THE government says, and the World Bank agrees, that Pakistan’s economy after years of grind at around three per cent (which really means no growth per person because of a matching increase in population) is now poised to grow. They may be believed, because the economic indices support them. The troublesome thought that at once arises is whether the seemingly endless bedlam of politics will let the economy grow.

Why the economy is stable and politics is in turmoil? The answer to this question is to be found in the way the two subjects were handled over the past three years. In matters economic, General Musharraf went by the advice of experts and conventional wisdom within the established system while in politics he was led by agencies and bureaus chartered to reward some and sequester or punish others. The result is a degree of consolidation of the economy but splintering of politics. Two or three mainstream moderate parties have broken into many factions while the extremist groups on the fringes have formed into a formidable group. Both situations bode ill for the economy.

The factions were bargaining long and hard to form government at the centre and in Sindh. The religious alliance, though implacably opposed to the new constitutional arrangement and threatening to launch even street agitation to undo it, has yet formed governments on its own in the NWFP and in conjunction with others in Balochistan.

The uncertainty afflicting the federal and Sindh administrations and the MMA government’s divergent policies and actions in areas bordering Afghanistan, it seems, will continue to distract from the basic task of making and implementing policies conducive to economic development. In fact, the danger of the economy becoming a hostage to the divisiveness of one and the ideological pursuit of the other is already visible.

It now appears that the federal government may not settle down to business till well after the elections to the Senate and by-elections to the assemblies are held. However, when it gets going it is expected not to deviate from the current economic policies nor question the new constitutional dispensation. However, the role of the MMA government in the NWFP, sharply opposed in some aspects and nebulous in others, will remain a source of anxiety. The ferment that its raids on cinemas and wine shops has caused will not last long, nor change the social behaviour of the people but would, surely, hamper economic activity and discourage new investment.

The declaration of the NWFP chief minister, Akram Durrani, that the Islamic system will be enforced in the province and interest outlawed soon and without ifs and buts has implications more serious and far-reaching than, perhaps, the chief minister realizes. Financial transactions with the other parts of the country and with foreign countries will be put to jeopardy as the banks in the province will be required to function on a different basis.

More damaging would be the provincial government’s declared hostility to American operations in Afghanistan which have inevitable repercussions for the tribes straddling the frontier with Afghanistan and moving freely across it. No less damaging can be hate graffiti and burning of effigies at which the provincial government is conniving. Internally, the danger that the NWFP might at some stage slide into a Taliban-like dispensation remains ever present; after all, some ideologues of the parties constituting the government there view the Taliban as the harbingers of a simple Islamic model which Pakistan could follow with advantage.

Investors and international financial institutions thus would keenly watch developments in the NWFP — to see how far the administration there comes close to, or distances itself from, the Taliban and whether or not it supports the American-led operations against terror before they decide to commit money to Pakistan. The litmus test for it would be the financing of the $2.5 billion Turkmenistan-Pakistan gas pipeline.

It is not easy to reconcile the lure of power with ideological predispositions but one cannot rule and rant at the same time. Pakistan’s federal structure,even in the ordinary circumstances, makes it difficult for the provinces to go against the wishes of the central government, leave aside the policies, and yet survive. In the current situation of crisis there is no way they can at all survive. The MMA government, by following a divergent Afghan policy, thus would be only impeding the economic progress of its own province and of the country itself without achieving its social or religious objectives. The chief minister and the alliance chiefs must dispel all misgivings on this score and bring their policies into conformity with those of the federation because these do have a bearing on investment and trade generally.

Some utterances and actions of the government leaders on which they need to be cautioned for their adverse impact on investment and revival of economic activity in general may be recalled here. Many ministers speak on subjects other than their own. In the past few days the centre’s information minister and a provincial minister for literacy have spoken on Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and aims. Discretion and discipline require a minister to desist from speaking on a subject other than his own except when related to a local problem. Only the prime minister, or authorized official spokesman, alone should comment on sensitive areas of state policy. Contradictions and alarm in these tense times are best avoided.

Every minister thinks he must speak on Kashmir in the hackneyed refrain that there can be no peace in the region until the Kashmir dispute is resolved. Kashmir is an agonizing human problem but it must not condemn the people of Pakistan to an existence of backwardness. The bellicose rhetoric is harming Pakistan without liberating the Kashmiris or even assuaging their suffering.

The long uprising in the valley and the retaliatory Indian repression have brought the world opinion to a point where India is being pressed to negotiate a solution and Pakistan is being persuaded to close the camps training warriors in aid of the insurgents. In the politics of power where national interests take precedence over human rights, the countries that matter are not prepared to go beyond this point though Pakistan is their most needed ally in the war on terror.

The foreign minister of Japan, Pakistan’s largest aid donor, visiting India, has said what a US State Department official, Richard Haass (in India at the time) said in greater detail quoting precedents from the decades of cold war: “Inability to resolve big issues should not stop progress on little ones. The path to large breakthroughs is paved with smaller agreements.” The patriots, demagogues and ordinary citizens alike will get wiser by reading Richard Haass’s exposition of the American view on Kashmir (which, perhaps, can be termed as the world’s view as well) reproduced at some length in Dawn on January 8.

India’s military hegemony may have been checked by our nuclear capability, but the worry for the generals and ministers now should be India’s more dangerous and permanent economic hegemony in the making. The nuclear war machine could not save the Soviet Union from collapsing because its economy stagnated behind the Iron Curtain. China would not meet that fate because its economy is making up in years what it lost in decades of isolation. Pakistan should follow the example of China and not that of the Soviet Union.

Neither the government nor the World Bank nor our own central bankers care to explain how over the past three years another ten million poor have become poorer, making the number going to bed hungry to form nearly one-third of the population. They are only fond of claiming that the fundamentals of the economy are now stronger than ever and in another two years the rate of growth should climb to six per cent (that is where India already is and China is higher).

Lest the political governments squander it away, the State Bank governor, Ishrat Husain, has sounded a note of warning against wasteful spendings. Perhaps he had in mind the ten per cent reduction in power tariff while Wapda and the KESC together have already accumulated a deficit of Rs 60 billion; allocation of so-called development funds to the legislators for unplanned spending or possible misappropriation; free education up to matric while the problem is not the cost but the standards of state-run schools; some other subsidies proposed; and, above all, over-size cabinets and ministries.

For three years now Pakistan has hitched its wagon of poverty to the promises of the IMF and World Bank and of our own generals, planners and bankers. The extravagance of the new governments should not provide a peg on which they could hang the blame for their failure.

IN the wake of the mass killings of the Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat, following the Godhra train incident on February 27 last year, in which 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya lost their lives, a tribunal was constituted to hold an inquiry into the carnage that rocked the state.

The tribunal, comprising eight retired judges, professors and prominent human rights activists, visited the affected areas in the state and met the affected people who testified before it voluntarily.

During its fortnight-long sittings in the affected areas, the tribunal recorded 2094 oral and written statements. It also heard a number of Hindus, either from the same affected areas or from the neighbouring localities, who, by and large, corroborated the statements given by the Muslims.

The tribunal inspected the burnt coach of the Sabarmati Express which was carrying the Hindu pilgrims. It also took into account the report of the forensic science laboratory, Ahmadabad, and agreed with its conclusion that the fire in the coach was caused by the pouring of highly inflammable fluid from within. The tribunal, thus, exonerated the Muslims of Godhra from all responsibility for the train incident, as alleged by the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, and his cohorts. Since the tribunal has conclusively established that the massacre of the Muslims in Gujarat was pre-planned, it is quite obvious that those very people who had plotted violence against the Muslims in Gujarat must have masterminded the Godhra incident.

Narendra Modi claimed that the violence against the Muslims was the result of “spontaneous reaction” to the train incident. The tribunal has, however, repudiated this claim by pointing out that sustained and systematic efforts were being made by organizations, like the BJP and its Sangh Parivar affiliates, to communalize Gujarat society. The Muslims were called fundamentalists, anti-national and pro-Pakistan. Hindus were exhorted not only to boycott the Muslims socially and economically but also to raise arms against them to ensure their elimination from Gujarat which was proposed to be built up as a “laboratory of Hindutva.”

The carnage was also marked by scurrilous speeches and vituperation against the Muslims and their faith. Narendra Modi himself took the lead in this regard and made highly inflammatory speeches against the Muslims and Pakistan. He used extremely derogatory language against General Pervez Musharraf for raising the question of genocide of the Muslims in Gujarat at the United Nations. The VHP secretary-general, Praveen Togadia, even advised the Hindus to give up the tradition of wearing garlands made of flowers and instead start garlanding themselves with human heads.

Many other leaders of the Sangh parivar also made similar speeches full of venom against the Muslims. They declared that they did not want to see a single Muslim alive in Gujarat and asked the Hindus to get ready to celebrate the next Holi festival with the corpses of the Muslims.

The tribunal adjudged Narendra Modi as the Principal figure behind the pogrom of the Muslims, who executed his genocide plan in a systematic manner. He visited Godhra immediately after the train incident and ordered the dead bodies of the Hindu pilgrims to be taken to Ahmadabad in a procession. Evidently, the purpose was to incite violence against the Muslims. Modi also instructed the police not to take any action against the rioters following the Godhra incident.

The testimonies from many survivors of the carnage provided ample evidence of dereliction of duty and, in many cases, even of the complicity of the police force in the ethnic cleansing of the Muslims. Many politicians and officials who took active part in anti-Muslim violence were neither prosecuted nor even questioned by the police.

The tribunal came across the fact that Narendra Modi’s two cabinet colleagues, Ashok Bhatt and Pratap Singh Chauhan, met in the evening of February 27 and planned the manner and method of unleashing violence on the Muslims from February 28 onwards. It also observed that an identical pattern was adopted, throughout the state, to kill the Muslims. Groups of the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal who participated in the carnage were provided with swords, trishuls (a three-pronged spear associated with Hindu mythology) and sophisticated explosives. They were also supplied with computerized lists and addresses of the Muslims and their properties. Most of the victims were killed or burnt. Women were raped and molested in public and cut into pieces before they were burnt.

More than two thousand Muslims have so far been killed in Gujarat since February 28 and properties worth billions of rupees destroyed. Apart from the killing spree, tens of thousands of Muslims have been rendered homeless. After the carnage, 1,50,000 persons were provided shelter and protection not by the state government but mostly by private organizations. Under court orders, on petitions filed by some citizens, the government willy-nilly provided some facilities to the affected persons and families.

However, it pressured the organizers of the relief camps to close them down without adequate rehabilitation of the survivors. Even medical facilities were denied to persons who had taken shelter in the camps and those who wanted to go to hospitals were prevented from doing so by the armed gangs of the Hindu communal organizations.

The Gujarat government did nothing to compute the damage to life and property. Modi did not conceal his feelings of antipathy towards the Muslims and publicly declared that his government would neither rebuild the houses of the victims nor even the mosques and shrines which were destroyed by Hindu rioters. The Tribunal also underlined the failure of the central government to discharge its constitutional responsibility. On the other hand, while some elements in and outside India condemned the violence against the Muslims in Gujarat, senior members of the central government made public statements defending the policies and the role of the state government.

The eruption of Hindu extremism, during the last decades, has seen the political ascendancy of the BJP which seeks to promote Hindu identity and curb the rights of the Muslims and other minorities to preach and practise their religious beliefs in the country. Ironically, the Congress, despite its pretensions of secularism and claiming to be their well wishers, also could not save the Muslims from the atrocities of the Hindu fundamentalists in Gujarat and elsewhere. In fact, during the recent state assembly elections in Gujarat, its election manifesto was soft on the question of Hindutva. There is no knowing what the stars hold in store for the Muslims in India.

One of the basic aims of the United Nations, as proclaimed in its Charter, is to promote and encourage respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms of all, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. The UN, therefore, has an increasingly important role to play for the protection of minorities through the relevant mechanism of the Commission of Human Rights and the Sub-commission on Prevention of Discrimination Against, and Protection of, Minorities, in protecting the rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities throughout the world.

The UN and the international community should, therefore, take a serious note of the unjust treatment being meted out to the minorities, particularly the Muslims, in India and to prevail upon the government of that country to put an end to its policy of discrimination and repression against minorities.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

[In this letter addressed to his students at the University of Vermont, US, the writer makes a strong case against the Bush administration’s planned attack on Iraq, arguing that the action will put a premium on the doctrine of pre-emption as a cover for military offensives by countries, big or small, against their perceived adversaries in disregard of international law and morality.]

Dear students,

IN the course of thirty-two years of teaching I have never written a letter like this. Deeply troubled by the looming war with Iraq, I am particularly concerned with what it may mean for you, as you look forward to a life, I hope, will be full, exciting, and rewarding.

Fifteen months ago at the start of a class in modern poetry, a student reported she had just heard that a plane flew into one of the towers of the World Trade Centre. At that moment it seemed a small event, an accident; I remember thinking that it was probably a small plane, flown by an amateur pilot. An hour later, when the class ended, we discovered what people the world around were also discovering: a terrorist attack had badly damaged both towers of the World Trade Centre. Like you, I watched in horror as television revealed, at the moment of its happening, the collapse of first one tower, then the other. Few moments can be said to be seared into a nation’s consciousness. This was certainly one.

We in America have come to understand that we live in a less certain world, a world more prone to violence than existed for us heretofore. The threat of terror is now taken as a fact of contemporary existence: if it does not reveal itself in our everyday activities, we suspect it is lurking just beyond the boundaries of the ordinary. Terror intrudes on our dreams and gnaws at our hopes for the future.

In a world made more dangerous, more precarious, by any sort of threat, one’s first reaction is to build defences. Thus, shoes as well as baggage are inspected when one boards a plane. Terror alerts appear on television in the same fashion as hurricane or flood alerts. Sadly, the fear of terrorism has led those in power to suspend some of our traditional civil liberties. They propose curtailing more.

As part of the need to find ‘solutions,’ to confront the menace openly, it is understandable that we seek to follow Hamlet’s advice to himself and “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.” (Though Hamlet, I might remind you, is contemplating suicide when he says these words.) President Bush, who like every one of us is impelled by a complex web of motivations, surely has in mind that attacking Iraq is a way to secure our nation from one of the threats looming up in that shadowy thing out there that we call ‘the world’. (I think he has other agendas in mind as well, but I do not mean to engage in politics here — or only politics of the largest sort.)

Precisely because attacking Iraq seems such a simple solution to the complexity of the contemporary situation, we need to examine the idea that using American military might against those who do not love us is a proper way to protect our imperilled security. For we — you, your classmates, I — are in a university precisely to examine things, to subject every concept and every human activity to scrutiny by reason. The very first university, Plato’s Academy, was based on Socrates’ core belief that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

When I myself was a student, four decades ago, the American involvement in a war in Vietnam was just beginning. For me, that involvement brought me face to face with questions about ‘just’ war and pacifism. Can an ethical life countenance, in any circumstance, the use of destructive violence against other human beings? I had before me two great twentieth century examples of nonviolence. One was Mohandas Gandhi, who took on the world’s pre-eminent imperial power and brought independence to India through nonviolent action. The other was Martin Luther King, who was in the process of bringing a greater degree of racial justice to the United States, also through a campaign committed to nonviolence.

I wish I could tell you that I fully resolved the question of nonviolence and pacifism, then or after. It is a hard truth that the largest questions facing us as humans are not always resolvable: though we think, and think some more, most of us do not ever come up with definitive answers.

Even though I have never fought in a war, I have read and thought about war for almost half a century now, and I am certain of one thing: war is brutal, bloody, destructive. In war, people die, children are left without parents, homes and towns and even whole cities are shattered into rubble. War, I believe, should be — if it is at all — only a last resort. It must be the final alternative, to be pursued only when a situation is truly dire, when there are no other ways to protect oneself or other people. And I am not even totally sure of that: pacifism is a strong position, and time and again it forces me to re-examine even the notion of war as final resort. It is certainly possible that war is worse than its alternatives, and there can never be a ‘just’ war.

So, like a sizable majority of Americans, I am extremely uncomfortable with a policy that would make war on Iraq before alternatives are explored, and before those alternatives fail. It is not my sense that caution is dangerous, that if we do not act tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon Saddam Hussein will explode a nuclear weapon — or loose a huge aerosol of anthrax — in New York or Los Angeles. There is time for thorough inspections, under the auspices of the United Nations, of what the government of Iraq is preparing to do. There is time, should those inspections reveal weapons of mass destruction, to eliminate those weapons, not by making war, but through the auspices of UN inspectors and an international effort under UN control.

War should never be a first alternative. Never. That is the first thing I want to tell you.

Second, I want to tell you how fearful I am for your future, and for the world you will inhabit in the next quarter of a century. Most of your professors come to teaching not because of salary or prestige, but because they believe in learning, believe that by learning together with you they will enrich both individual lives and also the community of which we are all a part. Wordsworth, that most wonderful of poets, understood the deepest goal of teaching: “What we have loved,/ Others will love, and we will teach them how.”

But the love that motivates teachers is more than love of what we teach. We have chosen teaching because we care deeply about you, our students. We teach because we want you to live lives even richer than our own, and to inhabit a future of near-boundless promise.

It pains me deeply that the impending war on Iraq may jeopardize your future. In this regard, I feel for you as I feel for my own two children: This is not the world you should be living in, not the future into which you should be moving. You deserve better.

Partly, my fear is direct. For some, your lives may be at risk in the near term. Perhaps, impelled by patriotism, you will enlist in the armed forces. Perhaps you will be conscripted, by a military draft.

I know there is currently no military draft. That there isn’t is a political strategy, one framed years ago in Washington to make war palatable. After all, the poor and disadvantaged don’t have alternative career paths, and will thus serve as the large majority of our nation’s fighting forces. Meanwhile, the children of the middle class — who do have other choices, and whose parents comprise the majority of voters, and who might strongly object to a war that puts them at risk — are exempt from military service.

But wars are strange things. Once the genie of violence has been let out of its bottle, it is very hard to get it back in again. The limited and quick war envisioned by the White House may turn out to be long, and — a terrible thought — may expand dramatically. Although those planning this war do not want a draft, at some point they may have no choice.

But even if your lives are not directly at risk in the desert of Iraq, or in a possible retaliatory action precipitated by American aggression against Iraq, great danger looms for the world your classes prepare you to inhabit.

We live, every human being, in a social existence shaped by many boundaries. Some of those boundaries have to do with nationality, with race, with class, with religion. Each of us has an identity, partly born into, partly created, which is shaped by the boundaries of nationality, religion, class. These things make us who we are. But they should always be malleable boundaries: we should be able to transform them, move beyond them if we wish.

And, most important, these boundaries should not be used by governments — or others — to categorize human beings so that they cannot grow, flourish, fulfil themselves. We all have, in the words of America’s Declaration of Independence, “certain inalienable rights ... among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Boundaries should not interfere with these rights, not the boundaries of race nor of class, gender or religion.

Let me share with you some words that are dear to my heart. In his 1855 “Preface” to Leaves of Grass, poet Walt Whitman inserted, in his sprawling and seemingly undisciplined prose, a startling injunction: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of me ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”

To be concluded