| June 15, 2008 | Sunday | Jamadi-us-Sani 10, 1429 |
Justice for the common man
Rural reforms By Allah Nawaz Samoo
MODES of expression change with time. New terms and phrases replace the old even though the intent or meaning to be conveyed remains the same. For instance, ‘taking into confidence’ has replaced ‘informing’.
DEMOCRACY, some would say the country, is poised on a knife-edge. Why boding of such a disaster so soon after democratic elections that were hailed to be reasonably free and fair?
Expressions in politics and diplomacy are often used to create the appearance of activity or progress when nothing (or the opposite of that which was expected) is in fact happening. When it is said that action on a certain issue will be taken ‘in due course of time’, the intention is to keep the possibility open that it will never be taken or to discourage questions as to when exactly it will be taken.
At times representatives of rival parties will sit down to see if they can work out a modus vivendi or perhaps even move toward a cooperative relationship. Their negotiations may fail and the outlook for normalisation of their relations remains less than bright. But neither side may want to admit failure or accuse the other of intransigence. There are various ways of taking the outside world ‘into confidence’. If neither side had been willing to make substantive concessions to the other, and if their encounter had been more adversarial than friendly, their joint statement at the end will probably say that the talks were ‘frank and candid’, and that as a result each side had gained a better understanding of the other’s point of view.
If the conferees were rivals but not enemies, and although their differences were not resolved, their interaction remained pleasant, with tea breaks and exchange of reminiscences, jokes and laughs, and if they understood the difficulties each had with making concessions, the announcement at the end may say that the talks had been cordial, and that they had improved the ‘atmosphere’ of their relations. The parties will probably say also that even though agreement on outstanding issues had not yet been reached, they were determined to continue their quest for it, and that the talks would be resumed in the near future.
Some of these terms and phrases have appeared in statements issued at the end of each round of the ‘composite dialogue’ between India and Pakistan. In the fourth round the foreign secretaries and the foreign ministers of the two countries conferred for two days (May 21 and 22). They did no better than agreeing to provide consular access to the citizens of one country languishing in the other’s jails. This was a ‘non-issue’ and its insignificance can be seen in the fact that Indian consular officials in Islamabad paid no heed to one of their spies who had been imprisoned in Pakistan for nearly 30 years in spite of his repeated appeals to the Indian embassy.
No agreement on any of the known disputes between the two countries was announced, but the ‘atmosphere’ of their relations was said to have improved. There were rumours that they might have come close to settling the Siachen and Sir Creek disputes. But even these were left for further consideration during the fifth round scheduled for mid-July. Both sides vowed to continue working towards a settlement of all of their disputes.
How does one explain the sterility of the India-Pakistan ‘dialogue’ during the last 60 years? At the end of the last round, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, announced his government’s intention to have a ‘grand reconciliation’ with India once the major disputes between them (including Kashmir) had been settled. Pranab Mukherjee, his Indian counterpart, countered with the observation that the existing disputes should not be allowed to stop the normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan. There was ample room, he said, for the expansion of commercial and cultural relations between them.
This, I think, is the crux of the matter: Pakistan wants to expand cooperative relations with India after the major disputes, especially the one relating to Kashmir, have been resolved. India will not accept any significant change in the status quo in Kashmir and possibly in other disputed situations as well. It wants Pakistan to put the Kashmir issue in the freezer and pursue cooperation in areas in which it is feasible and mutually advantageous. In sum, each side wants ‘normalisation’ on its own terms.
A couple of other considerations may be relevant. Both India and Pakistan being nuclear powers, there is no danger of war between them. Interaction between their governments may not be cordial; tensions between them have of late abated. People-to-people relations have improved. There is a good deal of visiting back and forth (even for shopping). Cultural relations are also going forward. Poets, writers, musicians, journalists, and professionals have been exchanging visits. Television in each country projects its culture to viewers in the other. There is no public pressure for the improvement of inter-governmental relations. I see no clamouring in Pakistan for a resolution of the Kashmir and other disputes as a precondition for more cordial people-to-people relations.
Even the two governments do not seem to regard the existing state of affairs as intolerable. This is evident from the fact that the CBMs to which they had agreed sometime ago are not being fully implemented. The opening of an Indian consulate in Karachi and a Pakistani consulate in Mumbai is by no means a big enterprise, but it has not been done in spite of persistent demands from people who want to visit friends and relatives in the other country. One gets the impression that neither government feels any urgency about the further improvement of their relations.
Then why the periodic meetings to pursue the ‘composite dialogue’? It may be partly to calm the outside world which is more scared of a violent conflict between Pakistan and India than the governments or the people of these countries are. Second, the exercise does not cost much. It is a short flight between Delhi and Islamabad. The visit need not last more than a couple of days. Delegates can not only talk with their counterparts but meet the elite in various spheres of life in the host country, and have good food at the dinners to which they are invited.
And, one cannot rule out the possibility that, with the passage of time and change of circumstances, new ways will open and some of the disputes get resolved. Let us then stay with the dialogue, albeit, with a moderate degree of optimism.
The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, was untilrecently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.
anwarsyed@cox.net
It is only because transition from old to the new regime has fallen prey to the machinations of party bosses who are either revengeful or ambitious. Had the restored leaders taken the divisive issues straight to the National Assembly instead of secret chambers, the political parties and their defectors, Musharraf loyalists and turncoats and all the rest would have coalesced to vote for or against. The majority view would have prevailed and that is what distinguishes democracy from dictatorship and mob rule.
The tenure of the government thus formed, based on instincts rather than on shared long-term goals, could have been short but that is the strength not weakness of the parliamentary system. If a government falls another is not long in coming so long as the National Assembly remains in existence. The bedrock of stability is parliament and not the cabinet or the party.
The life-long wish of our politicians has been that the army chief or the president should have no right or power to dissolve the National Assembly whatever the crisis. Now when that goal was in sight the very people who had suffered prison and banishment in this cause, or had fought it out in the courts, have chosen to undermine the supremacy of the parliament. It keeps one wondering how the parliamentarians, lawyers and judges, howsoever hurt they might be or just their cause, would react if the labourers and peasants who are perpetually wronged were also to start marching on the roads to seek justice? The sophisticated men of law and wealth may manage to remain peaceful but not the poor rustics who have nothing to lose and, in any case, no one would take notice of their grievance if they were not to riot.
Last week’s long march and more and longer marches to come, say that the Bar chief Aitzaz Ahsan, intends to pressurise the parliament to impeach the president and reinstate the judges. Pir Pagara, longer and wiser in politics, thinks Mr Ahsan is inviting only another martial law. And this time round, says the wisened Pir, it would not be a martial law of religious avowals as was Zia’s or of Musharraf’s moderation but ham-handed and untempered by religiosity or enlightenment.
Nawaz Sharif may not share the Pir’s alarm but, it seems, Asif Zardari does. He is prepared to be taken for a coward because, he says grandiloquently, on his shoulders lies the burden of feeding 160 million people. The future even in term of days and weeks ahead remains a guessing game but a safer bet would be on Asif’s caution rather than on Nawaz Sharif’s recklessness of the kind that had brought Musharraf into power and sent him into exile.
Hopefully another coup, or anarchy, doesn’t lie ahead but it is hard to see peace and order returning to the country except through a settlement in the parliament. Musharraf’s presence or exit is immaterial to the enormity of the task that awaits the new government that is so far recognised only through its teeming ministers, grizzling pundits and cronies.
Musharraf as constitutional head (he would be one as soon as the parliament repeals Article 58-2(b)) can neither help nor hinder solutions to inflation, insurgency in Balochistan and lawlessness in the tribal areas, criminals on the rampage or unemployed restive youth all over. These problems were there even when Musharraf was in the forefront but have been fast aggravating since his retreat.
After all, whatever else might have to be said against Musharraf and the technocrats and bureaucrats on whom he relied, it cannot be denied that in their time the national income had doubled — in nominal terms if not in purchasing power. Though the benefits of growth had not travelled down to one-third of the people at the bottom of the pile living on no more than Rs150 a day, the professional class indeed had expanded and prospered.
As it is the time ahead is difficult for the world economy as a whole, the democratic government should not make it more difficult for Pakistan through its compromises and incompetence. An independent judiciary is important to justice and the wrong done to the judges must be undone but it should not bring the business of the state to a standstill while the misery of the poor and jobless grows and life becomes insecure even for those who are more fortunately placed.
Let it be said for the common man that the chain of injustice for him begins from the constable on the beat to the police station and runs through a long hierarchy of offices and courts. Hardly ever does he get to reach the high court or Supreme Court to taste justice. Let it also be added on a personal note only to illustrate this point that a case of kidnapping for ransom in which this writer was the victim took seven years to decide and a revision application against the order of the sessions court is waiting to be heard in the Sindh High Court (SHC) for another seven years now.
In a bid to get it heard the writer twice saw the Chief Justice of SHC and also addressed a personal petition to the Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. It caused a mild stir but only for a while. For the last one year the registrar does not even acknowledge reminders.
Lawyers Aitzaz Ahsan, Ali Ahmad Kurd, Athar Minallah and a thousand others who are holding the government to ransom for justice to the common man perhaps would agree that injustice runs much wider and deeper than they would like the same common man to believe.
Meanwhile, amid fiery rhetoric and sacred vows the judicial crisis seems to be heading towards a solution conforming to the spirit of the times which is compromise at the cost of the institutions and the common man. All the judges — ‘theirs and ours’ — are going to stay to make Pakistan’s Supreme Court with its 29 judges the largest in the world — some distinction! Just to recall, the US has nine and India 13.
kunwaridris@hotmail.com
THE politics of food in the recently held high profile but fractious UN summit remained inconclusive on the ethical issue of producing biofuel at the cost of human survival. Sidelining this core issue responsible for the global crisis we are going through, the world leaders chose to rely, in their joint statement, on oft-repeated promises of expanding food production, promoting free trade and increasing aid to developing countries.
Showing disgust on such a “model that has brought agriculture under the control of transnational agribusiness corporations”, the small farmer’s groups in developing countries demanded “genuine agrarian reforms with radical change in policies”.
The problems of millions of poor in countries like ours are not rooted in lack of production or non-availability of food. According to research published in a leading medical publication, Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), “a quarter of the population of Pakistan is overweight or obese and at the risk of hypertension and diabetes” indicating that there is in fact enough food available to cause this.
We, at the same time, also have about half of the population, mostly living in rural areas, at serious risk of hunger and most of them suffering from malnourishment and diseases related to it. This stark contrast is characterised by wide economic disparity and social injustice. The divide is deeply related to and gets strength from the traditional power structure.
Though, we have a history of a plethora of projects for eliminating hunger and alleviating poverty, but none of them have ever dared to target the issue of economic divide. Some of the widely acclaimed programmes launched in the green-revolution decades like Village Agricultural and Industrial Development Programme (1952-61), the Rural Works Programme (1963-72) and People’s Works Programme (1972-80) gave some concrete results in terms of developing physical infrastructure, engaging rural communities in economic activities, enhancing their skills and creating employment opportunities for them. However, when the government introduced land reforms in the seventies in order to complement these outcomes and to narrow down income disparities, the initiative was rendered ineffective by influential lobbies in the echelons of power to protect their interests and status.
The situation in the eighties changed drastically in the wake of the Afghan war. International aid worth billions of dollars tied down by varying sets of conditionalities and acronyms poured into the country to achieve ambitious political objectives. A new policy framework entitled as the ‘structural adjustment programme’ (SAP) was imported and introduced. Any critique on its relevance and effectiveness was set aside with a sanctimonious approach. A decade later, research proved that the SAP was a failure. The Human Development Report 2003, produced by the Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre noted that “poverty started rising after the structural adjustment programme began in 1987-88. There are various reasons for this, most of which relate to the direct and indirect effects of the macroeconomic strategy itself.”
In the new millennium, the same flawed strategy and its failures were further reinforced. There was a tremendous shift of investment from the agricultural to non-agricultural sector. In this so called ‘transformation towards growth’ the relocation of labour out of agriculture was typically lagging, leaving out a large number of poor people in the rural areas and widening the income gap. Also, it could not succeed in developing town and village level enterprises and creating non-farm employment opportunities for more than 34 per cent of rural households that depend on wage labour as a sole source of livelihood. The result of such a deplorable situation is not difficult to imagine. The World Bank Development Report 2008 notes, “Pakistan (with 2.4 per cent agriculture growth rate) has been less successful in reducing poverty, mainly because of highly unequal ownership of and access to productive assets such as land and irrigation water.”
The report also highlights the most impressive success story of rural agricultural growth in China, which has been responsible for the decline in rural poverty from 53 per cent in 1981 to eight per cent in 2001. The major underlying factor was the ‘household responsibility system’, an agrarian reform implemented in 1981. This incentive system, designed to increase yields and improve the condition of local farmers, reallocated communal land to peasant households, creating hundreds of millions of smallholders with relative autonomy over land use decisions and crop collection. This was followed by the establishment of ‘Town and Village Enterprises’, which were industries owned by townships and villages.
Justin Yifu Lin, the renowned economist, writes in Reform in China: A Peasant’s Institutional Choice that “the household responsibility system was worked out among farmers initially without knowledge and approval of the central government. It was not imposed by the central authority and evolved spontaneously. Seeing the remarkable effects the central authorities agreed to adopt it. Perhaps, for this reason late Chinese leader Deng Xiaopang once termed it ‘a great invention of Chinese farmers’.”
The farmers in our country are also capable of making such great inventions if allowed to have a little more access to social justice. A genuine agrarian reform is necessary which gives landless and farming people ownership and control of the land they work on and returns territories to indigenous peoples. The right to land must be free of discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, race, social class or ideology; the land belongs to those who work it.
nsamoo@gmail.com
