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What Atal must tell Pervez
The
jehad that created a failed state
Shekhar Gupta
One great nightmare for the reporter on the Pakistan beat
used to be an interview with Benazir Bhutto, when she decided
to fly off at a tangent and give you a lecture on her nation’s
economy. She leapfrogged from one figure to another, mixing
ratios with percentages, indices with absolutes and fact with
apprehension or fantasy, given the mood of the day, unmindful
of you fidgeting as the minutes ticked by.
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When
I first visited Pakistan in the summer of 1985, the
contrast with India was striking and, for an Indian,
sobering. The average Pakistani seemed to live, eat
and dress better
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The
figures never added up and, mostly, made no sense. Then you
tried talking to her economic advisors and, being highly qualified
economists, they got their figures wrong anyway. So I will
not dare to write a treatise on the current state of Pakistan’s
economy. The facts and figures are either not available, or
not reliable. But if you see the International Monetary Fund
website and the conditionalities it lists for Pakistan, it
makes you wonder what new definitions of sovereignty bankrupt
nations are going to have to accept in days to come. A thought
that should scare Pakistan, worry us in case we plan to continue
letting our economy drift, and reassure us a great deal as
we get down to talk to Musharraf.
This tells us the price Pakistan has paid for the jehad in
Kashmir. We tend to unthinkingly fall prey to the very typical
Pakistani propaganda that any Indian peace initiative is a
capitulation; that India, bleeding from a thousand cuts, is
now suing for peace. Yes, India has bled and is continuing
to do so and the value of the lives lost in Kashmir cannot
be measured against money. But we also must not overlook the
withering costs this misadventure has inflicted on Pakistan.
We are conscious of the damage the so-called jehad has caused
to Pakistan’s polity and society, the fact that it has set
back its progress towards a more real, constitutional democracy.
It has created an anarchy of sorts, with armed militias that
set their own agendas in a rapidly talibanising society. Internationally,
it has given Pakistan a medieval, backward image. The world
over, Pakistan is today seen as a failed state and India,
perhaps with exaggerated optimism, a nation on the move. At
so many international security conferences this year the key
question has been, can the world economy and balance of power
absorb a booming China and a growing India?
Now, those of us who fret endlessly about our own lack of
governance and total waffling on economic reform may find
that optimism misplaced. But that is what the world expects
of us. India, today, is seen as a resurgent state, growing
at 6 per cent or above, modernising its industry and economy
and producing hordes of technically qualified candidates to
man high-tech industry overseas and at home. Meanwhile, Pakistan
is seen to be socially and economically in such a mess, nobody
would even set up a call centre there.
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We are bleeding in Kashmir from a
thousand cuts but for Pakistan, too, the price is a
massive economic haemorrhage. And so the peace dividend
will mean a lot more to them
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more modern and efficient. The phones worked and, of course,
you could rent an Avis car from the hotel lobby. The fact
that this was a more prosperous and reasonably stable state,
however, became more evident when you went to the money changers
squatting outside the duty-free shopping complex in Lahore.
They offered 85 Pakistani rupees for a hundred of ours. Please
go to them now and you will be pleantly surprised with the
offer of 125 Pakistani rupees for a hundred of yours.
Pop-economists may scoff at this kind of analysis, but if
you go back to the 1990 files, when jehad was launched in
earnest and when Benazir was making her ‘‘jag-jag, mo-mo,
han-han’’ (we will cut Jagmohan to pieces) speeches, the Pakistani
rupee to dollar equation was about 20 per cent better than
India’s. Today, if it has swung exactly the other way, it
must be one indication of the price the Pakistanis have paid
for running the jehad for over a decade. In the past decade,
Pakistan’s agricultural growth has gone down from 4.4 per
cent to 1.9 per cent, industrial growth from 7.3 per cent
to 2.5 per cent and its exports went south from 2.9 per cent
to minus 2.4 per cent.
Pre-1990, Pakistan stood better than India on almost all social
indicators, except literacy and infant mortality. It had a
much higher life expectancy, a per capita income more than
50 per cent higher than ours, many more telephones and television
sets per thousand people. Today, many of these indicators
have reversed and, on most others, the gap has narrowed a
great deal. While it still does not have anything to match
our vast islands of abject poverty, today Pakistan’s per capita
income is only around 20 per cent higher than ours. Given
the current difference in our respective growth rates, we
should leave them behind in a half decade. Our foreign exchange
reserves today are $43 billion (up from zilch in 1991) and
Pakistan’s are $1 billion, compared to a then substantial
$525 million a decade ago.
The truth is, in the post-Bangladesh national reconstruction,
Bhutto as well as Zia-ul-Haq had been able to restore to Pakistan’s
economy some of the vibrancy of Ayub Khan’s good, capitalist
days. Supplemented by large dollops of western aid during
the Afghan war, this created a boom economy which Pakistan
sacrificed in its desperation to keep this self-destructive
war going in Kashmir. Today, the World Bank ranks it among
the most hopeless of the failed states — Zambia, Uganda, Sierra
Leone and so on — states which are living not merely on debt
but on re-re-scheduled debt. In fact, even the current period
of IMF rescheduling will be over at the end of this year.
That is why while we must talk to Pakistan, one item we must
add to our list of essential reading is the IMF website. Read
the new conditionalities that demand fortnightly reports of
compliance in a tone that should make any self-respecting
nation cringe before it holds out promises of self-determination
and sovereignty to citizens of others. Clause 15 of the conditionalities
even puts firm restraints on Pakistan’s defence budget, freezing
it to a maximum percentage of the GDP and then stipulating
quarterly reviews to ensure that it is not exceeded. Then,
do not miss the icing on the cake. It is a letter written
jointly by the finance minister and the governor of the Reserve
Bank of Pakistan stating that while their government believes
that the IMF’s prescription will be good enough to fix their
economy, in case it fails they are willing to enter into ‘‘consultations’’
on the ‘‘additional measures’’ with the Fund.
Since we tend not to look at Pakistan from any angle other
than that of its role in Kashmir, we have meanwhile missed
where it is being a good boy. The IMF, actually, is thrilled
with its compliance with the conditionalities so far. The
western press has recently carried reports (mostly accurate)
of the way the Taliban have destroyed nearly 90 per cent of
the poppy cultivation. We are bleeding in Kashmir from a thousand
cuts but for Pakistan, too, the price for that is this massive
economic haemorrhage and loss of sovereignty. And so the peace
dividend, if it ever comes, will mean a lot more to them than
to us. Since it is reasonable to presume that they do not
understand that, Vajpayee, the older and gentler of the two
interlocutors, would do well to underline that next month
to Musharraf.
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