“Eat
Your Heart out, Pakistan!!”
By Dr Ghulam M. Haniff
St. Cloud, MN
No
one could have been more elated than my old acquaintance
from Bombay who upon seeing the cover story on
India in the recent issue of Time Magazine (June
26, 2006) let out a scream of unbounded joy yelling,
“Eat your heart out, Pakistan.” He
was of course fully justified in cherishing this
moment of glory for the article extolled the achievements
of India in science, technology, software development,
higher education and just about every field of
human endeavor, and predicted that this nation
of a billion people would be the next economic
superpower.
Emerging from the white man’s colonial control,
with all the degradation that it implies just
fifty-eight years ago, India has made remarkable
progress despite its gaping poverty and multitude
of entrenched social problems. The obscenely pejorative
term “native” was coined in India
by the British to refer to the pigmented inhabitants
as a form of put down to humiliate and denigrate
the people at every possible opportunity and to
assert the colonizer’s racial superiority.
In the mind of the colonizer that word is interchangeable
with another word “nigger” that continued
to be freely used until just a handful of years
ago.
Indians however made enormous breakthroughs in
every field despite mortally wounded in their
souls by the colonizer’s vulgar epithets.
Just today, looking at the Indians in the North
American diaspora, I listened to Sanjay Gupta
reporting on the CNN, thumped through the latest
novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, heard Lakhsmi Singh on
NPR and thought about going to M. Night Shyamalan’s
current blockbuster “Lady in the Water”
playing at the local theater. These sons and daughters
of India have made enormous strides in just a
generation or two. No wonder the “n”
word of either variety has been shamefully and
conveniently forgotten in reference to the subcontinent
but continues to be used by the occupiers in Iraq
as well as Palestine.
If there is one factor responsible for the forward
thrust of India it is the obsession with education.
Right after independence the country pursued learning
with a vengeance where eager promoters held classes
wherever a few children could be rounded up. Today,
no sacrifice is considered to be too great for
the parents to ensure that their child obtains
education for a middle class lifestyle. In higher
education the Indian universities are world class
and the Indian Institutes of Technology are said
to rival the likes of MIT. The number of institutions
of higher education in India at 4500 slightly
exceeds that of the United States.
When I asked my small circle of Pakistani friends,
all with doctorates, whether they had read the
Time article their answers were in the negative
indicating that they were not even aware of the
write up on India. At the Islamic center the response
was almost the same though one individual mentioned
having seen the picture of an Indian actress on
the cover of an American magazine at a newsstand.
This is typical of the community and observers
may well know that Pakistanis are not readers.
Illiteracy is deeply entrenched in the Pakistani
culture, many cannot read and those who can do
not consider reading to be a worthwhile pursuit.
The level of education in Pakistan is one of the
lowest in the world and the number of institutions
of higher education in the country at around 110
is puny compared to the neighbor next door.
Though Pakistan and India emerged from exactly
the same background the economy of the latter
far exceeds that of the former. India is considered
today to have the largest industrial infrastructure
in the world. For sometime it has been manufacturing
industrial goods of all kinds ranging from ships,
airplanes, automobiles, ballistic missiles, computers
to tractors. Consumer items of enormous variety
have been locally made for several decades and
their quality has improved so much that they are
in demand for export.
Pakistan meanwhile remains an exporter of cotton
and basmati rice, two commodities that require
hardly any skills to produce and are among the
least profitable. The skills that drive a modern
economy are barely present in the country.
The entrepreneurial spirit found in India is not
only the most remarkable part of the economy but
is the engine that propels the country forward.
Indian businessmen are very enterprising bringing
new products or new services that make for the
middle class lifestyle in the country. The innovative
genius of the Indian entrepreneurs has made the
nation a major player in the world software industry.
The economic growth of India at 8.0 percent is
the second highest in the world exceeded only
by China. However, whereas the Chinese economy
is state driven the Indian economy is fueled bottoms-up
through intense competition in the free-enterprise
market. The Pakistani economy, decades behind
both the countries with no particular orientation,
grew at the rate of 6.6 percent although the Prime
Minister had predicted 8.0 percent rate of growth.
The latest economic survey projects slowing of
the economic growth in Pakistan though the other
two countries, India and China, are expected to
forge ahead at a higher rate.
During the past six months India has been singled
out for considerable publicity with cover stories
in the Economist, the Business Week, Time and
surprisingly, Foreign Affairs. Projections are
that India will have the third largest economy
by the year 2020 judging by the size of its GDP.
And by the closing decades of the century it may
very well vie for the top position.
Pakistan no doubt is quite envious of the Indian
success having failed to achieve anything of significance
since its independence. A recent story in the
Economist (July 6, 2006) finds the Islamic Republic
to be a failing state with impending instability
that promises to spin out of control. The story
on Pakistan is in marked contrast to the ones
that appeared on India in various magazines cited
above. Even as these words are being written the
MMA is threatening “collective resignations”
and the two former prime ministers known for their
looting of the country are plotting in foreign
lands to make a come back.
During the heyday of colonialism an English bigot,
who worked in Lahore as an editor of a famous
paper, Rudyard Kipling, looked at the natives
of British India as “half savage, half child.”
His books caricatured the notorious image of an
Indian as Gunga Din, a dark-skinned, spiny, emaciated
figure, virtually naked, clad only in a loin cloth
and a turban, forever conniving to hood-wink the
white man with his duplicitous dealings and sleaze-ball
personality. This shifty-eyed character embodied
the image of the British India. That image remains
transfixed in the minds of the likes of Tony Blair
and other Western leaders as they try to come
to grips with the subcontinent and the world beyond.
It is hard for the white man to stomach that in
just a matter of a few years India will bypass
both Britain and France in the size of its economy.
Bush is already divining strategies for keeping
India under control despite it being the world’s
largest democracy with a booming free market.
Together with all these as India gains competitive
edge in Internet technology industry, the world
will never be the same again.
Gunga Din is no more. Long live Gunga Din!
- haniff@stcloudstate.edu
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