What would you do if your property is grabbed by the most powerful in the country? If one has an answer to this, one would be doing a great service by letting the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Chairman Ijaz Butt know it. What he has lost and how he lost he had a shocking story to tell the National Assembly's Public Accounts Committee.
His disclosure - so shocking that he would dare not tell the whole truth in public - was made as the PCB's audit report came up for scrutiny by the committee. According to him, out of some 29 acres of the PCB's costly land near the National Stadium, Karachi, 24 acres were taken over by the Army and judiciary. No bargain, no compensation; 'they just came and started constructing their houses without any formal transfer of land and payments,' he told the committee.
The Pakistan Cricket Board lost this prime property as General Pervez Musharraf ruled the country, with the help of a coterie of comrades-in-arms and a pliant judiciary. But Ijaz Butt's lament doesn't end here; he is now under threat to part with the rest of it, the five acres of costly land, worth about five billion rupees. And that threat comes from a political party he is reluctant to name, out of fear.
No doubt the national sports, particularly cricket, is presently in the dumps, but that doesn't mean that the PCB should be dispossessed of whatever little it is left with on its body. It's good and heart-warming to learn then that Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, has weighed in with the PCB and promised to help recover its illegally grabbed property. He would be writing letters to the Army Chief and Chief Justice of Pakistan. But his work should not finish there.
He has something even more urgent and closer to home to undertake: to confront the land-grabbers, who are after the plot, allotted to the Pakistan Cricket Board, to construct a cricket stadium in the Capital. They are asking Ijaz Butt to handover the land to them so that they manage the construction of the stadium, for which generous funds have been pledged by the Abu Dhabi rulers.
Let us see what the National Assembly's most powerful committee can do, now, to save the sinking ship of Pakistan cricket. But, more importantly, it is the army high command and the higher judiciary that need to relook into this saga of forcible usurpation of PCB's land in Karachi and restore the status quo ante. The Pak Army and the superior judiciary are the most prestigious national institutions and are held in high esteem by the people. But the narrative produced by the PCB chairman, before the PAC, tends to put that prestige at stake.
As they say, if the king steals an apple, his companions would feel free to plunder the whole orchard. Then the times have also qualitatively changed - no more is a serving general the country's Chief Executive and the superior judiciary stands thoroughly cleansed of the black sheep. We hope the PCB's complaint would be looked into by the relevant authorities and it gets back its usurped property, and the remaining five acres are saved from the front men of the powerful political outfit. Also, it is our hope that the Pakistan Cricket Board gets the possession of the plot for the proposed stadium in Islamabad, so that it can build the proposed cricket stadium.
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