Greater role for provinces

PAKISTAN’S senior economic policymakers believe that the country should be focusing on what they call “second generation reforms”. The first generation concerned the need to obtain macroeconomic stability, a goal that was reached in about four years after the assumption of political power by the military in October 1999. That effort involved reducing the budget deficit, reducing the burden of external and internal debt, as well as the rate of monetary expansion.

All this was achieved but at the cost of squeezing growth. However, growth returned in 2003-04 when the government and the State Bank relaxed both the fiscal and the monetary stance. At that time, policymakers in Islamabad began to talk about second-generation reforms involving a host of policies concerning various sectors of the economy, the government’s role in encouraging and regulating the private sector, strengthening and building institutions of economic management, and generally improving the environment in which the newly energised private sector could operate.

The government also revived the privatisation programme thus adding to the strength of private enterprise. What the identified second generation effort did not explicitly include were relations between the federal government and the governments at the subnational levels.

The evolution of the Pakistani economy has reached the point where the next big push will need to come from the provinces that are part of the federation. While Islamabad must continue to facilitate and regulate, the provinces need to get more fully involved in using the resources available to them for accelerating the rate of economic growth and addressing the problems of poverty and uneven distribution of income.

They will need to establish the goals they should aim to reach, determine how they will be reached and define how the public sector will need to work with private enterprise to move forward. If the provinces must move into the driver’s seat, they will have to be much more explicit in giving shape to public policy in reaching the defined goals.

Public policy itself must be shaped by discourse between those who govern and the citizenry. This dialogue must be conducted within a well defined institutional framework so that a tradition can be established for continuous consultation and feedback into the decision making process.

An institutional mechanism now exists that can be used to have on-going discourse between those who govern and those who are governed. Thanks to the promulgation of the Local Government Act in 2001, a mechanism is in place that can become part of this institutional process. This act established elected councils that have the capacity to work closely with the citizenry and to communicate the people’s aspirations to the higher echelons of government.

Given Pakistan’s history — if we begin history with the launch of the movement to create an independent state for the Muslims of British India — the country should have created a political structure that allowed considerable autonomy to the provinces. That did not happen. Of the three constitutions that have been used with varying degrees to govern political life in the country, those promulgated in 1956 and 1973 were supposedly federal in their design.

The second, authored by President Ayub Khan in 1962, was federal only in name. It prescribed, for all intents and purposes, a unitary form of government with concentration of power in the hands of the president. By design, the 1973 Constitution gave more power to the provinces and created institutions such as the Council of Common Interests (CCI) to which the provinces had recourse in case the federal government violated the basic principles governing the division of powers between different tiers of administration. It also entitled the provinces to receive compensation for the exploitation of their natural resources for national development.

These provisions notwithstanding, the system of governance that is in operation now concentrates most powers in the hands of the president who, in effect, is not only the head of state but is also the country’s chief executive. The CCI remains inactive and the National Finance Commission has been convened but not at regular intervals as mandated by the Constitution.

The last time the Commission offered an award was in February 1997 when an “interim administration” — between the dismissal of one elected government and the election of another — was in place. It was reconvened by the government of President Musharraf but, in spite of having been in session for a number of months, it was unable to reach a consensus on the distribution of financial resources to the provinces.

The formulas for compensating the provinces for their mineral wealth and water resources have become the subject of considerable controversy. They need to be updated. Many of the functions related to economic and social development continue to be performed from Islamabad. In short, provincial autonomy, while granted on paper, has not become the guiding principle for the design of public policy.

In order to realise the full development potential of its people and its endowments, Pakistan must allow more space within which the governments at different level can function without the centre’s often stifling control over the provinces. This implies the allowance of not only greater provincial autonomy but also the grant of a greater role for the various institutions that make up the system of local government. For this to happen, the systems already in place don’t need to be changed.

The 1973 Constitution allows considerable autonomy and operational space to the provinces. The local government system created in 2001 has introduced elements of political accountability to the people who now have the power to serve local communities. Laws don’t need to be changed. It is the spirit in which they are followed that needs to accommodate the need for greater delegation of political and economic authority.

There is also a growing body of economic literature that focuses on the very positive role subnational governments can play in bringing the process of development closer to the people. There is a consensus among the practitioners of development that bringing government closer to the people promotes economic development. It also provides a valve through which economic and political tensions can be released.

What happens to Pakistan’s four provinces will affect the country’s economic and political future in several different ways. Not only will the provinces deeply influence the country’s economic progress, they will also profoundly impact its social and political development and its relations with the outside world. There are many examples of the way the provinces will affect the direction and pace of the country’s economic progress. Some of this will happen for non-economic reasons.

To take one obvious example, whether the country is able to control the rise of Islamic extremism and overcome the challenges posed by the strengthened Al Qaeda will depend to a considerable extent on what happens to the North West Frontier Province and to the province’s tribal areas. These areas are, at this time, in the eye of the international storm. Pakistan is being constantly pressured by the West to apply force to bring under control the rapidly deteriorating situation in the tribal belt.

But force alone won’t work. The Iraq war has amply demonstrated that it takes more than the display of military strength and the use of military might to induce political and social change.

The same applies, albeit to a lesser extent, to Balochistan. There is a widespread impression in the West that Quetta, Balochistan’s capital, has become the command and control centre of the resurgent Taliban. Ethnic strife in Balochistan will also affect Pakistan’s economic future. The province has hosted an insurgency aimed at gaining greater political autonomy for several decades.

What is sought is a loosening of Islamabad’s firm control over the way the province’s economy is managed. Inspired in part by the tribal chiefs who fear loss of power if the province develops economically, the movement has at times threatened the integrity of the Pakistani state. This insurgency can also be overcome through rapid economic progress.

The province has vast mineral reserves not only of natural gas but also of coal and copper and many other minerals. It will also be the area of transit for the pipeline that is planned — and may be built some time in the future — connecting Iran with Pakistan and India.

Developments in and around the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea will further enhance the geographic importance of the province. The Pakistani government has recently announced the intention to build another deep water port on the Balochistan coast. The preliminary plan is to locate it at a small fishing village located between Karachi and the under-development port of Gwadar currently under development.The restiveness in these two provinces has one thing in common: they are an expression of the Pashtun sentiment, an ethnic group that is troubled at having been excluded from the way the political and economic power is being distributed among the various groups that inhabit these lands. These movements can be controlled and canalised towards productive ends if the economic and social developments of the Pashtun areas are systematically handled.

What is required is the adoption of a well thought-out and carefully developed strategy to bring economic development to this area’s economically and socially backward people. This will require a large flow of capital from both the central government and the donor community and the building of institutions aimed at regional development.

Balochistan along with the NWFP are the gateways to the resource rich countries of Central Asia. They could become the hub of economic activity if the countries in the region — both South and Central Asia — could find a way of working together.

If Pakistan is to take full advantage of its geographical position — its location on what could become busy corridors of commerce connecting the rapidly growing economies of Central Asia to the country’s north, the Middle East to the west, India to the south, and China to the east — it must develop separate economic strategies for its four provinces.

The province of Sindh — in particular the port city of Karachi — is increasingly becoming a hinterland for the rapidly developing Gulf region. There are already ambitious schemes — for the moment still on paper — aimed at developing Karachi’s housing and tourism sectors with the help of Arab capital.

The Arabs are now much more interested in keeping their incomes and wealth nearer home and they regard Pakistan as a part of their hinterland. There is news of the purchase of a couple of islands lying off the coast of Karachi for the development of tourist resorts on the lines of what has already begun to happen along the coast of the UAE.

There is some hope that what investors have done to the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, to Bahrain and Doha, they could also do to Karachi. Karachi has some advantages not available to the Gulf cities. It has a large population. It, therefore, does not have human resource constraints that inhibit the rapid development of the Gulf cities.However, it is the province of Punjab that will have the most pronounced impact on Pakistan’s economic future. How Punjab could help the country move forward will be the subject of the articles in this space for the next several weeks.

The language of entertainment

IN March 2007 I went to present a paper at a conference on Urdu at the University of Mumbai. I took this opportunity to interview script and dialogue writers, editors and directors about the language of Hindi films. Some Urdu literary figures like Quratul Ain Hyder have commented that Urdu has been hijacked and its name changed to Hindi in Bollywood.

Historians of the cinema have pointed out that beginning with the early success of ‘Alam Ara’, Urdu started dominating the cinema. A number of other films with Muslim dramatis personae and based on legends in the Islamic culture came to be made. The films were called Hindustani films, although, according to many people, this was actually Urdu.The British called it Hindustani and wrote it in both the Urdu and the Devanagari scripts. However, they used the Urdu script mostly. Though the censor board certified some films as being in Urdu, most considered to be in that language were given Hindi certificates. Even later, it was only rarely that a film got the Urdu certificate — Sohrab Moodi’s ‘Khoon Ka Khoon’ and ‘Pukar as well as Mahbub Khan’s ‘Al-Hilal’ and ‘Ailan’ did get it — but the language of the films which got Hindi certificates was also the same or, at least very similar.

Sometimes Urdu writers would maintain their script, and in their works the poems would appear in the form of the ghazal or rubai but these were are called Hindi ‘geet’ in the film. Famous singers such as Mukesh, Kishore, Rafi, Lata, Asha Bhosle, and Geeta Dutt did, and still do, reproduce flawless Urdu-Arabic sounds. The exceptions are singers and poets from Punjab who substitute ‘k’ for ‘q’ as, indeed, is the common practice in Pakistan.

My view is that the substitution of indigenous sounds for foreign (Arabic and Persian) ones is natural and one need not make so much fuss about it. However, the purists are always averse to such things and kick up a storm the moment one says anything as heterodox as that. The reason is that this particular pronunciation of Urdu, as well as its Persianised character, is an identity symbol of the ‘ashraf’ of north India which was mostly Muslim.

After the removal of Persian from its position of power by the British, this kind of Urdu became a social-class marker as well as a religious-identity marker of the ‘ashraf’ of this part of the world. That is why any infringement of the rules of pronunciation of Urdu is greeted with derision by the self-styled guardians of the language.

The idea that Bollywood films are all in Urdu and it is only for political reasons that they are said to be in Hindi is not entirely true as Javed Siddiqui, one of the great names of Bollywood, pointed out to me in a telephone interview. Hindi films are not all in the same language. They use different styles of speaking.

Some of them use Sanskritised Hindi in their titles, dialogues and even lyrics. Many use language appropriate for the occasion and the person. Thus, different characters draw upon different symbolic vocabularies — Muslims on Perso-Arabic ones in historical films and Hindus on Sanskritic ones — for distinctive authenticity.

Moreover, the argot of the Mumbai underworld — Bambaiya Hindi — is also used in some films as are dialects such as Bhojpuri. In short, only the language corresponding to Urdu, to the exclusion of other styles and varieties of the larger composite language Hindi-Urdu, are not used in Hindi films.

However, while the languages of Bollywood’s ‘Hindi’ movies is not always the language called ‘Urdu’ in Pakistan’s films, it is also true that it is not the Sanskritised Hindi of India’s officialdom. Thus, this language is closer to what used to be called Hindustani. In its commonly used form, it is almost identical to what Pakistanis call Urdu.

There are a few words which differ in Pakistani and Indian films. For instance, ‘vishwas/yaqeen’ are used in Bollywood whereas in Lollywood this is simply ‘yaqeen’. In the same way Bollywood uses ‘pariwar’ which in Lollywood is ‘khandaan’. These words are well-known, however, to film audiences on both sides of the border.

In general, notwithstanding some difficult Perso-Arabic words in Lollywood Urdu or Sanskritic ones in Bollywood Hindi, the language in general use is similar enough to be widely understood by audiences on both sides of the border. Thus those who celebrate the entertainment industry in South Asia including films, dramas, songs and jokes etc as the common linguistic legacy of the ancestor of Urdu and Hindi — call it by any name such as Hindustani, Hindi or Hindvi — have a point.

The name Urdu came to be used only in 1760 for this language but the names Rekhtah, Hindi, Hindvi, Dehlvi, Deccani and Gujri have been used ever since the 13th century if not earlier. Europeans had coined the names Indostan, Moors and the well-known Hindistani for it. But it is only the entertainment industry which uses this language, although, like everybody else, it calls it either Hindi or Urdu. It should be called Urdu-Hindi but that would not be politically correct.

The question as to why Bollywood chose a language, or a variety of a language, so close to what is called Urdu has been discussed by scholars. One of them, Mukul Kesavan of the Jamia Millia, argues that the roots of the Hindi cinema are in the Islamic culture of feudal, decadent, aristocratic Muslim centres of rule of which Lucknow is the best known archetype. The language of this culture, he argues, is Urdu.

Thus, Urdu, Awadh and the tawaif (courtesan) have been instrumental in shaping Hindi cinema as a whole and not just some “Muslim” component of it.

Others deny this. The people I interviewed, including such famous names as Javed Akhtar and Gulzar, said that it was Hindustani which was more easily understood than the other variants of this major language of north India. Javed Akhtar actually said it was Hindustani dipping towards the Urdu end of the language but Gulzar said this was easy Hindustani or folk Hindi.

Nadira Zaheer, wife of the famous Raj Babbar and daughter of the equally famous Sajjad Zaheer, told me she writes for the theatre in a language she calls Hindustani but which sounded mostly like Urdu to my ears. I was told that teachers are hired by actors to teach them the Urdu pronunciation. The biography of singers, such as Lata, also confirms this.

My own hypothesis is that the language of Bollywood dips towards the Urdu end, as does that of soap operas on TV and the street itself because this is the natural language of north Indian and Pakistani cities. It is popular because it is intelligible to more people than any other South Asian language and, therefore, it sells better than any other language.

The sellers of entertainment are aware of this and hence, wisely, do not get ensnared by ideology into using Sanskritised Hindi. Likewise, they do not use highly Persianised Urdu.

As it happens, ordinary Urdu spoken in Pakistani cities is very much like ordinary Hindi spoken in Indian cities. That is why the language of Bollywood is so close to the language of Lollywood. And that is precisely why officialdom, chauvinists and extremists on both sides want to deny the similarity of the commonly understood street language in north India and Pakistan and that this language — call it what you will — is closer to spoken Urdu in Pakistan than they wish to acknowledge.

Redefining the war on terror

The "Axis of Good" is starting to crumble. It is several months yet before British Prime Minister Tony Blair's promise to retire falls due, but already his current and former cabinet colleagues are trying to put some distance between themselves and his most disastrous legacy, the invasion of Iraq.

This is causing some embarrassment to his American and Australian partners in crime, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister John Howard. (Only those three countries actually shot and bombed their way into Iraq, although lots of others showed up later for a while.)

It started in New York on Tuesday last with Mr. Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary in the Blair cabinet and a contender to be deputy prime minister or foreign secretary when he goes. Benn revealed that the British government had told all its diplomats to stop using the phrase "war on terror" last December, because "we can't win by military means alone. And because this isn't us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives."

It was a dangerous phrase, Benn continued, because it imputed power, organisation and common purpose to "a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world. By letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength."

It was a small act of rebellion, but a significant one, for Prime Minister Blair's own website still uses the phrase "war on terror" a mind-numbing 154 times. Blair's official spokesperson, asked about the discrepancy, replied tight-lipped: "We all use our own phraseology." And it was significant that Hilary Benn made his speech not in Britain but in the United States, where it would cause maximum offence to President Bush, the originator and most frequent abuser of the offending phrase.

Blair's loss of authority over his own government was underlined the following day in Australia, when Helen Liddell, the British high commissioner, was asked about Benn's remarks. "Phrases like war on terror, these are tabloid slogans," she replied -- and went on to say something that must have caused Prime Minister John Howard great annoyance.

For four years, ever since he sent Australian troops to invade Iraq, Howard has insisted that they are there to fight terrorism:

"Iraq is not a diversion from the war on terror, it is the front line and we must face this reality," he said in 2004. And he has been repeating that ever since, together with the embellishment that Australia's troops have to be on that front line because defeat in Iraq would embolden terrorists in South-East Asia.

This summons up an intriguing image of potential South-East Asian terrorists checking each night for news from Iraq as they hover on the cusp of a choice between life as a terrorist and a career in accountancy, but their actual motivations are probably a bit more complex than that. What's interesting is not that John Howard is wrong; it's that the British high commissioner in Canberra said he was wrong. Ambassadors don't normally do that. Helen Liddell was a member of Tony Blair's cabinet in 2003 when

Britain took the decision to join the Bush administration in invading Iraq, and she spoke with the certainty of one who knows where the bodies are buried: "We have never seen Iraq as part of the war on terrorism.

Certainly at the moment we are engaged in a war on the streets in Afghanistan, in Iraq against terrorism. But our raison d'etre for our involvement in Iraq has not been about terrorism."

The real message of these events is that the new British cabinet that is installed this summer after Blair leaves office, presumably under the prime ministership of Gordon Brown, is not going to be tied by Blair's dogmas and Blair's commitments.

Australia may soon be America's only remaining significant ally in Iraq.

But there is another message, too: words matter. The "war on terror" was an extremely pernicious concept that led its purveyors down some very strange pathways, because both words were misleading.

"Terror," or terrorism, isn't a thing you can have a war against. It is a paramilitary technique, equally available to Tamils in Sri Lanka, Islamists in Algeria, and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

You use police and security measures to track down the terrorists, you deploy political measures to eat into their popular support, but unless and until they end up (like the Tamil Tigers) with political and military control over a large piece of territory, "war" is an irrelevant concept.

And that's the other word that's a problem. By calling it a war, the Bush administration conditioned the American public to expect invasions of whole countries -- and then delivered them. Whether the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq actually increased the "terrorist threat" to the West is still a contentious issue among military experts and strategic analysts, but they certainly didn't diminish it by much. It's a lucky thing that the threat is still so very small.

—Copyright

A clear choice

France faces one of the starkest choices in decades for the president who will lead the nation out of its economic decline, calm social tension and end a growing national identity crisis. Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, the leading rightwing and socialist candidates, have emerged into the second round of presidential elections, seeing off an unsettling centrist challenge from François Bayrou and a resurgent campaign from the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Mr Sarkozy emerged the clear favourite from the exit polls with 30% of the vote, while Ms Royal got 25.2 per cent. Mr Sarkozy's projected vote was a personal triumph, nearly 10 points above what his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, achieved. The turnout of over 85 per cent was also significant– at one point voters formed large queues at polling stations. The French were making amends for their abstention in 2002 which led to the shock appearance of Mr Le Pen in the second round. But they were also giving the next president of France a strong mandate for changing the country.

The biggest threat to both frontrunners and the potential recipient of France's large floating vote turned out not to be Mr Le Pen, who got only 11 per cent, but the avuncular, professorial figure of Mr Bayrou, who came away with 18 per cent of the vote. His promise to forge a new social democratic centre attracted a large following. So too did his manner. He charmed the electorate, whereas Mr Sarkozy invigorated some at the expense of frightening others.

Mr Bayrou's role in the election is not over with this result, for he emerges as the king or queen maker of the second round on May 6. Mr Sarkozy has more to gain from the far right than Ms Royal has from the far left, who were decimated in this election.

But the big question now is how many of Mr Bayrou's votes will go to Ms Royal and how many to Mr Sarkozy. Sensing last night that the fight for the presidency would be over the centre ground, Mr Sarkozy gave a restrained victory speech in which he promised to protect the weak and unite the country around a "French dream", a reference to Martin Luther King.

—The Guardian, London