AS President Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz tour the world with an alternate frequency they come to perceive the far larger export prospects of Pakistan in those countries. They now want Pakistan to fix far higher export targets and make earnest efforts to achieve them.

Pakistan’s steadily, though modestly, increasing exports are encouraging the government to set ambitious targets and persuade exporters to make them a reality. But the exporters expect far more incentives and active official assistance to meet the higher targets. They want the government to move fast and remove bottlenecks wherever they crop up, and not prevaricate or act too slowly or too inadequately.

Excited by his tour of four South-East Asian countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand the prime minister said Pakistan’s goal should be an export of a billion dollars to each country of this region. The Asean countries are ten in number, and if the average of our exports to them comes to a billion dollar each the total will be 10 billion dollars. That is a big leap from the over half a billion dollar trade we have with the Asean states.

A lot of hard work has to be done and a special task force to be set up to achieve the target in a highly competitive area. When we have FTA arrangements with all of them, or most of them, will that make larger exports any easier? Anyway the FTA with Malaysia should be signed before the end of the year, according to the Malaysian prime minister Badawi.

Mr Shaukat Aziz had also said that Pakistan’s export target should be 20 billion dollars for next four years rather than the 14 billion dollars as at present. That is not a very high goal if the right steps are taken and our exporters strive earnestly to achieve that goal.

Meanwhile, the export target for the next financial year may be set at 15.6 to 16 billion dollars, showing an increase of 14 per cent which is not high. The export target for the current year set earlier was 12.7 billion dollars, which was a distinct improvement over the previous year’s 12.20 billion dollars. And the improved performance this year, in the last ten months, has encouraged the government to revise the target upwards to 14 billion dollars. But it is imperative that we not only export far more but much of that is value-added. That means that most of them have to be manufactured exports, not raw materials like cotton, rice, raw leather and primary manufacturers like cheap yarn of 20 counts with very little value addition.

The late Dr Mahbubul Haq used to say that our garment industry should improve so much that our shirts, instead of getting less than two dollars a piece should fetch 20 to 40 dollars a piece as do Christian Dior shirts. He wanted garment makers to make necessary improvements in their manufacturing process. That hope or vision remains unfulfilled even after almost 20 years.

India is making a striking leap forward in exports and achieving remarkable success. It achieved its target of 80 billion dollar exports in the year ending March 31 last, and has now raised the target this year to 92 billion dollars.

When the Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao visited India recently Mr Kamal Nath, Indian commerce minister, said that India’s exports to China, which were a billion dollars a year in the mid-1990s, had now become a billion dollars a month, and were expanding further. The Chinese leaders’ visit to India was designed to step up economic cooperation between the two countries.

For all that, India, which has set a target of 150 billion dollars by 2009, has only one per cent of the world’s trade. it ranks 31st among the exporting countries while China occupies the fourth place. But based on the current pace of progress India hopes to achieve its export target of 150 billion dollars much before 2009 as its exports are more diversified than Pakistan.

As it is Pakistan has no sizable exportable surplus in any significant area. If we produce more cotton at a time when the world has a large surplus and world prices of cotton are down, we will not gain much. And the government may be the loser for offering large support prices to the growers to encourage them to produce more. To export far more we have to increase the yield per acre, and in cases like sugar cane increase the sucrose content of the cane. The quality of the agricultural output has to be improved all round so that they get better export prices.

Razzak Dawood, a former commerce minister, campaigned hard to make the farmers raise dust-free and pest-free cotton which will get the best prices in the world market instead of five to ten cents less because of the admixture. And he could achieve only partial success. That campaign has to be sustained universally in Pakistan and the best results obtained to get the top prices for our cotton around the world as we produce 15 million bales instead of the old target of 10 million bales.

And at a time when we are thrilled that China is going to import our mangoes, we should not use excessive chemical fertilisers in production of our fruits and vegetables, as we have been doing, making them lose their real taste and inherent worth. The fact is that much of our grapes, peaches, apples and other high priced fruits no longer taste the same. More use of chemical fertilisers may give them great shape but not the taste that made them famous and popular. Some of those fruits, of course, came from Afghanistan and are not available in the same quantities because of disturbed conditions there.

The farmers’ income can be augmented a good deal if the heavy loss during harvesting, transportation and storage is checked or minimised. The government, too, will be a gainer along with consumers. While we delight in exporting mangoes to China, China is exporting electronics, sophisticated machinery and other high-value items to the world and occupies the fourth place in the world as an exporter.

Shaukat Aziz spoke in Thailand of poor packaging of our products of small and medium industries. This is serious flaw which needs to be remedied urgently. The industrialists have to make investment on packaging to make their products more attractive. Our business efficiency has also to improve and become truly modern. The call centres set up in Pakistan to meet the needs of the West shows the way to the future. Complaints from our importers abroad routed through our trade commissioners show that our business practices or export techniques need to improve a great deal and our exporters have to be far more attentive to details than they have been. A few bad eggs can spoil the whole market for us. And that should be scrupulously avoided.

The first of the many Free Trade Agreements, which we have been negotiating from Bangladesh to the US is to come into effect from June 12. It provides for 206 Sri Lankan items, including 10,000 tonnes of Sri Lanka tea, into Pakistan duty free and 102 items from Pakistan duty-free into Sri Lanka. That is only the beginning. In spite of the good political and happy economic relations between the two countries their two-way trade has been only 148 million dollars, most of them in raw products.

Do we have enough of the 102 items to export to that country? Tea from Sri Lanka can increase the volume of trade between the two countries instead of most of the tea coming from Kenya. But we have to produce more of the 102 items to meet the needs of Sri Lanka.

Pakistan’s trade deficit this year is expected to swell to 6.5 billion dollars which is equal to almost half our exports this year. The deficit has shot up because of the record rise in world prices of oil, larger import of raw materials and industrial inputs and far more machinery than usual. But the large deficit will not cause serious economic upset, says the State Bank of Pakistan governor Dr Ishrat Husain, because of the large home remittances and rise in foreign investment to 1.3 billion dollars. When most of the developing countries think of signing Free Trade Agreements with other states, particularly the developed countries, they think largely of the access their goods have to foreign markets.

They don’t think seriously of the inroads the foreign goods, often tax-free, would be making into their own markets. Exports, openly or hiddenly subsidised, from other countries can play havoc with our own economy unless we make our manufacturing sector and the export economy really strong and truly resilient.

The havoc such inflow of goods from outside is reported to have caused has resulted in acts of suicide by a number of farmers in India. When the West subsidises its farmers to the extent of a billion dollar a day and makes small cuts into such subsidies very reluctantly, farmers in the developing countries are very adversely affected. Free but unequal trade can hurt poor farmers of the developing countries hard. They are hurt by the legacies of the feudalism where it has been formally abolished, and by the new threats posed by the WTO regulations.

THERE has been much discussion in the United States recently about how to “manage the rise of China.” The phrase itself is soothing, implying gradualism, predictability and time. Time enough to think and prepare, to take measurements of China’s trajectory and adjust as necessary.

If China eventually emerges as a clear threat to the US, there will be time to react. But meanwhile there is time enough not to overreact, to be watchful but patient and not to create self-fulfilling prophecies. If we prematurely treat China as an enemy, it is said, it will become an enemy.

The idea that we can manage China’s rise is comforting because it gives us a sense of control and mastery, and of paternalistic superiority. With proper piloting and steady nerves on our part, the massive Chinese ship can be brought safely into harbour and put at anchor. It can be “integrated” into the international system and thereby tamed and made safe for civilized existence in the postmodern world. Wisely “managed,” China can be a friend. Badly managed, it can become a very dangerous power indeed. But at least the choice seems to be ours.

The history of rising powers, however, and their attempted “management” by established powers provides little reason for confidence or comfort. Rarely have rising powers risen without sparking a major war that reshaped the international system to reflect new realities of power.

The most successful “management” of a rising power in the modern era was Britain’s appeasement of the United States in the late 19th century, when the British effectively ceded the entire Western Hemisphere (except Canada) to the expansive Americans. The fact that both powers shared a common liberal, democratic ideology, and thus roughly consonant ideas of international order, greatly lessened the risk of accommodation from the British point of view.

Other examples are less encouraging. Germany’s rise after 1870, and Europe’s reaction to it, eventually produced World War I. Even the masterly Bismarck, after a decade of successful German self-management, had a difficult time steering Europe away from collision. The British tried containment, appeasement and even offers of alliance, but never fully comprehended Kaiser Wilhelm’s need to challenge the British supremacy he both admired and envied. Right up until the eve of war, highly regarded observers of the European scene believed commercial ties among the leading powers made war between them unlikely, if not impossible.

Japan’s rise after 1868 produced two rounds of warfare — first with China and Russia at the turn of the century, and later with the United States and Britain in World War II. The initial Anglo-American response to Japan’s growing power was actually quite accommodating. Meiji Japan had chosen the path of modernization and even westernization, or so it seemed, and Americans welcomed its ascendancy over backward China and despotic Russia.

Then, too, there was the paternalistic hope of assisting Japan’s entry into the international system, which was to say the western system. “The Japs have played our game,” Theodore Roosevelt believed, and only occasionally did he wonder whether “the Japanese down at bottom did not lump Russians, English, Americans, Germans, all of us, simply as white devils inferior to themselves ... and to be treated politely only so long as would enable the Japanese to take advantage of our national jealousies, and beat us in turn.”

Today we look back at those failures and ruminate on the mistakes made with the usual condescension that the present has for the past. But there is no reason to believe we are any smarter today than the policymakers who “mismanaged” the rise of Germany and Japan. The majority of today’s policymakers and thinkers hold much the same general view of global affairs as their forebears: namely, that commercial ties between China and the other powers, especially with Japan and the United States, and also with Taiwan, will act as a buffer against aggressive impulses and ultimately ease China’s “integration” into the international system without war.

Once again we see an Asian power modernizing and believe this should be a force for peace. And we add to this the conviction, also common throughout history, that if we do nothing to provoke China, then it will be peaceful, without realizing that it may be the existing international system that the Chinese find provocative.

The security structures of East Asia, the Western liberal values that so dominate our thinking, the “liberal world order” we favour — this is the “international system” into which we would “integrate” China. But isn’t it possible that China does not want to be integrated into a political and security system that it had no part in shaping and that conforms neither to its ambitions nor to its own autocratic and hierarchical principles of rule? Might not China, like all rising powers of the past, including the United States, want to reshape the international system to suit its own purposes, commensurate with its new power, and to make the world safe for its autocracy? Yes, the Chinese want the prosperity that comes from integration in the global economy, but might they believe, as the Japanese did a century ago, that the purpose of getting rich is not to join the international system but to change it?

We may not know the answers to these questions. But we need to understand that the nature of China’s rise will be determined largely by the Chinese and not by us. The Chinese leadership may already believe the United States is its enemy, for instance, and there is nothing we can do to change that. Partly this is due to our actions — such as the strengthening of the U.S.-Japanese military alliance, which began during the Clinton administration, and our recent efforts to enhance strategic ties with India.

Partly it is due to our different forms of government, since autocratic rulers naturally feel threatened by a democratic superpower and its democratic allies around their periphery. Partly it is due to the nature of the situation in East Asia. It used to be an article of faith among Sinologists that the Chinese did not want to drive the United States out of the region. Today many are not so sure. It would not be unusual if an increasingly powerful China wanted to become the dominant power in its own region, and dominant not just economically but in all other respects, as well.

When one contemplates how to “manage” that, however, comforting notions of gradualness, predictability and time begin to fade. The obvious choices would seem to lie between ceding American predominance in the region and taking steps to contain China’s understandable ambitions. Not many Americans favour the former course, and for sound political, moral and strategic reasons. But let’s not kid ourselves. It will be hard to pursue the latter course without treating China as at least a prospective enemy, and not just 20 years from now, but now.

Nor, if that is the choice, can Chinese leaders be expected to wait patiently while the web of containment is strengthened around them. More likely, they will periodically want to challenge both the United States and its allies in the region to back off. Crises could come sooner than expected, and without much warning, requiring difficult judgments about the risks and rewards of both action and inaction.

That is likely what the future holds. The United States may not be able to avoid a policy of containing China; we are, in fact, already doing so. This is a sufficiently unsettling prospect, however, that we are doing all we can to avoid thinking about it. We conjure hopeful images of a modernizing China that seeks only economic growth and would do nothing to threaten commercial ties with us — unless provoked — even as we watch nervously the small but steady Chinese military buildup, the periodic eruptions of popular nationalism, the signs of Chinese confidence intermingled with feelings of historical injustice and the desire to right old wrongs.

Which China is it? A 21st-century power that wants to be integrated into a liberal international order, which would mean both a transformation of its own polity and a limitation of its strategic ambitions? Or a 19th-century power that wants to preserve its rule at home and expand its reach abroad?

It is a worthy subject for debate, because the answer will determine the future as much as or more than anything we do. But it is unlikely we will have a definitive answer in time to adjust, to “manage” China’s “rise,” any more than our predecessors did. As in the past, we will have to peer into the fog and make prudent judgments, informed by the many tragic lessons of history.—Dawn/Washington Post Service

The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

LAST week the guardians of the civilized nations gathered in Moscow to commemorate the worst episode of sustained savagery in the history of the world. We do not know the exact figures of dead during the awesome and sweeping victories of a Chengiz Khan or an Amir Taimur between China and Eastern Europe, for both victor and vanquished tend to exaggerate, one in pride and the other in anger.

The less careful historians take recourse to that useless phrase “countless millions” which is both a tautology and an absurdity. At what point do the millions become “countless”? After twenty? Moreover, the population of the world in the 13th and 14th centuries was not enough to justify such casualties, even though whole cities were wiped out. But the dead of the Second World War, which ended 60 years ago in Europe and a few atom bombs later in Japan, were counted, more or less.

It was entirely appropriate that the political memorial services were being held in Moscow, with the victorious, defeated and bystander nations in attendance. (India was in the curious position of being both a bystander and an activist for reasons we shall address later.) For as much as 70 per cent died in what is known as the eastern front, that vast expanse between Berlin and Moscow. It was on the eastern front and the conflict between Hitler and Stalin that the Second World War was won and lost. Compared to the Soviet Union, Britain and Winston Churchill were secondary players; America was a late but critical arrival and France was hors d’combat — out of the game.

Stalin won the war against Hitler and lost the propaganda against Hollywood. Vladimir Putin, his successor, was making a conscious effort to redress this injustice. A popular impression has been created that the tide began to turn against Hitler with the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944, D-Day. But D-Day only highlights the fact that no one was fighting on the European mainland for most of the war. The British empire retreated from Europe after the humiliations suffered in 1940, symbolized by the escape from Dunkirk and did not return till, bolstered by America, Allied troops crossed into Italy in 1943 and then into France (still with great trepidation) in 1944.

The nadir for the British came with the fall of Singapore and the almost contemptuous Japanese victories that brought Emperor Hirohito’s rule up to the Burmese door of India. Japan lost the war when it provoked the United States at Pearl Harbour, and Hitler lost the war when he awakened the Soviet bear. Britain’s contribution to real war came in Africa under Wavell (made Viceroy of India after he was replaced) and Montgomery. More accurately, it was the British empire’s contribution, for empire troops were a critical element of the British armies.

Churchill, in a sense, was more important than Britain. His contribution lay in courage and conviction, and his power lay in rhetoric. It would be foolish to underestimate the importance of such qualities.

Defeat begins in the mind and that is where Churchill refused to be defeated. This was in sharp contrast to France, where Marshal Petain, a genuine hero of the first war, compromised with Nazi evil. The figures tell the story: the Soviet Union lost 37 million dead. France does not advertize its casualty figures, although it was as key a battleground as Eastern Europe.

America lost around a quarter million, but that is not a true measure of its contribution. Since the war was not fought on American soil it was spared the ravages of civilian agony. This was the true savagery of this horrific war. Nations who called themselves progressive and civilized (vis-a-vis the “barbaric” brown and black people of Asia and Africa) indulged in unprecedented rape and bloodlust against civilians. Women were raped and men killed.

Nazi evil acquired an especially racist dimension against Jews and “non-Aryan” blood types such as the gypsies, who were treated as worse than vermin. Wars have always been fought between ruling classes in search of wealth and empire, but extermination of a race has rarely been a war objective. The nearest earlier instance was the Spanish Inquisition which eliminated Muslims and Jews from Spain and Portugal. Muslim kingdoms from Morocco to Ottoman Turkey provided space and shelter not only to the Muslims but also to the Jews who were welcomed as people of the Book and lived in those empires till the 20th century.

The Communists, who understand the relationship between motivation and definition, first ignored the Second World War as a clash between rival capitalist imperialists. Their analysis was right, but their complacency was wrong. Hitler turned towards the big prize, the Soviet Union, after he had occupied and pacified the rest of Europe and swept up to St. Petersburg and Moscow.

But when Stalin began to fight back, he defined the war as the Great Patriotic War — a defence of the homeland rather than an offence against Germany. It was a war of liberation from the oppressor. “Liberation” was a favourite word of the speech-givers in Moscow. But perhaps they should have extended the word into a term in order to complete its meaning. They were talking of self-liberation rather than liberation as a principle. In that sense, it was even a selfish liberation, for to the European powers liberation was never a universal virtue.

The British left India with less grace than they claimed, and might have been more stubborn had not the British electorate delivered a stunning defeat to Churchill in a general election just after he had saved his country from Germany. Churchill had vowed never to preside over the liquidation of the British empire.

Such duplicity (one principle of freedom and independence for Europe and another for the colonies) led inevitably to contradictions. In the same week that Dr Manmohan Singh was in Moscow to applaud the Allies for their victories in Europe, Shyam Benegal released his biopic of Subhas Chandra Bose in which the Indian nationalist’s escape from a British prison in Calcutta and his epic journey to Germany and Japan is a powerful theme. Bose, affectionately called Netaji, or the Leader, had a mature dialogue with Hitler who advised him to fight alongside Japan.

Bose agreed, and led 80,000 Indians up to Indian soil before the tide of war changed. It must be stressed that Bose was critical of Nazi genocide against Jews, but he was willing to deal with Hitler as an enemy’s enemy. Does that make Bose a fascist? No. In his estimate, he was negotiating with one enemy to destroy another.

Similar sentiments persuaded Gandhi to keep the Congress out of the British war effort, although Gandhi had absolutely no sympathy for Nazism and was willing to describe Hitler as evil. Gandhi’s position was not quite the paradox it seemed: India would fight beside Britain, but only if permitted to do so as an independent nation. Jawaharlal Nehru took a dimmer view of fascism, and would have joined the war effort, but of course he would never break rank with Gandhi.

The American President, Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat who was also a democrat, was sympathetic to the colonies and championed the vision of a United Nations (his term) of free countries. But he died before the war ended. His successor Harry Truman wore conventional glasses and remained indifferent to a change that Roosevelt could perceive.

And so after the Second World War ended, a genuine world war began, for freedom and liberation of the colonies from imperialists. There was no alliance, but each nation rose in anger and eventually found freedom.

During the Cold War many of the former colonies preferred to trust the official anti-imperialism of the Soviet Union to the neo-colonialism of the democratic West, but soon they realized that they had bought into an illusion. As East Europe proved and Afghanistan illustrated, the Soviet Union was an empire-monger as well.

Democracy has become George Bush’s leitmotif. He has all the zeal of a new convert since he discovered democracy only after he failed to discover the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But while zeal has its advantages, it is no substitute for understanding.

There is a basic and critical flaw in Bush’s prescription for the world’s ills. He is right in claiming that democracy is the best medicine but he cannot seem to appreciate that democracy is impossible without sovereignty. Democracy is a flower, not a weed. It will bloom only if its conditions are honoured. Strangely, you can have independence without democracy, but you cannot have democracy without independence. The elixir becomes a killer if it is not administered correctly. That is the danger of the American policy in Iraq.

Gandhi understood this perfectly. It is a pity that his name is being erased from the scroll of memory at a time when his ideas have become indispensable. After Moscow Bush went to Georgia where he praised the “Rose Revolution” in which the people of Georgia got rid of dictators through non-violent struggle. This is the new dharma in a post-9/11 world, that even the fight against injustice should be non-violent. Surely the greatest of the non-violent wars was the Revolution led by Gandhi. It is unlikely that a speechwriter travelling with President Bush will mention the Cotton Revolution. But a speechwriter with Dr Manmohan Singh should have.

The slogan of the French Revolution was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. The cry of the Cotton Revolution was “Liberty, Sovereignty, Non-violence”.

The Cotton Revolution did not devour its children as the French one did. Instead of unleashing terror it found space for children of many hues and a multiplicity of views, united not by any plastic ideology but by commitment to a nation.

I know that cotton is also called yarn in America, because it is spun. Trust me, President Bush: Gandhi spun a loom around the British empire, but his doctorate was not in spin. Raise a cheer to the Cotton Revolution!

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.

ONLY two months ago, the government of Sindh engaged itself in the controversial exercise of creating a number of new districts in the province. By doing so, it has only succeeded in giving the impression that both the politics and the administration of Sindh are up for redesigning. As a result of this plan, seven new districts have been created with two strokes of the pen.

Four new districts — Jamshoro, Kambar, Kashmore and Umarkot — were carved out of the old and established districts of Dadu, Larkana, Jacobabad and Tharparkar and three more — Matiari, Tando Mohammad Khan and Tando Allahyar — out of the old Hyderabad district.

The other objectionable thing that has happened as part of this reorganization plan was that all these changes were done in unusual haste and that too without carrying the public along on this sensitive issue by the provincial government. No public inquiry and no kutcheries were held to elicit local opinion on the issue nor was there any serious debate held on the subject in the Sindh Assembly.

To cap it all, the provincial government went about the whole thing in such a slipshod manner that it proceeded to create new districts without even doing the requisite planning that should normally from the basis of introducing such changes that affect the lives of millions of people.

There were indeed serious gaps in the procedure employed by the Sindh government in venturing into such a scheme, especially when the public perception about it was so very adverse. Instead of meeting the affected people in the concerned districts and answering objections to such a proliferation of districts in the province, the chief minister went out of his way to justify the arbitrary moves of his government. This is something that has been adversely commented upon by the national media in recent editorials.

In the provincial assembly there were allegations and counter allegations levelled across the political divide that can only add to the prevailing confusion. Even the reputation of the country is put at stake in such matters when questions are raised as to whether we are truly a practising democracy when arbitrary procedures are adopted in dealing with public issues.

In neighbouring India, all such measures are known to have been undertaken over a long gestation period through the holding of public inquiries. This longish procedure is adopted not only to elicit public opinion but also for professionally studying and examining the detailed aspects and implications of a major reorganization move.

Even the British colonial rulers in pre-independence India had much greater interaction with the people and the territories that they were administering. Whenever they touched on sensitive subjects such as local areas, their customs, the type of administration that was needed they kept in mind as to what was financially affordable as per the available local resources. And of course this was invariably related to the revenue potential of an area, its law and order situation and so on.

They were of course conservative in their estimates particularly where public monies and resources were involved. In effect, they were truly enlightened and moderate where it came to the using of public finances and did so in a cost effective manner without rushing into grandiose expansionist schemes.

It is, therefore, only natural for one to speculate as to what the compelling reasons, if any, were for embarking upon such an abrupt and administrative expansion. At a time when resources are tight and the country has to regularly report to the World Bank and other international organizations about the use of the funds to show that we are not being wasteful such administrative expansion is bewildering to say the least.

I can only think of one possible reason and that is that influential elements gathered around the provincial government in Sindh are busy looking ahead at their electoral prospects. There are lots of people in this country who are at present hanging on to the coat-tails of power and would like to establish themselves as permanent joy riders of the state.

The new districts that are presently proliferating in Sindh may well be the result of efforts on the part of such elements to make a permanent nuisance of themselves. Needless to say, those on the lookout for safe seats in parliament and provincial assemblies are focusing on having more easily manageable districts by getting hold of the district nazimships to ensure the sort of district power base that can provide some permanence to their scheme of things.

When the new system of devolution was enforced some three years ago one of its prime objectives was to push feudalism into oblivion. That, I am afraid, has not happened, and more and even smaller districts are not going to help push that process to fruition. In fact, to the contrary, the new and smaller districts are more likely to consolidate the feudal/tribal fabric of the society in those districts.

The British colonials proved themselves a lot more astute than we have during the post-independence period. They opted in favour of mixed populations in almost every district to provide built-in counterweights. In the 1970s and 1980s, this mistake was made in Punjab during General Ziaul Haq’s military government and several districts emerged dominated by a single “baradri”.

That mistake was further compounded in the 1980s and the 1990s when Balochistan went ahead its own district creation spree. The end result was that whole districts had the members of just one single tribe as its inhabitants. Another interesting factor is that even though it has the smallest population vis-‘-vis the other provinces, Balochistan has more districts than the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. No wonder that Balochistan has over the years become a lot harder to control in terms of law and order.

So what are we actually heading for as a country, as a nation or for that matter as a pluralistic and tolerant society? The clear message from all the evidence available is that we are well on the road to the consolidation of feudalism and tribalism and of the “baradri” system in our country. This is not the sort of development that we should be looking forward to if our goal is that of becoming a forward-looking and dynamic country in the 21st century.

We are in effect moving backwards and more or less into the situation faced by 19th century Britain where the biggest obstacles to the power of the people were pocket and rotten boroughs that were perpetuating the lords of the manors and their fiefdoms. It took a great politician and a greater prime minister in Sir Robert Peel to do away, in one sweeping stroke, with all the pocket and the rotten boroughs that had hitherto offered safely-managed seats in the British Parliament and thus paved the way for Britain’s becoming the world’s foremost democracy. That indeed is the path that we need to take. Because if we do not do so the danger is that we may, with internal stagnation and growing internal polarization, crumble before the forces of fratricide and external pressures.