The task before new leaders

WILL the present economic policy be changed by the leaders of the new government to be inducted soon following the general election? Prior to that, the question arises: Is there a demand and need for a change in policies?

Ultimately what matters is the cost: benefit ratio of the changes sought by the newly elected. Will the country and the people be better off by the changes demanded? And will the benefit be far in excess of the real cost of the change? The cost will not only be economic but also political since it has a foreign dimension as well.

The changes can come after the existing policies are carefully examined, their inter-linkages identified and the gains from the new policies assessed. Major changes in our economic policies are not domestic issues alone. The donors have to approve them. They have so far proceeded on the basis of continuity of the policies and have committed themselves to large financial assistance on that basis.

The current policies were hammered out after prolonged negotiations between the military government and the international aid agencies and donor states on the assumption that Gen Pervez Musharraf as President would provide the link between the old and the new administrations. In case the new government repudiates those policies or violates those commitments the president could invoke the assistance of the National Security Council to sustain them.

Gen Musharraf has said in Turkey that national policies cannot be changed without elaborating further. Do the present economic policies come under the label of national policies or official policies? The fact is the country has come a long way from the days when it was dubbed one-tranche country by the IMF. And that was because the governments of the day had agreed to almost any conditionality of the IMF, however unimplementable over a period of time, and breached them after getting the first tranche. Negotiations for a new agreement started thereafter and the charade went on for years, again and again.

But the country is now completing the second year of the three-year Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility with the IMF. And finance minister Shaukat Aziz has been talking of not seeking another deal with the IMF because of the humiliating conditionalities the country has to accept as well as lectures from junior IMF executives our top finance officials have to listen to.

India did the same a long time ago and returned the balance of the assistance from the IMF. Pakistan can do the same now because of the far improved foreign exchange reserves and better budgetary position.

The donors have some political conditions for continuing the committed aid and increasing it as indicated. They want the country to return to genuine democracy following the elections. While the election observers of the European Union have reported flaws in the holding of the elections, other observers have by and large approved the manner the elections have been held, particularly in view of the defeat of some significant pro-government candidates and sizable number of seats won by the opposition PPPP. But now they want a proper transfer of power to the newly elected. And for that, the political parties which have won the elections with substantial number of seats in the assemblies have to be ready to cooperate with each other to make the new system work. And deliver what they individually promised to the voters.

Qazi Husain Ahmad, chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is a major component of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal promises a welfare state. That is largely the objective of other parties as well. But creating a welfare state in our conditions, with too little of resources and too many poor people — 40 per cent of the population under the poverty line of a dollar a day — is a very tough job.

To create such a state, or even otherwise, the first objective of the new government should be to increase employment opportunities and with wages more than subsistence ones over a period of time. The second task should be reduction in the prices of essential commodities which went up as a result of the sustained inflation of almost four decades. Then, the rates for the utilities, which are under official control, will have to be lowered, particularly that of electricity.

Both the steps would need distinct improvement in law and order situation. Without that investment cannot come, and without investment more jobs cannot be created.

Shaukat Aziz talks of one billion dollars of foreign investment to come, particularly in the oil and gas sector, this year as against 480 million dollars last year. Foreign investment gives a spur to local investment as well although normally it should be the other way.

Following the return of politicians to power, workers in the public sector units earmarked for privatization may resume their protest against their sale. But the government is committed to the sale and the process of privatization of large units like KESC, Habib Bank and the Pakistan State Oil. The new government may delay that for a while, but cannot put it off unless it wants to upset the whole economic applecart.

The fact is that as we are placed now we cannot do without large external aid and relief from the heavy external debt. Otherwise poverty reduction which is a major target of this government, and which will be a major concern of the new government as well, will not make a real headway in this exceedingly poor country with its rich rulers and affluent officials.

Of course, the commitment of new prime minister and his actual role in this area will be very important. But the key player in this area will be the new finance minister who will also be in charge of economic affairs. Will Shaukat Aziz continue as finance minister following his election to the Senate by the Quaid-i-Azam Muslim League? That is certainly what President Musharraf and the donors and foreign investors want. They expect not only continuity of policies but also continuity of the economic managers.

Indisputably what has been achieved during the last three years in the economic sector cannot be upset or reversed hastily. In India too, after the BJP coalition came to power, the series of economic reforms initiated by the Congress in 1991 and after were not reversed or rejected. The present government tried to build on that, though very slowly in view of the fractious coalition that Atal Behari Vajpayee has been leading. The government to come in Pakistan has to be equally prudent.

If the new leaders try to make major changes in economic policy it can have major ramifications. If we change the policies we will be repudiating the commitments to foreign countries and aid agencies we had made. And if we repudiate those commitments the donors will also retrack from the large commitments they have made to help us, like that of the Asian Development Bank for 2.4 billion dollars to help us fight poverty. So we cannot just afford a reversal of policies and commitments and throw the donors off balance altogether.

The last three years have been a period of stabilization and consolidation of our weak economy. And that process should be strengthened and sustained in a period of economic travails around the world, which have hit the US and Western Europe as well, while Japan has been economically ailing for too long. If at such a time the 9/11 helped us a good deal, while hurting us in some areas, let us consolidate those gains and move ahead instead of reversing that process in the name of a different ideology or populist slogans.

Among the major achievements of Pakistan which had been in the economic and political doghouse following the nuclear explosions of 1998 and the military take-over of 1999, was reduction of the foreign debt from 38 billion dollars to 36 billion dollars. The foreign exchange reserves of the country have gone up to 8.3 billion dollars, and may touch 9 billion dollars by the end of this year and 10 billion dollars by the end of the financial year in June, says Shaukat Aziz.

Foreign loans valued at 2 billion dollars have been written off, and the write-off of one billion dollar as official US loans is under way. And now the government is hopefully negotiating conversion of the 12 billion dollar official loans of foreign countries into social sector development grants, and the negotiations need to be pursued now.

The external value of the rupee has been raised from a steadily sinking 67 to a dollar to around 59 to a dollar and the open market rate and the inter-bank rates have been made almost similar. The outflow of money from the country has come down greatly and home remittances rose from a billion dollars to 2.2 billion last year, and are expected to touch 3 billion dollars this year. There is scope for five billion dollars of remittances, says Shaukat Aziz.

Exports which rose to nine billion dollars last year have been rising since July and the foreign trade gap is narrowing, despite the high price of oil.

Tax collection has been improving steadily and the budget deficit has been shrinking. Sales tax collection has been improving steadily and the government expects to collect Rs 206 billion this year which will be about 40 per cent of the total tax revenue collection of Rs 460 billion. Such a large sales tax collection also boosts the provincial share of the federally collected revenues.

Interest of foreign investors in Pakistan has been increasing and China has come to play a very large role in that. China wants to help Pakistan in a big way, both in trade and infrastructure development, particularly in the development of Gwadar. It is also playing a major role in the development of copper and coal mines. China may be upset if we reverse our economic policies abruptly, particularly when it wants to help develop our textile sector in which foreign investment has been much too small.

Commercial banks, both public sector units and private sector outfits, are recovering fast and making profits and paying dividends. The high price of the National Bank share compared to the Rs 10 per share at which they were sold to the public is an indicator of the recovery of the banking sector.

This, therefore, is not the time for hasty reversal of economic policies. But certainly adjustments are possible in the light of how the reforms have worked. And certainly the poor and the middle class need relief instead of being left to fend for themselves after token relief.

In the military government there have been quite many rich men as ministers who could not feel the pangs of the poor or the hardships of the middle class. That should pave the way now for a more humane and welfarist approach. And the new leaders have to think more about the people than about their own gains while trying to recover the large investment they had made, illegally, on the elections which were far more costly than they would publicly declare.

Election 2002: some surprises

OF the many features of election 2002, two stand out distinctly. One, given a well defined issue, the electorate would rise above personal, parochial and tribal considerations.

This happened in 1946 when the people defied feudal lords and voted for Muslim League that was campaigning for a separate homeland for the Muslims. Neither they knew nor did they care to know who the candidate was. The same thing was repeated in 1970 when they voted to end exploitation by the privileged classes. In the current exercise the outcome in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan was determined by a clearly spelt out cause espoused by the MMAP.

The second surprise has been the political maturity shown by what is loosely referred to as religious parties. Hitherto, they were perceived as a group incapable of getting together even for prayers.

Scant attention was paid to the formation of the MMAP on the assumption that it would fall apart on the issue of grant of party tickets to candidates. Moreover the past performance in elections of religious parties was flaunted as reason enough to ignore it.

Political pundits had made similar forecasts about the ability the People’s Party and the Awami League to get votes in 1970 elections. The example set by the MMAP is well worth emulation by the two mainstream parties, the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People’s Party. Politics is the art of the possible and setting up a new faction when one fails to get his way reflects political immaturity.

Even the born again optimists would not find the results of the elections as promising an easy transition. The military government and the elected representatives have to share this responsibility with wisdom and maturity. Will they? Only time will tell. They can either rid themselves of rhetoric to accommodate each other and try to find the common denominator, or go for the all or nothing approach. Indications received so far are not very encouraging.

Three very prominent political leaders living abroad have charged that the elections were rigged. Solution to the problem lies in holding fresh elections according to one and launching street agitation in the opinion of the other.

Even if it is conceded that the charges are right the solutions suggested are the antithesis of the very system the political parties claim to be working for i.e. a civil society based on the rule of law. Allegations of rigging are not a new phenomenon for us. One cannot foresee an election in our country that would not attract this charge.

How many re-elections would have to be gone through before reaching one that passes the test? Who gives the verdict? Only an autocrat can afford the luxury of passing unsubstantiated judgments. A democrat is different. He works in a system based on law. Charges of wrongdoing should be taken up in the appropriate legal forum. That is what, in essence, distinguishes a civil society from the one based on brute force. The process may be painfully slow but it is the only one available. There are no short-cuts to it.

Suggestion of launching a street agitation to redress the wrongs allegedly committed during elections is fraught with even greater danger. We have been there before. In 1977 the PNA (Pakistan National Alliance) opted for that course after the elections. Many innocent lives were lost; there was serious dislocation in economic activity and both the political forces were placed in cold storage for nine long years. Which democrat would like to take the country to that end? In politics knee jerk reactions are best avoided. A tradition needs to be set that party leaders debate the issues in their working committee meetings before taking a stand on major issues.

One distinguishing feature of the period in which we had some sort of democratic rule (1988-99) was the refusal of the opposition to accept the results of the elections and start antics from day one to have the government packed up.

The desire of the ‘establishment’ to fail a democratically elected government is understandable but the opposition parties working towards that end is not.

One can only hope that horse-trading, herding of MPs in hotels, train marches, storming the Supreme Court, physically assaulting parliamentarians in the house, gagging the MPs with constitutional amendments passed in a jiffy legislation through ordinances and other such unsavoury acts are not repeated.

Another unfortunate development during the democratic period has been the politicization of civil service. The rot started during the first martial law of 1958 when security of service enjoyed by the civil servants was ended. It scaled new heights during the civilian rules that followed. As a net effect, civil servants became dependent on the whims of the head of the government of the day.

This needs to be redressed if a civil servant is to be able to say no to an unlawful command and act as a check on any transgressions of the rules by politicians. The latter often have political compulsions requiring bending of the rules.

Senate should vet appointments to key positions. The sacking of senior civil servants should be through a clearly defined procedure and making of an officer an OSD for more than a specified period be discontinued.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

Media phenomenon

THE final death toll is not yet known, but over half of those killed in the terrorist bombing in Bali on Sunday were Australian, so Australia (with about one-fifteenth of the US population) has suffered a loss of life of roughly the same order as the United States did on 11 September, 2001. Or, to put it another way, an extra month’s worth of traffic deaths this year.

I don’t wish to hurt the feelings of the bereaved, but I put it that way because it is the right way to think about it. Terrorism is not like war, which can devastate whole societies. It is an essentially marginal activity, carried out by those without much power, which only succeeds if it can stampede the target society into overreacting.

Some statistics. From 1942 to 1945, after the Russians, the Americans and the Japanese had all joined the fighting, the Second World War was killing over one million people per month: another Bali every ten minutes, day and night, for years.

That’s what major wars used to be like before nuclear weapons. If the Third World War had been fought around 1970, with all buttons pressed, it would probably have killed five hundred million people in the first month.

Terrorism is a much more bearable phenomenon. Over the past twelve months, excluding the single and perhaps never to be repeated mega-strike that killed over 3,000 people in New York and Washington, the monthly American death toll from terrorism has been less than three. Even if Islamist or other terrorist groups could pull off a 9/11-scale strike on American soil every year, that would still add up to an average of only 250 US deaths a month, or one in a million.

The average American’s likelihood of being killed by a terrorist would still be comparable, at worst, to their chances of winning a lottery.

Of course, this entirely neglects people’s intense psychological reaction to terrorist attacks. The United States government is prepared to spend a hundred times as much to prevent one American death from terrorism as it would commit to prevent one traffic death precisely because we view the former in a different light: human beings pay more attention to threats that they think they can do something about than to dangers that they can do little to control. In particular, history and maybe even evolution have conditioned us to go into overdrive when confronted with a threat from another group.

Terrorists know that, and work with it. The first objective of any competent terrorist group, therefore, is to get the attention of the target society and make itself a primary focus of public concern and government policy. It is by getting that far larger and more powerful society to react in ill-considered and self-defeating ways that you gradually approach your own objective.

In the case of al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies, the final objective is to destroy the existing ruling groups in Arab and some other Muslim countries and take their places. Since they cannot achieve that goal by direct action, they seek to conscript the unwitting West to their service, trying to push it into aggressive and repressive responses that will ‘reveal’ it as the sworn enemy of Muslims everywhere. It is the same tactic that the American Marxist philosopher and terrorist sympathiser Herbert Marcuse once characterised as “unmasking the oppressive tolerance of the liberal bourgeoisie.”

So far, the West is playing its allotted role quite satisfactorily. The initial restraint of the US government after the carnage of 9/11 was deeply disappointing to those who authorised al-Qaeda’s attacks — they had hoped for a massive, indiscriminate US retaliation that would drive millions of Arabs and other Muslims into their arms — but the growing anti-American backlash in Afghanistan and President Bush’s increasingly surreal plans for attacking Iraq have done much to restore their hopes.

The whole point of this exercise, from lower Manhattan to Bali to wherever the next strike hits, is to get the West to stamp around the Muslim world as violently and clumsily as possible, hurting lots of innocent people in the process. With the aid of the Western media, which wallow in each local tragedy in almost pornographic detail and magnify it into a harbinger of apocalyptic disasters to come, the terrorists are getting their misleading message across and leading Western policy-makers up the garden path.

The only antidote to this terrorist strategy is a clear focus on exactly how weak the terrorists are and how little damage they do. It goes against every instinct of human sympathy and every rule of practical politics to say so, but the horror in Bali was statistically and strategically insignificant. Good police and intelligence work will reduce the number of such incidents, but it will never eliminate them. They are part of the cost of living in a complicated and interconnected world. —Copyright

The wives of hidden valley

BEHIND every indicted CEO there is a woman. What has her life been like after her husband bled their company dry?

The wife of Sigmund Flattery, CEO of the Hidden Valley Gas and Energy Co., has had to change her lifestyle.

I found Ida Flattery sitting on a park bench in the town square, feeding pigeons.

She wanted to talk to somebody. “I owned this town. Because I was the wife of the CEO, they were afraid of me. I was the first one listed in the Hidden Valley Green Book. I lived on the top of the hill and it was an honour to be invited to one of my parties.”

“You are talking in the past tense,” I said.

“I first thought something was amiss when I got a call from Kay Kendall. I was informed I was no longer ‘Woman of the Year’ at her big fund-raiser in November.”

I said, “That must have been a body blow.”

Ida admitted, “It was a punch in the stomach because I had bought two tables for $50,000 and I was going to fly in my relatives from all over the country.”

“What did Kay say?”

“She said the committee decided they didn’t want a ‘Woman of the Year’ whose husband looted $2 billion from the company’s pension fund.”

I said, “Picky, picky, picky.”

Ida threw another peanut at a pigeon. ‘You know, I was also kicked out of the Hidden Valley Garden Club. They said they didn’t want a president who raises orchids with stolen money.”

I said, “They were pulling out all the stops.”

“I was also chairlady of the Opera Ball. They took away our box and gave us standing room only tickets on the second balcony.”

“That would make me suspicious.”

“I had the Hidden Valley animal shelter named after me. One day I walked by and they had taken my name off it. I asked a member of the Junior League why and she said her husband had lost his job, his house, his membership in the Kiwanis, and his position as coach of the little league baseball team.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “People have no sense of humour when someone bilks them out of their life savings.”

Ida said, “The worst thing that happened is that they took my charge card at the Hidden Valley Neiman Marcus. They said I might be charging clothes with stolen money. They told me they would only take cash.”

“Isn’t there some way you and Sigmund can make it up to the citizens of the town?”

“I don’t think so because I’m getting a divorce.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Sigmund stole all my house money.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

A Ticking Bomb

The United Nations, spurred by Washington, is pushing Iraq to let inspectors scour the country for its biological and chemical weapons. But what Iraq has may be peanuts compared with the stockpiles in Russia.

Inside Russia _ but not far from Afghanistan _ are 2 million artillery shells filled with nerve gas such as VX and sarin. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to design a plant to destroy those chemical weapons before they fall into the hands of other nations or terrorists. But for the last three years, Congress has blocked additional spending and some involved in building the facility are now being laid off.

The main bottleneck is in the U.S. House of Representatives. It should agree to resume funding for the plant in the Russian town of Shchuch’ye, near the border with Kazakhstan, that would destroy the deadly armaments.

Since the Cold War ended, the United States has helped finance Russia’s destruction of nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads once aimed at the United States. Hundreds of missiles, launchers and missile-firing submarines also have been destroyed. The Bush administration deserves praise for supporting this program.—Los Angeles Times

In the distance, a silver lining

THERE are weeks when hardly anything deserving of comment seems to happen. And then there are weeks when juicy topics appear to rain down, making it hard for a columnist to decide whether to reach for the keyboard or an umbrella.

The week just past falls in the latter category, what with Jack Straw’s misadventures in the Middle East, a public rebuff for a visibly discomfited Tony Blair from a shifty looking Vladimir Putin, and an endorsement for George W. Bush’s war mongering by the United States Congress. And there was the evil atrocity in Bali, which would appear to confirm that the “war against terror” is being waged on the wrong front, by the wrong means.

Some of these developments were to an extent inevitable, but the Nobel Peace Prize came as a surprise. Speculation in the international media focused on the likelihood of the recipient being Hamid Karzai, allegedly for his role in “bringing peace” to Afghanistan. That nice little fantasy was punctured by the fact that there isn’t yet peace in Afghanistan and that Karzai’s authority does not extend far beyond Kabul. However well-intentioned he may be, Karzai tends to be perceived as an American puppet who isn’t free to move around the country he purportedly governs without a phalanx of imported bodyguards.

Jimmy Carter is a considerably better choice. The Democratic buffer between the Nixon-Ford years and the Reagan-Bush era attracts a great deal of misgivings in Pakistan, and with good reason. The enduring image of his troubled presidency is reflected not in the personality of his charming but short-lived United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, but in that of Carter’s notorious national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who could easily have given Condoleezza Rice a run for her money,

But Carter’s Nobel has more to do with his post-White House conciliatory and mediatory efforts than his presidency (although the Sadat-Begin Camp David accord was specifically cited), and it is not easy to fault Carter’s role as a prominent, occasionally cantankerous but invariably fair-minded trouble-shooter.

More significantly, it would appear that the peanut farmer from Georgia qualified as a serious contender largely because the present White House incumbent has made it abundantly clear that he has no time for peace and diplomacy. In the present international climate, it was inevitable that a nod to Carter would lead to speculation about the Nobel Committee’s intentions.

To its credit, the committee didn’t leave it at that. “In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development,” it noted. Its chairman, Gunnar Berge, then went a step further to point out: “It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.”

A kick in the leg may not suffice to stop the war. But it’s an honourable gesture.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, a kick in the leg against General Pervez Musharraf’s alliance with the US has taken a considerably more ominous form. Just last week this column noted that Pakistani voters have rarely been inclined to put undue faith in Islamists. It appears that things have changed, particularly in the NWFP. But, then, so have the circumstances.

One must hope Musharraf realizes now that flouting the popular will wins neither hearts and minds nor votes. There can be little question that militant Islam — which actually has less to do with religion than with limited opportunities for political evolution — poses a far greater threat to Pakistan than it does to the neo-conservative nincompoop in the White House. Pakistan was desecularized primarily under the aegis of Musharraf’s predecessor as military ruler. Resecularization is a much harder task, but it can’t even be properly begun without explicitly recognizing General Ziaul Haq’s - and by extension the army’s, particularly the ISI’s — culpability in this respect (as in so many others).

Musharraf must be wondering how the relegation of the Abdullah family could be achieved relatively painlessly in Jammu and Kashmir, while the Bhuttos and the Sharifs refuse to be wiped off the political landscape. Here’s a hint: the tribulations of incumbency may have something to do with it.

The general has said he will “hand over” power around November 1. The delay involved could be attributed to the fact that he intends to relinquish only one of his three hats, and it could take time to disentangle it from the other two. Musharraf’s successor as chief executive — that is, the next prime minister — will find himself having to live up to the expectations of the army more than the public. A fascinating experiment, perhaps, but its results are not hard to prophesy, since it’s been attempted before. And not just in Pakistan.

By the time a mark II Junejo is sworn in, the results of the second round of presidential elections in Brazil will be known. Military rule in Brazil lasted from 1964 to 1985, which is almost twice as long as any bout of martial law that Pakistan has had to endure. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in his incarnation as a labour leader, was instrumental in bringing it down. It is widely suspected that he was cheated out of the presidency in the 1989 elections, and since then he has figured as a runner-up in two more contests. On October 6 he emerged for the first time as the front-runner, and that too by a huge margin.

In most democratic countries, 46 per cent of the popular vote would have been more than enough for him to be catapulted into the presidential palace. But in Brazil, where voting is compulsory, a candidate is obliged to slip past the 50 per cent mark in order to be declared a winner — which is why Lula (as he is popularly known) faces a run-off 11 days from today (EDS: OCT.27), which will pit him against the ruling coalition’s Jose Serra.

Serra polled half the votes Lula did in the first round, and the remaining two significant contenders, Anthony Garotinho and Ciro Gomes, have endorsed Lula for the second round. The latter’s victory would therefore appear to be a foregone conclusion. One mustn’t forget, though, that the US takes an inordinate interest in Latin American affairs, especially when it comes to “regime change”. Earlier this year, it conspired with conservative forces in Venezuela in an abortive attempt to topple Hugo Chavez. The rise to power of another Fidel Castro admirer, and that too in the continent’s largest country, is not a scenario that will play too well in Washington DC.

As an outspoken socialist and a perennial presidential contender, Lula is reminiscent in some ways of Chile’s Salvador Allende. Like Allende, he has consistently opposed the use of violence in politics. And, also like Allende, he runs the risk of being seen as an unacceptable example for the rest of South America. Unacceptable to the US, that is. Coincidentally, some of the most diabolical figures in the Bush government — Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — were right-wing rookies in the Nixon administration at the time Uncle Sam decided that an anti-socialist bloodbath in Chile would be well worth his while.

Brazil may not attract the same sort of attention — not so much because the US has become less paranoid about the potential of ostensibly radical regimes to undermine its perceived interests, but because Lula has gone out of his way to reassure the forces traditionally less than complacent about his agenda that he has no intention of rocking the boat too hard.

Compromises aside, Brazil’s likely new head of state remains adamantly opposed to what he describes as the United States’ “annexation plan” for Latin America; although he favours genuinely barrier-free trade; he views the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas as weighted against poorer countries. And he has vowed to work towards achieving a redistribution of wealth within most of the existing constraints. Notwithstanding all the image changes, Lula owes his support base primarily to his status a working-class hero. Brazil happens to be one of the world’s most unequal societies, and Lula’s background suggests he is well-acquainted with poverty through first-hand experience.

The October 6 election produced a resounding vote of no-confidence in the policies of president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, with 76 per cent of Brazilians voting against his choice of successor. Cardoso has prided himself on being an exponent of the “third way” popularized by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, but the people of Brazil appear to have seen through it as little more than conservatism wearing an unconvincing disguise.

With even the ruling coalition positioning itself (albeit questionably) as the centre-left, this year’s presidential field in Brazil was, remarkably, free of right-wing ideologues. If Lula, who began his working life as a newspaper seller and graduated to being a lathe operator, enters the presidential palace in Brasilia on January 1, it could not only signal a new era for Brazil but lead to a profound shift in Latin American politics as a whole.

Needless to say, a great deal will depend on the extent to which Lula succeeds in neutralizing capitalist excesses and instituting a better way of life for millions of his compatriots. But at least there is hope. Which is more than can be said for Pakistan in the wake of October 10.

E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com