Back Home All is Not Well
Even her detractors do not attempt to deny that Ms Benazir is a charismatic figure tailor-made to exploit the best out of the western media. Given a gift of the rhetoric, Pakistan’s PM is also a forceful advocate of Pakistani causes when she puts her mind to it. As a well educated, intelligent leader of international acclaim, it was always an even bet that she would vow her hosts in the US. What goodies she comes back with will make a considerable impact on her fortunes at home which are dependant upon a more cynical lot who tend to be impressed more by the birds in hand (F-16s) rather than promises in the bush.
Ms Benazir’s festering problem is Karachi, Pakistan’s major and only port city. While every shade of public opinion recognizes that it is imperative to restore democracy at the grassroots level, she was recently quoted in an interview to NEWSWEEK as dismissing the Local Bodies election option in Karachi for 2 or 3 years. While she may be right in speaking about the prevailing conditions in the city as an obstacle of sorts, the fact remains that any solution requires democracy as a pre-requisite. The leadership vacuum at the street level has become too dangerous to ignore. Unfortunately since her electoral base is in rural Sindh, the PPP is heavily dependant upon the quota system to safeguard the interests of its prized constituents, that is directly in confrontation to the merit factor which is the main component of the urban-based MQM platform. While the ideological divide is such that though a temporary marriage of convenience is possible, Rudyard Kipling’s “the twain shall never meet” adequately describes the possibility of an MQM-PPP rapprochement. However one lives in hope and given the Mandela-De Klerk meeting of the minds in South Africa and the Arafat-Rabin patch-up of sorts in the Middle East, it is quite possible that our leaders will take into account the devastation that will continue to happen if an agreement of sorts is not hammered out soon. The problem for the PPP is that while MQM is central to Karachi’s quagmire, the PPP is as much incidental to the city’s present and future as the PML, as such the option is very much available to the MQM to choose either. While practically it may make sense to the MQM to come to a compromise with the rural majority, given historical connotations their preference would be the PML. We thus have an eternal triangle of sorts with no one prepared to come to terms by giving some leeway.
Stock Market and Yupsters
The dollar took another beating on the world currency markets as a direct result of the US trade figures for February which showed the deficit increase by over US$ 1.4 billion, reversing the trend of the past few months. The US dollar promptly bounced back buoyed by the positive trade figures for March. At the moment it is going both ways. The earlier downturn triggered a sympathetic fall in the Dow Jones Index, the gnomes on Wall Street bringing it down a sharp 100 points or so. On the other hand, the Geneva Accord on Afghanistan fetched nary a blush and served as a significant example of the prevailing perceptions of various forces to paper agreements that (1) the Russians are using the Accord as a mere propaganda ploy as a backdrop of the Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Moscow in May 1988, having no real intention to go back and (2) the world of paper currency is increasingly getting divorced from happenings that are not real to them. There was a time when an honest to goodness “happening” on the international scene would act as a stimulant pushing share prices in either direction but the frenetic pace of panic selling/speculative buying is now linked to the vagaries of Corporate behaviour, Superpowers and Multi-nationals included. Having had their bits and chips snipped to the extent of trading within a span of 50 points up or down, computers are programmed to go into a limbo thereafter, while the market adjusts itself to real time. This fail-safe mechanism is meant to avoid a Wall Street meltdown a la Chernobyl, which almost happened on Black Monday last October when programmed computers set off a chain reaction almost leading to economic apocalypse.