HOSTS on television shows were recently asking ordinary folks in the four provinces of Pakistan what things had been like for them during 2008 and what their hopes and expectations were for 2009.

Almost all of them said they had been miserable; high prices had made it difficult for them to have even the basic necessities of life. Even those who did have some money could not buy things they needed because they were in extremely short supply. There was simply not enough of wheat flour, electricity, gas, petrol, safe drinking water to go around. They were on the verge of utter destitution and felt they were being driven to revolt against state and society.

Those belonging to the upper and middle classes, who do have access to the necessities, feel terribly insecure. A massive breakdown of law and order has made life and property more unsafe than at any time in recent memory.

The interviewees squarely blamed the government for their deprivations. The present government claims that the current adversities are a result of the mismanagement and neglect of Gen Pervez Musharraf’s regime and that of his cronies in the PML-Q. This assertion is open to two reservations. One, things were not as bad during Musharraf’s rule, and second, even if we assume that the consequences of his regime’s misdoings had to take time to unfold, the fact remains that the Zardari-Gilani combine, now occupying the helm, is doing nothing to rectify the prevailing situation.

It cannot be said that the shortages in Pakistan are wholly the fallout of a global phenomenon. For while shortages do exist in other places, they are not known to be as severe in, let us say, Turkey, Egypt, India and much of Southeast Asia.

The government could say to the people that the shortages are beyond its power to overcome, that the times are bad for all of us, and that we all have to tighten our belts. In that case the rulers and their functionaries will have to take the lead in adopting austerity. They have not made that kind of a plea to the people, and nor have they shown any signs of accepting austerity. It has become their custom to declare that they are making plans, appointing commissions and committees, and bringing in lavishly paid experts to meet the problems facing the people. But it is as firmly their custom not to take any concrete action to implement their assurances. It is also possible that they simply do not understand why the shortages in Pakistan are as severe as they are.

Going on to another aspect of the matter, I may suggest that ours has become a society of consumers much more than it is one of savers, investors and producers. Unpredictable bomb blasts notwithstanding, shoppers crowd stores and diners restaurants. Kitchens in middle-class homes are equipped with electric appliances such as microwave ovens, toasters, grinders, mixers, juicers and running hot water. Living spaces in homes have gas and electric heaters and air conditioners.

I have learned from researchers who have surveyed homes in Pangali, a small town close to the Lahore School of Economics where I am based, that 80 per cent of the households have television sets, 60 per cent have refrigerators, and 20 per cent even have air conditioners. Many of the meat and vegetable stores (and some vendors) in the town have freezers. All of these appliances consume energy.

Consumers multiply as the population grows, and it has grown nearly five-fold during the last 60 years. The production of goods has not increased correspondingly. Hence the shortages. But it is a fact also that living beyond our resources has become our style of living both as individuals and collectivities such as governments.

The existing power-generation facilities in the country are not working to their capacity because of insufficiency of water in our rivers and dams. With more rains and greater release of water from the reservoirs India is building in Kashmir, water in our rivers would increase and so should the production of electricity. But if the population continues to increase at its present rate, industrialisation proceeds, and lifestyles remain extravagant, no amount of energy we can generate will be enough. Gas is not a renewable source, and even if new fields are found, shortages will develop if consumption keeps increasing.

The Pakistani economy is in a slump. Industrial production has been falling, manufacturing units have been shutting down, and workers have been losing jobs. Global influences that contributed to these developments will recede with time. But domestic investors and entrepreneurs will continue to shy away so long as insecurity of life and property remains. The disruption of public order does not result mainly from some dramatic rise in the number of thieves and robbers. It is also the work of extremists, militants and terrorists.

No one really knows how extremism and militancy are to be eradicated. Some observers have maintained that dialogue with them is the way to go. But they do not know, or at least they have never specified, what the terms of reference for this dialogue might be.

A few days ago Mr Bashir Bilour, a senior minister in the NWFP, said in a television news show that his government had held negotiations and reached an accord with the Taliban in Swat, but they repudiated it within a few days. Then there are people who believe that the government has to use adequate force to put the Taliban out of action. The army, paramilitary force, Rangers and the police have been fighting militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, the adjoining settled districts and Swat for almost two years. A few fighters on each side get killed almost every day, but there are no indications that the government forces are close to winning a decisive victory.

The militants are well armed with modern weapons and well trained in using them. It is hard to say when the insurgents will be finally subdued and normal security of life and property, peace and stability restored. It seems to me that we in Pakistan will have to contend with “bad times” for the foreseeable future. Even more distressing is the fact that neither the government nor any organs of civil society are preparing the people to deal with adversity with courage, fortitude, and a will to overcome and move on.

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

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

INFORMATION Minister Sherry Rehman was ill advised to warn the Sharia campaigners of Swat against stopping girls from going to school. They reacted by burning down school buildings that took the toll beyond 180.

Their reaction to the invitation of the NWFP Assembly for talks and the unanimous condemnation of their behaviour by the National Assembly may be no different.

While the National Assembly’s resolution goes no further than to exhort the government to check militancy by creating jobs, which means brushing aside the real and pressing issue, the provincial assembly has called upon the religious parties to play their part or, so to say, help broker a deal with the terrorists. Maulana Fazlur Rahman, it is said, will act as an emissary of the legislators.

The maulana who heads a parliamentary party that is allied with the government both at the centre and in the province will be surely making a sincere effort to persuade the militants to negotiate rather than terrorise. But his would be a religious approach to a problem that is essentially administrative. The violence may subside for a while if he mediates but will continue to simmer only to resurface one day in a more menacing form and covering a wider area.

Objecting to women’s education is just one facet of extremism in Swat. Also under attack are some businesses like music and video shops which could offend the orthodox. In fact religion enjoins education — doctrinal and secular — irrespective of gender, wherever it can be best acquired. Hence, denial of education to women cannot be made negotiable on any religious pretext whatsoever.

In Swat education for girls cannot be questioned on grounds of tradition either as indeed it can be in some other tribal societies. Swat had schools for girls half a century ago when it was a state ruled by the Wali — more in number and better in quality than in the settled parts of the province then. The agitation by latter-day mullahs is just one of the many consequences of the flawed policies of successive governments that have allowed extraneous considerations to influence administrative matters.

Before merger with West Pakistan (One Unit) Swat, like the other two Frontier states of Dir and Chitral, was governed by the ruler under its own laws and customs. The political agent who reported both to the provincial and central government oversaw the administration to make sure that the few national laws and covenants that applied were not defied.

In Chitral state where this writer was the political officer in the pre-merger days all affairs were conducted and disputes decided either under the rule of the Sharia or in accordance with local usage and traditions. The government’s crime regulations applied only in specific areas and situations and were rarely invoked. In the tenure of this writer it wasn’t found necessary to invoke the Frontier Crimes Regulation even once.

Some offences fell in the jurisdiction of Meezan-i-Sharia. Most others were tried in a judicial council. Both worked under the watch of the political officer but the rules of evidence and punishment were so simply and clearly defined that partiality or corruption were seldom alleged for him to interfere.

The state was so orderly and peaceful that even a lone stranger travelling across the length of the state stretching from verdant valleys to glacial heights abutting Tajikistan could expect only help and hospitality from the people along the way. It is a different story of crime and sectarian murders now. Chitral was isolated and poor. Swat was larger, accessible and a holiday resort but still peaceful as the administration was effective and trial of offences and settlement of disputes under the local laws was expeditious.

The demand for the enforcement of the Sharia gathered support as crimes and the attendant hardship of the people grew and intensified. The new and complex laws and judicial procedures that had come to replace the rough and ready justice of the past did not provide either relief or security to the common people. They only added to their worries. The proliferating jihadis moved in to harness the general discontent to their advantage. The visible symbols of modernity or permissiveness like video cassettes and emancipated women going to schools and entering professions have become the targets of their wrath.

The basic cause of unrest in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) is similar. There too the covenants and traditions that determined the relationship between the tribes and governmental authority, and varied from agency to agency, were made to give way to new laws and aggressive intervention. Then the tribal hierarchy broke down under the stress of jihad, first against the Soviets and currently against the Americans.

The Mughals and later the British ruled the vast and varied Indian subcontinent by following a fundamental principle that whatever was working well — the law or the institution — must not be disturbed. We shouldn’t have.

The best hope for peace and order still lies in going back to the system in which the government’s representative, the political agent, administers on the basis of the customs of each area or tribe. If Sharia is a part of the tradition, as it was in Chitral, so be it. A country of such great cultural and geographical diversity as Pakistan cannot be governed by one rigid code nor driven by one stick. The writ of the state has become a cliché. Whatever works should be allowed to do so.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

IF you are the head of something called the Equality and Human Rights Commission, your job is to complain about the racism, gender discrimination and general unfairness of the society you live in. So Trevor Phillips, the chairman of Britain’s E&HRC, broke with tradition when he said last week that Britain is “by far — and I mean by far — the best place in Europe to live if you are not white.”

Phillips, whose own heritage is black Caribbean, made his remarks on the 10th anniversary of a report on the murder of a young black Londoner, Stephen Lawrence, that condemned the police as “institutionally racist.” So they were, at the time — but having lived in London half my life, I think Phillips is right. Things have changed.

Lucinda Platt of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Essex University thinks so too. She has just published a report revealing that one in five children in Britain now belongs to an ethnic minority — and one in 10 lives in a mixed-race family. The first statistic might merely confirm Enoch Powell’s fears of 40 years ago. The second proves that he was utterly wrong.

Enoch Powell was the Conservative politician who made a famous speech in 1968 predicting race war if the United Kingdom did not stop non-white immigration from the former empire. He dressed it up with quotes from the classics, but the message was plain: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.”

“That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic,” Powell went on, referring to the race riots that devastated many large American cities after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, “...is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, (the non-white part of the British population) will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.”

Powell was promptly expelled from the shadow cabinet, but an opinion poll soon afterwards showed that 74 per cent of the British population shared his fears. The general opinion at the time in Europe, based mainly on observation of the American experience, was that different races could not live comfortably together.

Fast forward 40 years, and Britain is more or less as Powell predicted: the proportion of non-whites among its citizens is almost the same as it is in the United States. But the next generation of British are not fighting each other, as Powell predicted; they are marrying each other.

Among British children who have an Indian heritage, 11 per cent live in families with one white parent. Among Muslim Britons the rate is much lower (only four per cent for kids of Pakistani heritage), but the younger generation of British people is largely blind to ethnicity, religious differences, all the old shibboleths. And apart from some former mill towns where unskilled immigrants from a single ethnic group confront the old white working class, both of them now unemployed, there are few racially segregated ghettoes in Britain.

Of London’s 32 boroughs, none is less than 10 per cent non-white. Only three reach 50 per cent, and those just barely. Despite the happy-ever-after inauguration of Barack Obama, the urban scene in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago is dramatically different.

The French “race riots” of 2005 and 2007 occasioned much discussion of France’s failure to integrate its immigrants, but lots of angry white kids took part in those riots too. The same was true of the Brixton “race riots” in London in 1981. They were actually anti-police riots, and whites were welcome to join. Many did.

Eastern Europe is different: it has far fewer non-whites, and so it is far more racist. But Britain, and to a lesser extent France, are rather like Canada, another country that was 98 per cent white only 50 years ago, but now has a racial diversity that equals or exceeds that of the United States. Yet it simply isn’t an issue for most of the young. Indeed, London and Toronto are probably the two best cities in the world in which to bring up mixed-race kids.

None of this detracts from the historic achievement of Americans in electing a black (well, all right, mixed-race) president. It’s just to say that it was much harder to do that in the United States because of the malign influence of history.

All the more credit to Americans for doing it anyway. And full marks to the British and the Canadians for showing that race really doesn’t matter when history doesn’t get in the way.