Revisiting our colonial legacy

NOW that we are once again embarked upon restructuring our polity, but don’t quite know which way to go, a look at our colonial past may provide a measure of enlightenment.

In the non-western world, colonialism denotes despotism, exploitation, economic and educational stagnation, and indignity that the Europeans imposed on many of the Asian and African peoples. The British, however, would appear to have been more enlightened than the other imperial powers, and one may argue that some of the legacy they left us deserves to be valued and saved. But let us first acknowledge its reprehensible parts.

The British ruled India through a combination of intrigue and force. They responded to revolts, and sometime even minor defiance, with ruthless harshness. They regulated industry and trade to allow their own merchants to buy cheap and sell dear in India. Indian soldiers, paid only a pittance, fought British wars in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Great Britain’s control of India’s material and human resources enabled it to act as a world power on a scale that would not have been possible otherwise.

While the East India Company ruled, many of the British officials and merchants in India showed considerable receptivity to the local cultures. They socialized with the natives of their rank and status, wore Indian dress on occasion, listened to Indian music and a few read and wrote Urdu poetry. But all of this changed when Company rule yielded to the Queen’s government in London following the “mutiny” of 1857.

British personnel segregated themselves and, as a matter of policy, excluded Indians from places of their own social gathering. For the most part — possibly barring anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and other scholars — they thought of Indians as belonging to inferior races, held their cultures in low esteem, and were arrogant, at best condescending, towards them.

They relented to a degree when they encountered Indians who were their equals or superiors in intellectual and/or professional capacities. I doubt that British officials, including governors and viceroys, were arrogant or condescending towards Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Rabindranath Tagore, Allama Iqbal, and other Indian politicians or intellectuals of high stature. It may incidentally be noted, however, that their inclination was not much different from that of the native ruling classes towards their subordinates (Brahmin vis-a-vis the “untouchable” and the typical feudal lord in relation to his peasants).

Now to the good part. First and foremost, by their very presence and modes of work, they pulled India out of the medieval age to some degree, and made an opening for it to enter the modern world. To this end they brought in western science and technology; established industry and banking, built roads, railways, a postal and telegraph system, and a vast network of irrigation canals; modernized the organization and equipment of the armed forces; and, when the time came, generated electric power, and introduced the Indian people to the products of modern technology.

More important than the above, the British established an extensive system of modern education. It may be interesting to recall that in the early 1920s no more than a score of Indonesians, under Dutch rule, had attended a European type of high school in their own country, and even fewer Vietnamese under French rule had done so. A group of the more prosperous Vietnamese families sent their young people to Japan for education, but the French authorities persuaded the Japanese government to send them back to Vietnam.

By contrast, at this time, tens of thousands of Indians went to colleges and universities that offered education in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, and the hard sciences. The British were somewhat niggardly in providing technological and professional education, but by the time they left almost every province in India had schools of law, medicine, engineering, commerce, agriculture and animal husbandry. There were even a few schools for things such as forestry and mining.

In this education system, just as important as the substantive content was the methodology of generating knowledge, called the “scientific method.” It also acquainted a substantial number of Indians with the English language, which gave them access to further developments in various fields of knowledge as they materialized in the West.

On the other hand, it should be noted also that the British went almost out of their way to highlight and, in some cases, revive aspects of India’s own cultural heritage. They established the Fort Williams College in Calcutta (now Kolkata) which did much to invigorate the native languages. Urdu prose flourished and new forms of creative expression — short story, novel, and drama — became part of it. Even Urdu poetry accepted certain English influences. With the encouragement of British scholars, Sanskrit came to life again. Persian and Arabic continued to be taught in schools and colleges. With the unveiling of Harappa and Moenjodharo, British archaeologists and anthropologists gave India a larger awareness of itself as a civilization.

A great number of British civil servants and army officers wrote memoirs, recounting their experience during their service in India. Many others wrote investigative reports, in the form of books, describing the land, its resources, the people, their social structure, customs, and power relationships in great detail. I have read Richard Burton’s book on Sindh -written when he was still a relatively young army officer — more than once, and each time I have been amazed at the man’s erudition and the depth of his knowledge of the area, including its languages.

In the area of governance, the British forged an elaborate structure at the central, provincial, district, and municipal levels with specific functions assigned to departments, directorates, bureaus, and other agencies at the headquarters and out in the field. They established a bureaucracy consisting of generalists and specialists, placed in a hierarchical order, with specified functions and responsibilities, working according to stipulated procedures, with their compensation and advancement governed by established rules. In another area, they devised codes of civil and criminal law and procedure, and established a system of courts and judges placed, once again, in a hierarchical order.

Three aspects of this enterprise merit attention. First, it highlighted the idea that the purpose of government is not only to collect revenues, suppress revolts, and catch thieves and robbers, but also to provide a variety of services to the people. Second, the rule of law applied to high and low, ruler and subject. It allowed an approved measure of “discretion” to higher officials, but it excluded arbitrariness from governance. All must follow the law, rules, and established procedures.

Third, the system institutionalized the merit principle in the appointment and promotion of public servants. It should be emphasized that the British sent their brighter young men, not the “run of the mill,” to enter the higher civil service in India. They instituted exceedingly tough competitive examinations (in which entrants usually possessed a level of competence comparable to that of the holders of an honours degree from Oxbridge) for appointments to the Indian Civil Service. They did so even before they established a similar system for recruitment to the “Administrative Class” in their home civil service.

In still another sphere, the British allowed the rudiments of a democratic political culture to emerge. Initially the Congress and the Muslim League surfaced with British encouragement, and later many other political parties came into being. Elections, albeit with limited franchise, were held, and they were not rigged. Legislative assemblies, and councils (with circumscribed authority) at the central, provincial, and local levels functioned.

The scope of democratic politics expanded with time, but the important point is that the idea of the government’s accountability to the people’s representatives began to enter our political consciousness. Native politicians were able to criticize the government, and later to denounce the very existence of British rule in India (acts for which they would have been beheaded in earlier, pre-British times). The right to oppose the government of the day is then another good thing we learned during British rule.

Lastly, for now, the British reawakened in our minds the distinction between the public and private realms and the related principle that public revenues were to be spent for public purposes as authorized by law, and that they were not the ruler’s personal possession which he could disburse as he might wish. I will not dwell on this matter here since I have discussed it in some detail earlier in this space.

Could we not have learned and adopted all of the above even if the British had never come to India? One way of dealing with this issue is to ask if any of the Muslim or Hindu rulers in India during the eighteenth or even the early nineteenth century understood modernization or entertained the thought of introducing it in their administrations. I cannot think of any.

Another way may be to ask how modernization fared in our neighbourhood — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt — where the British did not rule directly. It is beyond doubt that India and Pakistan, at the time of their independence, were far more advanced in all of the spheres mentioned above than any of these other countries. Try to imagine whither our region and people might have gone if the likes of Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi, successors of Ranjit Singh in Punjab and the North West Frontier area, and those of the Amirs of Sindh had continued to rule.

That we have let go of the more valuable parts of the British legacy is something to bemoan, not anything to celebrate. Our mission should be to recover it and adopt its essentials if we are to break the vicious circle of decay and degradation in which we have been caught for the last several decades, and if we are to go forward in this world.

Sectarian element in politics

IN AN atmosphere in which the electoral plans of the first-ranking political parties are still riven by doubt and division, an alliance of religious parties (Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal) has chosen to lead the October campaign.

Their train march, despite the push given to it by the government by banning it, has sputtered to a stop without breathing life into a generally feckless electioneering. The MMA is said to be the first of its kind that has vowed to outlive the stresses of the contest and its outcome. For good reason, scepticism outside its ranks abounds. Leaving aside the sparse electoral support the constituent parties have demonstrated in the past, their schism is thick and rooted in history. Political differences lend themselves to compromise but not the religious dogma. Rarer still is the political expediency leading to sectarian unity.

The main plank of the alliance’s programme is to make Pakistan into an Islamic state and to prevent its slide into secularism. The first question for it to grapple with therefore would be to agree on a truly Islamic state since the advent of Islam, for Pakistan cannot be the first to define or invent one. In other worlds, there must be a precedent in history to emulate.

The views on it are many and diverse. The only model of Islamic governance on which all divines and sects agree is the one during the life-time of the Holy Prophet. Most also include in it the 30 years of the republic (the caliphate) from 632 to 661 A.D. Some extend it to the period of Ummayad caliph Umar bin Abdulaziz. There are others indulgent enough to stretch it to cover the latter-day rules of Salahuddin Ayubi of Damascus, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni’s conquest of India and last of the great Mogul emperors, Aurangzeb.

Then there is the overarching yet impracticable view in the present era of nation-states that khilafat is a necessary part of the Islamic form of government and there can be but one khalifa of all Muslims on earth.

In the contemporary world, some political elements also look upon Saudi Arabia as an Islamic state despite the fact that it is ruled by a monarch drawing his support from a clan with minimal involvement of the common people in the making of the laws and public policy. Its Islamic character is seen more in its punitive rather than social justice.

When the Taliban had subdued most of Afghanistan and imposed on it a peace of the victors through harsh and arbitrary decrees, Maulana Samiul Haq (his faction of JUI forms a part of the MMA) saw in it an end to Pakistan’s dilemma about what kind of an Islamic polity it should be. ‘Just follow the Taliban,’ was the Maulana’s advice. That sentiment found an echo in the MMA’s meeting in Karachi when its leaders blamed the Americans and their puppets for destroying the puritanical order of the Taliban and sending Afghanistan reeling back into anarchy — the target being Islam and not terrorism.

It is an irony of Pakistan’s politics that the religious groups, all put together, which in the past four elections had polled less than five per cent of the votes cast have been the first to forge a united front and lead the election campaign. Is it their assessment that the mounting religious violence, mass murder of the minorities and hostility on the borders have earned them both respect and votes?

Or do they imagine that the people, disenchanted with the established political forces — PPP and Muslim League — and the army alike, would now give the neo-religious elements a chance, howsoever bizarre might be their ideas of governance (the Taliban being the model of a just Islamic rule) or of the economy (all relations with the World Bank, IMF, WTO will be severed) or of foreign policy inspiration will be drawn from Makkah and Madina and not Washington and London — little realizing that the rulers of Makkah-Madinah themselves are firmly entrenched in the Anglo-American camp).

None of these expectations are rooted in reality. In fact, religion in politics has wreaked such great havoc with public safety and justice that spurning the subsequent interpolations, the people of Pakistan now, one and all, endorse the principle laid down by the founder of the country on the eve of its creation that “religion or caste or creed has nothing to do with the business of the state.” This being the case, people are least likely now to permit the priests to run the state.

Going by its past performance and current reckoning, the clerical class stands not a ghost of a chance to come into power through elections — in October or at any time in the future. The people would not ever believe in the unrealistic promises they might make like reducing the electricity rates to one-fourth of the present when “Wapda and the KESC already run deficits of scores of billions, or to confiscate feudal lands for distribution among the peasantry.

But the rhetoric from the hustings and their doctrines on human rights and equality of citizens can cause enormous set-backs to the national image and economy. One the social plane, an acknowledged mufti has ruled that the utensils of the non-Muslims must not mix with that of the faithful. It leaves one wondering whether our maulanas on their frequent sojourns to Europe carry their own utensils. All this sounds more abominable than India’s caste untouchability.

The emergence of a theocracy, which is hostile to the other faiths and also have no significant adherents among the Muslims, can be a catastrophe much worse than a military dictatorship. An order based on such obscurantist political and social ideas can be justifiably viewed by the world more as theocratic than Islamic. Yet the view of our exponents of the Islamic state that its opposite means an irreligious state is universally rejected.

A secular state, Maulana Asa’ad Madni of India said at JUI’s convention in Peshawar some months ago, does not mean a state without religion but a state for all religions. An Islamic state which falls short of its pristine model, as it must in a sect-ridden Pakistan, is bound to be a theocracy or a tyranny which permits neither political dissent nor freedom of conscience.

The poor of this country have endured enormous hardships to bring its economy to the level of a passable investment rating. China gets foreign investment of 50 billion dollars a year, Pakistan just half a billion. The vast gap can be bridged only by keeping superstition, deception and bombast out of statecraft.

Once upon a sea...

JAMES Glennie, a British auction house cataloger, was combing through a Norfolk mansion this summer when he spotted a small, framed document hanging in a dark corner of the library. It was an original expense account from a 1776 voyage of Capt. James Cook.

An interesting discovery about the discoverer. Then Glennie’s hand grazed something. He turned the frame over. He pried a bit. What he uncovered tells an old story, fascinating even in an age of e-mail.

Secretly hanging for unknown decades in that country house was a handwritten, 231-year-old letter from Cook to the British Admiralty with first news of the safe return of his HMS Endeavour from a perilous three-year exploration of the South Pacific, including Australia’s discovery. Written in his distinctive florid script upon sighting British shores, Cook’s missive was rushed to shore by passing fishermen.

The letter, to be auctioned Dec. 17 by London’s Bonhams Auctioneers, reported the status of the Endeavour and its crew (30 percent died of malaria and dysentery contracted in Indonesia) and presaged recognition of the thorough navigation, seamanship and science of an explorer whose lonely voyages from Newfoundland to Antarctica, from Alaska to Botany Bay, completely redrew the known world.

A farmer’s son, the astute Cook apprenticed on North Sea merchantmen. His charting and navigational acumen helped ensure Britain’s victory over France in Quebec, which changed North American history. Cook’s voyages in wooden boats little longer than a tractor-trailer chronicled Australia, Antarctica, Asia, northwest America, numerous Pacific islands and cultures and debunked the myth of a Northwest Passage over North America.

His pioneering collections and reports on exotic plant life shaped biology; his suspicions and experiments about nutrition conquered scurvy. After wandering terra incognita as no man before then, Cook died in a 1779 skirmish with Hawaiian natives caught stealing a royal rowboat. His mutilated body was buried in the sea he lived his life upon.

Of course, if Capt. Cook had e-mail, the world then could have learned of those journeys instantly on, say, www.captcook.com and discussed his discoveries in online chat rooms (“Cook rules!” “You go, Jim!”) with pop-up cell phone and mortgage ads. Who wants to read an actual non-laser-quilled letter from the 18th century and conjure images of its adventures? With today’s technology, we could have simply deleted those useless old letters and reports and been done with them, as we do so routinely and ruthlessly in our everyday life now. What can old stories teach the residents of future times about the human spirit anyway? —Los Angeles Times

The three-year itch

EVERY three years we suffer a political itch. Like a patient with bedsores, the body politic heaves from left to right and back again to the previous discomfort. We are a traumatized nation. We yearn for an unknown peace to descend on us.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz expresses this mood to perfection: “Jaisey beemaar ko bey vajh qarrar aa jaey”. The comfort of “qarrar” eludes us. Our nation, driven in diverse directions, is loath to accept any government in power for more than three years.

We lurch from a sickening spectacle of civilian rule — full of greed, theft, misrule, bombast and civilian dictatorship wearing the clothes of dubious legality — to the illegitimacy of military rule, which may be honest, clean and goal-oriented as compared to its political predecessor, but bringing in train its own heavy baggage of a different sort.

Being a centralized one-unit rule, alienation grows like a weed from sub-nationalism to a quasi-nationalism. It loosens the sinews of the federation. This is skating on thin ice in a world increasingly accepting ethnicity as an ideology in this century.

Each ruler from Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad to President General Pervez Musharraf has broken our Basic Law. The military rulers change the Basic Laws with flat bits of paper known as Legal Framework Orders (LFOs) or presidential orders (P.O. 14 of 1985), the civilian rulers by breaking the rules (technically known as “suspending parliamentary procedure”) or by passing constitutional amendments within minutes without debate, taking as legal sanction a forest of raised hands — greedy dirty hands — at the command of a Caesar from under whose feet the rug would soon be pulled, and, in one tragic case he would be on the hangman’s platform.

Why is it so? Each ruler, irrespective of his caste marks, wishes to build an extra cushion to stay in power — just a little longer, ‘another few years’, till the holes in the ship of state have been closed, till the institutions are in place to avoid mega corruption, to implant democracy into our hearts, or to make us into a true Islamic republic and so on. These are of course subterfuges encapsulated in the famous words of Lord Acton: that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

I count President General Musharraf as a friend — straightforward, clean, clear-headed and honest. He has no sticky fingers. Not in living memory have we had an administration which is seen to be transparent and honest at the highest levels and surprisingly more tolerant of dissent than our fabled democrats. For three years many of our rank corrupt have been deservedly facing accountability courts.

Never in our brief history has the day of reckoning come so fast and even-handedly for our bad eggs. No doubt, the accountability is perceived to be askew; there are aberrations. But the engine of accountability has been set in motion and it cannot be pulled back. Like a giant spider it will in due course entangle those left out.

What are President Musharraf’s options? One would have thought that his best option was to have completed the jobs that he had assigned to himself without the distractions of a referendum and naked political ambition. Hold fair elections, bar the corrupt and quit. In this respect, President Musharraf has chosen “to save the nation” in exactly the same way as our previous military rulers did. Is it not best to sail into the sunset on a high tide?

Under the ‘quit’ option President Musharraf would have stood infinitely taller than any of his predecessors — civil or military. In middle age he would have been the ‘grand old man’ of our political estate. He would have had the political parties running after him to remain as president. He could have laid down his terms. Had he then said that his basic terms were the constitutional withdrawal of the 13th Amendment, restitution of Article 58 (2) (b) and the formation of the National Security Council (NSC) and a four-year assembly span as constitutional amendments passed by parliament, the politicians in power might have been persuaded to consider that realpolitik, demanded a permanent consensus, not permanent confrontation. Each country has its own political ethos, its own political culture. Political theories are for the birds; the thin air has little knowledge of ground reality.

But, this was not to be. The roles have been reversed. And the consequences will be what they will be.

What does democracy mean to our democrats? Till a year ago most of our uneducated mulla zealots were clamouring for some type of Taliban rule in Pakistan; the more learned cannot agree on what Islamization means in the context of a modern society. Those who wanted socialism in the past are not heard of any longer. For a run-of-the-mill politician what matters is pomp, pelf and power; in this respect most politicians are seekers of this triple P.

Political theory holds that the people are ‘bashaoor’ — the depository of public wisdom. The Swiss and British governments have handed to the ‘bashaoor’ people of this country the ‘smoking gun’ evidence of something like two billion dollars worth of traced foreign assets (one billion equals 1,000 million dollars, not rupees), owned clandestinely by two political dynasties. What esteem can one have for such ‘bashaoor’ multitudes who would flock in their millions to put the corrupt back in the saddle?

Ninety-nine per cent people of Pakistan do not care a bit whether there be an NSC or Article 58(2)(b); what concerns them is the daily torture of extracting justice from the courts, getting their children into schools, relief on utility bills, and, above all, getting a visa to leave the country, be it to bankrupt Argentina or icy Iceland.

What we need more than spurious brands of ‘democracy’ or democratic military rule is to build a civil society. It is not that our system of justice is unjust, or that judges are totally inept, but crippling procedures, delays, lack of motivation and overload of cases make a nullity of the system. It is said that when Churchill became the First Lord of the Treasury on that grim day in 1940 when London was being rained with German V bombs, his first question to his staff was: “Are the courts functioning?” On receiving an affirmative reply, he said, “then we shall surely win”. Why? Because justice seen being delivered unites a society of proud men and women on a voluntary basis.

No political party has on its agenda any concrete plans for a civil society. It is not poverty that bothers people so much as to see their few rights dwindling into the black hole of nothingness. I think it was Fareed Zakaria, currently the editor of the Newsweek, writing in ‘Foreign Affairs’ who said that pre-democracy western Europe of the 19th century had nurtured the institutions of a civil society, which then flowered into democracy in the 20th century. There is much truth in this. A civil society is a condition precedent to democracy. By looking at it the other way round, are we not putting the cart before the horse?

In this respect Pakistan is a failed state. Our priorities are Kashmir, atom bombs, missiles and bogus democracy with a parliament which is mostly sound and fury, and the grand schemes of the National Reconstruction Bureau. We need humble schemes which arise out of a firm resolve to correct what people have to suffer in the waiting rooms of hospitals, in the corridors of the courts, and in suffocating jail cells, noxious fumes of a degrading environment and drinking tap water from lines passing through sewers.

To end where we began, our patient with bedsores must simply turn to get some temporary respite. Three years is about the end of his patience. Nothing of course changes except the faces, but, that by itself provides for a grim satisfaction and a bit of drama. Why not? Let’s focus on a civil society, which is a precondition for democracy, no matter what be the texture of government.

The writer is a former member of the National Assembly of Pakistan. His e-mail address: murbr@isb.paknet.com.pk

Obsession for diet supplements

WE’VE been meaning to comment for several weeks now — or was it just one? — on the controversy over whether herbal and other supplements do good things like improve human memory. Over the centuries, health-seeking humans have self-prescribed a lot of pills, elixirs, potions, powders, creams and downright foul-smelling, evil-tasting stuff.

But everybody still died anyway. So earnest American Medical Association researchers took a chill pill and decided to do one of those randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group trials on ginkgo supplements. They got 230 folks over 60 to remember to down 40 milligrams of ginkgo or a placebo three times per day. They took tests before and after and were interviewed both times too.

Millions of Americans consume such daily supplements. We’ve always been an up-and-at-’em, take-charge society that likes new things — new worlds, new lands, new spouses, new bodies, hopefully without new wrinkles. One new study suggests that rubbing caffeine on exposed areas prevents skin cancer, a new reason to spill coffee.

Every year, Americans rub oceans of stuff all over their bodies and swallow tons of supplements because we want less fat, more muscle, less hair, less hair loss, more colour, less curls, more curls, smoother skin, better eyes, less wrinkles, larger body parts in front, less acid, smaller body parts in back, fewer pimples, better breath, thicker bones, regular heartbeat, punctual bowels, supple ligaments, more libido, less libido, reduced anxiety, more sleepiness, more alertness, less depression, clear arteries.

There are diet supplements to get larger and others to get smaller. Some people even consume those powdery bars of ersatz chocolate. Others supplement the supplements with alcohol and cheer for the Raiders.—Los Angeles Times