By Zubeida Mustafa
Has Pakistan been reduced to such a hopeless state that even the most creative and prolific of intellectuals have run out of ideas on how the country can be redeemed? Hopefully not. But a meeting with Professor Khalid Bin Sayeed provided no reassuring answers. It left me wondering how Pakistan will be saved from certain disaster and who will play the role of the savior. Continue reading A scholar and a gentleman
By Zubeida Mustafa
Professor Hamza Alavi has recently been in town. The suave, soft-spoken scholar, who says he developed a social conscience and became a socialist even before he had ever heard the word, has lived abroad for over three decades in pursuit of his academic career. Now he plans returning permanently to the city of his birth. That is, if he does not change his mind at the eleventh hour as he has done before. Continue reading A new look at old freedom movement myths
By Zubeida Mustafa
ELECTIONS- 88 in Pakistan have highlighted the two paradoxes that have come to characterise the role of women in politics in a number of Third World countries. At one end are a handful of enterprising, educated and emancipated women who participate in the political processes and gain general acceptance in leadership roles. At the other end are the women among the masses who lack education, political awareness and personal freedom. Their involvement in politics is minimal.
What is significant in Pakistan is that the size of the small group of women active in politics is growing, while the number of those uninvolved in and untouched by the electoral exercise which is the essence of a democratic system is shrinking. In the elections this time the women’s presence on the political scene created a greater impression than ever before. Continue reading Women in politics: The great paradox
By Zubeida Mustafa
ACCORDING to a recently jublished World Bank study, the slowdown in the :rash expansion of the school system in Third World countries, and the decline in the investment capital available to them, lave caused policymakers to turn their attention to the quality of education.
It is now being realised that low levels of student achievement are hampering economic development. Moreover, poor school quality means that in many cases education is not cost-efficient. Continue reading Where does Pakistan Stand? World Bank study on school quality
By Zuhair Siddiqui
The sweep of events during the past half year has been dramatic and fast, and the Bhutto and Indira regimes already seem to belong to a distant past; but as their leaders desperately try to pull themselves out of the meshes of the law, one is struck by the contrast between their past contempt for “Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence” and their present determination to exploit its mechanisms to the full.
“Certainly no man can over estimate the importance, of the mechanisms of justice. There have been greater avenues to freedom than that beaten out by the writ of habeas corpus…
“What seem, on the surface, insignificantly procedural changes — as when a man becomes entitled to a copy of the indictment upon which he is charged, or is able, in the witness-box, to testify upon his own behalf, or may appeal from the verdict of a jury and the sentence of a judge to a body of legal experts beyond them — these, for all their forbiddingly technical character, are more nearly related to freedom than the splendid sentences in which Rousseau depicts the conditions of their attainment. Continue reading Rape of the law