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Editorial: Is violent protest inevitable?

Multan witnessed its first big outbreak of public violence against load-shedding on Monday. Thousands of people spilled out and torched the offices of the Multan Electricity Power Company (MEPCO) along with some banks, shops, petrol pumps and automobiles. They were angry about unending hours of outage daily which had crippled the power-loom industry and rendered tens of thousands jobless. Along with Faisalabad, Multan has a big concentration of power looms whose lifeline is electricity. One banner said, “Constant load-shedding is our financial murder”.

What one saw the whole of last year in Karachi is now happening in Punjab. And this may spread unless the new government makes a complex calculus about protecting certain communities against unemployment by electricity outages. This is important because an ancillary crisis is also looming: the crisis of scarcity of food items at affordable prices. If people have money to buy food, they can survive the hardship of high prices; but if they are unemployed they have no other course but suicide or rioting. Now both these “options” are about to be exercised.

The industrial cities are hugely affected by the shortfall of 4000MW in the national electricity grid. If the large-scale but low employment industry can somehow avoid going under, the small-scale, high-employment sector is actually exposed to the risk of closure. It is cities like Multan and Gujranwala where unemployment will rise like a destructive tsunami unless some formula is designed to rationalise the outages faced by the industrial sector. In Multan, it is the 20-hour closure which has strained the patience of the workers. The MEPCO says the supply to the power-looms was “normal”, but looking at the desperation of the rioters this is hard to believe.

One is lucky that more than half the population of Pakistan lives in the countryside where the twin crisis of power and food doesn’t provoke riots. Or at least this is one crisis that doesn’t add a lot to their suffering on other counts. But the cities are in imminent danger of being destroyed by the rage of people brought to the brink. It is the city that had benefited from the high rate of growth posted by Pakistan after 2001. Poverty has grown — or not been reduced — in the countryside. After the power crisis, what is happening is the rolling back of the urban “trickle-down”. If this is not stopped, the other crisis — of food — will swoop down with all its cruelty.

Pakistan is already one of the group of states where food is in short supply for various reasons and where the people are liable to stage violent protests. A World Bank report says Pakistan is among 36 countries facing wheat shortage. Most of the stricken states are in Africa but the four Asian ones are in South Asia.

There are two dangers with regard to food and both are related to employment. Firstly unemployment will swell the number of those who simply can’t buy food. Secondly, the employed population has the money but can’t buy food at the price set for the survival of the farmer, without depriving himself in other areas of his need. These two categories sit athwart the job market: one has been kicked out because of the closures, the other is hanging on by the skin of his teeth. The first group will be violent and suicidal; the second will need marginal remedial measures on the part of the government. But on both counts there is not much the government can do effectively.

Electricity is going to be in short supply. This factor will become dangerous during the summer as domestic consumers start using more of it to avoid heat in the plains where the population is concentrated. There will be a need to manipulate the proportional consumption between industry and households. As far as the measures of “control” are concerned, Pakistan is much less amenable today than it was thirty years ago. Once “ration depots” worked nicely to control demand, today utility stores can’t do that job. Any subsidy like free distribution of special “low consumption” bulbs among the low-income groups will not work either because most people will sell them instead of using them.

Pakistan will need help, no doubt. And for that it will have to rethink its plans to radicalise its foreign policy in order to assert its sovereignty. It must turn inward and take a close look at what is staring it in its face. It must pay special attention to the small-scale industry centres in the country along with industry in general. A 20-hour outage is just too much. The power-looms of Multan and elsewhere can survive with a predicable six to eight hours load-shedding. That is what the government must ensure for them. *

Second Editorial: Taking the assassination case to the UN

The National Assembly on Monday unanimously passed a brief resolution mourning the assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto and asking the UN Security Council to create a special UN Commission “to get the tragic assassination of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto probed to identify the culprits, perpetrators, organisers, and financiers behind this heinous crime”. It wants a UN commission like the one that probed the murder of the Lebanese ex-prime minister Mr Rafik Hariri.

Mr Hariri was opposed to the occupying neighbouring state, Syria. After his killing, a Syrian “hand” was suspected. When the UN Security Council was approached it passed the resolution because the US was able to get Russia and China not to veto it. But the Commission has not delivered since 2005, the year of the assassination. Thus Islamabad may go to the UN Security Council with dangerous “implied” disabilities: that it doesn’t trust its own institutions and that the UN Commission may “intrusively” investigate Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies suspected of having killed Ms Bhutto. The “probe” will become “interventionist” when it wants to question people we don’t want to expose. It will most likely come to the same conclusion as Scotland Yard, confirming that Baitullah Mehsud’s franchises were behind it. Why go to the UN if you are not ready to take the consequences? *

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