The National Book Council of Pakistan, under poet Fehmida Riaz, may be finally beginning to get its act together. But it is not going to be without some hiccups first.
Ms Riaz inherited a bureaucratic structure from the martial law period and understandably wanted to get rid of it in a hurry. However, she ran into trouble when she tried to cancel the 1988 awards to authors and publishers given by a select committee established under the ancient regime. Since the award winners had already been formally notified before she took over, one author (who happens to be a police officer) threatened to go to court to uphold the earlier committee’s decisions if the NBC cancelled the awards. So Ms Riaz had to backtrack and dish out the prizes in a low-key ceremony in Islamabad two months ago. The whole episode was not concluded without the NBC displaying a certain degree of haste and bad taste.
In doling out this year’s awards, Ms Riaz’s own handpicked selection committee for 1989 did not bother with the intellectual or scholarly merits of authors and books, although her prize-winners do not lack these qualities. She wanted to acknowledge the contributions of ‘progressive’ men and women of letters ‘to the peoples’ struggle against the tyranny of the last decade’. She did just that, given her own personal likes and dislikes which are probably as good or as bad as anybody else’s.
However, the guest list for the award-giving ceremony (presided over by the PM) was just as one-sided as that of the recipients of the cash prizes. We know of at least one publisher, five of whose authors received the top honours, namely Habib Jalib, Yusuf Lodhi, Taufiq Rafat, Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, who was not even accorded the courtesy of an invitation by Ms Fahmida Riaz, let alone a citation for publishing these ‘progressive’ writers during the martial law years.
Probably an oversight, you might say. We think not. More likely an attitude of mind which afflicts all PPP-ites. Dale Carnegie should be on the prescribed reading list of everyone in Islamabad these days and Fehmida Riaz would do well to read his classic — How to win friends and influence people — and publish a cheap edition for distribution to all her fellow travellers. After all, what can she lose?