This is just another part of exposing the lies that have fed Musharafs legacy and the economy under the dictators rule…
According to Burki, very small portion of society has benefited… Those who may have had a chnace to reap the fruits of growth, are once again sidelined by the dictator and his incompetant rule.
Arithmetic of discontent
By Shahid Javed Burki
THOSE who seek power in a democratic system must learn to look at the economic situation in the society they wish to lead. This should be done from the perspective of those who have been left out and, therefore, are disadvantaged. If their number is large — which is certainly the case in today’s Pakistan — they can be the source of both political success as well as political failure.
They, the deprived and the disadvantaged, can bring to power those who promise to change their situation. That is one way they can reward a party that recognises their situation. That is how they can contribute to political success. Or they can turn way from the leaders and the parties that have promised in the past but not delivered. That is the way they can punish.
It is useful to do a bit of political arithmetic to identify those who may be able to change the Pakistani political landscape the way it was done in 1970. But before doing the arithmetic let me ask an important question: Why is there so much latent political power waiting to be released but still locked up in millions of people?
Some of those who are in this situation lack the skills that would get them productive employment. Some are disadvantaged because the economy is not creating the number of jobs needed by the class of economic groups to which they belong. Some are suffering because they live in the areas that have not been reached by economic growth. As against these there are those who have enjoyed enormous benefits from the performance of the economy in recent years. In providing some numbers I will start with those who have benefited greatly from the recent growth in the economy and work my way down the ladder.
The way the Pakistani economy was managed in the last few years resulted in creating a great deal of wealth for a few groups and for a few people. The benefits from economic growth reached about 10 to 12 per cent of the population, mostly in Punjab and in the large cities. The beneficiaries number about 16 to 20 million of whom about 10 million are potential voters. But no more than one to two million of these will go to the polling stations. The rich and the well-to-do normally don’t vote.
While the fruits of growth were not available to the middle classes, it created expectation that benefits would become available to them down the road with the right kind of public policies. These are the people who could gain access to the economic and social systems with a little bit of help and encouragement from public policy.
Most of those who belong to this category are from the professional classes. They number tens of millions and are scattered around the country, living in hundreds of large and small cities. They would benefit from an economically vibrant society that is also more open. They were at the margins of the system hoping to get in before their hopes and aspirations were dashed by the sudden turn in the political system.
The number of people who hoped to gain in the future is quite large, perhaps 25 to 35 per cent of the population. There are about 55 million people in this category of whom 25 million are potential voters and about 20 million will actually vote.
There are some 90 million people or 55 per cent of the total population who have been largely bypassed by the economic system. About one half of them, or 45 million, are of voting age. About 30 to 35 million of these people will vote.
By failing to address the needs of the last group of people, Pakistani political parties will suffer the same fate that met India’s Bhartiya Janata Party in the elections of 2004. The BJP was confident on the eve of that election that the electorate would reward it handsomely for producing “shining India”. That of course did not happen and an angry electorate with the majority made up of those who had benefited little from the ‘shining’ economy sent the BJP packing, replacing it with a coalition dominated by the Congress Party.
Something very similar has happened in Pakistan. The government headed by Gen Pervez Musharraf was confident that its economic record, with GDP increasing at an unprecedented seven per cent a year for five years, would be appreciated by the majority of the citizenry. Its confidence was so great that it was not prepared to listen to those who were sending signals of caution. Many commentators, including this columnist, kept on reminding Islamabad that macro numbers were hiding many micro problems. But Islamabad was in no mood to listen and has paid a price by sending the country into a spiral of political discontent that has gone on for nine months.
For the last two weeks I have been discussing why the discontent with Islamabad’s handling of both politics and economics has simmered but not turned into a mass movement. I also offered some thoughts on why the professional and middle classes were prepared to take to the street while the poor were willing to watch the situation from the sidelines. Today I will begin to discuss as to what the political parties can do — or should do — to interest the people in their programmes. Thus far the parties have lived on their past and have not revealed how they would manage the economy if they were to gain power.
Success in the next electoral contest will come only to those political parties that are able to win the support of the people not happy with their current economic situation. Continuing with the above arithmetic, it appears that some 57 million people are likely to go to the polls in January. Of these a vast majority — more than 95 per cent — will vote with no assurance that their welfare is the main concern of the parties seeking their support.
This is what makes politics so volatile in the country as it marches towards yet another election. There is a lot at stake in the coming election for the political parties preparing to contest and the leaders who manage them. To win the support of the discontented, the parties and their leaders will need to offer fairly well-developed programmes aimed at improving the welfare of the citizenry.
It is my belief that only those parties will succeed in January that have developed programmes to redress some of the problems created by the model pursued over the last five years. That model was focused on developing the principal cities of the country by promoting the sectors that provided a limited amount of employment and yielded incomes to a very small proportion of the population.
This model will need to be changed significantly to win the political backing of the deprived and disadvantaged. But that can only happen if the people are presented with programmes in which they can place some trust.
