THE Planning Commission has become wiser now. Dr. Akram Sheikh as deputy chairman of the commission knows that in the feudal political setup mention of land reform is a taboo and no more acceptable is the suggestion of income tax on farm incomes.

Similarly, the demand of various institutions that the capital gains tax (CGT) be imposed on the large incomes from stock exchange transactions and real estate deals are not acceptable to the present government. The big brokers have a firm hold on the present government which wants to show the ever soaring stock exchange index as a symbol of its economic success.

The planning commission (PC) is hence suggesting to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz that capital gains tax be introduced on stock exchange transactions and real estate deals to prevent wild speculation and promote real investment.

Similarly the top businessmen of the country at a meeting of central board of Revenue officials led by its chairman Abdullah Yusuf have urged the CBR to persuade the provincial governments to levy income tax on incomes from agriculture which has its 22 per cent in the GDP.

Agricultural income tax is no more acceptable to the provincial governments than are land reforms to the federal government and capital gains tax on property transactions to the federal bureaucrats.

Resisting land reforms and capital gains tax on land deals are not only the traditional feudal lords but also the generals and senior officials, both serving and the retired, who own vast lands and now valuable urban property. And the triple combination has been prevailing for long shooting down all land reform proposals.

The top businessmen including the president of the Federation of Pakistan chambers of commerce and industry Mr. Tanveer Sheikh argued at a meeting with CBR officials that it was unfair to make one section of the people pay more and more taxes and exempt another large section from tax altogether. And yet the government wanted more and more tax revenues from trade and industry, he said.

The CBR which is soon to become the Federal board of Revenue wants to broaden the tax base instead of limiting it to a revenue collection of 11 per cent of the GDP and seeks to become a truly autonomous body and assert itself. The CBR finds the ratio of revenues collected to the GDP is not only one of the lowest in the region but also one of the lowest in the world while exporters and industrialists called for tax relief to export more and be truly competitive in the world markets.

But if there is political obstruction in the land reform and agricultural income tax, there is administrative objection to capital gains tax from bureaucrats and other officials. And the big brokers in the stock exchange stand in the way of the capitals gains tax on their rollicking income.

The planning commission argues that money should go into the stock market for investment and real development instead for speculation and the official policy help them through large bank loans in the form of CFS loans which touch Rs 60 billion. The banks are happy to supply the funds as it is highly profitable for short term lending.

Capital gains tax is levied only on those who hold shares for a short time and not on long term investors. It is an incentive to real investment. Hence it is common all over the world including India.

The strongest opponents of capitals gains tax in Pakistan are not the real investors but the spirited speculators. The CGT should not be heavy initially but can increase gradually until it reaches its desired level. The planning commission has also suggested adequate incentives for setting up of export industries so that our modest industry can expand and produce more of the value added goods.

The PC wants the government to follow the Malaysian model of investment expansion through the right mix of incentives. Earlier the favourite model was the Thai pattern but now we are moving towards the Malaysian pattern which is strong on the export industries. Earlier the Thai model of “one village, one industry” used to fascinate our ministers beginning with Jehangir Tareen, minister for industries and special initiatives, but after the initial flutter there were no takers for that. Anyway the Sundar industrial estate near Lahore is based on the Thai model and has pleased all the stock holders including Chaudhary Pervez Elahi.

The PC also wants industries to develop their own brands and make them popular abroad. The commission wants Sialkot to be declared an export city as 90 per cent of its products goes abroad as well as have an airport of its own. It has also urged the setting up of new industrial estates, industrial parks and export cities with all the facilities which modern industries need.

It also wants political protests and demonstration not to disrupt industrial production or movement of goods but be confined to specified areas in each city. This is a recommendation with which the businessmen and industrialists will agree whole heartedly as they have been pleading for the same to reduce business losses.

Meeting the needs of 160 million people in a poor country with natural resources is not easy as our history of 60 years has shown. The most significant during these decades has been the increase in population by nearly four times with their rising expectations and increasing frustrations.

But not much can be achieved if both the traditional rich and the new rich do not pay their taxes beyond a fraction and much of what comes as state revenues is misspent through maladministration, corruption and extravagance of the ruling officials.

Now while the farmlords do not pay income tax on their large incomes, many in the service sector which is as large as 53 per cent of the GDP pay very little taxes or none at all. Among the traders the large majority of the retailers and the wholesalers do not pay taxes, says Abdullah Yusuf, chairman of the CBR.

Those who are engaged in transport which has a large share of the GDP, construction, hotels and restaurants pay very little of taxes. The same goes for commission agents he told a meeting of top businessmen.

Banks and insurance companies did not pay full taxes. Those engaged in livestock breeding, dairy farming and poultry business hardly paid any tax and the profits of the rich orchard and horticulture did not yield tax payments.

The textile and food processing sectors are major evaders he says.

He surprised his audience by saying sixty three per cent of the corporate income tax filers paid no taxes or declared losses. And 12 per cent of those that showed profits declared an income of 200,000. The president of the FPCCI Tanveer Sheikh who was at the meeting said the tax-GDP ratio should be at least 17 per cent of the GDP instead of 11 per cent. That is a long way off as while the percentage of the GDP growth increases steadily, the percentage of increase in tax revenues increase very poorly. Higher economic growth should be marked by far higher tax payments than now.

Now the businessmen no longer press for federal agricultural income tax on farm lords but want the provincial governments to collect that tax as agriculture is a provincial subject. They want the provincial government to do that in the name of equity and for larger provincial revenues, but the fact is that those who rule the provinces as feudal lords are as much opposed to income tax on agriculture as their federal elders are opposed to land reforms. Hence the businessmen are knocking at the same locked doors twice but will get no results.

So what can a revamped and renamed federal bureau of revenues do which the CBR can’t? How much will the prime minister empower the FBR in an election year?

Tax collection is now far more than the budgeted month after month but not enough to meet the soaring needs of the government and the modest expectations of people. Hence the increase in frustrations despite the promise of ‘Jam tomorrow’.

VLADIMIR PUTIN made headlines last weekend when he blasted the Bush administration for its "almost uncontained hyper-use of force" that has created a world where "no one feels safe." If he had been a Democratic presidential candidate, it would have been a standard stump speech. But coming from a Russian president, his remarks had pundits ruminating about a new Cold War.

I was in the audience in Munich when Putin made his speech, and the tone seemed to me more one of resentment than belligerence. He was proud, prickly, defiant -- a leader with all the Russian chips on his shoulder. You could hear his inner voice: We let you dismantle the Berlin Wall. We folded the Warsaw Pact. We dissolved the Soviet Union -- all on your promises that you wouldn't take advantage of our weakness. And what did we get? Nothing! You surrounded us with Nato weapons.

Putin's comments may be jarring to Americans, but they express a bitterness that's widespread here. His generation of Russians grew up in a country that claimed the status of "superpower," and they don't like being taken for granted. Putin, a former KGB officer with a black belt in judo, has been pugnacious in standing up for his country's interests, and Russians seem to like that. In the latest opinion polls, his popularity is well above 70 per cent.

I met with one of Putin's top aides on Tuesday in a building that once housed the headquarters of the Soviet Communist Party. "We want to work together with you," he explained. "But please open your eyes. We will never accept that the sole power in the world will be the US."

Russia is back. That's the real lesson I take from Putin's blunt comments. A country that was near collapse after the fall of Soviet communism has regained enough confidence and stability to take a verbal shot at its old rival. "We are emerging from nothing," the Putin aide told me. To explain the Putin phenomenon, the Kremlin's chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, recently compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another president who brought his country back from economic disaster and restored its pride. Like FDR, Putin is using "presidential power to the maximum degree for the sake of overcoming the crisis," Surkov said.

Visiting here for the first time since 1990, I am struck by how everything in Russia is different, and everything is the same. Driving in from the airport, you see the familiar monument marking the farthest German advance in World War II -- a testament to the Red Army's fierce resistance to foreign invasion. And next to it is the Mega Mall with its huge Ikea showroom -- a foreign invasion that, in the end, proved unstoppable.

In Red Square, the sombre stones of Lenin's tomb are a reminder of Soviet power. But across the way, in what used to be the drab GUM department store, are glittering displays of the latest fashions from Vuitton and Dior.

What hasn't changed is Russia's neurotic relationship with the West. Russian friends tell me the country feels unloved and unappreciated -- a political doormat that Western powers think they can walk on at will. That's the frustration that surfaced in Putin's speech in Munich.

By Russian standards, this is something of a golden age. Putin recently touted some of the country's achievements: Russian average incomes increased 10 percent in 2006 over the previous year; the economy grew by about 6.7 percent; inflation was in single digits for the first time in many years. Russia's currency reserves rose to $303 billion, the third-largest in the world, and its "stabilization fund" of energy profits was nearly $100 billion. All this in a nation that in 1998, on the eve of Putin's presidency, was essentially bankrupt.

The new Russia has a moment of opportunity. America, far from the "unipolar" superpower Putin describes, is weakened by the Iraq war and is badly in need of allies. If Putin is wise, he can play a pivotal role in resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis -- and thereby restore some of Russia's lost diplomatic clout. Or he can keep complaining that nobody appreciates his country -- and let his old rival struggle a while longer in the Iraq quagmire.

Was Putin's Munich manifesto an "invitation to dialogue," as one of his aides told me? Or was it a warning shot from a newly confident Russia that is rather enjoying America's troubles? If Putin wants to play a role in stabilizing the post-Iraq world, he is pushing on an open door. But does he have the vision and political will to seize the moment? --Dawn/Washington Post

“WHISPER of how I'm yearning”, sang George M Cohan in one of the great American songs of nostalgia, "to mingle with the old time throng". Well, I'm yearning too, not for the gang at 42nd Street exactly, but for the America that Cohan was indirectly hymning -- for the Idea of America, with a capital I, which once made the United States not just the most potent of all the nations but genuinely the most liked.

Perhaps, with a future new president already champing at the bit, we are about to witness its rebirth. As a foreigner I am immune to the rivalries or seductions of American party politics, but I have loved the old place for 60 years, and I simply pray for an American leader to give us back its baraka, as the Arabs say - nothing to do with religion or economics or power or even ideology, but the gift of being at once blessed and blessing.

Of course nobody can claim that the old dreams of America were ever perfectly fulfilled. They often let us down. They were betrayed by the national reputations for crime, corruption, racism and rampant materialism. Not all the presidents, God knows, were icons of virtue or even of glamour, and the benevolent Uncle Sam of the old cartoonists was more often interpreted, around the world, as a fat moron in horn-rimmed spectacles, chewing a cigar. Nobody's perfect, still less any republic.

But I think it is true that only in our time has the American Idea lost its baraka. A generation or two ago, most of us, wherever we lived, loved the generous self-satisfaction of it, if not in the general, at least in the particular. The GI was not then a sort of goggled monster in padded armour, but a cheerful fellow chatting up the girls and distributing candy not as a matter of policy, but out of plain goodwill -- everyone's friendly guy next door. To millions of radio listeners around the world, the Voice of America was a voice of decency, and one could watch the lachrymose patriotic rituals of America -- the hand on heart, the misty-eyed salute to the flag - with more affection than irony.

For myself, I responded to them all too sentimentally. Like Walt Whitman before me, I heard America sing! I relished the hackneyed old lyrics – “Mine eyes have seen the glory, Thy word our law, Thy paths our chosen way, Oe'r the land of the free and the home of the brave, God bless America, land that I love ... Most of the words were flaccid, many of the tunes were vulgar, but as I heard them I saw always in my mind's eye, as Whitman did, all the glorious space, grandeur and opportunity that was America, Manhattan to LA. Sea, in fact, to shining sea.”

In those days we did not think of American evangelists as prophets of political extremism -- they seemed more akin to the homely convictions of plantation or village chapel than to the machinations of neocons. We bridled rather at the American assumption that the US of A had been the only true victor of the second world war, but most of us did not very deeply resent the happy swagger of the legend and danced gratefully enough to the American rhythms of the time. We thought it all seemed essentially innocent.

Innocent! Dear God! Half a century, and nobody thinks that now. Far from being the most beloved country on earth, today the US is the most thoroughly detested. The rot really started to set in, in my view, with Abraham Lincoln, one of the most admirable men who ever lived. He it was who saw in American glory the duty of a mission. America, he declared, was the last best hope of earth. The pursuit of happiness was not its national vocation, but the example of democracy. The more like the United States the world became, the better the world would be. No statesman was ever more sincere or kindly in his beliefs, but poor old Abe would be horrified to see how his interpretation of destiny has gone sour.—Dawn/Guardian Service

THE word ‘racist’ surfaced recently in sections of the media in Britain, after three ill-mannered white British women hurled abuse on the ‘Big Brother’ television show at Shilpa Shetty, an actress from the Indian silver screen, The episode was described in an article published in the Dawn in its issue of February 4.

The tone of the attack and the use of four-letter words on television, unthinkable in the subcontinent, brought a storm of protest from Brits of Indian and Pakistani origin.The women claimed afterwards that they were not really racist at all. It was just cultural differences with the Indian glamour girl that brought about the assault. But the word ‘racist’ was nevertheless tossed about like a Waldorf salad. If that was not bad enough, the word ‘fascist’ also made a sudden appearance in staid, multicultural England, though in an entirely different context.

The two words mean two different things, and it is extremely rare for a person to refer to another member of the human species as both a racist and a fascist, and that too in the same breath. But apparently, shortly after the historic acquittal last November of a member of the British group that still wears jackboots and black uniforms and gives the Nazi salute at secret meetings, a commentator described the British National Party as both ‘racist’ and ‘fascist. ’

It is, of course, an exclamation of derision; rather like the convenient lumping together of all people from the Indian subcontinent as ‘Pakis.’ But the purist will agree that the use of the two words in conjunction is not only a bit of slipshod thinking but also ignores the distinction in language.

Mary Kenny, author of Germany Calling: A personal biography of William Joyce – Lord Haw-Haw put it rather nicely in an article which appeared in a section of the British press. A racist is a person who ridicules and pours scorn on people of another race because he thinks they are inferior, a sentiment often based on differences in colour. A racist may also hate certain religions where a faith is linked to ethnicity, as in the current attack on people professing the Islamic faith.

Fascism, on the other hand, is used to describe any movement which advocates a dictatorship of the right. It is the political philosophy of the authoritarian, corporate and militarist state as existed in Nazi Germany. It is hostile to communism and on occasion to capitalism.

Some western critics nevertheless added a new dimension to the meaning of fascist, by describing the systems which existed under Stalin and Mao Zedong as fascist states. The emphasis here is on a totalitarian as opposed to a democratic set-up. The fascist state, however, has a background and a history.

Fascism, in the historical sense, was the name given to a rightist political movement which governed Italy as a dictatorship during the period 1920–1943, founded in Milan in 1919 by Benito Mussolini who, like many of his associates, had been a socialist party member.

From its inception Italian fascism was able to capitalise on the chaotic economic situation prevailing in post World War I in Italy and on the weakness of the democratic centre parties. Hitler, who took his inspiration from Mussolini, also exploited the economic situation that existed in Germany after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and set up a totalitarian state in 1933.

In time Italian fascism emerged as the self-proclaimed enemy of Italian communism -- winning over the support of the industrialists, war veterans and the lower middle classes hit by high inflation and chronic unemployment. In 1921, the party won 35 seats in the Italian chamber of deputies.

Kenny points out that it is possible for a racist to be a fascist, but this is not always the case. Similarly, it is possible for a fascist to be a racist. Here again there are instances which suggest that this is not necessarily so. Two cases in point, of fascist leaders who were not racists, are Franco of Spain and Salazar of Portugal, both of whom had a pretty long innings at the crease.

While the Nazis were turning the screws on the sons of Zion in the concentration camps, Franco gave asylum and provided sanctuary to more Jewish refugees than democratic Sweden. What is more, in the 1930s, Franco was described in the left-wing New Statesman as being a ‘negrophile’ because he employed hordes of dark skinned Moroccan troops. Whatever Franco might have been, he was certainly not a racist.

Dr Salazar, a dictator with strong leanings towards the clergy, was another example of a fascist who was not a racist. In fact, it is difficult to think of another European country which has such a positive attitude towards foreigners, black or white, as Portugal. One has to only look at Brazil, a former Portuguese colony, to get an idea of what a truly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural country is like.

This writer is reminded of the time when a cruise ship flying the Brazilian flag docked at Cape Town. This was a good 20 years before apartheid was lifted in South Africa. The harbour police boarded the ship and asked the captain to point out how many of his crew and passengers were European and how many were African or Indian. The captain scratched his head, shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know what you fellows are talking about. We’re all Brazilians.”

The white South African regime which practised Apartheid was assuredly racist and thoughts of racial purity trickled down to every party, both rightist and leftist. How else can one explain the motto of the Communist Party of South Africa which urged ‘workers of the world to unite – for a white South Africa’? Nevertheless, the Boers were not fascist. They were anti-monarchist and practised a kind of democracy reserved exclusively for the whites.

There are a few European countries that managed to keep away from both fascism and racism, the most notable of them being France. For years before the two world wars, the French were regarded as the most civilised and cultured of the European countries. They tolerated every kind of religious and political dissent.

Of course, there were pockets of anti-Semitism in France, as there were in Russia, England, Germany, Austria, Costa Rica in Central America and parts of the United States of America. But racism, as it is generally understood, as an expression of intense disapproval caused by the colour of a person’s skin, was extremely rare, until immigrants started to pour in from former French colonies.

Who can forget how the black American jazz singers, led by the legendary Josephine Baker, were given a warm welcome by the French? Baker, who suffered discrimination and racist abuse in her native East St Louis, became the toast of the City of Lights almost overnight. All it really took was one successful performance at the Folies Bergere and Paris lay at her feet.

But long before the democratic French had tuned in on the coat tails of September 11, racism had started to rear its ugly head, and one heard of racist attacks on émigrés from Algeria, Morocco and other former French colonies south of the Sahara, who had decided to make France their home.

However, not too many Pakistanis visit France. Most gravitate to the United Kingdom for their holidays or to study. That is why the Shilpa Shetty episode caused a little heartburn among cinema fans in Karachi and Lahore. It took some of them back to the 1970s and the rash of ‘Paki’ jokes which erupted, one of which bears retelling. It’s the self-effacing one about the Pakistani telling his white neighbour that he was better off than he was.

In spite of the fact that they had a wife and two sons, lived in the same kind of house, drove the same kind of car, earned the same amount of money and had the same future prospects, the Pakistani claimed that he was far better off than his friend who lived next door. When quizzed about how he had come to this remarkable conclusion, the Pakistani said that he didn’t have a ‘Paki’ as a neighbour. One hopes that the Shetty episode is an isolated one and that the animosity was triggered off by cultural rather than racist feelings. Everything said and done, England is still the best country to live in.