| January 10, 2003 | Friday | Ziqa’ad 6, 1423 |
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Saffronizing history
Cable worries
EXPORTS seem to be leading the way for an expected turnaround in the economy over the last six months. In absolute terms, exports between July-December have fetched as much as 5.2 billion dollars which is exactly 50 per cent of the full-year target of 10.4 billion dollars. Cotton and textile products have been leading the export growth with a contribution of as much as 90 per cent in the first six months of the current fiscal year. Basing on this trend, the government is expecting to export cotton and textile products worth about seven billion dollars by the year end. Greater market access allowed to our textile products by the European Community as well as the clearance of the goods stuck up at American ports since last year because of various technical and procedural problems emerging out of the 9/11 seem to have contributed to a large extent to the remarkable improvement in exports earnings in the first six months. The access to EU market is expected to last through the next six months as well.
However, exports to the US in this period will depend entirely on fresh orders obtained by Pakistani exporters. That, of course, would call for our exporters to continue to pursue an aggressive marketing technique to be able to sustain the momentum achieved. Other products like rice, leather, sports goods, carpets, surgical instruments, petroleum products, molasses, meat and meat products, cement, oil seeds, handicrafts, guar and guar gum are slated to bring in the balance of about 3.4 billion dollars. On the face of it, this looks rather difficult because the export growth trend in these items over the last six months has not been very encouraging. In fact, some of the items have lagged far behind their performance during the corresponding period last year. So, all in all, while the trends in the first six months have been highly encouraging, to achieve the full annual export target, the exporters still need to do a lot, especially in the US market. It is only by maintaining this positive trend that the country can keep the trade deficit at a reasonable level in the face of a sudden increase also in imports in the last six months.
The deficit has jumped to 590 million dollars in the first half against 417 million dollars in the same period last year as a result of an 18.71 per cent increase in imports during this period. The trend is likely to continue as with the improvement in macroeconomic stability, investment too will improve. Indeed, foreign trade is likely to serve as the main engine of growth in the economy in the coming years. Exports will fetch resources for imports which in turn will sustain exports, making available investible surpluses. This is then expected to raise the level of domestic investment beyond the present 16 per cent and nearer to 20 per cent, leaving a gap of only two per cent to be filled by the generally shy foreign investment so that the real rate of investment goes up to 22 per cent, which is what is needed to achieve and sustain a growth rate of seven per cent to overcome the socio-economic gaps being created by the high population growth rate of nearly 2.5 per cent.
ASIDE from the on-going controversy in India regarding the Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempts at rewriting history to further its Hindutva agenda, recent history itself tells us that independent India has seldom known an objective account of events when it comes to textbooks. The distortion of textbooks began soon after partition when the Congress had history books rewritten to highlight its freedom struggle against British imperial rule. Indian historians took the foreign element of the colonial rule as the pivot of the broader historical framework, around which all Indian history writing began to revolve. Subsequently, attempts were made to lump the preceding Muslim rulers of India together with the British rulers on the false premise that, as invaders from outside, the former were as foreign to India as the British, ignoring the fact that unlike the British colonialists, Muslim rulers and people adopted many elements of culture and tradition and settled down in their new homeland forming part of a wider Indian identity. It was only in 1966 that a committee was formed to review history textbooks and to examine the validity of the allegation that these carried a pro-Hindu bias. The committee thus concluded: “Hindu beliefs are presented as if they are universally held by all Indians.”
The Communist Party of India, which succeeded in forming the state government in West Bengal, however, embarked on a different course: textbooks in Bangla still narrate history from a Marxist-socialist perspective. The Congress’s coalition with the CPI in the ‘60s and ‘70s further strengthened the leftists’ hold on textbook history writing, which infuriated even moderates like the Janata Dal, not to speak of the extreme right elements, the forerunners of the BJP. But a rabidly anti-Muslim bias in history books began to appear after the BJP came to power in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in 1991, spreading later to Maharashtra and Gujarat. Textbooks now being written speak of a ‘Vedic Indus-Saraswati’ civilization as opposed to the Indus Valley Civilization. Under the current BJP coalition government in New Delhi, all-out attempts are now being made to obliterate the fact that the Aryans, who invaded India from the north-west around 1,700 years BC, and drove away the indigenous Dravidians, were themselves as foreign to India as the later-day Muslim rulers. Thus, the obvious problems of rewriting history with deep-seated religious and ideological biases and predilections are far too serious and numerous, which even an official denial from Mr Vajpayee himself would do little to correct.
CABLE operators in the country seem to be facing problems on quite a few accounts. First, there is the MMA’s rise to power in the NWFP and Balochistan which must be bad news for this industry since the religious alliance has made it a point to say that it intends to prohibit cable television. Thankfully, this has not been done yet, but that has not prevented other self-styled guardians of morality and zealots from taking matters in their own hands. Evidence of this is a recent attack on the offices of a cable operator in Peshawar by 30 masked men. According to the NWFP Cable Operators Association, the men held the office staff at gunpoint and destroyed all the equipment. The local police station did not even bother to register an FIR till higher authorities were approached. This incident has led to cable operators in the province suspending their transmission, saying that failure to arrest the attackers would encourage more such incidents, given the new environment of intolerance.
The other, and perhaps more basic issue, has to do with the bureaucratic attitude of the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) which oversees cable networks nationally. The operators have threatened that they will not carry any major news channels unless PEMRA stops carrying out what they claim are unilateral changes to their licensing agreements. PEMRA has retaliated by contending that the issue is wider and has also to do with the tendency of many cable operators to flout regulations concerning the broadcast of Indian channels, pirated movies and “obscene” channels. It also says that cable operators should be showing only the approved channels. Unfortunately, for its part, PEMRA seems to be obsessed with content rather than the quality of cable services. Other than that, a look at the list of prescribed channels shows that it is thoroughly incomplete and needs to be enlarged to allow a wider range of news and entertainment choices for the viewers. The government regulator and cable operators should sort out their differences amicably and in such a manner that subscribers are left with very little choice. And, provincial governments, especially the NWFP’s, should see to it that the cable industry is given the same kind of protection from future attacks and coercion that is extended to any other legitimate business.