Sunday, December 14, 2008

Educating Hate

Read Shourie's speech. It is quite interesting and his points make a lot of sense barring the one about legal representation for terrorist suspects. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute Report on Pakistani school curricula is here. As Shourie points out in his speech, children are taught to hate Hindus and India from as early as Class I and to aspire for jehad and shahadat (martyrdom) as early as Class VI (you can skip to pages 20-23 if you do not have patience to read the whole thing). 

3 comments:

Dirt Digger said...

Pilid,
I have deep respect for some of the philosophies and approach of Mr.Shourie. His statements show that there are some politicians who have a semblance of aggressiveness in a government filled with pacifists.
The SDPI report is quite scary, simply because you are looking at most of the facts in that report is from the textbooks in schools.
Lets not forget a sizable chunk of that system is probably not measured as they are being run by the madrassas.
Now with Pakistan facing bankruptcy a lot of schools are shutting down and the only education is provided by these madrassas. India can look at a lot more of these attacks in the near future.

cbcnn_Pilid said...

DD,
Absolutely. The trouble, as this shows, is that even if you give money to the government to provide education in place of the madrasas, that is no solution with a syllabus of this kind. So where do you start?

An entire generation has gone through this stuff now starting with Zia-ul-Haq who is long dead. Dealing with a society that has been radicalized is the difficult question we face.

Anonymous said...

"Dealing with a society that has been radicalized is the difficult question we face."

is that radicalized society only across the borders? I guess I know the answer to that - we need to keep redrawing borders and carve out enclaves.

Hurriyat's Geelani is only a 'islamist, democratic, secular, politician', wasn't it?