Pakistan has been passing through a
difficult phase for quite some time now. Both the people as well as the
government of Pakistan are facing the brunt of cumulative effect of energy
shortage, fiscal deficit, food insecurity, governance issues, physical insecurity
and law and order situation, and fragility of climate, etc.
This reflects the multidimensionality of
crisis facing contemporary Pakistan. The natural inference that one may draw is
that the effects of these multidimensional issues would also be
multidimensional in nature. One of the outcomes of the above-mentioned
challenges is erosion of resilience which leads to poverty, marginalization and
social exclusion.
The contested notion of poverty, lack of
appropriate methodological tools, and the absence of aggregated data have
historically constrained the analysis of poverty to a reductionist version,
that too is not often officially acknowledged. Hence, the government of
Pakistan has not released any official poverty figures since 2008. In fact,
poverty can neither be understood, nor be answered using a mono-focal approach.
One can argue that in Pakistan, poverty is
a state of multiple deprivations, of fundamental human capabilities that the
poor often face simultaneously. Income or consumption being merely one of these
deprivations does not sufficiently reflect the level of poverty experienced by
the poor.
The individual facing these multiple
deprivations tend to get a collective identity. Attainment of this collective
identity whether ethnic, provincial, creed, or based on any other social
division (urban-rural; civil-military etc) always have the potential to lead to
class conflict, i.e., a conflict between haves and have-nots. This conflict, in
turn, again increases the poverty and human insecurity.
One can see the manifestation of above
mentioned vicious cycle between poverty and conflict in Balochistan, Karachi,
South Punjab, KP and in many other parts of Pakistan. Let us recall some of the
social indicators of Balochistan.
According to SDPI-WFP Food Insecurity
ranking of 2010, Dera Bugti was the worst food-insecure district of Pakistan.
Among the worst 20 districts of Pakistan, 10 belong to Balochistan. Musa Khel,
Dalbadin, Panjgur, Noshki, Loralai are also extremely food insecure. According
to this report, 26 out of 29 districts of Balochistan are extremely food
insecure.
The state of deprivation of Balochistan is
also endorsed by Multiple Poverty Index (MPI) report released by SDPI a couple
of month ago. SDPI used education, health, drinking water, sanitation, fuel,
quality of housing, wealth; asset ownership and landholding indicators for
poverty ranking. Obviously, there would be many other indicators for measuring
deprivations, such as religious and political freedom. However, we at SDPI were
not able to directly measure them.
According to MPI report, Balochistan faces
the highest incidence of poverty as compared to other provinces. There is also
an apparent geographic concentration of poverty in certain regions that are
poorer than the others. Poverty seems highly concentrated in the central and
southwest part of the province, with an exception of Musakhel. Districts at
border also have high incidence of poverty.
Now let us see the government and non
governmental organisations’ response to Balochistan’s problems. Ideally, the
state should be able to take care of this situation. The helplessness of
provincial government is evident from the fact that Chief Minister of
Balochistan is permanently living in Islamabad while the Governor of
Balochistan spends his time in Karachi.
The federal government is responding to the
needs of people through Benazir Income Support Program. However, as one can
guess, Rs. 1000/- per month would not be able to tackle health, education, and
social poverties. One, the money is too small, second, this amount is fixed
whereas the cost of health, education and social services is increasing due to
inflation, and third increase in income cannot guarantee religio-political
freedom.
The federal government is also providing
direct development grants to each provincial MPA. However, only a negligible
portion of these grants (if at all) gets spent on local communities. These
grants end up being used as political bribe from federal government to provincial
legislators.
Non-government organizations too seem
helpless to deliver in Balochistan due to security threats. After the
kidnapping and assassination of International Committee of Red Crescent (ICRC)
staff member there, ICRC, which was running world’s largest relief operation in
Pakistan, has pulled out from Balochistan. An FAO staff member was also
assassinated in Quetta earlier this year. Resultantly, UN agencies have also
pulled out. The province has been turned a “no go area” for humanitarian agencies.
The situation is also aggravated by a
permanent conflict between state and nationalists leaders. The state is simply
unable to comprehend the root causes of conflicts which are partly historical
in nature and partly due to the skewed distribution of natural resources.
This, in turn, broadened the mandate of
security agencies of Pakistan, who in an attempt to curb “anti federation
elements” clamped and captured many of the nationalist parties’ loyalists who
were later termed as “missing persons”, as there is no record of their arrest
or clue of their whereabouts.
I am not ruling out the involvement of
foreign hands in worsening the Balochistan situation. However, social
inequalities and inequities, when chronically ignored by home-states, pave the
way for foreign powers to use the situation for their own interests. On top of
everything else, the collusion between nationalists (who are always progressive
and secular) and religious militants has resulted in unprecedented sectarian
killing in Balochistan where Hazara community is bearing the brunt of
marginalisation and poverty.
The state must make an attempt to
accommodate basic demands, historic and of shared resources, through a
well-conceived process of political dialogues and social bargaining. In immediate
effect, while we await beginning of such process both the state and non-state
must create space for humanitarian organisations to alleviate suffering of the
people.
We need to remember that poverty is not
only economic poverty and to address multidimensional poverty, political
dialogue and social sector development through state and non-governmental
actors is a must. We did not learn our lessons from the 1971 tragedy and as a
nation should put our acts together to avoid another Dhaka happening in Balochistan.
The writer is executive director of
sustainable development policy institute and may be contacted at suleri@sdpi.org
|
