Sunday, August 16, 2020
Pakistan’s education ‘reforms’ are privileging the madrassa system
By Khaled Ahmed
Teachers labeled “liberal” and “secular” are the first to be rendered jobless under the looming reform. Nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy and another “science” teacher have been sacked from a Lahore university as a foretaste of what is to come.In July, Pakistan saw another so-called reform in education. The government of Imran Khan decided to conclude its “unification” of the three “systems” of education (Urdu medium schools, English medium schools and the madrassa) predictably imposing more of the madrassa on the other two streams. It announced an Islamic course at the Master’s level, and allowed raids on printing presses in Punjab province to confiscate “hostile” publications. Since education is a provincial subject, Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are bound to bear the brunt of this “reform” as they are ruled by Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party.
Teachers labelled “liberal” and “secular” are the first to be rendered jobless under the looming reform. Nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy and another “science” teacher have been sacked from a Lahore university as a foretaste of what is to come. Hoodbhoy’s thesis is that the reform will make the madrassa dominate the other two streams and that an already “religiously oriented” educational system will be further Islamised. Pakistan’s universities are not recognised outside Pakistan because of the heavy ideological content in their syllabi and the daunting presence of religious-fundamentalist elements in them.
The problem with education in a Muslim state is its reluctance to impart “analytical and critical” thinking. When a Pakistani educationist sits down to frame textbook content, he is scared of the “critical” trait of the human mind. His objective is to prevent the student from applying a “critical” yardstick while analysing “ideology”. The recent law allows the Punjab administration to form vigilante groups that could assault publishing houses to cull “objectionable content” and destroy it and subject the publisher-writer to punishment.
Pakistan is not alone among the Muslim states to have an educational system hostile to “free knowledge”. The Arab world is equally crippled while Iran and Turkey have succumbed to Islamism and its anti-knowledge worldview. The other negative factor in the Muslim world is the frequent incidence of war that upsets the intellectual conditions required for education, replacing it with “propaganda”. There is also the rise of Islamism that damages the edifice of rational learning. Boko Haram, an Islamic revival terrorist organisation active in several states in Africa, attacks “rational” (read English-medium) institutions and translates its own name as “English-medium education not allowed”. The other factor negating education is the incidence of violence in the shape of war and civil war. In the case of Pakistan, there is little money left after “fighting” or “preparing” for wars and there is simply no money left in the kitty for education after meeting the expenditure on the armed forces. In the Arab world too, there is frequent war during which no one thinks of education.
Teachers too are a problem. Most of the primary school teachers in Pakistan are madrassa graduates who have acquired knowledge that equips them for no secular profession. Children in most state-funded schools get poor training in math and history as fact-based narrative. The state sector education mostly relies on brainwash as teaching methodology. Looking for good teachers is a problem of the Islamic world where war and high birth rate outstrips the capacity of the state to produce good teachers capable of imparting “modern knowledge”.
In an article in Arab News, Zaid M Belbagi wrote: “Compounded by record levels of teachers reaching retirement age alongside unprecedented numbers of children entering the education system, UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics indicated that 1.6 million new teaching posts will need to be created in the Arab world if universal education is to be achieved. This figure is likely to increase.” Huma Yusuf in Dawn (May 7, 2018) states: “The threats to critical thinking and debate come from many sources: So-called state functionaries, student wings of religious political parties, firebrand students wielding blasphemy charges, politicised academics, complicit university administrators, and even right-wing media commentators who name and shame educational institutions, forcing them to go on the defensive and resort to self-censorship to protect students from mobs.”
It is curious that English and its “logical-sequential” discourse should disturb Imran Khan, who frequently lambasts modern “liberal” Pakistanis. His clubbing together of the three systems of education in Pakistan and squeezing “one system” out of them is typical of the Muslim educationist who is scared of English as a purveyor of rational thought.
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-education-reform-madrassa-system-6544847/
How Pakistan’s Military Lost Kashmir
BY AZEEM IBRAHIM
@azeemibrahim
For over seven decades, Kashmir has been the major flash point in the conflict between Pakistan and India. Since August 2019, the region has been in crisis after India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, scrapped the special designation the region once held, which recognized its unusual status as a Muslim-majority area. New Delhi put the region under military lockdown, arrested Kashmiri local representatives, and blocked virtually all communication lines between the region and the outside world. There are reports of the abuse of civilians and shortages of food and medicines. Amid worldwide criticism, no voice has been louder than that of Pakistan, where Prime Minister Imran Khan has raised concerns of ethnic cleansing. Given the Hindu supremacist administration in New Delhi, these are not unjustified.
Yet Pakistan is not without blame in what is going on in Kashmir at the moment. And while Khan of Pakistan himself has acted in good faith, the military-intelligence state, the real power in Pakistan, has many questions to answer as to how it managed to be completely outmaneuvered on Kashmir—especially as it justifies its bloated budgets by emphasizing the need to keep Indian ambitions in Kashmir in check.
One of Pakistan’s greatest foreign-policy successes was its cooperation with the United States and the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989). In this exercise, Pakistan proved itself indispensable to the United States’ Cold War grand strategy, but it also achieved its own strategic objectives to escape encirclement from Soviet-aligned Afghanistan and Soviet-aligned India.
Once that war was comprehensively won, Pakistan found itself with a great deal of spare military and intelligence capacity, as well as potentially useful relationships with militant groups and leaders that it could now redirect toward its traditional foe, India.
Once that war was comprehensively won, Pakistan found itself with a great deal of spare military and intelligence capacity, as well as potentially useful relationships with militant groups and leaders that it could now redirect toward its traditional foe, India.
Pakistan never stood a chance in a direct military conflict with India—and an all-out war between two nuclear powers was a terrifying possibility for everyone. But Pakistan thought that it could now leverage those same tactics that succeeded in Afghanistan against the militarily superior Soviet Union to put pressure on India. In the game-theoretical mindset of military and intelligence leaders, this seemed like a perfectly rational use of the available resources, especially since the key theater of conflict with India, Kashmir, shared remarkable similarities with Afghanistan: a remote, mountainous region, with a Muslim and friendly population, where it was easy to fight an insurgency against a larger foreign force, with relatively much lower use of resources.
But India was no Soviet Union. India was not entirely foreign to Kashmir linguistically and culturally, and the state was not being stretched to a breaking point economically and politically by maintaining its presence in the region. Nor did Pakistan’s adventures in Kashmir have the backing of the United States and the free world. In Afghanistan, Pakistan was a key lieutenant in a cover war sponsored by the world’s foremost superpower. In Kashmir, Pakistan was waging its own war, alone. And by sponsoring extreme militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, Pakistan crowded out genuine Kashmiri movements of self-determination. It also did little to endear itself to local Muslim sentiments: Mainstream Kashmiri Islam is much more deeply steeped in Sufi mysticism and is ideologically opposed to the kind of reactionary fundamentalism that drives the majority of jihadi terrorist groups that Pakistan was sponsoring.
To be sure, India did itself no favors in how it governed its half of Kashmir.
To be sure, India did itself no favors in how it governed its half of Kashmir.
Ham-handed attempts at installing puppet governments in the state’s capital and constantly manipulating elections engendered genuine hostility toward New Delhi among Kashmiri locals. This policy eventually gave an opening to pro-Pakistan militants in 1989 to create a reign of terror that drove out almost all Hindus from the valley, forcing India to militarize the whole region.
But then the broader geopolitical realities also changed from underneath the Pakistani military establishment, when their old friend and ally from the Afghanistan campaign, Osama bin Laden, started waging a global campaign of terrorism against U.S. assets, culminating in the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001. At this point, the Pakistani military establishment faced a choice: Would they retain their loyalty to the United States that had underwritten the independence of Pakistan throughout the Cold War, or would they retain the alliances with the Islamist militants that were key to their strategic depth against India?
Successive governments in Islamabad, and especially the autonomous military-intelligence complex, refused to make that choice. Nominally, they wished to retain their prized alliance with the United States, of course, but they were unwilling to forfeit the resources provided by the militants, which could be used against India—most notably in Kashmir. Instead of making that unavoidable choice, they tried to play both sides and sidelined any civilian administration that spoke of dialogue or rapprochement with India. This was the wrong strategy—and played directly into the hands of Indian hard-liners.
There is something remarkably stupid about the calculation those military leaders made that they could deceive the United States and keep both Washington and the Islamists on board. The United States had the foremost intelligence apparatus in the world. And it had the ability to act near-unilaterally even in Pakistan itself, as was demonstrated when the United States finally located Osama bin Laden in hiding near Pakistan’s military headquarters in Abbottabad and executed the operation to kill him without bothering to consult Islamabad.
With that raid, the charade was over. Pakistan had lost all credibility with the United States, as well as the close security ties it enjoyed throughout the Cold War. But the militants no longer had much reason left to believe that Pakistan could shelter them when push comes to shove. After playing both sides, Pakistan lost the trust of both and the ability to influence either. The United States continued its drone and ground campaigns against Islamists throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan as it saw fit. And the Islamists started conducting terrorist attacks all over the world according to their own calculations, without taking instruction from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Yes, they would on occasion help Pakistani geopolitical designs, but they were just as ready to carry out attacks within Pakistan, with little regard for the interests of the Pakistani state.
Pakistan thus lost a great deal of control over former proxies in the region. In Kashmir, this played directly into Modi’s hands. As Islamabad could no longer be relied upon to keep the Islamists in Kashmir on a tight leash, Modi had sufficient pretext to abandon all restraint in the territory of Kashmir while rejecting any dialogue with Pakistan’s civilian government as pointless.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to make peace with the Taliban in Kabul. If this comes to pass, that will once again release resources from Afghanistan for the regional Islamist networks. And the so-called liberation of Kashmir is almost certainly the next focus of those networks. Indian military chiefs would argue that Modi has been astute to move in on Kashmir before any such redeployment of resources could happen.
None of this is to defend the way in which New Delhi went about its crackdown in Kashmir. One year on, the humanitarian situation in Kashmir has only gotten worse. Nor should we lose track of the significance of Kashmir to the ongoing war New Delhi is waging against its Muslim citizens. A Hindu-supremacist Indian prime minister rolling out a military occupation into the only Muslim-majority state in India is cause for acute concern.
But looked at from the point of view of the history of India-Pakistan relations, Pakistan’s historical approach to Kashmir is just as responsible for enabling and facilitating this crisis as those Indians who vote for Modi in India’s general elections. Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex has only ever used Kashmir as pretext to increase its own power and to constantly attack India. And the suffering brought by that foolishness is falling on the civilians, especially Muslims, trapped on the Indian side of the border.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari - Plan to divert Sindh and its capital Karachi’s revenue to Islamabad will not succeed because Karachi is an integrated part of Sindh and the city would remain its integrated part forever.
A meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the PPP was held at Bilawal House Karachi, Saturday, which was co-chaired by the party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and former president Asif Ali Zardari. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari attended the meeting in person along with other party leaders, while former President Asif Ali Zardari attended the meeting via video link. Syed Qaim Ali Shah, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, Mian Raza Rabbani, Sardar Abdul Lateef Khosa, Sherry Rehman, Syed Naveed Qamar, Nafisa Shah, Humayun Khan, Shazia Marri, Nawab Yusuf Talpur, Saeed Ghani, Jamil Soomro, Sadiq Imrani, Waqar Mehdi, Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, Manzoor Hussain Wassan and Pir Mazharul Haq attended the meeting, while Nayyar Hussain Bukhari, Farhatullah Khan Babar, Faryal Talpur, Farooq H. Naik, Qamar Zaman Kaira, Ali Madad Jattak, Chaudhry Manzoor, Haider Zaman Qureshi, Faisal Karim Kundi, Azam Khan Afridi, Makhdoom Jameel-uz Zaman, Maula Bux Chandio, Nisar Ahmad Kharo, Chaudhry Latif Akbar, Advocate Amjad and others participated in the meeting through video link.
While addressing a post-meeting press conference, Mian Raza Rabbani said that the meeting was based on a 6-point agenda, including Gilgit-Baltistan elections, political situation and organisational issues in Punjab, recent legislation in the country, the developing situation in Karachi especially in light of a statement made by the Attorney General (AG), the NAB and Human Rights Watch reports and the situation in view of the Supreme Court remarks, as well as matters related to the August 17 NAB summons of former President Asif Ali Zardari and the overall situation of the party. The meeting discussed all the issues mentioned above.He said that Gilgit-Baltistan elections have been postponed for three months, while preparations for the elections and issues of giving tickets to candidates were discussed in the meeting. In the meeting, Syed Naveed Qamar gave a detailed briefing on the recent legislation regarding FATF.
Senator Raza Rabbani said that the government deliberately presented the bills related to FATF in the last hours of the stipulated deadline, so that they could not be reviewed in detail. The government once again tried to make the Parliament a rubber stamp through that move, but the opposition parties, especially the PPP, ensured for a limited time that the constitutional rights of ordinary citizens were not affected. The government included clauses in the bills that would deprive ordinary citizens of their rights, and they would live in fear of victimisation. He added that the opposition and especially the PPP has taken position on three laws. Among these are; the law on terrorism is such that if it is passed, every citizen will be affected by it, because the definition of terrorism described in it is very vague. This law is not just a black law, but a “king of black laws”. The second law is about amendments to the criminal procedure code (Cr.PC), examples of which can only be found in Hitler and Mussolini’s times. The government wants the investigating officer to have unlimited powers. The third bill is about anti-money laundering, as a result of which the entire nation would suffer. The bill violates a citizen’s confidence. Raza Rabbani said that PPP would resist these laws together with other opposition parties.
He said that the second issue was the role of NAB, which is naked to everyone. The role of NAB in the making Patriot party is not hidden. The PPP knows very well how the NAB is being used. Human Rights Watch report has fully exposed the NAB while the apex judiciary’s observations and decisions have exposed the NAB.He said that President Zardari did not need to be summoned by NAB at that time. He had appeared in the past, and will be again, if necessary. The PPP and its affiliates want party workers to appear before the NAB office. But President Asif Ali Zardari said that workers should not gather there, as he had faced NAB cases alone in past and would also face it in coming days. The party should protest on issues like sugar and flour crisis, inflation, bad governance and failures of the PTI government.Raza Rabbani said that during the meeting, the statement of the AG regarding Karachi in the Supreme Court was reviewed. This is nothing new. Ever since the PPP formed the provincial government, the PTI has sometimes talked of Governor Rule and sometimes of separating Karachi from Sindh. PTI does not recognise the federal concept in the constitution. Making Karachi a colony of the Federal government is tantamount to centralisation. PTI wants to take Pakistan back to 1962. In the 1962 constitution, the cabinet was not accountable to the Parliament. Even now, these people are not accountable to the Parliament because special assistants do not come to the Parliament and there are more than 18 people in the cabinet who have ministerial powers and they are not accountable to the Parliament. The solution and management of Karachi problem is the responsibility of Sindh government. The PPP will solve the problems of Karachi in an efficient manner. The conspiracy to separate Karachi from Sindh is not new. Islamabad wants to use Sindh capital’s revenue and people of Sindh will not accept it.
Raza Rabbani said that the party would increase its contacts with democratic forces and PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari would meet democratic parties and civil society members. Speaking on the occasion, PPP leader Latif Khosa said that Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, Begum Nusrat Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari were targeted by NAB rules and Musharraf also used it. Chaudhry Pervez Elahi and others were also affected by NAB. The NAB has summoned two former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Makhdoom Yousuf Raza Gilani as well as former president Asif Ali Zardari in the same case. All this is happening in the case of Tosha Khana in which the gifted car was bought in a transparent manner and money was given and no illegality occurred and the vehicle was taken in a transparent manner. He said that earlier other rulers have also made such payments and purchases. If there was any objection in such case, notice would have be given to them. He said that where there is unconstitutional work, it is the responsibility of the lawyers to protest. Peoples Lawyers Forum will appear on the 17th to defend the case.
He further said that there are references against the Punjab Chief Minister (CM) to which he has no answer. When the NAB calls, he says he does not know anything. Asif Ali Zardari is not a party in the case of taking loan on fake account and Park Lane case. NAB has no authority in this but media trial is being conducted. They should first arrest Punjab CM Usman Buzdar and should file a case against him. To a question, Raza Rabbani said that we will not compromise on the 18th amendment. We will try to protect basic human rights in the FATF laws. The party is united. At present the situation in the country is different from ten to fifteen years. Changes are being made keeping in view the situation but they are sticking to their principles but PTI regime wants to disperse opposition by creating differences between PPP, PML-N and other opposition parties.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/2020/08/15/plan-to-divert-sindh-and-its-capital-karachis-revenue-to-islamabad-will-not-succeed-because-karachi-is-an-integrated-part-of-sindh-and-the-city-would-remain-its-integrated-part-forever-2/
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