Being honest to ourselves

THE phrase “Pakistan is our identity” — “Pakistan hamari shanakt hai” — was much in the air during the celebratory Independence Day weekend. It’s a thought that moves very many Pakistanis who feel rightfully proud of their identity.

But then why do we bristle when trouble makers or people involved in acts of violence abroad are arrested and described as being of Pakistani extraction? The British nationals allegedly responsible for the London tube bombings or those arrested this month following the foiling of a terrorist plot are no doubt proud of their Pakistani extraction and their Muslim identity; and some element of this certainly was part of the mental make up that drove them to their acts of desperation.

Although born and bred in Britain, many of them had identifiable Pakistani links and among those arrested this month a couple at least had travelled to Pakistan. One of them was also said to have attended a jihadi training camp run somewhere in this country. One of the ring leaders was arrested in Pakistan, providing the lead for the rounding up of the other suspects. A Pakistani connection thus exists, whether amorphously as a state of mind or a sense of belonging or in the shape of definite connections to militant organisations.

Why seek to soft pedal on it or justify or rationalise it? What we should do is to try to understand it and then consider steps on how the state can crackdown on non-state actors, cut off sources of terrorist funding, stop making a distinction between terrorists and jihadists, and generally give up the games we have played over the past many decades.

The confusion between sectarian militants, who were stirring up trouble between Muslims, and militants getting training and going into Kashmir to fight Indian occupation was permitted to remain unaddressed for a long time, and continued down even to the reign of General Pervez Musharraf. The general, if memory serves, had become quite upset when it was suggested by a Pakistani correspondent at a news conference in New York in 2000 that there was an almost umbilical link between the sectarian preachers of hatred and the jihadists.

The events of 9/11 and the subsequent pressure to crackdown on militancy and terrorism well focussed the minds of the authorities on viewing the two strands as part of one big picture. But whether bad habits have been completely given up is hard to tell, particularly in view of the tolerance with which name-changing militant outfits are viewed. Many abroad do not seem fully convinced by Pakistani protestations of “how much more can we do?”

Of course, there is a whole history to what we are seeing today, and of course the current chief accusers, the Americans, are part of it. They instigated both right-wing religious organisations and military and civil officials willing to patronise such elements during the Cold War. Even before Afghanistan and the Soviet intervention, several right-wing groups were being encouraged and financed by the US. When some say Osama bin Laden is an American product, they may be exaggerating, but they are not entirely wrong.

Similarly, the Indian attitude towards both Kashmir and Pakistan generally has also encouraged religious militancy and extremism in Pakistan, apart from whatever damage it has done to India’s own polity. The reasons have been gone over again and again, and referring to them every time you write on such subjects is becoming a cliched exercise. But we have to understand that we have to change and we have to learn to give up many of our delusions. Most of all, we have to be honest to ourselves.

We have laboured for far too long under a grand sense of superiority and a sense of ‘macho-ness’. This is partly due to the domination of the government by the military types, but that is not the whole story. Sections of civil society and the bureaucracy have also suffered from the same delusion. It has sometimes taken the strange form of depicting wars that we have instigated and lost as victories; often it has resulted in blaming others for our own faults and weaknesses. We have backed totally reactionary causes like the Taliban and defended our actions till it became impossible to do so.

Even now one doesn’t know how much of the resurgence of the Taliban is due to the brilliant strategic thinking of some in our intelligence apparatus. Religious fanaticism and patriotic bigotry have got mixed up in a deadening cocktail. During either the 1965 war or the 1971 conflict, we had managed to capture the abandoned jeep of an Indian general. This was displayed in an exhibition of captured Indian weaponry organised in Lahore. One of the advertisements for the exhibition said “Bhagorey Bhartiya general Niranjan Prasad ki jeep ki sair, do rupaiy (drive in cowardly Indian general Niranjan Prasad’s jeep — Rs 2).”

It is this kind of boastful chauvinism that has, for the sake of a temporary ego boost, created an atmosphere in which bigotry and intolerance have thrived. We have come to believe in our own superiority, both moral and strategic, and consequently feel let down by the rest of world for failing to recognise our resounding virtues.

When Iqbal said that we are Muslims and the world belongs to us, did he mean that Muslims owned the world to rule it or that Muslims were part of the international fellowship of the world? We have been told to believe that the poet meant the former. The way symbols of military might such as fighter planes and canons have been accepted as essential parts of public decoration is but just another sign of how our psyche has been shaped. Remember also the Chagai mountain replicas in Karachi and Lahore that only the vagaries of weather have managed to obliterate.

Such warped thinking has led to warped policies. We appear to rely only on our geographic placement as the measure of our importance and we are constantly reminded by our rulers to realise our own importance as a country sitting at the crossroads of a troubled part of the globe. Should that be the only reason why the world must recognise our importance or do we have something else to offer by way of an ancient civilisation and moral and social values that had once been seen as revolutionary? Why don’t we present ourselves as a model of democracy, social justice and tolerance in a region marked by religious, ethnic and sectarian rivalries and tensions?

We ought to try and project Pakistan as a country at peace with itself and its neighbours, irrespective of the provocations from outside our borders. Instead, we have become a fractious, beleaguered society that never misses an opportunity to assert its prowess.

The decision to provide military assistance to Sri Lanka at this time, which apparently provoked the attack on the Pakistan high commissioner’s convoy in Colombo the other day, is just another example of overextending ourselves and getting involved in matters beyond our ken. Being a front-line state in the war on terrorism — our own official description — shouldn’t mean meddling everywhere. Doesn’t anyone in GHQ and the Foreign Office recall that sound old proverb that one should cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth?

Mercifully, these obsessions and delusions of grandeur have not influenced the generation now in the late 20s and mid-30s. They identify themselves with Pakistan, but they do so from a more internalised perspective, minus the historical baggage and flawed doctrines like “strategic depth”. Maybe they realise that a living, breathing, democratic, liberal, tolerant Pakistan will win greater respect than an interventionist, aggressive one forever proclaiming its might and virtue. It is with this segment of our population that hope must lie to help us shed the blinkers that have distorted our outlook so far.

Defining civil society

THE term ‘civil society’ is a complicated term which means different things to different people and is used in different contexts. Even in the more settled western societies, it has a changing meaning: late-20th century events have made the category more fluid, with civil society actors and constituents, moving in and out of the realm of civil society over a period of time.

In the countries of the East and the South, the location of the term ‘civil society’ and its meaning becomes even more complex. While there are different notions and contexts about what civil society is and is not, there is at least some broad agreement about what it must necessarily be. Civil society is supposed to be outside, and perhaps preferably in opposition to, or in contradiction with, the state.

In order to define civil society, it is a requirement that the organisations and actors of civil society not be controlled by the institutions or actors of the state. This ‘autonomous’ requirement is a necessary condition to distinguish civil society from the state.

For some more radical thinkers, the stricter requirement is that civil society must stand against both state and market, and particularly against economic liberalism. For them the “state, market and civil society are rival channels for the exercise of power’. For other theorists, civil society must necessarily be a democratising force. Howsoever one defines civil society and its constituents, the Pakistani case offers interesting (and contradictory) insights about the nature and form, and location, of civil society. It also shows the large number of contradictions which constitute the political settlement that is Pakistan.

Despite the fact that General Musharraf in October 1999 overthrew an elected prime minister, albeit an incompetent one, the largest and most public support for him came from the socially and culturally liberal and westernised sections of Pakistan’s elite, who embraced Musharraf as one of their own, which he very much was. Activists in the NGO movement in Pakistan were also vociferous in their support for Musharraf, precisely because he was seen as a liberal and westernised man.

Some prominent members of the NGO movement who had struggled for a democratic order in Pakistan when it was under General Ziaul Haq, actually joined Musharraf’s cabinet. Employers associations, trade bodies, women’s groups, and other such groupings which are all part of some acceptable notion of civil society, also welcomed the coup because General Musharraf was seen as a modernising man. Some intellectuals and peace and anti-nuclear activists also celebrated the arrival of a liberal head of state.

Clearly, for the westernised sections of civil society in Pakistan, the military general who had overthrown a democratically elected prime minister, was Pakistan’s latest saviour. Musharraf’s earliest critics and opponents included, what for lack of a more appropriate term one can call, the Islamic civil society, which did not like his liberalism and westernisation. Classical and western literature on civil society suggests that by being “against the state” in some ways, and especially by being against the autocratic undemocratic state, civil society is necessarily on the side of some form of a democratic dispensation. Not so in Pakistan.

For civil society in Pakistan, whether of the westernising, modernising kind, or of the more fundamentalist Islamic kind, the question has not been one of democracy versus non-democratic norms, but of liberalism against perceived and variously interpreted Islamic symbols and values. Unlike the traditional notion of civil society, the pursuit of democratic ideals is not a necessary and defining condition. Not only is this a fundamental difference, but so too is the necessary distinction of autonomy from the state, so integral to the meaning of civil society.

If sections of civil society are expected to challenge the state, in Pakistan, there are many who are the state’s partners. For instance, development groups which have emerged as a result of government failure in Pakistan and have become contractors in the form of NGOs in their own right, are often coopted by institutions of the state to become the latter’s ‘advisers,’ winning lucrative contracts and getting the publicity they need to further their credentials.

Human rights activists and advocacy groups, too, become partners with other stakeholders, particularly government, and try to redress problems created by the very institutions of the state that they are now partnering. The essence of Pakistan’s politics — very broadly defined — is one of compromise not confrontation, and of cooptation. Civil society in Pakistan is very much part of that political tradition.

Linked to this relationship with politics, and perhaps determining it, is the relationship of civil society and of NGOs with money, particularly donor funding. If, for example, the most prominent and potentially radical civil society organisations in Pakistan receive funding from donors who have specific interests or agendas, the ‘politicalness’ of these organisations gets muted. With the British and American governments amongst the biggest donors of civil society in Pakistan, one does not see much protest against them for their role in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, these governments are imposing their liberal social agenda on the two countries, an agenda which the westernised sections of Pakistani civil society endorse.

Moreover, the requirement that civil society be autonomous of the state is also undone since many of these NGOs, are highly dependent on foreign donor state. It is the broader westernised, ‘liberal’, modern (but in the case of Pakistan, non-democratic) vision, which western governments share with the elite and the westernised sections of those who constitute civil society in Pakistan — not with the Islamic elements or sections of civil society.

The greatest opposition to the foreign presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to Israel has come from the political and non-political sections of the ‘Islamic’ civil society. Unlike their westernised Pakistani cousins, this is an anti-imperialist political grouping, which is also against the agenda of the World Bank, the IMF, and economic liberalism, something that westernised civil society supports very enthusiastically. For both, however, democracy is less important.

Most definitions of civil society do not stretch themselves to include film societies, debating clubs or puppet and theatre festivals. Yet, because these entities have a political and radical cultural presence in the context of an Islamicised (and violently so) society like Pakistan, they can be included in a non-western context as belonging to civil society.

Even such benign civil society organisations seek patronage from the chief of the army staff, who is also the president of Pakistan, to further their cause: General Musharraf was the chief guest at the inaugural and closing ceremony of a puppet festival and a film festival, respectively, some months ago. While these cultural preferences may be the redeeming feature of Pakistan’s military coup maker, one should not forget that Beethoven and Goethe were claimed as the cultural ancestors of a certain group of Germans not six decades ago.

One is not stating that Pakistan’s experience is in any way unique, but one will argue that perhaps civil society ought to be defined by the conditions in which it exists so that one can understand its functioning and politics better. While Pakistan’s civil society is an outcome of its particular history and the way its institutions and politics have evolved, it is, nevertheless, essential to apply some minimum acceptable norms of civil society behaviour, to be able to evaluate its role and performance.

In the context of Pakistan, one is likely to find that civil society (its western wing), aspires to only a few of the necessary requisites. For it, a westernised, socially and culturally liberal agenda, is far more important and preferable than the messy indigenous politics essential for democracy. In fact, one of the main consequences of this ideology has been the depoliticisation of public life in Pakistan. Under such circumstances, where the main representatives of the uncivil society are perceived to be westernised and socially and culturally liberal, where civil society actors work for the emancipation of women and for human rights, and military generals support the same agenda, both civil society and “uncivil society” make consenting bedfellows.

Where Aids drugs work

‘MANY people in Africa have never seen a clock or a watch in their entire lives,” said Andrew Natsios, the former head of the US Agency for International Development, when asked in 2001 why more Africans didn’t have access to lifesaving Aids drugs. Only when we have proof Africans could take their medicines on schedule, Natsios said, should we make the drugs available to everyone.

His comments were, of course, ludicrously narrow-minded, if not bigoted. Nonetheless, such thinking remains all too common, even among experts whose decisions affect the lives of millions of people around the world. To this day, concern that people in Africa are incapable of following a strict Aids drug regimen is one reason some experts maintain that we shouldn’t increase the continent’s access to HIV medicines more quickly. — Los Angeles Times