PRESIDENT Asif Zardari’s captivation with Sarah Palin sidelined a more worthy highlight of his visit to the United Nations in New York in September — the signing of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by Pakistan on Sept 25, 2008.

The convention which was adopted by the UN in December 2006 and came into effect in May 2008 currently has 136 signatories. Safeguarding the interests of 650 million persons with disabilities worldwide, the convention promotes non-discrimination, respect for difference and acceptance of persons with disabilities as part of human diversity and humanity and their meaningful participation in the social, economic, political and cultural lives of communities. Countries which sign and ratify it are obliged to guarantee the rights enumerated under the convention under domestic law.

For approximately 77 million children with disabilities worldwide, Article 24 of the convention recognises the right to education. It reads as follows:

“(1) … States Parties shall ensure an inclusive education system at all levels … directed to the full development of human potential and sense of dignity and self-worth … (2) … States parties shall ensure that: (a) persons with disabilities are not excluded from the general education system on the basis of disability, and that children with disabilities are not excluded from free and compulsory primary education, or from secondary education, on the basis of disability … (d) persons with disabilities receive the support required, within the general education system … that maximise academic and social development, consistent with the goal of full inclusion….”

Compliance with Article 24 would require Pakistan to move towards an inclusive system of education. The principle of inclusive education is based on the social model of disability which perceives the current education system and schools as inadequate. It requires them to adapt to meet the individual needs of all learners whose exclusion from mainstream education may have been the result of disability or psychological, social, economic or cultural factors.

Its predecessor is the integrated education methodology still implemented in many countries. Integrated education essentially follows the medical model of disability which sees individuals with the disabilities as the problem. Additional and necessary arrangements for pull-out or remediation are made for these pupils without pressurising the regular school setting to change.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 laid the foundation for ‘education of all’ (as currently propagated by the World Bank) and was followed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989. Inclusive education was adopted at the World Conference on Special Needs Education in 1994 in Salamanca, Spain, restated at the World Education Forum in 2000 in Dakar, Senegal, and finally culminated in the Convention in 2006.

Besides the World Bank, UNESCO has been a major proponent of inclusive education particularly in developing countries where 90 per cent of the children with disabilities do not attend schools. Pakistan, Romania, Uganda, India, China, Indonesia, Panama, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are some of the countries in which the World Bank and/or UNESCO have undertaken projects.

In Pakistan, the methodologies of integrated or inclusive education are relatively unknown as our education system remains entrenched in the outdated mode of segregated schooling for children with disabilities and those without.

Currently, there is no specific law which protects the right of disabled children to be enrolled in mainstream schools. However, the courts including the Supreme Court of Pakistan have upheld the right of equality and non-discrimination enshrined in Article 25 of the constitution to direct medical colleges to grant admission to successful candidates despite their physical disabilities (Riffat Akram v. Chairman, Admission Board, King Edward Medical College, Lahore 1993 SCMR 2370).

A few top-tier mainstream primary schools in Karachi are experimenting with integration of children with disabilities if they are accompanied by resource teachers. In the public sector, instances of model inclusive schools are scattered.

Lack of parental awareness about disability and children’s potential for learning, albeit slow, dearth of special education needs educators and teacher-training programmes, physical inaccessibility of transport services and infrastructure of schools, gender discrimination, poverty and limited financial resources have seriously hampered the outgrowth of full-fledged programmes for large-scale implementation of inclusive or integrated schooling.

It is somewhat assuring to know that, at least in theory, the essence of inclusive education will trickle down into domestic law once Pakistan ratifies the Convention, whenever that might be.

For the overhaul of our education system to leapfrog into inclusive education, decades ahead of itself, the rewriting of domestic law would only be the starting point.

The administrative framework at the federal level needs redressing so that the portfolio of education currently divided between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Women Development, Social Welfare and Special Education is merged under the former. The latter may be revamped to discard the welfare or charity model of disability to adopt the social model which inherently seeks to empower and enable the disabled population.

An expanded yet flexible Ministry of Education advised by international consultants may facilitate the transition towards an inclusive and, in certain cases, integrated education. The traditional method of rote learning may be eliminated and extensive teacher-training programmes and competitive programmes may be initiated in universities for a surge in the local pool of special needs educators, remedial experts and therapists, social workers, counsellors, and behaviour experts.

Most challenging of all is fostering a working relationship with families of children with disabilities many of whom are barely able to feed and clothe themselves. As primary caregivers and providers their awareness must be raised and negative attitudes transformed. Respect, love and patience that consequentially develop are the essential building blocks for creating an environment conducive to learning for the overall success of inclusion.

Given the ground realities as they exist today, the leapfrog towards inclusive education is as ambitious as it is gigantic. It is also dependent on our financial resources, the availability of expertise and the removal of the barrier of discrimination, an unfortunate part of the human condition.

Advocates for the rights of persons with disabilities would be grateful for small moves instead of gigantic ones as long as these are forthcoming in the right direction and not unworthily sidelined in the future.

The writer is a lecturer for the University of London’s external LLB programme.

sadiamumtaz@gmail.com

EARLIER this month, veteran diplomat Ahmad Kamal spoke to a gathering of some 150 Pakistani Americans in San Francisco.

He is a senior fellow at the UN Foundation in New York and served as Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN during the tumultuous nineties when governance alternated between the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League. The participants, who had been brought together by a new pro-democracy group, Mashal, listened intently as the ambassador discussed Pakistan’s prospects in 2009 and beyond.

After providing a historical synopsis, and noting that his task was made difficult by the several assassinations that remain unresolved, the ambassador identified six factors that hold the key to Pakistan’s future. He identified them as feudalism, which had long acted as a canker in the nation’s strategic culture; the armed forces, which had performed poorly when they ran the government and even more poorly when they fought on the battlefield; the economy, which had problems but official statistics neglected the multitudinous transactions taking place in the large and significant informal sector; religion, the country having been created as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent and Islam was the glue that held it together; internal politics, which would decide the future with the game-changer being the replacement of a winner-takes-all attitude with an attitude of reconciliation and tolerance; and external politics.

The most salient influence came from Washington which the ambassador noted was called the real capital of Pakistan by some analysts. Saudi Arabia and Iran were competing for Pakistani influence and it would not be surprising to see Iran emerge victorious in the end. It had always had a much deeper influence on the culture of the subcontinent. And, finally, a lot would depend on how India dealt with Pakistan and whether it put an end to its history of expansionism.

Against this backdrop, Kamal talked of ways to accelerate positive change. He exhorted the youth to play an active role in coming up with creative solutions to Pakistan’s myriad problems and advised them to not let their elders talk them out of innovative thinking. He cited the inspiring example of a young woman who used the internet to single-handedly focus the world’s attention on the hazards posed by land mines.

In closing, the ambassador noted that the future of Pakistan would be decided ultimately by the battle that is now going on between those who are forward-looking and those who are fixated on past glories. A lively question and answer session moderated by Jaiza’s Omar Khan followed. Some of the ambassador’s points continued to occupy me in the days that followed.

Take the case of feudalism. Hardly a day goes by without some maven holding that factor responsible for all of Pakistan’s travails. Yet, in these very pages, S. Akbar Zaidi has shown convincingly that the share of agriculture in Pakistan’s economy has declined significantly since independence. Maybe the feudalism of political commentary is not the feudalism of economists but the feudalism of sociologists. The term may be best interpreted as a surrogate for elitism, a state of the mind, and not a state of the economy.

On the track record of the armed forces, one would be hard put to disagree with the ambassador. Even Shuja Nawaz, who hails from an army family and who is the younger brother of a former army chief, takes the army to task in both civil and military spheres in his encyclopaedic history, Crossed Swords.

Even the most nationalistic of Pakistanis would find it hard to accuse Nawaz of being on the payroll of various foreign intelligence services, a charge that they have always laid at the door of other writers who have dared to lift their pen against the army’s sword.

Change will only arise from within the army. The time will come when a forward-looking commander will realise that it’s time to reorganise and rightsize the army, so it can truly become one of Asia’s finest, a prospect that was put forth by the silver-tongued Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the early 1970s.

Yes, the informal economic sector is large and unaccounted for. But that does not mean the economy is doing better than it actually is. It is in a shambles and much of this sorry performance predates the global meltdown that began on Sept 15. Indeed, it goes back to the last two years of the Musharraf administration.

As for religion, while there can be no doubt that the country is called the Islamic Republic, it is equally evident that religion as a glue failed to hold the country together in 1971. As one witnesses the struggle going on for the soul of Pakistan today, not only in the tribal areas and Peshawar but also in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, one is made despondent by the thought that one day the country may be rent asunder not by a deficit of religiosity but by a surplus.

At the Mashal conference, Dr Erfan Ibrahim asked why people had forgotten the message of tolerance that was put forward by the Quaid in his speech of Aug 11, 1947, where he called on all Pakistanis to regard each other as equal citizens regardless of their personal faiths and beliefs. Time did not allow further discussion of the question at the conference.

However, it is not difficult to answer. Instead of finding inspiration in the Quaid’s pluralistic and entirely secular concept of nationhood, many Pakistanis have succumbed to patriotism, “the last refuge of a scoundrel” to quote Dr Johnson.

Such fervour has led them to a legerdemain where they trace every problem to the enemy’s hand and absolve themselves of any responsibility.When I wrote about Dr Abdus Salam’s towering achievements on these pages, a person who identified himself as a senior, award-winning journalist wrote to me that the scientist was a Zionist spy and that is why he was ordered out of the country by Prime Minister Bhutto.

It is sad that while the headlines in the world press dealing with Pakistan are about the kidnapping or killing of foreign journalists, the beheadings of ‘American spies’ and the honour killings of women, those about India deal with the successes of its space programme (which has now landed a probe on the moon) and about the transformation of its agrarian economy into a high-tech wonder that will soon be one of the world’s strongest.

An attitude of going forward to the past needs to be replaced with one of going back to the future, a bright future as envisioned by the Quaid, not the dark and conspiratorial future envisioned by Al Qaeda.

faruqui@pacbell.net

A HUSBAND forcibly shaves his wife’s head. Her parents file an FIR, the husband is arrested and the parents take the woman home. But that is not the end of the story.

A visit to the family reveals the woman was only a girl — barely 15. With her head tightly wrapped in a cloth, she sits on a bed in the corner of the one-room mud house of her parents. Outside, her uncle agitates and anxiously speaks of threats from the girl’s in-laws. There are the usual pressures to force the family to withdraw the case.

Excitedly, the girl’s mother recounts how she was informed by the women in the village about what had happened to her daughter. When she and her husband were not allowed to meet their daughter they went to the police station, filed a report and had the daughter recovered. By then 15 days had passed.

The girl’s husband was a gambler, and on that eventful day had told his wife to go to the man he was now indebted to. She refused, and that led to the husband shaving off her head. She was married three years ago and her husband was around 40 at that time. The father had taken Rs70,000 from the groom. He had sold his daughter said a man when the visitors inquired of the case from others in the district. There was some speculation that the father had taken away the daughter so he could sell her again. (So much for the security of the parental home.)

The visitors to the village paid tribute to the girl’s courage to say no to her husband and invited the parents and the girl’s uncle to a khuli katchery (open dialogue) they had organised on aurat ka ikhtiar (women’s empowerment). The parents agreed but the evening before the khuli katchery they expressed their inability to attend in view of the threats they had received.

The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) decided to give an award of self reliance to the girl. A WAF chapter had been formed in the district and it was to be introduced at the khuli katchery on women’s empowerment. The award was announced at the khuli katchery and displayed to the audience. It was an open wooden door symbolising the woman’s decision-making (ikhtiar), but the one to receive it was not there. The same evening it was delivered to her in her village, and the phone number of a WAF member of the district given to her — in case she needed help.

Surprisingly the numerous NGOs in the district had not taken any action on the case. Why did they not even protest or visit the victim or her family? There was a bit of surprise, but no understandable explanation for the inaction. Many of the NGOs work on issues of education, health, agriculture promotion, and some are linked to organisations that conduct human rights training. Why is there a disconnect between the violation of human rights and other aspects of life?

A group of women political activists appeared to be restless about the crimes against women. Obviously their weight within their political parties is not adequate to bring security in the lives of women. When political leaders are more concerned with the size of their cavalcade when they travel in their districts it is no surprise they can’t go beyond lip service to the rights of women and the poor.

Insecurity of young women at the hands of their own families or in-laws continues unabated in Pakistan. Girls married to more than one man; girls sold by their parents; husbands asking wives to appease other men to whom the husbands are indebted; women kidnapped to put pressure on families to return the girls who married into those families; and women killed after being declared kari. Newspapers today bristle with such news.

A domestic violence bill is ready to be tabled, but it does not categorically propose that the declaration of kari be made illegal. Its biggest challenge lies ahead when it faces the legislators (mostly men). Are they convinced that women have the inalienable right to not be abused in any manner? If the rulers and legislators, whether military or civilian, were convinced of the human rights of women (as they are convinced of their right to privileges) the women of Pakistan would not be as betrayed as they are today.

Teaching institutions don’t lag behind in teaching about the plight of women. However, what they teach and what practices their students engage in appear irrelevant to the women whose lives are bartered away or simply extinguished, or plunged into a silent horror when not killed but sold to live the life of an outcast in the family of the buyer who disposes of her as his whim directs.

The women of Pakistan continue with their struggle for peace and justice, and that alone is the modest comfort offered to millions who lead a life of disempowerment. While government and non-government actors clamour to associate women’s empowerment with the crumbs of education, healthcare and skills-training they dish out, women’s disempowerment persists. The negligence of state and non-state actors to integrate women’s security in all sectors legitimises the disempowerment of women.

Verbal acclamations, whether in policy documents or project proposals, are meaningless unless they are backed by action for women’s empowerment (ikhtiar). Unless this begins to happen on a large scale, the state and non-state actors of Pakistan stand guilty of failing the women of Pakistan.

WITH Britain sliding into depression, it is not surprising that the old Keynesian tool kit is being ransacked. But Keynesian economics is not just about fixing damaged economies. You don’t need very sophisticated economics to spend your way out of a depression.

In one form or other — usually by war or war preparations — governments have been doing this throughout history.

It does require very sophisticated economics to prove that depressions cannot happen. This was the economics Keynes set out to challenge in his great book, The General Theory Of Employment, Interest And Money, written during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His own ideas, he wrote, were “extremely simple, and should be obvious”. Economies were inherently unstable; governments had a vital role to play in stabilising them.

These heresies were too simple and obvious for the economics profession. For after a long and rather successful trial run, Keynesian economics was obliterated by the free-market revolution which swept the Anglo-American world under Thatcher and Reagan. In a notable comeback, updated versions of the theory Keynes had challenged “proved” that unregulated or lightly regulated market economics were very stable, and that government interventions only made things worse.

In apparent disregard for mathematical demonstrations to the contrary, crises and crashes, booms and busts continued to occur, and politicians continued to try to mitigate their consequences, their common sense being stronger than their logic. This is roughly the situation we are in today.

Keynes’s “simple and obvious” ideas can be summed up in two propositions. The first is that large parts of the future are unknowable. “The outstanding fact,” he wrote, “is the extreme precariousness of our estimates of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield [of securities] have to be made.” The “unknowability” of the future imparted an inherent instability to financial and investment markets, leading to periodic outbreaks of “herd behaviour”, when “new fears and hopes will without warning take charge of human affairs”.

How was this “abstraction” achieved? By assuming, Keynes wrote, that uncertainty could be “reduced” to calculable probability, and therefore to the same status as certainty itself. This underlies today’s “efficient market hypothesis” which treats uncertainty as measurable risk; its acceptance explains the explosion of the derivatives market since the 1980s, which has brought the financial system crashing down.

Keynes’s second proposition is that depressions can last a long time, longer than it is politically safe to tolerate. He did not doubt that markets worked “in the long run”. “But this long run,” he wrote in his best-known remark, “is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”

Keynes offered a number of reasons why economies did not simply “bounce back” after a great shock (the Dow Jones index did not recover its 1929 prices till 1952). However, his clinching argument in his 1930s debates with free market economists such as Friedrich Hayek was political. It was much too risky to allow economies to slide into deep depression. The example of Hitler was vivid in the minds of all democratic politicians. In 1928, at the height of Weimar Germany’s prosperity, the Nazis got 2 per cent of the vote. By 1930 they were up to 18 per cent. In 1933 Hitler was in power.

During that time, German unemployment had risen from two million to six million. Hayek and the free market economists never had an answer to this argument. So what should the British government do now? In 1931 Keynes favoured the devaluation of sterling, but this is now irrelevant: the pound is not fixed to gold as it was in his day, and is sinking quite naturally. The suggestion most favoured by editorial columns is to cut interest rates and go on cutting them.

The Bank of England might flood the market with money, but this would not necessarily produce lower interest rates — and therefore greater lending — if the tendency to hoard money was going up at the same time. “The possession of actual money,” Keynes wrote, “lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude.” As the adage has it: you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

This leaves fiscal policy as the unique instrument in the Keynesian tool kit. It is idle to speculate whether Keynes would have favoured tax cuts or public spending increases. His remedies were always tailored to their impact on the state of confidence. His essential point was that, in a depression, a government stimulus was needed to offset the decline in private spending. This would mean running a temporary budget deficit.

With output and inflation falling, Keynes would not have worried now about the “dangers of inflation”. He would have expected the budget deficit to shrink automatically as the economy recovered, and would have imposed new taxes as and when they were needed. “The boom, not the slump,” he wrote in 1937, “is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”

The final question is this. Will we be content simply to take Keynes out of his cupboard from time to time, dust him down, and put him in charge of rescue operations, before putting him back firmly in his cupboard? Or will we now try to run our affairs paying proper attention to his insights into financial instability so as to prevent these alternations of mania and panic from periodically seizing control of our lives?

— © The Independent