Youth and the National Narrative

Education, Terrorism and the Security State in Pakistan

Marie Lall, Tania Saeed

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350112216
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Didattica comparata

The role of the security establishment in Pakistan has been strengthened in a post-Musharraf era as social institutions are increasingly drawn into the security agenda. Pakistan's problems are often explained through the lens of ethnic or religious differences, the tense relationship between democracy and the Pakistan military, or geopolitics and terrorism, without taking into account young citizens' role in questioning the state and the role of the education system. Based on new research and interviews with more than 1900 Pakistanis aged 16-28 the authors examine young people's understanding of citizenship, political participation, the state and terrorism in post-Musharraf Pakistan. The authors explore the relationship between the youth and the security state, highlighting how the educational institutions, social media, political activism and the entire nature of the social contract in Pakistan has been increasingly securitized. The focus is on the voices of young Pakistanis, their views on state accountability (or lack thereof), political literacy and participation, and the continued problem of terrorism that is transforming their views of both their country and the world today. With 67% of the country's population under the age of 30, this book is a unique window into how Pakistan is likely to evolve in the next couple of decades.

1

Youth and the Social Contract

Introduction

I feel that generally people in Pakistan do not believe citizenship exists. ... If it does, it is a luxury open only to the elite and for them citizenship is only rights and not duties or responsibilities. As a concept it does not matter to the majority where basic human needs are not being met.

(Teacher, Female, Karachi)

Thar mei bachei mar rahei hain unkei liyei kuchh nahi karna par cricket match peh cheezei jilaani hain.¹ … We are willing to protest for not getting laptops but we won’t do the same for the famine in Thar.

(Focus Group, Government University² )

These two observations, by a teacher in Karachi and an undergraduate student in Lahore, illustrate the fragmented nature of the social contract in Pakistan. Many postcolonial societies like Pakistan adopted a Western model of state–citizen relationship after independence. The social contract was almost a given for these newly independent countries in the advent of new state and institution building. After the Second World War, the decolonizing states were following in the democratic footsteps of their former Western colonial masters. As such the state was responsible for structural inputs – electricity, water and infrastructure – and services such as health and education as well as security, guaranteeing their citizens certain basic rights. Pakistan set up a state based on the social contract model, developing basic education, health and other public infrastructure for its citizens. From the start, however, Pakistan allowed for a parallel system to operate in the private sector, benefiting the richer sections of society. The poor, comprising the vast majority of the country, were reliant on the state to meet their basic needs. The response of the teacher from Karachi illustrates this fragmented nature of the social contract, with rights becoming a luxury guaranteed only to the rich or the upper middle classes, while the rest of the citizens struggle for basic amenities. The regional disparity in relation to rights and duties is evident in the response of the student from the focus group in Lahore, quoting the example of one of the most deprived areas in Pakistan, Thar, that is suffering from severe drought, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of children.³ The lack of response or outrage from the population, particularly in Punjab, is indicative of the general divide across provinces and socio-economic groups in Pakistan. With Islam being mainstreamed into the state structure in the three decades after independence, the nature of the social contract for religious minorities and different sects also changed. In essence, this ‘social contract’ was different across socio-economic class and religious groups. Like most developing nations with a colonial legacy, Pakistan struggled to provide for its large and growing population. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, Pakistan was developing fast, and due to its market economy seemed poised to make the most of a growth trajectory.

Fast-forward to today and the picture looks rather different. There is an official recognition that the ‘state by definition must be strong and effective with a monopoly over the possession and employment of force and the authority and obligation for providing basic socio-economic needs and good governance to its people’ (NACTA 2018, p. 4). Yet, this recognition is in relation to a counterextremism strategy that attempts to examine how and why Pakistanis turn towards terrorism. There is a realization that the weakness of the state in governance and service delivery has created a vacuum exploited by extremist elements. It took over a decade of violence in the form of terrorist attacks for the Pakistani state to even acknowledge there was a failure on its part. But this recent acknowledgement is a long way from any concrete action. The state in Pakistan had become increasingly absent. State-provided services had been declining in quality and availability for several decades. Civil society and the private sector jumped in, but given Pakistan’s size and population they were unable to replace the state. Increasing numbers of lower-middle-class people and even the poor turned to the low-fee private sector to fulfil their education and health needs. As electricity, gas and water supplies became irregular, those who could afford paid for generators and water tankers. Those who could not, continue to bear the bad infrastructural conditions.⁴ From time to time there are protests reminding the government that the state structures have crumbled; however, most know that protests serve little purpose as officials are largely unable to do anything about the dismal state of affairs.⁵ The state, while becoming increasingly ineffective, was still able to broadly provide domestic security until around 2005–6. However, this too changed as the effects of the war in Afghanistan, especially after 9/11, started to take their toll.⁶ Until recently ordinary Pakistanis saw the role of the state not as one that necessarily provided basic amenities such as infrastructure, education and health, but one which at least provided security. As terrorist groups, both domestic and foreign, started to fight the Pakistani establishment, it was mostly ordinary citizens who suffered. Since 2008 the increased violence across the country in the form of suicide attacks and random bomb blasts has meant that the state is no longer fulfilling this role either, increasing the alienation across the country.

Over the seven decades since independence Pakistan has provided fewer and fewer basic social goods to its citizens and the political elites have failed to establish a relationship even in democratic times, reinforcing a stark class divide. Pakistan is ranked at 150 in the Human Development Index 2017 (UNDP 2018). According to a UNDP report, ‘In 1987/88 the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, was 0.35; by 2013/14 it had risen to 0.41. Pakistan’s richest 20 per cent now consume seven times more than the poorest 20%’ (UNDP 2016b, p. 1). There is further regional disparity. In 2016 the Multidimensional Poverty Index ‘found that 54.6% of rural Pakistanis experienced poverty compared to 9.3% in cities’ (UNDP 2016b). Furthermore, ‘multidimensional poverty stands at 31.5% in Punjab but rises to 73.7% in FATA’ (UNDP 2016b). The level of disparity is evident in the fact that ‘multidimensional poverty in Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, and Rawalpindi is below 10%; it exceeds 90% in Killa Abdullah, Harnai, Barkhan, Sherani Kohistan’ (UNDP 2016b). The Youth Development Index (YDI) that measures ‘health, education, employment and civic and politic al participation’ of youth between the ages of 15 and 29 for 183 countries, placed Pakistan at 154 in 2016, ‘the only non-African country amongst the ten lowest-ranked Commonwealth countries’ (UNDP 2017, p. 32). Regionally, Pakistan trails behind all other South Asian countries except Afghanistan in education indicators, ‘with a youth literacy of barely 70.7%’. While many of the country’s woes are often explained by the thirty-odd years of military dictatorships that plagued the country between 1958–69, 1977–88 and 1998–2008,⁷ a closer look at these three decades shows that while citizens’ rights were certainly abolished or violated, the social contract side of the state as a provider of services, that is, state responsibility, did continue, mostly unabated. Under military rule, the state was, if anything, more present in people’s lives than it was during times of democratically elected governments.

In any case the youth of today have hardly known the kind of military rule that their parents lived under. The ‘democratic decade’ with alternating rules of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif started in 1988. Musharraf’s military rule was rather different than that of his military predecessors with his emphasis on ‘Enlightened Moderation’ quite a stark contrast to the last military dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, and his Islamization policy. Musharraf ensured that elections were held in 2002. So the understanding of Pakistan’s youth is that of a country mostly led by democratically elected rulers and one pseudo despot.⁸ Democratic rule, more than any other form of government, is what has shaped their view of state–citizen relations. Although they have grown up under more ‘democratic governance’, the young people of today have experienced less state responsibility towards citizens than previously. Consequently, there is a malaise across the youth; they have little or no understanding of the functions or ‘use’ of the state. Young people feel disconnected because the state is absent. While issues such as the energy crises and unemployment have triggered sporadic protests in urban centres, with calls for the state to take responsibility for the provision of basic amenities, the response of the state has been negligible. State responsibility only exists on paper, as families have to fend for themselves and rights, especially related to social goods, are largely nonexistent. Life across all sections of society is lived in parallel to the state structures. The state makes an occasional appearance, for example after natural disasters such as the floods in Sindh in 2010 and 2011, when limited aid was provided to certain communities (Siddiqi 2014); however, civil society also carries a large part of post-disaster burdens. Right-wing religious organizations are also known to intervene in post-disaster relief efforts, thereby gaining on the ground support (Bano 2009). Often the military is perceived as the only visible part of the state, from anti-terror operations to providing relief camps. With regard to rights, it seems to make little difference to ordinary people what kind of government is in power – military or democratically elected.⁹

Given this reality one can argue that there has been a historical failure by the political elites to make the state relevant to the wider population. Only now in 2018 has there been an acknowledgement of this failure albeit through a counterextremism strategy. The NCEPG 2018 clearly state:

It is required to now restore further confidence in State as service provider particularly in conflict hit areas including Balochistan, Sindh and FATA. The basic unit of the administration in Pakistan is the revenue district with a population, outside the metropolises, of between one and three million people approximately. It is the center where people live, own land and property, earn their livelihood, interact with each other and get involved in disputes and conflicts. District is the meeting point between state and citizen...