Nice article, a pakistani’s experience and his research about India.
Things to learn from India](http://www.dawn.com/2005/11/22/op.htm#1)
By Shahid Javed Burki
WHILE I was in India last month I came across an American friend who had also travelled to Delhi to pursue some interest in development economics. This was his first visit to the country and he was initially very impressed with what he saw. He had also read Thomas Friedman’s book from which I quoted in the column last week. “India is indeed an economic superpower; one that will change the structure of the global economy”, he said to me, fully agreeing with Friedman’s thesis.
My friend was impressed with the hotel in which both of us were staying; impressed with the sights and sounds of Delhi; impressed with Gurgaon, the centre of Delhi’s high-tech economy; impressed with the way the Indian middle class was engaged in their country’s development.
He also liked what he saw of Indian art, Indian music, and the country’s film history. He asked me whether there was much in common between India and Pakistan; after all the two were once part of the same economic and political entity. When I said that the two countries had much in common and that what he had read and heard about Pakistan was not the Pakistani reality, he seemed very sceptical about my response. I am sure he attributed it to a misplaced sense of patriotism.
When I left Delhi and returned to Washington, my American friend and his wife went on a tour of the “golden triangle” — tourist sites in Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. They then saw a great more of the real India. Remembering the conversation we had he called me upon returning to the United States. He said that he had seen two Indias; one was well integrated into the global economy, the other was poor, extremely crowded, with poor infrastructure, poor housing, and an incredible number of street dwellers. The second India was not very different from Africa, a continent he knew well. He was now not very sure whether to see India as a success story or one still struggling very hard to succeed.
This account of first and second impressions of a development expert from the West raises a number of important questions. Why is there now so much talk in fairly informed circles about India becoming an economic superpower? Why do so many commentators such as Thomas Friedman believe that India, en route to becoming a superpower, will be able to overcome fairly quickly a number of obstacles that have kept so many developing countries trapped in poverty and backwardness? Why is it that so many people see so much negative in Pakistan and so much positive in India? What are the lessons that Pakistan could learn from India’s success and how could it also develop a different image for itself other than the one popular in the West? Why was it that while India was widely viewed as a rapidly modernizing society, Pakistan had come to be seen as backward and unwilling to join the rest of the world? In other words what has contributed to India’s seeming success and Pakistan’s seeming failure as economies and as political systems?
There are many reasons why the world views India and Pakistan so differently. I will mention four of them. The first is the way Pakistanis project their own country. The second reason is the amount of investment the Indians have made in higher education, the point underscored by Friedman in the passage quoted in the article published in this space last week. The third reason for the perception about India’s bright future is that it has now in place several institutions that work in various sectors of the economy. These institutions now have a record that provides comfort to the participants in the economy, both domestic and foreign. The fourth reason is the way the Indians have created a political system that accommodates diversity and allows participation to most segments of the population.
I will have more to say about these explanations over the next couple of weeks. Let me first deal with the damage Pakistanis themselves do to their image. In a recent conversation with me, L.K Advani in Delhi made an interesting point. He said while there are many differences among Indian politicians and political parties on domestic issues, there is almost complete understanding on foreign policy and how the country should be presented to the world outside. That is certainly not the case for Pakistan. Let me take one example of the difference between Pakistan and India in this respect.
It was certainly not prudent for the government of Pakistan, including President Pervez Musharraf, to discourage Mukhtaran Mai from visiting the United States, fearing that she would expose the worst about the country’s society and culture to the western audiences. In fact, by attempting to stop her from visiting America, Islamabad inflicted greater damage to its image than would have happened had she not been constrained. President Musharraf’s confession that he had himself ordered that Mukhtaran Mai should not be allowed to travel to the United States resulted in extremely hostile articles and editorials in several American newspapers.
When the visit did take place it did a great deal positive for the country’s image. She proved to be a good ambassador for Pakistan. The message she gave and the one that was picked up by the media dealt with the way many people in Pakistan are handling an issue that had previously not received much attention. Women’s place in Muslim society has become a subject of considerable interest in the West, not just in the United States, and by dealing it with openly and by saying that she had received support from many segments of Pakistani society she told the West that there are many people in her country who are deeply concerned about the way women are treated in some parts of Pakistan and by some segments of society.
Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times who first drew the attention of the readers in America to the Mukhtaran Mai case wrote yet another article describing the Pakistani woman as the Rosa Parks of the 21st century. He couldn’t have paid a greater complement. It was Parks, a black woman, who by refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger in a bus, lit the fuse that resulted in the civil rights movement. The movement that began with this one act of defiance brought about palpable change in the way white America treated coloured people.
By suggesting that Mukhtaran Mai may have done the same in the Muslim world with respect to women’s treatment, Kristof is making a positive point about the receptivity of these societies to accommodating change. The Pakistani government would do well to encourage rather than fear people such as Mukhtaran Mai.
While Mukhtaran Mai was visiting the United States another high stature woman also came to the country and addressed at least one influential audience. Khalid Hasan was at that meeting and in his report published by The Daily Times he made a powerful argument. While this person has been extraordinarily brave in bringing to light human right problems in Pakistan, her presentation in Washington condemned everything about her country. It is this type of all-embracing condemnation of everything Pakistani that leaves the impression that there is nothing good happening in the country, wrote Hasan for his newspaper.
I am not arguing in favour of blind patriotism; I am suggesting, instead, that it is very disturbing that many Pakistanis use deep antipathy towards the country — a development of recent years — as a passport for gaining access to think tanks and the editorial pages of major newspapers. I can’t think of any Indian writer of repute or an activist who would be so vocal in condemning all aspects of life in India.
The second reason for India’s increasing reputation is the effort it has made to produce a highly educated and skilled class of people not just in computer sciences but in a number of other disciplines as well. Indian names are prominent not only in information technology but also in business management, economics, finance, medicine, engineering, literature, cinema, and music. This is in part the result of a long history of scholarship in the country and in part because of the very intelligent choices made by the Indian state in the first few years after gaining independence. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning Indian economist, celebrates India’s advance in several fields of knowledge in a recent book titled The Argumentative Indian.
Sen argues that a number of advances made by the West during the period that began with the Enlightenment are owed to the Indians in the pre-Christian period. Most of the knowledge accumulated in India in those early times was communicated to the West by Arab scholars who translated Indian classics into Arabic. He also argues that India’s eclipse during the period of European colonialism was the consequence of neglect of education after the golden period of Hindu scholarship. This was of special concern for Rabindranath Tagore, another Indian Nobel laureate.
“In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions — all centre on this single factor,” wrote Tagore in 1930.
I should note in passing that while India values its Nobel laureates, Pakistan chose to ignore the only person to have won this distinction as he happened to belong to the Ahmadiya community. In November 1996 when Professor Abdus Salam’s body arrived in Pakistan for burial, the Pakistani state chose to ignore the event, fearful that any official recognition would invite the wrath of religious fundamentalists. I was at that time a member of the interim cabinet headed by Prime Minister Meraj Khalid. I suggested that the government should designate a high official to receive Professor Salam’s body. I was told that that would be politically risky.
The government of President Pervez Musharraf is now making an effort to close the large knowledge gap that has emerged between Pakistan and India — between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Islamabad is spending large amounts of money on higher education. However, what needs to be recognized is that such efforts will only succeed if there is a fundamental cultural change, if people begin to recognize that there cannot be any success in rapidly evolving global economic and political systems unless society awards high premium to the acquisition of knowledge.
India took the right decision when it chose to establish institutes of technology and institutes of management in various parts of the country in the 1950s. These institutions have produced tens and thousands of engineers, scientists, and managements gurus who are sought after in the western world. While students from Pakistan are finding it increasingly difficult to gain admission into foreign universities, recruitment teams from the world’s most prestigious universities and corporations routinely travel to India to bring that country’s graduates to college and corporate campuses.
There is a clear lesson in this for Pakistan. The country has to begin to value acquisition of knowledge as a primary occupation for the society. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of this objective, certainly not religious beliefs, especially when the religion we follow places so much emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge.
