| November 13, 2008 | Thursday | Ziqa'ad 14, 1429 |
Call for a change in bureaucratic mindset
Leftovers of the Left spring a new party
Arriving as a volunteer from Bombay aboard a ship carrying immigrants from India, Afaq Siddiqui was all alone, holding a suitcase and a small rolled-up bed. As he strolled towards an unspecified destination and uncertain future on the new soil at Keamari, he was involuntarily drawn to a melodic sound at a distance. As he got closer, he saw an old man and a young man lending their voice to the tune of a tumbura and a couple of other musical instruments as the audience sat enraptured on charpoys (stringed beds) all around.The lilting song tugged at the heartstrings of the young Afaq, but he could not follow the lyric. A man in the audience explained to him that it was a song by Sindh’s great sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. “For me it was love at first song for the poet. And I have cherished it over the last more than 60 years,” says Prof Afaq Siddiqui in an interview with Dawn. He tried to understand Shah’s poetry first through the translation by a Hindu scholar and then through its Persian translation.
Naturally, his most significant literary work is related to the mystic poet. He was the first person to translate Shah Latif’s lyrics ino Urdu. Besides helping Shaikh Ayaz in his versified translation of Shah jo Risalo, he had done many radio and TV programmes, including Sur Latif, which was based on Latif’s melodies. It ran on PTV for six months. Sur Latif’s lyrics were published in book form in 1995. He also wrote articles for newspapers and magazines and books to highlight the significance and relevance of Shah Latif’s poetry.
Speaking on his most favourite poet, he says: “Shah sahib’s poetry and message is as relevant today as it was ever as it is based on truth, love, human dignity and fellow feeling. To him, God is a combination of all such values.”
Afaq sahib has also worked on Khwaja Ghulam Fareed, Rehman Baba, Allama Iqbal and thus contributed to national cohesion.
Talking about his early days in Pakistan, he says: “Desperate for a job in 1947, I approached Dr Daudpota with a slip of paper from Zakir Hussain. He was the director of public administration for Sindh and Balochistan. Besides high school education, I was armed with a diploma in technical drawing and I told him that I wanted to be a teacher.
”Daudpota sahib explained to me that in Karachi all schools were English medium, run either by Parsis or Christians, and he had nothing to do with them. He, therefore, suggested that I go to Sukkur, saying that education was in very bad shape in the interior of Sindh.”
Afaq was lucky to be posted in Sukkur, which was the hub of literary activities as well as of trade. There he met noted writers and intellectuals of both Urdu and Sindhi, attended and helped organize mushairas and other literary events. These events were attended among others by Baba-i-Urdu Maulvi Abdul Haq, Pir Hussamuddin Rashidi and Shaikh Ayaz.
His started his teaching career at a government school in Sukkur. There he also played his role in the establishment of an association, the Muslim Education Society, which helped set up 14 schools in Sukkur. “Three of them still function. The Islamia College, set up on a knoll, was the biggest of its kind.”
After spending more than three productive and fulfilling decades in that city, he moved to Karachi in 1982 and joined the Liaquat government college in Malir and retired from there in 1988.
Although is over 80 now, he works till late in the night. He charges nothing from research scholars and other students visiting his modest Buffer Zone home, which he calls Kitabistan as books occupy every inch of space in the house. So, although he carries out significant research work, he proudly announces: “Once a teacher, always a teacher.” Incidentally, his wife is also a teacher.
He is content with his modest means of income, but is irked by politicians’ reneging on their promises. “Sindh Governor Dr Ishratul Ibad Khan had asked the Sindh government to grant me Rs200,000 for my research work. Later, a similar announcement was made by the then cultural minister Rauf Siddiqui, but nothing came out of those announcements.”
A man who has devoted his life to the cause of the country, beginning with the Pakistan Movement, trying to bring closer the diverse units of various cultures, languages and geographical divisions, deserves a better treatment from those at the helm. It is only too natural that he sounds bitter and disillusioned. “Travelling in shining cars and living in palatial houses doesn’t make one human. They are not human beings. They worship wealth. They are hypocrites to the hilt.”
He had begun writing poetry at a very early age and in 1942 he recited his verses at a mushaira (poetry recital) in India. When in Pakistan, he was asked by Khwaja Nazimuddin in the presence of Liaquat Ali Khan to write national songs. “I wrote many songs for the radio and sometimes I had to travel to Lahore as there was no radio station in Sindh then.” He says, he did not care for his name and money and helped Shaikh Ayaz in the versified translation of the poetry out of love for Shah Latif. Ayaz was, however, gracious enough to acknowledge his assistance in the monumental work.
Afaq Siddiqui was born in Manipur on May 4, 1928. His ancestral village was Shaikhpur. He received his early education at Kamal Ganj and went to Fatehgarh Cantt, some 10 kilometres away, for higher school education and passed the vernacular examination in 1942 with distinction.
His 41 books include Qalb Sarapa, Raza-i-Jaan, Aks-i-Lateef, Shah Lateef aur Asr-i-Hazir, Shahir-i-Haqnawa, Adab jharokay and Subh karna shaam ka. He has received many awards for his literary services, including the Pride of Performance. In recognition of his services concerning Shah Bhitai, he was given an award at a festival held at the Karachi Press Club a couple of months ago.
THE second phase of a multi-sectoral reform programme culminated a few months ago but it could slightly change the state of social service delivery system in Frontier province. However, it turned out beneficial to many in the bureaucracy, who were availing perks and privileges in the name of ‘reform’.The Provincial Reform Programme (PRP), launched in 2002 by an unelected government, focused on improving financial management, private sector development, public sector governance and health sector.
The first phase of the PRP was culminated in 2005 that was followed by another set of the so-called reform initiatives as PRP-II that was supposed to carry forward the left over reform agenda with slightly changes. The timeline for the implementation of this phase has expired in June last.
The managers of NWFP government, monitoring the reform initiatives, may have countless arguments and statistics, indicating improvement achieved during this period, but the bitter reality is that the state of service delivery in health, education, water supply like basic areas of social services has been and is still unsatisfactory.
The biggest problem with the reform agenda was that it was not really meant to make the civil administration more responsive and efficient. It was rather designed to secure a multi-million dollars credit line from the World Bank.
The successive governments (both elected and unelected) had borrowed $490 million from the international lending agency as budgetary support to finance the so-called reform programme.
Even though, the World Bank loan carries a nominal interest rate, it is still a liability and the people of cash-strapped province have to pay it back that would be too difficult in the wake of ongoing depreciation of rupee against dollar.
No proper consultation was carried out with the stakeholders prior to designing of the reform programme, as the ‘consultants’ got information about the overall working of the government departments, their future plans and compiled a report that became the PRP.
The PRP, officials say, lacks a unified approach to achieve the set targets in improving service delivery in health and education sectors and put in place an efficient civil administration in the province.
“There are many anomalies in the targets and their expected outcomes in the PRP,” opines a senior government official, adding most of the triggers set for the PRP by the World Bank are not going to remove the current inefficiencies in the government machinery and address the public grievances, which should have been focus of the change process.
Hospitals lack medicines and doctors, while schools are devoid of clean drinking water and toilets so the focus should have been on improving supplies and quality of services instead of heavily spending on short term initiatives such as provision of free text books and stipend to the girls students.
Even though, the eight-year long reform programme could hardly make any major difference in terms of service delivery, it offered many lucrative positions to the bureaucracy.The NWFP government in 2006 had set up a Reform Monitoring Unit (RMU), under the finance department, to coordinate reform activities in the province and subsequently communicate progress reports to the government and the World Bank.
The government allocated Rs61.830 million to run this unit, out of which Rs19.955 million had been utilised during last two years. Similarly, Rs16 million has been earmarked in current financial year.
The RMU is overstaffed, as until its establishment, the same job was undertaken efficiently by two officers sitting in the civil secretariat. Currently it has over a dozen staff members including seven officers from grade 17 to 20, who hardly sign three or four letters in a day.
Previously there was no separate premise for the RMU but now it has been housed in a rented building at a posh locality of the provincial capital. The government pays Rs85,000 as monthly rent for the building, which is sufficient to run a Rural Health Centre for a month.
In the PC-I of the RMU, there is no provision of payments for utilities and travelling and daily allowances of the officers but even then they are entitled to it. The officers are getting additional project allowance as well that makes the job lucrative for them. Similarly, purchase of luxury cars for its officers working at RMU is also on the cards.
Change cannot be achieved, if we continue with the same practices. It needs a change in the mindset, as Bernard Shaw said: “The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.”
The city of Rawalpindi is not a very auspicious place. There’s an old saying its ground is uneven, its trees bear no fruit and (what a bad thing to say!) its people are not faithful. There’s history one cannot refute. Its soil is soaked in the blood of three popular prime ministers. The break up of the country is also connected with the shifting of the capital to this city. Then the party that under Quaid-i-Azam’s leadership made Pakistan met its end in its cantonment when Gen Ayub Khan had it divided into Convention and Council Leagues that have been mutating ever since; the latest weed, Sheikh Rashid’s Awami Muslim League, having chosen this soil to sprout from.
But our progressive friends do not entertain any superstition of this kind despite the sad end of the ‘conspiracy’ associated with this city. In fact basing their resolve on trashing the bad omens and all scenarios of doom they injected hope and optimism by expressing their confidence and faith in the essential goodness of the masses who they said only needed organization to surmount the problems created by crop after crop of corrupt and insincere leaders, demagogues, charlatans and self-serving dictators. They decided time was ripe for action, people needed a viable political alternative to the present dispensation that took into account the state of society and polity in Pakistan as well as the objective conditions of the present day world under the thrust of irreversible change. They thought that after long and deep deliberations and countrywide consultations they possessed the necessary intellectual wherewithal to carry the people forward in the country’s transition from the hotchpotch semi-anarchy that it is to a modern progressive state. They announced the formation of the Awami Party to achieve this end.
The two-day confab on 8th and 9th November was characterised by fiery speeches and red rhetoric of the old guard but in the end it turned out to be mere cathartic froth when Harris Khalique, one of the conveners, stated the cool position: that the world had undergone a sea change since the October Revolution of 1917, and that if we could not revert to societies of a thousand years hence, we could not rejuvenate in the geopolitical dynamics of today mechanisms that worked well in the last century. So, though, as a party with a progressive agenda the Awami Party would own the Left as its background it would not allow it to be its baggage. This explains why they have formed a new party instead of joining one of the existing leftist groups, which are laden with the said baggage and probably for that reason have not made much advance in the given realities of the country and the changing times. The Awami Party wants to move on and refuses to be stuck in dogma. This is its position.
The substance of the AP programme is egalitarian. It will work for the elimination of poverty, lessening of the rich-poor gap by raising the standard of living of the common man through reforms of the farming sector, redistribution of land, industrial development through local entrepreneurship, protection of labour rights, provision of quality education to all without discrimination, health and housing facilities, civic amenities, village electrification and water supply to all citizens. But first and foremost guaranteed human rights, repeal of all discriminatory laws including those against women and minorities and also, let’s hope, the establishment of a free judiciary which the agency report doesn’t mention and which all well-meaning politics must internalise in its system if it is to be accepted by the people. This is a mix of the party’s long and short-term goals.
In a year’s time, the party will hold a countrywide convention but before that the party members will spread out to disseminate the good word of hope and mobilise the masses and foster leadership from among them.
A 55-member convening committee has elected a 14-member central convening committee who are Dr Hassan Nasir, Mirza Maqsood, Farhat Parveen, Ramzan Memon, Mehmal Sarfaraz, Abdul Rauf Khan, Aurangzeb Khan, Raza Tanoli, Shahab Khattak, Mehrab Baloch, Younus Baloch, Bushra Jaffar, Qamar Iqbal and Harris Khalique. Ashfaque Salim Mirza, Mazhar Arif, Nazeer Mahar, Nasreen Azhar, Zahid Elahi and Rao Tariq Latif will draft the party’s manifesto and constitution. A media and publications committee was also formed comprising Shabana Arif, Jabbar Khattak and Naeem Mirza.
It all sounds very good. There are a number of things though besides omens and fated imponderables. The state of the society is such that anyone with a sound head on his shoulders and clean hands will be rubbished as a fool in favour of patent scoundrels without a second thought. We have examples. Secondly, as historian Dr Mubarak Ali, said the other day, the proletariat has been systematically weakened through the years. There are no trade unions, student unions or farmers organizations to provide muscle to struggles for people’s rights or progressive causes. And third, of late political activity has been reduced to giggling and cracking jokes at TV talk shows, and being seen with Begum Nawazish Ali. There has been no public meeting in the Liaquat Bagh, at the Mochi Gate or elsewhere for a long long time that one heard of since Benazir’s tragic rally in Rawalpindi. Politics is no more an interactive phenomenon between leaders and followers. It is a long distance, remote, alternate reality game that hired media anchors play for you.
