[This piece was written before the recent cabinet reshuffle in New Delhi]

QUIZ Question: Who was K. Kamraj Nadar? It is not a trick question. But it may seem an unfair one in an environment where many might find it troublesome to answer “Who was Nehru?” Kamraj was a politician from Tamil Nadu, an astute and honest man who rose from the nameless ranks of Indians who fought for their freedom to hold, for a while in the sixties, the destiny of the nation in his formidable hands.

Kamraj never became a minister in Delhi. He reached a position infinitely more powerful in those days, when he was elected president of the Indian National Congress. Those were days when the prime minister of India was not afraid of the president of the Congress. Those were also days when the president of the Congress was not afraid of the prime minister of India. That generation was confident of its stature and therefore had no problem when it came to sharing power.

The Congress lived by a different philosophy then. Every region of the country was represented in the central power structure, unlike today when one individual seeks to represent all the regions of the country. It was collective leadership, and even a titan like Nehru realized its value when the moment of crisis arrived.

It did arrive; and as suited a titan, the proportions were titanic. Neither Jawaharlal nor his government were the same after the humiliating defeat in the 1962 war with China, a confrontation purchased by hardliners in the government led by Morarji Desai but also bought by Jawaharlal himself. Although the next general elections were scheduled only for 1967, Congress leaders could see defeat as clearly as the next politician, even against a disunited opposition.

Any thoughts of replacing Jawaharlal himself quickly dissolved in the heat of his continuing popularity (much as Gamel Nasser seemed even more indispensable to Egypt after his humiliation by Israel in 1967). But the Congress knew it had to reinvent itself, and reset the compass of its government. From this conviction emerged the plan named after the Congress president, the Kamraj Plan.

Nehru dropped half his cabinet, including his virtual deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai, with instructions that they leave power to return to the people via the party. This would also create space for a younger generation who would bring to governance the dynamism of new ideas and the rewards of simple hard work.

That was the theory in any case. It could not really be put to test because within a few months of the Kamraj Plan Nehru suffered a stroke, while sitting on the dais, at the Bhubaneswar session of the Congress in January 1964. That changed all equations. After he died in the summer of that year Lal Bahadur Shastri became prime minister, and gave a place to Indira Gandhi in his cabinet. The rest is as much mystery as history but that is another story — except to note that it was Kamraj who surprised the Congress and the country by installing Indira Gandhi as prime minister when Shastri died, suddenly, at Tashkent just after the historic talks with Pakistan’s Ayub Khan.

It is apparent that at some point during the last session of parliament Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee decided that his government and his party needed a Kamraj Plan-style shake-up and shake-out. All doubts ended with the failure of governance and collapse of civil society in Gujarat, for which Delhi had to share responsibility. The government that had been sworn in after his re-election was dead. Rebirth was essential. Instead of a government behind him Mr Vajpayee had a carcass around his neck.

Mr Vajpayee has one motto that he does not advertise: Sweet are the uses of adversity. The worst moment of his prime ministership came during his first term, when, despite the high of formal nuclear-power status, the government was stuck in a whirlpool of despondency and inaction. The BJP was wiped out in the first assembly elections it fought after coming to power. That seemed to wake up the prime minister. Within weeks he crafted two policy lines that have become the sinews of this administration: one line thrown to Pakistan in the hope that someone on the other side will pick it up; and a second to the economy, in the hope that reform will change India for the better.

By early this year it was evident that both lines had become hopelessly tangled. Relations between India and Pakistan are always prone to the dramatic, and every initiative is fraught with unseen dangers. The rewards of success might be high; the cost of failure can be devastating. The collapse of the Agra gambit had direct consequences on the ground as the conflict in Kashmir took on the proportions of a semi-declared war.

The prime minister had two options. One was to use the Advani-Fernandes route to open war with Pakistan despite the possibility of nuclear devastation; the second was to use the much more difficult, painstaking and non-glamorous option of diplomacy. For the record Mr Vajpayee left both choices open but there is no doubt that he put his own credibility and hopes behind the efforts of his foreign minister.

The performance of a government is by and large measured by that of its key ministries: home, finance, external affairs, defence, human resources. The one ministry with a consistent record of deft success has been external affairs; and in the last few months Mr Jaswant Singh has excelled himself. This is not the place for a fuller analysis of foreign policy; suffice to note that the minister had the extremely difficult task of telling a confounded world that India was ready for war without sounding like a warmonger, and simultaneously arguing the Indian case on Jammu and Kashmir without sounding like a self-server or, worse, an authoritarian. Circumstances helped of course. America has now made it clear, to Pakistan as well as to Palestine, that it is not ready to see any merit in the use of suicide-bombers, or the blood shed by self-styled “jihadis”.

The very success of such tactics became a problem for those who hoped to benefit from them, for the dominant power of America weighs heavily on governments such as the one in Pakistan, which do not have the ballast of popular support. But the world is a little larger than America, although it may not often seem so. Delhi was able to place its arguments with some success across the Islamic world. It did not isolate Pakistan, but it did not allow Pakistan to dominate the debate either.

It is an irony therefore that Mr Jaswant Singh is the favoured candidate to become the next finance minister. It is the kind of reward that he would hope to avoid.

But that was the end of the good news for the prime minister. Finance minister Yashwant Sinha may be the favourite victim of the season, but the record of more admired ministers is hardly worthy of applause. I do not care too much for labels. Hawks and doves become so often meaningless cliches in the exercise of governance. Necessity is equally the mother of invention. A dove is required to polish talons and hawks must smile and smile on command.

As a citizen all I want from a home minister is the right to live in peace in my country. I do not want to float on a river of destruction that has been carved out to leave Indian communities on different banks, because the ruling party wants a vote bank. A home minister may not be able to prevent a terrorist from crossing the border with Pakistan, but he should be able to prevent that terrorist from travelling hundreds of miles to try and blow up parliament or sow havoc in the heart of India.

The collapse of the finance ministry was a harder blow to Mr Vajpayee because there could be no resurrection of his government without an economic vision. Yashwant Sinha has presented five budgets, and you will find it difficult to find a word that defines such a long reign in office. He began well. He started with the pace of a hundred metres dash, and ended up as a pedestrian. In the last two years Mr Sinha has been going nowhere very fast. As a result finance has become a ministry without purpose, helpless about revenues uncollected and relieved by ministries that have left their allocations unspent.

With confrontation a continuing fact of life, George Fernandes had the opportunity to rise in public esteem. Instead he has given the defence ministry its worst scandal since Bofors, and the guns of Bofors were really trained on the prime minister of the time rather than the defence minister or the defence establishment. He has energy but too much of it is spent in public or populist relations that is not necessarily appreciated by the command structure of the armed forces.

The Prime Minister has promised a “major” reshuffle. This piece is being written on the eve of the revelations, but if by “major” he is thinking of merely numbers then Monday will not serve any purpose as far as he is concerned. There has to be a qualitative change in the government as much as a quantitative one. The Kamraj Plan had impact because Morarji Desai himself had to go. No one expects Home Minister L.K. Advani to be dropped; indeed he is going to be elevated to the status of deputy prime minister. But with or without the home ministry?

It is a question that must be travelling repeatedly through the mind of Murli Manohar Joshi, who was home minister for a brief period under Mr Vajpayee. To drop Yashwant Sinha is no longer news; the bigger story would be if he was retained. The real story is his replacement. If the prime minister wants to return to aggressive reform, then he needs a person who has the conviction to push through an agenda and the clout to carry the party along. That is the job profile, but who gets the job?

The writer is chief editor of The Asian Age, New Delhi.

THE possible political fallout of the twenty-nine constitutional proposals of the military government is being studied by the political parties. Some of them may move the courts against them before they are finalized for adoption by the government by the end of July.

One of the most significant aspects of the proposals is the rise in the number of seats of the national and provincial assemblies and the Senate from a total of 674 to 1,215 — around eighty per cent. The strength of the National Assembly is to be raised from 207 to 357 and of the senate from 87 to 100. The strength of the Punjab assembly is to be raised from 240 to 390 and of the Sindh assembly from 100 to 171, of the NWFP assembly from 80 to 130 and of Baluchistan from 40 to 67.

Although there has been a demand for the increase in the number of seats in the assemblies at times in a country which has done without assemblies most of the time because of periodic military intervention. The major political issue has not been the quantum of representation in the assembly but its quality. When tribal leaders and feudal chiefs pack the assemblies in any number the country cannot be said to be fully represented in the legislatures.

Of course, the government may claim that making it obligatory for the members of the assemblies to be graduates, an issue to be finally settled by the courts, may solve this problem but the outcome of the resistance from the political parties to making graduation the educational qualification for contesting elections remains to be seen.

This poor country is not only concerned with the sudden swell in the number of members of the assemblies but also its very high cost, when the cost of administration along with the pervasive misgovernance is a major issue in Pakistan. It cannot be argued that the size of the bureaucracy should be reduced while the size of the legislators should be doubled.

Major problems to be solved in Pakistan are not personal, or regional or affecting certain groups which were hitherto under-represented in the assemblies. Instead they are of collective nature like the widespread poverty, pervasive unemployment, low economic growth, for educational facilities, lack of health care in much of the country, neglect of the environment and destruction of the forests. These problems cannot be solved through a large increase in the number of people’s representatives in the assembly with those between eighteen and twenty-one too voting for them.

In the past, attempts were made to speed up economic development by enabling the members of the federal parliament and then of the provincial assemblies to prepare their own development programme funded by the government. But that in reality resulted in less development and more scandals. That became a political tool with the opposition members who were often denied the development funds.

Apart from the high cost of such short-cuts to development, which began with Mohammed Khan Junejo’s five-point programme and continued in the tenures of other regimes, there had been the official Social Action Programme which left us with too many ghost schools and ghost hospitals. And now a good deal of money has to be spent to enable the new-comers to the political arena to feel free to do some useful work for the people. While the number of legislators has been increased by eighty per cent, the life of the assemblies has been cut short to four years from five and of the Senate from six years to four while the provincial assemblies too will have a four year term instead of five but the president will have a five year term.

Now the problem of enhanced public spending on the additional representatives springs with the need to have larger legislatures to accommodate them. While the Senate can accommodate its hundred members, the National Assembly may not be able to accommodate 357 members and if they have a joint session as they do have from time to time, a far larger Parliament House will be needed. Money will have to be spent on creating additional space.

The Sindh assembly used to have space for eighty members, then it was expanded to accommodate 110 members. Now a great deal of money has to be spent to create space to accommodate 170 members or a new assembly erected at a high cost.

Other provincial assemblies also face similar space problems beginning with Punjab which has the largest assembly in Pakistan where membership will increase from 240 to 390 — an increase of 150 members.

Then there is the hostel problem to accommodate the additional five hundred and forty one members. While the members resident in the metropolis where the assembly meets may be expected to live in their own houses, additional accommodation has to be provided to the new members. This has two dimensions, the need to spend a great deal of money to create the additional accommodation and then make them pay for the accommodation, food and other services which most of them have not been paying for.

Will the new members be any different from the old members and can the government make them perform these obligations better.

There is the new problem which is looming large in the new political horizon. That is providing security to the old and new members which has become a major problem because of the increase in religious and political terrorism and the rise in big time crimes. The members of the assemblies during the session or even otherwise receive real threats or hoax calls and that would demand of the government to ensure adequate security for them in their homes, when they feel threatened, as they drive around and where they meet. The cost of such increase in security can be very heavy at a time when the government and the country are pressed for funds.

When viewed in terms of security and its high cost, this certainly is the wrong time to increase the strength of the assemblies in a big way, particularly when that can solve no major political problems. Will the new government revive the allocation of development programmes of the members of the assemblies — a hobby horse of the legislators in recent times, or will let the development be promoted in the normal manner, and if necessary, to be overseen by the members of the assemblies.

In addition to the federal and provincial governments, the present government talks of a key role to be played by the local governments under its much-touted devolution plan and the city governments have their own city councils and its members have been suggesting they should be paid to attend its meetings in the same way as the members of the provincial assemblies are paid. All that will add to the cost of the new polity at a time when official expenditure has to be reduced and more of the funds diverted to development particularly social sector development.

But from under-representation, if at all there was, we seem to be moving towards over-representation. The Senate, for example, will have hundred seats while the US senate too has hundred seats but with double the population of Pakistan. And while it will have hundred seats it will have far less authority than the US senate particularly in the financial sector. It may be said that the real authority of the National Assembly in the financial sector is small, as it cannot unscramble the consolidated fund for financing the government.

The government should calculate the total cost of expanding the assemblies and ascertain if giving more representation would help solve the problems of the people. The focus should now be on the quality of representation and the performance of the members than on increasing the numbers as that may create many new problems without solving the age-old problems. Let the government refocus its attention on the real issues rather than on peripheral issues right now or seeking solutions for problems, which are currently marginal.

Large assemblies could also mean large cabinets with too many members trying to become ministers or topple the government, which does not accommodate them.

IT’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at President George Bush’s much-awaited ‘vision’ of Mideast peace unveiled last week, a speech so obviously crafted by special interests and driven by domestic politics that the rest of the world winced in embarrassment and even moderate Israeli leader Shimon Peres called it a ‘fatal mistake.’

Veteran British journalist Robert Fisk acidly wrote that Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, who has made six visits to Bush’s White House, should be allowed to run the White House press office, to ‘spare the American President the ignominy of parroting everything he is told by the Israelis.’

Bush’s message to Palestinians: no state until you kick out Arafat, stop resisting Israeli occupation, develop true democracy, do what Israel tells you, create capitalism, eliminate corruption, and stop causing trouble. Then, someday, the US might consider an ‘interim’ Palestinian state whose borders and sovereignty would be ‘provisional,’ provided Israel agrees. Bush might as well tell Palestinians they won’t get their freedom and homeland until they can all speak Chinese.

Bush, a man untroubled by deep thought or irony, had the chutzpah, as we New Yorker say, to urge Palestinians to adopt Scandinavian-style democracy, while telling them they cannot re-elect Arafat, who was elected in a fair vote by over 80% of his people — rather better than President Bush, who slid into office thanks to court orders and voter exclusions in Florida. As for corruption, Arafat’s thieving PLO cronies look like beggars compared to Bush’s mega-crook pals at Enron who financed his elections.

Why didn’t Bush urge free elections on America’s other Mideast clients such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the Gulf states, mostly corrupt autocracies run by generals or feudal monarchs? What the President wants is a obedient Palestinian version of Afghanistan’s new leader, CIA ‘asset’ Hamid Karzai, who was put into power with US and British bayonets and billions in bribes.

Bush politely suggested Israel stop building settlements. Considering that Sharon scorned Bush when the president ordered him to pull his US-armed and financed troops out of the West Bank, there is zero chance Israel will stop gobbling up the West Bank. Sharon has made it perfectly clear he will never withdraw from the West Bank or Golan, which Israel occupies illegally, and will never accept a viable Palestinian state. Worse, Sharon appears likely to be succeeded by rival Benjamin Netanyahu, who actually calls Sharon ‘soft’ on Palestinians.

What Israel’s rightists and Bush want is apartheid-style ‘bantustan’s, tribal reservations policed by Palestinian kapos, surrounded by Israeli troops, covering about 40% of Palestine. Israel will get the rest. In fact, Israeli peace groups recently revealed there are now 400,000 Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories and Golan, not the 200,000 previously believed. When the Oslo ‘peace process’ was signed in 1993, there were 85,000 Jewish settlers.

Arafat’s US-financed Palestinian Authority and its security apparatus are dictatorial, thoroughly corrupt and abuse human rights. Arafat winks at terror attacks on Israeli civilians, is a liability to his people, and should make way for new leadership. But so should Ariel Sharon and Israel’s expansionists, who have plunged their nation into the current bloody morass and provoked anti-semitism around the globe. A pox on both houses.

Israel, at least, has moderate, capable alternative leaders like Peres and Yossi Beilin, who can bring some sanity to the political scene. The only real Palestinian candidate, Marawan Barghouti, is in an Israel prison. The PLO is totally discredited among Palestinians because of corruption and close cooperation with the US and Israel. This leaves the uncorrupt extremists — Hamas and Islamic Jihad — as the choice of a majority of Palestinians. Bush’s relentless undermining of Arafat’s PLO has strengthened Palestinian radicals and played into the hands of Sharon, who vows he will never deal with ‘terrorists.’

Israelis and their American supporters greeted Bush’s speech with predictable adulation. Bush and his advisors hope to increase their share of the Jewish vote in critical November mid-term elections from 19% to over 50%. Embracing Israel’s far right also delighted ardent Bush supporters on the Christian far right, North America’s version of Taliban. These rustic fundamentalists believe that when all Jews are moved into Biblical Israel (including the West Bank), their Christian Messiah will return and destroy the world in Armageddon. Good Christians will then go to paradise; Muslims, Jews and everyone else straight to hell.

President Bush’s ‘vision’ for Palestine is a myopic fantasy seen through rose-coloured glasses supplied by alter ego, Ariel Sharon. The plan is frightful news for Palestinians, bad news for Israelis seeking peace, and bad news for Americans. Bush has put domestic politics and his re-election before America’s proper national interests.

He has undermined real peacemakers among the Israelis and Arabs. Worse, instead of playing honest peace broker in the Mideast, Bush’s total identification with Israel’s far right ensures America will again become the target of extremists from an increasingly enraged Muslim World — and of furious Palestinians who now have nothing to loose except the cruel mirage of a fraudulent ‘provisional’ ‘interim’ state.—Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2002

WITH the promulgation of Madressah Registration Ordinance 2002, the debate on the role of religious education institutions and their syllabus has taken a new turn.

While the argument that madressah education does not meet the challenges of modern times and, therefore, needs to be modified and updated might be accepted for what it is, the issue of bringing about the desired improvement is an issue that merits sincere attention.

The promulgation of the ordinance in the present environment is not a good omen. While it might be necessary for the madaris to get registered and audit their accounts, employing the inept and corrupt official machinery to hold others into account at this point of time is a sure recipe for rise in the existing tension simmering on the issue. What is really needed is to understand the nature, use and purpose of madressah in society as well as its resistance to change. The best course would be to let the madressah change from within and introduce a meeting point between the religious and secular education systems.

Islam gives a revolutionary concept of knowledge and education: the one that blends the spiritual with the mundane, the religious with the secular. This revolutionary and all-embracing concept of knowledge was institutionalized in the form of madressah and Jamiah (university). This tradition flourished throughout the first twelve centuries of the Islamic era.

Although things had begun to weaken and the elements of distortion bad started appearing in the system after the Fall of Baghdad (13th century AC, 6th century Hijri), the real disintegration of the Islamic system took place in the post-18th century period. It was during the colonial rule that madressah education lost many of its dimensions and shrank into the shell of limited religious learning. A further shock was inflicted upon the system by the introduction of sectarian dimension, resulting in a shift of focus from the universal message of Islam to the limited sectarian concerns and priorities.

Muslim thinkers have been conscious of this situation and serious efforts have been made to reform the system from within, at least through three routes: (a) addition of modern disciplines in the old system; (b) establishment of institutions which could weld together the two streams of religious and secular education and (c) to build bridges between the two systems, so that the two could interact, with linkages at different levels ensuring movement from one system to the other. All these developments had nothing to do with the contemporary tirade against the madressah education.

After September 11, somewhat vicious interest is being taken in the madressah education. Although this new interest can be traced back to the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, and the advent of Taliban in 1995/96, the real floodgate was opened after the September 11. Many articles and studies have appeared in the American and European media, demonizing the institution of madressah and tracing every act of real or imaginary terrorism to madressah education.

Religious education is an integral part of the Muslim society and culture. It is impossible to visualize any Muslim society without appropriate institutional arrangement for religious education. However, religious education should weld into the mainstream education and the mainstream education itself should be permeated with the values of the Muslim society and culture and produce educated men and women who, on the one hand are equipped with the state of the art knowledge and skills needed in our own times and on the other be imbued with idealism, morality and character. That is the defining character of Islamic education.

Significant improvements have been made within the madressah education during the last 54 years of Pakistan’s existence and more changes are in the pipeline. International Islamic University, Islamabad, represents a new experiment to fuse together the streams of religious knowledge and modern knowledge into a harmonious whole; so is the International Islamic University, Kuala Lumpur.

It must be noted that the quantitative expansion of madressah education in Pakistan is neither linked to the Zia era (1977-88), as is commonly alleged, nor is it an accidental phenomenon. The growth of the system is related to the growth of population and the socio-economic development of the Pakistani society. It becomes all the more imperative because of the failure of the public education system. Public sector education has not kept pace with the growth of population and the economy. Hardly 50 per cent of the school-going boys and girls have access to primary education, and that too of a very low quality.

Almost 50 per cent dropout takes place at the primary stage, because the system is incapable of providing good education, congenial climate and proper incentives. Facilities at middle, secondary and higher stages of education leave much to be desired. The whole education system is in a mess.

Madressah education has provided an opportunity to the poorer and less privileged sections of society — both in urban and rural areas — to at least acquire a modicum of knowledge through these traditional institutions and equip themselves with certain skills to make a living. Religious institutions are not producing educated-unemployed, as is the case with the modern education sector. These institutions are being run on public charity.

The support from the government source does not cover even five per cent of the cost of madressah education. A research conducted by Aga Khan Foundation has shown that while public sector allocation to education at all levels is about 2.2 percent of the GDP, private charities, mainly motivated by the religious and moral considerations, are providing support to education, relief and social care activities to the tune of 70 billion rupees per year. People’s voluntary support to them is an index of their confidence in these institutions and the social good that is being promoted through them.

There are many misgivings about the products of these institutions. The reality is much different from some of the concocted perceptions. There is a pressing need to undertake properly researched studies to understand the nature and dimension of the madressah education. The picture that would thus emerge would be very different from the one that is being projected abroad by the western media and by the so-called secular lobby in this country.

There is no denying the fact that there are problems and pitfalls in madressah education, as everywhere else. The religious leadership in this country needs to take note of that. There have been certain sectarian outbursts, which have no justification in religion or the traditions of our culture and morality. But these aberrations do not represent the norm. Unfortunately, there are aberrations in every system and culture.

Who can deny that if the life histories of the persons accused of terrorism — in different parts of the world, whether belonging to the Muslim society or American, European or Japanese — are analyzed, they would not provide any credence to the alleged religious roots or links with madressah or similar institutions of religious education of different countries of the world.

Those alleged to be responsible for the September 11 terrorism are supposed to be the products of modern education, not only in their own countries, but also of the institutions of higher learning and technology in Europe and America. The recent massacre at a school in Germany was resorted to by none other than a product of the same school. So has been the case in respect of some of the major terrorist outbursts in America during the last two decades. It is too simplistic to attribute terrorism to any religion, culture or set of educational institutions.

Despite all the shortcomings of madressah education — and these need to be rectified — an overwhelming majority of those who seek religious education are conscious of the need for modern education, new technologies, religious tolerance and democratic processes of change. They are keenly interested in having access to modern disciplines and technologies to build a better future for themselves and their country.

This provides a basis for building national consensus and integrating the two systems of education — religious and modern. Every step in this direction would pave the way for a better Pakistan and a glorious future for the Islamic world.

The writer is Chairman of Institute of Policy Studies and a former Senator.