Daily Times

Every sensible politician will claim that beyond his own survival, preservation of the public interest is his primary concern. Foremost among its components is the survival of the nation itself. In the case of Pakistan, it cannot be taken for granted. Hostile forces within the country pose a greater threat to its continued existence and good order than any external enemies do. Assuming that survival is assured, one may ask what some of the more notable ingredients of its public interest are.

Some of them are evident enough. Examples would include health care, access to adequate amount of reasonably nutritious food, housing that protects residents from the elements, opportunities of making money to pay for one’s needs, among other things. The right to education is somewhat complicated. Literacy should mean more than the ability to write one’s name; it should include the ability to read, let us say, a newspaper. Society does need men and women who create knowledge in social and physical sciences. For the generality of students, education after the middle school should be geared to train them in the professions and teach them skills in one of the fields of modern technology. The market is crowded with graduates in the humanities and social sciences with relatively lower levels of attainment and it has few jobs for them. They have to be content with clerical positions in public and private establishments. I have met some who had been forced to take on the roles of messengers and errand boys. Public interest requires a reorientation of both the goals and substance of our system of education.

I do not endorse the advocacy that all education from the elementary school to college and university levels should be equalised, and that the syllabuses, standards of attainment, and medium of instruction should be made the same for all of them. The proponents of this view maintain that these measures will abolish or at least mitigate class distinctions. Proposals such as this are open to several objections. Public education is in a poor state. Privately owned and managed schools and colleges have mushroomed and hundreds of them have surfaced, presumably to fill the void. Education in Pakistan has become a huge money making industry. Its directors are a powerful lobby that will find ways of resisting external control. The quest for equalisation is ill advised. It would be insane to abolish the IBA in Karachi because some humdrum business school does not even aspire to reach its standards. It would be best to leave the fortunes of various institutions to the job market. Students will prefer to enroll in the IBA if its graduates command positions at high salaries. The same goes for other schools and colleges in the country.

Pakistani society like others elsewhere is composed of classes that will continue to exist. A classless society is a pipe dream. Certain revolutionaries in recent times abolished classes but they reemerged. The new ruling class came to have comforts and other privileges to which the ordinary citizen was not entitled. Differentiation between the ruler and his subjects, the elite and the mass, will not go away.

Education does not exhaust the domain of public interest. Civic virtues such as civility, tolerance of the dissident, and the right of all citizens to equal protection of the law invite attention. Since its first beginnings, this country has an adverse situation in Balochistan that successive governments have ignored and that has now assumed alarming proportions. Not only the Baloch nationalists but also many of the college educated young people in the province contend that the ruling establishment in Islamabad has not treated them like equal citizens but as herds of cattle. The more militant among them are already talking of opting out of Pakistan. In a television interview Akhtar Mengal, who recently returned from a voluntary exile, has stated that Baloch nationalists regard any one who speaks benevolently of Pakistan as a traitor.

This is a part of the larger problem of national integration. In a diverse state such as Pakistan, integration does not mean the elimination of regional and local identities and the imposition of sameness on all of the people. It means that while these local identities may be cherished, they do not obliterate the people’s identification with the country as a whole. A certain amount of alienation from the Pakistani nationhood has been visible among the Sindhis for many years and nothing good enough has been done to overcome it. Sindhi language and other cultural expressions are more highly developed than those of other regions but their higher status has not been acknowledged and honoured. It is then not surprising that many of the Sindhi intellectuals are unconcerned with Pakistani nationhood. In this connection it should be noted also that government-sponsored opinion makers have not made Pakistani nationhood a central part of their political discourse. Punjab is the largest province of Pakistan, containing about two thirds of its population, and it is richly endowed with resources. The responsibility for preserving the country falls primarily on its rulers and leaders. It is for them to find ways of alleviating the Sindhi and Baloch grievances. In his interview referred to above, Mengal gave us the tiding that the point of no return had not been reached in Balochistan and the situation there could still be mended, but time, he said, is of the essence.

Any serious student of Pakistani affairs knows that a general decline of morals has taken place in this country during the last two or three decades. The high and the mighty do not lose prestige as a result of wrongdoing if they have been able to get away with it. In the reckoning of most people, getting away with it is more important than the intrinsic virtue or wickedness of the act in question. It is the same way with the ordinary folks. They will feel free to cheat in both public and private transactions if they are not afraid of being caught and punished. Regretfully one has to say that we are on the way to becoming a nation of cheats and liars. Even the initial steps towards reversing this trend cannot be taken until the powers that be resolve to become honest and straightforward in their conduct. It remains to be seen if they will move in this direction. So far as the morals of the generality of the people are concerned, they will take even longer to improve.

The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and can be reached at anwarsyed@cox.net