Friday 24 July 2009

Pakistani Diaspora

LIFE AND TIMES OF
Pakistani DIASPORA



Pakistan inherited a much smaller cadre of British university trained cadre. It did not get its share of Indian university graduates either.
One does not have to go far in seeking the reasons for the disproportionate distribution. Non-Muslims deprived of higher positions in the administration under Muslim rulers had taken up business, commerce and learned professions and had a far higher percentage of educated personnel in colonial India due. Muslims assured of ascendancy had kept to the sword and patronage of arts. The sword had been snatched away by the British who had further actively discriminated against the followers of the creed till Independence movement burst forth in early twentieth century, by which time it was too late for Muslims to catch up.
The British had further promoted the minority at the cost of the majority in the respective territortries so that what became Pakistan all civil life was largely dominated by non-Muslims.
Non-Muslims educated class left Pakistan en-masse. In India only riot torn East Punjab was denuded of Muslims. Pakistan inherited 83 senior civil servants (out of a total of some one thousand) out of which only one was a Bengali, 48 from minority provinces, 36 from the Punjab, none from among the Sindhis, Baluchis or the Pathans. Roughly the same proportion obtained in lesser positions. The country though had more than its fair share of military officers. Majority of Political leaders too came from minority provinces. In the absence of viable civil institutions, a mix of army-bureaucratic culture prevailed and the therefore continued in the colonial mode.
Pakistan was born in complete chaos. It had been denuded of nearly all administrators, educators, technical personnel, traders and industrialists. Infrastructure such as it was in a state of sad repair. Aided and abetted by the last viceroy and the first Indian governor General Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel had withheld Pakistan’s share of assets. The country had empty coffers and had the Nizam of Hyderabad not come forth with a loan now equivalent to $ 150.00 million, it would have collapsed.
More than three million refugees in extreme degrees of destitution flooded the country. British officers and security agencies looked on as disinterested observers.
As though the burden was not crushing enough, the war in Kashmir was imposed adding a security imperative, which it could not afford and which empowered the armed forces, which would in time imperil the very existence of the country.
With unprecedented zeal, honesty and focus political leadership, administration, technical and educational services largely manned by immigrants and the people pulled the country through. But it did not last.
The country descended into political and civil anarchy. Korean war had given the economy a shot in the arm. It dwindled and could not create jobs for the teeming millions of unskilled workers, nor for the hundreds of thousands of semi-literate school and college graduates institutions were churning out. People were disillusioned. Army took over.
WWII had wrought an earth change in the UK. Flower of British manhood had perished. There ensued an acute shortage of skilled and unskilled manpower. In 1945 elections labor party won. They introduced National Health Service. British doctors boycotted it for a few years. To cope with the short fall the government actively encouraged doctors from the Indian sub-continent to come to the UK.
British government also offered all kinds of inducements and facilities for illiterate laborers to immigrate and work in the country. Working class was not only in short supply, but was in ferment too. Progressive movement was on the upswing in all of Europe. Manual workers from the subcontinent did not ask for any thing. They flocked from Kashmir, Punjab and Sylhet. Seeds of hatred sowed at the time between whites, blacks, browns and yellows persists grew like weeds into a storm of racial riots.
Mid sixties saw the trend change to migration to North America. (From this point I will concentrate on the Diaspora in the USA). In 1965 the USA deleted the preference for European immigrants. There was acute shortage of skilled workers there too. But the country screened visa applicants; so only the educated or the rich investors could get in. This measure was good national policy, for every Doctor, Scientist and Engineer the country allowed in, it saved $500,000.00, it would have had to spend educating and training one of its own. And they did not even have to acknowledge the receipt of this aid!
By the mid nineteen seventies a substantial number of expatriate Doctors and other professionals were well settled, owned homes, had started investing in commercial property and organizing into groups.
The groups do a lot of charitable and social work. I would like to make a special mention of Asian American Network against abuse (ANAA), which is one of the more vibrant human rights Advocacy groups, and lobbies for legislation to eradicate gender discrimination, honor killing and dowry murders .
Like expatriates all over the world Pakistanis had brought their social, cultural and religious norms and practices. But the divide between them and the Americans was much wider than that between earlier European Christian and Jewish immigrants and the latter. The Jews had honed the skills of survival over millennia of persecution and also successfully played on the collective guilt complex of the West over the holocaust.
The first generation did not have too difficult a time. They had money, were respected and could get by with socialization and professional inter action. They went home on annual vacations, contributed heavily to political candidates, supported charities and sponsored relatives to the country.
But the second generation, popularly known as ABCD’S (American Born Confused Desis) was an entirely different proposition. At this point we have to distinguish broadly between the expatriates who lived in smaller towns where perforce they had to interact with natives, those of “liberal-secular” bent of mind, conformists, zealots and urban dwellers who could afford or preferred to live in “Ghettoes”.
Generally speaking liberal-secular parents who were “cultural” Muslims and who had frank discussion with their children about the good and bad aspects of the culture they had inherited and the one they had been born into, had less social conflict. The zealots living in urban centers also had an easier time because they made their own world and lived in it with minimal outside contact. (As a part of the global trend there has been considerable regression to obscurantism. Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews, all are affected).
It is the people in the middle ground who are always the majority that suffer the most. They cannot impose their views forcefully and cannot accept unconventional behavior. Not financially well healed they go with out many amenities like expensive vacations, some work two full time jobs, make the children attend prep schools during vacations, get them tutored by private academies for college entrance examinations and send them to the most expensive schools they can get into. All they ask in return is that the children turn out like themselves.
The problems arise early. The average American parent is rather permissive. Their children get used to having their way from a very young age and naturally would rather have a good time than work at books. They acquire boy and girl friends before going to school, see their parents drinking and often drunk and a high percentage is brought up by single mothers/fathers. Going to Church is an alien concept. Many start drinking while still in lower school grades and a substantial number take to drugs too.
Pakistani children live in two different worlds. Their parents expect them to be obedient, insist that they work hard at their studies, go to bed at the prescribed time, avoid girls/boys, alcohol is taboo, drugs a direct route to hell. Most parents would send them to an Islamic school on Sundays. But what keeps them on the straight and the narrow path is the devotion and loyalty of the parents to them and each other.
Higher grades in the school bring their own challenges. Biology takes over. They are in early youth with splashing hormones unrepressed by social norms. They want to go out on dates and do whatever that involves. They feel fettered by parental bonds. At this point parents suffer further anguish of dichotomy. They are socialized to boys sowing their oats. Girls are a different kettle of fish. But they have been socialized too and are rather more restrained than the boys.
I believe those hailing from uni-centered homes, the ones where one parent sets the rules and especially the ones who do not bicker in front of children all the time, are more able to with stand temptations.
College-University is at age eighteen. Children leave home. But by this time the die has been cast. If they have done well so far they will keep on doing so.
The next roadblock is matrimony. Very few full blooded US born and brought up children would countenance an arranged marriage. Most are cognizant of the advantages of marrying in their own culture and religion. But it is not easy to click with a person with all the requisite qualifications. Here another dichotomy raises its head. Parents would take a boy’s “deviant” decision much more easily than they would a girl’s. If a girl were from a particular linguistic group and the boy from another, the parents would be grieved. And the very heavens will fall if she were to choose a Christian or a Jewish boy. But the worst-case scenario would be a Hindu boy.
The average parent would cry his/her eyes out, throw tantrums and I have come across fake and genuine too, heart attacks but in the end they accept it and the “other” party goes through a convenient conversion.
Pakistanis have come a long way from the portrait of “innocents abroad” of five decades ago. They have come of age as a community, matured and stabilized into an integrated whole which owes allegiance to the land it lives and works in, and to which its future is inextricably attached, yet find time, resources and will to try to bring much needed solace to our kith and kin left behind at “home’ as most of first generation expatriates call the countries of their origin. The trait of self-reliance, courage and independence of young girls is particularly gratifying. They assert themselves; take no such nonsense that they are delicate, dainty, helpless and emotionally labile beings, who should have half as much inheritance as their brothers, and half the vote as a witness.

It is a euphemism for tribe-clan murder rooted in the feudal mind set and is a thinly disguised subterfuge for keeping land and other assets in the family. The case of a girl and (her friend) accused of illicit sexual relations is brought before a tribal court. She is not allowed (if not already killed) to appear in her own defense, nor may she present witnesses. A guilty verdict is invariably handed down. The pair is executed by the girl’s family. If the case ever gets into a formal court of law, perpetrators are granted lenient punishment on the grounds that it was crime of passion. The practice in various guises is very common in Pakistan and other Muslim countries and to a lesser degree in India and Latin America

S.Ehtisham MD
PO Box 469,
Bath NY 14810

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