THE violent attack last Sunday by some 800 armed activists of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal to disrupt a mini-marathon in Gujranwala because women were participating in it is disturbing proof of the increasing level of intolerance among the extremist/ obscurantist elements in the country. Nineteen vehicles, including those of a provincial minister and a senior police official were burnt by the protesters, who were armed with home-made petrol bombs, clubs and stones.

According to the Punjab government, firearms were ‘freely used’. A government press note also said that the MMA men entered Jinnah stadium, where the women’s race was to end, and attacked the participants who were “pulled down from their seats, beaten and dragged on the ground”. The attackers also tried to burn some petrol pumps around the stadium and hurled petrol bombs, the government said.

This violent reaction was in response to the fact that the Gujranwala administration had decided to hold a series of races on Sunday, including one which was for female participants. Given that the starting point was the local divisional public school, it would be safe to say that most if not all of the female participants would have been school or college students.

Worst of all, the attackers were led by the local MNA who was elected on the MMA ticket and his son. After the attack, the member of parliament told a TV channel in rather an innocent tone that the protesters merely wanted to register their protest against the women’s race by staging a ‘dharna’ or sit-in outside the stadium. Without any apparent provocation, he went on to say, the police attacked the MMA activists as a result of which several people, including himself and his son, were “seriously injured”.

The MNA said that the MMA had asked the local administration to call off the race but since the latter failed to do that, the alliance and its activists had no choice but to register their protest on the day itself of the race.

One of its local leaders who was among the attackers told a foreign radio channel that the MMA could not sit idly by as the “nation’s daughters, wives and daughters-in-law” took part in a road race wearing “t-shirts and knickers”.

This was the same objection raised, at that time by Jamaat-I-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed, when the Lahore marathon was held a couple of months ago.

Police and independent eyewitness reports however suggest that this is not what happened, and that the MMA activists came well-armed and in large numbers with the intention of disrupting the race in a violent manner.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that religious extremists in Pakistan have used violence to shove their narrow and dogmatist version of religion down everyone else’s throat.

In fact, in Gujranwala itself a circus was attacked and burnt down last year by MMA activists who deemed it un-Islamic and decided to take matters in their own hands.

The Punjab government has said that it will try some of the attackers who have been arrested in anti-terrorism courts. However, the fact remains that flip-flops by the federal government on various issues has continuously emboldened the MMA and its supporters.

The recent U-turn on the religion column in the new machine readable passports came after the government had already said publicly that the column would not be re-inserted after the religious parties made a fuss in and outside of parliament.

According to some reports, one reason for the reversal of the earlier stand on this issue had to do with an unwritten understanding between PML president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and JUI and MMA leader Maulana Fazlur Rahman.

When the decision to re-insert the column was made public recently, the maulana was quick to claim a victory for the religious alliance.

So who is to blame for this increasing spread of religious bigotry in Pakistan? Is it the government, which speaks ad nauseum of “enlightened moderation” and of building a “soft image” (whatever that means) of Pakistan and then does nothing (but retreat) to put into practice its self-professed progressive and liberal worldview or to support or provide a level playing field to mainstream political parties.

Or is it the religious parties, whose adherence to a narrow and retrogressive version of religion and archaic worldview have caused much heartburn and anger among some Pakistanis who see the world from a completely different perspective.

Are Pakistan’s mainstream political parties to be blamed for not raising a voice against such bigotry and zealotry, save the odd press statements which find their way into newspapers from time to time.

One can understand their predicament because they — and here one is speaking of the PPP and PML-N specifically — are hamstrung by the current political dispensation but then how many of their members in parliament have actually taken part in rallies (as opposed to an airconditioned television studio in Dubai) to register their protest and outrage against acts like the attack in Gujranwala?

Perhaps, in all of this the greatest blame lies on civil society, especially those who hold progressive and forward-looking views. This includes intellectuals but the only problem with this variety of arm-chair critics is that apart from holding forth in airconditioned drawing rooms, or television studios or writing verbose articles in (mostly English) newspapers, they do nothing really to try and mould public opinion against rising intolerance and obscurantism in this country.

After all, it is the middle class and the intellectuals that are the driving force for modernity and progressive values in most developing countries, a good example being the activist role played by such forces in Latin American countries and even to quite a large extent closer at home in places like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly why intellectuals here have so far played no roles worth mentioning in the fight against increasing fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, but one link could be made to the (more or less) complete absence of a civilized culture of debate and dissent among the educated Pakistanis.

The many years of military rule have obviously created a suppressive political and social environment in which the issues and concerns of ordinary Pakistanis, or their views and opinions, hardly ever play a role in the policy/decision-making process.

In any civilized and suitably democratized country, where public opinion is respected, the norm would be for a government to first assess what the public thinks on a given issue and then formulate and finally implement a certain policy. But in the case of Pakistan, the opposite always happens, with government policies often at odds with public demands and expectation. The recent religion column controversy is a case in point where public opinion, barring that of the MMA’s constituent parties and their supporters, was by and large in favour of the initial decision to leave the religion column out of passports because it was wholly unnecessary.

However, to please a minority political grouping not even part of the ruling coalition, the government reversed its own policy outlined a few weeks earlier and restored the column.

Ironically, the U-turn seemed to go against the personal views if not wishes of the president, the prime minister and several members of the cabinet (including the interior minister who publicly had said that the column would not be re-inserted).

Little did those who acquiesced in this realize that making such a concession to the religious parties on this, which the government will deny, will only embolden them further and the result, a la Gujranwala, is all before us.

Unfortunately, apart from issuing a press statement or two and writing an article or a letter to the editor in some English-language newspapers (a case

of preaching to the already

converted), not a single civil society organization, NGO or any of the so-called intellectuals took their protest to the street.

Herein lies the difference between these people and activists of religious parties who often have no qualms about using violence to thrust their views on the rest of society, blackening billboards, harassing musicians and actors, damaging public property and preventing women from taking part in an athletics event. After all, why shouldn’t they?

In almost all such incidents, except perhaps the one that took place last Sunday in Gujranwala, no action was ever taken against them, no convictions, no fines, no jail sentences.

E-mail: omarq@cyber.net.pk

PRIME MINISTER Shaukat Aziz says that by achieving an economic growth rate of seven per cent this year, Pakistan has joined the top ten of the world’s high-growth countries led by China. Along with that, the per capita income of Pakistan has taken a leap to cross 600 dollars.

Along with that, one must admit that one-third of the people are still living below the poverty line of a dollar a day. Will the prosperity at the top help relieve these unfortunate absolute poor of their daily distress to some extent in a period of high unemployment and rising inflation which are disillusioning them? The acute poverty is 88 per cent in Balochistan and 51 per cent in the Frontier province which are often causes of violent clashes and incidents.

The high growth trajectory is not helping the educated unemployed either, whose number has risen to 59.2 per cent from 55.1 per cent in the year 2001-02.

The latest labour survey shows that the industrial revival and expansion in the service sector have reduced the number of the non-educated unemployed from 44.9 per cent to 40.8 per cent. But despite the spread of information technology education throughout the country, the number of educated unemployed has risen substantially. And that is happening in spite of high cost of private education. In the West too, the economy is expanding and productivity increasing without an increase in jobs.

To overcome the acute economic distress in Balochistan President Musharraf has come up with a long-term uplift plan with several mega-projects which will cost the government over Rs. 100 billion. How long will it take for the plan to be completed in toto has not been mentioned. It will be better if the programme is presented to the province in toto and the deadline for completing each major project is fixed and announced publicly.

But the government can argue, and very validly, that how soon will a mega-project be completed depends on the cooperation of the local leaders and the people. Even if cooperation is not forthcoming readily, at least there should be no resistance to the development programme.

With the communication and transport projects planned, along with the development of Gwadar port in its second stage, Balochistan will be at the cross-roads of West Asia, and become more and more open to the world.

Foreign countries will not make large investment in the province unless they are sure that the local people will welcome that, benefit by that and cooperate with the foreign investors there. The same goes for the investors from the rest of the country who too should be assisted to play their role in the development of the province. This is the time for the Baloch leaders to make the right decisions and go along with the development plans there. The complaint of the Baloch is that every government promises to develop their province in a big way but has done very little so far.

But every regime has also complained of lack of cooperation from the local sardars, and hence of their people. Can the process be reversed now and the Sardars and the federal government eventually work together?

The government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s wanted to do much to develop Balochistan while he had politically locked horns with the Sardars of the region. It was in his time that the Sandak copper mines were discovered along with streaks of gold here and there. But it would have cost a greet deal to extract copper. Since the vast investment needed was not available, enough work was not done in that direction. The lack of cooperation by the Sardars made investment on such a large project even more discouraging. The same should not happen now because of the resistance by the Sardars.

But the people of the province should see palpably they are gaining by the development projects and that they are getting more employment and their housing and transport facilities are getting better. They should have also enough number of schools and hospitals. When the people see that they will cooperate with the government more and more.

Pakistan’s joining the ten high-growth countries of the world has not prevented Gen Musharraf from appealing to the rich countries to step up their aid to the developing countries, and reduce their debt, if not write it off altogether. He wants the rich countries to raise their aid to 0.70 per cent of their GDP as was agreed to by them a long time ago. However, the US is giving less than 0.2 per cent of its GDP as aid, while large war budgets are approved to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the write-off is recommended largely now for the least developed and the poorest countries and not for low, middle income countries such as Pakistan, according to the World Bank.

Anyway, the British Treasury Secretary George Brown has been pleading for a raise in the aid of the rich countries from the current 50 billion dollars to 100 billion dollars a year for a period of ten years after which the countries assisted should be able to manage their own economies. But this proposition has few supporters among the rich states. Brown, however, is fighting for his proposition which will become stronger if after the forthcoming elections he becomes the British prime minister.

Meanwhile, the World Bank has asked the Pakistan government to raise its revenue target to Rs. 880 billion from the current year’s Rs. 654.83 billion. That target, says the Bank, can be achieved by drastically improving CBR’s audit functions and eliminating the existing large scale loopholes.

The Bank which is providing Rs. 7.2 billion for a tax administration reform programme which will cost Rs. 10 billion wants real results as the CBR has approved the programme and it remains to be completed earnestly and steadily.

With the economy growing fast and large sections of the people making huge profits it should be easy for the government to mobilise larger taxes than it does. But the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank want less of indirect taxes and reduction of high taxes and elimination of their multiplicity. But the government is too slow to change its tax structure.

Tax collection for the first nine months of this financial year ending March was Rs. 392.2 billion, while the target that was exceeded was Rs. 395.8 billion. And that means a rise in revenue collection of 12,7 per cent over the same period last year. Judging by the increase in bank credit to the private sector which has risen to Rs. 309 billion as saving Rs. 230 billion in the same nine month period last year, the private sector economic activities and profits have increased a great deal. That should mean larger taxes revenues but that kind of rise in revenues is not visible.

India is undergoing notable tax reforms. The Indian states under the umbrella of the Centre have imposed two sales tax — four per cent and 12.5 per cent. While Pakistan has a lump of 15 per cent sales tax, after the higher rates prevalent until June were given up. It is the high rate of taxation which stands in the way of full collection and encourages massive evasion. In addition, there is the multiplicity of taxes which the investors have been protesting against.

The Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly, which has been examining the accounts of the Central Board of Revenue, has recommended full authority to the CBR to pursue the tax related cases worth billions which has been in the courts for years. This recommendation was made after the PAC noted the CBR was losing most of the cases, and thousands of them were pending with various courts. One of the reasons for the CBR losing the cases is it is not allowed to hire good lawyers from the private sector. Even otherwise the CBR chairman Abdullah Yousuf has been talking of settling many of the cases out of court instead of long pending cases making the CBR lose large sums. The CBR should be more business minded rather than pursuing bureaucratic ways. The prime minister has now set up a special committee “to formulate policies for streamlining, improving and introducing broad based structural and institutional reforms in administration, parliament and judiciary.” The committee has a very broad based assignment and it could take a long time before it completes its task.

And it is doubtful whether the Parliament would accept the recommendations of the committee. The judiciary too may not be happy with the recommendations of the special committee though headed by the minister for law Mohammad Wasi Zafar. Parliamentary reforms, judicial reforms and the administration reforms may be beyond the competence of this committee. Hence the minimum the Prime Minister could do is to set up separate parliamentary and judicial subcommittees, while the main committee focuses on the administrative structure and operational efficiency.

According to its terms of reference, the committee will work with missionary spirit and suggested such measures which will bring about positive social change in society and economic development in the country.

There have been reports that the performance of some of the ministers during the past several months is not up to the mark or expectations. And after the trial period is over, the prime minister was expected to drop a few of them and reshuffle their portfolios. President Musharraf was also reported to be dissatisfied with a few ministers’ performance.

Now instead of a cabinet reshuffle, we have to deal with a special committee which is expected to suggest positive changes in society and economic development in the country. The persons chosen for this task are not competent enough and no great results should be expected from them. In fact, the pigeonholes of the secretariat in Islamabad are littered with reports of various committee and commissions and task forces set up by various governments. Making use of some of th reports may be far more rewarding than setting up one special committee with a large assignment and great expectations that may be an exercise in futility.

FORMER Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, once said of Sino-Pakistan ties that “the friendly exchanges between the two peoples date back to the dawn of history, and such friendly relations have stood the test of history.” More recently, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said, “Pakistan and China have had fruitful cooperation in politics, economy, foreign affairs and personnel exchange.”

Similar sentiments have been expressed at the presidential level. According to President Pervez Musharraf, “Despite changes at the regional and global levels, the deep-rooted ties between the two countries have been gaining strength with the passage of time.” Meanwhile, Chinese President Hu Jintao acknowledged that “nothing would affect the decades old Sino-Pakistan friendship despite the changes in the global and regional situation.” He has thanked Pakistan for its continued support on the issues of Taiwan, Tibet and human rights, and for being the first country to support the anti-secession law passed by the National Peoples Congress in March 2005.

For all the warmth of ties, variously described as “all-weather” and “timed-honoured”, since the 1980s Chinese foreign relations have undergone a qualitative change. There has been a shift from a centric ideology to a pragmatic approach. The change was brought about by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping who launched major economic and social reforms in an attempt to modernize his country. He was followed by President Jiang Zemin who tried to improve relations with western countries.

Hu Jintao, the current president, represents the “moderate and pragmatic current” and has continued with the policy of market economy and the economic development inaugurated a quarter of a century earlier by Deng Xiaoping. All these leaders developed peaceful relations with China’s 14 neighbours and concentrated on economic growth.

Earlier in the 1960s, during the era of Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, the Indo-China border conflict took place in 1962 and the Sino-Pakistan Frontier Agreement was signed in 1963. China supported self-determination in Kashmir as under the UN resolutions. Since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in 1981, Chinese policy embarked on a transforming course. Today, China is urging both India and Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir dispute through “mutual dialogue” and “bilateral means”. This is in keeping with the Chinese Indian policy. Relations between China and India have had a major breakthrough. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in an interview ahead of his visit to India commencing on April 9, said that Sino-Indian relations had entered a “new period of comprehensive cooperation” that outweighed differences. He remarked that Sino-Chinese cooperation “far outweighs our competition, our common understanding our differences. We have every reason to be friendly and cooperative and no reason whatsoever to go for conflict or confrontation.” He said that, “China and India have reached an important consensus. That is, both sides should view and handle the relations from a strategic high ground bearing in mind the larger picture, and refuse to let questions left over from history disrupt and impede the development of bilateral relations.”

In the economic sphere, trade between India and China is accelerating. If a free trade agreement is signed between the two countries, which is a likely development, there will be a tremendous leap forward in their relations.

China has come out of its isolation of the 1950s and 60s. Since 9/11, there has been a greater understanding between the US and China as both of them are partners in the war on terror, although their differences on US support to Taiwan and Japan remains a major obstacle to the development of cordial relations.

In any case, Pakistan remains very important to China. Owing to its strategic location, it has served as a bridge between China and the Middle East as well as in Sino-US rapprochement. This role is likely to persist even under the changed international scenario. Pakistan supports the Chinese stance on Taiwan, its policy against terrorism, and recognizes its neighbour’s full market economic status. Apart from political and defence cooperation between the two countries, economic relations are also showing an upward trend.

Several important projects in Pakistan have been completed, or are underway, with Chinese assistance. These include the Karakorum highway, the Indus highway, a heavy mechanical complex, the Pakistan aeronautical complex, the Saindak project, the Guddu thermal power station, the Jamshoro power station, the Chashma nuclear power plant, the Ghazi Brotha project, the Thar coal project and the Gwadar port. Before his visit to Pakistan, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged that “China and Pakistan are indeed good friends, good neighbours and good partners.” He added, “Greater emphasis should be put on closer trade and economic ties while deepening mutually beneficial cooperation across-the board.”

THE interesting question about the advent of $50-a-barrel oil is whether it signals a new era in the economics and politics of energy.

To sharpen the question: Have we entered a period when, owing to consistently strong demand and chronically scarce supplies, prices have moved permanently higher? We don’t know, but the answer could be “yes” for at least one reason: China.

Americans consume almost 21 million barrels of oil a day, a quarter of the world total of 84 million barrels a day, reports the International Energy Agency. But China is now second at 6.4 million barrels a day, and its demand could double by 2020, various analysts told a conference last week held by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

Moreover, China will import most of its new needs; its domestic output is steady at about 3.5 million barrels a day. It’s unclear how much China’s extra demand — and that of other developing countries, especially India — will stimulate extra oil production.

Oil markets do undergo seismic shifts. Until 1974 the United States was the world’s largest oil producer. Supplies were plentiful; Americans controlled their own oil prices, as Daniel Yergin explained in his 1991 book “The Prize.”

With surplus production capacity, the Texas Railroad Commission — which despite its name regulated the state’s oil — limited output to stabilize prices while maintaining a “security reserve” for times of crisis, wrote Yergin. In March 1971 the commission allowed all-out production to meet rising demand. America’s oil surplus had vanished. Worldwide prices rose, and OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) became more powerful.

We could now be at a similar inflection point, where the global oil system changes dramatically. Certainly the short-term outlook already has. From 1991 to 1999 world oil demand rose annually about 1 million barrels a day, Guy Caruso, head of the US Energy Information Administration, told the CSIS conference.

But in 2004 demand unexpectedly jumped 2.7 million barrels a day. A third of the increase came from China, and much of that reflected electricity shortages. Unable to get reliable power, factories installed their own generators. China’s regular power plants overwhelmingly use coal, but the new generators used imported diesel fuel. China could solve this problem by building more power plants and easing rail bottlenecks that hinder coal shipments. But there will still be new sources of oil demand. China now has about 20 million cars and trucks, energy consultant James Dorian said; by 2020 it could have 120 million. (In 2001 the United States had about 230 million cars, vans and trucks.) Higher oil demand has now strained the global production system to its limits.

Spare capacity of about 1.5 million barrels a day is the lowest in 30 years, said CSIS’s Frank Verrastro. Most is located in Saudi Arabia. Higher prices partly reflect fear of more supply disruptions — from terrorism, war, political upheavals, weather or accidents. In theory, higher prices should be partially self-correcting. They should dampen demand and encourage supply. But theory must always be revised for new realities.

Here, there are two.

One is that in rich countries — notably the United States — rising incomes make it easier to afford higher energy prices. In the latest month, American oil demand was actually up two per cent from a year earlier (and, yes, adjusted for inflation, today’s gasoline prices are still roughly a third below levels reached in 1980 and 1981).

A second reality is that big oil companies seem less willing or able to find new oil. A study by Credit Suisse First Boston reports that major companies have replaced more than half their depleted oil reserves by buying reserves from other companies or re-estimating existing reserves.

In 1990 companies replaced two-thirds of reserves with new discoveries. The poor performance may partly reflect the fact that 72 percent of the world’s oil reserves are controlled by state-owned oil companies, says Verrastro. Private companies can often get exploration rights only on terms that involve (to them) too much risk and too little profit.

Anything could now happen to oil. Prices could drop if the immediate fears behind today’s buying don’t materialize. But the long-term trends are unpromising. Global demand is rising inexorably; global supply seems less expansive. Dependence on precarious Gulf oil will probably increase.

The global economy remains hostage to uncertain or expensive fuel. Producing countries may become stronger, consuming countries weaker. There may be more competition among consuming nations to secure long-term supply contracts. China has already made a few such deals.

The message for Americans is simple. We import nearly 60 percent of our oil. We can’t eliminate imports any time soon, but we could limit them by producing more at home and conserving more (meaning higher fuel taxes, tougher gasoline standards, smaller vehicles and more hybrid engines). That would lessen our own vulnerability and ease pressures for the rest of the world.

The debate that pits greater production against greater conservation is wrong. We need both.

— Dawn/Washington Post Service