The 'Poor'
Neighbor
India is seen as a success
story, while Pakistan is written off as a failed
state and the hiding place of Osama bin Laden. What
went wrong?
By William
Dalrymple
Amid all the hoopla
surrounding the 60th anniversary of Indian independence,
almost nothing has been heard from Pakistan, which
turns 60 today (August 14 2007). Nothing, that is,
if you discount the low rumble of suicide bombings,
the noise of automatic weapons storming the Red
Mosque and the creak of slowly collapsing dictatorships.
In the world's media, never has the contrast between
the two countries appeared so stark: one is widely
perceived as the next great superpower; the other
written off as a failed state, a world center of
Islamic radicalism, the hiding place of Osama bin
Laden and the only US ally that Washington appears
ready to bomb.
On the ground, of course, the reality is different
and first-time visitors to Pakistan are almost always
surprised by the country's visible prosperity. There
is far less poverty on show in Pakistan than in
India, fewer beggars, and much less desperation.
In many ways the infrastructure of Pakistan is much
more advanced: there are better roads and airports,
and more reliable electricity. Middle-class Pakistani
houses are often bigger and better appointed than
their equivalents in India.
Moreover, the Pakistani economy is undergoing a
construction and consumer boom similar to India's,
with growth rates of 7%, and what is currently the
fastest-rising stock market in Asia. You can see
the effects everywhere: in new shopping centers
and restaurant complexes, in the hoardings for the
latest laptops and iPods, in the cranes and building
sites, in the endless stores selling mobile phones:
in 2003 the country had fewer than three million
cellphone users; today there are almost 50 million.
Mohsin Hamid, author of the Booker long-listed novel
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, wrote about this change
after a recent visit: having lived abroad as a banker
in New York and London, he returned home to find
the country unrecognizable. He was particularly
struck by "the incredible new world of media
that had sprung up, a world of music videos, fashion
programs, independent news networks, cross-dressing
talkshow hosts, religious debates, and stock-market
analysis".
I knew, of course, that the government of Pervez
Musharraf had opened the media to private operators.
But I had not until then realized how profoundly
things had changed. Not just television, but private
radio stations and newspapers have also flourished
in Pakistan over the past few years. The result
is an unprecedented openness. Young people are speaking
and dressing differently. Views both critical and
supportive of the government are voiced with breathtaking
frankness in an atmosphere remarkably lacking in
censorship. Public space, the common area for culture
and expression that had been so circumscribed in
my childhood, has now been vastly expanded. The
Vagina Monologues was recently performed on stage
to standing ovations.
Little of this is reported in the western press,
which prefers its sterotypes simple: India-successful;
Pakistan-failure.
Nevertheless, despite the economic boom, there are
three serious problems that Pakistan will have to
sort out if it is to continue to keep up with its
giant neighbor - or indeed continue as a coherent
state at all.
One is the fundamental flaw in Pakistan's political
system. Democracy has never thrived here, at least
in part because landowning remains almost the only
social base from which politicians can emerge. In
general, the educated middle class - which in India
seized control in 1947, emasculating the power of
its landowners - is in Pakistan still largely excluded
from the political process. As a result, in many
of the more backward parts of Pakistan the local
feudal zamindar can expect his people to vote for
his chosen candidate. Such loyalty can be enforced.
Many of the biggest zamindars have private prisons
and most have private armies.
In such an environment, politicians tend to come
to power more through deals done within Pakistan's
small elite than through the will of the people.
Behind Pakistan's swings between military governments
and democracy lies a surprising continuity of interests:
to some extent, the industrial, military, landowning
and bureaucratic elites are now all related and
look after one another. The current rumors of secret
negotiations going on between Musharraf and Benazir
Bhutto, the exiled former prime minister, are typical
of the way that the civil and military elites have
shared power with relatively little recourse to
the electorate.
The second major problem that the country faces
is linked with the absence of real democracy, and
that is the many burgeoning jihadi and Islamist
groups. For 25 years, the military and Pakistan's
powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), have
been the paymasters of myriad mujahideen groups.
These were intended for selective deployment first
in Afghanistan and then Kashmir, where they were
intended to fight proxy wars for the army, at low
cost and low risk. Twenty-eight years after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, however, the results
have been disastrous, filling the country with thousands
of armed but now largely unemployed jihadis, millions
of modern weapons, and a proliferation of militant
groups.
While the military and intelligence community in
Pakistan may have once believed that it could use
jihadis for its own ends, the Islamists have followed
their own agendas. As the recent upheavals in Islamabad
have dramatically shown, they have now brought their
struggle on to the streets and into the heart of
the country's politics.
The third major issue facing the country is its
desperate education crisis. No problem in Pakistan
casts such a long shadow over its future as the
abject failure of the government to educate more
than a fraction of its own people: at the moment,
a mere 1.8% of Pakistan's GDP is spent on government
schools. The statistics are dire: 15% of these government
schools are without a proper building; 52% without
a boundary wall; 71% without electricity.
This was graphically confirmed by a survey conducted
two years ago by the former Pakistan cricket captain
turned politician, Imran Khan, in his own constituency
of Mianwali. His research showed that 20% of government
schools supposed to be functioning in his constituency
did not exist at all, a quarter had no teachers
and 70% were closed. No school had more than half
of the teachers it was meant to have. Of those that
were just about functioning, many had children of
all grades crammed into a single room, often sitting
on the floor in the absence of desks.
This education gap is the most striking way in which
Pakistan is lagging behind India: in India, 65%
of the population is literate and the number rises
every year: only last year, the Indian education
system received a substantial boost of state funds.
But in Pakistan, the literacy figure is under half
(it is currently 49%) and falling: instead of investing
in education, Musharraf's military government is
spending money on a cripplingly expensive fleet
of American F-16s for its air force. As a result,
out of 162 million Pakistanis, 83 million adults
of 15 years and above are illiterate. Among women
the problem is worse still: 65% of all female adults
are illiterate. As the population rockets, the problem
gets worse.
The virtual collapse of government schooling has
meant that many of the country's poorest people
have no option but to place their children in the
madrasa system, where they are guaranteed an ultra-conservative
but free education, often subsidized by religious
endowments provided by the Wahhabi Saudis.
Altogether there are now an estimated 800,000 to
one million students enrolled in Pakistan's madrasas.
Though the link between the madrasas and al-Qaida
is often exaggerated, it is true that madrasa students
have been closely involved in the rise of the Taliban
and the growth of sectarian violence; it is also
true that the education provided by many madrasas
is often wholly inadequate to equip children for
modern life in a civil society.
Sixty years after its birth, India faces a number
of serious problems – not least the growing
gap between rich and poor, the criminalisation of
politics, and the flourishing Maoist and Naxalite
groups that have recently proliferated in the east
of the country. But Pakistan's problems are on a
different scale; indeed, the country finds itself
at a crossroads. As Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher
of the Lahore-based Friday Times, put it recently,
"After a period of relative quiet, for the
first time in a decade, we are back to the old question:
it is not just whether Pakistan, but will Pakistan
survive?" On the country's 60th birthday, the
answer is by no means clear.
(William Dalrymple's new book, The Last Mughal:
The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by
Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper
prize for history. Courtesy Guardian)
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