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Peter Foster, a London Telegraph reporter stationed in India, has just returned from a four-day jaunt into Pakistan. In many respects, the difference between India and Pakistan, he says, is like night and day. The roads and food are better, but when it comes to freedom of press, it's a whole 'nother story.
As for Pakistan, it’s a great change from India once in a while. The roads are smoother, the meat is juicy and, for an Englishman, there is something that makes you feel slightly less alien than in India which is so utterly 'other' from anywhere else on earth.The downside is that Pakistan is a police state. The joy of India for a journalist is that you can go anywhere, talk to anyone and do pretty well anything legal without interference. The Indian government really does protect the free press – even if they often don’t approve of what foreigners like me write sometimes.
In Pakistan the Special Branch, the Intelligence Bureau and the ISI (Military Intelligence) are never far away. They don’t make much effort to hide themselves. Outside one madrassah a man, introducing himself as ‘Intelligence Bureau’, came up to ask our identities from our Pakistani friends. Who were we? What were we doing? Who had given us permission?
Mr Foster was baffled by a visit to a madrassah run by a publicity-seeking Deobandi Islam Maulana.
[W]hat’s so hard to understand is how this highly educated Maulana – who was part-educated in the UK and is about to send his son to the London School of Economics – seems so content to keep his followers in the educational Dark Ages. Thousands of small boys and girls who follow his sect spend up to three years memorising the Koran in Arabic at the exclusion of all other studies.
The children don't even understand what they're memorising because they only speak Urdu.
