Culture of intolerance
Sunday, 30 May, 2010
FRIDAY’S gruesome attacks on Ahmadi worshippers in Lahore were a tragic reminder of the growing intolerance that is threatening to destroy our social fabric. Bigotry in this country has been decades in the making and is expressed in a variety of ways. Violence by individuals or groups against those who hold divergent views may be the most despicable manifestation of such prejudice but it is by no means the only one. Religious minorities in Pakistan have not only been shunted to the margins of society but also face outright persecution on a regular basis. Take the police force, which is notorious for terrorising the poor. Even within that section of society, how-ever, it reserves its harshest treatment for non-Muslims, for the simple reason that brutal or coercive acts directed against minorities are even less likely to get policemen into trouble. There is no shortage of more insidious means of discrimination either. To this day many job applications require candidates to state their religion. Has the irrelevance of this query never struck the organisations in question, or is it part of a screening process designed to weed out ‘undesirables’? Now let’s venture down to the basic building blocks of society, from institutions to households. In many middle-class and affluent Muslim homes, separate eating utensils of distinctly poorer quality are reserved for domestic staff. But there’s more: a further distinction in entitlement is made between Muslim and non-Muslim employees.
None of this is surprising in a country whose statute books are riddled with discriminatory laws, where jingoism is drummed into the heads of schoolchildren and where radio and television talk show participants can casually state that “we are all Muslims here in Pakistan”, which is patently not the case. This is a country where a non-Muslim cannot, by law, become president or prime minister. The blasphemy laws continue to be abused to settle personal scores, evade debts owed to non-Muslims and to grab their land by forcing them to flee in the face of violence. The state, meanwhile, remains largely unmoved by the plight of minorities — and that isn’t surprising either for it is a party to this persecution.
Tackling the terrorists who kill almost at will isn’t the only job at hand. The culture of intolerance has become ingrained in Pakistan and wide-ranging measures are required to change our collective mindset. Textbooks need to be revised and the perils of both brazen and covert narrow-mindedness must be publicly debated. It would also help if major religious parties came forward to condemn atrocities such as Friday’s attacks on Ahmadis in Lahore. But that is perhaps asking for too much.
Optimistic projections?
A REPORT in this newspaper on Thursday has suggested that the government will target tax-revenue generation of Rs1,650bn in the next fiscal year, an addition of just over Rs300bn over this year’s revised target. The absolute sum may look large, but there are several factors to consider. One, given the government’s projection of 4.5 per cent growth in GDP next year, the total tax revenue would anyway have risen. Two, given that significant inflation will still be around — the government is projecting an eight per cent inflation rate, but none of its projections have panned out on this front in the last couple of years — tax revenue in absolute terms is bound to rise anyway. This leaves approximately Rs130bn of genuinely ‘new’ revenues that will be added to the tax stream — a start, perhaps, given the disastrously low tax-to-GDP ratio of this country, but there are several big questions marks.
First, direct taxes are expected to go up by only Rs26bn. Absolutely no one in policymaking circles wants to talk about direct taxes, not even the opposition politicians. It is a fact that Pakistan’s tax structure is highly skewed towards indirect taxes, which hurt business and the less well-off more. And yet most of the reforms and fresh measures are focused on precisely the sector which hurts the less well-off the most: indirect taxes such as VAT, federal excise duty and the like. Second, the revenue projections of the new VAT regime may be on the more optimistic side. Doing away with many exemptions, rebates, special concessions, etc should in theory increase the revenue stream from VAT as opposed to GST — but that is based on proper implementation on the ground. Will this happen or will Pakistan once again be forced to revise downwards its revenue projections a few months into the new financial year? Third, even if the problems between Sindh and the centre and on the implementation front can be ironed out, there are concerns that the VAT regime will slowly become riddled with the same problems that plagued GST. Can the government be trusted to withstand pressure from sectors determined to stay out of the tax net?