WHAT had looked likely for months has now become a reality: yesterday, after a meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee concerning the international spread of wild poliovirus, WHO said in a statement that the conditions for a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” have been met. “This situation,” it said, “could result in failure to eradicate globally one of the world’s most serious vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Pakistan finds itself in the dock yet again. It remains one of the world’s three remaining polio-endemic countries, and the Pakistani strain of the virus has been detected in several other countries. Notwithstanding all the work put in by the polio immunisation campaign over more than two decades, the situation continues to worsen. From the passive refusal to let the Oral Polio Vaccine be administered, we now have active and brutal aggression. Vaccinators have been attacked and murdered, health teams work under siege conditions, there are problems with the cold-chain storage and doubts over the efficacy of the vaccine. In the TTP-dominated tribal areas, a ‘ban’ on the vaccination has been imposed, and in other areas tribal elders have tried to use it as a bargaining chip. It’s hardly any wonder, then, that WHO has finally advised that restrictions be placed on people travelling from countries that could export wild poliovirus, which includes Pakistan. The measure was first proposed in 2011 by the Independent Monitoring Board for Polio Eradication, and India implemented it early this year.

The way forward is what it has always been: Pakistan needs to get its house in order, urgently. The means and motivation have to be found to further the OPV initiative. While adults stand a small chance of contracting the disease, it is children with whom this crippling virus has an affinity, and in immunising every child — with starter and follow-up doses of the vaccine — lies the only hope for eradication. The state must not only better organise the logistics involved in reaching every child, it must also accomplish the task that is perhaps just as daunting: taking control of the narrative. No other country is at a comparable place, ie witnessing a seeming resurgence of the disease, and therefore the bulk of medical research refers to risk-assessment in the context of a falling, or halted, incidence of polio. The travel restriction advisory means that more challenges have been created. The various political elements that declaim their passion for the ‘national interest’ need reminding that the best way of achieving this lies in closing ranks. They must if they are to ensure that future generations don’t face being crippled, and that Pakistan is not an international pariah because of its inability to control the spread of a disease that, just a year ago, had very nearly been globally eradicated.

POVERTY is a multidimensional phenomenon. Hence, the trend of measuring poverty on the basis of several forms of deprivations such as healthcare, education, water supply, income, etc, is catching on globally. It, therefore, isn’t improbable that each country may have a poverty profile unique to itself, depending on the size and nature of such deprivations. The poverty profile of the US, for example, would be different from Pakistan’s or even Germany’s. Yet income remains the most important and common benchmark for calculating the number of poor in any country. Finance Minister Ishaq Dar’s suggestion to the ADB to revise upward its income threshold for measuring poverty from $1.25 a day to $2, therefore, is a reasonable proposition. It is also important for the bank to redefine its poverty line threshold because the IMF has already done so in view of the rapid rise in food and energy prices in most countries, particularly in economies struggling to cut the incidence of poverty, in the last few years.

Pakistan is located in a region where the majority of the world’s 2.4bn poor live. In testimony before a parliamentary panel in February last, Mr Dar had said 54pc of the country’s population is poor. Now that is a huge number. A vast number of them can be categorised as the chronic poor with little hope of their ever crossing the poverty line. Regrettably, we aren’t doing enough for them. Many of them are not eligible even for the cash handouts under the Benazir Income Support Programme initiated by the previous government because they don’t have an address. Those who are, get too paltry an amount, often with a lag of several months. The old concept that rapid GDP growth automatically takes care of poverty no longer holds good. Growth does help some but not everyone. If poverty in the country is to be tackled, the government will have to devise a focused plan to target it by removing all kinds of deprivations as well as substantially increasing cash handouts for the poor. Its decision to adopt the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index to measure poverty on the basis of various deprivations has given it an opportunity to develop a realistic poverty profile and attack it by launching targeted programmes.

BHAGAT Singh, ever the guerrilla fighter, keeps cropping up at places, as if trying to ambush the prigs who today inhabit the area he took by storm almost nine decades ago. Until recently, some patriots were successfully stalling an attempt to name a square in Lahore after him. But it seems that the attempt to deny history and deny its heroes their due has not been able to sufficiently dampen the spirits of those incorrigible souls looking to set the perspective right. A lawyer in Lahore has sought a reopening of the 1928 John Saunders’ case that led to the execution of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. The lawyer last week achieved what has been called by some as a mini victory. After some nudging, the police have provided him with a copy of the FIR of the case, which does not identify those who had attacked the British police officer. This could just mean the complainants did not know who the assailants were at the time the FIR was lodged, and that the names of the suspects might have been added later. This was not, nor is, an unusual practice, but the production of the FIR here is significant: the Lahore High Court had deemed its availability necessary for considering a reopening of the Bhagat Singh case.

The trials and mistrials of the freedom fighters are the latter’s medals, a proof of their gallantry and of the oppressive colonial treatment they were subjected to. From that angle, it is difficult to see what additional honours a retrial could confer on these heroes. But a reinvestigation would expose the facts and satisfy the urge to recreate a picture as close to reality as possible. It will help to better understand the system as it worked then, and maybe offer comparisons with the practices of today. To that end — the enriching of historical accounts with factual detail — it is worthwhile to revisit the case of Bhagat Singh and other persecuted freedom fighters.