LEARNING on the job may be proper in some cases in a developing country having acute poverty, but should we carry that to the other extreme to train ministers on their lofty posts?

If a handful of ministers were trained in this manner after nearly 60 years of the country’s birth that maybe permissible but when they become too many in a cabinet of 62 ministers and ministers of state, that is not proper, more so when the problems they face in office are too many and too complex.

To begin with, the total number of ministers itself at 62 is staggering in a developing country where men and women suitable for ministerial posts are so few. And yet it is surprising that a highly professionally qualified person like Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz should have such a large cabinet with a few truly qualified persons.

Having large cabinets is not an entirely new phenomenon. We have had such cabinets in the past, particularly after the political process was restored in 1988. The cabinets have been expanding ever since the last elections. Moreover, the salaries, allowances, and extra perquisites of ministers have been increasing constantly along with those of the members of parliament. And then, other privileges like expensive foreign trips are offered to many of them. During the last six months the foreign trips of the president, prime minister and members of parliament cost the country over $705 million. By the end of the financial year the total expenditure may exceed $1500 million which is a staggering sum.

Defending the foreign trips, the speaker of the National Assembly Chaudry Amir Hussain says these help enhance interaction with the world’s parliamentary leaders. What is the first lesson that our parliamentarians should have learnt while going abroad? They should attend the meetings of parliament unless they are preoccupied with parliamentary committee meetings, as in the US.

But in Pakistan, whether that be in National Assembly or the Senate or the provincial assembly the principal flaw is the lack of quorum even during key debates. It is the duty of the ruling party to provide quorum but it does not do much of the time. The opposition exploits the situation to get the assembly adjourned so even the budget debate becomes a brief exercise. And when the assembly is in session, few ministers are seen there responding to the points raised about their ministries.

And the standing committees of the house do not meet regularly and do their work properly so as to be watchful of the government at work.

The key public accounts committee of the National Assembly also do a highly unsatisfactory job and comes up with reports of mishandling of public funds long after the funds had been wasted and those guilty of doing that had vanished from the scene.

It appears that as long as we have a tribal and feudal socio-political order too many seats in parliament will have the sons, daughters and nieces of feudal lords through election or nomination. That has happened more this time than ever before because of the additional seats created. But if the leading feudal families have to be favoured politically that need not be done by making their scions ministers too soon. The right course would be to make them parliamentary secretaries and after a few years ministers of state and then ministers.

India has a system which divides ministers of state into two categories. One, those who work under senior ministers and, two, those who are given independent charge of ministries. The former are later promoted to the position of cabinet ministers. The system works smoothly.

When Shaukat Aziz’s cabinet came into being he had said the performance of ministers, ministers of state and departmental secretaries would be evaluated every quarter and they would be dealt with accordingly. But no such exercise appears to have taken place since then and the ministers had continued to hold their offices as a matter of routine until the last week’s reshuffle.

We are now told the modest reshuffle of the cabinet has been done in national interest and to prepare the country for new general elections. Chief Election Commissioner Qazi Mohammed Farooq has said the next election will be conducted by a caretaker setup. If so, how helpful will be the recent reshuffle for the ruling setup to win the elections is a matter of guess.

One of the recent privileges of a member of parliament or a provincial assembly has been the allocation of a large development fund to them individually. Along with that often misused funds came a quota of jobs for each member to recommend without real heed to the qualifications and finally in this disregard of the public service commission.

This is a greatly abused privilege which sacrifices merit in recruitment. Now the Sindh education department has failed to recruit seven thousand five hundred teachers following the demand of the coalition partners to appoint the teachers according to the MPA’s quotas. The Sindh education department has taken written tests of 7,500 teachers but now the chief minister is being pressured to give up the entire process and the vacancies be filled by allotting each ruling coalition member his or her quota.

And the World Bank says that since the teachers are recruited heedless of merit, its education grant would be suspended.

Education Minister Dr Hamida Khuro says 14,000 more vacancies for teachers would arise and she would want written tests for filling the posts. How far she would succeed in this venture remains to be seen. The World bank has suspended loans in the social sector in India following such abuses.

In the past the legislatures could misuse their funds to build roads leading to their homes. Schools were built using the public funds to serve as guest houses or cattle shed. The legislatures seek too many privileges for their own gains and not for the benefit of the people of their areas. Such abuses must stop now.

People ought to know more about their parliamentarians in this information age. The members of the National Assembly, Senate and the provincial assemblies should provide proper data and details about themselves on websites. Their educational qualification, training, their varied experience and the extent of their assets ought to be mentioned there. Such data will be useful for the media as well for an intelligent debate. The leadership options before people will also be clearer.

It is not proper that graduation should be prescribed as minimum qualification for legislators including local body members and then all kinds of certificates and papers are passed as equivalent to graduate degrees that is making a mockery of the education system as well as the parliamentary order. Graduation should not be made such a farce and made a pre-condition to contest an elections to assemblies.

Let us have a rationale approach to the whole system and do things consistent with the knowledge age. Let us have really educated and enlightened members of parliament and provincial assemblies instead of making a mockery of the whole system at a high cost.

The elected persons should be given training in parliamentary practices and made familiar with how the system works in democratic countries. It is truly essential for a report to be provided to the nation every year on how many sessions each member attended and what legislative initiatives he took. The number of foreign trips of parliamentarians should be reduced and they should be made to serve their people.

I WOULD like to think that my entry in the Harvard alumni directory pleased John Kenneth Galbraith, “writer, traveller, collector of epiphanies,” for Galbraith was himself a man of epiphany, who knew quite effectively how to manifest himself, his ideas, in ways that struck the imagination. He had been known these past few years simply as “Ret.” (Retired), while his long-time wife Catherine categorised herself not only as “Ms Catherine Atwater,” but also as an “HMG,” (home management), a fancy term for housewife or homemaker.

In the early 1970s, we were both teaching relatively popular courses — he in economics, his introductory course to the subject being at the time the university’s most sought out and best-attended course, myself in history and literature, during a series of courses that focused ironically on neither, but on a third subject taboo at the time at Harvard: cinema and my own experience working in French film.

He was informed of the appointment of a neighbour on Francis Avenue, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as the new US ambassador to India. “Can you imagine,” quipped Galbraith (who himself had been the US emissary to New Delhi under the administration of his dear friend John F. Kennedy) in his almost matter-of-fact way of saying such things, “we’ve just become the ‘Passage to India’,” as in the title of the E.M. Forster book, a first edition of which was displayed prominently in his library at 30 Francis Avenue.

I still can see the beautiful flowers that grew in his front yard, where, in the spring, there was a colourful assortment of tulips in yellow, orange and red, and in whatever other colours they came at the time. As his front yard was fenceless, I remember that often while passing in front of 30 Francis Avenue, upon returning from my university office around the corner at Five Bryant Street, in the Centre for European Studies (an ambiguously defined interdisciplinary organism founded by one Henry Kissinger, where I was charged with its cultural affairs) I would discreetly snatch up a bouquet of flowers to hand over to one of a number of young women who I was courting at the time.

One of these happened to be a young lass, by the name of Benazir Bhutto, her name officially hyphenated and she known at least then as “Pinkie,” who happened to reside at Eliot House — I was based then at Winthrop House — and who had been introduced to me at the very address from where came the flowers, and where, I later learnt, she was quite assiduously courted by Galbraith’s son Peter.

Speaking of colourful objects at the Galbraith residence, I can still see the vivid pink or electric purple 1950s-era Cadillac, one of those with the endless set of fins that were at the time Cadillac’s trademark, and which he’d won or been awarded perhaps in his capacity as the world’s leading expert on conspicuous consumption. It sat in front of his house for a considerable period of time as if waiting for Galbraith to step in, take the wheel, and drive off. Except that one day it left without Galbraith and became the proud possession of somebody who’d won it in a raffle or other lottery that Galbraith had decided to stage, as was his way, offering the proceeds to charity or to one of his pet political or social causes.

I remember Galbraith being somewhat envious of me at the time for from my office on the first floor of the European Studies building, I could see into the kitchen of another neighbour of his — Julia Child. She was then the most popular “French chef” of US public television. I had a superb view of all the bright shiny copper pots and pans in her kitchen, and it was surely the association with France that fascinated Galbraith, for whenever I would hold an event that involved French culture, especially the country’s then much appreciated film industry, he and his wife Catherine would usually attend.

I still remember their coming to the champagne receptions I would give at Winthrop House for such visiting friends as directors Francois Truffaut or Louis Malle or Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinematheque Francaise. It was during the reception for Langlois, in an elegant reception space that adjoined a cubby-hole office I had at Winthrop (the house at Harvard best associated with John F Kennedy, whose F-14 student room I chanced to live in briefly one summer) that Galbraith and Catherine took me aside to a seat encased in a window, to tell me something I doubt they had ever revealed to anybody else: “Do you realise, Michaud (for Galbraith, in the European fashion, would address people by their last name), that this is where I proposed to Catherine many years ago (if I remember it was in the late 1930s), when we were both tutors at Winthrop.”

I think it was the first time they’d returned to the site of that special moment, and I was happy that day to have made possible the remembrance.

Although John Galbraith could be a romantic individual, he didn’t let that side of him show through very well or very much. On another occasion, during the visit of another movie celebrity to the university, I invited him and Catherine to a screening of one of the more celebrated romantic films of French cinema. It was either Jacques Demy’s ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ or Agnes Varda’s ‘Le Bonheur’. I remember Galbraith stomping out only a few minutes into the film, exclaiming: “Michaud, it’s just not my sort of movie!” As for Catherine, who was as tiny and delicate as Galbraith was tall and awkward, she stayed through till the end, leaving, as always, with tears in her eyes.

As for relationships, for Galbraith, whose love affair with Catherine lasted for well over 60 years, these were a more complicated matter than could be captured by a French tearjerker. I remember how when in offering a course on cultural policy, he’d called me in because of my relationship with Andre Malraux, the French culture minister.

THE Communist Party of India was widely regarded as a valuable part of the gruelling political struggle to achieve freedom from British colonialism. This was to change drastically after independence although tensions had simmered all along.

As far back as the 1930s the Congress was far from sympathetic to peasant movements, such as those in Bihar and UP. Peasant organisations such as Kisan Sabhas justifiably dubbed Congress as the “Zamindar Congress” inasmuch as the Congress leadership eagerly compromised on tenancy rights on the zamindars’ terms in order to secure their support.

Nehru had earlier disavowed any link between the Congress and the labour movements. Nehru told a communist trade union leader that Congress could not be a labour organisation because it represented all sorts of tendencies and class interests. Thus, in the Saran district of Bihar, for example, the peasant leader Rahul Sankrityayana was denied status as a political prisoner during the freedom struggle because he was viewed as fighting only for peasant rights, not for the rights of “all tendencies”. This ridiculous situation showed the tenancy deal as a swindle, and the peasant knew it.

Sardar Patel, defending the Congress position, declared at Saran in 1938 that Vladimir Lenin was not born in India and he didn’t want a Lenin of any ethnic origin in the country. He described those who practised ‘class hatred’ as ‘renegades’. In Mumbai an industrial disputes bill favouring employers proposed by the first Congress ministry triggered a major confrontation with the working classes, who were being ruthlessly suppressed. Ambedkar, author of independent India’s constitution, declared that under Congress it wasn’t possible to have a single day’s strike without repression being unleashed. Democracy clearly had its limits where it encroached on the economic elites. A decade after independence, Nehru would dismiss the nuisance of a democratically elected communist government of Kerala.

Princely states like Rajkot, where Gandhi was born, and where his father was once diwan, were also in turmoil at the time of independence but Congress was not in the least sympathetic to the peasant and workers’ movements. This lack of sympathy by the Congress was praised by Gandhi as an act of statesmanship. As independence drew near there were serious uprisings in Travancore, present-day Kerala, and in the leading princely state of Hyderabad, now Andhra Pradesh. Telangana was part of Hyderabad where peasants and tribals engaged in a bloody and losing struggle from 1946 to 1951, first with the nizam’s forces and later with the Indian Army which suppressed these deprived people in the name of Congress, that party of all tendencies. Patel and General Chaudhri finished the job that the nizam had started. Three-thousand villages and 300,000 people were affected.

All these struggles were backed by the Communist Party, After independence the CPI gave up its revolutionary creed and chose the democratic, constitutional path. Yet conditions in many of the places mentioned above were often worse than before. Hence, the need arose for a new party which believed in armed struggle. During 1967, activists of the extreme left assembled at a place called Naxalbari, which gave its name to the struggle they launched.

But the Naxalites too were routed first by Congress and later by the United Front government of West Bengal, in which the communist parties were part of the coalition. This was a period of chauvinistic Indian nationalism first because of the China-India war and later because of the support Indira Gandhi gave to the East Pakistanis for their struggle against Pakistan.

It took a lot of time for the Naxalbari-inspired insurgency to be rekindled. In the early 1980s they began to rise but it took another two decades for the Naxalites to resolve their internal ideological differences and agree on a common programme. Today a red corridor stretches from Nepal to Andhra and Tamilnad. It also has links with the LTTE in Sri Lanka and with the Maoists in north-east India.

A full-scale mini-civil war is going on in several states of India, and little wonder, Indian writers, such as retired General J.R. Mukherjee observe that since the original resistance was controlled and put down, nothing was done by the Indian government for the poor in those areas. After consolidation in 2005, Maoists of different sects took control of northern Andhra, southern Orissa, and adjacent areas in Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and the western hill belt fringes of Bengal to create, in effect, a compact revolutionary zone.

For the interim, a base camp has been established in the forest on the Chattisgarh/ Maharastra Border. This thick forest area of 10,000 square miles is used for training camps. Around these camps are 237 villages and 20,000 tribals who all strongly support the Maoists. According to General Mukherjee, the major support is drawn from low castes and the Adivasis who are historically exploited by a baneful combination of moneylenders, feudal landlords and traders.

The people have no trust whatever in politicians and the police who repeatedly have proven themselves to be corrupt. The lower castes from UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra, who have lost their lands to the moneylenders and are virtually used as slaves by the new owners, form the backbone of the resistance.

After 2005 consolidation, the compact revolutionary zone has a central committee of 21 members and a politburo of seven along with three regional bureaus and zonal committees. The fighting strength of the Maoists is about 20,000 armed men with 50,000 ground supporters and some 100,000 people working underground in front organisations who coordinate propaganda.

The movement’s arsenal includes 700 AK rifles, 100 grenade firing weapons, mortars, and a large quantity of explosives and ammunition. They have managed to scrape an income of Rs 500 to Rs 700 crore annually which is used for weapons purchases. These groups are well-known for killings, kidnappings for ransom, raids and bank robberies, according to General Mukherjee

During a stay in India one learns from the press as well as from leftwing activists that 165 of 602 districts of India are deeply afflicted by the Maoist insurgency. The state of Chattisgarh has emerged as the worst affected state after Andra Pradesh, which itself was high in the news in February and March this year. The neighbouring states are in dialogue with the Maoists in their areas. Chattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh has said the fight against the insurgents is a difficult one because there is no unified policy among the neighbouring states. He said: “States do not know what to do. Delhi does not know what it is doing. This confusion must be cleared up immediately.”

But a great deal of confusion is evident in Mr Singh’s own policies. One reckless example in his state is that the leader of the Congress opposition joined hands with the BJP government to start the Salva Jadum campaign which portrays itself as a “spontaneous peace movement”. Salva Jadum translates into “Purification Hunt” and seeks the state mobilisation of tribals against the Maoists.

It reminds one of the White Army of the former Czarists fighting in the Russian civil war. Salva Jadum has not only inflicted mass violence, it has displaced some 40,000 tribals who are now huddled in refugee camps. Instead of cleansing their villages of Maoists influences, the campaign has cleansed a large number of tribal villages of people and made the latter refugees in their own land — much as the American did to the Vietnamese in the 1960s.

Pakistan also faces an insurgency-like situation in Balochistan and Waziristan, but there are important differences. A movement along the same lines as Telengana began at the time of independence in the Mymensingh district of East Pakistan which predictably also was crushed by the army. The activists were accused of being Indian agents.

It was high time for of Muslim nationalism. The leader of this uprising was the scion of a princely family who had redistributed his own land before joining the peasants’ uprising. Mohni Singh became a legendary figure in the communist and peasant struggles in East Pakistan.

Long after the uprising was crushed, a friend asked the then chief secretary of East Pakistan who had served in Mymensingh whether there was hope of any justice for the cause of Tehbhaga movement. He said the peasants, after all, “wanted only a third share of the crop they toiled to produce”.