Public representatives vs public servants

THROUGHOUT the 1990s, it was the elected governments which were prematurely dismissed one after the other by the President before they could complete their tenure. Now in the first few years of the 2000s, it has become the practice for bureaucrats holding the top administrative positions in the Islamabad Capital Territory to be transferred or suspended before they complete their tenure of appointment.

The latest changes in the ICT administration involves three top positions: the Inspector General of Police, the Chief Commissioner and the chairman of Capital Development Authority (CDA). The outgoing chairman of CDA, Abdul Rauf Chaudhry, and the outgoing Chief Commissioner G.M. Khan, have just only completed six months of their tenure, while the IGP who has been suspended, Maj Muhammad Akram (retired), has served in the post for about 20 months. (For civilian officials in the bureaucracy, their tenure in a posting is three years, while for retired army officials, it is two years.)

Abdul Rauf Chaudhry, who was appointed the CDA chairman on April 30, 2003, had replaced Mir Laiq Shah, who also could not complete his tenure, the latter having been appointed CDA chairman in September 2001. Mir Laiq Shah had replaced Khalid Saeed, who was the CDA chairman before October 1999.

The outgoing IGP, Maj Muhammad Akram (retired), has been suspended roughly four months before the completion of his tenure in the posting, after an inquiry into the handling of the funeral demonstration in the capital last month staged by the supporters of the assassinated MNA Maulana Azam Tariq. His predecessor, Maj-Gen Zaheer Ahmed (retired), was also abruptly transferred in March 2002 after the attack on a church in the Diplomatic Enclave.

In fact, officers holding the position of senior superintendent of police (SSP) have also suffered the same fate in recent years. SSP Nasir Khan Durrani was abruptly transferred at the same time as the IGP, Maj-Gen Zaheer Ahmed (retired), i.e., in March 2002. Durrani’s successor, Syed Kaleem Imam, was removed in March 2003 after holding the post of SSP for only a year.

Besides these top level changes, a string of lower officials have also been abruptly transferred or suspended. The latest which took place last week include the transfer of a DSP, Traffic, reportedly for not being able to clear a traffic jam to allow the federal interior minister to pass through.

According to a report in the press last week, many postings, promotions and even extension of re-employment contract involving grade-20 to grade-22 positions have also been made during the past year without going through the proper channels, i.e., the Establishment Division, the Central Selection Board or the Federal Public Service Commission. In several cases, according to the report, individual requests for promotion or extension of re-employment contract were granted by the prime minister’s secretariat only to be cancelled a few weeks later.

If the relationship in the past between public representatives and public servants has not exactly been smooth sailing, that relationship appears to have hit the rocks now. The apparent message which the elected representatives are trying to drive home to the bureaucracy by all these sudden changes in its personnel is that it is they who wield the power over the bureaucracy.

The long years of military rule in the country had created a vacuum in governance which was filled in by the bureaucracy. Rather than being mere policy implementors, as public servants are in many countries, the bureaucrats here became actively involved in policy making and formulation. Whenever the politicians or public representatives had the chance to rule, they tended to rely on the bureaucrats for policy making.

Now for the first time in the history of Pakistan, the public representatives are revolting against this traditional role of the public servants. The seeds of this revolt were sown by the introduction of the local government system by General Musharraf.

Under this new governance system, the traditional power of the bureaucrats at the local level was challenged by the emergence of a parallel system of elected representatives at the district, tehsil and union council level. In fact, with the establishment of the local government system, the officers of the most powerful category in the bureaucracy, the district management group, who used to be the ultimate power at the local level, have now to serve under the elected nazims at the district and tehsil levels.

Little wonder the installation of local governments is reported to have hampered development work at the local level in some areas because of the rivalry between the public representatives and the public servants. In the case of one province at least, this rivalry even obstructed relief efforts during a natural disaster emergency.

In Islamabad, the tussle between the elected representatives and the bureaucrats has begun even before local government elections are held. Here in the capital, the CDA chairman, which was established in 1960 during the military rule of Field Marshal Ayub Khan, grew to become the all powerful, in conjunction with the CC and the IGP. Both the outgoing CDA chairman, Abdul Rauf Chaudhry, and the CC, G.M. Khan, were apparently acting too independently and authoritatively for the liking of the elected representatives. Their tough policies against encroachments and the illegal housing societies, and the determined drive in summer to close down private schools within Islamabad city established after 1999, were all measures which did not go down well with the public representatives, partly because these annoyed their voters.

Earlier this year, the powers of the CDA chairman had been reduced when two separate officers were appointed as the CDA chairman and the Chief Commissioner. Before the appointment of G.M. Khan as the CC when Abdul Rauf Chaudhry was appointed CDA chairman earlier this year, the positions of CC and CDA chairman were held by the same officer. Hence, Abdul Rauf Chaudhry’s predecessor, Mir Laiq Shah, and the latter’s predecessor, Khalid Saeed, were at the same time also the CC of Islamabad.

In fact, the credentials and experience of the newly-appointed CDA chairman — reportedly picked by the federal interior minister himself — are themselves tell-tale signs of the kind of job which the CDA is likely to be circumscribed to perform in future. The new CDA chairman has been credited with beautifying Lahore with recreational facilities like parks, and with the establishment of the food street there when he was the deputy commissioner of Lahore. Upon his appointment, he has also been widely quoted to have said that his priority would be to beautify Islamabad.

Apart from beautifying Islamabad, it would appear that the new CDA chairman is also being tasked to reform the all powerful CDA into something akin to a purely municipal authority serving the future elected ICT district government. He has reportedly said that changes within the CDA are necessary to improve its working, and that he would be making changes in the CDA management. He has also been quoted to have said that he would first set CDA in order and then take up other issues. True to his word, in his first few days in office, he has suspended something like 10 CDA personnel for “negligence” of duty.

“Taming” the bureaucrats in the CDA and the capital police to serve as public servants whose duty is to implement policies rather than formulate them is no easy task. In the words of a writer in Dawn last week, such a reform means changing the role of the bureaucracy in the public policy process from that of “steering the boat” to that of “rowing the boat”. The people of Islamabad would welcome this reform if it translates into an efficient administration which can upgrade the civic facilities in the metropolitan.

Tollinton to house a museum

For the first time in more than eight decades, a fairly successful attempt has been made to arrest the decay of Tollinton Market on The Mall. More than that the exquisite colonial period structure has been dedicated more or less to the purpose which was specified for this building when it was completed in 1863.

The Tollinton Market issue has passed through many controversies over the last decade or so. To begin with more than one department laid claim over its proprietorship and delayed unnecessarily the plans for building’s conservation. This period also saw art historians and architects criticizing authorities for adding to the complexity of the matter.

Starting from Manzoor Wattoo, under whose rule in 1994 the building was closed because of its precarious condition, the criticism passed on to Shahbaz Sharif, and then to two governors of the military regime, Mohammad Safdar and Khalid Maqbool.

What has finally been decided is that this building will house a museum. Will it be a city museum or a museum of national arts and crafts is yet to be resolved. Already there is thinking that it should be so fashioned as to portray Lahore through the ages, highlighting its art and crafts from the period of Hindu mythological prince Loh, the son of mythological Lord Ramachandra, who is understood to be the founder of this great city of South Asia.

Another suggestion is that it should display the arts and crafts of four provinces, particularly those which are feared to go extinct and are rarely employed in the modern era. The second option seems to be finding more favour with the project bosses who have already designed an art and craft bazaar as part of the project, which is nearing completion.

The arts and crafts bazaar has been designed in the eastern hall of Tollinton Market where 14 shops on both sides have been constructed. Each of the splendid shops has an arched wooden balcony with latticed niches. The managers of the project plan to show artisans from the four provinces and Kashmir at work in these shops and also ensure marketing of their products.

The other option focuses on an exhibition of the development of the city and its crafts through the ages. History and physical geography of Lahore, comprising mainly maps, plans and photographs and condition of each and every area and monument in the Mughal, Sikh and British periods, will form basis of the exhibition. A display of the works of art and crafts will be added later on. It will hopefully include textile and carpet weaving, woodwork, leather work, metal work, porcelain ware, armoury and other arts and crafts in different periods of Lahore’s history. It is almost impossible to revive Tollinton Market’s original architecture (of 1863). The structure which has now been restored belongs to 1920s when Sir Ganga Ram converted it into a municipal market. It was called Ganga Ram Market for a brief period between 1922 and 1927. Later it was renamed Tollinton Market, but it was no longer the old building.

The Tollinton was originally built to house the first Punjab exhibition. The building was completed in the late 1863 and the exhibition started on Jan 20, 1864. The purpose was to put on display Punjab’s agricultural products and manufacturing and art industry along with specimens of antiquity. The exhibition continued till 1870 when Prince Victor laid the foundation of the present Lahore Museum. The Tollinton was formally notified as a museum when Lord BH Beadon Powell, manager of the exhibition, became the first curator of the Lahore Museum, which covers an area of 27,850 square feet.

The Tajdeed-i-Lahore Committee, which was constituted in 2000 to take up restoration of some of the old buildings on The Mall and the adjoining streets to their original architectural splendour, is in charge of Tollinton Market’s conservation and conversion into a museum. The Parks and Horticultural Authority and the City District Government have joined hands to finance the job. But it is still to be decided who will ultimately own and manage Tollinton.

Project consultant Sajjad Kausr, a member of the National College of Arts faculty, says three western halls will be used for the museum while the central hall will serve as a sitting area where replicas of the colonial period furniture will be installed.

The building will have no cafeteria and eateries will be provided in the backyard. A green lawn will be developed and few shops for souvenirs and a parking lot for 40 cars provided in the basement.

Talking to this correspondent, he said restoration of the original structure was difficult if not impossible. If the original design is to be restored, then 15 to 20 feet of The Mall will have to be added to the structure. “What we are doing is conservation and restoration of the building as it existed in 1922.”

This job, too, was not easy because no repairs of the building had been carried out since 1922 and when the project was undertaken, the structure was about to give in. Huge walls separated the various halls, and arches had disappeared because of these ugly structures. Their demolition was not easy. The entire structure was full of shrubberies while wooden beams had been eaten up by termite. Many portions had fallen while others were in an advanced stage of decay. The building had no damp-proofing. Now that this important work has also been done. “We have saved the building for another 50 years,” said Prof Kausr. In all about 25 per cent of the backyard will be covered while the remaining 75 per cent will be an open area. As for the sort of museum to be developed in the main building, Prof Sajjad said he would prefer it to be a British period display centre, because it was a colonial building. Faqir Syed Aizazuddin is believed to have promised to donate his rich collection of the period to the museum.

A committee of experts and not a government department should manage the museum, like in the case of Mohatta Palace in Karachi, answered an NCA teacher when asked who should take care of the Tollinton Market after completion.

We have nothing to lose except Model Town

ON Tuesday, Nov 11, I read the following dreadful advertisement in an Urdu language newspaper:

“PROPOSALS ARE INVITED

“The Cooperative Model Town Society (1962), Lahore, requires different proposals from established, reputed and professional companies/ firms for establishing Garden Restaurant, Play, Amusement Park and Golf Course, etc., at the Linear Park, Model Town, Lahore, adjacent to Ferozepur Road, Lahore. The proposals should reach the undersigned within fifteen days of the publication of this advertisement.

“Secretary

“The Cooperative Model Town Society (1962) Ltd.’

“Model Town, Lahore.”

As you can see, the advertiser is the secretary of the society who is a nobody. The sinister, almost criminal, plan to vandalize the Linear Park must have been conceived by a qabza group headed by people who are far more powerful, far more pernicious and who have been trying to commercialize the most well planned residential colony in the country.

Let me digress here a bit. In the sixties, when Gulberg was coming up, my father was still alive. When he and I used to drive through the Main Boulevard, my father would, with an amused, cynical smile say: “I will not be there, son, but you will see that all these huge houses will give way to the most sordid commercialization this city has ever known. The owners of these houses or their successors will soon need more money than they have now. Therefore, they will sell off their grand bungalows which will be bought by shopkeepers who will turn Gulberg into another Gowalmandi or worse, an Akbari Mandi.”

“How do you say this?” I would ask my father.

“I have lived in this city longer than you have, son, and I know the way the Lahori mind works. As a rule the Lahori does not like open spaces. He loves to make money without deserving it and what better way to do this except by turning kanals into marlas and marlas into yards and yards into feet?”

Father was right, of course. It is not only the Main Boulevard. The shopkeepers are taking over the rest of Gulberg surely and inexorably. Father, however, did not or could not foresee all of it. Those who have grabbed property in Gulberg but do not want to be known as shopkeepers have gone and done one better, or worse. They have opened schools. But come to think of it, our English-medium schools are no better than shops where education is bought and sold. So we have a bazaar within a bazaar. Call it education bazaar or what you will. There is money to be made out of old houses turned into schools, colleges and academies and now computer centres. You can even have your own law college and name it after the Quaid-i-Azam. And the contagion has spread all over town.

Let me digress a bit more and tell you another story.

KL Gaba was born and bred in Lahore. At partition, he migrated to India but he could never forget the city of his birth. Somewhere in the seventies, he decided to see Lahore once again. So he came here and went round the city. He was horrified at what he saw: “This is not the city of my childhood, of my youth. The Muslims have turned Lahore into a huge Shah Alam Gate. They have converted the whole city into a shopping slum. This is not my city and I will never come here again.” And so Gaba went back to India and never came here again.

And now to return to Model Town.

What is a garden restaurant and what is a playland and what is an amusement park? And how many golfers are there in Lahore? A hundred?. Two hundred? And who plays golf anyhow? I put these questions to the Model Town Cooperative Society. Why did our fathers decide to live in Model Town when they had all their ancestral property in Akbari Mandi and elsewhere around the old city? Or does the society want to turn Model Town into another Akbari Mandi? A restaurant in a public park? Why don’t we visit the Bagh-i-Jinnah and see what the restaurants there have done to the place? I am positive that the proposals sought by the secretary of the society will soon lead to the complete disappearance of the Linear Park and of the hundreds of trees it now has. The restaurant proposed to be built there will soon lead to an invasion by khokhawallahs and all the ugliness that goes with them.

Where are the senior citizens of Model Town? Where is Ashfaque Naqvi? Where is Shoaib Hashmi and where is his wife Salima? And where am I? Shall we all of us take the monstrous vandalization of Model Town lying down and allow our sons and daughters to live in a huge new slum?

My appeal today is:

Residents of Model Town, unite! You have nothing to lose except the place where you and your four-bears have lived in freedom from the noise and pollution of the rest of the city. Act now. Tomorrow will be too late. Let it not be said of us that we allowed the society to turn Model Town into another Gujranwala.

Homelessness

Megacities provide residential accommodation to millions of people, but there are thousands who have nowhere to live. The homeless are often spotted sleeping on pavements, under flyovers and in deserted buildings. This holds good for Karachi as well as for most other metropolises in the Third World.

Here, the homeless find shelter in many places: on the footpaths of Sohrab Goth and on the vast ground under the Keamari Bridge; in the congested environs of Cant Station and in the crowded shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi; in the desolate spaces of the incomplete Hyatt Regency building and in the abandoned basement of the Sea Breeze Hospital.

Karachi’s homeless are both men and women; they are of all ages. They include children as young as six years and women as old as 60. Some of them have irregular jobs like cleaning cars. Most of them are fed on charity food provided by Edhi or certain restaurants where their meals are paid for by pious seths. In practical terms, society’s responsibility towards these poor souls ends here. No government department looks after them. No NGO seems to be aware of their existence with the exception of the Edhi Foundation which, in its turn, does not — and possibly cannot — deal with their rehabilitation. True, the Foundation runs a number of Apna Ghars to provide refuge to the homeless but admission to these asylums entails a lengthy and cumbersome procedure to establish that one is indeed without a home.

Unwilling to surrender, however, this lot goes on living. A colleague who catches a bus from near the Cant Station to get to work, often sees a middle-aged woman who has made the footpath her home. He says that he constantly sees her surrounded by a bundle of dirty clothes and bedding, and a set of eating and cooking utensils. But the lady still retains some fondness for decoration and possesses a few flowerpots besides “tughras” which she has hung by a wall. Behind this wall is an empty plot measuring more than a thousand square yards.

Our colleague also misses Baba a lot. Baba was often seen resting under a tree near the Hindu Gymkhana, where he would enjoy the company of some young, glue-sniffing boys and an elderly, gloomy eunuch. He gossiped with them, entertained them, made them tea and also taught the kids to pick lice from their hair — a difficult task indeed, if you haven’t showered for months and possess a mop of matted locks.

Driving along Abdullah Haroon Road, it is hard not to notice that a section of Hotel Metropole, one of the oldest hotels in the city, is being reconstructed. Or, is it being demolished? Many old-timers are wondering whether this is the end of a familiar landmark of Karachi. The answer is yes and no.

Hotel Metropole was built shortly after the creation of Pakistan. It was then owned by the former vice-president of the Karachi Cantonment Board. His son and four daughters have inherited the property from him. (The ground floor belongs to the son, and each daughter owns one of the four upper floors.)

Hotel Metropole became an instant hit, especially because back then there was no five-star hotel in the city. The small Palace Hotel was the only competitor. Beach Luxury came later.

The old-timers recall attending many cultural events on the lawns of Hotel Metropole. Moral Rearmament Movement plays and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Hans Van Benda, were performed here and received applause from the audience.

The 1960s ushered in a competitive era for the hotel industry in Karachi. Hotel Intercontinental, the precursor of Pearl Continental, made a debut in the city followed by Holiday Inn, Karachi Sheraton and Avari Towers. Feeling the pinch, the management of Hotel Metropole let out the upper floors to private concerns. The hotel now has 156 such tenants.

Rumour has it that the section of Hotel Metropole facing the Services Mess is being demolished to make way for a shopping mall. The other section facing the Sind Club will continue to operate as a hotel. While one is saddened by the fact that Hotel Metropole is being truncated, one hopes that the relevant civic authorities are aware of the implications of a shopping mall in the locality and have made arrangements to tackle the expected rise in traffic around what is already a built-up area.

Nobody doubts the sincerity of the members of the Sindh Assembly who declare publicly that they want to legislate against Karo-kari or honour killings. Few can quarrel with the contention that this hideous practice should be abolished without further delay. All the same, the occupants of the press gallery share the impression that the Sindh Assembly has been dragging its feet on the issue. They feel that the plans to criminalize honour-killings have been stymied by those legislators who have a feudal background and considerable clout with their political parties.

Last Tuesday MPA Heer Ismail Soho of the Muttahida Quami Movement presented a bill in the Sindh Assembly, demanding that Karo-kari be treated as culpable homicide. The lawmaker suggested that the federal government be requested to amend Section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code.

Senior parliamentarian Syed Qaim Ali Shah pointed out that the Sindh Assembly was quite within its rights to legislate against honour-killings because under the Constitution criminal law was a concurrent subject.

The speaker of the Sindh Assembly, Syed Muzaffar Hussain Shah, agreed to form a committee tasked to go through the resolution as well as the amendments proposed by provincial minister Dr Saeeda Malik.

Though the government side at once nominated its members for the committee, the leader of the opposition, Nisar Khuhro, failed to name the members of the body. The Sindh Assembly session came to an end without fixing a day for further discussion on honour-killings.

A day before the Assembly session, Mr Khuhro, speaking at a seminar on honour-killings organized by the Aurat Foundation, had urged women parliamentarians to come well prepared to the Sindh Assembly so that they could defeat the evasive tactics of the government. As it turned out, it was Mr Khuhro who attended the session without doing his work.

Lack of coordination between the city government and the traffic police is largely responsible for snarl-ups in Ramazan. Top-ranking officials of the traffic police often complain that the elected representatives of the people working as nazims do not keep them posted about the allocation of sites for bachat bazaars, thus making it extremely difficult for them to make traffic arrangements in advance.

The city government granted permission for holding of makeshift bachat bazaars at 197 places in the city on the eve of Ramazan without consulting the traffic police. This naturally caused a large number of traffic jams in many localities.

Irked by the traffic mess in the city, the Sindh transport minister asked the city government to withdraw permission for bachat bazaars. However, his directives were not enforced.

Likewise, the traffic police were not consulted by the city government when it allowed entrepreneurs to set up mobile restaurants on some of the busy roads of Karachi. In addition, the city government collects a nominal sum from pushcart owners in return for which they are allowed to sell their wares on roads.

In front of the Police Club in Block 5, Clifton, the road has a fairly deep cut running right across. It has been there for at least a year. Police vehicles come and go, bumping along the cut, and no one bothers, perhaps because most of the police cars are official, and so who cares about their maintenance. If the club wished, it could perhaps have the rut filled from its own resources, and earn the gratitude of the many who live in the area.

As grandmother in Lahore would have said: “Oi, pulsiya, kucch tau Khuda da khauf karo.”

— By Karachian

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