Pakistan’s unmourned Bouazizi

It was a cold and clammy winter’s evening in Mexico City, but this did not seem to matter. It was a season of mirth and merriment, of mistletoe and chiming bells and the city was en fete, because in less than a week it would be Christmas and then, a few days later, at the stroke of midnight, 1982 would come to an end and a new year would begin. I was walking home from work when a shabbily dressed young man came up to me and asked for a light. As he lit his cigarette, I wished him a happy Christmas. There was an unmistakable mix of desperation and anger in his voice as he replied: “What happiness are you talking about when I am not even sure whether I can put food on the table this evening for my wife and little girl.” He walked away with faltering steps into the darkness of the night, and, soon after reaching home, killed himself.

I would not have known about this had his photograph not appeared in the inside pages of the local newspapers the next morning. What I did learn from that brief encounter with the impoverished Mexican is how excruciatingly painful and humiliating poverty can be. Words and phrases such as “food insecurity” are wholly inadequate and devoid of meaning because they do not describe the hideous implications of hunger and deprivation.

Twenty-seven years later, on December 17, 2010, a young fruit vendor, Muhammad Bouazizi, set himself ablaze in central Tunis because he could no longer feed himself or his family. This desperate act ignited revolution and soon several countries from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula were aflame. Entrenched dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen fell like ninepins. Anarchy verging on civil war rages in Syria while an uneasy calm prevails in Bahrain and in other hereditary monarchies of the Gulf region. It is yet uncertain whether the Arab spring will eventually yield a harvest of enduring freedom underpinned by social justice.

It was hunger again that forced Raja Khan, a youth from the small town of Naushahro Feroze in Sindh, to torch himself in front of Parliament House in Islamabad on October 25 last year. He had abandoned all hope of being able to feed his two little children and his wife. As his mortal remains were being lowered into his grave, his wife gave birth to their third child.

Shortly before he set himself ablaze, he left a message: “I am responsible for my death. I am taking this step because I am fed up with my financial condition.” He then implored the government to take care of his family. The dramatic manner in which Raja Khan ended his life had no impact. He is not even remembered, and is just one of the more than 1,100 poverty-related suicides in the country in the past one year.

Earlier this month, the ministry of food security admitted during a Senate hearing that 58 percent of the population was food-insecure in 2011, compared to 49 percent in 2009, as estimated by the Islamabad-based Sustainable Policy Development Institute (SPDI). This means that currently a startling 104 million Pakistanis are uncertain where their next meal will come from. It was also conceded during the briefing that a study carried out by SPDI in 2009 showed that 22 percent of the country’s population were living below the poverty line, and this represented an increase from the 17 percent estimated by the World Bank and the UNDP for the year 2007-2008. This was a shameless admission by the government that ordinary citizens are much worse off than they were five years ago.

The latest report released by the Planning Commission shows that the cost of the monthly “food basket” (the minimum intake of essential edibles) has shot up by 81 percent since 2007-2008 and, as a consequence, a majority of citizens consume only 1,700 calories per day, as against 2,150 calories envisaged in the food basket. Most families spend more than 59 percent of their monthly earnings on food, and yet only a few can afford one square meal a day. The fallout is an increasing number of undernourished and stunted children, an unacceptably high rate of infant mortality, and a labour force that has become increasingly vulnerable to illness and disease.

There are no quick fixes and things are unlikely to improve till such time as the government takes decisive measures to increase revenues, drastically curtail expenditure, weed out corruption and address the energy crisis. The joint study released on December 12 by the Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives and the Centre for Investigative Reporting shows that a mere two percent of the country’s population are registered as taxpayers, but not even a quarter of these actually contribute anything to the national exchequer. Those perched in high places are the most conspicuous tax defaulters.

President Asif Ali Zardari, who considers himself above the law, has not filed any tax returns and has set the trend. Thus, only 90 out of the 341 members of the National Assembly and 33 of the 55-strong cabinet have bothered to submit returns. The report also lays bare the truth that 70 percent of parliamentarians are tax-evaders. Though the study confines itself to the National Assembly and the Senate, the same rot has contaminated our provincial assemblies.

A day after the publication of the joint study, the chairman of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) told reporters that because of corruption, tax evasion and incompetence the country loses five to seven billion rupees every day. This works out to daily losses of $51.34 million to $71.88 million and is equivalent to 10 percent of the GDP which, according to the World Bank, was $211.1 billion in 2011.

But despite these horrifying statistics, politicians seem to be dwelling in the ethereal world of fantasy and make-believe. With the approach of the general elections they have made all sorts of outlandish promises. One such pledge is the transformation of Pakistan into an ‘Islamic welfare state’. But an Islamic state has never existed in history and none of the learned ulema (religious scholars), who were grilled with remarkable finesse by the Munir Commission in 1953, were able to identify such a dispensation in Islamic history other than a brief interlude of less than thirty years during the rule of the first four Enlightened Caliphs from 632 to 661.

The other slogan that the government never tires of repeating is that Pakistan wants ‘trade and not aid’. But trade presupposes the existence of an exportable surplus, which will just not be available till the energy crisis is overcome. But here again nothing has been done to address the problem, although the country has the potential of generating at least 50,000MW of hydropower, as against the existing capacity of only 6,500MW. Wapda is confident that it can increase this to 20,000MW by 2020 if it is assured an interrupted flow of funds.

Though the conditions prevailing here are far worse than those in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or any of the other countries in the Middle East, there will be no replication of the Arab spring in Pakistan. This is because the relative freedom in this country provides an outlet for expression of public anger. This was not available in the Arab world and the dramatic manner in which Bouazizi ended his life sparked a revolution.

In Pakistan, however, things can change for the better. All that is required, as a first step, is the faithful implementation of the controversial Article 62 of the constitution, which would automatically disqualify corrupt politicians from becoming members of parliament. The alternative is that ordinary citizens will continue to wallow in misery, some will take their own lives and others will swell the ranks of terrorist groups as suicide bombers.

The writer is the publisher of Criterion quarterly. Email: iftimurshed@ gmail.com