Rights of admission reserved

CERTAIN types of message never lose their sting. Take for example the forbidding sign that used to hang at the entrance of British-only clubs during the days of the Raj: ‘No dogs or Indians allowed.’ Could any message have conveyed more tartly the condescending mindset of a ruling class?

Since then times have changed, rulers have changed, but that message has not. The only change if any has been that what was unspeakable then is now conveyed unspoken. Those words of derogation have been substituted, better camouflaged, but their essential meaning remains: No barking Pakistanis allowed.

Two and a half incidents that occurred separately in Lahore recently will illustrate the point. The first occurred during the visit of the British activist, Mr Tariq Ali, a Pakistani by origin who returned to Pakistan in May to give three lectures at Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi.

Mr Tariq Ali is better known outside Pakistan than he is here. He achieved prominence in the late 1960s, while still an undergraduate at Oxford University, when he discomfited the British establishment by holding a debate at the Oxford Union on whether the house would be prepared to fight for Queen and Country. It was an emotive topic, chosen deliberately because it disinterred a controversy (thought safely buried) that had been argued with vehemence in the same forum, many years earlier in the 1930s, while the wounds of the Armageddon experience of the First World War were still raw and the prospect of a bloody encore too horrible even to contemplate.

Before he was twenty-five years old, Tariq Ali was already well-known as a volatile, abrasive left-winger, the brown counterpart to his German comrade-in-arms ‘Red’ Rudi Dutschke, and name enough as a student leader to be wooed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and J.A. Rahim.

They tried to coax him over a lunch at the patrician Claridges Hotel in London into joining their fledgling Pakistan People’s Party.

Tariq Ali preferred challenging governments, not joining them. Two years later, following the resignation of Ayub Khan, Tariq Ali made a triumphant tour of West and East Pakistan becoming the darling of the student community, and the bane of the military establishment under Yahya Khan.

For the past thirty years, however, Tariq Ali has been operating from the safety of British suburbia, a never-never land of intellectual rebellion. He has switched from penning pamphlets to publishing commercial works of fiction. In lieu of making history himself, he has made a living chronicling the history of others. His biography of the Nehru dynasty was one such foray.

To his numerous admirers, he has matured into a symbol of perpetual revolution; to others, he remains an ageless Peter Pan of student rebelliousness - a mixture of boyish bravado, of courage, of open-mouthed frankness. He functions best as an articulate advocate of causes, preferably current ones.

The theme of his lectures, titled ‘Infinite War and American Imperialism,’ could not have been more topical, nor his credentials more appropriate, for Tariq Ali, now in his sixties, has been a US-baiter since its ill-fated involvement in Vietnam.

The lecture was promoted by an English daily and should have been held at the Pearl Continental Hotel except that on the morning of the lecture, the venue and rather surprisingly the sponsorship was changed it was said, to assuage the government’s sensitivity. An NGO assumed sponsorship of Tariq Ali’s lecture at short notice and arranged a new venue.

Tariq Ali spoke for more than an hour and a half, without notes and with a practised fluency, lambasting the United States for its unconscionable rape of Iraq. He quoted in extenso from a memoir published by a retired US Marine Corps major-general, Smedley Butler, whose book ‘War is a Racket’ provided a belt of factual ammunition that Tariq Ali fired with deadly accuracy.

He would have been devastatingly effective, if only his targets — bellicose President George W. Bush and his belligerent US government - had been within range, and had the ammunition not been obsolete. General Butler’s post-service confessional had in fact been published in 1935, before the Second World War.

It was the kind of speech, that in Tariq Ali’s younger street fighting days would have ignited a demonstration, but for the fact that the audience ranged before him in that air-conditioned marriage hall in Lahore consisted of ageing admirers, his loyal family, and NGO-types in ethnic outfits and accompanied by same-sex companions.

They were not the kind (like the impulsive Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind’) to remove their gold rings and to donate them for the cause, or to rush out into the street to enlist against the coalition forces invading Iraq.

It was certainly not the kind of speech that should have increased a government into inducing the sponsors taking pre-emptive action the way they did. Someone should have advised the government that while punctuality may no longer be the politeness of our princes, listening to someone else’s opinions might be a harmless substitute.

The second incident of government low-handedness occurred at the Punjab provincial assembly on May 26, when members of the PPP opposition were prohibited from entering the assembly premises. Again, as with the bungled attempt at muffling Tariq Ali, it was a misguided, irresponsible and in the end superfluous display of muscular authority. Democracy, however superficial, cannot mean filtering out the voices of others so that only the singularity of one’s own voice can be heard.

By barricading first the approaches to the assembly building itself and then ‘imprisoning’ the official car of the opposition leader, Qasim Zia, within a corral of barbed wire, the provincial government in effect shifted the forum of debate from within the assembly hall where it should have been, to the pedestrian level of the public footpath outside. That may be where public leaders are born; that is not where they expect to conduct public business or to represent their voter’s mandate.

The disgruntled PPP-Parliamentarians, thus debarred from the assembly, then repaired to a nearby five-star hotel to discuss what should be their strategy. There occurred half of another incident, half because a full incident was prevented from happening. According to them, the management of the hotel informed them that they could not be permitted to enter the empty coffee shop, because it was ‘already occupied.’ Thwarted, they decided to take the matter a level higher, and walked towards the tubular glass lifts to go to the upper floors where one of the parliamentarians had a suite.

At the lifts, again they were denied admittance, this time on the grounds that their collective presence in the suite would be ‘a security hazard’ and any resultant disruptive behaviour would disturb the other guests. The compliant hotel management had taken legal cover under the small fig-leaf of a sign that everyone passes at the entrance of every hotel or restaurant but that no-one ever notices, leave alone reads: Rights of Admission Reserved.

And most recently, in Islamabad, in another act of denial, a hover of black-robed lawyers was stopped by the federal government from approaching the Supreme Court building, presumably to prevent them from repeating the same act of judicial desecration perpetrated on the same building by the uncontrollable stalwarts of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) six years ago, on November 28, 1997.

When any government begins to feel so insecure that it needs to resort to measures as extreme as physical exclusion and vocal suppression, it is time either for that government to be changed, or for the people who elected it into office to change, it themselves.

The present administration may not have wanted anyone to hear Tariq Ali speak. It has not yet gone to the lengths of proscribing his books, to prevent them being read. Had anyone in the government read his book Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (1987), he might have noticed the stanza Tariq Ali had included from a poem titled ‘The Solution’ by the German poet and playwright Bertholt Brecht, written after the death of Stalin in 1953. Worker and students in East Germany had rebelled, demanding the democratic rights denied them under the Soviet dictator. The uprising was crushed, and the miscreants were then told by the communist government that ‘the people /had forfeited the confidence of the government/and could win it back only/ by redoubled efforts.”

Brecht’s stanza continues by cynically asking a question that must have crossed many a weary autocrat’s mind since the voice of dissension first made itself heard:

Would it now be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?

Could there be a more perfect way of ensuring in a democracy that every government has an electorate of its choice?

Outsourcing of mini-budgets

THE annual budget is regarded as the most important economic event of the year, because the decisions relating to taxation, relief measures, transfer payments, investment or export incentives, grant or withdrawal of subsidies, pricing of public sector supplies and services affect every household and every business entity, directly or indirectly.

Notwithstanding its inherent importance, the process of budgeting in the developing countries tends to be ad hoc and incremental, both revenue and expenditure being related to the preceding year’s budget or “actuals”. There have been suggestions from time to time that we should move to zero-based budgeting, in which all demands for grants, whether existing or incremental, would have to be justified in the same manner as a new proposal. These suggestions have seldom been fully implemented in any country. The pattern tends to regress to the type with remarkable frequency.

The taxation measures also reflect an incremental process. These incremental accretions to the framework tend to disfigure the basic design, necessitating a periodic overhaul of the system to reestablish its character as a part of coherent fiscal policy.

More recently the multilateral institutions have been urging the developing countries to fit the annual budgets into a medium-term framework in order to attain a measure of direction. This three-year rolling framework also offers a substitute for the five-year plan mechanism which often ran into midcourse uncertainties emanating from its unrealistic premises and postulates.

The current budget incorporates some of the needed changes in approach and perspective. The document entitled Budget in Brief contains a separate chapter on the medium-term budgetary framework, outlining the horizon for 2004-05 in terms of growth rates, the rate of inflation, investment and savings, balance of payments and the budgetary outcomes. The total revenue is estimated at Rs 830 billion, CBR taxes at Rs 566 billion, development expenditure at Rs 185 billion and the total expenditure at Rs 1,010 billion. The fiscal deficit would be Rs 180 billion equivalent to 3.7 per cent of GDP.

This movement to a longer timeframe runs counter to the practice of mid-year budgetary interventions. The promise of the finance minister that there shall be no mini-budget in the coming year, has to be seen in this context. Yet it has been greeted with a measure of cynicism. The critics contend that “his assurance is of no significance, because this has been the theme song of all finance ministers.” Such cynicism may be unjust, but is understandable, as history underlines many mid-course changes germinating from the gaps between promise and performance. The efforts to close these gaps had several shapes and forms, but fall largely into three broad categories.

The most arduous of the mini-budget processes are “additional revenue measures”, a euphemism for more taxes in the course of the year. Pakistan has gone through this experience repeatedly since it began to negotiate agreements with the IMF in 1988, the purpose being to protect the deficit target or to achieve the level of revenues committed to the donors. Frequently these unhappy developments were the product of over-pitching tax targets (without measures) to avoid a political backlash against excessive taxation. But inevitably the breach of conditionalities forced recourse to mid-term taxation. An earlier intervention would have been prudent. A stitch in time saves nine. But we tend to be overoptimistic and often look to “that potent hand divine” to help us muddle through. It is instructive to witness how unrealistic tax revenue targets were fixed year after year. The figures can be seen in Table-I.

Shortfalls of this magnitude reveal a serious governance deficiency. Nobody is taken to task for the inflated estimates or for the lack of achievement. The absence of accountability perpetuates the syndrome. The current performance of the CBR in fully collecting the budgeted revenues stands out as an exception. This is a welcome change, but the cynics have fixed their gaze on history.

A favoured hunting ground of the deficit chasers has been the public sector development programme. The following comparison of the size of PSDP (Public Sector Development Programme) and the size of the fiscal deficit reflects the detours of our macro-economic management. See Table-II.

Over the course of a decade, there has been a drop of 4.1 per cent of GDP in the resources allocated to the development programme, while the reduction in the fiscal deficit is only 2.3 per cent of GDP. The squeeze on development was larger than the reduction in the fiscal deficit, the implication being that development budget had to accommodate the excesses of the current expenditure, in addition to offering space for reduction of the deficit. The downgrading of development is the softest form of mini-budgeting, because it requires no marketing, no persuasion. “The moving finger writes and having writ moves on”, but who pays the price for the neglect of development? The posterity. But posterity does not protest.

The third tactical device has been, in nature a territorial adjustment — shifting the home of some mini-budget constituents away from the ministry of finance. This applies to public sector utilities and petroleum products. The concerned agencies have been given the autonomy to organize price increases of electricity, gas, diesel and kerosene on their own. This arrangement has provided larger flexibility in the scope, frequency and timing of price increases. And price increases have been substantial, as would appear from the following figures in Table-III.

The intimate relationship of these services and commodities with the budgetary prospects cannot be denied, as they have a bearing on the level of subsidies to be paid or the surcharges to be received. The increases in these prices have an impact on the cost of living. The people usually attribute these increases to the government, notwithstanding the new administrative fiat that sanctifies them. The main advantage is fragmentation of resistance. But that is no more than a tactical device that cannot change the substance of things. The advantages that it offers can only be peripheral and transient.

The writer is a former deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.

When Musharraf meets Bush

GENERAL Pervez Musharraf’s upcoming meeting with President George Bush at Camp David has assumed great importance as the American leadership has stepped up its efforts to redraw the world order to entrench Pax Americana.

What Gen Musharraf will agree to at Camp David will not only have its impact on the people of Pakistan but on Pakistan-US ties, and Pakistan’s relations with China, India, and the Muslim world.

We don’t know yet what the agenda is for Camp David and what price Pakistan will have to pay for a “long,” “strategic” and “mutually beneficial” relationship with the US. But, according to Zhang Guihong, associate professor, Institute of International Studies, Zhejang University, China, whether or not the US-Pakistani partnership will actually be “long” and “strategic” this time and not just “temporary” and “tactical” as before will depend on whether Washington and Islamabad are “willing and able to enlarge the basis of the partnership and harmonize their conflicting goals.”

One thing is clear however that substantive India-Pakistan talks will not commence until General Musharraf is made to agree to a road map that will protect not only Washington’s long-term interests in the region but also of its “strategic ally”, India. After all it will be naive to expect that any “road map” given by the US will be allowed to interfere Washington’s new world order.

On Kashmir, the US appears to have adopted a proactive approach for engaging both India and Pakistan in a “substantive dialogue on all bilateral issues, particularly the Kashmir dispute”. According to the Chinese analyst, “India now seems to accept a behind-the-scenes, low-key US role in nudging the peace process along, and Pakistan also appears willing to restrain its support for the militants”.

But the American thinking on Kashmir, echoed by several think tanks and individuals, has met with opposition not only in India and Pakistan but also from the Kashmiris who believe it would lead to a further division of their community. The focus at Camp David will also be on cross-border terrorism and more stringent action against jihadi outfits.

In view of recent suggesting that Washington will attempt to roll back proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and may use force in pursuit of this objective. There is a perception that at Camp David there will be some “friendly arm twisting” to seek assurances from Gen Musharraf in this regard also.

Naturally, Gen Musharraf will try to extract as much American support as possible for himself and his mode of governance. He has prepared the ground for that support by deliberately escalating tensions with the MMA. His remarks at the Lahore Bar Association, when he virtually asked the people to confront the MMA in its “Islamization” pursuit, was a calculated move aimed at extra-regional powers. The general has polarized society by deliberately marginalizing the secular and progressive parties. The Americans also know very well the dynamics of the domestic scene but are apparently willing to condone Gen Musharraf’s measures that tend to undermine the democratic dispensation.

They are willing to go the extra mile with him if he is able to remove the threat of Islamic militancy, and there have already been reports that Americans may accept another year of Gen Musharraf’s discretionary powers. After that either they will support another uniformed man or plant a civilian proxy. The Americans have a very good track record of working with dictators and usurpers of civil liberties in the developing countries.

But it is not very important how long Musharraf should be at the helm. They are lucky to have many leaders in the queue who will be very happy to do their bidding.

Some analysts also believe that in not too distant a future, the Americans will also attempt to get rid of the Arab monarchies, especially the one considered to be the bastion of Wahabi Islam and are also suspected of being the main financial source for jihadis or Islamic militants.

They suspect that after the occupation of Iraq, and Saudi Arabia’s criticism of US policies, the political map of the Middle East will undergo a significant change in which Israel will be the dominant economic and military power with the backing of Washington. American occupation of Iraq has provided the US with a tremendous leverage in military and political terms. It is to be seen to what extent Gen Musharraf is willing to go along with the US plans for the region.

If one looks at the measures Washington had taken more than a decade ago, one would see how ambitious America has been. A report, entitled “Deepened Military Presence in Central Asia,” clearly states that while the Bush administration was busy telling the American public and its allies abroad that through its ‘war on terrorism’, it was quietly spending millions of dollars on establishing and upgrading military bases around the immense oil and gas reserves of Central Asia and the Gulf.

As a result, we see the US has entered into pacts with the Central Asian countries and the Gulf states and has built up extensive military facilities and stationed a sizable military force there not far from oil and gas reserves. This military presence in the Gulf has given Washington a tremendous military superiority against weak adversaries.

General Tommy Franks in late August 2002 had told reporters in Kabul that the “relationships that we have with surrounding states around Afghanistan will permit us over time to do the work that...all of us recognize needs to be done. It won’t be finished until it’s all done.”

In the new great game, Pakistan has become an important player. The US has secretly been using a Pakistani military base in Jacobabad as a ‘secret hub’ for its covert operations in Afghanistan.

At the core of the US effort at the base “are what the Pentagon calls ‘direct action’ missions: short-duration strikes by planes, gunships and ground troops intended to seize or destroy a specific target or person,” according to the report on the deepening American military presence in the region cited above. The controversial raid in Oruzgan that resulted in the killing of some 21 innocent Afghans was conducted from this base.

Gen Musharraf should use this visit for extracting maximum economic relief and concessions on military sales, without compromising the nuclear and other strategic interests. In view of the growing Chinese and Russian interests in the maintenance of peace in the region, and their collaboration with the US in the fight against terror, Gen Musharraf could use this convergence of interests to scuttle American pressure. At the same time, he should not make a U-turn on Israeli question and Kashmir and instead try to evolve a new constellation of moderate Muslim countries, without alienating Iran, having strong links with the Shanghai Six.

Pakistan, in the long term, should explore the possibility of building strong economic and political linkages with what is being termed “Old Europe”.

The tangled web of the LFO

VIEWERS of British sitcoms might remember that delightful phrase uttered by Jim Hacker, the minister of administrative affairs, which was heard in the award-winning BBC television series, ‘Yes Minister.’

‘O what a tangled web we weave,’ said a beleaguered Jim Hacker to his private secretary Bernard Wooley, in the presence of that British public nightmare, Sir Humphrey Appleby, the permanent under secretary and man of the 66-word sentence, during one of the latter’s rare attacks of conscience. But the incident to which the minister was referring was an event of little importance, a mere trifle compared to the constitutional web that is being currently woven in Pakistani politics.

One wonders what the two British scriptwriters would have made of the present scenario in Pakistan, where an unelected president, who refuses to take off his military uniform, is accusing the opposition of trying to destabilize the system, because it is agitating against attempts to subvert democracy.

The fact that the speaker of the national Assembly has finally given a ruling about the LFO, when this is something that should have been decided by parliament, has certainly made matters worse. It would be interesting to know Mr Bush’s and Mr Tony Blair’s views on the subject, especially as these two gentlemen were two of the statesmen who had been goading and pressuring General Musharraf to hold elections, at a time when the military regime had chalked up a number of notable achievements.

At the time of writing, President Musharraf has already had his meeting with the British prime minister, whose popularity ratings in recent weeks had dropped to their lowest level., and is on his way to Camp David to meet the president of the world’s sole superpower. But even though he is traipsing to the world’s capitals, trying to make friends and influence people, the King’s party, which is the Sinn Fein of the military constabulary, is not doing a very good job of minding the store.

The hostility displayed by the opposition in the country’s national and provincial assemblies shows no sign of abating. On the contrary, with each passing day the political arteries are hardening. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who represents the hard-liners in the MMA , recently quipped that General Musharraf should wear his full COAS uniform when he meets Mr Bush. That would, at least, help endorse the impression held by the State Department that Pakistan is just another banana republic, where the head of state speaks Urdu instead of Spanish.

The fact of the matter is that the controversy over the LFO will just not go away. It is there like the proverbial bad penny. It is obvious that neither the president nor the prime minister can sort out the unsavoury mess. But it must have crossed President Musharraf’s mind that his predecessors, Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq, had a relatively easier time with the civilians — something to envy them for.

A glance at major political developments during the last two months does, however, suggest that some sort of compromise might be reached. On April 26, when crucial differences continued to divide the government and the opposition, an agreement on procedural matters had been evolved. A decision had been taken to take up all contentious issues and to present the LFO before parliament for debate. This was not only a tacit affirmation by the opposition that the LFO must be presented before parliament for ratification, it was also an indication that the government had temporarily dropped its stand that the LFO was already part of the Constitution. A spirit of accommodation appeared to exist.

At the time, Prime Minister Jamali was quite hopeful about the outcome of the discussions, and issued statements to that effect. But he threw a spanner in the works by alluding to exiled political leaders who, for reasons best known to them, didn’t want to see the talks succeed. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, on the other hand, displayed the same principled stand that he had from the beginning, and wouldn’t budge from that position. The crucial differences which existed at the time, and continue to exist, haven’t changed. They focus on the offices of the president and COAS being combined in the same person, the president’s discretionary powers which coalesce in the highly contentious Article 58-2(B), which prime minister Nawaz Sharif had tossed out of the window, the increase in the judges’ retirement age, items incorporated in Schedule 6 and the arbitrarily composed National Security Council (NSC).

A news item in the press suggested that Qazi, Hussain Ahmed was willing to compromise on the dual responsibility issue, and was asking for a firm date when the president would take off his uniform. But, as subsequent events have shown, the Qazi did not press this point. A story that was circulated in Lahore suggests that the MMA leader might have been approached by some of his supporters who asked him to tone down his rhetoric.

They were worried that the whole apple cart might be overturned and that since it was highly unlikely that the MMA would ever achieve the same kind of success in a future election, they should make the best of a bad bargain. There is always that lurking fear that the president, who holds all the trumps cards, may dissolve the assemblies if he was pushed to the wall.

Power, as the great Chinese leader Mao Zedong, put it, flows from the barrel of a gun. Subsequent events, however, suggest that dissolution is highly unlikely, and that the prime minister will be pressed to find a solution.

Then on May 28 Mr Jamali had assured the nation that differences over the Legal Framework Order would be settled within a few days when a meeting of the party heads was to be held.

At that meeting the joint recommendations of the government and the opposition were to be announced. Rumours were rife at the time that the issue of the president’s uniform was about to be settled.

But the enigmatic Mr Jamali came out with the incredible statement that the issue of the uniform could only be settled by the people who gave it to him in the first place, and not by an elected government or parliament. It was a bolt from the blue, and has since taken the debate back to square one. In the Punjab assembly, the issue had already spun out of control and 27 MPAs, including the leader of the opposition, were denied entry into the house, even the assembly building. They were also roughed up, detained, humiliated and subsequently released.

The speaker of the National Assembly, Chaudhry Amir Hussain, has finally ruled on Mr Liaquat Baloch’s point of order after a lapse of seven months, and stated that the LFO’s amendments form part of the 1973 constitution. The opposition is livid and is united in its resolve to pass a vote of no confidence against the speaker. But, the thinking members of the opposition have realized that they have been placed in a tricky legal position. It has probably occurred to them that they had taken oath under the Constitution as it stood on October 12, 1999-before the military takeover, and if they participate in further proceedings, they would be tacitly acknowledging the LFO.

Put another way, what this means is that the LFO-amended constitution can be used for conducting the business of the house.

But the simple legal point is that the speaker cannot legalize the LFO. There is only one proper forum which can sort out this tangled web, and that is the Supreme Court. The sooner the apex court comes into the picture, the better it would be for everybody.

Reforming class actions

THE House of Representatives passed a bill last week that would take a modest but important step toward fixing America’s broken system of class action litigation. The bill’s passage is no surprise; the House has passed it in previous Congresses as well.

The big question now is whether it can pass the Senate, where it has previously stalled. A class action bill has been reported by the Judiciary Committee and is awaiting action by the full body. But its prospects remain cloudy. Yet no area of U.S. civil justice cries out more urgently for reform than the high-stakes extortion racket of class actions, in which truly crazy rules permit trial lawyers to cash in at the expense of businesses. Passing this bill would be an important start to rationalizing a system that’s out of control.

Class actions have two legitimate purposes. They can be useful for efficiently processing identical claims by many plaintiffs who all have the same gripe against the same defendant. They can also serve as mechanisms for holding corporations accountable for significant misbehaviour that may cause only small monetary damages to any one victim.

But class actions are also unusually ripe for abuse. For unlike traditional lawsuits, in which clients retain lawyers to represent them over injuries about which they feel aggrieved, most class actions originate with the lawyers themselves. The “clients” are something of a fiction: The users of the offending product or service may have no problem with it or even know they are suing anyone.

But unless they opt out of the class, they become devices for lawyers who are, in practical terms, representing nobody’s interests but their own. What’s more, even though class actions can involve people from all over the country, they tend to get disproportionately filed in certain venues known to be friendly to the plaintiffs’ bar, so that judges elected by a single county can end up effectively making national regulatory policy.

The bill would not fix the whole problem. But it would make it easier for defendants to get cases out of state courts and into federal courts.

—The Washington Post