Muddled thinking about education

FIRST the government of Punjab, and now the government of the North-West Frontier Province, has declared that education would be free up to matric stage. Who in his right mind would oppose this idea? But idea is one thing; implementing it properly and effectively is quite another. As it happens, we are not quite famous for always getting things done the way they ought to be done.

In the field of education our record can hardly be poorer, shoddier and more uneven. Look at the very first stage of education. Thousands of primary schools across the country are in a shambles. Add to this the shame that thousands are only on paper. The tax-payer’s money is paid out to ‘ghost’ teachers of these ‘ghost’ schools. Why not set this right, for a starter?

Of the schools that do exist and may be treated as functional, hundreds are in appallingly bad shape. To begin with, the buildings are inadequate and in a bad state of repair and maintenance. Many school buildings do not even have a nominal boundary wall. Hundreds of schools do not have proper furniture and the minimal educational aids.

How do we treat teachers in primary schools? In the rural areas and remote villages, primary schoolteachers are virtually domestic servants of the area landlord, wadera, malik, chaudhri or just the area station house police officer. In these pockets, where time stands still, primary school premises are often used as the landlord’s outhouse or as just cattle pen.

One must remain deeply sceptical about the quality of the primary schoolteachers. How are they recruited? What exactly are their qualifications? How they are trained? Teaching at the primary level is a specialized service for which teachers must be properly trained at specialized training institutions. This is hardly the standard practice in the country.

It does not take a lot of doing to announce that education would be free for all up to the matric level. But translating such admittedly noble intentions into practice, and making it a meaningful fact of life, would take a great deal of systematic thinking, planning and doing. Have the governments of Punjab and the NWFP done their homework?

The answer cannot be in the affirmative. Not yet because there is no evidence of any planning. There is no mention or suggestion that these provincial governments have worked out the cost of such an ambitious project. It is unlikely that these governments have available to them the statistics on the basis of which sensible planning is to be undertaken.

How many children are there of the primary education stage? How many of them are males and females? How many school buildings would be needed? Of what design and accommodation capacity? What kind of furniture and teaching aids would be needed per primary school and for all the schools in each province? These are not sophisticated details, only the basics.

One should have thought that the governments concerned would order a census of primary school stage children. This should perhaps be the task best performed by the village revenue or police departments because these departments are functioning at the very primary level of population. The census should begin at the village or taluka level. There is no evidence that this has been initiated.

Once there is a fairly clear idea of the number of children to be enrolled in the primary schools, work should begin on planning for books and other educational aids that each school child must be provided with these. These would of course include books, notebooks, pens and pencils and erasers, etc.

The schools would need furniture — seats and desks, teachers’ tables and chairs, cupboards, fans, etc. Not to be forgotten, are playgrounds and playing facilities. Every primary school should have at least one teacher in charge of games, sports and other outdoor activities. Playing talents of the children must be noted and nursed from the primary stage.

These are the very rudimentary needs and by no means fancy ideas. One should also be thinking of hobbies and extramural activities like painting, clay-modelling, woodcraft, papercraft. For girls there has to be provision for initial steps in sewing, knitting, doll-making and related creative work. And why not music, singing and folk dancing?

When one thinks seriously of primary education, it would be realized that what is being attempted is an enormous undertaking. It will take a huge lot more than the provincial education ministers or chief ministers just standing in front of a few news people and making an announcement. That is all that has been done so far. The ease and alacrity with which these grandiose announcements are made only proclaims that the governments do not have the foggiest idea of what they are promising.

Many decades ago, the British imperial rulers announced that primary education would be free as well as compulsory. With all their resources and administrative skills, the British rulers could not achieve even one per cent of what was needed. So huge an enterprise it was that more than half a century later, we are only talking glibly about it.

When this be the case with the primary education, to be promising free education up to the matric stage is only betraying ignorance of the nature and magnitude of the task involved in terms of funding, planning, organization, physical provisions and so forth. For heaven’s sake begin at the beginning and begin with common sense and a sense also of modesty in relation to the immensity of the task to be undertaken.

The government of the NWFP has also declared Urdu as the official language. There can be no quarrel with that kind of aspiration. It would perhaps be futile asking the MMA leadership to bring a modern and futuristic mindset to bear on a subject so sophisticated as education. These gentlemen seldom look ahead. Their sights are set, in fact fastened, on the past.

All education, if it has to be of any use in life to come, must be attuned to the language of the future. Make no mistake about the language of the technology on which life to come has to be built. They are all talking ceaselessly and loudly about information technology and computerization of all work. But few have so far been heard of talking of the language of information technology.

The language of tomorrow is English. It is no longer the language of the English people. It is the universal language of today and most definitely of tomorrow. We should be educating our children with the purpose of equipping them to deal with the reality of tomorrow. Nothing symbolizes the future of the human race more significantly than information technology that is inseparable from English language.

The vital importance of English language cannot be overemphasized. Is our government at the federal level sensitive to this basic and unchangeable fact of life today and much more so of tomorrow? The answer is: No, not yet. And that’s such a pity.

Where have all the protesters gone?

THE most interesting thing about the latest war threat is that the young people are not out in the street protesting, as did those who were against our involvement in Vietnam.

Why? In order to find out I went to Clyde’s in Georgetown. It was Friday night and the bar was jammed.

I went up to a man nursing a beer. “Are you against us going to war in Iraq?”

He took a swig from the bottle. “What war?”

“The one the president is threatening to launch because he is losing his patience.”

“I read something about it, but I didn’t follow the details.”

He took another swig and turned to the girl next to him. “A guy wants to know about the war.”

His girl said, “It’s none of his business.”

I persisted. “Suppose Bush brought back the draft?”

The man said, “He wouldn’t do that. It would be politically incorrect. Can we talk about something meaningful, like who’s going to win the Super Bowl?”

I moved down the bar and said, “Anyone here going out into the streets to protest what the government is doing?”

A fellow in a tank shirt said, “It won’t do any good. My father protested the Vietnam war and the only thing we have to show for it is 58,000 names on a wall. Kissinger still insists America did the right thing.”

The young man next to him said, “I would rather go to a concert for Eminem than Iraq.”

Everyone laughed.

A student who said he was a major in political science at Georgetown University told me, “The president is our commander-in-chief, and if he doesn’t know what to do, Dick Cheney does.”

His friend said, “Are you buying?”

I said, “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t like to give an opinion until somebody is buying.”

“OK, I’m buying. What do you think about your generation?”

“Who cares?”

Another drinker said, “We don’t have to go out on the streets to protest. We have the Internet and that is how our voices can be heard. I can e-mail Bush and he will listen to me more than if I carried a “No War” sign in front of the White House.”

Someone said, “Let’s drink to the Internet.” The people at the bar raised their glasses.

“We hate war,” a girl cried, “but we’re not going to make a big deal of it.”

I didn’t make much progress with the beer drinkers, but I knew it was not a scientific sampling. I left the bar Friday night. The next morning the kids left Clyde’s and said, “Let’s roll.”— Dawn/Tribune Media Services

War lobby’s real game

UN monitors have been in Iraq for several weeks now and the initial reports emanating from Baghdad are encouraging. Both, the team leader Hans Blix and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan have described Iraq’s cooperation as good. Iraq also met the UN Security Council deadline to provide details of its chemical, biological, and nuclear programmes.

These developments should have cleared the sky a little but some influential ones in the US think otherwise. Richard Perle, Chairman of Defence Policy Board, an advisory panel to Pentagon, told British MPs on November 15, that the US intended to attack Iraq even if the UN inspectors failed to find any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). According to him, “A clean bill of health from Hans Blix will not prevent the US from attacking Iraq. All he (Blix) can know is the result of his own investigations and that does not prove Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction... Suppose we are able to find someone who has been involved in the development of weapons and says there are stores of nerve agents and you cannot find them because they are well hidden. Do you actually have to take possession of nerve agents to convince?” he added.

Thomas Friedman, a journalist turned establishment guru, writing in The New York Times, urges his readers to ignore UN inspectors’ work and focus on a paragraph in the UNSC resolution 1441 allowing for removal of Iraqi scientists along with their entire families to be interviewed abroad. He obviously is corroborating what Perle said that all that the United States needed was a statement by any Iraqi scientist alleging the existence of the WMDs. President Bush was more direct. He said that it was up to Iraq, not the inspectors, to disclose its weapons’ programme or it would face a serious response.

So the existence or otherwise of the WMDs in Iraq is not the real issue. These exist in many countries round the globe and others have the potential to produce these. Russian use of a chemical weapons and North Korea’s admission of being in possession of nukes has not distracted the US from focusing on Iraq. The Egyptian call for sending UN inspectors to Israel has been drowned in the US media’s din and noise about Iraq. A question that receives no mention at all is why Iraq is being singled out as the only country denied the right to have these weapons for self-defence, given the fact that it has a hostile neighbour (Israel) armed with a large arsenal of nuclear weapons. Possession of the WMDs was not the first reason given for choosing Iraq as the target after Afghanistan. It was change of regime to ‘liberate’ Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein just like Afghans were freed from the Taliban stranglehold. It was too altruistic to sell. Why should Americans pay for and risk the lives of their young men for a people in a far-off land that have nothing in common with them? The next move was to scare the people at home with the possibility of a dirty bomb exploding somewhere in their neighbourhood because a bad guy had those. This seems to have worked at home if Republican Party’s success in the recent mid-term elections is any guide. So what is the real reason for wanting to attack Iraq? For answer we go back to the same guru, Tom Friedman.

In another article published in The New York Times’ magazine three years ago, (long before 9/11) he justified imperialist militarism as a protective shield for corporate wealth. According to him, “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist... the McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonald Douglas, the builder of the F-15 aircraft.” The fist he refers to is the entire US military might. An oil-rich country becomes a logical target for this fist for an establishment dominated by the oil lobby.

Through innuendoes American people are being told that gasoline prices may come down once the oil companies get control of the second largest reservoir of oil in the Middle East. In another age this could have been achieved without much ado as long as one had the will and the military capability but now even all-powerful countries need some moral justification when risking human lives.

In comes Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, with another one. On December 4, he issued a dossier detailing human rights abuses of the Iraqi regime explicitly linking this in his accompanying speech with the question of arms inspections and the possibility of war. The British, of course, have a long experience of imperialist conquests and are masters at finding a pretext for attacking and occupying another country.

Beginning in the 15th century, they colonized a large part of the world describing this as their duty as good Christians to bring civilization to barbarians. It was then called the white man’s burden. The same logic seems to be at work now: free the Iraqi people of an oppressive regime that routinely violates human rights. That there are more serious human rights violations elsewhere — Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, to name only a few — is irrelevant for them.

The publication of the Jack Straw dossier elicited sharp criticism more for its timing than for its substance. John Pilzer, writing in the Daily Mirror, commented: “When Bush and Blair refer to Saddam using chemical weapons against Kurds in Halabaja in 1988 they never explain that Britain and American were accomplices.”

Meanwhile, preparations for an attack on Iraq are going ahead without interruption. Turkey has been pressured into allowing the use of its bases; another aircraft carrier has set sail for the Gulf and a command and control centre established in Qatar.

For the Bush administration it appears there is no alternative to attacking Iraq. The US economy is not doing too well, expenditure on the social sector has been cut and many people have lost jobs. Looking for scapegoats, the treasury secretary and the economic adviser to the president have been sacked. War would be a better distraction from problems at home.

However, it may not be the last war. Mr Perle, cited at the outset, in an interview with the Guardian, stated that Iraq was the first in a series of countries that the US would target; others include Iran, Syria and North Korea. Iran, of course, has the same qualifications as Iraq for being selected as a target, namely it is oil-rich. Syria and North Korea appear to be red herrings.

A more likely target may well be Saudi Arabia, though that option may be deferred for the present. The process of giving the dog a bad name and then hanging it has already started. Some time ago charitable contributions made by the wife of Saudi ambassador in Washington were blown out of proportion on a mere suspicion that some of these funds ‘may’ have helped terrorists who attacked the World Trade Centre. Nothing has been proved so far but the American public has been made to believe that Saudis are not as good as they used to be.

It may be a mere coincidence but the lady in the eye of the storm happens to be the daughter of former king Faisal who was the only Arab ruler to use oil weapon during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and who met a tragic end. Then there are assertions that Saudi Arabia is not doing enough in war against terrorism. What that ‘enough’ means is never explained.

Saudi minister for interior, Prince Nayef, was quoted as saying in an interview that terrorist networks have links with foreign intelligence agencies, chief among them being Israeli Mossad, that work against Arab and Muslim interests. “We still ask ourselves who benefited the most from September 11 attacks? I think they (the Jews) were the protagonists of such attacks,” he added.

It is normal to start with the motive when attempting to solve a crime. In that sense Prince Nayef’s statement is perfectly logical. But the American media for the purpose of bringing disrepute to Saudi Arabia twisted it. Congressman Eliot Engel and Senator Charles Schumer also joined the chorus and criticized the administration for considering Saudis as allies in war against terrorism.

That the Iraqi people are going to receive the treatment meted out to their brethren in Afghanistan seems inevitable now. An avowed aim of attacks on Afghanistan — elimination of Al-Qaeda — has not been achieved if one were to believe CIA director, who finds the organization capable of striking anywhere in the world. It is a moot point if Iraqi people will get a better dispensation after the removal of Saddam Hussein. They might well be left at the mercy of multiple power centres dominated by more ruthless petty dictators.

The cost in terms of loss of human lives, human suffering, and destruction of infrastructure as well as to the American taxpayer will certainly be astronomical. Any dislocation in oil supplies may send fragile economies into a tailspin and bring misery to millions, particularly in the Third World.

Like the war on terrorism the one for the conquest of resources located in countries incapable of self-defence ostensibly would also be open-ended. The vicious cycle will only be broken if American people see through the game and assert their democratic power or the Third World produces another Gandhi who can convince his people to say no to imperialist goods. That is the only language readily understood by greedy mega corporations, which now dictate political policies in most of the democratic countries.

Russia’s deadly junk room

AS United Nations inspectors search Iraq for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, barns in the Siberian town of Shchuchye store thousands of tons of VX, sarin and other nerve agents, along with 2 million chemical artillery shells small enough to fit in a suitcase, each containing enough poison to kill a stadium full of people.

Ridding the world of such weapons — wherever they are — must be a top priority for the United States. Fortunately, after considerable prodding, Congress has authorized millions to destroy the gases in Shchuchye and other weapons across Russia before terrorists get them.

A US-Russian programme to burn or otherwise disable chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has worked well for more than a decade. Several years ago Congress approved more money for this task, then refused to release it. In November, President Bush, with vocal support from Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., prevailed on Congress to authorize spending the $466 million it originally earmarked for the programme, and last week Bush signed two waivers to free those funds.

It was Lugar and then-Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who set up the arms destruction programme in 1991. Russia was having difficulty even paying guards to stop thieves from snatching the weapons, let alone financing the programme. So the United States has spent $7 billion over 11 years to destroy thousands of nuclear warheads and hundreds of ballistic missiles, bombers and submarines in the former Soviet Union.

Some in Congress worried all along that money was being wasted and urged Russia to chip in — which it has. Critics also have demanded that the money be tied to ending human rights abuses in Russia and that the Kremlin stop helping build nuclear reactors in Iran. Those are good goals, but the place to pursue them is outside the weapons destruction programme.

The Bush administration reviewed the Nunn-Lugar programme upon taking office and found it worth the money. Last May, at a Moscow summit with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, Bush reiterated that the two countries should do everything possible to prevent the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The waivers give Bush the authority to set aside requirements that Russia meet certain conditions before receiving the money, such as establishing a better human rights record.— Los Angeles Times

Putting caste before country

WHEN political parties lose their vision, they go berserk. Winning at the polls becomes important and protecting cohesive temper of society gets a low priority.

In India, any sectional appeal is particularly dangerous because of its inherent disruptive character. We have too many fissiparous tendencies for us to take risks. Still there is little sensitivity on this point.

The BJP is the biggest culprit because it plays the Hindu card with a vengeance. It has revived communalism of the partition days after 55 years. But the Congress, having a long and great tradition, is confused. At best, it is passive. It is yet to take in right earnest the cudgels against those who are spreading hatred and, in the process, harming the country.

It is compromising the standards that Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru set before the country when they led the independence movement. Their idealism, sustained for several decades, has disappeared from the party. It seems that it would rather wear the light clothes of caste and Hindutva than the sturdy robe of secularism.

Making Sushil Kumar Shinde Maharashtra chief minister was meant to placate the backward community to which Shinde belongs. In Rajasthan, too, the Congress will probably use the caste factor to counter the Hindutva propaganda. The Congress has lost three by-elections in the state to the BJP. To cap it all, there was the rout in Gujarat.

True, caste transcends religion because the discrimination practised is not only against the lowly Hindus but also against the Muslims. It is the social division that strings them together. Religion, on the other hand, divides them community-wise. It has been seen in both UP and Bihar how the Hindu wave was stalled by caste. But should the Congress, with its secular credentials, be doing this is the question.

The BJP is clear in its mind about Hindutva. It blames the minorities, particularly the Muslims, for all the economic and cultural deficiencies in the country. It wants to replicate the Gujarat experiment.

That means it will continue to incite the Hindus in the name of religion, spread hatred against the Muslims and cash in on all these during elections if people buy the BJP’s line. It is no surprise because the party has been articulating the Hindu line since its inception in 1979. It has seen the communal approach paying dividends. Its strength in the state assemblies and parliament has been increasing election after election.

No doubt, society has got more polarized than before. But that is precisely what the BJP wants so as to ensure that the majority — the Hindus — is arrayed with the minorities. It helps the party to divide society into black and white, lessening the grey area, which togetherness represents.

Probably the BJP would not have come out in the open to play the Hindu card so soon. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, when in the opposition, publicly said that they had to pick up the kamandal (a vessel Sadus carry) to counter “the Mandal.” He was referring to L.K. Advani’s rath yatra through northern India to “fight” against the forces which reservations for the backward had “unleashed.”

The BJP thought it had no option but to use the Hindu sentiment to gather support. This was a wrong inference because the Mandal was a political weapon employed to stabilize the tottering V.P. Singh government. However, Advani’s yatra, which sparked off anti-Muslim murderous riots, hit the jackpot for the BJP, both in terms of Hindu consolidation and the enormous money the party collected. The difference between then and now is that the BJP is no more defensive.

The mistake of the Congress is that it wants to take recourse to caste combinations when it should be refurbishing its own glorious policy of Hindu-Muslim unity. The party has before it the proud example of freedom struggle to follow. The Hindus and the Muslims, the upper castes and lower castes and the teeming millions rising above caste and creed had come together at that time. The Congress then appealed to the people to rise above religious and caste prejudices. That worked. Why shouldn’t it now?

Instead of blaming the BJP for communalizing the polity, the Congress is diluting the ideological war against obscurantism. It is too mute, too inactive to be seriously taken. In fact, the Congress started sliding down when it began to align itself with the religious and caste forces for election purposes. To its dismay, it found that, however stringent it became in its tone, it could not match the high-pitched fanatics and rabble-rousers. They had the ear of the dalits and the extremist Hindus at least in the Hindi-speaking states. The Congress thinking was wrong. It should have stuck to its ideology of pluralism. It can still rectify the mistake.

The party does not have to become desperate to stall the BJP. Hindutva has to be fought not by depending on caste but by reinforcing the party’s faith in secularism, the country’s ethos. The Congress should never try to go away from it even if it can make temporary gains. The basic thing is that wrong means will not lead to right results. One unhappily watched Sonia Gandhi embarking on her election campaign in Gujarat after visiting a temple. Soft Hindutva, the thesis that some Congressmen are propounding, is only a pale carbon copy of the BJP’s philosophy. The Congress saw that it did not work in Gujarat.

The Congress should never lose sight of the fact that it stands for the values that are not acceptable to the BJP and the other members of the Sangh parivar. The BJP had Vir Savarkar as its leader. His call was: “Hindutva is not a word but history.” The leader of the Congress was Nehru who saw unity in the diversity India represented. He was against the old bigoted religious approach.

A better way for the Congress would have been to encourage the formation of a united front of anti-Hindutva forces to fight against the demon of communalism. This front could have NGOs, eminent citizens and members of political parties who are willing to eschew politics while representing the front. There should be a one-point agenda: to fight the Hindutva forces. Politics should take a back seat in such a formation.

What will also come in handy is the ideology of economic independence that Mahatma Gandhi wanted to be followed after having won political independence. Once Prime Minister Indira Gandhi swept the polls on the slogan of garibi hatao (oust poverty). It meant that people wanted a party that would help them meet their basic needs. In a country where 250 million people live in abject poverty while another 400 million barely manage to make ends meet, caste or the religious appeal can provide a sop, not the solution. Instead of tinkering with caste problems, the Congress should organize those who have no other political right except the “right to life” which is meaningless in the absence of right to food, shelter and health.

Such an approach can lessen the Hindutva appeal to the common man. The touchstone of whatever a political party does will be how far it has enabled the individual to meet his needs and rise above his petty self. Can the Congress do it?

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.