Archive for November 15th, 2007

Pakistani students divided over crisis

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

The Toronto Star, November 15, 2007
Sonya Fatah

LAHORE, Pakistan–Opposition politician Imran Khan learned a hard lesson yesterday about how bitterly divided Pakistani students are toward President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Over the last week, 500 to 1,000 students have protested daily on the campus of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), a leading university in Pakistan.

Police barricades and warnings have not intimidated the several hundred students who continue to demand an end to martial law, arbitrary arrests of activists and curbs on press freedom.

But at Punjab University, a student demonstration against emergency rule turned sour yesterday when Khan was arrested as he made an appearance. He had been evading house arrest for several days.

Khan, one of the most vocal critics of Musharraf’s unconstitutional methods of staying in power, was at first hoisted upon students’ shoulders as they chanted “Go Musharraf Go” and “Down with Musharraf.” His coming-out then degenerated into a farce.

Members of the hard-line Jamiat-e-Tuleba, the student arm of the country’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, bundled Khan into the Centre for High Energy Physics shortly after and handed him over to police.

Khan is the last of Musharraf’s opposition leaders to be rounded up following the Pakistani president’s Nov. 3 declaration of emergency. Police took him to an undisclosed location, sources said.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of political workers, lawyers and human rights activists have been held under house arrest or indefinitely detained.

Khan is revered as one of cricket’s all-time greats and admired for his charitable work, especially a hospital he set up for poor cancer patients.

He drummed up the money for that by motivating young people to go out and fundraise for him, as “mini-Imrans,” he said.

Khan hoped to rally the students for protests against Musharraf as well.

Pakistani students have been criticized in the past as a group that largely spends its time comparing designer clothes and electronic gadgets when not in the library studying.

“I want to get the students out,” Khan said last week.

“If you have to (make) sacrifices, this is the time. What you cannot do is sit on the fence anymore.”

The small, but increasing vocal and demonstrative student movement follows in the footsteps of the defiant lawyers’ movement.

What haunts the government is the memory of the starring role students have played in toppling previous leaders at key moments over the last 40 years.

In 1968, students were at the forefront of resistance against the despotic, corrupt regime of president Ayub Khan, one in the long line of generals to rule this country. Despite a repressive security apparatus at his disposal, Ayub Khan was forced to step down a year later.

Young people also turned out en masse against prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf’s biggest rival and herself a former premier. The elder Bhutto was ousted from power in 1977, then hanged in 1979.

With those examples in mind, later Pakistani governments launched a campaign to depoliticize college campuses, banning political activity and clamping down on student unions.

Many observers were therefore surprised, and in some cases exhilarated, by the political rumblings beginning to take form on various campuses, particularly LUMS.

At a recent demonstration, about 150 students met at Beacon House National University, a liberal arts institution, to support the university’s dean and human rights activist Salima Hashmi, who had been jailed for two days and recently released.

Encouragement from some university administrators has fuelled some of the student protests.

At LUMS University, the vice-chancellor and faculty members gave the students their blessings to stage demonstrations on campus.

Still, the relatively small student protests held at public universities were hardly examples of complete unity.

Of the 27,000 students at Punjab University, only a couple of hundred showed up for the demonstration yesterday.

“The Jamiat don’t allow us to protest,” said Afsa Mehmood, 19, who sported a black armband decrying the emergency.

“They are in favour of the government and they have the power to silence us.”

Students at both the old and new campuses of the university lamented the influence of the Jamiat group in organizing their own student protests and other activities.

At Punjab University yesterday, Jamiat students pulled Khan off the shoulders of their secular classmates, and prevented him from leading the rally.

Tempers flared and frustration soared as the smaller, less vocal secular contingent tried to battle the more impassioned Jamiat leaders.

“He wanted to be a hero on our shoulders,” said Salman Zaman, 22, and a Jamiat follower.

“We didn’t want that,” Zaman said.

“We didn’t want our protest to be hijacked by any one political agenda.”

Many conscientious objectors, including some who said they feared Islamist groups, turned to art to express their frustrations.

Like Bilal Ashraf, 22, sculpted a project called “This is Enough.” In it, Pakistan is depicted as a woman with no arms, her eyes blindfolded, and her head thrown back.

Her dress, a long papery gown, is a collage of newspaper headlines on the judiciary’s crisis.

The edges of the gown are frayed, and are beginning to burn at the bottom. But limbless and without sight, she (Pakistan) is helpless.

“Educated Pakistani youngsters have been kept at a distance from politics for decades,” said retired Brig. Rao Abid Hamid of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

“This movement is just in its infancy. Give it time.”

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Lessons to be learned from India?

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

Key differences in ideology, leadership may explain why Indians succeed where Pakistanis often fail
The Toronto Star, November 15, 2007
Sonya Fatah

LAHORE, Pakistan–Why has India thrived as a democracy for nearly six decades, while neighbouring Pakistan has been plagued by chronic military coups since British India was partitioned in 1947?

Sharp differences in political leadership, ideology and social institutions help explain why India has largely succeeded where Pakistan has perennially failed.

The intensely secular and staunchly democratic Jawaharlal Nehru led India for the first 17 years of its existence, arguably the most difficult period in the country’s history. There were others too – men like Sardar Vallabhai Patel who cut across caste and class lines and formed the core of India’s leadership.

By contrast, Pakistan lost its founding father, the secular-minded Mohammad Ali Jinnah, within a mere 13 months of its existence. Its first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in October 1951.

“Pakistan died with Jinnah,” says Ardeshir Cowasjee, 81, a newspaper columnist who has spent much of his life pressing for the rule of law in Pakistan.

Into the breach stepped a succession of military men.

Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan took the country’s reins in 1958 and stayed in charge for 11 years. After a turbulent decade following Jinnah’s death, people welcomed Khan, who gave the country much-needed stability.

Close on Khan’s heels came Gen. Yahya Khan, whose four-year stint oversaw the country’s disastrous 1971 war that ended with the loss of East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh.

After a rare few years of democratic rule, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq staged a coup and began a U.S.-backed 11-year reign marked by the Islamization of the country that haunts Pakistan till today.

In his recent hefty book on India’s contemporary history, India After Gandhi, historian Ramachandra Guha wonders “what would (Jinnah and Liaquat Ali) have done if they had enjoyed power as long as Nehru, and if they had had the kind of supporting cast that he did?”

India’s leaders propelled the country forward through radical land reform, particularly in the states of Punjab and Haryana. Those reforms broke the traditional grip of landlords who had massive holdings and ran political fiefdoms, exploiting low-caste groups.

It wasn’t a success everywhere. In India’s Bihar state, for instance, the government’s failure to implement reforms gave steam to the often-violent Naxalite rebel movement. Despite that, India’s diversity has thrown up leaders from outside the elites, even in Bihar state, demonstrating that in India politicians can represent the disenfranchised.

Pakistan’s story is very different.

Although reforms were attempted during two different governments, they were never implemented. Most of Pakistan’s political class, including Oxford-educated Benazir Bhutto, represents its feudal aristocracy – large families in possession of thousands of hectares of land, who run their estates as absentee landlords.

In this nation of 160 million, it is hard to think of an influential leader who has risen from Pakistan’s largely poor masses.

Instead, there remains a brittle alliance between the military, industrialists, Islamists and feudals.

India’s other advantage was the former colonial administrative machine that bound the nation through a unified civil structure.

“The Indian Administrative Service had all the paraphernalia that goes with government – administration, tax collection, law and order,” says retired Brig. Rao Abid Hamid, who now works at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

“It allowed for a healthy transition.”

Across the border, Pakistan didn’t have enough qualified officers to outfit its civil service. It had lost its Hindu and Sikh elite, who had previously staffed the bureaucracy.

“The only functioning, healthy institution in Pakistan was the army and that was misused.”

That tradition of misuse continues in Pakistan today.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is flexing his military muscle to prevent popular political parties from campaigning, demonstrating or organizing themselves.

In India, the independent election commission has pushed hard to ensure elections are free and fair.

When India’s Uttar Pradesh held its election recently, the commission sent in 72,000 paramilitary troops to prevent political gangs from disrupting the polling process for the state’s 190 million people.

Not surprisingly, Indians cherish their ability to vote their leaders into or out of power.

“India has got into the habit of democracy,” said Khushwant Singh, 92, one of India’s best-known authors and political analysts.

“We were lucky to have prime ministers who were committed to democracy … Today, we have politicians who are second-rate people but they are at least honest by the constitution.”

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