[sacw] sacw dispatch #2 (23 Oct 99)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #2
23 October 1999
___________________
#1. When women speak out [in Pakistan]
#2. Pakistan Back To "Normal"
#3. India's foodgrains rot in Storage
___________________
#1.
The News
=46riday, October 22, 1999

WHEN WOMEN SPEAK OUT
By Omar Asghar Khan

They help us meet our basic needs and have made us aware of our rights.
We condemn the totally unfounded allegations made by certain maulvis and
vested interests against Sungi * accusing it of promoting obscenity and
un-Islamic values. Vested interests are resorting to such tactics as
they are threatened by the platform Sungi provides to unite
disadvantaged groups," reads a resolution of August 5, 1999 signed by
more than 40 rural women in the Kaghan Valley. This resolution responds
to an ongoing malicious campaign against Sungi stirred up by certain
religious leaders and vested interests since June 1999. Similar
resolutions from many rural women and men have been received from
different parts of Hazara.

The bold positions taken by women and male activists against powerful
vested interests in the face of retaliation and the unequivocal support
expressed for progressive public interest organisations are significant
and encouraging. Powerful retrogressive forces have consistently
resisted attempts made by activists to raise issues of equity, fair
distribution of resources and equal opportunities for women and men. In
recurring campaigns to discredit such efforts, orthodox elements allege
promotion of un-Islamic values and vulgarity. They are projected as
violating cultural norms and promoting western values.

Often such maligning campaigns against public interest organisations are
a front for grievances that have little to do with women or their
status. Fearful that rights-based advocacy will lead to a loss of their
control over resources and services, vested interests attempt to stir up
popular resentment against these organisations by concocting tales of
vulgarity and perceived violation of cultural and religious values. They
propagate the popular perception of women as symbols of honour and
strongly resist any attempt to change women's traditional role.

In the struggle to maintain the status quo the nexus between various
power holders becomes apparent. In the recent campaign against Sungi in
the Kaghan Valley the key actors are a couple of religious leaders, the
timber mafia, certain political elements and a section of the local
media. They represent the traditional power bloc, protecting and serving
each other's interests. The government's inability to take effective
measures to stop the hate mongering of this bloc only emboldens these
elements.

In the power games played by the elite, women are usually passive
spectators. They have little say in campaigns that claim to protect
their honour. But many rural women in NWFP have chosen to break this
silence. "Sungi has shown us how to be self-reliant. Working
collectively in collaboration with Sungi we have solved many local
problems=8Ait has also given us economic options to improve our income.
But most importantly Sungi has united us so that we think and act
collectively," said the confident and articulate general secretary of
the Anjuman-e-Khawateen in rural Kaghan.

The Anjuman-e-Khawateen was established in late 1997 making it a
relatively recent collective. "Initially only a few women were
interested in joining our organisation But gradually as women saw its
usefulness many others joined. We now have over 40 members," recounted
the general secretary of the organisation. In this village women took
the initiative to contact Sungi seeking their assistance to form an
organisation and begin development work. Their success inspired local
men to form their own organisation following the lead of women from the
same village.

But such organisations in rural Pakistan rarely take totally independent
initiatives. Drawing on the strong information network that is a
distinctive feature of rural areas, these organisations are influenced
by adjacent villages. Sungi's gradually deepening partnerships with
around 130 villages in NWFP is an effective trust building measure. But
scale alone is insufficient to inspire confidence. The quality of the
partnership between local communities and an outside organisation like
Sungi is what really counts.

These village organisations are gradually coming together in the form of
area coordinating councils and coalitions. They are connected with
regional and national NGOs, the press and other progressive elements in
civil society. Collectively these emerging alliances present a viable
antidote to the manipulation of religion by the traditional power bloc.
Their numbers are still small and their initiatives are few. But the
potential of these rapidly growing village organisations is immense.

The need to support these emerging alliances of deprived and
marginalised groups becomes more acute in the face of religious
extremism, intolerance and militancy. Interestingly in the NWFP the
progressive and retrogressive forces appear to be working at the same
time. While the so-called Pakistani Taliban forcibly impose their own
perceptions of morality, women in the province are taking stands against
entrenched power holders.

"We are not afraid of the maulvis. We know the corrupt practices of
these self-proclaimed custodians of Islam. They are the ones that are
un-Islamic not Sungi," said a member of the women's village committee in
Paras, a village in the Kaghan Valley. "We know our religion better than
these self-styled religious leaders. Islam has given us rights which no
one can take away from us--the right to be treated fairly, equitably and
with respect is what Islam preaches. We will not allow them to
misinterpret Islam and bring Sungi into disrepute," stated an activist
of a women's organisation in Sari Bandi, a remote village in the valley.

Such statements by women who have had to experience the vilification
campaign of vested interests, were unheard of until they started getting
organised in small village committees a few years ago. To a large extent
the women have been supported in their efforts to organise by the men in
the Kaghan Valley.

This process of resistance to vested interests has been accompanied by a
dialogue with the religious leaders, which has created spaces for the
marginalised and dispossessed to articulate an agenda for social,
economic and political change. At another level the marginalised and
dispossessed have also engaged the local elites, be it within civil
society or the government, so as to sensitise them to the concerns and
needs of disadvantaged groups especially women. These engagements have
not only created critical linkages but has led to greater confidence
amongst both women and men who hitherto have not been able to stand up
for their rights and entitlements.

Even at the risk of being harmed by vested interests these men and women
have acquired new skills to negotiate with the power elite on the one
hand and mobilise other members of the community on the other hand. This
process has created a momentum that is resisting the onslaught of
bigotry, militancy and intolerance that is fast taking roots
in a society and a region that is inflicted by deprivation, injustice
and violence.
[ * Sungi is one of Pakistan's best known NGO's]
___________________
#2.

PAKISTAN BACK TO "NORMAL"
By I.K. Shukla

The wheel of coups that runs in Pakistan stops periodically for rest and
relaxation. That is as it should be. Not that the people there especially
love coups or are averse to democracy. In fact, exactly the opposite. It is
the ruling class, particularly the army, which is uncomfortable with even a
simulacrum of democracy if it even remotely appears upsetting the status quo
- the rule of the feudals and jagirdars, the =EBreligious'warlords, and the
big farmers and industrialists (20 houses). The army ensures that the polity
will firmly remain in the grip of these predatory patriarchs in perpetuity,
who in turn cede supremacy to the army, tacitly, even above the
Constitution. This is "legitimacy" enough as far as the ruling cabal is
concerned. (Witness the enthusiastic support extended to the brass hats by
Benazir and N.Sharif's own party, Pakistan Muslim League) People don't
configure in this arrangement, nor are they meant to. It is thus that the
Chief Exec overrides the judiciary. Amusingly, the Chief Justice of Supreme
Court and President Farooq Tarar have agreed to be subservient to the Chief
Exec Gen. Pervez Musharraf. That Benazir has begun hobnobbing with the jack
boots, in a cynical construction, may be called the attraction of the moth
for the flame- the poetic analogue of a perverse kind.

The pattern is familiar. Zulfie Bhutto had chosen Zia ul Haq over his nine
seniors. Gen. Zia had seen that Bhutto had subverted constitutional norms
and made highhandedness his guiding principle from rigging of elections to
murders of opponents. Zia, with his ambition vaulting, rewarded his
benefactor with a disciple's gusto by having him hanged. Nawaz Sharif
similarly superseded Musharraf's seniors. Musharraf , a dedicated pupil of
Zia, would improve upon the master. Not only by squelching democracy like
Zia, but also by rewarding his Nawaz patron with at least political exile,
if not more.

Here it would be realistic not to go gaga about the West feeling
uncomfortable with army rule in Pakistan. After the routine noises about
return to civilian rule and restoration of "democracy" the West would soon
settle down to business. Nothing suits it better than despotism and
dictatorship in the far flung provinces of the empire. Only that ensures
best the continuity and stability as defined and desired by the IMF and WB.
Gen. Musharraf will not take long to assure these Global Hegemons of his
intent to play by the rules of the game, anti-septically and suavely called
globalization. Already William B.Milan, the US ambassador, has certified
Musharraf to be "acting out of patriotic motivation." And, Washington has
begun veering to "constructive engagement" of South Africa fame, Reagan's
addition to the mumbo-jumbo of USA's foreign policy lexicon. Its bloodier
version was in operation in Indonesia, to take just one instance, under the
August aegis of Ford-Kissinger, Carter, Reagan-Bush, and Clinton - for just
three decades and more. So, in the case of Pakistan, there is no room for
much cavil.

Gen. Musharraf's profession of amity with India is too good to be credible.
It was primarily Nawaz Sharif's bid to normalize, if not harmonize,
relations with India that landed him in the soup he is in, earning him the
eternal ire of the jackboots. They had shown their angry disdain for such a
project by absenting themselves from the reception Sharif gave the Indian
PM. Too, Sharif had earlier aroused their wrath by rejecting their
importunate demand for a National Security Council which practically was
meant to override the Premier by institutionalizing the army as the Supreme
Arbiter. No popularly elected Prime Minster with such a massive majority
could agree to play second fiddle to the army brass. Ever since Sharif was
suspect and singled out for a punitive action. The army that has ruled the
roost since Pakistan's inception couldn't bear losing dominance. So, it
resorted to the time tested "honor killing" of democracy. The feudal polity
restores its honor by killing women and democracy with same regularity and
ruthlessness. There can be no compromise on this fundament.

Talking of corruption and salvaging the economy, to take only two pieties
from Musharraf's proclamation, the first is neither intended nor feasible,
the second is in hock to powers beyond the borders of Pakistan. Corruption
can't be weeded out because it would be tantamount to locking horns with a
drunken bull. The forces instrumental in the creation of Pakistan for
protecting their privileges, the landed gentry so-called, won't allow any
challenge to their hold. No politician would dare do that. Secondly, the
army itself has grown into a major trading conglomerate by hogging several
sectors of the national economy, reaping fantastic profits both via monopoly
and sub rosa. The army has a big slice of the drug trade, and a big stake in
the smuggling and sale of contraband arms. This lucrative portfolio is too
precious to be altruistically or democratically surrendered.

But the coup does impinge on the polities in the sub-continent. Forces of
atavistic reaction and obscurantist extremism in Bangladesh and India would
feel encouraged and inspired .This would threaten and tear the fabric of
socio-political peace in both the countries. Exclusivist redefinition of
national identity would become clamorous and intransigent. This can damage
irreparably both the civic life of the nations involved as also the
political character of their states. The longer the Pak military remains at
the helm, however well-intentioned and well behaved, the greater and graver
the damage it would inflict on the neighboring nations of the
sub-continent. This erosion and eruption will not remain limited to
minorities so-called; it will grievously and substantively smash the norms
that guided their polity thus far and that guaranteed a healthy
accommodation of diversity and dissent, the minimal desiderata of even a
nominal democracy. Not only can the jack boot be no herald of democracy in
Pakistan, it has never been anywhere. Besides, it will have the dubious
distinction of having installed and inaugurated authoritarianism all around.
And, this export of reaction would not upset the Imperium at all. Instead,
it will garner it encomium.

This is not to plead that Sharif was a paragon. But, the army deciding
national policies and ordering the elected representatives of the people
about, is treason. No chicanery can cover up this crime. A Prime Minister's
decision to dismiss military or civil personnel can't be called a
"conspiracy". It may be of questionable wisdom. But that is something else.
Every aggrieved party is within its rights to feel hurt. But it can't be
allowed to overturn the civil authority to which it pledged obedience in
deference to the laws of the land as enshrined in its Constitution.

It is pertinent now to recall a tragic bit of history that has considerable
bearing on the role of the military in Pakistan. The way Jinnah died reeks
of bloody conspiracy. It was not a natural death. He was killed on the
orders of the military in a solitary room in barren Quetta by a special
doctor appointed to administer him slow poison in food. What was his crime?

1.He was consulting the civil service, ignoring the untrustworthy cabinet
minsters, towards speedily codifying the Constitution and formulating a
policy of amity with India on the pattern of Canada-US relations. This was
the red rag for the military which had envisioned itself to be the chief
architect of Pakistan, besides the Nawabs, zamindars, and bureaucrats. He
had understood that the military wanted to entrench itself in the polity by
raising the problem of Kashmir which was amenable to a reasonable settlement
through discussions with India.

2. The Constitution he envisaged had no role for the landed barons and the
military.(However, he could not conceal it from the Muslim League
land-owners and military officers. The ISI was surreptitiously reading his
files.) This would have given a serious blow to the ambitions of the
military, leaving its scions in the lurch, forcing them to look for
ordinary and ill-paid civil jobs here and there. Therefore it was necessary
to keep the military permanently employed and its ever mounting expenditure
justified by making disagreements with India perpetual. It was to secure
for the military a permanently privileged supremacy, under the grandiose
cloak of a policy investing Pakistan with an aggressive identity, which
in the circumstances of its birth looked nebulous, if not blurred.

3. Jinnah knew that militaristic tension between two countries will help the
religious extremists on both sides reap dangerous political harvest.

4. The landed gentry, apprehensive of Jinnah's thoughts in respect of the
Constitution, started calling him obstinate and crazy. Threatened by the
Congress decision of 1930 to do away with big land holdings, they had
wrecked India. They had joined the campaign for Pakistan to keep their
estates intact. As ill luck would have it, Jinnah resorted to confiding in
the civil servants. This swelled its head and in turn made it into a monster
too.

=46or the reasons stated above, his dead body (after poisoning him) was
brought by a secret service aircraft but not to Karachi Airport where
thousands of mourners awaited it. Instead it landed at Maripur's military
airport. It was loaded in a ramshackle car and set on the way to the
Governor- General's House. According to the plan, it developed "trouble" on
the crossing of Bandar and Mission roads, to allow the corpse decompose from
the heat of the scorching sun, and erase the visible signs of death.

It was deliberately set afloat that the Qaid e Azam had come alive to
Karachi, but died from heat in a car gone kaput. Remember, the Civil
Hospital was only a few steps away. Informed, it would have rushed its
ambulances. Civil authorities in Karachi were in the dark for six hours as
to the fate of Jinnah.. Any one of the thousands of cars that passed by
could have been signalled to stop and help, but none was.

Afraid of their crime, the assassins had Pakistan Radio recite Quran, not
for 40 hours, but 40 days nearly incessantly. Thus were people effectively
deceived. The new nation saw the fingerprints of the criminals all over and
yet chose to close its eyes. The one magazine, the monthly Naqqad, edited by
Zafar Niyazi, that bravely detailed the conspiracy, was gagged and
penalized. The major media kept mum as if in tacit complicity.

According to this magazine the Qabaili invasion of Kashmir in 1947 was
against the wishes of Jinnah
who was overruled by the military upstarts. How the Kashmir Obsession has
continued to be the grand passion of the Pakistani brass hats, and what they
regard as Kashmiris' self-determination is evidenced in the murder of
Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq in 1990 who had started "preaching armed youth to talk
only of independence, notto seek Kashmir's accession to pakistan and protect
the minorities in the state." This revelation was made by Hashim Qureshi, an
ex-Chair, Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front in his book KASHMIR:UNVEILING THE
TRUTH. Hurriyat, undeterred by truth, has been accusing the Indian military
of the crime. So have, dutifully, and uncritically, the human rights
activists.
(See Mainstream, New Delhi, 9 Oct.1999; Media's Poll Manipulation:
G.S.Bhargava).

This divagation would give us a peep into how the polity was castrated and
its ideological foundation criminalized right at the nascent stage of
Pakistan. Both its identity and ideology were deformed. This most bloodless
of the Pak coups looks the more depressing and bodes ill for the
sub-continent. Its motions of disarming rhetoric of benign intent
notwithstanding, it cannot countenance or outlive the repudiation of its
reflexes and the ethos of a nation desperately foraging for an identity.

It can't be abandoned by the West for geo-political reasons, for besides
being a watch tower overseeing China and at a remove the ex-Soviets, it
provides the doorway for the US corporations ( for whose benefit Yugoslavia
was bludgeoned to death) to grab the Central Asian republics via a puppet
Afghanistan. Talibans, creatures of the CIA, pose no threat to Uncle Sam in
that they will remain dependent on Pakistan. As to human rights violations
and reversion to dark ages, well, that is no problem as long they don't
imperil "freedom and democracy" as defined by Washington.

(For the information on Jinnah's death I am indebted to HUM LOG /Oct.1999,
an Urdu monthly of Los Alamitos, California, edited by Mr Shafiq Niyazi, son
of the late Zafar Niyazi.)

October 22, 1999

I. K. Shukla
P.O. Box 646, San Pedro, CA 90733, USA
___________________
#3.
The Hindu
23 October 1999
Op-Ed.

ROTTING FOOD
By Gail Omvedt

INDIA'S FOOD is rotting. The greatest harvest of foodgrains in the
country's history is beginning to waste away in storage, eaten by
rodents and insects, spoiled by moisture. Some of it, for want of
storage space, is sitting in the open, exposed to the late monsoon
rains.

Estimated losses of foodgrains, according to the Ministry of Food and
Civil Supplies, are about 10 per cent of the total production, or 20
million tonnes a year, about as much as what Australia produces. Most of
these losses take place in storage, in the vast godowns of the Food
Corporation of India, which are, according to Rohit Saran in IndiaToday,
better protected than the nation's borders: the public is forbidden
entry. Transparency has never been a characteristic of India's
bureaucracy, least of all the FCI. And, while farmers have not done
badly at producing food, the bureaucracy of the FCI seems clearly to be
failing in its storage.

The situation regarding distribution seems even worse. The Public
Distribution System has always had its justification in terms of
providing ``food security,'' but a 1994 survey of rural households
carried out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research reveals
some disturbing facts. About 40 per cent of the PDS offtake is in the
cities. Less than a third of the rural households, in 1994, used the
PDS, and these got less than a fourth of their requirement of foodgrains
from it (the exact figures are 33.2 per cent and 23.5 per cent). Dalits
and adivasis have been in a slightly different position here: fewer SCs
and a little more STs use the PDS as compared to ``other Hindu''
households. Landless wage earners use more than their share (44.3 per
cent of such households use the PDS) but even these get only 25.8 per
cent of their grain requirements from the system.

Rather more shocking are the results gotten when the NCAER divides its
respondents into ``poverty groups''. Here we find that the poorer
households actually use the PDS less than households above the poverty
line! Specifically, 30 per cent of the households in the ``lower segment
below the poverty line,'' 29.5 per cent of the ``upper segment below the
poverty line,'' 37.1 per cent of the ``lower segment above the poverty
line'' and 30.6 per cent of the ``upper segment above the poverty line''
use the PDS. Not exactly what one would call good ``targeting!''

The greatest inequalities, however, are geographical. In the poorest
States, such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa, only 5.0, 5.2 and 5.2
per cent households use the PDS. The greatest coverage of the system is
in the southern States, where up to 78 per cent of rural households in
Kerala and 82 per cent in Tamil Nadu use the PDS. It is somewhat
questionable whether the overall effect really helps consumption: Tamil
Nadu and Kerala both have lower than average per capita consumption of
foodgrains.

It is clearly time to consider restructuring the PDS. Its costs keep
rising year by year; the amount of foodgrains stored goes beyond all
rational limits, and waste is increasing. Dr. Kirit Parikh, director of
the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, and a long-time
expert on PDS and food security, has noted that only about 12 paise of
every rupee spent on PDS actually reaches the poor in the form of food;
the rest goes to wastage and bureaucratic expenses. According to Dr.
Parikh, the optimum level of foodstocks held by the Government would be
about 4 million tonnes for rice and half a million for wheat; instead,
the FCI is now holding 19.8 million tonnes of wheat and 11.7 million
tonnes of rice. The cost of this immense storage in outdated godowns
comes to about Rs. 16,000 crores a year; such funds, invested, would
yield about twice the Government's entire food bill.

This does not mean there is no role for the Government in the shortage
and distribution of foodgrains. It does not mean that the poor should
simply be left to the mercy of the market. But the system needs to be
drastically modernised. The Nobel laureate, Dr. Amartya Sen, has been
arguing for the combination of democratic state action and market;
noting that there are some things that the Government should do - take
responsibility for education, health and welfare - and some things it
should not do. Running airplanes, hotels and businesses generally fall
in the latter category. It also seems that taking charge of storing and
distributing foodgrains has been something that the Government does not
do very well.

Just as agriculture needs technological modernisation, food distribution
and storage need to be updated. Here, a combination of public and
private has to be considered. Private traders are not necessarily more
efficient than the Government - there is also an estimate of heavy
losses of about 30 per cent of the total of fruits and vegetables
produced. (These are, of course, difficult to compare with foodgrains
because vegetables and fruits are much more perishable - crops like the
notorious onions, for example, will not keep in any conditions of
moisture). But letting private trading companies hold at least some of
the stores would provide an element of competiton that would spur the
functioning of the FCI, and help in promoting efficiency and innovation.
Estimates are that the cost of storing foodgrains is 50 per cent lower
in the private sector.

Restructuring the PDS, however, should go a lot farther than tinkering
with arrangements between public and private storage. At the very end of
the whole chain, from farmer outwards through the merchants, the
officials, the marketing committees, the godowns, the truckers, the
retail shops, stands the consumer. Up to now the PDS has simply meant
that the State provides a certain amount of specific goods - wheat,
rice, sugar, oil or whatever - against the ration card. Why not give the
consumer more choice in purchasing? Instead of directly providing the
rations, why not give food coupons, worth a certain amount of money
(with foodgrain prices calculated at ongoing market rates), but which
the consumers can use to buy whatever food they want, when they want it.
This would not only allow more choice, it would also give an advantage
to local producers, who can save the cost of transport.

The rationing system was begun during World War II but the roots of the
expansion of the vast system of the PDS and the associated bureaucracy
of the FCI are in the Nehruvian command economy, in the faith that the
royal road to development lay through State control and State
responsibility.

=46armers were considered to be ignorant, unresponsive to price
incentives; as the development economist, Mr. Sukhumoy Chakravarti, put
it, the basic assumption behind the outlook towards agriculture in the
early days of planning was that it could be the source of "cheap food,
cheap raw materials and cheap labour'' - the dispossessed rural people
fleeing from drought and an unprofitable agriculture to the cities,
ready to sell their labour power at low costs.

With all the rhetoric of "food security,'' cheap food was designed to
help industry just as much, by keeping wage costs low. And, just as the
State was considered the best bet for managing steel companies, so also
it was thought it could replace private traders, the notorious banias,
in distributing foodgrains.

This kind of development has now reached the end of its road.India has
now reached the situation where - thanks to a large degree to its
farmers and the much-maligned ``green revolution'' and some spread of
irrigation - a minimal level of consumption has been reached. Though
journalists sometimes may use hyperbole, it is no longer a "nation
stalked by starvation.'' With an availability of around 540 grams of
foodgrains a day and with the consumption of eggs, milk, fruit and
vegetables also rising, some form of floor is still needed for
consumption, to help the poorest. But the food distribution system
designed for the days of poverty and statism needs to be restructured.
______________________________________
SOUTH ASIA CITIZENS WEB DISPATCH is an informal, independent &
non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996.