September 17 , 2010

What Devoured Glamorous Pakistan

 

The above is the title of an interesting article by Vir Sanghvi, an eminent print and TV journalist of India who is currently the Editorial Director of Hindustan Times and also hosts some TV talk shows. I give below extracts from the write-up so that you get a picture of what he has to say. My own views about the problems of Pakistan follow the extracts. Sanghvi writes:

“I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how much the attitude to Indians had changed in the West. Once we were regarded as losers, people who inhabited a desperately poor country, continually ravaged by famine or drought, incapable of making a single world-class product, and condemned to live forever on foreign aid. Now, we have the world’s respect and, more tellingly, the West’s envy as more and more jobs are Bangalored away from their high-cost economies and handed over to Indians who perform much better for less money…. My concern this week is with the transformation of the image of the global Pakistani.

“I was at school and university in England in the Seventies and lived in London in the early 1980s. This was a time when Pakistan was regarded - hard as this may be to believe now - as being impossibly glamorous. The star of my first term at Oxford was Benazir Bhutto. In my second term, she became president of the Union and was the toast of Oxford. Her father was then prime minister of Pakistan…

“In those days, us poor Indians hardly ever got a look in. The Pakistanis were dashing, far richer (they spent in a weeks what we spent in the whole term), always going off to chic parties or nightclubs in London and charming the pants off the British (often, quite literally).

“In that era, the Arabs had just emerged on the world stage (following the massive oil-price hikes of 1973-4) and the Pakistanis were almost proprietorial about them. A Pakistani graduate student at my college even affected Arab dress from time to time and bragged that he had taught Arabs how to fly planes.

“My college-mate was merely reprising Z.A. Bhutto’s philosophy: the Arabs were rich but they were camel drivers. They needed Pakistanis to run the world for them and to teach them Western ways. It was this sort of thinking that led to the creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the first global Third World bank, run by Pakistanis with Arab money. For most of the 1980s, BCCI was staffed by sharply dressed young Pakistanis who entertained at London’s (and New York’s) best restaurants, hit the casinos, after dinner and talked casually about multi-million dollar deals….

“In that era, Indians knew absolutely nothing about wine or French food and the few Indian millionaires who vacationed in London were vegetarians….

“Even Pakistan’s millionaires were more glamorous than ours. In the Eighties when the Hinduja brothers (“we are strictly vegetarian”) first emerged in London, the Pakistanis stole the show with such flamboyant high-profile millionaires in Mahmud Sipra who financed feature films and kept a big yacht in the South of France.

“So what went wrong?

“First of all, much of the Pakistani profile was based on flash and fraud. BCCI collapsed amidst allegations that it was a scamster’s bank. Mahmud Sipra left England with the Fraud Squad in hot pursuit…

“Secondly, Indian democracy came to our rescue… Pakistan was a deeply unequal and therefore unstable society. When Bhutto rigged an election, this led to his downfall.

“Thirdly, Pakistan signed its own death warrant by trying to out-Arab the Arabs with a policy of Islamisation…fundamentalist Islam devoured what was left of glamorous Pakistan.

“Fourthly, the world just moved on. Flash can only get you so far. In the end it is substance that counts. And plodding, boring India came up with the substance….

“Of all these factors, two remain the most important. A nation created on the basis of Islam was destroyed by too much Islam. And a nation dedicated to democracy flourished because of too much democracy.”

No doubt, there is some substance in what Mr. Sanghvi says in his article. But, I find it difficult to share his conclusion that Pakistan “was destroyed by too much Islam” and India “flourished because of too much democracy”. Nor, do I find it an objective assessment and therefore convincing that the fast pace of Pakistan’s progress (growth rate over 6%) and glamour during the first three decades of its existence was but a “flash and fraud”.

Civil and military bureaucracies provided stability to the nascent state and goaded it on the path of socio-economic progress. Pakistan pursued vigorously its Five-Year Plans and largely succeeded in weaning the economy away from total dependence on agriculture to a partially industrialized economy. Institutions like the Industrial Development Corporation played a significant role in this. New industries, particularly in the textile sector, were cropping up in several parts of the country. Market economy was rendering its fruits. A group of 22 business families had emerged in the process, which exercised a hold on the economy. Then came Mr. Bhutto on the stage. He nationalized all basic industries, in the name of his socialist policy; it virtually hamstrung the growth momentum. And, he made a deliberate effort to bring into the parliament and the seats of power feudal aristocracy of the country. Being a big landlord, he felt himself secure and in a leadership position in the company of these feudal barons.

This marked the emergence of the prominence and hold of feudalism on the affairs of the nation. There was no deliberate effort to do away with large land holdings and feudalism. Land reforms carried out during the Ayub and Bhutto eras merely tinkered with the issue. Feudalism being averse to education that sector too was pushed to the back burner where it has been languishing.

On the other hand, India completely abolished some 600 princely states putting an end to all traces of feudalism in the country and laid full emphasis on the setting up of schools, colleges, universities and high-profile institutes of higher learning. India has now thousands of colleges producing hundreds of thousands of engineers, doctors, business managers and Information Technology majors.

From the dawn of Independence till his death in 1964, for seventeen years, Pundit Nehru remained the Prime Minister of India. That gave the much-needed stability to the government in India, while Pakistan had undergone a series of government changes till Gen. Ayub Khan took charge of the country. Mr. Nehru’s socialist policies recorded a lack-luster economic growth. Yet, he continued to be a passionate advocate of education for Indian youth and oversaw the setting up of many institutions of higher learning in the country. After his demise, his socialist policies were gradually replaced by systems of market economy providing incentives to the private sector to set up industries and businesses all over the country. Highly qualified youth produced by the thousands of colleges were easily available to man such businesses. Indian economy became a knowledge-based, highly competitive activity. Hence, its success.

The emphasis on quality education has resulted in the availability of well-qualified persons to man not only the crucial positions in the country’s own economy but in foreign lands, including the United States.

Last week I visited the Yellow Stone National Park and was surprised and really happy to notice dozens of Indian young men and women in the park sight-seeing and enjoying the Labor Weekend. They were mainly from South India holding lucrative positions in the IT and other technical sectors. They could afford the expensive trip, while Afro-Americans and Latinos were conspicuous by their absence.

Let me end this piece by reiterating that it is not so much the system of government or the religion of a nation that makes or mars its progress. It is how much that nation is investing in educating its youth that really counts.

arifhussaini@hotmail.com