Food insecurity

WEDNESDAY’s acrimonious and inconclusive meeting of the Federal Food Committee (FFC) does not bode well for the future. Called to map out a joint plan of action for improving food security, the meeting reportedly degenerated into a blame game and in the end tangible solutions remained as elusive as ever. Part of the problem is the FFC’s limited mandate. Its intentions may be honourable but the committee can only make recommendations and issue directives which may or may not be followed. Implementation is up to the provinces and their food departments whose vested interests are notorious and represent a major stumbling block in the way of coordination on a national level. More problems can be expected on this count when and if the FFC decides to recommend a major overhaul of the provincial food departments. Then there is the political and financial clout of flour mill owners who indulge in large-scale hoarding to drive up prices. It was largely because of their influence that the lists of hoarders prepared by the centre last year produced little or no punitive action once they were forwarded to the provinces. Although availability of flour has improved in recent days due to increased wheat supply, retail prices are still significantly higher than what they were a few months ago. As such it is only partly true that the crisis has abated, for the poor continue to suffer. Meanwhile, it is business as usual for wheat and flour smugglers even though paramilitary forces have been deployed to check their activities in all four provinces.

It was pointed out in the FFC meeting that failure to crack down on wheat and flour hoarders could trigger shortages of other food items in due course. While the majority has gone scot-free, the few hoarders rounded up by the authorities have been slapped with laughably small fines. This is entirely the wrong signal to send — make a killing, pay a token fine — and is tantamount to encouraging unscrupulous elements to hoard other essential items of everyday use. Already it is being said that a rice shortage may be imminent if exports are not curtailed. If rice does become scarce it is almost inevitable that hoarders, seemingly immune from prosecution as they are, will spring into action forthwith, driving up prices even further. This must not be allowed to happen. Food inflation is ravaging the people as it is.

Meanwhile, the blame game vis-à-vis the flour crisis would be comical if the issue weren’t so serious. None of the food or chief secretaries are apparently willing to accept responsibility for shortages in their respective areas of influence. Earlier, Mr Pervaiz Elahi felt it was in the fitness of things to accuse his fellow PML-Q leader and former PM Shaukat Aziz of engineering the wheat and flour crisis. Going public with this charge never occurred to Mr Elahi when he was chief minister of Punjab and full of praise for his party’s leader at the centre. Mr Elahi, in turn, is one of the guilty parties according to the PPP and PML-N. What is required right now are solutions, not more mud-slinging.

Futile academic shifts

AS elections approach, it appears that some in the caretaker set-up may be in a hurry to implement new agendas that are not only too ambitious, but also fairly disruptive. Being unelected and not being accountable to the people, the present government has no moral or political ground to take steps as the one under consideration by the Sindh education minister. His department has arbitrarily announced a shift in the start of the school year. Much consideration had led to an August-start academic calendar last year, which is now being switched to an April to March schedule. This has led to much consternation amongst parents and eminent educationists who have accused the concerned ministry of abuse of power and have also questioned how an intense summer, cited as one of the reasons, calls for changes in academic commitments. The controversial proclamation is also in direct conflict with international practices, whereby institutions observe a school schedule that allows the year to end with the long break when students can enjoy a carefree summer vacation. Moreover a change will be in conflict with British examinations such as O and A levels that are taken by many students in this country.

Other than these inconveniences, the department’s April-start announcement has served to heighten a long-standing problem of delays in textbook timetables. The Sindh Textbook Board has already hinted that it may not be able to meet the new deadline for the distribution of books, leaving the decision of a revised school year in the doldrums. Also, a term that concludes on March 31 reduces academic days to a mere 103, which violates the 180-day schedule stipulated by the education department. There has been speculation that vested interests with financial motives may be behind the move. The decision now rests on an inter-provincial meeting scheduled for early next week. On the other end, the fact that the decision has been taken in an interim environment makes it all the more contentious. The tasks before the caretaker government are those of supervision of existing mechanisms, resolving urgencies and at the most, of enhancing present structures. One, therefore, hopes that the government will refrain from taking measures that are unsettling and are likely to be undone by the elected successors.

Stealing to get promoted

THE Punjab University is once again rocked by reports of plagiarism by its teachers. After the university’s Centre for High Energy Physics, teachers from the psychology department are being accused of resorting to plagiarism. One teacher, Dr Mian Aftab Ahmad, has already lost his post as the head of the psychology department after allegations of plagiarism were levelled against him. The university authorities have ‘suspended’ him until the charges are proven. But in the latest twist to his story, Dr Ahmad has accused Dr Yasmin Nilofar Farooqi, who has replaced him as the department head, of having plagiarised her students’ work to include in her research papers. He claims he sent a report to the university authorities last February detailing how Dr Farooqi had included some students’ theses in her papers without getting permission from them and also without acknowledging their contribution. Though Dr Farooqi denies the charges, the university authorities need to step in before the issue starts rankling as it did when a number of teachers at the Centre for High Energy Physics were caught cheating. The university allowed them to get away with it until the Higher Education Commission (HEC) put its feet down and stopped financial aid to the university to force it to do something about the plagiarists. Even then the punishments given to the culprits were quite soft: none of them was removed from the service despite having committed the highest intellectual crime that an academic could be accused of.

The HEC’s policy on plagiarism is clear: anyone found guilty of it should go. The universities should not hide behind rules and regulations to clean the Augean stables of the country’s academia. Anyone working and receiving promotions as well as other financial benefits on spurious research is robbing the country of its precious resources and imparting false knowledge to the future generation. No expediency should allow this situation to persist. Otherwise we will remain stuck where we are in academic terms.

Grand themes of religion and military

THE year 1953 proved to be prophetic for Pakistan’s future political course as two grand Pakistani themes, religion and military, intersected. State policy abetted holy judgment-spewing clerics against the Ahmaddiyas (from whose ranks arose, among others, Pakistan’s first and only Nobel laureate in 1979).

As Lahore erupted in an uprising led by the clergy against the Ahmaddiya sect, Pakistan got its first taste of martial law. This is, arguably, the first confluence of religion and military in Pakistan’s history.

Religion is in Pakistan’s blood almost in the same way, in hindsight, as military intervention. Being the first nation-state, prior to Israel, to be founded on theology, Pakistan often gave the upper hand to the Islamic clergy — most happened to be the disciples of Maulana Maududi — to fix the rules. These more often than not conflicted with Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s scintillating Aug 11, 1947, Constituent Assembly speech conferring equal and integral rights on the country’s minorities.

This may have been driven by nationalistic fervour to differentiate from Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a multicultural, secular and pluralistic India. Post-Jinnah, the Pakistani state and state-fostered popular imagination elevated the interests of Muslims over Pakistani minorities. This was a natural countervailing tendency; unfettering the newborn state from the inchoate Indian subcontinent.

Even during the nominally secular regimes of Field Marshal Ayub Khan and Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the clergy coalesced to advance Maududi’s Wahabi values pressuring, for instance, Mr Bhutto to repackage his regime as Islamic.

This marked yet another ideological conflict between an avowedly secular, populist agenda, under Mr Bhutto, and the call of the clergy rebelling against him. A popularly elected government’s charismatic leader, Mr Bhutto tactically sang the religious singsong in order to compensate for perceptions of him being non-religious.

But such instances of expediency came at the cost of further mangling the identity of the country. Some argue that Mr Bhutto’s measures were merely cosmetic and intended to mollify the maddening mullahs. However hard it is to gauge intentions, Mr Bhutto nonetheless dealt a blow to the Pakistani polity through these concessions.

In 1974, 21 years after the Lahore martial law, Mr Bhutto declared the Ahmaddiyas non-Muslims, demoralising the secular Pakistani mindset. The true potency of religion as a weapon, however, came to the fore with General Ziaul Haq. Embarking upon a project of martial institutionalisation of the Pakistani religion and the Pakistani military, General Zia sought to remould the Pakistani identity which further denuded the country of Jinnah’s ideals of liberalism, secularism and rationality.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the state-sanctioned puritanical surge in the Pakistani military, sanctifying a professional army as a religious fiefdom. Through an extensive Islamisation programme introduced in the country, General Zia appealed to his sole constituency — the military — for strict adherence to Islamic injunctions. If a soldier were to deviate from the prescribed dogma, it could lead to his demotion or forced ejection from the military.

Adhering to strict Islamic guidelines meant that military matters came to be viewed through a holy lens, presenting a fuzzy sense of religious superiority, to break the back of opposing forces. This newfound religious mooring, enshrined in the concept of jihad, in the military was hand in glove with the Americans’ aims as they went deep inside Afghanistan for a battle with the Red Army. Imbued with a missionary zeal, the Mujahideen — holy warriors — acted as America’s proxy ground forces.

Clandestinely, US Congressman Charlie Wilson and General Zia successfully drew American largesse into that last frontier of the Cold War, turning Pakistan into a conduit of the drugs-for-arms bazaar — all in the name of faith. Although General Zia’s public stance may have been feverishly Islamic, his private leanings suggested a morbid degree of expediency over faith as evidenced by his involvement in Black Friday in 1970, where Pakistani troops slaughtered Palestinians in Jordan, and willingness to secretly deal with Israel during the Afghan war.

Remnants of the Afghan war’s infrastructure — composed of orphaned children easily misdirected, army officers sustaining ghosts and retaining their loyalty to their holy cause, and the proliferating trades of drugs and arms — as we now well know gave an impetus to the terror networks that have darted about in blatant breach of national sovereignty and security.

With the wilful support of General Zia and his cronies, these nascent, transnational actors quickly rose to represent Maulana Maududi’s dogma, the difference being that they had little or no remorse about resorting to violence as a device. The effect was a far cry from the Pakistan Mr Jinnah had envisaged — it was tottering from the threat of being declared a ‘terrorist state’ in early 1993 to become ‘the world’s most dangerous place’.

Present analyses of Pakistan inevitably ascribe the doomsday scenario to the currents the country finds itself in. These currents, whether they be waves of suicide bombing, political assassinations, Talibanisation or the export of jihad etc, are rooted in the Cold War’s layered framework binding the intelligence agencies and mercenaries’ corps. Underneath lies the bubbling legacy of Maulana Maududi, whose disparate international movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, morphed into a globalised entity, i.e. Al Qaeda, churning out jihadis. The western border and more so, Pakistan, geographically, by fate, became the world’s terror cauldron.

Unfettered by the checks and balances anchored in a true democratic government, Pakistan fumbled towards a coherent identity in its first few decades. Without a constitution, the Basic Law drawn up in 1956 was overthrown by the 1958 coup. The country finally got a constitution 26 years after its creation. This void opened up space for the military and clergy to manipulate to their converging advantage, i.e. pursue the goal of a theocratic, military-run, frontline state.

Various episodic bursts of ‘niche repression’ strained the young nation-state’s fabric. As the events of 1953 established, the minorities in Pakistan were viewed with suspicion by the mighty. That, in turn, disturbed the equilibrium that Mr Jinnah had deftly calibrated in the formation of Pakistan.But the final nail in the state’s battered religious-notion came with General Zia’s blasphemy law, so malleable in its application that an accusing finger by anyone sufficed to implicate any Pakistani, especially Christian or Hindu.

The formidable effects of Islamisation carried out under General Zia cast a shadow on the civilian governments of the early nineties. Benazir Bhutto battled with an entrenched religio-military lobby, surviving merciless machinations such as Operation Jackal in 1989, but time was not on her side as her government was booted out.

Her successor, Nawaz Sharif bridged the chasm between General Zia’s and his term by pandering to the clergy. Mr Sharif tabled his desired Islamic Sharia Bill during his second term but failed to have it passed into law by one vote in the Senate.

These acts were reminders of Zia’s imprints and emboldened a flourishing religio-military lobby to pursue the victimisation of minorities, arrest women’s empowerment, seek a universal strand of religion, abort civilian superiority over a military course, propagate jihad in the Islamic hinterlands, encourage the proliferation of unenlightened madressahs and reinforce Maulana Maududi’s ideology.

OTHER VOICES - Bangladesh Press

High stakes for EC

Prothom Alo

THE government has finally freed the Election Commission Secretariat from age-old control, thanks to an ordinance burying the practice of seeking approval for the use of funds from the administration.

In the presidential form of government, the EC Secretariat had been attached to the president’s office. The tradition lingered on in the parliamentary system. The EC Secretariat had worked under the prime minister’s office, which is now the chief adviser’s office.

The influence of the country’s chief executive over the EC Secretariat — certainly incompatible with democracy — is generally perceived to be harmful to a free and fair election. We must make sure that the EC Secretariat enjoys real freedom.

The separation of the EC Secretariat met a public demand but raised high expectations among the people.

The Election Commission ran into controversy by inviting one of the factions of former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party — an issue that ended up in the Supreme Court. It had nothing to do with the separation of the EC Secretariat, however. — (Jan 31)

WB’s energy mission

Amar Desh

THE need for energy in South Asia is rising by the day, but it is difficult to meet the needs of all countries in the region. Analysts say the situation has been made worse by the ever-increasing demand of the two Asian giants, China and India. …India has set sights on its next-door neighbours to guarantee energy for its population.

A senior World Bank official’s visit to Dhaka and his January 28 comment made it clear that the multilateral lending agency would try to put Bangladesh and Nepal together with India to start talks on the issue. The World Bank will back negotiations to guarantee a win-win situation for all and promote further integration among them, said Praful C. Patel, the Bank’s vice-president for the South Asia region. Critics question the possibility of tripartite projects.

Nepal has a joint project, the Mahakali hydropower plant, with India, which gave rise to much unhappiness among the Nepalese as the bulk of the output goes to India. Similarly, any energy deal between Bangladesh and India is bound to be lopsided, and it is highly likely that Bangladesh will lose rather than gain. — (Jan 30)

— Selected and translated by Arun Devnath