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Old Tuesday, May 29, 2007
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Default Budget

Here and now
As the current wave of politicisation happens to be coinciding with the upcoming announcement of the budget, there could be no better time than now to bring the defence budget into the spotlight

By Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

The political space that exists during a period of popular uprising demands the raising of radical demands and political programmes that stretch the imagination of the mass of people yearning for change. Working people across the country, particularly in urban areas, are waiting in earnest for a clear alternative to status quo. In spite of the fact that the overall political environment has become considerably more charged over the past two months, many people still wonder whether anything substantive will really change when Musharraf & co. finally abdicate.

The chances of substantive change in the short-term are admittedly limited. But this of course does not mean that the political discourse cannot be radicalised so that the objective of substantive change itself dominates the longer-term agenda. And arguably the most important aspect of this process will be challenging the national security paradigm that remains the most crucial pillar of the military's political project.

The current wave of politicisation happens to be coinciding with the upcoming announcement of the budget, and thus an opportunity presents itself to address several outstanding structural features of the official cost-accounting exercise. Even if we cannot address all of the closely interrelated aspects of our public income-generating and expenditure exercises, there could be no better time than now to bring the defence budget into the spotlight.

One of the reasons why so much resentment has built up against this present government is the extensive -- and somewhat undisguised -- nature of the military's independent corporate activities. Ordinary working people have now come into direct conflict with the military over arbitrary land grabbing, and many other such intrusions of the men in uniform into the public sphere. Civilian bureaucrats -- including those in the upper echelons of the administrative apparatus -- despise those serving and retired military officers who have displaced them. The whole country is painfully aware of the manner in which this government has reinforced the military's growing economic power, and penetration of social life more generally (importantly an exhaustively researched book on the military's corporate empire by Dr Ayesha Siddiqa has just been released, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt just how deeply entrenched an economic force the wardi walas actually are).

However, there was a time before the creation of this vast empire when the military relied almost exclusively on the official defence budget to meet its corporate needs. And till this day, the defence budget remains a symbol of the military's domination over the economic, political and ideational structures of the polity. Much hay has been made of the fact that the share of the budget dedicated to military expenditures has decreased in recent years, but this is a function of number-fudging and other technical shenanigans rather than a reflection of a genuine reconfiguration of our allocative priorities. Much of what is spent on defence is hidden from public view (read: not reflected in the official budget) in any case, and over the past few years, pensions to military men have been shifted to the civilian pension head in the budget (it was recently reported that 80 per cent of the expenditure under this head goes to military men).

Thus this is the time and place to raise again what has been a long-standing demand of many principled political and social activists in this country, namely that details of the defence budget should be presented to the general public in broad daylight and that this budget should be subject to open debate (to the extent the last few budget debates have actually been anything more than a tokenism).

Perhaps more importantly there should be a clear demand for the defence budget to be slashed in accordance with the government's supposed commitment to establishing peace in the region. Indeed, a detailed investigation into what constitutes the defence budget will reveal such a significant portion of it being channeled to meet 'non-combat expenditures' that the demand for a substantive reduction in the defence budget will be stating the obvious.

Even beyond this there is a need to revisit the logic of national security and the obsession that many of us continue to have with the imperative of guarding our frontiers. There is no immediate threat to our territorial sovereignty, and, as a matter of fact, there rarely has been at any stage over the past 60 years. Instead, under the guise of establishing military parity with India (which is impossible in any case given how much bigger that country is), we have totally surrendered our political and economic sovereignty by becoming economic dependencies of the US and more recently of the international financial institutions.

These are all clear assertions of our political reality that need to take centrestage now. They have a direct bearing on the longer-term struggle for an end to oligarchic rule. And they do strike a chord with working people who are less and less tolerant of hyper-nationalist invocations of the 'greater national interest'. Since the 18th of May, in the middle of the working class area of the federal capital, Aab Para Chowk, a 65-year old political worker has set out his stall pledging to hunger strike till death, vowing that he will keep at it until mainstream opposition parties vow to slash the defence budget if and when they come to power. Every evening hundreds of people gather around and listen intently to the very compelling logic of this man with a cause.

There are undoubtedly many more such acts of individual and collective defiance that can and will continue to come to the fore so long as the current wave of politicisation persists. It is in such an environment that the mainstream parties have been compelled to radicalise their public utterings and demonstrations of power. Things will not remain this charged indefinitely but for as long as they do, it is crucial that no opportunity to dissent against the established order is lost. The budget in particularly presents a heaven-sent opportunity to expand the base of a movement that has predominantly been viewed as a battle over the meaning of rule of law.

The generals will sooner or later need to part company with Musharraf, making him the fall guy so that the military as an institution can be protected from as much of the public glare as it possibly can. But more and more people are becoming aware of the fact that the problem is not with Musharraf's person as much as it is with the military's domination of political and economic life. This needs to be said as openly as possible, in as many different ways as possible, and with as much fearlessness as has been exhibited by the thousands who have already emphatically said no to dictatorship. What better place than here, what better time than now?
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