SURELY everyone and Charlie’s aunt has heard about the Doongi Ground scandal?

The one in which the government of Pervaiz Elahi tried unsuccessfully to convert (or in legal parlance, ‘change the use’ of) a park/playground to an entertainment centre containing an IMAX cinema?

An IMAX cinema in Lahore you may well ask? In a city that cannot provide its inhabitants clean drinking water? Where there are open garbage dumps on most street corners? Where the poor far outnumber the rich who play on M.M. Alam Road? Where the roads situated away from the VVIP routes are broken and potholed? And where, in any case, the scheme of the Gulberg colony dating to the early fifties had Doongi Ground clearly marked as a green/playground/park area?

An IMAX cinema in any city of Pakistan, you would ask when there are very few films in the entire world in the IMAX format? When the ticket costs would be prohibitive for the vast majority of the citizens of the city? When there was, even when the project was (mis)conceived four years ago, not enough electricity in the country to run equipment such as that in an IMAX which needed humidity control and a temperature of 26 degrees Celsius all year round to merely stay in good repair in hot and humid Pakistan?

Seems a pie-in-the-sky sort of project you would say, for who would pay for it? More than that who would defray the running expenses considering the IMAX would not, could not, turn a profit in a month of Sundays? Something like Rs10m a month would be needed just to keep the damned thing running.

Easy-peasy said the then movers and shakers of Punjab. The ‘use of land’ bit we’ll get around by just saying the original scheme of Gulberg colony had disappeared. Don’t believe me? Let me quote from the judgment of My Lords Khalilur Rahman Ramday and Raja Fayyaz Ahmed of the Supreme Court of Pakistan when they overturned the vacated stay order granted by a Single Bench of the Lahore High Court:

“The answer to this all important and crucial question lay in the scheme as framed and then sanctioned by the government for Gulberg and a mere look at the said scheme could have resolved the issue. But from the Single Bench (of the Lahore High Court) order, dated 23-2-2006, it appeared that the respondents, including the LDA had elected not to produce the said scheme before the High Court despite orders for the purpose”. Can you believe any of this, readers?

As for the economic non-viability of the project, it was decided from on high that the government would build a highbrow shopping plaza next to the IMAX, the rent going towards running the cinema. So highbrow that the model of the quite ugly building actually showed a Porsche showroom on the ground floor. I ask you! No prizes for guessing where the pugree or goodwill money would have gone.

As for the money, said the leading lights of the then government, it isn’t ours, it belongs to the people of Punjab, so who cares? The government of Punjab transferred several hundred million rupees to the information department under which the so-called Punjab Entertainment Company (PEC) was soon formed with eight sitting secretaries to the government on the board of the company (I ask you!). The shenanigans of the then Government of Punjab and its illegitimate child, the PEC, are so grave and blatant and impudent that they defy description, such as paying upfront for the IMAX equipment three years ago with the equipment yet to be shipped. I do not have the space here to enumerate the many others.

According to the PEC Rs480m belonging to the poor people of Punjab have already been sunk into this mire, and a further Rs320m are needed to complete its projects, none of which are viable. It was as if in the very first instance, a fancy and very expensive carriage was designed, then a donkey was hitched to it. When the poor little donkey failed to budge the heavy and overloaded carriage, a nag was put in its place.

And so on it went until a team of finely bred carriage horses was imported to pull the deadweight. People who know feel that the cost of the project would exceed Rs2,000m given inflation and the rising prices of building materials. Mark, readers that we haven’t even considered the cost of the 50 kanals of land stolen from the people of Lahore which is estimated to be close to Rs3bn.

But let’s go back a little. Why was the House of Gujrat/Zahoor unsuccessful in carrying out its little scheme considering that they were the leading handmaidens to the Commando and in turn did as they pleased under his benign gaze? Just because of a brave band of citizens, some from the locality who just could not bear to see the destruction of a playground that had produced several fine Test cricketers and which was actually recognised by the PCB as a cricket ground, some from the great Shehri which has taken on the building mafias principally in Karachi but also in other cities of our ravaged country. I salute them.

Any article on the Doongi Ground fiasco would not be complete unless the role of the Punjab bureaucracy is not exposed. From the word go it has behaved in a cavalier and utterly toadying manner. One word from their political masters and they jumped through hoops and indulged in behaviour that did not behove their high offices. It is an offence under the ESTA code for government servants to run business ventures.

Why, even most recently according to press reports, direct orders of the present chief minister to dissolve the PEC and make sure that the IMAX equipment was shipped were not carried out for six months. And this is the most effective government in the country according to observers.

My exhortation to the government of Punjab would be to bury the PEC ignominiously and dishonourably; to not throw good money after bad; and to return the Doongi Ground to the children of Lahore. The whole matter should then be turned over to a judicial and high-powered tribunal which should prosecute those who played so wantonly with public funds. For this is a case in which another person’s albatross is weighing down someone else.

And now for President Asif Zardari’s talking down to the variously ‘less intelligent’ and ‘unwise’ of his ‘friends’ doing this or that, and saying that he knows who Benazir’s killers are but is not saying for the sake of democracy. Will someone please show him the latest IRI poll? And, mark my words, sir, telling us who Benazir’s murderers are will help democracy; not telling us will derail it.

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk