Urdu research needs direction

Far and few may have been the times when our universities did any thing remarkable in the intellectual, scientific or scholastic field. At least not since the sixties when controls on expression and thought first started to take the academe in their sweep. Then came the fell swoop of ideology in the eighties which together with commercialization of education in the next decade has only helped to add pollution to stagnation. Yet in this dank and dark picture, small dots of light have continued to twinkle and shine, both in the shape of individuals and institutions.

Muqtadera’s Akhbar-i-Urdu in its latest issue has published a report on the fifth seminar on problems of literary research that Peshawar University’s Urdu department organized at Bara Gali from August 10 to 12. Generally ignored by the media, it was a big literary event as all universities and noted Urdu scholars participated in it. The Muqtadera remained closely involved at all stages of the seminar. The moving spirit behind this seminar series is Dr Sabir Kalorvi who heads Peshawar University’s Urdu department and whose untiring work in the service of the national language is widely acknowledged.

The opening session was presided over by Prof Fateh Mohammad Malik. Dr Yusuf Khushk of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai University and Dr Aqueel of Karachi University read their papers in this session. Dr A.J. Khan, principal of Abbottabad Medical College was the guest of honour.

Dr Khan in his address emphasized the need to conduct literary research on scientific lines. He favoured absorbtion of words from English and regional languages into the Urdu lexicon and pointed to the role Afghan refugees returning home would play in the spread of Urdu to the interior regions of Central Asia. Research, he said, would not get ahead with individual work unless it was undertaken at the institutional level with coordination among the various Urdu bodies. Translation was another important area which needed speeded work at a big scale.

Prof Malik, in his address opposed personality-based work in which Urdu research was usually trapped. That exercise should terminate at the masters level at the most. If at all personality-based research was to be pursued, it should be contextualized in the wider frame of literary trends and influence of contemporaries. For instance Mir Taqi Mir could be studied with Rehman Baba like Bhittai and Dard were viewed together in Dr Schimmel’s Pain and Grace.

Prof Malik questioned the restricting of work on Iqbal to its literary confines. Why were his themes not being seen from other than literary angles? Iqbaliat was not simply a literary field. Iqbal’s thought needed to be studied in other contexts also, such as history, politics, economics and other social aspects. The prof who does not favour fanatical protection of Urdu’s linguistic purity and keeping Urdu research confined within literary parameters, said that Urdu language was an open forum. It was not a moribund prospect. Urdu’s chief characteristic had been its close attachments to its environs.

The second session that day featured Dr Rashid Amjad’s account of Urdu research at National University of Modern Languages (NUML) and Bahauddin Zikriya University’s Dr Anwar Ahmad’s paper on “Languages of Research”. Dr Atash Durrani presented his paper on “Review of Research Design in Urdu”.

Next day Dr Rubina Tarin of Bahauddin Zikriya University presided over the first session. Prof Nasrin Zehra of Islamabad College for Women was the chief guest. It featured Syed Zafar Iqbal’s review of research work in Sindh University, Dr Abdul Razzaq Sabir’s paper on Baluchi language and Dr Nadim Shafiq’s (Peshawar University) paper on “Format”. He has also created a website on Urdu research journals. The second session on 11th featured Prof Shahid Iqbal’s (AIOU) paper on “Research in Iqbaliyat”, Prof S.M.Shahid’s paper on “Objectivity in Urdu Research”. Dr Rubina Tarin reviewed research activities at BZU. Dr Gohar Naushahi read his paper on “Textual criticism”.

The first session on the last day of the seminar, presided over by Prof Jabbar Shakir featured papers by Prof Nasrin Zehra, Dr Irshad Ahmed Shakir and Mirza Hamid Beg. The second session had papers read by Dr Nisar Ahmed Qureshi and Dr Aurangzeb Alamgir.

The last session of the seminar in the evening was presided over by Dr Atash Durrani who stressed the need for direction in Urdu research by forming principles on scientific lines as had been done in case of Hindi that was now internationally recognized. Adoption of scientific methods from research techniques used in education and psychology would give literary research in Urdu a standard basis for work. Research confined to reviews of the past would not advance Urdu research. He opposed the general tendency to regard Urdu as the mother tongue of an ethnic minority. As the national language of Pakistan, it was the mother tongue of all Pakistanis.

He presented a summary of the proposals by seminar participants which was adopted as the ‘Basic Points’ of the seminar. These are: Standardization of a uniform format for research papers; establishment of set pattern for conducting seminars and discussions; formation of research standards for masters, M. Phil and Ph.D levels; emphasis on principles, analysis and comparative study in dissertations; study of literary figures in contemporaneous contexts and under selected topics, grounding studies in their social and anthropological scenarios; adoption of defence method of examination at the doctorate level.

The GST that shouldn’t have been imposed

GOVERNMENT policies are supposed to ameliorate the problems and hardships of the public. Our government’s policies ironically often increase the misery of the common man. The policy of GST on medicines is a classic example. Something needs to be said about the thoughtless and haphazard manner in which the government decided, implemented and then withdrew this policy as suddenly as it had imposed it five months earlier.

Whether or not to impose the 15 per cent GST on an essential item like medicines in a country such as Pakistan where a third of the population is believed to be living in poverty should have been more seriously and thoroughly considered, IMF advice or no IMF advice. When the government imposed the tax on March 21 this year despite much public criticism, the tax had the effect of hitting the poor and the lower class the hardest as it put this key necessity even further away from their reach. The government’s decision immediately after the tax imposition, in response to the public outcry, to exempt a couple of hundreds of “life-saving” drugs from the GST — out of the couple of tens of thousands of drugs available on the shelves — was hardly any consolation at all.

Ironically the government’s sudden withdrawal of the GST five months later on Aug 23 only created further hardship for the people — an artificial shortage of medicines in the market — and utter confusion in the pharmaceutical industry. In its GST withdrawal announcement, the government had said that no GST would be charged from customers with immediate effect, yet at the same time it also announced that no refund of GST already paid would be made. Thus, retailers and distributors holding stocks and supplies on which pharmaceutical companies had already paid the GST panicked as neither they nor the pharmaceutical companies were willing to absorb the tax on yet-to-be-sold medicines. The result was that the supply chain practically ground to a halt and drug stores were not willing to sell medicines without the GST to customers until the refund problem was settled.

Finally, two weeks later on Sept 6 — much to the relief of all — the government announced that it would allow the pharmaceutical companies to claim a refund on the GST paid during the period July 1 and 31 as an adjustment against the GST paid on unsold stocks in the distribution channel. On the same day, the pharmaceutical industry hailed the government’s move and announced its decision to immediately start supplying products without GST to distributors and retailers.

But any relief at this outcome must surely be nullified by the hardships caused to consumers during the past five-and-a-half months simply because the government couldn’t quite exactly decide what it wanted to do. What kind of policy decision-making is it that the government first imposes the tax with immediate effect, then withdraws it from a couple of hundreds of “life- saving” drugs and, finally, withdraws the tax completely? Well almost completely, for the GST still remains on those medicines which are imported into the country, said to amount to about five per cent of the total quantity of medicines.

Similarly, although the government had stated categorically in a clause in the tax withdrawal order that it would not entertain any refund when it announced withdrawal of the tax on Aug 23, two weeks later it agreed on a refund of the tax to the pharmaceutical industry paid in July. The whole matter has only underlined the government’s indecision and lack of clarity in policy-making and implementation. The tax withdrawal simply reflects admission on the part of the government that the GST on medicines was a mistake and that it should not have been imposed in the first place. If the tax had been, as widely reported, an “IMF conditionality”, what has happened to that conditionality now? Or is the withdrawal only a short-term political decision and the tax will be re-introduced later on?

The GST on an essential item like medicines, and as high as 15 per cent, should not have been considered at all by the government as a means of raising revenue in a country with such a large population in the lower-income group. It was made worse by the sudden and insensitive manner in which the government implemented it. What any government sensitive to its people’s needs would have done is to impose the tax gradually over a period of time, first on imported drugs, then on locally-manufactured medicines, and then last on the so-called “life-saving” drugs. Instead, the government implemented it across the board all at once. This is the complete reverse of the kind of action that would make for a smooth implementation of a difficult decision or policy.

So also when the government was planning to withdraw the tax, surely it must have expected that the pharmaceutical industry would cause trouble for consumers, since neither they, the distributors or the retailers would want to absorb the tax already paid on stocks that were in the supply chain. Wise decision-making would have entailed the government to sort out the refund problem with the pharmaceutical companies first so as to prevent the kind of disarray in the pharmaceutical industry that caused consumers to face a shortage of medicines.

In this whole five-month episode of imposition and withdrawal of the GST on medicines, the sole beneficiary has been the government. According to a Dawn report last week, from March to August the CBR collected some Rs1.8 billion in GST on all kinds of medicines. The losers in this whole exercise are, therefore, the public at large. For it is they who have had to cough up Rs1.8 billion extra just to buy medicines during the past five months because of the GST. These people, the majority of whom are from low-income families struggling to keep themselves above water and for whom health care was already an expensive affair even before the GST, have been made to pay dearly for an apparent policy mistake on the part of the government.

The government has agreed to refund the GST paid by the pharmaceutical companies for July, as the pharmaceutical industry refused to bear the loss of GST on stocks already paid to the government but unsold as yet to the consumers. But what about the loss suffered by consumers as a whole when they paid the GST on medicines from March 21 to Aug 23? From where and from whom should they get their refund? If the government could refund to pharmaceutical companies, what less right does the public have to a refund of the GST that they have been paying unnecessarily for five months? Just because the pharmaceutical companies have clout to bargain with the government and the public does not have this clout does not mean that the latter should be made to pay for something which in hindsight the government realized should not have been instituted in the first place.

What is disturbing is that any public relief over the GST withdrawal may prove to be short-lived. For this looks likely to be only an “interim relief”. It is widely believed, and for good reasons too, that consumers will be hit by an escalation in the prices of medicines once the proposed government policy of de- regulation of drug prices materializes. And neither does the proposal of capping the price increases of drugs at the inflation level (Consumer Price Index), reportedly being considered by the government in current discussions on de-regulation, portend well at all for consumers.

Judging by the effect that the deregulation of petrol prices and its “linkage” with international oil prices have had on raising local petrol prices practically every fortnight, one can imagine what would happen to the prices of medicines, specially if they are “linked” to the inflation level. As someone suggested, would the government consider pegging the wages of workers and salaries of employees also to the inflation level?

How religious atavism sets the world’s new monkey trap

A MONKEY, which made a Hanuman temple in a small village its abode for 30 days, died of starvation recently after devotees resisted attempts by a team of veterinarians to shift it out for treatment.

The temple committee performed the last rites of the monkey even as thousands of devotees, who considered it an incarnation of the Hindu deity Hanuman, attended the funeral. The monkey had strayed into the sanctum sanctorum of the temple in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. It was found sitting atop the idol on Aug 1.

What next? A large number of devotees thronged the temple to offer garlands and fruits to the monkey and seek its blessings and forgiveness. But the monkey stopped eating after a few days and its health deteriorated. Subsequently, a voluntary organization approached the state high court to get it to direct the state government to provide medical care to the trapped monkey.

Following the court’s intervention, two veterinarians conducted a check-up on the monkey. But the devotees prevented them from shifting the simian to another place for treatment. A day later, the monkey died.

Elsewhere, in the state of Rajasthan another high court order concerned itself with the obnoxious practice of sati, a ritual in which widows are burnt on the funeral pyre of their husbands. British governor-general Lord Bentinck banned the practice around the 1830’s.

Last month, in a shocking incident of ‘sati’, a 65-year-old woman sat on the funeral pyre of her husband in a village in Madhya Pradesh’s Panna district. Earlier this month, the Rajasthan High Court permitted prayers and offerings at two sati temples that had come under a cloud following protests by women’s rights activists.

To be accurate Justice K. S. Rathore ordered that no glorification of sati would be allowed at Rani-Khemi temple in the Jhunjhunu district and Dholi Satiji temple at Fatehnpur in the Sikar district. On Sept 4, the high court passed a similar order for the famous Rani Sati Temple in Jhunjhunu disallowing holding of any fair but permitting prayers and offerings.

Women’s organizations decided to protest the glorification of sati saying the practice was a violation of a Supreme Court order.

It is rainy season in India, the season when Nag Panchami festival is celebrated in several parts of the country. This year the court in Maharashtra banned the catching of snakes for worshipping but TV news channels showed practically everyone interested in propitiating the venomous if endangered cobras brazenly violating the orders.

Of course, the Supreme Court spends much of its time considering state-sponsored petitions relating to the religious disputes in the temple town of Ayodhya.

The list is endless. Indian courts as we can all see are very busy. But with what? Marshalling the religious attitudes of the people of India? On one occasion when there was indeed a welcome involvement pertaining to the religious issue of divorce of a Muslim woman, parliament ganged up and overturned the verdict. And yet, with or without the involvement of the courts or of parliament, poor Shah Bano was destined to die in penury as she eventually did.

How do these examples of bizarre religious attitudes dovetail with the dominant global agenda of today of which India has emerged as an overly enthusiastic supporter?

There is a link. This month exactly a year ago, the terrorist onslaught against the United States triggered a global war against terrorism itself. One year on there is really no hard evidence of any measurable success in that endeavour. What we do have instead is a highly volatile spin-off rooted in religious obscurantism, ethnic hatred and reckless militarisation across the globe. India has had a fair share of this spin-off. But this is nothing new and not unique to this country.

Like much of the West, led by the United States, where ethnic profiling has become a common and acceptable feature after the WTC attacks, essentially targeting anyone who might resemble the self-conjured image of a terrorist, be it Sikh, Hindu or even a non-white Christian, the old but never defunct ethnic fault lines in India too have been scraped up and refurbished.

Three thousand innocent people were killed in the attack on WTC, which led to the manifold more so-called collateral deaths of civilians in Afghanistan. Similarly around 58 people, including women and children, were killed in a train by an equally intractable if mysterious perpetrator. That led to the instant massacre of 2000 innocents in Gujarat. It may be a coincidence that an overwhelming majority of those who died in Afghanistan and Gujarat were Muslim civilians.

Several perspectives have sprouted over the genesis of Sept 11. Similarly, there are diverse opinions expressed over the root- cause of Gujarat, particularly the recurring nature of ethnic violence that breaks out in the coastal state, with or without a palpable provocation.

More than a thousand years ago one of the keenest observers of social attitudes, Alberuni, had seen not just the symptoms but a full blown form of the disease itself in India, quite akin to the strain that appeared to have been acquired in the wake of Sept 11.

Alberuni came to India first with the rampaging hordes of Mahmud of Ghazni, and he wrote about the destruction caused by Mahmud’s raid in a way that today’s rightwing Hindu nationalists might approve.

“Mahmud utterly ruined the propriety of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions..Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims,” Alberuni wrote.

While Alberuni’s observations appear to hold the key to unending spiral of religious mistrust in Gujarat, the 11th century visitor also provided a closely argued account of why philosophical Hindu positions are not idolatrous.

He wrote: “Our object in mentioning all this mad raving is to teach the reader the accurate description of an idol, if he happens to see one, and to illustrate what we have said before, that such idols are erected only for uneducated low-class people of little understanding that the Hindus never made an idol of any supernatural being much less of God; and, lastly, to show how the crowd is kept in thraldom by all kinds of priestly tricks and deceits.”

“The low level of elementary education in that part of India surely contributes to this gullibility,” agrees Prof Amartya Sen.

India he observed in an article recently still has a shocking rate of adult literacy — only about 52 per cent — but in the “Hindi belt,” stretching across the north and central India where Hindi is the dominant language, the proportion is the lowest in India; in fact, the very low literacy rates in the Hindi belt drag down the Indian average substantially.

It was here that the Rama agitation assumed such force, and in fact, most of the Ayodhya agitators came from three states in the Hindi belt: Uttar Pradesh, where the Ayodhya is located, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

“While illiteracy may not be a central feature of communal fascism or of sectarian nationalism in general, its role in sustaining militant obscurantism can be very strong indeed,” Prof Sen wrote.

If indeed India’s illiteracy shores up its growing religious bigotry and militant obscurantism, its leaders would easily be the virulent preacher of hatred Ashok Singhal and, of course, the chief technician of the fascist laboratory in Gujarat, Narendra Modi.

But illiteracy cannot be the only explanation for the global agenda that is breeding obscurantism, particularly in the aftermath of Sept 11.

In the United States, nine months after calling Islam “a very evil and wicked religion,” the evangelist Franklin Graham asserted recently that Muslims had not sufficiently apologized for the terrorist attacks and that they should help compensate the victims’ families.

“I’m certainly not preaching against Muslim people,” Mr Graham, the son of the Rev. Billy Graham, said in a radio broadcast. “I am concerned about our nation, and on Sept. 11 last year, we were attacked by followers of Islam, claiming to do this in the name of Islam.”

Echoes of Ashok Singhal!! That is more likely to be the biggest danger to the world ahead of us as it teeters on the brink of disaster everyday. The threat to many of us appears to flow from a grand alliance that is taking shape, a kind of unity in obscurantism that may one day see Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists joining hands against a new perceived enemy — enlightened liberalism. A glimpse of that scenario is already available in India. Alberuni saw it several centuries ago.