The generation gap

ONCE I saw an inscription on one of the opening pages of a book in which its author was lamenting and denouncing the dress, hairstyles, preferences in song and dance, intolerance of advice, lack of deference for age, wilfulness, impertinence and impudence of the young people of his time. I was amused to see that the complainant was none other than Socrates. Even twenty-five hundred years ago some distance separated the generations. Is this to be deplored as Socrates seems to have done? Not necessarily.

I should like to speak to the issue first in general terms and, then, with specific reference to the Pakistani community living in America. In most societies the older folks tend to think that they understand the world and its ways as much as anyone can. They are also well satisfied with the values they cherish and the customs they follow. Many of them are inclined to think that the new generation is, at least to a degree, wayward and misguided.

Needless to say, the young people don’t agree. The older people, they believe, are simply unable to understand the new times and their demands. For that reason, but also because they have minds of their own, they are not amenable to advice. Even if they do not argue and talk back, they will often end up doing what they had intended to do all along.

The new generation is much more proficient in modern science and technology than we ever were. Technology has not only placed a buggy on Mars, it has made the world into a global village. Some Indian and Pakistani young people love to hear jazz, rock, pop, and disco and dance to them. On the other hand, Ravi Shankar and the late Ustad Fateh Ali Khan had countless admirers in America and Europe. Many Englishmen enjoy eating Indian and Pakistani food, and “desi” restaurants abound in their cities and towns. Pakistan and Pakistanis figure in British fiction, and one whole novel that I read recently revolves around a Pakistani family living in England. Little, if any, of this happened fifty years ago.

Progress in the area of human interaction — the way men treat one another — has been extremely slow and halting since all the way back to Noah and Moses. The cruelty of Changez Khan and Halaku is still here. Governments of the so-called civilized countries can be just as barbaric in dealing with other people as men and their rulers were hundreds of years ago. Yet, we have been seeing stirrings of change even in this area. There is increasing concern about human rights, and there is rising protest against their violation. In this respect also our own age is at least somewhat better than the bad old days.

Television and the video industry, computers and calculators have made an interesting impact on ways of life. Unless strictly disciplined and rationed, watching television occupies a great deal of many a person’s time out of school or the workplace. It has loosened the family ties to an extent because there is no time for members, even husband and wife, to chat with each other.

At another level, while chattering is still abundant, the art of conversation has declined; so has the inclination to read since you can hear books on tape, and the ability to write because you can talk to friends and family on the telephone. Knowledge of calculus and trigonometry may have advanced but that of elementary arithmetic is down. Boys and girls don’t have to memorize multiplication tables or formulas any more; the calculator will do divisions, multiplications, square root, and many other things for them.

The gap between the first generation Pakistani immigrants to America and their children and grandchildren can be dramatic. In addition to the matters mentioned above, it relates mainly to the issues of identity, language, and culture. Muslim identity of the original immigrants is as firm as it was while they were still in Pakistan, and in many cases it is firmer.

Surrounded by non-Muslims, fearing erosion of their identity through absorption, they have organized themselves, and established associations, hundreds of mosques, and Islamic centres throughout the country. The centres and many of the mosques run “Sunday schools” to provide instruction in Islamic studies. Some of these “schools” operate on several days each week. They are well attended.

But the Muslim identity of those who were born and raised in America is not to be taken for granted. If both father and mother are regular in prayer and fasting and in fulfilling other Islamic obligations, and spend a good deal of time discussing Islam-related subjects with their children every week, odds are good that the latter will turn out to be practising Muslims. This is a very difficult job for parents, especially fathers who have to be at work all day, and in many cases the effort will not be made. In that event the likelihood is that the children will grow up professing to be Muslims but they will know and practise Islam peripherally.

The first generation of Pakistani immigrants holds “mushairas,” “qawwalis,” and a variety of concerts in the larger cities. But Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz will have no standing with the second generation of Pakistani Americans except when their works are translated into English, and even then not surely but possibly. Nor will this generation have an ear for Pakistani classical or neo-classical music. Pakistani artistic expressions will live in America only so long as the flow of new immigrants continues. And perhaps it will continue, notwithstanding the setback that all Muslims have been experiencing following the events of September 11, 2001.

Let me now say a word about a more sensitive aspect of the generation gap. It relates to our notions of sexual morality. Even if we ourselves did occasionally yield to the appetites of the flesh in our younger days, we don’t want our children to do the same. We want to safeguard our women’s virginity before marriage and their chastity thereafter. We hope that our children (especially daughters) in high school and college are not “dating” and “necking” with members of the opposite sex.

These hopes and expectations are not entirely realistic. Our children grow up in a society whose attitudes towards romance, and man-woman relations generally, are very different from those of ours. In the absence of arranged marriages, young people have to find their own spouses. And in this context “love and marriage go together like horse and carriage.” When a young man and a young woman are in love and meet over a period of time, before getting married, it is probable that they will have some physical contact.

The parents of a regular American young woman (Christian or Jewish), who does not have a “boy friend” and does not go out on “dates,” are going to worry and wonder if there is something wrong with her. The training and indoctrination we have given our children may influence their thinking and behaviour to some degree as they reach adulthood, but I doubt that they can remain wholly untouched by the cultural environment in which they live, learn, and work.

In some instances our young people have married outside their faith. That is not happening on a large scale at the present time, but it may become more frequent with the passage of time. If we are to minimize that possibility, we need to tone down, not increase, our emphasis on segregation of men and women at gatherings in private homes, mosques, Islamic centres, conferences, and conventions. We should take steps to enable our young men and women to come together and find romance, love, and marriage within their own community.

One last point. The American component of the original immigrant’s identity is minimal. In many instances he thinks of himself as a Pakistani who is residing in America and carries an American passport for the sake of convenience. He has not formed an emotional attachment to the country he has adopted. But it does not work that way with those who were born and raised here. Their attachment and identification will likely go with America first. They will think of themselves as Americans of Pakistani origin. The generation that follows them will make their connection with Pakistan as a second thought. This is the way it has been with all other immigrant groups, and this is how it will go with the Pakistanis. You can’t come to America, take all that you are capable of taking, and give it nothing of yourself. Like it or not, it will take the flesh of your flesh and the bone of your bone — your children and grandchildren.

Indian Muslims and Pakistan

PAKISTAN has been criticized, on occasions ostracized, by the world community for its religious extremism, denying equal rights to the minorities and persecuting them. India gets away unscathed with much worse.

The world discriminates between the two because by its Constitution, laws and nomenclature, Pakistan is a religious state. India is secular. In real life extremism or, more familiar in subcontinental setting, communalism is more virulent and deep-rooted in India than it is in Pakistan because India’s grievance on the partition of the subcontinent still festers.

More than its origin in Muslim nationalism and Islamic laws particularly those enacted during Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law, what has given Pakistan a parochial image is the sequestering of the minorities by casting them out of the electoral mainstream. Till a recent reversal of this system by the present government for the forthcoming general elections, the minorities were required to elect their own representatives through constituencies as wide as the province or the country itself.

Since some minority groups like Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists were too small for each to have a representative of its own, it resulted in such preposterous arrangement as the Parsis of Karachi, Buddhists of Baltistan, Sikhs of Waziristan and Kafirs of Chitral all combining to choose one member to represent them all in the National Assembly. Obviously it had to be always a Parsi.

A ludicrous assumption inherent in the system of separate electorates was that the interests and rights of Kafirs were better safeguarded by a Parsi who had never seen their primitive paleolithic habitat a thousand miles away than by a Muslim neighbour. The nation would never be able to thank General Musharraf enough for doing away this absurdity which all but disenfranchised those among its citizens who professed a faith other than Islam, or the government so chose to decree despite their protestations.

The minorities in Pakistan are no more than five per cent of the population, half of them Hindus. Too few to fight, they live, by and large, peacefully but cautiously. The Muslims in India are around 12 per cent — more than twice as many as all the other minority groups put together leaving out the animist tribals or pagans. In all they number as many as in Pakistan — about 140 million. The representation of the Indian Muslims in politics, businesses, professions, services is much less than their population ratio. Though India has had Muslims to show as heads of state and judiciary, even chiefs of the armed forces and the richest of men, in public services their number is believed to be less than four per cent. Their presence in enterprises and professions is also generally one-fourth of what it should be on the basis of population.

The backwardness of the Muslims and discrimination against them is obvious from these numbers. Maulana Asad Madni who was here in Pakistan last year attending a conference of his (Deoband) school of thought described a secular state as a state not averse to religion but tolerant of all religions. By not contesting this definition the warring jihadi hosts of the Indian maulana conceded that Pakistan, being an Islamic state, was a state for Muslims alone. The followers of the other faiths could be the residents but not equal citizens.

That has come to stay as the world perception as well. Pakistan’s aggressive intervention in Afghanistan and Kashmir and the presence of its footloose warriors in unconcerned lands like Chechnya and Macedonia has given a militant dimension to its parochial image.

That explains the indifference of the world to the pillage and plunder in Gujarat resulting in the death, mostly by burning, of a thousand Muslims with more yet to be dug out of the smouldering rubble of their homes. Amidst all this carnage, the chief of Vishwa Hindu Parishad showed little remorse and blamed the Muslims for inviting the Hindu wrath by setting the Ayodhya pilgrim train afire.

Many versions go round on the burning of the train and the death of 58 Hindu radicals. Fanatical Muslims of Godhara, provocateurs of the Congress opposition to discredit the ruling coalition or of the BJP itself to divert attention from its humiliating defeat in the state elections are suspected of arson. The most credible version now emerging is of Washington Post (reported in Thursday’s Dawn). It was just a shouting match of insults accompanied by hurling of rocks. An oil-soaked rag set the train ablaze which was neither planned nor intended.

Last to be suspected should be the Godhara Muslims. Outnumbered by ten to one they had to be both stupid and insane not to have anticipated the ghastly aftermath of burning alive the karsevaks incensed by the Ayodhya agitation.

The vast tragedy of Gujarat should go to underline Pakistan’s responsibility in fostering harmony in the region and rein in its own forces of fanaticism and hatred. When it comes to spite and murder our sipahs and lashkars will find more than a match in the Indian parishads and senas. We have no maulana to match the venom of Bal Thackeray.

If not for common history, language and neighbourliness, Pakistan must strive for peace and friendship with India for the sake of the unity of the Muslims of the two countries. A hostile India cannot have Muslims friendly to Pakistan for their loyalty and welfare lies in India. Pakistan can do little for them. It cannot give them shelter if they were driven out by more Gujarat-like pogroms. They have no where else to go. The policies of Pakistan must enable them to live there in amity.

Shahid Javed Burki who feels and plans for a poor Pakistan living in rich America weekly makes out an extended argument in this paper for Pakistan to defect from South Asia to seek its fortune and future in West-Central Asia. He thinks of the ummah and abundant resources of that region forgetting that almost half of the ummah of the world lives in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. As an economist with a world view it is amazing for him to believe that Russia, America and Europe with their power of intervention and money would ever let a disparate, fractious Central Asia control its own oil and minerals and let Pakistan share it.

Whatever Burki’s world outlook of an expert, here even a country bumpkin looking across the Durand Line over Tora Bora and Gardez mountains does not see peace and stability returning to Afghanistan for a long time to come to give Pakistan access to the fabled Farghana, Samarkand and Bokhara and the wealth buried beneath them.

Pakistan belongs to South Asia and to nowhere else. It has tried East (Seato) and West (Cento) and half-way (ECO and OIC). Getting poorer by the day, it has no time left for yet another excursion into the unfamiliar and uncertain. It has no option but to make Saarc into an Asean.

The ummah sentiment finds no echo in Central Asia. It was best illustrated by the visiting head of a former Soviet republic when in reply to a sentimental harangue at a banquet by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan on Islam and common heritage, he said having come out of one maze after a century he wasn’t inclined to lead his people into another, he had come in search of prosperity, not ideology. Not many ministers or traders have come since then. Instead they swarm Dubai and Mumbai.

Leaving the fanatical outbursts and cynics aside and reconciled to divergent faiths, the people of India and Pakistan understand each other and can deal with each other only if their leaders let them. They have common saints, shrines and festivals. Many Hindus beseech more the Gharibnawaz (lover of the poor) of Ajmer than their own gods. Poet Iqbal eulogized Ram as the prince and pride of (united) India and its gift to the world.

Building on these sentiments the economists and planners should try to bridge the gulf between the two countries and not join the priests and politicians in widening it. Combined with Bangladesh it will form a formidable block for the ummah and economy alike.

Why poor people continue to stay poor?: An end to poverty? — II

STARTING from early fifties, when a large number of Third World countries got their independence, most of them failed to start an indigenous process of development. Almost all of them equated modernization with rapid industrialization, and ignoring the historical experience and cultural differences, started aping the West.

Consequently, they got the sequence of development process wrong. In Pakistan and elsewhere the major flaws of the development strategy were: a) industrial development without adequate agriculture development; b) large-scale industry without the prior development of small-scale industry; c) urbanization outpacing industrialization; d) services growing faster than the productive base of agriculture and industry, and e) population growth racing ahead of employment growth.

                                                     OUR OTHER FAILURES WERE:

We tried to adopt the ‘welfare state’ model (free education, free health service, free rural water supply, free sanitation) without having a broad-based taxation system like the Scandinavian countries or huge natural resources like Kuwait and Brunei. Because of lack of vision and poor implementation mechanism services were not delivered, but huge amounts of scarce resources were wasted. Major chunk was siphoned off by the consultants, engineers, contractors and bureaucrats. Some services were no doubt delivered, but it created a ‘dependency syndrome.’ In spite of our failure in improving the social indicators, we did not learn the lesson that you cannot run a welfare model with borrowed money.

We involved the state in almost all activities, although it had neither the capacity nor the resources to perform those jobs. At the same time, instead of devolving the authority to the lowest level, we placed heavy reliance on an over-centralized bureaucracy. Its hallmark: it is multi-layered, underpaid, over-staffed, inefficient and corrupt, and keeps on expanding exponentially. By its very nature it is status-quo oriented, slow moving and stifles the initiative of the people. (De Soto counted over two dozen government departments which had to be approached for seeking permission to start a small factory. In Pakistan the number of labour laws which are operated in the name of welfare of the workers are 27).

Due to poor targeting, most poverty alleviation schemes seldom reached the needy. They were hijacked by the middle classes and the influentials.

Lessons learnt from past experience:

a. Don’t treat ‘alleviation of poverty’ as a sector. How can you expect to reduce poverty by launching a few programmes, while all other macro policies continue to increase poverty;

b. Don’t start grandiose programmes and projects to help the poor. They never work. Start small, scale-up and mainstream gradually;

c. Don’t believe that massive foreign aid can lead to poverty reduction. IMF/World Bank are not the solution. As a matter of fact they are part of the problem. The thrust of their strategy lies in the obligation upon the aid-receiving countries to align their own economic policies with the requirements of the IMF/World Bank, to develop themselves as they want these countries to develop. Dependence on the aid-giving agencies has created a new type of ‘poverties’ and in many cases has resulted in an erosion of sovereignty and destabilization of societies. Sustainable development is only possible through local resources which can always be found if the programmes are participatory in nature and low in cost;

d. Don’t use soft programmes/subsidies to solve social sector problems — they will not be sustainable in the long run. (If properly targeted and effectively monitored, subsidies can be effective in specific programmes but normally they are grabbed by other than target groups).

e. Don’t believe that the NGOs can replace the government — they can at best quicken the process of social mobilization; can do intermediation between the state and the poor; carry out research to find low-cost solutions; implement pilot projects and test their viability, but the ultimate responsibility rests with the state. State cannot abdicate the responsibility;

f. Don’t believe that people are ignorant of what is happening around them. As a matter of fact the most profound thing that has happened during the last decade is the easy access to the knowledge that things have changed elsewhere;

g. Don’t believe that the poor can continue to be befooled. There is widespread frustration about the gap between the rich and the poor. People are seething with anger against the inequitable distribution of resources. Currently, they are not organized but they have the potential to destabilize societies which are resistant to change;

h. Don’t believe that community participation means that people participate in government programmes. It should be the other way round. Government should support what the people are doing.

We need to recognize that: Poor people do have assets, but in most cases they do not have formal title. In rural areas, the land they till, the place where they live, the tools they use, the cattle they own, cannot be transformed into capital because of lack of title. Similarly, over 35 per cent of urban population lives in kachchi abadis (squatter settlements) but in most cases they do not own that land legally. This is a huge resource, but because poor people rarely have formal title, they cannot use these assets as collateral to raise cash;

* In urban areas of Pakistan, the informal economy is bigger than the formal one. (In Karachi for example 70 per cent of the economy is informal). No effort has been made to formalize the informal, link it with the market, improve its productivity and create mortgageable assets for the poor;

* The main reasons for extra-legal businesses and squatter settlements in Pakistan not becoming legal are bureaucratic apathy, cumbersome procedures and corruption. The path of the poor is blocked by the officialdom at every step;

* Pakistan is an over-regulated country. Government not only regulates, but tries to control most of the business and trade activities. Whether it is purchase of land from the government, sanction of an electric connection or permission to start a new business, it may take years. Harassment at the hands of tax collectors is another tale. The cost and burden of this ‘over-regulation’ makes most businesses uncompetitive and difficult to run;

* The cost of running the country has increased to a horrendous level. Now it consumes about 95 per cent of our revenue income. If we continue to spend 25 per cent of our income on defence, about 55 per cent on debt servicing, 15 per cent on bureaucracy and intelligence services, how can we meet the rising demand for social services?

While devising poverty alleviation strategy following points need further emphasis: i) It must be admitted that conventional methods to eradicate poverty won’t work. Similarly, it must also be accepted that in the social sector, government cannot do everything. It has neither the capacity, nor the resources to do so. In Pakistan, the problem is neither shortage of funds, nor lack of skilled manpower. The main issue is poor governance and poor management;

ii) Grass-root reality needs to be studied and its result accepted with open mind. It must be admitted that people have been surviving in spite of the state, not because of the state. The initiative of the communities, and small enterprises in solving their problems needs to be supported and supplemented. They do not expect much from the government. What they need is an enabling environment, and availability of research-oriented technical support in solving their problems.

iii) Smaller things in the following sectors should be left to the people and their associations. There is empirical evidence that they can undertake these activities on ‘self-help and self-managed basis’ with the support of cooperatives and community-based organizations: Check dams and water management — agriculture cooperatives — rural water supply — sanitation and solid waste management — agriculture cooperatives - rural water supply — sanitation and solid waste management at lane level — housing — basic health — education at primary level — family planning — social forestry — savings and credit societies.

What they need is technical support from the professionals and space for social mobilization. Bigger things like big dams, trunk sewers, treatment plants, water source development, making land available for housing, and big hospitals, colleges, universities etc. should be the responsibility of the state. To implement this approach structural partnership based on the concept of component sharing needs to be developed;

iv) The myths and misconceptions about the poor that: i) they are not organizable; ii) they are too poor to pay for the services; iii) they are not bankable (they will not return the money if given to them in small loans) and iv) they do not want to change their lives, need to be thrown in the dustbin. There is empirical evidence across the globe to disprove these myths and misconceptions; (v) We must now go beyond the rhetoric of creating awareness, capacity building, advocacy networking and running training courses — the much-touted strategy advocated by the NGOs and donor agencies. What people need are low-cost, easy to implement, sustainable packages which can solve their basic problems;

vi) Technocrats and policy makers should unlearn what they have learnt in the universities, and start a process of re-learning. They must realize that the textbooks prescribed in the universities and colleges have no link with ground reality.

Concluded