F E A T U R E S

Battered Women of Pakistan
Gobind Thukral

Pakistan is a veritable cauldron of ideologies. Here if one law is enacted to offer relief to the tormented women, another comes into existence to add more to their suffering. Surprisingly this can happen at the same time. Last fortnight within 48 hours two different laws were enacted; one pushed the country backward into Talibinsation and another yearned to end injustice being done to women.

Legislators in Peshawar voted to set up vice squads to bully and browbeat ordinary citizens to conform to their constricted view of morality.  And, parliamentarians in the National Assembly in Islamabad responding to domestic and international pressure lifted some of the absurd and baneful provisions of the anti-women laws imposed by military dictator Gen. Zia in 1979.

North West Frontier Province now ruled by the mullahs and maulivis who wants to push society to some schizoid state. These Slogan-chanting members of the Muttahida Majlis-Amal (MMA) who walked out of the national assembly protesting against the Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Rights Bill, succeeded  a law that creates  a new  moral police. This Hasba Law would decide how people, particularly women have to dress themselves and how the marriages are to be decided and performed.

Ever since 1979 when Zia enacted a whole series of Islamic injunctions to appease the right wing mullahs and consolidate his position with the support of the Americans, the women have been in distress.  A raped woman was to provide four male witnesses to the crime in order to press the charges and it was a mockery of justice system.  For over two decades, under this law thousands of rapists get off scot-free. Simultaneously, a large number of women were imprisoned on charges of ‘fornication’ because obviously, they could not produce four adult male witnesses to the crime. It required the courage of Mukhtara Be and others like her who was raped on the orders of the village panchayat and as she could not produce any witness and she was thrown into the prison.  Mukhtara with help of some enlightened women fought back to win her freedom and lead a movement against injustice to women. Pakistani society had for long treated its women, particularly the poor as chattel. They were battered and insulted and had little dignity. Women groups, enlightened media and some political parities and international human rights groups forced a reluctant Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to push a law that restores some dignity to the raped women. Old law required women victims of rape to produce four male eyewitnesses to the offence, failing which they were thrown into prison and charged with adultery. Under the new law, rape is an offence under the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC). Both houses of the National assembly have passed this legislation. It is as in India.

Interestingly what a woman Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto could not do, Musharraf has done. He is now promising that his government would soon prepare legislation to end cruel practices against women such as marriage to the Quran, watta satta, vani and triple talaq. Under this bill, rape will be punishable with 10 to 25 years of imprisonment but with death or life imprisonment if committed by two or more persons together, while adultery under the Hudood ordinance is punishable with stoning to death. The new bill amends the Criminal Procedure Code to provide that only a session’s court can take cognizance of such a case after receiving a complaint. Yet  a `firewall’ has also been built to  provide a similar punishment for an accuser failing to prove the charge and bars converting zina and rape cases under other laws into fornication complaints at any stage.

The threat of resigning from National Assembly by Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal in protest against the passage of the Protection of Women’s Rights Bill looks phony. The MMA has 66 lawmakers in the 342-member Assembly. The People's Party Parliamentarians (PPP), the main opposition party, gave a rare support to the ruling coalition to pass the bill.

Yet despite this well meaning measure, the pressure from the right wing religious fanatics has not diminished. The Hasba in NWFP bill seeks to set up a department and a police force to enforce ‘Islamic’ morality. The new ombudsmen at various levels of government will “enforce virtue” and “prohibit vice”. It looks like a parallel judicial system in Pakistan. Here three sets of laws — the British-crafted criminal procedure code, the ‘Islamic’ Hudood ordinances, and the various martial law regulations which have been given constitutional cover — already exist.

When the MMA lawmakers were flashing victory signs over the passage of Hasba bill in the NWFP assembly, barely 40 kms to the south of Peshawar in Darra Adamkhel, the Taliban were warning tribal elders to close down schools meant for girls. They distributed menacing pamphlets with stark warnings to local tribal elders to behave or risk facing a fate similar to that of the 200 tribal maliks killed in the restive Waziristan tribal region. Two girls’ schools and a boarding house for female teachers have been closed down. If Talibanisation once seemed affecting some remote regions further south in Tank, Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan, it is now staring  Darra Adamkhel, a semi-autonomous region and one of the world’s biggest markets of illicit arms manufacturing that  borders Peshawar. If one believed that many trouble makers in Afghanistan get support from these tribal areas that have been denied any justice for centuries and left poor by successive governments, the new law strengthens them.

At the heart of these self inflicted wounds is the idea that religion must be the basis of law-making. It should govern all aspects of civil life. By moving faith from a spiritual, personal experience into the public sphere, we risk polluting both personal life and the public sphere. And since there are so many diverse interpretations and varying doctrines of Islam as of other religions, any attempt to impose one school of thought carries the danger of antagonising the others.  Christians and Hindus have tried this to their dismay. The rational way out of this gridlock is the route others have taken for long time. There is a vital need to separate church [religion] from the state, many countries have put sectarian strife behind them, and moved on.

Pakistan’s mullahs assert the Women Protection Bill will lead to sexual anarchy. Imagine this sexual anarchy in God’s own republic?  It looks that women are the biggest problem, bigger than democracy, bigger than anything else.  Dawn’s celebrated columnist Ayaz Amir finds this attitude to women not ridiculous but a little funny too. He wrote, “The more we have segregated and separated them, the more they seem to ride our imagination. Nature’s revenge, if you look at the matter judiciously. An attractive woman walks through a bazaar and even though she be veiled and dressed in a burqa, most men will be trying to x-ray her through their eyes, mesmerised by her ankles and hands if nothing else is visible… It is typical of the attitude of the sub continental male to the grave threat posed to his equanimity by the attractive female. I’m afraid I can’t be more explicit — but the prize, as far as hypocrisy is concerned, goes to our holy fathers. The general perception about them is that between their precepts and their practice the distance is great.” As for MMA is concerned its threat to quit the National Assembly is phony if not ridiculous and is close to their hypocritical  approach to basic issues of social and political life.

BACK

Tata and Corus Steel Themselves-2
Satya Narayana Sahu

LIKE the heirs of the Jamsetji Tata who removed the misperceptions of the British authorities about the competence of the Indians to erecting the first ever steel plant in Jamshedpur, it was late J.R.D, Tata, to correct Prof. Galbrailh. He wrote on 26th February 1975, "The example of the inadequate development of the steel industry by private enterprise which you have cited is hardly a good one for supporting the unexceptionable point you make that public agencies must do the essential things that private agencies cannot or will not do." He recalled that Jamsetji conjured up the vision of the first steel plant at a time when India was neither politically nor economically free and had been reduced to a market of the finished products of the British industries. He therefore described Galbraith's indictment of the private sector for taking little initiative in achieving less than one million tons of capacity of steel production as unfair and asserted "Indian private enterprise cannot, therefore, fairly be charged with having failed to establish a steel industry in India or of having been unduly tardy in doing so"

Prof. Galbraith on receiving the letter was candid enough to admit that he was not fully educated about the role of the Tatas during the British rule in taking important steps for the construction of the maiden steel plant in India. He highlighted the rightful role of the private sector in any economy for contributing to productivity of the nation as whole. He wrote, "I have always felt that the effort of the Indian Government to protect its own industries against private competition was a mistake. There is every thing to be gained from allowing public and private enterprises to serve as yardsticks, each against the other. And there is every thing to be gained from the added output."

More than three decades later private sector is in a better position to compete both at the national and international levels. The taking over of the Corus in Britain is an eloquent testimony to the competitive edge of the Indian companies in general and Tatas in particular. The country celebrates this added and vigorous ability of the Tatas in enhancing the prestige of India and elevating it to a new pitch. Shri Y. Sharada Prasad in an insightful article in the Asian Age on the take over of the Corus by the Tata steel thoughtfully wrote, "Indian managers and technological leaders will be seen in foreign lands more and more. The eyes will be on them. Will they be content to be brown sahibs? Or try to impress the world by their lavish oriental life style. Or will they be partners in an endeavour to ensure that globalization will not mean a further accentuation of economic inequalities among nations and classes but the starting point of the search for a new humanity."

Through his first Satyagraha, launched South Africa on 9/11, 1906, Mahatma Gandhi employed non-violent technique and engaged himself in search for a new humanity and global order based as much on recognition and guarantee of democratic rights of  peoples of the world  as  on reconciliation and understanding among them. Elsewhere I have stated that with the commencement of the first Satyagraha began the age of common people. The Tata Steel took birth at the time when the age of common people began. In the foregoing paras we have also referred to the contribution of Rs. 25.000 by Tatas to Satyagraha fund which helped Gandhi to sustain the momentum of the Satyagraha. On the eve of the centenary of the establishment of the first steel plant in India let Tatas be guided the vision lo serve the common people who were brought to the center stage of the first Satyagraha by Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and later became the moving force behind the intensification of the non-violent struggle for our independence under the leadership of the father of our nation.

Let us  turn the searchlight inwards and ask ourselves if the rising growth rate of GDP is contributing to the happiness of the people particularly the tribals, poor and marginalized among them who inhabit the land where more and more big industrial projects are being established? How do we explain the death of tribals, who were protesting, in police firing in Kalinga Nagar in Orissa where Tatas are establishing a steel plant? Why did people specially the ordinary citizens among them came out in large numbers to protest against the establishment of a Tata steel plant in Gopalpur in Orissa and as a result of which the decision to go ahead with the plant has been shelved?

The answers to these questions will define the contours of a globalization process. In fact it is instructive to hark back to the vision of Jamsetji Tata which was in consonance with the search for a new humanity and which was stressed and carried forward by his successors. It was best exemplified by J.R.D. Tata in the first half of the 21st  century when he stressed on taking into account the sensibilities of the tribals while building industrial enterprises. In a speech on the theme "Industrializing a Rural Society" delivered in July 1956, he said, "We have in India the special problems, largely unknown in the West, of integrating some twenty million primitive tribal people who live in hills and jungles. Largely, and perhaps fortunately, untouched by modern civilization, they are by and large, a happy, innocent and often child like people with special virtues as well as deficiencies. Their poverty is immense, their economic life cruelly uncertain. Their integration into the industrial community will obviously need special care and sympathetic understanding". Those words assume significance in the context of the tragic happenings in Kalinga Nagar in Orissa.

There is growing awakening among the tribals about their rights and responsibilities and emergence of a civil society which is in the forefront of a movement for defending the rights of the dispossessed and disinherited. Armed with right to information they are in fact in the beginning of an era of a silent revolution for deepening democracy and safeguarding the democratic rights and livelihood opportunities of the struggling millions.

Initiatives for construction of big river valley projects and industrialization and extraction of minerals in the areas inhabited by tribals have resulted in their displacement and growing restlessness among them.  Wide spread fears are being expressed that such activities will cause degradation of environment. Late President of India K.R.Narayanan spoke about the need to harmonise the process of industrialization with the interests of the tribals. In his speech delivered on the eve of the Republic Day on 25th January 2001 he dealt with the protest movements launched by tribals against the mining of their land and cautioned the nation by saying, "While the nation must benefit from the exploitation of these mineral resources, we will have to take into consideration questions of environmental protection and the rights of the tribals. Let it not be said by future generations that the Indian Republic has been built on the destruction of the green earth and the innocent tribals who have been living there for centuries". Any attempt to engage the Tatas or for that matter any corporate house for industrialization and development of nation must be in harmony with what was said by the JRD Tata in 1956 and President Narayanan in 2001.

In this context let us  again recall  J.R.D.Tata who while being felicitated after the conferment of Bharat Ratna on him in 1992, said, "I look forward to the prediction given by one American some time ago, that in some years India would he an Economic Super Power. I do not want India to be an economic Super Power. I want India to be a happy country. I want a country of which no one is afraid or a country whose spiritual and intellectual resources and abilities and performances would be recognized and appreciated".

It requires more hard work, suffering and sacrifice on the part of the well off and the beneficiaries of the economic reforms to make India a happy country than to see it emerge as an economic super power. We require a robust vision and vigorous action to make it happen. A tiny country like Bhutan has adopted Gross National Happiness in stead of Gross National Product for measuring its progress. J.R.D.Tata wanted to see emergence of India as a happy country. By following that lofty ideal how can any body reconcile to the killing of tribals and their harassment for establishing any enterprise in the fair name of the Tatas? In this context let me refer to a small book entitled "Stronger than Steel". Eminent activists from Orissa and rest of India brought it out in the middle of the 1990s when they were fighting against the establishment of Tata steel plant in Gopalpur, Orissa, which had some of the most fertile tracts of land. The resolute determination of people not to vacate the land for the construction of the steel plant was described as Stronger than Steel. Had the steel plant been constructed possibly it would have resulted in the unimaginable unhappiness of the people who were depending for their livelihood not only on land but also on the renewable   local resources. And a mega steel plant would have completely destroyed.

We have to be mindful of the fact that the strength of ordinary people is stronger than steel. It is hoped that the taking over of Corus by the Tata Steel, which has been described as the defining moment for Tatas will be the defining feature of their effort in search of a new humanity of which the poor and marginalized constitute the majority and whose strength is stronger than steel and by ignoring that strength we will inevitably put our own strength at stake. This is how we have to understand the defining moment associated with the taking over of the Corus by the Tata Steel.

[Author is Director in Prime Minister’s Office and the views expressed by the author are his personal views]

BACK

Culture and Health Care Attract Tourists
L.K. Verma

A lot of entrepreneurs and professionals see India emerging as a preferred holiday and business destination for people around the world. Many have started showcasing their skills and talents.  Foreigners who are visiting various parts of the North West are simply drawn here by the services on the Internet or by other means towards a new tourism.

Punjab has historical significance but once it is clubbed with a specialised service like medical treatment, cultural tours, religious tourism or simply an offer that makes business sense, People are unhesitatingly coming here.

Look at the emerging tourism scene. Whether it is Saggar Dental Clinic in Ludhiana, Whistling Willows, Vaseela Resorts, Ramgarh Fort or Kikar Lodge on the outskirt of Chandigarh or Amritsar based Divine Destination, tourists are flocking. No wonder many places in the country are fast emerging as hubs of medical, dental, adventure, cultural and religious tourism. Manali in Himachal Pradesh is all set to have a Winter Skiing resort, being setup by none other than the great grand son of Henry Ford. Many farms around Chandigarh have converted themselves into model or heritage villages, promoting cultural tourism by showcasing traditional cultural values and heritage of Punjab.

“It would be wrong to call it ‘Dental Tourism’ anymore. Initially, the term medical or dental tourism was coined and used in contest of hundreds of NRI visiting home on holiday and clubbing their dental and opthomological work with the visit just because it was cheaper to get it done here.

Then people started considering more serious surgery like open heart bypass because they could not afford it overseas. But today the kinds of patients I get have no cultural or ethnic links with the region. They are here simply because they have received a positive feedback about our competence and the treatment provided is at par with the best anywhere in the world, but at a far lower cost”, says Dr. Vivek Saggar, one of the first dentists from the region who travelled to U.K, USA and Canada to educate people there about the expertise available in India.

People realise that they can have medical care of the same level as in the west at a Fraction of the cost. On his website www.viveksaggar.com vings on one 'Major Tooth Treatment' can pay for an economy fare, if it is two teeth that need care, what it would cost in the US or UK can take care of the problem along with a week long vacation. And treatment of three teeth in the west equals treatment plus a week’s vacation for the whole family. 

Mr. Robert Kettering an American living in Paris, France was one of the first non-NRI patients that visited Ludhiana in November 2004 with the only purpose to get dental treatment done. After that the clinic has seen people come for treatment from Dubai, South Africa, Austria, US, U.K and Canada.

Having travelled from Washington to get his implants, Mr. Frederick Schoenthaler says “Expertise of doctor and supporting staff here is brilliant. My job has been done with an amazing degree of attention to detail, premises are fantastic as well as cost saving is phenomenal. I would recommend anybody who has got an ounce of intelligence not to pay exorbitant prices in the USA. I have come here two times in 2 years”.

“I came to Ludhiana, India on a recommendation. When I came I had horrible teeth, but now I am going back with a beautiful ‘Britesmile’. With the money I save by coming here, I will now travel to Goa. I recommend India for treatment to everyone without any hesitation,” says Jorg Weingerl from Netherland.

Even though the Indian Government has laid high budgetary outlay for healthcare, reduced import custom duties and simplified import procedures for medical equipment, declared Tax exemption and financial incentives for new hospitals and healthcare entrepreneurs, it is not so much for these incentives as for personal efforts of individuals that Indian healthcare has made a name for itself globally. Many Indian doctors are now choosing to spend six months in a year overseas and rest in India, bringing with them patients who cannot afford to pay higher expenses overseas.  Seeing the trend, the government has allowed a Foreign Direct Investment of up to 51per cent in hospital services and up to 26 per cent in health-insurance. Huge number of upcoming hospitals and healthcare centres has made India a popular healthcare tourism destination.

“According to research reports on the Indian healthcare sector, medical tourism is valued at over $ 310 million with over 100,000 foreign patients coming every year. The market is predicted to grow to $ 2.2 billion by 2011. India's healthcare industry grew at 13 per cent annually over the last decade and is currently growing at 17 per cent annually, putting the worth of the healthcare industry in 2003 at Rs 95,000 Crore (US $ 19.25 Billion) and projected estimates put it at Rs. 1, 75,000 Crore (US $ 40 Billion) in 2008 – and Rs. 3, 20,000 Crore (US $ 70 Billion) in 2012”, says Dr. Saggar adding that there is enough scope for all to grow. [To be continued]

BACK