November 05, 2007	Monday	Shawwal 23, 1428

Archives Write to Mr. Jawed Naqvi

If I remember right it was the eminent Pakistani historian Mubarak Ali who witnessed the assault on Christian minorities in Gujarat’s Dang region some years ago. His conclusion? “We do the same with our minorities in Pakistan. The difference is we do it under martial law and you do it under parliamentary democracy.” The strangely equal rule applies also to our national sovereignty. Pakistan surrendered it to a foreign power long ago through military rule and India is getting there through a quasi-parliamentary route.

In fact the arriving surrender of India’s sovereignty (as reflected for example in its coerced anti-Iran votes at IAEA or in its leader’s willingness to accept the Hyde Act which requires us to follow Washington’s lead in foreign policy or the suspected deliberate prevarication on the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline agreement and finally the scaling down of diplomatic interest in the Shanghai initiative) is not being pushed so much by the parliamentary route as it is sought to be ushered through the backdoor with under-hand methods. There is an attempt to create the illusion of popular will when the actual process involves a careful subversion of that will.

India is today run by the Congress party, which has fewer seats in parliament than the 153 it got even after suffering the “rout” of the post-emergency polls in 1977. The absurdity is there for all to see. A tally of 153 seats in 1977 was called a rout and a tally of 145 in 2004 is described as a mandate to overturn a foreign policy. Its percentage of votes too fell substantially in 2004 from its count in 1999. Effectively the Congress is heading a minority government and with a prime minister who was never elected directly by the people. On the contrary he holds his membership of the Rajya Sabha thanks to an outlandish residential address he gave in the remote state of Assam to avoid a challenge even for a safe seat in the upper house.

Worse has happened in the subversion of Indian democracy, which is not unrelated to an agenda to transform its foreign policy and economy to dovetail with external minders. It has not been widely discussed that there would be no economic reforms of Dr Manmohan Singh had a clutch of tribal MPs from Jharkhand not been bribed, as was only subsequently proved in the court of law which also convicted the guilty to prison sentences. So its was bribery that saved the government, in which Dr Singh was finance minister, from being voted out in a close confidence test. It has never been asked as far as I know what the then finance minister thought of the way his globally applauded agenda was actually predicated on an underhand vote in parliament.It has also not been sufficiently discussed how a so-called thriving democracy went all out to prevent Sonia Gandhi, the person who actually won the mandate, if there was one, in 2004 from being sworn in as prime minister.

The orchestrated move by the opposition to stall her by brazenly unconstitutional means, the bizarre fall in the stock market in alleged fear of Gandhi’s coronation (the truth of which is yet to be made public) and the keenness shown by some from within the Congress who shored up as the alternative choice a person who was best credited with policies that lost the Congress the elections in 1996 would make for a gripping thriller.

The question of why despite all the numbers she had in May 2004 Ms Gandhi was forced to make what came to be known as a much celebrated ‘sacrifice’ has not been asked either. It should be of interest to anyone who has seen last week’s revelations by her former close aide and foreign minister Natwar Singh. According to this revelation, Sonia Gandhi was initially opposed to the nuclear deal with the United States. It is significant and most probably an accurate account of the story because the truth of how an independent minded potential leader was sidelined and a pliable one installed in her place is couched somewhere there.

There is of course no palpable link between a democracy or a dictatorship and a government’s tendency to compromise its sovereignty in the name of national interest. Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule, which lasted for 19 months, is a good example of a dictatorial government that refused to budge on its foreign policy or its stated economic principles. Conversely, the Janata Party, a coalition of disparate interests, which rode a tide of popular support, though briefly, was able to put the focus sharply on “genuine non-alignment”, euphemism for a markedly pro-American tilt.

In Pakistan by contrast the one leader who challenged the traditional military-led alliance with the West was summarily hanged. His successors are perceived to be under pressure to give up their populist rhetoric in favour of a free-market mantra being practised by the current dispensation led by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

Neo-con economic policies are thus being pursued at will right across South Asia, from Afghanistan and Pakistan in the west, to India and Bangladesh in the east and Sri Lanka (which still calls itself a socialist republic!) in the south. It is being licked into shape by former Citibank executive Shaukat Aziz in Pakistan, or a bevy of former World Bank executives surrounding the prime minister of India as advisers, or Fakhruddin Ahmed, a Princeton-educated former World Bank employee who is heading a somewhat unending looking interim government in Bangladesh with the military’s support.

Benazir Bhutto on her return to Karachi after eight years in exile had remarked that she had come there to serve the poor of Pakistan. This is not quite the impression we are left with if we read for example what Salman Shah, economic adviser to Pakistan’s prime minister, had told me in September.

What Mr Shah had said presents a different story. Any new government in Pakistan following fresh elections, he stressed, must continue the current economic policies if the 7 per cent plus growth is to be maintained or even overhauled.“This is an election year,” he said in September. “Election year in Pakistan is always boisterous and you have a very high decibel levels. And ultimately I think the electorate always gives a good result. Right now our economy is doing very well. Growth rate is 7 per cent plus. Stock market is very high, foreign investments are coming in at a level that was unthinkable seven years ago. So I think the economic growth has weathered the political decibels.”

Asked if the free-market policies of the present government could be reviewed by a new party in power, particularly given PPP’s history of populism in the country, Mr Shah said: “We believe that whoever comes into power would have to follow (our) policies. We have a very independent media, we have an independent judiciary and we have, I think, very well informed people.

“So any mismanagement of the economy will not be tolerated — for the simple reason that the bench-marks that have been established in Pakistan in terms of fiscal management, in terms of monetary policy, in terms of exchange rate policies would brook no lowering of the bar,” Mr Shah said. “And the level of the growth, and the level of the investment, if it is not better than before, if any government will not be able to maintain it, will have a very tough time surviving.”

Does the description by Mr Shah of the state of the economy in September come anywhere close to the bleak picture painted by Gen Pervez Musharraf in the reasons he cited to proclaim emergency? And yet economic priorities can’t be far behind in his agenda to align the country with the prescriptions from abroad. He can of course always say, not without a degree of authority, that the same policies could just as easily be pursued under the cover of democracy, like in India.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com