NGOs go on “product diversification” spree

It all started with the prolonged, boring and repetitious lecture given by a two-woman one-man trio to journalists as if they were Grade II students at the Karachi Press Club. The trio ‘demanded’ the pressman to support the NGO’s chosen product diversification- the “demand” for respect for police. The trio’s primary justification for “demanding” respect for the police went something like this: “The police is among us ... the people are as bad as the police themselves so they should refrain from calling police with bad names... when you call somebody with bad names he/she/they/it become bad even if not actually bad... police should treat police humanely... salary should be increased.”
The boring “demand” for “respect” harangue would have had continued if my senior colleague and veteral journalist Abdul Hameed Chappara diplomatically brought the young lady’s canary-singing to a halt by asking , “if your lecture is finished we have questions to ask”

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Before proceeding any further let me clarify that I have no qualms about treating anybody with respect irrespective of the fact that whether one is a policeman/woman or not. I, however, get infuriated when somebody demands respect. And that was the point that I put as a question asking the trio to justify “demanding respect” for police exclusively in a country where police excesses have become routine and where police brutalities have become epidemic. I also wanted them to justify their reasoning to blame people for routine police excesses, brutalities including illegal arrests and detentions, third-degree tortures and barbaric extra-judicial killings of helpless innocents and accuseds without ever producing them in court of law. But that was not to be beause the trio shamelessly kept on promoting their new “demand” product.

I did confront the gray-haired female leader of the trio, who I personally witnessed refusing to give her name in a petition challenging encroachments as a respondent at Sindh High Court for fear of retribution- real or perceived. She arrogantly brushed aside my questions about basis or justification of floating of noble idea of “demand for respect” saying that “she is the employer of police” which was another way of saying that since police salary is paid by the tax-payers and since she is a taxpayer that makes her “employer of the police”. She also haughtily brushed aside my comment that “respect is earned, not demanded” depriving me the rebuttal that “she is not the sole employer of the police because in this country police are are exempted from income tax are milked out to pay income tax without even knowing it”.

But I would still ask you a number of questions:

a) Is she “the only employer of the Police”?

b) Who gives her the right to make such an absurd “demand” for a virtue that should only be earned through honest, dedicated and selfless long years of work?

c) Is it ethical/moral/politically correct to “demand” an un-demandable commodity like “respect” exclusively for a single group, and that too who ha failed to earn “respect” due to excesses and brutalities of its own?

d) Has the NGO successfully solved all the environment related issues in Karachi to initiate the “product-diversification”-driven expansion?

e) What about the majority of uncorrupt, honest, hard-working millions, who make the majority of this land of pure, for whom nobody is inclined to “demand respect” and who are being abused, exploited, tortured, ripped-off, killed routinely every single, weeks after week, year after year and decade after decade?

f) Why treat exploiter and the exploitee; torturer and the victim; bad and the good, corrupt and the honest as one and the same?

Why this insistence on demanding respect instead of earning it? Another shock came at a press briefing at the KPC of a Lahore-based Foundation, actually registered as company under Companies Ordinance 1984. The shock came during the question answer session during which replying to a question put up by the author the media coordinator and regional manager Karachi of the Foundation said that interest rate on the micro-financing loan given by it carries a basic of 3 per cent in addition to Kibor (Karachi Interbank Offer Rate). Already informed that the Foundation, which only loans money to women of the poorest of the poorests families starting with maximum ceiling of Rs 6,000-15,000, with successive additional ceiling of Rs 5,000 subject to the payment of earlier loan, the mark-up on these micro-financing loans is just unacceptably high, particularly on loans as small as these because Kibor pushes the interest rates as high as 17.5 per cent at presently. The shock kept coming as replying to another question put up by this writer the participants were told that the Foundation is launching a micro-financing bank on commercial basis. Needless to say, the Foudation headed by daughter of a prominent lawyer, who has remained close to with powers that be including former president Pervez Musharraf, whose works have been appreciated at the highest levels, not only domestically but also internationally. The high interest rates and creation of a micro-financing bank on purely commercial basis should not, would not and could not matter.

“Product-diversification” spree is the new mantra of the NGOs. Let’s not rock the boat- O ye good people of this land of pure.