DAWN - Opinion; April 05, 2007

Published April 5, 2007

Time for a bitter harvest

By I. A. Rehman


HAVING sown the wild wind for many a long year, Pakistan must now reap the whirlwind.

Within yards of the avenue in the capital where the concrete symbols of all the organs of the state are guarded by large contingents of gendarmerie, some lathi-wielding female students take the law into their hands, and announce their assumption of authority to detain and punish the ‘sinners’, and a pathetic-looking state apparatus sues for forgiveness. This is Pakistan after seven years of stability, economic progress, genuine democracy, suppression of obscurantism and enlightened moderation!One looks in vain for the establishment’s cheer-leaders who never tire of fulminating against dissident politicians, independent journalists and human rights activists and threatening them with lime and brimstone. No reference to the writ of the state is necessary because such expressions can be used only for the misguided serfs inhabiting certain parts of Balochistan, Sindh and Frontier. They cannot be used in the context of territories the state has been ceding to holy warriors in the northern part of the country.

This column is neither about the Islamabad incident referred to earlier nor about the establishment of a new order in Waziristan, Bajaur, Dir and even close to Khyber. It is only about the evolution of the theory of two sovereignties and its latest manifestation. This theory, in a sentence, is that every Pakistani Muslim has a right and a duty to bring his fellow-beings under a regime he thinks his belief prescribes even if this involves a defiance of the state-made (that is, man-made) laws and rules.

Quite a few scholars maintain, and not without some justification, that the seeds of this theory lay in the very basis of the demand for Pakistan. In support, some slogans raised during the 1945-46 elections are recalled – slogans that explained the idea of Pakistan wholly in religious terms. Whether these slogans really reflected the mind of the authors of the Pakistan idea or whether they were raised only to secure votes in pir-fiefs, such as in a large part of Punjab, the undeniable fact is that for a fairly large section of the population concerned these slogans embodied their ideal.

The first prominent politician to realise the danger in placing total reliance on the religious card was none else than the Quaid-i-Azam himself. Three days before the date set for the realisation of his dream he decided to make a heroic break from the politics of the past decades. The task after the establishment of the state of Pakistan was to build a new nation on the basis of political, economic and legal equality of all citizens regardless of their belief which in any case was each citizen’s private matter, he now declared. At the same time, the religio-political elements that had opposed the Muslim League and had been routed by it realised that circumstances, especially the partition of provinces, offered them an opportunity to hijack the ship of the infant state. Thus began a race in which successive regimes have sworn fidelity to Jinnah and served the mandarins opposed to him. A perfect suicide construct, as some analysts say.

Those who bank on the Quaid’s speech of August 11, 1947, ignore the fact that a single address could not persuade the people to purge their minds of ideas and arguments thrown up not only during the communal confrontation in the subcontinent but which had been fertilising in the Muslim mind across the globe for a much longer period. The task of Pakistan-building defined by the Quaid on August 11, 1947, involved the establishment of a people’s democracy, to use a phrase first used by Mr. Jinnah. The course chosen by the Quaid was abandoned by the state soon after his death.

The Objectives Resolution of 1949 marked the beginning of the dual sovereignty idea though the resolution did not say so explicitly. The field was left open for the contenders for power to interpret the meaning of the delegation of Allah’s sovereign rights to the State of Pakistan through the people, even after the opening paragraph of the resolution had been amended by the authors of the 1973 Constitution. The 1956 constitution made all laws subject to two conditions – one, that no law that contravened the fundamental rights could be valid and, secondly, no law repugnant to the Islamic injunctions could be made and all existing laws that were repugnant to Islam were to be harmonised with its injunctions.

The balance was however in favour of the constitutional authority in as much as the courts could strike down any law or practice that contravened the fundamental rights, the laws attracting censure for repugnancy to Islam were to be examined by a commission on whose report the legislature was to take the corrective action. Under subsequent constitutions the task of testing the laws on the touchstone of belief was assigned to the body now called the Council of Islamic Ideology.

It was General Ziaul Haq who not only created a hierarchy of religious courts but also gave them a constitutional status and placed them at par with courts established under the constitution earlier. The transition to the theory of two sovereignties was complete. The general courts (so described for want of a better expression) could strike down laws on the ground of inconsistency with fundamental rights and the shariah courts could do the same if they found any law inconsistent with the ruling elite’s belief, which might or might not be Islamic.

Indeed, the shariah courts were put on a higher level than the general courts because they could not only strike down a law they could also tell the legislature how a law was to be revised, a power the older category of courts did not have.

Once the judicature had been reorganised to suit the theocratic elements the battle for enforcement of a regime based on dogma began. Gen. Zia introduced the 9th amendment but failed to get it passed before he died. The Nawaz Sharif government drafted the 15the amendment but it failed to get it adopted by parliament before it was overthrown. The task has now been assumed by the NWFP government that has been trying through its Hasba Bills to control and regiment the lives of the people, their culture and their thoughts.

During the latter half of the eighties a new idea for enforcing amr-bil-ma’aroof wa nahi-anil-munkir was introduced to Pakistan’s conservative lobby after the insertion of the blasphemy provision into the Penal Code. According to the groups dominant in Pakistan, apostasy is punishable with death and any Muslim is supposed to be free to act as the prosecutor, the judge and the executioner although no law permits this. This view was confirmed when a judge reprimanded a person for only accusing a man of blasphemy and not killing him.

The case of a non-Muslim does not fall in the category of apostasy and yet it has been assumed that a Pakistani Muslim has a right to execute a non-Muslim as well as a fellow Muslim by declaring him guilty of blasphemy.The state has been guilty of criminal inaction and silence over the actions taken by individuals under cover of belief. Zafar Iqbal died in jail in circumstances that suggested murder, the killer of Naimat Ahmar was lionised in prison, a blasphemy accused was killed in a Lahore prison, another was lynched by a mob in Gujranwala, and a third was killed by the policeman who was supposed to protect the wretch from the mob and take him to a lock-up.

The government’s failure to deal with defiance of law under the cover of dogma led to the formation of private courts in Malakand and FATA. It does not take ideas long to travel from Bajaur to Islamabad, and matters have reached a point where the state’s policy of drift was bound to take them. A call has gone out that the state has become dormant and since dogma is superior to law, every Muslim has a right to punish the wayward and the unwary.

A sizeable section of the people believes the establishment derives political benefit out of the extra-legal challenges to its authority launched by religious militants. The regime is said to be using the existence and apparent strength of the militants as an insurance on its survival and, what is obviously more important, its continued acceptability to the ultimate patrons and power brokers. If there is any substance in this view it is clear that the country’s future is being jeopardised for the sake of a few.

Be that as it may, the government’s resistance to the clerics’ designs on the state has been limited to some appeals to the judiciary to bail it out (such as the two references on the Hasba Bills and the appeal in the case about interest-based laws) or empty rhetoric about enlightened moderation. All this is no more than an apology for surrender to fanatics whose title to speak in the name of the people’s belief is extremely tenuous.

What the establishment has to realise is that religious militancy and all other belief-related ills have sprouted in the vacuum caused by the suppression of politics. A democratic polity is inconceivable without democratic politics whereas Pakistan’s rulers have been telling the people to be content with a quasi-democratic façade without any space for democratic politics. This is not to say that without authoritarian rulers bigotry could not have raised its head.

Democratically constituted regimes also commit grave wrongs, especially when they give up democratic politics, but the system offers possibilities of redress and reversal, whereas under authoritarian regimes change comes through upheaval and often when it is too late. And if the state allows only hate to be cultivated in its lands nobody can expect anything other than a bitter harvest.

The murder of cricket

By F.S. Aijazuddin


THE game of cricket was once a gentlemanly sport; it is now a blood sport. Gone are the days when it was played on an English village green on weekends if the sun was shining, gone the white flannels and red cricket balls, the high teas and cucumber sandwiches, gone the genteel murmurs of 'Bad luck' to a batsman returning to the pavilion.

Nowadays, cricket is played by professional pugilists who compete at any time of the day or night, in coloured uniforms emblazoned with sponsors' logos, watched not simply by the umpires in the field or the spectators in the stadium but by millions of television viewers across the globe.

Cricket today is more than a game; it is a transnational corporation, with interested stakeholders in every country and at every level, among them speculators prepared to stake fortunes on which team wins and which loses, which batsman scores a six or which bowler scalps a wicket. From being a genteel game, cricket has become big business and like any business, it is not for the fainthearted.

Initially, that was regarded as the cause of the sudden death of the Pakistan cricket team coach Bob Woolmer in his hotel room. It was assumed that he had been so mortified at the annihilation of his team at the hands of the West Indies and then by the green Irish that he suffered a heart attack. The implication was that like some noble Japanese samurai, he had sacrificed himself and died in shame.

Gradually though, as an investigation into the actual cause of his death deepened, it transpired that there was something ignoble about the tragic incident. The Jamaican police indicated first asphyxiation, then murder. Had the crime writer Agatha Christie been alive, she would have written a novel about it. The ingredients were all there – a dead body, a luxury hotel in the West Indies teeming with guests, high drama with even higher stakes, and a gang of suspects still on the scene of the crime.

The Pakistan cricket team, as if it had not been punished enough by defeats on the field, had to endure humiliation off the field with allegations of conspiracy. It was implied by their sudden detractors that they had somehow either individually or collectively had a hand in his death. Could it have been a reprise of Christie's novel 'Murder on the Orient Express' in which the victim is murdered not by one passenger but by everyone on the luxury train?

Those closer to the demoralised Pakistan cricket team knew that even though the players had all been cross-examined and fingerprinted, they were unlikely assassins. Players who had found it difficult to play as a coordinated team on the field were unlikely to collaborate in such a dangerous enterprise off it.

The disappointing performance of the Pakistan cricket team had a parallel in the inept manner with which the Jamaican authorities conducted their investigations. Details were secreted to the international press, enough to titillate the tabloids but never enough to inform or satisfy the genuinely curious.

Perhaps the most startling retention by the investigators was of the CCTV footage in the hotel that must have monitored every floor of the hotel. One would have imagined that such video footage would have been the first piece of evidence to be examined to ascertain who had visited Bob Woolmer's room and when, assuming that he or they had not entered through a balcony window.

CCTV cameras in hotels today are the equivalent of the stocky Russian war-widows who used to be employed by the Soviets to sit at the end of each corridor in Russian hotels, glum-faced and sharp-eyed, watching and reporting on every movement to their KGB superiors. They have been replaced by technology, but by all accounts of the Jamaican police, the footage made available to them is hardly worth the money spent in installing it. So, it could in fact be anyone of the known residents or any of the thousand transient guests who were in the hotel on that fateful night.

What it is clear, even if they themselves are not, is that our Pakistani players are not prime suspects. They have been allowed to leave Bermuda for the infinitely worse punishment of a kangaroo court in Pakistan. Fans who would ordinarily have welcomed them with garlands when they landed at our airports thrust mobile phones in their faces, hoping to catch even a blurred image of their discomfiture.

For all of them it has been an ignominious, humiliating return. For Inzamanul Haque, once the unassailable Brian Lara of Pakistani cricket, it has been a particularly bitter and heart-wrenching abortion of a career. Takht ya takhta, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb had once described the vertical line between the throne and the grave. From Hero to Zero is the equivalent, modern hazard.

Inzi and his boys deserve better. They went to the World Cup to play on behalf of our country. They deserved our support when they succeeded, and need it all the more so now that they have failed, for their failure is our national failure. Victory may have a thousand fathers. Failure in this case has 160 million orphans.

Does cricket have any future in Pakistan, or have we ploughed up the pitch of our international reputation once and for all?

One has only to go to any open area or any city or village in Pakistan on a weekend or a holiday, to stop at any grassy or grassless patch, and one can witness the natural vitality and talent that is the breeding ground of our national and international cricketers. To vilify the present Pakistan cricket team is to demoralise every future generation of Pakistani cricketers.

In 1992, when our Pakistan cricket team won the World Cup at Melbourne under the captainship of Imran Khan, he was handed the crystal bowl trophy by the English cricketer Colin Cowdery. "You won't drop it, will you?" Cowdery said, patronisingly.

The reputation of Pakistani cricket, like some crystal cup, has fallen and shattered. It is time for all of us to pick up its pieces and reassemble our national sense of dignity and pride in a game that cannot be allowed to die with Bob Woolmer.

‘Long march’ to China’s interior

By Jason Subler


MAO Zedong and the Red Army once had a major base in the mountains not far from the town of Ji’an, but the mission Lin Yebiao and Zhuang Binguang are on has a decidedly capitalist objective.

Whereas Mao and his comrades retreated from the hills to avoid annihilation at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Lin and Zhuang are here to flee the cut-throat competition in Guangdong province, the economic powerhouse on the southern Chinese coast.

They and two other business partners used to run a small factory in the boom town of Shenzhen making shirts and other clothing, but with costs there rising, they just could not expand their business enough to stay in the game.

So they have come to scout out Ji’an, a small city in the province of Jiangxi, just inland from Guangdong.

“Guangdong is pretty complicated. There are lots of big companies. If you’re not big enough, the big ones will eat you up,” said Lin, 22, walking along a deserted road in an industrial park in the north of town, as workers in the neighbouring factories laboured over everything from cables to electric bikes.

“If we stayed there, we could probably only work for someone else,” he said.

It’s hardly just scrappy entrepreneurs like Lin and Zhuang who are looking to Ji’an and places like it as a refuge from the crowded conditions and higher costs on the coast.

NO MORE BROWNOUTS: In a new industrial park on the other side of town, Hong Kong electronics firm Red Board Ltd is digging into the red earth to build a plant that will be capable of churning out about $130 million worth of printed circuit boards a year by 2009.

Red Board is not fleeing Guangdong — it will keep its factory in the manufacturing hub of Dongguan, making the innards of everything from mobile phones to digital cameras.

But when it came time to expand, the company knew it had to look elsewhere, said Maurice Yip, the firm’s chief executive.

For one, the local government was increasingly frowning upon polluting industries like theirs, Yip said.

“The electricity and water supply is also very tight. We’ve been suffering a lot. Still today, we have to pay a premium for a guaranteed electricity supply,” he said.

Yip and his colleagues searched far and wide for a suitable location and settled on Ji’an, which falls about halfway between Guangdong and Shanghai, because it offered the right combination of low costs, convenient location and good transport links.

“The infrastructure that we are being provided is among the best that we saw. Things are ready. They need companies to come and use it,” Yip said.

He estimated that both power and water, which a factory like his consumes in vast amounts, cost about a fifth less in Ji’an than Dongguan — and the local government could promise an uninterrupted supply.

Cheap labour attracted Japanese electronics maker Uniden Corp., which in 2002 was one of the first foreign firms to set up shop in Ji’an, said Jun Sakamaki, head of its Jiangxi operations.

Sakamaki estimated that the gap in labour costs between Ji’an and Shenzhen, where Uniden has a big plant making cordless phones, had halved since then to about 25 per cent.

BETTER ROADS: Still, Uniden is giving Ji’an its vote of confidence by moving circuit board production into a new, bigger plant nearby.

The arrival of other high-tech companies brings promise of a broader supplier base, Sakamaki said, and the highways that now criss-cross Jiangxi have made shipping much easier.

“Before we had the expressway, it could take two or three days to go one way to Shenzhen during the rainy season,” he said.

That ever-expanding road network, along with low costs, is one of the advantages that Meng Jianzhu, Jiangxi’s top official, touts to lure investment to his province.

“We want to turn Jiangxi into a place that is a lowland in terms of business costs, a highland in terms of government services, and a happy land in terms of returns on investment,” Meng told reporters during the recent session of parliament.

Avinash Datta, president of Mahindra (China) Tractor Co, a joint venture between India’s Mahindra & Mahindra and a local industrial group in the provincial capital, Nanchang, said the local government actively sought feedback from investors.

One problem is that, even in the bigger city, it can be difficult to find skilled managerial staff, Datta said.

“You can’t ask a Shanghai guy to come — he won’t necessarily agree to come to live in Jiangxi, because clearly for him the opportunities are different in other places,” Datta said.

Back in Ji’an, the dark side of the boom was evident. One factory in an outlying district dumped black, untreated waste water into a local river that gave off a smell somewhere between burnt plastic and burning brake pads. That stream feeds into the Gan River, which is a tributary of the Yangtze.

“Five years ago you could swim in the river without any problem,” said one local man. “The local government doesn’t do anything about it because they’re only interested in tax money.”—Reuters

Failure of the occupation

By Max Hastings


EVERY now and again, grown-up people review their cherished opinions and prejudices. Does the evidence still stack up? Or are there grounds for thinking again? It seems especially important to do this at regular intervals with Iraq, because its fate is critical for the West.

Sceptics have for years been rehearsing a countdown to a day of doom. I am often among their number. But, as a compulsive consumer of the torrent of analysis and situation reports that comes out of Iraq, I sometimes shut my eyes and ask: is there a shred of hope?

Europeans are prone to think of the Americans who run the place as body-armoured oafs. If this was sometimes true in the past, it is certainly not so now. On the contrary, the US has belatedly entrusted the salvation of Iraq to its best and brightest - and I do not use that phrase pejoratively.

David Petraeus, who commands, is probably the cleverest and most imaginative general in the American army. He has assembled around himself a cluster of like-minded people, passionately committed to retrieving the country from the brink of disaster. Colonel HR McMaster, for instance, the most successful unit commander to have served in Iraq, was whisked back to Baghdad from an academic fellowship in London to join Petraeus's team.

Stephen Biddle, a civilian academic from the US Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of some outstanding papers on the country's plight, and was suddenly plucked out of Washington a fortnight ago to work 13 hours a day with Petraeus's brainstormers. Graeme Lamb, Petraeus's senior British deputy, is as able a soldier as the army has got.

Despite the latest Iraqi government figures showing civilian deaths up in March, the evidence is that Bush's "surge", entrusted to Petraeus's direction, is achieving real results. In Baghdad, there has been a dramatic fall in the rate of murders, suicide-bombings, insurgent attacks. Many Sunnis have become deeply hostile to the depredations of al-Qaeda’s foreign fighters. In some cases, Sunnis have taken violent action to expel or eliminate the intruders, whom they no longer want as allies.

Aided by much improved intelligence, so-called Tier One special forces -- of which almost one-third are British SAS -- have been carrying out intensive operations to "harvest" insurgent leaders. Hundreds have been captured or killed. The Americans have exchanged a policy of dispatching troops daily on armoured excursions from their huge bases for one of holding positions to provide visible security in the midst of Iraqi communities.

General Barry McCaffrey, a retired US officer fiercely critical of his nation's policies in Iraq, has just visited the country, seen all the top brass, and delivered a report to the US Military Academy at West Point. McCaffrey is full of praise for what Petraeus and his team are doing. He argues that there is now a slim chance of stabilising the country.

Yet everything turns not upon what Americans -- much less the British -- do, but upon Iraqis. "Reconciliation is the way out," writes the general. "There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable US force levels."

"Non-sustainable" applies, of course, to both the military and political constraints. Every senior officer engaged in Iraq knows that the British are easing out; the US army is stretched to its limits and beyond; the patience of Congress and the American people is ebbing fast.

It is common ground among all but irredeemable negativists that Petraeus's soldiers are doing better than anyone thought possible a year ago. Unfortunately, however, this is happening at three minutes to midnight. Pumpkin time is very close. Huge problems persist, first, with the paralysis of Iraqi rule. McCaffrey acknowledges "there is no function of government which operates across the nation".

Second, though progress is being made with training Iraqi soldiers and police, these are still a million miles from being sufficiently numerous, motivated, trained, or equipped to assume responsibility for the nation's security. McCaffrey calls for a hugely increased commitment to the forces: "We are still in the wrong ball park." ––Dawn/Guardian Service



© DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2007

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