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| December 05, 2006 | Tuesday | Ziqa'ad 13, 1427 |
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Risks to the economy
Rain and its aftermath
Looking away from poverty
Checking the vote
IF I was, God forbid, chief censor of world media there is one four-letter word that I would ban completely: doom. Doomsday is as dull a concept as one can imagine, for it represents the end of all action.
WHAT is Chaudhri Shujaat up to? Is he on some kind of personal crusade against the women’s bill? On Sunday he met a team of ulema who reportedly found six of the bill’s clauses anti-Islamic. After the meeting, one of the ulema said that the PML chief, too, believed that some of the clauses of the bill were unIslamic. Now it is the PML president’s duty to either deny the statement attributed to him or accept that he indeed believes that the bill contains some clauses which are in violation of the Quran and Sunnah. If the latter is the case, then he must stand by his word. On Nov 15, the day the National Assembly passed the Protection of Women (Amendment to Criminal Laws) Bill, Chaudhri Shujaat handed in his resignation to Speaker Amir Hussain, saying that he should keep it pending until someone proved that the bill did contain anti-Islam clauses. If it was drama, then the speaker evidently did not seem to go along and returned it to him. Later, Chaudhri Shujaat said that he would quit the National Assembly if it was proved that some clauses of the PWB were against Islam. Unless he denies what has been attributed to him after Sunday’s meeting, he should stand by his word and resign. Not many people would be very keen to see the PML president out of parliament, since his presence or absence would in any case make little difference to the quality of parliamentary proceedings; all one is trying to point out is the futility of such threats and the way the chief of the ruling party is conducting himself on a bill that is now on the statute book.
The basic issue that seems to elude our politicians is the sovereignty of parliament. Their behaviour often betrays a lack of understanding of this fundamental principle in the working of a state pledged to democracy. The preamble to the Constitution makes it clear that the state “shall exercise its authority through the chosen representatives of the people” — in other words, parliament — and Article 227 says no law shall be enacted if it is repugnant to Islamic injunctions. Whether a law violates Islamic injunctions must ultimately be decided by the people, because there is no other way of arriving at ijma (consensus). In his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Allama Iqbal argued that in modern times it is parliament that should be the vehicle of ijtihad — finding solutions to new situations by amending Islamic laws needing a modern interpretation. No group can arrogate to itself the sole right to Islam’s interpretation. To do so would amount to creating a religious hierarchy, something repugnant to Islam.
The Hudood ordinances were controversial. They were enforced through a decree by a dictator who did not bother to seek a consensus. The PWB, on the other hand, has been passed by parliament. The bill had been vetted by the standing committee, boycotted by the MMA which is now threatening to quit the Assembly. This hardly advances the cause of the sovereignty of parliament or democracy. Chaudhri Shujaat seems to have forgotten that he is head of a party which has a majority in parliament and the PWB bill would not have become law if the PML had not piloted it. By playing to the religious gallery, he is merely undermining the concept of parliamentary sovereignty.
WHILE the State Bank’s annual report 2006 deals with a wide range of macro-economic policies, two major issues of immediate public interest are the high rate of inflation and the negative return on deposits given specially by major banks with large networks of branches. Both are factors responsible for the current low domestic savings that need to be boosted for correcting mounting economic imbalances and for sustained economic growth. While pledging to continue the present tight monetary policy, the State Bank has advised the government to take administrative measures to ensure smooth supplies to bring down rising food prices that hit the poor most and erode their savings. The State Bank estimates that the inflation rate targeted at 6.5 per cent for the current fiscal year will be exceeded at 6.7 to 7.5 per cent. Another reason for the situation is marked variations in month-to-month government borrowings that fuel inflation even if the annual borrowings remain within the fixed annual ceiling. To ensure a fair return to the depositors, Governor Dr Shamshad Akhtar has warned the commercial banks that the central bank would intervene if they do not reduce the widening gap between lending and deposit rates. The banks have been asked to increase the deposit rates by January before the six-monthly Monetary Policy Statement is formulated and announced. The State Bank’s concern over the issue is understandable because higher domestic savings are critical to boost investment and cut fiscal and current account deficits.
Although the economic growth this year will be close to the targeted seven per cent (latest SBP estimates range between 6.7-7.2 per cent), the growth is narrowly based and the threats to macro-economic stability have increased. With a low tax-to-GDP ratio, the fiscal expansion is compounding the risks; deficit has risen to 4.2 per cent of the GDP in 2006 as against 3.3 per cent in the preceding year. With the widening trade and current account deficits, the external vulnerabilities are mounting. The increasing imbalances are a medium-term risk for growth. The government needs to have a fresh look at its macro-economic policies to prevent the economy from landing into a possible recession sooner or later.
ONE notes with a sense of cautious relief that the City District Government of Karachi has sprung into action to clear the roads of rainwater in response to the intermittent downpour that started on Sunday. What we now need to see is action matching the declaration by the CDGK that its sanitary staff would clear the accumulated rainwater within 24 hours after the rain stops. This is absolutely necessary, not only to clear the roads for vehicular traffic but also to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes, other insects and bacteria that eventually find their way into the food chain. The city cannot afford to have an outbreak of malaria or gastroenteritis at a time when residents are still coping with the threat posed by the dengue fever virus which continues to claim lives.
The need to redouble efforts in this regard is paramount, because Karachi has a history of being allergic to rain, as it were. The lesson of the last monsoon’s heavy rains and the disarray in which they left the civic services is that the sooner the job is started the better hope there will be to contain the effects of rainwater accumulations. Already, large parts of the city have braved power outages lasting more than 12 hours; in the affected areas the threat of a water supply crisis looms large. The city district government has done well to set up an emergency helpline, but given the absence of a working drainage system and the state of the power transmission lines giving way as the first drops of rain start falling, it will take prompt action to avoid a calamity. Karachiites are bracing for another tough bout of rain-related outages and hardship while it pours. One hopes that this time round they will not have to suffer the rain’s aftermath.
Doomsday is the ultimate reaction. Whether therefore the end is nigh or far out, why worry about it, particularly since you can do nothing about it? It is far more sensible to explore options in the sunshine instead of sniffling through gloom, making a virtue out of misery.
But there are limits to optimism, and it has been crossed by those who have concluded that India is a superpower. A curious and crazy mania of self-congratulation has overtaken us in India.
Perhaps every word in the previous sentence needs some elaboration. First: who is “us”? I suppose every reader of an English newspaper would belong to “us”. Broadly, “we” or the “us” are those who have crept, slithered, slimed or worked our way legitimately to that huge space above the misery index of India.
Poverty is only one of the lines dividing Indians. The poverty line is in fact the weakest line; it is the line of non-resistance. The truly impoverished do not have the strength to resist, or they would wreak havoc of a kind you might not deem suitable for a mere doomsday.
Above that comes the anger line. These are the Indians who have escaped from destitution, and discovered the courage to exercise their democratic right to anger. For them, democracy is not a matter of a vote every five years; they test its flexibility as often as they can, and with a gun if they can find one. Call them Naxalites, Maoists, terrorists, whatever: they don’t care. They have no interest in categories. They know that Indian democracy’s methods of healing are to offer a Band-Aid when the disease is cancer. They have been told that the honey of economic growth will trickle down to them eventually. Try offering the mirage of a trickle to a man dying of thirst.
Then there is a hatred line. It is a thin but potent line, and consists of those who are the leaders of anger. They channel anger towards violence. It is not a moral line, for those who hate also know how to negotiate. The establishment exploits this weakness quite liberally, offering rewards which buy leaders out of their group. Parliament is full of those who have been purchased by the establishment.
Above hatred is the envy line, that huge mass of Indians who are almost there, seething through small towns and villages, anxious to join the long queues of upward mobility. Envy is a good spur for aspiration, as anyone in mass marketing, or indeed banking, will confirm. This is the target group of future consumers which will keep the growth rate at 10 per cent and possibly send it higher. Envy is good for the economy. May it always flourish.
And on top of it all sit the exalted “us”: a mix of the smug, the complacent, the rich and the wealthy which now believes that it has arrived, and is totally convinced that because it has arrived India has also reached its historic destination.
This is the hyper India class, the doctrinaires of Superpower India. This is the fairy-tale “middle class”, the subject of international attention, which hates looking below, except of course to find servants. This class has reinvented the morality of caste. It believes that the less fortunate deserve their misfortune, just as untouchables once were thought to deserve their untouchability: karma is the curse of the inferior mind. But there is this difference. The new caste lines are not rigid. You can buy your way across the divide with a colour television set; and there are no questions asked once you reach the Maruti 800.
This great collective “us” has shifted night into day. India is already a superpower and cannot be defeated in anything, including cricket. Defeat in cricket wounds the self-esteem of this new India, and it howls like a banshee until its lollipop is restored. Cricket is no longer a game in which 11 men might play well one day, and badly the next. It is a drug fed with unimaginable wealth, and every cricketer must be on steroids all the time, or he will be banished into that dangerous pit called middle-class purgatory.
At the same time as the Indian team was getting properly and deservedly thrashed in South Africa, the National Family and Health Survey report was issued. It told the truth about “Superpower India”: three out of four infants in the 19 states surveyed were anaemic, as were more than half (54 percent to be precise) the pregnant women. Two out of five children were underweight, which, in a poor country like ours, means appalling malnutrition.
Parliament interrupted its regular interruptions in order to debate defeat in cricket and demand immediate action from Sharad Pawar, head of the Board of Control for Cricket, so that the hungry ticket-holders of the cricket amphitheatre could see their gladiators do what they were paid to do — kill the enemy. Parliament did not have time for the National Family and Health Survey which, frankly, is such a bore compared to cricket. Cricket is hyped by multinationals who produce lurid television spots screaming, in jungle rhythms, “Ha ha India!” — the best one can say about the ad is that it is about as tasteless as the product. Any chorus for the Family Survey would have to keep its refrain to a more doleful “Hai Hai India!”
The new middle class has created its own deities. The new Mother India carries, in her 10 invulnerable arms, a nuclear weapon, a share market index printout, a mobile phone, a cricket ball, a ticket from a low-cost airline, a job offer from an outsourcing company, a colour television set, patched jeans, an iPod full of superbly arranged dancing music from Bollywood and an English dictionary.
The high priests of this India are politicians and businessmen, two terms that encompass a wide variety of types. (Some of my best friends are politicians and businessmen.) Whenever high priests have taken charge of a nation’s destiny, they begin to tend towards corpulence and corruption, and the brightest minds are tempted into sloth. You can see the victory of fantasy over fact in the constant homage to the mirror, and the easy dismissal of everything that does not comfort or reinforce this self-image.
Back to our initial sentence: that this is crazy is obvious, but why should it be curious? The curious bit is the blindfold that all of “us” wear each morning as we head to work, and retain till it is time to go to sleep. It is not as if impoverished India lives in another geography. You can see poverty in the slums of Delhi, the stench of Mumbai, the peeling decay of inner Kolkata, in the thousands of street orphans and beggars that are a constant reminder of failure. The urban poor are the elite poor. Think of the tribal enveloped by fear outside Ranchi, or the rural Muslims stretched across the eastern curve of the Ganga. But we, all of “us”, are Eyeless in Delhi. Who has time for the hungry at our doorstep?
I am not a Utopian who believes that prosperity must march in step with equity; economic growth will come in stages, and there will be inexplicable disparity as we seek a better future. But what is it with the successful Indian that makes him so criminally indifferent to the truth of our poverty? We have certainly moved away from a hopeless past. India might become a superpower; India should become a superpower. But we are not there yet. We cannot call ourselves any kind of power as long as half of India still goes to sleep on a stomach that is only half-full.
The writer is editor-in-chief of The Asian Age, New Delhi.
FLORIDA and Katherine Harris are forever linked with American scepticism about the integrity of the voting system. So it is strangely appropriate that six years after a controversy over hanging chads ended with George W. Bush in the White House, a fight over election results to fill Ms. Harris’s 13th Congressional District seat is raising new questions about voting.
A state audit is underway to determine why some 18,000 ballots in Sarasota County did not show votes in a race ultimately decided, by a mere 369 votes, in favour of the Republican candidate. Did voters intentionally opt not to cast a vote? Did the electronic voting machines malfunction? Or, was it simply, as many believe, a case of a badly designed ballot that made it easy to overlook the Democratic candidate? It’s important that these questions be answered, not just to determine the outcome of this race but to maintain the integrity of voting for contests where more than one congressional district could be at stake.
Unfortunately, the chances of finding a definitive reason for the “missing” votes are diminished because of Florida’s failure to require a way to verify and audit votes recorded by touch-screen voting machines. A new alarm about the consequences of not having such a backup for the machines — which are used not just in Sarasota but in the Washington area and much of the nation — was sounded this week by an influential group that gives advice to the federal government.
The US Election Assistance Commission will review the draft report next week and, we hope, add its voice to the growing chorus for some type of paper trail that voters can use to verify their vote and that election officials can audit in close and disputed races.
Our support for a paper trail is not rooted in any belief that machines are to be mistrusted. Nor are we inclined to credit the theories about how election machines can be rigged.
— The Washington Post