What's new

Who wants peace, India or Pakistan?

Ayub Khan offered a pact for mutual defense to India in 1959 only to be rebuffed, read this.



Ayub tried again with Shashtri but to no avail.

Even if the treaty is signed would it have helped to prevent attacks from stateless terrorist from Pakistan?

They have shattered peace.
 
I have been educated in Pakistan, I do not know of any textbook where India bashing was a central part of it.

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect...columnists/nadeem-f-paracha-schools-out-ss-01

Pakistan is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and a multi-religious society. Non-Muslims are an integral part of it. Many of them have contributed to the country’s image, stature and well-being. However, according to the scholar and educationist, Professor A. H. Nayyar, the culture, the idiom and the manners of Muslim ‘majority-ism’ started gaining currency after 1971 and, in turn, got reflected in the educational process. A certain brand of Muslim sensibilities was imposed on all.


Another educationist, Dr Rubina Saigol, suggests that the attempt to mould the minds of the young through textbooks started in earnest in the early 1980s with the political agenda of Islamisation of the state. The syllabus was redesigned and textbooks were rewritten to create a monolithic image of Pakistan as an Islamic state and Pakistani citizens as Muslims only. According to Saigol, this clearly tells young non-Muslim students that they are excluded from national identity.


In an extensive study conducted by Nayyar and Ahmad Salim, in 2002, the following four themes emerged most strongly in history textbooks in Pakistan: that Pakistan is for Muslims alone; the Ideology of Pakistan is deeply interlinked with faith; one should never trust Hindus and India; and students should take the path of Jihad and martyrdom.


Scholars like Ayesha Jalal and Pervez Hoodbhoy have argued that the term ‘Ideology of Pakistan (Islam)’ is an after-thought; it was absent at the time of the creation of Pakistan. According to them Jinnah never used the words ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ (especially in respect to Islam). For fifteen years after the establishment of Pakistan, the Ideology of Pakistan was not known to anybody, until in 1962 some members of the Jamat-i-Islami used the words for the first time. The ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ had no historical basis in the Pakistan movement. It was coined much later by those political forces that needed it to sanctify their particular brand of politics — especially those Islamist parties which had earlier been against the creation of Pakistan. Even though in a report the famous Justice Munir strongly noted that Jinnah never uttered the words ‘Ideology of Pakistan,’ the curriculum documents insist that the students be taught the Ideology of Pakistan that was laid down by the Quaid.


No textbook has ever been able to cite a single reference to Jinnah using the term. On the contrary, Mr Jinnah’s speech to the Constituent Assembly on the 11th of September, 1947, completely defies the so-called ‘ideology’, as it has come to be presented in textbooks. It was during the Islamisation era of General Ziaul Haq that the use of the term was consolidated and made to appear in the curriculum documents. It was also firmly turned into an article of faith.


Nayyar, Jalal, Hoodbhoy and Saigol suggest that associated with the ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ is an essential component of hate against India and Hindus. Some time after Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 war, Indo-Pakistan history was replaced with Pakistan Studies, whose sole purpose was to define Pakistan as an Islamic state. Students were deprived of learning about pre-Islamic history of their region. Instead, history books now started with the Arab conquest of Sindh and swiftly jumped to the Muslim conquerors from Central Asia.


Nayyar and Salim have pointed out the following examples of the expression of hate in post-1971 history textbooks: that: Hindus have always been an enemy of Islam; Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols; Hindus declared Congress rule as the Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims; Hindus always desired to crush Muslims as a nation; Gandhi was as an extremist.


What’s more all history in these books is along religious lines while social, historical, material and economic causes are missing. After 1979, the themes of Jihad and martyrdom in textbooks become strong. In this period, history and social study books eulogise Jihad and martyrdom. According to Nayyar, in Pakistan the impression one gets from Pakistan Studies textbooks is that the students don’t learn history, but rather a carefully crafted collection of half-truths, even falsehoods. For example, in these books, Muhammad bin Qasim is declared the first Pakistani citizen. The story of the Arabs’ arrival in Sindh is accounted as the first move towards Pakistan with the glorious ascendancy of Islam. A widely taught history book insists that, ‘Although Pakistan was created in August 1947, present-day Pakistan has existed, as a more or less single entity, for centuries.’


Both Nayyar and Salim conclude that one should not be surprised at the irrational hate and confusion that ensconce Pakistani children after what they have learnt in school.
 
DAWN.COM | Editorial | Education and bigotry

Education and bigotry
By Zubeida Mustafa
Wednesday, 14 Jul, 2010
font-size small font-size largefont-sizeprint email share
A FRIEND who runs a school for children from modest-income families tells me that very often she has fathers coming to her with a request she found strange when she was first confronted with it.

They wanted to withdraw their sons from school for a year. When she probed into this unusual favour they sought, she was told that the boy was to be admitted to a madressah for a year.

The period the child was in the madressah was to be a gap year to enable the boy to become a hafiz-i-Quran (one who has memorised the holy book). Thereafter he would return to regular schooling. Being a hafiz was calculated to bring him many advantages in this world, if one lives in an Islamic Republic, and the next.

My friend’s observations on the child when he returned a year later are more intriguing. More than anything else, she found that the child’s mind was numbed and the initiative and interest he had shown in his studies previously was gone. His eyes had a blank look and for all practical purposes he was lost to her. She simply could not revive his erstwhile childhood buoyancy in spite of all her efforts.

If this can happen to a child in a madressah in the heart of Karachi where he would presumably be returning home to his family every evening, imagine what would be the state of mind of the 2.7 million children now enrolled in the 20,000 madressahs in the country. Many of them are removed from normal activities and community living. Being cut off from outside civilisation, these children are denied the warmth of a home environment for long stretches of time.

No change in the status, curricula and pedagogy of the madressahs seems to be on the cards. The Madressah Reform Committee, which was constituted last year as part of the National Education Policy 2009 (NEP) under the interior ministry to set the madressahs’ house in order and introduce reforms, has still not begun functioning on a regular basis. No meeting of this body has been held so far.

Many worry about the rigid discipline enforced in the madressahs and their obscurantist curricula and obsolete pedagogy. But as far as a doctrinaire approach goes, of equal concern is our mainstream education system which seeks to inculcate a mindset in our children that is hurting society irrevocably.

Studies have found that the psyche of a large number of youth enrolled in government schools is no better than what madressah education produces. It is, in fact, more dangerous because few people seem to be aware of the curriculum of hatred taught in our schools. For a very large number of children, ‘Hindu India’ is an enemy country and a war in Kashmir amounts to fighting jihad and so on.

The NEP 2009, which supposedly provides the framework for our education system today, defines Islamic education as being the duty of society and the state. According to the NEP “an integrated educational system is being developed in which Islamic values, principles, and objectives are reflected in the syllabi of all disciplines”. What is to be taught is spelt out quite comprehensively in the policy document. The aim is said to be to help children understand and apply the basic principles of Islam in their lives and develop society on those lines.

The NEP even notes in detail the contents of the Islamiat course that should, among other things, provide for instruction on the basic pillars of Islam which include “Risalat, prayers, fasting, zakat, pilgrimage, and jihad and their importance in daily social life”.

The entire tenor of the curricula ensures that students are subjected to a massive dose of indoctrination. If you look at the textbooks minus the title page it is difficult to differentiate one from the other. Be it an Islamiat book or books of English, Urdu or Pakistan Studies, each begins with chapters which are entirely religious in content or have a strong religious undertone. At one time even a biology book contained an ayat on jihad.

This has no doubt delighted the religious parties and efforts to change the tone somewhat were defeated and the announcement of NEP 2009 was delayed to enable the ministry of education to insert Chapter 4 on Islamic Education. This had been dropped from the original draft — the first time since the Zia days.

As religiosity takes over control of public thinking — at times giving rise to controversies rooted in different interpretations by different sects — voices are being raised asking why it cannot be left to the family to teach children about Islam as was done a few decades ago.

Moreover, this over-emphasis on religion has given rise to a majoritarian dictatorship that seeks to exclude the religious minorities from Pakistan’s society. What is shocking is that the state also patronises this approach, giving extra weight to a hafiz-i-Quran in admissions and making Islamic teaching compulsory in the teachers’ training curricula. The Punjab government went overboard on the last count and even issued orders to non-Muslim teachers to attend courses on Islam. Loud protests led to the withdrawal of this order.

Although the education policy pays lip service to a tolerant and peace-loving society, this ideal is negated by the approach adopted. By glorifying Muslims vis-à-vis non-Muslims a teacher can implicitly denigrate the latter. It also fosters the impression that Pakistan is mainly for Muslims when we know there are a number of religious minorities coexisting with Muslims enjoying — at least on paper — equal rights granted to them by the constitution.

After reading this, would it surprise anyone that a Jamaat-i-Islami leader should address only “the majority of the Muslims present in this meeting” at a gathering held last week at the PMA House on the Karachi situation? This invited an immediate intervention from renowned dancer/women’s rights activist Sheema Kermani, which won general approval. She pointed out to the speaker that Pakistan belonged to everyone and not all may necessarily be Muslims.

zubeidam2@gmail.com
 
DAWN - Cowasjee Corner; 09 November, 2003

Hindus and Muslims - II

By Ardeshir Cowasjee


When writing under such a title and on such a contentious issue one should not be surprised at the reactions prompted. Sixty-six e-mails from everywhere other than Pakistan poured in. Most were repetitious from Hindus in India and from Hindu expatriates in other countries. Excerpts from a couple of reactions from our Hindu friends are illustrative.

One strong reaction from a seemingly rather rabid and unforgiving Hindu from India:

"Your column is misleading in its primary emphasis that historians in independent India deliberately twist history to portray Muslims as congenitally ill-disposed to Hindus.

"There is incontrovertible evidence that Mahmud [Ghaznavi] attacked the famous Somnath temple 11 times and pillaged it at will. [Mohammad Ghori] was repulsed several times by Prithviraj Chauhan before he was betrayed and captured. [Ghori] dragged him in chains to Afghanistan, blinded and killed him. Prithviraj's grave is still in Kabul awaiting consecration by an Indian government - that will show enough pride in its heroes who had the courage to stand up to Muslim marauders.

"The slave dynasty that ruled Delhi was the first that directly targeted Hindus by levying the hated poll tax, jizia, for the first time. Most Muslim rulers of India, one exception being Akbar, subsequently levied Jizia.

"The Bahmanis who ruled in the Deccan ensured that all Hindu temples were razed to the ground after they overran the Vijaynagar Empire in 1565 AD. For over three centuries, there was no worship at the famous temple of Lord Venkateshwara in Tirupathi as Hindus wanted to protect it from Muslim plunder and desecration.

"The Tipu Sultan you speak about so proudly was instrumental in forcibly converting over 10,000 Hindus in the Mysore kingdom to Islam, besides taking several Hindu mistresses more out of spite rather than mere sexual gratification. And he made Urdu the so-called court language. Even I, then a resident of Mysore, had to study Urdu as my first language when I started school in 1947!! It was abolished only in 1950 when the princely state of Mysore became part of the Indian Republic.

"Only the deliberately blind would fail to see the desecration of Hindu temples in Varanasi where the tyrant Aurangzeb deliberately built the Gyan Vapi mosque on the half razed Lord Shiva's temple lest Hindus ever forget their subjugated status. Babar's general Mir Baqui razed Lord Rama's temple at Ayodhya and built the Babri mosque that was destroyed in December 1992 by Hindu fanatics. And in Mathura the very same Aurangzeb built a mosque next to Lord Krishna's birthplace. Every Hindu's blood boils when he sees these atrocities being 'preserved' till today. After independence it was at Sardar Patel's insistence (and notwithstanding Nehru's opposition) that the Somnath temple was rebuilt and reconsecrated. Would any other country have countenanced such assault on its heritage? And would attempts to redeem their pride, self-esteem and past glory be deemed revanchist and anti-secular?

"Nehru had nothing but contempt for Hindus. His 'secularist' pretensions meant irreligion at its most benign and constant search for 'Hindu fundamentalists' at its most virulent. He could get the Hindu Code Bill (which overturned the centuries old Manu Dharma Shastra which governed Hindu personal law) made into law despite opposition from conservative Hindu leaders like President Rajendra Prasad. This was indeed a very progressive move as it gave Hindu women several rights (widow remarriage, divorce rights, equality in inheritance). Yet the same Nehru balked at making any changes in Muslim and Christian personal laws as he was scared of inviting a backlash!! So even today Muslim personal laws in India are far more obscurantist (i.e. against the interests of women) than those prevailing in even Pakistan (triple talaq, no rights for divorced women, polygamy for men without any hindrance).

"Nehru and his successors in the Congress party were tolerant of Muslim communalism considering it no more than a minority trying to feel secure!! Today this very same Muslim communalism has taken the form of radical Islamization, harbouring of Pakistani terrorists and a defiant display of Islamic identity as separate from mainstream Indian identity that members of all other religions follow. No wonder this gave rise to Hindu counter-terrorism and being far fewer in numbers and blinded by fanaticism (where calm thinking is a casualty) Muslims in India invariably get the stick in every violent confrontation.

"Which textbook in which school in modern India portrays Muslims as violent, fanatical villains as you claim? Unless to you the chronicling of the atrocities perpetuated by Muslim rulers before the arrival of the British is itself taboo. People are not so naove that they do not know (or wish to know) the evil deeds of their forefathers.

"India has more Muslims than ... Pakistan. India is an open, secular, liberal democracy. Muslims, who were 3.5 crores in number in 1947, today number 13 crores. They are represented in all walks of life and are equal citizens along with Hindus. Only those Muslims who kept out of the mainstream, shunned modern education and stuck to orthodoxy remain poor and incapable of securing gainful employment (like those who enrol in your madrassahs). Muslims, who embraced modern education, did not wallow in self-pity nor pine for Pakistan, prospered. They knew that Pakistan was the greatest source of misery for them as it tried very hard to infiltrate them with ISI-trained agents and lured them to commit terrorist activities. Many impressionable Muslims fell prey to these **** designs and paid through their lives, having been shot by the police / army or lynched by Hindu fanatics.

"But what is Pakistan's record in treating the unfortunate Hindus who remained in Pakistan after 1947? From one crore then, their population is now about 10 lakhs. What happened? Answer - these hapless Hindus were brutally raped, murdered, forcibly converted and many driven out! The venom that is now poured about Hindus in your school textbooks is to instil among **** kids permanent hatred about India. To Pakistan, India is synonymous with Hindus - ignoring its 13 crore Muslims, 2.5 crore Christians. Lip sympathy is expressed in Pakistan for the so-called 'plight' of Indian Muslims.

"Unfortunately, Pakistan's designs are not working out as planned as the world, post-9/11, is a very different place. The financial support the Saudis have been giving Pakistan to build its nuclear bombs, its madrasshas and creating Frankensteins like Osama and the Taliban is now dwindling. The whole world categorizes all Muslims as terrorists, actual or potential - unjustly perhaps, but in times like these reason is the first casualty."

And one from a young Indian student in a foreign land :

"It'd be nice if we can hark back to the 1971-87 era when Kashmir was put on the back burner. The only practical solution to the Kashmir dispute appears to be the conversion of the LoC into [an] international border. The Indian political leadership... across all party lines is more or less prepared for this solution, but the Pak military wants the Kashmir Valley. A lot of Indians are against this idea because that would be tantamount to polarizing the people on communal lines. It would have an impact on the rest of India. The Hindus would blame the Muslims and God knows what would happen then.

"We in India are inclined to believe that all Pakistanis are Jihadis. If that notion is incorrect, it would be a good idea for quite a few of us non-Muslims to visit Pakistan and see for ourselves.

"But first, terrorism has to stop. Quite a few Pakistanis are convinced that Kashmir would be in the headlines only through terrorism. Maybe that's true, but at what cost? I still can't understand how people can kill just to gain a place in heaven and courting death in the process. Terrorism hasn't been able to retard India's progress; in fact, in the last 10 years we have grown as never before. It's Pakistan that's feeling the pinch and keeps needing begging bowls and bailout packages.


"I'm afraid I'm only a student and not a policymaker, not even a media person. But I know that there are quite a few students like me spread over all of India... who aren't swallowed by anti-Pakistan sentiment. That's because of our liberal education policy where rational thinking is encouraged. I'd like to know how many Pakistani students share similar ideas."

A good sign - the Indian youngsters are more tolerant, they have more hope than have their parents' generation. And on the count of a 'liberal education policy', it would seem that India is ahead of us.
 
Last edited:
Learning hate through history -DAWN - Books and Authors; February 19, 2002

Learning hate through history



By Krishna Kumar


Krishna Kumar explains how the history texts in India and Pakistan are selective in their treatment of various events for narrow ideological and cultural reasons

During a discussion on this study at a workshop of history teachers of Central schools from all over India, I was asked: “Why should history be taught from a perspective of peace? Why shouldn’t it reflect the reality?” The question had arisen from the argument that the manner in which the freedom struggle is presented to children helps sustain the hostility one sees between India and Pakistan. The larger argument was that the paucity of communication noticeable between the two countries is at least partly related to the rival perceptions of the past that schools promote among the young.

In particular, the events leading to the Partition are represented in school texts used in the two countries in ways that do not encourage children to look at the past as past. Rather, the past becomes a resource for keeping misgivings and enmity alive. Instead of imparting respect for the past and a sense of curiosity about it, the teaching of history fosters a perpetual quarrel with the past in both countries.

In India, the narrative of freedom is structured around the tension between ‘secular’ and ‘communal’ forces. Since the tension is directly relevant to defining India’s national identity and its distinctiveness with regard to Pakistan, an account of the nationalist movement structured around this tension necessarily encourages a disapproving and suspicious view of Pakistan. On the other hand, school textbooks used in Pakistan present the political narrative of freedom in a cultural wrapping designed specifically to buttress the claim that the urge to create Pakistan arose out of certain irreconcilable differences between Hindus and Muslims.

It seemed an awkward question at the time, but I now find in it an appropriate concluding thought for this book. The teacher who asked the question apparently regards history as a settled matter, something that deals with facts which cannot be disputed. The conceptual ground on which this common perception of history is based is that the past is past — it cannot be changed. This view of the past carries the stamp of everyday wisdom which suggests that, compared to the present and the future, the past is fully ‘known’ to us. Indeed, this perception extends to regarding the past itself as a source of wisdom — similar to the sagacity that comes with personal experience.

Someone who disregards the past or does not show the willingness to learn from it is considered to be immature or irresponsible. Most of the time, the argument is made in reverse; that is, when someone meets an unpleasant situation, people remind him that he would have done better if he had cared to keep the past in mind. This kind of commonsense is apparently based on a romantic view of memory as a reliable record of experience. Since memory is intertwined with the notion of one’s own self, and has a powerful role in giving an identity to individuals as well as to collectivities, it seeks validity entirely from itself in preference to external sources like the memory of others and documentary evidence. For that reason, memory of the past is not about reality; rather it represents a reconstruction of past reality in ways that nourish the self.

This is not to deny the role that memory can play in enhancing our understanding of history. Recollection as a means of reconstructing the past has enabled recent historiography to step into several erstwhile neglected areas of study. Subaltern and women’s history, and the study of traumatic events like the Holocaust are examples of this development. Urvashi Butalia’s book, The other side of silence, is a stunning instance of the potential that individual memories offer us for constructing a holistic view of extraordinary political happenings, such as the Partition.

However, a serious problem arises if memory and history are regarded as one and if the everyday wisdom I have discussed above in the context of memory is directly applied to history. As Bentley says, “history is precisely non-memory, a systematic discipline which seeks to rely on mechanisms and controls quite different from those which memory triggers and often intended to give memory the lie”. The teacher who asked the question about history and peace was using her memory — which perhaps millions of others share — of Indo-Pakistan relations as evidence of her knowledge of ‘reality’.

Unless we challenge this memory-based view of history, we cannot hope to save history as a school subject from getting trivialized. Memory may be a useful resource, among others, to widen the scope of history teaching, but the idea that historical happenings can be explored and interpreted objectively must receive priority.

There may be limits to objectivity in the social sciences, but it is a value without which it is very difficult to define learning. As it is, the social sciences have a weak status in the school curriculum. The expectation that the teaching of history would benefit from its incorporation in ‘social studies’ has remained unfulfilled in both India and Pakistan. The new subject was supposed to build bridges between history, geography, civics and economics. What it did, instead was to burden students and teachers with the compartmentalized syllabi of its different components masked under a single label. The crowding of facts and information resulting from this kind of mechanical organization of social studies precipitated the dilution of the roles that its discrete components might serve in children’s intellectual development.

In Pakistan, ‘social studies’ was further diluted and distorted by the introduction of ‘Pakistan Studies’. In India, the teaching of social sciences at school has come under assault from conservative critics who want a Hindu-revivalist line to replace the pluralistic vision of society reflected so far in curriculum policy and textbooks. These elements have used the familiar cover of ‘value orientation’ for twisting the content of syllabi and textbooks in favour of a narrow, religious-cultural representation of Indian society and its past. In the context of pedagogy, as Sarangapani has explained, this ascendant conservative approach is as deeply indifferent to children and their ways of constructing knowledge as the earlier approach was, if not more so.

Truncated debate
The public debate on school history has remained exclusively focused on its potential as a means of political socialization. Though the debate has served as a platform to articulate larger issues which have political and cultural significance, it has also contributed to the neglect of history as a school subject, particularly in terms of the pedagogical and examination practices associated with the teaching of history. It has encouraged text writers and teachers to overlook the pedagogic problems that arise out of the traditional role of writers of history texts as magicians who show students what all happened in the past but do not reveal the basis of their knowledge.

In India, the debate on history textbooks has been focused on the distinction between secular and communal perspectives, and in Pakistan, on the meaning of the ‘Pakistan ideology’. In neither country has the debate ever extended to questioning the quality of history teaching in schools. New Indian textbooks indicate that the writing of history — and consequently its teaching — may now become even more indifferent to children’s learning by absorbing the influence of the quiz culture associated with television.

The earlier trend of concentrating on ‘facts’ and ignoring evidence and argument takes a grimmer, extreme form in some of the recent textbooks published by provincial bodies. They follow the quiz approach which encourages children to regard the verbalization of the ‘right’ answer as the only competence that matters. The new ‘national curriculum framework’ gives us reason to suspect that the next generation of NCERT textbooks may also reflect this trivialization of history — that this may be the route that the politics of history now takes in order to let ideological indoctrination become the purpose of discussing the past.

In Pakistan, the textbooks used in state-run schools have been of this kind for well over a generation, and there is no sign yet to suggest that a serious rethinking is underway.

Instead of waiting
There is little reason to expect that the state policy in either India or Pakistan will remedy this situation in the foreseeable future. The zest for educational reform has never been high in either country; it is currently in a particularly low phase. In place of progressive reform, we are confronted in India with the prospect of retrograde measures like ‘value education’ — a device to mask the move to establish a wider scope for the inclusion of religious and mythological content. In Pakistan, the 1998 policy, with its thrust on the transmission of ideology, has little chance of being challenged or reversed in the immediate future.

In both countries, the atmosphere of political uncertainty is also likely to encourage the use of educational policy as a battleground for ideological debates. Aims and objectives will be hotly contested in these debates, while real schools, textbooks and teachers’ training programmes remain starved of attention. We can hardly imagine that the potential uses of history for promoting a sense of wonder and curiosity about the past and respect for it will receive official attention in either India or Pakistan, even if the two governments agree to engage in some sort of dialogue for achieving military peace.

Innovative enterprise, however, need not wait for systemic reform. A handful of schools in India and Pakistan can come together to design and offer a shared course of study of the modern period, including the freedom struggle. To begin with, such a course should provide for sufficient time to explore selected events in detail, training the students to assemble a scenario from a chosen vantage point. An exchange of students between participating schools could ensure that the process of scenario-building attempts to accommodate the rival national perspectives.

Similarly, an exchange of project reports prepared by Indian and Pakistani students would allow them to make sense of divergent perspectives. Use of biography, literature, and journalism to expand the scope of interpretation given in existing historical narratives must form a strong feature of this project. One of the objectives would be to encourage young students to probe controversies among historians by looking at the evidence cited or ignored by them. The controversy surrounding the 1857 revolt and the contested implications of the Nehru Report can serve as useful topics in this regard.

Application of analytical techniques and judgment is now a part of the curriculum for secondary classes in countries where a serious effort to reform the teaching of history has been made over the recent years. In Germany, for instance, secondary level students are required to probe the Holocaust by analyzing political, economic and cultural factors with the help of relevant material, including primary sources. In England, recent reforms in curricular practices have opened up the teaching of history to multiple forms of student inquiry, such as argument-building, appreciating ambiguity, and weighing rival judgements. Such ideas may look fanciful to us, given the poor state of history teaching we are used to in our schools, but the potential they have for enlivening the study of Indo-Pakistan history can hardly be denied.

Apart from bringing together teachers and students of the two countries, the project envisaged here might create an opportunity for professional historians of India and Pakistan to examine school textbooks in joint sessions. If that happens, it will inaugurate the lifting of what is arguably one of the thickest iron curtains in the present-day world, so far as the flow of ideas and scholarship is concerned. Popular music and cinema have served as a tunnel under this curtain, but pleasant tunes and faces cannot by themselves establish the basis for a peaceful and mature relationship.

Education has a vital role to play in helping India and Pakistan overcome the chronically unsettling effects of their interlocked frames of perception discussed in the first part of this book. The teaching of no other school subject has the same importance in this context as the teaching of history. Inculcating a respect for the past and the curiosity to make sense of it is a major educational challenge for societies where denial of the past and the urge to change it have enjoyed popular validity.

Excerpts from
Prejudice and pride: school histories of the freedom struggle in India and Pakistan
By Krishna Kumar
Penguin Books, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017, India
Website: Indian Book Shop and Online Bookstore, Buy Books Online - Penguin Books India
ISBN 0-67-004913-1
274pp. Indian Rs395
 
Even if the treaty is signed would it have helped to prevent attacks from stateless terrorist from Pakistan?

They have shattered peace.

Yea, India should not have armed and supported Mukti Bahini.

I do not know if you are dim or not but clearly if this treaty was signed, India and Pakistan would have had ties normalized.

This would have pre dated all other events but Nehru destroyed any chance of peace.
 
I did state that no articles will change my opinion as it has formed yours. Why do you not come to Pakistan yourself and find these textbooks. I said before that copy pasting articles would not be necessary as many Indians have done this before. Simialrly I can get such articles about India too.

Shows your mentality well when all follow the same pattern without knowing the facts.
 
^ FYI all these are from dawn.com a respected Pakistani news agency. Purposely avoided pasting anything that you can claim as non-neutral. It is pure fact. You may not have experienced it, but going by the number of young Pakistanis willing to fling themselves across the lc for a chance at shahaadat...
 
^ FYI all these are from dawn.com a respected Pakistani news agency.

T-Faz is right, come to Pakistan. Pakistanis do not have time to write HATEFUL speeches in our textbooks against India. They rather prefer to write about "1857 War of Independance". :confused:

Only thing they mentioned in their textbook about India is 1965 war against India and that too very briefly only on 1 or 2 pages praising Major Raja Aziz Bhatti Shaheed and few other martyrs like how they saved their motherland. The core of that speech is not about India the brave soldiers of Pakistan
 
^ FYI all these are from dawn.com a respected Pakistani news agency. Purposely avoided pasting anything that you can claim as non-neutral. It is pure fact. You may not have experienced it, but going by the number of young Pakistanis willing to fling themselves across the lc for a chance at shahaadat...

If what you say was the case then the amount of young Pakistani's (170mil pop.) flinging across the LoC would be so monumental that India would be in constant state of panic.

Just becuase a handful have done so, it does not mean that the whole nation is of the same view. This again shows how you have been moulded to beleive this as you have applied it to all.

Stereotype much.

Also why selectively agree with a source, you should take all that is written in it to be hard fact.
 
Ayub Khan offered a pact for mutual defense to India in 1959 only to be rebuffed, read this.
Ayub Khan had already made an effort to test this theory by offering in 1959 to join Nehru in a pact for the mutual defense of the subcontinent. Cracked Nehru, "Defense against whom?" and turned down the treaty.
Nehru's query remained unanswered for long. Why don't you attempt to answer the question.

Defense against whom?

Ayub tried again with Shashtri but to no avail.
Ayub Khan had even less success with Nehru's successor, Shastri. After a private meeting in Karachi, Ayub said that Shastri was willing to compromise on Kashmir but felt he was not strong enough to convince his own government. Ayub added, "I told him that, as Prime Minister of India, it was his duty to build public opinion in favor of a satisfactory solution. He might be criticized by some elements, but the bulk of the Indian people would thank him for relieving them of a great anxiety" Ayub concluded that it was impossible to reach an agreement with the ambivalent and indirect Shastri..
We all know what happened next. Don't we?
 
Back
Top Bottom