Last salute to a soldier

LT general Sirdar Farooq Shaukat Khan Lodi passed away at the age of 73 on Sept 14 in Karachi. He was one of the finest generals Pakistan has ever produced. General Lodi was born on June 17, 1931 in Baghdad, Iraq.

His father, the late Sirdar Mohammad Abdullah Khan Lodi, who served with the British/Indian civil service in Iraq in the Finance Department and married Jamila Khanum, a woman of great beauty and high social status in Baghdad. They returned home and settled in Srinagar, Kashmir, where the general's father was the accountant-general of the Jammu and Kashmir state.

General Lodi's schooling was completed in a private school, St Joseph College, Baramullah, in Kashmir. He then completed his FSc from the Sri Pratap College in Srinagar and followed his eldest brother into the Pakistan Army.

He passed out with distinction from the Military Academy and was first posted to the East Bengal Regiment in East Pakistan at his own request. He finally commanded a regiment in East Pakistan and was loved and respected by his men.

As a young captain, he was one of two officers chosen to attend the staff college in Camberley, UK, for further training. This has always been a highly competitive posting and only the top young officers with high potential are sent there. This remains true even today.

General Lodi was a highly successful battalion commander. He was promoted to colonel and then to the rank of brigadier and commanded a brigade in Lahore during the 1971 war with India.

His brigade served with great distinction during this conflict. He first served as an instructor in the staff college in Quetta and later as the chief instructor and his teachings are followed even to this day. As a brigadier he was again sent to England for a senior officers' course.

He was then promoted to the rank of major-general and took command of a division in Kharian. He served with distinction as a divisional commander and his division was singled out for praise by General Ziaul Haq during an inspection visit.

General Lodi was then posted as the CGS at army headquarters in Rawalpindi. This post is highly coveted and central to the high command in the army. After finishing his tenure successfully he was promoted to Lt-Gen and given command of the corps in Lahore. During his tenure he also served as governor of Punjab.

As corps commander in Lahore, General Lodi started a new trend: he ordered that all widows and dependent children of soldiers should be given new clothes, money and food during Eid.

General Lodi was then sent to Quetta as governor of Balochistan. In 1984, while flying back to Quetta from Rawalpindi after attending a meeting with President Ziaul Haq, the governor's plane, a Cessna, crashed in a sandstorm in a remote area.

Both the pilots and his ADC died in this accident. General Lodi miraculously survived with no major injuries. Because the accident happened in a remote area, the general was first taken to a local hospital where he was unnecessarily given a blood transfusion.

This blood not only infected him with malaria, but more seriously gave him hepatitis C. This later damaged his liver. He was then airlifted to CMH, Rawalpindi, where he recovered under the care of a most able surgical team.

After recovering from his injuries he returned to Quetta to resume his duties as governor before finally retiring and calling it a day. He then decided to settle in Karachi at the request of his wife.

While still in uniform he had passed the LLB exam and after settling in Karachi he passed his master's in law. He then started teaching law in a law college in Karachi. His talks and lectures were very popular. He wrote articles for newspapers, especially Dawn and magazines.

General Lodi will be profoundly missed by his brothers and sisters. He had a close relationship with us all. He was a caring brother who was loving and gentle. He was affectionate towards the children of his siblings and showed a lot of interest in their welfare.

He was a thorough gentleman who was always appropriately dressed and took pains to maintain proper decorum. He was a man of very high intellect and was an avid reader. His knowledge was vast. He was a modest and noble man.

Disrespect for law eroding trust in govt agencies

The government of Khaleda Zia seems to have decided to restore order in the society, especially in terms of minimising violent crimes of non-political nature that have affected the entire population, exposing them to a sense of perpetual uncertainty about lives and property.

But while making the efforts to restore order, the government has visibly been ignoring the law, although any government in a modern democracy is obliged to uphold it, primarily for the sake of honouring the social contract, and secondly to make sure that no one, be it a member of a law enforcement agency or a member of the general public, gets inspired to deliver rough justice to a perceived offender.

But personnel of the law enforcememt agencies and also the general public have recently indulged themselves in delivering rough justice to crime suspects, reflecting clearly on the law enforcers disrespect for rule of law on the one hand and the general public's lack of trust in the law-enforcers on the other.

The government launched on April 14 this year the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) as an elite force to exclusively take care of the glamorous' goons, reportedly equipped with sophisticated weaponry and political connections, who have been unleashing reigns of criminal terror in different regions of the country.

The RAB, as it appears, really acts rapidly: It has reportedly managed to kill, between June 26 and October 4, as many as 35 people, most of whom died during shoot outs and cross-firing, while the rest succumbed to interrogations by the so-called elite force.

On the other hand 14 persons reportedly crime suspects, were lynched across the country in the month of September, reports the Bangladesh Human Rights Bureau, a human rights NGO. The number reached 17 on October 4, with three fresh victims of lynching in the district of Mymen singh.

But the people at large seem, as it appears from discussions in public places and private parlours to be happy over the RAB operations. During such discussions, a few are seen making attempts, timidly though, to quote one human rights violations due to the extra-judicial murders by the elite force, but their voices are being subdued by loud counter-arguments that most of the RAB victims perpetrated various heinous crimes, including murders, infringing on the rights of much larger number of innocent people.

Clearly, many peace loving people refuse to realise that injustice on anyone, even a crime suspect is a threat to justice. The police, perhaps sensing government sanction for and the public approval of the acts of murdering crime suspects, decided to restore their image, if at all there was any, and prove that they also can match the ability of the RAB to take care of the hardened criminals.

The Detective Branch of the police has recently launched an elite force of its own- Cheetah. The nomenclature suggests that the force is meant to behave brutally. A force, named after a ferocious animal, is only expected to follow, with its inherent agility, the jungle law, which has nothing to do with the civilised idea of punishing a criminal through the process of a fair trial in a court of law.

The Cheetah, driven by a kind of animal instinct, has, therefore, succeeded by September 30, within a week of its commissioning on September 25 killing two persons, or crime suspects for that matter.

The anti-crime drives, however, have raised a serious question, given the fact that some of the victims of the extra-judicial killings in question were reportedly accused in more than half a dozen murder cases each.

Now, how could they afford to move in the society freely and continue to commit crimes in broad daylight? The politically conscious sections of the society are well aware of the fact the notorious criminals in question used to enjoy the patronage of influential political leaders, and they used to remain on bail for years, by bribing or intimidating the magistrates, who are, again, under the direct control of the executive branch of the state run by politicians.

Then why does the government sanction illegal murders of the criminals, eventually exempting their political godfathers from being tried? There is even the vital question, although yet to be raised strongly by the society, as to whether the criminals are being killed to protect their political godfathers, or in other words, to remove witnesses of the bigger crimes committed by the politicians concerned in collaboration with the criminals.

The daughter of one Hannan, one of the top 23 criminals on the police list, claimed to the press, after her father was killed in the RAB custody on early August 6, that he had disclosed, while on remand, names of some politicians maintaining close contacts with him?

There are concerns about the lynching by the angry mobs as well. Because such rough justice, although stems from the state s failure to protect the citizens' lives and property from the perpetrators of violent crimes, is being delivered in the breach of social contract, which bars the citizens from taking law in their own hands.

Such practices, if continued for long, would eventually result in total anarchy, which would eventually stand in the way of making positive efforts for building a democratic society.

Some Dhaka newspapers argue that the answer to the lynching lies in developing a sound criminal justice delivery system, in which the law-enforcement agencies arrest alleged criminals and make sure they are produced before a court of law for trial and punishment, while the government makes sure that the law-enforcers conduct investigations into allegations of a crime without fear and favour.