More meaningful dialogue

NO clear indications are available about the direction in which the government-opposition dialogue is moving. The opposition itself is seen as increasingly at odds over the basis on which such a dialogue should be held, as developments on Tuesday show. The PPP’s Asif Zardari made the strong statement in Lahore that he did not believe that the MMA was really interested in democracy. He also said the religious parties alliance was extreme in its stand, and the PPP disagreed with its views on women and other social issues. Simultaneously, the MMA has questioned the PPP’s faith in democracy, with Jamaat-i-Islami leader Qazi Hussain Ahmad criticizing Mr Zardari’s earlier statement in which he had described the military as a reality with which talks should be held. We are in a sense seeing a reversal of roles from the days of the debate on the Legal Framework Order and its subsequent incorporation in the Constitution as the 17th Amendment. At that time, the MMA was engaged in a dialogue with the military while the PPP and the other components of the ARD were opposed to it. Even the PML-N, the PPP’s ally in the ARD, has taken exception to Mr Zardari’s statement relating to the army and decided to call a meeting to review the situation.

Policy shifts on the part of political parties are not unusual, although in our case our parties have proved to be much more unprincipled than in most other countries. The important thing to realize is that the existing confusion needs to end and at least a rudimentary consensus developed on how we should proceed. The government claims that it has been able to correct the impression of Pakistan abroad as a country at drift, that it is committed to creating an economically progressive and a politically moderate and tolerant society. In broad terms there may be some truth in these assertions, but the internal discord remains unaddressed. There has to be a minimum of agreement on the basics of establishing a representative political system that creates a real sense of participation among the people. If the PPP says that the military’s role is a reality, that does not necessarily make the reality desirable. The MMA is gradually taking itself out of the democratic mainstream by constantly adopting the most peripheral issues that have no bearing on the country’s future as a functioning democracy. The PML-N, with which too the government claims it is in contact, appears torn between various options. The government itself hasn’t made up its mind on whether it wishes to continue in its present military-cum-civilian manifestation or genuinely wants free play for the country’s political forces.

In the long-term, there is no escape from the fact that political engineering will have to end. As the president himself pointed out during his visit to India, unresolved problems have a tendency to resurface, despite individual efforts to solve them. We have too many such unresolved problems of governance and constitutional rule that should be tackled now. How this is to be done, whether by seeking an accord with parties representing the largest spectrum of political and popular opinion or by holding early free general elections, ought to engage the attention of all political leaders. In any case, the government-opposition dialogue should acquire a more structured form than its present amorphous one based largely on claims and counter-claims.

Disproportionate taxes

A report released this week by the Social Policy and Development Centre (SPDC), a local think tank, says that Pakistan’s system of indirect taxation is aggressive and biased against the poor, putting a greater burden on lower income groups against the upper income ones. The burden of tax progressively declines as income rises and the richest 10 per cent of the affluent class contribute only 10 per cent of their income as indirect tax as against 16 per cent by lower income households. The reason for this disparity is that the share of direct taxes in government revenues in Pakistan is comparatively very low. As a consequence, the rich are able to get away relatively cheaply since their higher incomes are supposed to be taxed directly, which is really not the case. This glaring disproportion means that while the poor pay a number of flat taxes, levies and surcharges, the better-off also pay the same in spite of their much higher incomes. This also underlines a fact that the direct tax paid by the affluent classes is relatively very low.

Despite a number of promises to widen the tax base, very little has been done in this respect. There are over one million income tax payers in the country, as against three million believed to be the basic minimum. A tax survey conducted in 2000 that could have been used as a basis for raising the number of taxpayers has been put in cold storage on pressure from traders and industrialists. A sizable portion of wealth in the country remains untaxed despite the fact that if the tax base is widened and more Pakistanis are obliged to pay direct tax, a number of surcharges imposed by the government on utilities like power as well as essentials like oil and gas can be withdrawn or substantially reduced. It is time the government started widening its tax base horizontally. The statistics collected in the tax survey will show how many professionals and traders have been left out of the tax net or are dodging a large part of their tax obligation by fudging their returns or greasing the palms of tax officials.

Gender gap in education

REFERRING to one of the key aspects of Unicef’s five-year country programme in Pakistan, a report in this newspaper has highlighted the organization’s resolve to speed up the pace of girls’ enrolment in primary schools. As in other spheres of social development, the gender gap in the education sector is appalling, and the adult literacy rate for females in the country is a mere 28 per cent, a little more than half the figure for male literacy which is 53 per cent. Other related statistics are equally dismal. The national primary school enrolment rate stands at 38 per cent for girls and 46 for boys. About 50 per cent of the pupils leave primary school before completing their course. Most of the dropouts are girls — about 59 per cent. These figures depict the gender gap in education and indicate a strong bias against the female population in this sector all over the country.

It is true that the situation has much to do with the inaccessibility and remote locations of schools, especially in rural areas that make parents reluctant to send their daughters to a far-off school. But it also has to do with the fact that education for girls is generally not considered essential, and the prevalent view is that daughters are better employed looking after their younger siblings and contributing to the housework, or even working in other people’s homes, rather than studying. The emphasis, then, should be as much on the removal of these gender biases as on improving the school infrastructure. This is not an easy task as many obsolete, but firmly entrenched, traditions are contributing to regressive thinking on a number of social issues, education among them. Attempts to remove these would be one way of bridging the gender gap and improving education ratios for females.