Death of a state
March 3rd, 2011
Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti has been executed in Islamabad, by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Punjab chapter, as claimed in a pamphlet recovered from the site of the murder. He and the Christian community had been receiving threats for some time, after the conviction at a sessions court of an illiterate Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, for blasphemy. In Pakistan’s rapidly growing religious extremism, this is the second death which will probably shake the world, while Pakistani Muslims remain inured to the treatment received from the Taliban. The nation and the media are divided over a similar execution of former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer over the controversial blasphemy law, which allows innocent people to be given death sentences.
Bhatti had predicted his death. He had earlier voiced his fear that he would be “the highest target”, following the assassination of Salmaan Taseer. He had also said that fatwas had been issued by extremist clerics calling for his beheading. The public spread of these messages of violence has continued to enjoy impunity. Now the world will mourn the death of another lonely Christian in a country where hardly anyone listens to the woes of his community and where the Punjab government has simply brushed under the carpet repeated incidents of violence against those accused of blasphemy.
The Pakistani media has not paid much attention to this hapless community that opted to stay in Pakistan after 1947 because it had confidence in the leadership of Quaid-i-Azam and openly supported him. This was also the community that later served Pakistan well in the army and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Muslims in the war against India, winning bravery awards. This is also the community that served Pakistan selflessly in the sectors of education and health, educating even the leaders who grew up to ignore their plight in Punjab, where they are concentrated. When the Pope at the Vatican protested the conviction of Aasia Bibi, the Urdu press thought it wise to publicise the wrath of the narrow-minded cleric against him. Consequently, the world outside thinks Pakistan is drowning in its own extremism.
While the nation is in a fever from the threat it feels from the person of Raymond Davis, it is forgetting that the Taliban have a larger share in killing its sons and daughters. Even as Minister Bhatti was executed near his house, the other Taliban in Mardan attacked a girls’ school and opened fire on innocent pupils who the state is no longer able to protect. No thought is being spared for the most vulnerable sections of our society as powerful clerics appear on TV channels to threaten more violence.
Columnists don’t tire of playing down the blood-thirstiness of the religious terrorists as they invoke scenes of destruction allegedly wreaked by America through its agents. So incensed was Taliban chief Hakimullah at the allegation that he was working for the CIA that he allowed himself to be included in the snap showing the execution of ex-ISI officer Colonel Imam, just as he had had his picture taken together with a Jordanian who had helped kill a number of CIA agents in Afghanistan.
This is the death of the state through extremism. Nothing that Pakistan says is deemed reliable by the outside world. The economy is dying because its external links are snapped by the fear inspired by Pakistani thinking. Pakistanis say the country’s courts are independent and free but no one believes it to be true as terrorists are let off by judges, the latter not being protected by the state against threats of assassination. Its leaders are killed by assassins known to their victims — as in the case of Benazir Bhutto — but columnists insist that she was assassinated by America. It is quite possible that in the coming days, a protesting world would be told that Shahbaz Bhatti was executed by a group of assassins organised by Raymond Davis under orders from Washington!
Lawyers who have showered flower petals on the assassin of Taseer should take pause and look at the extremism of the death of Bhatti, a citizen of Pakistan whose only fault was that he was representing his community and protesting against its targeting under the blasphemy law.
Flood tax and the RGST
March 3rd, 2011
One can be sympathetic to the government’s need to raise revenues but levying new taxes through a presidential ordinance strikes us as a bad idea. At best, it is a temporary and incomplete fix to one symptom of a chronic problem that needs a much bolder solution than the government seems to be willing to pursue. According to the proposal, the government would impose a flood tax on those who already pay withholding taxes, although it would also eliminate some exemptions to the current sales tax regime. Both of these moves are likely to be extremely unpopular and will yield only Rs38 billion, which is not significant in comparison to the size of the fiscal deficit.
The problem with Pakistan’s taxation system is not that the tax rates are too high or too low. It is that far too many people escape being taxed altogether, either through lobbying for exemptions or by avoiding documentation. Levying a flood tax would simply burden those who are already shouldering the entirety of the civic responsibility of paying taxes. Instead of going through a constitutional backdoor for such a small sum, we would suggest that the government grit its teeth and push for the value added tax, now referred to as the reformed general sales tax (RGST). The tax has several merits, not least of which is the fact that it is not a new tax but rather a reduction in the rate of the current GST. Changes to the tax regime will yield higher revenues by eliminating the many exemptions in the system. It also has the added advantage of levying the tax across the value chain, instead of placing the entire burden on the end user, making it an inherently fairer tax.
Admittedly, the RGST is regressive in nature, since it taxes consumption — poorer segments of society consume more of their income, thus paying a higher rate of taxes. But the current proposal for the RGST has critical exemptions for essential items, thus removing at least some of its regressive nature. Passing the RGST bill may be hard, but, in the long run, it is also the right thing to do.