The problem with PIA

ENDLESSLY in turmoil, PIA’s affairs are a microcosm of governance in Pakistan. The national carrier, like many other state-run institutions, mirrors the myriad shortcomings of governments past and present: absence of a long-term vision, economic mismanagement, whimsical decision-making, vindictive politicking, rampant cronyism and lack of continuity at the helm. Little wonder then that Pakistan International’s deficit/debt now stands at a truly staggering Rs45bn and customer confidence in the airline is abysmally low. PIA has seen as many as five managing directors since 2005, the latest sighting on the baggage carousel being Capt Aijaz Haroon. He may be a fine pilot who is popular with his colleagues but is yet to demonstrate the financial acumen or top-flight management needed to turn around an organisation so mired in the bog as PIA. At a time when the airline needs a crack troubleshooter of proven pedigree, it has been saddled with an MD who appears to owe his appointment less to his credentials and more to his standing in the political quarters now calling the shots.

The new MD took over on May 7 and it took him just two weeks to order the reactivation of the B747 Jumbo fleet and the reinstatement of flight engineers sacked in March this year. This is not to suggest in any way that the original decision was correct. Far from it. It took Capt Haroon even less time — just one day in office — to sack 15 senior officials hired on contract. Again, defending the earlier appointments is not the intention here. The point is this: can 15 case files be given a fair read in one day and are two weeks enough to conduct exhaustive feasibility studies on the operations of some half a dozen Jumbos? If the original decisions were whimsical, so were the actions taken this month.

What PIA needs is a comprehensive business plan that takes the longer view and is based on the recommendations of diverse expert sources, as opposed to the offerings of confidants and yes-men. The new MD intends to cut costs across the board and that is all very well. But it is critical at the same time that this belt-tightening does not make the prospect of flying on PIA even less desirable than it is now. The management should also give some thought to routes rationalisation, fleet modernisation and aggressive marketing, and it goes without saying that some aspects of this strategy will require a huge injection of funds. But given the state of the government’s coffers, how this cash will materialise is anybody’s guess. What with spiralling fuel costs, even top-flight airlines are feeling the pinch these days and competition in aviation is cut-throat. Ad hocism in these testing times will get PIA nowhere.

New bloc for South America

THE efforts by 12 South American nations to create a new regional bloc will evoke considerable international interest. Created on Friday, the South American Union of Nations or Unasur, with ambitious plans for the future, should prove an event of great significance. Unlike the EU members, the South American nations are, relatively speaking, less divided linguistically and do not have a history of conflicts as the European nations have. What makes the new organisation different from earlier groupings in the region is its distinctly anti-American orientation. Friday’s summit brought together leaders such as Venezuela’s firebrand Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom hold America responsible for all their ills, with the former calling America Unasur’s “enemy number one”.

Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, who hosted Friday’s summit at Brasilia, said the formation of the grouping indicated that South America was becoming “a global actor”. As one of the world’s biggest countries, Brazil has been keen to assume a leadership role and project the South American continent as a major economic and political force in the world. He also wants Unasur to develop military cooperation and is keen to establish a South American Defence Council. But it remains to be seen whether the Unasur leaders are capable of turning their dream into a reality and creating a South American version of the European Union. Besides the Workers’ Parties in Brazil, leftist parties have also won elections in Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia. But bitter disputes exist among many Unasur members. Recently, Colombian forces raided Ecuador’s border region to hit anti-Colombian rebels there, while Ecuador accuses both Colombia and Venezuela of harbouring hostile guerillas.

The new grouping has come into being in a unipolar world, where American unilateralism in the wake of 9/11 has annoyed a wide spectrum of national leaderships across the globe. In marked contrast to the OAS that was set up in 1948 under the US leadership and now brings 35 countries of the continent together, Unasur could challenge Washington’s hegemonic approach in international affairs. However, it would take more than rhetoric to transform Unasur into a multinational grouping that ticks. It is true that there is general resentment in South America against the perceived economic exploitation of the American continent by US-based multinationals. But Washington is not without friends either. Unasur includes Chile and Colombia which have governments that are dedicated to the free-market economy. There is a long way to go before Unasur gets off the ground. It has first to go through a period of tradition and acquire legitimacy because it is a treaty and needs ratification from member states.

Why should students suffer?

LOAD-SHEDDING is here to stay for months, if not years, and people are trying hard to adapt as best as they can to a situation which is quite beyond their control. Whether it involves candles, kerosene lamps and hand fans or rechargeable lights/fans, uninterrupted power systems (UPS) and generators, families of all classes are digging deep into their pockets to cope with the frequent power interruptions. They are trying their utmost to reduce compromising on the quality of life at home when there is no electricity. But what about the quality of life at school? The report in this paper about the conditions under which many FA and FSc students in Islamabad are taking their Federal Board examinations is distressing to say the least. Seated in suffocating halls without fans or lights and dripping with sweat, how are these young men and women supposed to concentrate on an examination whose results will determine their future?

With some imagination, a little consideration, foresight and coordination on the part of all concerned authorities, including school and college administrations, the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, the ministries of education and power and Iesco, it could have been possible to manage and reduce the impact of power outages during crucial board examinations, if not during day-to-day teaching and learning. If it was not possible to suspend load-shedding for the duration of the examinations without creating a city-wide power meltdown, since the examination halls are scattered across the capital city in numerous schools and colleges, Iesco could perhaps have made special arrangements to ensure that there were no daytime power interruptions in these schools during the examinations. Alternatively, temporary arrangements involving other sources of power supply should have been made for the schools for the duration of the examinations, such as generators powerful enough to run fans and lights in the examination halls. It is bad enough that the power crisis is affecting the students’ studies at home and in school. We should at least ensure that their future is not compromised further by the non-availability of power when they are sitting for their papers.

OTHER VOICES - North American Press

McCain’s agents of intolerance

The New York Times

IT took a long time for him to do it, but Senator John McCain has finally rejected the endorsements of two evangelical ministers — one whose bizarre and hate-filled sermons deeply offended both Catholics and Jews and the other who has used his pulpit to attack Muslims.

Mr McCain had sought the endorsement of the Rev John Hagee, a televangelist, for more than a year and finally won it in February, only to have the Catholic League denounce Mr Hagee for waging “an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church.” … Then a recorded sermon emerged in which Mr Hagee suggested that Hitler and the Holocaust had been part of God’s plan to drive the Jews from Europe into Palestine — a final straw that led Mr McCain to reject the Hagee endorsement.

Mr McCain has tried to argue that his recent embrace of these two extremists was different from Barack Obama’s 20-year pastoral relationship with the Rev Jeremiah Wright Jr. The Rev Wright’s bigoted and paranoid rants are appalling, but that does not lessen the hatefulness of the views espoused by the Rev Hagee or the Rev Parsley, nor does political expediency excuse Mr McCain’s willingness to overlook those views until they became a political liability. — (May 24)

Common sense prevails

The Toronto Star

THE Supreme Court of Canada has struck a blow for common sense by refusing to award damages to a man who developed “debilitating” psychiatric problems after finding dead flies in his bottled water.

The case revolved around Waddah Mustapha, a Windsor man who in 2001 discovered one dead fly and part of another in an unopened bottle of water he was about to put on his home dispenser. He became “obsessed” with the discovery and suffered “a major depressive disorder with associated phobia and anxiety”. A trial judge awarded him $341,000 in damages, but the Ontario Court of Appeal later overturned that judgment.

In a 9-0 decision yesterday, the Supreme Court said the water supplier, Culligan of Canada Ltd, breached the “standard of care” by selling Mustapha contaminated water. It also accepted that Mustapha’s illness was real.

Mustapha did not show that it was “foreseeable that a person of ordinary fortitude would suffer serious injury from seeing the flies in the bottle of water he was about to install,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote.

This sensible decision is a welcome check on the trend towards litigation in our civil society. — (May 23)

Ayub Khan and the politics of script

THE script of a language is not only a linguistic issue, it is also a political one. Scripts are associated with the identity of a group and, therefore, function as icons, or symbols, of a certain cultural traditions.

During the British days in north India, the Perso-Arabic script was associated with a Muslim identity; the Gurmukhi script with the Sikh identity and the Devanagari one with the Hindu identity. In Bengal, however, the Bengali script — belonging to the Brahmi family of scripts like Devanagari — was a part of Bengali cultural identity.

Ayub Khan, the first military ruler of Pakistan, was keen on changing this. If Mustafa Kemal of Turkey could change the Arabic-based script of Turkey to the Roman one, so could the field marshal — or so Ayub Khan reasoned. But could he? This is the story of what happened. It has been just touched upon in Ayub’s biography in a synoptic form but this is the first time it has been reconstructed from the work entitled Introduction of Roman Script for Languages in Pakistan which has now been declassified and is in Islamabad’s National Documentation Centre that I take the opportunity to thank here.

The first entry is dated Dec 31, 1959. According to this, Ayub Khan said to his cabinet members that the Roman script would increase literacy and “could result in the creation of a common language.” English, it was agreed, was an international language and could not be discarded. The cabinet decided that the education commission should study the proposal. Thus, on Feb 4, 1959, this point was added to the agenda of the commission.

The wheels of government grind slowly so nothing much seems to have happened even a year later by which time the education commission had given its report. This time, on Dec 23, 1960, Ayub told the cabinet that “national unity between East and West Pakistan could result by understanding each other’s languages.”

This is, of course, a pet theory of all government officials — that unity is created by understanding each other’s language. The fact, however, is that conflicts are caused by many complicated reasons and knowing the language often does not help. If it had, the American war of independence would not have occurred nor would the Sikhs have fought with Punjabi-speaking Muslims and vice versa. Nor, indeed, would Nehru, a man who spoke better Urdu than many Pakistani leaders, have quarrelled with them and vice versa.

Anyway, we hear from politicians and generals that learning the others’ language means we cannot fight them. This is an illusion, but, for now, let us leave the powerful with their illusions and get back to the facts.

On Nov 29, 1961, Ayub Khan said in yet another cabinet meeting that no progress had been made in the constitution of a board set up in West Pakistan for the evolution of a composite language based on regional languages. This, incidentally, was another idea of Ayub Khan and his coterie. They believed that if words of Bengali, Punjabi, Pashto and Sindhi could be forced into Urdu, everybody would be happy and there would be peace and harmony.

The fact, however, is that harmony is a product of the people’s perception that they are being treated with justice and are being given their fair share of goods, services and power. Therefore, mingling of words to create an artificial language — even if it becomes popular which is a rather rare event — does not create harmony.

Anyway, bureaucracy considered the ideas and came up with the suggestion that committees of linguists should be formed to evolve a script for Urdu, Bengali and other languages of Pakistan. A letter of Jan 7, 1962, by the secretary (S.M. Sharif) tells us that the experiment was going on. Where? We are not told this but surely we can guess that the linguists were probably having a whale of a time drinking endless cups of tea.

A week later (Jan 13, 1962), the ‘Summary for the Governors Conference’ marked ‘secret’ spilled the beans. It appears that, besides quaffing tea, the linguists had also been calling the government names. In East Pakistan, they were almost throwing stones. The opposition was so great that a certain amount of trickery was recommended. Para 4 advocated that seminar type of meetings showing the advantages — not the disadvantages — of a single script should be arranged. The opponents, however, had to be kept away from them. The language chosen for this ruse was as follows: “by keeping out strong protagonists of the Urdu and Bengali scripts hot controversies would be avoided”.

The aim was to present only the pro-government view while blocking out the anti-government one. It was also decided to soften public opinion through occasional letters and articles in the press, involving some discussion of the subjects (S. H. Raza, director of the Bureau of National Reconstruction). The ‘discussions’ would presumably be conducted by pro-government linguists.

But here lay the rub. Pro-government linguists were in notoriously short supply. Those who did bother to write were nobodies. Prominent Bengali and Urdu literary figures pointed out that their literary traditions would become a closed book for them. Dr Syed Abdullah, a prominent Urdu and Persian scholar, said it would cut off West Pakistani languages from their Islamic roots. The Bengalis were extremely angry and, for once, Dr Abdullah thanked them for their intransigence. If they wanted to keep reading Tagore in the original, Dr Abdullah and his ilk stuck to their Ghalib and Iqbal. In short, no independent scholar came to the government’s rescue despite Ayub Khan’s hobnailed boots and field marshal’s baton.

The last letter from the much abused Bureau of National Reconstruction was dated May 11, 1962. It said that it would watch ‘the position’ while the Dhaka and Lahore offices would continue with the work. This was probably officialese for saying that the case had been lost before the court of the people. Understandably, there is a line in black handwriting below the letter: ‘the case may be closed’.

And that is why we still have our scripts intact. Had we not inherited some democratic decencies from the British or had Ayub Khan been ruthless in the Middle Eastern tradition we might have been unable to read Ghalib in the original today! Such is the politics of the script.

No end to colonial governance

THE Defence of India Act of 1915 was an emergency criminal law enacted by the British Raj to curtail revolutionary and nationalist activities in India during the First World War.

The apparent intent was to prevent ‘terrorists’ from calling public meetings, publishing material inciting the people to revolt, disseminating revolutionary literature, and so forth. The act was designed to curtail actions by armed revolutionaries characterised as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’ with links abroad.

However, the legislation was so wide in scope that it rendered “suspect all political activity that was even mildly critical of the British Government of India, and it put an effective end to whatever freedom of expression the Indian press had been allowed”. This act gave the government of British India special emergency powers to deal with German-inspired threats especially in Punjab. A special legal tribunal was established to deal with suspects who could be interned without warrant and had no recourse to appeal.

In March 1919, at the end of the war, the British extended the special ‘emergency powers’ by passing the recommendations of the Rowlatt Commission headed by a British judge, Sir Sydney Rowlatt. Under the guise of dealing with ‘public unrest’, ‘revolutionary activities’ and ‘terrorism’, especially in Bengal and Punjab, this act authorised the government to: 1) imprison suspects without trial; 2) arrest suspects without a warrant; 3) hold secret, in camera trials of suspects; 4) tell suspects where they should live; 5) quell sedition by silencing the press.

The reasons given for instituting such a draconian law were the following: 1) alleged assistance given to the revolutionary movement in India by the German government to destabilise the British government in India; 2) destabilisation of the political situation in neighbouring Afghanistan by inciting the emir to turn against British India and the possible links of this to Bolshevik Russia; and 3) civil and labour unrest in India due to the post-war recession which led to the Bombay Mill Workers’ strikes, unrest in Punjab due to several reasons including the havoc wrought by the Spanish flu epidemic causing the deaths of 13 million Indians.

The Rowlatt Act was met with immediate denunciation by Indian leaders. Gandhi organised strikes and demonstrations against the act and Jinnah resigned from the Legislative Council writing to the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, that “the fundamental principles of justice have been uprooted”.

The unjust law sparked furious waves of protest particularly in Punjab where there were rapid disruptions in rail, telegraph and communication systems, government buildings were burnt and five Europeans including government employees and civilians were killed.

The protests reached a peak in April 1919 and according to one account “practically the whole of Lahore was on the streets, the immense crowd that passed through Anarkali was estimated to be around 20,000”. Several banks, government buildings and the railway station were attacked. By April 13, the British government had decided to place most of Punjab under martial law. A number of restrictions were placed on civil liberties including freedom of assembly and a ban on gatherings of more than four people.

On April 13, 1919, around 10,000 people gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar to register their protest. The British feared an uprising along the lines of the 1857 revolt which began in the month of May. Under the command of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, British Indian soldiers opened fire on the unarmed crowd. The firing lasted for 10 minutes and 1,650 rounds, or 33 per soldier, were fired. Official British Raj placed the casualty figures at 379, however private sources revealed that over 1,000 people were killed and 2,000 injured. The civil surgeon Dr Smith claimed that there were over 1,800 casualties.

The Bagh was bounded on all sides by buildings and houses and the few narrow openings were locked. There was no escape. Some people tried desperately to clamber over the walls while others jumped into a well to escape the bullets. Around 120 bodies were dug out of the well.

A curfew was declared in Amritsar and Dyer reported to his superiors that he ‘had been confronted by a revolutionary army’ and was therefore obliged to ‘teach a moral lesson to the Punjab’. The lieutenant governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer wrote back: “Your action is correct. Lieutenant Governor approves.” Jawaharlal Nehru, in his autobiography, reported hearing British soldiers saying that they “wanted to teach the bloody browns a lesson”.

In his testimony before the Hunter Commission formed to inquire into the massacre, Brigadier Dyer acknowledged that he could have dispersed the crowd without firing but he would have become a laughing stock if they re-converged on the Bagh and made a fool of him. He said that if he would have used machine guns if he could get them through the narrow gates, and that taking the wounded to hospital was not his responsibility. British officers applauded the suppression of ‘another Indian mutiny’ and the House of Lords commended Dyer.

However, the House of Commons censured him and Winston Churchill remarked: “The incident in Jallianwala Bagh was an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.” Dyer was officially sanctioned by the British government and resigned in 1920. The British press nonetheless defended Dyer labelling him ‘Saviour of the Punjab’ and started a sympathy fund collecting £26,000 for him.

An American woman donated £100 saying, “I fear for the British women there now that Dyer has been dismissed.”

The events of 1919-20 bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary times. We are all too familiar with laws similar to the Rowlatt Act, martial laws, indiscriminate killing of dissenters, curbs on the press, detention without warrant, in camera trials and sympathies for killers. The massacre of May 12, 2007, is still fresh in our memories.

The constant armed attacks on innocent populations in Balochistan and the tribal areas in the name of fleshing out militants and rooting out terrorists are all too familiar. Our post-independence history is replete with martial laws, press and publications ordinances, arrests without warrant and detentions of terror suspects. All this has been exacerbated after 9/11 in the name of the so-called war on terror.

The techniques of colonial governmentality persist as the nature of the state is essentially colonial. As some historians say, we never really achieved independence and only experienced a transfer of power from foreign to local masters. The continuities of history reveal to us the amazing consistency of the forms and application of power.