QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Fame vaporises, money goes with the wind, and all that's left is character"
-- O.J. Simpson American football player

The Week In Review

Obama is miles ahead of McCain in the polls

-- PARAMANAND SOOBARAH

And the McCain camp is very angry, and has engaged in a virulent campaign of mud-slinging. Even old McCain himself has joined in. A very sad spectacle. But Barack Obama is floating high above all this.

Immediately on his return from his royal tour of the Middle East and Europe, he got back to work. He looked a little tired when, as first assignment on getting home, he had to address an important gathering of coloured journalists. In the first question he got, the journalist, a “native” American – a Red Indian for our younger readers but without the feathers around his head – reminded him that the Australians had recently apologized to the Aborigines for the ill-treatment that had been inflicted on them by the white settlers; they had been followed by the Canadians who took the same courageous step towards the Indians they had ill-treated in the past, and so also had the New Zealanders done towards the Maoris. The questioner wanted to know whether a President Obama would follow a similar course towards the native Indian community of America.

Somehow one felt that this was an unfair question to Barack Obama. It would have been more proper to address it to a representative of the community that had “genocided” the native Americans, like Senator John McCain or, better still, President George W. Bush. But Barack Obama always has an answer. There are many communities in America who have been treated unfairly, he said, meaning thereby that his own community – the African-American community -- had also been very unfairly dealt with, and it was important that the question of some sort of reparation towards them all be considered. But we must leave Obama here, and attend to more important matters for us.

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World Trade Organisation: The Doha Round breaks down

Countries like ours, including some very poor ones, cannot export their produce to important world markets because of tariff restrictions. We, in the poorer countries, impose duty on imported goods to raise money for running government services, but the rich countries do it to prevent cheap goods from entering their markets because these are likely to outsell the same goods made locally and sold at higher prices. As far as agricultural goods are concerned, which with investment can be produced very efficiently in the poorer countries, the rich countries prefer to pay huge subsidies to their own farmers to produce those items. This is one of the ‘benefits’ of democracy: the farmers are politically strong; they vote the governments into power and dictate their policy choices to them. So the United States and Europe, the potential markets for the agricultural goods of the poor countries, both have severe tariff restrictions to the entry of agricultural goods into their countries. But at the same time, these major trading blocks want other countries to allow access to their goods free of duty.

Talks have been going on since the end of the War, first in the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and later the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to get all countries to reduce their tariffs – something that will benefit consumers around the world. One can recall the Kennedy Round, the Uruguay Round, the Tokyo Round and latterly the Doha Round. Until this last round there was always some measure of incremental success, but not this time. The world is no longer as foolish and as weak as it used to be. Gone are the days when big fellow used to say “You are a bastard” and the little fellow would reply “Yes, Sir, thank you, Sir”. Other countries are rising and saying “No, Sir, not on my dead body.” Countries like China, India, Brazil and Argentina are no longer prepared to be pushed around. Therefore the present regime of tariffs remain. But both India and America, while blaming each other for the breakdown of the negotiations, are saying that a lot of progress has been made on which to build during future negotiations.

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Turkey: The current AK government narrowly escapes being dismissed

We reported two weeks ago that the secularists had brought a case against the government of the AK party on the grounds that its principles are supposedly not in accordance with secularism. The motion was rejected by just one vote, showing that the governing party came very near being banned. And it has not escaped scot-free: the Court’s ruling deprives it of half the financial assistance it received last time.

The whole litigation arose because the AK party had liberalised the wearing of veils and fez caps in schools and universities. That action was overturned by the Supreme Court. This discussion looks strange and surprising to us in the “free” world. We shall never put up with any ruling from any body that deprives us of the right to wear the little symbols associated with our cultures and our religions – like the sari, the shalwar-kamiz, the bindi, the veil, the ring and any other ornaments usually worn by Mauritians. It is absolutely idiotic to assume that one can only be truly secular if one follows the ways of European culture and European fashion.

Turkey is a very important country for us all, for Turkey is the home of Sufism. While this may not often be stated openly, most Indian Muslims, and I would imagine Mauritian Muslims, are Sufis to some degree or other. Our Mohammed Rafis, Ali Akbar Khans, Amjad Ali Khans and Bismillah Khans are all Sufis. There have existed people in India of this brand of Islam who are regarded as Saints by both Muslims and Hindus. The Sufi movement developed in India in parallel with the Bhakti movement. We should all pray for wisdom to prevail in Turkey.

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The Middle East: Suicidal bombings in Iraq

While everybody have been congratulating themselves that the so-called surge has worked, it is the number of people killed in suicide bombings that is surging. And now a new fashion has become firmly entrenched: the suicide bombers are all female. The last time this happened, it was reported that the innocent ladies “employed” were mentally deficient, and even so their bombs had been remotely triggered. We don’t know the details this time, but we don’t have to learn anything about the evil-mindedness of those who use such creatures for their foul deeds.

For how long will the world, particularly the Muslim world, put up with such abominable and despicable crimes? We are still waiting to hear one word about the one hundred and sixty thousand Algerian Muslims who had their throats slit by the activists of Islamic Salvation Front.

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South Asia: The Plot thickens

Bombings in Afghanistan, bombings in Pakistan, serial bombings in India – “successful” in Bangalore and Ahmedabad (including in hospitals), misfiring in Surat. In far away Washington, the Bush administration, in its sustained war against terror, has decided to provide Pakistan with F16s: that is what the Israelis use to fight Hamas terrorists, the Pakistanis have pointed out, and the Americans had to capitulate. Well, if the “freedom fighters” sent across the border do not fully succeed in demoralising the bloody Indians, the F16s will come in handy, won’t they?

But George W. Bush is not too sure. He has other things to worry about. His intelligence services have provided him with proof incontrovertible that the ISI is collaborating with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Pakistan Prime Minister, currently in Washington, denies it: what else can he do, the poor fellow? Should he even remotely give the impression of conceding the point, he will lose his job – and perhaps his life. Before leaving for Washington, he tried to bring the ISI under parliamentary control, but this was opposed by President Musharraf and General Kayani, the head of the Armed Forces, This shows that the real power does not lie with the people but with the Army. Public protests have been increasing in intensity in support of the judges who have yet to be reinstated. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is also calling for that. Should the Prime Minister agree with Nawaz Sharif about the the judges, he will lose his job – for his own polititical boss, Asif Zardari aka Mr Ten Per Cent, will sack him. What on earth is he to do?

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National Matters
The Communal Set-up in the Constitution – Clearing up some misunderstandings

My brief visit to the subject of the labelling of the our communities in the Constitution two issues ago has given rise to some protests – two so far, from members of the Chinese community. Surprisingly, and even regrettably, none have come so far from the community to whom it was addressed, namely our Creole compatriots. But the comments received to date permit me to revisit the subject and make some clarifications.

In his letter which appeared in the last issue, the distinguished President of the Fook Look Soo Senior Citizen Association had the following sentence: “Why should Sino-Mauritians be marginalized and be called “Creoles and other Christians” or “Chinese Christians”? It sounds crazy.” I couldn’t agree more, and I have not, repeat not, called for such a stupid thing. If he would kindly care to read my paragraph again, he will find that there was not the shadow of an attempt to bring about any change to the name of the Chinese community. The only change that I suggested was for the name “General Population” to be replaced by “Christians”, and then went on to address a problem that arises on making that change.

My purpose was to suggest to our Creole compatriots to agree to forming part of a wider Christian community, and agreeing to having the name of the community now referred to as the “General Population” into that of “Christians”. This community of ‘Christians’ would then be comprised of Creoles, the Coloured Community, Franco-Mauritians and Indo-Christians but would not include Chinese Christians.

It is a fact that many, if not most, members of the Chinese community are Christians but also lead a Chinese way of life. If one then wants to preserve the separate integrities of the Chinese community and the General Population, the mathematically exact way of restyling the General Population after taking religion into account would have to be “Christians other than Chinese Christians” or, in simpler language, “Christians minus Chinese Christians”. This is a bit of a complication, and that was what I wanted to avoid with the suggestion that the ‘General Population’ community (as it now stands) to be restyled simply “Christians”. For electoral purposes a definition would of course be required to clarify that Chinese Christians should be regarded as members of the Chinese community and not of the restyled “Christians” community. This would be a very simple task for our able draftsmen in the Solicitor-General’s department.

Some side issues which I did not at all have in mind have regrettably crept into the debate and which I feel I must address. To begin with, there was the choice by the founding fathers of religion to define the component segments of the population. For many reasons I would not wish to question that wisdom. The founding fathers were faced with the formidable task of bringing peace to a divided nation. The sixties, when they were engaged in framing the Constitution, were a particularly difficult decade in our history – that was the decade of “malbar pas oulé” and of rioting and strife between two major communities shortly before Independence, to the extent that peacekeeping troops had to be flown in by the British administration. We must take our hats off to the founding fathers that in spite of all these seemingly insurmountable problems they succeeded in keeping the rainbow nation together.

If not religion, what else? Political affiliation, for instance? That would certainly be one way, but we all know how unstable that would be as a criterion. The ultra-Bolshevists of the sixties and seventies who were going to wind up private ownership of the sugar estates are today the most right-wing capitalists, ramming ‘mari-deals” down our throats. What about ethnicity as a criterion? If you stop to think about it for a moment, that is also out of the question. Many members of two major segments population, coming as they do from the same Subcontinent, share their genetics but belong to different religions. And in one case the religion is shared, but the genetics aren’t. Some of our compatriots who fled to South Africa in the sixties, that is to say during the heyday of apartheid, were surprised to find that they were ‘denounced’ to the authorities by other former compatriots who had equally sought refuge there and who contested their ‘whiteness’. This also eliminates one other conceivable criteria for population division, namely skin colour. – some would indeed have liked to cut the nation up into segments that are white, black, brown, yellow and multiple shades of grey. But this would be a most abhorrent practice ethically, even if it were not accompanied by the discriminatory practices that went with such a division in apartheid South Africa.

Religion remains the least worst criterion that would be acceptable to most, and that was what was chosen by the founding fathers, more rightly than wrongly in my view. Only last week, Sydney Selvon pointed out in his article “Les Mauriciens et Dieu” in this paper that only four tenths of one per cent had declared they had no religion in the last census, and he went on to underline the great reverence that most Mauritians had for their religions. Those intellectuals who contest the reference to religion for describing the component groups of the nation will have to wait a very long time before the rest of us reach their stage of advancement.

In their desire to preserve the unity of the Chinese community which was a small well-defined group but not all of whom were Christians, the founding fathers were unable to call the Christian community by their name. The formula “General Population” provided a convenient way out, and this group was meant to include all Christians other than Chinese Christians, namely the Franco-Mauritians, the Coloured Community, the Creoles, and the Indo-Christians. In their desire to solve one problem they may have created another. The objection of members of the Creole community to being referred to as the General Population is understandable. Internationally it makes no sense at all; it is even a piece of outright nonsense. Why should I be described as “general”, which normally means “common”. Are others in any way more “special”? In today’s world I would regard the epithet as offensive and derogatory and attacking my standing in the world and my dignity.

However by changing the name of the General Population into “Creoles” or “Creoles and other Christians” (more accurately it should be “Creoles and other non-Chinese Christians), we would be introducing ethnicity into the Constitution in a big way. That privilege should remain with the Sino-Mauritian community only, a privilege that they have always had and which was consecrated at the birth of the nation. Any further reference to ethnicity will lead to undesirable fragmentation of the nation; if the experts in scientific communalism get to work, our nation will be blown to smithereens. Agreeing to the demands of Father Grégoire will be the thin edge of the wedge. I earnestly hope that the Prime Minister will not to succumb to political expediency and start the infamy of introducing ethnicity into our Constitution. If any component of the Christian community should decide it absolutely needs a distinctive name for itself, the precedents of separate cultural and linguistic centres are already there.

In our globalised world, the names of some of the segments of the General Population may require addressing. We have seen how in the Hindu community, some segments have adopted new names, now well-established, which were not there when our ancestors were still in India. We have to move with the times. In America, black people used to be referred to by the N-word up to the seventies, but the civil rights movement has seen that word out of the vocabulary. Now everybody refers to them as African Americans. Would members of the Creole community agree to consider themselves as Afro-Mauritians? Of course there is a well-defined Creole community in the Caribbean, but could it be better to join the Obama crowd in America and go back to the root of the Mother Continent instead of sticking to a name that once carried connotations of slavery? Similarly would members of the Coloured Community agree to some name which does carry any hint of colour with it?

In West Africa they would be called “Métisses”, but perhaps the most important point about that community is that it also claims some link with European culture; would the name “Euro-Mauritians” be too far-fetched for them?

Another issue that is repeatedly coming up is the relative importance of the contribution of the various communities to national development. That is a debate I would not myself wish to be drawn into. The settlers from France, the slaves from Africa and the coolies from India and China, and later some traders from Gujarat have all contributed to the best of their ability to make this country what it is. The blood, sweat and tears of the slaves who toiled in chains under the lashes of their owners and hardships and the angst of the coolies who tilled the land on the most meagre means of subsistence and under the harshest living conditions were in my view no less holy and indispensable for the national goal as the accounting abilities of the “captans” who kept the shops aided by the ant-like industriousness of their entire families or the administrative abilities of the “grand missiés” who owned and managed the estates and the factories. To put any one group above the others would be to decry the others, and that would in my view be most disrespectful of the sacrifices of the dead. In an arch all stones are equally important.

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The La Gaulette SSS Saga

We have heard a lot about this school in the last few weeks. Apparently the Ministry of Education wishes to rationalise its resources and adapt the school to the needs it perceives. But the people in the neighbouring villages, backed or perhaps urged on by the mainstream media and by politicians of the opposition, violently oppose the move. Mr Dharam Gokhool, the Minister of Education, has got himself into a fine mess. That comes from his having moved some way towards the wishes of those people who think that everything has to come by fun and play and that hard work is only for the others. They will talk to you about Howard Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences. For those who may be interested in the matter, Gardner now talks of only five “minds” – the disciplinary mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind. It is not only the children of La Gaulette SSS who must understand those “minds”, but also their parents, and more importantly, the chattering folk in the mainstream press and the political class.

I am sure that a former Minister of Education, Sir Kher Jagatsingh, would have started off any post-primary educational institution in La Gaulette as Junior Secondary School, perhaps associated with a Junior Technical School. The super-intelligent reformists started it out as a State Secondary School right away – without having given any thought to its staffing and even its pupilling. To them, good education comes from large concrete buildings and nice playgrounds. Teachers are like beasts without a will of their own and can be made to split themselves and go anywhere, and turn any child into graduates regardless of their entry abilities. They are the same crowd who thought that communism was the only way to run a country.

It is a good thing that Minister Dharam Gokhool, who started out as one of them, saw the light and left them. He must now do with what he finds right and reasonable in the circumstances and not what ideology dictates. If some children of La Gaulette have to be bussed to some other schools for their education, that is what he should do. If he is to heed what the protestors are saying, he should be building a University at Gaulette and at other places of interest to them.

What the Minister is doing is rationalising resources. It is important in my view for resources to be rationalised. For instance, I have myself called for science laboratories to be set up on a regional basis, and for pupils to be bussed between their schools and those regional labs for their practical work. Even football grounds could be so regionalised. There was a time when, for instance, the RCC had its own standard-size football ground, but after Independence it was found that this piece of largesse could not be sustained, and it has been built upon.

It is a wasteful idea to build expensive facilities that are required only occasionally at every school. The Ministry should get on with its business of rationalisation. Even though some of the things being done with taxpayers’ money by the Ministry of Finance looks like a game of ducks and drakes, it is essential for other ministries to tighten their belts. The present craze of throwing money out of the window (and opposing counter-inflation measures in the bargain) is not sustainable.

Today travel to school is very easy and even free. The whole country is well served by public transport, and there is usually a bus-stop not far away from where one lives. Travelling to another locality for one’s education is not something new. I used to live in Palma and walk everyday more than two miles every morning and every afternoon to and from the Railway Station at Quatre Bornes to catch the train for Curepipe Road in order to attend the RCC. All other children in my family and my village did the same. Some actually, like the Rughoopuths, the Jeewoonarains, and the Jugnauths even had a mile more to walk – I still remember all those boys and girls with their bags on their backs sweating away in the summer sun.

This does not mean that most of us have not done well. It is true that one of my schoolmates of Palma ended up as a garbage collector in Quatre Bornes, but then another made his way up to become Prime Minister and even President. Some even say that he has been the Lee Kuan Yew of Mauritius but there are two views about that. Sad to say, my classmates Ti-Jean and Ti-Jules, who lived by the La Ferme canal in Palma, never made it to the Sixth Standard. Having grown up and considered the matter, I think I know why.

On getting back home from school in Palma, I used to do chores for my mother, like collecting firewood for the evening cooking and grass for our goat; I must say it was great fun. In the dreaded evenings, my father would be back and it would be lessons and books – reading aloud from my schoolbooks and reciting my Bernon and the multiplication tables, and so on. And then on some days we had to go to the Baitka to learn Hindi, beyond what was being taught at school by Mr Hurrylall Rughooputh, our Hindi teacher. There was a movement in the country urging all parents to look after the education of their children; this movement was led by Pandit Bissoondoyal and the Arya Samaj; the formation of baikas in every village owes a lot to them. There were also some highly motivated individuals who thought that the education of all children was their responsibility. I have already mentioned the assistance I received from the Banymandhubs and the Padyas in my education for free. But they were not the only people devoted to the education and uplift of others. Take for instance Mr Rughooputh, the Hindi teacher I have mentioned above.

In addition to teaching at School, which in my days was only part-time but which became fulltime later, Mr Rughooputh would also turn his own house into a school in the afternoons – a little in the manner of present day private tutors, with the big difference that he charged no fees; on the contrary he thanked parents for sending their children, and would harass those that did not. In addition his wife would provide tea and cakes or sandwiches to all attendees. He used to buy books for those who could not afford it from his own pocket; some parents would later pay him back and others could only thank him. If he saw children loitering around shops, he would chase them and take the matter up with their parents. It is reported that even at school, when other teachers saw him approaching, they would immediately “get busy” – even though he was just another teacher like them. Goldsmith’s “Village Schoolmaster” pales in comparison with him in so far as the contribution to his village is concerned.

My friends Ti-Jean and Ti-Jules had no such luck. On getting back home from school they were left to their own devices. All the education they got from their parents and their communal elders was that Jesus had died on the cross to save their souls. One cannot go far with just that. I doubt whether the situation has much improved since those days in their community.

Some months ago I read a report in the News on Sunday of a conference on education. One of the speakers, a distinguished member of the Christian community, painted a picture of what obtains in today’s families of the likes of Ti-Jean and Ti-Jules that was far from flattering, and nowhere near conducive to the moral and educational development of the child. There is no Bissoondoyal and no Arya Samaj in the community urging parents to look after the developmental needs of their children. Only the naive can believe that education is only had from School. Four-fifths of personality development comes from the home environment, much of it from the mother. Mr Gokhool can only supply the remaining fifth, and that only if he is allowed to get on with his work without being hounded on all sides as he is being presently. Those who are shouting so loud ought to think of providing a Bissoondoyal-like movement, or an Arya Samaj, or even just small Hurrylall Rughooputh to their communities, in addition to, or better still instead of, rousing the villagers against the MOE plans.

Stick to your guns, Dharam!