Prime minister’s speeches
IN the unfortunate political history of this country, there have been many ill-advised speeches to the nation by political and military leaders. But Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appears determined to set something of a record for civilian leaders who, flanked by the national flag and seated under a picture of the Quaid, have used national television to make personal and thoroughly un-statesmanlike speeches. Twice now in recent weeks, the prime minister has addressed the nation on television, leaving a host of unanswered and grim questions in his wake. The most obvious question is: whatever has happened to the platform of parliament? So unused is the prime minister’s despatch box in the National Assembly that it appears that he is allergic to it. Never one to fail to remind his audience that he is a thrice-elected prime minister, Mr Sharif appears to hold the very chamber that has elected him as prime minister each time in the lowest regard.
Then there are the questions about the contents of his two most recent speeches. Mercifully, on Friday the prime minister did not at least return to his very personal anguish at the damage caused to his family businesses decades ago. Three weeks ago, the sad tale of a businessman trying to do good by his country and his good intentions being spurned by the republic was a bizarrely indulgent prime ministerial performance. But on Friday, there was no lack of other personal-political history and some rather astonishing attacks on political enemies. Alternating between innuendo and direct verbal assaults, Mr Sharif’s comments would have been unseemly at a political rally. Made from the platform of an address-to-the-nation broadcast by state television and carried simultaneously by news channels across the country, the speech was not just a political travesty — it transgressed the very norms of decent, democratic debate that the prime minister accused his political enemies of crossing.
Finally, there are the questions about what the prime minister should have said on Friday. To call for a judicial commission simply because that has been a section of the opposition’s demand is an inadequate response. If the prime minister’s actions are to match the tone and tenor of his words, there is an obvious thing that can and should be done: declare pre-emptively all his assets and those of his family, at home and abroad, and produce a detailed account of what was acquired when and where and through which proceeds. A full, detailed and scrupulously compiled declaration of assets — regardless of what the letter of the law requires in whichever jurisdictions, inside Pakistan and abroad — should surely not be above the elected prime minister of a democratic nation. Moreover, a full prime ministerial disclosure will force others to follow Mr Sharif’s example, helping deliver the cleaner politics the prime minister says he wants.
Violence in Okara
MUCH as the powers that be may wish it was not so, sometimes the exploited classes will stand their ground. So it is with the Okara Military Farms, a saga that refuses to go away ever since it surfaced in the media about 15 years ago. The controversy centres on 17,000 acres in Punjab’s ‘canal colonies’, and involves issues of patronage politics, state coercion and land rights that can be traced back to pre-Partition days when the British Indian Army — that acquired the area on lease in 1913 — refused to give ownership rights as promised to farmers working on the land. The Pakistan Army inherited this holdover from the British and continued along the earlier pattern, ie a 50-50 sharecropping arrangement with the farmers, without too much by way of defiance from the latter. However, in 2000, during Gen Musharraf’s time — military governments are an ever-reliable catalyst for expansion of the khakis’ economic interests — the authorities in Okara introduced a new system whereby tenant farmers had to pay rent in cash rather than in kind. This would, in effect, turn the sharecroppers, who had tilled the land for generations, into contract labour who could be evicted from the farms on short notice. That laid the foundations of a resistance movement led by a farmers’ union called Anjuman-i-Mazareen-i-Punjab, which has repeatedly been countered by the state through brute force.
The state’s actions this time around make it clear that it will spare no weapon at its disposal to crush the ‘rebellion’, even cynically using the pretext of the National Action Plan to justify preventing an AMP demonstration. Subsequently, 4,000 tenant farmers were booked on various charges, including under the Anti-Terrorism Act, for allegedly blocking GT Road and causing injuries to policemen through aerial firing. There have also been dark murmurings by local authorities of ‘no-go’ areas in the vicinity. One would imagine that some recalcitrant farmers who refuse to give up their customary right to the land — and whose claim to that land by some accounts is stronger than that of the military, notwithstanding the latter’s sense of entitlement — are a threat to the country’s peace. It is all very well to counter militancy in its naked, violent manifestations, but it is equally important to address the socioeconomic distortions that have laid the groundwork for extremist tendencies in the first place. This is not the way to win the larger war.
KP lawmaker’s murder
THE murder of PTI lawmaker Sardar Soran Singh in Buner on Friday highlights, once again, the dangers faced by members of minority communities in Pakistan, even those supposedly in positions of power. It also illustrates the precarious law and order situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where a lawmaker belonging to the ruling party can be gunned down with such relative ease. Singh is the fourth PTI legislator in the current KP Assembly to have been killed. It is, of course, true that many groups and communities located near the centres of militancy are at risk in KP and Fata. Those familiar with the area where the MPA was killed say militant groups remain active there; a number of targeted killings have occurred in the recent past, including of workers belonging to the ANP. As for the Sikh community, others belonging to this religious group have been gunned down in Fata as well as in Peshawar. Singh’s commitment to his country was quite evident as he refused to join members of his immediate family in India, preferring to stay in Pakistan.
Soran Singh’s murder is reminiscent of the killing of federal minister Shahbaz Bhatti in 2011. While minorities face varying levels of discrimination in Pakistan, when a high-profile member of a non-Muslim religious group is murdered in cold blood, the psychological impact on minorities is devastating. And although, some say that Singh was not too bothered when it came to matters of personal safety, the KP government should have provided him with extra security detail considering the threats that existed in the area. Regrettably, it appears that the reaction of KP’s ruling party to the killing has been muted, perhaps because everyone’s attention is drawn to the commotion over corruption. We hope this case is not forgotten soon and that the perpetrators are caught and punished. In the long term, the lawmaker’s murder shows that countrywide, the battle against militancy and violence is far from over.
Source: Editorials
Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2016