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Just Another BLOW-UP?
Mumbai: Terror`s Frankenstein on the loose
By Stephen Blank
The bombers in Mumbai, like their opposite numbers throughout the Muslim world, knew exactly what they were doing when they set off two bombs in India`s commercial capital on Monday. Their target was the fragile Indo-Pakistani minuet that has begun to show signs of actually improving relations between those two states.
If progress in those relations were actually to occur, it could only take place at the expense of the terrorist formations operating in Pakistan, Kashmir, and probably underground in India. In this respect, these terrorists emulate their counterparts in Iraq and Palestine, whose motto is the worse it is, the better it is for us. For these militant men and women, peace is the enemy.
It is also clear that people possessing so twisted a militant orientation, including belief in the merit of blowing oneself up, cannot in any way imagine a political solution to their grievances. Though their leaders are perfectly willing to exploit state support for their ulterior motives, they are ultimately a wild card who almost inevitably escape the bonds of control that the state which supports them tries to fasten on them.
Like Frankenstein, they refuse to be part of someone else`s experiment, and strike out on their own, causing havoc wherever they go. The terrorist groups that organized this latest bombing in Mumbai are thus Pakistan`s Frankenstein for they almost certainly issued forth, at some stage, from one or another of the groups sponsored and supported - either directly or indirectly - by Pakistan and its intelligence organs, such as the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).
This episode duly confirms that the decisive factor that makes South Asia so dangerous is the fact that, bearing all the aforementioned factors in mind, the terrorists, Pakistan, and India constantly act in reckless and provocative ways in order to stimulate or make the most of a crisis.
Indeed, the current crisis, triggered by the terror attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, America`s ensuing ``war against terrorism``, itself part of Afghanistan`s civil war, and subsequent terrorist attacks against Kashmir`s and India`s parliaments in Srinagar and New Delhi on October 1 and December 13, 2001, shows that the terrorists can now act increasingly autonomously to trigger a much grander Indo-Pakistani conflagration.
Pakistan, as a US ally against the Taliban, has lost some measure of official control over these groups and over disaffected pro-Taliban and other officials in Pakistan`s military and intelligence community who sponsored those attacks to oppose President General Pervez Musharraf`s pro-American policies.
Therefore, to a certain but undefined degree, terrorist groups, formerly or even presently backed by elements of Pakistan`s army and intelligence agencies, most prominently the ISI, possess a considerable tactical and strategic initiative. The terrorists and their backers could autonomously launch attacks that might overwhelm both states` political leadership and trigger a general war, or at least frustrate efforts to prevent war from breaking out.
The nearest historical analogy to this situation, albeit one that should not be overdrawn, is the Austro-Serb relationship in 1914. Serbian terrorists, operating with Belgrade`s support, but acting on their own, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg Empire. They hoped and believed, rightly as it turned out, that this would start a general crisis or war that would lead to Austria`s disintegration and Serbian territorial enlargement. Instead, World War I and a more general European devastation was the result.
Presumably, we have advanced beyond the statecraft of 1914. But that experience and analogy obligates leaders and analysts to proceed with utmost caution and to draw the appropriate lessons.
The most urgent lesson is that India and Pakistan must not give the terrorists the war that they want. A second lesson that must be learned from these crises is that states sponsor terrorism at their own risk and that this risk increases over time. Therefore, Pakistan must do more than merely arrest a few terrorists, release them and make statements condemning terrorism while arguing that one must draw a distinction between them and allegedly responsible ``freedom fighters``.
These distinctions are weasel words and are common to terrorists like the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hizballah, the Irish Republican Army, etc, all of whom seek to disrupt the ability of publics and governments to think straight about terrorism and unhinge their targets` polities.
In fact, the situation now makes clear that Pakistan, for its own safety, and not because India now demands it, must conclusively renounce terrorism as an instrument of its foreign and defense policies.
To deny the terrorists the strategic outcomes and the war that they seek we must understand what those outcomes and that war are. Obviously, the terrorist groups inside Pakistan and Kashmir seek to destroy or at least unhinge Indian rule in Kashmir to the point where Kashmir either completely goes out of control or India`s sovereignty is effectively compromised beyond any point of return.
Then, they believe, Kashmir will ultimately either become self-governing, autonomous, independent, or perhaps be partitioned or revert entirely to Pakistan. Terror and continuing guerrilla violence are long-established strategies towards those ends.
But the continuing attacks, seen in the context of the pervasive international resort to terrorism to achieve strategic goals, the attacks on the United States, and the Afghan civil war suggest much broader ambitions than merely destabilizing Indian rule in Kashmir. These continuing attacks strongly point to a wider strategic design whose objectives include, but transcend, Kashmir.
Terrorism is rarely, if ever, random. It is undertaken by intelligent, highly motivated and trained cadres to obtain specific strategic objectives that would otherwise (or at least so they believe) be denied to them. And its purveyors clearly embody a distinctive ethos that informs their perception of strategic opportunities and risks. Certainly, that was the case in this bombing in Mumbai. But there are also numerous examples from both South Asia and other theaters the world over. But today the most critical theater, or second front, is inside Pakistan, which is why these attacks are so provocative.
Foreign analysts have long known that Pakistan, despite its being a nuclear power with a respectable conventional army, is in danger of degenerating into ungovernability across a wide swath of its key cities and territories. In Pakistan, landowners, military and intelligence officials and Muslim fundamentalists all contend for power in authoritarian and corrupt fashion.
And large sums earned by drug running both inside the state and abroad are used, in part, to fund terrorists, or the Taliban, and extreme Islamic groups who are aligned with either or both those groups. Hence it would not take relatively much to destabilize Pakistan, a nuclear state, and unseat its government, or at least this is what the fanatics believe. The crisis the terrorists and their supporters hope to provoke aims to bring about precisely the kind of outcome the world most fears, a general Indo-Pakistani war and/or general crisis in Pakistan. The terrorists clearly know that India is generally thought to enjoy a substantial conventional superiority over Pakistan. Therefore, they hope to provoke the following outcomes.
First, many of them believe their own propaganda about the internal irresolution, corruption and weakness of India and the belief that they can exploit that, plus the deterrence afforded by Pakistan`s nuclear arsenal to defeat India. Second, they also probably believe - and this is not necessarily contradictory to the first belief - that even if, or especially if, Pakistan loses, the ``traitorous`` Musharraf government will fall and a regime more supportive of their objectives and of the Taliban, not to mention perhaps Osama bin Laden or his successor, will arise in Pakistan.
The terrorists most assuredly seek to strike at New Delhi, but even more importantly, seek to destroy Pakistan`s ability to act as a pro-American outpost in the ``war on terrorism`` because Pakistan is the strategic rear of this American war. Thus the terrorists want to unhinge Pakistan and cause a general civil war there in the belief that the ensuing upheaval will lead to a government amenable to their ends and to those of their brother insurgents in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
This could further escalate the Afghan civil war, which in itself is a microcosm or one local theater of the broader civil war within Islamic societies. In line with their and bin Laden`s beliefs, such global outbreaks would undo any effort by America and its Muslim supporters to protect their investment in a particular kind of Middle East and Pakistan and supposedly ultimately bring about the withdrawal of Western power from the Muslim world.
A general conflagration arising out of an Indo-Pakistani war that Pakistan would almost inevitably lose is precisely what they seek and they also seem extremely complacent about the nuclear contingencies that might arise from their scenarios. Unfortunately, such complacency is not available either to Pakistan`s, India`s or to other governments. Therefore, the prospect of a general war with Pakistan is a very sobering one indeed.
Pakistan thus now reaps the results of its own support for terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and at home. These groups and their protectors have made clear their determination to control the policies of the government in Islamabad, even if it means domestic terror inside Pakistan.
Thus, they have already assassinated the brother of Pakistan`s new interior minister who railed against political power in the hands of half-illiterate mullahs. They have become Pakistan`s Frankenstein, monsters who have eluded their masters` control and then turn on their masters for trying to control them.
Pakistan must now realize that creating such groups eventually leads them and not their masters to take control of the strategic initiative that could determine these masters` fate. But because domestic support for them, especially in the military-intelligence apparatus, is so great, Musharraf`s ability to act decisively against them and go beyond the hitherto essentially cosmetic measures taken is dubious. Indeed, doing so could bring about their goal: collapse of his regime and an internal civil war that will undermine not just Pakistan but all of South Asia and the ``war on terrorism``.
Pakistan`s military and intelligence agencies have acted in the belief that they could torment India with impunity and prevent it from becoming a stable hegemon over South Asia - India`s strategic goal - either by virtue of their foreign alliances or their own military power. They also sought to create Islamic regimes in Afghanistan to deny it first to the Soviets and second to India, which has always regarded Afghanistan as its strategic rear against Islamabad. Therefore, Pakistan`s present situation graphically testifies to the fact that states who sponsor terrorism risk becoming beholden to that terrorism, or to its anger against them and internal disaffection from those who have carried out that policy enthusiastically when official policy must change.
Gambling on terror thus turns out to be a high-risk venture; one that may ultimately force the gambler to become a gladiator in the wrong war. While states may sponsor terrorism profitably for a long time; ultimately either that card becomes unprofitable and the advantages derived from it diminishes; or it becomes a creation that escapes its creator`s controls and threatens to involve it in highly dangerous wars.
Those who wish to strike at terrorism in turn must calculate quite precisely exactly what outcome they want to achieve, thereby and how best to do so. For if they underplay or overplay their hand, they, too, can end up losing control of their own policy and strategy, and even of some of their territory. And where nuclear arms are potentially involved, that loss of strategic control or of a state`s integrity, precisely what the terrorists hope to achieve, becomes the most dangerous possibility of all.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of international security affairs residing in Harrisburg, PA.
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 26, 2003 05:07 am
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EH27Df01.htmlMumbai: Terror`s Frankenstein on the loose
By Stephen Blank
The bombers in Mumbai, like their opposite numbers throughout the Muslim world, knew exactly what they were doing when they set off two bombs in India`s commercial capital on Monday. Their target was the fragile Indo-Pakistani minuet that has begun to show signs of actually improving relations between those two states.
If progress in those relations were actually to occur, it could only take place at the expense of the terrorist formations operating in Pakistan, Kashmir, and probably underground in India. In this respect, these terrorists emulate their counterparts in Iraq and Palestine, whose motto is the worse it is, the better it is for us. For these militant men and women, peace is the enemy.
It is also clear that people possessing so twisted a militant orientation, including belief in the merit of blowing oneself up, cannot in any way imagine a political solution to their grievances. Though their leaders are perfectly willing to exploit state support for their ulterior motives, they are ultimately a wild card who almost inevitably escape the bonds of control that the state which supports them tries to fasten on them.
Like Frankenstein, they refuse to be part of someone else`s experiment, and strike out on their own, causing havoc wherever they go. The terrorist groups that organized this latest bombing in Mumbai are thus Pakistan`s Frankenstein for they almost certainly issued forth, at some stage, from one or another of the groups sponsored and supported - either directly or indirectly - by Pakistan and its intelligence organs, such as the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).
This episode duly confirms that the decisive factor that makes South Asia so dangerous is the fact that, bearing all the aforementioned factors in mind, the terrorists, Pakistan, and India constantly act in reckless and provocative ways in order to stimulate or make the most of a crisis.
Indeed, the current crisis, triggered by the terror attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, America`s ensuing ``war against terrorism``, itself part of Afghanistan`s civil war, and subsequent terrorist attacks against Kashmir`s and India`s parliaments in Srinagar and New Delhi on October 1 and December 13, 2001, shows that the terrorists can now act increasingly autonomously to trigger a much grander Indo-Pakistani conflagration.
Pakistan, as a US ally against the Taliban, has lost some measure of official control over these groups and over disaffected pro-Taliban and other officials in Pakistan`s military and intelligence community who sponsored those attacks to oppose President General Pervez Musharraf`s pro-American policies.
Therefore, to a certain but undefined degree, terrorist groups, formerly or even presently backed by elements of Pakistan`s army and intelligence agencies, most prominently the ISI, possess a considerable tactical and strategic initiative. The terrorists and their backers could autonomously launch attacks that might overwhelm both states` political leadership and trigger a general war, or at least frustrate efforts to prevent war from breaking out.
The nearest historical analogy to this situation, albeit one that should not be overdrawn, is the Austro-Serb relationship in 1914. Serbian terrorists, operating with Belgrade`s support, but acting on their own, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg Empire. They hoped and believed, rightly as it turned out, that this would start a general crisis or war that would lead to Austria`s disintegration and Serbian territorial enlargement. Instead, World War I and a more general European devastation was the result.
Presumably, we have advanced beyond the statecraft of 1914. But that experience and analogy obligates leaders and analysts to proceed with utmost caution and to draw the appropriate lessons.
The most urgent lesson is that India and Pakistan must not give the terrorists the war that they want. A second lesson that must be learned from these crises is that states sponsor terrorism at their own risk and that this risk increases over time. Therefore, Pakistan must do more than merely arrest a few terrorists, release them and make statements condemning terrorism while arguing that one must draw a distinction between them and allegedly responsible ``freedom fighters``.
These distinctions are weasel words and are common to terrorists like the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hizballah, the Irish Republican Army, etc, all of whom seek to disrupt the ability of publics and governments to think straight about terrorism and unhinge their targets` polities.
In fact, the situation now makes clear that Pakistan, for its own safety, and not because India now demands it, must conclusively renounce terrorism as an instrument of its foreign and defense policies.
To deny the terrorists the strategic outcomes and the war that they seek we must understand what those outcomes and that war are. Obviously, the terrorist groups inside Pakistan and Kashmir seek to destroy or at least unhinge Indian rule in Kashmir to the point where Kashmir either completely goes out of control or India`s sovereignty is effectively compromised beyond any point of return.
Then, they believe, Kashmir will ultimately either become self-governing, autonomous, independent, or perhaps be partitioned or revert entirely to Pakistan. Terror and continuing guerrilla violence are long-established strategies towards those ends.
But the continuing attacks, seen in the context of the pervasive international resort to terrorism to achieve strategic goals, the attacks on the United States, and the Afghan civil war suggest much broader ambitions than merely destabilizing Indian rule in Kashmir. These continuing attacks strongly point to a wider strategic design whose objectives include, but transcend, Kashmir.
Terrorism is rarely, if ever, random. It is undertaken by intelligent, highly motivated and trained cadres to obtain specific strategic objectives that would otherwise (or at least so they believe) be denied to them. And its purveyors clearly embody a distinctive ethos that informs their perception of strategic opportunities and risks. Certainly, that was the case in this bombing in Mumbai. But there are also numerous examples from both South Asia and other theaters the world over. But today the most critical theater, or second front, is inside Pakistan, which is why these attacks are so provocative.
Foreign analysts have long known that Pakistan, despite its being a nuclear power with a respectable conventional army, is in danger of degenerating into ungovernability across a wide swath of its key cities and territories. In Pakistan, landowners, military and intelligence officials and Muslim fundamentalists all contend for power in authoritarian and corrupt fashion.
And large sums earned by drug running both inside the state and abroad are used, in part, to fund terrorists, or the Taliban, and extreme Islamic groups who are aligned with either or both those groups. Hence it would not take relatively much to destabilize Pakistan, a nuclear state, and unseat its government, or at least this is what the fanatics believe. The crisis the terrorists and their supporters hope to provoke aims to bring about precisely the kind of outcome the world most fears, a general Indo-Pakistani war and/or general crisis in Pakistan. The terrorists clearly know that India is generally thought to enjoy a substantial conventional superiority over Pakistan. Therefore, they hope to provoke the following outcomes.
First, many of them believe their own propaganda about the internal irresolution, corruption and weakness of India and the belief that they can exploit that, plus the deterrence afforded by Pakistan`s nuclear arsenal to defeat India. Second, they also probably believe - and this is not necessarily contradictory to the first belief - that even if, or especially if, Pakistan loses, the ``traitorous`` Musharraf government will fall and a regime more supportive of their objectives and of the Taliban, not to mention perhaps Osama bin Laden or his successor, will arise in Pakistan.
The terrorists most assuredly seek to strike at New Delhi, but even more importantly, seek to destroy Pakistan`s ability to act as a pro-American outpost in the ``war on terrorism`` because Pakistan is the strategic rear of this American war. Thus the terrorists want to unhinge Pakistan and cause a general civil war there in the belief that the ensuing upheaval will lead to a government amenable to their ends and to those of their brother insurgents in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
This could further escalate the Afghan civil war, which in itself is a microcosm or one local theater of the broader civil war within Islamic societies. In line with their and bin Laden`s beliefs, such global outbreaks would undo any effort by America and its Muslim supporters to protect their investment in a particular kind of Middle East and Pakistan and supposedly ultimately bring about the withdrawal of Western power from the Muslim world.
A general conflagration arising out of an Indo-Pakistani war that Pakistan would almost inevitably lose is precisely what they seek and they also seem extremely complacent about the nuclear contingencies that might arise from their scenarios. Unfortunately, such complacency is not available either to Pakistan`s, India`s or to other governments. Therefore, the prospect of a general war with Pakistan is a very sobering one indeed.
Pakistan thus now reaps the results of its own support for terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and at home. These groups and their protectors have made clear their determination to control the policies of the government in Islamabad, even if it means domestic terror inside Pakistan.
Thus, they have already assassinated the brother of Pakistan`s new interior minister who railed against political power in the hands of half-illiterate mullahs. They have become Pakistan`s Frankenstein, monsters who have eluded their masters` control and then turn on their masters for trying to control them.
Pakistan must now realize that creating such groups eventually leads them and not their masters to take control of the strategic initiative that could determine these masters` fate. But because domestic support for them, especially in the military-intelligence apparatus, is so great, Musharraf`s ability to act decisively against them and go beyond the hitherto essentially cosmetic measures taken is dubious. Indeed, doing so could bring about their goal: collapse of his regime and an internal civil war that will undermine not just Pakistan but all of South Asia and the ``war on terrorism``.
Pakistan`s military and intelligence agencies have acted in the belief that they could torment India with impunity and prevent it from becoming a stable hegemon over South Asia - India`s strategic goal - either by virtue of their foreign alliances or their own military power. They also sought to create Islamic regimes in Afghanistan to deny it first to the Soviets and second to India, which has always regarded Afghanistan as its strategic rear against Islamabad. Therefore, Pakistan`s present situation graphically testifies to the fact that states who sponsor terrorism risk becoming beholden to that terrorism, or to its anger against them and internal disaffection from those who have carried out that policy enthusiastically when official policy must change.
Gambling on terror thus turns out to be a high-risk venture; one that may ultimately force the gambler to become a gladiator in the wrong war. While states may sponsor terrorism profitably for a long time; ultimately either that card becomes unprofitable and the advantages derived from it diminishes; or it becomes a creation that escapes its creator`s controls and threatens to involve it in highly dangerous wars.
Those who wish to strike at terrorism in turn must calculate quite precisely exactly what outcome they want to achieve, thereby and how best to do so. For if they underplay or overplay their hand, they, too, can end up losing control of their own policy and strategy, and even of some of their territory. And where nuclear arms are potentially involved, that loss of strategic control or of a state`s integrity, precisely what the terrorists hope to achieve, becomes the most dangerous possibility of all.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of international security affairs residing in Harrisburg, PA.
Just Another BLOW-UP?
IAN MACKINNON
INDIA’S deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, said yesterday that government had few clues as to who was behind the bombings.
But previous blasts in the city were the work of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), he said, assisted by the Islamic militants of Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan.
Paramilitary forces and bomb disposal squad officers were being rushed to the city last night to beef up security ahead of the arrival in Bombay today of Mr Advani and the Congress opposition leader, Sonia Gandhi.
Police in Bombay said the material used in yesterday’s terror attacks had been the same as that deployed in the six blasts in the past eight months. It suggested the student militants of SIMI could have carried out the latest deadly attacks, aimed at the Gujarati community near the India Gate monument. Lacking a claim for responsibility , security and political analysts yesterday hesitated to point the finger in yesterday’s atrocities.
One possible trigger for the attacks came yesterday with the release of a report by Indian archeologists, saying they had found evidence of a temple beneath the ruins of a 16th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. The mosque at the bitterly disputed holy site was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.
More recently, ethnic violence in Gujarat state, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu gangs, started after a Muslim mob set fire a train carrying Hindu pilgrims back from Ayodhya.
One theory suggests the student group has recruited heavily among Gujarat’s disaffected Muslim youth, but because of difficulties operating there may have chosen to exact their price on Bombay, perhaps assisted by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
``That would be an extremely devastating precedent,`` said Varun Sani, of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies. ``It would be a nightmare for the Indian state. Pakistan has tried for decades to radicalise India’s Muslims - but failed.``
Yet if Pakistan-backed militants are the culprits the jury is still out on the effect it might have on the nascent peace process between India and Pakistan.
New Delhi might consider it a ``freelance`` operation designed to destabilise the improving relations and discount it as it did with an bloody assault on an army camp in Jammu last month.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=938192003
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 26, 2003 05:07 am
India`s nightmare: Pakistan fuelling Muslim uprising IAN MACKINNON
INDIA’S deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, said yesterday that government had few clues as to who was behind the bombings.
But previous blasts in the city were the work of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), he said, assisted by the Islamic militants of Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan.
Paramilitary forces and bomb disposal squad officers were being rushed to the city last night to beef up security ahead of the arrival in Bombay today of Mr Advani and the Congress opposition leader, Sonia Gandhi.
Police in Bombay said the material used in yesterday’s terror attacks had been the same as that deployed in the six blasts in the past eight months. It suggested the student militants of SIMI could have carried out the latest deadly attacks, aimed at the Gujarati community near the India Gate monument. Lacking a claim for responsibility , security and political analysts yesterday hesitated to point the finger in yesterday’s atrocities.
One possible trigger for the attacks came yesterday with the release of a report by Indian archeologists, saying they had found evidence of a temple beneath the ruins of a 16th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. The mosque at the bitterly disputed holy site was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.
More recently, ethnic violence in Gujarat state, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu gangs, started after a Muslim mob set fire a train carrying Hindu pilgrims back from Ayodhya.
One theory suggests the student group has recruited heavily among Gujarat’s disaffected Muslim youth, but because of difficulties operating there may have chosen to exact their price on Bombay, perhaps assisted by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
``That would be an extremely devastating precedent,`` said Varun Sani, of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies. ``It would be a nightmare for the Indian state. Pakistan has tried for decades to radicalise India’s Muslims - but failed.``
Yet if Pakistan-backed militants are the culprits the jury is still out on the effect it might have on the nascent peace process between India and Pakistan.
New Delhi might consider it a ``freelance`` operation designed to destabilise the improving relations and discount it as it did with an bloody assault on an army camp in Jammu last month.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=938192003
Just Another BLOW-UP?
India Mourns for Bombay Bombing Victims
Muslims, Hindus Alike Mourn for the 46 People Killed in Bombay Terrorist Bombings
The Associated Press
MUMBAI, India Aug. 26 —
Hindus and Muslims alike mourned on Tuesday for victims of the worst terrorist attack in a decade in India`s financial heart of Bombay, while the death toll from the twin car bombings rose to 46, with 150 people wounded.
As relatives went to morgues to claim their dead or visited the injured in hospitals, investigators of Monday`s bombings focused their probe on Muslim militants.
These included groups that Hindu-majority India alleges are backed by Muslim Pakistan sparking fears of increasing tensions just when relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors appeared on the mend.
India`s Deputy Prime minister Lak Krishna Advani told reporters Tuesday that two of the people killed in the attack may be Pakistanis, but he did not say if he thought they were bombers. Advani said that two bodies were still unclaimed.
``I think they are Pakistani nationals,`` Advani said, refusing to explain how he had come to that conclusion.
Pakistan condemned the carnage as ``wanton targeting of civilians,`` and the United Nations and the United States also denounced the attack.
``Acts of terror are intended to sow fear and chaos among free peoples,`` President Bush said in a statement. ``I hope that the perpetrators of these murders will be identified quickly and brought to justice.``
Indian police and officials said they had no direct evidence of who carried out the bombings and no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed Hindus as well as Muslims.
``I can say it is a terrorist group, but which group, we can`t say,`` said Kripa Shankar, the home minister of Maharashtra state where Mumbai is located.
Terrorist attacks in the past have triggered severe tit-for-tat sectarian violence, and Muslims in Mumbai worried that they would be blamed by Hindus.
``There is a fear gripping the city,`` Muslim community leader and businessman Sohail Rokadia said. Overnight, roads in several parts of the city usually clogged with traffic were deserted.
But the metropolis of 16 million people, India`s largest, appeared calm as daybreak brought the usual hectic activity. Office-goers crowded pedestrian crossings on their way to work and schoolchildren were seen off by their parents.
The bombs in two taxis exploded minutes apart, ripping through a crowded jewelry market, the Zaveri Bazaar, and in front of a colonial-era tourist attraction, the Gateway of India. The blasts shattered window panes of the luxury Taj Mahal hotel facing the gateway and several other buildings.
Many people were being interrogated, including the driver of the taxi that blew up in the parking lot in front of the Gateway of India.
The Indian Express newspaper said police have launched a manhunt for five suspects including two women who hired the taxi to go to the Gateway of India. They got off the taxi, purportedly for lunch, leaving a bag inside. The driver also was strolling outside when the car blew up, the Express said. The driver of the second cab at the Zaveri Bazaar died in the explosion.
The timing of the blasts raised concerns they were linked to a dispute over a religious site in the northern city of Ayodhya claimed by both Hindus and Muslims that has been the source of much bloodshed in the past.
The bombings came hours after the release of a long-awaited archaeological report on the site that itself showed divisions over the site`s history.
Many Mumbai residents said the bombers seemed intent on triggering strife between India`s two largest religious groups, and recalled the horror of the last large-scale attack in the city serial blasts in March 1993 that killed more than 250 people.
On Tuesday, the Hindu nationalist World Hindu Council demanded an immediate ban on Islamic schools, and said its members will hold nationwide demonstrations on Wednesday.
Police Commissioner Ranjit Sharma said investigators were focusing on the Students Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, a militant Muslim students` group outlawed in 2001, and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. The latter is one of more than a dozen Islamic rebel groups fighting Indian security forces in Kashmir since 1989, seeking independence for the Himalayan province or its merger with Muslim-dominated Pakistan.
Advani also suggested the involvement of SIMI and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, citing a string of blasts in Mumbai in recent months blamed on the two groups.
India accuses Pakistan of aiding the Laskhar-e-Tayyaba, an allegation Islamabad denies.
The two neighbors which have gone to war three times since independence from Britain, twice over Kashmir have made recent moves toward reconciliation, including reinstating diplomats and restoring bus links.
In Zaveri Bazaar, the city`s gold and jewelry trading hub, many shops are owned by Hindus but many of its artisans are Muslims. The Gateway of India arch, a landmark built by British colonizers to mark a royal visit, is a popular lunchtime spot for both Muslims and Hindus.
Women wailed as the body of 19-year-old tourist guide Krishna Thakur, wrapped in a white shroud and marigold flowers, was taken away for cremation.
A few miles away at a Muslim burial ground, mourner prayed as the bodies of Sadique Ahmad, 42, and his nephew, Mohammed Sohail Latif Wadiwala, 21, were lowered into separate graves.
``Even after the blasts, both Hindus and Muslims were together in the rescue,`` Rokadia, the Muslim leader, said before the ceremony.
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 26, 2003 05:07 am
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20030826_255.htmlIndia Mourns for Bombay Bombing Victims
Muslims, Hindus Alike Mourn for the 46 People Killed in Bombay Terrorist Bombings
The Associated Press
MUMBAI, India Aug. 26 —
Hindus and Muslims alike mourned on Tuesday for victims of the worst terrorist attack in a decade in India`s financial heart of Bombay, while the death toll from the twin car bombings rose to 46, with 150 people wounded.
As relatives went to morgues to claim their dead or visited the injured in hospitals, investigators of Monday`s bombings focused their probe on Muslim militants.
These included groups that Hindu-majority India alleges are backed by Muslim Pakistan sparking fears of increasing tensions just when relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors appeared on the mend.
India`s Deputy Prime minister Lak Krishna Advani told reporters Tuesday that two of the people killed in the attack may be Pakistanis, but he did not say if he thought they were bombers. Advani said that two bodies were still unclaimed.
``I think they are Pakistani nationals,`` Advani said, refusing to explain how he had come to that conclusion.
Pakistan condemned the carnage as ``wanton targeting of civilians,`` and the United Nations and the United States also denounced the attack.
``Acts of terror are intended to sow fear and chaos among free peoples,`` President Bush said in a statement. ``I hope that the perpetrators of these murders will be identified quickly and brought to justice.``
Indian police and officials said they had no direct evidence of who carried out the bombings and no group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed Hindus as well as Muslims.
``I can say it is a terrorist group, but which group, we can`t say,`` said Kripa Shankar, the home minister of Maharashtra state where Mumbai is located.
Terrorist attacks in the past have triggered severe tit-for-tat sectarian violence, and Muslims in Mumbai worried that they would be blamed by Hindus.
``There is a fear gripping the city,`` Muslim community leader and businessman Sohail Rokadia said. Overnight, roads in several parts of the city usually clogged with traffic were deserted.
But the metropolis of 16 million people, India`s largest, appeared calm as daybreak brought the usual hectic activity. Office-goers crowded pedestrian crossings on their way to work and schoolchildren were seen off by their parents.
The bombs in two taxis exploded minutes apart, ripping through a crowded jewelry market, the Zaveri Bazaar, and in front of a colonial-era tourist attraction, the Gateway of India. The blasts shattered window panes of the luxury Taj Mahal hotel facing the gateway and several other buildings.
Many people were being interrogated, including the driver of the taxi that blew up in the parking lot in front of the Gateway of India.
The Indian Express newspaper said police have launched a manhunt for five suspects including two women who hired the taxi to go to the Gateway of India. They got off the taxi, purportedly for lunch, leaving a bag inside. The driver also was strolling outside when the car blew up, the Express said. The driver of the second cab at the Zaveri Bazaar died in the explosion.
The timing of the blasts raised concerns they were linked to a dispute over a religious site in the northern city of Ayodhya claimed by both Hindus and Muslims that has been the source of much bloodshed in the past.
The bombings came hours after the release of a long-awaited archaeological report on the site that itself showed divisions over the site`s history.
Many Mumbai residents said the bombers seemed intent on triggering strife between India`s two largest religious groups, and recalled the horror of the last large-scale attack in the city serial blasts in March 1993 that killed more than 250 people.
On Tuesday, the Hindu nationalist World Hindu Council demanded an immediate ban on Islamic schools, and said its members will hold nationwide demonstrations on Wednesday.
Police Commissioner Ranjit Sharma said investigators were focusing on the Students Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, a militant Muslim students` group outlawed in 2001, and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. The latter is one of more than a dozen Islamic rebel groups fighting Indian security forces in Kashmir since 1989, seeking independence for the Himalayan province or its merger with Muslim-dominated Pakistan.
Advani also suggested the involvement of SIMI and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, citing a string of blasts in Mumbai in recent months blamed on the two groups.
India accuses Pakistan of aiding the Laskhar-e-Tayyaba, an allegation Islamabad denies.
The two neighbors which have gone to war three times since independence from Britain, twice over Kashmir have made recent moves toward reconciliation, including reinstating diplomats and restoring bus links.
In Zaveri Bazaar, the city`s gold and jewelry trading hub, many shops are owned by Hindus but many of its artisans are Muslims. The Gateway of India arch, a landmark built by British colonizers to mark a royal visit, is a popular lunchtime spot for both Muslims and Hindus.
Women wailed as the body of 19-year-old tourist guide Krishna Thakur, wrapped in a white shroud and marigold flowers, was taken away for cremation.
A few miles away at a Muslim burial ground, mourner prayed as the bodies of Sadique Ahmad, 42, and his nephew, Mohammed Sohail Latif Wadiwala, 21, were lowered into separate graves.
``Even after the blasts, both Hindus and Muslims were together in the rescue,`` Rokadia, the Muslim leader, said before the ceremony.
I am Not a Patriot
IAN MACKINNON
INDIA’S deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, said yesterday that government had few clues as to who was behind the bombings.
But previous blasts in the city were the work of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), he said, assisted by the Islamic militants of Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan.
Paramilitary forces and bomb disposal squad officers were being rushed to the city last night to beef up security ahead of the arrival in Bombay today of Mr Advani and the Congress opposition leader, Sonia Gandhi.
Police in Bombay said the material used in yesterday’s terror attacks had been the same as that deployed in the six blasts in the past eight months. It suggested the student militants of SIMI could have carried out the latest deadly attacks, aimed at the Gujarati community near the India Gate monument. Lacking a claim for responsibility , security and political analysts yesterday hesitated to point the finger in yesterday’s atrocities.
One possible trigger for the attacks came yesterday with the release of a report by Indian archeologists, saying they had found evidence of a temple beneath the ruins of a 16th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. The mosque at the bitterly disputed holy site was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.
More recently, ethnic violence in Gujarat state, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu gangs, started after a Muslim mob set fire a train carrying Hindu pilgrims back from Ayodhya.
One theory suggests the student group has recruited heavily among Gujarat’s disaffected Muslim youth, but because of difficulties operating there may have chosen to exact their price on Bombay, perhaps assisted by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
``That would be an extremely devastating precedent,`` said Varun Sani, of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies. ``It would be a nightmare for the Indian state. Pakistan has tried for decades to radicalise India’s Muslims - but failed.``
Yet if Pakistan-backed militants are the culprits the jury is still out on the effect it might have on the nascent peace process between India and Pakistan.
New Delhi might consider it a ``freelance`` operation designed to destabilise the improving relations and discount it as it did with an bloody assault on an army camp in Jammu last month.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=938192003
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 26, 2003 05:07 am
India`s nightmare: Pakistan fuelling Muslim uprising IAN MACKINNON
INDIA’S deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, said yesterday that government had few clues as to who was behind the bombings.
But previous blasts in the city were the work of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), he said, assisted by the Islamic militants of Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan.
Paramilitary forces and bomb disposal squad officers were being rushed to the city last night to beef up security ahead of the arrival in Bombay today of Mr Advani and the Congress opposition leader, Sonia Gandhi.
Police in Bombay said the material used in yesterday’s terror attacks had been the same as that deployed in the six blasts in the past eight months. It suggested the student militants of SIMI could have carried out the latest deadly attacks, aimed at the Gujarati community near the India Gate monument. Lacking a claim for responsibility , security and political analysts yesterday hesitated to point the finger in yesterday’s atrocities.
One possible trigger for the attacks came yesterday with the release of a report by Indian archeologists, saying they had found evidence of a temple beneath the ruins of a 16th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. The mosque at the bitterly disputed holy site was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.
More recently, ethnic violence in Gujarat state, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu gangs, started after a Muslim mob set fire a train carrying Hindu pilgrims back from Ayodhya.
One theory suggests the student group has recruited heavily among Gujarat’s disaffected Muslim youth, but because of difficulties operating there may have chosen to exact their price on Bombay, perhaps assisted by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
``That would be an extremely devastating precedent,`` said Varun Sani, of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies. ``It would be a nightmare for the Indian state. Pakistan has tried for decades to radicalise India’s Muslims - but failed.``
Yet if Pakistan-backed militants are the culprits the jury is still out on the effect it might have on the nascent peace process between India and Pakistan.
New Delhi might consider it a ``freelance`` operation designed to destabilise the improving relations and discount it as it did with an bloody assault on an army camp in Jammu last month.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=938192003
Can Muslims Become Part of Mainstream Nationalism?
IAN MACKINNON
INDIA’S deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, said yesterday that government had few clues as to who was behind the bombings.
But previous blasts in the city were the work of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), he said, assisted by the Islamic militants of Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan.
Paramilitary forces and bomb disposal squad officers were being rushed to the city last night to beef up security ahead of the arrival in Bombay today of Mr Advani and the Congress opposition leader, Sonia Gandhi.
Police in Bombay said the material used in yesterday’s terror attacks had been the same as that deployed in the six blasts in the past eight months. It suggested the student militants of SIMI could have carried out the latest deadly attacks, aimed at the Gujarati community near the India Gate monument. Lacking a claim for responsibility , security and political analysts yesterday hesitated to point the finger in yesterday’s atrocities.
One possible trigger for the attacks came yesterday with the release of a report by Indian archeologists, saying they had found evidence of a temple beneath the ruins of a 16th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. The mosque at the bitterly disputed holy site was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.
More recently, ethnic violence in Gujarat state, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu gangs, started after a Muslim mob set fire a train carrying Hindu pilgrims back from Ayodhya.
One theory suggests the student group has recruited heavily among Gujarat’s disaffected Muslim youth, but because of difficulties operating there may have chosen to exact their price on Bombay, perhaps assisted by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
``That would be an extremely devastating precedent,`` said Varun Sani, of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies. ``It would be a nightmare for the Indian state. Pakistan has tried for decades to radicalise India’s Muslims - but failed.``
Yet if Pakistan-backed militants are the culprits the jury is still out on the effect it might have on the nascent peace process between India and Pakistan.
New Delhi might consider it a ``freelance`` operation designed to destabilise the improving relations and discount it as it did with an bloody assault on an army camp in Jammu last month.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=938192003
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 26, 2003 04:38 am
India`s nightmare: Pakistan fuelling Muslim uprising IAN MACKINNON
INDIA’S deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, said yesterday that government had few clues as to who was behind the bombings.
But previous blasts in the city were the work of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), he said, assisted by the Islamic militants of Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan.
Paramilitary forces and bomb disposal squad officers were being rushed to the city last night to beef up security ahead of the arrival in Bombay today of Mr Advani and the Congress opposition leader, Sonia Gandhi.
Police in Bombay said the material used in yesterday’s terror attacks had been the same as that deployed in the six blasts in the past eight months. It suggested the student militants of SIMI could have carried out the latest deadly attacks, aimed at the Gujarati community near the India Gate monument. Lacking a claim for responsibility , security and political analysts yesterday hesitated to point the finger in yesterday’s atrocities.
One possible trigger for the attacks came yesterday with the release of a report by Indian archeologists, saying they had found evidence of a temple beneath the ruins of a 16th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. The mosque at the bitterly disputed holy site was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.
More recently, ethnic violence in Gujarat state, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu gangs, started after a Muslim mob set fire a train carrying Hindu pilgrims back from Ayodhya.
One theory suggests the student group has recruited heavily among Gujarat’s disaffected Muslim youth, but because of difficulties operating there may have chosen to exact their price on Bombay, perhaps assisted by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
``That would be an extremely devastating precedent,`` said Varun Sani, of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies. ``It would be a nightmare for the Indian state. Pakistan has tried for decades to radicalise India’s Muslims - but failed.``
Yet if Pakistan-backed militants are the culprits the jury is still out on the effect it might have on the nascent peace process between India and Pakistan.
New Delhi might consider it a ``freelance`` operation designed to destabilise the improving relations and discount it as it did with an bloody assault on an army camp in Jammu last month.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=938192003
Bollywood: The Show Must Grow On
Contemporary, yet historical
A period film about urgent current issues is being shot in Hampi. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN tries to find out something more about ``Anaahat`` on the sets.
Enthused abouth their roles...: Sonali Bendre and Anant Nag
``An incredible dream!`` said the Italian tourist who visited Hampi in February 2003. ``From the top of the Malyavanta hill, I saw the magnificent ruins of a vast empire stretching before me. I came down and, in a pillared hall within the temple, the emperor stood in regal splendour — a queenly woman beside him — caught in a moment of deep crisis. For a split second I wondered if I had entered time past... The rolling camera and the shooting crew brought me down to the present!``
It is difficult not to get temporally disoriented in Hampi. Huge courtyards, colonnaded marketplaces, domed stables, palace remnants, and darksome, bat-haunted temple halls echo with the history of wealth and glory coming to a savage, iconoclastic end in Talikota 1565, when the Bahmani Sultans decimated the Vijayanagara empire. To stumble upon a period film shoot in such an exotic setting can be an awesome experience. And you can hardly recognise Anant Nag, Deepti Naval and Sonali Bendre in swishing silks and gleaming gold, making their first film in Marathi, directed by Amol Palekar.
For seasoned Naval, this is another opportunity to stretch herself. For Nag, who has worked in 175 commercial ventures in his career (in order to be able to accept the 25 good ones!), ``Anaahat`` is ``very profound, multi-shaded, trickily nuanced, a real challenge...`` He adds with a hearty laugh, ``Not many men would like to play this role!`` Why? Nag will reveal nothing.
Trailing flops from masala films, Bendre hopes that ``Anaahat`` will help her (and the industry) discover her potential as an actress, perhaps change her image. ``I will be proud of having done this film.``
The story remains a secret. The press release merely informs you that the film is a ``stylised presentation set in the epic tradition with a period ambience``. The director adds that it deals with urgent contemporary issues. Ask him to be more specific and he will choose his words in habitual unhurriedness, ``All the dilemmas, self doubts, the struggles and the search of a responsible citizen.`` He adds with a kind smile, ``Isn`t it fascinating to do a period film dealing with contemporary issues?`` All of which leaves us exactly where we were.
Deepti Naval and Sonali Bendre
You try another track. Recalling Palekar`s TV serial ``Mriganayani`` which used the fort and the music of the Gwalior region, you say that ``Anaahat`` seems more rigorous in confining itself to the rudra vina (Bahauddin Dagar), voice (Uday Bharalkar) and pakhawaj (Manik Munde) to render the ancient dhrupad style of music. ``I don`t want to talk about that because music is not a tag on, it is contained in the script, as articulate as the script itself,`` says Palekar. Palekar gets animated over the location. ``Hampi offers tremendous variety, with the pre-Islamic architecture essential for my story. The balance is right, a splendour that is not too decorative.`` The initial exploratory visit not only inspired, but helped Gokhale and Sameer Kulkarni fine-tune their script. Palekar obtained special permission from the Archaelogical Survey of India to shoot in the interiors of the shrines, by day and by night.
The entire film unit has stayed together in Hampi through the month, sharing comforts and discomforts, enjoying impromptu get-togethers with Anant Nag singing Purandaradasa bhajans. Debu Deodhar (camera) always gives that ``extra`` something to a Palekar film, while Nitin Desai (art direction) says he will be there whenever Palekar wants him, and Jayoo Patwardhan has done the tasteful costumes.
Was their longstanding friendship a reason for casting Anant Nag instead of a Mumbai actor? ``Show me one actor who is as good, fit and handsome as Anant even at this age,`` the actor-turned-film maker challenges you. ``I don`t think of language but of the actor`s capacity and personality in casting. Nor will you be able to tell the professional actor from the non-professional in any of my films whether `Dhyas Parva` or `Bangarwadi`. I think it is wonderful for Marathi cinema to have stars like Anant Nag and Deepti Naval.`` No, Sonali Bendre was not chosen for her glamour. She did have the sensuousness required for the role, but more important was the ``vulnerability that she has retained in spite of all the stupid roles she has done so far. Sonali has given a tremendous performance. It will be tough for others now, they will have to see her in a wholly different light after this,`` he chuckles.
The 90-minute film slated for a July release, has taken over a year to complete. The budget? ``Mira Nair once said that she made her films on peanuts. My film has been made in one-tenth of her peanuts. I am proud of having achieved the grandeur you will see on less than peanuts.``
Actor-turned-filmmaker Amol Palekar directing the two stars.
Many of Palekar`s nine films have bagged state, national and international honours. But he still has people asking why he makes a different kind of cinema.
``With 90 per cent of the formula films crashing at the box office don`t I stand a better chance with non-formula films?`` he asks. He doesn`t have to be apologetic about the technical quality of his films either; meticulous planning has achieved fine results on low budgets.
``People are fed up with seeing the same kind of film. There was a time when an Amitabh Bachchan-Manmohan Desai film and an Amol Palekar-Hrishikesh Mukherji film ran to packed houses at the same time, and a Dara Singh too found his followers. Now it looks as if people are going to get that kind of choice again. After all, variety is the greatest strength of Indian cinema.``
Finally Palekar has something to say about an objection you raised the day before — a Marathi film set in a period when that language hadn`t come into full-fledged existence...? ``I found out that Marathi`s origins go far beyond the 10th century. Anyway, the issue is not about language, but about life and its eternal struggles.``
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2003/04/06/stories/2003040600620500.htm
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 25, 2003 07:38 am
There is another film which is shot at Hampi ruins in Karnataka. It is a period film made in Marathi by Amol Palekar called ``Anaahat``, a film set in the 10th century *ing Sonali Bendre, Anant Nag and Deepti Naval.Contemporary, yet historical
A period film about urgent current issues is being shot in Hampi. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN tries to find out something more about ``Anaahat`` on the sets.
Enthused abouth their roles...: Sonali Bendre and Anant Nag
``An incredible dream!`` said the Italian tourist who visited Hampi in February 2003. ``From the top of the Malyavanta hill, I saw the magnificent ruins of a vast empire stretching before me. I came down and, in a pillared hall within the temple, the emperor stood in regal splendour — a queenly woman beside him — caught in a moment of deep crisis. For a split second I wondered if I had entered time past... The rolling camera and the shooting crew brought me down to the present!``
It is difficult not to get temporally disoriented in Hampi. Huge courtyards, colonnaded marketplaces, domed stables, palace remnants, and darksome, bat-haunted temple halls echo with the history of wealth and glory coming to a savage, iconoclastic end in Talikota 1565, when the Bahmani Sultans decimated the Vijayanagara empire. To stumble upon a period film shoot in such an exotic setting can be an awesome experience. And you can hardly recognise Anant Nag, Deepti Naval and Sonali Bendre in swishing silks and gleaming gold, making their first film in Marathi, directed by Amol Palekar.
For seasoned Naval, this is another opportunity to stretch herself. For Nag, who has worked in 175 commercial ventures in his career (in order to be able to accept the 25 good ones!), ``Anaahat`` is ``very profound, multi-shaded, trickily nuanced, a real challenge...`` He adds with a hearty laugh, ``Not many men would like to play this role!`` Why? Nag will reveal nothing.
Trailing flops from masala films, Bendre hopes that ``Anaahat`` will help her (and the industry) discover her potential as an actress, perhaps change her image. ``I will be proud of having done this film.``
The story remains a secret. The press release merely informs you that the film is a ``stylised presentation set in the epic tradition with a period ambience``. The director adds that it deals with urgent contemporary issues. Ask him to be more specific and he will choose his words in habitual unhurriedness, ``All the dilemmas, self doubts, the struggles and the search of a responsible citizen.`` He adds with a kind smile, ``Isn`t it fascinating to do a period film dealing with contemporary issues?`` All of which leaves us exactly where we were.
Deepti Naval and Sonali Bendre
You try another track. Recalling Palekar`s TV serial ``Mriganayani`` which used the fort and the music of the Gwalior region, you say that ``Anaahat`` seems more rigorous in confining itself to the rudra vina (Bahauddin Dagar), voice (Uday Bharalkar) and pakhawaj (Manik Munde) to render the ancient dhrupad style of music. ``I don`t want to talk about that because music is not a tag on, it is contained in the script, as articulate as the script itself,`` says Palekar. Palekar gets animated over the location. ``Hampi offers tremendous variety, with the pre-Islamic architecture essential for my story. The balance is right, a splendour that is not too decorative.`` The initial exploratory visit not only inspired, but helped Gokhale and Sameer Kulkarni fine-tune their script. Palekar obtained special permission from the Archaelogical Survey of India to shoot in the interiors of the shrines, by day and by night.
The entire film unit has stayed together in Hampi through the month, sharing comforts and discomforts, enjoying impromptu get-togethers with Anant Nag singing Purandaradasa bhajans. Debu Deodhar (camera) always gives that ``extra`` something to a Palekar film, while Nitin Desai (art direction) says he will be there whenever Palekar wants him, and Jayoo Patwardhan has done the tasteful costumes.
Was their longstanding friendship a reason for casting Anant Nag instead of a Mumbai actor? ``Show me one actor who is as good, fit and handsome as Anant even at this age,`` the actor-turned-film maker challenges you. ``I don`t think of language but of the actor`s capacity and personality in casting. Nor will you be able to tell the professional actor from the non-professional in any of my films whether `Dhyas Parva` or `Bangarwadi`. I think it is wonderful for Marathi cinema to have stars like Anant Nag and Deepti Naval.`` No, Sonali Bendre was not chosen for her glamour. She did have the sensuousness required for the role, but more important was the ``vulnerability that she has retained in spite of all the stupid roles she has done so far. Sonali has given a tremendous performance. It will be tough for others now, they will have to see her in a wholly different light after this,`` he chuckles.
The 90-minute film slated for a July release, has taken over a year to complete. The budget? ``Mira Nair once said that she made her films on peanuts. My film has been made in one-tenth of her peanuts. I am proud of having achieved the grandeur you will see on less than peanuts.``
Actor-turned-filmmaker Amol Palekar directing the two stars.
Many of Palekar`s nine films have bagged state, national and international honours. But he still has people asking why he makes a different kind of cinema.
``With 90 per cent of the formula films crashing at the box office don`t I stand a better chance with non-formula films?`` he asks. He doesn`t have to be apologetic about the technical quality of his films either; meticulous planning has achieved fine results on low budgets.
``People are fed up with seeing the same kind of film. There was a time when an Amitabh Bachchan-Manmohan Desai film and an Amol Palekar-Hrishikesh Mukherji film ran to packed houses at the same time, and a Dara Singh too found his followers. Now it looks as if people are going to get that kind of choice again. After all, variety is the greatest strength of Indian cinema.``
Finally Palekar has something to say about an objection you raised the day before — a Marathi film set in a period when that language hadn`t come into full-fledged existence...? ``I found out that Marathi`s origins go far beyond the 10th century. Anyway, the issue is not about language, but about life and its eternal struggles.``
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2003/04/06/stories/2003040600620500.htm
A Different Story
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
India Unvarnished
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Us and Them - A Pakistani professor counters Urdu newspapers
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
The Indian James Bond
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Why didn’t the Scientific Revolution happen in Islam?
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
The Real Jehad
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
The Menace of Education
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Bullock Cart to IT Bandwagon: India’s IT experience
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
What are they Teaching in Pakistani Schools Today?
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Academic Freedom in Pakistani Universities
M. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
Posted by
sarwar
Aug 23, 2003 08:29 am
The poisoning of young minds in PakistanM. V. KAMATH
http://www.samachar.com/features/210803-features.html
Is Pakistan, as some believe “inching towards normalisation” of relations with India? General Pervez Musharraf apart, are the people of Pakistan tiring of the drumbeats of hatred constantly being drummed into their ears? Most of July our newspapers were full of stories of how a Pakistan couple, Tayyeba and Nadeem Sajjad brought their little daughter Noor Fatima to Bangalore to be successfully operated upon for a major heart defect and how grateful they were for the hospitality and love showered ion them by countless Indians, strangers all.
About that time there were greatly hyped reports of the nine-day visit to India of Maulana Fazal-ur Rahman, leader of Pakistan’s hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, of his ardent desire for peace and of his being cordially received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, no less, for talks extending to an hour. Then a nonofficial delegation led by Pakistan-friendly journalist Nayar which had visited Pakistan also on a one-day safari had returned wide-eyed, Nayar claiming that he and colleagues had been swept off their feet “by love and affection showered up on us at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi”.
Nayar told the media that he had received a message from a commentator which said: “You have achieved the impossible. Of all the people, Liaquat Baloch of the Jammat-e-Islam is ecstatic on the private channels of Pakistan about the reception they hosted”. A Member of Nayar’s delegation, Shahid Siddiqui, M.P. had been similarly quoted as saying that he was surprised to notice the change in public mood against jehad and the craving of the Pakistani people for friendship and good relations with India. Now a 31-member Indian delegation is on a visit to Pakistan and no doubt will return just as ecstatically as the earlier delegation making one wonder whether, indeed, Pakistan is inching towards normalisation of ties with India. According to an Agence France Presse report from Islamabad sixteen Pakistani MPs will celebrate the back-to back Independence Days of India and Pakistan on August 14 and 15 in the western Indian city of Amritsar which is hardly 30 kms from Lahore.
Are we seeing the heavens falling? Meanwhile there is the story of Munir, the 13-year old Pakistan boy who unknowingly strayed into Indian police only to be ordered to be released from jail and returned to his home by Prime Minister Vajpayee. It is said that the lad was loaded with gifts before being put on the Delhi- Lahore bus.
If this is how the people of India and Pakistan react to each other, what has the Pakistani military got to say? Is it at all going to stop giving aid and comfort to terrorists to kill and maim innocent Kashmiris? When will it call a halt to its strident anti-India, anti- Hindu propaganda? That propaganda has been pushed to its limits in school textbooks since the days of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. This has now been revealed in a well-documented study conducted by the I s l a m a b a d - b a s e d Sustained Development Policy Institute of Pakistani textbooks in Social Studies, English, Urdu and Civics from Class I to Class XII.
The findings of the study conducted by two scholars, A. N. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim can only be described as damning. Apparently, till Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, Pakistani textbooks were balanced and fair in writing about India but with the military take-over of power under General Zia things were to change totally.
According to the report of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute “for over two decades, the curricula and the officially mandated textbooks have contained material that is directly contrary to the goals and values of a progressive, moderate and democratic Pakistan”. Says the report: “History is narrated with distortions and omissions. The causes, effects and responsibility for key events are presented so as to leave a false understanding of our national experience. A large part of the history of this region is also simply omitted, making it difficult to properly interpret events.
Four themes emerge most strongly as constituting the bulk of the curricula and textbooks of three compulsory subjects: Viz.
that Pakistan is for Muslims alone
that Islamiat is to be forcibly taught to all the students, whatever their faith, including a compulsory reading of the Quran
that ideology of Pakistan is to be internalised as faith and hate be created against Hindus and India.
And students are to be urged to take the path of Jehad and Shahadat.
Were the report not the work of an Islamanbad based Institute and written by Muslims themselves, one would ignore it. But it is impossible to ignore this report: it is so authentic. In Pakistan, one has to be a Muslim to be a Pakistani; only Muslims can be true Pakistani citizens. At every stage text books revert to Islam. Lessons have high Islamic content. Class I textbooks have four out of 25 lessons on Islam. Class II textbooks have 22 out of 44 lessons on Islam and so on to Class XII textbooks which have ten out of 68 lessons on Islam.
One does not know how many of the students in each school and in each class are non-Muslims but they are all forcibly taught Islamic religious studies. There is no escape. Jinnah never spoke of the “Ideology” of Pakistan. The authors of this report specifically state that “for fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody until, in 1962, a solitary member of the Jamaat-I-Islami used the words for the first time”. But in most textbooks, Jinnah has been turned into a pious Muslim, which he most certainly never was. His famous speech on 11th August 1947 to the Constituent Assembly in which he laid down the outlines of a democratic and secular Pakistan in which the state has no concern with the religion of its citizens and all, irrespective of their faith, are fully equal, finds no mention in any text book.
On the contrary the Hindu becomes an object of derision. Sample quotes from textbook for Class IV:
Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam.
The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things. Hindus do not respect women.
Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter a temple at a time.
The people of the sub-continent used to live in dark and small houses before the arrival of Muslims. The places of worship were built in a way that light and air could not find a way into them.
The Hindus treated the ancient population of the Indus Valley very badly. They set fire to their houses and butchered them.
A statement made in a textbook for Class VI says: “The Hindus wished to ruin Muslim civilisation and culture by destroying Urdu”. A book authored by Rabbani and Sayyid entitled An Introduction to Pakistan Studies says: “The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilization.” According to the authors of this monumental report, “the Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan amounts to creating an environment for non-Muslims in which (1) they become second class citizens with lesser rights and privileges (2) their patriotism becomes suspect and (3) their contribution to the society is ignored”. Ergo, state the authors, “the result is that they (non-Muslims) can easily cease to have any stake in the society”.
So obsessed are those who write the textbooks about what they consider is the Ideology of Pakistan that specific rules are laid down on the subject. Thus:
The Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and be never subjected to Ideology of Pakistan be presented as an accepted reality and should never be made controversial and debatable.
Textbooks on social studies are devoted to the denigration of Hindus, as greedy, opportunistic and intolerant. The Report quotes the following lines called from various text books:
Hindus thought there was no country other than India.
Hindus who have always been opportunistic, cooperated with the English.
Most of Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent.
Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the 1857 rebellion.
Comments the Report: “Young and impressionable minds are impregnated with seeds of hatred to serve self-styled ideological strait-jacket... The borrowing from Hindu culture is either ignored or condemned. The Pakistan movement is portrayed mostly in terms of the perfidy of the Hindus and the British... India is portrayed as the enemy, which is waiting to dismember Pakistan... Pakistan is shown to have won the 1965 war. Jinnah and Iqbal are presented as orthodox Muslims and any aspect of their thoughts and behaviour which does not conform to this image is suppressed...”
Is it any wonder, then, that Pakistan has been, and remains the land of the Taliban? What can one possibly say when a textbook avers that “Pakistan came to be established for the first time when the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim occupied Sind and Multan’’ and that ``during the 16th century Hindustan disappeared and was completely absorbed in Pakistan”? What kind of “friend” can we ever hope to find in our next-door neighbour?
- sarwar
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