For better fiscal discipline

THE proposed Fiscal Responsibility and Debt Limitation Ordinance prepared by the ministry of finance for public comment is being rightly billed as a major initiative by the government to demonstrate its seriousness about checking future governmental fiscal irresponsibility and financial mismanagement. The government should be commended for launching a legislation aimed at restoration of financial discipline and fiscal balance in budgetary operations.

The introductory blurb on the draft legislation sets out its objectives as: “ ... eliminate the revenue deficit and reduce public debt to a prudent level by effective public debt management and by enshrining principles of intergenerational equity ,,,,” Given the history of frequent slippages in achieving fiscal targets, the ordinance is expected to provide a legal and institutional framework to contain the growth of government debt and deter its level as a proportion of GDP, while maintaining a minimum prescribed level of priority expenditures on the social sectors. The legislation sets out the principles of fiscal management that the government of the day will be expected to commit itself to in order to attain medium-term targets in respect of some key fiscal indicators.

All these objectives are to be realized through the following key requirements:

a) Elimination of the revenue deficit by 2007 and thereafter ensuring that it is in surplus.

b) Reduction in the level of overall public debt to 60 per cent of GDP by 2012, an indicator that only the parliament would be empowered to relax, particularly in the event of an emergency, such as a war or a natural calamity.

c) The public debt would be brought down by 2.5 per cent of the estimated GDP for each year, while protecting social and poverty-related expenditures, ensuring that they do not fall below four per cent of the GDP.

d) Stopping governments from issuing any new guarantees in excess of two per cent of the estimated GDP of the year.

e) As an integral part of the budget, the government will have to submit a medium-term budgetary statement that would set out three-year rolling targets for key economic indicators.

f) A government failing to meet the debt-to-GDP ratio target for two consecutive years would be required to indicate all measures, including the suspension of salaries of the cabinet, to return to the debt reduction path within the next two years — although many may argue that a more appropriate penalty for such a failure would be the automatic loss of office by the government in power.

For greater transparency, and in the interest of an informed public debate on the government’s fiscal stance, the legislation requires the government to submit, along with the budgetary documents, its macro-economic framework, the budgetary estimates and assumptions, the rationale for adopting the proposed budgetary measures, changes, if any, in policies and the accounting treatment of expenditures and receipts. Also needed are information on the contingent liabilities connected with guarantees provided by the government, the liabilities not yet discharged in respect of major works and its fiscal policy and medium-term policy objectives. Henceforth, the government will also be required to explain why and how its assumptions and strategies were not successful and the fiscal strategy that it now proposes to adopt to prevent similar slippages from occurring in the future.

Having briefly described its objectives and key features, let us proceed to examine some of the provisions of the proposed ordinance that may not facilitate the achievement of the professed objectives.

To begin with, there seems to be some confusion about the impact of existing budgetary proposals on present and future generations. Whereas taxes reduce consumption by imposing a burden on the present generation, borrowing need not have a similar impact on the future generation since those paying taxes to service the debt as well as those receiving interest income from lending money to the government belong to the same generation. Since the individuals may be different, there are implications for intra-generational but not inter-generational distribution of incomes.

The provision of goods and services benefits members of the present generation while development expenditures increase the productive capacity of the economy, thereby benefiting the future generation. Only if policies and measures reduce the availability of goods and services to future generations are they worse off through cuts in investment expenditure. When resources are fully in harness an increase in non-development current expenditure, financed through taxes, does not alter inter-generational consumption. In case resources are not fully employed, consumption expenditure financed from debt may not be at the expense of investment. In fact, such expenditure could promote investment through its positive impact on the utilization of capacity of private sector investment in plant, equipment and services.

Again, whereas the proposed legislation aims to reduce the deficit in the revenue account, such a reduction and the lowering of the debt-to-GDP ratio could be achieved by different compositions of budgetary expenditures with sharply different outcomes. For instance, the same level of revenue deficit can be realized by cutting back on much needed expenditure on the repairs and maintenance of infrastructure. This lowering of expenditure, and the resulting deferred maintenance, would eventually get reflected as development projects in future years — a strategy that successive governments have been guilty of adopting in the past. Such an outcome cannot, obviously, be the objective of the proposed enactment.

The overall debt-to-GDP ratio can also be achieved by deciding to reduce priority investment expenditures rather than raise taxes or rationalize user charges (as has been happening in recent years), with all its implications for economic activity in general. There would be little economic justification for restructuring government investment that could have a high social return, since there are externalities of some investments that need not contribute directly to government revenues.

Moreover, there is also a need to distinguish between the structural and cyclical components of the deficit, a need improve the cost-effectiveness of government expenditures and to raise the tax-to-GDP ratio over time. The draft ordinance is silent on these issues, although imposing a tax-to-GDP target may reduce the degree of freedom of the government since implementing such proposals takes time. And without a stipulation separating the structural from the cyclical components of a deficit, the present government would not have been able to undertake the kind of capital restructuring of the KESC that was forced upon it in the previous financial year. This pushed the fiscal deficit beyond the target agreed with the IMF.

Finally, since treasury bills and other government bonds held by the State Bank of Pakistan essentially serve the purposes of a monetary policy, this holding may increase or decrease depending on open market operations conducted by the SBP. Since one of the implicit aims of the proposed legislation is to grant greater independence to the SBP to conduct its monetary policy, the SBP’s holdings of such government securities should be excluded from the purview of this ordinance, especially as these bonds would not, in the true sense of the term, constitute a part of the government’s debt.

This is because the SBP is in itself a part of the government and if a consolidated balance sheet were to be prepared this debt would be cancelled as a contra item. This writer would, therefore, propose that, in keeping with the spirit of the proposed Act, only that part of government debt held by households, companies, and financial intermediaries and institutions should be regarded as public debt, since the servicing of only this debt would generate a flow of funds (in the form of payments) from the government to the private sector of the economy.

The writer is a former finance minister of Punjab.

Basic rights and power structure

PRESIDENT Pervez Musharraf’s constitutional packages have focused public attention on the political power structure in the country. True, this is important, since the wielders of power do have the options and opportunity to change macro policies which vitally determine the state of the nation.

But recent happenings indicate that many of our woes stem from the power imbalance within society itself. There are many other factors which also influence social attitudes and thereby the power structure in society.

Pakistan has yet to outgrow the feudal mindset it inherited from the mediaeval ages, which was reinforced by the colonial rulers since it facilitated their hold on the native population. This approach allows special privileges to the landowners vis-a-vis the peasants, the wealthy industrialists vis-a-vis the workers, men vis-a-vis women, the state functionaries vis-a-vis ordinary citizens, the clerics vis-a-vis the laypersons and so on. Worse still is the privileged class status a person inherits because of his birth or religion.

Each class is further stratified by an internal hierarchy of its own and there is a lot of overlapping and crossing of spheres of influence. Hence, there is no clear-cut delineation of the social power structures which allows incidents to occur such as Meerwala (jirga-ordained gang-rape of a woman) and Chak Jhumra (stoning to death of a mentally ill person for ‘blasphemy’ on the fatwa of a pesh imam). When this is compounded by the abuse of political power, an ordinary Pakistani can find himself to be quite vulnerable.

What is not generally understood is the fact that this state of affairs will continue even if the country is given a perfect constitutional system. If nothing were to change at the grassroots, the new rulers, howsoever democratically they may have been elected in a fair and free election, will proceed to abuse their new found political power to their own advantage. Being the children of a society that has no respect for human dignity or the rule of law, would they act any differently when in office? The fact is that the ultimate checks and balances in the levers of power come from the people themselves and the social mores they follow.

While colonialism arrested the social, political and economic evolution of Third World countries, decolonization has catapulted them into the post-colonial technological age quite unprepared to cope with the challenges of modernization. Hence the contradictions found in every developing state. What is the answer to this paradox?

The recently released Arab Human Development Report 2002 (AHDR) (prepared by the UNDP with the help of some Arab intellectuals) holds out lessons for other Third World countries as well. It identifies three ‘shortcomings’ which are described as obstacles to building human development. They are summarized as the ‘deficits’ relating to freedom, empowerment of women and knowledge. The report specifically calls on the Arabs to rebuild their societies on the basis of full respect for human rights and freedoms as the cornerstone of good governance, complete empowerment of women and the consolidation of knowledge acquisition and its effective utilization.

All this is so pertinent to the state and society in Pakistan that we can do well to study the report in depth — not to gloat over the Arabs’ failure but to understand our own shortcomings. The conclusions it reaches hold true for us though in varying degrees.

Take the deficit in freedom in which the Arabs have been faulted severely. Pakistanis should be grateful for the little mercies they enjoy being more free politically than many in the Arab world. But can we truly claim to be a place where human rights conditions are ideal? A quick perusal of various reports which human rights organizations and others prepare annually — be they the HRCP, the Amnesty International, the American State Department — would confirm what most of us experience in our day-to-day lives. With the state itself committing many violations of civil freedoms, it is not surprising that the privileged classes also abuse power. What is worse is that the people are not sensitized to the concept of human dignity and accept these denials and violations as something natural which was decreed for them by fate.

Of the six international human rights conventions which are taken as yardsticks by international agencies to measure the performance of a country, Pakistan has acceded to only three (with some provisos), namely the Convention on the Elimination of Racism, Cedaw and Convention on the Rights of the Child. It has kept away from the more crucial conventions on civil and political rights, economic, social and cultural rights, and on the elimination of torture. According to the ‘freedom scores’ given by the AHDR, Pakistan ranks higher than the Arab countries but is worse than Bangladesh, India and even Nepal.

The deficit of women’s empowerment is another major drawback our society suffers from. It is not generally realized that by relegating the women to a secondary status, Pakistan not only loses half the human resource potential it can draw upon to strengthen its economy. It also suffers in terms of the quality of life its citizens can enjoy by empowering its women. The fact is that the treatment meted out to women has pitched this country at the bottom of the Gender Empowerment Measure with only Djibouti behind it.

The knowledge deficit is even worse. The average adult literacy rate in the Arab world is 59.7 per cent when it is barely 50 per cent in Pakistan. In the Education Index, too, all Arab countries are much ahead of Pakistan.

With this poor record, can we really expect Pakistanis to even understand and respect libertarian principles and social justice? And that is exactly what we have to strive for. It is here that civil society should step in. Until now the role of the NGOs has been that of pressure groups. They make their voices heard when something goes wrong. Their protests often force the powers that be to redress a wrong that has been committed. But it doesn’t ensure that a similar wrong will not be committed again.

Take the Meerwala case again. It came into view when a journalist who chanced upon it reported it in an Urdu daily of Lahore. Some lawyers visited the place. Once it had been exposed, NGOs visited the scene. But the downtrodden need more visible and enduring moral support which they do not always receive in, so to say, normal times. There must have been some people in Meerwala who must also have been as outraged as us by what happened but they are not empowered and so could not resist.

The arrival of human rights and women’s rights activists on the scene at such critical moments can be reassuring to the weak. It gives them courage to stand up for their rights and resist the persecution and abuse to which they are often subjected. It should also serve to warn those drunk with power that they cannot abuse their fellow men/women in the name of tribal honour which is actually a convenient cover for their abominable deeds. It would also help restrain the police who compound the people’s agony and encourage crime by giving protection to its perpetrators.

But coming back to Musharraf’s package, some of the basic weaknesses in our society do not mean that a military government can come barging in and ride roughshod over the people’s right to have a say in their governance. After all, changing a system or institutions can be meaningful and prove lasting only if civil society is involved not only in setting the direction of change but also in carrying the process through. This calls for a holistic approach. The need is to bring about changes in attitudes and behaviour at all levels and it should be undertaken at all levels.

The major factor which can be a catalyst for change is education. It is not surprising that those who have ruled this country have not done much to spread education. Exposure to knowledge, information and new ideas broadens a person’s mind and outlook and inevitably fosters new values and norms. But those in a privileged position do not want the status quo to change. This has been best ensured by denying the masses the advantages that accrue education offers. It is time civil society stepped in to educate the people. The process of change that would be thus initiated would facilitate the breaking down of barriers to progress, advancement, justice and equity.

Federalism and democracy

IN the reforms package, one doesn’t find anything new. The only thing of substance for the overall good of society is the reintroduction of the joint electorate system.

But this too is not new as the president himself had already announced this earlier and got due appreciation from the people of Pakistan and the international community. The main accomplishment of the National Reconstruction Bureau is the concentration of unprecedented powers in the hands of the president. But the past 54 years are replete with endeavours, manipulations and coercion to make the country and all its institutions subservient to one person. All the schemes and exercises of making and unmaking the constitutions have been aimed at this one point. And military governments have outshown the civilians in this cause.

When the present regime seized power it announced that the supremacy of the institutions and the rights of the provinces would be the corner-stones of its policies, programmes and reforms. In every parliamentary democracy, parliament is the supreme institution representing the sovereign will of the people. But through the proposed package the parliament has been reduced to the status of just another department of the government subordinate to the president.

The life of a house created by the people can be cut short at any moment by the president if and when he thinks that the institution is not working in the best interest of the country. The idea being sold is that one person is more prudent and patriotic than the collective wisdom and patriotism of the parliament or its creator - the people. It is assumed that prime minister could be an unscrupulous, and insincere person, so his reins should be in the safe hands of a president.

The NRB chief says that “it was unimaginable that the parliament would ever elect an unscrupulous person as president of Pakistan”. If one is so sure and confident about the ability and sincerity of the parliament then it should be allowed to make and break the governments and run its own affairs as it deems fit and proper.

But here the parliament enjoys this status only until it puts some particular person in the saddle of the supreme power. Immediately after that the roles are changed. All the qualities and abilities stand transferred to the president and the parliament becomes subservient to him. It is nowhere in the universe that the creator is subservient to the creature or the creature control the creator. But this practice has been in vogue in Pakistan and now it is being strengthened.

If the prime minister wants the assembly to be dissolved he will have to first get a resolution passed by the same assembly and then send it to the president for approval. This is against all norms of parliamentary democracy. But the president can dissolve the assembly instantly without following any procedure.

Similarly, to remove the prime minister the parliament will have to pass a no-confidence motion with two-thirds majority but if it is the President’s wish the prime minister will be on his way out the next moment. For all practical purposes it will be a presidential form of government. In fact a president in the ‘parliamentary democracy’ of Pakistan will be more powerful than a president in the presidential form of the US who is restrained by so many checks and balances.

In order to make things more clear first we take a brief look at some of the distinguished federal systems. In the US the federating units have their own constitutions, own judicial system up to the supreme court and very vast areas to legislate upon. There is only one federal legislative list while all the remaining subjects are with the states.

Senate which is always a symbol of federalism and protector of the rights of the federating units is very powerful in the USA in many areas, more than the house of representatives. It has the sole power to try all impeachments including that of the president. The Senate has same powers over revenue bills as on other bills with the only difference that these will be originated in the House of Representatives. The Senate ratifies treaties and appointment of ambassadors, judges and other high government functionaries. All this despite the fact that the states in the US are not historically, politically, culturally and linguistically so distinct as are the provinces in Pakistan.

In Australia also there are states with their own constitutions, own parliaments and own prime ministers having vast powers of legislation except defence, foreign affairs, finance and social services. Barring very few aborigines, all the inhabitants of these states are settlers from Europe and these states are not historically and culturally distinct entities.

In Canada the true federalism can be seen with regard to the province of Quebec as it is the only province with separate identity historically, culturally and linguistically. All the other provinces are English speaking and were created along with the federation having no previous existence. All other provinces have single legislative assembly while Quebec has a two-chamber parliament of its own and a very powerful prime minister. Quebec has different legal system from the rest of Canada in consonance with its French identity and even has powers, in some areas, to enter into treaties with foreign nations.

General Tanveer Naqvi claims German Federalism to be his ideal one. In the past there existed independent states and the constitution setting up the federation was approved by the state legislatures. The states are free to have their own constitutions.

In Germany states have their own flags. Each state has its own separate, distinct and autonomous education system.

In our case, the Senate has been made just a debating society without any say in the functioning of the government and having no powers to make any decisions in monetary, political, diplomatic, defence and foreign policy matters.

It is difficult to believe that any expert on federalism would suggest or support a highly centralized system. People were already finding very hard to call Pakistan’s system of governance a federal democracy, now after implementation of the proposed package it will turn into a unitary presidential dictatorship.

A Catch-22 situation

FOR some time now we have been expressing alarm at the Bush administration’s contention that, in the name of fighting terrorism, it can detain any US citizen and hold that person indefinitely and without access to counsel, by simple determination by the president that the person is an enemy combatant.

So last week’s opinion in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi was welcome for its important, if implicit, rejection of what the court termed the government’s “sweeping proposition ... that with no meaningful judicial review, any American citizen alleged to be an enemy combatant could be detained indefinitely without charges or counsel on the government’s say-so.”

But the opinion, written by Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, certainly does not resolve the complex issues posed by Hamdi’s detention and similar cases.

Hamdi, a probable American citizen, was captured in Afghanistan where the US government says he was fighting for the Taliban. He is being held incommunicado in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Va. A district judge had granted a public defender access to him, but the appeals court Friday reversed that order.

The lower court, Judge Wilkinson wrote, failed both to consider the complex set of issues the case presented and to show adequate deference to the military’s judgment that Hamdi is an enemy combatant. But the three-judge panel also rejected as “premature” the government’s idea that the case should be dismissed altogether, remanding it instead for a fuller consideration by the district court. Implicit in this remand is the insistence that American citizens can’t just disappear.

The court declined, as the panel put it, to “blueprint” the procedures the lower court should now follow. It insisted on deference to the executive branch, whose job it is to fight wars. This is right as far as it goes; battlefield commanders shouldn’t be hauled into court for interrogations about how and where a detainee was captured. But the opinion unfortunately leaves open — even encourages — the possibility that Hamdi’s status might be resolved without letting him challenge the government’s evidence at all. Whatever the appropriate standard may be, the liberty of Americans cannot be conditioned on secret, one-sided proceedings.

The government cites strong precedents for its authority to hold enemy combatants for the duration of an armed conflict, even if those combatants are citizens. —The Washington Post

Freedom is white — and possibly Christian

TODAY we no more live in a world that is the result of World War II: instead, the world of today has been shaped by the collapse of communism, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. If this, then, is international geopolitical reality, one wonders what those great wars of the twentieth century were fought for.

World War II was history’s most destructive war, and no figures are available as to how many people were killed. But rough western estimates — with which the Soviets do not agree — put the human casualty toll at 30 million, civilians and soldiers. (The Soviets say they alone lost 50 million, which could be a bit of exaggeration.)

Within 45 years of Germany’s defeat and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “victor” Soviet Union had disintegrated. “Vanquished” Germany and Japan had reappeared as economic giants, while, much earlier, the British, French, Dutch and Belgian empires had passed into history.

The responsibility for starting the two world wars is invariably placed on Germany, and the Germans are made to feel guilty. The truth is that the Germans’ real fault was that their victims invariably were Europeans. If, like the European maritime powers, Germany had created a mighty empire in Asia and Africa, it is doubtful if the Germans would have been demonized the way they were because of the first and second world wars.

Of course, Germans had no one to blame but themselves for not joining in the loot and plunder of Afro-Asia. The British and the French had their nation-states, each under a flag of its own, and they profited from the political weakness and economic and technological backwardness of Afro-Asia to create colonial empires for themselves. The Germans, on the other hand, were united under one flag — though not entirely — not until after the Franco-Prussian war of 1871. By this time, it was too late, for Britain and France and other small maritime nations like Holland and Belgium had already gobbled up most of Asia and Africa. Only the tottering Ottoman empire survived. By 1919, it too, had been parcelled out into smaller entities.

The Germans, the most numerous of all European nations in the heart of Europe, then found they could expand nowhere except in Europe itself. Wilhelm Kaiser had grandiose plans but was less megalomaniac and blunt than Hitler. He had his eyes on Belgium; he bullied the Belgian king and often tried to bribe him by offering French territory if he would cooperate and let his army’s right-wing smash through Belgium on the way to Paris.

Hitler’s ideas bordered on lunacy. He wanted not only a German-dominated “Nordic Europe,” there was no limit to the lebensraum he had in mind for the east. Once he spoke of “Germanizing” Russia up to the Urals. Finally, when the war ended in 1945, he had devastated and laid waste only European countries and populations. His enemies, too, (with the sole exception of the United States), had enslaved other nations, except that the enslaved nations were non-whites. Which was no crime.

If the German despots — Kaiser first and Hitler later — had targeted the nations of Afro-Asia, it is doubtful if Germans would have been reviled and denigrated the way they have been. Western war literature has also conferred morality on the war against Germany and made the world believe that the western powers, especially the US, Britain and France, fought to “save the world for democracy” and to usher in an era of freedom and democracy worldwide once Germany was defeated.

Actually, while the First World War was still on, the Sykes-Picot pact had already been agreed upon, providing for the occupation of Ottoman territories by Britain and France. At the same time, Britain made irreconcilable promises to Jews and Arabs: while Lord Balfour promised a homeland for the Jews in Palestine in a letter to Lord Rothschild, correspondence between Hussain bin Ali, the Sharif of Makkah, and Henry McMohan, the British high commissioner in Egypt, promised freedom for Arab provinces after the Ottoman empire had been defeated.

The story of the theft of Palestine by European Jewry is a story unto itself, to which the League of Nations added its own criminality by adding the elements of Balfour Declaration to its Covenant on Palestine and authorizing the Mandatory to take steps toward implementing the Balfour Declaration. The Jews, including Arabic-speaking Jews, then constituted six per cent of Palestine’s population.

In 1922, when the Mandate officially began, Palestine’s population was 649,348 of whom Arabs were 557,941 (Muslims 486,177 and Christians 71,764). However, under British patronage, white Jewish immigration began altering Palestine’s demographic complexion and a myth was created — that Ottoman misrule had depopulated Palestine. Hence the shibboleth devoid of all truth and justice: for a people without land, a land without people.

Within twenty years, the number of Jews in 1942 had gone up to nearly half a million (487,500 to be precise), out of a total population of 1,505,000, Arabs being more than a million — Muslims 908,000, Christians 126,000 and Druzes 6,000.

Now America, the real victor of the Second World War, began its Palestinian career, with Truman writing a letter to Attlee asking that 100,000 Jews be admitted immediately to Palestine, quota or no quota. Yet, in spite of the large-scale legal and illegal immigration, the Jews were still in a minority when the UN announced its partition plan in 1947. Ironically, such was the regard for truth and justice on the part of those who had waged war against Germany for the sake of freedom that the UN partition plan gave 60 per cent of Palestine to the Jewish minority while it awarded 40 per cent of the land to the Palestinian majority. Al Quds (Jerusalem) was given the status of corpus separatum to be placed under the UN Trusteeship Council.

The Arabs rejected the partition plan, though with the benefit of hindsight this appears a mistake. In 1967 Israel captured entire Palestine, thus depriving the Palestinian people of all their land. Today, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip constitute 22 per cent of Palestine, but the Israelis would not let them live in peace even in these pockets, which Ariel Sharon intends to turn into ghettos to avenge perhaps the persecution the Jews suffered at the hands of European Christians for 2,000 years.

Yet the issue for George W. Bush’s America today is not the freedom of the Palestinian people but the personality of an individual called Yasser Arafat. The fact that the Palestinians have been expelled from their homes (by means that have included massacres like those in Deir Yassin), their lands and water stolen from them, and they have been deprived of the right to live in freedom even in the 22 per cent of the land left for them to be content with has been made to be forgotten. Even this truncated Palestine has continued to be under Israeli occupation since 1967 and its vacation by Israel has now been made subject to a restructuring of the Palestinian Authority and for it to have a leader “uncompromised by terror.”

Here one can see a parallel with Kashmir. The issue is no more the right of the people of Kashmir to freedom, over 70,000 of whom have died in the last 13 years in trying to free themselves; the issue instead is “cross-border terrorism.” The question of freedom in both Palestine and Kashmir has, thus, been obfuscated and made to revolve round the omnibus term “terrorism.”

This is a world ruled by men for whom freedom is white. Its options and preferences are largely influenced by a media that turns a mass murderer and war criminal like Ariel Sharon into a hero. George W. Bush calls him “my friend.” That friend of his continues to build Jewish settlements in West Bank and other Palestinian areas in violation of all UN resolutions, but the American president reads out a speech in his June 24 “initiative” that even neutral observers in Europe say could as well have been written by Sharon.

As Robert Fisk of The Independent, London, remarked, the US has become “Israel’s spokesman,” and he asked, “Why...doesn’t Mr Bush let Ariel Sharon run the White House press bureau?...It would spare the American president the ignominy of parroting everything he is told by the Israelis.” Remarked, The Guardian editorially, “No peacemaker he, and no statesman either.”

For Jack Straw, the UN resolutions on Kashmir have become obsolete. For the information of Mr Straw, the UN has passed dozens of resolutions that have nothing to do with Kashmir but which uphold “all peoples’” right to shape their political destiny and have the right to self-determination. For instance, the UN Declaration on Principles of International Law, passed in 1970 says, “All peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status...(and the) establishment of a sovereign and independent state....”

If Kashmiris and Palestinians were Christians, even if non-white, “non-obsolete” resolutions would have seen to it that a plebiscite is held and they get their freedom as East Timorese did.

If certain UN resolutions are obsolete because they do not suit India and Israel (and for that reason some western powers) then perhaps the UN might as well be declared obsolete and wound up. Or, as an alternative, if the world body does after all serve certain Anglo-Saxon interests, why not strengthen the UN’s altered role and character and make Israel a permanent member of the Security Council? This will formalize the veto power which Israel in any case already exercises over many Security Council resolutions, through the courtesy of the US and Britain.