In the trap of history

Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif’s search for a new national narrative is a fraught endeavour

PRIME MINISTER NAWAZ SHARIF is looking for what has come to be called biyania (narrative) to defeat the influence of Islamist killers among the victimised masses. What he actually wants is a revision of the ideology of Pakistan which is the same as the one taught by its tormentors, al Qaeda and Islamic State. The counter-narrative is wrongly presumed to be what Pakistan needs: What is needed is the rollback of the state ideology and the lawmaking done under it. And that is going to be a tough ask, risking the undoing of the state itself rather than a revision of its ideology.

Sharif may have not realised, but his first big effort was misconceived and a failure the moment he made it. He called on madrasa Jamia Naeemia in Lahore on March 11 and asked the scholars there to invent a new biyania that would oppose the worldview of the terrorists killing Pakistanis in the name of Islam. Naeemia’s founder-priest, Allama Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi was killed in 2009 by a suicide-bomber after he condemned the killing of innocent people by the Taliban in the name of Islam. Sharif made a fervent appeal to the current head of the seminary to issue the genuine narrative of Islam against the trend of Muslims killing Muslims.

But his ministerial courtiers did not tell him about an unpleasant antecedent. On November 12, 2005, the Christian community of Sangla Hill in Nankana Sahib district in Punjab experienced a hair-raising day of violence and vandalism. Dawn (November 13, 2005) described it like this: “The burning down on Saturday of three churches, a missionary-run school, two hostels and several houses belonging to the Christian community by an enraged mob of some 3,000 people in Punjab’s Nankana district.”

Daily Pakistan (November 25, 2005) reported that Naeemi declared that the government had paid scant attention to the desecration of the Quran but had rounded up 88 Muslim citizens of Sangla Hill on fake charges of destroying Christian churches. He declared that the Christian clergy had set the churches on fire after the desecration incident and should be put behind bars and not allowed to leave the country. He warned that he was taking a procession to Sangla Hill to get the Muslims released from jail. Madrasa Naeemia, therefore, was not the place where a counter-narrative to terrorism could be found.

Pakistan’s killer narrative, which Sharif wants to change, has evolved over 70 years and its toxic direction can be described as a retreat from the memory of the British Raj under which the people of India felt they had become one nation. This may have happened because casteism and sectarianism was not recognised by the British. Pakistan’s preamble pledges sharia and the courts have followed this direction, interpreting various disputed laws in the light of sharia. When ideology stiffened under the pious military ruler, General Zia, Nawaz Sharif was with him, following the lead given by him and didn’t object when the laws against blasphemy and desecration of the Quran were passed and even made more draconian. Zakat tax meant to be spent on the poor can’t be spent on nonmuslims who are counted among the poorest communities in Pakistan. Muslims who are born in Christian hospitals and study in English-medium schools funded by Christian charity don’t mind if poor Christians are not helped with Muslim charity.

When Pakistan’s most sickeningly pathological terrorist Fazlullah killed 130 children in a school in Peshawar, he quoted from the hadith which form a part of sharia in Islam. Pushed back by sharia, Sharif took himself to Karachi last year where he mixed with the Hindu minority community and made them happy by observing Holi with them. But he was chastised for that by Pakistan’s religious parties who gathered in his hometown, Lahore, to warn him that they would overthrow his government if he continued to poison Pakistan with “ungodly liberalism”.

But Sharif doesn’t give up. His own counter-narrative is issuing expensive TV ads where he quotes Jinnah as describing Pakistan as a secular state. If Jinnah thought he could change the pledge made by his party, the Muslim League, of an Islamic state he was soon to be disabused in 1948 after his death: The Muslim League-dominated Constituent Assembly passed the Objectives Resolution, formally promising a state under sharia. The passage of time has not dimmed the resolve; actually the rest of the Islamic world too is hurtling towards what Pakistan has done to itself and what Nawaz Sharif wants to roll back.

The writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’ SOMETHING EERILY similar to the now notorious “notebandi” is being planned in Jawaharlal Nehru University, with the university administration’s decision to drastically curtail admissions to research degrees, this year, by 86 per cent. This follows a July 2016 UGC regulation which has reduced the number of students that teachers can accept for supervision. The notification, which has led to consternation in many universities nationwide, is yet to be debated and adopted through due academic process.

In May every year, some 85,000 young people take the entrance examination at 76 centres across the country to enter JNU for an undergraduate, post-graduate or research degree. Every year, a little over 2,100 students are admitted to 48 schools and centres across the university, of which about 1,800 are for post-graduate or higher degrees. The story is similar in several other universities across India. This large number of aspirants is neither because JNU has received the highest university accreditation from the NAAC — 3.91 on a 4.0 scale — in 2012 nor because it won the Visitor’s Award for the Best Central University earlier this year. Most of those who apply (civil service aspirants apart) do so because universities like JNU are recognised, both nationally and worldwide, as research universities. JNU, for instance, produces a creditable 600 Phds per year. Of the 5,219 students who were pursuing their Phds last year, a good half (2,661) were students belonging to the SC/ST/OBC categories. In addition, due to JNU’S uniquely derived, and hard-won, deprivation points, a large number of students are from regions that count as backward or underdeveloped (the statistics are from the National Institutional Ranking Framework, Union Ministry of Human Resource Development and JNU annual reports).

This profile of the university is now set to change dramatically, as the JNU administration shows unseemly haste in following, and indeed exceeding, the directives of the UGC (which supersedes its own regulation of 2009). In its shockingly mistaken interpretation of these guidelines, JNU has taken a notification about supervision to mean admission, and has slashed research student intake by 86 per cent. As a result, many centres and schools will see a zero admission of Mphil students this academic year.

Why do JNU centres and schools have a higher than the recently-mandated number of research students today? In part, this is because a number of centres, such as the Centre for Law and Governance, or the Centre for Community Health and Social Medicine, are exclusively research centres, with only Mphil and PHD programmes. There will be no teaching in such centres, perhaps for years to come. This is nothing less than a planned waste of public resources. Also, following the 2006 reservation of seats for OBCS, the existing faculty