Why The War On Ghosts Was Lost

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Mar 8, 1999
Dr. Hoodbhoy is professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. He is also a Chowk featured writer. See his collection at Particle Politics

In March of 1998, with great sound and fury, the
of the Islamic Republic of declared . The
was different from previous ones because this time the enemy
was well within our borders and unassailable by air power
and tank assaults. Though furtive in character and hard to
apprehend, this ghostly enemy was known to be immensely
destructive. Therefore we all clapped when the actually
began -- a against the fraudulent revenue-consuming but
student-less and teacher-less schools, popularly known as
ghost schools. Thought to number several thousand, these
suck money out of straight into the pockets of
various officials. Everyone knew that the federal and
provincial ministries, whose and
inefficiency is legendary, simply could not deal with an
enemy that had penetrated so deeply and widely. But suddenly
there was again.

Within weeks, thousands of khaki-clad exorcists of the
Army were ordered out in a blitzkrieg offensive
against phantoms, spooks and ghouls through the length and
breadth of the Punjab. As in all wars, stunning success was
claimed. learned that educational had
been dealt a mortal blow. Five thousand of these schools had
been discovered just in Punjab, said the newspapers, and
there were many thousands elsewhere. The scourge will be
eradicated from its roots, thundered the Chief Minister of
the Punjab, Mr. Shahbaz Sharif.

But a year later the drums are silent, the forgotten.
All that remains of Operation Ghost is a ghostly silence. No
report has been published, no one has been punished. What
began with a bang has ended with a whimper. The only good
news is that the cynical feel comfortable again. Expectedly
the vast network of cuts and kickbacks remains intact and
powerful interests within the state bureaucracy have proved
their resilience once more. Certainly, the system could not
have dealt with the shock of making public the list of
ghost-schools, the names of the ghost-headmasters and
ghost-teachers, the district officers who connived
with them, and the salaries regularly shelled out in
fictitious names.

Many questions lie begging for an answer. First, why did the
state suddenly decide to move against something whose
existence it had hitherto denied? Prior to the aborted
exercise, officials had said there were no ghost
schools. I have a personal recollection of this matter: four
years ago, in a public forum on in Islamabad,
the-then federal secretary of , responded to my
question by stating that ghost schools did not exist.
Thereupon I offered to reveal to him the name of a distant
relative who operates one such school near Hyderabad, and
regularly defrauds the state of huge sums every month. The
offer was instantly and angrily rejected.

A second question relates to why the report has not been
made public. Privately, some people in the ministries have
tried to justify this to me. They claim that that the army
data is unreliable, the methodology of the survey was
faulty, the criteria for what constitutes a ghost-school
were not properly laid down, etc. officials have
obviously resented the intrusion on their turf. They say,
with some justification, that calling in the army to check
WAPDA meters may be okay but no army is suited to check
whether a school is functional. Apparently school buildings
officially vacated or abandoned, or never actually built,
had been wrongly included and so the reported numbers could
be inflated. In one alleged instance, a rivalry within a
village led to wrong reporting and subsequent
mis-declaration of a properly functioning school as ghostly.
Another claim I heard was that no army personnel visited
schools of the area (as they were supposed to) and simply
wrote down what the assistant commissioner wanted of them --
a case of ghost inspections by ghost soldiers.

There may be grains of truth in these allegations and
explanations. But even if the army operation left things to
be desired, it is unlikely to be hugely wrong. Since no
documents have been released, or are likely to be released,
it is hard to say. If past experience is a guide, the truth
shall lie smothered in the dense and dark cocoons of
official secrecy, never to see the light of day. Yet another
has been lost, but may still be declared as won.

It is time for a post-mortem. We must understand why our
society has taken this defeat with such equanimity instead
of bursting with moral outrage against those scoundrels and
blackguards who steal from our innocent and ,
especially since this is but one of a score of recent
thefts. A brand new university campus with 30 buildings was
fully constructed in Khairpur, but had to be abandoned
because the buildings started collapsing even as they were
being built. The contractors made millions but no one has
been punished in spite of some scattered protests. Then,
last year one million dollars from Asian Development Bank
funds were brazenly embezzled by officials in
responsible for planning. In spite of an
FIA investigation, no arrests were made. And so one is
compelled to ask: why do people not fill the newspapers with
angry calls for , take to the streets, or "gherao"
the ministries even when such disgraceful scandals
become public?

Let me hazard one reason. In every society, some things are
considered good to have, others important, and some as
absolutely crucial. I have no that a survey of
opinions will uniformly find that ordinary Pakistanis
consider good or important. But that is it and no
more; is not considered crucial, the lifeblood of
the society's future. Correspondingly its failure is seen as
bad, regrettable, but not catastrophic. Therefore ghost
schools, shoddy textbooks, ignorant teachers, exam cheating,
and worthless universities raise concern without exciting
passion.

More importantly, perhaps, the on ghost schools was lost
because Pakistani society has become excessively tolerant.
Tolerant of , that is, though not yet of other
faiths, beliefs, or ideas. A chance encounter with two
ghosts reinforced this belief of mine. The female draws a
monthly salary of Rs 2800 but has not seen her school in a
year. She justified it on grounds that she had to pay Rs
50,000 to get her job. The male ghost is from central Punjab
and paid his MNA Rs 75,000 to get his job. Neither have a
negative self-image as criminals nor consider themselves a
whit different from other ordinary people

Curiously, neither of my two ghosts saw stealing from the
as real theft. Everyone does it, including all
the prime-ministers we have had, they said. The idea of the
common good was alien to them, as it remains to many in a
society where the connection between private and public good
still remains obscure. In further conversation, both
supported the Talibanization of . I remarked that
today's Kabul, with amputated hands and feet dangling from
trees and lamp-posts, was barbaric. Not so, was the
response, because Allah designed such punishments as a
deterrent. Clearly these two didn't think that their limbs
were at stake.

At a still deeper level the ghost-school fiasco, and the
collapse of state more generally, is an indication
of the decreasing ability of successive governments in
to enforce their writ. Other indications come from
such key areas as tax-collection, -and-order,
environmental protection, economic planning, and civil
administration. These are signs which point to a state that
is withering away, unable to assert its authority in a
positive sense. Karl Marx would be puzzled. After all, the
proletarian never came to , the ruling
classes have become steadily wealthier, and many
governments, including the present one, have been strong.
Yet the state gets weaker by the year, less and less able to
organize the forces of production, assure the safety of its
, and educate the young.

This puzzle of a strengthening ruling class and a weakening
state can be understood from the historically allocated
priorities and postures of 's state and society. On
the one hand, there is a consumptive ruling elite that lives
far beyond its means and has drowned the country in debt
and, on the other, the lop-sided expenditure on defence.
These have made it difficult to create strong institutions
in civil society for want of resources.

Still more importantly, it is the notion of what constitutes
a "good Pakistani" that has made nation-building so hard in
. The problem is that in our lexicon, patriotism is
divorced from loving the people who inhabit this particular
geographical area of the earth, or a desire to make their
lives better. Instead, the measure of an individual's
patriotism is the intensity with which he or she hates our
neighbour to the east.

It has therefore come to be that public alarm and anger are
exclusively reserved for defending the "true national
priorities" as defined by the state and efficiently guided
by the propaganda machinery it controls. Anyone seeking
proof of this assertion will find it on every 5th of
February when the Pakistani state forces all businesses and
schools to close down and orders people out in the streets.
Indeed, the standard formula for mass mobilization is
well-known and well-tested: -is-in-danger,
-is-in-flames, and -is-the-enemy. Turn the knob
slightly on any one of these and chanting crowds are
guaranteed to appear in the streets. Turn it further, and a
sea of humanity will pour into the city, burning, killing,
and ready to be killed with the full jazba-e-shahadat.

This Pavlovian conditioning has drained away vast amounts of
emotional and nervous from the people, consumed a
huge amount of psychological space, and reduced sensitivity
to pressing problems. Human nature is such that people can
get angry or worried about a few things but not everything.
A state and society that constantly perceives itself in
mortal danger and under active siege cannot get excited
about or clean drinking water. True, creating a
besieged mind-set produces a sense of unity that is
momentarily satisfying. But it is purely ephemeral, and the
price is the will, , and enthusiasm to effect
in society. This is why the ghosts keep winning and
keeps losing.