single organised unit which is known as the Indian Police Force..” The government was aghast and, not unexpectedly, moved the Supreme Court for expunction of those words. The Supreme Court did order the deletion on the ground that a decision on the issue before Justice Mulla did not necessitate that observation. But Justice Mulla stood his ground in his own inimitable way and seized an appropriate opportunity to comment on the controversy over his condemnation of the Indian police. He said: “As regards the complaint that the remarks are all too sweeping in character, there is a presumption that the evil is not equally sweeping. If, out of these two, anyone can be said to be more extensive and sweeping, it is the evil itself and not the observation.” Lawyers also point out that the Supreme Court ordered expunction of what it had seen as an obiter and did not enter the question whether it was too sweeping or contrary to facts. One can even argue that Justice Mulla’s bitter description of the Indian police is even more fitting today. The skeletons tumbling endlessly these days out of the capacious cupboards of the Indian police are ample evidence of the truth in the late Justice Mulla’s trenchant comment - irrespective of whether his words are on official record or only in popular memory. For quite some time media reports of fake encounters and the holes in the stories dished out by the police were pointing to a hitherto unimagined scale of the rot. And now a confirmation of the criminality of an alarmingly large number of India’s policemen is coming from the judiciary. When a High Court finds it necessary to sentence wholesale 10 policemen, including an Assistant Commissioner, to life imprisonment in a single case, as it happened in Delhi a few days ago, the situation must be frightening indeed for the citizenry. Yet we still do not know whether the unavailing defence of ACP Rathi and his men that the shooting of two innocent businessmen inside a car was a case of mistaken identity is the end of the horror story. Allegations have been heard from the side of the bereaved families that the policemen’s excuse that they were trying to eliminate a terrorist was a deliberate lie. What really happened, according to this version, was that the killer policemen carried out their lethal mission at the behest of a rival of one of the businessmen killed. If that is really so, the police marksmen had made their services available for what is called a contract killing or a supari in underworld lingo. This is not something previously unheard of. Remember the case of D.G.Vanzhara, a Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) in Gujarat, two other IPS officers and nearly a dozen other subordinate policemen now awaiting trial for abduction and murder of Sheikh Sohrabuddin and his wife? After the crime had been committed, DIG Vanzhara crowed at a press conference about his team’s “patriotism” in liquidating - in an encounter — a “terrorist” of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba, who had entered Gujarat to target Chief Minister Narendra Modi and other Gujarat political leaders. In reality, according to a more credible version, this was a contract job done by police gunmen on hire for private gain. Some marble dealers, troubled by extortionist demands of Sohrabuddin, a petty criminal, sought his elimination and found in Vanzhara a willing instrument. Sohrabuddin’s wife was killed to hide evidence. The DIG and his accomplices expected impunity. They looked for reward even from Chief Minister Modi, who had justified the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom as a natural “equal and opposite reaction” to the loss of some 60 lives in a mysterious burning of a railway train at Godhra. Criminality in policemen does not, of course, have the same motivation across the Indian landmass. Private gain by contract killing with State apparatuses misused for its facilitation is one. Commumalism is another impulsion which has worked with some virulence in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. In Punjab and Kashmir policemen turned lawless out of sheer desperation in containing separatist challenges. A variation of this phenomenon is now seen in Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar where policemen are finding it difficult to cope with the Naxalite challenge and are losing control over their own selves. And then there are policemen who take innocent people in custody, torture and kill them for nothing more than sadistic pleasure. All this in the Indian republic or state of the people for years with the administrative machinery seemingly unaware of the goings-on. True stories of the terrorisation of the people by the police are being told only now. They are just too many to be swept under the carpet. People are talking today and the courts are taking note. In one typical revelation, 2097 illegal cremations were done by the police in three crematoria in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar between 1984 and 1995. The Punjab police killed uncounted innocent men and did not even care to hand over the bodies to the relatives for dignified funeral. In the modus operandi of the Punjab police there are touches of the bizarre too. In several cases policemen collected rewards after “killing” men who were allegedly wanted, live or dead, and those “killed” have since been found leading normal lives! Three thousand people are still officially listed as missing in Punjab. The Punjab and Haryana High Court’s judgment earlier this month in the case of the abduction, torture and murder of Jaswant Singh Khalra should help in bringing some discipline back to the State police force. Khalra paid with his life for ferreting out the truth about the secret killings and cremations. A sessions court sentenced a DSP to life imprisonment and four other policemen to only seven years. The High Court has now ruled that the seven years is inadequate punishment and the four so leniently treated must also be behind bars for life. Punjab has been effectively rid of separatism but the problem persists in Kashmir in a more acute form in spite of all that police, military and para-military are capable of doing. Almost as a result the will of the forces of law and order to distinguish between rebels and peaceful citizens has dipped dangerously and atrocities are taking brazen forms. In Kashmir, UP and Bihar, a sharp decline in the moral authority of successive corrupt administrations led to a breakdown of discipline. Even the National Capital Region of Delhi has not been able to remain immune to the deadly virus. Here and also in Mumbai a kind of Ramboism by “encounter specialists”, who like cricketers flaunt their scores in century or half century, is responsible for cavalier killings. The spread of the evil of fake encounters is fanned by a system of rewards for unverified gallantry in fighting “dreaded criminals” or “Pakistani terrorists”. One or two at least of the “encounter specialists” are also alleged to have done some contract killings. There are no reliable figures yet of men and women killed in fake encounters or of custodial deaths in India. But the administrative culture of suppressing inconvenient facts is now facing challenges. Public opinion is becoming restive as, thanks largely to the competition in the media in exposing corruption, lurid details of fake encounters are being published and a still upright higher judiciary is hauling up lawless policemen. In Delhi recently, a retired ACP was sentenced to death for a custodial killing. To get his quarry in a petty case he had arrested the members of the fugitive’s family and when the man surrendered he tortured and killed him in custody. At his sentencing in court ACP Tyagi pleaded for mercy because he was now 65 years old. With the threat of condign punishment now overhanging many Punjab policemen especially, prominent politicians of the two main political parties, the BJP and the Congress, are both trying for an amnesty to those who killed perhaps more innocent citizens than terrorists. This amounts to ex post facto abetment of capital crime with a patriotic
veneer. |
Flying footnotes
AMONG the bleary-eyed passengers queueing up at the Chandigarh airport to catch the morning flight to the Capital, I spotted the familiar types. Trousseau-shopping NRI families with bags bursting at the seams and 30-something corporate types hanging on to their laptops for dear life. Bureaucrats headed for meetings in Delhi with fluorescent Post-its poking out of their folders and even a starlet from the latest hit music video in her over-the-top designer clothes and impossibly high stilettos. Nothing seemed to have changed since my last trip: the coffee machine was still a decoration piece and the lone PCO was unmanned and firmly locked. The security men on duty went about their perfunctory X-raying and frisking with the occasional steel bolt in someone’s leg setting off an alarm. I settled down in the aisle seat and found myself seated next to a young man who was reading a copy of The Economist. An elegant lady in the window seat counted her pre-take-off beads on a rosary. The airline was determined to prove its worth. “They always are when they begin operations”, Mr Frequent Flier seated three rows ahead informed us with an omniscient smirk. The cabin crew even managed to conduct the safety pantomime without a giggle or a snigger. Since it was just a 40-minute flight, breakfast would have to be served at the speed of light. “Vegetarian, ji” said Mr Safari Suit to the handsome steward who looked like he had stepped out of the local Government College only a year ago. “We are the world’s only vegetarian airline, Sir”, came the self-assured reply as the meal trolleys were wheeled out. As luck would have it, we hit a spot of turbulence and weird metallic noises filled the air. “Mummy….” wailed a frightened child. My neighbour’s Economist suddenly gave way to a Hanuman Chalisa booklet. The plane did a merry jig and the young woman in the sequined kurti across the aisle from me remarked, “The world’s first acrobatic airline!” But it was not funny anymore and the anxiety in the confined space was evident despite the fact that the pilot made the usual comforting announcements. After 10 minutes, it was all okay and the stewardess announced that the breakfast service would be resumed. “Oh ji! Concentrate on landing the plane safely. Never mind the breakfast,” said a strained voice in the rear. The plane ride was uneventful thereafter. We disembarked at Delhi and went our separate ways as co-passengers do, thankful that we were not part of a joint fatality statistic. At the check-in counter for my return journey later that evening, I was asked, “Same seat, Ma’am?” “Yes, thanks,” I replied with a grin that contorted into an anxious grimace at the thought of the see-saw ride that morning. Passenger memory is thankfully short, I reflected. That is why airlines, vegetarian or not, are still in
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Bad English is not Inglish MY friend Janet Caleb, a Britisher who married an Indian and is settled in Himachal Pradesh, showed me a letter when I met her the first time. The great-great grandson of a person who ruled India wrote it. When I read it, I was shocked by the numerous grammatical and spelling errors it contained. An average middle school Indian student would write better English, I thought. Mrs Caleb could read my mind. Visibly embarrassed, she told me in a classic case of understatement, “There is a language problem”. I was reminded of a retort the late V.K. Krishna Menon is believed to have made to an Englishman who complimented him for his excellent English: “While you inherited the language, I learnt it the hard way”. I recalled this incident only to suggest that just because a person was born into an upper class British family and lived in a manor house in Britain did not mean he would speak and write “Queen’s English”. Otherwise, every Hindi-speaking person would have written like Munshi Prem Chand. In other words, it cannot be presumed that you would write good English just because you speak English. For an overwhelming majority of Indians, English is not their mother tongue. They learn the language at school and in college. Some of them learn it well and some do not. There is another group that can write well in English but cannot speak in the same manner. When Kerala Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan visited Infosys in Bangalore last month, its chief executive S. Gopalakrishnan, who took him around the beautiful campus told him that Malayali youths were not fluent in spoken English, though they were good at work. This is a common problem those who pass out from non-English medium schools face. In an extremely sorrowful incident, a college student from such a background committed suicide because he could not cope with English. The incident forced Mrinal Pandey, who edits Hindustan, to argue in an article in English that the teach-in-Hindi only policy in the Hindi heartland has caused enormous damage to the employability of the youth from the area. There is also a small group of Indians, who can use the English language effectively in all forms. One reason why our BPO and Information Technology industries are doing well is because of the large pool of English speakers they can draw from for writing software and answering calls from their international customers. China has been trying hard to catch up with India on the English language front and once it succeeds, our monopoly, if not superiority, in this field will end. Unlike Chinese, Indians have been exposed to English for nearly four centuries, i.e., ever since English traders arrived at Surat in 1608 seeking Jehangir’s permission to build a factory. However, they began learning English only after the British set up a college at Fort William in Calcutta to train its civil servants. It was left to William Carey, a polyglot, who was quick at mastering new languages, to teach Bengali to the would-be civil servants. In due course, there arose a great demand for ‘clerks’ who knew English. The upper caste Bengali was the first to learn the language and he was also the first to demand English-medium schools as can be inferred from a memorandum submitted to the British by Raja Rammohun Roy and others in the 18th century. Thus came into being what is called the “Babu English” which continues to survive, much to the consternation of the purists. It retains many characteristics, which individually can be identified as Victorian, Elizabethan and modern. Despite such diversity, the language remains the quintessential “Indian English”, also called Inglish, Hindlish, etc. Every language evolves. I grew up on the advice proffered by M.V. Kamath, who wrote a primer for journalists, and Khushwant Singh, an illustrious practitioner of the profession, that daily reading of the King James Version of the Bible, “the greatest work in prose ever written in English” was a sure way to learn the language. Today I prefer the New International Version, which is simpler and free from archaic “speaketh” and “knoweth”. Even in Britain, English was not the favourite language of the upper crust of society, who preferred to speak in Latin like in Bengal where the Bhadralok used Sanskrit, instead of Bengali which was considered “fit only for women and demons”. The English language acquired the status it has today only after Geoffrey Chaucer began writing in “dialects”. Inglish has also evolved. Today we have a flourishing literature in the language that even wins the Booker. Yet, if every application for jobs still has expressions like ‘for favour of your kind perusal’, ‘I beg to offer myself as a candidate’ and ‘your most obedient servant’ ‘thanking you in anticipation’, it has something to do with the way the language is taught in schools. When rote learning is encouraged and teachers are ill equipped to teach the language, Babu English is bound to thrive. Indianism has taken such roots in the language that it is difficult to excise it. “As it is” may not be strict English but it has become an ‘integral’ part of English “as it is” used in India. Binoo K. John’s attempt to study the phenomenon in Entry From Backside Only - Hazaar Fundas of Indian-English (Penguin, 2007) fails because he sees bad English as Indian English. This is not a comment on his credentials. He was for a while my colleague at the Indian Express where he wrote pithy ‘third edits’ which were a pleasurable mass of words, if not ideas. Though I played a small role in the baptism of his son Zubin, I was not close enough to know that Arundhati Roy trusted his editing skills so much that she gave him the manuscript of The God of Small Things before it was sent to the publisher to become a literary sensation. Binoo’s is a hilarious book. The author’s eye for details and his sense of humour stand him in good stead in the writing of the book. He has quotation after quotation of bad English drawn from official documents, advertisements, books, pamphlets and letters to the editor that you can’t “repress” what Dr Johnson, who fought a war against plain language, calls “instantaneous motions of merriment”. Bad English does not necessarily mean Indian English. Otherwise, the horrible English contained in the user’s manual of a pen drive, made in Seoul, I bought recently would have forced me to conclude that it was a specimen of “Inglish”. No, it was Korean English or Korenglish. I read Binoo’s book in one go during a train journey. At one point I left it on the seat and went to the loo. When I returned, I saw a passenger reading it with a lot of interest. The moment he saw me, he closed the book and handed it to me saying he was “just reading it for ‘time pass”. Soon, a vendor selling peanuts arrived. He shouted “time pass mumphali, time pass kharare mumphali”. An illiterate old man using Inglish to sell his stuff!. That is the power of the language. However, a study of the phenomenon requires the rigours of linguistic research that cannot be expected from a journalist, who lives from deadline to deadline. But if you just want to laugh at others’ bad English, Entry From Backside Only provides loads of it. |
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‘The Knowledge’ seekers of London LONDON – By night, Gezim Cokaj is a bouncer at a West End nightclub. By day, he is a seeker of ‘The Knowledge.’ “The Knowledge,” introduced in 1865, requires licensees of the city’s black hackney cabs to know 37,000 roads, monuments, hotels, pubs, police stations and hospitals in London, in addition to the 320 complex routes back and forth – they’re often different – between the city’s most important points. Every road within a six-mile radius of central Charing Cross must be committed to memory. Scientists at University College London in 2000 conducted scans of the hippocampus region of London cab drivers’ brains, the part of the forebrain that governs memory and spatial navigation, and found it was not only larger than that of the average population but grew bigger with more time spent on the job. Cokaj, a 37-year-old immigrant from Kosovo, figures it will be at least another year before he can hope to get his license. A few more than 24,600 people have mastered ‘The Knowledge’ and won London’s coveted black-cab licenses, the large majority of them white men. They are the perennially wisecracking, occasionally curt, always opinionated blokes familiar to everyone who’s ever been late, lost and loaded with money in London. Prone to calling female fares “luv” and aiming their large black vehicles like guided missiles down crowded thoroughfares, they’ve been known to toss tips out of the window in disgust at passengers who have had the cheek to question their route. This rarefied world has been rocked in recent weeks by a new initiative from Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has launched a campaign to attract more women and minorities into the hackney cab trade. Although a third of Londoners are of an ethnic minority background and more than half are women, only 5 percent of the city’s cab fleet are ethnic minorities and fewer than 2 percent are women, the mayor’s office said in announcing the program. Officials from the London Development Agency, which is overseeing the campaign, emphasize that the test will not be dumbed down. Instead, the $4 million program, popularly dubbed “The Ethnic Knowledge,” aims to provide a three-year training course, language and math help, child care and other boosts to up to 600 women and non-whites seeking to enter the quintessentially British brotherhood. There always has been a distinct class barrier between the city’s elite hackney carriages and their poor relations, the nondescript minicabs, booked in advance on the phone and not nearly so painful on the pocketbook. The minicab is a Toyota or a Volkswagen that shows up anonymously at your door, as often as not with a Punjabi, Pakistani or an Afghani behind the wheel. The city’s 43,000 minicab drivers are required only to have three years’ driving experience and pass a test showing they can use a map to plan a route. A hackney one flags from the street, should it deign to slow and collect you. Once inside its functional and roomy embrace, one is either ignored or lectured on the subject of the day. Which it is depends on one’s mood, which a London cabbie can sense with a sly squint into the rear-view mirror as keenly as a bartender. Famous for their maneuvering ability – a London cab, it is said, can “turn on a sixpence” – the barrel-shaped bricks stop at neither yellow light nor pedestrian to achieve their destination; the putt-putt of their diesel engines at full bore as much a part of the audioscape of central London as Big Ben’s chimes. The controversy over the mayor’s new program began almost immediately, as the London Cab Drivers Club organized a protest and began a major letter-writing campaign. Club members, who are scheduled to meet with representatives of the mayor’s office Friday, say the program to help minorities is unfair to those who spent years on their own to study for The Knowledge. They fear the city’s ambitious plan to turn out hundreds of new cab drivers will flood the market and inevitably diminish standards. “There has never been any history of racism within the cab trade – you’ve got only to look at the amount of black drivers and Asian drivers and drivers of other minorities that have actually got their license and gone to work,” said Alan Fleming, the club’s chairman. “But when you start to social engineer, all of a sudden when you’ve got a driver who’s black, people are going to look at him and say, `Did he get his license because he’s black? Or did he do The Knowledge?’ “ Many other drivers say they don’t fear expanding the pool of drivers as long as the standards remain the same. The cab drivers’ union has come out in support of the program, saying drivers run the risk of being “divorced from the community” if they do not become more
diverse. By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post |
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Inside Pakistan UNENDING political instability and the rising tide of jihadi terrorism in Pakistan are posing a serious threat to its economy. With rising food prices, the situation is looking grim. The State Bank of Pakistan, according to Daily Times, has warned of “food-related inflation and a yawning current account deficit, with debt steadily rising in the background”. There is a sharp rise in the oil prices at the global level. If Pakistan “lets the burden of this hike fall on the citizens, there will be riots in the streets”, the paper warns. Terrorism, almost uncontrolled so far, “has now challenged the economy with a choice: will it go on performing or will it panic and retreat? Foreigners are scared, international conferences aimed at attracting customers are being called off, cricket teams are reluctant to play in some cities they consider a target of suicide bombers. Travel advisories against Pakistan are becoming a norm”, Daily Times adds. The ongoing economic reforms may also get derailed. Who will form the next government is not clear. No one knows the economic agenda of the opposition. The Special Secretary to the Ministry of Finance, Mr Ashfaq Khan, however, claimed at Johns Hopkins University recently that “despite political differences, there is agreement in Pakistan on the general direction of the economy and the economic reforms introduced by the present government would be maintained”, according to Business Recorder. Pak-Afghan trade issues Pakistan and Afghanistan see immense mutual trade potential, but are unable to bring it to the desired level because of suspicions on both sides of the Durand Line. A more liberal regime, Pakistan appears to fear, may open the floodgates of smuggling from Afghanistan. But the Afghans refuse to buy the Pakistani argument. According to Business Recorder (Oct 26), “Afghan officials had raised their concern at a meeting of the Joint Economic Commission and a joint jirga a while ago. Both sides had agreed at the time that the Pak-Afghan Joint Business Council should be made effective to identify areas of cooperation between the private sectors of the two countries, and that the council would report its activities to the JEC for improvement of trade. They had also agreed to take steps for increasing Afghan exports to Pakistan…” However, “things have not moved at the desired pace…” The continuing unrest in Afghanistan may also have to blame for the poor Afghan exports. Najmuddin A. Shaikh, a regular contributor to Dawn, says in his article carried on October 31: “General Rick Hillier, the Canadian chief of defence staff, after a recent three-day visit to Afghanistan, estimates that it would take 10 years to train and equip the Afghan armed forces and the police to take on the Taliban threat and provide security.” Shaikh laments: “The picture is grim and there is no discernible light at the end of the tunnel.” There is, perhaps, realisation in the ruling establishment in Islamabad that the government made a mistake in deporting former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Jeddah after he had come back to Pakistan on September 10. At least, PML (Q) chief Chaudhary Shujaat Hussain and his camp followers must be thinking on these lines. The Chaudhary, who has a considerable support base in Punjab, wants to have an option of forming an alliance with the Sharif-led PML (N) to prevent PPP leader Benazir Bhutto from becoming Prime Minister again. The Frontier Post reports that the Chaudhary has “quietly conveyed a message to his party men that they should refrain from issuing any statement against the Sharif brothers and the PML (N) in future. This decision was taken at a strategy session (of their party) where most of the participants felt that the reconciliation with the People’s Party of Pakistan has damaged the PML (Q) to an extent where its chances to perform well in the coming elections have been compromised”. The General is, perhaps, fully aware of the mounting uneasiness in the ruling coalition as a result of his political reconciliation drive, benefiting Ms Bhutto. He has reportedly accepted Chaudhary Shujaat’s line and is not averse to rapprochement with Mr Sharif. As Nasim Zehra says in an article in The News (Oct 31), “General Musharraf was always keen on the reunification of the PML (Q) and the PML (N)”. But the indirect channels of communication between the General and Mr Sharif got choked as a result of the PML (N) leader’s deportation to Saudi Arabia. It is time for realpolitik in Pakistan. Anything is possible in the race for power. |
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