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BEHIND the scenes, an issue has been building up amongst the cadres of the Lady Health Workers, a programme instituted many years ago to cater to the hitherto unmet health needs of rural populations and urban slum dwellers. It seems the salaries and other dues of many in Sindh have not been paid for some time.
According to the spokesperson of the All Pakistan Lady Health Workers Welfare Organisation, the Sindh government has been approached over the issue several times, to no avail. As a last resort, therefore, on Thursday the workers converged on the Chief Minister’s House in Karachi and held a sit-in. This is situated along a network of arterial thoroughfares that are amongst the city’s busiest, servicing as they do the commercial and financial hubs.
The sit-in had immediate effect. Traffic went out of whack almost immediately on upwards of a dozen arteries, and the resulting gridlock took hours to resolve. But the move did produce an outcome. The provincial health secretary arrived and during an hour-long negotiation, promised that the issue would be resolved within a week. The health workers called off the protest temporarily, vowing to converge at the same spot again if the government reneged on its most recent promise.
Not all forms of protest are equal.
Meanwhile, last week, private schools in Punjab remained shut for two days in a ‘strike’ against the recently passed Punjab Private Educational Institutions (Promotion and Regulation) Amendment Bill 2015. Earlier, parents of schoolchildren had been protesting against what they said was the private schools’ unfettered ability to annually raise fees. Punjab’s solution was this piece of legislation, which caps the annual raise at 5pc — which the schools resent.
Their administrations maintain that the cap is too low given inflation rates and rising costs of doing business (and private schooling has become in Pakistan a business like any other); further, they say, they are already having to bear the brunt of the costs incurred by putting in place beefed-up security measures required by the government in the wake of the massacre at Peshawar’s Army Public School.
In both the examples, the issues the protests were centred on aside, it was ordinary people who suffered — in the case of the health workers, the thousands of commuters who were stuck in traffic; and in the case of the schools, thousands of children who missed their days of learning. These are not the only instances where citizens have suffered as a result of bureaucracy’s alleged sluggishness and/or incompetence. From time to time, there is news of even doctors going so far as to shut down hospitals’ emergency rooms to draw attention to their issues. As a colleague commented, why punish ordinary citizens?
The right to protest is an inalienable part of a democratic polity. Where citizens are stripped of this right, the situation amounts to a dictatorship or fascism. But the right to protest is also not unfettered; not all forms of protest are equal.
Yes, all over the world strong unions cause disruptions in citizens’ lives to force their issue; there have been times that, for example, the London Underground has been forced to suspend operations. But there are also rules about ‘essential services’ that cannot be allowed to cease operations. Should the police or army be allowed to go on strike? If a power supplier had issue with the government, would it be acceptable for it to pull the plug on a city? Emergency rooms are essential services. Schools ought to be treated similarly.
But where should the limit be set in a country where the bureaucracy and administrations are famously inattentive and suffer from a lack of capacity so that the only hope lies in extreme measures? The health workers, for example, went through all the avenues they could; much good did it do them. The private schools, too, said that they had lobbied to the fullest extent possible with the government, but to no avail.
Yet there is also a glaring difference between the health workers and the private schools vis-à-vis their position with the state. The former are government employees. But the latter are not, and more pertinently, are the result of the original sin of the state: that it allowed public-sector education to deteriorate. Simply put, first the state abdicated its responsibility to educate, creating a void that private initiatives filled. Then, it abdicated its responsibility to provide security, confining itself to issuing guidelines that institutions had to comply with. And now, the school managements argue, the state is telling them to do business in the way it dictates, too.
As with everything else, matters begin and end with the state and its institutions. Were governmental functionaries able or willing to notice and take action when an issue has started festering, such extreme forms of protest would not have become the norm. But until then, unfortunately, the norm is set to remain.
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, March 14th, 2016
