Remembering Ercelaan

In the passing away of Aly Alp Ercelaan, in a Peshawar hospital on November 26, Pakistan’s economics profession has been robbed of a highly motivated and conscientious role model, the likes of whom are becoming almost extinct.

Born into a well-heeled middle class family of Kanpur, India, Ercelaan's father owned a tannery business. The family moved to Karachi and established a new business, where there was far less competition in the space vacated by Hindu businessmen.

Ercelaan was brought up in a liberal Muslim household, but was steeped in orthodox Muslim religious discipline. His father was an active member of the Tableeghi Jamaat. The family’s religious orientation, however, did not stand in the way of his receiving modern education. After obtaining an MBA from the country’s then only business school, he went for graduate studies in Economics at the Vanderbilt University to obtain his PhD under the eminent mathematical economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen who was also the founder of Vanderbilt’s Program on development economics. Dr Ercelaan’s research interests followed closely the path of his mentor.

Ercelaan, along with Nigar Ahmad, Jalil Abbas, Zubair Iqbal and Ehtesham Ahmad, were the main pillars of the young foreign-trained faculty that helped QAU restart its MSc (Econ) programme, which was almost stalled after the departure of Prof Md Anisur Rehman and other visiting faculty in 1971 in the wake of the 1970 elections and eventual secession of East Pakistan.

Ercelaan was the lynchpin of the programme, laying a firm basis of rigorous training in Math, Microeconomics and Econometrics. This enabled other instructors of higher level courses to introduce new issues and methodologies. Ercelaan became an avatar of excellence, rigour and discipline in economics teaching at QAU and his reputation as a teacher spread far and wide beyond Islamabad. QAU’s MSc (Econ.) degree became a preferred comparator for Ercelaan’s untiring efforts to maintain the high academic standards that QAU had achieved during the pre-1970 period under Prof Md Anisur-Rehman’s chairmanship of the Economics Department when the faculty consisted of four Ivy League PhDs.

Although teaching was his passion and the main source of his reputation, Ercelaan never cared about moving up the ladder in his academic career. In the 'publish or perish' academic tradition that we blindly follow, publications are given a higher premium than teaching, regardless of the quality of publications (or of teaching, for that matter). Being a conscientious teacher, Ercelaan put his students’ interests above his own and chose to err on the side of teaching. However, with the departure of a number of highly-qualified teachers towards the end of the 1970s, along with the general deterioration in the political climate of the country and the worsening academic atmosphere in QAU, he was forced to revisit his preferences.

Disheartened by the growing intolerance, both within and outside the campus, which peaked after Gen Zia’s coup in July 1977, Ercelaan and his US-born wife Ann began having second thoughts about making Pakistan their future home. After Zia’s Hudood Ordinance, which seriously curtailed the rights of women, they became even more concerned about the future of their two daughters.

He took a year off from teaching to start a business in Karachi, in the footsteps of his father who gave him a princely sum of one lakh rupees for investing in establishing a computer games space which was becoming a rage with the youth at that time. Not unpredictably, the venture failed and he soon realised that he was not cut out for business in the first place. It also brought home to him the fact that the business environment of Karachi was far removed from the fantasy world of perfect competition he taught his students in his microeconomics course.

Ercelaan's disenchantment with mainstream economics became more systemic. He became more interested in knowing about the conditions of the poor and the policies that perpetuated them. Towards that end, he involved himself in two major studies to delineate the profile of poverty in Pakistan. The first, in 1976, involving a majority of the QAU Economics Department jointly with UN-ESCAP, was a Pakistan-wide study, focusing on rural poverty and inequality in Pakistan. Ercelaan was chiefly responsible for analysing the sample data on a large number of households across Pakistan on a number of economic and social variables.

His second research venture began after leaving Islamabad in the 1980s and joined the AERC to collaborate with a group of young researchers, including Khald Nadvi, Noman Majid and Shahid Zahid among others, on the agrarian structure in Sindh. Although not a die-hard radical, Ercelaan was committed to the causes of social justice, human dignity, poverty reduction, women’s emancipation and workers’ rights. After AERC, he pursued the same interests at PILER under the renowned trade unionist, Karamat Ali. His work on bonded labour and tenurial relations was of a seminal nature and received wide recognition.

The last few years of Ercelaan’s life were a bit hard on him, as during this period his parents passed away and his own health deteriorated rapidly. The arrival of his grandson lifted his spirits and he tried to visit the US every year to be with the family. But all this could hardly dissipate his loneliness when he would return to an empty nest in Karachi.

While Ercelaan (Arsalan or lion in Turkish) had a lion’s heart, he was also a deeply private and introverted person. Although I thought I knew him fairly well, I am still discovering many of his hidden passions, such as music, art and philanthropy. Towards the end of his life -- which was caused by a lack of post-operative care after successful pancreatic surgery -- he gave away the proceeds from all his inherited property and his own savings to public causes he supported, such as the Zoya Schools run by one of his more socially-motivated pupils at QAU, Khwaja Sarmad, the Ercelawn Art Fund to mentor young artists, among others. The rebel in him manifested itself in his work with the fishermen of Karachi under the banner of Fisherfolk, which has energised it into a live-wire trade union movement.

To conclude, we have lost in Ercelaan a passionate teacher, a humanist economist, an honest and upright human being and a friend and fighter for the poor and oppressed. RIP, dear Ercelaan.

The writer is a former professor of economics at QAU, Islamabad.

Email: smnaseem@gmail.com