Measuring Poverty or ‘Prettifying’ Neo-Liberalism?

Prabhat Patnaik | 19 Oct 2024 | NEWSCLICK

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The new measure of “multidimensional poverty” by World Bank et al is conceptually flawed.

Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”. The World Bank has been in it for some time, but now we have a new measure of “Multidimensional Poverty” brought out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Neither of these measures, however, actually measures poverty; they typically end up “prettifying” neo-liberal capitalism.

In fact, according to the World Bank’s estimate, the proportion of the world’s population that lives in “extreme poverty” (that is, below a daily per capita expenditure of $1.90 at 2011 purchasing power parity exchange rate) has gone down from over 30% in the late 1990s to less than 10% in 2022, suggesting that under neo-liberal capitalism “millions have been lifted out of poverty”. Let us see why this much-quoted World Bank’s measure is conceptually flawed.

There are three basic problems with the World Bank’s measure: first, it makes no reference to a person’s asset position but only to that person’s income position. Second, it takes expenditure as a proxy for income. And third, for measuring real expenditure, it uses a price-index that grossly understates the actual increase in cost of living. The figures it gets, therefore, are grossly erroneous. Let us examine each of these points.

Any meaningful measure of poverty must have a “flow” dimension covering, say, income, and a “stock” dimension covering asset ownership. Both dimensions are important. For instance, if persons have the same real income between two dates but have lost all their assets by the later date, then it would be a travesty not to see them as having become poorer.

For one, the World Bank’s measure, however, makes no reference to the asset position of persons, which is a particularly glaring omission under neo-liberal capitalism, when the process of primitive accumulation of capital, that is, of the dispossession of individuals from their assets, is rampant. To say that “millions have been lifted out from poverty” when such rampant dispossession is occurring, constitutes supreme irony.

Second, even real income is not covered by this measure, since income data are not available in most countries, including India; besides, “income” is a conceptually complex entity. Typically, therefore, expenditure, on which data are more easily available and which is a conceptually simpler entity, is taken as a proxy for income.

But this makes the ignoring of a person’s net asset position even more unforgivable. Even when the income of persons goes down, they can maintain the earlier level of expenditure by running down assets or by borrowing. To conclude from this that the persons concerned have not become poorer because their expenditure has remained unchanged, would be quite absurd. In fact, both in flow terms, namely income, and in stock terms, namely net assets, these persons have become unambiguously poorer, but the measure based on expenditure would show the persons to be at the same level as before.

Third, the measurement of real expenditure even for countries like India, where we have money expenditure data for households through careful sample surveys carried out periodically, is grossly erroneous, since the price-index used for deflating such nominal expenditure understates the actual rise in cost of living.

The price-index used is a weighted average of individual price relatives for a bunch of commodities consumed in the base year. This is erroneous because important changes take place in the composition of the consumption basket following the base year owing to the non-availability of base year goods; the effects of such changes go unrecognised.

Under neo-liberalism, for instance, the privatisation of a range of services, such as education and healthcare that were earlier provided by public institutions, is a common phenomenon, which raises greatly the cost of these services to the people; but this is not captured by the price-index.

For instance, if a surgery in a public hospital which used to cost Rs 1,000 in the base year, costs Rs 2,000 now, then the price-index will take healthcare costs as having doubled; but the fact that the number of surgeries carried out in the public hospital has remained unchanged or even declined, because of which people are now forced to go to private hospitals, where the same surgery costs Rs 10,000, is not captured by the price-index.

The actual cost of living, in short, has increased to a far greater extent than shown by the price-index that is used to deflate nominal expenditure for obtaining “real” expenditure. Deflation by the official price-index, therefore, exaggerates the improvement in people’s living standards and hence seriously underestimates poverty.

Whenever people are squeezed by cost-of-living increases that make it difficult for them to make ends meet, they adjust in at least two distinct ways: first, by running down assets or running up debts, and second, by changing the composition of their consumption such that items considered “essential” are given priority over other items considered less essential.

The rise in the cost of meeting healthcare, or of children’s educational needs has caused both these adjustments in India: there has been a significant worsening of the net asset position of Indian households, especially in rural areas; and there has also been a skimping on household nutritional intake in the (mistaken) belief that economising on the nutritional intake does not matter much.

The All India Debt and Investment Survey of 2019 (which gives information as on end-June 2018), when compared with the AIRDIS for 2013 (which gives information as on end-June 2012), shows the following (all comparisons are of “real” as opposed to nominal figures, which have been deflated by the wholesale price index): first, 11% more rural households were indebted on the latter date; second, the average amount of debt per indebted rural household increased by 43% by the latter date; third, the average value of assets per cultivator household declined by 33% between the two dates and for non-cultivator households by 1%.

The picture is broadly similar for urban India. There was a decline in the average value of asset per household (29% for self-employed households and 3% for others); and while the percentage of indebted households remained more or less the same as before, the average amount of debt per indebted household increased by 24% between the two dates. It is an indubitable fact, in other words, that the net asset position of the bulk of Indian households has declined significantly.

The second kind of adjustment has also been occurring. The proportion of the rural population that does not have access to 2,200 calories per person per day has increased from 58% to 68% between 1993-94 and 2011-12; the proportion in urban India not having access to 2,100 calories (the corresponding benchmark used by the erstwhile Planning Commission) increased from 57% to 65% between these two dates.

The 2017-18 results of the National Sample Survey were so dismal, showing decline in real spending on all goods and services, that they were quickly withdrawn from the public domain by the National Democratic Alliance government.

From whatever data were available prior to this withdrawal (and assuming that the real food cost per unit of nutrients remained unchanged), it turns out that while the urban percentage was more or less the same as in 2011-12, the rural percentage had increased to well over 80%. (These figures are taken from Utsa Patnaik’s forthcoming book on poverty).

In contrast to this grim reality, the World Bank’s “extreme poverty” measure which, as already mentioned, takes a daily expenditure of less than $1.90 (at the 2011 purchasing power parity exchange rate) as its definition, shows a decline for India from around 12% in 2011-12, itself a gross underestimate, to just 2% in 2022-23.

Incidentally, the World Bank’s yardstick of $1.90 implies a poverty line in rupee terms of about Rs 53 per day for meeting all expenses. The World Bank’s yardstick is itself derived as an average of what several governments of the poor countries themselves use (invariably under Bank guidance) in their estimation of the poverty line; it is not a separate measure independently calculated. It suffers from exactly the same defects, such as underestimation of the cost-of-living increase in the price-index used for deflating nominal expenditure, that the official poverty estimates of these countries suffer from. The World Bank, in effect, gives an imprimatur to the propaganda of several Third World governments about how they have reduced or eliminated poverty.

All the talk about “millions being lifted out of poverty” is thus no more than a cruel joke. Unfortunately, one is likely to hear more such talk in the coming days as countries start vying with one another to show how they have been meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal.

ESSAY: THE WOUND THAT IS PALESTINE

Arundhati Roy 

Published October 20, 2024 

Illustration by Sarah Durrani

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s ‘Writer of Courage’, who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well as to those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience, but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India — lawyers, academics, students, journalists — Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj, and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.


When Ruth Borthwick, the chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel, first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define “the real truth of our lives and our societies” through “unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination.” That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.


Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10 at the British Library…

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’, which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua, but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago, a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today, after waging a 20-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the ‘unflinching’ US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to “Kill Anything That Moves.”


I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack… I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively ‘unflinching’ discussions about how to commit genocide — is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better?

The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want “life, happiness, wealth, power”, Asians “stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives” — and force America to carry their “strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.” A terrible burden to be borne ‘unflinchingly’.

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza, and now Lebanon, in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll, so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last 20 years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide — the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews — the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel — who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” — began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

[Former Israeli] Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians “two-legged beasts”, [former Israeli prime minister] Yitzhak Rabin called them “grasshoppers” who “could be crushed” and [former Israeli prime minister] Golda Meir said “There was no such thing as Palestinians.” [Former UK prime minister] Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time”, and then went on to declare that a “higher race” had the final right to the manger.

Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as “a land without people for a people without a land.” The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for the US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

The new state was supported unhesitatingly and ‘unflinchingly’, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home, whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.)

No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

Arundhathi Roy accepts the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. She is holding a portrait of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, named Writer of Courage by her | English PEN

What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done, it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

When US President Joe Biden met with [Israeli] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”

Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

I am acutely aware that, being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist.

The point is that, right now, they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God?

I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions — the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas — constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October, 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted — other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

Since October 7th, 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved — their history is sought to be erased.

All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel.

In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us, once and for all, dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.” A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people — including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to.

Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of free speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of Western democracies — with a few honourable exceptions — has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary, who is working to realise the dream of a Jewish homeland. But when Palestinians and their supporters chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination, projecting its own darkness on to others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free.

When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, “Amandla!” [Power to the people], were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone — including for Jewish people — and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders, that must inevitably follow the war, could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat — and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the square, with such bell-like clarity.

“The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General… The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realise that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes, nor the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves, are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre, because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day — From the river to the sea Palestine will be Free.
It will.

Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.

That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.

The writer is a Booker Prize-winning author and has written about human rights issues in India as well as war and capitalism globally

By arrangement with The Wire

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 20th, 2024

Climate finance at COP29

Imaduddin Ahmed 

Published October 19, 2024

DAWN

COP26 IN Glasgow served as a forum to grill developed country governments for failing to fulfil their cumulative pledge of $100 billion annually in climate finance for developing countries. COP29 in Baku will serve to scale the ambition, and improve the quality of climate finance. This might seem far-fetched. But progress made at COP28 in Dubai, together with fresh ideas, provide grounds for optimism.

At COP28, 15 national governments, spanning the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia, signed the Global Climate Finance Framework. To their voices, the Climate Justice Committee of Liberal International, a federation of liberal political parties across 120 countries, adds its own.

The Global Climate Finance Framework built on its predecessors, the Paris Pact for People and Planet, the Bridgetown Initiative, the Accra-Marrakesh Agenda, the G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration, and the African Leaders’ Nairobi Declaration on Climate and Call to Action. The Framework provides a blueprint for mobilising trillions of dollars by 2030 to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and to support developing countries manage the repercussions of climate change.

First, developed country governments should finance developing country-owned platforms, so that they align with local needs. A Pakistan-owned platform would allow better integration of climate funding into agriculture, water management and disaster resilience.

Second, multilateral organisations charged with disbursing climate funds must ease access. They must simplify and harmonise their criteria amongst themselves, speed up approvals, and make processes more transparent. This would assist Pakistani government agencies in raising the necessary funding for infrastructure projects that protect against flooding and drought, and would also allow them to begin the recovery from climate emergencies quicker. To fully serve their public purpose, multilateral development banks must also disburse more of their capital, and take greater risk.


Pakistan should add its signature to the Global Climate Finance Framework

Third, developed country governments need to increase public finance for adaptation to developing countries. Liberal International foresees climate displacement as a universal issue. The 2022 floods left eight million Pakistanis displaced. It is only a matter of time before developed and less climate-vulnerable countries start seeing mass immigration if they do not balance their emissions reductions commitments with addressing resilience in climate-vulnerable countries.

Markets already exist to enable emissions reductions, and to the extent that their integrity can be enhanced, governments, independent standard setters, verifiers, carbon credit rating agencies, carbon insurance companies and technology companies should step forward.

Fourth, developed country governments should broaden the sources of finance for climate action. For adaptation and resilience, every government can use regulation to mobilise private capital for projects that reduce long-term value of risk, and that reduce default risk. Governments should also require insurance companies and pension funds to invest a portion of their assets under management into adaptation and resilience, and emissions reductions and removals.

Developed governments should also expand carbon pricing and taxes to guarantee the portfolios of multilateral loans and recapitalise multilaterals.

Finally, developed governments should help highly indebted developing countries manage their debt. The global pandemic, the invasion of the Ukraine, and escalated cost-of-living crisis have increased developing countries’ indebtedness. We need a proliferation of judicious debt-for-climate swaps, sus-

tainability-linked bonds, a rechannelling of IMF Special Drawing Rights, and the full implementation of the Common Framework for Debt Treatments Beyond the Debt Service Suspension Initiative. These would reduce Pakistan’s debt burden and enable new investment into climate adaptation and mitigation.

The Global Climate Finance Framework can be leveraged to derisk outcomes of the official UN text to be negotiated at COP29. Its coherent and broad proposed package can reduce the time required to successfully negotiate outcomes that work for both developed and developing countries.

The Pakistani government would do well to add its signature to the Framework. At COP27, Pakistanis showed that we pull our weight in mobilising developing country opinion within the G77, and persuading developed country counterparts. At COP29, we have the opportunity to bring the global community closer to a consensus on how to scale climate finance ambitions, get the money out quicker, and make it work.

The writer sits on the Liberal International Climate Justice Committee.

Published in Dawn, October 19th, 2024

Human rights review

Editorial

Published October 20, 2024

DAWN

PAKISTAN is on shaky ground regarding human freedoms.

In a recent review, the UN Human Rights Committee — which carries out periodic assessments of other countries’ rights record too — has expressed concern about escalating human rights abuses: politically motivated oppression, torture, eroding freedom to practise religious beliefs, forced conversions, curbs on the freedom of expression, a ban on student unions, restrictions on assembly, harassment of rights activists, crimes against women and children, capital punishment and extrajudicial killings.

Successive governments have been responsible for matters reaching this point, while certain state agencies can specifically be held responsible for crimes such as enforced disappearances. Besides, the state’s failure to rein in radical religious elements has also contributed to a culture of fear.

While the scale of intimidation is significant, the rising crime graph is the outcome of a corrupt, ineffective and inequitable criminal justice system and structural flaws in the security apparatus. Among other things, these factors have contributed to the rampant violence against women: for instance, a rape takes place every two minutes in the country because of a 3pc conviction rate.

As for Pakistan’s children, not only are millions of them deprived of even basic freedoms like education and forced into manual labour, their existence itself is overlooked by the state: as the review notes, only 42pc of children under five were registered at birth.

Meanwhile, religious communities experience persistent tyranny through the misuse of blasphemy laws, while forced conversions underscore the defenselessness of the marginalised. Thus, the UN body dismissed the figure of 74 cases of forced conversions from the state party and observed that the actual number was far higher.

The review is a reminder that our constitutional protections exist as mere aspirations, and that the state has no regrets about its citizens morphing into missing persons, while it actively crushes dissent in places such as KP and Balochistan where movements protesting against atrocities by both the state and radical anti-state elements are growing. Even peaceful protesters have encountered the might of the state.

It is unfortunate that human rights are seen as a favour to the populace — an attitude that is visible in institutions and social groups, including the judicial system. It is an approach that prevents the authorities from forming pro-people policies or fortifying departments for social development and protecting them from exploitation.

Instead of focusing solely on Pakistan’s economic woes, the state must take a holistic view. It must understand that a fresh human rights regime will be realised when elected representatives are held accountable for rights excesses in their constituencies, policies are in line with international standards, and the state has a heart.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2024

BALOCHISTAN IS A COUNTRY

Dr. Mahrang Baloch booked in terrorism case days after being ‘barred’ from flying abroad

Imtiaz Ali 

Published October 12, 2024
Dr Mahrang Baloch (C) addresses the media at Karachi Press Club on October 8. — AFP
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Baloch rights activist Dr Mahrang Baloch was booked in a terrorism case over allegedly inciting people by levelling “allegations against security institutions”, it emerged on Saturday.

Dr Mahrang is a leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), which has organised various sit-ins and protests in the past few months over enforced disappearances in Balochistan.

On Tuesday, immigration authorities at Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport had barred her from boarding a flight to New York, where she was scheduled to attend a Time magazine function.

The activist had said she was due to attend the Time magazine’s gala for being featured on the Time100Next list.

Claiming she was stopped by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Mahrang had vowed to challenge the government’s decision to impose restrictions on her foreign travel in courts.

The first information report (FIR), a copy of which is available with Dawn.com, was registered by Malir district’s Quaidabad police on Friday on the complaint of a local resident named Asad Ali Shams, who claimed that Mahrang was inciting violence in his area.

The FIR invoked Section 7 (punishment for acts of terrorism) of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) 1997 as well as Sections 124-A (‘sedition law’), 148 (rioting, armed with deadly weapon), 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object), 153-A (promotion of enmity between groups), 500 (punishment for defamation) and 505 (statement conducing to public mischief) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

However, in a conversation with Dawn.com, Quaidabad Station House Officer (SHO) Farasat Shah said that Mahrang and her colleagues had not held any rally or protest on Friday.

He said the complainant had an issue with the activist as he alleged she was instigating the people against the state and its institutions.

“I am 100 per cent sure that Mahrang Baloch is carrying out anti-national activities in collaboration with BLA [Baloch Liberation Army] terrorists,” the FIR quoted the complainant as saying.

The FIR alleged that Baloch was involved in activities carried out by various militant groups, naming nine such groups, including the BLA.

“The innocent men and women of Balochistan have been misled in the failed anti-state conspiracies,” it said.

Dr Mahrang termed the case “fabricated”, saying it showed “how the state has grown increasingly uncomfortable” with her activism.




“My peaceful activism will not be deterred by such illegal, unconstitutional and coercive tactics,” she said in a post on X.

“These measures are part of a systematic campaign not only to harass me but also to divert attention from the ongoing failure of security agencies to maintain law and order, therefore they keep shifting blame for their failures onto others,” she added.

Dr Mahrang said that the FIR aimed to threaten the collective struggle of the Baloch nation, adding that she would “remain determined and unafraid of these coercive actions”.

“I will fight this in a court of law,” the rights activist vowed.

Speaking at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club on Tuesday, she had alleged that she and her female companions were harassed by law enforcement agencies on their way back from the airport.

Accompanied by rights activists Wahab Baloch, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan vice chairperson Qazi Khizar and Sammi Deen — who was also stopped from exiting the country by the FIA last month — Mahrang had said that she was barred from travelling abroad without any legal reason despite having a valid US visa and an invitation from Time.

Dr Mahrang Baloch named one of Time’s most influential people of 2024

Dawn.com 

Published October 2, 2024

Dr Mahrang Baloch pictured at a BYC gathering in Turbat. — Dawn/File

Dr Mahrang Baloch, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee leader, has been featured in Time magazine’s ‘2024 Time100 Next’ list for “advocating peacefully for Baloch rights”, the magazine said on Wednesday.

The list showcases 100 young individuals “who are not waiting long in life to make an impact” and includes artists, athletes, and advocates. The magazine says the list aims “to recognise that influence does not have [requirements] … nor does leadership look like it once did”.

The magazine selected Dr Mahrang for her peaceful advocacy as well as her December 2023 march to Islamabad, where she and hundreds of women marched for “justice for their husbands, sons, and brothers”.

“I am deeply honoured and delighted to be named among the top 100 emerging leaders of the world by TIME,” she wrote in a Facebook post after receiving the recognition.

“I dedicate this recognition to all Baloch women human rights defenders and families of victims of forcefully disappeared people.”

Dr Mahrang was suddenly pushed into the limelight when she began to spearhead protests after her father, Ghaffar Longove, went missing in December 2009 from outside a hospital in Karachi.

At the time, she was still a student in primary school. The eldest of six siblings, Mahrang would burn her school books in front of the Quetta Press Club in an act of protest, demanding that her father be returned home. Her father’s mutilated body was found in 2011.



In December 2023, Dr Mahrang was one of the organisers of a large march and sit-in in Islamabad to protest enforced disappearances.

According to a report released in July, a total of 197 missing persons cases were reported in the first half of 2024 alone, with a vast majority recorded in Balochistan.

Other notable inclusions on the list were Bangladesh student leader Nahid Islam and Gazan food blogger Hamada Shaqoura.

Islam spearheaded student protests in Bangladesh over the summer, which culminated in the ouster and exile of former premier Sheikh Hasina. He is currently serving as a minister in the interim government led by Dr Muhammad Yunus.

Shaqoura, who owned a restaurant in Gaza before the conflict broke out in October, has found a platform as a “wartime food blogger”, the magazine said, adding that he cultivates recipes from ingredients found in aid packages and shares videos cooking and distributing meals in the enclave.

While saying that he was honoured by the inclusion, he said he did not “particularly feel like celebrating, in a time when me, my Palestinian people & Lebanese brothers and sisters are still facing death 24/7.

“But I’ll take the moment to emphasise to the whole world, that we —Palestinians — are here, and will always be!”

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SMOKERS’ CORNER: MANAGING CIVIL UNREST

Nadeem F. Paracha

Published October 20, 2024 

DAWN/

Illustration by Abro

Studies show that incidents of civil unrest have been increasing across the world. Yet, there are also those who are of the view that the police are now more likely to contain and control unrest than ever before. The ‘success’ in this regard can be measured by the ability of the police to not only avoid causing fatal casualties among the protesters, but also within their own ranks.

The urgency to study violent unrests and, more so, how they are (or should be) tackled by the police, intensified in the 1970s after the world witnessed a brutal series of riots in the mid- and late 1960s. A large number of protesters lost their lives in these riots.

Till the 1960s, the most common tactic used by the police was to line up in front of the protesters and, at the slightest provocation, fire rounds of tear gas before charging and smashing into the protesters with batons. The idea was to create fear in the protesters and a sense of dread. This often led to multiple injuries and even deaths. These were ‘bad optics’ as well for an institution that wished to be seen as a legitimate force, out to prevent violence and chaos.

Therefore, during and soon after the 1960s, police in most countries began to be viewed by the media and most people as a symbol of brutality. It began to rapidly lose whatever little sympathy was left for it, as images of cops giving protesters severe thrashings became common on TV and in newspapers.

While police forces across the globe are now better equipped to manage and contain riots without causing casualties, they claim to have become more vulnerable themselves and are still largely perceived as ‘aggressors’ in such encounters

Over the next three decades, various new ‘crowd control’ tactics were developed. But this mostly took place in Europe and the US; old tactics to vanquish rioters and protesters continued to be applied in dictatorships in Asia, Africa and South America.

Deaths and severe injuries during protests remained a common feature in these regions and so did the reputation of the police as a ‘brutal force.’ However, things began to somewhat change in these regions as well from the 1990s onwards.

So, what were the new tactics?

One of the most prominent among these emerged in the US from a 1982 “Broken Window Theory.” It was called the ‘Broken Window Theory’ because if a broken window is ignored, it is bound to lead to the creation of much larger problems. The theory posited that major crimes and widespread violence can be prevented if minor offences are punished, instead of being ignored or only leniently addressed.

This, the argument went, would help regulate society’s violent and criminal tendencies and aid the creation of a law-abiding environment. This theory also posited that, in law-abiding environments, protests too remain peaceful. The theory was first turned into practice by the New York police in 1990. It was applied to various degrees in some European countries as well. But it soon began to attract criticism for having racial and class biases.

Secondly, its ‘achievements’ were said to be questionable, because they were based on outcomes whose sources were independent of the policies of the ‘Broken Window’ applications. Then there was the ‘faulty assumption’ that the intensity of crime and political unrest were related.

But before the ‘Broken Window’ policies began to be seen as preemptive measures based on what turned out to be largely flawed hypotheses, there was the ‘negotiated management’ tactic. In this, the government encouraged protesters to negotiate with the police in setting certain rules of engagement and the routes the protesters were to take to avoid violence. But most protesters often break such agreements. This, in turn, sees the police return to applying tougher measures.

In the 2000s and 2010s, police forces formulated two more tactics in a bid to contain the more severe outcomes of riots. In the first, police troops face the protesters as layered formations, with left and right flanks, and a front and a centre. This way, the troops can keep an eye on the protesters from various angles and act from multiple sides. This tactic also actually allows strategic gaps, from which protesters who want to exit the protest can leave.

Then there is what the faculty member of the US Army War College M Christopher calls ‘command and control’ — a tactic in which the police disperses pockets of people before they can come together to form a mob. The coming together is also foiled by creating physical barriers.

All these tactics are used depending on the conditions. Images of riots, as seen in the media, seem chaotic. But the authorities often have a holistic view of the proceedings. Police are only armed with batons, tear gas and shields. Officers who are allowed to carry pistols are discouraged from using them. The idea is to avoid casualties and severe injuries.

However, due to the new tactics, chances of cops getting injured or losing their lives have increased. The police often complain that, in a bid to avoid bad optics (in the media), authorities put the lives of the cops in greater danger.

During the 2021 mob attack on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, the Capitol Police sent out an urgent request to the military to deploy members of the National Guard. But the request was initially ignored because the director of the army staff “didn’t like the visual of the National Guard standing in a police line with the Capitol in the background.”

During the October 4 protests in Islamabad by the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), the police used negotiated management and command and control tactics. But whatever little rules of engagement were agreed, they quickly broke down.

Barriers were placed to stop people from marching towards Islamabad. These are often erected to isolate groups who might transform into mobs. These groups are then dispersed. This is why one only saw small groups of protesters sporadically managing to enter Islamabad. And yet, there was a causality — a cop.

Whereas severe injuries and deaths among protesters have greatly reduced due to the aforementioned tactics, these have increased among cops. Yet, the police have not been able to shrug off the image of being the aggressor.

Even one or two images of isolated incidents splashed in the media can undermine the position of the police as a legitimate force controlling ‘illegitimate’ action. This ‘damned if I do, damned if I don’t’ disposition can become a major source of despondency and frustration among cops.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 20th, 2024

PAKISTAN

Fighting toxic talk

Muna Khan

Published October 20, 2024 

DAWN

I HAD to step outside social media silos to understand what was happening in Lahore, because my trusted sources — ie, this newspaper and other legacy outlets — were reporting on student protests while information about the alleged rape seemed muted. On social media, meanwhile, things were alarming, even horrific. No rape was as possible as the cover up of one. I wanted to create a timeline myself to make sense of things — this is before The Current published a very good explainer — namely, had a rape occurred?

While student protests and police brutality have continued across Punjab, there’s more clarity, at least for me: a young woman and her family’s name have been dragged through the mud, and they will likely have to spend the next few years explaining that she/their daughter was not raped. Students who are braving police violence are being used for political point-scoring. No one believes the government, and likely won’t even if Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz pursues criminal cases against those who spread misinformation, as her administration seems to be doing. Minds have been made up across the political divide.

Welcome to this age of disinformation — with dangerous consequences.

Let it be clear that misinformation about this case was spread at a dizzying speed. Investigative journalist Umar Cheema, who was one of the first to report there was no rape at the said college, tweeted a video of a woman claiming to be the rape victim’s mother on Friday evening. She tells her followers on TikTok what happened to her daughter and asks them to call out the government and the news media for covering up the crime. After this teary-eyed confession, she posts her next video, wherein she is lip-syncing to a Bollywood song.

It’s easy to dismiss this woman as an attention-seeker but it’s the folks who believe it and share it that worry me more. According to Tom Buchanan, who wrote a paper on disinformation in 2020, those who deliberately create it do so “to deceive and mislead audiences for the purposes of causing harm, or for political, personal or financial gain”. People who then share it do so because it aligns with their worldview. Many, citing the sheer strength and effectiveness of a particular political party’s social media strategy, suspect its supporters of pushing news of this rape, saying they got the turmoil they wanted. Meanwhile, brave students will bear the brunt of police violence.

Whatever women say in this country is treated with suspicion.

Of course, a rape can occur on campus. Of course, parents would deny it. Of course, a guard or male school employee could be the harasser, CCTV footage could be deleted, the school administration could pressure and/or threaten students, the media could be involved in hushing things up. We have seen iterations of this play out plenty of times before. In this case, the police officer who told students to return to classes lest “something else” happen to them too is no different to the police officer asking why a woman gang-raped on the Motorway was driving alone at night.

We live in a country where whatever women say is treated with suspicion. I’m lying if I said I was raped, I’m covering up rape if I say I wasn’t. I’m telling the truth if I say a guard harassed me, I’m lying if I say an actor did. It is exhausting to be a woman in this country. Attitudes and policies deny us basic humanity. Digital platforms do not protect us.

Disinformation is a global threat and requires a global strategy and policies to quell it. However, misogyny threatens to unravel Pakistan’s core. Misogyny is being monetised, and it is being used to create divisions in society. It should be seen as as big a national security threat as terrorism. In fact, misogyny is terrorism. In August, the UK said it was planning to tackle misogyny as extremism. There are great concerns about incel culture in the West, promoted by the likes of Andrew Tate. Here, we elect men like Tate, invite them as state guests and fund campaigns for them to run for Oxford chancellor.

The government alone can’t fight the kind of disinformation this Lahore ‘rape’ case has shown. It requires parents and schools to teach media literacy classes from grade 1. And laws that don’t suppress civil liberties but punish those who spread false information. Not release them.

If not, I fear parents won’t want to send their daughters to colleges, women won’t want to stand for public office (given the disgusting hate campaigns they face) or report sexual harassment of violence due to the stigma. This will set us back decades. In 2022, Pakistan was the second worst country for women in terms of gender parity according to the World Econo­mic Forum. Imagine sinking lower.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.
X: *@LedeingLady*

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2024

Women and change

Muhammad Amir Rana 

Published October 20, 2024

DAWN

WITH their unwavering courage, Pakistani women have been challenging the odds and reshaping the country’s social and political landscape. Their increasing participation in political and rights movements, a testament to their bravery, can be read as ‘change is coming’.

The role of women significantly shapes the ongoing struggle against religious bigotry in the country. The images of police torture inflicted upon human rights activists, particularly on a young woman lawyer in Karachi, will be remembered. The visuals of Dr Mahrang Baloch, who was prevented from travelling to New York, added to the existing detestation of the government, which has been restricting freedoms in the country. She had been included in Time’s 100 most influential people of the year and was on her way to deliver a talk at a ceremony organised by the magazine. The significant participation of women in a jirga organised by the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) in Khyber district last week signals that silence is no longer an option, and women are becoming indispensable to the conduct of national affairs.

Change is underway, but its duration remains uncertain, as the perpetrators of oppression are still strong, especially given their solid institutional foundation and support from the power elite. However, recent developments offer a glimmer of hope that gender inequality is being challenged more structurally across the country. Many experts argue that the issue has gone beyond gender inequality, and reflects broader socio-political and cultural pressures that draw clear lines between the privileged elite and those who feel oppressed. It may also represent a silent transformation that has been unfolding for some time.

This shift is happening nationwide, including in Punjab, though the expressions of the change differ. When incidents of violence against women are normalised, and women haters justify such acts — perhaps by importing a misogynistic mullah to fuel damaging debates — the hysteria following allegations of a girl being raped in a Punjab hostel should come as no surprise. The youth in Punjab, influenced by recent events and the report of a sexual assault, are voicing their sentiments more than ever. Protests against extremism and movements advocating for rights in the other provinces are likely to have an impact in Punjab too. Amid political chaos and rising social discontent, misogynistic narratives propagated by certain religious factions are facing a backlash.

Many youth in Punjab have united behind a fair cause and are reacting against injustices that have become commonplace. Their unity mirrors reactions in other provinces and their increasing participation and prominent roles indicate that, with political awakening, social structures are also undergoing a transformation. The role of women in the political opposition, mainly the women in Punjab who are facing hardship, cannot be ignored. Women’s participation in politics in the province can be considered as part of the ongoing transformation.


Comprehending women leaders is always a challenge for the power elites.

Indeed, Pakistan has a history of women playing critical roles in politics and social development. However, most of these women belong to the upper classes, and their role has not triggered any significant transformation in society. Few women have emerged as universal symbols of courage and resistance, like the late Asma Jahangir. Now, the major difference between the two generations is that the new women leaders come from humble backgrounds, and socio-political circumstances have pushed them to act for change. These women have been supported by their communities, and their leadership has evolved organically. This gives optimism that the change will last long.

Comprehending women leaders is always a challenge for the power elites, who resort to their character assassination. The second argument, often used against women’s participation in social and political reforms, is taken from faith and culture. This approach creates hindrances. A combination of all these factors shows how power structures in Pakistan are inherently misogynistic; they don’t even change when women become prime ministers or chief ministers.

The PPP was recently being criticised for its brutal treatment of civil society, which was protesting against extremism. But this is not new for the ruling party of Sindh. Ruling elites always cater to the interests of the majority and those who are more powerful. The extremists are powerful in Sindh and have infiltrated the police, and the government is protecting their interests.

This is not limited to the PPP; all political parties are sympathetic to the establishment when they are in power. All major mainstream political parties sympathise with the oppressed and marginalised communities when they are in the opposition and face victimisation by the establishment. While sympathising with the marginalised, these parties sell their victimhood to gain power. Once in power, they deal with these communities and rights movements as the establishment wishes.

Rights movements may also reveal a tendency to ally with the establishment, as was witnessed recently when the Haq Do Tehreek in Gwadar compromised to secure a few electoral constituencies. Similar examples can be found in the PTM. However, the risk of compromise is reduced with a women leadership and its increased participation within right movements, as women leaders are seen as more dedicated to their cause and sound in the art of negotiation.

One may argue that women also actively participate in religious parties’ activities. This may be an encouraging thought, but such participation is mostly limited to attending the religious parties’ rallies and holding fund-collection drives. These parties hardly allow their women to lead from the front or take an active role in decision-making in party affairs. Secondly, their participation in religious and political activities remains mostly confined to protecting the social and political status quo.

Women’s role in the PTM is particularly critical. The fact that these women are facing multiple societal, political, and religious pressures as well as the TTP danger in their area cannot be underestimated: the banned group is the ally of the worst misogynistic regime — the Afghan Taliban. The resistance of these women is a beacon of hope not only for Pakistani but also for Afghan women.

The writer is a security analyst.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2024