This is the story of how the Pun­jab Chief Min­is­ter Amarinder Singh’s Plan To Get Oxy­gen From La­hore, a hare-brained idea catches on like a virus! Id­iocy is­n’t any­one’s mo­nop­oly; sim­ple Covid’iots have been beaten at the game by Coro­nil pop­pers, who are in­no­cents when mea­sured against anti-vac­cin­ists who, in turn, dwarf be­fore Gau­Mootra/​Go­bar Ther­apy ad­vo­cates, but Pun­jab has pro­duced a new va­ri­ety -the Pak­istani Oxy­gen seek­ers. All be­cause La­hore is 50 kilo­me­tres away!  Se­nior Jour­nal­ist S P Singh lam­basts politi­cians and a sec­tion of the me­dia that went into a tizzy at the bizarre im­prac­ti­cal idea.

RES­IST THE TEMP­TA­TION OF HAZ­ARD­ING A GUESS as to whether an un­due pro­cliv­ity to­wards ex­ces­sive sitaphal or cheeku con­sump­tion prompts such be­hav­iour or some par­tic­u­larly pe­cu­liar royal drug is to blame, but the fact is that when Pun­jab Chief Min­is­ter Amarinder Singh floated the hare-brained idea of im­port­ing Oxy­gen from Pak­istani Pun­jab, the line up of those hail­ing the barmy id­iocy also in­cluded el­e­ments are oth­er­wise known for rea­son­able lev­els of san­ity.

One af­ter the other me­dia plat­forms found Amarinder Singh’s idea fea­si­ble, many even laud­able, and a few ac­tu­ally ap­plauded from the side­lines. Re­spectable mast­heads fell for the id­iocy, lock stock and quill, and some po­lit­i­cal pun­dits even called it a mas­ter­stroke. Did they even in­hale enough oxy­gen, or were they on high- flow?

A few thought that all you need to find the best way to ac­cess Oxy­gen was a
mea­sur­ing tape: Pa­ni­pat, from where Pun­jab picks up some of its quota, is 350 kms
away, while La­hore is just 50 kms. Presto, Jim Hacker had found a so­lu­tion sit­ting in
Am­rit­sar.

Why try to find out more? To go back to Humphrey Ap­pleby, “they have a right to be ig­no­rant. Knowl­edge only means com­plic­ity in guilt; ig­no­rance has a cer­tain dig­nity.”

So, in a man­ner most “dig­ni­fied”, for want of a more po­lite term, even Al Jazeera jumped on to the band­wagon. “Pun­jab gasps as In­di­a’s Modi re­fuses to seek
oxy­gen from Pak­istan”, shrieked Al Jazeer­a’s head­line. Lest you miss the pol­i­tics
be­ing in­duced by the in­ter­na­tional chan­nel and its bright jour­nal­ist, they made it
ex­plicit even for read­ers on the bovine scale -“Re­peated re­quests by Pun­jab
lead­ers to im­port life-sav­ing gas from ‘en­emy na­tion’ go un­heeded by the fed­eral
gov­ern­ment.”

Once you quote BBC or Al Jazeera to a ‘glob­alised’ Pun­jabi, lit­tle fur­ther ev­i­dence is re­quired. Our search for truth stops at the for­eign me­dia logo.

Ac­cord­ing to umpteen ‘se­nior’ jour­nal­ists, ‘re­spect­ed’ news­pa­pers, shrieky
tele­vi­sion chan­nels and, lo and be­hold, Al Jazeera, “the Pun­jab gov­ern­ment
ap­proached Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi to fa­cil­i­tate an “oxy­gen cor­ri­dor” with
Pak­istan, In­di­a’s archri­val neigh­bour which shares a 550km-long (342 miles) bor­der
with the north­west­ern state.”

Once you quote BBC or Al Jazeera to a ‘glob­alised’ Pun­jabi, lit­tle fur­ther ev­i­dence is
re­quired. Our search for truth stops at the for­eign me­dia logo.

We were in­formed that Mod­i’s Hindu na­tion­al­ist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gov­ern­ment re­fused to seek any help from its “en­emy na­tion”. Al Jazeera sources
were as im­pec­ca­ble as our MP from Am­rit­sar, Gur­jit Singh Au­jla, who be­ing not far
from La­hore “barely 50km (31 miles) away from Am­rit­sar” as per Al Jazeera), must
had clearly seen stocks of Oxy­gen in, what was that?, ah! the “en­emy na­tion”—
Pak­istan.

Au­jla, in­ci­den­tally, ac­tu­ally re­leased a state­ment on May 4 to in­form that Mod­i’s
Cen­tre had re­jected his pro­posal to al­low Pun­jab’s lo­cal in­dus­try body to im­port
oxy­gen from Pak­istan through the Wa­gah-At­tari bor­der.

Put to­gether the tens of news­pa­pers, dozen-odd TV chan­nels, cou­ple of score of
‘se­nior’ jour­nal­ists and the awe-in­duc­ing Al Jazeera, and you get the ba­sic facts:

1. Pun­jab needs Oxy­gen.
2. La­hore is 50 kms away.
3. Why don’t we get Oxy­gen from Pak­istan?
4. We can’t – ob­vi­ously – be­cause the Hindu na­tion­al­ist BJP of Modi is­n’t al­low­ing it.

What more was there to find out?

Ex­cept, of course, one lit­tle in­ci­den­tal de­tail – how much Oxy­gen Pak­istan has to
spare, how much is Pak­istan’s to­tal Oxy­gen pro­duc­tion, how much is its Oxy­gen
pro­duc­tion ca­pac­ity and how is the Oxy­gen sup­ply sit­u­a­tion in Pak­istan’s or
La­hore’s hos­pi­tals for that mat­ter.

That would have re­quired Googling, at the least, and who has time for that inanity?
From Chandi­garh to La­hore, as seen from Chandi­garh, the truth was ev­i­dent, as was
the Pak­istani Oxy­gen.

Ex­cept that Pak­istan does not have sur­plus oxy­gen. It never had. In fact, Pak­istan
does not have Oxy­gen even for its own Covid re­lated needs. It never had enough
even be­fore Covid-19 sent its call­ing card from Wuhan. And it does not have the
re­sources to mar­shal plans to set up Oxy­gen plants overnight.

Of course, Pak­istan, the world’s only na­tion formed in the name of Is­lam, knows
how to pray. All that Pak­istani Prime Min­is­ter Im­ran Khan could do was to pray for
his In­dian brethren. (Fem­i­nists, hold your horses and in­hale some O2, please, at the
un­der­girded pa­tri­archy here. We are talk­ing Pak lingo!) So he tweeted: “Our prayers
for a speedy re­cov­ery go to all those suf­fer­ing from the pan­demic in our
neigh­bour­hood and the world.”

It is not clear if he made a spe­cial men­tion of our Oxy­gen re­quire­ment or had heard Amarinder Singh’s be­seech­ing calls to Modi to get some of the gas from La­hore, but that is a mat­ter be­tween Khan and Al­lah. The two haven’t been hav­ing the best of re­la­tion­ship, as is clear from the lat­est mus­cle-flex­ing by the Ja­hangir Tareen group or a rein­vig­o­rated She­hbaz Sharif, but lest Min­is­ter Jais­hankar ob­jects to my com­ments about an­other coun­try’s in­ter­nal af­fairs, let us stick to Oxy­gen.

Any­one fol­low­ing the de­lib­er­a­tions and daily brief­ings of Pak­istan’s NCOC – Na­tional Com­mand and Op­er­a­tion Cen­tre – headed by Pak­istan’s Min­is­ter for Plan­ning, De­vel­op­ment and Spe­cial Ini­tia­tives Asad Umar, knows how ill-equipped the neigh­bour­ing coun­try is in deal­ing with any se­ri­ous wave of the virus.

On April 29 this year, Asad Umar was wor­ried about the Oxy­gen sit­u­a­tion in Pak­istan when the to­tal num­ber of Pak­ista­nis on Oxy­gen was just 5,360, al­most half the num­ber of pa­tients on Oxy­gen just in Amarinder Singh’s Pun­jab.

Con­tin­u­ing to build ca­pac­ity, in yes­ter­day’s ncoc it was de­cided to im­port 6,000 tons oxy­gen, 5,000 cylin­ders and 20 cryo­genic tanks. It is this proac­tive de­ci­sion mak­ing which has with Al­lah’s bless­ings help us avoid the kind of scenes be­ing wit­nessed in some other coun­tries

— Asad Umar (@Asad_U­mar) April 30, 2021

Dur­ing the very week when Amarinder Singh was bad­ger­ing Modi to let him get
some Oxy­gen from Pak­istan, Asad Umar was sit­ting in La­hore, wor­ried about what
his coun­try will do if it needed even a frac­tion more Oxy­gen.

“Con­tin­u­ing to build ca­pac­ity …it was de­cided to im­port 6,000 tonnes of oxy­gen,
5,000 cylin­ders and 20 cryo­genic tanks,” he told re­porters on April 29 in Is­lam­abad, his re­marks re­ported widely in the me­dia. A day be­fore, he had told Pak­istan that Im­ran Khan’s gov­ern­ment had im­ported 19,200 oxy­gen cylin­ders in 2020 to aug­ment gas dis­tri­b­u­tion.

On the very day, Amarinder Singh wanted La­hore’s Oxy­gen, Prime Min­is­ter Im­ran Khan’s spe­cial as­sis­tant on na­tional health ser­vices, Dr Faisal Sul­tan was on Samaa TV of Pak­istan, telling his coun­try that “Pak­istan is con­sum­ing at least 90% of the oxy­gen it is pro­duc­ing.” Amarinder Singh se­ri­ously wanted a share in that pie?

Even at the peak of the first wave of Covid-19, Pak­istan’s Oxy­gen pro­duc­tion,
ca­pac­ity, dis­tri­b­u­tion, avail­abil­ity and hos­pi­tal sup­ply chain po­si­tion was, to put it
po­litely, lest Jais­hankar starts tweet­ing at me, pa­thetic!

The max­i­mum oxy­gen pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tional ca­pac­ity that Pak­istan could brag
about in 2020 was 487 met­ric tonnes per day. It has now been raised to 798 met­ric
tonnes, as per the fed­eral gov­ern­men­t’s claims. The ac­tual pro­duc­tion, of course,
re­mains a lit­tle less, cur­rently pegged at 725 tonnes as per the gov­ern­men­t’s and NCOCs own pub­lished claims. In­dia, on the same day, was pro­duc­ing about 7,500
met­ric tonnes every day.

Just to give you an idea, In­dia is cur­rently plan­ning to im­port 50,000 tonnes of
med­ical oxy­gen and the Min­istry of Health and Fam­ily Wel­fare has been di­rected to
float a ten­der for the pur­pose. Ma­ha­rash­tra alone pro­duces 1,250 plus met­ric
tonnes of Oxy­gen, three times more than what all of Pak­istan pro­duced last year,
and Ma­ha­rash­tra is well on its way to aug­ment its ca­pac­ity much more.

Pak­istan has vir­tu­ally es­caped the dance of death that coro­n­avirus has been stag­ing
in In­dia. As I write this, its cur­rent pos­i­tiv­ity rate is 8.2%, La­hore’s city hos­pi­tals have
only 355 pa­tients on high-flow oxy­gen and 89 had died in the last 24 hours as per
re­ports on the morn­ing of May 20, 2021. La­hore, which, you know, is just 50 kms,
from Am­rit­sar, re­ported just 399 cases, and oth­ers much less (Rawalpindi 193,
Sar­godha 115, Faisal­abad 90 and Mul­tan 67), but even then, warn­ings about Oxy­gen
were be­ing sounded every­where.

Pak­istani Pun­jab’s health sec­re­tary Nabeel Awan said that in La­hore’s gov­ern­ment
hos­pi­tals, 186 out of 272 ven­ti­la­tors were oc­cu­pied even with these low num­bers.

On the very day, Amarinder Singh wanted La­hore’s Oxy­gen, Prime Min­is­ter Im­ran Khan’s spe­cial as­sis­tant on na­tional health ser­vices, Dr Faisal Sul­tan was on Samaa TV of Pak­istan, telling his coun­try that “Pak­istan is con­sum­ing at least 90% of the oxy­gen it is pro­duc­ing.” Amarinder Singh se­ri­ously wanted a share in that pie?

Please watch from 1:53 on­wards -all about Oxy­gen in Pak­istan

“We need to take it very se­ri­ously,” Sul­tan said, but Ma­hara­jas hardly take such stuff
se­ri­ously, at least not as se­ri­ously as they worry about cus­tard ap­ples or mu­dap­ples.

See the part from 1:18 to 1:30.

Sunil Jakhar, Pun­jab Con­gress chief and oth­er­wise a sane head, also fell for the bait,
com­plain­ing that the Modi gov­ern­men­t’s Home and For­eign Of­fice has blocked Pun­jab’s bright idea of in­hal­ing Pak­istani oxy­gen.

Pak­istan, of course, has been tak­ing it se­ri­ously. Re­sist­ing much pres­sure from the
in­dus­try, the NCOC has or­dered shut­ting down of the scrap in­dus­try in La­hore’s Misri Shah Loha mandi, named af­ter the great Sufi saint and king of Kaafi po­etry, so
that oxy­gen could be di­verted to the health­care sec­tor in­stead.

Pak­istan has five oxy­gen pro­duc­ers — Mul­tan Chem­i­cals Lim­ited, POL, Ghani Gasses, Sha­reef Gasses Lim­ited and Sul­tan Gasses Lim­ited — for the med­ical as well as the in­dus­trial sec­tor, though cur­rently, the en­tire stock is be­ing sup­plied to only health fa­cil­i­ties in the coun­try.

Mul­tan Chem­i­cals Lim­it­ed’s Muneeb Khan Babar was quoted in Pak­istani me­dia as say­ing that the oxy­gen-pro­duc­ing sec­tor was ‘un­der stress’ at the mo­ment due to a surge in de­mand. On top of that, Pak­istan has se­ri­ous elec­tric­ity sup­ply is­sues that can thwart the best of oxy­gen pro­duc­tion plans.

Al Jazeer­a’s equally scin­til­lat­ing re­port­ing about – let me re­call – “Mod­i’s Hindu na­tion­al­ist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gov­ern­ment re­fus­ing to seek any help from its “en­emy na­tion”.

Since last month, Pak­istan’s Khy­ber Pakhtunkhwa state has put strict curbs on
Oxy­gen us­age and now med­ical oxy­gen can only be ad­min­is­tered to Covid-19
pa­tients.

As for Pun­jab, the one whose cap­i­tal is La­hore (Re­mem­ber? 50 kms away?),
some­one who was also a chief min­is­ter of Pun­jab and ar­guably knows the state
bet­ter than the chief min­is­ter of our Pun­jab was warn­ing the Us­man Buz­dar
gov­ern­ment as well as Im­ran Khan’s about the state of Oxy­gen avail­abil­ity.

Not pay­ing much heed to Amarinder Singh hark­ing about get­ting Pak­istan’s Oxy­gen from La­hore, PML-N Pres­i­dent and Leader of the Op­po­si­tion in Na­tional As­sem­bly (Pak­istan’s Par­lia­ment), She­hbaz Sharif was that very week ex­press­ing alarm and con­cern over the oxy­gen short­age in his coun­try amid ris­ing cases of Covid-19.

“All stake­hold­ers must for­mu­late a strat­egy on emer­gent grounds to save the coun­try from a cri­sis like the one pre­vail­ing in In­dia,” She­hbaz said in a state­ment on April 26, 2021.

Some of the top Pak­istani or Pak­istan-ori­gin re­searchers and pol­icy wonks, in
an ar­ti­cle that was writ­ten in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dawn and the Cen­tre for Eco­nomic Re­search in Pak­istan, ad­vised Is­lam­abad to start sourc­ing and procur­ing oxy­gen cylin­ders and con­cen­tra­tors and place ad­vance or­ders for mid-June. You think they should have asked Im­ran Khan to con­sider Amarinder Singh’s de­mand for some of that gas?

Of course, their ad­vice hap­pened to co­in­cide with Amarinder Singh’s bright idea of
get­ting Oxy­gen from Pak­istan, and its whole­hearted sup­port by Pun­jab based
me­dia, duly val­i­dated by Al Jazeer­a’s equally scin­til­lat­ing re­port­ing about – let me re­call – “Mod­i’s Hindu na­tion­al­ist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gov­ern­ment re­fus­ing
to seek any help from its “en­emy na­tion”.

And all this while, you thought Amarinder Singh, the fairly well-ed­u­cated chief min­is­ter of Pun­jab, was se­ri­ously in­ter­ested in mak­ing sure that you are able to breathe and was find­ing in­no­v­a­tive ways of ar­rang­ing Oxy­gen from wher­ever he could. Do you even for a mo­ment think he was not aware or was not made aware, about the avail­abil­ity of Oxy­gen in Pak­istan? What do you think was go­ing on? ‘Oxy­gen from Pak­istan’ idea made head­lines for more than a week, keep­ing you en­gaged and push­ing away other head­lines, like the num­ber of corpses be­ing churned out by the Amarinder Singh gov­ern­ment-run hos­pi­tal in his own con­stituency.

As for the fac­tual ve­rac­ity of how far La­hore is from Am­rit­sar when com­pared to
Pa­ni­pat, I stand with my ‘se­nior’ jour­nal­ists brethren, though some­times I have to
take a deep breath be­fore I do some­thing like that. Just to en­sure ad­e­quate up­take
of lo­cally avail­able Oxy­gen, not im­ported from La­hore, 50 kms away.