Pakistan-Bangladesh ties

BEGUM Khaleda Zia’s visit to Pakistan has been described as “historic” by her host, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Diplomatic parlance tends to use superlatives but it cannot be denied that Bangladesh and Pakistan are important for each other in several ways and the presence of the Bangladeshi prime minister in our midst confirmed the fact that the two governments are fully aware of the political, geostrategic and economic implications of the ties between their countries. It was therefore in the fitness of things that the two sides signed four MoUs which, if taken seriously, will promote cooperation in the fields of tourism, agricultural research, economic cooperation and promotion of standardization and quality assurance. But it was in the field of trade that the most significant headway will be made when the two sides finalize their free trade agreement in the next seven months, as was decided during the Bangladesh leader’s visit. Dhaka has asked for duty-free access to Pakistan’s market for over 70 items in a bid to reduce the $75-million deficit in its trade with Islamabad. It is in this context that one must see the decision of the two countries to support the operationalization of Safta. After all, both of them would want to open up the markets of South Asia to their exports.

While their common economic interests have created bonds between Pakistan and Bangladesh, they have also found that they can learn much from each other. In this respect, Mr Aziz’s statement at the joint news conference on Monday was very significant. He said that Pakistan wanted to benefit from Bangladesh’s experience in micro-finance, social sector and population welfare, while it could extend support to Bangladesh in IT and some other sectors. Bangladesh has made rapid strides in the empowerment of women as well as in population planning and microfinancing, both of which have direct relevance to women. There has been a lot of interaction between the non-government sectors of the two countries on these issues. The governments could possibly learn something from each other in terms of policy-making and strategies.

Although it is important to strengthen bilateral ties, in the final analysis the two countries must plan and think in the South Asian context. There was a time when Pakistan and Bangladesh used their ties and their relationship with India in a triangular pattern to score points against their adversary. One party or another in Bangladesh was known for its strong leanings towards New Delhi and when in office its foreign policy tilt was pronounced and affected South Asian equations. On other occasions when Islamabad and Dhaka tried to consolidate their ties, India felt left out. It is time this pattern of power relationship in the region was replaced by an equitable and multilateral system. This would help consolidate regionalism in South Asia and give Saarc the boost it badly needs. The time for this is ripe. The composite dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad has placed their relations on an even keel and either of them should not feel miffed at the other if it makes overtures to Dhaka. Bangladesh itself — no matter which party is in power — would also want to consolidate its position in the region as a South Asian state with friendly relations with both Islamabad and New Delhi. Begum Khaleda Zia understands these intricacies and is therefore paying a visit to New Delhi after her visit to Pakistan.

Dangerous talk

FOR reasons that would be hard to justify, some politicians have begun demanding a postponement of the general election due next year. Technically, parliament can delay a general election by a year, as pointed out by acting Chief Justice Rana Bhagwandas in Islamabad on Monday. But will such a move be advisable politically? As Pakistan’s history shows, the postponement of elections has served to erode democracy and strengthen authoritarian forces. The general election due in 1958 was postponed when the army carried out its first coup and overthrew a civilian government. The result was that the country did not have a free and fair election until 1970. Again, following the overthrow of Z.A. Bhutto’s elected government, Gen Ziaul Haq postponed the election due for November 1977. The result was that military rule stretched to well over a decade, during which Zia disfigured the 1973 Constitution. In fact, he made the political parties and civil society so powerless that some of the worst features of our society today — the arms and drug culture, religious fanaticism and senseless violence —which began during his rule are still with us. Another postponement could do incalculable harm to Pakistan.

The election held in 2002 was anything but fair, the idea being to foist on the nation a nominally elected government led by the military. The worst feature of the present system is Gen Pervez Musharraf’s dual role as army chief and president. The world will never accept Pakistan as a democracy as long as this anomalous arrangement — sanctioned by the judiciary — continues. People now pin hopes on two developments which could herald Pakistan’s entry into the community of democratic nations. First, Gen. Musharraf should give up one of the two offices, and, two, the 2007 election should be truly fair and free with an even playing field for all. Elections are not merely a political process; they give a sense of direction to society. The denial of an uninterrupted political process ultimately leads to social imbalances which in the longer run assume hideous proportions, as we are learning now to our cost.

Child labour on the rise

THE HRCP’s latest figures for child labour in the country are truly alarming. According to a report by the Human Rights Commission, there are currently 10 million child workers in the country, a statistic that is three times the official figure of 3.3 million based on a 1996 study. The figure is likely to increase in the years ahead, unless wide-ranging measures are taken to tackle poverty and bring down the rising cost of living that is responsible for children dropping out of school and taking up jobs to supplement the family income. What is also worrying is the nature of work that children, some of them as young as five or six years, are expected to do. Employed in hazardous industries such as bangle-making, mining, rag-picking, etc, many are exposed to the worst kind of physical and mental trauma. Note must also be taken of those hundreds of thousands of young domestic workers toiling away for long hours in homes where many have to face abusive employers.

Even if the government were pushed about the situation, given that over one-third of the population lives below the poverty line, any drastic action to eliminate child labour all at once would appear impractical. Child labour needs to be phased out gradually, although where hazardous occupations are concerned, this action must be expedited. Accompanying this phase-out must be steps to alleviate overall poverty and to make education mandatory for child workers so that their intellectual development is not stunted. Pakistan has legislation on child labour and is a party to several international conventions on the subject. However, parliamentary disinterest has resulted in the poor enforcement of their provisos. It is time the laws were implemented and new legislation enacted so that our children can be protected from the harsh working conditions that is currently their lot.

Queen Betty and two Kings

BACK in 1948, a couple of young women called Bettye Goldstein and Coretta Scott both attended the convention of the Progressive Party in Philadelphia. The organization, which lived up to its name but proved to be spectacularly unsuccessful in breaking America’s two-party mould, had been formed as a left-wing alternative to Harry Truman’s Democrats.

Its presidential candidate that year was Henry Wallace, a former vice-president to Franklin D. Roosevelt: he won about a million votes on a platform that included closer ties with the Soviet Union (as an alternative to the Cold War) and measures against racial bigotry (in an era when lynchings were still common).

In a sense, the Progressive debacle was the swan song of the Popular Front. McCarthyism lay ahead. But many of the hopes engendered before that dark age lived on, and found expression in various forms once the pall lifted. For instance, although their paths may never have crossed again, Goldstein and Scott — under different names — went on to become formidable warriors against specific forms of discrimination that were rampant in American society.

Bettye dropped the “e”, married Carl Friedan, and went on to write what many (not least the author herself) considered to be a revolutionary feminist tract. Coretta married a young Baptist preacher called Martin Luther King, but her role in the civil rights movement extended beyond standing by his side, egging him on and, after 1968, preserving his legacy.

Recently, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan died within a week of each other. Scott King breathed her last exactly two weeks after the United States marked its 20th Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday she had striven so hard to achieve — an honour King shares with only two other Americans, both of them ex-presidents: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. As flags on federal government buildings across the US flew at half mast, Scott King’s funeral was attended by four US presidents: the two Bushes, Clinton and Carter; it was an acknowledgement of the esteem she inspired, but also a nod to her husband’s status (at least some Americans would, I’m sure, agree that, for all his flaws, he towers above all 20th-century US presidents), although his dream of a more equitable, more just and more peaceful society remains glaringly unfulfilled.

Scott King died little more than three months after the demise of another, arguably more potent, civil rights icon: Rosa Parks, whose act of resistance on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 catalyzed the movement that propelled Martin Luther King to national prominence.

Coincidentally, Friedan shared Parks’s birthday: she turned 85, and died, on February 4. In her case, there were no eulogies from presidents past or present, although there was one from a would-be president: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that Friedan, through her activism and writings, “opened minds and doors, breaking barriers for women”.

Friedan is best known for her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, which grew from an article she planned to write about her 15-year college class reunion. In it she spoke of “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning” among American women: “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, .... lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’

“Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity .... All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.”

Friedan framed what she described as “the problem that has no name” in terms that could be construed as Marxist in origin: “the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities”. It was, perhaps, a subconscious nod to her progressive upbringing — something that she often went out of her way to conceal. Her biographer Daniel Horowitz says Friedan was “deeply embedded in and engaged with issues raised on the Left in the labour union movement (in the 1940s)”, recalling that 20 years before The Feminine Mystique, she had written: “Men, there’s a revolution brewing in the American kitchen.”

In the book she argued that women who accepted the limitations imposed on them by society are “committing a kind of suicide. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort .... We need a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity that will permit women to reach maturity, identity, completeness of self, without conflict with sexual fulfilment.”

If this was a clarion call, it didn’t fall on deaf ears. But, much to Friedan’s dismay, it was superseded before long by a new generation that embraced far more radical strands of feminism, many of whose leading exponents — rebellious princesses confronting an imperious queen — found her views too conservative and too complacent about the oppressive patriarchy.

To Camille Paglia, Germaine Greer, “with her defiant personal history and epic overview of art and politics” is “far more central a figure than Friedan”. As far is Greer is concerned, “Betty was not one to realize that she was being lifted on an existing wave; she thought she was the wave.... Betty believed that freeing women would not be the end of civilization as we know it; I hope that freeing women will be the end of civilization as we know it.”

Concluding a consistently amusing and double-edged tribute in The Guardian last week, Greer noted: “The world will be a tamer place without her.” That may well be so, but it probably would be appropriate to point out that in the age of Desperate Housewives, at least some of Friedan’s earliest prescriptions still ring true. And many more of them are fairly pertinent to the conditions of women in the Third World, especially in Muslim societies.

Her concept of fulfilment, meanwhile, has some relevance to the experience of Coretta Scott King. According to Barbara Reynolds, who was collaborating with Scott King on her as yet unpublished memoirs, during her marriage “she saw herself as a partner, not as an afterthought or an appendage”. Before she met Martin, “she had travelled internationally, crusading for world peace, arriving at that juncture” before her future husband.

Reynolds recalls Scott King telling her: “I had no problem being the wife of Martin, but I was never just a wife. In the 1950s, as a concert singer, I performed freedom concerts, raising funds for the movement. I ran my household, raised my children, and spoke out on world issues .... I once told Martin that although I loved being his wife and a mother, if that was all I did, I would have gone crazy .... I was married to the man whom I loved, but I was also married to the movement.”

At her funeral, George W. Bush said that “her dignity was a daily rebuke to the pettiness and cruelty of segregation”. He couldn’t have been expected to point out that the statistics on this score point towards regression. According to Professor Gary Orfield, the co-author of a Harvard University report on the topic, “The national segregation levels [at schools] are back at levels of the late 1960s. We have lost almost all the progress that came from desegregating our urban communities.”

Nor was it likely that Bush would acknowledge that Scott King’s activism extended well beyond the confines of racial equality. But he was compelled to listen as the Reverend Joseph Lowery, a contemporary of Dr King, noted: She knew there were no weapons of mass destruction over there, but Coretta knew and we knew there were weapons of misdirection right here. Millions without health insurance, poverty abounds.”

There can be little question that Martin Luther King would have concurred. In the years leading up to his assassination, King was beginning to break free of the restraints that had held him back from expressing opinions on crucial issues other than the denial of civil rights to African Americans. Speaking of an uprising in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

And in a groundbreaking speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — exactly a year before his murder — King decided to “break the betrayal of my own silences” and to unambiguously spell out that his own government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. (In this sphere too, not much has changed over four decades.) He condemned a society in which “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people” and declared: “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.” Even today, that requires no amplification. Nor a reassessment.

The press, King noted, that had been “so noble in its praise” when he advocated non-violence towards white oppressors “will curse you and damn you when you say be non-violent towards little brown Vietnamese children”. Or, one might add, little brown Iraqi children. Or little brown Palestinian children.