AS one should have expected, the terrorist attack in Mumbai on Nov 26 caused the government and people of India not only anguish but intense anger.

The anger was directed at Pakistan because of the suspicion that the perpetrators had been linked to certain militant organisations such as the Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jamaatud Dawa based in this country.

Construing the attack as an act of war, Indian officials (prime minister, defence minister, foreign minister) initially spoke of retaliation and strikes. They asserted also that if the attackers were “non-state actors”, it was still Pakistan’s responsibility to locate and interrogate their sponsors, procure evidence of their guilt, prosecute them and award them the penalties they merit. It would also have to eradicate all terrorist organisations operating within its borders.

The government and media in Pakistan matched India’s tough talk with some of their own. Resounding declarations of the resolve to fight back followed. The National Assembly passed a unanimous resolution to the same effect. Preparation for war appeared to be under way. Military personnel on leave were called back, and it was said that troops would move from the tribal areas to the eastern border with India. The Pakistani response caused Indian officials to have second thoughts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that war with Pakistan would be out of the question, and that it was not being contemplated.

Pakistan had banned Lashkar-i-Taiba several years ago, and it has now banned Jamaatud Dawa and detained a large number of its activists. India would prefer that some of these detained individuals to be turned over to its authorities for prosecution, but this option is not acceptable to Pakistan. Plans for their trial in Pakistan’s own courts have not as yet surfaced. As a result India’s dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s response to its grievance remains unabated and so does the tension between the two countries.

Further action against those who have been detained is fraught with complications. The arrests were made under the Maintenance of Public Order Act which is one of the preventive detention laws in force in the country. Detention under any of these laws does not mean that the person arrested is necessarily presumed to be guilty of a crime. The history of Pakistan is replete with instances of reputable and well-respected politicians, opposed to the government of the day, being placed in preventive detention.

The act of prosecuting the Jamaatud Dawa militants will signify that the government believes they have been undertaking, or otherwise aiding, terrorist acts. It will also imply acceptance of the Indian allegation that elements based in Pakistan are involved in terrorism in India. It should be noted also that the government’s prosecution of these persons will invite severe criticism within the country. It will be said that the government has knuckled under India’s pressure.

Pakistan had been asking India to provide hard evidence against the persons it suspects and has now said that India has done so although the likelihood of it being circumstantial evidence (intercepts of telephone conversations and confessions of a man, now accepted by Islamabad as being a Pakistani national and who has been in the custody of Indian police for weeks) may not bear scrutiny in a court of law. India cannot come up with ‘hard’ evidence such as eyewitness reports if the suspects hatched their conspiracies and made their preparations while sitting somewhere in Pakistan. It expects Pakistani investigators to procure the needed evidence through their interrogations, possibly including resort to torture. This they may or may not be able to do. The tension between the two countries may then remain.

Can we expect that relations between them will some day become cordial and mutually cooperative, and may we ask what such relations are like? First, it means that while the two governments may not see eye to eye on all issues, there is no conflict of vital interests between them. Next, cordial relations entail freer movement of persons, merchandise and capital between them, meaning that Indians may set up stores on the Mall and Anarkali in Lahore and factories in Sheikhupura and Gujranwala, and Pakistanis may be free to do the same in places of their choosing in India. We may then ask if the dominant forces in Pakistan and India — politicians, the military, higher bureaucracy, captains of business and industry, great landowners — desire such an outcome.

Indian businessmen and industrialists may welcome the opportunity to expand their ventures to Pakistan. The Indian bureaucracy may not feel strongly on the subject. There are no great landlords in India. It is likely that the ruling politicians and generals have little interest in improving relations with Pakistan; they stand to gain more if they can present Pakistan as an irritant or even as a threat to their national security. They may conceivably favour amity with Pakistan if it can be had without having to make concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir.

Politicians in Pakistan know that they cannot take Kashmir away from India by force of arms, and that India will not hand it over to them on a silver platter. Yet, they are not willing to let go of the issue. That being the case, there is no real prospect of any significant improvement in government-to-government relations. The landed aristocrats and the higher bureaucracy are not likely to be affected by any shifts in India-Pakistan relations. The Pakistani military establishment will probably doubt the wisdom of the enterprise of improving relations with India. If not only peace but amity and goodwill reign between them, the military’s primacy in the Pakistani scheme of things will decline.

Freer trade and investments do not suit Pakistani businessmen and manufacturers because their products will then not compete well with those of India. One may argue that the continuation of a moderate degree of tension between the two countries works to the advantage of the Pakistani generals and barons of commerce and industry.

It may be said that ‘people’ on both sides — tourists, shoppers, pilgrims — do have a stake in the easing of relations between their two countries. But it so happens that the ‘people’ are not the ones who make high policy in either country. Moreover, public opinion can be very fickle, and propagandists can easily change popular passion from mutual affection to hatred and conflict.

The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

LOUIS XV, the long-ruling ineffectual king of France, once asked his court physician Francois Quesnay what he would do if he were king. His answer was “Nothing”. Louis then asked him who in that case would rule. His answer was “The laws”.

Had Louis listened to his physician and not to his mistress Madame de Pompadour, France would not have lost its primacy in Europe by suffering a humiliating defeat in the Seven Years’ War at the hands of the Germans, nor would it have been driven out of Canada by the British. Bastille too wouldn’t have fallen to the rabble and a Louis still would have been the king of France.

History and fiction both record with great relish how Madame de Pompadour made Louis XV do what even an absolute monarch shouldn’t have been doing. But a rolled-back hairstyle is the only legacy by which she is remembered. Quesnay who wished the laws and not the king to hold sway in the realm has gone down in history as founder of the school of physiocrats who believe the government should not be seen interfering with the operation of natural laws.

Metaphorically speaking, the successive ‘kings’ of Pakistan have been surrounded more by seductive de Pompadours than sceptical Quesnays. However, now we live not in an age of bloody revolutions but peaceful military coups. Though neither our politicians nor our generals have been in any way devotees of Quesnay, luckily our laws — though considerably weakened and often violated — have survived the adventures and tomfoolery of both.

An illustration of it came forth in a small way recently. Mr Mumtaz Bhutto was arrested by the police in his village on the suspicion of having sent a score of his intimidating party men to the office of a minor newspaper in Karachi which would not publish his statement. He was brought to Karachi in a special aircraft, produced before a magistrate the next day who bailed him out during the very first hearing even though earlier the high court had refused to intervene.

The case surely would now linger long and may never come to trial but the episode has shown that even our weakened legal system is able to withstand the stress of arbitrary actions and provide remedy. The law enforcers made haste to arrest Mr Bhutto, it seems, either to please his political adversaries or at their behest.

Surely, the police would not have been so prompt to act and might not have even taken notice of the complaint of the proprietor of the newspaper if Mr Bhutto were a supporter of the party in power.

The strength of the laws has shown itself in the wholly justifiable refusal of the high court to quash the charge before it was investigated notwithstanding the fact that the accused was a former governor and chief minister of the province. Yet a junior court did not hesitate to set him free on bail once convinced that he would neither hamper the investigation nor abscond.

Leaving aside the truth or otherwise of the charge against Mumtaz Bhutto which is inconsequential, the point to emphasise is that the rule of law must prevail and apply to all manner of people in all situations. Mr Zardari’s contention “don’t ask me, just trust me” has a dictatorial ring.

All that he, or any other functionary of the state, does must be in public view and within the bounds of the law. And the first duty of the parliament is to define such bounds.

The routine and ever-increasing abuse of state power and resources calls for legal enactments on subjects which in a more responsible and democratic society would have been left to the discretion of the executive authority. Such an enactment is needed the most to regulate all appointments — political, administrative or judicial — in public service.

For instance, the law must clearly say how a chief justice is to be appointed and when a secretary to government must retire. No discretion should come into play in either case for that would tend to make them personal rather than public servants.

The current state of politics in the country, however, is not at all conducive to the rule of law. In fact in whatever form it does exist that too is threatened by the running catch-phrase of “taking everybody along”. That sounds like satisfying all political interests at the cost of the laws and the exchequer.

The general elections of last year have neither resolved the disputed constitutional issues nor have given direction to political policies. In fact both have become ever more confused with the sudden death of Benazir Bhutto and the forced exit of Pervez Musharraf from the political scene.

Elections are always fought with certain basic aims in view. In Bangladesh, 85 per cent of the voters turned out to reject religious radicalism. In Indian-administered Kashmir, the majority of people put their demand of azadi, or freedom, on the back burner to bring in a government that cares for their safety and well-being only to fight another day.

Here in Pakistan the expectation was that policies and direction would be set by Benazir Bhutto after the elections. The parliament, the government and the opposition emerging from the polls held after her death are not what the people had hoped or voted for. Their disapproval is so palpable as to call for fresh elections. If one view is that the country cannot withstand the stress of yet another election, the other view that it can withstand the stress of the current impasse even less would perhaps command more adherents.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

JUST a few months ago, we were being told that this is a period of stark, unprecedented and unfolding food crisis, with looming shortages and huge global imbalances between demand and supply. Everyone who matters — from officials in international organisations to leaders of rich and poor countries — warned us of the terrible social, political and nutritional consequences of doing nothing, of the millions who would go hungry and the riots that would occur if the imbalances persisted or increased.

But now the whole problem has disappeared from the international radar, relegated to the inside pages of newspapers and perfunctory afterthoughts in politicians’ speeches. So what happened? Was it not such a problem, after all?

No, the “silent tsunami” has simply been overwhelmed in public awareness by the much noisier tsunami in the world of international finance, with the giant sucking sounds of possible bank collapses and enormous bail-outs grabbing all the attention. Yet the global food crisis is far from over, and is even likely to intensify in the near future.

One reason why many analysts decided that the food crisis may not be so intense is the global decline in crop prices that began sometime in the middle of last year. For about two years before that, commodity prices, including both food and non-food crops, had been increasing, and in the first few months of 2008 they soared. But in early June last year the prices of both oil and food crops fell, so that they are now lower than they were even a year ago.

When food prices were rising, there was much talk of the shifts in demand that were causing this trend. President Bush joined those who decided that this reflected the increased demand from China and India as their per capita incomes grew. This was a ludicrous argument because food consumption has actually declined in both countries. Both economies have shown even sharper declines in per capita food intake despite the continued presence of widespread hunger, because of increased income inequalities within these countries.

In any case, that argument about more food demand from China and India quickly collapsed along with the fall in global prices. Now it is more than evident that the wild swings that have been observed in food and several commodity markets over this year have been the result of speculative forces, rather than any real changes in global demand and supply.

But despite this volatility and the recent price decline, the food crisis remains. And it does indeed reflect patterns of demand and supply but not the ones that have been talked about. The basic problem now is not even one of absolute shortage so much as the inability to pay for food, and this problem will get worse for many developing countries and their poorer citizens.

Three problems now dominate the global food scenario. First, there is a crisis of cultivation, especially in the developing world. This is the result of two decades of policy neglect: falling public investment in agricultural research, extension and support; aggressive trade liberalisation that exposed southern farmers to heavily subsidised marketing by northern agribusinesses; financial liberalisation that reduced cultivators’ access to credit and made them prey to speculative forces that also affected prices. As a result, cultivation costs have increased even in years when crop prices are falling, and cultivation is becoming unviable in many countries.

Second, this has been associated with a depression in wages in developing countries, which means that mass purchasing power did not increase even when the economies were growing. So demand for food has not gone up, simply because the poor do not have the incomes to pay for it.

Third, there has been an increasing concentration of firms operating in global agriculture, with a few large agribusinesses coming to dominate both input and output markets. These companies are also the ones which benefit from government subsidies promoting ethanol, which divert land meant for food to the paradoxically more energy-intensive production of fuel for cars. This concentration is reflected in recent food-price trends: while world prices have fallen sharply in the past four months, retail prices of food in most developing countries have not fallen.

Unfortunately, each of these negative processes is likely to intensify. The financial crisis will reduce the ability of developing country governments to increase much-needed investment in agriculture or enlarge the distribution of affordable food. It will adversely affect wage incomes, reducing purchasing power further. And it will add to pressures for concentration in industry, including agribusiness.

— The Guardian, London