Minority rights

THE constitution guarantees it and Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah promised as much on Aug 11, 1947. “We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state,” declared the father of the nation in the heady days of independence. Twenty-six years later, Mr Jinnah’s ‘fundamental principle’ came to be enshrined in the 1973 Constitution which made it clear that “All citizens are equal before law and are entitled to equal protection of law.” But the sad reality is that religious minorities in Pakistan continue to be treated as second-class citizens and remain politically and economically marginalised. If anything, their plight has worsened over the years. The dark days of the Zia era saw the creation of a separate electorate system and the introduction of blasphemy laws that are still being used to victimise non-Muslims, often with a view to grabbing their property. More recently, growing intolerance and the spread of Talibanisation has made a perennially fearful situation even more terrifying for the country’s religious minorities. A mere rumour can lead to a lynching, as seen in Karachi last month when a 20-year-old Hindu was beaten to death by co-workers on the suspicion of blasphemy. It later emerged that he may have been the victim of a purely personal vendetta.

On a political level, abolishing the separate electorate system may have enhanced the minorities’ sense of belonging and participation. Socio-economically, however, they remain as removed as ever from the national mainstream and their constitutional rights exist only on paper. Mired in poverty and thereby without a voice, most non-Muslims even lack easy access to public representatives from their own communities, for the latter are often more interested in power and politicking than minority rights. Given this combination of fear, voicelessness and apathy, it is up to the state to ensure that all citizens are treated equally under the law.

Any positive step in this regard, however tentative, deserves to be encouraged. On Tuesday, the Parliamentarians Commission for Human Rights condemned the persecution of minorities by law-enforcement officials and urged the government to put a stop to this practice. Progress here will not be possible without serious and far-reaching police reform, for the crux of the problem lies in this department. True, the police is usually blind to the plight of the unempowered, irrespective of their religion. But minorities are a particularly easy target when it comes to registering false cases or picking up and thrashing innocent people in order to extract bribes. True, heinous crimes are committed with impunity against the poor in this country. But when the victim is poor and a non-Muslim, the prospect of justice being served becomes almost non-existent.

Staving off stagflation

THE biggest economic challenge the ruling coalition is faced with today is to hold down price inflation without letting fiscal tightening hamper investment and economic growth. The trade-off between two conflicting objectives — controlling inflation and boosting economic growth — should help avoid a situation which can lead to stagflation, in which an economy is characterised by high inflation and a low or negative growth rate. Price inflation soared to above 17 per cent in April in spite of a tight monetary stance adopted by the State Bank to curb demand. The economic growth target for the outgoing fiscal has been revised down to 5.8 per cent from the original 7.2 per cent. The economy is facing multiple threats internally such as rising prices and expanding current account and fiscal deficits that have slowed down domestic and foreign investment. It is also under pressure from external factors such as spiking oil and commodity prices. The latest hike in the State Bank policy rate has come at a time when the economy is slowing down. All this has made some economists see signs of creeping stagflation.

The good news is that the coalition government seems to have finally found time to focus on the economy. This is manifest from Finance Minister Naveed Qamar’s statement in Karachi on Monday. Outlining the measures that the new government intends to take in the budget to contain inflation and spur growth, he promised to cut the ballooning revenue deficit for the outgoing year to 6.5 per cent of GDP and nip it further during the next year by improving tax collection and cutting unproductive spending. The government also plans to raise funds by enhancing returns on savings schemes and floating long-term investment bonds rather than taking overdrafts from the central bank. This measure can encourage private savings and curb demand as well as help fight inflation as borrowing from the central bank is always inflationary. He also promised relief for the poor. We hope that the government will do so through smart, targeted subsidies like cash handouts for marginalised people rather than across-the-board price subsidies. At the same time, it should also enhance spending on poverty alleviation.

The government may be able to revive business confidence, boost private investment in commodity-producing sectors, control inflation and stave off stagflation if it successfully manages to minimise its borrowings from the central bank, cut non-development expenditure, widen the tax base to include untaxed and undertaxed areas like agricultural income, plug revenue leakages, etc. The coming budget will be a test of the government’s commitment to prevent any further economic downturn.

Fewer ministers, not more

WITH a diverse portfolio of ever-worsening crises to contend with, the common man would be forgiven for assuming that there is perhaps no government in place. In fact there is no dearth of ministers, state ministers, advisers and special assistants who are supposedly managing the affairs of the state. By the looks of it, however, instead of running the country they are running riot across it by increasing the crunching burden of non-developmental expenditure on the national exchequer. Against this backdrop, a news report carried by this paper about the Sindh government’s plan for yet another expansion in the provincial cabinet is nothing but a bolt from the blue. As things stand today, the cabinet already has 52 members, which is just a shade less than one-third of the entire house. The performance of these ministers at both individual and collective levels being what it is, one wonders whose bright idea it is to have more of them. For a province whose budget deficit at last count was Rs12.34bn and whose biggest expenditure relates to its oversized administrative machinery, it should not have taken much to realise the need for fewer ministers.

With the PPP strong enough to form and run a government of its own, there was hope that it would be able to steer clear of the tricky path of political manoeuvring. But its ‘gesture of goodwill’ and ‘spirit of accommodation’ have apparently left it with no other choice but to continue with the much-maligned politics of bargaining. It is a pity how little our rulers seem to have learned about the virtues of good governance and tightening of belts. Worse still, amid rising poverty levels and falling social indicators, it is a shame to find ministers grumbling about their portfolios and a lack of plush offices rather than tackling public concerns.

OTHER VOICES - Middle East Press

Cyprus fine-tuning

Turkish Daily News

A MEETING between Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat and his Greek Cypriot counterpart Demetris Christofias — which lasted about three-and-a-half hours, far longer than expected — was an inconclusive exercise …

The joint statement read out by the United Nations secretary general’s new special envoy on Cyprus Taye-Brook Zerihoun … indeed provides some credible hints that the two leaders have made some ‘fine-tuning’ of the process and ‘re-emphasised’ the ultimate aim: [the] establishment of a new partnership state on the island by the two founding states on the basis of equality.

The new state will have one international identity, the ‘United Federal Republic of Cyprus’.

The new state will be a “bi-zonal and bi-communal federation based on the principle of equality”.

When the Cyprus comprehensive talks will start remains … an elusive subject. From the joint statement, we understand that the comprehensive talks will not start in June, as was planned, but instead the two leaders will come together again to review the works of the joint committees and [take] further confidence-building measures, including opening new border gates….

Thus, we may think that Talat — who is still ‘officially’ insisting that talks should start as planned on June 21 — has tacitly accepted [Christofias’s] … demand to postpone the start of comprehensive talks to the end of July. — (May 26)

Welcome Suleiman

Saudi Gazette

YESTERDAY was presidential election day in Lebanon, and while not a real election — the winner had already been determined by consensus of the country’s political leaders — it marks an extremely important turning point in contemporary Lebanon. It is a recognition that after the outburst of violence earlier this month that left 65 people dead and saw all parties looking into the abyss of civil war there are better ways to settle political conflicts than resorting to rifles and mortars.

Michel Suleiman, 59, enjoyed the support of all parties mainly because he managed to keep Lebanon relatively violence-free during his tenure as army chief and successfully suppressed a potential civil war in Lebanon’s north last year. As a civilian political leader, his political positions are largely unknown since a military chief’s role rarely entails speaking out. He may call the military shots but that is inevitably in the service of others who are making the political decisions. So there is an element of the unknown in Suleiman despite his acceptance by all concerned parties.… [T]he Lebanese presidency is not all-powerful. A great deal of power is shared with the prime minister and the council of ministers and under the agreement reached last week in Qatar the opposition has veto power…. Also, a new law for parliamentary elections is due next year, which means that whatever the configuration of parliament today, it is likely to be reconfigured in the relatively near future….

It is President Suleiman’s role to maintain … neutrality before all parties.… — (May 26)

Once upon a constitution

AFTER every martial law in Pakistan comes a constitutional vacuum. This is because constitutions are essentially living frameworks that should continually recognise changing political realities. On the other hand, when suspended in a dictatorship, they are unable to do so.

If one examines our country’s three prolonged dictatorial periods of rule, the end of each has resulted in jockeying to translate the changed political realities into a viable power structure. This is very much happening again today.

At the end of the first Ayub Khan/Yahya Khan rule, the political forces that emerged after the 1970 election had no framework to operate in. The dominant political force the Awami League and the military could not agree on the apportionment of power. The result was war and division of the country.

After the division of Pakistan, the remainder of the country suddenly had politics without the military as a player which went into a brief political retreat. This brief interregnum was capitalised upon by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who managed to agree on an apportionment of power among the political forces. The result was a constitution.

Unfortunately, as a result of the disputed 1977 elections, Mr Bhutto lost the consensus that had framed the constitution. Consequently, the military led by the power-hungry Gen Zia were able to impose martial law.

The end of Zia’s era ended in a political disaster very much like that of 1971 although of a lesser magnitude in geographical terms. The dominant political force, the PPP, led by Benazir Bhutto, wanted to establish an idealistic political framework which would recognise their mandate. The major mistake was that they thought the constitution mangled by Zia would be able to work in a changed political reality.

However, the constitution could only have worked if the new political forces were able to hammer out a compromise which would be acceptable to all of them. At the time, Nawaz Sharif was very much in the role Chaudhry Shujaat has assumed today — he was working with the military and did not permit a political compromise. The result was that the political forces failed to hammer out a viable political system that apportioned power to each of the actors.

That led to war of a kind different from that of 1971 but war all the same. Politics justified everything. The state’s institutions conspired against the federal government. The judiciary did not have the confidence of the actors and became like a yoyo trying to end up on the more powerful side. The inability of the political actors and the military to hammer out an apportionment of power eventually resulted in the Musharraf martial rule without law.

Today, the end of the Musharraf rule has thrown up the same issues. We again have a constitution that is unable to reflect the current power structure of the country. This time around Benazir Bhutto floated the doctrine of reconciliation to avoid making the earlier mistake of not making political realities part of the constitution.

Unpalatable as it is, the truth is that the ragtag political forces that coalesce around Musharraf and the military have the same numerical strength in the National Assembly and could muster as many popular votes as the PML-N. Musharraf’s strength within the military is unclear but the overall evidence is that he is still to some extent linked to the generals and represents certain institutional interests in Pakistan’s politics both national and international.

If these pro-Musharraf political forces and institutional interests they represent are ignored in any political dispensation, the fabric of the new political dispensation could be torn asunder.

Recognising this changed albeit unpalatable reality in the power structure will take some doing. Here are some of the irreconcilables which this complex exercise will need to bring together:

(a) Musharraf/military and the lawyers/Nawaz Sharif;

(b) Regressive religious thought and progressive economic models of economy;

(c) Army and democracy; and

(d) Defence spending and public welfare spending.

The details of these complex political interests will need to be negotiated but the end-result given the present political context should probably reflect the current power structures.

These structures should include the restoration of the chief justice and the Supreme Court with the clear understanding that the Supreme Court will not be a party to destabilising political frameworks as it has done in the past nor will it unnecessarily impede the implementation of political programmes.

In this connection, the main stumbling block is the maverick and immensely popular personality of Iftikhar Chaudhry. Given his current political profile, he together with the Supreme Court will need to restate his commitment to the reconciliation process. The judicial niceties of non-comment by the chief justice do not apply anymore at this juncture since he is at the head of an intensely political movement. If his commitment is not forthcoming the political process will go into a deadlock.

Other measures should include the devolution of presidential powers to the parliament. In this connection, the powers of the president to make appointments and dismiss parliament need to be relinquished. They are no longer necessary. President Musharraf will very much like Iftikhar Chaudhry to make a commitment on this.

To give institutional interests their due, President Musharraf needs to be recognised as constitutional president and instead of a trial of treason for his sins he should be rewarded for being the first dictator to hold a relatively free election and transfer power to an elected government. The deal has to be ‘power for legitimacy’.

To guide the public, perhaps a public statement from the president admitting the October 1999 mistake should be made part of the package. The military should agree to a media-led programme of public education which agrees that the military chiefs committed treason in the past and the new military leadership has agreed never to repeat this.

To put politics on a firm footing, the PPP and provincial governing parties should be allowed to go back to the electorate with their work five years from now and find out from the electorate whether they are a party which can provide good governance. In the absence of military intervention, the results should be fair.

The media, lawyers and political forces need to educate the people of Pakistan on this rather complex reconciliation agenda. The alternatives are confrontation and further weakening of the state. If this happens all the current actors will be the losers.

We now need a constitution that works in the present. The past is a good reference point but we live in the present. Let us not be shy of amending our national framework to take account of the way we are.

The writer is a corporate lawyer and a political analyst

lawgroup.q3@googlemail.com

The closing of young minds

MANY years ago, at the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre, I saw a very bright Karachi University student who had leprosy. His disease was quite advanced as it had not been diagnosed and treated in time. Hanging around his neck were half a dozen taweez of various sizes and colours meant to protect him from calamities.

When I told him that the disease had destroyed a number of his nerves and the damage was irreparable he broke down but did not give up his faith in the taweez as they were still there when he came for the follow-up.

In this article, I am analysing this frightening phenomenon which enslaves the mind of even highly educated and intelligent people. Indoctrination, also known as brainwashing, is a process in which certain ideas or beliefs are instilled in a person. Although indoctrination is possible at any time in one’s life, it is more easily accomplished during childhood.

In this respect, it is akin to a phenomenon known as imprinting, which was first described by Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz. This Austrian ethnologist discovered that imprinting in birds can be induced by both auditory and visual stimuli, if given early in life. For instance, if the embryonated eggs of a hen are exposed repeatedly to a certain sound, on hatching, the chicks follow that sound rather than the sound produced by the mother hen.

Imprinting also occurs in higher animals, including primates. The affectionate responses of young rhesus monkeys to cloth-covered objects known as ‘cloth-mothers’, for instance, are a demonstration of this kind of behaviour.

Although, the exact mechanism involved in imprinting is not known, it probably involves neuronal connections or synapses formed during early life. It is estimated that the human brain contains nearly 100bn neurons or nerve cells which are responsible for its mental activity. The neuron’s capacity to learn is greatest in the developing brain and consequently many habits, convictions and beliefs are acquired during this time.

In his book Total Man psychologist Stan Gooch expresses his belief that nationalism is also linked to imprinting since children are exposed to patriotic songs and symbols from an early age. Another psychologist, Daniel Goldman, in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence states, “the emotional lessons we learn as children at home and school shape the emotional circuits, making us more adept or inept towards certain emotions. This means that childhood and adolescence are critical for setting the habits that will govern our lives”.

Since 1994, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, US, have been using magnetic resonance imaging to take photographs of the brains of volunteers belonging to various ages. From the scans of more than 1,200 children and teenagers that have since been conducted for this study, they found that the brain grows rapidly in the early years, reaching 95 per cent of its adult weight of about 1.35kg by the time a child enters first grade.

Another spurt in growth occurs around age nine. If children spend time on academics, music or any other subject during this critical time, that is what their brains would be optimised for in the years to come.

Similarly, racial prejudices and religious hatreds also develop during this period. Thomas Pethgrew, a social psychologist at the University of California, states that “the notions of prejudice are formed in childhood, while the beliefs that are used to justify them come later”. Even if it is realised that a particular prejudice is unjustified, it may not loosen its hold, Pethgrew says, adding that many southerners confessed to him that, even though in their minds they no longer feel prejudice against the blacks, they feel squeamish when they shake hands with one. The feelings are left over from what they learned in their families as children.

There are, undoubtedly, many levels of indoctrination. The kamikaze missions organised by the Japanese navy during the Second World War are a good example of an extreme case. During these, Japanese suicide pilots loaded their planes with explosives and deliberately crashed into US ships. The ideology behind kamikaze was that suicide is a venerable act, either to destroy the enemy or to avoid capture and humiliation.

German philosopher Schopenhauer’s famous saying that, “a man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills”, applies to these Japanese pilots as their will had been subverted by the process of indoctrination. The suicide bombers we are now witnessing in Pakistan and the Middle East are the modern equivalent of the kamikaze pilots who took their own lives as a last resort when faced with a stronger enemy.

Religious indoctrination was common in the 17th century in almost all European schools run by the church. “Give me any child until he is seven and I will make him a Jesuit,” goes a famous saying by a Jesuit priest. As the state took over greater responsibility for educating the populace in later years, religious influence in day-to-day life declined. It is estimated that at present not more than 6.3 per cent of England’s population goes to church.

Secular education is now commonplace in the West although the struggle between the secular and religious approaches to life still continues. In the US, the debate between ‘creationists’ and ‘evolutionists’ is one example of this. This debate began during the famous ‘monkey trial’ of 1925 when a high school biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was convicted for violating a law which declared teaching the theory of evolution in public schools a crime.

The sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants continued in Europe for centuries, mainly because children were indoctrinated in their respective religious beliefs and grew up feeling distrust and hatred for each other. A similar situation exists in Pakistan where at least some madressahs inculcate hatred against other sects, with the result that there is unending sectarian conflict in the country.

Across the border in neighbouring India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is pushing hard for making the study of Hinduism mandatory in all schools of the country, which could in turn lead to the sharpening of the religious divide in the subcontinent.

One way to avoid indoctrination, which often leads to prejudice and misunderstanding, is to provide liberal education in schools and colleges so as to encourage pupils to explore, ask questions and develop critical thinking. An open mind and intolerance can’t co-exist and this really is the best safeguard against religious and ethnic conflict that has become common in many parts of the world.

The writer is a co-author of Religions of South Asia.