Khan of Kalat agrees to talk
ANY move that appears to break the stultifying impasse in Balochistan is cause for at least some cautious optimism. A report in this paper yesterday revealed that the Baloch leader, the Khan of Kalat Mir Suleman Dawood Jan, who lives in self-exile in London, has agreed to meet a delegation of Balochistan government officials. Prior to this, he will hold consultations with members of the Grand Jirga who, after the death of Nawab Akbar Bugti at the hands of the army in 2006, had sent him abroad to work towards the restoration of Kalat State. In September last year, the Balochistan Assembly passed a resolution to approach the tribal leader and enlist his help in establishing peace in the province.
For the National Party-led government that has been vowing to bring the ‘angry Baloch’ to the negotiating table, this is a victory of sorts. Aside from the Khan of Kalat’s lofty standing in Balochistan’s tribal hierarchy, there is the weight of history: in pre-Partition days, the erstwhile princely state — then ruled by the present Khan’s grandfather — held a pre-eminent position in the tribal confederacy that stretched across central and southern Balochistan. The government is obviously hoping that Mir Suleman can bring the other angry Baloch — the recalcitrant separatist leaders — to the negotiating table. However, history also records that when the then Khan of Kalat signed the Instrument of Accession to join Pakistan in 1948, it caused much anguish among nationalistminded Baloch. His progeny too, not least because of their perceived closeness to the establishment, came to be considered as ‘traitors’ to the Baloch cause as the bitterness exploded into open rebellion several times over subsequent decades. Although Nawab Bugti’s murder was a watershed that led Mir Suleman to break his ties with the state and himself adopt the separatist narrative, his influence on players in the insurgency is debatable. Not least because for the first time, the separatist movement finds widespread support among educated youth, particularly in the non-sardari southern belt where tribal hierarchy does not inspire the same deference.
Nevertheless, this is a much-needed political initiative after a succession of sterile militarised strategies. In this situation, the removal of precious artifacts from the Khan of Kalat’s palace in Kalat town by his son Prince Mohammed, from whom he is estranged, has the potential of scuttling the talks before they even begin. It also gives oxygen to suspicions of state machinations — never far from the surface in Balochistan — in this case to install the son, seen as a pro-establishment figure, as the Khan of Kalat in place of his father. To restore confidence, the government must ensure the artifacts are returned without delay. In Balochistan, with its Gordian knot of complexities resulting from decades of self-defeating policies, even the slightest wrong move could take us back to square one.
ECP’s challenge
AS the judicial commission inquiring into allegations of fraud and misconduct during the 2013 general election moves inexorably towards concluding its work, the detailed response submitted by the Election Commission of Pakistan is worth examining. The ECP is not only the constitutional body tasked with the holding of elections, it is also the body that lies at the heart of many of the electoral allegations made by the PTI since May 2013. As such, the ECP not only has a sophisticated insight into the minutiae of organising and conducting elections, it is also well positioned to explain many of the strident allegations against it. The ECP’s submission to the judicial commission is quite forthright: while there were fairly widespread procedural lapses by polling officials, nothing has been brought on the record as yet to suggest a systematic attempt to rig the general election, either at a provincial level or nationally. That chimes with what most independent observers have claimed since 2013: that while the general election was not truly free and fair, it produced a result that was acceptable and credible and an incremental improvement on previous general elections.
The more important point though — at least from an ECP perspective — is to suggest fixes for the procedural lapses that 2013 revealed. Here the ECP tends to deflect more blame than take charge of fixing the system. Clearly, given that presiding officers and returning officers are not full-time employees of the ECP, there are real world limitations to how much training can be imparted and to what extent authority over the POs and ROs can be exercised. Surely, that should not mean that improvement is simply not possible when it comes to the present system. Limitations aside, there is no reason why ROs, who were very experienced judicial officers, should not be able to receive and file the relevant election-related forms — scrupulous attention to detail and strictly following laid-down procedure is at the very heart of the judicial process, after all. There is also the reality that the average RO would have overseen several elections — so there is little reason for amateurish mistakes that the inquiry has revealed at various stages of the counting and collating process. What appears to be the problem is that while the ECP has the legal mandate and relatively strong powers, the commission’s officers are reluctant to take a hard line when lapses are revealed. A more assertive, rules-bound ECP would go a long way to further strengthening the electoral system.
Thalassaemia report
THERE is no denying that this is a country familiar with incompetence, mismanagement and corruption scandals. Even so, the revelations recently made about the Punjab Thalassaemia Prevention Programme are astounding. Consider the following, which are just a few of the findings made by the Planning & Development Department of the Punjab government: the PTPP has been forcing field officers to carry on using expired medical items. “Out of 96,000 vials about 67,000 have expired or are near expiry,” says the report; some Rs17m were spent on establishing a DNA lab but it was never made operational, with the PTPP outsourcing the work to a private lab at a further cost of Rs5.7m; of the estimated 6,000,000 carriers in Punjab of the mutant thalassaemia gene, the PTPP managed to detect only 7,837. And where foetuses were found to test positive for thalassaemia major, the PTPP has no documentation regarding the termination of such pregnancies; in this regard, the report points out, “hypothetically if a single child out of 311 foetuses [that tested positive] has been born, then [the] complete exercise ... will be futile.”
Thalassaemia affects some one in six Pakistanis, and the PTPP was set up in 2009. The initial budgetary outlay was Rs147.4m, revised upwards till it reached Rs196.835m by December last year. Its task was to introduce thalassaemia preventative measures through intervention in 22 districts. That this is its performance speaks volumes for, first, the kind of interest taken by the Punjab government in one of its own initiatives and, second, the level of oversight involved. It is legitimate, here, to point out the waste of a massive amount of funds. But that would be to ignore the plight of hundreds of thousands of adults and children who continue to suffer from this grievous affliction. Once again, it would seem, the promises of help made to them by their government remain confined to good intentions alone, with their fate abandoned to the promise of easy money.
Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2015
http://www.dawn.com/newspaper/editorial