Parha-likha (educated) Punjab is one of the favourite catchwords of Chaudry Pervaiz Elahi’s government. A fortune must have been spent on advertising extolling the chief minister’s services in the field of education. From the hype you would think he was a latter-day Confucius.

Amazing, therefore, that in martial Chakwal, home to some of the best jawans and most useless generals Pakistan has produced, the district and tehsil administrations are planning a brazen assault on the Chakwal Post-Graduate College for Men — which is to Chakwal what Government College Lahore is to Lahore, Edwards College to Peshawar or Gordon College to Rawalpindi.

Don’t ask me how — because no one with his eyes open would approve of such a silly idea — but the district administration managed to get a directive out of the chief minister allowing the construction of 180 shops, to be rented out, on the college grounds.

Says directive number DS (Coord)/CMS/06 etc (my photocopy not very legible at this point) dated January 19, 2006: “Construction of 180 shops around the Govt Post-Graduate College for Men, Chakwal... Please find enclosed a copy of recommendatory letter received from... Zila Nazim Chakwal regarding the subject cited above.... Chief Minister has been pleased to desire that the Project may be executed as planned. He has further desired that Education Department may facilitate the District Government Chakwal in this regard.” Signed: G. M. Sikander, Principal Secretary to Chief Minister.

The word ‘around’ is a clever piece of camouflage implying that the shops will be ‘around’ and not inside the college. There are no rolling steppes around the college. It is bounded on all sides by roads and buildings. The district administration’s plans call for the shops to be built on the college estate along its eastern, southern and western walls. The college will be squeezed within this girdle. Precisely because college property is involved, the Education Department has been ‘desired’ to ‘facilitate’ the district government.

No sooner was the directive issued than the tehsil administration swung into action, demolishing a nearly 200-300 feet stretch of the college boundary wall on the western side of the college, preparatory to seizing the land and starting construction on it.

The college lecturers’ association deserves praise for its sense of responsibility. It passed a resolution condemning the contemplated assault on college property. That’s when I came to know what was happening.

At a press conference I and some friends expressed concern about this absurd move. For added measure I called the Punjab chief secretary, Salman Siddique, who sounded surprised by the directive.

On an impulse I also called Mowahid Hussain (Mushahid’s brother and an adviser to the Punjab CM). He said he was already scheduled to meet the CM and would speak to him about the proposed scheme. He was as good as his word because an hour or so later I got a call from the CM himself.

To his credit, he sounded pretty embarrassed when I told him about the directive, mumbling something about nazims and what they were capable of (not that he will admit to it now). Promising to look into the matter he said the demolished wall would be rebuilt. More than a month has passed and of course it remains un-built, wheels of government in our part of the world moving slowly if they move at all.

Even so, after the approach to Lahore, there has been no further work on the project. But the directive still stands and as long as it does and is not consigned to the rubbish bin where it belongs, the scope for mischief will remain.

Given the political pressures involved, educationists these days are a harassed lot. But going against this trend, the Chakwal principal has resisted the designs of the district administration, informing his department and even lodging a complaint with the local police station about the demolition of the boundary wall, a criminal offence. Of course the police, as always averse to doing anything politically incorrect, have done nothing. The Education Department in Lahore, however, has moved a summary against the proposed move. Let’s see what comes of it.

We’ve made a mess of education as it is, educational standards plummeting and colleges and universities once famous throughout undivided India for academic achievement a pale shadow of their former glory. But even amidst this rot, this project — a line of shops stretching for over a mile on three sides of the government college — is in a class of its own.

And to think that this college — take this in — was the first government college established anywhere in Pakistan after 1947. There were other government colleges of course, like one in Attock, but all established by the British. This was the first ‘native’ government college after independence, at a time when even ‘Pindi and Gujrat although having private colleges, had no government college. In Jhelum too there was no government degree college.

I have it from poet and writer Jamil Yousaf (alumnus of the college) that when the noted Muslim League leader Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan visited Chakwal in 1959 to address the college’s annual convocation, he threw light on how the college had come to be established.

The British government had set aside a sum of Rs 200,000 for the welfare of World War II veterans of Chakwal tehsil. Sometime in 1948 (when Jinnah Sahib was still alive) this matter came up before the federal cabinet. It was felt that if the money was distributed each recipient would get only a paltry sum. Raja Ghazanfar, a member of the cabinet and from the district, said Chakwal was a backward area and stood badly in need of a degree college. So it was decided that the money was best spent on that. How many other colleges owe their origin to a decision of Pakistan’s first cabinet?

The Government High School was told to vacate its premises and move to what had been the Khalsa High School on Talagang Road (where it still is). Where the high school had been the college was established. A short distance to the west was the old Arya High School. This became the college hostel. (The part of the wall demolished by the tehsil administration is next to the old Arya school.)

In the centre of this estate was a Hindu temple overlooking a pond lined on all four sides by stone steps and surrounded by stately shisham trees. It was a beautiful place and as a boy I remember sitting on the steps, letting my imagination roam.

The temple has long gone. Near it has sprung up a makeshift cafeteria. The pond is covered with weeds and although most of the shishams are still there, in between them branches of the paper mulberry, a noxious weed, have sprouted up, making walking difficult. The stone steps are hidden. No lonely boy sits on them casting pebbles into the water. Strange that something so beautiful has turned into a dirty wilderness.

Hard though it is to believe this today, boys and girls studied together in the college. Smartly turned out girls clad in figure-hugging burqas occupied the front rows. Boys also smartly turned out, in trousers and red blazers and not shalwars, sat at the back.

Standards were high, discipline strict, debates both English and Urdu a regular affair, the annual sports meet a thing to look forward to, the principal a figure of dread, and the question simply not arising of boys misbehaving with the girls.

Boys being boys and girls being girls I am sure love or something close to it must have been in the air but there was no loutishness and none of the self-righteousness which has come with born-again Islam. (Girls have since moved to a separate college which I suppose is how we measure progress in our country.)

I can’t help quoting from a letter to the education department by some of the Muslim landowners (among them Ch. Tora Baz Khan, Col Abbas Khan, Col Ghulam Haider, etc) whose land was being acquired for the college:

“Whereas we are very grateful for the opening of a degree college in this backward area of the martial people, we take the opportunity to point out that....some vested interests are demanding the curtailment of the area round the college. They consider the existing land to be surplus for the college; whereas we the public consider that...(it) is only just sufficient to meet the requirements of playgrounds, athletics, botanical gardens and hostel accommodation...that is why out of patriotic sense we have sold our land on nominal price after making a sacrifice of Rs 400 per marla.”

That was then and this is now.

Ch Pervaiz Elahi has a political head on his shoulders. I am sure good sense will prevail and this directive no doubt inveigled out of him will be cancelled. It has no legal basis whatsoever, no chief minister having the prerogative to gift educational land for commercial purposes.

At the same time, if anything is worthy of the notice of my lord the Chief Justice who, in exercise of his suo motu powers, has already taken a number of important decisions in the public interest, it is this misconceived proposal, an offence to good sense and a mockery of the law.