Issue 52 Vol III, November 30, 2007

F O C U S

A visit to Pakistan
Ishtiaq Ahmed

BETWEEN October 27 and November 7, I happened to be in Pakistan mainly to attend a conference and to collect material for my latest research. The Institute of Public Policy Research Islamabad (IPRI) and the Institute for Security and Development Policy, Stockholm (ISDP) had jointly organised a most timely conference on, The Role of Religious Communities in Pakistan. It must be said to the full credit of the organisers that they invited the best Pakistani experts on the different religious communities in Pakistan.

It was very enlightening to learn from the experts about the diverse standpoints and concerns of the various religious communities and sects in Pakistan. Professor Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, who chaired the conference, encouraged all of us to speak our mind honestly and fearlessly. That put us at great ease and, therefore, some very frank exchange of views took place.

The conference epitomised the two competing viewpoints that pervade discussions on the relationship between the state and religion in all Pakistani fora: the one that holds that Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be a democratic, secular state and the other that is emphatic that he wanted to create an ideal Islamic state based on the Shariah. In a future article on this controversy, I shall try to make sense of these conflicting interpretations of Jinnah's legacy.

My own input was to provide a comparative-historical perspective of the relationship between religion and politics in the European and South Asian contexts. The thesis I advanced was that, contrary to popular perception, religion and state were intimately connected in Europe until as late as the Second World War. The secular, universal democracy that exists there now dates only from the time of the UN Charter of 1945.

On the other hand, in South Asia the state remained the protector of all communities, and that pluralist model remained in force until colonialism came to an end in 1947. Even Aurangzeb was a secular ruler in many senses of the word despite his personal inclination towards a doctrinal type of Islam.

Amid all these intellectually very stimulating discussions the upbeat mood of the conference suffered a blow on Oct. 30 when we learnt that only some kilometres away from the IPRI premises where we were meeting a suicide bomber had blown himself up and killed several policemen as well as a passing cyclist. On Thursday, November 1, another suicide bomber blew himself up and nine men of the Pakistan Air Force at Sargodha. Many others were badly injured.

It would be very interesting to call a conference just to discuss what makes a suicide bomber offer himself/herself for death and kill other innocent people too. Do such people notice that those who recruit them and indoctrinate them never themselves go on such missions or send their own children to such a gory fate? Is it poverty and illiteracy of the recruits or their psychological infirmity, which makes them not question their mentors, or a combination of all these factors that explains why they offer their life? One would really like to have more scientific and theoretical knowledge on this subject.

It seems that any religious text can be used to indoctrinate potential suicide bombers. It all began with the Tamil Tigers using this technique in the conflict against the Sri Lankan state. Professor Peter Schalk at Uppsala University, Sweden has shown that the Tamil Tigers used the Mahabharta Epic to instill among the Tamil youths the spirit of self-sacrifice for the honour of the nation. This technique seems to have been learnt by Islamist groups too.

The second reason for coming to Pakistan was to establish contacts with scholars and experts who could help me in my latest research project aiming to understand the nature of the American influence on Pakistan, especially on the Pakistani armed forces. There are several books available on the history of the Pakistan Army. Ahmad Faruqui has made a study of the Pakistani security paradigm in his pioneering work, Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan. The concept of 'Milibus' has been advanced by Ayesha Siddiqa to shed politico-economic light on this problem, while Mazhar Aziz has evolved the notion of a parallel state.

I am inclined to employ the notion of a garrison state suggested by Harold Lasswell in 1941 to distinguish states ruled by the military from those ruled by civilians. Such states base their existence on the real or imagined security threats from internal as well as external enemies. Tan Tai Yong has so fruitfully employed that concept to analyse the evolution of the British Indian Army and especially its role in the Punjab. I intend to find out what role the US has played in the consolidation of the garrison state in Pakistan.

In this connection, I interviewed the former chief of army staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg and the former head of the ISI, General Asad Durrani, in Islamabad. The next day I left for Lahore in the hope of talking to other retired senior army officers, but the imposition of the emergency meant that the interviews had to be suspended till normal times in the future.

As always, Lahore is the place that I love most but it is also the one where I almost always get a sore throat or bronchial trouble because pollution levels in that great city are really far beyond what human beings should be exposed to. Unfortunately things will go bad even more before they are ever corrected. Delhi used to be highly polluted, but now its air has improved dramatically.

In one of the bethaks (evening sittings) comprising my progressive comrades past events and people who once lived in Lahore and were now gone were recalled. We became more and more sentimental as the evening grew older. My own position is a peculiar one. I come for a few days and then slip into oblivion for long periods of time. I do hope destiny has in store some more visits to Lahore for me. I can't think of any other place like I feel about Lahore.

On the whole the trip to Pakistan was very useful in academic terms in that people have not given up hoping for a different and better Pakistan. The Pakistani press remains vigilant and strong despite restrictions that have been imposed on television channels and other sources of independent information and news. Police repression at the Lahore High Court on Monday, November 5, and other such events saddened me considerably.

[The author is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore, on leave from the University of Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: isasia@nus.edu.sg Courtesy News International http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=82569

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Where does India Stand?
Gobind Thukral

THERE is no dearth of the Indian political elite telling the world that it is just a matter of time when India is reckoned as world power along with America, England, Canada, Russia and China. Our prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh is saying is the Congress party president Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Earlier the leaders of the National Democratic Alliance like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishan Advani were presenting a shining India before the people.

These kinds of declarations are interesting and go to show the leaders take people as gullible lot. The leaders believe the public accepts as it has no experience of its own to question the claims, however false these may be. But what should one make when a respected institution like the United Nations tells us that India has dropped to rank 128-a fall of two places — among 177 countries in this year’s report on the Human Development Index This report states that climate change may actually reverse the trend of a steady progress in health, education and poverty.

In the immediate neighbourhood, Sri Lanka ranked 99 and Maldives 100, higher than India. Only Bhutan was 133, Pakistan 136, Bangladesh 140 and Nepal 142.  India has to do work really hard to catch up to do if it wants to get anywhere close to China in terms of human development, though the two countries are often compared in terms of their economic strengths. China ranks 81 in this year’s index. A small country like Iceland overtook Norway to top the human development ranking. Norway, which had held the top position for the last six years, is a close second. Clearly the size of a country does not matter. These are the commitments of the leaders and care they take of their public. Areas like social development, education, health and gender equality and economic areas like agriculture have remained neglected. Farm sector growth has slipped from four per cent to less than two per cent. Labour welfare has been complete abandoned. When reforms were introduced then the present prime minister who was then finance minister had declared that economic gains would tickle down and help the alleviation of poverty. This has clearly not happened during the past two decades.

Clearly other countries have done better. India’s gains are marginal. For example Gross Enrolment Ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary education has gone up from 62% to 63.8%. This study calls for huge investments from rich countries to cut emissions within the next decade not just in their countries but to finance low carbon growth in developing countries.

This report has clear warning. “While India is a high-growth economy, the benefits have been unequally shared and there is a large human development backlog. Around 28 per cent of the population, some 32 crore  people live below the poverty line and three quarters of the poor in rural areas¿ superimposing incremental climate change risks on this large human development deficit would compromise the ambition of inclusive growth set out in India’s Eleventh Five Year Plan.”

This year’s report attempts to explain what climate change means for the world 2.6 billion who survive on less than 80 rupees a day. Major threat apart from governmental apathy and lopsided polices and corruption is environment degradation is threatening the poor countries although these are rich countries like America, Canada, and European countries which are consuming resources. America alone consumes 46 per cent of world resources while it is just6 per cent of the world’s population. The Millennium Development Goals on health, education and sanitation may actually begin to get reversed. The report illustrates this through a number of examples: Indian women, during a flood in the 1970s, were 19 per cent less likely to have attended primary school.

Climate shocks like droughts and floods have resulted in grave setbacks in nutritional status, especially of women. Studies quoted in the report show that periods of low consumption and rising food prices, following such extreme events, are strongly associated with deaths among girls than boys.

Even within India, it is an inequitable world: research in Indian villages in the 1990s found that even slight variations in rainfall timing could reduce farm profits for the poorest quartile of respondents by one-third while having a negligible impact on profitability for the richest quartile.

Climate disasters between 2000 and 2004 affected 262 million people, 98 per cent of them in the developing world. The poor are often forced to sell productive assets or save on food, health and education, creating “life-long cycles of disadvantage.”

The report states that a temperature rise of between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius would displace 340 million people through flooding and droughts. Retreating glaciers would cut off drinking water from as many as 1.8 billion people.

Though India’s carbon footprint is 15 times less than that of the US, when climate disasters strike, it is the poor here who will be affected.

On climate change, the message this report sends out is that the world has less than a decade to change course. Dangerous climate change will be unavoidable if in the next 15 years emissions follow the same trend as in the past 15 years.

To avoid a catastrophic impact, the rise in global temperature must be limited to 2 degrees Celsius. To do that, the world needs to spend 1.6 per cent of global economic output annually through 2030 to stabilise the carbon stock. Rich countries, the biggest carbon emitters, should lead the way and cut emissions at least 30 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. Developing nations should cut emissions 20 per cent by 2050, states the report.

Cuts in developing countries have to be funded by the rich. You can’t go to a country like India from the European Union — in India we have 400 million people without access to electricity and a carbon footprint which is one-twelfth of that in the European Union. The report recommends a series of measures, including improved energy efficiency for appliances and cars, taxes or caps on emissions, and the ability to trade allowances to emit more.

In India, the governments at the national level and state level know the problem well. There is an unequal distribution of wealth and resources and opportunities. But nothing serious is being done.

Interestingly at the people as we find Punjab farmers worried about the dangers of excessive use of chemicals and over use of water are returning to organic farming. Partnerships between communities and local governments in states such as Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat for watershed development have been showcased as examples of what can be achieved. Those on the margins have already begun adapting, with or without outside help. In West Bengal, women living in the Ganges delta have begun constructing elevated bamboo platforms to take refuge during the monsoons. In Maharashtra, farmers have begun coping with increased exposure to drought by investing in watershed development.

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