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YOUR editorial 'Agricultural income tax' (Oct 30) was like a whiff of fresh air amidst the prevailing suffocation. There is a weed-like proliferation of TV channels.
There is also no dearth of newspapers in all the languages of the country. But their staple fare is Am-Pak relations, executive-judiciary standoff, Muslim League mergers with some local events like target killings and murderous raids on shrines and mosques thrown in for good measure.No one seems interested in issues that affect the masses. Even reference to the burgeoning commodity prices is muted. Dawn
Instead of treading the beaten track, has boldly broached one of the two critical issues that have plagued Pakistan. The other is land reform and abolition of zamindari.
In India, agricultural income was taxed soon after independence.
Even in what is now Bangladesh, tax on agricultural income was imposed early in 1951. But here, though agricultural holdings are spread over tens of thousands of acres, the tax has been successfully resisted, regardless of whether it was an elected government or military dictatorship.
The other and far more important issue is the abolition of zamindari and reducing the size of individual landholdings.
Again, in India zamindari was abolished at once after partition. In East Pakistan, zamindari was scrapped with a stroke of the pen in 1951 and without compensation. West Pakistani feudal tsars felt a gush of schadenfreude at the measure, because the zamindars in East Pakistan were Hindu but in this way they also unwittingly underscored the divide in the culture of the people of the two wings that would ultimately result in their separation.
Today the landholding ceiling in Bangladesh is 25 bighas. That works to about eight acres at three bighas to an acre. Thus, Bangladesh translated Iqbal's call, 'lada de mamoley ko shahbaz se', into action.
That is why Mukhtaran Mai does not happen there. There are no 'signeurs,' so there is no droit du signeur.
In Pakistan, the divide between the landholders and the landless presents a picture of France before the Revolution. It also accounts why Pakistan never had political leaders like Poland's Lech Walesa, Brazil's Lula de Silva, or intellectuals like Bangladesh's Nobel Laureate, Mohammad Yunus and why, as soon as Bangladesh was freed of the influence of West Pakistani feudal culture, it threw up Yunus.
S.G. JILANEE
Karachi
