DAWN - Cowasjee Corner; 18 April, 1999
Power thieves
By Ardeshir Cowasjee
THE dynasty began with Pir Syed Raja Shah Bokhari of Shah Jewna. He studied at Chiefs' College (otherwise known as Aitcheson) from 1888 to 1899. In 1910 he was appointed by the British as an honorary magistrate to do justice in Jhang, which he did judiciously, earning the acclaim of the people. In 1915 he died, a respected elder of the community, respected by rulers and the ruled. It was he who founded the Shah Jewna stud farm.
Bokhari's only child, Syed Abid Hussain, was born the year he died. He, following in his father's footsteps, studied at Chiefs' College from 1924-1930. He ran the stud farm, improving and increasing the bloodstock. He farmed, he did all the right things that were done in those days. During World War II, the British gave him the rank of an honorary colonel and he helped the war effort by supervising recruitment in his area. He was elected a member of the Legislative Assembly of India in 1946, together with Jinnah and the others. Come Pakistan, and he served as a minister in the central government and then in the government of West Pakistan. His forays into Pakistani politics were short. During the 1965 elections, for supporting Fatima Jinnah and opposing Ayub Khan, he was arrested.
Before he died of cancer in 1971 he cautioned his only child, his daughter who he called his son, Syeda Abida Hussain to the world, Chandi to her friends. Politics, he told her, is a dirty game anywhere and in Pakistan more so. Remember, if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. And, quoting Shakespeare, he forewarned her "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."
It was twenty-five years ago that I first met Chandi, in 1973. She was neither a borrower nor a lender but had opted to play the dirty game. The previous year she had been elected an MPA of the Punjab Assembly, on a PPP ticket, to one of the reserved seats for women. She resigned her membership of the PPP in March 1977 and joined the NDP. She contested the famous abandoned elections that year on a PNA ticket. In Zia's 1985 elections, she was elected from NA69 and became the first woman to sit in our National Assembly. She stood as an independent in 1988 and was re-elected, then lost the 1990 elections but joined the Jatoi caretaker cabinet of that year and meekly watched Mustafa Jatoi dole out plots of lands which were not his to gift. In 1991, Nawaz Sharif sent her as his ambassador to Washington, from which post she resigned when Nawaz Sharif was forced out in 1993. She officially joined the Muslim League in 1994 and was again elected to the National Assembly in 1997.
Now she has been accused of power theft and is bracketed with such lowly-life as former provincial minister Mian Miraj Din, party tough, the srong-arm man put in charge of transporting the Lahore PML 'activists' to Islamabad for the November 1997 raid on the Supreme Court. He was forced to resign his provincial ministership of excise and taxation when accused of power theft and was compensated by being awarded the lucrative waste paper disposal government contract for Punjab and the NWFP. Last week, whilst the Mian was on one of his bi-weekly visits to his hometown, Miraj Din made an impassioned plea to be restored to favour, to be given a chance to restore his 'lost honour,' "Mian saab, meri jan chhorao, hun tey baut ho gayee aya."
We may hold Chandi responsible for many of our ills (though she refuses to admit that she understands what collective responsibility entails) but not even her worst enemy could believe that she would filch electricity. The military men of WAPDA do have evidence of power theft at her farm, of meters having been tampered with. Fair enough. But if this be so, says Chandi, then she has either been framed or fixed. Most who know her and know politics, her rivals, her detractors, and her government, believe her.
When all this broke in the press, I looked at my KESC meter stuck on the wall of my garage together with the KESC fuse boxes. It bears two KESC paper seals. When anything blows, the KESC repair men arrive, tear the paper seals and fiddle around with fuses and wires. They also call to read the meter. Who knows what happens when they break the seals for whatever reason? I have no idea what is inside the meter box. I have no idea whether the meter has been 'tampered' with, whether it is running fast or slow. How familiar could Chandi be with all her WAPDA meters?
Now to what Chandi can be blamed for. Her fault is not power theft, but the fact that she joined a party of thieves and defaulters, remained with a party of thieves and defaulters, served a party of thieves and defaulters. She, with the rest of today's politicians, both in and out of power, can be accused of theft of another sort, the theft of political power, of depriving the people and the country of their assets and due rights.
Does she not know that those who lead her party, her fellow ministers, prime and others, have borrowed money from the government banks and financial institutions, money that they could never have borrowed had they not been in power, and money that certainly no respectable leading private bank would lend to them? Does she not know that the defaulters of her party claim to be technical defaulters and that some of the leading defaulting lights are attempting to have the laws of the land changed so that they may not have to pay interest?
Does Chandi not know who it was that stormed the Supreme Court in 1997 and the reason for the storming? Does she not remember how incorrectly and contrary to rules Constitutional Amendments 13 and 14 were rushed through the National Assembly in truly indecent haste? Does she know that a petition concerning the allotment of thousands of plots by the then Punjab Chief Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif is pending in the Supreme Court, that it has not so far come up and will not come up before July of this year, after the retirement of the present Chief Justice? Does she not know how the judiciary is pressured and prevailed upon to hear and not to hear? For instance, petitions regarding the unlawful ISI distribution of money, the award of wheat contracts by the prime minister, his misuse of power in putting pressure on the banks to settle loan matters out of court, all of which Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah was to hear had he not been forced out, remain pending in the Supreme Court.
Is Chandi not a party to the stifling of parliamentary dissent, having voted for the 14th Amendment? Was she not a party to the proposed impeachment of a president of the republic merely to shunt him out for purposes of expedience? Is she not one of those hoping to push the 15th Amendment Bill through parliament?
Her father taught her enough for her to know that as a federal minister, whilst sitting in the cabinet and irrespective of the portfolio she holds she bears equal responsibility with the rest of the members for all wrongs that are done, whether they relate to population or to poppy seeds. Now she maintains that her 'honour' has been tarnished. Does she not realize that it was tarnished the day she associated herself with one of our political parties and assumed a position of power?
She had wanted to resign for months, and finally she has resigned, whether voluntarily or otherwise. All for the better. There may one day be in-house changes and, if she keeps her head and talks less, she stands a good chance of coming back in a higher position. By her own admission she is only 53, young in politics. Time is on her side.
As this goes to press we read of another woman, a younger woman, Benazir Bhutto, who has often been accused of thieving power of the political sort and who now has been convicted for her thievery. "Plunderers of wealth punished for the first time, says Nawaz," roars one headline (The Nation, April 17). A more perceptive and prescient Muslim Leaguer, Syed Kabir Ali Wasti, commented, "The PML government had set a wrong precedent of conviction of the leader of the Opposition.......".