| November 24, 2007 | Saturday | Ziqa’ad 13, 1428 |
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‘Give us back our country’
ON Nov 15, a group of citizens placed a half-page ad in this newspaper in which we demanded the return of the status quo ante Nov 3, when the current bout of martial law was imposed.
Titled ‘Give us back our country’, the appeal carried the names of some seventy-odd people, and was a reiteration of the demands of civil society: the release of all political prisoners; the lifting of the emergency; and the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry as well as those of his colleagues who were arbitrarily removed from their respective benches.
But after the ad appeared, I began wondering what we would do with it if, by some miracle, we did get our country back. Who would run it, and to what end? A fairly elected government is the obvious answer to the first part of the question, but the second part is a bit trickier.
Superficially, we can trot out the usual clichés: the betterment of the people, clean government, and secure borders. But when we look around and examine the magnitude of the problems confronting us, the task of running Pakistan seems much more daunting.
Any government that is formed (the PML-Q of the Chaudhrys excepted) would, one presumes, seek to improve the lot of the millions of Pakistanis currently living in dire poverty. The social infrastructure, long neglected, needs massive investment. But the thrust of globalisation and the ruling neo-liberal philosophy both demand the downsizing of the state, and the privatisation of virtually all social services.
In the neo-liberal worldview, the state retreats to the barest possible functions, while the market determines where resources are to be used. Thus, if the economy needs more engineers, it will express its demand through higher wages.
This will send a signal to private teaching institutions to train more engineers. Similarly, if people are suffering from disease, they will pay for treatment, and this will encourage private hospitals to expand, or attract investment in new ones. And if the economy requires an educated workforce, the private sector will build more schools.
Thus, access to health and education is not a right, but something that has to be paid for at the market rate. Although it is difficult to sell this model to countries where the welfare state is now a fact of life, this agenda is being relentlessly pushed by a small group of well-entrenched academics, journalists and politicians.
For some reason that remains a mystery to me to this day, a few years ago I was invited to Sri Lanka to attend a four-day workshop run by the Mount Pellerin Society, a neo-liberal organisation. There, I got into arguments with the other participants all the time.
How, I asked, can you expect children to wait while the market creates schools, and how do you expect their parents to pay the fees? And what happens if the economy is weak and does not need workers? Does that mean their children should remain uneducated?
In a sense, the Pakistani state has followed this model and opted out of education, leaving the field open to secular and religious investors. Thus, we have a three-track educational system comprising terrible state schools; a wide range of private institutions; and madressahs that teach students to learn the scriptures by heart, and little else.
We see the result of this wilful neglect around us in the form of poorly educated young men and women whose material expectations are nevertheless very high. Those condemned to state institutions or madressahs cannot compete with the products of private schools, creating huge social and economic inequalities. And the economy remains unable to compete internationally largely due to the poorly educated workforce it is forced to hire.
Similarly, the vast majority is forced to seek treatment for their medical problems in grossly under-financed state hospitals because they cannot afford private health care. And despite the growing population, the government’s investment in health has declined in real terms. Barely any new public hospitals are being built, while the private sector is flourishing.
This brings us to the role and responsibility of the state: should it outsource most of its functions and let citizens sink or swim? Or should it play an active role in ensuring that nobody should go hungry; that all children are enrolled in schools where they receive a decent education, whether they can pay or not; and that everybody has access to adequate health care.
Clearly, providing all this needs vast resources. But more importantly, it needs political will. Which among our major political parties even addresses these issues seriously? And with elections around the corner, which party will put the poor at the centre of their manifesto, and mean what they say?
Of course there is a lot of bombast about the ‘common man’. But apart from lip service during electoral campaigns, who has initiated policies to even begin solving the many problems our mythical ‘common man’ faces?
Obviously, a military government is not interested in investing in the people. Its first concern is to stay in power, thereby ensuring the divergence of resources for its own purposes and perks. Above all, army juntas wish to preserve the lucrative status quo. Equally clearly, we can only get our country back if we can somehow push the army back to its barracks and to the borders.
Assuming that the present (or some future) movement does succeed, we return to the question of what we would do with it if we did get our country back. Thus far, there is very little consensus.
The holy fathers of the MMA are clear that they would want to take it straight back to the mediaeval era. The Muslim League in all its many manifestations is a party of and for the feudals and big business.
This leaves only the PPP representing the interests of the poor and the dispossessed. But over the years, it has come to occupy the same economic space inhabited by the Muslim League. Indeed, there was little to distinguish its economic policies from the PML’s each time it was in power in the ‘nineties.
This was hardly surprising, given the virtual collapse of socialism as an alternative path to development.
Nevertheless, the fact that so many women, minority groups and the downtrodden still regard it as their party places a heavy responsibility on the PPP. Although it is unlikely to form the next government, given the widespread rigging we can safely expect the party leadership need to focus on their responsibility to the people.
