Author: Anjum Niaz
Publication: www.pakistanlink.com
Date: May 9, 2003
URL: http://www.pakistanlink.com/Letters/2003/May/09/02.html
South Asian Institutes in America
are "literally in the hands of Indians and indirectly under the influence
of Hindutva
and Sangh Parivar," warns Prof Aslam
Syed of the University of Pennsylvania. And sure enough, the Director and
Associate Director at Columbia's South Asian Institute happen to be Indians.
And you know what mischief that can be.
"At U-Penn, there are more Indian
teachers than American," dryly observes Syed, who finds himself in a minority.
"Now that US forbids its funds
being spent on scholars in Pakistan (did we know that and has anyone protested?)
students who want to learn Urdu go to India instead of Lahore!" This symbiotic
relationship between US and India should be troubling for us.
Aslam Syed lays naked the truth
that our diplomats here and officials back home continue to dodge. "No
scholar
from here can now avail American
government fellowships in Pakistan since 9/11," says Syed, a Ph.D. from
Columbia and also a former holder of its Quaid-i-Azam Chair. "I have seen
similar trends at Princeton, Berkley, UCLA, Chicago, Duke and other major
schools where South Asian Studies are taught."
Affiliated with Quaid-i-Azam University
for decades, Syed has lived and worked long enough in America to
declare that Pakistanis, in particular,
and Muslims, in general, will be the targets of undisguised ideological
agenda for years to come. "There are agencies in this country which can
be approached for legal purposes. We can learn a lot from the Jewish organizations
who document each and every instance - no matter how trivial - whenever
they feel that their community is the victim of anti-Semitism."
But Muslims are either silent or
apologetic and strangely inarticulate when they are victimized: "Discrimination
takes
many shapes: from street harassment
to undeclared bias in jobs, and almost everywhere else you see public dealings.
Students, researchers and teachers are terrorized, watched and systematically
eased out."
Manhattan has missed the 'norwester'
narrowly, so instead of a wet drenching, we get a sunny one with the radiant
blue skyline seen from the glass-walled
15th floor of Columbia's Kellogg Center. Added to the comfort level are
familiar faces of fellow-Pakistanis mooting on the future of our homeland.
Besides Aslam Syed, we have no prophets of doom to scare us.
However, scholars in love with their
own voices get lost in the odyssey of their dry research, thinking they
journey
with us, but my caffeine level
is running low. The person sitting next to me whispers, "I need a brisk
walk around Columbia to make all this graspable."
"Our primary objective is to publish
a rigorous scholarly book on Pakistan," is the altruist hope of the Conference
Coordinator, Saeed Shafquat, currently
the Quaid-i-Azam Distinguished Professor at Columbia.
So, we will have yet one more book
on Pakistan gathering dust?
"I don't think so," says Sadi Mirza,
who has driven from beyond Washington DC to attend the Pakistan
Conference. "We need more of the
same - one cello player can't carry the whole orchestra, so this is but
a microcosmic attempt." A Pakistani-American, who has lived in the US for
the last 14 years and is a telecommunication engineer, Mirza, like many,
has seen the writing on the wall.
"I am a realist. The soul-searching
that I conducted after 9/11 led me to conclude that the discrimination
against
Muslims was temporary, and would
subside with time. But I was wrong. Actually, it's the beginning and my
fear is that the peak has yet to come. This is severely testing my ideals
that America is just."
It's lunch break and we're sitting
inside a crowded pizzeria nearby (we're not the lucky ones to have been
invited
by The News correspondent, the
affable Azim Mian, holding a luncheon for special guests).
"My profession teaches me to look
for real-world solutions," continues Mirza, a trifle too profound for pizza,
"we're also trained to cut our
losses and run when matters can't be salvaged - all signs point to something
worse two years down the road...what for me is unthinkable today will become
a fact of life two years from now, I don't know where to run.
"The shift in history is tectonic.
It has occurred. The flag-whipping belligerence of the American leaders,
media and
people belies rationalism."
Back at the seminar, I spot a young,
perky Pakistani woman, happy with life. Soon, I find out why. Razia Sultana,
who teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University,
is here as a Fulbright scholar. "I would suggest to my government to hold
such conferences more frequently to plug the gaps that get larger between
East and the West. Invest more in these dialogues, not only to balance
perceptions, but to counter Indian propaganda. This conference, however,
is general in content, issues like Kashmir, nuclearization, foreign policy
should have been included."
Aslam Syed couldn't agree more:
"This is an academic exercise, essentially to know what people in America
are
writing on Pakistan. But conspicuously
absent is religion, politics, democracy, human rights - topics that will
concern the State Department once Pakistan is dumped as a front-line state.
Have you noticed that the core issues like Pakistan-US relations have been
deliberately frozen out?"
Karachi-born Mayraj Fahim, who came
here as a child, has been advising America on local and national
governments. She's not impressed
by the lectures from Pakistani speakers, nor the content of the conference.
Modesty may not be her prime virtue, but she's polite when she tells me,
"I know stuff these speakers are not knowledgeable about, but it's only
appropriate for me to keep silent."
Conferences are held for two reasons:
to stir up a storm or to calm it down. The message I get from listening
to the
American scholars is that Pakistan's
problems are its own and it should learn to deal with them without looking
to the US for succor.
But before we dive into the pit
of doom and gloom, our knight in shining armor, I mean Shaukat Aziz, streaked
across to DC to kowtow to Rumsfeld
and his deputy hawk, Wolfowitz. Did the Finance Minister sell Pakistan
down the river in return for a non-preemptive strike by Pentagon?
Second-guessing doesn't involve
rocket science, or does it?
