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Unlike my other compatriots, and very much like my English supervisor, I was a bit lax about hopping on to the mobile bandwagon. It was only after almost everyone of my acquaintance had been using a mobile for some time, that I thought that I might acquire this rather ‘useless’ thing. I couldn’t see who I would need to call at such expense, or why a few words via text messaging would give the same pleasure as a nice e-mail, or better yet a hand-written letter. I couldn’t abide never being totally alone, always knowing that your parents or loved one could intrude and demand to know your whereabouts. Carrying around a piece of equipment which curtails your liberty seemed a bad bargain just for the point of proving you do adhere to some fashion.
   But, as with most cases in science, it is not a good idea to pontificate unless you have actually experimented. Taking a leap is the main thing: to spring requires courage, but you’re bound to end up someplace. And so, I leaped, and found myself succumbing. Having become a total convert to the ubiquitous joys of carrying around another piece in my already heavy backpack, all my past prejudices have been totally swamped. What isn’t more natural for parents and husbands and wives than to know where their children is at all times and thus being relieved of their anxiety as well as letting the youngsters enjoy some much-needed freedom.
   The mobile has become a part of a lot of people’s lives. Though it might still be a source of irritation, especially if you have to sit beside a continuously jabbering person on the bus for 30 minutes (who pays these people’s bills?), but the benefits really do outweigh any disadvantages which usually arise just from people’s lack of concern towards other’s comfort.
   And interestingly, science has woken up to the fact that it isn’t only a money-spinner, it is the technological development of the late twentieth century that has had the most impact on development. Eyebrows might be raised at this; after all, everyone knows that accolade should go to the computer and the Internet. But actually, how many computers are contributing to development in the villages of Dinajpur, say? Computers are efficient machines, to some urbanites indispensable, but to have good computer systems working you need reliable continuous power supply. Those who live in Dhaka have all experienced the pang in their hearts when their computers crash as a result of a blackout, and in the villages, where the voltage fluctuates extremely, the situation is rather laughable.
   But still, one of the favourite promises of politicians when they go to rural areas is the promise of computers, computer centres etc. and what not. Until the electricity situation is improved, this is an expensive, and unwise thing to promise.
   But this is not the case for the mobile or cell phone. It is a bit amusing that the joke seems to be that at one time even beggars of Dhaka will all have mobiles, as if this were something only for the technically savvy and well-off. But, maybe we should look at it in a completely different way, and consider it as another great tool of developing nations on their road to development. In a recent paper, economists Leonard Waverman, Meloria Muschi and Melvyn Fuss asserted that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates and their impact is twice as large in developing countries as in developed ones. Their model suggests that in a typical developing country, an increase of ten mobiles per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. This paper has basically worked out a theoretical model, however real examples of the benefits that mobiles bring to poor countries are considered, and the evidence comes close to supporting their conclusions. Given the opportunity and some simple teaching, poor people around the world are flocking to acquire mobile phones. In sub-Saharan Africa, subscriber growth exceeded 150% last year. The benefits are very clear, and they are different to the benefits of the usual talking, chattering, and sending of text messages between friends and relatives we commonly associate with mobiles.
   Mobile phones do not depend on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read and write. They can enable fishermen or farmers to check prices at different markets before selling their produce, they can make it easier for people to look for jobs, and they can prevent wasted journeys. In areas were roads are bad, fixed-lines almost non-existent, the post unreliable, they can be a Godsend. Mobile phones thus reduce transaction costs, even allowing in cases for the farmers to cut out the middlemen. Small businesses use them to see from where they can get good and inexpensive supplies. Several African nations use them to make cashless payments, thus obliterating the need to carry around lots of cash in a lawless region.
   The mobile phone is actually already at work in our country. It is heartening that Bangladesh was one of the first countries where the power of the mobile to help the poor was first understood, and as in many other cases, Grameen took the lead here too (in 1997). The ‘telephone ladies’ of Bangladesh have provided models for many developing nations. Because of the costs, mobile phones in rural areas all over the world are widely shared.
   One person in a village buys a mobile phone, usually using a micro-credit loan. Others then rent it out by the minute; the owner derives a small profit that is enough to pay back the loan and produce a living for her. Today there are 60,000 ‘telephone ladies’ supplying telephone service in 80 per cent of the villages in Bangladesh.
   In villages where there is no power supply, solar energy panels are used to charge the telephones. There are people able to read and write can set up as text message entrepreneurs. Texting is much cheaper than making voice calls, but you need to be able to write, so some people sell their services of sending and receiving text messages for the illiterate.
   The benefits are clear, so what can do the government do to help? Indeed, it’s best if it does as little as possible. Making the environment freer for competition to arise will result in more and more companies coming onto the market, and thus improvements to be made more quickly. Recently there was a protest by mobile phone users in Dhaka where they demanded that the four mobile companies currently operating cut their call charges. At present, there are less than 2 phones per 100 people, but with more competition and lowering of costs as well as a bit more knowledge of how mobiles can enrich lives, this number should certainly rise. Just the entrance of Egyptian company Orascom Telecom prompted Grameen to cut its charges by 25%. Let us all wish for a mobile world!

Pakistan’s impeccable record in commemorating the landmarks in its national struggle has not always been matched by an ability to coherently explain their historical significance.
   Sixty-five years since its adoption by the All-India Muslim League, the Lahore Resolution remains mired in contentious debates among historians of South Asia as well as the protagonists of provincial versus central rights in Pakistan.
   Not surprisingly, most Pakistanis are no nearer understanding how the would-be magna carta of their territorial statehood relates to their citizenship rights, far less squares the circle of the multiple conceptions of nationhood articulated by Muslims in the pre-independence period.
   The Resolution’s claim that Indian Muslims were not a minority but a nation was raised on behalf of all the Muslims of the subcontinent. Yet the territorial contours of the newly created homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947 left almost as many Muslim non-citizens outside as there were Muslim citizens within.
   Even after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 administered a rude shock to the official narratives of national identity, the contradiction between claims of nationhood and the achievement of statehood was never addressed, far less resolved.
   The silence has been a major stumbling block in Pakistan’s quest for an identity which is consistent with the appeal of Islamic universalism as well as the requirements of territorial nationalism.
   Instead of treating the Lahore Resolution as an issue of meta historical significance, an analytically nuanced history of the circumstances surrounding its passage can make for a stronger and more coherent sense of national identity.
   Discussions about the historical significance of the Resolution have concentrated more on the political implications of the transformation of the Muslim minority community in India into a ‘nation’ rather than on the ambiguities surrounding the demand for Muslim ‘statehood’.
   A close analysis of the historical context and actual content of the Resolution, however, suggests that there was no neat progression from an assertion of Muslim nationhood to the winning of separate statehood.
   My book The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1985) delineated the uneasy fit between the claim of Muslim ‘nationhood’ and the uncertainties and indeterminacies of politics in the late colonial era that led to the attainment of sovereign ‘statehood’.
   Instead of grasping the salience of the argument, some historians and publicists on both sides of the 1947 divide have interpreted this as implying that the demand for a Pakistan was a mere ‘bargaining counter’.
   In so far as politics is the art of the possible, bargaining is an intrinsic part of that art. To suggest, as some have glibly done, that Mohammed Ali Jinnah used Pakistan as a mere ruse against the Congress is a gross distortion of not only my argument but of the actual history.
   My argument in The Sole Spokesman, and one that I confirmed in Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850s (Routledge and Sang-i-Meel, 2000-1), was that while the insistence on national status for Indian Muslims became a non-negotiable issue after 1940, the demand for a wholly separate and sovereign state of ‘Pakistan’ remained open to negotiation as late as the summer of 1946.
   A refusal to acknowledge this is a result of the failure to draw an analytical distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘state’. More problematic has been a flawed historical methodology that takes the fact of partition as the point of departure for interpreting the historical evolution of the demand for a ‘Pakistan’.
   The historical backdrop of the Lahore Resolution makes plain why a claim to nationhood did not necessarily mean a complete severance of ties with the rest of India. Beginning with Mohammad Iqbal’s presidential address to the All-India Muslim League at Allahabad in December 1930, a succession of Muslims put forward imaginative schemes in the 1930s about how power might be shared between religiously enumerated ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’ in an independent India.
   In staking a claim for a share of power for Muslims on grounds of cultural difference, these schemes in their different ways challenged Congress’s right to indivisible sovereignty without rejecting any sort of identification with India.
   Describing India as ‘the greatest Muslim country in the world’, Iqbal called for the establishment of a Muslim state in north western India which would remain part of the sub continental whole.
   If even Iqbal was thinking in terms of an all-India whole, outright secession was simply not an option for Muslims hailing from provinces where they were in a minority.
   Virtually all the schemes put forward by Muslims living in minority provinces considered themselves as ‘a nation in minority’ that was part of ‘a larger nation inhabiting Pakistan and Bengal’.
   If Muslims in Hindustan were seen as belonging to a larger nation in north western India, religious minorities in ‘Pakistan’ and Bengal were expected to derive security from sharing a common nationality with co-religionists dominating the non-Muslim state.
   For the notion of reciprocal safeguards to work, Muslims and non-Muslims had to remain part of a larger Indian whole, albeit one that was to be dramatically reconceptualized in form and substance by practically independent self-governing parts.
   Even schemes with secessionist overtones, most notably that of Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, wanted to carve out half a dozen Muslim states in India and consolidate them into a ‘Pakistan Commonwealth of Nations.’
   What all these schemes led to was the claim that Muslims constituted a nation which could not be subjugated to a Hindu majority represented by the Congress. Taking this as its point of departure and avoiding mention of ‘partition’ or ‘Pakistan’, the League’s draft resolution called for the grouping of the Muslim-majority provinces in north western and north eastern India into ‘Independent States’ in which the constituent units would be ‘autonomous and sovereign’.
   There was no reference to a centre even though the fourth paragraph spoke of ‘the constitution’ to safeguard the interests of both sets of minorities, Muslim and non-Muslim. The claim that Muslims constituted a ‘nation’ was perfectly compatible with a federal or confederal state structure covering the whole of India.
   With ‘nations’ straddling states, the boundaries between states had to be permeable and flexible. This is why years after the adoption of the resolution, Jinnah and the League remained implacably opposed to the division of the Punjab and Bengal along religious lines.
   Historians and publicists in India have seized on the contradiction in the demand for a Pakistan based on the Muslim right of self-determination and the apparent unwillingness to grant the same right to non-Muslims living in Punjab and Bengal.
   Much like their counterparts in Pakistan, they have conveniently glossed over the difference between a purely secessionist demand and one aimed at providing the building block for an equitable power sharing arrangement at the sub continental level between two essentially sovereign states - ‘Pakistan’ based on the Muslim-majority provinces and Hindustan based on the Hindu-majority provinces.
   With their singular focus on a monolithic and indivisible concept of sovereignty borrowed from the erstwhile colonial rulers, scholars and students of history on both sides of the 1947 divide have been unable to envisage a political arrangement based on a measure of shared sovereignty which might have satisfied the demands of ‘majorities’ as well as safeguarded the interests of religious minorities in predominantly Muslim and Hindu areas.
   In 1944 and then again at the time of the Cabinet Mission Plan, the All-India Muslim League at the behest of Mohammad Ali Jinnah refused to accept a ‘Pakistan’ based on the division of the Punjab and Bengal.
   It was Congress’s unwillingness to countenance an equitable power sharing arrangement with the Muslim League which resulted in the creation of a sovereign Pakistan based on the partition of Punjab and Bengal along ostensibly religious lines.
   Cast against its will in the role of a state seceding from a hostile Indian union, Pakistan has tried securing its independent existence by espousing an ideology of Muslim ‘nationhood’ which has entailed riding roughshod over the provincial rights promised in the Lahore Resolution and dispensing with democracy for the better part of its history. It is no wonder that the claims of Muslim nationhood have been so poorly served by the achievement of territorial statehood.
   Such historical insights may not appeal to the authors of the contending narratives of a Pakistani or an Indian identity. But even national myths require some resemblance to history.
   Charting a linear course to the winning of Muslim statehood cannot even begin to grasp the vexed nature of the problems which faced a geographically dispersed and heterogeneous community in its bid to be considered a ‘nation’.
   Nor can it explain why there are more sub continental Muslims living outside Pakistan, the much vaunted Muslim homeland, in India and Bangladesh. Instead of being weighed under by opposing national reconstructions informed by the teleology of 1947, Pakistanis and Indians could craft a more accommodative future for the subcontinent by acknowledging the domain of political contingency, containing possibilities for different outcomes, that lay between the adoption of the Lahore Resolution and partition seven years later.
   The writer is Professor of History, Tufts University, Massachusetts, US. This article has been published by arrangement with Dawn

Disability is undoubtedly a great problem in the developing countries of south Asia. Unfortunately, though, it has not as yet been treated as such in Bangladesh. According to the statistics of World Health Organisation (WHO), at least 1 crore and 40 lakh disabled people live in this country and many treat them simply as a burden.
   In the developed countries, governments have taken the necessary steps to overcome many of the problems connected with disability. They give equal opportunities to their citizens, both disabled and able-bodied.
   Here, in our circumstances, we ignore the disabled and consider them to be a problem for society. It was in order to change this situation that a British lady, Valerie Taylor, established the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP) in 1979. This organisation is now one of the leading organisations of its kind in south Asia. The main activities of CIRP are to give treatment to those who are physically disabled by paralysis and to provide rehabilitation and training so that they can earn a living when they return to their own communities. Moreover, it is working in the community through its community-based rehabilitation programme and has established a professional training institute aimed at creating a pool of highly skilled health professionals for the future. It also has a special needs school for children with cerebral palsy.
   CRP has many programmes to prevent disability. One of its recent programmes is to turn Savar into an accident-free zone. To reach its goal CRP arranges regular road safety meetings, and has held rallies in the Savar area. CRP has put up 32 road safety signs from Gabtoli to Nayarhat on both sides of the road. This enables pedestrians as well as transport people to imbue lessons on how to use the road safely. Moreover, CRP has produced a full-length feature film named "Bihongo" to create public awareness about disability.
   CRP has started to organise a very new programme. It is generally a two-day programme, named CRP Open Day, for raising awareness about disability. The programme has been in place since 2001. The leading force behind the programme is Ms Leena Alam, a British-Bangladeshi and Trustee Member of CRP. Through the programme, many people who are not aware about the activities of disabled people are able to enlighten themselves on the issue.
   On February 11 and 12, Open Days were held at CRP-Savar. On both days, many. visitors came to CRP's Savar headquarters and its sub centre CRP-Gonokbari from Dhaka and many other areas of Bangladesh. Several stalls were set up, displaying and selling handicraft and other items produced at CRP. There were refreshment sales and stalls displaying services offered by CRP. A 'taka mile' was arranged where visitors lined up to raise funds.
   We believe that if we create public awareness in the area of disability then the problems connected with it can be reduced. Among the 22 UN standard rules on the equalisation of opportunities for disabled persons, 'awareness raising' is given top priority. CRP's open day programme will help reach its goal.
   The Bangladesh government has taken up a disability policy and disability welfare act. Moreover, it has many programmes at present to rehabilitate the disabled people. Many NGOs are working in this field in Bangladesh. People from all walks of life should be willing to come forward to help the disabled people. Otherwise a big number of them will be treated only as a burden for the country.