WHEN I began my first year of teaching (1951-52) at Government College, Lahore, I had no expectation of being able to go abroad for further education. But then one day I saw an advertisement from the United States Education Foundation in Pakistan, inviting applications for Fulbright scholarships to study in American universities. I sent in my credentials and, much to my surprise, I got an award to read economics at the University of Chicago.

Seeing that economics at Chicago required proficiency in mathematics, which I did not have, I switched to political science. This turned out to be a good decision, for some of the most renowned men in the field were assembled at the University of Chicago at this time, and I got the opportunity to study with them.

My Fulbright scholarship was renewed for a second year but this time it was located at the University of Pennsylvania. After it ended, I won other scholarships, and also made money working as a teaching assistant in the South Asia Studies Programme. Thus, I was one of the more prosperous graduate students on campus and did not ever have to get money from home. I got the Ph.D. degree in January 1957, and taught in Karachi for five years.

Forty years later (1996) I got an opportunity once again to avail of a Fulbright grant, this time to teach American political thought as a visiting professor at the Centre for North American Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, in Islamabad. This too was a most rewarding and delightful experience.

All of this was made possible by the Fulbright programme, which I should now like to address. But allow me first a word about the amazing man whose name it bears. J. William Fulbright was truly one of the great men in America’s intellectual and public life. After graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1925, majoring in political science, he earned a Master’s degree at Oxford University where he had gone as a Rhodes scholar. He got a law degree at the George Washington University (Washington, DC), served in the Department of Justice for a few years, taught law at the University of Arkansas, and in 1939 became president of that university. At 34, he was the youngest president of a university ever in America.

Fulbright was elected to the US House of Representatives in the fall of 1942. A few months later, the House approved a resolution he had moved, urging American participation in developing an international peace-keeping organization (which later emerged as the United Nations). His leading role in this enterprise brought him national attention.

He got elected to the United States Senate and served in that august body for 29 years (1945-1974). He served on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for almost 30 years and as its chairman for 15 of them (1959-74). He rose to be one of the most influential and best-known members of the Senate. In 1963, Walter Lippmann, the celebrated American journalist and thinker (with whose political philosophy my first published work was concerned), said of Fulbright: “The role he plays in Washington is indispensable. There is no one else who is so powerful, and also so wise, and if there were any question of removing him from public life, it would be a national calamity.”

J. William Fulbright was a conservative, not like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, but a classical conservative in the tradition of Aristotle and, closer to our own time, Edmund Burke. He was a man of great courage, willing to speak his mind and conscience even when it went against the more prevalent opinion.

He was the only senator in 1954 to vote against appropriations for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting sub-committee on investigations of un-American activities. He cautioned President Kennedy against the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and he was a consistent and outspoken critic of the government’s policies and measures during the Vietnam War. His book, The Arrogance of Power, remains a classic among commentaries on American foreign policy.

Fulbright’s bill, providing for the international exchange of students, scholars, men and women with leadership potential in various fields, became law in 1946. It envisaged increased mutual understanding between Americans and citizens of other countries through exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills. It would be a step towards building international cooperation.

The project would afford the participants the opportunity to observe each other’s political, economic, and cultural institutions, exchange ideas, and undertake joint ventures important to the general well-being of mankind. The first group of American Fulbright grantees went overseas in 1948. During the following 55 years approximately 96,400 Americans and 158, 600 citizens of other countries have benefited from the programme.

Most of its funding comes from the annual appropriation the US Congress makes, and which the office of educational and cultural affairs in the state department disburses. Governments of the participating countries also make a contribution, albeit modest. A board of 12 persons drawn from the academia and other professions (journalism, art, music, films, etc.), and appointed by the president of the United States, administers the programme at the American end.

It sets policies and procedures, and makes final decisions on grant applications of American citizens and those from foreign nationals, recommended by a bi-national commission known as the United States Education Foundation, in the country concerned. An organization called the Council for the Educational Exchange of Scholars in Washington, DC acts as a disbursing and placement agency for the Fulbright grantees from abroad.

The United States Education Foundation (USEF) in each of the participating countries administers the programme at that end. It consists of American officials and local academics and professionals. Its office (headed by an executive director who is usually an American with appropriate academic credentials) advertises the availability of grants, receives and processes applications, arranges for their review and evaluation by committees of relevant experts. The foundation ranks candidates in the order of merit and passes along its recommendations to the Fulbright board in Washington, DC.

It takes care of the programme’s mechanics in the host country. It arranges for the disbursement of funds, professional placement , housing, and travel for the American grantees who are going to study, teach, or do research in that country. Based on my own experience, I can say that USEF in Pakistan is a most hospitable and helpful agency.

The Fulbright programme has been operational in Pakistan since 1951, and since then 1,465 of its young people have received scholarships for graduate study, leading to MA and Ph.D. degrees, at American universities. In the old days only 15 or so persons received awards each year. The programme is now being greatly expanded.

The American ambassador in Islamabad has recently announced that, subject to Congressional approval, the United States government will allocate $75 million for the programme in Pakistan ($15 million per year) over the next five years starting with 2005. The Higher Education Commission will add $15 million ($3 million per year) to this project. The larger part of the American contribution will be given to students wishing to pursue a two-year Master’s degree programme at an American university. But some of it, and probably all of the HEC’s contribution, will be used to fund Ph.D. candidates (whose work usually takes about four years to complete).

As many as 112 Pakistani students will have Fulbright funding to pursue the master’s degree programmes in the United States, beginning September 2005. Each of them will have a full scholarship that covers tuition and other fees, maintenance (housing, food, “pocket money”), books, and travel. Each awardee has signed an agreement that upon completing his/her studies he/she will return to Pakistan and serve here for at least two years.

The grantees for the next academic year include 81 men and 31 women. Their distribution over the various areas of study is something like this: natural sciences, engineering, and technology: 32; public administration and public policy: 15; economics and finance: 14; political science, law, and human rights: 10; languages and linguistics: 7; health: 6; education: 6; environment: 4; human resource (personnel) management: 4; agriculture: 2; arts: 2; journalism: 1; and a few others.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is providing assistance for education in Pakistan beyond the Fulbright Programme. Some of the more notable projects relate to literacy programmes, primary school enrolments, student performance, training for teachers and educational administrators, school building, rehabilitation, and furnishing, and scholarships for study at Pakistani universities. Aid has gone mostly to Sindh, Balochistan, and the Fata area in NWFP.

The United States is indeed interested in Pakistan as a “strategic partner” (whatever that means) and for its role in fighting extremism and terrorism. But it is clear to me that it is also interested in Pakistan’s educational, social, and cultural advancement even when its assistance with America’s political and economic interests in the region is not particularly needed.

The American Centre, with its impressive library and information resources, in Lahore and Karachi used to be a highly gratifying place for students and scholars to visit. These centres have of late been closed, many of their books donated to local libraries, and the remaining ones along with the librarians moved to the main consular premises. I went to the facility in Lahore during my visit there last February and, to my great distress, found it deserted.

Attacks on American offices and personnel by terrorists, or enraged mobs, in recent years have heightened the security concerns of American officials serving in Pakistan to the point where their interaction with Pakistani intellectuals and professionals has become exceedingly difficult. I was very disturbed to find also that these Americans suffer personal privation in Pakistan: most of them are not allowed to bring their families to their post, and they are not entirely free to move about outside their heavily guarded offices and homes. It is a drastic change from the way things used to be, and it is one that hurts both sides.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

ALTHOUGH we continue to be shocked by the atrocities faced by the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail, a certain amount of national obliviousness exists to the dark and Dickensonian conditions prevailing in our own prisons. The recent clashes in Sukkur jail were but one example of their kind and remain an important indicator of the general state of our prisons.

In theory, prisons are meant to reform people so that they can re-enter society leaving their life of crime behind them. But Pakistani jails do not live up to this definition. Here in our prisons, people are criminalized further, and state power is collusive in such criminalization.

Regular reports by human rights bodies and the Pakistan Law Commission bring out the logistical and physical problems of jails. The most frequently cited problem is that of overcrowding (the interior ministry report released in June 2004 states that there are 80,000 prisoners in Pakistan’s 73 prisons, against a capacity of 35,365 inmates), lack of sanitation facilities, the slow disposal of cases, etc.

However commissions, reform reports etc, have failed to point out the worst aspect of Pakistani prisons: that a large number of them have become extraction centres, and crime dens, much like urban underworlds. The harrowing stories that are narrated by prisoners in Sindh’s jails depicts them in the light of human objects to be humiliated. They are treated as criminals, not to be reformed but to be punished. There is only one way to escape this — money.

Most jail superintendents, at least in Sindh, are running prisons on almost a commercial basis with money passing hands between the jail staff and the prisoners. In this article, my examples come from two jails, in Khairpur and Karachi. However, anecdotal evidence from other jails, including Sukkur jail, shows that the experience is probably not very different there.

Each jail has its own ‘market’ value. According to my calculation, based on various confidential letters sent to me from time to time by former prisoners and jail staff, Khairpur jail fetches easily about Rs. 20 lakh to Rs. 25 lakh a month while the figure at Karachi jail is about Rs. 80 lakh to a crore. Jail commissions might want to investigate how this ‘protection money’ is distributed.

A few months ago, a relation was sent to Karachi jail. The story he brought back was an eye-opener. There are about 8,000 inmates in the prison, most of them under-trial prisoners. There is just about enough space in the barracks to lie straight at night. Space is competitive and poverty is a major disincentive. Poor inmates are packed like sardines and there is not enough space even to turn around.

Nearly 200 people are thrown into a single barrack. The point here is that the condition of the prisoner is contingent upon the money he brings in. Inmates pay for everything, even to escape fatigue.

‘Sifarish’ helps too. I was told that initially, the jail guard demanded Rs. 200,000 from a group of five prisoners if they wanted to escape the general regimen of prisoners. It was only after the intervention of the governor that the demand was abandoned.

It is also reported that the jail authorities charged protection money to the tune of Rs. 100,000 from each member of the revenue staff recently arrested when the minister for revenue was sacked. The whole amount was paid.

So insult, humiliation, and protection money add to the travails of the inmates, most of whom are not convicts. Interestingly, the persons for the job, are long-serving convicts, who are now assigned duties of ‘watch and ward’ inside the jail premises.

As district nazim, I have received several letters from those at Khairpur jail over the years. There are complaints of humiliation, of beatings, of massive protection money being demanded. From time to time, I have intimated the higher authorities of these complaints, but in vain. Portions of a recent letter are reproduced below:

The jail officials, it notes, are “running everything on contract. Money for washing clothes, money for keeping mobile phones, money for charas, for gambling, and even young boys for money. Television is allowed and they all have cables. For every cable about Rs. 2,000 a month is charged.

“...There is a category of prisoners who are called dalal qaidis who have been sentenced to death ... who are assigned tasks for collection. If you make a visit inside the jail premises, you are charged Rs. 140 rupees... A sipahi has taken a contract for Rs. 5,000 a week. Every Eid, or on August 14, charges for one visit are Rs. 350.

“If an inmate is new, then he must furnish the jail superintendent with a sum of between Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 5,000, in order to avoid a beating. One prisoner — a dacoit — was charged Rs. 20,000 for not being sent to Sukkur. He is threatening others of having them transferred to Sukkur, Hyderabad or Larkana jails if he is not paid Rs. 1,000 per month...Some special prisoners have been given phones, and some have pistols as well.” This underlines the link the dacoits have with their companions outside jail.

According to another letter by a prisoner released on bail, a new prisoner is asked if he knows anyone inside the prison compound who could give an undertaking that an advance would be paid to jail authorities. If the reply is in the negative, the newcomer is beaten up. (It should be mentioned that severe beatings are inflicted on a new prisoner who is then kept in solitary confinement. A middleman, often a convicted prisoner, is sent to negotiate the price to be paid to avoid these cells. This mediator often also allows loans and guarantees to the new inmate to be compensated at a future date.)

Commenting on the poor prison diet, the letter says that flour is mixed with lentils to increase the quantity and that drugs are freely available. The government had apparently given the jail authorities Rs. 1500,000 but very little of this money was used on what it was meant for. Instead, money was extracted from the prisoners. Moreover, gas facilities are available only to the staff.

There is a category of prisoners known as yateem qaidis, who have no relatives and no money. Their services are sold to richer prisoners who hire them for Rs. 1,000 paid to the jail authorities for tasks like washing and cleaning shoes. The yateem qaidis are frequently beaten.

A recently released prisoner said that he had to pay Rs. 2,500 as protection money every month in Khairpur jail. This was confirmed by an officer who has served in the jail. Prostitution, too, is common in Khairpur jail. Young men are made available for other inmates. Prices may range to as high as Rs. 10,000 a night.

This information is neither classified nor confidential. It is well known. Anyone who serves time in jail comes back with similar grisly accounts of the treatment meted out to prisoners. However, inmates are not ready to testify in official inquiries and land themselves into greater trouble.

The collusion starts at the top, and it is possible that the notorious chain, linking officials and prisoners, also includes influential personalities, as quite a few people use “sifarish” to avoid multiple charges. Poor women come weeping to me, asking me to write letters to the jail superintendent to exempt them from paying money.

The repercussions of this scenario are serious. If prisoners pay through their teeth, then they also weaken the authority of the jail staff, and as the Sukkur incident shows, are not governed by any form of discipline.

Pakistan’s jails are regulated by the Prisoner’s Act of 1875, with added rules framed in 1972. The prison rules, a colonial mishmash, allow for severe punitive measures, solitary confinement, whipping, handcuffs, chain links and bar fetters to be used on the prisoners. The jail superintendent is the sole authority and the prisoners have no other recourse to lodge an appeal against their condition. These draconian measures legitimize the cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners at the hands of their jailers. This is a deterrent not to curb lawlessness but for those who do not pay.

A jail reform commission recommended more reform-oriented work and the provision of space, of building new prisons, including open jails, and of initiating technical and vocational skills. It also recommended separate jails for women and total separation of juvenile prisoners from adult (often more hardened) prisoners. However, these recommendations have not been seriously considered.

Our lawmakers must urgently evaluate the state of prisons. Large public interest groups comprising human rights activists, judges and lawyers must be included in committees charged with overseeing prison reforms and should perform the functions of legal entities on whom clear powers have been bestowed.

The writer is district nazim, Khairpur.

GENERAL Ziaul Haq’s rule was long and costly. His legacy is turning out to be costlier and longer lasting. The fighters, fanatics and hypocrites he spawned, the politicians he groomed and the Islamic ideologists (who saw an aura surrounding him) still dominate the national scene.

Ziaul Haq has also left behind a class of public leaders who have come to believe that the armed forces are a part of Pakistan’s civil society and have a role to play in its governance besides guarding its borders. Chaudhry Shujaat Husain could be considered the chief exponent of this view in the present times.

A paradox of Ziaul Haq’s legacy is that a raw and reluctant youth he chose and trained to be his political heir, that is Nawaz Sharif, and Raja Zafrul Haq, a seasoned politician who provided ideological underpinning to his rule both have taken a U-turn now to proclaim that the army’s intervention in politics amount to treason. What to them was politically and morally right for Zia is not so for Musharraf, not even out of necessity.

It is yet another paradox that the legions of believers Zia raised to fight the alien atheists and heretics at home are now pitched against the army itself or their own sectarian rivals. The genie refuses to go back into the bottle and the nurseries to replenish the legions continue to multiply and prosper.

Before the advent of Ziaul Haq, the number of madressahs in the country was put at around 4,000. Their number now, according to Chaudhry Shujaat, is 20,000. He couldn’t be wrong nor exaggerating for he was a minister in the cabinets both of Ziaul Haq and Nawaz Sharif. He should also be believed when as interior minister of Musharraf’s government he affirms on the basis of a survey his ministry conducted that madressahs do not impart military training to their pupils.

But he misses the central point of the argument. Indoctrination is more important than drills. Once the years of parochial instructions in madressahs and haranguing in the neighbourhood mosques have mentally prepared the youth to take up arms for a cause or against those who stray from the right path, it takes only a few weeks of training to learn to fire them. The supply of arms is cheap and abundant and, in these times of clashing ideologies and interests, the lures to use them at home and abroad are many. For the unemployed seminarians, it is not just a mission it is subsistence as well. General Musharraf’s reform plan for madressahs has made no headway in five years because his chief political adviser, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, and his religious affairs minister, Ejazul Haq, both are averse to it. They draw political strength from the madressah management hierarchy. Obviously, they do not want to strike at the base of their own power.

The madressahs are citadels of orthodoxy even if they don’t preach militancy or impart military training. Their present number, if Chaudhry Shujaat’s count is correct, is 20,000 and growing. The number of high schools in the country is less than that — just about 16,000. The number of students in the madressahs and high schools, according to one estimate, is almost equal — around 1.6 million. The schools, too, will be contributing their share to orthodoxy and extremism. Musharraf’s enlightened moderation thus would be losing, and not gaining, adherents with the passage of time as an increasing number of madressah alumni join the country’s political cadre.

That it has lost ground already is confirmed by the manner in which men and women taking part in the human rights rally at Lahore were roughed up and humiliated. It was naive of chief minister Pervaiz Elahi later to blame the district government for the atrocity. Everybody knows that in such situations the police these days gets orders only from the highest authority of the province. The chief minister has constituency to safeguard but the real betrayal is not a word of condemnation coming from the author of enlightened moderation himself.

The apprehension naturally arises that the police and political goons may now be routinely raiding the recreation grounds and parks. Surely, the “mixed walkers” in Karachi’s Zamzama alias Jarnail park, for instance, are no less outrageous than the gaggle the bruised and dishevelled Asma Jahangir and Iqbal Haider were trying to lead in Lahore. The Lahore incident may not be serious in physical terms yet it symbolizes the triumph of bigotry and force over human rights and dignity and may also have embarrassed a modernist Musharraf.

It is not human rights alone that is at stake. It is already being conceded that an end to the war on terror is nowhere in sight. It may become unwinnable if the extremists keep growing menacingly as they have been for some years now.

To reverse the tide of extremism it was expected of Musharraf to choose leaders and parties who shared his view of a liberal and tolerant society even if it was not democratic. The fact is that many in his government, or riding his bandwagon, hold the view that the Taliban represent quintessential Islam in public life and by their rule in Afghanistan they had set an example for Pakistan to follow. To them the mass murders of the Hazaras, the humiliation of women and the destruction of the Bamiyan statues (sacred to Buddhists and a heritage of all mankind) were but justified crimes in the pursuit of a pure Islamic order.

Every minister and adviser in Shaukat Aziz’s horrendously large rag bag of coalition (almost all selected by Musharraf) has his own plans for the future and each faction its own exit strategy. They would defect or coalesce as events shape and opportunities present themselves. They are not a source of continuity nor of commitment to Musharraf’s liberalism or the system of checks and balances and local government he has introduced. In fact, they loath both.

If Chaudhry Shujaat, Zafarullah Jamali, Ejazul Haq and Sheikh Rashid represent Musharraf’s enlightened moderation the people might as well have a government of the Jamaat or Jamiat for then the line would be visible between liberalism and orthodoxy.

The only recognized and democratic way to bring the liberal forces together on one platform is to hold early and fair elections. Indications are to the contrary — the elections may be delayed and would not be fair. When Chaudhry Shujaat says that the CEC would determine when and how the elections — local or national — are to be held, he doesn’t mean the chief election commissioner but the central executive committee of his faction of the Muslim League.

While this thinking prevails both democracy and liberalism will remain on the retreat for the street power lies with the militants and their allies in the ruling coalition and other institutions of the state. All that Musharraf can hope for is to trudge on for some more time banking on his commanders, technocrats and, not to be ignored, nazims.