EDITORIAL : THE DAWN, PAKISTAN

Spying farce

PAKISTAN and India seem to have a built-in mechanism for sabotaging peace moves. This uncanny but recurrent phenomenon sows doubts in the mind of the international community about our public avowals of peace and arouses derision for South Asian governments` diplomatic gaucheness, besides disappointing people on both sides. Prime Ministers Yousuf Raza Gilani and Manmohan Singh met at Mohali on Wednesday, their first meeting since Thimphu last year. Both displayed cautious optimism about the future relationship and seemed sincere in pushing the peace process forward. A day earlier — perhaps to create the right atmosphere for the two prime ministers to meet, the Pakistan and Indian home secretaries clinched a deal that among other things decided to establish a hotline to exchange real-time data on terrorism. Yet on the very day of the Mohali semi-final and what was billed as the third round of cricket diplomacy, Indian security agencies arrested a Pakistan high commission official to throw a spanner in the works. A day later, their Pakistani counterparts obliged with a tit-for-tat arrest that made Mohali appear a cruel joke.

The underworld of espionage and counter-espionage has its own rules of the game. Intelligence agencies across the world know more about things at home and abroad than their elected chiefs. Whether it is Pakistan`s ISI or India`s RAW, not to mention Raymond Davis`s ubiquitous agency, spying networks throughout the world exercise a certain degree of freedom of action which sometimes embarrasses their governments. Surely, those who arrested the Pakistan High Commission official must have kept him under surveillance for a long time and known all along what his presumed undiplomatic activities were. That they didn`t wait for the Mohali meeting to be over and arrested him that very day would make all well-wishers of peace wonder whether this was a deliberate act aimed at derailing a renewed peace process that looked like moving forward.

The Pakistan agencies too could have exercised discretion. Instead, by responding immediately to what by any standards was a provocative act at the Chandigarh airport they deprived their own government of any chance of occupying the moral high ground. Diplomats on both sides then got to work on what was a damage-control exercise; the Indian HC staff member was released after a phone call from New Delhi but the damage had been done. The invisible hands on both sides will now be hard put to explain to their governments and their own people what they achieved by enacting a spying farce that failed to evoke laughter. Let`s hope the episode proves no more than a minor setback in the peace journey.

Fee hike in private schools

IT is quite evident that private-sector education has experienced major growth in Pakistan. Yet many observers feel the state has failed to properly supervise the private sector, which has resulted in not only varying educational standards at these institutions, but also arbitrariness when it comes to setting fee structures. For example, a report in this paper says that private schools in Karachi have hiked tuition fees by between 25 and 45 per cent, which contravenes the Schools` Registration Act. By law private schools are allowed to increase tuition fees by five per cent in two years. Yet it is obvious many institutions are clearly violating this provision. Some parents believe officials in the Sindh government`s education department are facilitating these questionable increases because when the issue was brought to their notice, the officials gave the complainants a cold shoulder. It is true that inflation has affected all sectors; private schools, too, have salaries to pay and overheads to meet. Yet fee increases need to be in line with the law and cannot be abrupt and arbitrary. While some private educational institutions are doing a commendable job filling in the educational void, many schools are purely moneymaking concerns with hardly any state oversight where standards are concerned.

The public sector has failed to perform in many areas, and education is one of them. Pakistan is, as has recently been underscored, facing an `education emergency`. While the state cannot abdicate its responsibility of providing quality public education, it also cannot remain silent when so many parents across the country are sending their children to private schools. For example, in the recently released Education Emergency Pakistan report, it is said that more than half of urban children go to private schools; in rural areas the figure is over a quarter. Statistics from 2009 suggest that nearly 30 per cent of children in the country attend private schools. These are not insignificant figures. Hence the state`s mechanism to regulate private educational institutions needs to be strengthened so that private schools adhere to baseline quality standards and parents are protected from random fee hikes and other dubious charges.

Hindu marriages

AS part of the movement for the rights of scheduled caste Hindus in Pakistan, activists called on Thursday for the promulgation of a law formalising Hindu marriages. The fact that many Hindu couples still cannot acquire legal proof of marriage has implications broader than simply a lack of recognition by the state; it can become a significant hurdle when trying to get national identity cards, filing for divorce, obtaining property rights or even travelling within the country as a couple without facing harassment. Speakers at Thursday’s conference also pointed out that it makes it difficult to file cases in instances of abductions and forced conversions leading to remarriages, and that the lack of a CNIC makes it harder to cast votes. In the absence of legal documentation, Hindu couples are dependent on circumstantial evidence such as wedding photographs, the whims of the particular official they are dealing with, or lawyers’ affidavits, if they are able to procure these.

But more than an administrative inconvenience, this state of affairs runs counter to the constitution’s guarantee of equality for all citizens. Given the recent murders of two major public figures fighting for minority rights, now would be a good time to pass a law regarding Hindu marriage registration to reinforce that Pakistan’s minorities have the same rights as its Muslim population. Nor should it be a particularly controversial law for politicians to back; it is simply inertia, it seems, that has resulted in the long delay despite court cases, protests as well as a Supreme Court notice asking the government to look into the matter. Marriage is one of the most basic buildings blocks of our society and a common human aspiration. Denying its formal recognition to a specific portion of the population cannot be classified as anything other than discrimination.