A monstrous experiment

Nasir Abbas Mirza
Remote madrassas in Pakistan may be turning boys into drones but then there are thousands of madrassas spread all over Pakistan’s urban centres that are producing millions of neo-drones who may not become suicide bombers but are totally unfit to live in this world. These kids need to be rescued


Take a little boy and incarcerate him in a remote madrassa. Keep him far away from the rest of the world and bar any interaction with humanity. Indoctrinate him with a distorted version of a religion and tell him that he does not belong to this world. Teach him about the fanciful world that awaits him in the heaven, and that in order to attain that he has to destroy everything that stands in his way, including his own body.

By the time he is sixteen, the child would have become a drone: an un-manned man. Instead of a lively teenager, we would have a robot in living tissue ready to detonate on remote orders.

At full steam ahead in Pakistan, this is a monstrous experiment in brainwashing and it is on a par with, if not worse than, Nazi Germany’s eugenics. They did it in the name of science; here, it is being done in the name of God and religion. On a very large scale, this is a hugely successful experiment in which nurture triumphs and nature takes a beating.

Are we really prisoners of our genes? Or are we prisoners of our parents, teachers and societies? From what we are witnessing, genetic influences are secondary to environment.

Behavioural scientists have Nobel Prize-winning research material in Pakistan. Freud, Skinner or Pavlov would have worked nights to study this. Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell; this young man would blow himself up at the sound of a bell — his phone bell. “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man,” goes the old Jesuit saying.

It may be sinister, the Jesuit saying, but the fact remains that nobody understands the vulnerability of a child’s brain better than priests. On the one hand, witness the vigilance of parents when they let a maulvi sahib into their house to teach the Holy Quran to their children; and, on the other hand, there are parents in the same society who ‘give’ a child to madrassa-running priests not until he is seven, but until he is 14 or 15 or forever.

‘Give’ is a generalisation. Given our attitudes towards birth control, an overabundance of young children is a natural outcome. In population growth, we are not too far behind the 6 percent population growth rate of our role model country, Saudi Arabia. There is an endless supply of young boys for madrassas. There are abducted, orphaned or abandoned young boys. Then there are parents who are too poor to bring up a child. They simply sell or donate their boys for tabligh or jihad or for any other religious duty. The religious pretence converts their dastardly act into a noble deed.

Priestly abuse of children has been going on for as long as there have been priests and children. But never has this been done in such an organised manner as is the case here in Pakistan. This abuse (aside from the pervasive sexual abuse) spells disaster. Just step out of a large city and all you would see around you are hundreds and thousands of little children — from six to thirty-six months old. Until these kids are of an age to observe the ways of their elders, they live and behave like untrained dogs. That’s the real Pakistan and no military or political leader is having sleepless nights over this.

Mismanaging the national security state has kept our governments so busy that social uplift has been low on their priorities. For sixty years we gave all our money for security and today we don’t even have that. Even in a perfect world, our leaders couldn’t have done anything about it. The job at hand is beyond their capabilities. Just take a roll call of our leaders in the last thirty years. They have been such a simple and basic lot that protocol and property left them no time for anything else.

Will this ever change or improve. No, not for another thirty years. That’s thirty years after we do the needful: that is, a drastic reduction in the number of children we produce, modern education for all on war-footing basis and to do this, schools and First World-standard teachers. So start counting once all this is in place.

From Zia to Zardari, and all others in between, no one even acknowledged that we have an overpopulation problem. Such is the fear of backlash from religious conservatives.

Here’s the equation: a population that breeds likes rats equals poverty equals despair equals cannon fodder for religious organisations and terrorist networks. Were these children better off working at motor workshops or making carpets? Perhaps the ILO or an NGO can answer this question. They seem awfully quiet on something much worse than child labour.

There’s a reason for that: in matters of faith or religious beliefs, no one dare object. All kinds of evil, illegal or inhuman practices can be given sanction if a particular religion or sect proves that it is part of its belief. You could be dying in a hospital but no one would give you a hallucinogenic drug to save your life. But, hey, you can get official approval for the use of cannabis or other hallucinogenic drugs if you prove that use of these substances is part of your religious belief. In 2006, the US Supreme Court did just that.

Our children face a frightening future not because of the Taliban (they are just a handful) but because of the ultra-conservative wave of religion that has swept this country. Remote madrassas may be turning boys into drones but then there are thousands of madrassas spread all over Pakistan’s urban centres that are producing millions of neo-drones who may not become suicide bombers but are totally unfit to live in this world. These kids need to be rescued.

Alfred Hitchcock, the great movie director who specialised in frightening people, was once driving in Switzerland when he suddenly pointed out of the car window and said, “That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen.” It was a priest in conversation with a little boy, his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Hitchcock leaned out of the car window and shouted, “Run, little boy! Run for your life!”

The writer is a freelance columnist

(Courtesy: Daily Times, Pakistan, May 11.)

Marxists and Mullahs in West Bengal

For freedom, stand by Taslima Nasreen
Kanchan Gupta

Dissident Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen arriving in Delhi on Friday night

Those acquainted with contemporary Bengali literature could argue that dissident Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen is not a talented writer. But there are few who would disagree that she is an extremely courageous woman who has struck out at Islamic fanatics and mullahs whose sole passion in life is to come up with the most perverse interpretations of the Quran so that they can live out their dark fantasies born of obscurantism and twisted notions of patriarchy. Ms Nasreen gave up her profession as a qualified physician to take on radical Islamists who had begun to gather strength under the tutelage of Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Dhaka cantonment queen Begum Khaleda Zia, as well as Awami League, headed by a fork-tongued Sheikh Hasina Wajed. Her newspaper columns were hugely popular, especially among Bangladeshi women, although the Jamaat-e-Islami was none too pleased that someone should dare question the mullahs’ diktats.
Ms Nasreen became a celebrity of sorts in Kolkata after the publication of Nirbachito Column, a collection of her newspaper columns, which won her a prestigious literary award. Back in Dhaka, her success raised the hackles of those discomfited by the fact that rather than disappear behind a burqa and meekly accept the oppressive ways of the clergy, a Bangladeshi woman had begun to inspire others to emulate her defiance. They began to sharpen their knives for the kill; in the meanwhile, they turned on Bangladesh’s minuscule and disinherited, disempowered Hindu community, committing horrendous atrocities. After the demolition of the disputed Babri structure in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, they let loose a reign of terror, killing Hindu men, raping Hindu women and destroying Hindu temples. Lest all this be denied by Islamic fanatics on both sides of Padma — including those who fly the banners of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, All-India Milli Council and assorted organisations like All-India Minority Forum that make up the Brotherhood in Green — and their ‘secular’ patrons, the most casual scan of newspapers of those days will reveal the extent of the crimes committed against Hindus in Bangladesh in the guise of protesting the demolition of the disputed Babri structure.
It is a tribute to Ms Nasreen’s courage that rather than silently watch the persecution of Bangladeshi Hindus, she recorded those crimes in a slim volume, Lajja. Within days of the publication of the novel — it was ‘fiction’ based on incontrovertible facts — it was slammed by the Government of Bangladesh, which had clearly colluded with the fanatics by allowing them a free run, and the mullahs who, typically, were outraged that a Muslim (although Ms Nasreen says she is a ‘humanist’) should have dared put their misdeeds on record. The book was banned and a mullah issued a fatwa, calling for her execution as she had committed ‘blasphemy’! During Friday prayers in mosques across Bangladesh, believers were urged to murder Ms Nasreen if the Government failed to carry out the death sentence. Another mullah offered a reward of $ 2,000, which was really more a reflection of his cash flow problems than his desire to see her head brought to him on an aluminium platter borrowed from his kitchen.
But all this did not dampen the demand for Lajja. Pirated copies of the book sold in thousands even as fanatics took to the streets, clamouring that Ms Nasreen be executed to uphold shari’ah. Overnight, Ms Nasreen became a household name, here and abroad. In those days The Pioneer had a fiesty correspondent in Dhaka. I recall asking him for a copy of the book. He got hold of a pirated copy and sent it to us by courier. Since everybody was curious about what Ms Nasreen had written that had so angered the mullahs, The Pioneer published the relevant extracts. Later, the book was published in both Bengali and English in India; thankfully, the Government did not ban Lajja. That was the beginning of Ms Nasreen’s woes. Hounded by Islamists baying for her blood (in the hope of pocketing the promised $ 2,000), she fled her beloved country in 1995 and sought shelter in Sweden. Two decades earlier, another Bangladeshi writer, Daud Haider, had to similarly flee Bangladesh after fanatics declared him a heretic. We shall return to Daud’s story later.
Feted by Kolkata’s intellectuals, Ms Nasreen decided to shift to West Bengal and was granted a one-year visa in September 2005. But before that, she had run into trouble with Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who, despite his pretensions of being a writer and a Marxist, gave in without a fight and banned her autobiographical book, Dwikhondito, in November 2003 because it had references to the perversion of Islam by those who use religion to perpetuate their twisted notions of a Muslim woman’s place in society. Another book, Aamar Meyebela, also ran into trouble and was promptly banned in Bangladesh. The publishers of Dwikhondito went to court and appealed against the ban. The Calcutta High Court declared the ban was “untenable” and “unjustifiable” in September 2005. Dwikhondito reappeared in bookshops and became an instant bestseller, not least because it rips off many a ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ mask.
On August 10 this year, when Ms Nasreen visited Hyderabad for the launch of her translated works, she was set upon by leaders of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen who insisted that she should be handed over to them so that they could punish her for her ‘sins’. She escaped the lynching but the incident showed that fanatics had put in motion a plan to hound her out of India. Last Wednesday’s riots in central Kolkata when murderous mobs owing allegiance to All-India Minority Forum, headed by Mr Idris Ali, a Congress leader, demanded that she be thrown out of the country, are part of this devious plan whose ultimate goal is to demonstrate the might of radical Islamism in ‘secular’ India. Mr Biman Bose, chairman of the Left Front and a member of the CPI(M) Polit Bureau who loves to be portrayed in media as a remorseless, cold-blooded commissar, wilted in the face of Muslim fury and ensured Ms Nasreen’s eviction from Kolkata and West Bengal. Since then, she has been on the run, first seeking shelter in Jaipur and then in Rajasthan House in Delhi.
It is anybody’s guess as to whether the UPA Government will be able to summon the courage to stand up to fanatics and insist that Ms Nasreen shall remain in India. On another occasion, Mrs Indira Gandhi had succumbed to Muslim pressure and was on the verge of deporting Daud Haider to face death in Bangladesh when the dissident poet was rescued by German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass. If Ms Nasreen is forced to leave India, make no mistake that a time will come when anybody who doesn’t subscribe to the twisted worldview of Islamic fanatics will be similarly hounded in this wondrous secular democracy of ours.

{This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break on November 25, 2007.)