Sunday, January 16, 2022
If Pakistan doesn’t value work of non-Muslims like Har Gobind Khorana, science will remain dead
Ideology and science are like oil and water — they refuse to mix. Dawn article on Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011) threw me back 50 years when I, along with 600 other students had packed 26-100 (MIT’s largest lecture hall) to hear him speak. Being clueless of the basics of molecular biology, I understood little and left halfway through. Curiosity had driven me there because this famous MIT professor had won the 1968 Nobel Prize and started a brand new field — protein synthesis via nucleotides. More interestingly, he was a Lahori with bachelor and master’s degrees from Punjab University. Alas! Lahore, to its misfortune, does not know — nor cares to know — who this man was. The same holds true for another of its sons, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995), who became a Nobel Laureate in recognition of his definitive work on the death of stars. Today a Nasa satellite named Chandra scours the skies for neutron stars, black holes and other unusual astronomical objects. The story of Abdus Salam (1926-1996) is too well known to repeat here. Winner of the 1979 physics Nobel, he studied at Government College (GC) Lahore and later taught at Punjab University. However, no road or landmark in Lahore bears Salam’s name — or that of Khorana and Chandrasekhar. While a GC affiliated institution called the Abdus Salam School for Mathematical Studies nominally exists, to display his name on its signboard could be dangerous in a city often gripped by religious fervour. Less well known is the story of Chowla and Chawla. At GC there have been two mathematicians in number theory. One was Sarvadaman Chowla, an accomplished mathematician who headed the mathematics department from 1937 to 1947. Being Hindu, he left Lahore after the rioting began and went to Princeton University, then the University of Colorado at Boulder, and eventually became professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He died in 1995 and was celebrated as a famous number theorist by the American Mathematical Society with several important theorems to his name. Unless Pakistanis learn to value the works of non-Muslims, science in Pakistan shall remain dead. The other was Lal Muhammad Chawla who graduated from Oxford in 1955 and then taught at GC for many years. With rather modest professional achievements, he had only one well cited paper. As a Google search of his publications reveals, Chawla was more interested in writing religious books than advancing mathematics. However, the GC math society is named after Lal Muhammad Chawla and not the more famous and much more accomplished Sarvadaman Chowla. No Hindu scientist is celebrated in Pakistan. Rejecting non-Muslims of high professional merit has come at devastating cost to Pakistan. For one, it lost those who could have helped the newborn country establish a scientific base. For another, it became difficult to create institutional meritocracies. After Partition, many clever ones played the religious or ethnic card and undeservedly rose to positions of high authority. In time they became institutional gatekeepers with catastrophic consequences. The weakness of science education in Pakistan is too evident to belabour here. Unsurprisingly, our best and brightest young people usually go for soft stuff like medicine, law, and business. Unlike in China or India, hardly any opt for tough, demanding, scientifically oriented careers. So, how can we persuade our children towards them? What stories to tell them about science and scientists? Most importantly, who should be their role models? This brings up a civilisational problem. Over the last 300 years — which is how old modern science is — there are no Muslim subcontinental names associated with first tier (Nobel calibre) scientific accomplishments (after 1974 Salam must be excluded). Notwithstanding the valiant efforts of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), Indian Muslims shunned science and the English language. Thus, even at the distant second or third tier level, one finds barely a dozen names. Since one cannot find Muslim science heroes who belong to the soil, books for Pakistani children inevitably valorise Arabs from the Golden Age such as Al-Battani, Ibn-e-Shatir, Ibn-e-Haytham, etc. While these luminaries of Muslim science were genuine path-breakers, they do not serve well as role models. For one, persons from centuries ago cannot inspire today’s children. For another, excitement is inspired by those ‘of your own kind’. Arabs, however, are visibly different from people around here. Ancient Hindu scientists could have found some place in Pakistani books. However, they are excluded on ideological grounds because ‘woh hum main say nahin hain’ (they are not us). Instead, many Pakistanis anxiously seek ancestral roots in Arabia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. But modern laboratory tools are ripping apart dearly held myths of racial origins. Now several genetic marker studies are suggesting that the subcontinent’s Muslims have descended primarily from local Hindu converts with only a few per cent admixture of Arab or Central Asian genes. Excluding Hindu scientists from our books is absurd. Ideology and science are like oil and water — they refuse to mix. Science cares only about facts and logic, not personal likes and dislikes. History is replete with examples of failed attempts to fuse science with cherished beliefs. When Stalin sought to impose his Marxist views upon Soviet biology through his chosen tout, Trofim Lysenko, he nearly destroyed agriculture and forestry. Soviet Russia’s good fortune was that it had a scientific community robust enough to counter Lysenko’s meddling. Pakistan has not been so lucky. It has an abundance of charlatans pretending to be scientists but just a few who deserve to be called such. While there is a science ministry, several scientific bodies, and hundreds of institutions that purport to teach or do research in science, no community of genuine scientists exists. High-sounding scientific bodies — such as the Pakistan Academy of Sciences — are a joke. They command no respect internationally and should be dissolved.
Every kind of intellectual endeavour, science included, needs an enabling cultural and social environment to flourish. Science suffocates when scientists are judged by their religion, race, ethnicity or any criterion other than scientific achievement. Before Pakistan can produce any science worth the name, it will need to overcome its deeply held prejudices. It must learn to value all who share the common heritage of humankind. The day we count Khorana, Salam, and Chandrasekhar as our very own, Pakistan will have begun breaking the shackles of scientific under-development.
Pakistani mercenaries tricking J&K youth into terrorism, using them as ‘terror mules’: Officials
Pakistani mercenaries operating in Jammu and Kashmir are tricking the youth into terrorism and using them as “terror mules” who can even be eliminated if they plan to shun the path of violence, senior security officials said on Sunday.Referring to an encounter in Budgam earlier this month and the call details of 24-year-old Wasim Qadir Mir, a resident of Shahzadpora, the officials said he was the latest victim of the despotic behaviour of the Pakistani terrorists who eliminated him during a gunfight with security forces in village Zoiu in the central Kashmir district on January 6.
Mir along with his two Pakistani accomplices were trapped in a cordon-and-search operation, leading to a fierce gunfight, they said, adding by dawn, it was common news that the security forces had eliminated yet another group of terrorists in an encounter but what was uncommon was the way the series of events unfolded during the encounter the preceding night.
“During the encounter Mir wanted to put down his arms probably with an aim to come out and surrender to the security forces but was forced by the two Pakistani terrorists to keep firing back.“Details that emerged later including the post-mortem report further confirmed that Mir was actually killed by members of his own group, as a result of their failed attempts to resist him from surrendering,” a senior official involved in the gunfight said.
Mir was a school dropout who initially worked as an Over Ground Worker and subsequently was recruited into the terror folds in December 2020 by JeM commander Saifulla alias “Lambu Bhai”, a Pakistani terrorist.
Even though Mir’s stint as an active terrorist was short, he had a long list of acts of terror attributed to him, including the Zewan attack in which three police personnel were killed and 11 others were injured on December 13 last year, the officials said.They said it was probably his involvement in a long list of terror-related incidents that prevented him from re-joining the mainstream and eventually when he was given an opportunity by the security forces to save his own life, he did not stand a chance at the hands of the very companions for whom he was working as the “terror mule”.He said as it would have exposed the façade of the so-called local freedom movement and also shown the great human tragedy that the valley has been subjected to for the last three decades by Pakistan-based terror groups.
“As far as Kashmir is concerned, Pakistan’s modus operandi continues to remain the same over the years — infiltrate Pakistani terrorists into the valley in numbers, sizable enough to create and operate cellular groups of 3-4 terrorists, comprising at least one local boy,” he said.
The official said Pakistan’s strategic aim remains to mislead the global community and portray terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir as the result of a local uprising and an insurgent movement led by the local youth. They do it by creation of pseudo terror groups, namely Kashmir Tigers and The Resistance Front (TRF), which are only shadow outfits of banned terror groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashker-e-Taiba respectively.
The shadow groups were created by ISI coupled with the tactical aim of ensuring that these local Kashmiri recruits provide the much-needed logistical support to the foreign terrorists and act as a conduit to keep terrorism in the valley alive.
“But in reality, over the years these local recruits have been reduced to nothing but ‘terror mules’, acting as guides for the Pakistani terrorists, carrying the burden of Pakistan’s misinformation campaign and exploited to keep its terror factory up and running in the valley,” the official said.
He said the local Kashmiri recruit lies at the heart of this vicious terror cycle, carefully planned and surgically executed by ISI-backed terror groups, including JeM and LeT.
On recruitment of the local youth into terrorism, the official said it all begins with “talent” spotting, where radicalised mind and religious leaning form the virtues of a potential recruit.
“After being employed initially for logistical errands, transportation of arms and ammunition and reconnaissance of potential targets, the local Kashmiri boys are tasked to carry out random acts of terror which include grenade throwing, planting IED and stand-off attacks against security forces,” the official said.
“Once the routes back to a normal civil life are severed, the next step is to recruit them into the terror folds, followed with deliberate circulation of their photographs carrying arms, swearing allegiance to proscribed terror groups.
“If the persistence to surrender does not end there, they are intimidated by threatening the life of their loved ones by the same recruiters who forced them into terrorism,” the official said, adding “no matter how hard one tries to give up arms and go back to their home and live a normal life, they just fail to come out of this vicious quicksand of Pakistan’s terror cycle.”
https://theprint.in/india/pak-mercenaries-tricking-jk-youth-into-terrorism-using-them-as-terror-mules-officials/804896/
Imran Khan to face wrath of the people from 27 February – Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari
He said that increase in petroleum products’ prices after gas and electricity was a robbery on the pockets of the people. The government has mortgaged the people to the IMF. Pakistan’s decisions are being made abroad. He said that Imran Khan would have to face the wrath of the people from February 27for increasing electricity and petrol prices.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/26088/
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