| September 20, 2002 | Friday | Rajab 12, 1423 |
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Fat cats’ little secret
Is US going to war?
Jack and Jane
So many good leaders
IT was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest of UN secretary-generals, practitioner and contemplator in one, who observed that the UN was not established to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell.
ONE often forgets just how much the British altered the history of this sub-continent. In so many ways, the British era has left an indelible mark on the region’s political culture, systems and institutions.
At a time when landless sharecroppers in the rich agricultural districts of central Punjab are agitating for their tenancy rights, the impact of British colonization needs once again to become part of the discourse.
In recent times, peasant agitations in Okara, Khanewal, Sargodha, Sahiwal, and at least six other districts of Punjab has become headline news throughout the country. In general, such issues tend not to make the front or back page, but the story of Anjuman Mazarain Punjab, and the response of the state to it, has become one of the most compelling narratives of what is happening under this military government, and illustrative of how the state remains aloof and apathetic as in colonial times.
Almost 70,000 acres of land in the province, owned by the provincial government, is being operated by a multitude of government agencies, including the military and various agricultural departments. These agencies leased this land from the province once upon a time, but now have no legal claim to it (and have not for many years).
They have claimed harvest shares from sharecropping tenants for as long as they have been tilling the land. Now both the military and agricultural departments want to change the tenure status of the tenants by making them sign limited-tenure contracts. Under the existing tenancy laws, the tillers cannot be evicted, so long as they continue to be legally recognized as tenants. But under the new contract system, eviction becomes a distinct possibility.
There is a need, however, to recall a bit of history. Only a century ago, the vast majority of the 70,000 acres or so of land in question was a forested area. The local population was small, and consisted largely of pastoral communities. A distinct component of British colonization was the construction of irrigation systems in certain parts of the subcontinent.
In Punjab, it was districts such as Okara, Khanewal, Sahiwal, and Sargodha that were the “beneficiaries” of this experiment and unwitting hosts to thousands of migrants who were forcibly displaced from other areas of the province, mostly from eastern parts. It was these migrants that became the sharecropping tenants of the state-owned farms. They first had to completely change the landscape of the area and were promised ownership rights by the colonialists under the so-called abadkari schemes. When the forests were cleared and the British had their irrigated lands, these promises were forgotten.
And so the British radically altered the history of central Punjab as we know it. Other such shock therapies were also administered in areas of the Frontier province, most notably in the area known as Hashtnagar spanning Malakand, Charsadda and Mardan. These forested areas were cleared by communities moved from adjacent areas inhabited by the Mohmand tribe. The land and the accompanying new irrigation systems were turned over to a new class of landlords, in the way that much of the jagirdars of the British Raj were created.
In Hashtnagar, too, a peasant movement exists, although it is less prominent these days than the movement in Punjab because the sharecropping tenants in this case are not directly waging their struggle against the state. Indeed, in Hashtnagar movement, tenants are somewhat better placed, having successfully maintained their occupation of land after a long, historic struggle three decades ago when global trends were supportive of such movements.
It is only recently that the landlords in the area have attempted to re-establish their authority by embarking on a series of summary evictions with the full support of the local administration. The first eviction started some months ago in tehsil Tangi in Charsadda in a village where the land is owned by the SSP, Charsadda.
Evictions might soon be taking place in Okara and other districts where the tenant movement is going on. This would not be surprising, given the repressive methods that have been employed by the authorities in dealing with on-going agitation. The British created and maintained a new class of landed elites in this country as a backup to their rule in a very deliberate way, with the distinct goal of reaping the benefits of the resources — physical, human, and intellectual — of the subcontinent.
The sovereign Pakistani state continues to do more or less the same. The state’s insistence on preserving an unjust system based on the exploitation of man by man that characterized the relationship of the British colonialists and the native tenants in that era speaks volumes about the extent to which our own state has actually emerged from the vestiges of colonialism.
It is interesting that the language being used by the authorities to describe the tenant revolt in Okara and elsewhere in Punjab reminds one of the language that was used by the British to describe the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Accusations of involvement in anti-state activity are rife. Tenant activists who are simply demanding their deserved share of land they themselves made cultivable are being tried in anti-terrorism courts.
Interested parties and stakeholders on different sides of the standoff underscore the need to establish legal benchmarks and resolve the conflict in a legally binding manner. This might be a viable option in a country where the rule of law actually existed, but not where arbitrary self-interest determines when which laws should be invoked, and when in fact they should be ignored changed to suit expediency.
Now corporate farming is likely to undo whatever little land reforms were carried out in this country in the past. It becomes increasingly difficult therefore to entertain anything but mistrust for the government, and its rhetoric about change and reform. State institutions such as the police and the judiciary are being used to sustain an ambience of quiet acceptance or acquiescence, just as they did in the colonial times. One must remember that the resistance movement that drove the British out of the sub-continent was based on a clear awareness that formal structures of justice only served to reinforce the colonial power and the inequities of its system of rule.
Civil disobedience was the defining characteristic of the freedom movement. It is fair to say that the Pakistani state today is at best slightly more responsive to the needs of the people of this country than the British were. Is it therefore not legitimate for the sharecropping tenants of Okara, Khanewal, Hashtnagar or elsewhere to demand that things change in substantive terms and according to the norms of justice, fairness and equity?
Shareholders should learn about perks and benefits granted to top executives through Securities and Exchange Commission filings, not from leaks during a messy divorce. So should federal regulators, who Monday began investigating the eye-popping post-retirement package that General Electric granted to long-time Chief Executive Jack Welch.
GE easily could have avoided the public relations fiasco that erupted after divorce documents of Welch’s wife disclosed details of GE’s reported largess. In 1996, at about the time GE’s corporate board was readying Welch’s compensation package, directors swatted down a Teamsters proposal to tie compensation to published formulas and submit packages to shareholder votes.
Six years later, organized labour has a strange bedfellow in the Conference Board, a business think tank that Tuesday scolded corporate America for creating conditions ripe for a continuing string of corporate scandals.
The respected executives, investment fund directors and former government officials who wrote the report called for all publicly traded companies to expense stock options, fully disclose benefit packages to shareholders and link compensation plans to long-term corporate goals rather than to the quarterly stock price. And they went a welcome step further by suggesting that companies alert shareholders before their executives sell stock in their company.
Welch clearly isn’t cut from the same cloth as those who’ve ransacked Enron and other bankrupt companies. But “Neutron Jack” earned $16.7 million during his last year on the job and his net worth reportedly tops $900 million. Yet, board members granted the retiree access to corporate jets, use of a New York apartment and tickets to professional sports contests.
SEC investigators must determine whether GE accurately reported those perks and benefits. But investigations wouldn’t be necessary if corporate boards did what the Conference Board is demanding _ explaining pay plans not only “in plain English, but in plain sight as well.”
Corporations should be free to concoct whatever executive pay formulas they desire _ 500 times what the lowest-paid production worker takes home or triple what Texas Ranger shortstop Alex Rodriguez earns during a season. But extravagant compensation packages usually run counter to shareholder interests. They must be explained upfront, and clearly, so investors know how a company is spending their money.—Los Angeles Times
He would have been in his intellectual element wrestling with the present situation. Is it better if the US does go to war against Iraq that the UN approves it? It didn’t do the UN any good to be left on the shelf when the US and its main European allies bypassed it and decided to bomb Belgrade without a Security Council mandate.
Or is it better that the US goes ahead without the approval of the UN? If things go wrong with the war which well they might — Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister of Malaysia told the “Financial Times” on Tuesday that he despairs at a “racist” war that could spark communal violence across the globe — then the UN will at least be in a position to use its diplomatic influence, its aid machinery and even its peacekeeping forces to help quell these eruptions.
It was one of Hammarskjold’s appointees, the Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien, who summed up the dilemma that confronts the UN on these life and death occasions, “The feeling that the thing feared may be averted, and the thing hoped for won, by the solemn and collective use of words. This prayer still converges on the UN — as on a holy place — at times when, as in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, in the Middle Eastern crisis of the summer of 1967, the scourge of war seems once more about to descend. It is the prayer that makes the drama sacred.”
Although not much remarked upon these days we went through a similar crisis in March 1998. There was plenty of talk of going to war and Secretary General Kofi Annan rode off to Baghdad, to talk and talk and to pull Saddam Hussein’s sting.
On his return he was treated like a hero and his friends likened him to Hammarskjold. Well, he brought four and a half year’s of peace, which is not bad. But what is worrying is that a re-read of the debates of the time show that nothing has changed in substance. It was exactly the same fear of weapons of mass destruction that drove the U.S. to the brink of war and it was the promises to Annan by Saddam to allow more intrusive inspections that drove it back.
But the inference then was that if Saddam didn’t deliver on his part of the bargain that Annan would use his influence to persuade the Security Council that it would have to vote to support armed action.
Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem made perhaps the profoundest comment on the crisis: “Clinton’s wrangling with the UN Security Council and its emissary, Secretary General Kofi Annan, brings to mind the way in which medieval rulers once required the Pope’s consent before going to war. Now even the world’s sole remaining superpower finds it extraordinarily difficult to go to war without obtaining the sanction of international law. Thus the recent crisis may be remembered more as a stepping stone towards delegitimizing war between nations.”
Remembering this, the French and the Saudis — with the connivance of Secretary of State Colin Powell who seems to have trumped Vice-President Dick Cheney on the going-to-the-UN issue — are perhaps walking the US into a trap. By acknowledging that they may change their own position on the need for a war, but only as long as the Security Council approves one, are they leading the Americans into what O’Brien called “the solemn and collective use of appropriate words” as a substitute for war?—Copyright Jonathan Power
JACK and Jane went up the hill to get a pail of water. Then Jack fell in love with a younger woman — and all hell broke loose.
It’s one thing to have been the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world. It’s another to be a CEO sued for divorce.
An example of this is Jack Welch, the retired Chairman of General Electric, who became a household name when he wrote a best-selling book on his enormous business success and what it was like to be one of the most admired men of the 20th century.
Because he was such a good CEO, his board voted him all sorts of perks if he stayed on beyond his retirement age.
No one would have cared about it except that he dumped his wife, Jane, for an editor from the Harvard Business Review.
As soon as this happened, he stopped being known as “Good Jack.” Women started referring to him as “Bad Jack.”
In a bitter divorce proceeding, Jane Welch asked that she receive $600,000 a month (this is not a typo) in alimony, which she and her lawyer thought she deserved for her pain and emotional distress.
The reason the injured wife demanded the alimony is that Jack Welch, as chief executive, was on corporate welfare from GE.
Welch’s perks included a fistful of dollars, a company plane for life, a free apartment on Central Park West for life, all he can eat at a five-star restaurant of his choice, and floor tickets to every Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
When GE stockholders read the list of perks, they complained, but Welch said, “I deserved it.”
The trouble is that if Jane Welch gets divorced, she will no longer share in Jack’s perks. This means, she says, Welch has to provide the lifestyle that she enjoyed before Jack took up with “that other woman.”
Jane listed some of the perks she would lose because of the divorce. They include monthly expenses for a new house or apartment, $11,000 for jewellry, $4,000 for a car and chauffeur, $7,000 for clothing, $2,500 for dining out, $3,000 for gifts, and an unspecified amount for her personal trainer.
Now the question that arises is how much was Jack getting in GE money for his personal use? Jane’s lifestyle will never be the same. During the years of wedded bliss, she gave away free GE refrigerators to her friends, rode on helicopters anytime she wanted to, and had box seats to the opera.
Jack and Jane went up the hill to fetch a pail of money. Jack fell down and broke his vows, and Jane’s going to make him pay for it. —Dawn/Tribune Media Services
SOMETHING good comes out of even happenings that are not designed to be good, says an old adage. The October 2002 general election, which many consider an unnecessary exercise in a society that has no problems with living under people nominated by authority, has produced an early fruit.
Nearly 8,000 citizens of this country have passed the ultimate test of leadership qualities and integrity. That is the number of people whose nomination papers to contest the forthcoming elections to the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies have been found in order. One could never imagine that it was possible to find so many Pakistanis sound of head and heart. Somebody not so long ago had sought a handful of pure associates who would have been sufficient to turn Pakistan around. What indeed cannot be done with the treasure of human resource now displayed before us.
All of these people have reached the age of 25, none of them has been found infirm of mind by a competent court, and none of them is an undischarged insolvent. Besides, all of them hold graduation (or equivalent) degrees and thus belong to the new-found category of people competent to dispose of fellow human beings’ affairs.
All of them have paid back loans amounting to Rs two million or more and utility bills amounting to Rs 10,000 or more. Which is another way of saying that not only are they not defaulters, they are also not poor.
All of them are models of responsibility. None of them has ever, after the establishment of Pakistan, worked against the integrity of the country or opposed the ideology of Pakistan. They have not been found propagating any opinion, or acting in any manner prejudicial to the ideology of Pakistan, or the sovereignty, integrity or security of Pakistan, or the maintenance of public order, or the integrity or independence of the judiciary of Pakistan, or which defames or brings into ridicule the judiciary or the armed forces of Pakistan.
More than anything else, all of them are of good character, are sagacious, righteous and non-profligate and honest and ameen. The Muslims among then have adequate knowledge of Islamic teachings and practise obligatory duties prescribed by Islam besides abstaining from sins. The non-Muslims among them have not been tested for knowledge and practice of Islam, even though some of them might know more about Islamic injunctions than many Muslims (but apparently do not practise them). However, all of them have good moral character.
Just the right stuff, one might say, to propel Pakistan into a glorious age of true democracy, efficient governance, economic prosperity, freedom from corrupt leaders, and relief from the danger of any military take-over in the future.
But did we not find such highly qualified people earlier on? The same tests, barring a few, had been cleared by the candidates contesting elections in 1988, 1990, 1993, and 1997. Indeed, some of them, the likes of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto and many others, passed these tests more frequently than the authors of the 1985 constitution had contemplated (or is this a wrong assumption?).
Maybe, some of them did not have BA degrees or did not think of acquiring one before the date of filling nomination papers, but they were all accepted as sagacious, non-profligate and devoid of weakness for sin. It took us quite some time to discover that they were corrupt, inefficient and selfish and that they either looted the state and the people or were guilty of collusion and abetment in such foul deeds.
The question is not the failure of the previous lot to behave as the qualification and disqualification provisions of the 1985 constitution demanded or promised, because the world knows of no means of guaranteeing that one who is honest and wise today will retain these qualities tomorrow. Certainly not in Pakistan, where members of the elite have mastered the art of transforming themselves overnight, some in a matter of seconds. Elsewhere, too, much that is claimed as virtue is in reality lack of opportunity.
The issue is the utter uselessness of the provisions on qualification and disqualification of candidates. For a long time in our constitutional history any citizen who was qualified to vote could seek election to legislature subject only to having reached a certain age, that is, until 1985, when General Zia expanded the constitutional provisions (Article 62 and 63) to create the illusion that he had discovered the path to democratic, Islamic good governance. It is time to seriously face the question whether elected representatives were more honest and capable during the recent years of rule by hypocrisy.
The crux of the matter is that Pakistan has been led into the error of regulating entry into the hall of power without caring much about how people behave once they are inside the all-important portal. In a way attention has been concentrated on who should be allowed into power rather than on the requisites of fair and efficient functioning of institutions. No good can come out of this fallacious attitude towards politics. The more we have tried to personalize governance the greater has been our plight. One simple way of defining a sound institutional framework is that it will continue to function fairly well even if people of low calibre or integrity get into the driving seats while in a poor system even the wisest and the most honest are bound to fail.
At the moment one hears two main views in the country. One is that the National Reconstruction Bureau has succeeded in perfecting a system of true and sustainable democracy, which will deliver all that the people have been yearning for all these years. The other view is that so far it is a case of more of the same. Either way there is no place for the growing list of legislators’ eligibility tests and grounds of their disqualification.
If the institutions of governance have been made sound there is no need to put extra guards at the gates of authority and if the soundness of institutions cannot yet be guaranteed the screening at the gates won’t work. In the fist instance, the monstrous edifice of qualifications and disqualifications becomes superfluous and in the second case it is liable to be dismissed as ineffective.