The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

ARTICLE

Pakistan, China renew ties
Growing dilemma in an 'all-weather' friendship
by Harsh V. Pant

There is something not quite right about an inter-state bilateral relationship when words such as "higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, stronger than steel, dearer than eyesight and sweeter than honey" are used repeatedly to describe it. No other relationship depends so much on flowery language to underscore its significance as that of China and Pakistan does.

Much like his predecessors in recent times, Nawaz Sharif also made his maiden trip as Pakistan's Prime Minister to China where at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Sharif said his welcome "reminds me of the saying, our friendship is higher than the Himalayas and deeper than the deepest sea in the world, and sweeter than honey". Chinese President Xi Jinping, in response, referred to Sharif as an old friend and a good brother, said strengthening strategic cooperation with Islamabad was a priority for China's diplomacy.

A number of agreements were signed between the two sides during this visit, including a "long-term plan" related to the upgrade of the Karakoram highway as part of a proposed economic corridor between the two countries, and agreements on technology, polio prevention and solar housing. A $44-million project was also agreed to by the two countries to erect a fibre optic cable from the China-Pakistan border to Rawalpindi aimed at giving Pakistan more connectivity to international networks.

Sharif, in particular, lobbied with the Chinese companies to invest in the Pakistani power sector. More interesting was an agreement for cooperation between Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) and the Communist Party of China, underlining how nimble China can be in tilting its foreign policy to the political dispensation of the day.

The Pakistani government has suggested that Sharif's visit will be helpful in transforming traditional foreign policy into economic diplomacy to give new boost to trade and economic relations with neighbours as well as laying a foundation of new strategic economic cooperation between both the countries, benefitting not only the two countries, but also leading to the integration of all economic engines of the region. Whether India is part of this grand thinking, however, remains to be seen.

To show China how seriously it is taken in Islamabad, Sharif has introduced a 'China cell' in his office to speed up development projects in the country. This cell will supervise all development projects to be executed with the cooperation of Chinese companies in Pakistan. This is an attempt to address Chinese concerns about the shoddy state of their investment in Pakistan because of the lackadaisical attitude of the Pakistani government. Meanwhile, Beijing too needs political and military support of the Pakistani government to counter the cross-border movement of the Taliban forces in the border Xinjiang province.

Expected to cost around $18 billion, the "Pak-China economic corridor" will link Pakistan's Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea and Kashghar in Xinjiang in northwest China. India has been left protesting even as China has continued to expand its presence in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and now with plans to develop a special economic zone in Gwadar, there is a danger that India's marginalisation is only likely to grow.

At a time when Pakistan is under intense scrutiny for its role in fighting extremism and terrorism, the world has been watching with interest to see how China decides to deal with Pakistan. China was the only major power that openly voiced support for Pakistan after bin Laden's assassination. During the visit of the Pakistani Prime Minister, the then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao affirmed that "Pakistan has made huge sacrifices and an important contribution to the international fight against terrorism, that its independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity must be respected, and that the international community should understand and support Pakistan's efforts to maintain domestic stability and to realise economic and social development." Wen went on to state that China would like to be an "all-weather strategic partner" and would do its best to help the Pakistani government and people get through their difficulties.

To underscore its commitment, China agreed to immediately provide Pakistan with 50 new JF-17 Thunder multi-role jets under a co-production agreement, even as negotiations continued for more fighter aircraft, including those with stealth technology. Despite this, Pakistan wanted more from China - underscored by its expressed desire to have China take over the operation of Gwadar port. Pakistan had suggested that the port could be upgraded to a naval base for Chinese use.

China, however, immediately rejected this offer, not wanting to antagonise the US and India with the formal establishment of a base in Pakistan though earlier this year, the Chinese government-owned China Overseas Port Holdings Ltd had decided to purchase control of Gwadar port from Singapore's PSA International, which had won the contract in 2007 to operate the port for 40 years.

The Sino-Pakistan relationship remains fundamentally asymmetrical: Pakistan wants more out of its ties with China than China is willing to offer. Today, when Pakistan's domestic problems are gargantuan, China would be very cautious in involving itself even more. Moreover, the closer China gets to Pakistan, the faster India would move in to the American orbit.

Amid worries about the potential destabilising influence of Pakistani militants on its Muslim minority in Xinjiang, China has taken a harder line against Pakistan. The flow of arms and terrorists from across the border in Pakistan remains a major headache for the Chinese authorities and Pakistan's ability to control the flow of extremists to China at a time of growing domestic turmoil in Pakistan would remain a major variable.

As the Western forces move out of Afghanistan by 2014, Beijing is worried about regional stability and is recognising that close ties with Pakistan will not make it safer as recent troubles in Xinjiang have once again underscored. But officially, the two states will continue to view each other as important partners, especially as India's rise continues to aggravate Islamabad and cause anxiety in Beijing.n

The writer is a Reader in International Relations, Department of Defence Studies, King's College, London

MIDDLE

The death of telegram
by Pritam Bhullar

Is chithi nu tar samjana" (treat this letter as a telegram). To emphasise the urgency of the contents of a letter, its writer would often use this phrase in the olden days. The "tar" (telegram) breathed its last, after 163 years of eventful existence on July 14. After putting it in the grave, we have performed its requiem service with tearful eyes.

There was a time when this was the only mode of fast communication for our good and bad news. On reaching your door, the telegraph department man shouted "tar" and this sent shock waves down your spine. You received and opened the telegram with shaky hands, fearing that it might not carry some bad news.

We were setting out on a night exercise on September 11 in 1964, when I received a telegram, informing me about the death of my grandfather. I was second-in-command of an infantry battalion at Kota in Rajasthan then. I and my wife caught the night train and reached Batala in Punjab in the morning.

The congratulatory telegrams on my wedding in March 1955 left another indelible imprint on my mind. No wonder then hundreds of people, mostly of my generation, thronged the telegraph offices on July 14 to send their last telegram to their near ones, while bidding a goodbye to this memorable service with a heavy heart. .

Its slow-moving sister "chithi" (letter) has also lost its erstwhile attraction, thanks to the courier service, e-mail and short message service (SMS) on the mobile telephone, which are much faster modes of communication today. Letter writing had its own charm and advantage of conveying a written word with a personal touch, especially to a loved one. A visit by the postman, taking out the letter from his bag, opening and then reading it out, had its own pleasure. A letter from one's wife, which brought all the home news when one was in the field area in the Army, had its own unexplainable pleasure.

But this service is also dying out now as the mobile has become as important for a soldier as his personal weapon. Seemingly, the speed post, which is a much quicker means of taking across your letter to the addressee, will keep the postal mail service going at least in the foreseeable future. But this service cannot be operated in field areas.

How can I forget the "chithi" which carried my articles and fixed columns in the eighties and nineties, typed on the portable and imported typewriter bought by my father for a few chips in 1930? My heart goes out in praise of the efficiency of the postal services as I still remember that at times an article dispatched on Monday, appeared in a local English daily on Wednesday.

Undoubtedly, the present day services such as e-mail, internet and mobile telephone are fast and fit in well in today's fast-moving world. Also think of the headache that a mobile telephone creates for you because you cannot even have your meal in peace. Admittedly, the "tar" and "chithi" had their heydays when people were more relaxed, had time to spare and were happier than the present generation.

OPED SOCIETY

The servant quarter
The urban apartment block of post-liberalisation India is a cultural narrative of encounters between classes. It provides space for car parks but has banished the domestic help beyond horizons of our personal property
Radhika Chopra

“There is one sort of labour” wrote Adam Smith, in his 1904 tract An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, “that adds value to the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect...The labour of a menial servant adds to the value of nothing... Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of (the menial servant) perishes in the very instant of its production...and seldom leaves any value or trace behind...” To our twenty first century eyes and ears — Adam Smith’s words are harsh; but they compel us to recognise our own attitudes towards servitude and how little we value the work, or indeed the person — the domestic servant in our homes. I might dare to dispute Adam Smith and say that the work of the menial servant does leave a trace – clean floors, washed dishes, tidy beds. But where Smith’s cruel words strike home is in an acknowledgement that the servant is a social invisible, and there must be no trace of his or her presence. Unlike the actor, orator, or musician who must be seen and heard, a menial’s social invisibility in a household is their value.

Distanced: Keeping servants in their place — in a physical, olfactory and visual non presence.

Suspended identities

In negating the work done by domestics as not work at all – work without ‘productive’ value that leaves no trace – Adam Smith seemed to negate more than just work; he suspended identity. My own brutalisation of Adam Smith’s theory of labour value leads me to ask how invisibility and suspended identity were managed in domestic spaces. My question leads me straight towards the architectural and social history of the ‘servant quarter’. Growing up in cities, I witnessed the steady shrinking of space for servants over time. From separate rooms at one corner of the bungalow plot, to cubby holes in stairwells, to impermanent structures built under water tanks on the roofs of modern apartment blocks, the servant quarter dwindled and was displaced to the least used corners of the home. The servant seemed to be the last person to be thought about by architects in their designs of newer homes.

Historical validation

The Help, a 2011 Hollywood film, based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett, offered a fresh perspective on servant quarters too
The Help, a 2011 Hollywood film, based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett, offered a fresh perspective on servant quarters too

American etiquette books at the turn of the 19th century advised that the servant’s room be “simple, comfortable and pleasant,” at the same time “plain in decor and preferably of minimum size.” The emphasis was literally and spatially on ‘minimum’. In 1892, The British Medical Journal reported that sleeping accommodation provided for domestic servants in the fashionable neighbourhood of Marylebone were dark unventilated holes in the basement.

In fact the servant quarter changed from a legally designated space within the built environment of middle class housing to an illegal structure quickly dismantled if the municipality came anywhere near it. Now, in 2013, in newly built homes in the national capital live-in servants are lodged literally in the underbelly of apartment blocks, placed next to car ports. Servant rooms are not visible to the visitor and do not in any way blemish the dazzling facade of the building. Across the world and across the centuries, domestic architecture conveyed the sense of a servant’s place through vocabularies of distance and size. The servant quarter of twenty first century Delhi replicates Victorian house plans, turn of the 19th century urban American homes and suburban homes in apartheid Johannesburg, all of which had spaces to keep servants at physical, olfactory and visual distance. Servants remained ‘off stage’, in metaphorical cold storage, unseen but dutifully prepared for a soft footed appearance in the main rooms of the employers’ home. It is an almost universal principle of architectural texts to embody and convey the sense of power and pelf, and when it comes to the servant room, domestic architecture accomplishes its purpose of keeping menials literally and metaphorically in their place.

The invisible presence

Architecturally speaking, indoor plumbing and the servants’ wing became the objects of the greatest engineered and structural change in domestic architecture over time. The servant’s wing shrank, or was removed to the peripheries of the compound, or disappeared altogether in burgeoning metropolitan spaces. In India, the colonial bungalow fashioned on the English manor house (and in contemporary India still occupied by highly visible and valued bureaucratic ‘servants of the state’) is an outstanding example of how servants were rendered invisible. Apart from the servant quarters placed at a great distance from the main house, the bungalow was divided into two halves, the front and the back.

An elaborate choreography governed the presence of servants in the front half; dressed in uniform, standing stiffly to attention like stage props, their mute presence acted as a sign of colonial power. The back of the bungalow was governed by an equally elaborate etiquette. Colonial bungalows had indoor bathrooms and dry pattern commodes with separate entrances at the back to enable the cleaner to enter and leave without encountering anyone. The dry pattern commode had a trap door behind it, to facilitate the removal of the full bucket and its replacement again without a sign of the workers presence. The wall mounted cistern that allowed fairly efficient flushing did not make an appearance in the colonial bungalow till well after its invention in the 1870s. Until then, portable commodes or chamber pots made a whole category of labour essential to the household. Toilet cleaners, essential to the running of the home, were not however permitted be anywhere near the front of the bungalow. They remained well hidden to their master’s eye and indeed away from even the eyes of the ‘upper’ servants. If at all they lived within the bungalow compound complex, their quarters were placed well beyond sight, usually built low on the horizon, fabricated with temporary material and assembled as shacks, removed from the bungalow and from quarters of the ‘upper’ servants– the khidmatgar, the khansama and the ayah. Indoor plumbing became more widely used in the short half century from 1875 to 1925, but this did not mean the departure of the sweeper, nor his rehabilitation into the front half of the bungalow. It’s the social history of the toilet cleaner’s accommodation that bears out Adam Smith of the value of labour most completely.

Like the spaces of the colonial bungalow compound complex, the urban apartment block of post-liberalisation India is a cultural narrative of encounters between classes. In Delhi for example, the municipality has decreed that all new domestic construction has to provide parking space for cars of apartment owners. The municipality has also limited the height of a new building and the construction to four floors, not including the ground floor car park. Municipal rules make no reference to rooms or accommodation for servants.

The result of municipal fiat, coupled with escalating value of urban land, translates into shrinkage of space for servants. Urban India’s record is as bad as Victorian London’s. The same British Medical Journal noted that health officials thought that servants who slept in dark unventilated underground rooms, or in other “improper places, were prone to succumb to septic influences and to contract diseases”. The fact that twenty first century India replicates the dark unhealthy accommodations for their live-in servants says a lot about the value we, like Adam Smith, place on labour value of menials. Servants in cities like Delhi are now housed next to cars in tiny rooms that would compete with the upper class Victorian household’s in the fashionable neighbourhood of Marylebone where servants slept in airless basements or under kitchen tables.

Housed beyond our sight

The more humane among us don’t keep servants on the premises at all. In fact we banish them way beyond horizons of our personal property. So where, we might ask have all the servants gone? They certainly haven’t disappeared from our lives. An increasingly urbanised and upwardly mobile middle class has generated a huge demand for domestic workers; the migration of working class individuals into the city is tied in with the expansion of an urbanised middle class and the demands for domestic labour generated by this movement. Upward mobility of the middle class, and rural to urban migration of working classes, is the story of late twentieth and early twenty first century cities in India.

But where does this huge pool of workers stay? Within the city, middle class memsahibs are oddly conversant with the names of working class localities and neighbourhoods. They know these names not because they visit there, but because these are the localities from where their next maid or driver will come. Like the accommodations for sweepers in the colonial bungalow complex, many homes in these colonies are fabricated from an assortment of impermanent building material to provide fragile shelter. In Delhi, a larger pool of commuting labour travels daily between precarious homes in ‘working class’ neighbourhoods to middle class neighbourhoods and their gleaming new builder blocks, in an effort to keep middle class homes in aesthetic conformity with ideals of beautiful modernity. The anti-modern institution of servitude has an invisible presence in globalising India, leaving a trace of themselves on the maps of the city, though they leave no trace of themselves in the architecture of modern apartment blocks.

Architecture of convenience

Despite their architectural invisibility and their disappearance at the end of a working day into their working class neighbourhood, servants possess a peculiar value. For middle class Indians, servants represent a form of an authentic Indian past, an ‘enchanted’ sign of tradition within the modern home. Like memorials, servants are part of an imagined and valued zamana, a time that captures the anti-modern as a utopia brought forward into the present in the figure of the servant, to celebrate what modern Indians say they value most – deep and dependable traditions. The servant in the twenty first century has not vanished without trace. In fact each servant serves as a sign, a reassurance — that we need never be totally modern.

The writer is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. She is the author of Militant and Migrant: The Politics and Social History of Punjab and has been Co-chair, U.N. Expert Group on the Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality.