At his prime and until he argued the last case of his life, the late Abdul Hafeez Peerzada would subject judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts to sermons heavy on fire and brimstone if they ever erred on applying the real scheme and spirit of the 1973 Constitution. Apart from being an impressive and imposing advocate, Peerzada had also been a young member of the Committee tasked with drafting the Constitution nominated by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto after taking over from Yahya Khan in the wake of the 1971 debacle. “Who knows the constitution makers’ intention better than me? I am one of the makers,” Peerzada would thunder before judges who invariably fell silent with sheepish expressions on their faces at the best of times.
One of the bitter-sweet lessons for the Constituent Assembly had been to work towards devolving powers to the provinces after freeing them from the iron clutches of a unitary state perennially dominated by military dictatorships. Bitter because it was a ‘truncated’ Pakistan that they were attempting to rebuild, sweet because, despite a major catastrophe politically, they still had another chance to rebuild the country based on lessons learnt from attempts at effacing the regional, provincial cultures the Ayub Khan martial law in particular.
Barring a military dictator’s obsession to have uniform curricula for schools across the country, education, quite unambiguously, has always been a provincial subject per the textual language of the 1973 Constitution, and most elected administrations have adhered to it ever since. However, the PTI government (2018-2022), apart from being hopelessly bereft of sound policies in most areas, tried to do unimaginable damage and mindlessly went ahead to encroach upon the provincial domain by unleashing their version of the Single National Curriculum (SNC).
Although hailed as a revolutionary by none other than the then-Federal Minister of Education, Shafqat Mahmood and his so-called ‘foreign qualified’ advisors, who had their own axe to grind, to most discerning eyes, this project was clearly aimed at bringing back the One-Unit of the Ayub regime with respect to school education. A case of old wine in a new bottle and all, it has to be said, done in ‘good faith’ which, for instance, a dictator like Zia-ul-Haq, with a full-denture grin, would announce with ease. To legal and constitutional practitioners, the move clearly smacked of a military autocrat’s revenge to restore the status quo ante, especially after all the vagueness with regard to the powers of the federation and its provinces had been removed through the 18th Amendment to the Constitution.
Shafqat Mahmood: Forever defined by the SNC
There are approximately 20,000 brick kilns in Pakistan, where 4.5 million people work on a daily basis, including children. Temperatures in those kilns are reported to reach 1,100C.
In 2013, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) returned to power with Nawaz Sharif as Prime Minister for a third time. A total of 250 schools for brick kiln workers were announced, in which 2,000 children were working as labourers. Three areas were identified for those schools: Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar and Rahim Yar Khan.
It was never a means for pulling the education system down, but an attempt at reducing the gross education chasm that exists between varying socio-economic strata and to encourage upward social mobility
Keeping the horrific conditions in which these children were working and keen on bringing in the International Labour Organisation to have a stronger presence in Pakistan, in February 2016, then Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif announced he would eradicate child labour by focusing on enrolling children working at brick kilns and offering financial support to their families. The Punjab Prohibition of Child Labour at Brick Kilns Act 2016 banned children under the age of 15 from working at the kilns. But for the PML-N, the focus didn’t stop there – in fact, a drive to eradicate child labour from hotels, petrol pumps and workshops followed.
While the Single National Curriculum (SNC) was introduced by the PML N, the concept was to ensure that a basic curriculum is covered. The idea was to guarantee that all children would have some semblance of equality in terms of access to basic literacy and numeracy, amongst other subjects.
It was never a means for pulling the education system down, but an attempt at reducing the gross education chasm that exists between varying socio-economic strata and to encourage upward social mobility.
Enter the PTI. And the SNC becomes a magnificent tool to manipulate minds to churn out a mini army (pun unintended) that would uphold what the party’s ideology was and the dream of creating what then Prime Minister Imran Khan referred to as ‘Riyasat-e-Madina’. Exactly who would be the ones to tell the then PM that the education system in Saudi Arabia is heavily influenced by Western models? It was never considered because who knew the world better than him?
And so began the implementation in which publishers were consulted in a meeting with Dr Mariam Chughtai (who led the SNC) and, none of whom were easy with the demands of printing and reprinting hundreds of books, which lay dismissed as the critique poured in. The cost incurred by the printers was also never considered nor compensated. Finally, the printers stopped. How, in the 21st century, a country could have a publishing industry in which school books were not being printed is beyond comprehension. A sham list of academics laid to rest that the SNC had been backed by those who knew what they were talking about.
The ‘national’ badge was chucked away when Sindh rejected the SNC, and the ‘taj’ in the political crown, Punjab, was seen as the guinea pig led by provincial minister Murad Raas, whose qualifications brought an onslaught of inquiry about his legitimacy as education minister.
Most staggering was the Federal Minister Mahmood’s inability to rein in Raas’ aggressive implementation strategy with private schools in Punjab. Exactly why Army schools were never subjected to the same treatment is also a mystery.
The cruelty of having a glimmer of hope and then seeing it snatched away is perhaps the same as telling the Hazara who sat in dignified silence with their dead under the open sky not to conduct such acts of ‘blackmail’
Needless to say, plenty questioned that if the honourable minister was so unimpressed by the international system, the school where his children went, exactly why he didn’t live up to his own moral code and send his own to a school more aligned with his personal values (asking primary school children to wear caps and dupattas is what Punjab’s education minister’s biggest concern was back then) is the Lahori mystery Baker Street’s finest will never be able to solve.
What of the brick schools, then?
Surely, the poorest, the most downtrodden, and the weakest would be the perfect minds to mould and shape with PTI’s ideology to churn out soldiers (again, pun unintended) who would carry the legacy of PTI’s social media strategy?
These were the children who never stood a chance at questioning what they would be taught and would remain at the mercy of a sham education system that promised them a better life. What more could the PTI want, and what was better than these children to lay the foundations of a ‘riyasat’ than to educate these minds?
Alas, no. Those children were thrown back in the fires of the kilns.
Those children never mattered. The cruelty of having a glimmer of hope and then seeing it snatched away is perhaps the same as telling the Hazara who sat in dignified silence with their dead under the open sky not to conduct such acts of ‘blackmail’.
And now we have Shafqat Mahmood, who announced on 'X' (formerly known as Twitter) that he had decided to teach. As someone who participated in a democratic election and won on the basis of a democratic victory, will he finally address the questions surrounding the SNC that civil society, who voted for him, kept asking? For him to claim he ‘didn’t know’ as he did in the livestream organised by the Nutshell Group is perhaps the most banal thing a minister, someone who claims to have dedicated his life to public service, can say.
That’s over 2,000 children whose lives went up in smoke. If alive, they are now young adults, long past the age of formal education. One can only wonder if Mahmood has ever self-reflected and wondered whether that position of power was worth it? Because looking back at his history, it most certainly was not. Who wants to be remembered for destroying children?