Return of the Undertakers
Caretaker PM Moeen Qureshi is on his annual “yatra” to Pakistan. On Friday last he spoke on “Pakistan and its economy in the global context” to a gathering in Karachi organized by “The Reformers”, the brainchild of one of the Caretaker Ministers of 1993, Mr Nisar Memon, former long-term Chief of IBM in Pakistan. This elite audience consisting of businessmen, technocrats, intellectuals, bureaucrats etc was carefully selected to get the maximum mileage from Moeen Qureshi’s thoughts to the Pakistan populace. His message of “doom and gloom” was well articulated, he spoke about the eminent collapse of Pakistan’s economy. Our man who lives in Washington (but will agree to live here either as President or PM) has been saying the same thing for some years now, and the inference is that it was only because of his three months Caretaking in 1993 that Pakistan’s economy has managed to survive this long. Moeen Qureshi pontificated a few “priorities” for the military administration, viz (1) long-term loans from world financial institutions at low interest rates (2) restoring investors confidence (3) law and order situation to be improved (4) administration to be strengthened and (5) a long-term poverty alleviation programme to be structured with help of IMF and World Bank. Well, I have news for Mr Moeen Qureshi, with some adjustment to substance and priority, and with all due respects, isn’t that what the military regime has been trying to do for the past year? And Shaukat Aziz as Finance Minister has done a reasonable job in stabilizing the economy, we may default on our debts but not for any fault of Shaukat. Moreover, the heavens will not fall in case of Pakistan default even though there may be wailing in the corridors of the IMF and the World Bank because of the deviation from their prepared script. As much as I have read history and about economies, one cannot come across a single instance where a nation that can feed itself has collapsed economically. Moreover, any child in Pakistan knows that we spend too much on defence, that same child also knows that even that is not enough (by far) to retain parity with the enormous increases in defence spending that India is presently engaged in. What Moeen Qureshi is asking us to do in sophisticated language is to roll over and play dead. He may be a super-salesman for “signing of the CTBT crowd”, disarming and playing second fiddle to India will take some selling to Pakistanis, especially those who live in Pakistan.
