Friday, January 03, 2014
A culture of impunity
The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and its chairman Tariq Bajwa are trying to attempt the impossible: convince the public that all parliamentarians pay their fair share of taxes. The politicians have an obvious advantage here since tax information is rightfully private and cannot be disclosed to anyone. These privacy laws, however, allow parliamentarians to cynically lie about their tax returns to their hearts’ content, safe in the knowledge that their information will never be released. For them to say that they pay income tax is disingenuous; after all the salaries they receive as members of parliament have taxes deducted at source. But few, if any, members of parliament rely solely on this income. They usually have business interests, property and agricultural concerns on which they either pay no tax or severely underreport their income. We expect our politicians to lie to us, be it about taxation or any other matter, but the FBR should not be part of the cover-up. If they cannot disclose the tax details of those who are not paying their fair share then they certainly should not be allowed to defend the politicians either. Right now we have nothing but Bajwa’s word to ease our concerns – and the word of a political appointee is simply not sufficient.
There are two reasons why the tax returns of our elected representatives should be of such concern. First, we want those we vote into power to be honest, productive members of society who do not play by a different set of rules to the rest of us. Then, tax collection in this country is such a problem that few outside the salaried class pay what they owe. The problem lies in the culture of impunity that exists in the country, where the more you have the less responsibility you feel to do your bit for society. Tax dodgers are aided in their lawlessness by the FBR, where corruption reigns from the very top to the bottom. The higher-ups have political connections that lead them to turn a blind eye to tax evasion by the wealthy while the tax collectors at the bottom are happy to accept a personal bribe in lieu of paying taxes. To try and change this rotten culture is why we put pressure on parliamentarians to make public their tax returns. We have been misled too often to take them and their cronies at their word when they deny cheating the nation.
Bloody beginnings
The pilgrimage they had just completed did not bring good fortune for the 35 or so bus passengers travelling towards Quetta from Taftan on the Pak-Iran border. A suicide bomber driving a car laden with explosives slammed his vehicle into theirs in the Akhtarabad area on the outskirts of the Balochistan capital. The locality is a predominantly Hazara one. The three persons killed aboard the bus were Shia; so were most of the 30 others who were injured. The sense of fear was driven home by reports of security concerns regarding another attack, and consequent shifting of the injured to ‘safer’ hospitals, away from what police described as the most vulnerable areas. There are really few words left to describe the horror of what has been happening. Our familiarity with such horror is great. We have no doubts regarding which extremist groups carry out these attacks – whether or not they make a public claim of responsibility.
As more graves are dug, the question we need to ask is why we have been unable to stop the violence that has occurred again and again, with 2014 beginning with the ugly splash of red we see in Quetta. It seems we are to see the same pattern of death that occurred much too often through the previous year. This must end. For that to happen, we need better intelligence, with the ability to infiltrate the groups responsible for the spread of sectarian hatred and the suicide bombings or other acts of violence motivated by it. Our failure in this respect is discouraging. We also need security personnel better trained to deal with the terrorists so that they can be tracked down and their training camps disbanded. Perhaps most of all we need to persuade people everywhere in our country that difference in belief or opinion cannot be a reason to harm other citizens. The onslaught of hatred has washed over logic and humanity and what is left needs to be rescued from beneath the tide. We must have some hope of an end to the killings and the peace that so many had hoped for as they wrote out their new year’s messages or expressed sentiments wishing for a better future for the country.
Out in the cold
Babli was a victim of human neglect and indifference. The young female chimpanzee died apparently as a result of pneumonia and exposure to cold after suffering sickness at Safari Park, Karachi. Such deaths are indeed not uncommon at our zoos and safari parks. While these institutions should be places where people can be educated about animals, breeding programmes run for endangered species and the animals we share our planet with protected, they are instead run as virtual slaughter houses.
Babli, whose death needs to be investigated, was not the first to die. The death of a male chimpanzee had been recently reported at the Karachi zoo. A few years ago the female elephant Saheli, not yet a teenager in elephant years, died under mysterious circumstances at Islamabad’s zoo. A number of tigers at both the zoo and the safari park in Lahore have also died due to sickness. The conditions of ‘wildlife parks’ in various parts of the country remains deplorable: animal thefts, poaching and deaths have all been reported, while the unfortunate inhabitants of these centres are often penned up in tiny cages. All this needs to change. We need to create awareness about animals and their rights. In keeping with international law we also need to ascertain how Babli and her mate, a pair of endangered West African chimpanzees landed up at the Karachi Safari Park. The problem of smuggling, neglect and the poor maintenance of zoos and parks need to be tackled. We have had too many animals die unnecessary deaths and suffer pain they could easily have been spared had we shown a little more humanity in handling them.