Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Are Muslims Worse Off in Jinnah's Pakistan?


As Pakistanis celebrate Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's birthday today on Christmas Day, there are some who are questioning the founder's wisdom in seeking partition of India to carve out Pakistan as an independent nation.  The doubters justifiably point to the rising tide of intolerance and increasing violence and  a whole range of problems and crises Pakistan is facing. They wonder aloud if it was a mistake to demand a separate country for Muslims of undivided India.

 
Wax Statues of Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi in Islamabad


Are the critics correct in their assessment when they imply that Muslims in Pakistan would have been better off without partition? To answer this question, let us look at the following facts and data:

1. Muslims, the New Untouchables in India:

While India maintains its facade of  religious tolerance, democracy and secularism through a few high-profile Muslim tokens among its high officials and celebrities, the ground reality for the vast majority of ordinary Muslims is much harsher.

An Indian government commission headed by former Indian Chief Justice Rajendar Sachar confirms that Muslims are the new untouchables in caste-ridden and communal India. Indian Muslims suffer heavy discrimination in almost every field from  education and housing to jobs.  Their incarceration rates are also much higher than their Hindu counterparts.

According to Sachar Commission report, Muslims are now worse off than the Dalit caste, or those called untouchables. Some 52% of Muslim men are unemployed, compared with 47% of Dalit men. Among Muslim women, 91% are unemployed, compared with 77% of Dalit women. Almost half of Muslims over the age of 46 ca not read or write. While making up 11% of the population, Muslims account for 40% of India’s prison population. Meanwhile, they hold less than 5% of government jobs.

2. Upward Economic Mobility in Pakistan: 

In spite of all of its problems, Pakistan has continued to offer  higher upward economic and social mobility to its citizens over the last two decades than India. Since 1990, Pakistan's middle class had expanded by 36.5% and India's by only 12.8%, according to an ADB report titled "Asia's Emerging Middle Class: Past, Present And Future".

Miles Corak of University of Ottawa calculates that the intergenerational earnings elasticity in Pakistan is 0.46, the same as in Switzerland. It means that a difference of 100%  between the incomes of a rich father and a poor father is reduced to 46% difference between their sons' incomes. Among the 22 countries studied, Peru, China and Brazil have the lowest economic mobility with inter-generational elasticity of 0.67, 0.60 and 0.58 respectively. The highest economic mobility is offered by Denmark (0.15), Norway (0.17) and Finland (0.18).


The author also looked at Gini coefficient of each country and found reasonably good correlation between Gini and intergenerational income elasticity.

 More evidence of upward mobility is offered by recent Euromonitor market research indicating that Pakistanis are seeing rising disposable incomes. It says that there were 1.8 million Pakistani households (7.55% of all households) and 7.9 million Indian households (3.61% of all households) in 2009 with disposable incomes of $10,001 or more. This translates into 282% increase (vs 232% in India) from 1995-2009 in households with disposable incomes of $10,001 or more. Consumer spending in Pakistan has increased at a 26 percent average pace the past three years, compared with 7.7 percent for Asia, according to Bloomberg.

3. East Pakistan Debacle: 

Critics love to point out Pakistan's break-up in 1971 as evidence of failure of Jinnah's Pakistan.
They lavish praise on Bangladesh and scold Pakistan as part of the annual ritual a few days before Quaid-e-Azam's birthday every year.

Economic gap between East and West Pakistan in 1960s is often cited as a key reason for the secessionist movement led by Shaikh Mujib's Awami League and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. This disparity has grown over the last 40 years, and the per capita income in Pakistan now stands at more than twice Bangladesh's in 2012 in nominal dollar terms,  higher than 1.6 in 1971.

 Here are some figures from Economist magazine's EIU 2013:

Bangladesh GDP per head: $695 (PPP: $1,830)

Pakistan GDP per head: $1,410 (PPP: $2,960)

Pakistan-Bangladesh GDP per head Ratio: 2.03 ( PPP: 1.62)

4. Poverty, Hunger, Other Socioeconomic Indicators: 

 Pakistan's employment growth has been the highest in South Asia region since 2000, followed by Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka in that order, according to a recent World Bank report titled "More and Better Jobs in South Asia".


Total employment in South Asia (excluding Afghanistan and Bhutan) rose from 473 million in 2000 to 568 million in 2010, creating an average of just under 800,000 new jobs a month. In all countries except Maldives and Sri Lanka, the largest share of the employed are the low‐end self-employed.


Pakistanis have higher graduation rates in education and suffer lower levels of hunger and poverty than Indians and Bangladeshis.

Pakistanis spend more time in schools and colleges and graduate at a higher rate than their Indian counterparts in 15+ age group, according to a report on educational achievement by Harvard University researchers Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee.




Here is a summary of Barro-Lee's 2010 data in percentage of 15+ age group students who have enrolled in and-or completed primary, secondary and tertiary education:

Education Level.......India........Pakistan

Primary (Total)........20.9..........21.8

Primary (Completed)....18.9..........19.3

Secondary(Total).......40.7..........34.6

Secondary(Completed)...0.9...........22.5

College(Total).........5.8...........5.5

College(Completed).....3.1...........3.9



According to the latest world hunger index rankings, Pakistan ranks 57 while India and Bangladesh are worse at 65 and 68 among 79 countries ranked by International Food Policy Research Institute in 2012.


World Hunger Index 2012


The latest World Bank data shows that India's poverty rate of 27.5%, based on India's current poverty line of $1.03 per person per day, is more than 10 percentage points higher than Pakistan's 17.2%. Assam (urban), Punjab and Himachal Pradesh are the only three Indian states with similar or lower poverty rates than Pakistan's.


Clearly, Pakistanis have not lived up to Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's vision of a tolerant and democratic Pakistan where the basic rights of all of its citizens, including religious and ethnic minorities, are fully respected. Popular Pakistani columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee put it well when he wrote: "Fortunately for him, Jinnah did not live long enough to see his dream betrayed by men unworthy even to utter his name. He died before total disillusionment could set in (though he had his suspicions that it was on its way) and broke his heart. From what we know of him, he was that rare being, an incorruptible man in all the many varied meanings of the word corruption, purchasable by no other, swayed by no other, perverted by no other; a man of honor, integrity and high ideals. That the majority of his countrymen have been found wanting in these qualities is this country's tragedy."

I do think, however, that all of the available and credible data and indicators confirm the fact that Muslims in Pakistan are not only much better off than they are elsewhere in South Asia, they also enjoy higher economic and social mobility than their counterparts in India and Bangladesh.

Here's a video report on widespread discrimination against Muslims in India:



Muslims in India by desitvonline
Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Upwardly Mobile Pakistan

Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Vision of Pakistan

Rising Tide of Intolerance in Pakistan

Muslims-New Untouchables in India

Violent Conflict Marks Pakistan's Social Revolution

Economic Mobility in Pakistan

Poverty Across South Asia

Graduation Rates in Pakistan

Introspection of Pakistan's Creation

83 comments:

Hopewins said...

http://alturl.com/2o7cv

Partition was a mistake-- By Michael Barone

Oostur said...

Riaz, Great job. You made a solid case. Thank you.

PS: Lets see one comparing Pakistan to Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran instead of India and Bangladesh.

Anonymous said...

good job (as usual) Riaz Sahab!!! Pakistan or the issue of Pakistan is not comparable to any country, nation, or people on this planet. The numbers do not and cannot reflect the true ground realities. Its a test and a dilemma that the people will continue to deal with over the years to come.

Historian said...

We have relatives in India.

We all were at the same level in 1947.

Now we are miles ahead of them (and I am not being pompous here). And No Indian can convince us that Muslims get equal opportunities in India. They do not. They face HUGE amounts of discrimination.

Anonymous said...

@HopeWins...http://alturl.com/2o7cv

Partition was a mistake-- By Michael Barone.

Michael Baron is supposed to say that because he is getting for that job. This kind of situational analysis can be done for almost all nations, for examples for russia or USSR, for israel, China or even USA itself.

Almost any country which says anything against west is a disaster from history. Take Iran for example or North Korea.

Michael Barone's own country has clear divide between white and black race which is evident from their TV programmes. Isn't USA a mistake from history.

indus said...

@historian
Muslims do get an equal opportunity in India provided they are not fanatics and place their religious interest above national interest.
We had a muslim president(India's most reputed president Dr.APJ Abdul Kalam) and currently have ministers like salman khurshid serving in our cabinet ministry.If they were so crushed by the Indian system then how come these men made it there.BTW how many minorities do get such treatment in Pakistan.

Riaz Haq said...

Here's CNN on Pak cricket team's gift to Pakistan on Quaid-e-Azam's birthday:

On a day of national celebration in Pakistan, the country's cricket team provided the perfect present for Quaid Day by defeating archrival India in its Twenty20 encounter in Bangalore, India.

On the 136th anniversary since the birth of Father of the Nation, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's players marked the day in style with a hugely impressive performance.

The Quaid-e-Azam was the man who helped secure the formation of the state of Pakistan on August 14, 1947, and went on to become the nation's first ever governor general.

He is highly revered and his memory was not forgotten by Pakistan captain Mohammad Hafeez, who dedicated the victory to the national hero.

"It is a gift for the whole nation, it is Quaid day back home," said Hafeez following his team's five-wicket victory....


http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/25/sport/cricket-india-pakistan/

Hopewins said...

62 years after our Independence, this is the situation---

NYLA DAWOOD: What is your greatest concern today?

AFZAL TAUSEEF: That Pakistan survives.

NYLA DAWOOD: Where would you pin the cause for the state of things in Pakistan today?

AFZAL TAUSEEF: Jagirdari and the jagirdari mindset. It cost us a wing of the country. This system is an enemy of those with socially-awakened intellect. Nowhere else in the entire world can you find such an oppressive system.

http://alturl.com/iqggg

-----

RIAZ HAQ: And yet we have lowest GINI index in South-Asia, higher equality and inter-generational mobility than in the US and spectacularly impressive graduation rates.

Indeed, we are on our way to creating a "well-educated, industrialized, peaceful, prosperous and democratic Pakistan with a vibrant free press and an active civil society embedded in a large and growing middle-class"
----

The contradictions are too vast for this to be merely a spread of general opinion. It follows that somebody somewhere is delusionally out of touch with the realities on the ground in Pakistan today.

Vishesh said...

Ha, Well your assesments are skewed and twisted as usual. Muslim in India are much much better of than Hindus, Christians and other minorities in pakistan. Muslims kill other muslims in pakistan, look at the hatred amongst sunnis for shias and the recent attacks on them. More muslims are dying in terrorist attacks in pakistan than muslims in India. If Hindus were so intolerant and communal, we would have gone around killing muslims everyday here. Infact, we wouldn't have allowed a muslim state to be formed in what was originally Hindu land, we would've killed and ethnically cleansed out all muslims from the Hindu-kush to myanmmar (ie if we were like muslims). The fact of the matter is we find The khan trio in India, We Find the Pathan brother in India, We find Azim Premji in India. Infact you cannot find the same in pakistan. Name me succesful Hindus in pakistan.


As for your poverty figures,

As per your own media, it is clearly stated that it was most likely fudged because musharaf wanted to show the world bank his achievements in pakistan. The fact of the matter is that HDI in India is greater than pakistan and that gives the quality of life of different countries.

India comes under medium Human Development Index of .547 in 2011

pak comes under low Human development index very similar to bangladesh of .504

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index


pakistan is terrorising people of balochistan and Sindh who want freedom and tries to deflect this by accusing India of Holding kashmir which is rightfully and historically India's and peddling fake facts to its own people. Infact, both these places are being treated the same as Bangladesh was in 1947 and I hope they get freedom and justice.

http://www.niticentral.com/2012/12/is-balochistan-the-next-bangladesh.html


Average Indian is 32% richer than a Paki.

GDP per capita 2011 (PPP)

India-$3652
paki-$2763

Indian middle class is much higher than paks. A strong indicaton is than while Indians buy 2.7 million passenger vehicles a year (4 wheels), pakis just buy 2-2.25 lakh including imports. Since pakistans population is 1/6 that of India. It is evident that on per capita basis India buys more than twice as many cars and while Indias market is growing, Pakistan market has dropped 32% for the first 5 months of this year.

Indians are the largest consumers of gold in the world and consume more than twice per capita what pakis consume.

India has 50 times the number of known billionaires than pak has.

India's infrastructure is far superior to paks according to World banks Logistics performance Index.

Ranks-
India- 47
pak-110 (lower than bangladesh-79)

India electricity consumption per capita is higher than paks as of 2009.
India-570.9KWH
pak-449.2KWH

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/india/electric-power-consumption-kwh-per-capita-wb-data.html

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/pakistan/electric-power-consumption-kwh-per-capita-wb-data.html

And the situation has worsened alot since then while in India it has just been getting better.

There are many more indicators including internet penetration, mobile usage, public transport(metro) etc which can tell you that India and Indians have done exceedingly better than pakis and all this without Foreign aid infact India is a net giver of foreign Aid while pakistan is a net beggar of foreign aid.

Alas, One can really never expect the big picture truth from a hawk like you. The fact of the matter is jinnah had an extremist mindset and did not believe in unity or harmony.I guess that is the curse of a muslim. Hindu's have always been to kind to everyone and hence there is a thing known as pakistan today, If Hindus had the mindset (curse) of a muslims,there would have not been a single muslim living in the Indian subcontinent and there would have been complete anarchy in India like there is in pakistan where India wouldve been divided into many states!

Riaz Haq said...

Vishesh: "India has 50 times the number of known billionaires than pak has."

All of your boasting can not hide the following well-documented facts about deep deprivation suffered by the vast majority of Indians, including Muslims in India:

1. Average Indians are poorer than Pakistanis and poorer than sub-Saharan Africans. In fact, there are more poor people in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa, according to Oxford University data on multidimensional poverty.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2010/07/new-index-finds-indians-poorer-than.html

2. India has the world's largest population of poor, hungry and illiterates and the vast majority of Indians still defecate in the open, according to data reported by UN and various international groups.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2010/08/63-years-after-independence-india.html

http://www.riazhaq.com/2011/10/india-leads-world-in-open-defecation.html

Hopewins said...

^^Visheesh Said:

India has..
India is..
India will..
Indians are..
Indians could..
Indians will..
India.. bigger..
India.. higher..
India.. taller..
India.. stronger..
India.. greater..
Et cetera.
-------

And yet, in spite of ALL this, one basic fact still remains the same:

India leads the world in OPEN DEFECATION.

India(638m) is followed by Indonesia (58m), China (50m), Ethiopia (49m), Pakistan (48m), Nigeria (33m) and Sudan (17m). In terms of percentage of each country's population resorting to the unhygienic practice, Ethiopia tops the list with 60%, followed by India 54%, Nepal 50%, Pakistan 28%, Indonesia 26%, and China 4%

From the source that was referred:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/india/improved-sanitation-facilities-percent-of-population-with-access-wb-data.html

Hopewins said...

Dr. Haq,

Take a close look at the picture you have provided comparing our "Father of the Nation" with India's "Father of the Nation".

http://alturl.com/jxgmf

Now take a look at the influence these two "National Fathers" have had on the political "leaders" who have succeeded them:

1) Jinnah's Descendents: Still wearing imported clothes, shoes & accessories like our Quaid.
http://alturl.com/2jbki

2) Gandhi's Descendents: Still insist on wearing locally-made clothes, chappals and use minimal accessories like their Bapujee.
http://alturl.com/t69n5

Now, the question is this: Which of these two different strains really "represents" their masses in such a way that their poor millions can really self-identify with them?

What are your views? Apart from the low GINI index and all that, I mean.

Thank you.

Vishesh said...

hopewins- "And yet, in spite of ALL this, one basic fact still remains the same:

India leads the world in OPEN DEFECATION.

India(638m) is followed by Indonesia (58m), China (50m), Ethiopia (49m), Pakistan (48m), Nigeria (33m) and Sudan (17m). In terms of percentage of each country's population resorting to the unhygienic practice, Ethiopia tops the list with 60%, followed by India 54%, Nepal 50%, Pakistan 28%, Indonesia 26%, and China 4%

From the source that was referred:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/india/improved-sanitation-facilities-percent-of-population-with-access-wb-data.html"

As i said earlier, India is a developing country and these will and are getting solved step by step. India is not the richest country that it can solve all these problems by simple expediture. This has to be planned.

The fact of the matter is India is growing and is stable while pakistan is imploding.

This is all being done even though India is a NET GIVER OF AID and pak is a NET BEGGAR OF AID.

Hopewins said...

Jinnah: Sage or Fool? Hero or Villain?

By Amina Ali Dalal

Jinnah said that he was creating Pakistan for the sake of "India's Muslims". In today's terminology, of course, he meant "South Asia's Muslims".

It is elementary to show that the creation of Pakistan was the worst thing that could ever have happened to South Asia's Muslims.

South Asia's Muslims now lie divided in three equal parts in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Jinnah unthinkingly and inadvertently managed to partition & divide the Muslims of South Asia.

This division of the Muslims of South Asia was the best thing that could ever have happened to the right-wing nationalists of the Hindu Mahasabha. According to their view, the Hindus of South Asia became strengthened by being united under a single State, whereas the Muslims of South Asia became weakened by being divided into three equal parts in three different states.

If fact, if someone were to ever dig up records showing that Jinnah was actually acting as an agent for the Hindu Nationalists, they could easily use the end-result of Jinnah's actions as validation of their theory of his treachery towards South Asia's Muslims.

Looking at it this way, the conclusion is inevitable that Jinnah clearly either did not understand the consequences of his demand for Pakistan, or that Jinnah was actually an secret agent of the Hindu Mahasabha who intended to divide & weaken the Muslims of South Asia.

So the historical debate must continue: Was Jinnah just a fool who unthinkingly destroyed the unity of South Asian Muslims? Or was he a deliberate traitor towards the Muslims of South Asia? Or was Jinnah a secretly-Hindu sage and patriot who was acting as an agent of the Hindu Mahasabha for the cause of Hindu Unity?
------

Dr. Haq,

What is your view? Did Jinnah did not understand that he would be dividing not India, but the Muslims of India? Or do you really think it is possible that Jinnah was a fake-convert who was in reality acting on behalf of the right-wing Hindu groups?

What is your reading of this aspect of South Asian history?

Please comment.

Thank you.

Hopewins said...

^^Visheesh: ".. India is a developing country and these will and are getting solved step by step. India is not the richest country that it can solve all these problems by simple expediture. This has to be planned...This is all being done even though India is a NET GIVER OF AID and pak is a NET BEGGAR OF AID"
----

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses.

China is also a developing country. China was "poorer" that India in 1978 and yet China today has only 4% of their population practising open-defecation.

Instead of producing semi-literate internet warriors and handing out "aid" to other countries, perhaps India should focus its resources on preventing its poor from having to defecate all along its crumbing roads and rusting rail-tracks.

Indiscriminate open-defecation is the NUMBER ONE developmental concern raised by all international journalists who visit India, regardless of whether they come from Africa, Asia and Latin America or the West.

READ THIS: http://alturl.com/ycaxx

Hopewins said...

^^Visheesh: "..A strong indicaton is than while Indians buy 2.7 million passenger vehicles a year (4 wheels), pakis just buy 2-2.25 lakh including imports. Since pakistans population is 1/6 that of India. It is evident that on per capita basis India buys more than twice as many cars.."
---

It is good to know that Indians are buying millions & millions of car.

The key question, however, is whether these millions of Indian cars come equipped with this one absolutely-essential feature:

http://alturl.com/scbu3
http://alturl.com/8v96i
http://alturl.com/i2hmo

Hopewins said...

Amina Ali Dalal Wrote: "So the historical debate must continue: Was Jinnah just a fool who unthinkingly destroyed the unity of South Asian Muslims? Or was he a deliberate traitor towards the Muslims of South Asia? Or was Jinnah a secretly-Hindu sage and patriot who was acting as an agent of the Hindu Mahasabha for the cause of Hindu Unity?"
------

Dr. Haq,

This quote goes right to the HEART of the implied thesis of this blog article of yours:

Are the Muslims of South Asia worse-off or better-off because of Jinnah's Pakitan?

Not much point writing a blog article on the apparent & supposed benefits of Jinnah's Pakistan without confronting some of the uncomfortable & inconvenient facts that surround it.

Well? What is your view?

Was Jinnah a traitor or a patriot as far as South Asian Muslims are concerned? Was Jinnah a sage or a fool as far as South Asian Muslims are concerned?

Please deliberate & expound on these key questions for the benefit of your readers.

Thank you.

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "Was Jinnah a sage or a fool as far as South Asian Muslims are concerned?"

Jinnah was very prescient because he could see that, without Pakistan, all South Asian Muslims would become the new untouchables as they have in India which remains caste-ridden and communal 65 years after independence.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2008/12/muslims-indias-new-untouchables.html

Hopewins said...

^^RH:"Jinnah was very prescient because he could see that, without Pakistan, all South Asian Muslims would become the new untouchables as they have in India which remains caste-ridden and communal 65 years after independence. "
----

So are we to presume that you now feel that a prescient Jinnah WAS indeed the architect of Partition?

You are now absolutely sure of this. You are no longer considering the other theories of Ayesha Jalal, Jaswant Singh & Maulan Azad et cetera that Jinnah (prescient or not) did not really want Pakistan at all and that it was Nehru/Patel/British/Jagirdars who actually created Pakistan.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/11/introspection-of-pakistans-history.html

Is this correct? Has the pendulum stopping swinging? Has the mind been firmly made up? No more flip-flopping changes? Yes?

Anonymous said...

@HopeWins

It seems like you have forgotten a fact that in the begining Jinnah was a strong supporter of united india but along the way things changed.

It has been argued by many including some indian writers that it was Gandhi and Nehru who were responsible for partition.

I think Jinnah's decision was right, we are better off in Pakistan. We are no worse than many other 3rd world countries. We are passing through our own thick and thins and just like before when things seems disaster in our country someone will come along to make them better.

I agree with Riaz that we are better in Pakistan. There is no guarantee that without partition we could have been better than we are now. I don't see high degree of achievement in indian muslims apart from some in bollywood. They clearly are under represented in their country. Many will tell you if you work with them.

Riaz Haq said...

Punjab makes up more than half of Pakistan's population. It is the largest, best educated and most prosperous province in Pakistan.

Let me share some data that sheds some light on the lives of Muslims in undivided India.

From "PARTITION OF PUNJAB" by Dr. Kirpal Singh (1988:

1. Landholdings 65% non-Muslims the remaining by Muslims

2. Electrical Connections: Muslims 74,790 and non-Muslims 81,525

3. Tax paid for urban immobile property:
Rs. 924, 358 by non-Muslims &
Rs. 396,189 by Muslims

4. Sales Tax :
Rs. 519, 203 by non-Muslims &
Rs. 66,323 by Muslims

5. Out of the 97 banking branches only 7 were run by Muslims.

6. Of the Rs. 100 crore bank deposits only 1 crore belonged to Muslims

7. Out of 215 factories in Lahore 167 were owned by non-Muslims

8. Total investments Rs. 6.05 crores Rs. 4.88 crores by non-Muslims

9. OUT OF 16 COLLEGES ONLY 3 WERE RUN BY MUSLIMS

10. Out of the 40 High Schools only 13 were run by Muslims

11. Candidates appearing for University examinations only 28.51% were Muslims.

12. Several Public libraries and hospitals established in Lahore were by non-Muslims

13. Of the 5332 shops in Greater Lahore 3501 were owned by non-Muslims

14. Of the 80 Insurance offices, only 2 were owned by Muslims

15. Of the 12 Arts & Science colleges in Lahore only 1 was run by Muslims

16. Of the 15 professional colleges, excluding 3 run by the Govt, all were run by non-Muslims

17. Of the 12 hospitals NOT EVEN ONE WAS RUN BY MUSLIMS.

18. Rationing enumeration: Muslims (53.9%), Hindus (34%), Sikhs (10%) & others (2%).

Muslims in undivided Punjab had very low standards of living relative to Hindus and Sikhs, they were poor and backward, and there was no Muslim professional or business class as there is now.

Although I haven't seen any data on it yet, I bet similar or worse situation prevailed in Bengal and Sindh as well. And I can bet development never touched the lives of the Muslim provinces of NWFP and Baluchistan either.

Riaz Haq said...

Here are some excerpts of a piece titled "How's India Doing (2012)?" as published in The Hindu:

One, the decline in poverty has not been uniform across regions and communities. If in 1982 your parents lived on the banks of the Cooum in Madras or in Dharavi in Bombay, it is likely that today your economic status is better than theirs. But if you are from a Dalit or adivasi family in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, or Uttar Pradesh, chances are that you are no better off now than your parents were in 1982. Two, the benefits of growth have indeed trickled down, but that is exactly what has happened: it has been just a trickle. The incidence of poverty has declined, but a quarter of the population or around 300-350 million people are still desperately poor. Three, if other basic necessities like shelter, access to clean drinking water and sanitation are included, the picture is much more dismal. Research by R. Jayraj and S. Subramanian shows that severe “multidimensional poverty” afflicted 470 million in 2005-06, not much lower than the estimate of 520 million in 1992-93. Four, in certain critical areas — for instance, malnourishment and maternal mortality — conditions remain terrible. Close to half our children suffer from malnutrition, much the same as 30 years ago.

So if we paint a broader picture, the old sliver of the beneficiaries of India’s growth has only thickened a bit. For the large mass of India’s poor, daily life remains a struggle. There is no doubt India lost a major opportunity in the past three decades.

---

The sex ratio has at last begun to see some improvement, though only in the past decade. And the life expectancy of women is now, as it should be, longer than of men. But we are in a far worse situation than in 1982 with respect to the status of the girl child. The sex ratio at birth — the number of girls born for every 1,000 boys born — has declined in recent decades. And the sex ratio of children under six has also worsened. Whether the result of sex-selection at birth, female infanticide, or neglect of the girl child, India has become an awful place for girls.

---

The outcome, however, has not been any major improvement in the economic status of the deprived castes. It may be too early to express any definite opinion on the achievements of these parties, but the early optimism that they would position the demand for lower-caste rights as part of a larger movement for justice and equality has faded. These parties have at times turned into movements solely for the advancement of sectional interests, and, worse, have become vehicles of personal aggrandisement.

If these are the changes in four areas that Sen examined in 1982, one also has to recognise that major changes have taken place in other areas.
---------
For a country that became independent amid gruesome violence on religious lines, communalism has been no stranger. Soon after Sen’s essay, we had the anti-Sikh riots of November 1984. Mass murder was conducted over three days in the capital under the benign gaze of a new Prime Minister. The message was: if you mobilise yourself with force, you can get away with anything. The message was heard, and put into practice in Bhagalpur 1989, Bombay 1993, and Gujarat 2002.

Beyond such open violence, it is the routinisation of communalism in daily life that is new. Mobilisation on communal lines took new forms after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad/Bharatiya Janata Party decided to raise the issue of the Babri Masjid. The rath yatra of 1990, the Congress’s cynical attempt at soft Hindutva, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid completed the post-Independence transformation of India on communal lines. All this has contributed in no small measure to the growth of domestic terrorism. India is tragically now a less tolerant society than what it was in the early 1980s.


http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/how-is-india-doing-2012/article4249630.ece

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "Here are a few excerpts of an MIT doctoral thesis by Christopher Clary on future India-Pakistan conflict"
-----

This thesis was just a waste of the paper on which it was printed because it tries to find the right answer to the wrong question.

The idea of military conflict is outdated, as is the concept of hegemony through the force of arms.

The failure of the sole hyperpower to achieve its goals in Iraq & Afghanistan shows this point clearly.

The REAL danger to our country from India today is ECONOMIC HEGEMONY.

And India KNOWS this. It has been officially planning for what it calls the "New Front" ever since 2002. They opened this "New Front" when the US blocked their military response to the 2002 Terrorist attack on their Parliament.

The evidence of India's planning for this new type of conflict is there for all to see, if you know what to look for and where to look for it.

So what is Economic HEGEMONY? What is Economic DEPENDENCY? What is an Economic FIRST-STRIKE? How will India seek to SUBJUGATE us ECONOMICALLY?

Given that Nuclear weapons and armies are useless, how will we defend ourselves in this new form of warfare? What will be the key strategic issues on this ECONOMIC battlefield?

These are the questions of the FUTURE to which that Clary fellow should have directed his energies.

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "India is tragically now a less tolerant society than what it was in the early 1980s."
---

It is not just India that shows this trajectory towards a reduction in tolerance for Muslims.

A) Was America not a more tolerant society towards Muslims (and us Pakistanis) in the eighties?

Did this not change after the 1993 World Trade Center bombings?

Did this not get reinforced after the September 2011 suicide attacks?

B) Was England not a more tolerant society towards Muslims (and us Pakistanis) in the eighties?

Did this not change after the open preaching of hate & violence in the Mosques of London in the Nineties?

Did this not get reinforced after the July 2005 suicide bombings?

C) What do you think the current tolerance levels for Muslims (and us Pakistanis) are right now in Denmark, Spain, France, Germany et cetera? And what were the tolerance levels in these countries in the early eighties?

Is the whole world just randomly becoming more bigoted towards Muslims (and us Pakistanis) or ARE WE DOING SOMETHING that is causing this change?

What did we being to do (Pakistanis & Muslims) in the Eighties than we have never done up to the Seventies? What happened in the Eighties & later in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world?

Any thoughts?

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "Let me share some data that sheds some light on the lives of Muslims in undivided India.

From "PARTITION OF PUNJAB" by Dr. Kirpal Singh (1988)"
----

Are we Pakistanis so incompetent that we constantly need to refer to books written by an Indians? Where are the books written by our own Pakistani authors?

Kirpal Singh on Pakistani Muslims
Sharmila Bose on Bangalee Muslims
Rajinder Sachar on Indian Muslims

Where on earth are OUR writers and their reports, books, papers and analyses?

Why are we constantly discussing the intellectual and literary output of the Indians? Why are we not producing and discussing our own intellectual and literary works?

Do we even have any intellectual output worth mentioning? Or are we too busy with the "Global Jihad Against Everything & Everyone" to be actually producing anything worth reading?

Art, Cinema, Literature, Theatre, Dance, Music et cetera: Where are we in these creative fields? Is it not true that trying to create many of these things will either trigger a fatwa or get someone killed or both?

Is this Jinnah's Pakistan? Is this the society created by a bacon-and-eggs eating Anglophile? Is this the country that the whisky-and-soda swilling brown-sahib wanted? Is this the State that an English-educated barristor in a saville-row suit had in mind when he wrote "Now or Never"? It seems so hard to believe now.....

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that perhaps Jinnah's Pakistan died with him in 1948. What we have today is merely a dysfunctional, muddled State; it is definitely not Jinnah's Pakistan.

Hopewins said...

^^RH quotes Raja Pervez I-am-High-Caste-Ashraf as: "The party's intention to capitalise on the Bhutto legacy was underscored by Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. In a statement, he said: "Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, following in the tradition of generations, will prove to be an important turning point for democracy and politics."
-----

Go here:
http://dawn.com/2012/12/27/the-emergence-of-a-new-bhutto/

On the right-hand side of the page there is a POLL: "Will Bilawal Bhutto’s entry into politics begin a promising chapter in Pakistan’s political history?"

Enter your vote and THEN SEE THE RESULTS. Vox Populi; Vox Dieu.

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "Here are some excerpts of a piece titled "How is India Doing(2012)?" as published in The Hindu..."
--

Dr. Haq,

Look carefully at the statement by the Author of the article right at the end of the long-winded piece:

"In the end, one of the achievements of electoral democracy and the working of the Constitution is that the citizen knows she has rights and will fight for them, however much she may despair at not being able to exercise them"

Never mind the content; just look carefully at the language. Do you notice something very unusual?

Something to think about.

Thank you.

Pratish @ Sulabh said...

The oft repeated statistics on defecation is welcome as it will create awareness and challenge many to improve the situation. Although I'm not sure about the intentions of this blogger or others who may cherish on the idea, we at Sulabh are in the midst of taking the sanitation challenge head on.

Whereas you may want to bring shame, the problem is almost a problem of access to sanitation rather than of habit - and that is what our research shows.

For those who are interested in tackling this issue please volunteer to do something about it or visit us at Sulabh International Social Service Organisation
www.sulabhinternational.org

Abhi said...

I agree with you only to the extent that Muslims in India are in bad shape in India.

But some of the wounds, I dare say, are self inflicted. The community often resorts to ghettoising, to seek shelter in numbers perhaps, instead of mixing freely with different cultures and communities. The muslims in india, carry with them massive cultural / religious baggage which often overwhelms others, leading to a sense of wariness and caution.

The community is also deeply suspicious, which in turn invites suspicions from others. This of course is a classical chicken and egg situation.

Most followers of most religions in india (fanatics excluded), tone down the religious identity to find common ground with people of different faiths. Whereas religious orthodoxy, or rather the perception of the same, compounds the problems for muslims.

With all due respect to the faith, islam is perceived to seek an exclusive sphere of influence while being intolerant of other religions.

Islam, i imagine, would do well to discard religious orthodoxy. I believe, the journey towards God, is measured in one's acts and not in redundant rituals prescribed a few thousand years ago. This, of course, holds true for all religions.


Riaz Haq said...

Abhi: "The community often resorts to ghettoising, to seek shelter in numbers perhaps, instead of mixing freely with different cultures and communities."

There's plenty of evidence to show that "ghettoizing" of Muslims is not self-imposed. Rather it's the refusal of Hindus to sell or rent to Muslims in various neighborhoods under various pretexts.

Here's an excerpt of a Washington Post story on it:

" Mumbai has always had tensions over what are known here as "vegetarian buildings," where meat eaters are not allowed to live and are thus seen as devices to keep out Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. Those kinds of buildings have become more common in middle-class and posh neighborhoods as more merchants and industrialists from the neighboring state of Gujarat, where vegetarian Hinduism is the norm, migrate to India's richest city.

Managers of vegetarian buildings say they don't want the smell of meat in their hallways. But they often also explain their rules by saying they are worried about security and want like-minded residents to live together.

"Say you check one renter and they seem okay. But then they go to mosque and bring back their bearded friends and those friends are terrorists," said Raj Pathak, a vegetarian-building manager in downtown Mumbai. "Why do we have to live with such fears?"

Muslims, who have seen housing discrimination and the number of vegetarian buildings spike after every terrorist attack, see the issue as blatant discrimination.

"Everyone knows the vegetarian-only restriction is code language for 'No Muslims,' " said Naved Khan, a Muslim real estate broker who is trying to help Bollywood's Muslims find housing. "


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/18/AR2009041800792.html

Hopewins said...

^^RH: There's plenty of evidence to show that "ghettoizing" of Muslims is not self-imposed. Rather it's the refusal of Hindus to sell or rent to Muslims in various neighborhoods under various pretexts.

Here's an excerpt of a Washington Post story on it:

Here's a more recent piece in The Hindu on housing Apartheid against Indian Muslims in Delhi:
-----

This is not just happening in Indian cities.

It is happening in NY & London as well. I hear from friends that Paris, Berlin and others are also slowly following the same trend.

Muslims are clustering (or being clustered?) in housing around mosques and find it difficult to get housing elsewhere.

But why? Why don't the Europeans, Americans, English (or Christian Westerners if you like) shun Asian Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists in the same way? Why is this "apartheid" treatment solely inflicted on the Muslim minority in these countries?

It even goes further. In every country in the West, demographers call Asian Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists etc as "model minorities" because their second-generation community statistics on education, income, welfare, crime et cetera are better the local White-Christian majority's. With Muslims, however, the statistics are a lot worse, and Muslims are quickly becoming an underclass.

But why? There are often claims of apartheid and racial discrimination against non-European immigrants. But these racial prejudices do not seem to hold back immigrants from China, India et cetera. So what is so special about Muslims?

Is the whole world turning against us? And if so, why?

Riaz Haq said...

Here's PakObserver on PM Ashraf's speech in Karachi:

Sunday, December 30, 2012 - Karachi—Prime Minister of Pakistan Raja Pervez Ashraf has said that the Parliament is the mother of all institution, strengthening the democracy means strengthening of the parliament.

Addressing the leadership, President/Office Bearers and members of Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) here today, the Prime Minister said that energy crisis was due to increasing demand and supply gap while the electricity was also provided to the villages.

The government inorder to enhance energy production is working on Jhelum-Neelum, Diamir Bhasha and Thar Coal was in progress. He stated that Judiciary was playing its role and media was free and strong democracy will prevail in the days to come. Provinces have been empowered with transfer of Rs 1000 Billion, he stated

The business and industrial community of Karachi contributes largest chunk of revenue in the national exchequer and holds a distinction in Pakistan as well as the region. He stated that the KCCI is the role model and trendsetter of the business community. He said that the businesspersons are chosen ones to provide employment to the people, he complimented.

To make Pakistan strong, the business community has to be strengthened, he maintained. He ordered the Chief Secretary Sindh to revisit the case of factory fire incident as an accident and rectify the charges under proper sections of Pakistan Penal Code referring accident instead of PPC-302. For prosperous Pakistan, he emphasized on the collective efforts by all the segments of the society.

Highlighting some achievements of the government, Raja Pervez Ashraf said that many challenges were converted to opportunities by the Government as the forex reserves and exports increased, inflation reduced to single digit.

PM was accompanied by Makhdoom Amin Faheem Commerce Minister, Abbas Khan Afridi Minister of State for Commerce, Syed NaveedAmanullah Khan

Karachi—Prime Minister of Pakistan Raja Pervez Ashraf has said that the Parliament is the mother of all institution, strengthening the democracy means strengthening of the parliament.
Addressing the leadership, President/Office Bearers and members of Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) here today, the Prime Minister said that energy crisis was due to increasing demand and supply gap while the electricity was also provided to the villages.
The government inorder to enhance energy production is working on Jhelum-Neelum, Diamir Bhasha and Thar Coal was in progress. He stated that Judiciary was playing its role and media was free and strong democracy will prevail in the days to come. Provinces have been empowered with transfer of Rs 1000 Billion, he stated
The business and industrial community of Karachi contributes largest chunk of revenue in the national exchequer and holds a distinction in Pakistan as well as the region. He stated that the KCCI is the role model and trendsetter of the business community. He said that the businesspersons are chosen ones to provide employment to the people, he complimented.
To make Pakistan strong, the business community has to be strengthened, he maintained. He ordered the Chief Secretary Sindh to revisit the case of factory fire incident as an accident and rectify the charges under proper sections of Pakistan Penal Code referring accident instead of PPC-302. For prosperous Pakistan, he emphasized on the collective efforts by all the segments of the society.
Highlighting some achievements of the government, Raja Pervez Ashraf said that many challenges were converted to opportunities by the Government as the forex reserves and exports increased, inflation reduced to single digit....


http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=189317

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "It even goes further. In every country in the West, demographers call Asian Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists etc as "model minorities"

Unfortunately, a model minority was pushed to his death in front of a New York elevated train just last week.

Here's a NY Times story excerpt:

In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/nyregion/woman-is-held-in-death-of-man-pushed-onto-subway-tracks-in-queens.html

The points is that xenophobes hate anyone different from them...be it Indian or Pakistan, Hindu or Muslim, etc.

HWJ: "It is happening in NY & London as well. I hear from friends that Paris, Berlin and others are also slowly following the same trend."

My family and I have lived in different parts of US for many decades and have NEVER EVER suffered any housing discrimination any where.

Where ghettos do exist in the West, they exist based on Asian ethnicity...not based on religion....the best example being Southall in England where South Asian Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs live side by side.

Anonymous said...

Riaz jee...

Its all very well...so easy to point fingers at others.

Yes finding apartments for muslims is difficult but not impossible and it is especially easy in new construction coming up all over India.The builders want to sell apartments for cash aren't really in a position too be choosy.

Also kindly enlighten us about the housing situation of idol worshippers in the land of the pure??

Are they welcome is posh affluent educated 'progressive' neighbourhoods of clifton and defence colony??

Riaz Haq said...

Anon: "Also kindly enlighten us about the housing situation of idol worshippers in the land of the pure??Are they welcome is posh affluent educated 'progressive' neighbourhoods of clifton and defence colony??"

Here's an excerpt of a Rediff report on one of Pakistan's top fashion designers Deepak Perwani on the subject:

This was the first of its kind exposure for Perwani outside the Indian fashion circuit, of which he has long been a friend and fellow traveller. The humble Perwani, though, has long been used to facing Indian surprise. "People keep asking me, 'Oh you guys didn't migrate?', 'How are you treated there?' and so on. The questions show a lack of awareness." Perwani is part of Karachi's flourishing Hindu community, which is small but visible and influential even today. One lakh of Karachi's 1.3 crore population is Hindu.

http://www.rediff.com/getahead/slide-show/slide-show-1-fashion-pakistani-hindu-fashion-designer-bats-for-indo-pak-peace/20120418.htm

Riaz Haq said...

Here's Dawn on KSE-100 among best performers in the world:

KARACHI: Pakistani stocks closed lower on Monday, although the market gained 49 per cent during 2012 and crossed 17,000 points for the first time.

The Karachi Stock Exchange’s (KSE) benchmark 100-share index ended 0.22 per cent, or 37.86 points, lower at 16,905.33.

The market’s rise was partly down to a substantial decrease in the interest rate, said dealer Samar Iqbal at Topline Securities.

Stocks that ended positively included Byco Petroleum, which rose 4.81 per cent, or 0.67 rupee, to 14.59 per share and Bank of Punjab, which was up 10.31 per cent, or one rupee, to 10.70 per share.

Stocks that fell included TRG Pakistan, down 0.7 per cent to 5.65 per share, and Fauji Cement, which fell 0.91 per cent to 6.53 per share.

In the currency market, the Pakistani rupee ended steady at 97.18/97.23 against the dollar, compared to Friday’s close of 97.17/97.23.

Overnight rates in the money market ended at 8 per cent compared to Friday’s close of 7 per cent.


http://dawn.com/2012/12/31/pakistani-stocks-gain-49-per-cent-during-2012/

Here's Bloomberg on Asian markets:

Dec. 28 was the final trading day of the year in South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Thailand’s SET Index surged 36 percent this year, the biggest advance by any Asian benchmark gauge after Pakistan’s Karachi 100 Index.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-28/asian-stocks-rally-for-sixth-week-on-japan-and-china-bets.html

Anonymous said...

Riaz: "Establishing even a partial blockade takes time, and it takes even more time for that blockade to cause shortages on land that are noticeable."

During the Kargil conflict; India using its superior naval capabilities was able to severly restrict Pakistan's ability to import Petroleum.

This was because Pak. was over reliant on Karachi which is close to India. The development of Gwadar with Chinese help has reduced pressure on the Pak. navy to prevent blockade of Karachi. Even if
India were to take great risks to blockade Karachi, it would gain very little unless it could simultaneously blockade Gwadar as well. This whie possible is improbable due to distance between Gwadar and India and hungry mirages with excocet missiles ready to swoop down on Indian vessels as they cross Pak. waters.

I would argue that Pak. needs to do 2 moe things to furher reduce the effectivness of india's blockade threat. Neither strategy calls for more vessels or planes.

Firstly Pak. must create a strategic petroleum reserve modelled on the U.S. reserves. The reserves must hold enough petroleum to meet the needs of Pak. armed forces for at least two weeks. While setting up the reserves would be expensive, once set up the only cost would be forgone interst that the govt. could have earned. The situation would be like keeping money in a non-interest bank. The benefit would be the fact that the effectivness of blockade would be reduced.


Secodly Pak. must improve the highway connecting to Iran and speeding up the time it takes border officials to check and approve goods in transit. By improving land trade with Iran, naval blockade would be less effective because land trade would pick up the slack.

While the most direct action to reduce India's naval threat would be to purchase vessels and planes, it is not always the most cost effective option. As Gwadar port has shown and I am confident a strategic petroleum reserve and better highway with Iran will show that indirect action can be more cost effective and should be considered.

Hopewins said...

^^Anon: "Firstly Pak. must create a strategic petroleum reserve modelled on the U.S. reserves."
-----

The analysis present is flawed.

It is based a misunderstanding of what a strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) actually actually stores.

Here are some clarifications:

(1) SPRs store ONLY CRUDE oil. They are incapable of storing volatile refined fuels like diesel, gasoline etcetera.
(2) Pakistan does not have sufficient refineries to meet its domestic requirements of refined fuel.
(3) Therefore, 80% of Pakistan's oil imports are actually processed or refined volatile components (gasoline, diesel, kerosene etc)
(4) Only 20% is imported in crude oil form because Pakistan does not have the capital-intensive refinery industry to handle more than that.

Given this information, an SPR would be quite useless at this stage. Pakistan would FIRST need to make massive investments in expanding its own refinery industry. Without this, Pakistan would still need to keep importing the non-storable volatile refined fuels.


Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "Pakistan would FIRST need to make massive investments in expanding its own refinery industry. Without this, Pakistan would still need to keep importing the non-storable volatile refined fuels."

It's already happening. Here's a Reuters' report:

Karachi-based Byco Oil said it had completed Pakistan's largest oil refinery at Balouchistan with a capacity of 120,000 barrels per day, which is expected to reduce the country's imports of oil products.

The new refinery, manufactured in the UK and assembled in Pakistan, is currently in the pre-commissioning stage, with tests being done on various equipment, the company said on its website. Byco Oil is the parent company of listed Byco Petroleum .

"It will enhance overall crude oil refining capacity in the country from an existing 12.25 to 18 million tonnes per year and will significantly contribute in reducing a shortage of refined petroleum products in the country," the statement read.

Byco officials could not be reached for comment.

The new plant will more than triple Byco's current capacity of 35,000 bpd at its existing refinery.

The refinery can be further expanded up to 180,000 bpd, the company said.

An isomerisation plant to produce higher volumes and cleaner motor gasoline is also being commissioned with the refinery.

Pakistan operates five other refineries, the largest of which is Pak-Arab Refinery's 100,000 bpd plant.

Pakistan State Oil, a major oil importer in the country, imports about 250,000 tonnes of diesel every month through term volumes, they added


http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/21/pakistan-refinery-idUSL4N09V3ND20121221

Hopewins said...

^^^HWJ: "Pakistan would FIRST need to make massive investments in expanding its own refinery industry. Without this, Pakistan would still need to keep importing the non-storable volatile refined fuels."

^^RH: It's already happening. Here's a Reuters' report:

"It will enhance overall crude oil refining capacity in the country from an existing 12.25 to 18 million tonnes per year and will significantly contribute in reducing a shortage of refined petroleum products in the country,"

---

Is that right? From 12 to 18 MTPA? That is splendid. That means that we should be almosy self-sufficient as soon as this Karachi-based Byco Oil gets the new plant running.

In the meantime, please take a look at Table 8.6 on Page 121 of this GOP report:
http://www.finance.gov.pk/survey/chapter_12/08-TradeAndPayments.pdf

Look at Group (C) for 2011-12. Can you see that our CRUDE oil imports were only 33% of our total oil imports? A full 66% had to be imported as refined products.

Now let us see what this "Karachi-based Byco" can do for Pakistan in the next year or two. Keep your eye on this same table as the GOP keeps updating the file over the next two years.

Let us see how self-sufficient this "Karachi-based Byco" can make us.

Shivam said...

You missed something Riaz. Indian Americans are the most educated and richest group of people in the US...even more than Jews. Yes, check it.

Why do you think this is possible? Yes, the US has its share of bigots, but its hardly as bad as you Muslims make it out to be. All you can do is complain about your precious religion. My girlfriend wanted to come visit me for a month and the cheapest fares were on Saudia, but ...well then...I realized...single women cant travel on Saudia! Have you guys considered stepping out of the 7th century for just 5 minutes? Look around you: it is 4 decades since man walked on the moon and your laws still dont let single women step on a plane. Its not even a question of enforcement, discrimination IS the law in Islamic states.

And btw, I just came back from the Israeli Embassy. Nice people! They dont have horns and they dont bite. And they dont fly planes into buildings. You should meet one or two. Or at least you should consider diplomatically recognizing their country and their right to exist.

Oh...and I will never understand this. Muslim Americans dont like American society, American laws, American wars, American diplomacy...they have nothing positive to say about America. Then why do you come? Stay in your beloved country under Sharia law.





Riaz Haq said...

Shivam: "You missed something Riaz. Indian Americans are the most educated and richest group of people in the US...even more than Jews. Yes, check it."

This post is not about Indian-Americans who are clearly not representative of Indians living in India with its world's largest population of poor, hungry and illiterates.

As to the accomplishments of Indian-Americans, they are highly exaggerated as pointed out by the following piece in Times of India.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-03-12/us/27742502_1_indian-origin-indian-parliament-indian-americans

Shivam: " My girlfriend wanted to come visit me for a month and the cheapest fares were on Saudia, but ...well then...I realized...single women cant travel on Saudia! Have you guys considered stepping out of the 7th century for just 5 minutes?"

Don't confuse Saudi Arabia with the rest of the Islamic world where women enjoy much better rights than the women in your native India where there is a female genocide unfolding and 24,000 women are brutally raped every year.

Shivam: "And btw, I just came back from the Israeli Embassy. Nice people"

You've only been to an Israeli embassy. I have traveled to Israel many times and spent weeks at a time living and working there with Israeli engineers at Intel in Haifa ad elsewhere.

It's wrong to conflate Israeli aggression and brutal occupation policies with all Israelis and Jews. Many Jews oppose what Israel is doing on the West Bank and Gaza strip.

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "Unfortunately, a model minority was pushed to his death in front of a New York elevated train just last week......The point is that xenophobes hate anyone different from them...be it Indian or Pakistan, Hindu or Muslim, etc"

----

That is not how the Pakistani media and Al Jazeera are viewing it.

They say the hate is specifically directed at Muslims & Pakistanis.

Sometimes some others mistakenly get caught up in it, but their violence is intended for Muslims/Pakistanis.

SOURCE:
http://alturl.com/itbvc
http://alturl.com/ysek3

Riaz Haq said...

Here's Indian Express on Justice Katju's latest about poor treatment of minorities in India and Pakistan:

Both India and Pakistan have failed on the test for a civilised society as minorities in either of the countries are not respected, Press Council of India (PCI) chairperson Justice Markandey Katju said on Saturday.

“For every civilised society, there is a test that how does it treat minorities. Unless minorities can live with dignity and respect, it is not a civilised society. And on that criterion both India and Pakistan have failed,” he said.

“Neither we respected the minorities - what happened to Sikhs in 1984, to Muslims in 2002, to Kashmiri Pandits. And in Pakistan, Hindus are coming to India because they can't live with dignity. Nor Christians, Ahmediyyas and Shias...Neither India is a civilised society, nor Pakistan is a civilised society. Both of us do not treat our minorities with respect,” he added.

The PCI chairman was speaking at the book release function of 'Sarabjit Singh : A case of mistaken identity' written by Awais Sheikh. Sheikh is Singh's lawyer in Pakistan.

Indians and Pakistanis who are lodged in jails of either country become victims of propaganda which the British had unleashed after 1857, Katju said.

“Sarabjit and Dr Khalil Chishty have been victims to the mindset that communal propaganda which had been started by the British,” he said.

“The matter related to Sarabjit is not an isolated one. There are historical reasons that form the background. The mindset that has been created after Partition - in India that all Pakistanis are bad, and in Pakistan that all Indians are bad. Sarabjit Singh and Dr Khalil Chishty are victims of that propaganda,” Katju said.

While Singh is languishing in a Lahore jail for nearly 22 years, Chishty was released recently after spending 20 years in Ajmer jail.

Katju said the British had encouraged division between Hindus and Muslims after the first war of Independence.

“I don't accept Partition. I still believe India and Pakistan are one country. The only solution is reunification of India and Pakistan under a strong, secular, modern minded government which will not tolerate religious extremism and suppress it with an iron hand,” Katju said.

Katju said it was very easy to indulge in self-praise but the time had come to speak the truth.

“I had said 90 per cent Indians are fools, it was very painful. But when you go to vote you don't see merit but the caste of the candidate and vote like cattle. What does it prove?” Katju said.

Katju said he spoke what was good for India and also Pakistan, since he did not recognise the “fake partition”. The PCI chairman said he was sowing the seed of an idea which may bear fruit later.

India had more stability and managed to develop and progress more because of the secular ideal present in the Constitution, he said.

80 per cent of Hindus and Muslims were communal, Katju said. He, however, said secularism was the best approach because of the immense diversity among the people.


http://m.indianexpress.com/news/%22india-pakistan-failed-in-giving-minorities-their-due-markandey-katju%22/1055045/

Riaz Haq said...

Here's Times of India on Amartya Sen's assessment of India:

MUMBAI: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has expressed shock at some of the suggestions made by politicians in the wake of the horrific gang rape in New Delhi last month. Speaking at the G L Mehta memorial lecture titled 'India: A defence and a critique', at the IIT-Bombay campus on Saturday evening, he said, "Ever since the gang-rape silly statements about men and women have come from extremely conservative quarters."

Slamming the state for the way it has approached human development and the prevalent gender inequality in the state, he said, "Some people think the atrocities that this woman suffered, and many others suffer, is a problem of urban areas and that it does not exist in rural areas. Dalit women have been violated and subjected to violence day in and day out without any group taking up their cause. The whole issue of death and neglect is far greater than we assume. It has an immediate effect on human life because half the people in the world are women."

Sen spoke at length in the lecture that lasted for an hour and a half. He elaborated on the need to rectify the place of women in India and spoke of how Bangladesh has overtaken India in every parameter of human development, which has a lot to do with gender equality. "In Bangladesh's politics, gender equality became increasingly important," said Sen. ``Not too long ago Bangladesh was behind India on all indices. Today Bangladesh is the only country with more girls in schools than boys. It has a higher life expectancy, lower mortality rates and women in the labour force.''

Quoting a statement that Mahatma Gandhi made in 1931 when he was in London, Sen said, "Gandhi made an important statement about counting women as equal partners. I think it is important to recognize that the father of the nation was clear on this subject."

Sen felt the state had to keep its people at the core of its policies. Comparing India's success story with that of its other neighbour China, he said, "The difference is the commitment to deal with the basic needs of the economy, the society and the people. If you see the Chinese economy, they have concentrated on economic growth by expanding human development. The complete depravation of basic amenities in India could dim high growth rate and the quality of humanity."

Speaking about the question confounding India, Sen said, "You cannot be dogmatic about keeping the market out. However, relying entirely on the market doesn't help either. You have to have a combination of both."


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Amartya-Sen-shocked-over-politicians-comments-on-Delhi-gang-rape/articleshow/17906800.cms

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "So do the better ends of China justify its worse means?"

Here's what I wrote in a blog post after visiting Beijing in 2009:

Since the death of Chairman Mao and passing of the leadership to late Deng Xiaoping in 1980s, the Chinese communist party has pursued liberalizing the nation's economy without political liberalization, in the same way other East Asians did earlier. Such a strategy has allowed them to pursue rapid industrialization with accelerated economic growth over the last two decades, while forcefully controlling the chaos on the streets, to lift a record number people out of poverty. China's large neighbor India has failed to use a period of high economic growth to lift tens of millions of people out of poverty, falling far short of China’s record in protecting its population from the ravages of chronic hunger, United Nations officials said recently.

There's no greater human right than the right to food, to be free of hunger. There is no human dignity in being poor, hungry and illiterate.

The great emphasis on social sector in China and the resulting human development will bring better democracy than the kind of "paper rights" and unresponsive "democratic" governance India and Pakistan and many other developing countries have.

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "The great emphasis on social sector in China and the resulting human development will bring better democracy.."
---

When? Can you give us an estimate as to when this democracy will come to China?

How about 10 years from now? Do you expect to see some small trace of democracy in China in ten years time?

What if India has able to substantially wipe out hunger 10 years from now, but China has still not been able to bring in even a trace of democracy by that time?

What will you say then about the "trade-offs"?

Will your comparison then move to housing, clothing, education, healthcare, environment? Will it move to fridges, TVs, washing machines, cars et cetera? Are these things also more important that the "paper rights" of which you speak so dismissively?

Hopewins said...

RH Quotes Amartya Sen: "You cannot be dogmatic about keeping the market out. However, relying entirely on the market doesn't help either. You have to have a combination of both."
----

Even a chimpanzee knows that.

There is no such thing as a 100% market system and no such thing as a 100% state system. All systems, including the USSR & Red China, were, are, and will always be, a combination of both.

Here is the HARD question for Amartya Sen: What is the "optimum" combination?

95% Market, 5% State?
75% Market, 25% State?
50% Market, 50% State?
25% Market, 75% State?
5% Market, 95% State?

What does the world-renowned Leftist-Economist Amartya Sen have to say about this? It is easy to talk in terms of loose generalities when the devil that lies in the details can only be tackled by elaborating on the SPECIFICS. Perhaps Amartya Sen should become an Intel manager?

Anonymous said...

This was the first of its kind exposure for Perwani outside the Indian fashion circuit, of which he has long been a friend and fellow traveller. The humble Perwani, though, has long been used to facing Indian surprise. "People keep asking me, 'Oh you guys didn't migrate?', 'How are you treated there?' and so on. The questions show a lack of awareness." Perwani is part of Karachi's flourishing Hindu community, which is small but visible and influential even today. One lakh of Karachi's 1.3 crore population is Hindu.

And they are all deleriously happy at being in Pakistan infact this is innovative pakistani way of freeing more land for buildings in the bustling city of karachi....

http://dawn.com/2012/12/02/pakistani-hindus-protest-destruction-of-temple/

Hopewins said...

UPDATE ON Sechar Commission Report on state on Muslims in India...
http://alturl.com/nqfz4

Riaz Haq said...

Thank you HWJ.

Here are some excerpts of the 2013 update to Sachar Commission 2006 report on state of Muslims in India as published by Times of India:

...In a unique exercise, Sharif has calculated that providing education to Muslim and SC/ST communities would on its own boost the GDP growth rate up to 12%. At present, Muslims contribute only 11.2% to the country's GDP while dalits and adivasis contribute only 16.5%. This is because these communities are poorly educated and forced to work in traditional and low value creating occupations. In traditional services, the share of Muslims and SC/STs in the workforce is about 18% each while in modern services their respective shares are just 8 and 14%.

Comparing NSSO data of 2004-05 with 2009-10, the report notes that in this period literacy levels of Muslim OBCs improved by 5.9 percentage points in rural areas and 5.3 points in urban areas. In the same period, literacy among dalits improved by 8.5 points in rural areas and 5.1 points in urban areas. Among tribal communities, literacy shot up by 11.3 points in rural areas and 8.6 points in urban areas. As a result, Muslims, who were earlier roughly at the same level as dalits and tribals, are now beginning to lag behind.

At the class 10 level, a similar situation exists. In both rural and urban areas, the number of students clearing class 10 has increased by 13% and 11% for STs and SCs respectively in urban areas, and 10% and 9%, respectively in rural areas. For Muslims, the change is only about 5% to 7% in rural and urban areas.

The share of 17 to 29 years old youths who are in higher education has increased by just 1.6 percentage points for Muslim OBCs over the same period. For other Muslims, it has increased by a minuscule 0.8 points. Compare this with a 9.4 points increase among Hindu upper castes and 5.3 points among Hindu OBCs. The improvement in dalits and tribals are similar to the Muslims.

...The source of income for almost a quarter of Muslim households is self-employment in non-agricultural occupations, mainly artisanal work. Only 14% of dalits and 6% of tribals earn their living from similar occupations. Another 23% of Muslims households earn by doing agricultural labour. Among dalits and tribals, the shares are 36% for this occupation.

In urban areas, over 45% of Muslims are self employed — more than any other community. They are usually involved in petty trade and various services like repair, etc. In the better paying and more secure salaried jobs, Muslims have the lowest share of all communities.

NSSO data from 2009-10 shows that in urban areas, over 88% of Muslims workers of age 15 years and above are in informal employment, the highest for any community. Muslims make up just over 6% of all government jobs, the lowest share of all communities and social groups.

Government schemes like the MGNREGS meant to provide a cushion for the unemployed too seem to have bypassed the Muslim community as Muslim households made up only 2.3% of those that got work under the scheme.

The report also points out that there is policy confusion about how minority communities are to be targeted for benefits under various schemes. Two sets of "minority concentration districts (MCDs)" have been flagged - one set is of 90 districts having 52% Muslim and 3.3% Christian population while the other set of 121 districts is the target of the prime minister's 15-point programme and has 66% Muslim and 11% Christian population....


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Have-government-schemes-failed-Muslims/articleshow/18013610.cms

Anonymous said...

exactly,thats why they can be dropped off at the border so that you can take them all.

Riaz Haq said...

Anon: "exactly,thats why they can be dropped off at the border so that you can take them all."

Yes, as long as the land in Muslim majority districts or equivalent territory comes with the Indian Muslim population.

In the latest update to Sachar Commission report, over 200 "minority concentration districts (MCDs)" have been flagged in India - one set is of 90 districts having 52% Muslims while the other set of 121 districts with 66% Muslim population.

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an ET blog post taking media to task:

A recent article in Wired, Danger Room highlighted the resurgence of the US drone campaign in Pakistan. While it focuses on the war, a lot was left untold about the nation’s story that is as heartening as it is heartrending, and as inspiring as it is seemingly dismaying.
---------
The story of four of these start-ups, that launched in 2012 speak volumes about the resilience, commitment and resourcefulness of its founders.

The first is Vital Agri Nutrients, a young, agricultural Research and Development focused company that is working on developing innovative products for farmers. It has had some recent breakthroughs with their micro-nutrients and soil amendments which are currently in field trials. Given the expected shortage of water and growing prices of fertilisers world-wide, the company and its products present a promising opportunity for small and large farmers to improve the crop yield and lower their input cost per acre by employing soil amendments that help with more efficient use of fertilisers and water in plants.

Next, four young entrepreneurs at Eyedeus, aided by decades of joint research in computer vision, have developed technology that enables mobile devices to have eyes and intelligently process real-world imagery using an increasingly powerful mobile processors. Unlike the cameras on mobile devices that just allow ‘dumb’ recording of images or videos, Eyedeus technology allows developers to augment the reality around users. The company’s first product, called ‘Groopic’ (beta available on the AppStore) is already getting rave reviews. Groopic allows group pictures to be taken in a way never before possible. The person taking the picture can now be part of the group picture, go figure!

Eyedeus, by the way, is part of a full-service technology incubator called Plan 9, that’s a visionary initiative of the government of Punjab, and it hosts at least a dozen other start-ups alongside Eyedeus, working on equally innovative products and services.

Similarly, Invest2Innovate is another accelerator that is supporting at least five entrepreneurial ventures focused on businesses with a large social impact.

Third is a new age production house called JugnooMedia, developing interactive, digital musical toys for mobile devices with an aim of providing toddlers and young children new avenues of learning that are more fun and effective than the traditional, classroom teaching. The demos of their first title are very impressive and the company has announced that it will be released on the Apple AppStore and Android Marketplace soon.

And finally, there is BLISS – a social venture that is aimed at improving the livelihood of women in Pakistan alongside educating them. BLISS has already done a pilot program in a small village of Pakistan where women were taught embroidery skills alongside formal school education in the first phase. In the second phase, BLISS provided the same women an opportunity to co-op with the company and develop handbags designed by professional designers which were then marketed by BLISS through its online store as well as an impressive list of global brand ambassadors. The women who made the bags got the lion’s share of the revenue from those sales and the rest of the money is being used to sustain the operations of the organisation and scale the program.
----------
The next time a story is told about the problems Pakistan is having with the political instability, corruption, energy shortage and terrorism the world must know, that to the same land belong some of the best, battle-tested and inventive entrepreneurs working on shaping the future of the world!


http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/15611/pakistan-more-than-just-drones-blasts-and-terrorism/

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "Yes, as long as the land in Muslim majority districts or equivalent territory comes with the Indian Muslim population"
----

Somebody just raised an important point.

Are we not Indian Muslims? Are you not Indian Muslim? After all, the person whose face appears on our currency was, by his own accord, an Indian Muslim and he referred to our country as a homeland for "Muslims of India".

So people here are suggesting that you SHOULD have written (or worded) it as follows:
"..as long as the land in Muslim majority districts or equivalent territory comes with the Muslim population"

See the difference?

HopeWins Junior said...

Dr. Haq,

You were right!

Fake Indian secularism now exposed by the key "token" Muslim that they have been using for so long as a fascade...

Jan 26, 2013: http://alturl.com/o6p4w

Thank you.

RK wrote an article titled Being a Khan for Outlook Turning Points magazine.



Khan said in an article for Outlook Turning Points magazine, many politicians asked him to go back to his native homeland: Pakistan, after 9/11 incident.



“I sometimes become the inadvertent object of political leaders who choose to make me a symbol of all that they think is wrong and unpatriotic about Muslims in India".



"There have been occasions when I have been accused of bearing allegiance to our neighboring nation (Pakistan) rather than my own country – this even though I am an Indian, whose father fought for the freedom of India. Rallies have been held where leaders have exhorted me to leave and return what they refer to my ‘original’ homeland.”



“I gave my son and daughter names that could pass for generic (pan-India and pan-religious) ones – Aryan and Suhana,”Shahrukh Khan said.

“The Khan has been bequeathed by me so they can’t really escape it.

Khan said that he pronounced names of his children with his epiglottis when asked by Muslims and throw the Aryan as evidence of their race when non-Muslims enquire. "I imagine this will prevent my offspring from receiving unwarranted eviction orders or random fatwas in the future,” said Khan.



Khan said that he was pressed to make the film My Name is Khan to prove a point after being repeatedly detained in US airports because of his last name.



He said he was grilled at the airport for hours about my last name when he was going to promote the film in America for the first time.

Hopewins said...

Given that you quote him so often, I will assume that you consider Kapil komiready to be knowledgeable, wise and trustworthy.

So here he is writing about our country with reference to Jinnah's Pakistan:

QUOTE: "Pakistan's founders explained their HASTY creation as the promised land where no Muslim would be killed for being Muslim. Today, it is a land where Muslims are killed for not being Muslim ENOUGH...."

READMORE: http://alturl.com/wdfxv

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "I will assume that you consider Kapil komiready to be knowledgeable, wise and trustworthy."

No, I don't. Kmireddy is an Indian who reports about India...that's the extent of his expertise.

HWJ: "QUOTE: ".. it is a land where Muslims are killed for not being Muslim ENOUGH...."

First, this is a distortion of history. Jinnah wanted all citizens of Pakistan to have equal protection under the law.

"You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State." Quaid-e-Azam M.A. Jinnah in address to first constituent assembly, Aug 11, 1947

http://www.riazhaq.com/2008/07/quaid-e-azam-ma-jinnahs-vision-for.html

Second, internecine violence is not unique to Muslims or Pakistanis.

Gandhi was killed by a Hindu, as are 40,000 Hindus every year who are murdered by fellow Hindus.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2008/06/india-is-worlds-murder-capital.html

Lincoln and Kennedy were killed by fellow Christian Americans, as are tens of thousands of other Americans every year. 750,000 Americans were killed by fellow Americans during the civil war in 1860s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Black-on-black violence is very common in America.

IRA terrorists killed thousands of fellow Irish during their civil war in the latter part of last century.

Hopewins said...

>IF< the view below is true, it indicates that ours is a fundamentally reactive society that NEEDS to be perpetually and eternally obsessed with India. It implies that without India as the anchoring "other", we would be floating rootless like driftwood in the ocean.

Do you agree with the view expressed below?

QUOTE Jan 22, 2013: "Since Pakistan was largely defined as ‘not-India’, a national identity and discourse sans the ‘other’ (i.e., India) has never really developed. And this has permeated the population. We never self-define ourselves and always look at the ‘other’ first and then react."

READMORE: http://alturl.com/9i3tq

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "Do you agree with the view expressed.."

This author is naive. He does not understand that the idea of modern nation state is not very old. The concept of nation states of today is not as natural as were the smaller units like tribes which held people together for most of human history.

Look at our neighbor India which the author refers to. Given the many ethnic, regional, religious, tribal and caste fault lines running through the length and breadth of India, there have long been questions raised about India's identity as a nation. Speaking about it last April, the US South Asia expert Stephen Cohen of Brookings Institution said, " But there is no all-Indian Hindu identity—India is riven by caste and linguistic differences, and Aishwarya Rai and Sachin Tendulkar are more relevant rallying points for more Indians than any Hindu caste or sect, let alone the Sanskritized Hindi that is officially promulgated".

What holds India together today is the shared Hindu religion and shared hatred of Pakistan.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/08/chinese-strategist-argues-for-indias.html

In his book titled "Next 100 Years", George Friedman of Stratfor doesn't think India would emerge as a great power because it's too fragmented as a society.

In fact, Friedman raises serious doubts about India and China staying united as modern nation-states, much less emerge as great powers of the 21st century. He says India and China are regionally fragmented and it's very difficult to govern the vast nations from from Delhi or Beijing. He does not foresee Brazil or Russia emerge as great powers of the 21st century either, essentially dismissing all four members of the the much-hyped BRIC countries.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2010/02/are-india-and-pakistan-failed-states.html

Riaz Haq said...

Indian commentators have pounced upon Feroz Khan's erudite work on "Eating Grass-The Making of the Pakistani Bomb" by citing what they claim is an error regarding Indira Gandhi's triumphant speech to Indian parliament after the fall of Dacca in 1971.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/the-story-of-pakistans-improbable-pursuit-of-nuclear-weapons#full

http://business-standard.com/india/news/a-dietgrass/492898/

Such self-serving reviews of things Pakistan by Indian commentators are not surprising. They are meant to sustain the Indian narrative of demonization of Pakistan.

Brig Feroz Khan's book is a scholarly work that offers the first authentic account of the making of Pakistani bomb.

It details a story of spectacular scientific and strategic achievement by a nation dismissed as a temporary "tent" and a "nissen hut" by Mountbatten in 1947. That same "nissen hut" is now a nuclear power about which Brookings' Stephen Cohen has said as follows:

“One of the most important puzzles of India-Pakistan relations is not why the smaller Pakistan feels encircled and threatened, but why the larger India does. It would seem that India, seven times more populous than Pakistan and five times its size, and which defeated Pakistan in 1971, would feel more secure. This has not been the case and Pakistan remains deeply embedded in Indian thinking. There are historical, strategic, ideological, and domestic reasons why Pakistan remains the central obsession of much of the Indian strategic community, just as India remains Pakistan’s.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=H_XYAq8A06gC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=%E2%80%9COne+of+the+most+important+puzzles+of+India-Pakistan+relations+is+not+why+the+smaller+Pakistan+feels+encircled+and+threatened,+but+why+the+larger+India+does.+It+would+seem+that+India,+seven+times+more+populous+than+Pakistan+and+five+times+its+size,+and+which+defeated+Pakistan+in+1971,+would+feel+more+secure.+This+has+not+been+the+case+and+Pakistan+remains+deeply+embedded+in+Indian+thinking.+There+are+historical,+strategic,+ideological,+and+domestic+reasons+why+Pakistan+remains+the+central+obsession+of+much+of+the+Indian+strategic+community,+just+as+India+remains+Pakistan%E2%80%99s.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=fpjjb4H5Cs&sig=C-gS4adMQFbkv-7h4PqbaTPZj9I&hl=en&sa=X&ei=goIQUYKVBcfXigLR8IC4Dw&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Cohen&f=false

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "Brig Feroz Khan's book is a scholarly work..."
---

Transcripts of all Parliament speeches are available to the public in both India and Pakistan.

So did Indira Gandhi say what Khan claimed she said in Parliament in 1971?

Yes or no?

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "So did Indira Gandhi say what Khan claimed she said in Parliament in 1971?"

Khan has cited his reference for it as follows:

V. Langer, The Defence and Foreign Policy of India (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1998), 205. Cited in Sattar, Pakistan's Foreign Policy 1947-2005, 119.

Do you have anything to disprove it? Do you have a link to the full text of Indira Gandhi's speech to Indian parliament in 1971 after the Fall of Dacca?

http://books.google.com/books?id=yGgrNAsKZjEC&pg=PA413&lpg=PA413&dq=V.+Langer,+The+Defence+and+Foreign+Policy+of+India+%28New+Delhi:+Sterling+Publishers,+1998%29&source=bl&ots=AnxQ7nTOMN&sig=dW5jiOQb3_yO0Ot1eIUExrpJNLc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Nd0TUdaFDsHqiwLbx4CICg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=V.%20Langer%2C%20The%20Defence%20and%20Foreign%20Policy%20of%20India%20%28New%20Delhi%3A%20Sterling%20Publishers%2C%201998%29&f=false

Hopewins said...

^^RH:"Such self-serving reviews.."
---

But realistically and unemotionally speaking, isn't the book itself a self-serving review of our nuclear program by an Army/ISI insider? Is is not the objective of the book to glorify our National Security Apparatus?

Would this book have not been more credible if it were written by someone like Ayesha Siddiqa and included an expose of Army/ISI involvement in the so-called "non-state-actor" Nuclear smuggling racket?

Are we waiting for a book by the other Khan (the Indian fellow from Bhopal) which would clearly spell out the involvement of the Army/ISI in two-way nuclear smuggling?

What does KRL stand for these days? Is it still Khan Research Labs or has it been reverted to Kahuta Research Labs? Do you know?

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "But realistically and unemotionally speaking, isn't the book itself a self-serving review of our nuclear program by an Army/ISI insider? Is is not the objective of the book to glorify our National Security Apparatus?"

Read the book before spewing nonsense!

Unlike the western and Indian narratives based on rumor and innuendo about Pakistani nuclear program, Khan's book is based on personal experience. And Khan cites lots of independent references to reinforce his account.

Khan even acknowledges technical help and transfers from China and North Korea.

But he also explains in detail what it takes to build operational nuclear capability in terms of the complexity of the endeavor and the indigenous human capital required to develop, build and deploy nuclear weapons in the face of immense adversity.

Khan also details AQ Khan's KRL's contribution which was essentially the development and deployment of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment. It was PAEC that did the rest, including development of trigger mechanisms and the bomb and warhead design and testing.

PAEC is also credited with all of the Pu programs which have superseded HEU in Pak nuclear program.

HWJ:"Would this book have not been more credible if it were written by someone like Ayesha Siddiqa..."

Absolutely not!!

People like Ayesha Siddiqa are totally ignorant of such complexities as discussed i the book. Such individuals and other similar critics resort to hatchet jobs to cover up for the lack of rigor in their own research of the subjects they choose write about.

Hopewins said...

Given the scale of the slaughter we are now witnessing, I think we can safely say that Shias are clearly worse off in Jinnah's Pakistan than they are in casteist, rascist, communal, spiteful, hate-driven Hindu-India.

There can be no debate about this.

Indian Shias have been holding massive demonstrations all over their country against the mass-murder of Shias in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

In fact, things have become so bad that Iranian TV is broadcasting demonstrations by Shias in Indian-Held KASHMIR against the slaughter of Shias in Pakistan....

http://alturl.com/36jw7

Jinnah must be turning in his grave.

Riaz Haq said...

Muslims have lowest living standard in India: Govt survey

Muslims in India continue to be the worst off. Indian Muslims are worse off than even the untouchables...they are the new untouchables

http://m.timesofindia.com/india/Muslims-have-lowest-living-standard-in-India-Govt-survey/articleshow/21936020.cms?intenttarget=no

Riaz Haq said...

Urban elite of cities now in #Pakistan was #Hindu, #Sikh. #Muslims were peasants. #Lahore now "overrun by villagers”

http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/57YwvcZC4oXwM0Evqj7s4O/Remembering-Pakistans-intellectual-wanderer.html

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a Dawn piece by Indian journalist Javed Naqvi on Dalit leader Amberkar:

As the intellectual and academic focus shifts to the Dalit worldview in India with Arundhati Roy’s fresh evaluation of Dalit mascot B. R. Ambedkar, who like Jinnah was also Mahatma Gandhi’s bête noir, fresh perspectives are expected to be unearthed from that largely masked historiography.

For all his sharp and often sympathetic assertions on Pakistan, and despite the fact that Ambedkar and Jinnah shared the laurels at the Round Table Conference and together won short-lived victories for their communities, the Dalit view of the freedom movement has been largely airbrushed at every stage of academia in both countries.

The deletion of Jaswant Singh’s and Advani’s perspectives on Jinnah is of a piece with the fate assigned to Ambedkar’s kindred bonding with Jinnah. But why has he been shunned in Pakistan? There will be hopefully a renewal of interest in the great Dalit intellectual not the least because of the interest shown in him by Ms Roy, whose word counts for something even among the most India-phobic Pakistanis.

Ambedkar’s appreciation of the Muslim quandary flowed from his view of the Congress as an upper caste Hindu party, not willing to do away with the horrors of the caste system in a free India.

“At the Round Table Conference, the Muslims presented their list of safeguards, which were formulated in the well-known 14 points. The Hindu representatives at the Round Table Conference would not consent to them,” notes Ambedkar dispassionately in his work Pakistan, or the Partition of India, which he wrote in 1940.

“There was an impasse. The British government intervened and gave what is known as “the Communal decision”.

By that decision, the Muslims got all their 14 points. There was much bitterness amongst the Hindus against the Communal Award. But, the Congress did not take part in the hostility that was displayed by the Hindus generally towards it, although it did retain the right to describe it as anti-national and to get it changed with the consent of the Muslims.

“So careful was the Congress not to wound the feelings of the Muslims that when the Resolution was moved in the Central Assembly condemning the Communal Award, the Congress, though it did not bless it, remained neutral, neither opposing nor supporting it. The Mahomedans were well justified in looking upon this Congress attitude as a friendly gesture.” Ambedkar’s observations were unbiased, neutral.

He then notes characteristically without fear or favour: “The victory of the Congress at the polls in the provinces, where the Hindus are in a majority, did not disturb the tranquillity of the Musalmans. They felt they had nothing to fear from the Congress and the prospects were that the Congress and the Muslim League would work the constitution in partnership.

“But, two years and three months of the Congress government in the Hindu provinces have completely disillusioned them and have made them the bitterest enemies of the Congress. The Deliverance Day celebration held on the 22nd December 1939 shows the depth of their resentment. What is worse, their bitterness is not confined to the Congress. The Musalmans, who at the Round Table Conference joined in the demand for Swaraj, are today the most ruthless opponents of Swaraj.”

What has the Congress done to annoy the Muslims so much?

Ambedkar answers his own question: “The Muslim League has asserted that under the Congress regime the Muslims were actually tyrannised and oppressed. Two committees appointed by the League are said to have investigated and reported on the matter. But apart from these matters which require to be examined by an impartial tribunal, there are undoubtedly two things which have produced the clash: (1) the refusal by the Congress to recognise the Muslim League as the only representative body of the Muslims, (2) the refusal by the Congress to form coalition ministries in the Congress provinces.”...


http://www.dawn.com/news/1095469

Riaz Haq said...

the proportion of Muslims in Indian parliament is just 4% while their population in India is over 13%. On the other hand, Muslims are over-represented by more than 2X in the prison population with 28% of the prisoners in India being Muslim.

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Discrimination-in-India:-Christians-are-6-per-cent-of-the-prison-population-30626.html

Riaz Haq said...

The proportion of Muslims in Indian parliament is just 4% while their population in India is over 13%. On the other hand, Muslims are over-represented by more than 2X in the prison population with 28% of the prisoners in India being Muslim.
Live discussion on IBN TV with a Muslim young man who had been incarcerated and tortured by the Andhra Police for the crime committed by Swami Aseemanand and his gang. How this young man's life has been turned upside down after false accusations and tortures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ophj0c-KI

Riaz Haq said...

Economics was the basis of Pakistan’s creation

By Shahid Javed Burki
Published: January 12, 2015
A month or so ago, in the space of a few days, I got into an earnest debate with Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States. The substance of that debate is important given Pakistan’s current political difficulties as well as the country’s relations with the outside world. I have known Haqqani for decades. In fact, he reviewed one of earlier works on Pakistan, A Nation in the Making, for the now-defunct Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review. At the first meeting — a lunch at a restaurant in a Washington suburb — we talked about his recently published and much-discussed book, Magnificent Delusions.

The book, in dealing with Pakistan’s relations with the United States, covers a lot of ground, from the country’s founding to its current precarious situation. In the conversation with me, he questioned the political logic which led to the creation of Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, he suggested, should have known that if his demand for the creation of an independent state was accepted, it would leave a significant number of his co-religionists behind in the Hindu-dominated independent India. A smaller minority would find their lives even more difficult in a country in which the Hindus would be even more dominant. This assertion by the former ambassador led me to ask the obvious question: was Pakistan’s creation a mistake? He said it was. I thought and told him so that this was an extraordinary statement by a person who had represented as its ambassador a country he believed was mistakenly created.

His other argument was developed in much greater detail at the house of a rich Indian businessman where the audience was presented his book so that it could be signed by the author. His speech on the occasion concerned Pakistan’s inability to live with its four neighbours — Afghanistan, China, India and Iran as well as with the United States, the country’s long-time benefactor. Including China in the list was puzzling but he said that Beijing had sent some strong messages to Islamabad about the latter’s alleged support to the dissidents in the country’s autonomous region of Xinjiang.

Both arguments need to be considered carefully since they have started a conversation in the American capital about the feasibility of what is sometimes called the ‘idea of Pakistan’. By pursuing the Islamic ideology as the basis of nationhood, the former ambassador thought that Pakistan itself had posed an existential threat to itself.

I responded to these views by saying that Pakistan was created not because its founding fathers thought that ‘Islam was in danger’ but for entirely economic reasons. The present rise of extremism is also owing to economic and political reasons. Those who follow it are not fighting a war of faith with the Pakistani state or the West. These people resent their exclusion from political and economic systems — both dominated by narrow elites — and some of them have opted for extreme violence as the preferred form of expression.

In order to understand the direction in which we should go, we must carefully understand why the country in which we live and of which we are citizens was created. The Pakistan Movement was largely the result of economic factors; religion intervened since the Muslims feared that they will be discriminated against on account of their faith. In the 1940s, when Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his political associates raised the demand for Pakistan, British India had a population of 400 million of which 100 million followed Islam. Two parts of this community, one in the northwest of the British Indian colony and the other in the northeast, accounted for 70 per cent of this community; the remaining 30 per cent was dispersed all over in what were called the Muslim minority provinces....


http://tribune.com.pk/story/820262/economics-was-the-basis-of-pakistans-creation/

Riaz Haq said...

MQM Leader Altaf Hussain:


"The division of the Indian sub-continent was the biggest blunder in the history of mankind".


"Perhaps the idea of Pakistan was dead at its inception, when the majority of Muslims chose to stay back after independence, a truism reiterated in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971".

— Altaf Hussain's Keynote Speech at conference in New Delhi on 6 November 2004


https://books.google.com/books?id=Gr5IoddTKb8C&pg=PR1&lpg=PR1&dq=Indo-Pak+Relations:+Challenges+Before+New+Millennium&source=bl&ots=cQlNuPtF5r&sig=qIeImTdOe7oIbA-oeBg9SGxcKMM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Z0dCVbaAMsnuoATu1oC4Bg&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=MQM&f=false

The British government has confirmed that the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) leader Altaf Hussain wrote to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair in September 2001, calling for the abolition of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s premier spy agency.

According to information released under the Freedom of Information Act, the letter was dated 23 September 2001, signed by Altaf Hussain and delivered to 10 Downing Street by Nirj Deva, who is currently a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Southeast of England.

The British government was assured of MQM’s support in countering terrorism in Pakistan in return for help in achieving “equitable participation in governing the province of Sindh and in disbanding the ISI”. The letter appealed that the “ISI secret agency must be disbanded otherwise the ISI will continue to produce many Osama-bin-Ladens and Talibans in future”.

The MQM letter offered to provide “many demonstrations in Karachi in favour of the international community combating terrorism within five days notice after this agreement is signed, putting hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Karachi” and “unlimited resources throughout the towns and villages in the province of Sindh and the province of Punjab to some extent, to monitor the activities of fundamentalists and Taliban-led organisations, and also to monitor the activities of Madrasas (religious schools)”.It also promised the UK “to ensure select groups to penetrate Afghanistan in the form of aid workers so as to enhance the Western agencies intelligence information capabilities”.

In return for these services, the alleged letter asked for “equitable participation in the governance of the province of Sindh and the Federation as partners; genuine, equitable participation in all spheres of life including education, employment, army and administration; local policing consisting of Muhajirs and Sindhis”.

Britain’s Foreign Office has confirmed “the Prime Minister’s Office received a letter from Mr Altaf Hussain which was passed to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) for a response,” said the Cabinet Office, adding: “No information is held indicating that a response was sent to Mr Hussain”.

The FCO has confirmed further: “On 27 September 2001, the FCO received correspondence, via No.10, from Mr Nirj Deva MEP enclosing a copy of the letter from Mr Hussain. Mr Ben Bradshaw MP, the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the FCO, replied to Mr Deva’s letter.”

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-13-24034-UK-says-Altaf-Hussains-disband-ISI-letter-is-authentic

Riaz Haq said...

Excerpted from Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Throughout August 1947, as Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs engaged in one of the most terrible slaughters of the 20th century in next-door Punjab province, lights continued to blaze from New Delhi’s ivory-white Imperial Hotel. On weekends, diners packed the tables in the Grill Room overlooking the lawns, while Indian socialites dripping with gold and jewels filled the dance floor well past midnight. To many of the city’s well-to-do, the bloodshed that had erupted upon the birth of modern India and Pakistan still felt unreal. The Indian women in particular seemed to be “on heat,” one British journalist noted hungrily. “The aphrodisiac was independence.”

No band played on Saturday, Sept. 6, however. A curfew had emptied the dining room. Anyone standing on the hotel’s veranda would have been bathed in a different light—a rose-colored glow that filled the horizon to the north. The Muslim neighborhoods of Old Delhi were on fire.

When they imagine the terrible riots that accompanied the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, most people are picturing the bloodshed in the Punjab. On Aug. 15, the new border had split the province in two, leaving millions of Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs in what was now Pakistan, and at least as many Punjabi Muslims in India.

Gangs of killers roamed the border districts, slaughtering minorities or driving them across the frontier. Huge, miles-long caravans of refugees took to the dusty roads in terror. They left grim reminders of their passage—trees stripped of bark, which they peeled off in great chunks to use as fuel; dead and dying bullocks, cattle, and sheep; and thousands upon thousands of corpses lying alongside the road or buried shallowly. Vultures feasted so extravagantly that they could no longer fly.

As awful as the carnage was, though, it was for much of August concentrated in the Punjab. The combatants were mostly peasants, armed with crude weapons. If the two new governments had managed to quell the mayhem quickly, they might in time have found scope to cooperate on issues ranging from economic development to foreign policy. Instead, the infant India and Pakistan would soon be drawn into a rivalry that’s lasted almost 70 years and has cast a nuclear shadow over the subcontinent.

A few short days in Delhi at the beginning of September 1947 helped to tilt the scales. Most train services across the new border had been suspended because of the spiraling massacres, stranding thousands of Muslim civil servants destined for Pakistan in the Indian capital. Desperately short of staff, the Pakistani government was already struggling to cope with hundreds of thousands of traumatized refugees and a stalled economy. Pakistan’s prickly founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, suspected the Indians of deliberately seeking to sabotage his fragile state.

His fears weren’t entirely unfounded. For several days running, according to some eyewitness reports, small groups of Sikh and Hindu militants had been roving the broad, manicured avenues of New Delhi, defying the curfew. Some appear to have been marking out the rooms in government dormitories occupied by Muslim clerks and peons, as well as the houses and bungalows where Muslims lived or worked as servants. A British diplomat later reported seeing a lorry full of Sikhs pull up outside the home of the local chairman of British airline BOAC, which had agreed to transport Muslim officials to Pakistan by air until the trains resumed. “That’s the place,” one of the Sikhs confirmed, carefully noting down the address.


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/how_india_and_pakistan_became_enemies_excerpt_from_nisid_hajari_s_midnight.html

Riaz Haq said...

Excerpted from Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

On the night of Sept. 6, sword-wielding gangs began working their way from target to target, dragging out and killing Muslims. The next morning mobs took to the streets all over the city. One descended on the military airfield at Palam, from where the BOAC charters were taking off; another blocked the runways at the civilian Willingdon Airfield as airline employees fled in terror. Muslims caught out in the open were stabbed and gutted, including five who were killed in front of New Delhi’s cathedral while worshippers celebrated Sunday Mass. Looters broke into Muslim shops in Connaught Place, the colonnaded arcade at the heart of the city. By 10 that night, Delhi hospitals were reporting three times as many Muslim as non-Muslim casualties.

Rushing to Connaught Place, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was appalled to see a contingent of police standing by idly as Hindu and Sikh rioters carried off ladies’ handbags, cosmetics, and wool scarves—even bottles of fountain-pen ink. Nehru grabbed a baton from one indifferent policeman and flailed away at the crowd himself. The prime minister would learn later that Delhi police had picked up rumors that “two well-known [Sikh] extremists from Amritsar” had organized refugees from the Punjab into makeshift killing squads. Plot or no, Delhi’s police appeared content to let the rioters go about their business unmolested.

Although they later tried to play down the extent of the chaos, Nehru and his deputy, the tough Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel (known as “Sardar,” or Chief), at least temporarily lost control of their own capital. Ministries sat empty because clerks and officials were too afraid to come to work. Buses, taxis, and horse-drawn tongas—usually driven by Muslims—stopped plying the roads. The phones went dead. Within 48 hours, hospital mortuaries had filled to capacity; dozens of bodies lay unclaimed on the streets for days. With food shipments rotting in abandoned trains, ration shops closed up. At one point the city had only two days’ stock of wheat in reserve.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, Britain’s last viceroy, had stayed on after independence to serve as India’s first governor-general. Many of his staff members had seen combat with him during World War II; even they were stunned by the whirlwind. “This is more hectic than at any time of the war,” Mountbatten’s chief of staff Lord Hastings Ismay wrote to his wife—a potent statement from a man who had lived through the Blitz. He advised her to cancel her plans to come out to see him: “There is a possibility—and most keen a possibility—that orderly Government may collapse.”

Initially none of the Indian leaders doubted that Sikhs, who had played a central role in the Punjab violence, had spearheaded the Delhi attacks, too. More than 200,000 non-Muslim refugees from the Punjab had squeezed into the capital, and plenty of them thirsted for revenge. Patel called in local Sikh leaders and threatened to toss their followers into concentration camps if the violence did not cease. He also gave the army a “free hand” to go after Sikh troublemakers. Commanders ordered their troops to shoot rioters on sight. Though the military could not admit openly to targeting any particular community, Mountbatten joked grimly, “the object would have been achieved if in 48 hours’ time the local graves and concentration camps were occupied more fully by men with long beards than those without.”



http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/how_india_and_pakistan_became_enemies_excerpt_from_nisid_hajari_s_midnight.html

Riaz Haq said...

Excerpted from Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Very quickly, however, Patel’s assessment of the threat changed. The problem was not just the Sikhs. Earlier police reports had also warned of a brewing Muslim uprising in the capital. Most of the city’s ammunition dealers were Muslim, as were most of its blacksmiths. The latter had supposedly converted their workshops to churn out bombs, mortars, and bullets. Patel had been worried enough about the threat to issue licenses to several new Hindu arms dealers in Delhi. He had “been giving arms liberally to non-Muslim applicants” for self-defense, he reassured a colleague.

Some Delhi Muslims were indeed armed. They fought back against the police as well as the Hindu and Sikh gangs; among reported gunshot victims on Sunday, non-Muslims actually outnumbered Muslims 45 to 20. Though evidence of any conspiracy is scant, quite a few Delhiites seemed to believe that the city’s Muslims posed as great a threat as the death squads, if not greater.

During the riots, officials trying to rescue Muslims often found the public reluctant to help. Owners of private cars and trucks removed key parts so that the authorities couldn’t requisition the vehicles. Volunteer drivers pretended to get lost or to develop engine trouble when asked to deliver aid to Muslim areas. (Eventually the government enlisted idealistic students to ride along and watch over them.) Even four days into the rioting, the U.S. military attaché witnessed Indian army troops standing by as Muslim women and children were clubbed to death at Delhi’s railway station.

Patel was more in tune with the popular mood than Nehru. While the principle that Hindus and Muslims should be able to live together remained central to Nehru’s vision for India, the Sardar was less sentimental. He did not trust that all of India’s Muslims, many of whom had until recently supported Jinnah, had switched loyalties. If they did not think of themselves as Indians, he believed, then they belonged in Pakistan.

Nehru would almost certainly have lost an open fight with his deputy. Horrified by the casualty reports, the prime minister tried to ban Sikhs from wearing their ceremonial knives, known as kirpans. Patel pushed back, saying the decree discriminated against the Sikh faith. “Murder is not to be justified in the name of religion,” Nehru protested. Yet after a “violent disagreement” between the two men, the Sardar triumphed. Sikhs regained the right to carry their daggers after a 48-hour pause.

Nehru seemed to believe he had a better chance of quelling the unrest single-handedly than by working through his own administration. He went “on the prowl whenever he could escape from the [Cabinet] table, and took appalling personal risks,” Ismay recalled. Nehru would angrily face down mobs himself, rushing from trouble spot to trouble spot. A veritable tent city, filled with Muslim refugees, sprouted on the lawns of his York Road bungalow.

One night a Muslim friend named Badruddin Tyabji showed up at Nehru’s door to alert him to an especially troubled area—the Minto Bridge, which Muslims fleeing their Old Delhi neighborhoods had to cross to reach the safety of refugee camps in New Delhi. Each night, Tyabji said, gangs of Sikhs and Hindus lurked nearby and sprung upon the defenseless Muslims as they trudged past.



http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/how_india_and_pakistan_became_enemies_excerpt_from_nisid_hajari_s_midnight.2.html

Riaz Haq said...

Excerpted from Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Nehru’s individual heroics evoked great admiration in men like Ismay and Mountbatten. But they did little for Delhi’s Muslims. After the initial wave of attacks, thousands had fled their homes. Authorities almost immediately started evacuating the rest, claiming they could not guarantee the safety of residents if they remained where they were.

Muslims were dumped in guarded sites by the truckload—places which it would be generous to describe as refugee camps. Within a week, more than 50,000 were crammed into the Purana Qila, a ruined fort. They huddled pitifully on the muddy ground with no lights, no latrines, and hardly any water or food. The Pakistan government flew in shipments of cooked rice and chapatis all the way from Lahore to feed them.

Ismay melodramatically compared the scene at the Purana Qila to “Belsen—without the gas chambers.” Dignified Muslim professors and lawyers were squashed next to cooks and mechanics, longtime Gandhians next to stranded, would-be Pakistan bureaucrats. Wounded and sick moaned without medical attention; babies were born in the open. Armed Sikhs patrolled the one choked entrance, taking down the license plate numbers of Europeans driving in to deliver food and supplies to their friends and former servants.

With the help of Gurkha and South Indian troops—who were less vulnerable to the sectarian passions roiling their northern counterparts—authorities managed to control the worst of the violence within a week. Volunteers began to clean up the streets, and ration shops reopened. Nehru asked the governors of other Indian provinces to take in tens of thousands of Punjab refugees, to get them out of the capital.

But the riots fatally undermined any trust Pakistani leaders may have had in their Indian counterparts. Nehru’s estimate that 1,000 victims had died in the rioting was generally considered “ridiculous,” according to U.S. Ambassador Henry Grady. He figured the true toll to be at least five times higher; others said 20 times.

At the height of the violence, Jinnah was inundated with hysterical reports from the Pakistani ambassador in Delhi, Zakir Hussain. Hundreds of Muslim refugees had carpeted the grounds of his house, Hussain reported, and the embassy’s food supplies were running out. He described the Indian government as either intent upon eliminating the capital’s Muslim population or indifferent to their fate. Army troops were openly gunning down innocent Muslims. In one particularly florid cable Hussain warned, “The entire Muslim population of India is facing total extermination.”

A conviction was taking hold among Jinnah and his lieutenants that India had launched an “undeclared war” on the weaker Pakistan. The Indian leaders seemed incapable of transferring Pakistan government servants to the new capital Karachi, or of protecting them in their Delhi homes. Cargo trains full of equipment and supplies meant for Pakistan were being derailed and torched in the Punjab. At least some members of the Indian Cabinet appeared to be winking at the Sikhs’ murderous activities. “It is obvious that their orders are not carried out,” one of Hussain’s cables said of the Indian leaders, “or at least different members of the government are following conflicting policies.”


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/how_india_and_pakistan_became_enemies_excerpt_from_nisid_hajari_s_midnight.2.html

Riaz Haq said...

Excerpted from Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In mid-September, Ismay spent three days in Karachi trying to convince Jinnah that the Indian government bore Pakistan nothing but goodwill. Jinnah was dismissive. He was convinced that Sikh and Hindu militia leaders had planned the violence in the Punjab as well as Delhi. Though intelligence had given some inkling of their plans over the summer, they had been allowed to walk free. With its vast resources and powerful military, Jinnah believed, India could even now have suppressed the Sikhs if only Nehru had had the necessary “will and guts.” Instead he could not even guarantee the safety of Muslims in his own capital.

Ismay returned to Delhi profoundly depressed. In a secret codicil to his report, meant for Mountbatten’s eyes only, he warned that Jinnah had begun speaking in dangerously warlike tones. In the very first hour of their talks the Pakistani leader had struck Ismay “as a man who had given up all hope of further cooperation with the Government of India.” All that had happened in the month since independence just “went to prove that they were determined to strangle Pakistan at birth,” Jinnah had told Ismay grimly. “There is nothing for it but to fight it out.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/how_india_and_pakistan_became_enemies_excerpt_from_nisid_hajari_s_midnight.2.html

Riaz Haq said...

Try renting an apartment using a #Muslim name (In #India ), Shashi Tharoor to Anupam Kher. #Modi #BJP #Islamophobia http://tribune.com.pk/story/1039332/try-renting-an-apartment-using-a-muslim-name-shashi-tells-anupam/ …

Indian Congress leader Shashi Tharoor while defending his Twitter argument with veteran actor Anupam Kher, said if the actor is scared to openly call himself Hindu in India, he should try renting an apartment with a Muslim name.

During an interview Kher confessed that he fears “saying I’m a Hindu”. “In this country, I’m scared to say that if I wear a tilak (mark worn by a Hindu on the forehead to indicate caste, sect) and a gerua (saffron colored clothes), then I will be branded as an RSS (right-wing party) guy or a BJP fanatic,” said Kher.

Today, I’m scared to say I’m Hindu: Anupam Kher

A spat broke out as Tharoor tweeted against Kher’s comment, stating that though India has people from various religions, the country is recognised by Hindus at large. Kher in reply to the comment called Tharoor a ‘Congi Chamcha’.

Stating that minorities in India are the ones who have to struggle much harder than Hindus to be accepted by society, Tharoor in a column on NDTV said, “Try renting an apartment, for instance, while using a Muslim name: there are many parts of many towns where you will be turned away with one specious excuse or another. And yet Muslims are expected to grin and bear it, and move on. ”

Blind Muslim teacher barred from renting flat in India

“So when I said, truthfully, that I openly, and without self-consciousness, say I am Hindu, I am acknowledging that it’s far easier for me to do so than it is for an Indian Muslim or Christian to wear his faith on his sleeve without being typecast for doing so. And when I added that I am not the Sangh’s kind of Hindu, I meant that I am not belligerent about my Hinduism,” he wrote.

http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/on-my-twitter-dispute-with-anupam-kher-1272216?site=full

Riaz Haq said...

#Pakistan 4th largest source of remittances to #India. $5 billion sent annually from Pakistan to #Indian relatives. http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/pakistan-4th-largest-source-of-remittances-to-india-115122400035_1.html#.VtE2Ian44zg.twitter …

Surprising as it may seem, but Indians who have migrated to Pakistan are expected to remit back home a staggering $4.9 billion in 2015. This would make Pakistan the fourth largest source of India's remittances this year, according to a new study by the World Bank.

Why #WorldBank Says #Pakistanis Sent $5 billion to #India? It's from India-born relatives in #Pakistan http://on.wsj.com/1VFN1P7 via @WSJIndia

Pakistan is home to more than 1.4 million people who were born in India. However, these immigrants are not your traditional non-resident Indians. They are a remnant of partition when colonial India was split and millions of people moved as they picked a country or were kicked out and displaced by violence.

The World Bank attributes a large slice of India’s annual remittance income to Pakistan because there is such a large group of India-born citizens there. The money also flows the other way, according to the bank’s model, as there are around 1.1 million Pakistan-born people living in India. The World Bank estimates Pakistan received remittances of more than $2 billion from India.

Some readers of The Wall Street Journal who first saw these numbers in a story titled “The Difference Between Indian and Chinese Migrants,” were shocked, skeptical and scared. The amounts had to be a mistake, some said in comments, or proof that money is being sent to finance terrorism or organized crime in India.

Mr. Ratha still stands by the bank’s best guess and says the origin of the cash is much less sinister.

The billions of dollars flying back and forth between the two countries are from the same place as the rest of the world’s remittances: family and friends supporting each other across borders.

There are literally millions of family connections between the two countries and millions of reasons a person in Pakistan might find a way to get money to relatives in India. The money could be sent for a brother in need, a cousin’s wedding, an uncle’s funeral or even to help educate a niece.

Despite the animosity between the two countries, as well as the rules, regulations and restrictions, family and finance finds a way.

Sometimes that means using informal avenues like the hawala money transfer system or arranging for the money to be sent via a different country. Sometimes it means an envelope of cash carried by a friend traveling to India.

“These are two big economies right next to each other. The money must be flowing,” Mr. Ratha said. “That number we put out could even be an underestimation.”

Riaz Haq said...

A study in contrasts: Muslims in India vs Pakistan by Dr. Ata ur Rahman ... The per capita income of Muslims in Pakistan is about $1,460 while the per capita income of Muslims in India is only about $400 – less than one-fourth of the country’s national Indian GDP. About 52.3 percent of Muslims in India live below the poverty line, with an average monthly income of $5 or less. Muslims constitute about 14.5 percent of the total Indian population. However, only between two percent and three percent of them pass the civil services examinations.
----
The literacy level of Muslims in India is also much lower than the national average. Only about four percent (one in 25) of Indians who receive education up to the high school level are Muslims, while only 1.7 percent (one in 60) of college graduates in India are Muslims. When we consider that one in seven people in India is a Muslim, these figures bring out the stark disparities that exist in India between Hindus and Muslims. In his book, ‘India’s Muslim Problem’, V T Rajshekar states that Muslims “are in many ways worse than untouchables and in recent years they are facing dangers of mass annihilation”.

The mass killings of Muslims in Indian towns and cities also add strength to the Two-Nation Theory. About 630 Muslims lost their lives during the 1969 Gujarat riots. This was followed by anti-Muslim violence in the Indian towns of Bhiwandi, Jalgaon and Mahad in 1970 when a large number of properties of Muslims were burnt and many Muslims killed. During anti-Muslim violence in Moradabad in 1980, about 2,500 Muslims were killed by extremist Hindu elements. Another 1,800 Muslims were slaughtered in the state of Assam in 1983 in a village called Nellie. The official 600-page Tiwari Commission Report on the Nellie massacre has remained a closely guarded secret since 1984.

The destruction of Babri Masjid in December 1992 by Hindu nationalists led to the Bombay Riots. BBC correspondent Toral Varia concluded that the riots were “a pre-planned pogrom” that had been in the making since 1990. According to many independent scholars, extremist Hindu rioters had been given access to information about the locations of Muslim homes and businesses through confidential government sources. This violence was planned and executed by Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist group led by Bal Thackeray.

The anti-Muslim riots that occurred in Bombay in January 1993 following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, were reported in the following manner by international and Indian newspapers:

“Bombay: Day after day after day, for nine days and nights beginning on January 6, mobs of Hindus rampaged through this city, killing and burning people only because they were Muslims. No Muslim was safe – not in the slums, not in high-rise apartments, not in the city’s bustling offices – in an orgy of violence that left 600 people dead and 2,000 injured...Interviews have suggested, moreover, that the killing, arson and looting were far from random. In fact, they were organized by Hindu gangs, abetted by the Bombay police, and directed at Muslim families and businesses. The extent of police cooperation with the Hindu mobs appears to have spread through the entire police force, excluding only the most senior officers...neither the Maharashtra authorities nor the central government in New Delhi made any effort to stanch the flow of blood.” (The New York Times, February 4, 1993)

“Tragedy has struck Surat (Muslim) women… for them, it was hell let loose... While men were thrown into bonfires, torched alive or had burning tyres put around their necks, women were stripped of all their clothes and ordered to ‘run till they can’t… run”. (The Times of India, December 22, 1992).

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/223824-A-study-in-contrasts

Riaz Haq said...

Modi’s Double Engine Sarkar by Pervez Hoodbhoy

https://www.pakistanlink.org/Opinion/2022/Nov22/11/07.HTM

These are substantial, undeniable achievements that hubris-filled Hindu nationalists say derive from their greatness as an ancient civilization. But wait! China has done still better. And, though far smaller, many emergent countries of East Asia — Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore — also boast of better performance than India’s.

In every case, the secret of success is well-known — strong systems of education that create skills, knowledge, attitudes and social behavior’s suited for modern times. Together with that, a strong work ethic in the labor force. Stated differently, high national achievement springs naturally from the quickness with which a country universalizes or ‘Westernizes’ its education and creates positive attitudes towards work.

Here’s how India grew into the present. Empowered by the scientific and industrial revolutions, Britain colonized India and sought to spread Western education and values. Conservative Hindus emphatically rejected this modernization butsar reformist movements such as Brahmo Samaj under Ram Mohan Roy and others made deep inroads.

By 1947 under Jawaharlal Nehru — an avowed Hindu atheist devoted to the ‘scientific temper’ — India was already intellectually equipped to enter the modern world. For the next 50 years, India’s education sought to create a pluralist, secular, scientifically minded society. It reaps rich harvests to the present day — which the BJP happily appropriates as its own.

But Hindu nationalists now want India’s goals and self-image drastically revised. Modi’s second engine, fueled by febrile imaginations, pushes India towards emulating some kind of Hindu rashtra from an idyllic past. My friend Prof Badri Raina, now retired from Delhi University, says that “this backward engine would have us believe that in ancient times we had knowledge of plastic surgery, aeronautics, satellite vision, even as streams of foaming white milk flowed down our plains, and golden birds perched on the branches of trees”.

---------

The loudest call for reforming Muslim education was that of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Madressahs, he said, are entirely unnecessary. Using religious idiom, he passionately argued for science and modernity. While his efforts led to some measure of functionality and to jobs within the colonial system, they were nowhere deep or wide as that of Brahmo Samaj. Conservative backlash limited Sir Syed’s influence.

Thus, by the time Partition came around, there was a massive Hindu-Muslim gap. Nevertheless, for the first few decades, Pakistan’s engine #1 steadily gained strength and was consistently stronger than its second engine. Among other things, Pakistan’s space program (born 1961, now dead) much preceded India’s.

Riaz Haq said...

#Indian #Muslims in higher #education: Enrollment of Muslims in #India fell by 8% in 2019-20, while that of #Dalits, #Adivasis & #OBCs rose by 4.2%, 11.9% & 4% respectively. Upper caste #Hindus saw highest growth rate of 13.6%. #Islamophobia #Casteism https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/lower-in-higher-education-8598739/

The recently released All India Survey on Higher Education 2020–21 shows some contrasting trends. On the one hand, enrollment of Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs in higher education has increased by 4.2 per cent, 11.9 per cent and 4 per cent respectively compared to 2019-20. The upper castes, whose share in enrollment had been declining with the implementation of Mandal II since the late 2000s but who have come back with the highest growth rate of 13.6 per cent. On the other hand, the enrollment of Muslim students dropped by 8 per cent from 2019-20 – that is, by 1,79,147 students. This level of absolute decline has never happened in the recent past for any group.

UP accounts for 36 per cent of that total decline followed by Jammu and Kashmir, which accounts for 26 per cent, then Maharashtra (8.5 per cent), Tamil Nadu (8.1 per cent), Gujarat (6.1 per cent), Bihar (5.7 per cent) and Karnataka (3.7 per cent). Except in Tamil Nadu, Muslims alone witnessed an absolute decline in their enrollment. While the states that have a larger share of the Muslim population account for the higher share of decline, small states too show similar trends. For instance, between 2019-20 — 2020-21, Delhi lost about 20 per cent of its Muslim students while J&K lost about 36 per cent.

------------

Professor Sukhdeo Thorat, emeritus professor, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawahar Lal Nehru University and former chairman, University Grants Commission(UGC) said that financially weak Muslims may go for higher studies if they are helped through scholarships.
Speaking on a lecture ‘Where do the Muslims lag behind in higher education?: Lessons for policies’ on the occasion of the 25th Foundation Day of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (Manuu), Thorat said, “There are internal disparities among Muslims in attainment of higher education based on income level, gender and medium of education and institutions like Manuu must give preference to such groups through scholarships, differential fee structure, hostel facility and remedial coaching classes.”
He reiterated that Muslims have the lowest Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) at 16.6% in higher education among all the communities in the country (national average is 26.3%). He also pointed out that Muslim students depend highly on government institutions (54.1%) as compared to other communities (national average 45.2%) and only 18.2% Muslim students go to private aided higher education institutions and 27.4% go to private unaided higher education institutions against a national average of 24.4% and 30.1%, respectively.


https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/muslims-have-lowest-ger-in-higher-education/articleshow/88808430.cms