Truly, it is beyond my pale. But I fall back on two stalwarts, one well known – Paul Krugman of the New York Times, an acclaimed Nobel-winning economist; and a rather obscure gem who contributes among us on these pages – Dr Akmal Hussain – who surely goes unnoticed for subjects which remain rather unflashy to the ordinary mind.
For example, have you noticed the strain in his argument to explain what blights Pakistan and clouds its future? If not, you must, else you will only be weaned away to the blusterous and the flashy with little substance. Krugman, of course, is a master and seized with similar issues of finding the right remedy to a failing global economic model.
Both view events like the evolution of Trump and Sanders, and the continuous drift of societies in Europe towards the Right, including the recent Brexit manifestation, as symptoms of an economic failure in a model that was put in place in the early eighties by the Reagan-Thatcher combine and which has, with globalisation, monopolised the world as the only sustaining system of market-driven economies.
Dr Hussain is more localised in his studies, and rightly so, for much is happening on the political front in Pakistan as well, but both place the roots of our political vagaries in the failure of the economic model that the entire world has become woven in.
To both, the market-driven economic model is unequal, divisive and manipulative; and hence polarising. Political expression of this failure comes in how a man like Trump can seize centre ground and how Hillary Clinton is forced to modify her own economic programme per the Sanders dictates. Isis can express itself with consummate ease, calling upon borrowed franchises to further its agenda; simply, because the divisions in societies are now so stark that the alienated can be wooed around populist slogans aimed at expressing aggregated anger.
Political divisions in states like Pakistan dwarf societal schisms emerging from such polarisation that have gradually developed on the back of callous and exploitative system of power in the hand of the elites.
The Panama leaks may have only been a confirmation of what was popularly known and widely discussed, in line with how successive governments have plundered and stolen public money for personal favour – always at the cost of the common man. Similarly, the system of governance either does not exist, or where there is a semblance, it is tweaked to favour those in power and the resourceful. In a system where money gets to define what may work, the poor are only an irritable addenda to a system made irrelevant to them by the depravity of the design to keep them out.
It thus gives rise to anger which an uninitiated and rather unrefined populace lacks the means to channelise. In the more developed political structures, such frustration can translate into political expression; in Pakistan, at best it will tow another political Pied Piper’s tune, or at worst, deteriorate to the point of a social breakdown where mob frenzy takes over and destructs what comes in its way. Where it might lead to then is anyone’s guess.
The recently returned Nawaz Sharif and his cohorts however are tending to be as uninitiated into public sentiment as the larger populace itself seems to be in finding an organised expression. To keep the king in comfort they will feed him stories of how containing the fallout of the Panama logjam is but a matter of momentary wizardry. For a moment, though, if they were to retrospect how Abdus Sattar Eidhi was deified in the public eye they may just understand how the public at large abhors them and their authority, privilege and stolen pelf. Why the state did not permit Edhi a public funeral could have been exactly for such fears of stark opposites.
They would have noticed how the wretched and the unattended of this earth have created a parallel universe that tends to their needs and wants. And most importantly, how irrelevant are the privileged to the world of the poor. The two worlds exist in parallel, each looking askance at the other and awaiting a trigger to clash by design or default. So complete is the alienation of the one around the callous disregard by the other.
It is just that the public sentiment is still not organised enough or refined enough to express itself short of a widespread rampage that may, if sustained over time, mimic a revolution of the people. Such movements usually find their own leaders; those who may have helped initiate them are soon dumped along the way for lack of investment in public anger. In Pakistan, where leadership remains the resort of the privileged few, those apparent in the leadership domain have traditionally exploited the support of the masses to accentuate their own and familial gains through the politico-economic combine.
Krugman is struggling with what may replace a broken economic model and in all likelihood will gravitate to an interventionist model of public-private duality that will take on the responsibility to keep societies intact while the private sector can still grow to make wealth. Increased redistribution of the gains towards the underprivileged in either charity or economic opportunity may be the recourse. Education and health, and access to IT are levers around which social mobility can be enabled.
Krugman remains steadfast to his beliefs about providing responsible economic models that are inclusive. Unequal growth and lack of opportunity to the deprived are the governing concerns of those invested in this realm to enable stable socio-political environments. For the moment though practically all societies seem to be under some tumult under the strains of what has composed their existence hitherto.
Dr Akmal Hussain is a committed socialist and therefore propounds what he believes in. But what is important is that they have all diagnosed the underlying causes of the civil unrest well while the routes to a remedy may be different. If all politics is for economic ends, can a retweak of the economies usher in more caring politics? Perhaps that is what these guys are struggling to answer.
Pakistan’s own ailment may lie in this exact diagnosis. Can the leadership rise to change itself for a different economic imperative? Go to Krugman and Hussain for some answers.
The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst.
Email: shhzdchdhryyahoo.com