Affordable healthcare for Americans
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), has released The Affordable Health Choices Act, legislation that aims to reduce health care costs, protect individuals’ choices of doctors, hospitals and insurance plans and guarantee, quality and affordable health care for all Americans.
The Affordable Health Choices Act includes the following five major elements:
CHOICE: An important foundation of The Affordable Health Choices Act is the following principle: If you like the coverage you have now, you keep it. But if you don’t have health insurance or don’t like the insurance you have, our bill will give you new, more affordable options.
COST REDUCTION: The Affordable Health Choices Act will reduce health care costs through stronger prevention, better quality of care and use of information technology. It will also root out fraud and abuse and reduce unnecessary procedures.
PREVENTION: The best way to treat a disease is to prevent it from ever striking, which is exactly why The Affordable Health Choices Act will give citizens the information they need to take charge of their own health. The bill will make information widely available in medical settings, schools and communities. It will also promote early screening for heart disease, cancer and depression and give citizens more information on healthy nutrition and the dangers of smoking.
HEALTH SYSTEM MODERNIZATION: The Affordable Health Choices Act will take strong steps to see that America has a 21st-century workforce for a modern and responsive healthcare system. America must make sound investments in training the doctors, nurses, and other health professionals who will serve the needs of patients in the years to come. It will make sure that patients’ care is better coordinated so they see the right doctors, nurses and other health practitioners to address their individual health needs.
LONG TERM CARE AND SERVICES: The Affordable Health Choices Act will also make it possible for the elderly and disabled to live at home and function independently. It will help them afford to put ramps in their homes, pay someone to check in on them regularly, or any of an array of supports that will enable them to stay in their communities instead of in nursing homes.
OBAMA’S MUSLIM WORLD
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
By Aseem R. Shukla, MD
A nearly hourlong address in Cairo just two weeks ago transfixed a global audience that finally had a chance to hear a new American President speak his piece and listen for the words that could begin to assuage deep wounds of generational angst. The President peppered his speech with Koranic verses and experiences of his own with Muslims that ranged from Indonesia to Kenya to America’s own Muslim community, and showed a familiarity and empathy rarely evinced by a POTUS.
Reflecting on the speech and the breathless hype that preceded it, an unshakeable disquiet arises beginning with the playbill itself. Obama addresses the “Muslim world” the White House announced; a meditation on the “relationship between the West and Islam.” New ground would be broken and the path to reconciliation laid out.
Indeed the President did address his perceptions of the sense of injustice, betrayal, alleged victimization and manipulation endured by many who happen to be Muslim in parts of the world. He did also call out the Muslim extremists that have exploited these perceptions in the most heinous terror attacks that our world has recently witnessed.
But what, exactly, is the “Muslim world”? Is there truly a monolithic reality of mutual aspirations, ideology and narrative of victimhood? Would a Muslim in Indonesia, where the President spent much of his youth, share the same sense of place and community with a Muslim in America?
As M.J. Akbar, one of India’s foremost columnists asked in the aftermath of the speech:
“As an Indian Muslim I belong to the second largest Muslim community in the world. I also live, proudly, as an equal, in India, a nation that contains the largest Hindu community in the world. Do you think I have the same political views as my fellow Muslims in Pakistan or Bangladesh or Nepal?”
In his address to a Muslim world, President Obama decried violent extremism–utterly not related to the peaceful Muslims that comprise nearly four million in the United States; he spoke of the Israel-Palestinian conflict–not really central to the sufferings of Muslims killed yesterday by other Muslims in another deadly bombing in Peshawar, Pakistan; he addressed the lack of democracy and religious freedom in the Muslim world–Muslims in Indonesia, Bangladesh and India who enjoy the benefits of both would look around and wonder in which Muslim world they belonged!
Yes, global Muslims answer the call for prayer and aspire for a pilgrimage to Mecca, just as Hindus dream of a dip in the Ganges river or Jews and Christians a journey to the Holy Land. There is a fellowship among believers that cannot be denied–a community that spans continents.
It would seem, though, that the idea of a transnational Muslim world would have ended with the Ottoman Caliphate, doomed when Ataturk appropriated political authority in 1924. There is no pope speaking for all Muslims today, and most certainly, the Ayatollahs of Iran do not give voice or supplant the authority of a Sunni preacher in Iraq.
Indeed, the concept of a global Ummah or a Dar al-Islam–a world under Islam–is alive today only in the tenets and gospel of Islamism. From India’s state of Jammu and Kashmir to a few mosques in London, and a no-man’s land only nominally within the borders of either Afghanistan or Pakistan, bin Laden and his ilk have appealed to like-minded demons in a jihad to re-establish a Muslim world–a caliphate that could supplant in glory any that came before. The promise of an Islamic world, the call for a world of Muslims, is heard only from the pulpits of the most extreme and fill the hearts of too many with unshakeable dread.
And so we repeatedly heard from a United States President, plaintively calling out that America is not at “war with Islam”, and earnestly calling on the Muslim world to engage America in a reciprocal relationship built on trust and goodwill. But no American today claims, and no neutral observer could possibly indict this country for having launched such a war. As Akbar further wrote, “America would have to be a theocracy, with Inquisition as its preferred domestic policy, and conversion as the principal instrument of foreign affairs, to declare war on Islam.”
But there was President Obama breathing life into a concept of a headless Muslim world–one with no leader, no capital and no constitution. A world so very diverse that its citizens do not share language, culture, history, ethos or even, for that matter, religious beliefs–witness the clashes between Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis and others. And a concept only given life by the greatest enemies that the United States and much of the world has ever known.
One could argue further as to the exclusions in a speech if it were to truly address a Muslim world. President Obama became the greatest of interfaith proponents as he celebrated the commonalities of Abrahamic faiths and quoted from the Koran, Bible and Talmud. That Hindus in India, who have a tumultuous history with extremist Islam in India, must be a part of a broader dialogue, or that Buddhist heritage in Afghanistan was the most spectacular of cultural victims to the Taliban escaped mention to the disappointment of many. A dialogue to remedy historical prejudice, real and imagined, must be inclusive in the end.
President Obama addressed critical issues that affect a part of the world that spans the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan that day in Cairo. Those concerns are real and the United States has an integral role to play. President Obama spoke to a part of the world where Muslims live in majority, but his audience could not be the world of Muslims who are as diverse as the world which all people and faiths inhabit. To use the appellation of a “Muslim world” was facile and lacking in the intellectual rigor citizens should expect.
Aseem R Shukla is Co-Founder and Member, Board of Directors of Hindu American Foundation
Death and development in Canada-India trade
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
By Dr. John Samuel
Canada has plenty of asbestos the use of which for construction and other uses leads to a special type of terminal cancer – mesothelioma. Canada does not want to use it at home since the results are well known. Therefore, it is exported to whoever wants it. India wants it badly, especially in Gujarat, where they are looking for shortcuts to construction. The guaranteed result is increased incidence of mesothelioma.
In the US the past use of asbestos causes 3,000 deaths annually, let alone years and years of suffering before death, the saviour, arrives. Yet, India wants this deadly product very badly. Canada gladly exports it especially from Quebec where unemployment rate is high and where there is plenty of supply of this deadly material.
Who should be blamed? Canada that wants to export it with vigour and enthusiasm or India which wants to import it with even greater vigour and enthusiasm?
The question is somewhat similar to the export of harmful drugs from Latin America that destroys the lives of people. Everyone knows such drugs cause inexplicable and unavoidable harm to humans. But drug cartels with or without the implicit look-in-the-other-direction kind of attitudes of several Latin American countries get them by hook or crook to affluent North America where there is a ready market among those who look forward to the deadly short-term pleasure of its use.
The use of asbestos as construction material in the short term is attractive; but its long-term effects are extremely well known by this time. Who should intervene to prevent its exports and, more importantly, prevent its imports. Since the ominous effects are more at the receiving end, it should be India that should take measures to stop its import. Otherwise, India would have to pay dearly for its deleterious effects of illness, suffering and early deaths.
Does anyone care?
Dr. John Samuel is President and Managing Editor of South Asia Mail.
Canada’s ‘handsome fool’
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
By Dr. John Samuel
Canada has been ruled by the Conservative Party, close cousins of the Bush administration, for a few years now. It is high time that they should now vacate, and go back to the political wilderness. One is entitled to ask: why?
In a democracy, it is good to have choices for voters in terms of political parties to choose from. The Liberals were in power for some time and they made a lot of mistakes and are being put in the purgatory to atone for their sins. Towards the end of their rule, there were cases of corruption that were exposed and Prime Minister Paul Martin, despite his accomplishments as the main proponent of G-20 and a few other things, completely ignored their most ardent supporters, the minorities (who were projected to be a fifth of the population by 2017). In fact when he appointed 14 senators, not even one was picked from that group. Partly the blame is on the advisors he was surrounded with, the principal one among them from Prince Edward Island. Probably he had never seen a minority person in his life in that tiny province until he reached Ottawa. Thus the Liberals lost the minority and immigrants’ support and fell from power.
Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), unexpectedly and unceremoniously started an investigation in the middle of an election campaign to see whether there has been an impropriety dealing with income trusts. The RCMP announcement of the investigation turned the voters against the Liberals and though the Liberals were exonerated later, the damage was done. The voters suspected something fishy and voted in the Conservatives who rewarded the RCMP by allocating bags of money for them unnecessarily in a country with a low crime rate and few gun deaths. With the money, the RCMP hired a lot more police officials and nowadays if anyone goes over 5 km over the speed limit on a completely empty road, the RCMP is waiting to catch the ‘culprits’ and fine them.
The Conservative MPs are not from the main urban areas, and have much less education than MPs of other parties as a survey showed. Consequently the principal urban areas are not represented in the Cabinet. Out of 38 cabinet ministers, they do not have anyone who could legitimately be called a visible minority or with an immigrant background except for a fourth generation or so Japanese origin (the smallest group among minorities) person. There are no South Asians, the largest group, no Chinese, the second largest group in the Cabinet though they had some Conservative MPs elected. Thus the Conservatives have alienated several groups, immigrants, visible minorities, urban residents, and the better educated.
The Americans often refer to Canada as country comparable to “just small change” and ignore the country because of its population size. Over a million people abroad have applied for immigration to Canada and are waiting to be processed. The Conservatives are trying to cut immigration levels meanwhile! The 32 million people in Canada are not replacing themselves with 1.7 fertility rate while 2.1 is required to replace the population. The excuse is: “high unemployment rate”. This is a myth that has been exposed in the past and studies have shown that immigrants, through their consumption and enterprise make more jobs than they take.
Though not a hero in view of some of his personal failures, in terms of immigration levels Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was the most pro-immigration PM, Canada has had. He wanted immigration to be 1% of the population and it was during his time that it reached that level and then fell back when he left. Of course, policy-wise, it was John Diefenbaker and Pierre Elliot Trudeau the PMs who changed the policy towards minorities and facilitated their admission to Canada.
Stephen Harper, the current Prime Minister, is supposed to be a policy wonk and a strategist. None of it is showing in his performance especially with a bunch of ministers who are prone to leave secret documents and tapes with atrocious remarks by ministers carelessly in different homes and public washrooms, and tell the Toronto (the largest city in Canada) mayor to f…off when he disagreed on a policy matter.
Most telling of all, before the three other parties in the House of Commons threatened to vote together as a coalition to defeat Conservatives in the Parliament, Harper had to put together quickly plans to deal with the catastrophic effects of the economic turmoil engulfing the country.
Of course the Prime Minister looks very handsome, despite his celebrated pot belly. According to a female high commissioner from India, he is very handsome, but in terms of policies, he remains a fool. There is an apt term for such people in the state of Kerala – a handsome fool (sundara viddi). It is not sure for how long he will survive before an election is called, most likely in the summer/fall of this year. Though election-weary, the people of Canada have an obligation, if they want to continue to be a caring and productive society, to throw the Conservative bunch out, lock stock and barrel.
Dr. John Samuel is President and Managing Editor of South Asia Mail.
Justice in Sri Lanka
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
Over two hundred thousand people in refugee camps are not treated according to the law of the land, says the Chief Justice (CJ) of Sri Lanka
CJ Sarath Nanda Silva says that the war displaced are living under appalling conditions.
The chief justice was speaking at the ceremonial opening of the new court complex in Marawila.
“While we build new courts, ten people live in one tent in these camps. They could stand straight only in the centre of these tents. Their necks will break if they move to a side of the tent”.
The CJ who visited the refugee camps in Vavunia on the 14th of May spent a whole day in a camp talking to the refugees.
Not protected by law
He said that he could not explain the pathetic situation the people undergo.
He said, “IDPs are seen waiting in queues, extending for 100 yards to take their turn to use a toilet where there is only one pot hole at the end of it” .
The Chief Justice say the refugees does not the jurisdiction of the courts. “They live outside the protection of the law of the country. I am saying this in public, and ready to face any consequences. We are doing a great wrong to these people” says CJ Sarath Nanda Silva.
The Chief Justice is to retire from his post at the end June. He was attending to one of his last official events.
A well-made cabinet
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
The re-elected prime minister passes his first test, without merit
AT THE age of 84, M. Karunanidhi has naturally turned his thoughts to the next generation. The chief minister of India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, he led his party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), to surprising success in the country’s recent general election. The DMK won 18 of the 22 seats it contested. Emboldened, Mr Karunanidhi asked for five of the new government’s 30-odd cabinet jobs, two more than the DMK had in the last government. That would enable him to accommodate two loyal protégés, T.R. Baalu and A. Raja, and still have room for his relatives: his daughter, Kanimozhi; one of his sons, M.K. Azhagiri; and his grandnephew, Dayanidhi Maran.
This proposal, combining nepotism and cronyism, presented Manmohan Singh, the Congress party’s prime minister, with the first test of his new authority. He was sworn in for a second term on May 22nd, after Congress won a surprisingly thumping victory in the election, with 206 seats. Alas for Mr Karunanidhi, this has enabled Congress to drive a harder bargain with its allies than in 2004, when it won the previous election with 145 seats.
Mr Singh said he could have just three ministries, the same number held by the DMK in the previous government. Mr Karunanidhi quit Delhi in a huff, threatening to withdraw from the government. But he quickly relented.
In fact, he should be pleased. It was briefly rumoured that Mr Singh would also reject Mr Karunanidhi’s lieutenants, Messrs Baalu and Raja, among several former ministers of the previous government who are generally considered to have performed abysmally. Bowing to coalition convention, however, the conciliatory Mr Singh said Mr Karunanidhi could fill his allotted posts as he chose.
It therefore looked likely that Mr Raja would return to the telecoms ministry, where in 2008 he sold the nation’s airwaves at bargain prices, depriving the exchequer of much-needed cash. Mr Baalu may be less lucky. He looks unlikely to return to the cabinet where, as transport minister, he prompted the resignation of five chairmen of the National Highways Authority of India and scared away bidders for India’s national road-building contracts. His exit would make room for Mr Karunanidhi’s son and grandnephew, who may claim the ministry of textiles and the ministry of chemicals and fertiliser.
This tedious horse-trading was followed enthusiastically in India. Given Congress’s surprisingly strong showing, many are anxious to see signs that its new coalition government will be more coherent and efficient than its previous one. Moreover, in a country now addicted to political news after a month-long election, Mr Karunanidhi’s trials have made a rare post-results controversy. Congress’s choices for the main ministerial jobs were reasonably straightforward. The new finance minister is Pranab Mukherjee, who was foreign minister in the previous government. He is succeeded in that job by S.M. Krishna, a former chief minister of Karnataka. Palaniappan Chidambaram remains home minister; A.K. Anthony stays on as defence minister.
Mr Mukherjee’s was the only one of these appointments to generate mild ambivalence. A veteran political warhorse who first entered the cabinet in 1975, he was previously finance minister from 1982 to 1984, under Indira Gandhi. That was a different era, in which the ministry pulled the economy’s strings, choosing what companies could import and how much they could produce. A fixer not a visionary, Mr Mukherjee was not the obvious choice to steward today’s more open and vibrant economy. Then again, it should not take a visionary to attain India’s goal of annual growth of 9%. The impediments to that goal are mostly practical, not conceptual; political, not economic. A wily Congress fixer may be as qualified to overcome such obstacles as anyone.
India Votes For Continuity, Not Radical Change
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar,
India’s ruling coalition, led by the Congress Party, surged to an unexpected victory in last week’s elections. It no longer needs the Left Front (four Marxist parties) for survival, and so can go ahead with economic reforms earlier vetoed by the left. Yet its policy emphasis will be on continuity rather than radical change. A party re-elected after five years of almost 9% annual gross domestic product growth has no pressing reason to change its model.
Congress believes it won the election by focusing on the rural poor–raising support prices for crops, waiving repayment of bank loans by small farmers, guaranteeing 100 days work for rural laborers on government projects, improving rural infrastructure and providing massive subsidies for food and agricultural inputs.
Article Controls
rural prosperity in a country where 70% of the population is still rural, and where trade controls insulate rural India from the gyrations of global markets. This explains why Congress won handsomely: The rural masses were not touched by the global recession. Congress will now aim to strengthen this populist approach.
This will mean a heavy fiscal burden in a country where the combined fiscal deficit of the central and state governments exceeds 10%. But that will easily be defended as a Keynesian stimulus in these recessionary days. The new government will soon come out with a new stimulus package, possibly in its budget in June. This is likely to emphasize expanded credit and low interest rates more than tax giveaways: Manmohan Singh knows he must return to fiscal restraint once the recession ends.
Congress is by instinct a left-of-center party, and wishes to been seen as the savior of rural India, not the business community. Foreign investors think of Congress as the party that initiated the pro-market economic reforms in 1991, but that was sparked by a major balance of payments crisis.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, along with the success of Deng in China, helped gradually change the old socialist mind-set. But most of the heavy lifting on economic reform has already been done in the last two decades. So, when after the inconclusive election of 2004 the Left Front said its support would be conditional on a policy thrust on agriculture and the rural poor, Congress agreed as much out of conviction as compulsion.
However, the Left Front stymied the passage of several Congress-proposed bills as too market-friendly, and these may now go through. They cover areas such as pension reform to provide greater individual choice and facilitate more investment in equities; ending the public sector monopoly in coal mining; and increasing foreign investment limits in insurance, telecom and civil aviation.
The Left Front was opposed to foreign investment in retail, which may now be liberalized. While these reforms will be useful, they will not be game-changing like the reforms of the 1990s. Bills have to be passed by both houses of Parliament, and the Congress-led coalition is well short of a majority in the Upper House, and so will move cautiously on legislation, making sure it can get the support of small parties.
India’s Path to Economic Reform Reaches a Fork
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
By VIKAS BAJAJ MUMBAI,
India — In one of the many slick campaign commercials that are airing during this country’s month-long election, an actor reels off the signature achievements of the governing Congress Party over the last 60 years: independence, land reform, a green revolution and bank nationalization.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition, is championing subsidies for a struggling diamond industry and promising to protect farmland against “dubious industrial projects.” One regional party said it would reduce the government’s use of computers to increase employment.
India’s rise as an economic power has captivated many people in the West, but talk of economic openness and dynamism leaves many Indians cold. This year, the global financial crisis has made appeals to India’s traditional socialist-style self-sufficiency even more popular. Policies that seemed increasingly outdated during the fast growth of the past 15 years are getting a fresh hearing, partly because they are seen as insulating much of India from the global slump.
No matter which coalition of parties comes to power in voting that ended on Wednesday — none are expected to win a majority in Parliament — the next stage of Indian reforms will be deeply contentious.
Many in the political class are skeptical that India, after nearly a decade of high growth and rising prosperity, needs more openness to investment, fewer state-owned companies, or greater deregulation of the private sector.
Take banks. The government is the majority shareholder in about 70 percent of banks by deposits. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party’s president, has said that the nationalization of banks in the 1960s by her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, has “given our economy the stability and resilience we are now witnessing in the face of the economic slowdown.”
In its manifesto, Congress promises that the government will retain a majority stake in state-owned companies.
Congress, which started India on the path to economic openness in the early 1990s, now says it has saved the country from freewheeling capitalism. Many of its rivals claim they would do more. A Communist Party leader, Prakash Karat, who is hoping to form a “Third Front”
government in partnership with regional parties, has said that the left, which is criticized for holding India back, has in fact “protected our economy, national sovereignty and the interests of the people.”
Even L. K. Advani, the leader of the B.J.P., the opposition Hindu nationalist party that has been more supportive of free markets, has described the financial crisis as a “clear warning to India” not to emulate Western ways. “India cannot attain prosperity by boosting speculative instincts,” he said late last year according to the Press Trust of India.
Economists and political analysts who favor deeper reforms in India say they are worried by the tone of vindication among those who opposed the country’s fitful embrace of foreign trade and competition in recent years. These people say that Indian politicians seem to have forgotten the high price the country paid in terms of slow growth and unshakable poverty when the government kept the country insulated from the outside world during the cold war.
Many people “don’t quite remember how bad it was in the ’80s when we had tremendous amount of rationing, when it took years to get a car, when it took years to get a phone,” said Raghuram G. Rajan, a prominent economist who recently led a government-appointed panel that proposed financial reforms, including a gradual privatization of state-owned banks.
Mr. Rajan, who issued early warnings about the fragility of the American financial system, added that India could pursue reforms without risking the stability of its economy.
“Markets need regulations and regulators, and regulators need to do their job,” said Mr. Rajan, a finance professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
After several decades of state-led economic planning, a Congress-led government started opening up the economy in the early 1990s when a financial crisis forced policy makers to seek help from the International Monetary Fund. Since then, efforts to further liberalize the economy have come unpredictably, depending on the makeup of governing coalitions in New Delhi and the differing inclinations of regional leaders.
Though India’s strong growth in recent years has won the country’s leaders a measure of respect in the rest of the world, the departing Congress-led government had been slowing down reform anyway. It put off deregulation of financial services and the privatization of state-owned businesses to appease the regional, left-leaning parties it needed to stay in power.
Since the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States set off a global downturn, however, the antipathy toward capitalist excess has only grown. Now, smaller parties that respond more readily to populist demands seem poised to stall liberalization and perhaps even roll back measures, like more openness to foreign investors, if they gain seats in Parliament.
“This crisis provides cover for the Indian politicians to say we were right to be cautious,” said Razeen Sally, director of the European Center for International Political Economy who has been critical of the current government’s record. “It’s not only a danger in India, but across the world.”
But the Indian business establishment appears to be less worried, at least as long as the next government is led by Congress or the B.J.P.
and not a coalition made up entirely of leftist parties.
Chandrajit Banerjee, the executive director of the Confederation of Indian Industry, said the populist talk would dissipate once a new government confronted economic realities of slowing growth and falling foreign investment. His group is advocating greater infrastructure spending, changing labor laws to allow businesses to hire and fire workers more easily, lifting restrictions on foreign investment, and streamlining licensing requirements.
“Rhetoric is part of elections,” Mr. Banerjee said. Once elections are over, “what one would see is a very, very strong practical approach.”
Still, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, an independent member of the upper house of Parliament and an entrepreneur, said he was worried that the country would not undertake the next series of reforms until it faced a new crisis.
“The real issue is the leadership of the political parties, and the positions that they take are so stark that they don’t allow for a meeting of minds,” he said. “Sometimes the answer may be that you just have to allow the crisis to develop and use it to push through reforms.”
The Ignatieff revival
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
WHEN Michael Ignatieff, the interim leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, bounded to the stage at a packed fund-raising meeting last month, the choice of musical backing was a 1970s rock hit called “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”. That was an unsubtle message from party organisers that great things are expected from Mr Ignatieff, a former journalist and Harvard academic. Yet the song was also appropriate for a less flattering reason. More than five months after the Liberals, the main opposition, dumped Stéphane Dion and replaced him with Mr Ignatieff, the new leader has yet to set out where he and the party stand on many issues.
There is plenty of time for that, insists Mr Ignatieff. Details will be revealed “little by little”. For now Liberals are relieved that their new leader is hauling them back to political competitiveness after losing the last two federal elections to Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister.
In the second of those, in October, Mr Dion presided over the party’s worst showing ever. His final gambit was to try to topple Mr Harper’s minority government just weeks after the election by forming a disparate and stillborn coalition with the separatist Bloc Québécois and the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP). Mr Harper survived by shutting down Parliament for seven weeks, Mr Dion departed and Canadians quickly became more exercised by recession and job losses than by party shenanigans in Ottawa.
Mr Ignatieff was crowned, unopposed, as the Liberals’ permanent leader at a party convention in Vancouver starting on April 30th. The latest opinion polls give his party a significant edge, enough to form a minority government if replicated in an election (see chart).
But what does he stand for? Opposition parties in Canada, as elsewhere, have learnt to their cost that it does not pay to be too specific before an election. The Conservatives’ successful attack on Mr Dion’s plan for a carbon tax last year remains a painful memory. Mr Ignatieff ushered the carbon tax out with Mr Dion. He prefers a cap-and-trade system for emissions. And he has also dropped the idea of a coalition with the Bloc Québécois and the NDP.
Mr Ignatieff’s message has been vague and general: that the Liberals believe in an activist federal government with a national vision whereas the Conservatives do not. Within this framework, he has suggested strengthening the ties between the east and west of a vast, thinly populated country through a better electricity grid, a high-speed railway from Windsor to Quebec City and a national child-care programme. “The prime minister of Canada has one job and one job only: to hold the country together and leave it stronger, more united, than when he found it,” he says. As for foreign policy, Canada should look beyond North America now that “the noon hour” of the United States and its global dominance are over, he argues.
For now the Liberal leader is content to remain an enigma. “People like Ignatieff because he is not Stéphane Dion and he’s not Stephen Harper,” says Paul Adams of Ekos Research, a polling company. “But he’s still not defined in the public mind.”
Mr Ignatieff has had other priorities. One has been to reassure Canadians of his commitment to the country despite having spent most of his adult life abroad, in Britain and the United States. When he returned in 2005 and entered politics, he was resented by some as a carpetbagger. To try to change this perception, he published this week “True Patriot Love”, a slim volume in which he explores his Canadian roots. “Enthusiastic flag-waving and empty generalisations,” said a review in The National Post, a conservative newspaper.
The Liberals’ other priority has been to repair their party machine. Strict new limits on political donations have hurt the Liberals, who usually looked to business for money, more than the Conservatives, who are better at grass-roots fund-raising. To catch up, the Liberals recently bought software used by Barack Obama’s campaign in last year’s American election, and have centralised fund-raising. Rocco Rossi, the party’s national director, claims that it will pay off its debt within weeks. He is preparing for a possible election in the autumn.
The Conservatives have so far found Mr Ignatieff hard to attack. The Liberal leader surprised some Canadians by defending Alberta’s tar sands when their environmental record was attacked by National Geographic magazine. That brought criticism from the left. Conservative MPs pounced on a remark that tax increases would be needed to plug the fiscal deficit.
Mr Ignatieff acknowledges that his foes will seek ammunition among his writings and talks during a long career as an intellectual. His frequent use of “we” when addressing audiences in the United States may be turned against him. So too might his flirtation with the use of torture and his support for the war in Iraq (since recanted), a deeply unpopular cause in Canada. The next election may be both closely contested and dirty. (The Economist)
Towards Theocracy
Send us a comment to : feedback@southasiamail.com
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
FOR 20 years or more, a few of us in Pakistan have been desperately sending out SOS messages, warning of terrible times to come. Nevertheless, none anticipated how quickly and accurately our dire predictions would come true. It is a small matter that the flames of terrorism set Mumbai on fire and, more recently, destroyed Pakistan’s cricketing future. A much more important and brutal fight lies ahead as Pakistan, a nation of 175 million, struggles for its very survival. The implications for the future of South Asia are enormous.
Today a full-scale war is being fought in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), Swat and other “wild” areas of Pakistan, with thousands dying and hundreds of thousands of IDPs (internally displaced people) streaming into cities and towns. In February 2009, with the writ of the Pakistani state in tatters, the government gave in to the demand of the TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban Movement) to implement the Islamic Sharia in Malakand, a region of FATA. It also announced the suspension of a military offensive in Swat, which has been almost totally taken over by the TTP. But the respite that it brought was short-lived and started breaking down only hours later.
The fighting is now inexorably migrating towards Peshawar where, fearing the Taliban, video shop owners have shut shop, banners have been placed in bazaars declaring them closed for women, musicians are out of business, and kidnapping for ransom is the best business in town. Islamabad has already seen Lal Masjid and the Marriot bombing, and has had its police personnel repeatedly blown up by suicide bombers. Today, its barricaded streets give a picture of a city under siege. In Karachi, the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), an ethnic but secular party well known for strong-arm tactics, has issued a call for arms to prevent the Taliban from making further inroads into the city. Lahore once appeared relatively safe and different but, after the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, has rejoined Pakistan.
The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan’s urban life and shattered its national economy. Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals, and ordinary people praying in mosques have been reduced to hideous masses of flesh and fragments of bones. The bearded ones, many operating out of madrassas, are hitting targets across the country. Although a substantial part of the Pakistani public insists upon lionising them as “standing up to the Americans”, they are neither seeking to evict a foreign occupier nor fighting for a homeland. They want nothing less than to seize power and to turn Pakistan into their version of the ideal Islamic state. In their incoherent, ill-formed vision, this would include restoring the caliphate as well as doing away with all forms of western influence and elements of modernity. The AK-47 and the Internet, of course, would stay.
But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of military action against the cruel perpetrators, choosing to believe that they are fighting for Islam and against an imagined American occupation. Political leaders like Qazi Husain Ahmed and Imran Khan have no words of kindness for those who have suffered from Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved for the victims of predator drones, whether innocent or otherwise. By definition, for them terrorism is an act that only Americans can commit.
Why the Denial?
To understand Pakistan’s collective masochism, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have made this country so utterly different from what it was in earlier times. For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula.
This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a rich Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughal architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam – Wahabism – is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.
This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, under the approving gaze of Ronald Reagan’s America, the Pakistani state pushed Islam on to its people. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for university academic posts required that the candidate demonstrate knowledge of Islamic teachings, and jehad was declared essential for every Muslim.
Villages have changed drastically, driven in part by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other Muslims, who they do not consider to be proper Muslims. Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than Pashtuns, are now also beginning to take a line resembling the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from recent decisions in the Lahore High Court.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Education estimates that 1.5 million students are getting religious education in 13,000 madrassas. These figures could be quite off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 such schools. Here, students at the Jamia Manzoorul Islam, a madrassa in Lahore.
In the Pakistani lower-middle and middle-middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement which frowns on every expression of joy and pleasurable pastime. Lacking any positive connection to history, culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate “corruption” by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.
“Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichtarveena are completely dead,” laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has no teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence.
As a part of General Zia-ul-Haq’s cultural offensive, Hindi words were expunged from daily use and replaced with heavy-sounding Arabic ones. Persian, the language of Mughal India, had once been taught as a second or third language in many Pakistani schools. But, because of its association with Shiite Iran, it too was dropped and replaced with Arabic. The morphing of the traditional “khuda hafiz” (Persian for “God be with you”) into “allah hafiz” (Arabic for “God be with you”) took two decades to complete. The Arab import sounded odd and contrived, but ultimately the Arabic God won and the Persian God lost.
Genesis of Jehad
One can squarely place the genesis of religious militancy in Pakistan to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent efforts of the U.S.-Pakistan-Saudi grand alliance to create and support the Great Global Jehad of the 20th century. A toxic mix of imperial might, religious fundamentalism, and local interests ultimately defeated the Soviets. But the network of Islamic militant organisations did not disappear after it achieved success. By now the Pakistani Army establishment had realised the power of jehad as an instrument of foreign policy, and so the network grew from strength to strength.
The amazing success of the state is now turning out to be its own undoing. Today the Pakistan Army and establishment are under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same Army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jehad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers. Over 1,800 soldiers have died as of February 2009 in encounters with religious militants, and many have been tortured before decapitation. Nevertheless, the Army is still ambivalent in its relationship with the jehadists and largely focusses upon India.
Education or Indoctrination?
Similar sentiments exist in a large part of the Pakistani public media. The commonly expressed view is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA and that madrassas are the only jehad factories around. This could not be more wrong. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan’s towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this kind of education will produce a generation incapable of living together with any except strictly their own kind. Pakistan’s education system demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of the schoolchild a sense of siege and constant embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.
The government-approved curriculum, prepared by the Curriculum Wing of the Federal Ministry of Education, is the basic road map for transmitting values and knowledge to the young. By an Act of Parliament, passed in 1976, all government and private schools (except for O-level schools) are required to follow this curriculum. It is a blueprint for a religious fascist state.
The masthead of an illustrated primer for the Urdu alphabet states that it has been prepared by Iqra Publishers, Rawalpindi, along “Islamic lines”. Although not an officially approved textbook, it has been used for many years by some regular schools, as well as madrassas, associated with the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Pervez Musharraf.
The world of the Pakistani schoolchild was largely unchanged even after September 11, 2001, which led to Pakistan’s timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jehad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of “enlightened moderation”, Musharraf’s educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned-down copy of that under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto, who inherited it from Zia-ul-Haq.
Fearful of taking on powerful religious forces, every incumbent government refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What might happen a generation later has always been a secondary matter for a government challenged on so many sides.
The promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s so-called “secular” public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jehad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, invited students for jehad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers, and declared a war without borders. Pre-9/11, my university was ablaze with posters inviting students to participate in the Kashmir jehad. After 2001, this slipped below the surface.
For all his hypocritical talk of “enlightened moderation”, General Pervez Musharraf’s educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned-down copy of that under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto, who inherited it from Zia-ul-Haq.
The madrassas
The primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan’s education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates from the 11th century with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as “moulvi sahibs” teaching children to read the Quran.
The Afghan jehad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder needed for fighting a holy war. The Americans and the Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan.
A detailed picture of the current situation is not available. But, according to the national education census, which the Ministry of Education released in 2006, Punjab has 5,459 madrassas followed by the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) with 2,843; Sindh 1,935; Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA) 1,193; Balochistan 769; Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) 586; FATA 135; and Islamabad capital territory 77. The Ministry estimates that 1.5 million students are getting religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.
These figures could be quite off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free room, board and supplies to students, form a key part of their appeal. But the desire of parents across the country is for children to be “disciplined” and to be given a thorough Islamic education. This is also a major contributing factor.
Madrassas have deeply impacted upon the urban environment. For example, until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from all others in Pakistan. Still earlier, it had been largely the abode of Pakistan’s hyper-elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students with little prayer caps dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm around the city, making bare-faced women increasingly nervous.
Women – the Lesser Species
Total separation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists. Two decades ago the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu; it is a foreign import. But today, some shops in Islamabad specialise in abaya. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, female students are seeking the anonymity of the burqa. Such students outnumber their sisters who still dare show their faces.
While social conservatism does not necessarily lead to violent extremism, it does shorten the path. Those with beards and burqas are more easily convinced that Muslims are being demonised by the rest of the world. The real problem, they say, is the plight of the Palestinians, the decadent and discriminatory West, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Kashmir issue, the Bush doctrine, and so on. They vehemently deny that those committing terrorist acts are Muslims or, if faced by incontrovertible evidence, say it is a mere reaction to oppression. Faced with the embarrassment that 200 schools for girls were blown up in Swat by Fazlullah’s militants, they wriggle out by saying that some schools were housing the Pakistan Army, who should be targeted anyway.
The Prognosis
The immediate future is not hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control over the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Sufi Mohammad, Baitullah Mehsud, Fazlullah, Mangal Bagh…. The enabling environment of poverty, deprivation, lack of justice, and extreme differences of wealth is perfect for these demagogues. Their gruesome acts of terror and public beheadings are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis as part of the fight against imperialist America and, sometimes, India as well. This could not be more wrong.
The jehadists have longer-range goals. A couple of years ago, a Karachi-based monthly magazine ran a cover story on the terrorism in Kashmir. One fighter was asked what he would do if a political resolution were found for the disputed valley. Revealingly, he replied that he would not lay down his gun but turn it on the Pakistani leadership, with the aim of installing an Islamic government there.
Over the next year or two, we are likely to see more short-lived “peace accords”, as in Malakand, Swat and, earlier on, in Shakai. In my opinion, these are exercises in futility. Until the Pakistan Army finally realises that Mr. Frankenstein needs to be eliminated rather than be engaged in negotiations, it will continue to soft-pedal on counter-insurgency. It will also continue to develop and demand from the U.S. high-tech weapons that are not the slightest use against insurgents. There are some indications that some realisation of the internal threat is dawning, but the speed is as yet glacial.
Even if Mumbai-II occurs, India’s options in dealing with nuclear Pakistan are severely limited. Cross-border strikes should be dismissed from the realm of possibilities. They could lead to escalations that neither government would have control over. I am convinced that India’s prosperity – and perhaps its physical survival – demands that Pakistan stays together. Pakistan could disintegrate into a hell, where different parts are run by different warlords. Paradoxically perhaps, India’s most effective defence could be the Pakistan Army, torn and fractured though it may be. To convert a former enemy army into a possible ally will require that India change tack.
To create a future working alliance with the struggling Pakistani state, and in deference to basic democratic principles, India must be seen as genuinely working towards some kind of resolution of the Kashmir issue. It must not deny that the majority of Kashmiri Muslims are deeply alienated from the Indian state and that they desperately seek balm for their wounds. Else the forces of cross-border jehad, and its hate-filled holy warriors, will continue to receive unnecessary succour.
I shall end this rather grim essay on an optimistic note: the forces of irrationality will surely cancel themselves out because they act in random directions, whereas reason pulls in only one. History leads us to believe that reason will triumph over unreason, and humans will continue their evolution towards a higher and better species. Ultimately, it will not matter whether we are Pakistanis, Indians, Kashmiris, or whatever. Using ways that we cannot currently anticipate, people will somehow overcome their primal impulses of territoriality, tribalism, religion and nationalism. But for now this must be just a hypothesis.
Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy is Professor and Chairman of the Physics Department at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.