tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64040582389100670852024-03-14T04:45:54.936-07:00The Anthroplogical Lens: Popular Writings of Dr Nadeem Omar TararThe blogs carries the popular writings of Dr Nadeem Omar Tarar, published in various Pakistani newspapers and magazines, deliberating on the critical issues confronting Pakistani society.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-25100490104511131172016-12-10T11:14:00.003-08:002016-12-10T11:14:42.235-08:00Data based decision making in Pakistan: Issues and Options.<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Data-based decision making: Issues and options
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By Amjad Bhatti and Nadeem Omar</span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Tarar</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A</span></i><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span></i><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">is inevitably a blend of politics and science — politics because
power and money are linked to how many people live where, science because the
technically complex undertaking draws on many scientific disciplines. Kenneth
Prewitt, 2011.</span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Prelude:</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This series of article attempts to map out issues related to</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and statistics management in Pakistan and it
explores cross linkages of data generation and management with politics of
gender, ethnicity, elections and resource distribution</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> in Pakistan.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Context:</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Pakistan is among the 49 countries conducting</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">this year in 2011, which rightly so has been
called as the 'global</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">year'. Coincidentally,</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">acknowledging</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the significance of
demographic information that</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">generates, Pakistan has also</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">declared</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2011 as the
'Population Year'. Population and Housing</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">are essential tools for policy, development
planning and monitoring purposes. Reliable, disaggregated data on
socio-economic indicators derived from</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">are extensively used as inputs for
result-based management and tracking of progress towards national goals and
international goals such as</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Millennium</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">development Goals (MDGs).</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Most importantly, the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">data has strong sectoral linkages with the
constitutional provisions and administrative</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">arrangements.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Since its inception,
the demographic profile of the population in Pakistan has been the basis of
distribution of funds to the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">provinces,
determination of seats in the Parliament, recruitment and educational</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">quota</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">on civil posts and educational institutions.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Pakistan inherited a long history of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">undertaking that provides valuable data for
analysis, but it has unfortunately not been fully utilized. No serious
attention has ever been devoted to study Pakistan's diverse population and to
explore the implications it holds for country's development and politics and
ultimate</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">stability.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Pakistan's wide diversity in topography,
weather and climate, language, ethnicity, culture, polity and distribution of
resources presents a real challenge for the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">undertaking. With the first</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in 1951, Pakistan has inadequately deployed an
integral tool of development planning by being able to conduct only five</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">decennial</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">population and housing</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in 1951,1961,1972,
1981, and 1998 with increasing lapses of years. The 1998</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">puts Pakistan's population at 132.4 million,
with 48 percent females, making it the seventh most populous country in the
world. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In all five</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">information on the following ten topics was
solicited: name, sex, age, marital status, religion, language, and literacy,
employment and industry. Certain topics were added on to the list, because of
their multiple uses for different socio-economic development policy and
planning. These topics are: enrolment into educational institutions, field of
education, duration of continuous residence of migrant population, and nature
of visible disability from which a person is suffering.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For one hundred year from the inception of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">decennial</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in 1881 to 1981, the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">have been on the schedule. However, in the
last thirty years, the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">undertaking has become a irregular practice indicating a
deepening crisis of governance. The</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">scheduled for 1991was delayed for seven years
and could only be conducted in 1998, there by pushing the date for next</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">decennial</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">to 2008, which sadly still awaits completion.
The delays in holding national</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,
points to weakening territorial writ of the state over its citizens but also
reflects the contested nature of rights and privileges</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">administered</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">to the population on the basis of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Every single</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in Pakistan conducted under close military supervision, had led
to storms of protests from the disenfranchised ethnic and religious groups, but
without eliciting any changes in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">structure, categories and schedule. As a
result, the struggle for power among various groups in the society draws on the
imbalance between</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">figures and the situation on the ground.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and International Community</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The international</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">organization</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">such as UNFPA, UNFIEM,
UNFP, and UN-Habitat</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">contribute
substantively to the effective planning, management and execution of the
Pakistani</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,
while</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">encouraging the use of population data for
policy development. The donor have made</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">efforts in training the enumerators,</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">providing</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the logistic supports and technical capacity building of the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Population</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Organization</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(PCO) for the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in 2011, but their efforts have not brought
tofruition</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">due to lack of
political consensus on the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Inter-agency groups of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">UN have invested to</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">jointly enhance and develop the capacity of
the existing Geographic Information Systems for the statistic divisions of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">offices in Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore,
Peshawar and Quetta. They will also help train those using the systems in
modern technology and the latest GIS software. The use of GIS will replace
conventional maps with Google maps, and will minimize the chances of errors in
house and building counts.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and Urbanization</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The statistics on</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">urbanization</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in Pakistan are most
unreliable, given the out-dated</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">definition</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of urban population, and the challenges of
urban enumeration, created by vested political interest groups in the cities.
In Sindh, a coalition of political parties, has questioned the transparency of
the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">procedures and disputed the results of recent
household</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in Sindh, which is to provide a base for population</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. The population and household survey has not
yet begun at thescheduled</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">date in September.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and Christians</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As in other spheres of citizenship, Christian population is
discriminated and under reported in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. In the last</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of
1998, the total</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Christian</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">population was estimated to be 5 M, whereas
the Church records state them to be around 10 M. Most</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">independent</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">observers estimate it to be around 13 M.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and Ethnicity</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Attention needs to be placed on the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">categories which form the basis of public
policy planning and</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">administration.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the past five</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, there was no direct question as to ethnicity
of Pakistani citizens. The ethnic identity is inferred indirectly through the
question on language or mother tongue. In a large number of cases in all the
provinces in Pakistan, due to variety of reasons of upward mobility, migration
and resettlement, the ethnic groups lose their vernaculars/ethnic languages and
adopt other national or cosmopolitan languages. At the same time, they remain
culturally aligned to their ethnic group and follow the customs and kinship
practices and land tenure of their descent group. In other words, language is
one of the determinants of the ethnicity, and cannot be reduced to it.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With no question to document the claims to</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ethnicidentity, irrespective of language, it
will be a sociological error to subsume ethnic groups under the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">linguistic</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">categories.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and Gender</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The gender biases in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">have not been addressed. To make women work
visible, there is a need to make structural changes in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">procedures as well as involvement of women in</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">enumeration. Male enumerators have invariably
been deployed in all of Pakistan's</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">to collect information on the population and
its characteristics, on the housing stock and associated facilities. The
enumeration generally occurs during the day, so the enumerators usually face
female respondents. As many women in Pakistan find it difficult to disclose
personal information to men, even familiar ones, responding to the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">enumerators is frequently extremely
problematic, and women may provide incomplete, inadequate or erroneous
information, or may simply refuse to cooperate.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Scheduled 2011</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Although, the scheduled</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">activities for</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2011 are underway, and the first stage in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">operations, the household listing launched on
April 5 has been completed, amid controversies. The Council of Common Interests
had already expressed concerns about the latter’s usability in August, 2011 and
the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">activities are suspended till the resolution
of objections in the CCI, whose next meeting has still not been called.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> According to some reports, PML-N
questioned the abnormal rate of urbanization in the house listing</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, which saw 84 percent growth of households in
Sindh between 1998-2011, in contrast to 32 percent growth in Punjab.
Ironically, according to the house listing</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, Hyderabad, Karachi, Jacobabad and Jamshoro districts recorded
129, 114, 111 and 102 percent increase while Lahore district showed only 0.94
growth in its households.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is alarming to note that household</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, which is the basis of population head count,
will be out dated, if the population</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">does not commence by December, 2011. The most
likely</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">scenario</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">is that</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">process is likely to suffer delays and may not
take place this year, due to resource constraints and attention being diverted
to the preparation required to hold forthcoming national election in 2013. The
financial resources required for authentic and transparent</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">operations can be partially met nationally and
international donor support and private sector investments </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">must be provided to the government.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Although conducted by the Federal Government, the Provincial
Government plays a critical role by coordinating and supervising the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">activity</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and providing the field staff. The task of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">door to door verification</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of voter lists by Election Commission of
Pakistan and NADRA, is performed by same set of field staff in the provinces,
who are to undertake the population</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">New Statistical Law 2011</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">On a positive note, the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ordinance of 1959, which formed the basis of
statistical management in Pakistan and under which the past five</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">were conducted, has been revised and expanded
this year, under the Eighteenth Amendment. According to the decision of
Implementation Commission,</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">11 subjects related
to </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">collection,
compilation and managemnt of statistical data -- earlier being managed by the
abolished 17 ministries -- have been re-allocated to the Federal Bureau of
Statistics. As a follow-up legilsation to the 18<sup>th</sup></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Constitutional Amednmnet, the Parliamant has
passed the General Statiscts Act 2011.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The General Statistics Act 2011 -- for the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">reorganization</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of statistical</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">systems</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in Pakistan -- provides a fresh opportunity for reviewing the
instruments of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,
methodology, and institutional mechanisms for producing timely, reliable
authentic and transparent data. Surprisingly, the Act does not subscribe any
role to NADRA, a federal body for civil registration, for negotiating with the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">reorganization</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of statistical regimes in Pakistan. The
linkages between various institutions of statistical management are not clearly
spelled out in the revised Act.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and Elections 2011</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The alleged use of fake, duplicate and unauthorized Identity
Cards (Ids) during the voting on polling stations is repeatedly cited as one of
the most common instrument of rigging and proxy representation in Pakistani
elections. Currently, NADRA and Election Commission of Pakistan are working
jointly to bring about the regime of transparent data management of electroal
roles for next election. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The population increase would lead to increase the number of
voters requiring updated elctoral role for next election. A new strategy of One
CNIC, One Vote is being introduced by NADRA and the Election Commission of
Pakistan.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is important to note that NADRA has increased the
registration of population from 55% to 91% in last three years. Official data
indicates following provincial breakdown of registration: 98 percent of the
population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 82 percent of Federally Administered Tribal
Areas, 92 percent of Punjab, 85 percent of Sindh, 73 percent of Balochistan, 99
percent of Islamabad and Azad Jammu and Kashmir. “In Sindh and Balochistan, the
ratio of women’s registration has increased to 78 percent as compared to the
previous ratio of 28 percent.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Census </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and 7<sup>th</sup></span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></b><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">NFC Award</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The 7th NFC Award
indicates to a radical shift in the process of resource distribution between
federation and the federating units. The Award has adopted by consensus a set
of multiple criteria for determining horizontal distribution of resources
against a historical trend of using a single criterion of Population.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Multiple criteria for
distribution of revenues amongst the Provincial Governments was used for the
first time in the history of Pakistan. The four point criteria include:
population, poverty or backwardness, revenue collection, or generation and
inverse population density with the ratio of 82%, 10.3%, 5.0% and 2.7%
respectively.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Evidently, the
mechanism of resource distribution from federation to provinces and between
provinces is based on four indicators mentioned in the 7<sup>th</sup></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">NFC. Inevitably, that necessitates developing
disaggregated data on all four indicators as basis for accurate and predictable
resource distribution. However, apart from outdated population data, other
three indicators do not have any credible data generated by provinces or the
federation. This has critical implication on the implementation of 7<sup>th</sup></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">NFC -- as pre-requisites of fiscal decision
making will remain missing unless authentic and accurate data is not generated,
collated and interpreted for the fiscal management at federal and provincial
levels.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Conclusions and Recommendations</span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The turbulent history of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in Pakistan,
especially in Baluchistan and Sindh indicates the over</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">politicization</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in Pakistan, which has</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">jeopardized</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the national planning
process. Without reliable</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">figures, macroeconomic management is bound to fail and so is the
forthcoming electoral process based on</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">figures fraught with the duplicity. The
accuracy and authenticity of the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">figures are critical for</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">transparent, free and fair elections.</span><b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Given the rapid changes in the demographic
profile of Pakistan due to</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">urbanization,
migration, displacements </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and changes in the
federal structure of the state, it is imperative to review the changes in the
statistical management regime of Pakistan and suggest measures to reform the
traditional</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> censuses </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">with exhaustive information.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To democratize the process of</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">undertaking, data generation and statistics
management, the Council of Common Interest (CCI)</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">should convene a special sessions to iron out
some appropriate framework. Governments should raise awareness about the
importance of the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">for socio-economic development. It</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">should highlight</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the linkages between the reliable statistic
and equitable resource allocation and just political</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">representation.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Women's involvement in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">process should be enhanced. No systematic
attempt has been made by Government to involve women in planning, designing and
implementing</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">data collection. To enhance public participation in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, publicity campaign should be conducted
through panel discussions on television and radio, and to a lesser extent
display of some posters, jingles and songs carrying</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">messages on TV, and quiz programmes, jingles
and songs on radio. The effort to improve public participation in the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">activities and the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">data on gender sensitive issues should be
broadcasted on television and radio. Using television is the most effective way
to have</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">messages trickle down to the general public, respondents and
enumerators in order to elicit their cooperation. The involvement of NGOs in
the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">taking process should be enhanced. All</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">data users and stakeholders should be
consulted on the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">questionnaires. All concerned departments of the public sector,
including research organizations, universities, NGOs dealing with population
and housing data and relevant international agencies were invited to put
forward their requests for questions to be incorporated into the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. Women’s’ organizations dealing with
population should also be contacted.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The mirage of electoral democracy that holds the country
together will be in jeopardy, if the plans for decennial</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> census </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">are poorly accomplished.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(Amjad Bhatti is a development researcher, communication expert,
and founding executive director, School of Political and Strategic
Communications (SPSC), Islamabad. Dr Nadeem Omar Tarar is an development</span></i><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">anthropologist</span></i><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i><i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">based in Islamabad.)</span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-80930550277068098392016-12-09T14:05:00.001-08:002016-12-09T14:05:24.287-08:00Connection the Two Capitals: Taxila and Islamabad<div class="itemHeader" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 4px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); clear: both; font-family: segoe_uiregular, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px 0px 10px;">
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Connecting the Two Capitals: From Taxila to Islamabad</h2>
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Written By: Dr. Nadeem Omar Tarar</div>
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When Pakistani government chose to shift capital from the bustling port city of Karachi to the north of Rawalpindi, where the Potohar plateau rises to Margalla Hills, little did they realize that they are establishing a direct territorial link to the capital of an ancient civilization, Takshasila, i.e., the hill capital of the Kingdom of Gandhara. Situated at the pivotal junction of trade routes of South Asia and Central Asia in the lush green valleys of Margalla, Taxila city grew from the 8th Century BCE to 5th century AD, to become a prominent centre of ancient civilizations, with a diverse range of ruling dynasties, including Persian, Greek and Indian cultural stock. With purpose-built lecture halls and residential quarters, Taxila was the site for one of the earliest universities in the world, which made the conquering armies of Alexander in the 4th century BCE wonder in disbelief, as they had not seen the likes of it in their own centre of civilization, the ancient Greece of Plato and Aristotle.</div>
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<br />What apparently separates Taxila from Islamabad is Margalla Hills, a hill range part of the lesser Himalaya, whose very name recorded in Persian chronicles as Mar-i-qilla, Mar (serpent) Qila (fort) plays into Takshasila the hill capital of Takshas. Pakistani archaeologist, Ahmad Hassan Dani ponder over the historical relationship between the two capitals in the following words; “When Taxila on the western side of the hill was the capital, Islamabad on the eastern side was the suburb; now with Islamabad the capital, Taxila is the suburb”. The Greek planner of Islamabad, Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis might have recognized the historicity of the site that he was given for the new capital in the 1960s, but sadly Islamabad has been largely planned and built without being conscious to its ancient and medieval cultural heritage. The city's bosses of today continue to bulldoze the multiple layers of historic landscape, eliminating the traces of the past civilizations to make room for the expanding residential needs of the one of the fastest growing cities of Pakistan.</div>
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<br />One of the forgotten historic towns of Islamabad is Shah Allah Ditta, situated in a small picturesque valley in the northwest of the capital, bordering sector D-12. Downgraded as a village during British land settlement in the 19th century, it extends into the Margalla Hills National Park. The Margalla Hill Road, or what British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham, credited to have discovered the ruins of Taxila had called "the old road to Rawalpindi" winds through the Shah Allah Ditta and crosses the Margalla Hills to reach Taxila and Kashmir. At the outskirts of the Shah Allah Ditta, there is a site known in local history as Sadhu da Bagh, (the Garden of Saint), which was part of a much larger historic and cultural landscape, given its strategic location as the halting point of an ancient caravan route. For centuries a stone laden road, now paved and expanded, passing through the Sadhu da Bagh had served as a mountain passage for camel caravans and travellers to pass through the Margalla Hills to reach Taxila and to Kashmir. Sadu da Bagh was an expanding garden laden with fruit trees unique to the Potohar Plateau and fed by an underground spring. A lone mango tree, however, gigantic in size, choked by concrete stone perimeter wall pierced into its body, stands today as a stark reminder of man made destruction of the natural and cultural landscape.</div>
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<img alt="contthetwo.jpg" src="http://hilal.gov.pk/images/contthetwo.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: left; height: auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px; vertical-align: middle;" />Within the Sadhu da Bagh, there is a cave complex, where there are several caves of various depths, which bifurcates into many portions. An underground water spring, proverbially with healing properties, streams into a man-made pool. There used to be an arched gateway with steps leading down to the water and a few raised platforms like mud-terraces on both sides of the water pool. The cave complex is believed to be a prominent spiritual abode of successive generations of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Muslim dervishes over thousands of years, all of which have left their marks on the site. On the outer wall of one of these caves, there are faint signs of fresco paintings on the mud plaster. The paintings are more like drawings with the black and terracotta red paint. Based on the hard evidence of stone tools and potsherds found on the site, the archaeologists date the site to be under human use from the Middle Stone-Age Period.</div>
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<br />The cave complex comprises of Karst landscape with Tufa rocks amid the centuries old banyan trees, whose roots and branches are dangling from the cliff like a frozen water fall. Karst developed as rock, is dissolved by water as it flows across the land surface, passes underground and later emerges at springs. The cave complex is an archive of environmental change and its Karst landscape holds a universal value as a natural heritage. The site is also rich with fossilized deposits of seashells, plants, petrified wood and early sea life (around 40 to 50 million years old) as the Margalla hills were the seabed of the ancient ocean.</div>
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<br />After passing through the Sadu da Bagh the Margalla Hills Road reaches to the top of the hill, where there is a step-well, Losar Baoli or Kenthala Baoli, which is attributed to Sher Shah Suri. It is constructed from finely dressed limestone and laid in with immaculate care. From the medieval step-well, the Margalla Hills Road branches off in two opposite directions: one road leads to village Kenthala, and the other to Losar in Taxila. On its way, there is another site called Pakki Kund, which is side wall protection, attributed to Akbari period, and from there the road descends to Khanpur through the Garamthun and Chhoi reserve forests.</div>
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<img alt="contthetwo1.jpg" src="http://hilal.gov.pk/images/contthetwo1.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right; height: auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: middle;" />From the Sadhu da Bagh, there is a pathway leading to the north western side on the Margalla Hills and ending up in Giri Buddhist monastic complex in Taxila Valley. At almost same distance of two kilometres from Giri and Sadu da Bagh, there is a Bhuddist stupa measuring 10.15 by 26 metres, which has been excavated recently by the Department of Federal Archaeology. The stupa is dated to be from the Kushan period, between 2nd and 4th BCE. The base of the stupa is made of lime and kanjur stone, with semi ashlar and diaper masonry. Next to the stupa is a site called Ban Fakirian where there is a Mughal period mosque which is in ruins due to centuries of neglect.</div>
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<br />Living in a city in the foothills of Margalla, and situated in the historical suburbs of Takshashila obliges us to protect the cultural repositories of the past civilizations under imminent danger of extinction. Of many places in the city, Shah Allah Ditta is a site where the archaeological and architectural signpost of the succeeding civilizations, over thousands of years of historic evolution are abundantly scattered and fast turning into unrecognizable heap of stones and brick masonry. The high value cultural sites include traveller's inns, temples, mosques, forts, graveyards, sacred structures, pools, trees, caves, and mounds. Although it is coincidental that Islamabad is in the neighbourhood of Gandharan civilization, but if it can safeguard its cultural heritage and promote the many centres of advance learning, besides being the seat of government, perhaps it can prove to be a living successor to it today!</div>
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<br />In this backdrop, there is a need to reopen this historical route from Islamabad to Taxila via Shah Allah Ditta through Margalla Hills. A well constructed road passing through heritage of the ancient civilization will certainly be of great interest to general tourists as well as diplomatic community and dignitaries visiting Islamabad. The Capital Development Authority (CDA) should collaborate with Ministry of Tourism and develop this road from Islamabad to Taxila and provide for arrangement of guided tours on buses, horses-back and on foot with all infrastructure of sport and pleasure. This is a soft power treasure scattered in these mountains waiting to be explored.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-42018226102474155382016-12-09T14:00:00.003-08:002016-12-09T14:00:54.869-08:00What constitutes Political Literarcy?<h1 class="name post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; border: 0px none; color: #333333; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", arial, Georgia, serif !important; font-size: 28px; font-weight: normal; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">
Norms and forms of literacy</h1>
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The western practices of literacy contrasted with culturally different practices of literacy in world history</div>
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In today’s world, the ability to write and read is the primary condition of literacy, which is supported by international conventions and institutions like UNESCO. Our schools drill the children into the practices of writing and impart knowledge through reading of books.</div>
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Although books have been an integral part of education in every human civilisation, the relationship between the author and the reader, and the definition of literacy have varied across cultures. In some cultures like in historical India, books were not always written by scholars or read by readers. In many cases, the books were dictated by scholars to scribes, and heard by the students/scholars through orators/readers.</div>
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All that changed with the advent of colonialism and spread of printing press in the 19th century across the globe, after which the non-western knowledge systems underwent radical transformations. The historical experience of literacy of the west was turned into an educational model to be deployed universally in the name of “civilizing the natives”.</div>
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Our current intellectual impasse and educational scenarios are a product of this colonial encounter, whose itinerary is yet to be charted.</div>
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In the following paragraphs, I will briefly profile the western practices of literacy and contrast them with culturally different practices of literacy in the world history in broad brush strokes.</div>
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Writing acquired its prominence in the educational discourses of the 19th century Europe, where it was argued that since the invention of alphabet script in seventh century B.C., the famous ‘Greek revolution’, the acquisition of literacy through reading and writing caused a qualitative change in the perception and cognition of individuals and societies. Writing was considered a mark of “civilisation”, that is, to be civilised is to be able to write.</div>
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Anthropologists and missionaries ranked non-western societies as “primitive” or “illogical” due to the absence of writing skills and literate population. In the twentieth century, the literacy and writing was seen to have played a major role in the historical development of European societies, especially in providing a foundation for democracy, bureaucracy, and scientific method.</div>
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<b style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Anthropologists and missionaries ranked non-western societies as “primitive” or “illogical” due to the absence of writing skills and literate population.</b></div>
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A history of writing material and practices from ancient to modern times reveals the extensive use of manuscripts and writing materials at various tiers of society in combination with orality. Instead of perceiving orality and literacy as binary opposition, with foundational differences in terms of ‘techniques of intellect’, we need to see intersections between the composition, transmission, reception and reproduction of a piece of knowledge in different modes of social reproduction.</div>
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A noteworthy contrast to dominant literate tradition based on print literacy in Europe, the Arab civilization, which spread to North Africa and South East and South Asia in the centuries following the advent of Islam in the sixth century, evolved a different interface of orality with writing. Manuscript publishing in multiple languages through Arabic script continued to explode for several centuries even before the invention or the aid of printing press through oral recitations of scholars committed to writing by a large number of scribes.</div>
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In the Indian tradition, a unique form of literacy, called by Indian scientist Prof R Narasimhan as ‘tacit literacy’, emerged and allowed individuals, who are part of an<i style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">essentially</i> oral milieu, to engage in complex literate performances. The forms of articulations that have normally been considered to be available only in the literate mode through the explicit use of writing have been developed and perfected in the Indian tradition using purely oral techniques. Such techniques were used not only to memorise and transmit across generations complex texts in syllable perfect form, but also to support teaching and preservation of structurally complex performing arts and other cultural practices.</div>
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Such techniques can explicitly illustrate not only in the context of “high” culture, but in folk performances, and in the learning and practice of craft skills.</div>
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Before the Norman conquest of England in 1066, right to land was held through such socially verifiable and integral means as the swearing of an oath of “twelve good men” along with possession of seals and symbols that represented the right to land entitlement. The colonial bureaucracy in the medieval England imposed a detailed record keeping of the land entitlements, which led to a shift to literate modes. The “English natives” were embedded in an alien system in order to maintain holdings that provided their livelihood, while the conquerors became dependent on rolls, records, and written laws in order to acquire and control the knowledge that gave political power and legitimacy.</div>
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Literacy was a terrain, over which the struggles between colonised and the conqueror took place in the medieval world, as it continues in many third world countries today.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-57619752446254823142016-12-09T13:56:00.001-08:002016-12-09T13:56:36.143-08:00Islamabad's heritage in jeoparady<h1 class="name post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; border: 0px none; color: #333333; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", arial, Georgia, serif !important; font-size: 28px; font-weight: normal; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">
Islamabad’s threatened past</h1>
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<span class="bold" style="border: 0px none; display: inline-block; font-weight: bold !important; list-style: none; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/writers/nadeem-omar-tarar-2/" rel="tag" style="border: 0px none; color: #333333; font-weight: normal; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out;">Nadeem Omar Tarar</a></span> <span style="border: 0px none; display: inline-block; list-style: none; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">November 2, 2014</span> <span style="border: 0px none; display: inline-block; list-style: none; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/islamabads-threatened-past/#comments" style="border: 0px none; color: #333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out;" title="Comment on Islamabad’s threatened past">3 Comments</a></span></div>
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As the capital expands, it endangers the archeological remains in the heart of Gandhara civilisation</div>
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View of the caves at Shah Allah Ditta.</div>
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Although Islamabad has the reputation of being one of the youngest cities in Pakistan, it stands in the heartland of Gandharan civilisation, Taxila.</div>
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The exact Persian translation of Taxila is Margalla.</div>
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Margalla Hills are the cultural repositories of the past civilisations that have not been studied properly by archeologists or cultural historians in the past. This is where many of these high-value cultural sites are located.</div>
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Islamabad is a modern city planned by a Greek architect and town planner, Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis in the 1960s. All major government buildings in the city are credited to a generation of international architects. However, the city has been built without being conscious to its ancient and medieval cultural heritage.</div>
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There are reasonable gaps in archeological research on Taxila that help us understand why these high-value sites were never incorporated in planning this city.</div>
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The heritage sites in Islamabad under imminent danger include sarais, temples, mosques, forts, graveyards, mounds, sacred structures, ponds, trees, caves, mounds and stupas.</div>
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As a direct result of this, there is no cultural consciousness of its heritage, and Capital Development Authority (CDA) rarely acknowledges the cultural heritage of the city. The Federal Department of Archaeology and Museums, that has jurisdiction over heritage sites, gives greater attention to sites that are already documented and those that are on the World Heritage List.</div>
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This is in brief the academic, cultural and governance context in which one should locate how these high-value archeological sites are now being threatened with total annihilation. <b style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"></b></div>
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What apparently separates Taxila from Islamabad is the lush green mountain range, the famous Margalla Hills.</div>
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In the words of great scholar, Ahmad Hasan Dani, “the ruins of Taxila are scattered on its western slope while Islamabad, the present capital of Pakistan, spreads downs its eastern slope.” It is important to know that lower elevations of Margalla Hills did not present insurmountable barriers for the residents of Taxila to travel through the hills, given the numerous passes through the mountains, which have also played a key role in trade, war, and migration.</div>
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<a href="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/picture-of-mound-in-D-12.jpg" style="border: 0px none; color: #204989; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out;"><img alt="picture of mound in D-12" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-20813" height="328" src="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/picture-of-mound-in-D-12.jpg" style="border: none !important; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; list-style: none; margin: 2px auto; max-width: 100%; outline: none; padding: 4px;" width="964" /></a></div>
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The Margalla hills are known to have provided sanctuary to the residents of Taxila. In case of attack from the plains, they used to recede in the mountains in the valleys of Margalla Hills and further on to Kashmir. In times of peace, traders and pilgrims would cross the Margalla Hills through numerous passes for their movement in and out of Taxila. Given the geographical proximity and not distance as commonly perceived, the chances of extension of Ghandharan settlements into the Margalla Hills and Islamabad are substantial.</div>
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Among the areas that require critical attention are the villages and settlements near the foothills of Margalla, such as Shah Allah Ditta village (entered in colonial gazetters as Shalditta) which borders D-12 sector in Islamabad.</div>
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Being located on what has been called “the old road to Rawalpindi” by Alexander Cunningham, a British archaeologist, Shalditta was the halting point for the caravans entering or departing the Margalla Hills.</div>
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From the eastern slopes of Shah Allah Ditta, travellers arrived at Giri or Khurram in Taxila, located on the western slopes of Margalla Hills.</div>
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Drawing on the archeological probability model, it is likely that the ancient Ghandhran sites such as monasteries and stupas and other archeological structures of medieval periods, such as temples, sarais and ponds must have existed along the caravan paths and roads.</div>
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The natural caves at the outskirts of the village are known as Buddhist caves. On the basis of evidence found in the form of wall paintings and potsherds, archaeologists believe Buddhist monks once inhabited them. There is a spring in front of the caves, and water gathers in a pool which feeds a garden called Sadhu ka Bagh (the Garden of Saint) and the whole village.</div>
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A stupa that is partly damaged, dating back to Kushan<b style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"> </b>period, is located on the way to Shalditta Pass, some 2km from the Bhuddist caves. A short distance from the stupa is a large pond, at a place called Bandh Faqiran (Pond of Saints) with a small mosque on its bank, attributed to Ghaznavi period. All along the Shalditta Pass, there are visible signs of unidentified structures that require closer inspection as it might reveal something significant.</div>
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Islamabad is now considered the fastest growing city in Pakistan and the pace of development threatens to destroy our cultural treasures and heritage. Only a few sites that lie within the Margalla Hills National Park, a protected area, are safe from destruction.</div>
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Saving these cultural sites has to become a national priority without delay. It is of historic significance that Islamabad is not only in the neighbourhood of the principal centre of Ghandharan civilisation — Cunningham called Taxila or Taksha-sila, that is the hill capital of the Takshakas — but perhaps a living successor to it today!</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-46298227798535856132016-12-09T13:53:00.003-08:002016-12-09T13:53:58.902-08:00Frederick Bremner: the forgotten icons of colonial photography in Pakistan<div class="intro" style="background-color: white; border: 0px none; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5 !important; list-style: none; margin-bottom: 10px; outline: none; padding: 0px 0px 5px;">
A Scottish photographer, who was in Northwestern India roughly from 1882 to 1922, has a memorable album of monuments and personalities from that period</div>
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<img alt="From Bremner’s lens" src="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Nadeem-Omar-1.jpg" style="border: 0px none; height: auto; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: none; padding: 0px; width: 620px;" title="From Bremner’s lens" /></div>
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The Ravi & bridge of boats, Lahore.</div>
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Fred Bremner is one of the hundreds of British commercial photographers who had established their studios in Indian cities and cantonments in the heydays of British Raj.</div>
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As an independent photographer, who worked largely in the far flung areas of the Raj, such as Balochistan and Sindh that are today parts of Pakistan, Bremner is more likely to be forgotten. His memoirs <i style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">My Forty Years in India</i>, (1883-1923) complete with twenty one autotype reproductions of his work, which Bremner privately issued twenty years after he retired to England, is perhaps the only record of a pioneer postcard publisher in Northwestern India.</div>
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The son of a professional photographer in Banff, Scotland, Bremner left school to join his father’s studio at an early age. With a hope for better prospects, he came to India as a struggling young man in 1882. He worked for his brother-in-law G. W. Lawrie, a small time photographer in Lucknow for six years. It helped him improve on his studio operations, which he had learnt during the six years of apprenticeship with his father in Scotland.</div>
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After the first two years of scouting neighbouring towns, for his next assignment he was sent 1500 miles away to work in Karachi where he arrived via Lahore in the summer of 1885. The British had captured Karachi in 1839 when it had a population of only ten thousand. However, at the time of his arrival, Karachi had become an important sea port for overseas commerce for Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab provinces and its population had risen to a hundred and fifty thousand.</div>
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Even though prior to his arrival he had little acquaintance there, but his contacts with a Scottish regiment in Karachi saved the day for him. He was soon able to meet a Barrack Master Richardson who belonged to the Scottish Lodge of Freemasons, the organisation Bremner had done business with earlier. Richardson took him as a paying guest and also introduced him to a chemist friend who allowed the young photographer to set up his studio tent in his yard.</div>
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Bremner worked in this set-up for the next five months. During this time he also hired two local assistants who helped him with retouching, printing, finishing and hand colouring. At the end of his assignment he left Karachi in 1886 and did not return to the city for the next two years. In April 1888 his contract with Lawrie had ended, his sister had died and he wanted to go home. So he returned to Karachi to take a ship for the British Isles.</div>
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Upon his return from England in 1889, Bremner decided to open his studio in Karachi, the fledgling capital of Sindh. Through his savings he had bought some equipment from Glasgow and paid for the fair for himself and his one assistant whom he also had brought to Karachi with him. However, after paying for all that, he had very little money left to sustain. Luckily the opening of the Sukkur Bridge across the Indus by Lord Reay, Governor of the Bombay Province on March 25, 1889, afforded him photographic commissions to sustain his business.</div>
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More studios followed at various times in Quetta, Balochistan, and in Lahore and Rawalpindi in Punjab. The picture postcards carry the names of cities where Bremner had his studios at the time of issuing them. In 1910, Bremner opened a summer studio in Simla, the summer capital of the Raj. He married in the following year and was assisted in his work by his wife who newspaper ads referred to as “especially helpful with purdah-observing ladies”.</div>
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<a href="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Nadeem-Omar-2.jpg" style="border: 0px none; color: #444444; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out;"><img alt="Khan of Kalat and sardars, Balochistan, March 6, 1906." class="size-full wp-image-27692 " height="395" src="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Nadeem-Omar-2.jpg" style="border: 0px none; height: auto; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: none; padding: 0px;" width="660" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text" style="border: 0px none; color: #444444; list-style: none; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 5px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">
Khan of Kalat and sardars, Balochistan, March 6, 1906.</div>
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Some of the prominent and distinguished sitters Bremner ‘shot’ during his years in India were the viceroys Lord Minto, Lord Hardinge, Lord Chelmsford, and Lord Reading; Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Lord Kitchener, and Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Governor of Punjab. He also photographed the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) during his tour of India in 1922. Among the Indian nobility, he worked for the Nawab of Dholepore and later for the Maharajah of Jind, the Nawab of Maler Kotla, and the Maharajah of Kapurthala. He often photographed the Khan of Kalat in Balochistan.</div>
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Working with the British Indian army and occasionally for the member of British and Indian elite provided the mainstay of business, in addition to income from the retail shop. Since most newspapers even in the west carried a few pictures before 1910, situation in India was not any better. Colonial photographers like Bremner made the best possible use of growing European interest laden with imperial ambitions in picture postcards of foreign lands which were often colonised territory.</div>
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Picture postcards provided a lucrative outlet for their work, feeding back into their sales through commercial photography.<b style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"></b></div>
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<a href="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Nadeem-Omar-3.jpg" style="border: 0px none; color: #444444; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out;"><img alt="Golden Mosque, Lahore." class=" wp-image-27690 " height="197" src="http://tns.thenews.com.pk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Nadeem-Omar-3.jpg" style="border: 0px none; height: auto; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: none; padding: 0px;" width="168" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text" style="border: 0px none; color: #444444; list-style: none; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 5px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">
Golden Mosque, Lahore.</div>
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In 1900, he published a photographic album titled <i style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Baluchistan Illustrated</i>, which contains the only surviving photographic records of Quetta before it was destroyed by the earthquake in 1931. The photographs and images of architectural monuments of Lahore also were a favourite subject for postcard publishers to reflect the ancient purity of traditional culture of the past. The hotspots of photographic activity for the picture postcard publishing were Mughal monuments such as Masjid Wazir Khan, and Lahore Fort. The Gates of Lahore, especially Delhi Gate and<b style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"> </b>Lahori Gate were actively photographed and produced on postcards. The aesthetic conventions of these images — the medium in which they were executed and the manner in which they were framed — served to isolate the past from the present.</div>
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It was not uncommon for postcards to error in the title. Many titles and buildings were mismatched. Two glaring examples are of Mosque of Wazir Khan and Golden Mosque, which were heavily photographed and reproduced on the postcards. In one instance, the title of mosque of Wazir Khan is <i style="border: 0px none; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Pleasure Garden, Allahbad</i> and Golden Mosque is titled Golden temple.</div>
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Such errors itself indicate the scattered nature of the production process and are tell-tale signs of their distant origin.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-40538996394014917732016-12-09T13:49:00.001-08:002016-12-09T13:49:21.432-08:00Celebrating Pakistan's greatest photographer on the anniversary of Independence: F E Chaudhry<div style="background-color: white; font-family: segoe_uiregular, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px !important;">
F. E. Chaudhry, Pakistan’s first professional press photographer, extensively covered the activities of the Muslim Leagues' struggle for the independence. Credited to have taken photographs of Quaid-i-Azam, he followed the lives and career of all the Muslim League leaders, including Liaquat Ali Khan. As a visual chronicler of his times, he photographed the upheavals of partition and the migration of thousands of refugees from across the newly-drawn dividing line between India and Pakistan.</div>
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Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah addressing students and teachers at the Islamia College, Lahore, 1946.</div>
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The workers of Muslim League, marching towards Punjab Civil Secretariat building in 1947.</div>
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Quaid-i-Azam and Fatima Jinnah being received at the Walton Airport by Begum Geti Ara, President of the women's branch of the Muslim League Lahore and the members of National Guard in Lahore in 1947. Geti Ara was the daughter of Sir Muhammad Shafi, and wife of Bashir Ahmad, Pakistan’s first Ambassador to Turkey.</div>
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Maadr-e-Millat, Fatima Jinnah giving autograph to college girls in Lahore.</div>
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Quaid-i-Azam addressing at the inauguration ceremony of the State Bank of Pakistan, July 01, 1948.</div>
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A large number of refugees from East Punjab crossed the border at Wagha and struggled to find their places in temporary camps, roadside shelters and houses deserted by the fleeing population. In these pictures refugees are seen camping with their meagre belongings in the streets of Lahore, 1947.</div>
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Independence of the country saw one of the largest migrations in history of the world, with an estimated 17.9 million people leaving their homes in a span of six months, travelling in opposite directions on foot, carts and carriages, under administrative transition and divided loyalties. As a result, between 500,000 to 2 million people died although exact numbers are still not known. Refugee carawaans streaming into Pakistan with smiles on faces</div>
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Quaid-i-Azam inspecting the Pakistan Army units in Dhaka Cantonment with the GOC East Pakistan Maj. Gen. Ayub Khan, 1948.</div>
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Quaid-i-Azam, presenting a National Standard to Pakistan Army regiment at Peshawar, 1948.</div>
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During the mass exodus in the years of independence, railway services were choked to the capacity. According to official figures, the North Indian Railways transported 4.7 million refugees in 1947-1948. In this photograph, the refugees are perched on the roof of an over-crowded coach with their belongings.</div>
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At the time of partition, armed forces were deployed to transport families from across the border. Thousands of lives were saved due to protection by soldiers who remained on duty, away from their families to save their fellow citizens from loot, plunder and killing.</div>
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One of the most iconic images of Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan in which he clinched his fist as a show of defiance was taken by F. E. Chaudhry, staff reporter of the Pakistan Times. In the 50s, there was a massive build up of Indian forces across the international border on the western sector leading to serious risk of war between the two countries. However, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was not to be cowed down by the enemy's aggression. Instead, in a public speech at the State Guest House in Karachi, Liaquat Ali Khan showed his clinched fist to India and said that he and his people were ready to take on the Indian challenge. However, the event was not properly photographed at that time. Later, when Liaquat Ali Khan was visiting Lahore at Muslim League Office at MacLeod Road, F. E. Chaudhry seized the opportunity to request the Prime Minister to pose for a photo session to which he happily complied. Next day, the photograph was carried by all the newspapers, including the Pakistan Times.</div>
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F. E. Chaudhry (1909-2013) has the singular honour of documenting the Muslim League’s struggle for independence that was taking shape in Lahore. Having worked as a freelancer since 1935 for Civil and Military Gazette, Illustrated Weekly of India, and Statesman. F. E. Chaudhry joined the Pakistan Times, as a full time photo journalist in 1949. He served with its most illustrated editors including Faiz A. Faiz, Mazhar Ali Khan, I. A. Suleri and K. M. Asaf. He was also a commissioned photographer of United Nations. After his retirement at the age of 60, he never worked again; occasionally freelancing, he lived on to spend his life championing the rights of the communities. He died on March 15, 2013 at the age of 103. For his long standing services, F. E. Choudhry was awarded Tamgha-e-Khidmat in 1970, Pride of Performance in 1987 and Tehrik-e-Pakistan Gold Medal in 1992. F. E. Chaudhry was a proud father of Pakistan Air Force, Group Captain, Cecil Chaudhry, (27 August 1941 – 13 April 2012), who was a legendary fighter pilot of Pakistan Air Force. He participated in a number of aerial battles during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pak wars. He was credited with several air-to-air kills and was one of the distinguished Pakistani strike and fighter pilots of the period. In recognition of his meritorious services, he was awarded with Sitara-e-Jurat and Sitara-e-Basalat. After his retirement, he served as an educationist in Lahore. President's Award for Pride of Performance was also awarded to him posthumously in 2013 for his lifelong contributions.</div>
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The picture of Cecil Chaudhry as a young pilot was taken by his father F. E. Chaudhry in the 50s.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-8399656098400825662016-12-09T13:46:00.001-08:002016-12-09T13:46:21.870-08:00Cementing the bonds of friendship between China, Iran and Pakistan through cultural cooperation<div style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="color: brown; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold;">P</span>akistan is geographically located at the crossroads of cultures and historic civilizations, some of which have turned into mighty nation states of the Twentieth century, such as China. Pakistan was among the first countries to recognize the People’s Republic of China as a sovereign state in the 50s. Over the years, Pakistan-China relationship has been graduated into 'all-weather' Sino-Pak friendship, but mostly it is limited to inter-governmental contact with selected people-to-people interaction. A sustained relationship between Pakistan and China requires a mutual understanding of cultures, traditions and language, which can take place only through a robust people-to-people contact. The number of Chinese tourists in Pakistan does not exceed beyond few thousands in any given year. Even during more peaceful decades of Pakistani history, the number of Chinese visiting Pakistan remained less than the European and American visitors.</div>
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The lack of cultural contact between the two countries is one of the key challenges that Pakistan and China have to address for a durable economic relationship.</div>
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<br />Pakistan’s strategic planning shaped by the threats and opportunities of economic and military cooperation with its neighbours holds no special brief for understanding the cross cultural interactions taking place in Pakistan’s geographical neighbourhood in China, Iran, Afghanistan and India. At a time when Pakistan is entering into major economic relations with foreign countries in the region as well as globally, it is imperative to pay attention to the cultural dimensions of international relations by extending the scope of public diplomacy. The interactions between citizens of neighbouring countries, if based on an informed understanding of diverse cultural practices and aesthetic traditions, can engender a process of acculturation, which can help evolve transnational identities based on geo-cultural heritage of the region.</div>
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A quick overview of Pakistan's cultural policy relations with its neighbouring countries presents a somewhat dismal scenario, where there is a disarray of state initiatives and practices, at loggerhead with each other, which continued to change with the change of the government. A holistic state policy towards culture which could guide the national cultural development as well as fill in the ranks for the cultural diplomacy through foreign cultural relations is yet to take shape. Moreover, Pakistan's cultural policies do not reflect the changing geo-economic realities of the country. The very fact that the domain of culture is a relegated affair in the ministerial portfolios of the government, left at the mercy of bureaucratic inertia and reduced to the sectors of entertainment and national heritage, speaks volumes about the sagacity of Pakistan's cultural managers' vision of the future. The social and cultural consequences of the US $46 billion investment in the 3,000 kilometre long strategic China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that will connect Pakistan’s Arabian Sea port of Gwadar to China’s Xinjiang province, have not been fully anticipated. Given the likely cultural interaction between the citizens of Pakistan and China, it is imperative that we explore the avenues for renewed inter-cultural dialogue and revive the multi level links that are lying dormant in our shared cultural histories and regional biographies.</div>
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<br /><strong>Cultural Treasures and Potentials for Cooperation</strong></div>
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"Seek knowledge even though it be in China," is the popular saying (hadith) of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), read as a reflection of eminence of Chinese civilization, can still serve as a guiding light for the Pakistani knowledge bearers to learn from the Chinese culture. The modern day achievements of China are continuation of their historic past. In the ancient period, China is credited for a long list of inventions, like iron plough, hoe and wheelbarrow, which improved farming and increased food production, to other worth mentioning achievements, which changed the whole world such as the invention of gunpowder, compass, seismograph, crossbow, kite, printing machine, umbrella, papermaking, currency notes, silk making and preparing steel.</div>
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<br />For Chinese, Pakistan is situated at a sacred site, which was once the heartland of Buddhism in Gandhara, an ancient kingdom, located mainly in Peshawar, Swat and the Pothohar with main cities as Purushapura (Peshawar) and Takshashila (Taxila). Over the course of two millennia, Buddhist ideas and practices have shaped Chinese culture in a wide variety of areas, informing its art, politics, literature, philosophy, medicine, and material culture. The translation and printing of a large body of Indian Buddhist scriptures into Chinese had far-reaching implications for the dissemination of Buddhism throughout the Chinese cultural sphere, including Korea, Japan, Ryukyu Islands and Vietnam. With Chinese Buddhist comprising more than 25 crores, which is equal to 18 % of the total population of China, the opportunities for Chinese spiritual tourism in Northern Pakistani regions of Gilgit-Baltistan, Peshawar and Swat are far too great to be missed out by the Pakistani policy makers.</div>
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<br />Kong Qui, better known as Confucius, is the most influential Chinese philosopher in the world history who is relevant for Pakistani audience, given his philosophy of which emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity. Confucianism, later became the official imperial philosophy of China, and is still deemed influential in shaping Chinese culture and values. Despite obvious religious differences, the value systems of Chinese and Pakistani society resonates with similar ideals and concerns, such as respect for tradition, family honour, deference for women and elderly. Such traditional norms of propriety, based on Buddhism and Confucianism, also inform the modern Chinese corporations and state institutions. Traditional Chinese culture, unlike Pakistan, is not seen as a sign of decadence, but promoted as icon of modern Chinese cultural identity. For instance, traditional Chinese architecture adorns the cultural landscape of Chinese towns and villages alike, with Western-trained Chinese architects attempting to combine traditional Chinese designs into modern architecture.</div>
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<br />Given the shared cultural histories of China and Pakistan, the cultural links should extend beyond the traditional modes of inter-state contacts. It may include student and faculty exchange programmes between universities, academic conferences and professional associations of Chinese and Pakistani experts, and civil society collaborations. The interactions between Pakistani and Chinese media should be encouraged along with joint ventures in creative arts like cinema, theatre and music, led by inter-governmental collaborations. A fusion of Chinese and Pakistani classical music is possible, along the same lines as Chinese have evolved their Chinese orchestra, an art form that is based on the structure and principles of a Western symphony orchestra but using Chinese instruments.</div>
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<br />Pakistani folk arts of paper, kite flying and puppetry stand in comparison to traditional Chinese paper arts, kite flying and puppetry, which can provide a perfect combination for travelling exhibitions and theatrical performances all over the world, as emblem of Pak-China friendship. From traditional Chinese medicine, cuisine to calligraphy, kungfu and martial arts, a wide range of cultural expressions can be promoted in Pakistan for better understanding of Chinese culture. Traditional Chinese festival such as Spring festivals, Mid-Autumn Day, etc. can also be celebrated in Pakistan, along with Pakistani local festivals, such as Shindoor Mela, Mela Chiraghan, and Jashn-e-Baharaan. Senator Mushahid Hussain's non-governmental initiative of turning economic corridor into cultural corridor, such as Salam Confucius needs to be officially adopted as part of track II diplomacy to foster cultural contact with China. The activities of the Confucius Institutes in educational institutions in Pakistan, set up by Chinese government needs to be multiplied at a grand scale, including the classes in Chinese language, to overcome what seems like a forbidding communication barrier, to help create mutual understanding of cultures, as the two countries share a common destiny.</div>
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<br /><strong>Iran – an Additional Jewel in Cultural Necklace</strong></div>
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Our regional connections with China and Iran date back to ancient times, when Persian and Chinese dynasties enjoyed active trade linkages through the famous Silk Route passing through Gandhara. For some, the Silk Route mainly became established in the wake of splendid diplomatic relations between regions comprising Pakistan, China and Iran, leading to not only exchange of goods, but art and ideas, traditions and knowledge, customs and practices. The revival of ancient Silk Road that connected India, China, Iran, Central Asia to Europe under Chinese ‘One Road, One Belt’ project initiative will reinforce the latent potential of strong cultural ties between the neighbourly nations. As we would like to move towards cultural exchanges and integration with Chinese culture, China would appreciate and support enhanced cultural ties between Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan’s better relations with Iran add strength to China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. If Pakistan, Iran and China are brought further closer by enhanced cultural ties and expanded people-to-people contacts, that would have far-reaching effects on overall peace, prosperity and stability in the region.</div>
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<br />The Persian civilizational influences have shaped the cultural aesthetics of Muslims in India for centuries. One of the Iran's greatest medieval poet of the classical literary tradition, Muslih al-Din bin Abdallah Shirazi (1210-1292), better known by his pen-name Sheikh Saadi, was widely known in the literary circles of North India since the 13th century. His best known works Bostan (The Orchard) and Gulistan (The Rose Garden) continued to enjoy enormous popularity among the Muslims in India for more than six hundred years. His books remained part of the curriculum of local schools in Northwestern India till the advent of British colonialism in the 19th century. From the imperial architecture to the illustrated manuscripts of Mughal Period, the Persian arts and belle letters have groomed the illustrious Indo-Persian civilization in India. It is all but forgotten that for more than seven hundred years, Persian was the language of the Indian courts and the cultural elite, from the Great Mughals to the Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Punjab. Even the 19th century British administration had to learn the Persian language before Urdu was adopted as the language of the administration.</div>
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<br />Pakistan owes its greatest debt to the Iranian civilization in the form of Sufi thought, which introduced Iranian flavoured Sufi Islam to the Indian subcontinent during the 10th and 11th centuries of the Delhi Sultanate. By focusing on the more spiritual aspects of religion, based on the universal message of love, unity, tolerance and brotherhood, Sufis from Central Asia were able to unite people irrespective of their caste, culture, creed and religion. One of Pakistan's most celebrated saints, Abul Hassan Ali Hajveri, popularly known as Data Ganj Bakhsh of Lahore, was an 11th century Persian scholar, who has significantly contributed to the spread of Islam in South Asia. His most famous work Kashf Al Mahjoob (Revelation of the Veiled) was written in the Persian language and is considered as one of the earliest and most respected treatises of Sufism in Pakistan. The teachings of Sufi saints based on tolerance and peace should be widely promoted as a panacea for getting rid the society of extremism and sectarianism, which is crippling the country and marring its international image. Revered both by Sunnis and Shias, the Sufi festivals held throughout the year, drawing large crowds of devotees, can be turned into a tremendous opportunity for spiritual tourism and a well publicized international showcase for inter faith harmony in Pakistan.</div>
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From government initiatives to socially responsible business practices, the ability to understand and embrace the different values and needs of diverse cultures and societies becomes critical to the success in both, the inter-governmental relations and corporate affairs. In the world of international politics, the role of 'soft power' or the ability to persuade through culture, values and ideas, as opposed to 'hard power', which conquers or coerces through military might has gained significance. The disproportionate cultural influence of Pakistan’s archrival India on Pakistani public culture, in contrast to China or Iran, points to the sources of soft power that India exercises over Pakistan. It is partly due to the successful deployment of culture industry by India to mass produce and sell to the world the images of rising and shining India. It must be remembered that a mere media management will not soften up Pakistan's image, as the world is not only watching our news footage, but also screening our creative endeavours. In contemporary Iran, the art films have exploded on to the world stage, receiving critical attention from the international audience. Cinema is a powerful medium to project soft power onto the world stage through creative engagement with neighbouring countries, such as Iran with a thriving film industry under the patronage of the state. Pakistan-Iran relations have the greatest cultural depth. Its citizens share a common taste in art, architecture, cuisine, dance, music, poetry, drama, and literature, which is inspired by Iranian culture. The staging of Iranian popular culture in Pakistan can affect both a cultural renaissance but also an interfaith understanding to promote international peace and reconciliation.</div>
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<br /><strong>Conclusion</strong></div>
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The cultural links between Pakistan and China (including Iran appropriately to make a stable triangle) should be extended beyond the traditional mode of inter-state contacts. Pakistan and China have much common in culture, arts and crafts to further deepen the relations at societal level. It is only through further strengthening the people-to-people contacts that actually we would be transforming CPEC from a governmental project to an economic venture espousing grass-root affinities at much deeper level. Iran’s inclusion in the equation would further add to the strengthened relations among societies of these three important countries; countering Indian cultural influence would be an additional flavour to the stew.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-59676505882120596422016-12-09T13:19:00.002-08:002016-12-09T13:19:38.628-08:00How to decode the Pakistani culture?<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #252525; font-family: Merriweather, serif; font-size: 17.9999px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
FOR the state, NGOs, donor agencies and multilateral institutions, culture is a segregated affair, perceived as a ‘set of things’ requiring sectoral interventions as in music, the arts and literature. Even Unesco, whose mandate it is to raise awareness of the rich and diverse mesh of culture, has invested only in select domains of Pakistan’s cultural heritage. The concept of culture remains limited to heritage, aesthetics and art, and its multifarious links as ‘a way of life’ with social and economic change are as yet undefined.</div>
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Understood as comprising norms, traditions, values and the social structure of society, culture forms the lens through which people see the world. These are significant aspects that influence individual and community worldviews, perceptions and behaviour. Worldviews affect the way people think and react to risks and opportunities offered by the process of development.</div>
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To decrease uncertainty — a result of rapid modernisation — people construct cultural ideas about what causes the change and the possibility of religious intervention that can inform them of what to do. The significance of these cultural ideas must be understood and incorporated into any attempt to deal with development rather than treated as illogical.</div>
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The idea that information and knowledge provided by the outside agency (NGOs or the state) will make people behave rationally is discredited. Communities interpret information through their own cultural lens. They may draw conclusions which are not the same as those of the outside agency.</div>
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Where culture acts as a barrier it is important to understand it.</h4>
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As Terry Cannon put it in the context of environmental change, “If ‘traditional’ societies do it through magical-religious practices, modern societies do it through forecast. Even with these different epistemological approaches, shamans and meteorologists fulfil the function of interpreters to reduce climatic uncertainty”. It is only by investing in understanding the rationalities behind a variety of behaviour, some of which may appear to outsiders as irrational, that we can come up with culturally informed development strategies.</div>
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As a social construct, religion is a particularly important driver of perception and behaviour, in both constructive and negative ways. Although the social sciences have extensively studied religion and belief systems, this understanding is rarely consulted for guiding social development.</div>
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Governments disregard culturally embedded knowledge in the formulation of national policies and share the agnostic approach of donors and NGOs towards social change. They rely on technocratic solutions based on scientific rationality. Pakistan’s development strategies fail to understand the underlying intricacies of religious belief systems as they play out in the process of social change.</div>
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A case in point is the culture of resistance in the polio vaccination campaign in Pakistan carried under the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The vaccination campaign has become a contested affair which draws on the varied and deep-seated beliefs and mistrust of foreigners, leading to tension between divergent viewpoints and value systems. Although the government has faced stiff opposition from religiously motivated militant factions, leading to the murder of more than 50 LHWs and their armed escorts, the cultural rationality of resistance to the anti-polio campaign has not been fully explored.</div>
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Authoritarian regimes perceive the opposition to vaccination as a challenge to the state’s writ. However, elsewhere in the world, especially in the US, exemptions have been granted to mandatory vaccination based on religious beliefs, while strictly warning the parents of the health risks and social consequences of unvaccinated children. In Pakistan, no active effort was made to negotiate with an alternate cultural rationality, even when a TTP spokesperson reportedly expressed consent for the polio vaccination, provided assurances that polio drops were made according to Islamic tenets and that the campaign would not be used for espionage were given.</div>
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Where cultural factors are acting as barriers, it becomes even more important to understand and transform them. Taking alternate cultural logic obliges us to explore how local norms, values, and belief systems can be deployed as an aid in the process of modernisation — in order to develop an approach that can be effectively used by traditional and religious communities. In Botswana, WHO makes a similar case for integrating positive aspects of ‘witchcraft’ in the national health system, given the therapeutic potentials of spiritual healing.</div>
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Studies on behavioral economics, psychology, sociology and anthropology have long debated the relevance of alternate cultural rationalities for dealing with development and modernisation but surprisingly this knowledge has had little impact on the development discourse. The first step in changing the way that the development sector deals with religion and beliefs is to understand that faith matters, and understanding its advantages and disadvantages should be integrated into development policies.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-15781436632930994272016-12-09T13:18:00.000-08:002016-12-09T13:18:15.403-08:00Pakistani Culture beyond the Cultural Consumerism<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Cambria, "Hoefler Text", "Liberation Serif", Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25px; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
Pakistan’s policymakers have embarked on a yet another mission to form a cultural policy for the country, which indeed is a worthy attempt in its own right. However, governments have generally preferred to work without a declared cultural policy, while they issue cultural dictates in the course of governance. Even the draconian decade of Zia’s obscurantism was without an official cultural policy. However, culture cannot be controlled through censorship or hyped up through corporate media. The radical policies and measures initiated by the Musharraf regime to liberalise public culture could not grow beyond the select projects for creation of a ‘soft image’ through the mass appeal of electronic and print media.</div>
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Given all that, it is crucially important to review national and international best practices which can guide the growth and development of Pakistani culture. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO) is a leading but lone voice, which has consistently articulated the role of culture in promotion of peace, social cohesion, cultural diversity and education for sustainable development in Pakistan as well as worldwide. However, the cultural sector in Pakistan is regulated, as almost, completely oblivious of the conventions and guidelines of the UNESCO.</div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Cambria, "Hoefler Text", "Liberation Serif", Times, "Times New Roman", serif; text-align: justify;">The social role of Pakistani Tangible Cultural Heritage (TCH) and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is constructed in terms of its potential for consumption by national and international audience and not in terms of a regeneration of cultural heritage that allows society to inherit its cultural past. The consumptive role assigned to culture has led to its relegation to the lower orders of the ministerial portfolios of governments in Pakistan. It also forms the lowest priority area of intervention for the diplomatic and the donor community in the country.</span></div>
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Moreover, the TCH and ICH is perceived in political and aesthetic terms with reference to its role in national identity formation and international branding. It is achieved, for instance, through investments in heritage conservation of select sites in Pakistan. Culture is also perceived by international donor community in terms of financial prospects and market linkages of creative industries such as musical performances, film or other popular media. The celebration of popular music within the culture industry as the preferred form of cultural expression, to be marketed worldwide at the expense of classical, literary and visual art forms – such as poetry, painting and sculpture – has been fashionably adopted by leading members of the international donor community in Pakistan.</div>
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Even the draconian decade of Zia’s obscurantism lacked an official cultural policy</div>
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Judging from the recurring patterns of national and international investments in the cultural sector of Pakistan, it is clear that the funding is rarely drawn towards the architecture beyond monumental objects such as forts, palaces and shrines. The conservation of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">havelis</em> or historic houses in sprawling urban centers or in the countryside is never a priority. Likewise, in the field of ICH, the domains of indigenous knowledge and local wisdom that enable a society to creatively pursue its intellectual traditions, worldview and values expressed through oral, performative and manuscript based knowledge are never recognised or integrated into learning and education through curriculum or mass media. Similarly, a variety of local social practices and customs, such as <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">chopal or chaunk</em> in Punjab (a common room for the members of a village community, which enabled the members of a society to interact on terms of relative equality) are never promoted in cities via urban planning, despite being a potent custom that can promote peace, social cohesion and tolerance of diverse views at the grass-root levels. The multi-lingual oral traditions and cultural expressions of Pakistan society are rarely, if at all, recorded or transmitted through mass media. Even if the oral traditions may not live up to the higher standards of literary canon or possess great aesthetic value, still they need to respected as they constitute the primary vehicles of the cultural memory of diverse groups in Pakistani society.</div>
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In conclusion, it appears that the investment in the cultural sector is not sufficient to nurture the diverse shades of Pakistani indigenous culture. Instead, it seems our cultural policy is aimed only at facilitating the assimilation of certain parts of heritage in the global cultural economy. Small wonder that ‘fusion’ is the new buzzword in Pakistani cultural industry, whereas an arbitrary synchronisation of de-contextualised musical scores from diverse cultures is celebrated as the successful outcome of cultural synthesis, promoting ‘peace and tolerance’.</div>
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It must be remembered that in the age of globalisation of cultures, the survival of a distinct cultural identity of Pakistan is at stake. The disproportionate cultural influence of Pakistan’s archrival India on Pakistani public culture points to the sources of soft power that India exercises over Pakistan. Unless policy makers attend to the risks of homogenisation of cultures, the cultural knowledge of the past – which is neither integrated through school or college education nor promoted through planned interventions by the state or NGOs – will be completely eroded. There is already a colossal loss of cultural memory and ethnic identities with each succeeding generation, with a consequent rise in religious obscurantism. We tend to know more and more about distant cultures in the world than our immediate cultural neighborhood. The cultural gaps in collective memory, perpetuated through higher education, have produced a cultural amnesia where even educated architects could only express their appreciation for historic buildings as beautiful objects, but without knowledge of the building construction methods, materials or techniques for conservation.</div>
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Pakistan truly lays a solid claim to a vast TCH spread over more than 5,000 years – sites, artifacts, customs and practices of diverse religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, and several syncretic religions and many spiritual orders. With a world of knowledge literally buried in the ground under our very feet, we have blinded ourselves to our deep cultural past. The sheer scale of Pakistan’s TCH and ICH obliges us to encourage conservation architecture in higher education as well as employ urgent steps to document the diverse voices of our living cultural past that still echo today. Pakistan’s ICH is at great risk of being lost forever and more radical steps are needed to secure it. Given Pakistan’s under-developed intellectual property regimes, its natural heritage such as botanical and herbal knowledge lies unattended and unguarded for exploitation by predatory capital.</div>
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One of the fundamental steps to be taken towards the conservation of TCH of Pakistan is a thorough review of legislation to identify the fault-lines as well as designate areas of interventions. Urgent steps are needed to reform the legislation and control of historic urban or rural properties, owned privately or by the Evacuee Trust Board or the Auqaf Department. The jurisdiction of TCH in the provincial governments after the 18th constitutional amendment needs to be addressed, so as to bring the fruits of administrative de-centralisation to the grass roots.</div>
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Pakistan’s cultural managers can draw on the resources generated by UNESCO, through decades of international experience gathered by the best of minds, rather than trying to reinvent the whole wheel of cultural policy again. What the country needs are specific steps and concrete interventions – taken across the board – and not grand narratives and master plans for social engineering.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-48644349741128045642016-12-09T13:13:00.000-08:002016-12-09T13:13:57.656-08:00What do we know about Pakistani society?<div style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #252525; font-family: Merriweather, serif; font-size: 17.9999px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 1em; padding: 0px;">
IT is a cliché that Pakistani society is being torn apart by ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian conflicts. From highbrow politicians to street vendors, the level of concern for the strife in society is matched by the depth of ignorance regarding its reasons or the cure.</div>
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Little do we realise that there is a field of knowledge called social sciences, where students are trained to understand the changing dynamics of human societies by following long-established theories, frameworks and methods. The various fields of social sciences, if applied, have a lot to offer where contemporary challenges facing Pakistan are concerned.</div>
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The changing social and economic composition of cities, population explosion, rural-urban migrations, spread of the road network and civic infrastructure to remote areas, growth of small towns, development of new technologies of cellular communications, satellite and cable television and the rise of social media, are a few of the drivers of rapid social change and transformation in society, about which we have little scientific information.</div>
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Development is taken to mean economic development in Pakistan. The social sector research by NGOs is not only limited to select fields such as poverty alleviation, health, education etc, but also guided by donor-driven policies that are strategically framed by Western academics and think tanks. Pakistani researchers are expected to fill in the details rather than pose independent research questions that might lead to different answers and unexpected policy outcomes.</div>
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What are the consequences of the shifts in the way people lived and interacted with each other? Do we know enough about our ‘traditional’ society, which is in a state of flux? Take one of the new forms of digital communication as an example. Do we know the impact on the social psychology, public communications and visual norms of modesty of the ever-increasing number of image-savvy Facebook users cutting across classes and regions? Did we realise how Mullah Fazlullah aka Mullah Radio was able to use the latest broadcast technology to muster support for his retrogressive ideologies while we hailed the spread of technology as an aide to modernisation and development?</div>
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Do we know enough about our ‘traditional’ society?</h4>
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Even during the most turbulent decades of Pakistani history, when the very survival of the democratic state was at stake, social scientists — foreign or local — were never part of any negotiations and consultations. A case in point is the Swat armed insurgency of 2002.</div>
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The people of Swat were the subject of classic ethnographies, which explored the broader issues of history, culture, class, and religion of the Pakhtuns in general and the residents of Swat in particular. Frederick Barth was the first Western anthropologist who had laid the foundation of anthropological studies of Swat with his book Swat Pathans (1951).</div>
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When the people of Swat became embroiled in a bigger battle for control of this key geopolitical region, anthropologists who could have contributed to understand the conflicts were never consulted by the state or NGOs. No effort was made to see what was happening in society that led to massive social upheavals.</div>
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Likewise, beyond the security perspective, no analysis of the deepening crisis in Balochistan is offered for public debate, whereas social scientists who have a deeper understanding of the social structure and history of Balochistan can explain why the social order has collapsed and what can be done to mitigate it.</div>
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The hegemony of English-language scholarship in Pakistan has led to academic disconnect with centuries-old, rational intellectual tradition among Muslims in India written in classical and regional languages, such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Seraiki and Balochi.</div>
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In Punjab, Bulleh Shah, the 18th-century humanist philosopher who was well-versed in Arabic and Persian but chose to write in Punjabi, offers a powerful critique of the hegemonic interest of clerics and the state. His social analysis though articulated in rhyme was grounded in profound observation and rational interpretations.</div>
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The entire history of social analysis and critique of Muslim society in India, pioneered by the rationalist critique of Syed Ahmad Khan, should have served as the primary reference for social scientists on the current ills of fundamentalism and sectarianism, if not the theological critique of Ghulam Ahmad Pervaiz, Jinnah’s counsellor on religion affairs.</div>
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Social sciences need to help people cope with the impact of rapid social change to make their research relevant and responsive to the community needs. A people-centred agenda of applied research has to take front stage in social sciences, where the challenges facing the country are not seen as only matters of internal security.</div>
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The social science research into particular issues, rather than judicial commissions, can lead to mapping based on scientific grounds. It will be a sad commentary on us — as participants of a conference in 2002 concluded — if a bureaucratic, authoritarian, insecure, modernising and dependent state like Pakistan can produce only technocratic, apolitical, tame, hyper-factual and empiricist social sciences.</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The writer is secretary general of the Council of Social Sciences Pakistan.</em></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2015</em></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-86526273765822947152011-06-27T04:46:00.000-07:002016-12-09T13:30:23.539-08:00Book Review of Pakistan: Beyond the Crisis State by Maleeha Lodhi<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-11278312797862820242011-06-27T04:35:00.001-07:002016-12-09T13:39:40.918-08:00Book Review of Bridging Partition: People's Initiatives for Peace between India and Pakistan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-47894863281850348902009-07-12T14:17:00.000-07:002009-07-14T15:19:39.668-07:00CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT: THE MISSING LINK<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Published in The News on Sunday, Political Economy, 12 July, 2009</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Culture and development are intimately linked together in an increasingly globalised world, where development or its lack, is seen both as cause and solution of domestic social and cultural problems of global proportions. The strategic deployment of development and reconstruction plans in the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, to break the fundamentalist's hold on cultural productions and regional economy, offers one of more dramatic illustrations of this relationship.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A textbook example of relationship between culture and development is the relative success of Aga Khan Rural Support Program, a non-sectarian development project in Northern Pakistan, especially in Ismaili dominated regions, attributed largely to a mutual fit between development agenda and the cultural and religious organisations.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Irrespective of the geo politics of development, common to both cases is the emphasis placed on culture as a means of human growth and empowerment and the recognition that in order to achieve sustainable development, and international peace, economic, financial and social reforms have to be addressed from a cultural perspective.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The consensus on the cultural dimensions of development in the international development sector has been slow to emerge, largely out of experience of administering development in the Third World as well as with interactions between development practitioners and academicians in the field of anthropology, economics and sociology. Central to the culture in development approach is the emphasis placed on culture as a means of human growth and empowerment and the recognition that in order to achieve a sustainable development, and international peace, economic, financial and social reforms have to be addressed from a cultural perspective.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Culture and development are linked in a number of different ways, and the connections relate both to the ends and the means of development. In the current global policy thinking, culture is not merely a means of promoting material progress but constitutes as the very basis of human development. Understood, as comprising of norms, tradition and values of a society, culture plays a critical role in economic performance and business behavior. Weberian analysis of the role of values in the emergence of capitalism is of considerable interest in the contemporary world, particularly in the light of the recent success of market economies in non-Protestant and even non-Christian societies.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">While culture is regarded as the means and instrument of development, the notion of development, following Amrata Sen, is based on substantive expansion of freedom. It is not only the growth of GNP, but the enhancement of freedom and well being of people in a broad, holistic sense to include universal, physical, mental and social growth.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Appended to this approach is the idea that fostering respect for diversity and cultural pluralism is of crucial importance in the context of global and national culture, as the rapid spread of mass culture and its hegemonic tendencies are threatening the survival of traditional values and the interests of minorities. The need for respect for all cultures is particularly urgent at a time in which the uneasy acceptance of global culture and reactions against the alienating effects of large-scale modern technologies are reflected in the fast spread of religious fundamentalism and social intolerance.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Although the connections between cultural values and economic performance have been made in cultural theory as well as development economics, it remains debatable which set of values would work under what conditions. As in case of countries like Japan, China and India with fast economic growth, the relative merits of Confucian, Buddhist and Hindu values in shaping economic behavior are being debated.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Unfortunately, we lack informed debates on mainstreaming culture in development programmes and investments in the government and the non-government sector in Pakistan. The development sector in Pakistan is fairly cognizant of the importance of culture in development planning, yet the awareness of linkages remains at a level of project intervention in select areas rather than providing an overarching framework to restructure the development discourses. Organisation like UNESCO, which have from its very inception stressed the connection between culture and development have invested only in limited range of cultural arenas such as cultural tourism in Pakistan where as much more needs to be done to make cultural factors the focal point of all strategies for development.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-84989582473967268572009-06-28T14:08:00.000-07:002009-07-14T15:20:08.955-07:00CENSUS WITHOUT CONSENSUS<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Published in The News on Sunday, Political Economy, 28th June, 2009</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The census scheduled for 2008 has been postponed. The federal government, which is responsible for census operations, cannot foot the bill and is seeking international donor support and private sector investments to fund an exercise in which 150,000 armed forces' personnel would be required to provide security to civilian census staff, especially in Balochistan and the NWFP.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This is not the first time that the government has failed to conduct on time this national data gathering exercise, which can be the only informed basis of allocating resources and rights to the citizens. The demographic profile is a key indicator to rank wealth and power of a nation and its constituent entities. Its data determines social power and political rights. That is why for many it is the hallmark of what constitutes a nation.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The fifth census scheduled for 1991 was delayed by seven years, and was conducted in 1998. It is strange that we have been devising policies and programmes in the absence of an updated demographic profile like the census since that year. Pakistan conducted its first census in 1951. Since then, four more decennial population and housing censuses have been conducted -- in 1961, 1972, 1981 and 1998 -- with frequent lapses. The failure to hold regular census points to weakening writ of the state. It also reflects division within the nation, and the contested nature of rights and resources administered on the basis of census.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Is the delayed census a tragic reminder of a divided nation, which, if required, should be united through the use of armed forces? Or is there something about the census that does not neatly translate into indicators of equitable development and sustainable growth for all the members of a nation? A bit of history will help us answer this question.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Census as a tool of state craft was originated in the Western Europe in the early nineteenth century. After the first British census was conducted on March 10, 1801, and every 10 years thereafter, the practice of decennial census became a universal norm. The ability to conduct census also represented the power of the state over the nation. In the Indian subcontinent, the British colonial census drew on the long indigenous history of numeracy and information gathering institutions. This also included the Indian caste system, which provided the British with a relatively stable scheme to classify the Indian population according to indigenous criteria. Similarly, religion also appeared to the British a natural distinction to divide the population.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The first census of Punjab province, which forms a large part of present day Pakistan, was conducted in 1855 with Richard Temple as the chief census commissioner. It divided the population on the basis of two religious categories, the Hindus and the Muslims, creating the idea of numerical strength that was to serve as the basis of political representation and communal quotas later. The first decennial census was conducted by Denzil Ibbetson, who later became the governor of Punjab, in 1883. It extended the purview of census to the enumeration and ranking of castes in Punjab. The famous colonial anthropological text, The Punjab Castes, which is still in popular demand and is widely cited as the most authoritative account of castes and tribes of the province, was based on the report of this census.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The basis of Hindu-Muslim conflict can be traced back to the beginning of census operations in India. Communal boundaries between the Hindus and the Muslims were murky at the time of the first colonial census. Overlapping cultural codes and shared histories of dwelling rendered the communal identities as fluid. Therefore, the tabulation of information on population in distinct religious categories led to a heightened sense of religious identity. The census linked the elite political representation and communal quotas in education and employment with numerical strength of religious communities. In fact, state gazetteers and the census institutionalised the religious and cultural differences in mutually exclusive categories, sowing the seeds for inter-communal violence leading to partition and fuelling intra-state communal conflicts in the region.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Even the term 'Hindu' was largely a British invention. The British colonisers used it to demarcate a community distinct from the Muslims. Sikhs, untouchables and tribals were categorised as Hindus in the first census of Punjab. In 1868, the Sikhs were re-classified as distinct from the Hindus. Hindu nationalist saw this as a blow to their numerical strength and political representation. Every act of numeration sparked controversies and mobilised communities for effective self representation in census figures.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The colonial census computation of conversion rates of Hindus to Christianity and Islam precipitated the Hindu proselytising movement Arya Samaj in Punjab. For Muslims, on the other hand, early census returns brought home the realisation that they were a numerical minority in the Indian subcontinent, thus they sought education and jobs in the government service to bolster their demographic profile. The Muslim educational movement, such as Syed Ahmad Khan's Aligarh University, was engendered by similar fears of losing out on the religio-political front.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A quick reference to the censuses in Britain since the nineteenth century reveals how colonial census was used as a tool of imperialism in India. The census in Britain remained largely a secular institution as regards the collection and presentation of data. The census exercise exhibited either disinterest in religion or extreme reluctance to explore this field. In several censuses, there was no question on religion; and wherever any question on religion was included, it was done with extreme care. Not only this, the results were published separately from the census reports. No British census in the last two centuries has asked questions on ethnicity or religion. The question on ethnicity was for the first time introduced in 1991 Census and there was pressure to include religion in the 2001 Census of the Great Britain. The American census also specifically prevents collection of data on religion.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">On the other hand, census in the colonial India had a different purpose altogether. Driven by the colonialist need to know the land and population it controlled, the census served the imperative of control and domination. In colonial census of India, the question on religion, caste and race was introduced since its beginning in the 1850s. Religion was used as a fundamental category in census tabulations and data on this was published without any restraint. It seems that the projection of cleavages within the colonial society was essential for sustaining the British rule. In fact, the British used a variety of texts, forms and methods to continue and perpetuate their rule at the cost of strained communal relationships in India.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Since a foreign and colonial government initiated both gazetteers and census, no public opinion or the representative institutions existed to limit the subjects investigated in the two documents. A comparative view of census enables us to see how modern census has played a different role in the social and political life of people in Britain and its colonies. The policies, procedures and institutions in Pakistan are very much framed along the lines marked by colonial census in the British India.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">No attempt has ever been made to revisit the colonial categories and frame new one to unite, rather than divide, the society. From seats in the parliament to the allocation of jobs in government service, to the provision of education, health and civic services, all national resources are tied with numerical strength, irrespective of the needs of the marginalised segments of society. Every single census in Pakistan was conducted amid the storms of protests from the disenfranchised ethnic and religious groups, but without eliciting any changes in the census schedule. As a result, the struggle for power among various social and religious groups in the society draws on the imbalance between census figures and the situation on the ground.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Although the institutions gathering information on various aspects of population have diversified, along with the number of subjects under tabulation, the fundamental postulates of modern census as a measure of a nation's wealth and ranking have not changed. The politicisation of census in Pakistan has jeopardised the national planning process, because without reliable census figures, macroeconomic management is bound to fail and so is the electoral process based on doctored figures. The mirage of electoral democracy that holds the country together is in jeopardy, if the plans for decennial census are abandoned again. A fraction of media hype and public attention that is routinely showered on electoral process will relocate the issue of census and place it at the heart of the debate on national sovereignty and democratic struggle, to where it must belong.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-39980127507532042842009-02-14T13:52:00.000-08:002009-07-14T16:11:39.079-07:00COMMUNICATION: IN WORDS AND IMAGES<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 16px; font-family:'Lucida Grande';font-size:12px;"><p style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Published in The News on Sunday, March, 2009</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:16px;"></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Every art exhibition, which goes up in the city, leads to an afresh round of skirmishes between artists and critics. Much of it is fueled by the disagreement over how does art communicate. Some critics expect art to communicate to us </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">instantly</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and directly, in a manner an essay or a newspaper article does. They assume it to be an act of communication comparable to an act of speech or writing. These expectation and assumptions reflect a conflation of two communication activities, which are anything but different. The point of the article is to identify the different nature of communication process at work: in words and in images. </span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lets take written/verbal communication first.</span></span></span></span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></span></span><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Every non-visual communication act, be it verbal or non-verbal, involves a </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">medium</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">through which it carries a </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">message</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and delivers it to a</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">receiver</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">time</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">space. </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">An act of writing or speech contains an argument. An argument carries a </span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">message</span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">and delivers it to a </span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">receiver</span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> in a certain amount of </span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">time</span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, through the </span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">medium</span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> of writing or speech. (A dense argument may take more time to deliver). Two things should happen, if a message is to be delivered effectively. The message should lose its utility once it has reached the receiver (otherwise it may involve the risk of non-communication). Second, different receivers should get the same message, if a proper communication is to occur. </span></span></span></span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></span><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The present article, for instance, is an act of communication. It contains an argument (a message), expressed through writing (a medium) to be delivered to the readers (receiver) in a certain amount of time. Ideally speaking, in order for an effective communication to take place, the argument should be understood by all readers equally well, without leaving any room for conflicting interpretation. Moreover, once it has reached to the readers, this argument should run out its utility and may lead to another argument or counter argument. This is how we communication through words in daily lives.</span></span></span></span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">An essential feature of an effective verbal or written communication is linearity. Ideally, a speech or writing act is linear and unfold over time in a straight line. It starts from a point A and moves along a unilinear progression (of ideas and concepts) to conclude at a point Z in time. It is because of the linear nature of intellectual activity that even an entire book of 1000 pages can be described in a series of schematic statements.</span></span></span></span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></span><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The structure and character of written or speech communication act can now be contrasted with art or visual communication. </span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The prevailing confusion abou</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">t what the art objects says</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> lies precisely in the fact that it is not comparable to a speech or written act of communication. If we try to understand or read a work of art as an act of writing containing a specific message, we will end up in frustration. The reason lies less the fact that aesthetic communication leaves the sphere of rational discourse and enters into the realm of untheorised experience and feelings. The fabric of art is the province of subjective feelings, which lends itself to formulation through images.</span></span></span></span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></span></span><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The art or aesthetic communication is an on-going process. It does not start or stop at definite points. It neither contains an </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">essential</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">message intended by the artist, to be communicated to the spectator nor the message will be finished once the communication act is over. The great works of art never finish to communicate to the viewer. Theoretically speaking, a masterpiece should let you discover new meanings and message, every time you look at it. It is mainly because of the open-ended nature of the aesthetic communication that generation after generations can live off the aesthetic experiences of great works of arts, without losing their capacity to generate new messages. </span></span></span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Given these contrasting features of aesthetic communication and non-aesthetic communication, one can begin to understand the conflicting views held by artists and critics. The former tends to see their work, as a part of on-going aesthetic experience and later see it as a product of finished intellectual message. A ’structure of intelligent dialogue’ between critic and artist, can only be established, if the fundamental differences between the two communication acts are placed in their respective contexts. Other social explanations, including curbs on critical thinking in our society, of course, reinforce and split this divide further.</span></span></span></span></span></span></p></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-42598943497362080702008-11-30T06:12:00.000-08:002009-09-18T06:18:16.944-07:00The Idea of Civil Society: Reviewing Gellner<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: Times; "><b><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:130%;"><p align="CENTER">Ideological</p><p align="CENTER">pluralism</p></span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><p align="JUSTIFY">Conditions of</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Liberty:<img border="0" src="http://jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2008-weekly/nos-30-11-2008/images/lit2a1.jpg" align="right" width="131" height="200" /></p><p align="JUSTIFY">Civil Society</p><p align="JUSTIFY">and its Rivals</p><p align="JUSTIFY">By Ernest Gellner</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Published by Hamish Hamilton, 1994</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Republished by Penguin Books, 1996</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Pages: 225</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Price:$86.98</p><p align="JUSTIFY"> </p><i><p align="CENTER">By Nadeem Omar Tarar</p></i><p align="JUSTIFY"> </p><p align="JUSTIFY">Ernest Gellner, who died on 5 November 1995, was one of the great polymaths of the century. Many of his twenty books were concerned with philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Yet, at the core of his work was an historical question. In the backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gellner wrote essays on the origins of civil society which later provided substance for his book Conditions of Liberty which synthesised and extended the thought of a lifetime. In the wake of judicial crisis in the country, a large scale mobilisation of diverse groups across society have taken place, providing a renewed currency and valency to the term 'civil society' in Pakistan. Gellner's works can help initiate the debate on the role of civil society in the country.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Civil society is understood as a set of diverse, non-governmental institutions which are strong enough to counterbalance the state. Without preventing the state from fulfilling its role of peace-keeping and arbitration between major interests, the civil society can, nevertheless, prevent it from dominating and atomising the rest of the society. Underlying the concept of civil society is the notion of institutional and ideological pluralism that prevents the monopoly of power and counterbalances those central institutions which, through necessity might, otherwise acquire such monopoly.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">The phrase civil society was used in the philosophies of Locke and Hegel that kept the philosophers busy for some time to come. But the recent emergence of the idea of civil society as a shining emblem for a democratic society, is linked with the developments in the recent political history of the world. The political developments in Eastern Europe, as a result of disintegration of the former USSR, led to an upsurge in the idea of civil society which was found lacking in those societies. It can also be seen, as philosopher-sociologist Ernst Gellner argues, as a backlash to the suppression of ideal and practices of civil society by Marxist regimes in USSR and elsewhere. They firmly declared their central intuition that civil society is a fraud: being handmaiden to the dominating state, it is a facade to hide its oppression. The support for civil society is a bid to hide the complicity of civil society with state, which should go. The withering away of state will pave the way, it was argued, for a just social and moral order, that can take care of itself, without requiring a state or additional institutions to counter balance the central agency. Therefore, the active suppression of the idea of civil society by Marxist regimes and their consequent failure to live up to their own socialist vision, led to the renewed interests in the idea and the yearning for the creation of civil society.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">The growing expectation of the people to build up a civil society is not restricted to communist failure alone. In South Asia, it has its own independent roots. Among others, the most important is the hegemonic, over expanded state structures, that has started to crumble under its own weight, creating massive corruption and causing severe problems in the governance of the South Asian countries. The yearning for civil society in former Marxist countries and elsewhere in Asia makes one significant point. That is to say, civil society is not something that is given, it has to be groomed. It's not something that can be cherished as an idea and then imposed on a society by legal frameworks or governmental regulations. It is beyond the reach of an individual efforts or the well wishes of a group. Ernest Gellner outlines the institutional preconditions for the growth of civil society through a historical study of three societies namely Muslim, Marxist and Capitalist west.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Gellner analyses the emergence of distinct cultural forms, over the centuries in the aforementioned diverse societies. He is careful to distinguish between the forms of liberties. He doesn't generalise the conditions of civil society as a token of universal human condition.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Marxism was the first secular belief system to become a world religion, as well as a state ideology. It instituted a social and moral order with its own socio-metaphysics. It was not only moral, but also promised freedom from economic inequality and political oppression. Marxism promised a total salvation, not for an individual but to the total humanity which is reflected in its failure to create life cycles rituals in USSR. Gellner argues: "the great weakness of Marxism may not be so much its formal elimination of the transcendent from religion, but its over-sacralization of the immanent."</p><p align="JUSTIFY">The sacralization of social and economic life leaves out the option of retreating into profanity in the times of diminished zeal. With the sacralization of work, the failure in economy is likely to diminish the faith on the sacred. By a strong contrast, the success or the failure of economic activity (since its neutral), doesn't contaminate or effect the faith in Islam. The religious Umma or community of believers, was able to retain its control over its followers, by keeping up the distinction between sacred and profane and thereby, separating economic from religious. Whereas in Marxist societies, with the sacralization of economy and society, the distinction between sacred and profane was collapsed. As a result political economic and ideological hierarchies were united into a single pyramid of bureaucracy. This not only effected the economic performance, but also proved catastrophic for the social soul.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">"When the nomenklatura killed each other and accompanied the murderous rampage with blatantly mendacious political theatre, belief survived; but when the nomenklatura switched from shooting to bribing each other, faith evaporated." This observation has serious implication for the civil society. Gellner seems to be asserting that for Marxist regimes, civil society was considered a fraud, not only because of its assumed complicity with state but also due to sacralization of social and economic life. As a result no popular will, expressed through civil society, could be considered legitimate. In the same vein, but due to opposite reasons, in Islamic societies, state was considered as the implementer but not the creator of divine law. As long as it doesn't violate it, the need for an additional institution, expressing the popular will, and holding state accountable for other than divine will, was not considered legitimate. In both cases, there are no grounds for the existence of civil society.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">According to Gellner, civil society cannot be imposed from above. Rather, it takes its roots with the gradual evolution of institutional preconditions like the centralisation of authority for maintaining political order and decentralised economic and ideological control. For instance, in Europe, the French centralising monarchy, with its respect for property, prepared grounds for the civil society which modern democracy completed.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Economic decentralism is also considered essential precondition of civil society mainly because of two reasons. In an industrial society, it is not possible for sub units (like a county) to claim the loyalties of all of its members. The possibility of pluralism of politically autonomous, coercive units is rather too remote [unlike in a segmentary society composed of clans, baradaris]. Liberty, on the other hand, as a condition of balance of power of autonomous units, demands such pluralist arrangement. Since the pluralistic structure can not be political, therefore, it has to be economic. Secondly, the existence of genuinely independent productive and property controlling units is also necessary for the economic efficiency and growth.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">In this economic pluralist arrangement, however, Gellner doesn't discard the role of state. In contrast, he argues that modern technological innovations and the welfare system can not be managed alone by market, through the enlightened self interests of the individuals. It requires a loose state control. The assigned role of state becomes all the more necessary, when the "pure-market-cum-minimalist-<wbr>state" model cannot be relied upon. Viewing large scale and irreversible consequences of modern technological innovations on social order, the production process cannot be left in the 'invisible hand' of forces of market. There must be a regulatory body that monitors and effectively checks the productive units without depriving them of their autonomy. In this loose state-economy arrangements, it will be economic growth and ideological pluralism that balances the centralising trends of state. Ideological pluralism or "double think" is also necessary, because these are the cognitive mechanism underlying the technological-economic growth of societies.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">One of the adverse consequence of ideological and economic centralism, observable in Marxist societies, is the sacralization of social order. Communist system was a moral order where faith and social order was fused, but in a civil society it is reversed. The circle between faith, power and society is broken up. In a civil society, social order is not sacralized. With the desacralization of social order, the social cooperation, loyalty and solidarity do not require a shared faith, instead they require a shared doubt. In contrast to Durkhemian sociology, where man has a organic relationship with society marked by religion and ritual, Gellner makes a strong case for social modularity of modern man, as a essential precondition for civil society. Social modularity makes people capable of combing effective innovations and institutions without these being stranded. The formation of specific purpose, ad-hoc and limited organisation signifies a shift from status to contract form of social relationships. The transition from a moral order to a functional, pragmatic compromise is aided by economic prosperity and growth. Increase in economic growth facilities this delicate balance of power between desacralized, autonomous, economic units, under lose political control and keeps this strategic balance of forces in play, ensuring civil liberties in modern societies.</p></span></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-88827473207041939092008-05-14T08:38:00.000-07:002009-09-18T08:44:17.201-07:00The F.E. Choudhry Gallery: A Story of Normalcy, or of Displacement?<div class="head" style="margin-top: 10px; "><h1 style="text-align: center; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px; "><a href="http://pakistaniat.com/category/nadeem-omar/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(176, 43, 44); ">Nadeem Omar Tarar</a></span><br /></h1><h1 style="text-align: center; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 23px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><h1 style="text-align: center; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; ">Posted at All Things Pakistan.</span></h1><h1 style="text-align: center; font-size: 1.4em; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">http://pakistaniat.com/2008/05/14/fe-chaudhry-flood-1950-pakistan/</span></h1></span></span></h1></div><div class="post" style="line-height: 1.5em; font-size: 98%; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 5px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 5px; margin-bottom: 25px; "><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; ">This photographs from <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/2008/04/14/fe-choudhry-chaudhry/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(176, 43, 44); ">F.E. Chaudhry</a> depicts <em>Chacha</em>’s ability to turn a news story into a human story.<br /></p><p style="text-align: center; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://pakistaniat.com/?s=%22The+F.E.+Choudhry+Gallery%3A%22" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(176, 43, 44); "><img src="http://pakistaniat.com/images/FEC/FE-Chaudhry-01.jpg" alt="1951 1950 floods in Pakistan" title="1951 1950 floods in Pakistan" width="460" style="padding-top: 2px; padding-right: 2px; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 2px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 3px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 3px; border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-right-style: solid; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(0, 51, 0); border-right-color: rgb(0, 51, 0); border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 51, 0); border-left-color: rgb(0, 51, 0); " /></a></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; ">A narrative photograph of the <strong>Punjabi victims of the 1950 flood</strong>in the wake of which nearly three thousands perished. Their villages and homes submerged, a family has taken <strong>refuge in a railway bogey</strong>, which serves as a kitchen as well as shelter from the blistering heat.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; ">Each individual in the picture, though part of a single family with elderly heads of household and their children, is lost in his or her own personal world. With little interaction among them, they appear to be privately counting and mourning their losses.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; ">The young man while preparing food on the railway wagon apprehensively looks at the sky as if searching for the clouds that drowned their village and their lives. Except for the elderly woman who looks into the camera, the other younger women shield themselves from the prying eyes of the cameraman.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 0px; ">The story telling quality of the photograph lies precisely in the fact that each individual character in the photograph is revealing his or her own story without compromising on the overall composition or the melancholic effect of the image.</p></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-55624470406333938472008-05-04T06:29:00.000-07:002016-12-12T05:28:18.295-08:00 F.E. Choudhry Gallery: Ba Adab, Ba Mulahiza<h3>
<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;">This set of photographs from <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/2008/04/14/fe-choudhry-chaudhry/" style="color: #b02b2c; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">F.E. Chaudhry</a> depict the news journalist side of <em>Chacha</em>’s portfolio.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;"> </span><span style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;">In February 1961, </span><strong style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;">Queen Elizabeth II</strong><span style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;">, toured India, Iran, Nepal and Pakistan on her first ever tour of countries outside Europe. She arrived in Pakistan on 11th February, and was received at the airport by Govenor, </span><strong style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;">Nawab Kalabagh Khan</strong><span style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;">. As a staff reporter of </span><em style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;">The Pakistan Times</em><span style="line-height: 23px; text-align: center;">, F E Chaudhry covered her entire visit, but only two pictures are presented here for the reader's pleasure with brief commentary.</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdVtQokmUr2U9wRyKnjxfvoYZPq0TFHi8yGtzhQUHSldYG45RxdtpzGOr_Caw-VTSKPUDEXI1MBJsKHyIx3o89iVNcGgkswSNhrArPLpQpfglOb5z8clsw89uWFeQVCgP9Gw7kgiWehiuc/s1600/At+the+Airport.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdVtQokmUr2U9wRyKnjxfvoYZPq0TFHi8yGtzhQUHSldYG45RxdtpzGOr_Caw-VTSKPUDEXI1MBJsKHyIx3o89iVNcGgkswSNhrArPLpQpfglOb5z8clsw89uWFeQVCgP9Gw7kgiWehiuc/s400/At+the+Airport.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pakistani Notables greeting the Queen</td></tr>
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<span style="line-height: 23px;">In the first picture, taken at the Lahore airport, where out of hundreds who gathered to cheer the Queen, only a select group of high profile politicians and bureaucrats are being introduced to the Queen. </span></h3>
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<span style="line-height: 23px;">Bowing the head by gentleman in the suit while shaking hands with the Queen is only contrasted by the forced head bowing of two durbans holding spears at the entrance while clasping their hands in submission in the second picture, as Queen oblivious to their menial presence, is being escorted by the leading ladies to the Lahore Fort.</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXzHF_VEUjB4btSL74cBR8EYZ4rD2ras1EsBj3ISLtwGp3pPKYswpmsd7Tn8fF03hKYvYdWUWFqle2gQuNX1tmPCkRt4Nq94RsuCi99Jv0iSWqnd54RzF99p5YdTOE7gqqf_KKCqPn-yrb/s1600/Snapshot+2008-04-19+09-06-43.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXzHF_VEUjB4btSL74cBR8EYZ4rD2ras1EsBj3ISLtwGp3pPKYswpmsd7Tn8fF03hKYvYdWUWFqle2gQuNX1tmPCkRt4Nq94RsuCi99Jv0iSWqnd54RzF99p5YdTOE7gqqf_KKCqPn-yrb/s400/Snapshot+2008-04-19+09-06-43.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Queen's visit to Lahore Fort</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;">If the first picture projects an image of a modern, progressive nation, capable of hosting international dignitaries, the second picture deliberately re-creates a royal Indian past with the staged presence of <em>durbans</em> in Mughal costumes in a backdrop of the Lahore's medieval fort built by the mighty Mughals, </span><span style="line-height: 23px;">however, both joined by their acceptance of Western cultural and political domination revealed in the servile posturing of noted figures that frame the pictures and our history.</span></h3>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-80095576043980097502008-04-28T08:52:00.000-07:002013-03-16T15:48:17.545-07:00F E Chaudhry Gallery: Personal Hygiene<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB1AwZgbk7bcMT5eoJBYnktG7_0Xn2azwSnqcPskYI6FNbv2deZC5GsudtH79wP0igweIDYINlPjZXenqIR798MQ9aEtOd5CXR7LpNdo6jVCbMXmjK6Z-My3YS6gjPs-VZI-rQcDmS8wqd/s1600/women+picking+head.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB1AwZgbk7bcMT5eoJBYnktG7_0Xn2azwSnqcPskYI6FNbv2deZC5GsudtH79wP0igweIDYINlPjZXenqIR798MQ9aEtOd5CXR7LpNdo6jVCbMXmjK6Z-My3YS6gjPs-VZI-rQcDmS8wqd/s400/women+picking+head.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Dr <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/category/nadeem-omar/" style="color: #b02b2c; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Nadeem Omar Tarar</a></div>
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In this, the first in our series of photographs from <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/2008/04/14/fe-choudhry-chaudhry/" style="color: #b02b2c; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">the F.E. Chaudhry Collection</a>, we want to feature this remarkable photograph taken on a Lahore street-side, probably in the 1950s.</div>
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A group of four young women unabashedly sitting in a row on a road side in Lahore, picking each other’s heads for lice and so very focussed on the task at hand that they are oblivious to the passersby. The children (probably their own) squatting around and hiding in their laps, captures an age old family ritual that is no longer to be seen, even in the private, lost forever to the glamorous new world of branded soaps and shampoos.</div>
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The photograph shows F. E. Choudhry’s penchant for novel sights. The public performance of personal hygiene was not an uncommon sight, even amongst the more affluent. But usually not so for picking lice. Although it was a common practice for women (sometimes men too!) to pick head lice for each other, especially in summer, when head lice breed in great number, it was usually done in the privacy of home. This is clearly an example of poverty forcing people to “live” in the public space and conduct what would otherwise be private acts, in public. This, as we shall later see, was a recurrent theme in F.E. Choudhry’s portfolio.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-63293531846703851672008-04-27T08:47:00.000-07:002013-03-16T15:42:48.204-07:00F E Chaudhry Gallery: Women at Work<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"></span><br />
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<strong>Dr <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/category/nadeem-omar/" style="color: #b02b2c; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Nadeem Omar Tarar</a></strong></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7IqPRDFJ6f-aIh_vEq9tJXKKBGEKAccXdsQx7uCJpRJE-yjxUYv9X9UMI0-6q8Hv1Ab0KAmZBywumyuFZTQ1tXGEj2WglcG5VqkzUQJBde8cGdIeqmQieKw4Lbo9ApsTfMj0xvgq5XloC/s1600/Cycle+Rikshaw-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7IqPRDFJ6f-aIh_vEq9tJXKKBGEKAccXdsQx7uCJpRJE-yjxUYv9X9UMI0-6q8Hv1Ab0KAmZBywumyuFZTQ1tXGEj2WglcG5VqkzUQJBde8cGdIeqmQieKw4Lbo9ApsTfMj0xvgq5XloC/s400/Cycle+Rikshaw-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Much like the <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/?s=%22The+F.E.+Choudhry+Gallery%3A%22" style="color: #b02b2c; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">last photograph</a> in our series on <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/2008/04/14/fe-choudhry-chaudhry/" style="color: #b02b2c; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">the F.E. Chaudhry Collection</a>, this photograph is also about women at work. But in a different way.</div>
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This photograph, taken in Lahore probably in the 1960s, brings to light many Pakistani realities; some of which have changed, and some not.</div>
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Showing an elderly woman hauling a cycle rickshaw, boarded by a family of four, the photograph can be seen as the inhuman plight of an old women left to fend for herself. At the same time, it can speak for struggle of working women who can take to occupations generally associated with masculine strength, when the need arises, rather than being confined to domestic spaces to suffer in misery or beg on the streets.</div>
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The photograph also presents a forgotten image of Pakistani society, when it was not altogether uncommon for even working class women to ride or drive on the road. Contrary to the present, when its almost a taboo for women to ride a bicycle or motorcycle, a working class vehicle, forcing them to ride behind their men, this photograph clearly refutes the impression that our society in the past was less susceptible to gender equality. It makes one wonder how we came to lock ourselves in patriarchal prison, pushing half of our population off the public sphere.</div>
</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-35334713693932053002006-07-12T14:04:00.000-07:002009-07-14T15:22:07.632-07:00NORMS AND FORMS OF DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;font-size:12px;"><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'times new roman';font-size:16px;"></span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="text-align: center;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Published in Himal Southasia on December, 2006</span></span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Pakistani intelligentsia is used to bemoaning, in addition to the overdeveloped state structure, the disease of authoritarianism that threatens the future of democracy in Pakistan. This disease is nurtured, it is said, by a blend of retrogressive social values, which encourage submission to patriarchy and kill an individual’s questioning spirit. Most importantly, it is argued that an essential structure of democratic norms, having evolved in the West through a long process of conflict between bourgeois and feudal elements, has not established itself in Pakistani culture. Going by the prevailing arguments, there are cultural prerequisites to democracy as a system of governance, and the absence of a particular moral and social fibre in the society inhibits the growth of democratic practice in Pakistan.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This argument of organic incompatibility and retrogressive cultural values assumes a certain democratic ideal with which political situations can be compared – an ideal that is both a theoretical and a historical fiction. Such an argument brings Western and non-Western societies into a parallel that is unwarranted and simplistic, given the vast amount of historical and cultural differences between and within the two. In this hypothesis, democracy is granted a fixed historical origin. Instead of viewing culture as a process of becoming, the argument looks for prerequisites, as if it were not the democratic process but rather the culture without democracy that gives rise to democracy. Instead of studying the shaping influence of historical experience, this argument sticks to the emblems of origins, and pins the failure of democracy on cultural values. It omits the local brand of democracy by committing itself to the professional humanist habits of seeing only evolution along Western historical lines as true evolution, and of interpreting non-Western societies by their placement along such an imagined timeline. In other words, by staring too much at ‘History’, the Pakistani intelligentsia loses sight of its country’s own multiple, discrepant histories.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The argument of Pakistan’s incompatibility with democracy testifies to the claims of British colonial historiography: that democracy was bestowed on India through colonialism. It supports the idea that it is thus an alien concept, one that runs only through the institutions of power that were put in place to colonise the native population. No doubt there is an element of historical credence to this point, but in the heat of argument we often forget that the grand narratives of democracy and enlightenment – as well as their institutional practices – mobilised people in the colonised world to rise up and throw off the yoke of imperial subjection. Aijaz Ahmad, a postcolonial critic and historian, has argued that the historical adequacy of such things as democracy and nationhood should not be looked for by referring to their origins in Europe; rather, this needs to be established through reference to the practices of political subjects within a geo-political space.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The historically adequate referent for democracy exists in pre- and postcolonial India in the shape of the anti- colonial struggle. Internally this process was far more democratic than was the colonial state, and it mobilised some 20 million peasant households through the Quit India Movement. In a similar vein, various sub-national resistances against the internal colonialism of the nation state in Pakistan – such as those of Bengali, Sindhi, Pakhtun and Kashmiri nationalism, along with broad-based peasant and labour movements – are testimony to the fact that democracy is not the privilege of a few cultures, nor is it tied to a string of liberal cultural values. However, the sad fact is that official historians of state nationalism excised crucial chapters from the pages of subcontinental and Pakistani history: those of the unleashing of a democratic process by the anti-colonial struggle. They did so by splitting the struggle along communal and separatist lines, thus creating part of a story that puts the onus of responsibility for extended military dictatorships directly on the shoulders of the masses themselves.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Furthermore, the position that attributes the failure of democracy to certain archetypal features of Pakistani culture, such as family institutions and baradai networks, echoes the views of modernisation theorists who attribute underdevelopment to the internal backwardness of third-world societies rather than to historical and global circumstances. Such arguments, which emerge through the educated prisms of our intellectual elite, resonate with the paternalist arrogance of great fiction writers such as Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, who, by insisting that the Indian reality required (indeed, beseeched) British tutelage more or less indefinitely, ultimately forecast the untenability of their own theories of organic backwardness. Though the Pakistani state may give its citizens democracy more in breach than in observance, it is worth recalling that nowhere in Europe or North America is adult franchise implemented with such low levels of literacy and material well-being as there are in Southasia. And nowhere in the West did women achieve the right to vote in the founding moments of electoral democracy, as happened in post-Independence India and Pakistan.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">These observations are not intended to privilege feudal residues, patriarchy and gender oppression, or the presumed ills of social structure. Nor are they meant to play down the corrupting influences of martial law on Pakistan’s fractured political process. Nevertheless, there is a need to register unease with the argument that ties democracy to a handful of Western liberal values. Democracy as a political practice must be read in the active struggle of political subjects in their political space. The institutional values of democracy should be separated from democracy as a set of cultural practices. When it comes to cultural practice, it is the active political struggle of a subject that can adduce a historically adequate referent for democracy, and not a squabble over the question of origins and endings.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">However, the forms of democratic norms are bound to vary in different cultural spaces. It is in large part the colonial engineering of Pakistani society – which fostered a certain evolution of the social structure of the colonised – that is responsible for the fact that it is not individual ethos, but rather ethnic, religious and kin networks that will continue to provide the support for the electoral process. Those who think that democracy can only work where there is a pervasive philosophy of ‘one man, one vote’ – the individual existing free of kinship networks – are searching for an impossible ideal. If ‘clientelism’ (the generally exploitative relationship between a powerful ‘patron’ and a weaker ‘client’) of one sort or another pervades Pakistani society, then the point is not to disown customary practices by imagining a monolithic definition of feudalism, or to castigate them in a barrage of moral rhetoric. The task is to understand the sociological significance of the patron-client relationship, which provides an important nexus of electoral politics in Pakistan and elsewhere in Southasia.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">British anthropologist Ernest Gellner once called politics based on clientelism “government-by-network”. In this formation, formal institutional arrangements matter far less than do the informal connections of mutual trust – those based on past personal services, or on exchanges of protection from above for support from below. Pakistani society is ruled by networks, quasi-tribes, alliances forged on the basis of kin, services exchanged, groups of common regional and ethnic origins, and common institutional experiences. But even in this last case, the most important connections largely find their basis in personal trust, rather than in formal relations in a defined bureaucratic structure.</span></p><p align="justify" class="texts" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In our passionate yearning for democracy, it is important not to disavow what is often hastily dismissed as ‘feudal residue’. Rather, we need to understand how this structure has been carefully put in place through colonial governance, and how it works in the postcolonial state. Radical research into the various forms and norms of local democracies is what is needed to provide an understanding of a local democratic order. It should not be forgotten that if Pakistani society is ever to reform itself, it has to do so on the bedrock and by the terms of its own local cultural ideals and aspirations. Democracy cannot be thought of as something borrowed from the outside, or as something credited to its pristine ideals.</span></p><p></p></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-31301970372370915742006-07-08T14:39:00.000-07:002009-07-14T14:50:54.648-07:00BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: ARCHIVES AND ARCHIVING IN PAKISTAN<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Published in The News, August, 2006</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Archives are the repositories of official and public knowledge. For the historians, scholars, and journalist archives provide the primary sources of information to write about the past. The scale of conservation and level of access to the sources of primary information are two of the fundamental conditions for the original research in social sciences as well as investigative reporting and can be read as the indicators of the state of social sciences research in Pakistan.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">National Archives of Pakistan, Islamabad is the central organisation responsible for the collection, preservation and holding of all official records of the state of Pakistan. It claims to contain the official records of the government, all official publications, newspapers, periodicals, press clippings on selective subjects, T.V and radio news bulletins, rare books, manuscripts, oral archives, microfilm holdings and private collections. However, the official rule that ministries and divisions should send all their records to the Archives for permanent preservation is observed more in breach. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Despite the fact that constitution of Pakistan recognises the access to public information, various laws on the statutory books, such as Official Secret Act of 1923, promote the culture of secrecy, where by breach of loosely defined ‘official information’ is construed as criminal offence. Moreover, the military records have been kept separate from the records of civil administration and public access to those records such as PAF record office is rather limited. The international rule that official records of the state administration should be made public after a span of 30 years, though adhered to, is never strictly followed in the country. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Besides its collection, the National Archives maintains an active repair and conservation unit. Despite limited resources, it is the only organisation officially responsible for the training of the archives staff in the country. However, starting in as late as 1975 the number of training courses have been few and participant restricted to the key state departments. The training in conservation and restoration of archival material of private individuals or non-government organisations and public bodies remains outside the purview of the National Archives. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Visit to Archives should not be for the sole purpose of writing, lecturing or research. The pleasures of looking at old manuscripts, reading about forgotten families of the note and for the general pleasure of learning about the past are sufficient reasons for visiting an archive. However, it is an irony that provincial archives in Lahore, kept at the Anarkali tomb, are located in the civil secretariat, where access to the secretariat itself is scheduled to deter as many visitors as possible in a day. Even the interested scholars, leave aside the casual reader or observer have to face long hours of waiting before they could get to consult the archives. The facilities for photocopying are sometimes, denied even to seasoned scholars, on the humble pleas of precarious nature of archival material. Various categories of public records are randomly placed as classified documents, thereby depriving the scholars from an important source for writing the history of the region.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">It has been rumoured that students and scholars from British and American universities working on the colonial Punjab prefer to go to Indian Punjab given the difficulties faced in accessing information from the Punjab Archives, Lahore. There seems to be some credence to it, given the disproportionate references to the pre-partition Pakistani Punjab in the mounting bibliography of Punjab Studies, compiled by a British historian Ian Talbot in 2000. Much damaged seems to have been done in terms of adequate representation of the historical experience of the region in colonial and postcolonial period in the South Asian history. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">As an evidence of the past, which is textual, visual and oral, the archives form a part of collective social memory and is constrained or enabled by the discourse on national cultural heritage, which is inextricably linked with the time of the nation. It is a landmark on the national calendar, times check on the growth of a nation. The notion of national cultural heritage imposes an economy of violence on the imagination, exploration and conservation of the past. One dimensional view of the past, build on the singularity of the idea of an imagined community, defined by the exclusive parameters of the monotheistic religion, is what that is considered useful for the social reproduction and consumption by the state. I have used the word violence instructively. Any attempts to transcend the borders of national imagination bring the wrath of the nation state. Even in the days of much hyped Pakistan India peace, the themes of ‘common cultural heritage of pre-partition Punjab’ are strategically deployed by the two states. An unrestrained communication between regions poses a threat to the integrity of national body.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">As a signpost to the ideological control over the definition of what constitutes Pakistani culture and deserves to be conserved as the ‘national’ heritage, the official website of the Government of Pakistan under the title ‘Cultural Heritage of Pakistan’ cites the evidence of archaeological remains of 14 million years old fossil, identified as ‘Suvapithecus Pakinnisis’ , to produce a link between ancient civilisation and national culture as well as providing ancestral roots to the historical genealogy of an imagined community. The singularity of meaning over objects to create national heritage is imposed through a bizarre periodization of history, emphasizing the centrality of religion: ‘So rich and diversified is this heritage that Pakistani nation can be proud of its glorious past, be Islamic, Post-Islamic and Pre-Islamic as far as pre-historic times’.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Therefore the conservation and maintenance of the archives in Pakistan, is indicator of a set of priorities, which may not overlap with the order of preference of various social groups in a society. The selective indifference of the Pakistani state towards private archives is also graphically illustrated by the fact that Quaid-a-Azam papers forms one of the largest and perhaps only part of private collection of National Archives to date.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Given the narrow concerns of the state managed archives, and restricted access to public records, the records of social and political groups in Pakistan becomes critical to the writing of alternate histories that seeks to challenge the state authorised history. As Ahmad Saleem, who has been dubbed as the ex-officio keeper of citizen’s records, largely through his personal efforts for saving private archives, has illustrated the loss of records of leading political parties and their leaders, largely through confiscation or its threat by the state. All those records of events and activities that sought to challenge the political orthodoxy of the state were scraped. Each successive government vandalised the records of the political parties, sitting in opposition, thereby leading to serious breaches in the historical reconstruction of the political and social history of the country. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Unlike in most of western world and in Asian countries like India, the conservation of archives and ready access to scholars has been high on the state agenda. In recent years, in collaboration with thriving IT industry, Indian institutions has been able to keep up their presence on the cyber space and cater to much wider international audience by building interactive websites. In contrast, the national and provincial archives in Pakistan do not, in principal, aim to advertise their collections; rather they tend to restrict them to most die-hard visitors and scholars! Lack of adequate funds and lack of prospects for professional growth adversely affect the working of archives in Pakistan. In the era of privatisation of public services, it is reasonable to expect that present government will bring state archives, within the mandate of private public partnership. With prominent members of civil society on the Board of Governors, along with representatives of the state, who could raise funds from the private sector, the present crisis in the conservation and access to information can be addressed. <br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-61656837799740952902005-07-14T13:40:00.000-07:002009-07-14T14:55:58.040-07:00POLITICS OF CONFLICT: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEW<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:'Lucida Grande';font-size:12px;"><h3 id="post-11" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.3em; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); text-decoration: none; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 30px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br /></h3><div class="entry" style="line-height: 1.4em; "><div class="snap_preview"><p>“Strife is the mother of all things,” said Heraclitus, a 5th century Greek philosopher. Every society has developed mechanisms for negotiating with strife, conflicts and disputes because its quality, frequency and intensity profoundly affects the lives of people in any society. Conflicts cannot be completely avoided, however, they can be limited. One way of limiting social conflicts is to understand them in their historical context.</p><p>Until 18th Century, Indian societies were largely tribal and agricultural. The structure of economy was hereditary, ascriptive and non-competitive. A hierarchical order of caste and baradari groups governed the societies, which were also responsible for maintaining social order and managing conflicts. Conflicts were negotiated through long established customs and traditions, rather than through general and impersonal laws.</p><p>All this changed under the British rule in India, which brought the legal cannons of western provenance, to create a new order of things in Indian societies. An attempt (albeit a failed one) was made to create a new social order, which can transform India into a proto-type of an industrial society. Backed up by the colonial bureaucracy and impersonal laws and constitution, the new social order eroded the legitimacy of customs and traditions, along with the power of social groups, which regulated the older social order. They also challenged the traditional ordering devices of caste and Jatis, thereby creating new set of opportunities and new types of social groups, claiming a share in resources, power and social status. Egalitarian ideologies embodied, for example, in universal adult franchise, have shattering blows brought to bear on the received hierarchical social order.</p><p>This led not only to fresh sources of conflicts, but also increased the level and complexity of social conflicts in Indian societies. Another implications was that older modes of conflict resolution became ineffective and new and European ways of conflict resolutions did not acquired the social depth necessary to order the entire part of lives of people in Indian societies. [Law courts, for instances, only negotiated conflicts at the level of government, (in commerce, property, trade etc) but even they became instruments in aggravating conflict in the societies]</p><p>This brief historical context sets a stage to analyze the conflicts in Pakistani society. From ideological conflicts, which challenge the unquestioning claims of religion to dictate the lives of people, to overtly political conflicts about sharing resources between different social and economic class groups, conflicts appear to be breaking up the very fabric of Pakistani society. The separation of East Pakistan in 1971, as a result of long protracted conflict ending in a blood bath and war between India and Pakistan, looms large in the collective psyche of the nation.</p><p>Before proceeding further, a definition of social conflict is in order. Social conflict may be taken to mean “a struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponents are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rival”. The nature and scale of struggle and conflict can vary from street brawls to the war between nation states. (Like in the example of former East Pakistan, the conflict in the street may graduate into conflict between two language or culture groups [Bengali and Punjabi] and if not controlled at the level of state and society, can turn into war between nation-states [India and Pakistan]).</p><p>As said earlier, conflicts can divide into different types according to their scales and magnitude. First in the order of scale are Interpersonal Conflicts, which are rooted in personal preferences, likes and dislikes and can cause conflict between individuals.</p><p>Group Conflicts can cause a family, an office or party into faction fighting machines, which can potentially fight endlessly to an extent that conflict can become the sole basis for the formation and continuation of the groups.</p><p>Community Conflicts have generally historical basis to them. The conflicts between Hindus, and Muslim can marshal facts of history to support their contending claims to power and resources. In recent decades sectarian conflicts say between Shia and Sunni tends to implicate entire communities into their effects.</p><p>In an organizational scale, industrial and agrarian organization tends to display conflicts, which are largely related to the economic sphere. From a small factory to vast bureaucracies, different sets of conflicts are subsumed within the institutional conflicts. Compared to others, institutional conflicts are more and less institutionalized and are governed by laws, and particular institutions like management councils, and adopt legislatively established procedures for reconciliation, mediation and arbitration.</p><p>All social conflicts can be managed through the mechanism for resolving institutional conflicts. (Aga Khan Foundation, for instances, have tried to negotiate social conflicts, through special institutions at village levels, called Aga Khan Arbitration Board in Northerner Areas).</p><p>Territorial units like state may become party to conflicts between communities and lead to conflicts at the state level. Generally confined to institutions like parliament, courts and tribunals, yet the conflicts can become politicized. For instance as in recent months, the aggravating conflict between Sindh and Punjab government over the distribution of provincial share in water. Earlier on, a conflict between Punjabis and Bengalis led to the break up of country</p><p>There can be many causes of conflicts. Marxian tradition places much emphasis on the unequal distribution of wealth and resources as the prime causes of social conflict. In that respect, much of unequal control over land in Pakistan by ‘feudal lords’, which continues to fuel social conflict, is the result of socio-economic divisions made under British colonialism.</p><p>The increased social mobility is another factor causing conflict in Pakistani society. Unlike a small scale homogenous society where resource base is not so diverse, in a complex and heterogeneous society, for instance Karachi, where different ethnic groups, religious and linguistic communities and caste/baradari groups compete for diverse but limited resources, the potentials for social conflicts are much larger. The composition and distribution of population in heterogeneous society, the historical experience of different groups within it, the relative levels of their socio-economic development, their relative sense of unity and strengthen, provides basis for conflicts to erupt.</p><p>Violence is one measure of the intensity of the conflicts. It may be an indicator of the degree and magnitude of the conflict. However, violence also has been used as a political and strategic tool to solve a conflict and may not be a reflection of the intensity of the conflict. In contrast, Ghandian non-cooperation, for instance, may be intense yet non-violent.</p><p>A conflict may be realistic and non-realistic. A realistic conflict is a mean towards a specific end, where as a non-realistic conflict is an end in itself. Many conflicts have an element of non-realistic conflict in them. For instance, when violence is used to create a terror [as in bomb blasts at public places], the sole objective is to create generalized fear among people. In contrast, violent measures of hijacking are often aimed at getting specific demands accepted.</p><p>In short, it must be remembered that creating social order and achieving peace and harmony among different political groups in a society is a never-ending process. At no point in history, peace can ultimately and finally be restored. It has to be negotiated and achieved through continuous efforts. An awareness and attention to this conclusion is the only viable solution to the conflicts.</p></div></div></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-74431649293105811711999-06-14T13:04:00.000-07:002009-07-14T14:52:13.516-07:00NGOs, CIVIL SOCIETY AND STATE: AN ALLIANCE FOR THE FUTURE<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">Published in The News, June 1999.</span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">The prolific growth of NGOs is a world wide phenomena. Since the official end of cold war in 1989, bilateral and multilateral agencies pursuing New Policy Agenda has channeled much of the aid through non-government organization (NGOs). Notwithstanding the differing nature of the policies of various donors agencies, two elements of their polices, economic and political, seems to stand out. The first is encapsulated in the statement 'Imperfect markets are better than imperfect states'. Market and private initiative, therefore, are seen as efficient means to deliver services than the governments. In consequences, NGOs in private sector are preferred over others as the most competent and cost effective service providers than the government bureaucracies. <br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This preference is not without due justifications. Out of ten thousands registered NGOs in Pakistan, a large majority of them focus on the community development and provision of services. One of these NGOs, Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Karachi has set new standards of quality and cost effectiveness in providing relatively low unit cost services to the slum dwellers of Orangi. Similarly, the NGORC network in Khairpur works with existing community-based organisations, which are encouraged to take up development-oriented projects such as credit and saving schemes and non-formal education. Such example are not so rare and lends credibility to the claims of donors and NGOs.<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The second element in the policies of donors is their emphasies on the achievement of 'good governance' as an essential condition for a healthy economy. In this regard, NGOs are awarded a key role in the democratisation of country's management. They are seen as integral components of a thriving civil society and an essential counter balance to state power. By opening up channels of communication and mass participation, NGOs thereby promote pluralism and democracy. One observer went so far as to claim NGOs as 'assoicational revolution' equal to the rise of the nation-states in late nineteenth century. <br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In one of its chapters, the much acclaimed Human Development Report on South Asia 1997 by Mahbubul Haq, offers a balance sheet of information to asses the performance of NGOs. The summary account of the successful NGOs of the region, along with a brief analysis of their relationship with state and donors can have a sobering effect on the critics of NGO movement. Given the state of deprivation and economic misery that threatens the very existence of Pakistan, NGOs look as if the only hope for an economic survival. All that is undeniable as the record of their performance show.<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, there is something troubling in the reception of NGOs as the vanguard of democratisation process in Pakistan. Much of the rhetoric by the proponents of NGOs has given prominence to the belief that NGOs are affecting a fundamental transformation of the society. If the capacity of NGOs to deliver services is considered wide open to debate, and multiple strategies for community development are being 'rethought', then what is not considered debatable and doesn't really comes out of the report either, is the potentials of NGO movement as it stands now, to create a "thriving" civil society in Pakistan.<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the development world, civil society has come to mean two things: the world of NGOs providing services mainly at grass root level and activist who voices political concerns left out by formal political parties like gender, environment and development with a human face. But there is a lurking danger in all too common use of the phrase "civil society" as a lustrous badge of a liberal democratic order. This is further aggravated in consequence, by equating strong civil society with the mere presence of NGOs as a bearer of liberal values and a cradle of democratic culture. Civil society, as mentioned earlier, is much more complex and richer concept than this simple equation implies. Any analysis that wishes to study the NGO's role in promoting civil society must precede by a through examination of the component of civil society and a disaggregation of the groups that make it up. <br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At present, NGOs in Pakistan make up a rather small and in some cases, an insignificant part of civil society. The Euro-centric interpretations of civil society and the dogmatically modernist take on the social and economic issues, excludes many groups from the sphere of its operations, (like those who profess religious affiliations) that can critically effect the growth of civil society. Its exclusive focus on women, rural poor and the marginal groups commendable as well as necessary, given the prevailing conditions of patriarchal oppression and inhuman development in the country. Nevertheless this exclusive focus can and has made NGOs even with high levels of commitments and dedication, incongruous to the concerns of large groups in the civil society. <br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Moreover, in a climate where NGOs are being increasingly part of a deregulating market, it has to be carefully ascertained to what degree NGOs intend to provide basic services better than government and to what extent they are determined to contribute to transform relations within civil society as well as between civil society and state. <br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A trend visible within NGO movement to scale up and take over the state functions of providing services to the people, reflects the confusion of NGOs leaders in Pakistan in deciding their future agenda. Although given the crisis of governance in the country, it is understandable why NGOs should think so. Nevertheless, this is a dangerous trend which if accentuated will hamper the growth of civil society and state in Pakistan.<br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Considering the antagonist relations of state with NGOs, which perceives NGO as competitor in dwindling foreign aid and therefore tries to contain their operations by legislative action, one can understand the temptation of NGOs to take over the functions of state. But it must be remembered that a civil society needs a strong state that have the capacity not only to deliver services or to defend its national boundaries, but also to mediate between competing interests groups within a civil society. Instead of trying to substitute state by providing better services, NGOs should try to lobby with and against government in order to hold it accountable to the people. It is important to endorses and back up an emerging trend in some NGOs to take up advocacy related issues, than to provide mere relief services.<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Finally, in a environment where there is a mounting pressure on the third world from the international financial institutions to 'roll back the state', which can allow the exploitation of market, resources, labour, it is only a democratised state, that can serve as a buffer against the predatory international capital. A challenge for the NGOs as a part of civil society, then, is not to try and substitute state but to create civil networks that should be pluralist and inclusive and have the capacity to develop within individuals a sense of 'responsible autonomy', where rights are coupled with duties and obligations.<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As concluding remarks, let me hazard some comments on the 'organisational culture' of leading NGOs in Pakistan. A civil society organisation may perform two functions: Pluralistic and Educational. Defining themselves as non profit and independent, NGOs express a balance between different power centers, interests and opinions. Calling themselves as participatory and voluntary organisations, they intend to be open to popular demands. In line with their pluralistic function, they intend to serve as organs of socialisation into the practice of democratic norms, through a process of learning by doing. It is gradual learning of democratic skills that is deemed as one of the fundamental features of NGOs. <br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It will be a sad commentary on part of many NGOs who profess themselves to be the vanguard of democratic culture, that they are failing to practice in their internal organisation what they preach to wider society. Far from serving as organs of democratic socialisation, their social affiliation remains exclusive, their internal governance authoritarian and decision making undemocratic. They inherit all the vices of feudal culture but none of its virtues. Apart from ritual self flagellation in the seminar and public symposiums, a handful of presidents and directors chair, define and dictate their agendas. These practices should recede along with the vertical organisational structures, the perks and privileges coupled with fat salaries, and a culture of 'personality cult', to make NGOs more accountable to people - to whom they owe their legitimacy.<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6404058238910067085.post-29010906282993034491999-05-04T13:21:00.000-07:002009-07-14T13:39:47.778-07:00CAN FUNDAMENTALISM OF NEO-LIBERAL THOUGHT BE AVOIDED?<div style="text-align: justify;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">This article was written in the context of Nawaz Sharif’s brief compaign against madrassa and mujhadeens, in the last year of his last term in 1999. </span></div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“March against Fundamentalism” has become a rallying cry for even those elements that hitherto constituted contending camps of Pakistani polity. All groups from diverse political and ideological spectrum have joined the chorus led by the state and echoed by their international allies. One will have hard time in being out of tune with the band, given the threatening proportions of the fundamentalist reality. However, one must question the symphonic harmony of other wise conflicting voices. What has happened that changed the ideological make up of the mujahadeens and freedom fighters of the previous days, turning them into the terrorists of the present?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I guess one doesn’t have to be a Socrates to make it out, as several handy explanations of changing balance of international power (or inequality!) are in order. But one may be aspiring to the ideals of 'Socratic individual' to question the role of NGOs and secular democratic intellectuals in civil society played when state and international allies were refusing to see a fundamentalist threat to the society.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is no longer a guarded secret that so called fundamentalists served their time as hired mercenary of state to fight a proxy war in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It is not a secret either that their ranks were swelled with state’s authorisation and under the watchful eyes of our American allies. However, the hand that fed the mouth was also occasionally bitten is part of a separate story. But it will be revealing to wonder what civil society in Pakistan was busy doing when the Great Game of the 20th century was being played by much maligned “inefficient” and “crisis-prone" state and “instrumentalist” west , to borrow expressions from the prevailing vocabulary of NGOs in the country. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The secular democratic intellectuals in NGOs are, as in the past, busy chewing the fodder set as policy agenda by the so-called New World Order and its sister frameworks rooted in inequality of world resources. They were engaged in whipping their hobby horse, officially called state, for its acts of omission and commission strictly along the lines set by the policy agendas. This policy agenda has taken many forms. From giving policy advice to the state, to trying to substitute it, a whole battery of NGOs committed themselves in organising the poor and building up the capacities of marginalised as well as lambasting the state for want of good governance.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All these are undeniably noble and politically urgent measures and steps were and are being taken in good spirit. However, what was not included in the policy agenda set by the international donors and consequently not taken up by local NGOs is the abuse of the rights of a ’community of believers’ that has been abused as pawns in an inter-state game of territorial remote control. An abuse whose history can be explored through the employment registers of the Pakistani state. If we are critical of state’s abuse of rights of citizens, then are not the fundamentalist citizens of the state? Are they not consumers and producers of goods and services? How they can be divorced from a society through an ideological operation of secular democratic ethos, propogaged by intellectuals in NGOs? The question – why an individual citizen, a consumer and a member of Pakistani society, is eulogised as mujahid when he fights against the Zulim perpetuated by enemies of lslam, but denounced as a cool blooded terrorist when he raises arms against the violence authored and sanctioned by the state and its international allies– has not been a popular NGOs’ concern.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The madrassa-educated citizens have an equal right to hold their views and we should learn to respect their differences, as long as their faith does not become a polemical one. Even if their doctrine has turned into a prejudice, then what NGOs have done to soften it up, to date? How many instances of reaching out to communities of fundamentalists can be reported from the annual reports of NGOs? How many agendas of capacity building of sectarians can be quoted from the grant registers of donors? How many credit and savings programs for the religious extremist have been launched? How many attempted coalitions on civil rights with religious organisations can be cited from the ever increasing number of NGOs? How many campaigns to expose this exclusion can be quoted from the advocacy registers of think-tanks swelling the ranks of Pakistani intelligentsia?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">These questions could have provided some affirmative answers, had civil society not lapsed into a fit of historical blindness, where it is failing to see the fundamental character of their institutional existence and location of their public action. Ignorance to sectarian or religious ideologies is example of this historical forgetfulness. Why ideological questions have not been raised in the annals of development? Why the success of AKRSP, to name a flag bearer of planned development as modernisation, not been studied in the context of its ideological leaning? All successful models, be it Orangi Pilot Project or Khuda Ki Basti are routinely attributed to the structures of rational management, in complete disregard to ethnic, linguistics, sectarian and ideological factors, which have turned the question of development on its head.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The historical amnesia has been facilitated by dominant discourse of western intellectuals and policy makers in donor agencies. They are committed to the ideals of empowering women, securing the rights of child, and generally committed to the protecting human rights. But human is defined in a secular democratic order, which excludes all those categories that do not subscribe to specific configurations of state and market in a society. The praxis achieved by NGOs is firmly rooted in a secular democratic ethos that restricts the travesty of thoughts in other directions. The prevailing spirit (in Hegelian sense) of NGOs circumvent any efforts towards one such ’community of allies’ who had the potential to share much with the promise and failure of state and society in Pakistan. The secularist truism has to reinscribe itself for its rejuvenation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Post script:</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In all societies, different ideologies protect its social organisation. Rich and poor, moral and immoral, strong and weak have to survive together despite their conflicting claims to the survival. Call it culture, myth, or belief systems; these ideologies tend to ensure the survival of a social order. Interplay of conflicts of social and ideological orders is called as human history. However, one particular version of human history has prevailed over the others. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">From ideas of history as progress to the claims laid by end of history, the ideologies of western social order have ensured the survival of its host population. For how long, it will survive have been sounded off by cries of decline of the west to the rhetoric of triumph of the west. Science fiction is a good place to speculate about it. However, the rule of these ideological social orders is all too pervasive. Thanks to the hegemony of capitalism and (neo) colonialism on the imaginative and material landscape of the world.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The foregoing realisation requires several responses. One response is to accept it. We, the secular democratic individuals, have accepted it. Accepting the realisation that one particular social order has triumphed in ensuring human social order means two things: Make good use of it or make bad use of it. If we are to make good use of it, then its is important to see how it suits to various locations across the spectrum of these ideologies, thus ensuring their survival. The conflict of interest is not denied here, but presumed to be manageable. However, if we were to make bad use of it, perhaps as we do, then we will try not to subject it to organic mutations and not work out the modalities of its forms. The result is in-human mayhem. This is what we should hope to avoid in the future by questioning the fundamentalism of liberal thought.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A few suggestions can be made on the basis of present realisation. Ideological factors in development process need to be addressed. The role of state in sponsoring sectarian ideologies also requires to be seriously questioned. On the part of secular democratic individuals the binary opposition of secularism and fundamentalism would need analytical reworking. Some of the recent studies done in South Asia can be instructive in this regard.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13012312376698600938noreply@blogger.com0