The first black president

UNTIL the later part of the 20th century, the only blacks seen in the White House were cooks, butlers and ushers who were there to serve the president and his family. Any social visits were unheard of.

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, in an unprecedented move, asked Dr Booker Washington, president of a newly established black college at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, to visit him in the White House. Even more daring, the president invited him to stay for dinner with his family. As the news leaked out, it caused an outrage, prompting a newspaper editor in New Orleans to remark that the president had acted as if “the negro is the social equivalent of the white man.”

Since those dark days, America has taken impressive strides in achieving racial equality. A little over a century after Booker Washington’s controversial visit to the presidential mansion on Jan 20, 2009, an African-American, Barack Hussein Obama, was formally sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, the first non-white to occupy that office since the birth of the republic 220 years ago. Ironically, he and his family will be living in the majestic mansion, completed around 1800 and built largely by the labour of African-American slaves. While Barack Obama is not a descendant of slaves, his wife, Michelle Obama, is.

America got rid of the monarchy more than two centuries ago, yet, many of its trappings survive. The installation of an American president is more like the coronation of a king than the unobtrusive induction of a prime minister in a parliamentary democracy. For months, an Obama inauguration had evoked much anticipation and excitement, because of its unique historic nature. The extensive publicity given to the inauguration ceremony drew much business to Washington, a city with a population of less than 600,000. Hotel accommodation in the city and suburbs had long sold out, as an estimated two million visitors descended upon Washington. The public celebrations started several days before the event, with concerts, receptions and numerous inauguration balls enlivening the capital. On the day itself, huge crowds gathered along the parade route and the National Mall long before sunrise and waited for hours in the biting cold weather to watch the ceremony and the parade.

The swearing-in ceremony in the US capital observed a tradition set over two centuries ago which all presidents have followed. The only exceptions were the first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams. George Washington took his oath of office on April 30, 1789, in New York that at the time served as the temporary capital. His arrival at his inauguration, in keeping with the times, was much less spectacular than that of President Obama.

The proceedings started on Saturday with a ceremonial train ride from Philadelphia, following the example of Abraham Lincoln. Washington arrived at New York after several days, having travelled from his home in Virginia by coach, horseback and boat. He never lived in the White House, since it was still under construction. John Adams, who was installed in Philadelphia, the first capital of the country, briefly lived in the White House when the capital shifted to Washington in 1800.

Installation ceremonies have not always proved propitious. One of the past presidents, William Harrison, took his oath of office in 1841 in the open and without a coat or a hat as a fierce snowstorm raged across Washington. He took nearly two hours to deliver his inaugural address, unfortunately caught pneumonia in the process and died after serving for only one month — the shortest presidential term on record.

Traditionally, the bitterness generated during campaigns is forgotten soon after elections. In fact the sight of incoming and outgoing presidents driving together from the White House and appearing jointly at the swearing-in ceremony at the US Capitol powerfully showcases the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, the hallmark of a democratic system. However, John Adams, who lost his bid for re-election in 1800, was so unhappy with the outcome that he did not bother to show up at the inauguration of his successor, Thomas Jefferson. He left Washington in the dark the night before the ceremony by a horse-drawn carriage for his home town in Massachusetts. The ceremony went ahead without him.

The parades, inaugural balls and much of the pomp and ceremony are over. Now, the new president faces the reality of serious national and international problems left behind by his predecessor. Of immediate concern is the searing economic crisis the country is facing; nothing like it has been experienced since the days of the Great Depression in the early thirties. Although President Obama did not discuss his vision of the country’s foreign policy since his election, he has started to do so early in his term. Some of the promises made during the campaign, such as the closure of Guantanamo Bay detention facility and outlawing of torture, have already received presidential sanction. Plans for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq already appear to be under way. While increasing the number of forces in Afghanistan, the new president will explore new avenues to defeat the Taliban insurgency there. There are indications that President Obama intends to appoint high-powered, special envoys to address the Middle East conflict and tensions between India and Pakistan.

Few presidents in history have embarked upon their terms of office with the same reservoir of goodwill and optimism as Mr Obama. However, the coming 12 months are crucial as they are likely to indicate whether or not his presidency will be successful and transformational.

Higher education crisis

PAKISTAN inherited a colonial university system created by the British. The cardinal features of this system were that it was under-financed, bureaucratic, mediocre and teaching- (rather than research-) oriented.

The best graduates entered the colonial bureaucracy and the rest took up teaching. The colleges received the worst. The universities, though not much better, did have a couple of good scholars and scientists who were attracted to the job in spite of the system and not because of it.

In terms of figures, 2.6 per cent university-age students attended institutions of higher education in 2001. Only 23 per cent of the faculty had doctorates and not a single university was among the top 500 universities of the world. Then came the year 2002 when a quiet revolution occurred in the universities. First, the budget went up by 340 per cent in real terms from 2001 to 2006, bringing 39 per cent of the students into universities which expanded from 18 to 124 and more.

While this increase in numbers was at the cost of quality, certain other programmes of the Higher Education Commission — the body which had spearheaded these changes — were excellent. For instance, over 3,755 students were sent abroad to obtain their PhDs and over 20,000 journals and 45,000 e-books were made available through the digital library in Pakistani universities.

The salaries of academics were made so competitive that the best of them chose to stay in public universities. If these high salaries (under the Tenure Track System) had not been put in place, public universities would have lost good professors to the private sector.

But then came 2008 and, just as we were expecting to ‘take off’, the HEC’s own recurring grant was slashed by 23 per cent, and in early 2009, by another 20 per cent. Considering that inflation has gone up by 21.6 per cent and fuel prices by 66 per cent, universities would be forced to cut down on even essential expenses. The dream of sending PhD candidates every year to foreign countries will remain just that.

Moreover, who knows whether a good faculty will join the public universities considering that our TTS salaries are in jeopardy. In short, we were grounded before we took off.

Why I contend that we could have taken off is because our publications increased from 815 in 2002 to 2,495 in 2008. Admittedly, all these publications are not so good as to be cited but even the citations have grown in these few years. We have video-conferencing facilities in 42 universities and about 1,020 events have been arranged so far. Nor is our work irrelevant to national needs. Indeed, the research on gemstones (Peshawar), science (Quaid-i-Azam University), engineering and agriculture has commercial applications.

There is no doubt that some projects of the HEC were seriously flawed. I am not a scientist but I am told that some scientific equipment was either not required or useless. This mistake needs to be rectified in future but it does not mean that all projects should be frozen.

My personal critique has always been that the public sector universities need not have expanded to 67 from about 12 or so. Putting ‘university boards’ in colleges and in under-developed towns does not turn educational institutions into universities. It only bestows undeserved vice chancellorships on well-connected people and creates degree-giving factories.

The percentage of students enrolled in Egypt is 40, in Turkey 32, in India 12, and Bangladesh seven. Our own figure hovers around five per cent.

However, one can enroll students in university-colleges, teaching universities or just post-graduate colleges. The problem is that when all universities are theoretically equal then resources are distributed so thinly that no world-class university can be created. This was the HEC’s greatest blunder. It spread scarce resources too widely instead of creating just a couple of world-class universities to begin with.

Secondly, the HEC created an indigenous PhD programme in which supervisors and students were both paid. On the face of it, this appears to have been a good incentive but actually the 3,500 students in this programme are of unequal quality. The doctorates given to them, especially in the social sciences and humanities, are also not of standard quality.

If they join the faculty we will be saddled with mediocrity for a quarter of a century at least. Had the HEC spent all its funds only to send young people abroad it would have been better. The irony now is that the sending of students abroad for a PhD has been suspended while the indigenous PhD goes on.

Can something be done? Most certainly yes! Pakistan spent 2.44 per cent of its GDP in 2007-08 on education out of which the share of higher education was 15.6 per cent. This is not excessive as Iran spent 4.7 per cent, India 3.8 per cent, Maldives 7.5 per cent and even Nepal spent 3.4 per cent.

Actually, in real terms, we spend Rs21,063 per student per year in 2001-02 while now this figure has gone up to Rs22,059. If the government whittles down the expenditure on higher education by another 20 per cent the universities will stop dead in their tracks and the 293 development projects the HEC has on the cards will vanish into thin air.

Meanwhile, India is all set to create 12 central universities in addition to its existing 18 ones. This will cost Rs3,280 crores ($73m). India already has Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). Their number too will be increased. There will be 30 world-class universities; eight new IITs and seven new IIMs. The salaries of academics will also be increased by 70 per cent which, however, will be less than our TTS scales.

I do not know enough about India to be able to say whether these huge increases will dilute the standards of good universities, IITs and IIMs. As it is, none of India’s 348 universities is in the top 100 universities of the world. If India is serious about creating some world-class universities it will have to concentrate resources on a few big cities and not spread them out too thin. Be that as it may, the lesson for us is that India is continuing with what we too started doing since 2002 i.e. paying academics better and improving its universities.

I believe we should go on doing what we began but focus only on a few universities. The HEC should create a few world-class universities with TTS salary academics promoted on the basis of excellent research. Every young entrant in these universities should be sent abroad for a PhD, and state-of-the-art laboratories and libraries should be created. These world-class universities should admit students only on merit after very stringent tests.

Other universities, university-colleges and colleges should cater for the increasing number of mediocre students who too need degrees and jobs. But for all this, the HEC needs money and recognition. So, while no institution is above criticism and correction, starving the HEC of funds just when the universities are beginning to take off would be a colossal folly.

A sign of Indian maturity

INDIANS — and I daresay Pakistanis as well — are touchy about foreigners commenting on them or their country, whether it is in the form of a film or a book.

Ironically, however, many of these very films or books have actually benefited India. I shall mention some (there are many) here to make my point.

The first is Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, a magnificent film now recognised as a classic, on the founder and moving spirit of the Indian nation, the saintly Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It was a huge critical and box-office success, winning several Academy Awards, including best actor for Ben Kingsley’s riveting performance as Mahatma Gandhi. It was also great propaganda for India (a film was also made on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, with the same intention, but it was not nearly as successful).

On my travels I have met many people whose main knowledge about India and Gandhi is through Attenborough’s iconic film. And there are others who have come to India only because they liked the film so much. So, India should be thankful to Attenborough. No such luck. Believe it or not, Attenborough almost never made the film, such was the opposition in India to a ‘foreigner’ depicting Gandhi on the screen. It was only Indira Gandhi’s support for Attenborough’s venture that saw the film through.

Ditto with Freedom at Midnight, a stirring account of how India got its independence, co-authored by a Frenchman, Dominique Lapierre, and an American, Larry Collins. How dare a Frenchman and an American write such a book, said the so-called Indian ‘nationalist’ critics, while picking all kinds of imaginary holes in the narrative. One reviewer even questioned the authenticity of the account in the book of how Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, slept with the airhostess whom he met on his flight to Delhi — until Lapierre pointed out that this was based on a report by the Indian police which Indian historians themselves had not bothered to read!

The book sold millions of copies, was translated into several languages and brought tens of thousands of curious foreign tourists to India. If anything, the co-authors should have been honoured by the Indian government. Another book by Lapierre on Calcutta, City of God, got such a hostile reception from some Bengalis that it was almost banned, despite the writer having dedicated his royalties to help the city’s poor.

We Indians — and I suspect Pakistanis, too — are pretty ungracious and thin-skinned when it comes to outsiders depicting us, even sympathetically. Which brings me to the most recent controversy surrounding the film, Slumdog Millionaire. It is the biggest thing to happen to India since Gandhi won 10 Oscar nominations. Though the film’s director is British, its subject is very much Indian: the country’s financial capital and the recent victim of a terror attack, Mumbai. More specifically, it is Dharavi, the city’s — in fact, Asia’s — largest slum, a cesspool of poverty and crime, but also a beacon of hope for some.

Slumdog Millionaire, based on a book, Q&A, by Vikas Swarup, a diplomat who is currently India’s high commissioner in South Africa, revolves around the popular TV show, ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’. It tells the rags-to-riches story of a poor slum-dweller, Jamal Malik (played by UK-born actor Dev Patel), who overcomes adversity to become the winner of the quiz show. The female lead is Freida Pinto, a Mumbai-based model.

Apart from the film itself, it’s the music that has created the most waves. The composer is the painfully shy 38-year-old A.R. Rahman, whom Time magazine once dubbed as “the Mozart of Madras”. His is a remarkable story. Born Dileep Kumar, his father, a film music composer, died when Dileep was only 11. The family was thrown into dire poverty, son and mother trying to eke out a living and Dileep dropping out of school. Then, a Sufi pir visited the family and their fortunes changed for the better.

When he was 21, Dileep and his family converted to Islam, he taking the name Allah Rakha Rahman. The same year, director Mani Ratnam, commissioned him to write the score for his film, Roja. The music, with its magical blend of various influences (a major one being that of the late Pakistani singer and composer, Nusrat Fateh Ali) stunned Indians. A succession of successful scores followed. Today, Rahman is widely considered the best film composer the country has ever produced. More significantly perhaps, his music, with elements of pop, blues, African beats, jazz, Indian classical, hip-hop, rap, opera, sufi, Arabian sounds and folk, transcends national boundaries, making him universal. That is his true genius.

But there always has to be a spoiler in India and it came in the form of icon Amitabh Bachchan. In his blog, he said, “Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a Third World, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots”, while adding, self-righteously, “Let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.”

Bachchan has since then backtracked, saying rather defensively that his words were “misinterpreted” and blown out of proportion. Even more surprisingly, very few Indians have supported Bachchan, an icon otherwise. I find that to be a positive sign that India is changing for the better. Some years back, the film would have been widely condemned, perhaps even banned in India. Today, it is cause for celebration, “dirty underbelly” notwithstanding. Perhaps India has finally begun to mature.

The writer is a former editor of the Reader’s Digest and Indian Express.

singh.84@hotmail.com

8,000 dead: is the world aware?

THE statistics are numbing and mind-boggling and should make any Pakistani sit up: in 2008 the country saw 2,148 terrorist attacks, which caused 6,825 casualties — 2,267 of them fatal.

Suicide attacks alone killed nearly 1,000 people — 967 to be precise — and wounded or maimed for life over 2,000. Of the 63 suicide attacks countrywide, the highest — 32 — occurred in the NWFP, killing and wounding over 1,000 Pakistanis; 10 in Punjab (201, dead, 580 injured), and 16 in Fata (263 dead, 497 injured).

Compiled by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, these statistics do not include those who fell in ‘operational attacks’. According to the think-tanks’ report for 2008, more than 5,500 people were killed or injured in operational attacks (a minimum of 3,182 dead and 2,267 wounded).

What is scary is the steady rise over the years in the number of terrorist attacks and the consequent increase in casualties. In 2006, terrorist attacks left 907 dead and 1,543 injured; in 2007 there was a quantum jump in the figure for the dead — 3,448.

If to those killed in acts of terrorism we add those who died in operational attacks, sectarian and factional clashes and US drone attacks, the total number of civilians and security personnel killed in 2008 comes to a morbid 8,000, with the number of the injured approaching 10,000. The grand total for 2008, thus, comes to 18,000 Pakistani people getting killed or injured in acts of political violence.

Is the world aware of this Pakistani trauma? Going by the doubts cast on our commitment to fight terrorism and the ‘do more’ litany one doubts if we have been able to inform the world what this country and its people have been going through for years. In fact, it appears as if, barring US Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Richard Lugar in America and Foreign Secretary David Miliband in Britain, very few top personalities in the policymaking apparatus in the western world seem to be aware of Pakistan’s plight and the scourge which terrorism has become for us Pakistanis in our daily lives.

Our post-Mumbai diplomatic effort has not been all disaster. It did indeed succeed in convincing the world diplomatic community that Islamabad was not involved in the Mumbai crime. However, Pakistan’s advocacy of its case was characterised by diffidence. It failed to show our justifiable anger over India’s attempt to obfuscate the issue, and often we appeared to be pleading rather than telling.

Has India suffered anything even remotely resembling Pakistan’s trauma as seen in the cold statistics above? The answer is no, but the world evidently doesn’t think so. What the world does is to view the situation in terms of the ‘safe haven’ which is supposed to exist in Fata and elsewhere for the Taliban. That deprives us of the sympathy we deserve.

Luckily for Pakistan, and thanks to the Indian leaders’ obsessions, New Delhi bungled the job from its point of view. India, it became obvious to the world, was seeking international help not against terrorism but for advancing its national interests at Pakistan’s expense. It could have garnered world sympathy if in the aftermath of the Mumbai crisis New Delhi had worked patiently, curbed its anti-Pakistan instincts, focused on terrorism and refrained from launching a diplomatic and media drive aimed at isolating Pakistan. Instead it went over to an unthinking offensive that backfired, Miliband’s plain-speaking coming as a shock to India.

Pakistan must stay the course. The anti-American lobby’s slogans are catchy but hollow. Pulling out of the war on terror could do incalculable damage to Pakistan’s security concerns and come as a godsend for our enemies. Prejudices have no place in the conduct of war and foreign policy. Pakistan cannot afford to be without allies, even if the behaviour of some of our allies doesn’t come up to our expectations, just as ours doesn’t up to theirs. With the change in the White House, we need to exercise greater care and watch. Initial moves aren’t discouraging. The Biden-Lugar bill isn’t everything, but it does show an inkling of the new administration’s mind.