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Tom’s letter
No more diktats THIS refers to the article No more diktats, by Tasneem Siddique, published in the issue of April 20, 2003. The writer explores many important issues which were neglected in the past. I fully endorse his views that our legislators, financial managers and policy makers are equally responsible for this dilemma. They just play to the gallery and make high claims of the country being on the path to prosperity. All successive governments and regimes failed because they never intended to seriously address the issue of poverty. Even now, while the poor reel under one crisis or another, the elite never suffer. Sick industrial units never close down and we never hear of an industrialist going bankrupt in this country. If there is a disaster, for whatever the reason, we never hear of a feudal lord paying the price. On the contrary, they get their loans written off, and they more than recover their loses. Besides, they profit from inflation too. The elites have the best hospitals, the best schools and the best of everything else. They can even afford access to education and health facilities abroad. You have elite English-medium schools for the rich, and Urdu-medium and ‘Peela’ schools for the poor. The state has actually created unemployment and poverty through its agriculture, industrial and taxations policies, and despite all the money put in in such programmes, poverty has yet to come down. Human resource development, agrarian reforms and industrial growth need, of course, immediate action. But we should not forget that poverty cannot be alleviated without asset redistribution. The tax structure also needs to be turned around, so as to tax the rich and serve the poor. It is high time that people, NGOs and our leaders should mobilize themselves without relying on foreign aid, to root out poverty from our country. SYED ALI ZAIDI Hyderabad Asghar Khan’s option ASGHAR Khan’s interview, in the issue of April 27, 2003, was timely in view of the fact that leaders of India and Pakistan will resume their dialogue hopefully very shortly. The Kashmir problem has been the cause of much suffering of not only the Kashmiris of the Valley but also of the poor masses of the Indo-Pak Subcontinent. Initially, the Kashmiris, including their then prime minister, were inclined to join Pakistan but their case was spoiled by the Muslim League leadership of the forties. Firstly, the leadership was given a red-carpet welcome in 1944 by the Muslim Conference of Kashmir as well as the Communist Party, but the insistence of the League leadership that nothing could be done unless the Kashmiris join All India Muslim League led to problems. The students of Kashmir who were given Nehru Scholarships in the early fifties to study at Aligarh were positively in favour of having links with Pakistan rather than with India. Air Marshal Asghar Khan, being much more experienced than either Benazir or Nawaz Sharif, has made a very strong case for the third option which, in my opinion, is a necessity now after the cooking up of events in the Valley of Kashmir after 1989. Atal Behari Wajpai should realize that the suffering of the Kashmiris on both sides of the LoC is genuine and can only be alleviated if the two parts have the option to join hands like the Germans did in 1989. Afghanistan is a case in point where many faction are now trying to do away with differences. America should not be allowed to interfere. The Indians can continue to spend rupees one thousand crores annually on Kashmir and carry on trade with both parts of Kashmir just as they are doing in Afghanistan prior to the advent of the Taliban. Pakistan can do whatever little it can do to promote tourism instead of cross border activities in Kashmir. AHMAD ZAFAR FAROOQI Karachi | ||
I WISH what appeared in Amar Jaleel’s Mystic Notes Tom writes to mom, on April 17, 2003, would be true. It was a very nice effort from the writer to make people think (who haven’t done this before) about this war from that prospective.|
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