Human Rights Education in Asian Schools Volume V

His Rights/Her Duties: Citizen and Mother in the Civics Discourse*

States and Nations as Contested and Unstable Constructs

The nation-state and its constitutive ideology, nationalism, have both been subjected to intensive critique in the last several years. Nation-states have been considered "imagined communities" composed of a fictional unity and rhetorical homogenization.¹ It has been argued that the boundaries of nations and states do not coincide.² There are nations without states; for example, the Jews believed themselves to be a "nation" before the constitution of Israel as a state. East Bengalis carved out a separate state on the basis of language and ethnicity, articulated as "nationness," thereby rupturing Pakistan's ruling fiction called the "two-nation theory." Conversely, there are states which do not harbor single nations but are composed of a multiplicity of nations living within the territorial jurisdiction of the state. Pakistan itself is one such state. At least five nations claim to be living within its boundaries, that is, Sindhis, Balochis, Punjabis, and Pathans. The real number may be more or may increase with continuing fragmentation. The idea of the multiplicity of nations has been politically articulated in the form of the Pakistan Oppressed Nations Movement (PONM). Issues such as the construction of the Kalabagh Dam, which threatens the populations of Sindh and the Frontier province, have given further impetus to nationalist imaginings within the smaller provinces. Only the Punjab, the largest and most powerful province, has as yet not articulated a separate political sense of nationhood. Boundaries of nations and states are not contiguous and statehood needs to be imagined, asserted and articulated all the more passionately on account of being a tentative rhetorical construction.

   The notion of nations is often wider than the boundaries of a single state. For example, many Muslims believe themselves to be a nation, the Ummah, which is distributed territorially into several states. Thus, nations often cut across the territorial boundaries of a state and a single state can contain within its territory many nations. There has been increasing recognition of the fact that both concepts, "nation" and "state," are highly fluid and labile. The idea of fixity, so essential for a state to preserve its sovereignty, is a myth. A single state can so easily dissolve into many as in the cases of the former Soviet Union, which split into several new states, and India, which has split into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The processes of partitioning and re-aligning seem to be continuing and the emergence of new "states" and "nations" cannot be discounted in the future.
   The continuous partitioning, separatism and sub-national articulation of identity makes nations and states highly contested entities. The more contradictory and contested the nation/state, the more vociferously does it assert its sovereignty and distinct identity in official rhetoric. The contestation of states and nations comes from within and without. Oppressed ethnic and religious minorities within the boundaries of the state, and "enemies"/outsiders residing within other states/nations can both contest the legitimacy of a state. The perceived or real threat from those who do not accept the validity of statehood leads to intensified efforts at homogenization and superimposition of a contrived oneness upon diverse populations.


Inclusion/Exclusion as Regulatory Processes of States

This kind of forced homogenization from above, in the form of official nationalism, is often constructed through processes of inclusion and exclusion. A state attempting to forge a unified identity in the midst of a challenging diversity tends to create those who belong (insiders) and those who do not belong within the selfhood of the state/nation nexus (outsiders). Insiders usually have full citizenship with all the attendant rights that belong to citizens, while outsiders tend to become systematically excluded from various rights on the basis of some characteristic that differentiates between them and the insiders. This characteristic may be religious belief, gender, ethnic difference, or some other marker of identity that is perceived as alien or Other of the nation/state.
   Contradictions in statist and nationalist discourses arise from the simultaneous, but strategic, deployment of the rhetoric of universalism and particularity/difference. The Pakistani state, for example, plagued as it is by questions of identity and survival, draws upon the contradictory discourses of sameness and difference to include people into the official selfdefinition, or exclude them from equal participation in public life. The tension between equality and difference is maintained and played out in the political field as a part of the struggle for power and control. For example, the constitution of Pakistan (currently held in abeyance by an illegal military regime) states that there will be no discrimination on the basis of sex alone (Article 25 of Fundamental Rights), yet there are a number of laws, protected by the Eighth Constitutional Amendment, which virtually negate the equality and citizenship rights of women. Similarly, the constitution avers that the religious minorities will be free to practice their religion and there shall be no discrimination on the basis of religion, yet the religious minorities have been reduced to the status of non-citizens through the Separate Electorate System and a number of laws which make non-Muslims outsiders and exclude them from the enjoyment of full citizenship rights. For example, a non-Muslim cannot become the prime minister or president of Pakistan.
   The rhetoric of universal, inclusive, and equal citizenship irrespective of class, race, gender, ethnicity, or other markers of difference, is contradicted within the constitution by the discourse of difference, exclusion, and inequality articulated in laws such as the Law of Evidence of 1984 and the Citizenship Act of 1951, both of which reduce or negate women's equal citizenship on the basis of sex alone. The notion of separate electorates negates the equal citizenship of religious minorities who are thereby prevented from voting for those who make laws for them. Internal contestations by women and religious and ethnic minorities make the Pakistani state, like other similar states, a permanently contradictory site of political struggles. The state is forever contested by those whom it excludes from its presumed universality even while they exist within its territorial jurisdiction and are subject to its laws.
   The state's rhetoric of difference/differentiation/distinction on which exclusions are premised is derived from its constructions of nation/nationalism. While the idea of the modern "state" as a political construct emerged within Enlightenment discourses of equality, universality, rationality, representation, democracy, agency, and individualism, the equally modern ideas of "nation" and "nationalism" with which the state came to be associated were rooted in ideas of race, inequality, gender division, notions of inferiority of the Other, and difference. While the state referred to politicolegal concepts, nations appealed to family and kinship. The state was regarded as based on rationality, impersonal public relations, and individualism.³ On the other hand, nationalism made appeals to deep-rooted passions of blood ties and family, personal relations, and collective life. The bureaucratic proceduralism of states was derived from "scientific" notions of objective rules and regulations, uniformity and universality of impersonal procedural mechanisms based on rational calculation. On the other hand, nations referred to ideas of love, home, homeland, landscape, family, brotherhood, and collectivities bound by personalized ties.
   States and nations are thus conceived in terms that are considered dichotomous: rational versus emotional, impersonal versus personal, individual versus collective, outer versus inner, universal versus differentiated, and so on. While such dichotomies are usually false, they lend themselves to political manipulation with ease. They prove to be extremely helpful in the construction of the Other as the opposite of one's self and, therefore, to be excluded from the rights that are enjoyed by those who constitute the self, that is, the insiders. Through systematic exclusions, the state regulates society and particularly manages to control those who contest its inequalities. The exclusionary and differentiating practices of the state are thus regulatory practices that serve to control, regulate, and manipulate the lives of people at personal and political levels.


Deployment of Gender as a Strategy of Social Regulation

   The regulatory processes of the nationstate are located at various institutional sites and are practiced in multiple ways, including contestation. For example, both consent and coercion are intrinsic to the practices of a racialized and gendered citizenry...The regulatory practices of the nation-state founded upon a timeless notion of the people, and the compulsory state, are by no means static and fixed. Rather, they change over time to sanction access to the nation-state's resources.⁴
   Modern nation-states participate in the institutionalization of women's subordination by means of regulatory processes, the discursive formations that construct and discipline citizen-subjects.⁵

   The terms in which states and nations are articulated as discursive constructs are analogous to the rhetorical devices used in the construction of gender. States are conceived in masculine images, while nation is a feminine imaginary. Like states, men are regarded as being rational, individualistic, impersonal, objective, and worthy of being treated with universal equality. Like nations, women are perceived as being emotional, less individualistic, more concerned with collectivities such as the family and community, nonrational and, therefore, to be treated with difference. Men's relationship with male-defined states is considered to be that of an individual citizen's relation to the state. On the other hand, on account of women's difference, and their greater perceived concern with collective entities, their relation to the state comes to be mediated by men and ceases to be a direct one as an individual citizen. This mediation catapults women out of citizenship conceived as equal and universal.
   As the "symbolic borderguards" of nations and states, women come to be associated with the family primarily as mothers responsible for the biocultural reproduction of nations. They produce and reproduce nations biologically by giving birth to the population and culturally by bringing up men as good soldiers/workers/citizens capable of defending the "motherland," and engaging in productive work while being obedient to the law and subservient to authority. Similarly, they produce women who are obedient and subservient to men in the family and are capable of becoming "good mothers" who will carry on the work of reproduction in the future. Motherhood is central to national and cultural reproduction and the idea of the greatness of the self-sacrificing mother is glorified in virtually all forms of cultural and religious nationalisms.⁶ As mothers, women are expected to protect and preserve the nation's cultural values and norms, the inner core of self against all outsiders.⁷ The fear of miscegenation leads to the confinement of women to their homes and to strict surveillance by males. Fear of race mixture and impurity through contact with "unclean" outsiders of the nation, becomes the justification for mposing all kinds of controls upon women and for excluding them from the individualized rights of modern citizenship.
   Male identity comes to be constructed in terms of his rights as an individual citizen of the state, while female identity is predicated upon her duties to the nation/state as a mother. This kind of division of citizenship, based on women's difference, ensures that women will be confined to the so-called "private sphere" of home, family, and personal relations. Another false, but politically potent, dichotomy between the public and private spheres is constructed as a power move by those who stand to gain from dichotomous constructions of social and political life. The false division of the world into the public and private spheres (an extremely tenuous and fluid distinction) enables the regulation of the social and sexual life of the population. Women's systematic exclusion from democratic rights (usually conceived as being exercised in the public sphere) is often justified by appeals to their duties to the family. The public/private divide becomes the cornerstone of the nation's selfrepresentation o the world. The differentiated hierarchies of cultural and religious nationalism, articulated through gender distinctions in the family, thus come to contradict the universalized equality of citizenship discourses.
   Historically, the construction of citizenship in masculine terms has meant the exclusion of women from the state. This exclusion has naturally prevented them from fully enjoying the rights that citizenship carries. The private sphere has been constructed around duties rather than rights and there is constant emphasis is on women's duties to the family and state. According to Yuval-Davis and Werbner, citizenship discourse presents men's particularistic interests as universal interests.⁸ The universalism of male-defined citizenship hides particularistic interests and is, therefore, a false universalism. It conceals inequalities and hierarchies beneath a veneer of equality of all citizens.
   Citizenship, that is, membership in the political community, is thus based on the historical exclusion of women from public space and rights. Nationalism places representational value on women thereby limiting their access to rights and equality in the private sphere. Cultural nationalism excludes actual women from political participation by defining the home as the proper place for women while constructing the "nation" on the basis of the idealized, imagined woman/mother. Women thus carry the representational burden of the nation-state. The more such states are threatened due to their unstable, shifting, contested, and precarious character, the more strongly do they appeal to the nation's women to defend the ideological boundaries of the nation while men are called upon to defend the physical frontiers of the state. The attitudes and behavior of both men and women are thus regulated and controlled in the name of defending the honor of the nation and sovereignty of the state.


Civics Education as a Regulatory Practice of the State

   Different social institutions, primarily those of schooling and the media, can be used for ideological production in the modern liberal democratic state.⁹

   Prior to the emergence of nation-states on the world stage, education was the responsibility of the Church and religious institutions of society. Education in Madrassahs, Pathshalas, and the Church was primarily concerned with the spiritual life of the student. With modern nation-state formation, education was seized upon by the state as a prime means of the production and reproduction of modern citizens and national consciousness. Several theorists have noted that national educational systems in modern states, in particular within the newly constituted postcolonial states, have been the prime instruments of nation-building and stateformation.¹⁰ With the state taking over education as a tool of social and political reproduction, education was secularized and oriented toward the making of the citizen/worker rather than being concerned with salvation. While in countries like Pakistan education still performs a large part of its older function of imparting religious knowledge, in Western countries it has been secularized to a very large degree. However, secular and scientific teaching have been incorporated into education by new states attempting to modernize and develop. One of the foremost needs of a modern nation-state is a citizenry that is obedient, docile, and lawabiding as well as infused with the nationalist spirit. A good citizen is regarded as one who not only obeys the law and performs "national duties," but is also a hardworking and industrious person able to increase "national production." As Andy Green explains:

   However, in the majority of countries governments still see education as a process of nation-building which involves both economic and social objectives. Education systems are still national institutions devoted, in varying degrees, to the preparation of future workers and the formation of future citizens.¹¹

   While discussing the tendency for advanced countries to move away from using education as a force for national integration and cohesion, Green asserts:

   From a global perspective, it would appear that forming citizens and shaping national identities is still one of the primary functions in education in most countries. National curricula still tend to place great emphasis on national languages and cultures. History is used to popularize national myths and to promote national identities; literature to celebrate the national language and literary achievements; and civic and moral education to instill national values and notions of good citizenship. Many schools still incorporate into their daily rituals the symbolic paraphernalia of nationhood, with the flying of flags, the singing of anthems and the recital of pledges and declarations...to develop the qualities of social co-operation and individual discipline and persistence which are seen as central to the nation's values...Governments frequently call on education to promote national values and culture as a source of social cohesion and national solidarity.¹²

   According to Green, civic nationalism aims to "integrate multiple ethnic cultures and religions into a single, though diverse, national identity."¹³ However, in some countries, notions of nationalism are more ethnically based while schools have stridently promoted the language and culture of the dominant groups in society. This has been a process of forging a forced "sense of common identity while marginalizing and excluding minority groups and cultures."¹⁴
   Green continues to argue that the use of education for national identity-building has been most prevalent historically among emerging nation-states. According to him,

nation-building through education has been most evident in the new states which have emerged through decolonization, the collapse of former "empires" and other forms of national transition. "Most conspicuously, it has been among the new nation states undergoing periods of accelerated economic development and state formation that education has been used most deliberately as an instrument of forming citizens and forging new national identities' [emphasis mine].¹⁵

   This assertion echoes Michael Herzfeld's observation that metaphors and imagery of blood and kinship

unite whole societies in the pursuit of violence. The logic of nationalism treats the nation as a family. New states are especially liable to develop such devices through their educational systems, and may displace or coopt family affect for the purposes of national solidarity.¹⁶

   A textbook for Civics produced in Pakistan in 1975 for Class VI contains the following words which lend credence to Herzfeld's argument that family and kinship metaphors underpin the construction of citizen identity and statehood:

   Just as people in the home make up a small family, in the same way all our Pakistani brothers make up a big family. We are all members of this family. All those who live in Pakistan are brothers of one another. Just as we do not deceive or cheat inside the family circle, so also we should not deceive or cheat outside this circle.¹⁷

   In the above quoted lines, not only do we see the analogy between family and state in order to transfer the affect felt towards the family on to the state, thereby infusing the state with nationalist passion, we can also discern the excessively male construction of citizenship. All Pakistani citizens are brothers of one another and Pakistan is composed of a vast brotherhood that must be intensely loyal to itself. This passage lends support to Benedict Anderson's assertion that nations are imagined as a "vast horizontal brotherhood." Women are totally effaced from the discourse of masculine citizenship, their absence serving to give a sense of a strong and powerful nation. However, we also perceive the aspect of regulation and discipline in the admonition that just as families do not lie or deceive their members (in reality they very often do), citizens as a family should not lie to the state. Obedience and loyalty, built into citizenship concepts, are easier to instill when the state is reconstituted in familial and blood metaphors. Thus families have the capacity to regulate and discipline its members in ways that the state can rely on. When disloyalty to the state feels like disloyalty to one's kith and kin, and the state takes on parental attributes of admonition, punishment and reward, it is easier for citizens to transfer passion on to the state-as-parent. Civics discourse, as will be discussed below, reconstructs the state in parental and familial terms. Arguing that citizenship is a contested concept, Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis argue:

   ...freedom, autonomy and the right to be different--central credos of democratic citizenship --are pitched against the regulating forces of modernity and the state and subverted by discourses of "culture and tradition" --of nationalism, religiosity and the family.¹⁸

   Werbner and Yuval-Davis argue that citizenship is gendered, classed, and racialized so that in its constructions, exclusion and inclusion, difference and equality come into contradiction with one another.¹⁹ These differentiations and inequalities are articulated through family structures which underpin the hierarchies of cultural nationalism.
   Green argues that such processes of citizen formation and national identity construction have weakened in advanced capitalist societies due to confusion and "in part because few western governments have a clear notion of what nationhood and citizenship mean in complex and pluralistic modern democracies."²⁰ Citizenship education is undergoing a crisis in modern developed democracies as a result of global market forces which are forcing nationstates to retreat in the face of expanding markets which turn all citizens into consumers.
   Civics, as a subject, was introduced in the 19th century precisely for the creation of ideal subject citizens and productive workers. An important aspect of nation-state formation was the welding of diverse, conflicted, and multiple regional populations into the "national citizenry." Nation-state formation involved a move from regionalism to nationalism.²¹ Regional and narrower loyalties had to be weakened in favor of loyalty to the nation-state. This required a change in consciousness, feeling, and imagining. No institution could perform this function better than mass schooling, and it was towards this end that mass schooling was utilized in colonial times.
   In an incisive historical analysis of Civics education in India, Manish Jain argues that colonial rule required the transformation of natives into citizens in order to create a civil society in India.²² For this purpose, the natives had to be constructed as illiterate, backward, uncivilized, not politically conscious, indifferent to health and hygiene, dirty, immoral and depraved. This kind of construction of the colonized native had been provided by Charles Grant in 1797 when he described the Indians as liars, cheats, tricksters, backward, superstitious and in need of improvement.²³ The "improvement" metaphor came to form the basis of civic education in India in the 19th century.
   The first book of Civics, The Citizen of India, written by Lee Warner, appeared in India in 1897. Civics, like the education project in general, "was closely related to the colonial project of rule, cultural assimilation and establishment of British hegemony."²⁴ Jain argues that the colonial vision and images continue to shape both the subject and the idea of citizen after independence. The same is true of Pakistani Civics textbooks as revealed by my own examination of Fellow of Arts level Civics textbooks written by Mazhar-ul-Haq.²⁵ My own findings were that Civics education is designed to accommodate individuals to the domination of elite groups whose will is expressed in the state. Citizens are expected to be obedient, docile, law-abiding, fiercely loyal, and patriotic even though the state may be unwilling to provide the goods and services for which citizens pay taxes.
   The emphasis in postcolonial textbooks, like the colonial one, is on citizens' duties to the state. In 1877, the Textbook Committee recommended the inclusion of "duties of good citizens" in citizenship textbooks. As dissent against British rule grew in India, there were calls to improve the morals of the natives and to turn them into "good citizens" by which was meant that they should be loyal to the crown and subservient to the British. Loyalty was declared to be a central characteristic of good government. The British argued that they ought to teach a person her rights and duties, what is expected of her and what is done by the government to protect the property and health and well-being of the citizens. The citizens were deemed in need of protection by the state in return for loyalty, obedience, duties, good habits, and healthy activities. A parent-child relationship was thereby set up between the state and citizens in which a benign but strict parent cared for and protected its obedient and loyal children. Citizens were thus infantilized and the state came to be imbued with parental command and authority. The state was declared to be higher than the citizens and the narrower loyalties of community, village, and region. This was a process to end older regional loyalties in favor of new nationalist ones.
   A capitalist/colonial state also wanted to instill the spirit of competition in order to stimulate labor values among the natives. According to Lee Warner, the government was required to "maintain peace and justice and then capital alone could provide the impulse to labor."²⁶ The constant emphasis in Civics teaching was on order and discipline, which were deemed necessary for the internal defense of the country. Those who opposed British rule were regarded as "turbulent," "savage tribes," and "disorderly classes." Maintenance of the existing social order was among the most conservative of the functions of Civic education. Creating a civil society, based on private property, was considered imperative and this could be achieved by inculcating "desirable virtues" among citizens. Jain notes that the role of education, as outlined by Lord Minto was to "socialize the natives in the new order and minimize violence."²⁷ Education was set the task of "creating social harmony" and socializing individuals into the new order so that rebellion, class conflict, and dissent could be contained through the creation of "civilized citizens" out of "raw savages."
   A fundamental aspect of modern citizenship was that the individual was considered the primary unit of society and was expected to have the attributes of reason and rationality. Emotion and passion were considered the characteristics of the native who was "backward." Rationality among citizens was considered a prerequisite for the establishment of order which was central to the political vision of the colonial state. A good citizen was one who could assist in the creation of order and help prevent "anarchy," "lawlessness" and disorder. A citizen was thus constructed as nonthreatening as opposed to a native whose unbridled passion could sway him and lead to violence. The British fear of rebellion and overthrow lurked underneath the desire to create passive and docile citizens "freed" of the "negative traits" of passion, emotion, and anger. A good citizen was one who respected private property, the material basis of civil society. Jain argues that middle-class European values and norms were central in the transformation of the native into a citizen.²⁸ Ignorance, superstition, and lack of reason of "natives" helped strengthen the moral improvement project of colonial rule--an improvement couched in the terms of compliance and submission.
   The state's gendered construction in Civics discourse revolved around the protection idea (State-as-Father) and the idea that the state nurtures its citizens by looking after their health, sanitation, and other needs (State-as-Mother). The ethic of caring was emphasized for the state in the form of the benevolence of the colonial state. As Jain writes:

   The educational nature of colonial rule was the result of the conceptualization of the colonial enterprise as an adult-child relationship finding its justification in the enlightenment project and human evolution theories... enlightenment offered the possibility to mankind to come out of immaturity and become a rational and adult being... This emphasis on adult rationality, a value which originated in a specific historical period in European societies, formed a pedagogic and imperialist hierarchy between European adulthood and its childish, colonized Other.²⁹

   A good citizen was clean and had sanitary habits, dirt being the attribute of "filthy natives."
   Cleanliness became synonymous with good, modern citizenship. Cleanliness was not only a bodily but a political metaphor which meant a politically sanitized person incapable of mounting revolt or challenging colonial power. Moral uplift and mental discipline of the "natives" were metonymically connected with good, clean habits. The physical control over the body by means of sanitization was meant to translate into mental and moral cleanliness defined by passivity, obedience, and loyalty. Personal hygiene was thus a political metaphor for a "clean citizen" through a metonymic connection between morality, cleanliness, and performance of civic duties. The task of education was not merely schooling in various subjects but the creation of clean and healthy citizens. Education was called upon to provide discipline, organization, and law and order among citizens so that the colonial state's business could be run effectively and without interference. It was through a series of dichotomies revolving around clean/unclean, rational/emotional, parent/child, developed/backward, and superior/inferior that the colonizers constructed the native Other who was to be brought up by the colonial power in its own image. All negative cultural traits were attributed to the "natives" and positive ones to the British; all fears and hatred were projected on to the Other in the construction of citizen versus native.
   The improvement metaphor also led to excessive emphasis on character-building (as though natives lacked character and it needed to be built up through education). Later on the same idea was utilized in nation-building, an equally homogenizing idea that required "identical beings." Both character-building and nation-building were pivotal colonial educational myths since all individuals in society cannot have one, monolithic "character" (whatever the word implies), nor can a diverse populace be forcibly welded into a single and monolithic nation. However, the Civics discourse emphasized that the native should be trained in character-building and the state should perform this "developmental task" as a good, caring parent through the educational process. The modern citizen required a "national character" (yet another fiction) and the civilizing regime was responsible for creating such a citizen. The colonial state was thus depicted as a progressive force that would mould wild savages into rational, modern, educated, adult, clean, and moral citizens. It was through civics textbooks, writes Jain, that the educated Indian imbibed the concept of the ideal citizen in a submissive relation to the state which adopted a paternalistic attitude toward the masses. The state took upon itself the arduous moral task of uplifting them, and shaping masses into citizens considered ideal from an imperial perspective.³⁰ The state thus became an agent of change, a kind of progressive and developmental force, a benefactor who demanded absolute loyalty in return for providing the railway, education, telegraph, health, hygiene, and other services.
   Jain argues that Civics textbooks became a mask for the colonial state and its economic exploitation. It made the disciplinary management of natives seem like people's welfare and helped conceal the pecuniary gains of the foreign rulers. Civics textbooks, with their concepts of ideal citizen and ideal state, became an affirmation of colonial rule and served to justify absolute loyalty.
   The figure of citizen was also shaped by the nation, another colonial construction which went side by side with state formation. Nation, an exclusivist concept, rendered other nations inferior to one's own and, in theory, projected all citizens as equals among themselves. A "free" citizen, with agency to act independently, became an integral part of a "sovereign" nation-state, and the family a microcosm of the state, representing its values and ideals.
   To this day, postcolonial states socialize their children to become future citizens who, in theory, have the agency to act morally and politically. Civics textbooks are still used to instill these qualities as it is assumed even today that people lack these qualities and a civic education is required to inculcate them. Citizens are still required to be obedient, cleansed, virtuous, and passive. Passivity is promoted along with its seeming opposite, agency, so that the state can draw upon any discourse it might require in any given circumstances. Agency is currently couched in the language of "respon-sibility" and "duty" to the state to ensure that everyone conforms to the expectations of a "good citizen." Current Civics textbooks enumerate the following qualities of a "good citizen": good habits, amicable speech, orderliness, cleanliness, pleasantness, hard work, honesty, healthy, truthful and rational, qualities associated with middle-class bourgeois norms. The poor are regarded as burdens on state and society and their welfare is projected as benevolence rather than as a right implied in the very process of independence from colonial rule.
   An important feature of Civics textbooks pointed out by Jain is that women are invisible except in the private sphere.³¹ Women are portrayed in stereotyped roles, for example, performing domestic chores while public spaces are reserved for men. Men are portrayed in business, politics, and commerce. Men's achievements are lauded while those of women are either not mentioned or women's roles are reduced to "spectators of history." Traditional female roles are consistently reinforced to define the boundaries of the nation while men perform the state's work. In the 19th century, the social sciences lacked the concept of oppression with the result that the "portrayal of women and men in sex bound roles confirms the patriarchal notion that men are the legitimate, inside real actors in the social arena; women are the unworthy outsiders."³²
   Jain also refers to the phenomenon of exclusion as a regulatory practice in Civics education.³³ According to him, the figure of citizen in the earlier period was inclusive since mass support against colonial rule was required. Mobilization of different people was necessary to incorporate them into the newly born idea of the nation-state. As the national state was replacing the colonial one, as many loyal citizens of the newly imagined entity as possible were needed. However, after the consolidation of the new nation-state, the definition of citizen came to be rooted in exclusion and differentiation. The universality of the claims of independence movements was abandoned in favor of differentiations based on caste, class, sex, and creed. Requirements of full citizenship in the process of state-formation came to be based on characteristics that differentiate between people. The excluded, whether based on caste, class, or gender, had fewer rights which were curtailed by appeals to indigenous culture and tradition. Women were the main markers of this identity and among the first to lose equal citizenship on account merely of being female. The differences were constituted on the basis of perceived absences and lacks and, in the case of women, their very gender came to mean a number of lacks such as rationality, agency, independence, ability to make independent judgements, all characteristics associated with post-enlightenment constructions of citizenship based on rationality, agency and independent decision making. The powers denied to women by making appeals to culture and religion, were then used as excuses for reducing their status as citizens. This served the dual purpose of confining women to the so-called private sphere, as well regulating sex roles of both men and women. A full citizen had to/ could perform tasks that a half-citizen should not/could not, so went the argument.
   In Jain's assessment, this was a project in which new "natives of the nation-state" were created in the process of what has been called "internal colonialism."³⁴ The modern citizen of the nation-state was expected to internalize middle-class norms of behavior which were legitimized as the proper norms and values of the citizen. Civics textbooks went a long way toward inculcating the middle class moral virtues among the new citizens of the new nationstate. New boundaries and new margins were constructed through processes of inclusion and exclusion, legitimized in bureaucratic and policy procedures of the nation-state. Civics textbooks upheld these newer boundaries by not contesting the new boundary-mapping practices and overlooking the processes of class, race, caste, and gender conflicts which are central in social and political intergroup struggles for power and hegemony. The postcolonial states created and legitimized newer inequalities, which served the needs of powerful groups after independence when commitment to nation-state formation was no longer required. Earlier, by including as many different groups as possible, the numbers game was won for the sake of achieving independence.
   Post-independence Civics textbooks in both India and Pakistan have continued the colonial legacy of a parent-state performing the developmental task of "looking after" its childrencitizens and "improving their character" and morals by using a carrot-and-stick policy. The colonial ethos of "order, improvement and instilling rationality" indicates the continuation of the colonial legacy in which the state feared the people and the people mistrusted the state. The gulf between the people and the state has remained, despite the rulers being local instead of foreign. In this process, the class divide has played a significant role since the local ruling classes acted in a manner very similar to that of foreign rulers in their relation with the people. The power of the vote, which ostensibly provides citizens with some control over their rulers, has become a mockery in Pakistan where votes are regularly bought, sold, and manipulated during elections, thus making the whole election exercise a farce. The rhetoric of democracy has served to efface the effects of inequality and oppression by theoretically creating a façade of accountability of the rulers. The bureaucratic and military structures put in place by colonial rule have effectively ensured that real or substantive democracy will not flourish in the country. The colonial ideas of progress and development have come to mean luxurious lifestyles for the ruling elite classes such as the higher military and civil officers, landlords and industrialists by extracting cheap labor from countless dispossessed people. This kind of exploitation is not mentioned in a single civics textbook since the main purposes of such textbooks appear to be to accommodate people to existing social structures of power and inequality by exhorting them to be obedient, loyal, hard working, industrious and compliant.
   The discourse of "shortcomings of peasants, rural folk and the poor and ruled classes" effectively masks the rampant corruption and exploitation by those who rule while they constantly resort to the idea of the "illiterate peasant" or the "uncivilized and uneducated rustic" to explain so-called "backwardness" of the postcolonial "natives." Development deficits, mainly resulting from excessive exploitation, corruption and structures of inequality, are blamed on the "victims" of underdevelopment who are then constructed as being in need of improvement through education and training. The colonial metaphors of "improvement" and "civilizing," constructed for the purposes of defining the Other as "backward" and in need of "corrective measures," are deployed by postcolonial ruling elite classes to conceal the real causes of poverty, inequality and injustice rooted in class and patriarchal power.
   Nevertheless, virtually all Civics textbooks, examined by myself in Pakistan and by Jain in India, claim to create active and conscious citizens. With a strongly didactic, moralistic, and sermonizing tone adopted by the writers of such textbooks, it seems questionable whether they can or do create thinking and critical citizens with agency and political consciousness. Designed primarily to destroy agency, to accommodate people to an unjust order as "natural" and "divine," it is highly unlikely that such textbooks have the capacity to produce active agents of social critique and change. Civics pedagogy is deeply conservative and aims to preserve existing relations of power and privilege. The key words are "order" and "discipline," "obedience" and "loyalty," not challenging the unjust distribution of power and resources in society. Questioning the structures and institutions of the state is presented as treachery. Children are not allowed to debate or ask questions on structures and social stratification. They are expected to absorb the texts and reproduce them in the examinations. Centralized examinations thus become the foremost means of social control and reproduction of the existing relations of production through mechanisms of ideology production and dissemination. In fact, the dimension of social change appears to be completely absent from Civics pedagogy. There is also little or no mention of resistance movements, be they by women, workers, or peasants. Resistance, as a category of social and political discourse, seems to be absent from the pedagogy of Civics. The idea is to create a "civilized," "obedient," "wellmannered," "honest," "truthful," and "modernized" citizen in the sense in which these terms were used by the colonial administration. A child reading these textbooks can barely understand or conceptualize her/his own relation to a highly abstract version of state and society provided by Civics textbooks. A person who cannot see the relation of self to state and society is hardly likely to understand how to effect change in socioeconomic structures which disempower him. Contesting the dominant vision of society seems like heresy in the secular theodicy of the hallowed nation-state. Rooted in the banking concept of "filling the child with a plethora of unrelated facts," Civics pedagogy cannot even hope to be critical.
   For the downtrodden of this world, Civics, as taught in Pakistan, is extremely disempowering. The idea that education is an empowering activity is belied by reading a single textbook of Civics. Exclusion of women, peasants, artisans, and so-called "ordinary people" from the discourse of Civics, seems to imply that citizenship in Pakistan means a Muslim male from a powerful class. This, in effect, is the definition of citizen in Pakistan where religious nationalism in the form of the highly contested and contestable two-nation theory, has resulted in the near-total exclusion of women and minorities from the idea of citizenship.
   Jain correctly concludes his critique of modern-day Civics teaching by arguing that the discipline remains imprisoned in the colonial rupture of any relation between the school and society.³⁵ In class and patriarchal societies, education remains a project of instilling the dominant values that suit the ruling classes. The function of education continues to be one of mystifying the social relations of production to create the notion of a neutral state equally "caring" toward everyone. Women, religious minorities, and the poor have little to gain from the modern nation-state, especially one imbued with the kind of nationalism that differentiates between those who belong and those who do not. However, through a Civic education, the rulers try to engender feelings of love for the paternal state so that those whom it excludes may not challenge its authority.
   In Pakistan, Civics education takes a similar conservative approach to the production of subject human beings. The Civics Textbook for Class XI prepared by the Punjab Textbook Board in 1998 outlines the following qualities of "good citizenship": a noble character, good habits, common sense understandings, knowledge and loyalty, intelligence, discipline, and a good conscience.³⁶ The book asserts that citizens with good qualities are an asset for the state and help make the state more secure. The security of the state is considered paramount while that of citizens, which the state is expected to ensure, is overlooked. In Pakistani Civics discourse, state security overrides all other concerns, and sovereignty, instead of flowing from the people, flows from Allah. The people are thus effectively disenfranchised. They exist for the state and not the state for them. Hence, patriotism and loyalty are propagated on page after page while the state's duties to provide citizens with rights are downplayed. A citizen's first duty is defined as obeying and respecting the law of the land. The writer warns that if the laws are not obeyed the system would collapse and breaking them becomes a hindrance to the development of society.³⁷ There is no mention of laws that are discriminatory toward various groups such as women and minorities. All laws, regardless of their morality or otherwise, are to be obeyed.
   There is an immense emphasis on discipline and maintaining the social order without any reference to the fact that the social order is not equal for all. After obedience, the second duty of the citizen is loyalty to the state and the writer asserts that the state should be placed above the individual. The third duty is to lay down his/her life for the defense of the country. The fourth is to defend the country against "internal enemies." The fifth duty is to be obedient to the basic ideology of the state which, in Pakistan's case, is the two-nation form of nationalism. The sixth duty is payment of taxes (often without representation and despite imposition of military rule) without raising any questions of how that money will be spent (whether on bombs, guns, and tanks rather than food, water, health, and education).³⁸ In other words, the thrust is not toward creating critical, agency-oriented citizenship, but a conforming and submissive citizenship in which the state has all the rights and the citizen all the duties.


Citizen and Mother: State and Nation in Civics Education

   In the face of extreme nationalist or religious movements, women have had to challenge their symbolic function as guardians of their culture, the embodiments and "borderguards" of national collectivities. Women's ambivalent positioning is expressed in the fact that they are considered fully fledged members of the political community [and also] subjected to special rules and regulations aimed at controlling their behavior in order to ensure that they conform to this imposed "burden of representation."³⁹
   The "essential woman" becomes the national iconic signifer of the material, the passive, and the corporeal, to be worshipped, protected, and controlled by those with the power to remember and to forget, to guard, and to define, and redefine.⁴⁰

   The contradictions between the demands of modern democracy and nationalism, especially as regards the status and position of women, have been pointed out by various feminist writers. Werbner and Yuval-Davis have argued that democratic citizenship's overt stress on rationality, individuality and the rule of law has been frequently in tension with, or even antithetical to, the appeals to communal solidarities and primordial sentiments of soil and blood which nationalism makes.⁴¹ They argue that citizenship has been a site of intense struggle since it is a concept rooted in modernity with all its contradictory tendencies toward ordering, control, and normalization along with tolerance of uncertainty, scepticism, disagreement, and difference. While modern citizenship opens up arenas and spaces of freedom and the right to be different, it also places limits and "orders conflict, channels and tames it, labels and classifies collective differences, it determines how, where and when difference may legitimately be represented and who counts as "different" in the political arena itself a social construct."⁴² According to these writers, citizenship defines the limits of state power to determine where civil society and the "private sphere" begin.
   Werbner and Yuval-Davis argue that the

exclusion of women from citizenship was an intrinsic feature of their naturalization as embodiments of the private, the familial and the emotional. It was thus essential to the construction of the public sphere as masculine, rational, responsible and respectable. Women became the "property" that allowed married men, even the working classes, the right to be active citizens in the public sphere.⁴³

   Hence, citizenship was constructed in masculine terms by placing women within the matrix of personal, familial, and married relations. It was in marriage and the family that female equal universal citizenship was negated since familial hierarchies and inequalities contradict the notion that all citizens are equal before law regardless of sex, race, or class. Therefore, even the most egalitarian formulations of political rights are "predicated upon the gender division between citizens and noncitizens." The rhetoric of equality hides the inconsistencies and contradictions and defines women as subordinate and nonrational. Quoting Vogel, Werbner, and Yuval-Davis argue: "The egalitarian principles were... displaced and overlaid by a predominantly political interest in the hierarchical ordering of marriage."⁴⁴
   It is precisely in the hierarchical ordering of marriage that women's equality, promised by citizenship discourse, is negated. The textbook for Civics for Class XI, carries the following passage while defining the patriarchal marriage form:

   In such families, the male has a central position in the family. Lineage is traced from male heads of families. The father is the head of the family and is responsible for its economic support. In Islamic societies also, the patriarchal family is the norm and is popular. In the rest of the world too, the patriarchal form of the family is number one in popularity.⁴⁵

   This passage clearly establishes the familial hierarchies that place women in a subordinate position in relation to men. The male is described as having a central position in the family. In reality, there are increasing numbers of women-headed households due to urbanization and migration. However, an ideal form is presented here while overlooking that few families today conform to the essentialized version of the family due to economic and other pressures. The idea that lineage is traced from the father is not questioned even though in certain parts of South Asia, lineage has traditionally been traced from the mother since paternity is not certain. The next sentence avers that the male is responsible for economic support even though, in the rural areas, women work 16 hours a day in the fields and the home. In urban areas as well, increasing numbers of women have entered the workforce due to economic pressures. These facts are not recognized in the Civics textbooks where an idealized and highly abstract version of the family is presented as "right and proper." Gender difference is easily discernible in the assertion that "it is a husband's right that the wife should respect him, and the wife's right that he should treat her well."⁴⁶ For the wife respect is advised, while for the husband "good treatment." Good treatment is normally given to those who are lower and respect is given to those who are higher/senior. Respect has a hierarchical connotation in Pakistani society and does not necessarily imply mutuality or reciprocity.
   The connection of patriarchal families is made with Islamic societies so that this kind of family form is legitimized as being religiously correct. It is described as the norm and as being popular while the writer offers no evidence of its popularity or even that it is the norm. By asserting that it is popular, the writer's intention seems to be to provide justification for its existence. After connecting it with Islam, the writer asserts that the patriarchal form of the family is "number one in popularity" even in the rest of the world. Once again no evidence of its popularity is provided, nor is any evidence given of the violence and destruction that often characterizes patriarchal families.
   The matriarchal family form is described in the following way:

   In matriarchal families, the woman or the wife is the head of the household. Daughters inherit the family property. In the present, such families are seldom found anywhere in the world. In certain extremely backward parts of India and Tibet, the matriarchal family still exists.⁴⁷

   In the above quoted passage, the writer uses the dimension of time to place the matriarchal family in the past in order to make the association with backwardness. By claiming that in the present such families are seldom found anywhere in the world, he not only depicts such families as backward and nonprogressive, he tries to de-legitimize them on the basis that most cultures of the world have rejected them. This "rejection" is proof of the fact that such family forms are not "proper or correct." In the last sentence, he actually uses the word "backward" to describe such families, once again resorting to the dimension of time to prove their illegitimacy. However, the most interesting aspect of the last sentence is that such "bad" or "immoral" families, in which women are household heads, are associated with the "national enemy," that is, India. This serves the dual purpose of rejecting such a family form and also associating the immoral or the improper with the enemy. This kind of creation of the Other is central in cultural nationalisms which project all "negative" or "bad" aspects of the self on to the Other/enemy/outsider.⁴⁸ The idea here seems to be that by associating the matriarchal form of the family with Hindus, Buddhists, and Others of the Pakistani self, the students of Civics will reject it more easily and will not want to create such a family. Another notion present in the subtext of this passage is that the enemy/Other is weak and "impotent" because it has matriarchal families and women-headed households. This means that the enemy is not masculine enough as its men are unable to "control their women." Enemies are often either hypermasculinized in textbooks when aggression against them is justified on the basis of their being too violent; or feminized in order to overassert one's own masculinity. If the enemy nation is feminized and weak, then the masculine self, proved by the patriarchal family form and male-headed households, can overpower it and defeat it. One's own sense of helplessness and fear is turned into a sense of power by pointing out a "weakness" of the enemy. This is accomplished by denying that there are increasing numbers of female-headed households in Pakistan.
   Nevertheless, the Civics textbook asserts that "the matriarchal view has seldom taken practical shape all over the world. In every age and in every place, the patriarchal view proved to be correct to the extent of male leadership of the household."⁴⁹ The writer fails to take into the account the massive and growing numbers of female-headed households and offers no evidence of the claimed proof. The overwhelming need to justify patriarchal marriage forms seems to stem precisely from an unconscious fear that increasing numbers of women are earning an income and are the main providers of families. This phenomenon has reduced male power and privilege, as well as the male role historically, while doubling or tripling the female burden of household work along with the work outside the home.
   The hierarchical ordering of marriage is averred again while discussing "The Status of Women":

   In Pakistani society, the male is superior. The male is the head of the household and descent goes down in his name... Islam has determined woman's status. A Pakistani woman, unlike Western women, is not free of parental control or suffocated like women in traditional Hindu society. She is looked upon as the Queen of the Home. Heaven lies about her feet and this is an important concept.⁵⁰

   In the above passage, sexual inequality is openly propagated. Male superiority is asserted which negates the idea of equality of all citizens. These lines are followed by the argument that a Pakistani woman's status is predetermined. She does not have the right to decide or choose her own status, or even imagine that she has one! Religious/cultural nationalism is constructed by differentiating between our women and their women. Pakistani identity resides in the fact that Pakistani women are not free of parental control and are not suffocated like Hindu women. Hence, our Pakistani identity is constructed by opposing our ideas of "good womanhood" to Western and Hindu notions of womanhood. Nationalism, especially of the two-nation variety in Pakistan, depends heavily on creating such distinctions and differentiations against an Other who represents all negative characteristics. Western and Hindu cultures are both constructed as negative Others, that is, impure and morally depraved. This depravity is especially evident in the condition and position of their women with Western women being too "free" (read, loose) and Hindu women being too suffocated. Such differentiations place immense burdens on women to limit their freedom and activities with the result that the universalist ideas of equality and freedom (central for citizenship) are not applicable to women. Women, in this discourse, can never become full, equal citizens. While heaven lies about the mother's feet (an assertion designed to show how deeply a mother is respected in our society), the same feet are bound by a spate of customs, traditions, and "culture" marked on her body as so many chains.
   Nationalism, based as it is on the creation of negative Others, inequalities and differences, thereby contradicts democracy, freedom, equality and citizenship. Nationalism, in particular in its religious and cultural forms, is incompatible with the kind of universal equality implied by democracy. Citizenship is inconceivable without democracy. Hence, nationalist projects ensure that women will remain at best denuded and lesser citizens.⁵¹
   Cultural nationalism tends to draw upon the kind of public/private divide that exists in a society. While this divide is discursively produced, it has material effects in restricting women's space. Shahnaz Rouse argues that the state encourages women to participate in public life, but as second-class citizens while men formally control their sexuality and their public participation is perceived as secondary to their "primary" functions in the private realm.⁵² In the discourse of cultural nationalism, culture, tradition, and custom are reified and essentialized entities that are denuded of history. They are not regarded as the evolving projects of humankind but as "natural entities" that always existed and will always exist. Nationalism of this kind exists in empty time as it refers to eternity in the past and future. The particular form of the public/private divide that comes into being as a result of the interaction of the processes of culture, production and reproduction, determines how womanhood and nationhood will be conceptualized. Culture comes to be seen not as a product of history, and human interactions involving power relations, but as an eternal and hallowed category.
   The Civics Textbook creates a sharp divide between the public and private in a section entitled "The Protection of Private Life." According to the writer:

   In Islamic societies, the private life of all citizens is given protection and the home and the four walls are considered such a fortress that no one should violate or needlessly interfere in it.⁵³

   Private life is here sanctified and declared inviolable. Yet, numerous studies by women have demonstrated beyond a doubt that it is in the hallowed and "protected" private sphere that women are most unsafe. It is in the "protection of the home and four walls" that most women are beaten, tortured, maimed, mutilated, burnt, and murdered.⁵⁴ The murderers are mostly husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers. The place of maximum power for patriarchy is the space where women are most threatened by the very people whom they serve from dawn to dusk. The use of the word "fortress" for the home makes the connection between home and nation explicit. The home engulfs the inner space of the nation where the women of the nation protect the frontiers of purity and chastity. The public/private division serves to regulate sexuality and human behavior and, as such, is the most universally deployed strategy of the control over agency, decision making, and freedom. The deep interpenetration of public and private negates the construction of these categories in discourse. Rouse argues that the public realm of the state supervises and controls the private realm with a view toward regulating personal life. The masculine sphere is thus dominant over the feminine one and, argues Rouse, "in those arenas where the state sought incorporation of women into public life, one instance of this being women's education, it did so on the grounds that educated women made better mothers and wives."⁵⁵ According to Rouse, the state has moved from primarily private control over women to surveillance and monitoring at both the public and private levels and this has led to curtailment of political and civil rights, thereby diminishing women's space.⁵⁶ Farida Shaheed argues that while women could and did resist formal laws as they drastically reduced women's citizenship, family and personal matters continued to be governed by the family, which is considered inviolable. ⁵⁷ However, citizenship education fails to problematize the division of political, social, and economic life into public and private domains.
   The idea of a fortress seems to indicate that the home is so central for the survival of the nation that it has to be protected like a fortress during war. The "protectors," that is, the sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands, often "protect" the home, family, and "honor" at the expense of the women of the nation. Privacy is the one concept that has been used invariably to justify violence against women in the name of personal, family, tribal and ultimately, national honor. The nation-state, in this sense, draws its ideology from tribal culture which is rooted in notions of "honor" residing in the bodies of women. Tradition, culture and custom are forms of the control of female sexuality in the name of family, tribe, nation and state. By capitulating to such notions of "honor," upheld in judicial decisions, the Pakistani state has betrayed its ultimately tribal character despite persistent claims to being democratic.
   In a section on Pakistani Culture, the Civics textbook claims that Pakistani culture is based on Islam and "our lives must be ordered according to Islamic principles, ideology and traditions." ⁵⁸ Although a large part of Pakistani culture is South Asian, this is an absence, a denial in the text. The writer then asserts that religion plays a major role in constituting our culture which is deeply steeped in religious ideology. The competing ideologies arising from ethnic and other sources are suppressed by being shrouded in total silence. The writer then goes to the extent of asserting that Pak Sarzamin (the pure land) means "Muslim Civilization." ⁵⁹ Only Muslims can be pure and Pakistan is here made synonymous with Islam. One of the main constraints on good citizenship is defined as "indifference to religion." The writer of the Civics textbook asserts that religion familiarizes us with the high values of life and a "good citizen should have a strong relationship with God and religion."⁶⁰ Religion is thus presented as a defining characteristic of good citizenship in Pakistan. Citizenship, a modernist state-forming discourse, is appropriated by religion to effectively exclude all those who are not Muslims.
   In Civics textbooks, not only is the family considered a "holy and sacred union" the goal of which is to procreate, there is immense emotional appeal to Motherhood. The figure of the mother is central to the construction and maintenance of cultural nationalisms.⁶¹ It is the sexuality of woman-as-mother that most threatens national dissolution, destruction of family life, and disintegration of "social cohesion," a favorite term used by citizenshipmakers. The mother, as the biological and cultural reproducer of the nation, is called upon to be pure and chaste so that there is no mixture of blood or possibility of pollution from unclean outsiders. As Yuval-Davis puts it, "control of marriage, procreation and therefore sexuality would thus tend to be high on the nationalist agenda."⁶² A mother is expected to produce valiant soldiers, hardworking laborers, obedient citizens, loyal subjects, and submissive daughters in order to fulfill her duties to the nation. In the process of this kind of reproduction (considered a private sphere activity), the mother is called upon to sacrifice, place the family's needs before her own, and squelch her own desires, aspirations, and hopes for the sake of the nation. In denying her own needs, the mother's rights as an individual citizen become easy to curtail. She ceases to be a citizen with rights. All that remains is a mother with duties.
   The constant emphasis in family ideology is on the husband's rights and a wife's duties. Very seldom is there even a mention of a woman's, especially a mother's, rights. Her individuality, autonomy, and agency, the essential components of modern citizenship, are sacrificed on the altar of "the collective good" of the family, nation and state. By being thus encapsulated within a collective identity, a woman's individual and independent relation with the state is negated. A mother, therefore, cannot be a citizen and vice versa. Appeals are made to her emotion, not her rationality (except in the care of children), to her duties and not to her rights, to her identity in relation to husband and children, not as an individual citizen. Motherhood is defined as central to the cultural and biological production and reproduction of the nation. Mothering is considered central to the very survival of the nation as the following quote illustrates: "If the Woman does not want be Mother, Nation is on its way to die."⁶³ According to the Civics textbook, not only are women (families) responsible for producing children but "The mother's lap is the first school of the child...the moral training of the child is entirely dependent upon the family." ⁶⁴ Timothy Mitchell has argued that the political order begins on the mother's lap where the first training for submission to external authority is provided.⁶⁵ The connection between moral training and education at home, and later submission to the state, is clearly articulated in the following passage taken from the Civics Textbook with the heading "Learning to Obey."

   A child learns obedience from the family. He sees that all family members obey the head of the family. He accepts this influence which serves him in later life as he learns to obey the laws of the land and other authority figures. His earlier training in obedience serves him later. Thereby he becomes a good and upright citizen. Brotherhood, obedience, sacrifice are lessons that families teach.⁶⁶

   The family is thus considered the training ground for submission to political authority. The family is upheld as the basic pillar holding the edifice of the state on its shoulders. The affect and reverence felt for parents is transferred on to the state and political authority, transforming the state into an idealized parent. The Civics textbook describes the family as the earliest form of the state and the state is described as being an extended version of the family. It is argued that the natural evolution of the family led to the formation of the state.⁶⁷ Motherhood, then, is not merely central for nationalist representations but also for state formation and maintenance. Motherhood cannot be sacrificed on the altar of citizenship rights as it is too vital an institution to surrender to democracy. The inculcation of obedience underpins the coercive aspects of the family. Once again one finds that families are required to teach "brotherhood" as women are excluded from the public/political space of the nation-state.
   In the discourse of motherhood, a woman is simultaneously denigrated and exalted. As the idealized mother, she is exalted, but the same relation is defined as the basis of the need to control her. She is capable of "weakening" the nation by engaging in "illicit sex" which can lead to blood mixture and the weakening of the patriarchal family form. A woman, therefore, must be confined to the roles of wife, mother and daughter. Any other role, which might express agency or autonomy, is dangerous as it implies freedom, which, in turn, implies moral laxity. Hence, the discourses of freedom and equality, fundamental to modern citizenship, are cancelled by the overriding familial discourse in Civics. The following passage, taken from the Civics textbook, is an example of limiting female citizens to a relational identity which enables men to mediate their relationship with the state:

   Islam gives respect to all women... They are considered mothers, wives, daughters and sisters. Prior to the advent of Islam, a woman's status was that of a slave or servant. Islam gave women human rights and the right to inheritance.⁶⁸

   In this passage, again the time dimension is used to justify Islamic ideology by arguing that prior to the advent of Islam, women were treated very badly but Islam gave women many rights. Such assertions of history are highly contestable arguments. The Civics textbook, however, presents them as accepted truth. For example, one question at the end of the book reads: "Which religion in the world has given women a respectable status?" There can be many alternative answers to this question as it is a highly debatable point. However, the student is expected to memorize the text and regurgitate on the examination sheet. Any deviation from the rote memorized text can lead to penalty in terms of marks. Examinations thus ensure an enormous amount of control over ideology. This is an example of accommodating citizens to the dominant ideology of the nation-state.
   However, the form in which women are given "respect" is that they are considered wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. Hence, women's identity comes to be constructed in purely relational terms, especially in terms of their relations to men. The direct relationship of a citizen to the state is not available to women whose relation comes to be determined by male relatives. Thus, citizenship as a resource is not equally available to women as it is for men. The irony of the civics discourse is that while on the one hand it claims that women are given a great deal of "respect" in Islam, there is also a reference to the notion that Islam allows polygamy. While describing polygamy, the writer asserts that "Islam has allowed males four marriages with certain restrictions. However, the conditions are so severe that it is time-consuming and difficult for men to marry again."⁶⁹ The tone of this sentence is such that there is an undercurrent of anger over the feeling that the process of polygamy is difficult. The writer almost seems to express ire at the fact that the procedure is time-consuming. The moral discourse, especially as regards equality of all citizens, is obfuscated as the focus is on the difficulty of the procedure rather than the ethics of the issue.
   However, contradictions in the Civics discourse arise from its need to reconcile two irreconcilable ideologies, that is, cultural/religious nationalism and egalitarian democracy. While upholding nationalism and the family, appeals are made to culture and tradition (both in reified terms) while simultaneously there are sections on liberty and equality, both of which are curtailed where women are concerned. While discussing "Kinds of Equality" in a separate section, the writer of the Civics textbook states:

   Social equality means that there should be no discrimination in society and difference based on race, color or religion which reduce people to second class citizenship, for example, the kind of discrimination against the Muslims in India and the Blacks in Europe.⁷⁰

   In this passage, the idea that there should be no discrimination or difference on the basis of race, color, or religion is upheld as such difference would reduce people to second class citizenship. Gender-based or sex-based discrimination is ignored. However, it is noteworthy that once again India and Europe are used as examples of religious and racial discrimination. This is again a construction of the Other as representative of all that is repressed within the self. The treatment of minorities in Pakistan is notorious for being discriminatory. It has been institutionalized by the state in the form of separate electorate and the blasphemy laws have been repeatedly used against religious minorities. The condemnation of Qadianis in passport forms and the religion column in ID cards (which was proposed but not implemented) have been mechanisms of discrimination and denigration of minorities. However, in the Civics discourse, religious intolerance and racial discrimination have been projected on to India and Europe, the Hindus, and the West. This is consistent with negative depictions of matriarchal family forms in India and Tibet. Citizenship discourse seems to center around the differentiation of the good self against Hindus and the West. The mistreatment of minorities in Pakistan is a silence/denial in the Civics text. The exclusion of women from the equality discourse amounts to the exclusion of women from citizenship as the Civics textbook defines citizenship in terms of equality, liberty, autonomy, agency, and independence.
   In a section entitled "Kinds of Liberty," the writer of the Civics textbook asserts: "There should be no caste system which takes away individual liberty, for example, in India the Muslims and untouchables are mistreated and not provided with justice."⁷¹
   The consistency with which India is constructed as Pakistan's moral opposite Other is amazing since it seems to run through virtually every chapter. Pakistani citizenship, constructed as male, Muslim adult, seems to depend heavily on India (and often the "West") performing the roles of Others, outsiders, or enemies. India's "looming, menacing" presence seems an essential ingredient of Pakistani citizenship. Rouse argues that the universal and sovereign Pakistani is defined as Muslim male.⁷² Without India as a feminine and "weak" but "mean" Other, it seems that Pakistani citizenship, derived from the premises of the two-nation theory, cannot exist. This citizenship must exclude women from both liberty and equality for it to be fully Muslim and masculine.
   While Pakistani citizenship is constructed in highly exclusionary terms, the definitions of citizenship, scattered throughout the Civics Textbook, refer to universalist and inclusive norms of the right of every member of society to fully participate in the political, economic, and social and cultural life of the country. This kind of participation is severely restricted for women who are bombarded with injunctions such as "good women don't go out," "good women stay at home," "good women don't talk too much or loudly," "good women do not take part in political rallies," "good women stay away from public/market places," "good women obey men and listen to them instead of giving their own opinions," "good women do not speak in front of men," and so on. A large number of restrictions on speech, movement, and association that families impose upon women effectively curtail their participation in the public/political work of the state even while economically they contribute equally or more to national production than men. As T. Marshall puts it, "Women's citizenship... is usually of a dual nature: on the one hand they are included in the general body of citizens; on the other hand there are always rules, regulations and policies which are specific to them."⁷³ While their productivity (and reproductivity) are fully utilized by the state, their access to all kinds of resources, whether economic, political or other, are severely restricted. Since they are trained/educated to become the future mothers of the nation (motherhood being their number one duty to state and nation), they are not trained to become future citizens (in the sense of individuals with rights and equal access to resources). Mother and citizen thus seem to become mutually exclusive terms.
   In sum then, the trope of nation-as-mother (and conversely mother-as-nation) as well as the representation of the State-as-Father, have divided citizenship along the lines of gender. Gendered citizenship reproduces the older binaries of public and private, outer and inner, masculine and feminine, self and Other. Even though regarded as a modern concept based on universal equality and inclusion, citizenship is imbued with all the traditional categories of exclusion and differentiation, inequality and hierarchy that characterized earlier eras. In the modern nation-state, such exclusions and differentiations have become institutionalized in the form of laws and policy regulations that consistently draw upon and re-create the boundaries between the self and Others. In Pakistan, the Law of Evidence of 1984 and the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance both reduced women's citizenship, the former by reducing women's testimony in court to half that of men and the latter by diminishing the value of women's lives as half of men's lives. The Citizenship Act of 1951 also reduces women's citizenship by allowing men to marry a foreigner and get citizenship for her and not permitting women the same right. Gendered citizenship draws upon the family and kinship notions by placing all women within the relational categories of mother, daughter, sister, and wife and making all men brothers of each other. The male brotherhood of citizens excludes women from participation in public/political matters at many levels, from the personal to the political. Despite an equal or greater contribution to the economy, women have less access to power, decision making, as well as material resources. Women's role as mothers, as the biological and cultural reproducers of nations and states, imposes restrictions on their rights in the name of tradition, culture, and custom. The essentialist and reified categories of "tradition," "culture," and "custom" serve, in most cases, to contain female sexuality and limit it to heterosexual marriage.
   The granting of citizenship rights to future mothers is tantamount to the breakdown of the moral fiber of society. Cultural and religious nationalism of the two-nation variety, which draws heavily upon reified notions of "culture," ensures that future and current mothers will be kept away from the corrupting influences of modern public, active citizenship. A state like Pakistan, which draws upon contradictory discourses to suit differing interests, has been unable to reconcile its unique form of two-nation religious nationalism with attempts at democracy. Democracy, by definition, implies critical and active citizenship of all members of society, regardless of sex, race, class, gender, religion, or ethnicity. Religious nationalism, by definition, implies difference from others, superiority over other nations, and exclusion of religious minorities and women from the concept of self as a nation. Equality, liberty, and universalism, which compel the state to regard all citizens as equal, are not possible for a state which is fearful of being considered weak and unmanly because of giving women and non-Muslims equality. Its precarious and contested masculinity demands that its citizens be valiant Muslim males. Only then can superiority against other nations and states be asserted and "national honor" edeemed.
   Civics education in Pakistan draws upon various discourses including democracy, nationalism, citizenship, family, kinship, duties, rights, state, and nation. Through a selective appropriation and rejection of the different elements of these discourses, Civics education constructs a Pakistani citizen who seems to be equally caught between contradictory discursive strategies. Mutually contradictory elements are kept in separate watertight discursive compartments and no attempt is made to reconcile seemingly opposed ideas. For example, while the Civics textbook stresses "national integration," "national unity," and "national cohesion" throughout, there is a chapter at the end which refers to globalization and the idea that the world is being transformed into a "global village" so that we are all "world citizens." The tension between national education and globalization, which threatens to erode the "national," is not mentioned. The oxymoronic phrase "world citizens" is not contested even though the erosion of the state would mean the end of citizenship. However, Green has argued that national educational systems are still strong and that globalization has not managed to eliminate them because globalization itself has contradictory effects, in that it fragments as well as homogenizes, creates greater diversity as well as greater sameness.⁷⁴ Such contradictions and debates are characteristically avoided in simplistic textbooks which present a hodgepodge of conflicted ideas and facts without allowing students to engage in critical debate or discussion.
   For the student, the result is confusion and cognitive dissonance which is circumvented by resorting to the "helpful" strategy of rote memorizing the text and reproducing it verbatim in the examination. A faithful reproduction of this schizophrenic text is rewarded with good marks and a testimonial of educational attainment. The state's apparatus of ideological reproduction "works" through control over examinations in which questions of factual recall and reproduction of the text ensure that no deviation can be risked.
   However, it cannot be assumed that the students digest the text without contestation because they do have agency and often bring to the pedagogical interaction their own experience and intuitive knowledge. The latter provides the capacity to contest the text and reject it at least in part. Informal experience and observation reveal that most students are influenced by the kinds of images of nationalism and statehood that the Civics text conjures up. The absence of oppositional and critical pedagogy ensures that the text is internalized, but occasional strong contestations of the discursive strategies do arise in the classroom. Absolute passivity has not been achieved despite attempts by the educational apparatus to integrate students within the ideological net of the nation-state. Contesting and rejecting the dominant textual strategies becomes possible because of the contradictions that are inherent in interlocking, yet distinct, ideologies packed in the Civics text. Such contradictions provide the space for opposition, resistance, and rejection.


Globalization and the Need for Critical Citizenship

Currently, notions of state, nation, citizenship, and nationalism are highly contested and extremely fluid ideas. Their validity has been questioned in a world that is undergoing accelerated processes of globalization. In a world which heralds the triumph of the "free market economy" in slogans like "The End of History," the notion of "citizen" as a member of a collective community called the state, has been problematized. On the one hand, the state appears to be receding and giving up its functions of providing healthcare, education, water and other basic needs/rights to people. Its fiscal and political crises are being exported into the private sector which is expected to take up the work of the provision of basic necessities. The welfare functions of the state are being dismantled. On the other hand, the State is retaining its policing functions (law and order) and defense against "external" threats, real or imagined. The two processes seem to be interlinked in the sense that as the state's welfare functions diminish, its rhetoric of sovereignty and national independence appears to increase, along with expenditures on defense and "national security." Human and people's security seems to be giving way to the state's own security at the expense of that of the population. The whole notion of "security" is being subjected to changes as the state withdraws from providing human and economic security. The ever-expanding market is now expected to provide human security in terms of food, education, water, and healthcare.
   Markets, whether local or global, are dependent on the profit motive. Privatization of all basic services means, in effect, higher prices of basic human needs. How will a market guarantee the provision of needs? If the state erodes, as is being argued by some, who or what institution will guarantee rights, equality, and freedom? The laws of the market are based on the survival of the fittest, and fittest in this case means the one who owns resources. How will the world's millions of poor compete in heartless markets based on greed and avarice, especially in the absence of a state to protect them against the worst effects of profit-making? If the state recedes, will there be any such thing as a citizen? The notion of "citizen" is tied to the state. Markets only have consumers, not citizens. Will the definition of being human be reduced to being merely a consumer? In an unequal and highly competitive world, how will the "weak" survive?
   These and several other troubling questions surround the new discourse of globalization. Capital, in its most aggressive and advanced form, is working towards the End of Citizenship. This means the end of rights, equality, and freedom, ideas which early entrepreneurial capitalism found useful so that free traders and consumers could be produced. The totally "unfree" market (unfree because it is completely controlled by the international fiscal policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), development agendas of the World Bank and the unfair/nonfree-trade ideologies of the World Trade Organization--an unholy trinity indeed) will ride roughshod over the world's poor and dispossessed largely residing in so-called "Third World" countries. Modern capitalism has thrown off even its liberal veneer of basic human freedoms and rights since they now seem to be hurdles in the path towards World Take Over (WTO).⁷⁵
   Globalization has been an unevenly distributed ideology in the different parts of the world. It is being contested and countered by ideologies and strategies that are no less destructive, for example, fundamentalist religion, ultranationalist fascism, and appeals to the indigenous and the local, regardless of how pernicious the latter might be. Rouse rightly warns us that the retreat into cultural authenticity can serve as a subterfuge by solidifying a more terrifying hegemony in the name of difference. Cultural relativism as a counterpoint to globalization can be equally self-defeating, especially as the terms of the debate are set by the center that is being opposed.⁷⁶
   It is time to rethink and re-imagine the state as a counterpoint to global market invasiveness. The state, as currently constructed, is not standing up to the marketization of the world. Rather, many states are actively participating in the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and depriving their populations of the few necessities they might still have. The rulers of less developed countries are in league with international market brokers in destroying the economies of the poor states by forcing them into the expanding net of global capitalism. Their measures have led to increased poverty among these states, high inflation, currency devaluation, downsizing and unemployment, low growth rates, high tax rates, and withdrawal of subsidies from basic needs. The pressure to pay back the rich by stealing from the poor (who did not borrow the money in the first place) is forcing the governments of highly indebted countries like Pakistan to impose very tough budgets on their populations. The international financial institutions contain dissent by setting up "Poverty Alleviation Funds" and the like so that "friendly" governments can be saved from revolt and overthrow.
   How can the people fight against this "bandit" alliance between the national ruling elites and international robber barons? The only answer seems to be a truly national state! With all its faults, the state still seems to be the only hope against global capital destroying the very basis of the existence of millions of poor people around the world. Marxists would argue that the state is owned and controlled by the ruling classes. Feminists would argue that the state is representative of patriarchy and masculinist values. All such criticisms are absolutely valid and one has no quarrel with them. However, it is only the state which potentially can stem the tide of global capital and the conversion of the whole world into a market. Only the state has the apparatus to guarantee rights and freedoms. If it currently does not do so, the answer lies not in doing away with it. Reform of the state and taking control of the state seem to be the only options left to those who neither want global capital to walk all over the world, or fundamentalisms and nationalisms to divide and destroy society by creating hatred while serving international capital.
   Historically, feminists of various varieties have been rightly critical of the bourgeois, democratic liberal state, arguing that beneath the mask of democracy, equality, freedom, and liberalism, a great deal of the oppression of women and other groups is concealed. However, a liberal democratic state now seems to offer the possibility of taking over from traditional ruling groups. A liberal state can create spaces for feminists, Marxists, and other groups to speak on behalf of the working classes, women, and minorities. While liberal ideology is riddled with a host of contradictions and is the child of early capitalism, it has the capacity to begin a dialogue among various groups. Feminists can use the liberal state and its democratic freedoms to critique the state's project of nationalism or militarism. A liberal democratic state can accommodate a multiplicity of voices that a totalitarian, fascist, fundamentalist, or ultranationalist state cannot. This is not to argue that liberal democracy is neutral and that it does not have class and patriarchal bias. What is argued here is that liberal democracy, in the current global situation, can be an option to use liberal freedoms to speak out against oppression. No form of the state or political system is permanent or immutable. The process of history ensures that even the worst dictatorship will end. In the long run, liberal democracy (which is no less a class state), can also give way to a more just order. However, the power of the vote and the freedom of speech, association, and expression are tools that the women's movements and other movements must use against globalization, state oppression, and fundamentalist/nationalist forms of violence.
   This is where the role of critical citizenship comes in. Feminists have quite rightly argued that citizenship is a masculine construct based on male supremacy. However, it may be dangerous, in the current environment, to give it up completely. Citizenship, and the rights and freedoms associated with it, can also become the basis of change and emancipation. Green quotes Steward Ranson in his case for critical citizenship by arguing that "the challenge of the modern era...is the creation of a moral and political order that expresses and enables an active citizenship" to reconstitute an educated public that can participate actively in the shaping of a public arena "where tolerance, mutual respect and understanding and the ability to cooperate are cultivated." According to Green, education has a major role to play in this endeavor.⁷⁷ The central task of feminism is to redefine and reformulate the idea of citizenship to make it more inclusive and universal. True universalism must replace false universalism which conceals particularistic interests. In the words of Werbner and Yuval-Davis, "women must continue to fight to expose universalist claims that disguise particularist interests."⁷⁸
   This kind of work requires active, critical politics and engagement with systems of power. While it is perfectly valid to work outside and against the system, it is no less valid to use the rights and freedoms granted by a liberal democratic state to widen the political space for the inclusion of women, minorities, and the dispossessed. The definition of national will also have to be widened to include the cross-section of people in a truly pluralistic manner. The power to define what is "national" and what constitutes "national interests" will need to be wrested from traditional state authorities and given new meanings. For example, national security can be redefined as people's economic and social security. National interests can be reformulated to mean the provision of all basic, universally accepted rights to all social groups. The power of making meaning has been monopolized by the state in Pakistan. Militaries define "national interests" and "national security" and, therefore, who is an outsider or an "enemy." This power must be taken over by providing alternative definitions and engaging in political work for the acceptance of new definitions. As Rouse argues:

   The salience of history, context, and gender experience requires that issues of sovereignty, citizenship and identity are reexamined. In the Pakistani context, such a political and theoretical move is imperative if women and all currently excluded others are to gain control over their lives.⁷⁹

   However, a feminist restructuring of the idea of citizenship should refrain from dichotomizing the ethic of care from the ethic of justice as has been suggested by some feminists. Justice necessarily involves care, and the act of caring should not exclude justice. Dichotomizing the ethic of care and the ethic of justice, and associating care with women and justice with men, will serve only to reproduce the patriarchal constructions of masculine and feminine. Women will end up once again being denied justice. This style of argument, first proposed by Carol Gilligan, can create yet another oppressive binary division that is gendered through and through.⁸⁰ If difference is imposed upon women in ways that make them subordinate, the same difference, when used for empowerment, can have the opposite effect of reinforcing the original difference. The discourse of justice, equality, and universal inclusion should underpin newer constructions of citizenship if they are to break from the past. While the notion of citizen cannot be essentialized, as it is in the Civics discourse which functions as though each person occupies the same space in terms of class, region, gender, religion, and ethnicity--difference and diversity have to be deployed very carefully as oppositional discourses against a false universalism. Otherwise, there is a danger of falling into the older dichotomies that created the male/public, and female/private spheres. Agency can often become a part of the structure that it contests. Notions such as "citizen," "woman," and "nation" are essentialist and need to be used with great care as women differ by class, region, religion, and ethnic origin. Similarly, citizens have differential positioning vis à vis the state, and the terms "nation" and "state" have varied and multiple meanings across different regions of the world. The use of such terms needs to be qualified when reformulating the idea of citizenship. However, the danger lies in falling too far into difference and inadvertently denying universality. Difference and equality need to be balanced in a way that difference does not lead to oppression and subordination.
   Giving up the idea of citizenship because of its masculine and exclusionary history seems o be a mistake at this critical juncture. Such a move can fit in neatly with the global agenda of eliminating citizens and replacing them with consumers, eliminating politics/state and replacing it with a market. Citizenship needs to be redefined to include all social groups. Women can use the reformulated notion to demand equality and basic rights. For this, it is obviously imperative that the state should continue to exist, not in its current form but in a democratized and inclusive form. As Werbner and Yuval-Davis argue:

   Both as a political imaginary and as a set of practices citizenship is caught between the normalizing forces of modernity and the essentializing forces of nationalism and exclusion. These are played out historically in conjunctures that impact in culturally specific ways on women's membership in their political communities. Yet citizenship...holds a promise for the future: of personal autonomy and the protection of collective difference and diversity even beyond the nation-state.⁸¹

   The feminist struggle needs to be carried out at several levels. Two important levels of the struggle are the fight against globalization on the one hand, and the against an oppressive state apparatus on the other. These two might appear to be contradictory, but they are not. Globalization needs to be resisted simultaneously with the change in the state to make the state more responsive to the needs of its citizens rather than focusing on its own need to amass weapons, and to serve the needs of international capital. The women's movement needs to work collectively with the human rights, labor, and other social movements to take back the state.


Notes

   1. See, for example, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), and Michael Herzfeld's The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (New York: Berg, 1992).
   2. See Nira Yuval-Davis' "Theorizing Gender and Nation," in Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 11.
   3. See Saba Khattak's paper, "Gendered and Violent: Inscribing the Military on the Nation-State." In Engendering the Nation-State, p. 39.
   4. Norma Alarcon, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem (Eds). Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 10.
   5. Alarcon, Kaplan and Moallem, p. 12.
   6. For an understanding of how motherhood is central to the construction of nationalisms, see Uma Chakravarti's Whatever happened to the Vedic Dasi: Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past in Kum Kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, (Eds) Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). Also see Rubina Saigol's "The Gendering of Modernity: Nineteenth Century Educational Discourse" Neelam Hussain, Samiya Mumtaz and Rubina Saigol, (Eds). In Engendering the Nation-State. Vol. 1 (Lahore: Simorgh, 1997).
   7. For an understanding of how women and home come to represent the inner world of the colonized, see Partha Chatterjee's The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question, in Sangari, K. & Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women, pp. 233-253.
   8. See Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis' "Introduction: Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship" in Women, Citizenship and Difference (London: Zed Books, 1999).
   9. See Nira Yuval-Davis. "Theorising Gender and Nation" in Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 14.
   10. For an understanding of how national educational systems are deployed in the production and reproduction of nationalism, see Herzfeld, Michael, The Social Production of Indifference, p. 32; Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation as well as Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis' Women, Citizenship and Difference and Andy Green's Education, Globalization and the Nation-state (London: Macmillan, 1997); also see Rubina Saigol's Knowledge and Identity: Articulation of Gender in Educational Discourse in Pakistan (Lahore: ASR, 1995); and The Gendering of Modernity: Nineteenth Century Educational Discourse, in Engendering the Nation-state. Vol. 1.
   11. See Andy Green, Education, Globalization and the Nation-state, p. 181.
   12. Green, p. 183.
   13. Green, p. 183.
   14. Green, p. 183.
   15. Green, p. 184.
   16. See Michael Herzfeld's The Social Production of Indifference, p. 32.
   17. Textbook for Social Studies (Civics), 1975, for Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 85.
   18. See Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis' introduction "Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship" in Women, Citizenship and Difference, p. 1.
   19. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, p. 1.
   20. Andy Green, Education, Globalization and the Nation-State, p. 184.
   21. Nalini Natarajan has argued that modern stateformation was marked by a move from regionalism to nationalism and discrete regional identities were being molded into national ones. See "Woman, Nation and Narration in Midnight's Children," in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Eds.) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (London: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 82.
   22. Krishna Kumar as quoted in Manish Jain's paper, "Evolution of Civics and Citizen in India" presented at the South Asian Conference on Education, New Delhi, November 1999, p. 2.
   23. See Grant, Charles. "Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to Morals; and on the means for Improving it," in Syed Mahmood, A History of English Education in India: Its Rise, Development, Progress, Present Condition and Prospects (New Delhi: Idara-e-Review Adabiyat-e-Delhi, 1895).
   24. Manish Jain, p. 2.
   25. See Rubina Saigol's paper "Citizenship Education: Problems and Contradictions" in Education: Critical Perspectives (Lahore: Progressive, 1993), pp. 239- 46.
   26. Quoted by Manish Jain, p. 5.
   27. Jain, p. 6.
   28. Jain, p. 8.
   29. Jain, p. 12.
   30. Jain, p. 14.
   31. Jain, p. 18.
   32. N.N. Kalia as quoted by Jain, p. 20.
   33. Jain, p. 19.
   34. Jain, p. 19.
   35. Jain, p. 23.
   36. Civics Textbook for Class XI, (1998), Punjab Textbook Board, pp. 183-184.
   37. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 212.
   38. Civics Textbook For Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 213.
   39. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, p. 13.
   40. See "Introduction: Between Woman and Nation" by Norma Alarcon, Caren Kaplan and Minoo Moallem (Eds) in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (London: Duke University Press, 1999).
   41. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, p. 1-2.
   42. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, p. 2.
   43. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, p. 6.
   44. Vogel as quoted by Werbner and Yuval-Davis, p. 6.
   45. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 36.
   46. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 202.
   47. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 36.
   48. For a detailed analysis of how social studies textbooks construct a gendered nationalism by projecting all that is bad on to the other, see Rubina Saigol's chapter "Social Studies Curriculum and the Gendered Construction of Nationalism" in Knowledge and Identity, pp. 207-272.
   49. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 68.
   50. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 277.
   51. In this regard see Partha Chatterjee's paper "The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question" In Recasting Women. He argues that the postcolonial nationalist project found women's integration into the new nation-state problematic as women had to represent culture, tradition and custom which often militate against ideas of freedom and equality.
   52. Shahnaz Rouse, "The Outsider(s) Within: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Pakistan," in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (Eds). Resisting the Sacred and the Secular: Women's Activism and Politicized Religion In South Asia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999), p. 58.
   53. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 216.
   54. The fact that the home is the most unsafe place for women has been documented by a number of women's nongovernmental organizations, including Simorgh which is bringing out a volume on domestic violence based on data gathered from various reports and newspaper items.
   55. Shahnaz Rouse, "The Outsider(s) Within: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Pakistan," in Resisting the Sacred and the Secular, p. 55.
   56. Rouse, p. 69.
   57. See Farida Shaheed's paper "The Other Side of the Discourse: Women's Experiences of Identity, Religion, and Activism in Pakistan," in Resisting the Sacred and the Secular, pp. 143-166.
   58. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 272.
   59. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, pp. 274-275.
   60. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 190-191.
   61. For a more detailed analysis of the relation between "good motherhood" and nationalism, see Uma Chakravarti's "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?" In Recasting Women and Rubina Saigol's "The Gendering of Modernity" in Engendering the Nation-State.
   62. Yuval-Davis, "Theorising Gender and Nation," p. 22.
   63. Quoted by Yuval-Davis in "Theorizing Gender and Nation," p. 1.
   64. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 38.
   65. Timothy Mitchell argues that the mother's lap was considered the training ground for the new political order created by British colonialism in Egypt. See Timothy Mitchell. Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 111-113.
   66. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 39.
   67. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 67.
   68. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, pp. 216-217.
   69. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 37-38.
   70. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 178.
   71. Civics Textbook for Class XI, Punjab Textbook Board, p. 170.
   72. Shahnaz Rouse, "The Outsider(s) Within," p. 59.
   73. T. Marchall as quoted by Yuval-Davis in "Theorising Gender and Nation," p. 24.
   74. See Andy Green's "Education, Globalization and the Nation-state," pp. 162-163.
   75. I have borrowed this wonderful characterization of WTO as "World Take Over" from Najma Sadeque, a vociferous and undaunted crusader against globalization.
   76. See Shahnaz Rouse's paper "The Outsider(s) Within: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Pakistan," in Resisting the Sacred and the Secular.
   77. Andy Green. Education, Globalization and the Nation-state, p. 186.
   78. Werbner and Yuval-Davis, p. 30.
   79. Rouse, "The Outsider(s) Within," p. 69.
   80. See Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982). Gilligan argued that while men emphasized impersonal justice and rationality, women's moral thinking appeared to be more personal and related to the ethic of caring. Gilligan's controversial book divided morality into the ethic of justice (male) and the ethic of care (female). The critique of her arguments was that this dichotomy assumes that there is no care in the drive for justice and no justice in the need to care. The separation was considered dangerous on account of denying women justice precisely on the "traditional" idea that women are caretakers and men are breadwinners.
   81. Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis. "Women and the New Discourse of Citizenship" in Yuval-Davis and Werbner. Women, Citizenship and Difference, p. 28.


*This is chapter six of the Rubina Saigol's Symbolic Violence: Curriculum, Pedagogy and Society, (Lahore: SAHE, 2000).

"Tibet" is not a state and according to the United Nations geographical terminology is referred to as "Tibet Autonomous Region of China."

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