THE cost of running government has been increasing in Pakistan irrespective of the quality of governance. If the number of ministers and other functionaries continues to increase, there is little doubt that the scope for malpractices and waste of public funds, and eventually outright corruption, will keep on rising.

When a poor country like Pakistan has as many as four million employees in the federal, provincial and local governments the financial burden on the people becomes too heavy, more so when their productivity is too low, and they keep on adding to the red tape in the system. And if to add to that, the number of political officials keeps on mounting after an elected set-up comes in, the burden on the people can become excessive. Many of them are less representatives of the people than a heavy burden on them. They inflate the current expenditure of the government and leave far less for development.

Now there is a large increase in the number of members of the national and provincial assembly members. In addition, there is the new local government set up which is trying to find its feet in a very tentative manner.

The number of members of the National Assembly has risen from 227 to 342 and the provincial assembly members has risen to 728, making a total of 1,070. And they include not only the directly elected members but also the 188 women members nominated by the party leaders. The National Assembly has 60 such nominated women while the Punjab has 66 such women.

Large assemblies mean large cabinets and an increasing political cost, and higher salaries for all beginning with the president and the prime minister. Not only the salary of the President was virtually doubled earlier but also of the prime minister long before the elections. Speakers of the assemblies and chairman of the Senate are beneficiaries in a similar manner.

In such an environment all talk of downsizing the government and having a small government is out of question. Hence the efforts initiated by Mohammad Khan Junejo’s government after the 1985 elections and a return to the democratic process made little headway. Some officials were placed in the surplus pool and denied their perquisites; but that brought no relief to the people who have to pay larger taxes to fund the bigger official establishment.

In fact, instead of letting go the retired officials a large number of them were re-employed. And a considerable number of serving and retired military officials were employed in the civilian sector. And many of them came to head the autonomous bodies add even made vice-chancellor of a university. The ten per cent quota fixed earlier for employment of army officers in the civil sector was exceeded. Now we are told retired employees will not be reemployed. We have to wait and see. Some of them have also been getting lucrative employment as consultants, with no ceiling on their remuneration.

The federal cabinet sworn in on November 23 has 21 ministers, seven ministers of state and four advisers. It was noted that despite Nilofar Bakhtiar losing the general election she had been made an advisor with cabinet rank, as if the 60 women nominated by the party leaders, and some more directly elected, could not provide an advisor to the prime minister.

How many more ministers will be added, beginning with the MQM nominees, remain to be seen. Since Mir Zafarullah Jamali’s majority in the NA is too thin, he may have to induct more ministers. Already the divisions in the federal government have been raised to 32 by splitting the ministries such as the finance ministry becoming three divisions. It has been said each division will have a minister, a minister of state, a parliamentary secretary and up to ten advisors of junior level to patronize the party supporters.

Such an expansion of the cabinet with too many hangers-on is not what Shaukat Aziz would like as finance minister, who has to find the money to pay them. Nor will that be seen in good light by the international aid agencies which are providing funds to have a small government and an efficient administration, and not to fund for more and more ministers and other ministerial appendages. Certainly we should not be borrowing more and more from international agencies to pay the ministers.

The Sindh government too is to have 24 ministers and five advisers initially. The MQM alone is to have 12 ministers. How many more will be added as the Sindh cabinet tries to neutralize threats from the largest single party in the assembly, the PPP, in partnership with the MMA remains to be seen.

The cost to the public of having a large cabinet at the centre and in the provinces is heavy and come under various heads. It begins with their doubled salary or more which is the smallest part of the public expenditure. The perquisites beginning with the house and far more on the various heads provided to them cost a lot more. Even the telephone expenses can be staggering. Even the chairman of the Senate Waseem Sajjad ran up such incredibly high telephone bills without any executive task and for only occasional meetings of the Senate the President had to ultimately write off the arrears exceeding Rs two million. The Speaker of the National Assembly Yusuf Raza Gilani had ten cars at public expense and three offices in Islamabad, Lahore and Multan.

Then there is the large staff provided to each minister or adviser, who cost a huge amount of money for the public. Some of them have too many staff members to support them or embellish their offices.

The travel expenses of the ministers and their associates can be very heavy. And they include foreign travel.

The cost of providing adequate security to the ministers which is increasing all the time can be very heavy. They have to be protected at home, in their offices and as they travel around within their cities or in the course of cross-country travels.

The ministers also keep too many local officials busy. When they visit their homes or constituencies they expect the local officials to be around them. And when the ministers and advisers are too many at a place the local officials find the task of coping with them too demanding.

Normally when the security threat to the officials increases and law and order breaks down, the ministers should be moving around less and making less demand on the police. Instead they move around far more with a cavalcade of security forces. These are the days of TV, internet and telecommunications for the rulers to communicate with the people. Instead the political ministers and their backers want to be seen and heard by the people directly, applauded and garlanded. The people pay the cost for their preference in many ways.

The country has a bad history of coalition governments, except in Balochistan where the parties have been too many and too small. So too many members of the Balochistan Assembly had been in the cabinet and since they formed the majority the government could not be out-voted but only reshuffled when the need arose.

The centre has invariably tried to knock down provincial governments except those formed by its provincial party. So eventually the provinces ended up with having the same party government as that at the centre.

The second Benazir government had a coalition with the PML under Hamid Nasir Chatta. She had not to only keep a constant eye on him but also give too many cabinet posts to his party. And now how the coalition at the centre works remains to be seen.

In India for long now, they are accustomed to provincial governments far different from that of the centre. That followed the sharp decline of the Congress party as the supreme political force at the centre. And now the BJP government at the centre headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee has as many as 22 parties and holds.

In Pakistan too we have to learn to live with coalition governments. The question is: can that be done without having too large cabinets and without the ministers and others in power spending too much? To do that the prime minister has to be strong or be ready to tender his resignation rather than yield to undemocratic or illegal demands of his supporters in Parliament?

The first meeting of the federal cabinet decided that each member of the NA should be given Rs ten million as development fund instead of the Rs 5 million permitted earlier. When the Senate meets, its 100 members would also be given Rs ten million each every year. And as was the practice earlier of giving half the amount to the provincial assembly members, the 728 MPAs would also get Rs 5 million each every year. So, the total development outlay of the legislators comes to Rs 8.06 billion.

Mohammad Khan Junejo was the initiator of such personal development schemes for members of assemblies. He had suggested that to bind together the non-party members following the non-party elections of 1985. But what we had in October was party-based elections. And there is no justification for doubling the amount of money for each member of the assemblies certainly not ten million rupees for a MNA or Senator.

The country is littered with ghost schools and ghost hospitals created through this process. Will we have more of such vacuous institutions through this process which had made the Social Action Programme I and II too seriously blemished?

When such development funds were earmarked for the legislators there was no local government of the kind we have now. They know the local problems and local needs, and are in touch with the people every day. They ought to be given more funds as their functionaries are elected as well and have grass-root contacts. Instead the MNAs and MPAs are to have Rs 8 billion for discretionary spending, which could also mean building roads to their rural homes or farmyards.

The provincial governments too clamour for more funds as they have to sustain and develop the social sector. If defence takes away a great deal of the federal resources, law and order eats up a good part of the provincial revenues. Hence the provincial finances need to be strengthened, instead of the individual legislators being made more resourceful.

All this is being done at a time when the National Accountability Bureau is not to investigate the politicians through new cases. So what kind of accountability will we have? Even the Public Accounts Committee will become too feeble an organization and make the work of the Auditor-General less effective. That is not how an elected government should be making a beginning.

IF there is a characteristic that unites all human societies, past or present, it is surely an inordinate fondness for violence. Those who can force others to submit to their demands will do so until they meet a greater force.

We tend, in the superficially peaceful communities of the rich world, to forget that violence is the underlying determinant of human relations, and that this violence, far from disappearing, has simply been distilled into a political system which both protects and threatens us. Though we may avert our eyes, our respect for the law rests upon our recognition of the state’s capacity to compel us to submit by force of arms.

This, though it arose from centuries of arbitrary power, is the social contract upon which those of us who live in nations with elected governments appear to have settled. The state claims to protect us from external aggression and the violence of the powerful, and in return we surrender to it (unless we live in America) our weapons and our own capacity for violence.

The paradox of governance is that a state which is sufficiently powerful to protect the weak against the strong is also sufficiently powerful to crush the weak. History suggests that it will do so whenever its citizens fail to hold it to account. Indeed, the ultimate restraint upon the violence of the state is the violence of its citizens, who might seek to overthrow it if it abuses its powers. The great innovation introduced by democracy is that it permits us to remove the monopolists of violence by non-violent means. The great problem with democracy is that it permits us to replace them only with another set of monopolists.

Viewed in this light, our political systems appear deeply unattractive. But, as the people of Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (or, for that matter, the victims of America’s lax gun laws) are aware, the alternative appears to be even uglier. Without protection, the weak are trampled by the strong.

So our social contract, repulsive and hazardous as it is, is perhaps the best we can hope for: a system which offers some kind of remission from constant armed assault. If this is the case within the nation state, there would also appear to be an argument for applying the principle to the community of nations.

The UN security council, which is the body charged with the enforcement of international law, is inherently tyrannical. It is tyrannical because, while it asserts a global monopoly of violence, we cannot peacefully remove and replace it. The veto powers its permanent members possess are a constitutional guarantee against reform: no change can be made without the consent of those whom we would seek to change. No one, at the international level, guards the guards.

It is, or should be, astonishing that, despite growing protests, so many of those who claim to stand for global justice accept this dispensation. It is interesting that the European right, which prides itself on resisting the impositions of the European commission, not only submits to the tyranny of the security council and its strongest member, but actively supports it.

Two weeks ago, I had argued that, while the action being planned by the US and Britain against Iraq is wholly unjust and must be resisted, it would be possible to conceive of a just war against its government, if the sole aim was to help the nation’s oppressed people deliver themselves from dictatorship, if the states prosecuting that war were not themselves the principal sources of global violence and had nothing to gain from invasion, and if the non-violent means of achieving the same outcome had first been exhausted.

That viewpoint provoked a storm of protest from pacifists, many of whom argued that there can be no such thing as a just war. David Edwards and David Cromwell, who run the website MediaLens, suggested that even the war against Hitler should not have been fought, on the grounds that it provoked the Holocaust. Quoting the historian Howard Zinn, they argued that “Germany’s anti-semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds.”

Most of us would recognise this as a ridiculous evasion. This intellectual wriggling illustrates how hard it is to sustain the pacifist position in all circumstances. Indeed, many of those who claim to be against all war would, when pressed, agree that they recognise the right of the weak to defend themselves against the aggression of the strong.

They would have supported the efforts of the Spanish republicans to resist Franco, of the Sandinista government to hold off the proxy warriors of the US, and of the rebel army in East Timor to seek to oust the occupying forces of Indonesia. They might also agree that such freedom fighters should not be left to struggle alone against far better-equipped opponents, but should be supported by international action. If so, if all other options were exhausted and if all the preconditions for a just war were met, it surely follows that we should also welcome an impartial attempt to help the rebels in Iraq to overthrow their dictator.

The problem is that the security council is constitutionally partisan. Its justice is the justice of the powerful, meted out against the weak. It will never act against the infractions of its permanent members or their closest allies. It will permit international action only when that action advances the interests of the dominant state. As a result, no war prosecuted by the UN security council can ever be considered just.

The world ideally needs a non-partisan police force, which is accountable to its people, and which would be just as prepared to prevent Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians or Turkey’s persecution of the Kurds as it is to prevent the atrocities perpetrated by the Iraqi government. The problem faced by such a body, however, is that if it sought to enforce a decision against any of the world’s well-resourced states — the US or Britain, for example — it would discover that, far from possessing a monopoly of violence, it was hopelessly outgunned.

Indeed, a few months ago the US threatened to meet any attempt by the international criminal court to arrest its soldiers with greater violence. Yet if this police force were to accumulate enough weaponry to overwhelm the US, it could also acquire so much power that it would become oppressive in its own right.

It is not easy to see how we might resolve these problems. We could seek to establish alternative centres of power — a global parliament, for example, for which increasing numbers of activists are campaigning — which could slowly leach authority from the existing international bodies.

As America’s economic mismanagement reduces its global dominance, we could demand a security council which permits a better balance of power between nations. Tackling the permanent members’ veto is trickier; requiring perhaps a sustained revolt by many of their citizens. But these solutions must be sought, for without them there can be no just war, and no just peace.—Dawn/Guardian Service

RUSSIAN President Putin’s recent visit to India underlined the re-emergence of the nexus that had existed between Moscow and New Delhi during the cold war years. The joint declaration issued at the close of the visit was virtually tailored to suit India’s regional and global ambitions.

The declaration endorsed India’s condition for the resumption of Indo-Pakistan dialogue, namely the cessation of infiltration from Pakistan across the LoC and the Indian border. Russia and India voiced their common concerns over the rebellions they were facing in Chechnya and Kashmir respectively, and agreed to strengthen their cooperation in fighting Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.

The arms supply relationship entered a new phase as Russia agreed to provide a nuclear submarine to India, in addition to gifting an aircraft carrier, and selling other sophisticated weapons and equipment. India rolled out a red carpet for the Russian leader who rose to popularity by adopting a tough line against the “Islamic extremists” in Chechnya, and has been vocal in highlighting the threat from “militant Islam”. In the aftermath of the 9/11 events, the US is also committed to a war against terrorism, whose roots are stated to be in the Muslim countries. It is in this context that India feels emboldened to step up its repression in Kashmir and its intransigence towards Pakistan.

The post-cold war travails of a former superpower that has gone through the trauma of disintegration, intertwined with the abandonment of its communist ideology, as well as the rapid decline of its economic standing in the world, have forced fundamental changes in Moscow’s domestic and foreign policies. The decade of Yeltsin’s leadership had not only seen the break-up of the once mighty Soviet Union, but also witnessed an economic decline of enormous proportions.

As the command economy of the Soviet period collapsed, the induction of the capital-based market economy has been plagued by corruption and mismanagement, so that Russia’s GDP has plummeted to a level equivalent to the economy of tiny Belgium. The living standards of the great majority of the Russian people have declined to those of Third World countries. The fall in Russia’s international influence and standing has equally been precipitate, causing greater resentment among the proud Russian people than the decline in economic prosperity. Yeltsin picked up Putin, a relatively minor KGB official, as his successor because he perceived in him a commitment to the twin goals of restoring the country’s global status and of rebuilding its economy. To achieve these ends, the relationship with India has acquired a place of its own, second only to cultivating a new relationship with the dominant West on the one hand and with an emergent China on the other. With the bulk of its vast territory lying in Asia, Russia sees the importance of reinforcing its global standing by cultivating a cordial relationship with the world’s two most populous nations, China and India. Apart from adding to Moscow’s political weight and serving its strategic interests, the two provide enormous markets for its exports.

The lynch pin of current Russian diplomacy is the forging of a new relationship with Washington, as the US has the power and the resources to cater to Moscow’s needs. Putin has realized the imperative necessity of coming to terms with the US hegemony and of concentrating on the reconstruction of Russia’s shattered economy — a task which requires capital and technology from the US and the European Union.

A new strategic relationship has been evolved with the West that marks a total break with the hangover from the cold war years. Russia has virtually joined Nato that was originally formed to contain it. Once investment and technology from the West are assured, Russia’s Asian diplomacy would be pursued in a manner that underscores its ties with China and India, the two countries Putin visited in the first week of December.

Putin’s visit to China on December 2 and 3 served to cement ties that have been developed to promote regional cooperation and to serve their strategic goals in the global context. The past few years have seen them work together, mainly to resist the pressures from US unilateralism by stressing multipolarity, but also to serve their shared objectives in the areas of security and development. As the US has alternated between containment and engagement towards both, and sought to perpetuate its hegemony, they have found it expedient to become strategic partners. Both believe that the UN, specially the Security Council, should play a central role in handling contentious international issues. In this context, both are opposed to US unilateralism.

However, as this unilateralism has been reinforced following the 9/11 events, they have chosen not to confront the sole superpower, but to stress commonalities where they exist — for instance, in the fight against terrorism and on issues pertaining to disarmament and non-proliferation. Both stand to make important gains from engagement with the US, notably in the economic field. As such it is significant that in the joint statement issued in Beijing at the conclusion of Putin’s visit, both called on North Korea to give up its nuclear programme. Bilateral Sino-Russian ties have been strengthened in recent years. They signed the Russia-China good neighbourly treaty of peace and friendship in Moscow in July 2001. They have also turned the Shanghai Five Accord of 1994 into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2000, with the addition of four other members from Central Asia that were formerly a part of the Soviet Union. The SCO, which was initially concerned with economic cooperation, has turned its attention increasingly to countering terrorism and religious extremism. Its last summit was held in St. Petersburg in 2001.

Russia has been keen to promote a trilateral grouping that includes both China and India, but China has chosen to develop its relations with India on a bilateral basis. Unlike Russia, China is anxious to avoid being drawn into contentious issues in South Asia, where it would prefer that such issues be settled through bilateral dialogue. It happens to be the only big power that has common borders with South Asia. As such, Beijing is far more mindful of the interests and sensitivities of the smaller South Asian countries, almost all of which have problems with a hegemonic assertive India, anxious to become the successor to British raj in the region.

Russia, on the other hand, appears ready to live with resentments of the smaller South Asian countries in the interest of forging a close relationship with India. At a seminar on “Indo-Russian strategic partnership in the 21st Century” held in India ahead of the Putin visit, A.I. Nikolaev, chairman of the Russian Duma committee on defence, declared “Russia needs India as much as India needs Russia.” He drew attention to the fact that Russia was delivering the latest weapons to India, including some not yet in use by the Russian armed forces. He stated that “by strengthening India’s defence, we strengthen our own security.” Putin’s visit was designed to give a new thrust to the strategic partnership between Russia and India, which is meant to promote cooperation not only combating terrorism but also in a wide gamut of security and political fields. Several agreements were signed between the two countries in economic, scientific and technical fields.

Six months ago, Putin appeared keen to promote a dialogue between India and Pakistan, whose leaders were due to participate in a summit meeting of Asian powers in Almaty, Kazakhstan. However, since then he has apparently decided to play a different role, following his meeting with President Bush who had come to Prague for the Nato summit. He issued a statement recently, at a press conference in which he praised President Musharraf’s role in the fight against terrorism. However, he also used the occasion to voice concern about the possibility of Pakistan’s weapons of mass destruction falling into irresponsible hands. This insinuation acquires a more sinister connotation when that power is developing a military and political nexus with India.

As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia has a special responsibility for safeguarding international peace and stability. Russia should therefore ensure that its policies and judgments are based on principles enshrined in the UN Charter. Unfortunately, its attitude towards the South Asian region is coloured by its resentment of the role Pakistan played against Moscow’s military intervention in Afghanistan in the eighties. With its support to the Afghan resistance and its leading role in mobilizing international opinion against the Soviet occupation of a non-aligned Islamic country, Pakistan has incurred lasting Russian wrath that finds expression in the unqualified and total support to Indian hegemonic ambitions in the region.

One would hope that in order to live up to its great power status, Russia would demonstrate grater objectivity and a sense of justice than is reflected in its complete identification with Indian goals and perceptions. Russia had supported the resolutions on Kashmir adopted in 1948 and 1949, according to which the future of the state was to be decided by holding a plebiscite under UN auspices.

Lasting peace will come to South Asia, not through support to Indian hegemony but by upholding the right of the Kashmiri people to decide their own future. Backing Indian ambitions for hegemony and for a great power status, while it violates its commitments, will neither be fair nor just. Russia needs to reconsider its stance in support of Indian oppression in Kashmir.