| April 15, 2002 | Monday | Safar 1, 1423 |
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Post office’s irrationality
Suicides most foul
In his inaugural address to the Saarc Finance and Planning Ministers’ Conference in Islamabad, President Pervez Musharraf proposed the creation of a free trade zone in South Asia to promote economic cooperation among the member states and reduce poverty in the region. The suggestion was promptly endorsed by the deputy chairman of India’s Planning Commission, K.C. Pant, and subsequently featured in the unanimously adopted and highly ambitious Action Plan of the conference. The eleventh point of the plan states: “to strengthen poverty alleviation programme, the (earlier adopted) South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement be implemented and made fully operational soon and movement toward South Asian Free Trade Agreement be accelerated.” Ironically, this laudable objective has been supported by a conference which itself could not meet for five years. It was earlier scheduled for 1997, but tensions between the member countries did not permit an earlier assembly. Even today, the two most important members of the organization, Pakistan and India, are engaged in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, with one million soldiers concentrated along their borders and all civilian contacts between the two nations virtually severed.
Saarc, which has been in existence for about two decades now, has very little to show in terms of concrete achievements, barring some official contacts and the exchange of some minor information on experiences. Despite this disappointing track record, however, there is an acute realization among all member states that poverty in South Asia cannot even be addressed, let alone reduced, without very close regional economic cooperation. That is why a decision was taken to set up a South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement in 1995, with 5,500 items identified to be treated under a preferential tariff structure. These, however, were all minor items with little potential for growth. Even the modest targets set eight years ago have not been achieved yet. Intra-regional trade still represents only a fraction of the member countries’ global trade, remaining stagnant at a level of about three per cent. However, the objective was later revised to envisage a free trade zone by 2001. The year 2001 has come and gone but even the initial steps towards this objective have not yet been taken. Creating a free trade zone entails a very advanced stage of economic cooperation. Most economic and social policies of the member states need to be closely coordinated and a balanced stability in prices has to be maintained so that goods can move freely across borders without any duties and administrative hindrance. It is also essential that the free movement of people, especially businessmen, and of capital can take place easily and smoothly.
In South Asia, the establishment of a free trade zone is made immeasurably more difficult because of the tense relations between Pakistan and India. With the prospect of armed conflict constantly present and with the two countries seemingly frozen in their respective stands, the establishment of a free trade zone seems unrealistic and even utopian. This is a shame, because the creation of such a zone could well offer salvation to the 1.5 billion people of this region. In order to achieve this objective, India and Pakistan must display a great deal of flexibility in their respective positions and strive hard to move towards a solution of their long-standing disputes. The present rigidity can only undermine the objective of Safta and sabotage the future of one of the poorest and most populous regions in the world.
THE Pakistan Post Office, which in recent years has lost considerable business to courier companies, has come up with a highly debatable tactic to increase revenue. A public notice, issued by the PPO and published in newspapers, reminds people that under the Post Office Act of 1898 the “conveyance and delivery of letter post items is the exclusive privilege” of the PPO and that a courier company or a cargo service cannot engage in such a business. In typical bureaucratic pompous fashion, the notice, drenched in officialese, goes on to warn anyone who uses a courier company that this could warrant a fine under the law. It further “requests” them to send their “letter post items” only through the post office. In fact, the notice also deems the sending of a letter through a courier company an “illegal act” and asks readers to report any such violation.
Presumably, those at the helm in the PPO seem to think that simply by invoking an act dating back 104 years they have the right to tell citizens how to send their mail. Courier companies have been operating in the country since the early eighties with due permission from the government. In fact, this issue flared up in the mid-eighties and the dispute went to the federal ombudsman, who ruled that courier companies could carry documents that were “time-sensitive” in nature. The ruling also said that the PPO’s attempt to invoke the 1898 law and then warning people of possible penalty amounted to telling them how they should send their personal mail, a clear infringement of their basic rights. In any case, one wishes that the PPO had resorted to other, fairer, means for revitalizing its money-losing operations. The best, obviously, would be to improve its own delivery service instead of harassing courier companies, which do a reasonably good job. After all, why should people be forced to use the post office, especially when the alternative, though more expensive, is reliable and efficient?
IT seems incredible that frustration or depression should have driven not one but two fathers in Rawalpindi to kill their own children before committing suicide. In one such tragedy, the police say, Mohammad Haroon, 36, whose wife had died a year ago, strangled his three children, aged 10, eight and five, in their sleep before hanging himself with a rope just two days before he was to be remarried. A week earlier, the police say, a well-to-do lawyer, Khan Iftikhar Ahmed Khan, shot dead his wife and two sons, 17 and 14, before shooting himself in the head. In both cases, the police found suicide notes, and in both cases, it appears financial or economic reasons were not the cause of the tragedy. What were the causes then?
One hopes, the police have not conveniently presumed that suicide was the cause of death in each case simply because suicide notes were found at the scene. Perhaps a more in-depth and incisive investigation into their family and social background is required before both cases are closed. If it was really suicidal instincts that drove these two fathers to slay their own children, then it is certainly the job of our psychologists, sociologists and social scientists to study these two incidents and let the public know what they think of these two tragedies. After all, people would like to know what exactly it is that can push a man to such extremity that, in a final fit of madness, he gruesomely murders his children and family before killing himself? For two of such similar incidents to happen within a week of each other, and in the same city, is enough to send shivers down the spine. Such apparently inexplicably destructive and violent behaviour should be seriously taken note of by a nation caught, to repeat a time-worn observation, between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.