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Pakistan's chance of a moon shot bleak, notes Pak opinion piece
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IANS | 27 Jul, 2019
"Will Pakistan also get a slice of the moon?" With India's launch of
Chandrayaan-2, its second mission to the moon, Pakistanis naturally want
to know where they stand in science and what has given India "this
enormous lead over Pakistan?"
While comparing the Pakistani space
agency Suparco's "silence on space exploration plans", an opinion piece
in The Dawn says the credit for India's strides in space science should
go to its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. "An atheistic Nehru
brought to India an acceptance of European modernity," writes Pervez
Hoodbhoy, noted Pakistani nuclear physicist who teaches in Lahore and
Islamabad.
He says if history could be "wound back by 70-80
years" and Nehru was replaced by Narendra Modi, then "instead of
astronomy, today's India would be pursuing astrology. Its university
departments would have many 'ganitagayons' but few mathematicians, an
army of 'rishis' would outnumber physicists. The cure for cancer would
be sought in yoga while floods and earthquakes would somehow be linked
to cow slaughter. Instead of devising Chandrayaan, Indian scientists
would be searching for the fictitious Vimana of Ravana."
Remarking
that while "Pakistan never had a Nehru", he writes that the country
suffered a "further setback during the Ziaul Haq days (from 1978-88)
when Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's modernism had its remaining flesh eaten off
by Allama Iqbal's 'Shaheen'."
"As if to compensate the loss of
appetite for science, buildings for half-a-dozen science institutions
were erected along Islamabad's Constitution Avenue. They could be closed
down today and no one would notice. Today's situation for science -
"every kind except agriculture and biotechnology" - is dire."
On
Pakistan's national space agency - Space and Upper Atmosphere Research
Commission (Suparco) - he says it is "silent on space exploration plans"
though it was born a year before its Indian counterpart ISRO.
"Suparco
lists its earliest achievement the periodic launches of US-supplied
weather monitoring Rehbar rockets between 1962 and 1972. The most recent
activity listed is of July 9, 2018, when China launched two remote
sensing satellites for Pakistan to monitor progress on CPEC. One of the
two "was indigenously designed and solely developed by Suparco, and is
primarily aimed at remote sensing".
Terming it as a "pathetic
website", the writer says as a space filler Suparco "speaks in hushed
terms about the Hatf and Shaheen-III missile programmes but falls short
of saying what Suparco's role was, if any".
He lists the last
four chairmen of Suparco and their educational qualifications - all four
were army generals with three, including the present one Maj Gen Amer
Nadeem, being science graduates, while one had done a masters in
science.
He was unsparing in his criticism of Pakistan's "three
most celebrated scientists", who he said "have precious little to
offer". Though he did not name them, his hints are enough to identify
two as A.Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, and
Samar Mubarakmand.
Of Khan, who he identifies as 'X', Hoodbhoy
says, the nuclear physicist "appears to have lost his earlier passion
for bombs and missiles and these days is mostly concerned with finding
religious cure to cancer as well as advising women on how to deal with
menopause problems".
Of Mubarakmand, he writes that the scientist
is under probe "because he spent Rs 4.69 billion gasifying Thar coal
but failed to produce a single watt of electricity".
On scientist
'Z', the writer says he "has clawed his way back to power but cannot
explain why billions spent upon his institute have not produced a single
useful pharmaceutical product". The reference could likely be to
Atta-ur-Rahman, who is serving as Chairman of the Prime Minister's Task
Force on Science and Technology.
"Pakistan's chance of a moon
shot "unless on the back of a Chinese rocket" will stay zero for a long
time. There is no reason to cry about this. Much more important problems
need to be addressed. Solving them needs a strong scientific base at
every step.
"Creating this base calls for developing scientific
attitudes and dumping non-scientific ones. Symbolically this amounts to
putting Sir Syed ahead of Allama Iqbal as a national icon. Impossible?
Maybe. But, as they say, you can't make an omelette without breaking an
egg," says Hoodbhoy, who is also an activist concerned with promotion of
freedom of speech, secularism and education in Pakistan.
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