The NGO sector is growing globally. Statistics indicate a 400 percent increase in the number of international NGOs. From a couple of hundred in the 1960s, the number had reached 50,000 by 1993 worldwide. In 2001, the last year for which complete figures are mostly available, the size of the “non-firm, non-government” sector was estimated at 1.4 million organisations, with revenues of nearly $680 billion and an estimated 11.7 million employees. Over 15 percent of development aid is channelled through NGOs. A UN report says that the global non-profit sector with its more than $1 trillion turnover could rank as the world’s eighth largest economy.

The growing NGO influence is evident in many ways. On one hand, the overall global flow of funding through NGOs increased from $200 billion in 1970 to $2,600 billion in 1997. On the other hand, the buzzword ‘civil society’ has been appropriated by the NGOs. Understandably, there has been a twenty-fold increase in citations of NGOs in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times in the last few years.

Many international NGOs (or INGOs in NGO lingo) have organised themselves like multinationals. The Oxfam family had a turnover of $504 million in 1999 and worked in 117 countries, World Vision had $600 million and worked in 92 countries, Save had $368 million and worked in 121 countries. Seven of the largest NGOs had a combined income of $2.5 billion in 1999. NGOs are now invited to bid for aid projects in the UK. They compete both with government and private sectors.

It is hard to define an NGO, but according to the UN definition: “Any non-profit, voluntary citizens’ group which is organised on a local, national or international level. Task-oriented and driven by people with a common interest, NGOs perform a variety of services and humanitarian functions, bring citizens’ concern to governments, monitor policies and encourage political participation at the community level. They provide analysis and expertise, serve as early warning mechanisms and help monitor and implement international agreements. Some are organised around specific issues, such as human rights, the environment or health”.

One may cite various reasons for the phenomenal growth that the NGO sector has registered in the last two decades. According to researcher Tina Wallace, this process needs to be understood in terms of the way in which development aid conditionality has moved in the 1990s “from the strictly economic sphere into every aspect of social and political life”.

Another scholar, Jonathan Goodhand, thinks: “The end of Cold War removed the rationale for nurturing a complex web of political allegiance through military and development aid. This opened the space for aid donors to make funding decisions based primarily on development criteria such as needs, effectiveness and impact. NGOs gave them the flexibility to do so”. One may also cite the changed ideological milieu in the 1990s that contributed to the rise of the NGO sector. The disillusionment released by the disappearance of former Soviet Union undermined the internationalism and socialism. Millions of well-intentioned youth were no more interested in radical political mega-projects. However, they were ready to dedicate themselves to noble causes preached by NGOs: child labour, human rights, climate, women rights etc. No doubt, certain INGOs have campaigned for cancellation of third world debt, opposed the WTO and been pivotal in organising the World Social Forum. However, the character of an NGO is determined by its funding. The Doctors sans Frontiers, for instance, has built itself good reputation owing to the fact that it depends on private donations for roughly 90 percent of its funding.

Despite various trends in the NGO sector, as a phenomenon, therefore, it remains a reformist attempt that does not challenge the status quo. Even if it is an attempt at giving a human face to capitalism, the NGO sector has hardly served the purpose. To cite an extreme example: certain NGOs dealing with female issues in the USA lent support to the occupation of Afghanistan. It was not a coincidence that the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell grumbled back in 2001, that western NGOs are considered “a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team”.

Most importantly, NGOs are not accountable to anybody accept their donors. As a result, there is widespread corruption. On one hand, the (I)NGO executives and board members live and behave like multinationals’ CEOs, while their western staff draws salaries (these huge salaries constitute a violation of the human rights in themselves). Their junior partners in the Southern hemisphere, on the other hand, do not merely emulate them but lavishly pocket the money. Multi-donor evaluation, for instance, in Darfur could not locate one third of 170 NGOs and $120 million of funding went unaccounted for. This is just tip of the iceberg. The iceberg itself is often carefully concealed by the NGO bureaucracy.

This op-ed appeared first in The News, Islamabad, on December 20, 2011 and is being reproduced here with permission of the author.

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Veena Malik has provided Indians and Pakistanis something to talk about – to, at, and across each other. There is much that can be ignored but a few strands strike me as promising and worth pursuing.

Most of the outpouring, at least on the blogs, is a voicing of individual personal opinions for and against Ms. Malik’s act. That, to me at least, is the least interesting aspect of the fallout. Why should my personal opinion carry significance for anyone besides myself? If the objective were to run an opinion poll, people could vote yes or no anonymously and be done with it.

It would be different if the person offering the opinion were a public figure. Take Imran Khan, for example: his opinion on the incident could provide a clue where he might lead the nation if given the opportunity. How would his yuppie fan base respond if he took the line of the born-again Muslim? And how would his conservative supporters react if he came out in favor of individual choice? It could be useful to know how he might negotiate this cultural minefield. No wonder Imran Khan is keeping his lips sealed while those who have less at stake shout themselves hoarse.

Individuals voicing their opinions do believe they are supporting them with arguments. But these are nothing more than reiterations of the cultural positions that give rise to their opinions. Those against consider the act irreligious, immoral, contrary to social values and dishonorable to the family and the nation. Those for consider it an expression of free choice and individual right. The hard line separating family-value waalas from individual-choice waalas leaves hardly any grey area for meaningful discussion.

It is noticeable that there is barely any attempt by either side to try and understand the reasons for the conflicting opinions. The immediate recourse is to resort to name calling: the disapprovers consider the others depraved; the approvers deem the others backward or apologists for social oppression.

It is equally remarkable that individuals simply assume their social and cultural norms to be the touchstones for the rest of the world. Any deviation from their values is taken to be a deviation from propriety or common sense. Why that should be the case is not considered worth discussing.

Five issues seem worth exploring. First, does it make sense to judge a subset of society by norms relevant to another? Second, can problems in a subset be attributed primarily to social and cultural norms? Third, what is it that gives rise to the notion of a moral order used to judge individual acts? Fourth, how do moral orders change and evolve? And fifth, what should be the strategy for those working for change within heterogeneous societies?

The answer to the first question is that it is always possible to pass a verdict on one subset of society from the vantage point of another. If something doesn’t raise an eyebrow on a beach in Sydney, why should it be such a big issue in Pakistan? One answer, most often found on blogs, is that Pakistan is socially and culturally backward compared to Australia and should strive to be more like the latter if it wants to be part of the advanced, civilized world. This is hardly a useful answer and of little help in suggesting what should be done in the real Pakistan of today given that there is no magic wand that can transform the terrible is to the wonderful ought. If the objective is not just to score points but to suggest a concrete strategy for change there is no alternative to understanding a social subset of society on its own terms. This is not an argument for cultural relativism in which everything is considered right; it is to recognize the difference between explanation and approval, between finding a way forward and passing judgment.

The second question speaks to the charge that there are horrible things going on in Pakistan that stem from its notion of family values and family honor. This may be true, but surely one is not arguing that horrible things of a different nature are not taking place in Australia or the US. What is to be gained by attributing all those horrible things to an unmitigated individualism? Once again, the vacuous desire to score points overwhelms any serious attempt to get at the bottom of what drives the ills that plague various societies or subsets of societies and what they should be doing at the margin to move in the desired direction.

The third question actually begins to provide the conceptual apparatus needed for concrete analysis and action. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, has made a useful contribution by identifying five psychological drivers of our sense of morality. These comprise our attitudes to fairness, protection (of the vulnerable), loyalty (to one’s group), respect (for authority), and purity (or sanctity). According to Haidt, liberals place more value on the first two while conservatives stress the last three more. Every society has its mix of liberals and conservatives (how they get to be either is a separate question of much interest) and not much is to be gained by talking past each other. What is needed is a way for the two sides to engage and figure out the concerns that motivate moral judgments rather than to pass judgments of right and wrong. Thus, if Haidt argues that every subset has to be understood on its own terms, one needs to understand the rationale of his argument (and oppose it if warranted on grounds of logic) rather than to label him an apologist for patriarchal oppression.

The fourth question points to the fact that almost all societies are in a state of cultural change. Every society has its fundamentalists, conservatives, liberals and radicals. Every society, at least in recent times, has cultural tension across generations. Acts like those of Veena Malik push at the margins of the acceptable and set off a chain of reactions. How the equilibrium shifts and where it settles temporarily is very much a factor of the strength of the various subsets at any given point in time. Cultural change is not always in one direction; there have been many examples of severe cultural backlashes in the world – from Weimar to Nazi Germany being a particularly egregious recent example.

The fifth question brings us to the nitty-gritty of what is to be done to fight the widespread gender discrimination in countries like Pakistan. I doubt if Veena Malik’s act was spurred by a desire to strike one for oppressed women but it certainly provides an opening to take another look at the phenomenon. And this connects back with the strategic assessment of the balance of forces in society and the tactical need to understand rather than judge contrary moral standpoints. Those involved in this struggle in Pakistan have noted that the number of radical feminists has not increased much over the last many decades. The feminists who have felt it necessary to make a point of their individualism (say by smoking in public) have simply alienated a lot of women who might otherwise have been receptive to arguments that relied on a more familiar point of departure. As a result, it is actually the conservatives who have been gaining ground to the surprise and frustration of the liberals and radicals.

To castigate this trend without trying to understand it is to miss the point entirely. Veena Malik has given us one more opportunity to fathom the emotions that circumscribe our moral judgments and to tailor our strategies accordingly.

Useful Readings:

 Jonathan Haidt, Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.
Jonathan Haidt, What Makes People Vote Republican.
Ellen Willis, Escape from Freedom.
South Asian, The Confusions of Imran Khan.

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The incident last week at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in which NATO air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers has brought Pakistan-US relations to their lowest ebb since the OBL raid. The public reaction in both countries has revealed the extent of the mistrust between the supposed allies. The American public feels that since the US government gives Pakistan so much aid, it is ungrateful of the Pakistani government to block NATO’s supplies or ask the US to vacate airbases in the country.  Americans are also angered by reports of Pakistan’s alleged double-dealing and at best grudging cooperation with Washington.  The Pakistani public, on the other hand, is angered by what they see as violations of their country’s sovereignty. They also feel that fighting “America’s war” has caused a lot of blowback in their country, leading to the deaths of thousands of innocents at the hand of insurgents.

Reading the newspapers from both sides, one gets a sense of how different the narrative is in each country. The articles in The New York Times are accompanied by images of groups of bearded men burning the American flag or effigies of President Obama.  If one didn’t know any better, it would be easy to form the opinion that these photographs represent the average Pakistani. The text of these articles focuses on the double-dealing of the Pakistani government and especially of the country’s armed forces. The reader comments frequently feature Americans arguing that Pakistan is the real enemy of the US and that Pakistanis are supporting Al-Qaeda.

Pakistani newspapers tell a completely different story. The Express Tribune, for example, recently featured a slideshow of anti-NATO protests around the country.  The slideshow included images of student protests at Punjab University in Lahore. The protesters included young women, some clad in burqas and others in shalwar-kameez.  The boys were also clean-cut and were holding signs in English.  If images such as these were published in the US media, Americans would have a much harder time imagining Pakistanis as the “Other”, as strange religious fanatics who “hate us for our freedoms”.  Pakistani newspapers also portray NATO as the aggressor, killing our innocent and brave soldiers. As Foreign Minister Khar recently told NPR, this latest incident is not the first time that NATO has killed Pakistani soldiers. Rather, this is the eighth time that the country has suffered casualties due to friendly fire.  The reader comments on the Pakistani side reveal the depth of anger against the US and frustration with the national government which is seen as being in bed with Washington, to the detriment of the nation’s interests.

Americans and Pakistanis also have different ideas about the historical context of the bilateral relationship. For the average American, the US-Pakistan association began after September 11, 2001. They don’t understand why Pakistan is a reluctant ally. They believe that the US should be getting better results for the billions of dollars that have been given to Pakistan over the last decade.  Why, they ask, should we continue to give aid to Pakistan if they are not delivering the results that they promised?  However, for Pakistanis, the US-Pakistan connection did not commence just 10 years ago.  Pakistanis remember how involved the US was during the first Afghan War, how Washington cooperated with General Zia’s government in funding the mujahideen and using radical Islam to defeat the Soviets.  Once the Soviets were defeated, the Americans packed up and went home, leaving Pakistan to deal with the consequences of the war–the refugees, the drug addicts, the former mujahideen not fit for anything except war.  Not only that, but the US also placed economic sanctions on Pakistan as a punishment for testing nuclear weapons. Given this history, many Pakistanis feel justified in mistrusting the US and believing that once Washington withdraws from Afghanistan in 2014, Pakistan will once again be abandoned and forced to deal with the consequences of US activities in the region. In such a scenario, some Pakistanis wonder why the army shouldn’t hedge its bets and retain ties with some Taliban factions who may once again come to power in a post-war Afghanistan.

As for the issue of US aid to Pakistan, the perception among many Pakistanis is that this money is not really aid but payment to the Pakistani military for services rendered.  This “aid” does not buy the Americans the right to attack Pakistan whenever they please or to use unmanned drones to kill innocent residents of the tribal areas. Though the CIA claims that no civilians have died in drone attacks, Pakistanis believe this claim is not true and many people have been killed for no other crime than for living in FATA.   Many Pakistanis argue that instead of US aid, they would rather their country be treated as an equal and be respected by the international community.

The US-Pakistan relationship will remain distrustful and transactional unless the citizens and governments of the two countries engage in constructive dialogue and attempt to understand each other’s viewpoints. Pakistanis need to understand why Americans are so frustrated with the relationship while Americans need to understand why Pakistanis feels so disrespected and fear that once the US achieves its objectives in Afghanistan, Pakistan will once again be abandoned.

Kabir Altaf attended the Lahore University of Management Sciences and graduated from George Washington University.

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‘Urdu has changed from the Urdu of Mir and Ghalib but that simply proves it is a living language.’

That was one of the comments I received on earlier posts (here and here) about the past and future of the language. At one level, it is a statement of the obvious – nothing ever stays the same. At another, it invites a host of questions: What is the nature of the change? Who owns the language now? What functions is it serving?

Such questions could be answered by survey of Urdu speakers. A canvassing of urban centers would suffice in Pakistan since Urdu is not a regional language and hence not spoken widely in rural areas. (The situation might differ in India.) An organization like the National Language Authority could design the exercise but is unlikely to do so for any number of reasons. The best we can do for the moment is to rely on personal knowledge to generate longitudinal case studies going back almost a hundred years.

Longitudinal case studies do have some advantages since one can control for variations of class, ethnicity, education, etc. They can show how the engagement with language has changed for a typical family over an extended period of time. Based on further interaction with other families one can suggest plausible hypotheses for discussion. In the process it might become possible to generate a rich conversation that could lead us in unexpected directions.

The first case study, a story narrated by a person born in the 1940s, spans the lives of his grandfather (born 1880s), his mother (born 1920s) and his daughter (born 1970s). The genesis of the story was accidental – it just so happened that for a summer the narrator and a friend, a leading literary critic, had lunch every day at the former’s home where they were joined by the rest of the narrator’s family – his mother, wife and daughter.

A few days into the summer, the critic brought to the attention of the daughter the fact that her great-grandfather was a noted Urdu poet in UP; her grandmother knew thousands of couplets by heart; her father knew hundreds including the bahr-e taweel that probably only a handful of Urdu speakers can claim to know now. She, however, could not recite a single couplet.

Much handwringing ensued at this precipitous decline in familiarity with the heritage of Urdu literature and the critic proposed a remedial program: Every day he would discuss one couplet so that by the end of the summer the daughter would have a repertoire of the best of Urdu verse and be motivated and able to continue on her own. The proposal met with all round approval. It was agreed that the critic would recite a couplet, the daughter would clarify the meaning of any words unfamiliar to her, and the explication and commentary would follow.

The exercise was launched with the critic reciting the following couplet:

Mir in neem-baaz aankhon meN
saari mastii sharaab kii sii hai

It was the daughter’s turn to ask for the meaning of any of the words she had not understood. She thought for a while and said: “I understand all the words but what is the meaning of Mir?”

The critic, in turn, thought for a considerable time before deciding it would be wise to abandon the project. The foundation on which the edifice of knowledge was to be built had crumbled beyond repair. The lunch however was excellent UP cuisine that had lost none of its delicacy.

The second story evolved from a passing remark. A grandmother (born 1920s) at the dinner table asked whatever had happened to bayt baazi. The son (born 1940s) ventured that since few young people knew any Urdu poetry, it had gone out of fashion. Not surprisingly, attention was drawn to the granddaughter (born 1980s). Surely, she knew one couplet at least. Many minutes passed in attempts at memory recall before the following line was offered:

mujh se pehlii sii mohabbat merey mahbuub na maang

No one had the heart to mention that this was not a line from a ghazal.  That, no doubt, yielded the granddaughter a great deal of confidence. At this point the grandfather, whose memory had faded to the extent that he did not know who was sitting around the table, said:

Ghalib-e khasta ke baghair kaun se kaam band haiN
roiiye zaar zaar kyaa kiijiiye haay haay kyuuN

The granddaughter, unbidden, attributed the couplet to Faiz. Attention shifted, once again, to the excellence of the dinner on the table.

The point of these stories is not that the generation born in the 1970s and 1980s is bereft of culture. Many of them are writing poetry themselves but that poetry is in English or in a reincarnation of rekhta having a few Urdu words thrown into a composition in a foreign language. Interaction with families belonging to the ahle-zabaan, those who claim Urdu as their mother tongue, suggests that these stories reflect a widespread phenomenon. The new generation of upwardly-mobile native Urdu speakers has little connection with Urdu as a literary language. They use it to communicate with their grandmothers or with others unfamiliar with English; they know a large number of Bollywood film songs (Antakshari has replaced bayt baazi) and are quite familiar with the language of StarPlus soap operas. The birthday cake of the granddaughter of the second story, served up a few days later, had the following inscription in English, iced under the chocolate face of Shahrukh Khan:

Janam din kii shubhkamna Munni

The point is not to lament this change, just to record it and reflect on its implications. The old cultural elite for whom Urdu was the medium of literary exchange has over the better part of a hundred years transitioned to English with Urdu serving to communicate with mothers-in-law and servants or to add local color to conversations in a foreign language. Other cultural functions are being filled by Bollywood and StarPlus Hindi.

The research we need is to determine if there is another segment in society, perhaps unrelated to the ahle-zabaan, emerging to claim Urdu as a literary language. My guess, admittedly without hard evidence, is there is not. When I look at Hafiz Mahmood Shirani’s Sarmaaya-e Urdu that was a text for high school students till the 1950s, I have serious doubts if present-day college students could fathom either its language or its allusions.

Urdu is indeed a living language and it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon but its functions could be radically at odds with what it had become famous for:

Urdu hai jis ka naam hamiiN jante haiN Dagh
saare jahaN maiN dhuum hamaarii zabaaN kii hai

Literature continues to be produced in Urdu as well but is it the manifestation of a dwindling legacy? Without new generations acquiring the familiarity needed to sustain a literary language, is classical Urdu living on borrowed time? Urdu emerged as the language of the bazaar and flourished as a literary language when it was adopted by a declining elite sandwiched between the demise of Persian and the rise of English. Was this just a peculiar interregnum? Is it headed back to being a language of the bazaar, a medium of interaction for those whose native languages are mutually incomprehensible?

It can justifiably be said without exaggeration that Urdu to the Subcontinent is not what Persian is to Iran or what English is to England. Does that have a bearing on the evolution of the language?

I would appreciate if readers can contribute their personal experiences as comments either in support or contradiction of those narrated above.

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Reflecting on the official pronouncements of poverty in South Asia reminds me of the Marx Brothers saying: ‘Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.’

There are two kinds of poverty: monetary poverty and intellectual poverty. Together, I will argue, they make for a lethal combination.

The monetary and physical poverty in South Asia is undeniable; the controversies relate only to the few percentage points it might be above or below what is clearly an unacceptably high base level. The intellectual poverty is a more subtle phenomenon that, in my view, comes in the way of appropriately addressing the physical poverty.

Let me illustrate the existence of intellectual poverty in South Asia via an analogy that might help set up the discussion. People rush into places that have something rich to offer; if they can, people rush out of places that are impoverished. What do outsiders come to savor and learn in South Asia? Among other things, its aesthetics (music and dance), its spiritualism (yoga and sufism), and its cuisine. No one comes to South Asia to learn the theory or the methodology of any of the social sciences.

Why is that the case? It is because South Asian aesthetics, spiritualism and cuisine are unbroken indigenous traditions that remain alive today. In the social sciences, all that is left are great names, unfamiliar to most, from a history that is dead; the traditions that existed were swept aside or under by the interregnum of colonization.

The theories and methodologies of social science that are alive today were developed and are refined outside South Asia. Smart South Asians, and there are many, either leave South Asia to learn them abroad or learn them second-hand in India.

Consider just one example: the Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, is justly famous for his theory of justice and although he speaks of niti and nyaya, he places himself squarely in the line of thinkers that stretches from Adam Smith via Bentham, Marx and John Stuart Mill to Sen. His theory challenges an alternative formulation that derives from Hobbes via Locke, Rousseau and Kant to John Rawls. Surely there are indigenous South Asian theories of justice but they are not part of a tradition that is alive in academia.

Is that a problem? Yes, in my view, because thinking is different from producing. All the high-tech things are designed in the West and manufactured in the South but that works because most products are shipped back to be consumed in the West as well. But just as pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to invest in drugs that are needed by people without purchasing power in the South, so social scientists have little incentive producing theories that are rooted in the traditions of the South.

Theories emerge from the experience of the West; most of those we work with are products of the European Enlightenment and their subsequent modifications. These theories are then universalized and applied in other places. But a theory determines what data we look for in the application; it is not the raw data from the locale of the application that yields the theory.

Take Marxism and feudalism as examples. How much effort has been devoted to identifying kulaks, middle-peasants, and feudals in the South Asian countryside and with what results?

This brings us back to poverty. The prevalent approach to poverty alleviation – identifying the poor with a poverty line, targeting them through means-testing, and distributing welfare support through agents of the state, is relevant in places where the poor are a small proportion of the total population, where most transactions are negotiated through the market, where the agents of the state are not themselves poor, and where the institutions of the state are credible and robust.

This approach is ill-suited for places where the conditions are quite the opposite: the majority of the population is poor, there are many non-market transactions, state agents themselves are poor, and the institutions of the state are weak. Identifying the poor, means-testing them, and getting public support to them results in about Rs. 15 reaching the poor out of every Rs. 100 intended for them.

Asides from the vast corruption engendered by this approach, it creates social tensions by dividing the poor and the almost-poor, sets up perverse incentives for households and groups to be identified as poor, and is financially untenable. Seriously addressing poverty on this scale via welfare payments would surely bankrupt the economy.

Once again, an analogy might help. The treatment for an incipient cancer is not the same as that for one that has spread throughout the body. It has to be radically different. This is obvious to all. Why is not so in the case of poverty alleviation? The one answer I can think of is because we have been blinded by borrowed remedies, have not thought of them ourselves, and have marginalized those who do have indigenous wisdom to offer.

When Montek Singh Ahluwalia defends the Indian poverty lines of Rs. 26 and Rs. 32 per capita per day, he is technically correct. The universally employed poverty line is $1.50 per capita per day; converted at purchasing power parity it would yield the figures offered by the Indian Planning Commission. But these lines are good only to track, if one so desires, the number of individuals or the percentage of the population below them. They have no bearing on the appropriateness of a poverty alleviation strategy. For the latter, the percentage of the population that is poor, much like the spread of cancerous cells in a body, is of much more relevance.

If one thinks about it, even the simple counting could be problematic. If the number of individuals below these poverty lines are decreasing over time what is the assurance that they have been lifted out of poverty? Many might simply be dying early at this level of bare sustenance. Unless someone can provide data for income-specific life expectancies and rates of mortality, I would be justified in remaining skeptical of the official claims.

How have we arrived at the point where a man of Mr. Singh’s qualifications and credentials is seriously suggesting a survival proposition that any illiterate child would tell him cannot be true? Is it because the illiterate child is looking at India through his own eyes while Mr. Singh is looking at it through the eyes of others?

Therein might lie the real story of South Asian poverty.

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) notes in a publication released earlier this month that a “huge amount of new financial commitment, worth over $40 billion,” has been pledged by a collective of global agencies, towards maternal and child health projects in developing countries. The strategies that these projects will focus on include “innovative approaches” like the use of mobile phones “to create awareness and promote health” so that individuals and communities can have the information they need to make decisions about their health. Although the publication mentions the need to “address structural barriers to health,” the assumption is that lack of information and knowledge is the limiting factor. This assumption shows a woeful ignorance of the socio-cultural complexities that make up the local matrices within which “development” work has to be undertaken, which is why in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into developing countries as aid in the last five decades, there has been no commensurate improvement in the social sector parameters in terms of adequate food, shelter, access to healthcare and education.

Poverty persists in the developing regions; the gap between the haves and the have-nots has in fact widened in the wake of globalisation over the last two decades. Despite substantial growth in GDP, those on the lower economic rungs in these nations (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and many countries of Africa and South America) have seen their lifestyle parameters worsen. Maternal mortality is still unacceptably high in these regions (the Asian subcontinent accounts for a quarter of global maternal deaths). Infants are dying in unacceptably large numbers, of illnesses that are preventable. So why haven’t the massive doses of aid from overseas succeeded in delivering what they set out to address?

A candid answer to that question can be found in a new publication, titled So Much Aid, So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan (Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 978-1-4214-0137-9) written by Samia Waheed Altaf, a Pakistani specialist in public health who was a member of an international team that oversaw the Social Action Programme (SAP) in Pakistan during the ‘90s. She has observed and chronicled the way decisions are made in disbursing aid from multilateral agencies. Using real life stories of aid recipients and beneficiaries, the book describes how giving and receiving aid has become an end in itself – the donor agencies have the satisfaction of putting on record that so many millions were spent on such-and-such projects, while the receiving country pats itself on its back on the inflow. Invariably, however, the American or European “experts” who fly in to devise, and advise on, health projects, have no idea of the local constraints, and come up with strategies that guarantee failure in terms of real improvements in ground realities.

Young girls are recruited for stipends, for instance, and given training in creating awareness on family planning or contraception. The girls enroll because they need the money, but once the training is over, there is no way their families are going to allow them to go from door to door “creating awareness” about contraception (or even about general health issues for that matter) because young women do not wander around like that, unaccompanied, to address strangers. Not done, certainly not in the rural Asian context. The “experts” who fly back with a report about the completion of the project, have no idea why the training doesn’t result in better community health indices. As for awareness, the lowliest among illiterate villagers knows of course, that it is inadvisable to drink polluted water – but what options do they have, when the factory set up (in the name of development) discharges toxic effluents into the river that is the source of water  for the community? Or when water bodies dry up? Pregnant women do not deliver their babies at the hospital, not because they are ignorant but because they do not have the money to get to the nearest hospital, or there are no roads connecting the village to the city, or for a dozen other reasons. Women have multiple pregnancies not because they do not know any better, but because of son preference, which has nothing to do with foreign aid but decides how effective a project for limiting families will be. The western “consultant” who wonders why a woman does not walk out of a marriage where she is not permitted to go out and get involved in community work, is no different from the infamous French queen who wondered why the poor protesting about lack of bread could  not eat cake.

The foreign experts stay at five star hotels, hire air-conditioned cars and go shopping for exotic handicrafts to take back as “bargain buys” (just $45 per cushion cover that would cost  four times that much, in New York). Nearly 40 per cent of aid money goes back to the donor countries, as consultants’ fees (one of the conditions governing aid is that consultants from the donor country should be hired) and incidental expenses (hiring a fleet of vehicles, staff, field helpers, interpreters, meetings, daily or deputation allowances, publishing a glossy report with a liberal sprinkling of appropriate buzz words and highfalutin  phrases).The human dimension gets completely ignored, in the pursuit of paper projections and academic analyses.

Samia Altaf gives you hilarious accounts of how advisors from overseas go about implementing their “projects.” The epilogue, where she voices her concern about the way the West “aids” the poorer countries with scant regard for the appropriateness of their strategies under local conditions, is alone worth its weight in gold. How many at the World Bank, IMF and WHO have read this account of how aid actually works? How many high level bureaucrats with policy making powers at these agencies, will make the effort, or learn from these observations?

Sakuntala Narasimhan is an award winning Indian journalist and author specialising in gender and development. This op-ed appeared in Dawn, Karachi, on October18, 2011 and is reproduced here with permission of the author.

A review by Jakob Steiner is here. Another in an academic journal appeared in Regional Studies 45:9, 1289-1290, 2011 by Claudia R. Williamson, Development Research Institute, New York University.

The book is available in Pakistan from Paramount Books and in India and the rest of South Asia from Infibeam.  

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Imagine a large hall in a major city in Punjab. It’s packed with people, mostly women, from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. On the stage are two men, one a long-haired bearded, hairy-chested sardar, the other a clean shaven smooth-chested younger man. They’re engaged in a languorous, erotic, sometimes passionate, sometimes tender, rendering of the story of Heer Ranjha. In the background Madan Gopal’s wonderfully resonant voice sings the story. Tragedy hangs in the air, for most of the people in the hall are familiar with this beautiful story of star- crossed lovers, and after the initial hesitation at seeing two men, they now ‘believe’ that the bearded Navtej Johar is actually Heer, and the supple Anil is Ranjha. Such is the power of their dance.

We’re in Islamabad, attending a dance performance that marks the end of a day of conferencing, and of an award ceremony in the memory of a young woman, Meeto Bhasin Malik, whose untimely death remains one of the great losses of the women’s movement in India. There’s not a dry eye in the house – the story of Meeto, and the story of Heer and Ranjha have ensured that. There’s joy too, for the Meeto award this year, given for outstanding contribution to the cause of women by young women, is given to the only woman mayor in Afghanistan, a young, petite woman called Azra Jafri. And there’s tension – the organizers are on edge, a crowded event, a dance performance, an Indian team, it’s a recipe for disaster in a town – and a country – that is no stranger to violence. But things pass off peacefully, the dance ends, the music dies away, and the entire hall erupts in applause and appreciation.

The last time I was in this city wasn’t so long ago. Then, my Pakistani friends and I had eaten and shopped in the very same market where, a week later, the politician Salman Taseer would be shot in broad daylight for speaking out in defense of a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. Things have, if anything, become worse. Yet, as in all such places, life goes on and I see my Pakistani friends joke and laugh about the problems they face every day – some of them life-threatening – as they come out of discussions on violence against women. It’s an odd thing about meetings that involve Indians and Pakistanis. No matter who else is there, somehow the discussion inevitably becomes one where Pakistanis and Indians talk to each other, often breaking into Urdu, or Punjabi, forgetting that others need also to be in the know. Those watching might shake their heads in resignation, thinking, there they go again.

Our discussions for the past two days have focused on violence against women. Between our two countries there is no competition here – rape, molestation, ‘honour’ killings, domestic violence, we have them all, and we’d be hard put to it to say who is the better entity here. Both have shameful records – another thing we have in common. But here at least, we’re listening to each other. As speaker after speaker details the ways in which they deal with cases of violence, the mismatch between law and forensics, the impunity of offenders and state collusion, women from across South Asia listen and nod and learn from each other.  Nationalist rhetoric is remarkable by its absence here. The organizers, an NGO called Zeest Rozan, are happy, their large brood of male and female volunteers are excited, they’re learning so much, they’re meeting people from different countries but especially from across the border. A staff member who has been chasing our police clearances smiles as he hands them over to us – ‘it’s my dream to come to India one day,’ he says, ‘in meeting you I have at least begun the process of fulfilling that dream.’

As the conference ends I make my way to Lahore. I travel by bus, a unique Pakistani inter-city system known – rather like our Volvo buses – by the make of the buses rather than the routes on which they ply – as Daewoo. On the way I watch as the landscape of hills and hillocks gives way to flat terrain, as dusk sets in the dust begins to rise as the cows come home, the moment we call godhuli. I could be in India, there’s nothing that marks this flat terrain, these abundant crops, these heavy oxen, as different.

We stop for a fifteen-minute break. I’ve been told by all my friends to be very quick here – the bus doesn’t wait for anyone they say, that’s what makes it so efficient in keeping its timings. One loud report of the horn and it’s off. Fearful of missing it, and being stranded in the middle of nowhere, I stay on the bus. But a young couple sitting across from me comes up and encourages me to get off. There’s still two hours to go, they tell me, why don’t you come down and have a cup of tea. I’m not a tea drinker, but I don’t have it in me to say no, so I go with them. On the way, we decide to make a visit to the toilet, and the young woman and I have an idle discussion about the current fashion for women’s clothes in Pakistan. Something I say alerts her that I may not be local, and she exclaims: you’re from India? The gaggle of laughing, chattering women in the bathroom suddenly falls silent, they’re filled with curiosity – they look at me, at my clothes, my hair, my face, to see if I am any different, and they confess – or some of them do – that they dearly want to visit India, they’ve heard to much about it, and they watch serials on Star Plus!

The young woman’s partner returns, she tells him excitedly what she’s discovered about me, and he demands special tea from the chai wallah. I offer to pay – they’re both much younger than me, but they’ll have none of it. And the chai wallah, who’s heard our discussion, in the end doesn’t take anything from them, insisting that he wants to offer at least a cup of tea to the mehmaan in their midst.

I’m overwhelmed by this, but it’s nothing new. It’s not my first visit to Pakistan nor my first encounter with stray Pakistanis. And yet, apart from the odd occasion on which I have met hostility, people have been unfailingly polite, often very kind, and hospitable to a fault. I wonder, not for the first time, what the fuss and tension is about between our two countries.

I’m not naïve about this – I know of course that there are real issues there that keep the hostility alive, that keep us apart. But there’s also the inescapable reality that there is a deep curiosity, and a deep desire for people to meet and talk and learn that the ‘other’ is not the monster they believe him or her to be. Perhaps, I think, we should play many more cricket matches!

There’s another thing that happens – from Delhi, we’ve gone in a group: all women, one man who calls himself a trans-gender person (a TG in common parlance). From the moment we land in Lahore and begin the process of clearing immigration, he’s surrounded by people, mostly men, who have a deep curiosity about him and who don’t hesitate to show it. One of them even asks him if he feels more female than male – this a bare few moments after he sees him. At Lahore airport, as we wait to pick up our flight to Islamabad, a mother and daughter duo sitting across from us, watch him carefully, without seeming obvious. At some point, he walks across to them and the mother engages him in conversation and them makes him a gift of a lipstick.  I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m struck by the frank expression of curiosity and the unabashed expression of it.

Back in Delhi, I go to my yoga class. Where have I been, my friends in the class want to know. I tell them Pakistan.  Isn’t it dangerous, one of them asks me, did you feel safe there? The odd thing is, it is dangerous – the Pakistanis themselves will tell you this, they’ll advise you not to go to certain places, to always take care. But the only time I felt any danger, it was from the rampant dengue mosquito that has laid siege to the city of Lahore, where it has taken over 500 lives.

Six decades. It’s more than enough time. Time for us to make good our promises of normalizing relations, of opening up the borders, of making it possible for people to travel, to visit their old homes, to reconnect with their friends, to indulge in the simple pleasures of shopping, eating, visiting, and importantly, seeking our joint histories, perhaps working on joint research projects, uncovering our hidden histories.

Will this happen in the near future? It’s difficult to say. But this I do know, the day I am able to make a visit to Mohenjodaro and Taxila without having to seek a hundred permissions, without worrying about reporting to the police, the day my friends are able to cross over and visit Ajanta and Ellora, Indore and Orcha, I’ll know things have begun to normalize, and that’s when we can really begin to celebrate. It’s not such a difficult thing to imagine for two countries, can it really be so impossible to realize?

Urvashi Butalia, the author of the celebrated The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, is director of Zubaan Books, an imprint of Kali For Women. This article appeared first in The Tribune, Chandigarh, on October 19, 2011 and is reproduced here with permission of the author.

Related article on violence against women: Testing the Hypothesis of Sexual Repression in Pakistan

Meeto Bhasin Malik’s work (In the Making: The Formation of Identity in South Asia) has been mentioned many times on this blog.

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By Dipankar Gupta

Is the Congress afraid of winning in Gujarat?

Nothing else explains why it lets Narendra Modi tom-tom development when it should have been the Congress banging the drums. The economic achievements of governments before Modi’s read like an award citation, but too much secularism has since led the Congress astray. Instead of showcasing its past performance to regain Gujarat, it is obsessed with nailing Modi as a communalist-in-chief. Naturally, it is not getting anywhere fast.

Look also at the good memories the Congress is erasing away.

In 1991, a full ten years before Modi arrived, as many as 17,940 out of 18,028 villages were already electrified. The Ukai plant, which uses washed coal to generate power, was also pre-Modi as was the asphalting of 87.5% of Gujarat roads. 1980-81, Gujarat’s share in manufacturing at the national level was only 16.29%, but by 2000-1 it rose to an impressive 28.71%. Not surprising then, that between 1994-2001, well before Modi, Gujarat’s State Domestic Product grew at 10%-13%; way higher than the All-India average.

Since 1980, Gujarat has been India’s poster state. Modi had nothing to do with the world’s largest ship breaking yard coming up in Bhavnagar, nor with the setting up of the Ambani refinery in Jamnagar. Well before Modi, Gujarat accounted for 45% of India’s petroleum products, roughly 18% of the country’s cargo handling, 23% of our total requirement for crude oil and 30% of our natural gas needs from offshore basins.

In addition, Gujarat, since the 1990s, produces as much as 78% of the country’s salt, 98% of soda ash and 26% of India’s pharmaceutical products. Because of Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel’s intervention in 1993 that port traffic in this state jumped from a mere 3.18 million tonnes in 1981 to 86.17 million tonnes in 2001. In the same period, Gujarat’s share of the national port traffic increased from 45.36% to above 76% and has stayed there ever since. Modi’s decade has not made that percentage grow.

During the eventful 1990s, Gujarat successfully augmented 35% of its power generation capacity. It also closed down five major loss-making public sector units, initiating instead a variety of public-private partnerships. In fact, an early short-lived BJP government under Keshubhai Patel in 1995-6 did some good work too. In particular, he was instrumental in setting up Gujarat’s Industrial Development Board, but Modi has blanked him out from public memory as well.

If Gujarat’s agriculture is prospering today it is because the state has begun to receive Sardar Sarovar waters from 2002. Once again, Modi had little to do with the inauguration of this Project, but he was at the right place and at the right time to take the credit for it. If there was ever a person who reaped what somebody else had sown, then that is Modi.

Gujarat also is not alone in posting agricultural growth rates above the national average; even backward Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh handsomely beat the all India figure. Finally, it is not as if Gujarat is overall the richest state either; Haryana, Punjab, Maharashtra and Kerala are all much better off, primarily because they have lower rural poverty rates.

At the same time, to round off this number, it must be acknowledged Gujarat was never poor. True, it was a lowly eighth in terms of prosperity in 1960, but it has been at number three since 1985 and continues to hold that spot. Modi may not have self-started Gujarat’s development, but he certainly kept the engine running.

In line with this, Modi should be credited for taking a few initiatives on his own. For example, while Gujarat’s villages were all lit, it is also a fact that the State’s electricity board was bankrupt in 2002. Loans were arranged to overcome this shortfall and power thefts too were curtailed by police monitoring. Gujarat also did well in making Central Government’s “Sarva Shiksha Abhiayan” work, especially in connection with the girl child. Yet, the percentage fall in Gujarat’s IMR and poverty rates are well below the national average.

It is not as if Gujarat’s pre-2001 achievements are hard to dredge out of history. But by keeping silent about its successful past, the Congress has added body to Modi’s presence. This enables him to keep his people in line by telling them he is about to get angry, but that should not disorient the opposition. Now that Gujarat’s economy is all grown up and good looking, the Congress should admit its responsibility and submit to a paternity test. What is there to hide?

Hefty anti-saffron helpings, on their own, will not do. With a stomach full of that stuff, the Congress can hardly catch up with Modi.  In fact, Jawaharlal Nehru taught us that secularism does not win elections, development does. Why then is the Congress doing its best to come second best by gagging the record of non-BJP governments through much of the 1990s? In politics, as in sports, winning is not everything, it is the only thing.

Most recently, Mukesh Ambani praised Narendra Modi for putting Gujarat on the world map. He seems to have forgotten that his father, and Reliance, prospered in Gujarat well before Modi properly entered politics. On the other hand, there is much wisdom in the old Sicilian proverb that we keep our friends close, but our enemies even closer.

In which case, is Mukesh close or closer to Modi?

This op-ed appeared in the Times of India on October 7, 2011 and is reproduced here with permission of the author.

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[I am concerned about the perspective of proponents of economic development in India regarding people considered to be in the way of development, be they tribals living on mineral resources or farmers occupying land needed for industry. This concern has made me revisit the question of priorities: does development take precedence over people or should people determine the kind of development that ought to be pursued?

I addressed this question in 1992 when I was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a visiting faculty member. The paper was written for an Expert Meeting on the Role of Families in Development organized by the Committee on Population of the National Research Council in Washington, DC. It was published in 1993 in the proceedings of the meeting (Family and Development: Summary of an Expert Meeting, K. Foote and L. Martins, Eds. National Academy of Sciences Press, Washington, DC).]

The key issue addressed in the paper, which should be sufficient to motivate a discussion on this forum, is excerpted below. It is not necessary to read the full paper but the link is provided for those who might be interested.

This meeting presents an opportunity to deliberate upon the relationship between people and development. One starting point is provided by the stated goal of the meeting, i.e., “to discuss how families, as intermediaries between individuals and society, either hinder or facilitate social and economic development.”

When we juxtapose families and development, a question that one could ask is what comes first? Do families come first or does development come first? The historical record shows that this is not an empty question despite the fact that development is always intended to be for the benefit of people. “Socialism plus electrification,” Indira Gandhi’s family planning program, and Nyerere’s village collectivization program are all examples in which development came first. All of them had tragic consequences for the families for whom the development was intended.

The formulation of the stated goal of this meeting (“how families…  either hinder or facilitate development”) can leave the impression that development has a life of its own, independent of and external to the people involved. The content of development seems defined and the focus is on seeing how families either hinder or facilitate this objective. What happens if the families are deemed to be hindering development? Again, the historical record is sobering. In different times people in the path of development have been found in need of civilization or modernization with or without their consent; have been labeled backward or lazy; and in the worst case have been swept aside into retraining centers or the gulag.

The question of what comes first, people or development, is thus important and worthy of consideration. But suppose we wanted to put people first, where would we start? There are two alternatives. Ideally, we would need to find out what is it that people want. Failing that, we would need to determine at least how development hurts or benefits people.

[The full paper is accessible here.]

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The response to 9/11 has been challenged along two lines: that it imposed a huge cost on the world without making it much safer; and that a legal-political approach would have yielded better outcomes. Both arguments, implicitly or explicitly, presume that an alternative response was possible. A reassessment of this presumption can help highlight some less discussed aspects of our world before and after 9/11.

Prima facie it is plausible to assert that it was not necessary to frame the 9/11 provocation as an act of war. It could have been classified as a crime, albeit a spectacular one, and prosecuted using political leverage as needed. Given the near universal condemnation of the act and the swell of support for the US from nation-states, concerted political pressure on a weak Afghan state would in all likelihood have delivered the masterminds of the crime to be dealt with according to established legal procedures. The apprehension of Osama bin Laden might have occurred much earlier but even if it had taken ten years, as it eventually did, the cost to the US and to the world would have been much lower.

There are recent precedents for the response to an Al-Qaeda (AQ) style movement. All through the 1970s, the Red Army Fraction (RAF) and the Red Brigades (RB) terrorized Europe using extremist ideologies and very violent means to destabilize states. In both cases their acts were treated as crimes and it took about ten years to completely snuff out the movements.

At its peak, AQ had no more than between three and five thousand core members. Why could it not have been dealt with along similar lines? Both the similarities and the differences between AQ and the European groups are instructive for this argument. The similarities are so striking that one is forced to take seriously the question of why they were treated so differently. Why, in particular, was the ideological rhetoric of the RF and RB never taken seriously while that of AQ was taken at face value, a stance that opened the door to a declaration of war?

The differences suggest possible answers to the question. First, both the RAF and the RB were largely confined within national borders (of Germany and Italy, respectively). Second, the motivations of the RAF and RB were entirely ideological; there were no specific criminal acts of the German and Italian states to which the groups could lay claim as the motivation for their acts of terror or which the states had credible need to defend in front of any audience. Third, the ethnic and religious identities of the contending parties were the same.

In the case of 9/11, it can be argued that AQ brought into the US the kind of ‘crime’ that was a commonplace in the global international order – that of attempting to destabilize other countries for self-proclaimed aims of national interest. How else would one classify the acts of the US government in Iran and Guatemala, of the USSR in Hungary and Afghanistan, of Iraq in Kuwait, or of Pakistan in India, to list just a few examples? It would be hard to argue that the determination of a crime turns not on the violation of a law or norm but on agreement with the self-serving rhetoric of the violator. It stands to reason that treating 9/11 as a crime, apprehending the AQ criminals alive and prosecuting them in a public trial would have forced an open discussion of the relative merits of such claims even if they were to be ultimately dismissed.

Given that the American citizenry has remained largely unaware of the long history of such US interventions (for which those at the receiving end consider the term ‘crime’ appropriate), it was far easier to cloud the issue in the rhetoric of war and ride the swell of patriotism to minimize any debate that might otherwise have transpired. The ‘otherness’ of AQ in terms of ethnicity and religion helped press all the old stereotypes into action to inflate its threat, couch the war in the frame of a ‘clash of civilizations,’ and trigger a discourse of ‘them’ hating ‘us’ because of our values.

This argument can be better appreciated in a longer time frame. In the age before the emergence of the nation-state and sovereign borders, these types of interventions did not fall into the category of crime. Alexander could attempt to subdue India, Changez Khan could roll across Central Asia, and Isabella and Ferdinand could conquer Mexico. In retrospect we can deplore such ‘violations’ but there was no framework that classified them as such. The interventionists neither needed permission from their own subjects nor were answerable to any international body charged with protecting the rights of non-subjects.

This began to change with the emergence of representative governments. Even though no global institutions existed to protect non-subjects, even if only in name, till much later, governments intervening outside their borders had to provide some convincing narrative to their own voters. This is when the ‘burden of civilization’ was born as a serviceable rationale. Thus the British takeover of India after 1857, though it did not need to be covert, was couched in the heavy rhetoric of bringing enlightenment to natives living in darkness who had to be gradually raised to the position where they could deserve to rule themselves. It was accepted that some people needed to be suppressed for their own good.

By contrast, American interventions, especially those following WWII, occurred in times when they were in violation of international norms. Therefore, they had to be covert and when they couldn’t, they needed to be legitimized. Wars of self-defense and pre-emptive actions to make the world a better place were among the sources of such legitimacy. In this perspective, one can understand how 9/11 was framed as an act of war – the US had been attacked and forced to retaliate in its defense. In order to forestall a discussion of the past, 9/11 was transformed into another Zero hour of history.

Once declared, the ‘war on terror’ elicited all the accompanying rhetoric; it would not only avenge humiliation and ensure justice, it would make the world safer, spread democracy to places where dictators reigned, and liberate women living under oppression. Left unsaid, since the past had been obliterated, was the fact that it was the US itself that had derailed democracy in many of these places and installed the dictators who were now to be replaced. And that the plight of women, or of dissidents struggling for civil and political rights, had heretofore never been a concern warranting a call to arms. Given the burden of history, all this could not have been said without exposing US officials to criminal charges of the kind that those from smaller countries (Serbia, Croatia, etc.) were expected to face under international law.

There was thus no alternative response to 9/11 except a ‘war on terror’ quite independent of its costs and consequences. It is of course quite probable that US officials underestimated the cost and duration of the war (indeed the selling of the war made such underestimation inevitable) or that alternative ways of waging the war could have resulted in lower costs. The fact remains that is difficult to conceive of a viable alternative response given the magnitude of the provocation and the prior understanding of history by the citizenry. Hence the almost immediate decision to commit to war and a strong discouragement of any questioning of that choice.

Ten years later, the costs of the war, the fact that it has exacerbated the very dangers it was supposed to quell, and the huge encroachments on individual liberties are all forcing into the open the very issues that the war was intended to bury. A potent new source of global instability and uncertainty has emerged. It is a fact that there is no nation-state that can do in the US what the US can do in other countries relying on the imbalance of power. What remained unanticipated, a failure of intelligence, was that changes in technology might enable a non-state group to commit an act of terror of such magnitude inside the US. The imbalance of power now stands reversed because non-state actors only need a few successful acts to destabilize the world or impose a huge cost on it while nation-states need to prevent each and every such attempt to feel secure. Even so, the uncertainty can never be reduced to zero.

The open-ended war against terror poses a further dilemma. The pronouncements of NATO powers justifying the war to their citizens fuel the resentments of those whose lived experiences are consequences of what they consider criminal acts in their countries. This is clearly an unsustainable situation that signals a shift towards a different equilibrium in the future.

The framework of rights can possibly provide a glimpse of that future. Rights to date have been wrested by citizens, workers, minorities, women and children. But all these rights have protection, to greater or lesser degree, inside national boundaries. There has been no equivalent protection of the rights of non-citizens. The citizens of Egypt, for example, had no effective recourse against the alleged complicity of the US in the violation of their rights. There was no forum to which such a charge could be brought for deliberation.

Ten years after 9/11 we are beginning to conceive a world in which such acts would be more openly questioned, where violation of the rights of non-subjects would trigger legal consequences, where countries would not be able to exempt themselves from international conventions, and where, when such acts are committed, the perpetrators would be subject to prosecution.

9/11 was a major crime committed by a murderous gang. The response to 9/11 began to lift the veil from the imbalance of global power in which this was just one crime among many and highlighted the fact that the world would only become a safer place when all such crimes are reduced by a credible threat of prosecution and arbitrary retaliations are ruled out. The rights of all citizens of the world need to be formally guaranteed and effectively protected. For that to happen there is need to advance to the stage where justice is no longer selective or subservient to power.

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