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politics essay Federalism
and decentralisation health A crisis long
over looked Food
for all education
Centres of destruction
Politics of relief And the questions we ignore — that there is an uprising in Balochistan, that the historic marginalisation of this far-flung province is responsible for the devastating consequences of the earthquake, and that the Baloch associate the security forces with daily harassment, disappearances and torture who they think cannot pretend to be neutral aid distributors overnight By Mahvish Ahmad After a
7.7-magnitude earthquake hit southern Balochistan last week, flattening
entire villages, killing hundreds, and rendering thousands homeless,
politics has been treated as a topic best left untouched. Ask the
politicians and journalists, governments and For them, the
Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) attacks on army and government convoys
carrying food, medicine, and tents, is a clear-cut example of the dark
consequences of politics on emergency help. Here is the problem:
Refusing to talk about politics does not make it go away. We might
successfully cleanse our conversations of it, but we cannot excise
politics from Balochistan, its devastating earthquake, or the relief that
it so urgently needs. There might be a strong
urge to just “get things done”, but anyone with that urge needs to be
careful that they do not just stumble around in the dark like
well-meaning, clumsy giants trying to “do some good”. They will end up
breaking everything they run into, because they were either ignorant of
the situation on the ground, or too lazy to bother to understand the
politics of the place they are getting involved in. There is an uprising in
Balochistan. Those engaged with the Balochistan question can disagree on
the scale of the separatist movement, but few can deny that it is a
significant force in the province’s politics. This uprising is rooted in
a very real disenchantment with the powers that rule Pakistan. And it has
gained traction because of the enormous presence of the security forces.
According to an Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) press release,
there are currently 1000 soldiers from the Frontier Corps (FC) and
Pakistan Army If the earthquake had
taken place in, for example, Balochistan’s northern Pakhtun belt, the
politics that we needed to consider might have looked very different. The
fact of the matter, however, is that it did not take place in northern
Balochistan, but in the province’s southern belt, known for its
remittance-fueled, urbanised towns and BLF-sympathetic middle-class Baloch.
The epicenter of the earthquake, Awaran district, is also the birthplace
of the current Baloch uprising’s most popular militant leader: BLF
commander and doctor-turned-guerilla fighter Dr Allah Nazar. The historic
marginalisation of this far-flung province has fueled the support for the
BLF, and is one of the driving factors behind the devastating consequences
of the earthquake. While those who are opposed to bringing politics into
the conversation will claim that earthquakes are God- or nature-given,
others who closely analyse and work with natural disasters know that the
poor are always disproportionately affected. The decision by
governments in Islamabad and Quetta to finance major development projects
aimed at supporting Pakistan’s aspirations for economic growth at best,
and filling the pockets of politicians at worst, has meant that those
parts of the province w To say that politics is
irrelevant in understanding last week’s Balochistan earthquake is
disingenuous, if not an outright lie. Relief is no different.
Just like earthquakes, relief takes place in a political context.
Independent reports in BBC Urdu, which has provided some of the best
coverage of the earthquake over the past week, verify that many Baloch in
the disaster-hit areas associate security forces with daily harassment,
disappearances, torture, and the notorious kill-and-dump policies where
families discover the corpses of their sons bored through with holes. The
security forces have also been known for launching operations in this
region, many of them ignored by the mainstream press in the rest of the
country. For example, in late December last year, the FC launched an
operation in Awaran district’s Mashky, the home of Dr Nazar. At least 20
people, including women and children were killed in the operation, and the
FC established at least 12 new checkpoints in this far-flung part of the
country. To pretend that the army can transform itself into a neutral aid
distributor overnight is a farce. Acknowledging that the
army is a political player in Balochistan, even after a devastating
earthquake, is not the same as condoning BLF attacks on their relief
convoys. One’s position on the Balochistan question is unrelated to the
importance of acknowledging the tense political context in which the
earthquake has taken place, and in which relief is now being distributed.
There are some, like politicians in Quetta and Islamabad, who argue that
the BLF is just as much a source of fear in southern Balochistan as the
army, if not A relief that is
politically aware, rather than politically ignorant or blind, might ensure
that the thousands who are affected by the earthquake will finally receive
the aid that they so urgently need. Malik Siraj Akbar, the editor of the
banned online magazine, The Baloch Hal, has recommended a ceasefire
between the separatists and the army, and the involvement of international
humanitarian organisations. Dr Abdul Malik, the
chief minister of the provincial government in Balochistan, and Dr Allah
Nazar, have both called for the involvement of international humanitarian
organisations. These organisations, from Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors
Without Borders (MSF) to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),
know that the contexts within which they work are tense, and their policy
of neutrality comes not from a denial of the political, but from an
acknowledgement of politics. Interestingly, it is
some of the most unpopular actors, i.e. the federal government and the
security forces, that have been less than enthusiastic about international
aid workers. When the earthquake first hit Balochistan, the National
Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said that it would not be putting out
a call for international help. The army has likewise said that it is
concerned about whether it will be able to provide security for aid
workers. Some have said that federal and security force tentativeness
around aid workers is a September 11, post-Dr Shakil Afridi phenomenon,
where they are afraid that foreign governments will use the opportunity to
send spies into Balochistan — an indication that even aid can be
political. But separatists and
their sympathisers disagree, arguing that the government and the army want
to keep humanitarian agencies out because they are afraid that their human
rights abuses in the province will be exposed. It is still unclear
whether international humanitarian agencies will be allowed into interior
Balochistan. Either way, the politics of the earthquake and the relief
that surrounds it reveals a larger truth: In the end, few attempt to paint
a full picture of what is going on in Balochistan. Sometimes it is because
they are stopped from doing so. Access remains difficult for local and
foreign journalists, and those that have tried, have been attacked: for
example the offices of the Balochi newspaper, Daily Tawar, ransacked a few
months ago. But other times, it is
because we naively assume that the state version of what is going on in
Balochistan is more correct than what we hear from the Baloch themselves.
And because we fail to understand the larger politics of the events in
Balochistan. Missing persons cannot be understood without deeper knowledge
of the uprising. Attacks on development projects and Chinese engineers
cannot be comprehended without knowledge of the historic socio-economic
marginalisation of the province. And, earthquake and relief cannot be
understood without a sense of the political dynamics at play in
Balochistan. Questioning dominant state narratives, and having an
understanding of the politics at play is not equal to taking a pro- or
anti-Pakistan position, or a pro- or anti-Baloch insurgency position. It
does, however, ensure that we do not grapple around in the dark, and that
we become far more aware of what exactly it is that we’re dealing with. Mahvish Ahmad is a
journalist and lecturer living in Islamabad. She is also the co-founder of
Tanqeed | a magazine of politics and culture (www.tanqeed.org).
Left in Pakistan — II Sites of innovation How does the left in Pakistan address the women and the NGO-question? By Sarah Humayun Though ‘class
struggle’ is made out to be the prime vector of progressivism in Marxist
historiography, it has never been free of its own ‘contradictions’ (to
use a choice Marxist term of art). To pick out one issue that is being
articulated with increasing urgency: the ‘woman’ question. The problem
is not new. “Working class resistance was constituted in the past by
defending its own forms of oppressions (against women or apprentices)
against the regulation of the state or of the capitalist market. The
feminist movement is advancing resistance today by not fearing to
“divide workers”,” writes Jacques Ranciére. This remark finds an
echo in the experience of women’s struggles who have not found an ally
in the left or have felt the organised left to be an irrelevance if not a
hindrance. This 2011 article from Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/20/blue-labour-conservative-female-subservience)
shows a woman Labour councillor reminding the anti-market and
pro-community Blue Labour that “liberal rights and the role of the state
has done a lot to help women — and many other groups for that matter —
break out of community bonds that have often been oppressive,
unaccountable and male dominated”. Many women in the UK might have a
problem endorsing the romantic nostalgia for ‘working-class culture’,
for the community-and-union dominated ‘traditional’ leftism that has
been much in evidence in the UK, not least among academics. ‘The woman question’
is one of the sites of innovation for those interested in rethinking the
left, of taking it beyond the era of base and superstructure, of progress
on the back of the planned socialist economy and nationalist struggles for
liberation. I found almost all of my interlocutors were thinking along
these lines. “The woman is the most political being in Pakistan,” said
one in an interesting if enigmatic formulation. Although all but one of
the lefties I met were men, they are open, even keen, to acknowledge that
the left had a woman problem, that this was not restricted to
representation in the party but extended to social and personal
relationships in evidence in left circles. In conversation, it seemed that
there was a great desire to do something about the ‘woman question’ as
well as some uncertainty as to what, specifically, an activism of the left
might do here, whether they would go beyond or work with women’s rights
advocates and feminist activists. But were the women
comrades comfortable working with the men; did class differences
compounded by gender sometimes get in the way of comradely sociability?
This question was met with some unease, a pause to weigh up words and
thoughts. It is difficult, someone said. Another made a remark about
choosing places carefully; another, about the need to maintain gender
presentations in order to keep functioning working relationships. The stories I was told
about field activism were predominantly stories about men; men having
arguments late into the night, hiding from the police, coming together to
play cricket or to drink in what seemed to be cherished times of
camaraderie. An office that I visited was a welcoming space, but it was
full of men. Personally, the people I met were at ease with mixed-gender
groups, counted many women as friends and a few women as colleagues. But
the few that were mentioned in connection with party work seemed also to
be upper-class academics. Knowing all the reasons
why women can be absent or less visible, often by choice, I’m not sure
what weight to place on this. How is the difficult terrain of personal
interaction affected by affiliating oneself with a school of thought
explicitly committed to equality? Does this mean enfolding the question of
gender in class, conceived as the rubric under which difference and
elimination of difference is thought? Does taking account of class
differences present in the party offer a way out? Or does the ‘woman
question’ need another type of articulation, and what might that be,
given the commitment to universalist thinking in the left? Thinking about women and
thinking about class may never be a seamless fit, nor will the designation
of a class as the subject of emancipatory politics and capital as the
object of resistance open out paths to taking account of the diverse ways
in which the ‘woman question’ has been addressed. In the intellectual
resources open to the left (as well as to other political tendencies) the
‘woman question’ will pose repeated threats of splits and divisions
— of the vote, of a homosexual culture i.e. culture of one sex (as Luce
Irigaray puts it), of the family and of society. It will be interesting
to see how the left addresses this question, if it ever does, under the
sign of ‘merger’. But it should also be emphasised that the principles
of justice and equality that left parties everywhere have subscribed to
have given greater space for women historically to articulate their
concerns (even if they’re labelled ‘marginal’) and to organise
resistance. Small differences of political opportunity and intellectual
space are important and should always remain firmly in view. In Pakistan, the debate
about women and the left has an added twist. It is sometimes pointed out
that in recent history women have done better under the anti-politics,
rhetorically liberal dictatorship of General Musharraf. The provision of
33 per cent seats in local bodies, the dilution of the Hudood ordinances,
the promotion of education and media and culture (which arguably helps
women to claim more public space) were all achieved under conditions when
politics, or electoral politics, were in abeyance. This contention
deserves detailed and nuanced debate. But what is emphasised
through this type of argument, I think, is that the promotion of socially
progressive causes does not need a socially progressive politics that
searches out new possibilities of thought and action. It can be done, for
example, through personal enlightenment (presumably gained by buying an
expensive education), through an investment in social stability and
existing norms of citizenship. And by sticking to economic and social
formulae that have been shown to work elsewhere. This type of thinking
informs much commentary in the nominally-liberal media. The point being
made is that ‘causes’ do better without ‘politics’, do better in
conditions where they succeed through an implicit social consensus and a
firm government, the ‘writ of the state’. The onus is on citizens to
reach consensus and abide by the norms of government and the laws of the
state. NGOs have been linked to
projects of citizen empowerment that seek to circumvent political
processes by working on projects that bring in both assumptions and
funding form ‘elsewhere’ — this is commonly criticised by those on
the political right. When it comes to the left, the criticisms are more
complicated. Often in terms of field practice and the projected strategic
effects of mobilising for this or that issue, they are virtually
indistinguishable from the left. As some activists note, in the field they
are often identified as NGO-people; and they often give support to NGOs
and rights-based campaigns, who have more money to spend and bigger
networks to tap for mobilising. In addition, one would
hazard to guess, not a few working in NGOs would self-identify as
leftists. In spite of all this, I heard some strong criticisms of NGOs
from one activist in particular: NGOs prevent leaders from emerging from
within movements, ‘organically’, by creating and identifying key
individuals through whom they choose to work and to channel funds. They
make these leaders less accountable to movements. They dissolve
relationships of solidarity that might otherwise exist, and inhibit
internal democracy. They systematically discriminate against working-class
knowledge. Others were more
cautious, putting down the antagonism between the left and NGOs to a
struggle for identity and ‘intolerance of small differences’. A
student activist was not dismissive of the service-delivery aspect of NGO
work. He emphasised that ‘urban centres needs social services’ and the
left should not overlook this in its work. He disagreed with some people
who ‘confuse this with NGO work and refuse to see it as
revolutionary’. But he was still at
pains to dispel suggestions that the left received NGO funding. The
politics/issues distinction, however, was still in his mind: NGOs work on
political issues but not on politics. Has the effect of
NGO-work been non- or anti-political; or is the anti-political a
possibility present in any programme of politics? This, again, is a
subject that needs a more-than-cursory treatment, and there must be many
useful discussions on this subject that I haven’t read. But one can
perhaps note that both the civil-society-before-politics argument and the
politics of progressive-change-through-solidarity-and-antagonism argument
are narrow enough in their own way. Both are tainted with purism and
demand certain types of essentialised political subjects before they can
get under way. Absence of ‘organic struggles of resistance’ do not
necessarily indicate an absence of politics. Nor does the absence of
‘citizens’ as posited by liberal thought mean a dead end for projects
that seek to mobilise civil society. This may suggest a way
of looking at another concern often voiced about the left, and no less
about NGOs: that they are intellectuals and academics, remote from
political reality. Probably many of them are what they are accused of
being. But is not clear to me what kind of discomfort is signified by
accusation of intellectual/academic: discomfort with smugness, purism,
authoritarianism and policing of ideological deviance, which many
intellectuals are prone to? Or a discomfort with the
always-looking-elsewhere — to other thinkers, places, intellectual
traditions and sources — which is a trait of any politics but
particularly of left politics? This ‘otherness’ and
foreignness can also exist in what we claim as our own reality. It can
appear to offer itself, for instance, as a ‘sufi’ or working-class
tradition, or in a sub-nationalist movement that erupts with the promise
of a different perception of political reality. But there is always a risk
here that the ‘otherness’ is not pure, that a tradition or struggle
that claims to be an alternative bears in it layers and possibilities of
the status quo. In my view, this risk
can be dispelled neither through intellectual rigour nor through
impeccable praxis. To be continued Sarah Humayun is a
writer based in Lahore. She can be reached at sarah.humayun@gmail.com
Against the backdrop of 18th Constitutional Amendment, the recently held UNDP conference weighs the relevance and implications of decentralisation By Amjad Bhatti The 18th
Constitutional Amendment passed unanimously in April 2010 has sharpened
the debates on federalism in Pakistan. A number of issues have emerged in
the process of implementation and transition management in last three
years where a plethora of diverse argumentation have pre-dominated the
political and governance discourse in the country. Some have argued that
the 18th Amendment was “too little and too late”, while others have
adjudged it as “too much and too soon”. The contest on the relevance,
implications and implementation of the 18th Constitutional Amendment
continues till today. It was against this
backdrop that UNDP’s project on “Strengthening Participatory
Federalism and Decentralization” designed an international conference on
“Participatory Federalism and Decentralization: From Framework to
Functionality” on 25-27 September in Islamabad. The Conference was
jointly organised and co-hosted by UNDP, Inter-University Consortium on
the Promotion of Social Sciences, Ministry of Inter-Provincial
Coordination, the Forum of Federations, the Higher Education Commission,
and the National College of Arts. The conference was aimed
at studying different trends, levels, and indicators of institutional
interplay between democracy, federalism and decentralisation at national,
regional and global levels. Global and regional case studies were
presented on the subjects, which provided a technical baseline to inform
and facilitate the process of triangular integration between democracy,
federalism and decentralisation in Pakistan. Thirty papers were
presented in the conference out of which 13 papers covered international
case studies by foreign scholars while 17 papers were presented by the
local academia, experts and government representatives from all four
provinces. International representation comprised Ethiopia, Canada,
Australia, Sri Lanka, India, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Nepal, USA, Russia
and Germany. Besides, political
leadership from different parties was invited to provide participants an
opportunity to understand divergent perspectives and ideological
standpoints of different political dispositions in Pakistan. Prominent
among them were Senator Mian Raza Rabbani, Maulana Fzalur Rehman, Mahmood
Khan Achakzai, Shafqat Mehmood, Marvi Memon, Taj Haider, Danyal Aziz,
Qamar Zaman Kaira and Farhatullah Babar. Key
messages of the Conference:
Preventable deaths Being well-off does not necessarily promise a long and healthy life as both poverty and affluence contribute to the causes of preventable or premature deaths By Syed Mansoor Hussain One of the more
interesting concepts in medicine is of the ‘preventable or premature
deaths’. Putting aside the effects of trauma and accidents, the two
other major causes of preventable deaths are poverty and affluence.
Even in modern medical
literature, the period before delivery of a child is often referred to as
‘confinement’. That is a serious problem; women that are active until
the time of delivery of a child have a better chance of going through an
uneventful delivery. The well to do that are confined to bed and await the
time, do worse. Child birth is hard work and those that are used to hard
work do better. There is an interesting
story of an obstetrician in Vienna during the nineteenth century called
Ignaz Semmelweis. He made an important observation about the occurrence of
puerperal sepsis (infection during child birth that was often fatal). What
Semmelweis noticed was that women who had ‘street births’ or in other
words were too poor to come to a hospital had a much lower chance of
getting infected than those that delivered their babies in a hospital. What Semmelweis realised
and that is a seminal observation in medical history was that women who
delivered babies in the hospital were taken care of by doctors who would
come down from the ‘autopsy rooms’ and deliver babies without washing
their hands. As such they transmitted infection from the dead to the
living. By instituting the regimen of washing hands before delivering a
baby, Semmelweis was able to cut down tremendously the incidence of
infection. But then being ahead of
your time is never good. Since Semmelweis could not prove why washing
hands was good, he was ostracised and rejected by the physicians who
thought that washing hands before delivering a baby was beneath their
dignity. Germs as cause of infection was yet in the future and after being
rejected, Semmelweis fell apart and eventually died in a ‘mental
asylum’ after being beaten up. Today, child birth is
still fraught with danger among the poor. First, because of ‘child
marriages’. When ‘children’ get pregnant they are often just not
physically developed enough to go through a normal delivery. Second,
during child birth medical help, including the possibility of a
‘caesarean section’, is not available. Third, the child after a
prolonged labour is often not well enough and neither is the mother and
without medical help both might not survive. There are two other
factors that increase maternal and child mortality. First is inappropriate
nutrition for the mother, most if not all poor women going into child
birth are severely deficient in terms of blood strength (anaemia) and even
a moderate amount of bleeding during delivery of a child can push them
into severe medical problems that they might not recover from. And if the
mother is not around or is too sick, the child will also have a hard time
surviving. Once the child is born
and is well at birth, there are other problems in store for the poor. The
first is malnutrition. Malnutrition in the poor countries remains a major
cause of early (preventable) death. But even if a child gets adequate
nutrition, the fight for survival has just begun. Overcrowding, unsanitary
surroundings, inadequate access to clean drinking water, lack of
education, and almost no access to primary medical care and immunisations
all contribute to early deaths. Without going through all the possible
diseases, let me just mention the frequent epidemics of ‘gastro’
(short for gastroenteritis) and enteric fevers (typhoid) that are almost
entirely due to drinking water contaminated by human refuse or else due to
food prepared by persons that don’t wash hands after a visit to the
toilet. Lack of immunisation in children often leads to epidemics like the
recent one of ‘measles’. Adequate ‘education’ especially of the
mothers could well prevent many of these problems. Overcrowding has an
interesting history. Pulmonary Tuberculosis (TB) was the scourge for the
last few centuries. TB was called the ‘white plague’; it was also
often a ‘romantic’ disease that infected people of a ‘sensitive’
nature. To name two victims, first is the famous poet, John Keats, the
second of course is Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.
Interestingly, even before the definitive antibiotic treatment for TB was
discovered in the middle of the last century, the incidence of TB was
rapidly declining and this was due to the fact that overcrowding became
less common especially among the well to do and as such transmission of
this disease from person to person became less common. Here two ‘stories’
are of interest. Many of us of a ‘certain age’ were brought up on
Indian movies in which one member of a ‘romantic triangle’ often died
from TB thus leaving the field open for the friend and romantic rival.
Also, while reading a book on the history of TB a few decades ago, I came
upon a reference given by the person who discovered Streptomycin during
the nineteen forties, the antibiotic that was the first definitive
treatment of TB. The person who discovered Streptomycin mentions that he
received a letter from a physician who asked for Streptomycin to treat a
national leader in the ‘east’ but a few months later the physician
sent a letter saying it was no longer needed. Was the patient Jinnah? And now to the diseases
particular to the well off. The diseases that have become the scourge of
the modern world, of these two are worth mentioning. First is what we call
Adult onset Diabetes (Type II Diabetes) that is almost entirely due to the
increasing consumption of refined starches and sugars and the entailing
obesity. The second is blockages of heart arteries leading to heart
attacks. Besides, Diabetes and
obesity, the most important predisposing factor for blockages of the heart
arteries is a lack of physical activity, once again the result of a life
style that can only be sustained by the well off. Unfortunately, being
well off does not necessarily promise a long and healthy life. In most
developing and developed countries, Diabetes and heart disease are now the
major causes of preventable (?) deaths especially among the emerging
middle class. Interestingly, it is the newly ‘affluent’ that are much
more prone to dietary excess. That leaves two types of
disease that make up the second tier of preventable or premature deaths.
First is ‘cancer’, frankly if we didn’t live long enough, most of us
would never develop cancers. It is for this reason that cancers don’t
come in as a major cause of premature death in poor and developing
countries. The other category is of diseases associated with aging. Here
again you have to live long enough to develop these conditions. The writer is former
professor and Chairman Department of Cardiac Surgery, KEMU/Mayo Hospital,
Lahore: smhmbbs70@yahoo.com
A
crisis long over looked “Well fed
people can enhance their dignity, their health and their learning
capacity. Putting resources into social programs is not expenditure. It is
investment”, LuizInácio Lula da Silva, former President of Brazil. Finally, the federal
government has launched the long-awaited National Nutrition Survey (NNS)
2011 in Islamabad. Findings of the NNS 2011 are depressing and clearly
depicts how neglected the subject is in Pakistan. There has been no
improvement in nutrition indicators for the last almost four decades and
Minister Ahsan Iqbal rightly lamented the fact that the last decade
following NNS 2001 has been totally lost as no tangible steps have been
taken to improve the situation. Federal Minister for
Planning and Development and the Minister of State for Health Services
Regulations and Coordination with the respective secretaries,
representatives of the Provincial Governments and the Planning Commission
of Pakistan, Donors, UN Agencies and civil society were present at the
launching ceremony. The NNS 2011 was the
largest nutrition survey in the history of Pakistan conducted by the Aga
Khan University’s Division of Women and Child Health, Ministry of Health
and UNICEF with the financial support of AusAID and DFID. The NNS 2011
covered all provinces, Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Gilgit Baltistan and
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). This included 1,500
enumeration bocks (EBs)/villages and 30,000 households with a 49 per cent
urban and 51 per cent rural distribution. Results from the NNS
2011 indicated little change over the last decade in terms of core
maternal and childhood nutrition indicators. With regard to micronutrient
deficiencies, while iodine status had improved nationally, vitamin A
status has had deteriorated and there had been little or no improvement in
other indicators linked to micronutrient deficiencies. The NNS 2011 revealed
that the nutritional status has not changed much over the past decade. The
anthropometry of children under 5 revealed that 43.7 per cent were stunted
(too short for her/his age/low height for age) in 2011 as compared to 41.6
per cent in 2001 NNS. Similarly, 15.1 per cent children were wasted
(weight that is too low for her/his height) compared to 14.3 per cent in
2001. As per World Health Organization’s standards, a national average
of 15 per cent or above is labelled as an “EMERGENCY”. The NNS 2011 indicates
that stunting, wasting and micronutrient deficiencies are endemic in
Pakistan. These are caused by a combination of dietary deficiencies; poor
maternal and child health; a high burden of morbidity; and low
micronutrient content in the soil, especially iodine and zinc. Most of
these micronutrients have profound effects on immunity, growth and mental
development. They may underline the high burden of morbidity and mortality
among women and children in Pakistan. Malnutrition plays a
substantial role in Pakistan’s high child morbidity and mortality rates.
Due to its correlation with infections, malnutrition in Pakistan currently
threatens maternal and child survival and an estimated 35 per cent of all
under 5 deaths in the country are linked with malnutrition. It is
imperative to respond to the situation if Pakistan has to be on track to
achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4; about two third reduction in
under 5 mortality. More than 1.5 million
children in Pakistan are currently suffering from acute malnutrition,
making them susceptible to infectious diseases which may even lead to
death. Long-term (chronic) malnutrition undermines both physical and
mental development; nearly half of Pakistan’s children are chronically
malnourished, and have their brain development and immune systems
impaired, with life-long consequences. Most of the irreversible
damage due to malnutrition happens during conception and in the first 24
months of life meaning that risk begins from the day of conception to up
to two years of age also referred to as the first 1000 days. It was encouraging to
listen to the Federal Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal,
during the launch of the NNS 2011, who was very clear that it is time for
retrospection and that the issue is not going to be resolved through
routine approach and all the stakeholders should respond to the situation
as an emergency. Besides, the launch of
the NNS 2011 another positive development is Pakistan’s joining of the
Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative at the global level in April 2013.
More than 40 countries have joined the SUN Movement so far, Pakistan being
the largest country. The SUN is an opportunity which the government should
utilise effectively and gear up to improve the situation of nutrition in
the country. Key donors, UN Agencies, National and International NGOs are
there to support the federal and provincial governments to scale up
efforts for nutrition in a coordinated and efficient manner. The writer is a
development practitioner based in Islamabad and tweets @amahmood72
Food for all The developed
world is fast adopting biotechnology in agriculture and the developing
world is also trying to catch up. The ever-increasing demand for food and
loss in agricultural productivity due to over-cultivation, pest attacks
and diseases demand for scientific development of seeds which can take
care of these issue. While countries are
opting for genetic modifications in crops, certain anti-biotechnology
campaigners in Pakistan are opposing genetically modified (GM) crops on
grounds they are not safe and their introduction will create monopoly of
big multinationals in agriculture. They have been alleging
that GM crops are ‘untested’ and ‘unsafe’. The fact is that there
is no concrete scientific data proving that these crops are not safe for
human consumption but there is sufficient scientific data proving that
these crops, which are assessed for environmental, food and feed safety by
regulatory authorities before being allowed to be grown or sold
commercially, are perfectly safe for human consumption. Regarding their concerns
about monopoly of certain seed companies, one can say this debate arises
whenever a new technology comes into use and the outdated one has to be
discarded. But what happens is that soon after the introduction of a new
technology several local and international players enter the market and
gives birth to a competitive environment. Why are they going for gene
improvement in case of livestock and reluctant when it comes to
agricultural production? All agricultural
universities of Pakistan are teaching biotechnology. This means there will
be enough expertise soon in the country to challenge monopoly of one or
two companies. There is substantial
data available which clearly demonstrates safety and the benefits of the
technology to the farmers and environment. Regulators across the world
carry out rigorous risk assessment before granting commercial approvals.
UN, WHO, FAO, EFSA, Royal Academy of Sciences, National Academy of
Sciences, French Academy of Medicine, British Medical Association, 25
Nobel laureates (including Norman Borlaug) all concluded that Bt crops are
as safe as conventional crops. Billions of meals from genetically modified
products are being consumed globally. Besides, GM food has
been safely cultivated and consumed across the world, including tomato,
sweet pepper (China), papaya (USA, China), sugarbeet (USA, Canada), corn
(16 countries), potato (Sweden, Germany, Czech Republic) and squash (USA).
In meeting stringent food safety requirements and standards, biotech foods
are among the most thoroughly tested foods available. No other food crops in
history — including foods currently available on grocers’ shelves —
have been tested and regulated as thoroughly as have foods developed
through biotechnology. After more than 17 years of commercial production
and consumption of the foods produced over hundreds of million acres,
there are no instances on record where biotech have had negative effect on
human health. In Pakistan, opponents
of crop biotechnology often fear that introduction of GM crops would
create monopoly of big multinationals. The Bt cotton was first brought in
by the farmers through unofficial channels because they thought it was
useful for them and the government was too slow in approving the new
technology. Today, there are a
number of approved and unapproved varieties of Bt cotton available in the
country competing each other in the market. So where is the monopoly fear
created by these anti-science lobbies? The question here is
that is it really possible today to fool the farmer? Obviously, it is not.
Studies in countries where biotech products have been commercialised have
demonstrated that farmers are the major beneficiaries. Technology not
beneficial to the farmers can never be successfully marketed anywhere in
the world including Pakistan. Farmers always opt for the seeds developed
to suit their local agronomic and environmental conditions. They also look
out for the fact whether these seeds can bring them substantial benefits
in terms of high yields and better crop management. The government of
Pakistan is likely to introduce GM corn shortly. It will have the
capability to significantly reduce the losses caused by certain chewing
insect pests and weeds and ultimately result in higher production. In the United States,
where 86 per cent of the nation’s corn acreage is planted with
biotechnology varieties, average yields in 2010 were roughly 30 per cent
higher than the average corn yields prior to 1996 — the year biotech
varieties were first planted. In the Philippines, the only Asian country
where GM corn has been commercialised, there has been average yield
increase of 15 per cent with herbicide tolerant corn while 25 per cent
with insect resistant corn. Above all,
genetically-modified foods have the potential to solve many of the
world’s hunger and malnutrition problems, and to help protect and
preserve the environment by increasing yield and reducing reliance upon
chemical pesticides and herbicides. The majority of these benefits
continue to increasingly go to farmers in developing countries. The
environment is also benefiting as farmers increasingly adopt conservation
tillage practices, build their weed management practices around more
benign herbicides and replace insecticide use with insect resistant GM
crops. The reduction in
pesticide application and the switchover to no-till cropping systems is
continuing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. According
to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, feeding a world
population of 9.1 billion in 2050 will require raising overall food
production by 70 per cent (nearly 100 per cent in developing countries). To meet this challenge,
farmers will need to find ways to grow more food more sustainably.
Biotechnology has already helped increase food and feed production. For
example, biotechnology traits have added 74 million tonnes and 79.7
million tonnes respectively to global production of soybeans and corn
since its introduction in 1996. Vitamin A-enriched ‘Golden Rice’,
which has been developed by International Rice Research Institute (IRRI-Philippines),
is one of the examples of biotech crops that fight malnutrition (Vitamin A
deficiency). Globally, GM crops’
opposition is subsiding day by day as relevant scientific data is
convincing more and more anti-biotech campaigners to admit the fact that
agricultural biotechnology is safe and should be fully deployed in order
to ensure sufficient food for growing population. World-known British
writer and environmentalist Mark Lynas, who helped spur the anti-GM
movement back in the mid 1990s, has recently confessed that he was
completely wrong to oppose GMOs. In Pakistan too, agricultural scientists
have been informing the stakeholders that biotechnology is safe and can be
a key to address challenges facing the agriculture sector. University of
Agriculture Faisalabad VC Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan had recently said, “GMOs
would lead to the new green revolution and termed the GMOs a great and
safe intervention that would enhance the productivity to feed the growing
population.” Agriculture is the
backbone of our economy and any wrong decision regarding adoption or
rejection of any agricultural technology can have an adverse impact on our
country. Therefore, it is suggested that the government should take
decision on biotechnology, purely on the basis of scientific evidence and
ignore the propaganda of certain interest groups.
The language trinity Our medium of instruction policies are determined too often by political and nationalistic exigencies, playing a divisive role and contributing to fragmentation, exclusion, and growing disparities By Irfan Muzaffar Our country has
always been multilingual due to our uniquely rich cultural landscape. The
language one uses changes not just with geography, but also with each
passing hour during a typical day of an average Pakistani. At home you use your
mother tongue, whatever it may be. At the work place your language
performance is expected to alternate between English and Urdu depending on
your educational background, your position within the institutional
hierarchy, and who How has Pakistan’s
education policies addressed the problem of medium of instruction in this
multilingual context? The short answer is that they have utterly failed to
turn this cultural dividend, our multilingual heritage, into an
educational opportunity. Our medium of instruction policies have shown
utter disregard to pedagogical considerations and are determined too often
by political and nationalistic exigencies. These policies have also played
a divisive role and contributed to fragmentation, exclusion, and growing
disparities. It all begins at home
much before we encounter the effects of education policies at school. In
Pakistan, it is not uncommon to find middle class parents exposing their
children to a medley of available languages. That’s the sort of language
exposure I received from my own parents in early years. I listened to
Punjabi, was talked to in Urdu, and less frequently in English. More
frequently it was a mix of the three languages. But this wasn’t all. I
also came to associate different attitudes with the languages in use.
Punjabi was associated with loudness and informality, Urdu with my much
sought after bedtime fairy tales and rhymes, and English with cartoon
characters and space and time travellers such as those found in Star Trek
and The Time Tunnel. Somewhere along the
line, I learned that language was not just about talking and listening and
entertainment. It was much more, just like we had a national anthem and a
national bird, we also had a national language. Fortunately for me, the
national language happened to be the one in which my grand mother gave me
my daily doze of fairy tales. When in school, I also
learnt that English was not just about Popeye the Sailor, Star Trek, and
The Time Tunnel. I was never explicitly told in those early grades that
doing well in English was indispensable to my future success. But there
was an unspoken understanding that English was superior/preferred, an
understanding constructed at times by being fined for speaking in Urdu.
Those of you who have been cadets in the cadet colleges or academies might
even recall being asked to frog jump for speaking in ‘vernacular’. In
the school, English just came across as much more superior than the
so-called national language. What sort of an odd
society it was that first taught me that I had a national language and
then fined me to speak in it? To say nothing of the mother tongue, which I
did not even remember I had. There it was then, a
language version of the holy trinity — a mother tongue, Urdu, and
English. English, being the language of bureaucracy, commerce, science,
and technology, was the holiest of all. Urdu, being the national language,
was holier. The sanctity of mother tongue was anyone’s guess. It goes
without saying that to get the best of this trinity for their children,
the parents must choose to send their children to an English medium school
— only if they could afford to do so. While some of our
parents could afford to put us on the right side of the language trinity,
most Pakistani children had this trinity on their wrong side. Many of my
age-mates would never even see a school, and the education of those
who’d go to Urdu medium public schools or the low cost private schools
would not be prepared to compete with those of us who went to private
English medium schools. Little did we realise that more than anything
else, it is the language, which most effectively sets up the mutually
exclusive social, cultural, and economic zones. So we have effectively
ended up creating categories of persons in our society, differentiated by
access to different languages and the ability to speak them. So we
effectively ended up creating a range of persons in our society
characterised mainly by differences in access they had to different
languages. The language trinity could be clearly mapped onto scales of
privilege, advantage, and development. Mother tongues and vernaculars were
placed on the lower end and Urdu and English on the sophisticated and
developed end of these scales. It didn’t matter how well grounded one
was in his or her first language, s/he would still be perceived as
suffering from development deficit if inadequately skilled in English. Clearly, we are in a
bind on the issue of the demands that language diversity make on education
system. At least, in part, it has to do with the lack of willingness of
the Pakistani state to fully understand and take on the burden of actually
delivering a decent education to all children. Much like any other modern
state, Pakistan has always expressed the desire to extend educational
opportunity to all children. But in the same breath, it has also said that
the state could not finance it and has asked the private sector to pitch
in. Among other things, this only strengthened the effects of the language
trinity. The early policies, at
least apparently, proposed to turn the first two terms of the trinity
around by suggesting a time bound transition to national language. The
delegates of the first conference on education held in 1947, while clearly
in favour of declaring Urdu as the national language and lingua franca of
Pakistan, recognised the importance of the mother tongues and of teaching
both Urdu and English as a subject. Some attending the conference thought
that [Urdu] “should be taught right from the beginning of the school
stage so as to increasingly and progressively adopt it as the medium of
instruction in the educational system”. But there were also those who
argued that “it would be educationally unsound, particularly when the
mother tongues were sufficiently developed…the mother tongues could
flourish and develop side by side with the lingua franca and one need not
throttle the growth of the other” (From the report of the 1947
Conference on Education). The conference ultimately resolved to require
the schools to teach Urdu as a compulsory subject in schools and left the
question of medium of instruction to be decided by the provincial
governments. The first conference had
resolved to gradually replace English with Urdu by developing the latter
further and let the provincial governments determine the medium of
instruction in elementary schools. By 1951, different regions within
Pakistan were accommodating the language trinity in different ways. While
the mother tongue had been made the medium of instruction [at least
officially] in all primary schools, Urdu remained the medium of
instruction in secondary schools in the Punjab, Balochistan, the [then]
NWFP and Bahawalpur. In the case of Sindh and East Bengal, the regional
language constituted the medium of instruction and Urdu was taught as a
compulsory subject. With regards to English,
the report of the education conference held in 1951 observed that it was
only in the universities that English remained the medium of instruction
and that the ministry of interior was pondering over the question of time
frame needed to fully replace it with Urdu and Bengali in the West and
East Pakistan. The Urdu Committee appointed by the minister of interior,
Mr Fazlur Rehman, had recommended starting using Urdu on an experimental
basis side by side with English as a medium of instruction in the
Universities of Karachi, Punjab and Peshawar. The results of this
experiment were to be reviewed in 1956. Meanwhile, the market
place for English medium education, then largely being given through the
missionary schools and a few selected publicly financed institutions, was
allowed to flourish as it continued to produce an exclusive elite.
Undoubtedly, the quality of education offered at those institutions was
much better than the run of the mill public school. Yet it was only a few
who could benefit from this higher quality education. The hypocritical
policy elites of Pakistan continued to send their own children to these
high quality English medium schools while arguing for replacement of
English by Urdu for the rest. The holy trinity of
language pervaded our daily lives, while the education policy looked the
other way. The height of this hypocrisy was reached with the first
education policy issued by the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq in
1979. His education policy called English medium schools a colonial legacy
and called for the abolishment of this nomenclature. Nothing could be more
hypocritical than a policy elite selling to the masses at large what it
wouldn’t buy in the education market place itself. English continued to
be holiest in the language trinity by preserving its place as the language
of the military, the bureaucracy, commerce, science, and technology.
History suggests that when universities start to act as moral vigilantes, academic standards nosedive By Tahir Kamran The widely held
presumption that certain madaris are hatcheries of jihadis, target killers
and suicide bombers stands punctured after startling revelations about
universities in Lahore and Islamabad. Nine al-Qaeda suspects were arrested
from a Punjab University hostel, including their handler. Four of them had
received jihadi training in Miranshah in North Waziristan, while the other
five had expertise in information technology/communication and the making
of improvised explosive devises (IEDs). Obviously, they could
not have acquired all the skills they needed from any madrassa, certainly
not the diploma in automobile technology and media coordination, with
which some of them were equipped. One may surmise that madrassa-graduates
may, at best, act as cannon fodder whereas graduates in science and
technology from Pakistani universities form the critical mass for the
anti-state forces. On September 3, 2013, an
Arab national was apprehended by a premier intelligence agency from a
hostel at the Punjab University who had come to Lahore to lead a fidayeen
(suicide) mission. He was living in a room allotted to a member of the
Islami Jamiat Talba (IJT), whose spokesman denied link with any terrorist
organisation. However, anyone having the slightest cognisance of the
affairs of the Punjab University knows well that nothing can come to pass
without the affirmation of the IJT’s high command. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad,
one of the al-Qaeda leader, was arrested in March 2004 from the home of a
leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami’s women’s wing in Rawalpindi, providing
evidence of the latent nexus between the two. If educational institutions
are left the mercy of ideological monoliths, such occurrences become a
norm and not an aberration. By such means, the largest educational
institution in Pakistan has become no more than a conquered estate, to be
guarded at all costs against any encroachment by the ‘liberals’.
Subjected to the sway of one ideology, the Punjab University is now a
hideout for terrorists. This calls for a requiem to a bygone era when the
pursuit of knowledge and not terrorism was its emblem. If this was not enough,
in a recent incident one terrorist by the name of Hammad Adil was nabbed
from the Sabzi Mandi area in 1-11 Sector, Islamabad. He, in cahoots with
Omar Abdullah, Tanveer and Abdul Sattar, admitted to killing Shahbaz
Bhatti, the lone Christian Federal Minister in the PPP government, on
March 3, 2011. Adil also confessed to the murder of the prosecutor in the
Benazir Bhutto murder case, assistance in the suicide attack on the Danish
Embassy, burning Nato containers and attack on a general in the Pakistan
army. A vehicle laden with 120 kilogrammes of explosives was recovered
from his residence in Bara Kahu, in the outskirts of Islamabad. Worryingly, Hammad Adil
went to the Islamic International University (IIU), Islamabad and ‘was
convinced to go on jihad during his stay in the hostel’. Similarly, his
accomplice Tanveer graduated in Sharia law from IIU. Syed Irtiaz Nabi
Gilani, nephew of Asiya Andrabi, the chairperson of the all-women
pro-freedom outfit Dukhtran-i-Millat, absconded when police raided his
house to arrest him on terrorism-related charges. A huge cache of
ammunition and four spy planes were recovered from his house. Irtiaz too is a science
faculty member at IIU. That university, according to senior journalist
Khaled Ahmed, was ‘decreed by the Saudi king to consolidate the growing
involvement of Pakistan with Hadith-based dogmatic Islam’, and bears the
notorious imprint of Abdullah Azzam, the intellectual founder of al-Qaeda,
who once served there as a teacher. Rizwan Omar, an
enterprising police officer currently serving in Islamabad, claims that
graduates in Sharia-Law from IIU betray a strong subversive streak with
reference to the state of Pakistan. If that university is purged of Saudi
influence and its curriculum is radically transformed, it can serve the
society in a positive way. If not, then institutions like IIU, working to
foment someone else’s ideology, are likely to wreak disaster on the
beleaguered Pakistanis. Omar also mentioned the
University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore and National University
of Science and technology (NUST) as imbued with overriding religiosity.
The latter was recently in the news for enforcing a strict dress code on
its female students. Another institution of higher education in the
medical sciences, the Khyber Medical University Peshawar, also tried to
emulate NUST, ostensibly to promote ‘Islamic values’. The Jamaat-i-Islami, a
coalition partner of the Tehreek-i-Insaf of Imran Khan in KPK, is said to
be a driving force in enacting such a regulation. History suggests that
when universities start to act as moral vigilantes, academic standards
nosedive. That is exactly what has happened to our universities in the
last three decades or so. In such a situation,
expecting our institutions to impart a liberal-humanist education to our
coming generation — which Cardinal Newman identified as the main
function of a university — remains a distant dream. Similarly, the
Humboldtian ideal of creating scientific minds will remain unattainable
for our youth. Thus, Tariq Rehman’s despondency over the indifference of
Pakistani universities to the prescriptions of Newman and Humboldt makes
perfect sense. Pakistani universities
are churning out youngsters equipped with technological know-how but
obsessed with wreaking devastation with it. Things can be improved if
instruction in science and technology is coupled with a critical
understanding of socio-political realities. That will come only through a
carefully thought-out curriculum of social and human sciences, made
compulsory for all at the under-graduate level. The writer is a noted
Pakistani historian, currently the Iqbal Fellow at the University of
Cambridge as professor in the Centre of South Asian Studies
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state institutions seeing and engaging with Balochistan, and they will
tell you that politics obfuscates. For them, bringing the p-word into the
equation is both irrelevant and dangerous. Irrelevant, they say, since
earthquakes are natural: an inevitable act of God or nature that no one
could have avoided. And dangerous, they add, because any talk of politics
can hamper urgent humanitarian relief.
stationed
in southern Balochistan alone; 700 before the earthquake hit last week,
when the army deployed troops to the region from Karachi and Quetta.
Another 1000 troops are stationed in Quetta according to a source within
the FC, and many more can be found across the province, including Dera
Bugti and Kohlu, the homes of the notorious Bugti and Marri sardars. The
massive presence of soldiers across Balochistan indicates that even our
state institutions recognise the presence of rebellion and discontent with
the governments in Islamabad and Quetta.
here
people go about their daily lives do not have infrastructure ready to
withstand the threat of earthquakes. There is a reason that
earthquake-prone Japan sees nothing near the devastation that we see in
Pakistan — they have decided to invest in buildings that will keep their
people safe.
more,
and that the militant group and others allied to them have been part of
attacks on Punjabis and innocent government officials. Such a position
does not change the facts on the ground: that politics matters, and that
anyone truly interested in seeing relief effectively delivered and
distributed in Balochistan will have to integrate them into their
planning.
One
of the most dangerous points in a human life is birth. This is dangerous
especially for the mother but also for the child. Maternal and child
mortality continue to be a major problem especially in poor countries
including Pakistan. However, it is interesting to note that more than a
century ago, child birth was equally dangerous for the rich as well as the
poor. 
you are talking to. Pakistanis’ social and educational upbringing
programmes them when to switch to the most relevant language to get what
they want. We, as a people, are expected to be skilled in more than one
language.
