British Unemployment Rockets to 17-year high

LONDON: Britain's jobless total has hit a 17 year-high, data showed Wednesday, stoking fears of a new recession and denting government hopes that the private sector can compensate for massive cuts in state jobs.

Unemployment has riddled the world economy with severe economic problems

The number of jobless people jumped to 2.57 million in the three months to August, reaching the highest amount since late 1994, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed.

Youth unemployment, or the number of 16 to 24 year-olds without a job, hit a record high of 991,000 in the three months to August and neared the psychological barrier of one million, the ONS added in a statement.

And the unemployment rate shot up to 8.1 percent during the quarter, the highest level for 15 years, while the numbers claiming jobseeker's allowance increased for the seventh month in a row to 1.6 million in September.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose coalition government is slashing public-sector employment as part of its austerity drive, described the latest data as "very disappointing."

However, he pledged once again that Britain would not deviate from the painful deficit-cutting measures, amid persistent turmoil on global financial markets over high levels of state debt -- particularly in the eurozone.

"Every job that is lost is a tragedy for that person and for their family and that is why this government is going to do everything it possibly can to help get people into work," he told parliament.

"We've got to do more to get our economy moving, to get jobs for our people but we mustn't abandon the (deficit-reduction) plan that has given us record low interest rates."

"If we changed course on reducing our deficit we would end up with interest rates like Portugal, like Spain, like Italy, like Greece, and we would send our economy into a tailspin."

Cameron's Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition faced more vocal calls from the opposition Labour party to slow the pace of cuts and reduce the risk of a so-called double-dip downturn.

"I want you to change course so you have a credible plan to get people back to work in this country," Labour leader Ed Miliband said on Wednesday.

He added: "Month after month, as unemployment goes up, the number of people claiming benefits goes up, the cost goes up and fewer people are in work and paying taxes.

"To have a credible plan on the deficit, you need a credible plan for growth and you don't have one."

Cameron responded that the previous Labour government, which was ousted by the coalition in May 2010, had left them nursing a record public deficit.

Britain escaped from a deep recession in the third quarter of 2009 but its recovery has been severely constrained by collapsing consumer confidence, state austerity cuts and the eurozone debt crisis.

Wednesday's data comes less than a week after the Bank of England said it will inject #75 billion (86 billion euros, $115 billion) of new money into Britain's stalled economy in a bid to boost growth and prevent a return to recession.

The BoE already pumped #200 billion into the economy between March 2009 and January 2010, but the economy has struggled and over the past nine months it has virtually come to a halt.

BoE governor Mervyn King has warned that Britain is facing possibly its most serious ever financial crisis.

Capital Economics analyst Jonathan Loynes said that the sharp deterioration in the labour market data would ramp up the risks of another recession.

"While the labour market's previous resilience was one of the few sources of hope earlier in the year, its subsequent rapid deterioration now looks likely to exacerbate the weakness in the broader economy and increase the risks of a renewed recession," Loynes said. (AFP)

Source: http://thenews.com.pk/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=24458&title=British-unemployment-rockets-to-17-year-high

The war that established no new doctrine By Simon Tisdall

THE Libyan war, which began in earnest in February and edged towards a ragged conclusion on Thursday in the dusty, blood-specked alleyways of Sirte, was, in its most hyperbolic aspect, a victory for democracy, freedom, and the Arab spring.

This is how the British foreign secretary, William Hague, who reported to the UK House of Commons in London on the Qadhafi regime`s death throes on Thursday, habitually chooses to portray the nine-month struggle to oust Libya`s dictator-in-residence since 1969 and his Addams family of murderous retainers.

This is the uplifting narrative that carries Washington`s blessing, despite Barack Obama`s initial, chronic ambivalence about the Nato intervention.

And this is why the British Conservative party strategists will do their utmost to present Libya as a triumph of British leadership abroad, and, more particularly, of the prime minister. The intervention was a success, they will say, and it was the prime minister`s success. Libya 2011 was David Cameron`s war.

British politicians have long understood, as does their Libya comrade-in-arms, France`s Nicolas Sarkozy, the value of a short, sharp, not-too-costly foreign war in boosting national amour propre and personal standing. But call him “Lucky Dave”. All the self-congratulation, deserved and undeserved, cannot hide the fact that Cameron`s war was a high-risk adventure, long on aspiration and desperately short on tactical aims, planning and material. The embarrassing arrest of a British special forces infiltration team early on had more than a touch of the amateur about it.

More broadly, Cameron and Sarkozy`s Libyan policy managed, in a few short months, to expose and magnify the conflicting political, military and diplomatic faultlines that render international interventions of this sort so materially hazardous, morally questionable, and financially fraught.

And now that military victory has supposedly been secured, as in the doom-laden case of the “fall of Kabul” in November 2001, new questions arise under the title: who will win the peace?

Rebels in eastern Libya started fighting Gaddafi`s forces in February after the arrest of a human rights activist, Fethi Tarbel, sparked riots in Benghazi. Calls for a no-fly zone to protect the rebel enclave, first voiced by Australia`s Kevin Rudd, were taken up at the UN despite Russian and Chinese misgivings. After the National Transitional Council (NTC) declared itself Libya`s sole representative government, and Gaddafi threatened to hunt them down and kill them “house by house, room by room”, the security council on March 17 authorised “all necessary measures” to shield civilians under its rarely activated “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Arab League backing was crucial in ensuring the resolution passed. In effect, the league — many of whose leading members had old scores to settle with Gaddafi — had given unprecedented, unconditional support for western intervention in a Muslim country.

Nato started flying missions into Libya within days and, just as quickly, Arab League members began to get cold feet. But the mandate was in place, and was soon being very liberally interpreted, giving rise to cries of “mission creep”. To be given such latitude, with all the legal boxes ticked (unlike in Iraq), was Cameron`s first great piece of luck.

The Libyan intervention split Nato down the middle, with Germany in particular arguing it was dangerous and ill-advised, not least because of previous fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama administration, too, initially refused to get involved militarily.

Cameron`s second stroke of good fortune was to find in Sarkozy a man who, like him, was a relative lightweight in international affairs keen to make his mark as a matter of principle as well as politics.

France was only too happy to show that “European” militaries could act decisively on the world stage without the Americans. Like London, although this is fiercely denied, Paris had its eye on Libya`s oil, lucrative business contracts, and other potential spoils of war.

And Cameron stayed lucky as the Pentagon relented and provided vital logistical support to the Nato operation.

Having hastily thrown their lot in with the NTC`s irregular forces, Britain and other participating states could only look on, offering support from the air as street battles raged for key cities such as Misrata and, eventually, Tripoli.

All agreed that putting western military boots on the ground was out of the question. But at times, the rebel forces, despite a growing supply and training effort by the French and British, appeared disorganised and ineffective.

Meanwhile, the cost of British operations, put by the defence secretary, Liam Fox, at about GBP300m, was adding to the pressure on Cameron.

With the exception of Moussa Koussa, Libya`s foreign minister, who arrived in London in March, and one or two others, the predicted mass defections from the Gaddafi regime did not materialise.

Doubts began to grow about the staying power of the NTC leadership and, more disturbingly, the potential influence of radical Islamists opposed to western interests on a future Libyan government. Soon, American neoconservatives were suggesting Libya was being saved for Al Qaeda, and that the war was destabilising neighbouring, pro-western regimes in Algeria and Tunisia. It was not a big jump from these concerns to predictions that Libya, now belatedly revealed as a patchwork nation of rival tribal, clan, ethnic and religious affiliations, would fall apart, much as Iraq nearly did.

Worst of all, perhaps, as spring turned to summer, temperatures rose, and the holy month of Ramazan approached, Qadhafi remained on the loose, mocking the coalition and the rebels in radio broadcasts and vowing eternal defiance.

But Cameron`s luck held. An unexpectedly coherent rebel advance from the south triggered the sudden fall of Tripoli in August and the flight of Qadhafi`s family to Algeria. On Sept 13, the interim government chief, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, made his first speech in Tripoli and, two days later, Sarkozy and Cameron travelled to Benghazi and Tripoli.

It was not exactly a Roman triumph. But the television pictures of grateful pats on the back gladdened UK Conservative hearts. By now, Qadhafi was rumoured to be holed up deep in the southern desert.

With the imminent fall of Sirte, Cameron appears to have achieved the relatively swift victory that was, for him, after risking so much, the only acceptable political outcome.Cameron`s war in Libya was a one-off. It established no new doctrine. Rather, it set a limited post-Blair, post-Iraq precedent for selective, “do-able”, feelgood interventionism.

For the seriously oppressed peoples of Syria, Burma, Belarus, Zimbabwe and North Korea, for example, it was a meaningless exercise. And in the end, Cameron was lucky to get away with it.—Dawn/Guardian News Service

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/15/the-war-that-established-no-new-doctrine.html

Fighting the dengue epidemic By Prof Dr Arif Nawaz

Dengue fever has continued to haunt mankind for the last several centuries with historical accounts of this disease from Africa which are between five to six hundred years old. The first outbreaks of dengue fever reached Asia, South America and Africa concurrently in the 1780s. Now this disease is endemic in several regions including Southeast Asia, Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean; areas with a high vector population of the mosquitoes that causes the disease, theAedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Dengue fever has become aprominent infectious disease with outbreaks in as many as 120 countries of the world. The annual disease burden of this disease has reached 40 million with dengue becoming the second-most prevalent mosquito-borne infection after malaria in recent decades.

The illness causes significant morbidity with the cases of dengue haemorrhagic fever (which is a complicated form of this disease) touching several thousand a year. This disease was eliminated from Pakistan in the 1970s only to reappear in 1994. The recent epidemic of dengue fever in the country has been one of the biggest in the history of this country. Attention has been refocused on this condition due to the scale of devastation it has caused, in terms of health care related and economic costs.

Several countries including Sri Lanka have taken measures including case surveillance, research and interventions designed to eradicate the vector for this disease. Unfortunately, Pakistan has lagged behind in this respect. Health and economic research specific to dengue is urgently needed to ensure informed decision-making on the various options for controlling and preventing this disease. Several organisations, including various academic institutions and non-governmental organisations have initiated projects designed to address the menace of dengue fever. One such effort is the research being conducted by the Fatima Memorial System and Hospital in Lahore in collaboration with the University of Punjab.

While significant effort is on at the global level to institutionalise health research within the health care systems of countries, the developing countries are not benefitting from these endeavours owing to their severe health research capacity constraints. Pakistan too has to date not benefitted from the global initiatives to strengthen health research in developing countries. More than ever before our country needs to develop informed policies and implement evidence-based interventions to protect and promote the health of its people, curtail wasteful expenditure and thus accelerate its economic development.

The options for controlling this disease at this time include vector control and optimal medical therapy for the effected patients. Both these interventions are limited in several ways in their ability to eliminate this disease. A dengue vaccine would fill a substantial need as almost 3.6 billion people are at risk from this potentially fatal infection. Vaccines are in the process of development at this time and preliminary trials have given us hope of being able to control this disease. Development of vaccines has, however, been complicated by the need to immunise against all four serotypes of this virus simultaneously. There are currently at least six vaccines in various phases of clinical trials. It is anticipated that a safe and effective vaccines will be licensed for dengue fever in the next five years.

Source: http://tribune.com.pk/story/273975/fighting-the-dengue-epidemic/

Dawn Editorial - Crime and terrorism + Polio Cases

MILITANCY and terrorism in Pakistan is a hydra-headed monster. Experience has shown that even when the security forces achieve success in one area, their efforts do not succeed in killing the monster. By necessity, therefore, countering the threat requires concerted, multi-pronged efforts that target various aspects simultaneously, across the law and order spectrum. How crucial this last aspect is can be gauged from increasing evidence about links between the Pakistani Taliban and street crime as described in a recent news report. Increasingly, insurgents are raising funds for their activities through bank heists, kidnappings for ransom and extortion. Drawing upon a network of malcontents and for-hire criminals across the country, they are blamed for masterminding or carrying out crimes to fund their insurgency. In doing so, they add to the crime wave and contribute to further erosion of the people`s confidence in the state and intensification of fear. The Taliban hand, through the `Black Night` group, is said to have been behind a June raid on a Dera Ismail Khan bank; in Karachi, the Taliban are thought to have been behind three of four bank robberies carried out this year which netted $2.3m. Similar links have been found in numerous abduction and extortion cases.

The shift in sources is a simple equation. US and Pakistani military offensives have killed or sidelined many mid-level and senior commanders who were, in a number of cases, men with links to international funding networks. Meanwhile, greater scrutiny of money transfers has made it harder to send funds around the world. Countering this phenomenon will require cooperation and intelligence-sharing between the civil and military law-enforcement agencies. Only if both are equally well-equipped and trained, and are working in tandem to combat a common enemy, can there be any hope. Without that, both arms of the security forces will continue to address the problem in a piecemeal and ultimately ineffective fashion. As for the Taliban, the logic under which they justify their turning to crime is despicable. Although they advertise their war as being one of a religious hue, their tactics expose the hollowness of their ideology.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/15/crime-and-terrorism.html

New polio cases

A REPORT in this newspaper on Thursday says five fresh polio cases have been detected in Balochistan, bringing the number of children affected by the virus in Pakistan this year to over 100. Balochistan leads this unfortunate count with nearly 50 cases. Another alarming development is that a boy in Karachi`s Gadap Town, who reportedly received anti-polio drops seven times, is among the recent victims. It is worrisome that there are increasing reports of children in different parts of the country contracting polio despite receiving numerous doses of the vaccine. This raises questions about the efficacy of the polio vaccine; perhaps there are issues with the way it is being stored and handled. Reports that the virus has been detec-ted in Multan, Lahore and Rawalpindi are also cause for concern.

The state`s health authorities as well as international experts need to investigate why there have been cases of infection despite the vaccine being administered multiple times. If the vaccine`s efficacy has been compromised, the problem must be rectified immediately. The state also needs to monitor migrant and mobile populations who play a major role in transmitting the virus from high-risk to hitherto `clean` zones. For example, the highest number of polio cases was reported from Balochistan`s Qilla Abdullah district which borders Afghanistan. Pakistan and Afghanistan — both endemic countries — re-infect each other due to the regular movement of people between them. The World Health Organisation has recommended that mobile and migrant populations be mapped in order to keep track of polio`s spread. The state needs to implement this recommendation to the fullest and plug the loopholes. Failure to do so will have consequences apart from the health risk: the World Bank has warned that a $40m grant will be converted into a loan due to Pakistan`s poor response to the fight against polio.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/15/new-polio-cases.html

Looking for heroes By Shada Islam

GROWING up, there was no dearth of heroes. My father was certainly one. Even now, 11 years after his death, I still marvel at his intellect, admire his vision and chuckle at his jokes. My quest for other heroes — and heroines — has been less successful, however.

It seems I’m not alone: The whole world appears to be on the lookout for a person who — according to my dictionary’s description of a hero — should be of “distinguished courage and ability, admired for his/her brave deeds and noble qualities”.

Here in Europe, the prevailing moan is about the lack of strong political leaders to help us climb out of the eurozone catastrophe and other assorted crises. In the US, as mourning continues over the death of Apple whiz-kid Steve Jobs, most heroes either inhabit Silicon Valley or the TV and cinema screens. Certainly do not try and look for them in the Republican Party.

The Middle East has recently produced an extraordinary number of nasty villains. Latin America has Brazil’s Lula da Silva as a pan-continental hero and Africa is lucky enough to call Nelson Mandela a son of the soil.

But apart from Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Asia has been quite unsuccessful in producing modern-day heroes. And as for Pakistan, the less said about the lack of contemporary heroes, the better. So where are the men or women who can stir our imagination, capture our hopes and embody our dreams? Where are the people who can inspire and amuse, enrage and inflame — and make us want to be better versions of ourselves?

Everybody has their list of people they admire. My favourite teacher in school insisted that we should all have ‘scrapbooks’ containing pictures of the men and women we thought were special. They had to be living heroes, she said, not people from history books.

I spent many wonderful afternoons filling the books with pictures of the (mostly) men who dominated the global landscape as I was growing up. Looking at one of the albums recently, I saw faded newspaper pictures of an eclectic collection of presidents and prime ministers, astronauts, scientists and writers.

President Nasser of Egypt, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Algeria’s Boumedienne show up on several pages, undoubtedly indicating my interest in the Non-Aligned Movement. But there are also pictures of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Soviet Union’s Khrushchev, and once in a while, of Gen Ayub Khan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

There were two women who stood out: Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir — and yes, Jackie Kennedy but for completely different reasons.

I agree: I was confused. My list of icons certainly does not resonate with my son and daughter or any of their friends. Born after the end of the Cold War, into a globalised and interconnected world, both are able to travel and cross cultures without blinking an eyelid. And their standards when it comes to international and local heroes are much higher than their mother’s.

But my point is that there were many people in the 20th century who towered above the rest, inspiring interest in an impressionable girl sitting in faraway Karachi. It definitely does not appear to be the case today. As Europeans ponder over their future, it’s clear that one key problem is a lack of heroes — and heroines — to chart a new course for the continent.

Nostalgic EU-watchers get tears in their eyes when they talk of Jacques Delors, the much-respected former European Commission president, who ushered in the single market and the single European currency. The general consensus is that Delors, working alongside German chancellor Helmut Kohl and French president Francois Mitterrand, helped create an unparalleled golden ‘European Age’.

Contemporary European heroes are few and far between. Chancellor Angela Merkel has lost her gloss in recent months as she struggles to come up with a plan to salvage the euro.

For all their determination to liberate Libya from Qadhafi’s clutches, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron do not qualify as heroes. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi is a global laughing stock and Spain’s José Luis Zapatero is on his way out.

Vladimir Putin? Hardly. As he reinforces his grip over Russia, Putin — president or prime minister — is certainly making a place for himself in the history books but he is not winning many hearts and minds.

So what are we left with? I respect and admire both Recip Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia for turning around their countries’ destinies. But both men have significant flaws. Erdogan is suspected of having an
autocratic streak and Yudhoyono for being too ready to compromise. I like Manmohan Singh’s cool and quiet style and his success in transforming his country’s economic landscape. But his Indian critics appear determined to see the back of him.

No, I have not forgotten Barack Obama. America’s first black president is clearly not popular in Pakistan and has been unable to live up to his promises as regards the future of the Middle East. His numerous critics accuse him of being a cold, ‘egghead’
intellectual, unable to stand up to Israel and confused about Afghanistan.

I confess, however, that Obama remains high up on my list of ‘people to admire’. I still find it impressive that an African-American, whose middle name is Hussein, who thinks before he acts and knows the capitals of most nations, big and small, can
be elected as US president. I am urging my American friends to vote for him. And trying to convince my sceptical son and daughter that they should include Obama on whatever digital scrapbook they currently cut and paste their heroes into.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Brussels.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/15/looking-for-heroes.html

Power politics Irfan Husain

YOU may not win an election by providing regular electricity, but you can easily lose one by failing to.

At the last general elections in 2008, the ruling PML-Q got hammered because of its failure to add to the national grid despite rising demand. The resulting loadshedding was a principal cause of its rout.

I recall all too well the claim of the ex (and forgotten) prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, that he would export surplus electricity to India. Luckily, negotiations broke down over the price, otherwise we would no doubt have been sued for breach of contract.A friend in England recently asked me about the riots in Punjab over the extended power cuts that were running to 20 hours in some areas. When I got to the notion of ‘circular debt’ in my explanation, I could see his eyes glazing over. He just could not cope with the concept of the government not paying its electricity bills.

And this, of course, lies at the heart of the present crisis. If public and private power-generating companies aren’t paid in time, they can’t pay their bills for the oil and gas they need. And when suppliers aren’t paid, they are forced to cut deliveries. This reduces power availability, and the lights go out across the country. Simple cause and effect.

In a recent article in these pages (‘Is circular debt the real issue?’ By Salman Khalid and Kamal Munir), the authors have argued that the real problem goes back to 1994 when the traditional 70:30 hydro-thermal ratio was changed, and a very generous tariff policy for independent power producers (IPPs) announced. Khalid and Munir argue that we need to increase hydro-electrical capacity, and use indigenous coal to generate power.

There is considerable merit in this argument. However, these are long-term solutions: people sweltering in the dark are
unwilling to wait for a dysfunctional government to do what several of its predecessors have been unable to for decades.

Building dams takes a lot of time and money, neither of which we have. And coal from Thar is reportedly of poor quality with a low calorific content. In any case, it will be several years before it can actually be used for power generation.

Even though Khalid and Munir term circular debt a ‘red herring’, it is nevertheless devastating the economy and has serious social and political implications. In a recent article on Pakistan’s energy crisis, the Economist came up with a figure of $6bn as the amount outstanding in the shape of circular debt. It also cites an estimated loss of three to four per cent of GDP as the cost of the power shortages.

The bankruptcy of the government’s energy policy was laid bare when the finance minister recently announced the federal cabinet’s plan to tackle the crisis. This included the decision to shut down offices for two days a week, and to close markets at sunset. Neither step has been greeted with rapturous applause by either the provincial governments of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or the business community.

One little-reported aspect of the whole mess was highlighted in a series of cables sent by the previous US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson. Revealed by WikiLeaks in this newspaper, they focus pitilessly on the cumbersome bureaucracy that is choking off any possibility of improvement. Patterson wrote in April 2008:

“The unbundling of the power sector has resulted in the formation of 14 corporate entities; three power-generation companies, one national transmission and power despatch company (NTDC) and nine distribution companies. These companies are each working under independent boards of directors. Yet, Wapda still controls the finances of all these companies and in turn must get permission from the Ministry of Water and Power to make payments to each entity.

“…While many proposals exist for creating new power generation, turf wars for operational control among the ministries and agencies have seriously slowed or completely halted the approval processes. …Timely decisions were not taken to utilise all available resources and no agency or ministry has the lead in implementing the National Energy Strategy.”

The cables paint a dark but accurate picture of the fallout of this confusion and neglect:

“With massive blackouts affecting every region and every demographic, energy policy and shortages are daily front-page news. Not a single megawatt of electricity has been added to Pakistan’s national grid since 2000 despite record-breaking economic growth and population expansion. With economic and manufacturing capacity slumping due to power outages, unemployment is increasing while tempers and temperatures are rising.”

I know we hate hearing the truth, especially from the Americans, but I would urge readers to go through the WikiLeaks cables that can be accessed on this newspaper’s website.

The Economist has also commented on the confusion and corruption surrounding the energy shortfall: “…the government of Asif Zardari has done little as the energy crisis has grown, dithering over its strategy even as it cooks up new schemes for new power plants to enrich its cronies. In the process, the government has squandered billions of dollars.” Had a few of these billions been directed towards clearing the circular debt, people in Lahore and elsewhere would not have taken to the streets.

Apart from the issue of unpaid bills, the problem of electricity theft and transmission losses of an estimated 30 per cent of generated power has not yet been tackled seriously.

In a land blessed with fast-flowing rivers, there is no reason for us not to increase our hydel capacity to lower electricity cost.

But as we saw during the Kalabagh dam controversy, people are very sensitive about the location of water storage lakes:

nobody wants their backyards inundated. But more importantly, those downriver don’t want to see their share of scarce water
further reduced.

Thus, Sindh has good reason to fear a further depletion of the life-giving Indus if more dams are built upstream. Farmers have seen canals irrigating their fields dwindle over the years. There is a serious inter-provincial trust deficit that will have to be addressed.

Above all, we need clarity of purpose if we are to solve this perpetual problem. What we don’t need is bureaucratic confusion and foot-dragging. Even more importantly, we need fewer snouts in the public exchequer trough.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/15/power-politics-2.html

The making of the modern maulvi By Ajmal Kamal Tribune Opinion & Analysis

Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi opposed the Khilafat movement so fiercely that he was willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of opposing it. His Malfoozat have the following entry concerning the events. “During the peak days of the Tehreek-e-Khilafat, fiery people were in a state of great rage. There was fire all around. Matters came to such a pass that in addition to abuses, condemnations and sundry allegations, I began receiving letters containing death threats in case I did not join it. Hazrat Maulana Khalil Ahmad Sahib (RA), out of his extreme fondness for me, sent a special envoy to me with his advice that I should consider the dangerous times and if I decided to participate just a little bit only formally, there was room [in the religious sense]. I sent my reply that what he said certainly showed his affection, but the biggest threat was that of losing one’s life, for which I was prepared. However, I was neither willing to participate without being convinced [of the movement being correct] nor could I participate outwardly and remain aloof from the inside, as I considered it hypocrisy. So, behamdillah, I am alive and well before you today. These people have made it like a game for little girls: Either do as we do, or else get killed. During those days I went to the jungle as was my morning routine. On my way I met a Hindu Rajput old man, also from Thana Bhavan. The old-fashioned and elderly Hindus too have affection for me. He said, Maulvi-ji, do you have any idea what kind of things are being proposed for you? You should not come to the jungle alone like this. I said, Chaudhry, I know that, and I also know something that you do not know. He asked me what that was. I said, Without His order nobody can do anything. Despite being Hindu, he was so impressed by it that he exclaimed, Maulvi-ji, you may go wherever you feel like without any jokham (danger). For a man like you, jungle and mountains are no different from home.”

The leaders of the Khilafat movement, apart from collecting donations for the aid of the Ottoman Turks (which, according to reports, never made it to them), asked the Indian Muslims to quit their military or civilian jobs with the British colonial government because it was involved in a world war in which the Ottoman Khalifa had chosen to be in the opposite camp. Apart from producing a lot of sound and fury, such appeals remained largely ineffective, and the process of socio-economic change, initiated as a result of the policies of the colonial government continued. Thanvi, obviously, was opposed to any such adventure. Not only was his brother a district-level employee of the government, a large number of his mureeds and even khulifas, including his official biographer, were in the service of the government.

An offshoot of the same Khilafat movement was what is calledTehreek-e-Hijrat. Although Thanvi chooses to blame the Congress for it, fact is that it was the Deobandi maulvis belonging to Jamiat-ul Ulema-e-Hind (JUH) who, in their infinite wisdom, declared the subcontinent unfit for Muslims to live. They issued a religious fatwafor the shurafa Muslims, who could not undertake jihad against the British government for obvious reasons, to migrate to Afghanistan. The fatwa was obviously not directed at the vast majority of South Asian Muslims who were converts from lower castes and had no reason to feel any historical, ancestral or strategic affiliation with Afghanistan. Perhaps we could discern in this fantastic fatwa of the modern followers of Shah Waliullah an early version of what we today know as ‘strategic depth’, according to which it is presumed that the poor Afghans have a duty to let their land be used to enable ‘us’ to realise our regional, international, Pan-Islamic or whatever dream. Thousands upon thousands of starry-eyed Muslims sold their property and crossed the northwestern border into Afghanistan. The Afghans and their King Amanullah Khan, who could have no truck with the peculiar worldview of the Indian maulvis, felt that their country was unable to host so many uninvited guests, and so the borders were sealed to stop further migration. Those who had already landed there met a tragic fate, many of them even losing their lives.

When commenting on the ideas of Hijrat and quitting government jobs in his Malfoozat, Thanvis does not challenge the religious interpretation which provided the basis of the JUH fatwa. Curiously enough, he avoids even mentioning it. Instead he blames some ‘resolution’ (probably a Congress resolution) for it. He writes: “In the times of the Khilafat movement, a resolution was passed for Hijrat. Muslims stood up saying labbaik to it. Thousands of Muslims were made homeless as a result. Everyone knows its effect on the community (zaat) of Muslims. Then it was advised that they should quit government jobs. Those who had lost their minds (‘jin ki matain mari gayi theen’) left their jobs. The vacancies created by Muslims leaving their jobs were filled by Hindus. Many of them have still not found employment (‘ab tak jootian chatkhate phirte hain’). I receive letters in which people write that they had taken that stupid step then, and till now they are jobless and worried.”

Another tragic incident that took place as a result of Khilafat movement, which has been all but forgotten by our North-centric historians, was the armed rebellion of the Moplah Muslims in the southern region of Malabar in which around 10,000 people (including about 2,500 rebels) were killed, many more injured, and 20,000 deported to Kala Pani or the Andaman Islands. Thanvi comments on these events: “The nation (qaum) of Moplahs was destroyed by these leaders and the maulvis following them who lectured and flared them up. Their passions were aroused as they were of Arab descent. And then everyone knows what happened to them.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 15^th, 2011.

Source: http://tribune.com.pk/story/273974/the-making-of-the-modern-maulvi--ix/