The Arab revolts represent more than a rejection of dictatorship – they are the rejection of the neo-liberal economic order by the youth
Sunday, 06 March, 2011
W
The question to ask
The BBC defines what sparked the protests in Egypt as, “The main drivers of the unrest have been poverty, rising prices, social exclusion, anger over corruption and personal enrichment among the political elite, and a demographic bulge of young people unable to find work.” The question to ask is not who, but rather what is at fault? What happened after Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt? I suppose relatively few of us would know, but the aftermath of the toppling of the regime has seen a number of massive labour strikes: public transport workers have protested, bank workers have protested, health, tourism, oil and textile workers have protested. All these protests are despite the ban on independent unions during the Hosni Mubarak era. What produced these post-Mubarak
The Egyptian brand
The Egyptian brand of neo-liberalism was lauded by IFI’s such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success but a far starker picture emerged from behind the curtain of the blinds of statistics. In reality the marketisation and privatisation agenda was itself unevenly applied. Applied to whom? Of the most vulnerable classes of society – whose experience did not provide a pretty picture – organised labour was suppressed, and the public education and healthcare systems were left neglected and privatised. Wage fell in real terms relative to inflation and unemployment spiraled. All this while, Egypt was being lauded as a successful neo-liberal experiment. The same Egypt, of course, was different for its wealthy. For them, the public sector did not shrink. Rather, it reallocated public resources to the already affluent. The windfalls of privatisation fell to already politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Government contracts be-
The real truth
A revolt is against an order that oppresses a people – and rulers are only the visible sources of that order. The real truth of the order is hidden behind rulers – in the day to day operation of the State. In this sense, when the suicide that sparked the Tunisian protests occurred, it was not Ben Ali that directly caused it. It was the police that had displaced the fruit seller because he was, legally speaking, ‘encroaching.’ It was an operation by the po-
Shifting the gaze
And before we conclude it is important to shift our gaze from the Middle East to ourselves for a single critical moment. Pakistan itself during the Musharraf regime made a significant push towards neo-liberalism. The privatisation of public commodities began in the 1990s to be exact – but the ‘commodification of everything’ is symptomatic more so of the Musharraf era in Pakistan. Pushed ahead by the IFI’s the same policy-set continues to be expanded upon – at the detriment of the people. The Illegal Dispossession Act 2005 and the Sindh Public Property (Removal of Encroachment) Act 2010 are laws directed against the removal of ‘encroachments’. The laws themselves lie steeped in neoliberal rhetoric and have a deep anti-people foundation. The Sindh Law is currently being scrutinised by the Sindh High Court – but in Lahore the DCO has given encroachers a deadline till March 11 to leave ‘encroached’ lands by themselves – or face removal. The application of a similar set of laws in Tunisia sparked the selfimmolation that set Tunisia and subsequently the Middle East in uproar. Is there any chance that we shall learn?
2 Analysing the novel 3 The Aftermath 4 Rock Palace
ith Colonel Gaddafi hanging on to the last strings to his long rule in Libya, and the spillover of the Tunisian revolution spreading, we are left with a number of questions – a number of questions regarding the future that the youth of the world are articulating for themselves. We make a very casual mistake when we think regime-change (as revolt): we gloss over the intricate connection between politics and economics. Explained more specifically, we gloss over the deep connection the state has to preserving and ensuring that a particular economic order remains in place. Still taken as the foundational definition of the modern state’s face, Max Weber defined its specificity as, “the monopoly over physical violence over a territory.” Taken at face-value, the definition begs the question: a monopoly over physical violence to preserve what? If your answer is regime, then it is too simple an answer. Regime-change is a feature intrinsic to most political orders. The answer, rather, is: the state’s monopoly over physical violence exists to preserve an economic order (and, for more complicated souls, a symbolic order…but don’t think of this).
lice to enforce the legal norm of the day to day in Egypt that sparked the protests – a legal order predicated on the principles of neo-liberalism. And the protests in the Middle East are categorically against this neo-liberal order – a product of the post-Soviet union structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The rejection of the protestors is of the neo-liberal world order to which these sultans and dictators of the Middle East were perfectly honest to. And if in the ensuing politics its fundamentals are not questioned then the structural causation of the rage that is fueling the streets. Politicians, policemen, oppressors are all symptoms – not causes. It is the system that is being rejected.
the review
By Hashim bin Rashid
labour protests? The first task set in front of us is to open up the Egyptian economy (as a stereotype) – and understand the evolution of it to contextualise the material conditions which produced the current revolts. An article in Al-Jazeera makes two remarks about Egypt’s history as a neo-liberal state: one, it was at the forefront of neo-liberal policies in the Middle East (like Tunisia); two, the reality of the Egyptian political economy is very different from rhetoric (a constant feature amongst neo-liberal states from Chile to Indonesia).
came a major source of the profits of construction companies. The State itself remained central – it only used neo-liberal doctrine to reshape the distribution of profits. The interconnection of business and government became stronger – not weaker. The first task inside Egypt for the future is not to manage (IMF terminology) but to re-structure the Egyptian economy to a more pro-labour economy. Essential to that end is the displacement of the Egyptian military from control of major economic resources (much like our own army). The same task is required across the Middle East.
the review
Analysing the Orhan Pamuk’s latest work is a fluent 200 pages on his literary craft and absorbing reflections on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce and Mann
A
Orhan Pamuk…quicksilver intellect
t the Jaipur Literary Festival I was one of the couple of hundred people who could not get a seat to listen to Orhan Pamuk in the crowded front lawns of Diggi Palace. It was even better I thought, a sort of sweet penance, to actually stand through the hour on the sidelines to listen to an admired author in person. It was all fine till we came to the Q&A. A few lucky ones were selected from the sea of hands that rose from the audience. And like a trained handler of large audiences, Pamuk bit into each one of them, cutting them short, rephrasing their questions impatiently, hurrying on to the next. One somewhat longwinded but patently sincere questioner was waved disdainfully into stammering silence. Perhaps Pamuk did not intend to be rude at all and I am certainly not suggesting that there was a touch of Ottoman arrogance about it. Perhaps it was only a combination of his somewhat didactic manner, his heavily deliberated sentences and a quicksilver intellect, eager to get on with things. In any case, the spell was broken and I found myself wishing that at least I should have been seated. Nevertheless, I picked up his latest book, though I could not muster up the courage to have it signed by him. The Naïve and The Sentimental Novelist contains Pamuk’s brilliant Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 2009 and is modelled on the tradition set by E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and The Theory of the Novel by Hungarian critic Gyorgy Lukacs. Reading it, several other immensely readable works by novelists on the art and craft of fiction came to mind: John Gardner’s essays, Irving Wallace’s The Writing of a Novel and John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. In Pamuk’s lectures the words
“naïve” and “sentimental” are not used as ordinarily understood in English. The analogy is drawn from an 18th century essay by the German poet Schiller: “Naïve poets are one with nature; in fact, they are like nature – calm, cruel and wise. They write poetry spontaneously, almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual or ethical consequences of their words and paying no attention to what others might say… the sentimental (emotional, reflective) poet is uneasy… so he is exceedingly aware of the poem he writes, the methods and techniques he uses, the artifice involved in his endeavour.” Pamuk extends this analogy, and deepens it in the process, to novelists and novel readers, analysing the processes that go into reading a novel – following the narrative, absorbing the atmosphere, wondering how much is real and how much imagined, searching for what he calls its “secret center” – and in constructing it. The result is a fluent 200 pages on his literary craft and absorbing reflections on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce and Mann. In his lecture titled “Mr. Pamuk, did all this really happen to you?”, the author addresses that question that every writer faces from his readers, the question that forced Flaubert to exclaim, when repeatedly asked who Madame Bovary was modelled on: “I am Madame Bovary.” While Pamuk says clearly that he is not Kemal, the hero of his huge novel The Museum of Innocence, he is also aware that it is impossible to convince readers of this fact and also that partially he wants readers to believe that he is Kemal. The novelist expresses his own experience, his way of seeing things, through the experience and the reactions of his characters and it is this power that brings the text to life in the imagination of the reader.
The social demography of Pakistan
Sunday, 06 March, 2011
The book has a racy style. Its factual accuracy and narrative fluency is sure to interest and impress the readers
Illustrated & Designed by Babur Saghir
02 - 03
By Navtej Sarna
I
By Syed Afsar Sajid
n the recent years, the Oxford University Press in Pakistan has published a series of good books on national and international issues. Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan is one of these. It has been jointly composed by Arif Hasan and Mansooor Raza. Arif Hasan (Hilal-i-Imtiaz) is a Pakistani architect and planner, activist, teacher and social researcher. Educated at the Ox-
ford Polytechnic, he specializes in urban planning and development issues. He is also a consultant/advisor to many local CBOs (community-based organisations), national and international NGOs and donor agencies. He has been involved in the Orangi Pilot Project first as its Chief Consultant and then as the Chairman of its Research Institute. As an academic he is connected with many Pakistani and European universities and has authored a number of books on development and planning. Presently he is chairperson of the Federal Government’s Task Force on Urbanization. Co-author Mansoor Raza is a qualified engineer and environmental scientist. He is currently Deputy Director, Disaster Management for the Church World Service – Pakistan/Afghanistan. He has also
been associated with capacity building of community-based NGOs and designing of training packages for grassroots organisations. This book was originally published (2009) as a working paper encompassing a larger study by the International Institute for Environment and Development, on governance for local development in small urban centres responding to the challenges and opportunities of increasing migration/ emigration and mobility. The book has largely capitalized on secondary sources and census reports of the government of Pakistan. Besides visiting three small towns viz., Mithi (in district Tharparkar, Sindh), Uch (in district Bahawalpur, southern Punjab) and Chiniot ( now a district in central Punjab) chosen for
Title: Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan Authors: Arif Hasan with Mansoor Raza Publishers: Oxford University Press, Karachi Pages: 205; Price: 695/-
novel
The Aftermath By Karan Mahajan
The plot is nothing but a line that connects several thousands of small points, “large or small spheres of energy” or what Nabokov called “nerve endings” that make up the novel When a perceptive reader tells Pamuk: “I know you so well, you’d be surprised,” he is overcome with guilt and embarrassment. It was not the writer’s factual details or even his personal habits and views that the reader was referring to but “a deeper, more intimate, more secret thing.” Pamuk realises that the reader had come to know his sensory experiences: “how I feel when I inhale the scent of rain-soaked earth, when I get drunk in a noisy restaurant, when I touch my father’s false teeth after his death, when I regret that I am in love, when I get away with a small lie I have told…” and it is this knowledge of intimacy that embarrasses him in front of the reader. This ambiguity between the real and imagined is but one of the fascinating characteristics that makes the novel the unsurpassable genre that it is and it is clear that the more the novelist succeeds in blending his naïve and his sentimental sides, the better the novel. Pamuk also takes head-on the issue of character against plot. “Novelists do not first invent a protagonist with a very special soul, and then get pulled along, according to the wishes of this figure, into specific subjects or experiences. The desire to explore particular topics comes first. Only then do novelists conceive the figures who would be most suitable for elucidating these topics.” The plot is nothing but a line that connects several thousands of small points, “large or small spheres of energy” or what Nabokov called “nerve endings” that make up the novel. Each of these nerve endings, even if they be a mere description of landscape, or the snowflakes outside Anna Karenina’s train window, “should be an extension of the emotional, sensual and psychological world of the protagonists.” As I finished reading these fascinating lectures, including his ruminations on the similarity between novels and museums — his actual Museum of Innocence is nearing completion in Istanbul — I realised I like meeting Orhan Pamuk on the written page. I only wish I had managed to slip him a note on the crowded front lawns in Jaipur saying that it is the readers, be they naïve, sentimental or occasionally long-winded, who make the writer.
this book and their neighbouring villages, the authors interviewed a cross-section of people from amongst businessmen, NGO employees, artisans, welfare associations’ representatives, successful/unsuccessful migrants/emigrants and agents facilitating legal/informal emigration. The book has eight chapters preceded by abbreviations, glossary and the preface whereas the addenda comprise two lengthy appendices carrying excerpts from interviews and various tables. The title of the book viz., Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan explains itself in more than one way. It describes ‘the political, geographical, and ecological contexts within which migrations to and from Pakistan have taken place’ including those from India arising from the establishment of the canal colonies, partition and the Kashmir wars in the late nineteenth and early-mid twentieth centuries, and from Afghanistan and Bangladesh in the two crucial decades of 1970s and 1980s. The authors have also taken into account the scale of rural-urban migration and emigration along with its history, causes, repercussions (social, physical, economic and demographic in the relevant areas of study), and processes (both legal and illegal) vis-à-vis the actors at play i.e., emigrant organizations, state and private agencies and illegal operators. The book further describes the impact of remittances on Pakistan’s macro economy and the response of the state to the phenomena of emigration. It spotlights the evolution of small towns in general with special reference to the designated towns of Mithi, Uch and Chiniot. The relationship between political power, land holding, urban form and development of the aforesaid three towns has been critically evaluated. The text of the book is supported by a wide range of facts and figures containing statistical data, maps and interviews. A study of Mingora town in the Swat district of Khyber
types (a narcissistic record producer, a mad-genius Bulgarian folk musician, a suicidal Georgian poet and his gangster-moll sister), he complicates them by making them care for one another in warm and mysterious ways. The last section of “Solo” brims with superb descriptions of folk music and the drunken talk of men and women who are brought together, then driven apart, by the fall of Communism. In the end, it is the differences between the novellas that stay with the reader. Compared with the capitalist antics of the “Daydreams” section, the quiet heroism of Ulrich’s life becomes even more impressive. In his last decades, he is stripped of all relatives, denied his private experiments by the government and reduced to homelessness. Yet he goes on. And remarkably, at the end of “Solo,” Ulrich is still alive. Karan Mahajan is the author of the novel “Family Planning.” –Courtesy New York Times Review
M
ost people die before they can witness the historical consequences of their actions. Ulrich, the 100-year-old Bulgarian man at the center of Rana Dasgupta’s new novel, “Solo,” is an exception: he is so ancient he lives in a state of perpetual, dazed aftermath. Once the manager of a chemical factory for the Communists, he watches as Bulgaria’s rivers start oozing familiar poisons: “Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper.” Soon after, Communism falls, multiplying the pointlessness of Ulrich’s life. The first half of “Solo” is a swift retelling of Bulgarian history through Ulrich’s many failures. When this story ends, we are abruptly introduced to Ulrich’s “Daydreams” — his “private fictions” that “have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense.” But these so-called dreams are in fact the ultramodern and well-researched tales of three young Eastern European characters trying to make it big in New York in the 2000s. They are only glancingly fabulist and tenuously linked to Ulrich’s experiences. “Solo” bills itself as a novel, but it is really two distinct novellas held together by the author’s interest in Bulgaria and Georgia. Ulrich represents the proud Bulgarian spirit that was crushed by Communism. He is one of many students drawn by a surge of scientific optimism in the 1920s to Berlin, where a chance encounter with Einstein feeds his ambitions of making a great discovery. Tragically, he never finishes his studies in chemistry. Recalled to Sofia by his bankrupt family, he ends up working as a bookkeeper and, later, as the manager of a barium chloride factory. But he is never completely resigned to anonymity. In one startling section, he weeps uncontrollably when he witnesses any example of “surpassing human achievement.” His pitiable attempts to conduct private experiments are the most moving parts of the book. In formal, almost fussy prose, Dasgupta suggests Ulrich is alienated from his own past. Certain happy memories, like the one involving Ulrich’s courtship, in Berlin, of Clara Blum, the only woman he truly loved, are presented in a series of beautiful paragraph-long fragments. But these never deepen beyond snapshots. Neither
SOLO By Rana Dasgupta 339 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25. do the other characters, who speak in a lofty idealistic manner, and whose lives, cut short by war or Communism, are mere illustrations of the brutality of Bulgarian history. The overall effect is of reading the summary of a tragedy rather than experiencing it firsthand. Dasgupta’s writing soars when it isn’t tethered to historical fact. In the second novella, he moves fluidly from the pigfarming traditions of rural Bulgaria and the raves of post-Communist Tbilisi to contemporary New York, where a couple of Bulgarian bureaucrats approach an American record executive to produce a Bulgarian music superstar — the only way, they feel, the world can be made to care about their country. What ensues is not the silly comedy of errors one would expect: Dasgupta is a deeply empathetic, serious writer. If he works with fairly recognizable
Pakhtoonkhwa was also included in the original plan of the book. But it could not be visited by the authors owing to the adverse law and order situation prevailing in the area at that point of time (November, 2007). Nonetheless, studies from that province do find a place in the early chapters of the book as an alternative to their visit to Mingora. The book has a racy style. Its factual accuracy and narrative fluency is sure to interest and impress the readers. In the last chapter, the authors have come out with some optimistic conclusions about the positive impact of emigration on our social, political and economic life. But in the end they have also emphasized that ‘a number of issues need to be addressed regarding the processes and repercussions of emigration’ like illegal emigration, problem of bonded labour, need for productive investment of foreign remittances and protection of the human rights of migrants in the countries to which they emigrate.
A view of Fong Khar
View of Fong Khar. Notice the fong (rock) sticking out of the wall to give the castle its name
Sunday, 06 March, 2011
The old cook house
Rock Palace
We are slowly losing our built heritage to negligence. Will someone else too heed this cry from the heart and come forward to begin the long journey?
By Salman Rashid
W
hen I saw it in the summer of 1990, I despaired. Shigar Fort, as outsiders know it, or Fong Khar, to give it the real name, was in a state of near total ruin. The massive stone walls had tumbled down in various places, doors hung askew on large hinges in hefty jambs, roofs had collapsed and rain and snow had washed in the mud to fill the rooms. One room with its roof intact, perhaps the only one, was a shelter for a few cows. I came away from Fong Khar knowing that in another few years, its last traces will have crumbled into the dust. The sad part was that it was set in a perfect idyll: smack by a boisterous stream in the midst of huge plane and mulberry trees. If only the vines that would surely have once graced its eaves and overhangs were still there, the picture would have been complete. In August 2006 I was in Skardu and it was mentioned that Fong Khar had received a new lease of life breathed in by Aga Khan Cultural Service Pakistan (AKCSP). From utter perdition the building was once again rehabilitated. It was like a dream, I could hardly believe what I saw. It was in the 1630s that Hasan
Khan, twentieth in line of the Amacha rulers of Shigar, returned home. Ousted from his kingdom by the neighbouring Raja of Skardu, Hasan Khan had fled to the court of Shah Jehan, the Mughal king of India. Making a return bid with royal help, he defeated the usurper and imprisoned him in Shigar. Meanwhile, he set to building Fong (Rock) Khar (Fort) with stone masons, woodworkers and other artisans brought over from India. The name owes to the huge boulder around which one part of the palace is built. One wonders why the building could not avoid this mass that juts out of the east wall and apparently serves no purpose. Perhaps Raja Hasan Khan fancied the name Fong Khar and deliberately incorporated the rock. The architecture was strictly Balti incorporating defensive elements in a residential royal building, but the wood carving had subtle indications of| Tibetan, Kashmiri and Punjabi influences. Completing the fort, Hasan Khan moved into the valley from an older fort high up the hill to the east. From the middle years of the 17th century the family thus lived in this castle until it was abandoned in or about 1880. Hashmatullah Khan, a bureaucrat of the Raj who spent about two decades of his service in Kashmir, visited Fong Khar in the 1890s and found it in a reasonable state of upkeep. Photos from the 1930s, however, show a rundown and all but abandoned complex of buildings. As newer annexes were raised within the Fong Khar complex, older parts of the palace were abandoned. Only the annex known as Garden House built about 1950 served as residence for the Raja and his family as late as 2003. It was the following year that the Raja of Shigar realising that it was beyond his capacity or that
Pictures by the Author
From utter perdition the building was once again rehabilitated
of the government to redeem the building gifted it to AKCSP. Then he may not have imagined the ruin would be brought back from the brink. But it was that same meticulous planning and execution that gave us the restored Baltit Fort of Hunza that returned Fong Khar to its early 20th century shape. Today Fong Khan is a five-star hotel making for the perfect getaway by its noisy brook where the magpies
engage in noisy arguments and golden orioles sing in leafy treetops. When AKCSP took over Fong Khar, it had a definite plan. After restoration the proceeds from the hotel would be divided up to keep the hotel going as well as to enable local communities to finance their own projects. While thirty percent of the profit was to be kept aside to tide over lean years that the hotel might face, and equal percentage
was earmarked for maintenance – this being a nearly four hundred year old edifice. Ten percent was returned to AKCSP. The Shigar Town Management Society received twenty percent which this year amounted to something over one million rupees. This amount will be spent by the Society itself on whatever projects it deems fit. If Shigar and its environs see a change in the coming years,
they have to be thankful not only to AKCSP but to their elderly raja who gifted his palace to the organisation. Across Pakistan there are virtually thousands of historical buildings as important as exemplars of vernacular architecture as Fong Khar – many of them with the potential of becoming profitable concerns. Yet they rot, fall to pieces and are by and by lost. In the last thirty years I have seen a few hundred bite the dust. AKCSP spent money on Fong Khar and turned it into a profit-making establishment. Is it difficult that organisations (not necessarily AKCSP) replicate this sterling effort elsewhere in Pakistan? We are slowly losing our built heritage to negligence. Will someone else too heed this cri de coeur and come forward to begin the long journey? –Salman Rashid, rated as the best in the country, is a travel writer and photographer who has travelled all around Pakistan and written about his journeys.