Showing posts with label partition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label partition. Show all posts
Monday, 26 June 2023
Monday, 2 January 2023
Friday, 22 April 2022
The Perils Of Conceptual Reality
Nadeem F Paracha in The Friday Times
I’m sure by now you must have come across people (mostly on social media) who let loose a barrage of words as a reaction to what they believe is an anti-Imran-Khan tweet or post. The words are almost always,”looters,” “corrupt,” “chor,” and “traitors.” These words are dedicated to parties and leaders who till recently were in the opposition and are now in government (after ousting Khan).
Very rarely can one find a pro-Khan or pro-PTI person actually listing the successes of the ousted PM’s economic or social policies. But the fact is: as much as such folk are rare, so are the previous government’s successes. If one still believes that this is not the case, he or she needs to provide some intelligent, informed arguments so that an exchange can turn into a debate — instead of a hyper-monologue in which a single person is frantically crackling like a broken record: “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!”
Is this person stupid? Not quite. Because one even saw some apparently intelligent men and women crackling in the same manner when Khan fell. To most critics of populism, people who voted for men such as India’s Narendra Modi, America’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and Pakistan’s Imran Khan, were all largely ‘stupid.’
But what is stupidity? Ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of stupidity, especially in the context of politics, has been studied by various sociologists. One of the pioneers in this regard was the German scholar and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During the rise of Nazi rule in Germany, Bonhoeffer was baffled by the silence of millions of Germans when the Nazis began to publicly humiliate and brutalise Jewish people. Bonhoeffer condemned this. He asked: how could a nation that had produced so many philosophers, scientists and artists suddenly become so apathetic and even sympathetic towards state violence and oppression?
Unsurprisingly, in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. Two years later, he was executed. While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer began to put his thoughts on paper. These were posthumously published in the shape of a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the chapters in the book is called, “On Stupidity.” Bonhoeffer wrote: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it political or religious, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
According to Bonhoeffer, because of the overwhelming impact of a rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and they give up establishing an autonomous position towards the emerging circumstances. It is a condition in which people become mere tools in the hands of those in power, and begin to willingly surrender their capacity for independent thinking. Bonhoeffer wrote that holding a rational debate with such a person is futile, because it feels that one is not dealing with a person, but with slogans and catchwords. “Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!” ‘Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!’ Repeat.
But Khan did not rise. He fell. Truth is: this condition in which a person becomes a walking-talking instrument of repetitive slogans and catchwords, first appeared during Khan’s rise to power. During that period “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors” were active words, deployed to justify Khan’s rise, and the demise of his opponents. After his fall, the same words have become reactive. Either way, neither then nor now is this condition suitable for a more informed debate between two (or more) opposing ideas or narratives.
Does this mean that most Khan fans are incapable of having such a debate? Many may not be very well-informed about the ins and outs of politics or history, but does that make them stupid — even though sometimes they certainly sound it?
To Bonhoeffer, stupidity was not about lack of intelligence, but about a mind that had voluntarily closed itself to reason, especially after being impacted and/or swayed by an assertive external power. In a 2020 essay for The New Statesman, the British philosopher Sacha Golob wrote that being stupid and dumb were not the same thing. Intelligence (or lack thereof) can somewhat be measured through IQ tests. But even those who score high in these tests can do ‘stupid’ things or carry certain ‘stupid ideas.’
I’m sure by now you must have come across people (mostly on social media) who let loose a barrage of words as a reaction to what they believe is an anti-Imran-Khan tweet or post. The words are almost always,”looters,” “corrupt,” “chor,” and “traitors.” These words are dedicated to parties and leaders who till recently were in the opposition and are now in government (after ousting Khan).
Very rarely can one find a pro-Khan or pro-PTI person actually listing the successes of the ousted PM’s economic or social policies. But the fact is: as much as such folk are rare, so are the previous government’s successes. If one still believes that this is not the case, he or she needs to provide some intelligent, informed arguments so that an exchange can turn into a debate — instead of a hyper-monologue in which a single person is frantically crackling like a broken record: “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Is this person stupid? Not quite. Because one even saw some apparently intelligent men and women crackling in the same manner when Khan fell. To most critics of populism, people who voted for men such as India’s Narendra Modi, America’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and Pakistan’s Imran Khan, were all largely ‘stupid.’
But what is stupidity? Ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of stupidity, especially in the context of politics, has been studied by various sociologists. One of the pioneers in this regard was the German scholar and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During the rise of Nazi rule in Germany, Bonhoeffer was baffled by the silence of millions of Germans when the Nazis began to publicly humiliate and brutalise Jewish people. Bonhoeffer condemned this. He asked: how could a nation that had produced so many philosophers, scientists and artists suddenly become so apathetic and even sympathetic towards state violence and oppression?
Unsurprisingly, in 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. Two years later, he was executed. While awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer began to put his thoughts on paper. These were posthumously published in the shape of a book, Letters and Papers from Prison. One of the chapters in the book is called, “On Stupidity.” Bonhoeffer wrote: “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it political or religious, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
According to Bonhoeffer, because of the overwhelming impact of a rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and they give up establishing an autonomous position towards the emerging circumstances. It is a condition in which people become mere tools in the hands of those in power, and begin to willingly surrender their capacity for independent thinking. Bonhoeffer wrote that holding a rational debate with such a person is futile, because it feels that one is not dealing with a person, but with slogans and catchwords. “Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!” ‘Looters, corrupt, chor, traitors!’ Repeat.
But Khan did not rise. He fell. Truth is: this condition in which a person becomes a walking-talking instrument of repetitive slogans and catchwords, first appeared during Khan’s rise to power. During that period “looters, corrupt, chor, traitors” were active words, deployed to justify Khan’s rise, and the demise of his opponents. After his fall, the same words have become reactive. Either way, neither then nor now is this condition suitable for a more informed debate between two (or more) opposing ideas or narratives.
Does this mean that most Khan fans are incapable of having such a debate? Many may not be very well-informed about the ins and outs of politics or history, but does that make them stupid — even though sometimes they certainly sound it?
To Bonhoeffer, stupidity was not about lack of intelligence, but about a mind that had voluntarily closed itself to reason, especially after being impacted and/or swayed by an assertive external power. In a 2020 essay for The New Statesman, the British philosopher Sacha Golob wrote that being stupid and dumb were not the same thing. Intelligence (or lack thereof) can somewhat be measured through IQ tests. But even those who score high in these tests can do ‘stupid’ things or carry certain ‘stupid ideas.’
Golob gave the example of the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the famous fictional character Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, a private detective, was an ideal product of the ‘Age of Reason,’ imagined by Doyle as a man who shunned emotions and dealt only in reason, empiricism and the scientific method. Yet, later on in life, Doyle became the antithesis of his character, Holmes. He got into a silly argument with the celebrated illusionist Harry Houdini when the latter rubbished Doyle’s belief that one could communicate with spirits (in a seance).
How could a man who had created a rather convincing empiricist and rationalist character such as Sherlock Holmes begin to believe in seances? In fact, Doyle also began to believe in the existence of fairies. Every time someone would successfully debunk Doyle’s beliefs, he would go to great lengths to provide a counter-argument, but one which was even more absurd.
Golob wrote that stupidity can thus be found in supposedly very intelligent people as well. According to the American psychologist Ray Hyman, “Conan Doyle used his smartness to outsmart himself.” This can also answer why one sometimes comes across highly educated and informed men and women unabashedly spouting conspiracy theories that have either been convincingly debunked, or cannot be proven outside the domain of wishful thinking. But why would one do that?
There can be various reasons for this. According to Golob, Doyle, who had already developed some interest in ‘spirituality,’ began dabbling in the supernatural after the death of his son. According to Golob, “Doyle used his intellect to weave a path through grief that, although obviously irrational, was personally restorative.” So, it can be a way to live through grief or a personal tragedy which things like reason, rationality or logic cannot address. But this does not mean that the thousands of intelligent people who begin to mouth irrational populist hogwash all suffer personal tragedies. Yet, in the context of politics, resentfulness and grief can be triggered in a class or tribe if it is convinced that it has been neglected, mocked or sidelined by a ‘political elite.’
How could a man who had created a rather convincing empiricist and rationalist character such as Sherlock Holmes begin to believe in seances? In fact, Doyle also began to believe in the existence of fairies. Every time someone would successfully debunk Doyle’s beliefs, he would go to great lengths to provide a counter-argument, but one which was even more absurd.
Golob wrote that stupidity can thus be found in supposedly very intelligent people as well. According to the American psychologist Ray Hyman, “Conan Doyle used his smartness to outsmart himself.” This can also answer why one sometimes comes across highly educated and informed men and women unabashedly spouting conspiracy theories that have either been convincingly debunked, or cannot be proven outside the domain of wishful thinking. But why would one do that?
There can be various reasons for this. According to Golob, Doyle, who had already developed some interest in ‘spirituality,’ began dabbling in the supernatural after the death of his son. According to Golob, “Doyle used his intellect to weave a path through grief that, although obviously irrational, was personally restorative.” So, it can be a way to live through grief or a personal tragedy which things like reason, rationality or logic cannot address. But this does not mean that the thousands of intelligent people who begin to mouth irrational populist hogwash all suffer personal tragedies. Yet, in the context of politics, resentfulness and grief can be triggered in a class or tribe if it is convinced that it has been neglected, mocked or sidelined by a ‘political elite.’
The manifestation of conceptual reality
In the US, folk in the ‘rural’ South felt exactly that. They felt their ideas and lifestyles were mocked by the ‘liberal elite’ for being backward, anti-modern and superstitious. Their resentment in this regard was brilliantly tapped by Donald Trump. And even though the Southern states in the US have the largest number of Christian fundamentalists and regular Church-goers in that country, they continued to support Trump despite his involvement in scandals both of the flesh and finances.
This brings us back to Nazi Germany and Bonhoeffer. A nation was left grief-stricken by a humiliating defeat (during the First World War). It was thus willing to suspend all critical thinking after the grief was first treated with a barrage of conspiracy theories (blaming the Jews), and then by a man who became a powerful conduit of these theories. His rise was the sum of collective resentment and grief. It was a negation of empirical reality where a society was trapped in a serious existential crisis.
Theoretically, the crisis could have been addressed in a rational manner as well (such as through the continuation of the democratic process). But such processes evolve slowly and come to be seen as part of a reality that is pregnant with crisis. The answers to such a malaise often come in the shape of ‘conceptual reality.’ Empirical realty is the reality which one interacts with on a daily basis through the senses. Conceptual realty, on the other hand, is created and fuelled by certain ideological drivers or by what one thinks empirical reality should actually be. Conceptual reality is an imagined world but is stuffed with claims and physical paraphernalia to make it seem like empirical reality.
The promise of a ‘thousand-year-Reich’ by the Nazis was a fantasy that used physical symbols (such as a messiah-like leader, large rallies and public marches, uniforms, imposing architecture, etc.) to replace an empirical reality with a conceptual one. And when a person escapes into a conceptual reality, communicating with him or her on an empirical and rational level becomes next to impossible.
1983 copy of US government instructions to its embassies in Muslim countries on how to ‘politely’ deny that astronaut Neil Armstrong had converted to Islam
Conceptual reality is a product of – and mostly appeals to – people who have developed a persecution complex because they failed to find an identity or purpose in the empirical reality. So, they dismiss it and look to replace the ‘what is’ with the ‘what (they believe) should be’. This is fine if they can do so while remaining within the empirical reality. But the results can be disastrous when they reject empirical reality by losing themselves in building a conceptual reality. This reality is utopian. But when manifested physically, it quickly becomes dystopian, myopic and even delusional.
German historian Markus Daechsel has brilliantly demonstrated this in his book The Politics of Self Expression. Conceptual reality includes the projection of one’s religious and ideological beliefs on people that have little or nothing to do with them. Conceptual reality also entails projections that are often proliferated through populist media as a way to concretise conceptual reality.
Daechsel gave the example of certain pre-Partition Muslim and Hindu outfits who insisted that their members wear a uniform and hold parades. Daechsel writes that in the empirical reality, there was no war or revolution taking place there. But in the minds of the members of the outfits, there was such a situation (or there should have been). So, they created a conceptual reality in which there was revolutionary turmoil and these outfits were an integral part of it.
Daechsel also gave the example in which Hindus and Muslims, after feeling unable to challenge Western inventions and economics in the empirical reality, created a conceptual reality by claiming that whatever the West had achieved in the fields of science had already been achieved by ancient Hindus and/or is already present in Islamic texts.
In the late 1970s, tabloids in Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt carried a front-page news about Neil Armstrong — the famous American astronaut who, in 1969, became the first man to walk on the moon. The news claimed that Armstrong had converted to Islam. Supposedly he had done so after confessing that when he was on the moon, he had heard the sound of the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer.
Conceptual reality can be a very emotional place
J.R. Hensen, in his 2006 biography of Armstrong, First Man, writes that by 1980 the news had been repeatedly carried and reproduced by tabloids in a number of Muslim-majority countries. So much so, that Armstrong began receiving invitations from Islamic organisations. The news continued to gather momentum in Muslim countries. Hensen writes that in 1983, on Armstrong’s request, the US State Department issued instructions to US embassies in Muslim countries asking them to “politely but firmly” communicate that Armstrong had not converted to Islam and that “he had no current plans or desire to travel overseas to participate in Islamic activities.”
Despite this, the belief that he had converted to Islam after hearing the azaan on the moon continued to do the rounds. In fact, this impression still pops up on YouTube channels and websites funded and run by various Islamic evangelical organisations. This is a case of how a conceptual reality (in this case, the power of ‘Eastern spirituality’) compelled a member of empirical reality (Western science and technology) to leave the latter and embrace the former.
In December 2018, former PM Imran Khan gleefully shared a 1988 video recording on Twitter of conservative Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmad. In it, Ahmad is seen claiming that according to one of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s doctors, the founder of Pakistan, during his last moments, spoke about the importance of imposing Shariah laws and the caliphate system in Pakistan.
This was conceptual reality coming into play to counter the reality in which Jinnah had done no such thing and was, in fact, a Westernised and pluralistic politician. This nature of projection of a conceptual reality actually goes further back.
The day after the founder of the modern Turkish republic Kemal Ataturk passed away in November 1939, one of the leading Urdu dailies in pre-Partition India, the Inqilab, reported that Ataturk, who had slipped into a coma before his death, “briefly woke up to convey a message to a servant of his.” Apparently, the staunch, life-long secularist who went the whole nine yards during his long rule to erase all cultural and political expressions associated with Turkey’s caliphate past, had briefly woken up from a coma to instruct his servant to tell the “millat-i-Islamiyya” to follow on the footsteps of the Khulafa-i-Rashideen.
Inqilab was a well-respected Urdu daily catering to the urban Muslim middle classes in pre-Partition India. In its 11 November 1939 issue, the paper went on to ‘report’ that Ataturk, after communicating his message to the servant, shouted “Allah is great!” and passed away – this time, forever. Quite clearly, unable to come to terms with the dispositions of Ataturk and Jinnah in the empirical reality, some created a conceptual reality where, in death, both dramatically became caliphate enthusiasts.
Let us now take a more contemporary example: the so-called ‘US conspiracy’ that ousted Imran Khan as PM. This is being repeated over and over again by Khan, his supporters and some half-a-dozen TV anchors. In empirical reality, the performance of Khan’s regime compelled its erstwhile pillar of support, the powerful military establishment, to begin distancing itself from a malfunctioning government. This created space for opposition parties to conjure enough strength in the Parliament to remove him through a no-confidence vote.
However, in the conceptual reality — that began being constructed by Khan when his ouster became a stark possibility — US and European powers conspired with opposition parties and pressurised the military to oust Khan because he wanted a sovereign foreign policy and was planning to construct an anti-West bloc in the region. There is no empirical evidence that substantiates the existence of a foreign conspiracy. But then, there is no place for anything empirical in a realm that is entirely conceptual.
In the US, folk in the ‘rural’ South felt exactly that. They felt their ideas and lifestyles were mocked by the ‘liberal elite’ for being backward, anti-modern and superstitious. Their resentment in this regard was brilliantly tapped by Donald Trump. And even though the Southern states in the US have the largest number of Christian fundamentalists and regular Church-goers in that country, they continued to support Trump despite his involvement in scandals both of the flesh and finances.
This brings us back to Nazi Germany and Bonhoeffer. A nation was left grief-stricken by a humiliating defeat (during the First World War). It was thus willing to suspend all critical thinking after the grief was first treated with a barrage of conspiracy theories (blaming the Jews), and then by a man who became a powerful conduit of these theories. His rise was the sum of collective resentment and grief. It was a negation of empirical reality where a society was trapped in a serious existential crisis.
Theoretically, the crisis could have been addressed in a rational manner as well (such as through the continuation of the democratic process). But such processes evolve slowly and come to be seen as part of a reality that is pregnant with crisis. The answers to such a malaise often come in the shape of ‘conceptual reality.’ Empirical realty is the reality which one interacts with on a daily basis through the senses. Conceptual realty, on the other hand, is created and fuelled by certain ideological drivers or by what one thinks empirical reality should actually be. Conceptual reality is an imagined world but is stuffed with claims and physical paraphernalia to make it seem like empirical reality.
The promise of a ‘thousand-year-Reich’ by the Nazis was a fantasy that used physical symbols (such as a messiah-like leader, large rallies and public marches, uniforms, imposing architecture, etc.) to replace an empirical reality with a conceptual one. And when a person escapes into a conceptual reality, communicating with him or her on an empirical and rational level becomes next to impossible.
1983 copy of US government instructions to its embassies in Muslim countries on how to ‘politely’ deny that astronaut Neil Armstrong had converted to IslamConceptual reality is a product of – and mostly appeals to – people who have developed a persecution complex because they failed to find an identity or purpose in the empirical reality. So, they dismiss it and look to replace the ‘what is’ with the ‘what (they believe) should be’. This is fine if they can do so while remaining within the empirical reality. But the results can be disastrous when they reject empirical reality by losing themselves in building a conceptual reality. This reality is utopian. But when manifested physically, it quickly becomes dystopian, myopic and even delusional.
German historian Markus Daechsel has brilliantly demonstrated this in his book The Politics of Self Expression. Conceptual reality includes the projection of one’s religious and ideological beliefs on people that have little or nothing to do with them. Conceptual reality also entails projections that are often proliferated through populist media as a way to concretise conceptual reality.
Daechsel gave the example of certain pre-Partition Muslim and Hindu outfits who insisted that their members wear a uniform and hold parades. Daechsel writes that in the empirical reality, there was no war or revolution taking place there. But in the minds of the members of the outfits, there was such a situation (or there should have been). So, they created a conceptual reality in which there was revolutionary turmoil and these outfits were an integral part of it.
Daechsel also gave the example in which Hindus and Muslims, after feeling unable to challenge Western inventions and economics in the empirical reality, created a conceptual reality by claiming that whatever the West had achieved in the fields of science had already been achieved by ancient Hindus and/or is already present in Islamic texts.
In the late 1970s, tabloids in Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt carried a front-page news about Neil Armstrong — the famous American astronaut who, in 1969, became the first man to walk on the moon. The news claimed that Armstrong had converted to Islam. Supposedly he had done so after confessing that when he was on the moon, he had heard the sound of the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer.
Conceptual reality can be a very emotional placeJ.R. Hensen, in his 2006 biography of Armstrong, First Man, writes that by 1980 the news had been repeatedly carried and reproduced by tabloids in a number of Muslim-majority countries. So much so, that Armstrong began receiving invitations from Islamic organisations. The news continued to gather momentum in Muslim countries. Hensen writes that in 1983, on Armstrong’s request, the US State Department issued instructions to US embassies in Muslim countries asking them to “politely but firmly” communicate that Armstrong had not converted to Islam and that “he had no current plans or desire to travel overseas to participate in Islamic activities.”
Despite this, the belief that he had converted to Islam after hearing the azaan on the moon continued to do the rounds. In fact, this impression still pops up on YouTube channels and websites funded and run by various Islamic evangelical organisations. This is a case of how a conceptual reality (in this case, the power of ‘Eastern spirituality’) compelled a member of empirical reality (Western science and technology) to leave the latter and embrace the former.
In December 2018, former PM Imran Khan gleefully shared a 1988 video recording on Twitter of conservative Islamic scholar Dr Israr Ahmad. In it, Ahmad is seen claiming that according to one of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s doctors, the founder of Pakistan, during his last moments, spoke about the importance of imposing Shariah laws and the caliphate system in Pakistan.
This was conceptual reality coming into play to counter the reality in which Jinnah had done no such thing and was, in fact, a Westernised and pluralistic politician. This nature of projection of a conceptual reality actually goes further back.
The day after the founder of the modern Turkish republic Kemal Ataturk passed away in November 1939, one of the leading Urdu dailies in pre-Partition India, the Inqilab, reported that Ataturk, who had slipped into a coma before his death, “briefly woke up to convey a message to a servant of his.” Apparently, the staunch, life-long secularist who went the whole nine yards during his long rule to erase all cultural and political expressions associated with Turkey’s caliphate past, had briefly woken up from a coma to instruct his servant to tell the “millat-i-Islamiyya” to follow on the footsteps of the Khulafa-i-Rashideen.
Inqilab was a well-respected Urdu daily catering to the urban Muslim middle classes in pre-Partition India. In its 11 November 1939 issue, the paper went on to ‘report’ that Ataturk, after communicating his message to the servant, shouted “Allah is great!” and passed away – this time, forever. Quite clearly, unable to come to terms with the dispositions of Ataturk and Jinnah in the empirical reality, some created a conceptual reality where, in death, both dramatically became caliphate enthusiasts.
Let us now take a more contemporary example: the so-called ‘US conspiracy’ that ousted Imran Khan as PM. This is being repeated over and over again by Khan, his supporters and some half-a-dozen TV anchors. In empirical reality, the performance of Khan’s regime compelled its erstwhile pillar of support, the powerful military establishment, to begin distancing itself from a malfunctioning government. This created space for opposition parties to conjure enough strength in the Parliament to remove him through a no-confidence vote.
However, in the conceptual reality — that began being constructed by Khan when his ouster became a stark possibility — US and European powers conspired with opposition parties and pressurised the military to oust Khan because he wanted a sovereign foreign policy and was planning to construct an anti-West bloc in the region. There is no empirical evidence that substantiates the existence of a foreign conspiracy. But then, there is no place for anything empirical in a realm that is entirely conceptual.
Monday, 4 April 2022
Thursday, 31 December 2020
Monday, 1 June 2020
Saturday, 9 March 2019
Friday, 21 December 2018
The spectre of partition haunts India and Pakistan
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
As the month of December inches forward to herald a new year, we might pause to reflect on some issues that continue to pose existential problems for us as a nation.
The Federal Censor Board has not yet cleared a film on the life of famed writer Saadat Hasan Manto by Nandita Das, a renowned peace activist and producer/director in India. Apparently, the Censor Board is concerned about how some aspects of the “Partition” are depicted in the film. The sad ironies in this matter should not be missed. In India, too, the film was not selected for screening in an International Film Festival in Mumbai, despite being shown at the Film Festivals in Cannes and Toronto, because of sensitivities about “Partition”. Apparently, if Indians are inclined to object when Hindus are shown to rape and slaughter Muslims, Pakistanis are wont to protest when Muslims are depicted in much the same communal light. The bigger irony is that in both countries, Manto is celebrated by the writers and artists of the subcontinent as a great short story writer whose humanity soared above communal or ideological motives because he situated it in the agony, rage and sadness of both sides of the divide during the months leading to the “Partition”. The biggest irony is that Manto was persecuted and prosecuted for the same original sin in the “Purana Pakistan” of the 1950s for which he is posthumously paying the price in “Naya Pakistan”, despite being honoured with a Nishan-e-Imtiaz by the PPP government in 2012. It seems that, seventy years later, both countries are still trapped in the trauma of the “Partition” and constantly seek ways and means to reinforce its memory in our new generations instead of “moving on” to create fresh spaces for mutual welfare and growth.
Pakistan was itself “partitioned” in December 1971 with the bloody birth of Bangladesh. Unfortunately, most Pakistani writing on the subject is still focused on the role of India in the military debacle instead of the role of its own Punjabi civil-military oligarchy in creating the economic and political conditions that led to the acute alienation of East Pakistani Bengalis. In India, the same moment is rung up as an occasion to savour the Pakistani army’s “humiliating” surrender while in Dhaka it is time again to fuel rage against Pakistan for the “genocide” in 1971 and demand an “apology” and “reparations” for it. The collective hostile imagination of the “Partition” continues to sour the quest for peace in South Asia.
Tragically, however, Pakistan continues to be the most adversely affected country by the consequences of the original Partition. Its attempt to seize Kashmir from India – to redress a gross inequity of the division – by force shortly after independence sowed the seeds of a continuing confrontation that has crippled us politically, economically and socially. Enveloped in anxiety, fear and rage, we have ended up creating a “national-security state” that has, in the name of supreme national interest, trampled on civil freedoms, curtailed provincial autonomies, manufactured violent non-state actors, thwarted political leaders, fashioned parties, engineered anti-democratic political systems and dissembled “political Islam” as a legitimizing force for itself. This state continues to hog the budget and restricts regional development connectivity for “security” reasons. It constantly straitjackets the space for cultural freedom and social advancement. In short, it has stalled the development of a vibrant, pluralistic society at peace with itself and with the rest of the world.
The Taliban attack on the Army Public School in December 2014 in which over 149 children were martyred is another grim reminder of some of the painful consequences of the path taken by our national security state. The Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani offshoot are a direct consequence of our regional security policies centered on the “threat” from India. While the Afghans were given safe havens, the Pakistani Taliban were mollycoddled with one peace deal after another even as they were attacking girls’ schools and assassinating civilians with impunity. It is only after they attacked the APS that the national security state finally girded up its loins to go after them with a vengeance. Those who fled to Afghanistan have now become proxies against Pakistan in the new great game unfolding in the region.
This December we also should also expect a final denouement against the two mainstream parties of the country for whom most Pakistanis voted in the last elections. The PMLN leaders, Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif, are already shackled, and more troubles are in store for the PPP’s leader Asif Ali Zardari. To be sure, both parties and leaders are partly responsible for their tribulations. Each governed callously in turns. Each joined hands with the Miltablishment to undermine the other and erode the credibility of the democratic system. Now they are lined up to pay for their sins.
Unfortunately, however, the most enduring legacy of the Partition, the national security state, that has re-engineered the political system yet again, has put all its eggs in Imran Khan’s basket. But he is fumbling and stumbling, leaving us wondering about our options in case he drops the ball.
As the month of December inches forward to herald a new year, we might pause to reflect on some issues that continue to pose existential problems for us as a nation.
The Federal Censor Board has not yet cleared a film on the life of famed writer Saadat Hasan Manto by Nandita Das, a renowned peace activist and producer/director in India. Apparently, the Censor Board is concerned about how some aspects of the “Partition” are depicted in the film. The sad ironies in this matter should not be missed. In India, too, the film was not selected for screening in an International Film Festival in Mumbai, despite being shown at the Film Festivals in Cannes and Toronto, because of sensitivities about “Partition”. Apparently, if Indians are inclined to object when Hindus are shown to rape and slaughter Muslims, Pakistanis are wont to protest when Muslims are depicted in much the same communal light. The bigger irony is that in both countries, Manto is celebrated by the writers and artists of the subcontinent as a great short story writer whose humanity soared above communal or ideological motives because he situated it in the agony, rage and sadness of both sides of the divide during the months leading to the “Partition”. The biggest irony is that Manto was persecuted and prosecuted for the same original sin in the “Purana Pakistan” of the 1950s for which he is posthumously paying the price in “Naya Pakistan”, despite being honoured with a Nishan-e-Imtiaz by the PPP government in 2012. It seems that, seventy years later, both countries are still trapped in the trauma of the “Partition” and constantly seek ways and means to reinforce its memory in our new generations instead of “moving on” to create fresh spaces for mutual welfare and growth.
Pakistan was itself “partitioned” in December 1971 with the bloody birth of Bangladesh. Unfortunately, most Pakistani writing on the subject is still focused on the role of India in the military debacle instead of the role of its own Punjabi civil-military oligarchy in creating the economic and political conditions that led to the acute alienation of East Pakistani Bengalis. In India, the same moment is rung up as an occasion to savour the Pakistani army’s “humiliating” surrender while in Dhaka it is time again to fuel rage against Pakistan for the “genocide” in 1971 and demand an “apology” and “reparations” for it. The collective hostile imagination of the “Partition” continues to sour the quest for peace in South Asia.
Tragically, however, Pakistan continues to be the most adversely affected country by the consequences of the original Partition. Its attempt to seize Kashmir from India – to redress a gross inequity of the division – by force shortly after independence sowed the seeds of a continuing confrontation that has crippled us politically, economically and socially. Enveloped in anxiety, fear and rage, we have ended up creating a “national-security state” that has, in the name of supreme national interest, trampled on civil freedoms, curtailed provincial autonomies, manufactured violent non-state actors, thwarted political leaders, fashioned parties, engineered anti-democratic political systems and dissembled “political Islam” as a legitimizing force for itself. This state continues to hog the budget and restricts regional development connectivity for “security” reasons. It constantly straitjackets the space for cultural freedom and social advancement. In short, it has stalled the development of a vibrant, pluralistic society at peace with itself and with the rest of the world.
The Taliban attack on the Army Public School in December 2014 in which over 149 children were martyred is another grim reminder of some of the painful consequences of the path taken by our national security state. The Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani offshoot are a direct consequence of our regional security policies centered on the “threat” from India. While the Afghans were given safe havens, the Pakistani Taliban were mollycoddled with one peace deal after another even as they were attacking girls’ schools and assassinating civilians with impunity. It is only after they attacked the APS that the national security state finally girded up its loins to go after them with a vengeance. Those who fled to Afghanistan have now become proxies against Pakistan in the new great game unfolding in the region.
This December we also should also expect a final denouement against the two mainstream parties of the country for whom most Pakistanis voted in the last elections. The PMLN leaders, Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif, are already shackled, and more troubles are in store for the PPP’s leader Asif Ali Zardari. To be sure, both parties and leaders are partly responsible for their tribulations. Each governed callously in turns. Each joined hands with the Miltablishment to undermine the other and erode the credibility of the democratic system. Now they are lined up to pay for their sins.
Unfortunately, however, the most enduring legacy of the Partition, the national security state, that has re-engineered the political system yet again, has put all its eggs in Imran Khan’s basket. But he is fumbling and stumbling, leaving us wondering about our options in case he drops the ball.
Sunday, 3 January 2016
Tuesday, 13 January 2015
Saturday, 4 October 2014
What the British Raj can't be blamed for
Written by Khaled Ahmed in The Indian Express| Posted: October 4, 2014 12:00 am
On September 18, the Indo-British Heritage Trust held a discussion in London about “whether the Indian subcontinent benefited more than it lost from the experience of British colonisation”. Speakers who said the subcontinent lost were heavyweights like William Dalrymple and Shashi Tharoor, both of whom I have enjoyed listening to and whose books have given me great pleasure. From Pakistan, the speaker chosen on the other side was my colleague at Newsweek Pakistan, Nilofar Bakhtiar who, before leaving for London, agreed with me that we were better off under the British.
Is that surprising, after half a century of failing to fulfil the promises made twice to the people of India? Once when Muslims and Hindus were united in their struggle for freedom; and second when they fell apart, and Muslims promised to set up a utopian state where they would be “free to practise their religion”.
Under British Raj, we were not free, but we were also not slaves. The British were less brutal than the Belgians to their colonies in Africa. We claimed rightly that we had the right to be free, to decide our own destiny, to have the law we wanted and a government we were able to choose. Morally, we had the right to tell the Raj to go, to resist it and struggle against it. We’d had enough of serving the gora sahib and fighting his imperial wars.
We had a different vision of what kind of state we wanted. We wanted equality instead of inequality practised by exploiters, peace instead of the conflict of a developing bipolar world. After fighting the wars of the Raj, we thought of becoming neutral and nonaligned. We could achieve our visions only after becoming independent.
We have inequality today and we have fought many “just” wars to perpetuate it. And the index of unhappiness keeps on climbing.
By ousting the British we also wanted to purge ourselves of what we diagnosed as a “slave mentality”. We had had enough of local brown sahibs who spoke English and perpetuated the Raj of the mind. After Independence, we would revive our languages and learn to think “free” in them. But today, we are slaves to our narratives of exclusion.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have much to fall back on. The British had wrested India
from a dying ruling elite that didn’t even control it territorially. We had no political system we could emulate, except tyranny of one sort or another. Jawaharlal Nehru honestly thought the past was all rotten.
Keen to be born as a nation-state, we disagreed we were one nation. Under the British, India was united as one state. We should have become a nation, but we didn’t. One side suspected the Raj was dividing what was one nation; the other side thought we were not one nation in the first place.
Democracy, introduced by the British through limited franchise and devolved elections, was new to us and felt good. They forced us to respect democratic principles. We had a struggle ahead with the kind of society we were. To be truly democratic we had to remove the caste system, which the Raj couldn’t extirpate. We agreed to disapprove of it. But in 2014, certain communities in our region still feel left out.
The British enabled us to put the past behind us. But after 1947, becoming free, we revived the past we should have buried and got nothing out of it. Muslims thought faith had made them a nation but soon discovered that language divided more than religion united. Muslims rejected the biggest gift of the Raj: secular governance. The British taught us modern commerce, growing out of stock exchanges we had known nothing about. Bombay converted the mostly Gujarati merchant community into India’s wisest class — Hindu, Parsi, Ismaili, etc — who deserved to rule India and thought, rightly, that it was not yet time for independence. Nobody listened.
The Muslims of India got a raw deal. Religion didn’t bind in 1947; and Bangladesh was created in 1971. Further, rejecting the lessons of the Raj, they set up an Islamic state in Pakistan that immediately led to the reduction of the non-Muslims to second-class citizens. Pakistan as a revisionist state fought wars with India. The Muslims of India too became discriminated against. Today, India is ashamed of its Muslim-killing communal riots. South Asia has suffered ethnic cleansing to shame the Balkans.
If we are bad today, it doesn’t mean the British Raj was bad. The bad in us is a kind of return to being us. If India has communal riots, Pakistan is brutal to Hindus in Sindh, joined with Muslim Sindhis through language. Their daughters are kidnapped and forcibly married to Muslim boys after forced conversion, driving Hindu families into exile in India. In “secular” Bangladesh, Hindus should have fared better, but there too, their “bleeding” back into India is unending.
Under the British Raj, Muslims’ sectarianism was effectively suppressed. The Shia and the Sunni began to feel like one community under secular administration and it was no surprise that Pakistan was created by a Shia leader. Today, he would have been bumped off by a “target-killer” of Karachi. The late Papiya Ghosh — yes, there are such great “colonised” people in the subcontinent — in her classic Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (2007) tells us how self-determination went wrong in India.
Biharis were the first workers in a peasant India, after iron ore was discovered in Bihar and the steel industry came up there together with the railways. After 1947, Bihari Muslims were most unfairly driven out of India into East Pakistan, but there the self-determining principle was language, not religion. So they were killed and pushed out again. We are still “self-determining” after 67 years, and most of it is just killing. Did the British teach us to kill to achieve self-determination? What Dalrymple does to the Brits through his books is tonic for them.
There were things done in India that should make them squeal with guilt. But “freedom” shouldn’t make us forget how we have fallen short after 1947. What happened to the good things we learned from the European Enlightenment the British carried with them?
I unabashedly admire Raja Rammohan Roy and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan because they borrowed from the Enlightenment and tried to pull us out of the abyss that still attracts us. In Pakistan, “Khan” is not the password to acceptance you thought he would be. Borrowing values made them “unoriginal” for us.
Tagore actually told the Brits what was really wrong with them. He didn’t want the disease of nationalism creeping into “free” India. But we had strong “single” identity ingredients that “excluded” the manifold “other”. Toxic textbooks distort history today to make us feel proud of unworthy things that would’ve made Tagore wince.
I don’t know about India but in Pakistan, all the infrastructure that serves us today is a Raj bequest — the roads, bridges, railroad and the world’s largest canal system — without which the state of Pakistan couldn’t have survived. After 67 years, all that is now quite rundown. Unkindly, the world calls us a “failing” state. Did the Raj cause us to fail?
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Stop lecturing the Scots. They want freedom, not wealth
Westminster's arrogance has played straight into the SNP's hands: next year's Scottish referendum could deliver the shock of the century
No nation seeks independence to get rich. It seeks independence to get free. The Scottish leader, Alex Salmond, today published a 670-page account of the political economy of an independent Scotland prior to next year's referendum. Little of it really matters. Some 30 countries have separated from dominant neighbours in the last half-century, and few stopped to count the cost. They left details of flags, borders, taxes and currencies to their negotiators. They simply wanted to govern themselves as they saw fit. That was enough.
That Scotland should come even near the brink of secession after three centuries of union with England is historically astounding. A mere 50 years ago, it was inconceivable. The reason is specific. There seems no limit to the insensitivity of Westminster's political class to the aspirations of the subordinate tribes of the British Isles. Edmund Burke remarked that London ruled even its American colonies more considerately than it did Ireland. In Scotland's case, from the poll tax and delayed devolution to the contempt for Edinburgh of London's "tartan mafia", every move has played into the nationalists' hands.
Supporters of the old British empire assumed it would last for ever. They were wrong. It disappeared because the mood of the age was against it, abetted by inept colonial administrators. Only in the white commonwealth was retreat dusted with some dignity. Meanwhile Britain's earlier empire, that of the English over the so-called Celtic half of the British Isles, has also been crumbling. Most of Ireland is gone. Salmond's white paper is a blueprint for dismantling the rest.
The white paper recycles a familiar agenda, largely included in last year's document on an independent economy. It is a confusing mix of real constitutionalism and a rag-bag of old SNP policies tossed in to give independence voter appeal. The latter tarnishes the former.
The constitution proposals are clearly a negotiating hand. We learn that the Queen can remain monarch, borders can remain open, citizenship can be shared and national debts divided. If the Scots want Faslane's nuclear submarines to go, go they must. Or perhaps Faslane could become Scotland's Guantánamo Bay.
Salmond has more trouble over his twin economic pillars, of European Union membership and the retention of sterling. He and his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, must know that their economic model is heavy on optimism, if not fantasy. It portrays a Scotland surging forward on the cutting edge of capitalist innovation. Tax breaks galore would do for Scotland what they have done, up to a point, for Ireland. Scottish Widows would ride down silicon glen.
The reality is that Britain has long clamped the "golden handcuffs" of welfare dependency on the Scots, subsidising them annually by some £1,000 a head more than the English. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, admittedly on a worst-case base, reckons Scotland will need an 9% rise in income tax to compensate for losing Britain's subvention. Salmond retorts that the Scots would be £600 a head better off.
Whatever the truth of that, Salmond was unwise to distort the vexed debate by promising crude budgetary give-aways, such as childcare grants, tax cuts, social housing subsidies, windfarm hand-outs and the traditional splurge that tends to accompany the first stage of fiscal devolution. Nor does he allow himself the transitional leeway of a separate currency, with scope for depreciation. He wants to stay linked to the pound. He wants to share the national debt, pool financial sovereignty and reach a deal on pension and other inherited liabilities.
This is a recipe for Greek-style disaster. Scotland might enjoy the spurt of investment and growth that tends to greet new states, as in Slovakia or partly autonomous Catalonia. But the most likely sequence is brief euphoria followed by budgetary crisis, retrenchment and austerity. The emergence into the sunnier uplands of small-is-beautiful independence would be slow and painful. Salmond himself would not long survive such turmoil.
With nationalism realised, new forces to left and right would appear. Slashed payrolls and fewer benefits would see disaffection and emigration. Tourists would depart a Highlands landscape blighted by Salmond's turbine industrialisation. Optimism would no longer be an option. The road from Edinburgh to Denmark remains plausible, but it would be long and rocky.
Yet all this is Scotland's business, and is beside the question of how to give political shape to a fast-emerging national identity. Britain should know all about secession. It championed Ulster's separation from Ireland. It went to war to allow Kosovo to secede from Serbia. It sponsored the breakup of Yugoslavia, Iraq and now Afghanistan. The only empire London still supports appears to be its own ragged island confederacy.
If any generalisation is relevant to the Scottish referendum, it is that nation states worldwide are losing sovereignty upwards and downwards. States must pay obeisance to supranational treaties – in Britain's case to the EU – while their domestic control is eroded by ever more assertive sub-national groups. Wise countries such as Spain concede autonomy to the Basques and Catalans in response. There are many models of confederacy from which to choose, from Belgium and Italy to the European Union and the Commonwealth.
England's political tradition rejects such pluralism, and has paid the price. An empire that reached across oceans now struggles to reach across the Irish Sea, Hadrian's Wall and Offa's Dyke. Most of Ireland broke away in 1922, due to Westminster's mishandling. Today the English would be well-advised to stop lecturing the Scots and silence the claque of Scots expatriate scaremongers clearly appalled at becoming foreigners in their adopted land. Humility all round is urgently needed.
Polls suggest that the Scots may not go the whole hog to independence – but they may still deliver London the shock of the century. The truth is that there is no full national independence these days. There are layers of sovereignty, tiers of autonomy, democratic pluralism. Most Scots clearly seek greater detachment within, if not from, the UK.
Modern Edinburgh already feels more like Dublin than London. The coalition must seriously consider offering a new Anglo-Scottish deal, somewhere between independence and the present devolution. Salmond has put on the agenda a new dispensation between London and the "national" capitals of the UK, Northern Irish and Welsh as well as Scottish. Only the arrogance of London's political community finds such a prospect intolerable. That arrogance lost one British empire. It may yet lose another.
Thursday, 23 February 2012
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