| December 6, 2001 | Thursday | Ramazan 20, 1422 |
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Funds for the arts
Gender wars at grass roots
THE satisfaction expressed by a high-level meeting, presided over by Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz, at the supply position of wheat in the country seems justified. The meeting, held on Monday, took a number of decisions which aim at tackling the problem of surplus wheat. Pakistan has harvested a crop of 19 million tonnes during the current year which is determined to be two million tonnes surplus to its domestic requirements. At present, about seven million tonnes are in government stocks, of which 4.5 million tonnes will be released for local consumption by April next year. By that time the new crop would start coming into the market and is likely to be one million tonnes in excess of the current year’s crop, as about five per cent additional acreage has been sown in Punjab. That may yield a total surplus of three million tonnes. The government has consequently decided to build a strategic reserve of one million tonnes and take 2.45 million tonnes as carry-over into the next year. The target for the export of wheat during the current fiscal year has been raised to 1.4 million tonnes, about half of which has already been shipped and 0.7 million tonnes are in the pipeline. In view of the easy supply situation there is no justification any more for quotas for the millers. The food departments should do away with this patronage at the earliest, and the use of wheat for purposes other than traditional should be encouraged.
The current year’s bumper crop has created a crisis with regard to the storage of the surplus wheat. The lack of proper storage facilities has contributed to a deterioration of the quality. This in turn caused the cancellation of Iranian and Iraqi contracts although these countries have shown a renewed interest recently. Now the government has decided to encourage the construction of silos in the private sector, especially for export purposes at Karachi Port and Port Qasim. This needs to be expedited. A package of incentives is being assembled which may include low interest loans, an accelerated depreciation allowance, and a reduced custom duty for the import of equipment. Experience shows that, whenever there are prospects of a good crop, the prices generally fall sharply at the beginning of the season, in spite of the support price being in place, because of the absence of a ready mechanism to implement the policy of procurement. This hits the small farmers most who have small surpluses, no storage facility and no holding power. For various reasons, they are under pressure to dispose of their small surplus at the earliest. Thus, they are always the losers. The government now knows that the crop is most probably going to be good, yielding a big surplus, and the prices are, following the past pattern, most likely to fall, at least in the beginning. It is, therefore, imperative that the procurement machinery be in place before the new crop starts flowing into the market.
NORWAY’S decision to provide financial assistance to Pakistan to promote the performing arts is a welcome development. The aid will go directly to the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA), which will use the money to organize courses in the performing arts (including a week-long course for school children), and produce around eighteen stage dramas. However, overseas funding cannot, on its own, bring about any substantial change in the development of the arts. That impetus has to come from within the country, from Pakistani society, and the community of artistes and others involved in creative pursuits. Take the case of the auditorium complex of the Karachi Arts Council that has been lying incomplete for over a decade and for which funds have been allocated only now. Had successive governments attached priority to this project the auditorium would have been built a long time ago. Similarly, no one from the private sector — a group of artistes, perhaps — ever came forward to take up the cause.
The issue of foreign assistance also points to a dichotomy in the way the arts are funded and supported in Pakistan, by both the government and the private sector. Not much help is forthcoming usually from domestic sources of funding like the ministry of culture or corporate sponsors, not even to the government-owned PNCA. Ironically, though, it is organizations like the PNCA — and many others run privately — that grab any opportunity of foreign funding. Artistes in Pakistan have generally been a fractured community not a cohesive one, and that is perhaps why the arts are neglected. Illiteracy and increasing poverty have also not helped matters in this regard. In any case, people also need to realize that there’s only so much that a government can do, and that a genuine flowering of the arts cannot take place unless it has popular support from within society, especially from those who make a living from it. Progressive forces and members of civil society should resist conservative elements whose increasing influence has retarded the development of creative activity in the country. This is one aspect where intervention by the state — often unable or unwilling to check extremist forces — could prove useful.
IN THE past, local councils would often split along party or policy lines, but in today’s ostensibly partyless houses the new faultline seems to be based on gender. The most recent example of such a split comes from Rawalpindi, where women councillors engaged in a heated verbal battle with their male colleagues. The row, which soon descended into pandemonium, was sparked off by a remark from a male councillor, who stated that the conduct of women in the house was unbecoming. Enraged by the remarks, the women demanded an apology and began to hurl counter-accusations at the men present, accusing them of all manner of impropriety and even threatening to physically assault them. The bitter slanging match was finally defused after the intervention of certain councillors, happily comprising both men and women.
This was not an isolated incident. Since the advent of the new local bodies system, in which at least one-third of the seats are reserved for women, female councillors have regularly staged collective walkouts from a number of council meetings. The reasons have ranged from serious disagreements with their male colleagues over policy, especially development priorities, to complaints about male misbehaviour. The underlying cause, however, remains the same: the patronizing attitude of male colleagues, who refuse to treat them seriously. This kind of behaviour is an inevitable by-product of a new system where many councillors are political novices. At another level, it also reflects the discomfort many men feel towards the mixing of men and women as equals in a public chamber. With many of the new councillors coming from rural and socially conservative areas, adjusting to the spectacle of fiery oratory from women and having to put up with their public criticism must seem totally alienating. The positive side of this phenomenon is that women are increasingly asserting themselves at the local council level, once almost totally male preserves. One hopes that this traditional attitude towards women, as well as their ritual response to it, will gradually give way to a more stable relationship where what you have to say carries more weight than your gender.