Seeds of street crime

THERE can be nothing more absurd than ministers and senior government officials setting short deadlines for settling issues or problems that have built up over years and have grown because of many societal factors ignored by successive governments themselves.

The latest example is of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz coming to Karachi amidst an alarming rise in street crime and giving the police force a fortnight’s deadline to improve the situation. He said: “The incidents of street crime have declined in the first 12 days of October, but (still) a lot has to be done and I have given a deadline to the Sindh police to further curb street crimes by the end of this month.”

Will someone check after a fortnight whether there has been a drop in the crime rate — unless the implication is that the administration knows that the police know who the people are behind the crime wave and will now try for the record to produce some offenders for public effect? There is a suspicion, for instance, that many mobile phone thefts take place in neighbourhoods where policemen and their progeny live.

Did the prime minister also inquire into the strange cases of Rahman Dakait and Arshad Pappu in Karachi and the perceived police and political involvement with the fortunes of these characters? Their exploits have formed the staple of city pages for months; the former is believed to have absconded from police custody. The police have never officially acknowledged that he was ever under arrest, although newspapers have reported that this was the case. Arshad Pappu has only recently been caught from the house where he lived with his family — a fact known to everyone in the area, and often frequented by him despite his ostensible underground status. What’s going on here?

Also in the books of the Sindh police is the disappearance of scores of illegal Pakistani immigrants deported from Muscat just a few days ago. How did they escape and remain untraced, or was their escape a gesture made out of pity for the ordeal the deportees had already undergone? But what about frequent jail breaks from the notorious Sukkur prison and other Pakistani gaols?

Police connivance and inefficiency are generally accepted as factors in the breakdown of law and order in the country and, more than the statistics, the unquantified sense of insecurity that now haunts citizens of the big urban areas. But few bother to think how the morals of the police have been corrupted over the years by the illegal uses to which they have been put by government after government.

They have been set to harass political opponents, browbeat journalists, detain people after they have just been released by the courts and generally do every minister’s and powerful political figure’s bidding or risk losing their jobs. Once you ask a police official to act illegally in the interest of the government or a government functionary, he feels free to do a bit of law-breaking on his own to extort a little money for himself. The total lack of accountability now rampant in the system has affected the police force as much as it has any other branch of government.

There are other well established factors behind the rise in crime: growing populations, the influx into the cities of people from the countryside, unemployment, poor living conditions and a sense of social injustice among many sections of the people. The educated unemployed and frustrated have joined the ranks of criminals. A family was recently held up at gunpoint by three or four youth who ransacked the house and then wanted to go upstairs into the room of the old and retired head of the family despite the family’s plea to leave the gentleman alone.

They walked into the room to find that the old man was their retired college teacher. Confused but still maintaining a certain sense of morality, they left all the money and jewellery they had stolen except for some money which, they said, they had to pay to the neighbourhood police as their share.

There is the entire gun culture that was once mostly confined to the feudal classes but which has now been adopted by the political elite, many of whom in any case have feudal backgrounds and those who don’t want to assume feudal attitudes and be feared as much as the genuine article. Political workers and jiyalas have followed suit and politicians walk into gatherings in starched shalwar-kurtas, scratching their groins (to use a polite euphemism for an activity to which this particular ensemble lends itself easily) accompanied by armed guards. Even the maulvis in the plains, as distinct from their warrior cousins in the mountains, also now have armed escorts riding in their four-wheelers. Why doesn’t the prime minister ever set a deadline for the recovery of all illegal arms? Perhaps because he knows the fate of previous such deadlines.

There is a further and so to say a higher factor behind the current lawless conditions. This is the militarisation and brutalisation of society as part of a process that was set in motion when the basic law of the land was set aside at gunpoint for the first time in 1958. When there is no respect for constitutions and rule of law by a country’s rulers, how can one expect an arm of the government or indeed ordinary people so inclined to take the law into their own hands? The glorification of force as a solution of political problems has the same trickle-down effect.

Gen Ziaul Haq set a new benchmark in society’s brutalisation and destruction when he carried out the country’s first public hanging in Lahore and had state television show scenes of public floggings and then went on to hang an elected prime minister. The hunting and gunning down of Nawab Bugti — do you think it would not have added to the state of defiance of law in the minds of the ordinary Baloch?

Sectarian and religious/ideological militancy, fed by mullahs with microphones in mosques and by the condition of perpetual confrontation with India maintained by the armed forces and governments, has added another strain to our violent society. The system has now become fully geared to serving the interests of the powerful, which means both the moneyed and those with political connections. The manner in which public concern on this account is ignored or described as exaggerated is shameful. There have been so many high-profile murder and assassination cases, and each incident was followed by deadlines being set and the police ordered to produce the culprits within a week or a fortnight.

In how many cases has this actually happened? Mir Murtaza Bhutto was ambushed and killed in front of his house in Clifton in Karachi and in front of the DIG’s house. Bullets were flying all over the place and yet no one bothered. Has there been a real accounting of that crime?

Governance has become the art of producing the trite statement. Yet law and order, deeply and on a daily basis, concerns the wellbeing of the citizens and of the country’s economy. Political parties of all hues and shades should pay attention to this problem and seek to reduce the level of violent rhetoric that they have adopted as part of their political discourse and their actions. This will not bring down the street crime rate, but it will at least help in creating an atmosphere conducive to peace. It should be investigated whether the dismantling of the old police structure and its replacement by a new system has increased corruption and inefficiency in the police force or has had a beneficial effect. When the terrorist is held up as a model of religious fervour, who can prevent every Arshad Pappu and Rahman Dakait from behaving in the same cocky and arrogant manner?

You walk down the main avenues near government buildings and foreign missions and you have soldiers armed to the teeth pointing their guns at you. When the Rangers patrol, they too have their guns pointed at the people on the street. So why should the escorts of every wadera or political chief be left behind? They too sit in pick-ups and Pajeros, gun barrels trained on the puny commuters around them.

Why can’t we be remembered as a nation of gentle souls, tolerant and peaceful, rather than be cast in the macho image so dear to our rulers?

The way to new horizons

EVERY October, Nobel prizes are awarded to some of the most beautiful minds for their outstanding contributions to economics, physics, chemistry, medicine and literature apart from peace. Himself a brilliant scientist with a practical bent of mind, Alfred Nobel made millions by commercialising his scientific discoveries.

The Nobel prizes recognise outstanding research, the invention of ground-breaking techniques, equipment, practices or discoveries that benefit mankind.

The truth of this lies in the works of some of the winners: the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming; enhancing the productivity of wheat and maize plants by Norman Borlaug, a feat that practically banished the spectre of food scarcity from the world; lifting millions out of poverty as Mohammad Yunus did through his programme of credit without collateral. Or the game theory of John Nash now used in situations where cooperation and competition coexist — from personal relations to corporate rivalries to dangerous confrontations such as the Cuban missile crisis — demonstrating how win-win results can be achieved even in extremely tense and potentially destructive situations.

The landmass comprising the planet earth has not increased nor have its endowments and natural resources. And yet, the wealth generated by these same assets has been increased eight times since the industrial revolution. All incremental value and wealth have been generated from the same stock of assets by increasing the pool of knowledge and applying it to real world situations.

In the post-industrial modern age, defined by knowledge, no society can expect a renaissance to occur or be sustained without strong foundations in knowledge and an environment that encourages minds to keep producing and applying knowledge to real life issues. The much desired and long overdue renaissance in Muslim societies can gather momentum only when both conditions are implemented. Education is a critically important element of that environment but no less important are laws and institutions that encourage minds to produce knowledge and apply it for the benefit of societies.

But large segments of Muslim societies remain unsure, even afraid, to embrace the future, and cling on to their old and familiar tools, systems and institutions that brought their decline and downfall in the first place. Many refuse to appreciate how new wealth and power are created everyday in other parts of the world. They cannot match and compete with it while still relying on antediluvian tools and systems that have already been rendered obsolete. The stark failure of this approach should be obvious when we note that while Muslims constitute 25 per cent of the world population, they produce only five per cent of its wealth.

But before minds can work to create wealth and power for their societies they must be liberated from a myriad shackles that have held them down for half a millennium. That the value and power of knowledge is still not recognised is evident from this fact: in its 106 years’ history, while 782 Nobel prizes have been awarded worldwide, only nine have been won by Muslims — four from Egypt and one each from Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Bangladesh and Palestine.

Even individual institutions in the West are doing better than the entire membership of 57 countries of the OIC. Since the end of the Second World War, for instance, MIT has produced, nurtured and hired minds that have won 59 Nobel prizes in various disciplines of knowledge — 26 in physics, 13 in economics, 12 in chemistry, eight in medicine/physiology.

Meanwhile, a UNDP study tells us that there are only 35,000 full-time researchers in the Middle East (against 1.2 million in the US with about the same population). At the same time, global investment firms say that there are 300,000 millionaires in the same Middle East — nearly 10 times the number of scientists. It is difficult to create knowledge-based societies and nurture productive minds in environments where it is 10 times easier to produce millionaires than researchers and scientists. As for the non-oil producing members of the OIC, they do not have either category in significant numbers.

Education — widespread and quality education — is critically important. And oil wealth buys ease and a comfortable environment. Important as these are, they are not sufficient conditions for a renaissance. Critical to this is creating rule-based societies that respect human dignity and rights and open up opportunities for use of knowledge and skills to contribute to the full potential of their people and create wealth and power for their societies.

Examples abound to confirm this conclusion. Let us look at Europe. In the Middle Ages, Italy was richer and more advanced than England. Long before French displaced it, Italian was the diplomatic language of Europe and its elite. As the seat of the Roman Catholic Church, Italy benefited the most from widespread education through the extensive network of the church. The University of Bologna was the first university founded in Europe in 1088, long before either Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne were established. It was the knowledge and skills of Italians that introduced East and West to Europe through the exploits of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. In an explosion of knowledge and unmatched creative powers, Italy produced such giants as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Machiavelli and several others all in the 15th century.

But Italy was not able to build upon such superlative advantages because for long it continued to suffer from the personalised, unpredictable and violent rule of its ‘princes’ that kept rupturing its social, economic and political fabric. It did not develop rule-based institutions like England — those inanimate but extremely important vehicles guided more by laws than by the whims of the elite.

It is these increasingly rule-bound social, political and economic institutions of English society that protected it from a similar rupturing of its national fabric. They curbed personalised and unpredictable rule by the ‘princes’ accountable to none except those who could unleash ferocious power against them.

Combined with education and skills, the laws and institutions of England opened up opportunities, encouraged the application of knowledge and skills and protected their rewards with the rule of law. In return, England’s minds continued to create more wealth and power, making it the richest and most powerful country in Europe and overtaking richer and more educated mediaeval counterparts.

The story of the OIC countries continues to reflect mediaeval systems and values. Many of their societies reflect a world more reminiscent of the mediaeval Italy of Machiavelli’s princes than the rule-based society of England in the early days of its industrialisation.

Renaissance in the Muslim countries will only come if they create an environment that takes pride in the acquisition of knowledge and skills, provides opportunities for their application, and protects them through rule-based societies. Along with education, they need to develop laws and institutions that liberate minds, respect human dignity and rights and encourage the people to contribute towards making their societies rich, powerful and respected in the world.

Email: smshah@alum.mit.edu

Speak freely but carefully

STICKS and stones do break bones but words can hurt too. Just a week after Jack Straw’s remarks about the niqab, a clamour now arises from politicians joining the debate with their own concerns about Islam. Where Mr Straw was precise and careful with his language, the risk is that anxiety is being aired without clarity either as to the problems or the solutions.

Few Muslims feel comfortable about becoming the chief political preoccupation of the day, but that is how many will feel that they are seen after the past week. Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman and Tessa Jowell all went out of their way to give vocal support to Mr Straw’s original comments, giving the impression that the government attaches disproportionate importance to the veil.

Monday’s trumpeted plans to map out extremist Islamic hotspots came alongside the announcement of reforms to the admission rules for religious schools that ministers must have known would be seen primarily in the context of Islam. This followed a weekend where minister Phil Woolas demanded a teaching assistant be “sacked” for wearing a veil at work, second-guessing an employment tribunal that must decide on whether or not her dress is hampering her work, where the facts seem to be disputed. Tory home affairs spokesman David Davis has piled in too, warning that British Muslims risked falling into “voluntary apartheid”. Perhaps afraid of being called racist, the Conservatives had said little on these issues, but now Labour has given them cover.

Taken singly, many of these might be reasonable interventions; others, like Mr Woolas’s remarks, are just unconstructive. But viewed together — especially through the distorting lens of tabloid coverage — they can easily seem to imply a general problem with the Muslim community en bloc. That impression is unfair. Issues are distinct, and apply to relatively small numbers of people. Politicians would do well to untangle and tackle problems separately.

The first is not with Muslims themselves, but with non-Muslim Britons: the problem of Islamaphobia. The Guardian’s recent poll showed, encouragingly, that this is not as widespread as feared, but it does exist and needs to be faced.

—The Guardian, London