The Textbooks Of Pakistan
Months ago, I came across an article written by Col Athale(retd) at rediff.com. I have read Athale’s writings earlier and I have always found myself disagreeing with most of what he has to say. This article too, had a conclusion in the title itself — Peace with Pakistan: Chasing a mirage. But it did raise a very important point which made a very lasting impression about what the future could hold with regard to our western neighbor.
Colonel Anil Athale, in his article, indirectly points out that it was under Zia-ul-haq that Pakistan took a stance of radical Islam as a state policy. As a part of Zia’s adoption of Wahhabism, a very conservative and almost radical form of Islam, textbooks were changed in schools to accommodate religion as the basis of the state’s existence. In effect, what Zia’s textbooks of social studies, speculated to be still in effect, are seeking is “to create practicing Muslims rather than democratic citizens” (2), to put it mildly.
The author of the article should also be credited to taking this up with Prof. Abdul Hameed Nayyar, a prominent Pakistani physicist who is probably more famous as Pakistan’s man of peace. Professor Nayyar was, at that time in 1998, working on what was being preached out of Pakistani schoolbooks. In 2003, Nayyar went on to author a paper that created ripples in the country. “The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan” (1) clearly stated that what Pakistan was offering to its school going children was a very flawed version of history, among other things and facts, which were conveniently changed to nurture hatred for any non-Muslim, specially Hindus.
Not only that, the report mentioned that in the post-Independence days of Pakistan, the textbooks offered a much “real” version of history and even had admiration for Hindus. Chapters on MK Gandhi were a part of the curriculum while teachings of Ramayana and Mahabharata were also mentioned. This was contrasting because this text existed after the bloody experience of partition that both the countries went through and two gory wars.
What happened after Zia took over was a very systematic conversion of Pakistan from a democratic state to a country that based everything on religion. There have been many papers published since Nayyar’s, authored by Pakistani nationals and others, who have confirmed and validated the claims made by Prof. Nayyar. The textbooks have time and again mentioned the western powers and India specifically as sworn enemies of the state while endorsing the involvement of military forces in day to day governance of the state.
In his paper titled: “Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education: An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan”, professor Iftekhar Ahmad of Long Island University raises another important point that could very well be another branch of the concerns raised by Colonel Anil Athale: Could it be that it is this model of civic and citizenship education that is now hurting Pakistan the most?
Athale continues to say that If the texts of these books were changed for the better, it would still take a good two decades before we see any change coming out. There is no doubt in my mind about the validity of his statement.
Just a day ago, the Indian diplomat, SM Krishna, on his visit to Islamabad raised the issue of anti-India speeches made by LeT chief there in Pakistan. There is no doubt that the hate rhetoric coming out on the streets when Hafiz Saeed gives his speech should be objectionable to people in the Indian Government. What worries me is that the Textbooks of Pakistan, with their unending tirade against India, do not appear to be bothering much to the Indian administration.
References:
1. Islamisation of Curricula – A. H. Nayyar, link here.
2. Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education – An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan – Iftikhar Ahmad, link here.
3. Peace with Pakistan: Chasing a Mirage – Anil K Athale, link here.
Versions
At timesofindia.com, a report that is carried by many other Indian news sources, about Pakistan troops opening fire in Pooch, a sector along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir — Violation of cease fire by firing mortar bombs and rockets. Also mentioned is a jawan on the Indian side who was critically injured.
Dawn, Pakistan’s premier newspaper reports a very similar story at its website dawn.com — There was fire yes, but “due to unprovoked firing by Indians”. In fact, a Pakistani soldier “embraced martyrdom” in all this.
Both highly respected publications in their own part of the world, reporting the same incident with two entirely different versions.
Who were these soldiers, one who “embraced martyrdom” on the other side of the fence and the Indian jawan who was “critically injured”? What is the truth? When will this stop? We will never know.
Jumping the Gun
Caption: Pietersen and Morgan leave the ground after they won the T20 World cup (AP Photo)
England has just reached the semi-final of the T20 world cup. They may not may not win the World Cup from here but certainly, this is their best feat since the 2005 Ashes win.
By the way, you see something wrong in the caption of the picture, don’t you? Someone at Times Of India has been over enthusiastic of England’s prospects!
Meanwhile, another “jumping the gun” could be happening closer home — TOI reports that Dhoni may be sacked as the T20 and ODI captain. Why?
BCCI seems to be going beyond control. If this is true, Dhoni could probably be the first “domestic” casualty of BCCI’s autocratic nature that seems to be bothering everyone dealing with the sports body. The unsaid rule within Indian cricket has become this — If you want to play for the country or be considered for the job, you never criticize the BCCI. Anyone saying even a word against the body has to face the music. How do you expect the players to perform like this? The other day, Dhoni’s lame excuse of Late night IPL parties while defending the team for the World Cup debacle already had some people fuming in the BCCI. For all we know, that could be either the catalyst or the final nail in the coffin for Dhoni’s seemingly eminent end of Captaincy days.
In India’s (and Pakistan’s) cricket, it is thought that changing the cricket captain is the solution to most team problems. Dhoni could end up being the fall guy here. Just like Lalit Modi, off the field. People like Modi and Dhoni did not bring failure to the system, rather, they were a product of a failed system of Cricket (mis)administration. If anyone, BCCI should take and accept the blame for the mess Indian cricket is in. Removing Dhoni would yield absolutely nothing. I think as a captain, he has, more often than not, delivered the goods. That is where the BCCI could be jumping the gun. I have said it earlier, if there is something that the BCCI needs urgently, its a leader that believes in retrospection. And I don’t see it happening.
Hail the Martyr
“Indira’s killers are being hailed as ‘martyrs’, in New Zealand’s largest gurdwara”, screams the first line of this report, online at Timesofindia.com. The report originates from Melbourne and that makes me wonder what is with Australia and the Indian media.
Titled “Shaheed Bhai” – or martyr brother – the paintings of Satwant and Beant along with Kehar Singh, who was the co-conspirator, hang on the walls in the Takanini gurdwara alongside others who have been killed for their Sikh beliefs, the ‘Weekend Herald’ reported.
Furthermore:
The pictures have divided the Sikh community in Auckland – and upset others in the Indian community. But few were willing to speak publicly on the matter, the report said.
Something is wrong with the Sikh and the Indian community there. Why should it be condemned? Why are they upset? They have no reason to be.
Because right here, in the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, The Golden Temple – Amritsar, we hail them as martyrs too. To kill the PM of a country and then, in that country itself, be hailed as a martyr.
In 2006, I was disturbed to read this article. And then this was published, in 2009, in the Hindustan Times Editorial. I had then mentioned it on my blog, here.
If you feel disturbed too, please read them.
Bangalore Books India Journalism Political System Society
by aditya kumar
6 comments
Books that give answers
Yesterday evening, at Reliance Timeout, for launch of Dilip D’souza’s book, “Roadrunner”, there was a very insightful conversation that happened. We had the author along with India’s best historian, Ramachandra Guha and Rahul Dravid talking about India, America, about few of the the many dots that connect the two democracies and how this particular book tries to find answers while attempting to understand America from an Indian’s eyes.
But while at it, I picked up P.Sainath’s, “Everybody Loves A Good Drought”. Sainath is probably the only journalist who has worked extensively in India’s most rural districts and has, time and again, attempted to bring out the causes of the poorest of India’s citizens. I first heard about Sainath when Vidarbha was at boil over farmer suicides (I have written about Vidarbha here). The land is still at a boil and with Telangana’s formation imminent now, they might be justified in asking for a separate state as people at helm of affairs in Maharashtra and people in media have conveniently ignored Vidarbha’s problems. But all this, despite being fodder for thought is another topic altogether.
So Sainath, in the introduction of the book, emphasizes that while India’s hunger “would not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia would do”, that is precisely the challenge before a journalist because, I quote here, “while malnourished kids may look normal, yet lack of food can impair their mental and physical growth in such a way that they suffer its debilitating impact all their lives”.
And then there is the case of the “Number of poor”. Back in 1993, the Government of India set up an expert group to estimate the people living below the poverty line. The group, after arriving at a figure of 39% (people living below the poverty line) also recommended changes in the way the Government used to estimate poverty. In a later survey, discrediting the recommendations and the figure arrived at by the expert group, the Indian Administration came at a figure of 19%. But the story does not end here. In the time that was between these two figures, a few months, the Government of India cried out aloud in the World Summit for Social Development at Copenhagen — they presented a figure of 39.9% of people below poverty line. Why? More poor, more Donors, more money. No rocket science, this.
The year this happened was 1994 but aren’t we dealing with the same problems, 15 years on?
Coming back to the conversation between these three great intellectuals that I witnessed yesterday, there was one question from the audience, regarding India still being a developing nation and not a superpower. As a part of the response to the question, the author questioned back — Why do we need to be a superpower? Ramachandra Guha seemed to agree with it and while reading Sainath’s commentary in the introduction to his book last night, I found the answer in the question — Why can’t we be a better democracy first?
We may be the world’s largest democracy and be proud of it but we are far off from being a good democracy. I think its an obligation to each and every well-wisher who is a citizen of this nation, be it you, me, an ordinary citizen or a politician, to make the world’s largest democracy a better democracy. When that happens, maybe I’ll be much more content drawing parallels between the world’s oldest democracy and the largest one.
Not like you and me
Times of India’s website, timesofindia.com carries a report on how the late Andhra CM, YSR Reddy met a sudden death on his Bell chopper. The report also carries a picture of the body of the CM, that was found by the search party after more than 24 hours of the chopper’s disappearance.
The picture is probably the most horrifying picture I have ever seen of the deceased, put on a leading newspaper’s website — charred remains of the body of a man beyond visual recognition. A link below the picture takes the reader to another two photos, one of them of the diseased pilot. Its gory enough to make the average human feel sick.
As I write this, the story has about 37 comments posted by people like you and me. Out of these 37, at least 26 people have condemned or requested (or both) the TOI editors to remove the picture of the corpse as it defies sensitivities and sensibilities. The comments section is moderated by someone at TOI, surely not someone like you and me — for moderation means that the comments are read. And since the picture is still there after about 48 hours of the story, it probably means that someone at TOI does not give a damn.
But yes, the story features in the “Most commented” section of the website.
I think responsible media organizations draw their own lines in reporting and journalism. Ideally, I think every single word and picture that goes into the website should pass through the same filtering that is applied to its counterpart in the print media. I raise up this point because the same article in print, in yesterday’s TOI’s copy does not carry this gory picture. Clearly, the filtering mechanism, if it ever existed for Times Of India’s website, failed here. And since the forum below the article at the website is moderated, it would be a safe assumption that the comments of the readers were read but those guys at the TOI chose to discard them. It is dangerous — a newspaper is supposed to be the people. Is this newspaper run by insensitive incompetents?
But among all things, it baffles me what TOI has achieved by letting this picture be a part of their online article. Does a degree of real life horror and vulgarity help them getting more hits? And more comments? Even if the comments are nothing but a collective condemnation of the report?
PS: Some people say that this is what people want. This horror sells, just like sex. But I am not buying that. I do not think that this is permissible. I think what TOI did was an exploitation of lack of the laws which could have censored those pictures. That is exactly what I meant when I said that media has to draw its own lines. One cannot keep ignoring this because TOI has always done “things like this” before. Well, I don’t think so — I don’t this has ever happened before, I think this was a new low. Do you think there will be people who will suddenly switch to TOI, the newspaper, after they see this picture on their website? How will it help TOI, I wonder, apart from getting those few more clicks?
A story that I think is needed to be told is at Dilip’s blog. I won’t give a summary of what lies there but let me ask you this — In a religious place and one of the country’s most beautiful monuments and a tourist attraction — a place that is frequented by millions, why is it considered OK to call the assassins of the Country’s Prime Minister, martyrs? Published in The Hindustan Times, the story, from Dilip’s blog here.
Supplementing the Supplement
There was a recent story on CNN-IBN about a murder in broad daylight in East Delhi. What was peculiar about it, from the journalism angle, is that they showed scenes of the dead body lying on the street. There was no panic situation (as there is, in times like a bomb blast) while the camera focussed on the dead body, as if it was a commodity to be screened long enough for prime time. As reported, the police had failed to turn up before the press found out about it and there was no one to take control of the happenings at that point of time.
I think this is where journalism crosses the line. It is this line that electronic journalism needs to honor but fails to do so. It’s disappointing and perhaps alarming that the news channels find it so difficult to respect the dead. In a bid to fill the prime time slots, these channels go overboard. There have been enough voices raised by bloggers and by a few journalists of the “old school” kinds but clearly no one is listening.
All this while, the print media is dipping to lows of a different kind. Print media houses are essentially organizations that intend to make profit and they need to target a particular audience if they are to be in the market. In a bid to capture this audience, newspapers tend to disassociate with values they earlier stood for. The writers and articles that once formed the elite of the newspaper are compressed and done with in two pages.
So what we have, in the end, is basically something like those 10 pages that come as a “supplement” to the main newspaper. The first and the last pages usually have photos of skimpily clad women and news of their (not so) private affairs. I was in Delhi and I think it was in the mid-90s, initiated by The Times of India, that the “supplement” started to come 7 days a week with the main newspaper. A few months later TOI had eaten into Hindustan Time’s share. HT couldn’t bear it for long and what soon followed was a total overhaul (thats what they call it) of the look and feel of Delhi’s most popular Newspaper. Changes didn’t restrict themselves to the supplement. The whole newspaper, soon, had hardly any relevant news.
I know some people who start their morning reading the supplement first. I know some who read just the supplement. Now, many would say that this is what the people want. People asked for it and thats what they are getting. I think that argument is crap. People never asked for it.
It is not the people who have been calling the shots. It is the publication itself. You take up an aggressive marketing stance. Then, you feed people with the most irrelevant news that you can find on the planet and you continue feeding them that. You go to schools and you distribute the newspapers with supplements, free, to kids in the name of education. The kids grow up and by that time they are so used to your newspaper that…well, they start reading only the supplement. Then you claim that this is what people want. And, this, is just one way of doing it.
Even then, my problem is not with how a newspaper looks. My problem is that the quality of writing that makes up the newspaper is not of the standard an editor can look up to. I don’t have any problem with the photos that take up most of the space but I am concerned with the quality of the text that lies in the space that remains.
Another point: Blogs are serious competition to newspapers. Blogs vis-a-vis Newspapers; Not as sources of authentic information but for something as basic as quality of prose. The difference between the reader that you were 10 years ago and the reader that you are now is that you have less time to read. And if you spend most of that time reading blogs, shouldn’t Mr. Newspaper editor be concerned?