New Delhi: “There was a lady in one of the places we visited. She cleaned the latrines in one of the dispensaries in the village. She had been cleaning them for 10 years. She had not got a single paisa in remuneration.”
“Then what was she getting?”
“Nothing. She was had the hope that one day, someone would come and recognise her work, and give her all her money – one big sum – all at once. She said, ‘Kam se kam ye toh hai mere paas, agar ye nahi tha toh mein kya karti? (At least I have this. If I didn’t have this, what would I do?
“She only had hope,” he says. “For every story, we’re desperate. We don’t know where it will go, or what it will do. We just keep doing it.”
Sudharak Olwe, with the NGO WaterAid, went to 16 locations across Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to document the state of manual scavengers today, with a particular focus on women who are still forced to be in the outlawed profession. The photographs taken during this journey were showcased at the exhibition ‘Including the Excluded‘ at the India Habitat Centre till July 4. The Wire spoke to him about the issues he saw over this time.
In 2016, Pakistan was rocked by the ‘honour’ killing of its first internet celebrity. Sanam Maher’s book, extracted below, tells the story of a poor village girl who, in death, has become a defiant symbol for women’s freedom.
The author Sanam Maher in Karachi. Her book about Qandeel Baloch has already caused a stir in south Asia. Photograph: Khaula Jamil/The Observer
It takes a little over two hours to drive from Multan, a city in southern Punjab, Pakistan, to the village of Shah Sadar Din, and the first time the journalist Sanam Maher made the journey, her eyes widened at every turn. In Dera Ghazi Khan, a town close to the village, none of the faces of the women she saw on the streets were visible. Some wore what looked like black ski masks with slits for their eyes. Others were covered by burqas with no eye-slits at all and so extensive that she felt half naked under her own dupatta (scarf). A thin funnel rises from the top of this kind of burqa: a device to allow air inside so that the wearer does not suffocate. Her contact in the town, noticing her staring, mentioned a place not far away, where the tribal belt of Balochistan province starts: the women there, he told her, were not given shoes. She was confused. Why not? “You’ll never look at any man if you’re scared of where your naked foot might fall when you leave your home,” he replied impatiently, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Maher, who is based in Karachi, was in Shah Sadar Din to investigate the life and death of Fouzia Azeem, AKA Qandeel Baloch, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity and the woman some like to describe as its Kim Kardashian. Baloch was born here, the daughter of a poor family, and when she was murdered on 15 July, 2016, her body was supposed to end up in the village’s brown river, a spot well known for being the final resting place of women who have died at the hands of their relatives in so-called “honour” killings. On the day in question, however, there were too many people around to manage this (another villager had died; crowds of mourners were gathering). Baloch’s mother found the body at home; her father informed the authorities. When the police arrived, Baloch was still lying where she had been drugged and asphyxiated, in a bedroom at the small house that she rented for her parents in Multan. She was just 26.
“Visiting Shah Sadar Din was a huge culture shock for me,” says Maher, whose book about the case, A Woman Like Her, is published in the UK next month (it has already caused something of a sensation in south Asia). “The women were so completely covered: I’d never seen that anywhere that I’d lived or worked. But it’s important to say straight off that, though this is typical of south Punjab, it has nothing at all to do with religion. These [dress codes] are cultural diktats, just as honour killing and other forms of violence against women are cultural diktats. This is men wanting to control how the women around them live.
”Maher had become interested in writing about Baloch because she felt that her life was a good, if rather extreme, example of the tensions that currently exist for the young in Pakistan; of the difference between where they find themselves in society, and where they would like to be. As she puts it: “My generation is connected to the world in ways that previous generations never were, and because of that we aspire to live and to behave and dress in certain ways. Yet we’re also rooted in a physical space that doesn’t necessarily allow for those aspirations.” But now, in Shah Sadar Din, she saw something else. “I was amazed by Baloch’s gumption. When I went to her village, it struck me almost for the first time just how big a deal it was for a woman to get out of that situation.
“I didn’t want to put her on a pedestal in my book; I want people to make up their own minds about her. But I remain amazed by her, and it is very cool to be getting messages from readers across Asia telling me that, though they’d begun by wondering why I wanted to write about someone they saw as trashy, they now have real compassion for her.”
Qandeel Baloch first came to public attention in 2013, when she auditioned for the reality singing show, Pakistan Idol. Though she wasn’t chosen by the judges, who mocked her high-pitched voice, her performance – and the tears she supposedly shed on being eliminated – soon went viral. Thanks to this, she began to pick up occasional media work: modelling jobs, appearances on chat shows, gigs plugging products on her Facebook page. But how to sustain people’s interest? As a young woman with few contacts, no money and not much obvious talent, her only option was to exploit social media, something at which she turned out to be highly adept. In 2015, for instance, a scrappy but rather pert 20-second video she made of herself known as How I’m Looking? resulted in her inclusion in Google’s list of the top 10 most searched for Pakistanis online.
Qandeel Baloch speaks during a press conference in Lahore in June 2016, less than three weeks before her murder. Photograph: M Jameel/AP
There are more than 44 million users of social media in Pakistan, but the addicts among them are (this is the same the world over) easily bored. People scroll and scroll, and then move on. Baloch had no choice but to repeatedly up the ante if she wanted her followers to keep talking about her, and if this meant pushing against the boundaries of what was acceptable in Pakistan, it was a risk she was willing to take; opprobrium, after all, was just another form of fame. In October 2015, when Imran Khan, the former cricketer who is now Pakistan’s prime minister, announced the end of his second marriage, Baloch launched an online campaign to become wife number three (every TV channel screened her “press conference”). The following February, she released a message in which she denounced those conservatives in Pakistan who regarded the celebration of Valentine’s Day as un-Islamic. In March, she offered to perform a striptease for Shahid Afridi, the captain of the Pakistani national cricket team, if the side beat India in the World Twenty20 Cup. Finally, in April, she appeared on a comedy news show with a 50-year-old mullah, Mufti Abdul Qavi.
The cleric, something of a media star himself, did not rise to the bait offered by the show’s presenter, who asked him what he thought of her offer to Afridi (he also wondered aloud if striptease might not be a useful weapon in the national effort to deradicalise Islamic militants). But Qavi did say that he would like to meet Baloch again the next time he was in Karachi, where she was living by then. It isn’t clear, now, which of them made sure his seemingly throwaway request became a reality, but what we do know is that in June, Baloch released images of a meeting with the cleric that had taken place in a hotel room. In one, she poses in Qavi’s distinctive cap, her mouth open in a wide ‘O’ that suggests a certain disrespectful naughtiness on both their parts. In a short video, meanwhile, Qavi can be heard announcing that he intends, in the future, to offer her religious guidance.
Some of the world’s most prestigious universities aren’t in America.
China’s Tsinghua and Peking University are on par with Harvard and MIT.
These 10 universities consistently shuffle around for top tier status in Asian college rankings.
Universities in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and China have churned out dozens of Nobel Laureates and other renowned figures.Asia possesses some of the most cutting-edge and finest universities in the world. While we’re all accustomed to the powerhouse and traditional American and U.K.-based universities, in the past 100 years Asia has seen a surge of growth.
Leading the way in terms of advanced future research, while also partnering with established university systems around the world — Asia has become a destination for some of the world’s best and brightest.
Tsinghua University is one of the most prestigious institutions in China. Leading a rigorous multidisciplinary system for the past three decades, it has gone through many iterations and changes since its creation in 1911.
Known as one of the most elite schools in China, and referred to some as the “MIT of China,” the school prides itself on its strength in engineering and the sciences. Admitted students must have excellent scores on their national exams. Tsinghua consistently ranks in the top 30 of The World University Rankings.
Lengthy negotiations ensued again. Mountbatten had to concede the demand for partition of India, but he told Jinnah that if the country could be divided, provinces could be too and if Jinnah would not agree with the idea, he would simply hand over power to the congress and be done with it. Conscious of his fast deteriorating health, and certain that his assistants would not be to able to withstand the combined onslaught of the British and the congress, he agreed to a “moth eaten Pakistan”2 . Now, the small man that he was, having been thwarted in his designs to inaugurate a united independent India, Mountbatten decided to leave a veritable mess. Transfer of power was planned for June 1948. In March 1947 he advised the British government to bring the date forward to August 1947, otherwise, he claimed, the situation would get out of control. Civil war might break out. The loyalties of Indian soldiers would be sorely tried. British soldiers, too few and too tired, would not be able to cope with the situation. The cabinet had no choice but to accept his plan. He chose August 15, 1947, the date he had accepted surrender of the Japanese army two years earlier, as the date of transfer of power into Indian and Pakistani hands. Mountbatten, willful, unmindful, unaware, and not caring much for the consequences, delayed announcement of the boundary commission awards till two days after Independence.3 On Independence Day hundreds of thousands did not know which country their home was in. Officials had no information either. Such intricate business as dividing a country which had been one political entity for centuries would tax the skill of an experienced and seasoned administrator. Mountbatten, devoid of any such attributes, set unrealistic deadlines and proceeded with haphazard, disjointed and disorganized partition of the country, government and assets. He charged a boundary commission, the leader of which was unfamiliar with topography, with demarcating a line of control between 1Ibid. 2 Jinnah, on being shown a map of the future Pakistan, with Hindu majority areas, hived off the Punjab and Bengal, so described the country. 3Please see Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity byAkbar S. Ahmad and The Sole Spokesman byAyesha Jalal. A Medical Doctor Examines Life on Three Continents – A Pakistani View 34 India and Pakistan. The man had at best a rough outline of districts, few maps, and no statistics of the majority–minority areas. And he had only a few weeks. It was truly a scuttle. Mountbatten still harbored ambitions of staying on as the governor general of both countries. Nehru, cognizant of the advantages of keeping on the right side of the British government which still controlled all the levers of authority, readily offered the job to him. Jinnah rejected the feelers, claiming that his people wanted him to be the first Governor General of Pakistan. Mountbatten threatened Jinnah that it would have an adverse effect on Pakistan, but Jinnah would not budge. He sought advice from the British prime minister, who urged him to stay on as Governor General of India alone. Whether Jinnah had spurned the advances of Mountbatten because of vanity and arrogance or, as he told his confidants, because he wanted, right at the beginning, to claim an unquestioned independent status for Pakistan, one will never know for certain. The fact that he was terminally ill may have been the determining factor in his decision. Whatever the reason, it was to have a far reaching and grievous effect on Pakistan’s fortunes. Patel and Nehru (and, I suspect, Gandhi) were confident that Pakistan would collapse soon. There would be no other rational reason for Gandhi to change his stance abruptly and acquiesce to the idea of partition which previously he had vowed would happen only over his dead body. Patel is on record making a public speech that it would be only a matter of days, weeks, or at the most months, before Pakistan would collapse; they would go down on their knees to be taken back into the Indian Union. Only Azad, among the top Congress leaders, remained steadfast in opposing partition. Azad and Nehru were very close. Nehru probably did not take Azad into his confidence. Being acutely conscious of the latter’s sensibilities and lack of guile, he also may have wanted to spare his friend the Machiavellian designs of Patel. Azad had been the president of the Congress from 1940 to 1946. He would have been the automatic choice for the office of the first Prime Minister of India. But that was, under the circumstances, untenable. Muslims had got Pakistan. One of them could not be the PM of India too; such was the overwhelming sentiment. The party machine wanted Patel to succeed to the office. Azad offered to resign, but told Gandhi that he would not, till he was given solemn assurance that Nehru would follow him. To hasten the collapse, Nehru and Patel withheld Pakistan’s share of the joint assets. Mountbatten aided and abetted them. The patently lame excuse they gave was that Pakistan would use the funds to wage more effective aggression in Kashmir. And collapse it would — it did not even have funds to pay salary to government servants — if the Nizam of Hyderabad had not come to the rescue. Reputedly the Bill Gates of his time, he gave Pakistan two hundred million ru- Chapter 3. Negotiations for Transfer of Power and Partition 35 pees (equivalent to about $150 million at today’s value). Once Pakistan became a going concern, Gandhi went on a hunger strike to force India to hand over Pakistan’s share of assets to the country.
