Books come to rescue

I had resisted the temptation to delve into the Single National Curriculum (SNC) until this week when I thought there was nothing else to write home about. But I found two newly published books in my mail, just in time to rescue. The first, Alternative Vision: Voices of Reason, is written by Zaman Khan, a friend from the days of the fervour to make a revolution overnight. It dons a foreword by the indomitable IA Rehman, now Ibn Abdur Rehman. (No more need to be underground, perhaps!) He was a sane voice then, as he is now. To him, the book is a treasury of free voices. The other book by Jamil Nasir, Development for an Equitable Society, is a lament on the treasury of the usual kind. Nadeemul Haque, also from the heady days of shouting radical change, has done the foreword. Once he, too, hid behind “Abdus Samad” to write for newspapers. His current “webinar a day” activity seems like a run up to be the IA Rehman of economists.

Back to the books. Both are based on the authors’ contributions to the newspapers. Perhaps they found out that I also published a book of my newspaper pieces in 1974, Pakistan: An Economic Spectrum, in the Spectrum Series started by that kind soul, Sheikh Sahib of Co-opera Book Shop & Art Gallery on the Mall, Lahore. Professor Siddiq Kalim’s Pakistan: A Cultural Spectrum was published a year before. But I digressed again. Zaman Khan’s book is a collection of 67 interviews with literatures, artistes, historians, politicians, champions of rights, famous women and some not-so-famous men. Those interviewed are not confined to Pakistan or South Asia or Britain. There is a poet from Sweden, a South Asian scholar from France, a historian from Japan, a scholar from Russia and a Turkish intellectual. Hussain Naqi is the only missing person. While most conversations have a punchline or leave a thought to ponder, my favourites are those with a no-holds-barred Kishwar Naheed and the working class leader, Mirza Ibrahim.

He was once produced before Lahore’s deputy commissioner, who asked whether he knew him. “No, but I do know Tegh Allahbadi,” the pen name Mustafa Zaidi.

The starting point of Jamil Nasir’s book is the claim that his newspaper articles are not quickies, but analyses drawing on serious academic research. Going through the book, one finds it hard to challenge him. Some pieces remarkably put together interesting debates on the fashionable league tables on competitiveness and happiness. Others convey, in an intelligible manner, what is wrong with growth, even with prefixes of pro-poor, inclusive or whatever. An interesting piece relevant to the situation today highlights the short-lived excitement about exports following depreciation pushed by the IMF. In dealing with the main question raised by him — development for an equitable society — he uses the familiar sleight of hand seen on opinion pages. “Ours is a particular case of ‘King John Redistribution’ where the rich are getting richer through subverting institutions and political processes and the poor are suffering due to acute inequalities in the society. Do we need a ‘Robin Hood Redistribution’ through a social and political revolution? I leave it to the readers.” The only regret by one who actually tried, Mirza Ibrahim, was that “We could not bring revolution in Pakistan.” With the age of revolution gone, Jamil Nasir’s prognosis is to reform and strengthen the institutions of growth, besides investing in the education and health of the poor — a reorientation of growth narrative, that is.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18^th, 2020.

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