A Discovery in India, Outlook

James Tooley, The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, Penguin; 302 pages; Rs 499

I first met James Tooley on a cold morning in Delhi. I was drawn to him by his sincerity, his passion, and most of all by his infectious smile, which made everyone in the room smile back at him. As I watched him I thought of Tagore’s observation in the Stray Birds about how much the world loves a man when he smiles.
Tooley’s remarkable book, The Beautiful Tree, is a tale of heroism. In it, he discovers that in the slums of India, in remote mountain villages of China, and in shantytowns in Africa, the world’s poorest people are creating their own schools to give their children a better future. In an extraordinary journey which began in the slums of Hyderabad, Professor Tooley finds out how committed entrepreneurs and engaged teachers in poor communities have started private schools with very low fees (Rs 70-170 per month) in two rooms or entire buildings and these are affordable for the children of rikshawallas, street hawkers, and daily labourers. He concludes that 65 percent of schoolchildren in Hyderabad’s slums are in private unaided schools. In India today, there are tens of thousands such schools which are run by the poor for the poor. The education establishment, however, wants to close them down. The new Right to Education Act gives the government three years to close all ‘unrecognized schools’.
Before his discovery in India, James Tooley believed that government schools were the answer to universal education. Then he asked parents in the slums why they had removed their children from government schools with better facilities, and why they were paying their hard earned income to send them to private schools. The answer in all cases was that government schools had failed. Teachers did not show up and when they did, they did not teach. Despite that you had to often bribe to enrol your child. This explains why more than half the children in India’s cities and a quarter in India’s villages are in private unaided schools.

The government makes it difficult for these private schools to function. Tooley was baffled to learn how often inspectors visited these private schools for the poor. It was not because of an unusual dedication to quality and standards, but to be ‘made happy’ as one of the school teachers put it. Schools have to resort to bribery to keep the inspectors from closing them down. The principle effect that the Right to Education Act will have on them will be to raise the bribe required to make the inspectors ‘happy’. This in turn will force these schools to raise fees to the children of the poor. As the headmaster of one of these schools, a man named Wajid at Peace High School, tells Tooley that he became a private school educator because ‘Sometimes, government is the obstacle to the people.’

The secret of success of these private schools is that ‘teachers are accountable to the manager (who can fire them), and, through him or her, to the parents (who can withdraw their children)’. In a government school, on the other hand, the chain of accountability is much weaker, ‘as teachers have a permanent job with salaries and promotions unrelated to performance. This contrast is perceived with crystal clarity by the vast majority of parents.’

Tooley also quotes studies which explain their success: ‘The results from Delhi were typical. In mathematics, mean scores of children in government schools were 24.5 percent, whereas they were 42.1 percent in private unrecognized schools and 43.9 percent in private recognized. That is, children in unrecognized private schools scored nearly 18 percentage points more in math than children in government schools.’ The reason is that on average, they had smaller class sizes, more motivated teachers, all the while spending less than public schools. When parents pay the fees that keep a school afloat, he reasons, the school becomes more accountable to them.

These schools do not get recognition because they do not meet standards—i.e. they do not have a playing field of a certain size and they cannot pay government salaries to teachers (which after the Sixth Pay Commission are around Rs 20,000 per year). If they had to pay those salaries and have those playing fields, the schools would have to quadruple their fees. Then they would no longer be schools for the poor.

Professor Tooley’s pioneering research has turned the conventional wisdom on its head with a profound message of empowering the poor. Instead of being dependent on government and foreign aid, the world’s poor are educating their children with their own rupees. Instead of trying to uproot this beautiful tree and close these schools, governments should help them to obtain some form of graded recognition so that they are not outside the law. The Beautiful Tree is required reading for anyone who cares about achieving universal education in India.

Bring in reforms to prevent more Kodas

At a smart luncheon party in South Delhi this week something very peculiar happened. Someone blurted out, ‘These high and mighty guests are friends of Madhu Koda!’ This did not go well with our celebrity hostess, to whose discomfort the conversation soon went downhill as people sought the latest ‘juice’ on the Koda scandal. To my surprise, a consensus seemed to emerge that liberalization was at the root cause of corruption.

The link between corruption and economic reforms was also echoed in a cover story in one of our national magazines this week. In an opinion poll conducted by MDRA and the magazine, 83.4% of the people in eight major Indian cities believed that corruption had gone up after the liberalization process. It confirmed to me that people, who are otherwise sensible, still do not get it. They do not understand that corruption persists in India because reforms are incomplete and scams occur in sectors like mining which have not been reformed.

Madhu Koda’s is a rags to riches story. A labourer in a state owned iron ore mine in Chaibasa becomes an MLA in 2000. Five years later he is minister in charge of the lucrative mines portfolio. In 2006, he wins the ultimate prize--he becomes Jharkhand’s chief minister. Along the way he amasses Rs 4000 crores by giving away mining licenses in exchange for bribes, according to the charge-sheet. He turns non-entities into mining barons, gifting 11,100 acres of land to dubious companies. But he shares his wealth with his friends and everyone is happy.

Mining, like defence contracts, is prone to corruption. Extracting resources from the ground does not lend itself to the usual rules of competition. A mine is a natural monopoly and the state, which gives the right to mining, is also a monopoly. The two come together in the backroom and you get crony capitalism. What is the answer? It is not to focus on individuals but to change the system. Simulate competition. Have open, transparent bidding under a firm regulator (like an auction). The regulator evaluates the quantity and quality of coal in a mine, sets a minimum price (to keep out frivolous bidders and cartels) and offers the mine to the highest bidder. This would replace the present corrupt system of leases and licences, of monitoring production at each mine, checking each truck to ensure the operator does not clear 100 trucks and records only 30.

This is a tried and proven system followed in sensible mining countries and it will prevent future Kodas. The petroleum ministry has adopted it in India and it routinely auctions oil and gas fields. The Ambani brothers will not allow us to forget the many contentious issues related to the gas flowing from the Krishna-Godavari basin. But no one has criticised the government of corruption in awarding the gas fields to Mukesh Ambani’s company. The reason is that they were won in an open auction.

It is also important to break the monopoly of Coal India and de-nationalize coal mines which were nationalized by Indira Gandhi in 1973. India is the third largest producer of coal in the world but we have suffered immensely in the past 36 years from the lack of competition. ‘Power plant shut down because of lack of coal’ is a common headline in our local papers. Koda is a creation of this system. Efforts to undo it--Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Amendment Act 2000—remain stuck because politicians in the mining states do not want it.

Good societies do not look to heroes. They quietly reform their institutions. The best news is that we have in Delhi a coal minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal, who wants to reform precisely along the lines outlined above. His ministry is ready with a Bill to set up a regulator and open coal mining to competition. The Koda scandal should give him boost, but this reform will only happen if the entire cabinet and Sonia Gandhi put their weight behind it in order to counter the powerful lobby of mining interests, state politicians and bureaucrats.

The word ‘coda’ means the concluding passage in a composition of Western classical music. The coda in Madhu Koda’s story will hopefully see a speedy trial and a deterrent sentence for the guilty. But the really satisfactory coda will be the reform of the mining sector along the lines of the Hoda Committee report. The Koda story teaches that the answer is more reforms rather than less. Not only economic reforms, we need police reforms to make our investigating agencies autonomous; judicial reforms to speed up justice and deter future Kodas; administrative reforms to punish rotten bureaucrats and reward good ones and bring accountability; finally, political reforms to prevent criminals from entering politics. Only then will dharma rise in our nation. -

Wanted : A World Fit For Women

The conviction this week of Ajeet Singh Katiyar in Delhi in the notorious Dhaula Kuan gang rape case of a university student from Mizoram is good news. More important than the conviction is the 71 page judgement of the court which admonished the defence for maligning the victim and maintained that the private life of the victim is irrelevant. ‘A lady who has lost her virginity is not unreliable’ said the judge, whose verdict was primarily based on the victim’s consistent testimony.

We seem to have come a long way from the 1979 case of 16 year old Mathura, who was raped by two policemen within a police compound when the court acquitted the policemen on the grounds that Mathura had eloped with her boyfriend and ‘was habituated to sexual intercourse’. This case ultimately went to the Supreme Court, which sadly upheld the verdict. It became a landmark case, which went on to energise the women’s movement in India.

There were echoes in this week’s judgement of another historic case--that of Hanuffa Khatoon, who was gang raped in 1998 at the Howrah Station by railway employees. In that case, the Supreme Court in an unprecedented judgement held rape to be a violation of the fundamental right to live with human dignity. The court said: ‘Rape is a crime not only against the person of a woman, it is crime against the entire society…Rape is therefore the most hated crime’.

It is to literature that one turns to understand the human moral condition. The Mahabharata offers an amazing moment of insight about women’s status. After Yudhishthira loses everything in the game of dice to Shakuni, Queen Draupadi is dragged by Duhshasana into the assembly of nobles to humiliate her. She cries out, ‘this foul man, disgrace of the Kauravas, is molesting me, and I cannot bear it’. She reveals a right wing conspiracy to steal her husband’s kingdom in a rigged game of dice and looks to the elders in the assembly at Hastinapur for justice. But they fail her. Most disappointing is selfless Bhishma, who says ‘a woman and a slave are the property of others’. In the end, as every Indian child knows, only her never ending sari protects her from being disrobed. By the way, a company offered a ‘Draupadi Collection’ of saris after the successful TV series, which presumably did not stretch infinitely.

The attempted public disrobing of Draupadi is consistent with the moral paradigm of patriarchy. Karna’s revolting remarks show that patriarchical culture divides women into angels and whores. Draupadi has become a ‘whore’ in Kaurava eyes after their ‘defeat’ of the Pandavas. Their big-chested masculinity does not allow them to think that this unhappy person could have been ‘me’. Their wish to humiliate her is also related to the disgust that many men feel towards the sexual act. All cultures contain the seeds of violence when it comes to female sexuality. Tolstoy’s famous novella, The Kreutzer Sonata grew out of the Russian writer’s own relationship with his wife, and it describes the events that lead to her murder. The husband has violent and humiliating sex with her, and he feels miserable each time he rapes her. Since she is merely an object of bestial desire, he decides that he must kill her to put an end to his misery. Only after her death does she become ‘human’ in his eyes.

It is tempting to believe in the cynical French saying that the more something changes the more it remains the same. In two areas, however, there has been dramatic advance in human equality. One is the almost complete elimination of slavery in the world and the other is the recent rise in the status of women, even in urban India. Indian law has done its bit in addressing the issues of property, dowry, and domestic violence (and some claim that it may even have gone too far). But the real change has come with the dramatic rise in women’s education and job opportunities in a rapidly growing economy. Two-thirds of India’s women still live in villages, of course, and they have a long way to go but India is rapidly urbanizing and they too will soon feel the change.

At last, good news about poverty

If only we would pause and look beyond the horizon of day to day events, we would see a trend of great significance. More people on the earth have risen out of poverty in the past 25 years than at any other time in human history, and this has happened primarily because of sustained high economic growth in India and China. Unlike China which has embraced growth enthusiastically, India has a vast industry of ‘poverty-wallas’, who incessantly raise doubts if our growth is pro-poor.

These ‘growth skeptics’ tend to make our reformers defensive, which slows reforms and the nation loses the potential for even higher growth. Earlier they argued that post-reform growth was ‘jobless’ until recent data has proved them wrong. Nowadays, they usually say, ‘growth but…’ While the type of growth does matter, the truth is that growth in itself is virtuous, and we should celebrate that India is experiencing this miracle.

Now, two experts on poverty have come up with new research which shows that India’s high economic growth since 1991 is, indeed, pro-poor and has decisively reduced poverty. Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion, both respected economists, employed a new series of consumption-based poverty measures from 1950 to 2006 and 47 rounds of National Sample Surveys, to show that slightly more than one person in two lived below the poverty line in India during the 1950s and ‘60s. By 1990 this had fallen to one person in three. By 2005, it fell again, and only one in five persons now lives below the poverty line.

The authors conclude that ‘the post-reform process of urban economic growth has brought significant gains to the rural poor as well as the urban poor’. (See ‘Has India’s Economic Growth Become More Pro-Poor in the Wake of Economic Reforms?’ http://econ.worldbank.org, Policy Research Working Paper 5103). The poor in urban and rural areas are now linked through trade, migration, and transfers, which explains why rising standards in India’s towns are helping to reduce poverty in the villages. Even though agricultural growth has been relatively weak since 1991, overall high growth has affected positively the lives of the rural masses.

This is an outcome that the reformers had dreamt of. They believed that the reforms would create a more efficient and productive economy, which would raise the overall growth rate and it would transform both urban and rural society. This had happened during the great transformations which occurred in the West during the 19^th century and in East Asia in the second half of the 20^th century. It is now happening in India.

An earlier study by the two economists had examined the period prior to 1991 when our economy grew more slowly. India’s per capita GDP grew at an annual rate of barely 1% in the 1960s and 1970s; it picked up to 3% in the 1980s; and accelerated to 4-5% after 1991. In the pre-1991 period, modest urban growth brought little or no benefit to the rural poor. (Rural poverty decreased only through rural growth, such as the green revolution.) High growth after 1991 seems to be different—it has pro-poor backward linkages to the rural economy. Hence, the effort to create a more productive economy through the reforms is benefiting the poor, and we have the permission now to dream of becoming a middle class country. The dampener, alas, is that inequality after 1991 is also increasing.

This happy news, however, must be seen in the context of lost opportunities. If only India had reformed agriculture and had functioning schools and health centers, the poor would have gained even more from high growth. In another study comparing India, China and Brazil, Martin Ravallion shows that China (with higher growth) and Brazil (with lower growth) have done a much better job at poverty reduction. India’s failure in education and health is not a function of money alone, as the Prime Minister suggested this week when he vowed to raise spending on education to 6%. When one in four teachers is absent and one in four is not teaching, we need accountability in delivering services to the poor. Thus, administrative reforms are just as important to the lives of the poor than even economic reforms.

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No ifs or buts, defeat Maoist violence

Arundhati Roy writes seductively. Recently I picked up her new book, Listening to Grasshoppers, and I was mesmerized by her luminous prose but I disagreed profoundly with her conclusions. I was revolted, in particular, by her support for violence. She regards Naxalism as armed resistance against a sham democracy. I call it terrorism.

Roy thinks that India pretends to be a democracy in order to impress the world. I think our democracy is as real as my grandson’s thumb. Yes, it has many flaws but it is legitimate. We need to reform the police; speed up justice; make babus accountable; stop criminals from entering politics; etc.. Yet, this democracy has done a colossal amount of good. It has raised the prospects and self esteem of the lowest in our society and protected us from the great genocides of the 20th century. Gujarat, to its disgrace, may have killed 2000 people but Mao’s China killed more than 50 million, according to the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. One may be justified in taking up arms against a loathsome African or Latin American dictator but not against the Indian state.

Like many in the 1960s I was a Leftist and admired Charu Mazumdar who had founded the Naxalbari movement. Although I belonged to that idealistic middle class generation, I was not tempted to abandon all and join the Maoists. Perhaps, it was because I lived in sensible Bombay rather than Calcutta. The Naxalite movement died in the 1970s but it revived subsequently and today it operates in 200 districts across ten states and controls huge Indian territory. The Prime Minister thinks it is the greatest security threat to India, and I agree.

Soon after the Maoist leader, Kobad Ghandy, the police in Hazaribagh got another prize catch. On October 10th, they captured Ravi Sharma and his wife, B. Anuradha. Top level Naxalites, they hailed from Andhra but were running the Maoist movement in Bihar and Jharkhand for the past ten years. On their laptop the police found their strategy and their plans. Ravi Sharma is an agricultural scientist and a member of the Maoist Central Committee. As he was being led by the police to the court in Hazaribagh, Sharma told reporters that he did not regret killing thousands of people. “During a revolution,” he spoke honestly, “one does not care how many are killed; only the goal should be achieved.”

Ravi Sharma thus raised the old dilemma of means and ends. Vidura posed the same question in the Mahabharata when he justified sacrificing an individual for the sake of a village and a village for the sake of a nation. Vidura, like Sharma, judges an act to be dharmic if it produces good consequences for the greatest number of people. Yudhishthira, however, is concerned with means rather than ends. Having given his word to Dhritarashtra, he refuses to give in to Draupadi’s insistent demand that Pandavas raise an army and win back their kingdom which was stolen in a rigged game of dice. No matter how great the goal, Yudhishthira would not condone the Maoists’ use of violence.

I usually agree with Vidura but on this one I am with Yudhishthira. Marxists have never valued human life and have always found it easy to take the gun. Mao and Stalin easily justified killing millions for the sake of the revolution. They never understood that violence in the end brutalises both the oppressor and the victim. Neither should we let the Indian state get away by using wrong means for the sake of good ends. I agree with Arundhati Roy that the state should not get away with unlawful detention or killing people in custody. I applaud her and human rights activists for raising these issues.

The Naxalite movement has always found sympathy in our influential, leftish upper middle class. Like most people I was aghast at the beheading of police officer Francis Induwar on September 30 by the Maoists, and I expressed my horror to an elegantly dressed friend who was visiting me. She is with an NGO and has sentimental feelings for Maoists. She said, “Yes, it is wrong, but we need development as well as force to defeat Maoists.” I could not disagree with her, but I was appalled at the ease with which she dismissed the beheading. Mamata Banerji, the leader of Trinamool Congress, had the same response.

For once we have a home minister who understands the Maoist threat to our nation and is determined to act with courage. It is pathetic that he should be slowed by endless debate on development versus police action; or whether helicopters should fire on rebels and risk civilian casualties. We have talked for two decades. Enough is enough. No ifs or buts, you cannot negotiate with someone with a gun. Now is the time for action.
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Gurcharan Das is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

Mukesh’s Sacrifice

Corporate Affairs minister, Salman Khurshid, created quite a stir recently when he warned companies to refrain from paying “vulgar salaries” or face the music. Mukesh Ambani took his advice and cut his salary by 65%. Flaunting wealth is distasteful; it is also imprudent when market capitalism is still trying to find a comfortable home in India. However, the minister was profoundly wrong. The trouble with judging other people’s lifestyle is that soon you are tempted to control other things, and this is a short step to the command economy. Not to live ostentatiously is a call of dharma, not a legal duty.

The distinguished minister, who is a sensible lawyer, quickly realized his error and pulled back the next day. “Only the company’s shareholders can decide salaries…It cannot be mandated, but should be self-exercised,” he said. Yes, this is the right position—only shareholders have the right to fix salaries in a democracy, not the government. The significance of the minister’s two positions, however, goes beyond vulgar salaries and reflects an old conflict between our ideals of liberty and equality.
There is a voice in each of us which values liberty. It was alarmed at the spectre of the dreaded days prior to 1991 when our government did believe that the way to make a poor person rich is by making the rich poor. There is another voice, however, which values equality. This egalitarian voice was sympathetic to Khurshid’s advice to CEOs. Millions are hurting from the global economic recession and something is wrong when some earn Rs 40 crores while 250 million Indians survive on less than Rs 50 a day.

These two voices constitute the modern idea of a fair society. In democracies, liberty precedes equality. Socialist societies value equality more and will sacrifice freedom for more state control. The contest between these two ideals has been going on for 200 years but it ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Liberty won, and it will win in China too one day. Absolute equality is unrealistic because the human ego will not shrink that far. So we have learned to live with the lesser goal of an “equality of opportunity”. In our desire for a just society, the political Left continues to champion equality while the Right gives precedence to liberty.

I have always believed that it is none of my business how much Mukesh Ambani earns. He creates lots of jobs, pays his taxes, produces wealth for society--and that is good enough for me. Moreover, we ought to be more concerned with reducing poverty in a poor country rather worry about inequality. Controlling CEO salaries will not lift the poor. But economic reforms will. A minister of corporate affairs can make a huge difference by making it easier for a person to start and run a business. The vast majority of Indians are self-employed entrepreneurs in the informal economy. They cannot enter the formal economy because of formidable barriers of red tape and bribery. Hence, India has the shameful distinction of being 134 in a list of 180 countries in the ease of doing business. Cut the tape, Mr Minister, and you will spawn enterprise and prosperity.

A well-ordered society, however, ought to design institutions that help to diminish inequality while preserving liberty. If the advantages of the affluent are perceived as a reward for improving the situation of the worst off, then the inequality will be perceived as more just. If the lowest worker in a company believes that his prospects will improve if his company performs well, then he will not resent an outstanding CEO earning 50 times more. This was elaborated elegantly by the American thinker, John Rawls, in his famous book, The Theory of Justice.

If you want to take the sting out inequality, Mr Minister, cut red tape but also give the poor titles to their small property so that they can get a loan against it and start a business. And persuade your UPA colleagues to implement labour reforms so that 90% of Indians in the informal economy can hope for some sort of safety net. This is the way to genuine, inclusive growth. And let’s not worry too much about vulgar salaries.

Is the middle path the way to peace with Pakistan?

The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan are meeting today in New York to carry forward the peace dialogue begun at Sharm-el-Sheikh. India’s decision to meet has been prompted by Pakistan’s arrest of Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the Mumbai terror attacks. Many Indians feel cynical, however, about today’s meeting, especially after the disappointment at Sharm-el-Sheikh. Negotiating with a nation whose secret service might be plotting the next terrorist attack on you seems bizarre, but is there an alternative to the slow, maddening grind towards peace with our neighbour?

All of us dream of waking up one day to discover that the border between India and Pakistan had become as peaceful as the one between Canada and United States. It seems hopelessly romantic, but this is precisely what happened to France and Germany who were in perpetual conflict for 75 years. Now one cannot imagine these two European enemies ever going to war. If India and Pakistan could pull this off, we might even realize the vision of C. Rajagopalchari, who wanted the sub-continent to become re-unified into a peaceful confederation of nations like the European Union.

After the terrorist attack on Mumbai on 26/11, Indians were divided over how to respond. The hawks wanted to make a precision attack on the camps of Lashkar-e-Toiba. They modelled their strategy on Israel’s retaliation for the attack of its athletes in Munich. (You can watch it in the thriller, Munich, available on DVD.) The doves, on the other hand, advocated ahimsa, preferring to take the high moral ground and turn the other cheek. The third position was more circumspect and lay between these extremes. It is the policy which the Indian government has patiently pursued--providing dossiers of evidence to Pakistan, hoping that world pressure would force it to act against the terrorists. Will this frustratingly slow middle path reward us with lasting peace?

The Mahabharata seems to think so. Unique in engaging with the world of politics, the epic also had to wrestle with the same three positions. The first was the ‘amoral realism’ of Duryodhana, who believed that ‘might is right’ and when in doubt strike your enemy. At the other extreme was the idealistic position of the early Yudhishthira, who refused to follow Draupadi’s sensible advice, which was to gather an army and win back their kingdom stolen by the Kauravas in a rigged game of dice. The epic also adopted a pragmatic, middle path of negotiation, but when Duryodhana refused to part with the Pandavas’ rightful share, Yudhishthira had to declare war.

Mahabharata would thus reject the hawkish idea of a retaliatory strike against the terrorist camps in Pakistan--not for ideological reasons, but because it would only escalate the conflict. Israel’s many retaliatory strikes against Palestine have failed to ‘teach them a lesson’. It would also reject the dovish high moral ground of ahimsa because ‘turning the other cheek’ sends wrong signals to terrorists and the ISI. It would commend upright Manmohan Singh’s middle path of negotiation. But if negotiations fail, the Indian PM must be prepared to wield danda, ‘the rod of force’, just as Yudhishthira had to.

This pragmatic middle path is akin to the evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism, which socio-biologists have made popular in recent decades--smile at the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited. Your first move should be of goodness, but if you are slapped, then you have to reciprocate and slap back. Many Indians believe that our government is not following this sensible advice. We are either too conciliatory or too scared of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Hence, Pakistan thinks us weak, and its secret service has no qualms in planning its next terrorist strike.

This is not entirely true. We may be unwilling to play ‘tit-for-tat’ but we have never compromised on our basic principles. Take Kashmir. Pakistan believes that peace with India depends on settling the Kashmir dispute, which is a doubtful proposition. India has held firmly that the answer to Kashmir lies in getting everyone to accept the line of control as the permanent border. It is true we have lost many historic opportunities to achieve this. Our best chance was after the Bangladesh War when we should have made it a condition at the Simla Conference for the exchange of Pakistani officers and soldiers.

As the bigger and more powerful nation India has to be more conciliatory. As the world’s second fastest growing economy, we cannot afford to be distracted by interminable ‘tit for tats’. Yes, Pakistan does drag us into a pit of identity politics, hobbles us at every step, and sidetracks us from our real destiny. This is all the more reason to accept the slow, hard and frustrating grind towards a negotiated peace. In the meantime, the best medicine is to try and ignore Pakistan.