Another Folly

APRIL 2004 - It was an idea whose time had not come when it was first announced in 1991. Thirteen years and dozens of meetings and resolutions later, it has resurfaced and now seems to be heading for the finish line. The details are scattered in the dusty attic of our more recent past where schemes such as the Bab-e-Pakistan lie, gathering dust or as seems to be the case here, getting a revival. On 14th August this year, the general opinion indicates that President Pervez Musharraf, will finally open this monument at Walton Airport, Lahore. The monument is a tribute to those refugees who first set up camp here after arriving from India in 1947.

But it’s not as simple as that. Side by side with some thinking that passes for social development is a huge component that continues to push forward ideas and plans that should not receive the priority or the funding that they do in. Yet there are any number of people who persist in getting harebrained schemes implemented and when they finally end up in the rubbish heap, the architects, supporters and executors of these ill-founded plans have long departed for other shores and other scams. A great deal of public money has in the meantime been squandered, skimmed or stolen, never to be seen again.

First the gory details. The late Chief Minister of Punjab, Ghulam Haider Wyne had initiated the project in 1991 and had directed authorities to allocate 400 acres of land to house the monument dedicated to the immigrants who arrived here in that scorching and later, monsoon-soaked summer of 1947. The army’s top brass was consulted and their assent obtained since the Army, the Boy Scouts Association and the Punjab Police, occupied the land. A 100 dwellings pockmarked the site to establish the presence of these three outfits. The Punjab government had at the time allocated Rs 100 m for this project and when it was found that the Board of Revenue had leased the land to the three outfits, the project fell into its first pothole. The 400-acre grand vision was quickly trimmed down to 75 acres in consultation with the GHQ but Humpty Dumpty collapsed in 1993 and so did this monument of national honour.

When the Sharifs resurfaced next in 1997, the project was initiated under Bobby Kennedy aka Mian Shahbaz Sharif of the sweeping boulevards and imported date palm trees fame. A thundering declaration to hand over the 75 acres to the project was made, but was pretty soon revised to the purchase of 10 acres where if you remember the story so far, the Boy Scouts lived and practiced their oaths. The auction for the 10 acres, this being the land of slow coaches, took forever because who wants to give up anything in Pakistan? The Scouts, bless their hearts, said they weren’t interested after all and could be, provided they were accommodated elsewhere in the same area. Meanwhile Humpty Dumpty and party fell off the wall again and the project, lock, stock and barrel but actually with none of the above three, sank into Pakistan’s very large cold storage. Enter the next century and the current Punjab governor took up the matter again with the GHQ. After much humming and hawing, the GHQ agreed to hand over 25 acres of land to the Boy Scouts so that they could move on, camps and all, and the blighted monument could get started. However, several reminders from the Punjab government to the GHQ remain unanswered and now with the GHQ looking for a new and safer home in the happy climes of Islamabad, such matters as monuments is unlikely to occupy their attention for quite a while. However, hope lives as the Secretary of the Bab-e-Pakistan Committee – yes there is a committee, has announced that the project is alive and kicking and what’s more, the President has been invited to open the monument, which brings us to the start of this story. Whatever happened to the other stakeholders in this project, us lowly mortals do not know except that Rs 95 m has been sanctioned to build an auditorium, a library, a services block and a restaurant at the hallowed site.

It would be silly to question the thinking that permeates every set of rulers, who see nothing wrong in carving out huge chunks of land and polishing off massive finances from a country that remains largely impoverished, to build monuments such as the Bab-e-Pakistan. What is envisaged here at Walton is another folly. The library will never be used, the auditorium if ever maintained will simply become another forum where chief guests wearing cauliflowers on their chest will deliver repetitive and ignorant lectures on the ideology of Pakistan and other such riveting subjects. What the restaurant will do other than serve bad tea is a foregone conclusion. The services block, I confess has me fuddled because it could contain everything and nothing. But in a sense, it is not important what this project will or will not have or what impact if any it will have on the collective conscience of our people or those who may end up at the site. While we have been brutally re-inventing our history and whatever culture we have not surrendered to everyone else, filling up our text books with falsehood, deceit and ignorance, we wish to build grand monuments to retain connections with our past. What should be preserved and promoted remains consigned to dust bins. Instead, cheap monuments and projects fed on oratory and shallow perceptions come home triumphant, are then made living reality with money we cannot afford and then grind out their existence till they are consigned to an early death in the collective dustbin of our past.

The 1947 holocaust and the bloody birth of Pakistan cost over a million lives not all of whom were Muslims. In spite of reassurances by the leaderships of the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims made at the time, that their homes, valuables and lives would be safe, nothing like that actually happened. Not only Muslims were murdered but the collective frenzy and hate billowed out to trap Hindus and Sikhs alike, men and women, children and adults, the very young and the very old. Butchered, raped, and maimed there were a million bodies strewn over this land and across the border. From July to September, the massacres went on, till the rage within the people subsided. Neither India nor Pakistan ever revealed how many died and to this day, no one has been charged for crimes against humanity. As always, the ordinary people paid the price.

There is no relevance now to build a monument such as the Bab-e-Pakistan. Other than its grand scale, which makes me suspicious of its real intent, a more fitting monument should be on the pattern of a memorial, simple, elegant and moving. What is a restaurant doing in there selling pakoras? A monument exists already. On the Indian side of the Attari border, it proclaims the sad and untimely death of one million Punjabis but because it is on the Indian side, it is not good enough. Rather than raise another eyesore at a price that we can ill afford, the planners should instead confer with their Indian friends – this is no longer an act of treason, and build a joint memorial to all who lost their lives. If the Indians keep mourning theirs and we keep mourning ours, things will not move forward and neither will the awakening that such massive tragedies should never strike our lands again. In this new climate of restoring wounds and building bridges, the desire to raise a befitting memorial must be reflected in a monument that is simple, elegant and enduring and it should neither be in our part or theirs. If at all, it should rise in the no man’s land that now separates the two borders. Standing there, it will be far more symbolic than a grandiose no-brainer that the President is expected to anoint on Independence Day. But given the run of things, guess which idea will be shoved aside?