Amidst speculations that Deepika Padukone doesn’t have Indian citizenship and therefore she won’t be able to vote in the Lok Sabha elections, the actress has finally cleared the air. Since her birthplace is Denmark, rumours went around claiming that she holds a Danish Passport.
The actress, who is currently shooting for her upcoming movie ‘Chhapaak’, has rubbished all the rumours of being a Danish citizen. Deepika said that she holds an Indian passport and is a proud Indian citizen.
Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the philosophy of economics.
Scott Jacobsen: I want to shift the conversation into a brief foray in pseudoeconomics. Things purporting to be economics or some precise notion of international and national finance but, simply speaking, not connecting to the real world and, in fact, doing some time widespread damage. What defines pseudoeconomics?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: I don’t think ‘pseudoeconomics’ is a particularly useful category. To show why, let me say something about pseudoscience in general. Engaging in pseudoscience means aping the concepts and terminology of the sciences without taking on the critical methods that make them reliable. On this definition, to put it bluntly, much of economics is pseudoscience. These are fighting words, so let me try to explain carefully.
The concepts and terminology aped by economists consists mostly of mathematical notions. Since Stanley Jevons, economics has become increasingly mathematical; today it is probably the most heavily-mathematised applied subject with the possible exception of physics. But whereas certain areas of physics, quantum mechanics for example, can boast astonishing powers of predictive precision, economists don’t gain rewards in predictive power in proportion to their mathematical pains. The mathematics seems to be there only for show, or for intimidation. And this is a symptom of pseudoscience; one thinks of the intricate yet, in the end, irrelevant probability equations found in the work of Intelligent Design proponents like Michael Behe.
Alexander Rosenberg explained the lack of predictive precision in economics back in 1994, and I think the explanation holds. Physicists build complex mathematical models based on laws that have been rigorously tested empirically. Observation and experiment confirms that the crucial laws hold, and hold to very precise degrees. Something that really helps for testing a fundamental law is having distinct laws that concern the same properties. Take the Newtonian law, force equals mass times acceleration. To test this, you need to measure mass, but most ways of measuring mass – using scales for instance – presuppose the truth of the law. Happily there are other laws, e.g. Hooke’s spring law, that let you test mass without presupposing the truth of the Newtonian law. By measuring the mass of an object using the spring law – the way we measure it in outer space – you can then measure acceleration and force to see whether the Newtonian law bears out. In economics, however, you have laws that relate human behaviour to ‘utility functions’, yet there is no way to test a utility function except by observing behaviour. To infer a utility function from behaviour, you need a law connecting the two, yet you can’t test how well that law holds up unless you know some utility functions. Thus any alleged law-like connection between utility and behaviour – the assumption of maximisation – is something that we can’t test to any degree of precision. So why build incredibly complex mathematical models around functions representing causal relations that, for all we can scientifically know, might be quite wrong? This, to me, looks like pseudophysics: it copies the style but not the substance.
Economists often reply to me, when I make this point, that not all economists believe in utility-maximisation. There are models, they say, where this assumption is relaxed and replaced with more ‘realistic’ ideas about how people’s utility-functions govern their behaviour. What they don’t realise is that there is no empirical basis for saying that such assumptions are any more or less realistic. Assume that people don’t fully maximise their utility – say they use heuristics and ‘satisfice’. Now we can read a different utility function off their observed behaviour. How do we know that this assumption is ‘realistic’? Certainly not by seeing whether observed behaviour is what we would expect given the ‘satisficing’ assumption. For to know that, we need to know the utility function as well as the observed behaviour. And yet we just saw that we can only get to it by making the assumption we were trying to test.
Utility, said Joan Robinson, is a concept of impregnable circularity: there just isn’t any way for experiment and observation to break into the circle.
Naturally there is a great deal of mathematical interest in, say, decision theory and game theory. Interesting theorems can be proven in these branches of applied mathematics. To apply them to human behaviour in any predictively powerful way, we would need bridge-laws, formulating the degree to which real human behaviour implements the abstract mathematical model described in those sciences. But since human behaviour is the only observable thing, there just isn’t any scientifically respectable way to derive such bridge-laws.
Simply assuming that the results of a branch of applied mathematics have any relevance to the behaviour of a physical system – that’s pseudoscience rather than science. It has the outward elements of much modern science – mathematics and observation. But it fails to connect them together in the manner of a proper science. Since economics is, to this extent, pseudoscience, I don’t think it’s very useful to talk about pseudoeconomics; in a way I’d say that all economics is pseudoeconomics and a proper, mathematically-advanced science of human action lies in the future at best. But I’ll try to answer your further questions about pseudoeconomics by trying to imagine myself in the point of view of a working economist.
Jacobsen: What are some examples of pseudoeconomics in action? Examples of pseudoeconomics on the Left and on the Right, because this may be a non-partisan issue, but something of importance in the light of known damage from pseudoscience and pseudomedicine. How can pseudoeconomics be combatted?
Douglas: Again, I’m sceptical of the whole enterprise of economics, so the best I can do is report what economists say on this. Simon Wren-Lewis has written actively about what he would probably be happy to call ‘pseudoeconomics’; he’s collected this writing into a book called The Lies We Were Told. Some of his examples:
(1) The consensus among macroeconomists at top universities was that austerity was a damaging and unnecessary policy for the UK government to pursue, but the media reported this as a matter of contention among economic experts.
(2) The consensus among academic economists in general, as well as most experts with relevant knowledge, was that Brexit would have serious, harmful economic consequences. Again the media reported this as a balanced debate splitting the experts.
(3) Economic opinion on the economic effects of immigration does not bear out the alarmism that politicians such as Donald Trump exploit during their campaigns.
Note that these aren’t really cases of bogus economics; they are, rather, cases of misrepresentation. You’re not lying, nor even engaging in pseudoscience, if you go against the consensus opinion of academic economists. But you’re lying if you suggest that there is a consensus where there isn’t, or vice-versa. That seems to me to be the sort of thing Wren-Lewis is talking about. I’m happy to defer to his expertise on the question of what academic economists tend to believe.
Those are examples of pseudoeconomics on the Right, I suppose. I think Wren-Lewis could cite a similar example on the Left, in the case of Modern Monetary Theory (some of his posts on it are here). MMT is a school of economics that has a growing following on the blogosphere and is mentioned positively by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among others. Wren-Lewis is a critic of MMT, but his criticism is of what it says about mainstream economics. I think he’d agree with a statement something like this: MMT portrays mainstream macroeconomists, such as Wren-Lewis, as supporting policies that keep the unemployment rate higher than it needs to be, simply because they don’t understand the mechanisms of state spending. Wren-Lewis strenuously denies this, of course, though I don’t think he disagrees with any of the other factual claims made by MMT (he disagrees with MMT economists on policy recommendations, but it’s standard for economists to disagree over those).
Paul Krugman seems, for example in this blog post, to suggest that MMT is ‘pseudoeconomics’ in a stronger sense: it overlooks some crucial facts about how our economic institutions work. Krugman, however, doesn’t seem particularly well-informed about what MMT economists actually claim (one of them, Stephanie Kelton, took him to task on this). This, then, is a case of Krugman doing pseudoeconomics on my modified definition: representing economists as believing things they don’t actually believe.
Pseudoeconomics in this sense is only effective because of the prestige accorded to the opinions of economists. If the ratings agencies of the mind downgraded their opinions, nobody would bother with pseudoeconomics. Nobody bothers misrepresenting an unvalued opinion.
Jacobsen: Similar to the demarcation problem with science and non-science, how can we draw a line between economics and pseudoeconomics?
Douglas: I have no working theory on the demarcation problem. But I’ve tried to explain why I see economics as being on the ‘wrong’ side of the demarcation. To the extent that much successful modern science involves the application of mathematics to the natural world, the application itself is governed by a set of critical, empirical methods. Working on conic sections is amusing and edifying, but only a good track record of predicted observation justifies us in applying parabolas to the motion of projectiles.
Economics tries to skip to the end by working hard on the mathematics and then merely assuming its applicability to a portion of the natural world, namely the one made up by our bodies, our tools, and their various motions around the surface of the globe. This certainly forms a physical system of some sort, and we might one day hit upon a mathematical model that tracks its behaviour. But I see no reason to think that model will have anything to do with rational choice theory, which is really just a mathematical elaboration of our untested intuitions about human rationality, nor with the supposedly more realistic ‘behavioural models’, which are just mathematical elaborations of our untested intuitions about human irrationality.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Alex.
Canadian actress and model 43-year-old Stefanie Sherk has committed suicide, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner.
The cause of death includes anoxic encephalopathy — a condition caused by lack of oxygen to brain tissue — drowning and asphyxia.
Sherk’s husband and actor Demian Bichir shared the news of his wife’s death, in a message to his followers on Instagram. Along with a photograph of Sherk, Bichir wrote: “Dear friends, On behalf of the Sherk and the Bichir Nájera families, it is with inconceivable pain that I announce that on April 20, 2019, our dearest Stefanie Sherk, my beloved and loving wife, passed away peacefully.
“It has been the saddest and toughest time of our lives and we don’t know how much time it will take for us to overcome this pain. Stefanie’s beautiful, angelical and talented presence will be immensely missed. We will hold Stefanie in our hearts forever.”
The Vice President of India, Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu visited the National Museum of Indian Cinema, in Mumbai, and said that Exhibits at the museum would take the visitors down the memory lane of their favorite movies, actors and the music.
Shri Naidu said that Cinema being the most loved and watched platform by the almost every Indian, can act as an instrument of social change. He observed that there was a need to inform, educate, empower and enlighten the lovers of cinema through good, moral and educative themes.
In a Facebook post Shri Naidu penned his experiences after visiting the state of the art museum that celebrates and rejoices the legacy of the great mass media platform.
In a path-breaking development world’s first and only malaria vaccine was launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Malawi, earlier this week. This landmark pilot program of WHO aims to protect, in particular, hundreds of thousands of children under five against one of the world’s leading killers.
Malaria remains one of the world’s leading killers, claiming the life of one child every two minutes, according to WHO statistics. Most of these deaths are in Africa, where more than 250,000 children die from the disease every year. Children under five are at greatest risk of its life-threatening complications. Worldwide, malaria kills 4,35,000 people a year, most of them children.
Thirty years in the making, RTS,S is the first and to date the only vaccine that has demonstrated it can significantly reduce malaria in children, according to the WHO. In clinical trials, the vaccine was found to prevent about four in ten malaria cases, including three in ten cases of life-threatening severe malaria, reports Xinhua news agency.
Malawi is the first of three in Africa where RTS,S is to be made available to children up to two years of age. Ghana and Kenya will introduce the vaccine in the coming weeks.
Supreme Court judge, Justice N.V. Ramana, has recused himself from the Supreme Court’s in-house inquiry panel, set up to examine the allegations of sexual harassment against Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi. The recusal came a day after the apex court’s former woman employee wrote a letter to the panel expressing reservation over the inclusion of Justice Ramana. She objected to the presence of Justice Ramana in the panel on the ground that he is a close friend of the CJI and a regular visitor to his house.
However, Justice Ramana in his letter has said that he has not recused owing to the objections raised by the former woman employee who has levelled allegations of sexual harassment against the CJI, but it is done so that the whole exercise does not get vitiated. “My decision to recuse is only based on an intent to avoid any suspicion that this institution will not conduct itself in keeping with the highest standards of judicial propriety and wisdom,” he wrote in the letter.
Read the full text of Justice Ramana’s letter:
25th April, 2019
Sub: Recusal from the Committee constituted on 23rd April, 2019 “In the Matter of Complaint Dated 19th April 2019 Along with Affidavit Dated 18th April, 2019”.
Let me at the outset state that I recuse myself from the above referenced matter. I was asked to be a part of the said Committee by your Lordship which was duly approved by the Full Court. This involves an extraordinary obligation which ought not to be avoided unless there are extreme circumstances. I set forth, in brief, a broad outline of my reasons for recusing from this Committee.
The complainant, in the letter dated 24th April, 2019, has raised objections to my being a part of the Committee, on the grounds that, firstly, I may have pre- judged the matter based on a selective extract of my speech on the occasion of Centenary Celebrations of the High Court Building at Hyderabad, and, secondly, I am a close friend of the Chief Justice of India and like a family member to him. These grounds, according to the complainant, raise fears that her affidavit and evidence will not receive an objective and fair hearing.
I categorically reject these baseless and unfounded aspersions on my capacity to render impartial judgment in this matter, in-consonance with the best traditions of judicial propriety and the integrity of this Honourable Court. The grounds cited by the complainant ought not to be taken as evidence of a legitimate doubt for the following reasons:
(i) The topic of the speech – “Judicial Journey – The Road Ahead” – delivered by me on the occasion of the Centenary Celebrations of the High Court Building in Hyderabad, was decided at least two weeks prior to the receipt of the complaint in the instant matter. As a part of a broad analytical and factual discussion of the topic, which included discussions about pendency of cases, use of technology and issues relating to the Bar, I also spoke about personal attacks against members of the judiciary seeking to cast aspersions on their ability to render impartial judgements. If anything, the implicit assumption of that portion of my speech was that our conduct as judges ought to be exemplary so as to protect the dignity of the judicial institution from these frequent attacks. Judges, therefore, ought not to be cowed down in upholding the dignity of the judiciary. The dignity of the judiciary, first and foremost, flows from the capacity of judges to render impartial justice. The fact that this assertion, on the need to protect the dignity of the judiciary, is now being used to allege bias is a sad reflection of the state of affairs; and
(ii) As regards to the second apprehension raised by the complainant, I am, like any other judge of the Honourable Supreme Court, required to attend official meetings at the home office of the Chief Justice of India. We, the judges of Honourable Supreme Court, regularly meet each other – including socially – and also the Chief Justice of India. In fact, we call ourselves a “family” – to encapsulate that fraternity and collegiality. The same, inter alia, are essential for an honest appreciation of differences of opinions among fellow judges, which in turn, is vital for the intellectual growth of a judge. It helps us become wiser. The Chief Justice of India is primus inter pares, who allots a variety of administrative duties and responsibilities to the Judges. Thus, the judges often meet Chief Justice of India in connection with the same. My visits to the residence of Chief Justice of India cannot, therefore, suggest any proximity than what is absolutely normal under the circumstances. Thus, the apprehension expressed by the complainant in this regard is wholly misconceived.
In light of the above, I unequivocally reject the aspersions expressed by the complainant.
However, let us not be under any impression that the situation is not extraordinary – both in terms of the nature of the complaint and also the events that have transpired subsequently. The growth of every institution is necessarily based on iterative steps and a re-evaluation of the same with the courage to make changes based on our best sensibilities – intellectual and emotional. Wisdom does not flow from unbending assertion of authority, but recognition of frailty and the need to safeguard institutional integrity.
My decision to recuse is only based on an intent to avoid any suspicion that this institution will not conduct itself in keeping with the highest standards of judicial propriety and wisdom. It is the extraordinary nature of the complaint, and the evolving circumstances and discourse that underly my decision to recuse and not the grounds cited by the complainant per se. Let my recusal be a clear message to the nation that there should be no fears about probity in our institution, and that we will not refrain from going to any extent to protect the trust reposed in us. That is, after all, our final source of moral strength.
It is true that justice must not only be done, but also manifestly seem to be done. Let me also caution, at this stage, that it is also equally true that no one who approaches the Court should have the power to determine the forum and subvert the processes of justice. Let not my recusal in the instant matter be taken to mean, even in the slightest of measures, that we have transgressed either of these principles.
I wish to say nothing further.
Thanking all my Sister and Brother judges, who by reposing faith and confidence, unanimously chose me to be a Member of the Committee.
Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the philosophy of economics.
Scott Jacobsen: With psychology classified as a natural science by you, what are the most substantiated and broad-reaching strong conclusions of psychology relevant to economics?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: I’m no expert on this. Behavioural economics is the main area in which the findings of clinical psychology have been integrated. The major challenge attacks, as Robert Sugden puts it, the notion of ‘integrated’ preferences, according to which each agent is defined by a stable set of preferences that has to be tailored to fit her choice behaviour in all circumstances. So if I choose soup over salad today, and salad over soup tomorrow, then the assumption that I am rational compels us to redefine the objects in my preference-set. It would be irrational to prefer salad to soup and soup to salad tout court, but not, e.g., to prefer soup to salad when I’ve eaten 1000 soups in my life but salad to soup when I’ve eaten 1001 soups.
But is it rational for what I’ve eaten in the past to influence what I choose today? What about the lighting in the restaurant? What about what other people are eating? And then, of course, every soup is unique and every salad is unique: perhaps I prefer this soup to this salad, but not that soup to that salad. But then if the descriptions under which I choose become so specific, economic predictions become impossible: nothing about what I choose today will inform us about what I’ll choose tomorrow, since tomorrow everything will be slightly different.
Economists, it turns out, make a lot of implicit assumptions about what can and what can’t go rationally into what is called the ‘framing’ of a choice: past consumption is permitted to be relevant, but not seemingly extraneous factors like the day of the week on which a choice is made. But who is to say what it is rational to consider relevant to a choice? A lot of behavioural economics is about coming to terms with the importance of framing; people can be found, e.g., to choose to save 98 out of 100 lives but not to condemn two out of 100 people to death. Behavioural economics seeks to know how people typically frame their choices, and how the framing affects what they choose.
In a way, it tries to honour the ideal of ‘value-neutrality’ that underpins modern economics: it looks like a value-judgment to say that past consumption can rationally influence a choice but not the day of the week. Behavioural economists want to get by without even that value judgment. We shouldn’t say that people are irrational just because they take to be relevant what economic theorists take to be irrelevant.
Sugden believes, by the way, that even without identifying people’s preferences as such we can make some judgments about the sorts of economic institutions that they would rationally choose. I’m sceptical. He believes that people will rationally choose an economically liberal arrangement, in which free agents can engage in voluntary exchange in pursuit of a better allocation to themselves – and so they might, under that description. But how about under the sort of description Thomas Carlyle might give to such an arrangement: an unearthly ballet of higgling and haggling, conducted by little profit-and-loss philosophers; an array of pig-troughs where the pigs run across each other in unresting search of the tastiest slops, etc. etc.? Framing matters when agents ‘rationally’ choose institutions, just as much as when they ‘rationally’ choose goods. Public choice theory, I think, must also come to terms with the centrality of framing.
Jacobsen: How might, or are, these most substantiated and broad-reaching strong conclusions of psychology influence the philosophizing about economics?
Douglas: Once we bring framing into the question, I think the whole way of modelling human behaviour has to radically change. I don’t see how this can be avoided. A standard ‘utility function’ in economics will look something like this: U=f(x), where U is the overall utility or wellbeing of an agent and x is some vector of magnitudes, each representing the amount of a certain good consumed. To take framing into account, we’d need to replace x with a vector of descriptions of goods. These can’t be simple magnitudes, and so the whole project of a mathematisation of human behaviour is undermined. Could you not just expand the vector of magnitudes to have one argument for every good consumed under every possible description? You’d have one magnitude for coffee in the morning on my own, one for tea in the afternoon with a friend, one for tea in the afternoon with a work colleague, one for coffee in the evening with my beloved, etc. etc. The problem, of course, is that every good will fall under an infinite number of possible descriptions. And worse, there are descriptions of descriptions: choosing off a menu isn’t the same as choosing from a buffet, and so on.
Moreover, it is hard to see how we can get solid experimental evidence on how people frame choices. We might, using the above example, find that people will choose to accept the loss of two people but not to condemn two people to death. These framing effects matter a great deal, as our spin doctors know well. But how do we define the difference? That too is far from clear – our spin doctors know that too. I think that properly taking these subtleties into account would make economics into a qualitative, hermeneutic, ‘soft’ science – more akin to anthropology than physics.
Behavioural economists are attempting to walk the tightrope between hermeneutic anthropology and quantitative science, but I believe that the tightrope is of infinitesimal width, and sooner or later they’ll topple over onto one side.
Jacobsen: Do any of the aforementioned strong conclusions influence the treatment of time-inconsistency first considered by Spinoza and into the present with professional philosophers such as yourself?
Douglas: Spinoza has an idea of rationality that, I think, sits very badly with economics in general. For him it is irrational to discount the future at all. I might prefer one marshmallow today to two marshmallows tomorrow, but tomorrow I would, if I could, certainly not give up two marshmallows to have had one in the past. It is arbitrary to identify myself with myself at a particular moment in time. Thus he says that the rational person does not value a good differently depending on whether it is past, present, or future (Ethics 4p62).
When modern economists talk about time inconsistency, they mean something much weaker than this. They’re talking about a time-discounting function that is hyberbolic, or generally non-linear. Only a few concede that time-discounting, in general, is irrational; Joan Robinson calls it ‘an irrational or weak-minded failure to value the future consumption now at what its true worth … will turn out to be’ (The Accumulation of Capital, 394).
If agents didn’t engage in time-discounting, economic explanations of interest rate, profit, and so on wouldn’t work. Economists certainly don’t want to say that economic equilibrium depends on profound irrationality in the agents involved. In fact, I think you could argue that their equilibriums depend on forced labour or coercive extraction of some sort. If I take on a loan today, my future self will have to work to pay the interest. He gets no direct benefit from what happened in the past. Or, even if he does, he is unlikely to set the relative value of the past benefit as high as his past self did. But he simply wasn’t consulted in the decision. My past self can be paternalistic or exploitative towards my future selves, but, in any case, there is a dictatorship of the present. Economists treat as coercive a situation in which the preferences of a select group determine the outcomes for everyone. But that is exactly what happens when, in their models, agents at time zero determine what all their future selves will pay and receive, by negotiating with other agents present at time zero.
We could, of course, identify all the future selves of an agent with that agent at time zero, but then we would have an agent with deeply inconsistent preferences. Again: today I prefer to give up the promise of two marshmallows tomorrow for one today, but tomorrow I certainly wouldn’t give up two marshmallows in order to have had one in the past. So a single diachronic agent with a nonzero time-discounting rate would have preferences that are not just ‘inconsistent’ in some weak sense but plainly contradictory.
This isn’t only an academic exercise; it gets to the heart of why markets can’t plan – an issue rendered very palpable in our day by the climate crisis. James Galbraith points this out somewhere in The Predator State. You shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that futures markets allow markets to plan: what they allow is for present agents to divide up the spoils of what they plunder from future generations by contractual obligations or irreversible natural processes. In this way, as in many others, Spinoza has never been more relevant.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Alex.
Original publication in Uncommon Ground Media Ltd.
A few days ago the media in Kashmir carried a small election related news item about how voting at a polling booth in Srinagar was temporarily disrupted since the presiding officer had suffered a heart attack while voting was in progress. The positive part of this news is that the present condition of the officer named Zuhaib Bazaz who is being treated in SHMS Hospital is stated to be stable. Timely medical assistance is the key to survival in cases where a person suffers a heart attack and there is no doubt that it was because of prompt intervention that this incident ended on a happy note. But what’s intriguing is that the prompt action taken by a “first responder” that played a crucial role in saving Bazaz has gone largely unnoticed as the local media hasn’t mentioned anything about this.
Though Bazaz unfortunately suffered a heart attack inside the polling booth, he was still quite lucky because amongst the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) jawans deployed for polling booth’s security was a constable named Surinder Kumar who is one of the 50 CRPF soldiers trained by the Red Cross Society for the role of “first responder” during critical medical emergencies. On noticing that the presiding officer was feeling unwell, Constable Kumar immediately administered first aid. But when the patient fell unconscious, the CRPF jawan realised that Bazaz had most probably suffered a heart attack and he knew that lack of immediate medical assistance could endanger the life of the patient.
Realising the criticality of the situation, Kumar made frantic calls to medical emergency helplines but when no assistance was forthcoming, he took the wise decision of contacting his battalion doctor Dr Suneed Khan. What followed thereafter was reminiscent of a Hollywood thriller, while Dr Khan passed detailed instructions over the mobile phone on what to do to revive the patient, Kumar meticulously followed the instructions by performing emergency procedures directed by the doctor. For the next 45 minutes, Kumar gave Bazaz 30 compressions and three mouth-to-mouth respiration due to which the condition of the patient stabilised.
Meanwhile, Dr Khan contacted SMHS Hospital and with the help of DC (Divisional Commissioner) Srinagar arranged for an ambulance to evacuate Bazaz for specialised medical treatment. Doctors at the SMHS Hospital have attributed the patient’s near complete recovery to timely medical intervention and appreciated Constable Surinder Kumar for all his efforts. Remember, he was part of a CRPF detachment that was responsible for ensuring security of the polling booth against an external threat only. Accordingly, Kumar could have easily avoided taking the trouble of getting personally involved in resuscitating Bazaz since this wasn’t part of his mandate.
Those in uniform only know too well how security force personnel serving in Kashmir are often being demonised by some organisations and groups with vested interests. Accordingly, Kumar’s decision to go beyond his brief and administer first aid as also to perform emergency medical procedures to save the life of a person who had suffered a heart attack had its own associated dangers because anything could have gone wrong. Had the patient not responded, it is almost certain that Kumar would have been accused of having done something wrong due to which Bazaz’s medical condition had deteriorated and there are very bright chances that the ‘conspiracy’ angle behind the death would have also cropped up!
This brings us to the question as to why Constable Surinder Kumar, who had only undergone basic training as a ‘first responder’ and also knew the inherent risks of attending to a person who had just suffered a heart attack, still volunteer to do so? From the materialistic point of view, there may not be any precise answer that can satisfactorily explain this action, but we may find a suitable explanation if we view this incident from the human angle.
Despite materialistic considerations dominating all spheres of our activity today, there are still some occasions when conscience overrides worldly concerns and motivates a person to act with compassion. I wouldn’t like to speculate why the local media hasn’t mentioned anything about Kumar’s role in saving Bazaz but it would be very unfortunate if this is only because publicising the role of a ‘Good Samaritan’ played by a CRPF jawan may expose the motivated agenda of demonising security forces in Kashmir. Spelling out the reasons may be immaterial but by failing to articulate this truly inspirational story the fourth estate in Kashmir has missed a wonderful opportunity to spread the much needed message of how just a simple thing like ‘being human’ can make all the difference between life and death!
A series of events that took place recently are indicators of the very precarious security situation in Pakistan. The country is plagued with a series of small wars taking place across provinces. The Pakistan Army has reacted to the terrorist attack on the Hazara community at Hazarganji in Quetta, Balochistan with a massive crackdown in the province. Innocent civilians are being harassed with impunity; there are reports that the Pakistan Army has laid siege on Pirandar and Awaran in Balochistan where a family has disappeared. The names given are those of a woman called Shahnaaz, her father Abdul Hai and son Farhad. Pak Armed Forces are also said to have abducted another woman named Sanam, her five year old son, her newly born daughter and mother-in- law Naazal. These acts have drawn widespread disgust and condemnation.
Enforced disappearances have witnessed a significant surge in recent times and the numbers are on the rise. Earlier, in February this year, the Balochistan Post reported abduction and “disappearance” of two men from Awaran and Pirandar who were arrested during raids and taken to undisclosed locations. International Human Rights organisations like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have, on many occasions, accused Pakistani security forces for these disappearances, but the situation has not changed.
Prime Minister Imran Khan has shown very less inclination to apply balm on the wounds of the Hazara families affected by terrorist strikes. He agreed to visit the region only when pressure was exerted by the locals in the form of a sit-in that lasted three days. During his visit Imran Khan did not go to the site of the terror attack; instead families of the victims were called to the Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences (BUITEMS) in Quetta where a Fateha was performed. Video images show Khan sitting away from the families, as if an essential chore is being completed. There was no personal touch whatsoever.
Balochistan witnessed yet another terrorist attack at Omara on April 18, when gunmen reportedly entered a bus, demanded to see identification cards of passengers and killed service personnel travelling in the bus. The casualties included ten personnel serving Pakistan’s Navy, three from its Air Force and one with the Coastguard.
The first thing that strikes as very odd here is that the Pakistan Army allows service personnel from Balochistan to travel in public transport while going on leave, knowing fully well that they face threat from the militants groups operating there. In a weak attempt to cover the security lapse the Pakistan Army, through its Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, attempted to put the blame of the strike on Iran based “terrorist modules.”
The foreign minister told the media that “terrorist outfits” that carried out this deadly attack against armed forces had crossed the border from Iran. “We have shared this actionable evidence with Iran after due authentication, and have identified [the] location of the camps,” Qureshi said, adding that the attackers’ training and logistic camps were based “inside Iranian areas bordering Pakistan.” A protest letter to the Government of Iran has been conveniently leaked out to the media.
To the acute embarrassment of Prime Minister Imran Khan, his foreign ministry was carrying out this exercise a day before he was slated to visit Iran. Apparently, he would not have given sanction for the same and would have preferred to raise the issue personally at the highest level. It leaves no doubt that the foreign minister of Pakistan was working, not on the directions of his own prime minister, but some extra-judicial authority. And, there is none other than the Pakistan Army to fit the bill. Thus, the prestige of the Pakistan Army became more important than the prestige of the country and its prime minister.
Apart from the tense situation in Balochistan, there have been significant instances of violence in other provinces too. Clashes between Pakistani forces and the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban) in the AfPak region are commonplace, especially in and around the Bajaur Agency. There are reports of targeted killing in Peshawar, North Waziristan as well. One victim has been identified as Zeeshan Wazir, a first year engineering student in Iqra University; the assailants are still unknown. There is yet another report of a Shia Mosque being vandalised in Karachi. Pakistan is unable to put a check on attacks within the Muslim community itself, how can it legislate on the happenings across the world and speak of “Islamophobia?”
While there is so much turmoil all over, the political situation is also witnessing a paradigm shift. A major reshuffle in the cabinet of Imran Khan-led government has been carried out. The new cabinet is a true copy of the one which was in place at the time of dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf. There are several technocrats and some like Brigadier (retd.) Ijaz Shah, a former intelligence officer who was Director Intelligence Bureau in the Musharraf regime. He is said to have played a key role in harbouring Osama Bin Laden and was also named by Benazir Bhutto as a person plotting to kill her.
Reshuffle of a cabinet is normal procedure in any government; the criticality here is that the new entrants are all close to the Pakistan Army, and as such, the firm grip of the army over Pakistan becomes very obvious. It is well known that the army keeps security and foreign policy with itself and this cabinet is considered to be a successful one in dealing with western nations.
The internal security challenges posed to the country are of growing concern for the international community. How long Imran Khan himself will survive as Pakistan’s prime minister is now a big question. Instead of addressing the security concerns the Pakistan Army is interfering in governance and thus sending a wrong message to the militants who wish to rule the roost. Imran Khan would be a very worried and disillusioned man indeed, his country is going through critical challenges under his watch and he does not have any power to deal with them, this is not what he bargained for.
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in a Press statement has informed that the 66th National Film Awards will be declared after the Lok Sabha elections are over.
The selections for National Film Awards are made by an independent and impartial jury consisting of eminent film makers and film personalities and declared in the month of April every year. However, this year elections to the 17th Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assemblies of four states are underway and the Awards also include one for the most film friendly state. Since the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) is in force, which facilitates level playing field to all political parties and the candidates and inter alia seeks to ensure that the power of media is not used in such a manner which affects the general conduct and level playing field during the election process, it has been decided to declare the awards after the election process is over and the MCC concludes.
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