great example of Hindu-Mulim unity in Pakistan

Guadgian 20Pak Hindu’s gift of blood ends history of village hatredRICK WESTHEAD BASTI MAHRAN, PAKISTAN | 28th Aug Bachu Ram, a Hindu, sits with Muslim elder Mahar Abdul Latif in the village of Basti Mahran, Pakistan.single act of kindness, profound because it was so rare and unexpected, transformed this sun-bleached village in a remote corner of the Punjab.A Hindu man gave his blood to save the life of a Muslim woman who had lost too much in childbirth.In the seven years since, the 1,600 Muslims and 1,400 Hindus in this town live in peaceful co-existence, extraordinary because sectarian violence has marked the histories of Pakistan and India since the bloody partition of 1947."I was afraid, for sure. But it was the right thing to do," says Bachu Ram, the blood donor. He is smoking a cigarette in the home of a Muslim village elder, who once was so steeped in hatred that he led the charge on the clinic to take Ram's life.Hindu women sit near a temple that was renovated with the help of the Muslim villagers.Hatred and violence once defined life in Basti Mahran. Muslim men routinely raped Hindu girls — "we would have 20 cases a year," says one local. Muslim men beat Hindus with sticks and fists, seemingly with tacit approval of the local police. Cattle belonging to Hindu families were slaughtered if they strayed too close to Muslim homes.Mahar Abdul Latif, the host who now pours Ram tea, spent three years during the late 1990s as a member of the extremist religious group Jaish-e-Mohammad. He patrolled the rugged mountain passes and valleys of Kashmir, a region claimed both by India and Pakistan, killing Hindus when they crossed his path."I have done much I am ashamed of," says Latif, a 37-year-old father of three. "But we are friends now. Our kids are friends, too. They study and play together."Latif and other local Muslims gave their time and money last year to refurbish a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Hanuman. Muslims visit the temple when their neighbours celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Hindus respond in kind, joining in Muslim holiday celebrations.This village's transformation seems to have happened in a moment.The medical clinic was only open for a three-day health-care blitz when the young mother arrived suffering from severe blood loss and needing an infusion of O-negative blood. The doctors couldn't find a donor. Ram made his offer. As word spread among the village's Muslims, Latif led the charge on the clinic. It had always incensed him that the doctors rejected his demand for two separate camps, partitioned facilities so that instruments used on Hindus could not be used on Muslims.{ Word of Bachu Ram’s blood donation to a Muslim woman and Mahar Abdul Latif’s remorse spread through Basti Mahran. Muslim and Hindu women began talking to each other. Rapes virtually disappeared.Outside the clinic, a doctor intercepted Latif and told him the only chance the woman had was Ram."I don't know what came over me," Latif says. "I remember thinking that here we were refusing to even shake hands with the Hindus and he was willing to give us his blood. It was a marvellous thing he did. It was the turning point of my life." The next day, Latif went to say thank you. It's said to be the first time a Muslim had ever gone to a Hindu's home.Word of Ram's charity and Latif's remorse spread through Basti Mahran.Muslim and Hindu women began talking to each other. Rapes virtually disappeared. Eventually, a single tin-roofed cowshed was built to house all of the village's 3,000 cows, sheltering them from the scorching desert sun."That was a big deal," Ram says. "Before, you would not see the cows near each other at all. A Muslim would not have touched the milk from a cow owned by Hindus."Standing in Basti Mahran's round, thatch-roofed Hindu temple, 65-year-old Sobha Ram says he can't believe the changes in the village. "For years, we lived in fear of the Muslims but not now," he says, cleaning photos of Hindu gurus and adjusting strings of paper flowers and glitter paper. he odds seemed against peace in this village.In 1947, the year of partition, Hindus made up 15% of Pakistan's population. But soon many migrated to India, seeking a better, safer life. The same happened with Muslims who lived in India and moved west. Political leaders seemed ready to highlight the differences between the cultures, rather than their many similarities."The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literature," said Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father. "They neither intermarry, nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations."Today, just 2% of Pakistan's 170 million residents are Hindu.Yet the Hindus in Basti Mahran didn't seek refuge elsewhere."We were born here and we don't know anyone in India. Even though we are Hindu, we are still Pakistani," says Sobha Ram. "The few people who did want to go couldn't afford it."The changes have had a direct impact on the quality of life, and have helped earn better incomes.Hindu and Muslim women are working together to sell cotton to wholesaling middlemen, earning Rs 200 ($2.50) for a 40 kg bag of cotton, four times what they earned when they sold their cotton separately."You even see women travelling together unaccompanied by men to places like Lahore and Islamabad," says Razia Malik, an aid worker who has spent time in Basti Mahran.Communal harmony aside, it's still a difficult life here. Each morning, women set out in stifling 40-degree heat on a 4 km-walk to collect the day's drinking water. Cows have to be shepherded 8 km daily to their water supply.Most don't have enough money for feed for their cows, which graze on the Spartan green bushes that dot the desert plains.Now that they aren't fighting each other, Basti Mahran's Muslim and Hindus are working to demand a new road through the village and they have asked the state government to extend water pipes here. Last year, they successfully lobbied for power lines that provide electricity for at least 12 hours a day."We've been so wrong about the Hindus," Latif says, watching his 7-year-old son Osama play alongside Ram's 11-year-old boy Sindhal Ram. "The biggest surprise has been that they are just like us. They want to live their lives the same way we do."Rick Westhead is the South Asia bureau chief of Toronto Stararticle published in The Sunday Guardian .link : http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/pak-hindus-gift-of-blood-ends-history-of-village-hatred

New role of women in Asia has to be understood and celebrated

The decline of Asian marriage
Asia's lonely hearts
Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious

Aug 20th 2011 | from the print edition

TWENTY years ago a debate erupted about whether there were specific “Asian values”. Most attention focused on dubious claims by autocrats that democracy was not among them. But a more intriguing, if less noticed, argument was that traditional family values were stronger in Asia than in America and Europe, and that this partly accounted for Asia’s economic success. In the words of Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore and a keen advocate of Asian values, the Chinese family encouraged “scholarship and hard work and thrift and deferment of present enjoyment for future gain”.

On the face of it his claim appears persuasive still. In most of Asia, marriage is widespread and illegitimacy almost unknown. In contrast, half of marriages in some Western countries end in divorce, and half of all children are born outside wedlock. The recent riots across Britain, whose origins many believe lie in an absence of either parental guidance or filial respect, seem to underline a profound difference between East and West.
In this section

»Asia's lonely hearts
Patent medicine
The bonds that tie—or untie
The knees jerk
Breaking the box

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Asia

Yet marriage is changing fast in East, South-East and South Asia, even though each region has different traditions. The changes are different from those that took place in the West in the second half of the 20th century. Divorce, though rising in some countries, remains comparatively rare. What’s happening in Asia is a flight from marriage (see article).

Marriage rates are falling partly because people are postponing getting hitched. Marriage ages have risen all over the world, but the increase is particularly marked in Asia. People there now marry even later than they do in the West. The mean age of marriage in the richest places—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—has risen sharply in the past few decades, to reach 29-30 for women and 31-33 for men.

A lot of Asians are not marrying later. They are not marrying at all. Almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably half of those will always be. Over one-fifth of Taiwanese women in their late 30s are single; most will never marry. In some places, rates of non-marriage are especially striking: in Bangkok, 20% of 40-44-year old women are not married; in Tokyo, 21%; among university graduates of that age in Singapore, 27%. So far, the trend has not affected Asia’s two giants, China and India. But it is likely to, as the economic factors that have driven it elsewhere in Asia sweep through those two countries as well; and its consequences will be exacerbated by the sex-selective abortion practised for a generation there. By 2050, there will be 60m more men of marriageable age than women in China and India.

The joy of staying single

Women are retreating from marriage as they go into the workplace. That’s partly because, for a woman, being both employed and married is tough in Asia. Women there are the primary caregivers for husbands, children and, often, for ageing parents; and even when in full-time employment, they are expected to continue to play this role. This is true elsewhere in the world, but the burden that Asian women carry is particularly heavy. Japanese women, who typically work 40 hours a week in the office, then do, on average, another 30 hours of housework. Their husbands, on average, do three hours. And Asian women who give up work to look after children find it hard to return when the offspring are grown. Not surprisingly, Asian women have an unusually pessimistic view of marriage. According to a survey carried out this year, many fewer Japanese women felt positive about their marriage than did Japanese men, or American women or men.

At the same time as employment makes marriage tougher for women, it offers them an alternative. More women are financially independent, so more of them can pursue a single life that may appeal more than the drudgery of a traditional marriage. More education has also contributed to the decline of marriage, because Asian women with the most education have always been the most reluctant to wed—and there are now many more highly educated women.

No marriage, no babies

The flight from marriage in Asia is thus the result of the greater freedom that women enjoy these days, which is to be celebrated. But it is also creating social problems. Compared with the West, Asian countries have invested less in pensions and other forms of social protection, on the assumption that the family will look after ageing or ill relatives. That can no longer be taken for granted. The decline of marriage is also contributing to the collapse in the birth rate. Fertility in East Asia has fallen from 5.3 children per woman in the late 1960s to 1.6 now. In countries with the lowest marriage rates, the fertility rate is nearer 1.0. That is beginning to cause huge demographic problems, as populations age with startling speed. And there are other, less obvious issues. Marriage socialises men: it is associated with lower levels of testosterone and less criminal behaviour. Less marriage might mean more crime.

Can marriage be revived in Asia? Maybe, if expectations of those roles of both sexes change; but shifting traditional attitudes is hard. Governments cannot legislate away popular prejudices. They can, though, encourage change. Relaxing divorce laws might, paradoxically, boost marriage. Women who now steer clear of wedlock might be more willing to tie the knot if they know it can be untied—not just because they can get out of the marriage if it doesn’t work, but also because their freedom to leave might keep their husbands on their toes. Family law should give divorced women a more generous share of the couple’s assets. Governments should also legislate to get employers to offer both maternal and paternal leave, and provide or subsidise child care. If taking on such expenses helped promote family life, it might reduce the burden on the state of looking after the old.

Asian governments have long taken the view that the superiority of their family life was one of their big advantages over the West. That confidence is no longer warranted. They need to wake up to the huge social changes happening in their countries and think about how to cope with the consequences.

(first published in The Economist and later in The Indian Express)

why pakistan should stop raising kashmir issue? and why kashmirirs should stop looking at pakistan

Kabhi apni shakal dekhi hai?
By Feisal Naqvi
Published: July 11, 2011---Indian Express

The writer is a partner at Bhandari, Naqvi & Riaz and an advocate of the Supreme Court. The writer can be reached at http://twitter.com/#!/laalshah. The views presented in the article above are not those of his firm
‘Kabhi apni shakal dekhi hai’ is an Urdu phrase which literally translates as, ‘Have you ever seen your own face?’ Like many such phrases, it is not intended to be taken literally; most people have, of course, seen their own faces. Instead, what the query asks is this: Who are you to ask questions? Are you worthy of the demands you make?
The phrase in question came to my mind last night as I witnessed some earnest discussions between Pakistani and Indian intellectuals at a dinner. One of the topics of discussion was inevitably Kashmir and all around me my fellow citizens were confidently arguing that the people of Kashmir should be allowed to fulfil their natural destiny by joining with Pakistan. But the thought which kept going through my head was: Kabhi apni shakal dekhi hai?
The purpose of this column is to ask the members of our intelligentsia, who so confidently assume that the Kashmiris are protesting and dying in order to become Pakistanis, kabhi apni shakal dekhi hai?
Our country is a mess these days: Our economy is poised on the edge of a complete meltdown. Our largest city has just gone through a phase in which more than a hundred people were shot dead at random. Our industries are crippled by a lack of electricity. We are one of the world’s most water-stressed countries and also likely to be one of the worst affected by climate change. We are driven by sectarian hatred and under assault by religious fanatics. And if there is a sensible reason for wanting to be a woman in this benighted land, I have yet to hear it.
Finding things to criticise in Pakistan is like shooting fish in a barrel. The point that I am making here relates to what I saw later on that night of détente, as I drove two first-time visitors from across the Radcliffe Line to the Old City. They were simply stunned by the familiarity of it all. For them, Lahore was a magical reconstruction of Delhi, with the Lutyens bungalows being substituted by GORs, Regal Chowk standing in for Chandni Chowk and the Jama’a Masjid transmuted into the Badshahi Masjid.
At times like these, one is prone to dream of all that could be if relations were to normalise. The Delhi-wallahs kept on babbling about how Indian tourists would love to come to Lahore and all I could think of was, you poor fools, you have no bloody idea. We have built an entire country on our hatred for you. We have dedicated ourselves to enshrining our differences, first the differences with you and now the differences amongst ourselves.
Do you really think that the architecture of otherness can disappear at the drop of a hat?
We need to take a look at ourselves, ask how we have gotten to where we are, and perhaps reconsider our assumptions. Starting from the belief that the Kashmiris want to be Pakistanis and that the ‘loss’ of Kashmir is somehow fatal to our national existence — we have dedicated ourselves to winning back what is ‘rightfully’ ours. In pursuit of that victory, we have developed only one arm of the state: The army. And in order to justify the continued pursuit of militarism, we have distorted our ideology to the point that any and all steps taken towards the larger goal of a Kashmir restored to our anxious arms are deemed to be worthy of any sacrifice by us, irrespective of the consequences. Accordingly, we have supported the forces of hate in Kashmir because they fight our wars even though that same hate then drips back into Pakistan and poisons our own bloodstream. And all of this because the Kashmiris can supposedly conceive of no better future than to be a part of Pakistan. Kabhi apni shakal dekhi hai?
I do not mean to denigrate the struggles of the Kashmiri people. They have suffered much with great courage and dignity. I fully support the right of the Kashmiris to decide their own future, whether it be independence, union with Pakistan or something completely different. But it makes no sense for Pakistan to destroy itself in supposed support of the Kashmiri cause only because it removes any rational incentive for the Kashmiris to join with us. Obviously, whether or not Kashmiris really want to join us is a question only they can answer. Frankly speaking, at this point, I can’t see why they would.
We must, therefore, now turn our efforts to healing ourselves first. After six decades of worrying about others, we need to focus on what’s wrong with us, and leave aside the problems of the world. Perhaps then this will no longer be a country sensible people want to run away from. Perhaps then, if somebody asks, “kabhi apni shakal dekhi hai?” we will be in a position to respond, “Haan, dekhi hai.”
Published in The Express Tribune, July 12th, 2011.