Dharnas are the only cheap commodity left
There are many ways to dissect the PTI’s dharna in Lahore and the upcoming ones that they are going to stage. Do we delve into the economics of inflation? Do we discuss how much provincial governments are empowered in the matter and how much sway the federal government holds? Or do we cast a wider net and go into the norms and practices of parliamentary democracy and the responsibilities of sitting governments, at whatever tier they might be?
If the last were to be taken on first, then this paper would like to go ahead and say this was no time to stage a protest. A brief six months have passed since the governments have held office. Activity of this sort is the stuff election campaigns are made of. Even if it indeed is in the run up to the local government elections, it would have seemed a bit odd to the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, if one were to believe in the man-on-the-street footage of the province’s lone vernacular language news channel.
Furthermore, the PTI – which runs a province, leads the opposition in another, and is the second-largest opposition party in the national assembly – could have discussed inflation, an intangible concept, on the floors of these houses, rather than on the streets. The government, however, should avoid taking this line because the League’s own record to this end, especially the Punjab chief minister’s, during the last government, was far from ideal. The language that he had used in those protests, against inflation and the power crisis, had been the subject of much debate for months on end.
There is, however, another argument that the League makes: how about your performance against inflation in the province that you rule? To this, the PTI makes several points. First, the centre controls monetary policy; if the state bank prints more notes to finance deficits, there is bound to be more inflation. Second, the centre sets the prices of petroleum products, which drive the price of all else higher.
A valid set of arguments, those. But one that fails to take certain issues into account. The agricultural goods markets are provincially managed; the KP government’s performance on that front is far from stellar. Moreover, the centre doesn’t ‘set’ the prices of petroleum products, these are a function of global prices. One PTI talking head after another appears on TV talk shows and asks why the government doesn’t reduce prices when the international prices of crude oil have fallen. But the petrol that we buy from our corner pump is a staggered (by a significant time-lapse) function of the refined oil which we would have procured at our special OPEC rate. It is not dependent on the current price of crude oil.
The PTI raises an important point about the need to raise tax revenue instead of printing more notes. But this is a strange argument made by a party which had opposed (out of parliament) the attempts to reform the GST by the previous government, much like all other middle-class parties had, like the Leagues and the MQM. The RGST would have kept the GST the same, but would have created a database for the collection of income tax.