Madressah reform
IN exonerating the majority of madressahs across the country from any involvement with extremism or militancy, Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan may have meant to send a reassuring message to both the custodians of these seminaries and the public at large. Simple maths though suggests that the interior minister instead flagged an alarming problem: if, as he suggested, 90pc of the madressahs in the country are problem-free, then that still leaves thousands upon thousands of seminaries in the country that do have an extremism and militancy problem. The question then should be what the state is doing about the militancy and extremism sponsoring madressahs, although it is a rather pointless query given that the interior minister himself would rather gloss over the fact that there are thousands of madressahs with a militancy and extremism problem.
For too long, the religious right and madressah administrators across the country have resisted state oversight and even registration in the name of religious freedom, the argument ostensibly being that the state is really either trying to slow the growth of madressahs or progressively shut them down in the name of oversight. But that is simply untrue. A conservative population combined with a scarcity of education means that madressahs will continue to exist and even flourish, just like the private sector offering more mainstream education does. Surely though, providing a religion-based education does not or should not mean creating an enabling environment where either radicalisation of young minds directly takes place or militant groups seek out vulnerable individuals to recruit for terrorist purposes. Moreover, why should so many madressahs be able to teach a curriculum that simply does not prepare its student for any aspect of the modern world, leaving them without a set of skills that can help them find any semblance of a job outside the mosque-madressah-social welfare network that many militant groups have assembled? Reforms are essential, but so is extra vigilance and policing in the short term. While only a systematic and exhaustive survey will create a map of madressahs that identifies all the trouble spots, the big problem centres are well known. Whether it is hate speech, off-site recruiting facilitated by madressah administrations or straightforward ties to banned outfits that some high-profile madressahs have, the intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus of the country already has a reasonably developed picture. Now is the time to clamp down on madressahs that are sponsoring hate or promoting terrorism. But that will only be possible if decisiveness is shown by the state. If those such as Lal Masjid’s Abdul Aziz can spew hate and threaten suicide attacks in the heart of the federal capital, then what of the far-flung areas where the state’s writ is weak and local law enforcement very much subordinate to powerful madressahs with all manner of state and non-state connections? Now is the time to stand firm.
Power breakdowns
TWO large power breakdowns that affected huge swathes of the country have occurred within a period of 10 days. In both cases, the restoration of power took many hours. And in both cases the cause of the breakdown laid in the Guddu thermal power station and its transmission lines. Guddu is one of the oldest power plants in the country, and has three large transmission lines that feed its output to Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan. All of Balochistan’s power comes from here, and a large amount of the power consumed in Sindh is also generated in Guddu. Given its importance in our power grid, by virtue of its power-generation capacity and central location in transmission, it is sad to see the plant and its transmission lines sinking into a deplorable state of disrepair. A few years ago, an explosion at the plant occurred in its gas pipelines, again shutting it down and causing a massive power outage. The excuse being given this time is heavy fog, which supposedly caused the line that connects the plant with a grid station at Dadu to trip, and then hampered the movement of restoration teams.
In a sense, the ageing plant and its transmission infrastructure are a perfect metaphor for the advanced state of disrepair of our power infrastructure and the outdated control systems being used to operate it. For instance, it is astonishing to think that our transmission system cannot handle much more than 15,000MW and that it is laid out in a way that causes severe bottlenecks at critical junctions such as Guddu. It is also astonishing to note that fog can cause a massive transmission line to trip, and that the tripping can then cascade through the entire provincial transmission system, shutting down the country’s largest city for the better part of the day. The repeated breakdowns are a powerful reminder that our power crisis does not stem from a lack of generation capacity alone, but a poor transmission system, as well as woefully outdated systems to manage potential breakdowns and not allow their consequences to affect the entire system. It is high time we tackled the problems plaguing the power sector in a holistic manner rather than remedying each defect on its own in an ad hoc fashion. Until then, we can only hope that breakdowns of this sort are not going to become a regular feature of our lives the way load-shedding has come to be.
Tunisia’s example
IT is in the fitness of things that the country where the Arab Spring first blossomed should attempt to take the latter to its logical conclusion. Even though incumbent president Moncef Marzouki had yet to concede defeat to Beji Caid Essebsi at the time of writing, the victory of a presidential candidate belonging to a secular-leaning party within months of a parliamentary election shows Tunisia’s commendable progress towards a democratic dispensation. The first indication of Tunisia’s opinion swing came in October’s parliamentary election when the Islamist Ennahda Party lost to Nidaa Tounes. In the 2011 election, Ennahda had won and formed government, followed by amendments to the constitution.
Nidaa Tounes`s parliamentary victory and the success of Mr Essebsi underline a democratic transition of power something that no other Arab country Iraq’s is a complicated case witnessed. In fact, there has been a deplorable relapse into authoritarianism and anarchy. Egypt showed some promise when Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, followed by a fair election that brought Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to power. His overthrow by then army chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has landed Egypt back into a dictatorship that is seen as worse than that of Hosni Mubarak. Great tragedies occurred in Syria and Libya where the Arab Spring gave way to a multilateral civil war in which fundamentalist militias and several Al Qaeda offshoots have been waging savage battles for aims that have nothing to do with what the Arab Spring was originally meant to achieve. The ultimate sufferers are the people, especially in Syria, where more than 200,000 civilians have been killed and millions displaced. The most disturbing element has been the rise of the so-called Islamic State whose stunning military victories seem to threaten the Middle East’s century-old borders.
Observers had doubted whether Ennahda would give up power easily, though there is no doubt one reason for Ennahda’s cautious governance was the lesson it must have learnt from the way the Muslim Brotherhood lost power in Egypt. Nevertheless, the ease with which the transition has taken place holds out hope.