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AN apartment building in Islamabad had put up a printed sign near the main lift saying that ‘domestic staff’ employed in the apartments should use the service or back lifts and not the main ones. A club in Lahore does not allow domestic staff to enter the bakery on its premises.
A large departmental store in Liberty Market in Lahore practises profiling: it welcomes customers that clearly appear better off. But for those who appear to be drivers, domestic staff or just poorer customers, it requires them to give their identity card numbers and sometimes even their identity cards for the duration of their stay in the department store. A friend mentioned that she saw two poor street girls, who had walked in to buy some biscuits, being hounded out of the store by the staff.
How can we allow such apartheid when we claim that all individuals have equal rights? Does it make it any more acceptable, that money is the criterion for discrimination here?
And one can be sure it is not the administrations in these places that have instituted such practices on their own. It is their clientele that must have insisted that they would not like the ambiance of a club or shop to be undermined, and that they would not like their lifts to be polluted by the presence of domestic staff. Do poor people smell? Do they make the rich uncomfortable by their mere presence when in close proximity?
Recently a section of our society was up in arms against the audacity of a restaurant owner from Islamabad refusing to allow Pakistani passport holders in the restaurant premises. There was vocal if not substantial debate on the legality and morality of the issue. There was debate on whether the owner had the right licences. And the social pressure, on the owner and eventually on the Islamabad city administration, was quite substantial.
Ultimately the issue was resolved. But, for discrimination against the poor, we do not see the protest. One clear difference in the cases is clearly the class that is being discriminated against. At core is the idea that all are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The worst form of pride is thinking or feeling that one is superior to another, for whatever reason. And the desire to show the other as smaller or lesser than oneself is the worst manifestation of this pride. But these forms of pride and their manifestations seem to be very common in our society. We take pride in showing off (conspicuous consumption) and the more stark the difference between us and the others, the better it is.
There are other divisions in Pakistan too, based on ethnicity, religion, gender and so on. But the one based on poverty seems to be the most stringent and the least questioned. It is the poor who are at the receiving end of the discrimination stick. Who will speak for them? And if they speak for themselves, who is listening to them?
The other day I parked my car in front of a big bookshop in Islamabad. As I was going in a young man asked me if my car needed cleaning. I said yes. But then I noticed that the guard at the bookshop came to the car cleaner and told him he could not clean my car while it was parked in front of the shop. I asked him why.
He said he had been ordered by the owner or manager of the bookshop to make sure no car parked in front of the shop could be cleaned there. I asked him if they had an order from the Capital Development Authority. He said no, but that he had to do the owner’s bidding.
I told the cleaner to continue but went into the shop and asked the person behind the counter if they had any CDA order that allowed them to stop these young men from making a bit of money by cleaning cars. They did not have any such authority. I told the person to stop the badmashi. The owner of the shop, sitting in the back, came out and called me badtameez.
Since there was no point in continuing, I left the bookshop. The bookshop lost a customer, I lost respect for the bookseller. Neither of which will be of any consequence to the shop: it is too popular to worry about a customer. But it will, I am sure, continue to harass poor young men outside and not allow them to make a few hundred rupees that they make by cleaning cars.
The main reason for the harassment: the bookshop owner wants more and more cars in the parking and thinks that cleaning a car will take 15-20 minutes extra. But the fact they were harassing poor people and denying them the opportunity to even make a rudimentary living, and clearly using illegal means, was not an issue for the shopkeeper.
Maybe it is time to be more proactive on this front and systematically so. We are no longer seeing or noticing the very entrenched system of apartheid, against the poor, that we have developed in this country. It is odious and unconscionable, morally and even legally. But there does not seem to be any coalition against it. There does not seem to be any outrage or anger against it.
The writer is senior adviser, Pakistan at Open Society Foundations, associate professor of economics, LUMS, and a visiting fellow at IDEAS, Lahore.
