Election Day in Pakistan

Today Pakistanis will go to the polls in perhaps one of the most important and fraught elections in the benighted nation's history (with the possible exception of the 1970 elections which eventually resulted in the creation of Bangladesh). The atmosphere is filled with uncertainty about the fairness of the election process. Benazir Bhutto's assasination has cast a pall over these elections. The threat of violence is omnipresent and large numbers of people are suffering unprecedented economic difficulties driven by wheat and energy shortages. If the elections are crudely rigged, then these elections could very well be the harbinger of significant violence and worsening political instability.

As apprehensive as I am about the outcome of the elections, there is also a small chance that this could be a first step toward stability. If the elections are broadly free and fair and the two large opposition parties accept the poll results, then chances are that it could lead to Musharraf's exit from the scene and the formation of a national government that will have the chance to start putting the pieces back together. Even with a national government, however, there are a lot of difficulties ahead and the cleaning up of the Musharrafian mess will take feats of statesmanship that the opposition leaders have not previously demonstrated. Tackling the immediate issues of judicial independence, media freedom, provincial harmony and economic relief while evolving an equitable sharing of power without vengeful targeting of opponents is a tall order. All this does not even mention the control of the rapidly speading menace of terrorism that will require political compromise, public mobilization and some deft distancing from Washington.

Here is to hoping that February 18th, 2008 brings some positive change for the suffering and burdened citizens of the Pakistani state.

"A Few Words on the Soul" by Wislawa Szymborska

Taking the cue from one of my favorite destinations on the web, 3QD, I too have resolved to post more of my favorite poems this year. However, on this blog expect to see Urdu poetry as well as Western verse. Unlike my friend Raza Rumi I have no talent for poetry translation so, with regrets, Urdu poetry will be in the original (in Roman letters).

This poem is by the 1996 Polish Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska (b. 1923) and I just love the playful image of the soul, capable of being summoned only in moments when we are fully attuned to receiving its charms.

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.

No one's got it non-stop,

for keeps.

Day after day,

year after year

may pass without it.

Sometimes

it will settle for awhile

only in childhood's fears and raptures

Sometimes only in astonishment

that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand

in uphill tasks,

like moving furniture,

or lifting luggage,

or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out

whenever meat needs chopping

or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations

it participates in one,

if even that,

since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,

it slips off-duty.

It's picky,

it doesn't like seeing us in crowds.

our hustling for a dubious advantage

and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow

aren't two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

We can count on it

when we're sure of nothing

and curious about everything.

Among the material objects

it favors clocks with pendulums

and mirrors, which keep on working

even when no one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from

or when it's taking off again,

though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it

but apparently

it needs us

for some reason too.

(Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Campaigning for Obama

February 5th is Super Tuesday when 24 states, including California, will vote or caucus in the Democratic primary. I am supporting Barack Obama in this primary and would like to see him as the party's nominee against the Republicans in November. My reasons are simple: he is an inspirational figure with a preternatural ability to motivate people, has demonstrated independence and excellent judgment in opposing the Iraq war from the very beginning and possesses a healthy intelligence, policy acumen and intellectual curiosity necessary for the job. The historic prospect of an African-American President of the United States of America is also an important contributing factor. He does not have many years of experience in Washington but Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times has laid out the best argument on why this is not as important as is commonly believed(his lack of executive experience would be a more valid criticism). He made a blunder by sounding naively hawkish on Pakistan several months ago but demonstrated sound temperament by learning from the criticism that inevitably followed and fine tuned his views.

Julie is a mother of one of my daughter's schoolfriends and is a Palo Alto neighborhood precinct captain for Obama. Knowing that I had already cast my absentee ballot for Obama she called me last night to ask if I would be interested in volunteering for the campaign and doing some door to door canvassing. I agreed and this morning, along with another volunteer, walked the streets of Palo Alto. In our hands we had a printed list of targeted registered Democratic and Independent voters. Our job was to try to get people to vote on Tuesday but also to understand their leaning and indicate them on our list. This would help identify probable Obama voters for volunteers managing the phone banks on election day. They could then call these people on Tuesday to get them to vote or even drive them to the polling stations if required. It was an interesting experience as knocking on the doors of strangers is never pleasant but it was made easier by the camaraderie of the volunteers and because many of the people we talked to had either already voted for Obama or were strongly leaning toward him. It will be interesting to see where the race stands after "Tsunami Tuesday" but it already seems clear that unless there is a highly unexpected result, the Democratic race will continue for several more weeks.

Arundhati Roy & Tony Judt on Genocide

On January 18th, Arundhati Roy spoke in Istanbul at the first death anniversary of Hrant Dink, the courageous Turkish-Armenian editor of the newspaper Agos, who was assasinated by a 17 year old Turkish nationalist. With more than 100,000 people marching silently through the streets of Istanbul at Dink's funeral last year, the assasination brought into focus, yet again, the deplorable official Turkish position of continued denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915. In this speech titled "Listening to Grasshoppers", (reprinted in abridged version by Outlook India) Roy does not have much to say about the Armenian tragedy specifically but reflects more generally on the nature of genocides ("Its an old human habit, genocide is").

To her, "Union" and "Progress" are code words that are the "twin coordinates of genocide". Notions of "Union" pitch their populist but exclusionary appeal on platforms of shared race, religion, ethnicity and nationality and "Progress" on the ideals of individual and national attainment of wealth. Both these ideas inevitably lead to the dehumanization of those who are a threat to the "union" project or are obstacles to "progress". In Roy's Indian examples these "twin coordinates" inevitably lead to the genocidal mindset of Narendra Modi's Gujarat ("Union") or to the brutalities of Nandigram in West Bengal ("Progress"). Into this argument she weaves the idea of the expansionist need for "Lebensraum" ("living space"); a notion that necessitates the displacement or even 'extermination' of those who occupy land and resources thwarting the "noble" goals of union and progress. This is a powerfully engaging piece and reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's work ("Eichmann in Jerusalem", "The Origins of Totalitarianism") to make sense of man's murderous instincts.

In the past, Roy's non-fiction has sometimes struck me as emotionally overwrought. Her relentless attacks on India's (unequal) growth, even when fair, have never even cursorily acknowledged that growth (even with all its terrible inequalities) has been effective in bringing millions out of poverty in places like East Asia where the process has gone on longer. In 1997, the American economist and now the famously liberal New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman wrote a classic piece called "In praise of cheap labor" that articulates a different point of view that, at the very least, requires honest intellectual acknowledgment. However, despite these reservations about Arundhati Roy, I have come to admire her fierce and passionate intellect. There is no shortage of people who will always be willing to promote the economic miracles of China or fuel the hype of a "Shining India" with pride. But it takes a peculiar combination of intellectual acumen, relentless courage and a deep commitment to the plight of the powerless to keep an uncompromising focus on "Narmada Bachao", farmer suicides, Nandigram and Gujarat in the shadow of a frequently unreflective triumphalism of the "New India". Even if one quarrels with some of her intellectual foibles the world needs more Arundhati Roys.

Co-incidentally, Tony Judt , the British historian, also has an interesting piece on the issue of genocide in the February 14th, 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books. The essay is titled "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe". This piece too starts with a reference to Hannah Arendt's influential work. It goes on to state that Europe may be in danger of trivializing the lessons of its own genocidal past. The repetitive invocations of the Holocaust and its sometime political use as a defensive shield for Israel is desensitizing modern Europeans to the scale of these crimes.

"Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or "banalization"—that we face today."

The Cure at Troy - Seamus Heaney

In the New York Times several days ago, in a piece about Barack Obama and the politics of hope, the writer Dave Eggers quoted an excerpt from a poem titled "The Cure at Troy" by the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. The poem has stayed with me partly because in that very first reading it made me think about the situation in Pakistan where even though optimism seems to be in short supply there is still the lingering sense of hope exemplifed by the courageous lawyers and judges in their struggle for law and justice.

from "The Cure at Troy"

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols

beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker's father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:

The utter self-revealing

double-take of feeling.

If there's fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

the outcry and the birth-cry

of new life at its term.

Pakistan After Benazir Bhutto

I was in Pakistan on December 27th, the day Benazir Bhutto was assasinated in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. I watched the television screen in utter disbelief as the initial news of the murderous attack on her was soon followed by the confirmation of her death. Those who have read any of my political musings know that I took a dim view of her time as Prime Minister, was not a fan of her frequently opportunistic politics and thought her murky dealings with Musharraf at Amercian behest were a singularly bad idea.

However, since her assasination I have felt no desire to write a political analysis, provide a prognosis or even comment on the tastelessly quick backlash against her that started in the wake of widespread sympathy after her death (e.g. Dalrymple's piece). I continue to feel that this event has such large scale repercussions for Pakistan's future that the punditry still does not fully comprehend its dimensions. Never having been a supporter of the People's Party, the unique place of such a national party led by an ethnic minority has become clearly evident to me only after Benazir's death. If PPP disintegrates as a party or retreats into the Sindhi heartland, the institutional harm to Pakistan will be incalculable. In the short term, like everybody else, I am awaiting the outcome of the February 18th elections to see how Pakistan may find a way out of the current Musharraf-engendered political paralysis. However, even after the inevitable day that Musharraf leaves office, I only see compounding problems for those who follow him. Musharraf, like all of Pakistan's military dictators before him, will leave his successors a country riven with far greater problems than he inherited in 1999.

Simon Jenkins' Lament for Lahore

I love the city of Lahore. This sentiment is not an uncritical emotional attachment to my hometown but reflects a love for the incredible richness of Lahore's cultural history, the hospitality and generosity of its people and the inimitability of its cuisine. It is Pakistan's uniquely wonderful city. There are things to recommend places like Karachi (a Western-style cosmopolitanism) or Islamabad (an anodyne livability) but Lahore possesses a combination of charms that cannot be replicated elsewhere in Pakistan.

That Lahore has suffered as a city since partition is undeniable. The unfortunate cleansing of the Hindu and Sikh population at the time of independence robbed Lahore of much of its cultural diversity. The continuing neglect of its historic architectural heritage, the steady degradation of its environment and the erosion of many of its literary institutions have all contributed to a general sense of decline. Simon Jenkins writing in The Guardian is right to lament this downward slide even as he acknowledges the many wonders of the city. I am inclined to blame Musharraf for many of Pakistan's current ills but it is hard to pin the current state of Lahore on his malign neglect, as Jenkins asserts. To me the plight of modern day Lahore is simply a reflection of the general state of deterioration of the Pakistani polity.

The Brilliance of Steven Pinker's Mind

Cosmologists, Quantum Physicists, Geneticists, Cognitive Scientists, Evolutionary Biologists and others are continuously working to advance human understanding from the macro (origins of the universe) to the micro (behavior of genes, functioning of the mind). All this knowledge has a profound influence on metaphysics, religion, ethics, economics, sociology and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. These areas of human study then have to contend with the onrush of scientific evidence about human behavior, its nature and its origins either by incorporating the evidence or by challenging it. It is therefore of the utmost importance that laypeople who care about these issues develop some understanding of the current state of scientific learning about these subjects.

In the modern world where experts know "more and more about less and less" the effort of many brilliant practitioners in highly specialized fields to engage laypeople with their complex ideas is worthy of great praise. To make these ideas digestible without dumbing them down requires not only an exceptional clarity of mind but great expositional skills. Fortunately there are many accomplished scientists who also possess a rare ability to educate the non-specialist. Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Paul Davies, Brian Greene and Richard Feynman are some of the examples of scientists who have succeeded to varying degrees in reaching beyond their rarefied peer group.

Steven Pinker, the hard to label Harvard Evolutionary Psycholgist is amongst one of the best examples of current scientists who can write well for a broader audience. This post was precipitated after reading his excellent essay titled "The Moral Instinct" in the January 13th, 2008 issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. It is hard to summarize the breadth of the essay's argument but in it Pinker explains the existing evidence for the biological (evolutionary) underpinnings of our morality. He examines many interesting examples about the universality of morals and tries to square them with the clearly observed differences across cultures. The essay is somewhat long but I couldn't recommend it any more strongly and urge people to read it. There are few popular pieces of writing that engage this deeply in reflecting on the sources of our deeply held moral beliefs.

Excerpts:

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.
The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture.

---------

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

Musharraf's "War on Terrorism"

An Interview with Pankaj Mishra

I have written here before about Pankaj Mishra. At that time, I had linked to his several years old three-part essay on Kashmir written for the NY Review of Books. In that piece I had been impressed by his evident passion to dig below the surface for truth and his caring and empathetic style. Over the years, he has had a special relationship with the NYRB as his non-fiction writing blossomed under the tutelage of that periodical's legendary editor Barbara Epstein.

Mishra continues to be one of the most thoughtful literary and journalistic voices in contemporary India. I enjoyed reading a detailed interview with him in "The Believer" magazine. (Thanks to Amitava Kumar's blog).

Excerpts:

"--- but I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media. This is something that I’ve learned late. Obviously, I write for a very elite audience, but is there something else that I’m also responsible to? People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast. You can move around the world but meet only people who speak your language, who share the same ideas, the same beliefs, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the world does not think or believe in or speak the everyday discourse of the elite. Yet their lives are being shaped by these elites, by people like us. I don’t mean this in a pompous way, but we have a responsibility to articulate their sense of suffering."

"--- some of my students seem to want to be able to write without actually reading, which seems utterly bizarre. When I assign certain readings, they often say, “I can’t relate to this,” which means whatever story we’re reading is so far outside of their experience—which tends to be limited—that they will not make the effort to understand what it is about. I find this a crippling attitude to have toward literature, toward history, toward all sorts of things.
Some of my students don’t have a sense of whether their writing is any good or not. They think it’s good just because it comes out of them and it’s a part of their being. To criticize their writing is to criticize them in some profound way. It’s as if they’ve been taught far too much self-confidence—and maybe not much else."