Bush’s speech — a vision of permanent war

GEORGE Bush’s much-anticipated speech on how to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, weighed in at 1,867 words. More than one thousand words were devoted to making demands on the Palestinians, while just 137 words dealt with what Israel should do. The few remaining words were taken up with cliches and platitudes.

The content of few statements can have been leaked in advance as much as this one, and yet Bush’s pronouncement still managed to surprise by its sheer breathtaking unfairness and unwillingness to address a reality which is clearly perceived by the rest of the world.

The speech was so pro-Israel that Jerusalem Post reporter David Horowitz told National Public Radio that the Sharon government may feel they could have written it themselves. Bush has entirely accepted the Israeli view that “terror” alone is what is fuelling the conflict, and defined all Israeli violence as self-defence.

As expected, it is up to the Palestinians to “reform” themselves before any demands, no matter how mild, are made of Israel. Bush declared: “I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practising democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts.”

Bush’s apparent call on the Palestinians to get rid of Yasser Arafat immediately grabbed the headlines. But this call, just as Israel has re-invaded almost every Palestinian city, once more placed Arafat under house arrest and announced “massive action” imminently in the Gaza Strip, may actually serve as a green light to Sharon to kill or expel Arafat. Sharon whose popularity is flagging as he has failed to bring security through repression may now feel emboldened to make the move against Arafat that many in Israel are demanding. This would only increase the chaos and violence. On the other hand, now that Bush has openly identified Arafat as the obstacle to progress, Sharon may well do all he can to preserve Arafat in hale and vigorous health.

Arafat, demonstrating how incoherent and detached from reality he has become, reacted to Bush’s speech by calling it a “serious contribution to the Middle East peace process”. Such a declaration deserves at best pity for a man whose faculties are clearly failing him, but is more likely to generate among Palestinians only anger, derision and contempt. Bush’s message amounts to a demand that the Palestinians must develop all the institutions of a fully independent, democratic state and a fully functioning democracy. Yet, while demanding democracy from the Palestinians, Bush is not shy to tell them in advance whom they cannot have as their leaders.

What will be the Palestinians’ reward for achieving this impossible task? Not independence, but according to Bush “the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East”.

Hussein Ibish originally pointed out in The Los Angeles Times on June 20 that “interim independence and partial sovereignty make as much sense politically as a woman being somewhat pregnant. Independence and sovereignty are either fully realized or meaningless”.

Bush complained that “the elected Palestinian legislature has no authority, and power is concentrated in the hands of an unaccountable few.” He observed — correctly: “The Palestinian parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body.” What he left out is that it was the Oslo Accords, signed with the full blessing of the United States that explicitly limited the powers of the Palestinian legislature and gave the Israeli military authorities the right to annul any law passed by it.

Bush worried that “today, the Palestinian people lack effective courts of law and have no means to defend and vindicate their rights”. Yet he failed to mention that the very worst abuses were carried out by the infamous “State Security Court” established with the full approval of the United States and blessed in person by then Vice President Al Gore when he visited Jericho in 1994. Since then the Palestinian security services have arrested people and violated their human rights not merely with the acquiescence of the United States, but with the active encouragement, training and supervision of the CIA. Palestinian courts have no jurisdiction at all over the Israeli settlers living on confiscated land, and so even when reformed will not provide the Palestinians with “means to defend and vindicate their rights.” This is the difference between real independence and ‘provisional’ independence.

On the issue of violence, Bush made it very clear that only the Palestinians must renounce it. Israel was given a free hand to “continue to defend itself.” Palestinians are required to stop “terror” immediately, but Bush only called on Israel to withdraw its forces to the positions held prior to September 28, 2000, and to stop settlement construction in the occupied territories, “as we make progress”. This is essentially a licence for Israel to carry on with aggressive violence unilaterally, since the settlement building enterprise is based solely on violence.

Forty years ago, Frantz Fanon explained that between the colonizer and the colonized native “it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.... It is obvious here that the agents of the government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.” (The Wretched of the Earth, chapter 1)

So it is now with the “clear conscience of the upholder of the peace” that Bush is effectively inviting Sharon to accelerate the settlement enterprise until there is “progress”. Since the violence and despair that the settlements generate can only bring the opposite of progress towards security and peace, it is an open invitation.

When Bush speaks about Israeli “occupation” — it is merely a word, an abstraction. It is not a system of foreign military dictatorship over millions of people which is the very antithesis of every democratic value Bush claims to stand for and which invades every transaction of daily life. First and foremost, he views it not as a condition affecting the Palestinians but as something that harms Israelis, because “permanent occupation threatens Israel’s identity and democracy”.

Bush clearly views the Palestinians as being the direct cause of Israeli suffering: “I can understand the deep anger and anguish of the Israeli people. You’ve lived too long with fear and funerals, having to avoid markets and public transportation, and forced to put armed guards in kindergarten classrooms. The Palestinian Authority has rejected your offer at hand, and trafficked with terrorists. You have a right to a normal life; you have a right to security; and I deeply believe that you need a reformed, responsible Palestinian partner to achieve that security.”

But as for the Palestinians — dispossessed of their country and freedom for fifty-four years — Israel has no culpability at all: “I can understand the deep anger and despair of the Palestinian people. For decades you’ve been treated as pawns in the Middle East conflict. Your interests have been held hostage to a comprehensive peace agreement that never seems to come, as your lives get worse year by year.”

That is all Bush has to say. It is as if the Palestinians, because of a bit of rotten luck, have caught a cold. Yet if one reads carefully, it seems that if anyone is responsible for the Palestinians plight it is those who have “treated them as pawns.” This is usually a code word for other Arab states. Indeed, Bush places the Palestinians’ relationship with Israel on the same plane as their relations with other Arabs, as if the two can be compared, as if Israel is just another one of many countries with which the Palestinians can’t get along.

Is there anything hopeful in this speech? I cannot find anything unless it is Bush’s call — eventually — for an independent Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal. But there is nothing new even in this, and his latest statement does not even go as far as US secretary of state Colin Powell’s speech in Louisville, Kentucky, last November or Bush’s own Rose Garden declaration last April.

In the final analysis, Bush’s speech having failed to offer the only thing that can at this point stop the spiral towards disaster — a clear timetable, guaranteed by the international community to end the Israeli occupation and return to political negotiations, — may only make things worse. Israel’s far-right government will be emboldened that its patient strategy of pushing its aggression further step by step and weathering the periodic gusts of American and international criticism has paid off with a full US endorsement of its current policies. We can expect an acceleration of Israeli violence and settlement activity with predictably disastrous results. On the Palestinian side — among those who could distract themselves from the task of survival long enough to care what Bush has to say — his speech will only increase despair.

The future for the Palestinians and the Israelis is as grim as it has ever been. What Bush has offered is not a formula for provisional or any other kind of Palestinian statehood, but a vision of a permanent war.

The writer is vice-president of the Arab-American Action Network.

Economic inequality in US

LIKE those magicians whose hand is quicker than the eye, the acolytes of American capitalism make arguments that are fascinating — and deceptive. The historian Francis Fukuyama, darling of American bankers and industrialists and conservative politicians, famously proclaimed “the end of history”. What he was referring to was the uncontested victory of capitalism as the now dominant motor force of societies all over the globe.

There is no question that the United States is, by far, the wealthiest nation in the world; there seems little doubt that it, with its system of corporate capitalism, has amassed such a sheer abundance of material goods and productive capacity that it can lay claim to being the wealthiest nation in the history of humankind. What Fukuyama, and George Bush, and Bill Clinton before him (though the latter less so) do not pronounce nearly so boldly — they actually do not pronounce it at all — is who owns this wealth. Or, in more traditional economic terminology, they do not dwell on the manner in which this wealth is distributed.

In the United States today, the wealthiest one per cent of the population owns more than the bottom 95 per cent.

The United States has the greatest disparity of wealth in the entire industrialized world. That fact is a national disgrace, though it is largely invisible both in the media, and in the endless accolades about the wonders of capitalism. While America seems to be enjoying a banquet of unbelievable richness, most Americans do not get a full plate, and a remarkable number go hungry.

In the last quarter of a century when the United States moved from global power to global behemoth, a quarter of a century in which American corporations reaped huge profits while spreading their power and influence all over the globe, American workers made no gains. None. The wages of American workers have, since 1978, been flat or declining.

This may be hard to believe for those abroad who see, on television and in movies, Americans driving sports utility vehicles and living in well-appointed houses. But the economic reality is that increases in the standard of living — and many families have seen such increases — have come almost entirely because women have entered the work force in huge numbers, and households which formerly depended on one wage earner now depend on two. Child care, home management, cooking, today are not part of the work day, but in addition to it.

It is not only this increase in the invisible, unpaid work hours that accounts for the ability of many American families to maintain their standard of living. American workers today work longer hours than workers in any other industrialized nation, even hard-working Japan. Harvard economist Juliet Schor reported that the average American works an additional 163 hours, or one month a year, more than the workers did in 1969. American workers get less vacation time than in any other nation.

Let me repeat: the wealthiest one per cent of the population owns more than the bottom 95 per cent. There are three causes for this monstrous maldistribution of wealth: capitalism, government, and pay.

The first is obvious. Capitalism depends on capital, and some members of society have a lot more of it than others. So the in-built tendency of capitalism is to reward those who have capital, which in less technical terms means that those with money tend to see their wealth grow much faster than those who have no money. The rich get richer is a fundamental corollary of capitalist dynamics.

There are two ways of suppressing this tendency toward increasing concentration of wealth. One, obviously, is taxes; the other is government spending. Taxes support public services and government functions, but they have, always, another function. Taxes redistribute income. Governments take money from people via taxes, and they also give money back to people, via social programmes. Who the government takes money from, how much it takes, and what it spends the money on: these are decisions with redistributive consequences.

With the exception of a Clinton tax increase on the wealthy in 1993, the major tax changes since 1978 — an era in which Republicans Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes (father and son) were president a majority of the time — redistributed wealth upward. That is, larger tax breaks went to the wealthy than went to ordinary citizens. In fact, while taxes on the rich were reduced in a multitude of ways, the non-progressive social security tax for federally-funded pensions and the medicare tax for health care for senior citizens, took ever more dollars from working people.

How egregious this tax policy has been can be seen, dramatically, from the single most important initiative of Mr. George W. Bush’s presidency. Elected by a minority of voters only after shenanigans in the courts, Mr. Bush insisted that what the country wanted and what the economy needed was a huge tax cut. He proposed, and then rammed through the Republican Congress, a tax bill which redistributed money from social services into the pockets of the wealthy. The wealthiest one per cent of the population will rake in 52 per cent of the tax benefits when the cuts are fully operative. In the next ten years, the new tax plan will divert an astounding $500 billion out of federal coffers and into the bank accounts of those who earn over $375,000 a year. Diverting this money to the wealthy has moved the US government into deficit. Accordingly, the president and his Republican allies in the Congress are loathe to provide money for education, housing, health care, and other services which working people and the poor depend on. Not only are the rich made richer, the poor and even the middle class will see cuts in what they receive from the government. Redistribution two ways, in a country where the disparity of wealth is already so great that in the world’s richest nation, over sixteen per cent of children live in poverty.

Capitalism favours the rich, and in America tax policies have been skewed to take from the working people and give to the wealthy.

The third cause of the huge wealth gap between the rich and the great mass of ordinary Americans, is pay.

In the United States today, according to the authoritative publication, Business Week, the CEOs of large corporations earn, in salary and other compensation, five hundred times what their average workers make. Put in less arithmetical terms, they earn in slightly over half a day what their workers earn in an entire year. As the recent debacles of Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing, Adelphia Networks and others have revealed, corporate executives have been running their companies for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. And rich they have become.

While greed has been the operative guiding principle for corporate executives — and their bankers, their accountants, their investment advisers — American workers have seen hard times. Over the last four years, a total of 2 million factory jobs have been lost — ten per cent of the manufacturing workforce, which is the best-paying sector of the American economy. The executives who reward themselves so handsomely (the CEO of pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck received over $250 million for one year’s compensation) nonetheless cry in outrage at any mention in a rise in the minimum wage, currently at $5.15 an hour. Since 1979 the minimum wage, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has dropped 21 per cent. In the same period, corporate executives were under no such restraint: in 1980, CEOs made 45 times as much as their workers, while last year they made 531 times what their workers made.

Wages have been flat, the minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation and, to make matters worse, well-paying jobs have declined while low paying service-sector jobs have increased dramatically. Worse, in the last half-century concentrated efforts by business and the corporate media have combined to undermine unions and union-organizing activities. While in 1954, 34.7 per cent of American workers were unionized, currently only 13.9 per cent of the workers belong to a labour union. This too drives wages downward.

It bears repeating, for a third time: In the United States, the wealthiest one per cent of the population owns more than the bottom 95 per cent. It would seem that capitalism is scarcely triumphant, except for those who are at the top of the pile. It is not even the case that, as capitalist apologists always seem to claim, a rising tide lifts all boats, for as we have just seen, the evidence reveals that wages have been flat and wealth share declining for a majority of American workers.

The Americans are, in general, hardworking and generous people. But the maldistribution of wealth, and the Republican effort to continue — with Democratic connivance — the wealth shift, has painful consequences. For all the appearance of material prosperity, Americans often live with large reservoirs of economic anxiety and unfocussed political anger. Economic injustice is the great unacknowledged spectre which haunts American society. And this injustice is, sadly, increasing.

The writer is a professor at the University of Vermont in the US.

Legal status of Kashmir

IN order to understand the legal status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir it would be appropriate to recapitulate briefly the legal obligations and commitments undertaken by India and to prove that the question of the final settlement of this dispute is still wide open, contrary to the oft-repeated statements by India that Kashmir is its integral part and that its status has already been determined.

Before partition, it was agreed that the provinces and the princely states that had Muslim majorities and were contiguous would form Pakistan and those with Hindu majorities would be incorporated in the new state of India. As regards any state where the issue of accession was subject of dispute, the question would be settled in accordance with the wishes of the people of that state.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir had an overwhelmingly Muslim majority. However, the Maharaja was facing an indigenous freedom struggle from his Muslim subjects. He fled from Srinagar to Jammu on October 26, 1947, from where he wrote to Lord Mountbatten, the then governor-general of India asking for military support in restoring law and order in the state. In the same letter, he reportedly acceded to India.

While accepting the accession of the state, Mountbatten added an important rider, namely, that in conformity with their policy in case where the issue of accession has been the subject of dispute, the question of accession should be decided in accordance with the wishes of the people of the state. Consequently, as soon as law and order was restored in Kashmir and its soil cleared of the invaders, the question of the state’s accession would be settled by a reference to the people. As such, the accession was conditional. It must be noted that the so-called instrument of accession of the Maharaja is not traceable anywhere. It is, therefore, safe to presume that the whole exercise was a drama based on fraud.

In the recent past, India has again been avoiding its obligation to settle the dispute on Kashmir and even denied that legally there was a dispute invoking the following grounds:

1) That Jammu and Kashmir is an issue that can only be negotiated bilaterally as provided in the Simla Agreement.

2) That the people of Jammu and Kashmir have already decided their fate through vote at the elections.

3) That the security council resolutions are no longer relevant being old and not invoked by Pakistan for a long period of time.

As regards the first ground there has been a lot of criticism of Pakistan by the Indian rulers for taking up the Kashmir question in various international forums and termed this as a violation of the Simla Agreement. The relevant provisions of the Simla Agreement are follows:

i) That the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations shall govern the relations between the two countries;

ii) That the two countries are resolved to settle their difference by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them.

It is clear that the application of the UN Charter was reaffirmed in the Simla Declaration by providing that “the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations” should be the governing rule. It was also agreed at Simla that the two countries would settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them. But, apart from this general statement of principle, no further details were spelled out in the said agreement. It does not, for example, spell out the modalities for bringing the party refusing to negotiate to the negotiating table. It does not spell out how the dispute would be settled if one party is bent upon creating an impasse or the bilateral negotiations fail to bring about a settlement thereby creating a situation of tension.

The collapse of WorldCom

IT’S almost too poignant that, on the day that President Bush headed off to the G-8 summit of world leaders in Canada, WorldCom announced the biggest financial restatement in corporate history. Past G-8 summits have been occasions for American triumphalism, but this one takes place against a background of a falling dollar, a dramatic shift from budget surpluses to deficits and a string of corporate scandals that have shaken market confidence.

On Tuesday Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Fed, questioned the mantra that U.S. accounting standards are the best in the world. And that was before WorldCom’s extraordinary announcement. WorldCom is America’s second-biggest long-distance phone company; it employs 80,000 people and serves 20 million customers; it is the sort of institution of which someone might have said, “What’s good for WorldCom is good for America”. But now its survival is in doubt. Its share price has collapsed from a peak of more than $60 to somewhere below $1, representing a loss of wealth of more than $100 billion. It’s as though an entire year’s worth of output in Portugal or Israel were to vanish from the planet. The accounting tricks that triggered the latest stage of WorldCom’s collapse in some ways recall Enron. Like Enron, WorldCom was a 1990s stock market darling that apparently resorted to cheating rather than disappointing investors’ utterly unrealistic expections.

Like Enron, WorldCom employed Arthur Andersen to audit its accounts, a duty that Andersen failed to take seriously. Andersen happily signed off on WorldCom’s 2001 books, which announced an illusory profit of $1.4 billion. Later, when the illusion had been exposed, Andersen helpfully informed WorldCom that its audit reports “could not be relied upon”. Yet in other ways WorldCom is worse than Enron. The extent of its deceit — profits were overstated by $3.8 billion — appears to be greater, and the manner of the deceit is more troubling. Enron resorted to complex off-balance-sheet partnerships and other devices, encouraging the idea that the impenetrable sophistication of modern corporate finance was a big reason for its implosion.

But WorldCom makes that sort of excuse impossible. It cheated investors with the crudest of all scams, taking current expenses and counting them as capital costs that could be spread over an extended period. This violates Accounting 101. The fact that WorldCom executives dared to pull this trick shows how confident they were in their auditors’ compliant attitude. The good news is that, in the Senate at least, support seems to be growing for the Sarbanes bill, which is the best bet for restoring faith in audits. Sen. Tom Daschle, the majority leader, Wednesday promised to bring the bill to the floor right after the July 4 recess. But the House Republicans have passed a weak bill; the Bush administration is timid on reform; and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recently complained of “an unbelievable movement ... in the market without what I believe to be substantive information.”

O’Neill and others need to accept that it is precisely the lack of substantive information in corporate accounts that explains the market’s jitters. It’s hard to think of a more conclusive end to the booming 1990s, when small investors were repeatedly assured by all the investment houses that being in the highflying end of the stock market was the only way to prepare for their golden years. Market historians already point to the slavish worship of the entrepreneur and the stock market that took hold. WorldCom, like so many technology companies, emerged from obscurity to become a sudden financial giant.

No one should have been oblivious to the inherent risks of buying stocks, but the American economic system rests on investor confidence that the market is not rigged in favor of a few corrupt individuals. That confidence has evaporated along with the reputations of national companies like Rite Aid, Adelphia and Merrill Lynch, tugging the Dow briefly below 9,000 Tuesday. If any lesson is clear, it’s that the American economic system cannot regulate itself. Congress must start with legislation to increase funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission so it can regain its watchdog role. It must rein in accountants who serve as analysts for the companies they are supposed to be supervising. Otherwise, investors will continue to believe that a clean stock market is no more attainable for the average Joe or Jill than Martha Stewart’s gleaming kitchen.

— The Washington Post

Globalization of scholarship

ONE routinely hears that Pakistani universities lack research culture, academic excellence and scholastic vigour. Some believe that our universities are functioning at the high school level where getting a degree is the ultimate objective and nothing beyond that. Various reasons are cited for this unfortunate and ugly reality.

The conventional argument is that research is an expensive enterprise. Public sector universities lack financial resources to subscribe to expensive research journals/books, lab equipment or to offer fellowships and grants to research scholars. The result is that Pakistani universities are producing fewer Ph.Ds. compared to universities in other developing countries.

The question is: What are the causes of this decay? A lack of financial and human recourses may not be a cause in itself. Rather, it may be the effect. The real cause lies elsewhere; somewhere in the quality of university leaders and in the interaction between university and society.

My assumption is that a university can generate resources, both financial and human, if it caters to the needs of society. Generally, society is willing to invest in education and helps the university to overcome the resource crunch provided the university genuinely addresses its needs.

Take the example of Pakistani society. During the last few years, there have been some qualitative changes in the Pakistani set-up. In a rapidly changing domestic and international environment people are facing new challenges in terms of career planning and job security. To meet this challenge, people turn up to the university for capacity building by seeking a formal qualification. Now let us see what kinds of changes people are facing:

First: The craze for becoming a CSP or PCS officer is gradually fading partly because of the devolution of power and partly due to other structural changes in society. Resultantly, bureaucracies are getting more and more insecure and looking for some security by attaining specialized qualification. The growing tendency of civil servants to seek admission to M.Phil or doctoral programmes may be an indication of this trend.

Second: The forces of globalization have opened new opportunities at the global level but the competition requires advanced degrees with generally narrow specializations. For instance, to get employment in international development agencies, UN institutions and multinational cooperation, degrees like M. Phil or Ph.D. may significantly increase the chance of selection.

Third: In Pakistan, job opportunities are shrinking and the socio-economic environment is depressing. Consequently, more and more people want to migrate to Canada and other industrialized countries. Such people often strive to attain higher academic qualifications for faster integration with the host society. So a growing number of educated people look for advanced university degrees which could help them in future employment competition.

Given this context, Pakistani universities face a tough and formidable challenge. For its survival, a university needs to be a dynamic and vibrant institution capable of catering to the needs of the fast-changing society. In short, the university is under tremendous pressure to satisfy the needs of society. However there is a good news: globalization has created a wonderful opportunity for the universities in developing countries to accelerate academic activity through international interaction.

First, information technology especially the Internet has made it possible to access unlimited reservoirs of research and reference material at low cost and within a short period of time. Even though one needs to pay for online material, it is much cheaper than the subscription for a hard copy. This facility alone can revolutionize research work in the developing countries. Most of the universities of developing countries, especially India and Indonesia, have quickly and successfully exploited this opportunity.

Second, communication systems like e-mail provide enormous opportunities for two-way communication and interaction with academics across the globe. Now, there is a possibility that a doctoral candidate enrolled in Pakistan is supervised by a professor in an American university. It may be pointed out that various western universities have expressed their willingness to collaborate with Pakistani universities by using such modes of interaction and communication.

Third, there are many international organizations which encourage short-term pre-doctoral scholarships and research programmes for candidates enrolled in a Pakistani university. These institutions include the US Educational Foundation, th German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the joint Japan-World Bank fellowships.

Fourth, some doctoral candidates, if registered in Pakistan, may use their own resources to undertake a short visit to some western university for reading new literature or for honing research methodology skills by consulting a foreign professor. This might be more economical than studying four or five years in some British or American university.

Here lies the challenge. Pakistani universities must understand the dynamics of globalizations as well as internationalization of science and scholarship. Changing international politics, especially the growing conflict between Muslim and western civilizations, poses a unique challenge and opportunities for Pakistani universities. One thing should be clear: we must make our universities true centres of research and scholarship. Western universities may be hesitant to accommodate our doctoral scholars for obvious reasons. For this, we need to open our system, make it more transparent, liberal, dynamic and inclusive.

Here it would be pertinent to mention the recent experience of Punjab University in establishing research and academic culture at the campus. The University of Punjab took the commendable step of initiating a structured doctoral programme in more than two dozens academic disciplines without asking for any additional grant from the University Grants Commission or the federal government. The experience proved quite successful.

It is high time that public sector universities respond to this emerging need positively and effectively by tailoring flexible doctoral programmes. In principle, a university should not prevent anybody from obtaining higher education especially a Ph.D on the basis of age, sex, previous high school grades, race, professional or institutional affiliations.

We must understand that dignified survival in the 21st century lies in scientific research and high quality human resource development. Those who undermine the importance of knowledge and research under the belief that ‘we can get it from the west’ are terribly mistaken. Imported knowledge can never solve indigenous problems. The strength of a civilization depends on its ability to generate new knowledge. Those civilizations which ceased to produce knowledge were buried under the sands of time without an epitaph.

The writer teaches sociology in Punjab University