One of my insights into Pakistan’s socioeconomic evolution was due inadvertently to my father when, as a student of economics, I encountered his changed post-retirement pattern of time use.

It was the nature of the change that was surprising. I saw him rise early to monitor the water level in the rooftop storage tank, climb down to check the underground one, turn on the electric motor, then switch it off after an appropriate interval. Often the motor would malfunction and he would arrange to have it fixed. Less frequently, someone would be called to clean the tanks.

Over time the pipes to and from the tanks acquired a byzantine complexity with various valves catering to the vagaries of the public supply. A hand pump sprouted in the backyard as a last resort and its water sent for regular testing.

Water consumed a big part of our daily conversation. As a social scientist I was intrigued: What was going on? Privatization was a fad at the time and I could sense that the management of household water had become a private responsibility. But this was not really privatization – as I reflected I realized this was the beginning of the atomization of Pakistan’s urban life.

Privatization and atomization differ in the scale of their operations. A private provider can cater to an entire city; atomization occurs when each household turns into its own supplier.

Conceptually, and in terms of efficiency, this is a huge difference. As an economist, I wondered what the real cost of atomized water provisioning was over and above the tariff that was charged for the intermittent and unreliable public supply.

I published my conclusions in a 1994 paper titled The Economics of Household Response to Inadequate Water Supplies. Not surprisingly, I found that the aggregate costs of atomized water provision exceeded those of a modern water supply system even when I ignored many expenses – for boiling impure water, imputed value of household labor, redundancy costs of induced perversities like installation of suction pumps, costs to the environment, etc.

Over time I have observed the phenomenon of atomization becoming the defining feature of urban life in Pakistan. First it was security with people taking on the responsibility of protecting their assets and their persons. Then it was electricity with the investments in individual power supplies.

As with water, any objective analysis of service provisioning would show that the real costs per unit of atomized provisioning exceed the tariffs at which modern collective supplies can be viably operated by public or private suppliers. People are actually paying more than the higher tariffs they protest.

It is not that people are irrational. In subsequent work I found that households rejected higher tariffs for promised better supplies because they did not believe in the promises – they had lost faith in the possibility of efficient service delivery.

The atomization of society is thus the flip side of the failure of the state in Pakistan where the public sector is grossly inefficient as a service provider and hopelessly ineffective as a regulator of private suppliers. Part of the problem is well known – the use of the public sector for patronage and the unaccountability of regulatory staff.

Equally important, the system design is inappropriate in our context. The role of a monopoly provider is unavoidable for networked services (like water and electricity) where competition is difficult to introduce. But a monopoly provider is not well suited to deliver services at the retail level where variations in demand and income streams are much larger than in developed countries and the rule of law is weak.

Intelligent solutions are possible as I saw subsequently in East Asia. Monopoly providers supply bulk metered quantities to neighborhood blocks with private concessionaires responsible for subsequent retail operations. The performance of various concessionaires is subject to public disclosure to monitor egregious variations in cost or quality of service. Neighborhood committees ensure collective pressure for quick dispute resolution.

This design is not alien to Pakistan where the Orangi Project in Karachi has shown for sewerage that the mix of public bulk infrastructure and private tertiary operations offers a viable model.

Work in rural areas has helped me understand better the natural evolution of service provisioning. Take water: when all households are poor the need is served by the common village well; when a few become better-off, the sensible solution is for them to install private boreholes. However, there is a tipping point – when most households can afford private boreholes, upgrading at the individual level is no longer economically optimal. A central piped supply becomes more cost effective with the few households unable to afford the service subsidized from overall savings.

We are witnessing a perverse ruralization of urban life with affluent households resorting to self-provisioning. It is ironic because most rural localities, in the Punjab at least, have passed the tipping point and are ready for central provision, something I documented in a 1993 paper Rethinking Rural Water Supply Policy in the Punjab, Pakistan.

Transforming cities into giant villages is madness. A way back to sanity in the provisioning of urban public services is possible. What are needed are appropriate system design and the selection of competent managers. But neither is possible without strong and informed demand from citizens.

Learning from experience I tell students that the knowledge we generate as researchers should be directed not to policymakers but to citizens to create an informed lobby for better services. All we need now is to invent a language in which we can communicate with the men and women in the street. Test yourself: Translate Millennium Development Goals into a local language and see how far you can carry the conversation.

Anjum Altaf is Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. This op-ed appeared in Dawn on June 11, 2013 and is reproduced here with permission of the author.

Millennium Development Follies is a companion post that illustrates how we fail to communicate with our own citizens.

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Is poverty a violation of human rights? I was asked recently to speak on the subject and faced the following dilemma: If I convinced the audience it was, would that imply the most effective way to eliminate poverty would be to confer human rights on the poor?

Two questions follow immediately: First, if that were indeed the case, why haven’t rights been conferred already? Second, over the entire course of recorded history, has poverty ever been alleviated in this manner?

Likely answers to both suggest it would be more fruitful to start with poverty than with rights. Poverty has always been with us while the discourse of rights is very recent. Studying the experiences of poverty elimination could possibly better illuminate the overlap with rights and yield appropriate conclusions for consideration.

We can begin with the period when sovereignty rested in heaven and monarchs ruled with a divine right beyond challenge. For centuries under this order a very small group of aristocrats and clergy lived atop impoverished populations existing at bare survival. This did not mean the kingdoms were poor or lacked sophisticated cultures, just that they were characterized by extreme inequalities and poverty was considered a natural condition, an element of a divinely ordained order, not a social problem. At best, it was to be ameliorated through alms and charity which were deemed moral obligations.

[Since poverty is an ambiguous concept whose definition has changed markedly over time, it is useful to employ a simple characterization for purposes of this discussion. Consider as poor anyone not being able to afford ownership of a motorized vehicle (substitute horse-and-carriage for the age of monarchy). This indicator of ‘transport poverty’ can serve as an adequate proxy for poverty itself as also for economic transformation.]

The first major change in the monarchical social and moral order occurred in Europe, beginning in the 17^th century, and over 300 years absolute poverty in Western Europe and its settler colonies disappeared for good. Poverty was next eliminated in Eastern Europe beginning with the revolution in Russia in the early 20^th century. Parts of East Asia followed starting around the mid-20^th century with Japan starting earlier and China still in process. The last region to join was parts of Latin America beginning in the late 20^th century.

The point to note is that these various eliminations of absolute poverty had very little systematic relationship with human rights. Only in Western Europe did the process proceed in parallel with the acquisition of rights as subjects were transformed into citizens bound in a social contract. But even here, rights had to be wrenched from the aristocracies: civil rights via social revolutions (the French Revolution, for example, with its explicit call for equality); political rights via the struggles for suffrage; and economic rights via the pressure of labor unions.

In Eastern Europe and East Asia, poverty elimination through accelerated industrialization was accompanied by gross violations of rights and in Latin America the sharing of wealth continues to face a violent backlash by entrenched elites and their allies.

The causes for these transitions were equally varied. In Western Europe, the first mover, they included infusion of colonial wealth (involving violation of rights of natives), emergence of capitalism (with exploitation of labor including children), replacement of communitarianism with individualism through urbanization, wars of religion discrediting divine sovereignty, and the need to protect capitalism itself from its worst excesses and its challengers.

In Eastern Europe the spur was to compete and catch up with the first movers. In East Asia, social insurgencies hastened preemptive land reforms followed by the challenge to compete globally. In Latin America, urbanization finally strengthened the hands of citizens wielding the power of the vote.

Countries with significant absolute poverty today are overwhelmingly in Africa, South and West Asia. In South Asia several characteristics are salient: communitarian identities with weak tendencies to individualism; quasi-monarchical ethos with strong dynastic traditions; sovereignty in some countries still reposed in heaven; leaders aspiring or believing in divine right to rule; populations still more than half rural; negligible economic aspirations to be globally competitive; weak labor unions; poverty still considered a natural condition with charity the preferred route to amelioration; moral crusades retaining precedence over political action.

Given this characterization, South Asia seems barely at the point where poverty is considered a social or political problem; the poor have yet to mount a sustained challenge for the acquisition of civil or economic rights – the few attempts to date having been brutally crushed. The only right, conferred by departing colonial masters, is the political right to vote and entrenched elites are determined to dilute, fracture and negate that by any means foul or fair including in places overturning the electoral verdict by force or manipulation.

It seems a mistake to extrapolate from the Western European experience and associate democracy unambiguously with human rights and poverty alleviation. The relationship is a function of the specificity of history and context. In South Asia, where the power to vote has preceded social equality and civil rights, a prolonged, bitter and often violent and anarchic struggle is very much on the cards – think of the Naxal revolt in India, the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, or the civil war in Sri Lanka.

Poverty in South Asia, much like anywhere else in the world, is unlikely to be eliminated by a voluntary conferral of human rights simply because the form of governance happens to be democratic. The reality is a lot more complex than that.

Anjum Altaf is Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. This op-ed appeared in Dawn on June 4, 2013 and is reproduced here with permission of the author. It is a summary of a talk presented at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in April 2013.

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By Anjum Altaf

The presence of international borders that are closed is unfortunate in many ways. However, to a social scientist they present the possibility of fascinating natural experiments in which locations close to each other but separated by the border can be studied to advantage.

For example, the Punjab border separates Kasur in Pakistan from Ferozepur in India by a distance of 39 miles. One would not expect much to change over such a short distance except for policies that are decided at the national or regional levels, e.g., those related to land, taxation, subsidies, etc. If we study the two cities in depth perhaps we might be able to infer the impact of such policy differences on the prospects of the cities and the lives of their residents.

It was such a thought experiment that prompted me to propose a study along these lines. The study could include small cities across any or all of the following international borders in South Asia.

Indian Punjab – Pakistani Punjab
Rajasthan – Sindh
Gujarat – Sindh
Indian Occupied Kashmir – Pakistan Occupied Kashmir

Bengal – Bangladesh
Meghalaya – Bangladesh
Tripura – Bangladesh

Uttar Pradesh – Nepal
Bihar – Nepal

Assam – Bhutan
Tamilnadu – Sri Lanka
Kerala – Maldives

The exciting aspect of this proposal is that the academic motivation is only an incidental part of the exercise. We wish to build knowledge slowly from the bottom up leaving behind a lot of interest, awareness, and capacity for sustainability. What we are hoping to do is to link college students and instructors who would carry out the studies in these sister cities over an extended period of time. The students and instructors from paired institutions would exchange periodic visits to participate in each other’s work.

In this way we will diversify the development of people-to-people understanding away from metropolitan centers and elite institutions, something which is essential if the movement has to build an appeal with broad support. At the same time young citizens would go beyond the stage of expressing good intentions and be involved in collaborative work accumulating useful information for research and teaching purposes. In the process they would get to know each other in more intimate ways.

The study of matched pairs of cities would yield comparisons across international boundaries and across regions within some countries as well.

We will draw up simple baseline profiles of these towns using a few key indicators to be spelled out later. The preparation and regular updating of these profiles would be assigned to local academic institutions who would integrate them as class assignments for students of these institutions. The capacity of a core group of teachers would be enhanced to manage these profile updates over a five-year period.

At the end of the period we would know better what is going on in small towns and why. We would understand what are the commonalities and differences and what might account for them. In the process we would have built up a lot of local capacity and involved local students in research on local issues.

Based on these profiles we would put together an informed research agenda for the future.

What we are looking for now are suggestions from readers on how to finalize such a study and to put it into practice. It can be started with just one matched pair so we are looking for individuals who would volunteers to take charge in individual cities. As soon as we have a matched pair, we will specify the details of the next steps.

Note: The original idea for such a study was proposed in this post: What’s Happening in Small Towns?

We have already carried out a pilot study of small towns in Pakistan centered round Lahore – see schematic below (click to enlarge). Some of the readers might be surprised to know that Amritsar is just 30 miles from Lahore, an easy drive for lunch!

Anjum Altaf is Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Students have set up a Facebook group to share their research findings: http://www.facebook.com/groups/smallcitiesinitiative/

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The politics of urbanization could be less or more important than its economics.

It depends on the context. In relatively stable societies, economics shapes politics – these are places where one can meaningfully say “it’s the economy, stupid.” Even seemingly bizarre foreign policies can be related to economics as one might infer from the title of Lenin’s classic text Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

In less stable societies, the economy is hostage to politics. Think of Pakistan’s quixotic foreign policy adventures that have no conceivable relationship to national considerations and have driven the economy into the ground. The politics, in turn, is orchestrated by narrow, parochial and privileged economic interests as those who can discern can readily make out.

It is in this framework that the politics of urbanization in Pakistan is more fascinating than its economics.

Almost every news report in the election season makes the point that the urban sentiment is quite different to the rural one – more politically conscious, more receptive to party programs, less weighed down by clan loyalties, and less indebted to patrons for access to basic rights.

As the country becomes more urbanized, the hold of dynastic quasi-feudal elites should decline – but this is where politics intervenes. Electoral outcomes depend heavily on how individual constituencies are delimited. In most secondary cities the urban vote is fragmented over many constituencies each of which has a rural majority. As a result the urban vote is under-represented, a standard practice in all conservative polities where entrenched privilege benefits from rural votes.

It is also no surprise that the population census has not been carried out since 1998 although that is no more difficult a task than conducting an election. Given rapid migration and urbanization a census update clearly has implications for the allocation of seats both across provinces and the urban-rural divide.

It is here that one can glean a lot from the Latin American experience, a fore-runner to Pakistan’s encounters with kleptocratic democracies and authoritarian dictatorships focused on shoring up entrenched privilege against the demands of marginalized majorities empowered with the right to vote.

It was only after Latin American countries were almost fully urbanized that biased delimitation tactics became ineffective. Urban citizens were then able to struggle and organize over time to vote into power leaders like Lula, Chavez and Morales who represented better the demands of the majorities. Pakistan still awaits such representatives and must contend with several more rounds of rule by representatives of entrenched privilege, either populists like Peron or strongmen like Pinochet.

The violence with which the Latin American transition was accompanied, and which still continues, clearly suggests that the violence in Pakistan is not exceptional. We can expect our cities to become even more violent as entrenched privilege defends its interests and attempts to break up the solidarity of the urban vote. Here Pakistan is more vulnerable than Latin America because of the ethnic and sectarian heterogeneity of its urban population that remains vulnerable to the politics of identity – witness the internecine wars in Karachi the origins of which can be traced back to political manipulations of one kind or another.

The politics of urbanization plays out within cities as well as a brief recap of its history would illustrate. At the time Europe was urbanizing the footprint of the city was small. Without mass transportation rich and poor had to live in relative proximity. There were no privatized sources of clean air or water and no selective protection from diseases via immunizations. Outbreaks of pestilence affected all citizens with equal effect. It was this shared fate that became the basis for urban reform as elites fearful for their lives and businesses allocated resources to city-wide improvements in sanitation and sewerage.

All this has changed in our times as advances in science and technology have ironically worked to the disadvantage of the poor. The affluent can now physically segregate themselves by moving to suburbs, protect themselves from disease through inoculations, and are no longer dependent on city-wide networks for access to amenities. As a result our cities have split into rich enclaves and poor slums and there is no powerful group of influential citizens to lobby for reforms that benefit the entire city. Urban funds are spent on better roads for cars while pedestrians and cyclists are left to fend for themselves. The emphasis on clean water and sewerage for the low-income areas is remarkable only for its absence.

It is in this context that those who project cities as unambiguous engines of economic growth need to take pause. Because of their ethnic and sectarian heterogeneity and the polarization of rich and poor, South Asian cities can just as easily be powder kegs ready to explode. And the fuse is quite likely to be deliberately lit by those who stand to gain from the fracturing of the urban vote.

The gerrymandering of electoral constituencies does not mean however that the city can be ignored. We need to keep our eyes open and our ears to the ground as we move forward in time. The capacity of the state and market to deliver to urban citizens the essentials of everyday living like electricity and natural gas has eroded to a dangerous degree. Unless it is ameliorated, if not fully repaired, any random trigger can set off pent-up frustrations that have accumulated over the years.

If that happens the politics of urbanization would overwhelm not just the economy but the country itself.

Anjum Altaf is Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. This op-ed appeared in Dawn on May 19, 2013 and is reproduced here with permission of the author. This is a companion piece to The Economics of Urbanization which appeared in the same paper on May 6, 2013.

Thanks, Editors

The factual information appended below on the 2013 elections in Pakistan is courtesy of the British Pakistan Foundation who have further acknowledged their sources.

On Saturday, May 11th Pakistan will be voting its new parliament at its general elections 2013. For this reason we have compiled some relevant information to understand how the General Elections will influence the country’s political landscape. Please find below an infographic of AlJazeera on the Pakistan Elections 2013 (click on the link below the picture to view a larger image) as well as some information on the major political parties.

Source: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2013/05/20135815269941163.html

Main political parties at the 2013 General Elections

Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)
The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) is a mainstream political party in Pakistan. It was led by “life chairperson” Benazir Bhutto. The Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians (PPPP) is a party formed in 2002 by the PPP. At the last legislative elections, 20 October 2002, the party won 25.8 % of the popular vote and 71 out of 272 elected members, thus gaining the second-largest number of seats in the Parliament of Pakistan. The party was founded in 1967, on November 30th and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became its first chairman. The party creed is: “Islam is our faith; democracy is our politics; socialism is our economy; all power to the people.”

Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N)
The Pakistan Muslim League (N) is a center-right, fiscal conservative political party in Pakistan, being the largest conservative political force and second largest political party, roughly representing 19.6% of votes in the Parliament (both in Senate and National Assembly), in the latest national parliamentary elections. The Pakistan Muslim League (N) is currently headed by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI)
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice) is a political party in Pakistan. At the last legislative elections, 20 October 2002, the party won 0.8% of the popular vote and 1 out of 272 elected members. PTI has also a seat in provincial assembly of N.W.F.P. PTI is headed by Cricket legend Imran Khan. “Justice,Humanity and Self Esteem” is the slogan of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf.Imran Khan, the chairman of the party.

Pakistan Muslim League – Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q)
The Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam), or PML-Q is a centrist political party in Pakistan, derived from the original Pakistan Muslim League which had laid foundation of the state of Pakistan. It is widely considered as a centrist to conservative party.

Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM)
Muttahida Qaumi Movement generally known as MQM, is a political party in Pakistan founded and currently led by Altaf Hussain. It originated as an ethnic student organization in 1978 from University of Karachi. The students movement later turned into an influential political party of Sindh. Later on July 26, 1997, MQM officially changed its name from Muhajir Qaumi Movement to Muttahida Quami Movement.

Awami National Party (ANP)
The Awami National Party (ANP, Awami meaning People) is a nationalist political party (leftist) in Pakistan. The Party is mostly famous among the Pashtuns of Pakistan in NWFP, Balochistan, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Western Punjab, Northern Areas. The Party’s current president is Senator Asfandyar Wali Khan.

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI)
The founding session of Jamaat-e-Islami was scheduled on 26th August 1941 at Lahore.The participants from every nook and corner of India gathered at the residence ofMistree Abdullah at Islamia Park, Poonch Road, Lahore. The first session began at 8′pm in Mubarik Mosque, wherein, the following 75 persons participated.

Balochistan National Party (BNP)
The Balochistan National Party or Balochistan National Party (Mengal) is a political party in Balochistan, Pakistan. BNP believes in more provincial rights and greater autonomy for Baluchistan province through peaceful and democratic struggle. In 1972, the National Awami Party or NAP formed the first elected government in Balochistan after winning the elections.

We ought to care about urbanization because it will shape our lives, for better or for worse, and often in surprising ways.

An obvious starter is that all developed countries are predominantly urban. Of course one can ask whether it was development that led to urbanization or the other way around. The historical evidence is clear: cities produced jobs that pulled less productive labor from rural areas. That, in a nutshell, was the story of the Industrial Revolution.

The most unremarked replication in recent times has been in South Korea, going from 5 percent urban in 1925 to 80 percent by 2000. At the same time the country transitioned from an aid recipient to a member of the industrialized world, a donor in its own right.

The implication is not that moving all villagers to cities would yield a development miracle. Cities have to produce jobs at which migrants can be relatively more productive. The benefits of urbanization are linked to productive employment the outcome of which is accelerated economic growth. Urbanization and employment policies are interlinked; the types of jobs and where they are created should determine the beneficial movement of people.

At the same time, urbanization is not preventable or reversible except at huge social cost. Vey quietly, sometime in the early years of this century, the world became urban with more than half its population living in cities; the trend continues unabated whether cities are ready or not for migrants.

The workings of the market economy continue to reduce the demand for labor in farming pushing out people who know it is better to be poor in the city than in the village. Without employment creation, existing cities would become centers of poverty with people eking out miserable livelihoods providing informal services like children wiping windscreens at traffic lights.

The choice between good and bad urbanization is stark with huge implications for society. A little attention can make a big difference in the dynamic that will define our future.

This attention needs to go beyond a focus on mega-cities. While many are aware the world is now urban, few realize that the majority of urbanites reside in secondary centers not in mega-cities. This too has implications for policy design.

Urbanization is distinct from city management. The former is a process involving the movement of people between places connected in a network; the latter is a municipal function specific to individual places.

System designers know that optimizing a network differs from optimizing any one of its parts – the latter most often leads to sub-optimality of the network. Examples are legion. One familiar to Lahoris is the series of underpasses along the canal. As one weaves from one side of the road to the other, it is obvious that had the system had been viewed as a whole the alignment of individual underpasses would have been quite different. The result is compromised efficiency of traffic flow and safety of users.

Good urbanization policy would avoid lopsided attention to megacities and also consider measures in secondary centers that would help the regional economy. For example, poorly functioning land markets stand in the way of the migration of mature industries from big to small cities where land and labor costs are much lower.

This process ensuring the buoyancy of secondary cities is hampered in Pakistan by fears of purchasing land in places outside one’s area of influence. Transparency in land transactions is an essential requirement for healthy urbanization whereby the growth of vibrant secondary cities prevents the overcrowding of bigger ones.

Within individual cities, there is another little understood phenomenon at play. Cities are productive because they provide large pools of skilled labor. But the size of a city’s population is not the same as the size of its labor market – the latter depends critically on the efficiency of city transport.

In terms of labor markets, megacities in Pakistan are agglomerations of many small cities – one cannot go from one to the other in less than an hour, the standard measure of accepted commuting time. There is evidence that for every doubling of labor market size, productivity per worker could increase up to 40 percent. One can immediately see the economic loss imposed by fragmented labor markets. Our cities have all the disadvantages of large populations and few of the advantages of large labor markets.

Rapid transit and reduction of congestion are central to urban productivity; no surprise that almost all large Indian cities are investing in metro rail systems. The most dramatic improvements have taken place in China which has recognized the importance of labor markets. In Shanghai, for example, the population within an one-hour commute time increased from 4 to 12 million in less than 20 years. The BRT in Lahore is a rightful step but much more remains to be done.

The same logic applies to inter-city rapid transit. Once such links are in place, people could live in Gujranwala and work in Lahore which, in turn, would generate the dynamic for investments that would make Gujranwala a more livable city. Once again, this has been witnessed in other countries where suburbs and cities are linked with good transport.

It is ironic that such inter-city commuter transport did exist in Pakistan, a daily train from Sialkot that brought blue collar workers from intermediate stops to Lahore. Instead of improving over time the service became so unreliable it ceased to be a viable option.

Our visionary former Chief Planner succeeded in including a leading role for cities in the New Growth Framework approved by parliament. However, we can be sure it will not be implemented without pressure from below. We need to broaden the scope from cities to urbanization and become active stakeholders in shaping the process that would impact our welfare for years to come. Urbanization will be unforgiving with no second chances. It will not be possible to rewind and re-run the movie if we don’t like the ending.

Anjum Altaf is Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. This op-ed appeared in Dawn on May 6, 2013 and is reproduced here with permission of the author.

Related posts:

Lahore – What is to be Done?
Karachi is a Small City
Urbanization in India: Some Questions

I come across this gulf everyday in discussions of issues like health or environment or urbanization but let me illustrate with an example from education.

So, I am reading this op-ed in a leading newspaper of the country and I am presented with the usual litany of woes: declining standards, lowest per capita spending in the world, ignorant teachers, ghost schools, different systems for rich and poor, medium of instruction, blah, blah, blah.

There follows a dire warning: this would destroy the country.

And then we are off and running with the prescriptions: spending should be increased, teachers should be paid better, curriculum should be improved, television should be used, libraries should be added, blah, blah, blah.

(The lengths of these two lists are a function almost entirely of the time at the disposal of the writer or the word limit assigned by some editor.)

Which gets us to the conclusion: Of course there are many other things that can be done but this would provide a good start.

Hello. Hang on. So what is the value-added here? Half a century down the road there are still people who don’t know education is in trouble, that it is important, that libraries can help?

When I go with a fever to a doctor, I want to know the nature of my ailment before talking about medicines. If the doctor can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, I take my custom elsewhere. In health, going from symptoms to prescription requires a diagnosis (what is the cause of the fever?) and an incorrect diagnosis can spell disaster.

In policy, moving from problem description to prescription calls for an analysis. Why exactly are we in a particular predicament? Without an analysis there is little really to talk about, just one laundry list against another, and a misconceived prescription could worsen the problem with unintended consequences.

What I want to know, for example, is why, when everyone realizes the importance of libraries, their number is decreasing? Why, when television can so easily be used to teach, it is not? Why, when the curriculum could so readily be improved, it is not? And, so on.

I want to know why governments are not doing things that almost everyone knows need to be done. And I want to know whether governments could really do those things if by some miracle they wanted to.

I rarely come across such analyses. Nor do I come across many big ideas or intellectual frameworks in which disparate elements of prescriptive laundry lists hang together with some coherence.

Once in a while I hear we need more morality in education or more loyalty to the national ideology. Once in a while some big guru comes along to tell us this time it would be different. When I ask why, the guru goes religious and advises faith.

This is not an opinion about education so I don’t intend to supply an analysis here. In health there are laboratories that can provide a fairly good diagnosis even when the doctor is not fully on the ball. Where are the laboratories of the public policy domain? Should we rely on our elite educational institutions? But aren’t they a part of the malaise? Should we expect them from our consulting houses? But do they want to bite the hand that feeds?

This is an opinion about opinions, in particular those dealing with public policy that regurgitate descriptions and prescriptions without analysis. And so, in the spirit of my critique, I must explain why we have to deal with so many opinions that say so little.

In my analysis, the proximate cause is the lack of quality control in our media. To put it bluntly, almost any semi-coherent set of sentences makes it into print or on the air. While there is little analysis in print, pundits have more room to shoot the breeze on air. There we come across the type of analysis that relies on one-dimensional explanations – corruption, overpopulation, lack of money and decline in morality being by far the favorites.

Few bother to look across borders to see that the scale of corruption is far bigger in India and the number of people much larger in China and yet public policies there are not less effective. Nor do they ask why bombs and bullets have higher priority than schools and hospitals or why, even if they do, we fail to collect more taxes.

Few bother to note that while the land area of Pakistan is unchanged (at least since 1971), the number of mosques has multiplied – one can often hear six calls to prayer from any one point (all out of sequence and off pitch). So why has morality declined?

The kind of opinions we are exposed to would never make it in a medium that respected its audience, wished to educate it in any way, or depended for its survival on the quality of its output.

There is clearly a dearth of analytical training with hardly a school of public policy in the country and lack of motivation to contribute by those who are trained. A friend keeps complaining that Pakistani academics do not debate the government’s policy proposals. I agree it is important to debate, in general, but engaging with ritualistic pronouncements of deaf governments is hardly the best use of time.

Besides, all output is based on a calculus of supply and demand, or so we teach our students. So where exactly is the demand for sound analysis that should motivate academics or concern the media? There is an unsatiated demand for prescriptions and hot air and therefore no surprise there is a limitless supply of quacks and pundits peddling their wares. We get what we deserve or are willing to pay for. Enjoy. If it destroys the country, so be it – Allah maalik hai.

Elections are due in a few months and one of the questions being asked is whether they would be an exercise in futility. I think not even though nothing much is likely to change in the short term – for that, one can look across the border where six decades of uninterrupted democratic governance has not made a major difference in the lives of the marginalized. It is the long-term implications that ought to be the focus of our attention.

For better or for worse, and I feel it is for the better, we inherited representative government from the departing rulers. Better, because the precursor to representative governance, monarchy, no matter how benevolent at times, offered no mechanism for holding the aristocracy accountable or of institutionalizing orderly transfers of power. Those were huge negatives irrespective of how one looks at them.

With representative governance, sovereignty, at least in principle, rests with the people and the potential of the exercise of this sovereignty, whenever it is realized in actuality, is profound. The transition from a subject to a citizen, so far quite incomplete, is pregnant with possibilities.

This transition is not going to be easy by any means – note that citizens continue to act as supplicants and representatives who can bequeath office to next of kin as dispensers of largesse. The attitudinal hangover from the monarchical past is huge and telling. There is still next to no accountability and transfer of power remains fraught with intrigue and uncertainty.

The reason, if one thinks of it, should be obvious. In regions where rule by representation was born, it was preceded by a prolonged process of socioeconomic change that provided its underpinnings. In 17^th Century Europe religious conflicts discredited divine authority as the fount of sovereignty, the emergence of capitalism made peaceful coexistence attractive, and urbanization replaced the power of communities with an individualistic ethos. Not surprisingly, it was a period of immense intellectual activity in which alternatives to rule by divine right and religious precepts were furiously debated and the notion of a social contract between rulers and ruled came to the fore. It was postulated that the ruled might cede power to a sovereign in return for the recognition of some rights as citizens.

These ideas nurtured the movements for liberty, equality and fraternity that swept away feudal power, realized social equality, made access to rights independent of patronage, thereby creating the foundation on which governance based on one-man-one-vote and the politics of ideas could be erected. Even then, it was over a period of three centuries that all the rights of citizenship, civil, political, and social, were fully secured – recall how long it took women to get the vote.

This process of change and social leveling preceding the emergence of representative rule in Europe has been stood on its head in South Asia. Representative governance with full suffrage exists but patrons and clients remain in place; political rights are available but civil and social rights are virtually non-existent. The hangover of the past is so pronounced that our representative system is really disguised monarchy in democratic garb – witness the prevalence of dynastic rule in South Asia.

There were individuals in South Asia aware of this reality and its immense challenge. As early as 1948, Dr. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, made the following observations:

“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic” and “In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value… How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.”

This implies that South Asia has to achieve through the political process what socioeconomic change and social revolution accomplished in Europe. It is this aspect that deserves attention. This is also why it is less relevant to ask who to vote for in the next elections than what one ought to be doing to ensure that representative government begins to deliver for the people.

Democracy is not a thing as some talk of its coming and going might suggest. Rather it is a set of institutions comprised of rules moored in a particular socioeconomic context and modulated by a particular power structure. Our intellectual focus should be on understanding the context and examining the rules to see how they might be altered to make the institutions more accountable to the people. To take just two examples: why do we have a first-past-the-post system to elect representatives and why don’t we have a citizen’s referendum to recall representatives who fail to respect their mandates?

This will be a slow evolution but there is no acceptable alternative. Another look across the border would make us realize that despite the perception of minimal change, erstwhile subjects are continuing to claim the rights of citizenship – the rights to information and timely delivery of services being just the latest of gains.

There is no example in history where rights have been conferred on the ruled as favors. They had to be fought for by means that were appropriate at particular moments in time. In South Asia today, understanding and crafting the institutions of democracy are feasible choices available to the people. It will take more than casting a vote once every five years and hoping for a savior to achieve the outcomes that we desire.

Anjum Altaf is Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. This op-ed appeared in Dawn on April 1, 2013 and is reproduced here with permission of the author.

in The Millions:

From the beginning, there was a hint of the surreal to the recent Lahore Literary Festival, but it was difficult to put my finger on the root of that unsettling emotion, especially given the overall aura of triumph. A response to similar events elsewhere in the region – the most famous in Jaipur; the most rivalry-inducing, for the last four years, in Karachi – the festival seemed its own victory party, a massive and successful gambit in Lahore’s bid to reclaim its title as the “cultural capital” of Pakistan. The excitement had Lahore full of visitors, Mall Road festooned with banners, the Alhamra Arts Council packed with people, and in the middle of all that buzz it seemed almost churlish to have the suspicion that something odd was at work.

The urge to make every(positive)thing in Pakistan somehow momentous and meaningful is dangerous – every movie cannot offer a revitalization or renaissance of cinema, every political party cannot, at this point, be logically seen as a rebirth of hope – but there was some predictable truth to the truism that the festival played, in Lahore, a very different role than it would have in a country or a city where such events are more common and less fraught. In part of course this had to do with the unimaginable odds that Pakistan has been facing, not just the most dramatic and terrible (including for example two recent, devastating attacks on the Hazara community, in Quetta; including for example the murder of a prominent doctor and his twelve-year-old son, in broad daylight as they drove to the boy’s school — located on the same Mall Road where we were gathered — simply because they were Shia), but also the more subtle and insidious, which have been at work far longer than any terrorist.

More here.

March 8 was International Women’s Day about which I have two stories to narrate. They are from the heart of affluent Pakistan by virtue of the accident that I live on a university campus situated in an upscale urban residential district of Lahore.

The first story, the short one, is situated in what is generally acknowledged as the premier private university in the country. A group of students organized the ‘I Need Feminism…’ campaign in which individuals complete the sentence on a placard before uploading a photograph on social media. ‘I Need Feminism because I want to wear shorts in public’ was one of the placards that went up briefly before it was taken down because of threats to the bearer and the organizers from inside and outside the university.

The second story, the longer one, involves a woman who works in the complex of campus apartments and lives in a low-income pocket in the high-income district (this being how some cities adapt to the lack of public transport). On March 8 she arrived much later than usual because her mother had been beaten in the morning. The perpetrators of the violence were a group of women of a neighboring community from which a woman had eloped with a young man related to the victim. The runaway’s relatives had identified a girl from the man’s family in exchange as settlement which the family of the latter and their neighbors felt was a just demand; only the victim asked why the girl had to pay the price, whence the violence. (The husband was unable to defend the wife as it was against the norm to touch unrelated women.) After the violence, the transaction was accepted. On being asked if this outcome was right or wrong, the narrator indicated she was unable to say but ventured that this was a common occurrence.

What can these two stories tell us about feminism and violence and our attitudes to them?  Let us first place the concepts in context.

In every society at any given point in time there exists a social order selected aspects of which are considered normal, right, and proper by the majority. Any deviation from normalcy is feared as a potential source of disorder and violence can be employed to prevent such deviations. One example of this is the attitude of men towards women and the attempt to regulate what the latter can or cannot do. Gendering is the social process through which the proper behavior of men and women is reproduced by the enforcement of norms and rules whose legitimacy is considered beyond question.

Inherent in every social order is a distribution of power – power is concentrated in the center while the peripheries are inhabited by the powerless. One can easily note the distribution of power by gender in our social order. Power, however, stems from other sources as well, one of which is class. Thus, for example, a woman within her class would often have less power than younger males but across class a younger women would have more power than older servants, male or female. In general, however, women in South Asia have relatively less power than men and have many more constraints on their choices.

How do social orders evolve and change? In every social order, there are the powerless at the margin; the majority may have internalized the normalcy and propriety of their positions but some do strive for change. At the same time, there are privileged individuals at the center of power who can imagine themselves in the shoes of the powerless and join them in the struggle. A feminist is a person who can exercise this imagination with respect to the gender dimensions of the social order. To adopt feminism as a political stance, for a man or a woman, is to take a stand against the gender privileges that stem from the unequal distribution of power in society. To be a feminist is also to believe that change is possible and that it is necessary to work for that change through all means that are available and possible.

We can now go back to the two stories. In the first, a student expressed an opinion about what she would like. This was immediately met with a threat to desist. Even the expression of an opinion, let alone the act itself, was considered a threat to social order – the term floating around was fitnah, the source of disorder in society. Keep in mind that the expression of an opinion is not a violation of the law but the issuing of a threat is. The proper recourse in such a situation is to charge those issuing the threat with a breach of conduct and to adjuticate under the existing rules. However, the internalization of the social norms is such that the officials in charge might themselves believe that the expression of such an opinion was not judicious in our society.

The male prerogative is marked by ironies. It is quite possible that individuals issuing the threat might have felt at one time that co-education itself was not proper. Yet, the attraction of an education at one of the best institutions in the country could have overcome the qualms. It is equally likely that the same individuals would be seeking scholarships in countries where wearing shorts is the norm for females. There, existence in the midst of fitnah would be deemed acceptable under some plausible rationalization.

In the second story, one can observe the power of internalization of norms at the periphery. There was a sole voice protesting the injustice of offering for settlement a girl who had nothing to do with the incident. This resistance was crushed with violence perpetrated by women themselves and the settlement was considered fair by the community.

The two stories highlight the nature of the struggle ahead. In the most upscale urban district, the affluent promoting International Women’s Day on social media act quite contrary to its spirit as soon as their sense of propriety is challenged. And within the affluent district itself live people quite unaware of International Women’s Day reproducing a social order that is oppressive to them and their weaker members.

Feminism and violence stare at each other around the specificities of our social order and leave us with many questions to ponder. Where do we go from here? The first step is to recognize that holding contrary opinions is protected under the law and that violence or the threat of violence is a violation of the law. The second is to draw strength from the fact that social orders do change – one just has to reflect on the norms that were prescribed for women a hundred years ago to realize that nothing stays constant. That is why the struggle must go on.

For the conceptual elaborations in this post I am indebted to Professor Nivedita Menon whose excellent book ‘Seeing Like a Feminist’ was published in 2012 by Zubaan-Penguin Books, New Delhi.

I have two favorite texts on change which illustrate how strongly we believe that what exists at the moment is what is right and proper for all times and how we are proven wrong again and again. Yet we do not learn from history.

The first, Taleem-e-NiswaaN, is an essay on the education of women written around a hundred years ago reflecting the liberal progressive perspective of the time. The author, Muhammad Sajjad Mirza Baig Dehalvi (1876-1927), was a professor in the Nizam’s College in Hyderabad. The premises and assumptions taken for granted then are now only a source of amazement which should be a cause for humility – what we believe to be the ultimate truth at this time could well be considered amazing a hundred years from now. The essay is included in Sarmaya-e-Urdu by Hafiz Mahmood Shirani. The book was reissued by Sang-e-Meel in 2004 and is available in the market for Rs. 300.

The second is an excerpt (from Intizar Hussain’s classic novel Basti) which describes the arrival of electricity in a village. The following English translation is by Frances Pritchett:

Bi Amma had undoubtedly lived a long time. She always told how in her childhood only one torch, in the Small Bazaar, was lighted at night. Everywhere else, in the streets, in the lanes, was darkness. Before her very eyes the torch vanished, and lanterns appeared in the streets and lanes; and now in their places poles were standing, and here and there on the streets electric light could be seen.
Electricity had now begun to be installed in the mosque as well, but Abba Jan had thrown a spanner into the works. “This is ‘innovation.’” And equipping himself with a cudgel, he stood on guard in the doorway of the mosque. The electricians came, received a reprimand, and went away. Hakim Bande Ali and Musayyab Husain tried very hard to convince him, but he gave only one answer: “This is ‘innovation.’”
On the third day of his guard-duty, Bi Amma fell ill; her breathing became fast and shallow. Abba Jan, giving up the guard-duty, hurried home; but Bi Amma did not wait for his arrival.
The next day when Abba Jan went to the mosque for the dawn prayer, he saw that the electricity had already been installed. When he saw this he came right back, and for the first time in his life offered the dawn prayer at home. From then on he never entered the mosque, and never offered his prayers except at home. Though for many days he did go, morning and evening, to Bi Amma’s grave, and recited verses from the Quran there.
How hard Abba Jan tried to halt the spreading ‘innovations’ in Rupnagar! During Muharram, when big drums began to sound, he seized them and ripped out the drumheads. “Playing drums is forbidden by the Shariat. I won’t permit them to be played in any majlis or procession!”
“But in Lucknow, they play drums in every procession!”
“Let them play. The Lucknow people have no power to change the Shariat!”
That year drums were in fact not played in any majlis or procession, but by the next year, Abba Jan’s power had been broken. Every procession was accompanied by drums except the one that left from the Khirkivala Imambarah, for that was Abba Jan’s family imambarah and he had power over it. And also because that procession, which was in honor of Hazrat Hur, was recognized as the quietest of Rupnagar’s Muharram processions. No small drums, no big drums, no singing of elegies — for Abba Jan declared elegy-singing too to be contrary to religious law. Abba Jan had taken a firm stand against elegy-singing, but the results were the same as in the case of his other firm stands.
Abba Jan’s grip on Rupnagar was loosening. Bi Amma had been called home by God, and electricity had come to the town. Abba Jan couldn’t prevent electricity from being installed in the mosque, just as he couldn’t prevent drums from finding a place in the Muharram processions. His firm stand against electricity was the last of his firm stands against the ‘innovations’ of the time. After that, he retired to his room.