Many tails, many dogs

By Kamran Shafi

LAST week I had written about Laat Sahib Bahadur Punjab, HE Salman Taseer’s diabolical plan to take young Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on a political (long) march through the Punjab when the lad comes home for his August break at Oxford.

I have had fifteen emails, the most I have received for any of my pieces for this newspaper, every single one of them agreeing with my fervent plea to the governor to let the boy be; to let him concentrate on his studies (he is only in his first year at Oxford, for God’s sake); and be as care-free a student as his peers and mates.

To Lahore now. One had read about the Doongi Ground scandal in the papers when Their Lordships Khalilur Rehman Ramday and Raja Fayyaz Mahmood of the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan (destroyed by the dictator on Nov 3, 2007) issued a status quo order on April 14, 2006, halting further construction of the proposed IMAX theatre.

I visited Lahore recently and was shocked to see the extent of the ugliness that stared me in the face in place of the ground upon which local children and their friends from elsewhere played cricket. My mind went racing back thirty years when my younger boy Kassem, used to visit his great and good friend Mufti who lived very near the Doongi Ground. Whenever I went to bring my son back from visiting Mufti I used to find that the boys had gone to the ground to play cricket with other neighbourhood children.

Well, all it took was a visit to an IMAX theatre in London (or Berlin — the Punjab government is not sure!) by Pervaiz Elahi, in the company of the then secretary of information and culture and the director general (PR) and bingo! Lahore had to have an IMAX theatre too!

Never mind that there are not many films in the IMAX mode or format in the whole wide world; never mind that the tickets for the IMAX would be beyond the reach of the common citizen — the rich as we well know, have home theatres in their basements costing in some cases crores of rupees, I kid you not.

So what was the cunning plan Elahi’s Punjab government came up with? To add a shopping plaza to the theatre complex, which would pay the running expenses of the theatre. I ask you! Talk of the tail wagging the dog! What a dog! What a tail!

To add insult to injury, the Punjab government changed the ‘use’ of the land through several subterfuges, even paying hundreds of millions in consultancy fees/“compensation” to all manner of people, including the Commando’s favourite theatre producer/director Shah Sharabeel who was reportedly paid Rs4.5m to let go his rights over the Doongi Ground, handed over to him by, you guessed it: the Punjab Horticultural Authority, once headed by Kamran Lashari.

Now where did we hear Shah Sharabeel’s name before, in connection with other lucrative government leases? Remember the other ‘Doongi’ Ground, this time in Islamabad’s F-7 Markaz, that was handed over to this person by the CDA to develop a mini-golf thingy on it; a junk food outlet et al? And who was the chairman CDA when this little transaction happened? Er, none other than self-same Kamran Lashari.

Let us go on, leaving the Sharabeels of this world aside with a reminder that this was the man who had the temerity to actually bad-mouth, on live TV, the then sent on eave/dismissed/removed from office Chief Justice of Pakistan, My Lord Iftikhar Chaudhry with not a squeak emanating from the sitting judiciary about the unfair abuse heaped upon their brother. The reason was that on the plea of environmentalists the CJ had dared to stop Sharabeel from ‘developing’ the mini-golf thing.

Back to the Lahore IMAX, however. There is much that needs to be exposed by the Punjab government. It simply must tell the nation the extent of the fraud that went on. It must tell the people why Moonis Elahi, the elder scion of the House of Pervaiz sat in on meetings of the Punjab Entertainment Company (Guarantee) Limited (PECL) formed for the purpose? It must tell us why in the world, serving secretaries to the Government of Punjab sat on the board of PECL? And what it is doing towards making sure that public servants never again have the gall, yes that is the word, to follow apparently and evidently illegal orders? It must tell us too, why the Punjab government (I ask you!) issued cheques for the entire amount to the IMAX company in Canada without any performance guarantee, even without the machinery being shipped (to date!!).

A word about the Frontier tragedy. The situation will soon be out of our hands if we do not stop the madness right now. It is clear that the state of affairs there is well beyond the capabilities of the present set-up. How in the world can the Pakistan Army be expected to normalise a situation which it helped create in the first place?

It has been suggested before by others; let me suggest it again with all the force and persuasion at my command. Make an all-powerful committee of seven good men. Call them the ‘Czars of Peace’ in the Frontier. Let them, who know the Frontier and the tribes and their mannerisms and their mores, be responsible for every facet of the operation: from supervising the political wallahs to ordering military action, to granting monies/compensation, to prioritising development work. They should answer only to the parliament.

The situation is far different from when they were in the field, I know, made different by a quite numbing foolishness on the part of army commanders over the last eight years; made different by our very own agencies: Mangal Bagh, Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Radio did not just fall out of the sky. Still, if anyone can make a difference, these men can.

Surely there are others too, but let me venture to suggest the following: Major General Nasirullah Babar; Mohammad (Lala) Afzal Khan of Swat; Mr Jamil Ahmad CSP, Sahibzada Imtiaz Ahmad CSP, Mr Kunwar Idris CSP, Dr Humayun Khan CSP, and Major General Khurshid Ali Khan. They are sagacious wise men; they have all served in the Frontier; they will know slightly better than nineteen Lt Gen Whatstheirnames.

PS Many in Peshawar say the instant tamasha there is as a sop to the Americans just prior to Boucher’s visit to the Land of the Pure, and Gilani’s to pay homage to Dubya. What a tail; what a dog!

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk