Long way to peace
As with much in the Pakistan-India relationship, even the welcome news is often accompanied by bad news. On Friday, the Indian government announced that Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar will be dispatched to Saarc countries, with the focus inevitably being on speculation that the foreign secretary-level talks cancelled by India last August are now back on track. Then, yesterday, another round of violence along the Line of Control resulted in the death of a Pakistani sexagenarian in firing by Indian border forces. The up-and-down nature of mere expectations that India and Pakistan will begin to approach the idea of talks again indicates just how far from the path to normalisation the two countries have strayed.
As ever, there are two sides to the story. In the current Nawaz Sharif-Narendra Modi era, a great deal of responsibility for the impasse must be borne by the Indian side. Seemingly determined to take a tough, almost belligerent, line with Pakistan, the Modi government appears to have been in denial of a basic reality of the Pak-India relationship — as frustrating as it is for both sides to deal with each other, deal with each other they must. The decision to call off talks last August was a particularly petulant one, given that the Pakistan high commissioner to India, Abdul Basit, did nothing unusual — in fact, it was fairly routine — in meeting the leadership of the Hurriyat Conference. Moreover, the simmering tensions along the Line of Control and Working Boundary for much of the last year can be largely explained by the Indian government adopting an explicitly disproportionate approach in responding to any trouble in the area.
Even now, the imminent visit of Mr Jaishankar is being cast by the Indian government as a so-called Saarc yatra — indicating that India is not keen on doing anything more than the bare minimum. If it is true that US President Barack Obama nudged Prime Minister Modi to reach out to Pakistan, it seems Mr Modi is sending a message that he is neither very keen on it nor very hopeful. For all the problems on the Indian side, however, there is another basic reality too: Pakistan has simply not done enough to engage India on the matters that are of concern to it. Two big issues stand out: failure to get anywhere near a closure on the Mumbai-related trials here and shelving the Non-Discriminatory Market Access deal with the previous Congress government. Surely, for all of India’s sullenness and petulance, it is Pakistan’s inability to approach the Pak-India equation in a cooperative manner that is undermining the prospects of a return to dialogue. India has legitimate security concerns regarding Pakistan, as does Pakistan with India, but it is unreasonable on the part of the Pakistani state to not even do the basic things that could help pave the way for a meaningful resumption of dialogue.
Imran Khan’s criticism
ON his recent trip to Shikarpur to condole with the families that had lost relatives in the tragic attack on an imambargah last month, Imran Khan criticised the police and government in Sindh — as also in Punjab. He called for police reforms on the model that his party claims to have built in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and demanded that the law-enforcers be freed from political and personal influences. A few days later, terrorists targeted a Shia mosque in Peshawar, brutally reconfirming that the militant threat is spread over the length and breadth of the country, and that it cannot be dealt with exclusively by a province, or for that matter, by a single party. There obviously is great temptation for his opponents to blast the high-sounding PTI chief who is seen to flaunt his virtuous presence at all times, even on solemn occasions which require the sharing of grief, and not boasting. That is the temptation that needs to be resisted by politicians hailing from different regions and of all stripes. Criticism must be constructive — it would be of little use if, in the context of the strike in Peshawar on Friday, the PTI’s remarks about the administration in Sindh and Punjab were to be used for political point-scoring.
What can be done, instead, is to press the PTI chief to come up with some practical steps towards improving the performance of the police force. Perhaps the PTI government in KP can call a conference of senior law-enforcement officers from all over the country to discuss ideas. The PTI is fully within its rights to question how resources are being utilised anywhere in Pakistan and to point out how lacking in purpose and vitality the old system of governance is. Pending full-scale reform and just for the time being, however, the party could try and spearhead a move for greater coordination between the federating units. The angry talk alone could frustrate people across any divide of convenience between Shikarpur and Peshawar.
Baldia: losing focus
REVELATIONS from a joint interrogation report which surfaced last week allegedly linking 2012’s Baldia Town factory fire to an MQM worker — suggesting the building was deliberately set on fire due to non-payment of extortion money — have expectedly kicked up a storm. But political point-scoring threatens to take the focus away from the 258 victims of the tragedy, pushing the narrative in another direction. As the counsel for the victims pointed out on Friday, the statement of the suspect that has caused the uproar forms only one paragraph of the JIT report; the document filed with the Sindh High Court last week did not offer extensive details about the fire tragedy. In fact, the suspect was picked up in connection with a separate case and made the comments about the fire in passing, and, in the words of the counsel, “based on hearsay”, as the individual was not a witness to the blaze, nor did he take responsibility for it. It is also true that interrogation reports such as these are basically recorded statements of a suspect; no judgment is passed about their veracity — that is for investigators to establish. Moreover, the Baldia factory case currently pending with a trial court is a separate murder case.
But if it is true that the factory was set ablaze to punish the owners for not paying extortion money, then this horrific crime needs to be investigated and taken to its logical conclusion. The question is that when the interrogation team — which consisted of police as well as premier intelligence agencies — had the alleged details in June 2013, when the suspect was arrested, why was this lead not pursued then, and why did it only emerge recently? As expected, the MQM’s opponents have pounced on the party on the basis of the suspect’s claims. Nevertheless, the Muttahida needs to continue to convey its version of this matter — it is a fact that the party has earned a reputation for high-handedness, especially in Karachi. So whenever such allegations emerge, there is indeed a rush to judgment. But, ultimately, the Baldia tragedy should not be politicised and the ‘confession’ of the suspect should not be misread or placed out of context. The timely conclusion of the case assigning responsibility for the tragedy should hopefully give some closure to the families, and prevent similar disasters from being repeated.
Published in Dawn February 15th , 2015
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Bank liquidity
FOR the seventh time this year, the State Bank has conducted an outsized Open Market Operation to inject liquidity into the banking system. The last such operation injected Rs623bn into the interbank market. Such enormous OMO injections have been taking place since last September, although their size and frequency has grown steadily since then. A peak was hit in December, when the outstanding volume of net OMO injections touched Rs666bn, with daily average volumes going from Rs61bn in the first quarter of the fiscal year to Rs281bn in the second quarter. The only other time we saw OMO injections of this size was back in the first quarter of 2013, in the months leading up to the general elections, when the fiscal framework was in serious disarray. Prior to that, one has to go back to 2012 to find comparative examples.
This development ought to inspire questions, and it is surprising to see that little is being said about it. The liquidity problems at the banks that these OMOs are trying to address are said to have a number of drivers. The State Bank’s annual report points to the November 2013 decision on the discount rate as a key turning point in bank liquidity issues. The period prior to that rate hike was marked by abundant liquidity, and the period following it by a dry spell. Undoubtedly, expectations of a rate cut have played a role in the banks’ decision to accelerate their investments in longer tenor government debt in recent days. But the last monetary policy statement also points out the slowing down of deposit growth as an important factor in the liquidity problems facing the banks.
Deposit growth has been slowing since November at least, with most of the slowdown concentrated in low return current accounts. In the first half of the current fiscal year, there was a net withdrawal of Rs145bn from current accounts while growth in savings accounts surged to Rs350bn from Rs182bn in the corresponding period of the previous year. Clearly, bank customers are trying to tell them something: give us a return on our deposits. Failing to generate deposits, banks appear to be content turning to the State Bank to shore up their liquidity positions, either by visiting the discount window or looking for OMO injections. Indulging this behaviour endlessly carries risks, and the State Bank should be mindful that the large OMO injections should not become a pattern.
Gauging media freedom
THE report released on Thursday by Reporters Sans Frontières reminds us that politics around the world today has inevitably taken a heavy toll on media freedoms, squeezing both the public’s right to know and journalists’ duty to inform. “Press freedom ... is in retreat in all five continents,” said the RSF 2015 World Press Freedom Index. The head of the RSF told the media that the deterioration is linked to a range of factors, “with information wars and actions by non-state groups acting as news despots”. Examples of such groups are Boko Haram and the Islamic State, as well as criminal organisations in Italy and South America. Further, several countries fell in the rankings as compared to last year, for example the US. The latter’s drop was in part because it launched a “war on information” against whistleblowers including WikiLeaks and others, while Venezuela’s record worsened since the National Bolivarian Guard fired on “clearly identified” journalists covering protests.
Pakistan, where the threats faced by journalists and the constraints on reporting are a dirty, if open, secret, was ranked at 139 of the 180 countries evaluated.
That said, however, some of the positions awarded are curious, and raise questions about the methodology and logic used in ranking countries. Qatar, for example, like several other Gulf countries, is not exactly known for reporting freely on its internal politics. However, it weighed in at 115. Placed higher were the Central African Republic (110) and Kuwait (90), which, again, can by no means be considered places where there is any degree of freedom to report. In fact, the ranking exercise falls into the trap of counting statistics rather than analysing the actual situation in its full context, especially in developing countries. In several parts of the world, the growing levels of violence against journalists actually provides a clue to increasing media freedoms since the state or other parties hit back only when there is reportage to resent.
Pakistan is a good example of this: during earlier periods of severe restrictions on the media, violence against journalists was less frequent because information was so tightly controlled that much of it went unreported. As the scope of the media has expanded, so too has the resistance to open debate. It is a pity that a number of journalism’s watchdog bodies have failed to account for these nuances, for they are of vital importance in the complex web of media repression.
Census delay
THIS week a year has passed since the Council of Common Interests debated the census as part of its agenda item, yet the demographic exercise is no closer to being held today than it was last year. Everybody agrees that the last census conducted in 1998 is hopelessly out of date, and they all believe that this is a serious problem. Consider the important issues that are built around the availability of census data: the NFC award, delimitation of electoral constituencies, seat shares in parliament, local bodies polls, targeted subsidies, and all other policy matters that rest on population data. With the census data from 1998 practically obsolete, it is fair to suppose that all of these important matters today are actually based on suppositions that have no grounding in measured reality. Without a clean and impartial census, we don’t really know the face of the country that we are trying to run and govern.
A new census is badly needed but the obstacles that stand in its way are formidable and need to be acknowledged. At the heart of the foot-dragging is the demographic make-up of Sindh that nobody is very keen to talk about. With the massive population influx over the years, it stands to reason that Sindh has changed in important ways, and the ethnic balance as well as its share in the total population has undergone a profound transformation. The Sindhi, Mohajir and Pakhtun populations can shift the internal balance of the province, while the influx of people into Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur over the years can alter the share of the province in the total population of the country. Parties that seek their electoral fortunes in Punjab are reluctant to confront the real picture of what the new population shares of the respective provinces are, since this could affect NFC allocations as well as deal a psychological blow if Punjab’s share of the total population were to dip below 50pc.
Sindh is already reeling from a complex ethnic-based power struggle and any new numbers on the ethnic make-up would upset an uneasy status quo. With no takers at the national level, the census exercise is being endlessly delayed. But continuing with a fictitious status quo and making policies for a population mix that doesn’t exist any longer is no solution either. The ruling party must take the lead in initiating a credible move towards a new census, while finding a way to make the exercise agreeable to everyone. Perhaps the case of India can serve as a model, where they decided to freeze all seat shares in parliament irrespective of what the census revealed. That compromise paved the way for a political consensus around a new census, and could serve as a model for Pakistan too. One way or another, this government must ensure that a census is held during its term.
Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2015