BOOK REVIEW: A non-futile life in bureaucracy

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BOOK REVIEW: A non-futile life in bureaucracy by Khaled Ahmed

 Fard-e-Hayat;
By AK Khalid;
Allied Press Lahore 2006;

He went on to do his MA in History and Persian, and collected those tough degrees in Persian and Arabic known as Adeeb Fazil, Munshi Fazil and Maulvi Fazil. A cowherd from Gujrat had come to Lahore with nothing in his pocket and had walked away with the city’s best degrees

Abdul Karim Khalid is a tall dapper man in his eighties who became famous abroad…pointedly, not in Pakistan…for writing the best critical book on the wrong imposition of ushr in Pakistan: The Agrarian History of Pakistan. He did that as a result of the expertise accumulated by him as member Punjab Revenue Board for ten years at the end of a hardworking career in the Punjab Civil Service. The autobiography is a proof of what you can squeeze out of an otherwise dull life if you have the memory of a genius.

What is shocking about Khalid is his origin in a cowherd’s home in an obscure village of Gujrat and his rise as an unaccountably brilliant boy in schools where boys were usually admitted to drop out in short order to swell the local population of boorish Muslims. Boorish because when the partition came and Hindu and Sikh neighbours and friends had to be protected, the Gujjar Muslims of Karariwala Khurd asked them to embrace Islam or die. Khalid was put off by what was happening around him, but advised them to say the kalima and save their lives.

True to reputation, the village boors would not stop there. They asked the newly converted to eat the flesh of cow to prove that they were true Muslims and not just posing. Khalid, born in 1922, had just his got his three gold medals from Government College Lahore for passing BA Honours with a first position in the province when the evil of 1947 took place. He clearly saw it as the Muslims’ darkest hour. When the converts were asked to eat beef, an eighty-year-old Hindu goldsmith got up and tried to put them to shame by narrating how good the Hindus had been as neighbours, but to no avail. They were luckily rescued by the timely arrival of a platoon of Gurkhas who took them away. Gujrat has not produced the best stock of Muslims in the world.

Except of course Khalid who showed his genuine faith in Islam again and again, including the measures he took as local magistrate in Sialkot in 1953 when the Muslims of the city were baying for Qadiani blood. So effective was his preventive policy that Sialkot ended up as the only city in the province where the Qadianis were not done to death. He was magistrate in Rawalpindi when the old CSP scourge descended on him in the shape of envy and snobbery from deputy commissioner Yazdani Malik whose wrath he sought to avert through commissioner Syed Ghiasuddin Ahmed but to no avail because this gentleman too was steeped in the CSP hatred of the PCS. It was a Qadiani additional chief secretary MM Ahmed who rescued him by posting him out of harm’s way as secretary Police Commission.

There were good people too who cared for him and his poverty-stricken honesty, but they were mostly non-CSP officers. As he graduated from Zamindara School…and its despotic headmaster who punished him for writing verse he thought too rebellious…and entered Zamindara College in Gujrat, he found kindness in the treatment he received from principals U Karamat and Jahangir Khan, both sportsmen become educationists, the latter father of Majid Khan, the cricketer who arose to become the captain of the Pakistan team.

Later during his posting at Rawalpindi as the local magistrate, he worked nicely with commissioner Ahmad Raza Khan, an uncle of Majid Khan, who got him to end corruption among the local magistracy by building new accommodation for the judges. He saw Ahmad Raza Khan being pulled down unfairly by a junior who was an army officer plugged into the martial law government.

Khalid’s problem was poverty as he left Zamindara College…presided over by another kind and sympathetic principal, Taj Muhammad Khayal…to go Government College Lahore. He might have flunked the interview at GC but for principal GD Sondhi who discovered the genius in him despite his bad English. He lived in abysmal conditions and hardly had enough money to eat his meals in Lahore, but he excelled in his BA Honours.

He went on to do his MA in History and Persian, and collected those tough degrees in Persian and Arabic known as Adeeb Fazil, Munshi Fazil and Maulvi Fazil. A cowherd from Gujrat had come to Lahore with nothing in his pocket and had walked away with the city’s best degrees.

After his PCS, Khalid was posted to Gujrat where the deputy commissioner was another kind officer, Mian Riazuddin Ahmad, who eased him into the early routines. His posting to Sialkot put him in touch with other good people. If in Gujrat he had thought well of Fazl Elahi Chaudhry, the future president Pakistan, he equally appreciated the character of the politician Khwaja Safdar in Sialkot. He admired ASP city Sahibzada Rauf Ali but the man he really prized was deputy commissioner Sheikh Manzur Elahi when he was posted next to Multan. But he soon ran into the devil called Aziz Ansari as his successor who made life tough for him as also for additional DC Tariq Ismail who was actually charge-sheeted.

Khalid was a great ‘builder’. Those who lived in his jurisdiction were lucky because he built them housing colonies in no time and with very few state funds. But that produced no dividends because he was judged by the CSPs and politicians on yardsticks he cared little for. In Chakwal he found Masood Mufti to be an ideal officer but back in Pindi MH Shah was just the opposite.

As registrar of cooperatives in Lahore he locked horns with Chaudhry Zahur Elahi of Gujrat who had eaten up loans from a cooperative but asked to be let off after setting fire to records and assets he had taken the loan on. He used all kinds of tricks including sifarish from governor Ghulam Mustafa Khar, but Khalid got him to cough up the money despite the danger of being seen as involved in a Gujjar-Jat vendetta typical of Gujrat.

But the worst was borne by him from the cooperatives minister Abdul Hafeez Kardar the Skipper, who wanted to favour an implicated party that Khalid wouldn’t let off the hook. As the book narrates, Kardar used dirty tricks including invasion of his house by goondas, which made Khalid take refuge in the Staff College where he was asked to take further training before promotion. He thought nothing of Malik Meraj Khalid, a namby-pamby politician who wouldn’t take a stand on anything.

He was also treated badly by the mysteriously malicious chief minister Hanif Ramay after being appreciated by Bhutto when he was commissioner Bahawalpur. He was also ignored by Maulana Maududi, then in the Zia government, when he presented his case against the imposition of ushr by Zia. His book on ushr was published in 1998. It was ignored in Pakistan but the World Bank called him to a conference in Cambodia and told him that the book was the first of its kind on the subject. That was his best revenge. *

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Tags: AK Khalid, BOOK REVIEW, bureaucracy, Fard-e-Hayat, Life, non-futile, Punjab Civil Service, ushr