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Old Sunday, October 07, 2007
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The staggering cost of POLLUTION


IN a comprehensive environmental assessment report pertaining to Pakistan, the World Bank talks alarmingly of over 50,000 persons dying in Pakistan every year as a result of pollution and the economy suffering a loss of Rs356bn in the same period.

The loss to the GDP by environmental degradation is six per cent of the GDP amount, while the average economic growth now is around seven per cent, making possible a net gain of only one per cent a year despite the overall growth figures.

Population growth is now an understated 1.8 per cent. That means the net gain per capita is 0.8 per cent or around one per cent so what we are gaining on one hand we are losing on the other. The GDP loss is equal to the outlay of the annual public sector development programme last year which shows the colossal dimensions of the loss or how much more we could have gained had we not had to deal with pernicious pollution problems.

With the population increasing, the environmental degradation in the cities getting worse and squatter settlements springing up everywhere, the outcome can be alarming unless effective and sustainable remedies are found quickly.

There is no time to lose. But the fact is that much of what the report says is not new, only the quantification is new and that may be debatable. In fact, in the 1990s, when Asif Ali Zardari was the minister for environment, the government came up with a very comprehensive report on the state of the environment and the urgent remedies needed. But hardly anything was done to reverse the trend and put the country on safer rails.

It was good that the report was presented to the public in Lahore as it is the headquarters of Wapda which oversees the Indus River system and generates hydel power.

The rivers carry the industrial chemicals downstream to Sindh. When it rains, more chemicals flow into the river and come down. The waters eventually make their way to the sea in the south, rendering seawater even more salty and imperiling certain fish species.

Large lakes in Sindh like Keenjhar are also affected by the inflow of water laden with salt and chemicals. Environmental degradation is varied in Pakistan and includes aerial, water-borne and food-related pollution. The result is that there are many sorts of respiratory ailments and stomach diseases in Sindh. Water scarcity in large areas of Sindh forces the people to consume impure water, the cause of several ailments.

In Karachi many industrialists, by not treating effluents, send these on to the sea making it unsafe for marine life. It has been reported that the Pakistan Navy spends one billion rupees every year to keep its part of the harbour clean. But this is a small sum when compared to the total economic cost of pollution.

The report says that in Pakistani cities, a principle offender is the two-stroke rickshaw. While the government has been trying to eliminate these vehicles, their numbers have been increasing. Many rickshaws are being operated without a licence. They add to the fumes of badly maintained buses and decrepit old trucks. Together these vehicles produce a lot of smoke which is highly injurious to health.

In an effort to get clean and safe water, many people use bottled water. However, tests have shown that few bottling companies are following the rules and that lack of quality control results in even this water being impure. There is no protection against such pollution. Food pollution, too, is common as eatables are exposed to flies and other disease-causing agents. The result is frequent gastroenteritis in Karachi and the interior of Sindh.

Food adulteration is common and worse is the fact that the poor are often treated with impure drugs. So when the first line of protection for the poor fails, the second line of protection too fails — in spite of the fact that food items in Pakistan are priced higher than in other South Asian countries.

It is the duty of the local bodies or local governments to protect the people from pollution and the infections and diseases that this causes. But like everything else regarding the local government, it is more politically preoccupied and least concerned about the protection of the people. This, in fact, hardly seems to be a priority.

With a great deal of fanfare, one ‘gutter bagicha’ was set up and it underwent various trials and tribulations. What Karachi needs is not one of these but at least a dozen so that we can make the city green.

The World Bank report also points out that pollution has affected productivity. It has reduced the output of farm labour by about 20 per cent. A sick industrial worker is all too often absent from work and the output of the factory suffers as a consequence. Hence pollution has a dimension far beyond what is immediately visible and must be combated with vigour and political will.

A sick student is an irregular student. When he is not well, he will not be able to study well.

Having come up with a report on the environment, the World Bank will also be ready to provide the funds to combat pollution. It will be for the government to make the best and most judicious use of it, instead of concentrating on achieving seven per cent economic growth while foregoing six per cent due to pollution.

The government would also do well to launch an extensive campaign to educate the people on the importance of a clean and safe environment. The people should play a full role in creating such an environment, which would be to their own benefit. Aid money should not be wasted like it was in SAP I and SAP II.

Combating pollution is difficult in a country with a large population, especially one that is not given to protecting the environment, as this means too many polluters. The people have to be turned into protectors of the environment, and made to sustain their campaign against pollution and its effects.


By Sultan Ahmed

http://www.dawn.com/2007/10/07/ed.htm
October 07, 2007 Sunday
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Default Migration and development..

MIGRATION and development

IN the present-day world, marked by globalisation, economic integration and technological advancement, migration has become an international phenomenon.

There is freer movement of goods, services, capital, labour and ideas than ever before. Although barriers to international trade and financial transactions have been dismantled significantly over the past two decades, barriers to cross-border movement of people still remain high.

Migration was considered a problem in the past with negative implications for development. It was adversely viewed in terms of brain drain, labour force depletion and rural exodus. However, in the globalised world of today, there is a growing recognition of the positive effects of migration.

International migration has the potential to generate substantial welfare gains for migrants and their families and for the countries involved both of origin and destination. For developing economies like Pakistan, remittances are an important source of much-needed foreign exchange earnings. Migration also entails benefits such as knowledge, skills and technology transfer, reduction in unemployment, modernisation, democratisation and empowerment of the disadvantaged segments of society.

Despite its benefits, however, migration remains a polemical issue. The main reason for this is that migration, like trade and capital flows, has distributional implications, whereby net gains for society may entail losses for some individuals and groups. Migration also creates ripples of resistance because the movement of people has economic, psychological, social and political consequences.

Viewed from this perspective, the gains and losses from international migration need to be objectively evaluated, particularly from the standpoint of developing countries. What is more important is to consider policy initiatives that could enhance the developmental impact of migration and its contribution to poverty reduction.

This by no means is an easy task. As migration is a diverse phenomenon, its economic impact in one place or another is largely determined by the particular circumstances involved. Moreover, in view of the paucity of basic data on migration, assessing the impact of policy changes is fraught with difficulties. This underscores the need for better data and more research.

Moreover, institutional arrangements need to be made to provide authentic information on migration opportunities and risks to avert unfortunate migration decisions and to limit the abuse and exploitation of vulnerable migrants. An effective regulatory framework for recruitment agents is required to protect intending migrants and to improve transparency.

Greater emigration of low-skilled workers from labour-surplus developing countries could make a significant contribution to poverty reduction. A feasible option could be managed migration programmes between origin and destination countries that combine temporary migration with incentives for return.

The countries of origin that are adversely affected by high-skilled emigration can help to retain key workers by improving working conditions in public employment and by investing in research and development. Countries of origin can also take steps to encourage educated emigrants to return by offering incentives.

Governments can deepen the developmental impact of remittances through the adoption of appropriate policies. These include improving access of poor migrants and their families to formal financial services, expanding banking networks at home and abroad and facilitating the participation of micro-finance institutions in providing low-cost remittance services.

An important factor in this phenomenon is respect for human rights of all migrants. This is an essential component of migration management and development strategies. Enhanced dissemination and understanding of UN and ILO legal norms and instruments relating to migrants is required among all the stakeholders. Maltreatment of workers and non-compliance of contractual obligations in receiving countries are a cause of concern and require cooperation among origin country representatives abroad.

In this context the illegal human trafficking that needs to be checked assumes great importance. It needs the cooperation of a number of agencies to enhance capacity among institutions and individuals dealing with these issues.

However, the root causes of this phenomenon need to be addressed by undertaking development in high migration areas in countries of origin and by increasing opportunities for legal labour migration in countries of destination. The management of labour migration requires a multi-dimensional and well coordinated approach in order to contribute to the development of both origin and destination countries.

The efforts and initiatives undertaken by the International Organisation on Migration (IOM) during the recent past have resulted in positive outcomes. The ministerial meetings held at Colombo and Manila as well as the workshop held at Islamabad last July initiated the process of exchanging ideas and best practices.

The role of IOM as an inter-governmental facilitator in the migration process needs to be recognised. This role can be enhanced to assist countries of origin like Pakistan in placing our labour in new markets. It may be mentioned that about 3.8 million Pakistanis are working or living abroad.

The UN High-Level Dialogue on migration and development held in New York in September 2006 was a step in the right direction. The credit for this initiative goes to all the member-states who have worked to put international migration on the global agenda. The UN High-Level Dialogue offers a unique opportunity for states to share best practices on migration management. It also provides an excellent forum to foster international cooperation on key migration issues such as migration and development, migration management and human rights issues of migrants.

Such initiatives are raising awareness about the development dimension of migration worldwide and serve as a catalyst for governments to improve their internal coordination on migration and development issues. The developing countries, including Pakistan, should play a vibrant role in these global initiatives and ardently support the idea that the dialogue on migration and development should continue through an international body mandated for the task.

This should also be supplemented by regional consultative processes which are crucial for fostering dialogue and mutual understanding on shared migration challenges.

By Sami Saeed
The writer is a civil servant. The views expressed by him are his own.

samisaeed7@hotmail.com
http://www.dawn.com/2007/10/08/op.htm#3
October 08, 2007 Monday
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Default Eliminating poverty still a daunting task

Eliminating poverty still a daunting task


RAWALPINDI, Oct 16: The ‘International Day for the Eradication of Poverty,’ being observed on Wednesday, provides an opportunity to take stock of progress and re-energise efforts towards archiving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The theme for this year is ‘people living in poverty as agents of change.’

Poverty is still a serious concern in Pakistan as a new report on progress in terms of achieving the MDG goals by 2015, released this week reveals that it is off-track, having a high rate of underweight children.

A large percentage of the population classified as transitory poor. Nearly 40.5 percent can be classified as vulnerable and poor and only 12 per cent are extremely poor, says the ‘Pakistan in the 21st Century: Vision 2030.’

Despite an increase in per capita income, poverty has increased in the 1990s, resulting from worsening income distribution.

The income share of the lowest 20 per cent population in urban areas is lower than their rural counterparts, where informal safety nets are also weaker.

The new report, jointly prepared by UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Ecap) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), says other indicators for poverty relate to hunger and nutrition. Compared with the success in income poverty, the situation in the region is almost the reverse.

This is one of the region’s greatest failures —28 per cent of out under-five children are underweight taking the country off- target.

Asia and the Pacific accounts for around 65 per cent of the world’s underweight children. This high level is likely to be linked to the poor health and nutrition of women, as well as to unsafe water supplies and infectious diseases, such as diarrhoea, combined with inadequate care, says the report.

The ‘Vision 2030’ policy document of the government envisages that extreme poverty will have been eliminated in Pakistan in all its forms much before 2030, whether it relates to lack of productive resources to generate material wealth, access to food, health, and education, prevalence of diseases, or natural calamities such as floods or drought, or man-made calamities such as wars.

Yet, a large segment of the population lives in poverty. According to the rebated GDP numbers, the per capita income comes to 720 dollars. Poverty rates, which had fallen substantially in the 1980s and early 1990s, started to rise again toward the end of the decade.

More importantly, differences in income per capita across regions have persisted or widened. Poverty varies significantly among rural and urban areas and from province to province, from a low of 14 per cent in urban Singh to 41 per cent in rural NWFP.

The federal government, under a new initiative is developing the ‘Social Protection Strategy’ to protect poor and vulnerable households from having an adverse impact on their consumption; to support poor households in managing these shocks; and to build resilience against chronic poverty and interrupting inter- generational cycle of poverty by promoting investments in human and physical assets by poor households.

The long-term objective of social protection strategy is to develop an integrated and comprehensive social protection system, especially the vulnerable poor and non-poor. The focus is on providing cash transfers to the poorest of the poor and vulnerable, who are about 20 per cent of the population.

The number of beneficiaries is expected to increase from about 2 million, at present, to 3.2 million in the next five years. In addition, new pilot programmes, such as child support and public works programme, will be initiated.

The Asia-Pacific region has 61 per cent of the world’s population but in some cases its share is higher. One of the most widespread problems is sanitation; Asia and the Pacific accounts for 75 per cent of the world’s rural and 63 per cent urban population who do not have access to basic sanitation —1.9 billion in total.

The region also has high shares of people suffering from TB and underweight children. In addition, despite the region’s success in reducing poverty there are still 641 million people living on less than one dollar per day.

It has been estimated that persistent gender inequality is costing the region 58 billion to 77 billion dollars per year.

The report says that if the countries that are currently off-track-are either slow or regressing --were to alter their course they would be able to meet the targets.

This would mean 196 million more people would be lifted out of poverty; 23 million more children would no longer suffer from hunger; close to one million more children would survive beyond thier fifth birthday; four million more children would get basic education; 240 million more people in rural areas would have acess to improved sanitation and 80 million more people living in cities would have acess to improved water supplies.

By Amin Ahmed
http://www.dawn.com/2007/10/17/nat3.htm
October 17, 2007 Wednesday
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Default Trafficking of children

Trafficking of children


THERE is nothing new in reports that Pakistan is one of the biggest hubs of human trafficking — that is, the abominable business of transporting people illegally across borders. What is worrying though is the revelation that those willing to take up the arduous task of crossing many international frontiers in order to land somewhere in Europe include even minors and teenagers. Two youngsters being kept at the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau in Lahore after they were sent back to Pakistan by Iranian and Greek authorities prove that the trend is catching on. One news report suggests 15 youngsters have been deported back to Pakistan in the first ten months of the current year alone after they were arrested by border officials in Iran, Turkey or Greece. Coming on the heels of an international campaign that effectively ended the smuggling of Pakistani children to the Gulf states as camel jockeys, this latest trend shows that traffickers are successfully marketing European destinations to lure parents to send their children to these faraway places in search for quick and extra bucks.

At the same time it also confirms how vulnerable Pakistan is on this count. With a very young population — about 50 per cent of all people living in Pakistan are aged between 15 and 24 years — our country hardly affords facilities and opportunities to accommodate all of them within its own borders. That leaves a lot of room for desperate measures like sending our younger generation abroad, by any means possible, or leaving them at the mercy of the forces of anarchy and destruction. The fact that so many of Pakistani children are becoming the foot soldiers of international jihadi forces — as fighters as well as suicide bombers — testifies to our failure to channelise their youthful exuberance for positive gains rather than allow their trafficking to other parts of the world. The government of late has taken a lot of laudable steps, including the promulgation of a law in 2002, to stem the tide of human smuggling. Yet it will take a comprehensive strategy involving social, economic, educational and cultural measures to bring it to a complete halt. The only other option is to let people drift — a sure recipe for disaster if the people involved make up the bulk of the population and on them depends the future of the country.


http://www.dawn.com/2007/10/23/ed.htm#3
October 23, 2007 Tuesday
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Default Pathways for poverty alleviation..

Pathways for poverty alleviation


THE World Development Report 2008, released by the World Bank a few weeks ago, has discussed various facets of agriculture in regard to its role as a means of development.

This is acknowledgment of the fact that agriculture has an important role to play in poverty alleviation, especially in the developing world. Agriculture has not been accorded proper attention as an effective development strategy in Third World countries, which have tried to imitate the development strategies of the industrial countries.

As a result the agriculture sector was put on the backburner. This report shifts the focus back to agriculture as a vehicle for poverty alleviation.

The report highlights three pathways for rural households to break the vicious circle of unending poverty. These pathways are farming, rural labour market and migration from rural areas.

The first pathway for moving out of poverty for the rural households is through agricultural farming. Farming pathway is, however, more relevant to the cultivators and farmers who own a reasonable acreage of land.

In the case of Pakistan, the distribution of land is highly skewed. This situation has two important implications: first, the farming pathway for moving out of the poverty trap is limited to a minority of rural households.

Secondly, market orientation of the farming households, who are otherwise engaged in subsistence farming, will be possible only through diversification of their farming activities

In order to effectively use the farming pathway for poverty alleviation, it is imperative that an enabling environment is created for the rural farmers to improve productivity of their land and diversify their crops. Policies need to be fashioned in a way that the market orientation of the farmers is enhanced through human capital endowments.

Effective policies need to be formulated for improving the quality of land, decreasing land concentration, enhancing technical capacity of the rural people, widening scope and outreach of insurance schemes and facilitating access of small farmers to formal credit. Investment in education and the rural infrastructure — such as roads, markets, electricity and irrigation and others — is a prerequisite for bringing agriculture into the market.

Labour pathway is the second strategy discussed in the World Development Report for making use of agriculture for development. This strategy aimed at poverty alleviation implies that income earning from the non-agriculture sector be increased so that the people who do not own lands are absorbed in non-farm activities to earn their livelihood.

To make this pathway an effective tool for poverty reduction, it is imperative that policies are oriented towards non-farm occupations in the rural area. Enhancing off-farm activities and increasing occupational diversity is the key in this regard.

The phenomenonal success in the telecommunication sector is, however, a big achievement and if supplemented with other essential requirements like easy availability of finance, it can work wonders in rural development by promoting small businesses and non-farm activities. In this regard it is important that non-agriculture activities are given proper attention by the policy makers.

The third pathway for poverty alleviation discussed in the World Development Report 2008 is migration. There are two types of migrations, that is, permanent migration from the rural to the urban areas and migration to other countries of the world and temporary seasonal migration.

Rural to urban migration within a country adds to the problems of a country, so policy makers need to evolve development strategies that minimise the flow of rural people to the urban areas on permanent basis.

To overcome this problem, employment opportunities should be created in the rural areas through the labour pathway.

As regards migration from the native country to the outside world, it is acknowledged that this migration was used as a development strategy in some of the developing countries who encouraged their people to migrate.

In 1970s, a large number of Pakistanis migrated to the Middle East to earn their livelihoods. The remittances sent by these people have played a very vital role in the development of our country.

These remittances also contributed towards poverty reduction in rural areas as migration offers an effective pathway out of poverty for such people as well as their family members who stay back home.

The World Development Report 2008 quotes: “In Pakistan remittances from temporary migrants have a large impact on agricultural land purchases and returning migrants are more likely to set up a non-farm business.”

With the changed global scenario, migration has somehow lost its importance as an effective pathway for Pakistan. Therefore, it is appropriate that farming and labour strategies are given more attention as they are now more relevant in our case.

The World Development Report categorises the countries of the world into agriculture economies, transforming economies and urban economies. Pakistan has been placed into transforming economies by the report.

The report offers ‘differentiated approach’ to transform agriculture into a vehicle of change and development. This approach calls for different policy prescriptions for these three types of economies.

For example, in transforming economies like Pakistan, the most important element, as pointed out in the report, is reduction of rural-urban income disparities and stubbornly high rural poverty. The Report further stresses the need of political and macroeconomic stability in order to enable agriculture to play its effective role in the development.

To top it all, agriculture policies should be comprehensive in nature aimed at achieving such objectives as establishment of efficient markets, accelerating small land holders’ entry into agriculture markets and improving livelihood and food security in subsistence agriculture.

The efforts to improve the lot of the rural poor should aim at generating employment and enhancing the skills of the poor to enable them to seize emerging opportunities for moving out of the poverty trap.


By Jamil Nasir
http://www.dawn.com/2007/12/05/op.htm#4
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Default Eliminating child labour..

Eliminating child labour


THE other day a lady, a very sincere and dedicated social worker, described forced child labour as nothing less than slavery. She apologised for using such an odd expression, but insisted that she was not wrong in her assessment.

The wages may not mean much to these children but the fact that they are subjected to menial work when they see other children going to school and having time to play. This is bound to have a lasting impact on their minds and on their hearts, and is tantamount to slavery in many respects.

There was a time when even the most humane and sympathetic people felt no qualms in employing such kids as domestic servants. Their conscience was comforted by the self-assurance that they were treating these kids as part of their family. But nowadays, with increased awareness of social disapproval of domestic child labour they are becoming averse to the old practice. However, the practice of employing young boys in workshops and roadside eating places on a mere pittance goes on and the employers are too backward to feel bad about it.

As it is, throughout the world hundreds of thousands of children, particularly girls, are exploited when working as house maids. One is pained to see that in Pakistan hardly any politician or social reformer or religious leader feels inclined to campaign against this evil. That is the trouble with politics and social work. Those who choose to undertake this task, of course, for personal publicity do it in areas where the press and the electronic media are more interested. But child labour is a dark area; dark in the sense that the spotlight rarely falls on the volunteers who spend their time and efforts in pursuing it.

The truth is that many of those who are involved in this noble work do not see anything much wrong with little children working like grown-up adults in strange homes. This is despite the fact that now UN agencies like the International Labour Organisation (ILO) are extremely serious about the matter, though this is not an easy challenge for these bodies. Just look at what the ILO wants communities to ensure when they are engaged in campaigns against child labour. It wants these communities to spread awareness and address the root causes of exploitation of little ones, apart from the infinitely more difficult task of protection and withdrawal of children from harmful situations.

The ILO would like governments to develop time-bound measures and set specific goals to achieve results and then expose the affected children to education and skills for self-improvement. It advocates mobilisation of public support for actions to combat exploitation of children in domestic labour, especially its worst forms. And it expects governments to keep children’s rights high on their official agendas.

Which government in the Third World has time and inclination to do all this? However, the ILO has acquired unbounded patience over the long years when it has been pursuing such goals and keeps pestering governments, reminding them again and again, and seeking progress reports where there is hardly any progress. It asks about special measures taken by them and not just a rhetorical response and lip service to an unpleasant and difficult job.

I think it is appropriate to make the readers of this newspaper acquainted with at least the two ILO Conventions that are more intimately concerned with child labour. In their framework the ILO recognises three categories that must be abolished. One, all work done by children under the minimum legal age for that type of work. Two, work that endangers the health, safety and morals of the child. Three, worst forms of child labour defined as slavery, trafficking, bonded labour, forced recruitment into armed conflict, prostitution, pornography and activities such as the sale of drugs. All these are covered by Convention No. 182.

Convention No. 138 sets a minimum age of 15 years for employment, with an allowance of one year (i.e. 14 years) for developing countries. Very few of these countries however include domestic service in national minimum age provisions because of the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of enforcing it in private homes. And studies show that children enter domestic service when they are very young, mostly between 12 and 14. As an immediate step the ILO expects countries to prevent the employment of children under the minimum age and to gradually withdraw those who are under-age. Again, a Herculean task because of the extremely widespread nature of the problem.

Readers must pardon this scribe for being pessimistic about the ability of governments to do anything positive in this respect. I am not cynical by nature, but let us look at a hypothetical situation. Suppose the government actually succeeds in preventing small children from being employed in domestic labour, but can you visualise it withdrawing them from their jobs? Withdraw to where, and what to do with them when they are withdrawn?

So while I am all in favour of the ILO being strict in enforcing these Conventions, I am not optimistic about our government’s ability to expose these children to education and to skills that can enable them to acquire self-respect and self-reliance. That is why I believe that the campaign against child labour in homes should be run by society. In this connection I will like to make a positive suggestion. I know that private social welfare agencies do not have the clout to mobilise people against this evil. So this work must be taken up by various political parties.

If the political parties can have a serious showdown with the government on constitutional matters, why can’t they persuade themselves to be equally serious about helping to eradicate child labour from homes? Or aren’t they interested in the future of these small children who remain devoid of education which we, as Muslims, believe to be a basic right of every man, woman and child? I am sure that with the kind of popularity and influence they have, they can be very helpful in this regard.



By Hafizur Rahman
http://www.dawn.com/2008/01/16/op.htm -->
January 16, 2008 Wednesday
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Default Addiction: Pathology of power

Addiction: Pathology of power


By Dr Amin A. Muhammad Gadit

The term ‘addiction’ is a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in a specific activity, despite harmful consequences to the individual’s health, mental state or social life.

Though this term is reserved most often for drug addictions, it includes other compulsions like gambling, eating, Internet surfing, usage of computers, sex/pornography, work or the lust for power.

Drug addiction has both psychological and physical connotations, but addiction to other types fall into the category of psychological undercurrents. The problem of addiction is not uncommon. Of late, a well-recognised yet uncategorised problem is being highlighted by the media, and that is “power addiction”. This is the type of addiction being observed at managerial positions, in political hierarchies and general positions of power.

A general view point is that this type of addiction reaches pathologic proportions at times; such a feeling is insatiable and leads the patient to go to any extent in order to satisfy his/her cravings. It could be dangerous and destructive in terms of ignorance towards the right of others. Such addicts have been known to secure their hold on power by violating rules, becoming unethical, offering perks, undue favours and bribes, and buying loyalties etc.

In a well known psychological experiment, college students were placed in a simulated prison to play the roles of prisoners and guards. The experiment was conducted to see how the students might behave in those roles and it was intended to continue for two weeks. All too soon, the ‘guards’ became verbally abusive to the ‘prisoners’ and in view of the possible risk of physical harm, the experiment was terminated. This was a good example of the addictive nature of power.

A group of young unemployed men were provided with guns by a political party in one of the developing countries in order to create a powerful impression on the public. Soon these men started looting, plundering, kidnapping for ransom and perpetrated a reign of terror.

The world has witnessed that people in the highest offices never want to abandon their power and do everything, right or wrong, under the sun to perpetuate their rule. There are a number of examples of such dictatorship rules both in the developed and the developing worlds. Some of these people accumulate tremendous wealth and worldly gains but power remains their major aim.

Even in organisations one comes across a hierarchy where the game of power is an obvious feature. Aggression, greed and lust are always found in human nature, but should we call it an addiction? If yes, can we then explain it in terms of the neurochemicals in the brain playing their role? Can this be explained on the basis of a ‘genetic model’ or are there issues found within the personality with a psychological susceptibility?


http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/080203/dmag11.htm
February 03, 2008
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Default Is there feudalism in Pakistan?

Is there feudalism in Pakistan?


By Haider Nizamani


FOR the MQM leader Altaf Hussain and Ayesha Siddiqa, ‘feudalism’ is alive and kicking in Pakistan. According to the MQM’s 2008 election manifesto “the prevalent feudal system of (sic) Pakistan is the main obstacle in the progress of the country and the prosperity of the people”.

The party would abolish ‘feudalism’ to turn Pakistan into an egalitarian society. Ayesha Siddiqa, writing in these pages on Feb 25, 2008, started on a circumspect note by acknowledging that if we use the classical features of feudalism then present-day Pakistani society cannot be called feudal. Then she asked a question and offered a categorical answer too: “But does this … mean that feudalism is no more? The answer is no.”

Why? Because, agricultural land still remains a potent symbol of power in today’s Pakistan. The urban elite’s penchant for farmhouses is mimicking landlords. Furthermore, the occupants of these farmhouses replicate “the decadent lifestyle of the old nawabs and the feudal elite” by holding “huge parties, mujrahs and … flaunting … money”.

Many members in the national and provincial legislatures have landed backgrounds. Rural Pakistan continues to languish under the yoke of ‘feudalism’. Honour killings occur there, hapless peasants are exploited by the mighty landlord. The electronic media has perpetuated this same image for years. In Punjab, it was Chaudhri Hashmat of the drama serial Waris who reigned supreme. Since land is a symbol of power and these are the kind of social practices we won’t associate with modernity, Pakistan is deemed a predominantly feudal society.

My submission is that there is no feudalism in Pakistan today because there was no feudalism even before British colonialism.

Eqbal Ahmed, also in these pages (‘Feudal culture and violence’, Feb 2, 1998) summarised it well: “Feudalism serves as the whipping boy of Pakistan’s intelligentsia. Yet, to my knowledge not one serious study exists on the nature and extent of feudal power in Pakistan, and none to my knowledge on the hegemony which feudal culture enjoys in this country.”

Observing that feudalism as an economic system was not ascendant, he referred to Karl Marx’s point that the cultural vestiges of dying systems continue long after economic collapse. Ahmed was dead right in mentioning ‘mastery over violence’ as one of the defining features of the feudal order. Rather than rigorously testing whether that was the case in Pakistan, Ahmed wandered off into discussion of various forms of violence in Pakistani society.

We, therefore, need to exercise utmost caution in naming a system on the basis of practices that could well be just the remnants of a pre-capitalist system but not necessarily the defining parameter of the existing political economy.

When the British colonised India, they took on many forms of the local aristocracy. That did not make British rule a feudal form of governance. The urbanites’ mimicry of the landed gentry’s power is neither a uniquely Pakistani trait nor a recent phenomenon. The irony of the ascendant moneyed form of power trying to copy the dying agrarian source of power is vividly portrayed in Satyajit Ray’s film Jalsaghar (‘The Music Room’) where a nouveau-riche merchant tries to adopt some aspects of an indebted landlord’s lifestyle.

The Pakistani privileged class trying to recreate the opulence of an aristocratic era is an expression of what Marx put eloquently: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” But taking mujrahs in farmhouses for feudalism in Pakistan is mistaking appearances for substance.

Feudalism, according to Simon Bromley and William Brown, can be defined “politically as a personalised and geographically decentralised system of rule, and economically as the local and coercive extraction of surplus from a dependent peasantry, the two dimensions being fused in the institution of lordship and the feudal-vassal pyramid”. By 1999, 88 per cent of cultivated land in Pakistan was in farm sizes below 12.5 acres. Just over half the total farms in 1999 were less than five acres in size. This would hardly be the hallmark of a feudal society.

More important than haggling over whether contemporary Pakistan is a feudal society or not — because it would hardly qualify as a feudal society if judged by the characteristics of the feudal society provided by leading authorities on the issue — I want to share Harbans Mukhia’s argument that there never was feudalism even in medieval India. If this assertion is taken seriously, then it means that if there was no feudalism in medieval India how could we have it in 21st century Pakistan?

Let me paraphrase Mukhia’s reasons for reaching the above conclusion. Mukhia argues that “in Europe, feudalism arose as a result of a crisis of the production relations based on slavery on the one hand and changes resulting from growing stratification among the Germanic tribes on the other”. In India “owing to the natural richness of the soil and the relatively efficient tools and techniques, agricultural productivity was high, the subsistence level of the peasant was very low — thanks to climatic conditions”. Due to the combination of the above features, the production process in India “did not create an acute scarcity of labour”, therefore “enserfment of the peasant … was hardly necessary”.

This does not mean there was no stratification and exploitation in medieval India, just as there is no denying the stratification in contemporary Pakistan’s countryside. But using feudalism as a blanket term for sundry processes in the agrarian sector and evading “critical considerations such as production processes, social organisation of labour and concrete forms of non-economic coercion” will lead to anecdotal observations or politically expedient statements passing as historical analyses.

Pakistani society is part of the world capitalist system where a major share of agricultural produce is meant for selling in the market. Additionally, there is no causal link between land ownership and political power in today’s Pakistan. The land-owning classes, especially absentee landlords, rank high in the pecking order of rural Pakistan. But that ‘rural gentry’, to use Satish Chandra’s appropriate term for the class of people popularly called ‘feudal’ in Pakistan, is a junior partner in the state where those having mastery over violence have much closer ties with metropolitan power centres like Washington and London.

Exchanges in these pages are valuable but we need to rise up to the challenge Eqbal Ahmed threw at us. Let those among us who are serious about understanding issues concerning the exercise of power in our society undertake rigorous studies on these questions. Reputable historians like Mubarak Ali and other social scientists should be invited to share their insights and arguments on whether there is ‘feudalism’ in Pakistan.

The writer teaches at the School of International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada

hnizamani@hotmail.com

http://www.dawn.com/2008/04/30/op.htm
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Default Feudalism in Pakistan

Just a quick reflection over the thought provoking article by Haider Nizamani,
as he ended his article with an invitation for learnt people to have a debate over this unthought question, whether there is feudalism in pakistan or not?

I would ask a question, if you give the reason for the absence of feudalism in pakistan as "Feudals" are out of power, then think over it, whether the powerfull and elite politicians of our country came out of peasantry or their background was of Feudals. still the supreme authorities of leading political parties have strong landpower on their backs not the intellectual one. we should undertand the other dressings of feudalism.
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