About time!
Finally the prime minister wakes up to the polio problem, though not before Pakistan took the lead worldwide in spreading the virus, this year’s cases (235, a 14-year record) already doubled last year’s, and Independent Monitoring Board of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative dubbed Pakistan’s program “a disaster” and the leadership’s commitment “totally inadequate”. The sudden flurry at the top implies that Islamabad – not very proactive under PML-N – too has realised that the problem has gone unchecked for far too long, and the state’s “inadequate” response was inviting justified accusations of incompetence. As the prime minister himself said the other day, our problem of militant attacks on health workers delivering polio vaccine has no precedence anywhere in the world.
It is all the more surprising, then, that the PM waited this long before taking it up as a personal challenge. Initial news reports suggested he vowed to ‘end polio in six months’, though saner heads seem to have prevailed, and the timeline has now been removed. Still, Nawaz Sharif has promised to check progress every fortnight, and since the virus slows down during winter, the government has been made to believe that a concerted effort might well bring victory sooner rather than later. No doubt the health ministry realises, as does the prime minister, that merely providing security to vaccination teams will not do the job. The militants’ narrative – that polio drops cause impotence, or provide targets for drones – was an easy sell partially because the government was without a counter-narrative.
So polio must become part of the wider counter terrorism project, which must include treating tens of thousands of people indoctrinated in dubious madressas in the decades since the Soviet jihad. Islamabad was again embarrassed recently, when the Syrian government sent back plane loads of Pakistani jihadi volunteers, now dead, that were active in Syria. They also sent a letter to the UN, that Pakistani militants were responsible for spreading polio in their country, years after they had completely overcome the menace. The PM must act on polio not just because it is an extreme national emergency, but also because he must take some sensible decisions as head of the government. So far the N-league has done precious little to write home about. That it has finally become serious about polio is appreciated, but the proof of the pudding lies in the eating, so we will have to see results before giving the government too many points.
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