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  #41  
Old Monday, January 24, 2011
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What to say when you can’t?

Adiah Afraz

Let’s not talk about Salmaan Taseer’s murder now. It is simply too dangerous to tread that ground. And since the whole crux of the contention rests on choosing one’s words carefully, a person who writes in English simply cannot run the risk of being misinterpreted or misunderstood.
So let’s talk about the proverbial brighter side instead. Forget the deaths, the killings, the backwardness and the narrow-mindedness, and let’s talk about a progressive country where more than 98 million people use mobile phones. This might be the country with an international repute for being the hotbed of violence, injustice and human rights violations. Yet this is the country whose individual philanthropy and voluntarism rate exceeds that of the US and the whole world put together. The same hotbed of violence and injustice is home to the lawyers’ movement, the biggest non-violent uprising for the restoration of the rule of law. And the same hotbed of human right violations has the most defiant and vibrant media that recursively exercises the biggest of all human rights, the right to speak.
If anything, this is the country of stark contradictions. A country where people might have mobile phones to use, but they spend hours on end without electricity, cook their meals on coal during winters, and schedule their midnights around CNG quests. A country where lawyers might take to the streets for the sake of justice, but the same lawyers, in huge numbers, would openly support blatant forms of vigilante justice. A country that might break records of philanthropy, but would also break its own record of suffering five hundred bomb blasts a year. A country whose media reporting might be the most defiant and the most vibrant, but its reporting environment would be the most insecure and the most turbulent.
An ordinary Pakistani is not surprised at the contradictions any more. Load- shedding is an old story and CNG shortage is becoming a habit now. As for endorsing vigilante justice, our tragedy is that we all believe that institutional justice is out of our reach. So convinced are we that justice is not for ordinary people that the idea of vigilante justice seems perfectly acceptable. Anyone who has seen the Sultan Rahi films of the ‘80s and still follows their modified versions with gun-toting adolescents out on the streets to avenge some wrong or to restore some familial honour, can understand how the acceptance of vigilante justice is our cultural reality. This is the country of honourable people, and for honour they can kill.
And yet we cannot talk about these killings or the killers. It is too dangerous to do that, especially for the media persons. In fact, for Pakistani journalists bad working conditions do not mean load-shedding or CNG shortage. Bad working conditions for them mean harassment by the agencies, intimidation by influential individuals, real threats to their lives, and a general sense of insecurity that prevails throughout their careers.
The end of last year saw the incident of members of the Lahore Press Club’s governing body being beaten up at the hand of the land mafia. A few months before that, a senior investigative journalist, Umer Cheema, was kidnapped and tortured by unknown assailants. He was stripped, tortured and humiliated, was hung upside down and his head was shaved. Later he was left on a roadside to fend for himself.
In the past one decade or so, the fear of death is not just a fear anymore. It has become a dangerous reality as well. It is being reported that more than twenty Pakistani journalists have died under mysterious circumstances in the past few years. These include those five journalists who lost their lives in the tribal areas from 2000 to 2006.
The mysterious circumstances surrounding all of these deaths have ranged from being shot point-blank in broad daylight to being abducted and killed in remote areas. In most cases the killers are not even identified, let alone caught and brought to justice.
Those whose deaths can actually be connected to the kind of reporting they did include Jang correspondent Zubair Ahmad Mujahid, columnist Dr Chishti Mujahid, Geo TV reporter Musa Khankhel, Express TV reporter Mohammad Ibrahim, and, most recently, the young Geo reporter Wali Khan Babar.
Wali Khan Babar, 29, was shot dead by unidentified killers. He has been described by his colleagues as inquisitive and dedicated; a reporter who always looked for an angle in his stories. A young reporter just trying to do his job.
Imran Khan said in one of his interviews to CNN that a sense of insecurity has seeped into the general public. The reason for this is that if the government cannot provide security to its provincial governor, it is assumed that it cannot provide security to the ordinary man.
The question is: what is the implication of this sense of insecurity for the journalists? It is assumed that journalists make the biggest enemies in the government. So if the government cannot protect its own governor despite a 24-hour security cover, what can an unarmed ordinary journalist, without any security cover, expect from the government or the law-enforcing agencies?
Omer Cheema’s abductors still return from time to time, despite the extensive media coverage his ordeal had received, and despite the assurances by government officials on adequate security to him. It is difficult to imagine how a person continues to work when faced with a life-threatening situation?
So the crux of the contention is to be careful about what to say. But the question is how can a person be careful about what to say, especially when it is his job to say without fear, and say it out loud?
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  #42  
Old Monday, January 24, 2011
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Capital suggestion

Dr Farrukh Saleem

Justification of a modern government rests on three pillars: security, economic development and dispute resolution. Some ten thousand years ago, hunter-gatherers, small and mobile communities, didn’t need a government. Then came the first Agricultural Revolution whereby hunter-gatherers began settling down. Settled communities gave rise to roving bandits; ‘uncoordinated, competitive theft’ whereby individual action was constrained by two things: outside resistance and individual conscience.
Some five thousand years ago, two types of state structures began to rise: predatory and contractual states. In the predatory state structure, a single bandit eliminated competition, monopolised theft and transformed into a ‘stationary bandit’ (read: dictator). Within the predatory state there were four major developments. One, rewards of political power were extremely high. Two, there was an underinvestment in human capital as well as infrastructure. Three, public policy was to benefit the ‘stationary bandit’. Four, taxation was merely legitimisation of theft.
At the other end of the spectrum, rose a contractual state; citizen-voters electing from within themselves leaders, whereby there were two parties to a contract referred to as the ‘social contract’. The social contract determined three things. One, who will have to pay taxes. Two, how much will they pay. Three, most importantly, how will those taxes be spent.
Under the predatory state paradigm, there are four visible phenomena. One, human life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Two, citizens live in fear of each other. Three, individuals are free to “harm all who threaten their own self-preservation”. Four, there is an “endless war of all against all (Thomas Hobbes).”
In a contractual state, there are at least three visible phenomena. One, the ‘general will’ “decides what is good for society as a whole.” Two, a “neutral judge protects the lives, liberty and property of those who live within it (John Locke).” Three, individuals, “including the administrative head of state, who could be a monarch, must bow to the general will, or be forced to bow to it (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).”
Is Pakistan closer to a predatory or a contractual state? Here’s what is most visible in Pakistan. One, three out of four Pakistanis make Rs170 per day or less, plus life is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. Two, citizens live in fear of each other. Three, individuals are free to “harm all who threaten their own self-preservation.” Four, there exists a ‘general will’ in the form of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Five, there exists a class, “including the administrative head of state” that does not bow to the ‘general will’.
In Pakistan, we agree to vote for our leaders in exchange for promises of ‘security, economic development and dispute resolution’. John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher, stands for the “right of rebellion in case of the contract leading to tyranny.” Philip Pettit, the Irish political theorist, says that “the absence of an effective rebellion against the contract is the only legitimacy of it.”
A government of men or a government of laws? As far as we Pakistanis can remember ‘fire, water and government know nothing of mercy’.
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  #43  
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Over the top

Masood Hasan


Only a handful of people listen to jazz and even less actually savour it. Most have no clue what this music is and can wander through life without ever having been burdened with even a note or appreciating this unique music art form, born out of slavery that came from the world’s greatest continent, Africa to America. Here it was nurtured, developed and refined through many years by men and women who took this tribal means of communication and fashioned it with Europe’s classical heritage, Africa and Latin America’s exotic and heady rhythms and other flavours from all over the world.
The great thing about jazz then and jazz now is the music’s ability to embrace and absorb so many different streams to form this great river of human expression and emotion. Jazz has no screaming, hair-tearing mob following. It never did, it never will. But in spite of everything dismissive said about it, jazz has endured and in the process become richer.
So why talk about it when the dead are barely buried here in Pakistan and an entire nation, already at the crossroads of despair, stands at yet another crossroads of gloom and uncertainty? Why, indeed, when, wherever you go, whoever you talk to speaks in circles. And no one is able to point out a single direction that can lead us away from these forests, on fires stoked by hatred, intolerance, anger, fear, hypocrisy and twisted theories. A nation which was has never been clear where it came from or why and, worse, where it is headed, has been lashed and mutilated so much that the ensuing portrait evokes the famous line of Apocalypse Now, when Col Kurtz looks around the chaos and says, “The horror, the horror of it all.”
Those of us who were sometimes able to get out of Pakistan would be accosted by people from other countries and cultures who would look at us and say, “Aren’t you the people who hanged your prime minister?” and we didn’t know where to look. Mercifully, most didn’t know that we had also assassinated another prime minister at a public meeting, the killer conveniently killed post haste and the mystery never resolved. We were the same people who had their president, despicable angel of death as he was, blown into smithereens on a hot and humid August afternoon in Bahalwapur. And then, in 2007, we killed the charismatic daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, assassinated at the same garden where a prime minister had been shot 56 years before.
As is the hallowed tradition, nothing is known about who planned or executed this or the many other crimes. In between, this nation lost half the country, some heaving a sigh of great relief, others cheering and celebrating. The 90,000 prisoners of war who had been fighting their own people went were brought back, thanks to Bhutto’s skilful negotiations from a very weak position, and repaid the country with more martial laws and more misery. Now we have murdered our governor, with a large section of this confounded nation rejoicing as if we have found heaven on earth.
In between, before and after, the killings continue, the culprits never arrested or, God forbid, brought to justice. The blood of Pakistanis flows on and on and people sit in drawing rooms and theorise – those who have drawing rooms, that is. For most, there is nothing after six decades of “freedom.” Buffeted by prices of daily living now far beyond their measly income, denied power, gas, water, sanitation, rule of law, respect, dignity, fair play and abandoned repeatedly by a people’s rule that has neither people or rules, this is a country with a morbid death wish.
It also makes Pakistan one of the planet’s most corrupt nations, and yet, every day the media has nothing to report but more graft, more money illicitly changing hands and a yawning chasm between who we profess to be and who we actually are. In all this, the armed forces look on with many saying the time is right for yet another takeover. This surely is the winter of our discontent without the glorious promised summer.
So why jazz? Because in the dying moments of 2010, Dr Billy Taylor, the great American jazz pianist, died in New York. So who is Dr Taylor and why must one lament his passing? Many years ago, when Stan Getz, the legendary saxophone player, died at a time when even in ill health he was playing ever so beautifully, I wrote about it. An irate reader – the rumours are true: there are some who actually read this column – wrote to the newspaper and took me apart for writing something which had absolutely no relevance to our lives and about a music that made no difference to us. I find Dr Taylor’s life very relevant because it demonstrates a sustained commitment to a belief and the pursuit of something magical, music in this case, that all of us abandon so quickly and so readily. This is why none of us who have the opportunity are ready to take 30 minutes out of our trivial lives to spend listening to music or reading a book.
All we do is talk. Purposelessly, each theory more amazing and outlandish than the other and almost all of it, banal and forgettable. It is hard not to throw up each time one is served another exotic cocktail of a “grand” plan to dismember Pakistan, with the hands pointing at the Americans, the Chinese, the Jews or the Indians. A country so misguided as ours needs no enemies to push it over the brink. We should at least know that.
Dr Taylor wrote and played melodies that inspired the soul for 50-60 years from his beloved Steinway piano. “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life,” another great jazz master had said, and Dr Taylor believed it. I had the great privilege and honour to have met Dr Taylor when he toured Pakistan in the ‘80s and we maintained a friendship. Years later, when I chanced to be in NY, I hesitatingly called him and he was, as always, gracious and charming. Since I was in New York for just a few days, he cancelled previous appointments and insisted that I dine with him and his wife. Over my protests, he personally collected me and took me home to Riverside Drive, and there we had a memorable evening of jazz and a happy dinner. I recall the awe entering his home and seeing thousands of records and tapes, all catalogued, and being asked what I would like to hear! I said, “Dr Taylor,” and his eyes twinkled. “Really?” he asked, and then played divinely for an hour to an audience of one!
Each one of us has to find our solution to the madness that encompasses us. I and many like me are but flawed guides, but Pakistanis do need to look inside their souls and find what they can still save and nurture. Without this we are all nothing but a faded page of contemporary history that will age rather badly.
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  #44  
Old Thursday, March 03, 2011
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Unfit for public consumption?

Hajra Mumtaz ·

Our legislators are up in arms against television channels again. On Thursday, treasury and opposition MNAs found themselves in rare accord in parliament when they spoke angrily against private television channels.

They were upset because of the broadcast of material in dramas and advertisement that they felt was objectionable. The Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, Samsam Bukhari, thundered that “language, subjects, obscenity and the vulgar scenes are all objectionable in most of the dramas and in advertisements of the cellular companies. What kind of message are they sending to the children as they give them temptation to talk all through the night offering certain packages.”
Other legislators nodded in agreement as he further pointed out the presence of what he referred to as ‘vulgar’ talk shows where parliament was disgraced and disrespect was shown towards parliamentarians.
One may sympathise with Mr Bukhari’s concerns, but little can be said about the matter other than the fact that free speech is not always sensible or intelligent speech. Much can and has been said about the problems of quality and content in Pakistani talk shows. That is up to the channels. But what parliamentarians can do about the problem is make sure they do little to draw the ire of hosts. That includes appearing to care about the disaster that Pakistan has become.
The concern about obscenity is more interesting. It is no new issue, and television is not the only medium to have been targeted. In the past, voices from parliament to the judiciary have been raised on the subject, and in Lahore the matter once went to the extent of dance being banned from the theatre stage.
The point, as always, remains that one man’s obscenity is another’s art — or in the case of advertisements, money. And while the influences on children, in whose hands the country will soon be, are an important matter, would they not be more badly affected by the other matters that have become everyday, such as terror attacks, public lynchings and the violence and frustration that have become the hallmarks of Pakistani society? I may not love much of what passes as entertainment in our local programming, but I certainly can’t blame them for trying to depict a world where free of care people flirt and talk to each other all night.
This issue ought to die already. The greater obscenity is the state of the country and we, the public, would be far more grateful if those who run the country turned their full attention to fixing that situation. Really, it’s having a very negative impact on the sensibilities of younger generations.
But the calls for bans are not without precedent, and neither are they exclusive to Pakistan. Neither is their ridiculousness. Earlier this month, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruled that Dire Straits’ classic song ‘Money for Nothing’ be banned from the Canadian airwaves because it contained a word that was offensive to members of the gay community. The move came as a result of a complaint filed by a listener.
Many Canadians are not happy, and hundreds of letters of complaint against the ban have been filed. The song is, after all, one of established staples of rock. It was written and recorded a quarter of a century ago, and was a product of that time and that world.
Reality is a dirty place, and so is history. In my view, the effort to sanitise cultural fare to bring it in line with current sensibilities is not only an endless exercise but also a foolish one. There is no possibility of an entirely sanitised world. And, not only does such an exercise lead to unnecessary restrictions and a decreased number of choices for consumers, it also belittles their intelligence and ridicules their capacity for tolerance. Surely someone who finds a song or a book or whatever offensive can choose not to take an interest in it.
But that, it seems, is a wisdom that has not been learned. Take the example of Enid Blyton’s books, which also faced similar calls for sanitation. The golliwogs in them are, of course, racist. But unrestrained racism was a reality of the world when these books were written, and censoring them will not change that. True, new such material ought not be produced now, and in many places across the world there are laws to ensure this. But Blyton’s books are a product of their own times and ought to be left as such.
Similarly, as an example that such sanitisation is a path without an end, Blyton’s books can also be considered sexist. Remember how, almost across the board, the message they sent out was that girls were the carers and had to be looked after, while boys did things and made decisions? George of the Famous Five was interesting precisely because the character was conceived of and presented as such a curiosity. Will we one day hear calls to fix this aspect of the books too? And what will happen to The Taming of the Shrew, a misogynist piece of work if there ever was one?
The world is full of things that any community may potentially find offensive, once you start looking. In 2008, the UK government agency’s award panel turned down a digital version of the classic story of the three little pigs, warning that “the use of pigs raises cultural issues”. As the book’s creative director said at the time, rather than preventing the spread of racism, such an attitude was likely to inflame ill-feeling. “Does this mean that secondary schools cannot teach Animal Farm because it features pigs?” she asked.
But, given the world we live in, that is not outside the realm of imagination.
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  #45  
Old Thursday, March 03, 2011
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Cutting off the nose…

Kamran Shafi ·

BEING the rather unique people we are, as demonstrated by yours truly many a time in this space, we are proceeding to do just that: cutting off the (our) nose to spite the (our) face in the matter of Raymond Davis David.


He is alleged to be, variously, a spy, a Blackwater operative, a security guard and a US diplomat. There are as many stories about the man in our press as there are reporters in the newspapers, not one of them leading the reader to any conclusion. Ghairat Brigades
In just one day we are regaled by differing accounts in different newspapers: one saying David had overstayed his visa by two years, another telling us his visa was valid until 2012; one saying he was not a diplomat, yet another telling us that he was an `official`, and so on and so forth. I have been following this case since the day of the shooting, have read every word written about it, and have to say that I am most confused. Nothing makes sense at all — a lot of which has to do with the conspiracy theorists and the and their spin quacks putting a spin on any aspect they can get their hands on. Motor cycle sawaron nein nikaley aur goray ko lootnain ki koshish ki jiss peh goray nein unnko goliaan marein gora
What I myself saw on the very day of the shooting, about two hours after the event, was the interview of a young man off the street, conducted by a loud and vociferous channel. When asked what he had seen the man said: “pistol” (“The two motorcyclists drew their pistols to rob the foreigner [using the near-pejorative term , or Whitey] who shot them dead”). This was repeated twice in a period of 30 or so minutes and then taken off air. This is what I saw and heard myself. It is pertinent to note that that young man has not been seen, nor heard from, again. Neither has any newspaper quoted what he said on record.
Far more than this, there are stories in the press that the police is hesitant to register cases of mobile phone and wallet snatching against the two, crimes that two people allege they committed a few hours before their encounter with David, for fear of a `backlash`. Ghairat Brigades
Is this in itself a case of the dishonestly trying to turn the situation into an ugly one for the government, and for generally queering the pitch even further for American-Pakistani official relations? Is this yet another conspiracy to throw yet another spanner in the works with regards to the war on terror? None of which, of course, is to say that the Americans have done what they should have done in the very first instance: give a clear statement on just who the man was, what the circumstances of the shooting were, and then stick to it.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, their holinesses are upping the ante on the alleged move to amend the anti-blasphemy laws despite the fact that the terrorised and scared government has foresworn any such intention. Indeed, their holinesses should take heart from the craven way in which the Senate chairman refused to allow Senator Nilofer Bakhtiar`s motion condemning the brutal murder of governor Salman Taseer, and from MQM Senator Abdul Khaliq Peerzada`s refusal to lead the Fateha. If the so-called secular parties refuse to even offer Fateha for the departed soul of a man who was (totally falsely) purported to be a blasphemer himself, what chances are there for the blasphemy law being changed/altered? This is politics, pure and simple, the protest meeting addressed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Munawwar Hassan, Maulana Samiul Haq, Qazi Hussain Ahmed and other worthies in Lahore on Sunday using both the Tahaffuze Namoos-i-Risalat campaign and the David affair to inflame the passions of the people. It is another matter, of course, that one of the WikiLeaks cables told us in clear words that Maulana Fazlur Rehman actually put himself up to the American ambassador as a possible Pakistani prime ministerial candidate. Ghairat Brigades
But going back to the David affair, it is astonishing to note that the so-called anti-America are using the most ludicrous examples to try and prove how the Americans have been unfair to Pakistan and other countries when it comes to observing the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The two examples it gives most recently (Sunday, Jan 30) through stories in the press is of my friend Munir (Dopey) Akram allegedly assaulting his live-in girlfriend when he was our ambassador to the United Nations, and of a North Korean diplomat who was hauled up when he groped a woman in a public park. They actually refer to the second incident as `a minor case of very little significance`.
The fact of the matter is that if Munir Akram was not Pakistan`s ambassador to the UN and supported to the hilt by the government of Pakistan and by the extreme right media in this country, he would have faced a jail term, as would have the North Korean. These are not `minor cases of little significance` at all and sections of our mainstream press referring to them as such only goes to prove what misogynists they are. They should be grateful that the Americans helped us out of a very sticky situation.
In the instant case the law must take its course, David neither being treated harshly because he is an `ugly American`, nor being treated with deference just because he belongs to the country that keeps us in bread and tanks and F-16s. Let the whole, unvarnished truth come out and let it be released in the public domain.
Which reminds me: let those who are demanding that David be torn limb from limb for committing murder, also demand that Salman Taseer`s killer be tried in a court of law for his horrible crime. Let them demand too that future suicide bombers and their facilitators be exposed and hauled up to face the full force of the law. There is much that is wrong with our country which we can fix if we want to; merely latching on to events to divert the people`s attention simply will not do.
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A bad nuclear choice in India

Praful Bidwai ·


Imagine a beautiful ecosystem with virgin rainforests, great mountains, and immense biodiversity, in which two great rivers originate. Add to this a flourishing farming, fisheries and horticultural economy which grows the world-famous Alphonso mango. And you have the Jaitapur-Madban region in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district in the Western Ghats, termed by the Biological Survey of India as the country’s richest area for endemic plants.
Now, suppose a monstrous force wanted to destroy this ecosystem. What better way than nuking it? That’s precisely what Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd and the government are doing, by erecting six giant (1,650 MW) reactors designed by the French firm Areva.
Jaitapur will become the world’s largest nuclear station, generating 9,900 MW, or more than double India’s current nuclear capacity. It will also wreck thousands of livelihoods and generate electricity that’s three to five times costlier than power from other sources, thus replicating the economic disaster called Enron, but on a much larger scale. Ironically, the Enron plant is also located in Ratnagiri.
However, Jaitapur will be a nuclear Enron – capable, like all commercial atomic reactors, of undergoing a catastrophic accident similar to Chernobyl in 1986. Chernobyl, the world’s worst industrial accident, has killed an estimated 65,000 to 110,000 people from radiation-induced cancers and other effects.
Such fears are not alarmist. Scientists and engineers who have designed, operated or licensed nuclear reactors warn that they are all susceptible to an accident in which the fission chain reaction goes out of control, leading to a loss of coolant (usually water, which must rapidly remove heat from the reactor), and the melting of the core. The likelihood of a core meltdown is low, but its consequences are wholly unacceptable.
The Jaitapur project’s risk could be further aggravated because it’s in a seismically active zone and based on an untested reactor design. Areva’s European Pressurised Reactor hasn’t been cleared by any nuclear regulatory authority. Yet, India wants to install six EPRs – although the Department of Atomic Energy or NPCIL lacks the competence to evaluate their safety.
The government started acquiring 968 hectares (2,420 acres) for the Jaitapur project four years before an agreement with France was signed, an Environmental Impact Assessment report prepared, and clearance granted. It has treated the project’s critics as anti-science, anti-development Luddites who suffer from “misconceptions”.
Under India’s environmental law, all villagers must be given the EIA report in the local language one month in advance of the mandatory public hearing. In Jaitapur, only one of the five villages got it – four days before a farcical hearing last May.
Worse, as I noted during a recent visit to Jaitapur, the state has unleashed savage repression on the protesting people. It routinely arrests and serves externment notices to peaceful protesters, and promulgates prohibitory orders under which eminent citizens like former Navy chief Ramdas and a former supreme court judge are barred from entering Jaitapur.
An instance is a frail 70-year-old diabetic, falsely charged with pelting stones at the police – when he couldn’t have lifted a pebble. He was detained for 15 days. A former Bombay High Court judge was detained for five days and not even produced before a magistrate within 24 hours.
Others have had false charges framed against them, including attempt to murder. The higher judiciary has refused them anticipatory bail. This unprecedented repression resembles the police raj in Maharashtra’s Naxalite-affected areas.
The government is turning lower Konkan into a unique collection of polluting mining, pesticides production, steelmaking and power projects. Its power need is just 180 MW, but it’s being made to produce over 4,500 MW, and eventually 20,000-plus MW.
In what has become a massive assault on democracy, the government treats the local people like sub-human animals who can be lied to, ignored, or beaten at will. The people oppose the project because it will destroy their livelihoods, just as the Tarapur reactors nearby have done.
The Jaitapur population knows of the hazards of radiation and the DAE’s poor safety performance, including the exposure of hundreds in Tarapur to radiation exceeding the permissible limits, genetic deformities from uranium mining in Jaduguda, and high incidence of cancers near reactors in different locations.
The villagers, faced with repression, have launched a non-cooperation and civil disobedience movement. Over 95 per cent of the people have refused the INR10 lakhs-an-acre compensation for land; most of those who accepted it are absentee landowners living in Mumbai.
They refuse to sell food and other goods to state functionaries. When the government recently ordered teachers to brainwash pupils into believing that nuclear power is clean and green, people withdrew their children from school for a few days. Ten villages wouldn’t hoist the tricolour on Republic Day.
The government will be tempted to use diabolical divide-and-rule tactics in Jaitapur, including fomenting tensions between Muslims (30 per cent of the population) and Hindus; violence by agents provocateurs; and branding of all dissidents as Maoists/Naxalites – the latest lie being used to suppress popular movements. These methods must be exposed and resisted.
The Jaitapur public has much to fear from EPRs. Western Europe’s first reactor after Chernobyl, an EPR, is under construction in Finland. It has been delayed by four years and is 90 per cent over budget.
Finnish, French, British and US nuclear regulators have raised 3,000 safety issues about its design, including the adequacy of the reactor’s control and emergency-cooling systems. Given its size, the EPR will generate seven times more toxic iodine-129 than normal reactors, posing many problems.
Any design changes will add to the EPR’s capital costs, already Indian rupee 21 crores per MW, compared to INR9 crores for Indian reactors and INR5 crores for coal-fired power. Even on current estimates, Jaitapur’s unit power cost will be INR 5-8 – compared to INR 2-3 from other sources, including renewables.
However, the EPR’s greatest problem is safety. Nuclear power generation routinely exposes occupational workers and the public to radiation and harmful isotopes for whose effects, including cancer and genetic damage, there’s no remedy. Radiation is unsafe in all doses. All reactors leave behind high-level wastes which remain hazardous for centuries. Plutonium-239’s half-life is 24,400 years and uranium-235’s is 710 million years. Science hasn’t found a way of safely storing, leave alone neutralising, radioactive waste. When a reactor exhausts its economic life of 25 to 40 years, it must be “decommissioned”, entombed at a cost that’s one-third to one-half of the construction cost.
All these hazards are unacceptable. The Jaitapur reactors pose an additional one: the high temperature of the coolant water discharged into the sea. This will be 5°C hotter and destroy mangroves, corals and numerous marine species, reducing oxygen availability precipitously.
The EIA conducted by the ill-reputed National Environmental Engineering Research Institute hasn’t analysed these effects, or the ecosystem’s carrying capacity. And it doesn’t even mention high-level wastes! Yet, the MoEF cleared the project for political reasons only days before French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s India visit last December. Jaitapur must be scrapped.
Globally, nuclear power has exhausted its technological potential. It has a bleak future. The Pakistani people would do well to bear this in mind as plans are afoot to erect Chinese-made reactors there. We must all stop chasing the nuclear power mirage.
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Scaring FDI away


Dr Ashfaque H Khan,

January saw the government taking two economic decisions which are tantamount to systematic destruction of the economy – investors’ confidence in particular. And it is the economic team led by the finance minister which administered the last rites to foreign direct investment (FDI) in Pakistan.
The first decision was the government’s forced reversal of the KESC management’s retrenchment of its 4,460 non-core workforce (drivers, security guards, sanitary workers, bill distributors and office attendants). This was nothing but brute interference by the government in the affairs of a private company. The second ill-judged decision was permission for the import of five-year-old cars. This is equivalent to destroying the auto-industry.
These decisions will have far-reaching impacts specifically on the investment climate. It goes without saying that FDI, being the single largest source of private capital flows, has contributed immensely to investment and growth in developing countries. It has also become a vehicle for transfer of technology, skills, and organisational and managerial practices to recipient countries.
Given the effective role that FDI can play in the acceleration of economic growth, developing countries have been making efforts to improve their policy environment to attract it. Countries lagging behind in attracting FDI are ones that faced macroeconomic instability, pursued inconsistent policies coupled with relatively poor physical and human infrastructures, and showed indifferent and unsympathetic attitude towards foreign investors.
The fundamental requirement that governs FDI in developing countries revolves around ten main factors. These are political stability, good law and order situation, economic strength, government economic policies, government bureaucracy, local business environment, infrastructure, quality of labour force, quality of life, and a welcoming attitude. These can, in turn, be classified into four C’s: cost, convenience, capability and concessions.
Pakistan made considerable efforts in improving the investment climate by improving upon the ten factors. Constant interaction with local and foreign investors and resolving their issues on priority basis used to be the hallmark of government policy. Such efforts bore fruit in the form of foreign investment surging from $543 million in 1999-2000 (or 0.8 per cent of GDP) to $8.423 billion in 2006-07 (or 5.9 per cent of GDP) – a more than 15-fold increase in just seven years.
The investment climate has deteriorated rapidly during the last three years, and the two new decisions are likely to prove to be the last nail in the coffin of foreign investment in Pakistan. Foreign investment has declined from its peak at $8.423 billion in 2006-07 to $2.086 billion in 2009-10 – a decline of $6.337 billion. During the first half of the current fiscal years, foreign investment stood at only at $1.051 billion.
The interference of the government in KESC affairs was completely unjustified. The KESC is a private company meant to provide electricity to the people of Karachi. It is not an employment bureau meant to provide unnecessary jobs. A Dubai-based private equity firm, Abraaj Capital, has 50 per cent shares, with management control. They posted a loss of Rs14.64 billion last year and the management is making efforts to turn the KESC into a profitable company. They have every right to run the company the way they want, in order to make it profitable. They offered a Voluntary Separation Scheme to 4,460 non-core employees, with amounts ranging from Rs700,000 to Rs4.5 million. The government not only failed to protect the lives and properties of the foreign investors but also prevented them from determining the size and skill of their workforce.
As far as allowing imports of five-year-old cars, the government has damaged not only the automobile sector but also the auto parts industries in Pakistan. The auto industries have invested heavily and expanded their production capacities. Against their capacity of 275,000 cars per year, they were expected to produce 160,000. In other words, these industries are operating at 58 per cent capacity. Allowing import of five-year-old cars would further reduce their capacity utilisation, thus raising the fixed cost per unit produced. The auto industry value chain has created over a million jobs and contributed billions of rupees in taxes. The government’s argument is that car prices are higher in Pakistan.
Has anybody taken into account Shaukat Tareen’s depreciation of the rupee? The Pakistani rupee depreciated by 30 per cent against the US dollar, which has itself depreciated against the Japanese yen by 22 per cent. The multi-currency depreciation, along with the rise in input prices in the range of 26 to 82 per cent, are responsible for the rise in car prices.
By taking these two decisions, the government will discourage foreign investment at a time when the country needed more non-debt-creating inflows. Do we still need the ministry of privatisation and the Board of Investment? Would they still be able to claim that Pakistan is a “heaven for foreign investors”? We invite foreigners to invest in Pakistan but at the same time we determine their profit margins and control their HR operations. Why should anyone come to Pakistan? There are countries which offer better investment climates with more welcoming attitudes.
The government has caused serious damage to the investment climate. It is nothing short of systematic destruction of the economy of Pakistan. The economic team, led by the finance minister, has become party to this destruction. Welcome to investment-friendly Pakistan which offers little protection to the lives and properties of foreign investors – at least under this democratic dispensation.
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Reluctant regret—in ten words

Rahimullah Yusufzai ·

From the moment Raymond Davis, or whatever his real name, shot two young Pakistanis dead near the busy Mozang Chungi on Lahore’s Jail Road and contributed to the death of a third one in an avoidable traffic accident, the US government started making efforts to claim diplomatic immunity for the killer who confessed to the crime, taking the plea of self-defence.
In fact, every effort is being made to influence the police investigations and stall the judicial process. One evidence of this is the refusal of US diplomats to hand over the second vehicle and the driver and persons riding it when it crushed to death 25-year-old Obaidur Rahman, the trader from Shah Alam Market who had no role in the incident involving Davis and the two presumed “robbers.”
The US government is trying to bully Pakistani authorities to release Davis by accusing the police of unlawfully detaining him in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Thereby, it also wants to avoid handing over the Americans and possibly their Pakistani employees to the police for investigation into the death of Obaidur Rahman due to rash driving. And all this is being done in the name of diplomatic immunity, which has been described by sections of the Pakistani media as license to kill.
The long, seven-paragraph statement issued by the US embassy on the Jan 27 incident carried only 10 words regretting the loss of life. “We regret that this incident resulted in loss of life,” is all that the embassy would say about the death of Obaidur Rahman, an innocent man riding his motorcycle when the fleeing US consulate vehicle, which was in violation of the one-way traffic rule, hit and killed him. It is this kind of insensitivity that further inflames the anti-US sentiment in Pakistan.
The vague statement apparently wasn’t meant to refer to the deaths of the other two men, 23-year old Faizan Haider, and Mohammad Faheem, 21, because it clearly mentioned that they “had criminal backgrounds and had minutes earlier robbed money and valuables at gunpoint from a Pakistani citizen in the same area.”
Having presumed that these “two armed men on motorcycles” were criminals, and that “diplomat” Davis acted in self-defence because “he had every reason to believe that they meant him bodily harm,” the US embassy is convinced that the killer can neither be arrested by Pakistani police nor tried in a local court due to diplomatic immunity. The police, on the other hand, has yet to conclude that Faizan Haider and Faheem had a criminal record, though initially a few senior cops had hinted that the deceased were “robbers.” According to his family, Faizan Haider was carrying a pistol for self-defence – just like Davis – due to a blood feud in which his brother had been killed a few weeks ago.
It is now for the police to investigate and decide if Faizan Haider and Faheem were robbers trying to rob Davis in a busy place in broad daylight. And it is for the courts to conclude that Davis indeed was a diplomat deserving immunity, in a case in which he fired with his Beretta pistol to kill two Pakistanis and then tried to escape with the help of other American “diplomats” seated in another vehicle that overran and killed an innocent man.
In fact, it is a straightforward case that professional police investigators would be able to sort out fairly quickly, if they were allowed to work independently. The judicial process too could proceed smoothly if there was no political pressure. If the past is any guide, this is unlikely to happen. Politics and diplomacy have already come into play in the case and the mighty United States would likely exert enough pressure on the spineless Pakistani rulers to do the needful.
If the Americans have their way and Davis is declared a diplomat enjoying immunity, then he would have to be returned to the US to face the judicial process at home. The way the US embassy is trying to protect him from Pakistan’s law, it would be hard to convince the families of the deceased men and the Pakistani people that justice would be done in case he goes on trial in the US.
There have been cases in which Americans committing crimes abroad against non-Americans, including the ones in which US soldiers murdered innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan, have got away with light sentences. Already, many emotional Pakistanis are comparing Davis’ case with that of Dr Aafia Siddiqui – the frail woman of Pakistani origin sentenced to 86 years’ imprisonment for firing at and causing injuries to an American soldier in Afghanistan while she was in custody – and demanding that Davis should be publicly hanged. Others want Dr Aafia swapped with Davis, even though it is a bizarre idea because the two persons and their cases are so dissimilar. The US would probably be able to save Davis, but the cost in terms of losing whatever goodwill it has in Pakistan would be unusually high.
Many aspects of the incident are unclear. Even Davis’ real name is unknown because, during a briefing in Washington, State Department spokesman P J Crowley said the man’s name has been misreported. He refused to disclose his real identity, or the kind of work he was assigned to do in Pakistan. He also didn’t explain as to why the accused was carrying a firearm, which was obviously an unlawful act. The movements of the 40-year-old Davis were also mysterious as the Lahore police wasn’t informed about them. All this gave rise to suspicion that the Americans were trying to hide something to conceal Davis’ identity and his activities.
The US embassy insisted that Davis had a diplomatic passport and Pakistani visa valid until June 2012. The Pakistani authorities have contested the US claim that Davis was a diplomat, though they agree that he was a technical adviser working at the US consulate in Lahore. ABC News, a leading US media network, had earlier unearthed Davis’ identity, reporting that he was an employee of Hyperion Protective Consultants, a Florida-based private security company.
The way Davis fired 13 bullets with his pistol, shooting through the rear screen of his car, giving no chance to Faizan Haider and Faheem to fire back, showed that he was no ordinary diplomat. He was, more probably, a sharpshooter, who calmly made video clips of the two dead or dying men before trying to speed away. Was he, then, an undercover agent on special assignment, as many Pakistanis and sections of the media have been alleging?
All three Pakistanis killed by the Americans in Lahore that day were on motorcycles. “Robbers” riding motorbikes cannot have much of a chance chasing and overpowering a trained, fully armed undercover foreign agent seated securely inside a car.
On Feb 3 last year, the veil on the presence of US military personnel in Pakistan was partially lifted when three American soldiers were killed and two others were injured in a suicide bombing carried out by the Pakistani Taliban in Lower Dir district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The blast also killed five Pakistanis, including Frontier Corps militiamen escorting the Americans, and injured 131, mostly schoolgirls from a nearby school. Every effort was made to disguise the Americans, who were dressed in shalwar-kameez and wearing local caps, as they were being driven to inspect a school destroyed by the militants and rebuilt with US money.
That was the first time that Pakistanis came to know that members of the US Special Forces, at least 200 of them, were secretly operating in their country, ostensibly providing counterinsurgency training to the paramilitary Frontier Corps. The Pakistani government and military had hidden this information from their people. Who knows how many others like Davis are in Pakistan on secret missions, with or without the agreement of the Pakistani authorities.
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Military’s role


Ahmed Quraishi,

Scenes of ordinary people embracing soldiers and taking out their wrath on everything representing failed politicians happened for the second time in a few weeks. An uprising led by middle and lower-middle class citizens welcomed the Egyptian military’s deployment on the streets. Rioters obeyed orders given out by military officers. In sharp contrast, the same rioters pounded every symbol of the politicians, beginning with the police and its intelligence apparatus that protected an incompetent political system. Unlike Tunisia, Egypt has a robust and plural political culture controlled from the top. And yet not a single politician from any party dared join the protestors. Nor did the demonstrators demand the politicians to come out. In this context, how the Egyptians embraced the soldiers who came out to restore order is important.
Desolate Pakistanis flooded by water in far-flung parts of Balochistan and Sindh also embraced military rescuers while stoning the cars of visiting politicians. This does not mean people want military rule. The Egyptians want their military to ditch the corrupt elite and side with the creative, educated and honest people. Egyptians want their military to ally with them against a failed political system. This simply shows the military institution in countries with underdeveloped political systems have a role. The system cannot evolve on its own because we are not Sweden or England and conditions do not simultaneously exist for democracy to produce the same results here as it does in its European home turf. But democracy is a good system and we need it, albeit with local conditioning. In our case, a strong hand that inspires confidence and enforces discipline in the shape of a strong federal government is necessary for evolution. What is needed is military’s support for change and not a direct military rule. But the lead – both for change and governance – must come from the educated middle and lower middle class Pakistanis.
Tunisians and Egyptians begged their military to break its traditional ties to a political class that is tested, tried and failed. Similarly, Pakistan’s military establishment has grown too comfortable with a corrupt and incompetent political elite. Over five decades, our military establishment developed dependencies on elite politicians. This mutual dependency prolonged incompetence and corruption. The mutual ties became so strong that a former military chief who launched a coup in 1999 in the name of change ended up restoring to power the worst of the worst in Pakistani politics.
Look at what the Tunisian military has done. Key ministries of interior, defence, finance and foreign affairs were entrusted to technocrats and independent figures without any political affiliations. The new faces include an internationally acclaimed Tunisian filmmaker, a web designer and blogger, and political activists. The military, bowing to public pressure and possibly internal pressure as well from the rank and file, moved from the first hours to arrest corrupt relatives of the deposed president who were pulled out from airport departure lounges. The military did not hesitate in issuing arrest warrants for a president who looted public wealth. No deals were cut with foreign governments to house exiled corrupt Tunisian leaders. Even the tainted president of France found it difficult to grant asylum to close relatives of the former Tunisian president. This is not to say that the Tunisian military are walking angels. Some of its recent actions might turn out to be half-hearted. But whatever it managed to do in a few days is just a daydream in Pakistan.
Like the existing failed political system in Pakistan, many arguments can be made in favour of Hosni Mubarak. He stabilised Egypt and allowed its middle class to prosper and progress. But his government is incapable of unleashing the full potential of his nation. The common thread between Tunisia, Egypt and Pakistan is the middle class. The Pakistani middle class and the business class are responsible for most of the innovation in the country in the fields of culture, sports, music, film, education and science over the last two decades. The same is true for Tunisia and Egypt. Our existing political system is a roadblock in our progress. The required changes are nearly impossible to undertake from within the system. Our politics has degenerated into armed conflict. Political parties have become instruments for creating and sustaining linguistic divisions. They are unable to recognise that the fourth and fifth generation of Pakistanis is the most assimilated and integrated since independence. Technical issues like water-sharing and dams are politicised and foreign powers keep the ruling elite busy in ‘imported debates’ on religion vs secularism and whether the Afghan war is ours or not. It is not that Pakistanis are hopeless. It is a corrupt political system that pushes them toward these self-created divisions.
Pakistan’s military can play a major role in sustaining democracy in the country by ditching a failed political class. Tunisians have done it and the Egyptians are next.
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In search of a political track


Dr. Maleeha Lodhi,

The overwhelming focus in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was on pressing domestic issues – economic recovery and making America more competitive in a world transformed by rising powers.
Riding a political momentum driven by higher poll ratings Obama made the theme of “winning the future” the main emphasis of his speech. His stirring pronouncements on domestic issues were not however matched by any bold departures in foreign policy. International affairs received relatively little attention and the few references suggested no change in course.
Obama all but declared victory in Iraq. On Afghanistan he repeated the conclusions of the strategy review announced by his administration last December. Progress was being made, the insurgency was being weakened and al Qaeda’s leadership was “under more pressure than at any point since 2001” with the network’s safe havens shrinking.
The president did not repeat what he had said at the time of the war review that gains in Afghanistan were “fragile and reversible”, preferring instead to convey a more upbeat assessment to congress. But he warned of “tough fighting” ahead and put Kabul on notice to “deliver better governance”. He also reiterated the pledge to begin handing over security responsibilities to Afghan authorities and start bringing US troops home this July.
“This year”, he said, “We will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead”. He did not explain how this “Afghan lead” would be attained or addressed the question if this was feasible without a negotiated settlement to end the war. He also did not refer to the 2014 deadline – set by last year’s Nato summit – when the transition is to be completed and combat missions ended.
If there was any expectation that President Obama would use the annual congressional address as an opportunity to signal his administration would also support a political track – even as fighting raged – aimed to eventually bring the conflict to a close that did not materialise. The speech did not recap the formulation contained in the summary of the December review that present US “civilian and military efforts must support a durable and favourable political resolution of the conflict” including the Afghan-led reconciliation initiative.
Emphasising a narrative of progress, while notifying that more fighting lay ahead, reflected an effort to convince an increasingly wary American public that the war was worth fighting. It also laid bare Washington’s dilemma: of acknowledging there is no military solution but being unable to make the switch to a strategy designed to secure a negotiated solution. This left unresolved tension at the heart of the present US strategy – of wanting to gradually pull out from Afghanistan, but without putting in place the conditions for a managed withdrawal. The missing link is a political solution to bring nine years of war to closure.
This lack of clarity in US policy is a consequence of an administration still at odds with itself over the course to follow in Afghanistan. Little has changed since Bob Woodward’s portrayal of intense in house differences in his book, ‘Obama’s Wars’ published last year. This showed the president’s civilian advisers, Vice President Joe Biden and Obama himself unsure whether the war could be won but unable to challenge military commanders and the Pentagon on their recommendation for a substantial troop surge and intensification of the war effort.
Since last year the surge-enabled military escalation has continued apace under the direction of US/NATO commander, General David Petraeus. This has involved a scorch earth campaign of obliterating entire villages suspected of being Taliban hideouts (detailed in recent revelations in The Times) among other aggressive tactics. Assertions that these actions have given coalition forces “the edge” – as a three-page letter to troops from General Petraeus recently claimed – have to be squared with the popular resentment caused by such controversial tactics.
Moreover few independent observers support these claims of military gains or that they can endure them given the record of the past nine years.
The military campaign underway, with the presidential forecast of more to come, indicates the persisting belief that Nato forces can fight their way into forcing the Taliban into eventual dialogue. But few beyond the US military believe that the application of military might can be a game changer. Most of America’s coalition partners as well as Pakistan would like to see a de-escalation in fighting to open the diplomatic space for talks urged by President Hamid Karzai’s reconciliation plan and his establishment of a High Peace Council.
For now General Petraeus is, in the words of an American columnist, “looking for something closer to a surrender than a negotiation from the Taliban” and this remains “the default position in the Obama Administration”. With the strategy still in ‘re-integration’ mode, aimed at splitting not talking to the Taliban, no serious US effort has been forthcoming to help start a political track for negotiations.
In recent months, American officials have sought to explore rather than initiate moves towards such a process. During his recent visit to Pakistan, Vice President Joe Biden spent much time in meetings with top political and especially military officials asking how such a process could unfold and what results it could achieve.
While signalling that Washington had not yet taken the decision to shift from a military to a political strategy, he gave little indication of how the US envisioned the process. He is said to have probed his Pakistani interlocutors about their core interests and notion of what an Afghan ‘end state’ could look like, without however spelling out his administration’s thoughts on this.
The first indication of how US thinking on this is evolving may come in Washington’s response to the non-paper handed over last October by the Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. This sets out, among other things, how Pakistan envisages an Afghan-led peace process and emphasises the need to align the constraints of time and resources with the realities on the ground in Afghanistan. The American response is said to be a work in progress and expected to be conveyed ahead of the next round of the Pakistan-US strategic dialogue due in March.
While this waiting game continues, Pakistani and Afghan officials have been consulting more closely about how to take President Karzai’s reconciliation plan forward. Visits to Islamabad by the Peace Council led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and to Kabul by foreign secretary Salman Bashir have been part of the opening moves in this evolving process, followed by the visit by Afghanistan’s foreign minister.
But unless the US shows readiness to back this process, put military actions on hold, clarify its ‘end objectives’ and engage in efforts to secure a diplomatic solution, the Kabul-Islamabad consultations can only set the stage for talks. The US will be the deciding factor for the terms, timing and modalities of a peace process.
The US-Pakistan-Afghanistan trilateral meeting later this month in Washington offers an opportunity for further exchanges. But discussions about how to construct a political track will keep going around in circles until Washington takes the strategic decision to pursue a negotiated end to the war.
The Obama Administration may feel that it will be in a stronger political position by late spring to address more squarely what the military strategy has achieved because by then the surge option would have largely run its course. That might give President Obama the confidence – and political cover – to make his views prevail over his military commanders.
In what is expected to be a decisive year for Afghanistan the prospect for peace and stability rests more than ever on how US, Afghanistan and Pakistan align their positions on a reconciliation process that can deliver a political settlement.
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