Business Recorder Column March 19, 2019

Nobody writes to the rebel anymore

Rashed Rahman

(With apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

While Pakistan and the world reel in shock, horror, condemnation and mourning for the barbaric massacre of Muslims at Friday prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019, the people of Pakistan could be forgiven for arguing they have far more to mourn than the loss of 51 innocent lives of their brethren-in-faith. Happily though, Pakistani-origin Naeem Rashid, who attempted to tackle the white supremacist gunman and was killed along with his son, has been acknowledged by Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan and a civil award for bravery will be conferred on him on Pakistan Day, March 23, 2019.

Islamophobia is the reverse of the coin minted by jihadist groups operating in and away from Muslim countries. The Muslim terrorist phenomenon owes its origins to the Afghan wars stretching over the last four decades. However, despite initial support to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan by the US-led west and Pakistan, the phenomenon even to this day represents but a thin sliver of Muslim opinion throughout the globe. That has not prevented racist, white supremacist hate-mongers to tar all Muslims with the same ‘terrorist’ brush to justify their attacks on Muslims in their own countries.

The Christchurch attacks have focused minds as never before on the rampant Islamophobia to be found in far-right, neo-fascist circles in the developed world. They have been responsible for a series of attacks and massacres of Muslim immigrants in their countries. Fundamentalist assertion of free speech, ignoring the sensitivities and possible fallout, has encouraged some circles to mock Islam and its Prophet (PBUH). The west having traversed a history of the incremental decline of religion (Christianity) in their societies, think nothing of mocking a church that has besmirched itself in recent years through the sexual abuse (ongoing) scandals that have rocked it. But that is not the case with Muslim societies, in which religious belief is still deeply held and even the ‘bad’ Muslim will be outraged at the mocking of his faith. The cycle of hatred and violence by Muslim fanatics and terrorists and its counter-blast from Islamophobic hate-mongers has to be tackled before the whole world descends into atavistic barbarism.

The foreign ministers of the toothless Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) have been invited to a summit in Istanbul on March 22, 2019 by present revolving chair Turkish President Recip Erdogan to address the issue of Islamophobia. Not to prejudge the outcome but the OIC’s ability to change the present global landscape of hate and ‘othering’ (mutual to both sides of the hate coin, it must be admitted) is open to question. However, anti-immigration, racist leaders of the west like US President Donald Trump need to reverse course and policy if rivers of blood are to be stopped before they begin to flow.

While the world grapples with this issue, the people of Pakistan (as hinted at in the opening sentence) have more than their fair share of woes to deal with. Saddled with a Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government led by PM Imran Khan through a controversial election in 2018, the people of Pakistan are groaning under skyrocketing inflation, unemployment, insecurity of life and limb, and little or no prospects of any relief in sight. The PTI government could be forgiven for inexperience, but incompetence stemming from little or no homework before assuming office and contradictory policies are harder to forgive eight months down the road. The government has been unable to shake off its aura of being rudderless, still in opposition ‘container’ mode rather than in government, and unable to offer much except reliance on financial bailouts from friendly countries as a preliminary to going back to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a programme centring on balance of payments and budgetary support (both inflicted with stubborn deficits). The corruption mantra of the PTI, stemming from its agitational opposition mode, needs to be interrogated on the touchstone of credibility, effectiveness, and fallout.

Corruption is endemic in our system from top to bottom. Targeting a few opposition leading figures and bureaucrats suspected of loyalty to the previous governments of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) may reap political satisfaction to the incumbents, but it falls far short of a serious, systemic change in the loopholes that allow corruption. In the process, helped by the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB’s) ham-handed methodology, the cry of ‘victimisation’ from those targeted erodes the credibility of the anti-corruption drive, whether those targeted deserve it or not. The bureaucracy, gripped by fear of being dragged over the coals has, in time honoured fashion, ‘shut shop’ by refusing to take decisions that could later be used against them by NAB (as has happened to a few prominent bureaucrats). Paralysis of government is the inevitable outcome.

The indigenous business community is wooed on the one hand to assist the PTI government in reviving a sinking economy, while the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR), under pressure from the government to meet its revenue targets, is conducting raids on businesses with dubious legal validity and in the process destroying what remains of business confidence. Local investment therefore is harder to obtain than seeking a needle in a haystack. The FBR ‘raiders’ are having a field day in extorting bribes from business houses raided to exempt them from the further unwanted attentions of the tax machinery. Now finally there is talk in government circles of stopping this practice that is reaping negative dividends even where enhanced revenue is concerned.

The PTI government has yet to introduce a single piece of legislation in the last eight months in parliament (the hurried passing of a bill to enhance Punjab Assembly members’ salaries is perhaps the dubious and controversial exception, that has even earned the ire of PM Imran Khan in a situation where public finances are short and the people suffering). Given the arithmetic of the Assemblies, the government has no hope of passing significant legislation without the cooperation of the opposition (especially in the Senate), the very opposition government ministers from the PM down waste not a single opportunity to badmouth. The government wants, for example, to extend the life of the military courts set up in 2015 after the Army Public School Peshawar massacre of children and students by Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan terrorists, whose extended tenure expires on March 30, 2019. But for this, a constitutional amendment is required. Without the opposition’s help therefore, this is unlikely to pass muster.

The working class, peasantry, youth, women (despite the admirable, broad-based Women’s March this year) and minorities have all been left abandoned. They have little hope from either the older parties or the governing incumbents. With the decline of the Left, they lack a credible and effective champion to take up their cause/s. Hence the title of this piece, which reflects the current reality that critics, dissidents and rebels who oppose the present iniquitous, exploitative economic system and reject the parties representing at the core the interests of various factions of the elite are marginalised and struggling for relevance. The challenge for them is formidable in a global climate of writing off the Left’s vision, although green shoots of resistance are sprouting everywhere, even in the heart of global capitalism, the US.

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

Business Recorder Editorial March 19, 2019

Islamophobia threat

The carnage in the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during Friday payers on March 15, 2019, has shocked the world into a realisation of the threat Islamophobia poses to the peace and safety of people everywhere. The attacker, Brenton Tarrant, turns out to be a 28-year-old Australian man who makes no bones about his hatred for Muslims and all non-whites. In fact, his inspiration for his dastardly act is not only inspired by contacts with extreme right wing groups in Europe and elsewhere, his ‘hero’ appears to be US President Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” for his anti-immigration and racist views. Tarrant posted a 74-page manifesto online before the attacks setting out his hate-filled views on immigrants generally and Muslims in particular and live streamed the attack on social media as it unfolded. His effort at the two mosques has yielded a death toll of 51 people, six of them Pakistanis, including a father and son, Naeem Rashid and Talha Naeem, who tried to tackle the terrorist and died of their wounds in hospital. Prime Minister Imran Khan has dubbed them heroes and announced an award will be given for their courage and selfless sacrifice. The dead and wounded (48, including four Pakistanis) are from a number of Muslim countries. Some people amongst those in the mosques at the time of the attack are still missing. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pulled no punches in describing the incident as a “terrorist attack” and “one of New Zealand’s darkest days”. Amidst condemnation and condolences by world leaders, including US President Donald Trump, one insensitive Australian Senator Fraser Anning pointed to growing concern regarding immigration into New Zealand and Australia as being behind the attack, a statement that earned him not only egg on his face but literally on his head from a young protestor at his press conference.

Ever since terrorism became the currency of disaffected groups resorting to indiscriminate violence to promote their agendas, the fact that the phenomenon owes its modern origins to the Afghan wars and their fallout regionally and globally, it is Muslims per se that have been painted by white supremacists, racists and people asserting the need to push back against people of non-white ethnicities and origins as terrorists en masse. This is neither rational nor factual, since terrorists from Muslim countries still comprise a relatively small proportion of Muslims worldwide. Muslim societies themselves, as Pakistan’s experience shows, have been amongst the worst victims of terrorism, suffering some 70,000 deaths and billions in material damages. On the other hand, terrorist attacks by white racists and supremacists against innocent Muslims have become all too frequent in the west. New Zealand, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, is home to its diverse citizenry and considers immigrants part of its community. Such a shocking massacre is unprecedented in a country considered tolerant and inclusive. While some Muslim country heads of government, such as Prime Minister Imran Khan and President Recip Erdogan of Turkey have come out strongly against Islamophobia as the inspiration for attacks against Muslims worldwide, world leaders, the UN, the OIC and others have underlined the need to combat the spread of such hateful ideologies that victimise innocent people, whether Muslim or of any other faith. New Zealand is now faced with the unenviable task of protecting Muslims and their mosques throughout the country (even elsewhere in the west such steps have been taken in response to the Christchurch tragedy), and it is contemplating departures from the peaceful past by bringing in gun control laws and arming its police to face this new, unprecedented challenge.

Business Recorder Editorial March 16, 2019

Impasse in Doha

After a marathon fifth round of talks lasting 16 days in Doha, Qatar,   from February 24 to March 12, 2019 between the US and the Taliban, the two sides presented contrasting views on the outcome. US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad announced at the end of the talks that he was now heading to Washington for consultations. It seems disagreements on the agenda of the talks, two agreed points for discussion, i.e. the timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops and ensuring Afghan soil is never again used to attack the US or its allies, and Washington’s increasing insistence the Taliban hold face-to-face talks with the Afghan government and announce a ceasefire have emerged as roadblocks to a final, comprehensive agreement. Zalmay Khalilzad tried hard to maintain overall optimism in a series of tweets, asserting that the conditions for peace have improved, all sides want to end the war, and despite ups and downs, real strides were made. But he tempered this positive take by also underlining the obstacles to a final deal. These centre on four issues, according to the Ambassador: counter-terrorism assurances (no repeat of 9/11 ever again from Afghan soil), troop withdrawal, intra-Afghan dialogue (between the Taliban and the Afghan government), and a ceasefire. Khalilzad recalled that in January 2019, the US and Taliban had agreed in principle on these four elements. He went on to add that the two sides are now ‘agreed in draft’ on the first two. Once these are finalised, the intra-Afghan talks and ceasefire negotiations will begin. After consultations in Washington, Khalilzad ended, the two sides will meet again soon (probably April 2019) but cautioned that (in the light of the above) there is no final agreement until everything is agreed. In short, Khalilzad left his audience with the choice of deciding whether the glass was half full or half empty. The Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid described the talks as extensive and detailed regarding the two issues agreed upon in January 2019: withdrawal of foreign forces and preventing harm to others from Afghan soil. His take was that progress had been made but both sides will now brief and consult their respective leaderships. He did underline that no agreement was reached regarding a ceasefire and talks with Kabul, nor were other issues part of the current agenda. Although the Taliban spokesman refuted some media reports in this regard, there were reports of dissatisfaction and frustration in the Taliban delegation’s ranks because the US side, bolstered by two unnamed senior US administration officials, kept raising new issues that were not part of the agreed agenda. Nor did they offer anything in return for demands that the Taliban open up to discussions on intra-Afghan talks and a ceasefire, according to these reports. The frustrated and angry members of the Taliban delegation that spoke to some media outlets anonymously said that every time the two sides were grappling with the core issues of troop withdrawal and counter-terrorism assurances, the US officials kept skipping to other demands and questions, including the intra-Afghan talks, a ceasefire, and what sort of sharia the Taliban were now inclined to install if a negotiated political settlement could be worked out.

Tenuous and difficult as these negotiations in Doha are, it is obvious that there is still many a slip between the cup and the lip. While the US would like assurances on the four points mentioned above as well as being informed of the Taliban’s intentions regarding the political and social system they favour after a settlement, the Taliban are focused on just the first two points agreed for discussion in January 2019. This is because they still do not recognize the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, which they deride as a US puppet. Nor, despite putting out signals lately that they had no intention of returning Afghanistan to the ‘harsh’ sharia laws they had imposed when they were in power in 1996-2001, including concessions for women’s rights, they do not want their hands tied as to the future for Afghan society. In the meantime, the Taliban are not wasting even a minute in ratcheting up the fighting inside Afghanistan, the latest example of which is an attack in the Baba Murghab district of Baghdis province, in which 20 Afghan soldiers have been killed, 10 wounded, and 20-28 captured by the Taliban when they overran four security posts and captured a large amount of weapons and ammunition into the bargain. Although the Afghan government announced the sending of reinforcements and air support to prevent the whole province being overrun, this incident points to two irreducible facts. One, the Taliban are waging an increasingly successful war while continuing negotiations. Two, the US has all but lost the war in the strategic sense since it is by now caught in the classic bind of being torn between offensive actions against the insurgents and defensive holding of territory, both of which are increasingly under strain. Washington has already made up its mind to cut its losses and withdraw from what has demonstrably become an unwinnable war with the best face-saving on offer. That poses new questions and dilemmas for the Afghan people and the region, particularly Pakistan, as to what will fill the void left behind by the retreating US.

Business Recorder Editorial March 14, 2019

The President’s office

President Arif Alvi in an interview with a panel of this paper on March 11, 2019 dilated on a variety of issues including the regional situation in the wake of India’s war hysteria, striking a balance between the requirements of his office and having been an active party leader before assuming the post, the issues bedevilling the smaller provinces and Balochistan’s long standing sense of deprivation. The Constitution defines the President’s office as the head of state representing the unity of the Republic, therefore representative of the entire federation, irrespective of which party is in power where. As such, President Alvi’s answer to a question about his transition from being an active political worker of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) to the office of President, hit the nail on the head when he said he had taken an oath to remain unbiased and apolitical. He did admit however, that he had a very ‘strong bias’ towards the eradication of corruption, a cause dear to the heart of and constituting the PTI’s main political banner. Regarding what he called the hot debate inside the PTI and some other circles regarding replacing the present parliamentary system with a presidential one, President Alvi said every form of government works provided it is free of corruption and there is no intention to hegemonise the rights of different institutions. If any government wants a presidential system, he went on, they need a two-thirds majority to change the Constitution. However, the concerns of the smaller provinces regarding representation in the federation’s affairs needed to be kept in view, especially, it may be pointed out, since there exist such concerns and complaints even at present. Personally the president seemed quite satisfied with the parliamentary system, one of the few things on which all shades of opinion in the polity seem to agree. However, it needs to be emphasized that changing the system from the present parliamentary form to a presidential one may not be as simple as garnering a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament as it would alter the basic structure of the Constitution. It may require electing a constituent assembly to enact such an amendment. Not surprisingly, given his medical background, the cause of oral health, child mortality and malnutrition are priorities for the president. Dilating at length on the recent tensions with India, the president pointed to the serious challenge to secularism in India posed by extremism, contrasting it with Pakistan’s own experience and the huge price paid in this context over the last four decades. He praised the maturity with which Pakistan played its cards in the clash with India, underlining that the country wanted peace with dignity. Asked whether he could play a role in forging a consensus by taking all parties on board on all contentious issues like the unity shown by the country during the tensions with India, President Alvi rightly pointed out that the Constitution was silent on this point but since it would constitute a political initiative, the law is very clear that political matters are to be handled by the elected prime minister. The President defended the 18^th Amendment as he supported devolution but pointed to the need for capacity building of the provinces to handle the new responsibilities and subjects transferred to them. He also said the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M) was a coalition partner of the ruling PTI and the government had engaged with it on the issue of missing persons that the BNP-M amongst others has been agitating. Although President Alvi thought the state was unduly blamed for the phenomenon because of lack of transparency, it must be acknowledged that the state nevertheless cannot avoid its responsibilities for locating such people and dealing with cases of enforced disappearances, no matter how many or how few. Last but not least, a piquant question about his relationship and interaction with Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan produced interesting insights how, in the changed circumstances, the president and his political party leader handled their new responsibilities vis-à-vis each other. President Alvi said he was regularly briefed on federal cabinet decisions and foreign dignitaries’ visits but he cannot visit the PM because of his position and equally cannot call the PM to his office.

Pakistan in the past has experience of the president and PM coming from the same political party but some instances in the past offer lessons in what should be the protocol and method of functioning in the light of parliamentary and democratic conventions. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s handpicked president Fazal Ilahi Chaudhry could not escape becoming the butt of jokes about the need to ‘free’ him from the hold of the PM. Things have never reached quite that level since, but PM Imran Khan should set an example, adhere to constitutionally non-binding but parliamentary and democratic conventions by himself briefing and keeping the president up to date on all matters of state. This would not only enhance the PM’s credentials as a democrat who respects such protocol and conventions while diluting some of the criticism levelled at him for ignoring parliament, it would also help enhance the status and respect of the president’s office that it deserves and is its due under the Constitution.

Business Recorder Column March 12, 2019

Book Review

Jindriey: Tan Desaan Tera Tana: Burjwala ton Washington by Dr Manzur Ejaz (Wichaar Publishers; US, $ 15; Sahiwal, Rs 200; 2018)

An intellectual life’s journey

Rashed Rahman

Dr Manzur Ejaz is familiar to the Pakistani audience through his newspaper columns over many years. But perhaps only his friends know the interesting details of his life. That gap Manzur Ejaz has now filled by penning his autobiography, Jindriey: Tan Desaan Tera Tana: Burjwala ton Washington in Punjabi.

Manzur Ejaz has written a great deal about Punjabi literature and culture in Punjabi. However, an autobiography is essentially a different kettle of fish. Here he traces his life’s journey and intellectual growth, influences and directions. Born in a small Canal Colony village Burjwala near Sahiwal, Punjab, Manzur suffered an early grievous blow when struck by polio as a child. In those days, our villages were still stuck in a historical time warp and most villagers were unaware of what havoc polio could cause to children. The result was that one of his legs was badly affected. Something like crutches to get around with were almost unheard of too in the antediluvian universe of village life, and it took a while before he acquired a pair.

Manzur describes life in his native village, its culture, way of life, traditions, etc, in a manner that evokes, as he himself points out, Karl Marx’s descriptive analysis of the Asiatic mode of production, in which the Subcontinent's villages existed in an ancient system of minimal self-sufficiency, cut off from the world and even neighbouring villages to a large extent. This system, at least two thousand years old, interestingly was reproduced by the British colonialists even in the new Canal Colonies they set up and inhabited with the yeoman peasantry they awarded lands to and settled there. This minimal self-sufficient village structure proved for a very long time to be impervious to the revolutions, invasions, changes of kings and dynasties at the top that form the warp and woof of the Subcontinent’s history. Marx ascribed the inability of the peasantry under this system to change their fate to precisely this isolated, relatively self-sufficient system. Certainly Manzur Ejaz’s description of his early years, childhood and education bears out Marx’s descriptive analysis and critique.

What is thinly alluded to by Manzur Ejaz but remains a subject requiring inquiry and research, of which perhaps too little if any exists, is how this system has changed after Pakistan came into being and the effects of being enfolded in the developing capitalist market that connected these once isolated villages and hamlets to the wider world beyond. No doubt subsequent technological developments in later (more recent) years have had a transforming effect through the by now almost universal availability of newspapers, radio, television and the connectivity provided by the internet and social media.

But in Manzur Ejaz’s childhood and growing up years, the village was all but isolated from all beyond its boundaries. Despite his physical handicap, it is a testament to the courage and determination of the author that he fully participated in the games children traditionally played in village culture, got around on a bicycle and utilised his natural gifted intelligence to advance along the road of educating himself through school, college (Sahiwal) and university (Lahore). His years studying at Punjab University in the 1960s were a seminal turning point in his intellectual development. His subsequent move to Washington DC in the US, where he still lives, brought rich dividends in his education (including a PhD) and opened the doors to financial stability through employment in the academic field.

Given the radical currents of the time, it comes as no surprise that Manzur Ejaz was swept along by the then vibrant Left movement of the 1960s. His delineation of some of that movement’s leading lights and their worldview and politics leaves one hungry for more, but perhaps Manzur Ejaz was in this project more interested in recording his life’s journey as succinctly and briefly as possible and decided to leave a discussion of the history and trajectory of the Left in those heady days to another time and place.

Nevertheless, some of his tantalizingly brief references to the politics of the Left in those years open up the mind to new paths of largely unexplored inquiry. For example, when he dilates on the trends of the time in the Left, he mentions the history of a united Left and how and why it split in the 1960s in response to the rift between the Soviet Union and China in the international communist movement. However, for reasons already touched upon above, he does not go into depth to explain what were the debates, differences and fallout of these developments on our own indigenous Left.

It goes without saying that the traditionally pro-Moscow Left that suffered extreme repression in the early 1950s, starting from the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case that led to the banning of the Communist Party of Pakistan, subsequently sought to revive itself and continue the struggle under the umbrella of a broad coalition of the Left, nationalists and democrats that had come together in the National Awami Party (NAP). It is a tribute to the unity of these forces and the efforts and leadership of such heavyweight political leaders of the time as Maulana Bhashani and Khan Abdul Wali Khan that the Left seemed poised to win the first elections in Pakistan scheduled to be held in 1959. Many analysts consider this ‘threat’ to have fed into, if not triggered, the military coup of 1958 as a pre-emptive move to keep the Left-nationalist-democratic forces away from capturing power through the ballot box.

It is also a tragic fact that by the 1960s, this coalition had split between NAP (Bhashani – pro-Beijing) and NAP (Wali – pro-Moscow). Subsequent events in Pakistan’s history moved these two factions further and further away from each other, culminating in 1971 when East Pakistan broke away to re-emerge as Bangladesh.

The New Left (overwhelmingly pro-Beijing) that emerged worldwide in the late 1960s sought theoretically to break from the perceived and actual mistakes of the Old Left. However, in one critical aspect they followed the same path of seeking the umbrella of larger mainstream parties to work under and in. What this policy wrought universally, whether the umbrella was earlier NAP or later the Pakistan People’s Party, was leaving the fate of the Left dependent on the fortunes of these larger entities. When those umbrellas over time sprang ‘leaks’, changed direction or disappeared, this left the Left without an independent existence and it soon after succumbed to the ravages of the time, ideological confusion and the bitter splits that more often than not break out in a period of defeat and retreat. By the early 1980s, it was all but over for the ‘orphaned’ Left and it has still to recover from that local debacle. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s sealed our Left’s fate, small parties and groups that are still in the field notwithstanding.

This long digression has been triggered by some of the questions raised by Manzur Ejaz’s book. Both the writer and all of us need now to seriously introspect on the changed state of the world, Pakistan and the politics of the Left to discover and rediscover the way forward. For this stimulus to critical thinking, the reader owes a debt of gratitude to Manzur Ejaz.

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com