The common man

Legal eye

The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.

Ever since we have had the consciousness to notice the annual budget and its passage, one can recall being told that it is pro-development and pro-poor and will provide relief to the common man.

The ritual continues this year as well: the government claims to be the protector of the common man; the opposition contests such claim and lays its own claim to the saviour role. But other than spewing rhetoric does either do anything for the common man?

There is a common man (let’s call him Common Man 1) who does multiple jobs cleaning people’s houses. His wife does the work of a domestic helper at someone’s house who has provided the family with a ‘servant quarter’ where the husband and wife live with their three children, who all go to school. With both partners working and the school-going children helping out in the evening and on weekends, Common Man 1 barely manages to keep afloat.

Last month he was diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer. Being an uneducated man struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis, he is worried that his inability to work while being treated will reduce his income. He hasn’t yet understood that his disease has poor prognosis and, short of a miracle, he might not survive it. Between the treatment, its cost and other daily woes, the thought of what will become of his family if he is gone hasn’t even crossed his mind.

There is another common man (call him Common Man 2) who has a similar living and working arrangement as Common Man 1. But he is older and has four children: one normal adult son who works and contributes to the joint family, an adult son and daughter (both of whom can’t walk because they are afflicted with polio), and a younger son who is mentally disabled. Common Man 2 insists that drops were administered to all children, but two of them still got polio.

Because of limited means to get treatment and rehabilitation therapy, his children are a lot less independent than they could have been had he been affluent.

Last Ramzan someone got the polio-afflicted boy a hand-driven wheelchair so he could be mobile. The wheelchair remains parked outside Common Man 2’s wife’s employer’s house, as the boy can’t navigate it with precision and bumps it along walls leaving marks, which irks the employer. The boy has seen someone walk her dog while sitting in an electronic wheelchair. That is the one item on his wish list for this Eid. But he wants two of them, one for him and one for his sister.

Common Man 2 says he is doing all he can for the family. The husband and wife both work hard despite their advanced ages. They don’t beg and they don’t ask their children to beg. (Though he states that when the boy comes with him for Friday prayers, people give the boy money out of pity – which he doesn’t refuse). While they are managing to make ends meet at the moment, Common Man 2 worries about what will become of his dependent children when he and his wife are no longer around to take care of them.

There is another common man (call him Common Man 3), who was an orderly in government service from which he retired many years ago and for which he receives pension. While he is in his 60s and frail, his mental faculties and ambition for his children and grandchildren are intact. He has been working at an office for a while. Driven by the desire to provide his married daughters and their kids with facilities he never had, he has now taken up an additional 12-hour night job as a watchman.

With his wife having passed away, Common Man 3 has limited needs of his own. But he keeps trying – without success – to go ‘abroad’ to earn. He has built a small house for his daughter. He has found his son-in-law a temporary government job that pays a little over minimum wage for now. He says he has taken up the extra night job as he wishes the more needy of his daughters to have a car so her children can go to school with dignity and his grandchildren have things he never had.

These are not unique stories. Everyone is aware of these stories of poor hardworking families in urban Pakistan (or their more horrid and tragic variations). What is the relevance of Budget 2016-2017 for these common men? Other than Common Man 3 whose pension might have gone up a wee bit, does the budget do anything for Common Man 1 and Common Man 2, their life needs and aspirations? Should they be celebrating the budget because minimum wage is now Rs14000, up from Rs13000?

The common man in Pakistan is no different from the common man anywhere else. He is consumed by needs and demands of the circle of life. He needs basic security. When he is young he needs an education. As a youth he needs a job. Once married he needs to provide for his family, including ailing parents. He needs to afford his children an education, take them to hospital when they are sick and marry them off when they are of age. And he needs social security for old age.

Why are hardworking Pakistanis so desperate to leave Pakistan and work in the Gulf or the West? Because the Pakistani state and the power elites who control it have refused to fix warped state priorities to deliver on the state’s guarantee of upholding the right of the common man to a meaningful life. A job in a foreign country comes with the promise of enabling him to earn and save enough to provide for his needs; a promise that the Pakistani state was meant to keep.

According to the Global Slavery Index 2015, Pakistan ranked third in the world in terms of the maximum number of citizens who can be deemed to be in bondage. We can go around our daily lives pretending that these surveys are smear campaigns by the evil West to make us look bad. But do we not know deep down that there is no social or legal equality between the well off and the poor?

Do we not know that there is no logical way to justify incidence of birth in Pakistan as our state and society leave no space open for upward social mobility? If you are born in an indigent family, you can work three jobs. But chances are that you’ll hardly move the needle even with a lifetime of struggle. You won’t have the rights that the constitution guarantees. Instead, your needs will hinge on chance interaction with resourceful individuals, their generosity and proclivity for altruism.

Urban Pakistan hasn’t fallen apart as yet – probably because we are one of the most giving societies when it comes to private charity. The social safety net of urban workers is essentially the decency and compassion of employers in their private capacities. Whether it is funeral expenses, emergency medical needs, children’s education or their marriages, it is through private decisions of fellow citizens with means that the needs of the urban poor are met.

A society where fundamental human needs are met not by the state but by fellow citizens (on their whims and conditions) is unequal by definition. A state that provides no means for upward social mobility naturally generates resentment amongst those born on the poor side. How long can a state and society such as this remain sustainable? Common Man 1, 2 and 3 don’t rely on the budget. They know they are on their own.

Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu