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| May 16, 2008 | Friday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 10, 1429 |
Lebanon on the precipice
Nerves are cracking
OTHER VOICES - Pushto Press
Harmony in creation
How do we understand feudalism?
Passé politics
Friday feature
I HAVE been following the very interesting debate on the question of feudalism in Pakistan in the pages of Dawn. I think one among several problems with the notion of feudalism is that it was conceptualised long after its demise in Western Europe and in the wake of the rise of its adversary, i.e. capitalism. It was thus constituted not in its own terms but as the ‘other’ of capitalism. It thus became a residual category — inclusive of everything that capitalism was supposedly not.
ONLY a few months ago — in January — President Musharraf told world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, that “Judge economic performance, the welfare of the people and political stability. Please don’t judge (us) on maybe unrealistic western perceptions of democracy and human rights.”
IF the government didn’t do anything it would be accused of sitting idle as the energy crunch became more debilitating by the day. So it is good to see some thought going into an area as critical as conservation after almost a decade of ‘planning’ marked by an unhealthy obsession with ad hocism. A leadership concerned only with the immediate term can easily lose sight of sustainability and relegate future needs to the back burner. That is precisely what happened in Pakistan under the stewardship of Messrs Pervez Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz, of which duo at least one person knew all along that he was a short-term actor on the political stage. Such people, quite understandably, are not inclined to thinking about the future. But finally waking up and doing something does not necessarily mean that the government is doing the right thing. The energy-conservation plan outlined on Wednesday offers little that has not been tried earlier. It needs to be asked how an idea that has been flirted with twice before, only to fail, can somehow deliver the goods this time round.
The proof of the plan will lie in its implementation, in honesty of purpose. Perhaps the energy shortage is so dire now that any little bit will make a tangible difference. Perhaps this time the police and officers of city governments across Pakistan will not see the 9pm deadline for closing shops as yet another avenue for graft. Perhaps this time shopkeepers will not be penalised doubly, forced to run their stores on ever more expensive petrol during the day and then made to shut down at peak sales hours through no fault of their own. Perhaps daylight savings, a monumental failure when it was last tried, will finally be accepted by the people who pay the salaries of our elected representatives. We will have to wait and see.
Sacrifice is in order at every level. June 1 is still two weeks away and in the interim the government must set an example that the public can appreciate and follow readily. The austerity measures promised by the new administration are nowhere to be found. Ministers still travel in entourages of some half a dozen, diesel-guzzling SUVs flanked by police mobiles and outriders. This flashiness may massage the egos of the ruling elite but is viewed with seething contempt by ordinary citizens. People who have been rightfully elected through the ballot box are naturally held to a higher standard than king’s-party cronies and professional hangers-on. Statements that air conditioners will not be turned on in government offices until 11am cut no ice with a public that is well aware that the sahibs who are entitled to such luxuries never reach their offices before noon anyway. Fuel-fired power plants on barges in the Arabian Sea may make sense in the short term but they must never obfuscate the need to develop renewable sources of energy, of which wind is the most viable. Let’s see examples beyond the rhetoric.
ON Wednesday, Hezbollah scored its second victory in recent weeks over the pro-western Lebanese government headed by Fouad Siniora. It succeeded in getting the government to reverse its decision to outlaw the Hezbollah communication system and sack the airport security chief. This was in the first place a monumental blunder in view of the fractious nature of Lebanese politics and Hezbollah’s military strength. Earlier, Hezbollah fighters had driven pro-government Sunni militants out of West Beirut. The crisis began last November when Hezbollah, demanding a veto on cabinet decisions, had quit the Siniora government. It is an indication of the shape of things to come in Lebanese politics that the country has so far abandoned 19 attempts to elect a president after Emile Lahoud walked out six months ago without waiting for a successor to be elected.
The Arab League is now hopelessly divided on the Lebanese issue. The Cairo summit of Arab foreign ministers merely appealed for an end to violence but failed to agree on the text of a resolution that could lay down a peace formula acceptable to all. In fact, Syria, a major actor in Lebanon, did not even send its foreign minister to Cairo and was represented by its envoy to Egypt. A continuation of the crisis not only threatens Arab unity, it could widen the gulf between Iran and the Arab world. In a rather harsh statement, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal accused Iran of backing the anti-Hezbollah ‘coup’ and said this “will have an impact on its relations with all Arab countries”. President Ahmadinejad responded with restraint, saying he believed the Saudi foreign minister ‘spoke in anger’. He said he would take up the issue with Saudi Arabia after ‘his anger has cooled down’.
The problem with tiny Lebanon is that too many people are fishing in its troubled waters. Damascus has always considered Lebanon part of its territory that was separated from Syria by France. Israel has invaded Lebanon twice and has a network of intelligence deeply embedded in Lebanon’s government and society. Saudi Arabia backs the pro-western Siniora government, while President George Bush has not helped matters by laying blame on Syria and Iran every now and then for Lebanon’s troubles. American accusations, Washington should know, only undermine the Siniora government and help Hezbollah. Unless the Lebanese themselves realise the gravity of the situation and patch up their differences it is difficult to see how another civil war can be averted.
MUCH before the three men believed to be dacoits were given a thrashing and set afire allegedly by the lynching mob in Karachi’s Nishtar Road area on Wednesday, sanity, civic sense and human rationality had already died a silent and apparently unsung death. In any civilised society worth its name, things would not have come to such a tragic pass. If media reports are to be believed, area residents held absolute sway while the police kept themselves on the sidelines after a reported robbery in one of the nearby apartment blocks. Though the police have tabled their own version of events, the inconsistency it is suffering from is too obvious to have many takers. The attempt to own it as an armed encounter ending in a coincidental fall on spilled oil and an equally coincidental fire by a random burning stick can at best be described as brave. Making a mockery of their own account is the police claim that action would be initiated against people in the locality if an FIR was lodged by the heirs of the deceased. Besides, pictures of the gory incident carried by both the print and electronic media also fail to show even a single policeman close to the scene, which is indication enough of how the frightening episode must have actually unfolded.
The rising crime rate in the city coupled with the police’s failure to take action even when they apparently can seems to have started pushing people to the wall. Nerves are clearly cracking. Though condemnable to the core, the unfortunate incident does underline the lack of confidence the common man has in the system’s ability to respond to his cries for help. In the public perception, even if the police had arrested the three ill-fated souls, they would only have struck an underhand deal with them. To deny the police this privilege, the mob set the ‘robbers’ on fire. This is what lies at the crux of the incident. One wonders if some lessons have been learnt.
Ceasefire in Swat
Hewad, Peshawar
AFTER several months of operations and crossfire, a ceasefire was announced in the Swat valley after successful talks between the Awami National Party’s provincial leadership and the local Taliban. Unfortunately, right after the ceasefire was announced, an incident of suicide bombing on a police station in Mingora was reported. The Taliban in Swat refused to take responsibility but the question that arises in the minds of the people is: who carried out this act of sabotage? Whenever such an incident occurs, the Taliban refuse to take responsibility…. The people would like to know about the perpetrators of such gory incidents. It is of immense importance that the government is able to identify the culprits. The common people become sceptical when all parties concerned show their incapacity to point out the perpetrators.
The ceasefire announcement should be taken as a good omen. It is always desirable to resolve all issues related to conflicts through the process of dialogue. The efforts of the Awami National Party in this regard are commendable but the dialogue should not take place based on conditions the fulfillment of which may become a difficult task in the future. The government should be careful to see to it that the armed militants do not capture space that is not their right. The government by no means has to acquiesce to their undue demands.
There is also possibility of these talks being sabotaged. If this happens, the region may land into even more severe trouble than the present predicament. It is important in this regard that the exhibition of weapons in public is not allowed. Nobody has the right to establish a parallel state and push through changes in the system through force against the will of the majority of people. Nobody should be allowed to force their ideology on the people. This would go against the intent of the dialogue. The point should be driven home to the Taliban that they can contribute to peace and prosperity in the region only if they try to live with other viewpoints.
Dialogue should be conducted to bring peace to the Pakhtun region and to save neighbouring countries from the fire of militancy and extremism. It should be ensured that the fate of the Pakhtuns is not at stake in the global geostrategic drama. The Taliban, who consider themselves to be sons of the soil, should benefit from the offer of talks by the government and work for the peace and prosperity of the region. External forces that put unnecessary conditions to block the way of dialogue should be stopped from such acts of sabotage. There is every chance that these forces put such conditions for talks which will easily detract from the process of dialogue and peace in the region. Both parties have to be extra cautious in this regard. — (May 11)
— Selected and translated by Khadim Hussain
QURAN says: “He (God) subjected to you all that is in the heavens and in the earth, all from Himself. There are many signs in this for those who reflect” (45:13).
“And of His signs is the creation of the heaven and the earth and the differences in your languages and colours. Lo! Herein indeed are portents for men of knowledge” (30:22).
This seems to have three-fold object. One is that all those who observe and ponder over these signs and in particular over the degree of accuracy and harmony with which the whole system is functioning will accept, without any hesitation, that its creation without a single creator and designer could not have been possible.
Albert Einstein, the famous scientist, says: “God reveals Himself in the harmony that exists in the creation”. According to Quran, had there been other gods other than Allah, everything in the heavens and in the earth would have gone out of order (21:22).
The other object is that those who so ponder will readily accept that human beings, to whom all these creation have been subjected, are truly the vicegerents of Allah. The third is that they would learn something from these signs and make use thereof if they seriously ponder.
The first thing that one can note while pondering over the setting and functioning of countless celestial bodies could be the exceptional degree of harmony in their existence. This is clearly indicated by Quran when it says “He raised the heavens high and set the balance” (55:7). The verse, among other things, implies that after their creation, all the stars, planets and other heavenly bodies were placed in proper order with a view to maintaining necessary equilibrium and balance. Explaining it further Quran says “the sun must not catch up the moon, nor does the night outstrip the day. Each one is travelling in an orbit with its own motion.” (36:40).
If human beings follow the same lesson in their private lives, in inter-personal relations, in national affairs and in international dealings there is no reason as to why they should not overcome most of the problems of this age and live in peace and harmony. Take the example of human body. Slight increase in the rate of blood circulation can disturb the balance and cause damage to such vital parts of the body as heart and kidney. Only a balanced diet, among other things, can ensure the fitness of human body.
Quran also tells us about many a nation that were wiped out from the earth because they had disturbed the balance to an extent that their elimination could be the only way of restoring the balance. The examples of the people of Lut, of Faraoh and of Madyan could be the most glaring of all.
The upshot of the above lessons is that the setup of the whole universe of which we form a part is so designed and structured that every part thereof has to abide by the principles of balance if it has to survive in the system. Human beings, as the vicegerents of Allah, have been assigned a special role in this behalf and for that purpose have been provided necessary guidance. In the first instance they are told not to disturb the balance (55:8). Then they are told how they have to maintain the balance in the sphere of their own activities.
Quran says “we sent our Messengers with clear signs and sent down with them the Book and balance so that the people stand by justice.” (57:25). It means that Allah first made use of balance in setting the Universe in order (55:7) and then sent it down to earth so that the people make use of it in the sphere of their own activities.
Quran categorically tells us to do justice (5:8). Justice can be done in many ways but of particular significance could be when one is assigned to do it between the contesting parties in that case, justice will mainly depend on two things, one is the independence of the person assigned to do justice, the other is the relevance and unbiasedness of the evidence.
If capitalism was progressive and rational, feudalism was backward-looking and marked by superstition. If capitalism was driven by ceaseless technological and economic dynamism, feudalism was stagnant. If capitalism was based upon wage labour, which was a purely economic form of coercion, feudalism was fundamentally characterised by non-economic or extra-economic coercion. Combined with the post-Enlightenment derision of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages, marked by superstition, subservience, stagnation etc. etc., feudalism thus came to be a term of extensive, indeed comprehensive, abuse.
History, however, does not quite substantiate this derision. Economically and technologically it was a period of enormous dynamism. Indeed, the great historian of France, Marc Bloch, in his landmark work, Feudal Society, divided the period into the first and the second feudal ages and observed that even as the society lived by a consciousness of changelessness, so profound and pervasive was change that if an inhabitant of one feudal age were to visit the other, he would not have been able to recognise it.
Technology of agricultural production had evolved, greatly improving the productivity of land and labour; the three-field system had by and large replaced the two-field system; agricultural production itself had expanded to the arable vast forests in eastern Europe; new and better food crops were now being cultivated. Population had grown rapidly, releasing peasants, who were characteristically tied to the land, into an emerging mobile labour market; and so forth.
Indeed, later European historians of the second half of the 20th century had even become wary of using the term ‘feudalism’ for the medieval society, for it appeared to them to be far too tightly structured. And I speak of frontline historians such as Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff and Aaron Gurevich, among many others.
Culturally too, the European Middle Ages gave us some of the immortal works of art whether in architecture, or painting, music or poetry. The same can be said of the Middle Ages everywhere: India, China, Japan, the Arab-Muslim world. But then, the period was also one of enormous exploitation, repression and subordination of one or another section of society by those who had command over the resources, something again true of all ages, including our own.
But the image of feudalism as the repository of all that was oppressive, regressive, superstitious, has survived. One can read all these abuses and much more in some recent writings. It is this image that is mobilised in an attempt to rise to the rational modernity, which notion too is given to us by post-Enlightenment Europe, just as the notion of feudalism was. That is the problem: we are trapped in a discourse that is not of our making, whichever way we might turn.
The terms of debate are really not of our own creation, as it were. And clearly these are all heavily loaded terms, each carrying a baggage even as they appear to us as merely descriptive of an ‘objective’ situation.
We are thus faced with a situation of austere academic analysis of feudalism leading us in one direction and the need for its mobilisation for political agitation into another.
Can we find a compatible space between the two? I think it involves much harder work especially on the part of academics than the easy way out of falling back upon a convenient and familiar term. It is important to recognise that the classic Marxist definition of capitalism as ‘generalised commodity production where labour is a commodity’ marks its idealised, purest form, its ultimate goal; prior to arriving at that purest form, capitalism can combine all kinds of not only pre-capitalist labour uses, but virtually any kind of social structure.
The cotton farmers of the South in the US in the 19th century were no less capitalist because they were employing slave labour on their farms. Japan is among the frontline capitalist economies of the world today, next only to the US, but in terms of its social structure, especially its subjection of women, it is way behind many of even the developing countries; and the ‘feudal’ value of loyalty is still a strong tie that binds many of the employees to their companies even for generations. All of these do not contravene its character as a capitalist economy and society.
It is therefore important to seek to understand each scenario in concrete terms before we take the easy resort to carry bag categories.
The writer was professor of medieval history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
For the layman, it is difficult to reconcile such statements, just a few months later, with the outgoing finance minister’s address to the Senate Standing Committee on Finance “Pakistan’s economy is in a precarious situation because of former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s policies.” A report detailing the true state of the economy is due to be presented to parliament.
The ex-ministers fire back pointing at the deteriorating global economic situation. A recent issue of The Economist lists the dollar index for commodity prices, as a year over year rise of 31 per cent, with food prices increasing 69 per cent. The UN plans to set up a task force to look into the food crisis at hand.
While we ponder the arguments and wonder exactly where the truth lies, one thing is sure — we are squarely in the throes of a ‘blame game’. While the new government grapples with the situation at hand, the questions occupying people’s minds are about what is still to come. Few things are worse than the crush of poverty. An ever-increasing number are bracing to face it.
The familiar pattern repeats itself once again. The finance minister (who recently handed in his resignation) boards flights and sets about the unenviable task of making the usual stops in the US and Middle East, in his efforts to reschedule debt and obtain oil supply credit. Strategic friendship, and religious brotherhood goes the usual predictable distance, not far enough, but somewhere is better than nowhere.
“Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future,” said John F. Kennedy. Prudent governments around the world announce austere measures in the face of imminent economic slowdown. Plans are announced tailored to the needs of their nation. Brazil limits exports of rice, India announces export tariffs, and China and the Middle East focus on currency valuations and securing energy supplies.
Where do our choices stand? Shall we build up our inventory of energy supplies — can’t, strapped for cash. Shall we shift our revenue stream into subsidies for the poor — can’t, strapped for cash. Shall we invest in grand infrastructure projects to provide employment and lift the quality of life — can’t, strapped for cash. Shall we provide affordable housing and healthcare for the poor to ease their burden — can’t, strapped for cash. Can’t, can’t, can’t; strapped for options.
Our range of options is limited to borrowing, cutting spending on desperately needed development programmes, and fighting a losing battle of regulating prices. The unpleasant truth is the absence of fair taxation. I have never met a person, whether rich or poor, who enjoyed paying taxes. But they are necessary. A viable, proud and stable state depends on its own people.
The government which can instill a sense of responsibility and introduce a tax culture will have truly sown the seeds of prosperity. Measures providing incentives for investment are popular and attractive; placing tax burdens are not. A dictatorship will never succeed in achieving effective tax reforms. A democracy has a chance. The time for passé politics has come and gone.
Like a gambler on a losing streak, our situation grows more desperate. An overburdened populace who barely manage to get by with dignity, while putting on a brave face, is in real danger of falling into poverty. A government needs to take the unpopular step of implementing a revamped taxation system which eventually revives us. We may never be dealt a royal flush, but subsequent generations will have a better hand to play with.
