Shot across the bows
April 25, 2001
The MQM and JSQM (Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mohaz) gave a call for a Pahya Jam strike in Sindh to protest against water scarcity for Wednesday (April 16). The strike was a near total success throughout the province. Earlier, there were water marches by Awami Tehrik and road blockings by Dr Qadir Magsi's STPP. These should be seen a wake up call to Authority, despite the usual reasons for the success of a Karachi strike. Sindh has been seething with discontent and the water scarcity has acted as a catalyst. The overall success of the strike can be attributed to many factors, including the political designs of the parties that gave the call. But the significance of all these events must be sought with objectivity and political perspicacity. Isn't there a genuine anger among the common Sindhis on the water situation.
The political setting comprises the longstanding restiveness over perceived grievances. Much nitpicking can and will be done by Islamabad bureaucrats; some of the grievances would be found, in files, as baseless, others would be exaggerations and so forth. But that has no political bearing. What is relevant is the perception of grievances in Sindh that goes back to the time when One Unit was railroaded through their Provincial Assembly despite its original opposition. The scars of that event and in fact of earlier ones such as forcible detaching of Karachi from Sindh without adequate consultation have contributed to the grievances. Secondly, the serious grievances relate to the perceived division of costs and benefits. Sindhis believe that Sindh has been shortchanged. The One Unit was a net loss, even financially. The Sindh government in 1955 had over Rs30 crore in hand and when in 1970 when Sindh re-emerged, its kitty was empty. On the whole, Sindhis have had many grievance of political and economic deprivation.
Water scarcity has come on top of all this. Water in the Sindh's barrages, canals and water courses is woefully scarce. Everybody knows there has been a drought in recent years. The quantum of water in the Indus river system has been less than usual. There is no doubt about an overall water shortage. But if that alone had been the case and there was the perception that the hardship was being equitably shared between an all powerful Punjab and the less important Sindh, there would be no heart burning. It is necessary to perceive that the Sindhi opinion from one end of the province to the other, including the assessment of its irrigation experts and engineers, believes that the natural shortage of water has been aggravated by manipulation. The suspicion that Punjab has stolen more water than was its share is widespread. People have not forgotten the Daudpoto incident. It is this near-conviction that is a hard reality. It has to be recognised. Something has got to be done to set it right. It is not enough for chief executive of the day to order that Punjab has to give some additional water as a gesture or that the representative of the two provinces should sort out the matter between themselves or asking his high-ranking aides, the governors, to sit and compose the Sindh-Punjab differences. These stratagems, let it be said, are not enough and do not approximate to a solution of the problem.
A sympathetic view has to be taken of the grievances based on perceived deprivation of opportunities to develop and similar other matters. The clever-by-half statistics and mention of the measures that central bureaucracy has taken do not cut much ice in the political reckoning. There is the fact that aware citizens--most of whom are motivated by nationalistic aspirations--feel that the Centre and Punjab have amends to make. This problem has to be addressed by central authorities in full consultation with Sindhis if it wants a reasonably secure future of the country. Insofar as the genuineness of the grievances are concerned, instead of getting into heated debates over details of what precisely did the government do and how wrong the Sindhis are, the problem needs to be looked at in a broad political perspective.
The hard fact is that in the distribution of resources and allocation of funds Sindh's share was all too meagre. If opportunities for development in the first 25 years of Pakistan's history are now examined, the traumatic dismemberment of the country in 1971 falls into perspective. Why did it happen? Because of Bengal's perception was that it had been shortchanged and cheated by a central authority in which the share of Bengal was smaller and that of Punjab was maximal.
Now insofar as the second 25 years of Pakistan are concerned, look at the regional disparities. Where has maximum development taken place? What has been the share of the NWFP or Balochistan or Sindh? As for Karachi, well, a case of sorts can be made for its partial de-industrialisation and decline thanks to its law and order problems created by the emergence of MQM, its demands and the reaction of central authorities. That largely accounts for the loss of momentum in the Pakistan economy itself. Undoubtedly, people in the smaller provinces feel neglected and indeed cheated. If Islamabad notices the intensity and depth of the feeling on the subject, its actions do not reflect this realisation. It does look as if Authority is too myopic to notice anything amiss. Its conduct appears to confirm the attributed view that God is in his Heaven and everything is for the best.
Well, everything is not for the best, certainly not to the benefit of the smaller provinces. Scarcity of capital and other resources, now water, is a fact of life. If there is a noticeable absence of development in Sindh - no matter what contribution is made by local factors such as its feudal social system in which the urge for improvement is muzzled at its origins - the fact of the matter is that small and growing middle class, more or less urbanised, notices the differential in the state of Sindh and Punjab economies. He draws the obvious conclusions. This fact cannot be belied by mountains of statistics that bureaucracy can produce. If the smaller provinces think that they have been shortchanged by the same central authority against which the East Pakistanis had rebelled, it has to be purposefully recognised by Islamabad whether it is ruled by the PPP or Muslim League or the military directly. All the three faces of the Centre are virtually interchangeable in impact and produce much the same result. The leadership of the Punjab province, particularly the army, has to realise that Punjab has no great fund of goodwill to draw upon in times of crises.
Against this background, mishandling of protests by regional nationalists - and both MQM and JSQM along with many others are regional nationalists par excellence - is a dangerous business. It is may be that everything they demand cannot be conceded immediately. But physical suppression through brute force is not the way to handle this grave situation. Its gravity needs to be kept in view, particularly by the military that hopefully has taken over for a limited time. Its rule is not permanent. Therefore, it has no business to try to suppress, much less to destroy, nationalist movements. Their demands today are strictly political and need to be met with politics, if there is any. If they require a political government it cannot be helped. There is no law of nature that military must always take over whether or not the situation is capable of being tackled by it. It might as well recognise its limitations and go. In the short run when it is still in the saddle, it is necessary that it keeps its nerve. Shooting from the hip does not make it more macho nor prove it strong. Blaming the press for bad news is like shooting the carrier of bad news. A word about nationalist movements.
Authority has faced a fair number of national movements in Pakistan. They all demand regional autonomy for their ethnic entities' self-assertion. Insofar as the problem is about how the central authority can or should act, it is necessary to assert that denial of demands and suppression in a bloody minded way is not the best way to go about facing political reality. As noted, a political issue that has to be tackled politically by those who are capable of empathy with the concerned nationalists and have the imagination to find accommodation for them without violence to the political fabric of the federal state. Regional autonomy needs to be conceded in an enlightened manner; notionally it has to be conceded in full and at quite an early stage. The quantum of powers required by the regions would vary depending upon their desperation and circumstances. It would be much less if it is not denied and too much suppression had not gone on. A wooden headed violent campaign to suppress a movement merely strengthens the resolve of the nationalists. They demand more. What precise form the self-assertion takes would, up to a point, depend upon Authority's magnanimity. This is an important factor.
For a nationalist, the overall framework in which the fulfilment of his wishes is to take place is a secondary matter. It can be minor adjustments of the three subject lists for the centre and provinces to legislate, as was demonstrated in 1973. But the demand can grow more and more quantitatively--and it can end up ultimately in separation. Secessionism is inherent in all nationalistic demands. Federations have been invented for the purpose of meeting the natural urge of people with differing ethnic identities to find scope for developing their regional personalities, cultures, languages as well as to promote the feel good factor by an effective federation. This is a sensitive issue that has to be tackled sensitively. The sensitive here should not mean embarrassing to recognise. Sensitive means a subject that is delicate where the touch of the administrator must be adequately delicate. A hamhanded approach to deal with the regional nationalist, unless of course if central authority is moved by a death wish, can result in what happened in 1971.
A creative solution can be found in which all nationalities or quasi nationalities can be accommodated in a supple and flexible federation. A federation can become non-supple or inflexible at any given time. It is made so at times of crisis when demands for change become insistent and something has got to be done. Then it is accommodation that has to be sought. The minorities of all kinds require their demands to be met notionally in full, if they have to be happy in a plural political arrangement. But then they cannot afford to be unreasonable.
The author is a well-known journalist and freelance columnist