Columnist Open Letter to Chief Minister: Mir Hussain Too late to wake up from your slumber! By Mir Hussain Hnble Chief Minister, Farzandaane-e-Farzandaye Shiekh Sahib, Haakim-e-Nizaam-e-Jahaan-e-Twitter, Darroga-e-Haal-e-PSA-e-Kashmir, Izzat Maaf Jinab-e-Aala Omar Sahib, After sleeping over governance for the past five and a half years, the recent election defeat seems to have jolted you from your royal slumber. Evidently you seem to be in rush to score as many runs as possible in your last slog over, but come what may Miandad you cannot become. Your enhancing the retirement age might be welcomed by the effected employees, whose productivity has become a legend of sorts in Kashmir, government offices being where no work can get done until some Gandhis change hands. But even while government employees may have a reason to rejoice, people like me cannot see ourselves as part of any celebrations. Enhancing the upper age limit for new recruitments notwithstanding, this will bring no change in the number of unemployed since the enhancement of retirement age shall in any case act as freeze on available vacancies. Nor will it change the maama-bhaanja recruitment process in your government, where a daily wager recruited some years back can become MD of a corporation under the auspices of his Maama and with due political patronage. Much before you enhanced the upper age limit for recruitments, you had also promised that there shall be no extensions given to retirees nor any re-employment will be done, but your promises like always worked exactly in the opposite on ground. For years people like me have been applying at the local recruitment boards even for the few vacancies ever announced by them, where even a peons post had PhD holders applying for. Going by the number of applications received for the few posts advertised by SSRB, the amount of total fee received from applicants must be far higher than the wages paid to your Rehbar-e-Noukri appointees (who have been working on less than a daily labourers wages) for one whole year. Seems JKSSRB could be the only profitable department of your government, which earns millions from the unemployed. And if SSRB was not alone, the story of JKPSC is no different, where the likes of Prof Mushtaq Peer sold MBBS seats in bulk, earning billions for self and his political mentors. Mr. Peer is also credited for streamlining the recruitment of patwaris under his recruitment expertise; the custodians of our land records, most of who have been known to rise from modest dwellings to palatial houses within no time. Earlier we had 91 pass, now we have Mushtaq Peer MBBS and Mushtaq Peer Patwaris so on and so forth. Of course, this is in addition to current governments political appointees who have been scattered like free seedlings across departments, trampling upon merit and fair selection. One day I heard you speak of entrepreneurship, and decided to be a part of your Skype (excuse my spellings; since you are only visible on Internet, I mistook you saying SKEWPY as Skype). Wanted to start a dairy farm back in my village, but then found that your government had prescribed Kashmiris to consume urea and detergent based milk and milk products. This, I think, might be a part of your farsighted vision, to include growth and cleanliness in the same product, where urea shall ensure growth of common Kashmiris and detergents shall cleanse them. Since my dairy products would be no match for this futuristic milk, I gave up the entrepreneurship idea. You had been promising to build and rebuild (like the roads that are done like old rag patches again and again) infrastructure in this ravaged valley, I thought becoming a contractor was my best chance to earn some money. But to my utter (not) surprise found that such works in departments and ministries had been exclusively distributed to political families and groups. Mantirs brother and brother-in-law, son and son-in-law, cousin and brother-in-laws cousin et all had become contractors, distributing amongst themselves such works as if it were some family property. The few works that did go outside this syndicate went to players of this business who knew and practiced the arithmetic of official percentages in these contracts. Common understanding is these percentages are passed on upwards to all levels of governance. With my qualifications, I tried to approach your higher education minister. His vocabulary and linguistics went incomprehensible, some lingua franca that went beyond the understanding of people like me. Even with the pile of degrees I have, the Honourable Minister was delivering an entirely new language class. Before he could dub us, the qualified unemployed, as opposition ke agent or badmaashu ke badmassh, we fled. With everything failing I went to pray to God, to seek His help. Arriving early at the prayer place was seated in the first row, when a politician who is often seen (dis) figuring shrines as a part of his I am the only custodian of these shrines, accompanied by his coterie of Auqaf yes ministers appeared late and pushed me some rows back, making space for VIPs. It was then I realized that ruling politicians and their kin have not only gathered reservations in jobs, contracts and power access but have also seized reservations in prayer places. No doubt God has stopped listening to us the commoners, who have been pushed into the back rows awaiting redemption. Your last election offer of allowance to unemployed was never again heard of. You can keep that offer and money now, will be needed by your party, post its retirement after the coming elections. We are done with your offers of jobs (80,000 jobs you offered last time, which never came all these five and a half years). On the other side, my mother has for long wished to see me get married. Since the last defeat made you sit up and open the Jehaangiri Ghanta@gupkar (emperor Jehangir had his own Ghantaa to listen to public grievances, and we think you are trying to assume his modern role), I take this opportunity to make this one request. Can NC offer to get all vote able bachelors married with some promise of a bachelor allowance (knowing that you never fulfill your promise, this allowance wont cost you anything)? Nawa-e-Subah could be turned into one big marriage hall, since we dont see any productive activity going on there except for your ministers and party men enjoying wazwan when Kashmir was under curfew. I hope you have read A Young Turkish Catastrophe (by H.H Munro). If you get the marriage thing going, we can promise you to get all the in-laws and relatives to vote for you, including the minors. As in H.H Munros story, I see this as the only way you could win the next elections. Wasalam Mir Hussain Shehr-e-Khaas, Kasheer News Updated at : Friday, June 06, 2014
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 11:53:18 +0000
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