The ninety-day promise
Pakistan is a beautiful country and the green fields of rural Punjab a welcome change after Lahore. Economics soon asserts itself, however, when successive impoverished settlements punctuate those fields. Before each new village the car flashes past a large blue sign that reads ‘Drive Carefully: Populated Area Ahead.’
I’m really not sure why those signs are there. There is no doubt whatsoever of the supreme uninterrupted fecundity of the Pakistani people. As populous as the birds that peck at the ready corn are the people in the fields, even those fields with no village in sight. They sit under every tree and walk along each little path that traverses the fields. For every adult that trudges along the dusty road (the women with massive bundles of firewood balanced effortlessly on their heads, the men with picks and shovels), twenty children defecate amidst the rice, the wheat or vegetables, dart across the street on foot, on donkey-back or cart, and fifty more stare bug-eyed and silent at your car as you pass.
How can Pakistan’s fast dwindling resources ever be shared with equity among these teeming millions? Those bundles of wood are testimony to the lack of electricity and gas in homes. The farmers hereabouts spend thousands, even lacs of rupees every month on diesel (the cost of which rises brutally every few days) to replace the absent electricity which should be driving their tube wells. In India, power as well as seed and fertiliser are provided at subsidised rates to the agricultural sector. In Pakistan, the resultant high cost of production is passed on to the consumers and the process continues to spiral involving the entire country in its deadly vortex.
The children squatting bare bottomed in the fields indicate the utter lack of sanitation, and I, a woman in the front seat of a car the shocking immorality of the lipsticked world beyond.
After passing streets lined with refuse and dung cakes, our farmhouse appears, small but built to withstand ‘attack’, because yes, this area is lawless as well. Metal doors lead into the house which looks inwards into a secure courtyard. There are no entrances, exits or windows on the outer side, and the only way onto the roof is a ladder which must be pulled up.
The utter silence at night broken only by the occasional cry of jackals and the dull thump of a cow as it rubs against the outer wall is quite deafening to city ears.
Breakfast is served by Jamila who, at the age of thirty has few teeth and no husband which equates to no teeth at all. He died leaving her with some goats, and three children of whom the eldest walks three miles to school and back. There are no school buses because there are no roads. Her brother, accidentally shot, died upon eventually reaching hospital after losing more blood than he could sustain when the police detained him for prolonged ‘questioning’ before he got there.
There is little or no evidence of governance in this area, and no sign that anyone in the hallowed corridors of parliament cares a whit for this village’s existence, and they don’t, nor for countless others like it.
Without connections in high places, farmers are generally unable to take advantage of the minimum price guaranteed by the government for their wheat and rice, nor of the government’s assurance of their harvest being bought at that price in the absence of a higher bidder. Occasional government schemes advertising subsided seed and fertiliser and at times farm equipment are bewilderingly hard to access for lack of information and corruption. In almost every case only the privileged few are granted access to all these advantages, and the small farmer remains neglected.
Imran Khan’s promise of agricultural reform: local sheriffs, reformation of courts, accountability, an end to the patwari and thanedar stranglehold, digitised records etc – these would indeed be the answer to solving many of these problems, but given the nature of some of his ‘landed’ candidates, its like hiring the wolf as au pair for Gran and Red Riding Hood, even though the present au pair is no less lupine.
Bringing a captive electorate in their wake and used to being in power, the powerful new entrants to the PTI will demand the same or better. In turn why should the brutish landlord currently so dependant on patwari support, fudged records and a thuggish thanedar at his shoulder be willing to relinquish any of these, and why should his representative in government be willing to facilitate it? Anyway, what incentives lie at his disposal? It is truly unclear how Imran’s promises are to be implemented, much less within the stipulated ninety days, but in Pakistan one lives on hope.
