Of incredible figures and lip-service to policies

CREDIBILITY is a trait which is lacking with our governments, both civilian and military. So much so that official statistics are doubted and official policy intentions are ridiculed.

Take, for instance, the literacy rate of 50.5 per cent as has been given in the recent Economic Survey Report 2001-02. This figure prompted a letter-to-the-editor in Dawn last week questioning its reliability, since the literacy rate was supposed to have been only 36 per cent just a few years ago.

The government had apparently obtained the 50 per cent overall figure by taking the average of the percentage of rural literacy (30 per cent) plus the percentage of urban literacy (70 per cent). The writer’s argument was that since a much greater proportion of the country’s population lived in rural areas, the 30 per cent literacy rate would actually prevail much more than the 70 per cent of the comparatively small population in the cities.

The writer argued further that the impression gathered from the general surroundings also belies the official literacy figure. That children are seen around in the city streets begging, selling matchboxes and flowers, employed as cheap labour in houses, workshops, teashops, and in the carpet industry and other factories, simply does not support the government’s claim of a 50 per cent literacy rate.

Literacy rate aside, another incredible figure is the rate of inflation which at 2.7 per cent (2001-02) is supposedly the lowest in 30 years. Although this has been cited as “one of the major achievements” of the outgoing fiscal year, the fact is that the prices of electricity, gas, petrol and kerosene have actually gone up 30 to 60 per cent in the past few years, raising the prices of transport and production costs. The prices of many vegetables (e.g. onions) and fruits (e.g. bananas), and processed items (e.g. cooking oil), have also gone up noticeably. The general impression given by these price rises thus does not tally with the official three-decade low inflation rate figure.

At the same time, the government has also been trying to convince the public that the economy is not only looking but doing better by citing the increase in the country’s foreign reserves, currently over $6 billion, as compared to $1.5 billion in 1999. Regardless of the reliability of the figure, the common man is hardly convinced at all that the economy is doing any better because for him life continues to be difficult due to the rising prices and general lack of gainful employment opportunities.

Let alone these official statistics, even broad overall policy intentions are being pooh-poohed. A stark example is poverty alleviation. Despite loud official pronouncements about the poverty reduction strategy and the World Bank-sponsored poverty alleviation programme, people continue to doubt the government’s sincerity, so much so that its poverty alleviation programme has been ridiculed as actually being a strategy for poverty elevation.

This is because the government is saying one thing but seem to be actually doing something else. The finance minister recently announced a whopping Rs136 billion for the poverty alleviation programme in the fiscal 2002-3. This amount plus its stated commitment to a string of social projects, namely the Khushhal Pakistan programme, the food support programme, Zakat, micro credit, regularization of kutcha abadis, and land distribution, are all meant to show the government’s commitment to reducing poverty. But projects like Khushhal Pakistan, food support and micro credit are mere palliatives which may help to a small extent to address only the symptoms but hardly the root- causes of poverty.

Addressing the root-causes would require the concept of poverty reduction to figure prominently in the government’s overall economic strategy. But poverty reduction is completely missing here. There is no relief whatsoever for the common man in the form of better or cheaper health or education, and better living conditions or employment opportunities. The Public Sector Development Programme federal allocations (2002-2003) for education (Rs2.6 billion) and health (Rs3.3 billion) remain pathetic vis-a-vis the total PSDP federal budget of Rs90 billion.

Worse still, the government has adopted measures, which actually make life even harder for the common man, in effect producing even more poverty. First, the imposition of 15 per cent GST on medicines and now edible oil and vegetable ghee. These are basic items of everybody, rich or poor, but the taxes will hit the poor much harder because they spend a much greater proportion of their income on these items. Second, the decision to allow revision of oil prices every two weeks during the fiscal 2002-3 will definitely mean frequent increase in petrol prices, which in turn will raise transport and production costs, and thus consumer items in general — another big hit to the common man.

Finally, for any poverty alleviation programme to work, an aggressive population control programme has to form a major component of the government’s overall economic strategy. But no government has been able to make population control the cornerstone of its economic strategy. The population explosion, specially among the poor and lower income groups, is the root cause of our country’s economic and social ills. No matter how impressive or expensive the poverty alleviation programme, any positive result achieved will be more than nullified by the unchecked population growth.

Apart from poverty alleviation, education is another topic which the government has been blowing a lot of fanfare. In the Economic Survey (2001-02), education is described as the “key to change and progress” and the “most important factor which distinguishes the poor from the non-poor”. It is also recognized that “no nation can take advantage of trade and development opportunities without making major advances in education. Without rapid and substantial improvement in access to and quality of education, broader poverty reduction efforts will be blunted”.

To top it all, the finance minister says the government is making extraordinary efforts to boost the quality of education. Yet all this verbal gung-ho over education is not reflected at all in the budgetary allocations in this sector. Education will be getting only a very small 1.38 per cent of the total outlay in the fiscal 2002-03, that is, Rs10.2 billion (Rs7.6 billion current expenditure plus Rs2.6 billion development expenditure) out of the total budget estimate of Rs742 billion. How this measly amount is going to improve education qualitatively and quantitatively, as the government has vowed to do, is anybody’s guess. Especially so when the all important population control does not figure in the government’s overall economic and social strategy.

Credibility is earned through honest and sincere policies that are mirrored in real actions and deeds that produce concrete results which can be seen in the living conditions of the people in general. Credibility cannot be earned by merely paying lip- service through high-sounding policies or by unveiling unrealistic statistics and figures.

Old British laws, new US thought-police would make Orwell squirm

You can be booked in India for possessing two bottles of liquor in your house although keeping just one is fine. This idiotic, yet the little known law derives sustenance from an old British colonial rule book once used to keep the natives on a short leash. Although the law isn’t seen being very widely used today, it is there, just in case some irritating quarry needs to be fixed.

With several other innocuous-looking but sufficiently coercive statutes available to the world’s largest democracy to harass anyone at will, you do not really require the sham of an Official Secrets Act to punish an Iftikhar Geelani or discipline other errant journalists. Nor do you need a mountain-load of colonial bumf to stop Anand Patwardhan from screening his badly needed films against nuclear militarism, communal fascism.

There are other ways for the modern Indian rulers to tackle dissent. For example, Alex Perry, the Time magazine reporter, could be given the treatment for revealing to the ignorant public some facts about the prime minister’s weakness for high- cholesterol food habits. Since the British did not leave behind a foil against lampooning someone’s proclivity to fall asleep in public, the government found it useful to apply the equally crude system of “police-reporting” at the loathsome foreigners’ registration office, once invented to harass hapless visitors from Pakistan, to bring Perry to heel.

Look around yourselves and see how the young and already fading democracies of South Asia are reinventing the colonial laws of British vintage to hound and incarcerate dissent. Attacks on media are not an Indian monopoly.

In a letter to Pakistan’s Interior Minister Lt-Gen Moinuddin Haider, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontires — RSF) was last month calling for the prompt release of British journalist Amardeep Bassey of the Sunday Mercury, saying: “Once again, a reporter of Indian origin has been arrested by the Pakistani security services on a ridiculous pretext. The accusations of spying are grotesque, and indicate discrimination against journalists of Indian origin.”

Later, the very next month, the RSF was forced to protest to the Balochistan governor, Amirul Mulk Mengal, about the arrest of journalist Rashid Butt, a Pakistani this time.

“By arresting a journalist for reporting on their failure to act, the security forces have not chosen the best means of demonstrating their competence”, said Robert Minard, secretary- general of Reporters Without Borders. The journalist was subsequently released on bail but the charges against him were apparently never dropped.

Turn to Bangladesh, another erstwhile British colony. With 145 journalists assaulted or targeted with death threats, one reporter murdered, 16 news rooms or press clubs brutally attacked and four journalists detained by the authorities in scarcely over eight months — it is by far the country with the highest incidents of violence against members of the press.

“Not a single day goes by without the press reporting an assault or death threat against a journalist,” stressed Nayeemul Islam Khan, advisory editor of the daily Ajker Kagoj.

Says RSF: “This endemic violence against news media professionals is endangering press freedom. Paradoxically, however, this South Asian country has never enjoyed a greater plurality of information sources. The print and electronic media — specially television — have actually been enjoying very rapid growth over the last five years.”

In Nepal, the editor of a newspaper was arrested and murdered recently in cold blood, apparently for being sympathetic towards Maoist insurgents. Arrests and disappearances are expected to increase and not decrease as the landlocked kingdom braces to fight a strange new variant of terrorism, one that is not evenly remotely linked to 9/11. So why are the Americans and the Indians joining hands to crush people who do not qualify as Islamists, their pet hate? If anything these insurgents are Hindus, unhappy, perhaps disgruntled and definitely very angry Hindus, who possibly include some Buddhists among them too.

Sri Lanka is one of the world’s most educated and thriving democracies. But it has a sad record of treating its media. People are jailed, killed, beaten up. Many disappear without trace. It’s a strange schizophrenic kind of democracy, very charming and very dangerous.

RSF has been pursuing several cases in Sri Lanka, and was recently assured by the interior minister and the attorney-general that they are committed to completing investigation into the murder of the BBC stringer in Jaffna. Two people who may have been involved in the murder were recently detained by investigators. As though the state is not enough of a tormentor, journalists in South Asia have to contend increasingly with non-state players out to harm them, not infrequently at the behest of the state. Daniel Pearl’s murder in Pakistan is a case in point.

Not very long ago, in fact as recently as 1984, the great date on the Orwellian calendar, the world would have frowned upon these brutal ways of wayward South Asian democracies, rapping them on the knuckles for bad habits they had picked up from this or that communist country, which indeed they had all befriended. And yet, remember how we used to condemn the Soviet system and its satellites in East Europe for violating human rights? Personal freedoms could not be bartered for a totalitarian system and so on, even if that system rose to become a superpower. That was the argument many of us used to parrot in their ideological war against the “evil empire”.

And leading the anti-Soviet chorus was the United States, its Statue of Liberty becoming the symbol of struggle against communism for whoever cared to join it. Lech Walesa, Boris Yeltsin, great names, or were they? They all shouted from the rooftops for a change in the tyrannical system of communism. They succeeded. But somewhere, very quietly, someone inserted the word “free-market democracies”, where everyone was originally supposed to be struggling for freedom and democracy, regardless of their proximity to NYSE or Hanseng indexes.

Moreover, one of the main stated objectives of the American-led anti-Soviet campaign was to usher democracy in Central Asia and also perhaps in Russia. Going by their record so far and with the tacit and overt American encouragement they are getting, neither Turkmenistan, nor Uzbekistan, nor Tajikistan, nor Kazhakhstan is going to be making a beeline for multi-party elections in the foreseeable future.

Why go that far? Just take a look at what is happening with the world’s most powerful democratic, the erstwhile workhorse of all manner of freedoms. Now it all seems to have been a conman’s trick to deceive us. The promise of sugarcandy mountain, that led the animals to revolt against the owner of Manor Farm in George Orwell’s masterpiece, has become even a more distant dream today.

According to an Associated Press report, even within the United States the FBI is visiting libraries, yes libraries, nationwide and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties with terrorists or plotting an attack.

The FBI effort, authorized by the anti-terrorism law enacted after the September 11 attacks, is the first broad government check of library records since the 1970s when prosecutors reined in the practice for fear of abuses, the report said.

The University of Illinois conducted a survey of 1,020 public libraries in January and February and found that 85 libraries had been asked by federal or local law-enforcement officers for information about patrons related to Sept 11. The libraries that reported FBI contacts were nearly all in large urban areas.

If that is the signal from the patron-saint of global freedoms and human rights, why blame the doddering democracies and shameless dictatorships of South Asia if they are now bracing to do one better.

As far as President Bush is concerned he has bluntly defended the use of military tribunals to try non-US citizens accused of terrorism. Mark the word non-US citizens. In his speech on the issue last year, Bush said: “We must not let foreign enemies use the forms of liberty to destroy liberty itself.”

As Big Brother develops more muscle and grows even bolder, it is inevitable that personal freedoms will diminish. Here is columnist William Safire’s expression of concern about the ubiquitous monitoring of Washington, DC:

“Surveillance is in the saddle. Responding to the latest Justice Department terror alert, Washington police opened the Joint Operation Command Center of the Synchronized Operations Command Complex (SOCC). In it, 50 officials monitor a wall of 40 video screens showing images of travellers, drivers, residents and pedestrians. These used to be the Great Unwatched, free people conducting their private lives; now they are under close surveillance by hundreds of hidden cameras....

The monitoring system is already linked with 200 cameras in public schools. The watchers plan to expand soon into an equal number in the subways and parks. A private firm profits by photographing cars running red lights; those images will also join the surveillance network....

Terrorists and criminals — as well as unhappy spouses, runaway teens, hermits and other law-abiding people who want to drop out of society for a while — will have no way to get a fresh start. Is this the kind of world Americans want? The promise is greater safety; the trade-off is government control of individual lives. Personal security may or may not be enhanced by this all-seeing eye and ear, but personal freedom will surely be sharply curtailed. To be watched at all times, especially when doing nothing seriously wrong, is to be afflicted with a creepy feeling. That is what is felt by a convict in an always-lighted cell. It is the pervasive, inescapable feeling of being unfree.”

So, the Orwellian nightmare that once hurtled in from the left, is now speeding very rapidly in the rightward direction almost everywhere across the world, including in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka. In fact, here’s a next agenda for a Saarc summit. The question is, are we going to be around to cover it?