| September 15, 2003 | Monday | Rajab 17, 1424 |
Censure of Modi a reprimand for the US
A shameful scandal
There’s a lot in a name
LAST week, I began by giving you an account of the life of the Iranian intellectual, Abdolkarim Soroush. Let me pick up from where I had left off my website story. It adds:
When the Revolution began, Soroush returned to Iran and there he published his book, Knowledge and Value which he had completed in England. After returning to Iran, he went to Tehran’s teacher training college where he was appointed director of the newly established Islamic culture group: Not a year had elapsed when the movement by some students began and culminated in total closure of all universities. Shortly afterwards, a new body was formed by the name of the Cultural Revolution Institute comprising seven members, including Abdolkarim Soroush, all of whom were appointed directly by Imam Khomeini. The purpose of this institute was to bring about the re-opening of the universities and reviewing of the syllabi.
Some students and certain individuals who had been involved in the Cultural Revolution expected the universities to remain closed for a period of at least 20 years so that they might have fundamental reforms. Soroush and his colleagues took their case to Imam Khomeini and requested him to issue instructions for accelerating the re-opening of the universities, which he did in one of his public speeches. After a year-and-a-half, the universities began to open and, with new syllabi, gradually resumed their work.
In 1983, owing to certain differences which emerged between him and the management of the teacher training college, he secured a transfer to the institute for cultural research and studies where he has been serving as a research member of the staff until today. In the same year, the cultural revolution institute was changed into the cultural revolution council and its membership was increased to 17. Soroush participated in no more than one of this council’s sessions; he submitted his resignation from membership to Imam Khomeini and has since held no official position within the ruling system of Iran, except occasionally as an adviser to certain government bodies. His principal position has been that of a researcher in the institute of cultural research and studies.
Earlier, Soroush had begun teaching certain university subjects, principally the philosophy of science, for which he had great liking and which he taught the students of philosophy in
Tehran University. Also by virtue of his interest in Maulawi (Jalaluddin Rumi), he began a series of lectures on the Masnavi which were broadcast on Iranian Television. Later he delivered lectures on the Masnavi over eight terms in the universities. These lectures, which proved extremely popular, have all been recorded on audio cassettes and are still widely circulated both inside and outside Iran.
In addition to teaching the philosophy of science, he gave lectures on the philosophy of history, philosophy of religion — also known as Kalam-i-jadid (modern theology), the mysticism of Maulawi, comparative philosophy (falsafeh tatbighi) and the philosophy of empirical sciences for the MA students of sociology. The last course he was able to teach was in the last term of the academic year (1995-96), which, owing to the raids carried out by a group calling itself Ansar-i-Hizbullah (the Supporters of God’s Party) has had to be abandoned.
In 1988, Soroush started a series of weekly lectures in the Imam Sadeq Mosque in northern Tehran. These lectures have in the main revolved around the analysis of the subjects in Nahjulbalaghah. Two books have so far been produced from these lectures: Attributes of the pious (Awsaf-i-Parsayan) and Wisdom and Subsistence (hekmat va ma’eeshat). The former is an explanation of a famous sermon in Nahjulbalaghah, known as the Sermon of the Pious (khutbeh muttaqin), and the latter book is an explanation of Imam Ali’s letter to his son, Imam Hasan.
Soroush’s lectures continued smoothly for six years. Then owing to certain sensitivities, the weekly programme was suspended.
TO return now to my favourite chronology, The Statesman 1875-1975. I was in the twenties when I broke off a few weeks ago. Let me now resume. On May 16, 1925, the paper wrote:
The death of Sir Rider Haggard sweeps the memory of most of us back to childhood when we were first held spellbound by the virile adventures in King Solomon’s Mines or the shuddering horror of the death of “She”. Sir Rider Haggard as a romanticist never rose higher than in those early books of his.
Much of his later work with the pen was an attempt to recapture for his readers the somewhat crude thrills of which he once commanded the secret, but the world had somehow changed its taste and a new novel by Rider Haggard was no longer an event. Of its type his early work was excellent. It set a new fashion. It turned the thoughts of readers to that Dark Continent in which as a young officer, Rider Haggard had himself lived and worked. It was not in great style or conception, but it was good, wholesome stuff with emphasis on the strong qualities of strong men.
On March 6, 1926, the paper wrote:
This is the season of retirements. Among forthcoming demissions of office is that of Mr Percy Brown, A.R.C.A., Principal of the School of Arts, Calcutta, who goes on leave next month preparatory to retiring from his post after holding it for the best part of 20 years.
Mr Percy Brown came to Calcutta with a great reputation from Lahore, where he succeeded the late Mr Lockwood Kipling as Principal of the School of Art, having previously helped Sir Finders Petrie to evacuate in Egypt and Sir George Watt to create the Delhi Museum. His tenure of office in Calcutta has synchronised with the modern art movement in Bengal, which has produced a number of brilliant painters headed by Mr Ganguli, the vice-principal of the Calcutta school.
Apart from his direct influence on art in all its branches in Calcutta, Mr Brown has travelled over nearly every country in the East and has published a series of brilliant monographs on Eastern art, conspicuous among which are his contributions to the literature of Mughal paintings.
His retirement takes place under the age rule, but in his case as in that of many others, it finds him in the prime of life, with years of energy and usefulness in him. It is a thousand pities that the services of such a man should be lost to India at a moment when interest in (its) art and archaeology is so markedly reviving.
THE Indian Supreme Court’s withering censure of the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat came when US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Christina Rocca was visiting New Delhi as part of a US-India regional dialogue.
The timing of the court’s stiff observations may have been a coincidence, but it was significant that Ms Rocca was in town when the honourable judges effectively told Mr Modi to quit if he could not punish the perpetrators of last year’s anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat.
In more ways than one it was Ms Rocca’s unworthy and ill-considered defence of the Narendra Modi government as recently as March this year that was also given a sharp rap by the Supreme Court.
What did the Supreme Court say and what had Ms Rocca told the Committee on International Relations of the US House of Representatives on March 20, 2003?
“There have been a number of arrests and prosecutions,” Ms Rocca had answered blithely in response to serious questions on the Gujarat violence during her testimony before the house sub-committee on Asia and Pacific.
“The legal system in India is agonisingly slow and that gives the impression that nothing is happening,” she had said in defence of Mr Modi and his benefactors in the central government. “But the fact of the matter is that they did take action and they are continuing to take action.”
I do not know what the system in the United States is, but a government official in India if found to have misled parliament is punished for breach of privilege. It’s considered a serious offence.
Unfortunately for Ms Rocca, she now has to contend with what the Indian Supreme Court has to say about the way the state government of Gujarat had gone about denying legal protection to the thousands of victims of the pogrom carried out by Mr Modi’s supporters. And these observations run contrary to her claims before the house subcommittee that the guilty were being prosecuted and punished.
“I have no faith left in the prosecution and the Gujarat government,” Chief Justice V.N. Khare told the government counsel on Friday. “You have to protect people and punish the guilty. What else is raj dharma (sacred duty)? You (should) quit if you cannot prosecute the guilty.”
Justice Khare and his colleagues were incensed by the facile appeal the Gujarat government had filed in the state’s High Court against a lower court’s exoneration of all 21 accused in a lynching of 14 Muslims inside a bakery by a Hindu mob. The Supreme Court described the Modi government’s appeal as “an eye-wash” and has posted a second hearing on the issue on September 19.
The court’s parting comment came as a knockout blow: “We do not have any trust left in your prosecution agency,” Justice Khare told the state counsel. “There appears to be some collusion between the government and prosecution. It is a case where 14 persons were burnt alive and is this the way prosecution is conducted?”
Ms Rocca’s virtual defence of the Modi government flows from the exigencies of realpolitik, which have forced the US to discard its democratic pretensions and concern for human rights to appease the rightwing government in Delhi.
In fact Ms Rocca’s testimony is of a piece with the India policies prescribed by former US ambassador Robert Blackwill who is known to have shouted down even his colleagues when they tried to broach the subject of Gujarat.
According to The New York Times, the only public remarks about Gujarat that Mr Blackwill made in the aftermath of the violence was: “All our hearts go out to the people who were affected by this tragedy. I don’t have anything more to say than that.” In contrast, after terrorists killed 24 Kashmiris in late March this year, Mr Blackwill was quick to issue a statement condemning “the ghastly murder of innocent men, women, and children.”
US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was asked by The Hindu, about “why the US has not been forthcoming in its criticism.” She responded that the BJP “government is leading India well, and it will do the right thing.”
True, Ms Rocca, Washington’s point-person for South Asia, did term the events in Gujarat “really horrible,” but the few words of comfort were yanked out of her at a news conference in April 2002 when she was asked pointedly to comment on Gujarat.
And then she revealed at the same news conference that the subject was neither discussed with the Indian government, nor was it on her agenda. Yet, she presented a different view to the house subcommittee. The US has spoken out loudly and often on the terrible events of Gujarat, and it did not in any way get a pass from anywhere in the world, much less from the Bush administration.”
This is at variance with the observations made by the head of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Ms Felice Gaer. “We would like to know what is the US Government’s view of this,” She had said in October 2002, the year the pogroms were carried out.
Citing an official report on the subject, she said: “The same report tells us that several US officials went to Gujarat to examine the situation. But we are still waiting for a senior US official to speak out publicly about those findings, rather than to refer generically to ‘the horrible violence’.” Ms Gaer said.
Perhaps she should glean the facts from a report on Gujarat prepared by the British high commission in New Delhi, or the one by the European Union. But it would be best if she follows the proceedings in India’s Supreme Court.
EVER had a guest over who left you red-faced by heaping invectives on almost all your friends and singled out your adversary for fulsome praise? That is precisely what visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did while in Delhi. It was a full-scale tirade against Iran and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during his meeting with a group of journalists.
His deputy, Yosef Lapid, meanwhile, was taking all the care at another press meet to avoid saying anything offensive about Pakistan. Israel harbours no animosity towards Pakistan. In fact it appreciates Islamabad’s role as a frontline state against communism first and then in the current global war on terrorism. If Pakistan was willing, Israel was ready to establish diplomatic ties with it. This was the gist of Mr Lapid’s take on Pakistan.
As one newspaper observed on Saturday, if three Phalcon radars and some anti-terrorism technology was all that India was getting, it could have avoided the heavy diplomatic cost that would eventually come with Israel’s bill. The two dozen odd Arab ambassadors in Delhi are already asking uncomfortable questions.
AMONG the many incredible angularities of our national mindset that goes altogether unnoticed is the way we fail to react to horrors and live with them without so much as turning a hair. Our provincial education minister has been kind enough to volunteer the disclosure that in Sindh we have “3,700 schools lying closed for want of teachers.” He has made that statement with ease and equanimity that seems to suggest that nobody need worry about those closed schools. If they are closed, so be it.
We are becoming people past horror. Nothing upsets us, nothing bothers us, nothing puts us ill at ease — and nothing puts us to shame. For any citizen with a grain of self-esteem this information should come at once as a shock and shame. Taking a school has an average of one hundred students, 3,700 closed schools would mean we are depriving 370,000 children of education that is their birthright and the government’s bounden duty.
Mercifully, the minister did not say for how long these schools have remained closed, or why. The common excuse, and also the most patently unacceptable, is that there are not enough teachers around. On the one hand we are shedding tears (mostly crocodile) over the increasing numbers of the educated unemployed, and on the other we have the audacity to say there are not enough teachers to staff these closed schools. Absurdity has to have some limit.
Let us not oversimplify this situation. Not every educated unemployed would be expected to answer to the qualification needed of a primary school teacher. It is a specialized work. Primary school children are a very sensitive and fragile group. An indifferent primary school teacher may do more harm than good. But getting properly trained primary school teacher is by no means a Herculean task.
If the minister believes in the simple dictum of beginning at the beginning, let him start with a string of teachers training institutions. Let there be one such school in each district, or let us say three in the whole province with a three-month crash teaching programme. Before the year is out there should be a thousand reasonably trained primary school teachers. At that rate we should have enough teachers within the space of one year. The effort should be that the teachers get jobs as close to their homes as possible to avoid any displacement.
The President and the Prime Minister are talking of universal literacy at a frequency of twice a week and here we have existing schools with their doors shut and staff being paid from public funds. Of course the education minister is no stranger to Sindh province and its deeply-rooted anti-education culture. The average village Wadera looks upon education for his Haris as sowing the seeds of revolution that would some day put an end to his lordship over all he surveys.
The basic reason why schools in the countryside remain in disuse is that the local chieftain does not want the children of his Haris to get anywhere near education. Many Waderas look askance upon farm-to-market roads because he views roads as a facility that would open up his fiefdom to alien eyes and outlandish ideas. One can only ask whether it was an oversight or a calculated effort not to mention those village schools that are very much open but only as the local Wadera’s out-houses or cattle pens, and the school staff as part of his platoon of his personal servants and lackeys.
Behind the closed primary schools lies the continuation of some of the particularly sordid aspects of the feudal culture. The education minister had better make a deep study of the phenomenon of closed schools and try to reach to the roots of this scandal. There is a vast deal more to opening schools in the countryside than merely unlocking the closed school doors, putting in some furniture and appointing a couple of schoolteachers.
It is not going to be all that easy. Trying to take education to the dark corners of the reigning culture in the countryside is little short of a crusade. It must be pointed out that if Sindh has nearly four thousand closed schools, in Punjab they have ten times as many ‘ghost’ schools. In the Frontier the number may be smaller, thanks to the effective, though brief, government of the late Abdul Qayyum Khan.
Education ministers of all province have to realise that spreading education at the grassroots is a very tough assignment and one of the noblest any government can be persuaded to make bold to undertake. By all standards, education ought to be the first priority in any Third World society. It is no doubt good to note that the Higher Education Commission is making impressive strides. But if the higher education remains unaccompanied by a redoubled effort to spread education at the base, it would be building from top downwards. Not the wisest policy to adopt.
There can be absolutely no quarrel with the Sindh government’s declared policy that the Sindhi language shall be a compulsory subject. Definitely and by all means. However, let this euphoria not take our eyes off the real fact of life that the universal language of the world when our children enter life will be English. Anyone not adequately proficient in the English language would be an alien to life on this planet. Lack of working knowledge in English would make our children of today, and men and women of the word tomorrow, irrelevant to the reigning reality of life. Emphasis on the Sindhi language is not open to question so long as it is not at the cost of learning English with redoubled emphasis.
Khayaban-i-Janbaz, Khayaban-i-Shamsheer and Khayaban-i-Mujahid. These are the names of a few roads in the locality governed by the Defence Housing Authority. If the residential area has been built and developed by the DHA, it doesn’t mean that street names should necessarily reflect the militaristic spirit. There are exceptions like Khayaban-i-Sahar and Khayaban-i-Rahat, but one wonders why the DHA can’t name its boulevards after great writers and accomplished artists, not necessarily our own, because art and literature cut across all geographical boundaries? In New Delhi there is a Tolstoy Marg (marg means road). In Kolkatta, the home of the Bengali language, they have a Mirza Ghalib Marg.
In the whole of Karachi there is not a single road named after Faiz Ahmad Faiz, arguably the greatest Urdu poet of the second half of the 20th century. There is not even an insignificant street named after A.R. Chughtai or Shakir Ali or Sadequain.
The road connecting Guru Mandir and Lasbela House was once called Nazrul Islam Road, but very soon the road was renamed after a daily newspaper. Before the partition of the subcontinent, it was called Deepchand Ojha Road.
There is Hali Road in PECHS Society, but that is a small road, not even half a kilometre long. Way back in the sixties a street behind Barkat-i-Hyderi in Block D, North Nazimabad, was named Sharah-i-Abul Fazal. But the board announcing the name was removed soon after. Just as well, because the badly battered street is hardly a tribute to the titanic figure of Emperor Akbar’s court. He was one of the nine jewels (the so-called Navratan) of the greatest of all Mughals.
Mirza Ghalib has been lately honoured as a road in Clifton has been named after him. But one would have thought that an important highway like Sharea Faisal should have been called Sharea Ghalib or Sharea Mir Taqi Mir. The king may well be forgotten but the two great poets will remain ensconced in the history of Urdu literature. Isn’t it enough that the third largest city in the country has been renamed after King Faisal?
On a Sunday evening last month a friend was on his way home along with his wife and daughter when his car was stopped by four armed men at a traffic-light. The armed men ordered the family out, and drove away in their new car. It was about 7pm.
A passing motorist, who had witnessed the carjacking, took pity on the family and drove them home. Once there, the friend called the emergency police number to report the incident. The officer at the other end listened to the complaint patiently, and directed the friend to the nearest police station, saying that, in the interim, he would broadcast by wireless the details to all the police stations in the city. He promised that he would get back to the friend as soon as there was anything to report.
By 7.30pm the friend was at the police station, which had already received the complaint on the wireless. A police officer on duty recorded the details. In the meanwhile, the friend received a call from his wife on his mobile phone. She told him that their car had been found by officials of another police station three kilometres away. The police had called to inform her. The friend should be excused for thinking that the news was too good to be true. But the officer on duty confirmed the news, and directed him to the police station where the car had been parked.
Overjoyed, the friend went to the other police station without delay. The station house officer told the friend that one of his constables in plain clothes had found the car at a nearby market after it had hit a pushcart. Four men had been seen running off, abandoning the car. The conscientious constable took the wheel, and drove the car dutifully to the police station.
The police officer then took the friend with civility to the car which had been parked in the compound of the police station. The friend inspected the vehicle, and found, to his wonderment, that his wife’s purse containing some cash had not been touched. He drove away at 8.15pm.
In case our readers are wondering where the carjacking occurred and which police force acted with such agility and courtesy, here are the facts: the armed men robbed the family of their car on Khyaban-i-Bahria; the first police station was Gizri PS and the second one was DHA PS.
A friend used to complain incessantly about the inefficient manner in which the Pakistan Telecommunication Company treated its subscribers. His main grouse was that the phone company did not respond to his complaints promptly. He would also crib about what he called the erratic billing system of the PTCL.
Reposing implicit faith in the competence of the private sector, the friend recently acquired a mobile phone. He thought that with one master-stroke he had rid himself of all his phone woes. He was proved wrong.
Disregarding the warnings of his well-wishers, the friend engaged the services of a leading telecommunications company. He shortly found himself spending a great deal of time working out the credit balance of his pre-paid mobile phone connection. To his utter consternation, he learnt that the credit balance diminished at a rate greater than at which he made calls or availed himself of the short messaging service.
Last Sunday he recharged his mobile phone card. After deduction of tax, his credit balance showed the amount of Rs276. He made a brief call and found that the credit balance had come down to Rs269. Satisfied, the friend went to sleep.
The following morning he was astonished to discover that the credit balance had dropped to Rs196. He was certain that he had made no call. Since he was under the impression that a telecommunications company in the private sector would swing into action and redress his complaint without delay, he dialled the helpline number. He was beside himself with horror when he heard a prerecorded message saying that the service was currently unavailable.
Tuesday brought him no pleasant tidings. The credit balance had further dropped to Rs134 — and he had sent out only a couple of messages. When the friend related his sob story to his colleagues, he was told that many subscribers of the telecommunications company shared the same fate.
A colleague recently ran into a childhood friend on a busy road after years. As they recognized each other, they, taking advantage of the chance encounter, decided to go to a restaurant across the road and have a heart-to-heart for old times’ sake. They told each other over lunch what professions they had taken up after completing their education. The colleague was happy to learn that his friend had joined a well-known pharmaceutical company upon his return from the US where he had studied microbiology.
The colleague, a nosey newsman, asked his friend how pharmaceutical companies got doctors to prescribe their medicines. The friend told him that pharmaceutical companies sent their medical representatives to doctors with material containing information about new medicines and how they were better and more effective than the old ones.
The friend added that pharmaceutical companies also presented doctors with stationery, calendars, diaries, paperweights, etc. marked with the names of new medicines. The colleague wondered whether pharmaceutical companies employed other persuasive techniques to remind doctors of their medicines. Hesitatingly, the friend pointed out that at times a few doctors asked patients to purchase medicines from a certain pharmacy only. Sometimes they prescribed costly medicines despite the fact that inexpensive alternatives were available. The friend observed that few upright people could turn down an invitation to a vacation in the idyllic Northern Areas where medical conferences were held frequently.— By Karachian
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