| December 10, 2002 | Tuesday | Shawwal 5,1423 |
The weekly holiday debate all over again
“The subcontinent remains one of the most tense, if not explosive, regions in Asia and the world.” — Jaswant Singh, a former foreign minister of India.
UNLESS dismissed as one of Mr Advani’s weird ‘war-centric’ jokes, his challenge to Pakistan to ‘dare’ fight ‘a fourth round’ acquires a sombre strategic dimension in the context of India’s rising militarism.
As a chip of the old block, the Hindutva-ravaged Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, would go even a step or two ahead of his superior in replicating his war song. He went on to invoke the legend of ‘Chattarpati Shivaji’ — and 18th Century Hindu ‘Dharam Yudh’ (religious war) warrior to inspire every Hindu youth with the message “Har Yuva Bane Shivaji (Every youth should become a Shivaji)!”
Beyond the scope of a short newspaper comment, I choose to illustrate my point with a number of relevant quotes from India’s former foreign minister Jaswant Singh’s Defending India, published in 1999. Mr Singh’s work (earlier reviewed by me in detail) makes a provocatively candid statement of India’s inbred militarism, yearning to translate itself into a lethal panoply of hardware and manpower.
Mr Modi’s resuscitation of the Shivaji legend, integral to India’s traditional military mindset, draws its contemporary rationale from Jaswant Singh’s Defending India where he speaks nostalgically of Shivaji’s failed effort to sustain his fledgling navy.
“Had Shivaji’s naval fleet not been destroyed by the machinations of the Peshwas, the European trading powers could never have established themselves in peninsular India... The destruction of the Maratha navy was, therefore, a fateful strategic error for which India paid the price in the next two and a half centuries.” (P 266).
According to Mr Singh, wearing of arms was ‘de regeur’ in ancient India. That fact alone should make an excellent case for an armed India.
Of the strategic sweep and achievements of post-British India Mr Singh recalls...”the annexation of Sikkim; the aid to the Maldives in the late eighties; the two military assistance programmes with Sri Lanka, in 1971 and 1987; are all part of that same strategic culture of which the root lies in 1950.” (P 54).
In the context of India’s lack of expertise regarding foreign affairs under Nehru, Mr Singh observes that “except for what had only then technically become foreign territory, i.e. Pakistan, the people who manned the foreign office, all of whom I knew well, were (like myself) ignorant of foreign affairs.” (P 35).
What Mr Singh calls one of Nehru’s ‘critical strategic error’ was his decision to refer the Kashmir dispute to the UN in a “spirit of internationalism and that Western powers, under advice of British expertise, sought to treat the Kashmir question as if it was still some kind of an internal pre-independence problem — to determine whether Kashmir, with a Muslim majority, should be a part of India.” (P 31).
Mr Singh speaks proudly of India’s active military involvement and participation “in significant anti-insurgency operations starting with Nagaland around the mid-fifties and then in yet another state of the northeast, Mizoram, in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, and when insurgency spread to the valley of Brahmaputra, in the state of Assam as well.” (P 151).
One could go on quoting from Mr Singh’s excellent work to re- inforce the point of India’s mounting militarism, if only space would permit. He would not mind expressing his utter disdain for the ‘moral aspect’ of the Nehruvian and Gandhian politics...
“It is a confusion that arises from not differentiating between individual human morality and ethics and the reality of national interests. It is also a consequence of not recognizing that between high idealism and the hard stone of a pursuit of national goals what will splinter is always this ‘moral aspect’.” (Pp 42-43).
He goes on to write: “Time and again Nehru demonstrated the same tendency; a vacillation born of his search for the idealistically moral. He appropriated the responsibility of Jammu and Kashmir, as distinct and apart from the portfolio of princely states held by his deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Nehru was hesitant and tentative not simply about Kashmir but on the issue of relations with China and the vital question of Tibet as well. Witness, for example, the late Sardar’s clarity on the Sino-Indian question, or his firm directness about Hyderabad...” (Pp 42-43)
Now a bit of the lighter side of the Advani-Modi ultimatum to Pakistan. A typical election poster put up by the BJP’s campaign managers has chief minister Modi posing the question “as a choice between him and “Mian Musharraf.” (Dawn, Nov 30)
The writer is a retired brigadier.
THE weekly holiday and the Constitution are two things which usually remain constant for decades if not centuries in many countries the world over, regardless of the changes in governments. In Pakistan, however, the Constitution and the weekly holiday are two things which have been changing constantly since independence.
The 2002 LFO is the fourth major constitutional change in the country — the first three being in 1962, 1973 and 1985. Now the new government is considering changing the weekly holiday again, only five years after it was last changed in 1997. Hardly a week in office, Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali promised the religious leaders on Nov 30, after a two-hour meeting with them in Peshawar, that he would look into reverting to Friday as the weekly holiday for the whole country and that he would issue an order soon declaring this.
Is there a real need for yet another change in the weekly holiday again? Pakistan has already had three different weekly holiday schedules in 55 years. It first observed Sundays as the weekly holiday for 30 years after independence until 1977 when under pressure from the religious parties Friday was made the weekly off-day. Twenty years later in 1997, the country reverted to Sunday as the weekly holiday.
Now five years later, the government, again under pressure from the religious parties, is thinking of changing the weekly holiday back to Friday. Just as the country’s leaders can’t quite figure out which kind of constitution the country should have, have been equally fickle-minded about which day the weekly holiday should fall on.
Sunday off, the religious parties argue, is a colonial legacy that does not take into account respect for the general Muslim sentiments nor the honour and sanctity of Friday. If there has to be a weekly holiday, they argue, why not have it on Friday as is the practice in many Muslim countries instead of Sunday which is the Christian world’s day of worship.
The strongest argument in favour of Sunday as the weekly holiday is economic reasons. Having Friday as the weekly holiday means the country’s commercial sector would be out of sync with the international business community, which closes on Sundays. This, according to many Pakistan businessmen, particularly the exporters, puts the country in a disadvantageous position vis-a- vis their international competitors.
The Sultanate of Brunei has got round these two arguments by having two days off in a week — Fridays and Sundays! Government offices in this Southeast Asian Muslim nation have a truncated weekend with weekly holidays on Fridays and Sundays. Banks and other business enterprises on the other hand observe Sunday as a full holiday and Saturday as half day, which is the schedule similar to that in many countries in the East Asian region.
Multi-racial Brunei has evolved this pragmatic arrangement because the Muslim Malays there are mostly employed in the government sector, while the non-Muslim Indian and Chinese community are mostly in the business and commercial sector.
Religious emotion and economic pragmatism aside, one increasingly strong argument against yet another change in the weekly holiday in Pakistan is the need for continuity somewhere in this country which has seen little beyond constant upheavals in all spheres of life, be it political, economic or social. The people want some stability and the country desperately needs such stability if it is to move on at all in development.
The weekly holiday schedule of the past five years with Friday half holiday and Sunday full holiday goes some way towards respecting the religious sentiments while accommodating business pragmatism. The government ought really to think twice and hard before deciding to change the weekly holiday schedule all over again.
For if it does so, the government would be seen as merely caving in to the demands of the religious parties, and especially demands that seem to have no direct relevance to much more pressing problems that the people and the country are facing like unemployment, lack of access to health and educational facilities, poverty and corruption.
Already the religious alliance’s chief minister of the NWFP has come under criticism for banning things which have already been banned in the country — like alcohol, gambling and the playing of audio and video casettes in commercial vehicles. His actions, it is said, belie the religious parties’ interest in alleviating the problems of the people and only exposes their tactic of playing with the emotion and psyche of the nation.
The first priority and real test of the new government is to set the country on the path of economic and social development. To succeed, a great dose of pragmatism rather than mere emotion is needed. And pragmatism entails that the country should stick to the weekly Sunday full holiday and Friday half-day schedule.