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If you haven’t read the PTI’s white paper on the government’s first year in power, here’s a quick brief. It begins with a quote, rather strangely chosen, by a Frenchman from the revolutionary era, saying something about Spartans and Persians and how people are slaves because they cannot utter the word ‘no’. The Frenchman in question — Nicolas Chamfort — is then erroneously identified as a 19th-century French writer.
In fact, Chamfort died in 1794 and belonged firmly to the 18th century. But let’s not quibble over trivial details.
Monsieur Chamfort had other lines to his credit, besides the one that decorates the top of the white paper. “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” he once wrote.
The failures in governance are grave indeed but it would be helpful if the PTI did not turn them into a theatre of the absurd
Few ideas are more “generally held” in Pakistan than the idea that corruption alone holds this country back. The white paper peddles much of this simplistic reasoning, calling for a “historic struggle” against this “nearly 70-year pattern of careening from one corrupt and illegitimate regime to the next”.
And what is the pattern? In tight prose and a neat juxtaposition, the white paper begins with a panoramic view of the Metrobus project, “sealed off by steel barrier walls in splendid isolation from the rest of the traffic” and with a price tag said to be Rs1 billion per kilometre.
But it is what lies beneath the ground upon which the project is built that the authors draw our attention, where “invisible to the citizens of Lahore but vital to their existence, runs the city’s system of water pipes”. This system, the paper tells us citing a press report, is so poorly maintained that raw sewage infiltrates it, and the water is laced with arsenic.
“It is difficult to imagine a more perfect illustration of the grandiosity and cynicism of the ruling PML-N government than this stark juxtaposition,” says the paper. We get expensive visible projects, like the Metrobus, while “the actual workaday business of governing” is allowed to languish. “No one sees what is underground.”
From here the paper launches a broadside against the rule of the PML-N, “where the grinning Sharif brothers cut ribbons on vanity projects and then hand the invoices to working people” who are left to drink water laced with sewage and arsenic.
Let me say this: it’s a good thing that we have a political party which is pointing these failures out so trenchantly. The failures in governance are grave indeed and not just the Sharif brothers, but others too need to have them rubbed in their faces. But it would be helpful if in the course of doing so, the PTI did not reduce them to the level of “idiocy” by turning the whole thing into an absurd theatre.
The topics that the paper covers range from GDP growth to debt management to the youth loan scheme. In each case, a press report or two is what the claims are based on. The paper faults the government for taking expensive loans from abroad, for instance, without mentioning what other debt management alternatives should have been followed instead. Would domestic borrowing be preferred?
It faults the government for paying out Rs500bn to settle the circular debt at the very beginning of its term last year, but doesn’t mention what else could have been done to get power generation going again. Were other options available in the immediate term?
It faults the government for raising power tariffs by “78pc” in the last year, but how would the PTI advance power-sector reforms without narrowing the gap between the cost of generation and the cost of selling electricity?
In many places, the complaint it brings against the PML-N government is valid — like the government’s failure to reduce line losses or the fevered pursuit of the Nandipur power project. But in other places it takes failures that are the consequence of deep structural rigidities that will take far more than one year to resolve, and puts them on the list of the government’s failures in its first year in power. For example, raising the GDP growth rate or raising competitiveness.
It raises some valid points about delays in appointments in state-owned enterprises, but bundles in other miscellaneous complaints into the package, like Najam Sethi in the PCB and the sacking of the Nadra chairman.
The mixed bag of complaints — some valid, others imagined and many far-fetched — leads to another lyrical conclusion.
The present government, we are told, has reduced people’s lives to “a constant struggle for survival, it robs them of what makes us truly human — the ability to dream”.
Against this failure, the paper promises that “the protests will continue until the people have justice” and invokes the legacy of protests in city squares like Tiananmen, Tahrir and Taksim, while lionising “the courage of those who gave their lives trying to bring down corrupt rulers”. From here, the prose takes off into a flight of literary fancy of “only the truth can set a nation free” variety, describing the first year of the government as “a disaster of unprecedented proportions”.
Nothing bothered Monsieur Chamfort more than pretentious hyperbole of this sort. Groomed in the parlours of the French aristocracy, he fell out with his patrons and joined the Jacobins in the revolutionary years, serving as their secretary general for a while. Eventually, he turned the sharp end of his wit against the revolutionary pretensions of his new brethren, summing up their creed as “[b]e my brother, or I will kill you!” What a perfect epitaph for the pseudo revolutionary zeal that fires the marchers on the GT road today.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2014
