Choking on ourselves

If Pakistan’s population growth rate remains 1.9 per cent, our population will be close to 350 million by 2050.

Growing up in Wah in the mid-fifties, my cousins and I would take a leisurely walk along the then pristine little river, the Dhamra, which flows very near our village (and is a sewer now, carrying all forms of debris and raw sewage and chemicals from housing colonies and factories located upstream towards Taxila, the Pakistan Ordnance Factories being one of the worst offenders), catching Mahseer fish, one and two-pounders, on rude fishing rods made of cane, the cheapest fishing-lines and plain hooks. And whenever the heat got to us, jumping into its clear and cool waters for a swim. The river smells to high heaven now and not even frogs live in it. So much for ‘progress’ then.

A bit about the ‘Mahseer’: the best fresh-water game-fish in the world and a challenge for any fisherman to land. Its very name describes it: ‘Mahseer’: the lion of the waters. Stories are legion of this river, which becomes the River Haro seven miles downstream, being one of the best in Northern India for its Mahseer, which are said to have weighed up to 20 pounds around the early 1900s when fishermen used to come from Rawalpindi, many young officers by tonga, to fish in its waters. It remains a popular game-fish in South Asia, and India has built up a huge tourist industry around it.

What utter heaven was Wah, even in my youth; now like any urban area in Pakistan brimming with ugly plazas; garbage dumps; plastic bags flying about; motor service stations spewing oils and grease into the Dhamra as if the factories were not enough; the loquat and plum orchards giving way to polluting marble-cutting factories and other such.

And the population! By God the population! It simply boggles the senses to see just how many people there are! Population explosion did I hear anyone say? It’s a veritable nuclear bum that has already gone off if you ask me. Just get off the motorway at Brahma-Bahtar and drive along the GT Road towards Hasan Abdal. Apart from the nose-to-tail traffic, the pressure of population is so great that even the little hills around Wah which were once home to the partridge and the seesi partridge and the jackal and the fox are being levelled to make way for housing colonies.

To merely say that Pakistan needs to control its population growth is to understate the matter: it must do so on the utmost emergency basis. Consider: If Pakistan’s population growth rate remains as high as it is: 1.9 per cent, our population will be close to 350 million by 2050. Just look around you: can this country and its resources support so many people? We better do something about it, and fast.

And, one more time, an appeal to the Chairman POFs Board: Please adopt the Dhamra and the Wah hills as your (very rich) organisation’s contribution to improving the environment of a most beautiful part of our country. Have the river cleaned up by stopping effluents flowing into it, and re-stock it with the great Mahseer; and please stop further building on the Wah hills, remembering that your factory’s main source of drinking water is from the Wah Springs (once my family’s property). The sewage from the houses on the hills is polluting this God-gifted fresh-water source. You will long be remembered if you can do this.

Meanwhile, exit polls suggest the BJP has trounced the Congress in all four states, including Delhi, where elections have just been held. The extremely hard-line Narendra Modi’s magic has worked, it seems. While reality will rule his policies if he becomes prime minister, his present hard stance is a cause of concern for India’s neighbours, mainly Pakistan. More worrying is the fact that the hardest of the BJP lot surround him. The same lot who torpedoed the Agra talks.

This is what I wrote in The News on July 21, 2001 from Delhi: “There are also increasing numbers of thinking people here who are deeply disappointed at their government’s repeatedly beating the media drum to criticise Pakistan (when the far greater matter of the summit ending on a sour note goes unnoticed), specially when all our side did was to stay on their toes. Indeed, they castigate the Indian Minister for Information Ms Sushma Swaraj going public on the parleys and deliberately omitting to mention Kashmir. It is to be remembered that Pakistan’s spokespeople only reacted to that by issuing a clear statement that Kashmir had indeed been discussed. In the written word too, there is much comment on the summit. I give below excerpts from an article written by the well-known Indian academic, Dr Aijaz Ahmad, which will appear in the magazine Frontline today (Saturday, July 21, 2001).

“Rich in rhetoric, symbolism and even opportunity, the Agra summit kept lurching from exhilaration to impasse, disinformation to breakthrough, hope to high drama to exhaustion, before collapsing in the most disgraceful manner possible, so disgraceful indeed that none of what had been achieved could be salvaged. Soon after midday on the second and last day, television channels showed Mr Abdul Sattar, the seasoned foreign minister of Pakistan, telling media persons that a ‘declaration’ was ‘probable’. For some 10 hours, solemn commentators on the various channels pondered over the difference between ‘declaration’ and ‘statement’.

“Around four o’clock, Musharraf’s departure for Ajmer was finally cancelled, and the channels construed the cancellation as a harbinger of a breakthrough. By 10 or so, as rumours of an impending collapse swirled around, despondency began to set in, and the dimmest sliver of hope was attached to the fact that Musharraf had gone for a quick farewell visit to Mr Vajpayee but had stayed well over an hour. Suddenly, close to midnight, all one could see on the TV channels were the taillights of the speeding cars and vans that were taking the Pakistan delegation to the airport.”

One only hopes that any future peace talks between the two countries succeed in bringing peace to the region, all of us remembering that neither country can win a war against the other … all a war will ensure is mutual destruction.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2013.

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