Unemployment on the rise

A NEW reality demands fresh ideas. Pakistan has never been a welfare state but government-owned enterprises did serve as an avenue of employment even at the risk of considerable overstaffing. The situation on the ground today is altogether different and the trend of selling off state-owned organisations is perhaps irreversible. The dynamics of the private sector, meanwhile, are such that the focus is not simply on making a profit but on profit maximisation. Increasing revenues is one way to meet this goal but cutting down on labour costs is usually the preferred short-term route in a high-tech age. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs in the name of downsizing, right-sizing and smart-sizing, and those displaced by machines will never be able to reclaim their previous employments. The concept of a job-for-life is now redundant and lifetime employment can only be guaranteed through a series of jobs. So what is to be done in these changing times? Leaving the jobless to fend for themselves is clearly not an option in a country already on the brink of social implosion. The benefits of the rapid economic growth witnessed in recent years have failed to trickle down to the most needy, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor is widening. The result is widespread unemployment, as reflected by the rising suicide rate among the jobless, and a sharp increase in crime in large cities.

A new Asian Development Bank study confirms that unemployment is on the rise in Pakistan. While the overall unemployment rate fell from 8.3 per cent in 2001-02 to 7.7 per cent in 2003-04, the last two years have seen an upward hike in joblessness. The situation now, in fact, is worse than what it was in the first eight years of the nineties. According to the ADB, unemployment was the highest in the NWFP in 2003-04, at 12.9 per cent, followed by Balochistan and Punjab at eight and seven per cent respectively. Sindh fared better with a six per cent unemployment rate but this may be a deceptive statistic vis-à-vis poverty given that even peasants and bonded labourers are technically employed.

Since almost 80 per cent of Pakistan’s poor live in rural areas, there is a need to increase agricultural productivity, promote non-farm employment opportunities and improve communications and rural infrastructure. On the urban front, the government would do well to focus on self-employment and small and medium enterprises, for multinational corporations cannot absorb the growing ranks of the unemployed. A few menial jobs aside, the requirements of the MNCs are beyond the reach of the rank and file of Pakistani labour and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. Courtesy the current mismatch between the demands of the market and the knowledge imparted by educational institutions, this applies even to those with degrees. To encourage small and medium enterprises and the jobs they can create, it has to be ensured that small entrepreneurs are not made to run from pillar to post trying to acquire working capital. At the same time, trade skills must be taught to unskilled workers to increase their capacity. Uneducated, unemployed young men are easily drawn to militancy and the politics of violence now wracking the country. The social implications of joblessness can be ignored only at our peril.

Where are the ‘disappeared’?

CONTRARY to fears that the campaign for the recovery of missing persons, presumably in the custody of the intelligence agencies, would be overshadowed by the judicial crisis, the issue has not died down. Both the Supreme Court and the relatives of the ‘disappeared’ have been consistently applying pressure on the government for information about the whereabouts of the missing ones. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court once again asked the government to furnish details of 56 people who had been traced recently, while, on Sunday, relatives of the ‘disappeared’ said in Peshawar that 2,500 people had been whisked away by the agencies. Unfortunately, to say that the government has not extended full cooperation to the courts in locating the missing ones is an understatement. Judicial intervention has, indeed, resulted in the recovery of some of the ‘disappeared’, but it has been an uphill task so far. Moreover, the physical and emotional trauma of some of those who have been released indicates the kind of duress they faced during their incarceration. Perhaps no case has been as telling as that of trader Saud Memon, who recently died, weighing a mere 18kgs, days after being released by the intelligence agencies.

In the face of the government’s inability to rein in its security agencies, it appears that only judicial intervention and a strong civil campaign can curtail the intelligence apparatus’s penchant for arbitrarily arresting people. In detaining those who have not been formally charged, the agencies are flouting all legal and constitutional norms and subverting the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. And by refraining from taking strict action against its intelligence agencies, the government is only conniving at such offences. Whether or not a suspect has links with religious extremists or political insurgents is for the court to decide. Allowing the agencies to arrest the suspect and hold him incommunicado amounts to a grave violation of human rights. It also gives the intelligence apparatus an opportunity to operate outside the bounds of the law — which is unmistakable in so many ‘disappearance’ cases.

Fighting vani

IT IS encouraging to note that a 12-year-old girl is fighting back in a village in Mianwali and refusing to “honour” a forced marriage to a man who is 35 years old and father of three that was thrust on her. This evil curse of vani or swara, which never seeks a woman’s consent, is used as a way to settle scores between warring parties, where girls are offered as compensation. All too often very young girls are married off to very old men. In 2002, there was the case of a 20-year-old girl who refused to honour a marriage that was made when she was a mere four months old. Last year too many cases of vani were reported in the press, including one of a two-year-old girl in Bahwalnagar who was married to a 42-year-old man. This is simply barbaric and mercifully the law thinks so too, notably the Supreme Court which took note of the rise in such cases and ordered the police to play a more forceful role in registering

cases against those who practise it.

Laws alone cannot bring about a change and need to be supported by enlightened sections of the community speaking out against such abhorrent customs and practices. In this case, the 12-year-old girl wrote to the district police officer who looked into the matter and managed to convince the family to end the vani through divorce. While this is a good example of how the police can work with the community to resolve such problems, it must still provide the girl with some security for there is a likelihood that she could get into serious trouble for refusing to go through the vani process. It is for this reason that society must be enlightened and its attitudes towards primitive practices changed. NGOs are trying to do so and must be supported in their endeavours.

Miasma of miscalculations

IT WOULD be inaccurate to suggest that, six decades after its inception, Pakistan finds itself at the crossroads once more. The unfortunate truth is that it has never veered too far from that spot.

For more than half of those 60 years, the nation’s fortunes have been presided over by would-be saviours in khaki: the field marshal who declared that representative parliamentary democracy wasn’t suited to the national psyche; the whisky-sodden general who arranged the country’s first and only free elections and then proceeded to authorise genocidal behaviour that precipitated a second partition; the aspiring amir-ul-momineen whose legacy encompasses obscurantism and the proliferation of small arms and narcotics; and the enlightened moderate who cavorts with extremist forces when it suits his purposes, and who currently finds himself not so much at a crossroads as nine-tenths of the way up a cul-de-sac.

General Pervez Musharraf may still be tentatively holding on to the pipe dream of enhancing his longevity through a deal of some sort with the Pakistan People’s Party, notwithstanding his insistence that neither Benazir Bhutto nor Nawaz Sharif would be allowed back into the country ahead of the next elections. That particular threat, after all, has been issued many times before, yet it didn’t prevent surreptitious negotiations with the PPP, with both sides alternating between suggestive hints and denials laced with phony outrage.

However, any sort of an understanding would at best yield another hybrid administration, short-lived and possibly even more dysfunctional than the present arrangement. It would also poke further holes in the credibility of Musharraf and Bhutto when neither of them has much to spare.

Another potential scenario involves the imposition of emergency rule and/or undiluted martial law, with the avoidable May 12 carnage in Karachi being cited as one of the justifications. It isn’t difficult to engineer violence in any part of Pakistan, but at least for the past three decades Karachi has been more volatile than other urban centres.

The sensible course of action would have been to talk the Muttahida Qaumi Movement out of staging a show of strength on the same day as rallies planned by supporters of the suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry. Instead, it appears the law-enforcement agencies were under orders not to interfere, and the result was nearly 50 unnecessary deaths.

Internationally, the deadly clashes in Karachi reinforced the impression of an administration losing its grip. Sections of the British media, meanwhile, are fascinated by the discovery that the fortunes of Pakistan’s sprawling seaside metropolis are controlled to an astonishing extent from a nondescript office in Edgware.

Any goodwill that the MQM may lately have generated by demonstrating its support for a less oppressive form of Islam than that propagated by Islamabad’s Lal Masjid stalwarts has now been squandered, amid the impression that both its efforts were primarily an expression of loyalty towards Musharraf.

The latter has advised against viewing events in Karachi through the prism of ethnicity, raising the prospect of a “drift back to the ’90s”. He did not mention the ’80s, when ethnic strife flourished in Karachi under the aegis of a previous military ruler, and gave rise to the MQM. The basic nature of the organisation obviously hasn’t changed a great deal over the past couple of decades, and soliciting its assistance in times of trouble is hardly the ideal means of avoiding a return to the days when a traffic accident could spark violence on a scale that brought the city to a standstill.

Hopefully, the tinderbox moment will pass. But the effectiveness of the belated security clampdown ought not to be twisted into an argument for replicating it nationwide. At a superficial level, it could be argued that a drastic measure such as declaring an emergency would solve some of Musharraf’s problems by strengthening his grip. It would, at the same time, be tantamount to an acknowledgment of failure.

Besides, perhaps it is simply too late in his tenure for Musharraf to resort to strong-arm options. Eight years after his coup, there is every indication that he has entered the endgame phase, which makes it extremely difficult to backtrack. General Ziaul Haq attempted something of the kind when the docile Junejo administration showed signs of insubordination, and it did him little good.

There can be little doubt that in deciding to arbitrarily sack Iftikhar Chaudhry, Musharraf grievously misjudged not only the Chief Justice’s likely reaction but also misread the national mood. The tussle over the leadership of the Supreme Court coincided with growing popular disenchantment with the status quo.

The lawyers who took to the streets weren’t necessarily enthusiastic about Chaudhry at a personal level, but took umbrage at the insult to the institution. As a lawyer in Karachi told the BBC, “Musharraf has made a big mistake. None of us liked the Chief Justice. He was a rude fellow. He abused us all in court. But the way he’s been treated is just wrong.”

At home and abroad, the attempt to ease out the Chief Justice is being viewed as a consequence of his reputation for demanding answers from the authorities about individuals who have disappeared over the years, presumably as part of the “war on terror”.

Another motivating factor, reputedly, was the potential for embarrassment in the event of the issue of the president’s uniform being raised before the Supreme Court. Musharraf recently suggested that he intends to abide by the Constitution in this respect, which is all very well, except that the document has been devalued over the decades by the propensity of autocrats to amend it more or less at will.

The president has accused his opponents of politicising a legal matter, but he really ought to have taken a good look in the mirror before levelling that charge. Sure, many political parties have opportunistically clambered on to the Chaudhry bandwagon, but they could hardly have been expected to stay on sidelines as the legal fraternity took on what could, at a stretch, be designated the illegal fraternity.

Nor is there much cause for surprise in the fact that the regime in Islamabad has few stores of goodwill to rely upon. Its penchant for privatisation may have given rise to unusually high levels of foreign investment and a soaring stock market, yet basic necessities continue to be priced out of the common man’s reach. And it’s far from clear whether the realisation has dawned on Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz that there is a reason why trickle-down economics is a thoroughly discredited concept.

Poverty and ignorance provide fertile ground for religious fundamentalism to flourish, and it obviously doesn’t help when the ruling party’s leader, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, routinely accedes to every demand raised by the Lal Masjid mullahs, including the nationwide imposition of Sharia.

The government, hopefully, has no intention of implementing such measures, but the verbal acquiescence of its representatives only emboldens the obscurants, who consequently feel free to kidnap cops at will. At the time of writing there was another confrontation brewing in Islamabad, presaging another bout of negotiations aimed at a compromise — a courtesy that, tellingly, is not being extended to the agitating lawyers and judges, whose platform is broadly secular.

The Musharraf administration has engaged productively with India, although the results thus far have not been spectacular. Even if the overtures were intended in part as a distraction from domestic unpleasantness, there can be little question that conciliatory gestures are infinitely preferable to the belligerent rhetoric favoured by some political forces on both sides of the divide. At the same time, New Delhi can hardly be faulted for wishing to pursue more substantive discussions with a less unrepresentative regime. But if it’s holding out for greater stability, it could be in for a long wait.

Much like the US, India is understandably nervous about the possibility of nuclear-armed Pakistan falling under the sway of a regime — military, civilian or hybrid — overtly inclined towards the jihadi mentality. No one ought to be more alarmed by this prospect than Pakistanis. It cannot be indefinitely staved off, however, by a regime that appears to have outlived any utility it may once have had, and which has proved itself incapable of sustaining its handful of positive attributes, such as a relatively laissez-faire approach towards the media.

Unlikely as it may seem at this juncture, it still isn’t impossible for Musharraf to avoid a messy endgame and leave behind a legacy that boasts some redeeming features, provided his parting gift to the nation is genuinely free elections under a demonstrably neutral caretaker administration, with no curbs on participation — barring cases that stand up not only in legal quarters but also in the court of public opinion. Thereafter, it wouldn’t be a huge problem if Musharraf wishes to dispense with his uniform and run for president.

It could validly be argued that representative rule per se is a dubious remedy for Pakistan’s myriad ills, particularly in view of the dismal quality of leadership in the civilian sphere. It is also true, however, that periodic military intervention has done no favours to the nation’s polity: democratic institutions can hardly be expected to display signs of maturity if they are habitually bludgeoned in their infancy.

In the longer term, keeping the army out of politics is a sine qua non of sustainable democracy. Another necessary condition is the universality of education, which also holds the key to meaningful economic development and provides a natural shield against the depredations of obscurantism.

In the short run, all that can realistically be predicted is a long, hot summer of simmering discontent.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com