Plots against the nation

With more than its usual share of sound and fury, this was an eventful week. There were two concurrent terror attacks on security forces in Balochistan’s rebellious strip, triggering some hard questions.

But beyond this flaming news cycle, there is something more compelling for me to write about this week. And though it is about the loss of a friend, the overwhelming reference here is the state of our society and the diminishing role of developing professionals in its progressive evolution.

The idea, then, is to look at the life and career of Tasneem Siddiqui, who took the road that is less travelled by bureaucrats. It did make a difference. But the system that is essentially anti-people has prevailed. Pakistan has not had many senior bureaucrats who, like Tasneem, would refuse to be seduced by the trappings of power and pomp and honestly serve the people.

I had known Tasneem since his early years as a civil servant. Our families were friends. Since my wife Sadiqa was associated with the then National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA), there was an opportunity to interact with entire groups of senior bureaucrats and build lasting relationships with a few of them.

Tasneem stood out also because he would not throw his weight around, as civil servants are wont to do. There was no hint of aggression in his behaviour. It seemed natural for him to gravitate towards ideas such as Khuda ki Basti, a settlement for the poor that he conceived and developed in Hyderabad.

Tasneem eagerly grasped the opportunity of heading the Sindh Katchi Abadis Authority, a position not sufficiently cushy for other bureaucrats to go after. His objective was to provide affordable housing to the urban poor. What this means can be understood only when you know how land has historically been the currency and the instrument of corruption in this country.

I am not attempting a biographical sketch of Tasneem to trace his career path and milestones in his life after he retired. Almost literally, he died with his shoes on. His sudden cardiac arrest, at age 82, came in the evening of Friday last week, soon after he returned home in Karachi from day-long deliberations on some social issues.

That Tasneem’s concept of Khuda ki Basti – provision of land on affordable prices to the poor so that they could incrementally build their shelters with their own labour – was not replicated is a sad commentary on the commitment of governments and policy-level bureaucrats to public welfare.

But Tasneem was gloriously vindicated in a global context. He was given the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1999, known also as Asia’s Nobel Prize given to individuals in Asia for their selfless services that benefit their societies. He was thus in the company of the likes, in Pakistan, of Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, Dr Adeebul Hasan Rizvi, Asma Jahangir, Abdul Sattar Edhi, Shoaib Sultan Khan and I A Rehman. This is where he belonged.

Tasneem was inspired by Akhtar Hameed Khan, who was truly the ‘guru’ of all development professionals that cultivate pro-poor models of social change. Obviously, this is not what the ruling elite would have any sympathy for. Tasneem was trained to seek solutions for problems and thus had an optimistic outlook, contrary to my personal stance. He had formed his own NGO, Saiban, to try to scale up his model.

Way back in the late seventies, Dr Badar Siddiqui had started an informal group that met at his house irregularly for serious conversations on current affairs. This was naturally a cluster of like-minded people. Dr Badar Siddiqui is a gracious host and this practice, surprisingly, continued over all these years and even now, when he has shifted to Germany, old memories are dutifully revived whenever he is visiting Karachi.

The last time we met was some weeks ago, when Dr Badar Siddiqui was visiting after a long, Covid-dictated interval. Not all the regulars could make it and the meeting was more casual than it used to be. But Tasneem was there and we revived a bit of our banter on how Pakistan is not in a good place at this time.

Now, I stated at the outset that I would go around the major headlines to delve into something that is personal. But there is one headline that has gatecrashed into this discourse about a former civil servant who wanted the poor to be able to afford housing. Less than a week after Tasneem’s death, we have a judgment of the Islamabad High Court that would certainly have pleased him. It is also a tribute to his thinking about the people’s right to own land.

On Thursday, an IHC division bench consisting of Chief Justice Athar Minallah and Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani ruled that the allotment of plots on subsidised rates to top judges, lawyers and bureaucrats was illegal. The federal government’s real-estate entity was ordered to initiate housing schemes for the general public.

One hopes that this landmark judgment will have some impact on limiting corrupt and discriminatory practices in the allotment of land in urban housing projects. It is instructive to note how the judgment has identified lack of transparency and conflict of interest in the award of plots by the Federal Government Employees Housing Authority in sectors F-14 and F-15 in Islamabad.

If you have any sense of numbers, try to comprehend the observation in the judgment that the allotment of plots on subsidised rates had cost the public exchequer around Rs1 trillion in losses.

A ballot was held for the plots on August 17 and this is what the judgment said: “Surprisingly, the list of successful beneficiaries posted on the website included senior members of the bureaucracy and serving and retired judges of the superior judiciary. Virtually every judge of the district judiciary of Islamabad was amongst the beneficiaries. Ironically, they included judicial officers who were kept under observation either for incompetence or having questionable repute”.

Would anything like this be possible in a Khuda ki Basti?

The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at:

ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com