WALKING on the service road of Islamabad’s central avenue, the bizarrely-named Blue Area, I was startled to come across a showroom packed with brand-new Mercedes cars. There was a time when in our parts, a Mercedes was a rarity, possessed by the favoured few. Not any more. The numbers of the favoured few have risen.
BMWs came with the Sharifs when one of their henchmen, Saifur Rehman who’s disappeared God knows where, had a BMW showroom in — where else? — the Blue Area. Just a few days ago I came across an ad proudly announcing that the first Rolls-Royce dealership was soon to be established in Pakistan.
This sounds more like Dubai and less like the Pakistan we have known. Affluence has spread which is a good news but, alas, only in pockets. That is the bad news.
The privileged classes, basking in the glow of the economic turnaround which was our gift post-September 11, are splurging like never before. Flush with cash, banks have been fuelling a consumer boom, resulting in an explosion of spending and car ownership across the country. The wonders of this new economics can be seen in Islamabad every day. A sleepy, rather bovine town not long ago, it now has mini-Bangkok style traffic jams. I exaggerate of course but you get the point.
(Lest enthusiasts be misled, Islamabad’s similarity with Bangkok begins and ends with its traffic. It is not the City of Smiles and is not likely to be one for a long time. Still, for the hard-pressed some relief is at hand. There are now direct flights from Islamabad to Bangkok: the near-miraculous transition from piety to fun in about four hours. Not bad at all.)
The CDA is the capital’s municipal authority (unelected of course) and its answer to traffic congestion is to build more and wider roads. As long as I have been around, and I have been for a while, some road or the other, if not several at once, is being dug up in Islamabad. What a nuisance this can be is easily imagined.
Inspired planners have probably yet to realize that the more roads are built, the more traffic there will be. The answer is to improve public transport and reduce the number of cars choking city centres. But this won’t happen any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime.
Unless civilization as we know it is brought completely to its knees by the motor car — and fear not it will be by the motor car, global warming and the energy crisis — our attitudes will not change.
But I have been sidetracked. Scanning newspaper or TV ads can lend itself to the same optical illusion which has had India in its thrall since the onset of economic liberalization: the prosperity of the few seeming to be the prosperity of the many.
In Delhi you can hurtle between two time zones, riches to poverty, at dizzying speed, in the time it takes to drive from one part of the city to another. The same is happening here although still, given Pakistan’s smaller economy, on a lesser scale.
The BJP’s election slogan was “Shining India” and although no one is saying Shining Pakistan, that’s what the president and prime minister seem to have in mind when they wax eloquent, as they often do, about the economic strides Pakistan has taken in recent years.
The military regime’s idea of economic development seems to be to make life cushier for the already privileged. Ponder this. A few days ago Gen Musharraf was in Mangla to inaugurate a luxury housing project. The advertising supplement taken out on the occasion ecstatically proclaimed: “At Mangla View Resort you will always have a range of house designs to choose from:... Bayou, Alamanda, Mulberry, Chantique and Tropicana.... Imagine an early morning swim before you start your day.... or sipping your freshly squeezed fruit juice as you lounge by your pool on a balmy evening whilst a gentle breeze caresses you...” Savour the prose if not the fruit juice.
More power to the people behind such resorts (and, mind you, more and more of these are sprouting up across the country). Nothing wrong with luxury houses for the rich: happens everywhere and all the time. But in a land where poverty and deprivation are widespread and where millions live in slums, it looks odd for a head of state to bless an enterprise meant for a privileged few.
Equality is a pipedream. Only in a realm yet to be discovered will it ever be achieved. But surely there is something wrong with an approach almost calculated to promote inequality.
Look at defence housing authorities which are in danger of becoming the principal preoccupation of the defence services. Some of the full-page ads they bring out, and they bring out quite a few, are worth reading.
In a recent ad Defence Authority Lahore promises, among other things, ‘Defence Raya Gold and Country Club with Malaysian collaboration...by Dec 07’. There is some kind of a fixation here with ‘Malaysian collaboration’. There is already a plush club in Lahore on leased-out railway land set up with Malaysian collaboration. Membership fee: seven lakhs. Now we seem to be getting another.
Once upon a time, the army, for all its other faults, had a pretty frugal image. Messes were wet and officers drank but, generally, the officer class lived a pretty Spartan life. Nowadays think officer class and the first thing coming to mind is defence housing authorities.
Ayub extended some privileges to the officer class, Zia many more as a matter of policy. But now this trend of keeping the higher ranks happy seems to have crossed all limits. Nor is this an idiosyncratic observation. Conduct any poll you like, you’ll probably get the same answer.
No one seems overly bothered by the fact that all this ‘plush’ development is taking place against a backdrop of widespread discontent. There is fighting in parts of Balochistan, unrest in the tribal areas, a few days ago a full-scale shootout between warring clerics in the Khyber Agency just next door to Peshawar. Knowing what the ruling coterie is up to, most Pakistanis seem resigned to the outcome of the next elections. Barring the unforeseen, a Hosni Mubarak-style victory for the ruling party seems all but a foregone conclusion.
As a reality check, here’s Naween Mangi in this paper after a visit to Thar: “You can feel the anguish of Thar even before you get there. It’s early in the month of March and throughout the districts of Badin, Mirpurkhas and Umerkot, caravans of desperate, migrating Tharis are (undertaking) their... seasonal journey. Some take a break under a shadeless tree, their heads slumped in their hands. Others struggle to fetch pots of water to get through the afternoon heat.” Country clubs seem a long way off.
The rich in America and Europe are more seriously rich than anything we have in Pakistan. But in those heathen, faraway lands there is also some form of public welfare.
In Pakistan, nothing of the sort. There is private charity in plenty but no system of public welfare. Thank God, at least the community is more caring than the state.
It has happened elsewhere, at breakneck speed it is happening in Pakistan: the creation of two distinct societies, one shining, other not-so-shining. Far from promoting tranquillity and contentment, as prosperity should, this shallow, one-sided prosperity breeds resentment.
The hard-pressed are left with little option. Not having the means to fly to Bangkok or browse through the catalogue of a Mercedes showroom, they fall back upon the succour provided by religion. So-called ‘hard-line’ Islam, the kind espoused in Egypt by the Ikhwan, and in the Palestinian territories by Hamas, is a response to two things: injustice and hopelessness, an incendiary combination. Injustice alone does not breed despair. But when hopelessness is added to it, it does.
But marvel at the courage and chutzpah of our rulers. Taking their cue from the West from where they are fed most of their wisdom, they talk of ‘moderation’. What’s so moderate about a society which sells rainbow-coloured dreams on one end of the scale — Bayou and Alamanda-style houses — and can’t provide safe drinking water to most of its people on the other?