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(Published in Dawn of 02.07.2019)
Vacuous ideas
Dr Niaz MurtazaJuly 02, 2019
PAKISTAN is currently in the grip of serious economic and political problems. The currency is in free fall, exports and tax revenues are stagnant and inflation and unemployment are on the rise. Autocratic tendencies are ascendant[on the rise] while political grievances are increasing among marginalised groups. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, sages say. But in Pakistan’s case, its political leadership is in the grips of deep mediocrity as it churns out one vacuous [empty of thought] idea after another.
Imran Khan has recently set up a highly publicised commission to investigate the reasons for the rapid increase in public debt over the last 10 years. The step bears all the hallmarks of the wonky [عجیب طرح کی منطق پر مبنی] and impulsive ideas that often grip him. Two aims underlie this new quest. The first is to figure out if the debt was taken for the right priorities. The question is, can sleuths [سراغرساں] from spy agencies judge national priorities? The Economic Advisory Council could do so, but it has been made non-functional.
The second aim is to investigate possible corruption. It is just the high total quantum of loans that seems to have aroused suspicion. That makes the exercise seem futile as our massive devaluation and high external and fiscal deficits over the last 10 years provide ample reasons for the large debt increase. There may be some corruption in some specific loan projects, not just in Sindh and Punjab but also Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. However, to investigate all the loans over 10 years due to vague suspicions is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So the real aim seems political — to keep the focus on the opposition’s past misdeeds and away from the PTI’s own poor governance.
A National Development Council has also been set up, whose stated functions overlap with those of a number of existing national bodies. Oddly, it includes the army chief. Even flawed Third World democracies now avoid placing military officials in strategic decision-making bodies beyond those dealing with security issues. Only in autocratic states like Myanmar and Egypt do such officials participate in non-security forums. This step highlights the increasing autocratic tendencies of unelected bodies here.
The aim seems to be to keep the focus on the opposition’s past misdeeds.
Practically too, this body is unlikely to be more effective than the several other similar bodies. The step reflects the naive[احمقانہ] notion among many that security institutions have the solutions to our governance problems.
It makes the PTI regime look even more like a leaking balloon, as more and more key positions go to non-elected non-PTI figures.
The opposition has suggested a charter of economy. Khan has embraced the idea too but the opposition itself is having second thoughts. The idea is obviously inspired by the charter of democracy signed between the PPP and PML-N earlier, which itself was only partially successful. It succeeded on points that were largely dependent on the actions of the two parties, eg their resolve not to undermine each other’s governments using extra-constitutional methods and certain constitutional agreements that the two could together pass.
But the economy is different. There are only a few areas in economic policy that require constitutional amendments, and economic success depends heavily on the actions of numerous private parties. So there is little that a charter of economy could do to increase exports, currently our biggest challenge.
Political parties could try to come to an agreement on contentious public economic policy measures, eg about taxation and state enterprises. This would signal policy continuity and give political cover to the ruling party in taking tough measures in these areas. But even here there are deep ideological differences across the parties.
Also, it is difficult to see how the parties can reach a charter of economy without first reaching a charter of politics. This is so because of the highly charged relations between the PTI and the opposition and the latter’s genuine complaints about one-sided accountability and attempts to politically reduce the space for opposition parties. Also, a charter of economy makes much less sense today when the government has already finalised the IMF package and tied its hands on major economic decisions for the next three years.
The opposition is also playing its part in perpetuating[جاری و ساری رکھنا] its own vacuous ideas. It has failed to present clear alternative economic and political visions and a road map for pulling Pakistan out of its current troubles. Unelected institutions are adding to the problems by digressing [سمت بدل لینا] beyond their constitutional role into economics. So unfortunately, as the scale of the problem expands, there are few signs that our elected and non-elected decision-makers are willing and able to focus on identifying meaningful solutions for these problems.
The writer is a senior fellow with UC Berkeley and heads INSPIRING Pakistan, a progressive think tank.
murtazaniaz@yahoo.com
www.inspiring.pk
Twitter: @NiazMurtaza2
Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2019
No comment necessary
Arifa Noor
July 02, 2019
“PAKISTAN is stable now. That pressure [to stabilise the economy] has been relieved. Now I will go after them [the corrupt politicians],” said Imran Khan in an address to the nation. He asserted, “I’m making a high-powered inquiry commission with a one-point agenda: how did they raise the debt to Rs24,000 billion in 10 years?”
This was the prime minister’s contribution during the budget session, which is now over as the budget has been passed. All our elected ones must be relieved — they can stop quoting difficult figures and go back to what really matters — name-calling, production orders, corruption and incompetence.
Indeed, despite their great effort to show their concern for the people, the din in parliament rarely focused on the awam in depth. The budget was awam dushman because the current lot is incompetent or it was a tough one because those thrown out of power had made a hash of things, and hence difficult decisions had to be taken, but that was it. The backbreaking expenses came up time and again but only because it made it easier to criticise the treasury benches.
But if one is interested in the real story of the poverty-stricken awam, it is to be found away from parliament and in boring documents. For example, away from the rhetoric echoing in parliament, a recent survey on nutrition by the government of Pakistan itself reveals the state of our being.
“In Pakistan, four out of 10 children under five years of age are stunted [جو نشو نما نہیں پا سکا] while 17.7 per cent suffer from wasting. The double burden of malnutrition is becoming increasingly apparent, with almost one in three children underweight (28.9pc). The prevalence of overweight among children under five has almost doubled over seven years, increasing from five per cent in 2011 to 9.5pc in 2018,” say the 2018 report’s key findings. In other words, it seems that 40pc of our children are stunted and 5pc are overweight, leaving behind just around 50pc as what can perhaps be called healthy.
In case anyone still doesn’t know what stunting is (the prime minister used to mention it regularly in his early days in power, but not so much now) the WHO describes it as “impaired growth and development of children due to poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation. Children are defined as stunted if their height-for-age is more than two standard deviations below the WHO Child Growth Standards median.”
The real story of the poverty-stricken awam won’t be found in parliament.
The same international organisation describes wasting as a severe process of weight loss, which is often associated with acute starvation and/or severe disease.
But our leaders had other issues to fret about.
“They have spent Rs5,000bn only to place nameplates on projects initiated by us, whereas our government led by Nawaz Sharif initiated and completed power-generation projects, LNG projects, Bus Rapid Transport system, roads projects and many other plans,” Shahbaz Sharif said in parliament.
“Tell the country, when and who asked him [Prime Minister Imran Khan] for an NRO? Is there any witness? The country is very worried; Imran Khan says something but doesn’t give any evidence.
“I am saying this for the last time on the floor of the house: please tell this country who asked for an NRO, when did they ask and who is the witness?” he said during the budget.
But as the debate over the NRO continues — the important issue that it is —, let’s just read another snippet [ایک چھوٹا سا اقتباس] from the report on our awam. It tells us that, while the national figure for stunting is around 40pc, it varies from region to region — from 32.6pc in Islamabad Capital Territory to 48.3pc in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. But in Sindh, Balochistan, KP (including the region formerly known as Fata) and Gilgit-Baltistan, it is higher than the national average — over 40pc.
And our governance (which was so hotly debated recently) can be judged from the fact that while stunting improved from 1965 (48pc) to 1994 (36.3pc), from 2001 onwards it had been worsening — from 41.6pc to 43.7pc by 2011. In 2018, at 40.2pc, it remains at a global critical level.
The report warns that the average annual reduction rate is estimated at 0.5pc, too slow to significantly reduce the stunting rate in Pakistan.
But our great political debate is about when the next election should be.
“I am not a fortune-teller but Imran Khan will soon get his just deserts. Mid-term elections seem to be the answer to the miseries inflicted by the PTI government during the last 10 months,” Nawaz Sharif is reported to have said in jail.
We discuss elections as if it makes any difference to the awam; if the report is to be believed, our governments have been failing for much longer than the past 10 months.
Since the 1990s, the indicators have simply grown worse. We are told by the report that, since 1997, the prevalence of low weight for height among young children is on the rise, from 8.6pc in 1997 to 15.1pc in 2011 and 17.7pc in 2018. It is said that “acute malnutrition remains in a state of nutrition emergency. This is the highest rate of wasting in Pakistan’s history”.
Sindh has the worst figures for this form of malnutrition at 23.3pc, as does KP at 23.1pc, whereas GB and ICT have the lowest proportion of children with wasting, at 9.4pc and 12.1pc respectively.
But these figures can hardly catch the attention of our national-level leadership, which is obviously busy with national issues, such as the international conspiracy behind the budget.
On June 11, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari tweeted: “Today the PM of Pakistan danced on the floor of the house as his ministers introduced a PTIMF [sic] budget that increases taxes, inflation & unemployment. History will record how Imran danced as our economy burns.”
Sometimes, any sort of analysis or comment seems superfluous[غیر ضروری] .
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2019
A handy checklist of fascism
Jawed Naqvi
July 02, 2019
WHILE India’s communists may be grudgingly [بد دلی سے] opening up to the probability, if they ever do, that fascism is knocking hard on India’s doors, a first-time woman MP from West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress — the left’s hyper bête noir — took the Lok Sabha by storm recently with her recounting of the stark[جو صاف نظر آئے] warning signs of the menace stalking[چپکے چپکے تعاقب کرنا] the country. Defiantly, Mahua Moitra pushed back hecklers [کسی کی تقریر میں شور و غوغاکرنے والے ] from the treasury benches to raise the alert. {here is the link of her speech:
https://www.facebook.com/brutindia/videos/319571202279420/UzpfSTE5MDEzNDcwMTEyMzEzOToxNTYzNDM4NDkwNDU5NDEz/
It was unusual coming from the opposition benches, who haven’t recovered from their defeat in May. For her speech and more, she became an instant star with whatever remains of critical media in the country. Mahua quit a lucrative banker’s job in the US a few years ago to do grass roots work in her native Bengal. And, tellingly, she spoke with the vigour once associated with the left. In her compelling analysis, she harked back to the times[گذرے وقت کو یاد کرنا] when Bhupesh Gupta or Hiren Mukherjee spoke her language and gave hope to millions, usually with a Mahua Moitra-like warning. Before discussing the signs of India’s democratic erosion let’s, however, fill in an important blank Ms Moitra left in her dire summation of where India is headed.
It was in the early 1990s that I learnt a few useful things from several discussions I had with Sharad Pawar, then chief minister of Maharashtra. He was supervising relief operations from a camp near the site of a devastating earthquake that killed thousands in and around Latur. I was assigned to report from ground zero. Pawar told me he was defence minister when he met then Chinese premier Li Peng, who had expressed his worry for India’s unplanned and equally unpopular transition from a state-planned economy to a free market system. MPs were bribed and subsequently jailed for helping the wafer-thin majority that ushered India’s free-market system.
There was a price to pay, and that was the tearing down of India’s social fabric.
Li cited Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the fall of his powerful communist state by trying to create a new country in the image of the West. “Had Gorbachev followed perestroika (restructuring) before allowing glasnost (openness), the results would perhaps have been less damaging. But he went for economic change and democracy simultaneously.” Li’s reference was to Gorbachev’s recasting of the Soviet Union into a hazy imitation of the West’s liberal democracies in which he failed miserably. He hadn’t fathomed [گہرائی کا اندازہ لگانا] how the seductive charm [توبہ شکن حسن] of capitalism — The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — was raised on Dickensian nightmares with decades of colonialism and slave trade. “Your government hasn’t taken the last man into confidence,” Li cautioned Pawar. It wasn’t as if China had conferred with the poorest for its own adventurous departure from Maoist socialism. But it had the political muscle to absorb or, where necessary, suppress the pain.
Years later, I met Rahul Gandhi for the only chat I was going to have with him. Manmohan Singh had just become prime minister and I told him to be careful of his direction. He looked unwilling to continue the conversation. “You mean Jaswant Singh,” he probed, referring to the genial BJP MP. I said I was referring to Manmohan Singh. The soft-spoken economist was credited with ushering India’s IMF-advised market-friendly policies, but he had put the poorest of the poor right at the back of the prescribed never-ending queue, lined up to collect the manna from the promised trickling down [ٹپکنا] of the magical nectar [پھولوں کا رس].
Nearly the same problem had occurred in China when Deng Xiaoping ushered state capitalism in the 1970s. It, however, had the steel frame of the party together with the powerful state both equally determined to push through the haemorrhaging changes. Also, when the Chinese caught their variants of Harshad Mehtas stealing from the leaky public kitty [عوام کی فلاح کیلئے مختص رقم] — and there were and still are those around — they dealt with them as only the Chinese do.
Unlike the Soviet Union or China, the argumentative Indian never needed state intervention to inaugurate political glasnost, a genetic centrepiece of the national character, a factor no doubt in the burgeoning [ہردم بڑھتی ہوئی] sales of mobile phones and related bandwidth corruption. Introducing Singh’s painful perestroika in India required a distraction, a foil to the pervasive [جو گہرائی تک سرایت کر جائے] native glasnost, curtailed briefly by Indira with a cost. L.K. Advani’s chariot race and Singh’s economic jig courted each other, and in doing so foiled Li Peng’s worry momentarily. There was a price to pay, and that was the tearing down of India’s social fabric.
Should any proof be needed, the finance minister was presenting the budget in parliament when people were being raped and lynched in Gujarat on Feb 28, 2002. Evidence that neo-liberal economics would fail with an open society came from West Bengal during the rule of the Left Front. Hobnobbing with [تعلقات بنانا] big business, offering them land that belonged to the peasants [دہقان], while ignoring Li Peng’s warning that democracy and neo-liberalism don’t mix, the left was saddled with [جس پر سوار تھا] a political cost from which it hasn’t yet recovered.
The communists may blame the BJP’s rise on Mamata Banerjee’s alleged appeasement of[غصے کو ٹھنڈا کرنے کی پالیسی] Muslim communalism. It doesn’t wash. They would be better off explaining honestly what it meant when they urged Indians not too long ago to “defeat the Congress and isolate the BJP”. How was that meant to translate in the polling booth in a one-on-one contest between the BJP and Congress? Defeating the Congress was a doable command, but seeking the BJP’s isolation in the booth?
Anyway, if she considers how neo-liberal depredation [غارت گری، حملہ] drives and funds fascism in India, Mahua Moitra’s ominous pointers [کسی مصیبت کے اشارے] would be truer. Her list includes powerful and continuing nationalism; disdain [حقارت] for human rights; identification of enemies as a unifying cause; rampant[اندھا دھند ہونیوالا] sexism; controlled mass media; obsession with national security; religion and government intertwined; corporate power protected; labour power suppressed; disdain for intellectuals and the arts; obsession with crime and punishment; and rampant cronyism [دوستوں کو عہدے دیکر نوازنا] with corruption. Tick the boxes.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2019
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