COMMERCE and industries minister Razak Dawood has spoken of a strategic economic partnership with China following a very productive visit to Beijing, particularly in the area of textiles where China is making rapid advances.

China will be in favour of such strategic cooperation as it wants to help Pakistan in every way possible. It wants Pakistan to become stronger and self-reliant and make the best of its resources, including the large but under-utilized human resource. But the major question is: will we be able to rise to the challenge — not only the government, but also trade and industry, the big farmers, the army of bureaucrats and the workers as a whole? It has to be a collective and sustained endeavour over a long period of time to achieve real success.

The basic difference between China and Pakistan is that China has been able to achieve an economic growth of 10 per cent annually on an average in the 1990s and is now recording an eight per cent growth in spite of the adverse economic conditions in the region and the worsening global recession, beginning with the US which is the number one customer of China.

Compared to that, Pakistan has been recording an average of around 3 per cent growth since 1995 and the governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, Dr Ishrat Husain, holds the 1990s as “the lost decade.” Now even the 6 per cent average growth of 1980s seems too uphill a task, although that would mean a per capita growth of only 3 per cent after adjusting the population growth of around 3 per cent.

Now, following the global focus on terrorism and identifying poverty as one of the major causes of terrorism, the focus of the Pakistani official as well as the donors is on social sector development.

The “Economist” of London which ignores Pakistan in its “emerging market indicators” as ours is too small an economy, has this week published a chart showing Pakistan topping the nations of the world in adult illiteracy. It shows 55 per cent of the adults of Pakistan as illiterate and says “over half of those over the age of 15 in Pakistan cannot, with understanding, read and write a short simple statement about their everyday life. That is the World Bank’s definition of adult illiteracy.”

In fact the upper half of the chart, painfully for Muslims, consists of Muslim countries, including Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia. The major reason for such a record of adult illiteracy in Pakistan is the high population growth. We are not just setting up enough schools to educate them. When we do, with the help of foreign countries, there are too many ghost schools and ghost teachers, or schools serving as guest houses of feudal lords or cowsheds.

Compared to that China has been able to reduce its population growth to around one per cent for the last 15 years and provide for schooling for most of them. As a result, China’s adult illiteracy rate, as projected by the “Economist”, is only 17 per cent, and that is a rapidly eroding percentage.

The other major difference between China and Pakistan is that China has been able to develop a rapidly growing economy without large external aid, while Pakistan has been excessively dependent on external assistance. As a result, we received a total of 65 billion dollars, while the external debt to repay now is 38 billion dollars. Ten billion dollars out of that came as grants while the rest we had repaid and some part of that is still in the pipeline awaiting use after overcoming varied constraints, including matching rupee funds by Pakistan.

For all that, and the fact that we have become excessively addict, wanting larger and larger new doses, our per capita income is 450 dollars while that of China was 909 dollars last year or double that of Pakistan. And China refused to devalue its renminbi in 1997-97 when the East Asian currencies were being heavily devalued following the regional economic meltdown and its exchange rate still stands at 8.28 renminbi for a dollar. China has a foreign exchange reserves of 193 billion dollars and Hong Kong 113 billion dollars—- a total of 306 billion dollars against Pakistan’s 4 billion dollars, including private holdings, thanks to the foreign grants received now.

While Pakistan has been seeking foreign aid for developing the country, China has been relying on foreign investment. In recent years that investment had risen to an average of 40 billion dollars a year, and last month premier Zhu Rongji said that foreign investment so far this year had been 27 billion dollars in spite of the global recession and contraction of foreign investment worldwide.

Earlier, most of the foreign investment came in the shape of investment by overseas Chinese including indirectly by those residing in Taiwan. But now more and more world capital is coming, particularly American capital. And China’s entry into the World Trade Organization would give a fillip to the US investment as China can export to far more countries.

Compared to that, Pakistani capital has been flowing out over the years. If exporters and importers and later industrial investors buying machinery from abroad promoted that culture in the early years of Pakistan, corrupt bureaucrats, greedy politicians, criminals and the heroin mafia did that in a bigger way later. But now there is stand-still in this area as the deposits of Pakistanis and others abroad are being looked into critically to determine whether some of that had been fuelling terrorism as well or benefiting by that.

Chinese investment in the industrial sector in recent years has primarily been export-oriented, while our investment including foreign investment is primarily aimed at the domestic market. Look at the role of Lever Brothers and ICI Pakistan, for example. The result has been that we are not able to hit the modest target of nine billion dollars regardless of how often we had set the target of 10 billion dollars.

In the textile sector, China has made tremendous progress and invested a great deal. Its recent production of textile was 25 billion square metres and its cotton output is around 24 million bales. Recent reports said it intends to expand cotton output by 25 per cent.

Pakistan on the other hand is struggling to maintain its cotton output of 10 million bales, having earlier achieved 13 million bales. A slight increase or decrease in output becomes a major issue in Pakistan. A modest shortfall pushes up prices steeply while a small surplus brings down prices and the growers and ginners raise a big hue and cry and make it a major public issue. All that may be attributed to market forces but the markets should be somewhat more rational and far less hysterical than they tend to get in Pakistan.

Currently the small surplus in sugar has become a major issue. The sugar mills want large subsidies for export which the commerce minister supports while the finance minister finds that unacceptable or unaffordable. Such convulsions are not going to help the economy and make it truly export-oriented.

The reason why so much foreign investment goes into China is its low cost of production, particularly low wages. The wages can be low as inflation has been very low for many years now. Currently it is 0.2 per cent, unlike the statistically low inflation our officials speak of, which is belied by the market, particularly in the austere month of Ramazan.

The discipline of the Chinese workers despite the inroads of capitalism is till very good. The holidays are not too many and sudden strike days too few. And the threat of unemployment makes them work harder, along with the rewards of higher output.

Pakistan has low wages in terms of dollars, but in terms of productivity of the workers the wages are higher than those of many other countries. A Japanese investor asks me “how do we make a worker who is illiterate to read a work manual in an assembly line and produce? How do you industrialize rapidly with such a work force?”

Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen talks of the remarkable progress China has made in education and public health despite its authoritarian political system, while the performance of a democracy like India has been very poor. He has small regard for democracies without social justice or social development, particularly in the areas of education and health.

We are now told that much of the 1.2 billion dollars we have received from the US and other donors will be used for development of the social sector. While the provincial governments will be asked to use the funds, the Centre would monitor them and the donors would audit their output, particularly through the IMF, World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Let us hope for better results this time. Instead of leaving all the monitoring to the donors and the government, some NGOs too should take an active part in that and bring deviations from the goals and programmes to the notice of the government and the public.

Back to the strategic trade partnership with China, how do we export more to China and the rest of the world, beginning with the affluent Gulf region, unless we reduce the cost of production? To achieve that, we need lower and fewer taxes, cheaper bank credit even after the lowering of the export refinance rate to 10 per cent from 12 per cent, and cheaper energy. Without these concession an export boom will be an illusion.

THE rejoicing in most parts of Afghanistan and the sense of freedom that the Afghan people feel now should remove all doubts that the Pakistan, and specifically its military, was supporting an undemocratic, obscurantist and oppressive regime.

There is a distinct possibility that many from among the Taliban and Arab-Afghans shall cross into Pakistan and blend in with the support base they have in this country. How the present and future Pakistani governments deal with this process in addition to the already existent Islamist extremism is a serious question.

More than a decade after Zia-ul-Haq’s death in an aeroplane explosion, he continues to influence the country’s social life as Pakistan culturally shifts toward embracing orthodox Islamic values in public and private spaces. That legacy is also evident in the militancy of millions trained in the madressahs, supported and nurtured by the government.

In the last two decades, Pakistan’s major external policy initiative has been reduced to two elements; nurturing a Pakistan friendly regime in Afghanistan and encouraging an armed resistance against India in Kashmir. Both policies, interlinked as they are, had very little support from even Muslim states in the region.

The larger issue of madrassahs and Islamic extremism is partially also the result of the Pakistani elite’s failure to provide a vision of national integration, basic education and a modicum of economic opportunity to its people in the last five decades of the country’s existence.

The madressahs (here some distinction needs to be made between those that have historically provide training to our clergy and those that were opened in the wake of the Afghan war in the 1980s), for all their curricular and political problems, have also been conduits for Pakistan’s rural and urban poor to attain a level of literacy and an opportunity to socially succeed in life.

The neglect that successive civilian governments in the past decades have shown toward democratic governance, economic dispensation and social needs along with their rampant corruption have eroded their legitimacy and have led some people to follow other non-democratic paths towards social and political power. Within this context, the military has managed to portray itself as the stable social institution that can save Pakistan from its corrupt and inept civilian representatives.

However, the military’s own tenures in government have not been stellar performances either. In the present context, the Pakistani military may have saved its own skin from the wrath of a US-led coalition by accepting the US demands on its war effort in Afghanistan.

This was done ostensibly in exchange for fresh promises of international largesse. But in the process, the regime yet again, like in the 1980s, appears willing to plunge Pakistan into an uncharted future. During the 1980s when billion of dollars did pour into Pakistan, their impact on development indices was minimal, as a large percentage of the money was used by the government in purchasing military hardware and in supporting specific mujahideen groups.

Accusations of corruption and pilferage were also plenty. With the past performance of the Pakistani ruling elite, the Pakistani people may still not see any reasonable change in their lives with the promised aid.

Pakistan is at a difficult crossroads. Yet like all crises the moment has to be seized to rethink a range of options. This opportunity should be availed and workable solutions need to be found for Pakistan’s political and social problems. Otherwise, Pakistani society will continue to be riddled with social chaos and violent strife. The suffering population of the country deserves far better treatment than what its elite have offered it in the last five decades of its existence.

As a first step, it should be made clear by the international community that the support to the present government is not a green signal for it to perpetuate its rule indefinitely. International pressure, using economic aid as weapon, should be increased on the government to hold free and fair elections on the basis of adult franchise.

It should be persuaded to revoke all Zia era amendments to the Constitution, including laws that uphold separate electorates, those that discriminate against religious minorities and those that suppress rights of women.

All political parties irrespective of their affiliation and ideology should be allowed to participate in the elections. All provincial and federal ministers since 1985 should be debarred from participating in the electoral process for at least for another ten years.

This would guarantee a general cleansing of the political landscape from corrupt politicians who have used their access to power to accumulate immense amounts of wealth.

WHY did the BJP make Maneka Gandhi a minister? Numbers was a primary concern, a crucial determinant of value in a coalition government. Numbers were the reason why ministers eventually found less than competent were first given their jobs and then retained. Maneka Gandhi represents no one but herself.

An individual star then? With that ability which some politicians have to sway audiences with their oratory from Kerala to Bihar to Punjab to Mumbai. The prime minister, for instance: when Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee is in the mood he can pick up any audience and play with it as a child might play with a doll whose only response is “Mama...Mama”. (These days the prime minister reserves such skills for either NRI gatherings in Washington or BJP gatherings in Amritsar.) But Maneka Gandhi is not, repeat not, an orator.

The only leader in the Nehru-Gandhi family who was a true orator was Jawaharlal Nehru: he could speak on his feet because he would think all the time and read when he could. Indira Gandhi could never manage to distil the aroma of flowers into her phrases, although she more than made up with her confidence what she lacked in her language. No one could hammer a political theme, encapsulated in a few sentences, better than her.

She had the power of a blacksmith rather than a goldsmith. The most evocative two-liner in the history of Indian democracy surely has to be the Indira staple of the 1971 general election: “Woh kehte hain Indira hatao. Main kehti hoon garibi hatao (They say remove Indira; I say remove poverty)!” Touche. Which land would not slide after that?

Maneka Gandhi is more representative of the generation into which she married. Brevity is useful for this generation, because they do not have too much to say — unless it is written down for them. Sanjay Gandhi’s campaign speeches sounded like instructions from the legal guardian. Do this, do that. Vote for my five points. Sat Sri Akal. Jai Hind. Whatever.

Rajiv Gandhi had no flourish, and depended almost till the end on speech-writers of dubious value, and, on occasion, counterproductive worth (“Naani yaad dila denge” etc etc). Speech-writers tend to have one peculiar characteristic. They cannot resist making fun of their patrons behind their backs. Some of Rajiv Gandhi’s penmen would, partly to display their intellectual superiority and partly to advertise their proximity, leak out details like the exact number of minutes a particular speech would take. Reporters with an inside tract would then time the arrival and departure of phrases in a speech at any rally from the safety of the press box, with much subdued hilarity on the sidelines. No man is a hero to his speechwriter.

Brevity comes naturally to Maneka Gandhi for more than one reason: she has so many other things to do. I have no idea how she meshed into the earnest-schoolboy, part-crusader, part-bully culture of the Youth Congress during the Emergency and the Janata raj, but in middle age Maneka has become a maverick with a cause. Make that plural. A single cause would be insufficient for her energy levels. Such qualities would make her an excellent chief executive of a Norwegian-funded NGO. What are such passions doing in politics?

She is not in politics because she has deep ideological convictions, either Marxist or saffron. She is not in politics because her community wants her there, in the manner that Laloo Yadav or Mulayam Singh Yadav or Ram Bilas Paswan has built his base. If asked to identify her manifesto she would be a bit lost after she had gone beyond saving animals and forests. She belongs to no political party, and lives in a personal woodshed, in political terms. She cannot sway the electorate from Kerala to Kashmir. Of course she could turn around and say that everything in this paragraph applies to almost anyone you would meet in parliament, but Atal Behari Vajpayee does not make almost anyone you would meet in parliament a minister in his government. So why her?

The answer is family: the family Maneka Gandhi married into. The BJP, or at least the prime minister, was using her to give added credibility to the coalition he had built. Maneka Gandhi brought with her a surname from Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indira, brother of Rajiv and grandson of Jawaharlal.

There were two brothers in the family, and therefore two daughters-in-law. Both the brothers met tragic, even savage ends. One died in a plane he could not control while still in his thirties. Rajiv was brutally assassinated in his prime, when he still had so much left to offer his country. In between Indira Gandhi gave her life for India. As long as Rajiv was alive, there was no question of the political inheritance going to anyone else, whatever Maneka Gandhi may have thought of his political abilities. But the moment he died, she was in business.

She was helped by the fact that Sonia Gandhi opted for seven years of cloister. But her very presence prevented Maneka Gandhi from joining the Congress. This was her Achilles heel. For the Nehru-Gandhi inheritance to work it must be routed through the Congress. That is non-negotiable.

On the other hand, Maneka Gandhi did create some space for herself in the non-Congress, non-BJP region. It was not ideal, but it was significantly better than nothing, particularly at a time when the Congress was looking frayed from every angle: age, vision, clarity, thrust, relevance. When Sonia Gandhi formally entered politics, the family acquired a presence in both camps.

For the BJP it made eminent sense to elevate Maneka Gandhi to ministerial status: she, along with others like the old socialists, helped dilute the extremism that the party had become synonymous with during the Ayodhya movement and its cataclysmic climax. The BJP wanted to reposition itself as the “natural” magnet of a moderate coalition, and such associates certainly helped it to govern from the centre — both literally and politically. Maneka was the National Democratic Alliance’s very own Nehru-Gandhi. And if she was, in her combustible way, vituperative about Sonia Gandhi, why bother? She was not hurting the BJP by hurting Sonia.

So what happened? Why did the Prime Minister suddenly draw a sharp line last week and punished Maneka Gandhi by removing the culture ministry from her portfolio when Maneka wanted to nudge Sonia out of one of the government-funded institutions that Sonia has, well, inherited?

Let us take the best reason possible. Simple, old-fashioned respect across party lines, in the finest traditions of a democratic polity. If this is true, then it is most welcome. Since he became prime minister, Mr Vajpayee has certainly gone out of his way to ensure that all the privileges of office, like a bungalow and top grade security, are kept with Sonia Gandhi and her daughter Priyanka even while home minister L.K. Advani has whittled away the privileges of former office-bearers, including an ex prime minister like Chandra Shekhar.

If this is the real reason, then the BJP is a different party than it was when Rajiv Gandhi was alive. No abuse, including personal abuse, was too harsh for Rajiv Gandhi. The kind of atmosphere that was created against Rajiv Gandhi was unprecedented in democratic politics. Sonia Gandhi herself was fattened for the kill when, during the last general elections she seemed, briefly, as if she might offer a serious contest. Why has the ruling alliance gone soft on Sonia Gandhi now?

One can understand the volte face of Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh, the man who stopped Sonia Gandhi from being sworn in as prime minister when she claimed that she had the support of 272 MPs after the defeat of the Vajpayee government on the floor of the House. The same Amar Singh, who could not stand the thought of an Italian-born prime minister of India is now publicly asserting that this is a non-issue, and that he has himself killed the bill he brought in parliament to prevent any such possibility. That volte face is the call of Uttar Pradesh, where his party will probably need the support of Sonia Gandhi’s Congress to form the government in Lucknow. But the BJP can have no such understanding with Sonia Gandhi. Surely not.

The only rational explanation is that the BJP continues to believe that the presence of Sonia Gandhi as leader of the Opposition is the best guarantee it has that its coalition will survive any crisis. The thought of Sonia Gandhi as their potential prime minister, in other words, will keep the present BJP flock from wandering towards other pastures. The BJP knows that another wobble can be expected after the results of the Uttar Pradesh elections. The BJP will lose in Uttar Pradesh, and Lucknow always casts a shadow on Delhi.

Destiny, in the meantime, has a habit these days of pushing Maneka Gandhi towards the winning side of an election. She would have campaigned for the losing side if she had not been touched; now she will do the rounds of UP, but urge for a vote against the BJP government. The BJP would have lost in any case, but there is no harm in claiming some of the credit.

A drowning BJP has sent out a desperate SOS signal. For the BJP, of course, SOS can only stand for Save Our Sonia.

WITH the capture of Kabul and with the general situation in Afghanistan slipping into a holding and search pattern, the hothouse atmosphere in Washington has subsided somewhat.

Briefings on the course of the war and allied political developments are still held daily at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, but they have lost some of their post-September 11 intensity. The same questions are asked over and over again, and the same answers given. “The war is being won, but it will not end with the end of Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda .... It will continue till all those sheltering terrorism are brought to book ..... bin Laden is on the run, but we don’t know his exact whereabouts.... He will not be able to escape justice .... There is no question but (Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s favourite expression) that we will pursue the campaign to a conclusion ....”, and so on and so forth.

President Bush has displayed a phenomenal memory: he has now learnt by rote entire sentences and phrases which he repeats endlessly. But the great wonder is that every word spoken by him about the war or Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda is greeted by analysts as adding something significant to the course of events. The more cliched the president sounds, the greater the zeal of commentators to dissect his words and hold intensive discussions about the president’s thoughts.

There was not a single new thing in Mr Bush’s weekly radio address on Saturday, yet there were all those White House correspondents standing by at the Camp David retreat to first tell us what the president was likely to say and then when he had said it, to explain to dimwits around the country and the world what he meant by what he had said — basically that it is going to be a long campaign!

The US media coverage of the traumatic events of Sept 11 and their aftermath was quite stunning. Similarly, when the bombing campaign began in Afghanistan, it was American networks and Al Jazeera that brought graphic pictures of what was happening on the ground in that ravaged country. Even now, there are more western correspondents in Afghanistan than South Asian journalists, and they are trying in extremely difficult circumstances and at considerable risk to life and limb to make sense of developments there.

But in the past few days we all appear to have reached some kind of a plateau, and till something dramatic happens, such as the capture or killing of Osama or Mullah Omar or driving out the Taliban from Kandahar now that a large marine force is based outside the city, we are largely being forced to repeat ourselves and to search for words to avoid giving the impression that we are repeating ourselves. This had in greater or lesser degree always been a journalistic compulsion and foible; it has been given a shallower new dimension by 24-hour radio and television broadcasting.

The flying of kites by the children of Kabul became a symbol of freedom from the social oppression of the Taliban regime, and it resulted in some strikingly beautiful newspaper pictures. But, with hard news difficult to come by, this has also now been done to death — and not merely by the media, but by US officialdom, with everyone citing the fact as evidence of the success of the campaign against terrorism.

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy gave eloquent voice to the unwritten thoughts of many puzzled observers of the American scene when he wrote the other day: “A few questions, please. Why are we so happy that Afghans can now fly kites, shave their beards and wear short skirts when so few of us seemed to care about their plight before Sept 11? What about the millions of Afghans who are in danger of starvation this winter? Are they, too, flying kites amid the land mines and unexploded cluster bombs?” Also, there’s the other side: what about this picture in The New York Times of a Taliban fighter sitting in the Konduz town square, surrounded by Northern Alliance fighters, shot through his ribs and near death and whose dark robe, according to the accompanying report, was soaked with urine?

Then, there’s the whole question of Afghan women. Here, too, except for the odd documentary, no one particularly had shed any tears for the suppressed women of Afghanistan; perhaps our own Human Rights Commission of Pakistan had given the problem greater attention than similar groups in the US. But now, even when far knottier problems stand in the way, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his colleagues cannot tire of emphasizing that women should be part of a new broad-based coalition in Kabul.

No one noticed when Pakistan reserved 33 per cent seats in local bodies for women, but now you cannot move an inch towards a political solution in Afghanistan without some woman sitting next to the fierce Rashid Dostum in an Afghan cabinet. There can be no denying the sobering effect women can bring to government, but shouldn’t there be greater emphasis on Afghan women working with NGOs to change the war culture that has held the country in its grip for over two decades and on women helping to create a more peaceful, civilized society when they will automatically be able to take their position alongside men?

And what about some of America’s major coalition partners? How many women are in the cabinets of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries? Many of these states don’t have elections at all, and one or two that do, such as Kuwait, don’t allow women to vote (and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, even to drive or go out accompanied by someone who is not a ‘mahram’).

The problem with America is that it overdoes everything. If it has to respond militarily to a threat, it reacts beyond all reasonable proportions; if it has to meet a political challenge, it cannot think of anything less than recourse to extolling the virtues of a free market or of God and patriotism or of proclaiming the indispensability of America to shape the world according to what it considers right and just; if a major event takes place, then the last bit of it is squeezed out by the media and then as easily forgotten when something new occurs (where’s Chandra Levy and her senator-friend Gary Condit whose saga kept us in thrall for weeks on end?).

This extravagance of style has its endearing traits on an individual basis; translated nationally into state policy, it can result in the kind of overbearing conduct that so easily creates hostility in other nations and peoples.