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        Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

                                                                                     - Gauthama Buddha.

        Government sponsored and Government approved school textbooks in Pakistan are playing havoc on the minds and hearts of impressionable youth in Pakistan. These textbooks sometime back came under the scanner of public scrutiny in the West following a story in the Los Angeles Times. The story highlighted the built-in tirade against non-Muslims being encouraged through State-sponsored Text-books in Pakistan.

        Los Angeles Times reported: 'Thousands of Pakistani children learn from history books each year that Jews are tight-fisted moneylenders and Christians are vengeful conquerors.' It expressed horrified bewilderment that such lessons are taught not in madrassas but in government schools of a country whose leader Pervez Musharraf is considered to be an ally of the US in the war against terror. The Los Angeles Times report had the effect of moving US administration to voice its grave concern to the Government of Pakistan over the textbooks filled with religious bigotry and hatred towards all non-Islamic faiths. US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told a news briefing in August 2005: 'The issue is a matter of serious concern for Washington and the Bush administration would like the Pakistani leadership to effectively address it.'

        In response to the stand of the Government of United States on this issue, the Pakistan Education Minister Javed Ashraf Qazi stated that suitable action has been initiated to revise and reform the public school curriculum. But the gigantic nature of the problem involved can be illustrated through the mindset dominant in the Islamabad-based National Curriculum Wing (NCW). Functioning directly under Qazi's ministry, the NCW sets the guidelines for the four provincial textbook boards which publish course material for government schools. The NCW issued a directive in 2002 laying out the following objectives: nurture in children a sense of Islamic identity; instil pride in being a Pakistani; and to regard Pakistan as an Islamic country and to develop a deep love for it.

        What was essentially ignored in this exercise was the possibility that a child in school could be a non-Muslim and might feel alienated because textbooks equate every Pakistani with a Muslim. Although the subject of Islam, or Islamite, is compulsory only for Muslims, the directive awarded an extra 25 per cent marks to a non-Muslim student, should he or she opt for the pro-Islamic course. The 2002 directive was issued a month after the then education minister Zubaida Jalal had directed the NCW to revise history books taught in public schools.

        A distinguished Scientist and Educationist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy is of the view that the ongoing redefinition of education, first initiated under President Zia-ul-Haq and now being carried to its logical conclusion by NCW will have drastically illiberal implications for Pakistan. To quote his appropriate words: 'A new concept of education now prevails, the full impact of which will probably be felt when the present generation of schoolchildren attains maturity'.

        It will be clear from the above that the Pakistan rulers view Education as an essential tool for Islamising the whole society and forging a new national identity. Dr. Parvez Hoodbhoy has categorically explained: 'Important steps have already been taken in this direction: enforcement of chuddar in educational institutions; organisation of congregational afternoon prayers during school hours; compulsory teaching of Arabic as a second language from Class VI onwards; introduction of reading the Quran as a matriculation requirement; alteration of the definition of literacy to include religious knowledge; establishment of an Islamic university in Islamabad; introduction of religious knowledge as a criterion for selecting teachers; and the revision of conventional subjects to emphasise Islamic values.'

        The pernicious role of the political class in Islamising the education system can best be illustrated through an example. In March 2004, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), the fundamentalist alliance of five religious parties, disrupted the National Assembly proceedings and staged a walkout claiming that a certain reference to jehad as well as other Quranic verses had been excluded from the new edition of a state-prescribed biology textbook. The MMA threatened to launch a protest movement if the Quranic verses were not reinstated.

        However, then education minister Zubaida Jalal clarified that no chapter or verses relating to jehad (holy war) or shahadat (martyrdom) had been deleted from textbooks, and that the particular verse referring to jehad had only been shifted from the biology textbook for intermediate students (Classes XI and XII, that is) to the matriculation level course (Class X). The education ministry never bothered to inquire, as most people familiar with the discipline of biology logically would, as to why there were references to jehad in the biology textbook in the first place.

        The tragedy in India today is that the Congress Party (fully backed by the UPA Government) would treat the same subject in the same context as quite 'secular' in a Muslim/Christian School in India and treat the very same matter in the same context as rabidly 'communal' if some decent reference about Hindu God is made in any of the Textbooks in a Hindu School. To make my point in this context more clear, I would say that in India by birth every Muslim/Christian calling himself a Muslim/Christian is 'secular' while every Hindu calling himself a Hindu becomes by birth automatically 'non-secular' and 'communal'. The Congress definition of a Hindu is that he is a non-Muslim and a non-Christian and by virtue of this fact alone he runs the risk of being dismissed as an 'obscurantist', and 'superstitious' non-entity.

        I was recently reading a report called 'The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan' brought out by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad. This report has been jointly authored by A.H. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim and they have clearly shown how the educational system in Pakistan is contributing to the culture of sectarianism, religious intolerance and violence.

        Some of the major findings of the SDPI are: 'the current curriculum and textbooks are impregnating young and impressionable minds with seeds of hatred' to serve a self-styled ideological straitjacket; substantial distortion of the nature and significance of actual events in Pakistan's history; insensitivity to the existing religious diversity of the nation; promotion of perspectives that encourage prejudice, bigotry and discrimination towards fellow citizens, especially women and religious minorities and other nations; a glorification of war and the use of force; and incitement to militancy and violence, including encouragement of loaded concepts like jehad and martyrdom.

        Apart from making a frontal attack on the antiquated and primitive educational system in Pakistan, the SDPI report also graphically exposes American hypocrisy. Claiming that the concepts of jehad and martyrdom were incorporated into the Pakistani curricula after the start of the so-called Afghan jehad against the Soviet occupation troops, the SDPI report says, 'At that point, it suited the US and its most allied of allies, Pakistan, to encourage and glorify the so-called mujahideen, or holy warriors, in the war against the Russians. An American institution of higher education was asked to formulate textbooks for Pakistani schools accordingly. The University of Nebraska at Omaha, which has a centre for Afghan Studies, was subsequently mandated by the Central Intelligence Agency in the early eighties to rewrite textbooks for Afghan refugee children. The new textbooks included hate material even in arithmetic books. One question asked, 'If a man has five bullets and two go into the heads of Russian soldiers, how many are left'?' Should the Government of any country promote the production of textbooks of this sort only to generate glances of hatred that stab and raise a war cry of murder?

        America's hypocrisy apart, it is in Pakistan's interest to delete from textbooks hate material and ensure today's schoolchildren are groomed into liberal, democratic, secular Pakistanis, harbouring hatred for none and love for all. Malice can always find a mark to shoot at, and a pretence to fire. Hatred is madness of the heart. Only malice and hatred are being propagated through the school textbooks in Pakistan. The worst affected are the minorities belonging to the non-Muslim faiths like Christians, Hindus and Jews in Pakistan.

        Against this factual background about the grim ground realities in Pakistan, should not the aching pseudo-secular hearts of vermin in high places like Sonia Gandhi, Arjun Singh, Ram Vilas Paswan, Lallu Prasad Yadav and Mani Sankar Iyer and others of the same ilk rest in non-communal peace without honour in the larger interest of UPA coalition 'if not cohesion? Let the Congress Party in New Delhi and all the shady partners in the UPA coalition remember that Hindu-Muslim brotherhood is, in essence, a hope on the road ——the long road ——to fulfilment. To claim it to be already a full grown fact is to be guilty of pseudo-secular hypocrisy. To treat it always as a matter of fiction is to be guilty of fundamental cynicism. Let them avoid both in the larger interest of India's mute millions.

        Leo Tolstoy in his famous novel Anna Karenina had these small men in view when he wrote: 'Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the lease wide-awake of children recognises it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised'.