Destruction in the name of development

Islamabad diary

As if the three mega cement plants spewing poison into the air in the Kahoon Valley, part of the Salt Range, were not enough, the Punjab government has given leases for two new plants – one near village Khajoola near Choa Saidan Shah, and the other next to Buchal Kalan up on the Wanhar plateau. If these plants, God forbid, start working the destruction of the Salt Range, one of the marvels of creation – and I am not exaggerating – will be far advanced and irreversible.

About the Khajoola lease some other time…I visited Buchal on Sunday and it’s about the evil there – there is no other word for it – I wish to say something.

Let me first lay the ghost of development to rest. Cement is a necessity…granted. We can’t do without it. Build roads and bridges and highways and tall buildings and you can’t do without cement. But Pakistan is producing more cement than it needs and the rest it is exporting…much of it to Afghanistan. This means that for construction in Kabul, water, clay and limestone from Chakwal is being exploited.

Let us acknowledge that even this is necessary. But the question arises, if we are producing more than our needs – and cement is one of the booming items on the Karachi stock exchange – why do we want to destroy and pillage more of our environment to produce more cement than we need? It doesn’t make sense.

Yes, it is a profitable enterprise and from this necessary evil fat bucks are to be made. And the cement mafia is thriving and other industrial houses, seeing the profits rolling in, want a slice of the action. But should the cement industry be tailored to fit the nation’s needs? Or should it be tied to the greed of industrial robber barons?

On the subject of destruction suffice it to say that limestone extraction leaves behind a landscape hit as if by a nuclear strike. All vegetation is gone. The soil is eaten up and for all time to come, until eternity, until the edge of doom, that land remains barren and useless, an insult to the eyes.

Now on the peripheries of a mountain range, away from human habitation, a powerful case can be made out for limestone quarrying. But not where people live, not next to villages and grazing grounds and near sources of water used for centuries by local inhabitants. Setting up cement plants in such places is more than destruction. It amounts to inhumanity.

The three huge plants in the Kahoon Valley – producing about 20 to 30 thousand tons of cement a day – are an affront to humanity. And cursed was the day when they came up. What was the force behind those monstrosities? A shining galaxy consisting of Gen Pervez Musharraf, the then prime minister Shaukat Aziz, chief minister Pervaiz Elahi who sent in the Punjab Constabulary to enforce land acquisition, and the then district nazim, who was the local instrument. Does the Khadim-e-Aala want to follow in those hallowed footsteps?

Wanhar is a plateau which you climb after getting off from the Motorway at Kallar Kahar. The road to Khushab leads through it. To savour the beauty of this landscape you have to see it for yourself. In winters there is nothing to beat it. In summers it is cooler than the rest of Punjab except Murree and the Himalayan foothills. Buchal Kalan is the largest settlement of Wanhar and the cement plant for which the Lucky group has got the lease, is to be sited on the other side of Buchal overlooking an escarpment below which runs a broad valley like something out of Switzerland or the Bavarian Alps (I may be exaggerating a bit but not much).

Down below is the village of Sar Kalan. On the northern side of the valley are the villages of Marten and Makhial. On the southern and south-western sides are Sethi, Noorpur and other villages – 26 in all around this central valley of Wanhar. And right on the height of the escarpment will stand this cement plant, destroying for all time this heavenly vista and rushing out poison into the air, spreading disease and sickness in the name of development.

Cement plants chant a standard mantra. We are bringing in investment, they say. Investment for whom? Certainly not the local inhabitants. We will bring jobs, they say…which is stuff and nonsense, because these plants are highly mechanised and the only jobs for the locals will be that of a few chowkidars, a few gardeners and perhaps some tea-boys. Roadside hotels will come up as will a few workshops. There will be one or two petrol pumps and hundreds of trucks lining the roads. With drivers from outside there usually comes a whole new culture of drugs and related illnesses.

If this is anyone’s idea of development so be it. But this bit of paradise will be lost forever. There will be a stain, a scar, running through the heart of Wanhar and this land of hardy farmers and yeoman soldiers, for in goodly numbers young men from here head for the armed forces, will be crushed under the burden of new ‘realities’.

My idea is not to write a polemic or indulge in point-scoring. A remedy has to be found to stop this evil, for evil it is, in its tracks. The PM has an eye for good things. The rape of the Kahoon Valley under Musharraf has already occurred. Will the PM allow the rape of Wanhar under his watch? Maryam Nawaz is a lady of substance and style. There are so many things she is trying to do. Why doesn’t she visit the valley behind Buchal? It will take her barely two hours from Islamabad. (I can assure her I will not be there.)

But the major responsibility is on the shoulders of the Khadim-e-Aala. Governors and mansabdars come and go, lost in the mists of history and of time. Some weeks back I visited Shah Alam Market in Lahore and there bowed at the grave of Mahmud Ghaznavi’s governor of Lahore, the legendary Malik Ayaz. To what a narrow space his mausoleum is now shrunk although in his time he was a man of mark and renown.

We are here for our brief allotted spans and then are no more. But, to echo the Bard, the evil we do lives after us. When Musharraf and his carpetbagger prime minister are gone, the destruction of the Kahoon Valley will remain as a testimony to what they wrought. When the Khadim-e-Aala is one with the elements the destruction of Wanhar will be a standing reminder of things done in the name of development.

I have seen the limestone quarries of Gharibwal Cement which is on the edges of the Salt Range. They are like a nightmare from a forgotten episode of Star Wars. Is this to be the fate of Wanhar?

The Punjab CM is a great one for ordering Special Branch inquiries. Let him ask the Special Branch to look into the unrest caused in Wanhar by this proposed cement plant. I am forgetting an essential point: all the leased land is privately owned. How does the provincial government intend acquiring it?

I would say to all friends in the media, this is an issue worth fighting for. Kamran Khan, Arif Nizami, Kamran Shahid, Arshad Sharif, Rauf Klasra, Nasim Zehra, Asma Shirazi, Talat Hussain, Mujahid Brelvi, Kashif Abbasi, Mehr Bokhari, Dr Daanish – I am forgetting so many names – step forward please and do thy bit.

All my friend columnists crying themselves hoarse over democracy and dying for love of the Sharifs: please spare a thought, a few lines, for this issue.

My friend the Reverend Irfan Siddiqui: please bring this to the PM’s notice. If people from Wanhar come to the Lahore Press Club to record their protest, President Arshad Ansari please accord them some form of welcome.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com