The Financial Times recently warned of a “Spectre of Inflation over the Global Economy.” Haunted by this spectre countries across the world are tightening economic belts.

Inflation concerns have forced America’s Reserve Bank to keep interest rates on hold, and the European Central Bank may soon further raise interest rates. In our country a menacing upsurge in inflation is already under way: it is now the highest in three decades. Pensioners, workers, masses of poor people across the country are financially squeezed by spiralling prices.

The government is under pressure to cut subsidies. When that happens, we will be slapped with another round of further price increases. Without strong action it is all but certain that prices will continue to rise in the near future. Senators recently warned the government of “riots if inflation is not checked”. To avert that situation, which is very likely, it is imperative to beat inflation now or we are in for another lost decade like the eighties. Aggressively attacking inflation should be the highest priority of the Economic Coordination Committee and the cabinet.

Imported fuel and food inflation is part of the problem because fuel and food have a large share of the consumer price index. But the crux of the problem is eight years of mismanagement reflected in the economy’s present incapacity to weather a global economic downturn. Gravely overestimating the international environment, the previous regime depicted the rise in inflation as a temporary aberration. Its position being that ‘core’ inflation is what matters.

Strong action was delayed with the hope that fuel and food prices will fall! But hope — the regime’s inflation fighting policy — failed us. Inflation is now deeply ingrained in the sinews of our economy. Interest rates have been nudged up and reserve ratios fiddled with, but inflation targets have been missed and the Central Bank is losing credibility. In another policy misstep the inflation target has been further raised — not a credible way of dealing with an insidious enemy.

Eight years of erroneous policies led to worsening disparities of wealth and income, and shameful inequalities of health, education and opportunity, created imbalances, undermined economic stability and fuelled inflation. Rapidly growing money supply and negative real interest rates created asset bubbles and an upper-middle class consumer binge, when the economy should have been made resilient by reducing debt, expanding infrastructure and education, and building reserves — the shock absorbers that protect the country in a downturn.

The fruits of the bubbles were usurped by a clique of rich businessmen, speculators and inside-traders who drove the stock market to historical highs, along with real estate prices, while the condition of middle-class and poor Pakistanis deteriorated.

Laissez-faire Pakistan-style corruption-saddled capitalism that drives us with iron necessity repeatedly into crises is not the one basic approach to organising our economy. There is a strong moral and economic imperative for defending the interests of the wretched of our country. One hardly needs to be a Marxist to see the ‘reserve army of labour’ idling across the country. This army of uneducated labour keeps wages down and channels much of it to cheap unproductive domestic service.

The destiny of our country is tied up with the condition of the poor and disadvantaged people. The social support given to the poor by the budget is a laudable initiative. It should be extended, and salaries of the poorer public employees should be indexed against inflation. But Pakistan’s problems cannot be fixed by special measures alone. We need fundamental economic change. We can and must learn from the wisdom of old-fashioned socialism. Curb the sleazy excesses of our capitalism, nurture our public sector, curtail unproductive military expenditure, convert a large portion of our skilled defence forces to urgently needed civilian purposes, develop infrastructure, promote small business, extend full universal health coverage to all Pakistanis, triple minimum wage, protect the workers and peasants, vastly expand education through investing heavily in our teachers. Highly qualified, highly paid teachers at all levels are the critical missing link in our educational system and communities. They are the pivot to turn our public schools into the centre of our communities and cornerstones of a free, educated and law-abiding Pakistan.

There is no tension between these social goals and economic efficiency. Better education translates into a higher GDP. A well-educated workforce is our best defence against global economic cycles and imbalances. Pakistanis will readily understand and appreciate policies that promote these goals because we honour our constitution with its fine principles of social and economic justice and we loathe oppression, oppose militarism and unfettered capitalism, and are horrified by the excesses of our privileged classes.

Inflation is the Trojan horse of the previous regime. It will take the new government years to stabilise the economy. Interest rates need to be raised prohibitively high to restore price stability. Growth will suffer, which means rising unemployment will undermine the popular base of the government. In beating inflation now, the new government faces the trickiest survival test.

Properly tackling the economic problems handed down to it will make the next few years extremely difficult. But if the government does not offer anything convincing to beat inflation, nor rectify social and economic inequities, the field will be left open to those with the angriest remedies to offer.

Mr Bhutto fell perhaps because he changed Pakistan too much. The current government may fall if it abandons its base of poor and down-trodden masses and does too little to beat its insidious enemy.

The writer is a former principal of Gordon College, Rawalpindi.

‘Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it only takes twenty seconds of war to destroy him’

— King Badouin I of Belgium, 1959.

WHAT is the value of human life in today’s world? Look around and the conclusion will be — nothing much. Whether it is an American soldier in Iraq or a Taliban in Afghanistan, a civilian in either place or a bystander in Kashmir, Gaza or Waziristan; human life has little worth in today’s world.

The mayhem, death and destruction meted out by present-day ‘leaders’ are sending hundreds and thousands of young men to premature and needless death.

Stop and consider the effect of these losses on the closest of kin; a father, mother, wife, child or a sibling. Imagine the psychological trauma of losing a loved one so cruelly and suddenly? For every death, there are countless others who have been injured and maimed. Aside from soldiers and civilians with amputated limbs, brain damage, disfiguration and other forms of debilitating physical impairment, there are many more with deep psychological wounds; the nightmares of witnessing continuous death and destruction can haunt them for years. In this grim scenario of wrecked lives and mass destruction, more seeds of hatred are being sown. What for? To satisfy the insatiable greed for power and control of supposed leaders.

Today’s western civilisation prides itself on its institutions — democracy, freedom of expression and justice — and on having evolved into advanced societies of thought and technology. But have they actually evolved? Especially if they continue to resort to violence — the only difference is that Cruise and Tomahawk missiles have replaced the caveman’s mallet. These, and depleted uranium artillery shells, can be fired from hundreds of miles away and can pierce the thickest of armours. Is this really progress? Far from it.

Technology is helping modern man kill and maim more efficiently. Developed nations such as the US and UK, both citadels of democracy and free speech based on principles of justice and equality, are behaving in the worst possible manner. Devoid of any morals, leaders of both nations appear to have lost their way, causing untold grief and sorrow to countless innocent people.

Nearly 58,000 US soldiers and over three million Vietnamese died during the war in Vietnam. What was achieved in the end? South Vietnam was overrun but communism did not spread in South Asia. Today, Vietnam is slowly but surely turning towards a market economy. The dominos theory of Messrs Nixon, Kissinger and McNamara lies as discredited as the reputation of these leaders. After 30 years, Mr McNamara has discovered that the Vietnam adventure was a big mistake, which should never have happened. Mr. Kissinger has the dubious distinction of being the architect of the coup in Chile, which ousted the democratically elected socialist president Salvadore Allende and led to the disappearance of thousands of people. So many lives lost and almost nothing achieved in the end. This is the terrible legacy of these so-called leaders.

Today the same tragic mistakes are being repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. For Nixon read Bush, for McNamara read Rumsfeld, for Kissinger read Rice. Different era but the same arrogance, same hunger for power and same lack of respect for human life. They cooked up a crisis then — a US naval ship was ‘attacked’ in the Gulf of Tonkin — and this was used as a pretext to illegally attack a sovereign country — Vietnam. Similarly, they cooked up a crisis now with ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and illegally invaded another sovereign country; this time Iraq. Not surprisingly, the end result is the same.

The psychological impact of armed conflict on humans is immeasurable. The scars of war can affect people for decades. Their traumatised psyches can play havoc in their personal lives, affect their relationships, their work and academic performance and lead to psychological illnesses — from post-traumatic stress disorders, to depression, anxiety, alcoholism and drug abuse. It can change them from civilised human beings to beasts that have no respect for the lives of others, who kill and destroy without remorse. The traumatised Iraqi, Afghan and Palestinian child of today is tomorrow’s ‘terrorist’. But all this matters little to the leaders in London, Washington and Tel Aviv. For them, as long as their interests are served, little else matters. History is replete with dictators supported by the West, particularly the US for exigency, and then they are dumped once they have served their purpose. Noriega of Panama, Suharto of Indonesia, Pinochet of Chile, Duvalier of Haiti, Marcos of Philippines, Samoza of Nicaragua and our own Ziaul Haq are only some examples.

Much before Saddam Hussein became a demon, western countries were falling over each other to supply him with arms for his war with Iran. As long as their interests were served, whether he was gassing innocent Kurds in Halabjah or torturing and killing his opponents was irrelevant. George Monbiot, the eminent British journalist argues, “The US armed and funded Saddam when it needed to; it knocked him down when it needed to. In neither case did it act because it cared about the people of his country. It acted because it cared about its own self interests”.

Monbiot elaborates, “A superpower does not have moral imperatives. It has strategic imperatives. Its purpose is not to sustain the lives of other people, but to sustain itself. Concern for the rights and feelings of others is an impediment to the pursuit of its objectives. It can make the moral case, but that doesn’t mean that it is motivated by the moral case. The US, like all superpowers, does have a consistent approach to international affairs. But it is not morally consistent; it is strategically consistent”.

The question is, with so much poverty, disease and misery in this world as well as the added burden of armed conflicts, could the billions being used to kill innocent Iraqis, Afghanis and Palestinians not go towards improving the lot of the suffering masses? This madness has to stop. The needless massacres — whether of Americans or Iraqis, Palestinians, Israelis or Kashmiris, must be brought to a halt. Leaders of our day have to step back and give a thought to the lives and hopes that are being snuffed out and to the hatred that can haunt generations to come. They need to read and heed the lessons of history. Above all, they need to respect the sanctity of human life.

If they are able to do that, they may yet prevent needless suffering of thousands of people and earn their respect and gratitude. But if they do not, then neither the people nor history will ever forgive them.

The writer is professor of psychiatry at Aga Khan University, Karachi

muradmk@gmail.com

ON a second reading of an article on taking pride in being non-conformist, it was the writer’s exchange with a young student being chided for speaking in a language she is comfortable with, that stayed with me.

Sadly the Pakistani citizen’s relationship with language remains convoluted and reflective of how schizophrenic we all are when it comes to dealing with a ‘Pakistani identity’. I realised very soon that what I spoke at home did not fit in with the Holy Trinity — English, Urdu and Arabic — therefore it had no place in the classroom. And if I were to forget and let a word slip in, it would lead to serious rebukes from teachers and ridicule from classmates.

For Fairclough, and others in the academia, language exists not only for the coordination of social activity but “(functioning) as the medium in which identity is constituted, in which we understand and define ourselves”. And when we get into analysing the conversations we enter into, we can further deconstruct the ways in which we communicate (or are not allowed to). We might conclude that these are constrained by the structures and forces of the very social institutions which are essential to how we live and function. Similarly the language employed in the state discourse is also an instrument of control as well as of communication. Feminists have critiqued language by taking into account the relationships between masculinist authority and language, and as Gerda Lerner concludes “demonstrated the ways in which women have been subsumed by generic masculine, trivialised and degraded through derogatory metaphors, deprived of access to sacred languages, or silenced altogether”.

Coming to Pakistan, it is ironic that though this year marks the International Year of Language we continue to be as others have labelled us as “illiterate in more than one language”. If I were to put myself under the microscope per se I realise I speak Pushto but cannot write it. I can read and offer my prayers in Arabic but with no conversational skills. Pakistani students also sit in for the infamous Persian class in the Bachelor’s degree course where we only have to swot one book and answer in Urdu to get good grades.

Then there is the ‘foreign’ language that all good convent girls should take up (German in my case, but I speak German as I would Pushto!) My Urdu and English require major help when it comes to grammar. So where does that leave me? I frequently question myself, what do I know of the languages of Pakistan?

In fact what does anyone who is not Seraiki or Sindhi or Balochi know of the language? A ‘sadkey deeva’ we get from an Asghar Nadeem Syed play, singing along to Sheiki and Alan Faqir’s ‘Humma Humma’ or the ubiquitous Rajasthani tapestry on our walls does not a language make.

I admit that while growing up I rejected Urdu as a ‘colonising’ language. Perhaps some of this came courtesy PTV dramas that would drum in every evening that being ‘Urdu speaking’ and quoting Mir Taqi Mir was a sign of being sophisticated and any Pushto or Punjabi was left to the character playing the servant or the village bumpkin. I regret my aversion tactics now when I come across a snatch of Ghalib and realise the beauty of the words and promise myself to get back to it one day.

In addition to the aversion that the Pakistani government has towards the language of its people, it has also complicated matters by looking towards the Middle East and Saudi Arabia in particular for ‘affirmation’ and taken its cues from the region whether it is regarding its foreign policy, political and economic support, and even culture (which has added to its schizophrenia regarding its national identity). So circa the late seventies we have seen the introduction of an Arabic news bulletin on state television, the introduction of Arabic as a compulsory subject in certain public schools and the increasing ‘arabisation’ of the Urdu language and purging all that sounds ‘South Asian.’

Ayesha Jalal in her book, The State of Martial Rule: the origins of Pakistan’s political economy of defence, has also pointed out how it was right and proper for even the most liberal urban families to employ a maulvi for their children’s religious education which involved a compulsory reading of the Quran in Arabic, usually without a translation. She is of the opinion that, “exposed to Arabic while speaking in a regional language or dialect at home and learning English and Urdu in schools, and in Balochistan also Persian, most of the first generation of upper-and middle class Pakistanis grew up being literate not in one language but practically illiterate in at least four.”

Zia Mohyeddin puts it best when he speaks about his relationship with languages. I am quoting from his interview with Zameen: “What does language mean to me? I think essentially, language means to me...culture. Language is nothing but culture. When you use language accurately and when you are able to appreciate a language correctly, you become at ease with that culture. Once you feel that you have acquired not just the rudiments of that language but the expression of that language, then its misuse is a travesty.”

These are words to remember and live by. Especially in Pakistan, with all its trouble of a populace living with a multiplicity of belongings whether its culture or religion or our diverse ethnicities. It is only when we are at ease with difference and appreciate the rich tapestry of colours, sounds and languages of our beautiful land that any silly digs at how a particular language sounds, or reprimanding a student, would be as Mohyeddin identifies it — a “travesty”.

THIRTY-THREE years after the French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing invited fellow world leaders to Rambouillet to discuss the West’s economic crisis, the G8 will be working to a similar agenda when it meets in Japan.

The G6 — as it then was — met in the midst of a global downturn prompted by the fourfold increase in the price of oil triggered by the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

This summit is being held against a backdrop of crude closing in on $150 a barrel and developed economies facing a mild dose of the economic disease that afflicted the 1970s: stagflation.

The main topics that will dominate the summit are:

World economy: last year’s summit took place before the onset of the global credit crunch, caused initially by badly performing sub-prime mortgages in the US. Western economies have seen their banking systems freeze up, credit more stringently rationed and — in the US, Britain and other parts of the European Union — falling house prices. Many Wall Street analysts believe the US is already in recession, with Britain heading in the same direction with a six-month time lag.

The US central bank, the Federal Reserve, has cut rates aggressively to two per cent but similar action in other parts of the world has been dogged by fears of rising inflation, caused by sharp increases in the cost of fuel and food. Europe’s central bank, the ECB, raised interest rates to 4.25 per cent last week while the Bank of England has called a halt to cuts in borrowing costs after three quarter-point reductions in bank rate between December and April. Discussion in Japan will centre on ways of reducing oil prices, with Brown urging more pressure on the oil cartel Opec and Germany and France wanting tougher action against speculators. Brown and Bush will be urging the G8 to give a push to global trade talks, which reach a crucial stage in Geneva later this month.

Climate change: the G8 and the five major developing countries at the summit aim to agree on a plan to halve worldwide emissions by 2050 and may also — in principle — accept the need for some interim targets. The summit is also likely to announce a major fund to sponsor research into carbon capture storage and other green technologies.

These are the most optimistic outcomes for the summit and would mark a step forward from last year when Tony Blair managed to persuade Bush to commit the US to “seriously consider” a 50 per cent cut.

World leaders are battling to agree on a strategy for a major conference in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. The conference is seen as the moment when the world agrees a climate change plan to succeed the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. Negotiations have been stalled partly by US unwillingness to sign up to anything that gives rapidly developing countries such as China and India a free pass. Progress has been also hampered by suspicion of one another’s motives and the sheer technical difficulty of reaching a worldwide agreement.

The Japanese, one of the most energy efficient of the G8 countries, is proposing a sector-based approach to new targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This requires setting the same numerical goals for all companies in an industry, regardless of location. The Kyoto Protocol was based on national binding limits.

Food crisis: the Japanese prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, will be among those arguing that biofuel production is in competition with food supply. He will call for a speeding up of research and the introduction of second generation biofuels, which can make fuel out of various plants and not just food crops.

Gordon Brown will try to inject what he regards as some balance in the food crisis by publishing on the eve of the summit the best British scientific assessment of the value, and pitfalls, of biofuels. He believes the debate has swung from regarding biofuels as the solution to all our carbon ills to becoming the source of all our food shortages. He wants EU backing of biofuels to be more selective.

He will also publish a British report showing that UK food prices are rising faster than those of most other EU countries. The big issue is what to do to slow the rise in the cost of the food import basket for the least developed countries — up 90 per cent since 2000, as against 22 per cent in developed countries.

A large “aid for trade” package will be crucial but the UN food summit in Rome in June made only limited progress. The World Bank said $10bn was needed for emergency food aid and another $3.5bn for social and agricultural programmes to respond to the current crisis.

Africa: Japan has never had Africa at the top of its agenda and the deteriorating state of the global economy has meant development campaigners now face an even tougher task. Even so, British government sources say that the summit is an important staging post in a “make or break year” for the fight against poverty, which the UK premier Brown hopes will culminate in action at a special UN summit in New York in September.

In addition to a trade deal, Britain is urging action in three areas: increasing the number of health workers in poor countries; providing an extra $1bn to put more children into school; and a package to boost agriculture in poor countries.

—The Guardian, London