Their lordships do Lahore proud

Islamabad diary
If this were the Lahore of old, bars open on the Mall and clubs resounding to the sounds of revelry as the shadows of evening fell, music players tuning their instruments and dancers getting ready for the night’s entertainment, poets and cranks holding forth in their various corners…in that Lahore, now gone to the ages, glasses would be raised to a stirring judgement delivered last week by Milord Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of the Lahore High Court, Justice Yawar Ali and Justice Ayesha A Malik sitting on the bench with him.
This was a petition moved by I A Rehman and others and arguing it was one of Pakistan’s brightest lawyers, Salman A Raja (wise head on rather young shoulders). Ostensibly about the near-lunacy of the signal-free corridor from Liberty Chowk to Mozang Chungi – which would have turned this stretch of Lahore into another lookalike of a Dubai suburb – Raja dwelt more on the underlying constitutional aspects of the case.
The question he framed for their lordships: whose was the authority to proceed with such schemes, elected local bodies or the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) acting out the whims of its political masters? In his landmark judgement Milord Mansoor Ali Shah ruled that this was the province of elected local bodies and their mandate and jurisdiction was not to be violated or diluted by any fancy tinkering in the name of development.
The contractors had already moved in and heavy machinery was already in place at the turning where the Main Boulevard meets Jail Road (we deserve a prize for our road-naming…nowhere in the world is the same literary flair to be seen). Their lordships have ordered the immediate removal of this machinery and repairs to the damaged road.
If the judgrment is a blow to anything it is to the arbitrariness of decision-making – major decisions taken in the name of development without regard to laid-down procedure, without taking public sentiment into account and without adequate forethought about the consequences of such decisions.
From Islamabad to Lahore, from Peshawar to Karachi, the effects of poor planning and arbitrary decision-making are to be seen in all their glory: Islamabad transformed from a bucolic and green city to a nightmare of parallel and unwanted roads; Peshawar no longer the city it was; downtown Karachi losing the atmosphere it once had; and Lahore’s splendour and charm under sustained assault from Dubai-style planning…senseless road-widening and the like.
It’s hard to think of a more hare-brained scheme than the overhead expressway connecting Gulberg with the Motorway at Saggian. But this is what the LDA is bent on doing. Justice Mansoor Ali Shah has put a temporary brake on this as well. But the larger problem remains…old cities, monuments to the past, at the mercy of half-educated public officials.
Cities are no one’s personal property. Multan, Peshawar and Lahore, to name only these, in various shapes and forms have been around since history began. Those who are here now hold them in trust for future generations. Where we have the capacity and the skill we have a responsibility to make our cities more liveable and more beautiful, greater centres of art and learning, more vibrant centres of culture. But who has given us the right to take away their old beauty and turn them into pictures of ugliness?
Everyone is not an artist. It takes specialised training to become an architect. But every public official thinks he can be a city planner. You just can’t stand on a road and posing Mussolini-like with your hands on your hips say let this be a signal-free corridor. Every chief minister who comes thinks that he must add another lane to the Canal Road. They have ended up by disfiguring this most stately of thoroughfares, and the traffic, despite the road-widening, remains as bad as ever.
Our geniuses somehow don’t seem to understand that the answer to traffic is not more roads. If roads could remove traffic gridlock Bangkok would be a smooth city to drive in. But if visitors to the city’s legendary massage parlours can take time out to see the mess on the roads, they would realise that there have to be more imaginative responses to the modern curse of city traffic.
They have tried new solutions in Bogota. In Amsterdam they stress the virtues of bicycling. Paris has experimented with banning cars from the city centre on certain days of the week (and Parisians have loved it). Boris Johnson in London regularly uses the bicycle and there are bicycles for hire in the city. But here in Pakistan we seem to be living in another time and our only answer to traffic is more freeways, more underpasses, more flyovers…and the traffic problem remains as bad as ever, because when it comes to imagination and to new ideas we are no better than morons, stuck with the tried and the failed.
Hence the sheer amazement engendered by this initiative-setting, precedent-creating judgement of Milord Mansoor Ali Shah and his fellow judges, which says in effect that enough is enough, that the extended season of arbitrary decision-making must come to an end. Who knows when the local bodies arrive on the scene they behave worse than our present ad hoc despots. But at least a brake has been applied; asinine government has been given some time to think; and Lahorites have received a gentle reminder that there is more to life than karahi gosht and gurda kapoora.
Lahore’s problem is that whatever it was in the past – city of gardens, of Data Hajveri and the great Sir Ganga Ram (immortal as they come) – today in the main it is a city of Butts and Sheikhs (among whom I count my dear friends). Arbiters of taste and tsars of culture today are these worthy paladins. And the soul of Lahore is represented not by poets and singers, dancers and musicians, but the traders and shopkeepers of Brandreth Road and Hall Road, and the more up-market establishments that you find in and around Gulberg but whose thinking, Allah be praised, is no different from their down-market brothers-in-arms.
All the more honour then to such maverick outfits as Lahore Bachao Tehreek, and to such of its spirited flag-bearers as the indefatigable Imrana Tiwana who have invested great time and energy in this cause, and who have been trying to tell us that development should mean beauty and elegance, not more monuments raised to the power of concrete.
As a rule, what is ugly is not worth the pursuing. Lahore deserved an underground railway, and one with several branch lines. It has got an eyesore in the form of the metro-bus. Islamabad and Rawalpindi could have benefitted immensely from an underground link. They too have been gifted with an eyesore. That’s the difference between short-term fixes and long-term solutions. Stalin’s Moscow underground, built in 1935, remains a great ride and an architectural wonder. How many marks for aesthetics will anyone give our metro-bus disasters?
So let’s celebrate what we can. It’s the Supreme Court which has pushed the provincial governments and the Election Commission to wake up to their responsibility regarding local elections. The Cantonment Board elections after a lapse of so many years are being held only because of the Supreme Court (and the no-nonsense approach of Milord Justice Jawad S Khawaja). And the fact that they are being held on a party basis is because of an order passed by Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of the LHC (how much work does the man do?).
A persistent judiciary, a media sometimes alive to its responsibilities, and an army moving away from its ‘jihadi’ mindset…maybe these are pointers to something new happening in Pakistan.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com