[sacw] sacw dispatch #2 (11 June 00)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web - Dispatch #2.
11 June 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

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#1. Pakistan: What Are They Teaching In Pakistani Schools Today?
#2. India: Tamil-Friendly Hindutva
#3. India: Women campaign for entry into temple
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#1.

THE MENACE OF EDUCATION
What Are They Teaching In Pakistani Schools Today?

by Pervez Hoodbhoy

>From brain size and hair colour to the shape and texture of
toe-nails, every characteristic of an individual is totally
determined by just two twisted strands of human DNA. A similar
cultural DNA - a society's education system - contains within it the
detailed genetic blueprint determining what that society is destined
to become tomorrow. Forward oriented or fixated on the past,
democratic or authoritarian, egalitarian or elitist, peaceful or
violently engaged in civil strife - the choice between such options
is made when one generation passes on to the next one its values and
preferences.

So what are the values currently being transmitted and communicated
in Pakistan's schools? Obviously there is some variation across rich
and poor schools, between villages and cities, and across provinces.
But the basic road-map is provided by the school curriculum. Lest
there be any confusion the reader should know that, by an act of
Parliament passed in 1976, there is one and only one allowed
road-map, prepared by the Curriculum Wing of the Federal Ministry of
Education, Government of Pakistan.

The usefulness of having a national curriculum was soon recognized
by General Zia-ul-Haq. In 1981 he decreed that henceforth Pakistani
education was to be totally redefined and history rewritten
according to his vision of Pakistan. From now on the struggle for
Pakistan was no longer to be shown as a victorious struggle for a
Muslim homeland. Instead, it was to be depicted as the movement for
an Islamic state run according to Islamic law. Even if it conflicted
with reality, the heroes of the Pakistan movement - Jinnah, Iqbal,
Syed Ahmed Khan - were to be projected as Islamic heroes.
=46urthermore all subjects, including the sciences, were to be
speedily Islamized.

------------------------------------------
EXCERPTS FROM CURRICULUM DOCUMENT FOR CLASSES K-V
National Bureau of Curriculum and Textbooks
=46ederal Ministry of Education, 1995
Government of Pakistan.

At the completion of Class-V, the child should be able to:
=B7 "Acknowledge and identify forces that may be working against
Pakistan."[pg 154]
=B7 "Demonstrate by actions a belief in the fear of Allah." [pg154]
=B7 "Make speeches on Jehad and Shahadat" [pg154]
=B7 "Understand Hindu-Muslim differences and the resultant need for
Pakistan." [pg154]
=B7 "India's evil designs against Pakistan." [pg154]
=B7 "Be safe from rumour mongers who spread false news" [pg158]
=B7 "Visit police stations" [pg158]
=B7 "Collect pictures of policemen, soldiers, and National Guards"
[pg158]
=B7 "Demonstrate respect for the leaders of Pakistan" [pg153]
-----------------------------------------------

Two decades later the mindset of the Zia era, and the release of a
pent-up religious rage, continues to reflected in Pakistan's
currently enforced curriculum objectives [see Box] for primary
school children. Sadly, while many Pakistanis are aware that there
is something wrong with the nature of our schooling, only a few have
access to public documents such as those reproduced here and which
expose us to international shame, condemnation, and ridicule.
[Interestingly, in the foreword this curriculum document
acknowledges that "support was provided by international
organizations, in particular UNICEF, USAID, GTZ, and World Bank".
Shame on them!]

Consider the impact of the national curriculum objectives on a 12
year-old child in his last year of primary school. Instead of a
future that is joyous, and a peaceful country that offers hope to
all, he is told that life is actually about battling invisible
enemies. Fear is ever-present because beneath every stone lurks a
venomous snake and Pakistan is under the siege of sinister forces
which the child must learn to acknowledge, identify, and fight to
death. What mental space can remain for this child's innocence when
he or she must learn to make speeches on jihad and martyrdom? And
what scope exists for being tolerant and accepting of beliefs other
than your own?

Consider the kind of people the national curriculum seeks to install
as role models. They are not scholars and poets or scientists, nor
people like Abdus Sattar Edhi or others who have struggled for the
rights of others. Instead they are policemen, national guards, and
soldiers. The child must collect their pictures, revere them,
perhaps kiss them. His visits to police stations - where rapes,
tortures, and deaths in custody occur so routinely as to be
unremarkable - is expected to imbue him with the spirit of humanism
and patriotism. Is a greater perversion of human values really
possible?

Some of the curriculum objectives present more than just a slight
difficulty of implementation. To "demonstrate by actions a belief in
the fear of Allah" certainly left me stumped, but surely some wise
reader can think of ways to grade a child on this. How it is
possible to "be safe from rumour mongers who spread false news" is
also beyond my intelligence to answer. As for the requirement to
"demonstrate respect for the leaders of Pakistan", one presumes that
on the morning of the 12 October 1999 coup, a model student had to
present evidence of respect for Mr. Nawaz Sharif, and in the evening
for General Musharraf.

Could any part of what has been quoted in the Box be false? It all
sounds so utterly bizarre that the reader may well raise this
question. Indeed, at the ALIF education conference in Islamabad,
held in April 2000, the head of the Curriculum Wing, Dr. Parveen
Shahid, flatly denied that these points formed part of the present
curriculum document. In front of a full audience of over 200 people
she stated - as may be viewed on videotape by anyone interested -
that no document in her department exceeded a few pages whereas the
page numbers I had quoted were 153 and higher. A few days later, as
a member of the government appointed Education Advisory Board, I
brought my copy along to her office. It has 211 pages in all. At
this point she informed me that she had multiple copies of the same
document (containing exactly the points listed in the Box). She did
not need my copy!

What I have related above is but one example of how bureaucrats of
the Federal Ministry of Education, and particularly the Curriculum
Wing, brazenly pursue their narrow and destructive agenda, unfazed
and undeterred by those seeking change. Knowing that governments
come and governments go but they will stay on forever, the education
bureaucracy has closed ranks to protect their mutual interests.
Therefore demands by Education Advisory Board members that certain
parts of the curriculum be dumped, as well as numerous strong reform
proposals for school education, have been opposed, ignored, or
mutilated out of recognition.

In what must constitute the most brazen of practices, minutes of
Advisory Board meetings have been changed at will, twisted around,
and manipulated as seen fit. Not surprisingly what has emerged at
the end of several months are mere platitudes. Add to this that the
language used is so pathetically poor that one has difficulty in
deciphering official documents and minutes. For example I invite any
reader to explain to me the following recommendation of an Advisory
Board subcommittee: "females must be oriented for mental health".

The conclusion one reaches is an unhappy one. The CW must be
dissolved and curriculum development be rescued from the clutches of
the Federal Education Ministry. One possibility is to entrust this
work to certain of the country's universities. In doing so, Pakistan
will not be doing anything out of the way. In Britain, universities
such as Cambridge, Oxford, and London, define the curricula for
school-leaving examinations. There are numerous other models: in the
United States, every school is free to have its own curricula but
college entrance examinations (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) enforce
some standardization of learning. India and Iran also have no
national curriculum. If so many countries have demonstrated that
they can exist and prosper without a national curriculum, there is
no reason why Pakistan must be fixated upon having one.

Textbooks is another area needing radical reform. A comparison of
Matric and O-level physics and mathematics books reveals a world of
difference in the clarity of explanations, quality of questions and
exercises, and choice of examples. Sadly, vested interests have
successfully appealed to nationalist feelings and thus prevented a
wider use of internationally available books. I have yet to
understand what "Pakistani physics" or "Pakistani mathematics"
means, unless this is meant to denote something shoddy and
sub-standard.

Not surprisingly it is the Textbook Boards, together with their
favoured authors, which promote this fake nationalism. In fact many
individuals make huge profits by producing substandard and badly
written books filled with conceptual, pedagogical, and printing
mistakes. That their monopoly, under the protection of the state,
should have been tolerated for so long is tragic. Under intense
pressure from international education experts there had once been
some movement on this issue -- in principle the Government had
agreed to let private publishers compete and allow multiple
textbooks to be used. Unfortunately the Education Ministry
manipulated matters so as to empower the Curriculum Wing to select
books. A former head of the CW - incidentally one of the most
"patriotic" ones - had a certain fixed percentage for approving a
book, to be deposited into an overseas bank account. So back to
square one!

Where lies the way out? The answer needs to be given at several
different levels. First, at the most basic level, there has to be a
clear realization of the difference between the goals and methods of
modern education as opposed to the madrassa system of Nizam-ul-Mulk
of the 11th century, together with a clear statement of preference
of the former over the latter. Without this precondition, progress
or lack of it, carries zero meaning. Pakistan needs modern, not
madrassa, education.

At the second level lie reform issues related to the curriculum,
textbooks, examinations, teacher training, school adminstration,
etc. Here, instead of re-inventing the wheel, we need to speedily
begin the process of implementation after critically evaluating the
detailed reports and recommendations made by specialist teams,
international and national. Over the last decade every major
educational issue has been the subject of numerous costly and
detailed studies. Some have been excellently done while others are
only fair. But whatever one's opinion of the final recommendations
made in these reports, the professionals who authored them set out
the problems in clear and concise terms, marshalled data from
various sources, and identified various options. To my astonishment,
no such study was referred to at any time in any meeting of the
Education Advisory Board although these studies had been commisioned
by the Ministry of Education.

Thirdly, devolution of authority and resources is imperative. It is
civil society which is the beneficiary of education and which, in
our unique situation today, may best be entrusted with this task. A
moronic, incompetent, self-obsessed, corrupt, and ideologically
charged education bureaucracy today squarely blocks Pakistan's entry
into the 21st century. We cannot entrust the future of our country
to those who cannot write a single straight sentence, and for whom
good education means passivity, blind obedience, and indoctrination.
We must also do battle with those who insist that Pakistani children
learn in at least three languages - Urdu, English, Arabic - and
often the mother tongue as well, which is usually different. This
linguistic burden alone is sufficient to cripple children's minds.

While there are no quick fixes to a problem that has compounded over
five decades, not a moment should be lost in beginning the slow
process of rehabilitation and reform of the education system. A
country suffering from xenophobia and hatred for others harms
primarily itself. Therefore, instead of being virulent and
aggressive, Pakistani patriotism must be identified with civic
responsibilities such as paying one's fair share of taxes,
acceptance of Pakistan's diversity of cultures and peoples,
assurance of social justice, preserving the environment, and so
forth. Without this change we have no future.

[Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy is professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam
University, Islamabad. This article was published in The News, 11
June 2000.]
_______

#2.

Economic and Political Weekly =20
Commentary May 27-June 2, 2000
TAMIL-FRIENDLY HINDUTVA
by M S S Pandian

Sriman L Ganesan, the general secretary of the Tamil Nadu state unit of
the BJP, is a man of many roles. With an unmatched skill in political
masquerade, his new avatar is one of a passionate defender of Tamil and its
much-celebrated classicism. It is in this new avatar that he made an appeal
recently to Murli Manohar Joshi, the union minister for human resources
development, that Tamil should be declared a classical language and
accorded the status of an official language of the Indian union. What is
more, he also wants year 2000 to be sanctified as the year of Tamil.
Ganesan=92s appeal, which shares a close kinship with the language of the
Dravidian parties =96 in particular, the DMK, is not an idiosyncratic moment
in the career of the BJP in Tamil Nadu. It is indeed wilful and deliberate.
After all, for the past two years, Ganesan and his band of Hindu zealot are
grabbing every little occasion to declare loud and clear their untainted
love for Tamil =96 often putting to shame the raucous Tamil nationalists of
the past and the present. The BJP=92s national executive meeting held in
Chennai in December 1999 is a case in point. While the meeting complex was
named after the ancient Tamil poet of unrivalled fame, Thiruvalluvar, the
meeting hall itself was named after Subramania Bharati, a modern Tamil poet
of great eminence. One hundred couplets from Thirukkural, authored by
Thiruvalluvar, were translated into Hindi and English to be displayed in
the meeting venue.
The choice of Subramania Bharati is of course no surprise. He had been so
versatile a poet that his corpus of writing has something for everyone.
Thanks to their sheer pliability, his poems have been warming the hearts of
the BJP and the Communist Party cadres in the state at once. Above all, he
was an uncompromising nationalist. But the case of Thiruvalluvar and
Thirukkural is different. In any case, duped by the certitudes of the past,
that is what most thought. Thirukkural, written at time when nations and
nationalisms were not even remotely on the horizon, espoused a
=91transnational=92 universalism. In the deft hands of the Dravidian
ideologues, it metamorphosed during the 20th century, into a secular text
of Tamilness, opposed to the immoralities of caste. Though the Tamil
Saivites battled the Dravidian ideologues to expropriate Thiruvalluvar as
their own, it is the latter who prevailed at the end. In the post-1967
period, with the DMK occupying Fort St George, Thiruvalluvar and
Thirukkural were consecrated by means of statues, memorials, etc, as the
official icon of Tamil secular glory.
The secular past of Thiruvalluvar does not frighten away the Hindu
pragmatists of the present. In fact, one of the most favoured recruits of
the BJP in Tamil Nadu today is Thiruvalluavar. When M Karunanidhi unveiled
a 133-feet statue of Thiruvalluvar at the confluence of the three seas in
Kanyakumari in January this year, L Ganesan was at his rhetorical best. He
not only asked his audience to follow the precepts of 'divine'
Thiruvalluvar, but also broke into an emotive speech about Tamil: "Let us
speak in Tamil; let us advance Tamil; let us take the pledge that we shall
write our names in pure Tamil. Even foreigners are learning Tamil. But our
lack of interest in Tamil is regrettable." He did not stop with these
torrents of words, but promised action as well. He assured the audience
that the union government would get that controversial statue of
Thiruvalluvar in Bangalore unveiled. For the past nine years, the statue in
question has been remaining unveiled, wrapped in gunny bags, blindly facing
the Ulsoor lake =96 all in the face of continuous resistance from those whom
some call Kannada nationalists and others, Kannada chauvinists.
Let us now turn to another instance, the contentious order by the Tamil
Nadu government which decreed Tamil or the mother tongue of the child as
the medium of instruction in primary schools from 2000-2001 onwards. Though
the Madras High Court, in all its accumulated middle class wisdom, has
struck down the GO, the GO, did have its defenders in the state. And the
state unit of the BJP was one among them. L Ganesan was all in support of
the GO. He declared, "This is a bold step taken by the Tamil Nadu
government to save the age-old Tamil =96 none can destroy Tamil =96 this is =
not
merely a language issue, but an issue of self-respect. Whatever be the
opposition to the government order, we shall stand by it." He assured
the Tamil Nadu government that if Tamil was made the medium of instruction
even for college and post-college higher education, the BJP would
endorse it.
All the same, there are those who doubt the intentions of the BJP=92s
new-found passion for Tamil. For them, Ganesan has his own stock of
personal stories =96 all suffused with his love for Tamil. Writing recently
in Kumudam (May 18, 2000), a popular Tamil weekly, he tells us,
In my younger days, we used to have competitions on who could speak in
Tamil without using English words. It was in the 1960s. We had an
organisation named 'Vivekanandar Peravai'. Mostly medical college students
and intern doctors were its members. We all would go round the
Pragatheeswarar temple [in Thanjavur]. Till we left the temple complex, we
had to talk in Tamil without using English words. It would take about 45
minutes. If anyone used English words, we would keep a count of it. Whoever
had used the largest number of English words should buy peanuts for the
rest.

He did not mind the Sanskrit words, it seems. That need not detain us here.
Later when he became an employee of the revenue department, he refused to
compromise his love for Tamil: "I used to put my signature in Tamil. When
an officer expressed his reluctance to give my salary because my signature
was in Tamil, I told him to keep the money and walked out. My friends yell
at me and call me crazy. Despite all their reprimands, I wrote only in
Tamil". It is all as though the only thing he failed to do then was to join
the DMK. If he chose the RSS instead, he did not fail to conduct elocution
competition in Tamil for the RSS cadres.
In short, the DMK-speak of years is no longer the DMK-speak alone. It is
BJP-speak as well. The preachers of Hindu exclusivity who have meticulously
yoked together Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan as a means to usher in India that is
Bharat, are no longer fearful of Tamil which once they dreaded as the
vehicle of anti-Indian desire. As events of the recent past
foretell, it will not be a surprise if the BJP's new slogan for the Tamils
turns out to be "Tamil-Hindu-Hindustan". What has caused the BJP's fear of
Tamil to transform into pure love?
The path that Tamil nationalism of the DMK has traversed during the past
half a century is where one can look for clues. Though those incorrigible
pan-Indian nationalists present the history of Tamil nationalism as an
unwavering saga of anti-nationals, it was in fact a story of incredible
wavering. It took less than two decades for the DMK to swap its dream of a
Tamil homeland for power at Fort St George. Perhaps it was never a serious
dream. Then on, it spoke a convoluted language of state autonomy, greater
degree of federalism and the rights of the Tamil not so much in India but
in Sri Lanka. Even the surrogate nationalism of supporting the Sri Lankan
Tamils slowly withered away during the 1990s. If these tinpot Tamil
nationalists looked dangerous anti-nationals, it was the gift of Congress
politics. The Congress, which suffers from the hallucination that it has
the god-given right to rule India and its states forever, made on-and-off
menacing anti-nationals out of harmless DMK regionalists. The Congress
played the anti-national card to administer premature deaths to popularly
elected DMK governments over time.
The flip side of the semantic shift in the DMK=92s discourse on Tamil
nationalism is indeed its slow and steady drift towards pan-Indian
nationalism. The 1980s and the 1990s saw its emergence as a key player in
Delhi. The power in Delhi is as addictive as that in Chennai. The DMK has
no desire to return to its regional cocoon. But being condemned to be a
regional party because of the burden of its past, Tamil matters to it. It
continues to speak of Tamil, its hoary past, its promises for the future.
It is a sort of a ritual, but a necessary ritual. It has to keep its
regional identity going while partaking in the left-overs of power in
Delhi. Once upon a time, when the DMK spoke of Tamil, it was speaking about
other things =96 the ubiquitous brahmin, Sanskrit, northern imperialism, etc=
=2E
Now when it speaks of Tamil, it speaks of Tamil alone. Tamil has lost its
connotative vibrancy in the DMK=92s discursive universe. It is tame
and non-contestatory. The saffronites understand this.
There are other reasons as well which make Tamil an easy prey for the
saffronite agenda. The upper crust of the backward castes, a product of the
reservation politics of the Dravidian movement, no longer needs Tamil to
pursue their claims. The fastening together of the Tamil identity and
caste-based marginality in opposition to the hegemony of Sanskrit/Hindi and
the brahmin did yield them in the not-so- remote past much needed cultural
and material advancement. In their state of betterment, Tamil for them is
more an impediment than an aid to chase higher education and careers.
English is the panacea =96 as it had been for the brahmin during the Raj and
after. In other words, even if the DMK wishes to put on display old-style
Tamil nationalism, its takers are dwindling. For the Hindu nationalists,
Tamil is a harmless bet now.
There is more to it. The BJP is courting Tamil not just because it is
harmless to court. It can possibly profit the party with newer recruits.
There is a saivite side story which is most often not told. The non-brahmin
saivites have been and are fervently Hindu and Tamil at once. The saivite
idealogues, despite their distaste for the atheism of the
Dravidian movement, found common cause with Dravidian politics when it came
to the question of Tamil or brahminical hegemony. If they lent their
support to Periyar during the anti-Hindi agitation of the 1930s and after,
they also endorsed the DMK=92s move to introduce Tamil =91archanas=92 in tem=
ples.
No doubt, the saivite idealogues are few in number. But their sentiments
about the Hinduness of Tamil has many takers. As recently as 1998, when the
Hindu Protection Force sought legal intervention against Tamil archanas
claiming that "Devanagiri is supposed to be the language of communication
with God" there was widespread protest. Responding to the contention of the
Hindu Munnani that the language of worship was a matter to be decided by
the Hindu devotees alone, the Tamilar Desiya Iyakkam, a fringe Tamil
nationalist organisation headed by P Nedumaran, set up ballot boxes in
important temples in important Towns. In the best tradition of democracy,
the voting was secret and the devotees used printed ballot papers to
express their preferences. The vote was overwhelmingly =96 over 90 per cent =
=96
in favour of Tamil archanas in temples.
If this constituency endorsed the DMK because of Tamil, the BJP in its new
regional incarnation is offering them an option. They can now choose
between the DMK and the BJP. If the DMK is just Tamil, the BJP is both
Tamil and Hindu. The hindutva brigade knows what is doing. Addressing a BJP
workers=92 meet in Chennai in 1993, N Govindacharya said, "Politics in Tamil
Nadu is changing. We have to make use of this change. We should not
ridicule the Dravidian tradition. Atheism alone is not Dravidian tradition.
Can we reject Alwars, Nayanmars, and popular deities such as Ayyanar and
Maariamman as not being part of Dravidian tradition? That part of the
Dravidian tradition which emphasises equality and devotion to god is
indeed part of hindutva".
The non-brahmin saivites need not feel guilty to abandon their old ally,
the DMK, and move to the BJP. After all, the old ally itself is finding the
company of the BJP cozy.
_______

#3.

Indiaabroad.com
12 June 2000

WOMEN CAMPAIGN FOR ENTRY INTO TEMPLE

by V Radhika
June 11, 2000, 11:55 Hrs (IST)

Pune: A curfew has been clamped around a temple in Maharashtra that is
the focus of a campaign by activists who want its doors to be thrown
open to women now barred entry into the shrine.

The curfew was imposed even as 11 activists of the Shiv Sena, including
city chief Satish Maid, were arrested on Friday for flinging dirt and
hurling abuse at activists of the Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (ANS)
or 'superstition eradication committee', which is spearheading the
agitation.

The curfew, in Shingnapur village of Ahmednagar district, valid till the
night of June 11, covers an area of 100 meters around the temple.

ANS activists have been staging a demonstration and a hunger strike
outside the office of the local administrator demanding that women be
allowed to enter the 'chauthara' or platform of Shani temple as well as
to draw water from the well located within the temple premises.

Both acts are disallowed at present by temple authorities on the ground
that women's presence or their touch is "impure."

On June 5, the ANS launched a 'yatra' (trek) from Pandarpur, where
social reformer Sane Guruji had launched an agitation to demand the
entry of Dalits or "untouchables" in the temple in 1947. The ANS
activists reached Pune on June 7 and proceeded to Ahmednagar.

The yatra was to culminate in a demonstration on June 11 outside the
temple. Several women's organizations as well as other social groups
were supposed to join the demonstration.

The situation became tensed when ANS activists, appealed to the Shiv
Sena members to hold discussions on the issue of entry of women into the
temple but the Sena activists responded by throwing dirt and abusing the
agitators.

A delegation of the Bharatiya Janata Party's local unit led by city unit
chief Sunil Ramdsi met district collector Vimalendra Sharan on Friday to
demand the immediate arrest of ANS activists, alleging that law and
order situation in Ahmednagar was threatened by their agitation.

The BJP has said more than 500 of its workers will observe a hunger
strike and the local administration would be responsible if the
situation took a serious turn.

India Abroad News Service

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