Maulana Salahuddin Ahmed of Abadi Duniya fame, Lahore, 1964

Excerpt from Lahore: Portrait of a Lost City by Som Anand, Chapter 7 'Those who grieved':

(This account directly contradicts Nano's first-hand account of the house burning, which was not empty, and which was apparently burnt down by a Hindu mob, not a Muslim one. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how Som Anand describes par nana.)

'Communal riots became more intense after March '47 and it seemed that the Muslim leadership was out to clear the city of its non-Muslim inhabitants. That is not to say that every Muslim in Lahore liked what was happening. There were some who dreaded the prospect of the Hindus and Sikhs leaving the city for good. But such people could not speak of their feelings.

The atmosphere was so charged with hatred that no one dared restrain his fellow men from their actions. Swimming against the tide becomes an impossible task in such a terrible situation. The storm which was then raging had no parallel in history. Even so, there were individuals who tried to save their neighbours or friends or their property even at the risk of their own lives.

In the city of Lahore, one of the unhappiest among such Muslims was Maulana Salahuddin Ahmed who suffered both materially and mentally from the partition and riots. He was an editor who (through his celebrated Adabi Duniya, a monthly) brought writers like Krishnan Chander [a famous writer of Hindu origin] and Rajinder Singh Bedi [a famous Sikh writer, playwright, film director and screenwriter] into the limelight.

His [ . . . ] passion [ . . . ]was the development of the Urdu language as India's lingua franca. This grand old man of literary journalism was an institution in himself; his love of Urdu, his constant desire to find new talent in the field of creative writing and the sweetness of his demeanour made the younger set of writers flock to him. In the evenings, the office of Adabi Duniya presented the scene of a darbar at which he was the presiding deity.

Even when the riots spread, the indomitable Salahuddin continued to speak Urdu. His friends and associates thought that the man was crazy. At a time when loot, arson and stabbing were the order of the day, how could anyone think of literature or of the future of the language? But it seemed that the crazy man of Lahore did not pay much heed to what was happening around him. He remained unconcerned even after his own house was burnt down by the rioters.

It so happened that Maulana Salahuddin had a house in a locality which was predominantly inhabited by non-Muslims. At the time of partition, he was himself not living there but had deposited his collection of rare books there. When the riots in Lahore were at their peak, he became apprehensive about his library.

It was such a big collection that there was no space for it anywhere other than in that empty house. An idea struck him, and he suggested to his Hindu friend, Dwarka Dass 'Shola', that he should put his name-plate on the gate. Since it was a Hindu locality, he assumed that a Hindu name-place would do the trick. All was well as long as the original inhabitants stayed there. But soon they had left the area fearing attack from the neighbouring localities. When there was no one left, a frenzied mob came one day to burn down every bit of Hindu property. In that orgy they burnt down Maulana Salahuddin's house, thinking that it was the property of Dwarka Dass 'Shola'. By this quirk of fate, the famous litterateur of Lahore lost his valuable collection of books. But he did not talk to his friends about this loss and continued as usual to worry about what would happen to Urdu in India after partition.'


Of Maulana Salahuddin according to Asma khala (Asma Jahangir) in an interview she gave when she received the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay public service award -

'Maulana Salahuddin was also "a socialist in his behavior although he didn't think about it," says Asma, who treasures the memory of "a very simple man with no ego about him, a friend joking and laughing with his grandchildren." But "until he died and people wrote about him, we had no idea that he was actually a great man," she says. Years later, a recurring remark from the older generation-"I knew your grandfather"-deepened Asma's childhood memories of him. One of those memories was how he returned a British knighthood during the independence movement, causing no end of irritation to Malik Jilani's own father, who did not return his.

A second memory is more disturbing. One day, Asma says, "as a child, very vaguely, I recall my grandfather saying, 'I just can't breathe anymore. Once the military takes over, it never goes back.'" The Maulana was in prophetic mode. "My mother was very shocked," says Asma. "A lot of people, in fact everybody with few exceptions, thought the military had come as a savior from corrupt politicians. My mother thought he was just exaggerating because the prices of things had gone up and suddenly, artificially of course, the military had brought them down drastically. My mother was going to buy some dupatti, this veil that you wear, saying it was extremely cheap. But my grandfather said, 'It won't be cheap. You will have to pay a very heavy price for this day.'"

Young Pakistan's first experiment in democracy foundered on a rising tide of civil conflict, corruption, and instability. In its early years, the country seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis. A sort of consensus was achieved in 1956 with Pakistan's first Constitution. It proclaimed Pakistan an Islamic republic within the British Commonwealth. But scandals involving elected officials and cabinets that seemed to dissolve almost as quickly as they were formed brought acute instability. Asma had just turned six in 1958 when senior military officers led by the British-educated Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan mounted a successful coup d'etat, followed by a formal declaration of martial law (and the rapid departure of Iskander Mirza, Pakistan's first president, for England). For many Pakistanis, martial law came with a sigh of relief-Maulana Salahuddin's warnings notwithstanding.'

Image from the Economist

Imaduddin Ahmed

For Professor Daniel Drezner, Global Political Economy, DHP P 217

Final exam, part 1

The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Hah! Professor Drezner has posted this question to his blog: http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/15/are_you_smarter_than_a_fletcher_school_graduate_student

Are you smarter than a Fletcher School graduate student?

The following question was on the final exam for my Global Political Economy class this fall.  If you're interested, provide a one paragraph answer in the comments.  I'll report back later in the week if these answers are better than the ones I'm about to grade:

 

“When China becomes the world’s largest economy, the current era of globalization will come to an end. The simple fact is that while Great Britain and the United States had open liberal polities, China does not. This will foster mutual suspicion between China and the west, as well as discourage China from fully opening up its domestic market. That, plus the geopolitical tensions that come from a hegemonic power transition, means we can expect a new era of mercantilism.”

 

Do you agree or disagree with the above statement? Why or why not? Be sure to cite arguments made in the readings to support your position.

Given its domestic market size, resources and untapped potential for leverage, China, according to Goldman Sachs’ projected rates of growth, is set to become the largest state economy by 2030.[1] The other BRIC economies, meanwhile, are projected to an aggregate economy worth half of the USA’s by that time, which will drop to the second largest economy. By 2050, China’s economy will, according to the same projections, be worth almost double the USA’s. The core EU states and Japan’s economies will have grown relatively little. A discussion, therefore, of China’s economy becoming the largest economy is relevant. 

This article attempts to model the incentives, constraints and strategies of China and other relevant actors (the United States, Japan, the EU and multinational corporations) through a state-non-state actor prism in order to predict whether China’s rise as the world’s largest economy will spell the end of the current era of globalization and a new dawn for mercantilism.

The USA, EU states and Japan have grown together since the Second World War under the cover of US hegemonic stability, with the USA lending capital, maintaining open markets, creating a foreign-exchange regime and coordinating macroeconomic lending.[2]

While the EU states and Japan have not enjoyed hegemonic status, they have enjoyed economic prosperity, which is what the constituents of these liberal democracies demand of their elected state officials.

In light of US Cold-War posturing and military interventions since the 1950s, Gilpin and Krasner’s state-centric, realist view of the USA as a hegemon that created a liberal international economy primarily to promote its own political and security interests[3] seems compelling. 

China, meanwhile, is best understood as a realist state with a social contract with its citizenry to pursue power and economic growth,

‘Nationalism and economic performance [are] the twin pillars of [Chinese Communist Party] CCP legitimacy.’[4]

By liberalizing its economy, China has become the fourth largest economy in the world;[5] Chwieroth might try and explain this liberalization as the work of liberal economists within the Chinese state,[6] but Viner would correctly counter that as a realist state, China is concerned with accumulating wealth as a means of sustaining power, which in turn is necessary to sustain long-term prosperity and the security of the state.[7]

Nevertheless, China has attained its gain in wealth and power by playing the global hegemon’s game of trade liberalization. Can China usurp the role of global hegemon by playing a little longer? Why is the USA allowing China to play its game when China is seemingly making relative gains?

As a liberal-economy and democracy, the United States has weaknesses as a realist state. One is that it does not control enterprise. American firms will, as profit maximizing entities, seek to make investments in high growth markets, such as China, even if it means that China gains relatively more from the investment than does the USA. According to Oliver Williamson, American firms will even manage to create their own rules and transact where there was a lack of state governance of markets,[8] which further weakens the USA’s status as a purely realist state.

But a better explanation as to why the USA is seemingly conceding relative gains to China is suggested by Ikenberry. Although it may be possible for the Chinese economy to overtake the USA’s, it is much less likely that China will manage to overtake the Western order.[9] The economy of China will be much smaller than the combined economies of the OECD by 2030.[10] The EU, Japan and USA have functioned well as trading partners without China thus far, even before there was a uni-polar world. There is no compelling reason why their economies should close to one another or why their economic integration (or ‘globalization’ as is referred to in the question) should come to an end.

If the USA takes, as Drezner advocates,[11] a leadership role, rather than Gilpin’s hegemonic role, in remolding multilateral institutions so that they better represent the current structure of global power and make China feel enfranchised in the world order; and if the USA promotes John Ruggie’s ‘embedded liberalism’ in which governments intervene in their domestic policies to conform to internationally-agreed upon rules;[12] China will have to adhere to Benjamin Cohen’s ‘social conventions’[13] – residual existing rules of the game as they were once played when there was a clear global hegemon – in order to continue trading with the USA and its liberal allies and hence in order to continue achieving its goals of economic prosperity and gain in power. China’s gain in power, though, will be incremental. 

Brooke's entry:
http://www.slate.com/id/2237261/slideshow/2237294/fs/0//entry/2237301/

"The snow machine pummeled through the white-dusted plain like a jubilant beaver; snow spewing out from both sides, building its dam of snow like a beaver builds one of wood as Todd rode gallantly upon it."

—Brooke Adams (Fletcher '10 MALD, co-editor of the Fletcher Ledger, Fletcher's spoof newspaper)

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Slate feature: The sentences of Sarah Palin diagrammed