Challenges ahead

IT IS difficult to miss the strong undercurrent of concern about the state we are in which runs through the otherwise diverse end-of-the-year comments in our print and electronic media. At one level, it demonstrates how negligible is the impact that government publicity, often contained in expensive advertising supplements, makes on the instinctive assessments of our people who have a palpable and tactile contact with painful realities.

At another level, it illustrates a lingering scepticism about the claims made by men of power whose ascendancy has not been sanctioned by time-honoured democratic processes. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this yawning credibility gap is the feeling of uncertainty in the younger generation.

It is a matter for deep reflection if the youth of the country is still haunted by an existential fear about the survival of the state after 58 years of independence. Recently, within a short span of ten days, I addressed sizable student bodies at Peshawar and Punjab Universities. They represented deeply patriotic audiences. In informal conversations, some bright young students offered their own diagnosis. They were clear that their apprehensions about Pakistan were partly generated by the ruling elite.

Were they not repeatedly told by government ministers that if Pakistan had not accepted the US diktat on Afghanistan, the NWFP would have been turned into another Tora Bora and that Washington would have let loose an Indian horde on Lahore? Did I not realize that my faith in Pakistan’s ability to safeguard its freedom and integrity ran counter to the “official” message of nation’s political, economic and military defencelessness without the American umbrella?”

In the midst of much criticism of the insularity of Islamabad where I live, I heard closely reasoned explanations of the turmoil in Balochistan, the growing polarization on the construction of much-needed dams on Indus, the ‘lion river’ that sustains our lives, and the sectarian tensions in the Northern Areas. Such criticism as was there sprang from the desire to make Pakistan viable and strong. There was a yearning for reclaiming the lost pride in our nationhood. There was the trenchant, epigrammatic comment that “governments can do without self-esteem, a people cannot.”

A young woman from the Northern Areas reminded me of how they had liberated themselves and how they countenanced no future other than that of integration into Pakistan and then asked me as to who was spreading rumours in those extremely sensitive areas that Pakistan was secretly negotiating a joint India-Pakistan control over them. A terrible disconnect has already occurred between the decision-makers and the people. It is evident that the tactic of frightening the people into compliance has been overused and the result is a corrosive sense of insecurity. The knee-jerk opposition even to the beneficial projects is probably the revenge of debased, dishonoured and disenfranchised masses.

Chronologically speaking, the process began with US-based think tanks churning out studies that South Asian instability was rooted in Pakistan defying the logic of weak states-strong state (India) paradigm. Peace and prosperity would come when Pakistan reconciled itself to a reasonable scale of limited sovereignties vis a vis the regional giant, India. This adjustment was required in Pakistan’s own interest across the board and in particular on Kashmir and the nuclear weapon capability.

A foremost exponent of South Asian disparities, Stephen Cohen, has since slightly readjusted his sights and written out a persuasive prescription for a self-assured democratic Pakistan. But unfortunately, an influential section of the Pakistani establishment finds no way to climb out of its perception of Pakistan’s helplessness. It has simply lost the will and resolve to stake a claim to a place of honour and pride in the comity of nations.

In the final analysis, it is the internal consolidation of state and society that would restore self-esteem. This consolidation will come with policies that unite rather than divide, heal rather than fracture, the diverse strands constituting a glorious, many-splendoured, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual federation. The subjects mentioned above — Balochistan’s rights, Kalabagh Dam, the Northern Areas — as indeed, other issues of domestic polity need to be discussed in separate articles. The remainder of the space here can perhaps briefly allude to some of the international markers characterizing our present day situation.

This is no occasion to reopen a discussion on the fateful events that led to a precipitate realignment of Pakistan’s policies in the wake of 9/11. A large body of analysis and disclosure in the public domain in the United States is available here too and there has been no dearth of informed — and uniformed — comment on it. Perhaps what is euphemistically, and unprofessionally, called a U-turn on Afghanistan was a well-planned process rather than a dramatic consequence of the US decision to destroy the Taliban.

Be that as it may, it is time to free the Pakistan-US relationship from the Tora Bora syndrome and define it in normal inter-state terms just as India has done with consummate skill. Admittedly, an unequal relationship is more pronounced in Pakistan’s case but scores of states friendly to the United States — call it the sole superpower or the global empire of our times — have worked out these terms with closer approximation to international norms than us.

The norms include freedom to make independent choices in relations that serve Pakistan’s national interest but involve states that figure on the wrong side of Washington’s current list of imperial preferences and prejudices. Such lists are not perennial and as things stand, the world has to contend with them for no more than three years beyond which the present American policy would not stretch.

Notwithstanding a small band of Pakistan’s former diplomats and army generals who act as cheerleaders for US policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the vast majority amongst us knows that the quest for world conquest into which that great country was pushed by a group of adventurers has already run its course. For all practical purposes, the United States is getting ready for a new and more constructive phase of engagement with friends and foes alike. What is still lacking is the requisite robustness in our negotiating posture with that great country.

Around the middle of January in the new year, we begin the next round of the composite dialogue with India. That it has run a chequered course since the New York summit, on the sidelines of the UN session, is widely recognized in both countries. The causes for a degree of disenchantment that has crept into it are also well known. Lack of progress on Kashmir, Siachen, and a credible security regime are the principal sources of it on our side.

If government spokesman want to hide it behind the fiction that earth-shaking progress is being made behind the scenes, they do so at their peril as there are no takers of fancy tales amongst us. In fact, these ill-considered statements only add to fears that Pakistan may well retreat further from its principled positions just to keep India engaged in the dialogue.

In India, there is disappointment that Pakistan has not moved forward to accord the most favoured nation treatment and on granting it the transit trade rights to Afghanistan which the Indian manufacturers and trading houses hope to convert into a huge warehouse for Central Asia. Unlike Pakistan where keeping the dialogue alive with or without tangible progress on the major issues is the policy per se, India is not averse to risk-taking.

The highly studied comments on the situation in Balochistan provided ample illustration of this mindset. In a course of a few lines, India gave a warning about the alleged rehabilitation of the “infrastructure of terror” related to Kashmir, sent a message to the so-called extremists of the troubled province to avoid the politics of compromise, and reminded the world of its hegemonic prerogatives in the region. The litany of India’s own trouble spots from the Pakistani side was tedious and ineffectual. India had already made its point. While it can translate its implicit threat into dangerous manoeuvres, Pakistan has no such capability.

Few things would enhance Pakistan’s capability to pursue a relatively independent foreign policy as restoring substance to its relations with Iran and reinvigorating the Pakistan-China friendship. President Ahmadinejad may have his own calculations in countering the United States’ rhetoric about regime change in Iran by making intemperate statements about Israel.

But there is no reason why these exchanges should send shudders down the spines of the Pakistani diplomats. We have demonstrated more than once that a strong relationship between Islamabad and Tehran moderates the situation between Iran and the West and makes a significant contribution to Iran-Arab relations. By standing firm on objective facts, Pakistan has helped Iran in no small measure on the nuclear question. It is time to build on the goodwill generated by this episode. The absence of a pro-active policy of friendship with Iran would only facilitate the work of those who want to set the two countries up as political, economic and nuclear rivals in this region.

We have been following an enlightened policy towards the Karzai regime in Afghanistan. Stability in that tortured land adds to our own stability. But it is now time to persuade President Karzai to step up the process of national reconciliation by maximizing the potential of an elected parliament.

It is their internal affair but we need to wind down the military component of our support as exemplified by a protracted engagement in Waziristan. Pakistan must regain the option of dealing with the internal dimension of the problems in its tribal belt, if it is there at all, by readjusting the balance between law-enforcement measures and the traditional consultative procedures that have worked over centuries.

President Karzai knows better than us that no Afghan ruler has ever succeeded in overcoming opposition with the help of foreign forces. He needs a new contract with the occupying powers and he is pre-eminently qualified to draw it up. Meanwhile, Pakistan must reduce the inflammation in its own sensitive regions. From a national standpoint, the agenda for the new year is clear and unambiguous.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

The rewriting of history

THE recent international book fair held in Karachi’s Expo Centre was a huge and truly memorable event. It was the first time in this philistine city that so many representatives of Indian publishing houses jostled with local publishers, booksellers and curious onlookers under one roof. The spirit of bonhomie was unmistakable, and so was the enthusiasm of the visitors.

For a change the guest of honour was a highly educated historian, Dr Hamida Khuhro, who as Sindh minister of education has been trying to come to grips with some of the endemic problems that have emerged from the hideous maw of national education. And the guest speaker happened to be one of India’s most distinguished and well known historians.

Dr Romila Thapar, is a recognized authority on Indian history. She is emeritus professor of ancient Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and has served as visiting professor at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. Oxford University Press, who had organized the lecture, was lucky to have been able to play host to such a distinguished scholar.

As so often happens in the subcontinent, great thinkers have great detractors, and Dr Thapar is no exception. While she is held in high esteem in her own country, she continues to be targeted for her objectivity by members of the Hindu supremacist right who, like the anti-secular lobby in Pakistan, believe that history, however apocryphal, should be written with a religious slant and contain a highly nationalistic flavour. And so, for want of anything better, continue to label her as a Marxist and an anti-Hindu person.

Dr Thapar covered such a wide spectrum in the 45 minutes allotted to her and moved across so much analytical territory that one wished one had brought along a tape recorder or at least a notebook, instead of an envelope which eventually became replete with scribbles.. Nevertheless, as her presentation followed a logical train of thought, it wasn’t really very difficult to remember the salient features of her discourse and the various issues that she touched upon. Many of the points and phrases stuck in the memory.

Around the time of independence and for a short period after, scholars on both sides of the great divide inherited a long tradition of historical writings. These texts essentially followed one of two traditions. The first was the colonial approach with which a large section of the audience was familiar, and the second was what has come to be regarded as the nationalist approach. One was suddenly reminded of how time had altered the way one looked at the great historical event of 1857. In a boarding school in British India it used to be called the Indian mutiny. After independence it became the first war of independence.

The colonial approach which was introduced by James Mill in 1819, and paved the way for other British historians, had the great merit of being the first serious attempt to divide Indian history into periods. The British like things to be nice and tidy and so Mill put the history of India into three neat compartments: Hindu civilization, Muslim civilization and the British period. This division was based on the implied assumption that the basic units of Indian society are monolithic religious communities and that these large groups of people are mutually hostile. It was a view that had a profound effect on the politics of the 20th century.

British historians were obsessed with what came to be referred to as oriental despotism; and the view shared by both historians and novelists was that Indian states, whether they were ruled by maharajas or ‘nabobs,’ were static and did not undergo any evolutionary historical change. And because of oppressive, despotic rule and the lack of private property there was intense poverty. And so studies were conducted on the caste system which was rigid and frozen and based on racial segregation throwing up the Aryan history of race.

The audience then learnt that Indian historians, who conformed to the nationalist view of history, as it emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, challenged many of these theories and also the concept of oriental despotism, even though they did not replace it with any positive system of governance. But though they didn’t confront the practice of placing Hindus, Muslims and the British into separate periods, they presented a useful counterview. The systematic questioning of the interpretation of history, however, did not begin in India before the 1950s.

The drifting away period, in which young historians explored new approaches and distanced themselves from the colonial and nationalist interpretations of history began in the 1960s when scholars looked for something more meaningful and authentic which would enable them to understand their past better. The first thing they had to do was to discard James Mill’s initiative to divide the three civilizations and to treat them as distinct entities — because they did not reflect the flow of history. The historians also had to debunk the belief that 2000 years of Hindu dynastic rule and 800 years of Muslim dynastic rule were glorious, static and unchanging.

The new historians gradually moved from the traditional study of texts and events to the social sciences which were concerned with questions like what brought about the change that took place, and when and why did it occur? There was now a focus on the historical discipline — on what is referred to as the historical method. It became important to check the reliability of the evidence, to investigate if a change which took place had one cause or a number of causes. Archaeological finds were a great help, especially inscriptions that were precise and chronological.

A reference was made to the objection of peasants to taxation and oppression and the comparison that historians frequently made between India and China. We were told that in China there is a certain frequency of peasant revolts, while in India peasants don’t revolt, they migrate. One wondered at the time whether the late Charu Majumdar and his Naxalite friends would have agreed.

After that Dr Thapar became a little technical, and by the time she had gotten onto the part where the Buddhist tradition allowed women to become nuns, sections of the audience were finding it a little difficult to concentrate. It was an excellent discourse, profound, deeply researched and well delivered, but one couldn’t help getting the feeling that the proper venue for such a dissertation was the history department of the University of Karachi and not an international book fair. One had also hoped that this learned professor would have concluded her talk by throwing some light of the various philosophies of history that have intrigued students during the last 100 years.

One is referring, of course, to the theories of Marx, Spengler and Toynbee, who saw a definite pattern in historical events, and H.A.L Fischer, who in the introduction to his eminently readable classic A History of Europe famously claimed to detect no pattern whatsoever in history, as saw events following each other like the waves on the ocean.

Talking of historical cycles reminds one of Mark Twain’s famous comment, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it does rhyme. There is some degree of similarity or analogy to be found among historical events, else we could not learn from history, or profit from its study. Perhaps the history department in the local university could take up this intriguing question in a seminar: Does a loose historical similarity amount to historical cycles? Whether or not the students can quantify historical phenomena, it would certainly represent advancement in philosophical rectitude, of which there is a noticeable shortage in this country.

A prescription for decline

DR Atta-ur-Rehman, chairman, Higher Education Commission, speaking in September at a meeting of ECOSOC, UN, announced that the funding for higher education in Pakistan had gone up by 1500 per cent.

Just the development funds for higher education this year were about Rs 9 billion. The Medium Term Development Framework targets an increase in enrolment in higher education from three to eight per cent by 2010. The HEC has wasted no time in launching an indigenous PhD programme in 2003, designed to produce 1,000 PhDs every year for the next five years.

Seventy-five per cent of the students in higher education are enrolled in public sector universities. However, despite a generous inflow of funds for equipment, books and infrastructure, and incentives for supervising M.Phil and Ph.D theses, public sector universities are on the decline.

Higher education cannot improve unless there is a holistic approach to education. Education after 12 years of schooling falls into the category of higher education, but colleges have been completely ignored by our policymakers. Most students in public sector universities come from government colleges. The condition of equipment, libraries and infrastructure of colleges remains dismal. The teachers are poorly trained; learning is by rote, with reliance on outdated textbooks. How far can the universities go in transforming students coming from this backward system of education?

What makes for a good university is the faculty, not the size or the beauty of the campus. Harvard is rated better than UC Berkeley, although the latter has a much better campus and also an excellent library and labs. Visit any public sector university in Pakistan and there is a sense of decay and frustration. There was an influx of good teachers in the early ‘70s, they are either retiring, leaving for the private sector or going abroad.

The HEC has launched a foreign faculty hiring scheme where professors are paid in the range of Rs 78,750 to Rs 257,250, while our own professors are paid about Rs 50,000, which is much below their market value. An increasing number of social scientists from the Quaid-i-Azam University are joining LUMS, where they are paid anything from between Rs 125,000 to Rs 150,000. The programme on the HEC website says that they plan to hire 300 foreign faculties per year, and have already hired 112.

Going by the information on their website, 13 mathematicians have been hired, mostly from East Europe. Interestingly enough, about half a dozen faculties from the Department of Mathematics of the Quaid-i-Azam University have gone abroad, or moved to the private sector because of better emoluments. They might be better and certainly no less competent than the imported mathematicians. This, however, is just one example of how we prefer to import faculty at a much higher rate than pay our own.

The Tenure Track Scheme was launched with the objective of giving our more productive faculty the opportunity to draw a much better salary package. Interestingly, to date only 35 have been inducted into this system in the entire country.

Pakistan must be the only country which retires academics at the early age of 60. Given the fact that the enrolment in higher education has to jump from three to eight per cent in five years time, and the HEC wants to produce 1000 PhDs every year, it would have made sense to have a widespread re-hiring scheme.

Unfortunately, only 30 professors have been re-hired since the inception of the HEC in 2002. Numerous eminent professors are either sitting at home or doing part-time teaching, instead of supervising and teaching research students. The crisis in social sciences is particularly severe, where there is an acute shortage of good social scientists.

When countries like China are trying to spread the learning of English to their taxi drivers, not to mention their universities, higher education in Pakistan is ignoring the issue of English as the medium of instruction. Consequently, students coming out of our education system are barely able to express themselves in English, although, the market demand for young professionals proficient in English is increasing every year.

No public sector university possesses a research library. The digital library about which there has been a great deal of fanfare, makes 34 journals of natural sciences accessible electronically. A digital library can only supplements and not act as a substitute for a good library. Modern library science and librarians, which are taken for granted in the rest of the world, do not exist in Pakistan.

For the first time since Pakistan’s birth, education, and higher education in particular, are funding and attention. But we might wake up too late to the fact that no substantial improvement has been brought about in our abysmal educational standards.

The writer is an Allama Iqbal Fellow at Cambridge University, UK.

Congressional copycats

HOLLYWOOD already controls most of what Americans see on TV. Now a pair of representatives in Washington want to help Hollywood control how Americans see it — whether on their TV or some other new device. As a matter of both law and marketing, it’s a bad idea.

In the waning days of the 2005 session, Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. and John Conyers Jr. quietly introduced, on Hollywood’s command, legislation that would require new computers, TV sets and video recorders to limit copying. The bill targets the so-called analog hole, a security vulnerability present when there are conventional analog connections between devices - a TV, say, and a VCR. Newer devices have digital connectors that allow entertainment companies to scramble audio and video signals and thus protect themselves against illicit copying.

The bill aims to prevent pirates from slipping through the analog hole to copy movies or television programmes, then converting them into digital files that could be swapped on the Internet or burned onto DVDs. It would require any new device that receives an analog video signal — including TV tuners, computers and TiVos — to be equipped with technology to limit copying and redistribution online.

The measure, which is expected to draw fire from some computer and consumer-electronics companies, would give Hollywood unprecedented control over what people do with the programmes that come into their homes. Studios could force TiVos and other digital recorders to erase pay-per-view or on-demand movies stored for more than 90 minutes. New computers could be prevented from showing copyprotected programmes, such as a movie downloaded from an online store, in high definition.

The studios have an understandable interest in combating piracy. But Congress should not be mandating the technologies used to fight it, particularly when they aren’t proven. As Sony BMG learned when it used a new technology to prevent CDs from being copied, unanticipated glitches can inflict more than enough pain to offset any reduction in illegal copying.

At any rate, this legislation won’t stop determined video pirates, who will find other ways to make bootlegs. Its effect would be mainly on typical TV viewers, who would be prevented from doing a number of things they expect to be able to do with video. Maybe you’re an HBO subscriber who recorded an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to watch on the bus the next morning on your way to work. Today, you can use analog connectors to convert that recording into a digital file suitable for your iPod or Sony PSP. If the bill became law, the tools needed for the conversion would be illegal.

—Los Angeles Times